OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
The Evolution of Concept-Acquisition based on Developmental Psychology
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

A conceptual system with rich connotation is key to improving the performance of knowledge-based artificial intelligence systems. While a conceptual system, which has abundant concepts and rich semantic relationships, and is developable, evolvable, and adaptable to multi-task environments, its actual construction is not only one of the major challenges of knowledge engineering, but also the fundamental goal of research on knowledge and conceptualization. Finding a new method to represent concepts and construct a conceptual system will therefore greatly improve the performance of many intelligent systems. Fortunately the core of human cognition is a system with relatively complete concepts and a mechanism that ensures the establishment and development of the system. The human conceptual system can not be achieved immediately, but rather must develop gradually. Developmental psychology carefully observes the process of concept acquisition in humans at the behavioral level, and along with cognitive psychology has proposed some rough explanations of those observations. However, due to the lack of research in aspects such as representation, systematic models, algorithm details and realization, many of the results of developmental psychology have not been applied directly to the building of artificial conceptual systems. For example, Karmiloff-Smith's Representation Redescription (RR) supposition reflects a concept-acquisition process that re-describes a lower level representation of a concept to a higher one. This paper is inspired by this developmental psychology viewpoint. We use an object-oriented approach to re-explain and materialize RR supposition from the formal semantic perspective, because the OO paradigm is a natural way to describe the outside world, and it also has strict grammar regulations.
A Computational Approach to Historical Ontologies
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2020
Year: 2020

This paper presents a use case exploring the application of the Archival Resource Key (ARK) persistent identifier for promoting and maintaining ontologies. In particular, we look at improving computation with an in-house ontology server in the context of temporally aligned vocabularies. This effort demonstrates the utility of ARKs in preparing historical ontologies for computational archival science.
Better Knowledge Retention through Metric Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

In continual learning, new categories may be introduced over time, and an ideal learning system should perform well on both the original categories and the new categories. While deep neural nets have achieved resounding success in the classical supervised setting, they are known to forget about knowledge acquired in prior episodes of learning if the examples encountered in the current episode of learning are drastically different from those encountered in prior episodes. In this paper, we propose a new method that can both leverage the expressive power of deep neural nets and is resilient to forgetting when new categories are introduced. We found the proposed method can reduce forgetting by 2.3x to 6.9x on CIFAR-10 compared to existing methods and by 1.8x to 2.7x on ImageNet compared to an oracle baseline.
On the Composition of the Long Tail of Business Processes: Implications from a Process Mining Study
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2020
Year: 2020

Digital transformation forces companies to rethink their processes to meet current customer needs. Business Process Management (BPM) can provide the means to structure and tackle this change. However, most approaches to BPM face restrictions on the number of processes they can optimize at a time due to complexity and resource restrictions. Investigating this shortcoming, the concept of the long tail of business processes suggests a hybrid approach that entails managing important processes centrally, while incrementally improving the majority of processes at their place of execution. This study scrutinizes this observation as well as corresponding implications. First, we define a system of indicators to automatically prioritize processes based on execution data. Second, we use process mining to analyze processes from multiple companies to investigate the distribution of process value in terms of their process variants. Third, we examine the characteristics of the process variants contained in the short head and the long tail to derive and justify recommendations for their management. Our results suggest that the assumption of a long-tailed distribution holds across companies and indicators and also applies to the overall improvement potential of processes and their variants. Across all cases, process variants in the long tail were characterized by fewer customer contacts, lower execution frequencies, and a larger number of involved stakeholders, making them suitable candidates for distributed improvement.
MIMOS: A Deterministic Model for the Design and Update of Real-Time Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

Inspired by the pioneering work of Gilles Kahn on concurrent systems, we propose to model timed systems as a network of software components (implemented as real-time processes or tasks), each of which is specified to compute a collection of functions according to given timing constraints. We present a fixed-point semantics for this model which shows that each system function of such a network computes for a given set of (timed) input streams, a deterministic (timed) output stream. As a desired feature, such a network model can be modified by integrating new components for adding new system functions without changing the existing ones. Additionally, existing components may be replaced also by new ones fulfilling given requirements. Thanks to the deterministic semantics, a model-based approach is enabled for not only building systems but also updating them after deployment, allowing for efficient analysis techniques such as model-in-the-loop simulation to verify the complete behaviour of the updated system.
Contribution of Conceptual Modeling to Enhancing Historians' Intuition -Application to Prosopography
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

Historians, and in particular researchers in prosopography, focus a lot of effort on extracting and coding information from historical sources to build databases. To deal with this situation, they rely in some cases on their intuition. One important issue is to provide these researchers with the information extracted from the sources in a sufficiently structured form to allow the databases to be queried and to verify, and possibly, to validate hypotheses. The research in this paper attempts to take up the challenge of helping historians capturing and assessing information throughout automatic processes. The issue emerges when too many sources of uncertain information are available. Based on the high-level information fusion approach, we propose a process that automatically supports historians' intuition in the domain of prosopography. The contribution is threefold: a conceptual data model, a process model, and a set of rules combining the reliability of sources and the credibility of information.
FlexiRepair: Transparent Program Repair with Generic Patches
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2020
Year: 2020

Template-based program repair research is in need for a common ground to express fix patterns in a standard and reusable manner. We propose to build on the concept of generic patch (also known as semantic patch), which is widely used in the Linux community to automate code evolution. We advocate that generic patches could provide at the same time a unified representation and a specification for fix patterns. Generic patches are indeed formally defined, and there exists a robust, industry-adapted, and extensible engine that processes generic patches to perform control-flow code matching and automatically generates concretes patches based on the specified change operations. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a repair framework, FLEXIREPAIR, that explores generic patches as the core concept. In particular, we show how concretely generic patches can be inferred and applied in a pipeline of Automated Program Repair (APR). With FLEXIREPAIR, we address an urgent challenge in the template-based APR community to separate implementation details from actual scientific contributions by providing an open, transparent and flexible repair pipeline on top of which all advancements in terms of efficiency, efficacy and usability can be measured and assessed rigorously. Furthermore, because the underlying tools and concepts have already been accepted by a wide practitioner community, we expect FLEXIREPAIR's adoption by industry to be facilitated. Preliminary experiments with a prototype FLEXIREPAIR on the IntroClass and CodeFlaws benchmarks suggest that it already constitutes a solid baseline with comparable performance to some of the state of the art.
Predictive Collision Management for Time and Risk Dependent Path Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Autonomous agents such as self-driving cars or parcel robots need to recognize and avoid possible collisions with obstacles in order to move successfully in their environment. Humans, however, have learned to predict movements intuitively and to avoid obstacles in a forward-looking way. The task of collision avoidance can be divided into a global and a local level. Regarding the global level, we propose an approach called "Predictive Collision Management Path Planning" (PCMP). At the local level, solutions for collision avoidance are used that prevent an inevitable collision. Therefore, the aim of PCMP is to avoid unnecessary local collision scenarios using predictive collision management. PCMP is a graph-based algorithm with a focus on the time dimension consisting of three parts: (1) movement prediction, (2) integration of movement prediction into a time-dependent graph, and (3) time and risk-dependent path planning. The algorithm combines the search for a shortest path with the question: is the detour worth avoiding a possible collision scenario? We evaluate the evasion behavior in different simulation scenarios and the results show that a risk-sensitive agent can avoid 47.3% of the collision scenarios while making a detour of 1.3%. A risk-averse agent avoids up to 97.3% of the collision scenarios with a detour of 39.1%. Thus, an agent's evasive behavior can be controlled actively and risk-dependent using PCMP.
Overcoming Failures of Imagination in AI Infused System Development and Deployment
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

NeurIPS 2020 requested that research paper submissions include impact statements on "potential nefarious uses and the consequences of failure." However, as researchers, practitioners and system designers, a key challenge to anticipating risks is overcoming what Clarke (1962) called 'failures of imagination.' The growing research on bias, fairness, and transparency in computational systems aims to illuminate and mitigate harms, and could thus help inform reflections on possible negative impacts of particular pieces of technical work. The prevalent notion of computational harms -- narrowly construed as either allocational or representational harms -- does not fully capture the open, context dependent, and unobservable nature of harms across the wide range of AI infused systems.The current literature focuses on a small range of examples of harms to motivate algorithmic fixes, overlooking the wider scope of probable harms and the way these harms might affect different stakeholders. The system affordances may also exacerbate harms in unpredictable ways, as they determine stakeholders' control(including of non-users) over how they use and interact with a system output. To effectively assist in anticipating harmful uses, we argue that frameworks of harms must be context-aware and consider a wider range of potential stakeholders, system affordances, as well as viable proxies for assessing harms in the widest sense.
AutoNLU: An On-demand Cloud-based Natural Language Understanding System for Enterprises
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

With the renaissance of deep learning, neural networks have achieved promising results on many natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. Even though the source codes of many neural network models are publicly available, there is still a large gap from open-sourced models to solving real-world problems in enterprises. Therefore, to fill this gap, we introduce AutoNLU, an on-demand cloud-based system with an easy-to-use interface that covers all common use-cases and steps in developing an NLU model. AutoNLU has supported many product teams within Adobe with different use-cases and datasets, quickly delivering them working models. To demonstrate the effectiveness of AutoNLU, we present two case studies. i) We build a practical NLU model for handling various image-editing requests in Photoshop. ii) We build powerful keyphrase extraction models that achieve state-of-the-art results on two public benchmarks. In both cases, end users only need to write a small amount of code to convert their datasets into a common format used by AutoNLU.
Decoding and Diversity in Machine Translation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems are typically evaluated using automated metrics that assess the agreement between generated translations and ground truth candidates. To improve systems with respect to these metrics, NLP researchers employ a variety of heuristic techniques, including searching for the conditional mode (vs. sampling) and incorporating various training heuristics (e.g., label smoothing). While search strategies significantly improve BLEU score, they yield deterministic outputs that lack the diversity of human translations. Moreover, search tends to bias the distribution of translated gender pronouns. This makes human-level BLEU a misleading benchmark in that modern MT systems cannot approach human-level BLEU while simultaneously maintaining human-level translation diversity. In this paper, we characterize distributional differences between generated and real translations, examining the cost in diversity paid for the BLEU scores enjoyed by NMT. Moreover, our study implicates search as a salient source of known bias when translating gender pronouns.
Fast IR Drop Estimation with Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

IR drop constraint is a fundamental requirement enforced in almost all chip designs. However, its evaluation takes a long time, and mitigation techniques for fixing violations may require numerous iterations. As such, fast and accurate IR drop prediction becomes critical for reducing design turnaround time. Recently, machine learning (ML) techniques have been actively studied for fast IR drop estimation due to their promise and success in many fields. These studies target at various design stages with different emphasis, and accordingly, different ML algorithms are adopted and customized. This paper provides a review to the latest progress in ML-based IR drop estimation techniques. It also serves as a vehicle for discussing some general challenges faced by ML applications in electronics design automation (EDA), and demonstrating how to integrate ML models with conventional techniques for the better efficiency of EDA tools.
Tractable loss function and color image generation of multinary restricted Boltzmann machine
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

The restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) is a representative generative model based on the concept of statistical mechanics. In spite of the strong merit of interpretability, unavailability of backpropagation makes it less competitive than other generative models. Here we derive differentiable loss functions for both binary and multinary RBMs. Then we demonstrate their learnability and performance by generating colored face images.
Domain Adaptative Causality Encoder
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Current approaches which are mainly based on the extraction of low-level relations among individual events are limited by the shortage of publicly available labelled data. Therefore, the resulting models perform poorly when applied to a distributionally different domain for which labelled data did not exist at the time of training. To overcome this limitation, in this paper, we leverage the characteristics of dependency trees and adversarial learning to address the tasks of adaptive causality identification and localisation. The term adaptive is used since the training and test data come from two distributionally different datasets, which to the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to address. Moreover, we present a new causality dataset, namely MedCaus, which integrates all types of causality in the text. Our experiments on four different benchmark causality datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach over the existing baselines, by up to 7% improvement, on the tasks of identification and localisation of the causal relations from the text.
Interpretable Poverty Mapping using Social Media Data, Satellite Images, and Geospatial Information
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

Access to accurate, granular, and up-to-date poverty data is essential for humanitarian organizations to identify vulnerable areas for poverty alleviation efforts. Recent works have shown success in combining computer vision and satellite imagery for poverty estimation; however, the cost of acquiring high-resolution images coupled with black box models can be a barrier to adoption for many development organizations. In this study, we present a interpretable and cost-efficient approach to poverty estimation using machine learning and readily accessible data sources including social media data, low-resolution satellite images, and volunteered geographic information. Using our method, we achieve an $R^2$ of 0.66 for wealth estimation in the Philippines, compared to 0.63 using satellite imagery. Finally, we use feature importance analysis to identify the highest contributing features both globally and locally to help decision makers gain deeper insights into poverty.
Deep Active Learning for Sequence Labeling Based on Diversity and Uncertainty in Gradient
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Recently, several studies have investigated active learning (AL) for natural language processing tasks to alleviate data dependency. However, for query selection, most of these studies mainly rely on uncertainty-based sampling, which generally does not exploit the structural information of the unlabeled data. This leads to a sampling bias in the batch active learning setting, which selects several samples at once. In this work, we demonstrate that the amount of labeled training data can be reduced using active learning when it incorporates both uncertainty and diversity in the sequence labeling task. We examined the effects of our sequence-based approach by selecting weighted diverse in the gradient embedding approach across multiple tasks, datasets, models, and consistently outperform classic uncertainty-based sampling and diversity-based sampling.
Pruning and Quantizing Neural Belief Propagation Decoders
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

We consider near maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding of short linear block codes. In particular, we propose a novel decoding approach based on neural belief propagation (NBP) decoding recently introduced by Nachmani et al. in which we allow a different parity-check matrix in each iteration of the algorithm. The key idea is to consider NBP decoding over an overcomplete parity-check matrix and use the weights of NBP as a measure of the importance of the check nodes (CNs) to decoding. The unimportant CNs are then pruned. In contrast to NBP, which performs decoding on a given fixed parity-check matrix, the proposed pruning-based neural belief propagation (PB-NBP) typically results in a different parity-check matrix in each iteration. For a given complexity in terms of CN evaluations, we show that PB-NBP yields significant performance improvements with respect to NBP. We apply the proposed decoder to the decoding of a Reed-Muller code, a short low-density parity-check (LDPC) code, and a polar code. PB-NBP outperforms NBP decoding over an overcomplete parity-check matrix by 0.27-0.31 dB while reducing the number of required CN evaluations by up to 97%. For the LDPC code, PB-NBP outperforms conventional belief propagation with the same number of CN evaluations by 0.52 dB. We further extend the pruning concept to offset min-sum decoding and introduce a pruning-based neural offset min-sum (PB-NOMS) decoder, for which we jointly optimize the offsets and the quantization of the messages and offsets. We demonstrate performance 0.5 dB from ML decoding with 5-bit quantization for the Reed-Muller code.
Multi-task MR Imaging with Iterative Teacher Forcing and Re-weighted Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Noises, artifacts, and loss of information caused by the magnetic resonance (MR) reconstruction may compromise the final performance of the downstream applications. In this paper, we develop a re-weighted multi-task deep learning method to learn prior knowledge from the existing big dataset and then utilize them to assist simultaneous MR reconstruction and segmentation from the under-sampled k-space data. The multi-task deep learning framework is equipped with two network sub-modules, which are integrated and trained by our designed iterative teacher forcing scheme (ITFS) under the dynamic re-weighted loss constraint (DRLC). The ITFS is designed to avoid error accumulation by injecting the fully-sampled data into the training process. The DRLC is proposed to dynamically balance the contributions from the reconstruction and segmentation sub-modules so as to co-prompt the multi-task accuracy. The proposed method has been evaluated on two open datasets and one in vivo in-house dataset and compared to six state-of-the-art methods. Results show that the proposed method possesses encouraging capabilities for simultaneous and accurate MR reconstruction and segmentation.
Towards real-time object recognition and pose estimation in point clouds
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Object recognition and 6DoF pose estimation are quite challenging tasks in computer vision applications. Despite efficiency in such tasks, standard methods deliver far from real-time processing rates. This paper presents a novel pipeline to estimate a fine 6DoF pose of objects, applied to realistic scenarios in real-time. We split our proposal into three main parts. Firstly, a Color feature classification leverages the use of pre-trained CNN color features trained on the ImageNet for object detection. A Feature-based registration module conducts a coarse pose estimation, and finally, a Fine-adjustment step performs an ICP-based dense registration. Our proposal achieves, in the best case, an accuracy performance of almost 83\% on the RGB-D Scenes dataset. Regarding processing time, the object detection task is done at a frame processing rate up to 90 FPS, and the pose estimation at almost 14 FPS in a full execution strategy. We discuss that due to the proposal's modularity, we could let the full execution occurs only when necessary and perform a scheduled execution that unlocks real-time processing, even for multitask situations.
Lightweight U-Net for High-Resolution Breast Imaging
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

We study the fully convolutional neural networks in the context of malignancy detection for breast cancer screening. We work on a supervised segmentation task looking for an acceptable compromise between the precision of the network and the computational complexity.