OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Attentive Deep Regression Networks for Real-Time Visual Face Tracking in Video Surveillance
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Visual face tracking is one of the most important tasks in video surveillance systems. However, due to the variations in pose, scale, expression, and illumination it is considered to be a difficult task. Recent studies show that deep learning methods have a significant potential in object tracking tasks and adaptive feature selection methods can boost their performance. Motivated by these, we propose an end-to-end attentive deep learning based tracker, that is build on top of the state-of-the-art GOTURN tracker, for the task of real-time visual face tracking in video surveillance. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art GOTURN and IVT trackers by very large margins and it achieves speeds that are very far beyond the requirements of real-time tracking. Additionally, to overcome the scarce data problem in visual face tracking, we also provide bounding box annotations for the G1 and G2 sets of ChokePoint dataset and make it suitable for further studies in face tracking under surveillance conditions.
Efficiency and Scalability of Multi-Lane Capsule Networks (MLCN)
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Some Deep Neural Networks (DNN) have what we call lanes, or they can be reorganized as such. Lanes are paths in the network which are data-independent and typically learn different features or add resilience to the network. Given their data-independence, lanes are amenable for parallel processing. The Multi-lane CapsNet (MLCN) is a proposed reorganization of the Capsule Network which is shown to achieve better accuracy while bringing highly-parallel lanes. However, the efficiency and scalability of MLCN had not been systematically examined. In this work, we study the MLCN network with multiple GPUs finding that it is 2x more efficient than the original CapsNet when using model-parallelism. Further, we present the load balancing problem of distributing heterogeneous lanes in homogeneous or heterogeneous accelerators and show that a simple greedy heuristic can be almost 50% faster than a naive random approach.
Tensor Factorization with Label Information for Fake News Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2019
Year: 2019

The buzz over the so-called "fake news" has created concerns about a degenerated media environment and led to the need for technological solutions. As the detection of fake news is increasingly considered a technological problem, it has attracted considerable research. Most of these studies primarily focus on utilizing information extracted from textual news content. In contrast, we focus on detecting fake news solely based on structural information of social networks. We suggest that the underlying network connections of users that share fake news are discriminative enough to support the detection of fake news. Thereupon, we model each post as a network of friendship interactions and represent a collection of posts as a multidimensional tensor. Taking into account the available labeled data, we propose a tensor factorization method which associates the class labels of data samples with their latent representations. Specifically, we combine a classification error term with the standard factorization in a unified optimization process. Results on real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed method is competitive against state-of-the-art methods by implementing an arguably simpler approach.
Visual and Semantic Prototypes-Jointly Guided CNN for Generalized Zero-shot Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

In the process of exploring the world, the curiosity constantly drives humans to cognize new things. Supposing you are a zoologist, for a presented animal image, you can recognize it immediately if you know its class. Otherwise, you would more likely attempt to cognize it by exploiting the side-information (e.g., semantic information, etc.) you have accumulated. Inspired by this, this paper decomposes the generalized zero-shot learning (G-ZSL) task into an open set recognition (OSR) task and a zero-shot learning (ZSL) task, where OSR recognizes seen classes (if we have seen (or known) them) and rejects unseen classes (if we have never seen (or known) them before), while ZSL identifies the unseen classes rejected by the former. Simultaneously, without violating OSR's assumptions (only known class knowledge is available in training), we also first attempt to explore a new generalized open set recognition (G-OSR) by introducing the accumulated side-information from known classes to OSR. For G-ZSL, such a decomposition effectively solves the class overfitting problem with easily misclassifying unseen classes as seen classes. The problem is ubiquitous in most existing G-ZSL methods. On the other hand, for G-OSR, introducing such semantic information of known classes not only improves the recognition performance but also endows OSR with the cognitive ability of unknown classes. Specifically, a visual and semantic prototypes-jointly guided convolutional neural network (VSG-CNN) is proposed to fulfill these two tasks (G-ZSL and G-OSR) in a unified end-to-end learning framework. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the advantages of our learning framework.
A Study on Angular Based Embedding Learning for Text-independent Speaker Verification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Learning a good speaker embedding is important for many automatic speaker recognition tasks, including verification, identification and diarization. The embeddings learned by softmax are not discriminative enough for open-set verification tasks. Angular based embedding learning target can achieve such discriminativeness by optimizing angular distance and adding margin penalty. We apply several different popular angular margin embedding learning strategies in this work and explicitly compare their performance on Voxceleb speaker recognition dataset. Observing the fact that encouraging inter-class separability is important when applying angular based embedding learning, we propose an exclusive inter-class regularization as a complement for angular based loss. We verify the effectiveness of these methods for learning a discriminative embedding space on ASV task with several experiments. These methods together, we manage to achieve an impressive result with 16.5% improvement on equal error rate (EER) and 18.2% improvement on minimum detection cost function comparing with baseline softmax systems.
Retrofitting a two-way peg between blockchains
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

In December 2015, a bounty emerged to establish both reliable communication and secure transfer of value between the Dogecoin and Ethereum blockchains. This prized "Dogethereum bridge" would allow parties to "lock" a DOGE coin on Dogecoin and in exchange receive a newly minted WOW token in Ethereum. Any subsequent owner of the WOW token could burn it and, in exchange, earn the right to "unlock" a DOGE on Dogecoin. We describe an efficient, trustless, and retrofitting Dogethereum construction which requires no fork but rather employs economic collateral to achieve a "lock" operation in Dogecoin. The protocol relies on bulletproofs, Truebit, and parametrized tokens to efficiently and trustlessly relay events from the "true" Dogecoin blockchain into Ethereum. The present construction not only enables cross-platform exchange but also allows Ethereum smart contracts to trustlessly access Dogecoin. A similar technique adds Ethereum-based smart contracts to Bitcoin and Bitcoin data to Ethereum smart contracts.
Evaluating Tag Recommendations for E-Book Annotation Using a Semantic Similarity Metric
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we present our work to support publishers and editors in finding descriptive tags for e-books through tag recommendations. We propose a hybrid tag recommendation system for e-books, which leverages search query terms from Amazon users and e-book metadata, which is assigned by publishers and editors. Our idea is to mimic the vocabulary of users in Amazon, who search for and review e-books, and to combine these search terms with editor tags in a hybrid tag recommendation approach. In total, we evaluate 19 tag recommendation algorithms on the review content of Amazon users, which reflects the readers' vocabulary. Our results show that we can improve the performance of tag recommender systems for e-books both concerning tag recommendation accuracy, diversity as well as a novel semantic similarity metric, which we also propose in this paper.
BGD-based Adam algorithm for time-domain equalizer in PAM-based optical interconnects
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

To the best of our knowledge, for the first time, we propose adaptive moment estimation (Adam) algorithm based on batch gradient descent (BGD) to design a time-domain equalizer (TDE) for PAM-based optical interconnects. Adam algorithm has been widely applied in the fields of artificial intelligence. For TDE, BGD-based Adam algorithm can obtain globally optimal tap coefficients without being trapped in locally optimal tap coefficients. Therefore, fast and stable convergence can be achieved by BGD-based Adam algorithm with low mean square error. Meanwhile, BGD-based Adam algorithm is implemented by parallel processing, which is more efficient than conventional serial algorithms, such as least mean square and recursive least square algorithms. The experimental results demonstrate that BGD-based Adam feed-forward equalizer works well in 120-Gbit/s PAM8 optical interconnects. In conclusion, BGD-based Adam algorithm shows great potential for converging the tap coefficients of TDE in future optical interconnects.
Shared-Memory Branch-and-Reduce for Multiterminal Cuts
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

We introduce the fastest known exact algorithm~for~the multiterminal cut problem with k terminals. In particular, we engineer existing as well as new data reduction rules. We use the rules within a branch-and-reduce framework and to boost the performance of an ILP formulation. Our algorithms achieve improvements in running time of up to multiple orders of magnitudes over the ILP formulation without data reductions, which has been the de facto standard used by practitioners. This allows us to solve instances to optimality that are significantly larger than was previously possible.
Enabling Commercial Autonomous Space Robotic Explorers
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

In contrast to manned missions, the application of autonomous robots for space exploration missions decreases the safety concerns of the exploration missions while extending the exploration distance since returning transportation is not necessary for robotics missions. In addition, the employment of robots in these missions also decreases mission complexities and costs because there is no need for onboard life support systems: robots can withstand and operate in harsh conditions, for instance, extreme temperature, pressure, and radiation, where humans cannot survive. In this article, we introduce environments on Mars, review the existing autonomous driving techniques deployed on Earth, as well as explore technologies required to enable future commercial autonomous space robotic explorers. Last but not least, we also present that one of the urgent technical challenges for autonomous space explorers, namely, computing power onboard.
nGraph-HE2: A High-Throughput Framework for Neural Network Inference on Encrypted Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

In previous work, Boemer et al. introduced nGraph-HE, an extension to the Intel nGraph deep learning (DL) compiler, that enables data scientists to deploy models with popular frameworks such as TensorFlow and PyTorch with minimal code changes. However, the class of supported models was limited to relatively shallow networks with polynomial activations. Here, we introduce nGraph-HE2, which extends nGraph-HE to enable privacy-preserving inference on standard, pre-trained models using their native activation functions and number fields (typically real numbers). The proposed framework leverages the CKKS scheme, whose support for real numbers is friendly to data science, and a client-aided model using a two-party approach to compute activation functions. We first present CKKS-specific optimizations, enabling a 3x-88x runtime speedup for scalar encoding, and doubling the throughput through a novel use of CKKS plaintext packing into complex numbers. Second, we optimize ciphertext-plaintext addition and multiplication, yielding 2.6x-4.2x runtime speedup. Third, we exploit two graph-level optimizations: lazy rescaling and depth-aware encoding, which allow us to significantly improve performance. Together, these optimizations enable state-of-the-art throughput of 1,998 images/s on the CryptoNets network. Using the client-aided model, we also present homomorphic evaluation of (to our knowledge) the largest network to date, namely, pre-trained MobileNetV2 models on the ImageNet dataset, with 60.4\percent/82.7\percent\ top-1/top-5 accuracy and an amortized runtime of 381 ms/image.
Automatic Model Monitoring for Data Streams
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Detecting concept drift is a well known problem that affects production systems. However, two important issues that are frequently not addressed in the literature are 1) the detection of drift when the labels are not immediately available; and 2) the automatic generation of explanations to identify possible causes for the drift. For example, a fraud detection model in online payments could show a drift due to a hot sale item (with an increase in false positives) or due to a true fraud attack (with an increase in false negatives) before labels are available. In this paper we propose SAMM, an automatic model monitoring system for data streams. SAMM detects concept drift using a time and space efficient unsupervised streaming algorithm and it generates alarm reports with a summary of the events and features that are important to explain it. SAMM was evaluated in five real world fraud detection datasets, each spanning periods up to eight months and totaling more than 22 million online transactions. We evaluated SAMM using human feedback from domain experts, by sending them 100 reports generated by the system. Our results show that SAMM is able to detect anomalous events in a model life cycle that are considered useful by the domain experts. Given these results, SAMM will be rolled out in a next version of Feedzai's Fraud Detection solution.
Cache Optimization for Memory Intensive Workloads on Multi-socket Multi-core servers
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

Major chip manufacturers have all introduced multicore microprocessors. Multi-socket systems built from these processors are used for running various server applications. Depending on the application that is run on the system, remote memory accesses can impact overall performance. This paper presents a cache optimization that can cut down remote DRAM accesses. By keeping track of remote cache lines loaded from remote DRAM and by biasing the cache replacement policy towards such remote DRAM cache lines the number of cache misses are reduced. This in turn results in improvement of overall performance. I present the design details in this paper. I do a qualitative comparison of various solutions to the problem of performance impact of remote DRAM accesses. This work can be extended by doing a quantitative evaluation and by further refining cache optimization.
A General Theory of Concept Lattice (II): Tractable Lattice Construction and Implication Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2019
Year: 2019

As the second part of the treatise 'A General Theory of Concept Lattice', this paper speaks of the tractability of the general concept lattice for both its lattice structure and logic content. The general concept lattice permits a feasible construction that can be completed in a single scan of the formal context, though the conventional formal-concept lattice and rough-set lattice can be regained from the general concept lattice. The logic implication deducible from the general concept lattice takes the form of μ_1 {\rightarrow} μ_2 where μ_1,μ_2 {\in} M^{\ast} are composite attributes out of the concerned formal attributes M. Remarkable is that with a single formula based on the contextual truth 1_η one can deduce all the implication relations extractable from the formal context. For concreteness, it can be shown that any implication A {\rightarrow} B (A, B being subsets of the formal attributes M) discussed in the formal-concept lattice corresponds to a special case of μ_1 {\rightarrow} μ_2 by means of μ_1 = {\prod} A and μ_2 = {\prod} B. Thus, one may elude the intractability due to searching for the Guigues-Duquenne basis appropriate for the implication relations deducible from the formal-concept lattice. Likewise, one may identify those μ_1 {\rightarrow} μ_2 where μ_1 = {\sum} A and μ_2 = {\sum} B with the implications that can be acquired from the rough-set lattice. (Here, the product {\prod} stands for the conjunction and the summation {\sum} the disjunction.)}
SkrGAN: Sketching-rendering Unconditional Generative Adversarial Networks for Medical Image Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have the capability of synthesizing images, which have been successfully applied to medical image synthesis tasks. However, most of existing methods merely consider the global contextual information and ignore the fine foreground structures, e.g., vessel, skeleton, which may contain diagnostic indicators for medical image analysis. Inspired by human painting procedure, which is composed of stroking and color rendering steps, we propose a Sketching-rendering Unconditional Generative Adversarial Network (SkrGAN) to introduce a sketch prior constraint to guide the medical image generation. In our SkrGAN, a sketch guidance module is utilized to generate a high quality structural sketch from random noise, then a color render mapping is used to embed the sketch-based representations and resemble the background appearances. Experimental results show that the proposed SkrGAN achieves the state-of-the-art results in synthesizing images for various image modalities, including retinal color fundus, X-Ray, Computed Tomography (CT) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). In addition, we also show that the performances of medical image segmentation method have been improved by using our synthesized images as data augmentation.
Explaining Convolutional Neural Networks using Softmax Gradient Layer-wise Relevance Propagation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have become state-of-the-art in the field of image classification. However, not everything is understood about their inner representations. This paper tackles the interpretability and explainability of the predictions of CNNs for multi-class classification problems. Specifically, we propose a novel visualization method of pixel-wise input attribution called Softmax-Gradient Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (SGLRP). The proposed model is a class discriminate extension to Deep Taylor Decomposition (DTD) using the gradient of softmax to back propagate the relevance of the output probability to the input image. Through qualitative and quantitative analysis, we demonstrate that SGLRP can successfully localize and attribute the regions on input images which contribute to a target object's classification. We show that the proposed method excels at discriminating the target objects class from the other possible objects in the images. We confirm that SGLRP performs better than existing Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) based methods and can help in the understanding of the decision process of CNNs.
Action Recognition in Untrimmed Videos with Composite Self-Attention Two-Stream Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

With the rapid development of deep learning algorithms, action recognition in video has achieved many important research results. One issue in action recognition, Zero-Shot Action Recognition (ZSAR), has recently attracted considerable attention, which classify new categories without any positive examples. Another difficulty in action recognition is that untrimmed data may seriously affect model performance. We propose a composite two-stream framework with a pre-trained model. Our proposed framework includes a classifier branch and a composite feature branch. The graph network model is adopted in each of the two branches, which effectively improves the feature extraction and reasoning ability of the framework. In the composite feature branch, a 3-channel self-attention models are constructed to weight each frame in the video and give more attention to the key frames. Each self-attention models channel outputs a set of attention weights to focus on a particular aspect of the video, and a set of attention weights corresponds to a one-dimensional vector. The 3-channel self-attention models can evaluate key frames from multiple aspects, and the output sets of attention weight vectors form an attention matrix, which effectively enhances the attention of key frames with strong correlation of action. This model can implement action recognition under zero-shot conditions, and has good recognition performance for untrimmed video data. Experimental results on relevant data sets confirm the validity of our model.
Learning to Detect Collisions for Continuum Manipulators without a Prior Model
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

Due to their flexibility, dexterity, and compact size, Continuum Manipulators (CMs) can enhance minimally invasive interventions. In these procedures, the CM may be operated in proximity of sensitive organs; therefore, requiring accurate and appropriate feedback when colliding with their surroundings. Conventional CM collision detection algorithms rely on a combination of exact CM constrained kinematics model, geometrical assumptions such as constant curvature behavior, a priori knowledge of the environmental constraint geometry, and/or additional sensors to scan the environment or sense contacts. In this paper, we propose a data-driven machine learning approach using only the available sensory information, without requiring any prior geometrical assumptions, model of the CM or the surrounding environment. The proposed algorithm is implemented and evaluated on a non-constant curvature CM, equipped with Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) optical sensors for shape sensing purposes. Results demonstrate successful detection of collisions in constrained environments with soft and hard obstacles with unknown stiffness and location.
An Unsupervised, Iterative N-Dimensional Point-Set Registration Algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

An unsupervised, iterative point-set registration algorithm for an unlabeled (i.e. correspondence between points is unknown) N-dimensional Euclidean point-cloud is proposed. It is based on linear least squares, and considers all possible point pairings and iteratively aligns the two sets until the number of point pairs does not exceed the maximum number of allowable one-to-one pairings.
Detecting semantic anomalies
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

We critically appraise the recent interest in out-of-distribution (OOD) detection and question the practical relevance of existing benchmarks. While the currently prevalent trend is to consider different datasets as OOD, we argue that out-distributions of practical interest are ones where the distinction is semantic in nature for a specified context, and that evaluative tasks should reflect this more closely. Assuming a context of object recognition, we recommend a set of benchmarks, motivated by practical applications. We make progress on these benchmarks by exploring a multi-task learning based approach, showing that auxiliary objectives for improved semantic awareness result in improved semantic anomaly detection, with accompanying generalization benefits.