OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Learning Deep Multi-Level Similarity for Thermal Infrared Object Tracking
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Existing deep Thermal InfraRed (TIR) trackers only use semantic features to describe the TIR object, which lack the sufficient discriminative capacity for handling distractors. This becomes worse when the feature extraction network is only trained on RGB images.To address this issue, we propose a multi-level similarity model under a Siamese framework for robust TIR object tracking. Specifically, we compute different pattern similarities on two convolutional layers using the proposed multi-level similarity network. One of them focuses on the global semantic similarity and the other computes the local structural similarity of the TIR object. These two similarities complement each other and hence enhance the discriminative capacity of the network for handling distractors. In addition, we design a simple while effective relative entropy based ensemble subnetwork to integrate the semantic and structural similarities. This subnetwork can adaptive learn the weights of the semantic and structural similarities at the training stage. To further enhance the discriminative capacity of the tracker, we construct the first large scale TIR video sequence dataset for training the proposed model. The proposed TIR dataset not only benefits the training for TIR tracking but also can be applied to numerous TIR vision tasks. Extensive experimental results on the VOT-TIR2015 and VOT-TIR2017 benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods.
A Hierarchical Network for Diverse Trajectory Proposals
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

Autonomous explorative robots frequently encounter scenarios where multiple future trajectories can be pursued. Often these are cases with multiple paths around an obstacle or trajectory options towards various frontiers. Humans in such situations can inherently perceive and reason about the surrounding environment to identify several possibilities of either manoeuvring around the obstacles or moving towards various frontiers. In this work, we propose a 2 stage Convolutional Neural Network architecture which mimics such an ability to map the perceived surroundings to multiple trajectories that a robot can choose to traverse. The first stage is a Trajectory Proposal Network which suggests diverse regions in the environment which can be occupied in the future. The second stage is a Trajectory Sampling network which provides a finegrained trajectory over the regions proposed by Trajectory Proposal Network. We evaluate our framework in diverse and complicated real life settings. For the outdoor case, we use the KITTI dataset and our own outdoor driving dataset. In the indoor setting, we use an autonomous drone to navigate various scenarios and also a ground robot which can explore the environment using the trajectories proposed by our framework. Our experiments suggest that the framework is able to develop a semantic understanding of the obstacles, open regions and identify diverse trajectories that a robot can traverse. Our comparisons portray the performance gain of the proposed architecture over a diverse set of methods against which it is compared.
Dynamic Network Embedding via Incremental Skip-gram with Negative Sampling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Network representation learning, as an approach to learn low dimensional representations of vertices, has attracted considerable research attention recently. It has been proven extremely useful in many machine learning tasks over large graph. Most existing methods focus on learning the structural representations of vertices in a static network, but cannot guarantee an accurate and efficient embedding in a dynamic network scenario. To address this issue, we present an efficient incremental skip-gram algorithm with negative sampling for dynamic network embedding, and provide a set of theoretical analyses to characterize the performance guarantee. Specifically, we first partition a dynamic network into the updated, including addition/deletion of links and vertices, and the retained networks over time. Then we factorize the objective function of network embedding into the added, vanished and retained parts of the network. Next we provide a new stochastic gradient-based method, guided by the partitions of the network, to update the nodes and the parameter vectors. The proposed algorithm is proven to yield an objective function value with a bounded difference to that of the original objective function. Experimental results show that our proposal can significantly reduce the training time while preserving the comparable performance. We also demonstrate the correctness of the theoretical analysis and the practical usefulness of the dynamic network embedding. We perform extensive experiments on multiple real-world large network datasets over multi-label classification and link prediction tasks to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed framework, and up to 22 times speedup has been achieved.
Deep Unsupervised Drum Transcription
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2019
Year: 2019

We introduce DrummerNet, a drum transcription system that is trained in an unsupervised manner. DrummerNet does not require any ground-truth transcription and, with the data-scalability of deep neural networks, learns from a large unlabeled dataset. In DrummerNet, the target drum signal is first passed to a (trainable) transcriber, then reconstructed in a (fixed) synthesizer according to the transcription estimate. By training the system to minimize the distance between the input and the output audio signals, the transcriber learns to transcribe without ground truth transcription. Our experiment shows that DrummerNet performs favorably compared to many other recent drum transcription systems, both supervised and unsupervised.
Redundancy-Free Computation Graphs for Graph Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are based on repeated aggregations of information across nodes' neighbors in a graph. However, because common neighbors are shared between different nodes, this leads to repeated and inefficient computations. We propose Hierarchically Aggregated computation Graphs (HAGs), a new GNN graph representation that explicitly avoids redundancy by managing intermediate aggregation results hierarchically, eliminating repeated computations and unnecessary data transfers in GNN training and inference. We introduce an accurate cost function to quantitatively evaluate the runtime performance of different HAGs and use a novel HAG search algorithm to find optimized HAGs. Experiments show that the HAG representation significantly outperforms the standard GNN graph representation by increasing the end-to-end training throughput by up to 2.8x and reducing the aggregations and data transfers in GNN training by up to 6.3x and 5.6x, while maintaining the original model accuracy.
Aggregation of pairwise comparisons with reduction of biases
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

We study the problem of ranking from crowdsourced pairwise comparisons. Answers to pairwise tasks are known to be affected by the position of items on the screen, however, previous models for aggregation of pairwise comparisons do not focus on modeling such kind of biases. We introduce a new aggregation model factorBT for pairwise comparisons, which accounts for certain factors of pairwise tasks that are known to be irrelevant to the result of comparisons but may affect workers' answers due to perceptual reasons. By modeling biases that influence workers, factorBT is able to reduce the effect of biased pairwise comparisons on the resulted ranking. Our empirical studies on real-world data sets showed that factorBT produces more accurate ranking from crowdsourced pairwise comparisons than previously established models.
A Closed-Form Learned Pooling for Deep Classification Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

In modern computer vision tasks, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are indispensable for image classification tasks due to their efficiency and effectiveness. Part of their superiority compared to other architectures, comes from the fact that a single, local filter is shared across the entire image. However, there are scenarios where we may need to treat spatial locations in non-uniform manner. We see this in nature when considering how humans have evolved foveation to process different areas in their field of vision with varying levels of detail. In this paper we propose a way to enable CNNs to learn different pooling weights for each pixel location. We do so by introducing an extended definition of a pooling operator. This operator can learn a strict super-set of what can be learned by average pooling or convolutions. It has the benefit of being shared across feature maps and can be encouraged to be local or diffuse depending on the data. We show that for fixed network weights, our pooling operator can be computed in closed-form by spectral decomposition of matrices associated with class separability. Through experiments, we show that this operator benefits generalization for ResNets and CNNs on the CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and SVHN datasets and improves robustness to geometric corruptions and perturbations on the CIFAR-10-C and CIFAR-10-P test sets.
Random Access for Massive Machine-Type Communications
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

The thesis is dedicated to studying methods to improve the efficiency of random access schemes and to facilitate their deployment in machine-type communications (MTC). First, a joint user activity identification and channel estimation scheme is designed for grant-free random access systems. We propose a decentralized transmission control and design a compressed sensing (CS)-based user identification and channel estimation scheme. We analyze the packet delay and throughput of the proposed scheme. We also optimize the transmission control scheme to maximize the system throughput. Second, a random access scheme, i.e., the coded slotted ALOHA (CSA) scheme, is designed for erasure channels to improve the system throughput. By deriving the extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) functions and optimizing their convergence behavior, we design the code probability distributions for CSA schemes with repetition codes and maximum distance separable (MDS) codes to maximize the expected traffic load, under packet erasure and slot erasure channels. We derive the asymptotic throughput of CSA schemes over the erasure channels for an infinite frame length, which is verified to well approximate the throughput for a practical frame length. Third, an efficient data decoding algorithm for the CSA scheme is proposed to further improve the system efficiency. We present a low-complexity physical-layer network coding (PNC) method to obtain linear combinations of collided packets and design an enhanced message-level successive interference cancellation (SIC) algorithm to exploit the linear combinations of collided packets. We propose an analytical framework and derive the system throughput for the proposed scheme. The CSA scheme is further optimized to maximize the system throughput and energy efficiency.
A Survey on Neural Machine Reading Comprehension
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

Enabling a machine to read and comprehend the natural language documents so that it can answer some questions remains an elusive challenge. In recent years, the popularity of deep learning and the establishment of large-scale datasets have both promoted the prosperity of Machine Reading Comprehension. This paper aims to present how to utilize the Neural Network to build a Reader and introduce some classic models, analyze what improvements they make. Further, we also point out the defects of existing models and future research directions
Explicit behaviors affected by driver's trust in a driving automation system
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2019
Year: 2019

As various driving automation system (DAS) are commonly used in the vehicle, the over-trust in the DAS may put the driver in the risk. In order to prevent the over-trust while driving, the trust state of the driver should be recognized. However, description variables of the trust state are not distinct. This paper assumed that the outward expressions of a driver can represent the trust state of him/her-self. The explicit behaviors when driving with DAS is seen as those outward expressions. In the experiment, a driving simulator with a driver monitoring system was used for simulating a vehicle with the adaptive cruise control (ACC) and observing the motion information of the driver. Results show that if the driver completely trusted in the ACC, then 1) the participants were likely to put their feet far away from the pedals; 2) the operational intervention of the driver will delay in dangerous situations. In the future, a machine learning model will be tried to predict the trust state by using the motion information of the driver.
Minimal Session Types (Extended Version)
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2019
Year: 2019

Session types are a type-based approach to the verification of message-passing programs. They have been much studied as type systems for the pi-calculus and for languages such as Java. A session type specifies what and when should be exchanged through a channel. Central to session-typed languages are constructs in types and processes that specify sequencing in protocols. Here we study minimal session types, session types without sequencing. This is arguably the simplest form of session types. By relying on a core process calculus with sessions and higher-order concurrency (abstraction passing), we prove that every process typable with usual (non minimal) session types can be compiled down into a process typed with minimal session types. This means that having sequencing constructs in both processes and session types is redundant; only sequentiality in processes is indispensable, as it can precisely codify sequentiality in types. Our developments draw inspiration from work by Parrow on behavior-preserving decompositions of untyped processes. By casting Parrow's results in the realm of typed processes, our results reveal a conceptually simple formulation of session types and a principled avenue to the integration of session types into languages without sequencing in types.
Non-Coherent Rate Splitting for the MISO BC with Magnitude CSIT
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

A rate splitting based scheme is proposed to operate a broadcast setting with two antennas at the transmit side and two single-antenna receiving terminals. The transmitter knows the magnitude of the channel coefficients, and it is oblivious to the phase information. Each transmit antenna, with a power constraint, sends a private message and a common message to be decoded by both receivers. An achievable rate region is obtained, which enlarges the capacity region of the vector broadcast channel with vector channel magnitude feedback by means of superposition coding.
FaRM: Fair Reward Mechanism for Information Aggregation in Spontaneous Localized Settings (Extended Version)
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2019
Year: 2019

Although peer prediction markets are widely used in crowdsourcing to aggregate information from agents, they often fail to reward the participating agents equitably. Honest agents can be wrongly penalized if randomly paired with dishonest ones. In this work, we introduce \emph{selective} and \emph{cumulative} fairness. We characterize a mechanism as fair if it satisfies both notions and present FaRM, a representative mechanism we designed. FaRM is a Nash incentive mechanism that focuses on information aggregation for spontaneous local activities which are accessible to a limited number of agents without assuming any prior knowledge of the event. All the agents in the vicinity observe the same information. FaRM uses \textit{(i)} a \emph{report strength score} to remove the risk of random pairing with dishonest reporters, \textit{(ii)} a \emph{consistency score} to measure an agent's history of accurate reports and distinguish valuable reports, \textit{(iii)} a \emph{reliability score} to estimate the probability of an agent to collude with nearby agents and prevents agents from getting swayed, and \textit{(iv)} a \emph{location robustness score} to filter agents who try to participate without being present in the considered setting. Together, report strength, consistency, and reliability represent a fair reward given to agents based on their reports.
A scheme for dynamically integrating C library functions into a $λ$Prolog implementation
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2019
Year: 2019

The Teyjus system realizes the higher-order logic programming language$λ$Prolog by compiling programs into bytecode for an abstract machine and executing this translated form using a simulator for the machine. Teyjus supports a number of builtin relations that are realized through C code. In the current scheme, these relations are realized by including the C programs that implement them within the simulator and tailoring the compiler to produce instructions to invoke such code. There are two drawbacks to such an approach. First, the entire collection of library functions must be included within the system, thereby leading to a larger than necessary memory footprint. Second, enhancing the collection of built-in predicates requires changing parts of the simulator and compiler, a task whose accomplishment requires specific knowledge of these two subsystems. This project addresses these problems in three steps. First, the code for the builtin functions is moved from the simulator into a library from where relevant parts, determined by information in the bytecode file, are linked into the runtime system at load time. Second, information is associated with each library function about how it can be invoked from a $λ$Prolog program and where the C code for it is to be found. Finally, the compiler is modified to use the preceding information to include relevant linking instructions in the bytecode file and to translate invocations to builtin relations into a special instruction that calls the dynamically linked code. More generally, these ideas are capable of supporting an interface in $λ$Prolog to "foreign functions" implemented in C, a possibility that is also discussed.
Sum-Rate Maximization of Uplink Rate Splitting Multiple Access (RSMA) Communication
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, the problem of maximizing the wireless users' sum-rate for uplink rate splitting multiple access (RSMA) communications is studied. In the considered model, each user transmits a superposition of two messages to a base station (BS) with separate transmit power and the BS uses a successive decoding technique to decode the received messages. To maximize each user's transmission rate, the users must adjust their transmit power and the BS must determine the decoding order of the messages transmitted from the users to the BS. This problem is formulated as a sum-rate maximization problem with proportional rate constraints by adjusting the users' transmit power and the BS's decoding order. However, since the decoding order variable in the optimization problem is discrete, the original maximization problem with transmit power and decoding order variables can be transformed into a problem with only the rate splitting variable. Then, the optimal rate splitting of each user is determined. Given the optimal rate splitting of each user and a decoding order, the optimal transmit power of each user is calculated. Next, the optimal decoding order is determined by an exhaustive search method. To further reduce the complexity of the optimization algorithm used for sum-rate maximization in RSMA, a user pairing based algorithm is introduced, which enables two users to use RSMA in each pair and also enables the users in different pairs to be allocated with orthogonal frequency. For comparisons, the optimal sum-rate maximizing solutions with proportional rate constraints are obtained in closed form for non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), frequency division multiple access (FDMA), and time division multiple access (TDMA). Simulation results show that RSMA can achieve up to 10.0\%, 22.2\%, and 83.7\% gains in terms of sum-rate compared to NOMA, FDMA, and TDMA.
AGRR-2019: A Corpus for Gapping Resolution in Russian
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the gapping dataset for Russian that consists of 7.5k sentences with gapping (as well as 15k relevant negative sentences) and comprises data from various genres: news, fiction, social media and technical texts. The dataset was prepared for the Automatic Gapping Resolution Shared Task for Russian (AGRR-2019) - a competition aimed at stimulating the development of NLP tools and methods for processing of ellipsis. In this paper, we pay special attention to the gapping resolution methods that were introduced within the shared task as well as an alternative test set that illustrates that our corpus is a diverse and representative subset of Russian language gapping sufficient for effective utilization of machine learning techniques.
Patch Transformer for Multi-tagging Whole Slide Histopathology Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Automated whole slide image (WSI) tagging has become a growing demand due to the increasing volume and diversity of WSIs collected nowadays in histopathology. Various methods have been studied to classify WSIs with single tags but none of them focuses on labeling WSIs with multiple tags. To this end, we propose a novel end-to-end trainable deep neural network named Patch Transformer which can effectively predict multiple slide-level tags from WSI patches based on both the correlations and the uniqueness between the tags. Specifically, the proposed method learns patch characteristics considering 1) patch-wise relations through a patch transformation module and 2) tag-wise uniqueness for each tagging task through a multi-tag attention module. Extensive experiments on a large and diverse dataset consisting of 4,920 WSIs prove the effectiveness of the proposed model.
Leveraging BERT for Extractive Text Summarization on Lectures
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

In the last two decades, automatic extractive text summarization on lectures has demonstrated to be a useful tool for collecting key phrases and sentences that best represent the content. However, many current approaches utilize dated approaches, producing sub-par outputs or requiring several hours of manual tuning to produce meaningful results. Recently, new machine learning architectures have provided mechanisms for extractive summarization through the clustering of output embeddings from deep learning models. This paper reports on the project called Lecture Summarization Service, a python based RESTful service that utilizes the BERT model for text embeddings and KMeans clustering to identify sentences closes to the centroid for summary selection. The purpose of the service was to provide students a utility that could summarize lecture content, based on their desired number of sentences. On top of the summary work, the service also includes lecture and summary management, storing content on the cloud which can be used for collaboration. While the results of utilizing BERT for extractive summarization were promising, there were still areas where the model struggled, providing feature research opportunities for further improvement.