OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Epistemic Planning with Attention as a Bounded Resource
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Where information grows abundant, attention becomes a scarce resource. As a result, agents must plan wisely how to allocate their attention in order to achieve epistemic efficiency. Here, we present a framework for multi-agent epistemic planning with attention, based on Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL, a powerful formalism for epistemic planning). We identify the framework as a fragment of standard DEL, and consider its plan existence problem. While in the general case undecidable, we show that when attention is required for learning, all instances of the problem are decidable.
Multi-modal Sarcasm Detection and Humor Classification in Code-mixed Conversations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Sarcasm detection and humor classification are inherently subtle problems, primarily due to their dependence on the contextual and non-verbal information. Furthermore, existing studies in these two topics are usually constrained in non-English languages such as Hindi, due to the unavailability of qualitative annotated datasets. In this work, we make two major contributions considering the above limitations: (1) we develop a Hindi-English code-mixed dataset, MaSaC, for the multi-modal sarcasm detection and humor classification in conversational dialog, which to our knowledge is the first dataset of its kind; (2) we propose MSH-COMICS, a novel attention-rich neural architecture for the utterance classification. We learn efficient utterance representation utilizing a hierarchical attention mechanism that attends to a small portion of the input sentence at a time. Further, we incorporate dialog-level contextual attention mechanism to leverage the dialog history for the multi-modal classification. We perform extensive experiments for both the tasks by varying multi-modal inputs and various submodules of MSH-COMICS. We also conduct comparative analysis against existing approaches. We observe that MSH-COMICS attains superior performance over the existing models by > 1 F1-score point for the sarcasm detection and 10 F1-score points in humor classification. We diagnose our model and perform thorough analysis of the results to understand the superiority and pitfalls.
Measuring Model Fairness under Noisy Covariates: A Theoretical Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

In this work we study the problem of measuring the fairness of a machine learning model under noisy information. Focusing on group fairness metrics, we investigate the particular but common situation when the evaluation requires controlling for the confounding effect of covariate variables. In a practical setting, we might not be able to jointly observe the covariate and group information, and a standard workaround is to then use proxies for one or more of these variables. Prior works have demonstrated the challenges with using a proxy for sensitive attributes, and strong independence assumptions are needed to provide guarantees on the accuracy of the noisy estimates. In contrast, in this work we study using a proxy for the covariate variable and present a theoretical analysis that aims to characterize weaker conditions under which accurate fairness evaluation is possible. Furthermore, our theory identifies potential sources of errors and decouples them into two interpretable parts $γ$ and $ε$. The first part $γ$ depends solely on the performance of the proxy such as precision and recall, whereas the second part $ε$ captures correlations between all the variables of interest. We show that in many scenarios the error in the estimates is dominated by $γ$ via a linear dependence, whereas the dependence on the correlations $ε$ only constitutes a lower order term. As a result we expand the understanding of scenarios where measuring model fairness via proxies can be an effective approach. Finally, we compare, via simulations, the theoretical upper-bounds to the distribution of simulated estimation errors and show that assuming some structure on the data, even weak, is key to significantly improve both theoretical guarantees and empirical results.
Comment on Stochastic Polyak Step-Size: Performance of ALI-G
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

This is a short note on the performance of the ALI-G algorithm (Berrada et al., 2020) as reported in (Loizou et al., 2021). ALI-G (Berrada et al., 2020) and SPS (Loizou et al., 2021) are both adaptations of the Polyak step-size to optimize machine learning models that can interpolate the training data. The main algorithmic differences are that (1) SPS employs a multiplicative constant in the denominator of the learning-rate while ALI-G uses an additive constant, and (2) SPS uses an iteration-dependent maximal learning-rate while ALI-G uses a constant one. There are also differences in the analysis provided by the two works, with less restrictive assumptions proposed in (Loizou et al., 2021). In their experiments, (Loizou et al., 2021) did not use momentum for ALI-G (which is a standard part of the algorithm) or standard hyper-parameter tuning (for e.g. learning-rate and regularization). Hence this note as a reference for the improved performance that ALI-G can obtain with well-chosen hyper-parameters. In particular, we show that when training a ResNet-34 on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, the performance of ALI-G can reach respectively 93.5% (+6%) and 76% (+8%) with a very small amount of tuning. Thus ALI-G remains a very competitive method for training interpolating neural networks.
Dynamic enterprise architecture capabilities and organizational benefits: an empirical mediation study
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2021
Year: 2021

In recent years the literature has put a greater emphasis on theory building in the context of Enterprise Architecture, EA, research. Specifically, scholars tend to focus on EA-based capabilities that organize and deploy organization-specific resources to align strategic objectives with the particular use of technology. Despite the growth in EA studies, substantial gaps remain in the literature. The most noteworthy gaps are that the conceptualization of EA-based capabilities still lacks a firm base in theory and that there is no conclusive evidence on how EA-based capabilities drive business transformation and deliver benefits to the firm. Therefore, this study focuses on EA-based capabilities, using the dynamic capabilities view as a theoretical foundation, develops and tests a new research model that explains how dynamic enterprise architecture capabilities lead to organizational benefits. Hypotheses associated with the research model are tested using a dataset that contains responses from 299 CIOs, IT managers, and lead architects. Results show that dynamic enterprise architecture capabilities positively influence the firm's process innovation and business/IT alignment. These mediating forces are both positively associated with organizational benefits. This study advances our understanding of how to efficaciously de-lineate dynamic enterprise architecture capabilities in delivering benefits to the organization.
To do or not to do: finding causal relations in smart homes
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Research in Cognitive Science suggests that humans understand and represent knowledge of the world through causal relationships. In addition to observations, they can rely on experimenting and counterfactual reasoning -- i.e. referring to an alternative course of events -- to identify causal relations and explain atypical situations. Different instances of control systems, such as smart homes, would benefit from having a similar causal model, as it would help the user understand the logic of the system and better react when needed. However, while data-driven methods achieve high levels of correlation detection, they mainly fall short of finding causal relations, notably being limited to observations only. Notably, they struggle to identify the cause from the effect when detecting a correlation between two variables. This paper introduces a new way to learn causal models from a mixture of experiments on the environment and observational data. The core of our method is the use of selected interventions, especially our learning takes into account the variables where it is impossible to intervene, unlike other approaches. The causal model we obtain is then used to generate Causal Bayesian Networks, which can be later used to perform diagnostic and predictive inference. We use our method on a smart home simulation, a use case where knowing causal relations pave the way towards explainable systems. Our algorithm succeeds in generating a Causal Bayesian Network close to the simulation's ground truth causal interactions, showing encouraging prospects for application in real-life systems.
Uma implementação do jogo Pedra, Papel e Tesoura utilizando Visao Computacional
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

This paper presents a game, controlled by computer vision, in identification of hand gestures (hand-tracking). The proposed work is based on image segmentation and construction of a convex hull with Jarvis Algorithm , and determination of the pattern based on the extraction of area characteristics in the convex hull.
An Optical physics inspired CNN approach for intrinsic image decomposition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Intrinsic Image Decomposition is an open problem of generating the constituents of an image. Generating reflectance and shading from a single image is a challenging task specifically when there is no ground truth. There is a lack of unsupervised learning approaches for decomposing an image into reflectance and shading using a single image. We propose a neural network architecture capable of this decomposition using physics-based parameters derived from the image. Through experimental results, we show that (a) the proposed methodology outperforms the existing deep learning-based IID techniques and (b) the derived parameters improve the efficacy significantly. We conclude with a closer analysis of the results (numerical and example images) showing several avenues for improvement.
IDEAL: Independent Domain Embedding Augmentation Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Many efforts have been devoted to designing sampling, mining, and weighting strategies in high-level deep metric learning (DML) loss objectives. However, little attention has been paid to low-level but essential data transformation. In this paper, we develop a novel mechanism, the independent domain embedding augmentation learning ({IDEAL}) method. It can simultaneously learn multiple independent embedding spaces for multiple domains generated by predefined data transformations. Our IDEAL is orthogonal to existing DML techniques and can be seamlessly combined with prior DML approaches for enhanced performance. Empirical results on visual retrieval tasks demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method. For example, the IDEAL improves the performance of MS loss by a large margin, 84.5\% $\rightarrow$ 87.1\% on Cars-196, and 65.8\% $\rightarrow$ 69.5\% on CUB-200 at Recall$@1$. Our IDEAL with MS loss also achieves the new state-of-the-art performance on three image retrieval benchmarks, \ie, \emph{Cars-196}, \emph{CUB-200}, and \emph{SOP}. It outperforms the most recent DML approaches, such as Circle loss and XBM, significantly. The source code and pre-trained models of our method will be available at\emph{\url{https://github.com/emdata-ailab/IDEAL}}.
A Novel 3D-UNet Deep Learning Framework Based on High-Dimensional Bilateral Grid for Edge Consistent Single Image Depth Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

The task of predicting smooth and edge-consistent depth maps is notoriously difficult for single image depth estimation. This paper proposes a novel Bilateral Grid based 3D convolutional neural network, dubbed as 3DBG-UNet, that parameterizes high dimensional feature space by encoding compact 3D bilateral grids with UNets and infers sharp geometric layout of the scene. Further, another novel 3DBGES-UNet model is introduced that integrate 3DBG-UNet for inferring an accurate depth map given a single color view. The 3DBGES-UNet concatenates 3DBG-UNet geometry map with the inception network edge accentuation map and a spatial object's boundary map obtained by leveraging semantic segmentation and train the UNet model with ResNet backbone. Both models are designed with a particular attention to explicitly account for edges or minute details. Preserving sharp discontinuities at depth edges is critical for many applications such as realistic integration of virtual objects in AR video or occlusion-aware view synthesis for 3D display applications.The proposed depth prediction network achieves state-of-the-art performance in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations on the challenging NYUv2-Depth data. The code and corresponding pre-trained weights will be made publicly available.
Training Mixed-Objective Pointing Decoders for Block-Level Optimization in Search Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

Related or ideal follow-up suggestions to a web query in search engines are often optimized based on several different parameters -- relevance to the original query, diversity, click probability etc. One or many rankers may be trained to score each suggestion from a candidate pool based on these factors. These scorers are usually pairwise classification tasks where each training example consists of a user query and a single suggestion from the list of candidates. We propose an architecture that takes all candidate suggestions associated with a given query and outputs a suggestion block. We discuss the benefits of such an architecture over traditional approaches and experiment with further enforcing each individual metric through mixed-objective training.
GSSF: A Generative Sequence Similarity Function based on a Seq2Seq model for clustering online handwritten mathematical answers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Toward a computer-assisted marking for descriptive math questions,this paper presents clustering of online handwritten mathematical expressions (OnHMEs) to help human markers to mark them efficiently and reliably. We propose a generative sequence similarity function for computing a similarity score of two OnHMEs based on a sequence-to-sequence OnHME recognizer. Each OnHME is represented by a similarity-based representation (SbR) vector. The SbR matrix is inputted to the k-means algorithm for clustering OnHMEs. Experiments are conducted on an answer dataset (Dset_Mix) of 200 OnHMEs mixed of real patterns and synthesized patterns for each of 10 questions and a real online handwritten mathematical answer dataset of 122 student answers at most for each of 15 questions (NIER_CBT). The best clustering results achieved around 0.916 and 0.915 for purity, and around 0.556 and 0.702 for the marking cost on Dset_Mix and NIER_CBT, respectively. Our method currently outperforms the previous methods for clustering HMEs.
Act Like a Radiologist: Towards Reliable Multi-view Correspondence Reasoning for Mammogram Mass Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Mammogram mass detection is crucial for diagnosing and preventing the breast cancers in clinical practice. The complementary effect of multi-view mammogram images provides valuable information about the breast anatomical prior structure and is of great significance in digital mammography interpretation. However, unlike radiologists who can utilize the natural reasoning ability to identify masses based on multiple mammographic views, how to endow the existing object detection models with the capability of multi-view reasoning is vital for decision-making in clinical diagnosis but remains the boundary to explore. In this paper, we propose an Anatomy-aware Graph convolutional Network (AGN), which is tailored for mammogram mass detection and endows existing detection methods with multi-view reasoning ability. The proposed AGN consists of three steps. Firstly, we introduce a Bipartite Graph convolutional Network (BGN) to model the intrinsic geometric and semantic relations of ipsilateral views. Secondly, considering that the visual asymmetry of bilateral views is widely adopted in clinical practice to assist the diagnosis of breast lesions, we propose an Inception Graph convolutional Network (IGN) to model the structural similarities of bilateral views. Finally, based on the constructed graphs, the multi-view information is propagated through nodes methodically, which equips the features learned from the examined view with multi-view reasoning ability. Experiments on two standard benchmarks reveal that AGN significantly exceeds the state-of-the-art performance. Visualization results show that AGN provides interpretable visual cues for clinical diagnosis.
Expressivity of Quantitative Modal Logics: Categorical Foundations via Codensity and Approximation
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2021
Year: 2021

A modal logic that is strong enough to fully characterize the behavior of a system is called expressive. Recently, with the growing diversity of systems to be reasoned about (probabilistic, cyber-physical, etc.), the focus shifted to quantitative settings which resulted in a number of expressivity results for quantitative logics and behavioral metrics. Each of these quantitative expressivity results uses a tailor-made argument; distilling the essence of these arguments is non-trivial, yet important to support the design of expressive modal logics for new quantitative settings. In this paper, we present the first categorical framework for deriving quantitative expressivity results, based on the new notion of approximating family. A key ingredient is the codensity lifting -- a uniform observation-centric construction of various bisimilarity-like notions such as bisimulation metrics. We show that several recent quantitative expressivity results (e.g. by König et al. and by Fijalkow et al.) are accommodated in our framework; a new expressivity result is derived, too, for what we call bisimulation uniformity.
WildKey: A Privacy-Aware Keyboard Toolkit for Data Collection In-The-Wild
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2021
Year: 2021

Touch data, and in particular text-entry data, has been mostly collected in the laboratory, under controlled conditions. While touch and text-entry data have consistently shown its potential for monitoring and detecting a variety of conditions and impairments, its deployment in-the-wild remains a challenge. In this paper, we present WildKey, an Android keyboard toolkit that allows for the usable deployment of in-the-wild user studies. WildKey is able to analyze text-entry behaviors through implicit and explicit text-entry data collection while ensuring user privacy. We detail each of the WildKey's components and features, all of the metrics collected, and discuss the steps taken to ensure user privacy and promote compliance.
Random Hash Code Generation for Cancelable Fingerprint Templates using Vector Permutation and Shift-order Process
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Cancelable biometric techniques have been used to prevent the compromise of biometric data by generating and using their corresponding cancelable templates for user authentication. However, the non-invertible distance preserving transformation methods employed in various schemes are often vulnerable to information leakage since matching is performed in the transformed domain. In this paper, we propose a non-invertible distance preserving scheme based on vector permutation and shift-order process. First, the dimension of feature vectors is reduced using kernelized principle component analysis (KPCA) prior to randomly permuting the extracted vector features. A shift-order process is then applied to the generated features in order to achieve non-invertibility and combat similarity-based attacks. The generated hash codes are resilient to different security and privacy attacks whilst fulfilling the major revocability and unlinkability requirements. Experimental evaluation conducted on 6 datasets of FVC2002 and FVC2004 reveals a high-performance accuracy of the proposed scheme better than other existing state-of-the-art schemes.
The impact of social media presence and board member composition on new venture success: Evidences from VC-backed U.S. startups
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2021
Year: 2021

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of board member composition and board members' social media presence on the performance of startups. Using multiple sources, we compile a unique dataset of about 500 US-based technology startups. We find that startups with more venture capitalists on the board and whose board members are active on Twitter attract additional funding over the years, though they do not generate additional sales. By contrast, startups which have no venture capitalists on the board and whose board members are not on Twitter show an increased ability to translate assets into sales. Consistent with other research, our results indicate that startups potentially benefit from working with VCs because of the opportunity to access additional funding, although their presence does not necessarily translate into sales growth and operational efficiency. We use a number of control variables, including board gender representation and board members' position in the interlocking directorates' network.
Stance Detection with BERT Embeddings for Credibility Analysis of Information on Social Media
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

The evolution of electronic media is a mixed blessing. Due to the easy access, low cost, and faster reach of the information, people search out and devour news from online social networks. In contrast, the increasing acceptance of social media reporting leads to the spread of fake news. This is a minacious problem that causes disputes and endangers societal stability and harmony. Fake news spread has gained attention from researchers due to its vicious nature. proliferation of misinformation in all media, from the internet to cable news, paid advertising and local news outlets, has made it essential for people to identify the misinformation and sort through the facts. Researchers are trying to analyze the credibility of information and curtail false information on such platforms. Credibility is the believability of the piece of information at hand. Analyzing the credibility of fake news is challenging due to the intent of its creation and the polychromatic nature of the news. In this work, we propose a model for detecting fake news. Our method investigates the content of the news at the early stage i.e. when the news is published but is yet to be disseminated through social media. Our work interprets the content with automatic feature extraction and the relevance of the text pieces. In summary, we introduce stance as one of the features along with the content of the article and employ the pre-trained contextualized word embeddings BERT to obtain the state-of-art results for fake news detection. The experiment conducted on the real-world dataset indicates that our model outperforms the previous work and enables fake news detection with an accuracy of 95.32%.