OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Recurrent Calibration Network for Irregular Text Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Scene text recognition has received increased attention in the research community. Text in the wild often possesses irregular arrangements, typically including perspective text, curved text, oriented text. Most existing methods are hard to work well for irregular text, especially for severely distorted text. In this paper, we propose a novel Recurrent Calibration Network (RCN) for irregular scene text recognition. The RCN progressively calibrates the irregular text to boost the recognition performance. By decomposing the calibration process into multiple steps, the irregular text can be calibrated to normal one step by step. Besides, in order to avoid the accumulation of lost information caused by inaccurate transformation, we further design a fiducial-point refinement structure to keep the integrity of text during the recurrent process. Instead of the calibrated images, the coordinates of fiducial points are tracked and refined, which implicitly models the transformation information. Based on the refined fiducial points, we estimate the transformation parameters and sample from the original image at each step. In this way, the original character information is preserved until the final transformation. Such designs lead to optimal calibration results to boost the performance of succeeding recognition. Extensive experiments on challenging datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method, especially on irregular benchmarks.
Autoencoder Based Architecture For Fast & Real Time Audio Style Transfer
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2018
Year: 2018

Recently, there has been great interest in the field of audio style transfer, where a stylized audio is generated by imposing the style of a reference audio on the content of a target audio. We improve on the current approaches which use neural networks to extract the content and the style of the audio signal and propose a new autoencoder based architecture for the task. This network generates a stylized audio for a content audio in a single forward pass. The proposed network architecture proves to be advantageous over the quality of audio produced and the time taken to train the network. The network is experimented on speech signals to confirm the validity of our proposal.
SREdgeNet: Edge Enhanced Single Image Super Resolution using Dense Edge Detection Network and Feature Merge Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Deep learning based single image super-resolution (SR) methods have been rapidly evolved over the past few years and have yielded state-of-the-art performances over conventional methods. Since these methods usually minimized l1 loss between the output SR image and the ground truth image, they yielded very high peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) that is inversely proportional to these losses. Unfortunately, minimizing these losses inevitably lead to blurred edges due to averaging of plausible solutions. Recently, SRGAN was proposed to avoid this average effect by minimizing perceptual losses instead of l1 loss and it yielded perceptually better SR images (or images with sharp edges) at the price of lowering PSNR. In this paper, we propose SREdgeNet, edge enhanced single image SR network, that was inspired by conventional SR theories so that average effect could be avoided not by changing the loss, but by changing the SR network property with the same l1 loss. Our SREdgeNet consists of 3 sequential deep neural network modules: the first module is any state-of-the-art SR network and we selected a variant of EDSR. The second module is any edge detection network taking the output of the first SR module as an input and we propose DenseEdgeNet for this module. Lastly, the third module is merging the outputs of the first and second modules to yield edge enhanced SR image and we propose MergeNet for this module. Qualitatively, our proposed method yielded images with sharp edges compared to other state-of-the-art SR methods. Quantitatively, our SREdgeNet yielded state-of-the-art performance in terms of structural similarity (SSIM) while maintained comparable PSNR for x8 enlargement.
Constrained speaker diarization of TV series based on visual patterns
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2018
Year: 2018

Speaker diarization, usually denoted as the ''who spoke when'' task, turns out to be particularly challenging when applied to fictional films, where many characters talk in various acoustic conditions (background music, sound effects...). Despite this acoustic variability , such movies exhibit specific visual patterns in the dialogue scenes. In this paper, we introduce a two-step method to achieve speaker diarization in TV series: a speaker diarization is first performed locally in the scenes detected as dialogues; then, the hypothesized local speakers are merged in a second agglomerative clustering process, with the constraint that speakers locally hypothesized to be distinct must not be assigned to the same cluster. The performances of our approach are compared to those obtained by standard speaker diarization tools applied to the same data.
Continuous Trajectory Planning Based on Learning Optimization in High Dimensional Input Space for Serial Manipulators
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2018
Year: 2018

To continuously generate trajectories for serial manipulators with high dimensional degrees of freedom (DOF) in the dynamic environment, a real-time optimal trajectory generation method based on machine learning aiming at high dimensional inputs is presented in this paper. First, a learning optimization (LO) framework is established, and implementations with different sub-methods are discussed. Additionally, multiple criteria are defined to evaluate the performance of LO models. Furthermore, aiming at high dimensional inputs, a database generation method based on input space dimension-reducing mapping is proposed. At last, this method is validated on motion planning for haptic feedback manipulators (HFM) in virtual reality systems. Results show that the input space dimension-reducing method can significantly elevate the efficiency and quality of database generation and consequently improve the performance of the LO. Moreover, using this LO method, real-time trajectory generation with high dimensional inputs can be achieved, which lays a foundation for continuous trajectory planning for high-DOF-robots in complex environments.
Worst-case Bounds and Optimized Cache on $M^{th}$ Request Cache Insertion Policies under Elastic Conditions
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

Cloud services and other shared third-party infrastructures allow individual content providers to easily scale their services based on current resource demands. In this paper, we consider an individual content provider that wants to minimize its delivery costs under the assumptions that the storage and bandwidth resources it requires are elastic, the content provider only pays for the resources that it consumes, and costs are proportional to the resource usage. Within this context, we (i) derive worst-case bounds for the optimal cost and competitive cost ratios of different classes of "cache on $M^{th}$ request" cache insertion policies, (ii) derive explicit average cost expressions and bounds under arbitrary inter-request distributions, (iii) derive explicit average cost expressions and bounds for short-tailed (deterministic, Erlang, and exponential) and heavy-tailed (Pareto) inter-request distributions, and (iv) present numeric and trace-based evaluations that reveal insights into the relative cost performance of the policies. Our results show that a window-based "cache on $2^{nd}$ request" policy using a single threshold optimized to minimize worst-case costs provides good average performance across the different distributions and the full parameter ranges of each considered distribution, making it an attractive choice for a wide range of practical conditions where request rates of individual file objects typically are not known and can change quickly.
Non-parametric clustering over user features and latent behavioral functions with dual-view mixture models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

We present a dual-view mixture model to cluster users based on their features and latent behavioral functions. Every component of the mixture model represents a probability density over a feature view for observed user attributes and a behavior view for latent behavioral functions that are indirectly observed through user actions or behaviors. Our task is to infer the groups of users as well as their latent behavioral functions. We also propose a non-parametric version based on a Dirichlet Process to automatically infer the number of clusters. We test the properties and performance of the model on a synthetic dataset that represents the participation of users in the threads of an online forum. Experiments show that dual-view models outperform single-view ones when one of the views lacks information.
Deep Learning Approach in Automatic Iceberg - Ship Detection with SAR Remote Sensing Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Deep Learning is gaining traction with geophysics community to understand subsurface structures, such as fault detection or salt body in seismic data. This study describes using deep learning method for iceberg or ship recognition with synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data. Drifting icebergs pose a potential threat to activities offshore around the Arctic, including for both ship navigation and oil rigs. Advancement of satellite imagery using weather-independent cross-polarized radar has enabled us to monitor and delineate icebergs and ships, however a human component is needed to classify the images. Here we present Transfer Learning, a convolutional neural network (CNN) designed to work with a limited training data and features, while demonstrating its effectiveness in this problem. Key aspect of the approach is data augmentation and stacking of multiple outputs, resulted in a significant boost in accuracy (logarithmic score of 0.1463). This algorithm has been tested through participation at the Statoil/C-Core Kaggle competition.
TWINs: Two Weighted Inconsistency-reduced Networks for Partial Domain Adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

The task of unsupervised domain adaptation is proposed to transfer the knowledge of a label-rich domain (source domain) to a label-scarce domain (target domain). Matching feature distributions between different domains is a widely applied method for the aforementioned task. However, the method does not perform well when classes in the two domains are not identical. Specifically, when the classes of the target correspond to a subset of those of the source, target samples can be incorrectly aligned with the classes that exist only in the source. This problem setting is termed as partial domain adaptation (PDA). In this study, we propose a novel method called Two Weighted Inconsistency-reduced Networks (TWINs) for PDA. We utilize two classification networks to estimate the ratio of the target samples in each class with which a classification loss is weighted to adapt the classes present in the target domain. Furthermore, to extract discriminative features for the target, we propose to minimize the divergence between domains measured by the classifiers' inconsistency on target samples. We empirically demonstrate that reducing the inconsistency between two networks is effective for PDA and that our method outperforms other existing methods with a large margin in several datasets.
Automatic Alignment of Sequential Monte Carlo Inference in Higher-Order Probabilistic Programs
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2018
Year: 2018

Probabilistic programming is a programming paradigm for expressing flexible probabilistic models. Implementations of probabilistic programming languages employ a variety of inference algorithms, where sequential Monte Carlo methods are commonly used. A problem with current state-of-the-art implementations using sequential Monte Carlo inference is the alignment of program synchronization points. We propose a new static analysis approach based on the 0-CFA algorithm for automatically aligning higher-order probabilistic programs. We evaluate the automatic alignment on a phylogenetic model, showing a significant decrease in runtime and increase in accuracy.
XOR_p A maximally intertwined p-classes problem used as a benchmark with built-in truth for neural networks gradient descent optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

A natural p-classes generalization of the eXclusive OR problem, the subtraction modulo p, where p is prime, is presented and solved using a single fully connected hidden layer with p-neurons. Although the problem is very simple, the landscape is intricate and challenging and represents an interesting benchmark for gradient descent optimization algorithms. Testing 9 optimizers and 9 activation functions up to p = 191, the method converging most often and the fastest to a perfect classification is the Adam optimizer combined with the ELU activation function.
Proceedings of the Workshop on Social Robots in Therapy: Focusing on Autonomy and Ethical Challenges
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2018
Year: 2018

Robot-Assisted Therapy (RAT) has successfully been used in HRI research by including social robots in health-care interventions by virtue of their ability to engage human users both social and emotional dimensions. Research projects on this topic exist all over the globe in the USA, Europe, and Asia. All of these projects have the overall ambitious goal to increase the well-being of a vulnerable population. Typical work in RAT is performed using remote controlled robots; a technique called Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ). The robot is usually controlled, unbeknownst to the patient, by a human operator. However, WoZ has been demonstrated to not be a sustainable technique in the long-term. Providing the robots with autonomy (while remaining under the supervision of the therapist) has the potential to lighten the therapists burden, not only in the therapeutic session itself but also in longer-term diagnostic tasks. Therefore, there is a need for exploring several degrees of autonomy in social robots used in therapy. Increasing the autonomy of robots might also bring about a new set of challenges. In particular, there will be a need to answer new ethical questions regarding the use of robots with a vulnerable population, as well as a need to ensure ethically-compliant robot behaviours. Therefore, in this workshop we want to gather findings and explore which degree of autonomy might help to improve health-care interventions and how we can overcome the ethical challenges inherent to it.
Universal Successor Features Approximators
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

The ability of a reinforcement learning (RL) agent to learn about many reward functions at the same time has many potential benefits, such as the decomposition of complex tasks into simpler ones, the exchange of information between tasks, and the reuse of skills. We focus on one aspect in particular, namely the ability to generalise to unseen tasks. Parametric generalisation relies on the interpolation power of a function approximator that is given the task description as input; one of its most common form are universal value function approximators (UVFAs). Another way to generalise to new tasks is to exploit structure in the RL problem itself. Generalised policy improvement (GPI) combines solutions of previous tasks into a policy for the unseen task; this relies on instantaneous policy evaluation of old policies under the new reward function, which is made possible through successor features (SFs). Our proposed universal successor features approximators (USFAs) combine the advantages of all of these, namely the scalability of UVFAs, the instant inference of SFs, and the strong generalisation of GPI. We discuss the challenges involved in training a USFA, its generalisation properties and demonstrate its practical benefits and transfer abilities on a large-scale domain in which the agent has to navigate in a first-person perspective three-dimensional environment.
A Comparison of LSTMs and Attention Mechanisms for Forecasting Financial Time Series
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

While LSTMs show increasingly promising results for forecasting Financial Time Series (FTS), this paper seeks to assess if attention mechanisms can further improve performance. The hypothesis is that attention can help prevent long-term dependencies experienced by LSTM models. To test this hypothesis, the main contribution of this paper is the implementation of an LSTM with attention. Both the benchmark LSTM and the LSTM with attention were compared and both achieved reasonable performances of up to 60% on five stocks from Kaggle's Two Sigma dataset. This comparative analysis demonstrates that an LSTM with attention can indeed outperform standalone LSTMs but further investigation is required as issues do arise with such model architectures.
SDN - Architectural Enabler for Reliable Communication over Millimeter-Wave 5G Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequency bands offer a new frontier for next-generation wireless networks, popularly known as 5G, to enable multi-gigabit communication; however, the availability and reliability of mmWave signals are significantly limited due to its unfavorable propagation characteristics. Thus, mmWave networks rely on directional narrow-beam transmissions to overcome severe path-loss. To mitigate the impact of transmission-reception directionality and provide uninterrupted network services, ensuring the availability of mmWave transmission links is important. In this paper, we proposed a new flexible network architecture to provide efficient resource coordination among serving basestations during user mobility. The key idea of this holistic architecture is to exploit the software-defined networking (SDN) technology with mmWave communication to provide a flexible and resilient network architecture. Besides, this paper presents an efficient and seamless uncoordinated network operation to support reliable communication in highly-dynamic environments characterized by high density and mobility of wireless devices. To warrant high-reliability and guard against the potential radio link failure, we introduce a new transmission framework to ensure that there is at least one basestation is connected to the UE at all times. We validate the proposed transmission scheme through simulations.
Light Weight Color Image Warping with Inter-Channel Information
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Image warping is a necessary step in many multimedia applications such as texture mapping, image-based rendering, panorama stitching, image resizing and optical flow computation etc. Traditionally, color image warping interpolation is performed in each color channel independently. In this paper, we show that the warping quality can be significantly enhanced by exploiting the cross-channel correlation. We design a warping scheme that integrates intra-channel interpolation with cross-channel variation at very low computational cost, which is required for interactive multimedia applications on mobile devices. The effectiveness and efficiency of our method are validated by extensive experiments.
Decentralized Periodic Approach for Adaptive Fault Diagnosis in Distributed Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, Decentralized Periodic Approach for Adaptive Fault Diagnosis (DP-AFD) algorithm is proposed for fault diagnosis in distributed systems with arbitrary topology. Faulty nodes may be either unresponsive, may have either software or hardware faults. The proposed algorithm detects the faulty nodes situated in geographically distributed locations. This algorithm does not depend on a single node or leader to detect the faults in the system. However, it empowers more than one node to detect the fault-free and faulty nodes in the system. Thus, at the end of each test cycle, every fault-free node acts as a leader to diagnose faults in the system. This feature of the algorithm makes it applicable to any arbitrary network. After every test cycle of the algorithm, all the nodes have knowledge about faulty nodes and each node is tested only once. With this knowledge, there can be redistribution of load, which was earlier assigned to the faulty nodes. Also, the algorithm permits repaired node re-entry and new node entry. In a system of n nodes, the maximum number of faulty nodes can be (n-1) which is detected by DP-AFD algorithm. DP-AFD is periodic in nature which executes test cycles after regular intervals to detect the faulty nodes in the given distributed system.
Fast Botnet Detection From Streaming Logs Using Online Lanczos Method
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Botnet, a group of coordinated bots, is becoming the main platform of malicious Internet activities like DDOS, click fraud, web scraping, spam/rumor distribution, etc. This paper focuses on design and experiment of a new approach for botnet detection from streaming web server logs, motivated by its wide applicability, real-time protection capability, ease of use and better security of sensitive data. Our algorithm is inspired by a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to capture correlation in data, and we are first to recognize and adapt Lanczos method to improve the time complexity of PCA-based botnet detection from cubic to sub-cubic, which enables us to more accurately and sensitively detect botnets with sliding time windows rather than fixed time windows. We contribute a generalized online correlation matrix update formula, and a new termination condition for Lanczos iteration for our purpose based on error bound and non-decreasing eigenvalues of symmetric matrices. On our dataset of an ecommerce website logs, experiments show the time cost of Lanczos method with different time windows are consistently only 20% to 25% of PCA.
Fast and Accurate 3D Medical Image Segmentation with Data-swapping Method
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Deep neural network models used for medical image segmentation are large because they are trained with high-resolution three-dimensional (3D) images. Graphics processing units (GPUs) are widely used to accelerate the trainings. However, the memory on a GPU is not large enough to train the models. A popular approach to tackling this problem is patch-based method, which divides a large image into small patches and trains the models with these small patches. However, this method would degrade the segmentation quality if a target object spans multiple patches. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for 3D medical image segmentation that utilizes the data-swapping, which swaps out intermediate data from GPU memory to CPU memory to enlarge the effective GPU memory size, for training high-resolution 3D medical images without patching. We carefully tuned parameters in the data-swapping method to obtain the best training performance for 3D U-Net, a widely used deep neural network model for medical image segmentation. We applied our tuning to train 3D U-Net with full-size images of 192 x 192 x 192 voxels in brain tumor dataset. As a result, communication overhead, which is the most important issue, was reduced by 17.1%. Compared with the patch-based method for patches of 128 x 128 x 128 voxels, our training for full-size images achieved improvement on the mean Dice score by 4.48% and 5.32 % for detecting whole tumor sub-region and tumor core sub-region, respectively. The total training time was reduced from 164 hours to 47 hours, resulting in 3.53 times of acceleration.