OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Online Meta-Learning For Hybrid Model-Based Deep Receivers
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Recent years have witnessed growing interest in the application of deep neural networks (DNNs) for receiver design, which can potentially be applied in complex environments without relying on knowledge of the channel model. However, the dynamic nature of communication channels often leads to rapid distribution shifts, which may require periodically retraining. This paper formulates a data-efficient two-stage training method that facilitates rapid online adaptation. Our training mechanism uses a predictive meta-learning scheme to train rapidly from data corresponding to both current and past channel realizations. Our method is applicable to any deep neural network (DNN)-based receiver, and does not require transmission of new pilot data for training. To illustrate the proposed approach, we study DNN-aided receivers that utilize an interpretable model-based architecture, and introduce a modular training strategy based on predictive meta-learning. We demonstrate our techniques in simulations on a synthetic linear channel, a synthetic non-linear channel, and a COST 2100 channel. Our results demonstrate that the proposed online training scheme allows receivers to outperform previous techniques based on self-supervision and joint-learning by a margin of up to 2.5 dB in coded bit error rate in rapidly-varying scenarios.
CenterLoc3D: Monocular 3D Vehicle Localization Network for Roadside Surveillance Cameras
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Monocular 3D vehicle localization is an important task in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) and Cooperative Vehicle Infrastructure System (CVIS), which is usually achieved by monocular 3D vehicle detection. However, depth information cannot be obtained directly by monocular cameras due to the inherent imaging mechanism, resulting in more challenging monocular 3D tasks. Most of the current monocular 3D vehicle detection methods leverage 2D detectors and additional geometric modules, which reduces the efficiency. In this paper, we propose a 3D vehicle localization network CenterLoc3D for roadside monocular cameras, which directly predicts centroid and eight vertexes in image space, and the dimension of 3D bounding boxes without 2D detectors. To improve the precision of 3D vehicle localization, we propose a weighted-fusion module and a loss with spatial constraints embedded in CenterLoc3D. Firstly, the transformation matrix between 2D image space and 3D world space is solved by camera calibration. Secondly, vehicle type, centroid, eight vertexes, and the dimension of 3D vehicle bounding boxes are obtained by CenterLoc3D. Finally, centroid in 3D world space can be obtained by camera calibration and CenterLoc3D for 3D vehicle localization. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of 3D vehicle localization for roadside monocular cameras. Hence, we also propose a benchmark for this application including a dataset (SVLD-3D), an annotation tool (LabelImg-3D), and evaluation metrics. Through experimental validation, the proposed method achieves high accuracy and real-time performance. (limited words, please see the article for more details)
Min-Max Similarity: A Contrastive Semi-Supervised Deep Learning Network for Surgical Tools Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

A common problem with segmentation of medical images using neural networks is the difficulty to obtain a significant number of pixel-level annotated data for training. To address this issue, we proposed a semi-supervised segmentation network based on contrastive learning. In contrast to the previous state-of-the-art, we introduce Min-Max Similarity (MMS), a contrastive learning form of dual-view training by employing classifiers and projectors to build all-negative, and positive and negative feature pairs, respectively, to formulate the learning as solving a MMS problem. The all-negative pairs are used to supervise the networks learning from different views and to capture general features, and the consistency of unlabeled predictions is measured by pixel-wise contrastive loss between positive and negative pairs. To quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate our proposed method, we test it on four public endoscopy surgical tool segmentation datasets and one cochlear implant surgery dataset, which we manually annotated. Results indicate that our proposed method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art semi-supervised and fully supervised segmentation algorithms. And our semi-supervised segmentation algorithm can successfully recognize unknown surgical tools and provide good predictions. Also, our MMS approach could achieve inference speeds of about 40 frames per second (fps) and is suitable to deal with the real-time video segmentation.
FlexR: Few-shot Classification with Language Embeddings for Structured Reporting of Chest X-rays
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The automation of chest X-ray reporting has garnered significant interest due to the time-consuming nature of the task. However, the clinical accuracy of free-text reports has proven challenging to quantify using natural language processing metrics, given the complexity of medical information, the variety of writing styles, and the potential for typos and inconsistencies. Structured reporting and standardized reports, on the other hand, can provide consistency and formalize the evaluation of clinical correctness. However, high-quality annotations for structured reporting are scarce. Therefore, we propose a method to predict clinical findings defined by sentences in structured reporting templates, which can be used to fill such templates. The approach involves training a contrastive language-image model using chest X-rays and related free-text radiological reports, then creating textual prompts for each structured finding and optimizing a classifier to predict clinical findings in the medical image. Results show that even with limited image-level annotations for training, the method can accomplish the structured reporting tasks of severity assessment of cardiomegaly and localizing pathologies in chest X-rays.
Connections between Deep Equilibrium and Sparse Representation Models with Application to Hyperspectral Image Denoising
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In this study, the problem of computing a sparse representation of multi-dimensional visual data is considered. In general, such data e.g., hyperspectral images, color images or video data consists of signals that exhibit strong local dependencies. A new computationally efficient sparse coding optimization problem is derived by employing regularization terms that are adapted to the properties of the signals of interest. Exploiting the merits of the learnable regularization techniques, a neural network is employed to act as structure prior and reveal the underlying signal dependencies. To solve the optimization problem Deep unrolling and Deep equilibrium based algorithms are developed, forming highly interpretable and concise deep-learning-based architectures, that process the input dataset in a block-by-block fashion. Extensive simulation results, in the context of hyperspectral image denoising, are provided, which demonstrate that the proposed algorithms outperform significantly other sparse coding approaches and exhibit superior performance against recent state-of-the-art deep-learning-based denoising models. In a wider perspective, our work provides a unique bridge between a classic approach, that is the sparse representation theory, and modern representation tools that are based on deep learning modeling.
Investigating the Properties of Neural Network Representations in Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper we investigate the properties of representations learned by deep reinforcement learning systems. Much of the early work on representations for reinforcement learning focused on designing fixed-basis architectures to achieve properties thought to be desirable, such as orthogonality and sparsity. In contrast, the idea behind deep reinforcement learning methods is that the agent designer should not encode representational properties, but rather that the data stream should determine the properties of the representation -- good representations emerge under appropriate training schemes. In this paper we bring these two perspectives together, empirically investigating the properties of representations that support transfer in reinforcement learning. We introduce and measure six representational properties over more than 25 thousand agent-task settings. We consider Deep Q-learning agents with different auxiliary losses in a pixel-based navigation environment, with source and transfer tasks corresponding to different goal locations. We develop a method to better understand why some representations work better for transfer, through a systematic approach varying task similarity and measuring and correlating representation properties with transfer performance. We demonstrate the generality of the methodology by investigating representations learned by a Rainbow agent that successfully transfer across games modes in Atari 2600.
Multi-target Extractor and Detector for Unknown-number Speaker Diarization
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2023
Year: 2023

Strong representations of target speakers can help extract important information about speakers and detect corresponding temporal regions in multi-speaker conversations. In this study, we propose a neural architecture that simultaneously extracts speaker representations consistent with the speaker diarization objective and detects the presence of each speaker on a frame-by-frame basis regardless of the number of speakers in a conversation. A speaker representation (called z-vector) extractor and a time-speaker contextualizer, implemented by a residual network and processing data in both temporal and speaker dimensions, are integrated into a unified framework. Tests on the CALLHOME corpus show that our model outperforms most of the methods proposed so far. Evaluations in a more challenging case with simultaneous speakers ranging from 2 to 7 show that our model achieves 6.4% to 30.9% relative diarization error rate reductions over several typical baselines.
PEGG-Net: Pixel-Wise Efficient Grasp Generation in Complex Scenes
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Vision-based grasp estimation is an essential part of robotic manipulation tasks in the real world. Existing planar grasp estimation algorithms have been demonstrated to work well in relatively simple scenes. But when it comes to complex scenes, such as cluttered scenes with messy backgrounds and moving objects, the algorithms from previous works are prone to generate inaccurate and unstable grasping contact points. In this work, we first study the existing planar grasp estimation algorithms and analyze the related challenges in complex scenes. Secondly, we design a Pixel-wise Efficient Grasp Generation Network (PEGG-Net) to tackle the problem of grasping in complex scenes. PEGG-Net can achieve improved state-of-the-art performance on the Cornell dataset (98.9%) and second-best performance on the Jacquard dataset (93.8%), outperforming other existing algorithms without the introduction of complex structures. Thirdly, PEGG-Net could operate in a closed-loop manner for added robustness in dynamic environments using position-based visual servoing (PBVS). Finally, we conduct real-world experiments on static, dynamic, and cluttered objects in different complex scenes. The results show that our proposed network achieves a high success rate in grasping irregular objects, household objects, and workshop tools. To benefit the community, our trained model and supplementary materials are available at https://github.com/HZWang96/PEGG-Net.
Speculative Decoding: Exploiting Speculative Execution for Accelerating Seq2seq Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

We propose Speculative Decoding (SpecDec), for the first time ever, to formally study exploiting the idea of speculative execution to accelerate autoregressive (AR) decoding. Speculative Decoding has two innovations: Spec-Drafter -- an independent model specially optimized for efficient and accurate drafting -- and Spec-Verification -- a reliable method for verifying the drafted tokens efficiently in the decoding paradigm. Experimental results on various seq2seq tasks including machine translation and abstractive summarization show our approach can achieve around $5\times$ speedup for the popular Transformer architectures with comparable generation quality to beam search decoding, refreshing the impression that the draft-then-verify paradigm introduces only $1.4\times$$\sim$$2\times$ speedup. In addition to the remarkable speedup, we also demonstrate 3 additional advantages of SpecDec, revealing its practical value for accelerating generative models in real-world applications. Our models and codes are available at https://github.com/hemingkx/SpecDec.
Weakly Supervised Patch Label Inference Networks for Efficient Pavement Distress Detection and Recognition in the Wild
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Automatic image-based pavement distress detection and recognition are vital for pavement maintenance and management. However, existing deep learning-based methods largely omit the specific characteristics of pavement images, such as high image resolution and low distress area ratio, and are not end-to-end trainable. In this paper, we present a series of simple yet effective end-to-end deep learning approaches named Weakly Supervised Patch Label Inference Networks (WSPLIN) for efficiently addressing these tasks under various application settings. WSPLIN transforms the fully supervised pavement image classification problem into a weakly supervised pavement patch classification problem for solutions. Specifically, WSPLIN first divides the pavement image under different scales into patches with different collection strategies and then employs a Patch Label Inference Network (PLIN) to infer the labels of these patches to fully exploit the resolution and scale information. Notably, we design a patch label sparsity constraint based on the prior knowledge of distress distribution and leverage the Comprehensive Decision Network (CDN) to guide the training of PLIN in a weakly supervised way. Therefore, the patch labels produced by PLIN provide interpretable intermediate information, such as the rough location and the type of distress. We evaluate our method on a large-scale bituminous pavement distress dataset named CQU-BPDD and the augmented Crack500 (Crack500-PDD) dataset, which is a newly constructed pavement distress detection dataset augmented from the Crack500. Extensive results demonstrate the superiority of our method over baselines in both performance and efficiency. The source codes of WSPLIN are released on https://github.com/DearCaat/wsplin.
M-MELD: A Multilingual Multi-Party Dataset for Emotion Recognition in Conversations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Expression of emotions is a crucial part of daily human communication. Emotion recognition in conversations (ERC) is an emerging field of study, where the primary task is to identify the emotion behind each utterance in a conversation. Though a lot of work has been done on ERC in the past, these works only focus on ERC in the English language, thereby ignoring any other languages. In this paper, we present Multilingual MELD (M-MELD), where we extend the Multimodal EmotionLines Dataset (MELD) \cite{poria2018meld} to 4 other languages beyond English, namely Greek, Polish, French, and Spanish. Beyond just establishing strong baselines for all of these 4 languages, we also propose a novel architecture, DiscLSTM, that uses both sequential and conversational discourse context in a conversational dialogue for ERC. Our proposed approach is computationally efficient, can transfer across languages using just a cross-lingual encoder, and achieves better performance than most uni-modal text approaches in the literature on both MELD and M-MELD. We make our data and code publicly on GitHub.
Group Control for Procedural Rules: Parameterized Complexity and Consecutive Domains
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2023
Year: 2023

We consider Group Control by Adding Individuals (GCAI) in the setting of group identification for two procedural rules -- the consensus-start-respecting rule and the liberal-start-respecting rule. It is known that GCAI for both rules are NP-hard, but whether they are fixed-parameter tractable with respect to the number of distinguished individuals remained open. We resolve both open problems in the affirmative. In addition, we strengthen the NP-hardness of GCAI by showing that, with respect to the natural parameter the number of added individuals, GCAI for both rules are W[2]-hard. Notably, the W[2]-hardness for the liberal-start-respecting rule holds even when restricted to a very special case where the qualifications of individuals satisfy the so-called consecutive ones property. However, for the consensus-start-respecting rule, the problem becomes polynomial-time solvable in this special case. We also study a dual restriction where the disqualifications of individuals fulfill the consecutive ones property, and show that under this restriction GCAI for both rules turn out to be polynomial-time solvable. Our reductions for showing W[2]-hardness also imply several lower bounds concerning kernelization and exact algorithms.
PADA: Pruning Assisted Domain Adaptation for Self-Supervised Speech Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

While self-supervised speech representation learning (SSL) models serve a variety of downstream tasks, these models have been observed to overfit to the domain from which the unlabelled data originates. To alleviate this issue, we propose PADA (Pruning Assisted Domain Adaptation) and zero out redundant weights from models pre-trained on large amounts of out-of-domain (OOD) data. Intuitively, this helps to make space for the target-domain ASR finetuning. The redundant weights can be identified through various pruning strategies which have been discussed in detail as a part of this work. Specifically, we investigate the effect of the recently discovered Task-Agnostic and Task-Aware pruning on PADA and propose a new pruning paradigm based on the latter, which we call Cross-Domain Task-Aware Pruning (CD-TAW). CD-TAW obtains the initial pruning mask from a well fine-tuned OOD model, which makes it starkly different from the rest of the pruning strategies discussed in the paper. Our proposed CD-TAW methodology achieves up to 20.6% relative WER improvement over our baseline when fine-tuned on a 2-hour subset of Switchboard data without language model (LM) decoding. Furthermore, we conduct a detailed analysis to highlight the key design choices of our proposed method.
Analyzing the factors affecting usefulness of Self-Supervised Pre-trained Representations for Speech Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Self-supervised learning (SSL) to learn high-level speech representations has been a popular approach to building Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems in low-resource settings. However, the common assumption made in literature is that a considerable amount of unlabeled data is available for the same domain or language that can be leveraged for SSL pre-training, which we acknowledge is not feasible in a real-world setting. In this paper, as part of the Interspeech Gram Vaani ASR challenge, we try to study the effect of domain, language, dataset size, and other aspects of our upstream pre-training SSL data on the final performance low-resource downstream ASR task. We also build on the continued pre-training paradigm to study the effect of prior knowledge possessed by models trained using SSL. Extensive experiments and studies reveal that the performance of ASR systems is susceptible to the data used for SSL pre-training. Their performance improves with an increase in similarity and volume of pre-training data. We believe our work will be helpful to the speech community in building better ASR systems in low-resource settings and steer research towards improving generalization in SSL-based pre-training for speech systems.
Adversarial Neon Beam: A Light-based Physical Attack to DNNs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In the physical world, deep neural networks (DNNs) are impacted by light and shadow, which can have a significant effect on their performance. While stickers have traditionally been used as perturbations in most physical attacks, their perturbations can often be easily detected. To address this, some studies have explored the use of light-based perturbations, such as lasers or projectors, to generate more subtle perturbations, which are artificial rather than natural. In this study, we introduce a novel light-based attack called the adversarial neon beam (AdvNB), which utilizes common neon beams to create a natural black-box physical attack. Our approach is evaluated on three key criteria: effectiveness, stealthiness, and robustness. Quantitative results obtained in simulated environments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, and in physical scenarios, we achieve an attack success rate of 81.82%, surpassing the baseline. By using common neon beams as perturbations, we enhance the stealthiness of the proposed attack, enabling physical samples to appear more natural. Moreover, we validate the robustness of our approach by successfully attacking advanced DNNs with a success rate of over 75% in all cases. We also discuss defense strategies against the AdvNB attack and put forward other light-based physical attacks.
On the $\ell$-DLIPs of codes over finite commutative rings
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Generalizing the linear complementary duals, the linear complementary pairs and the hull of codes, we introduce the concept of $\ell$-dimension linear intersection pairs ($\ell$-DLIPs) of codes over a finite commutative ring $(R)$, for some positive integer $\ell$. In this paper, we study $\ell$-DLIP of codes over $R$ in a very general setting by a uniform method. Besides, we provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a non-free (or free) $\ell$-DLIP of codes over a finite commutative Frobenius ring. In addition, we obtain a generator set of the intersection of two constacyclic codes over a finite chain ring, which helps us to get an important characterization of $\ell$-DLIP of constacyclic codes. Finally, the $\ell$-DLIP of constacyclic codes over a finite chain ring are used to construct new entanglement-assisted quantum error correcting (EAQEC) codes.
AdaFace: Quality Adaptive Margin for Face Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Recognition in low quality face datasets is challenging because facial attributes are obscured and degraded. Advances in margin-based loss functions have resulted in enhanced discriminability of faces in the embedding space. Further, previous studies have studied the effect of adaptive losses to assign more importance to misclassified (hard) examples. In this work, we introduce another aspect of adaptiveness in the loss function, namely the image quality. We argue that the strategy to emphasize misclassified samples should be adjusted according to their image quality. Specifically, the relative importance of easy or hard samples should be based on the sample's image quality. We propose a new loss function that emphasizes samples of different difficulties based on their image quality. Our method achieves this in the form of an adaptive margin function by approximating the image quality with feature norms. Extensive experiments show that our method, AdaFace, improves the face recognition performance over the state-of-the-art (SoTA) on four datasets (IJB-B, IJB-C, IJB-S and TinyFace). Code and models are released in https://github.com/mk-minchul/AdaFace.