OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Minimizing Supervision in Multi-label Categorization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Multiple categories of objects are present in most images. Treating this as a multi-class classification is not justified. We treat this as a multi-label classification problem. In this paper, we further aim to minimize the supervision required for providing supervision in multi-label classification. Specifically, we investigate an effective class of approaches that associate a weak localization with each category either in terms of the bounding box or segmentation mask. Doing so improves the accuracy of multi-label categorization. The approach we adopt is one of active learning, i.e., incrementally selecting a set of samples that need supervision based on the current model, obtaining supervision for these samples, retraining the model with the additional set of supervised samples and proceeding again to select the next set of samples. A crucial concern is the choice of the set of samples. In doing so, we provide a novel insight, and no specific measure succeeds in obtaining a consistently improved selection criterion. We, therefore, provide a selection criterion that consistently improves the overall baseline criterion by choosing the top k set of samples for a varied set of criteria. Using this criterion, we are able to show that we can retain more than 98% of the fully supervised performance with just 20% of samples (and more than 96% using 10%) of the dataset on PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2012. Also, our proposed approach consistently outperforms all other baseline metrics for all benchmark datasets and model combinations.
Dimension Reduction-based Signal Compression for Uplink Distributed MIMO C-RAN with Limited Fronthaul Capacity
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

This paper proposes a dimension reduction-based signal compression scheme for uplink distributed MIMO cloud radio access networks (C-RAN) with an overall excess of receive antennas, in which users are jointly served by distributed multi-antenna receivers connected to a central processor via individual finite-capacity fronthaul links. We first show that, under quantization noise-limited operation, applying linear dimension reduction at each receiver before compressing locally with a uniform quantization noise level results in a sum capacity that scales approximately linearly with fronthaul capacity, and can come within a fixed gap of the cut-set bound. The dimension reduction filters that maximize joint mutual information are then shown to be truncated forms of the conditional Karhunen-Loeve transform, with a block coordinate ascent algorithm for finding a stationary point given. Analysis and numerical results indicate that the signal dimension can be reduced without significant loss of information, particularly at high signal-to-noise ratio, preserving the benefits of using excess antennas. The method is then adapted for the case of imperfect channel state information at the receivers. The scheme significantly outperforms conventional local signal compression at all fronthaul rates, and with complexity linear in network size represents a scalable solution for distributed MIMO C-RAN systems.
A Framework for Behavioral Biometric Authentication using Deep Metric Learning on Mobile Devices
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Mobile authentication using behavioral biometrics has been an active area of research. Existing research relies on building machine learning classifiers to recognize an individual's unique patterns. However, these classifiers are not powerful enough to learn the discriminative features. When implemented on the mobile devices, they face new challenges from the behavioral dynamics, data privacy and side-channel leaks. To address these challenges, we present a new framework to incorporate training on battery-powered mobile devices, so private data never leaves the device and training can be flexibly scheduled to adapt the behavioral patterns at runtime. We re-formulate the classification problem into deep metric learning to improve the discriminative power and design an effective countermeasure to thwart side-channel leaks by embedding a noise signature in the sensing signals without sacrificing too much usability. The experiments demonstrate authentication accuracy over 95% on three public datasets, a sheer 15% gain from multi-class classification with less data and robustness against brute-force and side-channel attacks with 99% and 90% success, respectively. We show the feasibility of training with mobile CPUs, where training 100 epochs takes less than 10 mins and can be boosted 3-5 times with feature transfer. Finally, we profile memory, energy and computational overhead. Our results indicate that training consumes lower energy than watching videos and slightly higher energy than playing games.
From Tether to Libra: Stablecoins, Digital Currency and the Future of Money
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

This paper provides an overview on stablecoins and introduces a novel terminology to help better identify stablecoins with truly disruptive potential. It provides a compact definition for stablecoins, identifying the unique features that make them distinct from previously known payment systems. Furthermore, it surveys the different use cases for stablecoins as well as the underlying economic incentives for creating them. Finally, it outlines critical regulatory considerations that constrain stablecoins and summarizes key factors that are driving their rapid development.
Context-Aware Collaborative-Intelligence with Spatio-Temporal In-Sensor-Analytics in a Large-Area IoT Testbed
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

Decades of continuous scaling has reduced the energy of unit computing to virtually zero, while energy-efficient communication has remained the primary bottleneck in achieving fully energy-autonomous IoT nodes. This paper presents and analyzes the trade-offs between the energies required for communication and computation in a wireless sensor network, deployed in a mesh architecture over a 2400-acre university campus, and is targeted towards multi-sensor measurement of temperature, humidity and water nitrate concentration for smart agriculture. Several scenarios involving In-Sensor-Analytics (ISA), Collaborative Intelligence (CI) and Context-Aware-Switching (CAS) of the cluster-head during CI has been considered. A real-time co-optimization algorithm has been developed for minimizing the energy consumption in the network, hence maximizing the overall battery lifetime of individual nodes. Measurement results show that the proposed ISA consumes ~467X lower energy as compared to traditional Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) communication, and ~69,500X lower energy as compared with Long Range (LoRa) communication. When the ISA is implemented in conjunction with LoRa, the lifetime of the node increases from a mere 4.3 hours to 66.6 days with a 230 mAh coin cell battery, while preserving more than 98% of the total information. The CI and CAS algorithms help in extending the worst-case node lifetime by an additional 50%, thereby exhibiting an overall network lifetime of ~104 days, which is >90% of the theoretical limits as posed by the leakage currents present in the system, while effectively transferring information sampled every second. A web-based monitoring system was developed to archive the measured data in a continuous manner, and to report anomalies in the measured data.
Domain-Specific Multi-Level IR Rewriting for GPU
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2020
Year: 2020

Traditional compilers operate on a single generic intermediate representation (IR). These IRs are usually low-level and close to machine instructions. As a result, optimizations relying on domain-specific information are either not possible or require complex analysis to recover the missing information. In contrast, multi-level rewriting instantiates a hierarchy of dialects (IRs), lowers programs level-by-level, and performs code transformations at the most suitable level. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach for the weather and climate domain. In particular, we develop a prototype compiler and design stencil- and GPU-specific dialects based on a set of newly introduced design principles. We find that two domain-specific optimizations (500 lines of code) realized on top of LLVM's extensible MLIR compiler infrastructure suffice to outperform state-of-the-art solutions. In essence, multi-level rewriting promises to herald the age of specialized compilers composed from domain- and target-specific dialects implemented on top of a shared infrastructure.
ALBA : Reinforcement Learning for Video Object Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

We consider the challenging problem of zero-shot video object segmentation (VOS). That is, segmenting and tracking multiple moving objects within a video fully automatically, without any manual initialization. We treat this as a grouping problem by exploiting object proposals and making a joint inference about grouping over both space and time. We propose a network architecture for tractably performing proposal selection and joint grouping. Crucially, we then show how to train this network with reinforcement learning so that it learns to perform the optimal non-myopic sequence of grouping decisions to segment the whole video. Unlike standard supervised techniques, this also enables us to directly optimize for the non-differentiable overlap-based metrics used to evaluate VOS. We show that the proposed method, which we call ALBA outperforms the previous stateof-the-art on three benchmarks: DAVIS 2017 [2], FBMS [20] and Youtube-VOS [27].
Examining Racial Bias in an Online Abuse Corpus with Structural Topic Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

We use structural topic modeling to examine racial bias in data collected to train models to detect hate speech and abusive language in social media posts. We augment the abusive language dataset by adding an additional feature indicating the predicted probability of the tweet being written in African-American English. We then use structural topic modeling to examine the content of the tweets and how the prevalence of different topics is related to both abusiveness annotation and dialect prediction. We find that certain topics are disproportionately racialized and considered abusive. We discuss how topic modeling may be a useful approach for identifying bias in annotated data.
Road Segmentation on low resolution Lidar point clouds for autonomous vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Point cloud datasets for perception tasks in the context of autonomous driving often rely on high resolution 64-layer Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) scanners. They are expensive to deploy on real-world autonomous driving sensor architectures which usually employ 16/32 layer LIDARs. We evaluate the effect of subsampling image based representations of dense point clouds on the accuracy of the road segmentation task. In our experiments the low resolution 16/32 layer LIDAR point clouds are simulated by subsampling the original 64 layer data, for subsequent transformation in to a feature map in the Bird-Eye-View (BEV) and SphericalView (SV) representations of the point cloud. We introduce the usage of the local normal vector with the LIDAR's spherical coordinates as an input channel to existing LoDNN architectures. We demonstrate that this local normal feature in conjunction with classical features not only improves performance for binary road segmentation on full resolution point clouds, but it also reduces the negative impact on the accuracy when subsampling dense point clouds as compared to the usage of classical features alone. We assess our method with several experiments on two datasets: KITTI Road-segmentation benchmark and the recently released Semantic KITTI dataset.
Robust Trajectory Forecasting for Multiple Intelligent Agents in Dynamic Scene
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Trajectory forecasting, or trajectory prediction, of multiple interacting agents in dynamic scenes, is an important problem for many applications, such as robotic systems and autonomous driving. The problem is a great challenge because of the complex interactions among the agents and their interactions with the surrounding scenes. In this paper, we present a novel method for the robust trajectory forecasting of multiple intelligent agents in dynamic scenes. The proposed method consists of three major interrelated components: an interaction net for global spatiotemporal interactive feature extraction, an environment net for decoding dynamic scenes (i.e., the surrounding road topology of an agent), and a prediction net that combines the spatiotemporal feature, the scene feature, the past trajectories of agents and some random noise for the robust trajectory prediction of agents. Experiments on pedestrian-walking and vehicle-pedestrian heterogeneous datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art prediction methods in terms of prediction accuracy.
MF-based Dimension Reduction Signal Compression for Fronthaul-Constrained Distributed MIMO C-RAN
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

In this work we propose a fronthaul compression scheme for distributed MIMO systems with multi-antenna receivers, in which, prior to signal quantisation, dimension reduction is performed at each receiver by matched filtering the received signal with a subset of the local user channel vectors. By choosing these matched filter vectors based on global channel information, a high proportion of the potential capacity may be captured by a small number of signal components, which can then be compressed efficiently using local signal compression. We outline a greedy algorithm for selecting the matched filtering vectors for each receiver, and a local transform coding approach for quantising them, giving expressions for the resulting system sum and user capacities. We then show that the scheme is easily modified to account for imperfect CSI at the receivers. Numerical results show that with a low signal dimension the scheme is able to operate very close to the cut-set bound in the fronthaul-limited regime, and demonstrates significant improvements in rate-capacity trade-off versus local compression at all operating points, particularly at high SNR.
Timed Automata Benchmark Description
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2020
Year: 2020

This report contains the descriptions of the timed automata (models) and the properties (specifications) that are used as the "benchmark examples in Data structure choices for on-the-fly model checking of real-time systems" and "The power of proofs: New algorithms for timed automata model checking." The four models from those sources are: CSMA, FISCHER, LEADER, and GRC. Additionally we include in this report two additional models: FDDI and PATHOS. These six models are often used to benchmark timed automata model checker speed throughout timed automata model checking papers.
CoVista: A Unified View on Privacy Sensitive Mobile Contact Tracing Effort
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

Governments around the world have become increasingly frustrated with tech giants dictating public health policy. The software created by Apple and Google enables individuals to track their own potential exposure through collated exposure notifications. However, the same software prohibits location tracking, denying key information needed by public health officials for robust contract tracing. This information is needed to treat and isolate COVID-19 positive people, identify transmission hotspots, and protect against continued spread of infection. In this article, we present two simple ideas: the lighthouse and the covid-commons that address the needs of public health authorities while preserving the privacy-sensitive goals of the Apple and google exposure notification protocols.
Extrapolative-Interpolative Cycle-Consistency Learning for Video Frame Extrapolation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Video frame extrapolation is a task to predict future frames when the past frames are given. Unlike previous studies that usually have been focused on the design of modules or construction of networks, we propose a novel Extrapolative-Interpolative Cycle (EIC) loss using pre-trained frame interpolation module to improve extrapolation performance. Cycle-consistency loss has been used for stable prediction between two function spaces in many visual tasks. We formulate this cycle-consistency using two mapping functions; frame extrapolation and interpolation. Since it is easier to predict intermediate frames than to predict future frames in terms of the object occlusion and motion uncertainty, interpolation module can give guidance signal effectively for training the extrapolation function. EIC loss can be applied to any existing extrapolation algorithms and guarantee consistent prediction in the short future as well as long future frames. Experimental results show that simply adding EIC loss to the existing baseline increases extrapolation performance on both UCF101 and KITTI datasets.
Arbitrary Style Transfer via Multi-Adaptation Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Arbitrary style transfer is a significant topic with research value and application prospect. A desired style transfer, given a content image and referenced style painting, would render the content image with the color tone and vivid stroke patterns of the style painting while synchronously maintaining the detailed content structure information. Style transfer approaches would initially learn content and style representations of the content and style references and then generate the stylized images guided by these representations. In this paper, we propose the multi-adaptation network which involves two self-adaptation (SA) modules and one co-adaptation (CA) module: the SA modules adaptively disentangle the content and style representations, i.e., content SA module uses position-wise self-attention to enhance content representation and style SA module uses channel-wise self-attention to enhance style representation; the CA module rearranges the distribution of style representation based on content representation distribution by calculating the local similarity between the disentangled content and style features in a non-local fashion. Moreover, a new disentanglement loss function enables our network to extract main style patterns and exact content structures to adapt to various input images, respectively. Various qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that the proposed multi-adaptation network leads to better results than the state-of-the-art style transfer methods.
Zoom in to the details of human-centric videos
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Presenting high-resolution (HR) human appearance is always critical for the human-centric videos. However, current imagery equipment can hardly capture HR details all the time. Existing super-resolution algorithms barely mitigate the problem by only considering universal and low-level priors of im-age patches. In contrast, our algorithm is under bias towards the human body super-resolution by taking advantage of high-level prior defined by HR human appearance. Firstly, a motion analysis module extracts inherent motion pattern from the HR reference video to refine the pose estimation of the low-resolution (LR) sequence. Furthermore, a human body reconstruction module maps the HR texture in the reference frames onto a 3D mesh model. Consequently, the input LR videos get super-resolved HR human sequences are generated conditioned on the original LR videos as well as few HR reference frames. Experiments on an existing dataset and real-world data captured by hybrid cameras show that our approach generates superior visual quality of human body compared with the traditional method.
Lessons learned in a decade of research software engineering GPU applications
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2020
Year: 2020

After years of using Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to accelerate scientific applications in fields as varied as tomography, computer vision, climate modeling, digital forensics, geospatial databases, particle physics, radio astronomy, and localization microscopy, we noticed a number of technical, socio-technical, and non-technical challenges that Research Software Engineers (RSEs) may run into. While some of these challenges, such as managing different programming languages within a project, or having to deal with different memory spaces, are common to all software projects involving GPUs, others are more typical of scientific software projects. Among these challenges we include changing resolutions or scales, maintaining an application over time and making it sustainable, and evaluating both the obtained results and the achieved performance. %In this paper, we present the challenges and lessons learned from research software engineering GPU applications.
A Quantitative Survey of Communication Optimizations in Distributed Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

Nowadays, large and complex deep learning (DL) models are increasingly trained in a distributed manner across multiple worker machines, in which extensive communications between workers pose serious scaling problems. In this article, we present a quantitative survey of communication optimization techniques for data parallel distributed DL. We first identify the major communication challenges and classify the existing solutions into three levels, namely the learning algorithm, the system architecture, and the network infrastructure. We present the state-of-the-art communication optimization techniques and conduct a comparative study of seven common lossless distributed DL methods on a 32-GPU cluster with 100Gbps InfiniBand (IB). We show that (1) the DL models with low model intensity (such as BERT and BERT-Large) are difficult to scale out even with the best available lossless algorithm over 100Gbps IB; (2) the system architecture and scheduling algorithms have a critical impact on the scaling property. We conclude the article with discussions on the open issues for further investigations.
Leveraging Energy Saving Capabilities of Current EEE Interfaces via Pre-Coalescing
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

The low power idle mode implemented by Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) allows network interfaces to save up to 90% of their nominal energy consumption when idling. There is an ample body of research that recommends the use of frame coalescing algorithms---that enter the low power mode as soon as there is no more traffic waiting to be sent, and delay the exit from this mode until there is an acceptable amount of traffic queued---to minimize energy usage while maintaining an acceptable performance. However, EEE capable hardware from several manufactures delays the entrance to the low power mode for a considerable amount of time (hysteresis). In this paper we augment existing EEE energy models to account for the hysteresis delay and show that, using the configuration ranges provided by manufacturers, most existing EEE networking devices are unable to obtain significant energy savings. To improve their energy efficiency, we propose to implement frame coalescing directly at traffic sources, before reaching the network interface. We also derive the optimum coalescing parameters to obtain a given target energy consumption at the EEE device when its configuration parameters are known in advance.