OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Knowledge Representation Approach to Automated Mathematical Modelling
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we propose a new mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model ontology and a novel constraint typology of MILP formulations. MILP is a commonly used mathematical programming technique for modelling and solving real-life scheduling, routing, planning, resource allocation, and timetabling optimization problems providing optimized business solutions for industry sectors such as manufacturing, agriculture, defence, healthcare, medicine, energy, finance, and transportation. Despite the numerous real-life Combinatorial Optimization Problems found and solved and millions yet to be discovered and formulated, the number of types of constraints (the building blocks of a MILP) is relatively small. In the search for a suitable machine-readable knowledge representation structure for MILPs, we propose an optimization modelling tree built based upon an MILP model ontology that can be used as a guide for automated systems to elicit an MILP model from end-users on their combinatorial business optimization problems. Our ultimate aim is to develop a machine-readable knowledge representation for MILP that allows us to map an end-user's natural language description of the business optimization problem to an MILP formal specification as a first step towards automated mathematical modelling.
Golden Grain: Building a Secure and Decentralized Model Marketplace for MLaaS
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

ML-as-a-service (MLaaS) becomes increasingly popular and revolutionizes the lives of people. A natural requirement for MLaaS is, however, to provide highly accurate prediction services. To achieve this, current MLaaS systems integrate and combine multiple well-trained models in their services. Yet, in reality, there is no easy way for MLaaS providers, especially for startups, to collect sufficiently well-trained models from individual developers, due to the lack of incentives. In this paper, we aim to fill this gap by building up a model marketplace, called as Golden Grain, to facilitate model sharing, which enforces the fair model-money swapping process between individual developers and MLaaS providers. Specifically, we deploy the swapping process on the blockchain, and further introduce a blockchain-empowered model benchmarking process for transparently determining the model prices according to their authentic performances, so as to motivate the faithful contributions of well-trained models. Especially, to ease the blockchain overhead for model benchmarking, our marketplace carefully offloads the heavy computation and designs a secure off-chain on-chain interaction protocol based on a trusted execution environment (TEE), for ensuring both the integrity and authenticity of benchmarking. We implement a prototype of our Golden Grain on the Ethereum blockchain, and conduct extensive experiments using standard benchmark datasets to demonstrate the practically affordable performance of our design.
Sample-driven optimal stopping: From the secretary problem to the i.i.d. prophet inequality
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2021
Year: 2021

We take a unifying approach to single selection optimal stopping problems with random arrival order and independent sampling of items. In the problem we consider, a decision maker (DM) initially gets to sample each of $N$ items independently with probability $p$, and can observe the relative rankings of these sampled items. Then, the DM faces the remaining items in an online fashion, observing the relative rankings of all revealed items. While scanning the sequence the DM makes irrevocable stop/continue decisions and her reward for stopping the sequence facing the item with rank $i$ is $Y_i$. The goal of the DM is to maximize her reward. We start by studying the case in which the values $Y_i$ are known to the DM, and then move to the case in which these values are adversarial. For the former case, we write the natural linear program that captures the performance of an algorithm, and take its continuous limit. We prove a structural result about this continuous limit, which allows us to reduce the problem to a relatively simple real optimization problem. We establish that the optimal algorithm is given by a sequence of thresholds $t_1\le t_2\le\cdots$ such that the DM should stop if seeing an item with current ranking $i$ after time $t_i$. Additionally we are able to recover several classic results in the area such as those for secretary problem and the minimum ranking problem. For the adversarial case, we obtain a similar linear program with an additional stochastic dominance constraint. Using the same machinery we are able to pin down the optimal competitive ratios for all values of $p$. Notably, we prove that as $p$ approaches 1, our guarantee converges linearly to 0.745, matching that of the i.i.d.~prophet inequality. Also interesting is the case $p=1/2$, where our bound evaluates to $0.671$, which improves upon the state of the art.
Towards Tight Bounds for Spectral Sparsification of Hypergraphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2021
Year: 2021

Cut and spectral sparsification of graphs have numerous applications, including e.g. speeding up algorithms for cuts and Laplacian solvers. These powerful notions have recently been extended to hypergraphs, which are much richer and may offer new applications. However, the current bounds on the size of hypergraph sparsifiers are not as tight as the corresponding bounds for graphs. Our first result is a polynomial-time algorithm that, given a hypergraph on $n$ vertices with maximum hyperedge size $r$, outputs an $ε$-spectral sparsifier with $O^*(nr)$ hyperedges, where $O^*$ suppresses $(ε^{-1} \log n)^{O(1)}$ factors. This size bound improves the two previous bounds: $O^*(n^3)$ [Soma and Yoshida, SODA'19] and $O^*(nr^3)$ [Bansal, Svensson and Trevisan, FOCS'19]. Our main technical tool is a new method for proving concentration of the nonlinear analogue of the quadratic form of the Laplacians for hypergraph expanders. We complement this with lower bounds on the bit complexity of any compression scheme that $(1+ε)$-approximates all the cuts in a given hypergraph, and hence also on the bit complexity of every $ε$-cut/spectral sparsifier. These lower bounds are based on Ruzsa-Szemerédi graphs, and a particular instantiation yields an $Ω(nr)$ lower bound on the bit complexity even for fixed constant $ε$. This is tight up to polylogarithmic factors in $n$, due to recent hypergraph cut sparsifiers of [Chen, Khanna and Nagda, FOCS'20]. Finally, for directed hypergraphs, we present an algorithm that computes an $ε$-spectral sparsifier with $O^*(n^2r^3)$ hyperarcs, where $r$ is the maximum size of a hyperarc. For small $r$, this improves over $O^*(n^3)$ known from [Soma and Yoshida, SODA'19], and is getting close to the trivial lower bound of $Ω(n^2)$ hyperarcs.
Image analysis for Alzheimer's disease prediction: Embracing pathological hallmarks for model architecture design
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is associated with local (e.g. brain tissue atrophy) and global brain changes (loss of cerebral connectivity), which can be detected by high-resolution structural magnetic resonance imaging. Conventionally, these changes and their relation to AD are investigated independently. Here, we introduce a novel, highly-scalable approach that simultaneously captures $\textit{local}$ and $\textit{global}$ changes in the diseased brain. It is based on a neural network architecture that combines patch-based, high-resolution 3D-CNNs with global topological features, evaluating multi-scale brain tissue connectivity. Our local-global approach reached competitive results with an average precision score of $0.95\pm0.03$ for the classification of cognitively normal subjects and AD patients (prevalence $\approx 55\%$).
Unified Multi-Modal Landmark Tracking for Tightly Coupled Lidar-Visual-Inertial Odometry
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

We present an efficient multi-sensor odometry system for mobile platforms that jointly optimizes visual, lidar, and inertial information within a single integrated factor graph. This runs in real-time at full framerate using fixed lag smoothing. To perform such tight integration, a new method to extract 3D line and planar primitives from lidar point clouds is presented. This approach overcomes the suboptimality of typical frame-to-frame tracking methods by treating the primitives as landmarks and tracking them over multiple scans. True integration of lidar features with standard visual features and IMU is made possible using a subtle passive synchronization of lidar and camera frames. The lightweight formulation of the 3D features allows for real-time execution on a single CPU. Our proposed system has been tested on a variety of platforms and scenarios, including underground exploration with a legged robot and outdoor scanning with a dynamically moving handheld device, for a total duration of 96 min and 2.4 km traveled distance. In these test sequences, using only one exteroceptive sensor leads to failure due to either underconstrained geometry (affecting lidar) or textureless areas caused by aggressive lighting changes (affecting vision). In these conditions, our factor graph naturally uses the best information available from each sensor modality without any hard switches.
Hybrid Federated and Centralized Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Many of the machine learning (ML) tasks are focused on centralized learning (CL), which requires the transmission of local datasets from the clients to a parameter server (PS) leading to a huge communication overhead. Federated learning (FL) overcomes this issue by allowing the clients to send only the model updates to the PS instead of the whole dataset. In this way, FL brings the learning to edge level, wherein powerful computational resources are required on the client side. This requirement may not always be satisfied because of diverse computational capabilities of edge devices. We address this through a novel hybrid federated and centralized learning (HFCL) framework to effectively train a learning model by exploiting the computational capability of the clients. In HFCL, only the clients who have sufficient resources employ FL; the remaining clients resort to CL by transmitting their local dataset to PS. This allows all the clients to collaborate on the learning process regardless of their computational resources. We also propose a sequential data transmission approach with HFCL (HFCL-SDT) to reduce the training duration. The proposed HFCL frameworks outperform previously proposed non-hybrid FL (CL) based schemes in terms of learning accuracy (communication overhead) since all the clients collaborate on the learning process with their datasets regardless of their computational resources.
Determinantal Point Processes Implicitly Regularize Semi-parametric Regression Problems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Semi-parametric regression models are used in several applications which require comprehensibility without sacrificing accuracy. Typical examples are spline interpolation in geophysics, or non-linear time series problems, where the system includes a linear and non-linear component. We discuss here the use of a finite Determinantal Point Process (DPP) for approximating semi-parametric models. Recently, Barthelmé, Tremblay, Usevich, and Amblard introduced a novel representation of some finite DPPs. These authors formulated extended L-ensembles that can conveniently represent partial-projection DPPs and suggest their use for optimal interpolation. With the help of this formalism, we derive a key identity illustrating the implicit regularization effect of determinantal sampling for semi-parametric regression and interpolation. Also, a novel projected Nyström approximation is defined and used to derive a bound on the expected risk for the corresponding approximation of semi-parametric regression. This work naturally extends similar results obtained for kernel ridge regression.
FLERT: Document-Level Features for Named Entity Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Current state-of-the-art approaches for named entity recognition (NER) typically consider text at the sentence-level and thus do not model information that crosses sentence boundaries. However, the use of transformer-based models for NER offers natural options for capturing document-level features. In this paper, we perform a comparative evaluation of document-level features in the two standard NER architectures commonly considered in the literature, namely "fine-tuning" and "feature-based LSTM-CRF". We evaluate different hyperparameters for document-level features such as context window size and enforcing document-locality. We present experiments from which we derive recommendations for how to model document context and present new state-of-the-art scores on several CoNLL-03 benchmark datasets. Our approach is integrated into the Flair framework to facilitate reproduction of our experiments.
Texture image classification based on a pseudo-parabolic diffusion model
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

This work proposes a novel method based on a pseudo-parabolic diffusion process to be employed for texture recognition. The proposed operator is applied over a range of time scales giving rise to a family of images transformed by nonlinear filters. Therefore each of those images are encoded by a local descriptor (we use local binary patterns for that purpose) and they are summarized by a simple histogram, yielding in this way the image feature vector. The proposed approach is tested on the classification of well established benchmark texture databases and on a practical task of plant species recognition. In both cases, it is compared with several state-of-the-art methodologies employed for texture recognition. Our proposal outperforms those methods in terms of classification accuracy, confirming its competitiveness. The good performance can be justified to a large extent by the ability of the pseudo-parabolic operator to smooth possibly noisy details inside homogeneous regions of the image at the same time that it preserves discontinuities that convey critical information for the object description. Such results also confirm that model-based approaches like the proposed one can still be competitive with the omnipresent learning-based approaches, especially when the user does not have access to a powerful computational structure and a large amount of labeled data for training.
Rate Splitting Multiple Access for Joint Communication and Sensing Systems with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

This paper investigates the problem of resource allocation for joint communication and radar sensing system on rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) based unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system. UAV simultaneously communicates with multiple users and probes signals to targets of interest to exploit cooperative sensing ability and achieve substantial gains in size, cost and power consumption. By virtue of using linearly precoded rate splitting at the transmitter and successive interference cancellation at the receivers, RSMA is introduced as a promising paradigm to manage interference as well as enhance spectrum and energy efficiency. To maximize the energy efficiency of UAV networks, the deployment location and the beamforming matrix are jointly optimized under the constraints of power budget, transmission rate and approximation error. To solve the formulated non-convex problem efficiently, we decompose it into the UAV deployment subproblem and the beamforming optimization subproblem. Then, we invoke the successive convex approximation and difference-of-convex programming as well as Dinkelbach methods to transform the intractable subproblems into convex ones at each iteration. Next, an alternating algorithm is designed to solve the non-linear and non-convex problem in an efficient manner, while the corresponding complexity is analyzed as well. Finally, simulation results reveal that proposed algorithm with RSMA is superior to orthogonal multiple access and power-domain non-orthogonal multiple access in terms of power consumption and energy efficiency.
Ego2Hands: A Dataset for Egocentric Two-hand Segmentation and Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Hand segmentation and detection in truly unconstrained RGB-based settings is important for many applications. However, existing datasets are far from sufficient in terms of size and variety due to the infeasibility of manual annotation of large amounts of segmentation and detection data. As a result, current methods are limited by many underlying assumptions such as constrained environment, consistent skin color and lighting. In this work, we present Ego2Hands, a large-scale RGB-based egocentric hand segmentation/detection dataset that is semi-automatically annotated and a color-invariant compositing-based data generation technique capable of creating training data with large quantity and variety. For quantitative analysis, we manually annotated an evaluation set that significantly exceeds existing benchmarks in quantity, diversity and annotation accuracy. We provide cross-dataset evaluation as well as thorough analysis on the performance of state-of-the-art models on Ego2Hands to show that our dataset and data generation technique can produce models that generalize to unseen environments without domain adaptation.
SpreadMeNot: A Provably Secure and Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing Protocol
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

A plethora of contact tracing apps have been developed and deployed in several countries around the world in the battle against Covid-19. However, people are rightfully concerned about the security and privacy risks of such applications. To this end, the contribution of this work is twofold. First, we present an in-depth analysis of the security and privacy characteristics of the most prominent contact tracing protocols, under both passive and active adversaries. The results of our study indicate that all protocols are vulnerable to a variety of attacks, mainly due to the deterministic nature of the underlying cryptographic protocols. Our second contribution is the design and implementation of SpreadMeNot, a novel contact tracing protocol that can defend against most passive and active attacks, thus providing strong (provable) security and privacy guarantees that are necessary for such a sensitive application. Our detailed analysis, both formal and experimental, shows that SpreadMeNot satisfies security, privacy, and performance requirements, hence being an ideal candidate for building a contact tracing solution that can be adopted by the majority of the general public, as well as to serve as an open-source reference for further developments in the field.
Conformer-Kernel with Query Term Independence at TREC 2020 Deep Learning Track
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

We benchmark Conformer-Kernel models under the strict blind evaluation setting of the TREC 2020 Deep Learning track. In particular, we study the impact of incorporating: (i) Explicit term matching to complement matching based on learned representations (i.e., the "Duet principle"), (ii) query term independence (i.e., the "QTI assumption") to scale the model to the full retrieval setting, and (iii) the ORCAS click data as an additional document description field. We find evidence which supports that all three aforementioned strategies can lead to improved retrieval quality.
Declarative Approaches to Counterfactual Explanations for Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

We propose answer-set programs that specify and compute counterfactual interventions on entities that are input on a classification model. In relation to the outcome of the model, the resulting counterfactual entities serve as a basis for the definition and computation of causality-based explanation scores for the feature values in the entity under classification, namely "responsibility scores". The approach and the programs can be applied with black-box models, and also with models that can be specified as logic programs, such as rule-based classifiers. The main focus of this work is on the specification and computation of "best" counterfactual entities, i.e. those that lead to maximum responsibility scores. From them one can read off the explanations as maximum responsibility feature values in the original entity. We also extend the programs to bring into the picture semantic or domain knowledge. We show how the approach could be extended by means of probabilistic methods, and how the underlying probability distributions could be modified through the use of constraints. Several examples of programs written in the syntax of the DLV ASP-solver, and run with it, are shown.
CDT: Cascading Decision Trees for Explainable Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has recently achieved significant advances in various domains. However, explaining the policy of RL agents still remains an open problem due to several factors, one being the complexity of explaining neural networks decisions. Recently, a group of works have used decision-tree-based models to learn explainable policies. Soft decision trees (SDTs) and discretized differentiable decision trees (DDTs) have been demonstrated to achieve both good performance and share the benefit of having explainable policies. In this work, we further improve the results for tree-based explainable RL in both performance and explainability. Our proposal, Cascading Decision Trees (CDTs) apply representation learning on the decision path to allow richer expressivity. Empirical results show that in both situations, where CDTs are used as policy function approximators or as imitation learners to explain black-box policies, CDTs can achieve better performances with more succinct and explainable models than SDTs. As a second contribution our study reveals limitations of explaining black-box policies via imitation learning with tree-based explainable models, due to its inherent instability.
PC-GAIN: Pseudo-label Conditional Generative Adversarial Imputation Networks for Incomplete Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Datasets with missing values are very common in real world applications. GAIN, a recently proposed deep generative model for missing data imputation, has been proved to outperform many state-of-the-art methods. But GAIN only uses a reconstruction loss in the generator to minimize the imputation error of the non-missing part, ignoring the potential category information which can reflect the relationship between samples. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised missing data imputation method named PC-GAIN, which utilizes potential category information to further enhance the imputation power. Specifically, we first propose a pre-training procedure to learn potential category information contained in a subset of low-missing-rate data. Then an auxiliary classifier is determined using the synthetic pseudo-labels. Further, this classifier is incorporated into the generative adversarial framework to help the generator to yield higher quality imputation results. The proposed method can improve the imputation quality of GAIN significantly. Experimental results on various benchmark datasets show that our method is also superior to other baseline approaches. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/WYu-Feng/pc-gain}.