Building Machine Learning Challenges for Anomaly Detection in Science

Scientific discoveries are often made by finding a pattern or object that was not predicted by the known rules of science. Oftentimes, these anomalous events or objects that do not conform to the norms are an indication that the rules of science governing the data are incomplete, and something new needs to be present to explain these unexpected outliers. The challenge of finding anomalies can be confounding since it requires codifying a complete knowledge of the known scientific behaviors and then projecting these known behaviors on the data to look for deviations. When utilizing machine learning, this presents a particular challenge since we require that the model not only understands scientific data perfectly but also recognizes when the data is inconsistent and out of the scope of its trained behavior. In this paper, we present three datasets aimed at developing machine learning-based anomaly detection for disparate scientific domains covering astrophysics, genomics, and polar science. We present the different datasets along with a scheme to make machine learning challenges around the three datasets findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). Furthermore, we present an approach that generalizes to future machine learning challenges, enabling the possibility of large, more compute-intensive challenges that can ultimately lead to scientific discovery.

AnomalyFactory: Regard Anomaly Generation as Unsupervised Anomaly Localization

Recent advances in anomaly generation approaches alleviate the effect of data insufficiency on task of anomaly localization. While effective, most of them learn multiple large generative models on different datasets and cumbersome anomaly prediction models for different classes. To address the limitations, we propose a novel scalable framework, named AnomalyFactory, that unifies unsupervised anomaly generation and localization with same network architecture. It starts with a BootGenerator that combines structure of a target edge map and appearance of a reference color image with the guidance of a learned heatmap. Then, it proceeds with a FlareGenerator that receives supervision signals from the BootGenerator and reforms the heatmap to indicate anomaly locations in the generated image. Finally, it easily transforms the same network architecture to a BlazeDetector that localizes anomaly pixels with the learned heatmap by converting the anomaly images generated by the FlareGenerator to normal images. By manipulating the target edge maps and combining them with various reference images, AnomalyFactory generates authentic and diversity samples cross domains. Comprehensive experiments carried on 5 datasets, including MVTecAD, VisA, MVTecLOCO, MADSim and RealIAD, demonstrate that our approach is superior to competitors in generation capability and scalability.

GRUtopia: Dream General Robots in a City at Scale

Recent works have been exploring the scaling laws in the field of Embodied AI. Given the prohibitive costs of collecting real-world data, we believe the Simulation-to-Real (Sim2Real) paradigm is a crucial step for scaling the learning of embodied models. This paper introduces project GRUtopia, the first simulated interactive 3D society designed for various robots. It features several advancements: (a) The scene dataset, GRScenes, includes 100k interactive, finely annotated scenes, which can be freely combined into city-scale environments. In contrast to previous works mainly focusing on home, GRScenes covers 89 diverse scene categories, bridging the gap of service-oriented environments where general robots would be initially deployed. (b) GRResidents, a Large Language Model (LLM) driven Non-Player Character (NPC) system that is responsible for social interaction, task generation, and task assignment, thus simulating social scenarios for embodied AI applications. (c) The benchmark, GRBench, supports various robots but focuses on legged robots as primary agents and poses moderately challenging tasks involving Object Loco-Navigation, Social Loco-Navigation, and Loco-Manipulation. We hope that this work can alleviate the scarcity of high-quality data in this field and provide a more comprehensive assessment of Embodied AI research. The project is available at https://github.com/OpenRobotLab/GRUtopia.

LogicAL: Towards logical anomaly synthesis for unsupervised anomaly localization

Anomaly localization is a practical technology for improving industrial production line efficiency. Due to anomalies are manifold and hard to be collected, existing unsupervised researches are usually equipped with anomaly synthesis methods. However, most of them are biased towards structural defects synthesis while ignoring the underlying logical constraints. To fill the gap and boost anomaly localization performance, we propose an edge manipulation based anomaly synthesis framework, named LogicAL, that produces photo-realistic both logical and structural anomalies. We introduce a logical anomaly generation strategy that is adept at breaking logical constraints and a structural anomaly generation strategy that complements to the structural defects synthesis. We further improve the anomaly localization performance by introducing edge reconstruction into the network structure. Extensive experiments on the challenge MVTecLOCO, MVTecAD, VisA and MADsim datasets verify the advantage of proposed LogicAL on both logical and structural anomaly localization.

A Dataset of Open-Domain Question Answering with Multiple-Span Answers

Multi-span answer extraction, also known as the task of multi-span question answering (MSQA), is critical for real-world applications, as it requires extracting multiple pieces of information from a text to answer complex questions. Despite the active studies and rapid progress in English MSQA research, there is a notable lack of publicly available MSQA benchmark in Chinese. Previous efforts for constructing MSQA datasets predominantly emphasized entity-centric contextualization, resulting in a bias towards collecting factoid questions and potentially overlooking questions requiring more detailed descriptive responses. To overcome these limitations, we present CLEAN, a comprehensive Chinese multi-span question answering dataset that involves a wide range of open-domain subjects with a substantial number of instances requiring descriptive answers. Additionally, we provide established models from relevant literature as baselines for CLEAN. Experimental results and analysis show the characteristics and challenge of the newly proposed CLEAN dataset for the community. Our dataset, CLEAN, will be publicly released at zhiyiluo.site/misc/clean_v1.0_ sample.json.

Using deep convolutional neural networks to classify poisonous and edible mushrooms found in China

Because of their abundance of amino acids, polysaccharides, and many other nutrients that benefit human beings, mushrooms are deservedly popular as dietary cuisine both worldwide and in China. However, if people eat poisonous fungi by mistake, they may suffer from nausea, vomiting, mental disorder, acute anemia, or even death. Each year in China, there are around 8000 people became sick, and 70 died as a result of eating toxic mushrooms by mistake. It is counted that there are thousands of kinds of mushrooms among which only around 900 types are edible, thus without specialized knowledge, the probability of eating toxic mushrooms by mistake is very high. Most people deem that the only characteristic of poisonous mushrooms is a bright colour, however, some kinds of them do not correspond to this trait. In order to prevent people from eating these poisonous mushrooms, we propose to use deep learning methods to indicate whether a mushroom is toxic through analyzing hundreds of edible and toxic mushrooms smartphone pictures. We crowdsource a mushroom image dataset that contains 250 images of poisonous mushrooms and 200 images of edible mushrooms. The Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is a specialized type of artificial neural networks that use a mathematical operation called convolution in place of general matrix multiplication in at least one of their layers, which can generate a relatively precise result by analyzing a huge amount of images, and thus is very suitable for our research. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model has high credibility and can provide a decision-making basis for the selection of edible fungi, so as to reduce the morbidity and mortality caused by eating poisonous mushrooms. We also open source our hand collected mushroom image dataset so that peer researchers can also deploy their own model to advance poisonous mushroom identification.

ASTF: Visual Abstractions of Time-Varying Patterns in Radio Signals

A time-frequency diagram is a commonly used visualization for observing the time-frequency distribution of radio signals and analyzing their time-varying patterns of communication states in radio monitoring and management. While it excels when performing short-term signal analyses, it becomes inadaptable for long-term signal analyses because it cannot adequately depict signal time-varying patterns in a large time span on a space-limited screen. This research thus presents an abstract signal time-frequency (ASTF) diagram to address this problem. In the diagram design, a visual abstraction method is proposed to visually encode signal communication state changes in time slices. A time segmentation algorithm is proposed to divide a large time span into time slices.Three new quantified metrics and a loss function are defined to ensure the preservation of important time-varying information in the time segmentation. An algorithm performance experiment and a user study are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the diagram for long-term signal analyses.

Transgender Community Sentiment Analysis from Social Media Data: A Natural Language Processing Approach

Transgender community is experiencing a huge disparity in mental health conditions compared with the general population. Interpreting the social medial data posted by transgender people may help us understand the sentiments of these sexual minority groups better and apply early interventions. In this study, we manually categorize 300 social media comments posted by transgender people to the sentiment of negative, positive, and neutral. 5 machine learning algorithms and 2 deep neural networks are adopted to build sentiment analysis classifiers based on the annotated data. Results show that our annotations are reliable with a high Cohen's Kappa score over 0.8 across all three classes. LSTM model yields an optimal performance of accuracy over 0.85 and AUC of 0.876. Our next step will focus on using advanced natural language processing algorithms on a larger annotated dataset.

An early prediction of covid-19 associated hospitalization surge using deep learning approach

The global pandemic caused by COVID-19 affects our lives in all aspects. As of September 11, more than 28 million people have tested positive for COVID-19 infection, and more than 911,000 people have lost their lives in this virus battle. Some patients can not receive appropriate medical treatment due the limits of hospitalization volume and shortage of ICU beds. An estimated future hospitalization is critical so that medical resources can be allocated as needed. In this study, we propose to use 4 recurrent neural networks to infer hospitalization change for the following week compared with the current week. Results show that sequence to sequence model with attention achieves a high accuracy of 0.938 and AUC of 0.850 in the hospitalization prediction. Our work has the potential to predict the hospitalization need and send a warning to medical providers and other stakeholders when a re-surge initializes.

Reverse-engineering Bar Charts Using Neural Networks

Reverse-engineering bar charts extracts textual and numeric information from the visual representations of bar charts to support application scenarios that require the underlying information. In this paper, we propose a neural network-based method for reverse-engineering bar charts. We adopt a neural network-based object detection model to simultaneously localize and classify textual information. This approach improves the efficiency of textual information extraction. We design an encoder-decoder framework that integrates convolutional and recurrent neural networks to extract numeric information. We further introduce an attention mechanism into the framework to achieve high accuracy and robustness. Synthetic and real-world datasets are used to evaluate the effectiveness of the method. To the best of our knowledge, this work takes the lead in constructing a complete neural network-based method of reverse-engineering bar charts.