OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
On Bundle Adjustment for Multiview PointCloud Registration
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Multiview registration is used to estimate Rigid Body Transformations (RBTs) from multiple frames and reconstruct a scene with corresponding scans. Despite the success of pairwise registration and pose synchronization, the concept of Bundle Adjustment (BA) has been proven to better maintain global consistency. So in this work, we make the multiview point-cloud registration more tractable from a different perspective in resolving range-based BA. Based on this analysis, we propose an objective function that takes both measurement noises and computational cost into account. For the feature parameter update, instead of calculating the global distribution parameters from the raw measurements, we aggregate the local distributions upon the pose update at each iteration. The computational cost of feature update is then only dependent on the number of scans. Finally, we develop a multiview registration system using voxel-based quantization that can be applied in real-world scenarios. The experimental results demonstrate our superiority over the baselines in terms of both accuracy and speed. Moreover, the results also show that our average positioning errors achieve the centimeter level.
Alternative Formulations for the Fluctuating Two-Ray Fading Model
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

We present two alternative formulations for the distribution of the fluctuating two-ray (FTR) fading model, which simplify its statistical characterization and subsequent use for performance evaluation. New expressions for the probability density function (PDF) and cumulative distribution function of the FTR model are obtained based on the observation that the FTR fading distribution is described, for arbitrary $m$, as an underlying Rician Shadowed (RS) distribution with continuously varying parameter $K$, while for the special case of $m$ being an integer, the FTR fading model is described in terms of a finite number of underlying squared Nakagami-$m$ distributions. It is shown that the chief statistics and any performance metric that are computed by averaging over the PDF of the FTR fading model can be expressed in terms of a finite-range integral over the corresponding statistic or performance metric for the RS (for arbitrary $m$) or the Nakagami-$m$ (for integer $m$) fading models, which have a simpler analytical characterization than the FTR model and for which many results are available in closed-form. New expressions for some Laplace-domain statistics of interest are also obtained; these are used to exemplify the practical relevance of this new formulation for performance analysis.
Optimizing full 3D SPARKLING trajectories for high-resolution T2*-weighted Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

The Spreading Projection Algorithm for Rapid K-space samplING, or SPARKLING, is an optimization-driven method that has been recently introduced for accelerated 2D T2*-w MRI using compressed sensing. It has then been extended to address 3D imaging using either stacks of 2D sampling patterns or a local 3D strategy that optimizes a single sampling trajectory at a time. 2D SPARKLING actually performs variable density sampling (VDS) along a prescribed target density while maximizing sampling efficiency and meeting the gradient-based hardware constraints. However, 3D SPARKLING has remained limited in terms of acceleration factors along the third dimension if one wants to preserve a peaky point spread function (PSF) and thus good image quality. In this paper, in order to achieve higher acceleration factors in 3D imaging while preserving image quality, we propose a new efficient algorithm that performs optimization on full 3D SPARKLING. The proposed implementation based on fast multipole methods (FMM) allows us to design sampling patterns with up to 10^7 k-space samples, thus opening the door to 3D VDS. We compare multi-CPU and GPU implementations and demonstrate that the latter is optimal for 3D imaging in the high-resolution acquisition regime (600$μ$m isotropic). Finally, we show that this novel optimization for full 3D SPARKLING outperforms stacking strategies or 3D twisted projection imaging through retrospective and prospective studies on NIST phantom and in vivo brain scans at 3 Tesla. Overall the proposed method allows for 2.5-3.75x shorter scan times compared to GRAPPA-4 parallel imaging acquisition at 3 Tesla without compromising image quality.
Feature Detection for Hand Hygiene Stages
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

The process of hand washing involves complex hand movements. There are six principal sequential steps for washing hands as per the World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines. In this work, a detailed description of an aluminium rig construction for creating a robust hand-washing dataset is discussed. The preliminary results with the help of image processing and computer vision algorithms for hand pose extraction and feature detection such as Harris detector, Shi-Tomasi and SIFT are demonstrated. The hand hygiene pose- Rub hands palm to palm was captured as an input image for running all the experiments. The future work will focus upon processing the video recordings of hand movements captured and applying deep-learning solutions for the classification of hand-hygiene stages.
Utilizing Treewidth for Quantitative Reasoning on Epistemic Logic Programs
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Extending the popular Answer Set Programming (ASP) paradigm by introspective reasoning capacities has received increasing interest within the last years. Particular attention is given to the formalism of epistemic logic programs (ELPs) where standard rules are equipped with modal operators which allow to express conditions on literals for being known or possible, i.e., contained in all or some answer sets, respectively. ELPs thus deliver multiple collections of answer sets, known as world views. Employing ELPs for reasoning problems so far has mainly been restricted to standard decision problems (complexity analysis) and enumeration (development of systems) of world views. In this paper, we take a next step and contribute to epistemic logic programming in two ways: First, we establish quantitative reasoning for ELPs, where the acceptance of a certain set of literals depends on the number (proportion) of world views that are compatible with the set. Second, we present a novel system that is capable of efficiently solving the underlying counting problems required to answer such quantitative reasoning problems. Our system exploits the graph-based measure treewidth and works by iteratively finding and refining (graph) abstractions of an ELP program. On top of these abstractions, we apply dynamic programming that is combined with utilizing existing search-based solvers like (e)clingo for hard combinatorial subproblems that appear during solving. It turns out that our approach is competitive with existing systems that were introduced recently. This work is under consideration for acceptance in TPLP.
Molecule Generation Experience: An Open Platform of Material Design for Public Users
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2021
Year: 2021

Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven material design has been attracting great attentions as a groundbreaking technology across a wide spectrum of industries. Molecular design is particularly important owing to its broad application domains and boundless creativity attributed to progresses in generative models. The recent maturity of molecular generative models has stimulated expectations for practical use among potential users, who are not necessarily familiar with coding or scripting, such as experimental engineers and students in chemical domains. However, most of the existing molecular generative models are Python libraries on GitHub, that are accessible for only IT-savvy users. To fill this gap, we newly developed a graphical user interface (GUI)-based web application of molecular generative models, Molecule Generation Experience, that is open to the general public. This is the first web application of molecular generative models enabling users to work with built-in datasets to carry out molecular design. In this paper, we describe the background technology extended from our previous work. Our new online evaluation and structural filtering algorithms significantly improved the generation speed by 30 to 1,000 times with a wider structural variety, satisfying chemical stability and synthetic reality. We also describe in detail our Kubernetes-based scalable cloud architecture and user-oriented GUI that are necessary components to achieve a public service. Finally, we present actual use cases in industrial research to design new photoacid generators (PAGs) as well as release cases in educational events.
Real-Time Visual Analysis of High-Volume Social Media Posts
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2021
Year: 2021

Breaking news and first-hand reports often trend on social media platforms before traditional news outlets cover them. The real-time analysis of posts on such platforms can reveal valuable and timely insights for journalists, politicians, business analysts, and first responders, but the high number and diversity of new posts pose a challenge. In this work, we present an interactive system that enables the visual analysis of streaming social media data on a large scale in real-time. We propose an efficient and explainable dynamic clustering algorithm that powers a continuously updated visualization of the current thematic landscape as well as detailed visual summaries of specific topics of interest. Our parallel clustering strategy provides an adaptive stream with a digestible but diverse selection of recent posts related to relevant topics. We also integrate familiar visual metaphors that are highly interlinked for enabling both explorative and more focused monitoring tasks. Analysts can gradually increase the resolution to dive deeper into particular topics. In contrast to previous work, our system also works with non-geolocated posts and avoids extensive preprocessing such as detecting events. We evaluated our dynamic clustering algorithm and discuss several use cases that show the utility of our system.
Deriving Disinformation Insights from Geolocalized Twitter Callouts
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

This paper demonstrates a two-stage method for deriving insights from social media data relating to disinformation by applying a combination of geospatial classification and embedding-based language modelling across multiple languages. In particular, the analysis in centered on Twitter and disinformation for three European languages: English, French and Spanish. Firstly, Twitter data is classified into European and non-European sets using BERT. Secondly, Word2vec is applied to the classified texts resulting in Eurocentric, non-Eurocentric and global representations of the data for the three target languages. This comparative analysis demonstrates not only the efficacy of the classification method but also highlights geographic, temporal and linguistic differences in the disinformation-related media. Thus, the contributions of the work are threefold: (i) a novel language-independent transformer-based geolocation method; (ii) an analytical approach that exploits lexical specificity and word embeddings to interrogate user-generated content; and (iii) a dataset of 36 million disinformation related tweets in English, French and Spanish.
Certified Compilation of Financial Contracts
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2021
Year: 2021

We present an extension to a certified financial contract management system that allows for templated declarative financial contracts and for integration with financial stochastic models through verified compilation into so-called payoff-expressions. Such expressions readily allow for determining the value of a contract in a given evaluation context, such as contexts created for stochastic simulations. The templating mechanism is useful both at the contract specification level, for writing generic reusable contracts, and for reuse of code that, without the templating mechanism, needs to be recompiled for different evaluation contexts. We report on the effect of using the certified system in the context of a GPGPU-based Monte Carlo simulation engine for pricing various over-the-counter (OTC) financial contracts. The full contract-management system, including the payoff-language compilation, is verified in the Coq proof assistant and certified Haskell code is extracted from our Coq development along with Futhark code for use in a data-parallel pricing engine.
The Differential Spectrum of the Power Mapping $x^{p^n-3}$
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

Let $n$ be a positive integer and $p$ a prime. The power mapping $x^{p^n-3}$ over $\mathbb{F}_{p^n}$ has desirable differential properties, and its differential spectra for $p=2,\,3$ have been determined. In this paper, for any odd prime $p$, by investigating certain quadratic character sums and some equations over $\mathbb{F}_{p^n}$, we determine the differential spectrum of $x^{p^n-3}$ with a unified approach. The obtained result shows that for any given odd prime $p$, the differential spectrum can be expressed explicitly in terms of $n$. Compared with previous results, a special elliptic curve over $\mathbb{F}_{p}$ plays an important role in our computation for the general case $p \ge 5$.
Computation and Communication Co-Design for Real-Time Monitoring and Control in Multi-Agent Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2021
Year: 2021

We investigate the problem of co-designing computation and communication in a multi-agent system (e.g. a sensor network or a multi-robot team). We consider the realistic setting where each agent acquires sensor data and is capable of local processing before sending updates to a base station, which is in charge of making decisions or monitoring phenomena of interest in real time. Longer processing at an agent leads to more informative updates but also larger delays, giving rise to a delay-accuracy-tradeoff in choosing the right amount of local processing at each agent. We assume that the available communication resources are limited due to interference, bandwidth, and power constraints. Thus, a scheduling policy needs to be designed to suitably share the communication channel among the agents. To that end, we develop a general formulation to jointly optimize the local processing at the agents and the scheduling of transmissions. Our novel formulation leverages the notion of Age of Information to quantify the freshness of data and capture the delays caused by computation and communication. We develop efficient resource allocation algorithms using the Whittle index approach and demonstrate our proposed algorithms in two practical applications: multi-agent occupancy grid mapping in time-varying environments, and ride sharing in autonomous vehicle networks. Our experiments show that the proposed co-design approach leads to a substantial performance improvement (18-82% in our tests).
Learning Activities in Colours and Rainbows for Programming Skill Development
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2021
Year: 2021

We present how we have created a series of bilingual (English and Welsh) STEM activities focusing on rainbows, colours, light and optical effects. The activities were motivated by the many rainbows that appeared in windows in the UK, in support of the National Health Service at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Rainbows are hopeful and are very fitting to be used as a positive iconic image at a time of much uncertainty. In this paper we explain how we have developed and organised the activities, focusing on colours, computer graphics and computer programming. Each lesson contains one or more activities, which enable people to take an active role in their learning. We have carefully prepared and organised several processes to guide academic colleagues to create and publish different activities in the theme. Which means that the activities appear similarly structured, can be categorised and searched in a consistent way. This structure can act as a blueprint for others to follow and apply to develop their own online course. The activities incrementally take people through learning about colour, rainbows, planning what to program, design and strategies to create colourful pictures using simple computer graphics principles based in processing.org.
Beam-Slicing for Jammer Mitigation in mmWave Massive MU-MIMO
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) massive multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) technology promises unprecedentedly high data rates for next-generation wireless systems. To be practically viable, mmWave massive MU-MIMO basestations (BS) must (i) rely on low-resolution data-conversion and (ii) be robust to jammer interference. This paper considers the problem of mitigating the impact of a permanently transmitting jammer during uplink transmission to a BS equipped with low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). To this end, we propose SNIPS, short for Soft-Nulling of Interferers with Partitions in Space. SNIPS combines beam-slicing---a localized, analog spatial transform that focuses the jammer energy onto a subset of all ADCs---together with a soft-nulling data detector that exploits knowledge of which ADCs are contaminated by jammer interference. Our numerical results show that SNIPS is able to successfully serve 65% of the user equipments (UEs) for scenarios in which a conventional antenna-domain soft-nulling data detector is only able to serve 2% of the UEs.
Operational Learning-based Boundary Estimation in Electromagnetic Medical Imaging
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Incorporating boundaries of the imaging object as a priori information to imaging algorithms can significantly improve the performance of electromagnetic medical imaging systems. To avoid overly complicating the system by using different sensors and the adverse effect of the subject's movement, a learning-based method is proposed to estimate the boundary (external contour) of the imaged object using the same electromagnetic imaging data. While imaging techniques may discard the reflection coefficients for being dominant and uninformative for imaging, these parameters are made use of for boundary detection. The learned model is verified through independent clinical human trials by using a head imaging system with a 16-element antenna array that works across the band 0.7-1.6 GHz. The evaluation demonstrated that the model achieves average dissimilarity of 0.012 in Hu-moment while detecting head boundary. The model enables fast scan and image creation while eliminating the need for additional devices for accurate boundary estimation.
On the complexity of the generalized Q2R automaton
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2021
Year: 2021

We study the dynamic and complexity of the generalized Q2R automaton. We show the existence of non-polynomial cycles as well as its capability to simulate with the synchronous update the classical version of the automaton updated under a block sequential update scheme. Furthermore, we show that the decision problem consisting in determine if a given node in the network changes its state is \textbf{P}-Hard.
Multi-Robot Path Planning in Complex Environments via Graph Embedding
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

We propose an approach to solve multi-agent path planning (MPP) problems for complex environments. Our method first designs a special pebble graph with a set of feasibility constraints, under which MPP problems have feasibility guarantee. We further propose an algorithm to greedily improve the optimality of planned MPP solutions via parallel pebble motions. As a second step, we develop a mesh optimization algorithm to embed our pebble graph into arbitrarily complex environments. We show that the feasibility constraints of a pebble graph can be converted into differentiable geometric constraints, such that our mesh optimizer can satisfy these constraints via constrained numerical optimization. We have evaluated the effectiveness and efficiency of our method using a set of environments with complex geometries, on which our method achieves an average of 99.0% free-space coverage and 30.3% robot density within hours of computation on a desktop machine.
A High Throughput Parallel Hash Table on FPGA using XOR-based Memory
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

Hash table is a fundamental data structure for quick search and retrieval of data. It is a key component in complex graph analytics and AI/ML applications. State-of-the-art parallel hash table implementations either make some simplifying assumptions such as supporting only a subset of hash table operations or employ optimizations that lead to performance that is highly data dependent and in the worst case can be similar to a sequential implementation. In contrast, in this work we develop a dynamic hash table that supports all the hash table queries - search, insert, delete, update, while allowing us to support 'p' parallel queries (p>1) per clock cycle via p processing engines (PEs) in the worst case i.e. the performance is data agnostic. We achieve this by implementing novel XOR based multi-ported block memories on FPGAs. Additionally, we develop a technique to optimize the memory requirement of the hash table if the ratio of search to insert/update/delete queries is known beforehand. We implement our design on state-of-the-art FPGA devices. Our design is scalable to 16 PEs and supports throughput up to 5926 MOPS. It matches the throughput of the state-of-the-art hash table design - FASTHash, which only supports search and insert operations. Comparing with the best FPGA design that supports the same set of operations, our hash table achieves up to 12.3x speedup.
Unbiased Cascade Bandits: Mitigating Exposure Bias in Online Learning to Rank Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

Exposure bias is a well-known issue in recommender systems where items and suppliers are not equally represented in the recommendation results. This is especially problematic when bias is amplified over time as a few popular items are repeatedly over-represented in recommendation lists. This phenomenon can be viewed as a recommendation feedback loop: the system repeatedly recommends certain items at different time points and interactions of users with those items will amplify bias towards those items over time. This issue has been extensively studied in the literature on model-based or neighborhood-based recommendation algorithms, but less work has been done on online recommendation models such as those based on multi-armed Bandit algorithms. In this paper, we study exposure bias in a class of well-known bandit algorithms known as Linear Cascade Bandits. We analyze these algorithms on their ability to handle exposure bias and provide a fair representation for items and suppliers in the recommendation results. Our analysis reveals that these algorithms fail to treat items and suppliers fairly and do not sufficiently explore the item space for each user. To mitigate this bias, we propose a discounting factor and incorporate it into these algorithms that controls the exposure of items at each time step. To show the effectiveness of the proposed discounting factor on mitigating exposure bias, we perform experiments on two datasets using three cascading bandit algorithms and our experimental results show that the proposed method improves the exposure fairness for items and suppliers.
Rethinking of AlphaStar
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

We present a different view for AlphaStar (AS), the program achieving Grand-Master level in the game StarCraft II. It is considered big progress for AI research. However, in this paper, we present problems with the AS, some of which are the defects of it, and some of which are important details that are neglected in its article. These problems arise two questions. One is that what can we get from the built of AS? The other is that does the battle between it with humans fair? After the discussion, we present the future research directions for these problems. Our study is based on a reproduction code of the AS, and the codes are available online.