OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Analyzing Political Bias and Unfairness in News Articles at Different Levels of Granularity
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Media organizations bear great reponsibility because of their considerable influence on shaping beliefs and positions of our society. Any form of media can contain overly biased content, e.g., by reporting on political events in a selective or incomplete manner. A relevant question hence is whether and how such form of imbalanced news coverage can be exposed. The research presented in this paper addresses not only the automatic detection of bias but goes one step further in that it explores how political bias and unfairness are manifested linguistically. In this regard we utilize a new corpus of 6964 news articles with labels derived from adfontesmedia.com and develop a neural model for bias assessment. By analyzing this model on article excerpts, we find insightful bias patterns at different levels of text granularity, from single words to the whole article discourse.
Is Batch Norm unique? An empirical investigation and prescription to emulate the best properties of common normalizers without batch dependence
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We perform an extensive empirical study of the statistical properties of Batch Norm and other common normalizers. This includes an examination of the correlation between representations of minibatches, gradient norms, and Hessian spectra both at initialization and over the course of training. Through this analysis, we identify several statistical properties which appear linked to Batch Norm's superior performance. We propose two simple normalizers, PreLayerNorm and RegNorm, which better match these desirable properties without involving operations along the batch dimension. We show that PreLayerNorm and RegNorm achieve much of the performance of Batch Norm without requiring batch dependence, that they reliably outperform LayerNorm, and that they can be applied in situations where Batch Norm is ineffective.
A Weighted Heterogeneous Graph Based Dialogue System
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Knowledge based dialogue systems have attracted increasing research interest in diverse applications. However, for disease diagnosis, the widely used knowledge graph is hard to represent the symptom-symptom relations and symptom-disease relations since the edges of traditional knowledge graph are unweighted. Most research on disease diagnosis dialogue systems highly rely on data-driven methods and statistical features, lacking profound comprehension of symptom-disease relations and symptom-symptom relations. To tackle this issue, this work presents a weighted heterogeneous graph based dialogue system for disease diagnosis. Specifically, we build a weighted heterogeneous graph based on symptom co-occurrence and a proposed symptom frequency-inverse disease frequency. Then this work proposes a graph based deep Q-network (Graph-DQN) for dialogue management. By combining Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) with DQN to learn the embeddings of diseases and symptoms from both the structural and attribute information in the weighted heterogeneous graph, Graph-DQN could capture the symptom-disease relations and symptom-symptom relations better. Experimental results show that the proposed dialogue system rivals the state-of-the-art models. More importantly, the proposed dialogue system can complete the task with less dialogue turns and possess a better distinguishing capability on diseases with similar symptoms.
On the Global Self-attention Mechanism for Graph Convolutional Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Applying Global Self-attention (GSA) mechanism over features has achieved remarkable success on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). However, it is not clear if Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) can similarly benefit from such a technique. In this paper, inspired by the similarity between CNNs and GCNs, we study the impact of the Global Self-attention mechanism on GCNs. We find that consistent with the intuition, the GSA mechanism allows GCNs to capture feature-based vertex relations regardless of edge connections; As a result, the GSA mechanism can introduce extra expressive power to the GCNs. Furthermore, we analyze the impacts of the GSA mechanism on the issues of overfitting and over-smoothing. We prove that the GSA mechanism can alleviate both the overfitting and the over-smoothing issues based on some recent technical developments. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets illustrate both superior expressive power and less significant overfitting and over-smoothing problems for the GSA-augmented GCNs, which corroborate the intuitions and the theoretical results.
ComboLoss for Facial Attractiveness Analysis with Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2020
Year: 2020

Loss function is crucial for model training and feature representation learning, conventional models usually regard facial attractiveness recognition task as a regression problem, and adopt MSE loss or Huber variant loss as supervision to train a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) to predict facial attractiveness score. Little work has been done to systematically compare the performance of diverse loss functions. In this paper, we firstly systematically analyze model performance under diverse loss functions. Then a novel loss function named ComboLoss is proposed to guide the SEResNeXt50 network. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on SCUT-FBP, HotOrNot and SCUT-FBP5500 datasets with an improvement of 1.13%, 2.1% and 0.57% compared with prior arts, respectively. Code and models are available at https://github.com/lucasxlu/ComboLoss.git.
FreeDOM: A Transferable Neural Architecture for Structured Information Extraction on Web Documents
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Extracting structured data from HTML documents is a long-studied problem with a broad range of applications like augmenting knowledge bases, supporting faceted search, and providing domain-specific experiences for key verticals like shopping and movies. Previous approaches have either required a small number of examples for each target site or relied on carefully handcrafted heuristics built over visual renderings of websites. In this paper, we present a novel two-stage neural approach, named FreeDOM, which overcomes both these limitations. The first stage learns a representation for each DOM node in the page by combining both the text and markup information. The second stage captures longer range distance and semantic relatedness using a relational neural network. By combining these stages, FreeDOM is able to generalize to unseen sites after training on a small number of seed sites from that vertical without requiring expensive hand-crafted features over visual renderings of the page. Through experiments on a public dataset with 8 different verticals, we show that FreeDOM beats the previous state of the art by nearly 3.7 F1 points on average without requiring features over rendered pages or expensive hand-crafted features.
Semantics-Guided Representation Learning with Applications to Visual Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Learning interpretable and interpolatable latent representations has been an emerging research direction, allowing researchers to understand and utilize the derived latent space for further applications such as visual synthesis or recognition. While most existing approaches derive an interpolatable latent space and induces smooth transition in image appearance, it is still not clear how to observe desirable representations which would contain semantic information of interest. In this paper, we aim to learn meaningful representations and simultaneously perform semantic-oriented and visually-smooth interpolation. To this end, we propose an angular triplet-neighbor loss (ATNL) that enables learning a latent representation whose distribution matches the semantic information of interest. With the latent space guided by ATNL, we further utilize spherical semantic interpolation for generating semantic warping of images, allowing synthesis of desirable visual data. Experiments on MNIST and CMU Multi-PIE datasets qualitatively and quantitatively verify the effectiveness of our method.
A Short Note on the Kinetics-700-2020 Human Action Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

We describe the 2020 edition of the DeepMind Kinetics human action dataset, which replenishes and extends the Kinetics-700 dataset. In this new version, there are at least 700 video clips from different YouTube videos for each of the 700 classes. This paper details the changes introduced for this new release of the dataset and includes a comprehensive set of statistics as well as baseline results using the I3D network.
PARENTing via Model-Agnostic Reinforcement Learning to Correct Pathological Behaviors in Data-to-Text Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

In language generation models conditioned by structured data, the classical training via maximum likelihood almost always leads models to pick up on dataset divergence (i.e., hallucinations or omissions), and to incorporate them erroneously in their own generations at inference. In this work, we build ontop of previous Reinforcement Learning based approaches and show that a model-agnostic framework relying on the recently introduced PARENT metric is efficient at reducing both hallucinations and omissions. Evaluations on the widely used WikiBIO and WebNLG benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of this framework compared to state-of-the-art models.
TurnGPT: a Transformer-based Language Model for Predicting Turn-taking in Spoken Dialog
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Syntactic and pragmatic completeness is known to be important for turn-taking prediction, but so far machine learning models of turn-taking have used such linguistic information in a limited way. In this paper, we introduce TurnGPT, a transformer-based language model for predicting turn-shifts in spoken dialog. The model has been trained and evaluated on a variety of written and spoken dialog datasets. We show that the model outperforms two baselines used in prior work. We also report on an ablation study, as well as attention and gradient analyses, which show that the model is able to utilize the dialog context and pragmatic completeness for turn-taking prediction. Finally, we explore the model's potential in not only detecting, but also projecting, turn-completions.
Visual Navigation in Real-World Indoor Environments Using End-to-End Deep Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Visual navigation is essential for many applications in robotics, from manipulation, through mobile robotics to automated driving. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) provides an elegant map-free approach integrating image processing, localization, and planning in one module, which can be trained and therefore optimized for a given environment. However, to date, DRL-based visual navigation was validated exclusively in simulation, where the simulator provides information that is not available in the real world, e.g., the robot's position or image segmentation masks. This precludes the use of the learned policy on a real robot. Therefore, we propose a novel approach that enables a direct deployment of the trained policy on real robots. We have designed visual auxiliary tasks, a tailored reward scheme, and a new powerful simulator to facilitate domain randomization. The policy is fine-tuned on images collected from real-world environments. We have evaluated the method on a mobile robot in a real office environment. The training took ~30 hours on a single GPU. In 30 navigation experiments, the robot reached a 0.3-meter neighborhood of the goal in more than 86.7% of cases. This result makes the proposed method directly applicable to tasks like mobile manipulation.
Towards Distributed Software Resilience in Asynchronous Many-Task Programming Models
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

Exceptions and errors occurring within mission critical applications due to hardware failures have a high cost. With the emerging Next Generation Platforms (NGPs), the rate of hardware failures will likely increase. Therefore, designing our applications to be resilient is a critical concern in order to retain the reliability of results while meeting the constraints on power budgets. In this paper, we discuss software resilience in AMTs at both local and distributed scale. We choose HPX to prototype our resiliency designs. We implement two resiliency APIs that we expose to the application developers, namely task replication and task replay. Task replication repeats a task n-times and executes them asynchronously. Task replay reschedules a task up to n-times until a valid output is returned. Furthermore, we expose algorithm based fault tolerance (ABFT) using user provided predicates (e.g., checksums) to validate the returned results. We benchmark the resiliency scheme for both synthetic and real world applications at local and distributed scale and show that most of the added execution time arises from the replay, replication or data movement of the tasks and not the boilerplate code added to achieve resilience.
Subword complexity of the Fibonacci-Thue-Morse sequence: the proof of Dekking's conjecture
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2020
Year: 2020

Recently Dekking conjectured the form of the subword complexity function for the Fibonacci-Thue-Morse sequence. In this note we prove his conjecture by purely computational means, using the free software Walnut.
A Neurochaos Learning Architecture for Genome Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2020
Year: 2020

There has been empirical evidence of presence of non-linearity and chaos at the level of single neurons in biological neural networks. The properties of chaotic neurons inspires us to employ them in artificial learning systems. Here, we propose a Neurochaos Learning (NL) architecture, where the neurons used to extract features from data are 1D chaotic maps. ChaosFEX+SVM, an instance of this NL architecture, is proposed as a hybrid combination of chaos and classical machine learning algorithm. We formally prove that a single layer of NL with a finite number of 1D chaotic neurons satisfies the Universal Approximation Theorem with an exact value for the number of chaotic neurons needed to approximate a discrete real valued function with finite support. This is made possible due to the topological transitivity property of chaos and the existence of uncountably infinite number of dense orbits for the chosen 1D chaotic map. The chaotic neurons in NL get activated under the presence of an input stimulus (data) and output a chaotic firing trajectory. From such chaotic firing trajectories of individual neurons of NL, we extract Firing Time, Firing Rate, Energy and Entropy that constitute ChaosFEX features. These ChaosFEX features are then fed to a Support Vector Machine with linear kernel for classification. The effectiveness of chaotic feature engineering performed by NL (ChaosFEX+SVM) is demonstrated for synthetic and real world datasets in the low and high training sample regimes. Specifically, we consider the problem of classification of genome sequences of SARS-CoV-2 from other coronaviruses (SARS-CoV-1, MERS-CoV and others). With just one training sample per class for 1000 random trials of training, we report an average macro F1-score > 0.99 for the classification of SARS-CoV-2 from SARS-CoV-1 genome sequences. Robustness of ChaosFEX features to additive noise is also demonstrated.
I-nteract 2.0: A Cyber-Physical System to Design 3D Models using Mixed Reality Technologies and Deep Learning for Additive Manufacturing
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

I-nteract is a cyber-physical system that enables real-time interaction with both virtual and real artifacts to design 3D models for additive manufacturing by leveraging on mixed reality technologies. This paper presents novel advances in the development of the interaction platform I-nteract to generate 3D models using both constructive solid geometry and artificial intelligence. The system also enables the user to adjust the dimensions of the 3D models with respect to their physical workspace. The effectiveness of the system is demonstrated by generating 3D models of furniture (e.g., chairs and tables) and fitting them into the physical space in a mixed reality environment.
SyDeBO: Symbolic-Decision-Embedded Bilevel Optimization for Long-Horizon Manipulation in Dynamic Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

This study proposes a Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) method with symbolic decisions embedded in a bilevel optimization. This TAMP method exploits the discrete structure of sequential manipulation for long-horizon and versatile tasks in dynamically changing environments. At the symbolic planning level, we propose a scalable decision-making method for long-horizon manipulation tasks using the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL) with causal graph decomposition. At the motion planning level, we devise a trajectory optimization (TO) approach based on the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM), suitable for solving constrained, large-scale nonlinear optimization in a distributed manner. Distinct from conventional geometric motion planners, our approach generates highly dynamic manipulation motions by incorporating the full robot and object dynamics. Furthermore, in lieu of a hierarchical planning approach, we solve a holistically integrated bilevel optimization problem involving costs from both the low-level TO and the high-level search. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate dynamic manipulation for long-horizon object sorting tasks in clutter and on a moving conveyor belt.
Security Issues and Challenges in Service Meshes -- An Extended Study
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

Service meshes have emerged as an attractive DevOps solution for collecting, managing, and coordinating microservice deployments. However, current service meshes leave fundamental security mechanisms missing or incomplete. The security burden means service meshes may actually cause additional workload and overhead for administrators over traditional monolithic systems. By assessing the effectiveness and practicality of service mesh tools, this work provides necessary insights into the available security of service meshes. We evaluate service meshes from two perspectives: skilled system administrators (who deploy optimal configurations of available security mechanisms) and default configurations. Under these two models, we consider a comprehensive set of adversarial scenarios and uncover important design flaws with contradicting goals, as well as the limitations and challenges encountered in employing service mesh tools for operational environments.
Stacking Neural Network Models for Automatic Short Answer Scoring
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Automatic short answer scoring is one of the text classification problems to assess students' answers during exams automatically. Several challenges can arise in making an automatic short answer scoring system, one of which is the quantity and quality of the data. The data labeling process is not easy because it requires a human annotator who is an expert in their field. Further, the data imbalance process is also a challenge because the number of labels for correct answers is always much less than the wrong answers. In this paper, we propose the use of a stacking model based on neural network and XGBoost for classification process with sentence embedding feature. We also propose to use data upsampling method to handle imbalance classes and hyperparameters optimization algorithm to find a robust model automatically. We use Ukara 1.0 Challenge dataset and our best model obtained an F1-score of 0.821 exceeding the previous work at the same dataset.
Sentence Boundary Augmentation For Neural Machine Translation Robustness
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models have demonstrated strong state of the art performance on translation tasks where well-formed training and evaluation data are provided, but they remain sensitive to inputs that include errors of various types. Specifically, in the context of long-form speech translation systems, where the input transcripts come from Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), the NMT models have to handle errors including phoneme substitutions, grammatical structure, and sentence boundaries, all of which pose challenges to NMT robustness. Through in-depth error analysis, we show that sentence boundary segmentation has the largest impact on quality, and we develop a simple data augmentation strategy to improve segmentation robustness.
Multi-Domain Dialogue State Tracking based on State Graph
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

We investigate the problem of multi-domain Dialogue State Tracking (DST) with open vocabulary, which aims to extract the state from the dialogue. Existing approaches usually concatenate previous dialogue state with dialogue history as the input to a bi-directional Transformer encoder. They rely on the self-attention mechanism of Transformer to connect tokens in them. However, attention may be paid to spurious connections, leading to wrong inference. In this paper, we propose to construct a dialogue state graph in which domains, slots and values from the previous dialogue state are connected properly. Through training, the graph node and edge embeddings can encode co-occurrence relations between domain-domain, slot-slot and domain-slot, reflecting the strong transition paths in general dialogue. The state graph, encoded with relational-GCN, is fused into the Transformer encoder. Experimental results show that our approach achieves a new state of the art on the task while remaining efficient. It outperforms existing open-vocabulary DST approaches.
Dynamic Layer Customization for Noise Robust Speech Emotion Recognition in Heterogeneous Condition Training
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2020
Year: 2020

Robustness to environmental noise is important to creating automatic speech emotion recognition systems that are deployable in the real world. Prior work on noise robustness has assumed that systems would not make use of sample-by-sample training noise conditions, or that they would have access to unlabelled testing data to generalize across noise conditions. We avoid these assumptions and introduce the resulting task as heterogeneous condition training. We show that with full knowledge of the test noise conditions, we can improve performance by dynamically routing samples to specialized feature encoders for each noise condition, and with partial knowledge, we can use known noise conditions and domain adaptation algorithms to train systems that generalize well to unseen noise conditions. We then extend these improvements to the multimodal setting by dynamically routing samples to maintain temporal ordering, resulting in significant improvements over approaches that do not specialize or generalize based on noise type.