OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Textual Visual Semantic Dataset for Text Spotting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Text Spotting in the wild consists of detecting and recognizing text appearing in images (e.g. signboards, traffic signals or brands in clothing or objects). This is a challenging problem due to the complexity of the context where texts appear (uneven backgrounds, shading, occlusions, perspective distortions, etc.). Only a few approaches try to exploit the relation between text and its surrounding environment to better recognize text in the scene. In this paper, we propose a visual context dataset for Text Spotting in the wild, where the publicly available dataset COCO-text [Veit et al. 2016] has been extended with information about the scene (such as objects and places appearing in the image) to enable researchers to include semantic relations between texts and scene in their Text Spotting systems, and to offer a common framework for such approaches. For each text in an image, we extract three kinds of context information: objects in the scene, image location label and a textual image description (caption). We use state-of-the-art out-of-the-box available tools to extract this additional information. Since this information has textual form, it can be used to leverage text similarity or semantic relation methods into Text Spotting systems, either as a post-processing or in an end-to-end training strategy. Our data is publicly available at https://git.io/JeZTb.
A NIS Directive compliant Cybersecurity Maturity Assessment Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

The NIS Directive introduces obligations for the security of the network and information systems of operators of essential services and of digital service providers and require from the national competent authorities to assess their compliance to these obligations. This paper describes a novel cybersecurity maturity assessment framework (CMAF) that is tailored to the NIS Directive requirements and can be used either as a self assessment tool from critical national infrastructures either as an audit tool from the National Competent Authorities for cybersecurity.
Runtime Analysis of Evolutionary Algorithms with Biased Mutation for the Multi-Objective Minimum Spanning Tree Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2020
Year: 2020

Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are general-purpose problem solvers that usually perform an unbiased search. This is reasonable and desirable in a black-box scenario. For combinatorial optimization problems, often more knowledge about the structure of optimal solutions is given, which can be leveraged by means of biased search operators. We consider the Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) problem in a single- and multi-objective version, and introduce a biased mutation, which puts more emphasis on the selection of edges of low rank in terms of low domination number. We present example graphs where the biased mutation can significantly speed up the expected runtime until (Pareto-)optimal solutions are found. On the other hand, we demonstrate that bias can lead to exponential runtime if heavy edges are necessarily part of an optimal solution. However, on general graphs in the single-objective setting, we show that a combined mutation operator which decides for unbiased or biased edge selection in each step with equal probability exhibits a polynomial upper bound -- as unbiased mutation -- in the worst case and benefits from bias if the circumstances are favorable.
Keyphrase Prediction With Pre-trained Language Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Recently, generative methods have been widely used in keyphrase prediction, thanks to their capability to produce both present keyphrases that appear in the source text and absent keyphrases that do not match any source text. However, the absent keyphrases are generated at the cost of the performance on present keyphrase prediction, since previous works mainly use generative models that rely on the copying mechanism and select words step by step. Besides, the extractive model that directly extracts a text span is more suitable for predicting the present keyphrase. Considering the different characteristics of extractive and generative methods, we propose to divide the keyphrase prediction into two subtasks, i.e., present keyphrase extraction (PKE) and absent keyphrase generation (AKG), to fully exploit their respective advantages. On this basis, a joint inference framework is proposed to make the most of BERT in two subtasks. For PKE, we tackle this task as a sequence labeling problem with the pre-trained language model BERT. For AKG, we introduce a Transformer-based architecture, which fully integrates the present keyphrase knowledge learned from PKE by the fine-tuned BERT. The experimental results show that our approach can achieve state-of-the-art results on both tasks on benchmark datasets.
SoQal: Selective Oracle Questioning in Active Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Large sets of unlabelled data within the healthcare domain remain underutilized. Active learning offers a way to exploit these datasets by iteratively requesting an oracle (e.g. medical professional) to label instances. This process, which can be costly and time-consuming is overly-dependent upon an oracle. To alleviate this burden, we propose SoQal, a questioning strategy that dynamically determines when a label should be requested from an oracle. We perform experiments on five publically-available datasets and illustrate SoQal's superiority relative to baseline approaches, including its ability to reduce oracle label requests by up to 35%. SoQal also performs competitively in the presence of label noise: a scenario that simulates clinicians' uncertain diagnoses when faced with difficult classification tasks.
Graph Convolutional Subspace Clustering: A Robust Subspace Clustering Framework for Hyperspectral Image
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Hyperspectral image (HSI) clustering is a challenging task due to the high complexity of HSI data. Subspace clustering has been proven to be powerful for exploiting the intrinsic relationship between data points. Despite the impressive performance in the HSI clustering, traditional subspace clustering methods often ignore the inherent structural information among data. In this paper, we revisit the subspace clustering with graph convolution and present a novel subspace clustering framework called Graph Convolutional Subspace Clustering (GCSC) for robust HSI clustering. Specifically, the framework recasts the self-expressiveness property of the data into the non-Euclidean domain, which results in a more robust graph embedding dictionary. We show that traditional subspace clustering models are the special forms of our framework with the Euclidean data. Basing on the framework, we further propose two novel subspace clustering models by using the Frobenius norm, namely Efficient GCSC (EGCSC) and Efficient Kernel GCSC (EKGCSC). Both models have a globally optimal closed-form solution, which makes them easier to implement, train, and apply in practice. Extensive experiments on three popular HSI datasets demonstrate that EGCSC and EKGCSC can achieve state-of-the-art clustering performance and dramatically outperforms many existing methods with significant margins.
Using Libraries of Approximate Circuits in Design of Hardware Accelerators of Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2020
Year: 2020

Approximate circuits have been developed to provide good tradeoffs between power consumption and quality of service in error resilient applications such as hardware accelerators of deep neural networks (DNN). In order to accelerate the approximate circuit design process and to support a fair benchmarking of circuit approximation methods, libraries of approximate circuits have been introduced. For example, EvoApprox8b contains hundreds of 8-bit approximate adders and multipliers. By means of genetic programming we generated an extended version of the library in which thousands of 8- to 128-bit approximate arithmetic circuits are included. These circuits form Pareto fronts with respect to several error metrics, power consumption and other circuit parameters. In our case study we show how a large set of approximate multipliers can be used to perform a resilience analysis of a hardware accelerator of ResNet DNN and to select the most suitable approximate multiplier for a given application. Results are reported for various instances of the ResNet DNN trained on CIFAR-10 benchmark problem.
Hardware and Interference Limited Cooperative CR-NOMA Networks under Imperfect SIC and CSI
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

The conflation of cognitive radio (CR) and nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) concepts is a promising approach to fulfil the massive connectivity goals of future networks given the spectrum scarcity. Accordingly, this letter investigates the outage performance of imperfect cooperative CR-NOMA networks under hardware impairments and interference. Our analysis is involved with the derivation of the end-to-end outage probability (OP) for secondary NOMA users by accounting for imperfect channel state information (CSI), as well as the residual interference caused by successive interference cancellation (SIC) errors and coexisting primary/secondary users. The numerical results validated by Monte Carlo simulations show that CR-NOMA network provides a superior outage performance over orthogonal multiple access. As imperfections become more significant, CR-NOMA is observed to deliver relatively poor outage performance.
Simple Dataset for Proof Method Recommendation in Isabelle/HOL (Dataset Description)
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2020
Year: 2020

Recently, a growing number of researchers have applied machine learning to assist users of interactive theorem provers. However, the expressive nature of underlying logics and esoteric structures of proof documents impede machine learning practitioners, who often do not have much expertise in formal logic, let alone Isabelle/HOL, from achieving a large scale success in this field. In this data description, we present a simple dataset that contains data on over 400k proof method applications along with over 100 extracted features for each in a format that can be processed easily without any knowledge about formal logic. Our simple data format allows machine learning practitioners to try machine learning tools to predict proof methods in Isabelle/HOL without requiring domain expertise in logic.
Challenges in migrating legacy software systems to the cloud an empirical study
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2020
Year: 2020

Moving existing legacy systems to cloud platforms is a difficult and high cost process that may involve technical and non-technical resources and challenges. There is evidence that the lack of understanding and preparedness of cloud computing migration underpin many migration failures in achieving organisations goals. The main goal of this article is to identify the most important challenging activities for moving legacy systems to cloud platforms from a perspective of reengineering process. Through a combination of a bottom-up and a top-down analysis, a set of common activities is derived from the extant cloud computing literature. These are expressed as a model and are validated using a population of 104 shortlisted and randomly selected domain experts from different industry sectors. We used a Web-based survey questionnaire to collect data and analysed them using SPSS Sample T-Test. The results of this study highlight the most important and critical challenges that should be addressed by various roles within a legacy to cloud migration endeavour. The study provides an overall understanding of this process including common occurring activities, concerns and recommendations. In addition, the findings of this study constitute a practical guide to conduct this transition. This guide is platform agnostic and independent from any specific migration scenario, cloud platform, or an application domain. Keywords. Cloud Computing, Legacy Systems, Cloud Migration, Cloud Migration Process
Action recognition in real-world videos
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

The goal of human action recognition is to temporally or spatially localize the human action of interest in video sequences. Temporal localization (i.e. indicating the start and end frames of the action in a video) is referred to as frame-level detection. Spatial localization, which is more challenging, means to identify the pixels within each action frame that correspond to the action. This setting is usually referred to as pixel-level detection. In this chapter, we are using action, activity, event interchangeably.
Cyberattacks and Countermeasures For In-Vehicle Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

As connectivity between and within vehicles increases, so does concern about safety and security. Various automotive serial protocols are used inside vehicles such as Controller Area Network (CAN), Local Interconnect Network (LIN) and FlexRay. CAN bus is the most used in-vehicle network protocol to support exchange of vehicle parameters between Electronic Control Units (ECUs). This protocol lacks security mechanisms by design and is therefore vulnerable to various attacks. Furthermore, connectivity of vehicles has made the CAN bus not only vulnerable from within the vehicle but also from outside. With the rise of connected cars, more entry points and interfaces have been introduced on board vehicles, thereby also leading to a wider potential attack surface. Existing security mechanisms focus on the use of encryption, authentication and vehicle Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), which operate under various constrains such as low bandwidth, small frame size (e.g. in the CAN protocol), limited availability of computational resources and real-time sensitivity. We survey In-Vehicle Network (IVN) attacks which have been grouped under: direct interfaces-initiated attacks, telematics and infotainment-initiated attacks, and sensor-initiated attacks. We survey and classify current cryptographic and IDS approaches and compare these approaches based on criteria such as real time constrains, types of hardware used, changes in CAN bus behaviour, types of attack mitigation and software/ hardware used to validate these approaches. We conclude with potential mitigation strategies and research challenges for the future.
Sum Rate Maximization for IRS-assisted Uplink NOMA
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

An intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) consists of a large number of low-cost reflecting elements, which can steer the incident signal collaboratively by passive beamforming. This way, IRS reconfigures the wireless environment to boost the system performance. In this paper, we consider an IRS-assisted uplink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system. The objective is to maximize the sum rate of all users under individual power constraint. The considered problem requires a joint power control at the users and beamforming design at the IRS, and is nonconvex. To handle it, semidefinite relaxation is employed, which provides a near-optimal solution. Presented numerical results show that the proposed NOMA-based scheme achieves a larger sum rate than orthogonal multiple access (OMA)-based one. Moreover, the impact of the number of reflecting elements on the sum rate is revealed.
Enabling Human-Robot Collaboration via Holistic Human Perception and Partner-Aware Control
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

As robotic technology advances, the barriers to the coexistence of humans and robots are slowly coming down. Application domains like elderly care, collaborative manufacturing, collaborative manipulation, etc., are considered the need of the hour, and progress in robotics holds the potential to address many societal challenges. The future socio-technical systems constitute of blended workforce with a symbiotic relationship between human and robot partners working collaboratively. This thesis attempts to address some of the research challenges in enabling human-robot collaboration. In particular, the challenge of a holistic perception of a human partner to continuously communicate his intentions and needs in real-time to a robot partner is crucial for the successful realization of a collaborative task. Towards that end, we present a holistic human perception framework for real-time monitoring of whole-body human motion and dynamics. On the other hand, the challenge of leveraging assistance from a human partner will lead to improved human-robot collaboration. In this direction, we attempt at methodically defining what constitutes assistance from a human partner and propose partner-aware robot control strategies to endow robots with the capacity to meaningfully engage in a collaborative task.
Experiential probabilistic assessment of cloud services
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

Substantial difficulties in adopting cloud services are often encountered during upgrades of existing software systems. A reliable early stage analysis can facilitate an informed decision process of moving systems to cloud platforms. It can also mitigate risks against system quality goals. Towards this, we propose an interactive goal reasoning approach which is supported by a probabilistic layer for the precise analysis of cloud migration risks to improve the reliability of risk control. The approach is illustrated using a commercial scenario of integrating a digital document processing system to Microsoft Azure cloud platform.
Sparse Generalized Canonical Correlation Analysis: Distributed Alternating Iteration based Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Sparse canonical correlation analysis (CCA) is a useful statistical tool to detect latent information with sparse structures. However, sparse CCA works only for two datasets, i.e., there are only two views or two distinct objects. To overcome this limitation, in this paper, we propose a sparse generalized canonical correlation analysis (GCCA), which could detect the latent relations of multiview data with sparse structures. Moreover, the introduced sparsity could be considered as Laplace prior on the canonical variates. Specifically, we convert the GCCA into a linear system of equations and impose $\ell_1$ minimization penalty for sparsity pursuit. This results in a nonconvex problem on Stiefel manifold, which is difficult to solve. Motivated by Boyd's consensus problem, an algorithm based on distributed alternating iteration approach is developed and theoretical consistency analysis is investigated elaborately under mild conditions. Experiments on several synthetic and real world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
Love, Joy, Anger, Sadness, Fear, and Surprise: SE Needs Special Kinds of AI: A Case Study on Text Mining and SE
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2020
Year: 2020

Do you like your code? What kind of code makes developers happiest? What makes them angriest? Is it possible to monitor the mood of a large team of coders to determine when and where a codebase needs additional help?
SimUSR: A Simple but Strong Baseline for Unsupervised Image Super-resolution
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we tackle a fully unsupervised super-resolution problem, i.e., neither paired images nor ground truth HR images. We assume that low resolution (LR) images are relatively easy to collect compared to high resolution (HR) images. By allowing multiple LR images, we build a set of pseudo pairs by denoising and downsampling LR images and cast the original unsupervised problem into a supervised learning problem but in one level lower. Though this line of study is easy to think of and thus should have been investigated prior to any complicated unsupervised methods, surprisingly, there are currently none. Even more, we show that this simple method outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised method with a dramatically shorter latency at runtime, and significantly reduces the gap to the HR supervised models. We submitted our method in NTIRE 2020 super-resolution challenge and won 1st in PSNR, 2nd in SSIM, and 13th in LPIPS. This simple method should be used as the baseline to beat in the future, especially when multiple LR images are allowed during the training phase. However, even in the zero-shot condition, we argue that this method can serve as a useful baseline to see the gap between supervised and unsupervised frameworks.
Learning Dialog Policies from Weak Demonstrations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Deep reinforcement learning is a promising approach to training a dialog manager, but current methods struggle with the large state and action spaces of multi-domain dialog systems. Building upon Deep Q-learning from Demonstrations (DQfD), an algorithm that scores highly in difficult Atari games, we leverage dialog data to guide the agent to successfully respond to a user's requests. We make progressively fewer assumptions about the data needed, using labeled, reduced-labeled, and even unlabeled data to train expert demonstrators. We introduce Reinforced Fine-tune Learning, an extension to DQfD, enabling us to overcome the domain gap between the datasets and the environment. Experiments in a challenging multi-domain dialog system framework validate our approaches, and get high success rates even when trained on out-of-domain data.
Evaluating FPGA Accelerator Performance with a Parameterized OpenCL Adaptation of the HPCChallenge Benchmark Suite
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

FPGAs have found increasing adoption in data center applications since a new generation of high-level tools have become available which noticeably reduce development time for FPGA accelerators and still provide high quality of results. There is however no high-level benchmark suite available which specifically enables a comparison of FPGA architectures, programming tools and libraries for HPC applications. To fill this gap, we have developed an OpenCL-based open source implementation of the HPCC benchmark suite for Xilinx and Intel FPGAs. This benchmark can serve to analyze the current capabilities of FPGA devices, cards and development tool flows, track progress over time and point out specific difficulties for FPGA acceleration in the HPC domain. Additionally, the benchmark documents proven performance optimization patterns. We will continue optimizing and porting the benchmark for new generations of FPGAs and design tools and encourage active participation to create a valuable tool for the community.
SL-DML: Signal Level Deep Metric Learning for Multimodal One-Shot Action Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Recognizing an activity with a single reference sample using metric learning approaches is a promising research field. The majority of few-shot methods focus on object recognition or face-identification. We propose a metric learning approach to reduce the action recognition problem to a nearest neighbor search in embedding space. We encode signals into images and extract features using a deep residual CNN. Using triplet loss, we learn a feature embedding. The resulting encoder transforms features into an embedding space in which closer distances encode similar actions while higher distances encode different actions. Our approach is based on a signal level formulation and remains flexible across a variety of modalities. It further outperforms the baseline on the large scale NTU RGB+D 120 dataset for the One-Shot action recognition protocol by 5.6%. With just 60% of the training data, our approach still outperforms the baseline approach by 3.7%. With 40% of the training data, our approach performs comparably well to the second follow up. Further, we show that our approach generalizes well in experiments on the UTD-MHAD dataset for inertial, skeleton and fused data and the Simitate dataset for motion capturing data. Furthermore, our inter-joint and inter-sensor experiments suggest good capabilities on previously unseen setups.