OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
The General Index of Software Engineering Papers
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

We introduce the General Index of Software Engineering Papers, a dataset of fulltext-indexed papers from the most prominent scientific venues in the field of Software Engineering. The dataset includes both complete bibliographic information and indexed ngrams (sequence of contiguous words after removal of stopwords and non-words, for a total of 577 276 382 unique n-grams in this release) with length 1 to 5 for 44 581 papers retrieved from 34 venues over the 1971-2020 period.The dataset serves use cases in the field of meta-research, allowing to introspect the output of software engineering research even when access to papers or scholarly search engines is not possible (e.g., due to contractual reasons). The dataset also contributes to making such analyses reproducible and independently verifiable, as opposed to what happens when they are conducted using 3rd-party and non-open scholarly indexing services.The dataset is available as a portable Postgres database dump and released as open data.
Lower Bounds for Restricted Schemes in the Two-Adaptive Bitprobe Model
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

In the adaptive bitprobe model answering membership queries in two bitprobes, we consider the class of restricted schemes as introduced by Kesh and Sharma (Discrete Applied Mathematics 2021). In that paper, the authors showed that such restricted schemes storing subsets of size 2 require $Ω(m^\frac{2}{3})$ space. In this paper, we generalise the result to arbitrary subsets of size $n$, and prove that the space required for such restricted schemes will be $Ω(\left(\frac{m}{n}\right)^{1 - \frac{1}{\lfloor n / 4 \rfloor + 2}})$.
Deep Learning for Real Time Satellite Pose Estimation on Low Power Edge TPU
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Pose estimation of an uncooperative space resident object is a key asset towards autonomy in close proximity operations. In this context monocular cameras are a valuable solution because of their low system requirements. However, the associated image processing algorithms are either too computationally expensive for real time on-board implementation, or not enough accurate. In this paper we propose a pose estimation software exploiting neural network architectures which can be scaled to different accuracy-latency trade-offs. We designed our pipeline to be compatible with Edge Tensor Processing Units to show how low power machine learning accelerators could enable Artificial Intelligence exploitation in space. The neural networks were tested both on the benchmark Spacecraft Pose Estimation Dataset, and on the purposely developed Cosmo Photorealistic Dataset, which depicts a COSMO-SkyMed satellite in a variety of random poses and steerable solar panels orientations. The lightest version of our architecture achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on both datasets but at a fraction of networks complexity, running at 7.7 frames per second on a Coral Dev Board Mini consuming just 2.2W.
On the Impact of Social Media Recommendations on Opinion Consensus
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2022
Year: 2022

We consider a discrete opinion formation problem in a setting where agents are influenced by both information diffused by their social relations and from recommendations received directly from the social media manager. We study how the "strength" of the influence of the social media and the homophily ratio affect the probability of the agents of reaching a consensus and how these factors can determine the type of consensus reached. In a simple 2-symmetric block model we prove that agents converge either to a consensus or to a persistent disagreement. In particular, we show that when the homophily ratio is large, the social media has a very low capacity of determining the outcome of the opinion dynamics. On the other hand, when the homophily ratio is low, the social media influence can have an important role on the dynamics, either by making harder to reach a consensus or inducing it on extreme opinions. Finally, in order to extend our analysis to more general and realistic settings we give some experimental evidences that our results still hold on general networks.
Using Decision Tree as Local Interpretable Model in Autoencoder-based LIME
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Nowadays, deep neural networks are being used in many domains because of their high accuracy results. However, they are considered as "black box", means that they are not explainable for humans. On the other hand, in some tasks such as medical, economic, and self-driving cars, users want the model to be interpretable to decide if they can trust these results or not. In this work, we present a modified version of an autoencoder-based approach for local interpretability called ALIME. The ALIME itself is inspired by a famous method called Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations (LIME). LIME generates a single instance level explanation by generating new data around the instance and training a local linear interpretable model. ALIME uses an autoencoder to weigh the new data around the sample. Nevertheless, the ALIME uses a linear model as the interpretable model to be trained locally, just like the LIME. This work proposes a new approach, which uses a decision tree instead of the linear model, as the interpretable model. We evaluate the proposed model in case of stability, local fidelity, and interpretability on different datasets. Compared to ALIME, the experiments show significant results on stability and local fidelity and improved results on interpretability.
Autoencoding Language Model Based Ensemble Learning for Commonsense Validation and Explanation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

An ultimate goal of artificial intelligence is to build computer systems that can understand human languages. Understanding commonsense knowledge about the world expressed in text is one of the foundational and challenging problems to create such intelligent systems. As a step towards this goal, we present in this paper ALMEn, an Autoencoding Language Model based Ensemble learning method for commonsense validation and explanation. By ensembling several advanced pre-trained language models including RoBERTa, DeBERTa, and ELECTRA with Siamese neural networks, our method can distinguish natural language statements that are against commonsense (validation subtask) and correctly identify the reason for making against commonsense (explanation selection subtask). Experimental results on the benchmark dataset of SemEval-2020 Task 4 show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art models, reaching 97.9% and 95.4% accuracies on the validation and explanation selection subtasks, respectively.
Information-driven Path Planning for Hybrid Aerial Underwater Vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

This paper presents a novel Rapidly-exploring Adaptive Sampling Tree (RAST) algorithm for the adaptive sampling mission of a hybrid aerial underwater vehicle (HAUV) in an air-sea 3D environment. This algorithm innovatively combines the tournament-based point selection sampling strategy, the information heuristic search process and the framework of Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT) algorithm. Hence can guide the vehicle to the region of interest to scientists for sampling and generate a collision-free path for maximizing information collection by the HAUV under the constraints of environmental effects of currents or wind and limited budget. The simulation results show that the fast search adaptive sampling tree algorithm has higher optimization performance, faster solution speed and better stability than the Rapidly-exploring Information Gathering Tree (RIGT) algorithm and the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm.
Predicting Performance of Heterogeneous AI Systems with Discrete-Event Simulations
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have found industrial applications in various fields. AI systems typically possess complex software and heterogeneous CPU/GPU hardware architecture, making it difficult to answer basic questions considering performance evaluation and software optimization. Where is the bottleneck impeding the system? How does the performance scale with the workload? How the speed-up of a specific module would contribute to the whole system? Finding the answers to these questions through experiments on the real system could require a lot of computational, human, financial, and time resources. A solution to cut these costs is to use a fast and accurate simulation model preparatory to implementing anything in the real system. In this paper, we propose a discrete-event simulation model of a high-load heterogeneous AI system in the context of video analytics. Using the proposed model, we estimate: 1) the performance scalability with the increasing number of cameras; 2) the performance impact of integrating a new module; 3) the performance gain from optimizing a single module. We show that the performance estimation accuracy of the proposed model is higher than 90%. We also demonstrate, that the considered system possesses a counter-intuitive relationship between workload and performance, which nevertheless is correctly inferred by the proposed simulation model.
Robust Event-Driven Interactions in Cooperative Multi-Agent Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2022
Year: 2022

We present an approach to reduce the communication required between agents in a Multi-Agent learning system by exploiting the inherent robustness of the underlying Markov Decision Process. We compute so-called robustness surrogate functions (off-line), that give agents a conservative indication of how far their state measurements can deviate before they need to update other agents in the system. This results in fully distributed decision functions, enabling agents to decide when it is necessary to update others. We derive bounds on the optimality of the resulting systems in terms of the discounted sum of rewards obtained, and show these bounds are a function of the design parameters. Additionally, we extend the results for the case where the robustness surrogate functions are learned from data, and present experimental results demonstrating a significant reduction in communication events between agents.
Surrogate-Assisted Evolutionary Generative Design Of Breakwaters Using Deep Convolutional Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2022
Year: 2022

In the paper, a multi-objective evolutionary surrogate-assisted approach for the fast and effective generative design of coastal breakwaters is proposed. To approximate the computationally expensive objective functions, the deep convolutional neural network is used as a surrogate model. This model allows optimizing a configuration of breakwaters with a different number of structures and segments. In addition to the surrogate, an assistant model was developed to estimate the confidence of predictions. The proposed approach was tested on the synthetic water area, the SWAN model was used to calculate the wave heights. The experimental results confirm that the proposed approach allows obtaining more effective (less expensive with better protective properties) solutions than non-surrogate approaches for the same time.
Maximizing Sums of Non-monotone Submodular and Linear Functions: Understanding the Unconstrained Case
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

Motivated by practical applications, recent works have considered maximization of sums of a submodular function $g$ and a linear function $\ell$. Almost all such works, to date, studied only the special case of this problem in which $g$ is also guaranteed to be monotone. Therefore, in this paper we systematically study the simplest version of this problem in which $g$ is allowed to be non-monotone, namely the unconstrained variant, which we term Regularized Unconstrained Submodular Maximization (RegularizedUSM). Our main algorithmic result is the first non-trivial guarantee for general RegularizedUSM. For the special case of RegularizedUSM in which the linear function $\ell$ is non-positive, we prove two inapproximability results, showing that the algorithmic result implied for this case by previous works is not far from optimal. Finally, we reanalyze the known Double Greedy algorithm to obtain improved guarantees for the special case of RegularizedUSM in which the linear function $\ell$ is non-negative; and we complement these guarantees by showing that it is not possible to obtain (1/2, 1)-approximation for this case (despite intuitive arguments suggesting that this approximation guarantee is natural).
Energy-Efficient Adaptive Machine Learning on IoT End-Nodes With Class-Dependent Confidence
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Energy-efficient machine learning models that can run directly on edge devices are of great interest in IoT applications, as they can reduce network pressure and response latency, and improve privacy. An effective way to obtain energy-efficiency with small accuracy drops is to sequentially execute a set of increasingly complex models, early-stopping the procedure for "easy" inputs that can be confidently classified by the smallest models. As a stopping criterion, current methods employ a single threshold on the output probabilities produced by each model. In this work, we show that such a criterion is sub-optimal for datasets that include classes of different complexity, and we demonstrate a more general approach based on per-classes thresholds. With experiments on a low-power end-node, we show that our method can significantly reduce the energy consumption compared to the single-threshold approach.
Task-Aware Active Learning for Endoscopic Image Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Semantic segmentation of polyps and depth estimation are two important research problems in endoscopic image analysis. One of the main obstacles to conduct research on these research problems is lack of annotated data. Endoscopic annotations necessitate the specialist knowledge of expert endoscopists and due to this, it can be difficult to organise, expensive and time consuming. To address this problem, we investigate an active learning paradigm to reduce the number of training examples by selecting the most discriminative and diverse unlabelled examples for the task taken into consideration. Most of the existing active learning pipelines are task-agnostic in nature and are often sub-optimal to the end task. In this paper, we propose a novel task-aware active learning pipeline and applied for two important tasks in endoscopic image analysis: semantic segmentation and depth estimation. We compared our method with the competitive baselines. From the experimental results, we observe a substantial improvement over the compared baselines. Codes are available at https://github.com/thetna/endo-active-learn.
Few-Shot Forecasting of Time-Series with Heterogeneous Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Learning complex time series forecasting models usually requires a large amount of data, as each model is trained from scratch for each task/data set. Leveraging learning experience with similar datasets is a well-established technique for classification problems called few-shot classification. However, existing approaches cannot be applied to time-series forecasting because i) multivariate time-series datasets have different channels and ii) forecasting is principally different from classification. In this paper we formalize the problem of few-shot forecasting of time-series with heterogeneous channels for the first time. Extending recent work on heterogeneous attributes in vector data, we develop a model composed of permutation-invariant deep set-blocks which incorporate a temporal embedding. We assemble the first meta-dataset of 40 multivariate time-series datasets and show through experiments that our model provides a good generalization, outperforming baselines carried over from simpler scenarios that either fail to learn across tasks or miss temporal information.
Video Diffusion Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Generating temporally coherent high fidelity video is an important milestone in generative modeling research. We make progress towards this milestone by proposing a diffusion model for video generation that shows very promising initial results. Our model is a natural extension of the standard image diffusion architecture, and it enables jointly training from image and video data, which we find to reduce the variance of minibatch gradients and speed up optimization. To generate long and higher resolution videos we introduce a new conditional sampling technique for spatial and temporal video extension that performs better than previously proposed methods. We present the first results on a large text-conditioned video generation task, as well as state-of-the-art results on established benchmarks for video prediction and unconditional video generation. Supplementary material is available at https://video-diffusion.github.io/
ProbNVS: Fast Novel View Synthesis with Learned Probability-Guided Sampling
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Existing state-of-the-art novel view synthesis methods rely on either fairly accurate 3D geometry estimation or sampling of the entire space for neural volumetric rendering, which limit the overall efficiency. In order to improve the rendering efficiency by reducing sampling points without sacrificing rendering quality, we propose to build a novel view synthesis framework based on learned MVS priors that enables general, fast and photo-realistic view synthesis simultaneously. Specifically, fewer but important points are sampled under the guidance of depth probability distributions extracted from the learned MVS architecture. Based on the learned probability-guided sampling, a neural volume rendering module is elaborately devised to fully aggregate source view information as well as the learned scene structures to synthesize photorealistic target view images. Finally, the rendering results in uncertain, occluded and unreferenced regions can be further improved by incorporating a confidence-aware refinement module. Experiments show that our method achieves 15 to 40 times faster rendering compared to state-of-the-art baselines, with strong generalization capacity and comparable high-quality novel view synthesis performance.
Position-based Prompting for Health Outcome Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Probing Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) using prompts has indirectly implied that language models (LMs) can be treated as knowledge bases. To this end, this phenomena has been effective especially when these LMs are fine-tuned towards not just data of a specific domain, but also to the style or linguistic pattern of the prompts themselves. We observe that, satisfying a particular linguistic pattern in prompts is an unsustainable constraint that unnecessarily lengthens the probing task, especially because, they are often manually designed and the range of possible prompt template patterns can vary depending on the prompting objective and domain. We therefore explore an idea of using a position-attention mechanism to capture positional information of each word in a prompt relative to the mask to be filled, hence avoiding the need to re-construct prompts when the prompts linguistic pattern changes. Using our approach, we demonstrate the ability of eliciting answers to rare prompt templates (in a case study on health outcome generation) such as Postfix and Mixed patterns whose missing information is respectively at the start and in multiple random places of the prompt. More so, using various biomedical PLMs, our approach consistently outperforms a baseline in which the default mask language model (MLM) representation is used to predict masked tokens.
On the Effectiveness of Pretrained Models for API Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

Developers frequently use APIs to implement certain functionalities, such as parsing Excel Files, reading and writing text files line by line, etc. Developers can greatly benefit from automatic API usage sequence generation based on natural language queries for building applications in a faster and cleaner manner. Existing approaches utilize information retrieval models to search for matching API sequences given a query or use RNN-based encoder-decoder to generate API sequences. As it stands, the first approach treats queries and API names as bags of words. It lacks deep comprehension of the semantics of the queries. The latter approach adapts a neural language model to encode a user query into a fixed-length context vector and generate API sequences from the context vector. We want to understand the effectiveness of recent Pre-trained Transformer based Models (PTMs) for the API learning task. These PTMs are trained on large natural language corpora in an unsupervised manner to retain contextual knowledge about the language and have found success in solving similar Natural Language Processing (NLP) problems. However, the applicability of PTMs has not yet been explored for the API sequence generation task. We use a dataset that contains 7 million annotations collected from GitHub to evaluate the PTMs empirically. This dataset was also used to assess previous approaches. Based on our results, PTMs generate more accurate API sequences and outperform other related methods by around 11%. We have also identified two different tokenization approaches that can contribute to a significant boost in PTMs' performance for the API sequence generation task.
FedADMM: A Robust Federated Deep Learning Framework with Adaptivity to System Heterogeneity
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Federated Learning (FL) is an emerging framework for distributed processing of large data volumes by edge devices subject to limited communication bandwidths, heterogeneity in data distributions and computational resources, as well as privacy considerations. In this paper, we introduce a new FL protocol termed FedADMM based on primal-dual optimization. The proposed method leverages dual variables to tackle statistical heterogeneity, and accommodates system heterogeneity by tolerating variable amount of work performed by clients. FedADMM maintains identical communication costs per round as FedAvg/Prox, and generalizes them via the augmented Lagrangian. A convergence proof is established for nonconvex objectives, under no restrictions in terms of data dissimilarity or number of participants per round of the algorithm. We demonstrate the merits through extensive experiments on real datasets, under both IID and non-IID data distributions across clients. FedADMM consistently outperforms all baseline methods in terms of communication efficiency, with the number of rounds needed to reach a prescribed accuracy reduced by up to 87%. The algorithm effectively adapts to heterogeneous data distributions through the use of dual variables, without the need for hyperparameter tuning, and its advantages are more pronounced in large-scale systems.
Conversational agents for fostering curiosity-driven learning in children
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

Curiosity is an important factor that favors independent and individualized learning in children. Research suggests that it is also a competence that can be fostered by training specific metacognitive skills and information-searching behaviors. In this light, we develop a conversational agent that helps children generate curiosity-driven questions, and encourages their use to lead autonomous explorations and gain new knowledge. The study was conducted with 51 primary school students who interacted with either a neutral agent or an incentive agent that helped curiosity-driven questioning by offering specific semantic cues. Results showed a significant increase in the number and the quality of the questions generated with the incentive agent. This interaction also resulted in longer explorations and stronger learning progress. Together, our results suggest that the more our agent is able to train children's curiosity-related metacognitive skills, the better they can maintain their information-searching behaviors and the more new knowledge they are likely to acquire.