nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
Reversing Place Transition Nets

Petri nets are a well-known model of concurrency and provide an ideal setting for the study of fundamental aspects in concurrent systems. Despite their simplicity, they still lack a satisfactory causally reversible semantics. We develop such semantics for Place/Transitions Petri nets (P/T nets) based on two observations. Firstly, a net that explicitly expresses causality and conflict among events, for example an occurrence net, can be straightforwardly reversed by adding a reverse transition for each of its forward transitions. Secondly, given a P/T net the standard unfolding construction associates with it an occurrence net that preserves all of its computation. Consequently, the reversible semantics of a P/T net can be obtained as the reversible semantics of its unfolding. We show that such reversible behaviour can be expressed as a finite net whose tokens are coloured by causal histories. Colours in our encoding resemble the causal memories that are typical in reversible process calculi.
Subspace Estimation from Unbalanced and Incomplete Data Matrices: $\ell_{2,\infty}$ Statistical Guarantees.

This paper is concerned with estimating the column space of an unknown low-rank matrix $\boldsymbol{A}^{\star}\in\mathbb{R}^{d_{1}\times d_{2}}$, given noisy and partial observations of its entries. There is no shortage of scenarios where the observations --- while being too noisy to support faithful recovery of the entire matrix --- still convey sufficient information to enable reliable estimation of the column space of interest. This is particularly evident and crucial for the highly unbalanced case where the column dimension $d_{2}$ far exceeds the row dimension $d_{1}$, which is the focal point of the current paper. 
We investigate an efficient spectral method, which operates upon the sample Gram matrix with diagonal deletion. We establish statistical guarantees for this method in terms of both $\ell_{2}$ and $\ell_{2,\infty}$ estimation accuracy, which improve upon prior results if $d_{2}$ is substantially larger than $d_{1}$. To illustrate the effectiveness of our findings, we develop consequences of our general theory for three applications of practical importance: (1) tensor completion from noisy data, (2) covariance estimation with missing data, and (3) community recovery in bipartite graphs. Our theory leads to improved performance guarantees for all three cases.
Minimum Cuts in Surface Graphs

We describe algorithms to efficiently compute minimum $(s,t)$-cuts and global minimum cuts of undirected surface-embedded graphs. Given an edge-weighted undirected graph $G$ with $n$ vertices embedded on an orientable surface of genus $g$, our algorithms can solve either problem in $g^{O(g)} n \log \log n$ or $2^{O(g)} n \log n$ time, whichever is better. When $g$ is a constant, our $g^{O(g)} n \log \log n$ time algorithms match the best running times known for computing minimum cuts in planar graphs. 
Our algorithms for minimum cuts rely on reductions to the problem of finding a minimum-weight subgraph in a given $\mathbb{Z}_2$-homology class, and we give efficient algorithms for this latter problem as well. If $G$ is embedded on a surface with $b$ boundary components, these algorithms run in $(g + b)^{O(g + b)} n \log \log n$ and $2^{O(g + b)} n \log n$ time. We also prove that finding a minimum-weight subgraph homologous to a single input cycle is NP-hard, showing it is likely impossible to improve upon the exponential dependencies on $g$ for this latter problem.
Adversarial Training: embedding adversarial perturbations into the parameter space of a neural network to build a robust system

Adversarial training, in which a network is trained on both adversarial and clean examples, is one of the most trusted defense methods against adversarial attacks. However, there are three major practical difficulties in implementing and deploying this method - expensive in terms of extra memory and computation costs; accuracy trade-off between clean and adversarial examples; and lack of diversity of adversarial perturbations. Classical adversarial training uses fixed, precomputed perturbations in adversarial examples (input space). In contrast, we introduce dynamic adversarial perturbations into the parameter space of the network, by adding perturbation biases to the fully connected layers of deep convolutional neural network. During training, using only clean images, the perturbation biases are updated in the Fast Gradient Sign Direction to automatically create and store adversarial perturbations by recycling the gradient information computed. The network learns and adjusts itself automatically to these learned adversarial perturbations. Thus, we can achieve adversarial training with negligible cost compared to requiring a training set of adversarial example images. In addition, if combined with classical adversarial training, our perturbation biases can alleviate accuracy trade-off difficulties, and diversify adversarial perturbations.
Bayesian factor models for multivariate categorical data obtained from questionnaires

Factor analysis is a flexible technique for assessment of multivariate dependence and codependence. Besides being an exploratory tool used to reduce the dimensionality of multivariate data, it allows estimation of common factors that often have an interesting theoretical interpretation in real problems. However, standard factor analysis is only applicable when the variables are scaled, which is often inappropriate, for example, in data obtained from questionnaires in the field of psychology, where the variables are often categorical. In this framework, we propose a factor model for the analysis of multivariate ordered and non-ordered polychotomous data. The inference procedure is done under the Bayesian approach via Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. Two Monte Carlo simulation studies are presented to investigate the performance of this approach in terms of estimation bias, precision and assessment of the number of factors. We also illustrate the proposed method to analyze participants' responses to the Motivational State Questionnaire dataset, developed to study emotions in laboratory and field settings.
Deep localization of protein structures in fluorescence microscopy images

Accurate localization of proteins from fluorescence microscopy images is a challenging task due to the inter-class similarities and intra-class disparities introducing grave concerns in addressing multi-class classification problems. Conventional machine learning-based image prediction relies heavily on pre-processing such as normalization and segmentation followed by hand-crafted feature extraction before classification to identify useful and informative as well as application specific features.We propose an end-to-end Protein Localization Convolutional Neural Network (PLCNN) that classifies protein localization images more accurately and reliably. PLCNN directly processes raw imagery without involving any pre-processing steps and produces outputs without any customization or parameter adjustment for a particular dataset. The output of our approach is computed from probabilities produced by the network. Experimental analysis is performed on five publicly available benchmark datasets. PLCNN consistently outperformed the existing state-of-the-art approaches from machine learning and deep architectures.
Learning to Contextually Aggregate Multi-Source Supervision for Sequence Labeling

Sequence labeling is a fundamental task for a range of natural language processing problems. When used in practice, its performance is largely influenced by the annotation quality and quantity, and meanwhile, obtaining ground truth labels is often costly. In many cases, ground truth labels do not exist, but noisy annotations or annotations from different domains are accessible. In this paper, we propose a novel framework Consensus Network (ConNet) that can be trained on annotations from multiple sources (e.g., crowd annotation, cross-domain data). It learns individual representation for every source and dynamically aggregates source-specific knowledge by a context-aware attention module. Finally, it leads to a model reflecting the agreement (consensus) among multiple sources. We evaluate the proposed framework in two practical settings of multi-source learning: learning with crowd annotations and unsupervised cross-domain model adaptation. Extensive experimental results show that our model achieves significant improvements over existing methods in both settings. We also demonstrate that the method can apply to various tasks and cope with different encoders.
Online Simultaneous Semi-Parametric Dynamics Model Learning

Accurate models of robots’ dynamics are critical for control, stability, motion optimization, and interaction. Semi-Parametric approaches to dynamics learning combine physics-based Parametric models with unstructured Non-Parametric regression with the hope to achieve both accuracy and generalizability. In this letter, we highlight the non-stationary problem created when attempting to adapt both Parametric and Non-Parametric components simultaneously. We present a consistency transform designed to compensate for this non-stationary effect, such that the contributions of both models can adapt simultaneously without adversely affecting the performance of the platform. Thus, we are able to apply the Semi-Parametric learning approach for continuous iterative online adaptation, without relying on batch or offline updates. We validate the transform via a perfect virtual model as well as by applying the overall system on a Kuka LWR IV manipulator. We demonstrate improved tracking performance during online learning and show a clear transference of contribution between the two components with a learning bias towards the Parametric component.
Halo Structural Parameters of Low Surface Brightness Galaxies.

We build a volume-limited sample of galaxies derived from the SDSS-DR7 to characterize several physical properties of the dark matter halos where LSB galaxies reside. Using an observational proxy for the assembly time, we found that LSB galaxies assembly half of their total halo mass later than HSB ones, reinforcing the idea of them being unevolved systems. We use 5 different methods to estimate the total halo mass, finding that the total stellar-to-halo mass ratio is up to 22% lower in LSB galaxies. Finally, in order to estimate the spin parameter, we use a bulge+disk decomposition to obtain the specific angular momentum $j_*$ of the galaxy, a Tully-Fisher relation to estimate the rotation velocity of the disk, and the 5 different estimations of the halo mass to calculate the spin parameter. We found that the spin of LSB galaxies is 1.2 to 2 times higher than for HSB ones. We compare these results with a control sample that includes kinematic information, taken from the ALFALFA $\alpha$.100 galaxy catalog, allowing us to measure directly the rotation velocity of the disk. The trends in the values of $j_*$ and $\lambda$ are similar to the volume-limited sample.
Stochastic Implicit Natural Gradient for Black-box Optimization

Black-box optimization is primarily important for many compute-intensive applications, including reinforcement learning (RL), robot control, etc. This paper presents a novel theoretical framework for black-box optimization, in which our method performs stochastic update within a trust region defined with KL-divergence. We show that this update is equivalent to a natural gradient step w.r.t. natural parameters of an exponential-family distribution. Theoretically, we prove the convergence rate of our framework for convex functions. Our theoretical results also hold for non-differentiable black-box functions. Empirically, our method achieves superior performance compared with the state-of-the-art method CMA-ES on separable benchmark test problems.
Prescribed Generative Adversarial Networks

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are a powerful approach to unsupervised learning. They have achieved state-of-the-art performance in the image domain. However, GANs are limited in two ways. They often learn distributions with low support---a phenomenon known as mode collapse---and they do not guarantee the existence of a probability density, which makes evaluating generalization using predictive log-likelihood impossible. In this paper, we develop the prescribed GAN (PresGAN) to address these shortcomings. PresGANs add noise to the output of a density network and optimize an entropy-regularized adversarial loss. The added noise renders tractable approximations of the predictive log-likelihood and stabilizes the training procedure. The entropy regularizer encourages PresGANs to capture all the modes of the data distribution. Fitting PresGANs involves computing the intractable gradients of the entropy regularization term; PresGANs sidestep this intractability using unbiased stochastic estimates. We evaluate PresGANs on several datasets and found they mitigate mode collapse and generate samples with high perceptual quality. We further found that PresGANs reduce the gap in performance in terms of predictive log-likelihood between traditional GANs and variational autoencoders (VAEs).
Gromov-Wasserstein Averaging in a Riemannian Framework

We introduce a theoretical framework for performing statistical tasks—including, but not limited to, averaging and principal component analysis—on the space of (possibly asymmetric) matrices with arbitrary entries and sizes. This is carried out under the lens of the Gromov-Wasserstein (GW) distance, and our methods translate the Riemannian framework of GW distances developed by Sturm into practical, implementable tools for network data analysis. Our methods are illustrated on datasets of letter graphs, asymmetric stochastic blockmodel networks, and planar shapes viewed as metric spaces. On the theoretical front, we supplement the work of Sturm by producing additional results on the tangent structure of this "space of spaces", as well as on the gradient flow of the Fréchet functional on this space.
One Sample Stochastic Frank-Wolfe

One of the beauties of the projected gradient descent method lies in its rather simple mechanism and yet stable behavior with inexact, stochastic gradients, which has led to its wide-spread use in many machine learning applications. However, once we replace the projection operator with a simpler linear program, as is done in the Frank-Wolfe method, both simplicity and stability take a serious hit. The aim of this paper is to bring them back without sacrificing the efficiency. In this paper, we propose the first one-sample stochastic Frank-Wolfe algorithm, called 1-SFW, that avoids the need to carefully tune the batch size, step size, learning rate, and other complicated hyper parameters. In particular, 1-SFW achieves the optimal convergence rate of $\mathcal{O}(1/\epsilon^2)$ for reaching an $\epsilon$-suboptimal solution in the stochastic convex setting, and a $(1-1/e)-\epsilon$ approximate solution for a stochastic monotone DR-submodular maximization problem. Moreover, in a general non-convex setting, 1-SFW finds an $\epsilon$-first-order stationary point after at most $\mathcal{O}(1/\epsilon^3)$ iterations, achieving the current best known convergence rate. All of this is possible by designing a novel unbiased momentum estimator that governs the stability of the optimization process while using a single sample at each iteration.
Practical License Plate Recognition in Unconstrained Surveillance Systems with Adversarial Super-Resolution

Although most current license plate (LP) recognition applications have been significantly advanced, they are still limited to ideal environments where training data are carefully annotated with constrained scenes. In this paper, we propose a novel license plate recognition method to handle unconstrained real world traffic scenes. To overcome these difficulties, we use adversarial super-resolution (SR), and one-stage character segmentation and recognition. Combined with a deep convolutional network based on VGG-net, our method provides simple but reasonable training procedure. Moreover, we introduce GIST-LP, a challenging LP dataset where image samples are effectively collected from unconstrained surveillance scenes. Experimental results on AOLP and GIST-LP dataset illustrate that our method, without any scene-specific adaptation, outperforms current LP recognition approaches in accuracy and provides visual enhancement in our SR results that are easier to understand than original data.
Unconstrained Road Marking Recognition with Generative Adversarial Networks

Recent road marking recognition has achieved great success in the past few years along with the rapid development of deep learning. Although considerable advances have been made, they are often over-dependent on unrepresentative datasets and constrained conditions. In this paper, to overcome these drawbacks, we propose an alternative method that achieves higher accuracy and generates high-quality samples as data augmentation. With the following two major contributions: 1) The proposed deblurring network can successfully recover a clean road marking from a blurred one by adopting generative adversarial networks (GAN). 2) The proposed data augmentation method, based on mutual information, can preserve and learn semantic context from the given dataset. We construct and train a class-conditional GAN to increase the size of training set, which makes it suitable to recognize target. The experimental results have shown that our proposed framework generates deblurred clean samples from blurry ones, and outperforms other methods even with unconstrained road marking datasets.
Rate-Distortion Optimization Guided Autoencoder for Generative Approach with quantitatively measurable latent space

In the generative model approach of machine learning, it is essential to acquire an accurate probabilistic model and compress the dimension of data for easy treatment. However, in the conventional deep-autoencoder based generative model such as VAE, the probability of the real space cannot be obtained correctly from that of in the latent space, because the scaling between both spaces is not controlled. This has also been an obstacle to quantifying the impact of the variation of latent variables on data. In this paper, we propose Rate-Distortion Optimization guided autoencoder, in which the Jacobi matrix from real space to latent space has orthonormality. It is proved theoretically and experimentally that (i) the probability distribution of the latent space obtained by this model is proportional to the probability distribution of the real space because Jacobian between two spaces is constant; (ii) our model behaves as non-linear PCA, where energy of acquired latent space is concentrated on several principal components and the influence of each component can be evaluated quantitatively. Furthermore, to verify the usefulness on the practical application, we evaluate its performance in unsupervised anomaly detection and it outperforms current state-of-the-art methods.
Sparse tree search optimality guarantees in POMDPs with continuous observation spaces

Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with continuous state and observation spaces have powerful flexibility for representing real-world decision and control problems but are notoriously difficult to solve. Recent online sampling-based algorithms that use observation likelihood weighting have shown unprecedented effectiveness in domains with continuous observation spaces. However there has been no formal theoretical justification for this technique. This work offers such a justification, proving that a simplified algorithm, partially observable weighted sparse sampling (POWSS), will estimate Q-values accurately with high probability and can be made to perform arbitrarily near the optimal solution by increasing computational power.
CityLearn: Diverse Real-World Environments for Sample-Efficient Navigation Policy Learning

Visual navigation tasks in real-world environments often require both self-motion and place recognition feedback. While deep reinforcement learning has shown success in solving these perception and decision-making problems in an end-to-end manner, these algorithms require large amounts of experience to learn navigation policies from high-dimensional data, which is generally impractical for real robots due to sample complexity. In this paper, we address these problems with two main contributions. We first leverage place recognition and deep learning techniques combined with goal destination feedback to generate compact, bimodal image representations that can then be used to effectively learn control policies from a small amount of experience. Second, we present an interactive framework, CityLearn, that enables for the first time training and deployment of navigation algorithms across city-sized, realistic environments with extreme visual appearance changes. CityLearn features more than 10 benchmark datasets, often used in visual place recognition and autonomous driving research, including over 100 recorded traversals across 60 cities around the world. We evaluate our approach on two CityLearn environments, training our navigation policy on a single traversal per dataset. Results show our method can be over 2 orders of magnitude faster than when using raw images, and can also generalize across extreme visual changes including day to night and summer to winter transitions.
Mass and angular momentum of charged rotating Gödel black holes in five-dimensional minimal supergravity

In this paper, for the sake of providing a concrete comparison between the usual Abbott-Deser-Tekin (ADT) formalism and its off-shell extension, as well as comparing the latter with the Barnich-Brandt-Compere (BBC) approach, we carry out these methods to compute the mass and angular momentum of the rotating charged G\"{o}del black holes in five-dimensional minimal supergravity. We first present the off-shell ADT potential of the supergravity theories in arbitrary odd dimensions, which is consistent with the superpotential via the BBC approach. Then the off-shell generalized ADT method is applied to evaluate the mass and angular momentum of the G\"{o}del-type black holes by including the contribution from the gauge field. Finally, we strictly obey the rules of the original ADT formalism to incorporate the contribution from the gauge field within the potential. With the help of the modified potential, we try to seek for appropriate reference backgrounds to produce the mass and angular momentum. It is observed that the ADT formalism has to incorporate the contribution from the matter fields to yield physical charges for the G\"{o}del-type black holes.
Time series classification for varying length series

Research into time series classification has tended to focus on the case of series of uniform length. However, it is common for real-world time series data to have unequal lengths. Differing time series lengths may arise from a number of fundamentally different mechanisms. In this work, we identify and evaluate two classes of such mechanisms -- variations in sampling rate relative to the relevant signal and variations between the start and end points of one time series relative to one another. We investigate how time series generated by each of these classes of mechanism are best addressed for time series classification. We perform extensive experiments and provide practical recommendations on how variations in length should be handled in time series classification.
Monotonicity of functionals along conformal Ricci flow

The main purpose of this note is to construct two functionals of the positive solutions to the conjugate heat equation associated to the metrics evolving by the conformal Ricci flow on closed manifolds. We show that they are nondecreasing by calculating the explicit evolution formulas of these functionals. For the entropy functional we give another proof of the monotonicity by establishing a pointwise formula. Moreover, we show that the increase are strict unless the metrics are Einstein.