OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Latent-Insensitive autoencoders for Anomaly Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Reconstruction-based approaches to anomaly detection tend to fall short when applied to complex datasets with target classes that possess high inter-class variance. Similar to the idea of self-taught learning used in transfer learning, many domains are rich with similar unlabelled datasets that could be leveraged as a proxy for out-of-distribution samples. In this paper we introduce Latent-Insensitive autoencoder (LIS-AE) where unlabeled data from a similar domain is utilized as negative examples to shape the latent layer (bottleneck) of a regular autoencoder such that it is only capable of reconstructing one task. We provide theoretical justification for the proposed training process and loss functions along with an extensive ablation study highlighting important aspects of our model. We test our model in multiple anomaly detection settings presenting quantitative and qualitative analysis showcasing the significant performance improvement of our model for anomaly detection tasks.
Data intensive physics analysis in Azure cloud
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is one of the largest data producers in the scientific world, with standard data products centrally produced, and then used by often competing teams within the collaboration. This work is focused on how a local institution, University of California San Diego (UCSD), partnered with the Open Science Grid (OSG) to use Azure cloud resources to augment its available computing to accelerate time to results for multiple analyses pursued by a small group of collaborators. The OSG is a federated infrastructure allowing many independent resource providers to serve many independent user communities in a transparent manner. Historically the resources would come from various research institutions, spanning small universities to large HPC centers, based on either community needs or grant allocations, so adding commercial clouds as resource providers is a natural evolution. The OSG technology allows for easy integration of cloud resources, but the data-intensive nature of CMS compute jobs required the deployment of additional data caching infrastructure to ensure high efficiency.
Let's Wait Awhile: How Temporal Workload Shifting Can Reduce Carbon Emissions in the Cloud
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

Depending on energy sources and demand, the carbon intensity of the public power grid fluctuates over time. Exploiting this variability is an important factor in reducing the emissions caused by data centers. However, regional differences in the availability of low-carbon energy sources make it hard to provide general best practices for when to consume electricity. Moreover, existing research in this domain focuses mostly on carbon-aware workload migration across geo-distributed data centers, or addresses demand response purely from the perspective of power grid stability and costs. In this paper, we examine the potential impact of shifting computational workloads towards times where the energy supply is expected to be less carbon-intensive. To this end, we identify characteristics of delay-tolerant workloads and analyze the potential for temporal workload shifting in Germany, Great Britain, France, and California over the year 2020. Furthermore, we experimentally evaluate two workload shifting scenarios in a simulation to investigate the influence of time constraints, scheduling strategies, and the accuracy of carbon intensity forecasts. To accelerate research in the domain of carbon-aware computing and to support the evaluation of novel scheduling algorithms, our simulation framework and datasets are publicly available.
DeepHelp: Deep Learning for Shout Crisis Text Conversations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

The Shout Crisis Text Line provides individuals undergoing mental health crises an opportunity to have an anonymous text message conversation with a trained Crisis Volunteer (CV). This project partners with Shout and its parent organisation, Mental Health Innovations, to explore the applications of Machine Learning in understanding Shout's conversations and improving its service. The overarching aim of this project is to develop a proof-of-concept model to demonstrate the potential of applying deep learning to crisis text messages. Specifically, this project aims to use deep learning to (1) predict an individual's risk of suicide or self-harm, (2) assess conversation success and CV skill using robust metrics, and (3) extrapolate demographic information from a texter survey to conversations where the texter did not complete the survey. To these ends, contributions to deep learning include a modified Transformer-over-BERT model; a framework for multitask learning to improve generalisation in the presence of sparse labels; and a mathematical model for using imperfect machine learning models to estimate population parameters from a biased training set. Key results include a deep learning model with likely better performance at predicting suicide risk than trained CVs and the ability to predict whether a texter is 21 or under with 88.4% accuracy. We produce three metrics for conversation success and evaluate the validity and usefulness for each. Finally, reversal of participation bias provides evidence that women, who make up 80.3% of conversations with an associated texter survey, make up closer to 73.5%- 74.8% of all conversations; and that if, after every conversation, the texter had shared whether they found their conversation helpful, affirmative answers would fall from 85.1% to 45.45% - 46.51%.
Reconciling Risk Allocation and Prevalence Estimation in Public Health Using Batched Bandits
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

In many public health settings, there is a perceived tension between allocating resources to known vulnerable areas and learning about the overall prevalence of the problem. Inspired by a door-to-door Covid-19 testing program we helped design, we combine multi-armed bandit strategies and insights from sampling theory to demonstrate how to recover accurate prevalence estimates while continuing to allocate resources to at-risk areas. We use the outbreak of an infectious disease as our running example. The public health setting has several characteristics distinguishing it from typical bandit settings, such as distribution shift (the true disease prevalence is changing with time) and batched sampling (multiple decisions must be made simultaneously). Nevertheless, we demonstrate that several bandit algorithms are capable out-performing greedy resource allocation strategies, which often perform worse than random allocation as they fail to notice outbreaks in new areas.
EarthGAN: Can we visualize the Earth's mantle convection using a surrogate model?
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Scientific simulations are often used to gain insight into foundational questions. However, many potentially useful simulation results are difficult to visualize without powerful computers. In this research, we seek to build a surrogate model, using a generative adversarial network, to allow for the visualization of the Earth's Mantle Convection data set on readily accessible hardware. We present our preliminary method and results, and all code is made publicly available. The preliminary results show that a surrogate model of the Earth's Mantle Convection data set can generate useful results. A comparison to the "ground-truth" is provided.
Meta-Learning for Multi-Label Few-Shot Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Even with the luxury of having abundant data, multi-label classification is widely known to be a challenging task to address. This work targets the problem of multi-label meta-learning, where a model learns to predict multiple labels within a query (e.g., an image) by just observing a few supporting examples. In doing so, we first propose a benchmark for Few-Shot Learning (FSL) with multiple labels per sample. Next, we discuss and extend several solutions specifically designed to address the conventional and single-label FSL, to work in the multi-label regime. Lastly, we introduce a neural module to estimate the label count of a given sample by exploiting the relational inference. We will show empirically the benefit of the label count module, the label propagation algorithm, and the extensions of conventional FSL methods on three challenging datasets, namely MS-COCO, iMaterialist, and Open MIC. Overall, our thorough experiments suggest that the proposed label-propagation algorithm in conjunction with the neural label count module (NLC) shall be considered as the method of choice.
Assessing the Sufficiency of Arguments through Conclusion Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

The premises of an argument give evidence or other reasons to support a conclusion. However, the amount of support required depends on the generality of a conclusion, the nature of the individual premises, and similar. An argument whose premises make its conclusion rationally worthy to be drawn is called sufficient in argument quality research. Previous work tackled sufficiency assessment as a standard text classification problem, not modeling the inherent relation of premises and conclusion. In this paper, we hypothesize that the conclusion of a sufficient argument can be generated from its premises. To study this hypothesis, we explore the potential of assessing sufficiency based on the output of large-scale pre-trained language models. Our best model variant achieves an F1-score of .885, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art and being on par with human experts. While manual evaluation reveals the quality of the generated conclusions, their impact remains low ultimately.
SHECS: A Local Smart Hands-free Elderly Care Support System on Smart AR Glasses with AI Technology
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2021
Year: 2021

Some elderly care homes attempt to remedy the shortage of skilled caregivers and provide long-term care for the elderly residents, by enhancing the management of the care support system with the aid of smart devices such as mobile phones and tablets. Since mobile phones and tablets lack the flexibility required for laborious elderly care work, smart AR glasses have already been considered. Although lightweight smart AR devices with a transparent display are more convenient and responsive in an elderly care workplace, fetching data from the server through the Internet results in network congestion not to mention the limited display area. To devise portable smart AR devices that operate smoothly, we first present a no keep alive Internet required smart hands-free elderly care support system that employs smart glasses with facial recognition and text-to-speech synthesis technologies. Our support system utilizes automatic lightweight facial recognition to identify residents, and information about each resident in question can be obtained hands free link with a local database. Moreover, a resident information can be displayed on just a portion of the AR smart glasses on the spot. Due to the limited size of the display area, it cannot show all the necessary information. We exploit synthesized voices in the system to read out the elderly care related information. By using the support system, caregivers can gain an understanding of each resident condition immediately, instead of having to devote considerable time in advance in obtaining the complete information of all elderly residents. Our lightweight facial recognition model achieved high accuracy with fewer model parameters than current state-of-the-art methods. The validation rate of our facial recognition system was 99.3% or higher with the false accept rate of 0.001, and caregivers rated the acceptability at 3.6 (5 levels) or higher.
Single Morphing Attack Detection using Feature Selection and Visualisation based on Mutual Information
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Face morphing attack detection is a challenging task. Automatic classification methods and manual inspection are realised in automatic border control gates to detect morphing attacks. Understanding how a machine learning system can detect morphed faces and the most relevant facial areas is crucial. Those relevant areas contain texture signals that allow us to separate the bona fide and the morph images. Also, it helps in the manual examination to detect a passport generated with morphed images. This paper explores features extracted from intensity, shape, texture, and proposes a feature selection stage based on the Mutual Information filter to select the most relevant and less redundant features. This selection allows us to reduce the workload and know the exact localisation of such areas to understand the morphing impact and create a robust classifier. The best results were obtained for the method based on Conditional Mutual Information and Shape features using only 500 features for FERET images and 800 features for FRGCv2 images from 1,048 features available. The eyes and nose are identified as the most critical areas to be analysed.
Directional Self-supervised Learning for Heavy Image Augmentations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Despite the large augmentation family, only a few cherry-picked robust augmentation policies are beneficial to self-supervised image representation learning. In this paper, we propose a directional self-supervised learning paradigm (DSSL), which is compatible with significantly more augmentations. Specifically, we adapt heavy augmentation policies after the views lightly augmented by standard augmentations, to generate harder view (HV). HV usually has a higher deviation from the original image than the lightly augmented standard view (SV). Unlike previous methods equally pairing all augmented views to symmetrically maximize their similarities, DSSL treats augmented views of the same instance as a partially ordered set (with directions as SV$\leftrightarrow $SV, SV$\leftarrow$HV), and then equips a directional objective function respecting to the derived relationships among views. DSSL can be easily implemented with a few lines of codes and is highly flexible to popular self-supervised learning frameworks, including SimCLR, SimSiam, BYOL. Extensive experimental results on CIFAR and ImageNet demonstrated that DSSL can stably improve various baselines with compatibility to a wider range of augmentations.
Flexible Refinement Proofs in Separation Logic
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2021
Year: 2021

Refinement transforms an abstract system model into a concrete, executable program, such that properties established for the abstract model carry over to the concrete implementation. Refinement has been used successfully in the development of substantial verified systems. Nevertheless, existing refinement techniques have limitations that impede their practical usefulness. Some techniques generate executable code automatically, which generally leads to implementations with sub-optimal performance. Others employ bottom-up program verification to reason about efficient implementations, but impose strict requirements on the structure of the code, the structure of the refinement proofs, as well as the employed verification logic and tools. In this paper, we present a novel refinement technique that removes these limitations. Our technique uses separation logic to reason about efficient concurrent implementations. It prescribes only a loose coupling between an abstract model and the concrete implementation. It thereby supports a wide range of program structures, data representations, and proof structures. We make only minimal assumptions about the underlying program logic, which allows our technique to be used in combination with a wide range of logics and to be automated using off-the-shelf separation logic verifiers. We formalize the technique, prove the central trace inclusion property, and demonstrate its usefulness on several case studies.
Concepts for Automated Machine Learning in Smart Grid Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Undoubtedly, the increase of available data and competitive machine learning algorithms has boosted the popularity of data-driven modeling in energy systems. Applications are forecasts for renewable energy generation and energy consumption. Forecasts are elementary for sector coupling, where energy-consuming sectors are interconnected with the power-generating sector to address electricity storage challenges by adding flexibility to the power system. However, the large-scale application of machine learning methods in energy systems is impaired by the need for expert knowledge, which covers machine learning expertise and a profound understanding of the application's process. The process knowledge is required for the problem formalization, as well as the model validation and application. The machine learning skills include the processing steps of i) data pre-processing, ii) feature engineering, extraction, and selection, iii) algorithm selection, iv) hyperparameter optimization, and possibly v) post-processing of the model's output. Tailoring a model for a particular application requires selecting the data, designing various candidate models and organizing the data flow between the processing steps, selecting the most suitable model, and monitoring the model during operation - an iterative and time-consuming procedure. Automated design and operation of machine learning aim to reduce the human effort to address the increasing demand for data-driven models. We define five levels of automation for forecasting in alignment with the SAE standard for autonomous vehicles, where manual design and application reflect Automation level 0.
Arbitrary Distribution Modeling with Censorship in Real-Time Bidding Advertising
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

The purpose of Inventory Pricing is to bid the right prices to online ad opportunities, which is crucial for a Demand-Side Platform (DSP) to win advertising auctions in Real-Time Bidding (RTB). In the planning stage, advertisers need the forecast of probabilistic models to make bidding decisions. However, most of the previous works made strong assumptions on the distribution form of the winning price, which reduced their accuracy and weakened their ability to make generalizations. Though some works recently tried to fit the distribution directly, their complex structure lacked efficiency on online inference. In this paper, we devise a novel loss function, Neighborhood Likelihood Loss (NLL), collaborating with a proposed framework, Arbitrary Distribution Modeling (ADM), to predict the winning price distribution under censorship with no pre-assumption required. We conducted experiments on two real-world experimental datasets and one large-scale, non-simulated production dataset in our system. Experiments showed that ADM outperformed the baselines both on algorithm and business metrics. By replaying historical data of the production environment, this method was shown to lead to good yield in our system. Without any pre-assumed specific distribution form, ADM showed significant advantages in effectiveness and efficiency, demonstrating its great capability in modeling sophisticated price landscapes.
Incremental Learning for Animal Pose Estimation using RBF k-DPP
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Pose estimation is the task of locating keypoints for an object of interest in an image. Animal Pose estimation is more challenging than estimating human pose due to high inter and intra class variability in animals. Existing works solve this problem for a fixed set of predefined animal categories. Models trained on such sets usually do not work well with new animal categories. Retraining the model on new categories makes the model overfit and leads to catastrophic forgetting. Thus, in this work, we propose a novel problem of "Incremental Learning for Animal Pose Estimation". Our method uses an exemplar memory, sampled using Determinantal Point Processes (DPP) to continually adapt to new animal categories without forgetting the old ones. We further propose a new variant of k-DPP that uses RBF kernel (termed as "RBF k-DPP") which gives more gain in performance over traditional k-DPP. Due to memory constraints, the limited number of exemplars along with new class data can lead to class imbalance. We mitigate it by performing image warping as an augmentation technique. This helps in crafting diverse poses, which reduces overfitting and yields further improvement in performance. The efficacy of our proposed approach is demonstrated via extensive experiments and ablations where we obtain significant improvements over state-of-the-art baseline methods.
DAG Card is the new Model Card
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

With the progressive commoditization of modeling capabilities, data-centric AI recognizes that what happens before and after training becomes crucial for real-world deployments. Following the intuition behind Model Cards, we propose DAG Cards as a form of documentation encompassing the tenets of a data-centric point of view. We argue that Machine Learning pipelines (rather than models) are the most appropriate level of documentation for many practical use cases, and we share with the community an open implementation to generate cards from code.
Robust physics discovery via supervised and unsupervised pattern recognition using the Euler characteristic
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2021
Year: 2021

Machine learning approaches have been widely used for discovering the underlying physics of dynamical systems from measured data. Existing approaches, however, still lack robustness, especially when the measured data contain a large level of noise. The lack of robustness is mainly attributed to the insufficient representativeness of used features. As a result, the intrinsic mechanism governing the observed system cannot be accurately identified. In this study, we use an efficient topological descriptor for complex data, i.e., the Euler characteristics (ECs), as features to characterize the spatiotemporal data collected from dynamical systems and discover the underlying physics. Unsupervised manifold learning and supervised classification results show that EC can be used to efficiently distinguish systems with different while similar governing models. We also demonstrate that the machine learning approaches using EC can improve the confidence level of sparse regression methods of physics discovery.
A Personalized Diagnostic Generation Framework Based on Multi-source Heterogeneous Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Personalized diagnoses have not been possible due to sear amount of data pathologists have to bear during the day-to-day routine. This lead to the current generalized standards that are being continuously updated as new findings are reported. It is noticeable that these effective standards are developed based on a multi-source heterogeneous data, including whole-slide images and pathology and clinical reports. In this study, we propose a framework that combines pathological images and medical reports to generate a personalized diagnosis result for individual patient. We use nuclei-level image feature similarity and content-based deep learning method to search for a personalized group of population with similar pathological characteristics, extract structured prognostic information from descriptive pathology reports of the similar patient population, and assign importance of different prognostic factors to generate a personalized pathological diagnosis result. We use multi-source heterogeneous data from TCGA (The Cancer Genome Atlas) database. The result demonstrate that our framework matches the performance of pathologists in the diagnosis of renal cell carcinoma. This framework is designed to be generic, thus could be applied for other types of cancer. The weights could provide insights to the known prognostic factors and further guide more precise clinical treatment protocols.