OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
GraspNet: A Large-Scale Clustered and Densely Annotated Dataset for Object Grasping
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Object grasping is critical for many applications, which is also a challenging computer vision problem. However, for the clustered scene, current researches suffer from the problems of insufficient training data and the lacking of evaluation benchmarks. In this work, we contribute a large-scale grasp pose detection dataset with a unified evaluation system. Our dataset contains 87,040 RGBD images with over 370 million grasp poses. Meanwhile, our evaluation system directly reports whether a grasping is successful or not by analytic computation, which is able to evaluate any kind of grasp poses without exhausted labeling pose ground-truth. We conduct extensive experiments to show that our dataset and evaluation system can align well with real-world experiments. Our dataset, source code and models will be made publicly available.
Differentially Private M-band Wavelet-Based Mechanisms in Machine Learning Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

In the post-industrial world, data science and analytics have gained paramount importance regarding digital data privacy. Improper methods of establishing privacy for accessible datasets can compromise large amounts of user data even if the adversary has a small amount of preliminary knowledge of a user. Many researchers have been developing high-level privacy-preserving mechanisms that also retain the statistical integrity of the data to apply to machine learning. Recent developments of differential privacy, such as the Laplace and Privelet mechanisms, drastically decrease the probability that an adversary can distinguish the elements in a data set and thus extract user information. In this paper, we develop three privacy-preserving mechanisms with the discrete M-band wavelet transform that embed noise into data. The first two methods (LS and LS+) add noise through a Laplace-Sigmoid distribution that multiplies Laplace-distributed values with the sigmoid function, and the third method utilizes pseudo-quantum steganography to embed noise into the data. We then show that our mechanisms successfully retain both differential privacy and learnability through statistical analysis in various machine learning environments.
SharpEdge: An Asynchronous and Core-Agnostic Solution to Guarantee Bounded-Delays
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

What are the key properties that a network should have to provide bounded-delay guarantees for the packets? In this paper, we attempt to answer this question. To that end, we explore the theory of bounded-delay networks and provide the necessary and the sufficient conditions required to have deterministic bounded-delays in the network. We prove that as long as a network is work-conserving, independent of the packet scheduling and queue management algorithms used in the switches, it is sufficient to shape the traffic~\textit{properly} at the edge of the network to meet hard bounded-delays in the network. Using the derived theorems, we present SharpEdge, a novel design to meet deterministic bounded-delays in the network. To the best of our knowledge, SharpEdge is the first scheme that can meet all following key properties: 1) it supports coexistence of different classes of traffic, while it can guarantee their different required bounded-delays 2) it does not require any changes in the core of the network, 3) it supports both periodic and bursty traffic patterns, and 4) it does not require any time synchronization between network devices.
Multi-organ Segmentation over Partially Labeled Datasets with Multi-scale Feature Abstraction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Shortage of fully annotated datasets has been a limiting factor in developing deep learning based image segmentation algorithms and the problem becomes more pronounced in multi-organ segmentation. In this paper, we propose a unified training strategy that enables a novel multi-scale deep neural network to be trained on multiple partially labeled datasets for multi-organ segmentation. In addition, a new network architecture for multi-scale feature abstraction is proposed to integrate pyramid input and feature analysis into a U-shape pyramid structure. To bridge the semantic gap caused by directly merging features from different scales, an equal convolutional depth mechanism is introduced. Furthermore, we employ a deep supervision mechanism to refine the outputs in different scales. To fully leverage the segmentation features from all the scales, we design an adaptive weighting layer to fuse the outputs in an automatic fashion. All these mechanisms together are integrated into a Pyramid Input Pyramid Output Feature Abstraction Network (PIPO-FAN). Our proposed method was evaluated on four publicly available datasets, including BTCV, LiTS, KiTS and Spleen, where very promising performance has been achieved. The source code of this work is publicly shared at https://github.com/DIAL-RPI/PIPO-FAN for others to easily reproduce the work and build their own models with the introduced mechanisms.
Business Value of ITSM. Requirement or Mirage?
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2020
Year: 2020

This paper builds on a presentation provided as part of a recent panel session on ITSM (IT Service Management) Business Value at the NYC itSMF (Service Management Forum) Local Interest Group meeting. The panel presentation explored the definition of Business Value and how ITSM itself could be measured to produce business value. While ITSM and ITIL have been in use for years it often remains a challenge to demonstrate the business value of these methods or even to understand business value itself. This paper expands on the panel discussion on what is meant by business value and how it can be found (if at all) in the context of ITSM development and process improvement.
Optimal Scheduling of Content Caching Subject to Deadline
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

Content caching at the edge of network is a promising technique to alleviate the burden of backhaul networks. In this paper, we consider content caching along time in a base station with limited cache capacity. As the popularity of contents may vary over time, the contents of cache need to be updated accordingly. In addition, a requested content may have a delivery deadline within which the content need to be obtained. Motivated by these, we address optimal scheduling of content caching in a time-slotted system under delivery deadline and cache capacity constraints. The objective is to minimize a cost function that captures the load of backhaul links. For our optimization problem we prove its NP-hardness via a reduction from the Partition problem. For problem solving, via a mathematical reformulation, we develop a solution approach based on repeatedly applying a column generation algorithm and a problem-tailored rounding algorithm. In addition, two greedy algorithms are developed based on existing algorithms from the literature. Finally, we present extensive simulations that verify the effectiveness of our solution approach in obtaining near-to-optimal solutions in comparison to greedy algorithms. The solutions obtained from our solution approach are within 1% from the global optimum.
Complexity and Efficient Algorithms for Data Inconsistency Evaluating and Repairing
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2020
Year: 2020

Data inconsistency evaluating and repairing are major concerns in data quality management. As the basic computing task, optimal subset repair is not only applied for cost estimation during the progress of database repairing, but also directly used to derive the evaluation of database inconsistency. Computing an optimal subset repair is to find a minimum tuple set from an inconsistent database whose remove results in a consistent subset left. Tight bound on the complexity and efficient algorithms are still unknown. In this paper, we improve the existing complexity and algorithmic results, together with a fast estimation on the size of optimal subset repair. We first strengthen the dichotomy for optimal subset repair computation problem, we show that it is not only APXcomplete, but also NPhard to approximate an optimal subset repair with a factor better than $17/16$ for most cases. We second show a $(2-0.5^{\tinyσ-1})$-approximation whenever given $σ$ functional dependencies, and a $(2-η_k+\frac{η_k}{k})$-approximation when an $η_k$-portion of tuples have the $k$-quasi-Tur$\acute{\text{a}}$n property for some $k>1$. We finally show a sublinear estimator on the size of optimal \textit{S}-repair for subset queries, it outputs an estimation of a ratio $2n+εn$ with a high probability, thus deriving an estimation of FD-inconsistency degree of a ratio $2+ε$. To support a variety of subset queries for FD-inconsistency evaluation, we unify them as the $\subseteq$-oracle which can answer membership-query, and return $p$ tuples uniformly sampled whenever given a number $p$. Experiments are conducted on range queries as an implementation of $\subseteq$-oracle, and results show the efficiency of our FD-inconsistency degree estimator.
Visual Machine Learning: Insight through Eigenvectors, Chladni patterns and community detection in 2D particulate structures
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Machine learning (ML) is quickly emerging as a powerful tool with diverse applications across an extremely broad spectrum of disciplines and commercial endeavors. Typically, ML is used as a black box that provides little illuminating rationalization of its output. In the current work, we aim to better understand the generic intuition underlying unsupervised ML with a focus on physical systems. The systems that are studied here as test cases comprise of six different 2-dimensional (2-D) particulate systems of different complexities. It is noted that the findings of this study are generic to any unsupervised ML problem and are not restricted to materials systems alone. Three rudimentary unsupervised ML techniques are employed on the adjacency (connectivity) matrix of the six studied systems: (i) using principal eigenvalue and eigenvectors of the adjacency matrix, (ii) spectral decomposition, and (iii) a Potts model based community detection technique in which a modularity function is maximized. We demonstrate that, while solving a completely classical problem, ML technique produces features that are distinctly connected to quantum mechanical solutions. Dissecting these features help us to understand the deep connection between the classical non-linear world and the quantum mechanical linear world through the kaleidoscope of ML technique, which might have far reaching consequences both in the arena of physical sciences and ML.
3D UAV Trajectory and Communication Design for Simultaneous Uplink and Downlink Transmission
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we investigate the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-aided simultaneous uplink and downlink transmission networks, where one UAV acting as a disseminator is connected to multiple access points, and the other UAV acting as a base station (BS) collects data from numerous sensor nodes. The goal of this paper is to maximize the sum of the UAV-BS and UAV-AP system throughput by jointly optimizing the 3D UAV trajectory, communication scheduling, and UAV-AP/SN transmit power. We first consider a special case where the UAV-BS and UAV-AP trajectories are pre-determined. Although the resulting problem is an integer and non-convex optimization problem, a globally optimal solution is obtained by applying the polyblock outer approximation (POA) method based on the problem's hidden monotonic structure. Subsequently, for the general case considering the 3D UAV trajectory optimization, an efficient iterative algorithm is proposed to alternately optimize the divided sub-problem based on the successive convex approximation (SCA) technique. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed design is able to achieve significant system throughput gain over the benchmarks. In addition, the SCA-based method can achieve nearly the same performance as the POA based method with much lower computational complexity.
Fast Perception, Planning, and Execution for a Robotic Butler: Wheeled Humanoid M-Hubo
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

As the aging population grows at a rapid rate, there is an ever growing need for service robot platforms that can provide daily assistance at practical speed with reliable performance. In order to assist with daily tasks such as fetching a beverage, a service robot must be able to perceive its environment and generate corresponding motion trajectories. This becomes a challenging and computationally complex problem when the environment is unknown and thus the path planner must sample numerous trajectories that often are sub-optimal, extending the execution time. To address this issue, we propose a unique strategy of integrating a 3D object detection pipeline with a kinematically optimal manipulation planner to significantly increase speed performance at runtime. In addition, we develop a new robotic butler system for a wheeled humanoid that is capable of fetching requested objects at 24% of the speed a human needs to fulfill the same task. The proposed system was evaluated and demonstrated in a real-world environment setup as well as in public exhibition.
Reconfigurable-Intelligent-Surface Empowered Wireless Communications: Challenges and Opportunities
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) are regarded as a promising emerging hardware technology to improve the spectrum and energy efficiency of wireless networks by artificially reconfiguring the propagation environment of electromagnetic waves. Due to the unique advantages in enhancing wireless channel capacity, RISs have recently become a hot research topic. In this article, we focus on three fundamental physical-layer challenges for the incorporation of RISs into wireless networks, namely, channel state information acquisition, passive information transfer, and low-complexity robust system design. We summarize the state-of-the-art solutions and explore potential research directions. Furthermore, we discuss other promising research directions of RISs, including edge intelligence and physical-layer security.
Rethinking Defeasible Reasoning: A Scalable Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2020
Year: 2020

Recent technological advances have led to unprecedented amounts of generated data that originate from the Web, sensor networks and social media. Analytics in terms of defeasible reasoning - for example for decision making - could provide richer knowledge of the underlying domain. Traditionally, defeasible reasoning has focused on complex knowledge structures over small to medium amounts of data, but recent research efforts have attempted to parallelize the reasoning process over theories with large numbers of facts. Such work has shown that traditional defeasible logics come with overheads that limit scalability. In this work, we design a new logic for defeasible reasoning, thus ensuring scalability by design. We establish several properties of the logic, including its relation to existing defeasible logics. Our experimental results indicate that our approach is indeed scalable and defeasible reasoning can be applied to billions of facts.
Optimal Randomized Group Testing Algorithm to Determine the Number of Defectives
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

We study the problem of determining exactly the number of defective items in an adaptive Group testing by using a minimum number of tests. We improve the existing algorithm and prove a lower bound that shows that the number of tests in our algorithm is optimal up to small additive terms.
Inter- and Intra-domain Knowledge Transfer for Related Tasks in Deep Character Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Pre-training a deep neural network on the ImageNet dataset is a common practice for training deep learning models, and generally yields improved performance and faster training times. The technique of pre-training on one task and then retraining on a new one is called transfer learning. In this paper we analyse the effectiveness of using deep transfer learning for character recognition tasks. We perform three sets of experiments with varying levels of similarity between source and target tasks to investigate the behaviour of different types of knowledge transfer. We transfer both parameters and features and analyse their behaviour. Our results demonstrate that no significant advantage is gained by using a transfer learning approach over a traditional machine learning approach for our character recognition tasks. This suggests that using transfer learning does not necessarily presuppose a better performing model in all cases.
The Offense-Defense Balance of Scientific Knowledge: Does Publishing AI Research Reduce Misuse?
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

There is growing concern over the potential misuse of artificial intelligence (AI) research. Publishing scientific research can facilitate misuse of the technology, but the research can also contribute to protections against misuse. This paper addresses the balance between these two effects. Our theoretical framework elucidates the factors governing whether the published research will be more useful for attackers or defenders, such as the possibility for adequate defensive measures, or the independent discovery of the knowledge outside of the scientific community. The balance will vary across scientific fields. However, we show that the existing conversation within AI has imported concepts and conclusions from prior debates within computer security over the disclosure of software vulnerabilities. While disclosure of software vulnerabilities often favours defence, this cannot be assumed for AI research. The AI research community should consider concepts and policies from a broad set of adjacent fields, and ultimately needs to craft policy well-suited to its particular challenges.
Dataset of Video Game Development Problems
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2020
Year: 2020

Different from traditional software development, there is little information about the software-engineering process and techniques in video-game development. One popular way to share knowledge among the video-game developers' community is the publishing of postmortems, which are documents summarizing what happened during the video-game development project. However, these documents are written without formal structure and often providing disparate information. Through this paper, we provide developers and researchers with grounded dataset describing software-engineering problems in video-game development extracted from postmortems. We created the dataset using an iterative method through which we manually coded more than 200 postmortems spanning 20 years (1998 to 2018) and extracted 1,035 problems related to software engineering while maintaining traceability links to the postmortems. We grouped the problems in 20 different types. This dataset is useful to understand the problems faced by developers during video-game development, providing researchers and practitioners a starting point to study video-game development in the context of software engineering.
Joint Goal and Strategy Inference across Heterogeneous Demonstrators via Reward Network Distillation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved tremendous success as a general framework for learning how to make decisions. However, this success relies on the interactive hand-tuning of a reward function by RL experts. On the other hand, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) seeks to learn a reward function from readily-obtained human demonstrations. Yet, IRL suffers from two major limitations: 1) reward ambiguity - there are an infinite number of possible reward functions that could explain an expert's demonstration and 2) heterogeneity - human experts adopt varying strategies and preferences, which makes learning from multiple demonstrators difficult due to the common assumption that demonstrators seeks to maximize the same reward. In this work, we propose a method to jointly infer a task goal and humans' strategic preferences via network distillation. This approach enables us to distill a robust task reward (addressing reward ambiguity) and to model each strategy's objective (handling heterogeneity). We demonstrate our algorithm can better recover task reward and strategy rewards and imitate the strategies in two simulated tasks and a real-world table tennis task.
Smart Summarizer for Blind People
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

In today's world, time is a very important resource. In our busy lives, most of us hardly have time to read the complete news so what we have to do is just go through the headlines and satisfy ourselves with that. As a result, we might miss a part of the news or misinterpret the complete thing. The situation is even worse for the people who are visually impaired or have lost their ability to see. The inability of these people to read text has a huge impact on their lives. There are a number of methods for blind people to read the text. Braille script, in particular, is one of the examples, but it is a highly inefficient method as it is really time taking and requires a lot of practice. So, we present a method for visually impaired people based on the sense of sound which is obviously better and more accurate than the sense of touch. This paper deals with an efficient method to summarize news into important keywords so as to save the efforts to go through the complete text every single time. This paper deals with many API's and modules like the tesseract, GTTS, and many algorithms that have been discussed and implemented in detail such as Luhn's Algorithm, Latent Semantic Analysis Algorithm, Text Ranking Algorithm. And the other functionality that this paper deals with is converting the summarized text to speech so that the system can aid even the blind people.
DAWSON: A Domain Adaptive Few Shot Generation Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Training a Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) for a new domain from scratch requires an enormous amount of training data and days of training time. To this end, we propose DAWSON, a Domain Adaptive FewShot Generation FrameworkFor GANs based on meta-learning. A major challenge of applying meta-learning GANs is to obtain gradients for the generator from evaluating it on development sets due to the likelihood-free nature of GANs. To address this challenge, we propose an alternative GAN training procedure that naturally combines the two-step training procedure of GANs and the two-step training procedure of meta-learning algorithms. DAWSON is a plug-and-play framework that supports a broad family of meta-learning algorithms and various GANs with architectural-variants. Based on DAWSON, We also propose MUSIC MATINEE, which is the first few-shot music generation model. Our experiments show that MUSIC MATINEE could quickly adapt to new domains with only tens of songs from the target domains. We also show that DAWSON can learn to generate new digits with only four samples in the MNIST dataset. We release source codes implementation of DAWSON in both PyTorch and Tensorflow, generated music samples on two genres and the lightning video.
Excitation-based Voice Quality Analysis and Modification
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2020
Year: 2020

This paper investigates the differences occuring in the excitation for different voice qualities. Its goal is two-fold. First a large corpus containing three voice qualities (modal, soft and loud) uttered by the same speaker is analyzed and significant differences in characteristics extracted from the excitation are observed. Secondly rules of modification derived from the analysis are used to build a voice quality transformation system applied as a post-process to HMM-based speech synthesis. The system is shown to effectively achieve the transformations while maintaining the delivered quality.