OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Gated Feedback Refinement Network for Coarse-to-Fine Dense Semantic Image Labeling
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Effective integration of local and global contextual information is crucial for semantic segmentation and dense image labeling. We develop two encoder-decoder based deep learning architectures to address this problem. We first propose a network architecture called Label Refinement Network (LRN) that predicts segmentation labels in a coarse-to-fine fashion at several spatial resolutions. In this network, we also define loss functions at several stages to provide supervision at different stages of training. However, there are limits to the quality of refinement possible if ambiguous information is passed forward. In order to address this issue, we also propose Gated Feedback Refinement Network (G-FRNet) that addresses this limitation. Initially, G-FRNet makes a coarse-grained prediction which it progressively refines to recover details by effectively integrating local and global contextual information during the refinement stages. This is achieved by gate units proposed in this work, that control information passed forward in order to resolve the ambiguity. Experiments were conducted on four challenging dense labeling datasets (CamVid, PASCAL VOC 2012, Horse-Cow Parsing, PASCAL-Person-Part, and SUN-RGBD). G-FRNet achieves state-of-the-art semantic segmentation results on the CamVid and Horse-Cow Parsing datasets and produces results competitive with the best performing approaches that appear in the literature for the other three datasets.
Proof-of-work certificates that can be efficiently computed in the cloud
Venue: arXiv cs.SC 2018
Year: 2018

In an emerging computing paradigm, computational capabilities, from processing power to storage capacities, are offered to users over communication networks as a cloud-based service. There, demanding computations are outsourced in order to limit infrastructure costs. The idea of verifiable computing is to associate a data structure, a proof-of-work certificate, to the result of the outsourced computation. This allows a verification algorithm to prove the validity of the result, faster than by recomputing it. We talk about a Prover (the server performing the computations) and a Verifier. Goldwasser, Kalai and Rothblum gave in 2008 a generic method to verify any parallelizable computation, in almost linear time in the size of the, potentially structured, inputs and the result. However, the extra cost of the computations for the Prover (and therefore the extra cost to the customer), although only almost a constant factor of the overall work, is nonetheless prohibitive in practice. Differently, we will here present problem-specific procedures in computer algebra, e.g. for exact linear algebra computations, that are Prover-optimal, that is that have much less financial overhead.
Learning a Shared Shape Space for Multimodal Garment Design
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2018
Year: 2018

Designing real and virtual garments is becoming extremely demanding with rapidly changing fashion trends and increasing need for synthesizing realistic dressed digital humans for various applications. This necessitates creating simple and effective workflows to facilitate authoring sewing patterns customized to garment and target body shapes to achieve desired looks. Traditional workflow involves a trial-and-error procedure wherein a mannequin is draped to judge the resultant folds and the sewing pattern iteratively adjusted until the desired look is achieved. This requires time and experience. Instead, we present a data-driven approach wherein the user directly indicates desired fold patterns simply by sketching while our system estimates corresponding garment and body shape parameters at interactive rates. The recovered parameters can then be further edited and the updated draped garment previewed. Technically, we achieve this via a novel shared shape space that allows the user to seamlessly specify desired characteristics across multimodal input {\em without} requiring to run garment simulation at design time. We evaluate our approach qualitatively via a user study and quantitatively against test datasets, and demonstrate how our system can generate a rich quality of on-body garments targeted for a range of body shapes while achieving desired fold characteristics.
Detecting Mammals in UAV Images: Best Practices to address a substantially Imbalanced Dataset with Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Knowledge over the number of animals in large wildlife reserves is a vital necessity for park rangers in their efforts to protect endangered species. Manual animal censuses are dangerous and expensive, hence Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with consumer level digital cameras are becoming a popular alternative tool to estimate livestock. Several works have been proposed that semi-automatically process UAV images to detect animals, of which some employ Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), a recent family of deep learning algorithms that proved very effective in object detection in large datasets from computer vision. However, the majority of works related to wildlife focuses only on small datasets (typically subsets of UAV campaigns), which might be detrimental when presented with the sheer scale of real study areas for large mammal census. Methods may yield thousands of false alarms in such cases. In this paper, we study how to scale CNNs to large wildlife census tasks and present a number of recommendations to train a CNN on a large UAV dataset. We further introduce novel evaluation protocols that are tailored to censuses and model suitability for subsequent human verification of detections. Using our recommendations, we are able to train a CNN reducing the number of false positives by an order of magnitude compared to previous state-of-the-art. Setting the requirements at 90% recall, our CNN allows to reduce the amount of data required for manual verification by three times, thus making it possible for rangers to screen all the data acquired efficiently and to detect almost all animals in the reserve automatically.
Learning from graphs with structural variation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

We study the effect of structural variation in graph data on the predictive performance of graph kernels. To this end, we introduce a novel, noise-robust adaptation of the GraphHopper kernel and validate it on benchmark data, obtaining modestly improved predictive performance on a range of datasets. Next, we investigate the performance of the state-of-the-art Weisfeiler-Lehman graph kernel under increasing synthetic structural errors and find that the effect of introducing errors depends strongly on the dataset.
(k,p)-Planarity: A Relaxation of Hybrid Planarity
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2018
Year: 2018

We present a new model for hybrid planarity that relaxes existing hybrid representations. A graph $G = (V,E)$ is $(k,p)$-planar if $V$ can be partitioned into clusters of size at most $k$ such that $G$ admits a drawing where: (i) each cluster is associated with a closed, bounded planar region, called a cluster region; (ii) cluster regions are pairwise disjoint, (iii) each vertex $v \in V$ is identified with at most $p$ distinct points, called \emph{ports}, on the boundary of its cluster region; (iv) each inter-cluster edge $(u,v) \in E$ is identified with a Jordan arc connecting a port of $u$ to a port of $v$; (v) inter-cluster edges do not cross or intersect cluster regions except at their endpoints. We first tightly bound the number of edges in a $(k,p)$-planar graph with $p<k$. We then prove that $(4,1)$-planarity testing and $(2,2)$-planarity testing are NP-complete problems. Finally, we prove that neither the class of $(2,2)$-planar graphs nor the class of $1$-planar graphs contains the other, indicating that the $(k,p)$-planar graphs are a large and novel class.
Understanding Fashionability: What drives sales of a style?
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2018
Year: 2018

We use customer demand data for fashion articles on Myntra, and derive a fashionability or style quotient, which represents customer demand for the stylistic content of a fashion article, decoupled with its commercials (price, offers, etc.). We demonstrate learning for assortment planning in fashion that would aim to keep a healthy mix of breadth and depth across various styles, and we show the relationship between a customer's perception of a style vs a merchandiser's catalogue of styles. We also backtest our method to calculate prediction errors in our style quotient and customer demand, and discuss various implications and findings.
Understanding the Nonlinear Behavior and Frequency Stability of a Grid-synchronized VSC Under Grid Voltage Dips
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

Transients of a grid-synchronized voltage source converter (VSC) are closely related to over- currents and voltages occurred under large disturbances (e.g. a grid fault). Previous analysis in evaluating these transients usually neglect the nonlinear control effects of a VSC (e.g. phase-locked-loop, PLL). Therefore, potential stability issues related with nonlinear dynamics cannot be revealed properly. This work aims to move further in this respect. To better analyze and gain more insights into the nonlinear properties, dynamical analysis of a grid-tied VSC is conducted by parts. Specifically, the nonlinear behaviors of VSC power control loop (PCL) are firstly analyzed, in which the dynamics of PLL are assumed steady. Then, the nonlinear behaviors of PLL-dominant dynamics are further explored in detail, where the PCL is assumed steady. In this case, frequency instability and the mechanisms behind it are revealed. At last, effects of PQ controller regulation as well as controller bandwidth on the frequency stability are discussed. All the analysis and conclusions are verified by time domain simulations in PSCAD/EMTDC, where a switching model of VSC is adopted.
Visual Attention and its Intimate Links to Spatial Cognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

It is almost universal to regard attention as the facility that permits an agent, human or machine, to give priority processing resources to relevant stimuli while ignoring the irrelevant. The reality of how this might manifest itself throughout all the forms of perceptual and cognitive processes possessed by humans, however, is not as clear. Here we examine this reality with a broad perspective in order to highlight the myriad ways that attentional processes impact both perception and cognition. The paper concludes by showing two real world problems that exhibit sufficient complexity to illustrate the ways in which attention and cognition connect. These then point to new avenues of research that might illuminate the overall cognitive architecture of spatial cognition.
Stress-testing memcomputing on hard combinatorial optimization problems
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2018
Year: 2018

Memcomputing is a novel paradigm of computation that utilizes dynamical elements with memory to both store and process information on the same physical location. Its building blocks can be fabricated in hardware with standard electronic circuits, thus offering a path to its practical realization. In addition, since memcomputing is based on non-quantum elements, the equations of motion describing these machines can be simulated efficiently on standard computers. In fact, it was recently realized that memcomputing, and in particular its digital (hence scalable) version, when simulated on a classical machine provides a significant speed-up over state-of-the-art algorithms on a variety of non-convex problems. Here, we stress-test the capabilities of this approach on finding approximate solutions to hard combinatorial optimization problems. These fall into a class which is known to require exponentially growing resources in the worst cases, even to generate approximations. We recently showed that in a region where state of the art algorithms demonstrate this exponential growth, simulations of digital memcomputing machines performed using the Falcon$^©$ simulator of MemComputing, Inc. only require time and memory resources that scale linearly. These results are extended in a stress-test up to $64\times10^6$ variables (corresponding to about 1 billion literals), namely the largest case that we could fit on a single node with 128 GB of DRAM. Since memcomputing can be applied to a wide variety of optimization problems, this stress test shows the considerable advantage of non-combinatorial, physics-inspired approaches over standard combinatorial ones.
A Constrained Coupled Matrix-Tensor Factorization for Learning Time-evolving and Emerging Topics
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2018
Year: 2018

Topic discovery has witnessed a significant growth as a field of data mining at large. In particular, time-evolving topic discovery, where the evolution of a topic is taken into account has been instrumental in understanding the historical context of an emerging topic in a dynamic corpus. Traditionally, time-evolving topic discovery has focused on this notion of time. However, especially in settings where content is contributed by a community or a crowd, an orthogonal notion of time is the one that pertains to the level of expertise of the content creator: the more experienced the creator, the more advanced the topic. In this paper, we propose a novel time-evolving topic discovery method which, in addition to the extracted topics, is able to identify the evolution of that topic over time, as well as the level of difficulty of that topic, as it is inferred by the level of expertise of its main contributors. Our method is based on a novel formulation of Constrained Coupled Matrix-Tensor Factorization, which adopts constraints well-motivated for, and, as we demonstrate, are essential for high-quality topic discovery. We qualitatively evaluate our approach using real data from the Physics and also Programming Stack Exchange forum, and we were able to identify topics of varying levels of difficulty which can be linked to external events, such as the announcement of gravitational waves by the LIGO lab in Physics forum. We provide a quantitative evaluation of our method by conducting a user study where experts were asked to judge the coherence and quality of the extracted topics. Finally, our proposed method has implications for automatic curriculum design using the extracted topics, where the notion of the level of difficulty is necessary for the proper modeling of prerequisites and advanced concepts.
Ant routing algorithm for the Lightning Network
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

We propose a decentralized routing algorithm that can be implemented in Bitcoin Lightning Network. All nodes in the network contribute equally to path searching. The algorithm is inspired from ant path searching algorithms.
Achieving Fairness through Adversarial Learning: an Application to Recidivism Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Recidivism prediction scores are used across the USA to determine sentencing and supervision for hundreds of thousands of inmates. One such generator of recidivism prediction scores is Northpointe's Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS) score, used in states like California and Florida, which past research has shown to be biased against black inmates according to certain measures of fairness. To counteract this racial bias, we present an adversarially-trained neural network that predicts recidivism and is trained to remove racial bias. When comparing the results of our model to COMPAS, we gain predictive accuracy and get closer to achieving two out of three measures of fairness: parity and equality of odds. Our model can be generalized to any prediction and demographic. This piece of research contributes an example of scientific replication and simplification in a high-stakes real-world application like recidivism prediction.
Inroads Toward Robot-Assisted Internal Fixation of Bone Fractures Using a Bendable Medical Screw and the Curved Drilling Technique
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2018
Year: 2018

Internal fixation is a common orthopedic procedure in which a rigid screw is used to fix fragments of a fractured bone together and expedite the healing process. However, the rigidity of the screw, geometry of the fractured anatomy (e.g. femur and pelvis), and patient age can cause an array of complications during screw placement, such as improper fracture healing due to misalignment of the bone fragments, lengthy procedure time and subsequently high radiation exposure. To address these issues, we propose a minimally invasive robot-assisted procedure comprising of a continuum robot, called ortho-snake, together with a novel bendable medical screw (BMS) for fixating the fractures. We describe the implementation of a curved drilling technique and focus on the design, manufacturing, and evaluation of a novel BMS, which can passively morph into the drilled curved tunnels with various curvatures. We evaluate the performance and efficacy of the proposed BMS using both finite element simulations as well as experiments conducted on synthetic bone samples.
Automated Directed Fairness Testing
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Fairness is a critical trait in decision making. As machine-learning models are increasingly being used in sensitive application domains (e.g. education and employment) for decision making, it is crucial that the decisions computed by such models are free of unintended bias. But how can we automatically validate the fairness of arbitrary machine-learning models? For a given machine-learning model and a set of sensitive input parameters, our AEQUITAS approach automatically discovers discriminatory inputs that highlight fairness violation. At the core of AEQUITAS are three novel strategies to employ probabilistic search over the input space with the objective of uncovering fairness violation. Our AEQUITAS approach leverages inherent robustness property in common machine-learning models to design and implement scalable test generation methodologies. An appealing feature of our generated test inputs is that they can be systematically added to the training set of the underlying model and improve its fairness. To this end, we design a fully automated module that guarantees to improve the fairness of the underlying model. We implemented AEQUITAS and we have evaluated it on six state-of-the-art classifiers, including a classifier that was designed with fairness constraints. We show that AEQUITAS effectively generates inputs to uncover fairness violation in all the subject classifiers and systematically improves the fairness of the respective models using the generated test inputs. In our evaluation, AEQUITAS generates up to 70% discriminatory inputs (w.r.t. the total number of inputs generated) and leverages these inputs to improve the fairness up to 94%.
Information theoretic limits of state-dependent networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

We investigate the information theoretic limits of two types of state-dependent models in this dissertation. These models capture a wide range of wireless communication scenarios where there are interference cognition among transmitters. Hence, information theoretic studies of these models provide useful guidelines for designing new interference cancellation schemes in practical wireless networks. In particular, we first study the two-user state-dependent Gaussian multiple access channel (MAC) with a helper. Inner and outer bounds on the capacity region are first derived, which improve the state-of-the-art bounds given in the literature. Further comparison of these bounds yields either segments on the capacity region boundary or the full capacity region by considering various regimes of channel parameters. We then study the two-user Gaussian state-dependent Z-IC and state-dependent IC. Three interference regimes are studied, and the capacity region or the sum capacity boundary is characterized either fully or partially under various channel parameters. The impact of the correlation between the states on the cancellation of state and interference as well as the achievability of the capacity is demonstrated via numerical analysis. Numerical investigation indicates that for the regular IC, the correlation between states impacts the achievability of the channel capacity in a different way from that of the Z-IC.
Tap-based User Authentication for Smartwatches
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

This paper presents TapMeIn, an eyes-free, two-factor authentication method for smartwatches. It allows users to tap a memorable melody (tap-password) of their choice anywhere on the touchscreen to unlock their watch. A user is verified based on the tap-password as well as her physiological and behavioral characteristics when tapping. Results from preliminary experiments with 41 participants show that TapMeIn could achieve an accuracy of 98.7% with a False Positive Rate of only 0.98%. In addition, TapMeIn retains its performance in different conditions such as sitting and walking. In terms of speed, TapMeIn has an average authentication time of 2 seconds. A user study with the System Usability Scale (SUS) tool suggests that TapMeIn has a high usability score.
Estimating Phenotypic Traits From UAV Based RGB Imagery
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

In many agricultural applications one wants to characterize physical properties of plants and use the measurements to predict, for example biomass and environmental influence. This process is known as phenotyping. Traditional collection of phenotypic information is labor-intensive and time-consuming. Use of imagery is becoming popular for phenotyping. In this paper, we present methods to estimate traits of sorghum plants from RBG cameras on board of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The position and orientation of the imagery together with the coordinates of sparse points along the area of interest are derived through a new triangulation method. A rectified orthophoto mosaic is then generated from the imagery. The number of leaves is estimated and a model-based method to analyze the leaf morphology for leaf segmentation is proposed. We present a statistical model to find the location of each individual sorghum plant.
SphereReID: Deep Hypersphere Manifold Embedding for Person Re-Identification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Many current successful Person Re-Identification(ReID) methods train a model with the softmax loss function to classify images of different persons and obtain the feature vectors at the same time. However, the underlying feature embedding space is ignored. In this paper, we use a modified softmax function, termed Sphere Softmax, to solve the classification problem and learn a hypersphere manifold embedding simultaneously. A balanced sampling strategy is also introduced. Finally, we propose a convolutional neural network called SphereReID adopting Sphere Softmax and training a single model end-to-end with a new warming-up learning rate schedule on four challenging datasets including Market-1501, DukeMTMC-reID, CHHK-03, and CUHK-SYSU. Experimental results demonstrate that this single model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on all four datasets without fine-tuning or re-ranking. For example, it achieves 94.4% rank-1 accuracy on Market-1501 and 83.9% rank-1 accuracy on DukeMTMC-reID. The code and trained weights of our model will be released.