nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
Weakly Supervised Action Learning with RNN Based Fine-to-Coarse Modeling

We present an approach for weakly supervised learning of human actions. Given a set of videos and an ordered list of the occurring actions, the goal is to infer start and end frames of the related action classes within the video and to train the respective action classifiers without any need for hand labeled frame boundaries. To address this task, we propose a combination of a discriminative representation of subactions, modeled by a recurrent neural network, and a coarse probabilistic model to allow for a temporal alignment and inference over long sequences. While this system alone already generates good results, we show that the performance can be further improved by approximating the number of subactions to the characteristics of the different action classes. To this end, we adapt the number of subaction classes by iterating realignment and reestimation during training. The proposed system is evaluated on two benchmark datasets, the Breakfast and the Hollywood extended dataset, showing a competitive performance on various weak learning tasks such as temporal action segmentation and action alignment.
An embedded segmental K-means model for unsupervised segmentation and clustering of speech

Unsupervised segmentation and clustering of unlabelled speech are core problems in zero-resource speech processing. Most approaches lie at methodological extremes: some use probabilistic Bayesian models with convergence guarantees, while others opt for more efficient heuristic techniques. Despite competitive performance in previous work, the full Bayesian approach is difficult to scale to large speech corpora. We introduce an approximation to a recent Bayesian model that still has a clear objective function but improves efficiency by using hard clustering and segmentation rather than full Bayesian inference. Like its Bayesian counterpart, this embedded segmental K-means model (ES-KMeans) represents arbitrary-length word segments as fixed-dimensional acoustic word embeddings. We first compare ES-KMeans to previous approaches on common English and Xitsonga data sets (5 and 2.5 hours of speech): ES-KMeans outperforms a leading heuristic method in word segmentation, giving similar scores to the Bayesian model while being 5 times faster with fewer hyperparameters. However, its clusters are less pure than those of the other models. We then show that ES-KMeans scales to larger corpora by applying it to the 5 languages of the Zero Resource Speech Challenge 2017 (up to 45 hours), where it performs competitively compared to the challenge
Visually Grounded Learning of Keyword Prediction from Untranscribed Speech

During language acquisition, infants have the benefit of visual cues to ground spoken language. Robots similarly have access to audio and visual sensors. Recent work has shown that images and spoken captions can be mapped into a meaningful common space, allowing images to be retrieved using speech and vice versa. In this setting of images paired with untranscribed spoken captions, we consider whether computer vision systems can be used to obtain textual labels for the speech. Concretely, we use an image-to-words multi-label visual classifier to tag images with soft textual labels, and then train a neural network to map from the speech to these soft targets. We show that the resulting speech system is able to predict which words occur in an utterance---acting as a spoken bag-of-words classifier---without seeing any parallel speech and text. We find that the model often confuses semantically related words, e.g. "man" and "person", making it even more effective as a semantic keyword spotter.
Tailored codes for small quantum memories

We demonstrate that small quantum memories, realized via quantum error correction in multi-qubit devices, can benefit substantially by choosing a quantum code that is tailored to the relevant error model of the system. For a biased noise model, with independent bit and phase flips occurring at different rates, we show that a single code greatly outperforms the well-studied Steane code across the full range of parameters of the noise model, including for unbiased noise. In fact, this tailored code performs almost optimally when compared with 10,000 randomly selected stabilizer codes of comparable experimental complexity. Tailored codes can even outperform the Steane code with realistic experimental noise, and without any increase in the experimental complexity, as we demonstrate by comparison in the observed error model in a recent 7-qubit trapped ion experiment.
Symmetries in the path integral formulation of the Langevin dynamics

We study a dissipative Langevin dynamics in the path integral formulation using the Martin-Siggia-Rose formalism. The effective action is supersymmetric and we identify the supercharges. In addition we study the transformations generated by superderivatives, which were recently included in the cohomological structure emerging in the dissipative systems. We find that these transformations do not generate Ward identities, which are explicitly broken, however, they lead to universal identities, which we derive from Schwinger-Dyson equations. We confirm that the above identities hold in an explicit example of Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process.
Localization of a microtubule organizing center by kinesin motors

Molecular motors are proteins which bind to a polarized cytoskeletal filament and move steadily along it. Molecular motors of the kinesin family move along microtubules (MTs), which are a component of the cytoskeleton. A very processive kinesin motor Kip3p, is known to promote catastrophes and pausing of MT, in particular on cortical contact. These properties play an important role in positioning the mitotic spindle in budding yeast. We present a theoretical approach to positioning of MT networks under confinement. In order to explore a localization mechanism of a microtubule organizing center (MTOC), we introduce an idealized system of two MTs connected by a MTOC. The dynamics of Kip3p is modeled by interacting stochastic particles, which allows us to study the effects of motor-induced depolymerization in a finite volume. We find that localization in the middle of the cavity is realized in a parameter regime where the motor densities on the MTs are increasing with the distance from the MTOC. Localization at an asymmetric position is also possible by tuning model parameters.
Possible signals of vacuum dynamics in the Universe

We study a generic class of time-evolving vacuum models which can provide a better phenomenological account of the overall cosmological observations as compared to the $\Lambda$CDM. Among these models, the running vacuum model (RVM) appears to be the most motivated and favored one, at a confidence level of $\sim 3\sigma$. We further support these results by computing the Akaike and Bayesian information criteria. Our analysis also shows that we can extract fair signals of dynamical dark energy (DDE) by confronting the same set of data to the generic XCDM and CPL parametrizations. In all cases we confirm that the combined triad of modern observations on Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations, Large Scale Structure formation, and the Cosmic Microwave Background, provide the bulk of the signal sustaining a possible vacuum dynamics. In the absence of any of these three crucial data sources, the DDE signal can not be perceived at a significant confidence level. Its possible existence could be a cure for some of the tensions existing in the $\Lambda$CDM when confronted to observations.
Flare: Native Compilation for Heterogeneous Workloads in Apache Spark

The need for modern data analytics to combine relational, procedural, and map-reduce-style functional processing is widely recognized. State-of-the-art systems like Spark have added SQL front-ends and relational query optimization, which promise an increase in expressiveness and performance. But how good are these extensions at extracting high performance from modern hardware platforms? 
While Spark has made impressive progress, we show that for relational workloads, there is still a significant gap compared with best-of-breed query engines. And when stepping outside of the relational world, query optimization techniques are ineffective if large parts of a computation have to be treated as user-defined functions (UDFs). 
We present Flare: a new back-end for Spark that brings performance closer to the best SQL engines, without giving up the added expressiveness of Spark. We demonstrate order of magnitude speedups both for relational workloads such as TPC-H, as well as for a range of machine learning kernels that combine relational and iterative functional processing. 
Flare achieves these results through (1) compilation to native code, (2) replacing parts of the Spark runtime system, and (3) extending the scope of optimization and code generation to large classes of UDFs.
Three-dimensional spatially resolved optical energy density enhanced by wavefront shaping

While a three-dimensional (3D) scattering medium is from the outset opaque, such a medium sustains intriguing transport channels with near-unity transmission that are pursued for fundamental reasons and for applications in solid-state lighting, random lasers, solar cells, and biomedical optics. Here, we study the 3D spatially resolved distribution of the energy density of light in a 3D scattering medium upon the excitation of highly transmitting channels. The coupling into these channels is excited by spatially shaping the incident optical wavefronts to a focus on the back surface. To probe the local energy density, we excite isolated fluorescent nanospheres distributed inside the medium. From the spatial fluorescent intensity pattern we obtain the position of each nanosphere, while the total fluorescent intensity gauges the energy density. Our 3D spatially resolved measurements reveal that the differential fluorescent enhancement changes with depth, up to 26× at the back surface of the medium, and the enhancement reveals a strong peak versus transverse position. We successfully interpret our results with a newly developed 3D model without adjustable parameters that considers the time-reversed diffusion starting from a point source at the back surface.
Semi-Automatic Segmentation and Ultrasonic Characterization of Solid Breast Lesions

Characterization of breast lesions is an essential prerequisite to detect breast cancer in an early stage. Automatic segmentation makes this categorization method robust by freeing it from subjectivity and human error. Both spectral and morphometric features are successfully used for differentiating between benign and malignant breast lesions. In this thesis, we used empirical mode decomposition method for semi-automatic segmentation. Sonographic features like ehcogenicity, heterogeneity, FNPA, margin definition, Hurst coefficient, compactness, roundness, aspect ratio, convexity, solidity, form factor were calculated to be used as our characterization parameters. All of these parameters did not give desired comparative results. But some of them namely echogenicity, heterogeneity, margin definition, aspect ratio and convexity gave good results and were used for characterization.
TokTrack: A Complete Token Provenance and Change Tracking Dataset for the English Wikipedia

We present a dataset that contains every instance of all tokens (~ words) ever written in undeleted, non-redirect English Wikipedia articles until October 2016, in total 13,545,349,787 instances. Each token is annotated with (i) the article revision it was originally created in, and (ii) lists with all the revisions in which the token was ever deleted and (potentially) re-added and re-deleted from its article, enabling a complete and straightforward tracking of its history. This data would be exceedingly hard to create by an average potential user as it is (i) very expensive to compute and as (ii) accurately tracking the history of each token in revisioned documents is a non-trivial task. Adapting a state-of-the-art algorithm, we have produced a dataset that allows for a range of analyses and metrics, already popular in research and going beyond, to be generated on complete-Wikipedia scale; ensuring quality and allowing researchers to forego expensive text-comparison computation, which so far has hindered scalable usage. We show how this data enables, on token-level, computation of provenance, measuring survival of content over time, very detailed conflict metrics, and fine-grained interactions of editors like partial reverts, re-additions and other metrics, in the process gaining several novel insights.
On the Robustness of Convolutional Neural Networks to Internal Architecture and Weight Perturbations

Deep convolutional neural networks are generally regarded as robust function approximators. So far, this intuition is based on perturbations to external stimuli such as the images to be classified. Here we explore the robustness of convolutional neural networks to perturbations to the internal weights and architecture of the network itself. We show that convolutional networks are surprisingly robust to a number of internal perturbations in the higher convolutional layers but the bottom convolutional layers are much more fragile. For instance, Alexnet shows less than a 30% decrease in classification performance when randomly removing over 70% of weight connections in the top convolutional or dense layers but performance is almost at chance with the same perturbation in the first convolutional layer. Finally, we suggest further investigations which could continue to inform the robustness of convolutional networks to internal perturbations.
The Dependence of Machine Learning on Electronic Medical Record Quality

There is growing interest in applying machine learning methods to Electronic Medical Records (EMR). Across different institutions, however, EMR quality can vary widely. This work investigated the impact of this disparity on the performance of three advanced machine learning algorithms: logistic regression, multilayer perceptron, and recurrent neural network. The EMR disparity was emulated using different permutations of the EMR collected at Children's Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) and Cardiothoracic Intensive Care Unit (CTICU). The algorithms were trained using patients from the PICU to predict in-ICU mortality for patients on a held out set of PICU and CTICU patients. The disparate patient populations between the PICU and CTICU provide an estimate of generalization errors across different ICUs. We quantified and evaluated the generalization of these algorithms on varying EMR size, input types, and fidelity of data.
Characterizing Directed and Undirected Networks via Multidimensional Walks with Jumps

Estimating distributions of node characteristics (labels) such as number of connections or citizenship of users in a social network via edge and node sampling is a vital part of the study of complex networks. Due to its low cost, sampling via a random walk (RW) has been proposed as an attractive solution to this task. Most RW methods assume either that the network is undirected or that walkers can traverse edges regardless of their direction. Some RW methods have been designed for directed networks where edges coming into a node are not directly observable. In this work, we propose Directed Unbiased Frontier Sampling (DUFS), a sampling method based on a large number of coordinated walkers, each starting from a node chosen uniformly at random. It applies to directed networks with invisible incoming edges because it constructs, in real time, an undirected graph consistent with the walkers trajectories, and its use of random jumps to prevent walkers from being trapped. DUFS generalizes previous RW methods and is suited for undirected networks and to directed networks regardless of in-edge visibility. We also propose an improved estimator of node label distribution that combines information from initial walker locations with subsequent RW observations. We evaluate DUFS, compare it to other RW methods, investigate the impact of its parameters on estimation accuracy and provide practical guidelines for choosing them. In estimating out-degree distributions, DUFS yields significantly better estimates of the head of the distribution than other methods, while matching or exceeding estimation accuracy of the tail. Last, we show that DUFS outperforms uniform sampling when estimating distributions of node labels of the top 10% largest degree nodes, even when sampling a node uniformly has the same cost as RW steps.
Improved NN-JPDAF for Joint Multiple Target Tracking and Feature Extraction

Feature aided tracking can often yield improved tracking performance over the standard multiple target tracking (MTT) algorithms with only kinematic measurements. However, in many applications, the feature signal of the targets consists of sparse Fourier-domain signals. It changes quickly and nonlinearly in the time domain, and the feature measurements are corrupted by missed detections and mis-associations. These two factors make it hard to extract the feature information to be used in MTT. In this paper, we develop a feature-aided nearest neighbour joint probabilistic data association filter (NN-JPDAF) for joint MTT and feature extraction in dense target environments. To estimate the rapidly varying feature signal from incomplete and corrupted measurements, we use the atomic norm constraint to formulate the sparsity of feature signal and use the $\ell_1$-norm to formulate the sparsity of the corruption induced by mis-associations. Based on the sparse representation, the feature signal are estimated by solving a semidefinite program (SDP) which is convex. We also provide an iterative method for solving this SDP via the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) where each iteration involves closed-form computation. With the estimated feature signal, re-filtering is performed to estimate the kinematic states of the targets, where the association makes use of both kinematic and feature information. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed algorithm in a radar application.
Supervisor Synthesis of POMDP based on Automata Learning

As a general and thus popular model for autonomous systems, partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) can capture uncertainties from different sources like sensing noises, actuation errors, and uncertain environments. However, its comprehensiveness makes the planning and control in POMDP difficult. Traditional POMDP planning problems target to find the optimal policy to maximize the expectation of accumulated rewards. But for safety critical applications, guarantees of system performance described by formal specifications are desired, which motivates us to consider formal methods to synthesize supervisor for POMDP. With system specifications given by Probabilistic Computation Tree Logic (PCTL), we propose a supervisory control framework with a type of deterministic finite automata (DFA), za-DFA, as the controller form. While the existing work mainly relies on optimization techniques to learn fixed-size finite state controllers (FSCs), we develop an $L^*$ learning based algorithm to determine both space and transitions of za-DFA. Membership queries and different oracles for conjectures are defined. The learning algorithm is sound and complete. An example is given in detailed steps to illustrate the supervisor synthesis algorithm.
A nonconvex splitting method for symmetric nonnegative matrix factorization: Convergence analysis and optimality

Symmetric non-negative matrix factorization (SymNMF) has important applications in data analytics problems such as document clustering, community detection and image segmentation. In this paper, we propose a novel nonconvex variable splitting method for solving SymNMF. Different from the existing works, we prove that the algorithm converges to the set of Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) points of the nonconvex SymNMF problem with a global sublinear convergence rate. We also show that the algorithm can be efficiently implemented in a distributed manner. Further, we provide sufficient conditions that guarantee the global and local optimality of the obtained solutions. Extensive numerical results performed on both synthetic and real data sets suggest that the proposed algorithm yields high quality of the solutions and converges quickly to the set of local minimum solutions compared with other algorithms.
An Asymptotically Tighter Bound on Sampling for Frequent Itemsets Mining

In this paper we present a new error bound on sampling algorithms for frequent itemsets mining. We show that the new bound is asymptotically tighter than the state-of-art bounds, i.e., given the chosen samples, for small enough error probability, the new error bound is roughly half of the existing bounds. Based on the new bound, we give a new approximation algorithm, which is much simpler compared to the existing approximation algorithms, but can also guarantee the worst approximation error with precomputed sample size. We also give an algorithm which can approximate the top-$k$ frequent itemsets with high accuracy and efficiency.
LRC: Dependency-aware cache management for data analytics clusters

Memory caches are being aggressively used in today's data-parallel systems such as Spark, Tez, and Piccolo. However, prevalent systems employ rather simple cache management policies — notably the Least Recently Used (LRU) policy — that are oblivious to the application semantics of data dependency, expressed as a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Without this knowledge, memory caching can at best be performed by “guessing” the future data access patterns based on historical information (e.g., the access recency and/or frequency), which frequently results in inefficient, erroneous caching with low hit ratio and a long response time. In this paper, we propose a novel cache replacement policy, Least Reference Count (LRC), which exploits the application-specific DAG information to optimize the cache management. LRC evicts the cached data blocks whose reference count is the smallest. The reference count is defined, for each data block, as the number of dependent child blocks that have not been computed yet. We demonstrate the efficacy of LRC through both empirical analysis and cluster deployments against popular benchmarking workloads. Our Spark implementation shows that, compared with LRU, LRC speeds up typical applications by 60%.
Big Cohen–Macaulay algebras and the vanishing
conjecture for maps of Tor in mixed characteristic

We prove a version of weakly functorial big Cohen-Macaulay algebras that suffices to establish Hochster-Huneke's vanishing conjecture for maps of Tor in mixed characteristic. As a corollary, we prove an analog of Boutot's theorem that direct summands of regular rings are pseudo-rational in mixed characteristic. Our proof uses perfectoid spaces and is inspired by the recent breakthroughs on the direct summand conjecture by Andre and Bhatt.