OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Towards Meta-Algorithm Selection
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Instance-specific algorithm selection (AS) deals with the automatic selection of an algorithm from a fixed set of candidates most suitable for a specific instance of an algorithmic problem class, where "suitability" often refers to an algorithm's runtime. Over the past years, a plethora of algorithm selectors have been proposed. As an algorithm selector is again an algorithm solving a specific problem, the idea of algorithm selection could also be applied to AS algorithms, leading to a meta-AS approach: Given an instance, the goal is to select an algorithm selector, which is then used to select the actual algorithm for solving the problem instance. We elaborate on consequences of applying AS on a meta-level and identify possible problems. Empirically, we show that meta-algorithm-selection can indeed prove beneficial in some cases. In general, however, successful AS approaches have problems with solving the meta-level problem.
Recurrence in Dense-time AMS Assertions
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2020
Year: 2020

The notion of recurrence over continuous or dense time, as required for expressing Analog and Mixed-Signal (AMS) behaviours, is fundamentally different from what is offered by the recurrence operators of SystemVerilog Assertions (SVA). This article introduces the formal semantics of recurrence over dense time and provides a methodology for the runtime verification of such properties using interval arithmetic. Our property language extends SVA with dense real-time intervals and predicates containing real-valued signals. We provide a tool kit which interfaces with off-the-shelf EDA tools through standard VPI.
Circus ANYmal: A Quadruped Learning Dexterous Manipulation with Its Limbs
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Quadrupedal robots are skillful at locomotion tasks while lacking manipulation skills, not to mention dexterous manipulation abilities. Inspired by the animal behavior and the duality between multi-legged locomotion and multi-fingered manipulation, we showcase a circus ball challenge on a quadrupedal robot, ANYmal. We employ a model-free reinforcement learning approach to train a deep policy that enables the robot to balance and manipulate a light-weight ball robustly using its limbs without any contact measurement sensor. The policy is trained in the simulation, in which we randomize many physical properties with additive noise and inject random disturbance force during manipulation, and achieves zero-shot deployment on the real robot without any adjustment. In the hardware experiments, dynamic performance is achieved with a maximum rotation speed of 15 deg/s, and robust recovery is showcased under external poking. To our best knowledge, it is the first work that demonstrates the dexterous dynamic manipulation on a real quadrupedal robot.
Avoiding Tampering Incentives in Deep RL via Decoupled Approval
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

How can we design agents that pursue a given objective when all feedback mechanisms are influenceable by the agent? Standard RL algorithms assume a secure reward function, and can thus perform poorly in settings where agents can tamper with the reward-generating mechanism. We present a principled solution to the problem of learning from influenceable feedback, which combines approval with a decoupled feedback collection procedure. For a natural class of corruption functions, decoupled approval algorithms have aligned incentives both at convergence and for their local updates. Empirically, they also scale to complex 3D environments where tampering is possible.
Exploring Neural Entity Representations for Semantic Information
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Neural methods for embedding entities are typically extrinsically evaluated on downstream tasks and, more recently, intrinsically using probing tasks. Downstream task-based comparisons are often difficult to interpret due to differences in task structure, while probing task evaluations often look at only a few attributes and models. We address both of these issues by evaluating a diverse set of eight neural entity embedding methods on a set of simple probing tasks, demonstrating which methods are able to remember words used to describe entities, learn type, relationship and factual information, and identify how frequently an entity is mentioned. We also compare these methods in a unified framework on two entity linking tasks and discuss how they generalize to different model architectures and datasets.
Contrastive Weight Regularization for Large Minibatch SGD
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

The minibatch stochastic gradient descent method (SGD) is widely applied in deep learning due to its efficiency and scalability that enable training deep networks with a large volume of data. Particularly in the distributed setting, SGD is usually applied with large batch size. However, as opposed to small-batch SGD, neural network models trained with large-batch SGD can hardly generalize well, i.e., the validation accuracy is low. In this work, we introduce a novel regularization technique, namely distinctive regularization (DReg), which replicates a certain layer of the deep network and encourages the parameters of both layers to be diverse. The DReg technique introduces very little computation overhead. Moreover, we empirically show that optimizing the neural network with DReg using large-batch SGD achieves a significant boost in the convergence and improved generalization performance. We also demonstrate that DReg can boost the convergence of large-batch SGD with momentum. We believe that DReg can be used as a simple regularization trick to accelerate large-batch training in deep learning.
A Novel RIS-Assisted Modulation Scheme
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

In this work, in order to achieve higher spectrum efficiency, we propose a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted multi-user communication uplink system. Different from previous work in which the RIS only optimizes the phase of the incident users's signal, we propose the use of the RIS to create a virtual constellation diagram to transmit the data of an additional user signal. We focus on the two-user case and develop a tight approximation for the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the received signal-to-noise ratio of both users. Then, based on the proposed statistical distribution, we derive the analytical expressions of the average bit error rate of the considered two users. The paper shows the trade off between the performance of the two users against each other as a function of the proposed phase shift at the RIS.
ADCPNet: Adaptive Disparity Candidates Prediction Network for Efficient Real-Time Stereo Matching
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Efficient real-time disparity estimation is critical for the application of stereo vision systems in various areas. Recently, stereo network based on coarse-to-fine method has largely relieved the memory constraints and speed limitations of large-scale network models. Nevertheless, all of the previous coarse-to-fine designs employ constant offsets and three or more stages to progressively refine the coarse disparity map, still resulting in unsatisfactory computation accuracy and inference time when deployed on mobile devices. This paper claims that the coarse matching errors can be corrected efficiently with fewer stages as long as more accurate disparity candidates can be provided. Therefore, we propose a dynamic offset prediction module to meet different correction requirements of diverse objects and design an efficient two-stage framework. Besides, we propose a disparity-independent convolution to further improve the performance since it is more consistent with the local statistical characteristics of the compact cost volume. The evaluation results on multiple datasets and platforms clearly demonstrate that, the proposed network outperforms the state-of-the-art lightweight models especially for mobile devices in terms of accuracy and speed. Code will be made available.
Domain Concretization from Examples: Addressing Missing Domain Knowledge via Robust Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

The assumption of complete domain knowledge is not warranted for robot planning and decision-making in the real world. It could be due to design flaws or arise from domain ramifications or qualifications. In such cases, existing planning and learning algorithms could produce highly undesirable behaviors. This problem is more challenging than partial observability in the sense that the agent is unaware of certain knowledge, in contrast to it being partially observable: the difference between known unknowns and unknown unknowns. In this work, we formulate it as the problem of Domain Concretization, an inverse problem to domain abstraction. Based on an incomplete domain model provided by the designer and teacher traces from human users, our algorithm searches for a candidate model set under a minimalistic model assumption. It then generates a robust plan with the maximum probability of success under the set of candidate models. In addition to a standard search formulation in the model-space, we propose a sample-based search method and also an online version of it to improve search time. We tested our approach on IPC domains and a simulated robotics domain where incompleteness was introduced by removing domain features from the complete model. Results show that our planning algorithm increases the plan success rate without impacting the cost much.
Vision-Based Shape Reconstruction of Soft Continuum Arms Using a Geometric Strain Parametrization
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Interest in soft continuum arms has increased as their inherent material elasticity enables safe and adaptive interactions with the environment. However to achieve full autonomy in these arms, accurate three-dimensional shape sensing is needed. Vision-based solutions have been found to be effective in estimating the shape of soft continuum arms. In this paper, a vision-based shape estimator that utilizes a geometric strain based representation for the soft continuum arm's shape, is proposed. This representation reduces the dimension of the curved shape to a finite set of strain basis functions, thereby allowing for efficient optimization for the shape that best fits the observed image. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in estimating the end effector with accuracy less than the soft arm's radius. Multiple basis functions are also analyzed and compared for the specific soft continuum arm in use.
Adversarial Profiles: Detecting Out-Distribution & Adversarial Samples in Pre-trained CNNs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Despite high accuracy of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), they are vulnerable to adversarial and out-distribution examples. There are many proposed methods that tend to detect or make CNNs robust against these fooling examples. However, most such methods need access to a wide range of fooling examples to retrain the network or to tune detection parameters. Here, we propose a method to detect adversarial and out-distribution examples against a pre-trained CNN without needing to retrain the CNN or needing access to a wide variety of fooling examples. To this end, we create adversarial profiles for each class using only one adversarial attack generation technique. We then wrap a detector around the pre-trained CNN that applies the created adversarial profile to each input and uses the output to decide whether or not the input is legitimate. Our initial evaluation of this approach using MNIST dataset show that adversarial profile based detection is effective in detecting at least 92 of out-distribution examples and 59% of adversarial examples.
TJU-DHD: A Diverse High-Resolution Dataset for Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Vehicles, pedestrians, and riders are the most important and interesting objects for the perception modules of self-driving vehicles and video surveillance. However, the state-of-the-art performance of detecting such important objects (esp. small objects) is far from satisfying the demand of practical systems. Large-scale, rich-diversity, and high-resolution datasets play an important role in developing better object detection methods to satisfy the demand. Existing public large-scale datasets such as MS COCO collected from websites do not focus on the specific scenarios. Moreover, the popular datasets (e.g., KITTI and Citypersons) collected from the specific scenarios are limited in the number of images and instances, the resolution, and the diversity. To attempt to solve the problem, we build a diverse high-resolution dataset (called TJU-DHD). The dataset contains 115,354 high-resolution images (52% images have a resolution of 1624$\times$1200 pixels and 48% images have a resolution of at least 2,560$\times$1,440 pixels) and 709,330 labeled objects in total with a large variance in scale and appearance. Meanwhile, the dataset has a rich diversity in season variance, illumination variance, and weather variance. In addition, a new diverse pedestrian dataset is further built. With the four different detectors (i.e., the one-stage RetinaNet, anchor-free FCOS, two-stage FPN, and Cascade R-CNN), experiments about object detection and pedestrian detection are conducted. We hope that the newly built dataset can help promote the research on object detection and pedestrian detection in these two scenes. The dataset is available at https://github.com/tjubiit/TJU-DHD.
Query Expressibility and Verification in Ontology-Based Data Access
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2020
Year: 2020

In ontology-based data access, multiple data sources are integrated using an ontology and mappings. In practice, this is often achieved by a bootstrapping process, that is, the ontology and mappings are first designed to support only the most important queries over the sources and then gradually extended to enable additional queries. In this paper, we study two reasoning problems that support such an approach. The expressibility problem asks whether a given source query $q_s$ is expressible as a target query (that is, over the ontology's vocabulary) and the verification problem asks, additionally given a candidate target query $q_t$, whether $q_t$ expresses $q_s$. We consider (U)CQs as source and target queries and GAV mappings, showing that both problems are $Π^p_2$-complete in DL-Lite, coNExpTime-complete between EL and ELHI when source queries are rooted, and 2ExpTime-complete for unrestricted source queries.
Prognostic and Health Management (PHM) tool for Robot Operating System (ROS)
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Nowadays, prognostics-aware systems are increasingly used in many systems and it is critical for sustaining autonomy. All engineering systems, especially robots, are not perfect. Absence of failures in a certain time is the perfect system and it is impossible practically. In all engineering works, we must try to predict or minimize/prevent failures in the system. Failures in the systems are generally unknown, so prediction of these failures and reliability of the system is made by prediction process. Reliability analysis is important for the improving the system performance, extending system lifetime, etc. Prognostic and Health Management (PHM) includes reliability, safety, predictive fault detection / isolation, advanced diagnostics / prognostics, component lifecycle tracking, health reporting and information management, etc. This study proposes an open source robot prognostic and health management tool using model-based methodology namely "Prognostics and Health Management tool for ROS". This tool is a generic tool for using with any kind of robot (mobile robot, robot arm, drone etc.) with compatible with ROS. Some features of this tool are managing / monitoring robots' health, RUL, probability of task completion (PoTC) etc. User is able to enter the necessary equations and components information (hazard rates, robot configuration etc.) to the PHM tool and the other sensory data like temperature, humidity, pressure, load etc. In addition to these, a case study is conducted for the mobile robots (OTA) using this tool.
First-Order Rewritability of Frontier-Guarded Ontology-Mediated Queries
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2020
Year: 2020

We focus on ontology-mediated queries (OMQs) based on (frontier-)guarded existential rules and (unions of) conjunctive queries, and we investigate the problem of FO-rewritability, i.e., whether an OMQ can be rewritten as a first-order query. We adopt two different approaches. The first approach employs standard two-way alternating parity tree automata. Although it does not lead to a tight complexity bound, it provides a transparent solution based on widely known tools. The second approach relies on a sophisticated automata model, known as cost automata. This allows us to show that our problem is 2ExpTime-complete. In both approaches, we provide semantic characterizations of FO-rewritability that are of independent interest.
High-Throughput and Memory-Efficient Parallel Viterbi Decoder for Convolutional Codes on GPU
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

This paper describes a parallel implementation of Viterbi decoding algorithm. Viterbi decoder is widely used in many state-of-the-art wireless systems. The proposed solution optimizes both throughput and memory usage by applying optimizations such as unified kernel implementation and parallel traceback. Experimental evaluations show that the proposed solution achieves higher throughput compared to previous GPU-accelerated solutions.
Diverse Plausible Shape Completions from Ambiguous Depth Images
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

We propose PSSNet, a network architecture for generating diverse plausible 3D reconstructions from a single 2.5D depth image. Existing methods tend to produce only small variations on a single shape, even when multiple shapes are consistent with an observation. To obtain diversity we alter a Variational Auto Encoder by providing a learned shape bounding box feature as side information during training. Since these features are known during training, we are able to add a supervised loss to the encoder and noiseless values to the decoder. To evaluate, we sample a set of completions from a network, construct a set of plausible shape matches for each test observation, and compare using our plausible diversity metric defined over sets of shapes. We perform experiments using Shapenet mugs and partially-occluded YCB objects and find that our method performs comparably in datasets with little ambiguity, and outperforms existing methods when many shapes plausibly fit an observed depth image. We demonstrate one use for PSSNet on a physical robot when grasping objects in occlusion and clutter.
A framework for the fine-grained evaluation of the instantaneous expected value of soccer possessions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

The expected possession value (EPV) of a soccer possession represents the likelihood of a team scoring or receiving the next goal at any time instance. By decomposing the EPV into a series of subcomponents that are estimated separately, we develop a comprehensive analysis framework providing soccer practitioners with the ability to evaluate the impact of both observed and potential actions. We show we can obtain calibrated models for all the components of EPV, including a set of yet-unexplored problems in soccer. We produce visually-interpretable probability surfaces for potential passes from a series of deep neural network architectures that learn from low-level spatiotemporal data. Additionally, we present a series of novel practical applications providing coaches with an enriched interpretation of specific game situations.
Investigation of Warrior Robots Behavior by Using Evolutionary Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

In this study, we review robots behavior especially warrior robots by using evolutionary algorithms. This kind of algorithms is inspired by nature that causes robots behaviors get resemble to collective behavior. Collective behavior of creatures such as bees was shown that do some functions which depended on interaction and cooperation would need to a well-organized system so that all creatures within it carry out their duty, very well. For robots which do not have any intelligence, we can define an algorithm and show the results by a simple simulation.
Redistricting Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2020
Year: 2020

Why not have a computer just draw a map? This is something you hear a lot when people talk about gerrymandering, and it's easy to think at first that this could solve redistricting altogether. But there are more than a couple problems with this idea. In this chapter, two computer scientists survey what's been done in algorithmic redistricting, discuss what doesn't work and highlight approaches that show promise. This preprint was prepared as a chapter in the forthcoming edited volume Political Geometry, an interdisciplinary collection of essays on redistricting. (https://mggg.org/gerrybook)
Contextual Fusion For Adversarial Robustness
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Mammalian brains handle complex reasoning tasks in a gestalt manner by integrating information from regions of the brain that are specialised to individual sensory modalities. This allows for improved robustness and better generalisation ability. In contrast, deep neural networks are usually designed to process one particular information stream and susceptible to various types of adversarial perturbations. While many methods exist for detecting and defending against adversarial attacks, they do not generalise across a range of attacks and negatively affect performance on clean, unperturbed data. We developed a fusion model using a combination of background and foreground features extracted in parallel from Places-CNN and Imagenet-CNN. We tested the benefits of the fusion approach on preserving adversarial robustness for human perceivable (e.g., Gaussian blur) and network perceivable (e.g., gradient-based) attacks for CIFAR-10 and MS COCO data sets. For gradient based attacks, our results show that fusion allows for significant improvements in classification without decreasing performance on unperturbed data and without need to perform adversarial retraining. Our fused model revealed improvements for Gaussian blur type perturbations as well. The increase in performance from fusion approach depended on the variability of the image contexts; larger increases were seen for classes of images with larger differences in their contexts. We also demonstrate the effect of regularization to bias the classifier decision in the presence of a known adversary. We propose that this biologically inspired approach to integrate information across multiple modalities provides a new way to improve adversarial robustness that can be complementary to current state of the art approaches.