OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Human-centric light sensing and estimation from RGBD images: The invisible light switch
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Lighting design in indoor environments is of primary importance for at least two reasons: 1) people should perceive an adequate light; 2) an effective lighting design means consistent energy saving. We present the Invisible Light Switch (ILS) to address both aspects. ILS dynamically adjusts the room illumination level to save energy while maintaining constant the light level perception of the users. So the energy saving is invisible to them. Our proposed ILS leverages a radiosity model to estimate the light level which is perceived by a person within an indoor environment, taking into account the person position and her/his viewing frustum (head pose). ILS may therefore dim those luminaires, which are not seen by the user, resulting in an effective energy saving, especially in large open offices (where light may otherwise be ON everywhere for a single person). To quantify the system performance, we have collected a new dataset where people wear luxmeter devices while working in office rooms. The luxmeters measure the amount of light (in Lux) reaching the people gaze, which we consider a proxy to their illumination level perception. Our initial results are promising: in a room with 8 LED luminaires, the energy consumption in a day may be reduced from 18585 to 6206 watts with ILS (currently needing 1560 watts for operations). While doing so, the drop in perceived lighting decreases by just 200 lux, a value considered negligible when the original illumination level is above 1200 lux, as is normally the case in offices.
Blurred Images Lead to Bad Local Minima
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Blurred Images Lead to Bad Local Minima
Benefiting from Duplicates of Compressed Data: Shift-Based Holographic Compression of Images
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2019
Year: 2019

Storage systems often rely on multiple copies of the same compressed data, enabling recovery in case of binary data errors, of course, at the expense of a higher storage cost. In this paper we show that a wiser method of duplication entails great potential benefits for data types tolerating approximate representations, like images and videos. We propose a method to produce a set of distinct compressed representations for a given signal, such that any subset of them allows reconstruction of the signal at a quality depending only on the number of compressed representations utilized. Essentially, we implement the holographic representation idea, where all the representations are equally important in refining the reconstruction. Here we propose to exploit the shift sensitivity of common compression processes and generate holographic representations via compression of various shifts of the signal. Two implementations for the idea, based on standard compression methods, are presented: the first is a simple, optimization-free design. The second approach originates in a challenging rate-distortion optimization, mitigated by the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), leading to a process of repeatedly applying standard compression techniques. Evaluation of the approach, in conjunction with the JPEG2000 image compression standard, shows the effectiveness of the optimization in providing compressed holographic representations that, by means of an elementary reconstruction process, enable impressive gains of several dBs in PSNR over exact duplications.
Pixelated Semantic Colorization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

While many image colorization algorithms have recently shown the capability of producing plausible color versions from gray-scale photographs, they still suffer from limited semantic understanding. To address this shortcoming, we propose to exploit pixelated object semantics to guide image colorization. The rationale is that human beings perceive and distinguish colors based on the semantic categories of objects. Starting from an autoregressive model, we generate image color distributions, from which diverse colored results are sampled. We propose two ways to incorporate object semantics into the colorization model: through a pixelated semantic embedding and a pixelated semantic generator. Specifically, the proposed convolutional neural network includes two branches. One branch learns what the object is, while the other branch learns the object colors. The network jointly optimizes a color embedding loss, a semantic segmentation loss and a color generation loss, in an end-to-end fashion. Experiments on PASCAL VOC2012 and COCO-stuff reveal that our network, when trained with semantic segmentation labels, produces more realistic and finer results compared to the colorization state-of-the-art.
A Meta-Transfer Objective for Learning to Disentangle Causal Mechanisms
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

We propose to meta-learn causal structures based on how fast a learner adapts to new distributions arising from sparse distributional changes, e.g. due to interventions, actions of agents and other sources of non-stationarities. We show that under this assumption, the correct causal structural choices lead to faster adaptation to modified distributions because the changes are concentrated in one or just a few mechanisms when the learned knowledge is modularized appropriately. This leads to sparse expected gradients and a lower effective number of degrees of freedom needing to be relearned while adapting to the change. It motivates using the speed of adaptation to a modified distribution as a meta-learning objective. We demonstrate how this can be used to determine the cause-effect relationship between two observed variables. The distributional changes do not need to correspond to standard interventions (clamping a variable), and the learner has no direct knowledge of these interventions. We show that causal structures can be parameterized via continuous variables and learned end-to-end. We then explore how these ideas could be used to also learn an encoder that would map low-level observed variables to unobserved causal variables leading to faster adaptation out-of-distribution, learning a representation space where one can satisfy the assumptions of independent mechanisms and of small and sparse changes in these mechanisms due to actions and non-stationarities.
Classifier Suites for Insider Threat Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Better methods to detect insider threats need new anticipatory analytics to capture risky behavior prior to losing data. In search of the best overall classifier, this work empirically scores 88 machine learning algorithms in 16 major families. We extract risk features from the large CERT dataset, which blends real network behavior with individual threat narratives. We discover the predictive importance of measuring employee sentiment. Among major classifier families tested on CERT, the random forest algorithms offer the best choice, with different implementations scoring over 98% accurate. In contrast to more obscure or black-box alternatives, random forests are ensembles of many decision trees and thus offer a deep but human-readable set of detection rules (>2000 rules). We address performance rankings by penalizing long execution times against higher median accuracies using cross-fold validation. We address the relative rarity of threats as a case of low signal-to-noise (< 0.02% malicious to benign activities), and then train on both under-sampled and over-sampled data which is statistically balanced to identify nefarious actors.
Caching or No Caching in Dense HetNets?
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

Caching the content closer to the user equipments (UEs) in heterogenous cellular networks (HetNets) improves user-perceived Quality-of-Service (QoS) while lowering the operators backhaul usage/costs. Nevertheless, under the current networking strategy that promotes aggressive densification, it is unclear whether cache-enabled HetNets preserve the claimed cost-effectiveness and the potential benefits. This is due to 1) the collective cost of caching which may inevitably exceed the expensive cost of backhaul in a dense HetNet, and 2) the excessive interference which affects the signal reception irrespective of content placement. We analyze these significant, yet overlooked, issues, showing that while densification reduces backhaul load and increases spectral efficiency in cache-enabled dense networks, it simultaneously reduces cache-hit probability and increases the network cost. We then introduce a caching efficiency metric, area spectral efficiency per unit spent cost, and find it enough to cache only about 3% of the content library size in the cache of smallcell base stations. Furthermore, we show that range expansion, which is known to be of substantial value in wireless networks, is almost impotent to curb the caching inefficiency. Surprisingly, unlike the conventional wisdom recommending traffic offloading from macro cells to small cells, in cache-enabled HetNets, it is generally more beneficial to exclude offloading altogether or to do the opposite.
Saliency detection for seismic applications using multi-dimensional spectral projections and directional comparisons
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we propose a novel approach for saliency detection for seismic applications using 3D-FFT local spectra and multi-dimensional plane projections. We develop a projection scheme by dividing a 3D-FFT local spectrum of a data volume into three distinct components, each depicting changes along a different dimension of the data. The saliency detection results obtained using each projected component are then combined to yield a saliency map. To accommodate the directional nature of seismic data, in this work, we modify the center-surround model, proven to be biologically plausible for visual attention, to incorporate directional comparisons around each voxel in a 3D volume. Experimental results on real seismic dataset from the F3 block in Netherlands offshore in the North Sea prove that the proposed algorithm is effective, efficient, and scalable. Furthermore, a subjective comparison of the results shows that it outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for saliency detection.
A New Proof of Nonsignalling Multiprover Parallel Repetition Theorem
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

We present an information theoretic proof of the nonsignalling multiprover parallel repetition theorem, a recent extension of its two-prover variant that underlies many hardness of approximation results. The original proofs used de Finetti type decomposition for strategies. We present a new proof that is based on a technique we introduced recently for proving strong converse results in multiuser information theory and entails a change of measure after replacing hard information constraints with soft ones.
Unsupervised Prediction of Negative Health Events Ahead of Time
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

The emergence of continuous health monitoring and the availability of an enormous amount of time series data has provided a great opportunity for the advancement of personal health tracking. In recent years, unsupervised learning methods have drawn special attention of researchers to tackle the sparse annotation of health data and real-time detection of anomalies has been a central problem of interest. However, one problem that has not been well addressed before is the early prediction of forthcoming negative health events. Early signs of an event can introduce subtle and gradual changes in the health signal prior to its onset, detection of which can be invaluable in effective prevention. In this study, we first demonstrate our observations on the shortcoming of widely adopted anomaly detection methods in uncovering the changes prior to a negative health event. We then propose a framework which relies on online clustering of signal segment representations which are automatically learned by a specially designed LSTM auto-encoder. We show the effectiveness of our approach by predicting Bradycardia events in infants using MIT-PICS dataset 1.3 minutes ahead of time with 68\% AUC score on average, using no label supervision. Results of our study can indicate the viability of our approach in the early detection of health events in other applications as well.
Human Face Expressions from Images - 2D Face Geometry and 3D Face Local Motion versus Deep Neural Features
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Several computer algorithms for recognition of visible human emotions are compared at the web camera scenario using CNN/MMOD face detector. The recognition refers to four face expressions: smile, surprise, anger, and neutral. At the feature extraction stage, the following three concepts of face description are confronted: (a) static 2D face geometry represented by its 68 characteristic landmarks (FP68); (b) dynamic 3D geometry defined by motion parameters for eight distinguished face parts (denoted as AU8) of personalized Candide-3 model; (c) static 2D visual description as 2D array of gray scale pixels (known as facial raw image). At the classification stage, the performance of two major models are analyzed: (a) support vector machine (SVM) with kernel options; (b) convolutional neural network (CNN) with variety of relevant tensor processing layers and blocks of them. The models are trained for frontal views of human faces while they are tested for arbitrary head poses. For geometric features, the success rate (accuracy) indicate nearly triple increase of performance of CNN with respect to SVM classifiers. For raw images, CNN outperforms in accuracy its best geometric counterpart (AU/CNN) by about 30 percent while the best SVM solutions are inferior nearly four times. For F-score the high advantage of raw/CNN over geometric/CNN and geometric/SVM is observed, as well. We conclude that contrary to CNN based emotion classifiers, the generalization capability wrt human head pose is for SVM based emotion classifiers poor.
Augmenting Model Robustness with Transformation-Invariant Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

The vulnerability of neural networks under adversarial attacks has raised serious concerns and motivated extensive research. It has been shown that both neural networks and adversarial attacks against them can be sensitive to input transformations such as linear translation and rotation, and that human vision, which is robust against adversarial attacks, is invariant to natural input transformations. Based on these, this paper tests the hypothesis that model robustness can be further improved when it is adversarially trained against transformed attacks and transformation-invariant attacks. Experiments on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and restricted ImageNet show that while transformations of attacks alone do not affect robustness, transformation-invariant attacks can improve model robustness by 2.5\% on MNIST, 3.7\% on CIFAR-10, and 1.1\% on restricted ImageNet. We discuss the intuition behind this phenomenon.
Quasi-Linear-Time Algorithm for Longest Common Circular Factor
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

We introduce the Longest Common Circular Factor (LCCF) problem in which, given strings $S$ and $T$ of length $n$, we are to compute the longest factor of $S$ whose cyclic shift occurs as a factor of $T$. It is a new similarity measure, an extension of the classic Longest Common Factor. We show how to solve the LCCF problem in $O(n \log^5 n)$ time.
Formal methods and software engineering for DL. Security, safety and productivity for DL systems development
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2019
Year: 2019

Deep Learning (DL) techniques are now widespread and being integrated into many important systems. Their classification and recognition abilities ensure their relevance for multiple application domains. As machine-learning that relies on training instead of algorithm programming, they offer a high degree of productivity. But they can be vulnerable to attacks and the verification of their correctness is only just emerging as a scientific and engineering possibility. This paper is a major update of a previously-published survey, attempting to cover all recent publications in this area. It also covers an even more recent trend, namely the design of domain-specific languages for producing and training neural nets.
Efficient Relative Pose Estimation for Cameras and Generalized Cameras in Case of Known Relative Rotation Angle
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

We propose two minimal solutions to the problem of relative pose estimation of (i) a calibrated camera from four points in two views and (ii) a calibrated generalized camera from five points in two views. In both cases, the relative rotation angle between the views is assumed to be known. In practice, such angle can be derived from the readings of a 3d gyroscope. We represent the rotation part of the motion in terms of unit quaternions in order to construct polynomial equations encoding the epipolar constraints. The Gröbner basis technique is then used to efficiently derive the solutions. Our first solver for regular cameras significantly improves the existing state-of-the-art solution. The second solver for generalized cameras is novel. The presented minimal solvers can be used in a hypothesize-and-test architecture such as RANSAC for reliable pose estimation. Experiments on synthetic and real datasets confirm that our algorithms are numerically stable, fast and robust.
Learning and Evaluating General Linguistic Intelligence
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

We define general linguistic intelligence as the ability to reuse previously acquired knowledge about a language's lexicon, syntax, semantics, and pragmatic conventions to adapt to new tasks quickly. Using this definition, we analyze state-of-the-art natural language understanding models and conduct an extensive empirical investigation to evaluate them against these criteria through a series of experiments that assess the task-independence of the knowledge being acquired by the learning process. In addition to task performance, we propose a new evaluation metric based on an online encoding of the test data that quantifies how quickly an existing agent (model) learns a new task. Our results show that while the field has made impressive progress in terms of model architectures that generalize to many tasks, these models still require a lot of in-domain training examples (e.g., for fine tuning, training task-specific modules), and are prone to catastrophic forgetting. Moreover, we find that far from solving general tasks (e.g., document question answering), our models are overfitting to the quirks of particular datasets (e.g., SQuAD). We discuss missing components and conjecture on how to make progress toward general linguistic intelligence.
Automatic Information Extraction from Piping and Instrumentation Diagrams
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

One of the most common modes of representing engineering schematics are Piping and Instrumentation diagrams (P&IDs) that describe the layout of an engineering process flow along with the interconnected process equipment. Over the years, P&ID diagrams have been manually generated, scanned and stored as image files. These files need to be digitized for purposes of inventory management and updation, and easy reference to different components of the schematics. There are several challenging vision problems associated with digitizing real world P&ID diagrams. Real world P&IDs come in several different resolutions, and often contain noisy textual information. Extraction of instrumentation information from these diagrams involves accurate detection of symbols that frequently have minute visual differences between them. Identification of pipelines that may converge and diverge at different points in the image is a further cause for concern. Due to these reasons, to the best of our knowledge, no system has been proposed for end-to-end data extraction from P&ID diagrams. However, with the advent of deep learning and the spectacular successes it has achieved in vision, we hypothesized that it is now possible to re-examine this problem armed with the latest deep learning models. To that end, we present a novel pipeline for information extraction from P&ID sheets via a combination of traditional vision techniques and state-of-the-art deep learning models to identify and isolate pipeline codes, pipelines, inlets and outlets, and for detecting symbols. This is followed by association of the detected components with the appropriate pipeline. The extracted pipeline information is used to populate a tree-like data-structure for capturing the structure of the piping schematics. We evaluated proposed method on a real world dataset of P&ID sheets obtained from an oil firm and have obtained promising results.
Learning to navigate image manifolds induced by generative adversarial networks for unsupervised video generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

In this work, we introduce a two-step framework for generative modeling of temporal data. Specifically, the generative adversarial networks (GANs) setting is employed to generate synthetic scenes of moving objects. To do so, we propose a two-step training scheme within which: a generator of static frames is trained first. Afterwards, a recurrent model is trained with the goal of providing a sequence of inputs to the previously trained frames generator, thus yielding scenes which look natural. The adversarial setting is employed in both training steps. However, with the aim of avoiding known training instabilities in GANs, a multiple discriminator approach is used to train both models. Results in the studied video dataset indicate that, by employing such an approach, the recurrent part is able to learn how to coherently navigate the image manifold induced by the frames generator, thus yielding more natural-looking scenes.
Fast and Efficient Lenslet Image Compression
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Light field imaging is characterized by capturing brightness, color, and directional information of light rays in a scene. This leads to image representations with huge amount of data that require efficient coding schemes. In this paper, lenslet images are rendered into sub-aperture images. These images are organized as a pseudo-sequence input for the HEVC video codec. To better exploit redundancy among the neighboring sub-aperture images and consequently decrease the distances between a sub-aperture image and its references used for prediction, sub-aperture images are divided into four smaller groups that are scanned in a serpentine order. The most central sub-aperture image, which has the highest similarity to all the other images, is used as the initial reference image for each of the four regions. Furthermore, a structure is defined that selects spatially adjacent sub-aperture images as prediction references with the highest similarity to the current image. In this way, encoding efficiency increases, and furthermore it leads to a higher similarity among the co-located Coding Three Units (CTUs). The similarities among the co-located CTUs are exploited to predict Coding Unit depths.Moreover, independent encoding of each group division enables parallel processing, that along with the proposed coding unit depth prediction decrease the encoding execution time by almost 80% on average. Simulation results show that Rate-Distortion performance of the proposed method has higher compression gain than the other state-of-the-art lenslet compression methods with lower computational complexity.