Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Interpretable UAV Collision Avoidance using Deep Reinforcement Learning

The significant components of any successful autonomous flight system are task completion and collision avoidance. Most deep learning algorithms successfully execute these aspects under the environment and conditions they are trained. However, they fail when subjected to novel environments. This paper presents an autonomous multi-rotor flight algorithm, using Deep Reinforcement Learning augmented with Self-Attention Models, that can effectively reason when subjected to varying inputs. In addition to their reasoning ability, they are also interpretable, enabling it to be used under real-world conditions. We have tested our algorithm under different weather conditions and environments and found it robust compared to conventional Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms.
GraphVICRegHSIC: Towards improved self-supervised representation learning for graphs with a hyrbid loss function

Self-supervised learning and pre-training strategieshave developed over the last few years especiallyfor Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Re-cently application of such methods can also be no-ticed for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) . In thispaper, we have used a graph based self-supervisedlearning strategy with different loss functions (Bar-low Twins[Zbontaret al., 2021], HSIC[Tsaiet al.,2021], VICReg[Bardeset al., 2021]) which haveshown promising results when applied with CNNspreviously. We have also proposed a hybrid lossfunction combining the advantages of VICReg andHSIC and called it as VICRegHSIC. The perfor-mance of these aforementioned methods have beencompared when applied to 7 different datasets suchas MUTAG, PROTEINS, IMDB-Binary, etc. Ex-periments showed that our hybrid loss function per-formed better than the remaining ones in 4 out of7 cases. Moreover, the impact of different batchsizes, projector dimensions and data augmentationstrategies have also been explored.
DiBS: Differentiable Bayesian Structure Learning

Bayesian structure learning allows inferring Bayesian network structure from data while reasoning about the epistemic uncertainty -- a key element towards enabling active causal discovery and designing interventions in real world systems. In this work, we propose a general, fully differentiable framework for Bayesian structure learning (DiBS) that operates in the continuous space of a latent probabilistic graph representation. Contrary to existing work, DiBS is agnostic to the form of the local conditional distributions and allows for joint posterior inference of both the graph structure and the conditional distribution parameters. This makes our formulation directly applicable to posterior inference of complex Bayesian network models, e.g., with nonlinear dependencies encoded by neural networks. Using DiBS, we devise an efficient, general purpose variational inference method for approximating distributions over structural models. In evaluations on simulated and real-world data, our method significantly outperforms related approaches to joint posterior inference.
Scalable Cross Validation Losses for Gaussian Process Models

We introduce a simple and scalable method for training Gaussian process (GP) models that exploits cross-validation and nearest neighbor truncation. To accommodate binary and multi-class classification we leverage P\`olya-Gamma auxiliary variables and variational inference. In an extensive empirical comparison with a number of alternative methods for scalable GP regression and classification, we find that our method offers fast training and excellent predictive performance. We argue that the good predictive performance can be traced to the non-parametric nature of the resulting predictive distributions as well as to the cross-validation loss, which provides robustness against model mis-specification.
Continual Learning at the Edge: Real-Time Training on Smartphone Devices

On-device training for personalized learning is a challenging research problem. Being able to quickly adapt deep prediction models at the edge is necessary to better suit personal user needs. However, adaptation on the edge poses some questions on both the efficiency and sustainability of the learning process and on the ability to work under shifting data distributions. Indeed, naively fine-tuning a prediction model only on the newly available data results in catastrophic forgetting, a sudden erasure of previously acquired knowledge. In this paper, we detail the implementation and deployment of a hybrid continual learning strategy (AR1*) on a native Android application for real-time on-device personalization without forgetting. Our benchmark, based on an extension of the CORe50 dataset, shows the efficiency and effectiveness of our solution.
Invariant Rational Functions, Linear Fractional Transformations and Irreducible Polynomials over Finite Fields

For a subgroup of $PGL(2,q)$ we show how some irreducible polynomials over $\mathbb{F}_q$ arise from the field of invariant rational functions. The proofs rely on two actions of $PGL(2,F)$, one on the projective line over a field $F$ and the other on the rational function field $F(x)$. The invariant functions in $F(x)$ are used to show that regular patterns exist in the factorization of certain polynomials into irreducible polynomials. We use some results about group actions and the orbit polynomial, whose proofs are included. An unusual connection to the conjugacy classes of $PGL(2,q)$ is shown. At the end of the paper we present an alternative approach, using Lang's theorem on algebraic groups.
A log-log speedup for exponent one-fifth deterministic integer factorisation

Building on techniques recently introduced by the second author, and further developed by the first author, we show that a positive integer $N$ may be rigorously and deterministically factored into primes in at most \[ O\left( \frac{N^{1/5} \log^{16/5} N}{(\log\log N)^{3/5}}\right) \] bit operations. This improves on the previous best known result by a factor of $(\log \log N)^{3/5}$.
CiteWorth: Cite-Worthiness Detection for Improved Scientific Document Understanding

Scientific document understanding is challenging as the data is highly domain specific and diverse. However, datasets for tasks with scientific text require expensive manual annotation and tend to be small and limited to only one or a few fields. At the same time, scientific documents contain many potential training signals, such as citations, which can be used to build large labelled datasets. Given this, we present an in-depth study of cite-worthiness detection in English, where a sentence is labelled for whether or not it cites an external source. To accomplish this, we introduce CiteWorth, a large, contextualized, rigorously cleaned labelled dataset for cite-worthiness detection built from a massive corpus of extracted plain-text scientific documents. We show that CiteWorth is high-quality, challenging, and suitable for studying problems such as domain adaptation. Our best performing cite-worthiness detection model is a paragraph-level contextualized sentence labelling model based on Longformer, exhibiting a 5 F1 point improvement over SciBERT which considers only individual sentences. Finally, we demonstrate that language model fine-tuning with cite-worthiness as a secondary task leads to improved performance on downstream scientific document understanding tasks.
Quantum and classical registers

We present a generic theory of "registers" in imperative programs and instantiate it in the classical and quantum setting. Roughly speaking, a register is some mutable part of the program state. Mutable classical variables and quantum registers and wires in quantum circuits are examples of this. However, registers in our setting can also refer to subparts of other registers, or combinations of parts from different registers, or quantum registers seen in a different basis, etc. Our formalization is intended to be well suited for formalization in theorem provers and as a foundation for modeling quantum/classical variables in imperative programs. We study the quantum registers in greater detail and cover the infinite-dimensional case as well. We implemented a large part of our results (including a minimal quantum Hoare logic and an analysis of quantum teleportation) in the Isabelle/HOL theorem prover.
Skeleton-aware multi-scale heatmap regression for 2D hand pose estimation

Existing RGB-based 2D hand pose estimation methods learn the joint locations from a single resolution, which is not suitable for different hand sizes. To tackle this problem, we propose a new deep learning-based framework that consists of two main modules. The former presents a segmentation-based approach to detect the hand skeleton and localize the hand bounding box. The second module regresses the 2D joint locations through a multi-scale heatmap regression approach that exploits the predicted hand skeleton as a constraint to guide the model. Furthermore, we construct a new dataset that is suitable for both hand detection and pose estimation. We qualitatively and quantitatively validate our method on two datasets. Results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art and can recover the pose even in cluttered images and complex poses.
Resource and Response Aware Path Planning for Long-term Autonomy of Ground Robots in Agriculture

Achieving long-term autonomy for mobile robots operating in real-world unstructured environments such as farms remains a significant challenge. This is made increasingly complex in the presence of moving humans or livestock. These environments require a robot to be adaptive in its immediate plans, accounting for the state of nearby individuals and the response that they might have to the robot's actions. Additionally, in order to achieve longer-term goals, consideration of the limited on-board resources available to the robot is required, especially for extended missions such as weeding an agricultural field. To achieve efficient long-term autonomy, it is thus crucial to understand the impact that online dynamic updates to an energy efficient offline plan might have on resource usage whilst navigating through crowds or herds. To address these challenges, a hierarchical planning framework is proposed, integrating an online local dynamic path planner with an offline longer-term objective-based planner. This framework acts to achieve long-term autonomy through awareness of both dynamic responses of individuals to a robot's motion and the limited resources available. This paper details the hierarchical approach and its integration on a robotic platform, including a comprehensive description of the planning framework and associated perception modules. The approach is evaluated in real-world trials on farms, requiring both consideration of limited battery capacity and the presence of nearby moving individuals. These trials additionally demonstrate the ability of the framework to adapt resource use through variation of the local dynamic planner, allowing adaptive behaviour in changing environments. A summary video is available at https://youtu.be/DGVTrYwJ304.
Texture synthesis via projection onto multiscale, multilayer statistics

We provide a new model for texture synthesis based on a multiscale, multilayer feature extractor. Within the model, textures are represented by a set of statistics computed from ReLU wavelet coefficients at different layers, scales and orientations. A new image is synthesized by matching the target statistics via an iterative projection algorithm. We explain the necessity of the different types of pre-defined wavelet filters used in our model and the advantages of multilayer structures for image synthesis. We demonstrate the power of our model by generating samples of high quality textures and providing insights into deep representations for texture images.
GOO: A Dataset for Gaze Object Prediction in Retail Environments

One of the most fundamental and information-laden actions humans do is to look at objects. However, a survey of current works reveals that existing gaze-related datasets annotate only the pixel being looked at, and not the boundaries of a specific object of interest. This lack of object annotation presents an opportunity for further advancing gaze estimation research. To this end, we present a challenging new task called gaze object prediction, where the goal is to predict a bounding box for a person's gazed-at object. To train and evaluate gaze networks on this task, we present the Gaze On Objects (GOO) dataset. GOO is composed of a large set of synthetic images (GOO Synth) supplemented by a smaller subset of real images (GOO-Real) of people looking at objects in a retail environment. Our work establishes extensive baselines on GOO by re-implementing and evaluating selected state-of-the art models on the task of gaze following and domain adaptation. Code is available on github.
Quantifying the mini-batching error in Bayesian inference for Adaptive Langevin dynamics

Bayesian inference allows to obtain useful information on the parameters of models, either in computational statistics or more recently in the context of Bayesian Neural Networks. The computational cost of usual Monte Carlo methods for sampling posterior laws in Bayesian inference scales linearly with the number of data points. One option to reduce it to a fraction of this cost is to resort to mini-batching in conjunction with unadjusted discretizations of Langevin dynamics, in which case only a random fraction of the data is used to estimate the gradient. However, this leads to an additional noise in the dynamics and hence a bias on the invariant measure which is sampled by the Markov chain. We advocate using the so-called Adaptive Langevin dynamics, which is a modification of standard inertial Langevin dynamics with a dynamical friction which automatically corrects for the increased noise arising from mini-batching. We investigate the practical relevance of the assumptions underpinning Adaptive Langevin (constant covariance for the estimation of the gradient, Gaussian minibatching noise), which are not satisfied in typical models of Bayesian inference, and quantify the bias induced by minibatching in this case. We also suggest a possible extension of AdL to further reduce the bias on the posterior distribution, by considering a dynamical friction depending on the current value of the parameter to sample.
Analysis of voxel-based 3D object detection methods efficiency for real-time embedded systems

Real-time detection of objects in the 3D scene is one of the tasks an autonomous agent needs to perform for understanding its surroundings. While recent Deep Learning-based solutions achieve satisfactory performance, their high computational cost renders their application in real-life settings in which computations need to be performed on embedded platforms intractable. In this paper, we analyze the efficiency of two popular voxel-based 3D object detection methods providing a good compromise between high performance and speed based on two aspects, their ability to detect objects located at large distances from the agent and their ability to operate in real time on embedded platforms equipped with high-performance GPUs. Our experiments show that these methods mostly fail to detect distant small objects due to the sparsity of the input point clouds at large distances. Moreover, models trained on near objects achieve similar or better performance compared to those trained on all objects in the scene. This means that the models learn object appearance representations mostly from near objects. Our findings suggest that a considerable part of the computations of existing methods is focused on locations of the scene that do not contribute with successful detection. This means that the methods can achieve a speed-up of $40$-$60\%$ by restricting operation to near objects while not sacrificing much in performance.
Gym-$μ$RTS: Toward Affordable Full Game Real-time Strategy Games Research with Deep Reinforcement Learning

In recent years, researchers have achieved great success in applying Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms to Real-time Strategy (RTS) games, creating strong autonomous agents that could defeat professional players in StarCraft~II. However, existing approaches to tackle full games have high computational costs, usually requiring the use of thousands of GPUs and CPUs for weeks. This paper has two main contributions to address this issue: 1) We introduce Gym-$\mu$RTS (pronounced "gym-micro-RTS") as a fast-to-run RL environment for full-game RTS research and 2) we present a collection of techniques to scale DRL to play full-game $\mu$RTS as well as ablation studies to demonstrate their empirical importance. Our best-trained bot can defeat every $\mu$RTS bot we tested from the past $\mu$RTS competitions when working in a single-map setting, resulting in a state-of-the-art DRL agent while only taking about 60 hours of training using a single machine (one GPU, three vCPU, 16GB RAM). See the blog post at https://wandb.ai/vwxyzjn/gym-microrts-paper/reports/Gym-RTS-Toward-Affordable-Deep-Reinforcement-Learning-Research-in-Real-Time-Strategy-Games--Vmlldzo2MDIzMTg and the source code at https://github.com/vwxyzjn/gym-microrts-paper
Modelling the development of counting with memory-augmented neural networks

Learning to count is an important example of the broader human capacity for systematic generalization, and the development of counting is often characterized by an inflection point when children rapidly acquire proficiency with the procedures that support this ability. We aimed to model this process by training a reinforcement learning agent to select N items from a binary vector when instructed (known as the give-$N$ task). We found that a memory-augmented modular network architecture based on the recently proposed Emergent Symbol Binding Network (ESBN) exhibited an inflection during learning that resembled human development. This model was also capable of systematic extrapolation outside the range of its training set - for example, trained only to select between 1 and 10 items, it could succeed at selecting 11 to 15 items as long as it could make use of an arbitrary count sequence of at least that length. The close parallels to child development and the capacity for extrapolation suggest that our model could shed light on the emergence of systematicity in humans.
Kotless: a Serverless Framework for Kotlin

Recent trends in Web development demonstrate an increased interest in serverless applications, i.e. applications that utilize computational resources provided by cloud services on demand instead of requiring traditional server management. This approach enables better resource management while being scalable, reliable, and cost-effective. However, it comes with a number of organizational and technical difficulties which stem from the interaction between the application and the cloud infrastructure, for example, having to set up a recurring task of reuploading updated files. In this paper, we present Kotless - a Kotlin Serverless Framework. Kotless is a cloud-agnostic toolkit that solves these problems by interweaving the deployed application into the cloud infrastructure and automatically generating the necessary deployment code. This relieves developers from having to spend their time integrating and managing their applications instead of developing them. Kotless has proven its capabilities and has been used to develop several serverless applications already in production. Its source code is available at https://github.com/JetBrains/kotless, a tool demo can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMSakPNl3TY
Embracing New Techniques in Deep Learning for Estimating Image Memorability

Various work has suggested that the memorability of an image is consistent across people, and thus can be treated as an intrinsic property of an image. Using computer vision models, we can make specific predictions about what people will remember or forget. While older work has used now-outdated deep learning architectures to predict image memorability, innovations in the field have given us new techniques to apply to this problem. Here, we propose and evaluate five alternative deep learning models which exploit developments in the field from the last five years, largely the introduction of residual neural networks, which are intended to allow the model to use semantic information in the memorability estimation process. These new models were tested against the prior state of the art with a combined dataset built to optimize both within-category and across-category predictions. Our findings suggest that the key prior memorability network had overstated its generalizability and was overfit on its training set. Our new models outperform this prior model, leading us to conclude that Residual Networks outperform simpler convolutional neural networks in memorability regression. We make our new state-of-the-art model readily available to the research community, allowing memory researchers to make predictions about memorability on a wider range of images.
Graph Convolutional Networks in Feature Space for Image Deblurring and  Super-resolution

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have achieved great success in dealing with data of non-Euclidean structures. Their success directly attributes to fitting graph structures effectively to data such as in social media and knowledge databases. For image processing applications, the use of graph structures and GCNs have not been fully explored. In this paper, we propose a novel encoder-decoder network with added graph convolutions by converting feature maps to vertexes of a pre-generated graph to synthetically construct graph-structured data. By doing this, we inexplicitly apply graph Laplacian regularization to the feature maps, making them more structured. The experiments show that it significantly boosts performance for image restoration tasks, including deblurring and super-resolution. We believe it opens up opportunities for GCN-based approaches in more applications.
Helsinki Deblur Challenge 2021: description of photographic data

The photographic dataset collected for the Helsinki Deblur Challenge 2021 (HDC2021) contains pairs of images taken by two identical cameras of the same target but with different conditions. One camera is always in focus and produces sharp and low-noise images the other camera produces blurred and noisy images as it is gradually more and more out of focus and has a higher ISO setting. Even though the dataset was designed and captured with the HDC2021 in mind it can be used for any testing and benchmarking of image deblurring algorithms. The data is available here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.477228
M4Depth: Monocular depth estimation for autonomous vehicles in unseen environments

Estimating the distance to objects is crucial for autonomous vehicles when using depth sensors is not possible. In this case, the distance has to be estimated from on-board mounted RGB cameras, which is a complex task especially in environments such as natural outdoor landscapes. In this paper, we present a new method named M4Depth for depth estimation. First, we establish a bijective relationship between depth and the visual disparity of two consecutive frames and show how to exploit it to perform motion-invariant pixel-wise depth estimation. Then, we detail M4Depth which is based on a pyramidal convolutional neural network architecture where each level refines an input disparity map estimate by using two customized cost volumes. We use these cost volumes to leverage the visual spatio-temporal constraints imposed by motion and to make the network robust for varied scenes. We benchmarked our approach both in test and generalization modes on public datasets featuring synthetic camera trajectories recorded in a wide variety of outdoor scenes. Results show that our network outperforms the state of the art on these datasets, while also performing well on a standard depth estimation benchmark. The code of our method is publicly available at https://github.com/michael-fonder/M4Depth.