OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Multi-Similarity Loss with General Pair Weighting for Deep Metric Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

A family of loss functions built on pair-based computation have been proposed in the literature which provide a myriad of solutions for deep metric learning. In this paper, we provide a general weighting framework for understanding recent pair-based loss functions. Our contributions are three-fold: (1) we establish a General Pair Weighting (GPW) framework, which casts the sampling problem of deep metric learning into a unified view of pair weighting through gradient analysis, providing a powerful tool for understanding recent pair-based loss functions; (2) we show that with GPW, various existing pair-based methods can be compared and discussed comprehensively, with clear differences and key limitations identified; (3) we propose a new loss called multi-similarity loss (MS loss) under the GPW, which is implemented in two iterative steps (i.e., mining and weighting). This allows it to fully consider three similarities for pair weighting, providing a more principled approach for collecting and weighting informative pairs. Finally, the proposed MS loss obtains new state-of-the-art performance on four image retrieval benchmarks, where it outperforms the most recent approaches, such as ABE\cite{Kim_2018_ECCV} and HTL by a large margin: 60.6% to 65.7% on CUB200, and 80.9% to 88.0% on In-Shop Clothes Retrieval dataset at Recall@1. Code is available at https://github.com/MalongTech/research-ms-loss.
Finding a latent k-simplex in O(k . nnz(data)) time via Subset Smoothing
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper we show that a large class of Latent variable models, such as Mixed Membership Stochastic Block(MMSB) Models, Topic Models, and Adversarial Clustering, can be unified through a geometric perspective, replacing model specific assumptions and algorithms for individual models. The geometric perspective leads to the formulation: \emph{find a latent $k-$ polytope $K$ in ${\bf R}^d$ given $n$ data points, each obtained by perturbing a latent point in $K$}. This problem does not seem to have been considered in the literature. The most important contribution of this paper is to show that the latent $k-$polytope problem admits an efficient algorithm under deterministic assumptions which naturally hold in Latent variable models considered in this paper. ur algorithm runs in time $O^*(k\; \mbox{nnz})$ matching the best running time of algorithms in special cases considered here and is better when the data is sparse, as is the case in applications. An important novelty of the algorithm is the introduction of \emph{subset smoothed polytope}, $K'$, the convex hull of the ${n\choose δn}$ points obtained by averaging all $δn$ subsets of the data points, for a given $δ\in (0,1)$. We show that $K$ and $K'$ are close in Hausdroff distance. Among the consequences of our algorithm are the following: (a) MMSB Models and Topic Models: the first quasi-input-sparsity time algorithm for parameter estimation for $k \in O^*(1)$, (b) Adversarial Clustering: In $k-$means, if, an adversary is allowed to move many data points from each cluster an arbitrary amount towards the convex hull of the centers of other clusters, our algorithm still estimates cluster centers well.
A Personalized Preference Learning Framework for Caching in Mobile Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

This paper comprehensively studies a content-centric mobile network based on a preference learning framework, where each mobile user is equipped with a finite-size cache. We consider a practical scenario where each user requests a content file according to its own preferences, which is motivated by the existence of heterogeneity in file preferences among different users. Under our model, we consider a single-hop-based device-to-device (D2D) content delivery protocol and characterize the average hit ratio for the following two file preference cases: the personalized file preferences and the common file preferences. By assuming that the model parameters such as user activity levels, user file preferences, and file popularity are unknown and thus need to be inferred, we present a collaborative filtering (CF)-based approach to learn these parameters. Then, we reformulate the hit ratio maximization problems into a submodular function maximization and propose two computationally efficient algorithms including a greedy approach to efficiently solve the cache allocation problems. We analyze the computational complexity of each algorithm. Moreover, we analyze the corresponding level of the approximation that our greedy algorithm can achieve compared to the optimal solution. Using a real-world dataset, we demonstrate that the proposed framework employing the personalized file preferences brings substantial gains over its counterpart for various system parameters.
Asymptotic Outage Analysis of Spatially Correlated Rayleigh MIMO Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

The outage performance of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technique has received intense attention in order to ensure the reliability requirement for mission-critical machine-type communication (cMTC) applications. In this paper, the outage probability is asymptotically studied for MIMO channels to thoroughly investigate the transmission reliability. To fully capture the spatial correlation effects, the MIMO fading channel matrix is modelled according to three types of Kronecker correlation structure, i.e., independent, semi-correlated and full-correlated Rayleigh MIMO channels. The outage probabilities under all three Kronecker models are expressed as representations of the weighted sum of the generalized Fox's H functions. The simple analytical results empower the asymptotic outage analyses at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), which are conducted not only to reveal helpful insights into understanding the behavior of fading effects, but also to offer useful design guideline for MIMO configurations. Particularly, the asymptotic outage probability is proved to be a monotonically increasing and convex function of the transmission rate. In the absence of the channel state information (CSI), the transmitter tends to equally allocate the total transmit power among its antennas to enhance the system reliability especially in high SNR regime. In the end, the analytical results are validated through extensive numerical experiments.
Geometric Network Creation Games
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2020
Year: 2020

Network Creation Games are a well-known approach for explaining and analyzing the structure, quality and dynamics of real-world networks like the Internet and other infrastructure networks which evolved via the interaction of selfish agents without a central authority. In these games selfish agents which correspond to nodes in a network strategically buy incident edges to improve their centrality. However, past research on these games has only considered the creation of networks with unit-weight edges. In practice, e.g. when constructing a fiber-optic network, the choice of which nodes to connect and also the induced price for a link crucially depends on the distance between the involved nodes and such settings can be modeled via edge-weighted graphs. We incorporate arbitrary edge weights by generalizing the well-known model by Fabrikant et al.[PODC'03] to edge-weighted host graphs and focus on the geometric setting where the weights are induced by the distances in some metric space. In stark contrast to the state-of-the-art for the unit-weight version, where the Price of Anarchy is conjectured to be constant and where resolving this is a major open problem, we prove a tight non-constant bound on the Price of Anarchy for the metric version and a slightly weaker upper bound for the non-metric case. Moreover, we analyze the existence of equilibria, the computational hardness and the game dynamics for several natural metrics. The model we propose can be seen as the game-theoretic analogue of a variant of the classical Network Design Problem. Thus, low-cost equilibria of our game correspond to decentralized and stable approximations of the optimum network design.
Consistent User-Traffic Allocation and Load Balancing in Mobile Edge Caching
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

Cache-equipped Base-Stations (CBSs) is an attractive alternative to offload the rapidly growing backhaul traffic in a mobile network. New 5G technology and dense femtocell enable one user to connect to multiple base-stations simultaneously. Practical implementation requires the caches in BSs to be regarded as a cache server, but few of the existing works considered how to offload traffic, or how to schedule HTTP requests to CBSs. In this work, we propose a DNS-based HTTP traffic allocation framework. It schedules user traffic among multiple CBSs by DNS resolution, with the consideration of load-balancing, traffic allocation consistency and scheduling granularity of DNS. To address these issues, we formulate the user-traffic allocation problem in DNS-based mobile edge caching, aiming at maximizing QoS gain and allocation consistency while maintaining load balance. Then we present a simple greedy algorithm which gives a more consistent solution when user-traffic changes dynamically. Theoretical analysis proves that it is within 3/4 of the optimal solution. Extensive evaluations in numerical and trace-driven situations show that the greedy algorithm can avoid about 50% unnecessary shift in user-traffic allocation, yield more stable cache hit ratio and balance the load between CBSs without losing much of the QoS gain.
Level-set based design of Wang tiles for modelling complex microstructures
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2020
Year: 2020

Microstructural geometry plays a critical role in the response of heterogeneous materials. Consequently, methods for generating microstructural samples are increasingly crucial to advanced numerical analyses. We extend Sonon et al.'s unified framework, developed originally for generating particulate and foam-like microstructural geometries of Periodic Unit Cells, to non-periodic microstructural representations based on the formalism of Wang tiles. This formalism has been recently proposed in order to generalize the Periodic Unit Cell approach, enabling a fast synthesis of arbitrarily large, stochastic microstructural samples from a handful of domains with predefined compatibility constraints. However, a robust procedure capable of designing complex, three-dimensional, foam-like and cellular morphologies of Wang tiles has not yet been proposed. This contribution fills the gap by significantly broadening the applicability of the tiling concept. Since the original Sonon et al.'s framework builds on a random sequential addition of particles enhanced with an implicit representation of particle boundaries by the level-set field, we first devise an analysis based on a connectivity graph of a tile set, resolving the question where a particle should be copied when it intersects a tile boundary. Next, we introduce several modifications to the original algorithm that are necessary to ensure microstructural compatibility in the generalized periodicity setting of Wang tiles. Having established a universal procedure for generating tile morphologies, we compare strictly aperiodic and stochastic sets with the same cardinality in terms of reducing the artificial periodicity in reconstructed microstructural samples. We demonstrate the superiority of the vertex-defined tile sets for two-dimensional problems and illustrate the capabilities of the algorithm with two- and three-dimensional examples.
Approximation and Uncertainty Quantification of Systems with Arbitrary Parameter Distributions using Weighted Leja Interpolation
Venue: arXiv cs.NA 2020
Year: 2020

Approximation and uncertainty quantification methods based on Lagrange interpolation are typically abandoned in cases where the probability distributions of one or more {system} parameters are not normal, uniform, or closely related {distributions}, due to the computational issues that arise when one wishes to define interpolation nodes for general distributions. This paper examines the use of the recently introduced weighted Leja nodes for that purpose. Weighted Leja interpolation rules are presented, along with a dimension-adaptive sparse interpolation algorithm, to be employed in the case of high-dimensional input uncertainty. The performance and reliability of the suggested approach is verified by four numerical experiments, where the respective models feature extreme value and truncated normal parameter distributions. Furthermore, the suggested approach is compared with a well-established polynomial chaos method and found to be either comparable or superior in terms of approximation and statistics estimation accuracy.
Audio-Visual Model Distillation Using Acoustic Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we investigate how to learn rich and robust feature representations for audio classification from visual data and acoustic images, a novel audio data modality. Former models learn audio representations from raw signals or spectral data acquired by a single microphone, with remarkable results in classification and retrieval. However, such representations are not so robust towards variable environmental sound conditions. We tackle this drawback by exploiting a new multimodal labeled action recognition dataset acquired by a hybrid audio-visual sensor that provides RGB video, raw audio signals, and spatialized acoustic data, also known as acoustic images, where the visual and acoustic images are aligned in space and synchronized in time. Using this richer information, we train audio deep learning models in a teacher-student fashion. In particular, we distill knowledge into audio networks from both visual and acoustic image teachers. Our experiments suggest that the learned representations are more powerful and have better generalization capabilities than the features learned from models trained using just single-microphone audio data.
Cross-Lingual Sentiment Quantification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

\emph{Sentiment Quantification} (i.e., the task of estimating the relative frequency of sentiment-related classes -- such as \textsf{Positive} and \textsf{Negative} -- in a set of unlabelled documents) is an important topic in sentiment analysis, as the study of sentiment-related quantities and trends across a population is often of higher interest than the analysis of individual instances. In this work we propose a method for \emph{Cross-Lingual Sentiment Quantification}, the task of performing sentiment quantification when training documents are available for a source language $\mathcal{S}$ but not for the target language $\mathcal{T}$ for which sentiment quantification needs to be performed. Cross-lingual sentiment quantification (and cross-lingual \emph{text} quantification in general) has never been discussed before in the literature; we establish baseline results for the binary case by combining state-of-the-art quantification methods with methods capable of generating cross-lingual vectorial representations of the source and target documents involved. We present experimental results obtained on publicly available datasets for cross-lingual sentiment classification; the results show that the presented methods can perform cross-lingual sentiment quantification with a surprising level of accuracy.
Automated Design of Deep Learning Methods for Biomedical Image Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Biomedical imaging is a driver of scientific discovery and core component of medical care, currently stimulated by the field of deep learning. While semantic segmentation algorithms enable 3D image analysis and quantification in many applications, the design of respective specialised solutions is non-trivial and highly dependent on dataset properties and hardware conditions. We propose nnU-Net, a deep learning framework that condenses the current domain knowledge and autonomously takes the key decisions required to transfer a basic architecture to different datasets and segmentation tasks. Without manual tuning, nnU-Net surpasses most specialised deep learning pipelines in 19 public international competitions and sets a new state of the art in the majority of the 49 tasks. The results demonstrate a vast hidden potential in the systematic adaptation of deep learning methods to different datasets. We make nnU-Net publicly available as an open-source tool that can effectively be used out-of-the-box, rendering state of the art segmentation accessible to non-experts and catalyzing scientific progress as a framework for automated method design.
CaseNet: Content-Adaptive Scale Interaction Networks for Scene Parsing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Objects at different spatial positions in an image exhibit different scales. Adaptive receptive fields are expected to capture suitable ranges of context for accurate pixel level semantic prediction. Recently, atrous convolution with different dilation rates has been used to generate features of multi-scales through several branches which are then fused for prediction. However, there is a lack of explicit interaction among the branches of different scales to adaptively make full use of the contexts. In this paper, we propose a Content-Adaptive Scale Interaction Network (CASINet) to exploit the multi-scale features for scene parsing. We build CASINet based on the classic Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) module, followed by a proposed contextual scale interaction (CSI) module, and a scale adaptation (SA) module. Specifically, in the CSI module, for each spatial position of some scale, instead of being limited by a fixed set of convolutional filters that are shared across different spatial positions for feature learning, we promote the adaptivity of the convolutional filters to spatial positions. We achieve this by the context interaction among the features of different scales. The SA module explicitly and softly selects the suitable scale for each spatial position and each channel. Ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed modules. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on three scene parsing benchmarks Cityscapes, ADE20K and LIP.
LO-Net: Deep Real-time Lidar Odometry
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

We present a novel deep convolutional network pipeline, LO-Net, for real-time lidar odometry estimation. Unlike most existing lidar odometry (LO) estimations that go through individually designed feature selection, feature matching, and pose estimation pipeline, LO-Net can be trained in an end-to-end manner. With a new mask-weighted geometric constraint loss, LO-Net can effectively learn feature representation for LO estimation, and can implicitly exploit the sequential dependencies and dynamics in the data. We also design a scan-to-map module, which uses the geometric and semantic information learned in LO-Net, to improve the estimation accuracy. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that LO-Net outperforms existing learning based approaches and has similar accuracy with the state-of-the-art geometry-based approach, LOAM.
I2PA, U-prove, and Idemix: An Evaluation of Memory Usage and Computing Time Efficiency in an IoT Context
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

The Internet of Things (IoT), in spite of its innumerable advantages, brings many challenges namely issues about users' privacy preservation and constraints about lightweight cryptography. Lightweight cryptography is of capital importance since IoT devices are qualified to be resource-constrained. To address these challenges, several Attribute-Based Credentials (ABC) schemes have been designed including I2PA, U-prove, and Idemix. Even though these schemes have very strong cryptographic bases, their performance in resource-constrained devices is a question that deserves special attention. This paper aims to conduct a performance evaluation of these schemes on issuance and verification protocols regarding memory usage and computing time. Recorded results show that both I2PA and U-prove present very interesting results regarding memory usage and computing time while Idemix presents very low performance with regard to computing time.
Tensor Sparse PCA and Face Recognition: A Novel Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Face recognition is the important field in machine learning and pattern recognition research area. It has a lot of applications in military, finance, public security, to name a few. In this paper, the combination of the tensor sparse PCA with the nearest-neighbor method (and with the kernel ridge regression method) will be proposed and applied to the face dataset. Experimental results show that the combination of the tensor sparse PCA with any classification system does not always reach the best accuracy performance measures. However, the accuracy of the combination of the sparse PCA method and one specific classification system is always better than the accuracy of the combination of the PCA method and one specific classification system and is always better than the accuracy of the classification system itself.
CornerNet-Lite: Efficient Keypoint Based Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Keypoint-based methods are a relatively new paradigm in object detection, eliminating the need for anchor boxes and offering a simplified detection framework. Keypoint-based CornerNet achieves state of the art accuracy among single-stage detectors. However, this accuracy comes at high processing cost. In this work, we tackle the problem of efficient keypoint-based object detection and introduce CornerNet-Lite. CornerNet-Lite is a combination of two efficient variants of CornerNet: CornerNet-Saccade, which uses an attention mechanism to eliminate the need for exhaustively processing all pixels of the image, and CornerNet-Squeeze, which introduces a new compact backbone architecture. Together these two variants address the two critical use cases in efficient object detection: improving efficiency without sacrificing accuracy, and improving accuracy at real-time efficiency. CornerNet-Saccade is suitable for offline processing, improving the efficiency of CornerNet by 6.0x and the AP by 1.0% on COCO. CornerNet-Squeeze is suitable for real-time detection, improving both the efficiency and accuracy of the popular real-time detector YOLOv3 (34.4% AP at 30ms for CornerNet-Squeeze compared to 33.0% AP at 39ms for YOLOv3 on COCO). Together these contributions for the first time reveal the potential of keypoint-based detection to be useful for applications requiring processing efficiency.
Disagreement-based Active Learning in Online Settings
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We study online active learning for classifying streaming instances within the framework of statistical learning theory. At each time, the learner either queries the label of the current instance or predicts the label based on past seen examples. The objective is to minimize the number of queries while constraining the number of prediction errors over a horizon of length $T$. We develop a disagreement-based online learning algorithm for a general hypothesis space and under the Tsybakov noise. We show that the proposed algorithm has a label complexity of $O(dT^{\frac{2-2α}{2-α}}\log^2 T)$ under a constraint of bounded regret in terms of classification errors, where $d$ is the VC dimension of the hypothesis space and $α$ is the Tsybakov noise parameter. We further establish a matching (up to a poly-logarithmic factor) lower bound, demonstrating the order optimality of the proposed algorithm. We address the tradeoff between label complexity and regret and show that the algorithm can be modified to operate at a different point on the tradeoff curve.