OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Deep Transfer Learning for Identifications of Slope Surface Cracks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Geohazards such as landslides have caused great losses to the safety of people's lives and property, which is often accompanied with surface cracks. If such surface cracks could be identified in time, it is of great significance for the monitoring and early warning of geohazards. Currently, the most common method for crack identification is manual detection, which is with low efficiency and accuracy. In this paper, a deep transfer learning framework is proposed to effectively and efficiently identify slope surface cracks for the sake of fast monitoring and early warning of geohazards such as landslides. The essential idea is to employ transfer learning by training (a) the large sample dataset of concrete cracks and (b) the small sample dataset of soil and rock masses cracks. In the proposed framework, (1) pretrained cracks identification models are constructed based on the large sample dataset of concrete cracks; (2) refined cracks identification models are further constructed based on the small sample dataset of soil and rock masses cracks. The proposed framework could be applied to conduct UAV surveys on high-steep slopes to realize the monitoring and early warning of landslides to ensure the safety of people's lives and property.
Tasks Structure Regularization in Multi-Task Learning for Improving Facial Attribute Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

The great success of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for facial attribute prediction relies on a large amount of labeled images. Facial image datasets are usually annotated by some commonly used attributes (e.g., gender), while labels for the other attributes (e.g., big nose) are limited which causes their prediction challenging. To address this problem, we use a new Multi-Task Learning (MTL) paradigm in which a facial attribute predictor uses the knowledge of other related attributes to obtain a better generalization performance. Here, we leverage MLT paradigm in two problem settings. First, it is assumed that the structure of the tasks (e.g., grouping pattern of facial attributes) is known as a prior knowledge, and parameters of the tasks (i.e., predictors) within the same group are represented by a linear combination of a limited number of underlying basis tasks. Here, a sparsity constraint on the coefficients of this linear combination is also considered such that each task is represented in a more structured and simpler manner. Second, it is assumed that the structure of the tasks is unknown, and then structure and parameters of the tasks are learned jointly by using a Laplacian regularization framework. Our MTL methods are compared with competing methods for facial attribute prediction to show its effectiveness.
COMPARE: A Taxonomy and Dataset of Comparison Discussions in Peer Reviews
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Comparing research papers is a conventional method to demonstrate progress in experimental research. We present COMPARE, a taxonomy and a dataset of comparison discussions in peer reviews of research papers in the domain of experimental deep learning. From a thorough observation of a large set of review sentences, we build a taxonomy of categories in comparison discussions and present a detailed annotation scheme to analyze this. Overall, we annotate 117 reviews covering 1,800 sentences. We experiment with various methods to identify comparison sentences in peer reviews and report a maximum F1 Score of 0.49. We also pretrain two language models specifically on ML, NLP, and CV paper abstracts and reviews to learn informative representations of peer reviews. The annotated dataset and the pretrained models are available at https://github.com/shruti-singh/COMPARE .
An Autonomous Driving System - Dedicated Vehicle for People with ASD and their Caregivers
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2021
Year: 2021

Automated driving system - dedicated vehicles (ADS-DVs), specially designed for people with various disabilities, can be beneficial to improve their mobility. However, research related to autonomous vehicles (AVs) for people with cognitive disabilities, especially Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is limited. Thus, in this study, we focused on the challenge that we framed: "How might we design an ADS-DV that benefits people with ASD and their caregivers?". In order to address the design challenge, we followed the human-centered design process. First, we conducted user research with caregivers of people with ASD. Second, we identified their user needs, including safety, monitoring and updates, individual preferences, comfort, trust, and reliability. Third, we generated a large number of ideas with brainstorming and affinity diagrams, based on which we proposed an ADS-DV prototype with a mobile application and an interior design. Fourth, we tested both the low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes to fix the possible issues. Our preliminary results showed that such an ASD-DV would potentially improve the mobility of those with ASD without worries.
Topology Inference of Networks utilizing Rooted Spanning Tree Embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Due to its high efficiency, routing based on greedy embeddings of rooted spanning trees is a promising approach for dynamic, large-scale networks with restricted topologies. Friend-to-friend (F2F) overlays, one key application of embedding-based routing, aim to prevent disclosure of their participants to malicious members by restricting exchange of messages to mutually trusted nodes. Since embeddings assign a unique integer vector to each node that encodes its position in a spanning tree of the overlay, attackers can infer network structure from knowledge about assigned vectors. As this information can be used to identify participants, an evaluation of the scale of leakage is needed. In this work, we analyze in detail which information malicious participants can infer from knowledge about assigned vectors. Also, we show that by monitoring packet trajectories, malicious participants cannot unambiguously infer links between nodes of unidentified participants. Using simulation, we find that the vector assignment procedure has a strong impact on the feasibility of inference. In F2F overlay networks, using vectors of randomly chosen numbers for routing decreases the mean number of discovered individuals by one order of magnitude compared to the popular approach of using child enumeration indexes as vector elements.
Stroke Correspondence by Labeling Closed Areas
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2021
Year: 2021

Constructing stroke correspondences between keyframes is one of the most important processes in the production pipeline of hand-drawn inbetweening frames. This process requires time-consuming manual work imposing a tremendous burden on the animators. We propose a method to estimate stroke correspondences between raster character images (keyframes) without vectorization processes. First, the proposed system separates the closed areas in each keyframe and estimates the correspondences between closed areas by using the characteristics of shape, depth, and closed area connection. Second, the proposed system estimates stroke correspondences from the estimated closed area correspondences. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by performing a user study and comparing the proposed system with conventional approaches.
Method Towards CVPR 2021 SimLocMatch Challenge
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

This report describes Megvii-3D team's approach towards SimLocMatch Challenge @ CVPR 2021 Image Matching Workshop.
Scalable Reverse Image Search Engine for NASAWorldview
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Researchers often spend weeks sifting through decades of unlabeled satellite imagery(on NASA Worldview) in order to develop datasets on which they can start conducting research. We developed an interactive, scalable and fast image similarity search engine (which can take one or more images as the query image) that automatically sifts through the unlabeled dataset reducing dataset generation time from weeks to minutes. In this work, we describe key components of the end to end pipeline. Our similarity search system was created to be able to identify similar images from a potentially petabyte scale database that are similar to an input image, and for this we had to break down each query image into its features, which were generated by a classification layer stripped CNN trained in a supervised manner. To store and search these features efficiently, we had to make several scalability improvements. To improve the speed, reduce the storage, and shrink memory requirements for embedding search, we add a fully connected layer to our CNN make all images into a 128 length vector before entering the classification layers. This helped us compress the size of our image features from 2048 (for ResNet, which was initially tried as our featurizer) to 128 for our new custom model. Additionally, we utilize existing approximate nearest neighbor search libraries to significantly speed up embedding search. Our system currently searches over our entire database of images at 5 seconds per query on a single virtual machine in the cloud. In the future, we would like to incorporate a SimCLR based featurizing model which could be trained without any labelling by a human (since the classification aspect of the model is irrelevant to this use case).
Joint Association and Resource Allocation for Multi-Hop Integrated Access and Backhaul (IAB) Network
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

Integrated access and backhaul (IAB) network is envisioned as a novel network architecture for increasing the network capacity and coverage. To facilitate the IAB network, the appropriate methods of wireless link association and resource management are required. In this paper, we investigate the joint optimization problem of association and resource allocation in terms of subchannel and power for IAB network. In particular, we handle the association and resource allocation problems for wireless backhaul and access links considering multi-hop backhauling. Since the optimization problem for IAB network is formulated as a mixed integer non-linear programming (MINLP), we divide it into three subproblems for association, subchannel allocation, and power allocation, respectively, and these subproblems are solved alternatively to obtain a local optimal solution. For the association problem, we adopt the Lagrangian duality approach to configure the backhaul and access links and successive convex approximation (SCA) approach is used to solve the subchannel and power allocation problems efficiently. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves better performance than single-hop backhauling based network and enhances the capacity and coverage by configuring the multi-hop backhauling.
Finding NeMo: Fishing in banking networks using network motifs
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2021
Year: 2021

Banking fraud causes billion-dollar losses for banks worldwide. In fraud detection, graphs help understand complex transaction patterns and discovering new fraud schemes. This work explores graph patterns in a real-world transaction dataset by extracting and analyzing its network motifs. Since banking graphs are heterogeneous, we focus on heterogeneous network motifs. Additionally, we propose a novel network randomization process that generates valid banking graphs. From our exploratory analysis, we conclude that network motifs extract insightful and interpretable patterns.
Exploiting Features with Split-and-Share Module
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown state-of-the-art performances in various computer vision tasks. Advances on CNN architectures have focused mainly on designing convolutional blocks of the feature extractors, but less on the classifiers that exploit extracted features. In this work, we propose Split-and-Share Module (SSM),a classifier that splits a given feature into parts, which are partially shared by multiple sub-classifiers. Our intuition is that the more the features are shared, the more common they will become, and SSM can encourage such structural characteristics in the split features. SSM can be easily integrated into any architecture without bells and whistles. We have extensively validated the efficacy of SSM on ImageNet-1K classification task, andSSM has shown consistent and significant improvements over baseline architectures. In addition, we analyze the effect of SSM using the Grad-CAM visualization.
Hierarchical Structural Analysis Method for Complex Equation-oriented Models
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2021
Year: 2021

Structural analysis is a method for verifying equation-oriented models in the design of industrial systems. Existing structural analysis methods need flattening of the hierarchical models into an equation system for analysis. However, the large-scale equations in complex models make structural analysis difficult. Aimed to address the issue, this study proposes a hierarchical structural analysis method by exploring the relationship between the singularities of the hierarchical equation-oriented model and its components. This method obtains the singularity of a hierarchical equation-oriented model by analyzing a dummy model constructed with the parts from the decomposing results of its components. Based on this, the structural singularity of a complex model can be obtained by layer-by-layer analysis according to their natural hierarchy. The hierarchical structural analysis method can reduce the equation scale in each analysis and achieve efficient structural analysis of very complex models. This method can be adaptively applied to nonlinear-algebraic and differential-algebraic equation models. The main algorithms, application cases and comparison with the existing methods are present in this paper. The complexity analysis results show the enhanced efficiency of the proposed method in the structural analysis of complex equation-oriented models. Compared with the existing methods, the time complexity of the proposed method is improved significantly.
Hand Pose Classification Based on Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In this work, deep learning models are applied to a segment of a robust hand-washing dataset that has been created with the help of 30 volunteers. This work demonstrates the classification of presence of one hand, two hands and no hand in the scene based on transfer learning. The pre-trained model; simplest NN from Keras library is utilized to train the network with 704 images of hand gestures and the predictions are carried out for the input image. Due to the controlled and restricted dataset, 100% accuracy is achieved during the training with correct predictions for the input image. Complete handwashing dataset with dense models such as AlexNet for video classification for hand hygiene stages will be used in the future work.
Topology optimization of thermal problems in a nonsmooth variational setting: closed-form optimality criteria
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2021
Year: 2021

This paper extends the nonsmooth Relaxed Variational Approach (RVA) to topology optimization, proposed by the authors in a preceding work, to the solution of thermal optimization problems. First, the RVA topology optimization method is briefly discussed and, then, it is applied to a set of representative problems in which the thermal compliance, the deviation of the heat flux from a given field and the average temperature are minimized. For each optimization problem, the relaxed topological derivative and the corresponding adjoint equations are presented. This set of expressions are then discretized in the context of the finite element method and used in the optimization algorithm to update the characteristic function. Finally, some representative (3D) thermal topology optimization examples are presented to asses the performance of the proposed method and the Relaxed Variational Approach solutions are compared with the ones obtained with the level set method in terms of the cost function, the topology design and the computational cost.
Deep Joint Learning of Pathological Region Localization and Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

The identification of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and its early stages using structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been attracting the attention of researchers. Various data-driven approaches have been introduced to capture subtle and local morphological changes of the brain accompanied by the disease progression. One of the typical approaches for capturing subtle changes is patch-level feature representation. However, the predetermined regions to extract patches can limit classification performance by interrupting the exploration of potential biomarkers. In addition, the existing patch-level analyses have difficulty explaining their decision-making. To address these problems, we propose the BrainBagNet with a position-based gate (PG-BrainBagNet), a framework for jointly learning pathological region localization and AD diagnosis in an end-to-end manner. In advance, as all scans are aligned to a template in image processing, the position of brain images can be represented through the 3D Cartesian space shared by the overall MRI scans. The proposed method represents the patch-level response from whole-brain MRI scans and discriminative brain-region from position information. Based on the outcomes, the patch-level class evidence is calculated, and then the image-level prediction is inferred by a transparent aggregation. The proposed models were evaluated on the ADNI datasets. In five-fold cross-validation, the classification performance of the proposed method outperformed that of the state-of-the-art methods in both AD diagnosis (AD vs. normal control) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) conversion prediction (progressive MCI vs. stable MCI) tasks. In addition, changes in the identified discriminant regions and patch-level class evidence according to the patch size used for model training are presented and analyzed.
An Open Framework for Analyzing and Modeling XR Network Traffic
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2021
Year: 2021

Thanks to recent advancements in the technology, eXtended Reality (XR) applications are gaining a lot of momentum, and they will surely become increasingly popular in the next decade. These new applications, however, require a step forward also in terms of models to simulate and analyze this type of traffic sources in modern communication networks, in order to guarantee to the users state of the art performance and Quality of Experience (QoE). Recognizing this need, in this work, we present a novel open-source traffic model, which researchers can use as a starting point both for improvements of the model itself and for the design of optimized algorithms for the transmission of these peculiar data flows. Along with the mathematical model and the code, we also share with the community the traces that we gathered for our study, collected from freely available applications such as Minecraft VR, Google Earth VR, and Virus Popper. Finally, we propose a roadmap for the construction of an end-to-end framework that fills this gap in the current state of the art.
Refactoring the Whitby Intelligent Tutoring System for Clean Architecture
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2021
Year: 2021

Whitby is the server-side of an Intelligent Tutoring System application for learning System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA), a methodology used to ensure the safety of anything that can be represented with a systems model. The underlying logic driving the reasoning behind Whitby is Situation Calculus, which is a many-sorted logic with situation, action, and object sorts. The Situation Calculus is applied to Ontology Authoring and Contingent Scaffolding: the primary activities within Whitby. Thus many fluents and actions are aggregated in Whitby from these two sub-applications and from Whitby itself, but all are available through a common situation query interface that does not depend upon any of the fluents or actions. Each STPA project in Whitby is a single situation term, which is queried for fluents that include the ontology, and to determine what pedagogical interventions to offer. Initially Whitby was written in Prolog using a module system. In the interest of a cleaner architecture and implementation with improved code reuse and extensibility, the initial application was refactored into Logtalk. This refactoring includes decoupling the Situation Calculus reasoner, Ontology Authoring framework, and Contingent Scaffolding framework into third-party libraries that can be reused in other applications. This extraction was achieved by inverting dependencies via Logtalk protocols and categories, which are reusable interfaces and components that provide functionally cohesive sets of predicate declarations and predicate definitions. In this paper the architectures of two iterations of Whitby are evaluated with respect to the motivations behind the refactor: clean architecture enabling code reuse and extensibility.
Modeling and Evaluating Personas with Software Explainability Requirements
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2021
Year: 2021

This work focuses on the context of software explainability, which is the production of software capable of explaining to users the dynamics that govern its internal functioning. User models that include information about their requirements and their perceptions of explainability are fundamental when building software with such capability. This study investigates the process of creating personas that include information about users' explainability perceptions and needs. The proposed approach is based on data collection with questionnaires, modeling of empathy maps, grouping the maps, generating personas from them and evaluation employing the Persona Perception Scale method. In an empirical study, personas are created from 61 users' response data to a questionnaire. The generated personas are evaluated by 60 users and 38 designers considering attributes of the Persona Perception Scale method. The results include a set of 5 distinct personas that users rate as representative of them at an average level of 3.7 out of 5, and designers rate as having quality 3.5 out of 5. The median rate is 4 out of 5 in the majority of criteria judged by users and designers. Both the personas and their creation and evaluation approach are contributions of this study to the design of software that satisfies the explainability requirement.