OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
On Accelerated Perceptrons and Beyond
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

The classical Perceptron algorithm of Rosenblatt can be used to find a linear threshold function to correctly classify $n$ linearly separable data points, assuming the classes are separated by some margin $γ> 0$. A foundational result is that Perceptron converges after $Ω(1/γ^{2})$ iterations. There have been several recent works that managed to improve this rate by a quadratic factor, to $Ω(\sqrt{\log n}/γ)$, with more sophisticated algorithms. In this paper, we unify these existing results under one framework by showing that they can all be described through the lens of solving min-max problems using modern acceleration techniques, mainly through optimistic online learning. We then show that the proposed framework also lead to improved results for a series of problems beyond the standard Perceptron setting. Specifically, a) For the margin maximization problem, we improve the state-of-the-art result from $O(\log t/t^2)$ to $O(1/t^2)$, where $t$ is the number of iterations; b) We provide the first result on identifying the implicit bias property of the classical Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent (NAG) algorithm, and show NAG can maximize the margin with an $O(1/t^2)$ rate; c) For the classical $p$-norm Perceptron problem, we provide an algorithm with $Ω(\sqrt{(p-1)\log n}/γ)$ convergence rate, while existing algorithms suffer the $Ω({(p-1)}/γ^2)$ convergence rate.
Probabilistic Forecasting Methods for System-Level Electricity Load Forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Load forecasts have become an integral part of energy security. Due to the various influencing factors that can be considered in such a forecast, there is also a wide range of models that attempt to integrate these parameters into a system in various ways. Due to the growing importance of probabilistic load forecast models, different approaches are presented in this analysis. The focus is on different models from the short-term sector. After that, another model from the long-term sector is presented. Then, the presented models are put in relation to each other and examined with reference to advantages and disadvantages. Afterwards, the presented papers are analyzed with focus on their comparability to each other. Finally, an outlook on further areas of development in the literature will be discussed.
Real-Time Driver Monitoring Systems through Modality and View Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Driver distractions are known to be the dominant cause of road accidents. While monitoring systems can detect non-driving-related activities and facilitate reducing the risks, they must be accurate and efficient to be applicable. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art methods prioritize accuracy while ignoring latency because they leverage cross-view and multimodal videos in which consecutive frames are highly similar. Thus, in this paper, we pursue time-effective detection models by neglecting the temporal relation between video frames and investigate the importance of each sensing modality in detecting drives' activities. Experiments demonstrate that 1) our proposed algorithms are real-time and can achieve similar performances (97.5\% AUC-PR) with significantly reduced computation compared with video-based models; 2) the top view with the infrared channel is more informative than any other single modality. Furthermore, we enhance the DAD dataset by manually annotating its test set to enable multiclassification. We also thoroughly analyze the influence of visual sensor types and their placements on the prediction of each class. The code and the new labels will be released.
Multi-granularity Argument Mining in Legal Texts
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we explore legal argument mining using multiple levels of granularity. Argument mining has usually been conceptualized as a sentence classification problem. In this work, we conceptualize argument mining as a token-level (i.e., word-level) classification problem. We use a Longformer model to classify the tokens. Results show that token-level text classification identifies certain legal argument elements more accurately than sentence-level text classification. Token-level classification also provides greater flexibility to analyze legal texts and to gain more insight into what the model focuses on when processing a large amount of input data.
Enabling Heterogeneous Domain Adaptation in Multi-inhabitants Smart Home Activity Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

Domain adaptation for sensor-based activity learning is of utmost importance in remote health monitoring research. However, many domain adaptation algorithms suffer with failure to operate adaptation in presence of target domain heterogeneity (which is always present in reality) and presence of multiple inhabitants dramatically hinders their generalizability producing unsatisfactory results for semi-supervised and unseen activity learning tasks. We propose \emph{AEDA}, a novel deep auto-encoder-based model to enable semi-supervised domain adaptation in the existence of target domain heterogeneity and how to incorporate it to empower heterogeneity to any homogeneous deep domain adaptation architecture for cross-domain activity learning. Experimental evaluation on 18 different heterogeneous and multi-inhabitants use-cases of 8 different domains created from 2 publicly available human activity datasets (wearable and ambient smart homes) shows that \emph{AEDA} outperforms (max. 12.8\% and 8.9\% improvements for ambient smart home and wearables) over existing domain adaptation techniques for both seen and unseen activity learning in a heterogeneous setting.
CNT (Conditioning on Noisy Targets): A new Algorithm for Leveraging Top-Down Feedback
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

We propose a novel regularizer for supervised learning called Conditioning on Noisy Targets (CNT). This approach consists in conditioning the model on a noisy version of the target(s) (e.g., actions in imitation learning or labels in classification) at a random noise level (from small to large noise). At inference time, since we do not know the target, we run the network with only noise in place of the noisy target. CNT provides hints through the noisy label (with less noise, we can more easily infer the true target). This give two main benefits: 1) the top-down feedback allows the model to focus on simpler and more digestible sub-problems and 2) rather than learning to solve the task from scratch, the model will first learn to master easy examples (with less noise), while slowly progressing toward harder examples (with more noise).
Soft-Labeled Contrastive Pre-training for Function-level Code Representation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Code contrastive pre-training has recently achieved significant progress on code-related tasks. In this paper, we present \textbf{SCodeR}, a \textbf{S}oft-labeled contrastive pre-training framework with two positive sample construction methods to learn functional-level \textbf{Code} \textbf{R}epresentation. Considering the relevance between codes in a large-scale code corpus, the soft-labeled contrastive pre-training can obtain fine-grained soft-labels through an iterative adversarial manner and use them to learn better code representation. The positive sample construction is another key for contrastive pre-training. Previous works use transformation-based methods like variable renaming to generate semantically equal positive codes. However, they usually result in the generated code with a highly similar surface form, and thus mislead the model to focus on superficial code structure instead of code semantics. To encourage SCodeR to capture semantic information from the code, we utilize code comments and abstract syntax sub-trees of the code to build positive samples. We conduct experiments on four code-related tasks over seven datasets. Extensive experimental results show that SCodeR achieves new state-of-the-art performance on all of them, which illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed pre-training method.
Denoising Enhanced Distantly Supervised Ultrafine Entity Typing
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Recently, the task of distantly supervised (DS) ultra-fine entity typing has received significant attention. However, DS data is noisy and often suffers from missing or wrong labeling issues resulting in low precision and low recall. This paper proposes a novel ultra-fine entity typing model with denoising capability. Specifically, we build a noise model to estimate the unknown labeling noise distribution over input contexts and noisy type labels. With the noise model, more trustworthy labels can be recovered by subtracting the estimated noise from the input. Furthermore, we propose an entity typing model, which adopts a bi-encoder architecture, is trained on the denoised data. Finally, the noise model and entity typing model are trained iteratively to enhance each other. We conduct extensive experiments on the Ultra-Fine entity typing dataset as well as OntoNotes dataset and demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms other baseline methods.
1st Place Solutions for the UVO Challenge 2022
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

This paper describes the approach we have taken in the challenge. We still adopted the two-stage scheme same as the last champion, that is, detection first and segmentation followed. We trained more powerful detector and segmentor separately. Besides, we also perform pseudo-label training on the test set, based on student-teacher framework and end-to-end transformer based object detection. The method ranks first on the 2nd Unidentified Video Objects (UVO) challenge, achieving AR@100 of 46.8, 64.7 and 32.2 in the limited data frame track, unlimited data frame track and video track respectively.
ATCON: Attention Consistency for Vision Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Attention--or attribution--maps methods are methods designed to highlight regions of the model's input that were discriminative for its predictions. However, different attention maps methods can highlight different regions of the input, with sometimes contradictory explanations for a prediction. This effect is exacerbated when the training set is small. This indicates that either the model learned incorrect representations or that the attention maps methods did not accurately estimate the model's representations. We propose an unsupervised fine-tuning method that optimizes the consistency of attention maps and show that it improves both classification performance and the quality of attention maps. We propose an implementation for two state-of-the-art attention computation methods, Grad-CAM and Guided Backpropagation, which relies on an input masking technique. We also show results on Grad-CAM and Integrated Gradients in an ablation study. We evaluate this method on our own dataset of event detection in continuous video recordings of hospital patients aggregated and curated for this work. As a sanity check, we also evaluate the proposed method on PASCAL VOC and SVHN. With the proposed method, with small training sets, we achieve a 6.6 points lift of F1 score over the baselines on our video dataset, a 2.9 point lift of F1 score on PASCAL, and a 1.8 points lift of mean Intersection over Union over Grad-CAM for weakly supervised detection on PASCAL. Those improved attention maps may help clinicians better understand vision model predictions and ease the deployment of machine learning systems into clinical care. We share part of the code for this article at the following repository: https://github.com/alimirzazadeh/SemisupervisedAttention.
Vision-based GNSS-Free Localization for UAVs in the Wild
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Considering the accelerated development of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) applications in both industrial and research scenarios, there is an increasing need for localizing these aerial systems in non-urban environments, using GNSS-Free, vision-based methods. Our paper proposes a vision-based localization algorithm that utilizes deep features to compute geographical coordinates of a UAV flying in the wild. The method is based on matching salient features of RGB photographs captured by the drone camera and sections of a pre-built map consisting of georeferenced open-source satellite images. Experimental results prove that vision-based localization has comparable accuracy with traditional GNSS-based methods, which serve as ground truth. Compared to state-of-the-art Visual Odometry (VO) approaches, our solution is designed for long-distance, high-altitude UAV flights. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/TIERS/wildnav.
Improving User's Sense of Participation in Robot-Driven Dialogue
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

In task-oriented dialogues with symbiotic robots, the robot usually takes the initiative in dialogue progression and topic selection. In such robot-driven dialogue, the user's sense of participation in the dialogue is reduced because the degree of freedom in timing and content of speech is limited, and as a result, the user's familiarity with and trust in the robot as a dialogue partner and the level of dialogue satisfaction decrease. In this study, we constructed a travel agent dialogue system focusing on improving the sense of dialogue participation. At the beginning of the dialogue, the robot tells the user the purpose of the upcoming dialogue and indicates that it is responsible for assisting the user in making decisions. In addition, in situations where users were asked to state their preferences, the robot encourages them to express their intentions with actions, as well as spoken language responses. In addition, we attempted to reduce the sense of discomfort felt toward the android robot by devising a timing control for the robot's detailed movements and facial expressions.
Spoken Dialogue Strategy Focusing on Asymmetric Communication with Android Robots
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Humans are easily conscious of small differences in an android robot's (AR's) behaviors and utterances, resulting in treating the AR as not-human, while ARs treat us as humans. Thus, there exists asymmetric communication between ARs and humans. In our system at Dialogue Robot Competition 2022, this asymmetry was a considerable research target in our dialogue strategy. For example, tricky phrases such as questions related to personal matters and forceful requests for agreement were experimentally used in AR's utterances. We assumed that these AR phrases would have a reasonable chance of success, although humans would likely hesitate to use the phrases. Additionally, during a five-minute dialogue, our AR's character, such as its voice tones and sentence expressions, changed from mechanical to human-like type in order to pretend to tailor to customers. The characteristics of the AR developed by our team, DSML-TDU, are introduced in this paper.
A Real-Time Fusion Framework for Long-term Visual Localization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Visual localization is a fundamental task that regresses the 6 Degree Of Freedom (6DoF) poses with image features in order to serve the high precision localization requests in many robotics applications. Degenerate conditions like motion blur, illumination changes and environment variations place great challenges in this task. Fusion with additional information, such as sequential information and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) inputs, would greatly assist such problems. In this paper, we present an efficient client-server visual localization architecture that fuses global and local pose estimations to realize promising precision and efficiency. We include additional geometry hints in mapping and global pose regressing modules to improve the measurement quality. A loosely coupled fusion policy is adopted to leverage the computation complexity and accuracy. We conduct the evaluations on two typical open-source benchmarks, 4Seasons and OpenLORIS. Quantitative results prove that our framework has competitive performance with respect to other state-of-the-art visual localization solutions.
Capacitated Vehicle Routing in Graphic Metrics
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

We study the capacitated vehicle routing problem in graphic metrics (graphic CVRP). Our main contribution is a new lower bound on the cost of an optimal solution. For graphic metrics, this lower bound is tight and significantly stronger than the well-known bound for general metrics. The proof of the new lower bound is simple and combinatorial. Using this lower bound, we analyze the approximation ratio of the classical iterated tour partitioning algorithm combined with the TSP algorithms for graphic metrics of Christofides [1976], of Mömke-Svensson [JACM 2016], and of Sebő-Vygen [Combinatorica 2014]. In particular, we obtain a 1.95-approximation for the graphic CVRP.
Eye-tracking based classification of Mandarin Chinese readers with and without dyslexia using neural sequence models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Eye movements are known to reflect cognitive processes in reading, and psychological reading research has shown that eye gaze patterns differ between readers with and without dyslexia. In recent years, researchers have attempted to classify readers with dyslexia based on their eye movements using Support Vector Machines (SVMs). However, these approaches (i) are based on highly aggregated features averaged over all words read by a participant, thus disregarding the sequential nature of the eye movements, and (ii) do not consider the linguistic stimulus and its interaction with the reader's eye movements. In the present work, we propose two simple sequence models that process eye movements on the entire stimulus without the need of aggregating features across the sentence. Additionally, we incorporate the linguistic stimulus into the model in two ways -- contextualized word embeddings and manually extracted linguistic features. The models are evaluated on a Mandarin Chinese dataset containing eye movements from children with and without dyslexia. Our results show that (i) even for a logographic script such as Chinese, sequence models are able to classify dyslexia on eye gaze sequences, reaching state-of-the-art performance, and (ii) incorporating the linguistic stimulus does not help to improve classification performance.
Performance evaluation of approximation algorithms for the minimum size 2-vertex strongly connected subgraph problem
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

Jaberi [7] presented approximation algorithms for the problem of computing a minimum size 2-vertex strongly biconnected subgraph in directed graphs. We have implemented approximation algorithms presented in [7] and we have tested the implementation on some graphs. The experimental results show that these algorithms work well in practice.
Information-theoretic Characterizations of Generalization Error for the Gibbs Algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

Various approaches have been developed to upper bound the generalization error of a supervised learning algorithm. However, existing bounds are often loose and even vacuous when evaluated in practice. As a result, they may fail to characterize the exact generalization ability of a learning algorithm. Our main contributions are exact characterizations of the expected generalization error of the well-known Gibbs algorithm (a.k.a. Gibbs posterior) using different information measures, in particular, the symmetrized KL information between the input training samples and the output hypothesis. Our result can be applied to tighten existing expected generalization error and PAC-Bayesian bounds. Our information-theoretic approach is versatile, as it also characterizes the generalization error of the Gibbs algorithm with a data-dependent regularizer and that of the Gibbs algorithm in the asymptotic regime, where it converges to the standard empirical risk minimization algorithm. Of particular relevance, our results highlight the role the symmetrized KL information plays in controlling the generalization error of the Gibbs algorithm.
Uncertainty estimation for out-of-distribution detection in computational histopathology
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

In computational histopathology algorithms now outperform humans on a range of tasks, but to date none are employed for automated diagnoses in the clinic. Before algorithms can be involved in such high-stakes decisions they need to "know when they don't know", i.e., they need to estimate their predictive uncertainty. This allows them to defer potentially erroneous predictions to a human pathologist, thus increasing their safety. Here, we evaluate the predictive performance and calibration of several uncertainty estimation methods on clinical histopathology data. We show that a distance-aware uncertainty estimation method outperforms commonly used approaches, such as Monte Carlo dropout and deep ensembles. However, we observe a drop in predictive performance and calibration on novel samples across all uncertainty estimation methods tested. We also investigate the use of uncertainty thresholding to reject out-of-distribution samples for selective prediction. We demonstrate the limitations of this approach and suggest areas for future research.
Few-Shot Learning of Compact Models via Task-Specific Meta Distillation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

We consider a new problem of few-shot learning of compact models. Meta-learning is a popular approach for few-shot learning. Previous work in meta-learning typically assumes that the model architecture during meta-training is the same as the model architecture used for final deployment. In this paper, we challenge this basic assumption. For final deployment, we often need the model to be small. But small models usually do not have enough capacity to effectively adapt to new tasks. In the mean time, we often have access to the large dataset and extensive computing power during meta-training since meta-training is typically performed on a server. In this paper, we propose task-specific meta distillation that simultaneously learns two models in meta-learning: a large teacher model and a small student model. These two models are jointly learned during meta-training. Given a new task during meta-testing, the teacher model is first adapted to this task, then the adapted teacher model is used to guide the adaptation of the student model. The adapted student model is used for final deployment. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in few-shot image classification using model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML). Our proposed method outperforms other alternatives on several benchmark datasets.
Number-Adaptive Prototype Learning for 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

3D point cloud semantic segmentation is one of the fundamental tasks for 3D scene understanding and has been widely used in the metaverse applications. Many recent 3D semantic segmentation methods learn a single prototype (classifier weights) for each semantic class, and classify 3D points according to their nearest prototype. However, learning only one prototype for each class limits the model's ability to describe the high variance patterns within a class. Instead of learning a single prototype for each class, in this paper, we propose to use an adaptive number of prototypes to dynamically describe the different point patterns within a semantic class. With the powerful capability of vision transformer, we design a Number-Adaptive Prototype Learning (NAPL) model for point cloud semantic segmentation. To train our NAPL model, we propose a simple yet effective prototype dropout training strategy, which enables our model to adaptively produce prototypes for each class. The experimental results on SemanticKITTI dataset demonstrate that our method achieves 2.3% mIoU improvement over the baseline model based on the point-wise classification paradigm.