nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
Fluid Annotation: A Human-Machine Collaboration Interface for Full Image Annotation

We introduce Fluid Annotation, an intuitive human-machine collaboration interface for annotating the class label and outline of every object and background region in an image. Fluid annotation is based on three principles:(I) Strong Machine-Learning aid. We start from the output of a strong neural network model, which the annotator can edit by correcting the labels of existing regions, adding new regions to cover missing objects, and removing incorrect regions.The edit operations are also assisted by the model.(II) Full image annotation in a single pass. As opposed to performing a series of small annotation tasks in isolation [51,68], we propose a unified interface for full image annotation in a single pass.(III) Empower the annotator.We empower the annotator to choose what to annotate and in which order. This enables concentrating on what the ma-chine does not already know, i.e. putting human effort only on the errors it made. This helps using the annotation budget effectively. Through extensive experiments on the COCO+Stuff dataset [11,51], we demonstrate that Fluid Annotation leads to accurate an-notations very efficiently, taking 3x less annotation time than the popular LabelMe interface [70].
RUDDER: Return Decomposition for Delayed Rewards

We propose RUDDER, a novel reinforcement learning approach for delayed rewards in finite Markov decision processes (MDPs). In MDPs the Q-values are equal to the expected immediate reward plus the expected future rewards. The latter are related to bias problems in temporal difference (TD) learning and to high variance problems in Monte Carlo (MC) learning. Both problems are even more severe when rewards are delayed. RUDDER aims at making the expected future rewards zero, which simplifies Q-value estimation to computing the mean of the immediate reward. We propose the following two new concepts to push the expected future rewards toward zero. (i) Reward redistribution that leads to return-equivalent decision processes with the same optimal policies and, when optimal, zero expected future rewards. (ii) Return decomposition via contribution analysis which transforms the reinforcement learning task into a regression task at which deep learning excels. On artificial tasks with delayed rewards, RUDDER is significantly faster than MC and exponentially faster than Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), TD({\lambda}), and reward shaping approaches. At Atari games, RUDDER on top of a Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) baseline improves the scores, which is most prominent at games with delayed rewards. Source code is available at \url{this https URL} and demonstration videos at \url{this https URL}.
Dense Object Nets: Learning Dense Visual Object Descriptors By and For Robotic Manipulation

What is the right object representation for manipulation? We would like robots to visually perceive scenes and learn an understanding of the objects in them that (i) is task-agnostic and can be used as a building block for a variety of manipulation tasks, (ii) is generally applicable to both rigid and non-rigid objects, (iii) takes advantage of the strong priors provided by 3D vision, and (iv) is entirely learned from self-supervision. This is hard to achieve with previous methods: much recent work in grasping does not extend to grasping specific objects or other tasks, whereas task-specific learning may require many trials to generalize well across object configurations or other tasks. In this paper we present Dense Object Nets, which build on recent developments in self-supervised dense descriptor learning, as a consistent object representation for visual understanding and manipulation. We demonstrate they can be trained quickly (approximately 20 minutes) for a wide variety of previously unseen and potentially non-rigid objects. We additionally present novel contributions to enable multi-object descriptor learning, and show that by modifying our training procedure, we can either acquire descriptors which generalize across classes of objects, or descriptors that are distinct for each object instance. Finally, we demonstrate the novel application of learned dense descriptors to robotic manipulation. We demonstrate grasping of specific points on an object across potentially deformed object configurations, and demonstrate using class general descriptors to transfer specific grasps across objects in a class.
The physics of baking good pizza

Physical principles are involved in almost any aspect of cooking. Here we analyse the specific process of baking pizzas, deriving in simple terms the baking times for two different situations: for a brick oven in a pizzeria and a modern metallic oven at home. Our study is based on fundamental thermodynamic principles relevant to the cooking process and is accessible to undergraduate students. We illustrate the underlying physics by some simple common examples and then apply them in detail to the example of baking pizza.
Character-Level Feature Extraction with Densely Connected Networks

Generating character-level features is an important step for achieving good results in various natural language processing tasks. To alleviate the need for human labor in generating hand-crafted features, methods that utilize neural architectures such as Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) or Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) to automatically extract such features have been proposed and have shown great results. However, CNN generates position-independent features, and RNN is slow since it needs to process the characters sequentially. In this paper, we propose a novel method of using a densely connected network to automatically extract character-level features. The proposed method does not require any language or task specific assumptions, and shows robustness and effectiveness while being faster than CNN- or RNN-based methods. Evaluating this method on three sequence labeling tasks - slot tagging, Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging, and Named-Entity Recognition (NER) - we obtain state-of-the-art performance with a 96.62 F1-score and 97.73% accuracy on slot tagging and POS tagging, respectively, and comparable performance to the state-of-the-art 91.13 F1-score on NER.
Learning Existing Social Conventions in Markov Games

In order for artificial agents to coordinate effectively with people, they must act consistently with existing conventions (e.g. how to navigate in traffic, which language to speak, or how to work with teammates). A group's conventions can be viewed as a choice of equilibrium in a coordination game. We consider the problem of an agent learning a policy for a coordination game in a simulated environment and then using this policy when it enters an existing group. When there are multiple possible conventions we show that learning a policy via multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is likely to find policies which achieve high payoffs at training time but fail to coordinate with the real group into which the agent enters. We assume access to a small number of samples of behavior from the true convention and show that we can augment the MARL objective to help it find policies consistent with the real group's convention. In three environments from the literature - traffic, communication, and team coordination - we observe that augmenting MARL with a small amount of imitation learning greatly increases the probability that the strategy found by MARL fits well with the existing social convention. We show that this works even in an environment where standard training methods very rarely find the true convention of the agent's partners.
Practical Access to Dynamic Programming on Tree Decompositions

Parameterized complexity theory has led to a wide range of algorithmic breakthroughs within the last few decades, but the practicability of these methods for real-world problems is still not well understood. We investigate the practicability of one of the fundamental approaches of this field: dynamic programming on tree decompositions. Indisputably, this is a key technique in parameterized algorithms and modern algorithm design. Despite the enormous impact of this approach in theory, it still has very little influence on practical implementations. The reasons for this phenomenon are manifold. One of them is the simple fact that such an implementation requires a long chain of non-trivial tasks (as computing the decomposition, preparing it, …). We provide an easy way to implement such dynamic programs that only requires the definition of the update rules. With this interface, dynamic programs for various problems, such as 3-coloring, can be implemented easily in about 100 lines of structured Java code. The theoretical foundation of the success of dynamic programming on tree decompositions is well understood due to Courcelle’s celebrated theorem, which states that every MSO-definable problem can be efficiently solved if a tree decomposition of small width is given. We seek to provide practical access to this theorem as well, by presenting a lightweight model checker for a small fragment of MSO 1 (that is, we do not consider “edge-set-based” problems). This fragment is powerful enough to describe many natural problems, and our model checker turns out to be very competitive against similar state-of-the-art tools.
Multi-Merge Budget Maintenance for Stochastic Gradient Descent SVM Training

Budgeted Stochastic Gradient Descent (BSGD) is a state-of-the-art technique for training large-scale kernelized support vector machines. The budget constraint is maintained incrementally by merging two points whenever the pre-defined budget is exceeded. The process of finding suitable merge partners is costly; it can account for up to 45% of the total training time. In this paper we investigate computationally more efficient schemes that merge more than two points at once. We obtain significant speed-ups without sacrificing accuracy.
Unsupervised learning by competing hidden units

Despite great success of deep learning a question remains to what extent the computational properties of deep neural networks are similar to those of the human brain. The particularly nonbiological aspect of deep learning is the supervised training process with the backpropagation algorithm, which requires massive amounts of labeled data, and a nonlocal learning rule for changing the synapse strengths. This paper describes a learning algorithm that does not suffer from these two problems. It learns the weights of the lower layer of neural networks in a completely unsupervised fashion. The entire algorithm utilizes local learning rules which have conceptual biological plausibility. It is widely believed that end-to-end training with the backpropagation algorithm is essential for learning good feature detectors in early layers of artificial neural networks, so that these detectors are useful for the task performed by the higher layers of that neural network. At the same time, the traditional form of backpropagation is biologically implausible. In the present paper we propose an unusual learning rule, which has a degree of biological plausibility and which is motivated by Hebb’s idea that change of the synapse strength should be local—i.e., should depend only on the activities of the pre- and postsynaptic neurons. We design a learning algorithm that utilizes global inhibition in the hidden layer and is capable of learning early feature detectors in a completely unsupervised way. These learned lower-layer feature detectors can be used to train higher-layer weights in a usual supervised way so that the performance of the full network is comparable to the performance of standard feedforward networks trained end-to-end with a backpropagation algorithm on simple tasks.
Contextual Language Model Adaptation for Conversational Agents

Statistical language models (LM) play a key role in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems used by conversational agents. These ASR systems should provide a high accuracy under a variety of speaking styles, domains, vocabulary and argots. In this paper, we present a DNN-based method to adapt the LM to each user-agent interaction based on generalized contextual information, by predicting an optimal, context-dependent set of LM interpolation weights. We show that this framework for contextual adaptation provides accuracy improvements under different possible mixture LM partitions that are relevant for both (1) Goal-oriented conversational agents where it's natural to partition the data by the requested application and for (2) Non-goal oriented conversational agents where the data can be partitioned using topic labels that come from predictions of a topic classifier. We obtain a relative WER improvement of 3% with a 1-pass decoding strategy and 6% in a 2-pass decoding framework, over an unadapted model. We also show up to a 15% relative improvement in recognizing named entities which is of significant value for conversational ASR systems.
Guided evolutionary strategies: escaping the curse of dimensionality in random search

Many applications in machine learning require optimizing a function whose true gradient is unknown, but where surrogate gradient information (directions that may be correlated with, but not necessarily identical to, the true gradient) is available instead. This arises when an approximate gradient is easier to compute than the full gradient (e.g. in meta-learning or unrolled optimization), or when a true gradient is intractable and is replaced with a surrogate (e.g. in certain reinforcement learning applications, or when using synthetic gradients). We propose Guided Evolutionary Strategies, a method for optimally using surrogate gradient directions along with random search. We define a search distribution for evolutionary strategies that is elongated along a guiding subspace spanned by the surrogate gradients. This allows us to estimate a descent direction which can then be passed to a first-order optimizer. We analytically and numerically characterize the tradeoffs that result from tuning how strongly the search distribution is stretched along the guiding subspace, and we use this to derive a setting of the hyperparameters that works well across problems. Finally, we apply our method to example problems including truncated unrolled optimization and a synthetic gradient problem, demonstrating improvement over both standard evolutionary strategies and first-order methods that directly follow the surrogate gradient. We provide a demo of Guided ES at this https URL
Learning a Saliency Evaluation Metric Using Crowdsourced Perceptual Judgments

In the area of human fixation prediction, dozens of computational saliency models are proposed to reveal certain saliency characteristics under different assumptions and definitions. As a result, saliency model benchmarking often requires several evaluation metrics to simultaneously assess saliency models from multiple perspectives. However, most computational metrics are not designed to directly measure the perceptual similarity of saliency maps so that the evaluation results may be sometimes inconsistent with the subjective impression. To address this problem, this paper first conducts extensive subjective tests to find out how the visual similarities between saliency maps are perceived by humans. Based on the crowdsourced data collected in these tests, we conclude several key factors in assessing saliency maps and quantize the performance of existing metrics. Inspired by these factors, we propose to learn a saliency evaluation metric based on a two-stream convolutional neural network using crowdsourced perceptual judgements. Specifically, the relative saliency score of each pair from the crowdsourced data is utilized to regularize the network during the training process. By capturing the key factors shared by various subjects in comparing saliency maps, the learned metric better aligns with human perception of saliency maps, making it a good complement to the existing metrics. Experimental results validate that the learned metric can be generalized to the comparisons of saliency maps from new images, new datasets, new models and synthetic data. Due to the effectiveness of the learned metric, it also can be used to facilitate the development of new models for fixation prediction.
Collaborative Annotation of Semantic Objects in Images with Multi-granularity Supervisions

Per-pixel masks of semantic objects are very useful in many applications, which, however, are tedious to be annotated. In this paper, we propose a collaborative annotation approach to efficiently generate per-pixel masks of semantic objects in tagged images with multi-granularity supervisions. Given a set of tagged images, a computer agent is dynamically generated to roughly localize the semantic objects described by the tag. The agent first extracts massive object proposals and then infer the tag-related ones under the weak and strong supervisions from linguistically and visually similar images as well as previously annotated objects. By representing such supervisions by over-complete dictionaries, tag-related proposals can pop-out according to their sparse coding length, which are then converted to superpixels with binary labels. After that, human annotators participate in the annotation by flipping labels and dividing superpixels with clicks, which are used as click supervisions that teaches the agent to recover false positives/negatives in processing images with the same tags. Experimental results show that our approach can facilitate the annotation and generate object masks that are consistent with those generated by the LabelMe toolbox.
Piecewise Approximations of Black Box Models for Model Interpretation

Machine Learning models have proved extremely successful for a wide variety of supervised learning problems, but the predictions of many of these models are difficult to interpret. A recent literature interprets the predictions of more general "black-box" machine learning models by approximating these models in terms of simpler models such as piecewise linear or piecewise constant models. Existing literature constructs these approximations in an ad-hoc manner. We provide a tractable dynamic programming algorithm that partitions the feature space into clusters in a principled way and then uses this partition to provide both piecewise constant and piecewise linear interpretations of an arbitrary "black-box" model. When loss is measured in terms of mean squared error, our approximation is optimal (under certain conditions); for more general loss functions, our interpretation is probably approximately optimal (in the sense of PAC learning). Experiments with real and synthetic data show that it continues to provide significant improvements (in terms of mean squared error) over competing approaches.
This looks like that: deep learning for interpretable image recognition

When we are faced with challenging image classification tasks, we often explain our reasoning by dissecting the image, and pointing out prototypical aspects of one class or another. The mounting evidence for each of the classes helps us make our final decision. In this work, we introduce a deep network architecture -- prototypical part network (ProtoPNet), that reasons in a similar way: the network dissects the image by finding prototypical parts, and combines evidence from the prototypes to make a final classification. The model thus reasons in a way that is qualitatively similar to the way ornithologists, physicians, and others would explain to people on how to solve challenging image classification tasks. The network uses only image-level labels for training without any annotations for parts of images. We demonstrate our method on the CUB-200-2011 dataset and the Stanford Cars dataset. Our experiments show that ProtoPNet can achieve comparable accuracy with its analogous non-interpretable counterpart, and when several ProtoPNets are combined into a larger network, it can achieve an accuracy that is on par with some of the best-performing deep models. Moreover, ProtoPNet provides a level of interpretability that is absent in other interpretable deep models.
Polar waves and chaotic flows in thin rotating spherical shells.

Convection in rotating spherical geometries is an important physical process in planetary and stellar systems. Using continuation methods at low Prandtl number, we find both strong equatorially asymmetric and symmetric polar nonlinear rotating waves in a model of thermal convection in thin rotating spherical shells with stress-free boundary conditions. For the symmetric waves convection is confined to high latitude in both hemispheres but is only restricted to one hemisphere close to the pole in the case of asymmetric waves. This is in contrast to what is previously known from studies in the field. These periodic flows, in which the pattern is rotating steadily in the azimuthal direction, develop a strong axisymmetric component very close to onset. Using stability analysis of periodic orbits the regions of stability are determined and the topology of the stable/unstable oscillatory flows bifurcated from the branches of rotating waves is described. By means of direct numerical simulations of these oscillatory chaotic flows, we show that these three-dimensional convective polar flows exhibit characteristics, such as force balance or mean physical properties, which are similar to flows occuring in planetary atmospheres. We show that these results may open a route to understanding unexplained features of gas giant atmospheres, in particular for the case of Jupiter. These include the observed equatorial asymmetry with a pronounced decrease at the equator (the so-called dimple), and the coherent vortices surrounding the poles recently observed by the Juno mission.
Gradient Similarity: An Explainable Approach to Detect Adversarial Attacks against Deep Learning

Deep neural networks are susceptible to small-but-specific adversarial perturbations capable of deceiving the network. This vulnerability can lead to potentially harmful consequences in security-critical applications. To address this vulnerability, we propose a novel metric called \emph{Gradient Similarity} that allows us to capture the influence of training data on test inputs. We show that \emph{Gradient Similarity} behaves differently for normal and adversarial inputs, and enables us to detect a variety of adversarial attacks with a near perfect ROC-AUC of 95-100\%. Even white-box adversaries equipped with perfect knowledge of the system cannot bypass our detector easily. On the MNIST dataset, white-box attacks are either detected with a high ROC-AUC of 87-96\%, or require very high distortion to bypass our detector.
Illuminating Generalization in Deep Reinforcement Learning through Procedural Level Generation

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has shown impressive results in a variety of domains, learning directly from high-dimensional sensory streams. However, when neural networks are trained in a fixed environment, such as a single level in a video game, they will usually overfit and fail to generalize to new levels. When RL models overfit, even slight modifications to the environment can result in poor agent performance. This paper explores how procedurally generated levels during training can increase generality. We show that for some games procedural level generation enables generalization to new levels within the same distribution. Additionally, it is possible to achieve better performance with less data by manipulating the difficulty of the levels in response to the performance of the agent. The generality of the learned behaviors is also evaluated on a set of human-designed levels. The results suggest that the ability to generalize to human-designed levels highly depends on the design of the level generators. We apply dimensionality reduction and clustering techniques to visualize the generators' distributions of levels and analyze to what degree they can produce levels similar to those designed by a human.