Stanceosaurus: Classifying Stance Towards Multilingual Misinformation

We present Stanceosaurus, a new corpus of 28,033 tweets in English, Hindi, and Arabic annotated with stance towards 251 misinformation claims. As far as we are aware, it is the largest corpus annotated with stance towards misinformation claims. The claims in Stanceosaurus originate from 15 fact-checking sources that cover diverse geographical regions and cultures. Unlike existing stance datasets, we introduce a more fine-grained 5-class labeling strategy with additional subcategories to distinguish implicit stance. Pre-trained transformer-based stance classifiers that are fine-tuned on our corpus show good generalization on unseen claims and regional claims from countries outside the training data. Cross-lingual experiments demonstrate Stanceosaurus' capability of training multi-lingual models, achieving 53.1 F1 on Hindi and 50.4 F1 on Arabic without any target-language fine-tuning. Finally, we show how a domain adaptation method can be used to improve performance on Stanceosaurus using additional RumourEval-2019 data. We make Stanceosaurus publicly available to the research community and hope it will encourage further work on misinformation identification across languages and cultures.

Improving Large-scale Paraphrase Acquisition and Generation

This paper addresses the quality issues in existing Twitter-based paraphrase datasets, and discusses the necessity of using two separate definitions of paraphrase for identification and generation tasks. We present a new Multi-Topic Paraphrase in Twitter (MultiPIT) corpus that consists of a total of 130k sentence pairs with crowdsoursing (MultiPIT_crowd) and expert (MultiPIT_expert) annotations using two different paraphrase definitions for paraphrase identification, in addition to a multi-reference test set (MultiPIT_NMR) and a large automatically constructed training set (MultiPIT_Auto) for paraphrase generation. With improved data annotation quality and task-specific paraphrase definition, the best pre-trained language model fine-tuned on our dataset achieves the state-of-the-art performance of 84.2 F1 for automatic paraphrase identification. Furthermore, our empirical results also demonstrate that the paraphrase generation models trained on MultiPIT_Auto generate more diverse and high-quality paraphrases compared to their counterparts fine-tuned on other corpora such as Quora, MSCOCO, and ParaNMT.

Decentralized LiDAR-inertial Swarm Odometry

Accurate self and relative state estimation are the critical preconditions for completing swarm tasks, e.g., collaborative autonomous exploration, target tracking, search and rescue. This paper proposes a fully decentralized state estimation method for aerial swarm systems, in which each drone performs precise ego-state estimation, exchanges ego-state and mutual observation information by wireless communication, and estimates relative state with respect to (w.r.t.) the rest of UAVs, all in real-time and only based on LiDAR-inertial measurements. A novel 3D LiDAR-based drone detection, identification and tracking method is proposed to obtain observations of teammate drones. The mutual observation measurements are then tightly-coupled with IMU and LiDAR measurements to perform real-time and accurate estimation of ego-state and relative state jointly. Extensive real-world experiments show the broad adaptability to complicated scenarios, including GPS-denied scenes, degenerate scenes for camera (dark night) or LiDAR (facing a single wall). Compared with ground-truth provided by motion capture system, the result shows the centimeter-level localization accuracy which outperforms other state-of-the-art LiDAR-inertial odometry for single UAV system.

Deployment of long distance multi-moving robots for underground pipe inspection

Blueprint of an in-pipe climbing robot that works with sharp transmissions to study complex line relationships. Standard wheeled/happening pipe climbing robots tend to slide when exploring pipe turns. Instruments help achieve a very distinct delay sequence in which the robot slides and drags as it progresses. The proposed transmission joins the farthest ground plane of the standard two-output transmission. This opens up a substantial time for 3 output transmissions. This instrument takes into account the force exerted on each track within the line relation to specifically alter the robot's track speed, unlocking the key to fine control. Deflection of the robot across pipe networks with different bearings and non-slip pipe bends demonstrate the integrity of the proposed structure.

Intelligent MIMO Detection Using Meta Learning

In a K-best detector for multiple-input-multiple-output(MIMO) systems, the value of K needs to be sufficiently large to achieve near-maximum-likelihood (ML) performance. By treating K as a variable that can be adjusted according to a fitting function of some learnable coefficients, an intelligent MIMO detection network based on deep neural networks (DNN) is proposed to reduce complexity of the detection algorithm with little performance degradation. In particular, the proposed intelligent detection algorithm uses meta learning to learn the coefficients of the fitting function for K to circumvent the problem of learning K directly. The idea of network fusion is used to combine the learning results of the meta learning component networks. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves near-ML detection performance while its complexity is close to that of linear detectors. Besides, it also exhibits strong ability of fast training.

Disentangled Representation Learning for RF Fingerprint Extraction under Unknown Channel Statistics

Deep learning (DL) applied to a device's radio-frequency fingerprint~(RFF) has attracted significant attention in physical-layer authentications due to its extraordinary classification performance. Conventional DL-RFF techniques, trained by adopting maximum likelihood estimation~(MLE), tend to overfit the channel statistics embedded in the training dataset. This restricts their practical applications as it is challenging to collect sufficient training data capturing the characteristics of all possible wireless channel environments. To address this challenge, we propose a DL framework of disentangled representation learning~(DRL) that first learns to factor the input signals into a device-relevant component and a device-irrelevant component via adversarial learning. Then, it synthesizes a set of augmented signals by shuffling these two parts within a given training dataset for training of subsequent RFF extractor. The implicit data augmentation in the proposed framework imposes a regularization on the RFF extractor to avoid the possible overfitting of device-irrelevant channel statistics, without collecting additional data from unknown channels. Experiments validate that the proposed approach, referred to as DR-RFF, outperforms conventional methods in terms of generalizability to unknown complicated propagation environments, e.g., dispersive multipath fading channels, even though all the training data are collected in a simple environment with dominated direct line-of-sight~(LoS) propagation paths.

Semi-supervised MIMO Detection Using Cycle-consistent Generative Adversarial Network

In this paper, a new semi-supervised deep MIMO detection approach using a cycle-consistent generative adversarial network (cycleGAN) is proposed, which performs the detection without any prior knowledge of underlying channel models. Specifically, we propose the cycleGAN detector by constructing a bidirectional loop of least squares generative adversarial networks (LS-GAN). The forward direction of the loop learns to model the transmission process, while the backward direction learns to detect the transmitted signals. By optimizing the cycle-consistency of the transmitted and received signals through this loop, the proposed method is able to train a specific detector block-by-block to fit the operating channel. The training is conducted online, including a supervised phase using pilots and an unsupervised phase using received payload data. This semi-supervised training strategy weakens the demand for the scale of labelled training dataset, which is related to the number of pilots, and thus the overhead is effectively reduced. Numerical results show that the proposed semi-blind cycleGAN detector achieves better bit error-rate (BER) than existing semi-blind deep learning detection methods as well as conditional linear detectors, especially when nonlinear distortion of the power amplifiers at the transmitter is considered.

Worst-case Design for RIS-aided Over-the-air Computation with Imperfect CSI

Over-the-air computation (AirComp) enables fast wireless data aggregation at the receiver through concurrent transmission by sensors in the application of Internet-of-Things (IoT). To further improve the performance of AirComp under unfavorable propagation channel conditions, we consider the problem of computation distortion minimization in a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided AirComp system. In particular, we take into account an additive bounded uncertainty of the channel state information (CSI) and the total power constraint, and jointly optimize the transceiver (Tx-Rx) and the RIS phase design from the perspective of worst-case robustness by minimizing the mean squared error (MSE) of the computation. To solve this intractable nonconvex problem, we develop an efficient alternating algorithm where both solutions to the robust sub-problem and to the joint design of Tx-Rx and RIS are obtained in closed forms. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

HMRNet: High and Multi-Resolution Network with Bidirectional Feature Calibration for Brain Structure Segmentation in Radiotherapy

Accurate segmentation of Anatomical brain Barriers to Cancer spread (ABCs) plays an important role for automatic delineation of Clinical Target Volume (CTV) of brain tumors in radiotherapy. Despite that variants of U-Net are state-of-the-art segmentation models, they have limited performance when dealing with ABCs structures with various shapes and sizes, especially thin structures (e.g., the falx cerebri) that span only few slices. To deal with this problem, we propose a High and Multi-Resolution Network (HMRNet) that consists of a multi-scale feature learning branch and a high-resolution branch, which can maintain the high-resolution contextual information and extract more robust representations of anatomical structures with various scales. We further design a Bidirectional Feature Calibration (BFC) block to enable the two branches to generate spatial attention maps for mutual feature calibration. Considering the different sizes and positions of ABCs structures, our network was applied after a rough localization of each structure to obtain fine segmentation results. Experiments on the MICCAI 2020 ABCs challenge dataset showed that: 1) Our proposed two-stage segmentation strategy largely outperformed methods segmenting all the structures in just one stage; 2) The proposed HMRNet with two branches can maintain high-resolution representations and is effective to improve the performance on thin structures; 3) The proposed BFC block outperformed existing attention methods using monodirectional feature calibration. Our method won the second place of ABCs 2020 challenge and has a potential for more accurate and reasonable delineation of CTV of brain tumors.