Insert related papers here

Insert related papers here

Insert related papers here

Insert related papers here

Insert related papers here

Insert related papers here

Welcome to Byte Size Arxiv

Papers made digestable

2022-11-03

Along Similar Lines: Local Obstacle Avoidance for Long-term Autonomous Path Following

Our architecture simplifies the obstacle-perception problem to that of place-dependent change detection. While we use the method with VT&R, it can be generalized to suit arbitrary path-following applications. Visual Teach and Repeat 3 (VT&R3), a generalization of stereo VT&R, achieves long-term autonomous path-following using topometric mapping and localization from a single rich sensor stream. In this paper, we improve the capabilities of a LiDAR implementation of VT&R3 to reliably detect and avoid obstacles in changing environments. Our architecture simplifies the obstacle-perception problem to that of place-dependent change detection. We then extend the behaviour of generic sample-based motion planners to better suit the teach-and-repeat problem structure by introducing a new edge-cost metric paired with a curvilinear planning space. The resulting planner generates naturally smooth paths that avoid local obstacles while minimizing lateral path deviation to best exploit prior terrain knowledge. While we use the method with VT&R, it can be generalized to suit arbitrary path-following applications. Experimental results from online run-time analysis, unit testing, and qualitative experiments on a differential drive robot show the promise of the technique for reliable long-term autonomous operation in complex unstructured environments.

Authors: Jordy Sehn, Yuchen Wu, Timothy D. Barfoot.

2022-11-03

Seamless Phase 2-3 Design: A Useful Strategy to Reduce the Sample Size for Dose Optimization

The statistical and design considerations that pertain to dose optimization are discussed. The sample size savings range from 16.6% to 27.3%, depending on the design and scenario, with a mean savings of 22.1%. The traditional more-is-better dose selection paradigm, developed based on cytotoxic chemotherapeutics, is often problematic When applied to the development of novel molecularly targeted agents (e.g., kinase inhibitors, monoclonal antibodies, and antibody-drug conjugates). The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) initiated Project Optimus to reform the dose optimization and dose selection paradigm in oncology drug development and call for more attention to benefit-risk consideration. We systematically investigated the operating characteristics of the seamless phase 2-3 design as a strategy for dose optimization, where in stage 1 (corresponding to phase 2) patients are randomized to multiple doses, with or without a control; and in stage 2 (corresponding to phase 3) the efficacy of the selected optimal dose is evaluated with a randomized concurrent control or historical control. Depending on whether the concurrent control is included and the type of endpoints used in stages 1 and 2, we describe four types of seamless phase 2-3 dose-optimization designs, which are suitable for different clinical settings. The statistical and design considerations that pertain to dose optimization are discussed. Simulation shows that dose optimization phase 2-3 designs are able to control the familywise type I error rates and yield appropriate statistical power with substantially smaller sample size than the conventional approach. The sample size savings range from 16.6% to 27.3%, depending on the design and scenario, with a mean savings of 22.1%. Due to the interim dose selection, the phase 2-3 dose-optimization design is logistically and operationally more challenging, and should be carefully planned and implemented to ensure trial integrity.

Authors: Liyun Jiang, Ying Yuan.

2022-11-03

Fast and robust Bayesian Inference using Gaussian Processes with GPry

We significantly improve performance using properties of the posterior in our active learning scheme and for the definition of the GP prior. In particular we account for the expected dynamical range of the posterior in different dimensionalities. We test our model against a number of synthetic and cosmological examples. We present the GPry algorithm for fast Bayesian inference of general (non-Gaussian) posteriors with a moderate number of parameters. GPry does not need any pre-training, special hardware such as GPUs, and is intended as a drop-in replacement for traditional Monte Carlo methods for Bayesian inference. Our algorithm is based on generating a Gaussian Process surrogate model of the log-posterior, aided by a Support Vector Machine classifier that excludes extreme or non-finite values. An active learning scheme allows us to reduce the number of required posterior evaluations by two orders of magnitude compared to traditional Monte Carlo inference. Our algorithm allows for parallel evaluations of the posterior at optimal locations, further reducing wall-clock times. We significantly improve performance using properties of the posterior in our active learning scheme and for the definition of the GP prior. In particular we account for the expected dynamical range of the posterior in different dimensionalities. We test our model against a number of synthetic and cosmological examples. GPry outperforms traditional Monte Carlo methods when the evaluation time of the likelihood (or the calculation of theoretical observables) is of the order of seconds; for evaluation times of over a minute it can perform inference in days that would take months using traditional methods. GPry is distributed as an open source Python package (pip install gpry) and can also be found at https://github.com/jonaselgammal/GPry.

Authors: Jonas El Gammal, Nils Schöneberg, Jesús Torrado, Christian Fidler.

2022-11-03

Competitive Kill-and-Restart Strategies for Non-Clairvoyant Scheduling

We consider the fundamental scheduling problem of minimizing the sum of weighted completion times on a single machine in the non-clairvoyant setting. However, to the best of our knowledge, this concept has never been considered for the total completion time objective in the non-clairvoyant model. This implies a performance guarantee of $(1+3\sqrt{3})\approx 6.197$ for the deterministic algorithm and of $\approx 3.032$ for the randomized version. We consider the fundamental scheduling problem of minimizing the sum of weighted completion times on a single machine in the non-clairvoyant setting. While no non-preemptive algorithm is constant competitive, Motwani, Phillips, and Torng (SODA '93) proved that the simple preemptive round robin procedure is $2$-competitive and that no better competitive ratio is possible, initiating a long line of research focused on preemptive algorithms for generalized variants of the problem. As an alternative model, Shmoys, Wein, and Williamson (FOCS '91) introduced kill-and-restart schedules, where running jobs may be killed and restarted from scratch later, and analyzed then for the makespan objective. However, to the best of our knowledge, this concept has never been considered for the total completion time objective in the non-clairvoyant model. We contribute to both models: First we give for any $b > 1$ a tight analysis for the natural $b$-scaling kill-and-restart strategy for scheduling jobs without release dates, as well as for a randomized variant of it. This implies a performance guarantee of $(1+3\sqrt{3})\approx 6.197$ for the deterministic algorithm and of $\approx 3.032$ for the randomized version. Second, we show that the preemptive Weighted Shortest Elapsed Time First (WSETF) rule is $2$-competitive for jobs released in an online fashion over time, matching the lower bound by Motwani et al. Using this result as well as the competitiveness of round robin for multiple machines, we prove performance guarantees of adaptions of the $b$-scaling algorithm to online release dates and unweighted jobs on identical parallel machines.

Authors: Sven Jäger, Guillaume Sagnol, Daniel Schmidt genannt Waldschmidt, Philipp Warode.

2022-11-03

Could Giant Pretrained Image Models Extract Universal Representations?

Frozen pretrained models have become a viable alternative to the pretraining-then-finetuning paradigm for transfer learning. With this work, we hope to bring greater attention to this promising path of freezing pretrained image models. Frozen pretrained models have become a viable alternative to the pretraining-then-finetuning paradigm for transfer learning. However, with frozen models there are relatively few parameters available for adapting to downstream tasks, which is problematic in computer vision where tasks vary significantly in input/output format and the type of information that is of value. In this paper, we present a study of frozen pretrained models when applied to diverse and representative computer vision tasks, including object detection, semantic segmentation and video action recognition. From this empirical analysis, our work answers the questions of what pretraining task fits best with this frozen setting, how to make the frozen setting more flexible to various downstream tasks, and the effect of larger model sizes. We additionally examine the upper bound of performance using a giant frozen pretrained model with 3 billion parameters (SwinV2-G) and find that it reaches competitive performance on a varied set of major benchmarks with only one shared frozen base network: 60.0 box mAP and 52.2 mask mAP on COCO object detection test-dev, 57.6 val mIoU on ADE20K semantic segmentation, and 81.7 top-1 accuracy on Kinetics-400 action recognition. With this work, we hope to bring greater attention to this promising path of freezing pretrained image models.

Authors: Yutong Lin, Ze Liu, Zheng Zhang, Han Hu, Nanning Zheng, Stephen Lin, Yue Cao.

2022-11-03

A logical analysis of fixpoint theorems

Sufficient conditions for the uniqueness of the fixpoint are established. Examples include known and new fixpoint theorems for metric spaces, fuzzy metric spaces, and probabilistic metric spaces. We prove a fixpoint theorem for contractions on Cauchy-complete quantale-enriched categories. It holds for any quantale whose underlying lattice is continuous, and applies to contractions whose control function is sequentially lower-semicontinuous. Sufficient conditions for the uniqueness of the fixpoint are established. Examples include known and new fixpoint theorems for metric spaces, fuzzy metric spaces, and probabilistic metric spaces.

Authors: Arij Benkhadra, Isar Stubbe.

2022-11-03

Video Event Extraction via Tracking Visual States of Arguments

Video event extraction aims to detect salient events from a video and identify the arguments for each event as well as their semantic roles. Existing methods focus on capturing the overall visual scene of each frame, ignoring fine-grained argument-level information. We further propose Object State Embedding, Object Motion-aware Embedding and Argument Interaction Embedding to encode and track these changes respectively. Experiments on various video event extraction tasks demonstrate significant improvements compared to state-of-the-art models.

Video event extraction aims to detect salient events from a video and identify the arguments for each event as well as their semantic roles. Existing methods focus on capturing the overall visual scene of each frame, ignoring fine-grained argument-level information. Inspired by the definition of events as changes of states, we propose a novel framework to detect video events by tracking the changes in the visual states of all involved arguments, which are expected to provide the most informative evidence for the extraction of video events. In order to capture the visual state changes of arguments, we decompose them into changes in pixels within objects, displacements of objects, and interactions among multiple arguments. We further propose Object State Embedding, Object Motion-aware Embedding and Argument Interaction Embedding to encode and track these changes respectively. Experiments on various video event extraction tasks demonstrate significant improvements compared to state-of-the-art models. In particular, on verb classification, we achieve 3.49% absolute gains (19.53% relative gains) in F1@5 on Video Situation Recognition.

Authors: Guang Yang, Manling Li, Xudong Lin, Jiajie Zhang, Shih-Fu Chang, Heng Ji.

2022-11-03

Controlling charge density order in 2H-TaSe$_{2}$ using a van Hove singularity

We use angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy to investigate changes in the Fermi surface of this material under surface doping with potassium. We report on the interplay between a van Hove singularity and a charge density wave state in 2H-TaSe$_{2}$. We use angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy to investigate changes in the Fermi surface of this material under surface doping with potassium. At high doping, we observe modifications which imply the disappearance of the $(3\times 3)$ charge density wave and formation of a different correlated state. Using a tight-binding-based approach as well as an effective model, we explain our observations as a consequence of coupling between the single-particle Lifshitz transition during which the Fermi level passes a van Hove singularity and the charge density order. The high electronic density of states associated with the van Hove singularity induces a change in the periodicity of the charge density wave from the known $(3\times 3)$ to a new $(2\times 2)$ superlattice.

Authors: William R. B. Luckin, Yiwei Li, Juan Jiang, Surani M. Gunasekera, Dharmalingam Prabhakaran, Felix Flicker, Yulin Chen, Marcin Mucha-Kruczynski.

2022-11-03

Exploring explicit coarse-grainend structure in artificial neural networks

The idea has been applied in two situations. The validity has been domonstrated on MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets. Further improvement and some open questions related are also discussed.

We propose to employ the hierarchical coarse-grained structure in the artificial neural networks explicitly to improve the interpretability without degrading performance. The idea has been applied in two situations. One is a neural network called TaylorNet, which aims to approximate the general mapping from input data to output result in terms of Taylor series directly, without resorting to any magic nonlinear activations. The other is a new setup for data distillation, which can perform multi-level abstraction of the input dataset and generate new data that possesses the relevant features of the original dataset and can be used as references for classification. In both cases, the coarse-grained structure plays an important role in simplifying the network and improving both the interpretability and efficiency. The validity has been domonstrated on MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets. Further improvement and some open questions related are also discussed.

Authors: Xi-Ci Yang, Z. Y. Xie, Xiao-Tao Yang.

2022-11-03

Progressive Transformation Learning For Leveraging Virtual Images in Training

In PTL, accurately quantifying the domain gap is critical. To do that, we theoretically demonstrate that the feature representation space of a given object detector can be modeled as a multivariate Gaussian distribution from which the Mahalanobis distance between a virtual object and the Gaussian distribution of each object category in the representation space can be readily computed. Experiments show that PTL results in a substantial performance increase over the baseline, especially in the small data and the cross-domain regime. To effectively interrogate UAV-based images for detecting objects of interest, such as humans, it is essential to acquire large-scale UAV-based datasets that include human instances with various poses captured from widely varying viewing angles. As a viable alternative to laborious and costly data curation, we introduce Progressive Transformation Learning (PTL), which gradually augments a training dataset by adding transformed virtual images with enhanced realism. Generally, a virtual2real transformation generator in the conditional GAN framework suffers from quality degradation when a large domain gap exists between real and virtual images. To deal with the domain gap, PTL takes a novel approach that progressively iterates the following three steps: 1) select a subset from a pool of virtual images according to the domain gap, 2) transform the selected virtual images to enhance realism, and 3) add the transformed virtual images to the training set while removing them from the pool. In PTL, accurately quantifying the domain gap is critical. To do that, we theoretically demonstrate that the feature representation space of a given object detector can be modeled as a multivariate Gaussian distribution from which the Mahalanobis distance between a virtual object and the Gaussian distribution of each object category in the representation space can be readily computed. Experiments show that PTL results in a substantial performance increase over the baseline, especially in the small data and the cross-domain regime.

Authors: Yi-Ting Shen, Hyungtae Lee, Heesung Kwon, Shuvra Shikhar Bhattacharyya.

2022-11-03

Evaluating a Synthetic Image Dataset Generated with Stable Diffusion

The results show differences depending on the test concepts considered and problems with very specific concepts. These evaluations were performed using a vision transformer model for image classification.

We generate synthetic images with the "Stable Diffusion" image generation model using the Wordnet taxonomy and the definitions of concepts it contains. This synthetic image database can be used as training data for data augmentation in machine learning applications, and it is used to investigate the capabilities of the Stable Diffusion model. Analyses show that Stable Diffusion can produce correct images for a large number of concepts, but also a large variety of different representations. The results show differences depending on the test concepts considered and problems with very specific concepts. These evaluations were performed using a vision transformer model for image classification.

Authors: Andreas Stöckl.

2022-11-03

Complexity of Simon's problem in classical sense

The goal is to find $s$. Simon's problem is a standard example of a problem that is exponential in classical sense, while it admits a polynomial solution in quantum computing. It is about a function $f$ for which it is given that a unique non-zero vector $s$ exists for which $f(x) = f(x \oplus s)$ for all $x$, where $\oplus$ is the exclusive or operator. The goal is to find $s$. The exponential lower bound for the classical sense assumes that $f$ only admits black box access. In this paper we investigate classical complexity when $f$ is given by a standard representation like a circuit. We focus on finding the vector space of all vectors $s$ for which $f(x) = f(x \oplus s)$ for all $x$, for any given $f$. Two main results are: (1) if $f$ is given by any circuit, then checking whether this vector space contains a non-zero element is NP-hard, and (2) if $f$ is given by any ordered BDD, then a basis of this vector space can be computed in polynomial time.

Authors: Hans Zantema.

2022-11-03

Two examples concerning existential undecidability in fields

Along the way, we construct an existentially decidable field of positive characteristic with an existentially undecidable finite extension, modifying a construction due to Kesavan Thanagopal.

We construct an existentially undecidable complete discretely valued field of mixed characteristic with existentially decidable residue field and decidable algebraic part, answering a question by Anscombe-Fehm in a strong way. Along the way, we construct an existentially decidable field of positive characteristic with an existentially undecidable finite extension, modifying a construction due to Kesavan Thanagopal.

Authors: Philip Dittmann.

2022-11-03

The competition between antiferromagnetism and superconductivity in a doped Hubbard model with anisotropic interaction

The competition between antiferromagnetism and superconductivity is one of the central questions in the research of strong correlated systems. Our results shows that the superconductivity emerges when the antiferromagnetism is suppressed by tuning the filling or the anisotropy of the interlayer Heisenberg interaction. This model can be seen as an analogue of unconventional superconductors and may help us to understand the transition from an antiferromagnetic insulator to a superconductor. The competition between antiferromagnetism and superconductivity is one of the central questions in the research of strong correlated systems. In this work, we utilize a double layer model containing Hubbard interaction and interlayer Heisenberg interaction to reveal their competitions. This model is free of sign problem at certain conditions, and we perform projector quantum Monte Carlo simulations to extract the ground state correlations of magnetism and superconductivity. Our results shows that the superconductivity emerges when the antiferromagnetism is suppressed by tuning the filling or the anisotropy of the interlayer Heisenberg interaction. This model can be seen as an analogue of unconventional superconductors and may help us to understand the transition from an antiferromagnetic insulator to a superconductor.

Authors: Runyu Ma, Tianxing Ma.

2022-11-03

Exploring Explainability Methods for Graph Neural Networks

We assess the qualitative and quantitative performance of these techniques on three different datasets and describe our findings. The results shed a fresh light on the notion of explainability in GNNs, particularly GATs.

With the growing use of deep learning methods, particularly graph neural networks, which encode intricate interconnectedness information, for a variety of real tasks, there is a necessity for explainability in such settings. In this paper, we demonstrate the applicability of popular explainability approaches on Graph Attention Networks (GAT) for a graph-based super-pixel image classification task. We assess the qualitative and quantitative performance of these techniques on three different datasets and describe our findings. The results shed a fresh light on the notion of explainability in GNNs, particularly GATs.

Authors: Harsh Patel, Shivam Sahni.