OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Progressive Spatial Recurrent Neural Network for Intra Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Intra prediction is an important component of modern video codecs, which is able to efficiently squeeze out the spatial redundancy in video frames. With preceding pixels as the context, traditional intra prediction schemes generate linear predictions based on several predefined directions (i.e. modes) for blocks to be encoded. However, these modes are relatively simple and their predictions may fail when facing blocks with complex textures, which leads to additional bits encoding the residue. In this paper, we design a Progressive Spatial Recurrent Neural Network (PS-RNN) that learns to conduct intra prediction. Specifically, our PS-RNN consists of three spatial recurrent units and progressively generates predictions by passing information along from preceding contents to blocks to be encoded. To make our network generate predictions considering both distortion and bit-rate, we propose to use Sum of Absolute Transformed Difference (SATD) as the loss function to train PS-RNN since SATD is able to measure rate-distortion cost of encoding a residue block. Moreover, our method supports variable-block-size for intra prediction, which is more practical in real coding conditions. The proposed intra prediction scheme achieves on average 2.5% bit-rate reduction on variable-block-size settings under the same reconstruction quality compared with HEVC.
Model Agnostic Supervised Local Explanations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Model interpretability is an increasingly important component of practical machine learning. Some of the most common forms of interpretability systems are example-based, local, and global explanations. One of the main challenges in interpretability is designing explanation systems that can capture aspects of each of these explanation types, in order to develop a more thorough understanding of the model. We address this challenge in a novel model called MAPLE that uses local linear modeling techniques along with a dual interpretation of random forests (both as a supervised neighborhood approach and as a feature selection method). MAPLE has two fundamental advantages over existing interpretability systems. First, while it is effective as a black-box explanation system, MAPLE itself is a highly accurate predictive model that provides faithful self explanations, and thus sidesteps the typical accuracy-interpretability trade-off. Specifically, we demonstrate, on several UCI datasets, that MAPLE is at least as accurate as random forests and that it produces more faithful local explanations than LIME, a popular interpretability system. Second, MAPLE provides both example-based and local explanations and can detect global patterns, which allows it to diagnose limitations in its local explanations.
Polarimetric Convolutional Network for PolSAR Image Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

The approaches for analyzing the polarimetric scattering matrix of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) data have always been the focus of PolSAR image classification. Generally, the polarization coherent matrix and the covariance matrix obtained by the polarimetric scattering matrix only show a limited number of polarimetric information. In order to solve this problem, we propose a sparse scattering coding way to deal with polarimetric scattering matrix and obtain a close complete feature. This encoding mode can also maintain polarimetric information of scattering matrix completely. At the same time, in view of this encoding way, we design a corresponding classification algorithm based on convolution network to combine this feature. Based on sparse scattering coding and convolution neural network, the polarimetric convolutional network is proposed to classify PolSAR images by making full use of polarimetric information. We perform the experiments on the PolSAR images acquired by AIRSAR and RADARSAT-2 to verify the proposed method. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method get better results and has huge potential for PolSAR data classification. Source code for sparse scattering coding is available at https://github.com/liuxuvip/Polarimetric-Scattering-Coding.
High-Resolution Mammogram Synthesis using Progressive Generative Adversarial Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

The ability to generate synthetic medical images is useful for data augmentation, domain transfer, and out-of-distribution detection. However, generating realistic, high-resolution medical images is challenging, particularly for Full Field Digital Mammograms (FFDM), due to the textural heterogeneity, fine structural details and specific tissue properties. In this paper, we explore the use of progressively trained generative adversarial networks (GANs) to synthesize mammograms, overcoming the underlying instabilities when training such adversarial models. This work is the first to show that generation of realistic synthetic medical images is feasible at up to 1280x1024 pixels, the highest resolution achieved for medical image synthesis, enabling visualizations within standard mammographic hanging protocols. We hope this work can serve as a useful guide and facilitate further research on GANs in the medical imaging domain.
Learning Singularity Avoidance
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

With the increase in complexity of robotic systems and the rise in non-expert users, it can be assumed that task constraints are not explicitly known. In tasks where avoiding singularity is critical to its success, this paper provides an approach, especially for non-expert users, for the system to learn the constraints contained in a set of demonstrations, such that they can be used to optimise an autonomous controller to avoid singularity, without having to explicitly know the task constraints. The proposed approach avoids singularity, and thereby unpredictable behaviour when carrying out a task, by maximising the learnt manipulability throughout the motion of the constrained system, and is not limited to kinematic systems. Its benefits are demonstrated through comparisons with other control policies which show that the constrained manipulability of a system learnt through demonstration can be used to avoid singularities in cases where these other policies would fail. In the absence of the systems manipulability subject to a tasks constraints, the proposed approach can be used instead to infer these with results showing errors less than 10^-5 in 3DOF simulated systems as well as 10^-2 using a 7DOF real world robotic system.
Inferring Multidimensional Rates of Aging from Cross-Sectional Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Modeling how individuals evolve over time is a fundamental problem in the natural and social sciences. However, existing datasets are often cross-sectional with each individual observed only once, making it impossible to apply traditional time-series methods. Motivated by the study of human aging, we present an interpretable latent-variable model that learns temporal dynamics from cross-sectional data. Our model represents each individual's features over time as a nonlinear function of a low-dimensional, linearly-evolving latent state. We prove that when this nonlinear function is constrained to be order-isomorphic, the model family is identifiable solely from cross-sectional data provided the distribution of time-independent variation is known. On the UK Biobank human health dataset, our model reconstructs the observed data while learning interpretable rates of aging associated with diseases, mortality, and aging risk factors.
A comprehensive study of sparse representation techniques for offline signature verification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

In this work, a feature extraction method for offline signature verification is presented that harnesses the power of sparse representation in order to deliver state-of-the-art verification performance in several signature datasets like CEDAR, MCYT-75, GPDS and UTSIG. Beyond the accuracy improvements, several major parameters associated with sparse representation; such as selected configuration, dictionary size, sparsity level and positivity priors are investigated. Besides, it is evinced that 2nd order statistics of the sparse codes is a powerful pooling function for the formation of the global signature descriptor. Also, a thorough evaluation of the effects of preprocessing is introduced by an automated algorithm in order to select the optimum thinning level. Finally, a segmentation strategy which employs a special form of spatial pyramid tailored to the problem of sparse representation is presented along with the enhancing of the produced descriptor on meaningful areas of the signature as emerged from the BRISK key-point detection mechanism. The obtained state-of-the-art results on the most challenging signature datasets provide a strong indication towards the benefits of learned features, even in writer dependent (WD) scenarios with a unique model for each writer and only a few available reference samples of him/her.
Video-based Person Re-identification via 3D Convolutional Networks and Non-local Attention
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Video-based person re-identification (ReID) is a challenging problem, where some video tracks of people across non-overlapping cameras are available for matching. Feature aggregation from a video track is a key step for video-based person ReID. Many existing methods tackle this problem by average/maximum temporal pooling or RNNs with attention. However, these methods cannot deal with temporal dependency and spatial misalignment problems at the same time. We are inspired by video action recognition that involves the identification of different actions from video tracks. Firstly, we use 3D convolutions on video volume, instead of using 2D convolutions across frames, to extract spatial and temporal features simultaneously. Secondly, we use a non-local block to tackle the misalignment problem and capture spatial-temporal long-range dependencies. As a result, the network can learn useful spatial-temporal information as a weighted sum of the features in all space and temporal positions in the input feature map. Experimental results on three datasets show that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin on multiple metrics.
Multi-Scale Convolutional-Stack Aggregation for Robust White Matter Hyperintensities Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Segmentation of both large and small white matter hyperintensities/lesions in brain MR images is a challenging task which has drawn much attention in recent years. We propose a multi-scale aggregation model framework to deal with volume-varied lesions. Firstly, we present a specifically-designed network for small lesion segmentation called Stack-Net, in which multiple convolutional layers are connected, aiming to preserve rich local spatial information of small lesions before the sub-sampling layer. Secondly, we aggregate multi-scale Stack-Nets with different receptive fields to learn multi-scale contextual information of both large and small lesions. Our model is evaluated on recent MICCAI WMH Challenge Dataset and outperforms the state-of-the-art on lesion recall and lesion F1-score under 5-fold cross validation. In addition, we further test our pre-trained models on a Multiple Sclerosis lesion dataset with 30 subjects under cross-center evaluation. Results show that the aggregation model is effective in learning multi-scale spatial information.It claimed the first place on the hidden test set after independent evaluation by the challenge organizer. In addition, we further test our pre-trained models on a Multiple Sclerosis lesion dataset with 30 subjects under cross-center evaluation. Results show that the aggregation model is effective in learning multi-scale spatial information.
LSTM-Based Zero-Velocity Detection for Robust Inertial Navigation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

We present a method to improve the accuracy of a zero-velocity-aided inertial navigation system (INS) by replacing the standard zero-velocity detector with a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network. While existing threshold-based zero-velocity detectors are not robust to varying motion types, our learned model accurately detects stationary periods of the inertial measurement unit (IMU) despite changes in the motion of the user. Upon detection, zero-velocity pseudo-measurements are fused with a dead reckoning motion model in an extended Kalman filter (EKF). We demonstrate that our LSTM-based zero-velocity detector, used within a zero-velocity-aided INS, improves zero-velocity detection during human localization tasks. Consequently, localization accuracy is also improved. Our system is evaluated on more than 7.5 km of indoor pedestrian locomotion data, acquired from five different subjects. We show that 3D positioning error is reduced by over 34% compared to existing fixed-threshold zero-velocity detectors for walking, running, and stair climbing motions. Additionally, we demonstrate how our learned zero-velocity detector operates effectively during crawling and ladder climbing. Our system is calibration-free (no careful threshold-tuning is required) and operates consistently with differing users, IMU placements, and shoe types, while being compatible with any generic zero-velocity-aided INS.
NEUZZ: Efficient Fuzzing with Neural Program Smoothing
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

Fuzzing has become the de facto standard technique for finding software vulnerabilities. However, even state-of-the-art fuzzers are not very efficient at finding hard-to-trigger software bugs. Most popular fuzzers use evolutionary guidance to generate inputs that can trigger different bugs. Such evolutionary algorithms, while fast and simple to implement, often get stuck in fruitless sequences of random mutations. Gradient-guided optimization presents a promising alternative to evolutionary guidance. Gradient-guided techniques have been shown to significantly outperform evolutionary algorithms at solving high-dimensional structured optimization problems in domains like machine learning by efficiently utilizing gradients or higher-order derivatives of the underlying function. However, gradient-guided approaches are not directly applicable to fuzzing as real-world program behaviors contain many discontinuities, plateaus, and ridges where the gradient-based methods often get stuck. We observe that this problem can be addressed by creating a smooth surrogate function approximating the discrete branching behavior of target program. In this paper, we propose a novel program smoothing technique using surrogate neural network models that can incrementally learn smooth approximations of a complex, real-world program's branching behaviors. We further demonstrate that such neural network models can be used together with gradient-guided input generation schemes to significantly improve the fuzzing efficiency. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate that NEUZZ significantly outperforms 10 state-of-the-art graybox fuzzers on 10 real-world programs both at finding new bugs and achieving higher edge coverage. NEUZZ found 31 unknown bugs that other fuzzers failed to find in 10 real world programs and achieved 3X more edge coverage than all of the tested graybox fuzzers for 24 hours running.
Manifold Adversarial Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Recently proposed adversarial training methods show the robustness to both adversarial and original examples and achieve state-of-the-art results in supervised and semi-supervised learning. All the existing adversarial training methods consider only how the worst perturbed examples (i.e., adversarial examples) could affect the model output. Despite their success, we argue that such setting may be in lack of generalization, since the output space (or label space) is apparently less informative.In this paper, we propose a novel method, called Manifold Adversarial Training (MAT). MAT manages to build an adversarial framework based on how the worst perturbation could affect the distributional manifold rather than the output space. Particularly, a latent data space with the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) will be first derived.On one hand, MAT tries to perturb the input samples in the way that would rough the distributional manifold the worst. On the other hand, the deep learning model is trained trying to promote in the latent space the manifold smoothness, measured by the variation of Gaussian mixtures (given the local perturbation around the data point). Importantly, since the latent space is more informative than the output space, the proposed MAT can learn better a robust and compact data representation, leading to further performance improvement. The proposed MAT is important in that it can be considered as a superset of one recently-proposed discriminative feature learning approach called center loss. We conducted a series of experiments in both supervised and semi-supervised learning on three benchmark data sets, showing that the proposed MAT can achieve remarkable performance, much better than those of the state-of-the-art adversarial approaches. We also present a series of visualization which could generate further understanding or explanation on adversarial examples.
Safe Reinforcement Learning via Probabilistic Shields
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2019
Year: 2019

This paper targets the efficient construction of a safety shield for decision making in scenarios that incorporate uncertainty. Markov decision processes (MDPs) are prominent models to capture such planning problems. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a machine learning technique to determine near-optimal policies in MDPs that may be unknown prior to exploring the model. However, during exploration, RL is prone to induce behavior that is undesirable or not allowed in safety- or mission-critical contexts. We introduce the concept of a probabilistic shield that enables decision-making to adhere to safety constraints with high probability. In a separation of concerns, we employ formal verification to efficiently compute the probabilities of critical decisions within a safety-relevant fragment of the MDP. We use these results to realize a shield that is applied to an RL algorithm which then optimizes the actual performance objective. We discuss tradeoffs between sufficient progress in exploration of the environment and ensuring safety. In our experiments, we demonstrate on the arcade game PAC-MAN and on a case study involving service robots that the learning efficiency increases as the learning needs orders of magnitude fewer episodes.
Waring Rank, Parameterized and Exact Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

Given nonnegative integers $n$ and $d$, where $n \gg d$, what is the minimum number $r$ such that there exist linear forms $\ell_1, \ldots, \ell_r \in \mathbb{C}[x_1, \ldots, x_n]$ so that $\ell_1^d + \cdots + \ell_r^d$ is supported exactly on the set of all degree-$d$ multilinear monomials in $x_1, \ldots, x_n$? We show that this and related questions have surprising and intimate connections to the areas of parameterized and exact algorithms, generalizing several well-known methods and providing a concrete approach to obtain faster approximate counting and deterministic decision algorithms. This gives a new application of Waring rank, a classical topic in algebraic geometry with connections to algebraic complexity theory, to computer science. To illustrate the amenability and utility of this approach, we give a randomized $4.075^d \cdot \mathrm{poly}(n, \varepsilon^{-1})$-time algorithm for computing a $(1 + \varepsilon)$ approximation of the sum of the coefficients of the multilinear monomials in a degree-$d$ homogeneous $n$-variate polynomial with nonnegative coefficients. As an application of this we give a faster algorithm for approximately counting subgraphs of bounded treewidth, improving on earlier work of Alon et al. Along the way we give an exact answer to an open problem of Koutis and Williams and sharpen a lower bound on the size of perfectly balanced hash families given by Alon and Gutner.
Hierarchical Multitask Learning for CTC-based Speech Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

Previous work has shown that neural encoder-decoder speech recognition can be improved with hierarchical multitask learning, where auxiliary tasks are added at intermediate layers of a deep encoder. We explore the effect of hierarchical multitask learning in the context of connectionist temporal classification (CTC)-based speech recognition, and investigate several aspects of this approach. Consistent with previous work, we observe performance improvements on telephone conversational speech recognition (specifically the Eval2000 test sets) when training a subword-level CTC model with an auxiliary phone loss at an intermediate layer. We analyze the effects of a number of experimental variables (like interpolation constant and position of the auxiliary loss function), performance in lower-resource settings, and the relationship between pretraining and multitask learning. We observe that the hierarchical multitask approach improves over standard multitask training in our higher-data experiments, while in the low-resource settings standard multitask training works well. The best results are obtained by combining hierarchical multitask learning and pretraining, which improves word error rates by 3.4% absolute on the Eval2000 test sets.
Generative adversarial interpolative autoencoding: adversarial training on latent space interpolations encourage convex latent distributions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

We present a neural network architecture based upon the Autoencoder (AE) and Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) that promotes a convex latent distribution by training adversarially on latent space interpolations. By using an AE as both the generator and discriminator of a GAN, we pass a pixel-wise error function across the discriminator, yielding an AE which produces non-blurry samples that match both high- and low-level features of the original images. Interpolations between images in this space remain within the latent-space distribution of real images as trained by the discriminator, and therfore preserve realistic resemblances to the network inputs. Code available at https://github.com/timsainb/GAIA
Determining ellipses from low-resolution images with a comprehensive image formation model
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

When determining the parameters of a parametric planar shape based on a single low-resolution image, common estimation paradigms lead to inaccurate parameter estimates. The reason behind poor estimation results is that standard estimation frameworks fail to model the image formation process at a sufficiently detailed level of analysis. We propose a new method for estimating the parameters of a planar elliptic shape based on a single photon-limited, low-resolution image. Our technique incorporates the effects of several elements - point-spread function, discretisation step, quantisation step, and photon noise - into a single cohesive and manageable statistical model. While we concentrate on the particular task of estimating the parameters of elliptic shapes, our ideas and methods have a much broader scope and can be used to address the problem of estimating the parameters of an arbitrary parametrically representable planar shape. Comprehensive experimental results on simulated and real imagery demonstrate that our approach yields parameter estimates with unprecedented accuracy. Furthermore, our method supplies a parameter covariance matrix as a measure of uncertainty for the estimated parameters, as well as a planar confidence region as a means for visualising the parameter uncertainty. The mathematical model developed in this paper may prove useful in a variety of disciplines which operate with imagery at the limits of resolution.