OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Constrained Optimization with Qualitative Preferences
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

The Conditional Preference Network (CP-net) graphically represents user's qualitative and conditional preference statements under the ceteris paribus interpretation. The constrained CP-net is an extension of the CP-net, to a set of constraints. The existing algorithms for solving the constrained CP-net require the expensive dominance testing operation. We propose three approaches to tackle this challenge. In our first solution, we alter the constrained CP-net by eliciting additional relative importance statements between variables, in order to have a total order over the outcomes. We call this new model, the constrained Relative Importance Network (constrained CPR-net). Consequently, We show that the Constrained CPR-net has one single optimal outcome (assuming the constrained CPR-net is consistent) that we can obtain without dominance testing. In our second solution, we extend the Lexicographic Preference Tree (LP-tree) to a set of constraints. Then, we propose a recursive backtrack search algorithm, that we call Search-LP, to find the most preferable outcome. We prove that the first feasible outcome returned by Search-LP (without dominance testing) is also preferable to any other feasible outcome. Finally, in our third solution, we preserve the semantics of the CP-net and propose a divide and conquer algorithm that compares outcomes according to dominance testing.
NUMA-aware FFT-based Convolution on ARMv8 Many-core CPUs
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), one of the most representative algorithms of deep learning, are widely used in various artificial intelligence applications. Convolution operations often take most of the computational overhead of CNNs. The FFT-based algorithm can improve the efficiency of convolution by reducing its algorithm complexity, there are a lot of works about the high-performance implementation of FFT-based convolution on many-core CPUs. However, there is no optimization for the non-uniform memory access (NUMA) characteristics in many-core CPUs. In this paper, we present a NUMA-aware FFT-based convolution implementation on ARMv8 many-core CPUs with NUMA architectures. The implementation can reduce a number of remote memory access through the data reordering of FFT transformations and the three-level parallelization of the complex matrix multiplication. The experiment results on a ARMv8 many-core CPU with NUMA architectures demonstrate that our NUMA-aware implementation has much better performance than the state-of-the-art work in most cases.
Cardiac Complication Risk Profiling for Cancer Survivors via Multi-View Multi-Task Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Complication risk profiling is a key challenge in the healthcare domain due to the complex interaction between heterogeneous entities (e.g., visit, disease, medication) in clinical data. With the availability of real-world clinical data such as electronic health records and insurance claims, many deep learning methods are proposed for complication risk profiling. However, these existing methods face two open challenges. First, data heterogeneity relates to those methods leveraging clinical data from a single view only while the data can be considered from multiple views (e.g., sequence of clinical visits, set of clinical features). Second, generalized prediction relates to most of those methods focusing on single-task learning, whereas each complication onset is predicted independently, leading to suboptimal models. We propose a multi-view multi-task network (MuViTaNet) for predicting the onset of multiple complications to tackle these issues. In particular, MuViTaNet complements patient representation by using a multi-view encoder to effectively extract information by considering clinical data as both sequences of clinical visits and sets of clinical features. In addition, it leverages additional information from both related labeled and unlabeled datasets to generate more generalized representations by using a new multi-task learning scheme for making more accurate predictions. The experimental results show that MuViTaNet outperforms existing methods for profiling the development of cardiac complications in breast cancer survivors. Furthermore, thanks to its multi-view multi-task architecture, MuViTaNet also provides an effective mechanism for interpreting its predictions in multiple perspectives, thereby helping clinicians discover the underlying mechanism triggering the onset and for making better clinical treatments in real-world scenarios.
Advances of the Python-based Fluid-Structure Interaction capabilities included in SU2
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2021
Year: 2021

Current research efforts in aeroelasticity aim at including higher fidelity aerodynamic results into the simulation frameworks. In the present effort, the Python--based Fluid--Structure Interaction framework of the well known SU2 code has been updated and extended to allow for efficient and fully open-source simulations of detailed aeroelastic phenomena. The interface has been standardised for easier inclusion of other external solvers and the comunication scheme between processors revisited. A native solver has been introduced to solve the structural equations coming from a Nastran--like Finite Element Model. The use of high level programming allows to perform simulations with ease and minimum human work. On the other hand, the Computational Fluid Dynamics code of choice has efficient lower level functions that provide a quick turnaround time. Further, the aerodynamic code is currently actively developed and exhibits interesting features for computational aeroelasticity, including an effective means of deforming the mesh. The developed software has been assessed against three different test cases, of increasing complexity. The first test involved the comparison with analytical results for a pitching-plunging airfoil. The second tackled a three-dimensional transonic wing, comparing experimental results. Finally, an entire wind tunnel test, with a flexible half-plane model, has been simulated. In all these tests the code performed well, increasing the confidence that it will be useful for a large range of applications, even in industrial settings. The final goal of the research is to provide with an excellent and free alternative for aeroelastic simulations, that will leverage the use of high-fidelity in the common practise.
TreeNet: A lightweight One-Shot Aggregation Convolutional Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

The architecture of deep convolutional networks (CNNs) has evolved for years, becoming more accurate and faster. However, it is still challenging to design reasonable network structures that aim at obtaining the best accuracy under a limited computational budget. In this paper, we propose a Tree block, named after its appearance, which extends the One-Shot Aggregation (OSA) module while being more lightweight and flexible. Specifically, the Tree block replaces each of the $3\times3$ Conv layers in OSA into a stack of shallow residual block (SRB) and $1\times1$ Conv layer. The $1\times1$ Conv layer is responsible for dimension increasing and the SRB is fed into the next step. By doing this, when aggregating the same number of subsequent feature maps, the Tree block has a deeper network structure while having less model complexity. In addition, residual connection and efficient channel attention(ECA) is added to the Tree block to further improve the performance of the network. Based on the Tree block, we build efficient backbone models calling TreeNets. TreeNet has a similar network architecture to ResNet, making it flexible to replace ResNet in various computer vision frameworks. We comprehensively evaluate TreeNet on common-used benchmarks, including ImageNet-1k for classification, MS COCO for object detection, and instance segmentation. Experimental results demonstrate that TreeNet is more efficient and performs favorably against the current state-of-the-art backbone methods.
A Principled Approach to Failure Analysis and Model Repairment: Demonstration in Medical Imaging
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Machine learning models commonly exhibit unexpected failures post-deployment due to either data shifts or uncommon situations in the training environment. Domain experts typically go through the tedious process of inspecting the failure cases manually, identifying failure modes and then attempting to fix the model. In this work, we aim to standardise and bring principles to this process through answering two critical questions: (i) how do we know that we have identified meaningful and distinct failure types?; (ii) how can we validate that a model has, indeed, been repaired? We suggest that the quality of the identified failure types can be validated through measuring the intra- and inter-type generalisation after fine-tuning and introduce metrics to compare different subtyping methods. Furthermore, we argue that a model can be considered repaired if it achieves high accuracy on the failure types while retaining performance on the previously correct data. We combine these two ideas into a principled framework for evaluating the quality of both the identified failure subtypes and model repairment. We evaluate its utility on a classification and an object detection tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/Rokken-lab6/Failure-Analysis-and-Model-Repairment
Replica Analysis for Generalized Linear Regression with IID Row Prior
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

Different from a typical independent identically distributed (IID) element assumption, this paper studies the estimation of IID row random matrix for the generalized linear model constructed by a linear mixing space and a row-wise mapping channel. The objective inference problem arises in many engineering fields, such as wireless communications, compressed sensing, and phase retrieval. We apply the replica method from statistical mechanics to analyze the exact minimum mean square error (MMSE) under the Bayes-optimal setting, in which the explicit replica symmetric solution of the exact MMSE estimator is obtained. Meanwhile, the input-output mutual information relation between the objective model and the equivalent single-vector system is established. To estimate the signal, we also propose a computationally efficient message passing based algorithm on expectation propagation (EP) perspective and analyze its dynamics. We verify that the asymptotic MSE of proposed algorithm predicted by its state evolution (SE) matches perfectly the exact MMSE estimator predicted by the replica method. That indicates, the optimal MSE error can be attained by the proposed algorithm if it has a unique fixed point.
Local Learning at the Network Edge for Efficient & Secure Real-Time Predictive Analytics
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

The ability to perform computation on devices, such as smartphones, cars, or other nodes present at the Internet of Things leads to constraints regarding bandwidth, storage, and energy, as most of these devices are mobile and operate on batteries. Using their computational power to perform locally machine learning and analytics tasks can enable accurate and real-time predictions at the network edge. A trained machine learning model requires high accuracy towards the prediction outcome, as wrong decisions can lead to negative consequences on the efficient conclusion of applications. Most of the data sensed in these devices are contextual and personal requiring privacy-preserving without their distribution over the network. When working with these privacy-preserving data, not only the protection is important but, also, the model needs the ability to adapt to regular occurring concept drifts and data distribution changes to guarantee a high accuracy of the prediction outcome. We address the importance of personalization and generalization in edge devices to adapt to data distribution updates over continuously evolving environments. The methodology we propose relies on the principles of Federated Learning and Optimal Stopping Theory extended with a personalization component. The privacy-efficient and quality-awareness of personalization and generalization is the overarching aim of this work.
Improved Soft Duplicate Detection in Search-Based Motion Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Search-based techniques have shown great success in motion planning problems such as robotic navigation by discretizing the state space and precomputing motion primitives. However in domains with complex dynamic constraints, constructing motion primitives in a discretized state space is non-trivial. This requires operating in continuous space which can be challenging for search-based planners as they can get stuck in local minima regions. Previous work on planning in continuous spaces introduced soft duplicate detection which requires search to compute the duplicity of a state with respect to previously seen states to avoid exploring states that are likely to be duplicates, especially in local minima regions. They propose a simple metric utilizing the euclidean distance between states, and proximity to obstacles to compute the duplicity. In this paper, we improve upon this metric by introducing a kinodynamically informed metric, subtree overlap, between two states as the similarity between their successors that can be reached within a fixed time horizon using kinodynamic motion primitives. This captures the intuition that, due to robot dynamics, duplicate states can be far in euclidean distance and result in very similar successor states, while non-duplicate states can be close and result in widely different successors.
Contrastive Unpaired Translation using Focal Loss for Patch Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Image-to-image translation models transfer images from input domain to output domain in an endeavor to retain the original content of the image. Contrastive Unpaired Translation is one of the existing methods for solving such problems. Significant advantage of this method, compared to competitors, is the ability to train and perform well in cases where both input and output domains are only a single image. Another key thing that differentiates this method from its predecessors is the usage of image patches rather than the whole images. It also turns out that sampling negatives (patches required to calculate the loss) from the same image achieves better results than a scenario where the negatives are sampled from other images in the dataset. This type of approach encourages mapping of corresponding patches to the same location in relation to other patches (negatives) while at the same time improves the output image quality and significantly decreases memory usage as well as the time required to train the model compared to CycleGAN method used as a baseline. Through a series of experiments we show that using focal loss in place of cross-entropy loss within the PatchNCE loss can improve on the model's performance and even surpass the current state-of-the-art model for image-to-image translation.
Basil: Breaking up BFT with ACID (transactions)
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

This paper presents Basil, the first transactional, leaderless Byzantine Fault Tolerant key-value store. Basil leverages ACID transactions to scalably implement the abstraction of a trusted shared log in the presence of Byzantine actors. Unlike traditional BFT approaches, Basil executes non-conflicting operations in parallel and commits transactions in a single round-trip during fault-free executions. Basil improves throughput over traditional BFT systems by four to five times, and is only four times slower than TAPIR, a non-Byzantine replicated system. Basil's novel recovery mechanism further minimizes the impact of failures: with 30% Byzantine clients, throughput drops by less than 25% in the worst-case.
Deciding Whether to Ask Clarifying Questions in Large-Scale Spoken Language Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

A large-scale conversational agent can suffer from understanding user utterances with various ambiguities such as ASR ambiguity, intent ambiguity, and hypothesis ambiguity. When ambiguities are detected, the agent should engage in a clarifying dialog to resolve the ambiguities before committing to actions. However, asking clarifying questions for all the ambiguity occurrences could lead to asking too many questions, essentially hampering the user experience. To trigger clarifying questions only when necessary for the user satisfaction, we propose a neural self-attentive model that leverages the hypotheses with ambiguities and contextual signals. We conduct extensive experiments on five common ambiguity types using real data from a large-scale commercial conversational agent and demonstrate significant improvement over a set of baseline approaches.
Anytime Game-Theoretic Planning with Active Reasoning About Humans' Latent States for Human-Centered Robots
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

A human-centered robot needs to reason about the cognitive limitation and potential irrationality of its human partner to achieve seamless interactions. This paper proposes an anytime game-theoretic planner that integrates iterative reasoning models, a partially observable Markov decision process, and chance-constrained Monte-Carlo belief tree search for robot behavioral planning. Our planner enables a robot to safely and actively reason about its human partner's latent cognitive states (bounded intelligence and irrationality) in real-time to maximize its utility better. We validate our approach in an autonomous driving domain where our behavioral planner and a low-level motion controller hierarchically control an autonomous car to negotiate traffic merges. Simulations and user studies are conducted to show our planner's effectiveness.
Electoral Programs of German Parties 2021: A Computational Analysis Of Their Comprehensibility and Likeability Based On SentiArt
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

The electoral programs of six German parties issued before the parliamentary elections of 2021 are analyzed using state-of-the-art computational tools for quantitative narrative, topic and sentiment analysis. We compare different methods for computing the textual similarity of the programs, Jaccard Bag similarity, Latent Semantic Analysis, doc2vec, and sBERT, the representational and computational complexity increasing from the 1st to the 4th method. A new similarity measure for entire documents derived from the Fowlkes Mallows Score is applied to kmeans clustering of sBERT transformed sentences. Using novel indices of the readability and emotion potential of texts computed via SentiArt (Jacobs, 2019), our data shed light on the similarities and differences of the programs regarding their length, main ideas, comprehensibility, likeability, and semantic complexity. Among others, they reveal that the programs of the SPD and CDU have the best chances to be comprehensible and likeable -all other things being equal-, and they raise the important issue of which similarity measure is optimal for comparing texts such as electoral programs which necessarily share a lot of words. While such analyses can not replace qualitative analyses or a deep reading of the texts, they offer predictions that can be verified in empirical studies and may serve as a motivation for changing aspects of future electoral programs potentially making them more comprehensible and/or likeable.
Self-Supervised Learning for MRI Reconstruction with a Parallel Network Training Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Image reconstruction from undersampled k-space data plays an important role in accelerating the acquisition of MR data, and a lot of deep learning-based methods have been exploited recently. Despite the achieved inspiring results, the optimization of these methods commonly relies on the fully-sampled reference data, which are time-consuming and difficult to collect. To address this issue, we propose a novel self-supervised learning method. Specifically, during model optimization, two subsets are constructed by randomly selecting part of k-space data from the undersampled data and then fed into two parallel reconstruction networks to perform information recovery. Two reconstruction losses are defined on all the scanned data points to enhance the network's capability of recovering the frequency information. Meanwhile, to constrain the learned unscanned data points of the network, a difference loss is designed to enforce consistency between the two parallel networks. In this way, the reconstruction model can be properly trained with only the undersampled data. During the model evaluation, the undersampled data are treated as the inputs and either of the two trained networks is expected to reconstruct the high-quality results. The proposed method is flexible and can be employed in any existing deep learning-based method. The effectiveness of the method is evaluated on an open brain MRI dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed self-supervised method can achieve competitive reconstruction performance compared to the corresponding supervised learning method at high acceleration rates (4 and 8). The code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/chenhu96/Self-Supervised-MRI-Reconstruction}.
Partial to Whole Knowledge Distillation: Progressive Distilling Decomposed Knowledge Boosts Student Better
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Knowledge distillation field delicately designs various types of knowledge to shrink the performance gap between compact student and large-scale teacher. These existing distillation approaches simply focus on the improvement of \textit{knowledge quality}, but ignore the significant influence of \textit{knowledge quantity} on the distillation procedure. Opposed to the conventional distillation approaches, which extract knowledge from a fixed teacher computation graph, this paper explores a non-negligible research direction from a novel perspective of \textit{knowledge quantity} to further improve the efficacy of knowledge distillation. We introduce a new concept of knowledge decomposition, and further put forward the \textbf{P}artial to \textbf{W}hole \textbf{K}nowledge \textbf{D}istillation~(\textbf{PWKD}) paradigm. Specifically, we reconstruct teacher into weight-sharing sub-networks with same depth but increasing channel width, and train sub-networks jointly to obtain decomposed knowledge~(sub-networks with more channels represent more knowledge). Then, student extract partial to whole knowledge from the pre-trained teacher within multiple training stages where cyclic learning rate is leveraged to accelerate convergence. Generally, \textbf{PWKD} can be regarded as a plugin to be compatible with existing offline knowledge distillation approaches. To verify the effectiveness of \textbf{PWKD}, we conduct experiments on two benchmark datasets:~CIFAR-100 and ImageNet, and comprehensive evaluation results reveal that \textbf{PWKD} consistently improve existing knowledge distillation approaches without bells and whistles.