OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Provably noise-robust, regularised $k$-means clustering
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

We consider the problem of clustering in the presence of noise. That is, when on top of cluster structure, the data also contains a subset of \emph{unstructured} points. Our goal is to detect the clusters despite the presence of many unstructured points. Any algorithm that achieves this goal is noise-robust. We consider a regularisation method which converts any center-based clustering objective into a noise-robust one. We focus on the $k$-means objective and we prove that the regularised version of $k$-means is NP-Hard even for $k=1$. We consider two algorithms based on the convex (sdp and lp) relaxation of the regularised objective and prove robustness guarantees for both. The sdp and lp relaxation of the standard (non-regularised) $k$-means objective has been previously studied by [ABC+15]. Under the stochastic ball model of the data they show that the sdp-based algorithm recovers the underlying structure as long as the balls are separated by $δ> 2\sqrt{2} + ε$. We improve upon this result in two ways. First, we show recovery even for $δ> 2 + ε$. Second, our regularised algorithm recovers the balls even in the presence of noise so long as the number of noisy points is not too large. We complement our theoretical analysis with simulations and analyse the effect of various parameters like regularization constant, noise-level etc. on the performance of our algorithm. In the presence of noise, our algorithm performs better than $k$-means++ on MNIST.
Toward Multimodal Image-to-Image Translation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Many image-to-image translation problems are ambiguous, as a single input image may correspond to multiple possible outputs. In this work, we aim to model a \emph{distribution} of possible outputs in a conditional generative modeling setting. The ambiguity of the mapping is distilled in a low-dimensional latent vector, which can be randomly sampled at test time. A generator learns to map the given input, combined with this latent code, to the output. We explicitly encourage the connection between output and the latent code to be invertible. This helps prevent a many-to-one mapping from the latent code to the output during training, also known as the problem of mode collapse, and produces more diverse results. We explore several variants of this approach by employing different training objectives, network architectures, and methods of injecting the latent code. Our proposed method encourages bijective consistency between the latent encoding and output modes. We present a systematic comparison of our method and other variants on both perceptual realism and diversity.
Paris-Lille-3D: a large and high-quality ground truth urban point cloud dataset for automatic segmentation and classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

This paper introduces a new Urban Point Cloud Dataset for Automatic Segmentation and Classification acquired by Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS). We describe how the dataset is obtained from acquisition to post-processing and labeling. This dataset can be used to learn classification algorithm, however, given that a great attention has been paid to the split between the different objects, this dataset can also be used to learn the segmentation. The dataset consists of around 2km of MLS point cloud acquired in two cities. The number of points and range of classes make us consider that it can be used to train Deep-Learning methods. Besides we show some results of automatic segmentation and classification. The dataset is available at: http://caor-mines-paristech.fr/fr/paris-lille-3d-dataset/
Robust Stereo Visual Inertial Odometry for Fast Autonomous Flight
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2018
Year: 2018

In recent years, vision-aided inertial odometry for state estimation has matured significantly. However, we still encounter challenges in terms of improving the computational efficiency and robustness of the underlying algorithms for applications in autonomous flight with micro aerial vehicles in which it is difficult to use high quality sensors and pow- erful processors because of constraints on size and weight. In this paper, we present a filter-based stereo visual inertial odometry that uses the Multi-State Constraint Kalman Filter (MSCKF) [1]. Previous work on stereo visual inertial odometry has resulted in solutions that are computationally expensive. We demonstrate that our Stereo Multi-State Constraint Kalman Filter (S-MSCKF) is comparable to state-of-art monocular solutions in terms of computational cost, while providing signifi- cantly greater robustness. We evaluate our S-MSCKF algorithm and compare it with state-of-art methods including OKVIS, ROVIO, and VINS-MONO on both the EuRoC dataset, and our own experimental datasets demonstrating fast autonomous flight with maximum speed of 17.5m/s in indoor and outdoor environments. Our implementation of the S-MSCKF is available at https://github.com/KumarRobotics/msckf_vio.
Deep-Reinforcement Learning Multiple Access for Heterogeneous Wireless Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

This paper investigates the use of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) in a MAC protocol for heterogeneous wireless networking referred to as Deep-reinforcement Learning Multiple Access (DLMA). The thrust of this work is partially inspired by the vision of DARPA SC2, a 3-year competition whereby competitors are to come up with a clean-slate design that "best share spectrum with any network(s), in any environment, without prior knowledge, leveraging on machine-learning technique". Specifically, this paper considers the problem of sharing time slots among a multiple of time-slotted networks that adopt different MAC protocols. One of the MAC protocols is DLMA. The other two are TDMA and ALOHA. The nodes operating DLMA do not know that the other two MAC protocols are TDMA and ALOHA. Yet, by a series of observations of the environment, its own actions, and the resulting rewards, a DLMA node can learn an optimal MAC strategy to coexist harmoniously with the TDMA and ALOHA nodes according to a specified objective (e.g., the objective could be the sum throughput of all networks, or a general alpha-fairness objective).
Coded Caching in a Multi-Server System with Random Topology
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

Cache-aided content delivery is studied in a multi-server system with $P$ servers and $K$ users, each equipped with a local cache memory. In the delivery phase, each user connects randomly to any $ρ$ out of $P$ servers. Thanks to the availability of multiple servers, which model small base stations with limited storage capacity, user demands can be satisfied with reduced storage capacity at each server and reduced delivery rate per server; however, this also leads to reduced multicasting opportunities compared to a single server serving all the users simultaneously. A joint storage and proactive caching scheme is proposed, which exploits coded storage across the servers, uncoded cache placement at the users, and coded delivery. The delivery \textit{latency} is studied for both \textit{successive} and \textit{simultaneous} transmission from the servers. It is shown that, with successive transmission the achievable average delivery latency is comparable to that achieved by a single server, while the gap between the two depends on $ρ$, the available redundancy across servers, and can be reduced by increasing the storage capacity at the SBSs.
The JKind Model Checker
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2018
Year: 2018

JKind is an open-source industrial model checker developed by Rockwell Collins and the University of Minnesota. JKind uses multiple parallel engines to prove or falsify safety properties of infinite state models. It is portable, easy to install, performance competitive with other state-of-the-art model checkers, and has features designed to improve the results presented to users: inductive validity cores for proofs and counterexample smoothing for test-case generation. It serves as the back-end for various industrial applications.
A Deeper Look at Experience Replay
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Recently experience replay is widely used in various deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, in this paper we rethink the utility of experience replay. It introduces a new hyper-parameter, the memory buffer size, which needs carefully tuning. However unfortunately the importance of this new hyper-parameter has been underestimated in the community for a long time. In this paper we did a systematic empirical study of experience replay under various function representations. We showcase that a large replay buffer can significantly hurt the performance. Moreover, we propose a simple O(1) method to remedy the negative influence of a large replay buffer. We showcase its utility in both simple grid world and challenging domains like Atari games.
Empirically Analyzing the Effect of Dataset Biases on Deep Face Recognition Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

It is unknown what kind of biases modern in the wild face datasets have because of their lack of annotation. A direct consequence of this is that total recognition rates alone only provide limited insight about the generalization ability of a Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs). We propose to empirically study the effect of different types of dataset biases on the generalization ability of DCNNs. Using synthetically generated face images, we study the face recognition rate as a function of interpretable parameters such as face pose and light. The proposed method allows valuable details about the generalization performance of different DCNN architectures to be observed and compared. In our experiments, we find that: 1) Indeed, dataset bias has a significant influence on the generalization performance of DCNNs. 2) DCNNs can generalize surprisingly well to unseen illumination conditions and large sampling gaps in the pose variation. 3) Using the presented methodology we reveal that the VGG-16 architecture outperforms the AlexNet architecture at face recognition tasks because it can much better generalize to unseen face poses, although it has significantly more parameters. 4) We uncover a main limitation of current DCNN architectures, which is the difficulty to generalize when different identities to not share the same pose variation. 5) We demonstrate that our findings on synthetic data also apply when learning from real-world data. Our face image generator is publicly available to enable the community to benchmark other DCNN architectures.
Symbolic-Numeric Integration of Rational Functions
Venue: arXiv cs.SC 2018
Year: 2018

We consider the problem of symbolic-numeric integration of symbolic functions, focusing on rational functions. Using a hybrid method allows the stable yet efficient computation of symbolic antiderivatives while avoiding issues of ill-conditioning to which numerical methods are susceptible. We propose two alternative methods for exact input that compute the rational part of the integral using Hermite reduction and then compute the transcendental part two different ways using a combination of exact integration and efficient numerical computation of roots. The symbolic computation is done within BPAS, or Basic Polynomial Algebra Subprograms, which is a highly optimized environment for polynomial computation on parallel architectures, while the numerical computation is done using the highly optimized multiprecision rootfinding package MPSolve. We show that both methods are forward and backward stable in a structured sense and away from singularities tolerance proportionality is achieved by adjusting the precision of the rootfinding tasks.
Optimal Quasi-Gray Codes: The Alphabet Matters
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

A quasi-Gray code of dimension $n$ and length $\ell$ over an alphabet $Σ$ is a sequence of distinct words $w_1,w_2,\dots,w_\ell$ from $Σ^n$ such that any two consecutive words differ in at most $c$ coordinates, for some fixed constant $c>0$. In this paper we are interested in the read and write complexity of quasi-Gray codes in the bit-probe model, where we measure the number of symbols read and written in order to transform any word $w_i$ into its successor $w_{i+1}$. We present construction of quasi-Gray codes of dimension $n$ and length $3^n$ over the ternary alphabet $\{0,1,2\}$ with worst-case read complexity $O(\log n)$ and write complexity $2$. This generalizes to arbitrary odd-size alphabets. For the binary alphabet, we present quasi-Gray codes of dimension $n$ and length at least $2^n - 20n$ with worst-case read complexity $6+\log n$ and write complexity $2$. This complements a recent result by Raskin [Raskin '17] who shows that any quasi-Gray code over binary alphabet of length $2^n$ has read complexity $Ω(n)$. Our results significantly improve on previously known constructions and for the odd-size alphabets we break the $Ω(n)$ worst-case barrier for space-optimal (non-redundant) quasi-Gray codes with constant number of writes. We obtain our results via a novel application of algebraic tools together with the principles of catalytic computation [Buhrman et al. '14, Ben-Or and Cleve '92, Barrington '89, Coppersmith and Grossman '75].
Coupling Story to Visualization: Using Textual Analysis as a Bridge Between Data and Interpretation
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2018
Year: 2018

Online writers and journalism media are increasingly combining visualization (and other multimedia content) with narrative text to create narrative visualizations. Often, however, the two elements are presented independently of one another. We propose an approach to automatically integrate text and visualization elements. We begin with a writer's narrative that presumably can be supported with visual data evidence. We leverage natural language processing, quantitative narrative analysis, and information visualization to (1) automatically extract narrative components (who, what, when, where) from data-rich stories, and (2) integrate the supporting data evidence with the text to develop a narrative visualization. We also employ bidirectional interaction from text to visualization and visualization to text to support reader exploration in both directions. We demonstrate the approach with a case study in the data-rich field of sports journalism.
On the Reliability of LTE Random Access: Performance Bounds for Machine-to-Machine Burst Resolution Time
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

Random Access Channel (RACH) has been identified as one of the major bottlenecks for accommodating massive number of machine-to-machine (M2M) users in LTE networks, especially for the case of burst arrival of connection requests. As a consequence, the burst resolution problem has sparked a large number of works in the area, analyzing and optimizing the average performance of RACH. However, the understanding of what are the probabilistic performance limits of RACH is still missing. To address this limitation, in the paper, we investigate the reliability of RACH with access class barring (ACB). We model RACH as a queuing system, and apply stochastic network calculus to derive probabilistic performance bounds for burst resolution time, i.e., the worst case time it takes to connect a burst of M2M devices to the base station. We illustrate the accuracy of the proposed methodology and its potential applications in performance assessment and system dimensioning.
Sequence Covering for Efficient Host-Based Intrusion Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

This paper introduces a new similarity measure, the covering similarity, that we formally define for evaluating the similarity between a symbolic sequence and a set of symbolic sequences. A pair-wise similarity can also be directly derived from the covering similarity to compare two symbolic sequences. An efficient implementation to compute the covering similarity is proposed that uses a suffix tree data-structure, but other implementations, based on suffix array for instance, are possible and possibly necessary for handling large scale problems. We have used this similarity to isolate attack sequences from normal sequences in the scope of Host-based Intrusion Detection. We have assessed the covering similarity on two well-known benchmarks in the field. In view of the results reported on these two datasets for the state of the art methods, and according to the comparative study we have carried out based on three challenging similarity measures commonly used for string processing or in bioinformatics, we show that the covering similarity is particularly relevant to address the detection of anomalies in sequences of system calls
Generalized Probability Smoothing
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

In this work we consider a generalized version of Probability Smoothing, the core elementary model for sequential prediction in the state of the art PAQ family of data compression algorithms. Our main contribution is a code length analysis that considers the redundancy of Probability Smoothing with respect to a Piecewise Stationary Source. The analysis holds for a finite alphabet and expresses redundancy in terms of the total variation in probability mass of the stationary distributions of a Piecewise Stationary Source. By choosing parameters appropriately Probability Smoothing has redundancy $O(S\cdot\sqrt{T\log T})$ for sequences of length $T$ with respect to a Piecewise Stationary Source with $S$ segments.
Optimal Power Management for Failure Mode of MVDC Microgrids in All-Electric Ships
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

Optimal power management of shipboard power system for failure mode (OPMSF) is a significant and challenging problem considering the safety of system and person. Many existing works focused on the transient-time recovery without consideration of the operating cost and the voyage plan. In this paper, the OPMSF problem is formulated considering the mid-time scheduling and the faults at bus and generator. Two- side adjustment methods including the load shedding and the reconfiguration are coordinated for reducing the fault effects. To address the formulated non-convex problem, the travel equality constraint and fractional energy efficiency operation indicator (EEOI) limitation are transformed into the convex forms. Then, considering the infeasibility scenario affected by faults, a further relaxation is adopted to formulate a new problem with feasibility guaranteed. Furthermore, a sufficient condition is derived to ensure that the new problem has the same optimal solution as the original one. Because of the mixed-integer nonlinear feature, an optimal algorithm based on Benders decomposition (BD) is developed to solve the new one. Due to the slow convergence caused by the time-coupled constraints, a low-complexity near-optimal algorithm based on BD (LNBD) is proposed. The results verify the effectivity of the proposed methods and algorithms.
Recommendation in Personalised Peer-Learning Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2018
Year: 2018

Recommendation in Personalised Peer Learning Environments (RiPPLE) is an adaptive, crowdsourced, web-based, student-facing, open-source platform that employs exemplary techniques from the fields of machine learning, crowdsourcing, learning analytics and recommender systems to provide personalised content and learning support at scale. RiPPLE presents students with a repository of tagged multiple-choice questions and provides instant feedback in response to student answers. The repository of the questions is created in partnership with the students through the use of crowdsourcing. RiPPLE uses students responses to the questions to approximate their knowledge states. Based on their knowledge state and learning needs, each student is recommended a set of personalised questions. For students that are interested in providing learning support, seeking learning support or finding study partners, RiPPLE recommends peer learning sessions based on their availability, knowledge state and preferences. This paper describes the RiPPLE interface and an implementation of that interface that has been built at the University of Queensland. The RiPPLE platform and a reference implementation are released as an open-source package under the Apache 2.0 license via GitHub.
Single-Shot Multi-Person 3D Pose Estimation From Monocular RGB
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

We propose a new single-shot method for multi-person 3D pose estimation in general scenes from a monocular RGB camera. Our approach uses novel occlusion-robust pose-maps (ORPM) which enable full body pose inference even under strong partial occlusions by other people and objects in the scene. ORPM outputs a fixed number of maps which encode the 3D joint locations of all people in the scene. Body part associations allow us to infer 3D pose for an arbitrary number of people without explicit bounding box prediction. To train our approach we introduce MuCo-3DHP, the first large scale training data set showing real images of sophisticated multi-person interactions and occlusions. We synthesize a large corpus of multi-person images by compositing images of individual people (with ground truth from mutli-view performance capture). We evaluate our method on our new challenging 3D annotated multi-person test set MuPoTs-3D where we achieve state-of-the-art performance. To further stimulate research in multi-person 3D pose estimation, we will make our new datasets, and associated code publicly available for research purposes.
3D Facial Expression Reconstruction using Cascaded Regression
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

This paper proposes a novel model fitting algorithm for 3D facial expression reconstruction from a single image. Face expression reconstruction from a single image is a challenging task in computer vision. Most state-of-the-art methods fit the input image to a 3D Morphable Model (3DMM). These methods need to solve a stochastic problem and cannot deal with expression and pose variations. To solve this problem, we adopt a 3D face expression model and use a combined feature which is robust to scale, rotation and different lighting conditions. The proposed method applies a cascaded regression framework to estimate parameters for the 3DMM. 2D landmarks are detected and used to initialize the 3D shape and mapping matrices. In each iteration, residues between the current 3DMM parameters and the ground truth are estimated and then used to update the 3D shapes. The mapping matrices are also calculated based on the updated shapes and 2D landmarks. HOG features of the local patches and displacements between 3D landmark projections and 2D landmarks are exploited. Compared with existing methods, the proposed method is robust to expression and pose changes and can reconstruct higher fidelity 3D face shape.
Deep convolutional neural networks for brain image analysis on magnetic resonance imaging: a review
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

In recent years, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown record-shattering performance in a variety of computer vision problems, such as visual object recognition, detection and segmentation. These methods have also been utilised in medical image analysis domain for lesion segmentation, anatomical segmentation and classification. We present an extensive literature review of CNN techniques applied in brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) analysis, focusing on the architectures, pre-processing, data-preparation and post-processing strategies available in these works. The aim of this study is three-fold. Our primary goal is to report how different CNN architectures have evolved, discuss state-of-the-art strategies, condense their results obtained using public datasets and examine their pros and cons. Second, this paper is intended to be a detailed reference of the research activity in deep CNN for brain MRI analysis. Finally, we present a perspective on the future of CNNs in which we hint some of the research directions in subsequent years.