On Human Motion Prediction Using Recurrent Neural Networks

Abstract: Human motion modelling is a classical problem at the intersection of graphics and computer vision, with applications spanning human-computer interaction, motion synthesis, and motion prediction for virtual and augmented reality. Following the success of deep learning methods in several computer vision tasks, recent work has focused on using deep recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to model human motion, with the goal of learning time-dependent representations that perform tasks such as short-term motion prediction and long-term human motion synthesis. We examine recent work, with a focus on the evaluation methodologies commonly used in the literature, and show that, surprisingly, state of the art performance can be achieved by a simple baseline that does not attempt to model motion at all. We investigate this result, and analyze recent RNN methods by looking at the architectures, loss functions, and training procedures used in state-of-the-art approaches. We propose three changes to the standard RNN models typically used for human motion, which results in a simple and scalable RNN architecture that obtains state-of-the-art performance on human motion prediction.

Structural-RNN: Deep Learning on Spatio-Temporal Graphs

Abstract: Deep Recurrent Neural Network architectures, though remarkably capable at modeling sequences, lack an intuitive high-level spatio-temporal structure. That is while many problems in computer vision inherently have an underlying high-level structure and can benefit from it. Spatio-temporal graphs are a popular tool for imposing such high-level intuitions in the formulation of real world problems. In this paper, we propose an approach for combining the power of high-level spatio-temporal graphs and sequence learning success of Recurrent Neural Networks~(RNNs). We develop a scalable method for casting an arbitrary spatio-temporal graph as a rich RNN mixture that is feedforward, fully differentiable, and jointly trainable. The proposed method is generic and principled as it can be used for transforming any spatio-temporal graph through employing a certain set of well defined steps. The evaluations of the proposed approach on a diverse set of problems, ranging from modeling human motion to object interactions, shows improvement over the state-of-the-art with a large margin. We expect this method to empower new approaches to problem formulation through high-level spatio-temporal graphs and Recurrent Neural Networks.

Learning Human Motion Models for Long-Term Predictions

Abstract: We propose a new architecture for the learning of predictive spatio-temporal motion models from data alone. Our approach, dubbed the Dropout Autoencoder LSTM (DAELSTM), is capable of synthesizing natural looking motion sequences over long-time horizons1 without catastrophic drift or motion degradation. The model consists of two components, a 3-layer recurrent neural network to model temporal aspects and a novel autoencoder that is trained to implicitly recover the spatial structure of the human skeleton via randomly removing information about joints during training. This Dropout Autoencoder (DAE) is then used to filter each predicted pose by a 3-layer LSTM network, reducing accumulation of correlated error and hence drift over time. Furthermore to alleviate insufficiency of commonly used quality metric, we propose a new evaluation protocol using action classifiers to assess the quality of synthetic motion sequences. The proposed protocol can be used to assess quality of generated sequences of arbitrary length. Finally, we evaluate our proposed method on two of the largest motion-capture datasets available and show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques on a variety of actions, including cyclic and acyclic motion, and that it can produce natural looking sequences over longer time horizons than previous methods.

Long-Term Human Motion Prediction by Modeling Motion Context and Enhancing Motion Dynamic

Abstract: Human motion prediction aims at generating future frames of human motion based on an observed sequence of skeletons. Recent methods employ the latest hidden states of a recurrent neural network (RNN) to encode the historical skeletons, which can only address short-term prediction. In this work, we propose a motion context modeling by summarizing the historical human motion with respect to the current prediction. A modified highway unit (MHU) is proposed for efficiently eliminating motionless joints and estimating next pose given the motion context. Furthermore, we enhance the motion dynamic by minimizing the gram matrix loss for long-term motion prediction. Experimental results show that the proposed model can promisingly forecast the human future movements, which yields superior performances over related state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, specifying the motion context with the activity labels enables our model to perform human motion transfer.

QuaterNet: A Quaternion-based Recurrent Model for Human Motion

Abstract: Deep learning for predicting or generating 3D human pose sequences is an active research area. Previous work regresses either joint rotations or joint positions. The former strategy is prone to error accumulation along the kinematic chain, as well as discontinuities when using Euler angle or exponential map parameterizations. The latter requires re-projection onto skeleton constraints to avoid bone stretching and invalid configurations. This work addresses both limitations. Our recurrent network, QuaterNet, represents rotations with quaternions and our loss function performs forward kinematics on a skeleton to penalize absolute position errors instead of angle errors. On short-term predictions, QuaterNet improves the state-of-the-art quantitatively. For long-term generation, our approach is qualitatively judged as realistic as recent neural strategies from the graphics literature.

Human Motion Prediction via Learning Local Structure Representations and Temporal Dependencies

Abstract: Human motion prediction from motion capture data is a classical problem in the computer vision, and conventional methods take the holistic human body as input. These methods ignore the fact that, in various human activities, different body components (limbs and the torso) have distinctive characteristics in terms of the moving pattern. In this paper, we argue local representations on different body components should be learned separately and, based on such idea, propose a network, Skeleton Network (SkelNet), for long-term human motion prediction. Specifically, at each time-step, local structure representations of input (human body) are obtained via SkelNet's branches of component-specific layers, then the shared layer uses local spatial representations to predict the future human pose. Our SkelNet is the first to use local structure representations for predicting the human motion. Then, for short-term human motion prediction, we propose the second network, named as Skeleton Temporal Network (Skel-TNet). Skel-TNet consists of three components: SkelNet and a Recurrent Neural Network, they have advantages in learning spatial and temporal dependencies for predicting human motion, respectively; a feed-forward network that outputs the final estimation. Our methods achieve promising results on the Human3.6M dataset and the CMU motion capture dataset.

Structured Prediction Helps 3D Human Motion Modelling

Abstract: Human motion prediction is a challenging and important task in many computer vision application domains. Existing work only implicitly models the spatial structure of the human skeleton. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that decomposes the prediction into individual joints by means of a structured prediction layer that explicitly models the joint dependencies. This is implemented via a hierarchy of small-sized neural networks connected analogously to the kinematic chains in the human body as well as a joint-wise decomposition in the loss function. The proposed layer is agnostic to the underlying network and can be used with existing architectures for motion modelling. Prior work typically leverages the H3.6M dataset. We show that some state-of-the-art techniques do not perform well when trained and tested on AMASS, a recently released dataset 14 times the size of H3.6M. Our experiments indicate that the proposed layer increases the performance of motion forecasting irrespective of the base network, joint-angle representation, and prediction horizon. We furthermore show that the layer also improves motion predictions qualitatively. We make code and models publicly available at https://ait.ethz.ch/projects/2019/spl.

A Neural Temporal Model for Human Motion Prediction

Abstract: We propose novel neural temporal models for predicting and synthesizing human motion, achieving state-of-the-art in modeling long-term motion trajectories while being competitive with prior work in short-term prediction and requiring significantly less computation. Key aspects of our proposed system include: 1) a novel, two-level processing architecture that aids in generating planned trajectories, 2) a simple set of easily computable features that integrate derivative information, and 3) a novel multi-objective loss function that helps the model to slowly progress from simple next-step prediction to the harder task of multi-step, closed-loop prediction. Our results demonstrate that these innovations improve the modeling of long-term motion trajectories. Finally, we propose a novel metric, called Normalized Power Spectrum Similarity (NPSS), to evaluate the long-term predictive ability of motion synthesis models, complementing the popular mean-squared error (MSE) measure of Euler joint angles over time. We conduct a user study to determine if the proposed NPSS correlates with human evaluation of long-term motion more strongly than MSE and find that it indeed does. We release code and additional results (visualizations) for this paper at: https://github.com/cr7anand/neural_temporal_models

PVRED: A Position-Velocity Recurrent Encoder-Decoder for Human Motion Prediction

Abstract: Human motion prediction, which aims to predict future human poses given past poses, has recently seen increased interest. Many recent approaches are based on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) which model human poses with exponential maps. These approaches neglect the pose velocity as well as temporal relation of different poses, and tend to converge to the mean pose or fail to generate natural-looking poses. We therefore propose a novel Position-Velocity Recurrent Encoder-Decoder (PVRED) for human motion prediction, which makes full use of pose velocities and temporal positional information. A temporal position embedding method is presented and a Position-Velocity RNN (PVRNN) is proposed. We also emphasize the benefits of quaternion parameterization of poses and design a novel trainable Quaternion Transformation (QT) layer, which is combined with a robust loss function during training. We provide quantitative results for both short-term prediction in the future 0.5 seconds and long-term prediction in the future 0.5 to 1 seconds. Experiments on several benchmarks show that our approach considerably outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. In addition, qualitative visualizations in the future 4 seconds show that our approach could predict future human-like and meaningful poses in very long time horizons. Code is publicly available on GitHub: https://github.com/hongsong-wang/PVRNN.

Probabilistic Human Motion Prediction via A Bayesian Neural Network

Abstract: Human motion prediction is an important and challenging topic that has promising prospects in efficient and safe human-robot-interaction systems. Currently, the majority of the human motion prediction algorithms are based on deterministic models, which may lead to risky decisions for robots. To solve this problem, we propose a probabilistic model for human motion prediction in this paper. The key idea of our approach is to extend the conventional deterministic motion prediction neural network to a Bayesian one. On one hand, our model could generate several future motions when given an observed motion sequence. On the other hand, by calculating the Epistemic Uncertainty and the Heteroscedastic Aleatoric Uncertainty, our model could tell the robot if the observation has been seen before and also give the optimal result among all possible predictions. We extensively validate our approach on a large scale benchmark dataset Human3.6m. The experiments show that our approach performs better than deterministic methods. We further evaluate our approach in a Human-Robot-Interaction (HRI) scenario. The experimental results show that our approach makes the interaction more efficient and safer.

Deep Representation Learning for Human Motion Prediction and Classification

Abstract: Generative models of 3D human motion are often restricted to a small number of activities and can therefore not generalize well to novel movements or applications. In this work we propose a deep learning framework for human motion capture data that learns a generic representation from a large corpus of motion capture data and generalizes well to new, unseen, motions. Using an encoding-decoding network that learns to predict future 3D poses from the most recent past, we extract a feature representation of human motion. Most work on deep learning for sequence prediction focuses on video and speech. Since skeletal data has a different structure, we present and evaluate different network architectures that make different assumptions about time dependencies and limb correlations. To quantify the learned features, we use the output of different layers for action classification and visualize the receptive fields of the network units. Our method outperforms the recent state of the art in skeletal motion prediction even though these use action specific training data. Our results show that deep feedforward networks, trained from a generic mocap database, can successfully be used for feature extraction from human motion data and that this representation can be used as a foundation for classification and prediction.

Convolutional Sequence to Sequence Model for Human Dynamics

Abstract: Human motion modeling is a classic problem in computer vision and graphics. Challenges in modeling human motion include high dimensional prediction as well as extremely complicated dynamics.We present a novel approach to human motion modeling based on convolutional neural networks (CNN). The hierarchical structure of CNN makes it capable of capturing both spatial and temporal correlations effectively. In our proposed approach, a convolutional long-term encoder is used to encode the whole given motion sequence into a long-term hidden variable, which is used with a decoder to predict the remainder of the sequence. The decoder itself also has an encoder-decoder structure, in which the short-term encoder encodes a shorter sequence to a short-term hidden variable, and the spatial decoder maps the long and short-term hidden variable to motion predictions. By using such a model, we are able to capture both invariant and dynamic information of human motion, which results in more accurate predictions. Experiments show that our algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the Human3.6M and CMU Motion Capture datasets. Our code is available at the project website1.

Learning Trajectory Dependencies for Human Motion Prediction

Abstract: Human motion prediction, i.e., forecasting future body poses given observed pose sequence, has typically been tackled with recurrent neural networks (RNNs). However, as evidenced by prior work, the resulted RNN models suffer from prediction errors accumulation, leading to undesired discontinuities in motion prediction. In this paper, we propose a simple feed-forward deep network for motion prediction, which takes into account both temporal smoothness and spatial dependencies among human body joints. In this context, we then propose to encode temporal information by working in trajectory space, instead of the traditionally-used pose space. This alleviates us from manually defining the range of temporal dependencies (or temporal convolutional filter size, as done in previous work). Moreover, spatial dependency of human pose is encoded by treating a human pose as a generic graph (rather than a human skeletal kinematic tree) formed by links between every pair of body joints. Instead of using a pre-defined graph structure, we design a new graph convolutional network to learn graph connectivity automatically. This allows the network to capture long range dependencies beyond that of human kinematic tree. We evaluate our approach on several standard benchmark datasets for motion prediction, including Human3.6M, the CMU motion capture dataset and 3DPW. Our experiments clearly demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves state of the art performance, and is applicable to both angle-based and position-based pose representations. The code is available at https://github.com/wei-mao-2019/LearnTrajDep

Learning Multiscale Correlations for Human Motion Prediction

Abstract: In spite of the great progress in human motion prediction, it is still a challenging task to predict those aperiodic and complicated motions. We believe that to capture the correlations among human body components is the key to understand the human motion. In this paper, we propose a novel multiscale graph convolution network (MGCN) to address this problem. Firstly, we design an adaptive multiscale interactional encoding module (MIEM) which is composed of two sub modules: scale transformation module and scale interaction module to learn the human body correlations. Secondly, we apply a coarse-to-fine decoding strategy to decode the motions sequentially. We evaluate our approach on two standard benchmark datasets for human motion prediction: Human3.6M and CMU motion capture dataset. The experiments show that the proposed approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance for both short-term and long-term prediction especially in those complicated action category.

Multitask Non-Autoregressive Model for Human Motion Prediction

Abstract: Human motion prediction, which aims at predicting future human skeletons given the past ones, is a typical sequence-to-sequence problem. Therefore, extensive efforts have been devoted to exploring different RNN-based encoder-decoder architectures. However, by generating target poses conditioned on the previously generated ones, these models are prone to bringing issues such as error accumulation problem. In this paper, we argue that such issue is mainly caused by adopting autoregressive manner. Hence, a novel Non-AuToregressive model (NAT) is proposed with a complete non-autoregressive decoding scheme, as well as a context encoder and a positional encoding module. More specifically, the context encoder embeds the given poses from temporal and spatial perspectives. The frame decoder is responsible for predicting each future pose independently. The positional encoding module injects positional signal into the model to indicate the temporal order. Besides, a multitask training paradigm is presented for both low-level human skeleton prediction and high-level human action recognition, resulting in the considerable improvement for the prediction task. Our approach is evaluated on Human3.6M and CMU-Mocap benchmarks and outperforms state-of-the-art autoregressive methods.

Multiscale Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Networks for 3D Skeleton-Based Motion Prediction

Abstract: We propose a multiscale spatio-temporal graph neural network (MST-GNN) to predict the future 3D skeleton-based human poses in an action-category-agnostic manner. The core of MST-GNN is a multiscale spatio-temporal graph that explicitly models the relations in motions at various spatial and temporal scales. Different from many previous hierarchical structures, our multiscale spatio-temporal graph is built in a data-adaptive fashion, which captures nonphysical, yet motion-based relations. The key module of MST-GNN is a multiscale spatio-temporal graph computational unit (MST-GCU) based on the trainable graph structure. MST-GCU embeds underlying features at individual scales and then fuses features across scales to obtain a comprehensive representation. The overall architecture of MST-GNN follows an encoder-decoder framework, where the encoder consists of a sequence of MST-GCUs to learn the spatial and temporal features of motions, and the decoder uses a graph-based attention gate recurrent unit (GA-GRU) to generate future poses. Extensive experiments are conducted to show that the proposed MST-GNN outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both short and long-term motion prediction on the datasets of Human 3.6M, CMU Mocap and 3DPW, where MST-GNN outperforms previous works by 5.33% and 3.67% of mean angle errors in average for short-term and long-term prediction on Human 3.6M, and by 11.84% and 4.71% of mean angle errors for short-term and long-term prediction on CMU Mocap, and by 1.13% of mean angle errors on 3DPW in average, respectively. We further investigate the learned multiscale graphs for interpretability.

Motion Prediction via Joint Dependency Modeling in Phase Space

Abstract: Motion prediction is a classic problem in computer vision, which aims at forecasting future motion given the observed pose sequence. Various deep learning models have been proposed, achieving state-of-the-art performance on motion prediction. However, existing methods typically focus on modeling temporal dynamics in the pose space. Unfortunately, the complicated and high dimensionality nature of human motion brings inherent challenges for dynamic context capturing. Therefore, we move away from the conventional pose based representation and present a novel approach employing a phase space trajectory representation of individual joints. Moreover, current methods tend to only consider the dependencies between physically connected joints. In this paper, we introduce a novel convolutional neural model to effectively leverage explicit prior knowledge of motion anatomy, and simultaneously capture both spatial and temporal information of joint trajectory dynamics. We then propose a global optimization module that learns the implicit relationships between individual joint features. Empirically, our method is evaluated on large-scale 3D human motion benchmark datasets (i.e., Human3.6M, CMU MoCap). These results demonstrate that our method sets the new state-of-the-art on the benchmark datasets. Our code will be available at https://github.com/Pose-Group/TEID.

HP-GAN: Probabilistic 3D Human Motion Prediction via GAN

Abstract: Predicting and understanding human motion dynamics has many applications, such as motion synthesis, augmented reality, security, and autonomous vehicles. Due to the recent success of generative adversarial networks (GAN), there has been much interest in probabilistic estimation and synthetic data generation using deep neural network architectures and learning algorithms. We propose a novel sequence-to-sequence model for probabilistic human motion prediction, trained with a modified version of improved Wasserstein generative adversarial networks (WGAN-GP), in which we use a custom loss function designed for human motion prediction. Our model, which we call HP-GAN, learns a probability density function of future human poses conditioned on previous poses. It predicts multiple sequences of possible future human poses, each from the same input sequence but a different vector z drawn from a random distribution. Furthermore, to quantify the quality of the non-deterministic predictions, we simultaneously train a motion-quality-assessment model that learns the probability that a given skeleton sequence is a real human motion. We test our algorithm on two of the largest skeleton datasets: NTURGB-D and Human3.6M. We train our model on both single and multiple action types. Its predictive power for long-term motion estimation is demonstrated by generating multiple plausible futures of more than 30 frames from just 10 frames of input. We show that most sequences generated from the same input have more than 50% probabilities of being judged as a real human sequence. We published all the code used in this paper to https://github.com/ebarsoum/hpgan.

BiHMP-GAN: Bidirectional 3D Human Motion Prediction GAN

Abstract: Human motion prediction model has applications in various fields of computer vision. Without taking into account the inherent stochasticity in the prediction of future pose dynamics, such methods often converges to a deterministic undesired mean of multiple probable outcomes. Devoid of this, we propose a novel probabilistic generative approach called Bidirectional Human motion prediction GAN, or BiHMP-GAN. To be able to generate multiple probable human-pose sequences, conditioned on a given starting sequence, we introduce a random extrinsic factor r, drawn from a predefined prior distribution. Furthermore, to enforce a direct content loss on the predicted motion sequence and also to avoid mode-collapse, a novel bidirectional framework is incorporated by modifying the usual discriminator architecture. The discriminator is trained also to regress this extrinsic factor r, which is used alongside with the intrinsic factor (encoded starting pose sequence) to generate a particular pose sequence. To further regularize the training, we introduce a novel recursive prediction strategy. In spite of being in a probabilistic framework, the enhanced discriminator architecture allows predictions of an intermediate part of pose sequence to be used as a conditioning for prediction of the latter part of the sequence. The bidirectional setup also provides a new direction to evaluate the prediction quality against a given test sequence. For a fair assessment of BiHMP-GAN, we report performance of the generated motion sequence using (i) a critic model trained to discriminate between real and fake motion sequence, and (ii) an action classifier trained on real human motion dynamics. Outcomes of both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, on the probabilistic generations of the model, demonstrate the superiority of BiHMP-GAN over previously available methods.

Aggregated Multi-GANs for Controlled 3D Human Motion Prediction

Abstract: Human motion prediction from historical pose sequence is at the core of many applications in machine intelligence. However, in current state-of-the-art methods, the predicted future motion is confined within the same activity. One can neither generate predictions that differ from the current activity, nor manipulate the body parts to explore various future possibilities. Undoubtedly, this greatly limits the usefulness and applicability of motion prediction. In this paper, we propose a generalization of the human motion prediction task in which control parameters can be readily incorporated to adjust the forecasted motion. Our method is compelling in that it enables manipulable motion prediction across activity types and allows customization of the human movement in a variety of fine-grained ways. To this aim, a simple yet effective composite GAN structure, consisting of local GANs for different body parts and aggregated via a global GAN is presented. The local GANs game in lower dimensions, while the global GAN adjusts in high dimensional space to avoid mode collapse. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art. The codes are available at https://github.com/herolvkd/AM-GAN.

Learning Human Motion Prediction via Stochastic Differential Equations

Abstract: Human motion understanding and prediction is an integral aspect in our pursuit of machine intelligence and human-machine interaction systems. Current methods typically pursue a kinematics modeling approach, relying heavily upon prior anatomical knowledge and constraints. However, such an approach is hard to generalize to different skeletal model representations, and also tends to be inadequate in accounting for the dynamic range and complexity of motion, thus hindering predictive accuracy. In this work, we propose a novel approach in modeling the motion prediction problem based on stochastic differential equations and path integrals. The motion profile of each skeletal joint is formulated as a basic stochastic variable and modeled with the Langevin equation. We develop a strategy of employing GANs to simulate path integrals that amounts to optimizing over possible future paths. We conduct experiments in two large benchmark datasets, Human 3.6M and CMU MoCap. It is highlighted that our approach achieves a 12.48% accuracy improvement over current state-of-the-art methods in average.

Convolution Network methods table

RNN-based Methods    With the examples of the successful applications in voice recognition {{cite:68886eb}}, {{cite:66f747c}}, machine translation {{cite:7fa9963}}, {{cite:f161eb3}}, and sequential prediction {{cite:0cc8cd0}}, {{cite:8210c63}}, RNNs (LSTM, GRU, and their variants) have become a widely used framework for the human motion prediction task.
It is normally deemed as sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) prediction tasks, where RNNs are adopted in solving. However, for the human motion prediction, a major distinction from other seq2seq tasks is that the human body is a human kinematics system with high constraints.
Therefore, some RNN structures particularly for human motion prediction are proposed.
As shown in Tab {{table:ca058cb3-fd6e-44dc-b1dd-b7c54034d3f9}} , these kinds of methods include: LSTM-3LR {{cite:882d948}}, ERD {{cite:2dd6132}}, Res-GRU {{cite:882d948}}, SRNN {{cite:eceeff9}}, DAE-LSTM {{cite:ed47f01}}, AGED {{cite:727dcad}}, MHU {{cite:f3c109b}}, QuaterNet {{cite:f4b0f21}}, SkelNet {{cite:2e4b7d2}}, DSR {{cite:6688270}}, HMR {{cite:1b3b377}}, RNN-SPL {{cite:d3f4eaa}}, VGRU {{cite:8abd638}}, C-RNN {{cite:cac9417}}, PVRED {{cite:938b1bd}}, BNN {{cite:c8e88f2}}.


Forecasting Daily Volume and Acuity of Patients in the Emergency Department

Abstract: This study aimed at analyzing the performance of four forecasting models in predicting the demand for medical care in terms of daily visits in an emergency department (ED) that handles high complexity cases, testing the influence of climatic and calendrical factors on demand behavior. We tested different mathematical models to forecast ED daily visits at Hospital de Clínicas de Porto Alegre (HCPA), which is a tertiary care teaching hospital located in Southern Brazil. Model accuracy was evaluated using mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), considering forecasting horizons of 1, 7, 14, 21, and 30 days. The demand time series was stratified according to patient classification using the Manchester Triage System's (MTS) criteria. Models tested were the simple seasonal exponential smoothing (SS), seasonal multiplicative Holt-Winters (SMHW), seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average (SARIMA), and multivariate autoregressive integrated moving average (MSARIMA). Performance of models varied according to patient classification, such that SS was the best choice when all types of patients were jointly considered, and SARIMA was the most accurate for modeling demands of very urgent (VU) and urgent (U) patients. The MSARIMA models taking into account climatic factors did not improve the performance of the SARIMA models, independent of patient classification.

Forecasting Patient Flows with Pandemic Induced Concept Drift using Explainable Machine Learning

Abstract: Accurately forecasting patient arrivals at Urgent Care Clinics (UCCs) and Emergency Departments (EDs) is important for effective resourcing and patient care. However, correctly estimating patient flows is not straightforward since it depends on many drivers. The predictability of patient arrivals has recently been further complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic conditions and the resulting lockdowns. This study investigates how a suite of novel quasi-real-time variables like Google search terms, pedestrian traffic, the prevailing incidence levels of influenza, as well as the COVID-19 Alert Level indicators can both generally improve the forecasting models of patient flows and effectively adapt the models to the unfolding disruptions of pandemic conditions. This research also uniquely contributes to the body of work in this domain by employing tools from the eXplainable AI field to investigate more deeply the internal mechanics of the models than has previously been done. The Voting ensemble-based method combining machine learning and statistical techniques was the most reliable in our experiments. Our study showed that the prevailing COVID-19 Alert Level feature together with Google search terms and pedestrian traffic were effective at producing generalisable forecasts. The implications of this study are that proxy variables can effectively augment standard autoregressive features to ensure accurate forecasting of patient flows. The experiments showed that the proposed features are potentially effective model inputs for preserving forecast accuracies in the event of future pandemic outbreaks.

Summary of literature predicting total daily patient flows in EDs, highlighting forecasting horizons, best algorithms and the accuracies achieved.

We review published literature which is most comparable to our work in terms of studies that have predominately investigated the forecasting of total daily volumes of patient arrivals. We also focused on studies which reported their forecasting accuracies in terms of the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (defined in Equation REF ) which to some degree enables comparisons across different studies. Forecast horizons in terms of the number of days ahead being estimated are relevant for this study, and these are also highlighted and summarised where possible in Table {{table:c7a6b23c-bf98-4f90-afcf-b470806251b3}} .

It is also observable through MAPE scores that the predictability of Clinic 2 patient flows is generally lower than that of Clinic 1. This is attributable to overall lower patient flows at Clinic 2 which predisposes it to more variability and thus higher unpredictability. This result underscores the limitations of blindly using the MAPE measure for comparisons across different studies without taking volumes into consideration since the magnitude of the total patient volumes affects variability and consequently, predictability. In saying that, comparative studies from reported literature cite MAPE accuracies ranging from 7.6% to 10.7% for 7-day forecasts (Table {{table:c7a6b23c-bf98-4f90-afcf-b470806251b3}} ) which provides some context for the 9% and 13.1% accuracies achieved by Clinics 1 and 2 respectively, taking into account that the prior studies did not cover the pandemic period.


Visual-based Dialogue Strategies Optimization

Pre-trained Vision Language Model-based VAD

Capturing related visual region through an associative attention memory.

Selectively referring dialogue history to refine the visual attention until referencing the answer.

Establishing mapping of visual object and textual entities to exclude undesired visual content.

Enhancing response generator with discriminator by RL reward.

Maximizing the information gain while asking questions with a RL paradigm for explicit dialogue goals.

Training unified Transformer encoder initialized by BERT with two visual training objectives.

Utilizing GPT-2 to capture cross-modal semantic dependencies.

Simulating Dual-coding theory of human cognition to adaptively find query-related information from the image.

Asking questions to confirm the conjecture of models about the referent guided by human cognitive literature.

Visual Reference Resolution using Attention Memory for Visual Dialog

Abstract: Visual dialog is a task of answering a series of inter-dependent questions given an input image, and often requires to resolve visual references among the questions. This problem is different from visual question answering (VQA), which relies on spatial attention (a.k.a. visual grounding) estimated from an image and question pair. We propose a novel attention mechanism that exploits visual attentions in the past to resolve the current reference in the visual dialog scenario. The proposed model is equipped with an associative attention memory storing a sequence of previous (attention, key) pairs. From this memory, the model retrieves the previous attention, taking into account recency, which is most relevant for the current question, in order to resolve potentially ambiguous references. The model then merges the retrieved attention with a tentative one to obtain the final attention for the current question; specifically, we use dynamic parameter prediction to combine the two attentions conditioned on the question. Through extensive experiments on a new synthetic visual dialog dataset, we show that our model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art (by ~16 % points) in situations, where visual reference resolution plays an important role. Moreover, the proposed model achieves superior performance (~ 2 % points improvement) in the Visual Dialog dataset, despite having significantly fewer parameters than the baselines.

Recursive Visual Attention in Visual Dialog

Abstract: Visual dialog is a challenging vision-language task, which requires the agent to answer multi-round questions about an image. It typically needs to address two major problems: (1) How to answer visually-grounded questions, which is the core challenge in visual question answering (VQA); (2) How to infer the co-reference between questions and the dialog history. An example of visual co-reference is: pronouns (\eg, ``they'') in the question (\eg, ``Are they on or off?'') are linked with nouns (\eg, ``lamps'') appearing in the dialog history (\eg, ``How many lamps are there?'') and the object grounded in the image. In this work, to resolve the visual co-reference for visual dialog, we propose a novel attention mechanism called Recursive Visual Attention (RvA). Specifically, our dialog agent browses the dialog history until the agent has sufficient confidence in the visual co-reference resolution, and refines the visual attention recursively. The quantitative and qualitative experimental results on the large-scale VisDial v0.9 and v1.0 datasets demonstrate that the proposed RvA not only outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, but also achieves reasonable recursion and interpretable attention maps without additional annotations. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/yuleiniu/rva}.

Multimodal Incremental Transformer with Visual Grounding for Visual Dialogue Generation

Abstract: Visual dialogue is a challenging task since it needs to answer a series of coherent questions on the basis of understanding the visual environment. Previous studies focus on the implicit exploration of multimodal co-reference by implicitly attending to spatial image features or object-level image features but neglect the importance of locating the objects explicitly in the visual content, which is associated with entities in the textual content. Therefore, in this paper we propose a {\bf M}ultimodal {\bf I}ncremental {\bf T}ransformer with {\bf V}isual {\bf G}rounding, named MITVG, which consists of two key parts: visual grounding and multimodal incremental transformer. Visual grounding aims to explicitly locate related objects in the image guided by textual entities, which helps the model exclude the visual content that does not need attention. On the basis of visual grounding, the multimodal incremental transformer encodes the multi-turn dialogue history combined with visual scene step by step according to the order of the dialogue and then generates a contextually and visually coherent response. Experimental results on the VisDial v0.9 and v1.0 datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model, which achieves comparable performance.

Are You Talking to Me? Reasoned Visual Dialog Generation Through Adversarial Learning

Abstract: The visual dialog task requires an agent to engage in a conversation about an image with a human. It represents an extension of the visual question answering task in that the agent needs to answer a question about an image, but it needs to do so in light of the previous dialog that has taken place. The key challenge in visual dialog is thus maintaining a consistent, and natural dialog while continuing to answer questions correctly. We present a novel approach that combines Reinforcement Learning and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANS) to generate more human-like responses to questions. The GAN helps overcome the relative paucity of training data, and the tendency of the typical MLE-based approach to generate overly terse answers. Critically, the GAN is tightly integrated into the attention mechanism that generates human-interpretable reasons for each answer. This means that the discriminative model of the GAN has the task of assessing whether a candidate answer is generated by a human or not, given the provided reason. This is significant because it drives the generative model to produce high quality answers that are well supported by the associated reasoning. The method also generates the state-of-the-art results on the primary benchmark.

What Should I Ask? Using Conversationally Informative Rewards for Goal-oriented Visual Dialog.

Abstract: The ability to engage in goal-oriented conversations has allowed humans to gain knowledge, reduce uncertainty, and perform tasks more efficiently. Artificial agents, however, are still far behind humans in having goal-driven conversations. In this work, we focus on the task of goal-oriented visual dialogue, aiming to automatically generate a series of questions about an image with a single objective. This task is challenging since these questions must not only be consistent with a strategy to achieve a goal, but also consider the contextual information in the image. We propose an end-to-end goal-oriented visual dialogue system, that combines reinforcement learning with regularized information gain. Unlike previous approaches that have been proposed for the task, our work is motivated by the Rational Speech Act framework, which models the process of human inquiry to reach a goal. We test the two versions of our model on the GuessWhat?! dataset, obtaining significant results that outperform the current state-of-the-art models in the task of generating questions to find an undisclosed object in an image.

VD-BERT: A Unified Vision and Dialog Transformer with BERT

Abstract: Visual dialog is a challenging vision-language task, where a dialog agent needs to answer a series of questions through reasoning on the image content and dialog history. Prior work has mostly focused on various attention mechanisms to model such intricate interactions. By contrast, in this work, we propose VD-BERT, a simple yet effective framework of unified vision-dialog Transformer that leverages the pretrained BERT language models for Visual Dialog tasks. The model is unified in that (1) it captures all the interactions between the image and the multi-turn dialog using a single-stream Transformer encoder, and (2) it supports both answer ranking and answer generation seamlessly through the same architecture. More crucially, we adapt BERT for the effective fusion of vision and dialog contents via visually grounded training. Without the need of pretraining on external vision-language data, our model yields new state of the art, achieving the top position in both single-model and ensemble settings (74.54 and 75.35 NDCG scores) on the visual dialog leaderboard. Our code and pretrained models are released at https://github.com/salesforce/VD-BERT.

Video-Grounded Dialogues with Pretrained Generation Language Models

Abstract: Pre-trained language models have shown remarkable success in improving various downstream NLP tasks due to their ability to capture dependencies in textual data and generate natural responses. In this paper, we leverage the power of pre-trained language models for improving video-grounded dialogue, which is very challenging and involves complex features of different dynamics: (1) Video features which can extend across both spatial and temporal dimensions; and (2) Dialogue features which involve semantic dependencies over multiple dialogue turns. We propose a framework by extending GPT-2 models to tackle these challenges by formulating video-grounded dialogue tasks as a sequence-to-sequence task, combining both visual and textual representation into a structured sequence, and fine-tuning a large pre-trained GPT-2 network. Our framework allows fine-tuning language models to capture dependencies across multiple modalities over different levels of information: spatio-temporal level in video and token-sentence level in dialogue context. We achieve promising improvement on the Audio-Visual Scene-Aware Dialogues (AVSD) benchmark from DSTC7, which supports a potential direction in this line of research.

DualVD: An Adaptive Dual Encoding Model for Deep Visual Understanding in Visual Dialogue

Abstract: Different from Visual Question Answering task that requires to answer only one question about an image, Visual Dialogue involves multiple questions which cover a broad range of visual content that could be related to any objects, relationships or semantics. The key challenge in Visual Dialogue task is thus to learn a more comprehensive and semantic-rich image representation which may have adaptive attentions on the image for variant questions. In this research, we propose a novel model to depict an image from both visual and semantic perspectives. Specifically, the visual view helps capture the appearance-level information, including objects and their relationships, while the semantic view enables the agent to understand high-level visual semantics from the whole image to the local regions. Futhermore, on top of such multi-view image features, we propose a feature selection framework which is able to adaptively capture question-relevant information hierarchically in fine-grained level. The proposed method achieved state-of-the-art results on benchmark Visual Dialogue datasets. More importantly, we can tell which modality (visual or semantic) has more contribution in answering the current question by visualizing the gate values. It gives us insights in understanding of human cognition in Visual Dialogue.

Looking for Confirmations: An Effective and Human-Like Visual Dialogue Strategy

Abstract: Generating goal-oriented questions in Visual Dialogue tasks is a challenging and long-standing problem. State-Of-The-Art systems are shown to generate questions that, although grammatically correct, often lack an effective strategy and sound unnatural to humans. Inspired by the cognitive literature on information search and cross-situational word learning, we design Confirm-it, a model based on a beam search re-ranking algorithm that guides an effective goal-oriented strategy by asking questions that confirm the model's conjecture about the referent. We take the GuessWhat?! game as a case-study. We show that dialogues generated by Confirm-it are more natural and effective than beam search decoding without re-ranking.

A summary of representative works according to resolved problems.

The phenomenon of co-reference in human language makes coreference resolution, which aims at recognizing noun phrases or pronouns representing of the same entity, be a fundamental research field in NLP communities {{cite:817b2c7}}, {{cite:7a2061e}}, {{cite:69e0b76}}. As for VAD, the problem evolves into visual reference resolution, which is the key component for visual dialogue agents to explicitly and accurately locate related objects in images and videos guided by textual entities in the input query and dialogue history, for intensive understanding of visual information. Fig.  shows an dialogue example with visual reference resolutions. The concerned entity that the entire dialogue focused on is boat, which is referred to by various pronouns (the closer one, it, the one in the distance) in the three subsequent rounds of the conversation. To response these questions accurately, VAD needs to conduct visual reference resolution to completely understand the dialogue context and reason over visual information. In this section, we summarize researches contributed to visual reference resolution for VAD and representative researches to address challenges in the subsequent subsections are summarized in Table {{table:5e79e761-518c-4e1d-b01a-295d7f2dc40d}} .


The Art of The Scam: Demystifying Honeypots in Ethereum Smart Contracts

Abstract: Modern blockchains, such as Ethereum, enable the execution of so-called smart contracts - programs that are executed across a decentralised network of nodes. As smart contracts become more popular and carry more value, they become more of an interesting target for attackers. In the past few years, several smart contracts have been exploited by attackers. However, a new trend towards a more proactive approach seems to be on the rise, where attackers do not search for vulnerable contracts anymore. Instead, they try to lure their victims into traps by deploying seemingly vulnerable contracts that contain hidden traps. This new type of contracts is commonly referred to as honeypots. In this paper, we present the first systematic analysis of honeypot smart contracts, by investigating their prevalence, behaviour and impact on the Ethereum blockchain. We develop a taxonomy of honeypot techniques and use this to build HoneyBadger - a tool that employs symbolic execution and well defined heuristics to expose honeypots. We perform a large-scale analysis on more than 2 million smart contracts and show that our tool not only achieves high precision, but is also highly efficient. We identify 690 honeypot smart contracts as well as 240 victims in the wild, with an accumulated profit of more than $90,000 for the honeypot creators. Our manual validation shows that 87% of the reported contracts are indeed honeypots.

Vandal: A Scalable Security Analysis Framework for Smart Contracts

Abstract: The rise of modern blockchains has facilitated the emergence of smart contracts: autonomous programs that live and run on the blockchain. Smart contracts have seen a rapid climb to prominence, with applications predicted in law, business, commerce, and governance. Smart contracts are commonly written in a high-level language such as Ethereum's Solidity, and translated to compact low-level bytecode for deployment on the blockchain. Once deployed, the bytecode is autonomously executed, usually by a %Turing-complete virtual machine. As with all programs, smart contracts can be highly vulnerable to malicious attacks due to deficient programming methodologies, languages, and toolchains, including buggy compilers. At the same time, smart contracts are also high-value targets, often commanding large amounts of cryptocurrency. Hence, developers and auditors need security frameworks capable of analysing low-level bytecode to detect potential security vulnerabilities. In this paper, we present Vandal: a security analysis framework for Ethereum smart contracts. Vandal consists of an analysis pipeline that converts low-level Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) bytecode to semantic logic relations. Users of the framework can express security analyses in a declarative fashion: a security analysis is expressed in a logic specification written in the \souffle language. We conduct a large-scale empirical study for a set of common smart contract security vulnerabilities, and show the effectiveness and efficiency of Vandal. Vandal is both fast and robust, successfully analysing over 95\% of all 141k unique contracts with an average runtime of 4.15 seconds; outperforming the current state of the art tools---Oyente, EthIR, Mythril, and Rattle---under equivalent conditions.

Finding The Greedy, Prodigal, and Suicidal Contracts at Scale

Abstract: Smart contracts---stateful executable objects hosted on blockchains like Ethereum---carry billions of dollars worth of coins and cannot be updated once deployed. We present a new systematic characterization of a class of trace vulnerabilities, which result from analyzing multiple invocations of a contract over its lifetime. We focus attention on three example properties of such trace vulnerabilities: finding contracts that either lock funds indefinitely, leak them carelessly to arbitrary users, or can be killed by anyone. We implemented MAIAN, the first tool for precisely specifying and reasoning about trace properties, which employs inter-procedural symbolic analysis and concrete validator for exhibiting real exploits. Our analysis of nearly one million contracts flags 34,200 (2,365 distinct) contracts vulnerable, in 10 seconds per contract. On a subset of3,759 contracts which we sampled for concrete validation and manual analysis, we reproduce real exploits at a true positive rate of 89%, yielding exploits for3,686 contracts. Our tool finds exploits for the infamous Parity bug that indirectly locked 200 million dollars worth in Ether, which previous analyses failed to capture.

sCompile: Critical Path Identification and Analysis for Smart Contracts

Abstract: Ethereum smart contracts are an innovation built on top of the blockchain technology, which provides a platform for automatically executing contracts in an anonymous, distributed, and trusted way. The problem is magnified by the fact that smart contracts, unlike ordinary programs, cannot be patched easily once deployed. It is important for smart contracts to be checked against potential vulnerabilities. In this work, we propose an alternative approach to automatically identify critical program paths (with multiple function calls including inter-contract function calls) in a smart contract, rank the paths according to their criticalness, discard them if they are infeasible or otherwise present them with user friendly warnings for user inspection. We identify paths which involve monetary transaction as critical paths, and prioritize those which potentially violate important properties. For scalability, symbolic execution techniques are only applied to top ranked critical paths. Our approach has been implemented in a tool called sCompile, which has been applied to 36,099 smart contracts. The experiment results show that sCompile is efficient, i.e., 5 seconds on average for one smart contract. Furthermore, we show that many known vulnerabilities can be captured if user inspects as few as 10 program paths generated by sCompile. Lastly, sCompile discovered 224 unknown vulnerabilities with a false positive rate of 15.4% before user inspection.

Securify: Practical Security Analysis of Smart Contracts

Abstract: Permissionless blockchains allow the execution of arbitrary programs (called smart contracts), enabling mutually untrusted entities to interact without relying on trusted third parties. Despite their potential, repeated security concerns have shaken the trust in handling billions of USD by smart contracts. To address this problem, we present Securify, a security analyzer for Ethereum smart contracts that is scalable, fully automated, and able to prove contract behaviors as safe/unsafe with respect to a given property. Securify's analysis consists of two steps. First, it symbolically analyzes the contract's dependency graph to extract precise semantic information from the code. Then, it checks compliance and violation patterns that capture sufficient conditions for proving if a property holds or not. To enable extensibility, all patterns are specified in a designated domain-specific language. Securify is publicly released, it has analyzed >18K contracts submitted by its users, and is regularly used to conduct security audits by experts. We present an extensive evaluation of Securify over real-world Ethereum smart contracts and demonstrate that it can effectively prove the correctness of smart contracts and discover critical violations.

ContractFuzzer: Fuzzing Smart Contracts for Vulnerability Detection

Abstract: Decentralized cryptocurrencies feature the use of blockchain to transfer values among peers on networks without central agency. Smart contracts are programs running on top of the blockchain consensus protocol to enable people make agreements while minimizing trusts. Millions of smart contracts have been deployed in various decentralized applications. The security vulnerabilities within those smart contracts pose significant threats to their applications. Indeed, many critical security vulnerabilities within smart contracts on Ethereum platform have caused huge financial losses to their users. In this work, we present ContractFuzzer, a novel fuzzer to test Ethereum smart contracts for security vulnerabilities. ContractFuzzer generates fuzzing inputs based on the ABI specifications of smart contracts, defines test oracles to detect security vulnerabilities, instruments the EVM to log smart contracts runtime behaviors, and analyzes these logs to report security vulnerabilities. Our fuzzing of 6991 smart contracts has flagged more than 459 vulnerabilities with high precision. In particular, our fuzzing tool successfully detects the vulnerability of the DAO contract that leads to $60 million loss and the vulnerabilities of Parity Wallet that have led to the loss of $30 million and the freezing of $150 million worth of Ether.

EVMFuzz: Differential Fuzz Testing of Ethereum Virtual Machine

Abstract: Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is the run-time environment for smart contracts and its vulnerabilities may lead to serious problems to the Ethereum ecology. With lots of techniques being developed for the validation of smart contracts, the security problems of EVM have not been well-studied. In this paper, we propose EVMFuzz, aiming to detect vulnerabilities of EVMs with differential fuzz testing. The core idea of EVMFuzz is to continuously generate seed contracts for different EVMs' execution, so as to find as many inconsistencies among execution results as possible, eventually discover vulnerabilities with output cross-referencing. First, we present the evaluation metric for the internal inconsistency indicator, such as the opcode sequence executed and gas used. Then, we construct seed contracts via a set of predefined mutators and employ dynamic priority scheduling algorithm to guide seed contracts selection and maximize the inconsistency. Finally, we leverage different EVMs as crossreferencing oracles to avoid manual checking of the execution output. For evaluation, we conducted large-scale mutation on 36,295 real-world smart contracts and generated 253,153 smart contracts. Among them, 66.2% showed differential performance, including 1,596 variant contracts triggered inconsistent output among EVMs. Accompanied by manual root cause analysis, we found 5 previously unknown security bugs in four widely used EVMs, and all had been included in Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database.

sFuzz: An Efficient Adaptive Fuzzer for Solidity Smart Contracts

Abstract: Smart contracts are Turing-complete programs that execute on the infrastructure of the blockchain, which often manage valuable digital assets. Solidity is one of the most popular programming languages for writing smart contracts on the Ethereum platform. Like traditional programs, smart contracts may contain vulnerabilities. Unlike traditional programs, smart contracts cannot be easily patched once they are deployed. It is thus important that smart contracts are tested thoroughly before deployment. In this work, we present an adaptive fuzzer for smart contracts on the Ethereum platform called sFuzz. Compared to existing Solidity fuzzers, sFuzz combines the strategy in the AFL fuzzer and an efficient lightweight multi-objective adaptive strategy targeting those hard-to-cover branches. sFuzz has been applied to more than 4 thousand smart contracts and the experimental results show that (1) sFuzz is efficient, e.g., two orders of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art tools; (2) sFuzz is effective in achieving high code coverage and discovering vulnerabilities; and (3) the different fuzzing strategies in sFuzz complement each other.

Exploiting The Laws of Order in Smart Contracts

Abstract: We investigate a family of bugs in blockchain-based smart contracts, which we call event-ordering (or EO) bugs. These bugs are intimately related to the dynamic ordering of contract events, i.e., calls of its functions on the blockchain, and enable potential exploits of millions of USD worth of Ether. Known examples of such bugs and prior techniques to detect them have been restricted to a small number of event orderings, typicall 1 or 2. Our work provides a new formulation of this general class of EO bugs as finding concurrency properties arising in long permutations of such events. The technical challenge in detecting our formulation of EO bugs is the inherent combinatorial blowup in path and state space analysis, even for simple contracts. We propose the first use of partial-order reduction techniques, using happen-before relations extracted automatically for contracts, along with several other optimizations built on a dynamic symbolic execution technique. We build an automatic tool called ETHRACER that requires no hints from users and runs directly on Ethereum bytecode. It flags 7-11% of over ten thousand contracts analyzed in roughly 18.5 minutes per contract, providing compact event traces that human analysts can run as witnesses. These witnesses are so compact that confirmations require only a few minutes of human effort. Half of the flagged contracts have subtle EO bugs, including in ERC-20 contracts that carry hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Ether. Thus, ETHRACER is effective at detecting a subtle yet dangerous class of bugs which existing tools miss.

Hunting the Ethereum Smart Contract: Color-inspired Inspection of Potential Attacks

Abstract: Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies are gaining unprecedented popularity and understanding. Meanwhile, Ethereum is gaining a significant popularity in the blockchain community, mainly due to the fact that it is designed in a way that enables developers to write smart contract and decentralized applications (Dapps). This new paradigm of applications opens the door to many possibilities and opportunities. However, the security of Ethereum smart contracts has not received much attention; several Ethereum smart contracts malfunctioning have recently been reported. Unlike many previous works that have applied static and dynamic analyses to find bugs in smart contracts, we do not attempt to define and extract any features; instead we focus on reducing the expert's labor costs. We first present a new in-depth analysis of potential attacks methodology and then translate the bytecode of solidity into RGB color code. After that, we transform them to a fixed-sized encoded image. Finally, the encoded image is fed to convolutional neural network (CNN) for automatic feature extraction and learning, detecting compiler bugs of Ethereum smart contract.

Towards Safer Smart Contracts: A Sequence Learning Approach to Detecting Security Threats

Abstract: Symbolic analysis of security exploits in smart contracts has demonstrated to be valuable for analyzing predefined vulnerability properties. While some symbolic tools perform complex analysis steps, they require a predetermined invocation depth to search vulnerable execution paths, and the search time increases with depth. The number of contracts on blockchains like Ethereum has increased 176 fold since December 2015. If these symbolic tools fail to analyze the increasingly large number of contracts in time, entire classes of exploits could cause irrevocable damage. In this paper, we aim to have safer smart contracts against emerging threats. We propose the approach of sequential learning of smart contract weaknesses using machine learning---long-short term memory (LSTM)---that allows us to be able to detect new attack trends relatively quickly, leading to safer smart contracts. Our experimental studies on 620,000 smart contracts prove that our model can easily scale to analyze a massive amount of contracts; that is, the LSTM maintains near constant analysis time as contracts increase in complexity. In addition, our approach achieves $99\%$ test accuracy and correctly analyzes contracts that were false positive (FP) errors made by a symbolic tool.

Checking Smart Contracts With Structural Code Embedding

Abstract: Smart contracts have been increasingly used together with blockchains to automate financial and business transactions. However, many bugs and vulnerabilities have been identified in many contracts which raises serious concerns about smart contract security, not to mention that the blockchain systems on which the smart contracts are built can be buggy. Thus, there is a significant need to better maintain smart contract code and ensure its high reliability. In this paper, we propose an automated approach to learn characteristics of smart contracts in Solidity, which is useful for clone detection, bug detection and contract validation on smart contracts. Our new approach is based on word embeddings and vector space comparison. We parse smart contract code into word streams with code structural information, convert code elements (e.g., statements, functions) into numerical vectors that are supposed to encode the code syntax and semantics, and compare the similarities among the vectors encoding code and known bugs, to identify potential issues. We have implemented the approach in a prototype, named SmartEmbed,11.The anonymous replication packages can be accessed at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kauLT3y2IiHPkUlVx4FSTda-dVAyL4za/view?usp=sharing. and evaluated it with more than 22,000 smart contracts collected from the Ethereum blockchain. Results show that our tool can effectively identify many repetitive instances of Solidity code, where the clone ratio is around 90 percent. Code clones such as type-III or even type-IV semantic clones can also be detected accurately. Our tool can identify more than 1000 clone related bugs based on our bug databases efficiently and accurately. Our tool can also help to efficiently validate any given smart contract against a known set of bugs, which can help to improve the users’ confidence in the reliability of the contract.

Literature of Offline Checking Methods

Table {{table:958da4ae-33a7-4693-ab82-f07db51cd3ef}}  summarises the 31 publications which use offline checking methods to help maintain smart contracts. Developers can use the proposed methods to check for security vulnerabilities to help them to maintain smart contracts. For example, using the proposed methods to locate bugs during corrective maintenance, and checking for vulnerabilities of the update versions before redeploying them to Ethereum. We divide the methods presented in these papers into five categories – program analysis, fuzzing, formal verification, machine learning, and others. In the following subsections, we discuss some key examples.


RL-based data redistributor + CNN/PCNN + Result-driven reward

PCNN (Sentence) + Cross-relation Cross-bag Selective Attention

CNN/PCNN (sentence) + GCN + Knowledge-aware attention

Robust Distant Supervision Relation Extraction via Deep Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: Distant supervision has become the standard method for relation extraction. However, even though it is an efficient method, it does not come at no cost—The resulted distantly-supervised training samples are often very noisy. To combat the noise, most of the recent state-of-the-art approaches focus on selecting one-best sentence or calculating soft attention weights over the set of the sentences of one specific entity pair. However, these methods are suboptimal, and the false positive problem is still a key stumbling bottleneck for the performance. We argue that those incorrectly-labeled candidate sentences must be treated with a hard decision, rather than being dealt with soft attention weights. To do this, our paper describes a radical solution—We explore a deep reinforcement learning strategy to generate the false-positive indicator, where we automatically recognize false positives for each relation type without any supervised information. Unlike the removal operation in the previous studies, we redistribute them into the negative examples. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy significantly improves the performance of distant supervision comparing to state-of-the-art systems.

DSGAN: Generative Adversarial Training for Distant Supervision Relation Extraction

Abstract: Distant supervision can effectively label data for relation extraction, but suffers from the noise labeling problem. Recent works mainly perform soft bag-level noise reduction strategies to find the relatively better samples in a sentence bag, which is suboptimal compared with making a hard decision of false positive samples in sentence level. In this paper, we introduce an adversarial learning framework, which we named DSGAN, to learn a sentence-level true-positive generator. Inspired by Generative Adversarial Networks, we regard the positive samples generated by the generator as the negative samples to train the discriminator. The optimal generator is obtained until the discrimination ability of the discriminator has the greatest decline. We adopt the generator to filter distant supervision training dataset and redistribute the false positive instances into the negative set, in which way to provide a cleaned dataset for relation classification. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy significantly improves the performance of distant supervision relation extraction comparing to state-of-the-art systems.

Distant Supervision Relation Extraction with Intra-Bag and Inter-Bag Attentions

Abstract: This paper presents a neural relation extraction method to deal with the noisy training data generated by distant supervision. Previous studies mainly focus on sentence-level de-noising by designing neural networks with intra-bag attentions. In this paper, both intra-bag and inter-bag attentions are considered in order to deal with the noise at sentence-level and bag-level respectively. First, relation-aware bag representations are calculated by weighting sentence embeddings using intra-bag attentions. Here, each possible relation is utilized as the query for attention calculation instead of only using the target relation in conventional methods. Furthermore, the representation of a group of bags in the training set which share the same relation label is calculated by weighting bag representations using a similarity-based inter-bag attention module. Finally, a bag group is utilized as a training sample when building our relation extractor. Experimental results on the New York Times dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed intra-bag and inter-bag attention modules. Our method also achieves better relation extraction accuracy than state-of-the-art methods on this dataset.

Cross-relation Cross-bag Attention for Distantly-supervised Relation Extraction

Abstract: Distant supervision leverages knowledge bases to automatically label instances, thus allowing us to train relation extractor without human annotations. However, the generated training data typically contain massive noise, and may result in poor performances with the vanilla supervised learning. In this paper, we propose to conduct multi-instance learning with a novel Cross-relation Cross-bag Selective Attention (C2SA), which leads to noise-robust training for distant supervised relation extractor. Specifically, we employ the sentence-level selective attention to reduce the effect of noisy or mismatched sentences, while the correlation among relations were captured to improve the quality of attention weights. Moreover, instead of treating all entity-pairs equally, we try to pay more attention to entity-pairs with a higher quality. Similarly, we adopt the selective attention mechanism to achieve this goal. Experiments with two types of relation extractor demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach over the state-of-the-art, while further ablation studies verify our intuitions and demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed two techniques.

RESIDE: Improving Distantly-Supervised Neural Relation Extraction using Side Information

Abstract: Distantly-supervised Relation Extraction (RE) methods train an extractor by automatically aligning relation instances in a Knowledge Base (KB) with unstructured text. In addition to relation instances, KBs often contain other relevant side information, such as aliases of relations (e.g., founded and co-founded are aliases for the relation founderOfCompany). RE models usually ignore such readily available side information. In this paper, we propose RESIDE, a distantly-supervised neural relation extraction method which utilizes additional side information from KBs for improved relation extraction. It uses entity type and relation alias information for imposing soft constraints while predicting relations. RESIDE employs Graph Convolution Networks (GCN) to encode syntactic information from text and improves performance even when limited side information is available. Through extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, we demonstrate RESIDE’s effectiveness. We have made RESIDE’s source code available to encourage reproducible research.

Long-tail Relation Extraction via Knowledge Graph Embeddings and Graph Convolution Networks

Abstract: We propose a distance supervised relation extraction approach for long-tailed, imbalanced data which is prevalent in real-world settings. Here, the challenge is to learn accurate “few-shot” models for classes existing at the tail of the class distribution, for which little data is available. Inspired by the rich semantic correlations between classes at the long tail and those at the head, we take advantage of the knowledge from data-rich classes at the head of the distribution to boost the performance of the data-poor classes at the tail. First, we propose to leverage implicit relational knowledge among class labels from knowledge graph embeddings and learn explicit relational knowledge using graph convolution networks. Second, we integrate that relational knowledge into relation extraction model by coarse-to-fine knowledge-aware attention mechanism. We demonstrate our results for a large-scale benchmark dataset which show that our approach significantly outperforms other baselines, especially for long-tail relations.

Comparison of popular models for distant supervision relation extraction/relation classification.

Distant Supervised Relation Extraction/Classification

Deep learning approaches also consider external knowledge to improve distance supervised relation extraction, such as incorporating the knowledge graph embeddings of entities into models {{cite:876ff46}}. RESIDE {{cite:b443366}} further uses a syntactic graph with side information for GCN-based representations. We compare these popular achievements in Table {{table:b347f863-6a4b-4355-bb4c-452b35210d41}} .


Semantic Brain Decoding: from fMRI to conceptually similar image reconstruction of visual stimuli

Abstract: Brain decoding is a field of computational neuroscience that uses measurable brain activity to infer mental states or internal representations of perceptual inputs. Therefore, we propose a novel approach to brain decoding that also relies on semantic and contextual similarity. We employ an fMRI dataset of natural image vision and create a deep learning decoding pipeline inspired by the existence of both bottom-up and top-down processes in human vision. We train a linear brain-to-feature model to map fMRI activity features to visual stimuli features, assuming that the brain projects visual information onto a space that is homeomorphic to the latent space represented by the last convolutional layer of a pretrained convolutional neural network, which typically collects a variety of semantic features that summarize and highlight similarities and differences between concepts. These features are then categorized in the latent space using a nearest-neighbor strategy, and the results are used to condition a generative latent diffusion model to create novel images. From fMRI data only, we produce reconstructions of visual stimuli that match the original content very well on a semantic level, surpassing the state of the art in previous literature. We evaluate our work and obtain good results using a quantitative semantic metric (the Wu-Palmer similarity metric over the WordNet lexicon, which had an average value of 0.57) and perform a human evaluation experiment that resulted in correct evaluation, according to the multiplicity of human criteria in evaluating image similarity, in over 80% of the test set.

Natural scene reconstruction from fMRI signals using generative latent diffusion

Abstract: In neural decoding research, one of the most intriguing topics is the reconstruction of perceived natural images based on fMRI signals. Previous studies have succeeded in re-creating different aspects of the visuals, such as low-level properties (shape, texture, layout) or high-level features (category of objects, descriptive semantics of scenes) but have typically failed to reconstruct these properties together for complex scene images. Generative AI has recently made a leap forward with latent diffusion models capable of generating high-complexity images. Here, we investigate how to take advantage of this innovative technology for brain decoding. We present a two-stage scene reconstruction framework called ``Brain-Diffuser''. In the first stage, starting from fMRI signals, we reconstruct images that capture low-level properties and overall layout using a VDVAE (Very Deep Variational Autoencoder) model. In the second stage, we use the image-to-image framework of a latent diffusion model (Versatile Diffusion) conditioned on predicted multimodal (text and visual) features, to generate final reconstructed images. On the publicly available Natural Scenes Dataset benchmark, our method outperforms previous models both qualitatively and quantitatively. When applied to synthetic fMRI patterns generated from individual ROI (region-of-interest) masks, our trained model creates compelling ``ROI-optimal'' scenes consistent with neuroscientific knowledge. Thus, the proposed methodology can have an impact on both applied (e.g. brain-computer interface) and fundamental neuroscience.

Brain decoding: toward real-time reconstruction of visual perception

Abstract: In the past five years, the use of generative and foundational AI systems has greatly improved the decoding of brain activity. Visual perception, in particular, can now be decoded from functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) with remarkable fidelity. This neuroimaging technique, however, suffers from a limited temporal resolution ($\approx$0.5 Hz) and thus fundamentally constrains its real-time usage. Here, we propose an alternative approach based on magnetoencephalography (MEG), a neuroimaging device capable of measuring brain activity with high temporal resolution ($\approx$5,000 Hz). For this, we develop an MEG decoding model trained with both contrastive and regression objectives and consisting of three modules: i) pretrained embeddings obtained from the image, ii) an MEG module trained end-to-end and iii) a pretrained image generator. Our results are threefold: Firstly, our MEG decoder shows a 7X improvement of image-retrieval over classic linear decoders. Second, late brain responses to images are best decoded with DINOv2, a recent foundational image model. Third, image retrievals and generations both suggest that MEG signals primarily contain high-level visual features, whereas the same approach applied to 7T fMRI also recovers low-level features. Overall, these results provide an important step towards the decoding - in real time - of the visual processes continuously unfolding within the human brain.

A Unified, Scalable Framework for Neural Population Decoding

Abstract: Our ability to use deep learning approaches to decipher neural activity would likely benefit from greater scale, in terms of both model size and datasets. However, the integration of many neural recordings into one unified model is challenging, as each recording contains the activity of different neurons from different individual animals. In this paper, we introduce a training framework and architecture designed to model the population dynamics of neural activity across diverse, large-scale neural recordings. Our method first tokenizes individual spikes within the dataset to build an efficient representation of neural events that captures the fine temporal structure of neural activity. We then employ cross-attention and a PerceiverIO backbone to further construct a latent tokenization of neural population activities. Utilizing this architecture and training framework, we construct a large-scale multi-session model trained on large datasets from seven nonhuman primates, spanning over 158 different sessions of recording from over 27,373 neural units and over 100 hours of recordings. In a number of different tasks, we demonstrate that our pretrained model can be rapidly adapted to new, unseen sessions with unspecified neuron correspondence, enabling few-shot performance with minimal labels. This work presents a powerful new approach for building deep learning tools to analyze neural data and stakes out a clear path to training at scale.

A representative list of recent BMI and neural decoding studies based on generative AI.

Foundation models have also been instrumental in enhancing the performance of BMI systems, especially in decoding audio and visual signals {{cite:c5c84e7}}, {{cite:c3cb36f}}, {{cite:e40ab38}}, {{cite:2a658f5}}, {{cite:3026e38}}, {{cite:398be8c}}, {{cite:1932449}}, {{cite:226a2da}}. For instance, {{cite:c5c84e7}} utilized a pre-trained speech generative model to decode clear speech from neural signals. Specifically, they used a sophisticated transformer-based speech encoding model (“HuBERT”) to learn a compact representation of speech, which was then transformed into high-quality speech using a pre-trained synthesizer. Beyond speech, music decoding has also seen progresses with the aid of generative AI. Multiple lines of recent research {{cite:398be8c}}, {{cite:1932449}} have demonstrated the feasibility of decoding music from neural signals using deep learning, with pre-trained models such as musicLM {{cite:502140b}}, to produce high-quality outputs. Similarly, image reconstruction from fMRI scans has achieved remarkable accuracy with the help of image generative models such as the VAE, GAN, and diffusion models {{cite:3026e38}}, {{cite:b09c83f}}, {{cite:9927969}}, {{cite:4b5ec77}}, {{cite:ea8e21c}}.
In these studies, neural signals were first converted into latent representations, and then used to produce images through various generative models (Table {{table:b851c774-6768-4f61-ad86-50463ac22263}} ). For instance, a two-stage scene reconstruction framework called “Brain-Diffuser" has been proposed: in the first stage, low-level image was first reconstructed via a very deep VAE, and in the second stage, a latent diffusion model conditioned on predicted multi-modal (text and visual) features was used to reconstruct high-quality images {{cite:ea8e21c}}.


CLEVRER: CoLlision Events for Video REpresentation and Reasoning

Abstract: The ability to reason about temporal and causal events from videos lies at the core of human intelligence. Most video reasoning benchmarks, however, focus on pattern recognition from complex visual and language input, instead of on causal structure. We study the complementary problem, exploring the temporal and causal structures behind videos of objects with simple visual appearance. To this end, we introduce the CoLlision Events for Video REpresentation and Reasoning (CLEVRER), a diagnostic video dataset for systematic evaluation of computational models on a wide range of reasoning tasks. Motivated by the theory of human casual judgment, CLEVRER includes four types of questions: descriptive (e.g., "what color"), explanatory ("what is responsible for"), predictive ("what will happen next"), and counterfactual ("what if"). We evaluate various state-of-the-art models for visual reasoning on our benchmark. While these models thrive on the perception-based task (descriptive), they perform poorly on the causal tasks (explanatory, predictive and counterfactual), suggesting that a principled approach for causal reasoning should incorporate the capability of both perceiving complex visual and language inputs, and understanding the underlying dynamics and causal relations. We also study an oracle model that explicitly combines these components via symbolic representations.

ComPhy: Compositional Physical Reasoning of Objects and Events from Videos

Abstract: Objects' motions in nature are governed by complex interactions and their properties. While some properties, such as shape and material, can be identified via the object's visual appearances, others like mass and electric charge are not directly visible. The compositionality between the visible and hidden properties poses unique challenges for AI models to reason from the physical world, whereas humans can effortlessly infer them with limited observations. Existing studies on video reasoning mainly focus on visually observable elements such as object appearance, movement, and contact interaction. In this paper, we take an initial step to highlight the importance of inferring the hidden physical properties not directly observable from visual appearances, by introducing the Compositional Physical Reasoning (ComPhy) dataset. For a given set of objects, ComPhy includes few videos of them moving and interacting under different initial conditions. The model is evaluated based on its capability to unravel the compositional hidden properties, such as mass and charge, and use this knowledge to answer a set of questions posted on one of the videos. Evaluation results of several state-of-the-art video reasoning models on ComPhy show unsatisfactory performance as they fail to capture these hidden properties. We further propose an oracle neural-symbolic framework named Compositional Physics Learner (CPL), combining visual perception, physical property learning, dynamic prediction, and symbolic execution into a unified framework. CPL can effectively identify objects' physical properties from their interactions and predict their dynamics to answer questions.

AGQA: A Benchmark for Compositional Spatio-Temporal Reasoning

Abstract: Visual events are a composition of temporal actions involving actors spatially interacting with objects. When developing computer vision models that can reason about compositional spatio-temporal events, we need benchmarks that can analyze progress and uncover shortcomings. Existing video question answering benchmarks are useful, but they often conflate multiple sources of error into one accuracy metric and have strong biases that models can exploit, making it difficult to pinpoint model weaknesses. We present Action Genome Question Answering (AGQA), a new benchmark for compositional spatio-temporal reasoning. AGQA contains 192M unbalanced question answer pairs for 9.6K videos. We also provide a balanced subset of 3.9M question answer pairs, 3 orders of magnitude larger than existing benchmarks, that minimizes bias by balancing the answer distributions and types of question structures. Although human evaluators marked 86.02% of our question-answer pairs as correct, the best model achieves only 47.74% accuracy. In addition, AGQA introduces multiple training/test splits to test for various reasoning abilities, including generalization to novel compositions, to indirect references, and to more compositional steps. Using AGQA, we evaluate modern visual reasoning systems, demonstrating that the best models barely perform better than non-visual baselines exploiting linguistic biases and that none of the existing models generalize to novel compositions unseen during training.

SUTD-TrafficQA: A Question Answering Benchmark and an Efficient Network for Video Reasoning over Traffic Events

Abstract: Traffic event cognition and reasoning in videos is an important task that has a wide range of applications in intelligent transportation, assisted driving, and autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we create a novel dataset, SUTD-TrafficQA (Traffic Question Answering), which takes the form of video QA based on the collected 10,080 in-the-wild videos and annotated 62,535 QA pairs, for benchmarking the cognitive capability of causal inference and event understanding models in complex traffic scenarios. Specifically, we propose 6 challenging reasoning tasks corresponding to various traffic scenarios, so as to evaluate the reasoning capability over different kinds of complex yet practical traffic events. Moreover, we propose Eclipse, a novel Efficient glimpse network via dynamic inference, in order to achieve computation-efficient and reliable video reasoning. The experiments show that our method achieves superior performance while reducing the computation cost significantly. The project page: https://github.com/SUTDCV/SUTD-TrafficQA.

NExT-QA: Next Phase of Question-Answering to Explaining Temporal Actions

Abstract: We introduce NExT-QA, a rigorously designed video question answering (VideoQA) benchmark to advance video understanding from describing to explaining the temporal actions. Based on the dataset, we set up multi-choice and open-ended QA tasks targeting causal action reasoning, temporal action reasoning, and common scene comprehension. Through extensive analysis of baselines and established VideoQA techniques, we find that top-performing methods excel at shallow scene descriptions but are weak in causal and temporal action reasoning. Furthermore, the models that are effective on multi-choice QA, when adapted to open-ended QA, still struggle in generalizing the answers. This raises doubt on the ability of these models to reason and highlights possibilities for improvement. With detailed results for different question types and heuristic observations for future works, we hope NExT-QA will guide the next generation of VQA research to go beyond superficial description towards a deeper understanding of videos. (The dataset and related resources are available at https://github.com/doc-doc/NExT-QA.git).

Video question answering benchmarks related with reasoning. OC and OG denote open-ended question answering as problem of classification and generation respectively. MC stands for multi-choice QA.

The video question answering task is more complex than the image question answering task due to the ubiquitous correlation between spatial and temporal information, i.e., the introduction of complex temporal relations. Thus, improving the spatial-temporal causal reasoning ability of models can improve the performance on this task, but simply approximating data distributions usually do not work. Thus, some recent released benchmark datasets are proposed to evaluate whether the model has the reasoning ability to understand the causal relation knowledge within the visual and linguistic content, as shown in Table {{table:7b1ccf28-5478-4531-b094-78776fcbf2a9}} .


Deep Learning Driven Visual Path Prediction From a Single Image

Abstract: Capabilities of inference and prediction are the significant components of visual systems. Visual path prediction is an important and challenging task among them, with the goal to infer the future path of a visual object in a static scene. This task is complicated as it needs high-level semantic understandings of both the scenes and underlying motion patterns in video sequences. In practice, cluttered situations have also raised higher demands on the effectiveness and robustness of models. Motivated by these observations, we propose a deep learning framework, which simultaneously performs deep feature learning for visual representation in conjunction with spatiotemporal context modeling. After that, a unified path-planning scheme is proposed to make accurate path prediction based on the analytic results returned by the deep context models. The highly effective visual representation and deep context models ensure that our framework makes a deep semantic understanding of the scenes and motion patterns, consequently improving the performance on visual path prediction task. In experiments, we extensively evaluate the model's performance by constructing two large benchmark datasets from the adaptation of video tracking datasets. The qualitative and quantitative experimental results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches and owns a better generalization capability.

Unsupervised Discovery of Mid-Level Discriminative Patches

Abstract: The goal of this paper is to discover a set of discriminative patches which can serve as a fully unsupervised mid-level visual representation. The desired patches need to satisfy two requirements: 1) to be representative, they need to occur frequently enough in the visual world; 2) to be discriminative, they need to be different enough from the rest of the visual world. The patches could correspond to parts, objects, "visual phrases", etc. but are not restricted to be any one of them. We pose this as an unsupervised discriminative clustering problem on a huge dataset of image patches. We use an iterative procedure which alternates between clustering and training discriminative classifiers, while applying careful cross-validation at each step to prevent overfitting. The paper experimentally demonstrates the effectiveness of discriminative patches as an unsupervised mid-level visual representation, suggesting that it could be used in place of visual words for many tasks. Furthermore, discriminative patches can also be used in a supervised regime, such as scene classification, where they demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on the MIT Indoor-67 dataset.

Categories of feature extraction for path prediction.

This section introduces methods of feature extraction from video for path prediction.
The path that the pedestrian takes is implicitly affected by many factors of the surrounding environment and the status of the pedestrian his self or herself.
The performance of path prediction is expected to be improve when using information that largely determines how the pedestrian decides the way to go.
Given the video, such information is extracted prior to the prediction.
Table {{table:888b4877-97e3-4a10-90e0-952856e78395}}  presents information extracted from video for path prediction.
Such information can be broadly categorized into that of (1) the environment and (2) the target.