OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Ego-motion and Surrounding Vehicle State Estimation Using a Monocular Camera
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Understanding ego-motion and surrounding vehicle state is essential to enable automated driving and advanced driving assistance technologies. Typical approaches to solve this problem use fusion of multiple sensors such as LiDAR, camera, and radar to recognize surrounding vehicle state, including position, velocity, and orientation. Such sensing modalities are overly complex and costly for production of personal use vehicles. In this paper, we propose a novel machine learning method to estimate ego-motion and surrounding vehicle state using a single monocular camera. Our approach is based on a combination of three deep neural networks to estimate the 3D vehicle bounding box, depth, and optical flow from a sequence of images. The main contribution of this paper is a new framework and algorithm that integrates these three networks in order to estimate the ego-motion and surrounding vehicle state. To realize more accurate 3D position estimation, we address ground plane correction in real-time. The efficacy of the proposed method is demonstrated through experimental evaluations that compare our results to ground truth data available from other sensors including Can-Bus and LiDAR.
Presenting convex sets of probability distributions by convex semilattices and unique bases
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2020
Year: 2020

We prove that every finitely generated convex set of finitely supported probability distributions has a unique base, and use this result to show that the monad of convex sets of probability distributions is presented by the algebraic theory of convex semilattices.
How to Train Your Energy-Based Model for Regression
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Energy-based models (EBMs) have become increasingly popular within computer vision in recent years. While they are commonly employed for generative image modeling, recent work has applied EBMs also for regression tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance on object detection and visual tracking. Training EBMs is however known to be challenging. While a variety of different techniques have been explored for generative modeling, the application of EBMs to regression is not a well-studied problem. How EBMs should be trained for best possible regression performance is thus currently unclear. We therefore accept the task of providing the first detailed study of this problem. To that end, we propose a simple yet highly effective extension of noise contrastive estimation, and carefully compare its performance to six popular methods from literature on the tasks of 1D regression and object detection. The results of this comparison suggest that our training method should be considered the go-to approach. We also apply our method to the visual tracking task, achieving state-of-the-art performance on five datasets. Notably, our tracker achieves 63.7% AUC on LaSOT and 78.7% Success on TrackingNet. Code is available at https://github.com/fregu856/ebms_regression.
Transforming and Projecting Images into Class-conditional Generative Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

We present a method for projecting an input image into the space of a class-conditional generative neural network. We propose a method that optimizes for transformation to counteract the model biases in generative neural networks. Specifically, we demonstrate that one can solve for image translation, scale, and global color transformation, during the projection optimization to address the object-center bias and color bias of a Generative Adversarial Network. This projection process poses a difficult optimization problem, and purely gradient-based optimizations fail to find good solutions. We describe a hybrid optimization strategy that finds good projections by estimating transformations and class parameters. We show the effectiveness of our method on real images and further demonstrate how the corresponding projections lead to better editability of these images.
GSR Analysis for Stress: Development and Validation of an Open Source Tool for Noisy Naturalistic GSR Data
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

The stress detection problem is receiving great attention in related research communities. This is due to its essential part in behavioral studies for many serious health problems and physical illnesses. There are different methods and algorithms for stress detection using different physiological signals. Previous studies have already shown that Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), also known as Electrodermal Activity (EDA), is one of the leading indicators for stress. However, the GSR signal itself is not trivial to analyze. Different features are extracted from GSR signals to detect stress in people like the number of peaks, max peak amplitude, etc. In this paper, we are proposing an open-source tool for GSR analysis, which uses deep learning algorithms alongside statistical algorithms to extract GSR features for stress detection. Then we use different machine learning algorithms and Wearable Stress and Affect Detection (WESAD) dataset to evaluate our results. The results show that we are capable of detecting stress with the accuracy of 92 percent using 10-fold cross-validation and using the features extracted from our tool.
FarsBase-KBP: A Knowledge Base Population System for the Persian Knowledge Graph
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

While most of the knowledge bases already support the English language, there is only one knowledge base for the Persian language, known as FarsBase, which is automatically created via semi-structured web information. Unlike English knowledge bases such as Wikidata, which have tremendous community support, the population of a knowledge base like FarsBase must rely on automatically extracted knowledge. Knowledge base population can let FarsBase keep growing in size, as the system continues working. In this paper, we present a knowledge base population system for the Persian language, which extracts knowledge from unlabeled raw text, crawled from the Web. The proposed system consists of a set of state-of-the-art modules such as an entity linking module as well as information and relation extraction modules designed for FarsBase. Moreover, a canonicalization system is introduced to link extracted relations to FarsBase properties. Then, the system uses knowledge fusion techniques with minimal intervention of human experts to integrate and filter the proper knowledge instances, extracted by each module. To evaluate the performance of the presented knowledge base population system, we present the first gold dataset for benchmarking knowledge base population in the Persian language, which consisting of 22015 FarsBase triples and verified by human experts. The evaluation results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed system.
A learning problem whose consistency is equivalent to the non-existence of real-valued measurable cardinals
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We show that the $k$-nearest neighbour learning rule is universally consistent in a metric space $X$ if and only if it is universally consistent in every separable subspace of $X$ and the density of $X$ is less than every real-measurable cardinal. In particular, the $k$-NN classifier is universally consistent in every metric space whose separable subspaces are sigma-finite dimensional in the sense of Nagata and Preiss if and only if there are no real-valued measurable cardinals. The latter assumption is relatively consistent with ZFC, however the consistency of the existence of such cardinals cannot be proved within ZFC. Our results were inspired by an example sketched by Cérou and Guyader in 2006 at an intuitive level of rigour.
Probabilistic End-to-End Vehicle Navigation in Complex Dynamic Environments with Multimodal Sensor Fusion
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

All-day and all-weather navigation is a critical capability for autonomous driving, which requires proper reaction to varied environmental conditions and complex agent behaviors. Recently, with the rise of deep learning, end-to-end control for autonomous vehicles has been well studied. However, most works are solely based on visual information, which can be degraded by challenging illumination conditions such as dim light or total darkness. In addition, they usually generate and apply deterministic control commands without considering the uncertainties in the future. In this paper, based on imitation learning, we propose a probabilistic driving model with ultiperception capability utilizing the information from the camera, lidar and radar. We further evaluate its driving performance online on our new driving benchmark, which includes various environmental conditions (e.g., urban and rural areas, traffic densities, weather and times of the day) and dynamic obstacles (e.g., vehicles, pedestrians, motorcyclists and bicyclists). The results suggest that our proposed model outperforms baselines and achieves excellent generalization performance in unseen environments with heavy traffic and extreme weather.
CPU and GPU Accelerated Fully Homomorphic Encryption
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is one of the most promising technologies for privacy protection as it allows an arbitrary number of function computations over encrypted data. However, the computational cost of these FHE systems limits their widespread applications. In this paper, our objective is to improve the performance of FHE schemes by designing efficient parallel frameworks. In particular, we choose Torus Fully Homomorphic Encryption (TFHE) as it offers exact results for an infinite number of boolean gate (e.g., AND, XOR) evaluations. We first extend the gate operations to algebraic circuits such as addition, multiplication, and their vector and matrix equivalents. Secondly, we consider the multi-core CPUs to improve the efficiency of both the gate and the arithmetic operations. Finally, we port the TFHE to the Graphics Processing Units (GPU) and device novel optimizations for boolean and arithmetic circuits employing the multitude of cores. We also experimentally analyze both the CPU and GPU parallel frameworks for different numeric representations (16 to 32-bit). Our GPU implementation outperforms the existing technique, and it achieves a speedup of 20x for any 32-bit boolean operation and 14.5x for multiplications.
A Versatile Data-Driven Framework for Model-Independent Control of Continuum Manipulators Interacting With Obstructed Environments With Unknown Geometry and Stiffness
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

This paper addresses the problem of controlling a continuum manipulator (CM) in free or obstructed environments with no prior knowledge about the deformation behavior of the CM and the stiffness and geometry of the interacting obstructed environment. We propose a versatile data-driven priori-model-independent (PMI) control framework, in which various control paradigms (e.g. CM's position or shape control) can be defined based on the provided feedback. This optimal iterative algorithm learns the deformation behavior of the CM in interaction with an unknown environment, in real time, and then accomplishes the defined control objective. To evaluate the scalability of the proposed framework, we integrated two different CMs, designed for medical applications, with the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK). The performance and learning capability of the framework was investigated in 11 sets of experiments including PMI position and shape control in free and unknown obstructed environments as well as during manipulation of an unknown deformable object. We also evaluated the performance of our algorithm in an ex-vivo experiment with a lamb heart.The theoretical and experimental results demonstrate the adaptivity, versatility, and accuracy of the proposed framework and, therefore, its suitability for a variety of applications involving continuum manipulators.
AlignShift: Bridging the Gap of Imaging Thickness in 3D Anisotropic Volumes
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

This paper addresses a fundamental challenge in 3D medical image processing: how to deal with imaging thickness. For anisotropic medical volumes, there is a significant performance gap between thin-slice (mostly 1mm) and thick-slice (mostly 5mm) volumes. Prior arts tend to use 3D approaches for the thin-slice and 2D approaches for the thick-slice, respectively. We aim at a unified approach for both thin- and thick-slice medical volumes. Inspired by recent advances in video analysis, we propose AlignShift, a novel parameter-free operator to convert theoretically any 2D pretrained network into thickness-aware 3D network. Remarkably, the converted networks behave like 3D for the thin-slice, nevertheless degenerate to 2D for the thick-slice adaptively. The unified thickness-aware representation learning is achieved by shifting and fusing aligned "virtual slices" as per the input imaging thickness. Extensive experiments on public large-scale DeepLesion benchmark, consisting of 32K lesions for universal lesion detection, validate the effectiveness of our method, which outperforms previous state of the art by considerable margins without whistles and bells. More importantly, to our knowledge, this is the first method that bridges the performance gap between thin- and thick-slice volumes by a unified framework. To improve research reproducibility, our code in PyTorch is open source at https://github.com/M3DV/AlignShift.
Energy Efficiency Optimization for NOMA UAV Network with Imperfect CSI
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are developing rapidly owing to flexible deployment and access services as air base stations. However, the channel errors of low-altitude communication links formed by mobile deployment of UAVs cannot be ignored. And the energy efficiency of the UAVs communication with imperfect channel state information (CSI) hasnt been well studied yet. Therefore, we focus on system performance optimization in non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) UAV network considering imperfect CSI between the UAV and users. A suboptimal resource allocation scheme including user scheduling and power allocation is designed for maximizing energy efficiency. Because of the nonconvexity of optimization function with an probability constraint for imperfect CSI, the original problem is converted into a non-probability problem and then decoupled into two convex subproblems. First, a user scheduling method is applied in the two-side matching of users and subchannels by the difference of convex programming. Then based on user scheduling, the energy efficiency in UAV cells is optimized through a suboptimal power allocation algorithm by successive convex approximation method. The simulation results prove that the proposed algorithm is effective compared with existing resource allocation schemes.
Discrete-to-Deep Supervised Policy Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Neural networks are effective function approximators, but hard to train in the reinforcement learning (RL) context mainly because samples are correlated. For years, scholars have got around this by employing experience replay or an asynchronous parallel-agent system. This paper proposes Discrete-to-Deep Supervised Policy Learning (D2D-SPL) for training neural networks in RL. D2D-SPL discretises the continuous state space into discrete states and uses actor-critic to learn a policy. It then selects from each discrete state an input value and the action with the highest numerical preference as an input/target pair. Finally it uses input/target pairs from all discrete states to train a classifier. D2D-SPL uses a single agent, needs no experience replay and learns much faster than state-of-the-art methods. We test our method with two RL environments, the Cartpole and an aircraft manoeuvring simulator.
Towards QoS-Aware and Resource-Efficient GPU Microservices Based on Spatial Multitasking GPUs In Datacenters
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

While prior researches focus on CPU-based microservices, they are not applicable for GPU-based microservices due to the different contention patterns. It is challenging to optimize the resource utilization while guaranteeing the QoS for GPU microservices. We find that the overhead is caused by inter microservice communication, GPU resource contention and imbalanced throughput within microservice pipeline. We propose Camelot, a runtime system that manages GPU micorservices considering the above factors. In Camelot, a global memory-based communication mechanism enables onsite data sharing that significantly reduces the end-to-end latencies of user queries. We also propose two contention aware resource allocation policies that either maximize the peak supported service load or minimize the resource usage at low load while ensuring the required QoS. The two policies consider the microservice pipeline effect and the runtime GPU resource contention when allocating resources for the microservices. Compared with state-of-the-art work, Camelot increases the supported peak load by up to 64.5% with limited GPUs, and reduces 35% resource usage at low load while achieving the desired 99%-ile latency target.
Adaptive Coded Modulation for IM/DD Free-Space Optical Backhauling: A Probabilistic Shaping Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we propose a practical adaptive coding modulation scheme to approach the capacity of free-space optical (FSO) channels with intensity modulation/direct detection based on probabilistic shaping. The encoder efficiently adapts the transmission rate to the signal-to-noise ratio, accounting for the fading induced by the atmospheric turbulence. The transponder can support an arbitrarily large number of transmission modes using a low complexity channel encoder with a small set of supported rates. Hence, it can provide a solution for FSO backhauling in terrestrial and satellite communication systems to achieve higher spectral efficiency. We propose two algorithms to determine the capacity and capacity-achieving distribution of the scheme with unipolar M-ary pulse amplitude modulation (M-PAM) signaling. Then, the signal constellation is probabilistically shaped according to the optimal distribution, and the shaped signal is channel encoded by an efficient binary forward error correction scheme. Extensive numerical results and simulations are provided to evaluate the performance. The proposed scheme yields a rate close to the tightest lower bound on the capacity of FSO channels. For instance, the coded modulator operates within 0.2 dB from the M-PAM capacity, and it outperforms uniform signaling with more than 1.7 dB, at a transmission rate of 3 bits per channel use.
Comparing SNNs and RNNs on Neuromorphic Vision Datasets: Similarities and Differences
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Neuromorphic data, recording frameless spike events, have attracted considerable attention for the spatiotemporal information components and the event-driven processing fashion. Spiking neural networks (SNNs) represent a family of event-driven models with spatiotemporal dynamics for neuromorphic computing, which are widely benchmarked on neuromorphic data. Interestingly, researchers in the machine learning community can argue that recurrent (artificial) neural networks (RNNs) also have the capability to extract spatiotemporal features although they are not event-driven. Thus, the question of "what will happen if we benchmark these two kinds of models together on neuromorphic data" comes out but remains unclear. In this work, we make a systematic study to compare SNNs and RNNs on neuromorphic data, taking the vision datasets as a case study. First, we identify the similarities and differences between SNNs and RNNs (including the vanilla RNNs and LSTM) from the modeling and learning perspectives. To improve comparability and fairness, we unify the supervised learning algorithm based on backpropagation through time (BPTT), the loss function exploiting the outputs at all timesteps, the network structure with stacked fully-connected or convolutional layers, and the hyper-parameters during training. Especially, given the mainstream loss function used in RNNs, we modify it inspired by the rate coding scheme to approach that of SNNs. Furthermore, we tune the temporal resolution of datasets to test model robustness and generalization. At last, a series of contrast experiments are conducted on two types of neuromorphic datasets: DVS-converted (N-MNIST) and DVS-captured (DVS Gesture).
mmWave Channel Estimation via Approximate Message Passing with Side Information
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

This work considers millimeter-wave channel estimation in a setting where parameters of the underlying mmWave channels are varying dynamically over time and there is a single drifting path. In this setting, channel estimates at time block $k$ can be used as side information (SI) when estimating the channel at block $k+1$. To estimate channel parameters, we employ an SI-aided (complex) approximate message passing algorithm and compare its performance to a benchmark based on orthogonal matching pursuit.
Secure Single-Server Nearly-Identical Image Deduplication
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

Cloud computing is often utilized for file storage. Clients of cloud storage services want to ensure the privacy of their data, and both clients and servers want to use as little storage as possible. Cross-user deduplication is one method to reduce the amount of storage a server uses. Deduplication and privacy are naturally conflicting goals, especially for nearly-identical (``fuzzy'') deduplication, as some information about the data must be used to perform deduplication. Prior solutions thus utilize multiple servers, or only function for exact deduplication. In this paper, we present a single-server protocol for cross-user nearly-identical deduplication based on secure locality-sensitive hashing (SLSH). We formally define our ideal security, and rigorously prove our protocol secure against fully malicious, colluding adversaries with a proof by simulation. We show experimentally that the individual parts of the protocol are computationally feasible, and further discuss practical issues of security and efficiency.
Don't Explain without Verifying Veracity: An Evaluation of Explainable AI with Video Activity Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

Explainable machine learning and artificial intelligence models have been used to justify a model's decision-making process. This added transparency aims to help improve user performance and understanding of the underlying model. However, in practice, explainable systems face many open questions and challenges. Specifically, designers might reduce the complexity of deep learning models in order to provide interpretability. The explanations generated by these simplified models, however, might not accurately justify and be truthful to the model. This can further add confusion to the users as they might not find the explanations meaningful with respect to the model predictions. Understanding how these explanations affect user behavior is an ongoing challenge. In this paper, we explore how explanation veracity affects user performance and agreement in intelligent systems. Through a controlled user study with an explainable activity recognition system, we compare variations in explanation veracity for a video review and querying task. The results suggest that low veracity explanations significantly decrease user performance and agreement compared to both accurate explanations and a system without explanations. These findings demonstrate the importance of accurate and understandable explanations and caution that poor explanations can sometimes be worse than no explanations with respect to their effect on user performance and reliance on an AI system.