OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Learning Saliency Prediction From Sparse Fixation Pixel Map
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Ground truth for saliency prediction datasets consists of two types of map data: fixation pixel map which records the human eye movements on sample images, and fixation blob map generated by performing gaussian blurring on the corresponding fixation pixel map. Current saliency approaches perform prediction by directly pixel-wise regressing the input image into saliency map with fixation blob as ground truth, yet learning saliency from fixation pixel map is not explored. In this work, we propose a first-of-its-kind approach of learning saliency prediction from sparse fixation pixel map, and a novel loss function for training from such sparse fixation. We utilize clustering to extract sparse fixation pixel from the raw fixation pixel map, and add a max-pooling transformation on the output to avoid false penalty between sparse outputs and labels caused by nearby but non-overlapping saliency pixels when calculating loss. This approach provides a novel perspective for achieving saliency prediction. We evaluate our approach over multiple benchmark datasets, and achieve competitive performance in terms of multiple metrics comparing with state-of-the-art saliency methods.
Barriers in Seamless QoS for Mobile Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

For seamless QoS, it is important that all the stakeholders, such as the hosts, applications, access networks, routers, and other middleboxes, follow a single protocol and they trust each other. In this article, we investigate the participation of these entities in providing QoS over wireless networks in light of DiffServ QoS architecture. We initiate the study by investigating WiFi and Cellular network traces, which further motivates us a thorough investigation of these stakeholders with empirical measurements. Our findings are the followings. (i) Modern mobile VoIP applications request QoS to the network. (ii) While the operating systems support basic APIs requesting QoS, application developers either are not aware of such requirements or they misuse the architecture for improved QoS. (iii) Wireless access networks rewrite the QoS requirements at the edge and enforce the rest of the routers or hops to provide best effort service. (iv) QoS requests are also nullified by the secure tunnels. (v) Although the access networks may nullify the QoS requests, the performance of the network still may differentiate traffic. We further emphasize that although the latest 5G network considers DiffServ QoS framework, it cannot deal with the challenges posed by the privacy related applications. Network neutrality is going to pose similar challenges.
Online Evaluation for Effective Web Service Development
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2018
Year: 2018

Development of the majority of the leading web services and software products today is generally guided by data-driven decisions based on evaluation that ensures a steady stream of updates, both in terms of quality and quantity. Large internet companies use online evaluation on a day-to-day basis and at a large scale. The number of smaller companies using A/B testing in their development cycle is also growing. Web development across the board strongly depends on quality of experimentation platforms. In this tutorial, we overview state-of-the-art methods underlying everyday evaluation pipelines at some of the leading Internet companies. Software engineers, designers, analysts, service or product managers --- beginners, advanced specialists, and researchers --- can learn how to make web service development data-driven and do it effectively.
Context-Patch Face Hallucination Based on Thresholding Locality-constrained Representation and Reproducing Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Face hallucination is a technique that reconstruct high-resolution (HR) faces from low-resolution (LR) faces, by using the prior knowledge learned from HR/LR face pairs. Most state-of-the-arts leverage position-patch prior knowledge of human face to estimate the optimal representation coefficients for each image patch. However, they focus only the position information and usually ignore the context information of image patch. In addition, when they are confronted with misalignment or the Small Sample Size (SSS) problem, the hallucination performance is very poor. To this end, this study incorporates the contextual information of image patch and proposes a powerful and efficient context-patch based face hallucination approach, namely Thresholding Locality-constrained Representation and Reproducing learning (TLcR-RL). Under the context-patch based framework, we advance a thresholding based representation method to enhance the reconstruction accuracy and reduce the computational complexity. To further improve the performance of the proposed algorithm, we propose a promotion strategy called reproducing learning. By adding the estimated HR face to the training set, which can simulates the case that the HR version of the input LR face is present in the training set, thus iteratively enhancing the final hallucination result. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed TLcR-RL method achieves a substantial increase in the hallucinated results, both subjectively and objectively. Additionally, the proposed framework is more robust to face misalignment and the SSS problem, and its hallucinated HR face is still very good when the LR test face is from the real-world. The MATLAB source code is available at https://github.com/junjun-jiang/TLcR-RL
A3Net: Adversarial-and-Attention Network for Machine Reading Comprehension
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we introduce Adversarial-and-attention Network (A3Net) for Machine Reading Comprehension. This model extends existing approaches from two perspectives. First, adversarial training is applied to several target variables within the model, rather than only to the inputs or embeddings. We control the norm of adversarial perturbations according to the norm of original target variables, so that we can jointly add perturbations to several target variables during training. As an effective regularization method, adversarial training improves robustness and generalization of our model. Second, we propose a multi-layer attention network utilizing three kinds of high-efficiency attention mechanisms. Multi-layer attention conducts interaction between question and passage within each layer, which contributes to reasonable representation and understanding of the model. Combining these two contributions, we enhance the diversity of dataset and the information extracting ability of the model at the same time. Meanwhile, we construct A3Net for the WebQA dataset. Results show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art models (improving Fuzzy Score from 73.50% to 77.0%).
Convolutional Neural Network for Trajectory Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Predicting trajectories of pedestrians is quintessential for autonomous robots which share the same environment with humans. In order to effectively and safely interact with humans, trajectory prediction needs to be both precise and computationally efficient. In this work, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN) based human trajectory prediction approach. Unlike more recent LSTM-based moles which attend sequentially to each frame, our model supports increased parallelism and effective temporal representation. The proposed compact CNN model is faster than the current approaches yet still yields competitive results.
GuessTheKarma: A Game to Assess Social Rating Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2018
Year: 2018

Popularity systems, like Twitter retweets, Reddit upvotes, and Pinterest pins have the potential to guide people toward posts that others liked. That, however, creates a feedback loop that reduces their informativeness: items marked as more popular get more attention, so that additional upvotes and retweets may simply reflect the increased attention and not independent information about the fraction of people that like the items. How much information remains? For example, how confident can we be that more people prefer item A to item B if item A had hundreds of upvotes on Reddit and item B had only a few? We investigate using an Internet game called GuessTheKarma that collects independent preference judgments (N=20,674) for 400 pairs of images, approximately 50 per pair. Unlike the rating systems that dominate social media services, GuessTheKarma is devoid of social and ranking effects that influence ratings. Overall, Reddit scores were not very good predictors of the true population preferences for items as measured by GuessTheKarma: the image with higher score was preferred by a majority of independent raters only 68% of the time. However, when one image had a low score and the other was one of the highest scoring in its subreddit, the higher scoring image was preferred nearly 90% of the time by the majority of independent raters. Similarly, Imgur view counts for the images were poor predictors except when there were orders of magnitude differences between the pairs. We conclude that popularity systems marked by feedback loops may convey a strong signal about population preferences, but only when comparing items that received vastly different popularity scores.
Exhaustive generation for permutations avoiding a (colored) regular sets of patterns
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2018
Year: 2018

Despite the fact that the field of pattern avoiding permutations has been skyrocketing over the last two decades, there are very few exhaustive generating algorithms for such classes of permutations. In this paper we introduce the notions of regular and colored regular set of forbidden patterns, which are particular cases of right-justified sets of forbidden patterns. We show the (colored) regularity of several sets of forbidden patterns (some of them involving variable length patterns) and we derive a general framework for the efficient generation of permutations avoiding them. The obtained generating algorithms are based on succession functions, a notion which is a byproduct of the ECO method introduced in the context of enumeration and random generation of combinatorial objects by Barcucci et al. in 1999, and developed later by Bacchelli et al. in 2004, for instance. For some classes of permutations falling under our general framework, the corresponding counting sequences are classical in combinatorics, such as Pell, Fibonacci, Catalan, Schröder and binomial transform of Padovan sequence.
A high order hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin method for incompressible miscible displacement in heterogeneous media
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2018
Year: 2018

We present a new method for approximating solutions to the incompressible miscible displacement problem in porous media. At the discrete level, the coupled nonlinear system has been split into two linear systems that are solved sequentially. The method is based on a hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin method for the Darcy flow, which produces a mass--conservative flux approximation, and a hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin method for the transport equation. The resulting method is high order accurate. Due to the implicit treatment of the system of partial differential equations, we observe computationally that no slope limiters are needed. Numerical experiments are provided that show that the method converges optimally and is robust for highly heterogeneous porous media in 2D and 3D.
A comparative study of top-k high utility itemset mining methods
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2018
Year: 2018

High Utility Itemset (HUI) mining problem is one of the important problems in the data mining literature. The problem offers greater flexibility to a decision maker to incorporate her/his notion of utility into the pattern mining process. The problem, however, requires the decision maker to choose a minimum utility threshold value for discovering interesting patterns. This is quite challenging due to the disparate itemset characteristics and their utility distributions. In order to address this issue, Top-K High Utility Itemset (THUI) mining problem was introduced in the literature. THUI mining problem is primarily a variant of the HUI mining problem that allows a decision maker to specify the desired number of HUIs rather than the minimum utility threshold value. Several algorithms have been introduced in the literature to efficiently mine top-k HUIs. This paper systematically analyses the top-k HUI mining methods in the literature, describes the methods, and performs a comparative analysis. The data structures, threshold raising strategies, and pruning strategies adopted for efficient top-k HUI mining are also presented and analysed. Furthermore, the paper reviews several extensions of the top-k HUI mining problem such as data stream mining, sequential pattern mining and on-shelf utility mining. The paper is likely to be useful for researchers to examine the key methods in top-k HUI mining, evaluate the gaps in literature, explore new research opportunities and enhance the state-of-the-art in high utility pattern mining.
More is Less: Perfectly Secure Oblivious Algorithms in the Multi-Server Setting
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

The problem of Oblivious RAM (ORAM) has traditionally been studied in a single-server setting, but more recently the multi-server setting has also been considered. Yet it is still unclear whether the multi-server setting has any inherent advantages, e.g., whether the multi-server setting can be used to achieve stronger security goals or provably better efficiency than is possible in the single-server case. In this work, we construct a perfectly secure 3-server ORAM scheme that outperforms the best known single-server scheme by a logarithmic factor. In the process, we also show, for the first time, that there exist specific algorithms for which multiple servers can overcome known lower bounds in the single-server setting.
Handwriting styles: benchmarks and evaluation metrics
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Evaluating the style of handwriting generation is a challenging problem, since it is not well defined. It is a key component in order to develop in developing systems with more personalized experiences with humans. In this paper, we propose baseline benchmarks, in order to set anchors to estimate the relative quality of different handwriting style methods. This will be done using deep learning techniques, which have shown remarkable results in different machine learning tasks, learning classification, regression, and most relevant to our work, generating temporal sequences. We discuss the challenges associated with evaluating our methods, which is related to evaluation of generative models in general. We then propose evaluation metrics, which we find relevant to this problem, and we discuss how we evaluate the evaluation metrics. In this study, we use IRON-OFF dataset. To the best of our knowledge, there is no work done before in generating handwriting (either in terms of methodology or the performance metrics), our in exploring styles using this dataset.
Error Performance of Various QAM Schemes for Nonrenegerative Cooperative MIMO Network with Transmit Antenna Selection
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, performance of a dual-hop cooperative multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) system is analyzed over Rayleigh faded channels. For the considered system model, non-regenerative MIMO scheme with transmit antenna selection strategy (TAS) is employed. In this scheme, a single transmit antenna which maximizes the total received signal power at the receiver is selected for transmission. Useful insights from average symbol error rate for various quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) schemes such as general order hexagonal QAM (HQAM), general order rectangular QAM (RQAM) and 32-cross QAM (XQAM) are drawn. Monte-Carlo simulations are performed to validate the derived analytical expressions.
Treewidth of display graphs: bounds, brambles and applications
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2018
Year: 2018

Phylogenetic trees and networks are leaf-labelled graphs used to model evolution. Display graphs are created by identifying common leaf labels in two or more phylogenetic trees or networks. The treewidth of such graphs is bounded as a function of many common dissimilarity measures between phylogenetic trees and this has been leveraged in fixed parameter tractability results. Here we further elucidate the properties of display graphs and their interaction with treewidth. We show that it is NP-hard to recognize display graphs, but that display graphs of bounded treewidth can be recognized in linear time. Next we show that if a phylogenetic network displays (i.e. topologically embeds) a phylogenetic tree, the treewidth of their display graph is bounded by a function of the treewidth of the original network (and also by various other parameters). In fact, using a bramble argument we show that this treewidth bound is sharp up to an additive term of 1. We leverage this bound to give an FPT algorithm, parameterized by treewidth, for determining whether a network displays a tree, which is an intensively-studied problem in the field. We conclude with a discussion on the future use of display graphs and treewidth in phylogenetics.
Faster Balanced Clusterings in High Dimension
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2018
Year: 2018

The problem of constrained clustering has attracted significant attention in the past decades. In this paper, we study the balanced $k$-center, $k$-median, and $k$-means clustering problems where the size of each cluster is constrained by the given lower and upper bounds. The problems are motivated by the applications in processing large-scale data in high dimension. Existing methods often need to compute complicated matchings (or min cost flows) to satisfy the balance constraint, and thus suffer from high complexities especially in high dimension. We develop an effective framework for the three balanced clustering problems to address this issue, and our method is based on a novel spatial partition idea in geometry. For the balanced $k$-center clustering, we provide a $4$-approximation algorithm that improves the existing approximation factors; for the balanced $k$-median and $k$-means clusterings, our algorithms yield constant and $(1+ε)$-approximation factors with any $ε>0$. More importantly, our algorithms achieve linear or nearly linear running times when $k$ is a constant, and significantly improve the existing ones. Our results can be easily extended to metric balanced clusterings and the running times are sub-linear in terms of the complexity of $n$-point metric.
Compressive Hyperspectral Imaging: Fourier Transform Interferometry meets Single Pixel Camera
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

This paper introduces a single-pixel HyperSpectral (HS) imaging framework based on Fourier Transform Interferometry (FTI). By combining a space-time coding of the light illumination with partial interferometric observations of a collimated light beam (observed by a single pixel), our system benefits from (i) reduced measurement rate and light-exposure of the observed object compared to common (Nyquist) FTI imagers, and (ii) high spectral resolution as desirable in, e.g., Fluorescence Spectroscopy (FS). From the principles of compressive sensing with multilevel sampling, our method leverages the sparsity "in level" of FS data, both in the spectral and the spatial domains. This allows us to optimize the space-time light coding using time-modulated Hadamard patterns. We confirm the effectiveness of our approach by a few numerical experiments.
Matrix Difference in Pose-Graph Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2018
Year: 2018

Pose-Graph optimization is a crucial component of many modern SLAM systems. Most prominent state of the art systems address this problem by iterative non-linear least squares. Both number of iterations and convergence basin of these approaches depend on the error functions used to describe the problem. The smoother and more convex the error function with respect to perturbations of the state variables, the better the least-squares solver will perform. In this paper we propose an alternative error function obtained by removing some non-linearities from the standard used one - i.e. the geodesic error function. Comparative experiments conducted on common benchmarking datasets confirm that our function is more robust to noise that affects the rotational component of the pose measurements and, thus, exhibits a larger convergence basin than the geodesic. Furthermore, its implementation is relatively easy compared to the geodesic distance. This property leads to rather simple derivatives and nice numerical properties of the Jacobians resulting from the effective computation of the quadratic approximation used by Gauss-Newton algorithm.
Targeted Nonlinear Adversarial Perturbations in Images and Videos
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

We introduce a method for learning adversarial perturbations targeted to individual images or videos. The learned perturbations are found to be sparse while at the same time containing a high level of feature detail. Thus, the extracted perturbations allow a form of object or action recognition and provide insights into what features the studied deep neural network models consider important when reaching their classification decisions. From an adversarial point of view, the sparse perturbations successfully confused the models into misclassifying, although the perturbed samples still belonged to the same original class by visual examination. This is discussed in terms of a prospective data augmentation scheme. The sparse yet high-quality perturbations may also be leveraged for image or video compression.
Étude de l'informativité des transcriptions : une approche basée sur le résumé automatique
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper we propose a new approach to evaluate the informativeness of transcriptions coming from Automatic Speech Recognition systems. This approach, based in the notion of informativeness, is focused on the framework of Automatic Text Summarization performed over these transcriptions. At a first glance we estimate the informative content of the various automatic transcriptions, then we explore the capacity of Automatic Text Summarization to overcome the informative loss. To do this we use an automatic summary evaluation protocol without reference (based on the informative content), which computes the divergence between probability distributions of different textual representations: manual and automatic transcriptions and their summaries. After a set of evaluations this analysis allowed us to judge both the quality of the transcriptions in terms of informativeness and to assess the ability of automatic text summarization to compensate the problems raised during the transcription phase.
Aesthetic Discrimination of Graph Layouts
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2018
Year: 2018

This paper addresses the following basic question: given two layouts of the same graph, which one is more aesthetically pleasing? We propose a neural network-based discriminator model trained on a labeled dataset that decides which of two layouts has a higher aesthetic quality. The feature vectors used as inputs to the model are based on known graph drawing quality metrics, classical statistics, information-theoretical quantities, and two-point statistics inspired by methods of condensed matter physics. The large corpus of layout pairs used for training and testing is constructed using force-directed drawing algorithms and the layouts that naturally stem from the process of graph generation. It is further extended using data augmentation techniques. The mean prediction accuracy of our model is 95.70%, outperforming discriminators based on stress and on the linear combination of popular quality metrics by a statistically significant margin.