OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Efficient Contour Computation of Group-based Skyline
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2019
Year: 2019

Skyline, aiming at finding a Pareto optimal subset of points in a multi-dimensional dataset, has gained great interest due to its extensive use for multi-criteria analysis and decision making. The skyline consists of all points that are not dominated by any other points. It is a candidate set of the optimal solution, which depends on a specific evaluation criterion for optimum. However, conventional skyline queries, which return individual points, are inadequate in group querying case since optimal combinations are required. To address this gap, we study the skyline computation in the group level and propose efficient methods to find the Group-based skyline (G-skyline). For computing the front $l$ skyline layers, we lay out an efficient approach that does the search concurrently on each dimension and investigates each point in the subspace. After that, we present a novel structure to construct the G-skyline with a queue of combinations of the first-layer points. We further demonstrate that the G-skyline is a complete candidate set of top-$l$ solutions, which is the main superiority over previous group-based skyline definitions. However, as G-skyline is complete, it contains a large number of groups which can make it impractical. To represent the "contour" of the G-skyline, we define the Representative G-skyline (RG-skyline). Then, we propose a Group-based clustering (G-clustering) algorithm to find out RG-skyline groups. Experimental results show that our algorithms are several orders of magnitude faster than the previous work.
The 2019 DAVIS Challenge on VOS: Unsupervised Multi-Object Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

We present the 2019 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation, the third edition of the DAVIS Challenge series, a public competition designed for the task of Video Object Segmentation (VOS). In addition to the original semi-supervised track and the interactive track introduced in the previous edition, a new unsupervised multi-object track will be featured this year. In the newly introduced track, participants are asked to provide non-overlapping object proposals on each image, along with an identifier linking them between frames (i.e. video object proposals), without any test-time human supervision (no scribbles or masks provided on the test video). In order to do so, we have re-annotated the train and val sets of DAVIS 2017 in a concise way that facilitates the unsupervised track, and created new test-dev and test-challenge sets for the competition. Definitions, rules, and evaluation metrics for the unsupervised track are described in detail in this paper.
Human Action Recognition with Deep Temporal Pyramids
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are nowadays achieving significant leaps in different pattern recognition tasks including action recognition. Current CNNs are increasingly deeper, data-hungrier and this makes their success tributary of the abundance of labeled training data. CNNs also rely on max/average pooling which reduces dimensionality of output layers and hence attenuates their sensitivity to the availability of labeled data. However, this process may dilute the information of upstream convolutional layers and thereby affect the discrimination power of the trained representations, especially when the learned categories are fine-grained. In this paper, we introduce a novel hierarchical aggregation design, for final pooling, that controls granularity of the learned representations w.r.t the actual granularity of action categories. Our solution is based on a tree-structured temporal pyramid that aggregates outputs of CNNs at different levels. Top levels of this hierarchy are dedicated to coarse categories while deep levels are more suitable to fine-grained ones. The design of our temporal pyramid is based on solving a constrained minimization problem whose solution corresponds to the distribution of weights of different representations in the temporal pyramid. Experiments conducted using the challenging UCF101 database show the relevance of our hierarchical design w.r.t other related methods.
Galaxy Learning -- A Position Paper
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2019
Year: 2019

The recent rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI, mainly driven by machine learning research, especially deep learning) has achieved phenomenal success in various applications. However, to further apply AI technologies in real-world context, several significant issues regarding the AI ecosystem should be addressed. We identify the main issues as data privacy, ownership, and exchange, which are difficult to be solved with the current centralized paradigm of machine learning training methodology. As a result, we propose a novel model training paradigm based on blockchain, named Galaxy Learning, which aims to train a model with distributed data and to reserve the data ownership for their owners. In this new paradigm, encrypted models are moved around instead, and are federated once trained. Model training, as well as the communication, is achieved with blockchain and its smart contracts. Pricing of training data is determined by its contribution, and therefore it is not about the exchange of data ownership. In this position paper, we describe the motivation, paradigm, design, and challenges as well as opportunities of Galaxy Learning.
Clustering Images by Unmasking - A New Baseline
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

We propose a novel agglomerative clustering method based on unmasking, a technique that was previously used for authorship verification of text documents and for abnormal event detection in videos. In order to join two clusters, we alternate between (i) training a binary classifier to distinguish between the samples from one cluster and the samples from the other cluster, and (ii) removing at each step the most discriminant features. The faster-decreasing accuracy rates of the intermediately-obtained classifiers indicate that the two clusters should be joined. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to apply unmasking in order to cluster images. We compare our method with k-means as well as a recent state-of-the-art clustering method. The empirical results indicate that our approach is able to improve performance for various (deep and shallow) feature representations and different tasks, such as handwritten digit recognition, texture classification and fine-grained object recognition.
Flip Distance to some Plane Configurations
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2019
Year: 2019

We study an old geometric optimization problem in the plane. Given a perfect matching $M$ on a set of $n$ points in the plane, we can transform it to a non-crossing perfect matching by a finite sequence of flip operations. The flip operation removes two crossing edges from $M$ and adds two non-crossing edges. Let $f(M)$ and $F(M)$ denote the minimum and maximum lengths of a flip sequence on $M$, respectively. It has been proved by Bonnet and Miltzow (2016) that $f(M)=O(n^2)$ and by van Leeuwen and Schoone (1980) that $F(M)=O(n^3)$. We prove that $f(M)=O(nΔ)$ where $Δ$ is the spread of the point set, which is defined as the ratio between the longest and the shortest pairwise distances. This improves the previous bound if the point set has sublinear spread. For a matching $M$ on $n$ points in convex position we prove that $f(M)=n/2-1$ and $F(M)={{n/2} \choose 2}$; these bounds are tight. Any bound on $F(\cdot)$ carries over to the bichromatic setting, while this is not necessarily true for $f(\cdot)$. Let $M'$ be a bichromatic matching. The best known upper bound for $f(M')$ is the same as for $F(M')$, which is essentially $O(n^3)$. We prove that $f(M')\le n-2$ for points in convex position, and $f(M')= O(n^2)$ for semi-collinear points. The flip operation can also be defined on spanning trees. For a spanning tree $T$ on a convex point set we show that $f(T)=O(n\log n)$.
Budget-Feasible Mechanism Design for Non-Monotone Submodular Objectives: Offline and Online
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2019
Year: 2019

The framework of budget-feasible mechanism design studies procurement auctions where the auctioneer (buyer) aims to maximize his valuation function subject to a hard budget constraint. We study the problem of designing truthful mechanisms that have good approximation guarantees and never pay the participating agents (sellers) more than the budget. We focus on the case of general (non-monotone) submodular valuation functions and derive the first truthful, budget-feasible and $O(1)$-approximate mechanisms that run in polynomial time in the value query model, for both offline and online auctions. Prior to our work, the only $O(1)$-approximation mechanism known for non-monotone submodular objectives required an exponential number of value queries. At the heart of our approach lies a novel greedy algorithm for non-monotone submodular maximization under a knapsack constraint. Our algorithm builds two candidate solutions simultaneously (to achieve a good approximation), yet ensures that agents cannot jump from one solution to the other (to implicitly enforce truthfulness). Ours is the first mechanism for the problem where---crucially---the agents are not ordered with respect to their marginal value per cost. This allows us to appropriately adapt these ideas to the online setting as well. To further illustrate the applicability of our approach, we also consider the case where additional feasibility constraints are present. We obtain $O(p)$-approximation mechanisms for both monotone and non-monotone submodular objectives, when the feasible solutions are independent sets of a $p$-system. With the exception of additive valuation functions, no mechanisms were known for this setting prior to our work. Finally, we provide lower bounds suggesting that, when one cares about non-trivial approximation guarantees in polynomial time, our results are asymptotically best possible.
Behavior Planning of Autonomous Cars with Social Perception
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

Autonomous cars have to navigate in dynamic environment which can be full of uncertainties. The uncertainties can come either from sensor limitations such as occlusions and limited sensor range, or from probabilistic prediction of other road participants, or from unknown social behavior in a new area. To safely and efficiently drive in the presence of these uncertainties, the decision-making and planning modules of autonomous cars should intelligently utilize all available information and appropriately tackle the uncertainties so that proper driving strategies can be generated. In this paper, we propose a social perception scheme which treats all road participants as distributed sensors in a sensor network. By observing the individual behaviors as well as the group behaviors, uncertainties of the three types can be updated uniformly in a belief space. The updated beliefs from the social perception are then explicitly incorporated into a probabilistic planning framework based on Model Predictive Control (MPC). The cost function of the MPC is learned via inverse reinforcement learning (IRL). Such an integrated probabilistic planning module with socially enhanced perception enables the autonomous vehicles to generate behaviors which are defensive but not overly conservative, and socially compatible. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is verified in simulation on an representative scenario with sensor occlusions.
Remote measurement of sea ice dynamics with regularized optimal transport
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

As Arctic conditions rapidly change, human activity in the Arctic will continue to increase and so will the need for high-resolution observations of sea ice. While satellite imagery can provide high spatial resolution, it is temporally sparse and significant ice deformation can occur between observations. This makes it difficult to apply feature tracking or image correlation techniques that require persistent features to exist between images. With this in mind, we propose a technique based on optimal transport, which is commonly used to measure differences between probability distributions. When little ice enters or leaves the image scene, we show that regularized optimal transport can be used to quantitatively estimate ice deformation. We discuss the motivation for our approach and describe efficient computational implementations. Results are provided on a combination of synthetic and MODIS imagery to demonstrate the ability of our approach to estimate dynamics properties at the original image resolution.
Real-time and robust multiple-view gender classification using gait features in video surveillance
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

It is common to view people in real applications walking in arbitrary directions, holding items, or wearing heavy coats. These factors are challenges in gait-based application methods because they significantly change a person's appearance. This paper proposes a novel method for classifying human gender in real time using gait information. The use of an average gait image (AGI), rather than a gait energy image (GEI), allows this method to be computationally efficient and robust against view changes. A viewpoint (VP) model is created for automatically determining the viewing angle during the testing phase. A distance signal (DS) model is constructed to remove any areas with an attachment (carried items, worn coats) from a silhouette to reduce the interference in the resulting classification. Finally, the human gender is classified using multiple view-dependent classifiers trained using a support vector machine. Experiment results confirm that the proposed method achieves a high accuracy of 98.8% on the CASIA Dataset B and outperforms the recent state-of-the-art methods.
Range closest-pair search in higher dimensions
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2019
Year: 2019

Range closest-pair (RCP) search is a range-search variant of the classical closest-pair problem, which aims to store a given set $S$ of points into some space-efficient data structure such that when a query range $Q$ is specified, the closest pair in $S \cap Q$ can be reported quickly. RCP search has received attention over years, but the primary focus was only on $\mathbb{R}^2$. In this paper, we study RCP search in higher dimensions. We give the first nontrivial RCP data structures for orthogonal, simplex, halfspace, and ball queries in $\mathbb{R}^d$ for any constant $d$. Furthermore, we prove a conditional lower bound for orthogonal RCP search for $d \geq 3$.
Compressibility Loss for Neural Network Weights
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper we apply a compressibility loss that enables learning highly compressible neural network weights. The loss was previously proposed as a measure of negated sparsity of a signal, yet in this paper we show that minimizing this loss also enforces the non-zero parts of the signal to have very low entropy, thus making the entire signal more compressible. For an optimization problem where the goal is to minimize the compressibility loss (the objective), we prove that at any critical point of the objective, the weight vector is a ternary signal and the corresponding value of the objective is the squared root of the number of non-zero elements in the signal, thus directly related to sparsity. In the experiments, we train neural networks with the compressibility loss and we show that the proposed method achieves weight sparsity and compression ratios comparable with the state-of-the-art.
Inter-Cell Antenna Calibration for Coherent Joint Transmission in TDD System
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

In this work the modeling and calibration method of reciprocity error in a coherent TDD coordinated multi-point (CoMP) joint transmission (JT) system are addressed. The modeling includes parameters such as amplitude gains and phase differences of RF chains between the eNBs. The calibration method used for inter-cell antenna calibration is based on precoding matrix indicator (PMI) feedback by UE. Furthermore, we provide some simulation results for evaluating the performance of the calibration method in different cases such as varying estimation-period, cell-specific reference signals (CRS) ports configuration, signal to noise ratio (SNR), phase difference, etc. The main conclusion is that the proposed method for intercell antenna calibration has good performance for estimating the residual phase difference. Keywords-LTE-Advanced; TDD; CoMP; JT; reciprocity error; phase difference; inter-cell antenna calibration
Semantic Segmentation of Video Sequences with Convolutional LSTMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Most of the semantic segmentation approaches have been developed for single image segmentation, and hence, video sequences are currently segmented by processing each frame of the video sequence separately. The disadvantage of this is that temporal image information is not considered, which improves the performance of the segmentation approach. One possibility to include temporal information is to use recurrent neural networks. However, there are only a few approaches using recurrent networks for video segmentation so far. These approaches extend the encoder-decoder network architecture of well-known segmentation approaches and place convolutional LSTM layers between encoder and decoder. However, in this paper it is shown that this position is not optimal, and that other positions in the network exhibit better performance. Nowadays, state-of-the-art segmentation approaches rarely use the classical encoder-decoder structure, but use multi-branch architectures. These architectures are more complex, and hence, it is more difficult to place the recurrent units at a proper position. In this work, the multi-branch architectures are extended by convolutional LSTM layers at different positions and evaluated on two different datasets in order to find the best one. It turned out that the proposed approach outperforms the pure CNN-based approach for up to 1.6 percent.
Group Emotion Recognition Using Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Automatic facial emotion recognition is a challenging task that has gained significant scientific interest over the past few years, but the problem of emotion recognition for a group of people has been less extensively studied. However, it is slowly gaining popularity due to the massive amount of data available on social networking sites containing images of groups of people participating in various social events. Group emotion recognition is a challenging problem due to obstructions like head and body pose variations, occlusions, variable lighting conditions, variance of actors, varied indoor and outdoor settings and image quality. The objective of this task is to classify a group's perceived emotion as Positive, Neutral or Negative. In this report, we describe our solution which is a hybrid machine learning system that incorporates deep neural networks and Bayesian classifiers. Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) work from bottom to top, analysing facial expressions expressed by individual faces extracted from the image. The Bayesian network works from top to bottom, inferring the global emotion for the image, by integrating the visual features of the contents of the image obtained through a scene descriptor. In the final pipeline, the group emotion category predicted by an ensemble of CNNs in the bottom-up module is passed as input to the Bayesian Network in the top-down module and an overall prediction for the image is obtained. Experimental results show that the stated system achieves 65.27% accuracy on the validation set which is in line with state-of-the-art results. As an outcome of this project, a Progressive Web Application and an accompanying Android app with a simple and intuitive user interface are presented, allowing users to test out the system with their own pictures.
Positive-Instance Driven Dynamic Programming for Graph Searching
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

Research on the similarity of a graph to being a tree - called the treewidth of the graph - has seen an enormous rise within the last decade, but a practically fast algorithm for this task has been discovered only recently by Tamaki (ESA 2017). It is based on dynamic programming and makes use of the fact that the number of positive subinstances is typically substantially smaller than the number of all subinstances. Algorithms producing only such subinstances are called positive-instance driven (PID). We give an alternative and intuitive view on this algorithm from the perspective of the corresponding configuration graphs in certain two-player games. This allows us to develop PID-algorithms for a wide range of important graph parameters such as treewidth, pathwidth, and treedepth. We analyse the worst case behaviour of the approach on some well-known graph classes and perform an experimental evaluation on real world and random graphs.
Multi-level Dynamic Optimization of Intelligent LEACH with Cost Effective Deep Belief Network
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

Energy utilization is a key attribute for energy constrained wireless sensor networks (WSN) that directly impacts the life time of the network. LEACH (and its variants) are considered to be the most common energy efficient routing protocols for WSN. In this paper, we propose an optimized modification of LEACH that makes use of multi-hop communication, dynamic cluster boundaries and energy conservation in routing to maximize lifetime of a network. We propose a multi-level approach to maximize our gains with regards to energy conservation i.e., i) Dynamic programming based intra-cluster optimization technique has been proposed ii) Ant Colony Optimization is used for energy efficient cluster head connection with sink node and iii) Voronoi Tessellation are employed for efficient coverage planning i.e., dynamic formation of cluster boundaries. In order to accommodate a more flexible adhoc network, hybrid (reactive and proactive) event monitoring based on Deep Belief Network has been integrated in distributed nodes to improve the latency of the system. The results show that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms the current state of the art with regards to network lifetime and throughput.
Higher aggregation of gNodeBs in Cloud-RAN architectures via parallel computing
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we address the virtualization and the centralization of real-time network functions, notably in the framework of Cloud RAN (C-RAN). We thoroughly analyze the required fronthaul capacity for the deployment of the proposed C-RAN architecture. We are specifically interested in the performance of the software based channel coding function. We develop a dynamic multi-threading approach to achieve parallel computing on a multi-core platform. Measurements from an OAI-based testbed show important gains in terms of latency; this enables the increase of the distance between the radio elements and the virtualized RAN functions and thus a higher aggregation of gNodeBs in edge data centers, referred to as Central Offices (COs).
Offline Writer Identification based on the Path Signature Feature
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we propose a novel set of features for offline writer identification based on the path signature approach, which provides a principled way to express information contained in a path. By extracting local pathlets from handwriting contours, the path signature can also characterize the offline handwriting style. A codebook method based on the log path signature---a more compact way to express the path signature---is used in this work and shows competitive results on several benchmark offline writer identification datasets, namely the IAM, Firemaker, CVL and ICDAR2013 writer identification contest dataset.