OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
PAN-DOMAIN: Privacy-preserving Sharing and Auditing of Infection Identifier Matching
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

The spread of COVID-19 has highlighted the need for a robust contact tracing infrastructure that enables infected individuals to have their contacts traced, and followed up with a test. The key entities involved within a contact tracing infrastructure may include the Citizen, a Testing Centre (TC), a Health Authority (HA), and a Government Authority (GA). Typically, these different domains need to communicate with each other about an individual. A common approach is when a citizen discloses his personally identifiable information to both the HA a TC, if the test result comes positive, the information is used by the TC to alert the HA. Along with this, there can be other trusted entities that have other key elements of data related to the citizen. However, the existing approaches comprise severe flaws in terms of privacy and security. Additionally, the aforementioned approaches are not transparent and often being questioned for the efficacy of the implementations. In order to overcome the challenges, this paper outlines the PAN-DOMAIN infrastructure that allows for citizen identifiers to be matched amongst the TA, the HA and the GA. PAN-DOMAIN ensures that the citizen can keep control of the mapping between the trusted entities using a trusted converter, and has access to an audit log.
Tracking the QUIC Spin Bit on Tofino
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2021
Year: 2021

QUIC offers security and privacy for modern web traffic by closely integrating encryption into its transport functionality. In this process, it hides transport layer information often used for network monitoring, thus obsoleting traditional measurement concepts. To still enable passive RTT estimations, QUIC introduces a dedicated measurement bit - the spin bit. While simple in its design, tracking the spin bit at line-rate can become challenging for software-based solutions. Dedicated hardware trackers are also unsuitable as the spin bit is not invariant and can change in the future. Thus, this paper investigates whether P4-programmable hardware, such as the Intel Tofino, can effectively track the spin bit at line-rate. We find that the core functionality of the spin bit can be realized easily, and our prototype has an accuracy close to software-based trackers. Our prototype further protects against faulty measurements caused by reordering and prepares the data according to the needs of network operators, e.g., by classifying samples into pre-defined RTT classes. Still, distinct concepts in QUIC, such as its connection ID, are challenging with current hardware capabilities.
Anomaly Detection in IR Images of PV Modules using Supervised Contrastive Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Increasing deployment of photovoltaic (PV) plants requires methods for automatic detection of faulty PV modules in modalities, such as infrared (IR) images. Recently, deep learning has become popular for this. However, related works typically sample train and test data from the same distribution ignoring the presence of domain shift between data of different PV plants. Instead, we frame fault detection as more realistic unsupervised domain adaptation problem where we train on labelled data of one source PV plant and make predictions on another target plant. We train a ResNet-34 convolutional neural network with a supervised contrastive loss, on top of which we employ a k-nearest neighbor classifier to detect anomalies. Our method achieves a satisfactory area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) of 73.3 % to 96.6 % on nine combinations of four source and target datasets with 2.92 million IR images of which 8.5 % are anomalous. It even outperforms a binary cross-entropy classifier in some cases. With a fixed decision threshold this results in 79.4 % and 77.1 % correctly classified normal and anomalous images, respectively. Most misclassified anomalies are of low severity, such as hot diodes and small hot spots. Our method is insensitive to hyperparameter settings, converges quickly and reliably detects unknown types of anomalies making it well suited for practice. Possible uses are in automatic PV plant inspection systems or to streamline manual labelling of IR datasets by filtering out normal images. Furthermore, our work serves the community with a more realistic view on PV module fault detection using unsupervised domain adaptation to develop more performant methods with favorable generalization capabilities.
The artificial synesthete: Image-melody translations with variational autoencoders
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Abstract This project presents a system of neural networks to translate between images and melodies. Autoencoders compress the information in samples to abstract representation. A translation network learns a set of correspondences between musical and visual concepts from repeated joint exposure. The resulting "artificial synesthete" generates simple melodies inspired by images, and images from music. These are novel interpretation (not transposed data), expressing the machine' perception and understanding. Observing the work, one explores the machine's perception and thus, by contrast, one's own.
Flexible-Joint Manipulator Trajectory Tracking with Learned Two-Stage Model employing One-Step Future Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Flexible-joint manipulators are frequently used for increased safety during human-robot collaboration and shared workspace tasks. However, joint flexibility significantly reduces the accuracy of motion, especially at high velocities and with inexpensive actuators. In this paper, we present a learning-based approach to identify the unknown dynamics of a flexible-joint manipulator and improve the trajectory tracking at high velocities. We propose a two-stage model which is composed of a one-step forward dynamics future predictor and an inverse dynamics estimator. The second part is based on linear time-invariant dynamical operators to approximate the feed-forward joint position and velocity commands. We train the model end-to-end on real-world data and evaluate it on the Baxter robot. Our experiments indicate that augmenting the input with one-step future state prediction improves the performance, compared to the same model without prediction. We compare joint position, joint velocity and end-effector position tracking accuracy against the classical baseline controller and several simpler models.
TaskDrop: A Competitive Baseline for Continual Learning of Sentiment Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we study the multi-task sentiment classification problem in the continual learning setting, i.e., a model is sequentially trained to classifier the sentiment of reviews of products in a particular category. The use of common sentiment words in reviews of different product categories leads to large cross-task similarity, which differentiates it from continual learning in other domains. This knowledge sharing nature renders forgetting reduction focused approaches less effective for the problem under consideration. Unlike existing approaches, where task-specific masks are learned with specifically presumed training objectives, we propose an approach called Task-aware Dropout (TaskDrop) to generate masks in a random way. While the standard dropout generates and applies random masks for each training instance per epoch for effective regularization, TaskDrop applies random masking for task-wise capacity allocation and reuse. We conducted experimental studies on three multi-task review datasets and made comparison to various baselines and state-of-the-art approaches. Our empirical results show that regardless of simplicity, TaskDrop overall achieved competitive performances for all the three datasets, especially after relative long term learning. This demonstrates that the proposed random capacity allocation mechanism works well for continual sentiment classification.
What goes on inside rumour and non-rumour tweets and their reactions: A Psycholinguistic Analyses
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

In recent years, the problem of rumours on online social media (OSM) has attracted lots of attention. Researchers have started investigating from two main directions. First is the descriptive analysis of rumours and secondly, proposing techniques to detect (or classify) rumours. In the descriptive line of works, where researchers have tried to analyse rumours using NLP approaches, there isnt much emphasis on psycho-linguistics analyses of social media text. These kinds of analyses on rumour case studies are vital for drawing meaningful conclusions to mitigate misinformation. For our analysis, we explored the PHEME9 rumour dataset (consisting of 9 events), including source tweets (both rumour and non-rumour categories) and response tweets. We compared the rumour and nonrumour source tweets and then their corresponding reply (response) tweets to understand how they differ linguistically for every incident. Furthermore, we also evaluated if these features can be used for classifying rumour vs. non-rumour tweets through machine learning models. To this end, we employed various classical and ensemble-based approaches. To filter out the highly discriminative psycholinguistic features, we explored the SHAP AI Explainability tool. To summarise, this research contributes by performing an in-depth psycholinguistic analysis of rumours related to various kinds of events.
Weakly Supervised Prototype Topic Model with Discriminative Seed Words: Modifying the Category Prior by Self-exploring Supervised Signals
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Dataless text classification, i.e., a new paradigm of weakly supervised learning, refers to the task of learning with unlabeled documents and a few predefined representative words of categories, known as seed words. The recent generative dataless methods construct document-specific category priors by using seed word occurrences only, however, such category priors often contain very limited and even noisy supervised signals. To remedy this problem, in this paper we propose a novel formulation of category prior. First, for each document, we consider its label membership degree by not only counting seed word occurrences, but also using a novel prototype scheme, which captures pseudo-nearest neighboring categories. Second, for each label, we consider its frequency prior knowledge of the corpus, which is also a discriminative knowledge for classification. By incorporating the proposed category prior into the previous generative dataless method, we suggest a novel generative dataless method, namely Weakly Supervised Prototype Topic Model (WSPTM). The experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate that WSPTM outperforms the existing baseline methods.
Optimized Deployment of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Wildfire Detection and Monitoring
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

In recent years, increased wildfires have caused irreversible damage to forest resources worldwide, threatening wildlives and human living conditions. The lack of accurate frontline information in real-time can pose great risks to firefighters. Though a plethora of machine learning algorithms have been developed to detect wildfires using aerial images and videos captured by drones, there is a lack of methods corresponding to drone deployment. We propose a wildfire rapid response system that optimizes the number and relative positions of drones to achieve full coverage of the whole wildfire area. Trained on the data from historical wildfire events, our model evaluates the possibility of wildfires at different scales and accordingly allocates the resources. It adopts plane geometry to deploy drones while balancing the capability and safety with inequality constrained nonlinear programming. The method can flexibly adapt to different terrains and the dynamic extension of the wildfire area. Lastly, the operation cost under extreme wildfire circumstances can be assessed upon the completion of the deployment. We applied our model to the wildfire data collected from eastern Victoria, Australia, and demonstrated its great potential in the real world.
Isomer: Transfer enhanced Dual-Channel Heterogeneous Dependency Attention Network for Aspect-based Sentiment Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Aspect-based sentiment classification aims to predict the sentiment polarity of a specific aspect in a sentence. However, most existing methods attempt to construct dependency relations into a homogeneous dependency graph with the sparsity and ambiguity, which cannot cover the comprehensive contextualized features of short texts or consider any additional node types or semantic relation information. To solve those issues, we present a sentiment analysis model named Isomer, which performs a dual-channel attention on heterogeneous dependency graphs incorporating external knowledge, to effectively integrate other additional information. Specifically, a transfer-enhanced dual-channel heterogeneous dependency attention network is devised in Isomer to model short texts using heterogeneous dependency graphs. These heterogeneous dependency graphs not only consider different types of information but also incorporate external knowledge. Experiments studies show that our model outperforms recent models on benchmark datasets. Furthermore, the results suggest that our method captures the importance of various information features to focus on informative contextual words.
Temporal-Spatial Causal Interpretations for Vision-Based Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents are becoming increasingly proficient in a range of complex control tasks. However, the agent's behavior is usually difficult to interpret due to the introduction of black-box function, making it difficult to acquire the trust of users. Although there have been some interesting interpretation methods for vision-based RL, most of them cannot uncover temporal causal information, raising questions about their reliability. To address this problem, we present a temporal-spatial causal interpretation (TSCI) model to understand the agent's long-term behavior, which is essential for sequential decision-making. TSCI model builds on the formulation of temporal causality, which reflects the temporal causal relations between sequential observations and decisions of RL agent. Then a separate causal discovery network is employed to identify temporal-spatial causal features, which are constrained to satisfy the temporal causality. TSCI model is applicable to recurrent agents and can be used to discover causal features with high efficiency once trained. The empirical results show that TSCI model can produce high-resolution and sharp attention masks to highlight task-relevant temporal-spatial information that constitutes most evidence about how vision-based RL agents make sequential decisions. In addition, we further demonstrate that our method is able to provide valuable causal interpretations for vision-based RL agents from the temporal perspective.
Domain-oriented Language Pre-training with Adaptive Hybrid Masking and Optimal Transport Alignment
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Motivated by the success of pre-trained language models such as BERT in a broad range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, recent research efforts have been made for adapting these models for different application domains. Along this line, existing domain-oriented models have primarily followed the vanilla BERT architecture and have a straightforward use of the domain corpus. However, domain-oriented tasks usually require accurate understanding of domain phrases, and such fine-grained phrase-level knowledge is hard to be captured by existing pre-training scheme. Also, the word co-occurrences guided semantic learning of pre-training models can be largely augmented by entity-level association knowledge. But meanwhile, by doing so there is a risk of introducing noise due to the lack of groundtruth word-level alignment. To address the above issues, we provide a generalized domain-oriented approach, which leverages auxiliary domain knowledge to improve the existing pre-training framework from two aspects. First, to preserve phrase knowledge effectively, we build a domain phrase pool as auxiliary training tool, meanwhile we introduce Adaptive Hybrid Masked Model to incorporate such knowledge. It integrates two learning modes, word learning and phrase learning, and allows them to switch between each other. Second, we introduce Cross Entity Alignment to leverage entity association as weak supervision to augment the semantic learning of pre-trained models. To alleviate the potential noise in this process, we introduce an interpretable Optimal Transport based approach to guide alignment learning. Experiments on four domain-oriented tasks demonstrate the superiority of our framework.
On the algebraic structures of the space of interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy numbers
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

This study is inspired by those of Huang et al. (Soft Comput. 25, 2513--2520, 2021) and Wang et al. (Inf. Sci. 179, 3026--3040, 2009) in which some ranking techniques for interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy numbers (IVIFNs) were introduced. In this study, we prove that the space of all IVIFNs with the relation in the method for comparing any two IVIFNs based on a score function and three types of entropy functions is a complete chain and obtain that this relation is an admissible order. Moreover, we demonstrate that IVIFNs are complete chains to the relation in the comparison method for IVIFNs on the basis of score, accuracy, membership uncertainty index, and hesitation uncertainty index functions.
Keeping it Simple: Language Models can learn Complex Molecular Distributions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Deep generative models of molecules have grown immensely in popularity, trained on relevant datasets, these models are used to search through chemical space. The downstream utility of generative models for the inverse design of novel functional compounds depends on their ability to learn a training distribution of molecules. The most simple example is a language model that takes the form of a recurrent neural network and generates molecules using a string representation. More sophisticated are graph generative models, which sequentially construct molecular graphs and typically achieve state of the art results. However, recent work has shown that language models are more capable than once thought, particularly in the low data regime. In this work, we investigate the capacity of simple language models to learn distributions of molecules. For this purpose, we introduce several challenging generative modeling tasks by compiling especially complex distributions of molecules. On each task, we evaluate the ability of language models as compared with two widely used graph generative models. The results demonstrate that language models are powerful generative models, capable of adeptly learning complex molecular distributions -- and yield better performance than the graph models. Language models can accurately generate: distributions of the highest scoring penalized LogP molecules in ZINC15, multi-modal molecular distributions as well as the largest molecules in PubChem.
Active Learning Meets Optimized Item Selection
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

Designing recommendation systems with limited or no available training data remains a challenge. To that end, a new combinatorial optimization problem is formulated to generate optimized item selection for experimentation with the goal to shorten the time for collecting randomized training data. We first present an overview of the optimized item selection problem and a multi-level optimization framework to solve it. The approach integrates techniques from discrete optimization, unsupervised clustering, and latent text embeddings. We then discuss how to incorporate optimized item selection with active learning as part of randomized exploration in an ongoing fashion.
UniLog: Deploy One Model and Specialize it for All Log Analysis Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2021
Year: 2021

UniLog: Deploy One Model and Specialize it for All Log Analysis Tasks
Tele-EvalNet: A Low-cost, Teleconsultation System for Home based Rehabilitation of Stroke Survivors using Multiscale CNN-LSTM Architecture
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Technology has an important role to play in the field of Rehabilitation, improving patient outcomes and reducing healthcare costs. However, existing approaches lack clinical validation, robustness and ease of use. We propose Tele-EvalNet, a novel system consisting of two components: a live feedback model and an overall performance evaluation model. The live feedback model demonstrates feedback on exercise correctness with easy to understand instructions highlighted using color markers. The overall performance evaluation model learns a mapping of joint data to scores, given to the performance by clinicians. The model does this by extracting clinically approved features from joint data. Further, these features are encoded to a lower dimensional space with an autoencoder. A novel multi-scale CNN-LSTM network is proposed to learn a mapping of performance data to the scores by leveraging features extracted at multiple scales. The proposed system shows a high degree of improvement in score predictions and outperforms the state-of-the-art rehabilitation models.
SIMD-Optimized Search Over Sorted Data
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

Applications often require a fast, single-threaded search algorithm over sorted data, typical in table-lookup operations. We explore various search algorithms for a large number of search candidates over a relatively small array of logarithmically-distributed sorted data. These include an innovative hash-based search that takes advantage of floating point representation to bin data by the exponent. Algorithms that can be optimized to take advantage of SIMD vector instructions are of particular interest. We then conduct a case study applying our results and analyzing algorithmic performance with the EOSPAC package. EOSPAC is a table look-up library for manipulation and interpolation of SESAME equation-of-state data. Our investigation results in a couple of algorithms with better performance with a best case 8x speedup over the original EOSPAC Hunt-and-Locate implementation. Our techniques are generalizable to other instances of search algorithms seeking to get a performance boost from vectorization.
Learning Connectivity with Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-based Action Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Learning graph convolutional networks (GCNs) is an emerging field which aims at generalizing convolutional operations to arbitrary non-regular domains. In particular, GCNs operating on spatial domains show superior performances compared to spectral ones, however their success is highly dependent on how the topology of input graphs is defined. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework for graph convolutional networks that learns the topological properties of graphs. The design principle of our method is based on the optimization of a constrained objective function which learns not only the usual convolutional parameters in GCNs but also a transformation basis that conveys the most relevant topological relationships in these graphs. Experiments conducted on the challenging task of skeleton-based action recognition shows the superiority of the proposed method compared to handcrafted graph design as well as the related work.