OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Querent Intent in Multi-Sentence Questions
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Multi-sentence questions (MSQs) are sequences of questions connected by relations which, unlike sequences of standalone questions, need to be answered as a unit. Following Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), we recognise that different "question discourse relations" between the subparts of MSQs reflect different speaker intents, and consequently elicit different answering strategies. Correctly identifying these relations is therefore a crucial step in automatically answering MSQs. We identify five different types of MSQs in English, and define five novel relations to describe them. We extract over 162,000 MSQs from Stack Exchange to enable future research. Finally, we implement a high-precision baseline classifier based on surface features.
Towards Interpreting BERT for Reading Comprehension Based QA
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

BERT and its variants have achieved state-of-the-art performance in various NLP tasks. Since then, various works have been proposed to analyze the linguistic information being captured in BERT. However, the current works do not provide an insight into how BERT is able to achieve near human-level performance on the task of Reading Comprehension based Question Answering. In this work, we attempt to interpret BERT for RCQA. Since BERT layers do not have predefined roles, we define a layer's role or functionality using Integrated Gradients. Based on the defined roles, we perform a preliminary analysis across all layers. We observed that the initial layers focus on query-passage interaction, whereas later layers focus more on contextual understanding and enhancing the answer prediction. Specifically for quantifier questions (how much/how many), we notice that BERT focuses on confusing words (i.e., on other numerical quantities in the passage) in the later layers, but still manages to predict the answer correctly. The fine-tuning and analysis scripts will be publicly available at https://github.com/iitmnlp/BERT-Analysis-RCQA .
Sliding Differential Evolution Scheduling for Federated Learning in Bandwidth-Limited Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

Federated learning (FL) in a bandwidth-limited network with energy-limited user equipments (UEs) is under-explored. In this paper, to jointly save energy consumed by the battery-limited UEs and accelerate the convergence of the global model in FL for the bandwidth-limited network, we propose the sliding differential evolution-based scheduling (SDES) policy. To this end, we first formulate an optimization that aims to minimize a weighted sum of energy consumption and model training convergence. Then, we apply the SDES with parallel differential evolution (DE) operations in several small-scale windows, to address the above proposed problem effectively. Compared with existing scheduling policies, the proposed SDES performs well in reducing energy consumption and the model convergence with lower computational complexity.
Log-rank and lifting for AND-functions
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2020
Year: 2020

Let $f: \{0,1\}^n \to \{0, 1\}$ be a boolean function, and let $f_\land (x, y) = f(x \land y)$ denote the AND-function of $f$, where $x \land y$ denotes bit-wise AND. We study the deterministic communication complexity of $f_\land$ and show that, up to a $\log n$ factor, it is bounded by a polynomial in the logarithm of the real rank of the communication matrix of $f_\land$. This comes within a $\log n$ factor of establishing the log-rank conjecturefor AND-functions with no assumptions on $f$. Our result stands in contrast with previous results on special cases of the log-rank conjecture, which needed significant restrictions on $f$ such as monotonicity or low $\mathbb{F}_2$-degree. Our techniques can also be used to prove (within a $\log n$ factor) a lifting theorem for AND-functions, stating that the deterministic communication complexity of $f_\land$ is polynomially-related to the AND-decision tree complexity of $f$. The results rely on a new structural result regarding boolean functions $f:\{0, 1\}^n \to \{0, 1\}$ with a sparse polynomial representation, which may be of independent interest. We show that if the polynomial computing $f$ has few monomials then the set system of the monomials has a small hitting set, of size poly-logarithmic in its sparsity. We also establish extensions of this result to multi-linear polynomials $f:\{0,1\}^n \to \mathbb{R}$ with a larger range.
Image-based Automated Species Identification: Can Virtual Data Augmentation Overcome Problems of Insufficient Sampling?
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Automated species identification and delimitation is challenging, particularly in rare and thus often scarcely sampled species, which do not allow sufficient discrimination of infraspecific versus interspecific variation. Typical problems arising from either low or exaggerated interspecific morphological differentiation are best met by automated methods of machine learning that learn efficient and effective species identification from training samples. However, limited infraspecific sampling remains a key challenge also in machine learning. 1In this study, we assessed whether a two-level data augmentation approach may help to overcome the problem of scarce training data in automated visual species identification. The first level of visual data augmentation applies classic approaches of data augmentation and generation of faked images using a GAN approach. Descriptive feature vectors are derived from bottleneck features of a VGG-16 convolutional neural network (CNN) that are then stepwise reduced in dimensionality using Global Average Pooling and PCA to prevent overfitting. The second level of data augmentation employs synthetic additional sampling in feature space by an oversampling algorithm in vector space (SMOTE). Applied on two challenging datasets of scarab beetles (Coleoptera), our augmentation approach outperformed a non-augmented deep learning baseline approach as well as a traditional 2D morphometric approach (Procrustes analysis).
Solving Shisen-Sho boards
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2020
Year: 2020

We give a simple proof of that determining solvability of Shisen-Sho boards is NP-complete. Furthermore, we show that under realistic assumptions, one can compute in logarithmic time if two tiles form a playable pair. We combine an implementation of the algoritm to test playability of pairs with my earlier algorithm to solve Mahjong Solitaire boards with peeking, to obtain an algorithm to solve Shisen-Sho boards. We sample several Shisen-Sho and Mahjong Solitaire layouts for solvability for Shisen-Sho and Mahjong Solitaire.
Explaining and Improving Model Behavior with k Nearest Neighbor Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Interpretability techniques in NLP have mainly focused on understanding individual predictions using attention visualization or gradient-based saliency maps over tokens. We propose using k nearest neighbor (kNN) representations to identify training examples responsible for a model's predictions and obtain a corpus-level understanding of the model's behavior. Apart from interpretability, we show that kNN representations are effective at uncovering learned spurious associations, identifying mislabeled examples, and improving the fine-tuned model's performance. We focus on Natural Language Inference (NLI) as a case study and experiment with multiple datasets. Our method deploys backoff to kNN for BERT and RoBERTa on examples with low model confidence without any update to the model parameters. Our results indicate that the kNN approach makes the finetuned model more robust to adversarial inputs.
Deep Structured Prediction for Facial Landmark Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Existing deep learning based facial landmark detection methods have achieved excellent performance. These methods, however, do not explicitly embed the structural dependencies among landmark points. They hence cannot preserve the geometric relationships between landmark points or generalize well to challenging conditions or unseen data. This paper proposes a method for deep structured facial landmark detection based on combining a deep Convolutional Network with a Conditional Random Field. We demonstrate its superior performance to existing state-of-the-art techniques in facial landmark detection, especially a better generalization ability on challenging datasets that include large pose and occlusion.
Addressing Variance Shrinkage in Variational Autoencoders using Quantile Regression
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Estimation of uncertainty in deep learning models is of vital importance, especially in medical imaging, where reliance on inference without taking into account uncertainty could lead to misdiagnosis. Recently, the probabilistic Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) has become a popular model for anomaly detection in applications such as lesion detection in medical images. The VAE is a generative graphical model that is used to learn the data distribution from samples and then generate new samples from this distribution. By training on normal samples, the VAE can be used to detect inputs that deviate from this learned distribution. The VAE models the output as a conditionally independent Gaussian characterized by means and variances for each output dimension. VAEs can therefore use reconstruction probability instead of reconstruction error for anomaly detection. Unfortunately, joint optimization of both mean and variance in the VAE leads to the well-known problem of shrinkage or underestimation of variance. We describe an alternative approach that avoids this variance shrinkage problem by using quantile regression. Using estimated quantiles to compute mean and variance under the Gaussian assumption, we compute reconstruction probability as a principled approach to outlier or anomaly detection. Results on simulated and Fashion MNIST data demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. We also show how our approach can be used for principled heterogeneous thresholding for lesion detection in brain images.
Inverse Dynamics Control of Compliant Hybrid Zero Dynamic Walking
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

We present a trajectory planning and control architecture for bipedal locomotion at a variety of speeds on a highly underactuated and compliant bipedal robot. A library of compliant walking trajectories are planned offline, and stored as compact arrays of polynomial coefficients for tracking online. The control implementation uses a floating-base inverse dynamics controller which generates dynamically consistent feedforward torques to realize walking using information obtained from the trajectory optimization. The effectiveness of the controller is demonstrated in simulation and on hardware for walking both indoors on flat terrain and over unplanned disturbances outdoors. Additionally, both the controller and optimization source code are made available on GitHub.
Social-VRNN: One-Shot Multi-modal Trajectory Prediction for Interacting Pedestrians
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Prediction of human motions is key for safe navigation of autonomous robots among humans. In cluttered environments, several motion hypotheses may exist for a pedestrian, due to its interactions with the environment and other pedestrians. Previous works for estimating multiple motion hypotheses require a large number of samples which limits their applicability in real-time motion planning. In this paper, we present a variational learning approach for interaction-aware and multi-modal trajectory prediction based on deep generative neural networks. Our approach can achieve faster convergence and requires significantly fewer samples comparing to state-of-the-art methods. Experimental results on real and simulation data show that our model can effectively learn to infer different trajectories. We compare our method with three baseline approaches and present performance results demonstrating that our generative model can achieve higher accuracy for trajectory prediction by producing diverse trajectories.
Multimodal semantic forecasting based on conditional generation of future features
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

This paper considers semantic forecasting in road-driving scenes. Most existing approaches address this problem as deterministic regression of future features or future predictions given observed frames. However, such approaches ignore the fact that future can not always be guessed with certainty. For example, when a car is about to turn around a corner, the road which is currently occluded by buildings may turn out to be either free to drive, or occupied by people, other vehicles or roadworks. When a deterministic model confronts such situation, its best guess is to forecast the most likely outcome. However, this is not acceptable since it defeats the purpose of forecasting to improve security. It also throws away valuable training data, since a deterministic model is unable to learn any deviation from the norm. We address this problem by providing more freedom to the model through allowing it to forecast different futures. We propose to formulate multimodal forecasting as sampling of a multimodal generative model conditioned on the observed frames. Experiments on the Cityscapes dataset reveal that our multimodal model outperforms its deterministic counterpart in short-term forecasting while performing slightly worse in the mid-term case.
View-Invariant Gait Recognition with Attentive Recurrent Learning of Partial Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Gait recognition refers to the identification of individuals based on features acquired from their body movement during walking. Despite the recent advances in gait recognition with deep learning, variations in data acquisition and appearance, namely camera angles, subject pose, occlusions, and clothing, are challenging factors that need to be considered for achieving accurate gait recognition systems. In this paper, we propose a network that first learns to extract gait convolutional energy maps (GCEM) from frame-level convolutional features. It then adopts a bidirectional recurrent neural network to learn from split bins of the GCEM, thus exploiting the relations between learned partial spatiotemporal representations. We then use an attention mechanism to selectively focus on important recurrently learned partial representations as identity information in different scenarios may lie in different GCEM bins. Our proposed model has been extensively tested on two large-scale CASIA-B and OU-MVLP gait datasets using four different test protocols and has been compared to a number of state-of-the-art and baseline solutions. Additionally, a comprehensive experiment has been performed to study the robustness of our model in the presence of six different synthesized occlusions. The experimental results show the superiority of our proposed method, outperforming the state-of-the-art, especially in scenarios where different clothing and carrying conditions are encountered. The results also revealed that our model is more robust against different occlusions as compared to the state-of-the-art methods.
Can Clean New Code reduce Technical Debt Density?
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2020
Year: 2020

While technical debt grows in absolute numbers as software systems evolve over time, the density of technical debt (technical debt divided by lines of code) is reduced in some cases. This can be explained by either the application of refactorings or the development of new artifacts with limited Technical Debt. In this paper we explore the second explanation, by investigating the relation between the amount of Technical Debt in new code and the evolution of Technical Debt in the system. To this end, we compare the Technical Debt Density of new code with existing code, and we investigate which of the three major types of code changes (additions, deletions and modifications) is primarily responsible for changes in the evolution of Technical Debt density. Furthermore, we study whether there is a relation between code quality practices and the 'cleanness' of new code. To obtain the required data, we have performed a large-scale case study on twenty-seven open-source software projects by the Apache Software Foundation, analyzing 66,661 classes and 56,890 commits. The results suggest that writing "clean" (or at least "cleaner") new code can be an efficient strategy for reducing Technical Debt Density, and thus preventing software decay over time. The findings also suggest that projects adopting an explicit policy for quality improvement, e.g. through discussions on code quality in board meetings, are associated with a higher frequency of cleaner new code commits. Therefore, we champion the establishment of processes that monitor the density of Technical Debt of new code to control the accumulation of Technical Debt in a software system.
SciSummPip: An Unsupervised Scientific Paper Summarization Pipeline
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

The Scholarly Document Processing (SDP) workshop is to encourage more efforts on natural language understanding of scientific task. It contains three shared tasks and we participate in the LongSumm shared task. In this paper, we describe our text summarization system, SciSummPip, inspired by SummPip (Zhao et al., 2020) that is an unsupervised text summarization system for multi-document in news domain. Our SciSummPip includes a transformer-based language model SciBERT (Beltagy et al., 2019) for contextual sentence representation, content selection with PageRank (Page et al., 1999), sentence graph construction with both deep and linguistic information, sentence graph clustering and within-graph summary generation. Our work differs from previous method in that content selection and a summary length constraint is applied to adapt to the scientific domain. The experiment results on both training dataset and blind test dataset show the effectiveness of our method, and we empirically verify the robustness of modules used in SciSummPip with BERTScore (Zhang et al., 2019a).
A novel method for inference of chemical compounds with prescribed topological substructures based on integer programming
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2020
Year: 2020

Analysis of chemical graphs is becoming a major research topic in computational molecular biology due to its potential applications to drug design. One of the major approaches in such a study is inverse quantitative structure activity/property relationships (inverse QSAR/QSPR) analysis, which is to infer chemical structures from given chemical activities/properties. Recently, a novel framework has been proposed for inverse QSAR/QSPR using both artificial neural networks (ANN) and mixed integer linear programming (MILP). This method consists of a prediction phase and an inverse prediction phase. In the first phase, a feature vector $f(G)$ of a chemical graph $G$ is introduced and a prediction function $ψ_{\mathcal{N}}$ on a chemical property $π$ is constructed with an ANN $\mathcal{N}$. In the second phase, given a target value $y^*$ of the chemical property $π$, a feature vector $x^*$ is inferred by solving an MILP formulated from the trained ANN $\mathcal{N}$ so that $ψ_{\mathcal{N}}(x^*)$ is equal to $y^*$ and then a set of chemical structures $G^*$ such that $f(G^*)= x^*$ is enumerated by a graph enumeration algorithm. The framework has been applied to chemical compounds with a rather abstract topological structure such as acyclic or monocyclic graphs and graphs with a specified polymer topology with cycle index up to 2. In this paper, we propose a new flexible modeling method to the framework so that we can specify a topological substructure of graphs and a partial assignment of chemical elements and bond-multiplicity to a target graph.
DBA bandits: Self-driving index tuning under ad-hoc, analytical workloads with safety guarantees
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2020
Year: 2020

Automating physical database design has remained a long-term interest in database research due to substantial performance gains afforded by optimised structures. Despite significant progress, a majority of today's commercial solutions are highly manual, requiring offline invocation by database administrators (DBAs) who are expected to identify and supply representative training workloads. Unfortunately, the latest advancements like query stores provide only limited support for dynamic environments. This status quo is untenable: identifying representative static workloads is no longer realistic; and physical design tools remain susceptible to the query optimiser's cost misestimates (stemming from unrealistic assumptions such as attribute value independence and uniformity of data distribution). We propose a self-driving approach to online index selection that eschews the DBA and query optimiser, and instead learns the benefits of viable structures through strategic exploration and direct performance observation. We view the problem as one of sequential decision making under uncertainty, specifically within the bandit learning setting. Multi-armed bandits balance exploration and exploitation to provably guarantee average performance that converges to a fixed policy that is optimal with perfect hindsight. Our comprehensive empirical results demonstrate up to 75% speed-up on shifting and ad-hoc workloads and 28% speed-up on static workloads compared against a state-of-the-art commercial tuning tool.
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Spatio-Temporal Action Localization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Spatio-temporal action localization is an important problem in computer vision that involves detecting where and when activities occur, and therefore requires modeling of both spatial and temporal features. This problem is typically formulated in the context of supervised learning, where the learned classifiers operate on the premise that both training and test data are sampled from the same underlying distribution. However, this assumption does not hold when there is a significant domain shift, leading to poor generalization performance on the test data. To address this, we focus on the hard and novel task of generalizing training models to test samples without access to any labels from the latter for spatio-temporal action localization by proposing an end-to-end unsupervised domain adaptation algorithm. We extend the state-of-the-art object detection framework to localize and classify actions. In order to minimize the domain shift, three domain adaptation modules at image level (temporal and spatial) and instance level (temporal) are designed and integrated. We design a new experimental setup and evaluate the proposed method and different adaptation modules on the UCF-Sports, UCF-101 and JHMDB benchmark datasets. We show that significant performance gain can be achieved when spatial and temporal features are adapted separately, or jointly for the most effective results.
Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes for Inferring Topics and Visualization
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Visualization and topic modeling are widely used approaches for text analysis. Traditional visualization methods find low-dimensional representations of documents in the visualization space (typically 2D or 3D) that can be displayed using a scatterplot. In contrast, topic modeling aims to discover topics from text, but for visualization, one needs to perform a post-hoc embedding using dimensionality reduction methods. Recent approaches propose using a generative model to jointly find topics and visualization, allowing the semantics to be infused in the visualization space for a meaningful interpretation. A major challenge that prevents these methods from being used practically is the scalability of their inference algorithms. We present, to the best of our knowledge, the first fast Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes based inference method for jointly inferring topics and visualization. Since our method is black box, it can handle model changes efficiently with little mathematical rederivation effort. We demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our method on real-world large datasets and compare it with existing baselines.