OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Learning the parameters of a differential equation from its trajectory via the adjoint equation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

The paper contributes to strengthening the relation between machine learning and the theory of differential equations. In this context, the inverse problem of fitting the parameters, and the initial condition of a differential equation to some measurements constitutes a key issue. The paper explores an abstraction that can be used to construct a family of loss functions with the aim of fitting the solution of an initial value problem to a set of discrete or continuous measurements. It is shown, that an extension of the adjoint equation can be used to derive the gradient of the loss function as a continuous analogue of backpropagation in machine learning. Numerical evidence is presented that under reasonably controlled circumstances the gradients obtained this way can be used in a gradient descent to fit the solution of an initial value problem to a set of continuous noisy measurements, and a set of discrete noisy measurements that are recorded at uncertain times.
VReBERT: A Simple and Flexible Transformer for Visual Relationship Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Visual Relationship Detection (VRD) impels a computer vision model to 'see' beyond an individual object instance and 'understand' how different objects in a scene are related. The traditional way of VRD is first to detect objects in an image and then separately predict the relationship between the detected object instances. Such a disjoint approach is prone to predict redundant relationship tags (i.e., predicate) between the same object pair with similar semantic meaning, or incorrect ones that have a similar meaning to the ground truth but are semantically incorrect. To remedy this, we propose to jointly train a VRD model with visual object features and semantic relationship features. To this end, we propose VReBERT, a BERT-like transformer model for Visual Relationship Detection with a multi-stage training strategy to jointly process visual and semantic features. We show that our simple BERT-like model is able to outperform the state-of-the-art VRD models in predicate prediction. Furthermore, we show that by using the pre-trained VReBERT model, our model pushes the state-of-the-art zero-shot predicate prediction by a significant margin (+8.49 R@50 and +8.99 R@100).
Bear the Query in Mind: Visual Grounding with Query-conditioned Convolution
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Visual grounding is a task that aims to locate a target object according to a natural language expression. As a multi-modal task, feature interaction between textual and visual inputs is vital. However, previous solutions mainly handle each modality independently before fusing them together, which does not take full advantage of relevant textual information while extracting visual features. To better leverage the textual-visual relationship in visual grounding, we propose a Query-conditioned Convolution Module (QCM) that extracts query-aware visual features by incorporating query information into the generation of convolutional kernels. With our proposed QCM, the downstream fusion module receives visual features that are more discriminative and focused on the desired object described in the expression, leading to more accurate predictions. Extensive experiments on three popular visual grounding datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. In addition, the query-aware visual features are informative enough to achieve comparable performance to the latest methods when directly used for prediction without further multi-modal fusion.
Redundancy Reduction Twins Network: A Training framework for Multi-output Emotion Regression
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we propose the Redundancy Reduction Twins Network (RRTN), a redundancy reduction training framework that minimizes redundancy by measuring the cross-correlation matrix between the outputs of the same network fed with distorted versions of a sample and bringing it as close to the identity matrix as possible. RRTN also applies a new loss function, the Barlow Twins loss function, to help maximize the similarity of representations obtained from different distorted versions of a sample. However, as the distribution of losses can cause performance fluctuations in the network, we also propose the use of a Restrained Uncertainty Weight Loss (RUWL) or joint training to identify the best weights for the loss function. Our best approach on CNN14 with the proposed methodology obtains a CCC over emotion regression of 0.678 on the ExVo Multi-task dev set, a 4.8% increase over a vanilla CNN 14 CCC of 0.647, which achieves a significant difference at the 95% confidence interval (2-tailed).
Deep Compatible Learning for Partially-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Partially-supervised learning can be challenging for segmentation due to the lack of supervision for unlabeled structures, and the methods directly applying fully-supervised learning could lead to incompatibility, meaning ground truth is not in the solution set of the optimization problem given the loss function. To address the challenge, we propose a deep compatible learning (DCL) framework, which trains a single multi-label segmentation network using images with only partial structures annotated. We first formulate the partially-supervised segmentation as an optimization problem compatible with missing labels, and prove its compatibility. Then, we equip the model with a conditional segmentation strategy, to propagate labels from multiple partially-annotated images to the target. Additionally, we propose a dual learning strategy, which learns two opposite mappings of label propagation simultaneously, to provide substantial supervision for unlabeled structures. The two strategies are formulated into compatible forms, termed as conditional compatibility and dual compatibility, respectively. We show this framework is generally applicable for conventional loss functions. The approach attains significant performance improvement over existing methods, especially in the situation where only a small training dataset is available. Results on three segmentation tasks have shown that the proposed framework could achieve performance matching fully-supervised models.
Piecewise Linear Neural Networks and Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

As a powerful modelling method, PieceWise Linear Neural Networks (PWLNNs) have proven successful in various fields, most recently in deep learning. To apply PWLNN methods, both the representation and the learning have long been studied. In 1977, the canonical representation pioneered the works of shallow PWLNNs learned by incremental designs, but the applications to large-scale data were prohibited. In 2010, the Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) advocated the prevalence of PWLNNs in deep learning. Ever since, PWLNNs have been successfully applied to extensive tasks and achieved advantageous performances. In this Primer, we systematically introduce the methodology of PWLNNs by grouping the works into shallow and deep networks. Firstly, different PWLNN representation models are constructed with elaborated examples. With PWLNNs, the evolution of learning algorithms for data is presented and fundamental theoretical analysis follows up for in-depth understandings. Then, representative applications are introduced together with discussions and outlooks.
MANorm: A Normalization Dictionary for Moroccan Arabic Dialect Written in Latin Script
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Social media user-generated text is actually the main resource for many NLP tasks. This text however, does not follow the standard rules of writing. Moreover, the use of dialect such as Moroccan Arabic in written communications increases further NLP tasks complexity. A dialect is a verbal language that does not have a standard orthography, which leads users to improvise spelling while writing. Thus, for the same word we can find multiple forms of transliterations. Subsequently, it is mandatory to normalize these different transliterations to one canonical word form. To reach this goal, we have exploited the powerfulness of word embedding models generated with a corpus of YouTube comments. Besides, using a Moroccan Arabic dialect dictionary that provides the canonical forms, we have built a normalization dictionary that we refer to as MANorm. We have conducted several experiments to demonstrate the efficiency of MANorm, which have shown its usefulness in dialect normalization.
Validation of two-wire power line UAV localization based on the magnetic field strength
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper we extend our previous work on UAV localization based on the magnetic field strength. The method is based on a magnetic flux density distribution in vicinity of two very long, thin and parallel transmission lines. An UAV is equipped with 4 magnetometers, positioned so that obtained measurements give unique solution to an optimization problem used to find relative position and orientation of the UAV with respect to conductors. Several sets of experiments, undertaken on a laboratory setup, confirmed validity of the method for both solutions - analytical and numerical optimization. Obtained results, compared with high precision motion capture system, are within range of standard RTK positioning.
REVECA -- Rich Encoder-decoder framework for Video Event CAptioner
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

We describe an approach used in the Generic Boundary Event Captioning challenge at the Long-Form Video Understanding Workshop held at CVPR 2022. We designed a Rich Encoder-decoder framework for Video Event CAptioner (REVECA) that utilizes spatial and temporal information from the video to generate a caption for the corresponding the event boundary. REVECA uses frame position embedding to incorporate information before and after the event boundary. Furthermore, it employs features extracted using the temporal segment network and temporal-based pairwise difference method to learn temporal information. A semantic segmentation mask for the attentional pooling process is adopted to learn the subject of an event. Finally, LoRA is applied to fine-tune the image encoder to enhance the learning efficiency. REVECA yielded an average score of 50.97 on the Kinetics-GEBC test data, which is an improvement of 10.17 over the baseline method. Our code is available in https://github.com/TooTouch/REVECA.
Digital Surveillance Networks of 2014 Ebola Epidemics and Lessons for COVID-19
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

2014 Ebola outbreaks can offer lessons for the COVOID-19 and the ongoing variant surveillance and the use of multi method approach to detect public health preparedness. We are increasingly seeing a delay and disconnect of the transmission of locally situated information to the hierarchical system for making the overall preparedness and response more proactive than reactive for dealing with emergencies such as 2014 Ebola. For our COVID-19, it is timely to consider whether digital surveillance networks and support systems can be used to bring the formal and community based ad hoc networks required for facilitating the transmission of both strong (i.e., infections, confirmed cases, deaths in hospital or clinic settings) and weak alters from the community. This will allow timely detection of symptoms of isolated suspected cases for making the overall surveillance and intervention strategy far more effective. The use of digital surveillance networks can further contribute to the development of global awareness of complex emergencies such as Ebola for constructing information infrastructure required to develop, monitor and analysis of community based global emergency surveillance in developed and developing countries. In this study, a systematic analysis of the spread during the months of March to October 2014 was performed using data from the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases (ProMED) and the Factiva database. Using digital surveillance networks, we aim to draw network connections of individuals/groups from a localized to a globalized transmission of Ebola using reported suspected/probable/confirmed cases at different locations around the world. We argue that public health preparedness and response can be strengthened by understanding the social network connections between responders (such as local health authorities) and spreaders (infected individuals and groups).
Collocation2Text: Controllable Text Generation from Guide Phrases in Russian
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Large pre-trained language models are capable of generating varied and fluent texts. Starting from the prompt, these models generate a narrative that can develop unpredictably. The existing methods of controllable text generation, which guide the narrative in the text in the user-specified direction, require creating a training corpus and an additional time-consuming training procedure. The paper proposes and investigates Collocation2Text, a plug-and-play method for automatic controllable text generation in Russian, which does not require fine-tuning. The method is based on two interacting models: the autoregressive language ruGPT-3 model and the autoencoding language ruRoBERTa model. The idea of the method is to shift the output distribution of the autoregressive model according to the output distribution of the autoencoding model in order to ensure a coherent transition of the narrative in the text towards the guide phrase, which can contain single words or collocations. The autoencoding model, which is able to take into account the left and right contexts of the token, "tells" the autoregressive model which tokens are the most and least logical at the current generation step, increasing or decreasing the probabilities of the corresponding tokens. The experiments on generating news articles using the proposed method showed its effectiveness for automatically generated fluent texts which contain coherent transitions between user-specified phrases.
Robin Milner's Work on Concurrency: An Appreciation
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2022
Year: 2022

We give a short appreciation of Robin Milner's seminal contributions to the theory of concurrency.
Mutation-Driven Follow the Regularized Leader for Last-Iterate Convergence in Zero-Sum Games
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2022
Year: 2022

In this study, we consider a variant of the Follow the Regularized Leader (FTRL) dynamics in two-player zero-sum games. FTRL is guaranteed to converge to a Nash equilibrium when time-averaging the strategies, while a lot of variants suffer from the issue of limit cycling behavior, i.e., lack the last-iterate convergence guarantee. To this end, we propose mutant FTRL (M-FTRL), an algorithm that introduces mutation for the perturbation of action probabilities. We then investigate the continuous-time dynamics of M-FTRL and provide the strong convergence guarantees toward stationary points that approximate Nash equilibria under full-information feedback. Furthermore, our simulation demonstrates that M-FTRL can enjoy faster convergence rates than FTRL and optimistic FTRL under full-information feedback and surprisingly exhibits clear convergence under bandit feedback.
DECK: Model Hardening for Defending Pervasive Backdoors
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Pervasive backdoors are triggered by dynamic and pervasive input perturbations. They can be intentionally injected by attackers or naturally exist in normally trained models. They have a different nature from the traditional static and localized backdoors that can be triggered by perturbing a small input area with some fixed pattern, e.g., a patch with solid color. Existing defense techniques are highly effective for traditional backdoors. However, they may not work well for pervasive backdoors, especially regarding backdoor removal and model hardening. In this paper, we propose a novel model hardening technique against pervasive backdoors, including both natural and injected backdoors. We develop a general pervasive attack based on an encoder-decoder architecture enhanced with a special transformation layer. The attack can model a wide range of existing pervasive backdoor attacks and quantify them by class distances. As such, using the samples derived from our attack in adversarial training can harden a model against these backdoor vulnerabilities. Our evaluation on 9 datasets with 15 model structures shows that our technique can enlarge class distances by 59.65% on average with less than 1% accuracy degradation and no robustness loss, outperforming five hardening techniques such as adversarial training, universal adversarial training, MOTH, etc. It can reduce the attack success rate of six pervasive backdoor attacks from 99.06% to 1.94%, surpassing seven state-of-the-art backdoor removal techniques.
Knowledge Learning with Crowdsourcing: A Brief Review and Systematic Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Big data have the characteristics of enormous volume, high velocity, diversity, value-sparsity, and uncertainty, which lead the knowledge learning from them full of challenges. With the emergence of crowdsourcing, versatile information can be obtained on-demand so that the wisdom of crowds is easily involved to facilitate the knowledge learning process. During the past thirteen years, researchers in the AI community made great efforts to remove the obstacles in the field of learning from crowds. This concentrated survey paper comprehensively reviews the technical progress in crowdsourcing learning from a systematic perspective that includes three dimensions of data, models, and learning processes. In addition to reviewing existing important work, the paper places a particular emphasis on providing some promising blueprints on each dimension as well as discussing the lessons learned from our past research work, which will light up the way for new researchers and encourage them to pursue new contributions.
Efficient Checking of Timed Order Compliance Rules over Graph-encoded Event Logs
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2022
Year: 2022

Validation of compliance rules against process data is a fundamental functionality for business process management. Over the years, the problem has been addressed for different types of process data, i.e., process models, process event data at runtime, and event logs representing historical execution. Several approaches have been proposed to tackle compliance checking over process logs. These approaches have been based on different data models and storage technologies including relational databases, graph databases, and proprietary formats. Graph-based encoding of event logs is a promising direction that turns several process analytics tasks into queries on the underlying graph. Compliance checking is one class of such analysis tasks. In this paper, we argue that encoding log data as graphs alone is not enough to guarantee efficient processing of queries on this data. Efficiency is important due to the interactive nature of compliance checking. Thus, compliance checking would benefit from sub-linear scanning of the data. Moreover, as more data are added, e.g., new batches of logs arrive, the data size should grow sub-linearly to optimize both the space of storage and time for querying. We propose two encoding methods using graph representation, realized in Neo4J, and show the benefits of these encoding on a special class of queries, namely timed order compliance rules. Compared to a baseline encoding, our experiments show up to 5x speed up in the querying time as well as a 3x reduction in the graph size.
On The Memory Complexity of Uniformity Testing
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper we consider the problem of uniformity testing with limited memory. We observe a sequence of independent identically distributed random variables drawn from a distribution $p$ over $[n]$, which is either uniform or is $\varepsilon$-far from uniform under the total variation distance, and our goal is to determine the correct hypothesis. At each time point we are allowed to update the state of a finite-memory machine with $S$ states, where each state of the machine is assigned one of the hypotheses, and we are interested in obtaining an asymptotic probability of error at most $0<δ<1/2$ uniformly under both hypotheses. The main contribution of this paper is deriving upper and lower bounds on the number of states $S$ needed in order to achieve a constant error probability $δ$, as a function of $n$ and $\varepsilon$, where our upper bound is $O(\frac{n\log n}{\varepsilon})$ and our lower bound is $Ω(n+\frac{1}{\varepsilon})$. Prior works in the field have almost exclusively used collision counting for upper bounds, and the Paninski mixture for lower bounds. Somewhat surprisingly, in the limited memory with unlimited samples setup, the optimal solution does not involve counting collisions, and the Paninski prior is not hard. Thus, different proof techniques are needed in order to attain our bounds.
Hierarchical coded elastic computing
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

Elasticity is offered by cloud service providers to exploit under-utilized computing resources. The low-cost elastic nodes can leave and join any time during the computation cycle. The possibility of elastic events occurring together with the problem of slow nodes, referred to as stragglers, increases the uncertainty of the system, leading to computation delay. Recent results have shown that coded computing can be used to reduce the negative effect of elasticity and stragglers. In this paper, we propose two hierarchical coded elastic computing schemes that can further speed up the system by exploiting stragglers and effectively allocating tasks among available nodes. In our simulations, our scheme realizes 45% improvement in average finishing time compared to the state-of-the-art coded elastic computing scheme.
MME-CRS: Multi-Metric Evaluation Based on Correlation Re-Scaling for Evaluating Open-Domain Dialogue
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Automatic open-domain dialogue evaluation is a crucial component of dialogue systems. Recently, learning-based evaluation metrics have achieved state-of-the-art performance in open-domain dialogue evaluation. However, these metrics, which only focus on a few qualities, are hard to evaluate dialogue comprehensively. Furthermore, these metrics lack an effective score composition approach for diverse evaluation qualities. To address the above problems, we propose a Multi-Metric Evaluation based on Correlation Re-Scaling (MME-CRS) for evaluating open-domain dialogue. Firstly, we build an evaluation metric composed of 5 groups of parallel sub-metrics called Multi-Metric Evaluation (MME) to evaluate the quality of dialogue comprehensively. Furthermore, we propose a novel score composition method called Correlation Re-Scaling (CRS) to model the relationship between sub-metrics and diverse qualities. Our approach MME-CRS ranks first on the final test data of DSTC10 track5 subtask1 Automatic Open-domain Dialogue Evaluation Challenge with a large margin, which proved the effectiveness of our proposed approach.