OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Lightweight Modular Continuum Manipulator with IMU-based Force Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Most aerial manipulators use serial rigid-link designs, which results in large forces when initiating contacts during manipulation and could cause flight stability difficulty. This limitation could potentially be improved by the compliance of continuum manipulators. To achieve this goal, we present the novel design of a compact, lightweight, and modular cable-driven continuum manipulator for aerial drones. We then derive a complete modeling framework for its kinematics, statics, and stiffness (compliance). The modeling framework can guide the control and design problems to integrate the manipulator to aerial drones. In addition, thanks to the derived stiffness (compliance) matrix, and using a low-cost IMU sensor to capture deformation angles, we present a simple method to estimate manipulation force at the tip of the manipulator. We report preliminary experimental validations of the hardware prototype, providing insights on its manipulation feasibility. We also report preliminary results of the IMU-based force estimation method.
Preprint: Open Source Compiling for V1Model RMT Switch: Making Data Center Networking Innovation Accessible
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

Very few of the innovations in deep networking have seen data center scale implementation. Because the Data Center network's extreme scale performance requires hardware implementation, which is only accessible to a few. However, the emergence of reconfigurable match-action table (RMT) paradigm-based switches have finally opened up the development life cycle of data plane devices. The P4 language is the dominant language choice for programming these devices. Now, Network operators can implement the desired feature over white box RMT switches. The process involves an innovator writing new algorithms in the P4 language and getting them compiled for the target hardware. However, there is still a roadblock. After designing an algorithm, the P4 program's compilation technology is not fully open-source. Thus, it is very difficult for an average researcher to get deep insight into the performance of his/her innovation when executed at the silicon level. There is no open-source compiler backend available for this purpose. Proprietary compiler backends provided by different hardware vendors are available for this purpose. However, they are closed-source and do not provide access to the internal mapping mechanisms. Which inhibits experimenting with new mapping algorithms and innovative instruction sets for reconfigurable match-action table architecture. This paper describes our work toward an open-source compiler backend for compiling P416 targeted for the V1Model architecture-based programmable switches.
Predictive Display with Perspective Projection of Surroundings in Vehicle Teleoperation to Account Time-delays
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

Teleoperation provides human operator sophisticated perceptual and cognitive skills into an over the network control loop. It gives hope of addressing some challenges related to vehicular autonomy which is based on artificial intelligence by providing a backup plan. Variable network time delays in data transmission is the major problem in teleoperating a vehicle. On 4G network, variability of these delays is high. Due to this, both video streaming and driving commands encounter variable time delay. This paper presents an approach of providing the human operator a forecast video stream which replicates future perspective of vehicle field of view accounting the delay present in the network. Regarding the image transformation, perspective projection technique is combined with correction given by smith predictor in the control loop. This image transformation accounts current time delay and tries to address both issues, time delays as well as its variability. For experiment sake, only frontward field of view is forecast. Performance is evaluated by performing online vehicle teleoperation on street edge case maneuvers and later comparing the path deviation with and without perspective projection.
Confidence-guided Centroids for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Unsupervised person re-identification (ReID) aims to train a feature extractor for identity retrieval without exploiting identity labels. Due to the blind trust in imperfect clustering results, the learning is inevitably misled by unreliable pseudo labels. Albeit the pseudo label refinement has been investigated by previous works, they generally leverage auxiliary information such as camera IDs and body part predictions. This work explores the internal characteristics of clusters to refine pseudo labels. To this end, Confidence-Guided Centroids (CGC) are proposed to provide reliable cluster-wise prototypes for feature learning. Since samples with high confidence are exclusively involved in the formation of centroids, the identity information of low-confidence samples, i.e., boundary samples, are NOT likely to contribute to the corresponding centroid. Given the new centroids, current learning scheme, where samples are enforced to learn from their assigned centroids solely, is unwise. To remedy the situation, we propose to use Confidence-Guided pseudo Label (CGL), which enables samples to approach not only the originally assigned centroid but other centroids that are potentially embedded with their identity information. Empowered by confidence-guided centroids and labels, our method yields comparable performance with, or even outperforms, state-of-the-art pseudo label refinement works that largely leverage auxiliary information.
A case study of proactive auto-scaling for an ecommerce workload
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

Preliminary data obtained from a partnership between the Federal University of Campina Grande and an ecommerce company indicates that some applications have issues when dealing with variable demand. This happens because a delay in scaling resources leads to performance degradation and, in literature, is a matter usually treated by improving the auto-scaling. To better understand the current state-of-the-art on this subject, we re-evaluate an auto-scaling algorithm proposed in the literature, in the context of ecommerce, using a long-term real workload. Experimental results show that our proactive approach is able to achieve an accuracy of up to 94 percent and led the auto-scaling to a better performance than the reactive approach currently used by the ecommerce company.
Supervised Contrastive Learning on Blended Images for Long-tailed Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Real-world data often have a long-tailed distribution, where the number of samples per class is not equal over training classes. The imbalanced data form a biased feature space, which deteriorates the performance of the recognition model. In this paper, we propose a novel long-tailed recognition method to balance the latent feature space. First, we introduce a MixUp-based data augmentation technique to reduce the bias of the long-tailed data. Furthermore, we propose a new supervised contrastive learning method, named Supervised contrastive learning on Mixed Classes (SMC), for blended images. SMC creates a set of positives based on the class labels of the original images. The combination ratio of positives weights the positives in the training loss. SMC with the class-mixture-based loss explores more diverse data space, enhancing the generalization capability of the model. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks show the effectiveness of our one-stage training method.
COVID-Net Assistant: A Deep Learning-Driven Virtual Assistant for COVID-19 Symptom Prediction and Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to put a significant burden on healthcare systems worldwide, there has been growing interest in finding inexpensive symptom pre-screening and recommendation methods to assist in efficiently using available medical resources such as PCR tests. In this study, we introduce the design of COVID-Net Assistant, an efficient virtual assistant designed to provide symptom prediction and recommendations for COVID-19 by analyzing users' cough recordings through deep convolutional neural networks. We explore a variety of highly customized, lightweight convolutional neural network architectures generated via machine-driven design exploration (which we refer to as COVID-Net Assistant neural networks) on the Covid19-Cough benchmark dataset. The Covid19-Cough dataset comprises 682 cough recordings from a COVID-19 positive cohort and 642 from a COVID-19 negative cohort. Among the 682 cough recordings labeled positive, 382 recordings were verified by PCR test. Our experimental results show promising, with the COVID-Net Assistant neural networks demonstrating robust predictive performance, achieving AUC scores of over 0.93, with the best score over 0.95 while being fast and efficient in inference. The COVID-Net Assistant models are made available in an open source manner through the COVID-Net open initiative and, while not a production-ready solution, we hope their availability acts as a good resource for clinical scientists, machine learning researchers, as well as citizen scientists to develop innovative solutions.
Teach-DETR: Better Training DETR with Teachers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we present a novel training scheme, namely Teach-DETR, to learn better DETR-based detectors from versatile teacher detectors. We show that the predicted boxes from teacher detectors are effective medium to transfer knowledge of teacher detectors, which could be either RCNN-based or DETR-based detectors, to train a more accurate and robust DETR model. This new training scheme can easily incorporate the predicted boxes from multiple teacher detectors, each of which provides parallel supervisions to the student DETR. Our strategy introduces no additional parameters and adds negligible computational cost to the original detector during training. During inference, Teach-DETR brings zero additional overhead and maintains the merit of requiring no non-maximum suppression. Extensive experiments show that our method leads to consistent improvement for various DETR-based detectors. Specifically, we improve the state-of-the-art detector DINO with Swin-Large backbone, 4 scales of feature maps and 36-epoch training schedule, from 57.8% to 58.9% in terms of mean average precision on MSCOCO 2017 validation set. Code will be available at https://github.com/LeonHLJ/Teach-DETR.
A Survey on Backdoor Attack and Defense in Natural Language Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Deep learning is becoming increasingly popular in real-life applications, especially in natural language processing (NLP). Users often choose training outsourcing or adopt third-party data and models due to data and computation resources being limited. In such a situation, training data and models are exposed to the public. As a result, attackers can manipulate the training process to inject some triggers into the model, which is called backdoor attack. Backdoor attack is quite stealthy and difficult to be detected because it has little inferior influence on the model's performance for the clean samples. To get a precise grasp and understanding of this problem, in this paper, we conduct a comprehensive review of backdoor attacks and defenses in the field of NLP. Besides, we summarize benchmark datasets and point out the open issues to design credible systems to defend against backdoor attacks.
Multi-View Neural Surface Reconstruction with Structured Light
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Three-dimensional (3D) object reconstruction based on differentiable rendering (DR) is an active research topic in computer vision. DR-based methods minimize the difference between the rendered and target images by optimizing both the shape and appearance and realizing a high visual reproductivity. However, most approaches perform poorly for textureless objects because of the geometrical ambiguity, which means that multiple shapes can have the same rendered result in such objects. To overcome this problem, we introduce active sensing with structured light (SL) into multi-view 3D object reconstruction based on DR to learn the unknown geometry and appearance of arbitrary scenes and camera poses. More specifically, our framework leverages the correspondences between pixels in different views calculated by structured light as an additional constraint in the DR-based optimization of implicit surface, color representations, and camera poses. Because camera poses can be optimized simultaneously, our method realizes high reconstruction accuracy in the textureless region and reduces efforts for camera pose calibration, which is required for conventional SL-based methods. Experiment results on both synthetic and real data demonstrate that our system outperforms conventional DR- and SL-based methods in a high-quality surface reconstruction, particularly for challenging objects with textureless or shiny surfaces.
Web-based Search: How Do Animated User Interface Elements Affect Autistic and Non-Autistic Users?
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

Many websites and other user interfaces include animated elements, particularly for advertisements. However, these can have a negative impact on users, with some cohorts, such as autistic users, being more affected. In our mixed methods study on the effect of irrelevant animations on usability we observed the effect on search activities. For those greatly impacted by on-screen animation the effect was not always to slow down a task, but search terms were entered hastily to avoid more exposure, with shorter queries on average and a greater tendency to copy and paste during query formulation. Autistic users found the task more mentally demanding, and were more distracted or annoyed by the animations.
REFINE: Reachability-based Trajectory Design using Robust Feedback Linearization and Zonotopes
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Performing real-time receding horizon motion planning for autonomous vehicles while providing safety guarantees remains difficult. This is because existing methods to accurately predict ego vehicle behavior under a chosen controller use online numerical integration that requires a fine time discretization and thereby adversely affects real-time performance. To address this limitation, several recent papers have proposed to apply offline reachability analysis to conservatively predict the behavior of the ego vehicle. This reachable set can be constructed by utilizing a simplified model whose behavior is assumed a priori to conservatively bound the dynamics of a full-order model. However, guaranteeing that one satisfies this assumption is challenging. This paper proposes a framework named REFINE to overcome the limitations of these existing approaches. REFINE utilizes a parameterized robust controller that partially linearizes the vehicle dynamics even in the presence of modeling error. Zonotope-based reachability analysis is then performed on the closed-loop, full-order vehicle dynamics to compute the corresponding control-parameterized, over-approximate Forward Reachable Sets (FRS). Because reachability analysis is applied to the full-order model, the potential conservativeness introduced by using a simplified model is avoided. The pre-computed, control-parameterized FRS is then used online in an optimization framework to ensure safety. The proposed method is compared to several state of the art methods during a simulation-based evaluation on a full-size vehicle model and is evaluated on a 1/10th race car robot in real hardware testing. In contrast to existing methods, REFINE is shown to enable the vehicle to safely navigate itself through complex environments.
Explainability of Traditional and Deep Learning Models on Longitudinal Healthcare Records
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Recent advances in deep learning have led to interest in training deep learning models on longitudinal healthcare records to predict a range of medical events, with models demonstrating high predictive performance. Predictive performance is necessary but insufficient, however, with explanations and reasoning from models required to convince clinicians for sustained use. Rigorous evaluation of explainability is often missing, as comparisons between models (traditional versus deep) and various explainability methods have not been well-studied. Furthermore, ground truths needed to evaluate explainability can be highly subjective depending on the clinician's perspective. Our work is one of the first to evaluate explainability performance between and within traditional (XGBoost) and deep learning (LSTM with Attention) models on both a global and individual per-prediction level on longitudinal healthcare data. We compared explainability using three popular methods: 1) SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), 2) Layer-Wise Relevance Propagation (LRP), and 3) Attention. These implementations were applied on synthetically generated datasets with designed ground-truths and a real-world medicare claims dataset. We showed that overall, LSTMs with SHAP or LRP provides superior explainability compared to XGBoost on both the global and local level, while LSTM with dot-product attention failed to produce reasonable ones. With the explosion of the volume of healthcare data and deep learning progress, the need to evaluate explainability will be pivotal towards successful adoption of deep learning models in healthcare settings.
Time Series Forecasting with Hypernetworks Generating Parameters in Advance
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Forecasting future outcomes from recent time series data is not easy, especially when the future data are different from the past (i.e. time series are under temporal drifts). Existing approaches show limited performances under data drifts, and we identify the main reason: It takes time for a model to collect sufficient training data and adjust its parameters for complicated temporal patterns whenever the underlying dynamics change. To address this issue, we study a new approach; instead of adjusting model parameters (by continuously re-training a model on new data), we build a hypernetwork that generates other target models' parameters expected to perform well on the future data. Therefore, we can adjust the model parameters beforehand (if the hypernetwork is correct). We conduct extensive experiments with 6 target models, 6 baselines, and 4 datasets, and show that our HyperGPA outperforms other baselines.
Simulating Human Gaze with Neural Visual Attention
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Existing models of human visual attention are generally unable to incorporate direct task guidance and therefore cannot model an intent or goal when exploring a scene. To integrate guidance of any downstream visual task into attention modeling, we propose the Neural Visual Attention (NeVA) algorithm. To this end, we impose to neural networks the biological constraint of foveated vision and train an attention mechanism to generate visual explorations that maximize the performance with respect to the downstream task. We observe that biologically constrained neural networks generate human-like scanpaths without being trained for this objective. Extensive experiments on three common benchmark datasets show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised human attention models in generating human-like scanpaths.
The transport problem for non-additive measures
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

Non-additive measures, also known as fuzzy measures, capacities, and monotonic games, are increasingly used in different fields. Applications have been built within computer science and artificial intelligence related to e.g. decision making, image processing, machine learning for both classification, and regression. Tools for measure identification have been built. In short, as non-additive measures are more general than additive ones (i.e., than probabilities), they have better modeling capabilities allowing to model situations and problems that cannot be modeled by the latter. See e.g. the application of non-additive measures and the Choquet integral to model both Ellsberg paradox and Allais paradox. Because of that, there is an increasing need to analyze non-additive measures. The need for distances and similarities to compare them is no exception. Some work has been done for defining $f$-divergence for them. In this work we tackle the problem of defining the optimal transport problem for non-additive measures. Distances for pairs of probability distributions based on the optimal transport are extremely used in practical applications, and they are being studied extensively for their mathematical properties. We consider that it is necessary to provide appropriate definitions with a similar flavour, and that generalize the standard ones, for non-additive measures. We provide definitions based on the Möbius transform, but also based on the $(\max, +)$-transform that we consider that has some advantages. We will discuss in this paper the problems that arise to define the transport problem for non-additive measures, and discuss ways to solve them. In this paper we provide the definitions of the optimal transport problem, and prove some properties.
PESE: Event Structure Extraction using Pointer Network based Encoder-Decoder Architecture
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

The task of event extraction (EE) aims to find the events and event-related argument information from the text and represent them in a structured format. Most previous works try to solve the problem by separately identifying multiple substructures and aggregating them to get the complete event structure. The problem with the methods is that it fails to identify all the interdependencies among the event participants (event-triggers, arguments, and roles). In this paper, we represent each event record in a unique tuple format that contains trigger phrase, trigger type, argument phrase, and corresponding role information. Our proposed pointer network-based encoder-decoder model generates an event tuple in each time step by exploiting the interactions among event participants and presenting a truly end-to-end solution to the EE task. We evaluate our model on the ACE2005 dataset, and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our model by achieving competitive performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods.