OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Dynamic Region Division for Adaptive Learning Pedestrian Counting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Accurate pedestrian counting algorithm is critical to eliminate insecurity in the congested public scenes. However, counting pedestrians in crowded scenes often suffer from severe perspective distortion. In this paper, basing on the straight-line double region pedestrian counting method, we propose a dynamic region division algorithm to keep the completeness of counting objects. Utilizing the object bounding boxes obtained by YoloV3 and expectation division line of the scene, the boundary for nearby region and distant one is generated under the premise of retaining whole head. Ulteriorly, appropriate learning models are applied to count pedestrians in each obtained region. In the distant region, a novel inception dilated convolutional neural network is proposed to solve the problem of choosing dilation rate. In the nearby region, YoloV3 is used for detecting the pedestrian in multi-scale. Accordingly, the total number of pedestrians in each frame is obtained by fusing the result in nearby and distant regions. A typical subway pedestrian video dataset is chosen to conduct experiment in this paper. The result demonstrate that proposed algorithm is superior to existing machine learning based methods in general performance.
Deep Hashing for Signed Social Network Embedding
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2019
Year: 2019

Network embedding is a promising way of network representation, facilitating many signed social network processing and analysis tasks such as link prediction and node classification. Recently, feature hashing has been adopted in several existing embedding algorithms to improve the efficiency, which has obtained a great success. However, the existing feature hashing based embedding algorithms only consider the positive links in signed social networks. Intuitively, negative links can also help improve the performance. Thus, in this paper, we propose a novel deep hashing method for signed social network embedding by considering simultaneously positive and negative links. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method performs better than several state-of-the-art baselines through link prediction task over two real-world signed social networks.
Self-supervised Data Bootstrapping for Deep Optical Character Recognition of Identity Documents
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

The essential task of verifying person identities at airports and national borders is very time consuming. To accelerate it, optical character recognition for identity documents (IDs) using dictionaries is not appropriate due to high variability of the text content in IDs, e.g., individual street names or surnames. Additionally, no properties of the used fonts in IDs are known. Therefore, we propose an iterative self-supervised bootstrapping approach using a smart strategy to mine real character data from IDs. In combination with synthetically generated character data, the real data is used to train efficient convolutional neural networks for character classification serving a practical runtime as well as a high accuracy. On a dataset with 74 character classes, we achieve an average class-wise accuracy of 99.4 %. In contrast, if we would apply a classifier trained only using synthetic data, the accuracy is reduced to 58.1 %. Finally, we show that our whole proposed pipeline outperforms an established open-source framework
Exploring the relations between net benefits of IT projects and CIOs' perception of quality of software development disciplines
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2019
Year: 2019

Software development enterprises are under consistent pressure to improve their management techniques and development processes. These are comprised of several disciplines like requirements acquisition, design, coding, testing, etc. that must be continuously improved and individually tailored to suit specific software development project. This paper presents an evaluation approach that enables the enterprises to increase development process net benefits by improving disciplines' quality and increasing developers' satisfaction. Our approach builds on Kano's model of quality. Based on an empirical study of top 1000 enterprises from Slovenia we find that application of software development methodologies in individual development disciplines significantly relates to net benefits of IT projects. The results show that different types of Kano quality are present in individual disciplines. Enterprises should be cautious when altering must-be quality disciplines like testing or deployment as they can significantly disrupt the established routines, cause great dissatisfaction between developers and significantly reduce benefits. On the other hand, changing the attractive quality disciplines like requirements acquisition can notably increase developers' satisfaction and benefits but is less likely to disrupt the established routines.
VISON: An Ontology-Based Approach for Software Visualization Tool Discoverability
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2019
Year: 2019

Although many tools have been presented in the research literature of software visualization, there is little evidence of their adoption. To choose a suitable visualization tool, practitioners need to analyze various characteristics of tools such as their supported software concerns and level of maturity. Indeed, some tools can be prototypes for which the lifespan is expected to be short, whereas others can be fairly mature products that are maintained for a longer time. Although such characteristics are often described in papers, we conjecture that practitioners willing to adopt software visualizations require additional support to discover suitable visualization tools. In this paper, we elaborate on our efforts to provide such support. To this end, we systematically analyzed research papers in the literature of software visualization and curated a catalog of 70 available tools that employ various visualization techniques to support the analysis of multiple software concerns. We further encapsulate these characteristics in an ontology. VISON, our software visualization ontology, captures these semantics as concepts and relationships. We report on early results of usage scenarios that demonstrate how the ontology can support (i) developers to find suitable tools for particular development concerns, and (ii) researchers who propose new software visualization tools to identify a baseline tool for a controlled experiment.
Towards Deep Learning-Based EEG Electrode Detection Using Automatically Generated Labels
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Electroencephalography (EEG) allows for source measurement of electrical brain activity. Particularly for inverse localization, the electrode positions on the scalp need to be known. Often, systems such as optical digitizing scanners are used for accurate localization with a stylus. However, the approach is time-consuming as each electrode needs to be scanned manually and the scanning systems are expensive. We propose using an RGBD camera to directly track electrodes in the images using deep learning methods. Studying and evaluating deep learning methods requires large amounts of labeled data. To overcome the time-consuming data annotation, we generate a large number of ground-truth labels using a robotic setup. We demonstrate that deep learning-based electrode detection is feasible with a mean absolute error of 5.69 +- 6.1mm and that our annotation scheme provides a useful environment for studying deep learning methods for electrode detection.
How do Developers Promote Open Source Projects?
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2019
Year: 2019

Open source projects have an increasing importance on modern software development. For this reason, these projects, as usual with commercial software projects, should make use of promotion channels to communicate and establish contact with users and contributors. In this article, we study the channels used to promote a set of 100 popular GitHub projects. First, we reveal that Twitter, user meetings, and blogs are the most common promotion channels used by the studied projects. Second, we report a major difference between the studied projects and a random sample of projects, regarding the use of the investigated promotion channels. Third, we show the importance of a popular news aggregation site (Hacker News) on the promotion of open source. We conclude by presenting a set of practical recommendation to open source project managers and leaders, regarding the promotion of their projects.
Deep Dexterous Grasping of Novel Objects from a Single View
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

Dexterous grasping of a novel object given a single view is an open problem. This paper makes several contributions to its solution. First, we present a simulator for generating and testing dexterous grasps. Second we present a data set, generated by this simulator, of 2.4 million simulated dexterous grasps of variations of 294 base objects drawn from 20 categories. Third, we present a basic architecture for generation and evaluation of dexterous grasps that may be trained in a supervised manner. Fourth, we present three different evaluative architectures, employing ResNet-50 or VGG16 as their visual backbone. Fifth, we train, and evaluate seventeen variants of generative-evaluative architectures on this simulated data set, showing improvement from 69.53% grasp success rate to 90.49%. Finally, we present a real robot implementation and evaluate the four most promising variants, executing 196 real robot grasps in total. We show that our best architectural variant achieves a grasp success rate of 87.8% on real novel objects seen from a single view, improving on a baseline of 57.1%.
Neural Text Generation with Unlikelihood Training
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Neural text generation is a key tool in natural language applications, but it is well known there are major problems at its core. In particular, standard likelihood training and decoding leads to dull and repetitive outputs. While some post-hoc fixes have been proposed, in particular top-$k$ and nucleus sampling, they do not address the fact that the token-level probabilities predicted by the model are poor. In this paper we show that the likelihood objective itself is at fault, resulting in a model that assigns too much probability to sequences containing repeats and frequent words, unlike those from the human training distribution. We propose a new objective, unlikelihood training, which forces unlikely generations to be assigned lower probability by the model. We show that both token and sequence level unlikelihood training give less repetitive, less dull text while maintaining perplexity, giving superior generations using standard greedy or beam search. According to human evaluations, our approach with standard beam search also outperforms the currently popular decoding methods of nucleus sampling or beam blocking, thus providing a strong alternative to existing techniques.
Repetitive Reprediction Deep Decipher for Semi-Supervised Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Most recent semi-supervised deep learning (deep SSL) methods used a similar paradigm: use network predictions to update pseudo-labels and use pseudo-labels to update network parameters iteratively. However, they lack theoretical support and cannot explain why predictions are good candidates for pseudo-labels. In this paper, we propose a principled end-to-end framework named deep decipher (D2) for SSL. Within the D2 framework, we prove that pseudo-labels are related to network predictions by an exponential link function, which gives a theoretical support for using predictions as pseudo-labels. Furthermore, we demonstrate that updating pseudo-labels by network predictions will make them uncertain. To mitigate this problem, we propose a training strategy called repetitive reprediction (R2). Finally, the proposed R2-D2 method is tested on the large-scale ImageNet dataset and outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 5 percentage points.
Methodological Issues in Observational Studies
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2019
Year: 2019

Background. Starting from the 1960s, practitioners and researchers have looked for ways to empirically investigate new technologies such as inspecting the effectiveness of new methods, tools, or practices. With this purpose, the empirical software engineering domain started to identify different empirical methods, borrowing them from various domains such as medicine, biology, and psychology. Nowadays, a variety of empirical methods are commonly applied in software engineering, ranging from controlled and quasi-controlled experiments to case studies, from systematic literature reviews to the newly introduced multivocal literature reviews. However, to date, the only available method for proving any cause-effect relationship are controlled experiments. Objectives. The goal of the thesis is introducing new methodologies for studying causality in empirical software engineering. Methods. Other fields use observational studies for proving causality. They allow observing the effect of a risk factor and testing this without trying to change who is or is not exposed to it. As an example, with an observational study it is possible to observe the effect of pollution on the growth of a forest or the effect of different factors on development productivity without the need of waiting years for the forest to grow or exposing developers to a specific treatment. Conclusion. In this thesis, we aim at defining a methodology for applying observational studies in empirical software engineering, providing guidelines on how to conduct such studies, how to analyze the data, and how to report the studies themselves.
Exploiting Multi-domain Visual Information for Fake News Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2019
Year: 2019

The increasing popularity of social media promotes the proliferation of fake news. With the development of multimedia technology, fake news attempts to utilize multimedia contents with images or videos to attract and mislead readers for rapid dissemination, which makes visual contents an important part of fake news. Fake-news images, images attached in fake news posts,include not only fake images which are maliciously tampered but also real images which are wrongly used to represent irrelevant events. Hence, how to fully exploit the inherent characteristics of fake-news images is an important but challenging problem for fake news detection. In the real world, fake-news images may have significantly different characteristics from real-news images at both physical and semantic levels, which can be clearly reflected in the frequency and pixel domain, respectively. Therefore, we propose a novel framework Multi-domain Visual Neural Network (MVNN) to fuse the visual information of frequency and pixel domains for detecting fake news. Specifically, we design a CNN-based network to automatically capture the complex patterns of fake-news images in the frequency domain; and utilize a multi-branch CNN-RNN model to extract visual features from different semantic levels in the pixel domain. An attention mechanism is utilized to fuse the feature representations of frequency and pixel domains dynamically. Extensive experiments conducted on a real-world dataset demonstrate that MVNN outperforms existing methods with at least 9.2% in accuracy, and can help improve the performance of multimodal fake news detection by over 5.2%.
SDM-NET: Deep Generative Network for Structured Deformable Mesh
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2019
Year: 2019

We introduce SDM-NET, a deep generative neural network which produces structured deformable meshes. Specifically, the network is trained to generate a spatial arrangement of closed, deformable mesh parts, which respect the global part structure of a shape collection, e.g., chairs, airplanes, etc. Our key observation is that while the overall structure of a 3D shape can be complex, the shape can usually be decomposed into a set of parts, each homeomorphic to a box, and the finer-scale geometry of the part can be recovered by deforming the box. The architecture of SDM-NET is that of a two-level variational autoencoder (VAE). At the part level, a PartVAE learns a deformable model of part geometries. At the structural level, we train a Structured Parts VAE (SP-VAE), which jointly learns the part structure of a shape collection and the part geometries, ensuring a coherence between global shape structure and surface details. Through extensive experiments and comparisons with the state-of-the-art deep generative models of shapes, we demonstrate the superiority of SDM-NET in generating meshes with visual quality, flexible topology, and meaningful structures, which benefit shape interpolation and other subsequently modeling tasks.
Icebreaker: Element-wise Active Information Acquisition with Bayesian Deep Latent Gaussian Model
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper we introduce the ice-start problem, i.e., the challenge of deploying machine learning models when only little or no training data is initially available, and acquiring each feature element of data is associated with costs. This setting is representative for the real-world machine learning applications. For instance, in the health-care domain, when training an AI system for predicting patient metrics from lab tests, obtaining every single measurement comes with a high cost. Active learning, where only the label is associated with a cost does not apply to such problem, because performing all possible lab tests to acquire a new training datum would be costly, as well as unnecessary due to redundancy. We propose Icebreaker, a principled framework to approach the ice-start problem. Icebreaker uses a full Bayesian Deep Latent Gaussian Model (BELGAM) with a novel inference method. Our proposed method combines recent advances in amortized inference and stochastic gradient MCMC to enable fast and accurate posterior inference. By utilizing BELGAM's ability to fully quantify model uncertainty, we also propose two information acquisition functions for imputation and active prediction problems. We demonstrate that BELGAM performs significantly better than the previous VAE (Variational autoencoder) based models, when the data set size is small, using both machine learning benchmarks and real-world recommender systems and health-care applications. Moreover, based on BELGAM, Icebreaker further improves the performance and demonstrate the ability to use minimum amount of the training data to obtain the highest test time performance.
Loop Closure Detection in Closed Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

Low cost robots, such as vacuum cleaners or lawn mowers employ simplistic and often random navigation policies. Although a large number of sophisticated mapping and planning approaches exist, they require additional sensors like LIDAR sensors, cameras or time of flight sensors. In this work, we propose a loop closure detection method based only on odometry data which can be generated using low-range or binary signal sensors together with simple wall following techniques. We show how to include the detected loop closing constraints into a pose graph formulation such that standard pose graph optimization techniques can be used for map estimation. We evaluate our map estimate and loop closure approach using both, simulation and a real lawn mower in complex and realistic environments. Our results demonstrate that our approach generates accurate map estimates on the basis of odometry data only. We further show that our assumption about the discriminative nature of neighboring poses in the pose graph is solid, even under large odometry noise. These improved map estimates provide the basis for smart navigation policies in low cost robots and extends their abilities to goal-directed behavior like pick and place or complete coverage path planning in realistic environments.
Modeling Personality vs. Modeling Personalidad: In-the-wild Mobile Data Analysis in Five Countries Suggests Cultural Impact on Personality Models
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2019
Year: 2019

Sensor data collected from smartphones provides the possibility to passively infer a user's personality traits. Such models can be used to enable technology personalization, while contributing to our substantive understanding of how human behavior manifests in daily life. A significant challenge in personality modeling involves improving the accuracy of personality inferences, however, research has yet to assess and consider the cultural impact of users' country of residence on model replicability. We collected mobile sensing data and self-reported Big Five traits from 166 participants (54 women and 112 men) recruited in five different countries (UK, Spain, Colombia, Peru, and Chile) for 3 weeks. We developed machine learning based personality models using culturally diverse datasets -- representing different countries -- and we show that such models can achieve state-of-the-art accuracy when tested in new countries, ranging from 63% (Agreeableness) to 71% (Extraversion) of classification accuracy. Our results indicate that using country-specific datasets can improve the classification accuracy between 3% and 7% for Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. We show that these findings hold regardless of gender and age balance in the dataset. Interestingly, using gender- or age- balanced datasets as well as gender-separated datasets improve trait prediction by up to 17%. We unpack differences in personality models across the five countries, highlight the most predictive data categories (location, noise, unlocks, accelerometer), and provide takeaways to technologists and social scientists interested in passive personality assessment.
Non-deterministic weighted automata evaluated over Markov chains
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2019
Year: 2019

We present the first study of non-deterministic weighted automata under probabilistic semantics. In this semantics words are random events, generated by a Markov chain, and functions computed by weighted automata are random variables. We consider the probabilistic questions of computing the expected value and the cumulative distribution for such random variables. The exact answers to the probabilistic questions for non-deterministic automata can be irrational and are uncomputable in general. To overcome this limitation, we propose approximation algorithms for the probabilistic questions, which work in exponential time in the size of the automaton and polynomial time in the size of the Markov chain and the given precision. We apply this result to show that non-deterministic automata can be effectively determinised with respect to the standard deviation metric.
Matrix Nets: A New Deep Architecture for Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

We present Matrix Nets (xNets), a new deep architecture for object detection. xNets map objects with different sizes and aspect ratios into layers where the sizes and the aspect ratios of the objects within their layers are nearly uniform. Hence, xNets provide a scale and aspect ratio aware architecture. We leverage xNets to enhance key-points based object detection. Our architecture achieves mAP of 47.8 on MS COCO, which is higher than any other single-shot detector while using half the number of parameters and training 3x faster than the next best architecture.
Playing log(N)-Questions over Sentences
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

We propose a two-agent game wherein a questioner must be able to conjure discerning questions between sentences, incorporate responses from an answerer, and keep track of a hypothesis state. The questioner must be able to understand the information required to make its final guess, while also being able to reason over the game's text environment based on the answerer's responses. We experiment with an end-to-end model where both agents can learn simultaneously to play the game, showing that simultaneously achieving high game accuracy and producing meaningful questions can be a difficult trade-off.