OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Cross-Modal Contrastive Representation Learning for Audio-to-Image Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

Multiple modalities for certain information provide a variety of perspectives on that information, which can improve the understanding of the information. Thus, it may be crucial to generate data of different modality from the existing data to enhance the understanding. In this paper, we investigate the cross-modal audio-to-image generation problem and propose Cross-Modal Contrastive Representation Learning (CMCRL) to extract useful features from audios and use it in the generation phase. Experimental results show that CMCRL enhances quality of images generated than previous research.
Complementing Semi-Supervised Learning with Uncertainty Quantification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

The problem of fully supervised classification is that it requires a tremendous amount of annotated data, however, in many datasets a large portion of data is unlabeled. To alleviate this problem semi-supervised learning (SSL) leverages the knowledge of the classifier on the labeled domain and extrapolates it to the unlabeled domain which has a supposedly similar distribution as annotated data. Recent success on SSL methods crucially hinges on thresholded pseudo labeling and thereby consistency regularization for the unlabeled domain. However, the existing methods do not incorporate the uncertainty of the pseudo labels or unlabeled samples in the training process which are due to the noisy labels or out of distribution samples owing to strong augmentations. Inspired by the recent developments in SSL, our goal in this paper is to propose a novel unsupervised uncertainty-aware objective that relies on aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty quantification. Complementing the recent techniques in SSL with the proposed uncertainty-aware loss function our approach outperforms or is on par with the state-of-the-art over standard SSL benchmarks while being computationally lightweight. Our results outperform the state-of-the-art results on complex datasets such as CIFAR-100 and Mini-ImageNet.
Personalised Robot Behaviour Modelling for Robot-Assisted Therapy in the Context of Autism Spectrum Disorder
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

In robot-assisted therapy for individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder, the workload of therapists during a therapeutic session is increased if they have to control the robot manually. To allow therapists to focus on the interaction with the person instead, the robot should be more autonomous, namely it should be able to interpret the person's state and continuously adapt its actions according to their behaviour. In this paper, we develop a personalised robot behaviour model that can be used in the robot decision-making process during an activity; this behaviour model is trained with the help of a user model that has been learned from real interaction data. We use Q-learning for this task, such that the results demonstrate that the policy requires about 10,000 iterations to converge. We thus investigate policy transfer for improving the convergence speed; we show that this is a feasible solution, but an inappropriate initial policy can lead to a suboptimal final return.
Applying Spatiotemporal Attention to Identify Distracted and Drowsy Driving with Vision Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

A 20% rise in car crashes in 2021 compared to 2020 has been observed as a result of increased distraction and drowsiness. Drowsy and distracted driving are the cause of 45% of all car crashes. As a means to decrease drowsy and distracted driving, detection methods using computer vision can be designed to be low-cost, accurate, and minimally invasive. This work investigated the use of the vision transformer to outperform state-of-the-art accuracy from 3D-CNNs. Two separate transformers were trained for drowsiness and distractedness. The drowsy video transformer model was trained on the National Tsing-Hua University Drowsy Driving Dataset (NTHU-DDD) with a Video Swin Transformer model for 10 epochs on two classes -- drowsy and non-drowsy simulated over 10.5 hours. The distracted video transformer was trained on the Driver Monitoring Dataset (DMD) with Video Swin Transformer for 50 epochs over 9 distraction-related classes. The accuracy of the drowsiness model reached 44% and a high loss value on the test set, indicating overfitting and poor model performance. Overfitting indicates limited training data and applied model architecture lacked quantifiable parameters to learn. The distracted model outperformed state-of-the-art models on DMD reaching 97.5%, indicating that with sufficient data and a strong architecture, transformers are suitable for unfit driving detection. Future research should use newer and stronger models such as TokenLearner to achieve higher accuracy and efficiency, merge existing datasets to expand to detecting drunk driving and road rage to create a comprehensive solution to prevent traffic crashes, and deploying a functioning prototype to revolutionize the automotive safety industry.
Deep Laparoscopic Stereo Matching with Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

The self-attention mechanism, successfully employed with the transformer structure is shown promise in many computer vision tasks including image recognition, and object detection. Despite the surge, the use of the transformer for the problem of stereo matching remains relatively unexplored. In this paper, we comprehensively investigate the use of the transformer for the problem of stereo matching, especially for laparoscopic videos, and propose a new hybrid deep stereo matching framework (HybridStereoNet) that combines the best of the CNN and the transformer in a unified design. To be specific, we investigate several ways to introduce transformers to volumetric stereo matching pipelines by analyzing the loss landscape of the designs and in-domain/cross-domain accuracy. Our analysis suggests that employing transformers for feature representation learning, while using CNNs for cost aggregation will lead to faster convergence, higher accuracy and better generalization than other options. Our extensive experiments on Sceneflow, SCARED2019 and dVPN datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our HybridStereoNet.
dCAM: Dimension-wise Class Activation Map for Explaining Multivariate Data Series Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Data series classification is an important and challenging problem in data science. Explaining the classification decisions by finding the discriminant parts of the input that led the algorithm to some decisions is a real need in many applications. Convolutional neural networks perform well for the data series classification task; though, the explanations provided by this type of algorithm are poor for the specific case of multivariate data series. Addressing this important limitation is a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel method that solves this problem by highlighting both the temporal and dimensional discriminant information. Our contribution is two-fold: we first describe a convolutional architecture that enables the comparison of dimensions; then, we propose a method that returns dCAM, a Dimension-wise Class Activation Map specifically designed for multivariate time series (and CNN-based models). Experiments with several synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that dCAM is not only more accurate than previous approaches, but the only viable solution for discriminant feature discovery and classification explanation in multivariate time series. This paper has appeared in SIGMOD'22.
Novel Strategy Generating Variable-length State Machine Test Paths
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

Finite State Machine is a popular modeling notation for various systems, especially software and electronic. Test paths can be automatically generated from the system model to test such systems using a suitable algorithm. This paper presents a strategy that generates test paths and allows to start and end test paths only in defined states of the finite state machine. The strategy also simultaneously supports generating test paths only of length in a given range. For this purpose, alternative system models, test coverage criteria, and a set of algorithms are developed. The strategy is compared with the best alternative based on the reduction of the test set generated by the established N-switch coverage approach on a mix of 171 industrial and artificially generated problem instances. The proposed strategy outperforms the compared variant in a smaller number of test path steps. The extent varies with the used test coverage criterion and preferred test path length range from none to two and half fold difference. Moreover, the proposed technique detected up to 30% more simple artificial defects inserted into experimental SUT models per one test step than the compared alternative technique. The proposed strategy is well applicable in situations where a possible test path starts and ends in a state machine needs to be reflected and, concurrently, the length of the test paths has to be in a defined range.
How much of UCCA can be predicted from AMR?
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we consider two of the currently popular semantic frameworks: Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR)a more abstract framework, and Universal Conceptual Cognitive Annotation (UCCA)-an anchored framework. We use a corpus-based approach to build two graph rewriting systems, a deterministic and a non-deterministic one, from the former to the latter framework. We present their evaluation and a number of ambiguities that we discovered while building our rules. Finally, we provide a discussion and some future work directions in relation to comparing semantic frameworks of different flavors.
Post-processing Networks: Method for Optimizing Pipeline Task-oriented Dialogue Systems using Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Many studies have proposed methods for optimizing the dialogue performance of an entire pipeline task-oriented dialogue system by jointly training modules in the system using reinforcement learning. However, these methods are limited in that they can only be applied to modules implemented using trainable neural-based methods. To solve this problem, we propose a method for optimizing a pipeline system composed of modules implemented with arbitrary methods for dialogue performance. With our method, neural-based components called post-processing networks (PPNs) are installed inside such a system to post-process the output of each module. All PPNs are updated to improve the overall dialogue performance of the system by using reinforcement learning, not necessitating each module to be differentiable. Through dialogue simulation and human evaluation on the MultiWOZ dataset, we show that our method can improve the dialogue performance of pipeline systems consisting of various modules.
Domain Decorrelation with Potential Energy Ranking
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Machine learning systems, especially the methods based on deep learning, enjoy great success in modern computer vision tasks under experimental settings. Generally, these classic deep learning methods are built on the \emph{i.i.d.} assumption, supposing the training and test data are drawn from a similar distribution independently and identically. However, the aforementioned \emph{i.i.d.} assumption is in general unavailable in the real-world scenario, and as a result, leads to sharp performance decay of deep learning algorithms. Behind this, domain shift is one of the primary factors to be blamed. In order to tackle this problem, we propose using \textbf{Po}tential \textbf{E}nergy \textbf{R}anking (PoER) to decouple the object feature and the domain feature (\emph{i.e.,} appearance feature) in given images, promoting the learning of label-discriminative features while filtering out the irrelevant correlations between the objects and the background. PoER helps the neural networks to capture label-related features which contain the domain information first in shallow layers and then distills the label-discriminative representations out progressively, enforcing the neural networks to be aware of the characteristic of objects and background which is vital to the generation of domain-invariant features. PoER reports superior performance on domain generalization benchmarks, improving the average top-1 accuracy by at least 1.20\% compared to the existing methods. Moreover, we use PoER in the ECCV 2022 NICO Challenge\footnote{https://nicochallenge.com}, achieving top place with only a vanilla ResNet-18. The code has been made available at https://github.com/ForeverPs/PoER.
A Resilient Navigation and Path Planning System for High-speed Autonomous Race Car
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

This paper describes a resilient navigation and planning system used in the Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) competition. The IAC is a competition where full-scale race cars run autonomously on Indianapolis Motor Speedway(IMS) up to 290 km/h (180 mph). Race cars will experience severe vibrations. Especially at high speeds. These vibrations can degrade standard localization algorithms based on precision GPS-aided inertial measurement units. Degraded localization can lead to serious problems, including collisions. Therefore, we propose a resilient navigation system that enables a race car to stay within the track in the event of localization failures. Our navigation system uses a multi-sensor fusion-based Kalman filter. We detect degradation of the navigation solution using probabilistic approaches to computing optimal measurement values for the correction step of our Kalman filter. In addition, an optimal path planning algorithm for obstacle avoidance is proposed. In this challenge, the track has static obstacles on the track. The vehicle is required to avoid them with minimal time loss. By taking the original optimal racing line, obstacles, and vehicle dynamics into account, we propose a road-graph-based path planning algorithm to ensure that our race car can perform efficient obstacle avoidance. The proposed localization system was successfully validated to show its capability to prevent localization failures in the event of faulty GPS measurements during the historic world's first autonomous racing at IMS. Owing to our robust navigation and planning algorithm, we were able to finish the race as one of the top four teams while the remaining five teams failed to finish due to collisions or out-of-track violations.
Personality-Driven Social Multimedia Content Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

Social media marketing plays a vital role in promoting brand and product values to wide audiences. In order to boost their advertising revenues, global media buying platforms such as Facebook Ads constantly reduce the reach of branded organic posts, pushing brands to spend more on paid media ads. In order to run organic and paid social media marketing efficiently, it is necessary to understand the audience, tailoring the content to fit their interests and online behaviours, which is impossible to do manually at a large scale. At the same time, various personality type categorization schemes such as the Myers-Briggs Personality Type indicator make it possible to reveal the dependencies between personality traits and user content preferences on a wider scale by categorizing audience behaviours in a unified and structured manner. This problem is yet to be studied in depth by the research community, while the level of impact of different personality traits on content recommendation accuracy has not been widely utilised and comprehensively evaluated so far. Specifically, in this work we investigate the impact of human personality traits on the content recommendation model by applying a novel personality-driven multi-view content recommender system called Personality Content Marketing Recommender Engine, or PersiC. Our experimental results and real-world case study demonstrate not just PersiC's ability to perform efficient human personality-driven multi-view content recommendation, but also allow for actionable digital ad strategy recommendations, which when deployed are able to improve digital advertising efficiency by over 420% as compared to the original human-guided approach.
DeepFusion: Real-Time Dense 3D Reconstruction for Monocular SLAM using Single-View Depth and Gradient Predictions
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

While the keypoint-based maps created by sparse monocular simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) systems are useful for camera tracking, dense 3D reconstructions may be desired for many robotic tasks. Solutions involving depth cameras are limited in range and to indoor spaces, and dense reconstruction systems based on minimising the photometric error between frames are typically poorly constrained and suffer from scale ambiguity. To address these issues, we propose a 3D reconstruction system that leverages the output of a convolutional neural network (CNN) to produce fully dense depth maps for keyframes that include metric scale. Our system, DeepFusion, is capable of producing real-time dense reconstructions on a GPU. It fuses the output of a semi-dense multiview stereo algorithm with the depth and gradient predictions of a CNN in a probabilistic fashion, using learned uncertainties produced by the network. While the network only needs to be run once per keyframe, we are able to optimise for the depth map with each new frame so as to constantly make use of new geometric constraints. Based on its performance on synthetic and real-world datasets, we demonstrate that DeepFusion is capable of performing at least as well as other comparable systems.
NN2Rules: Extracting Rule List from Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

We present an algorithm, NN2Rules, to convert a trained neural network into a rule list. Rule lists are more interpretable since they align better with the way humans make decisions. NN2Rules is a decompositional approach to rule extraction, i.e., it extracts a set of decision rules from the parameters of the trained neural network model. We show that the decision rules extracted have the same prediction as the neural network on any input presented to it, and hence the same accuracy. A key contribution of NN2Rules is that it allows hidden neuron behavior to be either soft-binary (eg. sigmoid activation) or rectified linear (ReLU) as opposed to existing decompositional approaches that were developed with the assumption of soft-binary activation.
AutoCellLibX: Automated Standard Cell Library Extension Based on Pattern Mining
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2022
Year: 2022

Custom standard cell libraries can improve the final quality of the corresponding VLSI designs but properly customizing standard cell libraries remains challenging due to the complex characteristics of the VLSI designs. This paper presents an automatic standard-cell library extension framework, AutoCellLibX. It can find a set of standard cell cluster pattern candidates from the post-technology mapping gate-level netlist, with the consideration of standard cell characteristics and technology mapping constraints, based on our high-efficiency frequent subgraph mining algorithm. Meanwhile, to maximize the area benefit of standard cell customization for the given gate-level netlist, AutoCellLibX includes our proposed pattern combination algorithm which can iteratively find a set of gate-level patterns from numerous candidates as the extension part of the given initial standard cell library. To the best of our knowledge, AutoCellLibX is the first automated standard cell extension framework that closes the optimization loop between the analysis of gate-level netlist and standard cell library customization for VLSI design productivity. The experiments with FreePDK45 library and benchmarks from various domains show that AutoCellLibX can generate the library extension with up to 5 custom standard cells within 1.1 hours for each of the 31 benchmark designs and the resultant extension of the standard cell library can save design area by 4.49% averagely.
Action Quality Assessment using Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Action quality assessment (AQA) is an active research problem in video-based applications that is a challenging task due to the score variance per frame. Existing methods address this problem via convolutional-based approaches but suffer from its limitation of effectively capturing long-range dependencies. With the recent advancements in Transformers, we show that they are a suitable alternative to the conventional convolutional-based architectures. Specifically, can transformer-based models solve the task of AQA by effectively capturing long-range dependencies, parallelizing computation, and providing a wider receptive field for diving videos? To demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed architectures, we conducted comprehensive experiments and achieved a competitive Spearman correlation score of 0.9317. Additionally, we explore the hyperparameters effect on the model's performance and pave a new path for exploiting Transformers in AQA.
Exploiting High Quality Tactile Sensors for Simplified Grasping
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Robots are expected to grasp a wide range of objects varying in shape, weight or material type. Providing robots with tactile capabilities similar to humans is thus essential for applications involving human-to-robot or robot-to-robot interactions, particularly in those situations where a robot is expected to grasp and manipulate complex objects not previously encountered. A critical aspect for successful object grasp and manipulation is the use of high-quality fingertips equipped with multiple high-performance sensors, distributed appropriately across a specific contact surface. In this paper, we present a detailed analysis of the use of two different types of commercially available robotic fingertips (BioTac and WTS-FT), each of which is equipped with multiple sensors distributed across the fingertips' contact surface. We further demonstrate that, due to the high performance of the fingertips, a complex adaptive grasping algorithm is not required for grasping of everyday objects. We conclude that a simple algorithm based on a proportional controller will suffice for many grasping applications, provided the relevant fingertips exhibit high sensitivity. In a quantified assessment, we also demonstrate that, due in part to the sensor distribution, the BioTac-based fingertip performs better than the WTS-FT device, in enabling lifting of loads up to 850g, and that the simple proportional controller can adapt the grasp even when the object is exposed to significant external vibrational challenges.