Long, powerful soft detection forward error correction codes are typically constructed by concatenation of shorter component codes that are decoded through iterative Soft-Input Soft-Output (SISO) procedures. The current gold-standard is Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes, which are built from weak single parity check component codes that are capable of producing accurate SO. Due to the recent development of SISO decoders that produce highly accurate SO with codes that have multiple redundant bits, square product code constructions that can avail of more powerful component codes have been shown to be competitive with the LDPC codes in the 5G New Radio standard in terms of decoding performance while requiring fewer iterations to converge. Motivated by applications that require more powerful low-rate codes, in the present paper we explore the possibility of extending this design space by considering the construction and decoding of cubic tensor codes.
The success of AI models relies on the availability of large, diverse, and high-quality datasets, which can be challenging to obtain due to data scarcity, privacy concerns, and high costs. Synthetic data has emerged as a promising solution by generating artificial data that mimics real-world patterns. This paper provides an overview of synthetic data research, discussing its applications, challenges, and future directions. We present empirical evidence from prior art to demonstrate its effectiveness and highlight the importance of ensuring its factuality, fidelity, and unbiasedness. We emphasize the need for responsible use of synthetic data to build more powerful, inclusive, and trustworthy language models.
In large-scale systems there are fundamental challenges when centralised techniques are used for task allocation. The number of interactions is limited by resource constraints such as on computation, storage, and network communication. We can increase scalability by implementing the system as a distributed task-allocation system, sharing tasks across many agents. However, this also increases the resource cost of communications and synchronisation, and is difficult to scale. In this paper we present four algorithms to solve these problems. The combination of these algorithms enable each agent to improve their task allocation strategy through reinforcement learning, while changing how much they explore the system in response to how optimal they believe their current strategy is, given their past experience. We focus on distributed agent systems where the agents' behaviours are constrained by resource usage limits, limiting agents to local rather than system-wide knowledge. We evaluate these algorithms in a simulated environment where agents are given a task composed of multiple subtasks that must be allocated to other agents with differing capabilities, to then carry out those tasks. We also simulate real-life system effects such as networking instability. Our solution is shown to solve the task allocation problem to 6.7% of the theoretical optimal within the system configurations considered. It provides 5x better performance recovery over no-knowledge retention approaches when system connectivity is impacted, and is tested against systems up to 100 agents with less than a 9% impact on the algorithms' performance.
Hyperproperties are commonly used in computer security to define information-flow policies and other requirements that reason about the relationship between multiple computations. In this paper, we study a novel class of hyperproperties where the individual computation paths are chosen by the strategic choices of a coalition of agents in a multi-agent system. We introduce HyperATL*, an extension of computation tree logic with path variables and strategy quantifiers. Our logic can express strategic hyperproperties, such as that the scheduler in a concurrent system has a strategy to avoid information leakage. HyperATL* is particularly useful to specify asynchronous hyperproperties, i.e., hyperproperties where the speed of the execution on the different computation paths depends on the choices of the scheduler. Unlike other recent logics for the specification of asynchronous hyperproperties, our logic is the first to admit decidable model checking for the full logic. We present a model checking algorithm for HyperATL* based on alternating automata, and show that our algorithm is asymptotically optimal by providing a matching lower bound. We have implemented a prototype model checker for a fragment of HyperATL*, able to check various security properties on small programs.
Spatio-temporal forecasting is challenging attributing to the high nonlinearity in temporal dynamics as well as complex location-characterized patterns in spatial domains, especially in fields like weather forecasting. Graph convolutions are usually used for modeling the spatial dependency in meteorology to handle the irregular distribution of sensors' spatial location. In this work, a novel graph-based convolution for imitating the meteorological flows is proposed to capture the local spatial patterns. Based on the assumption of smoothness of location-characterized patterns, we propose conditional local convolution whose shared kernel on nodes' local space is approximated by feedforward networks, with local representations of coordinate obtained by horizon maps into cylindrical-tangent space as its input. The established united standard of local coordinate system preserves the orientation on geography. We further propose the distance and orientation scaling terms to reduce the impacts of irregular spatial distribution. The convolution is embedded in a Recurrent Neural Network architecture to model the temporal dynamics, leading to the Conditional Local Convolution Recurrent Network (CLCRN). Our model is evaluated on real-world weather benchmark datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance with obvious improvements. We conduct further analysis on local pattern visualization, model's framework choice, advantages of horizon maps and etc.
Conventional entity typing approaches are based on independent classification paradigms, which make them difficult to recognize inter-dependent, long-tailed and fine-grained entity types. In this paper, we argue that the implicitly entailed extrinsic and intrinsic dependencies between labels can provide critical knowledge to tackle the above challenges. To this end, we propose \emph{Label Reasoning Network(LRN)}, which sequentially reasons fine-grained entity labels by discovering and exploiting label dependencies knowledge entailed in the data. Specifically, LRN utilizes an auto-regressive network to conduct deductive reasoning and a bipartite attribute graph to conduct inductive reasoning between labels, which can effectively model, learn and reason complex label dependencies in a sequence-to-set, end-to-end manner. Experiments show that LRN achieves the state-of-the-art performance on standard ultra fine-grained entity typing benchmarks, and can also resolve the long tail label problem effectively.
Self-supervised learning methods are gaining increasing traction in computer vision due to their recent success in reducing the gap with supervised learning. In natural language processing (NLP) self-supervised learning and transformers are already the methods of choice. The recent literature suggests that the transformers are becoming increasingly popular also in computer vision. So far, the vision transformers have been shown to work well when pretrained either using a large scale supervised data or with some kind of co-supervision, e.g. in terms of teacher network. These supervised pretrained vision transformers achieve very good results in downstream tasks with minimal changes. In this work we investigate the merits of self-supervised learning for pretraining image/vision transformers and then using them for downstream classification tasks. We propose Self-supervised vIsion Transformers (SiT) and discuss several self-supervised training mechanisms to obtain a pretext model. The architectural flexibility of SiT allows us to use it as an autoencoder and work with multiple self-supervised tasks seamlessly. We show that a pretrained SiT can be finetuned for a downstream classification task on small scale datasets, consisting of a few thousand images rather than several millions. The proposed approach is evaluated on standard datasets using common protocols. The results demonstrate the strength of the transformers and their suitability for self-supervised learning. We outperformed existing self-supervised learning methods by large margin. We also observed that SiT is good for few shot learning and also showed that it is learning useful representation by simply training a linear classifier on top of the learned features from SiT. Pretraining, finetuning, and evaluation codes will be available under: //github.com/Sara-Ahmed/SiT.
Hashing has been widely used in approximate nearest search for large-scale database retrieval for its computation and storage efficiency. Deep hashing, which devises convolutional neural network architecture to exploit and extract the semantic information or feature of images, has received increasing attention recently. In this survey, several deep supervised hashing methods for image retrieval are evaluated and I conclude three main different directions for deep supervised hashing methods. Several comments are made at the end. Moreover, to break through the bottleneck of the existing hashing methods, I propose a Shadow Recurrent Hashing(SRH) method as a try. Specifically, I devise a CNN architecture to extract the semantic features of images and design a loss function to encourage similar images projected close. To this end, I propose a concept: shadow of the CNN output. During optimization process, the CNN output and its shadow are guiding each other so as to achieve the optimal solution as much as possible. Several experiments on dataset CIFAR-10 show the satisfying performance of SRH.
Although measuring held-out accuracy has been the primary approach to evaluate generalization, it often overestimates the performance of NLP models, while alternative approaches for evaluating models either focus on individual tasks or on specific behaviors. Inspired by principles of behavioral testing in software engineering, we introduce CheckList, a task-agnostic methodology for testing NLP models. CheckList includes a matrix of general linguistic capabilities and test types that facilitate comprehensive test ideation, as well as a software tool to generate a large and diverse number of test cases quickly. We illustrate the utility of CheckList with tests for three tasks, identifying critical failures in both commercial and state-of-art models. In a user study, a team responsible for a commercial sentiment analysis model found new and actionable bugs in an extensively tested model. In another user study, NLP practitioners with CheckList created twice as many tests, and found almost three times as many bugs as users without it.
Most deep learning-based models for speech enhancement have mainly focused on estimating the magnitude of spectrogram while reusing the phase from noisy speech for reconstruction. This is due to the difficulty of estimating the phase of clean speech. To improve speech enhancement performance, we tackle the phase estimation problem in three ways. First, we propose Deep Complex U-Net, an advanced U-Net structured model incorporating well-defined complex-valued building blocks to deal with complex-valued spectrograms. Second, we propose a polar coordinate-wise complex-valued masking method to reflect the distribution of complex ideal ratio masks. Third, we define a novel loss function, weighted source-to-distortion ratio (wSDR) loss, which is designed to directly correlate with a quantitative evaluation measure. Our model was evaluated on a mixture of the Voice Bank corpus and DEMAND database, which has been widely used by many deep learning models for speech enhancement. Ablation experiments were conducted on the mixed dataset showing that all three proposed approaches are empirically valid. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in all metrics, outperforming previous approaches by a large margin.
Object detection typically assumes that training and test data are drawn from an identical distribution, which, however, does not always hold in practice. Such a distribution mismatch will lead to a significant performance drop. In this work, we aim to improve the cross-domain robustness of object detection. We tackle the domain shift on two levels: 1) the image-level shift, such as image style, illumination, etc, and 2) the instance-level shift, such as object appearance, size, etc. We build our approach based on the recent state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN model, and design two domain adaptation components, on image level and instance level, to reduce the domain discrepancy. The two domain adaptation components are based on H-divergence theory, and are implemented by learning a domain classifier in adversarial training manner. The domain classifiers on different levels are further reinforced with a consistency regularization to learn a domain-invariant region proposal network (RPN) in the Faster R-CNN model. We evaluate our newly proposed approach using multiple datasets including Cityscapes, KITTI, SIM10K, etc. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for robust object detection in various domain shift scenarios.