OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Native Chinese Reader: A Dataset Towards Native-Level Chinese Machine Reading Comprehension
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

We present Native Chinese Reader (NCR), a new machine reading comprehension (MRC) dataset with particularly long articles in both modern and classical Chinese. NCR is collected from the exam questions for the Chinese course in China's high schools, which are designed to evaluate the language proficiency of native Chinese youth. Existing Chinese MRC datasets are either domain-specific or focusing on short contexts of a few hundreds of characters in modern Chinese only. By contrast, NCR contains 8390 documents with an average length of 1024 characters covering a wide range of Chinese writing styles, including modern articles, classical literature and classical poetry. A total of 20477 questions on these documents also require strong reasoning abilities and common sense to figure out the correct answers. We implemented multiple baseline models using popular Chinese pre-trained models and additionally launched an online competition using our dataset to examine the limit of current methods. The best model achieves 59% test accuracy while human evaluation shows an average accuracy of 79%, which indicates a significant performance gap between current MRC models and native Chinese speakers. We release the dataset at https://sites.google.com/view/native-chinese-reader/.
Centroid-UNet: Detecting Centroids in Aerial Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In many applications of aerial/satellite image analysis (remote sensing), the generation of exact shapes of objects is a cumbersome task. In most remote sensing applications such as counting objects requires only location estimation of objects. Hence, locating object centroids in aerial/satellite images is an easy solution for tasks where the object's exact shape is not necessary. Thus, this study focuses on assessing the feasibility of using deep neural networks for locating object centroids in satellite images. Name of our model is Centroid-UNet. The Centroid-UNet model is based on classic U-Net semantic segmentation architecture. We modified and adapted the U-Net semantic segmentation architecture into a centroid detection model preserving the simplicity of the original model. Furthermore, we have tested and evaluated our model with two case studies involving aerial/satellite images. Those two case studies are building centroid detection case study and coconut tree centroid detection case study. Our evaluation results have reached comparably good accuracy compared to other methods, and also offer simplicity. The code and models developed under this study are also available in the Centroid-UNet GitHub repository: https://github.com/gicait/centroid-unet
A Complete Characterisation of ReLU-Invariant Distributions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

We give a complete characterisation of families of probability distributions that are invariant under the action of ReLU neural network layers. The need for such families arises during the training of Bayesian networks or the analysis of trained neural networks, e.g., in the context of uncertainty quantification (UQ) or explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). We prove that no invariant parametrised family of distributions can exist unless at least one of the following three restrictions holds: First, the network layers have a width of one, which is unreasonable for practical neural networks. Second, the probability measures in the family have finite support, which basically amounts to sampling distributions. Third, the parametrisation of the family is not locally Lipschitz continuous, which excludes all computationally feasible families. Finally, we show that these restrictions are individually necessary. For each of the three cases we can construct an invariant family exploiting exactly one of the restrictions but not the other two.
Makeup216: Logo Recognition with Adversarial Attention Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

One of the challenges of logo recognition lies in the diversity of forms, such as symbols, texts or a combination of both; further, logos tend to be extremely concise in design while similar in appearance, suggesting the difficulty of learning discriminative representations. To investigate the variety and representation of logo, we introduced Makeup216, the largest and most complex logo dataset in the field of makeup, captured from the real world. It comprises of 216 logos and 157 brands, including 10,019 images and 37,018 annotated logo objects. In addition, we found that the marginal background around the pure logo can provide a important context information and proposed an adversarial attention representation framework (AAR) to attend on the logo subject and auxiliary marginal background separately, which can be combined for better representation. Our proposed framework achieved competitive results on Makeup216 and another large-scale open logo dataset, which could provide fresh thinking for logo recognition. The dataset of Makeup216 and the code of the proposed framework will be released soon.
Hybrid Graph Neural Networks for Few-Shot Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been used to tackle the few-shot learning (FSL) problem and shown great potentials under the transductive setting. However under the inductive setting, existing GNN based methods are less competitive. This is because they use an instance GNN as a label propagation/classification module, which is jointly meta-learned with a feature embedding network. This design is problematic because the classifier needs to adapt quickly to new tasks while the embedding does not. To overcome this problem, in this paper we propose a novel hybrid GNN (HGNN) model consisting of two GNNs, an instance GNN and a prototype GNN. Instead of label propagation, they act as feature embedding adaptation modules for quick adaptation of the meta-learned feature embedding to new tasks. Importantly they are designed to deal with a fundamental yet often neglected challenge in FSL, that is, with only a handful of shots per class, any few-shot classifier would be sensitive to badly sampled shots which are either outliers or can cause inter-class distribution overlapping. %Our two GNNs are designed to address these two types of poorly sampled few-shots respectively and their complementarity is exploited in the hybrid GNN model. Extensive experiments show that our HGNN obtains new state-of-the-art on three FSL benchmarks.
Geometric Path Enumeration for Equivalence Verification of Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

As neural networks (NNs) are increasingly introduced into safety-critical domains, there is a growing need to formally verify NNs before deployment. In this work we focus on the formal verification problem of NN equivalence which aims to prove that two NNs (e.g. an original and a compressed version) show equivalent behavior. Two approaches have been proposed for this problem: Mixed integer linear programming and interval propagation. While the first approach lacks scalability, the latter is only suitable for structurally similar NNs with small weight changes. The contribution of our paper has four parts. First, we show a theoretical result by proving that the epsilon-equivalence problem is coNP-complete. Secondly, we extend Tran et al.'s single NN geometric path enumeration algorithm to a setting with multiple NNs. In a third step, we implement the extended algorithm for equivalence verification and evaluate optimizations necessary for its practical use. Finally, we perform a comparative evaluation showing use-cases where our approach outperforms the previous state of the art, both, for equivalence verification as well as for counter-example finding.
Multi-agent Soft Actor-Critic Based Hybrid Motion Planner for Mobile Robots
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, a novel hybrid multi-robot motion planner that can be applied under non-communication and local observable conditions is presented. The planner is model-free and can realize the end-to-end mapping of multi-robot state and observation information to final smooth and continuous trajectories. The planner is a front-end and back-end separated architecture. The design of the front-end collaborative waypoints searching module is based on the multi-agent soft actor-critic algorithm under the centralized training with decentralized execution diagram. The design of the back-end trajectory optimization module is based on the minimal snap method with safety zone constraints. This module can output the final dynamic-feasible and executable trajectories. Finally, multi-group experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed motion planner.
Fast Single-Core K-Nearest Neighbor Graph Computation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Fast and reliable K-Nearest Neighbor Graph algorithms are more important than ever due to their widespread use in many data processing techniques. This paper presents a runtime optimized C implementation of the heuristic "NN-Descent" algorithm by Wei Dong et al. for the l2-distance metric. Various implementation optimizations are explained which improve performance for low-dimensional as well as high dimensional datasets. Optimizations to speed up the selection of which datapoint pairs to evaluate the distance for are primarily impactful for low-dimensional datasets. A heuristic which exploits the iterative nature of NN-Descent to reorder data in memory is presented which enables better use of locality and thereby improves the runtime. The restriction to the l2-distance metric allows for the use of blocked distance evaluations which significantly increase performance for high dimensional datasets. In combination the optimizations yield an implementation which significantly outperforms a widely used implementation of NN-Descent on all considered datasets. For instance, the runtime on the popular MNIST handwritten digits dataset is halved.
Learning to Learn Transferable Attack
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Transfer adversarial attack is a non-trivial black-box adversarial attack that aims to craft adversarial perturbations on the surrogate model and then apply such perturbations to the victim model. However, the transferability of perturbations from existing methods is still limited, since the adversarial perturbations are easily overfitting with a single surrogate model and specific data pattern. In this paper, we propose a Learning to Learn Transferable Attack (LLTA) method, which makes the adversarial perturbations more generalized via learning from both data and model augmentation. For data augmentation, we adopt simple random resizing and padding. For model augmentation, we randomly alter the back propagation instead of the forward propagation to eliminate the effect on the model prediction. By treating the attack of both specific data and a modified model as a task, we expect the adversarial perturbations to adopt enough tasks for generalization. To this end, the meta-learning algorithm is further introduced during the iteration of perturbation generation. Empirical results on the widely-used dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our attack method with a 12.85% higher success rate of transfer attack compared with the state-of-the-art methods. We also evaluate our method on the real-world online system, i.e., Google Cloud Vision API, to further show the practical potentials of our method.
Subspace Decomposition based DNN algorithm for elliptic type multi-scale PDEs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

While deep learning algorithms demonstrate a great potential in scientific computing, its application to multi-scale problems remains to be a big challenge. This is manifested by the "frequency principle" that neural networks tend to learn low frequency components first. Novel architectures such as multi-scale deep neural network (MscaleDNN) were proposed to alleviate this problem to some extent. In this paper, we construct a subspace decomposition based DNN (dubbed SD$^2$NN) architecture for a class of multi-scale problems by combining traditional numerical analysis ideas and MscaleDNN algorithms. The proposed architecture includes one low frequency normal DNN submodule, and one (or a few) high frequency MscaleDNN submodule(s), which are designed to capture the smooth part and the oscillatory part of the multi-scale solutions, respectively. In addition, a novel trigonometric activation function is incorporated in the SD$^2$NN model. We demonstrate the performance of the SD$^2$NN architecture through several benchmark multi-scale problems in regular or irregular geometric domains. Numerical results show that the SD$^2$NN model is superior to existing models such as MscaleDNN.
Firefly: Supporting Drone Localization With Visible Light Communication
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Drones are not fully trusted yet. Their reliance on radios and cameras for navigation raises safety and privacy concerns. These systems can fail, causing accidents, or be misused for unauthorized recordings. Considering recent regulations allowing commercial drones to operate only at night, we propose a radically new approach where drones obtain navigation information from artificial lighting. In our system, standard light bulbs modulate their intensity to send beacons and drones decode this information with a simple photodiode. This optical information is combined with the inertial and altitude sensors in the drones to provide localization without the need for radios, GPS or cameras. Our framework is the first to provide 3D drone localization with light and we evaluate it with a testbed consisting of four light beacons and a mini-drone. We show that, our approach allows to locate the drone within a few decimeters of the actual position and compared to state-of-the-art positioning methods, reduces the localization error by 42%.
Land use identification through social network interaction
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2021
Year: 2021

The Internet generates large volumes of data at a high rate, in particular, posts on social networks. Although social network data has numerous semantic adulterations, and is not intended to be a source of geo-spatial information, in the text of posts we find pieces of important information about how people relate to their environment, which can be used to identify interesting aspects of how human beings interact with portions of land based on their activities. This research proposes a methodology for the identification of land uses using Natural Language Processing (NLP) from the contents of the popular social network Twitter. It will be approached by identifying keywords with linguistic patterns from the text, and the geographical coordinates associated with the publication. Context-specific innovations are introduced to deal with data across South America and, in particular, in the city of Arequipa, Peru. The objective is to identify the five main land uses: residential, commercial, institutional-governmental, industrial-offices and unbuilt land. Within the framework of urban planning and sustainable urban management, the methodology contributes to the optimization of the identification techniques applied for the updating of land use cadastres, since the results achieved an accuracy of about 90%, which motivates its application in the real context. In addition, it would allow the identification of land use categories at a more detailed level, in situations such as a complex/mixed distribution building based on the amount of data collected. Finally, the methodology makes land use information available in a more up-to-date fashion and, above all, avoids the high economic cost of the non-automatic production of land use maps for cities, mostly in developing countries.
ANEA: Automated (Named) Entity Annotation for German Domain-Specific Texts
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Named entity recognition (NER) is an important task that aims to resolve universal categories of named entities, e.g., persons, locations, organizations, and times. Despite its common and viable use in many use cases, NER is barely applicable in domains where general categories are suboptimal, such as engineering or medicine. To facilitate NER of domain-specific types, we propose ANEA, an automated (named) entity annotator to assist human annotators in creating domain-specific NER corpora for German text collections when given a set of domain-specific texts. In our evaluation, we find that ANEA automatically identifies terms that best represent the texts' content, identifies groups of coherent terms, and extracts and assigns descriptive labels to these groups, i.e., annotates text datasets into the domain (named) entities.
A Survey of Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Visual Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

While huge volumes of unlabeled data are generated and made available in many domains, the demand for automated understanding of visual data is higher than ever before. Most existing machine learning models typically rely on massive amounts of labeled training data to achieve high performance. Unfortunately, such a requirement cannot be met in real-world applications. The number of labels is limited and manually annotating data is expensive and time-consuming. It is often necessary to transfer knowledge from an existing labeled domain to a new domain. However, model performance degrades because of the differences between domains (domain shift or dataset bias). To overcome the burden of annotation, Domain Adaptation (DA) aims to mitigate the domain shift problem when transferring knowledge from one domain into another similar but different domain. Unsupervised DA (UDA) deals with a labeled source domain and an unlabeled target domain. The principal objective of UDA is to reduce the domain discrepancy between the labeled source data and unlabeled target data and to learn domain-invariant representations across the two domains during training. In this paper, we first define UDA problem. Secondly, we overview the state-of-the-art methods for different categories of UDA from both traditional methods and deep learning based methods. Finally, we collect frequently used benchmark datasets and report results of the state-of-the-art methods of UDA on visual recognition problem.
Khmer Text Classification Using Word Embedding and Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Text classification is one of the fundamental tasks in natural language processing to label an open-ended text and is useful for various applications such as sentiment analysis. In this paper, we discuss various classification approaches for Khmer text, ranging from a classical TF-IDF algorithm with support vector machine classifier to modern word embedding-based neural network classifiers including linear layer model, recurrent neural network and convolutional neural network. A Khmer word embedding model is trained on a 30-million-Khmer-word corpus to construct word vector representations that are used to train three different neural network classifiers. We evaluate the performance of different approaches on a news article dataset for both multi-class and multi-label text classification tasks. The result suggests that neural network classifiers using a word embedding model consistently outperform the traditional classifier using TF-IDF. The recurrent neural network classifier provides a slightly better result compared to the convolutional network and the linear layer network.
Multi-objective simulation optimization of the adhesive bonding process of materials
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Automotive companies are increasingly looking for ways to make their products lighter, using novel materials and novel bonding processes to join these materials together. Finding the optimal process parameters for such adhesive bonding process is challenging. In this research, we successfully applied Bayesian optimization using Gaussian Process Regression and Logistic Regression, to efficiently (i.e., requiring few experiments) guide the design of experiments to the Pareto-optimal process parameter settings.
On the Value of ML Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

We argue that, when establishing and benchmarking Machine Learning (ML) models, the research community should favour evaluation metrics that better capture the value delivered by their model in practical applications. For a specific class of use cases -- selective classification -- we show that not only can it be simple enough to do, but that it has import consequences and provides insights what to look for in a ``good'' ML model.
Bento and the Art of Repeated Research
Venue: arXiv cs.OS 2021
Year: 2021

Bento provides a new approach to developing file systems, with safety and high-velocity development in mind. This is achieved by using Rust, a modern and memory-safe systems programming language, and by providing a framework to run a single file system implementation in kernel space with the VFS or in user space with FUSE. In this paper, the benchmarking experiments from the Bento paper are repeated. We fail to exactly reproduce the results of the Bento paper, but more or less find the same patterns albeit with more outlying results. Additionally we unsuccessfully run a standardized test suite, and expand the set of experiments with latency benchmarks and throughput benchmarks using a RAM block device. The latency benchmarks show that ext4 with journaling consistently outperforms Bento-fs and the RAM throughput benchmarks show no additional consistent performance pattern. During this experimentation, a set of 12 bugs was encountered and analyzed. We find that the ratio of memory related bugs is lower than other systems programming projects that use C as opposed to Rust, thus supporting the claims of the Bento framework.
Sparse Interventions in Language Models with Differentiable Masking
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

There has been a lot of interest in understanding what information is captured by hidden representations of language models (LMs). Typically, interpretation methods i) do not guarantee that the model actually uses the encoded information, and ii) do not discover small subsets of neurons responsible for a considered phenomenon. Inspired by causal mediation analysis, we propose a method that discovers within a neural LM a small subset of neurons responsible for a particular linguistic phenomenon, i.e., subsets causing a change in the corresponding token emission probabilities. We use a differentiable relaxation to approximately search through the combinatorial space. An $L_0$ regularization term ensures that the search converges to discrete and sparse solutions. We apply our method to analyze subject-verb number agreement and gender bias detection in LSTMs. We observe that it is fast and finds better solutions than the alternative (REINFORCE). Our experiments confirm that each of these phenomenons is mediated through a small subset of neurons that do not play any other discernible role.
Virtualizing Mixed-Criticality Systems: A Survey on Industrial Trends and Issues
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

Virtualization is gaining attraction in the industry as it promises a flexible way to integrate, manage, and re-use heterogeneous software components with mixed-criticality levels, on a shared hardware platform, while obtaining isolation guarantees. This work surveys the state-of-the-practice of real-time virtualization technologies by discussing common issues in the industry. In particular, we analyze how different virtualization approaches and solutions can impact isolation guarantees and testing/certification activities, and how they deal with dependability challenges. The aim is to highlight current industry trends and support industrial practitioners to choose the most suitable solution according to their application domains.