pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Pattern-Aware Data Augmentation for LiDAR 3D Object Detection
Authors: Jordan S. K. Hu, Steven L. Waslander
Date: 2021-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Autonomous Driving, Data Augmentation, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Autonomous driving datasets are often skewed and in particular, lack training data for objects at farther distances from the ego vehicle. The imbalance of data causes a performance degradation as the distance of the detected objects increases. In this paper, we propose pattern-aware ground truth sampling, a data augmentation technique that downsamples an object's point cloud based on the LiDAR's characteristics. Specifically, we mimic the natural diverging point pattern variation that occurs for objects at depth to simulate samples at farther distances. Thus, the network has more diverse training examples and can generalize to detecting farther objects more effectively. We evaluate against existing data augmentation techniques that use point removal or perturbation methods and find that our method outperforms all of them. Additionally, we propose using equal element AP bins to evaluate the performance of 3D object detectors across distance. We improve the performance of PV-RCNN on the car class by more than 0.7 percent on the KITTI validation split at distances greater than 25 m.
Predicting Poverty Level from Satellite Imagery using Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Varun Chitturi, Zaid Nabulsi
Date: 2021-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation

Determining the poverty levels of various regions throughout the world is crucial in identifying interventions for poverty reduction initiatives and directing resources fairly. However, reliable data on global economic livelihoods is hard to come by, especially for areas in the developing world, hampering efforts to both deploy services and monitor/evaluate progress. This is largely due to the fact that this data is obtained from traditional door-to-door surveys, which are time consuming and expensive. Overhead satellite imagery contain characteristics that make it possible to estimate the region's poverty level. In this work, I develop deep learning computer vision methods that can predict a region's poverty level from an overhead satellite image. I experiment with both daytime and nighttime imagery. Furthermore, because data limitations are often the barrier to entry in poverty prediction from satellite imagery, I explore the impact that data quantity and data augmentation have on the representational power and overall accuracy of the networks. Lastly, to evaluate the robustness of the networks, I evaluate them on data from continents that were absent in the development set.
Sound-Guided Semantic Image Manipulation
Authors: Seung Hyun Lee, Wonseok Roh, Wonmin Byeon, Sang Ho Yoon, Chan Young Kim, Jinkyu Kim, Sangpil Kim
Date: 2021-11-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Audio Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Image Manipulation, Zero-shot Audio Classification

The recent success of the generative model shows that leveraging the multi-modal embedding space can manipulate an image using text information. However, manipulating an image with other sources rather than text, such as sound, is not easy due to the dynamic characteristics of the sources. Especially, sound can convey vivid emotions and dynamic expressions of the real world. Here, we propose a framework that directly encodes sound into the multi-modal (image-text) embedding space and manipulates an image from the space. Our audio encoder is trained to produce a latent representation from an audio input, which is forced to be aligned with image and text representations in the multi-modal embedding space. We use a direct latent optimization method based on aligned embeddings for sound-guided image manipulation. We also show that our method can mix text and audio modalities, which enrich the variety of the image modification. We verify the effectiveness of our sound-guided image manipulation quantitatively and qualitatively. We also show that our method can mix different modalities, i.e., text and audio, which enrich the variety of the image modification. The experiments on zero-shot audio classification and semantic-level image classification show that our proposed model outperforms other text and sound-guided state-of-the-art methods.
An implementation of the "Guess who?" game using CLIP
Authors: Arnau Martí Sarri, Victor Rodriguez-Fernandez
Date: 2021-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining) is an efficient method for learning computer vision tasks from natural language supervision that has powered a recent breakthrough in deep learning due to its zero-shot transfer capabilities. By training from image-text pairs available on the internet, the CLIP model transfers non-trivially to most tasks without the need for any data set specific training. In this work, we use CLIP to implement the engine of the popular game "Guess who?", so that the player interacts with the game using natural language prompts and CLIP automatically decides whether an image in the game board fulfills that prompt or not. We study the performance of this approach by benchmarking on different ways of prompting the questions to CLIP, and show the limitations of its zero-shot capabilites.
Infinite Neural Network Quantum States: Entanglement and Training Dynamics
Authors: Di Luo, James Halverson
Date: 2021-12-01 00:00:00

We study infinite limits of neural network quantum states ($\infty$-NNQS), which exhibit representation power through ensemble statistics, and also tractable gradient descent dynamics. Ensemble averages of Renyi entropies are expressed in terms of neural network correlators, and architectures that exhibit volume-law entanglement are presented. A general framework is developed for studying the gradient descent dynamics of neural network quantum states (NNQS), using a quantum state neural tangent kernel (QS-NTK). For $\infty$-NNQS the training dynamics is simplified, since the QS-NTK becomes deterministic and constant. An analytic solution is derived for quantum state supervised learning, which allows an $\infty$-NNQS to recover any target wavefunction. Numerical experiments on finite and infinite NNQS in the transverse field Ising model and Fermi Hubbard model demonstrate excellent agreement with theory. $\infty$-NNQS opens up new opportunities for studying entanglement and training dynamics in other physics applications, such as in finding ground states.
Clustering Mixtures with Almost Optimal Separation in Polynomial Time
Authors: Jerry Li, Allen Liu
Date: 2021-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

We consider the problem of clustering mixtures of mean-separated Gaussians in high dimensions. We are given samples from a mixture of $k$ identity covariance Gaussians, so that the minimum pairwise distance between any two pairs of means is at least $\Delta$, for some parameter $\Delta > 0$, and the goal is to recover the ground truth clustering of these samples. It is folklore that separation $\Delta = \Theta (\sqrt{\log k})$ is both necessary and sufficient to recover a good clustering, at least information theoretically. However, the estimators which achieve this guarantee are inefficient. We give the first algorithm which runs in polynomial time, and which almost matches this guarantee. More precisely, we give an algorithm which takes polynomially many samples and time, and which can successfully recover a good clustering, so long as the separation is $\Delta = \Omega (\log^{1/2 + c} k)$, for any $c > 0$. Previously, polynomial time algorithms were only known for this problem when the separation was polynomial in $k$, and all algorithms which could tolerate $\textsf{poly}( \log k )$ separation required quasipolynomial time. We also extend our result to mixtures of translations of a distribution which satisfies the Poincar\'{e} inequality, under additional mild assumptions. Our main technical tool, which we believe is of independent interest, is a novel way to implicitly represent and estimate high degree moments of a distribution, which allows us to extract important information about high-degree moments without ever writing down the full moment tensors explicitly.
DeepAoANet: Learning Angle of Arrival from Software Defined Radios with Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Zhuangzhuang Dai, Yuhang He, Tran Vu, Niki Trigoni, Andrew Markham
Date: 2021-12-01 00:00:00

Direction finding and positioning systems based on RF signals are significantly impacted by multipath propagation, particularly in indoor environments. Existing algorithms (e.g MUSIC) perform poorly in resolving Angle of Arrival (AoA) in the presence of multipath or when operating in a weak signal regime. We note that digitally sampled RF frontends allow for the easy analysis of signals, and their delayed components. Low-cost Software-Defined Radio (SDR) modules enable Channel State Information (CSI) extraction across a wide spectrum, motivating the design of an enhanced Angle-of-Arrival (AoA) solution. We propose a Deep Learning approach to deriving AoA from a single snapshot of the SDR multichannel data. We compare and contrast deep-learning based angle classification and regression models, to estimate up to two AoAs accurately. We have implemented the inference engines on different platforms to extract AoAs in real-time, demonstrating the computational tractability of our approach. To demonstrate the utility of our approach we have collected IQ (In-phase and Quadrature components) samples from a four-element Universal Linear Array (ULA) in various Light-of-Sight (LOS) and Non-Line-of-Sight (NLOS) environments, and published the dataset. Our proposed method demonstrates excellent reliability in determining number of impinging signals and realized mean absolute AoA errors less than $2^{\circ}$.
Graph Conditioned Sparse-Attention for Improved Source Code Understanding
Authors: Junyan Cheng, Iordanis Fostiropoulos, Barry Boehm
Date: 2021-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Summarization, Variable misuse

Transformer architectures have been successfully used in learning source code representations. The fusion between a graph representation like Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) and a source code sequence makes the use of current approaches computationally intractable for large input sequence lengths. Source code can have long-range dependencies that require larger sequence lengths to model effectively. Current approaches have a quadratic growth in computational and memory costs with respect to the sequence length. Using such models in practical scenarios is difficult. In this work, we propose the conditioning of a source code snippet with its graph modality by using the graph adjacency matrix as an attention mask for a sparse self-attention mechanism and the use of a graph diffusion mechanism to model longer-range token dependencies. Our model reaches state-of-the-art results in BLEU, METEOR, and ROUGE-L metrics for the code summarization task and near state-of-the-art accuracy in the variable misuse task. The memory use and inference time of our model have linear growth with respect to the input sequence length as compared to the quadratic growth of previous works.
Efficient and Local Parallel Random Walks
Authors: Michael Kapralov, Silvio Lattanzi, Navid Nouri, Jakab Tardos
Date: 2021-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Clustering

Random walks are a fundamental primitive used in many machine learning algorithms with several applications in clustering and semi-supervised learning. Despite their relevance, the first efficient parallel algorithm to compute random walks has been introduced very recently (Lacki et al.). Unfortunately their method has a fundamental shortcoming: their algorithm is non-local in that it heavily relies on computing random walks out of all nodes in the input graph, even though in many practical applications one is interested in computing random walks only from a small subset of nodes in the graph. In this paper, we present a new algorithm that overcomes this limitation by building random walk efficiently and locally at the same time. We show that our technique is both memory and round efficient, and in particular yields an efficient parallel local clustering algorithm. Finally, we complement our theoretical analysis with experimental results showing that our algorithm is significantly more scalable than previous approaches.
Remixing Functionally Graded Structures: Data-Driven Topology Optimization with Multiclass Shape Blending
Authors: Yu-Chin Chan, Daicong Da, LiWei Wang, Wei Chen
Date: 2021-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

To create heterogeneous, multiscale structures with unprecedented functionalities, recent topology optimization approaches design either fully aperiodic systems or functionally graded structures, which compete in terms of design freedom and efficiency. We propose to inherit the advantages of both through a data-driven framework for multiclass functionally graded structures that mixes several families, i.e., classes, of microstructure topologies to create spatially-varying designs with guaranteed feasibility. The key is a new multiclass shape blending scheme that generates smoothly graded microstructures without requiring compatible classes or connectivity and feasibility constraints. Moreover, it transforms the microscale problem into an efficient, low-dimensional one without confining the design to predefined shapes. Compliance and shape matching examples using common truss geometries and diversity-based freeform topologies demonstrate the versatility of our framework, while studies on the effect of the number and diversity of classes illustrate the effectiveness. The generality of the proposed methods supports future extensions beyond the linear applications presented.
TEDGE-Caching: Transformer-based Edge Caching Towards 6G Networks
Authors: Zohreh Hajiakhondi Meybodi, Arash Mohammadi, Elahe Rahimian, Shahin Heidarian, Jamshid Abouei, Konstantinos N. Plataniotis
Date: 2021-12-01 00:00:00

As a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for telecommunication for remote learning/working and telemedicine has significantly increased. Mobile Edge Caching (MEC) in the 6G networks has been evolved as an efficient solution to meet the phenomenal growth of the global mobile data traffic by bringing multimedia content closer to the users. Although massive connectivity enabled by MEC networks will significantly increase the quality of communications, there are several key challenges ahead. The limited storage of edge nodes, the large size of multimedia content, and the time-variant users' preferences make it critical to efficiently and dynamically predict the popularity of content to store the most upcoming requested ones before being requested. Recent advancements in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have drawn much research attention to predict the content popularity in proactive caching schemes. Existing DNN models in this context, however, suffer from longterm dependencies, computational complexity, and unsuitability for parallel computing. To tackle these challenges, we propose an edge caching framework incorporated with the attention-based Vision Transformer (ViT) neural network, referred to as the Transformer-based Edge (TEDGE) caching, which to the best of our knowledge, is being studied for the first time. Moreover, the TEDGE caching framework requires no data pre-processing and additional contextual information. Simulation results corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed TEDGE caching framework in comparison to its counterparts.
Towards Futuristic Autonomous Experimentation--A Surprise-Reacting Sequential Experiment Policy
Authors: Imtiaz Ahmed, Satish Bukkapatnam, Bhaskar Botcha, Yu Ding
Date: 2021-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization

An autonomous experimentation platform in manufacturing is supposedly capable of conducting a sequential search for finding suitable manufacturing conditions by itself or even for discovering new materials with minimal human intervention. The core of the intelligent control of such platforms is a policy to decide where to conduct the next experiment based on what has been done thus far. Such policy inevitably trades off between exploitation and exploration. Currently, the prevailing approach is to use various acquisition functions in the Bayesian optimization framework. We discuss whether it is beneficial to trade off exploitation versus exploration by measuring the element and degree of surprise associated with the immediate past observation. We devise a surprise-reacting policy using two existing surprise metrics, known as the Shannon surprise and Bayesian surprise. Our analysis shows that the surprise-reacting policy appears to be better suited for quickly characterizing the overall landscape of a response surface under resource constraints. We do not claim that we have a fully autonomous experimentation system but believe that the surprise-reacting capability benefits the automation of sequential decisions in autonomous experimentation.
Meta Arcade: A Configurable Environment Suite for Meta-Learning
Authors: Edward W. Staley, Chace Ashcraft, Benjamin Stoler, Jared Markowitz, Gautam Vallabha, Christopher Ratto, Kapil D. Katyal
Date: 2021-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Meta-Learning, Transfer Learning

Most approaches to deep reinforcement learning (DRL) attempt to solve a single task at a time. As a result, most existing research benchmarks consist of individual games or suites of games that have common interfaces but little overlap in their perceptual features, objectives, or reward structures. To facilitate research into knowledge transfer among trained agents (e.g. via multi-task and meta-learning), more environment suites that provide configurable tasks with enough commonality to be studied collectively are needed. In this paper we present Meta Arcade, a tool to easily define and configure custom 2D arcade games that share common visuals, state spaces, action spaces, game components, and scoring mechanisms. Meta Arcade differs from prior environments in that both task commonality and configurability are prioritized: entire sets of games can be constructed from common elements, and these elements are adjustable through exposed parameters. We include a suite of 24 predefined games that collectively illustrate the possibilities of this framework and discuss how these games can be configured for research applications. We provide several experiments that illustrate how Meta Arcade could be used, including single-task benchmarks of predefined games, sample curriculum-based approaches that change game parameters over a set schedule, and an exploration of transfer learning between games.
Systematic Generalization with Edge Transformers
Authors: Leon Bergen, Timothy J. O'Donnell, Dzmitry Bahdanau
Date: 2021-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Dependency Parsing, Natural Language Understanding, Relational Reasoning, Semantic Parsing, Systematic Generalization

Recent research suggests that systematic generalization in natural language understanding remains a challenge for state-of-the-art neural models such as Transformers and Graph Neural Networks. To tackle this challenge, we propose Edge Transformer, a new model that combines inspiration from Transformers and rule-based symbolic AI. The first key idea in Edge Transformers is to associate vector states with every edge, that is, with every pair of input nodes -- as opposed to just every node, as it is done in the Transformer model. The second major innovation is a triangular attention mechanism that updates edge representations in a way that is inspired by unification from logic programming. We evaluate Edge Transformer on compositional generalization benchmarks in relational reasoning, semantic parsing, and dependency parsing. In all three settings, the Edge Transformer outperforms Relation-aware, Universal and classical Transformer baselines.
Toward Foundation Models for Earth Monitoring: Proposal for a Climate Change Benchmark
Authors: Alexandre Lacoste, Evan David Sherwin, Hannah Kerner, Hamed Alemohammad, Björn Lütjens, Jeremy Irvin, David Dao, Alex Chang, Mehmet Gunturkun, Alexandre Drouin, Pau Rodriguez, David Vazquez
Date: 2021-12-01 00:00:00

Recent progress in self-supervision shows that pre-training large neural networks on vast amounts of unsupervised data can lead to impressive increases in generalisation for downstream tasks. Such models, recently coined as foundation models, have been transformational to the field of natural language processing. While similar models have also been trained on large corpuses of images, they are not well suited for remote sensing data. To stimulate the development of foundation models for Earth monitoring, we propose to develop a new benchmark comprised of a variety of downstream tasks related to climate change. We believe that this can lead to substantial improvements in many existing applications and facilitate the development of new applications. This proposal is also a call for collaboration with the aim of developing a better evaluation process to mitigate potential downsides of foundation models for Earth monitoring.
DPRK-BERT: The Supreme Language Model
Authors: Arda Akdemir, Yeojoo Jeon
Date: 2021-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, model

Deep language models have achieved remarkable success in the NLP domain. The standard way to train a deep language model is to employ unsupervised learning from scratch on a large unlabeled corpus. However, such large corpora are only available for widely-adopted and high-resource languages and domains. This study presents the first deep language model, DPRK-BERT, for the DPRK language. We achieve this by compiling the first unlabeled corpus for the DPRK language and fine-tuning a preexisting the ROK language model. We compare the proposed model with existing approaches and show significant improvements on two DPRK datasets. We also present a cross-lingual version of this model which yields better generalization across the two Korean languages. Finally, we provide various NLP tools related to the DPRK language that would foster future research.
On Mixing Times of Metropolized Algorithm With Optimization Step (MAO) : A New Framework
Authors: EL Mahdi Khribch, George Deligiannidis, Daniel Paulin
Date: 2021-12-01 00:00:00

In this paper, we consider sampling from a class of distributions with thin tails supported on $\mathbb{R}^d$ and make two primary contributions. First, we propose a new Metropolized Algorithm With Optimization Step (MAO), which is well suited for such targets. Our algorithm is capable of sampling from distributions where the Metropolis-adjusted Langevin algorithm (MALA) is not converging or lacking in theoretical guarantees. Second, we derive upper bounds on the mixing time of MAO. Our results are supported by simulations on multiple target distributions.