OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
When Deep Learning Meets Data Alignment: A Review on Deep Registration Networks (DRNs)
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Registration is the process that computes the transformation that aligns sets of data. Commonly, a registration process can be divided into four main steps: target selection, feature extraction, feature matching, and transform computation for the alignment. The accuracy of the result depends on multiple factors, the most significant are the quantity of input data, the presence of noise, outliers and occlusions, the quality of the extracted features, real-time requirements and the type of transformation, especially those ones defined by multiple parameters, like non-rigid deformations. Recent advancements in machine learning could be a turning point in these issues, particularly with the development of deep learning (DL) techniques, which are helping to improve multiple computer vision problems through an abstract understanding of the input data. In this paper, a review of deep learning-based registration methods is presented. We classify the different papers proposing a framework extracted from the traditional registration pipeline to analyse the new learning-based proposal strengths. Deep Registration Networks (DRNs) try to solve the alignment task either replacing part of the traditional pipeline with a network or fully solving the registration problem. The main conclusions extracted are, on the one hand, 1) learning-based registration techniques cannot always be clearly classified in the traditional pipeline. 2) These approaches allow more complex inputs like conceptual models as well as the traditional 3D datasets. 3) In spite of the generality of learning, the current proposals are still ad hoc solutions. Finally, 4) this is a young topic that still requires a large effort to reach general solutions able to cope with the problems that affect traditional approaches.
Deep Active Inference for Autonomous Robot Navigation
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

Active inference is a theory that underpins the way biological agent's perceive and act in the real world. At its core, active inference is based on the principle that the brain is an approximate Bayesian inference engine, building an internal generative model to drive agents towards minimal surprise. Although this theory has shown interesting results with grounding in cognitive neuroscience, its application remains limited to simulations with small, predefined sensor and state spaces. In this paper, we leverage recent advances in deep learning to build more complex generative models that can work without a predefined states space. State representations are learned end-to-end from real-world, high-dimensional sensory data such as camera frames. We also show that these generative models can be used to engage in active inference. To the best of our knowledge this is the first application of deep active inference for a real-world robot navigation task.
Me Love (SYN-)Cookies: SYN Flood Mitigation in Programmable Data Planes
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

The SYN flood attack is a common attack strategy on the Internet, which tries to overload services with requests leading to a Denial-of-Service (DoS). Highly asymmetric costs for connection setup - putting the main burden on the attackee - make SYN flooding an efficient and popular DoS attack strategy. Abusing the widely used TCP as an attack vector complicates the detection of malicious traffic and its prevention utilizing naive connection blocking strategies. Modern programmable data plane devices are capable of handling traffic in the 10 Gbit/s range without overloading. We discuss how we can harness their performance to defend entire networks against SYN flood attacks. Therefore, we analyze different defense strategies, SYN authentication and SYN cookie, and discuss implementation difficulties when ported to different target data planes: software, network processors, and FPGAs. We provide prototype implementations and performance figures for all three platforms. Further, we fully disclose the artifacts leading to the experiments described in this work.
TranS^3: A Transformer-based Framework for Unifying Code Summarization and Code Search
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2020
Year: 2020

Code summarization and code search have been widely adopted in sofwaredevelopmentandmaintenance. However, fewstudieshave explored the efcacy of unifying them. In this paper, we propose TranS^3 , a transformer-based framework to integrate code summarization with code search. Specifcally, for code summarization,TranS^3 enables an actor-critic network, where in the actor network, we encode the collected code snippets via transformer- and tree-transformer-based encoder and decode the given code snippet to generate its comment. Meanwhile, we iteratively tune the actor network via the feedback from the critic network for enhancing the quality of the generated comments. Furthermore, we import the generated comments to code search for enhancing its accuracy. To evaluatetheefectivenessof TranS^3 , we conduct a set of experimental studies and case studies where the experimental results suggest that TranS^3 can signifcantly outperform multiple state-of-the-art approaches in both code summarization and code search and the study results further strengthen the efcacy of TranS^3 from the developers' points of view.
Quality of Word Embeddings on Sentiment Analysis Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Word embeddings or distributed representations of words are being used in various applications like machine translation, sentiment analysis, topic identification etc. Quality of word embeddings and performance of their applications depends on several factors like training method, corpus size and relevance etc. In this study we compare performance of a dozen of pretrained word embedding models on lyrics sentiment analysis and movie review polarity tasks. According to our results, Twitter Tweets is the best on lyrics sentiment analysis, whereas Google News and Common Crawl are the top performers on movie polarity analysis. Glove trained models slightly outrun those trained with Skipgram. Also, factors like topic relevance and size of corpus significantly impact the quality of the models. When medium or large-sized text sets are available, obtaining word embeddings from same training dataset is usually the best choice.
A Hybrid Approach for Tracking Individual Players in Broadcast Match Videos
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Tracking people in a video sequence is a challenging task that has been approached from many perspectives. This task becomes even more complicated when the person to track is a player in a broadcasted sport event, the reasons being the existence of difficulties such as frequent camera movements or switches, total and partial occlusions between players, and blurry frames due to the codification algorithm of the video. This paper introduces a player tracking solution which is both fast and accurate. This allows to track a player precisely in real-time. The approach combines several models that are executed concurrently in a relatively modest hardware, and whose accuracy has been validated against hand-labeled broadcast video sequences. Regarding the accuracy, the tests show that the area under curve (AUC) of our approach is around 0.6, which is similar to generic state of the art solutions. As for performance, our proposal can process high definition videos (1920x1080 px) at 80 fps.
Wavelet-based spatial audio framework
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2020
Year: 2020

Ambisonics is a complete theory for spatial audio whose building blocks are the spherical harmonics. Some of the drawbacks of low order Ambisonics, like poor source directivity and small sweet-spot, are directly related to the properties of spherical harmonics. In this thesis we illustrate a novel spatial audio framework similar in spirit to Ambisonics that replaces the spherical harmonics by an alternative set of functions with compact support: the spherical wavelets. We develop a complete audio chain from encoding to decoding, using discrete spherical wavelets built on a multiresolution mesh. We show how the wavelet family and the decoding matrices to loudspeakers can be generated via numerical optimization. In particular, we present a decoding algorithm optimizing acoustic and psychoacoustic parameters that can generate decoding matrices to irregular layouts for both Ambisonics and the new wavelet format. This audio workflow is directly compared with Ambisonics.
Towards a predictive spatio-temporal representation of brain data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

The characterisation of the brain as a "connectome", in which the connections are represented by correlational values across timeseries and as summary measures derived from graph theory analyses, has been very popular in the last years. However, although this representation has advanced our understanding of the brain function, it may represent an oversimplified model. This is because the typical fMRI datasets are constituted by complex and highly heterogeneous timeseries that vary across space (i.e., location of brain regions). We compare various modelling techniques from deep learning and geometric deep learning to pave the way for future research in effectively leveraging the rich spatial and temporal domains of typical fMRI datasets, as well as of other similar datasets. As a proof-of-concept, we compare our approaches in the homogeneous and publicly available Human Connectome Project (HCP) dataset on a supervised binary classification task. We hope that our methodological advances relative to previous "connectomic" measures can ultimately be clinically and computationally relevant by leading to a more nuanced understanding of the brain dynamics in health and disease. Such understanding of the brain can fundamentally reduce the constant specialised clinical expertise in order to accurately understand brain variability.
Heterogeneity Loss to Handle Intersubject and Intrasubject Variability in Cancer
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Developing nations lack adequate number of hospitals with modern equipment and skilled doctors. Hence, a significant proportion of these nations' population, particularly in rural areas, is not able to avail specialized and timely healthcare facilities. In recent years, deep learning (DL) models, a class of artificial intelligence (AI) methods, have shown impressive results in medical domain. These AI methods can provide immense support to developing nations as affordable healthcare solutions. This work is focused on one such application of blood cancer diagnosis. However, there are some challenges to DL models in cancer research because of the unavailability of a large data for adequate training and the difficulty of capturing heterogeneity in data at different levels ranging from acquisition characteristics, session, to subject-level (within subjects and across subjects). These challenges render DL models prone to overfitting and hence, models lack generalization on prospective subjects' data. In this work, we address these problems in the application of B-cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (B-ALL) diagnosis using deep learning. We propose heterogeneity loss that captures subject-level heterogeneity, thereby, forcing the neural network to learn subject-independent features. We also propose an unorthodox ensemble strategy that helps us in providing improved classification over models trained on 7-folds giving a weighted-$F_1$ score of 95.26% on unseen (test) subjects' data that are, so far, the best results on the C-NMC 2019 dataset for B-ALL classification.
Captioning Images with Novel Objects via Online Vocabulary Expansion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In this study, we introduce a low cost method for generating descriptions from images containing novel objects. Generally, constructing a model, which can explain images with novel objects, is costly because of the following: (1) collecting a large amount of data for each category, and (2) retraining the entire system. If humans see a small number of novel objects, they are able to estimate their properties by associating their appearance with known objects. Accordingly, we propose a method that can explain images with novel objects without retraining using the word embeddings of the objects estimated from only a small number of image features of the objects. The method can be integrated with general image-captioning models. The experimental results show the effectiveness of our approach.
Experimental Studies in General Game Playing: An Experience Report
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

We describe nearly fifteen years of General Game Playing experimental research history in the context of reproducibility and fairness of comparisons between various GGP agents and systems designed to play games described by different formalisms. We think our survey may provide an interesting perspective of how chaotic methods were allowed when nothing better was possible. Finally, from our experience-based view, we would like to propose a few recommendations of how such specific heterogeneous branch of research should be handled appropriately in the future. The goal of this note is to point out common difficulties and problems in the experimental research in the area. We hope that our recommendations will help in avoiding them in future works and allow more fair and reproducible comparisons.
Serverless in the Wild: Characterizing and Optimizing the Serverless Workload at a Large Cloud Provider
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

Function as a Service (FaaS) has been gaining popularity as a way to deploy computations to serverless backends in the cloud. This paradigm shifts the complexity of allocating and provisioning resources to the cloud provider, which has to provide the illusion of always-available resources (i.e., fast function invocations without cold starts) at the lowest possible resource cost. Doing so requires the provider to deeply understand the characteristics of the FaaS workload. Unfortunately, there has been little to no public information on these characteristics. Thus, in this paper, we first characterize the entire production FaaS workload of Azure Functions. We show for example that most functions are invoked very infrequently, but there is an 8-order-of-magnitude range of invocation frequencies. Using observations from our characterization, we then propose a practical resource management policy that significantly reduces the number of function coldstarts,while spending fewerresources than state-of-the-practice policies.
SIR Analysis via Signal Fractions
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

The analysis of signal-to-interference ratios (SIRs) in wireless networks is instrumental to derive important performance metrics, including reliability, throughput, and delay. While a host of results on SIR distributions are now available, they are often not straightforwards to interpret, bound, visualize, and compare. In this letter, we offer an alternative path towards the analysis and visualization of the SIR distribution. The quantity at the core of this approach is the signal fraction (SF), which is the ratio of the signal power to the total received power. A key advantage is that the SF is constrained to [0,1]. We exemplify the benefits of the SF-based approach by reviewing known results for Poisson cellular networks. In the process, we derive new approximation and bounding techniques that are generally applicable.
New Constructions of Complementary Sequence Pairs over $4^q$-QAM
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

The previous constructions of quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) Golay complementary sequences (GCSs) were generalized as $4^q $-QAM GCSs of length $2^{m}$ by Li \textsl{et al.} (the generalized cases I-III for $q\ge 2$) in 2010 and Liu \textsl{et al.} (the generalized cases IV-V for $q\ge 3$) in 2013 respectively. Those sequences are presented as the combination of the quaternary standard GCSs and compatible offsets. By providing new compatible offsets based on the factorization of the integer $q$, we proposed two new constructions of $4^q $-QAM GCSs, which have the generalized cases I-V as special cases. The numbers of the proposed GCSs (including the generalized cases IV-V) are equal to the product of the number of the quaternary standard GCSs and the number of the compatible offsets. For $q=q_{1}\times q_{2}\times \dots\times q_{t}$ ($q_k>1$), the number of new offsets in our first construction is lower bounded by a polynomial of $m$ with degree $t$, while the numbers of offsets in the generalized cases I-III and IV-V are a linear polynomial of $m$ and a quadratic polynomial of $m$, respectively. In particular, the numbers of new offsets in our first construction is seven times more than that in the generalized cases IV-V for $q=4$. We also show that the numbers of new offsets in our two constructions is lower bounded by a cubic polynomial of $m$ for $q=6$. Moreover, our proof implies that all the mentioned GCSs over QAM in this paper can be regarded as projections of Golay complementary arrays of size $2\times2\times\cdots\times2$.
Deep learning for prediction of population health costs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Accurate prediction of healthcare costs is important for optimally managing health costs. However, methods leveraging the medical richness from data such as health insurance claims or electronic health records are missing. Here, we developed a deep neural network to predict future cost from health insurance claims records. We applied the deep network and a ridge regression model to a sample of 1.4 million German insurants to predict total one-year health care costs. Both methods were compared to Morbi-RSA models with various performance measures and were also used to predict patients with a change in costs and to identify relevant codes for this prediction. We showed that the neural network outperformed the ridge regression as well as all Morbi-RSA models for cost prediction. Further, the neural network was superior to ridge regression in predicting patients with cost change and identified more specific codes. In summary, we showed that our deep neural network can leverage the full complexity of the patient records and outperforms standard approaches. We suggest that the better performance is due to the ability to incorporate complex interactions in the model and that the model might also be used for predicting other health phenotypes.
Data Management for Context-Aware Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2020
Year: 2020

We envisage future context-aware applications will dynamically adapt their behaviors to various context data from sources in wide-area networks, such as the Internet. Facing the changing context and the sheer number of context sources, a data management system that supports effective source organization and efficient data lookup becomes crucial to the easy development of context-aware applications. In this paper, we propose the design of a new context data management system that is equipped with query processing capabilities. We encapsulate the context sources into physical spaces belonging to different context spaces and organize them as peers in semantic overlay networks. Initial evaluation results of an experimental system prototype demonstrate the effectiveness of our design
Learn and Transfer Knowledge of Preferred Assistance Strategies in Semi-autonomous Telemanipulation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Enabling robots to provide effective assistance yet still accommodating the operator's commands for telemanipulation of an object is very challenging because robot's assistive action is not always intuitive for human operators and human behaviors and preferences are sometimes ambiguous for the robot to interpret. Although various assistance approaches are being developed to improve the control quality from different optimization perspectives, the problem still remains in determining the appropriate approach that satisfies the fine motion constraints for the telemanipulation task and preference of the operator. To address these problems, we developed a novel preference-aware assistance knowledge learning approach. An assistance preference model learns what assistance is preferred by a human, and a stagewise model updating method ensures the learning stability while dealing with the ambiguity of human preference data. Such a preference-aware assistance knowledge enables a teleoperated robot hand to provide more active yet preferred assistance toward manipulation success. We also developed knowledge transfer methods to transfer the preference knowledge across different robot hand structures to avoid extensive robot-specific training. Experiments to telemanipulate a 3-finger hand and 2-finger hand, respectively, to use, move, and hand over a cup have been conducted. Results demonstrated that the methods enabled the robots to effectively learn the preference knowledge and allowed knowledge transfer between robots with less training effort.
MobilePose: Real-Time Pose Estimation for Unseen Objects with Weak Shape Supervision
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we address the problem of detecting unseen objects from RGB images and estimating their poses in 3D. We propose two mobile friendly networks: MobilePose-Base and MobilePose-Shape. The former is used when there is only pose supervision, and the latter is for the case when shape supervision is available, even a weak one. We revisit shape features used in previous methods, including segmentation and coordinate map. We explain when and why pixel-level shape supervision can improve pose estimation. Consequently, we add shape prediction as an intermediate layer in the MobilePose-Shape, and let the network learn pose from shape. Our models are trained on mixed real and synthetic data, with weak and noisy shape supervision. They are ultra lightweight that can run in real-time on modern mobile devices (e.g. 36 FPS on Galaxy S20). Comparing with previous single-shot solutions, our method has higher accuracy, while using a significantly smaller model (2~3% in model size or number of parameters).
The Variational InfoMax Learning Objective
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Bayesian Inference and Information Bottleneck are the two most popular objectives for neural networks, but they can be optimised only via a variational lower bound: the Variational Information Bottleneck (VIB). In this manuscript we show that the two objectives are actually equivalent to the InfoMax: maximise the information between the data and the labels. The InfoMax representation of the two objectives is not relevant only per se, since it helps to understand the role of the network capacity, but also because it allows us to derive a variational objective, the Variational InfoMax (VIM), that maximises them directly without resorting to any lower bound. The theoretical improvement of VIM over VIB is highlighted by the computational experiments, where the model trained by VIM improves the VIB model in three different tasks: accuracy, robustness to noise and representation quality.
Experimental Comparison of Global Motion Planning Algorithms for Wheeled Mobile Robots
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Planning smooth and energy-efficient motions for wheeled mobile robots is a central task for applications ranging from autonomous driving to service and intralogistic robotics. Over the past decades, a wide variety of motion planners, steer functions and path-improvement techniques have been proposed for such non-holonomic systems. With the objective of comparing this large assortment of state-of-the-art motion-planning techniques, we introduce a novel open-source motion-planning benchmark for wheeled mobile robots, whose scenarios resemble real-world applications (such as navigating warehouses, moving in cluttered cities or parking), and propose metrics for planning efficiency and path quality. Our benchmark is easy to use and extend, and thus allows practitioners and researchers to evaluate new motion-planning algorithms, scenarios and metrics easily. We use our benchmark to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of several common state-of-the-art motion planners and provide recommendations on when they should be used.