OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
How to Place Your Apps in the Fog -- State of the Art and Open Challenges
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

Fog computing aims at extending the Cloud towards the IoT so to achieve improved QoS and to empower latency-sensitive and bandwidth-hungry applications. The Fog calls for novel models and algorithms to distribute multi-service applications in such a way that data processing occurs wherever it is best-placed, based on both functional and non-functional requirements. This survey reviews the existing methodologies to solve the application placement problem in the Fog, while pursuing three main objectives. First, it offers a comprehensive overview on the currently employed algorithms, on the availability of open-source prototypes, and on the size of test use cases. Second, it classifies the literature based on the application and Fog infrastructure characteristics that are captured by available models, with a focus on the considered constraints and the optimised metrics. Finally, it identifies some open challenges in application placement in the Fog.
A Relation Between Weight Enumerating Function and Number of Full Rank Sub-matrices
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

In most of the network coding problems with $k$ messages, the existence of binary network coding solution over $\mathbb{F}_2$ depends on the existence of adequate sets of $k$-dimensional binary vectors such that each set comprises of linearly independent vectors. In a given $k \times n$ ($n \geq k$) binary matrix, there exist ${n}\choose{k}$ binary sub-matrices of size $k \times k$. Every possible $k \times k$ sub-matrix may be of full rank or singular depending on the columns present in the matrix. In this work, for full rank binary matrix $\mathbf{G}$ of size $k \times n$ satisfying certain condition on minimum Hamming weight, we establish a relation between the number of full rank sub-matrices of size $k \times k$ and the weight enumerating function of the error correcting code with $\mathbf{G}$ as the generator matrix. We give an algorithm to compute the number of full rank $k \times k$ submatrices.
Sparse Non-Negative Recovery from Biased Subgaussian Measurements using NNLS
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

We investigate non-negative least squares (NNLS) for the recovery of sparse non-negative vectors from noisy linear and biased measurements. We build upon recent results from [1] showing that for matrices whose row-span intersects the positive orthant, the nullspace property (NSP) implies compressed sensing recovery guarantees for NNLS. Such results are as good as for $\ell_1$-regularized estimators but do not require tuning parameters that depend on the noise level. A bias in the sensing matrix improves this auto-regularization feature of NNLS and the NSP then determines the sparse recovery performance only. We show that NSP holds with high probability for biased subgaussian matrices and its quality is independent of the bias.
A Capacity-Achieving $T$-PIR Scheme Based On MDS Array Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

Suppose a database containing $M$ records is replicated in each of $N$ servers, and a user wants to privately retrieve one record by accessing the servers such that identity of the retrieved record is secret against any up to $T$ servers. A scheme designed for this purpose is called a $T$-private information retrieval ($T$-PIR) scheme. In this paper we focus on the field size of $T$-PIR schemes. We design a generalcapacity-achieving $T$-PIR scheme whose queries are generated by using some {\rm MDS } array codes. It only requires field size $q\geq\sqrt[\ell]{N}$, where $\ell=\min\{t^{M-2},(n-t)^{M-2}\}$, $~t=T/{\rm gcd}(N,T)$,$~n=N/{\rm gcd}(N,T)$ and has the optimal sub-packetization $Nn^{M-2}$. Comparing with existing capacity-achieving $T$-PIR schemes, our scheme has the following advantage, that is, its field size monotonically decreases as the number of records $M$ grows. In particular, the binary field is sufficient for building a capacity-achieving T-PIR scheme as long as $M\geq 2+\lceil\log_μ\log_2N\rceil$, where $μ=\min\{t,n-t\}>1$.
Visual enhancement of Cone-beam CT by use of CycleGAN
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) offers advantages over conventional fan-beam CT in that it requires a shorter time and less exposure to obtain images. CBCT has found a wide variety of applications in patient positioning for image-guided radiation therapy, extracting radiomic information for designing patient-specific treatment, and computing fractional dose distributions for adaptive radiation therapy. However, CBCT images suffer from low soft-tissue contrast, noise, and artifacts compared to conventional fan-beam CT images. Therefore, it is essential to improve the image quality of CBCT. In this paper, we propose a synthetic approach to translate CBCT images with deep neural networks. Our method requires only unpaired and unaligned CBCT images and planning fan-beam CT (PlanCT) images for training. Once trained, 3D reconstructed CBCT images can be directly translated to high-quality PlanCT-like images. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with images obtained from 24 prostate patients, and we provide a statistical and visual comparison. The image quality of the translated images shows substantial improvement in voxel values, spatial uniformity, and artifact suppression compared to those of the original CBCT. The anatomical structures of the original CBCT images were also well preserved in the translated images. Our method enables more accurate adaptive radiation therapy, and opens up new applications for CBCT that hinge on high-quality images.
Ensemble Feature for Person Re-Identification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

In person re-identification (re-ID), the key task is feature representation, which is used to compute distance or similarity in prediction. Person re-ID achieves great improvement when deep learning methods are introduced to tackle this problem. The features extracted by convolutional neural networks (CNN) are more effective and discriminative than the hand-crafted features. However, deep feature extracted by a single CNN network is not robust enough in testing stage. To improve the ability of feature representation, we propose a new ensemble network (EnsembleNet) by dividing a single network into multiple end-to-end branches. The ensemble feature is obtained by concatenating each of the branch features to represent a person. EnsembleNet is designed based on ResNet-50 and its backbone shares most of the parameters for saving computation and memory cost. Experimental results show that our EnsembleNet achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the public Market1501, DukeMTMC-reID and CUHK03 person re-ID benchmarks.
Unobtrusive and Multimodal Approach for Behavioral Engagement Detection of Students
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2019
Year: 2019

We propose a multimodal approach for detection of students' behavioral engagement states (i.e., On-Task vs. Off-Task), based on three unobtrusive modalities: Appearance, Context-Performance, and Mouse. Final behavioral engagement states are achieved by fusing modality-specific classifiers at the decision level. Various experiments were conducted on a student dataset collected in an authentic classroom.
Spatially Coupled LDPC Codes and the Multiple Access Channel
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

We consider spatially coupled low-density parity-check (SC-LDPC) codes within a non-orthogonal interleave division multiple access (IDMA) scheme to avoid cumbersome degree profile matching of the LDPC code components to the iterative multi-user detector (MUD). Besides excellent decoding thresholds, the approach benefits from the possibility of using rather simple and regular underlying block LDPC codes owing to the universal behavior of the resulting coupled code with respect to the channel front-end, i.e., the iterative MUD. Furthermore, an additional outer repetition code makes the scheme flexible to cope with a varying number of users and user rates, as the SC-LDPC itself can be kept constant for a wide range of different user loads. The decoding thresholds are obtained via density evolution (DE) and verified by bit error rate (BER) simulations. To keep decoding complexity and latency small, we introduce a joint iterative windowed detector/decoder imposing carefully adjusted sub-block interleavers. Finally, we show that the proposed coding scheme also works for Rayleigh channels using the same code with tolerable performance loss compared to the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel.
A Performance Comparison of Loss Functions for Deep Face Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Face recognition is one of the most widely publicized feature in the devices today and hence represents an important problem that should be studied with the utmost priority. As per the recent trends, the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based approaches are highly successful in many tasks of Computer Vision including face recognition. The loss function is used on the top of CNN to judge the goodness of any network. In this paper, we present a performance comparison of different loss functions such as Cross-Entropy, Angular Softmax, Additive-Margin Softmax, ArcFace and Marginal Loss for face recognition. The experiments are conducted with two CNN architectures namely, ResNet and MobileNet. Two widely used face datasets namely, CASIA-Webface and MS-Celeb-1M are used for the training and benchmark Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) face dataset is used for the testing.
High performance scheduling of mixed-mode DAGs on heterogeneous multicores
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

Many HPC applications can be expressed as mixed-mode computations, in which each node of a computational DAG is itself a parallel computation that can be molded at runtime to allocate different amounts of processing resources. At the same time, modern HPC systems are becoming increasingly heterogeneous to address the requirements of energy efficiency. Effectively using heterogeneous devices is complex, requiring the developer to be aware of each DAG nodes' criticality, and the relative performance of the underlying heterogeneous resources. This paper studies how irregular mixed-mode parallel computations can be mapped on a single-ISA heterogeneous architecture with the goals of performance and portability. To achieve high performance we analyze various schemes for heterogeneous scheduling, including both criticality-aware and performance-only schemes, and extend them with task molding to dynamically adjust the amount of resources used for each task. To achieve performance portability we track each DAG nodes' performance and construct an online model of the system and its performance. Using a HiKey960 big.LITTLE board as experimental system, the resulting scheduler implementations achieve large speed-ups when executing irregular DAGs compared to traditional random work stealing.
Diverse mini-batch Active Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

We study the problem of reducing the amount of labeled training data required to train supervised classification models. We approach it by leveraging Active Learning, through sequential selection of examples which benefit the model most. Selecting examples one by one is not practical for the amount of training examples required by the modern Deep Learning models. We consider the mini-batch Active Learning setting, where several examples are selected at once. We present an approach which takes into account both informativeness of the examples for the model, as well as the diversity of the examples in a mini-batch. By using the well studied K-means clustering algorithm, this approach scales better than the previously proposed approaches, and achieves comparable or better performance.
PSACNN: Pulse Sequence Adaptive Fast Whole Brain Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

With the advent of convolutional neural networks~(CNN), supervised learning methods are increasingly being used for whole brain segmentation. However, a large, manually annotated training dataset of labeled brain images required to train such supervised methods is frequently difficult to obtain or create. In addition, existing training datasets are generally acquired with a homogeneous magnetic resonance imaging~(MRI) acquisition protocol. CNNs trained on such datasets are unable to generalize on test data with different acquisition protocols. Modern neuroimaging studies and clinical trials are necessarily multi-center initiatives with a wide variety of acquisition protocols. Despite stringent protocol harmonization practices, it is very difficult to standardize the gamut of MRI imaging parameters across scanners, field strengths, receive coils etc., that affect image contrast. In this paper we propose a CNN-based segmentation algorithm that, in addition to being highly accurate and fast, is also resilient to variation in the input acquisition. Our approach relies on building approximate forward models of pulse sequences that produce a typical test image. For a given pulse sequence, we use its forward model to generate plausible, synthetic training examples that appear as if they were acquired in a scanner with that pulse sequence. Sampling over a wide variety of pulse sequences results in a wide variety of augmented training examples that help build an image contrast invariant model. Our method trains a single CNN that can segment input MRI images with acquisition parameters as disparate as $T_1$-weighted and $T_2$-weighted contrasts with only $T_1$-weighted training data. The segmentations generated are highly accurate with state-of-the-art results~(overall Dice overlap$=0.94$), with a fast run time~($\approx$ 45 seconds), and consistent across a wide range of acquisition protocols.
Activation Functions for Generalized Learning Vector Quantization - A Performance Comparison
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

An appropriate choice of the activation function (like ReLU, sigmoid or swish) plays an important role in the performance of (deep) multilayer perceptrons (MLP) for classification and regression learning. Prototype-based classification learning methods like (generalized) learning vector quantization (GLVQ) are powerful alternatives. These models also deal with activation functions but here they are applied to the so-called classifier function instead. In this paper we investigate successful candidates of activation functions known for MLPs for application in GLVQ and their influence on the performance.
Robust Design of AC Computing-Enabled Receiver Architecture for SWIPT Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

Inspired by the direct use of alternating current (AC) for computation, we propose a novel integrated information and energy receiver architecture for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) networks. In this context, the AC computing method, in which wirelessly harvested AC energy is directly used to supply the computing block of receivers, enhances not only computational ability but also energy efficiency over the conventional direct current (DC) one. Further, we aim to manage the trade-off between the information decoding (ID) and energy harvesting (EH) optimally while taking imperfect channel estimation into account. It results in a worst-case optimization problem of maximizing the data rate under the constraints of an EH requirement, the energy needed for supplying the AC computational logic, and a transmit power budget. Then, we propose a method to derive closed-form optimal solutions. The numerical results demonstrate that the proposed architecture with AC computing significantly improves the rate-energy region.
High-speed Video from Asynchronous Camera Array
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

This paper presents a method for capturing high-speed video using an asynchronous camera array. Our method sequentially fires each sensor in a camera array with a small time offset and assembles captured frames into a high-speed video according to the time stamps. The resulting video, however, suffers from parallax jittering caused by the viewpoint difference among sensors in the camera array. To address this problem, we develop a dedicated novel view synthesis algorithm that transforms the video frames as if they were captured by a single reference sensor. Specifically, for any frame from a non-reference sensor, we find the two temporally neighboring frames captured by the reference sensor. Using these three frames, we render a new frame with the same time stamp as the non-reference frame but from the viewpoint of the reference sensor. Specifically, we segment these frames into super-pixels and then apply local content-preserving warping to warp them to form the new frame. We employ a multi-label Markov Random Field method to blend these warped frames. Our experiments show that our method can produce high-quality and high-speed video of a wide variety of scenes with large parallax, scene dynamics, and camera motion and outperforms several baseline and state-of-the-art approaches.
Automatic Keyboard Layout Design for Low-Resource Latin-Script Languages
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

We present our approach to automatically designing and implementing keyboard layouts on mobile devices for typing low-resource languages written in the Latin script. For many speakers, one of the barriers in accessing and creating text content on the web is the absence of input tools for their language. Ease in typing in these languages would lower technological barriers to online communication and collaboration, likely leading to the creation of more web content. Unfortunately, it can be time-consuming to develop layouts manually even for language communities that use a keyboard layout very similar to English; starting from scratch requires many configuration files to describe multiple possible behaviors for each key. With our approach, we only need a small amount of data in each language to generate keyboard layouts with very little human effort. This process can help serve speakers of low-resource languages in a scalable way, allowing us to develop input tools for more languages. Having input tools that reflect the linguistic diversity of the world will let as many people as possible use technology to learn, communicate, and express themselves in their own native languages.
An ADMM-Based Approach to Robust Array Pattern Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

In most existing robust array beam pattern synthesis studies, the bounded-sphere model is used to describe the steering vector (SV) uncertainties. In this letter, instead of bounding the norm of SV perturbations as a whole, we explore the amplitude and phase perturbations of each SV element separately, thereby obtaining a tighter SV uncertainty model. Based on this model, we formulate the robust array pattern synthesis problem from the perspective of the min-max optimization, which aims to minimize the maximum side lobe response, while preserving the main lobe response. However, this problem is difficult due to the infinitely many non-convex constraints. As a remedy, we employ the worst-case criterion and recast the problem as a convex second-order cone program (SOCP). To solve the SOCP, we further develop an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM)-based algorithm, which is computationally efficient with each step being computed in closed form. Numerical simulations demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of the proposed algorithm.
Exploring Semi-supervised Variational Autoencoders for Biomedical Relation Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

The biomedical literature provides a rich source of knowledge such as protein-protein interactions (PPIs), drug-drug interactions (DDIs) and chemical-protein interactions (CPIs). Biomedical relation extraction aims to automatically extract biomedical relations from biomedical text for various biomedical research. State-of-the-art methods for biomedical relation extraction are primarily based on supervised machine learning and therefore depend on (sufficient) labeled data. However, creating large sets of training data is prohibitively expensive and labor-intensive, especially so in biomedicine as domain knowledge is required. In contrast, there is a large amount of unlabeled biomedical text available in PubMed. Hence, computational methods capable of employing unlabeled data to reduce the burden of manual annotation are of particular interest in biomedical relation extraction. We present a novel semi-supervised approach based on variational autoencoder (VAE) for biomedical relation extraction. Our model consists of the following three parts, a classifier, an encoder and a decoder. The classifier is implemented using multi-layer convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and the encoder and decoder are implemented using both bidirectional long short-term memory networks (Bi-LSTMs) and CNNs, respectively. The semi-supervised mechanism allows our model to learn features from both the labeled and unlabeled data. We evaluate our method on multiple public PPI, DDI and CPI corpora. Experimental results show that our method effectively exploits the unlabeled data to improve the performance and reduce the dependence on labeled data. To our best knowledge, this is the first semi-supervised VAE-based method for (biomedical) relation extraction. Our results suggest that exploiting such unlabeled data can be greatly beneficial to improved performance in various biomedical relation extraction.
Look before you sweep: Visibility-aware motion planning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

This paper addresses the problem of planning for a robot with a directional obstacle-detection sensor that must move through a cluttered environment. The planning objective is to remain safe by finding a path for the complete robot, including sensor, that guarantees that the robot will not move into any part of the workspace before it has been seen by the sensor. Although a great deal of work has addressed a version of this problem in which the "field of view" of the sensor is a sphere around the robot, there is very little work addressing robots with a narrow or occluded field of view. We give a formal definition of the problem, several solution methods with different computational trade-offs, and experimental results in illustrative domains.
Multi-Object Tracking with Multiple Cues and Switcher-Aware Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we propose a unified Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) framework learning to make full use of long term and short term cues for handling complex cases in MOT scenes. Besides, for better association, we propose switcher-aware classification (SAC), which takes the potential identity-switch causer (switcher) into consideration. Specifically, the proposed framework includes a Single Object Tracking (SOT) sub-net to capture short term cues, a re-identification (ReID) sub-net to extract long term cues and a switcher-aware classifier to make matching decisions using extracted features from the main target and the switcher. Short term cues help to find false negatives, while long term cues avoid critical mistakes when occlusion happens, and the SAC learns to combine multiple cues in an effective way and improves robustness. The method is evaluated on the challenging MOT benchmarks and achieves the state-of-the-art results.