OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Adaptive Normalized Representation Learning for Generalizable Face Anti-Spoofing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

With various face presentation attacks arising under unseen scenarios, face anti-spoofing (FAS) based on domain generalization (DG) has drawn growing attention due to its robustness. Most existing methods utilize DG frameworks to align the features to seek a compact and generalized feature space. However, little attention has been paid to the feature extraction process for the FAS task, especially the influence of normalization, which also has a great impact on the generalization of the learned representation. To address this issue, we propose a novel perspective of face anti-spoofing that focuses on the normalization selection in the feature extraction process. Concretely, an Adaptive Normalized Representation Learning (ANRL) framework is devised, which adaptively selects feature normalization methods according to the inputs, aiming to learn domain-agnostic and discriminative representation. Moreover, to facilitate the representation learning, Dual Calibration Constraints are designed, including Inter-Domain Compatible loss and Inter-Class Separable loss, which provide a better optimization direction for generalizable representation. Extensive experiments and visualizations are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method against the SOTA competitors.
Direct Construction of Optimal Z-Complementary Code Sets for all Possible Even Length by Using Pseudo-Boolean Functions
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

Z-complementary code set (ZCCS) are well known to be used in multicarrier code-division multiple access (MCCDMA) system to provide a interference free environment. Based on the existing literature, the direct construction of optimal ZCCSs are limited to its length. In this paper, we are interested in constructing optimal ZCCSs of all possible even lengths using Pseudo-Boolean functions. The maximum column sequence peakto-man envelop power ratio (PMEPR) of the proposed ZCCSs is upper-bounded by two, which may give an extra benefit in managing PMEPR in an ZCCS based MC-CDMA system, as well as the ability to handle a large number of users.
Crystalline: Fast and Memory Efficient Wait-Free Reclamation
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

Historically, memory management based on lock-free reference counting was very inefficient, especially for read-dominated workloads. Thus, approaches such as epoch-based reclamation (EBR), hazard pointers (HP), or a combination thereof have received significant attention. EBR exhibits excellent performance but is blocking due to potentially unbounded memory usage. In contrast, HP are non-blocking and achieve good memory efficiency but are much slower. Moreover, HP are only lock-free in the general case. Recently, several new memory reclamation approaches such as WFE and Hyaline have been proposed. WFE achieves wait-freedom, but is less memory efficient and suffers from suboptimal performance in oversubscribed scenarios; Hyaline achieves higher performance and memory efficiency, but lacks wait-freedom. We present a new wait-free memory reclamation scheme, Crystalline, that simultaneously addresses the challenges of high performance, high memory efficiency, and wait-freedom. Crystalline guarantees complete wait-freedom even when threads are dynamically recycled, asynchronously reclaims memory in the sense that any thread can reclaim memory retired by any other thread, and ensures (an almost) balanced reclamation workload across all threads. The latter two properties result in Crystalline's high performance and high memory efficiency. Simultaneously ensuring all three properties require overcoming unique challenges which we discuss in the paper. Crystalline's implementation relies on specialized instructions which are widely available on commodity hardware such as x86-64 or ARM64. Our experimental evaluations show that Crystalline exhibits outstanding scalability and memory efficiency, and achieves superior throughput than typical reclamation schemes such as EBR as the number of threads grows.
Efficient recurrent neural network methods for anomalously diffusing single particle short and noisy trajectories
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Anomalous diffusion occurs at very different scales in nature, from atomic systems to motions in cell organelles, biological tissues or ecology, and also in artificial materials, such as cement. Being able to accurately measure the anomalous exponent associated with a given particle trajectory, thus determining whether the particle subdiffuses, superdiffuses or performs normal diffusion is of key importance to understand the diffusion process. Also, it is often important to trustingly identify the model behind the trajectory, as this gives a large amount of information on the system dynamics. Both aspects are particularly difficult when the input data are short and noisy trajectories. It is even more difficult if one cannot guarantee that the trajectories output in experiments is homogeneous, hindering the statistical methods based on ensembles of trajectories. We present a data-driven method able to infer the anomalous exponent and to identify the type of anomalous diffusion process behind single, noisy and short trajectories, with good accuracy. This model was used in our participation in the Anomalous Diffusion (AnDi) Challenge. A combination of convolutional and recurrent neural networks were used to achieve state-of-the-art results when compared to methods participating in the AnDi Challenge, ranking top 4 in both classification and diffusion exponent regression.
Evolution of emotion semantics
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Humans possess the unique ability to communicate emotions through language. Although concepts like anger or awe are abstract, there is a shared consensus about what these English emotion words mean. This consensus may give the impression that their meaning is static, but we propose this is not the case. We cannot travel back to earlier periods to study emotion concepts directly, but we can examine text corpora, which have partially preserved the meaning of emotion words. Using natural language processing of historical text, we found evidence for semantic change in emotion words over the past century and that varying rates of change were predicted in part by an emotion concept's prototypicality - how representative it is of the broader category of "emotion". Prototypicality negatively correlated with historical rates of emotion semantic change obtained from text-based word embeddings, beyond more established variables including usage frequency in English and a second comparison language, French. This effect for prototypicality did not consistently extend to the semantic category of birds, suggesting its relevance for predicting semantic change may be category-dependent. Our results suggest emotion semantics are evolving over time, with prototypical emotion words remaining semantically stable, while other emotion words evolve more freely.
Building a Foundation for Data-Driven, Interpretable, and Robust Policy Design using the AI Economist
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Optimizing economic and public policy is critical to address socioeconomic issues and trade-offs, e.g., improving equality, productivity, or wellness, and poses a complex mechanism design problem. A policy designer needs to consider multiple objectives, policy levers, and behavioral responses from strategic actors who optimize for their individual objectives. Moreover, real-world policies should be explainable and robust to simulation-to-reality gaps, e.g., due to calibration issues. Existing approaches are often limited to a narrow set of policy levers or objectives that are hard to measure, do not yield explicit optimal policies, or do not consider strategic behavior, for example. Hence, it remains challenging to optimize policy in real-world scenarios. Here we show that the AI Economist framework enables effective, flexible, and interpretable policy design using two-level reinforcement learning (RL) and data-driven simulations. We validate our framework on optimizing the stringency of US state policies and Federal subsidies during a pandemic, e.g., COVID-19, using a simulation fitted to real data. We find that log-linear policies trained using RL significantly improve social welfare, based on both public health and economic outcomes, compared to past outcomes. Their behavior can be explained, e.g., well-performing policies respond strongly to changes in recovery and vaccination rates. They are also robust to calibration errors, e.g., infection rates that are over or underestimated. As of yet, real-world policymaking has not seen adoption of machine learning methods at large, including RL and AI-driven simulations. Our results show the potential of AI to guide policy design and improve social welfare amidst the complexity of the real world.
An Efficient Egocentric Regulator for Continuous Targeting Problems of the Underactuated Quadrotor
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Flying robots such as the quadrotor could provide an efficient approach for medical treatment or sensor placing of wild animals. In these applications, continuously targeting the moving animal is a crucial requirement. Due to the underactuated characteristics of the quadrotor and the coupled kinematics with the animal, nonlinear optimal tracking approaches, other than smooth feedback control, are required. However, with severe nonlinearities, it would be time-consuming to evaluate control inputs, and real-time tracking may not be achieved with generic optimizers onboard. To tackle this problem, a novel efficient egocentric regulation approach with high computational efficiency is proposed in this paper. Specifically, it directly formulates the optimal tracking problem in an egocentric manner regarding the quadrotor's body coordinates. Meanwhile, the nonlinearities of the system are peeled off through a mapping of the feedback states as well as control inputs, between the inertial and body coordinates. In this way, the proposed efficient egocentric regulator only requires solving a quadratic performance objective with linear constraints and then generate control inputs analytically. Comparative simulations and mimic biological experiment are carried out to verify the effectiveness and computational efficiency. Results demonstrate that the proposed control approach presents the highest and stablest computational efficiency than generic optimizers on different platforms. Particularly, on a commonly utilized onboard computer, our method can compute the control action in approximately 0.3 ms, which is on the order of 350 times faster than that of generic nonlinear optimizers, establishing a control frequency around 3000 Hz.
Implementasi dan Analisis Performa Bonding Interface Mode 802.3ad sebagai Link Redundancy pada Router Mikrotik
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2021
Year: 2021

Network stability and reliability is an absolute requirement for telecommunications networks. Bonding interface is a technique that can facilitate the network to serve services that require network stability and reliability. This interface bonding system combines two interfaces into a virtual link that is characterized by the use of one IP address. If a frame is sent from the sender to the receiver, but in the process of sending one of the links there is an interruption, then the link that is still connected will be able to maintain the connection so that frame transmission continues, this working system is called link redundancy. To monitor the condition of the link whether it is connected or broken, a mechanism called link-monitoring is used. The monitoring link used in this final project is Media Independent Interface (MII). The test step is to implement a Bonding Interface network for the use of video streaming, VoIP, and file transfer. The analysis carried out is a failover test that uses a connection switching time parameter and a QoS test with packet loss, delay, jitter, and throughput parameters. The results will then be compared with a network that does not use a Bonding Interface, which is a network that is only connected using one link. From the results of the research conducted is that the Bonding Interface system is able to perform a redundancy mechanism when one of the links is broken/down to an active/connected link and the services that are run are not interrupted. Bonding Interface is also able to provide network stability compared to networks that do not use a Bonding Interface, this is characterized by a smaller jitter value than the use of a network with one link.
High-frequency shape recovery from shading by CNN and domain adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Importance of structured-light based one-shot scanning technique is increasing because of its simple system configuration and ability of capturing moving objects. One severe limitation of the technique is that it can capture only sparse shape, but not high frequency shapes, because certain area of projection pattern is required to encode spatial information. In this paper, we propose a technique to recover high-frequency shapes by using shading information, which is captured by one-shot RGB-D sensor based on structured light with single camera. Since color image comprises shading information of object surface, high-frequency shapes can be recovered by shape from shading techniques. Although multiple images with different lighting positions are required for shape from shading techniques, we propose a learning based approach to recover shape from a single image. In addition, to overcome the problem of preparing sufficient amount of data for training, we propose a new data augmentation method for high-frequency shapes using synthetic data and domain adaptation. Experimental results are shown to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Efficient and Generic Interactive Segmentation Framework to Correct Mispredictions during Clinical Evaluation of Medical Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Semantic segmentation of medical images is an essential first step in computer-aided diagnosis systems for many applications. However, given many disparate imaging modalities and inherent variations in the patient data, it is difficult to consistently achieve high accuracy using modern deep neural networks (DNNs). This has led researchers to propose interactive image segmentation techniques where a medical expert can interactively correct the output of a DNN to the desired accuracy. However, these techniques often need separate training data with the associated human interactions, and do not generalize to various diseases, and types of medical images. In this paper, we suggest a novel conditional inference technique for DNNs which takes the intervention by a medical expert as test time constraints and performs inference conditioned upon these constraints. Our technique is generic can be used for medical images from any modality. Unlike other methods, our approach can correct multiple structures simultaneously and add structures missed at initial segmentation. We report an improvement of 13.3, 12.5, 17.8, 10.2, and 12.4 times in user annotation time than full human annotation for the nucleus, multiple cells, liver and tumor, organ, and brain segmentation respectively. We report a time saving of 2.8, 3.0, 1.9, 4.4, and 8.6 fold compared to other interactive segmentation techniques. Our method can be useful to clinicians for diagnosis and post-surgical follow-up with minimal intervention from the medical expert. The source-code and the detailed results are available here [1].
An Empirical Study on End-to-End Singing Voice Synthesis with Encoder-Decoder Architectures
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2021
Year: 2021

With the rapid development of neural network architectures and speech processing models, singing voice synthesis with neural networks is becoming the cutting-edge technique of digital music production. In this work, in order to explore how to improve the quality and efficiency of singing voice synthesis, in this work, we use encoder-decoder neural models and a number of vocoders to achieve singing voice synthesis. We conduct experiments to demonstrate that the models can be trained using voice data with pitch information, lyrics and beat information, and the trained models can produce smooth, clear and natural singing voice that is close to real human voice. As the models work in the end-to-end manner, they allow users who are not domain experts to directly produce singing voice by arranging pitches, lyrics and beats.
Road Scenes Segmentation Across Different Domains by Disentangling Latent Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Deep learning models obtain impressive accuracy in road scenes understanding, however they need a large quantity of labeled samples for their training. Additionally, such models do not generalise well to environments where the statistical properties of data do not perfectly match those of training scenes, and this can be a significant problem for intelligent vehicles. Hence, domain adaptation approaches have been introduced to transfer knowledge acquired on a label-abundant source domain to a related label-scarce target domain. In this work, we design and carefully analyse multiple latent space-shaping regularisation strategies that work together to reduce the domain shift. More in detail, we devise a feature clustering strategy to increase domain alignment, a feature perpendicularity constraint to space apart features belonging to different semantic classes, including those not present in the current batch, and a feature norm alignment strategy to separate active and inactive channels. In addition, we propose a novel evaluation metric to capture the relative performance of an adapted model with respect to supervised training. We validate our framework in driving scenarios, considering both synthetic-to-real and real-to-real adaptation, outperforming previous feature-level state-of-the-art methods on multiple road scenes benchmarks.
Sequen-C: A Multilevel Overview of Temporal Event Sequences
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2021
Year: 2021

Building a visual overview of temporal event sequences with an optimal level-of-detail (i.e. simplified but informative) is an ongoing challenge - expecting the user to zoom into every important aspect of the overview can lead to missing insights. We propose a technique to build a multilevel overview of event sequences, whose granularity can be transformed across sequence clusters (vertical level-of-detail) or longitudinally (horizontal level-of-detail), using hierarchical aggregation and a novel cluster data representation Align-Score-Simplify. By default, the overview shows an optimal number of sequence clusters obtained through the average silhouette width metric - then users are able to explore alternative optimal sequence clusterings. The vertical level-of-detail of the overview changes along with the number of clusters, whilst the horizontal level-of-detail refers to the level of summarization applied to each cluster representation. The proposed technique has been implemented into a visualization system called Sequence Cluster Explorer (Sequen-C) that allows multilevel and detail-on-demand exploration through three coordinated views, and the inspection of data attributes at cluster, unique sequence, and individual sequence level. We present two case studies using real-world datasets in the healthcare domain: CUREd and MIMIC-III; which demonstrate how the technique can aid users to obtain a summary of common and deviating pathways, and explore data attributes for selected patterns.
When Googling it doesn't work: The challenge of finding security advice for smart home devices
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

As users increasingly introduce Internet-connected devices into their homes, having access to accurate and relevant cyber security information is a fundamental means of ensuring safe use. Given the paucity of information provided with many devices at the time of purchase, this paper engages in a critical study of the type of advice that home Internet of Things (IoT) or smart device users might be presented with on the Internet to inform their cyber security practices. We base our research on an analysis of 427 web pages from 234 organisations that present information on security threats and relevant cyber security advice. The results show that users searching online for information are subject to an enormous range of advice and news from various sources with differing levels of credibility and relevance. With no clear explanation of how a user may assess the threats as they are pertinent to them, it becomes difficult to understand which pieces of advice would be the most effective in their situation. Recommendations are made to improve the clarity, consistency and availability of guidance from recognised sources to improve user access and understanding.
Topology Optimization Methods for 3D Structural Problems: A Comparative Study
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2021
Year: 2021

The work provides an exhaustive comparison of some representative families of topology optimization methods for 3D structural optimization, such as the Solid Isotropic Material with Penalization (SIMP), the Level-set, the Bidirectional Evolutionary Structural Optimization (BESO), and the Variational Topology Optimization (VARTOP) methods. The main differences and similarities of these approaches are then highlighted from an algorithmic standpoint. The comparison is carried out via the study of a set of numerical benchmark cases using industrial-like fine-discretization meshes (around 1 million finite elements), and Matlab as the common computational platform, to ensure fair comparisons. Then, the results obtained for every benchmark case with the different methods are compared in terms of computational cost, topology quality, achieved minimum value of the objective function, and robustness of the computations (convergence in objective function and topology). Finally, some quantitative and qualitative results are presented, from which, an attempt of qualification of the methods, in terms of their relative performance, is done.
Investigating The Impacting Factors on The Public's Attitudes Towards Autonomous Vehicles Using Sentiment Analysis from Social Media Data
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2021
Year: 2021

The public's attitudes play a critical role in the acceptance, purchase, use, and research and development of autonomous vehicles (AVs). To date, the public's attitudes towards AVs were mostly estimated through traditional survey data with high labor costs and a low quantity of samples, which also might be one of the reasons why the influencing factors on the public's attitudes of AVs have not been studied from multiple aspects in a comprehensive way yet. To address the issue, this study aims to propose a method by using large-scale social media data to investigate key factors that affect the public's attitudes and acceptance of AVs. A total of 954,151 Twitter data related to AVs and 53 candidate independent variables from seven categories were extracted using the web scraping method. Then, sentiment analysis was used to measure the public attitudes towards AVs by calculating sentiment scores. Random forests algorithm was employed to preliminarily select candidate independent variables according to their importance, while a linear mixed model was performed to explore the impacting factors considering the unobserved heterogeneities caused by the subjectivity level of tweets. The results showed that the overall attitude of the public on AVs was slightly optimistic. Factors like "drunk", "blind spot", and "mobility" had the largest impacts on public attitudes. In addition, people were more likely to express positive feelings when talking about words such as "lidar" and "Tesla" that relate to high technologies. Conversely, factors such as "COVID-19", "pedestrian", "sleepy", and "highway" were found to have significantly negative effects on the public's attitudes. The findings of this study are beneficial for the development of AV technologies, the guidelines for AV-related policy formulation, and the public's understanding and acceptance of AVs.