OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Weather Influence and Classification with Automotive Lidar Sensors
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Lidar sensors are often used in mobile robots and autonomous vehicles to complement camera, radar and ultrasonic sensors for environment perception. Typically, perception algorithms are trained to only detect moving and static objects as well as ground estimation, but intentionally ignore weather effects to reduce false detections. In this work, we present an in-depth analysis of automotive lidar performance under harsh weather conditions, i.e. heavy rain and dense fog. An extensive data set has been recorded for various fog and rain conditions, which is the basis for the conducted in-depth analysis of the point cloud under changing environmental conditions. In addition, we introduce a novel approach to detect and classify rain or fog with lidar sensors only and achieve an mean union over intersection of 97.14 % for a data set in controlled environments. The analysis of weather influences on the performance of lidar sensors and the weather detection are important steps towards improving safety levels for autonomous driving in adverse weather conditions by providing reliable information to adapt vehicle behavior.
Conditional Parallel Coordinates
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2019
Year: 2019

Parallel Coordinates are a popular data visualization technique for multivariate data. Dating back to as early as 1880 PC are nearly as old as John Snow's famous cholera outbreak map of 1855, which is frequently regarded as a historic landmark for modern data visualization. Numerous extensions have been proposed to address integrity, scalability and readability. We make a new case to employ PC on conditional data, where additional dimensions are only unfolded if certain criteria are met in an observation. Compared to standard PC which operate on a flat set of dimensions the ontology of our input to Conditional Parallel Coordinates is of hierarchical nature. We therefore briefly review related work around hierarchical PC using aggregation or nesting techniques. Our contribution is a visualization to seamlessly adapt PC for conditional data under preservation of intuitive interaction patterns to select or highlight polylines. We conclude with intuitions on how to operate CPC on two data sets: an AutoML hyperparameter search log, and session results from a conversational agent.
On the Robustness of the Backdoor-based Watermarking in Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Obtaining the state of the art performance of deep learning models imposes a high cost to model generators, due to the tedious data preparation and the substantial processing requirements. To protect the model from unauthorized re-distribution, watermarking approaches have been introduced in the past couple of years. We investigate the robustness and reliability of state-of-the-art deep neural network watermarking schemes. We focus on backdoor-based watermarking and propose two -- a black-box and a white-box -- attacks that remove the watermark. Our black-box attack steals the model and removes the watermark with minimum requirements; it just relies on public unlabeled data and a black-box access to the classification label. It does not need classification confidences or access to the model's sensitive information such as the training data set, the trigger set or the model parameters. The white-box attack, proposes an efficient watermark removal when the parameters of the marked model are available; our white-box attack does not require access to the labeled data or the trigger set and improves the runtime of the black-box attack up to seventeen times. We as well prove the security inadequacy of the backdoor-based watermarking in keeping the watermark undetectable by proposing an attack that detects whether a model contains a watermark. Our attacks show that a recipient of a marked model can remove a backdoor-based watermark with significantly less effort than training a new model and some other techniques are needed to protect against re-distribution by a motivated attacker.
Nash equilibria in games over graphs equipped with a communication mechanism
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2019
Year: 2019

We study pure Nash equilibria in infinite-duration games on graphs, with partial visibility of actions but communication (based on a graph) among the players. We show that a simple communication mechanism consisting in reporting the deviator when seeing it and propagating this information is sufficient for characterizing Nash equilibria. We propose an epistemic game construction, which conveniently records important information about the knowledge of the players. With this abstraction, we are able to characterize Nash equilibria which follow the simple communication pattern via winning strategies. We finally discuss the size of the construction, which would allow efficient algorithmic solutions to compute Nash equilibria in the original game.
Inverse Kinematics of Some General 6R/P Manipulators
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

We develop an algorithm that solves the inverse kinematics of general serial 2RP3R, 2R2P2R, 3RP2R and 6R manipulators based on the HuPf algorithm. We identify the workspaces of the 3-subchains of the manipulator with a quasi-projective variety in $\mathbb{P}^7$ via dual quaternions. This allows us to compute linear forms that describe linear spaces containing the workspaces of these 3-subchains. We present numerical examples that illustrate the algorithm and show the real solutions.
A Static Analysis-based Cross-Architecture Performance Prediction Using Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

Porting code from CPU to GPU is costly and time-consuming; Unless much time is invested in development and optimization, it is not obvious, a priori, how much speed-up is achievable or how much room is left for improvement. Knowing the potential speed-up a priori can be very useful: It can save hundreds of engineering hours, help programmers with prioritization and algorithm selection. We aim to address this problem using machine learning in a supervised setting, using solely the single-threaded source code of the program, without having to run or profile the code. We propose a static analysis-based cross-architecture performance prediction framework (Static XAPP) which relies solely on program properties collected using static analysis of the CPU source code and predicts whether the potential speed-up is above or below a given threshold. We offer preliminary results that show we can achieve 94% accuracy in binary classification, in average, across different thresholds
BitcoinHeist: Topological Data Analysis for Ransomware Detection on the Bitcoin Blockchain
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

Proliferation of cryptocurrencies (e.g., Bitcoin) that allow pseudo-anonymous transactions, has made it easier for ransomware developers to demand ransom by encrypting sensitive user data. The recently revealed strikes of ransomware attacks have already resulted in significant economic losses and societal harm across different sectors, ranging from local governments to health care. Most modern ransomware use Bitcoin for payments. However, although Bitcoin transactions are permanently recorded and publicly available, current approaches for detecting ransomware depend only on a couple of heuristics and/or tedious information gathering steps (e.g., running ransomware to collect ransomware related Bitcoin addresses). To our knowledge, none of the previous approaches have employed advanced data analytics techniques to automatically detect ransomware related transactions and malicious Bitcoin addresses. By capitalizing on the recent advances in topological data analysis, we propose an efficient and tractable data analytics framework to automatically detect new malicious addresses in a ransomware family, given only a limited records of previous transactions. Furthermore, our proposed techniques exhibit high utility to detect the emergence of new ransomware families, that is, ransomware with no previous records of transactions. Using the existing known ransomware data sets, we show that our proposed methodology provides significant improvements in precision and recall for ransomware transaction detection, compared to existing heuristic based approaches, and can be utilized to automate ransomware detection.
Surf at MEDIQA 2019: Improving Performance of Natural Language Inference in the Clinical Domain by Adopting Pre-trained Language Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

While deep learning techniques have shown promising results in many natural language processing (NLP) tasks, it has not been widely applied to the clinical domain. The lack of large datasets and the pervasive use of domain-specific language (i.e. abbreviations and acronyms) in the clinical domain causes slower progress in NLP tasks than that of the general NLP tasks. To fill this gap, we employ word/subword-level based models that adopt large-scale data-driven methods such as pre-trained language models and transfer learning in analyzing text for the clinical domain. Empirical results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed methods by achieving 90.6% accuracy in medical domain natural language inference task. Furthermore, we inspect the independent strengths of the proposed approaches in quantitative and qualitative manners. This analysis will help researchers to select necessary components in building models for the medical domain.
Learning to Reconstruct and Understand Indoor Scenes from Sparse Views
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

This paper proposes a new method for simultaneous 3D reconstruction and semantic segmentation of indoor scenes. Unlike existing methods that require recording a video using a color camera and/or a depth camera, our method only needs a small number of (e.g., 3-5) color images from uncalibrated sparse views as input, which greatly simplifies data acquisition and extends applicable scenarios. Since different views have limited overlaps, our method allows a single image as input to discern the depth and semantic information of the scene. The key issue is how to recover relatively accurate depth from single images and reconstruct a 3D scene by fusing very few depth maps. To address this problem, we first design an iterative deep architecture, IterNet, that estimates depth and semantic segmentation alternately, so that they benefit each other. To deal with the little overlap and non-rigid transformation between views, we further propose a joint global and local registration method to reconstruct a 3D scene with semantic information from sparse views. We also make available a new indoor synthetic dataset simultaneously providing photorealistic high-resolution RGB images, accurate depth maps and pixel-level semantic labels for thousands of complex layouts, useful for training and evaluation. Experimental results on public datasets and our dataset demonstrate that our method achieves more accurate depth estimation, smaller semantic segmentation errors and better 3D reconstruction results, compared with state-of-the-art methods.
Extended probabilistic Rand index and the adjustable moving window-based pixel-pair sampling method
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

The probabilistic Rand (PR) index has the following three problems: It lacks variations in its value over images; the normalized probabilistic Rand (NPR) index to address this is theoretically unclear, and the sampling method of pixel-pairs was not proposed concretely. In this paper, we propose methods for solving these problems. First, we propose extended probabilistic Rand (EPR) index that considers not only similarity but also dissimilarity between segmentations. The EPR index provides twice as wide effective range as the PR index does. Second, we propose an adjustable moving window-based pixel-pair sampling (AWPS) method in which each pixel-pair is sampled adjustably by considering granularities of ground truth segmentations. Results of experiments show that the proposed methods work effectively and efficiently.
Batch Active Learning Using Determinantal Point Processes
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Data collection and labeling is one of the main challenges in employing machine learning algorithms in a variety of real-world applications with limited data. While active learning methods attempt to tackle this issue by labeling only the data samples that give high information, they generally suffer from large computational costs and are impractical in settings where data can be collected in parallel. Batch active learning methods attempt to overcome this computational burden by querying batches of samples at a time. To avoid redundancy between samples, previous works rely on some ad hoc combination of sample quality and diversity. In this paper, we present a new principled batch active learning method using Determinantal Point Processes, a repulsive point process that enables generating diverse batches of samples. We develop tractable algorithms to approximate the mode of a DPP distribution, and provide theoretical guarantees on the degree of approximation. We further demonstrate that an iterative greedy method for DPP maximization, which has lower computational costs but worse theoretical guarantees, still gives competitive results for batch active learning. Our experiments show the value of our methods on several datasets against state-of-the-art baselines.
The Effect of Translationese in Machine Translation Test Sets
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

The effect of translationese has been studied in the field of machine translation (MT), mostly with respect to training data. We study in depth the effect of translationese on test data, using the test sets from the last three editions of WMT's news shared task, containing 17 translation directions. We show evidence that (i) the use of translationese in test sets results in inflated human evaluation scores for MT systems; (ii) in some cases system rankings do change and (iii) the impact translationese has on a translation direction is inversely correlated to the translation quality attainable by state-of-the-art MT systems for that direction.
A survey of OpenRefine reconciliation services
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2019
Year: 2019

We review the services implementing the OpenRefine reconciliation API, comparing their design to the state of the art in record linkage. Due to the design of the API, the matching scores returned by the services are of little help to guide matching decisions. This suggests possible improvements to the specifications of the API, which could improve user workflows by giving more control over the scoring mechanism to the client.
Transfer NAS: Knowledge Transfer between Search Spaces with Transformer Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Recent advances in Neural Architecture Search (NAS) have produced state-of-the-art architectures on several tasks. NAS shifts the efforts of human experts from developing novel architectures directly to designing architecture search spaces and methods to explore them efficiently. The search space definition captures prior knowledge about the properties of the architectures and it is crucial for the complexity and the performance of the search algorithm. However, different search space definitions require restarting the learning process from scratch. We propose a novel agent based on the Transformer that supports joint training and efficient transfer of prior knowledge between multiple search spaces and tasks.
Wasserstein Adversarial Imitation Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Imitation Learning describes the problem of recovering an expert policy from demonstrations. While inverse reinforcement learning approaches are known to be very sample-efficient in terms of expert demonstrations, they usually require problem-dependent reward functions or a (task-)specific reward-function regularization. In this paper, we show a natural connection between inverse reinforcement learning approaches and Optimal Transport, that enables more general reward functions with desirable properties (e.g., smoothness). Based on our observation, we propose a novel approach called Wasserstein Adversarial Imitation Learning. Our approach considers the Kantorovich potentials as a reward function and further leverages regularized optimal transport to enable large-scale applications. In several robotic experiments, our approach outperforms the baselines in terms of average cumulative rewards and shows a significant improvement in sample-efficiency, by requiring just one expert demonstration.
Collecting and Presenting Reproducible Intranode Stencil Performance: INSPECT
Venue: arXiv cs.PF 2019
Year: 2019

Stencil algorithms have been receiving considerable interest in HPC research for decades. The techniques used to approach multi-core stencil performance modeling and engineering span basic runtime measurements, elaborate performance models, detailed hardware counter analysis, and thorough scaling behavior evaluation. Due to the plurality of approaches and stencil patterns, we set out to develop a generalizable methodology for reproducible measurements accompanied by state-of-the-art performance models. Our open-source toolchain, and collected results are publicly available in the "Intranode Stencil Performance Evaluation Collection" (INSPECT). We present the underlying methodologies, models and tools involved in gathering and documenting the performance behavior of a collection of typical stencil patterns across multiple architectures and hardware configuration options. Our aim is to endow performance-aware application developers with reproducible baseline performance data and validated models to initiate a well-defined process of performance assessment and optimization.
Branch Prediction Is Not a Solved Problem: Measurements, Opportunities, and Future Directions
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

Modern branch predictors predict the vast majority of conditional branch instructions with near-perfect accuracy, allowing superscalar, out-of-order processors to maximize speculative efficiency and thus performance. However, this impressive overall effectiveness belies a substantial missed opportunity in single-threaded instructions per cycle (IPC). For example, we show that correcting the mispredictions made by the state-of-the-art TAGE-SC-L branch predictor on SPECint 2017 would improve IPC by margins similar to an advance in process technology node. In this work, we measure and characterize these mispredictions. We find that they categorically arise from either (1) a small number of systematically hard-to-predict (H2P) branches; or (2) rare branches with low dynamic execution counts. Using data from SPECint 2017 and additional large code footprint applications, we quantify the occurrence and IPC impact of these two categories. We then demonstrate that increasing the resources afforded to existing branch predictors does not alone address the root causes of most mispredictions. This leads us to reexamine basic assumptions in branch prediction and to propose new research directions that, for example, deploy machine learning to improve pattern matching for H2Ps, and use on-chip phase learning to track long-term statistics for rare branches.
AI-enabled Blockchain: An Outlier-aware Consensus Protocol for Blockchain-based IoT Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

A new framework for a secure and robust consensus in blockchain-based IoT networks is proposed using machine learning. Hyperledger fabric, which is a blockchain platform developed as part of the Hyperledger project, though looks very apt for IoT applications, has comparatively low tolerance for malicious activities in an untrustworthy environment. To that end, we propose AI-enabled blockchain (AIBC) with a 2-step consensus protocol that uses an outlier detection algorithm for consensus in an IoT network implemented on hyperledger fabric platform. The outlier-aware consensus protocol exploits a supervised machine learning algorithm which detects anomaly activities via a learned detector in the first step. Then, the data goes through the inherent Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) consensus protocol in the hyperledger fabric for ledger update. We measure and report the performance of our framework with respect to the various delay components. Results reveal that our implemented AIBC network (2-step consensus protocol) improves hyperledger fabric performance in terms of fault tolerance by marginally compromising the delay performance.
Holistic evaluation of XML queries with structural preferences on an annotated strong dataguide
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2019
Year: 2019

With the emergence of XML as de facto format for storing and exchanging information over the Internet, the search for ever more innovative and effective techniques for their querying is a major and current concern of the XML database community. Several studies carried out to help solve this problem are mostly oriented towards the evaluation of so-called exact queries which, unfortunately, are likely (especially in the case of semi-structured documents) to yield abundant results (in the case of vague queries) or empty results (in the case of very precise queries). From the observation that users who make requests are not necessarily interested in all possible solutions, but rather in those that are closest to their needs, an important field of research has been opened on the evaluation of preferences queries. In this paper, we propose an approach for the evaluation of such queries, in case the preferences concern the structure of the document. The solution investigated revolves around the proposal of an evaluation plan in three phases: rewriting-evaluation-merge. The rewriting phase makes it possible to obtain, from a partitioning -transformation operation of the initial query, a hierarchical set of preferences path queries which are holistically evaluated in the second phase by an instrumented version of the algorithm TwigStack. The merge phase is the synthesis of the best results.
PyRobot: An Open-source Robotics Framework for Research and Benchmarking
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

This paper introduces PyRobot, an open-source robotics framework for research and benchmarking. PyRobot is a light-weight, high-level interface on top of ROS that provides a consistent set of hardware independent mid-level APIs to control different robots. PyRobot abstracts away details about low-level controllers and inter-process communication, and allows non-robotics researchers (ML, CV researchers) to focus on building high-level AI applications. PyRobot aims to provide a research ecosystem with convenient access to robotics datasets, algorithm implementations and models that can be used to quickly create a state-of-the-art baseline. We believe PyRobot, when paired up with low-cost robot platforms such as LoCoBot, will reduce the entry barrier into robotics, and democratize robotics. PyRobot is open-source, and can be accessed via https://pyrobot.org.