OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Tigris: Architecture and Algorithms for 3D Perception in Point Clouds
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Machine perception applications are increasingly moving toward manipulating and processing 3D point cloud. This paper focuses on point cloud registration, a key primitive of 3D data processing widely used in high-level tasks such as odometry, simultaneous localization and mapping, and 3D reconstruction. As these applications are routinely deployed in energy-constrained environments, real-time and energy-efficient point cloud registration is critical. We present Tigris, an algorithm-architecture co-designed system specialized for point cloud registration. Through an extensive exploration of the registration pipeline design space, we find that, while different design points make vastly different trade-offs between accuracy and performance, KD-tree search is a common performance bottleneck, and thus is an ideal candidate for architectural specialization. While KD-tree search is inherently sequential, we propose an acceleration-amenable data structure and search algorithm that exposes different forms of parallelism of KD-tree search in the context of point cloud registration. The co-designed accelerator systematically exploits the parallelism while incorporating a set of architectural techniques that further improve the accelerator efficiency. Overall, Tigris achieves 77.2$\times$ speedup and 7.4$\times$ power reduction in KD-tree search over an RTX 2080 Ti GPU, which translates to a 41.7% registration performance improvements and 3.0$\times$ power reduction.
Exploiting Human Social Cognition for the Detection of Fake and Fraudulent Faces via Memory Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Advances in computer vision have brought us to the point where we have the ability to synthesise realistic fake content. Such approaches are seen as a source of disinformation and mistrust, and pose serious concerns to governments around the world. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) demonstrate encouraging results when detecting fake images that arise from the specific type of manipulation they are trained on. However, this success has not transitioned to unseen manipulation types, resulting in a significant gap in the line-of-defense. We propose a Hierarchical Memory Network (HMN) architecture, which is able to successfully detect faked faces by utilising knowledge stored in neural memories as well as visual cues to reason about the perceived face and anticipate its future semantic embeddings. This renders a generalisable face tampering detection framework. Experimental results demonstrate the proposed approach achieves superior performance for fake and fraudulent face detection compared to the state-of-the-art.
Efficient Hardware Implementation of Incremental Learning and Inference on Chip
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we tackle the problem of incrementally learning a classifier, one example at a time, directly on chip. To this end, we propose an efficient hardware implementation of a recently introduced incremental learning procedure that achieves state-of-the-art performance by combining transfer learning with majority votes and quantization techniques. The proposed design is able to accommodate for both new examples and new classes directly on the chip. We detail the hardware implementation of the method (implemented on FPGA target) and show it requires limited resources while providing a significant acceleration compared to using a CPU.
Improving Document Classification with Multi-Sense Embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

Efficient representation of text documents is an important building block in many NLP tasks. Research on long text categorization has shown that simple weighted averaging of word vectors for sentence representation often outperforms more sophisticated neural models. Recently proposed Sparse Composite Document Vector (SCDV) (Mekala et. al, 2017) extends this approach from sentences to documents using soft clustering over word vectors. However, SCDV disregards the multi-sense nature of words, and it also suffers from the curse of higher dimensionality. In this work, we address these shortcomings and propose SCDV-MS. SCDV-MS utilizes multi-sense word embeddings and learns a lower dimensional manifold. Through extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets, we show that SCDV-MS embeddings outperform previous state-of-the-art embeddings on multi-class and multi-label text categorization tasks. Furthermore, SCDV-MS embeddings are more efficient than SCDV in terms of time and space complexity on textual classification tasks.
Logo-2K+: A Large-Scale Logo Dataset for Scalable Logo Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Logo classification has gained increasing attention for its various applications, such as copyright infringement detection, product recommendation and contextual advertising. Compared with other types of object images, the real-world logo images have larger variety in logo appearance and more complexity in their background. Therefore, recognizing the logo from images is challenging. To support efforts towards scalable logo classification task, we have curated a dataset, Logo-2K+, a new large-scale publicly available real-world logo dataset with 2,341 categories and 167,140 images. Compared with existing popular logo datasets, such as FlickrLogos-32 and LOGO-Net, Logo-2K+ has more comprehensive coverage of logo categories and larger quantity of logo images. Moreover, we propose a Discriminative Region Navigation and Augmentation Network (DRNA-Net), which is capable of discovering more informative logo regions and augmenting these image regions for logo classification. DRNA-Net consists of four sub-networks: the navigator sub-network first selected informative logo-relevant regions guided by the teacher sub-network, which can evaluate its confidence belonging to the ground-truth logo class. The data augmentation sub-network then augments the selected regions via both region cropping and region dropping. Finally, the scrutinizer sub-network fuses features from augmented regions and the whole image for logo classification. Comprehensive experiments on Logo-2K+ and other three existing benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed method. Logo-2K+ and the proposed strong baseline DRNA-Net are expected to further the development of scalable logo image recognition, and the Logo-2K+ dataset can be found at https://github.com/msn199959/Logo-2k-plus-Dataset.
VITON-GAN: Virtual Try-on Image Generator Trained with Adversarial Loss
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Generating a virtual try-on image from in-shop clothing images and a model person's snapshot is a challenging task because the human body and clothes have high flexibility in their shapes. In this paper, we develop a Virtual Try-on Generative Adversarial Network (VITON-GAN), that generates virtual try-on images using images of in-shop clothing and a model person. This method enhances the quality of the generated image when occlusion is present in a model person's image (e.g., arms crossed in front of the clothes) by adding an adversarial mechanism in the training pipeline.
Visual Dialogue State Tracking for Question Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

GuessWhat?! is a visual dialogue task between a guesser and an oracle. The guesser aims to locate an object supposed by the oracle oneself in an image by asking a sequence of Yes/No questions. Asking proper questions with the progress of dialogue is vital for achieving successful final guess. As a result, the progress of dialogue should be properly represented and tracked. Previous models for question generation pay less attention on the representation and tracking of dialogue states, and therefore are prone to asking low quality questions such as repeated questions. This paper proposes visual dialogue state tracking (VDST) based method for question generation. A visual dialogue state is defined as the distribution on objects in the image as well as representations of objects. Representations of objects are updated with the change of the distribution on objects. An object-difference based attention is used to decode new question. The distribution on objects is updated by comparing the question-answer pair and objects. Experimental results on GuessWhat?! dataset show that our model significantly outperforms existing methods and achieves new state-of-the-art performance. It is also noticeable that our model reduces the rate of repeated questions from more than 50% to 21.9% compared with previous state-of-the-art methods.
Copy-Move Forgery Classification via Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

In the current era, image manipulation is becoming increasingly easier, yielding more natural looking images, owing to the modern tools in image processing and computer vision techniques. The task of the segregation of forged images has become very challenging. To tackle such problems, publicly available datasets are insufficient. In this paper, we propose to create a synthetic forged dataset using deep semantic image inpainting algorithm. Furthermore, we use an unsupervised domain adaptation network to detect copy-move forgery in images. Our approach can be helpful in those cases, where the classification of data is unavailable.
Towards Good Practices for Multi-Person Pose Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Multi-Person Pose Estimation is an interesting yet challenging task in computer vision. In this paper, we conduct a series of refinements with the MSPN and PoseFix Networks, and empirically evaluate their impact on the final model performance through ablation studies. By taking all the refinements, we achieve 78.7 on the COCO test-dev dataset and 76.3 on the COCO test-challenge dataset.
Streetify: Using Street View Imagery And Deep Learning For Urban Streets Development
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

The classification of streets on road networks has been focused on the vehicular transportational features of streets such as arterials, major roads, minor roads and so forth based on their transportational use. City authorities on the other hand have been shifting to more urban inclusive planning of streets, encompassing the side use of a street combined with the transportational features of a street. In such classification schemes, streets are labeled for example as commercial throughway, residential neighborhood, park etc. This modern approach to urban planning has been adopted by major cities such as the city of San Francisco, the states of Florida and Pennsylvania among many others. Currently, the process of labeling streets according to their contexts is manual and hence is tedious and time consuming. In this paper, we propose an approach to collect and label imagery data then deploy advancements in computer vision towards modern urban planning. We collect and label street imagery then train deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) to perform the classification of street context. We show that CNN models can perform well achieving accuracies in the 81% to 87%, we then visualize samples from the embedding space of streets using the t-SNE method and apply class activation mapping methods to interpret the features in street imagery contributing to output classification from a model.
Optimal repairing schemes for Reed-Solomon codes with alphabet sizes linear in lengths under the rack-aware model
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

In modern practical data centers, storage nodes are usually organized into equally sized groups, which is called racks. The cost of cross-rack communication is much more expensive compared with the intra-rack communication cost. The codes for this system are called rack-aware regenerating codes. Similar to standard minimum storage regenerating (MSR) codes, it is a challenging task to construct minimum storage rack-aware regenerating (MSRR) codes achieving the cut-set bound. The known constructions of MSRR codes achieving the cut-set bound give codes with alphabet size $q$ exponential in the code length $n$, more precisely, $q=Ω(\exp(n^n))$. The main contribution of this paper is to provide explicit construction of MSRR codes achieving the cut-set bound with the alphabet size linear in $n$. To achieve this goal, we first present a general framework to repair Reed-Solomon codes. It turns out that the known repairing schemes of Reed-Solomon codes can be realized under our general framework. Several techniques are used in this paper. In particular, we use the degree decent method to repair failure node. This technique allows us to get Reed-Solomon codes with the alphabet size linear in $n$. The other techniques include choice of good polynomials. Note that good polynomials are used for construction of locally repairable code in literature. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time in this paper to make use of good polynomials for constructions of regenerating codes.
DARB: A Density-Aware Regular-Block Pruning for Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

The rapidly growing parameter volume of deep neural networks (DNNs) hinders the artificial intelligence applications on resource constrained devices, such as mobile and wearable devices. Neural network pruning, as one of the mainstream model compression techniques, is under extensive study to reduce the number of parameters and computations. In contrast to irregular pruning that incurs high index storage and decoding overhead, structured pruning techniques have been proposed as the promising solutions. However, prior studies on structured pruning tackle the problem mainly from the perspective of facilitating hardware implementation, without analyzing the characteristics of sparse neural networks. The neglect on the study of sparse neural networks causes inefficient trade-off between regularity and pruning ratio. Consequently, the potential of structurally pruning neural networks is not sufficiently mined. In this work, we examine the structural characteristics of the irregularly pruned weight matrices, such as the diverse redundancy of different rows, the sensitivity of different rows to pruning, and the positional characteristics of retained weights. By leveraging the gained insights as a guidance, we first propose the novel block-max weight masking (BMWM) method, which can effectively retain the salient weights while imposing high regularity to the weight matrix. As a further optimization, we propose a density-adaptive regular-block (DARB) pruning that outperforms prior structured pruning work with high pruning ratio and decoding efficiency. Our experimental results show that DARB can achieve 13$\times$ to 25$\times$ pruning ratio, which are 2.8$\times$ to 4.3$\times$ improvements than the state-of-the-art counterparts on multiple neural network models and tasks. Moreover, DARB can achieve 14.3$\times$ decoding efficiency than block pruning with higher pruning ratio.
Simultaneous Region Localization and Hash Coding for Fine-grained Image Retrieval
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Fine-grained image hashing is a challenging problem due to the difficulties of discriminative region localization and hash code generation. Most existing deep hashing approaches solve the two tasks independently. While these two tasks are correlated and can reinforce each other. In this paper, we propose a deep fine-grained hashing to simultaneously localize the discriminative regions and generate the efficient binary codes. The proposed approach consists of a region localization module and a hash coding module. The region localization module aims to provide informative regions to the hash coding module. The hash coding module aims to generate effective binary codes and give feedback for learning better localizer. Moreover, to better capture subtle differences, multi-scale regions at different layers are learned without the need of bounding-box/part annotations. Extensive experiments are conducted on two public benchmark fine-grained datasets. The results demonstrate significant improvements in the performance of our method relative to other fine-grained hashing algorithms.
Super-Nyquist Rateless Coding for Intersymbol Interference Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

A rateless transmission architecture is developed for communication over Gaussian intersymbol interference channels, based on the concept of super-Nyquist (SNQ) signaling. In such systems, the signaling rate is chosen significantly higher than the Nyquist rate of the system. We show that such signaling, when used in conjunction with good "off-the-shelf" base codes, simple linear redundancy, and minimum mean-square error decision feedback equalization, results in capacity-approaching, low-complexity rateless codes for the time-varying intersymbol-interference channel. Constructions for both single-input / single-output (SISO) and multi-input / multi-output (MIMO) ISI channels are developed.
Poison as a Cure: Detecting & Neutralizing Variable-Sized Backdoor Attacks in Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Deep learning models have recently shown to be vulnerable to backdoor poisoning, an insidious attack where the victim model predicts clean images correctly but classifies the same images as the target class when a trigger poison pattern is added. This poison pattern can be embedded in the training dataset by the adversary. Existing defenses are effective under certain conditions such as a small size of the poison pattern, knowledge about the ratio of poisoned training samples or when a validated clean dataset is available. Since a defender may not have such prior knowledge or resources, we propose a defense against backdoor poisoning that is effective even when those prerequisites are not met. It is made up of several parts: one to extract a backdoor poison signal, detect poison target and base classes, and filter out poisoned from clean samples with proven guarantees. The final part of our defense involves retraining the poisoned model on a dataset augmented with the extracted poison signal and corrective relabeling of poisoned samples to neutralize the backdoor. Our approach has shown to be effective in defending against backdoor attacks that use both small and large-sized poison patterns on nine different target-base class pairs from the CIFAR10 dataset.
A novel method for identifying the deep neural network model with the Serial Number
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Deep neural network (DNN) with the state of art performance has emerged as a viable and lucrative business service. However, those impressive performances require a large number of computational resources, which comes at a high cost for the model creators. The necessity for protecting DNN models from illegal reproducing and distribution appears salient now. Recently, trigger-set watermarking, breaking the white-box restriction, relying on adversarial training pre-defined (incorrect) labels for crafted inputs, and subsequently using them to verify the model authenticity, has been the main topic of DNN ownership verification. While these methods have successfully demonstrated robustness against removal attacks, few are effective against the tampering attacks from competitors forging the fake watermarks and dogging in the manager. In this paper, we put forth a new framework of the trigger-set watermark by embedding a unique Serial Number (relatedness less original labels) to the deep neural network for model ownership identification, which is both robust to model pruning and resist to tampering attacks. Experiment results demonstrate that the DNN Serial Number only incurs slight accuracy degradation of the original performance and is valid for ownership verification.
Adaptive Activation Network and Functional Regularization for Efficient and Flexible Deep Multi-Task Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Multi-task learning (MTL) is a common paradigm that seeks to improve the generalization performance of task learning by training related tasks simultaneously. However, it is still a challenging problem to search the flexible and accurate architecture that can be shared among multiple tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning model called Task Adaptive Activation Network (TAAN) that can automatically learn the optimal network architecture for MTL. The main principle of TAAN is to derive flexible activation functions for different tasks from the data with other parameters of the network fully shared. We further propose two functional regularization methods that improve the MTL performance of TAAN. The improved performance of both TAAN and the regularization methods is demonstrated by comprehensive experiments.
Communication, Distortion, and Randomness in Metric Voting
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2019
Year: 2019

In distortion-based analysis of social choice rules over metric spaces, one assumes that all voters and candidates are jointly embedded in a common metric space. Voters rank candidates by non-decreasing distance. The mechanism, receiving only this ordinal (comparison) information, should select a candidate approximately minimizing the sum of distances from all voters. It is known that while the Copeland rule and related rules guarantee distortion at most 5, many other standard voting rules, such as Plurality, Veto, or $k$-approval, have distortion growing unboundedly in the number $n$ of candidates. Plurality, Veto, or $k$-approval with small $k$ require less communication from the voters than all deterministic social choice rules known to achieve constant distortion. This motivates our study of the tradeoff between the distortion and the amount of communication in deterministic social choice rules. We show that any one-round deterministic voting mechanism in which each voter communicates only the candidates she ranks in a given set of $k$ positions must have distortion at least $\frac{2n-k}{k}$; we give a mechanism achieving an upper bound of $O(n/k)$, which matches the lower bound up to a constant. For more general communication-bounded voting mechanisms, in which each voter communicates $b$ bits of information about her ranking, we show a slightly weaker lower bound of $Ω(n/b)$ on the distortion. For randomized mechanisms, it is known that Random Dictatorship achieves expected distortion strictly smaller than 3, almost matching a lower bound of $3-\frac{2}{n}$ for any randomized mechanism that only receives each voter's top choice. We close this gap, by giving a simple randomized social choice rule which only uses each voter's first choice, and achieves expected distortion $3-\frac{2}{n}$.
Topological computing of arrangements with (co)chains
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2019
Year: 2019

In many areas of applied geometric/numeric computational mathematics, including geo-mapping, computer vision, computer graphics, finite element analysis, medical imaging, geometric design, and solid modeling, one has to compute incidences, adjacencies and ordering of cells, generally using disparate and often incompatible data structures and algorithms. This paper introduces computational topology algorithms to discover the 2D/3D space partition induced by a collection of geometric objects of dimension 1D/2D, respectively. Methods and language are those of basic geometric and algebraic topology. Only sparse vectors and matrices are used to compute both spaces and maps, i.e., the chain complex, from dimension zero to three.