OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Hierarchical Policy Design for Sample-Efficient Learning of Robot Table Tennis Through Self-Play
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

Training robots with physical bodies requires developing new methods and action representations that allow the learning agents to explore the space of policies efficiently. This work studies sample-efficient learning of complex policies in the context of robot table tennis. It incorporates learning into a hierarchical control framework using a model-free strategy layer (which requires complex reasoning about opponents that is difficult to do in a model-based way), model-based prediction of external objects (which are difficult to control directly with analytic control methods, but governed by learnable and relatively simple laws of physics), and analytic controllers for the robot itself. Human demonstrations are used to train dynamics models, which together with the analytic controller allow any robot that is physically capable to play table tennis without training episodes. Using only about 7,000 demonstrated trajectories, a striking policy can hit ball targets with about 20 cm error. Self-play is used to train cooperative and adversarial strategies on top of model-based striking skills trained from human demonstrations. After only about 24,000 strikes in self-play the agent learns to best exploit the human dynamics models for longer cooperative games. Further experiments demonstrate that more flexible variants of the policy can discover new strikes not demonstrated by humans and achieve higher performance at the expense of lower sample-efficiency. Experiments are carried out in a virtual reality environment using sensory observations that are obtainable in the real world. The high sample-efficiency demonstrated in the evaluations show that the proposed method is suitable for learning directly on physical robots without transfer of models or policies from simulation. Supplementary material available at https://sites.google.com/view/robottabletennis
Online Abstraction with MDP Homomorphisms for Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Abstraction of Markov Decision Processes is a useful tool for solving complex problems, as it can ignore unimportant aspects of an environment, simplifying the process of learning an optimal policy. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for finding abstract MDPs in environments with continuous state spaces. It is based on MDP homomorphisms, a structure-preserving mapping between MDPs. We demonstrate our algorithm's ability to learn abstractions from collected experience and show how to reuse the abstractions to guide exploration in new tasks the agent encounters. Our novel task transfer method outperforms baselines based on a deep Q-network in the majority of our experiments. The source code is at https://github.com/ondrejba/aamas_19.
Discovering Molecular Functional Groups Using Graph Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Functional groups (FGs) are molecular substructures that are served as a foundation for analyzing and predicting chemical properties of molecules. Automatic discovery of FGs will impact various fields of research, including medicinal chemistry and material sciences, by reducing the amount of lab experiments required for discovery or synthesis of new molecules. In this paper, we investigate methods based on graph convolutional neural networks (GCNNs) for localizing FGs that contribute to specific chemical properties of interest. In our framework, molecules are modeled as undirected relational graphs with atoms as nodes and bonds as edges. Using this relational graph structure, we trained GCNNs in a supervised way on experimentally-validated molecular training sets to predict specific chemical properties, e.g., toxicity. Upon learning a GCNN, we analyzed its activation patterns to automatically identify FGs using four different explainability methods that we have developed: gradient-based saliency maps, Class Activation Mapping (CAM), gradient-weighted CAM (Grad-CAM), and Excitation Back-Propagation. Although these methods are originally derived for convolutional neural networks (CNNs), we adapt them to develop the corresponding suitable versions for GCNNs. We evaluated the contrastive power of these methods with respect to the specificity of the identified molecular substructures and their relevance for chemical functions. Grad-CAM had the highest contrastive power and generated qualitatively the best FGs. This work paves the way for automatic analysis and design of new molecules.
Efficient Butterfly Counting for Large Bipartite Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2019
Year: 2019

Bipartite networks are of great importance in many real-world applications. In bipartite networks, butterfly (i.e., a complete 2 x 2 biclique) is the smallest non-trivial cohesive structure and plays a key role. In this paper, we study the problem of efficient counting the number of butterflies in bipartite networks. The most advanced techniques are based on enumerating wedges which is the dominant cost of counting butterflies. Nevertheless, the existing algorithms cannot efficiently handle large-scale bipartite networks. This becomes a bottleneck in large-scale applications. In this paper, instead of the existing layer-priority-based techniques, we propose a vertex-priority-based paradigm BFC-VP to enumerate much fewer wedges; this leads to a significant improvement of the time complexity of the state-of-the-art algorithms. In addition, we present cache-aware strategies to further improve time efficiency while theoretically retaining the time complexity of BFC-VP. Moreover, we also show that our proposed techniques can work efficiently in external and parallel contexts. Our extensive empirical studies demonstrate that the proposed techniques can speed up the state-of-the-art techniques by up to two orders of magnitude for the real datasets.
Nonlinear Stochastic Position and Attitude Filter on the Special Euclidean Group 3
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2019
Year: 2019

This paper formulates the pose estimation problem as nonlinear stochastic filter kinematics evolved directly on the Special Euclidean Group SE(3). Proposed filter guarantees that the errors present in position and Rodriguez vector estimates are semi-globally uniformly ultimately bounded (SGUUB) in mean square, and that they converge to small neighborhood of the origin in probability. Simulation results show the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed filter in presence of high levels of noise and bias associated with the velocity vector as well as body-frame measurements. Keywords: Pose estimator, pose observer, attitude estimate, control, estimator, observer, Nonlinear stochastic pose filter, stochastic differential equations, Brownian motion process, Ito, Stratonovich, Wong Zakai, unit-quaternion, special orthogonal group, homogeneous transformation matrix, complimentary filter, Euler angles, Angle-axis, mapping, Parameterization, Representation, Robust, Multiplicative Extended Kalman Filter, Unscented Kalman Filter, Particle filter, KF, EKF, IEKF, UKF, MEKF, partial derivative, small, dynamics, equilibrium, asymptotic, covariance, expected value, zero, unknown, time-varying, global, semi-global, stable, stability, uncertain, Gaussian, colored, white, noise, vectorial measurement, vector measurement, translational velocity, angular velocity, singular value decomposition, rotational matrix, identity, deterministic, comparison, inertial frame, rigid body, three dimensional, 3D, space, adjoint, Lie group, projection, landmark, feature, Gyroscope, micro electromechanical systems, Inertial measurement units, sensor, IMUs, Fixed, moving, orientation, Roll, Pitch, Yaw, SVD, UAVs, QUAV, unmanned, underwater vehicle, robot, Robotic System, Spacecraft, quadrotor, quadcopter, integral, advantage, disadvantage, Comparative study, Review, Overview, Survey, autonomous, xyz, axis, SO(3), SE(3).
LEAF: A Benchmark for Federated Settings
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Modern federated networks, such as those comprised of wearable devices, mobile phones, or autonomous vehicles, generate massive amounts of data each day. This wealth of data can help to learn models that can improve the user experience on each device. However, the scale and heterogeneity of federated data presents new challenges in research areas such as federated learning, meta-learning, and multi-task learning. As the machine learning community begins to tackle these challenges, we are at a critical time to ensure that developments made in these areas are grounded with realistic benchmarks. To this end, we propose LEAF, a modular benchmarking framework for learning in federated settings. LEAF includes a suite of open-source federated datasets, a rigorous evaluation framework, and a set of reference implementations, all geared towards capturing the obstacles and intricacies of practical federated environments.
Determinant Codes with Helper-Independent Repair for Single and Multiple Failures
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

Determinant codes are a class of exact-repair regenerating codes for distributed storage systems with parameters (n, k = d, d). These codes cover the entire trade-off between per-node storage and repair-bandwidth. In an earlier work of the authors, the repair data of the determinant code sent by a helper node to repair a failed node depends on the identity of the other helper nodes participating in the process, which is practically undesired. In this work, a new repair mechanism is proposed for determinant codes, which relaxes this dependency, while preserving all other properties of the code. Moreover, it is shown that the determinant codes are capable of repairing multiple failures, with a per-node repair-bandwidth which scales sub-linearly with the number of failures.
Topologically Trivial Closed Walks in Directed Surface Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2019
Year: 2019

Let $G$ be a directed graph with $n$ vertices and $m$ edges, embedded on a surface $S$, possibly with boundary, with first Betti number $β$. We consider the complexity of finding closed directed walks in $G$ that are either contractible (trivial in homotopy) or bounding (trivial in integer homology) in $S$. Specifically, we describe algorithms to determine whether $G$ contains a simple contractible cycle in $O(n+m)$ time, or a contractible closed walk in $O(n+m)$ time, or a bounding closed walk in $O(β(n+m))$ time. Our algorithms rely on subtle relationships between strong connectivity in $G$ and in the dual graph $G^*$; our contractible-closed-walk algorithm also relies on a seminal topological result of Hass and Scott. We also prove that detecting simple bounding cycles is NP-hard. We also describe three polynomial-time algorithms to compute shortest contractible closed walks, depending on whether the fundamental group of the surface is free, abelian, or hyperbolic. A key step in our algorithm for hyperbolic surfaces is the construction of a context-free grammar with $O(g^2L^2)$ non-terminals that generates all contractible closed walks of length at most L, and only contractible closed walks, in a system of quads of genus $g\ge2$. Finally, we show that computing shortest simple contractible cycles, shortest simple bounding cycles, and shortest bounding closed walks are all NP-hard.
Multilevel MIMO Detection with Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

A quasi-static flat multiple-antenna channel is considered. We show how real multilevel modulation symbols can be detected via deep neural networks. A multi-plateau sigmoid function is introduced. Then, after showing the DNN architecture for detection, we propose a twin-network neural structure. Batch size and training statistics for efficient learning are investigated. Near-Maximum-Likelihood performance with a relatively reasonable number of parameters is achieved.
Knowing what you know in brain segmentation using Bayesian deep neural networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we describe a Bayesian deep neural network (DNN) for predicting FreeSurfer segmentations of structural MRI volumes, in minutes rather than hours. The network was trained and evaluated on a large dataset (n = 11,480), obtained by combining data from more than a hundred different sites, and also evaluated on another completely held-out dataset (n = 418). The network was trained using a novel spike-and-slab dropout-based variational inference approach. We show that, on these datasets, the proposed Bayesian DNN outperforms previously proposed methods, in terms of the similarity between the segmentation predictions and the FreeSurfer labels, and the usefulness of the estimate uncertainty of these predictions. In particular, we demonstrated that the prediction uncertainty of this network at each voxel is a good indicator of whether the network has made an error and that the uncertainty across the whole brain can predict the manual quality control ratings of a scan. The proposed Bayesian DNN method should be applicable to any new network architecture for addressing the segmentation problem.
Benchmarking Keyword Spotting Efficiency on Neuromorphic Hardware
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Using Intel's Loihi neuromorphic research chip and ABR's Nengo Deep Learning toolkit, we analyze the inference speed, dynamic power consumption, and energy cost per inference of a two-layer neural network keyword spotter trained to recognize a single phrase. We perform comparative analyses of this keyword spotter running on more conventional hardware devices including a CPU, a GPU, Nvidia's Jetson TX1, and the Movidius Neural Compute Stick. Our results indicate that for this inference application, Loihi outperforms all of these alternatives on an energy cost per inference basis while maintaining equivalent inference accuracy. Furthermore, an analysis of tradeoffs between network size, inference speed, and energy cost indicates that Loihi's comparative advantage over other low-power computing devices improves for larger networks.
Summarizing Videos with Attention
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

In this work we propose a novel method for supervised, keyshots based video summarization by applying a conceptually simple and computationally efficient soft, self-attention mechanism. Current state of the art methods leverage bi-directional recurrent networks such as BiLSTM combined with attention. These networks are complex to implement and computationally demanding compared to fully connected networks. To that end we propose a simple, self-attention based network for video summarization which performs the entire sequence to sequence transformation in a single feed forward pass and single backward pass during training. Our method sets a new state of the art results on two benchmarks TvSum and SumMe, commonly used in this domain.
Equational Axiomatization of Algebras with Structure
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2019
Year: 2019

This paper proposes a new category theoretic account of equationally axiomatizable classes of algebras. Our approach is well-suited for the treatment of algebras equipped with additional computationally relevant structure, such as ordered algebras, continuous algebras, quantitative algebras, nominal algebras, or profinite algebras. Our main contributions are a generic HSP theorem and a sound and complete equational logic, which are shown to encompass numerous flavors of equational axiomizations studied in the literature.
SADA: Semantic Adversarial Diagnostic Attacks for Autonomous Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

One major factor impeding more widespread adoption of deep neural networks (DNNs) is their lack of robustness, which is essential for safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving. This has motivated much recent work on adversarial attacks for DNNs, which mostly focus on pixel-level perturbations void of semantic meaning. In contrast, we present a general framework for adversarial attacks on trained agents, which covers semantic perturbations to the environment of the agent performing the task as well as pixel-level attacks. To do this, we re-frame the adversarial attack problem as learning a distribution of parameters that always fools the agent. In the semantic case, our proposed adversary (denoted as BBGAN) is trained to sample parameters that describe the environment with which the black-box agent interacts, such that the agent performs its dedicated task poorly in this environment. We apply BBGAN on three different tasks, primarily targeting aspects of autonomous navigation: object detection, self-driving, and autonomous UAV racing. On these tasks, BBGAN can generate failure cases that consistently fool a trained agent.
EvoMSA: A Multilingual Evolutionary Approach for Sentiment Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

Sentiment analysis (SA) is a task related to understanding people's feelings in written text; the starting point would be to identify the polarity level (positive, neutral or negative) of a given text, moving on to identify emotions or whether a text is humorous or not. This task has been the subject of several research competitions in a number of languages, e.g., English, Spanish, and Arabic, among others. In this contribution, we propose an SA system, namely EvoMSA, that unifies our participating systems in various SA competitions, making it domain independent and multilingual by processing text using only language-independent techniques. EvoMSA is a classifier, based on Genetic Programming, that works by combining the output of different text classifiers and text models to produce the final prediction. We analyze EvoMSA on different SA competitions to provide a global overview of its performance, and as the results show, EvoMSA is competitive obtaining top rankings in several SA competitions. Furthermore, we performed an analysis of EvoMSA's components to measure their contribution to the performance; the idea is to facilitate a practitioner or newcomer to implement a competitive SA classifier. Finally, it is worth to mention that EvoMSA is available as open-source software.
Heterogeneous V2V Communications in Multi-Link and Multi-RAT Vehicular Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

Connected and automated vehicles will enable advanced traffic safety and efficiency applications thanks to the dynamic exchange of information between vehicles, and between vehicles and infrastructure nodes. Connected vehicles can utilize IEEE 802.11p for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications. However, a widespread deployment of connected vehicles and the introduction of connected automated driving applications will notably increase the bandwidth and scalability requirements of vehicular networks. This paper proposes to address these challenges through the adoption of heterogeneous V2V communications in multi-link and multi-RAT vehicular networks. In particular, the paper proposes the first distributed (and decentralized) context-aware heterogeneous V2V communications algorithm that is technology and application agnostic, and that allows each vehicle to autonomously and dynamically select its communications technology taking into account its application requirements and the communication context conditions. This study demonstrates the potential of heterogeneous V2V communications, and the capability of the proposed algorithm to satisfy the vehicles' application requirements while approaching the estimated upper bound network capacity.
Modelling Identity Rules with Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we show that standard feed-forward and recurrent neural networks fail to learn abstract patterns based on identity rules. We propose Relation Based Pattern (RBP) extensions to neural network structures that solve this problem and answer, as well as raise, questions about integrating structures for inductive bias into neural networks. Examples of abstract patterns are the sequence patterns ABA and ABB where A or B can be any object. These were introduced by Marcus et al (1999) who also found that 7 month old infants recognise these patterns in sequences that use an unfamiliar vocabulary while simple recurrent neural networks do not.This result has been contested in the literature but it is confirmed by our experiments. We also show that the inability to generalise extends to different, previously untested, settings. We propose a new approach to modify standard neural network architectures, called Relation Based Patterns (RBP) with different variants for classification and prediction. Our experiments show that neural networks with the appropriate RBP structure achieve perfect classification and prediction performance on synthetic data, including mixed concrete and abstract patterns. RBP also improves neural network performance in experiments with real-world sequence prediction tasks. We discuss these finding in terms of challenges for neural network models and identify consequences from this result in terms of developing inductive biases for neural network learning.
Multi-Hop Communication for nTorrent in a Wireless Ad Hoc Environment
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

nTorrent is a BitTorrent-like application that is based on NDN (Named Data Networking). Ad hoc environments introduce additional challenges to the dissemination of files among peers. Some issues that we encounter are that not all peers in the neighborhood or environment run the nTorrent application or desire the same torrent file. These issues cause nTorrent interests to be unable to be processed or prevent peers from downloading their desired torrent files. In order to solve this issue, I implemented pure forwarding nodes that represent peers that do not run the nTorrent application and also extended the original nTorrent application to be able to forward interests for torrent files other than their own desired torrent file. For this project, the solution is able to facilitate multi-hop communication through all nodes present in the environment whether or not they run nTorrent.
Attending to Mathematical Language with Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

Mathematical expressions were generated, evaluated and used to train neural network models based on the transformer architecture. The expressions and their targets were analyzed as a character-level sequence transduction task in which the encoder and decoder are built on attention mechanisms. Three models were trained to understand and evaluate symbolic variables and expressions in mathematics: (1) the self-attentive and feed-forward transformer without recurrence or convolution, (2) the universal transformer with recurrence, and (3) the adaptive universal transformer with recurrence and adaptive computation time. The models respectively achieved test accuracies as high as 76.1%, 78.8% and 84.9% in evaluating the expressions to match the target values. For the cases inferred incorrectly, the results differed from the targets by only one or two characters. The models notably learned to add, subtract and multiply both positive and negative decimal numbers of variable digits assigned to symbolic variables.