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 South America


Land use identification through social network interaction

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The Internet generates large volumes of data at a high rate, in particular, posts on social networks. Although social network data has numerous semantic adulterations, and is not intended to be a source of geo-spatial information, in the text of posts we find pieces of important information about how people relate to their environment, which can be used to identify interesting aspects of how human beings interact with portions of land based on their activities. This research proposes a methodology for the identification of land uses using Natural Language Processing (NLP) from the contents of the popular social network Twitter. It will be approached by identifying keywords with linguistic patterns from the text, and the geographical coordinates associated with the publication. Context-specific innovations are introduced to deal with data across South America and, in particular, in the city of Arequipa, Peru. The objective is to identify the five main land uses: residential, commercial, institutional-governmental, industrial-offices and unbuilt land. Within the framework of urban planning and sustainable urban management, the methodology contributes to the optimization of the identification techniques applied for the updating of land use cadastres, since the results achieved an accuracy of about 90%, which motivates its application in the real context. In addition, it would allow the identification of land use categories at a more detailed level, in situations such as a complex/mixed distribution building based on the amount of data collected. Finally, the methodology makes land use information available in a more up-to-date fashion and, above all, avoids the high economic cost of the non-automatic production of land use maps for cities, mostly in developing countries.


NL-Augmenter: A Framework for Task-Sensitive Natural Language Augmentation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Data augmentation is an important component in the robustness evaluation of models in natural language processing (NLP) and in enhancing the diversity of the data they are trained on. In this paper, we present NL-Augmenter, a new participatory Python-based natural language augmentation framework which supports the creation of both transformations (modifications to the data) and filters (data splits according to specific features). We describe the framework and an initial set of 117 transformations and 23 filters for a variety of natural language tasks. We demonstrate the efficacy of NL-Augmenter by using several of its transformations to analyze the robustness of popular natural language models. The infrastructure, datacards and robustness analysis results are available publicly on the NL-Augmenter repository (\url{https://github.com/GEM-benchmark/NL-Augmenter}).


Dynamic Token Normalization Improves Vision Transformer

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Vision Transformer (ViT) and its variants (e.g., Swin, PVT) have achieved great success in various computer vision tasks, owing to their capability to learn longrange contextual information. Layer Normalization (LN) is an essential ingredient in these models. However, we found that the ordinary LN makes tokens at different positions similar in magnitude because it normalizes embeddings within each token. It is difficult for Transformers to capture inductive bias such as the positional context in an image with LN. We tackle this problem by proposing a new normalizer, termed Dynamic Token Normalization (DTN), where normalization is performed both within each token (intra-token) and across different tokens (intertoken). Firstly, it is built on a unified formulation and thus can represent various existing normalization methods. Secondly, DTN learns to normalize tokens in both intra-token and inter-token manners, enabling Transformers to capture both the global contextual information and the local positional context. Thirdly, by simply replacing LN layers, DTN can be readily plugged into various vision transformers, such as ViT, Swin, PVT, LeViT, T2T-ViT, BigBird and Reformer. Extensive experiments show that the transformer equipped with DTN consistently outperforms baseline model with minimal extra parameters and computational overhead. For example, DTN outperforms LN by 0.5% - 1.2% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, by 1.2 - 1.4 box AP in object detection on COCO benchmark, by 2.3% - 3.9% mCE in robustness experiments on ImageNet-C, and by 0.5% - 0.8% accuracy in Long ListOps on Long-Range Arena. Codes will be made public at https://github.com/wqshao126/DTN. Vision Transformers (ViTs) have been employed in various tasks of computer vision, such as image classification (Dosovitskiy et al., 2020; Yuan et al., 2021), object detection (Wang et al., 2021b; Liu et al., 2021) and semantic segmentation (Strudel et al., 2021). Compared with the conventional Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), ViTs have the advantages in modeling long-range dependencies, as well as learning from multimodal data due to the representational capacity of the multi-head self-attention (MHSA) modules (Vaswani et al., 2017; Dosovitskiy et al., 2020). These appealing properties are desirable for vision systems, enabling ViTs to serve as a versatile backbone for various visual tasks.


Probabilistic Deep Learning to Quantify Uncertainty in Air Quality Forecasting

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Data-driven forecasts of air quality have recently achieved more accurate short-term predictions. Despite their success, most of the current data-driven solutions lack proper quantifications of model uncertainty that communicate how much to trust the forecasts. Recently, several practical tools to estimate uncertainty have been developed in probabilistic deep learning. However, there have not been empirical applications and extensive comparisons of these tools in the domain of air quality forecasts. Therefore, this work applies state-of-the-art techniques of uncertainty quantification in a real-world setting of air quality forecasts. Through extensive experiments, we describe training probabilistic models and evaluate their predictive uncertainties based on empirical performance, reliability of confidence estimate, and practical applicability. We also propose improving these models using "free" adversarial training and exploiting temporal and spatial correlation inherent in air quality data. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed models perform better than previous works in quantifying uncertainty in data-driven air quality forecasts. Overall, Bayesian neural networks provide a more reliable uncertainty estimate but can be challenging to implement and scale. Other scalable methods, such as deep ensemble, Monte Carlo (MC) dropout, and stochastic weight averaging-Gaussian (SWAG), can perform well if applied correctly but with different tradeoffs and slight variations in performance metrics. Finally, our results show the practical impact of uncertainty estimation and demonstrate that, indeed, probabilistic models are more suitable for making informed decisions. Code and dataset are available at \url{https://github.com/Abdulmajid-Murad/deep_probabilistic_forecast}


Intention Recognition for Multiple Agents

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Intention recognition is an important step to facilitate collaboration in multi-agent systems. Existing work mainly focuses on intention recognition in a single-agent setting and uses a descriptive model, e.g. Bayesian networks, in the recognition process. In this paper, we resort to a prescriptive approach to model agents' behaviour where which their intentions are hidden in implementing their plans. We introduce landmarks into the behavioural model therefore enhancing informative features for identifying common intentions for multiple agents. We further refine the model by focusing only action sequences in their plan and provide a light model for identifying and comparing their intentions. The new models provide a simple approach of grouping agents' common intentions upon partial plans observed in agents' interactions. We provide experimental results in support.


How Do AI Represent the Urban?

#artificialintelligence

It's important to remember that these images aren't created from scratch. They're built from "training sets" of images that human researchers feed into the AI to help it learn and recognise patterns. If you're not familiar with how such AI apps work, this old article from 2015 does a pretty good job of explaining this. I suspect that while the process has become more sophisticated over the years, the basic principle of recursively feeding images back into neural nets until the AI "gets it" hasn't changed. Therefore, human biases do exist in the patterns chosen and images generated, which turns these images into AI interpretations of human biases.


LoNLI: An Extensible Framework for Testing Diverse Logical Reasoning Capabilities for NLI

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Natural Language Inference (NLI) is considered a representative task to test natural language understanding (NLU). In this work, we propose an extensible framework to collectively yet categorically test diverse Logical reasoning capabilities required for NLI (and by extension, NLU). Motivated by behavioral testing, we create a semi-synthetic large test-bench (363 templates, 363k examples) and an associated framework that offers following utilities: 1) individually test and analyze reasoning capabilities along 17 reasoning dimensions (including pragmatic reasoning), 2) design experiments to study cross-capability information content (leave one out or bring one in); and 3) the synthetic nature enable us to control for artifacts and biases. The inherited power of automated test case instantiation from free-form natural language templates (using CheckList), and a well-defined taxonomy of capabilities enable us to extend to (cognitively) harder test cases while varying the complexity of natural language. Through our analysis of state-of-the-art NLI systems, we observe that our benchmark is indeed hard (and non-trivial even with training on additional resources). Some capabilities stand out as harder. Further fine-grained analysis and fine-tuning experiments reveal more insights about these capabilities and the models -- supporting and extending previous observations. Towards the end we also perform an user-study, to investigate whether behavioral information can be utilised to generalize much better for some models compared to others.


Artificial Cognitively-inspired Generation of the Notion of Topological Group in the Context of Artificial Mathematical Intelligence

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The new computational paradigm of conceptual computation has been introduced in the research program of Artificial Mathematical Intelligence. We provide the explicit artificial generation (or conceptual computation) for the fundamental mathematical notion of topological groups. Specifically, we start with two basic notions belonging to topology and abstract algebra, and we describe recursively formal specifications in the Common Algebraic Specification Language (CASL). The notion of conceptual blending between such conceptual spaces can be materialized computationally in the Heterogeneous Tool Set (HETS). The fundamental notion of topological groups is explicitly generated through three different artificial specifications based on conceptual blending and conceptual identification, starting with the concepts of continuous functions and mathematical groups (described with minimal set-theoretical conditions). This constitutes in additional heuristic evidence for the third pillar of Artificial Mathematical Intelligence.


Will The Rise of Facial Recognition Technology in Surveillance Signal the End of Privacy?

#artificialintelligence

Facial-recognition technology (FRT) is mainly deployed in the cybersecurity and surveillance sectors. It has long been in use at airport borders and on smartphones, and as a tool to help police identify criminals. But it is now creeping further into private and public spaces. From Quito to Nairobi, Moscow to Detroit, hundreds of municipalities have installed cameras equipped with FRT, sometimes promising to feed data to central command centres as part of'safe city' or'smart city' solutions to crime. The COVID-19 pandemic might accelerate their spread.


Enhanced Self-Organizing Map Solution for the Traveling Salesman Problem

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Using an enhanced Self-Organizing Map method, we provided suboptimal solutions to the Traveling Salesman Problem. Besides, we employed hyperparameter tuning to identify the most critical features in the algorithm. All improvements in the benchmark work brought consistent results and may inspire future efforts to improve this algorithm and apply it to different problems.