OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Exploiting the Full Capacity of Deep Neural Networks while Avoiding Overfitting by Targeted Sparsity Regularization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Overfitting is one of the most common problems when training deep neural networks on comparatively small datasets. Here, we demonstrate that neural network activation sparsity is a reliable indicator for overfitting which we utilize to propose novel targeted sparsity visualization and regularization strategies. Based on these strategies we are able to understand and counteract overfitting caused by activation sparsity and filter correlation in a targeted layer-by-layer manner. Our results demonstrate that targeted sparsity regularization can efficiently be used to regularize well-known datasets and architectures with a significant increase in image classification performance while outperforming both dropout and batch normalization. Ultimately, our study reveals novel insights into the contradicting concepts of activation sparsity and network capacity by demonstrating that targeted sparsity regularization enables salient and discriminative feature learning while exploiting the full capacity of deep models without suffering from overfitting, even when trained excessively.
Detailed Proofs of Alternating Minimization Based Trajectory Generation for Quadrotor Aggressive Flight
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

This technical report provides detailed theoretical analysis of the algorithm used in \textit{Alternating Minimization Based Trajectory Generation for Quadrotor Aggressive Flight}. An assumption is provided to ensure that settings for the objective function are meaningful. What's more, we explore the structure of the optimization problem and analyze the global/local convergence rate of the employed algorithm.
Cross-Resolution Adversarial Dual Network for Person Re-Identification and Beyond
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Person re-identification (re-ID) aims at matching images of the same person across camera views. Due to varying distances between cameras and persons of interest, resolution mismatch can be expected, which would degrade re-ID performance in real-world scenarios. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel generative adversarial network to address cross-resolution person re-ID, allowing query images with varying resolutions. By advancing adversarial learning techniques, our proposed model learns resolution-invariant image representations while being able to recover the missing details in low-resolution input images. The resulting features can be jointly applied for improving re-ID performance due to preserving resolution invariance and recovering re-ID oriented discriminative details. Extensive experimental results on five standard person re-ID benchmarks confirm the effectiveness of our method and the superiority over the state-of-the-art approaches, especially when the input resolutions are not seen during training. Furthermore, the experimental results on two vehicle re-ID benchmarks also confirm the generalization of our model on cross-resolution visual tasks. The extensions of semi-supervised settings further support the use of our proposed approach to real-world scenarios and applications.
Dr. Strangelove or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the citations
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2020
Year: 2020

Citations are getting more and more important in the career of a researcher. But how to use them in the best possible way? This is a satirical paper, showing a bad trend currently happening in citation trends, due to intensive use of citation metrics. I am putting this on the arXiv and on Researchgate. Should you be interested to publish this paper on a journal of which you are editor, let me know.
It's Not What Machines Can Learn, It's What We Cannot Teach
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Can deep neural networks learn to solve any task, and in particular problems of high complexity? This question attracts a lot of interest, with recent works tackling computationally hard tasks such as the traveling salesman problem and satisfiability. In this work we offer a different perspective on this question. Given the common assumption that $\textit{NP} \neq \textit{coNP}$ we prove that any polynomial-time sample generator for an $\textit{NP}$-hard problem samples, in fact, from an easier sub-problem. We empirically explore a case study, Conjunctive Query Containment, and show how common data generation techniques generate biased datasets that lead practitioners to over-estimate model accuracy. Our results suggest that machine learning approaches that require training on a dense uniform sampling from the target distribution cannot be used to solve computationally hard problems, the reason being the difficulty of generating sufficiently large and unbiased training sets.
The Automated Inspection of Opaque Liquid Vaccines
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In the pharmaceutical industry the screening of opaque vaccines containing suspensions is currently a manual task carried out by trained human visual inspectors. We show that deep learning can be used to effectively automate this process. A moving contrast is required to distinguish anomalies from other particles, reflections and dust resting on a vial's surface. We train 3D-ConvNets to predict the likelihood of 20-frame video samples containing anomalies. Our unaugmented dataset consists of hand-labelled samples, recorded using vials provided by the HAL Allergy Group, a pharmaceutical company. We trained ten randomly initialized 3D-ConvNets to provide a benchmark, observing mean AUROC scores of 0.94 and 0.93 for positive samples (containing anomalies) and negative (anomaly-free) samples, respectively. Using Frame-Completion Generative Adversarial Networks we: (i) introduce an algorithm for computing saliency maps, which we use to verify that the 3D-ConvNets are indeed identifying anomalies; (ii) propose a novel self-training approach using the saliency maps to determine if multiple networks agree on the location of anomalies. Our self-training approach allows us to augment our data set by labelling 217,888 additional samples. 3D-ConvNets trained with our augmented dataset improve on the results we get when we train only on the unaugmented dataset.
Graph Computing based Distributed State Estimation with PMUs
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

Power system state estimation plays a fundamental and critical role in the energy management system (EMS). To achieve a high performance and accurate system states estimation, a graph computing based distributed state estimation approach is proposed in this paper. Firstly, a power system network is divided into multiple areas. Reference buses are selected with PMUs being installed at these buses for each area. Then, the system network is converted into multiple independent areas. In this way, the power system state estimation could be conducted in parallel for each area and the estimated system states are obtained without compromise of accuracy. IEEE 118-bus system and MP 10790-bus system are employed to verify the results accuracy and present the promising computation performance.
TFApprox: Towards a Fast Emulation of DNN Approximate Hardware Accelerators on GPU
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

Energy efficiency of hardware accelerators of deep neural networks (DNN) can be improved by introducing approximate arithmetic circuits. In order to quantify the error introduced by using these circuits and avoid the expensive hardware prototyping, a software emulator of the DNN accelerator is usually executed on CPU or GPU. However, this emulation is typically two or three orders of magnitude slower than a software DNN implementation running on CPU or GPU and operating with standard floating point arithmetic instructions and common DNN libraries. The reason is that there is no hardware support for approximate arithmetic operations on common CPUs and GPUs and these operations have to be expensively emulated. In order to address this issue, we propose an efficient emulation method for approximate circuits utilized in a given DNN accelerator which is emulated on GPU. All relevant approximate circuits are implemented as look-up tables and accessed through a texture memory mechanism of CUDA capable GPUs. We exploit the fact that the texture memory is optimized for irregular read-only access and in some GPU architectures is even implemented as a dedicated cache. This technique allowed us to reduce the inference time of the emulated DNN accelerator approximately 200 times with respect to an optimized CPU version on complex DNNs such as ResNet. The proposed approach extends the TensorFlow library and is available online at https://github.com/ehw-fit/tf-approximate.
Performance / Complexity Trade-offs of the Sphere Decoder Algorithm for Massive MIMO Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

Massive MIMO systems are seen by many researchers as a paramount technology toward next generation networks. This technology consists of hundreds of antennas that are capable of sending and receiving simultaneously a huge amount of data. One of the main challenges when using this technology is the necessity of an efficient decoding framework. The latter must guarantee both a low complexity and a good signal detection accuracy. The Sphere Decoder (SD) algorithm represents one of the promising decoding algorithms in terms of detection accuracy. However, it is inefficient for dealing with large MIMO systems due to its prohibitive complexity. To overcome this drawback, we propose to revisit the sequential SD algorithm and implement several variants that aim at finding appropriate trade-offs between complexity and performance. Then, we propose an efficient high-level parallel SD scheme based on the master/worker paradigm, which permits multiple SD instances to simultaneously explore the search space, while mitigating the overheads from load imbalance. The results of our parallel SD implementation outperform the state-of-the-art by more than 5x using similar MIMO configuration systems, and show a super-linear speedup on multicore platforms. Moreover, this paper presents a new hybrid implementation that combines the strengths of SD and K-best algorithms, i.e., maintaining the detection accuracy of SD, while reducing the complexity using the K-best way of pruning search space. The hybrid approach extends our parallel SD implementation: the master contains the SD search tree, and the workers use the K-best algorithm to accelerate its exploration. The resulting hybrid approach enhances the diversification gain, and therefore, lowers the overall complexity. Our synergistic hybrid approach permits to deal with large MIMO configurations up to 100x100, without sacrificing the accuracy and complexity.
Emergent Communication with World Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

We introduce Language World Models, a class of language-conditional generative model which interpret natural language messages by predicting latent codes of future observations. This provides a visual grounding of the message, similar to an enhanced observation of the world, which may include objects outside of the listening agent's field-of-view. We incorporate this "observation" into a persistent memory state, and allow the listening agent's policy to condition on it, akin to the relationship between memory and controller in a World Model. We show this improves effective communication and task success in 2D gridworld speaker-listener navigation tasks. In addition, we develop two losses framed specifically for our model-based formulation to promote positive signalling and positive listening. Finally, because messages are interpreted in a generative model, we can visualize the model beliefs to gain insight into how the communication channel is utilized.
Multi-Representation Knowledge Distillation For Audio Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2020
Year: 2020

As an important component of multimedia analysis tasks, audio classification aims to discriminate between different audio signal types and has received intensive attention due to its wide applications. Generally speaking, the raw signal can be transformed into various representations (such as Short Time Fourier Transform and Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients), and information implied in different representations can be complementary. Ensembling the models trained on different representations can greatly boost the classification performance, however, making inference using a large number of models is cumbersome and computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end collaborative learning framework for the audio classification task. The framework takes multiple representations as the input to train the models in parallel. The complementary information provided by different representations is shared by knowledge distillation. Consequently, the performance of each model can be significantly promoted without increasing the computational overhead in the inference stage. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can improve the classification performance and achieve state-of-the-art results on both acoustic scene classification tasks and general audio tagging tasks.
Private Stochastic Convex Optimization: Efficient Algorithms for Non-smooth Objectives
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we revisit the problem of private stochastic convex optimization. We propose an algorithm based on noisy mirror descent, which achieves optimal rates both in terms of statistical complexity and number of queries to a first-order stochastic oracle in the regime when the privacy parameter is inversely proportional to the number of samples.
Efficient Sentence Embedding via Semantic Subspace Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

A novel sentence embedding method built upon semantic subspace analysis, called semantic subspace sentence embedding (S3E), is proposed in this work. Given the fact that word embeddings can capture semantic relationship while semantically similar words tend to form semantic groups in a high-dimensional embedding space, we develop a sentence representation scheme by analyzing semantic subspaces of its constituent words. Specifically, we construct a sentence model from two aspects. First, we represent words that lie in the same semantic group using the intra-group descriptor. Second, we characterize the interaction between multiple semantic groups with the inter-group descriptor. The proposed S3E method is evaluated on both textual similarity tasks and supervised tasks. Experimental results show that it offers comparable or better performance than the state-of-the-art. The complexity of our S3E method is also much lower than other parameterized models.
Using Single-Step Adversarial Training to Defend Iterative Adversarial Examples
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Adversarial examples have become one of the largest challenges that machine learning models, especially neural network classifiers, face. These adversarial examples break the assumption of attack-free scenario and fool state-of-the-art (SOTA) classifiers with insignificant perturbations to human. So far, researchers achieved great progress in utilizing adversarial training as a defense. However, the overwhelming computational cost degrades its applicability and little has been done to overcome this issue. Single-Step adversarial training methods have been proposed as computationally viable solutions, however they still fail to defend against iterative adversarial examples. In this work, we first experimentally analyze several different SOTA defense methods against adversarial examples. Then, based on observations from experiments, we propose a novel single-step adversarial training method which can defend against both single-step and iterative adversarial examples. Lastly, through extensive evaluations, we demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the SOTA single-step and iterative adversarial training defense. Compared with ATDA (single-step method) on CIFAR10 dataset, our proposed method achieves 35.67% enhancement in test accuracy and 19.14% reduction in training time. When compared with methods that use BIM or Madry examples (iterative methods) on CIFAR10 dataset, it saves up to 76.03% in training time with less than 3.78% degeneration in test accuracy.
Machine Translation System Selection from Bandit Feedback
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Adapting machine translation systems in the real world is a difficult problem. In contrast to offline training, users cannot provide the type of fine-grained feedback (such as correct translations) typically used for improving the system. Moreover, different users have different translation needs, and even a single user's needs may change over time. In this work we take a different approach, treating the problem of adaptation as one of selection. Instead of adapting a single system, we train many translation systems using different architectures, datasets, and optimization methods. Using bandit learning techniques on simulated user feedback, we learn a policy to choose which system to use for a particular translation task. We show that our approach can (1) quickly adapt to address domain changes in translation tasks, (2) outperform the single best system in mixed-domain translation tasks, and (3) make effective instance-specific decisions when using contextual bandit strategies.
Guided Constrained Policy Optimization for Dynamic Quadrupedal Robot Locomotion
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) uses model-free techniques to optimize task-specific control policies. Despite having emerged as a promising approach for complex problems, RL is still hard to use reliably for real-world applications. Apart from challenges such as precise reward function tuning, inaccurate sensing and actuation, and non-deterministic response, existing RL methods do not guarantee behavior within required safety constraints that are crucial for real robot scenarios. In this regard, we introduce guided constrained policy optimization (GCPO), an RL framework based upon our implementation of constrained proximal policy optimization (CPPO) for tracking base velocity commands while following the defined constraints. We also introduce schemes which encourage state recovery into constrained regions in case of constraint violations. We present experimental results of our training method and test it on the real ANYmal quadruped robot. We compare our approach against the unconstrained RL method and show that guided constrained RL offers faster convergence close to the desired optimum resulting in an optimal, yet physically feasible, robotic control behavior without the need for precise reward function tuning.
Interpretable Crowd Flow Prediction with Spatial-Temporal Self-Attention
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Crowd flow prediction has been increasingly investigated in intelligent urban computing field as a fundamental component of urban management system. The most challenging part of predicting crowd flow is to measure the complicated spatial-temporal dependencies. A prevalent solution employed in current methods is to divide and conquer the spatial and temporal information by various architectures (e.g., CNN/GCN, LSTM). However, this strategy has two disadvantages: (1) the sophisticated dependencies are also divided and therefore partially isolated; (2) the spatial-temporal features are transformed into latent representations when passing through different architectures, making it hard to interpret the predicted crowd flow. To address these issues, we propose a Spatial-Temporal Self-Attention Network (STSAN) with an ST encoding gate that calculates the entire spatial-temporal representation with positional and time encodings and therefore avoids dividing the dependencies. Furthermore, we develop a Multi-aspect attention mechanism that applies scaled dot-product attention over spatial-temporal information and measures the attention weights that explicitly indicate the dependencies. Experimental results on traffic and mobile data demonstrate that the proposed method reduces inflow and outflow RMSE by 16% and 8% on the Taxi-NYC dataset compared to the SOTA baselines.
Structural Combinatorial of Network Information System of Systems based on Evolutionary Optimization Method
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2020
Year: 2020

The network information system is a military information network system with evolution characteristics. Evolution is a process of replacement between disorder and order, chaos and equilibrium. Given that the concept of evolution originates from biological systems, in this article, the evolution of network information architecture is analyzed by genetic algorithms, and the network information architecture is represented by chromosomes. Besides, the genetic algorithm is also applied to find the optimal chromosome in the architecture space. The evolutionary simulation is used to predict the optimal scheme of the network information architecture and provide a reference for system construction.
Safe Screening for the Generalized Conditional Gradient Method
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

The conditional gradient method (CGM) has been widely used for fast sparse approximation, having a low per iteration computational cost for structured sparse regularizers. We explore the sparsity acquiring properties of a generalized CGM (gCGM), where the constraint is replaced by a penalty function based on a gauge penalty; this can be done without significantly increasing the per-iteration computation, and applies to general notions of sparsity. Without assuming bounded iterates, we show $O(1/t)$ convergence of the function values and gap of gCGM. We couple this with a safe screening rule, and show that at a rate $O(1/(tδ^2))$, the screened support matches the support at the solution, where $δ\geq 0$ measures how close the problem is to being degenerate. In our experiments, we show that the gCGM for these modified penalties have similar feature selection properties as common penalties, but with potentially more stability over the choice of hyperparameter.
Non-Intrusive Detection of Adversarial Deep Learning Attacks via Observer Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Recent studies have shown that deep learning models are vulnerable to specifically crafted adversarial inputs that are quasi-imperceptible to humans. In this letter, we propose a novel method to detect adversarial inputs, by augmenting the main classification network with multiple binary detectors (observer networks) which take inputs from the hidden layers of the original network (convolutional kernel outputs) and classify the input as clean or adversarial. During inference, the detectors are treated as a part of an ensemble network and the input is deemed adversarial if at least half of the detectors classify it as so. The proposed method addresses the trade-off between accuracy of classification on clean and adversarial samples, as the original classification network is not modified during the detection process. The use of multiple observer networks makes attacking the detection mechanism non-trivial even when the attacker is aware of the victim classifier. We achieve a 99.5% detection accuracy on the MNIST dataset and 97.5% on the CIFAR-10 dataset using the Fast Gradient Sign Attack in a semi-white box setup. The number of false positive detections is a mere 0.12% in the worst case scenario.