OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Universal Semantic Segmentation for Fisheye Urban Driving Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Semantic segmentation is a critical method in the field of autonomous driving. When performing semantic image segmentation, a wider field of view (FoV) helps to obtain more information about the surrounding environment, making automatic driving safer and more reliable, which could be offered by fisheye cameras. However, large public fisheye datasets are not available, and the fisheye images captured by the fisheye camera with large FoV comes with large distortion, so commonly-used semantic segmentation model cannot be directly utilized. In this paper, a seven degrees of freedom (DoF) augmentation method is proposed to transform rectilinear image to fisheye image in a more comprehensive way. In the training process, rectilinear images are transformed into fisheye images in seven DoF, which simulates the fisheye images taken by cameras of different positions, orientations and focal lengths. The result shows that training with the seven-DoF augmentation can improve the model's accuracy and robustness against different distorted fisheye data. This seven-DoF augmentation provides a universal semantic segmentation solution for fisheye cameras in different autonomous driving applications. Also, we provide specific parameter settings of the augmentation for autonomous driving. At last, we tested our universal semantic segmentation model on real fisheye images and obtained satisfactory results. The code and configurations are released at https://github.com/Yaozhuwa/FisheyeSeg.
Weighted Average Precision: Adversarial Example Detection in the Visual Perception of Autonomous Vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Recent works have shown that neural networks are vulnerable to carefully crafted adversarial examples (AE). By adding small perturbations to input images, AEs are able to make the victim model predicts incorrect outputs. Several research work in adversarial machine learning started to focus on the detection of AEs in autonomous driving. However, the existing studies either use preliminary assumption on outputs of detections or ignore the tracking system in the perception pipeline. In this paper, we firstly propose a novel distance metric for practical autonomous driving object detection outputs. Then, we bridge the gap between the current AE detection research and the real-world autonomous systems by providing a temporal detection algorithm, which takes the impact of tracking system into consideration. We perform evaluation on Berkeley Deep Drive (BDD) and CityScapes datasets to show how our approach outperforms existing single-frame-mAP based AE detections by increasing 17.76% accuracy of performance.
On the effect of symmetry requirement for rendezvous on the complete graph
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2020
Year: 2020

We consider a classic rendezvous game where two players try to meet each other on a set of $n$ locations. In each round, every player visits one of the locations and the game finishes when the players meet at the same location. The goal is to devise strategies for both players that minimize the expected waiting time till the rendezvous. In the asymmetric case, when the strategies of the players may differ, it is known that the optimum expected waiting time of $\frac{n+1}{2}$ is achieved by the wait-for-mommy pair of strategies, where one of the players stays at one location for $n$ rounds, while the other player searches through all the $n$ locations in a random order. However, if we insist that the players are symmetric --- they are expected to follow the same strategy --- then the best known strategy, proposed by Anderson and Weber, achieves an asymptotic expected waiting time of $0.829 n$. We show that the symmetry requirement indeed implies that the expected waiting time needs to be asymptotically larger than in the asymmetric case. Precisely, we prove that for every $n\geqslant 2$, if the players need to employ the same strategy, then the expected waiting time is at least $\frac{n+1}{2}+\varepsilon n$, where $\varepsilon=2^{-36}$.
Improving the Evaluation of Generative Models with Fuzzy Logic
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Objective and interpretable metrics to evaluate current artificial intelligent systems are of great importance, not only to analyze the current state of such systems but also to objectively measure progress in the future. In this work, we focus on the evaluation of image generation tasks. We propose a novel approach, called Fuzzy Topology Impact (FTI), that determines both the quality and diversity of an image set using topology representations combined with fuzzy logic. When compared to current evaluation methods, FTI shows better and more stable performance on multiple experiments evaluating the sensitivity to noise, mode dropping and mode inventing.
Investigating the Importance of Shape Features, Color Constancy, Color Spaces and Similarity Measures in Open-Ended 3D Object Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Despite the recent success of state-of-the-art 3D object recognition approaches, service robots are frequently failed to recognize many objects in real human-centric environments. For these robots, object recognition is a challenging task due to the high demand for accurate and real-time response under changing and unpredictable environmental conditions. Most of the recent approaches use either the shape information only and ignore the role of color information or vice versa. Furthermore, they mainly utilize the $L_n$ Minkowski family functions to measure the similarity of two object views, while there are various distance measures that are applicable to compare two object views. In this paper, we explore the importance of shape information, color constancy, color spaces, and various similarity measures in open-ended 3D object recognition. Towards this goal, we extensively evaluate the performance of object recognition approaches in three different configurations, including \textit{color-only}, \textit{shape-only}, and \textit{ combinations of color and shape}, in both offline and online settings. Experimental results concerning scalability, memory usage, and object recognition performance show that all of the \textit{combinations of color and shape} yields significant improvements over the \textit{shape-only} and \textit{color-only} approaches. The underlying reason is that color information is an important feature to distinguish objects that have very similar geometric properties with different colors and vice versa. Moreover, by combining color and shape information, we demonstrate that the robot can learn new object categories from very few training examples in a real-world setting.
Adversarial Data Encryption
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

In the big data era, many organizations face the dilemma of data sharing. Regular data sharing is often necessary for human-centered discussion and communication, especially in medical scenarios. However, unprotected data sharing may also lead to data leakage. Inspired by adversarial attack, we propose a method for data encryption, so that for human beings the encrypted data look identical to the original version, but for machine learning methods they are misleading. To show the effectiveness of our method, we collaborate with the Beijing Tiantan Hospital, which has a world leading neurological center. We invite $3$ doctors to manually inspect our encryption method based on real world medical images. The results show that the encrypted images can be used for diagnosis by the doctors, but not by machine learning methods.
Level Three Synthetic Fingerprint Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Today's legal restrictions that protect the privacy of biometric data are hampering fingerprint recognition researches. For instance, all high-resolution fingerprint databases ceased to be publicly available. To address this problem, we present a novel hybrid approach to synthesize realistic, high-resolution fingerprints. First, we improved Anguli, a handcrafted fingerprint generator, to obtain dynamic ridge maps with sweat pores and scratches. Then, we trained a CycleGAN to transform these maps into realistic fingerprints. Unlike other CNN-based works, we can generate several images for the same identity. We used our approach to create a synthetic database with 7400 images in an attempt to propel further studies in this field without raising legal issues. We included sweat pore annotations in 740 images to encourage research developments in pore detection. In our experiments, we employed two fingerprint matching approaches to confirm that real and synthetic databases have similar performance. We conducted a human perception analysis where sixty volunteers could hardly differ between real and synthesized fingerprints. Given that we also favorably compare our results with the most advanced works in the literature, our experimentation suggests that our approach is the new state-of-the-art.
Playing to Learn Better: Repeated Games for Adversarial Learning with Multiple Classifiers
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We consider the problem of prediction by a machine learning algorithm, called learner, within an adversarial learning setting. The learner's task is to correctly predict the class of data passed to it as a query. However, along with queries containing clean data, the learner could also receive malicious or adversarial queries from an adversary. The objective of the adversary is to evade the learner's prediction mechanism by sending adversarial queries that result in erroneous class prediction by the learner, while the learner's objective is to reduce the incorrect prediction of these adversarial queries without degrading the prediction quality of clean queries. We propose a game theory-based technique called a Repeated Bayesian Sequential Game where the learner interacts repeatedly with a model of the adversary using self play to determine the distribution of adversarial versus clean queries. It then strategically selects a classifier from a set of pre-trained classifiers that balances the likelihood of correct prediction for the query along with reducing the costs to use the classifier. We have evaluated our proposed technique using clean and adversarial text data with deep neural network-based classifiers and shown that the learner can select an appropriate classifier that is commensurate with the query type (clean or adversarial) while remaining aware of the cost to use the classifier.
Qatten: A General Framework for Cooperative Multiagent Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2020
Year: 2020

In many real-world tasks, multiple agents must learn to coordinate with each other given their private observations and limited communication ability. Deep multiagent reinforcement learning (Deep-MARL) algorithms have shown superior performance in such challenging settings. One representative class of work is multiagent value decomposition, which decomposes the global shared multiagent Q-value $Q_{tot}$ into individual Q-values $Q^{i}$ to guide individuals' behaviors, i.e. VDN imposing an additive formation and QMIX adopting a monotonic assumption using an implicit mixing method. However, most of the previous efforts impose certain assumptions between $Q_{tot}$ and $Q^{i}$ and lack theoretical groundings. Besides, they do not explicitly consider the agent-level impact of individuals to the whole system when transforming individual $Q^{i}$s into $Q_{tot}$. In this paper, we theoretically derive a general formula of $Q_{tot}$ in terms of $Q^{i}$, based on which we can naturally implement a multi-head attention formation to approximate $Q_{tot}$, resulting in not only a refined representation of $Q_{tot}$ with an agent-level attention mechanism, but also a tractable maximization algorithm of decentralized policies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art MARL methods on the widely adopted StarCraft benchmark across different scenarios, and attention analysis is further conducted with valuable insights.
Self-Supervised Joint Encoding of Motion and Appearance for First Person Action Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Wearable cameras are becoming more and more popular in several applications, increasing the interest of the research community in developing approaches for recognizing actions from the first-person point of view. An open challenge in egocentric action recognition is that videos lack detailed information about the main actor's pose and thus tend to record only parts of the movement when focusing on manipulation tasks. Thus, the amount of information about the action itself is limited, making crucial the understanding of the manipulated objects and their context. Many previous works addressed this issue with two-stream architectures, where one stream is dedicated to modeling the appearance of objects involved in the action, and another to extracting motion features from optical flow. In this paper, we argue that learning features jointly from these two information channels is beneficial to capture the spatio-temporal correlations between the two better. To this end, we propose a single stream architecture able to do so, thanks to the addition of a self-supervised block that uses a pretext motion prediction task to intertwine motion and appearance knowledge. Experiments on several publicly available databases show the power of our approach.
Sperm Detection and Tracking in Phase-Contrast Microscopy Image Sequences using Deep Learning and Modified CSR-DCF
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Nowadays, computer-aided sperm analysis (CASA) systems have made a big leap in extracting the characteristics of spermatozoa for studies or measuring human fertility. The first step in sperm characteristics analysis is sperm detection in the frames of the video sample. In this article, we used RetinaNet, a deep fully convolutional neural network as the object detector. Sperms are small objects with few attributes, that makes the detection more difficult in high-density samples and especially when there are other particles in semen, which could be like sperm heads. One of the main attributes of sperms is their movement, but this attribute cannot be extracted when only one frame would be fed to the network. To improve the performance of the sperm detection network, we concatenated some consecutive frames to use as the input of the network. With this method, the motility attribute has also been extracted, and then with the help of the deep convolutional network, we have achieved high accuracy in sperm detection. The second step is tracking the sperms, for extracting the motility parameters that are essential for indicating fertility and other studies on sperms. In the tracking phase, we modify the CSR-DCF algorithm. This method also has shown excellent results in sperm tracking even in high-density sperm samples, occlusions, sperm colliding, and when sperms exit from a frame and re-enter in the next frames. The average precision of the detection phase is 99.1%, and the F1 score of the tracking method evaluation is 96.61%. These results can be a great help in studies investigating sperm behavior and analyzing fertility possibility.
Nested Multiple Instance Learning in Modelling of HTTP network traffic
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

In many interesting cases, the application of machine learning is hindered by data having a complicated structure stimulated by a structured file-formats like JSONs, XMLs, or ProtoBuffers, which is non-trivial to convert to a vector / matrix. Moreover, since the structure frequently carries a semantic meaning, reflecting it in the machine learning model should improve the accuracy but more importantly it facilitates the explanation of decisions and the model. This paper demonstrates on the identification of infected computers in the computer network from their HTTP traffic, how to achieve this reflection using recent progress in multiple-instance learning. The proposed model is compared to complementary approaches from the prior art, the first relying on human-designed features and the second on automatically learned features through convolution neural networks. In a challenging scenario measuring accuracy only on unseen domains/malware families, the proposed model is superior to the prior art while providing a valuable feedback to the security researchers. We believe that the proposed framework will found applications elsewhere even beyond the field of security.
Model adaptation and unsupervised learning with non-stationary batch data under smooth concept drift
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Most predictive models assume that training and test data are generated from a stationary process. However, this assumption does not hold true in practice. In this paper, we consider the scenario of a gradual concept drift due to the underlying non-stationarity of the data source. While previous work has investigated this scenario under a supervised-learning and adaption conditions, few have addressed the common, real-world scenario when labels are only available during training. We propose a novel, iterative algorithm for unsupervised adaptation of predictive models. We show that the performance of our batch adapted prediction algorithm is better than that of its corresponding unadapted version. The proposed algorithm provides similar (or better, in most cases) performance within significantly less run time compared to other state of the art methods. We validate our claims though extensive numerical evaluations on both synthetic and real data.
Automatic Discourse Segmentation: an evaluation in French
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

In this article, we describe some discursive segmentation methods as well as a preliminary evaluation of the segmentation quality. Although our experiment were carried for documents in French, we have developed three discursive segmentation models solely based on resources simultaneously available in several languages: marker lists and a statistic POS labeling. We have also carried out automatic evaluations of these systems against the Annodis corpus, which is a manually annotated reference. The results obtained are very encouraging.
Outlier Guided Optimization of Abdominal Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Abdominal multi-organ segmentation of computed tomography (CT) images has been the subject of extensive research interest. It presents a substantial challenge in medical image processing, as the shape and distribution of abdominal organs can vary greatly among the population and within an individual over time. While continuous integration of novel datasets into the training set provides potential for better segmentation performance, collection of data at scale is not only costly, but also impractical in some contexts. Moreover, it remains unclear what marginal value additional data have to offer. Herein, we propose a single-pass active learning method through human quality assurance (QA). We built on a pre-trained 3D U-Net model for abdominal multi-organ segmentation and augmented the dataset either with outlier data (e.g., exemplars for which the baseline algorithm failed) or inliers (e.g., exemplars for which the baseline algorithm worked). The new models were trained using the augmented datasets with 5-fold cross-validation (for outlier data) and withheld outlier samples (for inlier data). Manual labeling of outliers increased Dice scores with outliers by 0.130, compared to an increase of 0.067 with inliers (p<0.001, two-tailed paired t-test). By adding 5 to 37 inliers or outliers to training, we find that the marginal value of adding outliers is higher than that of adding inliers. In summary, improvement on single-organ performance was obtained without diminishing multi-organ performance or significantly increasing training time. Hence, identification and correction of baseline failure cases present an effective and efficient method of selecting training data to improve algorithm performance.
Energy and Spectral Efficiency Tradeoff in OFDMA Networks via Antenna Selection Strategy
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we investigate the joint resource allocation and antenna selection algorithm design for uplink orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) communication system. We propose a multi-objective optimization framework to strike a balance between spectral efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE). The resource allocation design is formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem (MOOP), where the conflicting objective functions are linearly combined into a single objective function employing the weighted sum method. In order to develop an efficient solution, the majorization minimization (MM) approach is proposed where a surrogate function serves as a lower bound of the objective function. Then an iterative suboptimal algorithm is proposed to maximize the approximate objective function. Numerical results unveil an interesting tradeoff between the considered conflicting system design objectives and reveal the improved EE and SE facilitated by the proposed transmit antenna selection in OFDMA systems.
Explaining Explanations: Axiomatic Feature Interactions for Deep Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Recent work has shown great promise in explaining neural network behavior. In particular, feature attribution methods explain which features were most important to a model's prediction on a given input. However, for many tasks, simply knowing which features were important to a model's prediction may not provide enough insight to understand model behavior. The interactions between features within the model may better help us understand not only the model, but also why certain features are more important than others. In this work, we present Integrated Hessians, an extension of Integrated Gradients that explains pairwise feature interactions in neural networks. Integrated Hessians overcomes several theoretical limitations of previous methods to explain interactions, and unlike such previous methods is not limited to a specific architecture or class of neural network. Additionally, we find that our method is faster than existing methods when the number of features is large, and outperforms previous methods on existing quantitative benchmarks. Code available at https://github.com/suinleelab/path_explain
LoCEC: Local Community-based Edge Classification in Large Online Social Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2020
Year: 2020

Relationships in online social networks often imply social connections in the real world. An accurate understanding of relationship types benefits many applications, e.g. social advertising and recommendation. Some recent attempts have been proposed to classify user relationships into predefined types with the help of pre-labeled relationships or abundant interaction features on relationships. Unfortunately, both relationship feature data and label data are very sparse in real social platforms like WeChat, rendering existing methods inapplicable. In this paper, we present an in-depth analysis of WeChat relationships to identify the major challenges for the relationship classification task. To tackle the challenges, we propose a Local Community-based Edge Classification (LoCEC) framework that classifies user relationships in a social network into real-world social connection types. LoCEC enforces a three-phase processing, namely local community detection, community classification and relationship classification, to address the sparsity issue of relationship features and relationship labels. Moreover, LoCEC is designed to handle large-scale networks by allowing parallel and distributed processing. We conduct extensive experiments on the real-world WeChat network with hundreds of billions of edges to validate the effectiveness and efficiency of LoCEC.