OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Towards Interpretable and Robust Hand Detection via Pixel-wise Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

The lack of interpretability of existing CNN-based hand detection methods makes it difficult to understand the rationale behind their predictions. In this paper, we propose a novel neural network model, which introduces interpretability into hand detection for the first time. The main improvements include: (1) Detect hands at pixel level to explain what pixels are the basis for its decision and improve transparency of the model. (2) The explainable Highlight Feature Fusion block highlights distinctive features among multiple layers and learns discriminative ones to gain robust performance. (3) We introduce a transparent representation, the rotation map, to learn rotation features instead of complex and non-transparent rotation and derotation layers. (4) Auxiliary supervision accelerates the training process, which saves more than 10 hours in our experiments. Experimental results on the VIVA and Oxford hand detection and tracking datasets show competitive accuracy of our method compared with state-of-the-art methods with higher speed.
DeepQuarantine for Suspicious Mail
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we introduce DeepQuarantine (DQ), a cloud technology to detect and quarantine potential spam messages. Spam attacks are becoming more diverse and can potentially be harmful to email users. Despite the high quality and performance of spam filtering systems, detection of a spam campaign can take some time. Unfortunately, in this case some unwanted messages get delivered to users. To solve this problem, we created DQ, which detects potential spam and keeps it in a special Quarantine folder for a while. The time gained allows us to double-check the messages to improve the reliability of the anti-spam solution. Due to high precision of the technology, most of the quarantined mail is spam, which allows clients to use email without delay. Our solution is based on applying Convolutional Neural Networks on MIME headers to extract deep features from large-scale historical data. We evaluated the proposed method on real-world data and showed that DQ enhances the quality of spam detection.
Reliable and interoperable computational molecular engineering: 2. Semantic interoperability based on the European Materials and Modelling Ontology
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2020
Year: 2020

The European Materials and Modelling Ontology (EMMO) is a top-level ontology designed by the European Materials Modelling Council to facilitate semantic interoperability between platforms, models, and tools in computational molecular engineering, integrated computational materials engineering, and related applications of materials modelling and characterization. Additionally, domain ontologies exist based on data technology developments from specific platforms. The present work discusses the ongoing work on establishing a European Virtual Marketplace Framework, into which diverse platforms can be integrated. It addresses common challenges that arise when marketplace-level domain ontologies are combined with a top-level ontology like the EMMO by ontology alignment.
Towards Evaluating Plan Generation Approaches with Instructional Texts
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

Recent research in behaviour understanding through language grounding has shown it is possible to automatically generate behaviour models from textual instructions. These models usually have goal-oriented structure and are modelled with different formalisms from the planning domain such as the Planning Domain Definition Language. One major problem that still remains is that there are no benchmark datasets for comparing the different model generation approaches, as each approach is usually evaluated on domain-specific application. To allow the objective comparison of different methods for model generation from textual instructions, in this report we introduce a dataset consisting of 83 textual instructions in English language, their refinement in a more structured form as well as manually developed plans for each of the instructions. The dataset is publicly available to the community.
Resource Sharing in the Edge: A Distributed Bargaining-Theoretic Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2020
Year: 2020

The growing demand for edge computing resources, particularly due to increasing popularity of Internet of Things (IoT), and distributed machine/deep learning applications poses a significant challenge. On the one hand, certain edge service providers (ESPs) may not have sufficient resources to satisfy their applications according to the associated service-level agreements. On the other hand, some ESPs may have additional unused resources. In this paper, we propose a resource-sharing framework that allows different ESPs to optimally utilize their resources and improve the satisfaction level of applications subject to constraints such as communication cost for sharing resources across ESPs. Our framework considers that different ESPs have their own objectives for utilizing their resources, thus resulting in a multi-objective optimization problem. We present an $N$-person \emph{Nash Bargaining Solution} (NBS) for resource allocation and sharing among ESPs with \emph{Pareto} optimality guarantee. Furthermore, we propose a \emph{distributed}, primal-dual algorithm to obtain the NBS by proving that the strong-duality property holds for the resultant resource sharing optimization problem. Using synthetic and real-world data traces, we show numerically that the proposed NBS based framework not only enhances the ability to satisfy applications' resource demands, but also improves utilities of different ESPs.
Possibility and prevention of inappropriate data manipulation in Polar Data Journal
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

Stakeholders in the scientific field must always maintain transparency in the process of publishing research results in journals. Unfortunately, although research misconduct has stopped, certain forms of manipulation continue to appear in other forms. As new techniques of scientific publishing develop, science stakeholders need to examine the possibility of inappropriate activity in these new platforms. The National Institute of Polar Research in Japan launched a new data journal Polar Data Journal (PDJ) in 2017 to review the quality of data obtained in the polar region. To maintain transparency in this new data journal, we investigated the possibility of inappropriate data manipulation in peer reviews before the inception of this journal. We clarified inappropriate activity for the data in the peer review and considered preventive measures. We designed a specific workflow for PDJ. This included two measures: (i) the comparison of hash values in the review process and (ii) open peer review report publishing. Using the hash value comparison, we detected two instances of inappropriate data manipulation after the start of the journal. This research will help improve workflow in data journals and data repositories.
Nmbr9 as a Constraint Programming Challenge
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

Modern board games are a rich source of interesting and new challenges for combinatorial problems. The game Nmbr9 is a solitaire style puzzle game using polyominoes. The rules of the game are simple to explain, but modelling the game effectively using constraint programming is hard. This abstract presents the game, contributes new generalized variants of the game suitable for benchmarking and testing, and describes a model for the presented variants. The question of the top possible score in the standard game is an open challenge.
Information transmission bounds between moving terminals
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

In networks of mobile autonomous agents, e.g. for data acquisition, we may wish to maximize data transfer or to reliably transfer a minimum amount of data, subject to quality of service or energy constraints. These requirements can be guaranteed through both offline node design/specifications and online trajectory/communications design. Regardless of the distance between them, for a stationary point-to-point transmitter-receiver pair communicating across a single link under average power constraints, the total data transfer is unbounded as time tends to infinity. In contrast, we show that if the transmitter/receiver is moving at any constant speed away from each other, then the maximum transmittable data is bounded. Although general closed-form expressions as a function of communication and mobility profile parameters do not yet exist, we provide closed-form expressions for particular cases, such as ideal free space path loss. Under more general scenarios we instead give lower bounds on the total transmittable information across a single link between mobile nodes.
Deep learning to discover and predict dynamics on an inertial manifold
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

A data-driven framework is developed to represent chaotic dynamics on an inertial manifold (IM), and applied to solutions of the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation. A hybrid method combining linear and nonlinear (neural-network) dimension reduction transforms between coordinates in the full state space and on the IM. Additional neural networks predict time-evolution on the IM. The formalism accounts for translation invariance and energy conservation, and substantially outperforms linear dimension reduction, reproducing very well key dynamic and statistical features of the attractor.
Geometric deep learning for computational mechanics Part I: Anisotropic Hyperelasticity
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

This paper is the first attempt to use geometric deep learning and Sobolev training to incorporate non-Euclidean microstructural data such that anisotropic hyperelastic material machine learning models can be trained in the finite deformation range. While traditional hyperelasticity models often incorporate homogenized measures of microstructural attributes, such as porosity averaged orientation of constitutes, these measures cannot reflect the topological structures of the attributes. We fill this knowledge gap by introducing the concept of weighted graph as a new mean to store topological information, such as the connectivity of anisotropic grains in assembles. Then, by leveraging a graph convolutional deep neural network architecture in the spectral domain, we introduce a mechanism to incorporate these non-Euclidean weighted graph data directly as input for training and for predicting the elastic responses of materials with complex microstructures. To ensure smoothness and prevent non-convexity of the trained stored energy functional, we introduce a Sobolev training technique for neural networks such that stress measure is obtained implicitly from taking directional derivatives of the trained energy functional. By optimizing the neural network to approximate both the energy functional output and the stress measure, we introduce a training procedure the improves efficiency and generalize the learned energy functional for different microstructures. The trained hybrid neural network model is then used to generate new stored energy functional for unseen microstructures in a parametric study to predict the influence of elastic anisotropy on the nucleation and propagation of fracture in the brittle regime.
When Humans Aren't Optimal: Robots that Collaborate with Risk-Aware Humans
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

In order to collaborate safely and efficiently, robots need to anticipate how their human partners will behave. Some of today's robots model humans as if they were also robots, and assume users are always optimal. Other robots account for human limitations, and relax this assumption so that the human is noisily rational. Both of these models make sense when the human receives deterministic rewards: i.e., gaining either $100 or $130 with certainty. But in real world scenarios, rewards are rarely deterministic. Instead, we must make choices subject to risk and uncertainty--and in these settings, humans exhibit a cognitive bias towards suboptimal behavior. For example, when deciding between gaining $100 with certainty or $130 only 80% of the time, people tend to make the risk-averse choice--even though it leads to a lower expected gain! In this paper, we adopt a well-known Risk-Aware human model from behavioral economics called Cumulative Prospect Theory and enable robots to leverage this model during human-robot interaction (HRI). In our user studies, we offer supporting evidence that the Risk-Aware model more accurately predicts suboptimal human behavior. We find that this increased modeling accuracy results in safer and more efficient human-robot collaboration. Overall, we extend existing rational human models so that collaborative robots can anticipate and plan around suboptimal human behavior during HRI.
The Two-Pass Softmax Algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.PF 2020
Year: 2020

The softmax (also called softargmax) function is widely used in machine learning models to normalize real-valued scores into a probability distribution. To avoid floating-point overflow, the softmax function is conventionally implemented in three passes: the first pass to compute the normalization constant, and two other passes to compute outputs from normalized inputs. We analyze two variants of the Three-Pass algorithm and demonstrate that in a well-optimized implementation on HPC-class processors performance of all three passes is limited by memory bandwidth. We then present a novel algorithm for softmax computation in just two passes. The proposed Two-Pass algorithm avoids both numerical overflow and the extra normalization pass by employing an exotic representation for intermediate values, where each value is represented as a pair of floating-point numbers: one representing the "mantissa" and another representing the "exponent". Performance evaluation demonstrates that on out-of-cache inputs on an Intel Skylake-X processor the new Two-Pass algorithm outperforms the traditional Three-Pass algorithm by up to 28% in AVX512 implementation, and by up to 18% in AVX2 implementation. The proposed Two-Pass algorithm also outperforms the traditional Three-Pass algorithm on Intel Broadwell and AMD Zen 2 processors. To foster reproducibility, we released an open-source implementation of the new Two-Pass Softmax algorithm and other experiments in this paper as a part of XNNPACK library at GitHub.com/google/XNNPACK.
LESS is More: Rethinking Probabilistic Models of Human Behavior
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Robots need models of human behavior for both inferring human goals and preferences, and predicting what people will do. A common model is the Boltzmann noisily-rational decision model, which assumes people approximately optimize a reward function and choose trajectories in proportion to their exponentiated reward. While this model has been successful in a variety of robotics domains, its roots lie in econometrics, and in modeling decisions among different discrete options, each with its own utility or reward. In contrast, human trajectories lie in a continuous space, with continuous-valued features that influence the reward function. We propose that it is time to rethink the Boltzmann model, and design it from the ground up to operate over such trajectory spaces. We introduce a model that explicitly accounts for distances between trajectories, rather than only their rewards. Rather than each trajectory affecting the decision independently, similar trajectories now affect the decision together. We start by showing that our model better explains human behavior in a user study. We then analyze the implications this has for robot inference, first in toy environments where we have ground truth and find more accurate inference, and finally for a 7DOF robot arm learning from user demonstrations.
On the Replicability of Combining Word Embeddings and Retrieval Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

We replicate recent experiments attempting to demonstrate an attractive hypothesis about the use of the Fisher kernel framework and mixture models for aggregating word embeddings towards document representations and the use of these representations in document classification, clustering, and retrieval. Specifically, the hypothesis was that the use of a mixture model of von Mises-Fisher (VMF) distributions instead of Gaussian distributions would be beneficial because of the focus on cosine distances of both VMF and the vector space model traditionally used in information retrieval. Previous experiments had validated this hypothesis. Our replication was not able to validate it, despite a large parameter scan space.
Examining the Effects of Emotional Valence and Arousal on Takeover Performance in Conditionally Automated Driving
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

In conditionally automated driving, drivers have difficulty in takeover transitions as they become increasingly decoupled from the operational level of driving. Factors influencing takeover performance, such as takeover lead time and the engagement of non-driving related tasks, have been studied in the past. However, despite the important role emotions play in human-machine interaction and in manual driving, little is known about how emotions influence drivers takeover performance. This study, therefore, examined the effects of emotional valence and arousal on drivers takeover timeliness and quality in conditionally automated driving. We conducted a driving simulation experiment with 32 participants. Movie clips were played for emotion induction. Participants with different levels of emotional valence and arousal were required to take over control from automated driving, and their takeover time and quality were analyzed. Results indicate that positive valence led to better takeover quality in the form of a smaller maximum resulting acceleration and a smaller maximum resulting jerk. However, high arousal did not yield an advantage in takeover time. This study contributes to the literature by demonstrating how emotional valence and arousal affect takeover performance. The benefits of positive emotions carry over from manual driving to conditionally automated driving while the benefits of arousal do not.
Heteroglossia: In-Situ Story Ideation with the Crowd
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

Ideation is essential for creative writing. Many authors struggle to come up with ideas throughout the writing process, yet modern writing tools fail to provide on-the-spot assistance for writers when they get stuck. This paper introduces Heteroglossia, an add-on for Google Docs that allows writers to elicit story ideas from the online crowd using their text editors. Writers can share snippets of their working drafts and ask the crowd to provide follow-up story ideas based on it. Heteroglossia employs a strategy called "role play", where each worker is assigned a fictional character in a story and asked to brainstorm plot ideas from that character's perspective. Our deployment with two experienced story writers shows that Heteroglossia is easy to use and can generate interesting ideas. Heteroglossia allows us to gain insight into how future technologies can be developed to support ideation in creative writing
Boosting Deep Face Recognition via Disentangling Appearance and Geometry
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we propose a framework for disentangling the appearance and geometry representations in the face recognition task. To provide supervision for this aim, we generate geometrically identical faces by incorporating spatial transformations. We demonstrate that the proposed approach enhances the performance of deep face recognition models by assisting the training process in two ways. First, it enforces the early and intermediate convolutional layers to learn more representative features that satisfy the properties of disentangled embeddings. Second, it augments the training set by altering faces geometrically. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that integrating the proposed approach into state-of-the-art face recognition methods effectively improves their performance on challenging datasets, such as LFW, YTF, and MegaFace. Both theoretical and practical aspects of the method are analyzed rigorously by concerning ablation studies and knowledge transfer tasks. Furthermore, we show that the knowledge leaned by the proposed method can favor other face-related tasks, such as attribute prediction.
180-degree Outpainting from a Single Image
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Presenting context images to a viewer's peripheral vision is one of the most effective techniques to enhance immersive visual experiences. However, most images only present a narrow view, since the field-of-view (FoV) of standard cameras is small. To overcome this limitation, we propose a deep learning approach that learns to predict a 180° panoramic image from a narrow-view image. Specifically, we design a foveated framework that applies different strategies on near-periphery and mid-periphery regions. Two networks are trained separately, and then are employed jointly to sequentially perform narrow-to-90° generation and 90°-to-180° generation. The generated outputs are then fused with their aligned inputs to produce expanded equirectangular images for viewing. Our experimental results show that single-view-to-panoramic image generation using deep learning is both feasible and promising.
Group Testing with Runlength Constraints for Topological Molecular Storage
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

Motivated by applications in topological DNA-based data storage, we introduce and study a novel setting of Non-Adaptive Group Testing (NAGT) with runlength constraints on the columns of the test matrix, in the sense that any two 1's must be separated by a run of at least d 0's. We describe and analyze a probabilistic construction of a runlength-constrained scheme in the zero-error and vanishing error settings, and show that the number of tests required by this construction is optimal up to logarithmic factors in the runlength constraint d and the number of defectives k in both cases. Surprisingly, our results show that runlength-constrained NAGT is not more demanding than unconstrained NAGT when d=O(k), and that for almost all choices of d and k it is not more demanding than NAGT with a column Hamming weight constraint only. Towards obtaining runlength-constrained Quantitative NAGT (QNAGT) schemes with good parameters, we also provide lower bounds for this setting and a nearly optimal probabilistic construction of a QNAGT scheme with a column Hamming weight constraint.
Cloudburst: Stateful Functions-as-a-Service
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) platforms and "serverless" cloud computing are becoming increasingly popular. Current FaaS offerings are targeted at stateless functions that do minimal I/O and communication. We argue that the benefits of serverless computing can be extended to a broader range of applications and algorithms. We present the design and implementation of Cloudburst, a stateful FaaS platform that provides familiar Python programming with low-latency mutable state and communication, while maintaining the autoscaling benefits of serverless computing. Cloudburst accomplishes this by leveraging Anna, an autoscaling key-value store, for state sharing and overlay routing combined with mutable caches co-located with function executors for data locality. Performant cache consistency emerges as a key challenge in this architecture. To this end, Cloudburst provides a combination of lattice-encapsulated state and new definitions and protocols for distributed session consistency. Empirical results on benchmarks and diverse applications show that Cloudburst makes stateful functions practical, reducing the state-management overheads of current FaaS platforms by orders of magnitude while also improving the state of the art in serverless consistency.