Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Multivariate Functional Additive Mixed Models

Multivariate functional data can be intrinsically multivariate like movement trajectories in 2D or complementary like precipitation, temperature, and wind speeds over time at a given weather station. We propose a multivariate functional additive mixed model (multiFAMM) and show its application to both data situations using examples from sports science (movement trajectories of snooker players) and phonetic science (acoustic signals and articulation of consonants). The approach includes linear and nonlinear covariate effects and models the dependency structure between the dimensions of the responses using multivariate functional principal component analysis. Multivariate functional random intercepts capture both the auto-correlation within a given function and cross-correlations between the multivariate functional dimensions. They also allow us to model between-function correlations as induced by e.g.\ repeated measurements or crossed study designs. Modeling the dependency structure between the dimensions can generate additional insight into the properties of the multivariate functional process, improves the estimation of random effects, and yields corrected confidence bands for covariate effects. Extensive simulation studies indicate that a multivariate modeling approach is more parsimonious than fitting independent univariate models to the data while maintaining or improving model fit.
Unknown Object Segmentation from Stereo Images

Although instance-aware perception is a key prerequisite for many autonomous robotic applications, most of the methods only partially solve the problem by focusing solely on known object categories. However, for robots interacting in dynamic and cluttered environments, this is not realistic and severely limits the range of potential applications. Therefore, we propose a novel object instance segmentation approach that does not require any semantic or geometric information of the objects beforehand. In contrast to existing works, we do not explicitly use depth data as input, but rely on the insight that slight viewpoint changes, which for example are provided by stereo image pairs, are often sufficient to determine object boundaries and thus to segment objects. Focusing on the versatility of stereo sensors, we employ a transformer-based architecture that maps directly from the pair of input images to the object instances. This has the major advantage that instead of a noisy, and potentially incomplete depth map as an input, on which the segmentation is computed, we use the original image pair to infer the object instances and a dense depth map. In experiments in several different application domains, we show that our Instance Stereo Transformer (INSTR) algorithm outperforms current state-of-the-art methods that are based on depth maps. Training code and pretrained models will be made available.
Dynamic Grasping with a "Soft" Drone: From Theory to Practice

Rigid grippers used in existing aerial manipulators require precise positioning to achieve successful grasps and transmit large contact forces that may destabilize the drone. This limits the speed during grasping and prevents "dynamic grasping", where the drone attempts to grasp an object while moving. On the other hand, biological systems (e.g., birds) rely on compliant and soft parts to dampen contact forces and compensate for grasping inaccuracy, enabling impressive feats. This paper presents the first prototype of a soft drone -- a quadrotor where traditional (i.e., rigid) landing gears are replaced with a soft tendon-actuated gripper to enable aggressive grasping. We provide three key contributions. First, we describe our soft drone prototype, including electro-mechanical design, software infrastructure, and fabrication. Second, we review the set of algorithms we use for trajectory optimization and control of the drone and the soft gripper; the algorithms combine state-of-the-art techniques for quadrotor control (i.e., an adaptive geometric controller) with advanced soft robotics models (i.e., a quasi-static finite element model). Finally, we evaluate our soft drone in physics simulations (using SOFA and Unity) and in real tests in a motion-capture room. Our drone is able to dynamically grasp objects of unknown shape where baseline approaches fail. Our physical prototype ensures consistent performance, achieving 91.7% successful grasps across 23 trials. We showcase dynamic grasping results in the video attachment. Video Attachment: https://youtu.be/mqbj8mEyCdk
Large Batch Simulation for Deep Reinforcement Learning

We accelerate deep reinforcement learning-based training in visually complex 3D environments by two orders of magnitude over prior work, realizing end-to-end training speeds of over 19,000 frames of experience per second on a single GPU and up to 72,000 frames per second on a single eight-GPU machine. The key idea of our approach is to design a 3D renderer and embodied navigation simulator around the principle of "batch simulation": accepting and executing large batches of requests simultaneously. Beyond exposing large amounts of work at once, batch simulation allows implementations to amortize in-memory storage of scene assets, rendering work, data loading, and synchronization costs across many simulation requests, dramatically improving the number of simulated agents per GPU and overall simulation throughput. To balance DNN inference and training costs with faster simulation, we also build a computationally efficient policy DNN that maintains high task performance, and modify training algorithms to maintain sample efficiency when training with large mini-batches. By combining batch simulation and DNN performance optimizations, we demonstrate that PointGoal navigation agents can be trained in complex 3D environments on a single GPU in 1.5 days to 97% of the accuracy of agents trained on a prior state-of-the-art system using a 64-GPU cluster over three days. We provide open-source reference implementations of our batch 3D renderer and simulator to facilitate incorporation of these ideas into RL systems.
Adversarial Laser Beam: Effective Physical-World Attack to DNNs in a  Blink

Though it is well known that the performance of deep neural networks (DNNs) degrades under certain light conditions, there exists no study on the threats of light beams emitted from some physical source as adversarial attacker on DNNs in a real-world scenario. In this work, we show by simply using a laser beam that DNNs are easily fooled. To this end, we propose a novel attack method called Adversarial Laser Beam ($AdvLB$), which enables manipulation of laser beam's physical parameters to perform adversarial attack. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach in both digital- and physical-settings. We further empirically analyze the evaluation results and reveal that the proposed laser beam attack may lead to some interesting prediction errors of the state-of-the-art DNNs. We envisage that the proposed $AdvLB$ method enriches the current family of adversarial attacks and builds the foundation for future robustness studies for light.
Stochastic-HMDs: Adversarial Resilient Hardware Malware Detectors through Voltage Over-scaling

Machine learning-based hardware malware detectors (HMDs) offer a potential game changing advantage in defending systems against malware. However, HMDs suffer from adversarial attacks, can be effectively reverse-engineered and subsequently be evaded, allowing malware to hide from detection. We address this issue by proposing a novel HMDs (Stochastic-HMDs) through approximate computing, which makes HMDs' inference computation-stochastic, thereby making HMDs resilient against adversarial evasion attacks. Specifically, we propose to leverage voltage overscaling to induce stochastic computation in the HMDs model. We show that such a technique makes HMDs more resilient to both black-box adversarial attack scenarios, i.e., reverse-engineering and transferability. Our experimental results demonstrate that Stochastic-HMDs offer effective defense against adversarial attacks along with by-product power savings, without requiring any changes to the hardware/software nor to the HMDs' model, i.e., no retraining or fine tuning is needed. Moreover, based on recent results in probably approximately correct (PAC) learnability theory, we show that Stochastic-HMDs are provably more difficult to reverse engineer.
A Distributed, Decoupled System for Losslessly Streaming Dynamic Light Probes to Thin Clients

We present a networked, high performance graphics system that combines dynamic, high quality, ray traced global illumination computed on a server with direct illumination and primary visibility computed on a client. This approach provides many of the image quality benefits of real-time ray tracing on low-power and legacy hardware, while maintaining a low latency response and mobile form factor. Our system distributes the graphic pipeline over a network by computing diffuse global illumination on a remote machine. Global illumination is computed using a recent irradiance volume representation combined with a novel, lossless, HEVC-based, hardware-accelerated encoding, and a perceptually-motivated update scheme. Our experimental implementation streams thousands of irradiance probes per second and requires less than 50 Mbps of throughput, reducing the consumed bandwidth by 99.4% when streaming at 60 Hz compared to traditional lossless texture compression. This bandwidth reduction allows higher quality and lower latency graphics than state-of-the-art remote rendering via video streaming. In addition, our split-rendering solution decouples remote computation from local rendering and so does not limit local display update rate or resolution.
Interpretable Machines: Constructing Valid Prediction Intervals with Random Forests

An important issue when using Machine Learning algorithms in recent research is the lack of interpretability. Although these algorithms provide accurate point predictions for various learning problems, uncertainty estimates connected with point predictions are rather sparse. A contribution to this gap for the Random Forest Regression Learner is presented here. Based on its Out-of-Bag procedure, several parametric and non-parametric prediction intervals are provided for Random Forest point predictions and theoretical guarantees for its correct coverage probability is delivered. In a second part, a thorough investigation through Monte-Carlo simulation is conducted evaluating the performance of the proposed methods from three aspects: (i) Analyzing the correct coverage rate of the proposed prediction intervals, (ii) Inspecting interval width and (iii) Verifying the competitiveness of the proposed intervals with existing methods. The simulation yields that the proposed prediction intervals are robust towards non-normal residual distributions and are competitive by providing correct coverage rates and comparably narrow interval lengths, even for comparably small samples.
Components of symmetric wide-matrix varieties

We show that if X_n is a variety of cxn-matrices that is stable under the group Sym([n]) of column permutations and if forgetting the last column maps X_n into X_{n-1}, then the number of Sym([n])-orbits on irreducible components of X_n is a quasipolynomial in n for all sufficiently large n. To this end, we introduce the category of affine FI^op-schemes of width one, review existing literature on such schemes, and establish several new structural results about them. In particular, we show that under a shift and a localisation, any width-one FI^op-scheme becomes of product form, where X_n=Y^n for some scheme Y in affine c-space. Furthermore, to any FI^op-scheme of width one we associate a component functor from the category FI of finite sets with injections to the category PF of finite sets with partially defined maps. We present a combinatorial model for these functors and use this model to prove that Sym([n])-orbits of components of X_n, for all n, correspond bijectively to orbits of a groupoid acting on the integral points in certain rational polyhedral cones. Using the orbit-counting lemma for groupoids and theorems on quasipolynomiality of lattice point counts, this yields our Main Theorem.
Multicalibrated Partitions for Importance Weights

The ratio between the probability that two distributions $R$ and $P$ give to points $x$ are known as importance weights or propensity scores and play a fundamental role in many different fields, most notably, statistics and machine learning. Among its applications, importance weights are central to domain adaptation, anomaly detection, and estimations of various divergences such as the KL divergence. We consider the common setting where $R$ and $P$ are only given through samples from each distribution. The vast literature on estimating importance weights is either heuristic, or makes strong assumptions about $R$ and $P$ or on the importance weights themselves. In this paper, we explore a computational perspective to the estimation of importance weights, which factors in the limitations and possibilities obtainable with bounded computational resources. We significantly strengthen previous work that use the MaxEntropy approach, that define the importance weights based on a distribution $Q$ closest to $P$, that looks the same as $R$ on every set $C \in \mathcal{C}$, where $\mathcal{C}$ may be a huge collection of sets. We show that the MaxEntropy approach may fail to assign high average scores to sets $C \in \mathcal{C}$, even when the average of ground truth weights for the set is evidently large. We similarly show that it may overestimate the average scores to sets $C \in \mathcal{C}$. We therefore formulate Sandwiching bounds as a notion of set-wise accuracy for importance weights. We study these bounds to show that they capture natural completeness and soundness requirements from the weights. We present an efficient algorithm that under standard learnability assumptions computes weights which satisfy these bounds. Our techniques rely on a new notion of multicalibrated partitions of the domain of the distributions, which appear to be useful objects in their own right.
CEQE: Contextualized Embeddings for Query Expansion

In this work we leverage recent advances in context-sensitive language models to improve the task of query expansion. Contextualized word representation models, such as ELMo and BERT, are rapidly replacing static embedding models. We propose a new model, Contextualized Embeddings for Query Expansion (CEQE), that utilizes query-focused contextualized embedding vectors. We study the behavior of contextual representations generated for query expansion in ad-hoc document retrieval. We conduct our experiments on probabilistic retrieval models as well as in combination with neural ranking models. We evaluate CEQE on two standard TREC collections: Robust and Deep Learning. We find that CEQE outperforms static embedding-based expansion methods on multiple collections (by up to 18% on Robust and 31% on Deep Learning on average precision) and also improves over proven probabilistic pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) models. We further find that multiple passes of expansion and reranking result in continued gains in effectiveness with CEQE-based approaches outperforming other approaches. The final model incorporating neural and CEQE-based expansion score achieves gains of up to 5% in P@20 and 2% in AP on Robust over the state-of-the-art transformer-based re-ranking model, Birch.
Towards Action Model Learning for Player Modeling

Player modeling attempts to create a computational model which accurately approximates a player's behavior in a game. Most player modeling techniques rely on domain knowledge and are not transferable across games. Additionally, player models do not currently yield any explanatory insight about a player's cognitive processes, such as the creation and refinement of mental models. In this paper, we present our findings with using action model learning (AML), in which an action model is learned given data in the form of a play trace, to learn a player model in a domain-agnostic manner. We demonstrate the utility of this model by introducing a technique to quantitatively estimate how well a player understands the mechanics of a game. We evaluate an existing AML algorithm (FAMA) for player modeling and develop a novel algorithm called Blackout that is inspired by player cognition. We compare Blackout with FAMA using the puzzle game Sokoban and show that Blackout generates better player models.
AutoDO: Robust AutoAugment for Biased Data with Label Noise via Scalable Probabilistic Implicit Differentiation

AutoAugment has sparked an interest in automated augmentation methods for deep learning models. These methods estimate image transformation policies for train data that improve generalization to test data. While recent papers evolved in the direction of decreasing policy search complexity, we show that those methods are not robust when applied to biased and noisy data. To overcome these limitations, we reformulate AutoAugment as a generalized automated dataset optimization (AutoDO) task that minimizes the distribution shift between test data and distorted train dataset. In our AutoDO model, we explicitly estimate a set of per-point hyperparameters to flexibly change distribution of train data. In particular, we include hyperparameters for augmentation, loss weights, and soft-labels that are jointly estimated using implicit differentiation. We develop a theoretical probabilistic interpretation of this framework using Fisher information and show that its complexity scales linearly with the dataset size. Our experiments on SVHN, CIFAR-10/100, and ImageNet classification show up to 9.3% improvement for biased datasets with label noise compared to prior methods and, importantly, up to 36.6% gain for underrepresented SVHN classes.
A Quantum Algorithm for the Sensitivity Analysis of Business Risks

We present a novel use case for quantum computation: the sensitivity analysis for a risk model used at Deutsche B\"orse Group. Such an analysis is computationally too expensive to perform on classical computers. We show in detail how the risk model and its analysis can be implemented as a quantum circuit. We test small scale versions of the model in simulation and find that the expected quadratic speedup compared to the classical implementation used at Deutsche B\"orse Group can be realized. Full scale production usage would be possible with less than 200 error corrected qubits. Our quantum algorithm introduces unitary but imperfect oracles which use Quantum Amplitude Estimation to detect and mark states. This construction should be of general interest and we present theoretical results regarding the performance of Grover's search algorithm with imperfect oracles.
Protect Against Unintentional Insider Threats: The risk of an employee's cyber misconduct on a Social Media Site

Social Media is a cyber-security risk for every business. What do people share on the Internet? Almost everything about oneself is shared: friendship, demographics, family, activities, and work-related information. This could become a potential risk in every business if the organization's policies, training and technology fail to properly address these issues. In many cases, it is the employees' behaviour that can put key company information at danger. Social media has turned into a reconnaissance tool for malicious actors and users accounts are now seen as a goldmine for cyber criminals. Investigation of Social Media is in the embryonic stage and thus, is not yet well understood. This research project aims to collect and analyse open-source data from LinkedIn, discover data leakage and analyse personality types through software as a service (SAAS). The final aim of the study is to understand if there are behavioral factors that can predicting one's attitude toward disclosing sensitive data.
Cutoff for the Asymmetric Riffle Shuffle

In the Gilbert-Shannon-Reeds shuffle, a deck of $N$ cards is cut into two approximately equal parts which are then riffled uniformly at random. Bayer and Diaconis famously showed that this Markov chain undergoes cutoff in total variation after $\frac{3\log(N)}{2 \log(2)}$ shuffles. We establish cutoff for the more general asymmetric riffle shuffles in which one cuts the deck into differently sized parts before riffling. The value of the cutoff point confirms a conjecture of Lalley from 2000. Some appealing consequences are that asymmetry always slows mixing and that total variation mixing is strictly faster than separation and $L^{\infty}$ mixing.
Space-Time Codes from Sum-Rank Codes

Just as rank-metric or Gabidulin codes may be used to construct rate-diversity tradeoff optimal space-time codes, a recently introduced generalization for the sum-rank metric -- linearized Reed-Solomon codes -- accomplishes the same in the case of multiple fading blocks. In this paper, we provide the first explicit construction of minimal delay rate-diversity optimal multiblock space-time codes as an application of linearized Reed-Solomon codes. We also provide sequential decoders for these codes and, more generally, space-time codes constructed from finite field codes. Simulation results show that the proposed codes can outperform full diversity codes based on cyclic division algebras at low SNRs as well as utilize significantly smaller constellations.
Deep Learning-based High-precision Depth Map Estimation from Missing Viewpoints for 360 Degree Digital Holography

In this paper, we propose a novel, convolutional neural network model to extract highly precise depth maps from missing viewpoints, especially well applicable to generate holographic 3D contents. The depth map is an essential element for phase extraction which is required for synthesis of computer-generated hologram (CGH). The proposed model called the HDD Net uses MSE for the better performance of depth map estimation as loss function, and utilizes the bilinear interpolation in up sampling layer with the Relu as activation function. We design and prepare a total of 8,192 multi-view images, each resolution of 640 by 360 for the deep learning study. The proposed model estimates depth maps through extracting features, up sampling. For quantitative assessment, we compare the estimated depth maps with the ground truths by using the PSNR, ACC, and RMSE. We also compare the CGH patterns made from estimated depth maps with ones made from ground truths. Furthermore, we demonstrate the experimental results to test the quality of estimated depth maps through directly reconstructing holographic 3D image scenes from the CGHs.
Towards Human-Like Automated Test Generation: Perspectives from Cognition and Problem Solving

Automated testing tools typically create test cases that are different from what human testers create. This often makes the tools less effective, the created tests harder to understand, and thus results in tools providing less support to human testers. Here, we propose a framework based on cognitive science and, in particular, an analysis of approaches to problem-solving, for identifying cognitive processes of testers. The framework helps map test design steps and criteria used in human test activities and thus to better understand how effective human testers perform their tasks. Ultimately, our goal is to be able to mimic how humans create test cases and thus to design more human-like automated test generation systems. We posit that such systems can better augment and support testers in a way that is meaningful to them.