OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Blockchain for Multi-Robot Collaboration to Combat COVID-19 and Future Pandemics
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

This conceptual paper overviews how blockchain technology is involving the operation of multi-robot collaboration for combating COVID-19 and future pandemics. Robots are a promising technology for providing many tasks such as spraying, disinfection, cleaning, treating, detecting high body temperature/mask absence, and delivering goods and medical supplies experiencing an epidemic COVID-19. For combating COVID-19, many heterogeneous and homogenous robots are required to perform different tasks for supporting different purposes in the quarantine area. Controlling and decentralizing multi-robot play a vital role in combating COVID-19 by reducing human interaction, monitoring, delivering goods. Blockchain technology can manage multi-robot collaboration in a decentralized fashion, improve the interaction among them to exchange information, share representation, share goals, and trust. We highlight the challenges and provide the tactical solutions enabled by integrating blockchain and multi-robot collaboration to combat COVID-19 pandemic. The framework of our conceptual proposed can increase the intelligence, decentralization, and autonomous operations of connected multi-robot collaboration in the blockchain network. We overview blockchain potential benefits to defining a framework of multi-robot collaboration applications to combat COVID-19 epidemics such as monitoring and outdoor and hospital End to End (E2E) delivery systems. Furthermore, we discuss the challenges and opportunities of integrated blockchain, multi-robot collaboration, and the Internet of Things (IoT) for combating COVID-19 and future pandemics.
AdaLead: A simple and robust adaptive greedy search algorithm for sequence design
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Efficient design of biological sequences will have a great impact across many industrial and healthcare domains. However, discovering improved sequences requires solving a difficult optimization problem. Traditionally, this challenge was approached by biologists through a model-free method known as "directed evolution", the iterative process of random mutation and selection. As the ability to build models that capture the sequence-to-function map improves, such models can be used as oracles to screen sequences before running experiments. In recent years, interest in better algorithms that effectively use such oracles to outperform model-free approaches has intensified. These span from approaches based on Bayesian Optimization, to regularized generative models and adaptations of reinforcement learning. In this work, we implement an open-source Fitness Landscape EXploration Sandbox (FLEXS: github.com/samsinai/FLEXS) environment to test and evaluate these algorithms based on their optimality, consistency, and robustness. Using FLEXS, we develop an easy-to-implement, scalable, and robust evolutionary greedy algorithm (AdaLead). Despite its simplicity, we show that AdaLead is a remarkably strong benchmark that out-competes more complex state of the art approaches in a variety of biologically motivated sequence design challenges.
Viable Threat on News Reading: Generating Biased News Using Natural Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Recent advancements in natural language generation has raised serious concerns. High-performance language models are widely used for language generation tasks because they are able to produce fluent and meaningful sentences. These models are already being used to create fake news. They can also be exploited to generate biased news, which can then be used to attack news aggregators to change their reader's behavior and influence their bias. In this paper, we use a threat model to demonstrate that the publicly available language models can reliably generate biased news content based on an input original news. We also show that a large number of high-quality biased news articles can be generated using controllable text generation. A subjective evaluation with 80 participants demonstrated that the generated biased news is generally fluent, and a bias evaluation with 24 participants demonstrated that the bias (left or right) is usually evident in the generated articles and can be easily identified.
Ego-Motion Alignment from Face Detections for Collaborative Augmented Reality
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Sharing virtual content among multiple smart glasses wearers is an essential feature of a seamless Collaborative Augmented Reality experience. To enable the sharing, local coordinate systems of the underlying 6D ego-pose trackers, running independently on each set of glasses, have to be spatially and temporally aligned with respect to each other. In this paper, we propose a novel lightweight solution for this problem, which is referred as ego-motion alignment. We show that detecting each other's face or glasses together with tracker ego-poses sufficiently conditions the problem to spatially relate local coordinate systems. Importantly, the detected glasses can serve as reliable anchors to bring sufficient accuracy for the targeted practical use. The proposed idea allows us to abandon the traditional visual localization step with fiducial markers or scene points as anchors. A novel closed form minimal solver which solves a Quadratic Eigenvalue Problem is derived and its refinement with Gaussian Belief Propagation is introduced. Experiments validate the presented approach and show its high practical potential.
Learning to Generalize for Sequential Decision Making
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

We consider problems of making sequences of decisions to accomplish tasks, interacting via the medium of language. These problems are often tackled with reinforcement learning approaches. We find that these models do not generalize well when applied to novel task domains. However, the large amount of computation necessary to adequately train and explore the search space of sequential decision making, under a reinforcement learning paradigm, precludes the inclusion of large contextualized language models, which might otherwise enable the desired generalization ability. We introduce a teacher-student imitation learning methodology and a means of converting a reinforcement learning model into a natural language understanding model. Together, these methodologies enable the introduction of contextualized language models into the sequential decision making problem space. We show that models can learn faster and generalize more, leveraging both the imitation learning and the reformulation. Our models exceed teacher performance on various held-out decision problems, by up to 7% on in-domain problems and 24% on out-of-domain problems.
An Ensemble Approach for Automatic Structuring of Radiology Reports
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Automatic structuring of electronic medical records is of high demand for clinical workflow solutions to facilitate extraction, storage, and querying of patient care information. However, developing a scalable solution is extremely challenging, specifically for radiology reports, as most healthcare institutes use either no template or department/institute specific templates. Moreover, radiologists' reporting style varies from one to another as sentences are telegraphic and do not follow general English grammar rules. We present an ensemble method that consolidates the predictions of three models, capturing various attributes of textual information for automatic labeling of sentences with section labels. These three models are: 1) Focus Sentence model, capturing context of the target sentence; 2) Surrounding Context model, capturing the neighboring context of the target sentence; and finally, 3) Formatting/Layout model, aimed at learning report formatting cues. We utilize Bi-directional LSTMs, followed by sentence encoders, to acquire the context. Furthermore, we define several features that incorporate the structure of reports. We compare our proposed approach against multiple baselines and state-of-the-art approaches on a proprietary dataset as well as 100 manually annotated radiology notes from the MIMIC-III dataset, which we are making publicly available. Our proposed approach significantly outperforms other approaches by achieving 97.1% accuracy.
Deep Anomaly Detection by Residual Adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Deep anomaly detection is a difficult task since, in high dimensions, it is hard to completely characterize a notion of "differentness" when given only examples of normality. In this paper we propose a novel approach to deep anomaly detection based on augmenting large pretrained networks with residual corrections that adjusts them to the task of anomaly detection. Our method gives rise to a highly parameter-efficient learning mechanism, enhances disentanglement of representations in the pretrained model, and outperforms all existing anomaly detection methods including other baselines utilizing pretrained networks. On the CIFAR-10 one-versus-rest benchmark, for example, our technique raises the state of the art from 96.1 to 99.0 mean AUC.
Understanding the Mechanics of SPIGOT: Surrogate Gradients for Latent Structure Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Latent structure models are a powerful tool for modeling language data: they can mitigate the error propagation and annotation bottleneck in pipeline systems, while simultaneously uncovering linguistic insights about the data. One challenge with end-to-end training of these models is the argmax operation, which has null gradient. In this paper, we focus on surrogate gradients, a popular strategy to deal with this problem. We explore latent structure learning through the angle of pulling back the downstream learning objective. In this paradigm, we discover a principled motivation for both the straight-through estimator (STE) as well as the recently-proposed SPIGOT - a variant of STE for structured models. Our perspective leads to new algorithms in the same family. We empirically compare the known and the novel pulled-back estimators against the popular alternatives, yielding new insight for practitioners and revealing intriguing failure cases.
Video Anomaly Detection Using Pre-Trained Deep Convolutional Neural Nets and Context Mining
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Anomaly detection is critically important for intelligent surveillance systems to detect in a timely manner any malicious activities. Many video anomaly detection approaches using deep learning methods focus on a single camera video stream with a fixed scenario. These deep learning methods use large-scale training data with large complexity. As a solution, in this paper, we show how to use pre-trained convolutional neural net models to perform feature extraction and context mining, and then use denoising autoencoder with relatively low model complexity to provide efficient and accurate surveillance anomaly detection, which can be useful for the resource-constrained devices such as edge devices of the Internet of Things (IoT). Our anomaly detection model makes decisions based on the high-level features derived from the selected embedded computer vision models such as object classification and object detection. Additionally, we derive contextual properties from the high-level features to further improve the performance of our video anomaly detection method. We use two UCSD datasets to demonstrate that our approach with relatively low model complexity can achieve comparable performance compared to the state-of-the-art approaches.
Adversarial Grammatical Error Correction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Recent works in Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) have leveraged the progress in Neural Machine Translation (NMT), to learn rewrites from parallel corpora of grammatically incorrect and corrected sentences, achieving state-of-the-art results. At the same time, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been successful in generating realistic texts across many different tasks by learning to directly minimize the difference between human-generated and synthetic text. In this work, we present an adversarial learning approach to GEC, using the generator-discriminator framework. The generator is a Transformer model, trained to produce grammatically correct sentences given grammatically incorrect ones. The discriminator is a sentence-pair classification model, trained to judge a given pair of grammatically incorrect-correct sentences on the quality of grammatical correction. We pre-train both the discriminator and the generator on parallel texts and then fine-tune them further using a policy gradient method that assigns high rewards to sentences which could be true corrections of the grammatically incorrect text. Experimental results on FCE, CoNLL-14, and BEA-19 datasets show that Adversarial-GEC can achieve competitive GEC quality compared to NMT-based baselines.
Efficient Inference For Neural Machine Translation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Large Transformer models have achieved state-of-the-art results in neural machine translation and have become standard in the field. In this work, we look for the optimal combination of known techniques to optimize inference speed without sacrificing translation quality. We conduct an empirical study that stacks various approaches and demonstrates that combination of replacing decoder self-attention with simplified recurrent units, adopting a deep encoder and a shallow decoder architecture and multi-head attention pruning can achieve up to 109% and 84% speedup on CPU and GPU respectively and reduce the number of parameters by 25% while maintaining the same translation quality in terms of BLEU.
UnQovering Stereotyping Biases via Underspecified Questions
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

While language embeddings have been shown to have stereotyping biases, how these biases affect downstream question answering (QA) models remains unexplored. We present UNQOVER, a general framework to probe and quantify biases through underspecified questions. We show that a naive use of model scores can lead to incorrect bias estimates due to two forms of reasoning errors: positional dependence and question independence. We design a formalism that isolates the aforementioned errors. As case studies, we use this metric to analyze four important classes of stereotypes: gender, nationality, ethnicity, and religion. We probe five transformer-based QA models trained on two QA datasets, along with their underlying language models. Our broad study reveals that (1) all these models, with and without fine-tuning, have notable stereotyping biases in these classes; (2) larger models often have higher bias; and (3) the effect of fine-tuning on bias varies strongly with the dataset and the model size.
Modeling Preconditions in Text with a Crowd-sourced Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Preconditions provide a form of logical connection between events that explains why some events occur together and information that is complementary to the more widely studied relations such as causation, temporal ordering, entailment, and discourse relations. Modeling preconditions in text has been hampered in part due to the lack of large scale labeled data grounded in text. This paper introduces PeKo, a crowd-sourced annotation of preconditions between event pairs in newswire, an order of magnitude larger than prior text annotations. To complement this new corpus, we also introduce two challenge tasks aimed at modeling preconditions: (i) Precondition Identification -- a standard classification task defined over pairs of event mentions, and (ii) Precondition Generation -- a generative task aimed at testing a more general ability to reason about a given event. Evaluation on both tasks shows that modeling preconditions is challenging even for today's large language models (LM). This suggests that precondition knowledge is not easily accessible in LM-derived representations alone. Our generation results show that fine-tuning an LM on PeKo yields better conditional relations than when trained on raw text or temporally-ordered corpora.
On the Universality of Rotation Equivariant Point Cloud Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Learning functions on point clouds has applications in many fields, including computer vision, computer graphics, physics, and chemistry. Recently, there has been a growing interest in neural architectures that are invariant or equivariant to all three shape-preserving transformations of point clouds: translation, rotation, and permutation. In this paper, we present a first study of the approximation power of these architectures. We first derive two sufficient conditions for an equivariant architecture to have the universal approximation property, based on a novel characterization of the space of equivariant polynomials. We then use these conditions to show that two recently suggested models are universal, and for devising two other novel universal architectures.
Downscaling Attack and Defense: Turning What You See Back Into What You Get
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

The resizing of images, which is typically a required part of preprocessing for computer vision systems, is vulnerable to attack. Images can be created such that the image is completely different at machine-vision scales than at other scales and the default settings for some common computer vision and machine learning systems are vulnerable. We show that defenses exist and are trivial to administer provided that defenders are aware of the threat. These attacks and defenses help to establish the role of input sanitization in machine learning.
Identifying Spurious Correlations for Robust Text Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

The predictions of text classifiers are often driven by spurious correlations -- e.g., the term `Spielberg' correlates with positively reviewed movies, even though the term itself does not semantically convey a positive sentiment. In this paper, we propose a method to distinguish spurious and genuine correlations in text classification. We treat this as a supervised classification problem, using features derived from treatment effect estimators to distinguish spurious correlations from "genuine" ones. Due to the generic nature of these features and their small dimensionality, we find that the approach works well even with limited training examples, and that it is possible to transport the word classifier to new domains. Experiments on four datasets (sentiment classification and toxicity detection) suggest that using this approach to inform feature selection also leads to more robust classification, as measured by improved worst-case accuracy on the samples affected by spurious correlations.
GRUEN for Evaluating Linguistic Quality of Generated Text
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Automatic evaluation metrics are indispensable for evaluating generated text. To date, these metrics have focused almost exclusively on the content selection aspect of the system output, ignoring the linguistic quality aspect altogether. We bridge this gap by proposing GRUEN for evaluating Grammaticality, non-Redundancy, focUs, structure and coherENce of generated text. GRUEN utilizes a BERT-based model and a class of syntactic, semantic, and contextual features to examine the system output. Unlike most existing evaluation metrics which require human references as an input, GRUEN is reference-less and requires only the system output. Besides, it has the advantage of being unsupervised, deterministic, and adaptable to various tasks. Experiments on seven datasets over four language generation tasks show that the proposed metric correlates highly with human judgments.
Categorizing Online Shopping Behavior from Cosmetics to Electronics: An Analytical Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

A success factor for modern companies in the age of Digital Marketing is to understand how customers think and behave based on their online shopping patterns. While the conventional method of gathering consumer insights through questionnaires and surveys still form the bases of descriptive analytics for market intelligence units, we propose a machine learning framework to automate this process. In this paper we present a modular consumer data analysis platform that processes session level interaction records between users and products to predict session level, user journey level and customer behavior specific patterns leading towards purchase events. We explore the computational framework and provide test results on two Big data sets-cosmetics and consumer electronics of size 2GB and 15GB, respectively. The proposed system achieves 97-99% classification accuracy and recall for user-journey level purchase predictions and categorizes buying behavior into 5 clusters with increasing purchase ratios for both data sets. Thus, the proposed framework is extendable to other large e-commerce data sets to obtain automated purchase predictions and descriptive consumer insights.
Finding Ethereum Smart Contracts Security Issues by Comparing History Versions
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2020
Year: 2020

Smart contracts are Turing-complete programs running on the blockchain. They cannot be modified, even when bugs are detected. The Selfdestruct function is the only way to destroy a contract on the blockchain system and transfer all the Ethers on the contract balance. Thus, many developers use this function to destroy a contract and redeploy a new one when bugs are detected. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based method to find security issues of Ethereum smart contracts by finding the updated version of a destructed contract. After finding the updated versions, we use open card sorting to find security issues.
PCAL: A Privacy-preserving Intelligent Credit Risk Modeling Framework Based on Adversarial Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

Credit risk modeling has permeated our everyday life. Most banks and financial companies use this technique to model their clients' trustworthiness. While machine learning is increasingly used in this field, the resulting large-scale collection of user private information has reinvigorated the privacy debate, considering dozens of data breach incidents every year caused by unauthorized hackers, and (potentially even more) information misuse/abuse by authorized parties. To address those critical concerns, this paper proposes a framework of Privacy-preserving Credit risk modeling based on Adversarial Learning (PCAL). PCAL aims to mask the private information inside the original dataset, while maintaining the important utility information for the target prediction task performance, by (iteratively) weighing between a privacy-risk loss and a utility-oriented loss. PCAL is compared against off-the-shelf options in terms of both utility and privacy protection. Results indicate that PCAL can learn an effective, privacy-free representation from user data, providing a solid foundation towards privacy-preserving machine learning for credit risk analysis.
SupMMD: A Sentence Importance Model for Extractive Summarization using Maximum Mean Discrepancy
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Most work on multi-document summarization has focused on generic summarization of information present in each individual document set. However, the under-explored setting of update summarization, where the goal is to identify the new information present in each set, is of equal practical interest (e.g., presenting readers with updates on an evolving news topic). In this work, we present SupMMD, a novel technique for generic and update summarization based on the maximum mean discrepancy from kernel two-sample testing. SupMMD combines both supervised learning for salience and unsupervised learning for coverage and diversity. Further, we adapt multiple kernel learning to make use of similarity across multiple information sources (e.g., text features and knowledge based concepts). We show the efficacy of SupMMD in both generic and update summarization tasks by meeting or exceeding the current state-of-the-art on the DUC-2004 and TAC-2009 datasets.