OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
S2DNAS:Transforming Static CNN Model for Dynamic Inference via Neural Architecture Search
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Recently, dynamic inference has emerged as a promising way to reduce the computational cost of deep convolutional neural network (CNN). In contrast to static methods (e.g. weight pruning), dynamic inference adaptively adjusts the inference process according to each input sample, which can considerably reduce the computational cost on "easy" samples while maintaining the overall model performance. In this paper, we introduce a general framework, S2DNAS, which can transform various static CNN models to support dynamic inference via neural architecture search. To this end, based on a given CNN model, we first generate a CNN architecture space in which each architecture is a multi-stage CNN generated from the given model using some predefined transformations. Then, we propose a reinforcement learning based approach to automatically search for the optimal CNN architecture in the generated space. At last, with the searched multi-stage network, we can perform dynamic inference by adaptively choosing a stage to evaluate for each sample. Unlike previous works that introduce irregular computations or complex controllers in the inference or re-design a CNN model from scratch, our method can generalize to most of the popular CNN architectures and the searched dynamic network can be directly deployed using existing deep learning frameworks in various hardware devices.
Taming Reasoning in Temporal Probabilistic Relational Models
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2019
Year: 2019

Evidence often grounds temporal probabilistic relational models over time, which makes reasoning infeasible. To counteract groundings over time and to keep reasoning polynomial by restoring a lifted representation, we present temporal approximate merging (TAMe), which incorporates (i) clustering for grouping submodels as well as (ii) statistical significance checks to test the fitness of the clustering outcome. In exchange for faster runtimes, TAMe introduces a bounded error that becomes negligible over time. Empirical results show that TAMe significantly improves the runtime performance of inference, while keeping errors small.
Unsupervised Deep Metric Learning via Auxiliary Rotation Loss
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Deep metric learning is an important area due to its applicability to many domains such as image retrieval and person re-identification. The main drawback of such models is the necessity for labeled data. In this work, we propose to generate pseudo-labels for deep metric learning directly from clustering assignment and we introduce unsupervised deep metric learning (UDML) regularized by a self-supervision (SS) task. In particular, we propose to regularize the training process by predicting image rotations. Our method (UDML-SS) jointly learns discriminative embeddings, unsupervised clustering assignments of the embeddings, as well as a self-supervised pretext task. UDML-SS iteratively cluster embeddings using traditional clustering algorithm (e.g., k-means), and sampling training pairs based on the cluster assignment for metric learning, while optimizing self-supervised pretext task in a multi-task fashion. The role of self-supervision is to stabilize the training process and encourages the model to learn meaningful feature representations that are not distorted due to unreliable clustering assignments. The proposed method performs well on standard benchmarks for metric learning, where it outperforms current state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin and it also shows competitive performance with various metric learning loss functions.
Causality-based Feature Selection: Methods and Evaluations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Feature selection is a crucial preprocessing step in data analytics and machine learning. Classical feature selection algorithms select features based on the correlations between predictive features and the class variable and do not attempt to capture causal relationships between them. It has been shown that the knowledge about the causal relationships between features and the class variable has potential benefits for building interpretable and robust prediction models, since causal relationships imply the underlying mechanism of a system. Consequently, causality-based feature selection has gradually attracted greater attentions and many algorithms have been proposed. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of recent advances in causality-based feature selection. To facilitate the development of new algorithms in the research area and make it easy for the comparisons between new methods and existing ones, we develop the first open-source package, called CausalFS, which consists of most of the representative causality-based feature selection algorithms (available at https://github.com/kuiy/CausalFS). Using CausalFS, we conduct extensive experiments to compare the representative algorithms with both synthetic and real-world data sets. Finally, we discuss some challenging problems to be tackled in future causality-based feature selection research.
Mining Unfollow Behavior in Large-Scale Online Social Networks via Spatial-Temporal Interaction
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2019
Year: 2019

Online Social Networks (OSNs) evolve through two pervasive behaviors: follow and unfollow, which respectively signify relationship creation and relationship dissolution. Researches on social network evolution mainly focus on the follow behavior, while the unfollow behavior has largely been ignored. Mining unfollow behavior is challenging because user's decision on unfollow is not only affected by the simple combination of user's attributes like informativeness and reciprocity, but also affected by the complex interaction among them. Meanwhile, prior datasets seldom contain sufficient records for inferring such complex interaction. To address these issues, we first construct a large-scale real-world Weibo dataset, which records detailed post content and relationship dynamics of 1.8 million Chinese users. Next, we define user's attributes as two categories: spatial attributes (e.g., social role of user) and temporal attributes (e.g., post content of user). Leveraging the constructed dataset, we systematically study how the interaction effects between user's spatial and temporal attributes contribute to the unfollow behavior. Afterwards, we propose a novel unified model with heterogeneous information (UMHI) for unfollow prediction. Specifically, our UMHI model: 1) captures user's spatial attributes through social network structure; 2) infers user's temporal attributes through user-posted content and unfollow history; and 3) models the interaction between spatial and temporal attributes by the nonlinear MLP layers. Comprehensive evaluations on the constructed dataset demonstrate that the proposed UMHI model outperforms baseline methods by 16.44% on average in terms of precision. In addition, factor analyses verify that both spatial attributes and temporal attributes are essential for mining unfollow behavior.
Multi-Zone Unit for Recurrent Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have been widely used to deal with sequence learning problems. The input-dependent transition function, which folds new observations into hidden states to sequentially construct fixed-length representations of arbitrary-length sequences, plays a critical role in RNNs. Based on single space composition, transition functions in existing RNNs often have difficulty in capturing complicated long-range dependencies. In this paper, we introduce a new Multi-zone Unit (MZU) for RNNs. The key idea is to design a transition function that is capable of modeling multiple space composition. The MZU consists of three components: zone generation, zone composition, and zone aggregation. Experimental results on multiple datasets of the character-level language modeling task and the aspect-based sentiment analysis task demonstrate the superiority of the MZU.
Predicting Device-to-Device Channels from Cellular Channel Measurements: A Learning Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

Device-to-device (D2D) communication, which enables a direct connection between users while bypassing the cellular channels to base stations (BSs), is a promising way to offload the traffic from conventional cellular networks. In D2D communication, one recurring problem is that, in order to optimally allocate resources across D2D and cellular users, the knowledge of D2D channel gains is needed. However, such knowledge is hard to obtain at reasonable signaling costs. In this paper, we show this problem can be circumvented by tapping into the information provided by the estimation of the cellular channels between the users and surrounding BSs as this estimation is done anyway for a normal operation of the network. While the cellular and D2D channel gains exhibit independent fast fading behavior, we show that average gains of the cellular and D2D channels share a non-explicit correlation structure, which is rooted into the network topology, terrain, and buildings setup. We propose a machine (deep) learning approach capable of predicting the D2D channel gains from seemingly independent cellular channels. Our results show a high degree of convergence between true and predicted D2D channel gains. The predicted gains allow to reach a near-optimal communication capacity in many radio resource management algorithms.
Concept-oriented model: Modeling and processing data using functions
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2019
Year: 2019

We describe a new logical data model, called the concept-oriented model (COM). It uses mathematical functions as first-class constructs for data representation and data processing as opposed to using exclusively sets in conventional set-oriented models. Functions and function composition are used as primary semantic units for describing data connectivity instead of relations and relation composition (join), respectively. Grouping and aggregation are also performed by using (accumulate) functions providing an alternative to group-by and reduce operations. This model was implemented in an open source data processing toolkit examples of which are used to illustrate the model and its operations. The main benefit of this model is that typical data processing tasks become simpler and more natural when using functions in comparison to adopting sets and set operations.
Error Analysis for Vietnamese Named Entity Recognition on Deep Neural Network Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

In recent years, Vietnamese Named Entity Recognition (NER) systems have had a great breakthrough when using Deep Neural Network methods. This paper describes the primary errors of the state-of-the-art NER systems on Vietnamese language. After conducting experiments on BLSTM-CNN-CRF and BLSTM-CRF models with different word embeddings on the Vietnamese NER dataset. This dataset is provided by VLSP in 2016 and used to evaluate most of the current Vietnamese NER systems. We noticed that BLSTM-CNN-CRF gives better results, therefore, we analyze the errors on this model in detail. Our error-analysis results provide us thorough insights in order to increase the performance of NER for the Vietnamese language and improve the quality of the corpus in the future works.
Leveraging Multi-view Image Sets for Unsupervised Intrinsic Image Decomposition and Highlight Separation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

We present an unsupervised approach for factorizing object appearance into highlight, shading, and albedo layers, trained by multi-view real images. To do so, we construct a multi-view dataset by collecting numerous customer product photos online, which exhibit large illumination variations that make them suitable for training of reflectance separation and can facilitate object-level decomposition. The main contribution of our approach is a proposed image representation based on local color distributions that allows training to be insensitive to the local misalignments of multi-view images. In addition, we present a new guidance cue for unsupervised training that exploits synergy between highlight separation and intrinsic image decomposition. Over a broad range of objects, our technique is shown to yield state-of-the-art results for both of these tasks.
Detecting F-formations & Roles in Crowded Social Scenes with Wearables: Combining Proxemics & Dynamics using LSTMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we investigate the use of proxemics and dynamics for automatically identifying conversing groups, or so-called F-formations. More formally we aim to automatically identify whether wearable sensor data coming from 2 people is indicative of F-formation membership. We also explore the problem of jointly detecting membership and more descriptive information about the pair relating to the role they take in the conversation (i.e. speaker or listener). We jointly model the concepts of proxemics and dynamics using binary proximity and acceleration obtained through a single wearable sensor per person. We test our approaches on the publicly available MatchNMingle dataset which was collected during real-life mingling events. We find out that fusion of these two modalities performs significantly better than them independently, providing an AUC of 0.975 when data from 30-second windows are used. Furthermore, our investigation into roles detection shows that each role pair requires a different time resolution for accurate detection.
Towards Efficient Anytime Computation and Execution of Decoupled Robustness Envelopes for Temporal Plans
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2019
Year: 2019

One of the major limitations for the employment of model-based planning and scheduling in practical applications is the need of costly re-planning when an incongruence between the observed reality and the formal model is encountered during execution. Robustness Envelopes characterize the set of possible contingencies that a plan is able to address without re-planning, but their exact computation is extremely expensive; furthermore, general robustness envelopes are not amenable for efficient execution. In this paper, we present a novel, anytime algorithm to approximate Robustness Envelopes, making them scalable and executable. This is proven by an experimental analysis showing the efficiency of the algorithm, and by a concrete case study where the execution of robustness envelopes significantly reduces the number of re-plannings.
Sparse $\ell_1$ and $\ell_2$ Center Classifiers
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

The nearest-centroid classifier is a simple linear-time classifier based on computing the centroids of the data classes in the training phase, and then assigning a new datum to the class corresponding to its nearest centroid. Thanks to its very low computational cost, the nearest-centroid classifier is still widely used in machine learning, despite the development of many other more sophisticated classification methods. In this paper, we propose two sparse variants of the nearest-centroid classifier, based respectively on $\ell_1$ and $\ell_2$ distance criteria. The proposed sparse classifiers perform simultaneous classification and feature selection, by detecting the features that are most relevant for the classification purpose. We show that training of the proposed sparse models, with both distance criteria, can be performed exactly (i.e., the globally optimal set of features is selected) and at a quasi-linear computational cost. The experimental results show that the proposed methods are competitive in accuracy with state-of-the-art feature selection techniques, while having a significantly lower computational cost.
Robotic Sculpting with Collision-free Motion Planning in Voxel Space
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we explore the task of robot sculpting. We propose a search based planning algorithm to solve the problem of sculpting by material removal with a multi-axis manipulator. We generate collision free trajectories for a manipulator using best-first search in voxel space. We also show significant speedup of our algorithm by using octrees to decompose the voxel space. We demonstrate our algorithm on a multi-axis manipulator in simulation by sculpting Michelangelo's Statue of David, evaluate certain metrics of our algorithm and discuss future goals for the project.
Towards Robust RGB-D Human Mesh Recovery
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

We consider the problem of human pose estimation. While much recent work has focused on the RGB domain, these techniques are inherently under-constrained since there can be many 3D configurations that explain the same 2D projection. To this end, we propose a new method that uses RGB-D data to estimate a parametric human mesh model. Our key innovations include (a) the design of a new dynamic data fusion module that facilitates learning with a combination of RGB-only and RGB-D datasets, (b) a new constraint generator module that provides SMPL supervisory signals when explicit SMPL annotations are not available, and (c) the design of a new depth ranking learning objective, all of which enable principled model training with RGB-D data. We conduct extensive experiments on a variety of RGB-D datasets to demonstrate efficacy.
Vulnerability Analysis for Data Driven Pricing Schemes
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Data analytics and machine learning techniques are being rapidly adopted into the power system, including power system control as well as electricity market design. In this paper, from an adversarial machine learning point of view, we examine the vulnerability of data-driven electricity market design. More precisely, we follow the idea that consumer's load profile should uniquely determine its electricity rate, which yields a clustering oriented pricing scheme. We first identify the strategic behaviors of malicious users by defining a notion of disguising. Based on this notion, we characterize the sensitivity zones to evaluate the percentage of malicious users in each cluster. Based on a thorough cost benefit analysis, we conclude with the vulnerability analysis.
Optimal deployments of UAVs with directional antennas for a power-efficient coverage
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

To provide a reliable wireless uplink for users in a given ground area, one can deploy Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as base stations (BSs). In another application, one can use UAVs to collect data from sensors on the ground. For a power-efficient and scalable deployment of such flying BSs, directional antennas can be utilized to efficiently cover arbitrary 2-D ground areas. We consider a large-scale wireless path-loss model with a realistic angle-dependent radiation pattern for the directional antennas. Based on such a model, we determine the optimal 3-D deployment of N UAVs to minimize the average transmit-power consumption of the users in a given target area. The users are assumed to have identical transmitters with ideal omnidirectional antennas and the UAVs have identical directional antennas with given half-power beamwidth (HPBW) and symmetric radiation pattern along the vertical axis. For uniformly distributed ground users, we show that the UAVs have to share a common flight height in an optimal power-efficient deployment. We also derive in closed-form the asymptotic optimal common flight height of $N$ UAVs in terms of the area size, data-rate, bandwidth, HPBW, and path-loss exponent.
Fine-Grained Neural Architecture Search
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

We present an elegant framework of fine-grained neural architecture search (FGNAS), which allows to employ multiple heterogeneous operations within a single layer and can even generate compositional feature maps using several different base operations. FGNAS runs efficiently in spite of significantly large search space compared to other methods because it trains networks end-to-end by a stochastic gradient descent method. Moreover, the proposed framework allows to optimize the network under predefined resource constraints in terms of number of parameters, FLOPs and latency. FGNAS has been applied to two crucial applications in resource demanding computer vision tasks---large-scale image classification and image super-resolution---and demonstrates the state-of-the-art performance through flexible operation search and channel pruning.
SOGNet: Scene Overlap Graph Network for Panoptic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

The panoptic segmentation task requires a unified result from semantic and instance segmentation outputs that may contain overlaps. However, current studies widely ignore modeling overlaps. In this study, we aim to model overlap relations among instances and resolve them for panoptic segmentation. Inspired by scene graph representation, we formulate the overlapping problem as a simplified case, named scene overlap graph. We leverage each object's category, geometry and appearance features to perform relational embedding, and output a relation matrix that encodes overlap relations. In order to overcome the lack of supervision, we introduce a differentiable module to resolve the overlap between any pair of instances. The mask logits after removing overlaps are fed into per-pixel instance \verb|id| classification, which leverages the panoptic supervision to assist in the modeling of overlap relations. Besides, we generate an approximate ground truth of overlap relations as the weak supervision, to quantify the accuracy of overlap relations predicted by our method. Experiments on COCO and Cityscapes demonstrate that our method is able to accurately predict overlap relations, and outperform the state-of-the-art performance for panoptic segmentation. Our method also won the Innovation Award in COCO 2019 challenge.
Semi-Automatic Task Graph Construction for $\mathcal{H}$-Matrix Arithmetic
Venue: arXiv cs.MS 2019
Year: 2019

A new method to construct task graphs for \mcH-matrix arithmetic is introduced, which uses the information associated with all tasks of the standard recursive \mcH-matrix algorithms, e.g., the block index set of the matrix blocks involved in the computation. Task refinement, i.e., the replacement of tasks by sub-computations, is then used to proceed in the \mcH-matrix hierarchy until the matrix blocks containing the actual matrix data are reached. This process is a natural extension of the classical, recursive way in which \mcH-matrix arithmetic is defined and thereby simplifies the efficient usage of many-core systems. Examples for standard and accumulator based \mcH-arithmetic are shown for model problems with different block structures.
The impact of quantum computing on real-world security: A 5G case study
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

This paper provides a detailed analysis of the impact of quantum computing on the security of 5G mobile telecommunications. This involves considering how cryptography is used in 5G, and how the security of the system would be affected by the advent of quantum computing. This leads naturally to the specification of a series of simple, phased, recommended changes intended to ensure that the security of 5G (as well as 3G and 4G) is not badly damaged if and when large scale quantum computing becomes a practical reality. By exploiting backwards-compatibility features of the 5G security system design, we are able to propose a novel multi-phase approach to upgrading security that allows for a simple and smooth migration to a post-quantum-secure system.