OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Fire Dragon and Unicorn Princess; Gender Stereotypes and Children's Products in Search Engine Responses
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

Search engines in e-commerce settings allow users to search, browse, and select items from a wide range of products available online including children's items. Children's products such as toys, books, and learning materials often have stereotype-based gender associations. Both academic research and public campaigns are working to promote stereotype-free childhood development. However, to date, e-commerce search engines have not received as much attention as physical stores, product design, or marketing as a potential channel of gender stereotypes. To fill this gap, in this paper, we study the manifestations of gender stereotypes in e-commerce sites when responding to queries related to children's products by exploring query suggestions and search results. We have three primary contributions. First, we provide an aggregated list of children's products with associated gender stereotypes from the existing body of research. Second, we provide preliminary methods for identifying and quantifying gender stereotypes in system's responses. Third, to show the importance of attending this problem, we identify the existence of gender stereotypes in query suggestions and search results across multiple e-commerce sites.
Comparison of Speech Representations for the MOS Prediction System
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

Automatic methods to predict Mean Opinion Score (MOS) of listeners have been researched to assure the quality of Text-to-Speech systems. Many previous studies focus on architectural advances (e.g. MBNet, LDNet, etc.) to capture relations between spectral features and MOS in a more effective way and achieved high accuracy. However, the optimal representation in terms of generalization capability still largely remains unknown. To this end, we compare the performance of Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) features obtained by the wav2vec framework to that of spectral features such as magnitude of spectrogram and melspectrogram. Moreover, we propose to combine the SSL features and features which we believe to retain essential information to the automatic MOS to compensate each other for their drawbacks. We conduct comprehensive experiments on a large-scale listening test corpus collected from past Blizzard and Voice Conversion Challenges. We found that the wav2vec feature set showed the best generalization even though the given ground-truth was not always reliable. Furthermore, we found that the combinations performed the best and analyzed how they bridged the gap between spectral and the wav2vec feature sets.
Gradual Soundness: Lessons from Static Python
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2022
Year: 2022

Context: Gradually-typed languages allow typed and untyped code to interoperate, but typically come with significant drawbacks. In some languages, the types are unreliable; in others, communication across type boundaries can be extremely expensive; and still others allow only limited forms of interoperability. The research community is actively seeking a sound, fast, and expressive approach to gradual typing. Inquiry: This paper describes Static Python, a language developed by engineers at Instagram that has proven itself sound, fast, and reasonably expressive in production. Static Python's approach to gradual types is essentially a programmer-tunable combination of the concrete and transient approaches from the literature. Concrete types provide full soundness and low performance overhead, but impose nonlocal constraints. Transient types are sound in a shallow sense and easier to use; they help to bridge the gap between untyped code and typed concrete code. Approach: We evaluate the language in its current state and develop a model that captures the essence of its approach to gradual types. We draw upon personal communication, bug reports, and the Static Python regression test suite to develop this model. Knowledge: Our main finding is that the gradual soundness that arises from a mix of concrete and transient types is an effective way to lower the maintenance cost of the concrete approach. We also find that method-based JIT technology can eliminate the costs of the transient approach. On a more technical level, this paper describes two contributions: a model of Static Python and a performance evaluation of Static Python. The process of formalization found several errors in the implementation, including fatal errors. Grounding: Our model of Static Python is implemented in PLT Redex and tested using property-based soundness tests and 265 tests from the Static Python regression suite. This paper includes a small core of the model to convey the main ideas of the Static Python approach and its soundness. Our performance claims are based on production experience in the Instagram web server. Migrations to Static Python in the server have caused a 3.7\% increase in requests handled per second at maximum CPU load. Importance: Static Python is the first sound gradual language whose piece-meal application to a realistic codebase has consistently improved performance. Other language designers may wish to replicate its approach, especially those who currently maintain unsound gradual languages and are seeking a path to soundness.
Generating near-infrared facial expression datasets with dimensional affect labels
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Facial expression analysis has long been an active research area of computer vision. Traditional methods mainly analyse images for prototypical discrete emotions; as a result, they do not provide an accurate depiction of the complex emotional states in humans. Furthermore, illumination variance remains a challenge for face analysis in the visible light spectrum. To address these issues, we propose using a dimensional model based on valence and arousal to represent a wider range of emotions, in combination with near infra-red (NIR) imagery, which is more robust to illumination changes. Since there are no existing NIR facial expression datasets with valence-arousal labels available, we present two complementary data augmentation methods (face morphing and CycleGAN approach) to create NIR image datasets with dimensional emotion labels from existing categorical and/or visible-light datasets. Our experiments show that these generated NIR datasets are comparable to existing datasets in terms of data quality and baseline prediction performance.
Haul Road Mapping from GPS Traces
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Automation in mining requires accurate maps of road networks on site. Because roads on open-cut mines are dynamic in nature and continuously changing, manually updating road maps is tedious and error-prone. This paper investigates the possibility of automatically deriving an accurate representation of the road network using GPS data available from haul trucks operating on site. We present an overview of approaches proposed in literature and test the performance of publicly available methods on GPS data collected from trucks operating on site. Based on shortcomings seen in all tested algorithms, a post-processing step is developed which geometrically analyses the created road map for artefacts typical of free-drive areas on mine sites and significantly improves the quality of the final road network graph.
RAPID: AppRoximAte Pipelined Soft Multipliers and Dividers for High-Throughput and Energy-Efficiency
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2022
Year: 2022

The rapid updates in error-resilient applications along with their quest for high throughput have motivated designing fast approximate functional units for Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Studies that proposed imprecise functional techniques are posed with three shortcomings: first, most inexact multipliers and dividers are specialized for Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) platforms. Second, state-of-the-art (SoA) approximate units are substituted, mostly in a single kernel of a multi-kernel application. Moreover, the end-to-end assessment is adopted on the Quality of Results (QoR), but not on the overall gained performance. Finally, existing imprecise components are not designed to support a pipelined approach, which could boost the operating frequency/throughput of, e.g., division-included applications. In this paper, we propose RAPID, the first pipelined approximate multiplier and divider architecture, customized for FPGAs. The proposed units efficiently utilize 6-input Look-up Tables (6-LUTs) and fast carry chains to implement Mitchell's approximate algorithms. Our novel error-refinement scheme not only has negligible overhead over the baseline Mitchell's approach but also boosts its accuracy to 99.4% for arbitrary size of multiplication and division. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed pipelined and non-pipelined RAPID multipliers and dividers over accurate counterparts. Moreover, the end-to-end evaluations of RAPID, deployed in three multi-kernel applications in the domains of bio-signal processing, image processing, and moving object tracking for Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAV) indicate up to 45% improvements in area, latency, and Area-Delay-Product (ADP), respectively, over accurate kernels, with negligible loss in QoR.
An Algebraic Construction Technique for Codes over Hurwitz Integers
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

Let α be a prime Hurwitz integer. Hα, which is the set of residual class with respect to related modulo function in the rings of Hurwitz integers, is a subset of H, which is the set of all Hurwitz integers. We consider left congruent module α and, the domain of related modulo function in this study is ZN(α), which is residual class ring of ordinary integers with N(α) elements, which is the norm of prime Hurwitz integer α. In this study, we present an algebraic construction technique, which is a modulo function formed depending on two modulo operations, for codes over Hurwitz integers. Thereby, we obtain the residue class rings of Hurwitz integers with N(α) size. In addition, we present some results for mathematical notations used in two modulo functions, and for the algebraic construction technique formed depending upon two modulo functions. Moreover, we present graphs obtained by graph layout methods, such as spring, high-dimensional, and spiral embedding, for the set of the residual class obtained with respect to the related modulo function in the rings of Hurwitz integers.
Item Matching using Text Description and Similarity Search
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we focus on the problem of item matching using only the description. Those specific items not only lack a unique code but also contain short text descriptions, making the item matching process difficult. Our goal is to compare products using only the description provided by the purchase process. Therefore, evaluating other characteristics and differences can uncover possible flaws during the acquiring phase. However, the text of the items that we were working on was very small, with numbers due to the nature of the products and we have a limited amount of time to develop the solution which was 8 weeks. As result, we showed that working using a well-oriented methodology we were able to deliver a successful MVP and achieve the results expected with up to 55% match.
Comparison of metadata with relevance for bibliometrics between Microsoft Academic Graph and OpenAlex until 2020
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2022
Year: 2022

Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) has been studied a lot concerning its suitability for bibliometric evaluations. In May 2021, it was announced that it would retire on December 31, 2021. Soon after that, the non-profit organization OurResearch, aiming at providing 'a fully open catalog of the global research system', announced they would preserve and incorporate the last full MAG corpus, only excluding patent data, and to continue and hopefully improve it. After the launch of OpenAlex in January 2022, it is of interest to know if the usefulness of the MAG data is preserved or even improved in OpenAlex. To this end, we compared metadata that are relevant for bibliometric analyses (in particular field and time normalization of citations) of MAG and OpenAlex: - the coverage of documents over the years, - the agreement of bibliographic data, - the numbers of references of each document, - the kind and distribution of document types, - the distribution and relation of subject classifications.
DayDreamer: World Models for Physical Robot Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

To solve tasks in complex environments, robots need to learn from experience. Deep reinforcement learning is a common approach to robot learning but requires a large amount of trial and error to learn, limiting its deployment in the physical world. As a consequence, many advances in robot learning rely on simulators. On the other hand, learning inside of simulators fails to capture the complexity of the real world, is prone to simulator inaccuracies, and the resulting behaviors do not adapt to changes in the world. The Dreamer algorithm has recently shown great promise for learning from small amounts of interaction by planning within a learned world model, outperforming pure reinforcement learning in video games. Learning a world model to predict the outcomes of potential actions enables planning in imagination, reducing the amount of trial and error needed in the real environment. However, it is unknown whether Dreamer can facilitate faster learning on physical robots. In this paper, we apply Dreamer to 4 robots to learn online and directly in the real world, without simulators. Dreamer trains a quadruped robot to roll off its back, stand up, and walk from scratch and without resets in only 1 hour. We then push the robot and find that Dreamer adapts within 10 minutes to withstand perturbations or quickly roll over and stand back up. On two different robotic arms, Dreamer learns to pick and place multiple objects directly from camera images and sparse rewards, approaching human performance. On a wheeled robot, Dreamer learns to navigate to a goal position purely from camera images, automatically resolving ambiguity about the robot orientation. Using the same hyperparameters across all experiments, we find that Dreamer is capable of online learning in the real world, establishing a strong baseline. We release our infrastructure for future applications of world models to robot learning.
The NLP Sandbox: an efficient model-to-data system to enable federated and unbiased evaluation of clinical NLP models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Objective The evaluation of natural language processing (NLP) models for clinical text de-identification relies on the availability of clinical notes, which is often restricted due to privacy concerns. The NLP Sandbox is an approach for alleviating the lack of data and evaluation frameworks for NLP models by adopting a federated, model-to-data approach. This enables unbiased federated model evaluation without the need for sharing sensitive data from multiple institutions. Materials and Methods We leveraged the Synapse collaborative framework, containerization software, and OpenAPI generator to build the NLP Sandbox (nlpsandbox.io). We evaluated two state-of-the-art NLP de-identification focused annotation models, Philter and NeuroNER, using data from three institutions. We further validated model performance using data from an external validation site. Results We demonstrated the usefulness of the NLP Sandbox through de-identification clinical model evaluation. The external developer was able to incorporate their model into the NLP Sandbox template and provide user experience feedback. Discussion We demonstrated the feasibility of using the NLP Sandbox to conduct a multi-site evaluation of clinical text de-identification models without the sharing of data. Standardized model and data schemas enable smooth model transfer and implementation. To generalize the NLP Sandbox, work is required on the part of data owners and model developers to develop suitable and standardized schemas and to adapt their data or model to fit the schemas. Conclusions The NLP Sandbox lowers the barrier to utilizing clinical data for NLP model evaluation and facilitates federated, multi-site, unbiased evaluation of NLP models.
Evaluating Understanding on Conceptual Abstraction Benchmarks
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

A long-held objective in AI is to build systems that understand concepts in a humanlike way. Setting aside the difficulty of building such a system, even trying to evaluate one is a challenge, due to present-day AI's relative opacity and its proclivity for finding shortcut solutions. This is exacerbated by humans' tendency to anthropomorphize, assuming that a system that can recognize one instance of a concept must also understand other instances, as a human would. In this paper, we argue that understanding a concept requires the ability to use it in varied contexts. Accordingly, we propose systematic evaluations centered around concepts, by probing a system's ability to use a given concept in many different instantiations. We present case studies of such an evaluations on two domains -- RAVEN (inspired by Raven's Progressive Matrices) and the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) -- that have been used to develop and assess abstraction abilities in AI systems. Our concept-based approach to evaluation reveals information about AI systems that conventional test sets would have left hidden.
$\mathbb{Z}_p\mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-additive cyclic codes: kernel and rank
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

A code $C = Φ(\mathcal{C})$ is called $\mathbb{Z}_p \mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-linear if it's the Gray image of the $\mathbb{Z}_p \mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-additive code $\mathcal{C}$. In this paper, the rank and the dimension of the kernel of $\mathcal{C}$ are studied. Both of the codes $\langle Φ(\mathcal{C}) \rangle$ and $\ker(Φ(\mathcal{C}))$ are proven $\mathbb{Z}_p \mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-additive cyclic codes, and their generator polynomials are determined. Finally, accurate values of rank and the dimension of the kernel of some classes of $\mathbb{Z}_p \mathbb{Z}_{p^2}$-additive cyclic codes are considered.
GAN-based Intrinsic Exploration For Sample Efficient Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

In this study, we address the problem of efficient exploration in reinforcement learning. Most common exploration approaches depend on random action selection, however these approaches do not work well in environments with sparse or no rewards. We propose Generative Adversarial Network-based Intrinsic Reward Module that learns the distribution of the observed states and sends an intrinsic reward that is computed as high for states that are out of distribution, in order to lead agent to unexplored states. We evaluate our approach in Super Mario Bros for a no reward setting and in Montezuma's Revenge for a sparse reward setting and show that our approach is indeed capable of exploring efficiently. We discuss a few weaknesses and conclude by discussing future works.
Simple and Effective Knowledge-Driven Query Expansion for QA-Based Product Attribute Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

A key challenge in attribute value extraction (AVE) from e-commerce sites is how to handle a large number of attributes for diverse products. Although this challenge is partially addressed by a question answering (QA) approach which finds a value in product data for a given query (attribute), it does not work effectively for rare and ambiguous queries. We thus propose simple knowledge-driven query expansion based on possible answers (values) of a query (attribute) for QA-based AVE. We retrieve values of a query (attribute) from the training data to expand the query. We train a model with two tricks, knowledge dropout and knowledge token mixing, which mimic the imperfection of the value knowledge in testing. Experimental results on our cleaned version of AliExpress dataset show that our method improves the performance of AVE (+6.08 macro F1), especially for rare and ambiguous attributes (+7.82 and +6.86 macro F1, respectively).
Lessons Learned on MPI+Threads Communication
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

Hybrid MPI+threads programming is gaining prominence, but, in practice, applications perform slower with it compared to the MPI everywhere model. The most critical challenge to the parallel efficiency of MPI+threads applications is slow MPI_THREAD_MULTIPLE performance. MPI libraries have recently made significant strides on this front, but to exploit their capabilities, users must expose the communication parallelism in their MPI+threads applications. Recent studies show that MPI 4.0 provides users with new performance-oriented options to do so, but our evaluation of these new mechanisms shows that they pose several challenges. An alternative design is MPI Endpoints. In this paper, we present a comparison of the different designs from the perspective of MPI's end-users: domain scientists and application developers. We evaluate the mechanisms on metrics beyond performance such as usability, scope, and portability. Based on the lessons learned, we make a case for a future direction.
Stronger Together: Air-Ground Robotic Collaboration Using Semantics
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

In this work, we present an end-to-end heterogeneous multi-robot system framework where ground robots are able to localize, plan, and navigate in a semantic map created in real time by a high-altitude quadrotor. The ground robots choose and deconflict their targets independently, without any external intervention. Moreover, they perform cross-view localization by matching their local maps with the overhead map using semantics. The communication backbone is opportunistic and distributed, allowing the entire system to operate with no external infrastructure aside from GPS for the quadrotor. We extensively tested our system by performing different missions on top of our framework over multiple experiments in different environments. Our ground robots travelled over 6 km autonomously with minimal intervention in the real world and over 96 km in simulation without interventions.
Indistinguishability Obfuscation of Circuits and its Application in Security
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Under discussion in the paper is an $i\mathcal{O}$ (indistinguishability obfuscator) for circuits in Nick's Class. The obfuscator is constructed by encoding the Branching Program given by Barrington's theorem using Multilinear Jigsaw Puzzle framework. We will show under various indistinguishability hardness assumptions, the constructed obfuscator is an $i\mathcal{O}$ for Nick's Class. Using Fully Homomorphic Encryption, we will amplify the result and construct an $i\mathcal{O}$ for $\textbf{P}/poly$, which are circuits of polynomial size. Discussion on $i\mathcal{O}$ and Functional Encryption is also included in this paper.
Multiuser MISO PS-SWIPT Systems: Active or Passive RIS?
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-based communication networks promise to improve channel capacity and energy efficiency. However, the promised capacity gains could be negligible for passive RISs because of the double pathloss effect. Active RISs can overcome this issue because they have reflector elements with a low-cost amplifier. This letter studies the active RIS-aided simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) in a multiuser system. The users exploit power splitting (PS) to decode information and harvest energy simultaneously based on a realistic piecewise nonlinear energy harvesting model. The goal is to minimize the base station (BS) transmit power by optimizing its beamformers, PS ratios, and RIS phase shifts/amplification factors. The simulation results show significant improvements (e.g., 19% and 28%) with the maximum reflect power of 10 mW and 15 mW, respectively, compared to the passive RIS without higher computational complexity cost. We also show the robustness of the proposed algorithm against imperfect channel state information.