OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Towards improving the e-learning experience for deaf students: e-LUX
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2019
Year: 2019

Deaf people are more heavily affected by the digital divide than many would expect. Moreover, most accessibility guidelines addressing their needs just deal with captioning and audio-content transcription. However, this approach to the problem does not consider that deaf people have big troubles with vocal languages, even in their written form. At present, only a few organizations, like W3C, produced guidelines dealing with one of their most distinctive expressions: Sign Language (SL). SL is, in fact, the visual-gestural language used by many deaf people to communicate with each other. The present work aims at supporting e-learning user experience (e-LUX) for these specific users by enhancing the accessibility of content and container services. In particular, we propose preliminary solutions to tailor activities which can be more fruitful when performed in one's own "native" language, which for most deaf people, especially younger ones, is represented by national SL.
Machine Learning-based Signal Detection for PMH Signals in Load-modulated MIMO System
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

Phase Modulation on the Hypersphere (PMH) is a power efficient modulation scheme for the \textit{load-modulated} multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmitters with central power amplifiers (CPA). However, it is difficult to obtain the precise channel state information (CSI), and the traditional optimal maximum likelihood (ML) detection scheme incurs high complexity which increases exponentially with the number of antennas and the number of bits carried per antenna in the PMH modulation. To detect the PMH signals without knowing the prior CSI, we first propose a signal detection scheme, termed as the hypersphere clustering scheme based on the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm with maximum likelihood detection (HEM-ML). By leveraging machine learning, the proposed detection scheme can accurately obtain information of the channel from a few of the received symbols with little resource cost and achieve comparable detection results as that of the optimal ML detector. To further reduce the computational complexity in the ML detection in HEM-ML, we also propose the second signal detection scheme, termed as the hypersphere clustering scheme based on the EM algorithm with KD-tree detection (HEM-KD). The CSI obtained from the EM algorithm is used to build a spatial KD-tree receiver codebook and the signal detection problem can be transformed into a nearest neighbor search (NNS) problem. The detection complexity of HEM-KD is significantly reduced without any detection performance loss as compared to HEM-ML. Extensive simulation results verify the effectiveness of our proposed detection schemes.
Multi-PCA based Fault Detection Model Combined with Prior knowledge of HVAC
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

The traditional PCA fault detection methods completely depend on the training data. The prior knowledge such as the physical principle of the system has not been taken into account. In this paper, we propose a new multi-PCA fault detection model combined with prior knowledge. This new model can adapt to the variable operating conditions of the central air conditioning system, and it can detect small deviation faults of sensors and significantly shorten the time delay of detecting drift faults. We also conducted enough ablation experiments to demonstrate that our model is more robust and efficient.
Domain-invariant Stereo Matching Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

State-of-the-art stereo matching networks have difficulties in generalizing to new unseen environments due to significant domain differences, such as color, illumination, contrast, and texture. In this paper, we aim at designing a domain-invariant stereo matching network (DSMNet) that generalizes well to unseen scenes. To achieve this goal, we propose i) a novel "domain normalization" approach that regularizes the distribution of learned representations to allow them to be invariant to domain differences, and ii) a trainable non-local graph-based filter for extracting robust structural and geometric representations that can further enhance domain-invariant generalizations. When trained on synthetic data and generalized to real test sets, our model performs significantly better than all state-of-the-art models. It even outperforms some deep learning models (e.g. MC-CNN) fine-tuned with test-domain data.
Hybrid Precoding Design for Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface aided mmWave Communication Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

In this letter, we focus on the hybrid precoding (HP) design for the reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) aided multi-user (MU) millimeter wave (mmWave) communication systems. Specifically, we aim to minimize the mean-squared-error (MSE) between the received symbols and the transmitted symbols by jointly optimizing the analog-digital HP at the base-station (BS) and the phase shifts (PSs) at the RIS, where the non-convex element-wise constant-modulus constraints for the analog precoding and the PSs are tackled by resorting to the gradient-projection (GP) method. We analytically prove the convergence of the proposed algorithm and demonstrate the desirable performance gain for the proposed design through numerical results.
OptiBox: Breaking the Limits of Proposals for Visual Grounding
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

The problem of language grounding has attracted much attention in recent years due to its pivotal role in more general image-lingual high level reasoning tasks (e.g., image captioning, VQA). Despite the tremendous progress in visual grounding, the performance of most approaches has been hindered by the quality of bounding box proposals obtained in the early stages of all recent pipelines. To address this limitation, we propose a general progressive query-guided bounding box refinement architecture (OptiBox) that leverages global image encoding for added context. We apply this architecture in the context of the GroundeR model, first introduced in 2016, which has a number of unique and appealing properties, such as the ability to learn in the semi-supervised setting by leveraging cyclic language-reconstruction. Using GroundeR + OptiBox and a simple semantic language reconstruction loss that we propose, we achieve state-of-the-art grounding performance in the supervised setting on Flickr30k Entities dataset. More importantly, we are able to surpass many recent fully supervised models with only 50% of training data and perform competitively with as low as 3%.
Fooling the Crowd with Deep Learning-based Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2019
Year: 2019

Modern, state-of-the-art deep learning approaches yield human like performance in numerous object detection and classification tasks. The foundation for their success is the availability of training datasets of substantially high quantity, which are expensive to create, especially in the field of medical imaging. Recently, crowdsourcing has been applied to create large datasets for a broad range of disciplines. This study aims to explore the challenges and opportunities of crowd-algorithm collaboration for the object detection task of grading cytology whole slide images. We compared the classical crowdsourcing performance of twenty participants with their results from crowd-algorithm collaboration. All participants performed both modes in random order on the same twenty images. Additionally, we introduced artificial systematic flaws into the precomputed annotations to estimate a bias towards accepting precomputed annotations. We gathered 9524 annotations on 800 images from twenty participants organised into four groups in concordance to their level of expertise with cytology. The crowd-algorithm mode improved on average the participants' classification accuracy by 7%, the mean average precision by 8% and the inter-observer Fleiss' kappa score by 20%, and reduced the time spent by 31%. However, two thirds of the artificially modified false labels were not recognised as such by the contributors. This study shows that crowd-algorithm collaboration is a promising new approach to generate large datasets when it is ensured that a carefully designed setup eliminates potential biases.
[Re] Learning to Learn By Self-Critique
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

This work is a reproducibility study of the paper of Antoniou and Storkey [2019], published at NeurIPS 2019. Our results are in parts similar to the ones reported in the original paper, supporting the central claim of the paper that the proposed novel method, called Self-Critique and Adapt (SCA), improves the performance of MAML++. The conducted additional experiments on the Caltech-UCSD Birds 200 dataset confirm the superiority of SCA compared to MAML++. In addition, the reproduced paper suggests a novel high-end version of MAML++ for which we could not reproduce the same results. We hypothesize that this is due to the many implementation details that were omitted in the original paper.
Counting invariant subspaces and decompositions of additive polynomials
Venue: arXiv cs.SC 2019
Year: 2019

The functional (de)composition of polynomials is a topic in pure and computer algebra with many applications. The structure of decompositions of (suitably normalized) polynomials f(x) = g(h(x)) in F[x] over a field F is well understood in many cases, but less well when the degree of f is divisible by the positive characteristic p of F. This work investigates the decompositions of r-additive polynomials, where every exponent and also the field size is a power of r, which itself is a power of p. The decompositions of an r-additive polynomial f are intimately linked to the Frobenius-invariant subspaces of its root space V in the algebraic closure of F. We present an efficient algorithm to compute the rational Jordan form of the Frobenius automorphism on V. A formula of Fripertinger (2011) then counts the number of Frobenius-invariant subspaces of a given dimension and we derive the number of decompositions with prescribed degrees.
XGBOD: Improving Supervised Outlier Detection with Unsupervised Representation Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

A new semi-supervised ensemble algorithm called XGBOD (Extreme Gradient Boosting Outlier Detection) is proposed, described and demonstrated for the enhanced detection of outliers from normal observations in various practical datasets. The proposed framework combines the strengths of both supervised and unsupervised machine learning methods by creating a hybrid approach that exploits each of their individual performance capabilities in outlier detection. XGBOD uses multiple unsupervised outlier mining algorithms to extract useful representations from the underlying data that augment the predictive capabilities of an embedded supervised classifier on an improved feature space. The novel approach is shown to provide superior performance in comparison to competing individual detectors, the full ensemble and two existing representation learning based algorithms across seven outlier datasets.
MANELA: A Multi-Agent Algorithm for Learning Network Embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2019
Year: 2019

Playing an essential role in data mining, machine learning has a long history of being applied to networks on multifarious tasks and has played an essential role in data mining. However, the discrete and sparse natures of networks often render it difficult to apply machine learning directly to networks. To circumvent this difficulty, one major school of thought to approach networks using machine learning is via network embeddings. On the one hand, this network embeddings have achieved huge success on aggregated network data in recent years. On the other hand, learning network embeddings on distributively stored networks still remained understudied: To the best of our knowledge, all existing algorithms for learning network embeddings have hitherto been exclusively centralized and thus cannot be applied to these networks. To accommodate distributively stored networks, in this paper, we proposed a multi-agent model. Under this model, we developed the multi-agent network embedding learning algorithm (MANELA) for learning network embeddings. We demonstrate MANELA's advantages over other existing centralized network embedding learning algorithms both theoretically and experimentally. Finally, we further our understanding in MANELA via visualization and exploration of its relationship to DeepWalk.
An Observational Investigation of Reverse Engineers' Processes
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

Reverse engineering is a complex process essential to software-security tasks such as vulnerability discovery and malware analysis. Significant research and engineering effort has gone into developing tools to support reverse engineers. However, little work has been done to understand the way reverse engineers think when analyzing programs, leaving tool developers to make interface design decisions based only on intuition. This paper takes a first step toward a better understanding of reverse engineers' processes, with the goal of producing insights for improving interaction design for reverse engineering tools. We present the results of a semi-structured, observational interview study of reverse engineers (N=16). Each observation investigated the questions reverse engineers ask as they probe a program, how they answer these questions, and the decisions they make throughout the reverse engineering process. From the interview responses, we distill a model of the reverse engineering process, divided into three phases: overview, sub-component scanning, and focused experimentation. Each analysis phase's results feed the next as reverse engineers' mental representations become more concrete. We find that reverse engineers typically use static methods in the first two phases, but dynamic methods in the final phase, with experience playing large, but varying, roles in each phase. % and the role of experience varies between phases. Based on these results, we provide five interaction design guidelines for reverse engineering tools.
Fast Stochastic Ordinal Embedding with Variance Reduction and Adaptive Step Size
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Learning representation from relative similarity comparisons, often called ordinal embedding, gains rising attention in recent years. Most of the existing methods are based on semi-definite programming (\textit{SDP}), which is generally time-consuming and degrades the scalability, especially confronting large-scale data. To overcome this challenge, we propose a stochastic algorithm called \textit{SVRG-SBB}, which has the following features: i) achieving good scalability via dropping positive semi-definite (\textit{PSD}) constraints as serving a fast algorithm, i.e., stochastic variance reduced gradient (\textit{SVRG}) method, and ii) adaptive learning via introducing a new, adaptive step size called the stabilized Barzilai-Borwein (\textit{SBB}) step size. Theoretically, under some natural assumptions, we show the $\boldsymbol{O}(\frac{1}{T})$ rate of convergence to a stationary point of the proposed algorithm, where $T$ is the number of total iterations. Under the further Polyak-Łojasiewicz assumption, we can show the global linear convergence (i.e., exponentially fast converging to a global optimum) of the proposed algorithm. Numerous simulations and real-world data experiments are conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm by comparing with the state-of-the-art methods, notably, much lower computational cost with good prediction performance.
Talking with Robots: Opportunities and Challenges
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2019
Year: 2019

Notwithstanding the tremendous progress that is taking place in spoken language technology, effective speech-based human-robot interaction still raises a number of important challenges. Not only do the fields of robotics and spoken language technology present their own special problems, but their combination raises an additional set of issues. In particular, there is a large gap between the formulaic speech that typifies contemporary spoken dialogue systems and the flexible nature of human-human conversation. It is pointed out that grounded and situated speech-based human-robot interaction may lead to deeper insights into the pragmatics of language usage, thereby overcoming the current `habitability gap'.
Machine learning applications in time series hierarchical forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Hierarchical forecasting (HF) is needed in many situations in the supply chain (SC) because managers often need different levels of forecasts at different levels of SC to make a decision. Top-Down (TD), Bottom-Up (BU) and Optimal Combination (COM) are common HF models. These approaches are static and often ignore the dynamics of the series while disaggregating them. Consequently, they may fail to perform well if the investigated group of time series are subject to large changes such as during the periods of promotional sales. We address the HF problem of predicting real-world sales time series that are highly impacted by promotion. We use three machine learning (ML) models to capture sales variations over time. Artificial neural networks (ANN), extreme gradient boosting (XGboost), and support vector regression (SVR) algorithms are used to estimate the proportions of lower-level time series from the upper level. We perform an in-depth analysis of 61 groups of time series with different volatilities and show that ML models are competitive and outperform some well-established models in the literature.
Automated curriculum generation for Policy Gradients from Demonstrations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we present a technique that improves the process of training an agent (using RL) for instruction following. We develop a training curriculum that uses a nominal number of expert demonstrations and trains the agent in a manner that draws parallels from one of the ways in which humans learn to perform complex tasks, i.e by starting from the goal and working backwards. We test our method on the BabyAI platform and show an improvement in sample efficiency for some of its tasks compared to a PPO (proximal policy optimization) baseline.
PAPR-Limited Precoding in Massive MIMO Systems with Reflect- and Transmit-Array Antennas
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

Conventional hybrid analog-digital architectures for millimeter-wave massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems suffer from poor scalability and high implementational costs. The former is caused by the high power loss in the analog network, and the latter is due to the fact that classic MIMO transmission techniques require power amplifiers with high back-offs. This paper proposes a novel hybrid analog-digital architecture which addresses both of these challenges. This architecture implements the analog front-end via a passive reflect- or transmit-array to resolve the scalability issue. To keep the system cost-efficient, a digital precoder is designed whose peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) on each active antenna is tunable. Using the approximate message passing algorithm, this precoder is implemented with tractable computational complexity. The proposed architecture allows for the use of power amplifiers with low back-offs which reduces the overall radio frequency cost of the system. Numerical results demonstrate that for low PAPRs, significant performance enhancements are achieved compared to the state of the art.
New inconsistency indicators for incomplete pairwise comparisons matrices
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

We introduce two new inconsistency measures for the incomplete pairwise comparisons matrices and show several examples of their calculation. We also carry out a comparative analysis of the new inconsistency indices with the existing ones based on the Monte Carlo simulation.
Some Results on Dominating Induced Matchings
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2019
Year: 2019

Let $G$ be a graph, a dominating induced matching (DIM) of $G$ is an induced matching that dominates every edge of $G$. In this paper we show that if a graph $G$ has a DIM, then $χ(G) \leqslant 3$. Also, it is shown that if $G$ is a connected graph whose all edges can be partitioned into DIM, then $G$ is either a regular graph or a biregular graph and indeed we characterize all graphs whose edge set can be partitioned into DIM. Also, we prove that if $G$ is an $r$-regular graph of order $n$ whose edges can be partitioned into DIM, then $n$ is divisible by $\binom{2r - 1}{r - 1}$ and $n = \binom{2r - 1}{r - 1}$ if and only if $G$ is the Kneser graph with parameters $r-1$, $2r-1$.
An Attention-Based Speaker Naming Method for Online Adaptation in Non-Fixed Scenarios
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2019
Year: 2019

A speaker naming task, which finds and identifies the active speaker in a certain movie or drama scene, is crucial for dealing with high-level video analysis applications such as automatic subtitle labeling and video summarization. Modern approaches have usually exploited biometric features with a gradient-based method instead of rule-based algorithms. In a certain situation, however, a naive gradient-based method does not work efficiently. For example, when new characters are added to the target identification list, the neural network needs to be frequently retrained to identify new people and it causes delays in model preparation. In this paper, we present an attention-based method which reduces the model setup time by updating the newly added data via online adaptation without a gradient update process. We comparatively analyzed with three evaluation metrics(accuracy, memory usage, setup time) of the attention-based method and existing gradient-based methods under various controlled settings of speaker naming. Also, we applied existing speaker naming models and the attention-based model to real video to prove that our approach shows comparable accuracy to the existing state-of-the-art models and even higher accuracy in some cases.
DAL -- A Deep Depth-aware Long-term Tracker
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

The best RGBD trackers provide high accuracy but are slow to run. On the other hand, the best RGB trackers are fast but clearly inferior on the RGBD datasets. In this work, we propose a deep depth-aware long-term tracker that achieves state-of-the-art RGBD tracking performance and is fast to run. We reformulate deep discriminative correlation filter (DCF) to embed the depth information into deep features. Moreover, the same depth-aware correlation filter is used for target re-detection. Comprehensive evaluations show that the proposed tracker achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Princeton RGBD, STC, and the newly-released CDTB benchmarks and runs 20 fps.