OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Sampling Colorings and Independent Sets of Random Regular Bipartite Graphs in the Non-Uniqueness Region
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2021
Year: 2021

For spin systems, such as the $q$-colorings and independent-set models, approximating the partition function in the so-called non-uniqueness region, where the model exhibits long-range correlations, is typically computationally hard for bounded-degree graphs. We present new algorithmic results for approximating the partition function and sampling from the Gibbs distribution for spin systems in the non-uniqueness region on random regular bipartite graphs. We give an $\mathsf{FPRAS}$ for counting $q$-colorings for even $q=O\big(\tfracΔ{\logΔ}\big)$ on almost every $Δ$-regular bipartite graph. This is within a factor $O(\logΔ)$ of the sampling algorithm for general graphs in the uniqueness region and improves significantly upon the previous best bound of $q=O\big(\tfrac{\sqrtΔ}{(\logΔ)^2}\big)$ by Jenssen, Keevash, and Perkins (SODA'19). Analogously, for the hard-core model on independent sets weighted by $λ>0$, we present an $\mathsf{FPRAS}$ for estimating the partition function when $λ=Ω\big(\tfrac{\logΔ}Δ\big)$, which improves upon previous results by an $Ω(\log Δ)$ factor. Our results for the colorings and hard-core models follow from a general result that applies to arbitrary spin systems. Our main contribution is to show how to elevate probabilistic/analytic bounds on the marginal probabilities for the typical structure of phases on random bipartite regular graphs into efficient algorithms, using the polymer method. We further show evidence that our result for colorings is within a constant factor of best possible using current polymer-method approaches.
Aggregate Cyber-Risk Management in the IoT Age: Cautionary Statistics for (Re)Insurers and Likes
Venue: arXiv cs.PF 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we provide (i) a rigorous general theory to elicit conditions on (tail-dependent) heavy-tailed cyber-risk distributions under which a risk management firm might find it (non)sustainable to provide aggregate cyber-risk coverage services for smart societies, and (ii)a real-data driven numerical study to validate claims made in theory assuming boundedly rational cyber-risk managers, alongside providing ideas to boost markets that aggregate dependent cyber-risks with heavy-tails.To the best of our knowledge, this is the only complete general theory till date on the feasibility of aggregate cyber-risk management.
DeepRT: A Soft Real Time Scheduler for Computer Vision Applications on the Edge
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

The ubiquity of smartphone cameras and IoT cameras, together with the recent boom of deep learning and deep neural networks, proliferate various computer vision driven mobile and IoT applications deployed on the edge. This paper focuses on applications which make soft real time requests to perform inference on their data - they desire prompt responses within designated deadlines, but occasional deadline misses are acceptable. Supporting soft real time applications on a multi-tenant edge server is not easy, since the requests sharing the limited GPU computing resources of an edge server interfere with each other. In order to tackle this problem, we comprehensively evaluate how latency and throughput respond to different GPU execution plans. Based on this analysis, we propose a GPU scheduler, DeepRT, which provides latency guarantee to the requests while maintaining high overall system throughput. The key component of DeepRT, DisBatcher, batches data from different requests as much as possible while it is proven to provide latency guarantee for requests admitted by an Admission Control Module. DeepRT also includes an Adaptation Module which tackles overruns. Our evaluation results show that DeepRT outperforms state-of-the-art works in terms of the number of deadline misses and throughput.
Acoustic Scene Classification Using Multichannel Observation with Partially Missing Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2021
Year: 2021

Sounds recorded with smartphones or IoT devices often have partially unreliable observations caused by clipping, wind noise, and completely missing parts due to microphone failure and packet loss in data transmission over the network. In this paper, we investigate the impact of the partially missing channels on the performance of acoustic scene classification using multichannel audio recordings, especially for a distributed microphone array. Missing observations cause not only losses of time-frequency and spatial information on sound sources but also a mismatch between a trained model and evaluation data. We thus investigate how a missing channel affects the performance of acoustic scene classification in detail. We also propose simple data augmentation methods for scene classification using multichannel observations with partially missing channels and evaluate the scene classification performance using the data augmentation methods.
Improved Surrogate Modeling of Fluid Dynamics with Physics-Informed Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have recently shown great promise as a way of incorporating physics-based domain knowledge, including fundamental governing equations, into neural network models for many complex engineering systems. They have been particularly effective in the area of inverse problems, where boundary conditions may be ill-defined, and data-absent scenarios, where typical supervised learning approaches will fail. Here, we further explore the use of this modeling methodology to surrogate modeling of a fluid dynamical system, and demonstrate additional undiscussed and interesting advantages of such a modeling methodology over conventional data-driven approaches: 1) improving the model's predictive performance even with incomplete description of the underlying physics; 2) improving the robustness of the model to noise in the dataset; 3) reduced effort to convergence during optimization for a new, previously unseen scenario by transfer optimization of a pre-existing model. Hence, we noticed the inclusion of a physics-based regularization term can substantially improve the equivalent data-driven surrogate model in many substantive ways, including an order of magnitude improvement in test error when the dataset is very noisy, and a 2-3x improvement when only partial physics is included. In addition, we propose a novel transfer optimization scheme for use in such surrogate modeling scenarios and demonstrate an approximately 3x improvement in speed to convergence and an order of magnitude improvement in predictive performance over conventional Xavier initialization for training of new scenarios.
Density-Aware Federated Imitation Learning for Connected and Automated Vehicles with Unsignalized Intersection
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2021
Year: 2021

Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) has become one of the essential components in Industry 4.0. As one of the critical indicators of ITS, efficiency has attracted wide attention from researchers. However, the next generation of urban traffic carried by multiple transport service providers may prohibit the raw data interaction among multiple regions for privacy reasons, easily ignored in the existing research. This paper puts forward a federated learning-based vehicle control framework to solve the above problem, including interactors, trainers, and an aggregator. In addition, the density-aware model aggregation method is utilized in this framework to improve vehicle control. What is more, to promote the performance of the end-to-end learning algorithm in the safety aspect, this paper proposes an imitation learning algorithm, which can obtain collision avoidance capabilities from a set of collision avoidance rules. Furthermore, a loss-aware experience selection strategy is also explored, reducing the communication overhead between the interactors and the trainers via extra computing. Finally, the experiment results demonstrate that the proposed imitation learning algorithm obtains the ability to avoid collisions and reduces discomfort by 55.71%. Besides, density-aware model aggregation can further reduce discomfort by 41.37%, and the experience selection scheme can reduce the communication overhead by 12.80% while ensuring model convergence.
SeaDronesSee: A Maritime Benchmark for Detecting Humans in Open Water
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are of crucial importance in search and rescue missions in maritime environments due to their flexible and fast operation capabilities. Modern computer vision algorithms are of great interest in aiding such missions. However, they are dependent on large amounts of real-case training data from UAVs, which is only available for traffic scenarios on land. Moreover, current object detection and tracking data sets only provide limited environmental information or none at all, neglecting a valuable source of information. Therefore, this paper introduces a large-scaled visual object detection and tracking benchmark (SeaDronesSee) aiming to bridge the gap from land-based vision systems to sea-based ones. We collect and annotate over 54,000 frames with 400,000 instances captured from various altitudes and viewing angles ranging from 5 to 260 meters and 0 to 90 degrees while providing the respective meta information for altitude, viewing angle and other meta data. We evaluate multiple state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms on this newly established benchmark serving as baselines. We provide an evaluation server where researchers can upload their prediction and compare their results on a central leaderboard
XAI-KG: knowledge graph to support XAI and decision-making in manufacturing
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

The increasing adoption of artificial intelligence requires accurate forecasts and means to understand the reasoning of artificial intelligence models behind such a forecast. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) aims to provide cues for why a model issued a certain prediction. Such cues are of utmost importance to decision-making since they provide insights on the features that influenced most certain forecasts and let the user decide if the forecast can be trusted. Though many techniques were developed to explain black-box models, little research was done on assessing the quality of those explanations and their influence on decision-making. We propose an ontology and knowledge graph to support collecting feedback regarding forecasts, forecast explanations, recommended decision-making options, and user actions. This way, we provide means to improve forecasting models, explanations, and recommendations of decision-making options. We tailor the knowledge graph for the domain of demand forecasting and validate it on real-world data.
Mind Reading at Work: Cooperation without common ground
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

As Stefan Kopp and Nicole Kramer say in their recent paper[Frontiers in Psychology 12 (2021) 597], despite some very impressive demonstrations over the last decade or so, we still don't know how how to make a computer have a half decent conversation with a human. They argue that the capabilities required to do this include incremental joint co-construction and mentalizing. Although agreeing whole heartedly with their statement of the problem, this paper argues for a different approach to the solution based on the "new" AI of situated action.
Refinements of Futures Past: Higher-Order Specification with Implicit Refinement Types (Extended Version)
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2021
Year: 2021

Refinement types decorate types with assertions that enable automatic verification. Like assertions, refinements are limited to binders that are in scope, and hence, cannot express higher-order specifications. Ghost variables circumvent this limitation but are prohibitively tedious to use as the programmer must divine and explicate their values at all call-sites. We introduce Implicit Refinement Types which turn ghost variables into implicit pair and function types, in a way that lets the refinement typechecker automatically synthesize their values at compile time. Implicit Refinement Types further take advantage of refinement type information, allowing them to be used as a lightweight verification tool, rather than merely as a technique to automate programming tasks. We evaluate the utility of Implicit Refinement Types by showing how they enable the modular specification and automatic verification of various higher-order examples including stateful protocols, access control, and resource usage.
Do Natural Language Explanations Represent Valid Logical Arguments? Verifying Entailment in Explainable NLI Gold Standards
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

An emerging line of research in Explainable NLP is the creation of datasets enriched with human-annotated explanations and rationales, used to build and evaluate models with step-wise inference and explanation generation capabilities. While human-annotated explanations are used as ground-truth for the inference, there is a lack of systematic assessment of their consistency and rigour. In an attempt to provide a critical quality assessment of Explanation Gold Standards (XGSs) for NLI, we propose a systematic annotation methodology, named Explanation Entailment Verification (EEV), to quantify the logical validity of human-annotated explanations. The application of EEV on three mainstream datasets reveals the surprising conclusion that a majority of the explanations, while appearing coherent on the surface, represent logically invalid arguments, ranging from being incomplete to containing clearly identifiable logical errors. This conclusion confirms that the inferential properties of explanations are still poorly formalised and understood, and that additional work on this line of research is necessary to improve the way Explanation Gold Standards are constructed.
Rare Disease Identification from Clinical Notes with Ontologies and Weak Supervision
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

The identification of rare diseases from clinical notes with Natural Language Processing (NLP) is challenging due to the few cases available for machine learning and the need of data annotation from clinical experts. We propose a method using ontologies and weak supervision. The approach includes two steps: (i) Text-to-UMLS, linking text mentions to concepts in Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), with a named entity linking tool (e.g. SemEHR) and weak supervision based on customised rules and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) based contextual representations, and (ii) UMLS-to-ORDO, matching UMLS concepts to rare diseases in Orphanet Rare Disease Ontology (ORDO). Using MIMIC-III US intensive care discharge summaries as a case study, we show that the Text-to-UMLS process can be greatly improved with weak supervision, without any annotated data from domain experts. Our analysis shows that the overall pipeline processing discharge summaries can surface rare disease cases, which are mostly uncaptured in manual ICD codes of the hospital admissions.
Flavours of Sequential Information Flow
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2021
Year: 2021

Information-flow policies prescribe which information is available to a given user or subsystem. We study the problem of specifying such properties in reactive systems, which may require dynamic changes in information-flow restrictions between their states. We formalize several flavours of sequential information-flow, which cover different assumptions about the semantic relation between multiple observations of a system. Information-flow specification falls into the category of hyperproperties. We define different variants of sequential information-flow specification using a first-order logic with both trace quantifiers and temporal quantifiers called Hypertrace Logic. We prove that HyperLTL, equivalent to a subset of Hypertrace Logic with restricted quantifier prefixes, cannot specify the majority of the studied two-state independence variants. For our results, we introduce a notion of equivalence between sets of traces that cannot be distinguished by certain classes of formulas in Hypertrace Logic. This presents a new approach to proving inexpressiveness results for logics such as HyperLTL.
Dynamic Reliability Management in Neuromorphic Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2021
Year: 2021

Neuromorphic computing systems uses non-volatile memory (NVM) to implement high-density and low-energy synaptic storage. Elevated voltages and currents needed to operate NVMs cause aging of CMOS-based transistors in each neuron and synapse circuit in the hardware, drifting the transistor's parameters from their nominal values. Aggressive device scaling increases power density and temperature, which accelerates the aging, challenging the reliable operation of neuromorphic systems. Existing reliability-oriented techniques periodically de-stress all neuron and synapse circuits in the hardware at fixed intervals, assuming worst-case operating conditions, without actually tracking their aging at run time. To de-stress these circuits, normal operation must be interrupted, which introduces latency in spike generation and propagation, impacting the inter-spike interval and hence, performance, e.g., accuracy. We propose a new architectural technique to mitigate the aging-related reliability problems in neuromorphic systems, by designing an intelligent run-time manager (NCRTM), which dynamically destresses neuron and synapse circuits in response to the short-term aging in their CMOS transistors during the execution of machine learning workloads, with the objective of meeting a reliability target. NCRTM de-stresses these circuits only when it is absolutely necessary to do so, otherwise reducing the performance impact by scheduling de-stress operations off the critical path. We evaluate NCRTM with state-of-the-art machine learning workloads on a neuromorphic hardware. Our results demonstrate that NCRTM significantly improves the reliability of neuromorphic hardware, with marginal impact on performance.
Understanding Short-Range Memory Effects in Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is of fundamental importance in deep learning. Despite its simplicity, elucidating its efficacy remains challenging. Conventionally, the success of SGD is ascribed to the stochastic gradient noise (SGN) incurred in the training process. Based on this consensus, SGD is frequently treated and analyzed as the Euler-Maruyama discretization of stochastic differential equations (SDEs) driven by either Brownian or Levy stable motion. In this study, we argue that SGN is neither Gaussian nor Levy stable. Instead, inspired by the short-range correlation emerging in the SGN series, we propose that SGD can be viewed as a discretization of an SDE driven by fractional Brownian motion (FBM). Accordingly, the different convergence behavior of SGD dynamics is well-grounded. Moreover, the first passage time of an SDE driven by FBM is approximately derived. The result suggests a lower escaping rate for a larger Hurst parameter, and thus SGD stays longer in flat minima. This happens to coincide with the well-known phenomenon that SGD favors flat minima that generalize well. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate our conjecture, and it is demonstrated that short-range memory effects persist across various model architectures, datasets, and training strategies. Our study opens up a new perspective and may contribute to a better understanding of SGD.
Schematic Memory Persistence and Transience for Efficient and Robust Continual Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Continual learning is considered a promising step towards next-generation Artificial Intelligence (AI), where deep neural networks (DNNs) make decisions by continuously learning a sequence of different tasks akin to human learning processes. It is still quite primitive, with existing works focusing primarily on avoiding (catastrophic) forgetting. However, since forgetting is inevitable given bounded memory and unbounded task loads, 'how to reasonably forget' is a problem continual learning must address in order to reduce the performance gap between AIs and humans, in terms of 1) memory efficiency, 2) generalizability, and 3) robustness when dealing with noisy data. To address this, we propose a novel ScheMAtic memory peRsistence and Transience (SMART) framework for continual learning with external memory that builds on recent advances in neuroscience. The efficiency and generalizability are enhanced by a novel long-term forgetting mechanism and schematic memory, using sparsity and 'backward positive transfer' constraints with theoretical guarantees on the error bound. Robust enhancement is achieved using a novel short-term forgetting mechanism inspired by background information-gated learning. Finally, an extensive experimental analysis on both benchmark and real-world datasets demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of our model.
Benchmarking Structured Policies and Policy Optimization for Real-World Dexterous Object Manipulation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Dexterous manipulation is a challenging and important problem in robotics. While data-driven methods are a promising approach, current benchmarks require simulation or extensive engineering support due to the sample inefficiency of popular methods. We present benchmarks for the TriFinger system, an open-source robotic platform for dexterous manipulation and the focus of the 2020 Real Robot Challenge. The benchmarked methods, which were successful in the challenge, can be generally described as structured policies, as they combine elements of classical robotics and modern policy optimization. This inclusion of inductive biases facilitates sample efficiency, interpretability, reliability and high performance. The key aspects of this benchmarking is validation of the baselines across both simulation and the real system, thorough ablation study over the core features of each solution, and a retrospective analysis of the challenge as a manipulation benchmark. The code and demo videos for this work can be found on our website (https://sites.google.com/view/benchmark-rrc).
PolarMask++: Enhanced Polar Representation for Single-Shot Instance Segmentation and Beyond
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Reducing the complexity of the pipeline of instance segmentation is crucial for real-world applications. This work addresses this issue by introducing an anchor-box free and single-shot instance segmentation framework, termed PolarMask, which reformulates the instance segmentation problem as predicting the contours of objects in the polar coordinate, with several appealing benefits. (1) The polar representation unifies instance segmentation (masks) and object detection (bounding boxes) into a single framework, reducing the design and computational complexity. (2) Two modules are carefully designed (i.e. soft polar centerness and polar IoU loss) to sample high-quality center examples and optimize polar contour regression, making the performance of PolarMask does not depend on the bounding box prediction results and thus becomes more efficient in training. (3) PolarMask is fully convolutional and can be easily embedded into most off-the-shelf detection methods. To further improve the accuracy of the framework, a Refined Feature Pyramid is introduced to further improve the feature representation at different scales, termed PolarMask++. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of both PolarMask and PolarMask++, which achieve competitive results on instance segmentation in the challenging COCO dataset with single-model and single-scale training and testing, as well as new state-of-the-art results on rotate text detection and cell segmentation. We hope the proposed polar representation can provide a new perspective for designing algorithms to solve single-shot instance segmentation. The codes and models are available at: github.com/xieenze/PolarMask.