OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Learning Disentangled Representations of Timbre and Pitch for Musical Instrument Sounds Using Gaussian Mixture Variational Autoencoders
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we learn disentangled representations of timbre and pitch for musical instrument sounds. We adapt a framework based on variational autoencoders with Gaussian mixture latent distributions. Specifically, we use two separate encoders to learn distinct latent spaces for timbre and pitch, which form Gaussian mixture components representing instrument identity and pitch, respectively. For reconstruction, latent variables of timbre and pitch are sampled from corresponding mixture components, and are concatenated as the input to a decoder. We show the model efficacy by latent space visualization, and a quantitative analysis indicates the discriminability of these spaces, even with a limited number of instrument labels for training. The model allows for controllable synthesis of selected instrument sounds by sampling from the latent spaces. To evaluate this, we trained instrument and pitch classifiers using original labeled data. These classifiers achieve high accuracy when tested on our synthesized sounds, which verifies the model performance of controllable realistic timbre and pitch synthesis. Our model also enables timbre transfer between multiple instruments, with a single autoencoder architecture, which is evaluated by measuring the shift in posterior of instrument classification. Our in depth evaluation confirms the model ability to successfully disentangle timbre and pitch.
Speeding HEP Analysis with ROOT Bulk I/O
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

Distinct HEP workflows have distinct I/O needs; while ROOT I/O excels at serializing complex C++ objects common to reconstruction, analysis workflows typically have simpler objects and can sustain higher event rates. To meet these workflows, we have developed a "bulk I/O" interface, allowing multiple events data to be returned per library call. This reduces ROOT-related overheads and increases event rates - orders-of-magnitude improvements are shown in microbenchmarks. Unfortunately, this bulk interface is difficult to use as it requires users to identify when it is applicable and they still "think" in terms of events, not arrays of data. We have integrated the bulk I/O interface into the new RDataFrame analysis framework inside ROOT. As RDataFrame's interface can provide improved type information, the framework itself can determine what data is readable via the bulk IO and automatically switch between interfaces. We demonstrate how this can improve event rates when reading analysis data formats, such as CMS's NanoAOD.
MediaPipe: A Framework for Building Perception Pipelines
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

Building applications that perceive the world around them is challenging. A developer needs to (a) select and develop corresponding machine learning algorithms and models, (b) build a series of prototypes and demos, (c) balance resource consumption against the quality of the solutions, and finally (d) identify and mitigate problematic cases. The MediaPipe framework addresses all of these challenges. A developer can use MediaPipe to build prototypes by combining existing perception components, to advance them to polished cross-platform applications and measure system performance and resource consumption on target platforms. We show that these features enable a developer to focus on the algorithm or model development and use MediaPipe as an environment for iteratively improving their application with results reproducible across different devices and platforms. MediaPipe will be open-sourced at https://github.com/google/mediapipe.
A Novel DDoS Attack Detection Method Using Optimized Generalized Multiple Kernel Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack has become one of the most destructive network attacks which can pose a mortal threat to Internet security. Existing detection methods can not effectively detect early attacks. In this paper, we propose a detection method of DDoS attacks based on generalized multiple kernel learning (GMKL) combining with the constructed parameter R. The super-fusion feature value (SFV) and comprehensive degree of feature (CDF) are defined to describe the characteristic of attack flow and normal flow. A method for calculating R based on SFV and CDF is proposed to select the combination of kernel function and regularization paradigm. A DDoS attack detection classifier is generated by using the trained GMKL model with R parameter. The experimental results show that kernel function and regularization parameter selection method based on R parameter reduce the randomness of parameter selection and the error of model detection, and the proposed method can effectively detect DDoS attacks in complex environments with higher detection rate and lower error rate.
Training on test data: Removing near duplicates in Fashion-MNIST
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

MNIST and Fashion MNIST are extremely popular for testing in the machine learning space. Fashion MNIST improves on MNIST by introducing a harder problem, increasing the diversity of testing sets, and more accurately representing a modern computer vision task. In order to increase the data quality of FashionMNIST, this paper investigates near duplicate images between training and testing sets. Near-duplicates between testing and training sets artificially increase the testing accuracy of machine learning models. This paper identifies near-duplicate images in Fashion MNIST and proposes a dataset with near-duplicates removed.
Multi-Agent Pathfinding: Definitions, Variants, and Benchmarks
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2019
Year: 2019

The MAPF problem is the fundamental problem of planning paths for multiple agents, where the key constraint is that the agents will be able to follow these paths concurrently without colliding with each other. Applications of MAPF include automated warehouses and autonomous vehicles. Research on MAPF has been flourishing in the past couple of years. Different MAPF research papers make different assumptions, e.g., whether agents can traverse the same road at the same time, and have different objective functions, e.g., minimize makespan or sum of agents' actions costs. These assumptions and objectives are sometimes implicitly assumed or described informally. This makes it difficult to establish appropriate baselines for comparison in research papers, as well as making it difficult for practitioners to find the papers relevant to their concrete application. This paper aims to fill this gap and support researchers and practitioners by providing a unifying terminology for describing common MAPF assumptions and objectives. In addition, we also provide pointers to two MAPF benchmarks. In particular, we introduce a new grid-based benchmark for MAPF, and demonstrate experimentally that it poses a challenge to contemporary MAPF algorithms.
SwiftNet: Using Graph Propagation as Meta-knowledge to Search Highly Representative Neural Architectures
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Designing neural architectures for edge devices is subject to constraints of accuracy, inference latency, and computational cost. Traditionally, researchers manually craft deep neural networks to meet the needs of mobile devices. Neural Architecture Search (NAS) was proposed to automate the neural architecture design without requiring extensive domain expertise and significant manual efforts. Recent works utilized NAS to design mobile models by taking into account hardware constraints and achieved state-of-the-art accuracy with fewer parameters and less computational cost measured in Multiply-accumulates (MACs). To find highly compact neural architectures, existing works relies on predefined cells and directly applying width multiplier, which may potentially limit the model flexibility, reduce the useful feature map information, and cause accuracy drop. To conquer this issue, we propose GRAM(GRAph propagation as Meta-knowledge) that adopts fine-grained (node-wise) search method and accumulates the knowledge learned in updates into a meta-graph. As a result, GRAM can enable more flexible search space and achieve higher search efficiency. Without the constraints of predefined cell or blocks, we propose a new structure-level pruning method to remove redundant operations in neural architectures. SwiftNet, which is a set of models discovered by GRAM, outperforms MobileNet-V2 by 2.15x higher accuracy density and 2.42x faster with similar accuracy. Compared with FBNet, SwiftNet reduces the search cost by 26x and achieves 2.35x higher accuracy density and 1.47x speedup while preserving similar accuracy. SwiftNetcan obtain 63.28% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K with only 53M MACs and 2.07M parameters. The corresponding inference latency is only 19.09 ms on Google Pixel 1.
Scalable and Differentially Private Distributed Aggregation in the Shuffled Model
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Federated learning promises to make machine learning feasible on distributed, private datasets by implementing gradient descent using secure aggregation methods. The idea is to compute a global weight update without revealing the contributions of individual users. Current practical protocols for secure aggregation work in an "honest but curious" setting where a curious adversary observing all communication to and from the server cannot learn any private information assuming the server is honest and follows the protocol. A more scalable and robust primitive for privacy-preserving protocols is shuffling of user data, so as to hide the origin of each data item. Highly scalable and secure protocols for shuffling, so-called mixnets, have been proposed as a primitive for privacy-preserving analytics in the Encode-Shuffle-Analyze framework by Bittau et al., which was later analytically studied by Erlingsson et al. and Cheu et al.. The recent papers by Cheu et al., and Balle et al. have given protocols for secure aggregation that achieve differential privacy guarantees in this "shuffled model". Their protocols come at a cost, though: Either the expected aggregation error or the amount of communication per user scales as a polynomial $n^{Ω(1)}$ in the number of users $n$. In this paper we propose simple and more efficient protocol for aggregation in the shuffled model, where communication as well as error increases only polylogarithmically in $n$. Our new technique is a conceptual "invisibility cloak" that makes users' data almost indistinguishable from random noise while introducing zero distortion on the sum.
Learning Patient Engagement in Care Management: Performance vs. Interpretability
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

The health outcomes of high-need patients can be substantially influenced by the degree of patient engagement in their own care. The role of care managers includes that of enrolling patients into care programs and keeping them sufficiently engaged in the program, so that patients can attain various goals. The attainment of these goals is expected to improve the patients' health outcomes. In this paper, we present a real world data-driven method and the behavioral engagement scoring pipeline for scoring the engagement level of a patient in two regards: (1) Their interest in enrolling into a relevant care program, and (2) their interest and commitment to program goals. We use this score to predict a patient's propensity to respond (i.e., to a call for enrollment into a program, or to an assigned program goal). Using real-world care management data, we show that our scoring method successfully predicts patient engagement. We also show that we are able to provide interpretable insights to care managers, using prototypical patients as a point of reference, without sacrificing prediction performance.
Trepan Reloaded: A Knowledge-driven Approach to Explaining Artificial Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2019
Year: 2019

Explainability in Artificial Intelligence has been revived as a topic of active research by the need of conveying safety and trust to users in the `how' and `why' of automated decision-making. Whilst a plethora of approaches have been developed for post-hoc explainability, only a few focus on how to use domain knowledge, and how this influences the understandability of global explanations from the users' perspective. In this paper, we show how ontologies help the understandability of global post-hoc explanations, presented in the form of symbolic models. In particular, we build on Trepan, an algorithm that explains artificial neural networks by means of decision trees, and we extend it to include ontologies modeling domain knowledge in the process of generating explanations. We present the results of a user study that measures the understandability of decision trees using a syntactic complexity measure, and through time and accuracy of responses as well as reported user confidence and understandability. The user study considers domains where explanations are critical, namely, in finance and medicine. The results show that decision trees generated with our algorithm, taking into account domain knowledge, are more understandable than those generated by standard Trepan without the use of ontologies.
A Monaural Speech Enhancement Method for Robust Small-Footprint Keyword Spotting
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2019
Year: 2019

Robustness against noise is critical for keyword spotting (KWS) in real-world environments. To improve the robustness, a speech enhancement front-end is involved. Instead of treating the speech enhancement as a separated preprocessing before the KWS system, in this study, a pre-trained speech enhancement front-end and a convolutional neural networks (CNNs) based KWS system are concatenated, where a feature transformation block is used to transform the output from the enhancement front-end into the KWS system's input. The whole model is trained jointly, thus the linguistic and other useful information from the KWS system can be back-propagated to the enhancement front-end to improve its performance. To fit the small-footprint device, a novel convolution recurrent network is proposed, which needs fewer parameters and computation and does not degrade performance. Furthermore, by changing the input features from the power spectrogram to Mel-spectrogram, less computation and better performance are obtained. our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves the KWS system with respect to noise robustness.
Cryptanalysis of Khatoon et al.'s ECC-based Authentication Protocol for Healthcare Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

Telecare medical information systems are gaining rapid popularity in terms of providing the delivery of online health-related services such as online remote health profile access for patients and doctors. Due to being installed entirely on Internet, these systems are exposed to various security and privacy threats. Hence, establishing a secure key agreement and authentication process between the patients and the medical servers is an important challenge. Recently, Khatoon et.al proposed an ECC-based unlink-able authentication and key agreement method for healthcare related application in smart city. In this article, we provide a descriptive analysis on their proposed scheme and prove that Khatoon et al.'s scheme is vulnerable to known-session-specific temporary information attack and is not able to provide perfect forward secrecy.
Physical Layer Security for Ultra-Reliable and Low-Latency Communications
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

Ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (URLLC) is one category of service to be provided by next-generation wireless networks. Motivated by increasing security concerns in such networks, this article focuses on physical layer security (PLS) in the context of URLLC. The PLS technique mainly uses transmission designs based on the intrinsic randomness of the wireless medium to achieve secrecy. As such, PLS is of lower complexity and incurs less latency than traditional cryptography. In this article, we first introduce appropriate performance metrics for evaluating PLS in URLLC, illustrating the tradeoff between latency, reliability, and security. We then identify the key challenging problems for achieving PLS for URLLC, and discuss the role that channel state information can have in providing potential solutions to these problems. Finally, we present our recommendations on future research directions in this emerging area.
Nested Network with Two-Stream Pyramid for Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Arising from the various object types and scales, diverse imaging orientations, and cluttered backgrounds in optical remote sensing image (RSI), it is difficult to directly extend the success of salient object detection for nature scene image to the optical RSI. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end deep network called LV-Net based on the shape of network architecture, which detects salient objects from optical RSIs in a purely data-driven fashion. The proposed LV-Net consists of two key modules, i.e., a two-stream pyramid module (L-shaped module) and an encoder-decoder module with nested connections (V-shaped module). Specifically, the L-shaped module extracts a set of complementary information hierarchically by using a two-stream pyramid structure, which is beneficial to perceiving the diverse scales and local details of salient objects. The V-shaped module gradually integrates encoder detail features with decoder semantic features through nested connections, which aims at suppressing the cluttered backgrounds and highlighting the salient objects. In addition, we construct the first publicly available optical RSI dataset for salient object detection, including 800 images with varying spatial resolutions, diverse saliency types, and pixel-wise ground truth. Experiments on this benchmark dataset demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art salient object detection methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.
A System Modeling Approach to Enhance Functional and Software Development
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2019
Year: 2019

This paper presents a SysML-based approach to enhance functional and software development process within an industrial context. The recent changes in technology such as electromobility and increased automation in heavy construction machinery lead to increased complexity for embedded software. Hence there emerges a need for new development methodologies to address flexible functional development, enhance communication among development teams, and maintain traceability from design concepts to software artefacts. The discussed approach has experimented in the context of developing a new transmission system (partially electrified) and its functionality. While the modeling approach is a work-in-progress, some initial success, as well as existing gaps pointing to future works are highlighted.
An observable time series based SLAM algorithm for deforming environment
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we study the back-end of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem in deforming environment, where robot localizes itself and tracks multiple non-rigid soft surface using its onboard sensor measurements. An elaborate analysis is conducted on conventional deformation modelling method, Embedded Deformation (ED) graph. We demonstrate and prove that the ED graph widely used in such scenarios is unobservable and leads to multiple solutions unless suitable priors are provided. Example as well as theoretical prove are provided to show the ambiguity of ED graph and camera pose. In modelling non-rigid scenario with ED graph, motion priors of the deforming environment is essential to separate robot pose and deforming environment. The conclusion can be extrapolated to any free form deformation formulation. In solving the observability, this research proposes a preliminary deformable SLAM approach to estimate robot pose in complex environments that exhibits regular motion. A strategy that approximates deformed shape using a linear combination of several previous shapes is proposed to avoid the ambiguity in robot movement and rigid and non-rigid motions of the environment. Fisher information matrix rank analysis with a base case is discussed to prove the effectiveness. Moreover, the proposed algorithm is validated extensively on Monte Carlo simulations and real experiments. It is demonstrated that the new algorithm significantly outperforms conventional rigid SLAM and ED based SLAM especially in scenarios where there is large deformation.
Probabilistic Tile Visibility-Based Server-Side Rate Adaptation for Adaptive 360-Degree Video Streaming
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we study the server-side rate adaptation problem for streaming tile-based adaptive 360-degree videos to multiple users who are competing for transmission resources at the network bottleneck. Specifically, we develop a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based viewpoint prediction model to capture the nonlinear relationship between the future and historical viewpoints. A Laplace distribution model is utilized to characterize the probability distribution of the prediction error. Given the predicted viewpoint, we then map the viewport in the spherical space into its corresponding planar projection in the 2-D plane, and further derive the visibility probability of each tile based on the planar projection and the prediction error probability. According to the visibility probability, tiles are classified as viewport, marginal and invisible tiles. The server-side tile rate allocation problem for multiple users is then formulated as a non-linear discrete optimization problem to minimize the overall received video distortion of all users and the quality difference between the viewport and marginal tiles of each user, subject to the transmission capacity constraints and users' specific viewport requirements. We develop a steepest descent algorithm to solve this non-linear discrete optimization problem, by initializing the feasible starting point in accordance with the optimal solution of its continuous relaxation. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve a near-optimal solution, and outperforms the existing rate adaptation schemes for tile-based adaptive 360-video streaming.
REBEC: Robust Evolutionary-based Calibration Approach for the Numerical Wind Wave Model
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2019
Year: 2019

The adaptation of numerical wind wave models to the local time-spatial conditions is a problem that can be solved by using various calibration techniques. However, the obtained sets of physical parameters become over-tuned to specific events if there is a lack of observations. In this paper, we propose a robust evolutionary calibration approach that allows to build the stochastic ensemble of perturbed models and use it to achieve the trade-off between quality and robustness of the target model. The implemented robust ensemble-based evolutionary calibration (REBEC) approach was compared to the baseline SPEA2 algorithm in a set of experiments with the SWAN wind wave model configuration for the Kara Sea domain. Provided metrics for the set of scenarios confirm the effectiveness of the REBEC approach for the majority of calibration scenarios.