OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Operationalizing Digital Self Determination
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

We live in an era of datafication, one in which life is increasingly quantified and transformed into intelligence for private or public benefit. When used responsibly, this offers new opportunities for public good. However, three key forms of asymmetry currently limit this potential, especially for already vulnerable and marginalized groups: data asymmetries, information asymmetries, and agency asymmetries. These asymmetries limit human potential, both in a practical and psychological sense, leading to feelings of disempowerment and eroding public trust in technology. Existing methods to limit asymmetries (e.g., consent) as well as some alternatives under consideration (data ownership, collective ownership, personal information management systems) have limitations to adequately address the challenges at hand. A new principle and practice of digital self-determination (DSD) is therefore required. DSD is based on existing concepts of self-determination, as articulated in sources as varied as Kantian philosophy and the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Updated for the digital age, DSD contains several key characteristics, including the fact that it has both an individual and collective dimension; is designed to especially benefit vulnerable and marginalized groups; and is context-specific (yet also enforceable). Operationalizing DSD in this (and other) contexts so as to maximize the potential of data while limiting its harms requires a number of steps. In particular, a responsible operationalization of DSD would consider four key prongs or categories of action: processes, people and organizations, policies, and products and technologies.
Graph Sequential Neural ODE Process for Link Prediction on Dynamic and Sparse Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Link prediction on dynamic graphs is an important task in graph mining. Existing approaches based on dynamic graph neural networks (DGNNs) typically require a significant amount of historical data (interactions over time), which is not always available in practice. The missing links over time, which is a common phenomenon in graph data, further aggravates the issue and thus creates extremely sparse and dynamic graphs. To address this problem, we propose a novel method based on the neural process, called Graph Sequential Neural ODE Process (GSNOP). Specifically, GSNOP combines the advantage of the neural process and neural ordinary differential equation that models the link prediction on dynamic graphs as a dynamic-changing stochastic process. By defining a distribution over functions, GSNOP introduces the uncertainty into the predictions, making it generalize to more situations instead of overfitting to the sparse data. GSNOP is also agnostic to model structures that can be integrated with any DGNN to consider the chronological and geometrical information for link prediction. Extensive experiments on three dynamic graph datasets show that GSNOP can significantly improve the performance of existing DGNNs and outperform other neural process variants.
Camera simulation for robot simulation: how important are various camera model components?
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Modeling cameras for the simulation of autonomous robotics is critical for generating synthetic images with appropriate realism to effectively evaluate a perception algorithm in simulation. In many cases though, simulated images are produced by traditional rendering techniques that exclude or superficially handle processing steps and aspects encountered in the actual camera pipeline. The purpose of this contribution is to quantify the degree to which the exclusion from the camera model of various image generation steps or aspects affect the sim-to-real gap in robotics. We investigate what happens if one ignores aspects tied to processes from within the physical camera, e.g., lens distortion, noise, and signal processing; scene effects, e.g., lighting and reflection; and rendering quality. The results of the study demonstrate, quantitatively, that large-scale changes to color, scene, and location have far greater impact than model aspects concerned with local, feature-level artifacts. Moreover, we show that these scene-level aspects can stem from lens distortion and signal processing, particularly when considering white-balance and auto-exposure modeling.
CoNFies: Controllable Neural Face Avatars
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) are compelling techniques for modeling dynamic 3D scenes from 2D image collections. These volumetric representations would be well suited for synthesizing novel facial expressions but for two problems. First, deformable NeRFs are object agnostic and model holistic movement of the scene: they can replay how the motion changes over time, but they cannot alter it in an interpretable way. Second, controllable volumetric representations typically require either time-consuming manual annotations or 3D supervision to provide semantic meaning to the scene. We propose a controllable neural representation for face self-portraits (CoNFies), that solves both of these problems within a common framework, and it can rely on automated processing. We use automated facial action recognition (AFAR) to characterize facial expressions as a combination of action units (AU) and their intensities. AUs provide both the semantic locations and control labels for the system. CoNFies outperformed competing methods for novel view and expression synthesis in terms of visual and anatomic fidelity of expressions.
PBSM: Backdoor attack against Keyword spotting based on pitch boosting and sound masking
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

Keyword spotting (KWS) has been widely used in various speech control scenarios. The training of KWS is usually based on deep neural networks and requires a large amount of data. Manufacturers often use third-party data to train KWS. However, deep neural networks are not sufficiently interpretable to manufacturers, and attackers can manipulate third-party training data to plant backdoors during the model training. An effective backdoor attack can force the model to make specified judgments under certain conditions, i.e., triggers. In this paper, we design a backdoor attack scheme based on Pitch Boosting and Sound Masking for KWS, called PBSM. Experimental results demonstrated that PBSM is feasible to achieve an average attack success rate close to 90% in three victim models when poisoning less than 1% of the training data.
Exploring Detection-based Method For Speaker Diarization @ Ego4D Audio-only Diarization Challenge 2022
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

We provide the technical report for Ego4D audio-only diarization challenge in ECCV 2022. Speaker diarization takes the audio streams as input and outputs the homogeneous segments according to the speaker's identity. It aims to solve the problem of "Who spoke when." In this paper, we explore a Detection-based method to tackle the audio-only speaker diarization task. Our method first extracts audio features by audio backbone and then feeds the feature to a detection-generate network to get the speaker proposals. Finally, after postprocessing, we can get the diarization results. The validation dataset validates this method, and our method achieves 53.85 DER on the test dataset. These results rank 3rd on the leaderboard of Ego4D audio-only diarization challenge 2022.
Learning with Noisy Labels over Imbalanced Subpopulations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Learning with Noisy Labels (LNL) has attracted significant attention from the research community. Many recent LNL methods rely on the assumption that clean samples tend to have "small loss". However, this assumption always fails to generalize to some real-world cases with imbalanced subpopulations, i.e., training subpopulations varying in sample size or recognition difficulty. Therefore, recent LNL methods face the risk of misclassifying those "informative" samples (e.g., hard samples or samples in the tail subpopulations) into noisy samples, leading to poor generalization performance. To address the above issue, we propose a novel LNL method to simultaneously deal with noisy labels and imbalanced subpopulations. It first leverages sample correlation to estimate samples' clean probabilities for label correction and then utilizes corrected labels for Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) to further improve the robustness. Specifically, in contrast to previous works using classification loss as the selection criterion, we introduce a feature-based metric that takes the sample correlation into account for estimating samples' clean probabilities. Then, we refurbish the noisy labels using the estimated clean probabilities and the pseudo-labels from the model's predictions. With refurbished labels, we use DRO to train the model to be robust to subpopulation imbalance. Extensive experiments on a wide range of benchmarks demonstrate that our technique can consistently improve current state-of-the-art robust learning paradigms against noisy labels, especially when encountering imbalanced subpopulations.
AlignVE: Visual Entailment Recognition Based on Alignment Relations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Visual entailment (VE) is to recognize whether the semantics of a hypothesis text can be inferred from the given premise image, which is one special task among recent emerged vision and language understanding tasks. Currently, most of the existing VE approaches are derived from the methods of visual question answering. They recognize visual entailment by quantifying the similarity between the hypothesis and premise in the content semantic features from multi modalities. Such approaches, however, ignore the VE's unique nature of relation inference between the premise and hypothesis. Therefore, in this paper, a new architecture called AlignVE is proposed to solve the visual entailment problem with a relation interaction method. It models the relation between the premise and hypothesis as an alignment matrix. Then it introduces a pooling operation to get feature vectors with a fixed size. Finally, it goes through the fully-connected layer and normalization layer to complete the classification. Experiments show that our alignment-based architecture reaches 72.45\% accuracy on SNLI-VE dataset, outperforming previous content-based models under the same settings.
A Basic Algorithm for Generating Individualized Numerical Scale (BAGINS)
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

Linguistic labels are effective means of expressing qualitative assessments because they account for the uncertain nature of human preferences. However, to perform computations with linguistic labels, they must first be converted to numbers using a scale function. Within the context of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), the most popular scale used to represent linguistic labels numerically is the linear 1-9 scale, which was proposed by Saaty. However, this scale has been criticized by several researchers, and various alternatives are proposed in the literature. There is a growing interest in scale individualization rather than relying on a generic fixed scale since the perceptions of the decision maker regarding these linguistic labels are highly subjective. The methods proposed in the literature for scale individualization focus on minimizing the transitivity errors, i.e., consistency. In this research, we proposed a novel, easy-to-learn, easy-to-implement, and computationally less demanding scale individualization approach based on compatibility. We also developed an experimental setup and introduced two new metrics that can be used by researchers that contribute to the theory of AHP. To assess the value of scale individualization in general, and the performance of the proposed novel approach in particular, numerical and two empirical studies are conducted. The results of the analyses demonstrate that the scale individualization outperforms the conventional fixed scale approach and validates the benefit of the proposed novel heuristic.
An Efficient COarse-to-fiNE Alignment Framework @ Ego4D Natural Language Queries Challenge 2022
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

This technical report describes the CONE approach for Ego4D Natural Language Queries (NLQ) Challenge in ECCV 2022. We leverage our model CONE, an efficient window-centric COarse-to-fiNE alignment framework. Specifically, CONE dynamically slices the long video into candidate windows via a sliding window approach. Centering at windows, CONE (1) learns the inter-window (coarse-grained) semantic variance through contrastive learning and speeds up inference by pre-filtering the candidate windows relevant to the NL query, and (2) conducts intra-window (fine-grained) candidate moments ranking utilizing the powerful multi-modal alignment ability of the contrastive vision-text pre-trained model EgoVLP. On the blind test set, CONE achieves 15.26 and 9.24 for R1@IoU=0.3 and R1@IoU=0.5, respectively.
Some Properties of the Nash Equilibrium in $2 \times 2$ Zero-Sum Games
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2022
Year: 2022

In this report, some properties of the set of Nash equilibria (NEs) of $2 \times 2$ zero-sum games are reviewed. In particular, the cardinality of the set of NEs is given in terms of the entries of the payoff matrix. Moreover, closed-form expressions for the NE strategies and the payoff at the NE (the value of the game) are provided in terms of the entries of the payoff matrix. The results presented in this report are not necessarily new knowledge, as they follow from the definition of the NE after some tedious calculations. Nevertheless this synthetic presentation is original in the literature.
Speeding Up Recommender Systems Using Association Rules
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Recommender systems are considered one of the most rapidly growing branches of Artificial Intelligence. The demand for finding more efficient techniques to generate recommendations becomes urgent. However, many recommendations become useless if there is a delay in generating and showing them to the user. Therefore, we focus on improving the speed of recommendation systems without impacting the accuracy. In this paper, we suggest a novel recommender system based on Factorization Machines and Association Rules (FMAR). We introduce an approach to generate association rules using two algorithms: (i) apriori and (ii) frequent pattern (FP) growth. These association rules will be utilized to reduce the number of items passed to the factorization machines recommendation model. We show that FMAR has significantly decreased the number of new items that the recommender system has to predict and hence, decreased the required time for generating the recommendations. On the other hand, while building the FMAR tool, we concentrate on making a balance between prediction time and accuracy of generated recommendations to ensure that the accuracy is not significantly impacted compared to the accuracy of using factorization machines without association rules.
Neurodevelopmental Phenotype Prediction: A State-of-the-Art Deep Learning Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

A major challenge in medical image analysis is the automated detection of biomarkers from neuroimaging data. Traditional approaches, often based on image registration, are limited in capturing the high variability of cortical organisation across individuals. Deep learning methods have been shown to be successful in overcoming this difficulty, and some of them have even outperformed medical professionals on certain datasets. In this paper, we apply a deep neural network to analyse the cortical surface data of neonates, derived from the publicly available Developing Human Connectome Project (dHCP). Our goal is to identify neurodevelopmental biomarkers and to predict gestational age at birth based on these biomarkers. Using scans of preterm neonates acquired around the term-equivalent age, we were able to investigate the impact of preterm birth on cortical growth and maturation during late gestation. Besides reaching state-of-the-art prediction accuracy, the proposed model has much fewer parameters than the baselines, and its error stays low on both unregistered and registered cortical surfaces.
Fast and Accurate FSA System Using ELBERT: An Efficient and Lightweight BERT
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

With the development of deep learning and Transformer-based pre-trained models like BERT, the accuracy of many NLP tasks has been dramatically improved. However, the large number of parameters and computations also pose challenges for their deployment. For instance, using BERT can improve the predictions in the financial sentiment analysis (FSA) task but slow it down, where speed and accuracy are equally important in terms of profits. To address these issues, we first propose an efficient and lightweight BERT (ELBERT) along with a novel confidence-window-based (CWB) early exit mechanism. Based on ELBERT, an innovative method to accelerate text processing on the GPU platform is developed, solving the difficult problem of making the early exit mechanism work more effectively with a large input batch size. Afterward, a fast and high-accuracy FSA system is built. Experimental results show that the proposed CWB early exit mechanism achieves significantly higher accuracy than existing early exit methods on BERT under the same computation cost. By using this acceleration method, our FSA system can boost the processing speed by nearly 40 times to over 1000 texts per second with sufficient accuracy, which is nearly twice as fast as FastBERT, thus providing a more powerful text processing capability for modern trading systems.
Creative divergent synthesis with generative models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Machine learning approaches now achieve impressive generation capabilities in numerous domains such as image, audio or video. However, most training \& evaluation frameworks revolve around the idea of strictly modelling the original data distribution rather than trying to extrapolate from it. This precludes the ability of such models to diverge from the original distribution and, hence, exhibit some creative traits. In this paper, we propose various perspectives on how this complicated goal could ever be achieved, and provide preliminary results on our novel training objective called \textit{Bounded Adversarial Divergence} (BAD).
Challenges related to system-of-systems for greening and climate adaptation in smart cities
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

This paper presents the results of interviews conducted as part of the DYNASOS project. The objective was to collect challenges related to the design, implementation and management of system-of-systems (SoS) in the context of climate adaptation and greening of smart cities. 23 individuals from cities, academia, and industry were interviewed between March and May 2022 and 57 distinct challenges were collected and analyzed. Our results show that while technical issues (such as interoperability or data acquisition) persist, non-technical issues are the main obstacles. Difficulties in information sharing, effective communication, and synchronization between different actors are the most important challenges.
Weakly-supervised Fingerspelling Recognition in British Sign Language Videos
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

The goal of this work is to detect and recognize sequences of letters signed using fingerspelling in British Sign Language (BSL). Previous fingerspelling recognition methods have not focused on BSL, which has a very different signing alphabet (e.g., two-handed instead of one-handed) to American Sign Language (ASL). They also use manual annotations for training. In contrast to previous methods, our method only uses weak annotations from subtitles for training. We localize potential instances of fingerspelling using a simple feature similarity method, then automatically annotate these instances by querying subtitle words and searching for corresponding mouthing cues from the signer. We propose a Transformer architecture adapted to this task, with a multiple-hypothesis CTC loss function to learn from alternative annotation possibilities. We employ a multi-stage training approach, where we make use of an initial version of our trained model to extend and enhance our training data before re-training again to achieve better performance. Through extensive evaluations, we verify our method for automatic annotation and our model architecture. Moreover, we provide a human expert annotated test set of 5K video clips for evaluating BSL fingerspelling recognition methods to support sign language research.
Is my automatic audio captioning system so bad? spider-max: a metric to consider several caption candidates
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

Automatic Audio Captioning (AAC) is the task that aims to describe an audio signal using natural language. AAC systems take as input an audio signal and output a free-form text sentence, called a caption. Evaluating such systems is not trivial, since there are many ways to express the same idea. For this reason, several complementary metrics, such as BLEU, CIDEr, SPICE and SPIDEr, are used to compare a single automatic caption to one or several captions of reference, produced by a human annotator. Nevertheless, an automatic system can produce several caption candidates, either using some randomness in the sentence generation process, or by considering the various competing hypothesized captions during decoding with beam-search, for instance. If we consider an end-user of an AAC system, presenting several captions instead of a single one seems relevant to provide some diversity, similarly to information retrieval systems. In this work, we explore the possibility to consider several predicted captions in the evaluation process instead of one. For this purpose, we propose SPIDEr-max, a metric that takes the maximum SPIDEr value among the scores of several caption candidates. To advocate for our metric, we report experiments on Clotho v2.1 and AudioCaps, with a transformed-based system. On AudioCaps for example, this system reached a SPIDEr-max value (with 5 candidates) close to the SPIDEr human score of reference.
Teaching Algorithmic Reasoning via In-context Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Large language models (LLMs) have shown increasing in-context learning capabilities through scaling up model and data size. Despite this progress, LLMs are still unable to solve algorithmic reasoning problems. While providing a rationale with the final answer has led to further improvements in multi-step reasoning problems, Anil et al. 2022 showed that even simple algorithmic reasoning tasks such as parity are far from solved. In this work, we identify and study four key stages for successfully teaching algorithmic reasoning to LLMs: (1) formulating algorithms as skills, (2) teaching multiple skills simultaneously (skill accumulation), (3) teaching how to combine skills (skill composition) and (4) teaching how to use skills as tools. We show that it is possible to teach algorithmic reasoning to LLMs via in-context learning, which we refer to as algorithmic prompting. We evaluate our approach on a variety of arithmetic and quantitative reasoning tasks, and demonstrate significant boosts in performance over existing prompting techniques. In particular, for long parity, addition, multiplication and subtraction, we achieve an error reduction of approximately 10x, 9x, 5x and 2x respectively compared to the best available baselines.