OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
iSeg3D: An Interactive 3D Shape Segmentation Tool
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

A large-scale dataset is essential for learning good features in 3D shape understanding, but there are only a few datasets that can satisfy deep learning training. One of the major reasons is that current tools for annotating per-point semantic labels using polygons or scribbles are tedious and inefficient. To facilitate segmentation annotations in 3D shapes, we propose an effective annotation tool, named iSeg for 3D shape. It can obtain a satisfied segmentation result with minimal human clicks (< 10). Under our observation, most objects can be considered as the composition of finite primitive shapes, and we train iSeg3D model on our built primitive-composed shape data to learn the geometric prior knowledge in a self-supervised manner. Given human interactions, the learned knowledge can be used to segment parts on arbitrary shapes, in which positive clicks help associate the primitives into the semantic parts and negative clicks can avoid over-segmentation. Besides, We also provide an online human-in-loop fine-tuning module that enables the model perform better segmentation with less clicks. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of iSeg3D on PartNet shape segmentation. Data and codes will be made publicly available.
Stochastic Learning Equation using Monotone Increasing Resolution of Quantization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we propose a quantized learning equation with a monotone increasing resolution of quantization and stochastic analysis for the proposed algorithm. According to the white noise hypothesis for the quantization error with dense and uniform distribution, we can regard the quantization error as i.i.d.\ white noise. Based on this, we show that the learning equation with monotonically increasing quantization resolution converges weakly as the distribution viewpoint. The analysis of this paper shows that global optimization is possible for a domain that satisfies the Lipschitz condition instead of local convergence properties such as the Hessian constraint of the objective function.
Benchmarking Pedestrian Odometry: The Brown Pedestrian Odometry Dataset (BPOD)
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

We present the Brown Pedestrian Odometry Dataset (BPOD) for benchmarking visual odometry algorithms in head-mounted pedestrian settings. This dataset was captured using synchronized global and rolling shutter stereo cameras in 12 diverse indoor and outdoor locations on Brown University's campus. Compared to existing datasets, BPOD contains more image blur and self-rotation, which are common in pedestrian odometry but rare elsewhere. Ground-truth trajectories are generated from stick-on markers placed along the pedestrian's path, and the pedestrian's position is documented using a third-person video. We evaluate the performance of representative direct, feature-based, and learning-based VO methods on BPOD. Our results show that significant development is needed to successfully capture pedestrian trajectories. The link to the dataset is here: \url{https://doi.org/10.26300/c1n7-7p93
DARTS without a Validation Set: Optimizing the Marginal Likelihood
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

The success of neural architecture search (NAS) has historically been limited by excessive compute requirements. While modern weight-sharing NAS methods such as DARTS are able to finish the search in single-digit GPU days, extracting the final best architecture from the shared weights is notoriously unreliable. Training-Speed-Estimate (TSE), a recently developed generalization estimator with a Bayesian marginal likelihood interpretation, has previously been used in place of the validation loss for gradient-based optimization in DARTS. This prevents the DARTS skip connection collapse, which significantly improves performance on NASBench-201 and the original DARTS search space. We extend those results by applying various DARTS diagnostics and show several unusual behaviors arising from not using a validation set. Furthermore, our experiments yield concrete examples of the depth gap and topology selection in DARTS having a strongly negative impact on the search performance despite generally receiving limited attention in the literature compared to the operations selection.
Gaussian Process Bandits with Aggregated Feedback
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

We consider the continuum-armed bandits problem, under a novel setting of recommending the best arms within a fixed budget under aggregated feedback. This is motivated by applications where the precise rewards are impossible or expensive to obtain, while an aggregated reward or feedback, such as the average over a subset, is available. We constrain the set of reward functions by assuming that they are from a Gaussian Process and propose the Gaussian Process Optimistic Optimisation (GPOO) algorithm. We adaptively construct a tree with nodes as subsets of the arm space, where the feedback is the aggregated reward of representatives of a node. We propose a new simple regret notion with respect to aggregated feedback on the recommended arms. We provide theoretical analysis for the proposed algorithm, and recover single point feedback as a special case. We illustrate GPOO and compare it with related algorithms on simulated data.
Enabling Real-time On-chip Audio Super Resolution for Bone Conduction Microphones
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2021
Year: 2021

Voice communication using the air conduction microphone in noisy environments suffers from the degradation of speech audibility. Bone conduction microphones (BCM) are robust against ambient noises but suffer from limited effective bandwidth due to their sensing mechanism. Although existing audio super resolution algorithms can recover the high frequency loss to achieve high-fidelity audio, they require considerably more computational resources than available in low-power hearable devices. This paper proposes the first-ever real-time on-chip speech audio super resolution system for BCM. To accomplish this, we built and compared a series of lightweight audio super resolution deep learning models. Among all these models, ATS-UNet is the most cost-efficient because the proposed novel Audio Temporal Shift Module (ATSM) reduces the network's dimensionality while maintaining sufficient temporal features from speech audios. Then we quantized and deployed the ATS-UNet to low-end ARM micro-controller units for real-time embedded prototypes. Evaluation results show that our system achieved real-time inference speed on Cortex-M7 and higher quality than the baseline audio super resolution method. Finally, we conducted a user study with ten experts and ten amateur listeners to evaluate our method's effectiveness to human ears. Both groups perceived a significantly higher speech quality with our method when compared to the solutions with the original BCM or air conduction microphone with cutting-edge noise reduction algorithms.
Stealthy Attack on Algorithmic-Protected DNNs via Smart Bit Flipping
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Recently, deep neural networks (DNNs) have been deployed in safety-critical systems such as autonomous vehicles and medical devices. Shortly after that, the vulnerability of DNNs were revealed by stealthy adversarial examples where crafted inputs -- by adding tiny perturbations to original inputs -- can lead a DNN to generate misclassification outputs. To improve the robustness of DNNs, some algorithmic-based countermeasures against adversarial examples have been introduced thereafter. In this paper, we propose a new type of stealthy attack on protected DNNs to circumvent the algorithmic defenses: via smart bit flipping in DNN weights, we can reserve the classification accuracy for clean inputs but misclassify crafted inputs even with algorithmic countermeasures. To fool protected DNNs in a stealthy way, we introduce a novel method to efficiently find their most vulnerable weights and flip those bits in hardware. Experimental results show that we can successfully apply our stealthy attack against state-of-the-art algorithmic-protected DNNs.
Combining Improvements for Exploiting Dependency Trees in Neural Semantic Parsing
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

The dependency tree of a natural language sentence can capture the interactions between semantics and words. However, it is unclear whether those methods which exploit such dependency information for semantic parsing can be combined to achieve further improvement and the relationship of those methods when they combine. In this paper, we examine three methods to incorporate such dependency information in a Transformer based semantic parser and empirically study their combinations. We first replace standard self-attention heads in the encoder with parent-scaled self-attention (PASCAL) heads, i.e., the ones that can attend to the dependency parent of each token. Then we concatenate syntax-aware word representations (SAWRs), i.e., the intermediate hidden representations of a neural dependency parser, with ordinary word embedding to enhance the encoder. Later, we insert the constituent attention (CA) module to the encoder, which adds an extra constraint to attention heads that can better capture the inherent dependency structure of input sentences. Transductive ensemble learning (TEL) is used for model aggregation, and an ablation study is conducted to show the contribution of each method. Our experiments show that CA is complementary to PASCAL or SAWRs, and PASCAL + CA provides state-of-the-art performance among neural approaches on ATIS, GEO, and JOBS.
Cyclic Lattices, Ideal Lattices and Bounds for the Smoothing Parameter
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

Cyclic lattices and ideal lattices were introduced by Micciancio in \cite{D2}, Lyubashevsky and Micciancio in \cite{L1} respectively, which play an efficient role in Ajtai's construction of a collision resistant Hash function (see \cite{M1} and \cite{M2}) and in Gentry's construction of fully homomorphic encryption (see \cite{G}). Let $R=Z[x]/\langle ϕ(x)\rangle$ be a quotient ring of the integer coefficients polynomials ring, Lyubashevsky and Micciancio regarded an ideal lattice as the correspondence of an ideal of $R$, but they neither explain how to extend this definition to whole Euclidean space $\mathbb{R}^n$, nor exhibit the relationship of cyclic lattices and ideal lattices. In this paper, we regard the cyclic lattices and ideal lattices as the correspondences of finitely generated $R$-modules, so that we may show that ideal lattices are actually a special subclass of cyclic lattices, namely, cyclic integer lattices. In fact, there is a one to one correspondence between cyclic lattices in $\mathbb{R}^n$ and finitely generated $R$-modules (see Theorem \ref{th4} below). On the other hand, since $R$ is a Noether ring, each ideal of $R$ is a finitely generated $R$-module, so it is natural and reasonable to regard ideal lattices as a special subclass of cyclic lattices (see corollary \ref{co3.4} below). It is worth noting that we use more general rotation matrix here, so our definition and results on cyclic lattices and ideal lattices are more general forms. As application, we provide cyclic lattice with an explicit and countable upper bound for the smoothing parameter (see Theorem \ref{th5} below). It is an open problem that is the shortest vector problem on cyclic lattice NP-hard? (see \cite{D2}). Our results may be viewed as a substantial progress in this direction.
Stop Line Aided Cooperative Positioning of Connected Vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

This paper develops a stop line aided cooperative positioning framework for connected vehicles, which creatively utilizes the location of the stop-line to achieve the positioning enhancement for a vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) in intersection scenarios via Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication. Firstly, a self-positioning correction scheme for the first stopped vehicle is presented, which applied the stop line information as benchmarks to correct the GNSS/INS positioning results. Then, the local observations of each vehicle are fused with the position estimates of other vehicles and the inter-vehicle distance measurements by using an extended Kalman filter (EKF). In this way, the benefits of the first stopped vehicle are extended to the whole VANET. Such a cooperative inertial navigation (CIN) framework can greatly improve the positioning performance of the VANET. Finally, experiments in Beijing show the effectiveness of the proposed stop line aided cooperative positioning framework.
Delivery Issues Identification from Customer Feedback Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Millions of packages are delivered successfully by online and local retail stores across the world every day. The proper delivery of packages is needed to ensure high customer satisfaction and repeat purchases. These deliveries suffer various problems despite the best efforts from the stores. These issues happen not only due to the large volume and high demand for low turnaround time but also due to mechanical operations and natural factors. These issues range from receiving wrong items in the package to delayed shipment to damaged packages because of mishandling during transportation. Finding solutions to various delivery issues faced by both sending and receiving parties plays a vital role in increasing the efficiency of the entire process. This paper shows how to find these issues using customer feedback from the text comments and uploaded images. We used transfer learning for both Text and Image models to minimize the demand for thousands of labeled examples. The results show that the model can find different issues. Furthermore, it can also be used for tasks like bottleneck identification, process improvement, automating refunds, etc. Compared with the existing process, the ensemble of text and image models proposed in this paper ensures the identification of several types of delivery issues, which is more suitable for the real-life scenarios of delivery of items in retail businesses. This method can supply a new idea of issue detection for the delivery of packages in similar industries.
A CNN-BiLSTM Model with Attention Mechanism for Earthquake Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Earthquakes, as natural phenomena, have continuously caused damage and loss of human life historically. Earthquake prediction is an essential aspect of any society's plans and can increase public preparedness and reduce damage to a great extent. Nevertheless, due to the stochastic character of earthquakes and the challenge of achieving an efficient and dependable model for earthquake prediction, efforts have been insufficient thus far, and new methods are required to solve this problem. Aware of these issues, this paper proposes a novel prediction method based on attention mechanism (AM), convolution neural network (CNN), and bi-directional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) models, which can predict the number and maximum magnitude of earthquakes in each area of mainland China-based on the earthquake catalog of the region. This model takes advantage of LSTM and CNN with an attention mechanism to better focus on effective earthquake characteristics and produce more accurate predictions. Firstly, the zero-order hold technique is applied as pre-processing on earthquake data, making the model's input data more proper. Secondly, to effectively use spatial information and reduce dimensions of input data, the CNN is used to capture the spatial dependencies between earthquake data. Thirdly, the Bi-LSTM layer is employed to capture the temporal dependencies. Fourthly, the AM layer is introduced to highlight its important features to achieve better prediction performance. The results show that the proposed method has better performance and generalize ability than other prediction methods.
Retrieving Effective Acoustic Impedance and Refractive Index for Size Mismatch Samples
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we have presented an analytical solution to extract the effective properties of acoustic metamaterials from the measured complex transmission and reflection coefficients when the metamaterial and impedance tube have different sizes. We have first modeled this problem as a bilayer metamaterial located inside a duct and treated the air gap as a separate domain. Then we have mathematically proved that the effective properties of acoustic metamaterial can be obtained by solving a set of eight linear equations when the dimensions are known. Finally, we have evaluated the proposed method with results from numerical simulations. It is shown that the proposed method can calculate the effective refractive index and impedance with an error of below 1\%. This method provides an efficient approach to analyzing the effective properties of acoustic metamaterials of various sizes.
Quantum codes constructed from cyclic codes over the ring $\mathbb{F}_q+v\mathbb{F}_q+v^2\mathbb{F}_q+v^3\mathbb{F}_q+v^4\mathbb{F}_q$
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

In this article, we investigate properties of cyclic codes over a finite non-chain ring $\mathbb{F}_q+v\mathbb{F}_q+v^2\mathbb{F}_q+v^3\mathbb{F}_q+v^4\mathbb{F}_q,$ where $q=p^r,$ $r$ is a positive integer, $p$ is an odd prime, $4 \mid (p-1),$ and $v^5=v.$ As an application, we construct several quantum error correcting codes over the finite field $\mathbb{F}_q.$
Evaluating Software User Feedback Classifiers on Unseen Apps, Datasets, and Metadata
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

Listening to user's requirements is crucial to building and maintaining high quality software. Online software user feedback has been shown to contain large amounts of information useful to requirements engineering (RE). Previous studies have created machine learning classifiers for parsing this feedback for development insight. While these classifiers report generally good performance when evaluated on a test set, questions remain as to how well they extend to unseen data in various forms. This study evaluates machine learning classifiers performance on feedback for two common classification tasks (classifying bug reports and feature requests). Using seven datasets from prior research studies, we investigate the performance of classifiers when evaluated on feedback from different apps than those contained in the training set and when evaluated on completely different datasets (coming from different feedback platforms and/or labelled by different researchers). We also measure the difference in performance of using platform-specific metadata as a feature in classification. We demonstrate that classification performance is similar on feedback from unseen apps compared to seen apps in the majority of cases tested. However, the classifiers do not perform well on unseen datasets. We show that multi-dataset training or zero shot classification approaches can somewhat mitigate this performance decrease. Finally, we find that using metadata as features in classifying bug reports and feature requests does not lead to a statistically significant improvement in the majority of datasets tested. We discuss the implications of these results on developing user feedback classification models to analyse and extract software requirements.
Design, Manufacturing, and Controls of a Prismatic Quadruped Robot: PRISMA
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Most of the quadrupeds developed are highly actuated, and their control is hence quite cumbersome. They need advanced electronics equipment to solve convoluted inverse kinematic equations continuously. In addition, they demand special and costly sensors to autonomously navigate through the environment as traditional distance sensors usually fail because of the continuous perturbation due to the motion of the robot. Another challenge is maintaining the continuous dynamic stability of the robot while walking, which requires complicated and state-of-the-art control algorithms. This paper presents a thorough description of the hardware design and control architecture of our in-house prismatic joint quadruped robot called the PRISMA. We aim to forge a robust and kinematically stable quadruped robot that can use elementary control algorithms and utilize conventional sensors to navigate an unknown environment. We discuss the benefits and limitations of the robot in terms of its motion, different foot trajectories, manufacturability, and controls.
Event-based clinical findings extraction from radiology reports with pre-trained language model
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Radiology reports contain a diverse and rich set of clinical abnormalities documented by radiologists during their interpretation of the images. Comprehensive semantic representations of radiological findings would enable a wide range of secondary use applications to support diagnosis, triage, outcomes prediction, and clinical research. In this paper, we present a new corpus of radiology reports annotated with clinical findings. Our annotation schema captures detailed representations of pathologic findings that are observable on imaging ("lesions") and other types of clinical problems ("medical problems"). The schema used an event-based representation to capture fine-grained details, including assertion, anatomy, characteristics, size, count, etc. Our gold standard corpus contained a total of 500 annotated computed tomography (CT) reports. We extracted triggers and argument entities using two state-of-the-art deep learning architectures, including BERT. We then predicted the linkages between trigger and argument entities (referred to as argument roles) using a BERT-based relation extraction model. We achieved the best extraction performance using a BERT model pre-trained on 3 million radiology reports from our institution: 90.9%-93.4% F1 for finding triggers 72.0%-85.6% F1 for arguments roles. To assess model generalizability, we used an external validation set randomly sampled from the MIMIC Chest X-ray (MIMIC-CXR) database. The extraction performance on this validation set was 95.6% for finding triggers and 79.1%-89.7% for argument roles, demonstrating that the model generalized well to the cross-institutional data with a different imaging modality. We extracted the finding events from all the radiology reports in the MIMIC-CXR database and provided the extractions to the research community.
UV-SLAM: Unconstrained Line-based SLAM Using Vanishing Points for Structural Mapping
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

In feature-based simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), line features complement the sparsity of point features, making it possible to map the surrounding environment structure. Existing approaches utilizing line features have primarily employed a measurement model that uses line re-projection. However, the direction vectors used in the 3D line mapping process cannot be corrected because the line measurement model employs only the lines' normal vectors in the Plücker coordinate. As a result, problems like degeneracy that occur during the 3D line mapping process cannot be solved. To tackle the problem, this paper presents a UV-SLAM, which is an unconstrained line-based SLAM using vanishing points for structural mapping. This paper focuses on using structural regularities without any constraints, such as the Manhattan world assumption. For this, we use the vanishing points that can be obtained from the line features. The difference between the vanishing point observation calculated through line features in the image and the vanishing point estimation calculated through the direction vector is defined as a residual and added to the cost function of optimization-based SLAM. Furthermore, through Fisher information matrix rank analysis, we prove that vanishing point measurements guarantee a unique mapping solution. Finally, we demonstrate that the localization accuracy and mapping quality are improved compared to the state-of-the-art algorithms using public datasets.