Deep RL at Scale: Sorting Waste in Office Buildings with a Fleet of Mobile Manipulators

We describe a system for deep reinforcement learning of robotic manipulation skills applied to a large-scale real-world task: sorting recyclables and trash in office buildings. Real-world deployment of deep RL policies requires not only effective training algorithms, but the ability to bootstrap real-world training and enable broad generalization. To this end, our system combines scalable deep RL from real-world data with bootstrapping from training in simulation, and incorporates auxiliary inputs from existing computer vision systems as a way to boost generalization to novel objects, while retaining the benefits of end-to-end training. We analyze the tradeoffs of different design decisions in our system, and present a large-scale empirical validation that includes training on real-world data gathered over the course of 24 months of experimentation, across a fleet of 23 robots in three office buildings, with a total training set of 9527 hours of robotic experience. Our final validation also consists of 4800 evaluation trials across 240 waste station configurations, in order to evaluate in detail the impact of the design decisions in our system, the scaling effects of including more real-world data, and the performance of the method on novel objects. The projects website and videos can be found at \href{http://rl-at-scale.github.io}{rl-at-scale.github.io}.

Learning Pairwise Interaction for Generalizable DeepFake Detection

A fast-paced development of DeepFake generation techniques challenge the detection schemes designed for known type DeepFakes. A reliable Deepfake detection approach must be agnostic to generation types, which can present diverse quality and appearance. Limited generalizability across different generation schemes will restrict the wide-scale deployment of detectors if they fail to handle unseen attacks in an open set scenario. We propose a new approach, Multi-Channel Xception Attention Pairwise Interaction (MCX-API), that exploits the power of pairwise learning and complementary information from different color space representations in a fine-grained manner. We first validate our idea on a publicly available dataset in a intra-class setting (closed set) with four different Deepfake schemes. Further, we report all the results using balanced-open-set-classification (BOSC) accuracy in an inter-class setting (open-set) using three public datasets. Our experiments indicate that our proposed method can generalize better than the state-of-the-art Deepfakes detectors. We obtain 98.48% BOSC accuracy on the FF++ dataset and 90.87% BOSC accuracy on the CelebDF dataset suggesting a promising direction for generalization of DeepFake detection. We further utilize t-SNE and attention maps to interpret and visualize the decision-making process of our proposed network. https://github.com/xuyingzhongguo/MCX-API

Event-driven Spectrotemporal Feature Extraction and Classification using a Silicon Cochlea Model

This paper presents a reconfigurable digital implementation of an event-based binaural cochlear system on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). It consists of a pair of the Cascade of Asymmetric Resonators with Fast Acting Compression (CAR FAC) cochlea models and leaky integrate and fire (LIF) neurons. Additionally, we propose an event-driven SpectroTemporal Receptive Field (STRF) Feature Extraction using Adaptive Selection Thresholds (FEAST). It is tested on the TIDIGTIS benchmark and compared with current event-based auditory signal processing approaches and neural networks.

Phenotype Detection in Real World Data via Online MixEHR Algorithm

Understanding patterns of diagnoses, medications, procedures, and laboratory tests from electronic health records (EHRs) and health insurer claims is important for understanding disease risk and for efficient clinical development, which often require rules-based curation in collaboration with clinicians. We extended an unsupervised phenotyping algorithm, mixEHR, to an online version allowing us to use it on order of magnitude larger datasets including a large, US-based claims dataset and a rich regional EHR dataset. In addition to recapitulating previously observed disease groups, we discovered clinically meaningful disease subtypes and comorbidities. This work scaled up an effective unsupervised learning method, reinforced existing clinical knowledge, and is a promising approach for efficient collaboration with clinicians.

When Handcrafted Features and Deep Features Meet Mismatched Training and Test Sets for Deepfake Detection

The accelerated growth in synthetic visual media generation and manipulation has now reached the point of raising significant concerns and posing enormous intimidations towards society. There is an imperative need for automatic detection networks towards false digital content and avoid the spread of dangerous artificial information to contend with this threat. In this paper, we utilize and compare two kinds of handcrafted features(SIFT and HoG) and two kinds of deep features(Xception and CNN+RNN) for the deepfake detection task. We also check the performance of these features when there are mismatches between training sets and test sets. Evaluation is performed on the famous FaceForensics++ dataset, which contains four sub-datasets, Deepfakes, Face2Face, FaceSwap and NeuralTextures. The best results are from Xception, where the accuracy could surpass over 99\% when the training and test set are both from the same sub-dataset. In comparison, the results drop dramatically when the training set mismatches the test set. This phenomenon reveals the challenge of creating a universal deepfake detection system.

A Comprehensive Analysis of AI Biases in DeepFake Detection With Massively Annotated Databases

In recent years, image and video manipulations with DeepFake have become a severe concern for security and society. Therefore, many detection models and databases have been proposed to detect DeepFake data reliably. However, there is an increased concern that these models and training databases might be biased and thus, cause DeepFake detectors to fail. In this work, we tackle these issues by (a) providing large-scale demographic and non-demographic attribute annotations of 41 different attributes for five popular DeepFake datasets and (b) comprehensively analysing AI-bias of multiple state-of-the-art DeepFake detection models on these databases. The investigation analyses the influence of a large variety of distinctive attributes (from over 65M labels) on the detection performance, including demographic (age, gender, ethnicity) and non-demographic (hair, skin, accessories, etc.) information. The results indicate that investigated databases lack diversity and, more importantly, show that the utilised DeepFake detection models are strongly biased towards many investigated attributes. Moreover, the results show that the models' decision-making might be based on several questionable (biased) assumptions, such if a person is smiling or wearing a hat. Depending on the application of such DeepFake detection methods, these biases can lead to generalizability, fairness, and security issues. We hope that the findings of this study and the annotation databases will help to evaluate and mitigate bias in future DeepFake detection techniques. Our annotation datasets are made publicly available.

Chat-to-Design: AI Assisted Personalized Fashion Design

In this demo, we present Chat-to-Design, a new multimodal interaction system for personalized fashion design. Compared to classic systems that recommend apparel based on keywords, Chat-to-Design enables users to design clothes in two steps: 1) coarse-grained selection via conversation and 2) fine-grained editing via an interactive interface. It encompasses three sub-systems to deliver an immersive user experience: A conversation system empowered by natural language understanding to accept users' requests and manages dialogs; A multimodal fashion retrieval system empowered by a large-scale pretrained language-image network to retrieve requested apparel; A fashion design system empowered by emerging generative techniques to edit attributes of retrieved clothes.

GEMv2: Multilingual NLG Benchmarking in a Single Line of Code

Evaluation in machine learning is usually informed by past choices, for example which datasets or metrics to use. This standardization enables the comparison on equal footing using leaderboards, but the evaluation choices become sub-optimal as better alternatives arise. This problem is especially pertinent in natural language generation which requires ever-improving suites of datasets, metrics, and human evaluation to make definitive claims. To make following best model evaluation practices easier, we introduce GEMv2. The new version of the Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics Benchmark introduces a modular infrastructure for dataset, model, and metric developers to benefit from each others work. GEMv2 supports 40 documented datasets in 51 languages. Models for all datasets can be evaluated online and our interactive data card creation and rendering tools make it easier to add new datasets to the living benchmark.

Fantastic Questions and Where to Find Them: FairytaleQA -- An Authentic Dataset for Narrative Comprehension

Question answering (QA) is a fundamental means to facilitate assessment and training of narrative comprehension skills for both machines and young children, yet there is scarcity of high-quality QA datasets carefully designed to serve this purpose. In particular, existing datasets rarely distinguish fine-grained reading skills, such as the understanding of varying narrative elements. Drawing on the reading education research, we introduce FairytaleQA, a dataset focusing on narrative comprehension of kindergarten to eighth-grade students. Generated by educational experts based on an evidence-based theoretical framework, FairytaleQA consists of 10,580 explicit and implicit questions derived from 278 children-friendly stories, covering seven types of narrative elements or relations. Our dataset is valuable in two folds: First, we ran existing QA models on our dataset and confirmed that this annotation helps assess models' fine-grained learning skills. Second, the dataset supports question generation (QG) task in the education domain. Through benchmarking with QG models, we show that the QG model trained on FairytaleQA is capable of asking high-quality and more diverse questions.