OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Age- and Deviation-of-Information of Time-Triggered and Event-Triggered Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

Age-of-information is a metric that quantifies the freshness of information obtained by sampling a remote sensor. In signal-agnostic sampling, sensor updates are triggered at certain times without being conditioned on the actual sensor signal. Optimal update policies have been researched and it is accepted that periodic updates achieve smaller age-of-information than random updates. We contribute a study of a signal-aware policy, where updates are triggered by a random sensor event. By definition, this implies random updates and as a consequence inferior age-of-information. Considering a notion of deviation-of-information as a signal-aware metric, our results show, however, that event-triggered systems can perform equally well as time-triggered systems while causing smaller mean network utilization.
The Importance of Image Interpretation: Patterns of Semantic Misclassification in Real-World Adversarial Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Adversarial images are created with the intention of causing an image classifier to produce a misclassification. In this paper, we propose that adversarial images should be evaluated based on semantic mismatch, rather than label mismatch, as used in current work. In other words, we propose that an image of a "mug" would be considered adversarial if classified as "turnip", but not as "cup", as current systems would assume. Our novel idea of taking semantic misclassification into account in the evaluation of adversarial images offers two benefits. First, it is a more realistic conceptualization of what makes an image adversarial, which is important in order to fully understand the implications of adversarial images for security and privacy. Second, it makes it possible to evaluate the transferability of adversarial images to a real-world classifier, without requiring the classifier's label set to have been available during the creation of the images. The paper carries out an evaluation of a transfer attack on a real-world image classifier that is made possible by our semantic misclassification approach. The attack reveals patterns in the semantics of adversarial misclassifications that could not be investigated using conventional label mismatch.
YOLOv5s-GTB: light-weighted and improved YOLOv5s for bridge crack detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

In response to the situation that the conventional bridge crack manual detection method has a large amount of human and material resources wasted, this study is aimed to propose a light-weighted, high-precision, deep learning-based bridge apparent crack recognition model that can be deployed in mobile devices' scenarios. In order to enhance the performance of YOLOv5, firstly, the data augmentation methods are supplemented, and then the YOLOv5 series algorithm is trained to select a suitable basic framework. The YOLOv5s is identified as the basic framework for the light-weighted crack detection model through experiments for comparison and validation.By replacing the traditional DarkNet backbone network of YOLOv5s with GhostNet backbone network, introducing Transformer multi-headed self-attention mechanism and bi-directional feature pyramid network (BiFPN) to replace the commonly used feature pyramid network, the improved model not only has 42% fewer parameters and faster inference response, but also significantly outperforms the original model in terms of accuracy and mAP (8.5% and 1.1% improvement, respectively). Luckily each improved part has a positive impact on the result. This paper provides a feasible idea to establish a digital operation management system in the field of highway and bridge in the future and to implement the whole life cycle structure health monitoring of civil infrastructure in China.
Federating and querying heterogeneous and distributed Web APIs and triple stores
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2022
Year: 2022

Today's international corporations such as BASF, a leading company in the crop protection industry, produce and consume more and more data that are often fragmented and accessible through Web APIs. In addition, part of the proprietary and public data of BASF's interest are stored in triple stores and accessible with the SPARQL query language. Homogenizing the data access modes and the underlying semantics of the data without modifying or replicating the original data sources become important requirements to achieve data integration and interoperability. In this work, we propose a federated data integration architecture within an industrial setup, that relies on an ontology-based data access method. Our performance evaluation in terms of query response time showed that most queries can be answered in under 1 second.
PROMISSING: Pruning Missing Values in Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

While data are the primary fuel for machine learning models, they often suffer from missing values, especially when collected in real-world scenarios. However, many off-the-shelf machine learning models, including artificial neural network models, are unable to handle these missing values directly. Therefore, extra data preprocessing and curation steps, such as data imputation, are inevitable before learning and prediction processes. In this study, we propose a simple and intuitive yet effective method for pruning missing values (PROMISSING) during learning and inference steps in neural networks. In this method, there is no need to remove or impute the missing values; instead, the missing values are treated as a new source of information (representing what we do not know). Our experiments on simulated data, several classification and regression benchmarks, and a multi-modal clinical dataset show that PROMISSING results in similar prediction performance compared to various imputation techniques. In addition, our experiments show models trained using PROMISSING techniques are becoming less decisive in their predictions when facing incomplete samples with many unknowns. This finding hopefully advances machine learning models from being pure predicting machines to more realistic thinkers that can also say "I do not know" when facing incomplete sources of information.
Style-Content Disentanglement in Language-Image Pretraining Representations for Zero-Shot Sketch-to-Image Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

In this work, we propose and validate a framework to leverage language-image pretraining representations for training-free zero-shot sketch-to-image synthesis. We show that disentangled content and style representations can be utilized to guide image generators to employ them as sketch-to-image generators without (re-)training any parameters. Our approach for disentangling style and content entails a simple method consisting of elementary arithmetic assuming compositionality of information in representations of input sketches. Our results demonstrate that this approach is competitive with state-of-the-art instance-level open-domain sketch-to-image models, while only depending on pretrained off-the-shelf models and a fraction of the data.
Measuring Gender Bias in Word Embeddings of Gendered Languages Requires Disentangling Grammatical Gender Signals
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

Does the grammatical gender of a language interfere when measuring the semantic gender information captured by its word embeddings? A number of anomalous gender bias measurements in the embeddings of gendered languages suggest this possibility. We demonstrate that word embeddings learn the association between a noun and its grammatical gender in grammatically gendered languages, which can skew social gender bias measurements. Consequently, word embedding post-processing methods are introduced to quantify, disentangle, and evaluate grammatical gender signals. The evaluation is performed on five gendered languages from the Germanic, Romance, and Slavic branches of the Indo-European language family. Our method reduces the strength of grammatical gender signals, which is measured in terms of effect size (Cohen's d), by a significant average of d = 1.3 for French, German, and Italian, and d = 0.56 for Polish and Spanish. Once grammatical gender is disentangled, the association between over 90% of 10,000 inanimate nouns and their assigned grammatical gender weakens, and cross-lingual bias results from the Word Embedding Association Test (WEAT) become more congruent with country-level implicit bias measurements. The results further suggest that disentangling grammatical gender signals from word embeddings may lead to improvement in semantic machine learning tasks.
Deep Learning Prediction of Severe Health Risks for Pediatric COVID-19 Patients with a Large Feature Set in 2021 BARDA Data Challenge
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Most children infected with COVID-19 have no or mild symptoms and can recover automatically by themselves, but some pediatric COVID-19 patients need to be hospitalized or even to receive intensive medical care (e.g., invasive mechanical ventilation or cardiovascular support) to recover from the illnesses. Therefore, it is critical to predict the severe health risk that COVID-19 infection poses to children to provide precise and timely medical care for vulnerable pediatric COVID-19 patients. However, predicting the severe health risk for COVID-19 patients including children remains a significant challenge because many underlying medical factors affecting the risk are still largely unknown. In this work, instead of searching for a small number of most useful features to make prediction, we design a novel large-scale bag-of-words like method to represent various medical conditions and measurements of COVID-19 patients. After some simple feature filtering based on logistical regression, the large set of features is used with a deep learning method to predict both the hospitalization risk for COVID-19 infected children and the severe complication risk for the hospitalized pediatric COVID-19 patients. The method was trained and tested the datasets of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) Pediatric COVID-19 Data Challenge held from Sept. 15 to Dec. 17, 2021. The results show that the approach can rather accurately predict the risk of hospitalization and severe complication for pediatric COVID-19 patients and deep learning is more accurate than other machine learning methods.
A Learning-Based Method for Automatic Operator Selection in the Fanoos XAI System
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

We describe an extension of the Fanoos XAI system [Bayani et al 2022] which enables the system to learn the appropriate action to take in order to satisfy a user's request for description to be made more or less abstract. Specifically, descriptions of systems under analysis are stored in states, and in order to make a description more or less abstract, Fanoos selects an operator from a large library to apply to the state and generate a new description. Prior work on Fanoos predominately used hand-written methods for operator-selection; this current work allows Fanoos to leverage experience to learn the best operator to apply in a particular situation, balancing exploration and exploitation, leveraging expert insights when available, and utilizing similarity between the current state and past states. Additionally, in order to bootstrap the learning process (i.e., like in curriculum learning), we describe a simulated user which we implemented; this simulation allows Fanoos to gain general insights that enable reasonable courses of action, insights which later can be refined by experience with real users, as opposed to interacting with humans completely from scratch. Code implementing the methods described in the paper can be found at https://github/DBay-ani/Operator_Selection_Learning_Extensions_For_Fanoos.
Adversarial RAW: Image-Scaling Attack Against Imaging Pipeline
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Deep learning technologies have become the backbone for the development of computer vision. With further explorations, deep neural networks have been found vulnerable to well-designed adversarial attacks. Most of the vision devices are equipped with image signal processing (ISP) pipeline to implement RAW-to-RGB transformations and embedded into data preprocessing module for efficient image processing. Actually, ISP pipeline can introduce adversarial behaviors to post-capture images while data preprocessing may destroy attack patterns. However, none of the existing adversarial attacks takes into account the impacts of both ISP pipeline and data preprocessing. In this paper, we develop an image-scaling attack targeting on ISP pipeline, where the crafted adversarial RAW can be transformed into attack image that presents entirely different appearance once being scaled to a specific-size image. We first consider the gradient-available ISP pipeline, i.e., the gradient information can be directly used in the generation process of adversarial RAW to launch the attack. To make the adversarial attack more applicable, we further consider the gradient-unavailable ISP pipeline, in which a proxy model that well learns the RAW-to-RGB transformations is proposed as the gradient oracles. Extensive experiments show that the proposed adversarial attacks can craft adversarial RAW data against the target ISP pipelines with high attack rates.
Seamless Interaction Design with Coexistence and Cooperation Modes for Robust Human-Robot Collaboration
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

A robot needs multiple interaction modes to robustly collaborate with a human in complicated industrial tasks. We develop a Coexistence-and-Cooperation (CoCo) human-robot collaboration system. Coexistence mode enables the robot to work with the human on different sub-tasks independently in a shared space. Cooperation mode enables the robot to follow human guidance and recover failures. A human intention tracking algorithm takes in both human and robot motion measurements as input and provides a switch on the interaction modes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CoCo system in a use case analogous to a real world multi-step assembly task.
Onesweep: A Faster Least Significant Digit Radix Sort for GPUs
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

We present Onesweep, a least-significant digit (LSD) radix sorting algorithm for large GPU sorting problems residing in global memory. Our parallel algorithm employs a method of single-pass prefix sum that only requires ~2n global read/write operations for each digit-binning iteration. This exhibits a significant reduction in last-level memory traffic versus contemporary GPU radix sorting implementations, where each iteration of digit binning requires two passes through the dataset totaling ~3n global memory operations. On the NVIDIA A100 GPU, our approach achieves 29.4 GKey/s when sorting 256M random 32-bit keys. Compared to CUB, the current state-of-the-art GPU LSD radix sort, our approach provides a speedup of ~1.5x. For 32-bit keys with varied distributions, our approach provides more consistent performance compared to HRS, the current state-of-the-art GPU MSD radix sort, and outperforms it in almost all cases.
HDDL 2.1: Towards Defining an HTN Formalism with Time
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

Real world applications of planning, like in industry and robotics, require modelling rich and diverse scenarios. Their resolution usually requires coordinated and concurrent action executions. In several cases, such planning problems are naturally decomposed in a hierarchical way and expressed by a Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) formalism. The PDDL language used to specify planning domains has evolved to cover the different planning paradigms. However, formulating real and complex scenarios where numerical and temporal constraints concur in defining a solution is still a challenge. Our proposition aims at filling the gap between existing planning languages and operational needs. To do so, we propose to extend HDDL taking inspiration from PDDL 2.1 and ANML to express temporal and numerical expressions. This paper opens discussions on the semantics and the syntax needed to extend HDDL, and illustrate these needs with the modelling of an Earth Observing Satellite planning problem.
Relevance in Dialogue: Is Less More? An Empirical Comparison of Existing Metrics, and a Novel Simple Metric
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

In this work, we evaluate various existing dialogue relevance metrics, find strong dependency on the dataset, often with poor correlation with human scores of relevance, and propose modifications to reduce data requirements and domain sensitivity while improving correlation. Our proposed metric achieves state-of-the-art performance on the HUMOD dataset while reducing measured sensitivity to dataset by 37%-66%. We achieve this without fine-tuning a pretrained language model, and using only 3,750 unannotated human dialogues and a single negative example. Despite these limitations, we demonstrate competitive performance on four datasets from different domains. Our code, including our metric and experiments, is open sourced.
Extreme Compression for Pre-trained Transformers Made Simple and Efficient
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Extreme compression, particularly ultra-low bit precision (binary/ternary) quantization, has been proposed to fit large NLP models on resource-constraint devices. However, to preserve the accuracy for such aggressive compression schemes, cutting-edge methods usually introduce complicated compression pipelines, e.g., multi-stage expensive knowledge distillation with extensive hyperparameter tuning. Also, they oftentimes focus less on smaller transformer models that have already been heavily compressed via knowledge distillation and lack a systematic study to show the effectiveness of their methods. In this paper, we perform a very comprehensive systematic study to measure the impact of many key hyperparameters and training strategies from previous works. As a result, we find out that previous baselines for ultra-low bit precision quantization are significantly under-trained. Based on our study, we propose a simple yet effective compression pipeline for extreme compression, named XTC. XTC demonstrates that (1) we can skip the pre-training knowledge distillation to obtain a 5-layer BERT while achieving better performance than previous state-of-the-art methods, e.g., the 6-layer TinyBERT; (2) extreme quantization plus layer reduction is able to reduce the model size by 50x, resulting in new state-of-the-art results on GLUE tasks.
Receding Horizon Navigation and Target Tracking for Aerial Detection of Transient Radioactivity
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

The paper presents a receding horizon planning and control strategy for quadrotor-type \ac{mav}s to navigate reactively and intercept a moving target in a cluttered unknown and dynamic environment. Leveraging a lightweight short-range sensor that generates a point-cloud within a relatively narrow and short \ac{fov}, and an \acs{ssd}-MobileNet based Deep neural network running on board the \ac{mav}, the proposed motion planning and control strategy produces safe and dynamically feasible \ac{mav} trajectories within the sensor \acs{fov}, which the vehicle uses to autonomously navigate, pursue, and intercept its moving target. This task is completed without reliance on a global planner or prior information about the environment or the moving target. The effectiveness of the reported planner is demonstrated numerically and experimentally in cluttered indoor and outdoor environments featuring maximum speeds of up to 4.5-5~m/s.
Saliency Attack: Towards Imperceptible Black-box Adversarial Attack
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples, even in the black-box setting where the attacker is only accessible to the model output. Recent studies have devised effective black-box attacks with high query efficiency. However, such performance is often accompanied by compromises in attack imperceptibility, hindering the practical use of these approaches. In this paper, we propose to restrict the perturbations to a small salient region to generate adversarial examples that can hardly be perceived. This approach is readily compatible with many existing black-box attacks and can significantly improve their imperceptibility with little degradation in attack success rate. Further, we propose the Saliency Attack, a new black-box attack aiming to refine the perturbations in the salient region to achieve even better imperceptibility. Extensive experiments show that compared to the state-of-the-art black-box attacks, our approach achieves much better imperceptibility scores, including most apparent distortion (MAD), $L_0$ and $L_2$ distances, and also obtains significantly higher success rates judged by a human-like threshold on MAD. Importantly, the perturbations generated by our approach are interpretable to some extent. Finally, it is also demonstrated to be robust to different detection-based defenses.
Achievement of Objectives of Library Information Management: Result of Right Structuring of Library Network System
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2022
Year: 2022

The world is transforming through a revolution and development in the progression of information and its broadcasting. The number of research journals, books and reports being published the world over has been increasing phenomenally. Currently, about five lakh books, one lakh periodicals, lakhs of patents, thousands of standards and numerous other types of documents are being published every year. The hypothesis was tested using SPSS to obtain covariances by going to Analyze Correlate Bivariate, A Likert type scale was prepared and used to capture the feedback using the feedback survey Total 90 library staff were asked to complete this survey through questionnaires.
Quantifying and Using System Uncertainty in UAV Navigation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

As autonomous systems increasingly rely on Deep Neural Networks (DNN) to implement the navigation pipeline functions, uncertainty estimation methods have become paramount for estimating confidence in DNN predictions. Bayesian Deep Learning (BDL) offers a principled approach to model uncertainties in DNNs. However, DNN components from autonomous systems partially capture uncertainty, or more importantly, the uncertainty effect in downstream tasks is ignored. This paper provides a method to capture the overall system uncertainty in a UAV navigation task. In particular, we study the effect of the uncertainty from perception representations in downstream control predictions. Moreover, we leverage the uncertainty in the system's output to improve control decisions that positively impact the UAV's performance on its task.
Inbetween: Visual Selection in Parametric Design
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

The act of selection plays a leading role in the design process and in the definition of personal style. This work introduces visual selection catalogs into parametric design environments. A two-fold contribution is presented: (i) guidelines for construction of a minimal-bias visual selection catalog from a parametric space, and (ii) Inbetween, a catalog for a parametric typeface that adheres to the guidelines, allows for font selection from a continuous design space, and enables the investigation of personal style. A user study conducted among graphic designers, revealed self-coherent characteristics in selection patterns, and a high correlation in selection patterns within tasks. These findings suggest that such patterns reflect personal user styles, formalizing the style selection process as traversals of decision trees. Together, our guidelines and catalog aid in making visual selection a key building block in the digital creation process and validate selection processes as a measure of personal style.