OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
BARD: A structured technique for group elicitation of Bayesian networks to support analytic reasoning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

In many complex, real-world situations, problem solving and decision making require effective reasoning about causation and uncertainty. However, human reasoning in these cases is prone to confusion and error. Bayesian networks (BNs) are an artificial intelligence technology that models uncertain situations, supporting probabilistic and causal reasoning and decision making. However, to date, BN methodologies and software require significant upfront training, do not provide much guidance on the model building process, and do not support collaboratively building BNs. BARD (Bayesian ARgumentation via Delphi) is both a methodology and an expert system that utilises (1) BNs as the underlying structured representations for better argument analysis, (2) a multi-user web-based software platform and Delphi-style social processes to assist with collaboration, and (3) short, high-quality e-courses on demand, a highly structured process to guide BN construction, and a variety of helpful tools to assist in building and reasoning with BNs, including an automated explanation tool to assist effective report writing. The result is an end-to-end online platform, with associated online training, for groups without prior BN expertise to understand and analyse a problem, build a model of its underlying probabilistic causal structure, validate and reason with the causal model, and use it to produce a written analytic report. Initial experimental results demonstrate that BARD aids in problem solving, reasoning and collaboration.
A First Step Towards Understanding Real-world Attacks on IoT Devices
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

With the rapid growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, it is imperative to proactively understand the real-world cybersecurity threats posed to them. This paper describes our initial efforts towards building a honeypot ecosystem as a means to gathering and analyzing real attack data against IoT devices. A primary condition for a honeypot to yield useful insights is to let attackers believe they are real systems used by humans and organizations. IoT devices pose unique challenges in this respect, due to the large variety of device types and the physical-connectedness nature. We thus create a multiphased approach in building a honeypot ecosystem, where researchers can gradually increase a low-interaction honeypot's sophistication in emulating an IoT device by observing real-world attackers' behaviors. We deployed honeypots both on-premise and in the cloud, with associated analysis and vetting infrastructures to ensure these honeypots cannot be easily identified as such and appear to be real systems. In doing so we were able to attract increasingly sophisticated attack data. We present the design of this honeypot ecosystem and our observation on the attack data so far. Our data shows that real-world attackers are explicitly going after IoT devices, and some captured activities seem to involve direct human interaction (as opposed to scripted automatic activities). We also build a low interaction honeypot for IoT cameras, called Honeycamera, that present to attackers seemingly real videos. This is our first step towards building a more comprehensive honeypot ecosystem that will allow researchers to gain concrete understanding of what attackers are going after on IoT devices, so as to more proactively protect them.
Reachability Analysis for Feed-Forward Neural Networks using Face Lattices
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

Deep neural networks have been widely applied as an effective approach to handle complex and practical problems. However, one of the most fundamental open problems is the lack of formal methods to analyze the safety of their behaviors. To address this challenge, we propose a parallelizable technique to compute exact reachable sets of a neural network to an input set. Our method currently focuses on feed-forward neural networks with ReLU activation functions. One of the primary challenges for polytope-based approaches is identifying the intersection between intermediate polytopes and hyperplanes from neurons. In this regard, we present a new approach to construct the polytopes with the face lattice, a complete combinatorial structure. The correctness and performance of our methodology are evaluated by verifying the safety of ACAS Xu networks and other benchmarks. Compared to state-of-the-art methods such as Reluplex, Marabou, and NNV, our approach exhibits a significantly higher efficiency. Additionally, our approach is capable of constructing the complete input set given an output set, so that any input that leads to safety violation can be tracked.
The Use of Implicit Human Motor Behaviour in the Online Personalisation of Prosthetic Interfaces
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

In previous work, the authors proposed a data-driven optimisation algorithm for the personalisation of human-prosthetic interfaces, demonstrating the possibility of adapting prosthesis behaviour to its user while the user performs tasks with it. This method requires that the human and the prosthesis personalisation algorithm have same pre-defined objective function. This was previously ensured by providing the human with explicit feedback on what the objective function is. However, constantly displaying this information to the prosthesis user is impractical. Moreover, the method utilised task information in the objective function which may not be available from the wearable sensors typically used in prosthetic applications. In this work, the previous approach is extended to use a prosthesis objective function based on implicit human motor behaviour, which represents able-bodied human motor control and is measureable using wearable sensors. The approach is tested in a hardware implementation of the personalisation algorithm on a prosthetic elbow, where the prosthetic objective function is a function of upper-body compensation, and is measured using wearable IMUs. Experimental results on able-bodied subjects using a supernumerary prosthetic elbow mounted on an elbow orthosis suggest that it is possible to use a prosthesis objective function which is implicit in human behaviour to achieve collaboration without providing explicit feedback to the human, motivating further studies.
Robot Mindreading and the Problem of Trust
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

This paper raises three questions regarding the attribution of beliefs, desires, and intentions to robots. The first one is whether humans in fact engage in robot mindreading. If they do, this raises a second question: does robot mindreading foster trust towards robots? Both of these questions are empirical, and I show that the available evidence is insufficient to answer them. Now, if we assume that the answer to both questions is affirmative, a third and more important question arises: should developers and engineers promote robot mindreading in view of their stated goal of enhancing transparency? My worry here is that by attempting to make robots more mind-readable, they are abandoning the project of understanding automatic decision processes. Features that enhance mind-readability are prone to make the factors that determine automatic decisions even more opaque than they already are. And current strategies to eliminate opacity do not enhance mind-readability. The last part of the paper discusses different ways to analyze this apparent trade-off and suggests that a possible solution must adopt tolerable degrees of opacity that depend on pragmatic factors connected to the level of trust required for the intended uses of the robot.
Predicting A Creator's Preferences In, and From, Interactive Generative Art
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

As a lay user creates an art piece using an interactive generative art tool, what, if anything, do the choices they make tell us about them and their preferences? These preferences could be in the specific generative art form (e.g., color palettes, density of the piece, thickness or curvatures of any lines in the piece); predicting them could lead to a smarter interactive tool. Or they could be preferences in other walks of life (e.g., music, fashion, food, interior design, paintings) or attributes of the person (e.g., personality type, gender, artistic inclinations); predicting them could lead to improved personalized recommendations for products or experiences. To study this research question, we collect preferences from 311 subjects, both in a specific generative art form and in other walks of life. We analyze the preferences and train machine learning models to predict a subset of preferences from the remaining. We find that preferences in the generative art form we studied cannot predict preferences in other walks of life better than chance (and vice versa). However, preferences within the generative art form are reliably predictive of each other.
MPC-guided Imitation Learning of Neural Network Policies for the Artificial Pancreas
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Even though model predictive control (MPC) is currently the main algorithm for insulin control in the artificial pancreas (AP), it usually requires complex online optimizations, which are infeasible for resource-constrained medical devices. MPC also typically relies on state estimation, an error-prone process. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to AP control that uses Imitation Learning to synthesize neural-network insulin policies from MPC-computed demonstrations. Such policies are computationally efficient and, by instrumenting MPC at training time with full state information, they can directly map measurements into optimal therapy decisions, thus bypassing state estimation. We apply Bayesian inference via Monte Carlo Dropout to learn policies, which allows us to quantify prediction uncertainty and thereby derive safer therapy decisions. We show that our control policies trained under a specific patient model readily generalize (in terms of model parameters and disturbance distributions) to patient cohorts, consistently outperforming traditional MPC with state estimation.
Towards Noise-resistant Object Detection with Noisy Annotations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Training deep object detectors requires significant amount of human-annotated images with accurate object labels and bounding box coordinates, which are extremely expensive to acquire. Noisy annotations are much more easily accessible, but they could be detrimental for learning. We address the challenging problem of training object detectors with noisy annotations, where the noise contains a mixture of label noise and bounding box noise. We propose a learning framework which jointly optimizes object labels, bounding box coordinates, and model parameters by performing alternating noise correction and model training. To disentangle label noise and bounding box noise, we propose a two-step noise correction method. The first step performs class-agnostic bounding box correction by minimizing classifier discrepancy and maximizing region objectness. The second step distils knowledge from dual detection heads for soft label correction and class-specific bounding box refinement. We conduct experiments on PASCAL VOC and MS-COCO dataset with both synthetic noise and machine-generated noise. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance by effectively cleaning both label noise and bounding box noise. Code to reproduce all results will be released.
Digital Collaborator: Augmenting Task Abstraction in Visualization Design with Artificial Intelligence
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

In the task abstraction phase of the visualization design process, including in "design studies", a practitioner maps the observed domain goals to generalizable abstract tasks using visualization theory in order to better understand and address the users needs. We argue that this manual task abstraction process is prone to errors due to designer biases and a lack of domain background and knowledge. Under these circumstances, a collaborator can help validate and provide sanity checks to visualization practitioners during this important task abstraction stage. However, having a human collaborator is not always feasible and may be subject to the same biases and pitfalls. In this paper, we first describe the challenges associated with task abstraction. We then propose a conceptual Digital Collaborator: an artificial intelligence system that aims to help visualization practitioners by augmenting their ability to validate and reason about the output of task abstraction. We also discuss several practical design challenges of designing and implementing such systems
Bayesian Receiver Design for Grant-Free NOMA with Message Passing Based Structured Signal Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

Grant-free non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is promising to achieve low latency massive access in Internet of Things (IoT) applications. In grant-free NOMA, pilot signals are often used for user activity detection (UAD) and channel estimation (CE) prior to multiuser detection (MUD) of active users. However, the pilot overhead makes the communications inefficient for IoT devices with sporadic transmissions and short data packets, or when the channel coherence time is short. Hence, it is desirable to improve the efficiency by avoiding the use of pilot signals, which can also further achieve lower latency. This work focuses on Bayesian receiver design for grant-free low density signature orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (LDS-OFDM), where each user is allocated a unique low density spreading sequence. We propose to use the low density spreading sequences for active user detection, thereby avoiding the use of pilot signals. Firstly, the task of joint UAD, CE and MUD is formulated as a structured signal estimation problem. Then message passing based Bayesian approach is developed to solve the structured signal estimation problem. In particular, belief propagation (BP), expectation propagation (EP) and mean field (MF) message passing are used to develop efficient hybrid message passing algorithms to achieve trade-off between performance and complexity. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed receiver for grant-free LDS-OFDM without the use of pilot signals.
Performance Optimization for Edge-Cloud Serverless Platforms via Dynamic Task Placement
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

We present a framework for performance optimization in serverless edge-cloud platforms using dynamic task placement. We focus on applications for smart edge devices, for example, smart cameras or speakers, that need to perform processing tasks on input data in real to near-real time. Our framework allows the user to specify cost and latency requirements for each application task, and for each input, it determines whether to execute the task on the edge device or in the cloud. Further, for cloud executions, the framework identifies the container resource configuration needed to satisfy the performance goals. We have evaluated our framework in simulation using measurements collected from serverless applications in AWS Lambda and AWS Greengrass. In addition, we have implemented a prototype of our framework that runs in these same platforms. In experiments with our prototype, our models can predict average end-to-end latency with less than 6% error, and we obtain almost three orders of magnitude reduction in end-to-end latency compared to edge-only execution.
EGAD! an Evolved Grasping Analysis Dataset for diversity and reproducibility in robotic manipulation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

We present the Evolved Grasping Analysis Dataset (EGAD), comprising over 2000 generated objects aimed at training and evaluating robotic visual grasp detection algorithms. The objects in EGAD are geometrically diverse, filling a space ranging from simple to complex shapes and from easy to difficult to grasp, compared to other datasets for robotic grasping, which may be limited in size or contain only a small number of object classes. Additionally, we specify a set of 49 diverse 3D-printable evaluation objects to encourage reproducible testing of robotic grasping systems across a range of complexity and difficulty. The dataset, code and videos can be found at https://dougsm.github.io/egad/
ADWPNAS: Architecture-Driven Weight Prediction for Neural Architecture Search
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2020
Year: 2020

How to discover and evaluate the true strength of models quickly and accurately is one of the key challenges in Neural Architecture Search (NAS). To cope with this problem, we propose an Architecture-Driven Weight Prediction (ADWP) approach for neural architecture search (NAS). In our approach, we first design an architecture-intensive search space and then train a HyperNetwork by inputting stochastic encoding architecture parameters. In the trained HyperNetwork, weights of convolution kernels can be well predicted for neural architectures in the search space. Consequently, the target architectures can be evaluated efficiently without any finetuning, thus enabling us to search fortheoptimalarchitectureinthespaceofgeneralnetworks (macro-search). Through real experiments, we evaluate the performance of the models discovered by the proposed AD-WPNAS and results show that one search procedure can be completed in 4.0 GPU hours on CIFAR-10. Moreover, the discovered model obtains a test error of 2.41% with only 1.52M parameters which is superior to the best existing models.
CLUECorpus2020: A Large-scale Chinese Corpus for Pre-training Language Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we introduce the Chinese corpus from CLUE organization, CLUECorpus2020, a large-scale corpus that can be used directly for self-supervised learning such as pre-training of a language model, or language generation. It has 100G raw corpus with 35 billion Chinese characters, which is retrieved from Common Crawl. To better understand this corpus, we conduct language understanding experiments on both small and large scale, and results show that the models trained on this corpus can achieve excellent performance on Chinese. We release a new Chinese vocabulary with a size of 8K, which is only one-third of the vocabulary size used in Chinese Bert released by Google. It saves computational cost and memory while works as good as original vocabulary. We also release both large and tiny versions of the pre-trained model on this corpus. The former achieves the state-of-the-art result, and the latter retains most precision while accelerating training and prediction speed for eight times compared to Bert-base. To facilitate future work on self-supervised learning on Chinese, we release our dataset, new vocabulary, codes, and pre-trained models on Github.
Shape analysis via inconsistent surface registration
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2020
Year: 2020

In this work, we develop a framework for shape analysis using inconsistent surface mapping. Traditional landmark-based geometric morphometrics methods suffer from the limited degrees of freedom, while most of the more advanced non-rigid surface mapping methods rely on a strong assumption of the global consistency of two surfaces. From a practical point of view, given two anatomical surfaces with prominent feature landmarks, it is more desirable to have a method that automatically detects the most relevant parts of the two surfaces and finds the optimal landmark-matching alignment between those parts, without assuming any global 1-1 correspondence between the two surfaces. Our method is capable of solving this problem using inconsistent surface registration based on quasi-conformal theory. It further enables us to quantify the dissimilarity of two shapes using quasi-conformal distortion and differences in mean and Gaussian curvatures, thereby providing a natural way for shape classification. Experiments on Platyrrhine molars demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and shed light on the interplay between function and shape in nature.
Coverage Analysis of UAVs in Millimeter Wave Networks: A Stochastic Geometry Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

Recent developments in robotics and communication technologies are paving the way towards the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to provide ubiquitous connectivity in public safety scenarios or in remote areas. The millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum, in particular, has gained momentum since the huge amount of free spectrum available at such frequencies can yield very high data rates. In the UAV context, however, mmWave operations may incur severe signal attenuation and sensitivity to blockage, especially considering the very long transmission distances involved. In this paper, we present a tractable stochastic analysis to characterize the coverage probability of UAV stations operating at mmWaves. We exemplify some of the trade-offs to be considered when designing solutions for millimeter wave (mmWave) scenarios, such as the beamforming configuration, and the UAV altitude and deployment.
DeepSperm: A robust and real-time bull sperm-cell detection in densely populated semen videos
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Background and Objective: Object detection is a primary research interest in computer vision. Sperm-cell detection in a densely populated bull semen microscopic observation video presents challenges such as partial occlusion, vast number of objects in a single video frame, tiny size of the object, artifacts, low contrast, and blurry objects because of the rapid movement of the sperm cells. This study proposes an architecture, called DeepSperm, that solves the aforementioned challenges and is more accurate and faster than state-of-the-art architectures. Methods: In the proposed architecture, we use only one detection layer, which is specific for small object detection. For handling overfitting and increasing accuracy, we set a higher network resolution, use a dropout layer, and perform data augmentation on hue, saturation, and exposure. Several hyper-parameters are tuned to achieve better performance. We compare our proposed method with those of a conventional image processing-based object-detection method, you only look once (YOLOv3), and mask region-based convolutional neural network (Mask R-CNN). Results: In our experiment, we achieve 86.91 mAP on the test dataset and a processing speed of 50.3 fps. In comparison with YOLOv3, we achieve an increase of 16.66 mAP point, 3.26 x faster on testing, and 1.4 x faster on training with a small training dataset, which contains 40 video frames. The weights file size was also reduced significantly, with 16.94 x smaller than that of YOLOv3. Moreover, it requires 1.3 x less graphical processing unit (GPU) memory than YOLOv3. Conclusions: This study proposes DeepSperm, which is a simple, effective, and efficient architecture with its hyper-parameters and configuration to detect bull sperm cells robustly in real time. In our experiment, we surpass the state of the art in terms of accuracy, speed, and resource needs.
Procedural band patterns
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2020
Year: 2020

We seek to cover a parametric domain with a set of evenly spaced bands which number and widthvaries according to a density field. We propose an implicit procedural algorithm, that generates theband pattern from a pixel shader and adapts to changes to the control fields in real time. Each band isuniquely identified by an integer. This allows a wide range of texturing effects, including specifying adifferent appearance in each individual bands. Our technique also affords for progressive gradationsof scales, avoiding the abrupt doubling of the number of lines of typical subdivision approaches. Thisleads to a general approach for drawing bands, drawing splitting and merging curves, and drawingevenly spaced streamlines. Using these base ingredients, we demonstrate a wide variety of texturingeffects.