Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
An improved lower bound for the planar Turán number of cycles

The planar Turán number of a graph $H$, denoted by $ex_{_\mathcal{P}}(n,H)$, is the largest number of edges in a planar graph on $n $ vertices without containing $H$ as a subgraph. In this paper, we continue to study the topic of "extremal" planar graphs initiated by Dowden [J. Graph Theory 83 (2016) 213--230]. We first obtain an improved lower bound for $ex_{_\mathcal{P}}(n,C_k)$ for all $k\ge 13$ and $n\ge 5(k-6+\lfloor{(k-1)}/2\rfloor)(k-1)/2$; the construction for each $k$ and $n$ provides a simpler counterexample to a conjecture of Ghosh, Győri, Martin, Paulos and Xiao [arxiv:2004.14094v1], which has recently been disproved by Cranston, Lidický, Liu and Shantanam [Electron. J. Combin. 29(3) (2022) \#P3.31] for every $k\ge 11$ and $n$ sufficiently large (as a function of $k$). We then prove that $ex_{_\mathcal{P}}(n,H^+)=ex_{_\mathcal{P}}(n,H)$ for all $k\ge 5$ and $n\ge |H|+1$, where $H\in\{C_k, 2C_k\}$ and $H^+$ is obtained from $H$ by adding a pendant edge to a vertex of degree two.
CrossDial: An Entertaining Dialogue Dataset of Chinese Crosstalk

Crosstalk is a traditional Chinese theatrical performance art. It is commonly performed by two performers in the form of a dialogue. With the typical features of dialogues, crosstalks are also designed to be hilarious for the purpose of amusing the audience. In this study, we introduce CrossDial, the first open-source dataset containing most classic Chinese crosstalks crawled from the Web. Moreover, we define two new tasks, provide two benchmarks, and investigate the ability of current dialogue generation models in the field of crosstalk generation. The experiment results and case studies demonstrate that crosstalk generation is challenging for straightforward methods and remains an interesting topic for future works.
Classification of Breast Tumours Based on Histopathology Images Using Deep Features and Ensemble of Gradient Boosting Methods

Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women worldwide. Early-stage diagnosis of breast cancer can significantly improve the efficiency of treatment. Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems are widely adopted in this issue due to their reliability, accuracy and affordability. There are different imaging techniques for a breast cancer diagnosis; one of the most accurate ones is histopathology which is used in this paper. Deep feature transfer learning is used as the main idea of the proposed CAD system's feature extractor. Although 16 different pre-trained networks have been tested in this study, our main focus is on the classification phase. The Inception-ResNet-v2 which has both residual and inception networks profits together has shown the best feature extraction capability in the case of breast cancer histopathology images among all tested CNNs. In the classification phase, the ensemble of CatBoost, XGBoost and LightGBM has provided the best average accuracy. The BreakHis dataset was used to evaluate the proposed method. BreakHis contains 7909 histopathology images (2,480 benign and 5,429 malignant) in four magnification factors. The proposed method's accuracy (IRv2-CXL) using 70% of BreakHis dataset as training data in 40x, 100x, 200x and 400x magnification is 96.82%, 95.84%, 97.01% and 96.15%, respectively. Most studies on automated breast cancer detection have focused on feature extraction, which made us attend to the classification phase. IRv2-CXL has shown better or comparable results in all magnifications due to using the soft voting ensemble method which could combine the advantages of CatBoost, XGBoost and LightGBM together.
Disconnected Emerging Knowledge Graph Oriented Inductive Link Prediction

Inductive link prediction (ILP) is to predict links for unseen entities in emerging knowledge graphs (KGs), considering the evolving nature of KGs. A more challenging scenario is that emerging KGs consist of only unseen entities, called as disconnected emerging KGs (DEKGs). Existing studies for DEKGs only focus on predicting enclosing links, i.e., predicting links inside the emerging KG. The bridging links, which carry the evolutionary information from the original KG to DEKG, have not been investigated by previous work so far. To fill in the gap, we propose a novel model entitled DEKG-ILP (Disconnected Emerging Knowledge Graph Oriented Inductive Link Prediction) that consists of the following two components. (1) The module CLRM (Contrastive Learning-based Relation-specific Feature Modeling) is developed to extract global relation-based semantic features that are shared between original KGs and DEKGs with a novel sampling strategy. (2) The module GSM (GNN-based Subgraph Modeling) is proposed to extract the local subgraph topological information around each link in KGs. The extensive experiments conducted on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that DEKG-ILP has obvious performance improvements compared with state-of-the-art methods for both enclosing and bridging link prediction. The source code is available online.
Scramble number and tree-cut decompositions

The scramble number of a graph is an invariant recently developed to study chip-firing games and divisorial gonality. In this paper we introduce the screewidth of a graph, based on a variation of the existing literature on tree-cut decompositions. We prove that this invariant serves as an upper bound on scramble number, though they are not always equal. We study properties of screewidth, and present results and conjectures on its connection to divisorial gonality.
Model Selection in High-Dimensional Block-Sparse Linear Regression

Model selection is an indispensable part of data analysis dealing very frequently with fitting and prediction purposes. In this paper, we tackle the problem of model selection in a general linear regression where the parameter matrix possesses a block-sparse structure, i.e., the non-zero entries occur in clusters or blocks and the number of such non-zero blocks is very small compared to the parameter dimension. Furthermore, a high-dimensional setting is considered where the parameter dimension is quite large compared to the number of available measurements. To perform model selection in this setting, we present an information criterion that is a generalization of the Extended Bayesian Information Criterion-Robust (EBIC-R) and it takes into account both the block structure and the high-dimensionality scenario. The analytical steps for deriving the EBIC-R for this setting are provided. Simulation results show that the proposed method performs considerably better than the existing state-of-the-art methods and achieves empirical consistency at large sample sizes and/or at high-SNR.
Outsourcing Control requires Control Complexity

An embodied agent constantly influences its environment and is influenced by it. We use the sensorimotor loop to model these interactions and thereby we can quantify different information flows in the system by various information theoretic measures. This includes a measure for the interaction among the agent's body and its environment, called Morphological Computation. Additionally, we examine the controller complexity by two measures, one of which can be seen in the context of the Integrated Information Theory of consciousness. Applying this framework to an experimental setting with simulated agents allows us to analyze the interaction between an agent and its environment, as well as the complexity of its controller, the brain of the agent. Previous research reveals an antagonistic relationship between the controller complexity and Morphological Computation. A morphology adapted well to a task can reduce the necessary complexity of the controller significantly. This creates the problem that embodied intelligence is correlated with a reduced necessity of a controller, a brain. However, in order to interact well with their surroundings, the agents first have to understand the relevant dynamics of the environment. By analyzing learning agents we observe that an increased controller complexity can facilitate a better interaction between an agent's body and its environment. Hence, learning requires an increased controller complexity and the controller complexity and Morphological Computation influence each other.
Do Large Language Models know what humans know?

Humans can attribute beliefs to others. However, it is unknown to what extent this ability results from an innate biological endowment or from experience accrued through child development, particularly exposure to language describing others' mental states. We test the viability of the language exposure hypothesis by assessing whether models exposed to large quantities of human language display sensitivity to the implied knowledge states of characters in written passages. In pre-registered analyses, we present a linguistic version of the False Belief Task to both human participants and a Large Language Model, GPT-3. Both are sensitive to others' beliefs, but while the language model significantly exceeds chance behavior, it does not perform as well as the humans, nor does it explain the full extent of their behavior -- despite being exposed to more language than a human would in a lifetime. This suggests that while statistical learning from language exposure may in part explain how humans develop the ability to reason about the mental states of others, other mechanisms are also responsible.
Pseudo-LiDAR for Visual Odometry

In the existing methods, LiDAR odometry shows superior performance, but visual odometry is still widely used for its price advantage. Conventionally, the task of visual odometry mainly rely on the input of continuous images. However, it is very complicated for the odometry network to learn the epipolar geometry information provided by the images. In this paper, the concept of pseudo-LiDAR is introduced into the odometry to solve this problem. The pseudo-LiDAR point cloud back-projects the depth map generated by the image into the 3D point cloud, which changes the way of image representation. Compared with the stereo images, the pseudo-LiDAR point cloud generated by the stereo matching network can get the explicit 3D coordinates. Since the 6 Degrees of Freedom (DoF) pose transformation occurs in 3D space, the 3D structure information provided by the pseudo-LiDAR point cloud is more direct than the image. Compared with sparse LiDAR, the pseudo-LiDAR has a denser point cloud. In order to make full use of the rich point cloud information provided by the pseudo-LiDAR, a projection-aware dense odometry pipeline is adopted. Most previous LiDAR-based algorithms sampled 8192 points from the point cloud as input to the odometry network. The projection-aware dense odometry pipeline takes all the pseudo-LiDAR point clouds generated from the images except for the error points as the input to the network. While making full use of the 3D geometric information in the images, the semantic information in the images is also used in the odometry task. The fusion of 2D-3D is achieved in an image-only based odometry. Experiments on the KITTI dataset prove the effectiveness of our method. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first visual odometry method using pseudo-LiDAR.
Representative Image Feature Extraction via Contrastive Learning Pretraining for Chest X-ray Report Generation

Medical report generation is a challenging task since it is time-consuming and requires expertise from experienced radiologists. The goal of medical report generation is to accurately capture and describe the image findings. Previous works pretrain their visual encoding neural networks with large datasets in different domains, which cannot learn general visual representation in the specific medical domain. In this work, we propose a medical report generation framework that uses a contrastive learning approach to pretrain the visual encoder and requires no additional meta information. In addition, we adopt lung segmentation as an augmentation method in the contrastive learning framework. This segmentation guides the network to focus on encoding the visual feature within the lung region. Experimental results show that the proposed framework improves the performance and the quality of the generated medical reports both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Generalization in Neural Networks: A Broad Survey

This paper reviews concepts, modeling approaches, and recent findings along a spectrum of different levels of abstraction of neural network models including generalization across (1) Samples, (2) Distributions, (3) Domains, (4) Tasks, (5) Modalities, and (6) Scopes. Results on (1) sample generalization show that, in the case of ImageNet, nearly all the recent improvements reduced training error while overfitting stayed flat; with nearly all the training error eliminated, future progress will require a focus on reducing overfitting. Perspectives from statistics highlight how (2) distribution generalization can be viewed alternately as a change in sample weights or a change in the input-output relationship; thus, techniques that have been successful in domain generalization have the potential to be applied to difficult forms of sample or distribution generalization. Transfer learning approaches to (3) domain generalization are summarized, as are recent advances and the wealth of domain adaptation benchmark datasets available. Recent breakthroughs surveyed in (4) task generalization include few-shot meta-learning approaches and the BERT NLP engine, and recent (5) modality generalization studies are discussed that integrate image and text data and that apply a biologically-inspired network across olfactory, visual, and auditory modalities. Recent (6) scope generalization results are reviewed that embed knowledge graphs into deep NLP approaches. Additionally, concepts from neuroscience are discussed on the modular architecture of brains and the steps by which dopamine-driven conditioning leads to abstract thinking.
SCL-RAI: Span-based Contrastive Learning with Retrieval Augmented Inference for Unlabeled Entity Problem in NER

Named Entity Recognition is the task to locate and classify the entities in the text. However, Unlabeled Entity Problem in NER datasets seriously hinders the improvement of NER performance. This paper proposes SCL-RAI to cope with this problem. Firstly, we decrease the distance of span representations with the same label while increasing it for different ones via span-based contrastive learning, which relieves the ambiguity among entities and improves the robustness of the model over unlabeled entities. Then we propose retrieval augmented inference to mitigate the decision boundary shifting problem. Our method significantly outperforms the previous SOTA method by 4.21% and 8.64% F1-score on two real-world datasets.
Variational Inference for Model-Free and Model-Based Reinforcement Learning

Variational inference (VI) is a specific type of approximate Bayesian inference that approximates an intractable posterior distribution with a tractable one. VI casts the inference problem as an optimization problem, more specifically, the goal is to maximize a lower bound of the logarithm of the marginal likelihood with respect to the parameters of the approximate posterior. Reinforcement learning (RL) on the other hand deals with autonomous agents and how to make them act optimally such as to maximize some notion of expected future cumulative reward. In the non-sequential setting where agents' actions do not have an impact on future states of the environment, RL is covered by contextual bandits and Bayesian optimization. In a proper sequential scenario, however, where agents' actions affect future states, instantaneous rewards need to be carefully traded off against potential long-term rewards. This manuscript shows how the apparently different subjects of VI and RL are linked in two fundamental ways. First, the optimization objective of RL to maximize future cumulative rewards can be recovered via a VI objective under a soft policy constraint in both the non-sequential and the sequential setting. This policy constraint is not just merely artificial but has proven as a useful regularizer in many RL tasks yielding significant improvements in agent performance. And second, in model-based RL where agents aim to learn about the environment they are operating in, the model-learning part can be naturally phrased as an inference problem over the process that governs environment dynamics. We are going to distinguish between two scenarios for the latter: VI when environment states are fully observable by the agent and VI when they are only partially observable through an observation distribution.
An Adaptive Black-box Defense against Trojan Attacks (TrojDef)

Trojan backdoor is a poisoning attack against Neural Network (NN) classifiers in which adversaries try to exploit the (highly desirable) model reuse property to implant Trojans into model parameters for backdoor breaches through a poisoned training process. Most of the proposed defenses against Trojan attacks assume a white-box setup, in which the defender either has access to the inner state of NN or is able to run back-propagation through it. In this work, we propose a more practical black-box defense, dubbed TrojDef, which can only run forward-pass of the NN. TrojDef tries to identify and filter out Trojan inputs (i.e., inputs augmented with the Trojan trigger) by monitoring the changes in the prediction confidence when the input is repeatedly perturbed by random noise. We derive a function based on the prediction outputs which is called the prediction confidence bound to decide whether the input example is Trojan or not. The intuition is that Trojan inputs are more stable as the misclassification only depends on the trigger, while benign inputs will suffer when augmented with noise due to the perturbation of the classification features. Through mathematical analysis, we show that if the attacker is perfect in injecting the backdoor, the Trojan infected model will be trained to learn the appropriate prediction confidence bound, which is used to distinguish Trojan and benign inputs under arbitrary perturbations. However, because the attacker might not be perfect in injecting the backdoor, we introduce a nonlinear transform to the prediction confidence bound to improve the detection accuracy in practical settings. Extensive empirical evaluations show that TrojDef significantly outperforms the-state-of-the-art defenses and is highly stable under different settings, even when the classifier architecture, the training process, or the hyper-parameters change.
Private and Accurate Decentralized Optimization via Encrypted and Structured Functional Perturbation

We propose a decentralized optimization algorithm that preserves the privacy of agents' cost functions without sacrificing accuracy, termed EFPSN. The algorithm adopts Paillier cryptosystem to construct zero-sum functional perturbations. Then, based on the perturbed cost functions, any existing decentralized optimization algorithm can be utilized to obtain the accurate solution. We theoretically prove that EFPSN is (epsilon, delta)-differentially private and can achieve nearly perfect privacy under deliberate parameter settings. Numerical experiments further confirm the effectiveness of the algorithm.
Indoor Path Planning for Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles via Curriculum Learning

Multi-agent reinforcement learning was performed in this study for indoor path planning of two unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Each UAV performed the task of moving as fast as possible from a randomly paired initial position to a goal position in an environment with obstacles. To minimize training time and prevent the damage of UAVs, learning was performed by simulation. Considering the non-stationary characteristics of the multi-agent environment wherein the optimal behavior varies based on the actions of other agents, the action of the other UAV was also included in the state space of each UAV. Curriculum learning was performed in two stages to increase learning efficiency. A goal rate of 89.0% was obtained compared with other learning strategies that obtained goal rates of 73.6% and 79.9%.
Induced Cycles and Paths Are Harder Than You Think

The goal of the paper is to give fine-grained hardness results for the Subgraph Isomorphism (SI) problem for fixed size induced patterns $H$, based on the $k$-Clique hypothesis that the current best algorithms for Clique are optimal. Our first main result is that for any pattern graph $H$ that is a {\em core}, the SI problem for $H$ is at least as hard as $t$-Clique, where $t$ is the size of the largest clique minor of $H$. This improves (for cores) the previous known results [Dalirrooyfard-Vassilevska W. STOC'20] that the SI for $H$ is at least as hard as $k$-clique where $k$ is the size of the largest clique {\em subgraph} in $H$, or the chromatic number of $H$ (under the Hadwiger conjecture). For detecting \emph{any} graph pattern $H$, we further remove the dependency of the result of [Dalirrooyfard-Vassilevska W. STOC'20] on the Hadwiger conjecture at the cost of a sub-polynomial decrease in the lower bound. The result for cores allows us to prove that the SI problem for induced $k$-Path and $k$-Cycle is harder than previously known. Previously [Floderus et al. Theor. CS 2015] had shown that $k$-Path and $k$-Cycle are at least as hard to detect as a $\lfloor k/2\rfloor$-Clique. We show that they are in fact at least as hard as $3k/4-O(1)$-Clique, improving the conditional lower bound exponent by a factor of $3/2$. Finally, we provide a new conditional lower bound for detecting induced $4$-cycles: $n^{2-o(1)}$ time is necessary even in graphs with $n$ nodes and $O(n^{1.5})$ edges.
Multi-Modal Experience Inspired AI Creation

AI creation, such as poem or lyrics generation, has attracted increasing attention from both industry and academic communities, with many promising models proposed in the past few years. Existing methods usually estimate the outputs based on single and independent visual or textual information. However, in reality, humans usually make creations according to their experiences, which may involve different modalities and be sequentially correlated. To model such human capabilities, in this paper, we define and solve a novel AI creation problem based on human experiences. More specifically, we study how to generate texts based on sequential multi-modal information. Compared with the previous works, this task is much more difficult because the designed model has to well understand and adapt the semantics among different modalities and effectively convert them into the output in a sequential manner. To alleviate these difficulties, we firstly design a multi-channel sequence-to-sequence architecture equipped with a multi-modal attention network. For more effective optimization, we then propose a curriculum negative sampling strategy tailored for the sequential inputs. To benchmark this problem and demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, we manually labeled a new multi-modal experience dataset. With this dataset, we conduct extensive experiments by comparing our model with a series of representative baselines, where we can demonstrate significant improvements in our model based on both automatic and human-centered metrics. The code and data are available at: https://github.com/Aman-4-Real/MMTG.