OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
On Embeddings in Relational Databases
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2020
Year: 2020

We address the problem of learning a distributed representation of entities in a relational database using a low-dimensional embedding. Low-dimensional embeddings aim to encapsulate a concise vector representation for an underlying dataset with minimum loss of information. Embeddings across entities in a relational database have been less explored due to the intricate data relations and representation complexity involved. Relational databases are an inter-weaved collection of relations that not only model relationships between entities but also record complex domain-specific quantitative and temporal attributes of data defining complex relationships among entities. Recent methods for learning an embedding constitute of a naive approach to consider complete denormalization of the database by materializing the full join of all tables and representing as a knowledge graph. This popular approach has certain limitations as it fails to capture the inter-row relationships and additional semantics encoded in the relational databases. In this paper we demonstrate; a better methodology for learning representations by exploiting the underlying semantics of columns in a table while using the relation joins and the latent inter-row relationships. Empirical results over a real-world database with evaluations on similarity join and table completion tasks support our proposition.
Coordinates-based Resource Allocation Through Supervised Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Appropriate allocation of system resources is essential for meeting the increased user-traffic demands in the next generation wireless technologies. Traditionally, the system relies on channel state information (CSI) of the users for optimizing the resource allocation, which becomes costly for fast-varying channel conditions. Considering that future wireless technologies will be based on dense network deployment, where the mobile terminals are in line-of-sight of the transmitters, the position information of terminals provides an alternative to estimate the channel condition. In this work, we propose a coordinates-based resource allocation scheme using supervised machine learning techniques, and investigate how efficiently this scheme performs in comparison to the traditional approach under various propagation conditions. We consider a simplistic system set up as a first step, where a single transmitter serves a single mobile user. The performance results show that the coordinates-based resource allocation scheme achieves a performance very close to the CSI-based scheme, even when the available coordinates of terminals are erroneous. The proposed scheme performs consistently well with realistic-system simulation, requiring only 4 s of training time, and the appropriate resource allocation is predicted in less than 90 microseconds with a learnt model of size less than 1 kB.
3D Face Anti-spoofing with Factorized Bilinear Coding
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

We have witnessed rapid advances in both face presentation attack models and presentation attack detection (PAD) in recent years. When compared with widely studied 2D face presentation attacks, 3D face spoofing attacks are more challenging because face recognition systems are more easily confused by the 3D characteristics of materials similar to real faces. In this work, we tackle the problem of detecting these realistic 3D face presentation attacks, and propose a novel anti-spoofing method from the perspective of fine-grained classification. Our method, based on factorized bilinear coding of multiple color channels (namely MC\_FBC), targets at learning subtle fine-grained differences between real and fake images. By extracting discriminative and fusing complementary information from RGB and YCbCr spaces, we have developed a principled solution to 3D face spoofing detection. A large-scale wax figure face database (WFFD) with both images and videos has also been collected as super-realistic attacks to facilitate the study of 3D face presentation attack detection. Extensive experimental results show that our proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on both our own WFFD and other face spoofing databases under various intra-database and inter-database testing scenarios.
Distance-2 Coloring in the CONGEST Model
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

We give efficient randomized and deterministic distributed algorithms for computing a distance-$2$ vertex coloring of a graph $G$ in the CONGEST model. In particular, if $Δ$ is the maximum degree of $G$, we show that there is a randomized CONGEST model algorithm to compute a distance-$2$ coloring of $G$ with $Δ^2+1$ colors in $O(\logΔ\cdot\log n)$ rounds. Further if the number of colors is slightly increased to $(1+ε)Δ^2$ for some $ε>1/{\rm polylog}(n)$, we show that it is even possible to compute a distance-$2$ coloring deterministically in polylog$(n)$ time in the CONGEST model. Finally, we give a $O(Δ^2 + \log^* n)$-round deterministic CONGEST algorithm to compute distance-$2$ coloring with $Δ^2+1$ colors.
Pedestrian Action Anticipation using Contextual Feature Fusion in Stacked RNNs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

One of the major challenges for autonomous vehicles in urban environments is to understand and predict other road users' actions, in particular, pedestrians at the point of crossing. The common approach to solving this problem is to use the motion history of the agents to predict their future trajectories. However, pedestrians exhibit highly variable actions most of which cannot be understood without visual observation of the pedestrians themselves and their surroundings. To this end, we propose a solution for the problem of pedestrian action anticipation at the point of crossing. Our approach uses a novel stacked RNN architecture in which information collected from various sources, both scene dynamics and visual features, is gradually fused into the network at different levels of processing. We show, via extensive empirical evaluations, that the proposed algorithm achieves a higher prediction accuracy compared to alternative recurrent network architectures. We conduct experiments to investigate the impact of the length of observation, time to event and types of features on the performance of the proposed method. Finally, we demonstrate how different data fusion strategies impact prediction accuracy.
Fashion Recommendation and Compatibility Prediction Using Relational Network
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2020
Year: 2020

Fashion is an inherently visual concept and computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI) are playing an increasingly important role in shaping the future of this domain. Many research has been done on recommending fashion products based on the learned user preferences. However, in addition to recommending single items, AI can also help users create stylish outfits from items they already have, or purchase additional items that go well with their current wardrobe. Compatibility is the key factor in creating stylish outfits from single items. Previous studies have mostly focused on modeling pair-wise compatibility. There are a few approaches that consider an entire outfit, but these approaches have limitations such as requiring rich semantic information, category labels, and fixed order of items. Thus, they fail to effectively determine compatibility when such information is not available. In this work, we adopt a Relation Network (RN) to develop new compatibility learning models, Fashion RN and FashionRN-VSE, that addresses the limitations of existing approaches. FashionRN learns the compatibility of an entire outfit, with an arbitrary number of items, in an arbitrary order. We evaluated our model using a large dataset of 49,740 outfits that we collected from Polyvore website. Quantitatively, our experimental results demonstrate state of the art performance compared with alternative methods in the literature in both compatibility prediction and fill-in-the-blank test. Qualitatively, we also show that the item embedding learned by FashionRN indicate the compatibility among fashion items.
PERLEX: A Bilingual Persian-English Gold Dataset for Relation Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Relation extraction is the task of extracting semantic relations between entities in a sentence. It is an essential part of some natural language processing tasks such as information extraction, knowledge extraction, and knowledge base population. The main motivations of this research stem from a lack of a dataset for relation extraction in the Persian language as well as the necessity of extracting knowledge from the growing big-data in the Persian language for different applications. In this paper, we present "PERLEX" as the first Persian dataset for relation extraction, which is an expert-translated version of the "Semeval-2010-Task-8" dataset. Moreover, this paper addresses Persian relation extraction utilizing state-of-the-art language-agnostic algorithms. We employ six different models for relation extraction on the proposed bilingual dataset, including a non-neural model (as the baseline), three neural models, and two deep learning models fed by multilingual-BERT contextual word representations. The experiments result in the maximum f-score 77.66% (provided by BERTEM-MTB method) as the state-of-the-art of relation extraction in the Persian language.
Simplified ResNet approach for data driven prediction of microstructure-fatigue relationship
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2020
Year: 2020

The heterogeneous microstructure in metallic components results in locally varying fatigue strength. Metal fatigue strongly depends on size and shape of non-metallic inclusions and pores, commonly referred to as "defects". Nodular cast iron (NCI) contains graphite inclusions (nodules) whose shape and frequency influence the fatigue strength. Fatigue strength can be simulated by micromechanical finite element models. The drawback of these models are the large computational costs. Therefore, we employ a data-driven machine learning methodology. More precisely, we utilize the simplified residual neural network (SimResNet) which was recently introduced (Herty et al., Kinetic Theory for Residual Neural Networks, 2020) to predict fatigue strength from metallographic data. For the training, we use fatigue data which is simulated with a micromechanical model and the shakedown theorem. The micromechanical models are derived directly from micrographs of nodular cast iron, respectively. The application of SimResNet shows a good performance to predict fatigue strength by local microstructures of nodular cast iron. We show several test cases. The simplified character of SimResNet enables fast predictions of fatigue by microstructures, even in comparision to classical residual neural networks.
Comparative Analysis of Text Classification Approaches in Electronic Health Records
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Text classification tasks which aim at harvesting and/or organizing information from electronic health records are pivotal to support clinical and translational research. However these present specific challenges compared to other classification tasks, notably due to the particular nature of the medical lexicon and language used in clinical records. Recent advances in embedding methods have shown promising results for several clinical tasks, yet there is no exhaustive comparison of such approaches with other commonly used word representations and classification models. In this work, we analyse the impact of various word representations, text pre-processing and classification algorithms on the performance of four different text classification tasks. The results show that traditional approaches, when tailored to the specific language and structure of the text inherent to the classification task, can achieve or exceed the performance of more recent ones based on contextual embeddings such as BERT.
SCAT: Second Chance Autoencoder for Textual Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

We present a k-competitive learning approach for textual autoencoders named Second Chance Autoencoder (SCAT). SCAT selects the $k$ largest and smallest positive activations as the winner neurons, which gain the activation values of the loser neurons during the learning process, and thus focus on retrieving well-representative features for topics. Our experiments show that SCAT achieves outstanding performance in classification, topic modeling, and document visualization compared to LDA, K-Sparse, NVCTM, and KATE.
Structured Query-Based Image Retrieval Using Scene Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

A structured query can capture the complexity of object interactions (e.g. 'woman rides motorcycle') unlike single objects (e.g. 'woman' or 'motorcycle'). Retrieval using structured queries therefore is much more useful than single object retrieval, but a much more challenging problem. In this paper we present a method which uses scene graph embeddings as the basis for an approach to image retrieval. We examine how visual relationships, derived from scene graphs, can be used as structured queries. The visual relationships are directed subgraphs of the scene graph with a subject and object as nodes connected by a predicate relationship. Notably, we are able to achieve high recall even on low to medium frequency objects found in the long-tailed COCO-Stuff dataset, and find that adding a visual relationship-inspired loss boosts our recall by 10% in the best case.
Exploiting Multi-Layer Grid Maps for Surround-View Semantic Segmentation of Sparse LiDAR Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we consider the transformation of laser range measurements into a top-view grid map representation to approach the task of LiDAR-only semantic segmentation. Since the recent publication of the SemanticKITTI data set, researchers are now able to study semantic segmentation of urban LiDAR sequences based on a reasonable amount of data. While other approaches propose to directly learn on the 3D point clouds, we are exploiting a grid map framework to extract relevant information and represent them by using multi-layer grid maps. This representation allows us to use well-studied deep learning architectures from the image domain to predict a dense semantic grid map using only the sparse input data of a single LiDAR scan. We compare single-layer and multi-layer approaches and demonstrate the benefit of a multi-layer grid map input. Since the grid map representation allows us to predict a dense, 360° semantic environment representation, we further develop a method to combine the semantic information from multiple scans and create dense ground truth grids. This method allows us to evaluate and compare the performance of our models not only based on grid cells with a detection, but on the full visible measurement range.
Efficient iterative thresholding algorithms with functional feedbacks and convergence analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

An accelerated class of adaptive scheme of iterative thresholding algorithms is studied analytically and empirically. They are based on the feedback mechanism of the null space tuning techniques (NST+HT+FB). The main contribution of this article is the accelerated convergence analysis and proofs with a variable/adaptive index selection and different feedback principles at each iteration. These convergence analysis require no longer a priori sparsity information $s$ of a signal. %key theory in this paper is the concept that the number of indices selected at each iteration should be considered in order to speed up the convergence. It is shown that uniform recovery of all $s$-sparse signals from given linear measurements can be achieved under reasonable (preconditioned) restricted isometry conditions. Accelerated convergence rate and improved convergence conditions are obtained by selecting an appropriate size of the index support per iteration. The theoretical findings are sufficiently demonstrated and confirmed by extensive numerical experiments. It is also observed that the proposed algorithms have a clearly advantageous balance of efficiency, adaptivity and accuracy compared with all other state-of-the-art greedy iterative algorithms.
Power-Efficient Resource Allocation for Multiuser MISO Systems via Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

Intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) are regarded as key enablers of next-generation wireless communications, due to their capability of customizing the wireless propagation environment. In this paper, we investigate power-efficient resource allocation for IRS-assisted multiuser multiple-input single-output (MISO) systems. To minimize the transmit power, both the beamforming vectors at the access point (AP) and phase shifts at the IRS are jointly optimized while taking into account the minimum required quality-of-service (QoS) of the users. To tackle the non-convexity of the formulated optimization problem, an inner approximation (IA) algorithm is developed. Unlike existing designs, which cannot guarantee local optimality, the proposed algorithm is guaranteed to converge to a Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) solution. Our simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm compared to baseline schemes and reveal that deploying IRSs is more promising than leveraging multiple antennas at the AP in terms of energy efficiency.
MixML: A Unified Analysis of Weakly Consistent Parallel Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Parallelism is a ubiquitous method for accelerating machine learning algorithms. However, theoretical analysis of parallel learning is usually done in an algorithm- and protocol-specific setting, giving little insight about how changes in the structure of communication could affect convergence. In this paper we propose MixML, a general framework for analyzing convergence of weakly consistent parallel machine learning. Our framework includes: (1) a unified way of modeling the communication process among parallel workers; (2) a new parameter, the mixing time tmix, that quantifies how the communication process affects convergence; and (3) a principled way of converting a convergence proof for a sequential algorithm into one for a parallel version that depends only on tmix. We show MixML recovers and improves on known convergence bounds for asynchronous and/or decentralized versions of many algorithms, includingSGD and AMSGrad. Our experiments substantiate the theory and show the dependency of convergence on the underlying mixing time.
ECIR 2020 Workshops: Assessing the Impact of Going Online
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2020
Year: 2020

ECIR 2020 https://ecir2020.org/ was one of the many conferences affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Conference Chairs decided to keep the initially planned dates (April 14-17, 2020) and move to a fully online event. In this report, we describe the experience of organizing the ECIR 2020 Workshops in this scenario from two perspectives: the workshop organizers and the workshop participants. We provide a report on the organizational aspect of these events and the consequences for participants. Covering the scientific dimension of each workshop is outside the scope of this article.
Super-Resolution of Positive Sources on an Arbitrarily Fine Grid
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

In super-resolution it is necessary to locate with high precision point sources from noisy observations of the spectrum of the signal at low frequencies capped by f_c. In the case when the point sources are positive and are located on a grid, it has been recently established that the super-resolution problem can be solved via linear programming in a stable manner and that the method is nearly optimal in the minimax sense. The quality of the reconstruction critically depends on the Rayleigh regularity of the support of the signal; that is, on the maximum number of sources that can occur within an interval of side length about 1/f_c. This work extends the earlier result and shows that the conclusion continues to hold when the locations of the point sources are arbitrary, i.e., the grid is arbitrarily fine. The proof relies on new interpolation constructions in Fourier analysis.
Intermittently Failing Tests in the Embedded Systems Domain
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2020
Year: 2020

Software testing is sometimes plagued with intermittently failing tests and finding the root causes of such failing tests is often difficult. This problem has been widely studied at the unit testing level for open source software, but there has been far less investigation at the system test level, particularly the testing of industrial embedded systems. This paper describes our investigation of the root causes of intermittently failing tests in the embedded systems domain, with the goal of better understanding, explaining and categorizing the underlying faults. The subject of our investigation is a currently-running industrial embedded system, along with the system level testing that was performed. We devised and used a novel metric for classifying test cases as intermittent. From more than a half million test verdicts, we identified intermittently and consistently failing tests, and identified their root causes using multiple sources. We found that about 1-3% of all test cases were intermittently failing. From analysis of the case study results and related work, we identified nine factors associated with test case intermittence. We found that a fix for a consistently failing test typically removed a larger number of failures detected by other tests than a fix for an intermittent test. We also found that more effort was usually needed to identify fixes for intermittent tests than for consistent tests. An overlap between root causes leading to intermittent and consistent tests was identified. Many root causes of intermittence are the same in industrial embedded systems and open source software. However, when comparing unit testing to system level testing, especially for embedded systems, we observed that the test environment itself is often the cause of intermittence.
A Category Theory Approach to Interoperability
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

In this article, we propose a Category Theory approach to (syntactic) interoperability between linguistic tools. The resulting category consists of textual documents, including any linguistic annotations, NLP tools that analyze texts and add additional linguistic information, and format converters. Format converters are necessary to make the tools both able to read and to produce different output formats, which is the key to interoperability. The idea behind this document is the parallelism between the concepts of composition and associativity in Category Theory with the NLP pipelines. We show how pipelines of linguistic tools can be modeled into the conceptual framework of Category Theory and we successfully apply this method to two real-life examples.
A Polar Code Based TIN-SIC Scheme for the Unsourced Random Access in the Quasi-Static Fading MAC
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

We consider a problem of unsourced random access in the quasi-static Rayleigh fading channel. In the previous work, the authors have proposed LDPC code based solutions based on joint and treat interference as noise in combination with successive interference cancellation (TIN-SIC) decoder architectures. The authors showed that TIN-SIC decoding significantly outperforms the joint decoding approach and much simpler from the implementation point of view. In this paper, we continue the analysis of TIN-SIC decoding. We derive a finite length achievability bound for TIN-SIC decoder using random coding and propose a practical polar code based TIN-SIC scheme. The latter's performance becomes significantly better in comparison to LDPC code based solutions and close to the finite length achievability bound.