OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
BN-invariant sharpness regularizes the training model to better generalization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

It is arguably believed that flatter minima can generalize better. However, it has been pointed out that the usual definitions of sharpness, which consider either the maxima or the integral of loss over a $δ$ ball of parameters around minima, cannot give consistent measurement for scale invariant neural networks, e.g., networks with batch normalization layer. In this paper, we first propose a measure of sharpness, BN-Sharpness, which gives consistent value for equivalent networks under BN. It achieves the property of scale invariance by connecting the integral diameter with the scale of parameter. Then we present a computation-efficient way to calculate the BN-sharpness approximately i.e., one dimensional integral along the "sharpest" direction. Furthermore, we use the BN-sharpness to regularize the training and design an algorithm to minimize the new regularized objective. Our algorithm achieves considerably better performance than vanilla SGD over various experiment settings.
Spatial Object Recommendation with Hints: When Spatial Granularity Matters
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

Existing spatial object recommendation algorithms generally treat objects identically when ranking them. However, spatial objects often cover different levels of spatial granularity and thereby are heterogeneous. For example, one user may prefer to be recommended a region (say Manhattan), while another user might prefer a venue (say a restaurant). Even for the same user, preferences can change at different stages of data exploration. In this paper, we study how to support top-k spatial object recommendations at varying levels of spatial granularity, enabling spatial objects at varying granularity, such as a city, suburb, or building, as a Point of Interest (POI). To solve this problem, we propose the use of a POI tree, which captures spatial containment relationships between POIs. We design a novel multi-task learning model called MPR (short for Multi-level POI Recommendation), where each task aims to return the top-k POIs at a certain spatial granularity level. Each task consists of two subtasks: (i) attribute-based representation learning; (ii) interaction-based representation learning. The first subtask learns the feature representations for both users and POIs, capturing attributes directly from their profiles. The second subtask incorporates user-POI interactions into the model. Additionally, MPR can provide insights into why certain recommendations are being made to a user based on three types of hints: user-aspect, POI-aspect, and interaction-aspect. We empirically validate our approach using two real-life datasets, and show promising performance improvements over several state-of-the-art methods.
On the Turnpike to Design of Deep Neural Nets: Explicit Depth Bounds
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

It is well-known that the training of Deep Neural Networks (DNN) can be formalized in the language of optimal control. In this context, this paper leverages classical turnpike properties of optimal control problems to attempt a quantifiable answer to the question of how many layers should be considered in a DNN. The underlying assumption is that the number of neurons per layer -- i.e., the width of the DNN -- is kept constant. Pursuing a different route than the classical analysis of approximation properties of sigmoidal functions, we prove explicit bounds on the required depths of DNNs based on asymptotic reachability assumptions and a dissipativity-inducing choice of the regularization terms in the training problem. Numerical results obtained for the two spiral task data set for classification indicate that the proposed estimates can provide non-conservative depth bounds.
On the Recognition of Strong-Robinsonian Incomplete Matrices
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2021
Year: 2021

A matrix is incomplete when some of its entries are missing. A Robinson incomplete symmetric matrix is an incomplete symmetric matrix whose non-missing entries do not decrease along rows and columns when moving toward the diagonal. A Strong-Robinson incomplete symmetric matrix is an incomplete symmetric matrix $A$ such that $a_{k,l} \geq a_{i,j}$ if $a_{i,j}$ and $a_{k,l}$ are two non-missing entries of $A$ and $i\leq k \leq l \leq j$. On the other hand, an incomplete symmetric matrix is Strong-Robinsonian if there is a simultaneous reordering of its rows and columns that produces a Strong-Robinson matrix. In this document, we first show that there is an incomplete Robinson matrix which is not Strong-Robinsonian. Therefore, these two definitions are not equivalent. Secondly, we study the recognition problem for Strong-Robinsonian incomplete matrices. It is known that recognition of incomplete Robinsonian matrices is NP-Complete. We show that the recognition of incomplete Strong-Robinsonian matrices is also NP-Complete. However, we show that recognition of Strong-Robinsonian matrices can be parametrized with respect to the number of missing entries. Indeed, we present an $O(|w|^bn^2)$ recognition algorithm for Strong-Robinsonian matrices, where $b$ is the number of missing entries, $n$ is the size of the matrix, and $|w|$ is the number of different values in the matrix.
Contextual Classification Using Self-Supervised Auxiliary Models for Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Classification problems solved with deep neural networks (DNNs) typically rely on a closed world paradigm, and optimize over a single objective (e.g., minimization of the cross-entropy loss). This setup dismisses all kinds of supporting signals that can be used to reinforce the existence or absence of a particular pattern. The increasing need for models that are interpretable by design makes the inclusion of said contextual signals a crucial necessity. To this end, we introduce the notion of Self-Supervised Autogenous Learning (SSAL) models. A SSAL objective is realized through one or more additional targets that are derived from the original supervised classification task, following architectural principles found in multi-task learning. SSAL branches impose low-level priors into the optimization process (e.g., grouping). The ability of using SSAL branches during inference, allow models to converge faster, focusing on a richer set of class-relevant features. We show that SSAL models consistently outperform the state-of-the-art while also providing structured predictions that are more interpretable.
Quantum Tensor Network in Machine Learning: An Application to Tiny Object Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Tiny object classification problem exists in many machine learning applications like medical imaging or remote sensing, where the object of interest usually occupies a small region of the whole image. It is challenging to design an efficient machine learning model with respect to tiny object of interest. Current neural network structures are unable to deal with tiny object efficiently because they are mainly developed for images featured by large scale objects. However, in quantum physics, there is a great theoretical foundation guiding us to analyze the target function for image classification regarding to specific objects size ratio. In our work, we apply Tensor Networks to solve this arising tough machine learning problem. First, we summarize the previous work that connects quantum spin model to image classification and bring the theory into the scenario of tiny object classification. Second, we propose using 2D multi-scale entanglement renormalization ansatz (MERA) to classify tiny objects in image. In the end, our experimental results indicate that tensor network models are effective for tiny object classification problem and potentially will beat state-of-the-art. Our codes will be available online https://github.com/timqqt/MERA_Image_Classification.
A review paper of bio-inspired environmental adaptive and precisely maneuverable soft robots
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

This paper summarizes the most recent research in soft robotic field from the factors of material, actuation, mechanicsproperty, dimension & scale and architecture, and then presents the relations among the functionalities, manufacturing process and the factors mentioned above.
Leveraging Multilingual Transformers for Hate Speech Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Detecting and classifying instances of hate in social media text has been a problem of interest in Natural Language Processing in the recent years. Our work leverages state of the art Transformer language models to identify hate speech in a multilingual setting. Capturing the intent of a post or a comment on social media involves careful evaluation of the language style, semantic content and additional pointers such as hashtags and emojis. In this paper, we look at the problem of identifying whether a Twitter post is hateful and offensive or not. We further discriminate the detected toxic content into one of the following three classes: (a) Hate Speech (HATE), (b) Offensive (OFFN) and (c) Profane (PRFN). With a pre-trained multilingual Transformer-based text encoder at the base, we are able to successfully identify and classify hate speech from multiple languages. On the provided testing corpora, we achieve Macro F1 scores of 90.29, 81.87 and 75.40 for English, German and Hindi respectively while performing hate speech detection and of 60.70, 53.28 and 49.74 during fine-grained classification. In our experiments, we show the efficacy of Perspective API features for hate speech classification and the effects of exploiting a multilingual training scheme. A feature selection study is provided to illustrate impacts of specific features upon the architecture's classification head.
Graph-of-Tweets: A Graph Merging Approach to Sub-event Identification
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Graph structures are powerful tools for modeling the relationships between textual elements. Graph-of-Words (GoW) has been adopted in many Natural Language tasks to encode the association between terms. However, GoW provides few document-level relationships in cases when the connections between documents are also essential. For identifying sub-events on social media like Twitter, features from both word- and document-level can be useful as they supply different information of the event. We propose a hybrid Graph-of-Tweets (GoT) model which combines the word- and document-level structures for modeling Tweets. To compress large amount of raw data, we propose a graph merging method which utilizes FastText word embeddings to reduce the GoW. Furthermore, we present a novel method to construct GoT with the reduced GoW and a Mutual Information (MI) measure. Finally, we identify maximal cliques to extract popular sub-events. Our model showed promising results on condensing lexical-level information and capturing keywords of sub-events.
Optimizing Hospital Room Layout to Reduce the Risk of Patient Falls
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Despite years of research into patient falls in hospital rooms, falls and related injuries remain a serious concern to patient safety. In this work, we formulate a gradient-free constrained optimization problem to generate and reconfigure the hospital room interior layout to minimize the risk of falls. We define a cost function built on a hospital room fall model that takes into account the supportive or hazardous effect of the patient's surrounding objects, as well as simulated patient trajectories inside the room. We define a constraint set that ensures the functionality of the generated room layouts in addition to conforming to architectural guidelines. We solve this problem efficiently using a variant of simulated annealing. We present results for two real-world hospital room types and demonstrate a significant improvement of 18% on average in patient fall risk when compared with a traditional hospital room layout and 41% when compared with randomly generated layouts.
Unveiling the I2P web structure: a connectivity analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Web is a primary and essential service to share information among users and organizations at present all over the world. Despite the current significance of such a kind of traffic on the Internet, the so-called Surface Web traffic has been estimated in just about 5% of the total. The rest of the volume of this type of traffic corresponds to the portion of Web known as Deep Web. These contents are not accessible by search engines because they are authentication protected contents or pages that are only reachable through the well known as darknets. To browse through darknets websites special authorization or specific software and configurations are needed. Despite TOR is the most used darknet nowadays, there are other alternatives such as I2P or Freenet, which offer different features for end users. In this work, we perform an analysis of the connectivity of websites in the I2P network (named eepsites) aimed to discover if different patterns and relationships from those used in legacy web are followed in I2P, and also to get insights about its dimension and structure. For that, a novel tool is specifically developed by the authors and deployed on a distributed scenario. Main results conclude the decentralized nature of the I2P network, where there is a structural part of interconnected eepsites while other several nodes are isolated probably due to their intermittent presence in the network.
Bayesian U-Net for Segmenting Glaciers in SAR Imagery
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Fluctuations of the glacier calving front have an important influence over the ice flow of whole glacier systems. It is therefore important to precisely monitor the position of the calving front. However, the manual delineation of SAR images is a difficult, laborious and subjective task. Convolutional neural networks have previously shown promising results in automating the glacier segmentation in SAR images, making them desirable for further exploration of their possibilities. In this work, we propose to compute uncertainty and use it in an Uncertainty Optimization regime as a novel two-stage process. By using dropout as a random sampling layer in a U-Net architecture, we create a probabilistic Bayesian Neural Network. With several forward passes, we create a sampling distribution, which can estimate the model uncertainty for each pixel in the segmentation mask. The additional uncertainty map information can serve as a guideline for the experts in the manual annotation of the data. Furthermore, feeding the uncertainty map to the network leads to 95.24% Dice similarity, which is an overall improvement in the segmentation performance compared to the state-of-the-art deterministic U-Net-based glacier segmentation pipelines.
Synthetic Glacier SAR Image Generation from Arbitrary Masks Using Pix2Pix Algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Supervised machine learning requires a large amount of labeled data to achieve proper test results. However, generating accurately labeled segmentation maps on remote sensing imagery, including images from synthetic aperture radar (SAR), is tedious and highly subjective. In this work, we propose to alleviate the issue of limited training data by generating synthetic SAR images with the pix2pix algorithm. This algorithm uses conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (cGANs) to generate an artificial image while preserving the structure of the input. In our case, the input is a segmentation mask, from which a corresponding synthetic SAR image is generated. We present different models, perform a comparative study and demonstrate that this approach synthesizes convincing glaciers in SAR images with promising qualitative and quantitative results.
A Gamification of Japanese Dependency Parsing
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Gamification approaches have been used as a way for creating language resources for NLP. It is also used for presenting and teaching the algorithms in NLP and linguistic phenomena. This paper argues about a design of gamification for Japanese syntactic dependendency parsing for the latter objective. The user interface design is based on a transition-based shift reduce dependency parsing which needs only two actions of SHIFT (not attach) and REDUCE (attach) in Japanese dependency structure. We assign the two actions for two-way directional control on a gamepad or other devices. We also design the target sentences from psycholinguistics researches.
Unifying Relational Sentence Generation and Retrieval for Medical Image Report Composition
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Beyond generating long and topic-coherent paragraphs in traditional captioning tasks, the medical image report composition task poses more task-oriented challenges by requiring both the highly-accurate medical term diagnosis and multiple heterogeneous forms of information including impression and findings. Current methods often generate the most common sentences due to dataset bias for individual case, regardless of whether the sentences properly capture key entities and relationships. Such limitations severely hinder their applicability and generalization capability in medical report composition where the most critical sentences lie in the descriptions of abnormal diseases that are relatively rare. Moreover, some medical terms appearing in one report are often entangled with each other and co-occurred, e.g. symptoms associated with a specific disease. To enforce the semantic consistency of medical terms to be incorporated into the final reports and encourage the sentence generation for rare abnormal descriptions, we propose a novel framework that unifies template retrieval and sentence generation to handle both common and rare abnormality while ensuring the semantic-coherency among the detected medical terms. Specifically, our approach exploits hybrid-knowledge co-reasoning: i) explicit relationships among all abnormal medical terms to induce the visual attention learning and topic representation encoding for better topic-oriented symptoms descriptions; ii) adaptive generation mode that changes between the template retrieval and sentence generation according to a contextual topic encoder. Experimental results on two medical report benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework in terms of both human and metrics evaluation.
Estimation of Missing Data in Intelligent Transportation System
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Missing data is a challenge in many applications, including intelligent transportation systems (ITS). In this paper, we study traffic speed and travel time estimations in ITS, where portions of the collected data are missing due to sensor instability and communication errors at collection points. These practical issues can be remediated by missing data analysis, which are mainly categorized as either statistical or machine learning(ML)-based approaches. Statistical methods require the prior probability distribution of the data which is unknown in our application. Therefore, we focus on an ML-based approach, Multi-Directional Recurrent Neural Network (M-RNN). M-RNN utilizes both temporal and spatial characteristics of the data. We evaluate the effectiveness of this approach on a TomTom dataset containing spatio-temporal measurements of average vehicle speed and travel time in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). We evaluate the method under various conditions, where the results demonstrate that M-RNN outperforms existing solutions,e.g., spline interpolation and matrix completion, by up to 58% decreases in Root Mean Square Error (RMSE).
Selection of Optimal Parameters in the Fast K-Word Proximity Search Based on Multi-component Key Indexes
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

Proximity full-text search is commonly implemented in contemporary full-text search systems. Let us assume that the search query is a list of words. It is natural to consider a document as relevant if the queried words are near each other in the document. The proximity factor is even more significant for the case where the query consists of frequently occurring words. Proximity full-text search requires the storage of information for every occurrence in documents of every word that the user can search. For every occurrence of every word in a document, we employ additional indexes to store information about nearby words, that is, the words that occur in the document at distances from the given word of less than or equal to the MaxDistance parameter. We showed in previous works that these indexes can be used to improve the average query execution time by up to 130 times for queries that consist of words occurring with high-frequency. In this paper, we consider how both the search performance and the search quality depend on the value of MaxDistance and other parameters. Well-known GOV2 text collection is used in the experiments for reproducibility of the results. We propose a new index schema after the analysis of the results of the experiments. This is a pre-print of a contribution published in Supplementary Proceedings of the XXII International Conference on Data Analytics and Management in Data Intensive Domains (DAMDID/RCDL 2020), Voronezh, Russia, October 13-16, 2020, P. 336-350, published by CEUR Workshop Proceedings. The final authenticated version is available online at: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2790/
Semantic Segmentation of Remote Sensing Images with Sparse Annotations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Training Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for very high resolution images requires a large quantity of high-quality pixel-level annotations, which is extremely labor- and time-consuming to produce. Moreover, professional photo interpreters might have to be involved for guaranteeing the correctness of annotations. To alleviate such a burden, we propose a framework for semantic segmentation of aerial images based on incomplete annotations, where annotators are asked to label a few pixels with easy-to-draw scribbles. To exploit these sparse scribbled annotations, we propose the FEature and Spatial relaTional regulArization (FESTA) method to complement the supervised task with an unsupervised learning signal that accounts for neighbourhood structures both in spatial and feature terms.