OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Visually Impaired Aid using Convolutional Neural Networks, Transfer Learning, and Particle Competition and Cooperation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Navigation and mobility are some of the major problems faced by visually impaired people in their daily lives. Advances in computer vision led to the proposal of some navigation systems. However, most of them require expensive and/or heavy hardware. In this paper we propose the use of convolutional neural networks (CNN), transfer learning, and semi-supervised learning (SSL) to build a framework aimed at the visually impaired aid. It has low computational costs and, therefore, may be implemented on current smartphones, without relying on any additional equipment. The smartphone camera can be used to automatically take pictures of the path ahead. Then, they will be immediately classified, providing almost instantaneous feedback to the user. We also propose a dataset to train the classifiers, including indoor and outdoor situations with different types of light, floor, and obstacles. Many different CNN architectures are evaluated as feature extractors and classifiers, by fine-tuning weights pre-trained on a much larger dataset. The graph-based SSL method, known as particle competition and cooperation, is also used for classification, allowing feedback from the user to be incorporated without retraining the underlying network. 92\% and 80\% classification accuracy is achieved in the proposed dataset in the best supervised and SSL scenarios, respectively.
Classification of abrupt changes along viewing profiles of scientific articles
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2020
Year: 2020

With the expansion of electronic publishing, a new dynamics of scientific articles dissemination was initiated. Nowadays, many works are widely disseminated even before publication, in the form of preprints. Another important new element concerns the views of published articles. Thanks to the availability of respective data by some journals, such as PLoS ONE, it became possible to develop investigations on how scientific works are viewed along time, often before the first citations appear. This provides the main theme of the present work. More specifically, our research was motivated by preliminary observations that the view profiles along time tend to present a piecewise linear nature. A methodology was then delineated in order to identify the main segments in the view profiles, which allowed several related measurements to be derived. In particular, we focused on the inclination and length of each subsequent segment. Basic statistics indicated that the inclination can vary substantially along subsequent segments, while the segment lengths resulted more stable. Complementary joint statistics analysis, considering pairwise correlations, provided further information about the properties of the views. In order to better understand the view profiles, we performed respective multivariate statistical analysis, including principal component analysis and hierarchical clustering. The results suggest that a portion of the polygonal views are organized into clusters or groups. These groups were characterized in terms of prototypes indicating the relative increase or decrease along subsequent segments. Four respective distinct models were then developed for representing the observed segments. It was found that models incorporating joint dependencies between the properties of the segments provided the most accurate results among the considered alternatives.
Epipolar Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

A common approach to localize 3D human joints in a synchronized and calibrated multi-view setup consists of two-steps: (1) apply a 2D detector separately on each view to localize joints in 2D, and (2) perform robust triangulation on 2D detections from each view to acquire the 3D joint locations. However, in step 1, the 2D detector is limited to solving challenging cases which could potentially be better resolved in 3D, such as occlusions and oblique viewing angles, purely in 2D without leveraging any 3D information. Therefore, we propose the differentiable "epipolar transformer", which enables the 2D detector to leverage 3D-aware features to improve 2D pose estimation. The intuition is: given a 2D location p in the current view, we would like to first find its corresponding point p' in a neighboring view, and then combine the features at p' with the features at p, thus leading to a 3D-aware feature at p. Inspired by stereo matching, the epipolar transformer leverages epipolar constraints and feature matching to approximate the features at p'. Experiments on InterHand and Human3.6M show that our approach has consistent improvements over the baselines. Specifically, in the condition where no external data is used, our Human3.6M model trained with ResNet-50 backbone and image size 256 x 256 outperforms state-of-the-art by 4.23 mm and achieves MPJPE 26.9 mm.
Belief Rule Based Expert System to Identify the Crime Zones
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

This paper focuses on Crime zone Identification. Then, it clarifies how we conducted the Belief Rule Base algorithm to produce interesting frequent patterns for crime hotspots. The paper also shows how we used an expert system to forecast potential types of crime. In order to further analyze the crime datasets, the paper introduces an analysis study by combining our findings of the Chittagong crime dataset with demographic information to capture factors that could affect neighborhood safety. The results of this solution could be used to raise awareness of the dangerous locations and to help agencies predict future crimes at a specific location in a given time.
Robust Tensor Decomposition for Image Representation Based on Generalized Correntropy
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Traditional tensor decomposition methods, e.g., two dimensional principal component analysis and two dimensional singular value decomposition, that minimize mean square errors, are sensitive to outliers. To overcome this problem, in this paper we propose a new robust tensor decomposition method using generalized correntropy criterion (Corr-Tensor). A Lagrange multiplier method is used to effectively optimize the generalized correntropy objective function in an iterative manner. The Corr-Tensor can effectively improve the robustness of tensor decomposition with the existence of outliers without introducing any extra computational cost. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method significantly reduces the reconstruction error on face reconstruction and improves the accuracies on handwritten digit recognition and facial image clustering.
How Context Affects Language Models' Factual Predictions
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

When pre-trained on large unsupervised textual corpora, language models are able to store and retrieve factual knowledge to some extent, making it possible to use them directly for zero-shot cloze-style question answering. However, storing factual knowledge in a fixed number of weights of a language model clearly has limitations. Previous approaches have successfully provided access to information outside the model weights using supervised architectures that combine an information retrieval system with a machine reading component. In this paper, we go a step further and integrate information from a retrieval system with a pre-trained language model in a purely unsupervised way. We report that augmenting pre-trained language models in this way dramatically improves performance and that the resulting system, despite being unsupervised, is competitive with a supervised machine reading baseline. Furthermore, processing query and context with different segment tokens allows BERT to utilize its Next Sentence Prediction pre-trained classifier to determine whether the context is relevant or not, substantially improving BERT's zero-shot cloze-style question-answering performance and making its predictions robust to noisy contexts.
A Generalized Kernel Risk Sensitive Loss for Robust Two-Dimensional Singular Value Decomposition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Two-dimensional singular decomposition (2DSVD) has been widely used for image processing tasks, such as image reconstruction, classification, and clustering. However, traditional 2DSVD algorithm is based on the mean square error (MSE) loss, which is sensitive to outliers. To overcome this problem, we propose a robust 2DSVD framework based on a generalized kernel risk sensitive loss (GKRSL-2DSVD) which is more robust to noise and and outliers. Since the proposed objective function is non-convex, a majorization-minimization algorithm is developed to efficiently solve it with guaranteed convergence. The proposed framework has inherent properties of processing non-centered data, rotational invariant, being easily extended to higher order spaces. Experimental results on public databases demonstrate that the performance of the proposed method on different applications significantly outperforms that of all the benchmarks.
Joint Uplink-Downlink Resource Allocation for OFDMA-URLLC MEC Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we study resource allocation algorithm design for multiuser orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) ultra-reliable low latency communication (URLLC) in mobile edge computing (MEC) systems. To achieve the stringent end-to-end delay and reliability requirements of URLLC MEC systems, we propose joint uplink-downlink resource allocation and finite blocklength transmission. Furthermore, we propose a partial time overlap between the uplink and downlink frames to minimize the end-to-end delay, which introduces new time causality constraints. Then, the proposed resource allocation algorithm is formulated as an optimization problem for minimization of the total weighted transmit power of the network under constraints on the minimum quality-of-service regarding the number of computed URLLC user bits within the maximum allowable computing time, i.e., the end-to-end delay of a computation task. Due to the non-convexity of the optimization problem, finding the globally optimal solution entails a high computational complexity which is not tolerable for real-time applications. Therefore, a low-complexity algorithm based on successive convex approximation is proposed to find a high-quality sub-optimal solution. Our simulation results show that the proposed resource allocation algorithm design facilitates the application of URLLC in MEC systems, and yields significant power savings compared to a benchmark scheme.
Channel Estimation for Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Assisted Millimeter Wave MIMO Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

Intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) are regarded as promising enablers for future millimeter wave (mmWave) wireless communication, due to their ability to create favorable line-of-sight (LoS) propagation environments. In this paper, we investigate channel estimation in downlink IRS-assisted mmWave multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. By leveraging the sparsity of mmWave channels, we formulate the channel estimation problem as a fixed-rank constrained non-convex optimization problem. To tackle the non-convexity, an efficient algorithm is proposed by capitalizing on alternating minimization and manifold optimization (MO), which yields a locally optimal solution. Simulation results show that the proposed MO-based estimation (MO-EST) algorithm significantly outperforms two benchmark schemes and demonstrate the robustness of the MO-EST algorithm with respect to imperfect knowledge of the sparsity level of the channels in practical implementations.
Knowledge Graph semantic enhancement of input data for improving AI
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

Intelligent systems designed using machine learning algorithms require a large number of labeled data. Background knowledge provides complementary, real world factual information that can augment the limited labeled data to train a machine learning algorithm. The term Knowledge Graph (KG) is in vogue as for many practical applications, it is convenient and useful to organize this background knowledge in the form of a graph. Recent academic research and implemented industrial intelligent systems have shown promising performance for machine learning algorithms that combine training data with a knowledge graph. In this article, we discuss the use of relevant KGs to enhance input data for two applications that use machine learning -- recommendation and community detection. The KG improves both accuracy and explainability.
Towards Robustifying NLI Models Against Lexical Dataset Biases
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

While deep learning models are making fast progress on the task of Natural Language Inference, recent studies have also shown that these models achieve high accuracy by exploiting several dataset biases, and without deep understanding of the language semantics. Using contradiction-word bias and word-overlapping bias as our two bias examples, this paper explores both data-level and model-level debiasing methods to robustify models against lexical dataset biases. First, we debias the dataset through data augmentation and enhancement, but show that the model bias cannot be fully removed via this method. Next, we also compare two ways of directly debiasing the model without knowing what the dataset biases are in advance. The first approach aims to remove the label bias at the embedding level. The second approach employs a bag-of-words sub-model to capture the features that are likely to exploit the bias and prevents the original model from learning these biased features by forcing orthogonality between these two sub-models. We performed evaluations on new balanced datasets extracted from the original MNLI dataset as well as the NLI stress tests, and show that the orthogonality approach is better at debiasing the model while maintaining competitive overall accuracy. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/owenzx/LexicalDebias-ACL2020
Approaching Optimal Duplicate Detection in a Sliding Window
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2020
Year: 2020

Duplicate detection is the problem of identifying whether a given item has previously appeared in a (possibly infinite) stream of data, when only a limited amount of memory is available. Unfortunately the infinite stream setting is ill-posed, and error rates of duplicate detection filters turn out to be heavily constrained: consequently they appear to provide no advantage, asymptotically, over a biased coin toss [8]. In this paper we formalize the sliding window setting introduced by [13,16], and show that a perfect (zero error) solution can be used up to a maximal window size $w_\text{max}$. Above this threshold we show that some existing duplicate detection filters (designed for the $\textit{non-windowed}$ setting) perform better that those targeting the windowed problem. Finally, we introduce a "queuing construction" that improves on the performance of some duplicate detection filters in the windowed setting. We also analyse the security of our filters in an adversarial setting.
BayesRace: Learning to race autonomously using prior experience
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Autonomous race cars require perception, estimation, planning, and control modules which work together asynchronously while driving at the limit of a vehicle's handling capability. A fundamental challenge encountered in designing these software components lies in predicting the vehicle's future state (e.g. position, orientation, and speed) with high accuracy. The root cause is the difficulty in identifying vehicle model parameters that capture the effects of lateral tire slip. We present a model-based planning and control framework for autonomous racing that significantly reduces the effort required in system identification and control design. Our approach alleviates the gap induced by simulation-based controller design by learning from on-board sensor measurements. A major focus of this work is empirical, thus, we demonstrate our contributions by experiments on validated 1:43 and 1:10 scale autonomous racing simulations.
Keen2Act: Activity Recommendation in Online Social Collaborative Platforms
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2020
Year: 2020

Social collaborative platforms such as GitHub and Stack Overflow have been increasingly used to improve work productivity via collaborative efforts. To improve user experiences in these platforms, it is desirable to have a recommender system that can suggest not only items (e.g., a GitHub repository) to a user, but also activities to be performed on the suggested items (e.g., forking a repository). To this end, we propose a new approach dubbed Keen2Act, which decomposes the recommendation problem into two stages: the Keen and Act steps. The Keen step identifies, for a given user, a (sub)set of items in which he/she is likely to be interested. The Act step then recommends to the user which activities to perform on the identified set of items. This decomposition provides a practical approach to tackling complex activity recommendation tasks while producing higher recommendation quality. We evaluate our proposed approach using two real-world datasets and obtain promising results whereby Keen2Act outperforms several baseline models.
Non-iterative Simultaneous Rigid Registration Method for Serial Sections of Biological Tissue
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we propose a novel non-iterative algorithm to simultaneously estimate optimal rigid transformation for serial section images, which is a key component in volume reconstruction of serial sections of biological tissue. In order to avoid error accumulation and propagation caused by current algorithms, we add extra condition that the position of the first and the last section images should remain unchanged. This constrained simultaneous registration problem has not been solved before. Our algorithm method is non-iterative, it can simultaneously compute rigid transformation for a large number of serial section images in a short time. We prove that our algorithm gets optimal solution under ideal condition. And we test our algorithm with synthetic data and real data to verify our algorithm's effectiveness.
The Fairness of Leximin in Allocation of Indivisible Chores
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2020
Year: 2020

The leximin solution -- which selects an allocation that maximizes the minimum utility, then the second minimum utility, and so forth -- is known to provide EFX (envy-free up to any good) fairness guarantee in some contexts when allocating indivisible goods. However, it remains unknown how fair the leximin solution is when used to allocate indivisible chores. In this paper, we demonstrate that the leximin solution can be modified to also provide compelling fairness guarantees for the allocation of indivisible chores. First, we generalize the definition of the leximin solution. Then, we show that the leximin solution finds a PROP1 (proportional up to one good) and PO (Pareto-optimal) allocation for 3 or 4 agents in the context of chores allocation with additive distinct valuations. Additionally, we prove that the leximin solution is EFX for combinations of goods and chores for agents with general but identical valuations.
3-D Diffusive Molecular Communication with Two Fully-Absorbing Receivers: Hitting Probability and Performance Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

Exact analytical channel models for molecular communication via diffusion (MCvD) systems involving multiple fully absorbing receivers (FARs) in a three-dimensional (3- D) medium are hard to obtain due to the mathematical intractability of corresponding diffusion equations. This work, therefore, consider an MCvD system with two spherical FARs in a 3-D diffusion-limited medium and develop several insights using an approximate analytical expression for the hitting probability of information molecule (IM). Further, based on the hitting probability, a novel approximate closed-form analytical expression for the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) is derived to analyze the detection performance at each FAR in the presence of other FAR. Finally, simulation results are presented to validate the analytical results using the particle-based and Monte-Carlo simulations and to yield important insights into the MCvD system performance with two FARs
Performance Optimization of a Fuzzy Entropy based Feature Selection and Classification Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, based on a fuzzy entropy feature selection framework, different methods have been implemented and compared to improve the key components of the framework. Those methods include the combinations of three ideal vector calculations, three maximal similarity classifiers and three fuzzy entropy functions. Different feature removal orders based on the fuzzy entropy values were also compared. The proposed method was evaluated on three publicly available biomedical datasets. From the experiments, we concluded the optimized combination of the ideal vector, similarity classifier and fuzzy entropy function for feature selection. The optimized framework was also compared with other six classical filter-based feature selection methods. The proposed method was ranked as one of the top performers together with the Correlation and ReliefF methods. More importantly, the proposed method achieved the most stable performance for all three datasets when the features being gradually removed. This indicates a better feature ranking performance than the other compared methods.
Maximizing Information Gain in Partially Observable Environments via Prediction Reward
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

Information gathering in a partially observable environment can be formulated as a reinforcement learning (RL), problem where the reward depends on the agent's uncertainty. For example, the reward can be the negative entropy of the agent's belief over an unknown (or hidden) variable. Typically, the rewards of an RL agent are defined as a function of the state-action pairs and not as a function of the belief of the agent; this hinders the direct application of deep RL methods for such tasks. This paper tackles the challenge of using belief-based rewards for a deep RL agent, by offering a simple insight that maximizing any convex function of the belief of the agent can be approximated by instead maximizing a prediction reward: a reward based on prediction accuracy. In particular, we derive the exact error between negative entropy and the expected prediction reward. This insight provides theoretical motivation for several fields using prediction rewards---namely visual attention, question answering systems, and intrinsic motivation---and highlights their connection to the usually distinct fields of active perception, active sensing, and sensor placement. Based on this insight we present deep anticipatory networks (DANs), which enables an agent to take actions to reduce its uncertainty without performing explicit belief inference. We present two applications of DANs: building a sensor selection system for tracking people in a shopping mall and learning discrete models of attention on fashion MNIST and MNIST digit classification.