OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Monocular Depth Estimation with Directional Consistency by Deep Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

As processing power has become more available, more human-like artificial intelligences are created to solve image processing tasks that we are inherently good at. As such we propose a model that estimates depth from a monocular image. Our approach utilizes a combination of structure from motion and stereo disparity. We estimate a pose between the source image and a different viewpoint and a dense depth map and use a simple transformation to reconstruct the image seen from said viewpoint. We can then use the real image at that viewpoint to act as supervision to train out model. The metric chosen for image comparison employs standard L1 and structural similarity and a consistency constraint between depth maps as well as smoothness constraint. We show that similar to human perception utilizing the correlation within the provided data by two different approaches increases the accuracy and outperforms the individual components.
A New Shortest Path Algorithm Generalized on Dynamic Graph for Commercial Intelligent Navigation for Transportation Management
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

Dynamic graph research is an essential subject in Computer Science. The shortest path problem is still the central in this field; moreover there is a variety of applications in practical projects. In this paper, we select the transportation activity as a paradigm to study. Of course there exists the most clear and appealing practical application over the intelligent navigation, also which is an important part in intelligent transportation system (ITS). Totally speaking, this activity is fairly simple and well-behavior under our consideration, for which, there is a lot of sophisticated theories and techniques to motivate our researches although this problem relates to interdisciplinary; so that we can be dedicated to computing aspect. Below, a host of practical problems will by the way be discussed in theory and empiricism including correctness, sampling, accuracy, compatibility, quick query and the application into other research; therein some have been scarcely argued intentionally or not in literatures before. Through these contents, we are able to have a smart system built which easy to incorporate other modules to realize a sophisticated industrial system.
GE852: A Dataset of 852 Game Engines
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2019
Year: 2019

Game engines provide a platform for developers to build games with an interface tailored to handle the complexity during game development. To reduce effort and improve quality of game development, there is a strong need to understand and analyze the quality of game engines and their various aspects such as API usability, code quality, code reuse and so on. To the best our knowledge, we are not aware of any dataset that caters to game engines in the literature. To this end, we present GE852, a dataset of 852 game engine repositories mined from GitHub in two languages, namely Java and C++. The dataset contains metadata of all the mined repositories including commits, pull requests, issues and so on. We believe that our dataset can lay foundation for empirical investigation in the area of game engines.
Boosting Generative Models by Leveraging Cascaded Meta-Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Deep generative models are effective methods of modeling data. However, it is not easy for a single generative model to faithfully capture the distributions of complex data such as images. In this paper, we propose an approach for boosting generative models, which cascades meta-models together to produce a stronger model. Any hidden variable meta-model (e.g., RBM and VAE) which supports likelihood evaluation can be leveraged. We derive a decomposable variational lower bound of the boosted model, which allows each meta-model to be trained separately and greedily. Besides, our framework can be extended to semi-supervised boosting, where the boosted model learns a joint distribution of data and labels. Finally, we combine our boosting framework with the multiplicative boosting framework, which further improves the learning power of generative models.
Hessian transport gradient flows
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

We derive new gradient flows of divergence functions in the probability space embedded with a class of Riemannian metrics. The Riemannian metric tensor is built from the transported Hessian operator of an entropy function. The new gradient flow is a generalized Fokker-Planck equation and is associated with a stochastic differential equation that depends on the reference measure. Several examples of Hessian transport gradient flows and the associated stochastic differential equations are presented, including the ones for the reverse Kullback--Leibler divergence, alpha-divergence, Hellinger distance, Pearson divergence, and Jenson--Shannon divergence.
Change of basis for m-primary ideals in one and two variables
Venue: arXiv cs.SC 2019
Year: 2019

Following recent work by van der Hoeven and Lecerf (ISSAC 2017), we discuss the complexity of linear mappings, called untangling and tangling by those authors, that arise in the context of computations with univariate polynomials. We give a slightly faster tangling algorithm and discuss new applications of these techniques. We show how to extend these ideas to bivariate settings, and use them to give bounds on the arithmetic complexity of certain algebras.
One-Shot Federated Learning: Theoretical Limits and Algorithms to Achieve Them
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

We consider distributed statistical optimization in one-shot setting, where there are $m$ machines each observing $n$ i.i.d. samples. Based on its observed samples, each machine sends a $B$-bit-long message to a server. The server then collects messages from all machines, and estimates a parameter that minimizes an expected convex loss function. We investigate the impact of communication constraint, $B$, on the expected error and derive a tight lower bound on the error achievable by any algorithm. We then propose an estimator, which we call Multi-Resolution Estimator (MRE), whose expected error (when $B\ge\log mn$) meets the aforementioned lower bound up to poly-logarithmic factors, and is thereby order optimal. We also address the problem of learning under tiny communication budget, and present lower and upper error bounds when $B$ is a constant. The expected error of MRE, unlike existing algorithms, tends to zero as the number of machines ($m$) goes to infinity, even when the number of samples per machine ($n$) remains upper bounded by a constant. This property of the MRE algorithm makes it applicable in new machine learning paradigms where $m$ is much larger than $n$.
Software System Design based on Patterns for Newton-Type Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.MS 2019
Year: 2019

A wide range of engineering applications uses optimisation techniques as part of their solution process. The researcher uses specialized software that implements well-known optimisation techniques to solve his problem. However, when it comes to develop original optimisation techniques that fit a particular problem the researcher has no option but to implement his own new method from scratch. This leads to large development times and error prone code that, in general, will not be reused for any other application. In this work, we present a novel methodology that simplifies, fasten and improves the development process of scientific software. This methodology guide us on the identification of design patterns. The application of this methodology generates reusable, flexible and high quality scientific software. Furthermore, the produced software becomes a documented tool to transfer the knowledge on the development process of scientific software. We apply this methodology for the design of an optimisation framework implementing Newton's type methods which can be used as a fast prototyping tool of new optimisation techniques based on Newton's type methods. The abstraction, reusability and flexibility of the developed framework is measured by means of Martin's metric. The results indicate that the developed software is highly reusable.
Automating chaos experiments in production
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2019
Year: 2019

Distributed systems often face transient errors and localized component degradation and failure. Verifying that the overall system remains healthy in the face of such failures is challenging. At Netflix, we have built a platform for automatically generating and executing chaos experiments, which check how well the production system can handle component failures and slowdowns. This paper describes the platform and our experiences operating it.
On Flow Profile Image for Video Representation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Video representation is a key challenge in many computer vision applications such as video classification, video captioning, and video surveillance. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for video representation that captures meaningful information including motion and appearance from a sequence of video frames and compacts it into a single image. To this end, we compute the optical flow and use it in a least squares optimization to find a new image, the so-called Flow Profile Image (FPI). This image encodes motions as well as foreground appearance information while background information is removed. The quality of this image is validated in activity recognition experiments and the results are compared with other video representation techniques such as dynamic images [1] and eigen images [2]. The experimental results as well as visual quality confirm that FPIs can be successfully used in video processing applications.
Nonvolatile Memory Cell Based on Memristor Emulator
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2019
Year: 2019

Memristor, one of the fundamental circuit elements, has promising applications in non-volatile memory and storage technology as it can theoretically achieve infinite states. Information can be stored independently in these states and retrieved whenever required. In this paper, we have proposed a non volatile memory cell based on memristor emulator. The circuit is able to perform read and write operations. In this memristor based memroy cell, unipolar pulse is used for writing and bipolar pulse is used for reading. Unlike other earlier designs, the circuit does not need external read/write enable switches to switch between read and write operations; the switching is achieved by the zero average bipolar read pulse given after the completion of write cycle. In our proposed memristor based memory cell, single bit can be read and any voltages from 0 to 5 volts can be written. Mathematical analysis and the simulation results of memristor emulator based read write circuit have been presented to confirm its operation.
Construction of three classes of Strictly Optimal Frequency-Hopping Sequence Sets
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we construct three classes of strictly optimal frequency-hopping sequence (FHS) sets with respect to partial Hamming correlation and family size. The first class is based on a generic construction, the second and third classes are based from the trace map.
The Order of Things: Position-Aware Network-friendly Recommendations in Long Viewing Sessions
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

Caching has recently attracted a lot of attention in the wireless communications community, as a means to cope with the increasing number of users consuming web content from mobile devices. Caching offers an opportunity for a win-win scenario: nearby content can improve the video streaming experience for the user, and free up valuable network resources for the operator. At the same time, recent works have shown that recommendations of popular content apps are responsible for a significant percentage of users requests. As a result, some very recent works have considered how to nudge recommendations to facilitate the network (e.g., increase cache hit rates). In this paper, we follow up on this line of work, and consider the problem of designing cache friendly recommendations for long viewing sessions; specifically, we attempt to answer two open questions in this context: (i) given that recommendation position affects user click rates, what is the impact on the performance of such network-friendly recommender solutions? (ii) can the resulting optimization problems be solved efficiently, when considering both sequences of dependent accesses (e.g., YouTube) and position preference? To this end, we propose a stochastic model that incorporates position-aware recommendations into a Markovian traversal model of the content catalog, and derive the average cost of a user session using absorbing Markov chain theory. We then formulate the optimization problem, and after a careful sequence of equivalent transformations show that it has a linear program equivalent and thus can be solved efficiently. Finally, we use a range of real datasets we collected to investigate the impact of position preference in recommendations on the proposed optimal algorithm. Our results suggest more than 30\% improvement with respect to state-of-the-art methods.
Introduction to StarNEig -- A Task-based Library for Solving Nonsymmetric Eigenvalue Problems
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we present the StarNEig library for solving dense non-symmetric (generalized) eigenvalue problems. The library is built on top of the StarPU runtime system and targets both shared and distributed memory machines. Some components of the library support GPUs. The library is currently in an early beta state and only real arithmetic is supported. Support for complex data types is planned for a future release. This paper is aimed for potential users of the library. We describe the design choices and capabilities of the library, and contrast them to existing software such as ScaLAPACK. StarNEig implements a ScaLAPACK compatibility layer that should make it easy for a new user to transition to StarNEig. We demonstrate the performance of the library with a small set of computational experiments.
Ques-Chain: an Ethereum Based E-Voting System
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

Ethereum is an open-source, public, blockchain-based distributed computing platform and operating system featuring smart contract functionality. In this paper, we proposed an Ethereum based eletronic voting (e-voting) protocol, Ques-Chain, which can ensure the authentication can be done without hurting confidentiality and the anonymity can be protected without problems of scams at the same time. Furthermore, the authors considered the wider usages Ques-Chain can be applied on, pointing out that it is able to process all kinds of messages and can be used in all fields with similar needs.
Color spanning Localized query
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2019
Year: 2019

Let P be a set of n points and each of the points is colored with one of the k possible colors. We present efficient algorithms to pre-process P such that for a given query point q, we can quickly identify the smallest color spanning object of the desired type containing q. In this paper, we focus on (i) intervals, (ii) axis-parallel square, (iii) axis-parallel rectangle, (iv) equilateral triangle of fixed orientation and (v) circle, as our desired type of objects.
VideoGraph: Recognizing Minutes-Long Human Activities in Videos
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Many human activities take minutes to unfold. To represent them, related works opt for statistical pooling, which neglects the temporal structure. Others opt for convolutional methods, as CNN and Non-Local. While successful in learning temporal concepts, they are short of modeling minutes-long temporal dependencies. We propose VideoGraph, a method to achieve the best of two worlds: represent minutes-long human activities and learn their underlying temporal structure. VideoGraph learns a graph-based representation for human activities. The graph, its nodes and edges are learned entirely from video datasets, making VideoGraph applicable to problems without node-level annotation. The result is improvements over related works on benchmarks: Epic-Kitchen and Breakfast. Besides, we demonstrate that VideoGraph is able to learn the temporal structure of human activities in minutes-long videos.
AMZ Driverless: The Full Autonomous Racing System
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

This paper presents the algorithms and system architecture of an autonomous racecar. The introduced vehicle is powered by a software stack designed for robustness, reliability, and extensibility. In order to autonomously race around a previously unknown track, the proposed solution combines state of the art techniques from different fields of robotics. Specifically, perception, estimation, and control are incorporated into one high-performance autonomous racecar. This complex robotic system, developed by AMZ Driverless and ETH Zurich, finished 1st overall at each competition we attended: Formula Student Germany 2017, Formula Student Italy 2018 and Formula Student Germany 2018. We discuss the findings and learnings from these competitions and present an experimental evaluation of each module of our solution.
The Edgeworth Conjecture with Small Coalitions and Approximate Equilibria in Large Economies
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2019
Year: 2019

We revisit the connection between bargaining and equilibrium in exchange economies, and study its algorithmic implications. We consider bargaining outcomes to be allocations that cannot be blocked (i.e., profitably re-traded) by coalitions of small size and show that these allocations must be approximate Walrasian equilibria. Our results imply that deciding whether an allocation is approximately Walrasian can be done in polynomial time, even in economies for which finding an equilibrium is known to be computationally hard.
Graph U-Nets
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

We consider the problem of representation learning for graph data. Convolutional neural networks can naturally operate on images, but have significant challenges in dealing with graph data. Given images are special cases of graphs with nodes lie on 2D lattices, graph embedding tasks have a natural correspondence with image pixel-wise prediction tasks such as segmentation. While encoder-decoder architectures like U-Nets have been successfully applied on many image pixel-wise prediction tasks, similar methods are lacking for graph data. This is due to the fact that pooling and up-sampling operations are not natural on graph data. To address these challenges, we propose novel graph pooling (gPool) and unpooling (gUnpool) operations in this work. The gPool layer adaptively selects some nodes to form a smaller graph based on their scalar projection values on a trainable projection vector. We further propose the gUnpool layer as the inverse operation of the gPool layer. The gUnpool layer restores the graph into its original structure using the position information of nodes selected in the corresponding gPool layer. Based on our proposed gPool and gUnpool layers, we develop an encoder-decoder model on graph, known as the graph U-Nets. Our experimental results on node classification and graph classification tasks demonstrate that our methods achieve consistently better performance than previous models.
A Stochastic Gradient Method with Biased Estimation for Faster Nonconvex Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

A number of optimization approaches have been proposed for optimizing nonconvex objectives (e.g. deep learning models), such as batch gradient descent, stochastic gradient descent and stochastic variance reduced gradient descent. Theory shows these optimization methods can converge by using an unbiased gradient estimator. However, in practice biased gradient estimation can allow more efficient convergence to the vicinity since an unbiased approach is computationally more expensive. To produce fast convergence there are two trade-offs of these optimization strategies which are between stochastic/batch, and between biased/unbiased. This paper proposes an integrated approach which can control the nature of the stochastic element in the optimizer and can balance the trade-off of estimator between the biased and unbiased by using a hyper-parameter. It is shown theoretically and experimentally that this hyper-parameter can be configured to provide an effective balance to improve the convergence rate.
Smartwatch games: Encouraging privacy-protective behaviour in a longitudinal study
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2019
Year: 2019

While the public claim concern for their privacy, they frequently appear to overlook it. This disparity between concern and behaviour is known as the Privacy Paradox. Such issues are particularly prevalent on wearable devices. These products can store personal data, such as text messages and contact details. However, owners rarely use protective features. Educational games can be effective in encouraging changes in behaviour. Therefore, we developed the first privacy game for (Android) Wear OS watches. 10 participants used smartwatches for two months, allowing their high-level settings to be monitored. Five individuals were randomly assigned to our treatment group, and they played a dynamically-customised privacy-themed game. To minimise confounding variables, the other five received the same app but lacking the privacy topic. The treatment group improved their protection, with their usage of screen locks significantly increasing (p = 0.043). In contrast, 80% of the control group continued to never restrict their settings. After the posttest phase, we evaluated behavioural rationale through semi-structured interviews. Privacy concerns became more nuanced in the treatment group, with opinions aligning with behaviour. Actions appeared influenced primarily by three factors: convenience, privacy salience and data sensitivity. This is the first smartwatch game to encourage privacy-protective behaviour.
Winograd Convolution for DNNs: Beyond linear polynomials
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Winograd convolution is widely used in deep neural networks (DNNs). Existing work for DNNs considers only the subset Winograd algorithms that are equivalent to Toom-Cook convolution. We investigate a wider range of Winograd algorithms for DNNs and show that these additional algorithms can significantly improve floating point (FP) accuracy in many cases. We present results for three FP formats: fp32, fp16 and bf16 (a truncated form of fp32) using 2000 inputs from the ImageNet dataset. We found that in fp16 this approach gives us up to 6.5 times better image recognition accuracy in one important case while maintaining the same number of elementwise multiplication operations in the innermost loop. In bf16 the convolution can be computed using 5% fewer innermost loop multiplications than with currently used Winograd algorithms while keeping the accuracy of image recognition the same as for direct convolution method.