OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
E$^2$BoWs: An End-to-End Bag-of-Words Model via Deep Convolutional Neural Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Traditional Bag-of-visual Words (BoWs) model is commonly generated with many steps including local feature extraction, codebook generation, and feature quantization, etc. Those steps are relatively independent with each other and are hard to be jointly optimized. Moreover, the dependency on hand-crafted local feature makes BoWs model not effective in conveying high-level semantics. These issues largely hinder the performance of BoWs model in large-scale image applications. To conquer these issues, we propose an End-to-End BoWs (E$^2$BoWs) model based on Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN). Our model takes an image as input, then identifies and separates the semantic objects in it, and finally outputs the visual words with high semantic discriminative power. Specifically, our model firstly generates Semantic Feature Maps (SFMs) corresponding to different object categories through convolutional layers, then introduces Bag-of-Words Layers (BoWL) to generate visual words for each individual feature map. We also introduce a novel learning algorithm to reinforce the sparsity of the generated E$^2$BoWs model, which further ensures the time and memory efficiency. We evaluate the proposed E$^2$BoWs model on several image search datasets including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, MIRFLICKR-25K and NUS-WIDE. Experimental results show that our method achieves promising accuracy and efficiency compared with recent deep learning based retrieval works.
AG codes and AG quantum codes from cyclic extensions of the Suzuki and Ree curves
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

We investigate several types of linear codes constructed from two families $\tilde{\mathcal S}_q$ and $\tilde{\mathcal R}_q$ of maximal curves over finite fields recently constructed by Skabelund as cyclic covers of the Suzuki and Ree curves. Plane models for such curves are provided, and the Weierstrass semigroup $H(P)$ at an $\mathbb{F}_{q}$-rational point $P$ is shown to be symmetric.
Crossing Patterns in Nonplanar Road Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2017
Year: 2017

We define the crossing graph of a given embedded graph (such as a road network) to be a graph with a vertex for each edge of the embedding, with two crossing graph vertices adjacent when the corresponding two edges of the embedding cross each other. In this paper, we study the sparsity properties of crossing graphs of real-world road networks. We show that, in large road networks (the Urban Road Network Dataset), the crossing graphs have connected components that are primarily trees, and that the remaining non-tree components are typically sparse (technically, that they have bounded degeneracy). We prove theoretically that when an embedded graph has a sparse crossing graph, it has other desirable properties that lead to fast algorithms for shortest paths and other algorithms important in geographic information systems. Notably, these graphs have polynomial expansion, meaning that they and all their subgraphs have small separators.
How intelligent are convolutional neural networks?
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Motivated by the Gestalt pattern theory, and the Winograd Challenge for language understanding, we design synthetic experiments to investigate a deep learning algorithm's ability to infer simple (at least for human) visual concepts, such as symmetry, from examples. A visual concept is represented by randomly generated, positive as well as negative, example images. We then test the ability and speed of algorithms (and humans) to learn the concept from these images. The training and testing are performed progressively in multiple rounds, with each subsequent round deliberately designed to be more complex and confusing than the previous round(s), especially if the concept was not grasped by the learner. However, if the concept was understood, all the deliberate tests would become trivially easy. Our experiments show that humans can often infer a semantic concept quickly after looking at only a very small number of examples (this is often referred to as an "aha moment": a moment of sudden realization), and performs perfectly during all testing rounds (except for careless mistakes). On the contrary, deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) could approximate some concepts statistically, but only after seeing many (x10^4) more examples. And it will still make obvious mistakes, especially during deliberate testing rounds or on samples outside the training distributions. This signals a lack of true "understanding", or a failure to reach the right "formula" for the semantics. We did find that some concepts are easier for DCNN than others. For example, simple "counting" is more learnable than "symmetry", while "uniformity" or "conformance" are much more difficult for DCNN to learn. To conclude, we propose an "Aha Challenge" for visual perception, calling for focused and quantitative research on Gestalt-style machine intelligence using limited training examples.
Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Access to large, diverse RGB-D datasets is critical for training RGB-D scene understanding algorithms. However, existing datasets still cover only a limited number of views or a restricted scale of spaces. In this paper, we introduce Matterport3D, a large-scale RGB-D dataset containing 10,800 panoramic views from 194,400 RGB-D images of 90 building-scale scenes. Annotations are provided with surface reconstructions, camera poses, and 2D and 3D semantic segmentations. The precise global alignment and comprehensive, diverse panoramic set of views over entire buildings enable a variety of supervised and self-supervised computer vision tasks, including keypoint matching, view overlap prediction, normal prediction from color, semantic segmentation, and region classification.
Human Understandable Explanation Extraction for Black-box Classification Models Based on Matrix Factorization
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2017
Year: 2017

In recent years, a number of artificial intelligent services have been developed such as defect detection system or diagnosis system for customer services. Unfortunately, the core in these services is a black-box in which human cannot understand the underlying decision making logic, even though the inspection of the logic is crucial before launching a commercial service. Our goal in this paper is to propose an analytic method of a model explanation that is applicable to general classification models. To this end, we introduce the concept of a contribution matrix and an explanation embedding in a constraint space by using a matrix factorization. We extract a rule-like model explanation from the contribution matrix with the help of the nonnegative matrix factorization. To validate our method, the experiment results provide with open datasets as well as an industry dataset of a LTE network diagnosis and the results show our method extracts reasonable explanations.
Algorithm and Hardware Design of Discrete-Time Spiking Neural Networks Based on Back Propagation with Binary Activations
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2017
Year: 2017

We present a new back propagation based training algorithm for discrete-time spiking neural networks (SNN). Inspired by recent deep learning algorithms on binarized neural networks, binary activation with a straight-through gradient estimator is used to model the leaky integrate-fire spiking neuron, overcoming the difficulty in training SNNs using back propagation. Two SNN training algorithms are proposed: (1) SNN with discontinuous integration, which is suitable for rate-coded input spikes, and (2) SNN with continuous integration, which is more general and can handle input spikes with temporal information. Neuromorphic hardware designed in 40nm CMOS exploits the spike sparsity and demonstrates high classification accuracy (>98% on MNIST) and low energy (48.4-773 nJ/image).
Look Wider to Match Image Patches with Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

When a human matches two images, the viewer has a natural tendency to view the wide area around the target pixel to obtain clues of right correspondence. However, designing a matching cost function that works on a large window in the same way is difficult. The cost function is typically not intelligent enough to discard the information irrelevant to the target pixel, resulting in undesirable artifacts. In this paper, we propose a novel learn a stereo matching cost with a large-sized window. Unlike conventional pooling layers with strides, the proposed per-pixel pyramid-pooling layer can cover a large area without a loss of resolution and detail. Therefore, the learned matching cost function can successfully utilize the information from a large area without introducing the fattening effect. The proposed method is robust despite the presence of weak textures, depth discontinuity, illumination, and exposure difference. The proposed method achieves near-peak performance on the Middlebury benchmark.
A Novel Quasigroup Substitution Scheme for Chaos Based Image Encryption
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2017
Year: 2017

A During last two decades, there has been a prolific growth in the chaos based image encryption algorithms. Up to an extent these algorithms have been able to provide an alternative to exchange large media files (images and videos) over the networks in a secure way. However, there have been some issues with the implementation of chaos based image ciphers in practice. One of them is reduced/small key space due to the fact that chaotic behavior is only observed for certain range of system parameters/initial conditions of the chaotic system used in such algorithms. To overcome this difficulty, we propose a simple, efficient and robust image encryption algorithm based on combined applications of quasigroups and chaotic standard map. The proposed image cipher is based on the popular substitution-diffusion architecture (Shanon) where a quasigroup of order 256 and chaotic standard map have been used for the substitution and permutation of image pixels respectively. Due to the introduction of quasigroup as part of the secret key along with the parameter and initial conditions of the chaotic standard map, the key space has been increased significantly. The proposed image cipher is very fast due to the fact that the substitution based on the quasigroup operations is very simple and can be executed easily through the lookup table operations on Latin squares (which are Cayley operation tables of quasigroups) and the permutation is performed row-by-row as well as column-by-column using the pseudo random number sequences gener-ated through the chaotic standard map. The security and performance have been analyzed through the histograms, correlation coefficients, information entropy, key sensitivity analysis, differential analysis, key space analysis etc. and the results prove the efficiency and robustness of the proposed image cipher against the possible security threats.
Is Geo-Indistinguishability What You Are Looking for?
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2017
Year: 2017

Since its proposal in 2013, geo-indistinguishability has been consolidated as a formal notion of location privacy, generating a rich body of literature building on this idea. A problem with most of these follow-up works is that they blindly rely on geo-indistinguishability to provide location privacy, ignoring the numerical interpretation of this privacy guarantee. In this paper, we provide an alternative formulation of geo-indistinguishability as an adversary error, and use it to show that the privacy vs.~utility trade-off that can be obtained is not as appealing as implied by the literature. We also show that although geo-indistinguishability guarantees a lower bound on the adversary's error, this comes at the cost of achieving poorer performance than other noise generation mechanisms in terms of average error, and enabling the possibility of exposing obfuscated locations that are useless from the quality of service point of view.
A General Framework for the Recognition of Online Handwritten Graphics
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

We propose a new framework for the recognition of online handwritten graphics. Three main features of the framework are its ability to treat symbol and structural level information in an integrated way, its flexibility with respect to different families of graphics, and means to control the tradeoff between recognition effectiveness and computational cost. We model a graphic as a labeled graph generated from a graph grammar. Non-terminal vertices represent subcomponents, terminal vertices represent symbols, and edges represent relations between subcomponents or symbols. We then model the recognition problem as a graph parsing problem: given an input stroke set, we search for a parse tree that represents the best interpretation of the input. Our graph parsing algorithm generates multiple interpretations (consistent with the grammar) and then we extract an optimal interpretation according to a cost function that takes into consideration the likelihood scores of symbols and structures. The parsing algorithm consists in recursively partitioning the stroke set according to structures defined in the grammar and it does not impose constraints present in some previous works (e.g. stroke ordering). By avoiding such constraints and thanks to the powerful representativeness of graphs, our approach can be adapted to the recognition of different graphic notations. We show applications to the recognition of mathematical expressions and flowcharts. Experimentation shows that our method obtains state-of-the-art accuracy in both applications.
Analogical-based Bayesian Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

Some real-world problems revolve to solve the optimization problem \max_{x\in\mathcal{X}}f\left(x\right) where f\left(.\right) is a black-box function and X might be the set of non-vectorial objects (e.g., distributions) where we can only define a symmetric and non-negative similarity score on it. This setting requires a novel view for the standard framework of Bayesian Optimization that generalizes the core insightful spirit of this framework. With this spirit, in this paper, we propose Analogical-based Bayesian Optimization that can maximize black-box function over a domain where only a similarity score can be defined. Our pathway is as follows: we first base on the geometric view of Gaussian Processes (GP) to define the concept of influence level that allows us to analytically represent predictive means and variances of GP posteriors and base on that view to enable replacing kernel similarity by a more genetic similarity score. Furthermore, we also propose two strategies to find a batch of query points that can efficiently handle high dimensional data.
Automatic Leaf Extraction from Outdoor Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Automatic plant recognition and disease analysis may be streamlined by an image of a complete, isolated leaf as an initial input. Segmenting leaves from natural images is a hard problem. Cluttered and complex backgrounds: often composed of other leaves are commonplace. Furthermore, their appearance is highly dependent upon illumination and viewing perspective. In order to address these issues we propose a methodology which exploits the leaves venous systems in tandem with other low level features. Background and leaf markers are created using colour, intensity and texture. Two approaches are investigated: watershed and graph-cut and results compared. Primary-secondary vein detection and a protrusion-notch removal are applied to refine the extracted leaf. The efficacy of our approach is demonstrated against existing work.
A LBP Based Correspondence Identification Scheme for Multi-view Sensing Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

In this paper, we describes a correspondence identification method between two-views of regular RGB camera that can be run in real-time. The basic idea is first applying normalized cross correlation to retrieve a sparse set of matching pairs from image pair. Then loopy belief propagation scheme is applied to the the set of possible candidates to densely identify correspondences from different views. The experiment results demonstrate superb accuracy and precision that outperform the state-of-the-art in the computer vision field. Meanwhile, the implementation is simple enough that can be optimized for real-time performance. We have given the detailed comparison of existing approaches and show that this method can enable various practical applications from 3D reconstruction to image search.
Linking Twitter Events With Stock Market Jitters
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2017
Year: 2017

Predicting investors reactions to financial and political news is important for the early detection of stock market jitters. Evidence from several recent studies suggests that online social media could improve prediction of stock market movements. However, utilizing such information to predict strong stock market fluctuations has not been explored so far. In this work, we propose a novel event detection method on Twitter, tailored to detect financial and political events that influence a specific stock market. The proposed approach applies a bursty topic detection method on a stream of tweets related to finance or politics followed by a classification process which filters-out events that do not influence the examined stock market. We train our classifier to recognise real events by using solely information about stock market volatility, without the need of manual labeling. We model Twitter events as feature vectors that encompass a rich variety of information, such as the geographical distribution of tweets, their polarity, information about their authors as well as information about bursty words associated with the event. We show that utilizing only information about tweets polarity, like most previous studies, results in wasting important information. We apply the proposed method on high-frequency intra-day data from the Greek and Spanish stock market and we show that our financial event detector successfully predicts most of the stock market jitters.
Learning to Detect Violent Videos using Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Developing a technique for the automatic analysis of surveillance videos in order to identify the presence of violence is of broad interest. In this work, we propose a deep neural network for the purpose of recognizing violent videos. A convolutional neural network is used to extract frame level features from a video. The frame level features are then aggregated using a variant of the long short term memory that uses convolutional gates. The convolutional neural network along with the convolutional long short term memory is capable of capturing localized spatio-temporal features which enables the analysis of local motion taking place in the video. We also propose to use adjacent frame differences as the input to the model thereby forcing it to encode the changes occurring in the video. The performance of the proposed feature extraction pipeline is evaluated on three standard benchmark datasets in terms of recognition accuracy. Comparison of the results obtained with the state of the art techniques revealed the promising capability of the proposed method in recognizing violent videos.
When 3D-Aided 2D Face Recognition Meets Deep Learning: An extended UR2D for Pose-Invariant Face Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Most of the face recognition works focus on specific modules or demonstrate a research idea. This paper presents a pose-invariant 3D-aided 2D face recognition system (UR2D) that is robust to pose variations as large as 90? by leveraging deep learning technology. The architecture and the interface of UR2D are described, and each module is introduced in detail. Extensive experiments are conducted on the UHDB31 and IJB-A, demonstrating that UR2D outperforms existing 2D face recognition systems such as VGG-Face, FaceNet, and a commercial off-the-shelf software (COTS) by at least 9% on the UHDB31 dataset and 3% on the IJB-A dataset on average in face identification tasks. UR2D also achieves state-of-the-art performance of 85% on the IJB-A dataset by comparing the Rank-1 accuracy score from template matching. It fills a gap by providing a 3D-aided 2D face recognition system that has compatible results with 2D face recognition systems using deep learning techniques.
BIOS ORAM: Improved Privacy-Preserving Data Access for Parameterized Outsourced Storage
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2017
Year: 2017

Algorithms for oblivious random access machine (ORAM) simulation allow a client, Alice, to obfuscate a pattern of data accesses with a server, Bob, who is maintaining Alice's outsourced data while trying to learn information about her data. We present a novel ORAM scheme that improves the asymptotic I/O overhead of previous schemes for a wide range of size parameters for client-side private memory and message blocks, from logarithmic to polynomial. Our method achieves statistical security for hiding Alice's access pattern and, with high probability, achieves an I/O overhead that ranges from $O(1)$ to $O(\log^2 n/(\log\log n)^2)$, depending on these size parameters, where $n$ is the size of Alice's outsourced memory. Our scheme, which we call BIOS ORAM, combines multiple uses of B-trees with a reduction of ORAM simulation to isogrammic access sequences.
Trading Computation for Communication: A Taxonomy
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2017
Year: 2017

A critical challenge for modern system design is meeting the overwhelming performance, storage, and communication bandwidth demand of emerging applications within a tightly bound power budget. As both the time and power, hence the energy, spent in data communication by far exceeds the energy spent in actual data generation (i.e., computation), (re)computing data can easily become cheaper than storing and retrieving (pre)computed data. Therefore, trading computation for communication can improve energy efficiency by minimizing the energy overhead incurred by data storage, retrieval, and communication. This paper hence provides a taxonomy for the computation vs. communication trade-off along with quantitative characterization.
Think Globally, Embed Locally --- Locally Linear Meta-embedding of Words
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2017
Year: 2017

Distributed word embeddings have shown superior performances in numerous Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, their performances vary significantly across different tasks, implying that the word embeddings learnt by those methods capture complementary aspects of lexical semantics. Therefore, we believe that it is important to combine the existing word embeddings to produce more accurate and complete \emph{meta-embeddings} of words. For this purpose, we propose an unsupervised locally linear meta-embedding learning method that takes pre-trained word embeddings as the input, and produces more accurate meta embeddings. Unlike previously proposed meta-embedding learning methods that learn a global projection over all words in a vocabulary, our proposed method is sensitive to the differences in local neighbourhoods of the individual source word embeddings. Moreover, we show that vector concatenation, a previously proposed highly competitive baseline approach for integrating word embeddings, can be derived as a special case of the proposed method. Experimental results on semantic similarity, word analogy, relation classification, and short-text classification tasks show that our meta-embeddings to significantly outperform prior methods in several benchmark datasets, establishing a new state of the art for meta-embeddings.