OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Freeze the Discriminator: a Simple Baseline for Fine-Tuning GANs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have shown outstanding performance on a wide range of problems in computer vision, graphics, and machine learning, but often require numerous training data and heavy computational resources. To tackle this issue, several methods introduce a transfer learning technique in GAN training. They, however, are either prone to overfitting or limited to learning small distribution shifts. In this paper, we show that simple fine-tuning of GANs with frozen lower layers of the discriminator performs surprisingly well. This simple baseline, FreezeD, significantly outperforms previous techniques used in both unconditional and conditional GANs. We demonstrate the consistent effect using StyleGAN and SNGAN-projection architectures on several datasets of Animal Face, Anime Face, Oxford Flower, CUB-200-2011, and Caltech-256 datasets. The code and results are available at https://github.com/sangwoomo/FreezeD.
A Deep Learning Framework for Simulation and Defect Prediction Applied in Microelectronics
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

The prediction of upcoming events in industrial processes has been a long-standing research goal since it enables optimization of manufacturing parameters, planning of equipment maintenance and more importantly prediction and eventually prevention of defects. While existing approaches have accomplished substantial progress, they are mostly limited to processing of one dimensional signals or require parameter tuning to model environmental parameters. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach based on deep neural networks that simulates changes in the 3D structure of a monitored object in a batch based on previous 3D measurements. In particular, we propose an architecture based on 3D Convolutional Neural Networks (3DCNN) in order to model the geometric variations in manufacturing parameters and predict upcoming events related to sub-optimal performance. We validate our framework on a microelectronics use-case using the recently published PCB scans dataset where we simulate changes on the shape and volume of glue deposited on an Liquid Crystal Polymer (LCP) substrate before the attachment of integrated circuits (IC). Experimental evaluation examines the impact of different choices in the cost function during training and shows that the proposed method can be efficiently used for defect prediction.
Identifying Self-Admitted Technical Debts with Jitterbug: A Two-step Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2020
Year: 2020

Keeping track of and managing Self-Admitted Technical Debts (SATDs) are important to maintaining a healthy software project. This requires much time and effort from human experts to identify the SATDs manually. The current automated solutions do not have satisfactory precision and recall in identifying SATDs to fully automate the process. To solve the above problems, we propose a two-step framework called Jitterbug for identifying SATDs. Jitterbug first identifies the "easy to find" SATDs automatically with close to 100% precision using a novel pattern recognition technique. Subsequently, machine learning techniques are applied to assist human experts in manually identifying the remaining "hard to find" SATDs with reduced human effort. Our simulation studies on ten software projects show that Jitterbug can identify SATDs more efficiently (with less human effort) than the prior state-of-the-art methods.
Least Squares Optimization: from Theory to Practice
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Nowadays, Non-Linear Least-Squares embodies the foundation of many Robotics and Computer Vision systems. The research community deeply investigated this topic in the last years, and this resulted in the development of several open-source solvers to approach constantly increasing classes of problems. In this work, we propose a unified methodology to design and develop efficient Least-Squares Optimization algorithms, focusing on the structures and patterns of each specific domain. Furthermore, we present a novel open-source optimization system, that addresses transparently problems with a different structure and designed to be easy to extend. The system is written in modern C++ and can run efficiently on embedded systems. Source code: https://srrg.gitlab.io/srrg2-solver.html. We validated our approach by conducting comparative experiments on several problems using standard datasets. The results show that our system achieves state-of-the-art performances in all tested scenarios.
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces: Towards Standalone Operation
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

The promising coverage and spectral efficiency gains of intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) are attracting increasing interest. In order to realize these surfaces in practice, however, several challenges need to be addressed. One of these main challenges is how to configure the reflecting coefficients on these passive surfaces without requiring massive channel estimation or beam training overhead. Earlier work suggested leveraging supervised learning tools to design the IRS reflection matrices. While this approach has the potential of reducing the beam training overhead, it requires collecting large datasets for training the neural network models. In this paper, we propose a novel deep reinforcement learning framework for predicting the IRS reflection matrices with minimal training overhead. Simulation results show that the proposed online learning framework can converge to the optimal rate that assumes perfect channel knowledge. This represents an important step towards realizing a standalone IRS operation, where the surface configures itself without any control from the infrastructure.
On the CAD-compatible conversion of S-patches
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2020
Year: 2020

S-patches have many nice mathematical properties. It is known since their first appearance, that any regular S-patch can be exactly converted into a trimmed rational Bézier surface. This is a big advantage compared to other multi-sided surface representations that have to be approximated for exporting them into CAD/CAM systems. The actual conversion process, however, remained at a theoretical level, with bits and pieces scattered in multiple publications. In this paper we review the entirety of the algorithm, and investigate it from a practical aspect.
Dynamic Incentive-aware Learning: Robust Pricing in Contextual Auctions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Motivated by pricing in ad exchange markets, we consider the problem of robust learning of reserve prices against strategic buyers in repeated contextual second-price auctions. Buyers' valuations for an item depend on the context that describes the item. However, the seller is not aware of the relationship between the context and buyers' valuations, i.e., buyers' preferences. The seller's goal is to design a learning policy to set reserve prices via observing the past sales data, and her objective is to minimize her regret for revenue, where the regret is computed against a clairvoyant policy that knows buyers' heterogeneous preferences. Given the seller's goal, utility-maximizing buyers have the incentive to bid untruthfully in order to manipulate the seller's learning policy. We propose learning policies that are robust to such strategic behavior. These policies use the outcomes of the auctions, rather than the submitted bids, to estimate the preferences while controlling the long-term effect of the outcome of each auction on the future reserve prices. When the market noise distribution is known to the seller, we propose a policy called Contextual Robust Pricing (CORP) that achieves a T-period regret of $O(d\log(Td) \log (T))$, where $d$ is the dimension of {the} contextual information. When the market noise distribution is unknown to the seller, we propose two policies whose regrets are sublinear in $T$.
sBSNN: Stochastic-Bits Enabled Binary Spiking Neural Network with On-Chip Learning for Energy Efficient Neuromorphic Computing at the Edge
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2020
Year: 2020

In this work, we propose stochastic Binary Spiking Neural Network (sBSNN) composed of stochastic spiking neurons and binary synapses (stochastic only during training) that computes probabilistically with one-bit precision for power-efficient and memory-compressed neuromorphic computing. We present an energy-efficient implementation of the proposed sBSNN using 'stochastic bit' as the core computational primitive to realize the stochastic neurons and synapses, which are fabricated in 90nm CMOS process, to achieve efficient on-chip training and inference for image recognition tasks. The measured data shows that the 'stochastic bit' can be programmed to mimic spiking neurons, and stochastic Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity (or sSTDP) rule for training the binary synaptic weights without expensive random number generators. Our results indicate that the proposed sBSNN realization offers possibility of up to 32x neuronal and synaptic memory compression compared to full precision (32-bit) SNN and energy efficiency of 89.49 TOPS/Watt for two-layer fully-connected SNN.
Geometric Fusion via Joint Delay Embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

We introduce geometric and topological methods to develop a new framework for fusing multi-sensor time series. This framework consists of two steps: (1) a joint delay embedding, which reconstructs a high-dimensional state space in which our sensors correspond to observation functions, and (2) a simple orthogonalization scheme, which accounts for tangencies between such observation functions, and produces a more diversified geometry on the embedding space. We conclude with some synthetic and real-world experiments demonstrating that our framework outperforms traditional metric fusion methods.
Computationally efficient transfinite patches with fullness control
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2020
Year: 2020

Transfinite patches provide a simple and elegant solution to the problem of representing non-four-sided continuous surfaces, which are useful in a variety of applications, such as curve network based design. Real-time responsiveness is essential in this context, and thus reducing the computation cost is an important concern. The Midpoint Coons (MC) patch presented in this paper is a fusion of two previous transfinite schemes, combining the speed of one with the superior control mechanism of the other. This is achieved using a new constrained parameterization based on generalized barycentric coordinates and transfinite blending functions.
Super-Resolving Commercial Satellite Imagery Using Realistic Training Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In machine learning based single image super-resolution, the degradation model is embedded in training data generation. However, most existing satellite image super-resolution methods use a simple down-sampling model with a fixed kernel to create training images. These methods work fine on synthetic data, but do not perform well on real satellite images. We propose a realistic training data generation model for commercial satellite imagery products, which includes not only the imaging process on satellites but also the post-process on the ground. We also propose a convolutional neural network optimized for satellite images. Experiments show that the proposed training data generation model is able to improve super-resolution performance on real satellite images.
LORAX: Loss-Aware Approximations for Energy-Efficient Silicon Photonic Networks-on-Chip
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2020
Year: 2020

The approximate computing paradigm advocates for relaxing accuracy goals in applications to improve energy-efficiency and performance. Recently, this paradigm has been explored to improve the energy efficiency of silicon photonic networks-on-chip (PNoCs). In this paper, we propose a novel framework (LORAX) to enable more aggressive approximation during communication over silicon photonic links in PNoCs. Given that silicon photonic interconnects have significant power dissipation due to the laser sources that generate the wavelengths for photonic communication, our framework attempts to reduce laser power overheads while intelligently approximating communication such that application output quality is not distorted beyond an acceptable limit. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that considers loss-aware laser power management and multilevel signaling to enable effective data approximation and energy-efficiency in PNoCs. Simulation results show that our framework can achieve up to 31.4% lower laser power consumption and up to 12.2% better energy efficiency than the best known prior work on approximate communication with silicon photonic interconnects, for the same application output quality
A neural network model of perception and reasoning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

How perception and reasoning arise from neuronal network activity is poorly understood. This is reflected in the fundamental limitations of connectionist artificial intelligence, typified by deep neural networks trained via gradient-based optimization. Despite success on many tasks, such networks remain unexplainable black boxes incapable of symbolic reasoning and concept generalization. Here we show that a simple set of biologically consistent organizing principles confer these capabilities to neuronal networks. To demonstrate, we implement these principles in a novel machine learning algorithm, based on concept construction instead of optimization, to design deep neural networks that reason with explainable neuron activity. On a range of tasks including NP-hard problems, their reasoning capabilities grant additional cognitive functions, like deliberating through self-analysis, tolerating adversarial attacks, and learning transferable rules from simple examples to solve problems of unencountered complexity. The networks also naturally display properties of biological nervous systems inherently absent in current deep neural networks, including sparsity, modularity, and both distributed and localized firing patterns. Because they do not sacrifice performance, compactness, or training time on standard learning tasks, these networks provide a new black-box-free approach to artificial intelligence. They likewise serve as a quantitative framework to understand the emergence of cognition from neuronal networks.
Improved Extension Protocols for Byzantine Broadcast and Agreement
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

Byzantine broadcast (BB) and Byzantine agreement (BA) are two most fundamental problems and essential building blocks in distributed computing, and improving their efficiency is of interest to both theoreticians and practitioners. In this paper, we study extension protocols of BB and BA, i.e., protocols that solve BB/BA with long inputs of $l$ bits using lower costs than $l$ single-bit instances. We present new protocols with improved communication complexity in almost all settings: authenticated BA/BB with $t<n/2$, authenticated BB with $t<(1-ε)n$, unauthenticated BA/BB with $t<n/3$, and asynchronous reliable broadcast and BA with $t<n/3$. The new protocols are advantageous and significant in several aspects. First, they achieve the best-possible communication complexity of $Θ(nl)$ for wider ranges of input sizes compared to prior results. Second, the authenticated extension protocols achieve optimal communication complexity given the current best available BB/BA protocols for short messages. Third, to the best of our knowledge, our asynchronous and authenticated protocols in the setting are the first extension protocols in that setting.
Convergence to Second-Order Stationarity for Non-negative Matrix Factorization: Provably and Concurrently
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is a fundamental non-convex optimization problem with numerous applications in Machine Learning (music analysis, document clustering, speech-source separation etc). Despite having received extensive study, it is poorly understood whether or not there exist natural algorithms that can provably converge to a local minimum. Part of the reason is because the objective is heavily symmetric and its gradient is not Lipschitz. In this paper we define a multiplicative weight update type dynamics (modification of the seminal Lee-Seung algorithm) that runs concurrently and provably avoids saddle points (first order stationary points that are not second order). Our techniques combine tools from dynamical systems such as stability and exploit the geometry of the NMF objective by reducing the standard NMF formulation over the non-negative orthant to a new formulation over (a scaled) simplex. An important advantage of our method is the use of concurrent updates, which permits implementations in parallel computing environments.
Asymmetric Streaming Algorithms for Edit Distance and LCS
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2020
Year: 2020

The edit distance (ED) and longest common subsequence (LCS) are two fundamental problems which quantify how similar two strings are to one another. In this paper, we consider these problems in the asymmetric streaming model introduced by Andoni et al. (FOCS'10) and Saks and Seshadhri (SODA'13). In this model we have random access to one string and streaming access the other string. Our main contribution is a constant factor approximation algorithm for ED with the memory of $\tilde O(n^δ)$ for any constant $δ> 0$. In addition to this, we present an upper bound of $\tilde O_ε(\sqrt{n})$ on the memory needed to approximate ED or LCS within a factor $1+ε$. All our algorithms are deterministic and run in a single pass. For approximating ED within a constant factor, we discover yet another application of triangle inequality, this time in the context of streaming algorithms. Triangle inequality has been previously used to obtain subquadratic time approximation algorithms for ED. Our technique is novel and elegantly utilizes triangle inequality to save memory at the expense of an exponential increase in the runtime.
Designing Truthful Contextual Multi-Armed Bandits based Sponsored Search Auctions
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2020
Year: 2020

For sponsored search auctions, we consider contextual multi-armed bandit problem in the presence of strategic agents. In this setting, at each round, an advertising platform (center) runs an auction to select the best-suited ads relevant to the query posted by the user. It is in the best interest of the center to select an ad that has a high expected value (i.e., probability of getting a click $\times$ value it derives from a click of the ad). The probability of getting a click (CTR) is unknown to the center and depends on the user's profile (context) posting the query. Further, the value derived for a click is the private information to the advertiser and thus needs to be elicited truthfully. The existing solution in this setting is not practical as it suffers from very high regret ($O(T^{\frac{2}{3}})$).
Controllable Descendant Face Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Kinship face synthesis is an interesting topic raised to answer questions like "what will your future children look like?". Published approaches to this topic are limited. Most of the existing methods train models for one-versus-one kin relation, which only consider one parent face and one child face by directly using an auto-encoder without any explicit control over the resemblance of the synthesized face to the parent face. In this paper, we propose a novel method for controllable descendant face synthesis, which models two-versus-one kin relation between two parent faces and one child face. Our model consists of an inheritance module and an attribute enhancement module, where the former is designed for accurate control over the resemblance between the synthesized face and parent faces, and the latter is designed for control over age and gender. As there is no large scale database with father-mother-child kinship annotation, we propose an effective strategy to train the model without using the ground truth descendant faces. No carefully designed image pairs are required for learning except only age and gender labels of training faces. We conduct comprehensive experimental evaluations on three public benchmark databases, which demonstrates encouraging results.
Performance Evaluation of Deep Generative Models for Generating Hand-Written Character Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

There have been many work in the literature on generation of various kinds of images such as Hand-Written characters (MNIST dataset), scene images (CIFAR-10 dataset), various objects images (ImageNet dataset), road signboard images (SVHN dataset) etc. Unfortunately, there have been very limited amount of work done in the domain of document image processing. Automatic image generation can lead to the enormous increase of labeled datasets with the help of only limited amount of labeled data. Various kinds of Deep generative models can be primarily divided into two categories. First category is auto-encoder (AE) and the second one is Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). In this paper, we have evaluated various kinds of AE as well as GANs and have compared their performances on hand-written digits dataset (MNIST) and also on historical hand-written character dataset of Indonesian BALI language. Moreover, these generated characters are recognized by using character recognition tool for calculating the statistical performance of these generated characters with respect to original character images.
Learning a Directional Soft Lane Affordance Model for Road Scenes Using Self-Supervision
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Humans navigate complex environments in an organized yet flexible manner, adapting to the context and implicit social rules. Understanding these naturally learned patterns of behavior is essential for applications such as autonomous vehicles. However, algorithmically defining these implicit rules of human behavior remains difficult. This work proposes a novel self-supervised method for training a probabilistic network model to estimate the regions humans are most likely to drive in as well as a multimodal representation of the inferred direction of travel at each point. The model is trained on individual human trajectories conditioned on a representation of the driving environment. The model is shown to successfully generalize to new road scenes, demonstrating potential for real-world application as a prior for socially acceptable driving behavior in challenging or ambiguous scenarios which are poorly handled by explicit traffic rules.
Using Distributional Thesaurus Embedding for Co-hyponymy Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Discriminating lexical relations among distributionally similar words has always been a challenge for natural language processing (NLP) community. In this paper, we investigate whether the network embedding of distributional thesaurus can be effectively utilized to detect co-hyponymy relations. By extensive experiments over three benchmark datasets, we show that the vector representation obtained by applying node2vec on distributional thesaurus outperforms the state-of-the-art models for binary classification of co-hyponymy vs. hypernymy, as well as co-hyponymy vs. meronymy, by huge margins.