OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Looking GLAMORous: Vehicle Re-Id in Heterogeneous Cameras Networks with Global and Local Attention
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Vehicle re-identification (re-id) is a fundamental problem for modern surveillance camera networks. Existing approaches for vehicle re-id utilize global features and local features for re-id by combining multiple subnetworks and losses. In this paper, we propose GLAMOR, or Global and Local Attention MOdules for Re-id. GLAMOR performs global and local feature extraction simultaneously in a unified model to achieve state-of-the-art performance in vehicle re-id across a variety of adversarial conditions and datasets (mAPs 80.34, 76.48, 77.15 on VeRi-776, VRIC, and VeRi-Wild, respectively). GLAMOR introduces several contributions: a better backbone construction method that outperforms recent approaches, group and layer normalization to address conflicting loss targets for re-id, a novel global attention module for global feature extraction, and a novel local attention module for self-guided part-based local feature extraction that does not require supervision. Additionally, GLAMOR is a compact and fast model that is 10x smaller while delivering 25% better performance.
A Language for Describing Optimization Strategies
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2020
Year: 2020

Optimizing programs to run efficiently on modern parallel hardware is hard but crucial for many applications. The predominantly used imperative languages - like C or OpenCL - force the programmer to intertwine the code describing functionality and optimizations. This results in a nightmare for portability which is particularly problematic given the accelerating trend towards specialized hardware devices to further increase efficiency. Many emerging DSLs used in performance demanding domains such as deep learning, automatic differentiation, or image processing attempt to simplify or even fully automate the optimization process. Using a high-level - often functional - language, programmers focus on describing functionality in a declarative way. In some systems such as Halide or TVM, a separate schedule specifies how the program should be optimized. Unfortunately, these schedules are not written in well-defined programming languages. Instead, they are implemented as a set of ad-hoc predefined APIs that the compiler writers have exposed. In this paper, we present Elevate: a functional language for describing optimization strategies. Elevate follows a tradition of prior systems used in different contexts that express optimization strategies as composition of rewrites. In contrast to systems with scheduling APIs, in Elevate programmers are not restricted to a set of built-in optimizations but define their own optimization strategies freely in a composable way. We show how user-defined optimization strategies in Elevate enable the effective optimization of programs expressed in a functional data-parallel language demonstrating competitive performance with Halide and TVM.
EgoMap: Projective mapping and structured egocentric memory for Deep RL
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Tasks involving localization, memorization and planning in partially observable 3D environments are an ongoing challenge in Deep Reinforcement Learning. We present EgoMap, a spatially structured neural memory architecture. EgoMap augments a deep reinforcement learning agent's performance in 3D environments on challenging tasks with multi-step objectives. The EgoMap architecture incorporates several inductive biases including a differentiable inverse projection of CNN feature vectors onto a top-down spatially structured map. The map is updated with ego-motion measurements through a differentiable affine transform. We show this architecture outperforms both standard recurrent agents and state of the art agents with structured memory. We demonstrate that incorporating these inductive biases into an agent's architecture allows for stable training with reward alone, circumventing the expense of acquiring and labelling expert trajectories. A detailed ablation study demonstrates the impact of key aspects of the architecture and through extensive qualitative analysis, we show how the agent exploits its structured internal memory to achieve higher performance.
Fine-Grained Urban Flow Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

The ubiquitous deployment of monitoring devices in urban flow monitoring systems induces a significant cost for maintenance and operation. A technique is required to reduce the number of deployed devices, while preventing the degeneration of data accuracy and granularity. In this paper, we present an approach for inferring the real-time and fine-grained crowd flows throughout a city based on coarse-grained observations. This task exhibits two challenges: the spatial correlations between coarse- and fine-grained urban flows, and the complexities of external impacts. To tackle these issues, we develop a model entitled UrbanFM which consists of two major parts: 1) an inference network to generate fine-grained flow distributions from coarse-grained inputs that uses a feature extraction module and a novel distributional upsampling module; 2) a general fusion subnet to further boost the performance by considering the influence of different external factors. This structure provides outstanding effectiveness and efficiency for small scale upsampling. However, the single-pass upsampling used by UrbanFM is insufficient at higher upscaling rates. Therefore, we further present UrbanPy, a cascading model for progressive inference of fine-grained urban flows by decomposing the original tasks into multiple subtasks. Compared to UrbanFM, such an enhanced structure demonstrates favorable performance for larger-scale inference tasks.
Automatic Inference of High-Level Network Intents by Mining Forwarding Patterns
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

There is a semantic gap between the high-level intents of network operators and the low-level configurations that achieve the intents. Previous works tried to bridge the gap using verification or synthesis techniques, both requiring formal specifications of the intended behavior which are rarely available or even known in the real world. This paper discusses an alternative approach for bridging the gap, namely to infer the high-level intents from the low-level network behavior. Specifically, we provide Anime, a framework and a tool that given a set of observed forwarding behavior, automatically infers a set of possible intents that best describe all observations. Our results show that Anime can infer high-quality intents from the low-level forwarding behavior with acceptable performance.
A locality-based approach for coded computation
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

Modern distributed computation infrastructures are often plagued by unavailabilities such as failing or slow servers. These unavailabilities adversely affect the tail latency of computation in distributed infrastructures. The simple solution of replicating computation entails significant resource overhead. Coded computation has emerged as a resource-efficient alternative, wherein multiple units of data are encoded to create parity units and the function to be computed is applied to each of these units on distinct servers. A decoder can use the available function outputs to decode the unavailable ones. Existing coded computation approaches are resource efficient only for simple variants of linear functions such as multilinear, with even the class of low degree polynomials requiring the same multiplicative overhead as replication for practically relevant straggler tolerance. In this paper, we present a new approach to model coded computation via the lens of locality of codes. We introduce a generalized notion of locality, denoted computational locality, building upon the locality of an appropriately defined code. We show that computational locality is equivalent to the required number of workers for coded computation and leverage results from the well-studied locality of codes to design coded computation schemes. We show that recent results on coded computation of multivariate polynomials can be derived using local recovering schemes for Reed-Muller codes. We present coded computation schemes for multivariate polynomials that adaptively exploit locality properties of input data-- an inadmissible technique under existing frameworks. These schemes require fewer workers than the lower bound under existing coded computation frameworks, showing that the existing multiplicative overhead on the number of servers is not fundamental for coded computation of nonlinear functions.
Continuous Geodesic Convolutions for Learning on 3D Shapes
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

The majority of descriptor-based methods for geometric processing of non-rigid shape rely on hand-crafted descriptors. Recently, learning-based techniques have been shown effective, achieving state-of-the-art results in a variety of tasks. Yet, even though these methods can in principle work directly on raw data, most methods still rely on hand-crafted descriptors at the input layer. In this work, we wish to challenge this practice and use a neural network to learn descriptors directly from the raw mesh. To this end, we introduce two modules into our neural architecture. The first is a local reference frame (LRF) used to explicitly make the features invariant to rigid transformations. The second is continuous convolution kernels that provide robustness to sampling. We show the efficacy of our proposed network in learning on raw meshes using two cornerstone tasks: shape matching, and human body parts segmentation. Our results show superior results over baseline methods that use hand-crafted descriptors.
Constructive Hybrid Games
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2020
Year: 2020

Hybrid games are models which combine discrete, continuous, and adversarial dynamics. Game logic enables proving (classical) existence of winning strategies. We introduce constructive differential game logic (CdGL) for hybrid games, where proofs that a player can win the game correspond to computable winning strategies. This is the logical foundation for synthesis of correct control and monitoring code for safety-critical cyber-physical systems. Our contributions include novel static and dynamic semantics as well as soundness and consistency.
Long-Range Gesture Recognition Using Millimeter Wave Radar
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

Millimeter wave (mmWave) based gesture recognition technology provides a good human computer interaction (HCI) experience. Prior works focus on the close-range gesture recognition, but fall short in range extension, i.e., they are unable to recognize gestures more than one meter away from considerable noise motions. In this paper, we design a long-range gesture recognition model which utilizes a novel data processing method and a customized artificial Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Firstly, we break down gestures into multiple reflection points and extract their spatial-temporal features which depict gesture details. Secondly, we design a CNN to learn changing patterns of extracted features respectively and output the recognition result. We thoroughly evaluate our proposed system by implementing on a commodity mmWave radar. Besides, we also provide more extensive assessments to demonstrate that the proposed system is practical in several real-world scenarios.
Noncontact Thermal and Vibrotactile Display Using Focused Airborne Ultrasound
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

In a typical mid-air haptics system, focused airborne ultrasound provides vibrotactile sensations to localized areas on a bare skin. Herein, a method for displaying thermal sensations to hands where mesh fabric gloves are worn is proposed. The gloves employed in this study are commercially available mesh fabric gloves with sound absorption characteristics, such as cotton work gloves without any additional devices such as Peltier elements. The method proposed in this study can also provide vibrotactile sensations by changing the ultrasonic irradiation pattern. In this paper, we report basic experimental investigations on the proposed method. By performing thermal measurements, we evaluate the local heat generation on the surfaces of both the glove and the skin by focused airborne ultrasound irradiation. In addition, we performed perceptual experiments, thereby confirming that the proposed method produced both thermal and vibrotactile sensations. Furthermore, these sensations were selectively provided to a certain extent by changing the ultrasonic irradiation pattern. These results validate the effectiveness of our method and its feasibility in mid-air haptics applications.
Learning Class Regularized Features for Action Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Training Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) is based on the notion of using multiple kernels and non-linearities in their subsequent activations to extract useful features. The kernels are used as general feature extractors without specific correspondence to the target class. As a result, the extracted features do not correspond to specific classes. Subtle differences between similar classes are modeled in the same way as large differences between dissimilar classes. To overcome the class-agnostic use of kernels in CNNs, we introduce a novel method named Class Regularization that performs class-based regularization of layer activations. We demonstrate that this not only improves feature search during training, but also allows an explicit assignment of features per class during each stage of the feature extraction process. We show that using Class Regularization blocks in state-of-the-art CNN architectures for action recognition leads to systematic improvement gains of 1.8%, 1.2% and 1.4% on the Kinetics, UCF-101 and HMDB-51 datasets, respectively.
Audio-Visual-Olfactory Resource Allocation for Tri-modal Virtual Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2020
Year: 2020

Virtual Environments (VEs) provide the opportunity to simulate a wide range of applications, from training to entertainment, in a safe and controlled manner. For applications which require realistic representations of real world environments, the VEs need to provide multiple, physically accurate sensory stimuli. However, simulating all the senses that comprise the human sensory system (HSS) is a task that requires significant computational resources. Since it is intractable to deliver all senses at the highest quality, we propose a resource distribution scheme in order to achieve an optimal perceptual experience within the given computational budgets. This paper investigates resource balancing for multi-modal scenarios composed of aural, visual and olfactory stimuli. Three experimental studies were conducted. The first experiment identified perceptual boundaries for olfactory computation. In the second experiment, participants (N=25) were asked, across a fixed number of budgets (M=5), to identify what they perceived to be the best visual, acoustic and olfactory stimulus quality for a given computational budget. Results demonstrate that participants tend to prioritise visual quality compared to other sensory stimuli. However, as the budget size is increased, users prefer a balanced distribution of resources with an increased preference for having smell impulses in the VE. Based on the collected data, a quality prediction model is proposed and its accuracy is validated against previously unused budgets and an untested scenario in a third and final experiment.
Discretization and Machine Learning Approximation of BSDEs with a Constraint on the Gains-Process
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We study the approximation of backward stochastic differential equations (BSDEs for short) with a constraint on the gains process. We first discretize the constraint by applying a so-called facelift operator at times of a grid. We show that this discretely constrained BSDE converges to the continuously constrained one as the mesh grid converges to zero. We then focus on the approximation of the discretely constrained BSDE. For that we adopt a machine learning approach. We show that the facelift can be approximated by an optimization problem over a class of neural networks under constraints on the neural network and its derivative. We then derive an algorithm converging to the discretely constrained BSDE as the number of neurons goes to infinity. We end by numerical experiments. Mathematics Subject Classification (2010): 65C30, 65M75, 60H35, 93E20, 49L25.
DynamicPPL: Stan-like Speed for Dynamic Probabilistic Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We present the preliminary high-level design and features of DynamicPPL.jl, a modular library providing a lightning-fast infrastructure for probabilistic programming. Besides a computational performance that is often close to or better than Stan, DynamicPPL provides an intuitive DSL that allows the rapid development of complex dynamic probabilistic programs. Being entirely written in Julia, a high-level dynamic programming language for numerical computing, DynamicPPL inherits a rich set of features available through the Julia ecosystem. Since DynamicPPL is a modular, stand-alone library, any probabilistic programming system written in Julia, such as Turing.jl, can use DynamicPPL to specify models and trace their model parameters. The main features of DynamicPPL are: 1) a meta-programming based DSL for specifying dynamic models using an intuitive tilde-based notation; 2) a tracing data-structure for tracking RVs in dynamic probabilistic models; 3) a rich contextual dispatch system allowing tailored behaviour during model execution; and 4) a user-friendly syntax for probabilistic queries. Finally, we show in a variety of experiments that DynamicPPL, in combination with Turing.jl, achieves computational performance that is often close to or better than Stan.
Embedding Jamming Attacks into Physical Layer Models in Optical Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

Optical networks are prone to physical layer attacks, in particular the insertion of high jamming power. In this paper, we present a study of jamming attacks in elastic optical networks (EON) by embedding the jamming into the physical layer model, and we analyze its impact on the blocking probability and slots utilization. We evaluate our proposed model using a single link and a network topology and we show that for in-band-jamming, the slots utilization decreases with the increase of jamming power, and becomes null when the jamming power is higher than 3 dB, while for out-of-band jamming, the impact is maximal for a specific jamming power, 1.75 dB in our simulation. Considering multiple positions of attackers, we attained the highest blocking probability 32% for a specific jamming power 2 dB. We conclude that the impact of jamming depends on attacker positions as well as the jamming power.
On Sampling Continuous-Time AWGN Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

For a continuous-time additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel with possible feedback, it has been shown that as sampling gets infinitesimally fine, the mutual information of the associative discrete-time channels converges to that of the original continuous-time channel. We give in this paper more quantitative strengthenings of this result, which, among other implications, characterize how over-sampling approaches the true mutual information of a continuous-time Gaussian channel with bandwidth limit. The assumptions in our results are relatively mild. In particular, for the non-feedback case, compared to the Shannon-Nyquist sampling theorem, a widely used tool to connect continuous-time Gaussian channels to their discrete-time counterparts that requires the band-limitedness of the channel input, our results only require some integrability conditions on the power spectral density function of the input.
RAID: Randomized Adversarial-Input Detection for Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

In recent years, neural networks have become the default choice for image classification and many other learning tasks, even though they are vulnerable to so-called adversarial attacks. To increase their robustness against these attacks, there have emerged numerous detection mechanisms that aim to automatically determine if an input is adversarial. However, state-of-the-art detection mechanisms either rely on being tuned for each type of attack, or they do not generalize across different attack types. To alleviate these issues, we propose a novel technique for adversarial-image detection, RAID, that trains a secondary classifier to identify differences in neuron activation values between benign and adversarial inputs. Our technique is both more reliable and more effective than the state of the art when evaluated against six popular attacks. Moreover, a straightforward extension of RAID increases its robustness against detection-aware adversaries without affecting its effectiveness.
Views on Quality Requirements in Academia and Practice: Commonalities, Differences, and Context-Dependent Grey Areas
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2020
Year: 2020

Context: Quality requirements (QRs) are a topic of constant discussions both in industry and academia. Debates entwine around the definition of quality requirements, the way how to handle them, or their importance for project success. While many academic endeavors contribute to the body of knowledge about QRs, practitioners may have different views. In fact, we still lack a consistent body of knowledge on QRs since much of the discussion around this topic is still dominated by observations that are strongly context-dependent. This holds for both academic and practitioners' views. Our assumption is that, in consequence, those views may differ. Objective: We report on a study to better understand the extent to which available research statements on quality requirements, as found in exemplary peer-reviewed and frequently cited publications, are reflected in the perception of practitioners. Our goal is to analyze differences, commonalities, and context-dependent grey areas in the views of academics and practitioners to allow a discussion on potential misconceptions (on either sides) and opportunities for future research. Method: We conducted a survey with 109 practitioners to assess whether they agree with research statements about QRs reflected in the literature. Based on a statistical model, we evaluate the impact of a set of context factors to the perception of research statements. Results: Our results show that a majority of the statements is well respected by practitioners; however, not all of them. When examining the different groups and backgrounds of respondents, we noticed interesting deviations of perceptions within different groups that may lead to new research questions. Conclusions: Our results help identifying prevalent context-dependent differences about how academics and practitioners view QRs and pinpointing statements where further research might be useful.
Recursive PGFs for BSTs and DSTs
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2020
Year: 2020

We review fundamentals underlying binary search trees and digital search trees, with (atypical) emphasis on recursive formulas for associated probability generating functions. Other topics include higher moments of BST search costs and combinatorics for a certain finite-key analog of DSTs.
Population Monotonic Allocation Schemes for Vertex Cover Games
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2020
Year: 2020

For vertex cover games (introduced by Deng et al., Math. Oper. Res., 24:751-766, 1999), we investigate population monotonic allocation schemes (introduced by Sprumont, Games Econ. Behav., 2: 378-394, 1990). We show that the existence of a population monotonic allocation scheme (PMAS for short) for vertex cover games can be determined efficiently and that a PMAS, if exists, can be constructed accordingly. We also show that integral PMAS-es for vertex cover games can be characterized with stable matchings and be enumerated by employing Gale-Shapley algorithm (introduced by Gale and Shapley, Amer. Math. Monthly, 69:9-15, 1962).