OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Evoplex: A platform for agent-based modeling on networks
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2019
Year: 2019

Agent-based modeling and network science have been used extensively to advance our understanding of emergent collective behavior in systems that are composed of a large number of simple interacting individuals or agents. With the increasing availability of high computational power in affordable personal computers, dedicated efforts to develop multi-threaded, scalable and easy-to-use software for agent-based simulations are needed more than ever. Evoplex meets this need by providing a fast, robust and extensible platform for developing agent-based models and multi-agent systems on networks. Each agent is represented as a node and interacts with its neighbors, as defined by the network structure. Evoplex is ideal for modeling complex systems, for example in evolutionary game theory and computational social science. In Evoplex, the models are not coupled to the execution parameters or the visualization tools, and there is a user-friendly graphical interface which makes it easy for all users, ranging from newcomers to experienced, to create, analyze, replicate and reproduce the experiments.
Spatially Controllable Image Synthesis with Internal Representation Collaging
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

We present a novel CNN-based image editing strategy that allows the user to change the semantic information of an image over an arbitrary region by manipulating the feature-space representation of the image in a trained GAN model. We will present two variants of our strategy: (1) spatial conditional batch normalization (sCBN), a type of conditional batch normalization with user-specifiable spatial weight maps, and (2) feature-blending, a method of directly modifying the intermediate features. Our methods can be used to edit both artificial image and real image, and they both can be used together with any GAN with conditional normalization layers. We will demonstrate the power of our method through experiments on various types of GANs trained on different datasets. Code will be available at https://github.com/pfnet-research/neural-collage.
InstaNAS: Instance-aware Neural Architecture Search
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Conventional Neural Architecture Search (NAS) aims at finding a single architecture that achieves the best performance, which usually optimizes task related learning objectives such as accuracy. However, a single architecture may not be representative enough for the whole dataset with high diversity and variety. Intuitively, electing domain-expert architectures that are proficient in domain-specific features can further benefit architecture related objectives such as latency. In this paper, we propose InstaNAS---an instance-aware NAS framework---that employs a controller trained to search for a "distribution of architectures" instead of a single architecture; This allows the model to use sophisticated architectures for the difficult samples, which usually comes with large architecture related cost, and shallow architectures for those easy samples. During the inference phase, the controller assigns each of the unseen input samples with a domain expert architecture that can achieve high accuracy with customized inference costs. Experiments within a search space inspired by MobileNetV2 show InstaNAS can achieve up to 48.8% latency reduction without compromising accuracy on a series of datasets against MobileNetV2.
Generalised Differential Privacy for Text Document Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

We address the problem of how to "obfuscate" texts by removing stylistic clues which can identify authorship, whilst preserving (as much as possible) the content of the text. In this paper we combine ideas from "generalised differential privacy" and machine learning techniques for text processing to model privacy for text documents. We define a privacy mechanism that operates at the level of text documents represented as "bags-of-words" - these representations are typical in machine learning and contain sufficient information to carry out many kinds of classification tasks including topic identification and authorship attribution (of the original documents). We show that our mechanism satisfies privacy with respect to a metric for semantic similarity, thereby providing a balance between utility, defined by the semantic content of texts, with the obfuscation of stylistic clues. We demonstrate our implementation on a "fan fiction" dataset, confirming that it is indeed possible to disguise writing style effectively whilst preserving enough information and variation for accurate content classification tasks.
Adaptive Wavelet Clustering for Highly Noisy Data
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper we make progress on the unsupervised task of mining arbitrarily shaped clusters in highly noisy datasets, which is a task present in many real-world applications. Based on the fundamental work that first applies a wavelet transform to data clustering, we propose an adaptive clustering algorithm, denoted as AdaWave, which exhibits favorable characteristics for clustering. By a self-adaptive thresholding technique, AdaWave is parameter free and can handle data in various situations. It is deterministic, fast in linear time, order-insensitive, shape-insensitive, robust to highly noisy data, and requires no pre-knowledge on data models. Moreover, AdaWave inherits the ability from the wavelet transform to cluster data in different resolutions. We adopt the "grid labeling" data structure to drastically reduce the memory consumption of the wavelet transform so that AdaWave can be used for relatively high dimensional data. Experiments on synthetic as well as natural datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method.
What is Interpretable? Using Machine Learning to Design Interpretable Decision-Support Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Recent efforts in Machine Learning (ML) interpretability have focused on creating methods for explaining black-box ML models. However, these methods rely on the assumption that simple approximations, such as linear models or decision-trees, are inherently human-interpretable, which has not been empirically tested. Additionally, past efforts have focused exclusively on comprehension, neglecting to explore the trust component necessary to convince non-technical experts, such as clinicians, to utilize ML models in practice. In this paper, we posit that reinforcement learning (RL) can be used to learn what is interpretable to different users and, consequently, build their trust in ML models. To validate this idea, we first train a neural network to provide risk assessments for heart failure patients. We then design a RL-based clinical decision-support system (DSS) around the neural network model, which can learn from its interactions with users. We conduct an experiment involving a diverse set of clinicians from multiple institutions in three different countries. Our results demonstrate that ML experts cannot accurately predict which system outputs will maximize clinicians' confidence in the underlying neural network model, and suggest additional findings that have broad implications to the future of research into ML interpretability and the use of ML in medicine.
A Frank-Wolfe Framework for Efficient and Effective Adversarial Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Depending on how much information an adversary can access to, adversarial attacks can be classified as white-box attack and black-box attack. For white-box attack, optimization-based attack algorithms such as projected gradient descent (PGD) can achieve relatively high attack success rates within moderate iterates. However, they tend to generate adversarial examples near or upon the boundary of the perturbation set, resulting in large distortion. Furthermore, their corresponding black-box attack algorithms also suffer from high query complexities, thereby limiting their practical usefulness. In this paper, we focus on the problem of developing efficient and effective optimization-based adversarial attack algorithms. In particular, we propose a novel adversarial attack framework for both white-box and black-box settings based on a variant of Frank-Wolfe algorithm. We show in theory that the proposed attack algorithms are efficient with an $O(1/\sqrt{T})$ convergence rate. The empirical results of attacking the ImageNet and MNIST datasets also verify the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. More specifically, our proposed algorithms attain the best attack performances in both white-box and black-box attacks among all baselines, and are more time and query efficient than the state-of-the-art.
Chasing the Echo State Property
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2019
Year: 2019

Reservoir Computing (RC) provides an efficient way for designing dynamical recurrent neural models. While training is restricted to a simple output component, the recurrent connections are left untrained after initialization, subject to stability constraints specified by the Echo State Property (ESP). Literature conditions for the ESP typically fail to properly account for the effects of driving input signals, often limiting the potentialities of the RC approach. In this paper, we study the fundamental aspect of asymptotic stability of RC models in presence of driving input, introducing an empirical ESP index that enables to easily analyze the stability regimes of reservoirs. Results on two benchmark datasets reveal interesting insights on the dynamical properties of input-driven reservoirs, suggesting that the actual domain of ESP validity is much wider than what covered by literature conditions commonly used in RC practice.
DSBI: Double-Sided Braille Image Dataset and Algorithm Evaluation for Braille Dots Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Braille is an effective way for the visually impaired to learn knowledge and obtain information. Braille image recognition aims to automatically detect Braille dots in the whole Braille image. There is no available public datasets for Braille image recognition to push relevant research and evaluate algorithms. This paper constructs a large-scale Double-Sided Braille Image dataset DSBI with detailed Braille recto dots, verso dots and Braille cells annotation. To quickly annotate Braille images, an auxiliary annotation strategy is proposed, which adopts initial automatic detection of Braille dots and modifies annotation results by convenient human-computer interaction method. This labeling strategy can averagely increase label efficiency by six times for recto dots annotation in one Braille image. Braille dots detection is the core and basic step for Braille image recognition. This paper also evaluates some Braille dots detection methods on our dataset DSBI and gives the benchmark performance of recto dots detection. We have released our Braille images dataset on the GitHub website.
Kernel-based Multi-Task Contextual Bandits in Cellular Network Configuration
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Cellular network configuration plays a critical role in network performance. In current practice, network configuration depends heavily on field experience of engineers and often remains static for a long period of time. This practice is far from optimal. To address this limitation, online-learning-based approaches have great potentials to automate and optimize network configuration. Learning-based approaches face the challenges of learning a highly complex function for each base station and balancing the fundamental exploration-exploitation tradeoff while minimizing the exploration cost. Fortunately, in cellular networks, base stations (BSs) often have similarities even though they are not identical. To leverage such similarities, we propose kernel-based multi-BS contextual bandit algorithm based on multi-task learning. In the algorithm, we leverage the similarity among different BSs defined by conditional kernel embedding. We present theoretical analysis of the proposed algorithm in terms of regret and multi-task-learning efficiency. We evaluate the effectiveness of our algorithm based on a simulator built by real traces.
Efficiently Charting RDF
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2019
Year: 2019

We propose a visual query language for interactively exploring large-scale knowledge graphs. Starting from an overview, the user explores bar charts through three interactions: class expansion, property expansion, and subject/object expansion. A major challenge faced is performance: a state-of-the-art SPARQL engine may require tens of minutes to compute the multiway join, grouping and counting required to render a bar chart. A promising alternative is to apply approximation through online aggregation, trading precision for performance. However, state-of-the-art online aggregation algorithms such as Wander Join have two limitations for our exploration scenario: (1) a high number of rejected paths slows the convergence of the count estimations, and (2) no unbiased estimator exists for counts under the distinct operator. We thus devise a specialized algorithm for online aggregation that augments Wander Join with exact partial computations to reduce the number of rejected paths encountered, as well as a novel estimator that we prove to be unbiased in the case of the distinct operator. In an experimental study with random interactions exploring two large-scale knowledge graphs, our algorithm shows a clear reduction in error with respect to computation time versus Wander Join.
An explicit representation and enumeration for negacyclic codes of length $2^kn$ over $\mathbb{Z}_4+u\mathbb{Z}_4$
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, an explicit representation and enumeration for negacyclic codes of length $2^kn$ over the local non-principal ideal ring $R=\mathbb{Z}_4+u\mathbb{Z}_4$ $(u^2=0)$ is provided, where $k, n$ are any positive integers and $n$ is odd. As a corollary, all distinct negacyclic codes of length $2^k$ over $R$ are listed precisely. Moreover, a mass formula for the number of negacyclic codes of length $2^kn$ over $R$ is given and a mistake in [Cryptogr. Commun. (2017) 9: 241--272] is corrected.
Using Attribution to Decode Dataset Bias in Neural Network Models for Chemistry
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Deep neural networks have achieved state of the art accuracy at classifying molecules with respect to whether they bind to specific protein targets. A key breakthrough would occur if these models could reveal the fragment pharmacophores that are causally involved in binding. Extracting chemical details of binding from the networks could potentially lead to scientific discoveries about the mechanisms of drug actions. But doing so requires shining light into the black box that is the trained neural network model, a task that has proved difficult across many domains. Here we show how the binding mechanism learned by deep neural network models can be interrogated, using a recently described attribution method. We first work with carefully constructed synthetic datasets, in which the 'fragment logic' of binding is fully known. We find that networks that achieve perfect accuracy on held out test datasets still learn spurious correlations due to biases in the datasets, and we are able to exploit this non-robustness to construct adversarial examples that fool the model. The dataset bias makes these models unreliable for accurately revealing information about the mechanisms of protein-ligand binding. In light of our findings, we prescribe a test that checks for dataset bias given a hypothesis. If the test fails, it indicates that either the model must be simplified or regularized and/or that the training dataset requires augmentation.
Deep Regionlets: Blended Representation and Deep Learning for Generic Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we propose a novel object detection algorithm named "Deep Regionlets" by integrating deep neural networks and a conventional detection schema for accurate generic object detection. Motivated by the effectiveness of regionlets for modeling object deformations and multiple aspect ratios, we incorporate regionlets into an end-to-end trainable deep learning framework. The deep regionlets framework consists of a region selection network and a deep regionlet learning module. Specifically, given a detection bounding box proposal, the region selection network provides guidance on where to select sub-regions from which features can be learned from. An object proposal typically contains 3-16 sub-regions. The regionlet learning module focuses on local feature selection and transformations to alleviate the effects of appearance variations. To this end, we first realize non-rectangular region selection within the detection framework to accommodate variations in object appearance. Moreover, we design a "gating network" within the regionlet leaning module to enable instance dependent soft feature selection and pooling. The Deep Regionlets framework is trained end-to-end without additional efforts. We present ablation studies and extensive experiments on the PASCAL VOC dataset and the Microsoft COCO dataset. The proposed method yields competitive performance over state-of-the-art algorithms, such as RetinaNet and Mask R-CNN, even without additional segmentation labels.
CrowdCam: Dynamic Region Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

We consider the problem of segmenting dynamic regions in CrowdCam images, where a dynamic region is the projection of a moving 3D object on the image plane. Quite often, these regions are the most interesting parts of an image. CrowdCam images is a set of images of the same dynamic event, captured by a group of non-collaborating users. Almost every event of interest today is captured this way. This new type of images raises the need to develop new algorithms tailored specifically for it. We propose a comprehensive solution to the problem. Our solution combines cues that are based on geometry, appearance and proximity. First, geometric reasoning is used to produce rough score maps that determine, for every pixel, how likely it is to be the projection of a static or dynamic scene point. These maps are noisy because CrowdCam images are usually few and far apart both in space and in time. Then, we use similarity in appearance space and proximity in the image plane to encourage neighboring pixels to be labeled similarly as either static or dynamic. We collected a new, and challenging, data set to evaluate our algorithm. Results show that the success score of our algorithm is nearly double that of the current state of the art approach.
Compliant Fluidic Control Structures: Concept and Synthesis Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2019
Year: 2019

The concept and synthesis approach for planar Compliant Fluidic Control Structures (CFCSs), monolithic flexible continua with embedded functional pores, is presented in this manuscript. Such structures are envisioned to find application in biomedicine as tunable microuidic devices for drug/nutrient delivery. The functional pores enlarge and/or contract upondeformation of the compliant structure in response to external stimuli, facilitating the regulated control of fluid/nutrient/drug transport. A thickness design variable based topology optimization problem is formulated to generate effective designs of these structures. An objective based on hydraulic diameter(s) is conceptualized, and it is extremized using a gradient based optimizer. Both geometrical and material nonlinearities are considered. The nonlinear behaviour of employed hyperelastic material is modeled via the Arruda-Boyce constitutive material model. Large-displacement finite element analysis is performed using the updated Lagrangian formulation in plane-stress setting. The proposed synthesis approach is applied to various CFCSs for a variety of fluidic control functionalities. The optimized designs of various CFCSs with single and/or multiple functional pores are fabricated via a Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) soft lithography process, using a high precision 3D printed mold and their performances are compared. with the numerical predictions.
Nonlinear Decomposition Principle and Fundamental Matrix Solutions for Dynamic Compartmental Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2019
Year: 2019

A decomposition principle for nonlinear dynamic compartmental systems is introduced in the present paper. This theory is based on the mutually exclusive and exhaustive, analytical and dynamic, novel system and subsystem partitioning methodologies. A deterministic mathematical method is developed for the dynamic analysis of nonlinear compartmental systems based on the proposed theory. The dynamic method enables tracking the evolution of all initial stocks, external inputs, and arbitrary intercompartmental flows, as well as the associated storages derived from these stocks, inputs, and flows individually and separately within the system. The transient and the dynamic direct, indirect, acyclic, cycling, and transfer (diact) flows and associated storages transmitted along a particular flow path or from one compartment--directly or indirectly--to any other are then analytically characterized, systematically classified, and mathematically formulated. Thus, the dynamic influence of one compartment, in terms of flow and storage transfer, directly or indirectly on any other compartment is ascertained. Consequently, new mathematical system analysis tools are formulated as quantitative system indicators. The proposed mathematical method is then applied to various models from literature to demonstrate its efficiency and wide applicability.
The basins of attraction of the global minimizers of the non-convex sparse spike estimation problem
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

The sparse spike estimation problem consists in estimating a number of off-the-grid impulsive sources from under-determined linear measurements. Information theoretic results ensure that the minimization of a non-convex functional is able to recover the spikes for adequately chosen measurements (deterministic or random). To solve this problem, methods inspired from the case of finite dimensional sparse estimation where a convex program is used have been proposed. Also greedy heuristics have shown nice practical results. However, little is known on the ideal non-convex minimization method. In this article, we study the shape of the global minimum of this non-convex functional: we give an explicit basin of attraction of the global minimum that shows that the non-convex problem becomes easier as the number of measurements grows. This has important consequences for methods involving descent algorithms (such as the greedy heuristic) and it gives insights for potential improvements of such descent methods.
Generalized Coarse-to-Fine Visual Recognition with Progressive Training
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Computer vision is difficult, partly because the desired mathematical function connecting input and output data is often complex, fuzzy and thus hard to learn. Coarse-to-fine (C2F) learning is a promising direction, but it remains unclear how it is applied to a wide range of vision problems. This paper presents a generalized C2F framework by making two technical contributions. First, we provide a unified way of C2F propagation, in which the coarse prediction (a class vector, a detected box, a segmentation mask, etc.) is encoded into a dense (pixel-level) matrix and concatenated to the original input, so that the fine model takes the same design of the coarse model but sees additional information. Second, we present a progressive training strategy which starts with feeding the ground-truth instead of the coarse output into the fine model, and gradually increases the fraction of coarse output, so that at the end of training the fine model is ready for testing. We also relate our approach to curriculum learning by showing that data difficulty keeps increasing during the training process. We apply our framework to three vision tasks including image classification, object localization and semantic segmentation, and demonstrate consistent accuracy gain compared to the baseline training strategy.