OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Efficient Broadcast for Timely Updates in Mobile Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2021
Year: 2021

This study considers a wireless network where an access point (AP) broadcasts timely updates to numerous mobile users. The timeliness of information owned by a user is characterized by the age of information. Frequently broadcasting the timely updates at constant maximum power can minimize the age of information for all users, but wastes valuable communication resources (ie., time and energy). To address the age-energy trade-off, it is critical to develop an efficient scheduling algorithm that identifies broadcast times and allocates power. Moreover, unpredictable user movement would cause rapidly varying communication channels; in particular, those channels can be non-stationary. Our main contribution is to develop an online scheduling algorithm and a channel-agnostic scheduling algorithm for such a mobile network with a provable performance guarantee.
Bi-ISCA: Bidirectional Inter-Sentence Contextual Attention Mechanism for Detecting Sarcasm in User Generated Noisy Short Text
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Many online comments on social media platforms are hateful, humorous, or sarcastic. The sarcastic nature of these comments (especially the short ones) alters their actual implied sentiments, which leads to misinterpretations by the existing sentiment analysis models. A lot of research has already been done to detect sarcasm in the text using user-based, topical, and conversational information but not much work has been done to use inter-sentence contextual information for detecting the same. This paper proposes a new state-of-the-art deep learning architecture that uses a novel Bidirectional Inter-Sentence Contextual Attention mechanism (Bi-ISCA) to capture inter-sentence dependencies for detecting sarcasm in the user-generated short text using only the conversational context. The proposed deep learning model demonstrates the capability to capture explicit, implicit, and contextual incongruous words & phrases responsible for invoking sarcasm. Bi-ISCA generates state-of-the-art results on two widely used benchmark datasets for the sarcasm detection task (Reddit and Twitter). To the best of our knowledge, none of the existing state-of-the-art models use an inter-sentence contextual attention mechanism to detect sarcasm in the user-generated short text using only conversational context.
Learnable Gabor modulated complex-valued networks for orientation robustness
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Robustness to transformation is desirable in many computer vision tasks, given that input data often exhibits pose variance. While translation invariance and equivariance is a documented phenomenon of CNNs, sensitivity to other transformations is typically encouraged through data augmentation. We investigate the modulation of complex valued convolutional weights with learned Gabor filters to enable orientation robustness. The resulting network can generate orientation dependent features free of interpolation with a single set of learnable rotation-governing parameters. By choosing to either retain or pool orientation channels, the choice of equivariance versus invariance can be directly controlled. Moreover, we introduce rotational weight-tying through a proposed cyclic Gabor convolution, further enabling generalisation over rotations. We combine these innovations into Learnable Gabor Convolutional Networks (LGCNs), that are parameter-efficient and offer increased model complexity. We demonstrate their rotation invariance and equivariance on MNIST, BSD and a dataset of simulated and real astronomical images of Galactic cirri.
GLGE: A New General Language Generation Evaluation Benchmark
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Multi-task benchmarks such as GLUE and SuperGLUE have driven great progress of pretraining and transfer learning in Natural Language Processing (NLP). These benchmarks mostly focus on a range of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks, without considering the Natural Language Generation (NLG) models. In this paper, we present the General Language Generation Evaluation (GLGE), a new multi-task benchmark for evaluating the generalization capabilities of NLG models across eight language generation tasks. For each task, we continue to design three subtasks in terms of task difficulty (GLGE-Easy, GLGE-Medium, and GLGE-Hard). This introduces 24 subtasks to comprehensively compare model performance. To encourage research on pretraining and transfer learning on NLG models, we make GLGE publicly available and build a leaderboard with strong baselines including MASS, BART, and ProphetNet (The source code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/microsoft/glge).
Multi-Features Guidance Network for partial-to-partial point cloud registration
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

To eliminate the problems of large dimensional differences, big semantic gap, and mutual interference caused by hybrid features, in this paper, we propose a novel Multi-Features Guidance Network for partial-to-partial point cloud registration(MFG). The proposed network mainly includes four parts: keypoints' feature extraction, correspondences searching, correspondences credibility computation, and SVD, among which correspondences searching and correspondence credibility computation are the cores of the network. Unlike the previous work, we utilize the shape features and the spatial coordinates to guide correspondences search independently and fusing the matching results to obtain the final matching matrix. In the correspondences credibility computation module, based on the conflicted relationship between the features matching matrix and the coordinates matching matrix, we score the reliability for each correspondence, which can reduce the impact of mismatched or non-matched points. Experimental results show that our network outperforms the current state-of-the-art while maintaining computational efficiency.
Wide-angle Image Rectification: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Wide field-of-view (FOV) cameras, which capture a larger scene area than narrow FOV cameras, are used in many applications including 3D reconstruction, autonomous driving, and video surveillance. However, wide-angle images contain distortions that violate the assumptions underlying pinhole camera models, resulting in object distortion, difficulties in estimating scene distance, area, and direction, and preventing the use of off-the-shelf deep models trained on undistorted images for downstream computer vision tasks. Image rectification, which aims to correct these distortions, can solve these problems. In this paper, we comprehensively survey progress in wide-angle image rectification from transformation models to rectification methods. Specifically, we first present a detailed description and discussion of the camera models used in different approaches. Then, we summarize several distortion models including radial distortion and projection distortion. Next, we review both traditional geometry-based image rectification methods and deep learning-based methods, where the former formulate distortion parameter estimation as an optimization problem and the latter treat it as a regression problem by leveraging the power of deep neural networks. We evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art methods on public datasets and show that although both kinds of methods can achieve good results, these methods only work well for specific camera models and distortion types. We also provide a strong baseline model and carry out an empirical study of different distortion models on synthetic datasets and real-world wide-angle images. Finally, we discuss several potential research directions that are expected to further advance this area in the future.
The Cost of Simple Bidding in Combinatorial Auctions
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2021
Year: 2021

We study a class of manipulations in combinatorial auctions where bidders fundamentally misrepresent what goods they are interested in. Prior work has largely assumed that bidders only submit bids on their bundles of interest, which we call simple bidding: strategizing over the bid amounts, but not the bundle identities. However, we show that there exists an entire class of auction instances for which simple bids are never optimal in Bayes-Nash equilibrium, always being strictly dominated by complex bids (where bidders bid on goods they are not interested in). We show this result for the two most widely used auction mechanisms: first price and VCG-nearest. We also explore the structural properties of the winner determination problem that cause this phenomenon, and we use the insights gained to investigate how impactful complex bidding may be. We find that, in the worst case, a bidder's optimal complex bid may require bidding on an exponential number of bundles, even if the bidder is interested only in a single good. Thus, this phenomenon can greatly impact the auction's outcome and should not be ignored by bidders and auction designers alike.
Fiedler vector analysis for particular cases of connected graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, some subclasses of block graphs are considered in order to analyze Fiedler vector of its members. Two families of block graphs with cliques of fixed size, the block-path and block-starlike graphs, are introduced. Cases A and B of classification for both families were considered, as well as the behavior of the algebraic connectivity for particular cases of block-path graphs.
CircleGAN: Generative Adversarial Learning across Spherical Circles
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

We present a novel discriminator for GANs that improves realness and diversity of generated samples by learning a structured hypersphere embedding space using spherical circles. The proposed discriminator learns to populate realistic samples around the longest spherical circle, i.e., a great circle, while pushing unrealistic samples toward the poles perpendicular to the great circle. Since longer circles occupy larger area on the hypersphere, they encourage more diversity in representation learning, and vice versa. Discriminating samples based on their corresponding spherical circles can thus naturally induce diversity to generated samples. We also extend the proposed method for conditional settings with class labels by creating a hypersphere for each category and performing class-wise discrimination and update. In experiments, we validate the effectiveness for both unconditional and conditional generation on standard benchmarks, achieving the state of the art.
Omni: Automated Ensemble with Unexpected Models against Adversarial Evasion Attack
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Background: Machine learning-based security detection models have become prevalent in modern malware and intrusion detection systems. However, previous studies show that such models are susceptible to adversarial evasion attacks. In this type of attack, inputs (i.e., adversarial examples) are specially crafted by intelligent malicious adversaries, with the aim of being misclassified by existing state-of-the-art models (e.g., deep neural networks). Once the attackers can fool a classifier to think that a malicious input is actually benign, they can render a machine learning-based malware or intrusion detection system ineffective. Goal: To help security practitioners and researchers build a more robust model against non-adaptive, white-box, and non-targeted adversarial evasion attacks through the idea of an ensemble model. Method: We propose an approach called Omni, the main idea of which is to explore methods that create an ensemble of "unexpected models"; i.e., models whose control hyperparameters have a large distance to the hyperparameters of an adversary's target model, with which we then make an optimized weighted ensemble prediction. Result: In studies with five types of adversarial evasion attacks (FGSM, BIM, JSMA, DeepFooland Carlini-Wagner) on five security datasets (NSL-KDD, CIC-IDS-2017, CSE-CIC-IDS2018, CICAnd-Mal2017, and the Contagio PDF dataset), we show Omni is a promising approach as a defense strategy against adversarial attacks when compared with other baseline treatments. Conclusion: When employing ensemble defense against adversarial evasion attacks, we suggest creating an ensemble with unexpected models that are distant from the attacker's expected model (i.e., target model) through methods such as hyperparameter optimization.
Deep Physics-aware Inference of Cloth Deformation for Monocular Human Performance Capture
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Recent monocular human performance capture approaches have shown compelling dense tracking results of the full body from a single RGB camera. However, existing methods either do not estimate clothing at all or model cloth deformation with simple geometric priors instead of taking into account the underlying physical principles. This leads to noticeable artifacts in their reconstructions, e.g. baked-in wrinkles, implausible deformations that seemingly defy gravity, and intersections between cloth and body. To address these problems, we propose a person-specific, learning-based method that integrates a simulation layer into the training process to provide for the first time physics supervision in the context of weakly supervised deep monocular human performance capture. We show how integrating physics into the training process improves the learned cloth deformations, allows modeling clothing as a separate piece of geometry, and largely reduces cloth-body intersections. Relying only on weak 2D multi-view supervision during training, our approach leads to a significant improvement over current state-of-the-art methods and is thus a clear step towards realistic monocular capture of the entire deforming surface of a clothed human.
torchdistill: A Modular, Configuration-Driven Framework for Knowledge Distillation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

While knowledge distillation (transfer) has been attracting attentions from the research community, the recent development in the fields has heightened the need for reproducible studies and highly generalized frameworks to lower barriers to such high-quality, reproducible deep learning research. Several researchers voluntarily published frameworks used in their knowledge distillation studies to help other interested researchers reproduce their original work. Such frameworks, however, are usually neither well generalized nor maintained, thus researchers are still required to write a lot of code to refactor/build on the frameworks for introducing new methods, models, datasets and designing experiments. In this paper, we present our developed open-source framework built on PyTorch and dedicated for knowledge distillation studies. The framework is designed to enable users to design experiments by declarative PyYAML configuration files, and helps researchers complete the recently proposed ML Code Completeness Checklist. Using the developed framework, we demonstrate its various efficient training strategies, and implement a variety of knowledge distillation methods. We also reproduce some of their original experimental results on the ImageNet and COCO datasets presented at major machine learning conferences such as ICLR, NeurIPS, CVPR and ECCV, including recent state-of-the-art methods. All the source code, configurations, log files and trained model weights are publicly available at https://github.com/yoshitomo-matsubara/torchdistill .
Enabling GPU Accelerated Computing in the SUNDIALS Time Integration Library
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

As part of the Exascale Computing Project (ECP), a recent focus of development efforts for the SUite of Nonlinear and DIfferential/ALgebraic equation Solvers (SUNDIALS) has been to enable GPU-accelerated time integration in scientific applications at extreme scales. This effort has resulted in several new GPU-enabled implementations of core SUNDIALS data structures, support for programming paradigms which are aware of the heterogeneous architectures, and the introduction of utilities to provide new points of flexibility. In this paper, we discuss our considerations, both internal and external, when designing these new features and present the features themselves. We also present performance results for several of the features on the Summit supercomputer and early access hardware for the Frontier supercomputer, which demonstrate negligible performance overhead resulting from the additional infrastructure and significant speedups when using both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs.
Mixed Membership Graph Clustering via Systematic Edge Query
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

This work considers clustering nodes of a largely incomplete graph. Under the problem setting, only a small amount of queries about the edges can be made, but the entire graph is not observable. This problem finds applications in large-scale data clustering using limited annotations, community detection under restricted survey resources, and graph topology inference under hidden/removed node interactions. Prior works tackled this problem from various perspectives, e.g., convex programming-based low-rank matrix completion and active query-based clique finding. Nonetheless, many existing methods are designed for estimating the single-cluster membership of the nodes, but nodes may often have mixed (i.e., multi-cluster) membership in practice. Some query and computational paradigms, e.g., the random query patterns and nuclear norm-based optimization advocated in the convex approaches, may give rise to scalability and implementation challenges. This work aims at learning mixed membership of nodes using queried edges. The proposed method is developed together with a systematic query principle that can be controlled and adjusted by the system designers to accommodate implementation challenges -- e.g., to avoid querying edges that are physically hard to acquire. Our framework also features a lightweight and scalable algorithm with membership learning guarantees. Real-data experiments on crowdclustering and community detection are used to showcase the effectiveness of our method.
A Fast Point Cloud Ground Segmentation Approach Based on Coarse-To-Fine Markov Random Field
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Ground segmentation is an important preprocessing task for autonomous vehicles (AVs) with 3D LiDARs. To solve the problem of existing ground segmentation methods being very difficult to balance accuracy and computational complexity, a fast point cloud ground segmentation approach based on a coarse-to-fine Markov random field (MRF) method is proposed. The method uses an improved elevation map for ground coarse segmentation, and then uses spatiotemporal adjacent points to optimize the segmentation results. The processed point cloud is classified into high-confidence obstacle points, ground points, and unknown classification points to initialize an MRF model. The graph cut method is then used to solve the model to achieve fine segmentation. Experiments on datasets showed that our method improves on other algorithms in terms of ground segmentation accuracy and is faster than other graph-based algorithms, which require only a single core of an I7-3770 CPU to process a frame of Velodyne HDL-64E data (in 39.77 ms, on average). Field tests were also conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Universal Semantics for the Stochastic Lambda-Calculus
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2021
Year: 2021

We define sound and adequate denotational and operational semantics for the stochastic lambda calculus. These two semantic approaches build on previous work that used similar techniques to reason about higher-order probabilistic programs, but for the first time admit an adequacy theorem relating the operational and denotational views. This resolves the main issue left open in (Bacci et al. 2018).
Disjoint Stable Matchings in Linear Time
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2021
Year: 2021

We show that given a SM instance G as input we can find a largest collection of pairwise edge-disjoint stable matchings of G in time linear in the input size. This extends two classical results: 1. The Gale-Shapley algorithm, which can find at most two ("extreme") pairwise edge-disjoint stable matchings of G in linear time, and 2. The polynomial-time algorithm for finding a largest collection of pairwise edge-disjoint perfect matchings (without the stability requirement) in a bipartite graph, obtained by combining König's characterization with Tutte's f-factor algorithm. Moreover, we also give an algorithm to enumerate all maximum-length chains of disjoint stable matchings in the lattice of stable matchings of a given instance. This algorithm takes time polynomial in the input size for enumerating each chain. We also derive the expected number of such chains in a random instance of Stable Matching.
SoccerNet-v2: A Dataset and Benchmarks for Holistic Understanding of Broadcast Soccer Videos
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Understanding broadcast videos is a challenging task in computer vision, as it requires generic reasoning capabilities to appreciate the content offered by the video editing. In this work, we propose SoccerNet-v2, a novel large-scale corpus of manual annotations for the SoccerNet video dataset, along with open challenges to encourage more research in soccer understanding and broadcast production. Specifically, we release around 300k annotations within SoccerNet's 500 untrimmed broadcast soccer videos. We extend current tasks in the realm of soccer to include action spotting, camera shot segmentation with boundary detection, and we define a novel replay grounding task. For each task, we provide and discuss benchmark results, reproducible with our open-source adapted implementations of the most relevant works in the field. SoccerNet-v2 is presented to the broader research community to help push computer vision closer to automatic solutions for more general video understanding and production purposes.
NaturalAE: Natural and Robust Physical Adversarial Examples for Object Detectors
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we propose a natural and robust physical adversarial example attack method targeting object detectors under real-world conditions. The generated adversarial examples are robust to various physical constraints and visually look similar to the original images, thus these adversarial examples are natural to humans and will not cause any suspicions. First, to ensure the robustness of the adversarial examples in real-world conditions, the proposed method exploits different image transformation functions, to simulate various physical changes during the iterative optimization of the adversarial examples generation. Second, to construct natural adversarial examples, the proposed method uses an adaptive mask to constrain the area and intensities of the added perturbations, and utilizes the real-world perturbation score (RPS) to make the perturbations be similar to those real noises in physical world. Compared with existing studies, our generated adversarial examples can achieve a high success rate with less conspicuous perturbations. Experimental results demonstrate that, the generated adversarial examples are robust under various indoor and outdoor physical conditions, including different distances, angles, illuminations, and photographing. Specifically, the attack success rate of generated adversarial examples indoors and outdoors is high up to 73.33% and 82.22%, respectively. Meanwhile, the proposed method ensures the naturalness of the generated adversarial example, and the size of added perturbations is much smaller than the perturbations in the existing works. Further, the proposed physical adversarial attack method can be transferred from the white-box models to other object detection models.