OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Cross-Resolution Learning for Face Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Convolutional Neural Networks have reached extremely high performances on the Face Recognition task. Largely used datasets, such as VGGFace2, focus on gender, pose and age variations trying to balance them to achieve better results. However, the fact that images have different resolutions is not usually discussed and resize to 256 pixels before cropping is used. While specific datasets for very low resolution faces have been proposed, less attention has been payed on the task of cross-resolution matching. Such scenarios are of particular interest for forensic and surveillance systems in which it usually happens that a low-resolution probe has to be matched with higher-resolution galleries. While it is always possible to either increase the resolution of the probe image or to reduce the size of the gallery images, to the best of our knowledge an extensive experimentation of cross-resolution matching was missing in the recent deep learning based literature. In the context of low- and cross-resolution Face Recognition, the contributions of our work are: i) we proposed a training method to fine-tune a state-of-the-art model in order to make it able to extract resolution-robust deep features; ii) we tested our models on the benchmark datasets IJB-B/C considering images at both full and low resolutions in order to show the effectiveness of the proposed training algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work testing extensively the performance of a FR model in a cross-resolution scenario; iii) we tested our models on the low resolution and low quality datasets QMUL-SurvFace and TinyFace and showed their superior performances, even though we did not train our model on low-resolution faces only and our main focus was cross-resolution; iv) we showed that our approach can be more effective with respect to preprocessing faces with super resolution techniques.
End-to-end Training of CNN-CRF via Differentiable Dual-Decomposition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Modern computer vision (CV) is often based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that excel at hierarchical feature extraction. The previous generation of CV approaches was often based on conditional random fields (CRFs) that excel at modeling flexible higher order interactions. As their benefits are complementary they are often combined. However, these approaches generally use mean-field approximations and thus, arguably, did not directly optimize the real problem. Here we revisit dual-decomposition-based approaches to CRF optimization, an alternative to the mean-field approximation. These algorithms can efficiently and exactly solve sub-problems and directly optimize a convex upper bound of the real problem, providing optimality certificates on the way. Our approach uses a novel fixed-point iteration algorithm which enjoys dual-monotonicity, dual-differentiability and high parallelism. The whole system, CRF and CNN can thus be efficiently trained using back-propagation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system on semantic image segmentation, showing consistent improvement over baseline models.
Lower Bounds for Compressed Sensing with Generative Models
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

The goal of compressed sensing is to learn a structured signal $x$ from a limited number of noisy linear measurements $y \approx Ax$. In traditional compressed sensing, "structure" is represented by sparsity in some known basis. Inspired by the success of deep learning in modeling images, recent work starting with~\cite{BJPD17} has instead considered structure to come from a generative model $G: \mathbb{R}^k \to \mathbb{R}^n$. We present two results establishing the difficulty of this latter task, showing that existing bounds are tight. First, we provide a lower bound matching the~\cite{BJPD17} upper bound for compressed sensing from $L$-Lipschitz generative models $G$. In particular, there exists such a function that requires roughly $Ω(k \log L)$ linear measurements for sparse recovery to be possible. This holds even for the more relaxed goal of \emph{nonuniform} recovery. Second, we show that generative models generalize sparsity as a representation of structure. In particular, we construct a ReLU-based neural network $G: \mathbb{R}^{2k} \to \mathbb{R}^n$ with $O(1)$ layers and $O(kn)$ activations per layer, such that the range of $G$ contains all $k$-sparse vectors.
Towards Interpretable and Learnable Risk Analysis for Entity Resolution
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2019
Year: 2019

Machine-learning-based entity resolution has been widely studied. However, some entity pairs may be mislabeled by machine learning models and existing studies do not study the risk analysis problem -- predicting and interpreting which entity pairs are mislabeled. In this paper, we propose an interpretable and learnable framework for risk analysis, which aims to rank the labeled pairs based on their risks of being mislabeled. We first describe how to automatically generate interpretable risk features, and then present a learnable risk model and its training technique. Finally, we empirically evaluate the performance of the proposed approach on real data. Our extensive experiments have shown that the learning risk model can identify the mislabeled pairs with considerably higher accuracy than the existing alternatives.
Sampling-Free Learning of Bayesian Quantized Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Bayesian learning of model parameters in neural networks is important in scenarios where estimates with well-calibrated uncertainty are important. In this paper, we propose Bayesian quantized networks (BQNs), quantized neural networks (QNNs) for which we learn a posterior distribution over their discrete parameters. We provide a set of efficient algorithms for learning and prediction in BQNs without the need to sample from their parameters or activations, which not only allows for differentiable learning in QNNs, but also reduces the variance in gradients. We evaluate BQNs on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, KMNIST and CIFAR10 image classification datasets, compared against bootstrap ensemble of QNNs (E-QNN). We demonstrate BQNs achieve both lower predictive errors and better-calibrated uncertainties than E-QNN (with less than 20% of the negative log-likelihood).
Constructive derandomization of query algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2019
Year: 2019

We give efficient deterministic algorithms for converting randomized query algorithms into deterministic ones. We first give an algorithm that takes as input a randomized $q$-query algorithm $R$ with description length $N$ and a parameter $\varepsilon$, runs in time $\mathrm{poly}(N) \cdot 2^{O(q/\varepsilon)}$, and returns a deterministic $O(q/\varepsilon)$-query algorithm $D$ that $\varepsilon$-approximates the acceptance probabilities of $R$. These parameters are near-optimal: runtime $N + 2^{Ω(q/\varepsilon)}$ and query complexity $Ω(q/\varepsilon)$ are necessary. Next, we give algorithms for instance-optimal and online versions of the problem: $\circ$ Instance optimal: Construct a deterministic $q^\star_R$-query algorithm $D$, where $q^\star_R$ is minimum query complexity of any deterministic algorithm that $\varepsilon$-approximates $R$. $\circ$ Online: Deterministically approximate the acceptance probability of $R$ for a specific input $\underline{x}$ in time $\mathrm{poly}(N,q,1/\varepsilon)$, without constructing $D$ in its entirety. Applying the techniques we develop for these extensions, we constructivize classic results that relate the deterministic, randomized, and quantum query complexities of boolean functions (Nisan, STOC 1989; Beals et al., FOCS 1998). This has direct implications for the Turing machine model of computation: sublinear-time algorithms for total decision problems can be efficiently derandomized and dequantized with a subexponential-time preprocessing step.
Visual-Textual Association with Hardest and Semi-Hard Negative Pairs Mining for Person Search
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Searching persons in large-scale image databases with the query of natural language description is a more practical important applications in video surveillance. Intuitively, for person search, the core issue should be visual-textual association, which is still an extremely challenging task, due to the contradiction between the high abstraction of textual description and the intuitive expression of visual images. However, for this task, while positive image-text pairs are always well provided, most existing methods doesn't tackle this problem effectively by mining more reasonable negative pairs. In this paper, we proposed a novel visual-textual association approach with visual and textual attention, and cross-modality hardest and semi-hard negative pair mining. In order to evaluate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed approach, we conduct extensive experiments on typical person search datasdet: CUHK-PEDES, in which our approach achieves the top1 score of 55.32% as a new state-of-the-art. Besides, we also evaluate the semi-hard pair mining approach in COCO caption dataset, and validate the effectiveness and complementarity of the methods.
Why Should we Combine Training and Post-Training Methods for Out-of-Distribution Detection?
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Deep neural networks are known to achieve superior results in classification tasks. However, it has been recently shown that they are incapable to detect examples that are generated by a distribution which is different than the one they have been trained on since they are making overconfident prediction for Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) examples. OOD detection has attracted a lot of attention recently. In this paper, we review some of the most seminal recent algorithms in the OOD detection field, we divide those methods into training and post-training and we experimentally show how the combination of the former with the latter can achieve state-of-the-art results in the OOD detection task.
300 GHz Radar Object Recognition based on Deep Neural Networks and Transfer Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

For high resolution scene mapping and object recognition, optical technologies such as cameras and LiDAR are the sensors of choice. However, for robust future vehicle autonomy and driver assistance in adverse weather conditions, improvements in automotive radar technology, and the development of algorithms and machine learning for robust mapping and recognition are essential. In this paper, we describe a methodology based on deep neural networks to recognise objects in 300GHz radar images, investigating robustness to changes in range, orientation and different receivers in a laboratory environment. As the training data is limited, we have also investigated the effects of transfer learning. As a necessary first step before road trials, we have also considered detection and classification in multiple object scenes.
Self-Supervised Visual Terrain Classification from Unsupervised Acoustic Feature Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

Mobile robots operating in unknown urban environments encounter a wide range of complex terrains to which they must adapt their planned trajectory for safe and efficient navigation. Most existing approaches utilize supervised learning to classify terrains from either an exteroceptive or a proprioceptive sensor modality. However, this requires a tremendous amount of manual labeling effort for each newly encountered terrain as well as for variations of terrains caused by changing environmental conditions. In this work, we propose a novel terrain classification framework leveraging an unsupervised proprioceptive classifier that learns from vehicle-terrain interaction sounds to self-supervise an exteroceptive classifier for pixel-wise semantic segmentation of images. To this end, we first learn a discriminative embedding space for vehicle-terrain interaction sounds from triplets of audio clips formed using visual features of the corresponding terrain patches and cluster the resulting embeddings. We subsequently use these clusters to label the visual terrain patches by projecting the traversed tracks of the robot into the camera images. Finally, we use the sparsely labeled images to train our semantic segmentation network in a weakly supervised manner. We present extensive quantitative and qualitative results that demonstrate that our proprioceptive terrain classifier exceeds the state-of-the-art among unsupervised methods and our self-supervised exteroceptive semantic segmentation model achieves a comparable performance to supervised learning with manually labeled data.
Potential Passenger Flow Prediction: A Novel Study for Urban Transportation Development
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Recently, practical applications for passenger flow prediction have brought many benefits to urban transportation development. With the development of urbanization, a real-world demand from transportation managers is to construct a new metro station in one city area that never planned before. Authorities are interested in the picture of the future volume of commuters before constructing a new station, and estimate how would it affect other areas. In this paper, this specific problem is termed as potential passenger flow (PPF) prediction, which is a novel and important study connected with urban computing and intelligent transportation systems. For example, an accurate PPF predictor can provide invaluable knowledge to designers, such as the advice of station scales and influences on other areas, etc. To address this problem, we propose a multi-view localized correlation learning method. The core idea of our strategy is to learn the passenger flow correlations between the target areas and their localized areas with adaptive-weight. To improve the prediction accuracy, other domain knowledge is involved via a multi-view learning process. We conduct intensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of our method with real-world official transportation datasets. The results demonstrate that our method can achieve excellent performance compared with other available baselines. Besides, our method can provide an effective solution to the cold-start problem in the recommender system as well, which proved by its outperformed experimental results.
Digital Twin: Acquiring High-Fidelity 3D Avatar from a Single Image
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

We present an approach to generate high fidelity 3D face avatar with a high-resolution UV texture map from a single image. To estimate the face geometry, we use a deep neural network to directly predict vertex coordinates of the 3D face model from the given image. The 3D face geometry is further refined by a non-rigid deformation process to more accurately capture facial landmarks before texture projection. A key novelty of our approach is to train the shape regression network on facial images synthetically generated using a high-quality rendering engine. Moreover, our shape estimator fully leverages the discriminative power of deep facial identity features learned from millions of facial images. We have conducted extensive experiments to demonstrate the superiority of our optimized 2D-to-3D rendering approach, especially its excellent generalization property on real-world selfie images. Our proposed system of rendering 3D avatars from 2D images has a wide range of applications from virtual/augmented reality (VR/AR) and telepsychiatry to human-computer interaction and social networks.
Comparison of Neuronal Attention Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Recent models for image processing are using the Convolutional neural network (CNN) which requires a pixel per pixel analysis of the input image. This method works well. However, it is time-consuming if we have large images. To increase the performance, by improving the training time or the accuracy, we need a size-independent method. As a solution, we can add a Neuronal Attention model (NAM). The power of this new approach is that it can efficiently choose several small regions from the initial image to focus on. The purpose of this paper is to explain and also test each of the NAM's parameters.
A Real-time Global Inference Network for One-stage Referring Expression Comprehension
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) is an emerging research spot in computer vision, which refers to detecting the target region in an image given an text description. Most existing REC methods follow a multi-stage pipeline, which are computationally expensive and greatly limit the application of REC. In this paper, we propose a one-stage model towards real-time REC, termed Real-time Global Inference Network (RealGIN). RealGIN addresses the diversity and complexity issues in REC with two innovative designs: the Adaptive Feature Selection (AFS) and the Global Attentive ReAsoNing unit (GARAN). AFS adaptively fuses features at different semantic levels to handle the varying content of expressions. GARAN uses the textual feature as a pivot to collect expression-related visual information from all regions, and thenselectively diffuse such information back to all regions, which provides sufficient context for modeling the complex linguistic conditions in expressions. On five benchmark datasets, i.e., RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, RefCOCOg, ReferIt and Flickr30k, the proposed RealGIN outperforms most prior works and achieves very competitive performances against the most advanced method, i.e., MAttNet. Most importantly, under the same hardware, RealGIN can boost the processing speed by about 10 times over the existing methods.
Privacy-Preserving Inference in Machine Learning Services Using Trusted Execution Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

This work presents Origami, which provides privacy-preserving inference for large deep neural network (DNN) models through a combination of enclave execution, cryptographic blinding, interspersed with accelerator-based computation. Origami partitions the ML model into multiple partitions. The first partition receives the encrypted user input within an SGX enclave. The enclave decrypts the input and then applies cryptographic blinding to the input data and the model parameters. Cryptographic blinding is a technique that adds noise to obfuscate data. Origami sends the obfuscated data for computation to an untrusted GPU/CPU. The blinding and de-blinding factors are kept private by the SGX enclave, thereby preventing any adversary from denoising the data, when the computation is offloaded to a GPU/CPU. The computed output is returned to the enclave, which decodes the computation on noisy data using the unblinding factors privately stored within SGX. This process may be repeated for each DNN layer, as has been done in prior work Slalom. However, the overhead of blinding and unblinding the data is a limiting factor to scalability. Origami relies on the empirical observation that the feature maps after the first several layers can not be used, even by a powerful conditional GAN adversary to reconstruct input. Hence, Origami dynamically switches to executing the rest of the DNN layers directly on an accelerator without needing any further cryptographic blinding intervention to preserve privacy. We empirically demonstrate that using Origami, a conditional GAN adversary, even with an unlimited inference budget, cannot reconstruct the input. We implement and demonstrate the performance gains of Origami using the VGG-16 and VGG-19 models. Compared to running the entire VGG-19 model within SGX, Origami inference improves the performance of private inference from 11x while using Slalom to 15.1x.
MoebInv: C++ libraries for manipulations in non-Euclidean geometry
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2019
Year: 2019

The introduced package MoebInv contains two CPP libraries for symbolic, numeric and graphical manipulations in non-Euclidean geometry. The first library cycle implements basic geometric operations on cycles, which are the zero sets of certain polynomials of degree two. The second library figure operates on ensembles of cycles interconnected by Moebius-invariant relations: orthogonality, tangency, etc. Both libraries work in spaces with any dimension and arbitrary signatures of their metrics. Their essential functionality is accessible in interactive modes from Python/Jupyter shells and a dedicated Graphical User Interface. The latter does not require any coding skills and can be used in education. The package is tested on (and supplied for) various Linux distributions, Windows 10, Mac OS X and several cloud services.
Parameterized Algorithms for MILPs with Small Treedepth
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

Solving (mixed) integer linear programs, (M)ILPs for short, is a fundamental optimization task. While hard in general, recent years have brought about vast progress for solving structurally restricted, (non-mixed) ILPs: $n$-fold, tree-fold, 2-stage stochastic and multi-stage stochastic programs admit efficient algorithms, and all of these special cases are subsumed by the class of ILPs of small treedepth. In this paper, we extend this line of work to the mixed case, by showing an algorithm solving MILP in time $f(a,d) \textrm{poly}(n)$, where $a$ is the largest coefficient of the constraint matrix, $d$ is its treedepth, and $n$ is the number of variables. This is enabled by proving bounds on the denominators of the vertices of bounded-treedepth (non-integer) linear programs. We do so by carefully analyzing the inverses of invertible submatrices of the constraint matrix. This allows us to afford scaling up the mixed program to the integer grid, and applying the known methods for integer programs. We trace the limiting boundary of our approach, showing that naturally related classes of linear programs have vertices of unbounded fractionality. Finally, we show that restricting the structure of only the integral variables in the constraint matrix does not yield tractable special cases.
Towards a Critical Race Methodology in Algorithmic Fairness
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2019
Year: 2019

We examine the way race and racial categories are adopted in algorithmic fairness frameworks. Current methodologies fail to adequately account for the socially constructed nature of race, instead adopting a conceptualization of race as a fixed attribute. Treating race as an attribute, rather than a structural, institutional, and relational phenomenon, can serve to minimize the structural aspects of algorithmic unfairness. In this work, we focus on the history of racial categories and turn to critical race theory and sociological work on race and ethnicity to ground conceptualizations of race for fairness research, drawing on lessons from public health, biomedical research, and social survey research. We argue that algorithmic fairness researchers need to take into account the multidimensionality of race, take seriously the processes of conceptualizing and operationalizing race, focus on social processes which produce racial inequality, and consider perspectives of those most affected by sociotechnical systems.