OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Manifold-driven Attention Maps for Weakly Supervised Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Segmentation using deep learning has shown promising directions in medical imaging as it aids in the analysis and diagnosis of diseases. Nevertheless, a main drawback of deep models is that they require a large amount of pixel-level labels, which are laborious and expensive to obtain. To mitigate this problem, weakly supervised learning has emerged as an efficient alternative, which employs image-level labels, scribbles, points, or bounding boxes as supervision. Among these, image-level labels are easier to obtain. However, since this type of annotation only contains object category information, the segmentation task under this learning paradigm is a challenging problem. To address this issue, visual salient regions derived from trained classification networks are typically used. Despite their success to identify important regions on classification tasks, these saliency regions only focus on the most discriminant areas of an image, limiting their use in semantic segmentation. In this work, we propose a manifold driven attention-based network to enhance visual salient regions, thereby improving segmentation accuracy in a weakly supervised setting. Our method generates superior attention maps directly during inference without the need of extra computations. We evaluate the benefits of our approach in the task of segmentation using a public benchmark on skin lesion images. Results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art GradCAM by a margin of ~22% in terms of Dice score.
Inferential Text Generation with Multiple Knowledge Sources and Meta-Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

We study the problem of generating inferential texts of events for a variety of commonsense like \textit{if-else} relations. Existing approaches typically use limited evidence from training examples and learn for each relation individually. In this work, we use multiple knowledge sources as fuels for the model. Existing commonsense knowledge bases like ConceptNet are dominated by taxonomic knowledge (e.g., \textit{isA} and \textit{relatedTo} relations), having a limited number of inferential knowledge. We use not only structured commonsense knowledge bases, but also natural language snippets from search-engine results. These sources are incorporated into a generative base model via key-value memory network. In addition, we introduce a meta-learning based multi-task learning algorithm. For each targeted commonsense relation, we regard the learning of examples from other relations as the meta-training process, and the evaluation on examples from the targeted relation as the meta-test process. We conduct experiments on Event2Mind and ATOMIC datasets. Results show that both the integration of multiple knowledge sources and the use of the meta-learning algorithm improve the performance.
egg: Fast and Extensible Equality Saturation
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2020
Year: 2020

An e-graph efficiently represents a congruence relation over many expressions. Although they were originally developed in the late 1970s for use in automated theorem provers, a more recent technique known as equality saturation repurposes e-graphs to implement state-of-the-art, rewrite-driven compiler optimizations and program synthesizers. However, e-graphs remain unspecialized for this newer use case. Equality saturation workloads exhibit distinct characteristics and often require ad-hoc e-graph extensions to incorporate transformations beyond purely syntactic rewrites. This work contributes two techniques that make e-graphs fast and extensible, specializing them to equality saturation. A new amortized invariant restoration technique called rebuilding takes advantage of equality saturation's distinct workload, providing asymptotic speedups over current techniques in practice. A general mechanism called e-class analyses integrates domain-specific analyses into the e-graph, reducing the need for ad hoc manipulation. We implemented these techniques in a new open-source library called egg. Our case studies on three previously published applications of equality saturation highlight how egg's performance and flexibility enable state-of-the-art results across diverse domains.
Interview: A Large-Scale Open-Source Corpus of Media Dialog
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Existing conversational datasets consist either of written proxies for dialog or small-scale transcriptions of natural speech. We introduce 'Interview': a large-scale (105K conversations) media dialog dataset collected from news interview transcripts. Compared to existing large-scale proxies for conversational data, language models trained on our dataset exhibit better zero-shot out-of-domain performance on existing spoken dialog datasets, demonstrating its usefulness in modeling real-world conversations. 'Interview' contains speaker role annotations for each turn, facilitating the development of engaging, responsive dialog systems. In fact, experiments on two dialog tasks show that leveraging such labels improves performance over strong speaker-agnostic baselines, and enabling models to generate more specific and inquisitive responses in interview-style conversations.
Ranking Computer Vision Service Issues using Emotion
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2020
Year: 2020

Software developers are increasingly using machine learning APIs to implement 'intelligent' features. Studies show that incorporating machine learning into an application increases technical debt, creates data dependencies, and introduces uncertainty due to non-deterministic behaviour. However, we know very little about the emotional state of software developers who deal with such issues. In this paper, we do a landscape analysis of emotion found in 1,245 Stack Overflow posts about computer vision APIs. We investigate the application of an existing emotion classifier EmoTxt and manually verify our results. We found that the emotion profile varies for different question categories.
Neutralizing Gender Bias in Word Embedding with Latent Disentanglement and Counterfactual Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Recent research demonstrates that word embeddings, trained on the human-generated corpus, have strong gender biases in embedding spaces, and these biases can result in the discriminative results from the various downstream tasks. Whereas the previous methods project word embeddings into a linear subspace for debiasing, we introduce a \textit{Latent Disentanglement} method with a siamese auto-encoder structure with an adapted gradient reversal layer. Our structure enables the separation of the semantic latent information and gender latent information of given word into the disjoint latent dimensions. Afterwards, we introduce a \textit{Counterfactual Generation} to convert the gender information of words, so the original and the modified embeddings can produce a gender-neutralized word embedding after geometric alignment regularization, without loss of semantic information. From the various quantitative and qualitative debiasing experiments, our method shows to be better than existing debiasing methods in debiasing word embeddings. In addition, Our method shows the ability to preserve semantic information during debiasing by minimizing the semantic information losses for extrinsic NLP downstream tasks.
Real-time Classification from Short Event-Camera Streams using Input-filtering Neural ODEs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Event-based cameras are novel, efficient sensors inspired by the human vision system, generating an asynchronous, pixel-wise stream of data. Learning from such data is generally performed through heavy preprocessing and event integration into images. This requires buffering of possibly long sequences and can limit the response time of the inference system. In this work, we instead propose to directly use events from a DVS camera, a stream of intensity changes and their spatial coordinates. This sequence is used as the input for a novel \emph{asynchronous} RNN-like architecture, the Input-filtering Neural ODEs (INODE). This is inspired by the dynamical systems and filtering literature. INODE is an extension of Neural ODEs (NODE) that allows for input signals to be continuously fed to the network, like in filtering. The approach naturally handles batches of time series with irregular time-stamps by implementing a batch forward Euler solver. INODE is trained like a standard RNN, it learns to discriminate short event sequences and to perform event-by-event online inference. We demonstrate our approach on a series of classification tasks, comparing against a set of LSTM baselines. We show that, independently of the camera resolution, INODE can outperform the baselines by a large margin on the ASL task and it's on par with a much larger LSTM for the NCALTECH task. Finally, we show that INODE is accurate even when provided with very few events.
Challenges and Opportunities in CPS Security: A Physics-based Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

The integration of cyber technologies (computing and communication) with the physical world gives rise to complex systems referred to as Cyber Physical Systems (CPS), for example, manufacturing, transportation, smart grid, and water treatment. Many of those systems are part of the critical infrastructure and need to perform safely, reliably, and securely in real-time. CPS security is challenging as compared to the conventional IT systems. An adversary can compromise the system in both the cyber and the physical domains. However, the unique set of technologies and processes being used in a CPS also bring up opportunities for defense. CPS security has been approached in several ways due to the complex interaction of physical and cyber components. In this work, a comprehensive study is taken to summarize the challenges and the proposed solutions for securing CPS from a Physics-based perspective.
Specific Single- and Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms for the Chance-Constrained Knapsack Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2020
Year: 2020

The chance-constrained knapsack problem is a variant of the classical knapsack problem where each item has a weight distribution instead of a deterministic weight. The objective is to maximize the total profit of the selected items under the condition that the weight of the selected items only exceeds the given weight bound with a small probability of $α$. In this paper, consider problem-specific single-objective and multi-objective approaches for the problem. We examine the use of heavy-tail mutations and introduce a problem-specific crossover operator to deal with the chance-constrained knapsack problem. Empirical results for single-objective evolutionary algorithms show the effectiveness of our operators compared to the use of classical operators. Moreover, we introduce a new effective multi-objective model for the chance-constrained knapsack problem. We use this model in combination with the problem-specific crossover operator in multi-objective evolutionary algorithms to solve the problem. Our experimental results show that this leads to significant performance improvements when using the approach in evolutionary multi-objective algorithms such as GSEMO and NSGA-II.
Contention-based Grant-free Transmission with Independent Multi-pilot Scheme
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

Contention-based grant-free transmission is very promising for future massive machine-type communication (mMTC). In contention-based transmission, the random pilot collision is a challenging problem. To solve this problem, multiple pilots scheme is used to reduce the pilot collision probabliltiy. However, the existing work on multiple pilots relies on the low correlation of spatial channels, limiting its applicability. In this paper, an independent multi-pilot scheme is proposed, which utilizes the diversity of multiple pilots and is not limited by the spatial correlation. The receiver employs interference cancellation for both data symbols and multiple pilots to ensure the performance. The simulation results also show that the proposed independent multi-pilot scheme can significantly improve the BLER performance and increase the number of simultaneous access users.
Improving Fluency of Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Non-autoregressive (nAR) models for machine translation (MT) manifest superior decoding speed when compared to autoregressive (AR) models, at the expense of impaired fluency of their outputs. We improve the fluency of a nAR model with connectionist temporal classification (CTC) by employing additional features in the scoring model used during beam search decoding. Since the beam search decoding in our model only requires to run the network in a single forward pass, the decoding speed is still notably higher than in standard AR models. We train models for three language pairs: German, Czech, and Romanian from and into English. The results show that our proposed models can be more efficient in terms of decoding speed and still achieve a competitive BLEU score relative to AR models.
Hierarchical Opacity Propagation for Image Matting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Natural image matting is a fundamental problem in computational photography and computer vision. Deep neural networks have seen the surge of successful methods in natural image matting in recent years. In contrast to traditional propagation-based matting methods, some top-tier deep image matting approaches tend to perform propagation in the neural network implicitly. A novel structure for more direct alpha matte propagation between pixels is in demand. To this end, this paper presents a hierarchical opacity propagation (HOP) matting method, where the opacity information is propagated in the neighborhood of each point at different semantic levels. The hierarchical structure is based on one global and multiple local propagation blocks. With the HOP structure, every feature point pair in high-resolution feature maps will be connected based on the appearance of input image. We further propose a scale-insensitive positional encoding tailored for image matting to deal with the unfixed size of input image and introduce the random interpolation augmentation into image matting. Extensive experiments and ablation study show that HOP matting is capable of outperforming state-of-the-art matting methods.
Inspector Gadget: A Data Programming-based Labeling System for Industrial Images
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

As machine learning for images becomes democratized in the Software 2.0 era, one of the serious bottlenecks is securing enough labeled data for training. This problem is especially critical in a manufacturing setting where smart factories rely on machine learning for product quality control by analyzing industrial images. Such images are typically large and may only need to be partially analyzed where only a small portion is problematic (e.g., identifying defects on a surface). Since manual labeling these images is expensive, weak supervision is an attractive alternative where the idea is to generate weak labels that are not perfect, but can be produced at scale. Data programming is a recent paradigm in this category where it uses human knowledge in the form of labeling functions and combines them into a generative model. Data programming has been successful in applications based on text or structured data and can also be applied to images usually if one can find a way to convert them into structured data. In this work, we expand the horizon of data programming by directly applying it to images without this conversion, which is a common scenario for industrial applications. We propose Inspector Gadget, an image labeling system that combines crowdsourcing, data augmentation, and data programming to produce weak labels at scale for image classification. We perform experiments on real industrial image datasets and show that Inspector Gadget obtains better performance than other weak-labeling techniques: Snuba, GOGGLES, and self-learning baselines using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) without pre-training.
Function-as-a-Service Performance Evaluation: A Multivocal Literature Review
Venue: arXiv cs.PF 2020
Year: 2020

Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) is one form of the serverless cloud computing paradigm and is defined through FaaS platforms (e.g., AWS Lambda) executing event-triggered code snippets (i.e., functions). Many studies that empirically evaluate the performance of such FaaS platforms have started to appear but we are currently lacking a comprehensive understanding of the overall domain. To address this gap, we conducted a multivocal literature review (MLR) covering 112 studies from academic (51) and grey (61) literature. We find that existing work mainly studies the AWS Lambda platform and focuses on micro-benchmarks using simple functions to measure CPU speed and FaaS platform overhead (i.e., container cold starts). Further, we discover a mismatch between academic and industrial sources on tested platform configurations, find that function triggers remain insufficiently studied, and identify HTTP API gateways and cloud storages as the most used external service integrations. Following existing guidelines on experimentation in cloud systems, we discover many flaws threatening the reproducibility of experiments presented in the surveyed studies. We conclude with a discussion of gaps in literature and highlight methodological suggestions that may serve to improve future FaaS performance evaluation studies.
Towards Efficient Unconstrained Palmprint Recognition via Deep Distillation Hashing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Deep palmprint recognition has become an emerging issue with great potential for personal authentication on handheld and wearable consumer devices. Previous studies of palmprint recognition are mainly based on constrained datasets collected by dedicated devices in controlled environments, which has to reduce the flexibility and convenience. In addition, general deep palmprint recognition algorithms are often too heavy to meet the real-time requirements of embedded system. In this paper, a new palmprint benchmark is established, which consists of more than 20,000 images collected by 5 brands of smart phones in an unconstrained manner. Each image has been manually labeled with 14 key points for region of interest (ROI) extraction. Further, the approach called Deep Distillation Hashing (DDH) is proposed as benchmark for efficient deep palmprint recognition. Palmprint images are converted to binary codes to improve the efficiency of feature matching. Derived from knowledge distillation, novel distillation loss functions are constructed to compress deep model to further improve the efficiency of feature extraction on light network. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on both constrained and unconstrained palmprint databases. Using DDH, the accuracy of palmprint identification can be increased by up to 11.37%, and the Equal Error Rate (EER) of palmprint verification can be reduced by up to 3.11%. The results indicate the feasibility of our database, and DDH can outperform other baselines to achieve the state-of-the-art performance. The collected dataset and related source codes are publicly available at http://gr.xjtu.edu.cn/web/bell/resource.
Streaming Networks: Increase Noise Robustness and Filter Diversity via Hard-wired and Input-induced Sparsity
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

The CNNs have achieved a state-of-the-art performance in many applications. Recent studies illustrate that CNN's recognition accuracy drops drastically if images are noise corrupted. We focus on the problem of robust recognition accuracy of noise-corrupted images. We introduce a novel network architecture called Streaming Networks. Each stream is taking a certain intensity slice of the original image as an input, and stream parameters are trained independently. We use network capacity, hard-wired and input-induced sparsity as the dimensions for experiments. The results indicate that only the presence of both hard-wired and input-induces sparsity enables robust noisy image recognition. Streaming Nets is the only architecture which has both types of sparsity and exhibits higher robustness to noise. Finally, to illustrate increase in filter diversity we illustrate that a distribution of filter weights of the first conv layer gradually approaches uniform distribution as the degree of hard-wired and domain-induced sparsity and capacities increases.
Predict the model of a camera
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In this work we address the problem of predicting the model of a camera based on the content of their photographs. We use two set of features, one set consist in properties extracted from a Discrete Wavelet Domain (DWD) obtained by applying a 4 level Fast Wavelet Decomposition of the images, and a second set are Local Binary Patterns (LBP) features from the after filter noise of images. The algorithms used for classification were Logistic regression, K-NN and Artificial Neural Networks
Automatic Generation of Chinese Handwriting via Fonts Style Representation Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we propose and end-to-end deep Chinese font generation system. This system can generate new style fonts by interpolation of latent style-related embeding variables that could achieve smooth transition between different style. Our method is simpler and more effective than other methods, which will help to improve the font design efficiency
A Machine Learning Based Framework for the Smart Healthcare Monitoring
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we propose a novel framework for the smart healthcare system, where we employ the compressed sensing (CS) and the combination of the state-of-the-art machine learning based denoiser as well as the alternating direction of method of multipliers (ADMM) structure. This integration significantly simplifies the software implementation for the lowcomplexity encoder, thanks to the modular structure of ADMM. Furthermore, we focus on detecting fall down actions from image streams. Thus, teh primary purpose of thus study is to reconstruct the image as visibly clear as possible and hence it helps the detection step at the trained classifier. For this efficient smart health monitoring framework, we employ the trained binary convolutional neural network (CNN) classifier for the fall-action classifier, because this scheme is a part of surveillance scenario. In this scenario, we deal with the fallimages, thus, we compress, transmit and reconstruct the fallimages. Experimental results demonstrate the impacts of network parameters and the significant performance gain of the proposal compared to traditional methods.
Exact separation of forbidden-set cuts associated with redundant parity checks of binary linear codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

In recent years, several integer programming (IP) approaches were developed for maximum-likelihood decoding and minimum distance computation for binary linear codes. Two aspects in particular have been demonstrated to improve the performance of IP solvers as well as adaptive linear programming decoders: the dynamic generation of forbidden-set (FS) inequalities, a family of valid cutting planes, and the utilization of so-called redundant parity-checks (RPCs). However, to date, it had remained unclear how to solve the exact RPC separation problem (i.e., to determine whether or not there exists any violated FS inequality w.r.t. any known or unknown parity-check). In this note, we prove NP-hardness of this problem. Moreover, we formulate an IP model that combines the search for most violated FS cuts with the generation of RPCs, and report on computational experiments. Empirically, for various instances of the minimum distance problem, it turns out that while utilizing the exact separation IP does not appear to provide a computational advantage, it can apparently be avoided altogether by combining heuristics to generate RPC-based cuts.