OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Computing Elimination Ideals and Discriminants of Likelihood Equations
Venue: arXiv cs.SC 2018
Year: 2018

We develop a probabilistic algorithm for computing elimination ideals of likelihood equations, which is for larger models by far more efficient than directly computing Groebner bases or the interpolation method proposed in the first author's previous work. The efficiency is improved by a theoretical result showing that the sum of data variables appears in most coefficients of the generator polynomial of elimination ideal. Furthermore, applying the known structures of Newton polytopes of discriminants, we can also efficiently deduce discriminants of the elimination ideals. For instance, the discriminants of 3 by 3 matrix model and one Jukes-Cantor model in phylogenetics (with sizes over 30 GB and 8 GB text files, respectively) can be computed by our methods.
Formal Concept Analysis with Many-sorted Attributes
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2018
Year: 2018

This paper unites two problem-solving traditions in computer science: (1) constraint-based reasoning, and (2) formal concept analysis. For basic definitions and properties of networks of constraints, we follow the foundational approach of Montanari and Rossi. This paper advocates distributed relations as a more semantic version of networks of constraints. The theory developed here uses the theory of formal concept analysis, pioneered by Rudolf Wille and his colleagues, as a key for unlocking the hidden semantic structure within distributed relations. Conversely, this paper offers distributed relations as a seamless many-sorted extension to the formal contexts of formal concept analysis. Some of the intuitions underlying our approach were discussed in a preliminary fashion by Freuder and Wallace.
UOLO - automatic object detection and segmentation in biomedical images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

We propose UOLO, a novel framework for the simultaneous detection and segmentation of structures of interest in medical images. UOLO consists of an object segmentation module which intermediate abstract representations are processed and used as input for object detection. The resulting system is optimized simultaneously for detecting a class of objects and segmenting an optionally different class of structures. UOLO is trained on a set of bounding boxes enclosing the objects to detect, as well as pixel-wise segmentation information, when available. A new loss function is devised, taking into account whether a reference segmentation is accessible for each training image, in order to suitably backpropagate the error. We validate UOLO on the task of simultaneous optic disc (OD) detection, fovea detection, and OD segmentation from retinal images, achieving state-of-the-art performance on public datasets.
Explaining Black Boxes on Sequential Data using Weighted Automata
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Understanding how a learned black box works is of crucial interest for the future of Machine Learning. In this paper, we pioneer the question of the global interpretability of learned black box models that assign numerical values to symbolic sequential data. To tackle that task, we propose a spectral algorithm for the extraction of weighted automata (WA) from such black boxes. This algorithm does not require the access to a dataset or to the inner representation of the black box: the inferred model can be obtained solely by querying the black box, feeding it with inputs and analyzing its outputs. Experiments using Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) trained on a wide collection of 48 synthetic datasets and 2 real datasets show that the obtained approximation is of great quality.
GPU-Accelerated Robotic Simulation for Distributed Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2018
Year: 2018

Most Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) algorithms require a prohibitively large number of training samples for learning complex tasks. Many recent works on speeding up Deep RL have focused on distributed training and simulation. While distributed training is often done on the GPU, simulation is not. In this work, we propose using GPU-accelerated RL simulations as an alternative to CPU ones. Using NVIDIA Flex, a GPU-based physics engine, we show promising speed-ups of learning various continuous-control, locomotion tasks. With one GPU and CPU core, we are able to train the Humanoid running task in less than 20 minutes, using 10-1000x fewer CPU cores than previous works. We also demonstrate the scalability of our simulator to multi-GPU settings to train more challenging locomotion tasks.
CPNet: A Context Preserver Convolutional Neural Network for Detecting Shadows in Single RGB Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Automatic detection of shadow regions in an image is a difficult task due to the lack of prior information about the illumination source and the dynamic of the scene objects. To address this problem, in this paper, a deep-learning based segmentation method is proposed that identifies shadow regions at the pixel-level in a single RGB image. We exploit a novel Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture to identify and extract shadow features in an end-to-end manner. This network preserves learned contexts during the training and observes the entire image to detect global and local shadow patterns simultaneously. The proposed method is evaluated on two publicly available datasets of SBU and UCF. We have improved the state-of-the-art Balanced Error Rate (BER) on these datasets by 22\% and 14\%, respectively.
Cloud Detection Algorithm for Remote Sensing Images Using Fully Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

This paper presents a deep-learning based framework for addressing the problem of accurate cloud detection in remote sensing images. This framework benefits from a Fully Convolutional Neural Network (FCN), which is capable of pixel-level labeling of cloud regions in a Landsat 8 image. Also, a gradient-based identification approach is proposed to identify and exclude regions of snow/ice in the ground truths of the training set. We show that using the hybrid of the two methods (threshold-based and deep-learning) improves the performance of the cloud identification process without the need to manually correct automatically generated ground truths. In average the Jaccard index and recall measure are improved by 4.36% and 3.62%, respectively.
Towards Provably Safe Mixed Transportation Systems with Human-driven and Automated Vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

Currently, we are in an environment where the fraction of automated vehicles is negligibly small. We anticipate that this fraction will increase in coming decades before if ever, we have a fully automated transportation system. Motivated by this we address the problem of provable safety of mixed traffic consisting of both intelligent vehicles (IVs) as well as human-driven vehicles (HVs). An important issue that arises is that such mixed systems may well have lesser throughput than all human traffic systems if the automated vehicles are expected to remain provably safe with respect to human traffic. This necessitates the consideration of strategies such as platooning of automated vehicles in order to increase the throughput. In this paper, we address the design of provably safe systems consisting of a mix of automated and human-driven vehicles including the use of platooning by automated vehicles. We design motion planing policies and coordination rules for participants in this novel mixed system. HVs are considered as nearsighted and modeled with relatively loose constraints, while IVs are considered as capable of following much tighter constraints. HVs are expected to follow reasonable and simple rules. IVs are designed to move under a model predictive control (MPC) based motion plans and coordination protocols. Our contribution of this paper is in showing how to integrate these two types of models safely into a mixed system. System safety is proved in single lane scenarios, as well as in multi-lane situations allowing lane changes.
Categorical Aspects of Parameter Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

Parameter learning is the technique for obtaining the probabilistic parameters in conditional probability tables in Bayesian networks from tables with (observed) data --- where it is assumed that the underlying graphical structure is known. There are basically two ways of doing so, referred to as maximal likelihood estimation (MLE) and as Bayesian learning. This paper provides a categorical analysis of these two techniques and describes them in terms of basic properties of the multiset monad M, the distribution monad D and the Giry monad G. In essence, learning is about the reltionships between multisets (used for counting) on the one hand and probability distributions on the other. These relationsips will be described as suitable natural transformations.
GreenDataFlow: Minimizing the Energy Footprint of Global Data Movement
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

The global data movement over Internet has an estimated energy footprint of 100 terawatt hours per year, costing the world economy billions of dollars. The networking infrastructure together with source and destination nodes involved in the data transfer contribute to overall energy consumption. Although considerable amount of research has rendered power management techniques for the networking infrastructure, there has not been much prior work focusing on energy-aware data transfer solutions for minimizing the power consumed at the end-systems. In this paper, we introduce a novel application-layer solution based on historical analysis and real-time tuning called GreenDataFlow, which aims to achieve high data transfer throughput while keeping the energy consumption at the minimal levels. GreenDataFlow supports service level agreements (SLAs) which give the service providers and the consumers the ability to fine tune their goals and priorities in this optimization process. Our experimental results show that GreenDataFlow outperforms the closest competing state-of-the art solution in this area 50% for energy saving and 2.5x for the achieved end-to-end performance.
Dexterous Manipulation with Deep Reinforcement Learning: Efficient, General, and Low-Cost
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

Dexterous multi-fingered robotic hands can perform a wide range of manipulation skills, making them an appealing component for general-purpose robotic manipulators. However, such hands pose a major challenge for autonomous control, due to the high dimensionality of their configuration space and complex intermittent contact interactions. In this work, we propose deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) as a scalable solution for learning complex, contact rich behaviors with multi-fingered hands. Deep RL provides an end-to-end approach to directly map sensor readings to actions, without the need for task specific models or policy classes. We show that contact-rich manipulation behavior with multi-fingered hands can be learned by directly training with model-free deep RL algorithms in the real world, with minimal additional assumption and without the aid of simulation. We learn a variety of complex behaviors on two different low-cost hardware platforms. We show that each task can be learned entirely from scratch, and further study how the learning process can be further accelerated by using a small number of human demonstrations to bootstrap learning. Our experiments demonstrate that complex multi-fingered manipulation skills can be learned in the real world in about 4-7 hours for most tasks, and that demonstrations can decrease this to 2-3 hours, indicating that direct deep RL training in the real world is a viable and practical alternative to simulation and model-based control. \url{https://sites.google.com/view/deeprl-handmanipulation}
Dimension Reduction for Origin-Destination Flow Estimation: Blind Estimation Made Possible
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2018
Year: 2018

This paper studies the problem of estimating origin-destination (OD) flows from link flows. As the number of link flows is typically much less than that of OD flows, the inverse problem is severely ill-posed and hence prior information is required to recover the ground truth. The basic approach in the literature relies on a forward model where the so called traffic assignment matrix maps OD flows to link flows. Due to the ill-posedness of the problem, prior information on the assignment matrix and OD flows are typically needed. The main contributions of this paper include a dimension reduction of the inquired flows from $O(n^2)$ to $O(n)$, and a demonstration that for the first time the ground truth OD flows can be uniquely identified with no or little prior information. To cope with the ill-posedness due to the large number of unknowns, a new forward model is developed which does not involve OD flows directly but is built upon the flows characterized only by their origins, henceforth referred as O-flows. The new model preserves all the OD information and more importantly reduces the dimension of the inverse problem substantially. A Gauss-Seidel method is deployed to solve the inverse problem, and a necessary condition for the uniqueness of the solution is proved. Simulations demonstrate that blind estimation where no prior information is available is possible for some network settings. Some challenging network settings are identified and discussed, where a remedy based on temporal patterns of the O-flows is developed and numerically shown effective.
Finite-Time Distributed State Estimation over Time-Varying Graphs: Exploiting the Age-of-Information
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

We study the problem of collaboratively estimating the state of a discrete-time LTI process by a network of sensor nodes interacting over a time-varying directed communication graph. Existing approaches to this problem either (i) make restrictive assumptions on the dynamical model, or (ii) make restrictive assumptions on the sequence of communication graphs, or (iii) require multiple consensus iterations between consecutive time-steps of the dynamics, or (iv) require higher-dimensional observers. In this paper, we develop a distributed observer that operates on a single time-scale, is of the same dimension as that of the state, and works under mild assumptions of joint observability of the sensing model, and joint strong-connectivity of the sequence of communication graphs. Our approach is based on the notion of a novel "freshness-index" that keeps track of the age-of-information being diffused across the network. In particular, such indices enable nodes to reject stale information regarding the state of the system, and in turn, help achieve stability of the estimation error dynamics. Based on the proposed approach, the estimate of each node can be made to converge to the true state exponentially fast, at any desired convergence rate. In fact, we argue that finite-time convergence can also be achieved through a suitable selection of the observer gains. Our proof of convergence is self-contained, and employs simple arguments from linear system theory and graph theory.
Solution for Large-Scale Hierarchical Object Detection Datasets with Incomplete Annotation and Data Imbalance
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

This report demonstrates our solution for the Open Images 2018 Challenge. Based on our detailed analysis on the Open Images Datasets (OID), it is found that there are four typical features: large-scale, hierarchical tag system, severe annotation incompleteness and data imbalance. Considering these characteristics, an amount of strategies are employed, including SNIPER, soft sampling, class-aware sampling (CAS), hierarchical non-maximum suppression (HNMS) and so on. In virtue of these effective strategies, and further using the powerful SENet154 armed with feature pyramid module and deformable ROIalign as the backbone, our best single model could achieve a mAP of 56.9%. After a further ensemble with 9 models, the final mAP is boosted to 62.2% in the public leaderboard (ranked the 2nd place) and 58.6% in the private leaderboard (ranked the 3rd place, slightly inferior to the 1st place by only 0.04 point).
Energy Efficiency Fairness for Multi-Pair Wireless-Powered Relaying Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

We consider a multi-pair amplify-and-forward relay network where the energy-constrained relays adopting time-switching protocol harvest energy from the radio frequency signals transmitted by the users for assisting user data transmission. Both one-way and two-way relaying techniques are investigated. Aiming at energy efficiency (EE) fairness among the user pairs, we construct an energy consumption model incorporating rate-dependent signal processing power, the dependence on output power level of power amplifiers' efficiency, and nonlinear energy harvesting (EH) circuits. Then we formulate the max-min EE fairness problems in which the data rates, users' transmit power, relays' processing coefficient, and EH time are jointly optimized under the constraints on the quality of service and users' maximum transmit power. To achieve efficient suboptimal solutions to these nonconvex problems, we devise monotonic descent algorithms based on the inner approximation (IA) framework, which solve a second-order-cone program in each iteration. To further simplify the designs, we propose an approach combining IA and zero-forcing beamforming, which eliminates inter-pair interference and reduces the numbers of variables and required iterations. Finally, extensive numerical results are presented to validate the proposed approaches. More specifically, the results demonstrate that ignoring the realistic aspects of power consumption might degrade the performance remarkably, and jointly designing parameters involved could significantly enhance the energy efficiency.
UMONS Submission for WMT18 Multimodal Translation Task
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

This paper describes the UMONS solution for the Multimodal Machine Translation Task presented at the third conference on machine translation (WMT18). We explore a novel architecture, called deepGRU, based on recent findings in the related task of Neural Image Captioning (NIC). The models presented in the following sections lead to the best METEOR translation score for both constrained (English, image) -> German and (English, image) -> French sub-tasks.
Improving Topic Models with Latent Feature Word Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

Probabilistic topic models are widely used to discover latent topics in document collections, while latent feature vector representations of words have been used to obtain high performance in many NLP tasks. In this paper, we extend two different Dirichlet multinomial topic models by incorporating latent feature vector representations of words trained on very large corpora to improve the word-topic mapping learnt on a smaller corpus. Experimental results show that by using information from the external corpora, our new models produce significant improvements on topic coherence, document clustering and document classification tasks, especially on datasets with few or short documents.
Virtualization of tissue staining in digital pathology using an unsupervised deep learning approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Histopathological evaluation of tissue samples is a key practice in patient diagnosis and drug development, especially in oncology. Historically, Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) has been used by pathologists as a gold standard staining. However, in many cases, various target specific stains, including immunohistochemistry (IHC), are needed in order to highlight specific structures in the tissue. As tissue is scarce and staining procedures are tedious, it would be beneficial to generate images of stained tissue virtually. Virtual staining could also generate in-silico multiplexing of different stains on the same tissue segment. In this paper, we present a sample application that generates FAP-CK virtual IHC images from Ki67-CD8 real IHC images using an unsupervised deep learning approach based on CycleGAN. We also propose a method to deal with tiling artifacts caused by normalization layers and we validate our approach by comparing the results of tissue analysis algorithms for virtual and real images.
Small One-Dimensional Euclidean Preference Profiles
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2018
Year: 2018

We characterize one-dimensional Euclidean preference profiles with a small number of alternatives and voters. In particular, we show the following. 1. Every preference profile with up to two voters is one-dimensional Euclidean if and only if it is single-peaked. 2. Every preference profile with up to five alternatives is one-dimensional Euclidean if and only if it is single-peaked and single-crossing. By [12], we thus obtain that the smallest single-peaked and single-crossing preference profiles that are not one-dimensional Euclidean consist of three voters and six alternatives.
Unsupervised Deep Features for Remote Sensing Image Matching via Discriminator Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

The advent of deep perceptual networks brought about a paradigm shift in machine vision and image perception. Image apprehension lately carried out by hand-crafted features in the latent space have been replaced by deep features acquired from supervised networks for improved understanding. However, such deep networks require strict supervision with a substantial amount of the labeled data for authentic training process. These methods perform poorly in domains lacking labeled data especially in case of remote sensing image retrieval. Resolving this, we propose an unsupervised encoder-decoder feature for remote sensing image matching (RSIM). Moreover, we replace the conventional distance metrics with a deep discriminator network to identify the similarity of the image pairs. To the best of our knowledge, discriminator network has never been used before for solving RSIM problem. Results have been validated with two publicly available benchmark remote sensing image datasets. The technique has also been investigated for content-based remote sensing image retrieval (CBRSIR); one of the widely used applications of RSIM. Results demonstrate that our technique supersedes the state-of-the-art methods used for unsupervised image matching with mean average precision (mAP) of 81%, and image retrieval with an overall improvement in mAP score of about 12%.
Memory Vulnerability: A Case for Delaying Error Reporting
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2018
Year: 2018

To face future reliability challenges, it is necessary to quantify the risk of error in any part of a computing system. To this goal, the Architectural Vulnerability Factor (AVF) has long been used for chips. However, this metric is used for offline characterisation, which is inappropriate for memory. We survey the literature and formalise one of the metrics used, the Memory Vulnerability Factor, and extend it to take into account false errors. These are reported errors which would have no impact on the program if they were ignored. We measure the False Error Aware MVF (FEA) and related metrics precisely in a cycle-accurate simulator, and compare them with the effects of injecting faults in a program's data, in native parallel runs. Our findings show that MVF and FEA are the only two metrics that are safe to use at runtime, as they both consistently give an upper bound on the probability of incorrect program outcome. FEA gives a tighter bound than MVF, and is the metric that correlates best with the incorrect outcome probability of all considered metrics.