OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Lexicographic Search Method for Multi-Objective Motion Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

We propose a novel method for multi-objective motion planning problems by leveraging the paradigm of lexicographic optimization and applying it for the first time to graph search over probabilistic roadmaps. The competing resources of interest are penalized hierarchically during the search. Higher-ranked resources cause a robot to incur non-negative costs over the paths traveled, which are occasionally zero-valued. This is intended to capture problems in which a robot must manage resources such as visibility of threats, availability of communications, and access to valuable measurements. This leaves freedom for tie-breaking with respect to lower-priority resources; at the bottom of the hierarchy is a strictly positive quantity consumed by the robot, such as distance traveled, energy expended or time elapsed. We compare our method with two other multi-objective approaches, a naive weighted sum method and an expanded graph search method, demonstrating that a lexicographic search can solve such planning problems efficiently without a need for parameter-tuning in unintuitive units. The proposed method is also demonstrated on hardware using a laser-equipped ground robot.
Powerset Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We present a novel class of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for set functions, i.e., data indexed with the powerset of a finite set. The convolutions are derived as linear, shift-equivariant functions for various notions of shifts on set functions. The framework is fundamentally different from graph convolutions based on the Laplacian, as it provides not one but several basic shifts, one for each element in the ground set. Prototypical experiments with several set function classification tasks on synthetic datasets and on datasets derived from real-world hypergraphs demonstrate the potential of our new powerset CNNs.
Supervised Multimodal Bitransformers for Classifying Images and Text
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Self-supervised bidirectional transformer models such as BERT have led to dramatic improvements in a wide variety of textual classification tasks. The modern digital world is increasingly multimodal, however, and textual information is often accompanied by other modalities such as images. We introduce a supervised multimodal bitransformer model that fuses information from text and image encoders, and obtain state-of-the-art performance on various multimodal classification benchmark tasks, outperforming strong baselines, including on hard test sets specifically designed to measure multimodal performance.
SystemDS: A Declarative Machine Learning System for the End-to-End Data Science Lifecycle
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2020
Year: 2020

Machine learning (ML) applications become increasingly common in many domains. ML systems to execute these workloads include numerical computing frameworks and libraries, ML algorithm libraries, and specialized systems for deep neural networks and distributed ML. These systems focus primarily on efficient model training and scoring. However, the data science process is exploratory, and deals with underspecified objectives and a wide variety of heterogeneous data sources. Therefore, additional tools are employed for data engineering and debugging, which requires boundary crossing, unnecessary manual effort, and lacks optimization across the lifecycle. In this paper, we introduce SystemDS, an open source ML system for the end-to-end data science lifecycle from data integration, cleaning, and preparation, over local, distributed, and federated ML model training, to debugging and serving. To this end, we aim to provide a stack of declarative language abstractions for the different lifecycle tasks, and users with different expertise. We describe the overall system architecture, explain major design decisions (motivated by lessons learned from Apache SystemML), and discuss key features and research directions. Finally, we provide preliminary results that show the potential of end-to-end lifecycle optimization.
Automatic Critical Mechanic Discovery Using Playtraces in Video Games
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

We present a new method of automatic critical mechanic discovery for video games using a combination of game description parsing and playtrace information. This method is applied to several games within the General Video Game Artificial Intelligence (GVG-AI) framework. In a user study, human-identified mechanics are compared against system-identified critical mechanics to verify alignment between humans and the system. The results of the study demonstrate that the new method is able to match humans with higher consistency than baseline. Our system is further validated by comparing MCTS agents augmented with critical mechanics and vanilla MCTS agents on $4$ games from GVG-AI. Our new playtrace method shows a significant performance improvement over the baseline for all 4 tested games. The proposed method also shows either matched or improved performance over the old method, demonstrating that playtrace information is responsible for more complete critical mechanic discovery.
Efficient Sentence Embedding using Discrete Cosine Transform
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Vector averaging remains one of the most popular sentence embedding methods in spite of its obvious disregard for syntactic structure. While more complex sequential or convolutional networks potentially yield superior classification performance, the improvements in classification accuracy are typically mediocre compared to the simple vector averaging. As an efficient alternative, we propose the use of discrete cosine transform (DCT) to compress word sequences in an order-preserving manner. The lower order DCT coefficients represent the overall feature patterns in sentences, which results in suitable embeddings for tasks that could benefit from syntactic features. Our results in semantic probing tasks demonstrate that DCT embeddings indeed preserve more syntactic information compared with vector averaging. With practically equivalent complexity, the model yields better overall performance in downstream classification tasks that correlate with syntactic features, which illustrates the capacity of DCT to preserve word order information.
Auto-completion for Data Cells in Relational Tables
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2020
Year: 2020

We address the task of auto-completing data cells in relational tables. Such tables describe entities (in rows) with their attributes (in columns). We present the CellAutoComplete framework to tackle several novel aspects of this problem, including: (i) enabling a cell to have multiple, possibly conflicting values, (ii) supplementing the predicted values with supporting evidence, (iii) combining evidence from multiple sources, and (iv) handling the case where a cell should be left empty. Our framework makes use of a large table corpus and a knowledge base as data sources, and consists of preprocessing, candidate value finding, and value ranking components. Using a purpose-built test collection, we show that our approach is 40\% more effective than the best baseline.
Neural Architecture Search in Embedding Space
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

The neural architecture search (NAS) algorithm with reinforcement learning can be a powerful and novel framework for the automatic discovering process of neural architectures. However, its application is restricted by noncontinuous and high-dimensional search spaces, which result in difficulty in optimization. To resolve these problems, we proposed NAS in embedding space (NASES), which is a novel framework. Unlike other NAS with reinforcement learning approaches that search over a discrete and high-dimensional architecture space, this approach enables reinforcement learning to search in an embedding space by using architecture encoders and decoders. The current experiment demonstrated that the performance of the final architecture network using the NASES procedure is comparable with that of other popular NAS approaches for the image classification task on CIFAR-10. The results of the experiment were efficient and indicated that NASES was highly efficient to discover final architecture only in $<$3.5 GPU hours. The beneficial-performance and effectiveness of NASES was impressive when the architecture-embedding searching and weight initialization were applied.
Option Encoder: A Framework for Discovering a Policy Basis in Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Option discovery and skill acquisition frameworks are integral to the functioning of a Hierarchically organized Reinforcement learning agent. However, such techniques often yield a large number of options or skills, which can potentially be represented succinctly by filtering out any redundant information. Such a reduction can reduce the required computation while also improving the performance on a target task. In order to compress an array of option policies, we attempt to find a policy basis that accurately captures the set of all options. In this work, we propose Option Encoder, an auto-encoder based framework with intelligently constrained weights, that helps discover a collection of basis policies. The policy basis can be used as a proxy for the original set of skills in a suitable hierarchically organized framework. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method on a collection of grid-worlds and on the high-dimensional Fetch-Reach robotic manipulation task by evaluating the obtained policy basis on a set of downstream tasks.
Chargrid-OCR: End-to-end Trainable Optical Character Recognition for Printed Documents using Instance Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

We present an end-to-end trainable approach for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on printed documents. Specifically, we propose a model that predicts a) a two-dimensional character grid (\emph{chargrid}) representation of a document image as a semantic segmentation task and b) character boxes for delineating character instances as an object detection task. For training the model, we build two large-scale datasets without resorting to any manual annotation - synthetic documents with clean labels and real documents with noisy labels. We demonstrate experimentally that our method, trained on the combination of these datasets, (i) outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches in accuracy (ii) is easily parallelizable on GPU and is, therefore, significantly faster and (iii) is easy to train and adapt to a new domain.
Graph-based data clustering via multiscale community detection
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2020
Year: 2020

We present a graph-theoretical approach to data clustering, which combines the creation of a graph from the data with Markov Stability, a multiscale community detection framework. We show how the multiscale capabilities of the method allow the estimation of the number of clusters, as well as alleviating the sensitivity to the parameters in graph construction. We use both synthetic and benchmark real datasets to compare and evaluate several graph construction methods and clustering algorithms, and show that multiscale graph-based clustering achieves improved performance compared to popular clustering methods without the need to set externally the number of clusters.
First Analysis of Local GD on Heterogeneous Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We provide the first convergence analysis of local gradient descent for minimizing the average of smooth and convex but otherwise arbitrary functions. Problems of this form and local gradient descent as a solution method are of importance in federated learning, where each function is based on private data stored by a user on a mobile device, and the data of different users can be arbitrarily heterogeneous. We show that in a low accuracy regime, the method has the same communication complexity as gradient descent.
Neural Belief Reasoner
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

This paper proposes a new generative model called neural belief reasoner (NBR). It differs from previous models in that it specifies a belief function rather than a probability distribution. Its implementation consists of neural networks, fuzzy-set operations and belief-function operations, and query-answering, sample-generation and training algorithms are presented. This paper studies NBR in two tasks. The first is a synthetic unsupervised-learning task, which demonstrates NBR's ability to perform multi-hop reasoning, reasoning with uncertainty and reasoning about conflicting information. The second is supervised learning: a robust MNIST classifier for 4 and 9, which is the most challenging pair of digits. This classifier needs no adversarial training, and it substantially exceeds the state of the art in adversarial robustness as measured by the L2 metric, while at the same time maintains 99.1% accuracy on natural images.
MultiFiT: Efficient Multi-lingual Language Model Fine-tuning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Pretrained language models are promising particularly for low-resource languages as they only require unlabelled data. However, training existing models requires huge amounts of compute, while pretrained cross-lingual models often underperform on low-resource languages. We propose Multi-lingual language model Fine-Tuning (MultiFiT) to enable practitioners to train and fine-tune language models efficiently in their own language. In addition, we propose a zero-shot method using an existing pretrained cross-lingual model. We evaluate our methods on two widely used cross-lingual classification datasets where they outperform models pretrained on orders of magnitude more data and compute. We release all models and code.
Deep Declarative Networks: A New Hope
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We explore a new class of end-to-end learnable models wherein data processing nodes (or network layers) are defined in terms of desired behavior rather than an explicit forward function. Specifically, the forward function is implicitly defined as the solution to a mathematical optimization problem. Consistent with nomenclature in the programming languages community, we name these models deep declarative networks. Importantly, we show that the class of deep declarative networks subsumes current deep learning models. Moreover, invoking the implicit function theorem, we show how gradients can be back-propagated through many declaratively defined data processing nodes thereby enabling end-to-end learning. We show how these declarative processing nodes can be implemented in the popular PyTorch deep learning software library allowing declarative and imperative nodes to co-exist within the same network. We also provide numerous insights and illustrative examples of declarative nodes and demonstrate their application for image and point cloud classification tasks.
Comprehensive Analysis of Aspect Term Extraction Methods using Various Text Embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Recently, a variety of model designs and methods have blossomed in the context of the sentiment analysis domain. However, there is still a lack of wide and comprehensive studies of aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA). We want to fill this gap and propose a comparison with ablation analysis of aspect term extraction using various text embedding methods. We particularly focused on architectures based on long short-term memory (LSTM) with optional conditional random field (CRF) enhancement using different pre-trained word embeddings. Moreover, we analyzed the influence on the performance of extending the word vectorization step with character embedding. The experimental results on SemEval datasets revealed that not only does bi-directional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) outperform regular LSTM, but also word embedding coverage and its source highly affect aspect detection performance. An additional CRF layer consistently improves the results as well.
Domain-Agnostic Few-Shot Classification by Learning Disparate Modulators
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Although few-shot learning research has advanced rapidly with the help of meta-learning, its practical usefulness is still limited because most of them assumed that all meta-training and meta-testing examples came from a single domain. We propose a simple but effective way for few-shot classification in which a task distribution spans multiple domains including ones never seen during meta-training. The key idea is to build a pool of models to cover this wide task distribution and learn to select the best one for a particular task through cross-domain meta-learning. All models in the pool share a base network while each model has a separate modulator to refine the base network in its own way. This framework allows the pool to have representational diversity without losing beneficial domain-invariant features. We verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm through experiments on various datasets across diverse domains.
Online Trajectory Generation with Distributed Model Predictive Control for Multi-Robot Motion Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

We present a distributed model predictive control (DMPC) algorithm to generate trajectories in real-time for multiple robots. We adopted the \textit{on-demand collision avoidance} method presented in previous work to efficiently compute non-colliding trajectories in transition tasks. An event-triggered replanning strategy is proposed to account for disturbances. Our simulation results show that the proposed collision avoidance method can reduce, on average, around 50% of the travel time required to complete a multi-agent point-to-point transition when compared to the well-studied Buffered Voronoi Cells (BVC) approach. Additionally, it shows a higher success rate in transition tasks with a high density of agents, with more than 90% success rate with 30 palm-sized quadrotor agents in a 18 m^3 arena. The approach was experimentally validated with a swarm of up to 20 drones flying in close proximity.
A Survey of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping with an Envision in 6G Wireless Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) achieves the purpose of simultaneous positioning and map construction based on self-perception. The paper makes an overview in SLAM including Lidar SLAM, visual SLAM, and their fusion. For Lidar or visual SLAM, the survey illustrates the basic type and product of sensors, open source system in sort and history, deep learning embedded, the challenge and future. Additionally, visual inertial odometry is supplemented. For Lidar and visual fused SLAM, the paper highlights the multi-sensors calibration, the fusion in hardware, data, task layer. The open question and forward thinking with an envision in 6G wireless networks end the paper. The contributions of this paper can be summarized as follows: the paper provides a high quality and full-scale overview in SLAM. It's very friendly for new researchers to hold the development of SLAM and learn it very obviously. Also, the paper can be considered as a dictionary for experienced researchers to search and find new interesting orientation.
SoftTriple Loss: Deep Metric Learning Without Triplet Sampling
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Distance metric learning (DML) is to learn the embeddings where examples from the same class are closer than examples from different classes. It can be cast as an optimization problem with triplet constraints. Due to the vast number of triplet constraints, a sampling strategy is essential for DML. With the tremendous success of deep learning in classifications, it has been applied for DML. When learning embeddings with deep neural networks (DNNs), only a mini-batch of data is available at each iteration. The set of triplet constraints has to be sampled within the mini-batch. Since a mini-batch cannot capture the neighbors in the original set well, it makes the learned embeddings sub-optimal. On the contrary, optimizing SoftMax loss, which is a classification loss, with DNN shows a superior performance in certain DML tasks. It inspires us to investigate the formulation of SoftMax. Our analysis shows that SoftMax loss is equivalent to a smoothed triplet loss where each class has a single center. In real-world data, one class can contain several local clusters rather than a single one, e.g., birds of different poses. Therefore, we propose the SoftTriple loss to extend the SoftMax loss with multiple centers for each class. Compared with conventional deep metric learning algorithms, optimizing SoftTriple loss can learn the embeddings without the sampling phase by mildly increasing the size of the last fully connected layer. Experiments on the benchmark fine-grained data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed loss function. Code is available at https://github.com/idstcv/SoftTriple
Joint Event and Temporal Relation Extraction with Shared Representations and Structured Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

We propose a joint event and temporal relation extraction model with shared representation learning and structured prediction. The proposed method has two advantages over existing work. First, it improves event representation by allowing the event and relation modules to share the same contextualized embeddings and neural representation learner. Second, it avoids error propagation in the conventional pipeline systems by leveraging structured inference and learning methods to assign both the event labels and the temporal relation labels jointly. Experiments show that the proposed method can improve both event extraction and temporal relation extraction over state-of-the-art systems, with the end-to-end F1 improved by 10% and 6.8% on two benchmark datasets respectively.
Recognizing Object Affordances to Support Scene Reasoning for Manipulation Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Affordance information about a scene provides important clues as to what actions may be executed in pursuit of meeting a specified goal state. Thus, integrating affordance-based reasoning into symbolic action plannning pipelines would enhance the flexibility of robot manipulation. Unfortunately, the top performing affordance recognition methods use object category priors to boost the accuracy of affordance detection and segmentation. Object priors limit generalization to unknown object categories. This paper describes an affordance recognition pipeline based on a category-agnostic region proposal network for proposing instance regions of an image across categories. To guide affordance learning in the absence of category priors, the training process includes the auxiliary task of explicitly inferencing existing affordances within a proposal. Secondly, a self-attention mechanism trained to interpret each proposal learns to capture rich contextual dependencies through the region. Visual benchmarking shows that the trained network, called AffContext, reduces the performance gap between object-agnostic and object-informed affordance recognition. AffContext is linked to the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL) with an augmented state keeper for action planning across temporally spaced goal-oriented tasks. Manipulation experiments show that AffContext can successfully parse scene content to seed a symbolic planner problem specification, whose execution completes the target task. Additionally, task-oriented grasping for cutting and pounding actions demonstrate the exploitation of multiple affordances for a given object to complete specified tasks.