OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
AltCLIP: Altering the Language Encoder in CLIP for Extended Language Capabilities
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

In this work, we present a conceptually simple and effective method to train a strong bilingual/multilingual multimodal representation model. Starting from the pre-trained multimodal representation model CLIP released by OpenAI, we altered its text encoder with a pre-trained multilingual text encoder XLM-R, and aligned both languages and image representations by a two-stage training schema consisting of teacher learning and contrastive learning. We validate our method through evaluations of a wide range of tasks. We set new state-of-the-art performances on a bunch of tasks including ImageNet-CN, Flicker30k-CN, COCO-CN and XTD. Further, we obtain very close performances with CLIP on almost all tasks, suggesting that one can simply alter the text encoder in CLIP for extended capabilities such as multilingual understanding. Our models and code are available at https://github.com/FlagAI-Open/FlagAI.
Learning-based Sustainable Multi-User Computation Offloading for Mobile Edge-Quantum Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, a novel paradigm of mobile edge-quantum computing (MEQC) is proposed, which brings quantum computing capacities to mobile edge networks that are closer to mobile users (i.e., edge devices). First, we propose an MEQC system model where mobile users can offload computational tasks to scalable quantum computers via edge servers with cryogenic components and fault-tolerant schemes. Second, we show that it is NP-hard to obtain a centralized solution to the partial offloading problem in MEQC in terms of the optimal latency and energy cost of classical and quantum computing. Third, we propose a multi-agent hybrid discrete-continuous deep reinforcement learning using proximal policy optimization to learn the long-term sustainable offloading strategy without prior knowledge. Finally, experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can reduce at least 30% of the cost compared with the existing baseline solutions under different system settings.
Partial Visual-Semantic Embedding: Fashion Intelligence System with Sensitive Part-by-Part Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

In this study, we propose a technology called the Fashion Intelligence System based on the visual-semantic embedding (VSE) model to quantify abstract and complex expressions unique to fashion, such as ''casual,'' ''adult-casual,'' and ''office-casual,'' and to support users' understanding of fashion. However, the existing VSE model does not support the situations in which the image is composed of multiple parts such as hair, tops, pants, skirts, and shoes. We propose partial VSE, which enables sensitive learning for each part of the fashion coordinates. The proposed model partially learns embedded representations. This helps retain the various existing practical functionalities and enables image-retrieval tasks in which changes are made only to the specified parts and image reordering tasks that focus on the specified parts. This was not possible with conventional models. Based on both the qualitative and quantitative evaluation experiments, we show that the proposed model is superior to conventional models without increasing the computational complexity.
Hibikino-Musashi@Home 2022 Team Description Paper
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Our team, Hibikino-Musashi@Home (HMA), was founded in 2010. It is based in Japan in the Kitakyushu Science and Research Park. Since 2010, we have annually participated in the RoboCup@Home Japan Open competition in the open platform league (OPL).We participated as an open platform league team in the 2017 Nagoya RoboCup competition and as a domestic standard platform league (DSPL) team in the 2017 Nagoya, 2018 Montreal, 2019 Sydney, and 2021 Worldwide RoboCup competitions.We also participated in theWorld Robot Challenge (WRC) 2018 in the service-robotics category of the partner-robot challenge (real space) and won first place. Currently, we have 27 members from nine different laboratories within the Kyushu Institute of Technology and the university of Kitakyushu. In this paper, we introduce the activities that have been performed by our team and the technologies that we use.
Multistep feature aggregation framework for salient object detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Recent works on salient object detection have made use of multi-scale features in a way such that high-level features and low-level features can collaborate in locating salient objects. Many of the previous methods have achieved great performance in salient object detection. By merging the high-level and low-level features, a large number of feature information can be extracted. Generally, they are doing these in a one-way framework, and interweaving the variable features all the way to the final feature output. Which may cause some blurring or inaccurate localization of saliency maps. To overcome these difficulties, we introduce a multistep feature aggregation (MSFA) framework for salient object detection, which is composed of three modules, including the Diverse Reception (DR) module, multiscale interaction (MSI) module and Feature Enhancement (FE) module to accomplish better multi-level feature fusion. Experimental results on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that MSFA achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Pavlovian reflex in colloids
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2022
Year: 2022

Pavlovian reflex is an essential mechanism of nervous systems of living beings which allows them to learn. Liquid colloid computing devices offer a high degree of fault-tolerance, reconfigurability and plasticity. As a first step towards designing and prototyping colloidal neuromorphic computing systems we decided to evaluate if it is possible to implement Pavlovian reflexes. We equate an increase of a synaptic weight with decreased resistance. In laboratory experiments we demonstrated that it is possible to implement Pavlovian learning using just two volumes of colloid liquid.
Deep Unsupervised Key Frame Extraction for Efficient Video Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Video processing and analysis have become an urgent task since a huge amount of videos (e.g., Youtube, Hulu) are uploaded online every day. The extraction of representative key frames from videos is very important in video processing and analysis since it greatly reduces computing resources and time. Although great progress has been made recently, large-scale video classification remains an open problem, as the existing methods have not well balanced the performance and efficiency simultaneously. To tackle this problem, this work presents an unsupervised method to retrieve the key frames, which combines Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Temporal Segment Density Peaks Clustering (TSDPC). The proposed TSDPC is a generic and powerful framework and it has two advantages compared with previous works, one is that it can calculate the number of key frames automatically. The other is that it can preserve the temporal information of the video. Thus it improves the efficiency of video classification. Furthermore, a Long Short-Term Memory network (LSTM) is added on the top of the CNN to further elevate the performance of classification. Moreover, a weight fusion strategy of different input networks is presented to boost the performance. By optimizing both video classification and key frame extraction simultaneously, we achieve better classification performance and higher efficiency. We evaluate our method on two popular datasets (i.e., HMDB51 and UCF101) and the experimental results consistently demonstrate that our strategy achieves competitive performance and efficiency compared with the state-of-the-art approaches.
Task Tree Retrieval Algorithms for Robotic Cooking Using The Functional Object-Oriented Network
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Using the Functional Object-Oriented Network, we have implemented three search algorithms for generating the task trees for the given goal nodes. The approach, process, and results are written in this paper.
EdnaML: A Declarative API and Framework for Reproducible Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Machine Learning has become the bedrock of recent advances in text, image, video, and audio processing and generation. Most production systems deal with several models during deployment and training, each with a variety of tuned hyperparameters. Furthermore, data collection and processing aspects of ML pipelines are receiving increasing interest due to their importance in creating sustainable high-quality classifiers. We present EdnaML, a framework with a declarative API for reproducible deep learning. EdnaML provides low-level building blocks that can be composed manually, as well as a high-level pipeline orchestration API to automate data collection, data processing, classifier training, classifier deployment, and model monitoring. Our layered API allows users to manage ML pipelines at high-level component abstractions, while providing flexibility to modify any part of it through the building blocks. We present several examples of ML pipelines with EdnaML, including a large-scale fake news labeling and classification system with six sub-pipelines managed by EdnaML.
Energy-Based Residual Latent Transport for Unsupervised Point Cloud Completion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Unsupervised point cloud completion aims to infer the whole geometry of a partial object observation without requiring partial-complete correspondence. Differing from existing deterministic approaches, we advocate generative modeling based unsupervised point cloud completion to explore the missing correspondence. Specifically, we propose a novel framework that performs completion by transforming a partial shape encoding into a complete one using a latent transport module, and it is designed as a latent-space energy-based model (EBM) in an encoder-decoder architecture, aiming to learn a probability distribution conditioned on the partial shape encoding. To train the latent code transport module and the encoder-decoder network jointly, we introduce a residual sampling strategy, where the residual captures the domain gap between partial and complete shape latent spaces. As a generative model-based framework, our method can produce uncertainty maps consistent with human perception, leading to explainable unsupervised point cloud completion. We experimentally show that the proposed method produces high-fidelity completion results, outperforming state-of-the-art models by a significant margin.
Conversational Pattern Mining using Motif Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

The subject of conversational mining has become of great interest recently due to the explosion of social and other online media. Supplementing this explosion of text is the advancement in pre-trained language models which have helped us to leverage these sources of information. An interesting domain to analyse is conversations in terms of complexity and value. Complexity arises due to the fact that a conversation can be asynchronous and can involve multiple parties. It is also computationally intensive to process. We use unsupervised methods in our work in order to develop a conversational pattern mining technique which does not require time consuming, knowledge demanding and resource intensive labelling exercises. The task of identifying repeating patterns in sequences is well researched in the Bioinformatics field. In our work, we adapt this to the field of Natural Language Processing and make several extensions to a motif detection algorithm. In order to demonstrate the application of the algorithm on a dynamic, real world data set; we extract motifs from an open-source film script data source. We run an exploratory investigation into the types of motifs we are able to mine.
Social Welfare Maximization for Collaborative Edge Computing: A Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

Collaborative Edge Computing (CEC) is an effective method that improves the performance of Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) systems by offloading computation tasks from busy edge servers (ESs) to idle ones. However, ESs usually belong to different MEC service providers so they have no incentive to help others. To motivate cooperation among them, this paper proposes a cooperative mechanism where idle ESs can earn extra profits by sharing their spare computational resources. To achieve the optimal resource allocation, we formulate the social welfare maximization problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and decompose it into two stages involving the allocation and execution of offloaded tasks. The first stage is solved by extending the well-known Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) algorithm. For the second stage, we first show that we only need to decide the processing order of tasks and the utilized computational resources. After that, we propose a dynamic programming and a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)-based algorithm to solve the two types of decisions, respectively. Numerical results indicate that our algorithm significantly improves social welfare under various situations.
Xu at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Pre-BERT Neural Network Methods vs Post-BERT RoBERTa Approach for Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

This paper describes my participation in the SemEval-2022 Task 4: Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection. I participate in both subtasks: Patronizing and Condescending Language (PCL) Identification and Patronizing and Condescending Language Categorization, with the main focus put on subtask 1. The experiments compare pre-BERT neural network (NN) based systems against post-BERT pretrained language model RoBERTa. This research finds NN-based systems in the experiments perform worse on the task compared to the pretrained language models. The top-performing RoBERTa system is ranked 26 out of 78 teams (F1-score: 54.64) in subtask 1, and 23 out of 49 teams (F1-score: 30.03) in subtask 2.
Automatic Eye-in-Hand Calibration using EKF
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, a self-calibration approach for eye-in-hand robots using SLAM is considered. The goal is to calibrate the positioning of a robotic arm, with a camera mounted on the end-effector automatically using a SLAM-based method like Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). Given the camera intrinsic parameters and a set of feature markers in a work-space, the camera extrinsic parameters are approximated. An EKF based measurement model is deployed to effectively localize the camera and compute the camera to end-effector transformation. The proposed approach is tested on a UR5 manipulator with a depth-camera mounted on the end-effector to validate our results.
Generalizing distribution of partial rewards for multi-armed bandits with temporally-partitioned rewards
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

We investigate the Multi-Armed Bandit problem with Temporally-Partitioned Rewards (TP-MAB) setting in this paper. In the TP-MAB setting, an agent will receive subsets of the reward over multiple rounds rather than the entire reward for the arm all at once. In this paper, we introduce a general formulation of how an arm's cumulative reward is distributed across several rounds, called Beta-spread property. Such a generalization is needed to be able to handle partitioned rewards in which the maximum reward per round is not distributed uniformly across rounds. We derive a lower bound on the TP-MAB problem under the assumption that Beta-spread holds. Moreover, we provide an algorithm TP-UCB-FR-G, which uses the Beta-spread property to improve the regret upper bound in some scenarios. By generalizing how the cumulative reward is distributed, this setting is applicable in a broader range of applications.
Learning from partially labeled data for multi-organ and tumor segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Medical image benchmarks for the segmentation of organs and tumors suffer from the partially labeling issue due to its intensive cost of labor and expertise. Current mainstream approaches follow the practice of one network solving one task. With this pipeline, not only the performance is limited by the typically small dataset of a single task, but also the computation cost linearly increases with the number of tasks. To address this, we propose a Transformer based dynamic on-demand network (TransDoDNet) that learns to segment organs and tumors on multiple partially labeled datasets. Specifically, TransDoDNet has a hybrid backbone that is composed of the convolutional neural network and Transformer. A dynamic head enables the network to accomplish multiple segmentation tasks flexibly. Unlike existing approaches that fix kernels after training, the kernels in the dynamic head are generated adaptively by the Transformer, which employs the self-attention mechanism to model long-range organ-wise dependencies and decodes the organ embedding that can represent each organ. We create a large-scale partially labeled Multi-Organ and Tumor Segmentation benchmark, termed MOTS, and demonstrate the superior performance of our TransDoDNet over other competitors on seven organ and tumor segmentation tasks. This study also provides a general 3D medical image segmentation model, which has been pre-trained on the large-scale MOTS benchmark and has demonstrated advanced performance over BYOL, the current predominant self-supervised learning method. Code will be available at \url{https://git.io/DoDNet}.
Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning in the Presence of an Adversary
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Reinforcement learning has seen increasing applications in real-world contexts over the past few years. However, physical environments are often imperfect and policies that perform well in simulation might not achieve the same performance when applied elsewhere. A common approach to combat this is to train agents in the presence of an adversary. An adversary acts to destabilise the agent, which learns a more robust policy and can better handle realistic conditions. Many real-world applications of reinforcement learning also make use of goal-conditioning: this is particularly useful in the context of robotics, as it allows the agent to act differently, depending on which goal is selected. Here, we focus on the problem of goal-conditioned learning in the presence of an adversary. We first present DigitFlip and CLEVR-Play, two novel goal-conditioned environments that support acting against an adversary. Next, we propose EHER and CHER -- two HER-based algorithms for goal-conditioned learning -- and evaluate their performance. Finally, we unify the two threads and introduce IGOAL: a novel framework for goal-conditioned learning in the presence of an adversary. Experimental results show that combining IGOAL with EHER allows agents to significantly outperform existing approaches, when acting against both random and competent adversaries.
An Online Agent-Based Search Approach in Automated Computer Game Testing with Model Construction
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

The complexity of computer games is ever increasing. In this setup, guiding an automated test algorithm to find a solution to solve a testing task in a game's huge interaction space is very challenging. Having a model of a system to automatically generate test cases would have a strong impact on the effectiveness and efficiency of the algorithm. However, manually constructing a model turns out to be expensive and time-consuming. In this study, we propose an online agent-based search approach to solve common testing tasks when testing computer games that also constructs a model of the system on-the-fly based on the given task, which is then exploited to solve the task. To demonstrate the efficiency of our approach, a case study is conducted using a game called Lab Recruits.
Language Model Classifier Aligns Better with Physician Word Sensitivity than XGBoost on Readmission Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Traditional evaluation metrics for classification in natural language processing such as accuracy and area under the curve fail to differentiate between models with different predictive behaviors despite their similar performance metrics. We introduce sensitivity score, a metric that scrutinizes models' behaviors at the vocabulary level to provide insights into disparities in their decision-making logic. We assess the sensitivity score on a set of representative words in the test set using two classifiers trained for hospital readmission classification with similar performance statistics. Our experiments compare the decision-making logic of clinicians and classifiers based on rank correlations of sensitivity scores. The results indicate that the language model's sensitivity score aligns better with the professionals than the xgboost classifier on tf-idf embeddings, which suggests that xgboost uses some spurious features. Overall, this metric offers a novel perspective on assessing models' robustness by quantifying their discrepancy with professional opinions. Our code is available on GitHub (https://github.com/nyuolab/Model_Sensitivity).
IFQA: Interpretable Face Quality Assessment
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Existing face restoration models have relied on general assessment metrics that do not consider the characteristics of facial regions. Recent works have therefore assessed their methods using human studies, which is not scalable and involves significant effort. This paper proposes a novel face-centric metric based on an adversarial framework where a generator simulates face restoration and a discriminator assesses image quality. Specifically, our per-pixel discriminator enables interpretable evaluation that cannot be provided by traditional metrics. Moreover, our metric emphasizes facial primary regions considering that even minor changes to the eyes, nose, and mouth significantly affect human cognition. Our face-oriented metric consistently surpasses existing general or facial image quality assessment metrics by impressive margins. We demonstrate the generalizability of the proposed strategy in various architectural designs and challenging scenarios. Interestingly, we find that our IFQA can lead to performance improvement as an objective function.
PMR: Prototypical Modal Rebalance for Multimodal Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Multimodal learning (MML) aims to jointly exploit the common priors of different modalities to compensate for their inherent limitations. However, existing MML methods often optimize a uniform objective for different modalities, leading to the notorious "modality imbalance" problem and counterproductive MML performance. To address the problem, some existing methods modulate the learning pace based on the fused modality, which is dominated by the better modality and eventually results in a limited improvement on the worse modal. To better exploit the features of multimodal, we propose Prototypical Modality Rebalance (PMR) to perform stimulation on the particular slow-learning modality without interference from other modalities. Specifically, we introduce the prototypes that represent general features for each class, to build the non-parametric classifiers for uni-modal performance evaluation. Then, we try to accelerate the slow-learning modality by enhancing its clustering toward prototypes. Furthermore, to alleviate the suppression from the dominant modality, we introduce a prototype-based entropy regularization term during the early training stage to prevent premature convergence. Besides, our method only relies on the representations of each modality and without restrictions from model structures and fusion methods, making it with great application potential for various scenarios.