OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Learning Spatial and Temporal Variations for 4D Point Cloud Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

LiDAR-based 3D scene perception is a fundamental and important task for autonomous driving. Most state-of-the-art methods on LiDAR-based 3D recognition tasks focus on single frame 3D point cloud data, and the temporal information is ignored in those methods. We argue that the temporal information across the frames provides crucial knowledge for 3D scene perceptions, especially in the driving scenario. In this paper, we focus on spatial and temporal variations to better explore the temporal information across the 3D frames. We design a temporal variation-aware interpolation module and a temporal voxel-point refiner to capture the temporal variation in the 4D point cloud. The temporal variation-aware interpolation generates local features from the previous and current frames by capturing spatial coherence and temporal variation information. The temporal voxel-point refiner builds a temporal graph on the 3D point cloud sequences and captures the temporal variation with a graph convolution module. The temporal voxel-point refiner also transforms the coarse voxel-level predictions into fine point-level predictions. With our proposed modules, the new network TVSN achieves state-of-the-art performance on SemanticKITTI and SemantiPOSS. Specifically, our method achieves 52.5\% in mIoU (+5.5% against previous best approaches) on the multiple scan segmentation task on SemanticKITTI, and 63.0% on SemanticPOSS (+2.8% against previous best approaches).
(Nearly) Optimal Private Linear Regression via Adaptive Clipping
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

We study the problem of differentially private linear regression where each data point is sampled from a fixed sub-Gaussian style distribution. We propose and analyze a one-pass mini-batch stochastic gradient descent method (DP-AMBSSGD) where points in each iteration are sampled without replacement. Noise is added for DP but the noise standard deviation is estimated online. Compared to existing $(ε, δ)$-DP techniques which have sub-optimal error bounds, DP-AMBSSGD is able to provide nearly optimal error bounds in terms of key parameters like dimensionality $d$, number of points $N$, and the standard deviation $σ$ of the noise in observations. For example, when the $d$-dimensional covariates are sampled i.i.d. from the normal distribution, then the excess error of DP-AMBSSGD due to privacy is $\frac{σ^2 d}{N}(1+\frac{d}{ε^2 N})$, i.e., the error is meaningful when number of samples $N= Ω(d \log d)$ which is the standard operative regime for linear regression. In contrast, error bounds for existing efficient methods in this setting are: $\mathcal{O}\big(\frac{d^3}{ε^2 N^2}\big)$, even for $σ=0$. That is, for constant $ε$, the existing techniques require $N=Ω(d\sqrt{d})$ to provide a non-trivial result.
Identifying public values and spatial conflicts in urban planning
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

Identifying the diverse and often competing values of citizens, and resolving the consequent public value conflicts, are of significant importance for inclusive and integrated urban development. Scholars have highlighted that relational, value-laden urban space gives rise to many diverse conflicts that vary both spatially and temporally. Although notions of public value conflicts have been conceived in theory, there are very few empirical studies that identify such values and their conflicts in urban space. Building on public value theory and using a case-study mixed-methods approach, this paper proposes a new approach to empirically investigate public value conflicts in urban space. Using unstructured participatory data of 4,528 citizen contributions from a Public Participation Geographic Information Systems in Hamburg, Germany, natural language processing and spatial clustering techniques are used to identify areas of potential value conflicts. Four expert workshops assess and interpret these quantitative findings. Integrating both quantitative and qualitative results, 19 general public values and a total of 9 archetypical conflicts are identified. On the basis of these results, this paper proposes a new conceptual tool of Public Value Spheres that extends the theoretical notion of public-value conflicts and helps to further account for the value-laden nature of urban space.
A Miniature 3-DoF Flexible Parallel Robotic Wrist Using NiTi Wires for Gastrointestinal Endoscopic Surgery
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Gastrointestinal endoscopic surgery (GES) has high requirements for instruments' size and distal dexterity, because of the narrow endoscopic channel and long, tortuous human gastrointestinal tract. This paper utilized Nickel-Titanium (NiTi) wires to develop a miniature 3-DoF (pitch-yaw-translation) flexible parallel robotic wrist (FPRW). Additionally, we assembled an electric knife on the wrist's connection interface and then teleoperated it to perform an endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD) on porcine stomachs. The effective performance in each ESD workflow proves that the designed FPRW has sufficient workspace, high distal dexterity, and high positioning accuracy.
Leader-Follower Dynamics in Complex Obstacle Avoidance Task
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

A question that many researchers in social robotics are addressing is how to create more human-like behaviour in robots to make the collaboration between a human and a robot more intuitive to the human partner. In order to develop a human-like collaborative robotic system, however, human collaboration must first be better understood. Human collaboration is something we are all familiar with, however not that much is known about it from a kinematic standpoint. One dynamic that hasn't been researched thoroughly, yet naturally occurs in human collaboration, is for instance leader-follower dynamics. In our previous study, we tackled the question of leader-follower role allocation in human dyads during a collaborative reaching task, where the results implied that the subjects who performed higher in the individual experiment would naturally assume the role of a leader when in physical collaboration. In this study, we build upon the leader-follower role allocation study in human dyads by observing how the leader-follower dynamics change when the collaborative task becomes more complex. Here, the study was performed on a reaching task, where one subject in a dyad was faced with an additional task of obstacle avoidance when performing a 2D reaching task, while their partner was not aware of the obstacle. We have found that subjects change their roles throughout the task in order to complete it successfully, however looking at the overall task leader the higher-performing individual will always dominate over the lower-performing one, regardless of whether they are aware of the additional task of obstacle avoidance or not.
TArC: Tunisian Arabish Corpus First complete release
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper we present the final result of a project on Tunisian Arabic encoded in Arabizi, the Latin-based writing system for digital conversations. The project led to the creation of two integrated and independent resources: a corpus and a NLP tool created to annotate the former with various levels of linguistic information: word classification, transliteration, tokenization, POS-tagging, lemmatization. We discuss our choices in terms of computational and linguistic methodology and the strategies adopted to improve our results. We report on the experiments performed in order to outline our research path. Finally, we explain why we believe in the potential of these resources for both computational and linguistic researches. Keywords: Tunisian Arabizi, Annotated Corpus, Neural Network Architecture
Long-term Reproducibility for Neural Architecture Search
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

It is a sad reflection of modern academia that code is often ignored after publication -- there is no academic 'kudos' for bug fixes / maintenance. Code is often unavailable or, if available, contains bugs, is incomplete, or relies on out-of-date / unavailable libraries. This has a significant impact on reproducibility and general scientific progress. Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is no exception to this, with some prior work in reproducibility. However, we argue that these do not consider long-term reproducibility issues. We therefore propose a checklist for long-term NAS reproducibility. We evaluate our checklist against common NAS approaches along with proposing how we can retrospectively make these approaches more long-term reproducible.
Low-complexity Joint Phase Adjustment and Receive Beamforming for Directional Modulation Networks via IRS
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a revolutionary and low-cost technology for boosting the spectrum and energy efficiencies in future wireless communication network. In order to create controllable multipath transmission in the conventional line-of-sight (LOS) wireless communication environment, an IRS-aided directional modulation (DM) network is considered. In this paper, to improve the transmission security of the system and maximize the receive power sum (Max-RPS), two alternately optimizing schemes of jointly designing receive beamforming (RBF) vectors and IRS phase shift matrix (PSM) are proposed: Max-RPS using general alternating optimization (Max-RPS-GAO) algorithm and Max-RPS using zero-forcing (Max-RPS-ZF) algorithm. Simulation results show that, compared with the no-IRS-assisted scheme and the no-PSM optimization scheme, the proposed IRS-assisted Max-RPS-GAO method and Max-RPS-ZF method can significantly improve the secrecy rate (SR) performance of the DM system. Moreover, compared with the Max-RPS-GAO method, the proposed Max-RPS-ZF method has a faster convergence speed and a certain lower computational complexity.
RRMSE Voting Regressor: A weighting function based improvement to ensemble regression
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

This paper describes the RRMSE (Relative Root Mean Square Error) based weights to weight the occurrences of predictive values before averaging for the ensemble voting regression. The core idea behind ensemble regression is to combine several base regression models in order to improve the prediction performance in learning problems with a numeric continuous target variable. The default weights setting for the ensemble voting regression is uniform weights, and without domain knowledge of learning task, assigning weights for predictions are impossible, which makes it very difficult to improve the predictions. This work attempts to improve the prediction of voting regression by implementing the RRMSE based weighting function. Experiments show that RRMSE voting regressor produces significantly better predictions than other state-of-the-art ensemble regression algorithms on six popular regression learning datasets.
TIPS: Transaction Inclusion Protocol with Signaling in DAG-based Blockchain
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) is a popular approach to achieve scalability of blockchain networks. Due to its high efficiency in data communication and great scalability, DAG has been widely adopted in many applications such as Internet of Things (IoT) and Decentralized Finance (DeFi). DAG-based blockchain, nevertheless, faces the key challenge of transaction inclusion collision due to the high concurrency and the network delay. Particularly, the transaction inclusion collision in DAG-based blockchain leads to the revenue and throughput dilemmas, which would greatly degrade the system performance. In this paper, we propose "TIPS", the Transaction Inclusion Protocol with Signaling, which broadcasts a signal indicating the transactions in the block. We show that with the prompt broadcast of a signal, TIPS substantially reduces the transaction collision and thus resolves these dilemmas. Moreover, we show that TIPS can defend against both the denial-of-service and the delay-of-service attacks. We also conduct intensive experiments to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed protocol.
Experimental End-To-End Delay Analysis of LTE cat-M With High-Rate Synchrophasor Communications
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

Micro-Phasor Measurement Units (u-PMUs) are devices that permit monitoring voltage and current in the distribution grid with high accuracy, thus enabling a wide range of smart grid applications, such as state estimation, protection and control. These devices need to transmit the synchronous measurements of voltage and current, also known as synchrophasors, to the power utility control center at high rate. The use of wireless networks, such as LTE, to transmit synchrophasor data is becoming increasingly popular. However, synchrophasors are included in small frames and it would be more efficient to use low power cellular solutions, such as LTE cat-M. In this work, we present experimental research on the deployment of a u-PMU with the ability to connect over a commercial LTE cat-M network. The deployed u-PMU is built with off-the-shelf hardware, such as Arduino microcontrollers, and is used to transmit data-compliant with the IEEE C37.118.2 standard at a variable rate from 1 frame/s to 80 frames/s. A detailed network performance analysis is carried out to show the suitability of LTE cat-M to support u-PMU communications. Experimental results on performance indicators, such as delay and jitter, are reported. The effect of the LTE cat-M access mechanism on the time distribution of frame arrivals is also thoroughly analyzed.
Linear Leaky-Integrate-and-Fire Neuron Model Based Spiking Neural Networks and Its Mapping Relationship to Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2022
Year: 2022

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are brain-inspired machine learning algorithms with merits such as biological plausibility and unsupervised learning capability. Previous works have shown that converting Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) into SNNs is a practical and efficient approach for implementing an SNN. However, the basic principle and theoretical groundwork are lacking for training a non-accuracy-loss SNN. This paper establishes a precise mathematical mapping between the biological parameters of the Linear Leaky-Integrate-and-Fire model (LIF)/SNNs and the parameters of ReLU-AN/Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Such mapping relationship is analytically proven under certain conditions and demonstrated by simulation and real data experiments. It can serve as the theoretical basis for the potential combination of the respective merits of the two categories of neural networks.
Online bin stretching lower bounds: Improved search of computational proofs
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2022
Year: 2022

Computing lower and upper bounds on the competitive ratio of online algorithms is a challenging question: For a minimization combinatorial problem, proving a competitive ratio for a given algorithm leads to an upper bound. However computing lower bounds requires a proof on all algorithms. This can be modeled as a 2-player game where a strategy for one of the players is a proof for the lower bound. The tree representing the proof can can be found computationally. This method has been used with success on the online bin stretching problem where a set of items must be packed online in $m$ bins. The items are guaranteed to fit into the $m$ bins. However, the online procedure might require to stretch the bins to a larger capacity in order to be able to pack all the items. This stretching factor is the objective to be minimized. We propose original ideas to strongly improve the speed of computer searches for lower bound: propagate the game states that can be pruned from the search and improve the speed and memory usage in the dynamic program which is used in the search. These improvements allowed to increase significantly the speed of the search and hence to prove new lower bounds for the bin stretching problem for 6, 7 and 8 bins.
Submodular Dominance and Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

In submodular optimization we often deal with the expected value of a submodular function $f$ on a distribution $\mathcal{D}$ over sets of elements. In this work we study such submodular expectations for negatively dependent distributions. We introduce a natural notion of negative dependence, which we call Weak Negative Regression (WNR), that generalizes both Negative Association and Negative Regression. We observe that WNR distributions satisfy Submodular Dominance, whereby the expected value of $f$ under $\mathcal{D}$ is at least the expected value of $f$ under a product distribution with the same element-marginals. Next, we give several applications of Submodular Dominance to submodular optimization. In particular, we improve the best known submodular prophet inequalities, we develop new rounding techniques for polytopes of set systems that admit negatively dependent distributions, and we prove existence of contention resolution schemes for WNR distributions.
TASKOGRAPHY: Evaluating robot task planning over large 3D scene graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

3D scene graphs (3DSGs) are an emerging description; unifying symbolic, topological, and metric scene representations. However, typical 3DSGs contain hundreds of objects and symbols even for small environments; rendering task planning on the full graph impractical. We construct TASKOGRAPHY, the first large-scale robotic task planning benchmark over 3DSGs. While most benchmarking efforts in this area focus on vision-based planning, we systematically study symbolic planning, to decouple planning performance from visual representation learning. We observe that, among existing methods, neither classical nor learning-based planners are capable of real-time planning over full 3DSGs. Enabling real-time planning demands progress on both (a) sparsifying 3DSGs for tractable planning and (b) designing planners that better exploit 3DSG hierarchies. Towards the former goal, we propose SCRUB, a task-conditioned 3DSG sparsification method; enabling classical planners to match and in some cases surpass state-of-the-art learning-based planners. Towards the latter goal, we propose SEEK, a procedure enabling learning-based planners to exploit 3DSG structure, reducing the number of replanning queries required by current best approaches by an order of magnitude. We will open-source all code and baselines to spur further research along the intersections of robot task planning, learning and 3DSGs.
Discovering Domain Disentanglement for Generalized Multi-source Domain Adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

A typical multi-source domain adaptation (MSDA) approach aims to transfer knowledge learned from a set of labeled source domains, to an unlabeled target domain. Nevertheless, prior works strictly assume that each source domain shares the identical group of classes with the target domain, which could hardly be guaranteed as the target label space is not observable. In this paper, we consider a more versatile setting of MSDA, namely Generalized Multi-source Domain Adaptation, wherein the source domains are partially overlapped, and the target domain is allowed to contain novel categories that are not presented in any source domains. This new setting is more elusive than any existing domain adaptation protocols due to the coexistence of the domain and category shifts across the source and target domains. To address this issue, we propose a variational domain disentanglement (VDD) framework, which decomposes the domain representations and semantic features for each instance by encouraging dimension-wise independence. To identify the target samples of unknown classes, we leverage online pseudo labeling, which assigns the pseudo-labels to unlabeled target data based on the confidence scores. Quantitative and qualitative experiments conducted on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the validity of the proposed framework.
Horizontal Federated Learning and Secure Distributed Training for Recommendation System with Intel SGX
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

With the advent of big data era and the development of artificial intelligence and other technologies, data security and privacy protection have become more important. Recommendation systems have many applications in our society, but the model construction of recommendation systems is often inseparable from users' data. Especially for deep learning-based recommendation systems, due to the complexity of the model and the characteristics of deep learning itself, its training process not only requires long training time and abundant computational resources but also needs to use a large amount of user data, which poses a considerable challenge in terms of data security and privacy protection. How to train a distributed recommendation system while ensuring data security has become an urgent problem to be solved. In this paper, we implement two schemes, Horizontal Federated Learning and Secure Distributed Training, based on Intel SGX(Software Guard Extensions), an implementation of a trusted execution environment, and TensorFlow framework, to achieve secure, distributed recommendation system-based learning schemes in different scenarios. We experiment on the classical Deep Learning Recommendation Model (DLRM), which is a neural network-based machine learning model designed for personalization and recommendation, and the results show that our implementation introduces approximately no loss in model performance. The training speed is within acceptable limits.
An Interpretable Joint Nonnegative Matrix Factorization-Based Point Cloud Distance Measure
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we propose a new method for determining shared features of and measuring the distance between data sets or point clouds. Our approach uses the joint factorization of two data matrices $X_1,X_2$ into non-negative matrices $X_1 = AS_1, X_2 = AS_2$ to derive a similarity measure that determines how well the shared basis $A$ approximates $X_1, X_2$. We also propose a point cloud distance measure built upon this method and the learned factorization. Our method reveals structural differences in both image and text data. Potential applications include classification, detecting plagiarism or other manipulation, data denoising, and transfer learning.