T\"urkiye is located on a fault line; earthquakes often occur on a large and small scale. There is a need for effective solutions for gathering current information during disasters. We can use social media to get insight into public opinion. This insight can be used in public relations and disaster management. In this study, Twitter posts on Izmir Earthquake that took place on October 2020 are analyzed. We question if this analysis can be used to make social inferences on time. Data mining and natural language processing (NLP) methods are used for this analysis. NLP is used for sentiment analysis and topic modelling. The latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm is used for topic modelling. We used the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model working with Transformers architecture for sentiment analysis. It is shown that the users shared their goodwill wishes and aimed to contribute to the initiated aid activities after the earthquake. The users desired to make their voices heard by competent institutions and organizations. The proposed methods work effectively. Future studies are also discussed.

Long-term non-prehensile planar manipulation is a challenging task for robot planning and feedback control. It is characterized by underactuation, hybrid control, and contact uncertainty. One main difficulty is to determine contact points and directions, which involves joint logic and geometrical reasoning in the modes of the dynamics model. To tackle this issue, we propose a demonstration-guided hierarchical optimization framework to achieve offline task and motion planning (TAMP). Our work extends the formulation of the dynamics model of the pusher-slider system to include separation mode with face switching cases, and solves a warm-started TAMP problem by exploiting human demonstrations. We show that our approach can cope well with the local minima problems currently present in the state-of-the-art solvers and determine a valid solution to the task. We validate our results in simulation and demonstrate its applicability on a pusher-slider system with real Franka Emika robot in the presence of external disturbances.

The classification loss functions used in deep neural network classifiers can be grouped into two categories based on maximizing the margin in either Euclidean or angular spaces. Euclidean distances between sample vectors are used during classification for the methods maximizing the margin in Euclidean spaces whereas the Cosine similarity distance is used during the testing stage for the methods maximizing margin in the angular spaces. This paper introduces a novel classification loss that maximizes the margin in both the Euclidean and angular spaces at the same time. This way, the Euclidean and Cosine distances will produce similar and consistent results and complement each other, which will in turn improve the accuracies. The proposed loss function enforces the samples of classes to cluster around the centers that represent them. The centers approximating classes are chosen from the boundary of a hypersphere, and the pairwise distances between class centers are always equivalent. This restriction corresponds to choosing centers from the vertices of a regular simplex. There is not any hyperparameter that must be set by the user in the proposed loss function, therefore the use of the proposed method is extremely easy for classical classification problems. Moreover, since the class samples are compactly clustered around their corresponding means, the proposed classifier is also very suitable for open set recognition problems where test samples can come from the unknown classes that are not seen in the training phase. Experimental studies show that the proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art accuracies on open set recognition despite its simplicity.

Recently the focus of the computer vision community has shifted from expensive supervised learning towards self-supervised learning of visual representations. While the performance gap between supervised and self-supervised has been narrowing, the time for training self-supervised deep networks remains an order of magnitude larger than its supervised counterparts, which hinders progress, imposes carbon cost, and limits societal benefits to institutions with substantial resources. Motivated by these issues, this paper investigates reducing the training time of recent self-supervised methods by various model-agnostic strategies that have not been used for this problem. In particular, we study three strategies: an extendable cyclic learning rate schedule, a matching progressive augmentation magnitude and image resolutions schedule, and a hard positive mining strategy based on augmentation difficulty. We show that all three methods combined lead up to 2.7 times speed-up in the training time of several self-supervised methods while retaining comparable performance to the standard self-supervised learning setting.

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) are extensively utilized for deep learning on graphs. The large data sizes of graphs and their vertex features make scalable training algorithms and distributed memory systems necessary. Since the convolution operation on graphs induces irregular memory access patterns, designing a memory- and communication-efficient parallel algorithm for GCN training poses unique challenges. We propose a highly parallel training algorithm that scales to large processor counts. In our solution, the large adjacency and vertex-feature matrices are partitioned among processors. We exploit the vertex-partitioning of the graph to use non-blocking point-to-point communication operations between processors for better scalability. To further minimize the parallelization overheads, we introduce a sparse matrix partitioning scheme based on a hypergraph partitioning model for full-batch training. We also propose a novel stochastic hypergraph model to encode the expected communication volume in mini-batch training. We show the merits of the hypergraph model, previously unexplored for GCN training, over the standard graph partitioning model which does not accurately encode the communication costs. Experiments performed on real-world graph datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithms achieve considerable speedups over alternative solutions. The optimizations achieved on communication costs become even more pronounced at high scalability with many processors. The performance benefits are preserved in deeper GCNs having more layers as well as on billion-scale graphs.

We introduce ViewNeRF, a Neural Radiance Field-based viewpoint estimation method that learns to predict category-level viewpoints directly from images during training. While NeRF is usually trained with ground-truth camera poses, multiple extensions have been proposed to reduce the need for this expensive supervision. Nonetheless, most of these methods still struggle in complex settings with large camera movements, and are restricted to single scenes, i.e. they cannot be trained on a collection of scenes depicting the same object category. To address these issues, our method uses an analysis by synthesis approach, combining a conditional NeRF with a viewpoint predictor and a scene encoder in order to produce self-supervised reconstructions for whole object categories. Rather than focusing on high fidelity reconstruction, we target efficient and accurate viewpoint prediction in complex scenarios, e.g. 360{\deg} rotation on real data. Our model shows competitive results on synthetic and real datasets, both for single scenes and multi-instance collections.

Understanding the 3D world without supervision is currently a major challenge in computer vision as the annotations required to supervise deep networks for tasks in this domain are expensive to obtain on a large scale. In this paper, we address the problem of unsupervised viewpoint estimation. We formulate this as a self-supervised learning task, where image reconstruction provides the supervision needed to predict the camera viewpoint. Specifically, we make use of pairs of images of the same object at training time, from unknown viewpoints, to self-supervise training by combining the viewpoint information from one image with the appearance information from the other. We demonstrate that using a perspective spatial transformer allows efficient viewpoint learning, outperforming existing unsupervised approaches on synthetic data, and obtains competitive results on the challenging PASCAL3D+ dataset.

The success of state-of-the-art deep neural networks heavily relies on the presence of large-scale labelled datasets, which are extremely expensive and time-consuming to annotate. This paper focuses on tackling semi-supervised part segmentation tasks by generating high-quality images with a pre-trained GAN and labelling the generated images with an automatic annotator. In particular, we formulate the annotator learning as a learning-to-learn problem. Given a pre-trained GAN, the annotator learns to label object parts in a set of randomly generated images such that a part segmentation model trained on these synthetic images with their predicted labels obtains low segmentation error on a small validation set of manually labelled images. We further reduce this nested-loop optimization problem to a simple gradient matching problem and efficiently solve it with an iterative algorithm. We show that our method can learn annotators from a broad range of labelled images including real images, generated images, and even analytically rendered images. Our method is evaluated with semi-supervised part segmentation tasks and significantly outperforms other semi-supervised competitors when the amount of labelled examples is extremely limited.

In recent years, generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been an actively studied topic and shown to successfully produce high-quality realistic images in various domains. The controllable synthesis ability of GAN generators suggests that they maintain informative, disentangled, and explainable image representations, but leveraging and transferring their representations to downstream tasks is largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose to distill knowledge from GAN generators by squeezing and spanning their representations. We squeeze the generator features into representations that are invariant to semantic-preserving transformations through a network before they are distilled into the student network. We span the distilled representation of the synthetic domain to the real domain by also using real training data to remedy the mode collapse of GANs and boost the student network performance in a real domain. Experiments justify the efficacy of our method and reveal its great significance in self-supervised representation learning. Code is available at https://github.com/yangyu12/squeeze-and-span.

文本分割旨在将文本分为连续的语义连贯段，而段标签则与每个段的生成标签有关。过去的工作表明，在解决文档和对话的分段和标签方面取得了成功。通过特定于任务的管道，受监督和无监督的学习目标的结合，这是可能的。在这项工作中，我们提出了一个单一的编码器神经网络，该网络可以处理长文档和对话，同时仅使用标准监督进行细分和细分标记。我们成功地展示了将组合任务作为纯生成任务解决的方法，我们称之为结构化摘要。我们将相同的技术应用于文档和对话数据，并在高资产设置和低资源设置下显示了各个数据集的最新技术性能。我们的结果确定了一个有力的案例，可以考虑整体文本细分和细分标签，并朝着不依赖域专业知识或特定于任务的组件的通用技术迈进。