OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Dual Attention MobDenseNet(DAMDNet) for Robust 3D Face Alignment
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

3D face alignment of monocular images is a crucial process in the recognition of faces with disguise.3D face reconstruction facilitated by alignment can restore the face structure which is helpful in detcting disguise interference.This paper proposes a dual attention mechanism and an efficient end-to-end 3D face alignment framework.We build a stable network model through Depthwise Separable Convolution, Densely Connected Convolutional and Lightweight Channel Attention Mechanism. In order to enhance the ability of the network model to extract the spatial features of the face region, we adopt Spatial Group-wise Feature enhancement module to improve the representation ability of the network. Different loss functions are applied jointly to constrain the 3D parameters of a 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) and its 3D vertices. We use a variety of data enhancement methods and generate large virtual pose face data sets to solve the data imbalance problem. The experiments on the challenging AFLW,AFLW2000-3D datasets show that our algorithm significantly improves the accuracy of 3D face alignment. Our experiments using the field DFW dataset show that DAMDNet exhibits excellent performance in the 3D alignment and reconstruction of challenging disguised faces.The model parameters and the complexity of the proposed method are also reduced significantly.The code is publicly available at https:// github.com/LeiJiangJNU/DAMDNet
Systematic Analysis of Image Generation using GANs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Generative Adversarial Networks have been crucial in the developments made in unsupervised learning in recent times. Exemplars of image synthesis from text or other images, these networks have shown remarkable improvements over conventional methods in terms of performance. Trained on the adversarial training philosophy, these networks aim to estimate the potential distribution from the real data and then use this as input to generate the synthetic data. Based on this fundamental principle, several frameworks can be generated that are paragon implementations in several real-life applications such as art synthesis, generation of high resolution outputs and synthesis of images from human drawn sketches, to name a few. While theoretically GANs present better results and prove to be an improvement over conventional methods in many factors, the implementation of these frameworks for dedicated applications remains a challenge. This study explores and presents a taxonomy of these frameworks and their use in various image to image synthesis and text to image synthesis applications. The basic GANs, as well as a variety of different niche frameworks, are critically analyzed. The advantages of GANs for image generation over conventional methods as well their disadvantages amongst other frameworks are presented. The future applications of GANs in industries such as healthcare, art and entertainment are also discussed.
Contact Inertial Odometry: Collisions are your Friends
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

Autonomous exploration of unknown environments with aerial vehicles remains a challenge, especially in perceptually degraded conditions. Dust, fog, or a lack of visual or LiDAR-based features results in severe difficulties for state estimation algorithms, which failure can be catastrophic. In this work, we show that it is indeed possible to navigate in such conditions without any exteroceptive sensing by exploiting collisions instead of treating them as constraints. To this end, we present a novel contact-based inertial odometry (CIO) algorithm: it uses estimated external forces with the environment to detect collisions and generate pseudo-measurements of the robot velocity, enabling autonomous flight. To fully exploit this method, we first perform modeling of a hybrid ground and aerial vehicle which can withstand collisions at moderate speeds, for which we develop an external wrench estimation algorithm. Then, we present our CIO algorithm and develop a reactive planner and control law which encourage exploration by bouncing off obstacles. All components of this framework are validated in hardware experiments and we demonstrate that a quadrotor can traverse a cluttered environment using an IMU only. This work can be used on drones to recover from visual inertial odometry failure or on micro-drones that do not have the payload capacity to carry cameras, LiDARs or powerful computers.
Cloudy with high chance of DBMS: A 10-year prediction for Enterprise-Grade ML
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2019
Year: 2019

Machine learning (ML) has proven itself in high-value web applications such as search ranking and is emerging as a powerful tool in a much broader range of enterprise scenarios including voice recognition and conversational understanding for customer support, autotuning for videoconferencing, intelligent feedback loops in large-scale sysops, manufacturing and autonomous vehicle management, complex financial predictions, just to name a few. Meanwhile, as the value of data is increasingly recognized and monetized, concerns about securing valuable data and risks to individual privacy have been growing. Consequently, rigorous data management has emerged as a key requirement in enterprise settings. How will these trends (ML growing popularity, and stricter data governance) intersect? What are the unmet requirements for applying ML in enterprise settings? What are the technical challenges for the DB community to solve? In this paper, we present our vision of how ML and database systems are likely to come together, and early steps we take towards making this vision a reality.
HM-NAS: Efficient Neural Architecture Search via Hierarchical Masking
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

The use of automatic methods, often referred to as Neural Architecture Search (NAS), in designing neural network architectures has recently drawn considerable attention. In this work, we present an efficient NAS approach, named HM- NAS, that generalizes existing weight sharing based NAS approaches. Existing weight sharing based NAS approaches still adopt hand-designed heuristics to generate architecture candidates. As a consequence, the space of architecture candidates is constrained in a subset of all possible architectures, making the architecture search results sub-optimal. HM-NAS addresses this limitation via two innovations. First, HM-NAS incorporates a multi-level architecture encoding scheme to enable searching for more flexible network architectures. Second, it discards the hand-designed heuristics and incorporates a hierarchical masking scheme that automatically learns and determines the optimal architecture. Compared to state-of-the-art weight sharing based approaches, HM-NAS is able to achieve better architecture search performance and competitive model evaluation accuracy. Without the constraint imposed by the hand-designed heuristics, our searched networks contain more flexible and meaningful architectures that existing weight sharing based NAS approaches are not able to discover.
Functional advantages of an adaptive Theory of Mind for robotics: a review of current architectures
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

Great advancements have been achieved in the field of robotics, however, main challenges remain, including building robots with an adaptive Theory of Mind (ToM). In the present paper, seven current robotic architectures for human-robot interactions were described as well as four main functional advantages of equipping robots with an adaptive ToM. The aim of the present paper was to determine in which way and how often ToM features are integrated in the architectures analyzed, and if they provide robots with the associated functional advantages. Our assessment shows that different methods are used to implement ToM features in robotic architectures. Furthermore, while a ToM for false-belief understanding and tracking is often built in social robotic architectures, a ToM for proactivity, active perception and learning is less common. Nonetheless, progresses towards better adaptive ToM features in robots are warranted to provide them with full access to the advantages of having a ToM resembling that of humans.
Simple $k$-Planar Graphs are Simple $(k+1)$-Quasiplanar
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2019
Year: 2019

A simple topological graph is $k$-quasiplanar ($k\geq 2$) if it contains no $k$ pairwise crossing edges, and $k$-planar if no edge is crossed more than $k$ times. In this paper, we explore the relationship between $k$-planarity and $k$-quasiplanarity to show that, for $k \geq 2$, every $k$-planar simple topological graph can be transformed into a $(k+1)$-quasiplanar simple topological graph.
UPI-Net: Semantic Contour Detection in Placental Ultrasound
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Semantic contour detection is a challenging problem that is often met in medical imaging, of which placental image analysis is a particular example. In this paper, we investigate utero-placental interface (UPI) detection in 2D placental ultrasound images by formulating it as a semantic contour detection problem. As opposed to natural images, placental ultrasound images contain specific anatomical structures thus have unique geometry. We argue it would be beneficial for UPI detectors to incorporate global context modelling in order to reduce unwanted false positive UPI predictions. Our approach, namely UPI-Net, aims to capture long-range dependencies in placenta geometry through lightweight global context modelling and effective multi-scale feature aggregation. We perform a subject-level 10-fold nested cross-validation on a placental ultrasound database (4,871 images with labelled UPI from 49 scans). Experimental results demonstrate that, without introducing considerable computational overhead, UPI-Net yields the highest performance in terms of standard contour detection metrics, compared to other competitive benchmarks.
SCALABLE INTERNETWORKING: Final Technical Report
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

This document describes the work completed at the University of California, Santa Cruz under the project Scalable Internetworking sponsored by ARPA under Contract No. F19628-93-C-0175. This report covers work performed from 1 April 1993 to 31 December 1995. Results on routing and multicasting for large-scale internets are summarized. The technical material discussed assumes familiarity with the content of our proposal and previous quarterly reports submitted in this project.
Exploring Reproducibility and FAIR Principles in Data Science Using Ecological Niche Modeling as a Case Study
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2019
Year: 2019

Reproducibility is a fundamental requirement of the scientific process since it enables outcomes to be replicated and verified. Computational scientific experiments can benefit from improved reproducibility for many reasons, including validation of results and reuse by other scientists. However, designing reproducible experiments remains a challenge and hence the need for developing methodologies and tools that can support this process. Here, we propose a conceptual model for reproducibility to specify its main attributes and properties, along with a framework that allows for computational experiments to be findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. We present a case study in ecological niche modeling to demonstrate and evaluate the implementation of this framework.
Monitoring stance towards vaccination in Twitter messages
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

We developed a system to automatically classify stance towards vaccination in Twitter messages, with a focus on messages with a negative stance. Such a system makes it possible to monitor the ongoing stream of messages on social media, offering actionable insights into public hesitance with respect to vaccination. For Dutch Twitter messages that mention vaccination-related key terms, we annotated their stance and feeling in relation to vaccination (provided that they referred to this topic). Subsequently, we used these coded data to train and test different machine learning set-ups. With the aim to best identify messages with a negative stance towards vaccination, we compared set-ups at an increasing dataset size and decreasing reliability, at an increasing number of categories to distinguish, and with different classification algorithms. We found that Support Vector Machines trained on a combination of strictly and laxly labeled data with a more fine-grained labeling yielded the best result, at an F1-score of 0.36 and an Area under the ROC curve of 0.66, outperforming a rule-based sentiment analysis baseline that yielded an F1-score of 0.25 and an Area under the ROC curve of 0.57. The outcomes of our study indicate that stance prediction by a computerized system only is a challenging task. Our analysis of the data and behavior of our system suggests that an approach is needed in which the use of a larger training dataset is combined with a setting in which a human-in-the-loop provides the system with feedback on its predictions.
Signified chromatic number of grids is at most 9
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2019
Year: 2019

A signified graph is a pair $(G, Σ)$ where $G$ is a graph, and $Σ$ is a set of edges marked with '$-$'. Other edges are marked with '$+$'. A signified coloring of the signified graph $(G, Σ)$ is a homomorphism into a signified graph $(H, Δ)$. The signified chromatic number of the signified graph $(G, Σ)$ is the minimum order of $H$. In this paper we show that for every 2-dimensional grid $(G, Σ)$ there exists homomorphism from $(G, Σ)$ into the signed Paley graphs $SP_9$. Hence signified chromatic number of the signified grids is at most 9. This improves upper bound on this number obtained recently by Bensmail.
Towards Robust Learning-Based Pose Estimation of Noncooperative Spacecraft
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

This work presents a novel Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture and a training procedure to enable robust and accurate pose estimation of a noncooperative spacecraft. First, a new CNN architecture is introduced that has scored a fourth place in the recent Pose Estimation Challenge hosted by Stanford's Space Rendezvous Laboratory (SLAB) and the Advanced Concepts Team (ACT) of the European Space Agency (ESA). The proposed architecture first detects the object by regressing a 2D bounding box, then a separate network regresses the 2D locations of the known surface keypoints from an image of the target cropped around the detected Region-of-Interest (RoI). In a single-image pose estimation problem, the extracted 2D keypoints can be used in conjunction with corresponding 3D model coordinates to compute relative pose via the Perspective-n-Point (PnP) problem. These keypoint locations have known correspondences to those in the 3D model, since the CNN is trained to predict the corners in a pre-defined order, allowing for bypassing the computationally expensive feature matching processes. This work also introduces and explores the texture randomization to train a CNN for spaceborne applications. Specifically, Neural Style Transfer (NST) is applied to randomize the texture of the spacecraft in synthetically rendered images. It is shown that using the texture-randomized images of spacecraft for training improves the network's performance on spaceborne images without exposure to them during training. It is also shown that when using the texture-randomized spacecraft images during training, regressing 3D bounding box corners leads to better performance on spaceborne images than regressing surface keypoints, as NST inevitably distorts the spacecraft's geometric features to which the surface keypoints have closer relation.
Big Data Analytics for Manufacturing Internet of Things: Opportunities, Challenges and Enabling Technologies
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2019
Year: 2019

The recent advances in information and communication technology (ICT) have promoted the evolution of conventional computer-aided manufacturing industry to smart data-driven manufacturing. Data analytics in massive manufacturing data can extract huge business values while can also result in research challenges due to the heterogeneous data types, enormous volume and real-time velocity of manufacturing data. This paper provides an overview on big data analytics in manufacturing Internet of Things (MIoT). This paper first starts with a discussion on necessities and challenges of big data analytics in manufacturing data of MIoT. Then, the enabling technologies of big data analytics of manufacturing data are surveyed and discussed. Moreover, this paper also outlines the future directions in this promising area.
Efficient Resource Allocation for Relay-Assisted Computation Offloading in Mobile Edge Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

In this article, we consider the problem of relay assisted computation offloading (RACO), in which user A aims to share the results of computational tasks with another user B through wireless exchange over a relay platform equipped with mobile edge computing capabilities, referred to as a mobile edge relay server (MERS). To support the computation offloading, we propose a hybrid relaying (HR) approach employing two orthogonal frequency bands, where the amplify-and-forward scheme is used in one band to exchange computational results, while the decode-and-forward scheme is used in the other band to transfer the unprocessed tasks. The motivation behind the proposed HR scheme for RACO is to adapt the allocation of computing and communication resources both to dynamic user requirements and to diverse computational tasks. Within this framework, we seek to minimize the weighted sum of the execution delay and the energy consumption in the RACO system by jointly optimizing the computation offloading ratio, the bandwidth allocation, the processor speeds, as well as the transmit power levels of both user $A$ and the MERS, under practical constraints on the available computing and communication resources. The resultant problem is formulated as a non-differentiable and nonconvex optimization program with highly coupled constraints. By adopting a series of transformations and introducing auxiliary variables, we first convert this problem into a more tractable yet equivalent form. We then develop an efficient iterative algorithm for its solution based on the concave-convex procedure. By exploiting the special structure of this problem, we also propose a simplified algorithm based on the inexact block coordinate descent method, with reduced computational complexity. Finally, we present numerical results that illustrate the advantages of the proposed algorithms over state-of-the-art benchmark schemes.
Beyond The Wall Street Journal: Anchoring and Comparing Discourse Signals across Genres
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

Recent research on discourse relations has found that they are cued not only by discourse markers (DMs) but also by other textual signals and that signaling information is indicative of genres. While several corpora exist with discourse relation signaling information such as the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB, Prasad et al. 2008) and the Rhetorical Structure Theory Signalling Corpus (RST-SC, Das and Taboada 2018), they both annotate the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) section of the Penn Treebank (PTB, Marcus et al. 1993), which is limited to the news domain. Thus, this paper adapts the signal identification and anchoring scheme (Liu and Zeldes, 2019) to three more genres, examines the distribution of signaling devices across relations and genres, and provides a taxonomy of indicative signals found in this dataset.
Low-Complexity Linear Equalizers for OTFS Exploiting Two-Dimensional Fast Fourier Transform
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

Orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) modulation can effectively convert a doubly dispersive channel into an almost non-fading channel in the delay-Doppler domain. However, one critical issue for OTFS is the very high complexity of equalizers. In this letter, we first reveal the doubly block circulant feature of OTFS channel represented in the delay-Doppler domain. By exploiting this unique feature, we further propose zero-forcing (ZF) and minimum mean squared error (MMSE) equalizers that can be efficiently implemented with the two-dimensional fast Fourier transform. The complexity of our proposed equalizers is gracefully reduced from $\mathcal{O}\left(\left(NM\right)^{3}\right)$ to $\mathcal{O}\left(NM\mathrm{log_{2}}\left(NM\right)\right)$, where $N$ and $M$ are the number of OTFS symbols and subcarriers, respectively. Analysis and simulation results show that compared with other existing linear equalizers for OTFS, our proposed linear equalizers enjoy a much lower computational complexity without any performance loss.
A Sketch-Based System for Semantic Parsing
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

This paper presents our semantic parsing system for the evaluation task of open domain semantic parsing in NLPCC 2019. Many previous works formulate semantic parsing as a sequence-to-sequence(seq2seq) problem. Instead, we treat the task as a sketch-based problem in a coarse-to-fine(coarse2fine) fashion. The sketch is a high-level structure of the logical form exclusive of low-level details such as entities and predicates. In this way, we are able to optimize each part individually. Specifically, we decompose the process into three stages: the sketch classification determines the high-level structure while the entity labeling and the matching network fill in missing details. Moreover, we adopt the seq2seq method to evaluate logical form candidates from an overall perspective. The co-occurrence relationship between predicates and entities contribute to the reranking as well. Our submitted system achieves the exactly matching accuracy of 82.53% on full test set and 47.83% on hard test subset, which is the 3rd place in NLPCC 2019 Shared Task 2. After optimizations for parameters, network structure and sampling, the accuracy reaches 84.47% on full test set and 63.08% on hard test subset(Our code and data are available at https://github.com/zechagl/NLPCC2019-Semantic-Parsing).
Logic and the $2$-Simplicial Transformer
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

We introduce the $2$-simplicial Transformer, an extension of the Transformer which includes a form of higher-dimensional attention generalising the dot-product attention, and uses this attention to update entity representations with tensor products of value vectors. We show that this architecture is a useful inductive bias for logical reasoning in the context of deep reinforcement learning.
All You Need is Ratings: A Clustering Approach to Synthetic Rating Datasets Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2019
Year: 2019

The public availability of collections containing user preferences is of vital importance for performing offline evaluations in the field of recommender systems. However, the number of rating datasets is limited because of the costs required for their creation and the fear of violating the privacy of the users by sharing them. For this reason, numerous research attempts investigated the creation of synthetic collections of ratings using generative approaches. Nevertheless, these datasets are usually not reliable enough for conducting an evaluation campaign. In this paper, we propose a method for creating synthetic datasets with a configurable number of users that mimic the characteristics of already existing ones. We empirically validated the proposed approach by exploiting the synthetic datasets for evaluating different recommenders and by comparing the results with the ones obtained using real datasets.