pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Quadrotor going through a window and landing: An image-based visual servo control approach
Authors: Zhiqi Tang, Rita Cunha, David Cabecinhas, Tarek Hamel, Carlos Silvestre
Date: 2021-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Flow Estimation, Position

This paper considers the problem of controlling a quadrotor to go through a window and land on a planar target, the landing pad, using an Image-Based Visual Servo (IBVS) controller that relies on sensing information from two on-board cameras and an IMU. The maneuver is divided into two stages: crossing the window and landing on the pad. For the first stage, a control law is proposed that guarantees that the vehicle will not collide with the wall containing the window and will go through the window with non-zero velocity along the direction orthogonal to the window, keeping at all times a safety distance with respect to the window edges. For the landing stage, the proposed control law ensures that the vehicle achieves a smooth touchdown, keeping at all time a positive height above the plane containing the landing pad. For control purposes, the centroid vectors provided by the combination of the spherical image measurements of a collection of landmarks (corners) for both the window and the landing pad are used as position measurement. The translational optical flow relative to the wall, window edges, and landing plane is used as velocity cue. To achieve the proposed objective, no direct measurements nor explicit estimate of position or velocity are required. Simulation and experimental results are provided to illustrate the performance of the presented controller.
Toward nonlinear dynamic control over encrypted data for infinite time horizon
Authors: Junsoo Kim, Farhad Farokhi, Iman Shames, Hyungbo Shim
Date: 2021-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

Recent studies on encrypted control using homomorphic encryption allow secure operation by directly performing computations on encrypted data without decryption. Implementing dynamic controllers on encrypted data presents unique challenges due to limitations on the number of operations on an encrypted message. Hence, it may not be possible to perform the recursive operations for an infinite time horizon. In this note, we demonstrate that it is possible to run a dynamic controller over encrypted data for an infinite time horizon if the output of the controller can be represented as a function of a fixed number of previous inputs and outputs. The presented implementation requires encryption at both input and output of the plant. We identify a class of nonlinear systems that can accommodate the proposed implementation. The closed-loop performance can be guaranteed using the proposed encrypted controller by ensuring that quantization error is made arbitrarily small with appropriate choice of parameters. We show that the proposed method is amenable to linear systems (as a subset of the said nonlinear systems) with performance guarantees.
Stacking Integrators Without Sacrificing the Overshoot in Reset Control Systems
Authors: Nima Karbasizadeh, S. Hassan HosseinNia
Date: 2021-10-12 00:00:00

According to the well-known loop-shaping control design approach, the steady-state precision of control systems can be improved by stacking integrators. However, due to the waterbed effect in linear control systems, such an action will worsen the transient response by increasing overshoot and creating wind-up problems. This paper presents a new architecture for rest control systems that can significantly decrease the overshoot and create a no-overshoot performance even in presence of stacked integrators. The steady-state analysis of the proposed system will also show that improved precision expected due to stacked integrators can be achieved as well. A numerical simulation study is presented to verify the results and the tuning guide presented.
Towards Efficient NLP: A Standard Evaluation and A Strong Baseline
Authors: Xiangyang Liu, Tianxiang Sun, Junliang He, Jiawen Wu, Lingling Wu, Xinyu Zhang, Hao Jiang, Zhao Cao, Xuanjing Huang, Xipeng Qiu
Date: 2021-10-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL 2022 7

Supersized pre-trained language models have pushed the accuracy of various natural language processing (NLP) tasks to a new state-of-the-art (SOTA). Rather than pursuing the reachless SOTA accuracy, more and more researchers start paying attention on model efficiency and usability. Different from accuracy, the metric for efficiency varies across different studies, making them hard to be fairly compared. To that end, this work presents ELUE (Efficient Language Understanding Evaluation), a standard evaluation, and a public leaderboard for efficient NLP models. ELUE is dedicated to depict the Pareto Frontier for various language understanding tasks, such that it can tell whether and how much a method achieves Pareto improvement. Along with the benchmark, we also release a strong baseline, ElasticBERT, which allows BERT to exit at any layer in both static and dynamic ways. We demonstrate the ElasticBERT, despite its simplicity, outperforms or performs on par with SOTA compressed and early exiting models. With ElasticBERT, the proposed ELUE has a strong Pareto Frontier and makes a better evaluation for efficient NLP models.
Non-Invasive Fault Detection of Stator Windings of Induction Motors
Authors: Rayyan Bin Fairuz
Date: 2021-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Fault Detection

Condition monitoring of induction motor has been widely researched over recent years due to its ability to monitor operating characteristics and the health status of induction motor. Various methods have been used to monitor induction motors such as thermal monitoring and vibration analysis. This paper introduces an alternative method which is to use an inductive coupling method to extract in-circuit impedance of induction motor. This method allows for an online measurement of the system under test (SUT) preventing any unnecessary shutdowns. These unnecessary shutdowns may incur a loss of revenue for relevant industries that depends heavily on induction motor operations. Two sets of experiments were conducted in this paper, the first experiment was to examine the accuracy of the proposed method by simulating various SUT using simulated resistor, inductor, and capacitor (RLC) network. The next experiment was to detect incipient stator faults such as turn to turn faults in an induction motor. This proposed method measures the impedance of the stator winding of an induction motor to identify abnormalities. In addition, this method allows for an accurate in-circuit impedance measurement without the influence of motor load and frequency changes as well as faults such as bearing and rotor faults.
Compliance checking in reified IO logic via SHACL
Authors: Livio Robaldo, Kolawole J. Adebayo
Date: 2021-10-13 00:00:00

Reified Input/Output (I/O) logic[21] has been recently proposed to model real-world norms in terms of the logic in [11]. This is massively grounded on the notion of reification, and it has specifically designed to model meaning of natural language sentences, such as the ones occurring in existing legislation. This paper presents a methodology to carry out compliance checking on reified I/O logic formulae. These are translated in SHACL (Shapes Constraint Language) shapes, a recent W3C recommendation to validate and reason with RDF triplestores. Compliance checking is then enforced by validating RDF graphs describing states of affairs with respect to these SHACL shapes.
Bag-of-Vectors Autoencoders for Unsupervised Conditional Text Generation
Authors: Florian Mai, James Henderson
Date: 2021-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Conditional Text Generation, Sentence Summarization, Text Generation

Text autoencoders are often used for unsupervised conditional text generation by applying mappings in the latent space to change attributes to the desired values. Recently, Mai et al. (2020) proposed Emb2Emb, a method to learn these mappings in the embedding space of an autoencoder. However, their method is restricted to autoencoders with a single-vector embedding, which limits how much information can be retained. We address this issue by extending their method to Bag-of-Vectors Autoencoders (BoV-AEs), which encode the text into a variable-size bag of vectors that grows with the size of the text, as in attention-based models. This allows to encode and reconstruct much longer texts than standard autoencoders. Analogous to conventional autoencoders, we propose regularization techniques that facilitate learning meaningful operations in the latent space. Finally, we adapt Emb2Emb for a training scheme that learns to map an input bag to an output bag, including a novel loss function and neural architecture. Our empirical evaluations on unsupervised sentiment transfer show that our method performs substantially better than a standard autoencoder.
Bandits Don't Follow Rules: Balancing Multi-Facet Machine Translation with Multi-Armed Bandits
Authors: Julia Kreutzer, David Vilar, Artem Sokolov
Date: 2021-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Multi-Armed Bandits, Translation

Training data for machine translation (MT) is often sourced from a multitude of large corpora that are multi-faceted in nature, e.g. containing contents from multiple domains or different levels of quality or complexity. Naturally, these facets do not occur with equal frequency, nor are they equally important for the test scenario at hand. In this work, we propose to optimize this balance jointly with MT model parameters to relieve system developers from manual schedule design. A multi-armed bandit is trained to dynamically choose between facets in a way that is most beneficial for the MT system. We evaluate it on three different multi-facet applications: balancing translationese and natural training data, or data from multiple domains or multiple language pairs. We find that bandit learning leads to competitive MT systems across tasks, and our analysis provides insights into its learned strategies and the underlying data sets.
A Novel Clustering-Based Algorithm for Continuous and Non-invasive Cuff-Less Blood Pressure Estimation
Authors: Ali Farki, Reza Baradaran Kazemzadeh, Elham Akhondzadeh Noughabi
Date: 2021-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Blood pressure estimation, Clustering, regression

Extensive research has been performed on continuous, non-invasive, cuffless blood pressure (BP) measurement using artificial intelligence algorithms. This approach involves extracting certain features from physiological signals like ECG, PPG, ICG, BCG, etc. as independent variables and extracting features from Arterial Blood Pressure (ABP) signals as dependent variables, and then using machine learning algorithms to develop a blood pressure estimation model based on these data. The greatest challenge of this field is the insufficient accuracy of estimation models. This paper proposes a novel blood pressure estimation method with a clustering step for accuracy improvement. The proposed method involves extracting Pulse Transit Time (PTT), PPG Intensity Ratio (PIR), and Heart Rate (HR) features from Electrocardiogram (ECG) and Photoplethysmogram (PPG) signals as the inputs of clustering and regression, extracting Systolic Blood Pressure (SBP) and Diastolic Blood Pressure (DBP) features from ABP signals as dependent variables, and finally developing regression models by applying Gradient Boosting Regression (GBR), Random Forest Regression (RFR), and Multilayer Perceptron Regression (MLP) on each cluster. The method was implemented using the MIMICII dataset with the silhouette criterion used to determine the optimal number of clusters. The results showed that because of the inconsistency, high dispersion, and multi-trend behavior of the extracted features vectors, the accuracy can be significantly improved by running a clustering algorithm and then developing a regression model on each cluster, and finally weighted averaging of the results based on the error of each cluster. When implemented with 5 clusters and GBR, this approach yielded an MAE of 2.56 for SBP estimates and 2.23 for DBP estimates, which were significantly better than the best results without clustering (DBP: 6.27, SBP: 6.36).
Scaling Laws for the Few-Shot Adaptation of Pre-trained Image Classifiers
Authors: Gabriele Prato, Simon Guiroy, Ethan Caballero, Irina Rish, Sarath Chandar
Date: 2021-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, image-classification, Image Classification

Empirical science of neural scaling laws is a rapidly growing area of significant importance to the future of machine learning, particularly in the light of recent breakthroughs achieved by large-scale pre-trained models such as GPT-3, CLIP and DALL-e. Accurately predicting the neural network performance with increasing resources such as data, compute and model size provides a more comprehensive evaluation of different approaches across multiple scales, as opposed to traditional point-wise comparisons of fixed-size models on fixed-size benchmarks, and, most importantly, allows for focus on the best-scaling, and thus most promising in the future, approaches. In this work, we consider a challenging problem of few-shot learning in image classification, especially when the target data distribution in the few-shot phase is different from the source, training, data distribution, in a sense that it includes new image classes not encountered during training. Our current main goal is to investigate how the amount of pre-training data affects the few-shot generalization performance of standard image classifiers. Our key observations are that (1) such performance improvements are well-approximated by power laws (linear log-log plots) as the training set size increases, (2) this applies to both cases of target data coming from either the same or from a different domain (i.e., new classes) as the training data, and (3) few-shot performance on new classes converges at a faster rate than the standard classification performance on previously seen classes. Our findings shed new light on the relationship between scale and generalization.
Bundle Networks: Fiber Bundles, Local Trivializations, and a Generative Approach to Exploring Many-to-one Maps
Authors: Nico Courts, Henry Kvinge
Date: 2021-10-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Forecasting

Many-to-one maps are ubiquitous in machine learning, from the image recognition model that assigns a multitude of distinct images to the concept of "cat" to the time series forecasting model which assigns a range of distinct time-series to a single scalar regression value. While the primary use of such models is naturally to associate correct output to each input, in many problems it is also useful to be able to explore, understand, and sample from a model's fibers, which are the set of input values $x$ such that $f(x) = y$, for fixed $y$ in the output space. In this paper we show that popular generative architectures are ill-suited to such tasks. Motivated by this we introduce a novel generative architecture, a Bundle Network, based on the concept of a fiber bundle from (differential) topology. BundleNets exploit the idea of a local trivialization wherein a space can be locally decomposed into a product space that cleanly encodes the many-to-one nature of the map. By enforcing this decomposition in BundleNets and by utilizing state-of-the-art invertible components, investigating a network's fibers becomes natural.
Output Space Entropy Search Framework for Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization
Authors: Syrine Belakaria, Aryan Deshwal, Janardhan Rao Doppa
Date: 2021-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, Computational Efficiency

We consider the problem of black-box multi-objective optimization (MOO) using expensive function evaluations (also referred to as experiments), where the goal is to approximate the true Pareto set of solutions by minimizing the total resource cost of experiments. For example, in hardware design optimization, we need to find the designs that trade-off performance, energy, and area overhead using expensive computational simulations. The key challenge is to select the sequence of experiments to uncover high-quality solutions using minimal resources. In this paper, we propose a general framework for solving MOO problems based on the principle of output space entropy (OSE) search: select the experiment that maximizes the information gained per unit resource cost about the true Pareto front. We appropriately instantiate the principle of OSE search to derive efficient algorithms for the following four MOO problem settings: 1) The most basic em single-fidelity setting, where experiments are expensive and accurate; 2) Handling em black-box constraints} which cannot be evaluated without performing experiments; 3) The discrete multi-fidelity setting, where experiments can vary in the amount of resources consumed and their evaluation accuracy; and 4) The em continuous-fidelity setting, where continuous function approximations result in a huge space of experiments. Experiments on diverse synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that our OSE search based algorithms improve over state-of-the-art methods in terms of both computational-efficiency and accuracy of MOO solutions.
Block Contextual MDPs for Continual Learning
Authors: Shagun Sodhani, Franziska Meier, Joelle Pineau, Amy Zhang
Date: 2021-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Generalization Bounds, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In reinforcement learning (RL), when defining a Markov Decision Process (MDP), the environment dynamics is implicitly assumed to be stationary. This assumption of stationarity, while simplifying, can be unrealistic in many scenarios. In the continual reinforcement learning scenario, the sequence of tasks is another source of nonstationarity. In this work, we propose to examine this continual reinforcement learning setting through the block contextual MDP (BC-MDP) framework, which enables us to relax the assumption of stationarity. This framework challenges RL algorithms to handle both nonstationarity and rich observation settings and, by additionally leveraging smoothness properties, enables us to study generalization bounds for this setting. Finally, we take inspiration from adaptive control to propose a novel algorithm that addresses the challenges introduced by this more realistic BC-MDP setting, allows for zero-shot adaptation at evaluation time, and achieves strong performance on several nonstationary environments.
Interpretable AI forecasting for numerical relativity waveforms of quasi-circular, spinning, non-precessing binary black hole mergers
Authors: Asad Khan, E. A. Huerta, Huihuo Zheng
Date: 2021-10-13 00:00:00

We present a deep-learning artificial intelligence model that is capable of learning and forecasting the late-inspiral, merger and ringdown of numerical relativity waveforms that describe quasi-circular, spinning, non-precessing binary black hole mergers. We used the NRHybSur3dq8 surrogate model to produce train, validation and test sets of $\ell=|m|=2$ waveforms that cover the parameter space of binary black hole mergers with mass-ratios $q\leq8$ and individual spins $|s^z_{\{1,2\}}| \leq 0.8$. These waveforms cover the time range $t\in[-5000\textrm{M}, 130\textrm{M}]$, where $t=0M$ marks the merger event, defined as the maximum value of the waveform amplitude. We harnessed the ThetaGPU supercomputer at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility to train our AI model using a training set of 1.5 million waveforms. We used 16 NVIDIA DGX A100 nodes, each consisting of 8 NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs and 2 AMD Rome CPUs, to fully train our model within 3.5 hours. Our findings show that artificial intelligence can accurately forecast the dynamical evolution of numerical relativity waveforms in the time range $t\in[-100\textrm{M}, 130\textrm{M}]$. Sampling a test set of 190,000 waveforms, we find that the average overlap between target and predicted waveforms is $\gtrsim99\%$ over the entire parameter space under consideration. We also combined scientific visualization and accelerated computing to identify what components of our model take in knowledge from the early and late-time waveform evolution to accurately forecast the latter part of numerical relativity waveforms. This work aims to accelerate the creation of scalable, computationally efficient and interpretable artificial intelligence models for gravitational wave astrophysics.
Considering user agreement in learning to predict the aesthetic quality
Authors: Suiyi Ling, Andreas Pastor, Junle Wang, Patrick Le Callet
Date: 2021-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

How to robustly rank the aesthetic quality of given images has been a long-standing ill-posed topic. Such challenge stems mainly from the diverse subjective opinions of different observers about the varied types of content. There is a growing interest in estimating the user agreement by considering the standard deviation of the scores, instead of only predicting the mean aesthetic opinion score. Nevertheless, when comparing a pair of contents, few studies consider how confident are we regarding the difference in the aesthetic scores. In this paper, we thus propose (1) a re-adapted multi-task attention network to predict both the mean opinion score and the standard deviation in an end-to-end manner; (2) a brand-new confidence interval ranking loss that encourages the model to focus on image-pairs that are less certain about the difference of their aesthetic scores. With such loss, the model is encouraged to learn the uncertainty of the content that is relevant to the diversity of observers' opinions, i.e., user disagreement. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that the proposed multi-task aesthetic model achieves state-of-the-art performance on two different types of aesthetic datasets, i.e., AVA and TMGA.
A Survey on Legal Question Answering Systems
Authors: Jorge Martinez-Gil
Date: 2021-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: legal outcome extraction, Question Answering, Survey

Many legal professionals think that the explosion of information about local, regional, national, and international legislation makes their practice more costly, time-consuming, and even error-prone. The two main reasons for this are that most legislation is usually unstructured, and the tremendous amount and pace with which laws are released causes information overload in their daily tasks. In the case of the legal domain, the research community agrees that a system allowing to generate automatic responses to legal questions could substantially impact many practical implications in daily activities. The degree of usefulness is such that even a semi-automatic solution could significantly help to reduce the workload to be faced. This is mainly because a Question Answering system could be able to automatically process a massive amount of legal resources to answer a question or doubt in seconds, which means that it could save resources in the form of effort, money, and time to many professionals in the legal sector. In this work, we quantitatively and qualitatively survey the solutions that currently exist to meet this challenge.