OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Sim2Real for Peg-Hole Insertion with Eye-in-Hand Camera
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Even though the peg-hole insertion is one of the well-studied problems in robotics, it still remains a challenge for robots, especially when it comes to flexibility and the ability to generalize. Successful completion of the task requires combining several modalities to cope with the complexity of the real world. In our work, we focus on the visual aspect of the problem and employ the strategy of learning an insertion task in a simulator. We use Deep Reinforcement Learning to learn the policy end-to-end and then transfer the learned model to the real robot, without any additional fine-tuning. We show that the transferred policy, which only takes RGB-D and joint information (proprioception) can perform well on the real robot.
Achievable Rate Analysis and Phase Shift Optimization on Intelligent Reflecting Surface with Hardware Impairments
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is envisioned as a promising hardware solution to hardware cost and energy consumption in the fifth-generation (5G) mobile communication network. It exhibits great advantages in enhancing data transmission, but may suffer from performance degradation caused by inherent hardware impairment (HWI). For analysing the achievable rate (ACR) and optimizing the phase shifts in the IRS-aided wireless communication system with HWI, we consider that the HWI appears at both the IRS and the signal transceivers. On this foundation, first, we derive the closed-form expression of the average ACR and the IRS utility. Then, we formulate optimization problems to optimize the IRS phase shifts by maximizing the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the receiver side, and obtain the solution by transforming non-convex problems into semidefinite programming (SDP) problems. Subsequently, we compare the IRS with the conventional decode-and-forward (DF) relay in terms of the ACR and the utility. Finally, we carry out simulations to verify the theoretical analysis, and evaluate the impact of the channel estimation errors and residual phase noises on the optimization performance. Our results reveal that the HWI reduces the ACR and the IRS utility, and begets more serious performance degradation with more reflecting elements. Although the HWI has an impact on the IRS, it still leaves opportunities for the IRS to surpass the conventional DF relay, when the number of reflecting elements is large enough or the transmitting power is sufficiently high.
HourNAS: Extremely Fast Neural Architecture Search Through an Hourglass Lens
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) refers to automatically design the architecture. We propose an hourglass-inspired approach (HourNAS) for this problem that is motivated by the fact that the effects of the architecture often proceed from the vital few blocks. Acting like the narrow neck of an hourglass, vital blocks in the guaranteed path from the input to the output of a deep neural network restrict the information flow and influence the network accuracy. The other blocks occupy the major volume of the network and determine the overall network complexity, corresponding to the bulbs of an hourglass. To achieve an extremely fast NAS while preserving the high accuracy, we propose to identify the vital blocks and make them the priority in the architecture search. The search space of those non-vital blocks is further shrunk to only cover the candidates that are affordable under the computational resource constraints. Experimental results on the ImageNet show that only using 3 hours (0.1 days) with one GPU, our HourNAS can search an architecture that achieves a 77.0% Top-1 accuracy, which outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
Neural Simultaneous Speech Translation Using Alignment-Based Chunking
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

In simultaneous machine translation, the objective is to determine when to produce a partial translation given a continuous stream of source words, with a trade-off between latency and quality. We propose a neural machine translation (NMT) model that makes dynamic decisions when to continue feeding on input or generate output words. The model is composed of two main components: one to dynamically decide on ending a source chunk, and another that translates the consumed chunk. We train the components jointly and in a manner consistent with the inference conditions. To generate chunked training data, we propose a method that utilizes word alignment while also preserving enough context. We compare models with bidirectional and unidirectional encoders of different depths, both on real speech and text input. Our results on the IWSLT 2020 English-to-German task outperform a wait-k baseline by 2.6 to 3.7% BLEU absolute.
An Efficient Indoor Navigation Technique To Find Optimal Route For Blinds Using QR Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

Blind navigation is an accessibility application that enables blind to use an android Smartphone in an easy way for indoor navigation with instructions in audio form. We have proposed a prototype which is an indoor navigation application for blinds that uses QR codes. It is developed for android Smart phones and does not require any additional hardware for navigation. It provides automatic navigational assistance on pre-defined paths for blind. QR codes are placed on the floor sections after specific distance that acts as an input for current location detection and navigation. Whenever a QR code is scanned it provides the user with the information of the current location and asks the user to select the destination and then offers optimal and shortest path using path finding algorithms. During navigation whenever the deviation from the proposed path is detected it prompts the user and guides back to the right path by comparing the current path with the generated path. All of the instructions throughout the application are provided in audio form to the user. The interface of the application is well built for blinds which makes the smart phones user-friendly and useable for blind people. The user interacts with the application through a specific set of user-friendly gestures for specific inputs and operations. At the end, we have performed comparison between different state of art approaches and concluded that our approach is more user friendly, cost effective and produced more accurate results.
Enhanced nonconvex low-rank approximation of tensor multi-modes for tensor completion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Higher-order low-rank tensor arises in many data processing applications and has attracted great interests. Inspired by low-rank approximation theory, researchers have proposed a series of effective tensor completion methods. However, most of these methods directly consider the global low-rankness of underlying tensors, which is not sufficient for a low sampling rate; in addition, the single nuclear norm or its relaxation is usually adopted to approximate the rank function, which would lead to suboptimal solution deviated from the original one. To alleviate the above problems, in this paper, we propose a novel low-rank approximation of tensor multi-modes (LRATM), in which a double nonconvex $L_γ$ norm is designed to represent the underlying joint-manifold drawn from the modal factorization factors of the underlying tensor. A block successive upper-bound minimization method-based algorithm is designed to efficiently solve the proposed model, and it can be demonstrated that our numerical scheme converges to the coordinatewise minimizers. Numerical results on three types of public multi-dimensional datasets have tested and shown that our algorithm can recover a variety of low-rank tensors with significantly fewer samples than the compared methods.
On Uplink Performance of Multiuser Massive MIMO Relay Network With Limited RF Chains
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

This paper considers a multiuser massive multiple-input multiple-output uplink with the help of an analog amplify-and-forward relay. The base station equips a large array of $N_d$ antennas but is supported by a far smaller number of radio-frequency chains. By first deriving new results for a cascaded phase-aligned two-hop channel, we obtain a tight bound for the ergodic rate in closed form for both perfect and quantized channel phase information. The rate is characterized as a function of a scaled equivalent signal-to-noise ratio of the two-hop channel. It implies that the source and relay powers can be respectively scaled down as $1/N_d^a$ and $1/N_d^{1-a}~ (0\!\leq\!a\!\leq\!1)$ for an asymptotically unchanged sum rate. Then for the rate maximization, the problem of power allocation is optimized with closed-form solutions. Simulation results verified the observations of our derived results.
Modeling System Dynamics with Physics-Informed Neural Networks Based on Lagrangian Mechanics
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Identifying accurate dynamic models is required for the simulation and control of various technical systems. In many important real-world applications, however, the two main modeling approaches often fail to meet requirements: first principles methods suffer from high bias, whereas data-driven modeling tends to have high variance. Additionally, purely data-based models often require large amounts of data and are often difficult to interpret. In this paper, we present physics-informed neural ordinary differential equations (PINODE), a hybrid model that combines the two modeling techniques to overcome the aforementioned problems. This new approach directly incorporates the equations of motion originating from the Lagrange Mechanics into a deep neural network structure. Thus, we can integrate prior physics knowledge where it is available and use function approximation--e. g., neural networks--where it is not. The method is tested with a forward model of a real-world physical system with large uncertainties. The resulting model is accurate and data-efficient while ensuring physical plausibility. With this, we demonstrate a method that beneficially merges physical insight with real data. Our findings are of interest for model-based control and system identification of mechanical systems.
Detection of Bangla Fake News using MNB and SVM Classifier
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Fake news has been coming into sight in significant numbers for numerous business and political reasons and has become frequent in the online world. People can get contaminated easily by these fake news for its fabricated words which have enormous effects on the offline community. Thus, interest in research in this area has risen. Significant research has been conducted on the detection of fake news from English texts and other languages but a few in Bangla Language. Our work reflects the experimental analysis on the detection of Bangla fake news from social media as this field still requires much focus. In this research work, we have used two supervised machine learning algorithms, Multinomial Naive Bayes (MNB) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers to detect Bangla fake news with CountVectorizer and Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency Vectorizer as feature extraction. Our proposed framework detects fake news depending on the polarity of the corresponding article. Finally, our analysis shows SVM with the linear kernel with an accuracy of 96.64% outperform MNB with an accuracy of 93.32%.
WhylSon: Proving your Michelson Smart Contracts in Why3
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2020
Year: 2020

This paper introduces WhylSon, a deductive verification tool for smart contracts written in Michelson, which is the low-level language of the Tezos blockchain. WhylSon accepts a formally specified Michelson contract and automatically translates it to an equivalent program written in WhyML, the programming and specification language of the Why3 framework. Smart contract instructions are mapped into a corresponding WhyML shallow-embedding of the their axiomatic semantics, which we also developed in the context of this work. One major advantage of this approach is that it allows an out-of-the-box integration with the Why3 framework, namely its VCGen and the backend support for several automated theorem provers. We also discuss the use of WhylSon to automatically prove the correctness of diverse annotated smart contracts.
DIGIT: A Novel Design for a Low-Cost Compact High-Resolution Tactile Sensor with Application to In-Hand Manipulation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Despite decades of research, general purpose in-hand manipulation remains one of the unsolved challenges of robotics. One of the contributing factors that limit current robotic manipulation systems is the difficulty of precisely sensing contact forces -- sensing and reasoning about contact forces are crucial to accurately control interactions with the environment. As a step towards enabling better robotic manipulation, we introduce DIGIT, an inexpensive, compact, and high-resolution tactile sensor geared towards in-hand manipulation. DIGIT improves upon past vision-based tactile sensors by miniaturizing the form factor to be mountable on multi-fingered hands, and by providing several design improvements that result in an easier, more repeatable manufacturing process, and enhanced reliability. We demonstrate the capabilities of the DIGIT sensor by training deep neural network model-based controllers to manipulate glass marbles in-hand with a multi-finger robotic hand. To provide the robotic community access to reliable and low-cost tactile sensors, we open-source the DIGIT design at https://digit.ml/.
Wallet Attestations for Virtual Asset Service Providers and Crypto-Assets Insurance
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

The emerging virtual asset service providers (VASP) industry currently faces a number of challenges related to the Travel Rule, notably pertaining to customer personal information, account number and cryptographic key information. VASPs will be handling virtual assets of different forms, where each may be bound to different private-public key pairs on the blockchain. As such, VASPs also face the additional problem of the management of its own keys and the management of customer keys that may reside in a customer wallet. The use of attestation technologies as applied to wallet systems may provide VASPs with suitable evidence relevant to the Travel Rule regarding cryptographic key information and their operational state. Additionally, wallet attestations may provide crypto-asset insurers with strong evidence regarding the key management aspects of a wallet device, thereby providing the insurance industry with measurable levels of assurance that can become the basis for insurers to perform risk assessment on crypto-assets bound to keys in wallets, both enterprise-grade wallets and consumer-grade wallets.
Differentially Private Decomposable Submodular Maximization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We study the problem of differentially private constrained maximization of decomposable submodular functions. A submodular function is decomposable if it takes the form of a sum of submodular functions. The special case of maximizing a monotone, decomposable submodular function under cardinality constraints is known as the Combinatorial Public Projects (CPP) problem [Papadimitriou et al., 2008]. Previous work by Gupta et al. [2010] gave a differentially private algorithm for the CPP problem. We extend this work by designing differentially private algorithms for both monotone and non-monotone decomposable submodular maximization under general matroid constraints, with competitive utility guarantees. We complement our theoretical bounds with experiments demonstrating empirical performance, which improves over the differentially private algorithms for the general case of submodular maximization and is close to the performance of non-private algorithms.
Environmental regulation using Plasticoding for the evolution of robots
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Evolutionary robot systems are usually affected by the properties of the environment indirectly through selection. In this paper, we present and investigate a system where the environment also has a direct effect: through regulation. We propose a novel robot encoding method where a genotype encodes multiple possible phenotypes, and the incarnation of a robot depends on the environmental conditions taking place in a determined moment of its life. This means that the morphology, controller, and behavior of a robot can change according to the environment. Importantly, this process of development can happen at any moment of a robot lifetime, according to its experienced environmental stimuli. We provide an empirical proof-of-concept, and the analysis of the experimental results shows that Plasticoding improves adaptation (task performance) while leading to different evolved morphologies, controllers, and behaviour.
Fast Execute-Only Memory for Embedded Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

Remote code disclosure attacks threaten embedded systems as they allow attackers to steal intellectual property or to find reusable code for use in control-flow hijacking attacks. Execute-only memory (XOM) prevents remote code disclosures, but existing XOM solutions either require a memory management unit that is not available on ARM embedded systems or incur significant overhead. We present PicoXOM: a fast and novel XOM system for ARMv7-M and ARMv8-M devices which leverages ARM's Data Watchpoint and Tracing unit along with the processor's simplified memory protection hardware. On average, PicoXOM incurs 0.33% performance overhead and 5.89% code size overhead on two benchmark suites and five real-world applications.
Automated Neuron Shape Analysis from Electron Microscopy
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Morphology based analysis of cell types has been an area of great interest to the neuroscience community for several decades. Recently, high resolution electron microscopy (EM) datasets of the mouse brain have opened up opportunities for data analysis at a level of detail that was previously impossible. These datasets are very large in nature and thus, manual analysis is not a practical solution. Of particular interest are details to the level of post synaptic structures. This paper proposes a fully automated framework for analysis of post-synaptic structure based neuron analysis from EM data. The processing framework involves shape extraction, representation with an autoencoder, and whole cell modeling and analysis based on shape distributions. We apply our novel framework on a dataset of 1031 neurons obtained from imaging a 1mm x 1mm x 40 micrometer volume of the mouse visual cortex and show the strength of our method in clustering and classification of neuronal shapes.
Automatic Generation of Topic Labels
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2020
Year: 2020

Topic modelling is a popular unsupervised method for identifying the underlying themes in document collections that has many applications in information retrieval. A topic is usually represented by a list of terms ranked by their probability but, since these can be difficult to interpret, various approaches have been developed to assign descriptive labels to topics. Previous work on the automatic assignment of labels to topics has relied on a two-stage approach: (1) candidate labels are retrieved from a large pool (e.g. Wikipedia article titles); and then (2) re-ranked based on their semantic similarity to the topic terms. However, these extractive approaches can only assign candidate labels from a restricted set that may not include any suitable ones. This paper proposes using a sequence-to-sequence neural-based approach to generate labels that does not suffer from this limitation. The model is trained over a new large synthetic dataset created using distant supervision. The method is evaluated by comparing the labels it generates to ones rated by humans.
Topic Detection and Summarization of User Reviews
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

A massive amount of reviews are generated daily from various platforms. It is impossible for people to read through tons of reviews and to obtain useful information. Automatic summarizing customer reviews thus is important for identifying and extracting the essential information to help users to obtain the gist of the data. However, as customer reviews are typically short, informal, and multifaceted, it is extremely challenging to generate topic-wise summarization.While there are several studies aims to solve this issue, they are heuristic methods that are developed only utilizing customer reviews. Unlike existing method, we propose an effective new summarization method by analyzing both reviews and summaries.To do that, we first segment reviews and summaries into individual sentiments. As the sentiments are typically short, we combine sentiments talking about the same aspect into a single document and apply topic modeling method to identify hidden topics among customer reviews and summaries. Sentiment analysis is employed to distinguish positive and negative opinions among each detected topic. A classifier is also introduced to distinguish the writing pattern of summaries and that of customer reviews. Finally, sentiments are selected to generate the summarization based on their topic relevance, sentiment analysis score and the writing pattern. To test our method, a new dataset comprising product reviews and summaries about 1028 products are collected from Amazon and CNET. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our method compared with other methods.
Analyzing and Learning from User Interactions for Search Clarification
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2020
Year: 2020

Asking clarifying questions in response to search queries has been recognized as a useful technique for revealing the underlying intent of the query. Clarification has applications in retrieval systems with different interfaces, from the traditional web search interfaces to the limited bandwidth interfaces as in speech-only and small screen devices. Generation and evaluation of clarifying questions have been recently studied in the literature. However, user interaction with clarifying questions is relatively unexplored. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study by analyzing large-scale user interactions with clarifying questions in a major web search engine. In more detail, we analyze the user engagements received by clarifying questions based on different properties of search queries, clarifying questions, and their candidate answers. We further study click bias in the data, and show that even though reading clarifying questions and candidate answers does not take significant efforts, there still exist some position and presentation biases in the data. We also propose a model for learning representation for clarifying questions based on the user interaction data as implicit feedback. The model is used for re-ranking a number of automatically generated clarifying questions for a given query. Evaluation on both click data and human labeled data demonstrates the high quality of the proposed method.
Sparsity-Adaptive Beamspace Channel Estimation for 1-Bit mmWave Massive MIMO Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

We propose sparsity-adaptive beamspace channel estimation algorithms that improve accuracy for 1-bit data converters in all-digital millimeter-wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) basestations. Our algorithms include a tuning stage based on Stein's unbiased risk estimate (SURE) that automatically selects optimal denoising parameters depending on the instantaneous channel conditions. Simulation results with line-of-sight (LoS) and non-LoS mmWave massive MIMO channel models show that our algorithms improve channel estimation accuracy with 1-bit measurements in a computationally-efficient manner.