OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Performance Tradeoffs of Joint Radar-Communication Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

This letter considers a network where nodes share a wireless channel to work in turn as pulse radars for target detection and as transmitters for data exchange. Radar detection range and network throughput are studied using stochastic geometry tools. We derive closed-form expressions that identify the key tradeoffs between radar and communication operations. Results reveal interesting design hints and stress a marked sensitivity of radar detection to communication interference.
Multiple Manifolds Metric Learning with Application to Image Set Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

In image set classification, a considerable advance has been made by modeling the original image sets by second order statistics or linear subspace, which typically lie on the Riemannian manifold. Specifically, they are Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) manifold and Grassmann manifold respectively, and some algorithms have been developed on them for classification tasks. Motivated by the inability of existing methods to extract discriminatory features for data on Riemannian manifolds, we propose a novel algorithm which combines multiple manifolds as the features of the original image sets. In order to fuse these manifolds, the well-studied Riemannian kernels have been utilized to map the original Riemannian spaces into high dimensional Hilbert spaces. A metric Learning method has been devised to embed these kernel spaces into a lower dimensional common subspace for classification. The state-of-the-art results achieved on three datasets corresponding to two different classification tasks, namely face recognition and object categorization, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Anonymous Walk Embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

The task of representing entire graphs has seen a surge of prominent results, mainly due to learning convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on graph-structured data. While CNNs demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in graph classification task, such methods are supervised and therefore steer away from the original problem of network representation in task-agnostic manner. Here, we coherently propose an approach for embedding entire graphs and show that our feature representations with SVM classifier increase classification accuracy of CNN algorithms and traditional graph kernels. For this we describe a recently discovered graph object, anonymous walk, on which we design task-independent algorithms for learning graph representations in explicit and distributed way. Overall, our work represents a new scalable unsupervised learning of state-of-the-art representations of entire graphs.
Algebraic Expression of Subjective Spatial and Temporal Patterns
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Universal learning machine is a theory trying to study machine learning from mathematical point of view. The outside world is reflected inside an universal learning machine according to pattern of incoming data. This is subjective pattern of learning machine. In [2,4], we discussed subjective spatial pattern, and established a powerful tool -- X-form, which is an algebraic expression for subjective spatial pattern. However, as the initial stage of study, there we only discussed spatial pattern. Here, we will discuss spatial and temporal patterns, and algebraic expression for them.
Automatic Large-Scale Data Acquisition via Crowdsourcing for Crosswalk Classification: A Deep Learning Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Correctly identifying crosswalks is an essential task for the driving activity and mobility autonomy. Many crosswalk classification, detection and localization systems have been proposed in the literature over the years. These systems use different perspectives to tackle the crosswalk classification problem: satellite imagery, cockpit view (from the top of a car or behind the windshield), and pedestrian perspective. Most of the works in the literature are designed and evaluated using small and local datasets, i.e. datasets that present low diversity. Scaling to large datasets imposes a challenge for the annotation procedure. Moreover, there is still need for cross-database experiments in the literature because it is usually hard to collect the data in the same place and conditions of the final application. In this paper, we present a crosswalk classification system based on deep learning. For that, crowdsourcing platforms, such as OpenStreetMap and Google Street View, are exploited to enable automatic training via automatic acquisition and annotation of a large-scale database. Additionally, this work proposes a comparison study of models trained using fully-automatic data acquisition and annotation against models that were partially annotated. Cross-database experiments were also included in the experimentation to show that the proposed methods enable use with real world applications. Our results show that the model trained on the fully-automatic database achieved high overall accuracy (94.12%), and that a statistically significant improvement (to 96.30%) can be achieved by manually annotating a specific part of the database. Finally, the results of the cross-database experiments show that both models are robust to the many variations of image and scenarios, presenting a consistent behavior.
Automatic generation of object shapes with desired functionalities
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

3D objects (artefacts) are made to fulfill functions. Designing an object often starts with defining a list of functionalities that it should provide, also known as functional requirements. Today, the design of 3D object models is still a slow and largely artisanal activity, with few Computer-Aided Design (CAD) tools existing to aid the exploration of the design solution space. To accelerate the design process, we introduce an algorithm for generating object shapes with desired functionalities. Following the concept of form follows function, we assume that existing object shapes were rationally chosen to provide desired functionalities. First, we use an artificial neural network to learn a function-to-form mapping by analysing a dataset of objects labeled with their functionalities. Then, we combine forms providing one or more desired functions, generating an object shape that is expected to provide all of them. Finally, we verify in simulation whether the generated object possesses the desired functionalities, by defining and executing functionality tests on it.
Unification and Logarithmic Space
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2018
Year: 2018

We present an algebraic characterization of the complexity classes Logspace and Nlogspace, using an algebra with a composition law based on unification. This new bridge between unification and complexity classes is rooted in proof theory and more specifically linear logic and geometry of interaction. We show how to build a model of computation in the unification algebra and then, by means of a syntactic representation of finite permutations in the algebra, we prove that whether an observation (the algebraic counterpart of a program) accepts a word can be decided within logarithmic space. Finally, we show that the construction naturally corresponds to pointer machines, a convenient way of understanding logarithmic space computation.
Automatic, fast and robust characterization of noise distributions for diffusion MRI
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Knowledge of the noise distribution in magnitude diffusion MRI images is the centerpiece to quantify uncertainties arising from the acquisition process. The use of parallel imaging methods, the number of receiver coils and imaging filters applied by the scanner, amongst other factors, dictate the resulting signal distribution. Accurate estimation beyond textbook Rician or noncentral chi distributions often requires information about the acquisition process (e.g. coils sensitivity maps or reconstruction coefficients), which is not usually available. We introduce a new method where a change of variable naturally gives rise to a particular form of the gamma distribution for background signals. The first moments and maximum likelihood estimators of this gamma distribution explicitly depend on the number of coils, making it possible to estimate all unknown parameters using only the magnitude data. A rejection step is used to make the method automatic and robust to artifacts. Experiments on synthetic datasets show that the proposed method can reliably estimate both the degrees of freedom and the standard deviation. The worst case errors range from below 2% (spatially uniform noise) to approximately 10% (spatially variable noise). Repeated acquisitions of in vivo datasets show that the estimated parameters are stable and have lower variances than compared methods.
Towards Understanding the Role of Over-Parametrization in Generalization of Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Despite existing work on ensuring generalization of neural networks in terms of scale sensitive complexity measures, such as norms, margin and sharpness, these complexity measures do not offer an explanation of why neural networks generalize better with over-parametrization. In this work we suggest a novel complexity measure based on unit-wise capacities resulting in a tighter generalization bound for two layer ReLU networks. Our capacity bound correlates with the behavior of test error with increasing network sizes, and could potentially explain the improvement in generalization with over-parametrization. We further present a matching lower bound for the Rademacher complexity that improves over previous capacity lower bounds for neural networks.
Context Exploitation using Hierarchical Bayesian Models
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

We consider the problem of how to improve automatic target recognition by fusing the naive sensor-level classification decisions with "intuition," or context, in a mathematically principled way. This is a general approach that is compatible with many definitions of context, but for specificity, we consider context as co-occurrence in imagery. In particular, we consider images that contain multiple objects identified at various confidence levels. We learn the patterns of co-occurrence in each context, then use these patterns as hyper-parameters for a Hierarchical Bayesian Model. The result is that low-confidence sensor classification decisions can be dramatically improved by fusing those readings with context. We further use hyperpriors to address the case where multiple contexts may be appropriate. We also consider the Bayesian Network, an alternative to the Hierarchical Bayesian Model, which is computationally more efficient but assumes that context and sensor readings are uncorrelated.
Novel Video Prediction for Large-scale Scene using Optical Flow
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Making predictions of future frames is a critical challenge in autonomous driving research. Most of the existing methods for video prediction attempt to generate future frames in simple and fixed scenes. In this paper, we propose a novel and effective optical flow conditioned method for the task of video prediction with an application to complex urban scenes. In contrast with previous work, the prediction model only requires video sequences and optical flow sequences for training and testing. Our method uses the rich spatial-temporal features in video sequences. The method takes advantage of the motion information extracting from optical flow maps between neighbor images as well as previous images. Empirical evaluations on the KITTI dataset and the Cityscapes dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Employing p-CSMA on a LoRa Network Simulator
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWANs) emerged to cover the needs of Internet of Things (IoT)-devices for operational longevity and long operating range. Among LPWANs, Long Range (LoRa) WAN has been the most promising; an upcoming IoT protocol, already adopted by big mobile operators like KPN and TTN. With LoRaWANs, IoT-devices transmit data to their corresponding gateways over many kilometers in a single hop and with 1% duty-cycle. However, in a LoRa network, any device claims the channel for data-transmission without performing channel-sensing or synchronization with other devices. This increases humongously the number of collisions of information-packets when the number of IoT-devices that are connected per gateway increases. To improve the utilization of the channel, we propose the application of persistent-Carrier Sense Multiple Access (p-CSMA) protocols on the MAC layer of LoRaWANs. In this manuscript, we report on the initial design of a p-CSMA component for the simulation of LoRa networks in ns3. In particular, the classes adding p-CSMA functionality to the IoT-devices are presented. Additionally, the dependencies and relations between these classes and an existing LoRaWAN module on which they apply are detailed. Further, we evaluate this new p-CSMA LoRaWAN module in terms of Packet Reception Ratio (PRR) by simulating LoRa networks. The current report is the first step in the creation of a holistic p-CSMA module, directed to support network-researchers and connoisseurs in simulating all aspects of LoRa networks in ns3.
Cybersecurity Information Sharing Governance Structures: An Ecosystem of Diversity, Trust, and Tradeoffs
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2018
Year: 2018

In recent years the cybersecurity policy debate in Washington has been dominated by calls for greater information sharing within the private sector, and between the private sector and the federal government. The passage of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) (signed into law under the Cybersecurity Act of 2015) underscored federal efforts to collect information from the private sector, and assuaged some concerns regarding private sector liability in sharing activities. However, the law lacked specificity on how continued federal efforts would work with existing information sharing networks, and failed to address other challenges associated with sharing including trust building, privacy and propriety interests, reciprocation, and quality control. This paper aims to bring granularity to implementations of information sharing initiatives by creating a taxonomy of the governance and policy models within each of these organizations. The research shows how this diverse ecosystem of sharing models work together and separately, and the impact governance and policy have on key components critical to sharing infrastructure.
Learning Factorized Representations for Open-set Domain Adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Domain adaptation for visual recognition has undergone great progress in the past few years. Nevertheless, most existing methods work in the so-called closed-set scenario, assuming that the classes depicted by the target images are exactly the same as those of the source domain. In this paper, we tackle the more challenging, yet more realistic case of open-set domain adaptation, where new, unknown classes can be present in the target data. While, in the unsupervised scenario, one cannot expect to be able to identify each specific new class, we aim to automatically detect which samples belong to these new classes and discard them from the recognition process. To this end, we rely on the intuition that the source and target samples depicting the known classes can be generated by a shared subspace, whereas the target samples from unknown classes come from a different, private subspace. We therefore introduce a framework that factorizes the data into shared and private parts, while encouraging the shared representation to be discriminative. Our experiments on standard benchmarks evidence that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art in open-set domain adaptation.
Adversarial Attacks on Face Detectors using Neural Net based Constrained Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Adversarial attacks involve adding, small, often imperceptible, perturbations to inputs with the goal of getting a machine learning model to misclassifying them. While many different adversarial attack strategies have been proposed on image classification models, object detection pipelines have been much harder to break. In this paper, we propose a novel strategy to craft adversarial examples by solving a constrained optimization problem using an adversarial generator network. Our approach is fast and scalable, requiring only a forward pass through our trained generator network to craft an adversarial sample. Unlike in many attack strategies, we show that the same trained generator is capable of attacking new images without explicitly optimizing on them. We evaluate our attack on a trained Faster R-CNN face detector on the cropped 300-W face dataset where we manage to reduce the number of detected faces to $0.5\%$ of all originally detected faces. In a different experiment, also on 300-W, we demonstrate the robustness of our attack to a JPEG compression based defense typical JPEG compression level of $75\%$ reduces the effectiveness of our attack from only $0.5\%$ of detected faces to a modest $5.0\%$.
Collaborative Multi-modal deep learning for the personalized product retrieval in Facebook Marketplace
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2018
Year: 2018

Facebook Marketplace is quickly gaining momentum among consumers as a favored customer-to-customer (C2C) product trading platform. The recommendation system behind it helps to significantly improve the user experience. Building the recommendation system for Facebook Marketplace is challenging for two reasons: 1) Scalability: the number of products in Facebook Marketplace is huge. Tens of thousands of products need to be scored and recommended within a couple hundred milliseconds for millions of users every day; 2) Cold start: the life span of the C2C products is very short and the user activities on the products are sparse. Thus it is difficult to accumulate enough product level signals for recommendation and we are facing a significant cold start issue. In this paper, we propose to address both the scalability and the cold-start issue by building a collaborative multi-modal deep learning based retrieval system where the compact embeddings for the users and the products are trained with the multi-modal content information. This system shows significant improvement over the benchmark in online and off-line experiments: In the online experiment, it increases the number of messages initiated by the buyer to the seller by +26.95%; in the off-line experiment, it improves the prediction accuracy by +9.58%.
Simultaneous Optical Flow and Segmentation (SOFAS) using Dynamic Vision Sensor
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

We present an algorithm (SOFAS) to estimate the optical flow of events generated by a dynamic vision sensor (DVS). Where traditional cameras produce frames at a fixed rate, DVSs produce asynchronous events in response to intensity changes with a high temporal resolution. Our algorithm uses the fact that events are generated by edges in the scene to not only estimate the optical flow but also to simultaneously segment the image into objects which are travelling at the same velocity. This way it is able to avoid the aperture problem which affects other implementations such as Lucas-Kanade. Finally, we show that SOFAS produces more accurate results than traditional optic flow algorithms.
Optimal cyclic $(r,δ)$ locally repairable codes with unbounded length
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

Locally repairable codes with locality $r$ ($r$-LRCs for short) were introduced by Gopalan et al. \cite{1} to recover a failed node of the code from at most other $r$ available nodes. And then $(r,δ)$ locally repairable codes ($(r,δ)$-LRCs for short) were produced by Prakash et al. \cite{2} for tolerating multiple failed nodes. An $r$-LRC can be viewed as an $(r,2)$-LRC. An $(r,δ)$-LRC is called optimal if it achieves the Singleton-type bound. It has been a great challenge to construct $q$-ary optimal $(r,δ)$-LRCs with length much larger than $q$. Surprisingly, Luo et al. \cite{3} presented a construction of $q$-ary optimal $r$-LRCs of minimum distances 3 and 4 with unbounded lengths (i.e., lengths of these codes are independent of $q$) via cyclic codes. In this paper, inspired by the work of \cite{3}, we firstly construct two classes of optimal cyclic $(r,δ)$-LRCs with unbounded lengths and minimum distances $δ+1$ or $δ+2$, which generalize the results about the $δ=2$ case given in \cite{3}. Secondly, with a slightly stronger condition, we present a construction of optimal cyclic $(r,δ)$-LRCs with unbounded length and larger minimum distance $2δ$. Furthermore, when $δ=3$, we give another class of optimal cyclic $(r,3)$-LRCs with unbounded length and minimum distance $6$.
Physical Layer Security over Fluctuating Two-Ray Fading Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

Ensuring the physical layer security (PHY-security) of millimeter wave (mmWave) communications is one of the key factors for the success of 5G. Recent field measurements show that conventional fading models cannot accurately model the random fluctuations of mmWave signals. To tackle this challenge, the fluctuating two-ray (FTR) fading model has been proposed. In this correspondence, we comprehensively analyze the PHY-security in mmWave communications over FTR fading channels. More specifically, we derive analytical expressions for significant PHY-security metrics, such as average secrecy capacity, secrecy outage probability, and the probability of strictly positive secrecy capacity, with simple functions. The effect of channel parameters on the PHY-security has been validated by numerical results.
CrowdRev: A platform for Crowd-based Screening of Literature Reviews
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper and demo we present a crowd and crowd+AI based system, called CrowdRev, supporting the screening phase of literature reviews and achieving the same quality as author classification at a fraction of the cost, and near-instantly. CrowdRev makes it easy for authors to leverage the crowd, and ensures that no money is wasted even in the face of difficult papers or criteria: if the system detects that the task is too hard for the crowd, it just gives up trying (for that paper, or for that criteria, or altogether), without wasting money and never compromising on quality.
Computing all Wardrop Equilibria parametrized by the Flow Demand
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2018
Year: 2018

We develop an algorithm that computes for a given undirected or directed network with flow-dependent piece-wise linear edge cost functions all Wardrop equilibria as a function of the flow demand. Our algorithm is based on Katzenelson's homotopy method for electrical networks. The algorithm uses a bijection between vertex potentials and flow excess vectors that is piecewise linear in the potential space and where each linear segment can be interpreted as an augmenting flow in a residual network. The algorithm iteratively increases the excess of one or more vertex pairs until the bijection reaches a point of non-differentiability. Then, the next linear region is chosen in a Simplex-like pivot step and the algorithm proceeds. We first show that this algorithm correctly computes all Wardrop equilibria in undirected single-commodity networks along the chosen path of excess vectors. We then adapt our algorithm to also work for discontinuous cost functions which allows to model directed edges and/or edge capacities. Our algorithm is output-polynomial in non-degenerate instances where the solution curve never hits a point where the cost function of more than one edge becomes non-differentiable. For degenerate instances we still obtain an output-polynomial algorithm computing the linear segments of the bijection by a convex program. The latter technique also allows to handle multiple commodities.