OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Semantic Softmax Loss for Zero-Shot Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

A typical pipeline for Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) is to integrate the visual features and the class semantic descriptors into a multimodal framework with a linear or bilinear model. However, the visual features and the class semantic descriptors locate in different structural spaces, a linear or bilinear model can not capture the semantic interactions between different modalities well. In this letter, we propose a nonlinear approach to impose ZSL as a multi-class classification problem via a Semantic Softmax Loss by embedding the class semantic descriptors into the softmax layer of multi-class classification network. To narrow the structural differences between the visual features and semantic descriptors, we further use an L2 normalization constraint to the differences between the visual features and visual prototypes reconstructed with the semantic descriptors. The results on three benchmark datasets, i.e., AwA, CUB and SUN demonstrate the proposed approach can boost the performances steadily and achieve the state-of-the-art performance for both zero-shot classification and zero-shot retrieval.
An Out-of-the-box Full-network Embedding for Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

Transfer learning for feature extraction can be used to exploit deep representations in contexts where there is very few training data, where there are limited computational resources, or when tuning the hyper-parameters needed for training is not an option. While previous contributions to feature extraction propose embeddings based on a single layer of the network, in this paper we propose a full-network embedding which successfully integrates convolutional and fully connected features, coming from all layers of a deep convolutional neural network. To do so, the embedding normalizes features in the context of the problem, and discretizes their values to reduce noise and regularize the embedding space. Significantly, this also reduces the computational cost of processing the resultant representations. The proposed method is shown to outperform single layer embeddings on several image classification tasks, while also being more robust to the choice of the pre-trained model used for obtaining the initial features. The performance gap in classification accuracy between thoroughly tuned solutions and the full-network embedding is also reduced, which makes of the proposed approach a competitive solution for a large set of applications.
Learning to Associate Words and Images Using a Large-scale Graph
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

We develop an approach for unsupervised learning of associations between co-occurring perceptual events using a large graph. We applied this approach to successfully solve the image captcha of China's railroad system. The approach is based on the principle of suspicious coincidence. In this particular problem, a user is presented with a deformed picture of a Chinese phrase and eight low-resolution images. They must quickly select the relevant images in order to purchase their train tickets. This problem presents several challenges: (1) the teaching labels for both the Chinese phrases and the images were not available for supervised learning, (2) no pre-trained deep convolutional neural networks are available for recognizing these Chinese phrases or the presented images, and (3) each captcha must be solved within a few seconds. We collected 2.6 million captchas, with 2.6 million deformed Chinese phrases and over 21 million images. From these data, we constructed an association graph, composed of over 6 million vertices, and linked these vertices based on co-occurrence information and feature similarity between pairs of images. We then trained a deep convolutional neural network to learn a projection of the Chinese phrases onto a 230-dimensional latent space. Using label propagation, we computed the likelihood of each of the eight images conditioned on the latent space projection of the deformed phrase for each captcha. The resulting system solved captchas with 77% accuracy in 2 seconds on average. Our work, in answering this practical challenge, illustrates the power of this class of unsupervised association learning techniques, which may be related to the brain's general strategy for associating language stimuli with visual objects on the principle of suspicious coincidence.
Convolutional Networks with MuxOut Layers as Multi-rate Systems for Image Upscaling
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

We interpret convolutional networks as adaptive filters and combine them with so-called MuxOut layers to efficiently upscale low resolution images. We formalize this interpretation by deriving a linear and space-variant structure of a convolutional network when its activations are fixed. We introduce general purpose algorithms to analyze a network and show its overall filter effect for each given location. We use this analysis to evaluate two types of image upscalers: deterministic upscalers that target the recovery of details from original content; and second, a new generation of upscalers that can sample the distribution of upscale aliases (images that share the same downscale version) that look like real content.
A unified view of entropy-regularized Markov decision processes
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

We propose a general framework for entropy-regularized average-reward reinforcement learning in Markov decision processes (MDPs). Our approach is based on extending the linear-programming formulation of policy optimization in MDPs to accommodate convex regularization functions. Our key result is showing that using the conditional entropy of the joint state-action distributions as regularization yields a dual optimization problem closely resembling the Bellman optimality equations. This result enables us to formalize a number of state-of-the-art entropy-regularized reinforcement learning algorithms as approximate variants of Mirror Descent or Dual Averaging, and thus to argue about the convergence properties of these methods. In particular, we show that the exact version of the TRPO algorithm of Schulman et al. (2015) actually converges to the optimal policy, while the entropy-regularized policy gradient methods of Mnih et al. (2016) may fail to converge to a fixed point. Finally, we illustrate empirically the effects of using various regularization techniques on learning performance in a simple reinforcement learning setup.
TricorNet: A Hybrid Temporal Convolutional and Recurrent Network for Video Action Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Action segmentation as a milestone towards building automatic systems to understand untrimmed videos has received considerable attention in the recent years. It is typically being modeled as a sequence labeling problem but contains intrinsic and sufficient differences than text parsing or speech processing. In this paper, we introduce a novel hybrid temporal convolutional and recurrent network (TricorNet), which has an encoder-decoder architecture: the encoder consists of a hierarchy of temporal convolutional kernels that capture the local motion changes of different actions; the decoder is a hierarchy of recurrent neural networks that are able to learn and memorize long-term action dependencies after the encoding stage. Our model is simple but extremely effective in terms of video sequence labeling. The experimental results on three public action segmentation datasets have shown that the proposed model achieves superior performance over the state of the art.
SmartPaste: Learning to Adapt Source Code
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

Deep Neural Networks have been shown to succeed at a range of natural language tasks such as machine translation and text summarization. While tasks on source code (ie, formal languages) have been considered recently, most work in this area does not attempt to capitalize on the unique opportunities offered by its known syntax and structure. In this work, we introduce SmartPaste, a first task that requires to use such information. The task is a variant of the program repair problem that requires to adapt a given (pasted) snippet of code to surrounding, existing source code. As first solutions, we design a set of deep neural models that learn to represent the context of each variable location and variable usage in a data flow-sensitive way. Our evaluation suggests that our models can learn to solve the SmartPaste task in many cases, achieving 58.6% accuracy, while learning meaningful representation of variable usages.
Block building programming for symbolic regression
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2017
Year: 2017

Symbolic regression that aims to detect underlying data-driven models has become increasingly important for industrial data analysis. For most existing algorithms such as genetic programming (GP), the convergence speed might be too slow for large-scale problems with a large number of variables. This situation may become even worse with increasing problem size. The aforementioned difficulty makes symbolic regression limited in practical applications. Fortunately, in many engineering problems, the independent variables in target models are separable or partially separable. This feature inspires us to develop a new approach, block building programming (BBP). BBP divides the original target function into several blocks, and further into factors. The factors are then modeled by an optimization engine (e.g. GP). Under such circumstances, BBP can make large reductions to the search space. The partition of separability is based on a special method, block and factor detection. Two different optimization engines are applied to test the performance of BBP on a set of symbolic regression problems. Numerical results show that BBP has a good capability of structure and coefficient optimization with high computational efficiency.
Enhancement of Epidemiological Models for Dengue Fever Based on Twitter Data
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2017
Year: 2017

Epidemiological early warning systems for dengue fever rely on up-to-date epidemiological data to forecast future incidence. However, epidemiological data typically requires time to be available, due to the application of time-consuming laboratorial tests. This implies that epidemiological models need to issue predictions with larger antecedence, making their task even more difficult. On the other hand, online platforms, such as Twitter or Google, allow us to obtain samples of users' interaction in near real-time and can be used as sensors to monitor current incidence. In this work, we propose a framework to exploit online data sources to mitigate the lack of up-to-date epidemiological data by obtaining estimates of current incidence, which are then explored by traditional epidemiological models. We show that the proposed framework obtains more accurate predictions than alternative approaches, with statistically better results for delays greater or equal to 4 weeks.
Concurrent Channel Probing and Data Transmission in Full-duplex MIMO Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2017
Year: 2017

An essential step for achieving multiplexing gain in MIMO downlink systems is to collect accurate channel state information (CSI) from the users. Traditionally, CSIs have to be collected before any data can be transmitted. Such a sequential scheme incurs a large feedback overhead, which substantially limits the multiplexing gain especially in a network with a large number of users. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to mitigate the feedback overhead by leveraging the recently developed Full-duplex radios. Our approach is based on the key observation that using Full-duplex radios, when the base-station (BS) is collecting CSI of one user through the uplink channel, it can use the downlink channel to simultaneously transmit data to other (non-interfering) users for which CSIs are already known. By allowing concurrent channel probing and data transmission, our scheme can potentially achieve a higher throughput compared to traditional schemes using Half-duplex radios. The new flexibility introduced by our scheme, however, also leads to fundamental challenges in achieving throughout optimal scheduling. In this paper, we make an initial effort to this important problem by considering a simplified group interference model. We develop a throughput optimal scheduling policy with complexity $O((N/I)^I)$, where $N$ is the number of users and $I$ is the number of user groups. To further reduce the complexity, we propose a greedy policy with complexity $O(N\log N)$ that not only achieves at least 2/3 of the optimal throughput region, but also outperforms any feasible Half-duplex solutions. We derive the throughput gain offered by Full-duplex under different system parameters and show the advantage of our algorithms through numerical studies.
Use of Knowledge Graph in Rescoring the N-Best List in Automatic Speech Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2017
Year: 2017

With the evolution of neural network based methods, automatic speech recognition (ASR) field has been advanced to a level where building an application with speech interface is a reality. In spite of these advances, building a real-time speech recogniser faces several problems such as low recognition accuracy, domain constraint, and out-of-vocabulary words. The low recognition accuracy problem is addressed by improving the acoustic model, language model, decoder and by rescoring the N-best list at the output of the decoder. We are considering the N-best list rescoring approach to improve the recognition accuracy. Most of the methods in the literature use the grammatical, lexical, syntactic and semantic connection between the words in a recognised sentence as a feature to rescore. In this paper, we have tried to see the semantic relatedness between the words in a sentence to rescore the N-best list. Semantic relatedness is computed using TransE~\cite{bordes2013translating}, a method for low dimensional embedding of a triple in a knowledge graph. The novelty of the paper is the application of semantic web to automatic speech recognition.
Compressing Recurrent Neural Network with Tensor Train
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) are a popular choice for modeling temporal and sequential tasks and achieve many state-of-the-art performance on various complex problems. However, most of the state-of-the-art RNNs have millions of parameters and require many computational resources for training and predicting new data. This paper proposes an alternative RNN model to reduce the number of parameters significantly by representing the weight parameters based on Tensor Train (TT) format. In this paper, we implement the TT-format representation for several RNN architectures such as simple RNN and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU). We compare and evaluate our proposed RNN model with uncompressed RNN model on sequence classification and sequence prediction tasks. Our proposed RNNs with TT-format are able to preserve the performance while reducing the number of RNN parameters significantly up to 40 times smaller.
Local Monotonic Attention Mechanism for End-to-End Speech and Language Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2017
Year: 2017

Recently, encoder-decoder neural networks have shown impressive performance on many sequence-related tasks. The architecture commonly uses an attentional mechanism which allows the model to learn alignments between the source and the target sequence. Most attentional mechanisms used today is based on a global attention property which requires a computation of a weighted summarization of the whole input sequence generated by encoder states. However, it is computationally expensive and often produces misalignment on the longer input sequence. Furthermore, it does not fit with monotonous or left-to-right nature in several tasks, such as automatic speech recognition (ASR), grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P), etc. In this paper, we propose a novel attention mechanism that has local and monotonic properties. Various ways to control those properties are also explored. Experimental results on ASR, G2P and machine translation between two languages with similar sentence structures, demonstrate that the proposed encoder-decoder model with local monotonic attention could achieve significant performance improvements and reduce the computational complexity in comparison with the one that used the standard global attention architecture.
A Multi-Armed Bandit to Smartly Select a Training Set from Big Medical Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

With the availability of big medical image data, the selection of an adequate training set is becoming more important to address the heterogeneity of different datasets. Simply including all the data does not only incur high processing costs but can even harm the prediction. We formulate the smart and efficient selection of a training dataset from big medical image data as a multi-armed bandit problem, solved by Thompson sampling. Our method assumes that image features are not available at the time of the selection of the samples, and therefore relies only on meta information associated with the images. Our strategy simultaneously exploits data sources with high chances of yielding useful samples and explores new data regions. For our evaluation, we focus on the application of estimating the age from a brain MRI. Our results on 7,250 subjects from 10 datasets show that our approach leads to higher accuracy while only requiring a fraction of the training data.
Reference String Extraction Using Line-Based Conditional Random Fields
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2017
Year: 2017

The extraction of individual reference strings from the reference section of scientific publications is an important step in the citation extraction pipeline. Current approaches divide this task into two steps by first detecting the reference section areas and then grouping the text lines in such areas into reference strings. We propose a classification model that considers every line in a publication as a potential part of a reference string. By applying line-based conditional random fields rather than constructing the graphical model based on the individual words, dependencies and patterns that are typical in reference sections provide strong features while the overall complexity of the model is reduced.
Distributed Testing of Conductance
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2017
Year: 2017

We study the problem of testing conductance in the setting of distributed computing and give a two-sided tester that takes $\mathcal{O}(\log(n) / (εΦ^2))$ rounds to decide if a graph has conductance at least $Φ$ or is $ε$-far from having conductance at least $Φ^2 / 1000$ in the distributed CONGEST model. We also show that $Ω(\log n)$ rounds are necessary for testing conductance even in the LOCAL model. In the case of a connected graph, we show that we can perform the test even when the number of vertices in the graph is not known a priori. This is the first two-sided tester in the distributed model we are aware of. A key observation is that one can perform a polynomial number of random walks from a small set of vertices if it is sufficient to track only some small statistics of the walks. This greatly reduces the congestion on the edges compared to tracking each walk individually.
Logical Learning Through a Hybrid Neural Network with Auxiliary Inputs
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2017
Year: 2017

The human reasoning process is seldom a one-way process from an input leading to an output. Instead, it often involves a systematic deduction by ruling out other possible outcomes as a self-checking mechanism. In this paper, we describe the design of a hybrid neural network for logical learning that is similar to the human reasoning through the introduction of an auxiliary input, namely the indicators, that act as the hints to suggest logical outcomes. We generate these indicators by digging into the hidden information buried underneath the original training data for direct or indirect suggestions. We used the MNIST data to demonstrate the design and use of these indicators in a convolutional neural network. We trained a series of such hybrid neural networks with variations of the indicators. Our results show that these hybrid neural networks are very robust in generating logical outcomes with inherently higher prediction accuracy than the direct use of the original input and output in apparent models. Such improved predictability with reassured logical confidence is obtained through the exhaustion of all possible indicators to rule out all illogical outcomes, which is not available in the apparent models. Our logical learning process can effectively cope with the unknown unknowns using a full exploitation of all existing knowledge available for learning. The design and implementation of the hints, namely the indicators, become an essential part of artificial intelligence for logical learning. We also introduce an ongoing application setup for this hybrid neural network in an autonomous grasping robot, namely as_DeepClaw, aiming at learning an optimized grasping pose through logical learning.
Tools for improving resilience of electric distribution systems with networked microgrids
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2017
Year: 2017

In the electrical grid, the distribution system is themost vulnerable to severe weather events. Well-placed and coordinatedupgrades, such as the combination of microgrids, systemhardening and additional line redundancy, can greatly reduce thenumber of electrical outages during extreme events. Indeed, ithas been suggested that resilience is one of the primary benefitsof networked microgrids. We formulate a resilient distributiongrid design problem as a two-stage stochastic program andmake use of decomposition-based heuristic algorithms to scaleto problems of practical size. We demonstrate the feasibilityof a resilient distribution design tool on a model of an actualdistribution network. We vary the study parameters, i.e., thecapital cost of microgrid generation relative to system hardeningand target system resilience metrics, and find regions in thisparametric space corresponding to different distribution systemarchitectures, such as individual microgrids, hardened networks,and a transition region that suggests the benefits of microgridsnetworked via hardened circuit segments.
A New 3D Segmentation Technique for QCT Scans of the Lumbar Spine to Determine BMD and Vertebral Geometry
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Quantitative computed tomography (QCT) is a standard method to determine bone mineral density (BMD) in the spine. Traditionally single 8 - 10 mm thick slices have been analyzed only. Current spiral CT scanners provide true 3D acquisition schemes allowing for a more differential BMD analysis and an assessment of geometric parameters, which may improve fracture prediction. We developed a novel 3D segmentation approach that combines deformable balloons, multi seeded volume growing, and dedicated morphological operations to extract the vertebral bodies. An anatomy-oriented coordinate system attached automatically to each vertebra is used to define volumes of interest. We analyzed intra-operator precision of the segmentation procedure using abdominal scans from 10 patients (60 mAs, 120 kV, slice thickness 1mm, B40s, Siemens Sensation 16). Our new segmentation method shows excellent precision errors in the order of < 1 % for BMD and < 2 % for volume.