OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Key 6G Challenge and Opportunity -- Connecting the Remaining 4 Billions: A Survey on Rural Connectivity
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

Providing connectivity to around half of the World population living in rural or underprivileged areas is a tremendous challenge, but also a unique opportunity. In this paper, a survey of technologies for providing connectivity to rural areas, and that can help address this challenge, is provided. Fronthaul and backhaul techniques are discussed. In addition, energy and cost efficiency of the studied technologies are analyzed. Typical application scenarios in rural areas are discussed, and several country-specific use cases are surveyed. Directions for future evolution of rural connectivity are outlined.
Adversarial Robustness via Label-Smoothing
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

We study Label-Smoothing as a means for improving adversarial robustness of supervised deep-learning models. After establishing a thorough and unified framework, we propose several variations to this general method: adversarial, Boltzmann and second-best Label-Smoothing methods, and we explain how to construct your own one. On various datasets (MNIST, CIFAR10, SVHN) and models (linear models, MLPs, LeNet, ResNet), we show that Label-Smoothing in general improves adversarial robustness against a variety of attacks (FGSM, BIM, DeepFool, Carlini-Wagner) by better taking account of the dataset geometry. The proposed Label-Smoothing methods have two main advantages: they can be implemented as a modified cross-entropy loss, thus do not require any modifications of the network architecture nor do they lead to increased training times, and they improve both standard and adversarial accuracy.
A shallow residual neural network to predict the visual cortex response
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Understanding how the visual cortex of the human brain really works is still an open problem for science today. A better understanding of natural intelligence could also benefit object-recognition algorithms based on convolutional neural networks. In this paper we demonstrate the asset of using a shallow residual neural network for this task. The benefit of this approach is that earlier stages of the network can be accurately trained, which allows us to add more layers at the earlier stage. With this additional layer the prediction of the visual brain activity improves from $10.4\%$ (block 1) to $15.53\%$ (last fully connected layer). By training the network for more than 10 epochs this improvement can become even larger.
Technical Health Check For Cloud Service Providers
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2019
Year: 2019

Understanding the overall health of an IT Infrastructure is a key part of IT Service Management. Traditional approach to perform technical health check is by visiting customer's physical site and rigorously examining the IT infrastructure with Subject Matter Experts. Alternatively, periodic surveys are sent to Technical Architects who are responsible for the managed IT infrastructure. In essence, both site visits and surveys suffer from reactive nature, and subjective assessment. In this paper, we present technical health check for cloud providers, that monitors, assesses operational data and depicts the current health of an IT infrastructure in real time. We also discuss challenges and opportunities of technical health check in Hybrid Cloud Environment.
A non-intrusive reduced order modeling framework for quasi-geostrophic turbulence
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2019
Year: 2019

In this study, we present a non-intrusive reduced order modeling (ROM) framework for large-scale quasi-stationary systems. The framework proposed herein exploits the time series prediction capability of long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network such that: (i) in the training phase, the LSTM model is trained on the modal coefficients extracted from the high-resolution data using proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) transform, and (ii) in the testing phase, the trained model predicts the modal coefficients for the total time recursively based on the initial time history. To illustrate the predictive performance of the proposed framework, the mean flow fields and time series response of the field values are reconstructed from the predicted modal coefficients by using an inverse POD transform. As a representative benchmark test case, we consider a two-dimensional quasi-geostrophic (QG) ocean circulation model which, in general, displays an enormous range of fluctuating spatial and temporal scales. We first illustrate that the conventional Galerkin projection based ROM of such systems requires a high number of POD modes to obtain a stable flow physics. In addition, ROM-GP does not seem to capture the intermittent bursts appearing in the dynamics of the first few most energetic modes. However, the proposed non-intrusive ROM framework based on LSTM (ROM-LSTM) yields a stable solution even for a small number of POD modes. We also observe that the ROM-LSTM model is able to capture quasi-periodic intermittent bursts accurately, and yields a stable and accurate mean flow dynamics using the time history of a few previous time states, denoted as the lookback time-window in this paper. Our findings suggest that the proposed ROM framework is capable of predicting noisy nonlinear fluid flows in an extremely efficient way compared to the conventional projection based ROM.
ORRB -- OpenAI Remote Rendering Backend
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2019
Year: 2019

We present the OpenAI Remote Rendering Backend (ORRB), a system that allows fast and customizable rendering of robotics environments. It is based on the Unity3d game engine and interfaces with the MuJoCo physics simulation library. ORRB was designed with visual domain randomization in mind. It is optimized for cloud deployment and high throughput operation. We are releasing it to the public under a liberal MIT license: https://github.com/openai/orrb .
SpliceRadar: A Learned Method For Blind Image Forensics
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Detection and localization of image manipulations like splices are gaining in importance with the easy accessibility of image editing softwares. While detection generates a verdict for an image it provides no insight into the manipulation. Localization helps explain a positive detection by identifying the pixels of the image which have been tampered. We propose a deep learning based method for splice localization without prior knowledge of a test image's camera-model. It comprises a novel approach for learning rich filters and for suppressing image-edges. Additionally, we train our model on a surrogate task of camera model identification, which allows us to leverage large and widely available, unmanipulated, camera-tagged image databases. During inference, we assume that the spliced and host regions come from different camera-models and we segment these regions using a Gaussian-mixture model. Experiments on three test databases demonstrate results on par with and above the state-of-the-art and a good generalization ability to unknown datasets.
A Game Model for Proofs with Costs
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2019
Year: 2019

We look at substructural calculi from a game semantic point of view, guided by certain intuitions about resource conscious and, more specifically, cost conscious reasoning. To this aim, we start with a game, where player I defends a claim corresponding to a (single-conclusion) sequent, while player II tries to refute that claim. Branching rules for additive connectives are modeled by choices of II, while branching for multiplicative connectives leads to splitting the game into parallel subgames, all of which have to be won by player I to succeed. The game comes into full swing by adding cost labels to assumptions, and a corresponding budget. Different proofs of the same end-sequent are interpreted as more or less expensive strategies for I to defend the corresponding claim. This leads to a new kind of labelled calculus, which can be seen as a fragment of SELL (subexponential linear logic). Finally, we generalize the concept of costs in proofs by using a semiring structure, illustrate our interpretation by examples and investigate some proof-theoretical properties.
Team JL Solution to Google Landmark Recognition 2019
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we describe our solution to the Google Landmark Recognition 2019 Challenge held on Kaggle. Due to the large number of classes, noisy data, imbalanced class sizes, and the presence of a significant amount of distractors in the test set, our method is based mainly on retrieval techniques with both global and local CNN approaches. Our full pipeline, after ensembling the models and applying several steps of re-ranking strategies, scores 0.37606 GAP on the private leaderboard which won the 1st place in the competition.
Comparing Energy Efficiency of CPU, GPU and FPGA Implementations for Vision Kernels
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Developing high performance embedded vision applications requires balancing run-time performance with energy constraints. Given the mix of hardware accelerators that exist for embedded computer vision (e.g. multi-core CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs), and their associated vendor optimized vision libraries, it becomes a challenge for developers to navigate this fragmented solution space. To aid with determining which embedded platform is most suitable for their application, we conduct a comprehensive benchmark of the run-time performance and energy efficiency of a wide range of vision kernels. We discuss rationales for why a given underlying hardware architecture innately performs well or poorly based on the characteristics of a range of vision kernel categories. Specifically, our study is performed for three commonly used HW accelerators for embedded vision applications: ARM57 CPU, Jetson TX2 GPU and ZCU102 FPGA, using their vendor optimized vision libraries: OpenCV, VisionWorks and xfOpenCV. Our results show that the GPU achieves an energy/frame reduction ratio of 1.1-3.2x compared to the others for simple kernels. While for more complicated kernels and complete vision pipelines, the FPGA outperforms the others with energy/frame reduction ratios of 1.2-22.3x. It is also observed that the FPGA performs increasingly better as a vision application's pipeline complexity grows.
A Preliminary Study on Data Augmentation of Deep Learning for Image Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Deep learning models have a large number of freeparameters that need to be calculated by effective trainingof the models on a great deal of training data to improvetheir generalization performance. However, data obtaining andlabeling is expensive in practice. Data augmentation is one of themethods to alleviate this problem. In this paper, we conduct apreliminary study on how three variables (augmentation method,augmentation rate and size of basic dataset per label) can affectthe accuracy of deep learning for image classification. The studyprovides some guidelines: (1) it is better to use transformationsthat alter the geometry of the images rather than those justlighting and color. (2) 2-3 times augmentation rate is good enoughfor training. (3) the smaller amount of data, the more obviouscontributions could have.
HalalNet: A Deep Neural Network that Classifies the Halalness Slaughtered Chicken from their Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Halal requirement in food is important for millions of Muslims worldwide especially for meat and chicken products, insuring that slaughter houses adhere to this requirement is a challenging task to do manually. In this paper a method is proposed that uses a camera that takes images of slaughtered chicken on the conveyor in a slaughter house, the images are then analyzed by a deep neural network to classify if the image is of a halal slaughtered chicken or not. However, traditional deep learning models require large amounts of data to train on, which in this case these amounts of data were challenging to collect especially the images of non-halal slaughtered chicken, hence this paper shows how the use of one shot learning [1] and transfer learning [2] can reach high accuracy on the few amounts of data that were available. The architecture used is based on the Siamese neural networks architecture which ranks the similarity between two inputs [3] while using the Xception network [4] as the twin networks. We call it HalalNet. This work was done as part of SYCUT (syriah compliant slaughtering system) which is a monitoring system that monitors the halalness of the slaughtered chicken in a slaughter house. The data used to train and validate HalalNet was collected from the Azain slaughtering site (Semenyih, Selangor, Malaysia) containing images of both halal and non-halal slaughtered chicken.
On Physical Adversarial Patches for Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we demonstrate a physical adversarial patch attack against object detectors, notably the YOLOv3 detector. Unlike previous work on physical object detection attacks, which required the patch to overlap with the objects being misclassified or avoiding detection, we show that a properly designed patch can suppress virtually all the detected objects in the image. That is, we can place the patch anywhere in the image, causing all existing objects in the image to be missed entirely by the detector, even those far away from the patch itself. This in turn opens up new lines of physical attacks against object detection systems, which require no modification of the objects in a scene. A demo of the system can be found at https://youtu.be/WXnQjbZ1e7Y.
A database for face presentation attack using wax figure faces
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Compared to 2D face presentation attacks (e.g. printed photos and video replays), 3D type attacks are more challenging to face recognition systems (FRS) by presenting 3D characteristics or materials similar to real faces. Existing 3D face spoofing databases, however, mostly based on 3D masks, are restricted to small data size or poor authenticity due to the production difficulty and high cost. In this work, we introduce the first wax figure face database, WFFD, as one type of super-realistic 3D presentation attacks to spoof the FRS. This database consists of 2200 images with both real and wax figure faces (totally 4400 faces) with a high diversity from online collections. Experiments on this database first investigate the vulnerability of three popular FRS to this kind of new attack. Further, we evaluate the performance of several face presentation attack detection methods to show the attack abilities of this super-realistic face spoofing database.
Data Extraction from Charts via Single Deep Neural Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Automatic data extraction from charts is challenging for two reasons: there exist many relations among objects in a chart, which is not a common consideration in general computer vision problems; and different types of charts may not be processed by the same model. To address these problems, we propose a framework of a single deep neural network, which consists of object detection, text recognition and object matching modules. The framework handles both bar and pie charts, and it may also be extended to other types of charts by slight revisions and by augmenting the training data. Our model performs successfully on 79.4% of test simulated bar charts and 88.0% of test simulated pie charts, while for charts outside of the training domain it degrades for 57.5% and 62.3%, respectively.
An unsupervised approach to Geographical Knowledge Discovery using street level and street network images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Recent researches have shown the increasing use of machine learn-ing methods in geography and urban analytics, primarily to extract features and patterns from spatial and temporal data using a supervised approach. Researches integrating geographical processes in machine learning models and the use of unsupervised approacheson geographical data for knowledge discovery had been sparse. This research contributes to the ladder, where we show how latent variables learned from unsupervised learning methods on urbanimages can be used for geographic knowledge discovery. In particular, we propose a simple approach called Convolutional-PCA(ConvPCA) which are applied on both street level and street network images to find a set of uncorrelated and ordered visual latentcomponents. The approach allows for meaningful explanations using a combination of geographical and generative visualisations to explore the latent space, and to show how the learned representation can be used to predict urban characteristics such as streetquality and street network attributes. The research also finds that the visual components from the ConvPCA model achieves similaraccuracy when compared to less interpretable dimension reduction techniques.
A New Compensatory Genetic Algorithm-Based Method for Effective Compressed Multi-function Convolutional Neural Network Model Selection with Multi-Objective Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2019
Year: 2019

In recent years, there have been many popular Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), such as Google's Inception-V4, that have performed very well for various image classification problems. These commonly used CNN models usually use the same activation function, such as RELU, for all neurons in the convolutional layers; they are "Single-function CNNs." However, SCNNs may not always be optimal. Thus, a "Multi-function CNN" (MCNN), which uses different activation functions for different neurons, has been shown to outperform a SCNN. Also, CNNs typically have very large architectures that use a lot of memory and need a lot of data in order to be trained well. As a result, they tend to have very high training and prediction times too. An important research problem is how to automatically and efficiently find the best CNN with both high classification performance and compact architecture with high training and prediction speeds, small power usage, and small memory size for any image classification problem. It is very useful to intelligently find an effective, fast, energy-efficient, and memory-efficient "Compressed Multi-function CNN" (CMCNN) from a large number of candidate MCNNs. A new compensatory algorithm using a new genetic algorithm (GA) is created to find the best CMCNN with an ideal compensation between performance and architecture size. The optimal CMCNN has the best performance and the smallest architecture size. Simulations using the CIFAR10 dataset showed that the new compensatory algorithm could find CMCNNs that could outperform non-compressed MCNNs in terms of classification performance (F1-score), speed, power usage, and memory usage. Other effective, fast, power-efficient, and memory-efficient CMCNNs based on popular CNN architectures will be developed for image classification problems in important real-world applications, such as brain informatics and biomedical imaging.
Training Models to Extract Treatment Plans from Clinical Notes Using Contents of Sections with Headings
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

Objective: Using natural language processing (NLP) to find sentences that state treatment plans in a clinical note, would automate plan extraction and would further enable their use in tools that help providers and care managers. However, as in the most NLP tasks on clinical text, creating gold standard to train and test NLP models is tedious and expensive. Fortuitously, sometimes but not always clinical notes contain sections with a heading that identifies the section as a plan. Leveraging contents of such labeled sections as a noisy training data, we assessed accuracy of NLP models trained with the data. Methods: We used common variations of plan headings and rule-based heuristics to find plan sections with headings in clinical notes, and we extracted sentences from them and formed a noisy training data of plan sentences. We trained Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models with the data. We measured accuracy of the trained models on the noisy dataset using ten-fold cross validation and separately on a set-aside manually annotated dataset. Results: About 13% of 117,730 clinical notes contained treatment plans sections with recognizable headings in the 1001 longitudinal patient records that were obtained from Cleveland Clinic under an IRB approval. We were able to extract and create a noisy training data of 13,492 plan sentences from the clinical notes. CNN achieved best F measures, 0.91 and 0.97 in the cross-validation and set-aside evaluation experiments respectively. SVM slightly underperformed with F measures of 0.89 and 0.96 in the same experiments. Conclusion: Our study showed that the training supervised learning models using noisy plan sentences was effective in identifying them in all clinical notes. More broadly, sections with informal headings in clinical notes can be a good source for generating effective training data.
Convolution Based Spectral Partitioning Architecture for Hyperspectral Image Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Hyperspectral images (HSIs) can distinguish materials with high number of spectral bands, which is widely adopted in remote sensing applications and benefits in high accuracy land cover classifications. However, HSIs processing are tangled with the problem of high dimensionality and limited amount of labelled data. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a deep learning architecture using three dimensional convolutional neural networks with spectral partitioning to perform effective feature extraction. We conduct experiments using Indian Pines and Salinas scenes acquired by NASA Airborne Visible/Infra-Red Imaging Spectrometer. In comparison to prior results, our architecture shows competitive performance for classification results over current methods.
Efficient Spatial Anti-Aliasing Rendering for Line Joins on Vector Maps
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2019
Year: 2019

The spatial anti-aliasing technique for line joins (intersections of the road segments) on vector maps is exclusively crucial to visual experience and system performance. Due to limitations of OpenGL API, one common practice to achieve the anti-aliased effect is splicing multiple triangles at varying scale levels to approximate the fan-shaped line joins. However, this approximation inevitably produces some unreality, and the system rendering performance is not optimal. To circumvent these drawbacks, in this paper, we propose a simple but efficient algorithm which uses only two triangles to substitute the multiple triangles approximation and then renders a realistic fan-shaped curve with alpha operation based on geometrical relation computing. Our experiment shows it has advantages of a realistic anti-aliasing effect, less memory cost, higher frame rate, and drawing line joins without overlapping rendering. Our proposed spatial anti-aliasing technique has been widely used in Internet Maps such as Tencent Mobile Maps and Tencent Automotive Maps.