Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
AdaCoF: Adaptive Collaboration of Flows for Video Frame Interpolation

Video frame interpolation is one of the most challenging tasks in video processing research. Recently, many studies based on deep learning have been suggested. Most of these methods focus on finding locations with useful information to estimate each output pixel using their own frame warping operations. However, many of them have Degrees of Freedom (DoF) limitations and fail to deal with the complex motions found in real world videos. To solve this problem, we propose a new warping module named Adaptive Collaboration of Flows (AdaCoF). Our method estimates both kernel weights and offset vectors for each target pixel to synthesize the output frame. AdaCoF is one of the most generalized warping modules compared to other approaches, and covers most of them as special cases of it. Therefore, it can deal with a significantly wide domain of complex motions. To further improve our framework and synthesize more realistic outputs, we introduce dual-frame adversarial loss which is applicable only to video frame interpolation tasks. The experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for both fixed training set environments and the Middlebury benchmark.
Self-Supervised Adaptation of High-Fidelity Face Models for Monocular Performance Tracking

Improvements in data-capture and face modeling techniques have enabled us to create high-fidelity realistic face models. However, driving these realistic face models requires special input data, e.g. 3D meshes and unwrapped textures. Also, these face models expect clean input data taken under controlled lab environments, which is very different from data collected in the wild. All these constraints make it challenging to use the high-fidelity models in tracking for commodity cameras. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised domain adaptation approach to enable the animation of high-fidelity face models from a commodity camera. Our approach first circumvents the requirement for special input data by training a new network that can directly drive a face model just from a single 2D image. Then, we overcome the domain mismatch between lab and uncontrolled environments by performing self-supervised domain adaptation based on "consecutive frame texture consistency" based on the assumption that the appearance of the face is consistent over consecutive frames, avoiding the necessity of modeling the new environment such as lighting or background. Experiments show that we are able to drive a high-fidelity face model to perform complex facial motion from a cellphone camera without requiring any labeled data from the new domain.
Uncalibrated Deflectometry with a Mobile Device on Extended Specular Surfaces

We introduce a system and methods for the three-dimensional measurement of extended specular surfaces with high surface normal variations. Our system consists only of a mobile hand held device and exploits screen and front camera for Deflectometry-based surface measurements. We demonstrate high quality measurements without the need for an offline calibration procedure. In addition, we develop a multi-view technique to compensate for the small screen of a mobile device so that large surfaces can be densely reconstructed in their entirety. This work is a first step towards developing a self-calibrating Deflectometry procedure capable of taking 3D surface measurements of specular objects in the wild and accessible to users with little to no technical imaging experience.
Handling Numerous Stakeholders Requirements A Research Agenda and Preliminary Outcomes

This research aims to design and develop a new requirements prioritization approach for analyzing and prioritizing stakeholders requirements which are mentioned in the feedback for software products. This paper presents a PhD research agenda and preliminary outcomes from the early analysis. A roadmap to the proposed research methodology that is to be followed to achieve the targeted outcomes is also outlined. Outcomes to date show that the requirements prioritization problem has been researched extensively, however, gaps still remain when considering techniques that handle a large number of crowdsourced requirements. Furthermore, requirements prioritization as a problem affects many domains beyond software engineering. Hence, knowledge from other fields could be useful for informing requirements prioritization practice in the software engineering space.
Multiplex graph matching matched filters

We consider the problem of detecting a noisy induced multiplex template network in a larger multiplex background network. Our approach, which extends the framework of Sussman et al. (2019) to the multiplex setting, leverages a multiplex analogue of the classical graph matching problem to use the template as a matched filter for efficiently searching the background for candidate template matches. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated both theoretically and empirically, with particular attention paid to the potential benefits of considering multiple channels.
The Dangers of Post-hoc Interpretability: Unjustified Counterfactual Explanations

Post-hoc interpretability approaches have been proven to be powerful tools to generate explanations for the predictions made by a trained black-box model. However, they create the risk of having explanations that are a result of some artifacts learned by the model instead of actual knowledge from the data. This paper focuses on the case of counterfactual explanations and asks whether the generated instances can be justified, i.e. continuously connected to some ground-truth data. We evaluate the risk of generating unjustified counterfactual examples by investigating the local neighborhoods of instances whose predictions are to be explained and show that this risk is quite high for several datasets. Furthermore, we show that most state of the art approaches do not differentiate justified from unjustified counterfactual examples, leading to less useful explanations.
Secure and Transparent Audit Logs with BlockAudit

Audit logs serve as a critical component in enterprise business systems and are used for auditing, storing, and tracking changes made to the data. However, audit logs are vulnerable to a series of attacks enabling adversaries to tamper data and corresponding audit logs without getting detected. Among them, two well-known attacks are "the physical access attack," which exploits root privileges, and "the remote vulnerability attack," which compromises known vulnerabilities in database systems. In this paper, we present BlockAudit: a scalable and tamper-proof system that leverages the design properties of audit logs and security guarantees of blockchain to enable secure and trustworthy audit logs. Towards that, we construct the design schema of BlockAudit and outline its functional and operational procedures. We implement our design on a custom-built Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) blockchain system and evaluate the performance in terms of latency, network size, payload size, and transaction rate. Our results show that conventional audit logs can seamlessly transition into BlockAudit to achieve higher security and defend against the known attacks on audit logs.
Bayesian Inference Gaussian Process Multiproxy Alignment of Continuous Signals (BIGMACS): Applications for Paleoceanography

We first introduce a novel profile-based alignment algorithm, the multiple continuous Signal Alignment algorithm with Gaussian Process Regression profiles (SA-GPR). SA-GPR addresses the limitations of currently available signal alignment methods by adopting a hybrid of the particle smoothing and Markov-chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms to align signals, and by applying the Gaussian process regression to construct profiles to be aligned continuously. SA-GPR shares all the strengths of the existing alignment algorithms that depend on profiles but is more exact in the sense that profiles do not need to be discretized as sequential bins. The uncertainty of performance over the resolution of such bins is thereby eliminated. This methodology produces alignments that are consistent, that regularize extreme cases, and that properly reflect the inherent uncertainty. Then we extend SA-GPR to a specific problem in the field of paleoceanography with a method called Bayesian Inference Gaussian Process Multiproxy Alignment of Continuous Signals (BIGMACS). The goal of BIGMACS is to infer continuous ages for ocean sediment cores using two classes of age proxies: proxies that explicitly return calendar ages (e.g., radiocarbon) and those used to synchronize ages in multiple marine records (e.g., an oxygen isotope based marine proxy known as benthic ${\delta}^{18}{\rm O}$). BIGMACS integrates these two proxies by iteratively performing two steps: profile construction from benthic ${\delta}^{18}{\rm O}$ age models and alignment of each core to the profile also reflecting radiocarbon dates. We use BIGMACS to construct a new Deep Northeastern Atlantic stack (i.e., a profile from a particular benthic ${\delta}^{18}{\rm O}$ records) of five ocean sediment cores. We conclude by constructing multiproxy age models for two additional cores from the same region by aligning them to the stack.
Doubly-Adaptive Artificial Compression Methods for Incompressible Flow

This report presents adaptive artificial compression methods in which the time-step and artificial compression parameter $\varepsilon $ are independently adapted. The resulting algorithms are supported by analysis and numerical tests. The first and second-order methods are embedded. As a result, the computational, cognitive and space complexities of the adaptive $% \varepsilon ,k$ algorithms are negligibly greater than that of the simplest, first-order, constant $\varepsilon ,$ constant $k$ artificial compression method.
MintNet: Building Invertible Neural Networks with Masked Convolutions

We propose a new way of constructing invertible neural networks by combining simple building blocks with a novel set of composition rules. This leads to a rich set of invertible architectures, including those similar to ResNets. Inversion is achieved with a locally convergent iterative procedure that is parallelizable and very fast in practice. Additionally, the determinant of the Jacobian can be computed analytically and efficiently, enabling their generative use as flow models. To demonstrate their flexibility, we show that our invertible neural networks are competitive with ResNets on MNIST and CIFAR-10 classification. When trained as generative models, our invertible networks achieve competitive likelihoods on MNIST, CIFAR-10 and ImageNet 32x32, with bits per dimension of 0.98, 3.32 and 4.06 respectively.
User-Interactive Machine Learning Model for Identifying Structural Relationships of Code Features

Traditional machine learning based intelligent systems assist users by learning patterns in data and making recommendations. However, these systems are limited in that the user has little means of understanding the rationale behind the systems suggestions, communicating their own understanding of patterns, or correcting system behavior. In this project, we outline a model for intelligent software based on a human computer feedback loop. The Machine Learning (ML) systems recommendations are reviewed by the user, and in turn, this information shapes the systems decision making. Our model was applied to developing an HTML editor that integrates ML with user interaction to ascertain structural relationships between HTML document features and apply them for code completion. The editor utilizes the ID3 algorithm to build decision trees, sequences of rules for predicting code the user will type. The editor displays the decision trees rules in the Interactive Rules Interface System (IRIS), which allows developers to prioritize, modify, or delete them. These interactions alter the data processed by ID3, providing the developer some control over the autocomplete system. Validation indicates that, absent user interaction, the ML model is able to predict tags with 78.4 percent accuracy, attributes with 62.9 percent accuracy, and values with 12.8 percent accuracy. Based off of the results of the user study, user interaction with the rules interface corrects feature relationships missed or mistaken by the automated process, enhancing autocomplete accuracy and developer productivity. Additionally, interaction is proven to help developers work with greater awareness of code patterns. Our research demonstrates the viability of a software integration of machine intelligence with human feedback.
Only Time Can Tell: Discovering Temporal Data for Temporal Modeling

Understanding temporal information and how the visual world changes over time is a fundamental ability of intelligent systems. In video understanding, temporal information is at the core of many current challenges, including compression, efficient inference, motion estimation or summarization. However, in current video datasets it has been observed that action classes can often be recognized without any temporal information from a single frame of video. As a result, both benchmarking and training in these datasets may give an unintentional advantage to models with strong image understanding capabilities, as opposed to those with strong temporal understanding. In this paper we address this problem head on by identifying action classes where temporal information is actually necessary to recognize them and call these "temporal classes". Selecting temporal classes using a computational method would bias the process. Instead, we propose a methodology based on a simple and effective human annotation experiment. We remove just the temporal information by shuffling frames in time and measure if the action can still be recognized. Classes that cannot be recognized when frames are not in order are included in the temporal Dataset. We observe that this set is statistically different from other static classes, and that performance in it correlates with a network's ability to capture temporal information. Thus we use it as a benchmark on current popular networks, which reveals a series of interesting facts. We also explore the effect of training on the temporal dataset, and observe that this leads to better generalization in unseen classes, demonstrating the need for more temporal data. We hope that the proposed dataset of temporal categories will help guide future research in temporal modeling for better video understanding.
Dynamical Distance Learning for Semi-Supervised and Unsupervised Skill Discovery

Reinforcement learning requires manual specification of a reward function to learn a task. While in principle this reward function only needs to specify the task goal, in practice reinforcement learning can be very time-consuming or even infeasible unless the reward function is shaped so as to provide a smooth gradient towards a successful outcome. This shaping is difficult to specify by hand, particularly when the task is learned from raw observations, such as images. In this paper, we study how we can automatically learn dynamical distances: a measure of the expected number of time steps to reach a given goal state from any other state. These dynamical distances can be used to provide well-shaped reward functions for reaching new goals, making it possible to learn complex tasks efficiently. We show that dynamical distances can be used in a semi-supervised regime, where unsupervised interaction with the environment is used to learn the dynamical distances, while a small amount of preference supervision is used to determine the task goal, without any manually engineered reward function or goal examples. We evaluate our method both on a real-world robot and in simulation. We show that our method can learn to turn a valve with a real-world 9-DoF hand, using raw image observations and just ten preference labels, without any other supervision. Videos of the learned skills can be found on the project website: https://sites.google.com/view/dynamical-distance-learning.
Neural Probabilistic Logic Programming in DeepProbLog

We introduce DeepProbLog, a neural probabilistic logic programming language that incorporates deep learning by means of neural predicates. We show how existing inference and learning techniques of the underlying probabilistic logic programming language ProbLog can be adapted for the new language. We theoretically and experimentally demonstrate that DeepProbLog supports (i) both symbolic and subsymbolic representations and inference, (ii) program induction, (iii) probabilistic (logic) programming, and (iv) (deep) learning from examples. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to propose a framework where general-purpose neural networks and expressive probabilistic-logical modeling and reasoning are integrated in a way that exploits the full expressiveness and strengths of both worlds and can be trained end-to-end based on examples.
Analysis of Word Embeddings Using Fuzzy Clustering

In data dominated systems and applications, a concept of representing words in a numerical format has gained a lot of attention. There are a few approaches used to generate such a representation. An interesting issue that should be considered is the ability of such representations - called embeddings - to imitate human-based semantic similarity between words. In this study, we perform a fuzzy-based analysis of vector representations of words, i.e., word embeddings. We use two popular fuzzy clustering algorithms on count-based word embeddings, known as GloVe, of different dimensionality. Words from WordSim-353, called the gold standard, are represented as vectors and clustered. The results indicate that fuzzy clustering algorithms are very sensitive to high-dimensional data, and parameter tuning can dramatically change their performance. We show that by adjusting the value of the fuzzifier parameter, fuzzy clustering can be successfully applied to vectors of high - up to one hundred - dimensions. Additionally, we illustrate that fuzzy clustering allows to provide interesting results regarding membership of words to different clusters.
Self Organizing Supply Chains for Micro-Prediction: Present and Future uses of the ROAR Protocol

A multi-agent system is trialed as a means of crowd-sourcing inexpensive but high quality streams of predictions. Each agent is a microservice embodying statistical models and endowed with economic self-interest. The ability to fork and modify simple agents is granted to a large number of employees in a firm and empirical lessons are reported. We suggest that one plausible trajectory for this project is the creation of a Prediction Web.
Factor copula models for mixed data

We develop factor copula models for analysing the dependence among mixed continuous and discrete responses. Factor copula models are canonical vine copulas that involve both observed and latent variables, hence they allow tail, asymmetric and non-linear dependence. They can be explained as conditional independence models with latent variables that don't necessarily have an additive latent structure. We focus on important issues that would interest the social data analyst, such as model selection and goodness-of-fit. Our general methodology is demonstrated with an extensive simulation study and illustrated by re-analysing three mixed response datasets. Our study suggests that there can be a substantial improvement over the standard factor model for mixed data and makes the argument for moving to factor copula models.
Connecting Lyapunov Control Theory to Adversarial Attacks

Significant work is being done to develop the math and tools necessary to build provable defenses, or at least bounds, against adversarial attacks of neural networks. In this work, we argue that tools from control theory could be leveraged to aid in defending against such attacks. We do this by example, building a provable defense against a weaker adversary. This is done so we can focus on the mechanisms of control theory, and illuminate its intrinsic value.
Deep Multi-View Learning via Task-Optimal CCA

Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) is widely used for multimodal data analysis and, more recently, for discriminative tasks such as multi-view learning; however, it makes no use of class labels. Recent CCA methods have started to address this weakness but are limited in that they do not simultaneously optimize the CCA projection for discrimination and the CCA projection itself, or they are linear only. We address these deficiencies by simultaneously optimizing a CCA-based and a task objective in an end-to-end manner. Together, these two objectives learn a non-linear CCA projection to a shared latent space that is highly correlated and discriminative. Our method shows a significant improvement over previous state-of-the-art (including deep supervised approaches) for cross-view classification, regularization with a second view, and semi-supervised learning on real data.
Towards Understanding Generalization in Gradient-Based Meta-Learning

In this work we study generalization of neural networks in gradient-based meta-learning by analyzing various properties of the objective landscapes. We experimentally demonstrate that as meta-training progresses, the meta-test solutions, obtained after adapting the meta-train solution of the model, to new tasks via few steps of gradient-based fine-tuning, become flatter, lower in loss, and further away from the meta-train solution. We also show that those meta-test solutions become flatter even as generalization starts to degrade, thus providing an experimental evidence against the correlation between generalization and flat minima in the paradigm of gradient-based meta-leaning. Furthermore, we provide empirical evidence that generalization to new tasks is correlated with the coherence between their adaptation trajectories in parameter space, measured by the average cosine similarity between task-specific trajectory directions, starting from a same meta-train solution. We also show that coherence of meta-test gradients, measured by the average inner product between the task-specific gradient vectors evaluated at meta-train solution, is also correlated with generalization. Based on these observations, we propose a novel regularizer for MAML and provide experimental evidence for its effectiveness.
Evaluating Explanation Without Ground Truth in Interpretable Machine Learning

Interpretable Machine Learning (IML) has become increasingly important in many real-world applications, such as autonomous cars and medical diagnosis, where explanations are significantly preferred to help people better understand how machine learning systems work and further enhance their trust towards systems. However, due to the diversified scenarios and subjective nature of explanations, we rarely have the ground truth for benchmark evaluation in IML on the quality of generated explanations. Having a sense of explanation quality not only matters for assessing system boundaries, but also helps to realize the true benefits to human users in practical settings. To benchmark the evaluation in IML, in this article, we rigorously define the problem of evaluating explanations, and systematically review the existing efforts from state-of-the-arts. Specifically, we summarize three general aspects of explanation (i.e., generalizability, fidelity and persuasibility) with formal definitions, and respectively review the representative methodologies for each of them under different tasks. Further, a unified evaluation framework is designed according to the hierarchical needs from developers and end-users, which could be easily adopted for different scenarios in practice. In the end, open problems are discussed, and several limitations of current evaluation techniques are raised for future explorations.