OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
BayesOD: A Bayesian Approach for Uncertainty Estimation in Deep Object Detectors
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

When incorporating deep neural networks into robotic systems, a major challenge is the lack of uncertainty measures associated with their output predictions. Methods for uncertainty estimation in the output of deep object detectors (DNNs) have been proposed in recent works, but have had limited success due to 1) information loss at the detectors non-maximum suppression (NMS) stage, and 2) failure to take into account the multitask, many-to-one nature of anchor-based object detection. To that end, we introduce BayesOD, an uncertainty estimation approach that reformulates the standard object detector inference and Non-Maximum suppression components from a Bayesian perspective. Experiments performed on four common object detection datasets show that BayesOD provides uncertainty estimates that are better correlated with the accuracy of detections, manifesting as a significant reduction of 9.77\%-13.13\% on the minimum Gaussian uncertainty error metric and a reduction of 1.63\%-5.23\% on the minimum Categorical uncertainty error metric. Code will be released at {\url{https://github.com/asharakeh/bayes-od-rc}}.
Analysis of the use of smart cards on the urban railway
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2019
Year: 2019

The article analyzes the patterns of use of railway stations in the Moscow region. The basis for the analysis is the data of smart cards on the entrances and exits of passengers. The technical tool is time series similarity analysis. As a result, the work identifies the main patterns of user behavior on the use of railway stations (railway transport). The results of the work were used in the design of new lines of urban railways. Obviously, the use patterns reflect the current state of the transport system and the urban environment. Accordingly, the recorded changes in usage patterns can serve as indicators and metrics for changes in the urban environment.
A Motivational Game-Theoretic Approach for Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading in the Smart Grid
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2019
Year: 2019

Peer-to-peer trading in energy networks is expected to be exclusively conducted by the prosumers of the network with negligible influence from the grid. This raises the critical question: how can enough prosumers be encouraged to participate in peer-to-peer trading so as to make its operation sustainable and beneficial to the overall electricity network? To this end, this paper proposes how a motivational psychology framework can be used effectively to design peer-to-peer energy trading to increase user participation. To do so, first, the state-of-the-art of peer-to-peer energy trading literature is discussed by following a systematic classification, and gaps in existing studies are identified. Second, a motivation psychology framework is introduced, which consists of a number of motivational models that a prosumer needs to satisfy before being convinced to participate in energy trading. Third, a game-theoretic peer-to-peer energy trading scheme is developed, its relevant properties are studied, and it is shown that the coalition among different prosumers is a stable coalition. Fourth, through numerical case studies, it is shown that the proposed model can reduce carbon emissions by 18.38% and 9.82% in a single day in Summer and Winter respectively compared to a feed-in-tariff scheme. The proposed scheme is also shown to reduce the cost of energy up to 118 cents and 87 cents per day in Summer and Winter respectively. Finally, how the outcomes of the scheme satisfy all the motivational psychology models is discussed, which subsequently shows its potential to attract users to participate in energy trading.
Learning-Based Cost Functions for 3D and 4D Multi-Surface Multi-Object Segmentation of Knee MRI: Data from the Osteoarthritis Initiative
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

A fully automated knee MRI segmentation method to study osteoarthritis (OA) was developed using a novel hierarchical set of random forests (RF) classifiers to learn the appearance of cartilage regions and their boundaries. A neighborhood approximation forest is used first to provide contextual feature to the second-level RF classifier that also considers local features and produces location-specific costs for the layered optimal graph image segmentation of multiple objects and surfaces (LOGISMOS) framework. Double echo steady state (DESS) MRIs used in this work originated from the Osteoarthritis Initiative (OAI) study. Trained on 34 MRIs with varying degrees of OA, the performance of the learning-based method tested on 108 MRIs showed a significant reduction in segmentation errors (\emph{p}$<$0.05) compared with the conventional gradient-based and single-stage RF-learned costs. The 3D LOGISMOS was extended to longitudinal-3D (4D) to simultaneously segment multiple follow-up visits of the same patient. As such, data from all time-points of the temporal sequence contribute information to a single optimal solution that utilizes both spatial 3D and temporal contexts. 4D LOGISMOS validation on 108 MRIs from baseline and 12 month follow-up scans of 54 patients showed a significant reduction in segmentation errors (\emph{p}$<$0.01) compared to 3D. Finally, the potential of 4D LOGISMOS was further explored on the same 54 patients using 5 annual follow-up scans demonstrating a significant improvement of measuring cartilage thickness (\emph{p}$<$0.01) compared to the sequential 3D approach.
DeepTagRec: A Content-cum-User based Tag Recommendation Framework for Stack Overflow
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we develop a content-cum-user based deep learning framework DeepTagRec to recommend appropriate question tags on Stack Overflow. The proposed system learns the content representation from question title and body. Subsequently, the learnt representation from heterogeneous relationship between user and tags is fused with the content representation for the final tag prediction. On a very large-scale dataset comprising half a million question posts, DeepTagRec beats all the baselines; in particular, it significantly outperforms the best performing baseline T agCombine achieving an overall gain of 60.8% and 36.8% in precision@3 and recall@10 respectively. DeepTagRec also achieves 63% and 33.14% maximum improvement in exact-k accuracy and top-k accuracy respectively over TagCombine
A full controller for a fixed-wing UAV
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2019
Year: 2019

This paper presents a nonlinear control law for the stabilization of a fixed-wing UAV. Such controller solves the path-following problem and the longitudinal control problem in a single control. Furthermore, the control design is performed considering aerodynamics and state information available in the commercial autopilots with the aim of an ease implementation. It is achieved that the closed-loop system is G.A.S. and robust to external disturbances. The difference among the available controllers in the literature is: 1) it depends on available states, hence it is not required extra sensors or observers; and 2) it is possible to achieve any desired airplane state with an ease of implementation, since its design is performed keeping in mind the capability of implementation in any commercial autopilot.
Efficiently Reusing Natural Language Processing Models for Phenotype-Mention Identification in Free-text Electronic Medical Records: Methodology Study
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

Background: Many efforts have been put into the use of automated approaches, such as natural language processing (NLP), to mine or extract data from free-text medical records to construct comprehensive patient profiles for delivering better health-care. Reusing NLP models in new settings, however, remains cumbersome - requiring validation and/or retraining on new data iteratively to achieve convergent results. Objective: The aim of this work is to minimize the effort involved in reusing NLP models on free-text medical records. Methods: We formally define and analyse the model adaptation problem in phenotype-mention identification tasks. We identify "duplicate waste" and "imbalance waste", which collectively impede efficient model reuse. We propose a phenotype embedding based approach to minimize these sources of waste without the need for labelled data from new settings. Results: We conduct experiments on data from a large mental health registry to reuse NLP models in four phenotype-mention identification tasks. The proposed approach can choose the best model for a new task, identifying up to 76% (duplicate waste), i.e. phenotype mentions without the need for validation and model retraining, and with very good performance (93-97% accuracy). It can also provide guidance for validating and retraining the selected model for novel language patterns in new tasks, saving around 80% (imbalance waste), i.e. the effort required in "blind" model-adaptation approaches. Conclusions: Adapting pre-trained NLP models for new tasks can be more efficient and effective if the language pattern landscapes of old settings and new settings can be made explicit and comparable. Our experiments show that the phenotype-mention embedding approach is an effective way to model language patterns for phenotype-mention identification tasks and that its use can guide efficient NLP model reuse.
NormalNet: Learning-based Normal Filtering for Mesh Denoising
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2019
Year: 2019

Mesh denoising is a critical technology in geometry processing that aims to recover high-fidelity 3D mesh models of objects from their noise-corrupted versions. In this work, we propose a learning-based normal filtering scheme for mesh denoising called NormalNet, which maps the guided normal filtering (GNF) into a deep network. The scheme follows the iterative framework of filtering-based mesh denoising. During each iteration, first, the voxelization strategy is applied on each face in a mesh to transform the irregular local structure into the regular volumetric representation, therefore, both the structure and face normal information are preserved and the convolution operations in CNN(Convolutional Neural Network) can be easily performed. Second, instead of the guidance normal generation and the guided filtering in GNF, a deep CNN is designed, which takes the volumetric representation as input, and outputs the learned filtered normals. At last, the vertex positions are updated according to the filtered normals. Specifically, the iterative training framework is proposed, in which the generation of training data and the network training are alternately performed, whereas the ground truth normals are taken as the guidance normals in GNF to get the target normals. Compared to state-of-the-art works, NormalNet can effectively remove noise while preserving the original features and avoiding pseudo-features.
Exploration of Interesting Dense Regions in Spatial Data
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2019
Year: 2019

Nowadays, spatial data are ubiquitous in various fields of science, such as transportation and the social Web. A recent research direction in analyzing spatial data is to provide means for "exploratory analysis" of such data where analysts are guided towards interesting options in consecutive analysis iterations. Typically, the guidance component learns analyst's preferences using her explicit feedback, e.g., picking a spatial point or selecting a region of interest. However, it is often the case that analysts forget or don't feel necessary to explicitly express their feedback in what they find interesting. Our approach captures implicit feedback on spatial data. The approach consists of observing mouse moves (as a means of analyst's interaction) and also the explicit analyst's interaction with data points in order to discover interesting spatial regions with dense mouse hovers. In this paper, we define, formalize and explore Interesting Dense Regions (IDRs) which capture preferences of analysts, in order to automatically find interesting spatial highlights. Our approach involves a polygon-based abstraction layer for capturing preferences. Using these IDRs, we highlight points to guide analysts in the analysis process. We discuss the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach through realistic examples and experiments on Airbnb and Yelp datasets.
Redditors in Recovery: Text Mining Reddit to Investigate Transitions into Drug Addiction
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2019
Year: 2019

Increasing rates of opioid drug abuse and heightened prevalence of online support communities underscore the necessity of employing data mining techniques to better understand drug addiction using these rapidly developing online resources. In this work, we obtain data from Reddit, an online collection of forums, to gather insight into drug use/misuse using text data from users themselves. Specifically, using user posts, we trained 1) a binary classifier which predicts transitions from casual drug discussion forums to drug recovery forums and 2) a Cox regression model that outputs likelihoods of such transitions. In doing so, we found that utterances of select drugs and certain linguistic features contained in one's posts can help predict these transitions. Using unfiltered drug-related posts, our research delineates drugs that are associated with higher rates of transitions from recreational drug discussion to support/recovery discussion, offers insight into modern drug culture, and provides tools with potential applications in combating the opioid crisis.
Spatial-Aware Non-Local Attention for Fashion Landmark Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Fashion landmark detection is a challenging task even using the current deep learning techniques, due to the large variation and non-rigid deformation of clothes. In order to tackle these problems, we propose Spatial-Aware Non-Local (SANL) block, an attentive module in deep neural network which can utilize spatial information while capturing global dependency. Actually, the SANL block is constructed from the non-local block in the residual manner which can learn the spatial related representation by taking a spatial attention map from Grad-CAM. We then establish our fashion landmark detection framework on feature pyramid network, equipped with four SANL blocks in the backbone. It is demonstrated by the experimental results on two large-scale fashion datasets that our proposed fashion landmark detection approach with the SANL blocks outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods considerably. Some supplementary experiments on fine-grained image classification also show the effectiveness of the proposed SANL block.
Interference Mitigation for Ultrareliable Low-Latency Wireless Communication
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

This paper proposes interference mitigation techniques for provisioning ultrareliable low-latency wireless communication in an industrial automation setting, where multiple transmissions from controllers to actuators interfere with each other. Channel fading and interference are key impairments in wireless communication. This paper leverages the recently proposed ``Occupy CoW'' protocol that efficiently exploits the broadcast opportunity and spatial diversity through a two-hop cooperative communication strategy among distributed receivers to combat deep fading, but points out that because this protocol avoids interference by frequency division orthogonal transmission, it is not scalable in terms of bandwidth required for achieving ultrareliability, when multiple controllers simultaneously communicate with multiple actuators (akin to the downlink of a multicell network). The main observation of this paper is that full frequency reuse in the first phase, together with successive decoding and cancellation of interference, can improve the performance of this strategy notably. We propose two protocols depending on whether interference cancellation or avoidance is implemented in the second phase, and show that both outperform Occupy CoW in terms of the required bandwidth and power for achieving ultrareliability at practical values of the transmit power.
Proteus: A Scalable BFT Consesus Protocol for Blockchains
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus exhibits higher throughput in comparison to Proof of Work (PoW) in blockchains. But BFT-based protocols suffer from scalability problems with respect to the number of replicas in the network. The main reason for this limitation is the quadratic message complexity of BFT protocols. Previously, proposed solutions improve BFT performance for normal operation, but will fall back to quadratic message complexity once the protocol observes a certain number of failures. This makes the protocol performance unpredictable as it is not guaranteed that the network will face a a certain number of failures. As a result, such protocols are only scalable when conditions are favorable (i.e., the number of failures are less than a given threshold). To address this issue we propose Proteus, a new BFT-based consensus protocol which elects a subset of nodes $c$ as a root committee. Proteus guarantees stable performance, regardless of the number of failures in the network and it improves on the quadratic message complexity of typical BFT-based protocols to $O(cn)$, where $c<<n$, for large $n$. Thus, message complexity remains small and less than quadratic when $c$ is asymptotically smaller than $n$, and this helps the protocol to provide stable performance even during the view change process (change of root committee). Our view change process is different than typical BFT protocols as it replaces the whole root committee compared to replacing a single primary in other protocols. We deployed and tested our protocol on $200$ Amazon $EC2$ instances, with two different baseline BFT protocols (PBFT and Bchain) for comparison. In these tests, our protocol outperformed the baselines by more than $2\times$ in terms of throughput as well as latency.
The Unconstrained Ear Recognition Challenge 2019 - ArXiv Version With Appendix
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

This paper presents a summary of the 2019 Unconstrained Ear Recognition Challenge (UERC), the second in a series of group benchmarking efforts centered around the problem of person recognition from ear images captured in uncontrolled settings. The goal of the challenge is to assess the performance of existing ear recognition techniques on a challenging large-scale ear dataset and to analyze performance of the technology from various viewpoints, such as generalization abilities to unseen data characteristics, sensitivity to rotations, occlusions and image resolution and performance bias on sub-groups of subjects, selected based on demographic criteria, i.e. gender and ethnicity. Research groups from 12 institutions entered the competition and submitted a total of 13 recognition approaches ranging from descriptor-based methods to deep-learning models. The majority of submissions focused on ensemble based methods combining either representations from multiple deep models or hand-crafted with learned image descriptors. Our analysis shows that methods incorporating deep learning models clearly outperform techniques relying solely on hand-crafted descriptors, even though both groups of techniques exhibit similar behaviour when it comes to robustness to various covariates, such presence of occlusions, changes in (head) pose, or variability in image resolution. The results of the challenge also show that there has been considerable progress since the first UERC in 2017, but that there is still ample room for further research in this area.
MSFD:Multi-Scale Receptive Field Face Detector
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

We aim to study the multi-scale receptive fields of a single convolutional neural network to detect faces of varied scales. This paper presents our Multi-Scale Receptive Field Face Detector (MSFD), which has superior performance on detecting faces at different scales and enjoys real-time inference speed. MSFD agglomerates context and texture by hierarchical structure. More additional information and rich receptive field bring significant improvement but generate marginal time consumption. We simultaneously propose an anchor assignment strategy which can cover faces with a wide range of scales to improve the recall rate of small faces and rotated faces. To reduce the false positive rate, we train our detector with focal loss which keeps the easy samples from overwhelming. As a result, MSFD reaches superior results on the FDDB, Pascal-Faces and WIDER FACE datasets, and can run at 31 FPS on GPU for VGA-resolution images.
Distributed deep learning for robust multi-site segmentation of CT imaging after traumatic brain injury
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Machine learning models are becoming commonplace in the domain of medical imaging, and with these methods comes an ever-increasing need for more data. However, to preserve patient anonymity it is frequently impractical or prohibited to transfer protected health information (PHI) between institutions. Additionally, due to the nature of some studies, there may not be a large public dataset available on which to train models. To address this conundrum, we analyze the efficacy of transferring the model itself in lieu of data between different sites. By doing so we accomplish two goals: 1) the model gains access to training on a larger dataset that it could not normally obtain and 2) the model better generalizes, having trained on data from separate locations. In this paper, we implement multi-site learning with disparate datasets from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) without compromising PHI. Three neural networks are trained to convergence on a computed tomography (CT) brain hematoma segmentation task: one only with NIH data,one only with VUMC data, and one multi-site model alternating between NIH and VUMC data. Resultant lesion masks with the multi-site model attain an average Dice similarity coefficient of 0.64 and the automatically segmented hematoma volumes correlate to those done manually with a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.87,corresponding to an 8% and 5% improvement, respectively, over the single-site model counterparts.
Manifold Mixup improves text recognition with CTC loss
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Modern handwritten text recognition techniques employ deep recurrent neural networks. The use of these techniques is especially efficient when a large amount of annotated data is available for parameter estimation. Data augmentation can be used to enhance the performance of the systems when data is scarce. Manifold Mixup is a modern method of data augmentation that meld two images or the feature maps corresponding to these images and the targets are fused accordingly. We propose to apply the Manifold Mixup to text recognition while adapting it to work with a Connectionist Temporal Classification cost. We show that Manifold Mixup improves text recognition results on various languages and datasets.
The relationship between word complexity and computational complexity in subshifts
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2019
Year: 2019

We prove several results about the relationship between the word complexity function of a subshift and the set of Turing degrees of points of the subshift, which we call the Turing spectrum. Among other results, we show that a Turing spectrum can be realized via a subshift of linear complexity if and only if it consists of the union of a finite set and a finite number of cones, that a Turing spectrum can be realized via a subshift of exponential complexity (i.e. positive entropy) if and only if it contains a cone, and that every Turing spectrum which either contains degree 0 or is a union of cones is realizable by subshifts with a wide range of 'intermediate' complexity growth rates between linear and exponential.