OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Towards Compact ConvNets via Structure-Sparsity Regularized Filter Pruning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

The success of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in computer vision applications has been accompanied by a significant increase of computation and memory costs, which prohibits its usage on resource-limited environments such as mobile or embedded devices. To this end, the research of CNN compression has recently become emerging. In this paper, we propose a novel filter pruning scheme, termed structured sparsity regularization (SSR), to simultaneously speedup the computation and reduce the memory overhead of CNNs, which can be well supported by various off-the-shelf deep learning libraries. Concretely, the proposed scheme incorporates two different regularizers of structured sparsity into the original objective function of filter pruning, which fully coordinates the global outputs and local pruning operations to adaptively prune filters. We further propose an Alternative Updating with Lagrange Multipliers (AULM) scheme to efficiently solve its optimization. AULM follows the principle of ADMM and alternates between promoting the structured sparsity of CNNs and optimizing the recognition loss, which leads to a very efficient solver (2.5x to the most recent work that directly solves the group sparsity-based regularization). Moreover, by imposing the structured sparsity, the online inference is extremely memory-light, since the number of filters and the output feature maps are simultaneously reduced. The proposed scheme has been deployed to a variety of state-of-the-art CNN structures including LeNet, AlexNet, VGG, ResNet and GoogLeNet over different datasets. Quantitative results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves superior performance over the state-of-the-art methods. We further demonstrate the proposed compression scheme for the task of transfer learning, including domain adaptation and object detection, which also show exciting performance gains over the state-of-the-arts.
AspeRa: Aspect-based Rating Prediction Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

We propose a novel end-to-end Aspect-based Rating Prediction model (AspeRa) that estimates user rating based on review texts for the items and at the same time discovers coherent aspects of reviews that can be used to explain predictions or profile users. The AspeRa model uses max-margin losses for joint item and user embedding learning and a dual-headed architecture; it significantly outperforms recently proposed state-of-the-art models such as DeepCoNN, HFT, NARRE, and TransRev on two real world data sets of user reviews. With qualitative examination of the aspects and quantitative evaluation of rating prediction models based on these aspects, we show how aspect embeddings can be used in a recommender system.
How do Mixture Density RNNs Predict the Future?
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Gaining a better understanding of how and what machine learning systems learn is important to increase confidence in their decisions and catalyze further research. In this paper, we analyze the predictions made by a specific type of recurrent neural network, mixture density RNNs (MD-RNNs). These networks learn to model predictions as a combination of multiple Gaussian distributions, making them particularly interesting for problems where a sequence of inputs may lead to several distinct future possibilities. An example is learning internal models of an environment, where different events may or may not occur, but where the average over different events is not meaningful. By analyzing the predictions made by trained MD-RNNs, we find that their different Gaussian components have two complementary roles: 1) Separately modeling different stochastic events and 2) Separately modeling scenarios governed by different rules. These findings increase our understanding of what is learned by predictive MD-RNNs, and open up new research directions for further understanding how we can benefit from their self-organizing model decomposition.
Approximate k-Cover in Hypergraphs: Efficient Algorithms, and Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2019
Year: 2019

Given a weighted hypergraph $\mathcal{H}(V, \mathcal{E} \subseteq 2^V, w)$, the approximate $k$-cover problem seeks for a size-$k$ subset of $V$ that has the maximum weighted coverage by \emph{sampling only a few hyperedges} in $\mathcal{E}$. The problem has emerged from several network analysis applications including viral marketing, centrality maximization, and landmark selection. Despite many efforts, even the best approaches require $O(k n \log n)$ space complexities, thus, cannot scale to, nowadays, humongous networks without sacrificing formal guarantees. In this paper, we propose BCA, a family of algorithms for approximate $k$-cover that can find $(1-\frac{1}{e} -ε)$-approximation solutions within an \emph{$O(ε^{-2}n \log n)$ space}. That is a factor $k$ reduction on space comparing to the state-of-the-art approaches with the same guarantee. We further make BCA more efficient and robust on real-world instances by introducing a novel adaptive sampling scheme, termed DTA.
PD-ML-Lite: Private Distributed Machine Learning from Lighweight Cryptography
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Privacy is a major issue in learning from distributed data. Recently the cryptographic literature has provided several tools for this task. However, these tools either reduce the quality/accuracy of the learning algorithm---e.g., by adding noise---or they incur a high performance penalty and/or involve trusting external authorities. We propose a methodology for {\sl private distributed machine learning from light-weight cryptography} (in short, PD-ML-Lite). We apply our methodology to two major ML algorithms, namely non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) and singular value decomposition (SVD). Our resulting protocols are communication optimal, achieve the same accuracy as their non-private counterparts, and satisfy a notion of privacy---which we define---that is both intuitive and measurable. Our approach is to use lightweight cryptographic protocols (secure sum and normalized secure sum) to build learning algorithms rather than wrap complex learning algorithms in a heavy-cost MPC framework. We showcase our algorithms' utility and privacy on several applications: for NMF we consider topic modeling and recommender systems, and for SVD, principal component regression, and low rank approximation.
Quantum finite automata: survey, status and research directions
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2019
Year: 2019

Quantum computing is concerned with computer technology based on the principles of quantum mechanics, with operations performed at the quantum level. Quantum computational models make it possible to analyze the resources required for computations. Quantum automata can be classified thusly: quantum finite automata, quantum sequential machine, quantum pushdown automata, quantum Turing machine and orthomodular lattice-valued automata. These models are useful for determining the expressive power and boundaries of various computational features. In light of the current state of quantum computation theory research, a systematic review of the literature seems timely. This article seeks to provide a comprehensive and systematic analysis of quantum finite automata models, quantum finite automata models with density operators and quantum finite automata models with classical states, interactive proof systems, quantum communication complexity and query complexity as described in the literature. The statistics of quantum finite automata related papers are shown and open problems are identified for more advanced research. The current status of quantum automata theory is distributed into various categories. This research work also highlights the previous research, current status and future directions of quantum automata models.
Removing Stripes, Scratches, and Curtaining with Non-Recoverable Compressed Sensing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Highly-directional image artifacts such as ion mill curtaining, mechanical scratches, or image striping from beam instability degrade the interpretability of micrographs. These unwanted, aperiodic features extend the image along a primary direction and occupy a small wedge of information in Fourier space. Deleting this wedge of data replaces stripes, scratches, or curtaining, with more complex streaking and blurring artifacts-known within the tomography community as missing wedge artifacts. Here, we overcome this problem by recovering the missing region using total variation minimization, which leverages image sparsity based reconstruction techniques-colloquially referred to as compressed sensing-to reliably restore images corrupted by stripe like features. Our approach removes beam instability, ion mill curtaining, mechanical scratches, or any stripe features and remains robust at low signal-to-noise. The success of this approach is achieved by exploiting compressed sensings inability to recover directional structures that are highly localized and missing in Fourier Space.
Sentiment and Sarcasm Classification with Multitask Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

Sentiment classification and sarcasm detection are both important natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Sentiment is always coupled with sarcasm where intensive emotion is expressed. Nevertheless, most literature considers them as two separate tasks. We argue that knowledge in sarcasm detection can also be beneficial to sentiment classification and vice versa. We show that these two tasks are correlated, and present a multi-task learning-based framework using a deep neural network that models this correlation to improve the performance of both tasks in a multi-task learning setting. Our method outperforms the state of the art by 3-4% in the benchmark dataset.
Sitatapatra: Blocking the Transfer of Adversarial Samples
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are widely used to solve classification tasks in computer vision. However, they can be tricked into misclassifying specially crafted `adversarial' samples -- and samples built to trick one model often work alarmingly well against other models trained on the same task. In this paper we introduce Sitatapatra, a system designed to block the transfer of adversarial samples. It diversifies neural networks using a key, as in cryptography, and provides a mechanism for detecting attacks. What's more, when adversarial samples are detected they can typically be traced back to the individual device that was used to develop them. The run-time overheads are minimal permitting the use of Sitatapatra on constrained systems.
Distillation Strategies for Proximal Policy Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Vision-based deep reinforcement learning (RL) typically obtains performance benefit by using high capacity and relatively large convolutional neural networks (CNN). However, a large network leads to higher inference costs (power, latency, silicon area, MAC count). Many inference optimizations have been developed for CNNs. Some optimization techniques offer theoretical efficiency, such as sparsity, but designing actual hardware to support them is difficult. On the other hand, distillation is a simple general-purpose optimization technique which is broadly applicable for transferring knowledge from a trained, high capacity teacher network to an untrained, low capacity student network. DQN distillation extended the original distillation idea to transfer information stored in a high performance, high capacity teacher Q-function trained via the Deep Q-Learning (DQN) algorithm. Our work adapts the DQN distillation work to the actor-critic Proximal Policy Optimization algorithm. PPO is simple to implement and has much higher performance than the seminal DQN algorithm. We show that a distilled PPO student can attain far higher performance compared to a DQN teacher. We also show that a low capacity distilled student is generally able to outperform a low capacity agent that directly trains in the environment. Finally, we show that distillation, followed by "fine-tuning" in the environment, enables the distilled PPO student to achieve parity with teacher performance. In general, the lessons learned in this work should transfer to other modern actor-critic RL algorithms.
Vision-based Obstacle Removal System for Autonomous Ground Vehicles Using a Robotic Arm
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

Over the past few years, the use of camera-equipped robotic platforms for data collection and visually monitoring applications has exponentially grown. Cluttered construction sites with many objects (e.g., bricks, pipes, etc.) on the ground are challenging environments for a mobile unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) to navigate. To address this issue, this study presents a mobile UGV equipped with a stereo camera and a robotic arm that can remove obstacles along the UGV's path. To achieve this objective, the surrounding environment is captured by the stereo camera and obstacles are detected. The obstacle's relative location to the UGV is sent to the robotic arm module through Robot Operating System (ROS). Then, the robotic arm picks up and removes the obstacle. The proposed method will greatly enhance the degree of automation and the frequency of data collection for construction monitoring. The proposed system is validated through two case studies. The results successfully demonstrate the detection and removal of obstacles, serving as one of the enabling factors for developing an autonomous UGV with various construction operating applications.
Reciprocal Translation between SAR and Optical Remote Sensing Images with Cascaded-Residual Adversarial Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Despite the advantages of all-weather and all-day high-resolution imaging, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images are much less viewed and used by general people because human vision is not adapted to microwave scattering phenomenon. However, expert interpreters can be trained by comparing side-by-side SAR and optical images to learn the mapping rules from SAR to optical. This paper attempts to develop machine intelligence that are trainable with large-volume co-registered SAR and optical images to translate SAR image to optical version for assisted SAR image interpretation. Reciprocal SAR-Optical image translation is a challenging task because it is raw data translation between two physically very different sensing modalities. This paper proposes a novel reciprocal adversarial network scheme where cascaded residual connections and hybrid L1-GAN loss are employed. It is trained and tested on both spaceborne GF-3 and airborne UAVSAR images. Results are presented for datasets of different resolutions and polarizations and compared with other state-of-the-art methods. The FID is used to quantitatively evaluate the translation performance. The possibility of unsupervised learning with unpaired SAR and optical images is also explored. Results show that the proposed translation network works well under many scenarios and it could potentially be used for assisted SAR interpretation.
Reachability Problem in Non-uniform Cellular Automata
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2019
Year: 2019

This paper deals with the CREP (Configuration REachability Problem) for non-uniform cellular automata (CAs). The cells of non-uniform CAs, we have considered here, can use different Wolfram's rules to generate their next states. We report an algorithm which decides whether or not a configuration of a given (non-uniform) cellular automaton is reachable from another configuration. A characterization tool, named Reachability tree, is used to develop theories and the decision algorithm for the CREP. Though the worst case complexity of the algorithm is exponential in time and space, but the average performance is very good.
Anomaly Detection in Road Traffic Using Visual Surveillance: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Computer vision has evolved in the last decade as a key technology for numerous applications replacing human supervision. In this paper, we present a survey on relevant visual surveillance related researches for anomaly detection in public places, focusing primarily on roads. Firstly, we revisit the surveys done in the last 10 years in this field. Since the underlying building block of a typical anomaly detection is learning, we emphasize more on learning methods applied on video scenes. We then summarize the important contributions made during last six years on anomaly detection primarily focusing on features, underlying techniques, applied scenarios and types of anomalies using single static camera. Finally, we discuss the challenges in the computer vision related anomaly detection techniques and some of the important future possibilities.
Efficient Lightweight Encryption Algorithm for Smart Video Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

The future generation networks: Internet of things (IoT), in combination with the advanced computer vision techniques poses new challenges for securing videos for end-users. The visual devices generally have constrained resources in respects to their low computation power, small memory with limited power supply. Therefore, to facilitate the video security in smart environment, lightweight security schemes are required instead of inefficient existing traditional cryptography algorithms. This research paper provides the solution to overcome such problems. A novel lightweight cipher algorithm is proposed here which targets multimedia in IoT with an in-house name EXPer i.e. Extended permutation with eXclusive OR (XOR). EXPer is a symmetric stream cipher that consists of simple XOR and left shift operations with three keys of 128 bits. The proposed cipher algorithm has been tested on various sample videos. Comparison of proposed algorithm has been made with the traditional cipher algorithms XOR and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). Visual results confirm that EXPer provides security level equivalent to the AES algorithm with less computational cost than AES. Therefore, it can easily be perceived that the EXPer is a better replacement of AES for securing real-time video applications in IoT.
Recovery of Structured Signals From Corrupted Non-Linear Measurements
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

This paper studies the problem of recovering a structured signal from a relatively small number of corrupted non-linear measurements. Assuming that signal and corruption are contained in some structure-promoted set, we suggest an extended Lasso to disentangle signal and corruption. We also provide conditions under which this recovery procedure can successfully reconstruct both signal and corruption.
Deep Reasoning with Multi-Scale Context for Salient Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

To detect salient objects accurately, existing methods usually design complex backbone network architectures to learn and fuse powerful features. However, the saliency inference module that performs saliency prediction from the fused features receives much less attention on its architecture design and typically adopts only a few fully convolutional layers. In this paper, we find the limited capacity of the saliency inference module indeed makes a fundamental performance bottleneck, and enhancing its capacity is critical for obtaining better saliency prediction. Correspondingly, we propose a deep yet light-weight saliency inference module that adopts a multi-dilated depth-wise convolution architecture. Such a deep inference module, though with simple architecture, can directly perform reasoning about salient objects from the multi-scale convolutional features fast, and give superior salient object detection performance with less computational cost. To our best knowledge, we are the first to reveal the importance of the inference module for salient object detection, and present a novel architecture design with attractive efficiency and accuracy. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that our simple framework performs favorably compared with the state-of-the-art methods with complex backbone design.
Dispensing with Noise Forward in the "Weak" Relay-Eavesdropper Channel
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

The "weak" relay-eavesdropper channel was first studied by Lai and El Gamal, whose achievable scheme introduced noise forwarding (NF) and used backward decoding. We suggest a novel sliding window decoding scheme with a two block decoding delay, where the relay uses compress-forward with Wyner-Ziv (WZ) binning but does not use NF. Wireless engineers will welcome the reduced decoding delay. Sliding window decoding mandates multiblock equivocation calculations; dispensing with NF enables it. We identify nine regimes and develop a case-by-case choice of relay channel codebook and WZ bin sizes to maximize the secrecy rate. The multiblock equivocation calculations may be of independent interest.
Periodic-corrected data driven coupling of blood flow and vessel wall for virtual surgery
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2019
Year: 2019

Fast and realistic coupling of blood flow and vessel wall is of great importance to virtual surgery. In this paper, we propose a novel data-driven coupling method that formulates physics-based blood flow simulation as a regression problem, using an improved periodic-corrected neural network (PcNet), estimating the acceleration of every particle at each frame to obtain fast, stable and realistic simulation. We design a particle state feature vector based on smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH), modeling the mixed contribution of neighboring proxy particles on the blood vessel wall and neighboring blood particles, giving the extrapolation ability to deal with more complex couplings. We present a semi-supervised training strategy to improve the traditional BP neural network, which corrects the error periodically to ensure long term stability. Experimental results demonstrate that our method is able to implement stable and vivid coupling of blood flow and vessel wall while greatly improving computational efficiency.
On the Transformation of Latent Space in Autoencoders
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Noting the importance of the latent variables in inference and learning, we propose a novel framework for autoencoders based on the homeomorphic transformation of latent variables, which could reduce the distance between vectors in the transformed space, while preserving the topological properties of the original space, and investigate the effect of the latent space transformation on learning generative models and denoising corrupted data. The experimental results demonstrate that our generative and denoising models based on the proposed framework can provide better performance than conventional variational and denoising autoencoders due to the transformation, where we evaluate the performance of generative and denoising models in terms of the Hausdorff distance between the sets of training and processed i.e., either generated or denoised images, which can objectively measure their differences, as well as through direct comparison of the visual characteristics of the processed images.