OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Guided Anisotropic Diffusion and Iterative Learning for Weakly Supervised Change Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Large scale datasets created from user labels or openly available data have become crucial to provide training data for large scale learning algorithms. While these datasets are easier to acquire, the data are frequently noisy and unreliable, which is motivating research on weakly supervised learning techniques. In this paper we propose an iterative learning method that extracts the useful information from a large scale change detection dataset generated from open vector data to train a fully convolutional network which surpasses the performance obtained by naive supervised learning. We also propose the guided anisotropic diffusion algorithm, which improves semantic segmentation results using the input images as guides to perform edge preserving filtering, and is used in conjunction with the iterative training method to improve results.
Experimental Clock Calibration\\on a Crystal-Free Mote-on-a-Chip
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

The elimination of the off-chip frequency reference, typically a crystal oscillator, would bring important benefits in terms of size, price and energy efficiency to IEEE802.15.4 compliant radios and systems-on-chip. The stability of on-chip oscillators is orders of magnitude worse than that of a crystal. It is known that as the temperature changes, they can drift more than 50 ppm/°C. This paper presents the result of an extensive experimental study. First, we propose mechanisms for crystal-free radios to be able to track an IEEE802.15.4 join proxy, calibrate the on-chip oscillators and maintain calibration against temperature changes. Then, we implement the resulting algorithms on a crystal-free platform and present the results of an experimental validation. We show that our approach is able to track a crystal-based IEEE802.15.4-compliant join proxy and maintain the requested radio frequency stability of +/-40 ppm, even when subject to temperature variation of 2°C/min.
Online Matching with General Arrivals
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

The online matching problem was introduced by Karp, Vazirani and Vazirani nearly three decades ago. In that seminal work, they studied this problem in bipartite graphs with vertices arriving only on one side, and presented optimal deterministic and randomized algorithms for this setting. In comparison, more general arrival models, such as edge arrivals and general vertex arrivals, have proven more challenging and positive results are known only for various relaxations of the problem. In particular, even the basic question of whether randomization allows one to beat the trivially-optimal deterministic competitive ratio of $\frac{1}{2}$ for either of these models was open. In this paper, we resolve this question for both these natural arrival models, and show the following. 1. For edge arrivals, randomization does not help --- no randomized algorithm is better than $\frac{1}{2}$ competitive. 2. For general vertex arrivals, randomization helps --- there exists a randomized $(\frac{1}{2}+Ω(1))$-competitive online matching algorithm.
Automatic Accuracy Prediction for AMR Parsing
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) represents sentences as directed, acyclic and rooted graphs, aiming at capturing their meaning in a machine readable format. AMR parsing converts natural language sentences into such graphs. However, evaluating a parser on new data by means of comparison to manually created AMR graphs is very costly. Also, we would like to be able to detect parses of questionable quality, or preferring results of alternative systems by selecting the ones for which we can assess good quality. We propose AMR accuracy prediction as the task of predicting several metrics of correctness for an automatically generated AMR parse - in absence of the corresponding gold parse. We develop a neural end-to-end multi-output regression model and perform three case studies: firstly, we evaluate the model's capacity of predicting AMR parse accuracies and test whether it can reliably assign high scores to gold parses. Secondly, we perform parse selection based on predicted parse accuracies of candidate parses from alternative systems, with the aim of improving overall results. Finally, we predict system ranks for submissions from two AMR shared tasks on the basis of their predicted parse accuracy averages. All experiments are carried out across two different domains and show that our method is effective.
Sesqui-Pushout Rewriting: Concurrency, Associativity and Rule Algebra Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2019
Year: 2019

Sesqui-pushout (SqPO) rewriting is a variant of transformations of graph-like and other types of structures that fit into the framework of adhesive categories where deletion in unknown context may be implemented. We provide the first account of a concurrency theorem for this important type of rewriting, and we demonstrate the additional mathematical property of a form of associativity for these theories. Associativity may then be exploited to construct so-called rule algebras (of SqPO type), based upon which in particular a universal framework of continuous-time Markov chains for stochastic SqPO rewriting systems may be realized.
Use of Approaches to the Methodology of Factor Analysis of Information Risks for the Quantitative Assessment of Information Risks Based on the Formation of Cause-And-Effect Links
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

The paper suggests methods to the assessment of information risks, which makes the transition from a qualitative assessment of information risks (according to the factor analysis of information risks methodology) to a quantitative assessment. The development factor analysis of information risks methodology of the methodology was carried out using the mathematical apparatus of probability theory, namely Bayesian networks. A comparative analysis of the standard factor analysis of information risks methodology and the developed methodology using statistical data was carried out. During the analysis, the cause and effect relationships of the confidentiality violation have been formed, defined and given in the corresponding table and in the form of the Ishikawa diagram. As an example, it was calculated the amount of risk the company may be exposed to in case of violation of information confidentiality according to the standard factor analysis of information risks methodology and the developed methodology. It is shown that the use of proposed technique allows quantifying the risk assessment that can be obtained using the factor analysis of information risks methodology.
Fast object detection in compressed JPEG Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Object detection in still images has drawn a lot of attention over past few years, and with the advent of Deep Learning impressive performances have been achieved with numerous industrial applications. Most of these deep learning models rely on RGB images to localize and identify objects in the image. However in some application scenarii, images are compressed either for storage savings or fast transmission. Therefore a time consuming image decompression step is compulsory in order to apply the aforementioned deep models. To alleviate this drawback, we propose a fast deep architecture for object detection in JPEG images, one of the most widespread compression format. We train a neural network to detect objects based on the blockwise DCT (discrete cosine transform) coefficients {issued from} the JPEG compression algorithm. We modify the well-known Single Shot multibox Detector (SSD) by replacing its first layers with one convolutional layer dedicated to process the DCT inputs. Experimental evaluations on PASCAL VOC and industrial dataset comprising images of road traffic surveillance show that the model is about $2\times$ faster than regular SSD with promising detection performances. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to address detection in compressed JPEG images.
Neural Painters: A learned differentiable constraint for generating brushstroke paintings
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

We explore neural painters, a generative model for brushstrokes learned from a real non-differentiable and non-deterministic painting program. We show that when training an agent to "paint" images using brushstrokes, using a differentiable neural painter leads to much faster convergence. We propose a method for encouraging this agent to follow human-like strokes when reconstructing digits. We also explore the use of a neural painter as a differentiable image parameterization. By directly optimizing brushstrokes to activate neurons in a pre-trained convolutional network, we can directly visualize ImageNet categories and generate "ideal" paintings of each class. Finally, we present a new concept called intrinsic style transfer. By minimizing only the content loss from neural style transfer, we allow the artistic medium, in this case, brushstrokes, to naturally dictate the resulting style.
MultiNet++: Multi-Stream Feature Aggregation and Geometric Loss Strategy for Multi-Task Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Multi-task learning is commonly used in autonomous driving for solving various visual perception tasks. It offers significant benefits in terms of both performance and computational complexity. Current work on multi-task learning networks focus on processing a single input image and there is no known implementation of multi-task learning handling a sequence of images. In this work, we propose a multi-stream multi-task network to take advantage of using feature representations from preceding frames in a video sequence for joint learning of segmentation, depth, and motion. The weights of the current and previous encoder are shared so that features computed in the previous frame can be leveraged without additional computation. In addition, we propose to use the geometric mean of task losses as a better alternative to the weighted average of task losses. The proposed loss function facilitates better handling of the difference in convergence rates of different tasks. Experimental results on KITTI, Cityscapes and SYNTHIA datasets demonstrate that the proposed strategies outperform various existing multi-task learning solutions.
Robust Exploration with Tight Bayesian Plausibility Sets
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Optimism about the poorly understood states and actions is the main driving force of exploration for many provably-efficient reinforcement learning algorithms. We propose optimism in the face of sensible value functions (OFVF)- a novel data-driven Bayesian algorithm to constructing Plausibility sets for MDPs to explore robustly minimizing the worst case exploration cost. The method computes policies with tighter optimistic estimates for exploration by introducing two new ideas. First, it is based on Bayesian posterior distributions rather than distribution-free bounds. Second, OFVF does not construct plausibility sets as simple confidence intervals. Confidence intervals as plausibility sets are a sufficient but not a necessary condition. OFVF uses the structure of the value function to optimize the location and shape of the plausibility set to guarantee upper bounds directly without necessarily enforcing the requirement for the set to be a confidence interval. OFVF proceeds in an episodic manner, where the duration of the episode is fixed and known. Our algorithm is inherently Bayesian and can leverage prior information. Our theoretical analysis shows the robustness of OFVF, and the empirical results demonstrate its practical promise.
Matrix Completion With Selective Sampling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Matrix completion is a classical problem in data science wherein one attempts to reconstruct a low-rank matrix while only observing some subset of the entries. Previous authors have phrased this problem as a nuclear norm minimization problem. Almost all previous work assumes no explicit structure of the matrix and uses uniform sampling to decide the observed entries. We suggest methods for selective sampling in the case where we have some knowledge about the structure of the matrix and are allowed to design the observation set.
Creative Procedural-Knowledge Extraction From Web Design Tutorials
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2019
Year: 2019

Complex design tasks often require performing diverse actions in a specific order. To (semi-)autonomously accomplish these tasks, applications need to understand and learn a wide range of design procedures, i.e., Creative Procedural-Knowledge (CPK). Prior knowledge base construction and mining have not typically addressed the creative fields, such as design and arts. In this paper, we formalize an ontology of CPK using five components: goal, workflow, action, command and usage; and extract components' values from online design tutorials. We scraped 19.6K tutorial-related webpages and built a web application for professional designers to identify and summarize CPK components. The annotated dataset consists of 819 unique commands, 47,491 actions, and 2,022 workflows and goals. Based on this dataset, we propose a general CPK extraction pipeline and demonstrate that existing text classification and sequence-to-sequence models are limited in identifying, predicting and summarizing complex operations described in heterogeneous styles. Through quantitative and qualitative error analysis, we discuss CPK extraction challenges that need to be addressed by future research.
Fast algorithms for handling diagonal constraints in timed automata
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2019
Year: 2019

A popular method for solving reachability in timed automata proceeds by enumerating reachable sets of valuations represented as zones. A naïve enumeration of zones does not terminate. Various termination mechanisms have been studied over the years. Coming up with efficient termination mechanisms has been remarkably more challenging when the automaton has diagonal constraints in guards. In this paper, we propose a new termination mechanism for timed automata with diagonal constraints based on a new simulation relation between zones. Experiments with an implementation of this simulation show significant gains over existing methods.
Client/Server Based Online Environment for Manual Segmentation of Medical Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Segmentation is a key step in analyzing and processing medical images. Due to the low fault tolerance in medical imaging, manual segmentation remains the de facto standard in this domain. Besides, efforts to automate the segmentation process often rely on large amounts of manually labeled data. While existing software supporting manual segmentation is rich in features and delivers accurate results, the necessary time to set it up and get comfortable using it can pose a hurdle for the collection of large datasets. This work introduces a client/server based online environment, referred to as Studierfenster (studierfenster.at), that can be used to perform manual segmentations directly in a web browser. The aim of providing this functionality in the form of a web application is to ease the collection of ground truth segmentation datasets. Providing a tool that is quickly accessible and usable on a broad range of devices, offers the potential to accelerate this process. The manual segmentation workflow of Studierfenster consists of dragging and dropping the input file into the browser window and slice-by-slice outlining the object under consideration. The final segmentation can then be exported as a file storing its contours and as a binary segmentation mask. In order to evaluate the usability of Studierfenster, a user study was performed. The user study resulted in a mean of 6.3 out of 7.0 possible points given by users, when asked about their overall impression of the tool. The evaluation also provides insights into the results achievable with the tool in practice, by presenting two ground truth segmentations performed by physicians.
Learning a No-Reference Quality Assessment Model of Enhanced Images With Big Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper we investigate into the problem of image quality assessment (IQA) and enhancement via machine learning. This issue has long attracted a wide range of attention in computational intelligence and image processing communities, since, for many practical applications, e.g. object detection and recognition, raw images are usually needed to be appropriately enhanced to raise the visual quality (e.g. visibility and contrast). In fact, proper enhancement can noticeably improve the quality of input images, even better than originally captured images which are generally thought to be of the best quality. In this work, we present two most important contributions. The first contribution is to develop a new no-reference (NR) IQA model. Given an image, our quality measure first extracts 17 features through analysis of contrast, sharpness, brightness and more, and then yields a measre of visual quality using a regression module, which is learned with big-data training samples that are much bigger than the size of relevant image datasets. Results of experiments on nine datasets validate the superiority and efficiency of our blind metric compared with typical state-of-the-art full-, reduced- and no-reference IQA methods. The second contribution is that a robust image enhancement framework is established based on quality optimization. For an input image, by the guidance of the proposed NR-IQA measure, we conduct histogram modification to successively rectify image brightness and contrast to a proper level. Thorough tests demonstrate that our framework can well enhance natural images, low-contrast images, low-light images and dehazed images. The source code will be released at https://sites.google.com/site/guke198701/publications.
Dynamic Binary Countdown for Massive IoT Random Access in Dense 5G Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

Massive connectivity for Internet of Things applications is expected to challenge the way access reservation protocols are designed in 5G networks. Since the number of devices and their density are envisioned to be orders of magnitude larger, state-of-the-art access reservation, Random Access (RA) procedure, might be a bottleneck for end-to-end delay. This would be especially challenging for burst arrival scenarios: Semi-synchronous triggering of a large number of devices due to a common event (blackout, emergency alarm, etc.). In this article, to improve RA procedure scalability, we propose to combine Binary Countdown Contention Resolution (BCCR) with the state-of-the-art Access Class Barring (ACB). We present a joint analysis of ACB and BCCR and apply a framework for treating RA as a bi-objective optimization, minimizing the resource consumption and maximizing the throughput of the procedure in every contention round. We use this framework to devise dynamic load-adaptive algorithm and simulatively illustrate that the proposed algorithm reduces the burst resolution delay while consuming less resources compared to the state-of-the-art techniques.
Particle Filter on Episode
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

Differently from animals, robots can record its experience correctly for long time. We propose a novel algorithm that runs a particle filter on the time sequence of the experience. It can be applied to some teach-and-replay tasks. In a task, the trainer controls a robot, and the robot records its sensor readings and its actions. We name the sequence of the record an episode, which is derived from the episodic memory of animals. After that, the robot executes the particle filter so as to find a similar situation with the current one from the episode. If the robot chooses the action taken in the similar situation, it can replay the taught behavior. We name this algorithm the particle filter on episode (PFoE). The robot with PFoE shows not only a simple replay of a behavior but also recovery motion from skids and interruption. In this paper, we evaluate the properties of PFoE with a small mobile robot.
An Empirical Evaluation of Text Representation Schemes on Multilingual Social Web to Filter the Textual Aggression
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2019
Year: 2019

This paper attempt to study the effectiveness of text representation schemes on two tasks namely: User Aggression and Fact Detection from the social media contents. In User Aggression detection, The aim is to identify the level of aggression from the contents generated in the Social media and written in the English, Devanagari Hindi and Romanized Hindi. Aggression levels are categorized into three predefined classes namely: `Non-aggressive`, `Overtly Aggressive`, and `Covertly Aggressive`. During the disaster-related incident, Social media like, Twitter is flooded with millions of posts. In such emergency situations, identification of factual posts is important for organizations involved in the relief operation. We anticipated this problem as a combination of classification and Ranking problem. This paper presents a comparison of various text representation scheme based on BoW techniques, distributed word/sentence representation, transfer learning on classifiers. Weighted $F_1$ score is used as a primary evaluation metric. Results show that text representation using BoW performs better than word embedding on machine learning classifiers. While pre-trained Word embedding techniques perform better on classifiers based on deep neural net. Recent transfer learning model like ELMO, ULMFiT are fine-tuned for the Aggression classification task. However, results are not at par with pre-trained word embedding model. Overall, word embedding using fastText produce best weighted $F_1$-score than Word2Vec and Glove. Results are further improved using pre-trained vector model. Statistical significance tests are employed to ensure the significance of the classification results. In the case of lexically different test Dataset, other than training Dataset, deep neural models are more robust and perform substantially better than machine learning classifiers.
Herdability of Linear Systems Based on Sign Patterns and Graph Structures
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2019
Year: 2019

We consider the notion of herdability, a set-based reachability condition, which asks whether the state of a system can be controlled to be element-wise larger than a non-negative threshold. First a number of foundational results on herdability of a continuous time, linear time invariant system are presented. These show that the herdability of a linear system can be determined based on certain matrices, such as the controllability matrix, which arise in the study of controllability of linear systems. Second, the relationship between the sign pattern of the underlying graph structure of a system and the herdability properties of the system is investigated. In doing so the notion of sign herdability is introduced which captures classes of systems whose sign pattern determines their herdability. We identify a set of conditions, first on the sign pattern of the controllability matrix and then on the underlying graph structure, that ensure that the system is sign herdable.
Evaluating the Underlying Gender Bias in Contextualized Word Embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

Gender bias is highly impacting natural language processing applications. Word embeddings have clearly been proven both to keep and amplify gender biases that are present in current data sources. Recently, contextualized word embeddings have enhanced previous word embedding techniques by computing word vector representations dependent on the sentence they appear in. In this paper, we study the impact of this conceptual change in the word embedding computation in relation with gender bias. Our analysis includes different measures previously applied in the literature to standard word embeddings. Our findings suggest that contextualized word embeddings are less biased than standard ones even when the latter are debiased.