pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Episodic Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning with Curiosity-Driven Exploration
Authors: Lulu Zheng, Jiarui Chen, Jianhao Wang, Jiamin He, Yujing Hu, Yingfeng Chen, Changjie Fan, Yang Gao, Chongjie Zhang
Date: 2021-11-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Efficient Exploration, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Starcraft, Starcraft II

Efficient exploration in deep cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) still remains challenging in complex coordination problems. In this paper, we introduce a novel Episodic Multi-agent reinforcement learning with Curiosity-driven exploration, called EMC. We leverage an insight of popular factorized MARL algorithms that the "induced" individual Q-values, i.e., the individual utility functions used for local execution, are the embeddings of local action-observation histories, and can capture the interaction between agents due to reward backpropagation during centralized training. Therefore, we use prediction errors of individual Q-values as intrinsic rewards for coordinated exploration and utilize episodic memory to exploit explored informative experience to boost policy training. As the dynamics of an agent's individual Q-value function captures the novelty of states and the influence from other agents, our intrinsic reward can induce coordinated exploration to new or promising states. We illustrate the advantages of our method by didactic examples, and demonstrate its significant outperformance over state-of-the-art MARL baselines on challenging tasks in the StarCraft II micromanagement benchmark.
CDistNet: Perceiving Multi-Domain Character Distance for Robust Text Recognition
Authors: Tianlun Zheng, Zhineng Chen, Shancheng Fang, Hongtao Xie, Yu-Gang Jiang
Date: 2021-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Position, Scene Text Recognition

The Transformer-based encoder-decoder framework is becoming popular in scene text recognition, largely because it naturally integrates recognition clues from both visual and semantic domains. However, recent studies show that the two kinds of clues are not always well registered and therefore, feature and character might be misaligned in difficult text (e.g., with a rare shape). As a result, constraints such as character position are introduced to alleviate this problem. Despite certain success, visual and semantic are still separately modeled and they are merely loosely associated. In this paper, we propose a novel module called Multi-Domain Character Distance Perception (MDCDP) to establish a visually and semantically related position embedding. MDCDP uses the position embedding to query both visual and semantic features following the cross-attention mechanism. The two kinds of clues are fused into the position branch, generating a content-aware embedding that well perceives character spacing and orientation variants, character semantic affinities, and clues tying the two kinds of information. They are summarized as the multi-domain character distance. We develop CDistNet that stacks multiple MDCDPs to guide a gradually precise distance modeling. Thus, the feature-character alignment is well built even various recognition difficulties are presented. We verify CDistNet on ten challenging public datasets and two series of augmented datasets created by ourselves. The experiments demonstrate that CDistNet performs highly competitively. It not only ranks top-tier in standard benchmarks, but also outperforms recent popular methods by obvious margins on real and augmented datasets presenting severe text deformation, poor linguistic support, and rare character layouts. Code is available at https://github.com/simplify23/CDistNet.
Backdoor Attack through Frequency Domain
Authors: Tong Wang, Yuan YAO, Feng Xu, Shengwei An, Hanghang Tong, Ting Wang
Date: 2021-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Backdoor Attack

Backdoor attacks have been shown to be a serious threat against deep learning systems such as biometric authentication and autonomous driving. An effective backdoor attack could enforce the model misbehave under certain predefined conditions, i.e., triggers, but behave normally otherwise. However, the triggers of existing attacks are directly injected in the pixel space, which tend to be detectable by existing defenses and visually identifiable at both training and inference stages. In this paper, we propose a new backdoor attack FTROJAN through trojaning the frequency domain. The key intuition is that triggering perturbations in the frequency domain correspond to small pixel-wise perturbations dispersed across the entire image, breaking the underlying assumptions of existing defenses and making the poisoning images visually indistinguishable from clean ones. We evaluate FTROJAN in several datasets and tasks showing that it achieves a high attack success rate without significantly degrading the prediction accuracy on benign inputs. Moreover, the poisoning images are nearly invisible and retain high perceptual quality. We also evaluate FTROJAN against state-of-the-art defenses as well as several adaptive defenses that are designed on the frequency domain. The results show that FTROJAN can robustly elude or significantly degenerate the performance of these defenses.
Many Heads but One Brain: Fusion Brain -- a Competition and a Single Multimodal Multitask Architecture
Authors: Daria Bakshandaeva, Denis Dimitrov, Vladimir Arkhipkin, Alex Shonenkov, Mark Potanin, Denis Karachev, Andrey Kuznetsov, Anton Voronov, Vera Davydova, Elena Tutubalina, Aleksandr Petiushko
Date: 2021-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Handwritten Text Recognition, object-detection, Object Detection, Question Answering, Translation, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA), Zero-Shot Object Detection

Supporting the current trend in the AI community, we present the AI Journey 2021 Challenge called Fusion Brain, the first competition which is targeted to make the universal architecture which could process different modalities (in this case, images, texts, and code) and solve multiple tasks for vision and language. The Fusion Brain Challenge combines the following specific tasks: Code2code Translation, Handwritten Text recognition, Zero-shot Object Detection, and Visual Question Answering. We have created datasets for each task to test the participants' submissions on it. Moreover, we have collected and made publicly available a new handwritten dataset in both English and Russian, which consists of 94,128 pairs of images and texts. We also propose a multimodal and multitask architecture - a baseline solution, in the center of which is a frozen foundation model and which has been trained in Fusion mode along with Single-task mode. The proposed Fusion approach proves to be competitive and more energy-efficient compared to the task-specific one.
Operations for Autonomous Spacecraft
Authors: Rebecca Castano, Tiago Vaquero, Federico Rossi, Vandi Verma, Ellen Van Wyk, Dan Allard, Bennett Huffmann, Erin M. Murphy, Nihal Dhamani, Robert A. Hewitt, Scott Davidoff, Rashied Amini, Anthony Barrett, Julie Castillo-Rogez, Steve A. Chien, Mathieu Choukroun, Alain Dadaian, Raymond Francis, Benjamin Gorr, Mark Hofstadter, Mitch Ingham, Cristina Sorice, Iain Tierney
Date: 2021-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Summarization, Scheduling

Onboard autonomy technologies such as planning and scheduling, identification of scientific targets, and content-based data summarization, will lead to exciting new space science missions. However, the challenge of operating missions with such onboard autonomous capabilities has not been studied to a level of detail sufficient for consideration in mission concepts. These autonomy capabilities will require changes to current operations processes, practices, and tools. We have developed a case study to assess the changes needed to enable operators and scientists to operate an autonomous spacecraft by facilitating a common model between the ground personnel and the onboard algorithms. We assess the new operations tools and workflows necessary to enable operators and scientists to convey their desired intent to the spacecraft, and to be able to reconstruct and explain the decisions made onboard and the state of the spacecraft. Mock-ups of these tools were used in a user study to understand the effectiveness of the processes and tools in enabling a shared framework of understanding, and in the ability of the operators and scientists to effectively achieve mission science objectives.
Enhancing Multilingual Language Model with Massive Multilingual Knowledge Triples
Authors: Linlin Liu, Xin Li, Ruidan He, Lidong Bing, Shafiq Joty, Luo Si
Date: 2021-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Logical Reasoning, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, Relation, Relation Classification, Representation Learning, Retrieval, Sentence

Knowledge-enhanced language representation learning has shown promising results across various knowledge-intensive NLP tasks. However, prior methods are limited in efficient utilization of multilingual knowledge graph (KG) data for language model (LM) pretraining. They often train LMs with KGs in indirect ways, relying on extra entity/relation embeddings to facilitate knowledge injection. In this work, we explore methods to make better use of the multilingual annotation and language agnostic property of KG triples, and present novel knowledge based multilingual language models (KMLMs) trained directly on the knowledge triples. We first generate a large amount of multilingual synthetic sentences using the Wikidata KG triples. Then based on the intra- and inter-sentence structures of the generated data, we design pretraining tasks to enable the LMs to not only memorize the factual knowledge but also learn useful logical patterns. Our pretrained KMLMs demonstrate significant performance improvements on a wide range of knowledge-intensive cross-lingual tasks, including named entity recognition (NER), factual knowledge retrieval, relation classification, and a newly designed logical reasoning task.
MidNet: An Anchor-and-Angle-Free Detector for Oriented Ship Detection in Aerial Images
Authors: Feng Jie, Yuping Liang, Junpeng Zhang, Xiangrong Zhang, Quanhe Yao, Licheng Jiao
Date: 2021-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

Ship detection in aerial images remains an active yet challenging task due to arbitrary object orientation and complex background from a bird's-eye perspective. Most of the existing methods rely on angular prediction or predefined anchor boxes, making these methods highly sensitive to unstable angular regression and excessive hyper-parameter setting. To address these issues, we replace the angular-based object encoding with an anchor-and-angle-free paradigm, and propose a novel detector deploying a center and four midpoints for encoding each oriented object, namely MidNet. MidNet designs a symmetrical deformable convolution customized for enhancing the midpoints of ships, then the center and midpoints for an identical ship are adaptively matched by predicting corresponding centripetal shift and matching radius. Finally, a concise analytical geometry algorithm is proposed to refine the centers and midpoints step-wisely for building precise oriented bounding boxes. On two public ship detection datasets, HRSC2016 and FGSD2021, MidNet outperforms the state-of-the-art detectors by achieving APs of 90.52% and 86.50%. Additionally, MidNet obtains competitive results in the ship detection of DOTA.
Renewable energy integration and microgrid energy trading using multi-agent deep reinforcement learning
Authors: Daniel J. B. Harrold, Jun Cao, Zhong Fan
Date: 2021-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, energy trading, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In this paper, multi-agent reinforcement learning is used to control a hybrid energy storage system working collaboratively to reduce the energy costs of a microgrid through maximising the value of renewable energy and trading. The agents must learn to control three different types of energy storage system suited for short, medium, and long-term storage under fluctuating demand, dynamic wholesale energy prices, and unpredictable renewable energy generation. Two case studies are considered: the first looking at how the energy storage systems can better integrate renewable energy generation under dynamic pricing, and the second with how those same agents can be used alongside an aggregator agent to sell energy to self-interested external microgrids looking to reduce their own energy bills. This work found that the centralised learning with decentralised execution of the multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient and its state-of-the-art variants allowed the multi-agent methods to perform significantly better than the control from a single global agent. It was also found that using separate reward functions in the multi-agent approach performed much better than using a single control agent. Being able to trade with the other microgrids, rather than just selling back to the utility grid, also was found to greatly increase the grid's savings.
Health Monitoring of Industrial machines using Scene-Aware Threshold Selection
Authors: Arshdeep Singh, Raju Arvind, Padmanabhan Rajan
Date: 2021-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Scene Classification

This paper presents an autoencoder based unsupervised approach to identify anomaly in an industrial machine using sounds produced by the machine. The proposed framework is trained using log-melspectrogram representations of the sound signal. In classification, our hypothesis is that the reconstruction error computed for an abnormal machine is larger than that of the a normal machine, since only normal machine sounds are being used to train the autoencoder. A threshold is chosen to discriminate between normal and abnormal machines. However, the threshold changes as surrounding conditions vary. To select an appropriate threshold irrespective of the surrounding, we propose a scene classification framework, which can classify the underlying surrounding. Hence, the threshold can be selected adaptively irrespective of the surrounding. The experiment evaluation is performed on MIMII dataset for industrial machines namely fan, pump, valve and slide rail. Our experiment analysis shows that utilizing adaptive threshold, the performance improves significantly as that obtained using the fixed threshold computed for a given surrounding only.
Surprise Minimization Revision Operators
Authors: Adrian Haret
Date: 2021-11-21 00:00:00

Prominent approaches to belief revision prescribe the adoption of a new belief that is as close as possible to the prior belief, in a process that, even in the standard case, can be described as attempting to minimize surprise. Here we extend the existing model by proposing a measure of surprise, dubbed relative surprise, in which surprise is computed with respect not just to the prior belief, but also to the broader context provided by the new information, using a measure derived from familiar distance notions between truth-value assignments. We characterize the surprise minimization revision operator thus defined using a set of intuitive rationality postulates in the AGM mould, along the way obtaining representation results for other existing revision operators in the literature, such as the Dalal operator and a recently introduced distance-based min-max operator.
A Software Tool for Evaluating Unmanned Autonomous Systems
Authors: Abdollah Homaifar, Ali Karimoddini, Mike Heiges, Mubbashar A. Khan, Berat A. Erol, Shabnam Nazmi
Date: 2021-11-21 00:00:00

The North Carolina Agriculture and Technical State University (NC A&T) in collaboration with Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) has developed methodologies for creating simulation-based technology tools that are capable of inferring the perceptions and behavioral states of autonomous systems. These methodologies have the potential to provide the Test and Evaluation (T&E) community at the Department of Defense (DoD) with a greater insight into the internal processes of these systems. The methodologies use only external observations and do not require complete knowledge of the internal processing of and/or any modifications to the system under test. This paper presents an example of one such simulation-based technology tool, named as the Data-Driven Intelligent Prediction Tool (DIPT). DIPT was developed for testing a multi-platform Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) system capable of conducting collaborative search missions. DIPT's Graphical User Interface (GUI) enables the testers to view the aircraft's current operating state, predicts its current target-detection status, and provides reasoning for exhibiting a particular behavior along with an explanation of assigning a particular task to it.
Diffusion Tensor Estimation with Uncertainty Calibration
Authors: Davood Karimi, Simon K. Warfield, Ali Gholipour
Date: 2021-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Diffusion  MRI

It is highly desirable to know how uncertain a model's predictions are, especially for models that are complex and hard to understand as in deep learning. Although there has been a growing interest in using deep learning methods in diffusion-weighted MRI, prior works have not addressed the issue of model uncertainty. Here, we propose a deep learning method to estimate the diffusion tensor and compute the estimation uncertainty. Data-dependent uncertainty is computed directly by the network and learned via loss attenuation. Model uncertainty is computed using Monte Carlo dropout. We also propose a new method for evaluating the quality of predicted uncertainties. We compare the new method with the standard least-squares tensor estimation and bootstrap-based uncertainty computation techniques. Our experiments show that when the number of measurements is small the deep learning method is more accurate and its uncertainty predictions are better calibrated than the standard methods. We show that the estimation uncertainties computed by the new method can highlight the model's biases, detect domain shift, and reflect the strength of noise in the measurements. Our study shows the importance and practical value of modeling prediction uncertainties in deep learning-based diffusion MRI analysis.
Automated Controller Calibration by Kalman Filtering
Authors: Marcel Menner, Karl Berntorp, Stefano Di Cairano
Date: 2021-11-21 00:00:00

This paper proposes a method for calibrating control parameters. Examples of such control parameters are gains of PID controllers, weights of a cost function for optimal control, filter coefficients, the sliding surface of a sliding mode controller, or weights of a neural network. Hence, the proposed method can be applied to a wide range of controllers. The method uses a Kalman filter that estimates control parameters, using data of closed-loop system operation. The control parameter calibration is driven by a training objective, which encompasses specifications on the performance of the dynamical system. The performance-driven calibration method tunes the parameters online and robustly, is computationally efficient, has low data storage requirements, and is easy to implement making it appealing for many real-time applications. Simulation results show that the method is able to learn control parameters quickly, is able to tune the parameters to compensate for disturbances, and is robust to noise. A simulation study with the high-fidelity vehicle simulator CarSim shows that the method can calibrate controllers of a complex dynamical system online, which indicates its applicability to a real-world system. We also verify the real-time feasibility on an embedded platform with automotive-grade processors by implementing our method on a dSPACE MicroAutoBox-II rapid prototyping unit.
Vulcan: Solving the Steiner Tree Problem with Graph Neural Networks and Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Haizhou Du, Zong Yan, Qiao Xiang, Qinqing Zhan
Date: 2021-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Graph Embedding, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Steiner Tree Problem

Steiner Tree Problem (STP) in graphs aims to find a tree of minimum weight in the graph that connects a given set of vertices. It is a classic NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem and has many real-world applications (e.g., VLSI chip design, transportation network planning and wireless sensor networks). Many exact and approximate algorithms have been developed for STP, but they suffer from high computational complexity and weak worst-case solution guarantees, respectively. Heuristic algorithms are also developed. However, each of them requires application domain knowledge to design and is only suitable for specific scenarios. Motivated by the recently reported observation that instances of the same NP-hard combinatorial problem may maintain the same or similar combinatorial structure but mainly differ in their data, we investigate the feasibility and benefits of applying machine learning techniques to solving STP. To this end, we design a novel model Vulcan based on novel graph neural networks and deep reinforcement learning. The core of Vulcan is a novel, compact graph embedding that transforms highdimensional graph structure data (i.e., path-changed information) into a low-dimensional vector representation. Given an STP instance, Vulcan uses this embedding to encode its pathrelated information and sends the encoded graph to a deep reinforcement learning component based on a double deep Q network (DDQN) to find solutions. In addition to STP, Vulcan can also find solutions to a wide range of NP-hard problems (e.g., SAT, MVC and X3C) by reducing them to STP. We implement a prototype of Vulcan and demonstrate its efficacy and efficiency with extensive experiments using real-world and synthetic datasets.
Network representation learning: A macro and micro view
Authors: Xueyi Liu, Jie Tang
Date: 2021-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Network Embedding, Representation Learning, Survey

Graph is a universe data structure that is widely used to organize data in real-world. Various real-word networks like the transportation network, social and academic network can be represented by graphs. Recent years have witnessed the quick development on representing vertices in the network into a low-dimensional vector space, referred to as network representation learning. Representation learning can facilitate the design of new algorithms on the graph data. In this survey, we conduct a comprehensive review of current literature on network representation learning. Existing algorithms can be categorized into three groups: shallow embedding models, heterogeneous network embedding models, graph neural network based models. We review state-of-the-art algorithms for each category and discuss the essential differences between these algorithms. One advantage of the survey is that we systematically study the underlying theoretical foundations underlying the different categories of algorithms, which offers deep insights for better understanding the development of the network representation learning field.