arXiv subjects

Xin Qin

Publications and source records attributed to Xin Qin.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Generalizable Low-Resource Activity Recognition with Diverse and Discriminative Representation Learning

Human activity recognition (HAR) is a time series classification task that focuses on identifying the motion patterns from human sensor readings. Adequate data is essential but a major bottleneck for training a generalizable HAR model, which assists customization and optimization of online web applications. However, it is costly in time and economy to collect large-scale labeled data in reality, i.e., the low-resource challenge. Meanwhile, data collected from different persons have distribution shifts due to different living habits, body shapes, age groups, etc. The low-resource and distribution shift challenges are detrimental to HAR when applying the trained model to new unseen subjects. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Diverse and Discriminative representation Learning (DDLearn) for generalizable low-resource HAR. DDLearn simultaneously considers diversity and discrimination learning. With the constructed self-supervised learning task, DDLearn enlarges the data diversity and explores the latent activity properties. Then, we propose a diversity preservation module to preserve the diversity of learned features by enlarging the distribution divergence between the original and augmented domains. Meanwhile, DDLearn also enhances semantic discrimination by learning discriminative representations with supervised contrastive learning. Extensive experiments on three public HAR datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-art methods by an average accuracy improvement of 9.5% under the low-resource distribution shift scenarios, while being a generic, explainable, and flexible framework. Code is available at: https://github.com/microsoft/robustlearn.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Conformal Prediction for STL Runtime Verification

We are interested in predicting failures of cyber-physical systems during their operation. Particularly, we consider stochastic systems and signal temporal logic specifications, and we want to calculate the probability that the current system trajectory violates the specification. The paper presents two predictive runtime verification algorithms that predict future system states from the current observed system trajectory. As these predictions may not be accurate, we construct prediction regions that quantify prediction uncertainty by using conformal prediction, a statistical tool for uncertainty quantification. Our first algorithm directly constructs a prediction region for the satisfaction measure of the specification so that we can predict specification violations with a desired confidence. The second algorithm constructs prediction regions for future system states first, and uses these to obtain a prediction region for the satisfaction measure. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first formal guarantees for a predictive runtime verification algorithm that applies to widely used trajectory predictors such as RNNs and LSTMs, while being computationally simple and making no assumptions on the underlying distribution. We present numerical experiments of an F-16 aircraft and a self-driving car.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2023

Polarized image of a rotating black hole surrounded by a cold dark matter halo

We have studied the polarized image of an equatorial emitting ring around a rotating black hole surrounded by a cold dark matter (CDM) halo. Results show that the CDM halo density has the similar effects of the halo's characteristic radius on the polarized image for the black hole. The effects of the CDM halo on the polarized image depend on the magnetic field configuration, the fluid velocity and the observed inclination. With the increase of the CDM halo parameters, the observed polarization intensity decreases when the magnetic field lies in equatorial plane, but in the case where the magnetic field is perpendicular to the equatorial plane, the change of the observed polarization intensity with CDM halo also depends on the position of the emitting point in the ring. The change of the electric vector position angle (EVPA) with the CDM halo becomes more complicated. Our results also show that the influence of the CDM halo on the polarized image is generally small, which are consistent with the effects of dark matter halo on black hole shadows. These results could help to further understand dark matter from black hole images.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2023

Energy Storage State-of-Charge Market Model

This paper introduces and rationalizes a new model for bidding and clearing energy storage resources in wholesale energy markets. Charge and discharge bids in this model depend on the storage state-of-charge (SoC). In this setting, storage participants submit different bids for each SoC segment. The system operator monitors the storage SoC and updates their bids accordingly in market clearings. Combined with an optimal bidding design algorithm using dynamic programming, our paper shows that the SoC segment market model provides more accurate representations of the opportunity costs of energy storage compared to existing power-based bidding models. The new model also captures the inherent SoC-dependent operational characteristics of energy storage. We benchmark the SoC segment market model against an existing single-segment model in price-taker and price-influencer simulations. The simulation results show that compared to the existing power-based bidding model, the proposed model improves profits by 10-56% in the price-taker case study; the model also improves total system cost reduction from storage by around 5%, and helps reduce price volatilities in the price-influencer case study.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2022

Risk-Awareness in Learning Neural Controllers for Temporal Logic Objectives

In this paper, we consider the problem of synthesizing a controller in the presence of uncertainty such that the resulting closed-loop system satisfies certain hard constraints while optimizing certain (soft) performance objectives. We assume that the hard constraints encoding safety or mission-critical task objectives are expressed using Signal Temporal Logic (STL), while performance is quantified using standard cost functions on system trajectories. In order to prioritize the satisfaction of the hard STL constraints, we utilize the framework of control barrier functions (CBFs) and algorithmically obtain CBFs for STL objectives. We assume that the controllers are modeled using neural networks (NNs) and provide an optimization algorithm to learn the optimal parameters for the NN controller that optimize the performance at a user-specified robustness margin for the safety specifications. We use the formalism of risk measures to evaluate the risk incurred by the trade-off between robustness margin of the system and its performance. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on well-known difficult examples for nonlinear control such as a quad-rotor and a unicycle, where the mission objectives for each system include hard timing constraints and safety objectives.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2022

Polarized image of an equatorial emitting ring around a 4D Gauss-Bonnet black hole

We have studied the polarized image of an equatorial emitting ring around a 4D Gauss-Bonnet black hole. Our results show that the effects of Gauss-Bonnet parameter on the polarized image depend on the magnetic field configuration, the observation inclination angle, and the fluid velocity. As the magnetic field lies in the equatorial plane, the observed polarization intensity increases monotonously with Gauss-Bonnet parameter in the low inclination angle case, and its monotonicity disappears in the case with high inclination angle. However, as the magnetic field is vertical to the equatorial plane, the polarization intensity is a monotonously increasing function of Gauss-Bonnet parameter in the high inclination angle case. The changes of the electric vector position angle with Gauss-Bonnet parameter in both cases are more complicated. We also probe the effects of Gauss-Bonnet parameter on the Strokes $Q$-$U$ loops.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2022

Polarized image of a rotating black hole in Scalar-Tensor-Vector-Gravity theory

The polarized images of a synchrotron emitting ring are studied in the spacetime of a rotating black hole in the Scalar-Tensor-Vector-Gravity (STVG) theory. The black hole owns an additional dimensionless MOG parameter described its deviation from Kerr black hole. The effects of the MOG parameter on the observed polarization vector and Strokes $Q-U$ loops depend heavily on the spin parameter, the magnetic field configuration, the fluid velocity and the observation inclination angle. For the fixed MOG parameter, the changes of the polarization vector in the image plane are similar to those in the Kerr black hole case. The comparison of the polarization images between Kerr-MOG black hole and M87* implies that there remains some possibility for the STVG-MOG theory.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2022

Domain Generalization for Activity Recognition via Adaptive Feature Fusion

Human activity recognition requires the efforts to build a generalizable model using the training datasets with the hope to achieve good performance in test datasets. However, in real applications, the training and testing datasets may have totally different distributions due to various reasons such as different body shapes, acting styles, and habits, damaging the model's generalization performance. While such a distribution gap can be reduced by existing domain adaptation approaches, they typically assume that the test data can be accessed in the training stage, which is not realistic. In this paper, we consider a more practical and challenging scenario: domain-generalized activity recognition (DGAR) where the test dataset \emph{cannot} be accessed during training. To this end, we propose \emph{Adaptive Feature Fusion for Activity Recognition~(AFFAR)}, a domain generalization approach that learns to fuse the domain-invariant and domain-specific representations to improve the model's generalization performance. AFFAR takes the best of both worlds where domain-invariant representations enhance the transferability across domains and domain-specific representations leverage the model discrimination power from each domain. Extensive experiments on three public HAR datasets show its effectiveness. Furthermore, we apply AFFAR to a real application, i.e., the diagnosis of Children's Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder~(ADHD), which also demonstrates the superiority of our approach.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Semantic-Discriminative Mixup for Generalizable Sensor-based Cross-domain Activity Recognition

It is expensive and time-consuming to collect sufficient labeled data to build human activity recognition (HAR) models. Training on existing data often makes the model biased towards the distribution of the training data, thus the model might perform terribly on test data with different distributions. Although existing efforts on transfer learning and domain adaptation try to solve the above problem, they still need access to unlabeled data on the target domain, which may not be possible in real scenarios. Few works pay attention to training a model that can generalize well to unseen target domains for HAR. In this paper, we propose a novel method called Semantic-Discriminative Mixup (SDMix) for generalizable cross-domain HAR. Firstly, we introduce semantic-aware Mixup that considers the activity semantic ranges to overcome the semantic inconsistency brought by domain differences. Secondly, we introduce the large margin loss to enhance the discrimination of Mixup to prevent misclassification brought by noisy virtual labels. Comprehensive generalization experiments on five public datasets demonstrate that our SDMix substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches with 6% average accuracy improvement on cross-person, cross-dataset, and cross-position HAR.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2022

Personalized Federated Learning with Adaptive Batchnorm for Healthcare

There is a growing interest in applying machine learning techniques to healthcare. Recently, federated learning (FL) is gaining popularity since it allows researchers to train powerful models without compromising data privacy and security. However, the performance of existing FL approaches often deteriorates when encountering non-iid situations where there exist distribution gaps among clients, and few previous efforts focus on personalization in healthcare. In this article, we propose FedAP to tackle domain shifts and then obtain personalized models for local clients. FedAP learns the similarity between clients based on the statistics of the batch normalization layers while preserving the specificity of each client with different local batch normalization. Comprehensive experiments on five healthcare benchmarks demonstrate that FedAP achieves better accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods (e.g., 10% accuracy improvement for PAMAP2) with faster convergence speed.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Polarized image of a Schwarzschild black hole with a thin accretion disk as photon couples to Weyl tensor

We have studied polarized image of a Schwarzschild black hole with an equatorial thin accretion disk as photon couples to Weyl tensor. The birefringence of photon originating from the coupling affect the black hole shadow, the thin disk pattern and its luminosity distribution. We also analyze the observed polarized intensity in the sky plane. The observed polarized intensity in the bright region is stronger than that in the darker region. The stronger effect of the coupling on the observed polarized vector appears only in the bright region close to black hole. These features in the polarized image could help us to understand black hole shadow, the thin accretion disk and the coupling between photon and Weyl tensor.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2021

Mining Shape Expressions with ShapeIt

We present ShapeIt, a tool for mining specifications of cyber-physical systems (CPS) from their real-valued behaviors. The learned specifications are in the form of linear shape expressions, a declarative formal specification language suitable to express behavioral properties over real-valued signals. A linear shape expression is a regular expression composed of parameterized lines as atomic symbols with symbolic constraints on the line parameters. We present here the architecture of our tool along with the different steps of the specification mining algorithm. We also describe the usage of the tool demonstrating its applicability on several case studies from different application domains.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2021

Cross-domain Activity Recognition via Substructural Optimal Transport

It is expensive and time-consuming to collect sufficient labeled data for human activity recognition (HAR). Domain adaptation is a promising approach for cross-domain activity recognition. Existing methods mainly focus on adapting cross-domain representations via domain-level, class-level, or sample-level distribution matching. However, they might fail to capture the fine-grained locality information in activity data. The domain- and class-level matching are too coarse that may result in under-adaptation, while sample-level matching may be affected by the noise seriously and eventually cause over-adaptation. In this paper, we propose substructure-level matching for domain adaptation (SSDA) to better utilize the locality information of activity data for accurate and efficient knowledge transfer. Based on SSDA, we propose an optimal transport-based implementation, Substructural Optimal Transport (SOT), for cross-domain HAR. We obtain the substructures of activities via clustering methods and seeks the coupling of the weighted substructures between different domains. We conduct comprehensive experiments on four public activity recognition datasets (i.e. UCI-DSADS, UCI-HAR, USC-HAD, PAMAP2), which demonstrates that SOT significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods w.r.t classification accuracy (9%+ improvement). In addition, our mehtod is 5x faster than traditional OT-based DA methods with the same hyper-parameters.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2021

When Video Classification Meets Incremental Classes

With the rapid development of social media, tremendous videos with new classes are generated daily, which raise an urgent demand for video classification methods that can continuously update new classes while maintaining the knowledge of old videos with limited storage and computing resources. In this paper, we summarize this task as Class-Incremental Video Classification (CIVC) and propose a novel framework to address it. As a subarea of incremental learning tasks, the challenge of catastrophic forgetting is unavoidable in CIVC. To better alleviate it, we utilize some characteristics of videos. First, we decompose the spatio-temporal knowledge before distillation rather than treating it as a whole in the knowledge transfer process; trajectory is also used to refine the decomposition. Second, we propose a dual granularity exemplar selection method to select and store representative video instances of old classes and key-frames inside videos under a tight storage budget. We benchmark our method and previous SOTA class-incremental learning methods on Something-Something V2 and Kinetics datasets, and our method outperforms previous methods significantly.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

FedHealth 2: Weighted Federated Transfer Learning via Batch Normalization for Personalized Healthcare

The success of machine learning applications often needs a large quantity of data. Recently, federated learning (FL) is attracting increasing attention due to the demand for data privacy and security, especially in the medical field. However, the performance of existing FL approaches often deteriorates when there exist domain shifts among clients, and few previous works focus on personalization in healthcare. In this article, we propose FedHealth 2, an extension of FedHealth \cite{chen2020fedhealth} to tackle domain shifts and get personalized models for local clients. FedHealth 2 obtains the client similarities via a pretrained model, and then it averages all weighted models with preserving local batch normalization. Wearable activity recognition and COVID-19 auxiliary diagnosis experiments have evaluated that FedHealth 2 can achieve better accuracy (10%+ improvement for activity recognition) and personalized healthcare without compromising privacy and security.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Statistical Verification of Autonomous Systems using Surrogate Models and Conformal Inference

In this paper, we propose conformal inference based approach for statistical verification of CPS models. Cyber-physical systems (CPS) such as autonomous vehicles, avionic systems, and medical devices operate in highly uncertain environments. This uncertainty is typically modeled using a finite number of parameters or input signals. Given a system specification in Signal Temporal Logic (STL), we would like to verify that for all (infinite) values of the model parameters/input signals, the system satisfies its specification. Unfortunately, this problem is undecidable in general. {\em Statistical model checking} (SMC) offers a solution by providing guarantees on the correctness of CPS models by statistically reasoning on model simulations. We propose a new approach for statistical verification of CPS models for user-provided distribution on the model parameters. Our technique uses model simulations to learn {\em surrogate models}, and uses {\em conformal inference} to provide probabilistic guarantees on the satisfaction of a given STL property. Additionally, we can provide prediction intervals containing the quantitative satisfaction values of the given STL property for any user-specified confidence level. We also propose a refinement procedure based on Gaussian Process (GP)-based surrogate models for obtaining fine-grained probabilistic guarantees over sub-regions in the parameter space. This in turn enables the CPS designer to choose assured validity domains in the parameter space for safety-critical applications. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of our technique on several CPS models.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2021

Automatic Testing With Reusable Adversarial Agents

Autonomous systems such as self-driving cars and general-purpose robots are safety-critical systems that operate in highly uncertain and dynamic environments. We propose an interactive multi-agent framework where the system-under-design is modeled as an ego agent and its environment is modeled by a number of adversarial (ado) agents. For example, a self-driving car is an ego agent whose behavior is influenced by ado agents such as pedestrians, bicyclists, traffic lights, road geometry etc. Given a logical specification of the correct behavior of the ego agent, and a set of constraints that encode reasonable adversarial behavior, our framework reduces the adversarial testing problem to the problem of synthesizing controllers for (constrained) ado agents that cause the ego agent to violate its specifications. Specifically, we explore the use of tabular and deep reinforcement learning approaches for synthesizing adversarial agents. We show that ado agents trained in this fashion are better than traditional falsification or testing techniques because they can generalize to ego agents and environments that differ from the original ego agent. We demonstrate the efficacy of our technique on two real-world case studies from the domain of self-driving cars.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

What and Where: Learn to Plug Adapters via NAS for Multi-Domain Learning

As an important and challenging problem, multi-domain learning (MDL) typically seeks for a set of effective lightweight domain-specific adapter modules plugged into a common domain-agnostic network. Usually, existing ways of adapter plugging and structure design are handcrafted and fixed for all domains before model learning, resulting in the learning inflexibility and computational intensiveness. With this motivation, we propose to learn a data-driven adapter plugging strategy with Neural Architecture Search (NAS), which automatically determines where to plug for those adapter modules. Furthermore, we propose a NAS-adapter module for adapter structure design in a NAS-driven learning scheme, which automatically discovers effective adapter module structures for different domains. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our MDL model against existing approaches under the conditions of comparable performance.

cs.LG↗