OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Object Detection on Single Monocular Images through Canonical Correlation Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Without using extra 3-D data like points cloud or depth images for providing 3-D information, we retrieve the 3-D object information from single monocular images. The high-quality predicted depth images are recovered from single monocular images, and it is fed into the 2-D object proposal network with corresponding monocular images. Most existing deep learning frameworks with two-streams input data always fuse separate data by concatenating or adding, which views every part of a feature map can contribute equally to the whole task. However, when data are noisy, and too much information is redundant, these methods no longer produce predictions or classifications efficiently. In this report, we propose a two-dimensional CCA(canonical correlation analysis) framework to fuse monocular images and corresponding predicted depth images for basic computer vision tasks like image classification and object detection. Firstly, we implemented different structures with one-dimensional CCA and Alexnet to test the performance on the image classification task. And then, we applied one of these structures with 2D-CCA for object detection. During these experiments, we found that our proposed framework behaves better when taking predicted depth images as inputs with the model trained from ground truth depth.
High Performance Logistic Regression for Privacy-Preserving Genome Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we present a secure logistic regression training protocol and its implementation, with a new subprotocol to securely compute the activation function. To the best of our knowledge, we present the fastest existing secure Multi-Party Computation implementation for training logistic regression models on high dimensional genome data distributed across a local area network.
The Conditional Entropy Bottleneck
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Much of the field of Machine Learning exhibits a prominent set of failure modes, including vulnerability to adversarial examples, poor out-of-distribution (OoD) detection, miscalibration, and willingness to memorize random labelings of datasets. We characterize these as failures of robust generalization, which extends the traditional measure of generalization as accuracy or related metrics on a held-out set. We hypothesize that these failures to robustly generalize are due to the learning systems retaining too much information about the training data. To test this hypothesis, we propose the Minimum Necessary Information (MNI) criterion for evaluating the quality of a model. In order to train models that perform well with respect to the MNI criterion, we present a new objective function, the Conditional Entropy Bottleneck (CEB), which is closely related to the Information Bottleneck (IB). We experimentally test our hypothesis by comparing the performance of CEB models with deterministic models and Variational Information Bottleneck (VIB) models on a variety of different datasets and robustness challenges. We find strong empirical evidence supporting our hypothesis that MNI models improve on these problems of robust generalization.
MUST, SHOULD, DON'T CARE: TCP Conformance in the Wild
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

Standards govern the SHOULD and MUST requirements for protocol implementers for interoperability. In case of TCP that carries the bulk of the Internets' traffic, these requirements are defined in RFCs. While it is known that not all optional features are implemented and nonconformance exists, one would assume that TCP implementations at least conform to the minimum set of MUST requirements. In this paper, we use Internet-wide scans to show how Internet hosts and paths conform to these basic requirements. We uncover a non-negligible set of hosts and paths that do not adhere to even basic requirements. For example, we observe hosts that do not correctly handle checksums and cases of middlebox interference for TCP options. We identify hosts that drop packets when the urgent pointer is set or simply crash. Our publicly available results highlight that conformance to even fundamental protocol requirements should not be taken for granted but instead checked regularly.
EndoL2H: Deep Super-Resolution for Capsule Endoscopy
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Although wireless capsule endoscopy is the preferred modality for diagnosis and assessment of small bowel diseases, the poor camera resolution is a substantial limitation for both subjective and automated diagnostics. Enhanced-resolution endoscopy has shown to improve adenoma detection rate for conventional endoscopy and is likely to do the same for capsule endoscopy. In this work, we propose and quantitatively validate a novel framework to learn a mapping from low-to-high resolution endoscopic images. We combine conditional adversarial networks with a spatial attention block to improve the resolution by up to factors of 8x, 10x, 12x, respectively. Quantitative and qualitative studies performed demonstrate the superiority of EndoL2H over state-of-the-art deep super-resolution methods DBPN, RCAN and SRGAN. MOS tests performed by 30 gastroenterologists qualitatively assess and confirm the clinical relevance of the approach. EndoL2H is generally applicable to any endoscopic capsule system and has the potential to improve diagnosis and better harness computational approaches for polyp detection and characterization. Our code and trained models are available at https://github.com/CapsuleEndoscope/EndoL2H.
MODRL/D-AM: Multiobjective Deep Reinforcement Learning Algorithm Using Decomposition and Attention Model for Multiobjective Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2020
Year: 2020

Recently, a deep reinforcement learning method is proposed to solve multiobjective optimization problem. In this method, the multiobjective optimization problem is decomposed to a number of single-objective optimization subproblems and all the subproblems are optimized in a collaborative manner. Each subproblem is modeled with a pointer network and the model is trained with reinforcement learning. However, when pointer network extracts the features of an instance, it ignores the underlying structure information of the input nodes. Thus, this paper proposes a multiobjective deep reinforcement learning method using decomposition and attention model to solve multiobjective optimization problem. In our method, each subproblem is solved by an attention model, which can exploit the structure features as well as node features of input nodes. The experiment results on multiobjective travelling salesman problem show the proposed algorithm achieves better performance compared with the previous method.
Geometric Systems of Unbiased Representatives
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2020
Year: 2020

Let $P$ be a set of points in $\mathbb{R}^d$, $B$ a bicoloring of $P$ and $\Oo$ a family of geometric objects (that is, intervals, boxes, balls, etc). An object from $\Oo$ is called balanced with respect to $B$ if it contains the same number of points from each color of $B$. For a collection $\B$ of bicolorings of $P$, a geometric system of unbiased representatives (G-SUR) is a subset $\Oo'\subseteq\Oo$ such that for any bicoloring $B$ of $\B$ there is an object in $\Oo'$ that is balanced with respect to $B$. We study the problem of finding G-SURs. We obtain general bounds on the size of G-SURs consisting of intervals, size-restricted intervals, axis-parallel boxes and Euclidean balls. We show that the G-SUR problem is NP-hard even in the simple case of points on a line and interval ranges. Furthermore, we study a related problem on determining the size of the largest and smallest balanced intervals for points on the real line with a random distribution and coloring. Our results are a natural extension to a geometric context of the work initiated by Balachandran et al. on arbitrary systems of unbiased representatives.
Understanding individual behaviour: from virtual to physical patterns
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

As "Big Data" has become pervasive, an increasing amount of research has connected the dots between human behaviour in the offline and online worlds. Consequently, researchers have exploited these new findings to create models that better predict different aspects of human life and recommend future behaviour. To date, however, we do not yet fully understand the similarities and differences of human behaviour in these virtual and physical worlds. Here, we analyse and discuss the mobility and application usage of 400,000 individuals over eight months. We find an astonishing similarity between people's mobility in the physical space and how they move from app to app in smartphones. Our data shows that individuals use and visit a finite number of apps and places, but they keep exploring over time. In particular, two distinct profiles of individuals emerge: those that keep changing places and services, and those that are stable over time, named as "explorers" and "keepers". We see these findings as crucial to enrich a discussion for the potentials and the challenges of building human-centric AI systems, which might leverage recent results in Computational Social Science.
Replacing Mobile Camera ISP with a Single Deep Learning Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

As the popularity of mobile photography is growing constantly, lots of efforts are being invested now into building complex hand-crafted camera ISP solutions. In this work, we demonstrate that even the most sophisticated ISP pipelines can be replaced with a single end-to-end deep learning model trained without any prior knowledge about the sensor and optics used in a particular device. For this, we present PyNET, a novel pyramidal CNN architecture designed for fine-grained image restoration that implicitly learns to perform all ISP steps such as image demosaicing, denoising, white balancing, color and contrast correction, demoireing, etc. The model is trained to convert RAW Bayer data obtained directly from mobile camera sensor into photos captured with a professional high-end DSLR camera, making the solution independent of any particular mobile ISP implementation. To validate the proposed approach on the real data, we collected a large-scale dataset consisting of 10 thousand full-resolution RAW-RGB image pairs captured in the wild with the Huawei P20 cameraphone (12.3 MP Sony Exmor IMX380 sensor) and Canon 5D Mark IV DSLR. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed solution can easily get to the level of the embedded P20's ISP pipeline that, unlike our approach, is combining the data from two (RGB + B/W) camera sensors. The dataset, pre-trained models and codes used in this paper are available on the project website.
Multi-Vehicle Routing Problems with Soft Time Windows: A Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

Multi-vehicle routing problem with soft time windows (MVRPSTW) is an indispensable constituent in urban logistics distribution systems. Over the past decade, numerous methods for MVRPSTW have been proposed, but most are based on heuristic rules that require a large amount of computation time. With the current rapid increase of logistics demands, traditional methods incur the dilemma between computational efficiency and solution quality. To efficiently solve the problem, we propose a novel reinforcement learning algorithm called the Multi-Agent Attention Model that can solve routing problem instantly benefit from lengthy offline training. Specifically, the vehicle routing problem is regarded as a vehicle tour generation process, and an encoder-decoder framework with attention layers is proposed to generate tours of multiple vehicles iteratively. Furthermore, a multi-agent reinforcement learning method with an unsupervised auxiliary network is developed for the model training. By evaluated on four synthetic networks with different scales, the results demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms Google OR-Tools and traditional methods with little computation time. In addition, we validate the robustness of the well-trained model by varying the number of customers and the capacities of vehicles.
Feature-level Malware Obfuscation in Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

We consider the problem of detecting malware with deep learning models, where the malware may be combined with significant amounts of benign code. Examples of this include piggybacking and trojan horse attacks on a system, where malicious behavior is hidden within a useful application. Such added flexibility in augmenting the malware enables significantly more code obfuscation. Hence we focus on the use of static features, particularly Intents, Permissions, and API calls, which we presume cannot be ultimately hidden from the Android system, but only augmented with yet more such features. We first train a deep neural network classifier for malware classification using features of benign and malware samples. Then we demonstrate a steep increase in false negative rate (i.e., attacks succeed), simply by randomly adding features of a benign app to malware. Finally we test the use of data augmentation to harden the classifier against such attacks. We find that for API calls, it is possible to reject the vast majority of attacks, where using Intents or Permissions is less successful.
Abnormal respiratory patterns classifier may contribute to large-scale screening of people infected with COVID-19 in an accurate and unobtrusive manner
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Research significance: The extended version of this paper has been accepted by IEEE Internet of Things journal (DOI: 10.1109/JIOT.2020.2991456), please cite the journal version. During the epidemic prevention and control period, our study can be helpful in prognosis, diagnosis and screening for the patients infected with COVID-19 (the novel coronavirus) based on breathing characteristics. According to the latest clinical research, the respiratory pattern of COVID-19 is different from the respiratory patterns of flu and the common cold. One significant symptom that occurs in the COVID-19 is Tachypnea. People infected with COVID-19 have more rapid respiration. Our study can be utilized to distinguish various respiratory patterns and our device can be preliminarily put to practical use. Demo videos of this method working in situations of one subject and two subjects can be downloaded online. Research details: Accurate detection of the unexpected abnormal respiratory pattern of people in a remote and unobtrusive manner has great significance. In this work, we innovatively capitalize on depth camera and deep learning to achieve this goal. The challenges in this task are twofold: the amount of real-world data is not enough for training to get the deep model; and the intra-class variation of different types of respiratory patterns is large and the outer-class variation is small. In this paper, considering the characteristics of actual respiratory signals, a novel and efficient Respiratory Simulation Model (RSM) is first proposed to fill the gap between the large amount of training data and scarce real-world data. The proposed deep model and the modeling ideas have the great potential to be extended to large scale applications such as public places, sleep scenario, and office environment.
XCS Classifier System with Experience Replay
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

XCS constitutes the most deeply investigated classifier system today. It bears strong potentials and comes with inherent capabilities for mastering a variety of different learning tasks. Besides outstanding successes in various classification and regression tasks, XCS also proved very effective in certain multi-step environments from the domain of reinforcement learning. Especially in the latter domain, recent advances have been mainly driven by algorithms which model their policies based on deep neural networks -- among which the Deep-Q-Network (DQN) is a prominent representative. Experience Replay (ER) constitutes one of the crucial factors for the DQN's successes, since it facilitates stabilized training of the neural network-based Q-function approximators. Surprisingly, XCS barely takes advantage of similar mechanisms that leverage stored raw experiences encountered so far. To bridge this gap, this paper investigates the benefits of extending XCS with ER. On the one hand, we demonstrate that for single-step tasks ER bears massive potential for improvements in terms of sample efficiency. On the shady side, however, we reveal that the use of ER might further aggravate well-studied issues not yet solved for XCS when applied to sequential decision problems demanding for long-action-chains.
Generalized LDPC Codes with Convolutional Code Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

Braided convolutional codes (BCCs) are a class of spatially coupled turbo-like codes that can be described by a $(2,3)$-regular compact graph. In this paper, we introduce a family of $(d_v,d_c)$-regular GLDPC codes with convolutional code constraints (CC-GLDPC codes), which form an extension of classical BCCs to arbitrary regular graphs. In order to characterize the performance in the waterfall and error floor regions, we perform an analysis of the density evolution thresholds as well as the finite-length ensemble weight enumerators and minimum distances of the ensembles. In particular, we consider various ensembles of overall rate $R=1/3$ and $R=1/2$ and study the trade-off between variable node degree and strength of the component codes. We also compare the results to corresponding classical LDPC codes with equal degrees and rates. It is observed that for the considered LDPC codes with variable node degree $d_v>2$, we can find a CC-GLDPC code with smaller $d_v$ that offers similar or better performance in terms of BP and MAP thresholds at the expense of a negligible loss in the minimum distance.
Training Large Neural Networks with Constant Memory using a New Execution Algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Widely popular transformer-based NLP models such as BERT and Turing-NLG have enormous capacity trending to billions of parameters. Current execution methods demand brute-force resources such as HBM devices and high speed interconnectivity for data parallelism. In this paper, we introduce a new relay-style execution technique called L2L (layer-to-layer) where at any given moment, the device memory is primarily populated only with the executing layer(s)'s footprint. The model resides in the DRAM memory attached to either a CPU or an FPGA as an entity we call eager param-server (EPS). To overcome the bandwidth issues of shuttling parameters to and from EPS, the model is executed a layer at a time across many micro-batches instead of the conventional method of minibatches over whole model. L2L is implemented using 16GB V100 devices for BERT-Large running it with a device batch size of up to 256. Our results show 45% reduction in memory and 40% increase in the throughput compared to the state-of-the-art baseline. L2L is also able to fit models up to 50 Billion parameters on a machine with a single 16GB V100 and 512GB CPU memory and without requiring any model partitioning. L2L scales to arbitrary depth allowing researchers to develop on affordable devices which is a big step toward democratizing AI. By running the optimizer in the host EPS, we show a new form of mixed precision for faster throughput and convergence. In addition, the EPS enables dynamic neural architecture approaches by varying layers across iterations. Finally, we also propose and demonstrate a constant memory variation of L2L and we propose future enhancements. This work has been performed on GPUs first, but also targeted towards all high TFLOPS/Watt accelerators.
Politics of Adversarial Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

In addition to their security properties, adversarial machine-learning attacks and defenses have political dimensions. They enable or foreclose certain options for both the subjects of the machine learning systems and for those who deploy them, creating risks for civil liberties and human rights. In this paper, we draw on insights from science and technology studies, anthropology, and human rights literature, to inform how defenses against adversarial attacks can be used to suppress dissent and limit attempts to investigate machine learning systems. To make this concrete, we use real-world examples of how attacks such as perturbation, model inversion, or membership inference can be used for socially desirable ends. Although the predictions of this analysis may seem dire, there is hope. Efforts to address human rights concerns in the commercial spyware industry provide guidance for similar measures to ensure ML systems serve democratic, not authoritarian ends
An Ontology-driven Treatment Article Retrieval System for Precision Oncology
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2020
Year: 2020

This paper presents an ontology-driven treatment article retrieval system developed and experimented using the data and ground truths provided by the TREC 2017 precision medicine track. The key aspects of our system include: meaningful integration of various disease, gene, and drug name ontologies, training of a novel perceptron model for article relevance labeling, a ranking module that considers additional factors such as journal impact and article publication year, and comprehensive query matching rules. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed system considerably outperforms the results of the best participating system of the TREC 2017 precision medicine challenge.
Analysis of Users' Behaviour and Adoption Trends of Social Media Payment Platforms
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

The recent proliferation of Electronic Commerce (E-commerce) has been further escalated by multifaceted emerging payment solutions such as cryptocurrencies, mobile, peer-to-peer (P2P) and social media payment platforms. While these technological advancements are gaining tremendous popularity, mostly for their ease of use, various impediments such as security and privacy concerns, societal and cultural norms etc. forbear the users' adoption trends to some extents. This article examines the current status of the social media payment platforms as well as the projection of future adoption trends. Our research underlines the motivations and obstacles to the adoption of social media platforms.
An Open Source Solution for Smart Contract-based Parking
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

This paper discusses an open source solution to smart-parking in highly urbanized areas. Interviews have been conducted with domain experts, user stories defined and a system architecture has been proposed with a case study. Our solution allows independent owners of parking space to be integrated into one unified system, that facilitates the parking situation in a smart city. The utilization of such a system raises the issues of trust and transparency among several actors of the parking process. In order to tackle those, we propose a smart contract-based solution, that brings in trust by encapsulating sensitive relations and processes into transparent and distributed smart contracts.