Bayesian state and parameter estimation have been automated effectively in a variety of probabilistic programming languages. The process of model comparison on the other hand, which still requires error-prone and time-consuming manual derivations, is often overlooked despite its importance. This paper efficiently automates Bayesian model averaging, selection, and combination by message passing on a Forney-style factor graph with a custom mixture node. Parameter and state inference, and model comparison can then be executed simultaneously using message passing with scale factors. This approach shortens the model design cycle and allows for the straightforward extension to hierarchical and temporal model priors to accommodate for modeling complicated time-varying processes.
Accurately assessing the potential value of new sensor observations is a critical aspect of planning for active perception. This task is particularly challenging when reasoning about high-level scene understanding using measurements from vision-based neural networks. Due to appearance-based reasoning, the measurements are susceptible to several environmental effects such as the presence of occluders, variations in lighting conditions, and redundancy of information due to similarity in appearance between nearby viewpoints. To address this, we propose a new active perception framework incorporating an arbitrary number of perceptual effects in planning and fusion. Our method models the correlation with the environment by a set of general functions termed perceptual factors to construct a perceptual map, which quantifies the aggregated influence of the environment on candidate viewpoints. This information is seamlessly incorporated into the planning and fusion processes by adjusting the uncertainty associated with measurements to weigh their contributions. We evaluate our perceptual maps in a simulated environment that reproduces environmental conditions common in robotics applications. Our results show that, by accounting for environmental effects within our perceptual maps, we improve in the state estimation by correctly selecting the viewpoints and considering the measurement noise correctly when affected by environmental factors. We furthermore deploy our approach on a ground robot to showcase its applicability for real-world active perception missions.
Spoken language identification refers to the task of automatically predicting the spoken language in a given utterance. Conventionally, it is modeled as a speech-based language identification task. Prior techniques have been constrained to a single modality; however in the case of video data there is a wealth of other metadata that may be beneficial for this task. In this work, we propose MuSeLI, a Multimodal Spoken Language Identification method, which delves into the use of various metadata sources to enhance language identification. Our study reveals that metadata such as video title, description and geographic location provide substantial information to identify the spoken language of the multimedia recording. We conduct experiments using two diverse public datasets of YouTube videos, and obtain state-of-the-art results on the language identification task. We additionally conduct an ablation study that describes the distinct contribution of each modality for language recognition.
We present a method for automatically constructing a concept hierarchy for a given domain by querying a large language model. We apply this method to various domains using OpenAI's GPT 3.5. Our experiments indicate that LLMs can be of considerable help for constructing concept hierarchies.
The inference of topological principles is a key problem in structured reconstruction. We observe that wrongly predicted topological relationships are often incurred by the lack of holistic geometry clues in low-level features. Inspired by the fact that massive signals can be compactly described with frequency analysis, we experimentally explore the efficiency and tendency of learning structure geometry in the frequency domain. Accordingly, we propose a frequency-domain feature learning strategy (F-Learn) to fuse scattered geometric fragments holistically for topology-intact structure reasoning. Benefiting from the parsimonious design, the F-Learn strategy can be easily deployed into a deep reconstructor with a lightweight model modification. Experiments demonstrate that the F-Learn strategy can effectively introduce structure awareness into geometric primitive detection and topology inference, bringing significant performance improvement to final structured reconstruction. Code and pre-trained models are available at //github.com/Geo-Tell/F-Learn.
We initiate the study of parallel algorithms for fairly allocating indivisible goods among agents with additive preferences. We give fast parallel algorithms for various fundamental problems, such as finding a Pareto Optimal and EF1 allocation under restricted additive valuations, finding an EF1 allocation for up to three agents, and finding an envy-free allocation with subsidies. On the flip side, we show that fast parallel algorithms are unlikely to exist (formally, $CC$-hard) for the problem of computing Round-Robin EF1 allocations.
We consider the problem of signal estimation in a generalized linear model (GLM). GLMs include many canonical problems in statistical estimation, such as linear regression, phase retrieval, and 1-bit compressed sensing. Recent work has precisely characterized the asymptotic minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) for GLMs with i.i.d. Gaussian sensing matrices. However, in many models there is a significant gap between the MMSE and the performance of the best known feasible estimators. In this work, we address this issue by considering GLMs defined via spatially coupled sensing matrices. We propose an efficient approximate message passing (AMP) algorithm for estimation and prove that with a simple choice of spatially coupled design, the MSE of a carefully tuned AMP estimator approaches the asymptotic MMSE in the high-dimensional limit. To prove the result, we first rigorously characterize the asymptotic performance of AMP for a GLM with a generic spatially coupled design. This characterization is in terms of a deterministic recursion (`state evolution') that depends on the parameters defining the spatial coupling. Then, using a simple spatially coupled design and judicious choice of functions defining the AMP, we analyze the fixed points of the resulting state evolution and show that it achieves the asymptotic MMSE. Numerical results for phase retrieval and rectified linear regression show that spatially coupled designs can yield substantially lower MSE than i.i.d. Gaussian designs at finite dimensions when used with AMP algorithms.
Nonlinear metamaterials with tailored mechanical properties have applications in engineering, medicine, robotics, and beyond. While modeling their macromechanical behavior is challenging in itself, finding structure parameters that lead to ideal approximation of high-level performance goals is a challenging task. In this work, we propose Neural Metamaterial Networks (NMN) -- smooth neural representations that encode the nonlinear mechanics of entire metamaterial families. Given structure parameters as input, NMN return continuously differentiable strain energy density functions, thus guaranteeing conservative forces by construction. Though trained on simulation data, NMN do not inherit the discontinuities resulting from topological changes in finite element meshes. They instead provide a smooth map from parameter to performance space that is fully differentiable and thus well-suited for gradient-based optimization. On this basis, we formulate inverse material design as a nonlinear programming problem that leverages neural networks for both objective functions and constraints. We use this approach to automatically design materials with desired strain-stress curves, prescribed directional stiffness and Poisson ratio profiles. We furthermore conduct ablation studies on network nonlinearities and show the advantages of our approach compared to native-scale optimization.
Deep neural networks have shown impressive performance for image-based disease detection. Performance is commonly evaluated through clinical validation on independent test sets to demonstrate clinically acceptable accuracy. Reporting good performance metrics on test sets, however, is not always a sufficient indication of the generalizability and robustness of an algorithm. In particular, when the test data is drawn from the same distribution as the training data, the iid test set performance can be an unreliable estimate of the accuracy on new data. In this paper, we employ stress testing to assess model robustness and subgroup performance disparities in disease detection models. We design progressive stress testing using five different bidirectional and unidirectional image perturbations with six different severity levels. As a use case, we apply stress tests to measure the robustness of disease detection models for chest X-ray and skin lesion images, and demonstrate the importance of studying class and domain-specific model behaviour. Our experiments indicate that some models may yield more robust and equitable performance than others. We also find that pretraining characteristics play an important role in downstream robustness. We conclude that progressive stress testing is a viable and important tool and should become standard practice in the clinical validation of image-based disease detection models.
External knowledge is often useful for natural language understanding tasks. We introduce a contextual text representation model called Conceptual-Contextual (CC) embeddings, which incorporates structured knowledge into text representations. Unlike entity embedding methods, our approach encodes a knowledge graph into a context model. CC embeddings can be easily reused for a wide range of tasks just like pre-trained language models. Our model effectively encodes the huge UMLS database by leveraging semantic generalizability. Experiments on electronic health records (EHRs) and medical text processing benchmarks showed our model gives a major boost to the performance of supervised medical NLP tasks.
External knowledge is often useful for natural language understanding tasks. We introduce a contextual text representation model called Conceptual-Contextual (CC) embeddings, which incorporates structured knowledge into text representations. Unlike entity embedding methods, our approach encodes a knowledge graph into a context model. CC embeddings can be easily reused for a wide range of tasks just like pre-trained language models. Our model effectively encodes the huge UMLS database by leveraging semantic generalizability. Experiments on electronic health records (EHRs) and medical text processing benchmarks showed our model gives a major boost to the performance of supervised medical NLP tasks.