Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Totalitarian Random Tug-of-War Games in Graphs

In this work we discuss a random Tug-of-War game in graphs where one of the players has the power to decide at each turn whether to play a round of classical random Tug-of-War, or let the other player choose the new game position in exchange of a fixed payoff. We prove that this game has a value using a discrete comparison principle and viscosity tools, as well as probabilistic arguments. This game is related to Jensen's extremal equations, which have a key role in Jensen's celebrated proof of uniqueness of infinity harmonic functions.
An Efficient 3D CNN for Action/Object Segmentation in Video

Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based image segmentation has made great progress in recent years. However, video object segmentation remains a challenging task due to its high computational complexity. Most of the previous methods employ a two-stream CNN framework to handle spatial and motion features separately. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end encoder-decoder style 3D CNN to aggregate spatial and temporal information simultaneously for video object segmentation. To efficiently process video, we propose 3D separable convolution for the pyramid pooling module and decoder, which dramatically reduces the number of operations while maintaining the performance. Moreover, we also extend our framework to video action segmentation by adding an extra classifier to predict the action label for actors in videos. Extensive experiments on several video datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach for action and object segmentation compared to the state-of-the-art.
TARN: Temporal Attentive Relation Network for Few-Shot and Zero-Shot Action Recognition

In this paper we propose a novel Temporal Attentive Relation Network (TARN) for the problems of few-shot and zero-shot action recognition. At the heart of our network is a meta-learning approach that learns to compare representations of variable temporal length, that is, either two videos of different length (in the case of few-shot action recognition) or a video and a semantic representation such as word vector (in the case of zero-shot action recognition). By contrast to other works in few-shot and zero-shot action recognition, we a) utilise attention mechanisms so as to perform temporal alignment, and b) learn a deep-distance measure on the aligned representations at video segment level. We adopt an episode-based training scheme and train our network in an end-to-end manner. The proposed method does not require any fine-tuning in the target domain or maintaining additional representations as is the case of memory networks. Experimental results show that the proposed architecture outperforms the state of the art in few-shot action recognition, and achieves competitive results in zero-shot action recognition.
Strategic Voting Under Uncertainty About the Voting Method

Much of the theoretical work on strategic voting makes strong assumptions about what voters know about the voting situation. A strategizing voter is typically assumed to know how other voters will vote and to know the rules of the voting method. A growing body of literature explores strategic voting when there is uncertainty about how others will vote. In this paper, we study strategic voting when there is uncertainty about the voting method. We introduce three notions of manipulability for a set of voting methods: sure, safe, and expected manipulability. With the help of a computer program, we identify voting scenarios in which uncertainty about the voting method may reduce or even eliminate a voter's incentive to misrepresent her preferences. Thus, it may be in the interest of an election designer who wishes to reduce strategic voting to leave voters uncertain about which of several reasonable voting methods will be used to determine the winners of an election.
Speeding Up Iterative Closest Point Using Stochastic Gradient Descent

Sensors producing 3D point clouds such as 3D laser scanners and RGB-D cameras are widely used in robotics, be it for autonomous driving or manipulation. Aligning point clouds produced by these sensors is a vital component in such applications to perform tasks such as model registration, pose estimation, and SLAM. Iterative closest point (ICP) is the most widely used method for this task, due to its simplicity and efficiency. In this paper we propose a novel method which solves the optimisation problem posed by ICP using stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Using SGD allows us to improve the convergence speed of ICP without sacrificing solution quality. Experiments using Kinect as well as Velodyne data show that, our proposed method is faster than existing methods, while obtaining solutions comparable to standard ICP. An additional benefit is robustness to parameters when processing data from different sensors.
Evaluating Recommender System Algorithms for Generating Local Music Playlists

We explore the task of local music recommendation: provide listeners with personalized playlists of relevant tracks by artists who play most of their live events within a small geographic area. Most local artists tend to be obscure, long-tail artists and generally have little or no available user preference data associated with them. This creates a cold-start problem for collaborative filtering-based recommendation algorithms that depend on large amounts of such information to make accurate recommendations. In this paper, we compare the performance of three standard recommender system algorithms (Item-Item Neighborhood (IIN), Alternating Least Squares for Implicit Feedback (ALS), and Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR)) on the task of local music recommendation using the Million Playlist Dataset. To do this, we modify the standard evaluation procedure such that the algorithms only rank tracks by local artists for each of the eight different cities. Despite the fact that techniques based on matrix factorization (ALS, BPR) typically perform best on large recommendation tasks, we find that the neighborhood-based approach (IIN) performs best for long-tail local music recommendation.
Diffuse ionized gas and its effects on nebular metallicity estimates of star-forming galaxies

We investigate the impact of the diffuse ionized gas (DIG) on abundance determinations in star-forming (SF) galaxies. The DIG is characterized using the H α equivalent width (WH α). From a set of 1 409 SF galaxies from the Mapping Nearby Galaxies at APO (MaNGA) survey, we calculate the fractional contribution of the DIG to several emission lines using high-S/N data from SF spaxels (instead of using noisy emission-lines in DIG-dominated spaxels). Our method is applicable to spectra with observed WH α ≳ 10 Å (which are not dominated by DIG emission). Since the DIG contribution depends on galactocentric distance, we provide DIG-correction formulae for both entire galaxies and single aperture spectra. Applying those to a sample of $\, \gt 90\, 000$ SF galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, we find the following. (1) The effect of the DIG on strong-line abundances depends on the index used. It is negligible for the ([O iii]/H β)/([N ii]/H α) index, but reaches ∼0.1 dex at the high-metallicity end for [N ii]/H α. (2) This result is based on the ∼kpc MaNGA resolution, so the real effect of the DIG is likely greater. (3) We revisit the mass–metallicity–star formation rate (SFR) relation by correcting for the DIG contribution in both abundances and SFR. The effect of DIG removal is more prominent at higher stellar masses. Using the [N ii]/Hα index, O/H increases with SFR at high stellar mass, contrary to previous claims.
Early Findings from Field Trials of Heavy-Duty Truck Connected Eco-Driving System

In recent years, the development of connected and automated vehicle (CAV) technology has inspired numerous advanced applications targeted at improving existing transportation systems. As one of the widely studied applications of CAV technology, connected eco-driving takes advantage of Signal Phase and Timing (SPaT) information from traffic signals to enable CAVs to approach and depart from signalized intersections in an energy-efficient manner. However, the majority of the connected eco-driving studies have been numerical or microscopic traffic simulations. Only few studies have implemented the application on real vehicles, and even fewer have been focused on heavy-duty trucks. In this study, we developed a connected eco-driving system and equipped it on a heavy-duty diesel truck using cellular-based wireless communications. Field trials were conducted in the City of Carson, California, along two corridors with six connected signalized intersections capable of communicating their SPaT information. Early results showed the benefits of the system in smoothing the speed profiles of the equipped truck when approaching the connected signalized intersections.
RobustTP: End-to-End Trajectory Prediction for Heterogeneous Road-Agents in Dense Traffic with Noisy Sensor Inputs

We present RobustTP, an end-to-end algorithm for predicting future trajectories of road-agents in dense traffic with noisy sensor input trajectories obtained from RGB cameras (either static or moving) through a tracking algorithm. In this case, we consider noise as the deviation from the ground truth trajectory. The amount of noise depends on the accuracy of the tracking algorithm. Our approach is designed for dense heterogeneous traffic, where the road agents corresponding to a mixture of buses, cars, scooters, bicycles, or pedestrians. RobustTP is an approach that first computes trajectories using a combination of a non-linear motion model and a deep learning-based instance segmentation algorithm. Next, these noisy trajectories are trained using an LSTM-CNN neural network architecture that models the interactions between road-agents in dense and heterogeneous traffic. Our trajectory prediction algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods for end-to-end trajectory prediction using sensor inputs. We achieve an improvement of upto 18% in average displacement error and an improvement of up to 35.5% in final displacement error at the end of the prediction window (5 seconds) over the next best method. All experiments were set up on an Nvidia TiTan Xp GPU. Additionally, we release a software framework, TrackNPred. The framework consists of implementations of state-of-the-art tracking and trajectory prediction methods and tools to benchmark and evaluate them on real-world dense traffic datasets.
X-ray study of spatial structures in Tycho’s supernova remnant using unsupervised deep learning

Recent rapid development of deep learning algorithms, which can implicitly capture structures in high-dimensional data, opens a new chapter in astronomical data analysis. We report here a new implementation of deep learning techniques for X-ray analysis. We apply a variational autoencoder (VAE) using a deep neural network for spatio-spectral analysis of data obtained by Chandra X-ray Observatory from Tycho’s supernova remnant (SNR). We established an unsupervised learning method combining the VAE and a Gaussian mixture model (GMM), where the dimensions of the observed spectral data are reduced by the VAE, and clustering in feature space is performed by the GMM. We found that some characteristic spatial structures, such as the iron knot on the eastern rim, can be automatically recognized by this method, which uses only spectral properties. This result shows that unsupervised machine learning can be useful for extracting characteristic spatial structures from spectral information in observational data (without detailed spectral analysis), which would reduce human-intensive preprocessing costs for understanding fine structures in diffuse astronomical objects, e.g. SNRs or galaxy clusters. Such data-driven analysis can be used to select regions from which to extract spectra for detailed analysis and help us make the best use of the large amount of spectral data available currently and arriving in the coming decades.
Enhancing performance of subject-specific models via subject-independent information for SSVEP-based BCIs

Recently, brain-computer interface (BCI) systems developed based on steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) have attracted much attention due to their high information transfer rate (ITR) and increasing number of targets. However, SSVEP-based methods can be improved in terms of their accuracy and target detection time. We propose a new method based on canonical correlation analysis (CCA) to integrate subject-specific models and subject-independent information and enhance BCI performance. We propose to use training data of other subjects to optimize hyperparameters for CCA-based model of a specific subject. An ensemble version of the proposed method is also developed for a fair comparison with ensemble task-related component analysis (TRCA). The proposed method is compared with TRCA and extended CCA methods. A publicly available, 35-subject SSVEP benchmark dataset is used for comparison studies and performance is quantified by classification accuracy and ITR. The ITR of the proposed method is higher than those of TRCA and extended CCA. The proposed method outperforms extended CCA in all conditions and TRCA for time windows greater than 0.3 s. The proposed method also outperforms TRCA when there are limited training blocks and electrodes. This study illustrates that adding subject-independent information to subject-specific models can improve performance of SSVEP-based BCIs.
Three ways to select from two attosecond pulses.

We demonstrate that by filtering high harmonics it is possible to obtain two different single attosecond pulses (SAP) resulting from naturally separated spectral domains formed during propagation in the macroscopic medium. We propose a feasible experimental configuration in which one can obtain a SAP in a lower energy domain ( 300 eV). Without filtering, a double attosecond pulse emission with fixed temporal separation is obtained. The gap between the two spectral domains is close to the onset of the water window.
Deep Learning for Time Series Forecasting: The Electric Load Case

Management and efficient operations in critical infrastructure such as Smart Grids take huge advantage of accurate power load forecasting which, due to its nonlinear nature, remains a challenging task. Recently, deep learning has emerged in the machine learning field achieving impressive performance in a vast range of tasks, from image classification to machine translation. Applications of deep learning models to the electric load forecasting problem are gaining interest among researchers as well as the industry, but a comprehensive and sound comparison among different architectures is not yet available in the literature. This work aims at filling the gap by reviewing and experimentally evaluating on two real-world datasets the most recent trends in electric load forecasting, by contrasting deep learning architectures on short term forecast (one day ahead prediction). Specifically, we focus on feedforward and recurrent neural networks, sequence to sequence models and temporal convolutional neural networks along with architectural variants, which are known in the signal processing community but are novel to the load forecasting one.
Calculating the equation of state of dense quark-gluon plasma using the complex Langevin equation

The pressure and energy density of the quark-gluon plasma at finite baryon chemical potential are calculated using the Complex Langevin equation. The stout smearing procedure is generalized for the SL(3,$\mathcal{C}$) manifold allowing the usage of an improved action in the Complex Langevin setup. Four degenerate flavors of staggered quarks with $m_\pi=500-700$ MeV are used with a tree-level Symanzik improved gauge action on $16^3 \times 8 $ lattices. Results are compared to the Taylor expansion and good agreement is found for small chemical potentials.
Millimeter-Wave Massive MIMO Systems Relying on Generalized Sub-Array-Connected Hybrid Precoding

In this paper, we consider a generalized sub-array-connected (GSAC) architecture for arbitrary radio frequency (RF) chain and antenna configurations, where the number of RF chains connected to a sub-array and the number of antennas in each sub-array can be arbitrary. Our design objective is to improve the energy efficiency of the hybrid precoder of millimeter-wave massive multiple input multiple output systems. We first propose a successive interference cancellation based hybrid precoding algorithm to maximize the achievable rate for any given RF chain and antenna configuration. This algorithm first decomposes the total achievable rate optimization problem into multiple sub-rate optimization problems, then it successively maximizes these sub-rates. Since the number of RF chains is limited, we can afford using an exhaustive search scheme to evaluate all configurations and identify the one having the best energy efficiency. Moreover, to rely on an attractive limited feedback, we also propose a beamsteering codebook for our hybrid precoding aided GSAC architecture. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves a similar rate as the corresponding optimal unconstrained precoder. Furthermore, we show that the energy efficiency of the proposed scheme is better than that of the existing schemes in the fully connected and sub-array-connected architectures.
Deep Fault Diagnosis for Rotating Machinery with Scarce Labeled Samples

Early and accurately detecting faults in rotating machinery is crucial for operation safety of the modern manufacturing system. In this paper, we proposed a novel Deep fault diagnosis (DFD) method for rotating machinery with scarce labeled samples. DFD tackles the challenging problem by transferring knowledge from shallow models, which is based on the idea that shallow models trained with different hand-crafted features can reveal the latent prior knowledge and diagnostic expertise and have good generalization ability even with scarce labeled samples. DFD can be divided into three phases. First, a spectrogram of the raw vibration signal is calculated by applying a Short-time Fourier transform (STFT). From those spectrograms, discriminative time-frequency domain features can be extracted and used to form a feature pool. Then, several candidate Support vector machine (SVM) models are trained with different combinations of features in the feature pool with scarce labeled samples. By evaluating the pretrained SVM models on the validation set, the most discriminative features and best-performed SVM models can be selected, which are used to make predictions on the unlabeled samples. The predicted labels reserve the expert knowledge originally carried by the SVM model. They are combined together with the scarce fine labeled samples to form an Augmented training set (ATS). Finally, a novel 2D deep Convolutional neural network (CNN) model is trained on the ATS to learn more discriminative features and a better classifier. Experimental results on two fault diagnosis datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DFD, which achieves better performance than SVM models and the vanilla deep CNN model trained on scarce labeled samples. Moreover, it is computationally efficient and is promising for real-time rotating machinery fault diagnosis.
Spatial patterns emerging from a stochastic process near criticality

There is mounting empirical evidence that many communities of living organisms display key features which closely resemble those of physical systems at criticality. We here introduce a minimal model framework for the dynamics of a community of individuals which undergoes local birth-death, immigration and local jumps on a regular lattice. We study its properties when the system is close to its critical point. Even if this model violates detailed balance, within a physically relevant regime dominated by fluctuations, it is possible to calculate analytically the probability density function of the number of individuals living in a given volume, which captures the close-to-critical behavior of the community across spatial scales. We find that the resulting distribution satisfies an equation where spatial effects are encoded in appropriate functions of space, which we calculate explicitly. The validity of the analytical formulæ is confirmed by simulations in the expected regimes. We finally discuss how this model in the critical-like regime is in agreement with several biodiversity patterns observed in tropical rain forests.
Learning the Relation Between Code Features and Code Transforms With Structured Prediction

To effectively guide the exploration of the code transform space for automated code evolution techniques, we present in this article the first approach for structurally predicting code transforms at the level of AST nodes using conditional random fields (CRFs). Our approach first learns offline a probabilistic model that captures how certain code transforms are applied to certain AST nodes, and then uses the learned model to predict transforms for arbitrary new, unseen code snippets. Our approach involves a novel representation of both programs and code transforms. Specifically, we introduce the formal framework for defining the so-called AST-level code transforms and we demonstrate how the CRF model can be accordingly designed, learned, and used for prediction. We instantiate our approach in the context of repair transform prediction for Java programs. Our instantiation contains a set of carefully designed code features, deals with the training data imbalance issue, and comprises transform constraints that are specific to code. We conduct a large-scale experimental evaluation based on a dataset of bug fixing commits from real-world Java projects. The results show that when the popular evaluation metric top-3 is used, our approach predicts the code transforms with an accuracy varying from 41% to 53% depending on the transforms. Our model outperforms two baselines based on history probability and neural machine translation (NMT), suggesting the importance of considering code structure in achieving good prediction accuracy. In addition, a proof-of-concept synthesizer is implemented to concretize some repair transforms to get the final patches. The evaluation of the synthesizer on the Defects4j benchmark confirms the usefulness of the predicted AST-level repair transforms in producing high-quality patches.
Adaptive Weight Decay for Deep Neural Networks

Regularization in the optimization of deep neural networks is often critical to avoid undesirable over-fitting leading to better generalization of model. One of the most popular regularization algorithms is to impose $L_{2}$ penalty on the model parameters resulting in the decay of parameters, called weight-decay, and the decay rate is generally constant to all the model parameters in the course of optimization. In contrast to the previous approach based on the constant rate of weight-decay, we propose to consider the residual that measures dissimilarity between the current state of model and observations in the determination of the weight-decay for each parameter in an adaptive way, called adaptive weight-decay (AdaDecay) where the gradient norms are normalized within each layer and the degree of regularization for each parameter is determined in proportional to the magnitude of its gradient using the sigmoid function. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of AdaDecay in comparison to the state-of-the-art optimization algorithms using popular benchmark datasets: MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CIFAR-10 with conventional neural network models ranging from shallow to deep. The quantitative evaluation of our proposed algorithm indicates that AdaDecay improves generalization leading to better accuracy across all the datasets and models.