OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
AV-Gaze: A Study on the Effectiveness of Audio Guided Visual Attention Estimation for Non-Profilic Faces
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

In challenging real-life conditions such as extreme head-pose, occlusions, and low-resolution images where the visual information fails to estimate visual attention/gaze direction, audio signals could provide important and complementary information. In this paper, we explore if audio-guided coarse head-pose can further enhance visual attention estimation performance for non-prolific faces. Since it is difficult to annotate audio signals for estimating the head-pose of the speaker, we use off-the-shelf state-of-the-art models to facilitate cross-modal weak-supervision. During the training phase, the framework learns complementary information from synchronized audio-visual modality. Our model can utilize any of the available modalities i.e. audio, visual or audio-visual for task-specific inference. It is interesting to note that, when AV-Gaze is tested on benchmark datasets with these specific modalities, it achieves competitive results on multiple datasets, while being highly adaptive toward challenging scenarios.
Active Learning and Multi-label Classification for Ellipsis and Coreference Detection in Conversational Question-Answering
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

In human conversations, ellipsis and coreference are commonly occurring linguistic phenomena. Although these phenomena are a mean of making human-machine conversations more fluent and natural, only few dialogue corpora contain explicit indications on which turns contain ellipses and/or coreferences. In this paper we address the task of automatically detecting ellipsis and coreferences in conversational question answering. We propose to use a multi-label classifier based on DistilBERT. Multi-label classification and active learning are employed to compensate the limited amount of labeled data. We show that these methods greatly enhance the performance of the classifier for detecting these phenomena on a manually labeled dataset.
AFFORCE: Actionable Framework for Designing Crowdsourcing Experiences for Older Adults
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

In this article we propose a unique framework for designing attractive and engaging crowdsourcing systems for older adults, which is called AFFORCE (Actionable Framework For Crowdsourcing Experiences). We first categorize and map mitigating factors and barriers to crowdsourcing for older adults to finally discuss, present and combine system elements addressing them into an actionable reference framework. This innovative framework is based on our experience with the design of crowdsourcing systems for older adults in exploratory cases and studies, related work, as well as our and related research at the intersection of older adults' use of ICT, crowdsourcing and citizen science.
Older Adults' Motivation and Engagement with Diverse Crowdsourcing Citizen Science Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

In this exploratory study we evaluated the engagement, performance and preferences of older adults who interacted with different citizen science tasks. Out of 40 projects recently active on the Zooniverse platform we selected top ones to be represented by 8 diverse, yet standardized, microtasks, 2 in each category of image, audio, text and pattern recognition. Next, 33 older adults performed these microtasks at home and evaluated each task right after its completion to, finally, share what could encourage them to engage with such tasks in their free time. Based on the results we draw preliminary conclusions regarding older adults' motivations for engaging with such crowdsourcing tasks and suggest some guidelines for task design while discussing interesting avenues for further inquiry in the area of crowdsourcing for older adults.
MCTS with Refinement for Proposals Selection Games in Scene Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

We propose a novel method applicable in many scene understanding problems that adapts the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm, originally designed to learn to play games of high-state complexity. From a generated pool of proposals, our method jointly selects and optimizes proposals that minimize the objective term. In our first application for floor plan reconstruction from point clouds, our method selects and refines the room proposals, modelled as 2D polygons, by optimizing on an objective function combining the fitness as predicted by a deep network and regularizing terms on the room shapes. We also introduce a novel differentiable method for rendering the polygonal shapes of these proposals. Our evaluations on the recent and challenging Structured3D and Floor-SP datasets show significant improvements over the state-of-the-art, without imposing hard constraints nor assumptions on the floor plan configurations. In our second application, we extend our approach to reconstruct general 3D room layouts from a color image and obtain accurate room layouts. We also show that our differentiable renderer can easily be extended for rendering 3D planar polygons and polygon embeddings. Our method shows high performance on the Matterport3D-Layout dataset, without introducing hard constraints on room layout configurations.
Towards Immediate Feedback for Security Relevant Code in Development Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

Nowadays, the correct use of cryptography libraries is essential to ensure the necessary information security in different kinds of applications. A common practice in software development is the use of static application security testing (SAST) tools to analyze code regarding security vulnerabilities. Most of these tools are designed to run separately from development environments. Their results are extensive lists of security notifications, which software developers have to inspect manually in a time-consuming follow-up step. To support developers in their tasks of developing secure code, we present an approach for providing them with continuous immediate feedback of SAST tools in integrated development environments (IDEs). Our approach also considers the understandability of security notifications and aims for a user-centered approach that leverages developers' feedback to build an adaptive system tailored to each individual developer.
Robust optimal well control using an adaptive multi-grid reinforcement learning framework
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising tool to solve robust optimal well control problems where the model parameters are highly uncertain, and the system is partially observable in practice. However, RL of robust control policies often relies on performing a large number of simulations. This could easily become computationally intractable for cases with computationally intensive simulations. To address this bottleneck, an adaptive multi-grid RL framework is introduced which is inspired by principles of geometric multi-grid methods used in iterative numerical algorithms. RL control policies are initially learned using computationally efficient low fidelity simulations using coarse grid discretization of the underlying partial differential equations (PDEs). Subsequently, the simulation fidelity is increased in an adaptive manner towards the highest fidelity simulation that correspond to finest discretization of the model domain. The proposed framework is demonstrated using a state-of-the-art, model-free policy-based RL algorithm, namely the Proximal Policy Optimisation (PPO) algorithm. Results are shown for two case studies of robust optimal well control problems which are inspired from SPE-10 model 2 benchmark case studies. Prominent gains in the computational efficiency is observed using the proposed framework saving around 60-70% of computational cost of its single fine-grid counterpart.
Wrapping Haptic Displays Around Robot Arms to Communicate Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Humans can leverage physical interaction to teach robot arms. As the human kinesthetically guides the robot through demonstrations, the robot learns the desired task. While prior works focus on how the robot learns, it is equally important for the human teacher to understand what their robot is learning. Visual displays can communicate this information; however, we hypothesize that visual feedback alone misses out on the physical connection between the human and robot. In this paper we introduce a novel class of soft haptic displays that wrap around the robot arm, adding signals without affecting that interaction. We first design a pneumatic actuation array that remains flexible in mounting. We then develop single and multi-dimensional versions of this wrapped haptic display, and explore human perception of the rendered signals during psychophysic tests and robot learning. We ultimately find that people accurately distinguish single-dimensional feedback with a Weber fraction of 11.4%, and identify multi-dimensional feedback with 94.5% accuracy. When physically teaching robot arms, humans leverage the single- and multi-dimensional feedback to provide better demonstrations than with visual feedback: our wrapped haptic display decreases teaching time while increasing demonstration quality. This improvement depends on the location and distribution of the wrapped haptic display. You can see videos of our device and experiments here: https://youtu.be/yPcMGeqsjdM
SC2EGSet: StarCraft II Esport Replay and Game-state Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

As a relatively new form of sport, esports offers unparalleled data availability. Despite the vast amounts of data that are generated by game engines, it can be challenging to extract them and verify their integrity for the purposes of practical and scientific use. Our work aims to open esports to a broader scientific community by supplying raw and pre-processed files from StarCraft II esports tournaments. These files can be used in statistical and machine learning modeling tasks and related to various laboratory-based measurements (e.g., behavioral tests, brain imaging). We have gathered publicly available game-engine generated "replays" of tournament matches and performed data extraction and cleanup using a low-level application programming interface (API) parser library. Additionally, we open-sourced and published all the custom tools that were developed in the process of creating our dataset. These tools include PyTorch and PyTorch Lightning API abstractions to load and model the data. Our dataset contains replays from major and premiere StarCraft II tournaments since 2016. To prepare the dataset, we processed 55 tournament "replaypacks" that contained 17930 files with game-state information. Based on initial investigation of available StarCraft II datasets, we observed that our dataset is the largest publicly available source of StarCraft II esports data upon its publication. Analysis of the extracted data holds promise for further Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), psychological, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and sports-related studies in a variety of supervised and self-supervised tasks.
Convolution Neural Network based Mode Decomposition for Degenerated Modes via Multiple Images from Polarizers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, a mode decomposition (MD) method for degenerated modes has been studied. Convolution neural network (CNN) has been applied for image training and predicting the mode coefficients. Four-fold degenerated $LP_{11}$ series has been the target to be decomposed. Multiple images are regarded as an input to decompose the degenerate modes. Total of seven different images, including the full original near-field image, and images after linear polarizers of four directions (0$^\circ$, 45$^\circ$, 90$^\circ$, and 135$^\circ$), and images after two circular polarizers (right-handed and left-handed) has been considered for training, validation, and test. The output label of the model has been chosen as the real and imaginary components of the mode coefficient, and the loss function has been selected to be the root-mean-square (RMS) of the labels. The RMS and mean-absolute-error (MAE) of the label, intensity, phase, and field correlation between the actual and predicted values have been selected to be the metrics to evaluate the CNN model. The CNN model has been trained with 100,000 three-dimensional images with depths of three, four, and seven. The performance of the trained model was evaluated via 10,000 test samples with four sets of images - images after three linear polarizers (0$^\circ$, 45$^\circ$, 90$^\circ$) and image after right-handed circular polarizer - showed 0.0634 of label RMS, 0.0292 of intensity RMS, 0.1867 rad of phase MAE, and 0.9978 of average field correlation. The performance of 4 image sets showed at least 50.68\% of performance enhancement compared to models considering only images after linear polarizers.
Mirror Complementary Transformer Network for RGB-thermal Salient Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

RGB-thermal salient object detection (RGB-T SOD) aims to locate the common prominent objects of an aligned visible and thermal infrared image pair and accurately segment all the pixels belonging to those objects. It is promising in challenging scenes such as nighttime and complex backgrounds due to the insensitivity to lighting conditions of thermal images. Thus, the key problem of RGB-T SOD is to make the features from the two modalities complement and adjust each other flexibly, since it is inevitable that any modalities of RGB-T image pairs failure due to challenging scenes such as extreme light conditions and thermal crossover. In this paper, we propose a novel mirror complementary Transformer network (MCNet) for RGB-T SOD. Specifically, we introduce a Transformer-based feature extraction module to effective extract hierarchical features of RGB and thermal images. Then, through the attention-based feature interaction and serial multiscale dilated convolution (SDC) based feature fusion modules, the proposed model achieves the complementary interaction of low-level features and the semantic fusion of deep features. Finally, based on the mirror complementary structure, the salient regions of the two modalities can be accurately extracted even one modality is invalid. To demonstrate the robustness of the proposed model under challenging scenes in real world, we build a novel RGB-T SOD dataset VT723 based on a large public semantic segmentation RGB-T dataset used in the autonomous driving domain. Expensive experiments on benchmark and VT723 datasets show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, including CNN-based and Transformer-based methods. The code and dataset will be released later at https://github.com/jxr326/SwinMCNet.
X-haul Outage Compensation in 5G/6G Using Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

5G network operators consider the dense deployment of small base-stations (SBSs) to increase network coverage and capacity. Hence, operators face the challenge of X-hauling, i.e., backhauling or fronthauling, their traffic to the core network. Also, SBSs densification will increase the possibility of failure of these X-haul links. To cope with this problem, an X-haul outage compensation scheme with the assistance of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) is proposed to mitigate or at least alleviate the effect of X-haul failure. The RIS is a newly adopted technology that is able to improve the performance of wireless networks. In this paper, we present and evaluate an X-haul outage compensation scheme based on placing a number of RIS panels in pre-planned locations to mitigate the effect of X-haul failure. This evaluation is done using frequencies below and beyond 6 GHz. Based on our analytical results, the proposed RIS scheme shows that placing a sufficient number of RIS elements in proximity to the failed SBS under certain conditions can help acquire the same X-haul rate before the occurrence of the failure. Also, we show that for high X-haul spectral density, the RIS-assisted transmission with a certain number of elements can be more energy-efficient than line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight transmissions. Finally, the system's energy efficiency is addressed with and without RIS, and the optimal number of RIS reflecting elements is derived.
Integrating Sensing, Computing, and Communication in 6G Wireless Networks: Design and Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

The roll-out of various emerging wireless services has triggered the need for the sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks to provide functions of target sensing, intelligent computing and information communication over the same radio spectrum. In this paper, we provide a unified framework integrating sensing, computing, and communication to optimize limited system resource for 6G wireless networks. In particular, two typical joint beamforming design algorithms are derived based on multi-objective optimization problems (MOOP) with the goals of the weighted overall performance maximization and the total transmit power minimization, respectively. Extensive simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. Moreover, the impacts of key system parameters are revealed to provide useful insights for the design of integrated sensing, computing, and communication (ISCC).
A Support Vector Model of Pruning Trees Evaluation Based on OTSU Algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

The tree pruning process is the key to promoting fruits' growth and improving their productions due to effects on the photosynthesis efficiency of fruits and nutrition transportation in branches. Currently, pruning is still highly dependent on human labor. The workers' experience will strongly affect the robustness of the performance of the tree pruning. Thus, it is a challenge for workers and farmers to evaluate the pruning performance. Intended for a better solution to the problem, this paper presents a novel pruning classification strategy model called "OTSU-SVM" to evaluate the pruning performance based on the shadows of branches and leaves. This model considers not only the available illuminated area of the tree but also the uniformity of the illuminated area of the tree. More importantly, our group implements OTSU algorithm into the model, which highly reinforces robustness of the evaluation of this model. In addition, the data from the pear trees in the Yuhang District, Hangzhou is also used in the experiment. In this experiment, we prove that the OTSU-SVM has good accuracy with 80% and high performance in the evaluation of the pruning for the pear trees. It can provide more successful pruning if applied into the orchard. A successful pruning can broaden the illuminated area of individual fruit, and increase nutrition transportation from the target branch, dramatically elevating the weights and production of the fruits.
SETSum: Summarization and Visualization of Student Evaluations of Teaching
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Student Evaluations of Teaching (SETs) are widely used in colleges and universities. Typically SET results are summarized for instructors in a static PDF report. The report often includes summary statistics for quantitative ratings and an unsorted list of open-ended student comments. The lack of organization and summarization of the raw comments hinders those interpreting the reports from fully utilizing informative feedback, making accurate inferences, and designing appropriate instructional improvements. In this work, we introduce a novel system, SETSum, that leverages sentiment analysis, aspect extraction, summarization, and visualization techniques to provide organized illustrations of SET findings to instructors and other reviewers. Ten university professors from diverse departments serve as evaluators of the system and all agree that SETSum helps them interpret SET results more efficiently; and 6 out of 10 instructors prefer our system over the standard static PDF report (while the remaining 4 would like to have both). This demonstrates that our work holds the potential to reform the SET reporting conventions in the future. Our code is available at https://github.com/evahuyn/SETSum
Deepfake Face Traceability with Disentangling Reversing Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Deepfake face not only violates the privacy of personal identity, but also confuses the public and causes huge social harm. The current deepfake detection only stays at the level of distinguishing true and false, and cannot trace the original genuine face corresponding to the fake face, that is, it does not have the ability to trace the source of evidence. The deepfake countermeasure technology for judicial forensics urgently calls for deepfake traceability. This paper pioneers an interesting question about face deepfake, active forensics that "know it and how it happened". Given that deepfake faces do not completely discard the features of original faces, especially facial expressions and poses, we argue that original faces can be approximately speculated from their deepfake counterparts. Correspondingly, we design a disentangling reversing network that decouples latent space features of deepfake faces under the supervision of fake-original face pair samples to infer original faces in reverse.
Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Fundus Image Segmentation with Category-level Regularization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Existing unsupervised domain adaptation methods based on adversarial learning have achieved good performance in several medical imaging tasks. However, these methods focus only on global distribution adaptation and ignore distribution constraints at the category level, which would lead to sub-optimal adaptation performance. This paper presents an unsupervised domain adaptation framework based on category-level regularization that regularizes the category distribution from three perspectives. Specifically, for inter-domain category regularization, an adaptive prototype alignment module is proposed to align feature prototypes of the same category in the source and target domains. In addition, for intra-domain category regularization, we tailored a regularization technique for the source and target domains, respectively. In the source domain, a prototype-guided discriminative loss is proposed to learn more discriminative feature representations by enforcing intra-class compactness and inter-class separability, and as a complement to traditional supervised loss. In the target domain, an augmented consistency category regularization loss is proposed to force the model to produce consistent predictions for augmented/unaugmented target images, which encourages semantically similar regions to be given the same label. Extensive experiments on two publicly fundus datasets show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art comparison algorithms.
Bounding Box Disparity: 3D Metrics for Object Detection With Full Degree of Freedom
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

The most popular evaluation metric for object detection in 2D images is Intersection over Union (IoU). Existing implementations of the IoU metric for 3D object detection usually neglect one or more degrees of freedom. In this paper, we first derive the analytic solution for three dimensional bounding boxes. As a second contribution, a closed-form solution of the volume-to-volume distance is derived. Finally, the Bounding Box Disparity is proposed as a combined positive continuous metric. We provide open source implementations of the three metrics as standalone python functions, as well as extensions to the Open3D library and as ROS nodes.