OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
SUM: Suboptimal Unitary Multi-task Learning Framework for Spatiotemporal Data Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

The typical multi-task learning methods for spatio-temporal data prediction involve low-rank tensor computation. However, such a method have relatively weak performance when the task number is small, and we cannot integrate it into non-linear models. In this paper, we propose a two-step suboptimal unitary method (SUM) to combine a meta-learning strategy into multi-task models. In the first step, it searches for a global pattern by optimising the general parameters with gradient descents under constraints, which is a geological regularizer to enable model learning with less training data. In the second step, we derive an optimised model on each specific task from the global pattern with only a few local training data. Compared with traditional multi-task learning methods, SUM shows advantages of generalisation ability on distant tasks. It can be applied on any multi-task models with the gradient descent as its optimiser regardless if the prediction function is linear or not. Moreover, we can harness the model to enable traditional prediction model to make coKriging. The experiments on public datasets have suggested that our framework, when combined with current multi-task models, has a conspicuously better prediction result when the task number is small compared to low-rank tensor learning, and our model has a quite satisfying outcome when adjusting the current prediction models for coKriging.
Evolving Gaussian Process kernels from elementary mathematical expressions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Choosing the most adequate kernel is crucial in many Machine Learning applications. Gaussian Process is a state-of-the-art technique for regression and classification that heavily relies on a kernel function. However, in the Gaussian Process literature, kernels have usually been either ad hoc designed, selected from a predefined set, or searched for in a space of compositions of kernels which have been defined a priori. In this paper, we propose a Genetic-Programming algorithm that represents a kernel function as a tree of elementary mathematical expressions. By means of this representation, a wider set of kernels can be modeled, where potentially better solutions can be found, although new challenges also arise. The proposed algorithm is able to overcome these difficulties and find kernels that accurately model the characteristics of the data. This method has been tested in several real-world time-series extrapolation problems, improving the state-of-the-art results while reducing the complexity of the kernels.
Adversarial Colorization Of Icons Based On Structure And Color Conditions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

We present a system to help designers create icons that are widely used in banners, signboards, billboards, homepages, and mobile apps. Designers are tasked with drawing contours, whereas our system colorizes contours in different styles. This goal is achieved by training a dual conditional generative adversarial network (GAN) on our collected icon dataset. One condition requires the generated image and the drawn contour to possess a similar contour, while the other anticipates the image and the referenced icon to be similar in color style. Accordingly, the generator takes a contour image and a man-made icon image to colorize the contour, and then the discriminators determine whether the result fulfills the two conditions. The trained network is able to colorize icons demanded by designers and greatly reduces their workload. For the evaluation, we compared our dual conditional GAN to several state-of-the-art techniques. Experiment results demonstrate that our network is over the previous networks. Finally, we will provide the source code, icon dataset, and trained network for public use.
Contextualising and Aligning Security Metrics and Business Objectives: a GQM-based Methodology
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

Pre-defined security metrics suffer from the problem of contextualisation, i.e. a lack of adaptability to particular organisational contexts - domain, technical infrastructure, stakeholders, business process, etc. Adapting metrics to an organisational context is essential (1) for the metrics to align with business requirements (2) for decision makers to maintain relevant security goals based on measurements from the field. In this paper we propose SYMBIOSIS, a methodology that defines a goal elicitation and refinement process mapping business objectives to security measurement goals via the use of systematic templates that capture relevant context elements (business goals, purpose, stakeholders, system scope). The novel contribution of SYMBIOSIS is the well-defined process, which enforces that (1) metrics align with business objectives via a top-down derivation that refines top-level business objectives to a manageable granularity (2) the impact of metrics on business objectives is explicitly traced via a bottom-up feedback mechanism, allowing an incremental approach where feedback from metrics influences business goals, and vice-versa. In this paper, we discuss the findings from applying SYMBIOSIS to three case studies of known security incidents. Our analysis shows how the aforementioned pitfalls of security metrics development processes affected the outcome of these high-profile security incidents and how SYMBIOSIS addresses such issues.
Map Matching Algorithm for Large-scale Datasets
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

GPS receivers embedded in cell phones and connected vehicles generate a series of location measurements that can be used for various analytical purposes. A common pre-processing step of this data is the so-called map matching. The goal of map matching is to infer the trajectory that the device followed in a road network from a potentially sparse series of noisy location measurements. Although accurate and robust map matching algorithms based on probabilistic models exist, they are computationally heavy and thus impractical for processing of large datasets. In this paper, we present a scalable map-matching algorithm based on Dijkstra shortest path method, that is both accurate and applicable to large datasets. Our experiments on a publicly-available dataset showed that the proposed method achieves accuracy that is comparable to that of the existing map matching methods using only a fraction of computational resources. In result, our algorithm can be used to efficiently process large datasets of noisy and potentially sparse location data that would be unexploitable using existing techniques due to their high computational requirements.
Rotation-invariant shipwreck recognition with forward-looking sonar
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Under the sea, visible spectrum cameras have limited sensing capacity, being able to detect objects only in clear water, but in a constrained range. Considering any sea water condition, sonars are more suitable to support autonomous underwater vehicles' navigation, even in turbid condition. Despite that sonar suitability, this type of sensor does not provide high-density information, such as optical sensors, making the process of object recognition to be more complex. To deal with that problem, we propose a novel trainable method to detect and recognize (identify) specific target objects under the sea with a forward-looking sonar. Our method has a preprocessing step in charge of strongly reducing the sensor noise and seabed background. To represent the object, our proposed method uses histogram of orientation gradient (HOG) as feature extractor. HOG ultimately feed a multi-scale oriented detector combined with a support vector machine to recognize specific trained objects in a rotation-invariant way. Performance assessment demonstrated promising results, favoring the method to be applied in underwater remote sensing.
Regularizing Model-Based Planning with Energy-Based Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Model-based reinforcement learning could enable sample-efficient learning by quickly acquiring rich knowledge about the world and using it to improve behaviour without additional data. Learned dynamics models can be directly used for planning actions but this has been challenging because of inaccuracies in the learned models. In this paper, we focus on planning with learned dynamics models and propose to regularize it using energy estimates of state transitions in the environment. We visually demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and show that off-policy training of an energy estimator can be effectively used to regularize planning with pre-trained dynamics models. Further, we demonstrate that the proposed method enables sample-efficient learning to achieve competitive performance in challenging continuous control tasks such as Half-cheetah and Ant in just a few minutes of experience.
sPortfolio: Stratified Visual Analysis of Stock Portfolios
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2019
Year: 2019

Quantitative Investment, built on the solid foundation of robust financial theories, is at the center stage in investment industry today. The essence of quantitative investment is the multi-factor model, which explains the relationship between the risk and return of equities. However, the multi-factor model generates enormous quantities of factor data, through which even experienced portfolio managers find it difficult to navigate. This has led to portfolio analysis and factor research being limited by a lack of intuitive visual analytics tools. Previous portfolio visualization systems have mainly focused on the relationship between the portfolio return and stock holdings, which is insufficient for making actionable insights or understanding market trends. In this paper, we present sPortfolio, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first visualization that attempts to explore the factor investment area. In particular, sPortfolio provides a holistic overview of the factor data and aims to facilitate the analysis at three different levels: a Risk-Factor level, for a general market situation analysis; a Multiple-Portfolio level, for understanding the portfolio strategies; and a Single-Portfolio level, for investigating detailed operations. The system's effectiveness and usability are demonstrated through three case studies. The system has passed its pilot study and is soon to be deployed in industry.
Cross-Domain Image Classification through Neural-Style Transfer Data Augmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

In particular, the lack of sufficient amounts of domain-specific data can reduce the accuracy of a classifier. In this paper, we explore the effects of style transfer-based data transformation on the accuracy of a convolutional neural network classifiers in the context of automobile detection under adverse winter weather conditions. The detection of automobiles under highly adverse weather conditions is a difficult task as such conditions present large amounts of noise in each image. The InceptionV2 architecture is trained on a composite dataset, consisting of either normal car image dataset , a mixture of normal and style transferred car images, or a mixture of normal car images and those taken at blizzard conditions, at a ratio of 80:20. All three classifiers are then tested on a dataset of car images taken at blizzard conditions and on vehicle-free snow landscape images. We evaluate and contrast the effectiveness of each classifier upon each dataset, and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of style-transfer based approaches to data augmentation.
New robust ScaLAPACK routine for computing the QR factorization with column pivoting
Venue: arXiv cs.MS 2019
Year: 2019

In this note we describe two modifications of the ScaLAPACK subroutines PxGEQPF for computing the QR factorization with the Businger-Golub column pivoting. First, we resolve a subtle numerical instability in the same way as we have done it for the LAPACK subroutines xGEQPF, xGEQP3 in 2006. [LAPACK Working Note 176 (2006); ACM Trans. Math. Softw. 2008]. The problem originates in the first release of LINPACK in the 1970's: due to severe cancellations in the down-dating of partial column norms, the pivoting procedure may be in the dark completely about the true norms of the pivot column candidates. This may cause miss-pivoting, and as a result loss of the important rank revealing structure of the computed triangular factor, with severe consequences on other solvers that rely on the rank revealing pivoting. The instability is so subtle that, e.g., inserting a WRITE statement or changing the process topology can drastically change the result. Secondly, we also correct a programming error in the complex subroutines PCGEQPF, PZGEQPF, which also causes wrong pivoting because of erroneous use of PSCNRM2, PDZNRM2 for the explicit norm computation.
How are attributes expressed in face DCNNs?
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

As deep networks become increasingly accurate at recognizing faces, it is vital to understand how these networks process faces. While these networks are solely trained to recognize identities, they also contain face related information such as sex, age, and pose of the face. The networks are not trained to learn these attributes. We introduce expressivity as a measure of how much a feature vector informs us about an attribute, where a feature vector can be from internal or final layers of a network. Expressivity is computed by a second neural network whose inputs are features and attributes. The output of the second neural network approximates the mutual information between feature vectors and an attribute. We investigate the expressivity for two different deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) architectures: a Resnet-101 and an Inception Resnet v2. In the final fully connected layer of the networks, we found the order of expressivity for facial attributes to be Age > Sex > Yaw. Additionally, we studied the changes in the encoding of facial attributes over training iterations. We found that as training progresses, expressivities of yaw, sex, and age decrease. Our technique can be a tool for investigating the sources of bias in a network and a step towards explaining the network's identity decisions.
Extracting Incentives from Black-Box Decisions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

An algorithmic decision-maker incentivizes people to act in certain ways to receive better decisions. These incentives can dramatically influence subjects' behaviors and lives, and it is important that both decision-makers and decision-recipients have clarity on which actions are incentivized by the chosen model. While for linear functions, the changes a subject is incentivized to make may be clear, we prove that for many non-linear functions (e.g. neural networks, random forests), classical methods for interpreting the behavior of models (e.g. input gradients) provide poor advice to individuals on which actions they should take. In this work, we propose a mathematical framework for understanding algorithmic incentives as the challenge of solving a Markov Decision Process, where the state includes the set of input features, and the reward is a function of the model's output. We can then leverage the many toolkits for solving MDPs (e.g. tree-based planning, reinforcement learning) to identify the optimal actions each individual is incentivized to take to improve their decision under a given model. We demonstrate the utility of our method by estimating the maximally-incentivized actions in two real-world settings: a recidivism risk predictor we train using ProPublica's COMPAS dataset, and an online credit scoring tool published by the Fair Isaac Corporation (FICO).
VATEX Captioning Challenge 2019: Multi-modal Information Fusion and Multi-stage Training Strategy for Video Captioning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

Multi-modal information is essential to describe what has happened in a video. In this work, we represent videos by various appearance, motion and audio information guided with video topic. By following multi-stage training strategy, our experiments show steady and significant improvement on the VATEX benchmark. This report presents an overview and comparative analysis of our system designed for both Chinese and English tracks on VATEX Captioning Challenge 2019.
The Impact of Popularity Bias on Fairness and Calibration in Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2019
Year: 2019

Recently there has been a growing interest in fairness-aware recommender systems, including fairness in providing consistent performance across different users or groups of users. A recommender system could be considered unfair if the recommendations do not fairly represent the tastes of a certain group of users while other groups receive recommendations that are consistent with their preferences. In this paper, we use a metric called miscalibration for measuring how a recommendation algorithm is responsive to users' true preferences and we consider how various algorithms may result in different degrees of miscalibration. A well-known type of bias in recommendation is popularity bias where few popular items are over-represented in recommendations, while the majority of other items do not get significant exposure. We conjecture that popularity bias is one important factor leading to miscalibration in recommendation. Our experimental results using two real-world datasets show that there is a strong correlation between how different user groups are affected by algorithmic popularity bias and their level of interest in popular items. Moreover, we show algorithms with greater popularity bias amplification tend to have greater miscalibration.
Image Generation and Recognition (Emotions)
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) were proposed in 2014 by Goodfellow et al., and have since been extended into multiple computer vision applications. This report provides a thorough survey of recent GAN research, outlining the various architectures and applications, as well as methods for training GANs and dealing with latent space. This is followed by a discussion of potential areas for future GAN research, including: evaluating GANs, better understanding GANs, and techniques for training GANs. The second part of this report outlines the compilation of a dataset of images `in the wild' representing each of the 7 basic human emotions, and analyses experiments done when training a StarGAN on this dataset combined with the FER2013 dataset.
An Efficient Beam and Channel Acquisition via Sparsity Map and Joint Angle-Delay Power Profile Estimation for Wideband Massive MIMO Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, an efficient beam and channel acquisition scheme together with joint angle-delay power profile (JADPP) construction are proposed for single-carrier mm-wave wideband sparse massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels when hybrid beamforming architecture is utilized. We consider two different modes of operation, namely slow-time beam acquisition and fast-time instantaneous channel estimation, for training stage of time division duplex based systems. In the first mode, where pre-structured hybrid beams are formed to scan intended angular sectors, the joint angle-delay sparsity map together with power intensities of each user channels are obtained by using a novel constant false alarm rate thresholding algorithm inspired from adaptive radar detection theory. The proposed thresholding algorithm employs a spatio-temporal adaptive matched filter type estimator, taking the strong interference due to simultaneously active multipath components of different user channels into account, in order to estimate JADPP of each user. After applying the proposed thresholding algorithm on the estimated power profile, the angle-delay sparsity map of the massive MIMO channel is constructed, based on which the channel covariance matrices (CCMs) are formed with significantly reduced amount of training snapshots. Then, by using the estimated CCMs, the analog beamformer is reconstructed by means of a virtual sectorization while taking the inter-group and inter-symbol interference into account. Finally, for the second mode of operation, two novel reduced-rank instantaneous channel estimators, operating in a proper beamspace formed by the hybrid structure, are proposed. The proposed beam and channel acquisition techniques attain the channel estimation accuracy of minimum mean square error filter with true knowledge of CCMs.
A Large-Deviation Upperbound on Directed Last-Passage Percolation Growth Rate Based on Entropy of Direction Vector
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

This short note provides a large-deviation-based upper bound on the growth rate of directed last passage percolation (LPP) using the entropy of the normalized direction vector.
A New Local Transformation Module for Few-shot Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Few-shot segmentation segments object regions of new classes with a few of manual annotations. Its key step is to establish the transformation module between support images (annotated images) and query images (unlabeled images), so that the segmentation cues of support images can guide the segmentation of query images. The existing methods form transformation model based on global cues, which however ignores the local cues that are verified in this paper to be very important for the transformation. This paper proposes a new transformation module based on local cues, where the relationship of the local features is used for transformation. To enhance the generalization performance of the network, the relationship matrix is calculated in a high-dimensional metric embedding space based on cosine distance. In addition, to handle the challenging mapping problem from the low-level local relationships to high-level semantic cues, we propose to apply generalized inverse matrix of the annotation matrix of support images to transform the relationship matrix linearly, which is non-parametric and class-agnostic. The result by the matrix transformation can be regarded as an attention map with high-level semantic cues, based on which a transformation module can be built simply.The proposed transformation module is a general module that can be used to replace the transformation module in the existing few-shot segmentation frameworks. We verify the effectiveness of the proposed method on Pascal VOC 2012 dataset. The value of mIoU achieves at 57.0% in 1-shot and 60.6% in 5-shot, which outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 1.6% and 3.5%, respectively.
Transformers without Tears: Improving the Normalization of Self-Attention
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

We evaluate three simple, normalization-centric changes to improve Transformer training. First, we show that pre-norm residual connections (PreNorm) and smaller initializations enable warmup-free, validation-based training with large learning rates. Second, we propose $\ell_2$ normalization with a single scale parameter (ScaleNorm) for faster training and better performance. Finally, we reaffirm the effectiveness of normalizing word embeddings to a fixed length (FixNorm). On five low-resource translation pairs from TED Talks-based corpora, these changes always converge, giving an average +1.1 BLEU over state-of-the-art bilingual baselines and a new 32.8 BLEU on IWSLT'15 English-Vietnamese. We observe sharper performance curves, more consistent gradient norms, and a linear relationship between activation scaling and decoder depth. Surprisingly, in the high-resource setting (WMT'14 English-German), ScaleNorm and FixNorm remain competitive but PreNorm degrades performance.