OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Shape-from-Mask: A Deep Learning Based Human Body Shape Reconstruction from Binary Mask Images
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2018
Year: 2018

3D content creation is referred to as one of the most fundamental tasks of computer graphics. And many 3D modeling algorithms from 2D images or curves have been developed over the past several decades. Designers are allowed to align some conceptual images or sketch some suggestive curves, from front, side, and top views, and then use them as references in constructing a 3D model automatically or manually. However, to the best of our knowledge, no studies have investigated on 3D human body reconstruction in a similar manner. In this paper, we propose a deep learning based reconstruction of 3D human body shape from 2D orthographic views. A novel CNN-based regression network, with two branches corresponding to frontal and lateral views respectively, is designed for estimating 3D human body shape from 2D mask images. We train our networks separately to decouple the feature descriptors which encode the body parameters from different views, and fuse them to estimate an accurate human body shape. In addition, to overcome the shortage of training data required for this purpose, we propose some significantly data augmentation schemes for 3D human body shapes, which can be used to promote further research on this topic. Extensive experimen- tal results demonstrate that visually realistic and accurate reconstructions can be achieved effectively using our algorithm. Requiring only binary mask images, our method can help users create their own digital avatars quickly, and also make it easy to create digital human body for 3D game, virtual reality, online fashion shopping.
An Approximate Dynamic Programming Approach to Community Recovery Management (Extended Abstract)
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2018
Year: 2018

The functioning of interdependent civil infrastructure systems in the aftermath of a disruptive event is critical to the performance and vitality of any modern urban community. Post-event stressors and chaotic circumstances, time limitations, and complexities in the community recovery process highlight the necessity for a comprehensive decision-making framework at the community-level for post-event recovery management. Such a framework must be able to handle large-scale scheduling and decision processes, which involve difficult control problems with large combinatorial decision spaces. This study utilizes approximate dynamic programming algorithms along with heuristics for the identification of optimal community recovery actions following the occurrence of an extreme earthquake event. The proposed approach addresses the curse of dimensionality in its analysis and management of multi-state, large-scale infrastructure systems. Furthermore, the proposed approach can consider the cur-rent recovery policies of responsible public and private entities within the community and shows how their performance might be improved. A testbed community coarsely modeled after Gilroy, California, is utilized as an illustrative example. While the illustration provides optimal policies for the Electrical Power Network serving Gilroy following a severe earthquake, preliminary work shows that the methodology is computationally well suited to other infrastructure systems and hazards.
Insights from Analysis of Video Streaming Data to Improve Resource Management
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

Today a large portion of Internet traffic is video. Over The Top (OTT) service providers offer video streaming services by creating a large distributed cloud network on top of a physical infrastructure owned by multiple entities. Our study explores insights from video streaming activity by analyzing data collected from Korea's largest OTT service provider. Our analysis of nationwide data shows interesting characteristics of video streaming such as correlation between user profile information (e.g., age, sex) and viewing habits, viewing habits of users (when do the users watch? using which devices?), viewing patterns (early leaving viewer vs. steady viewer), etc. Video on Demand (VoD) streaming involves costly (and often limited) compute, storage, and network resources. Findings from our study will be beneficial for OTTs, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and Carrier Network Operators, to improve their resource allocation and management techniques.
Polarized Rewriting and Tableaux in B Set Theory
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2018
Year: 2018

We propose and extension of the tableau-based first-order automated theorem prover Zenon Modulo to polarized rewriting. We introduce the framework and explain the potential benefits. The first target is an industrial benchmark composed of B Set Theory problems.
Subgradient-Free Stochastic Optimization Algorithm for Non-smooth Convex Functions over Time-Varying Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper we consider a distributed stochastic optimization problem without the gradient/subgradient information for the local objective functions, subject to local convex constraints. The objective functions may be non-smooth and observed with stochastic noises, and the network for the distributed design is time-varying. By adding the stochastic dithers into the local objective functions and constructing the randomized differences motivated by the Kiefer-Wolfowitz algorithm, we propose a distributed subgradient-free algorithm to find the global minimizer with local observations. Moreover, we prove that the consensus of estimates and global minimization can be achieved with probability one over the time-varying network, and then obtain the convergence rate of the mean average of estimates as well. Finally, we give a numerical example to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
An accurate retrieval through R-MAC+ descriptors for landmark recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

The landmark recognition problem is far from being solved, but with the use of features extracted from intermediate layers of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), excellent results have been obtained. In this work, we propose some improvements on the creation of R-MAC descriptors in order to make the newly-proposed R-MAC+ descriptors more representative than the previous ones. However, the main contribution of this paper is a novel retrieval technique, that exploits the fine representativeness of the MAC descriptors of the database images. Using this descriptors called "db regions" during the retrieval stage, the performance is greatly improved. The proposed method is tested on different public datasets: Oxford5k, Paris6k and Holidays. It outperforms the state-of-the- art results on Holidays and reached excellent results on Oxford5k and Paris6k, overcame only by approaches based on fine-tuning strategies.
Point cloud segmentation using hierarchical tree for architectural models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Recent developments in the 3D scanning technologies have made the generation of highly accurate 3D point clouds relatively easy but the segmentation of these point clouds remains a challenging area. A number of techniques have set precedent of either planar or primitive based segmentation in literature. In this work, we present a novel and an effective primitive based point cloud segmentation algorithm. The primary focus, i.e. the main technical contribution of our method is a hierarchical tree which iteratively divides the point cloud into segments. This tree uses an exclusive energy function and a 3D convolutional neural network, HollowNets to classify the segments. We test the efficacy of our proposed approach using both real and synthetic data obtaining an accuracy greater than 90% for domes and minarets.
Francy - An Interactive Discrete Mathematics Framework for GAP
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2018
Year: 2018

Data visualization and interaction with large data sets is known to be essential and critical in many businesses today, and the same applies to research and teaching, in this case, when exploring large and complex mathematical objects. GAP is a computer algebra system for computational discrete algebra with an emphasis on computational group theory. The existing XGAP package for GAP works exclusively on the X Window System. It lacks abstraction between its mathematical and graphical cores, making it difficult to extend, maintain, or port. In this paper, we present Francy, a graphical semantics package for GAP. Francy is responsible for creating a representational structure that can be rendered using many GUI frameworks independent from any particular programming language or operating system. Building on this, we use state of the art web technologies that take advantage of an improved REPL environment, which is currently under development for GAP. The integration of this project with Jupyter provides a rich graphical environment full of features enhancing the usability and accessibility of GAP.
A Predictive Model for Music Based on Learned Interval Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2018
Year: 2018

Connectionist sequence models (e.g., RNNs) applied to musical sequences suffer from two known problems: First, they have strictly "absolute pitch perception". Therefore, they fail to generalize over musical concepts which are commonly perceived in terms of relative distances between pitches (e.g., melodies, scale types, modes, cadences, or chord types). Second, they fall short of capturing the concepts of repetition and musical form. In this paper we introduce the recurrent gated autoencoder (RGAE), a recurrent neural network which learns and operates on interval representations of musical sequences. The relative pitch modeling increases generalization and reduces sparsity in the input data. Furthermore, it can learn sequences of copy-and-shift operations (i.e. chromatically transposed copies of musical fragments)---a promising capability for learning musical repetition structure. We show that the RGAE improves the state of the art for general connectionist sequence models in learning to predict monophonic melodies, and that ensembles of relative and absolute music processing models improve the results appreciably. Furthermore, we show that the relative pitch processing of the RGAE naturally facilitates the learning and the generation of sequences of copy-and-shift operations, wherefore the RGAE greatly outperforms a common absolute pitch recurrent neural network on this task.
Improved bounds for multipass pairing heaps and path-balanced binary search trees
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2018
Year: 2018

We revisit multipass pairing heaps and path-balanced binary search trees (BSTs), two classical algorithms for data structure maintenance. The pairing heap is a simple and efficient "self-adjusting" heap, introduced in 1986 by Fredman, Sedgewick, Sleator, and Tarjan. In the multipass variant (one of the original pairing heap variants described by Fredman et al.) the minimum item is extracted via repeated pairing rounds in which neighboring siblings are linked. Path-balanced BSTs, proposed by Sleator (Subramanian, 1996), are a natural alternative to Splay trees (Sleator and Tarjan, 1983). In a path-balanced BST, whenever an item is accessed, the search path leading to that item is re-arranged into a balanced tree. Despite their simplicity, both algorithms turned out to be difficult to analyse. Fredman et al. showed that operations in multipass pairing heaps take amortized $O(\log{n} \cdot \log\log{n} / \log\log\log{n})$ time. For searching in path-balanced BSTs, Balasubramanian and Raman showed in 1995 the same amortized time bound of $O(\log{n} \cdot \log\log{n} / \log\log\log{n})$, using a different argument. In this paper we show an explicit connection between the two algorithms and improve the two bounds to $O\left(\log{n} \cdot 2^{\log^{\ast}{n}} \cdot \log^{\ast}{n}\right)$, respectively $O\left(\log{n} \cdot 2^{\log^{\ast}{n}} \cdot (\log^{\ast}{n})^2 \right)$, where $\log^{\ast}(\cdot)$ denotes the very slowly growing iterated logarithm function. These are the first improvements in more than three, resp. two decades, approaching in both cases the information-theoretic lower bound of $Ω(\log{n})$.
Learning to Rank from Samples of Variable Quality
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2018
Year: 2018

Training deep neural networks requires many training samples, but in practice, training labels are expensive to obtain and may be of varying quality, as some may be from trusted expert labelers while others might be from heuristics or other sources of weak supervision such as crowd-sourcing. This creates a fundamental quality-versus quantity trade-off in the learning process. Do we learn from the small amount of high-quality data or the potentially large amount of weakly-labeled data? We argue that if the learner could somehow know and take the label-quality into account when learning the data representation, we could get the best of both worlds. To this end, we introduce "fidelity-weighted learning" (FWL), a semi-supervised student-teacher approach for training deep neural networks using weakly-labeled data. FWL modulates the parameter updates to a student network (trained on the task we care about) on a per-sample basis according to the posterior confidence of its label-quality estimated by a teacher (who has access to the high-quality labels). Both student and teacher are learned from the data. We evaluate FWL on document ranking where we outperform state-of-the-art alternative semi-supervised methods.
Design and Application of Data Aquistion Interface Circuit
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2018
Year: 2018

A commitment to condition monitoring involves the operators of plant in the conduct of a range of activities. These activities may be compli-cated in nature and indeed may often be performed automatically under computer control. They can, however, always be down into a rela-tively small number of easily identifiable functional tasks. This makes it much easier to identify the common elements of machine condition monitoring schemes. A proposed interface circuit design and application will be further explain in this paper, the implemented monitoring unit circuit also illustrated, see appendix A. Two scenarios presented in this paper, first ten turns assume to be shorted, and in the second thirty turns shorted to show the difference in the amplitude of frequencies at each case. This paper present. An improvement in three-phase squirrel-cage induction motor stator inter-turn fault detection and diagnosis based on a neural network approach is presented.
The Natural Language Decathlon: Multitask Learning as Question Answering
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

Deep learning has improved performance on many natural language processing (NLP) tasks individually. However, general NLP models cannot emerge within a paradigm that focuses on the particularities of a single metric, dataset, and task. We introduce the Natural Language Decathlon (decaNLP), a challenge that spans ten tasks: question answering, machine translation, summarization, natural language inference, sentiment analysis, semantic role labeling, zero-shot relation extraction, goal-oriented dialogue, semantic parsing, and commonsense pronoun resolution. We cast all tasks as question answering over a context. Furthermore, we present a new Multitask Question Answering Network (MQAN) jointly learns all tasks in decaNLP without any task-specific modules or parameters in the multitask setting. MQAN shows improvements in transfer learning for machine translation and named entity recognition, domain adaptation for sentiment analysis and natural language inference, and zero-shot capabilities for text classification. We demonstrate that the MQAN's multi-pointer-generator decoder is key to this success and performance further improves with an anti-curriculum training strategy. Though designed for decaNLP, MQAN also achieves state of the art results on the WikiSQL semantic parsing task in the single-task setting. We also release code for procuring and processing data, training and evaluating models, and reproducing all experiments for decaNLP.
Synchronization of Singularly Perturbed Systems with Time Scales
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

Synchronization problems of continuous and discrete singularly perturbed systems are studied in this paper with singular perturbations and time scales (SPaTS) technique. The dynamics of leader and followers are decomposed into pure-slow and pure-fast subsystems. Locally optimal decentralized tracking sub-controllers are synthesized respectively to asymptotically synchronize each subsystem of follower. A composite control protocol is proposed to synchronize the original dynamics of each follower with the leader's dynamics. Both analogous and digital flight control systems for aircraft formation flying are utilized to verify the effectiveness of the control schemes.
A readout method based on 10 Gigabit Ethernet for Sipixel detector
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

With the rapid development of network protocol, TCP/IP has been widely applied in various OS systems because of its advantages of high-speed network transmission and standardization. Furthermore, TCP/IP has the functions of retransmission and flow control, so it can ensure data's security and stability. In recent years, as a transmission Field-bus, it is also widely used in high-energy physics detectors. This article describes a readout method using 10 gigabit network processor applied in silicon pixel detector which is a pixel detector designed for the High Energy Photon Source (HEPS) in China. The PHY layer and the MAC layer of this hardware are both instantiated in FPGA. The logic of hardware can process and read out the data of the detectors. Meanwhile, it wraps up data and send them to TOE (TCP Offload Engine). A kind of bus control protocol interface is also provided, which can facilitate the host computer to read and write the specific register directly through the UDP protocol. Only a piece of FPGA can complete the processing of the TCP and UDP packets. It is important for the miniaturization of the detectors.
A Community-Driven Validation Service for Standard Medical Imaging Objects
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2018
Year: 2018

Digital medical imaging laboratories contain many distinct types of equipment provided by different manufacturers. Interoperability is a critical issue and the DICOM protocol is a de facto standard in those environments. However, manufacturers' implementation of the standard may have non-conformities at several levels, which will hinder systems' integration. Moreover, medical staff may be responsible for data inconsistencies when entering data. Those situations severely affect the quality of healthcare services since they can disrupt system operations. The existence of software able to confirm data quality and compliance with the DICOM standard is important for programmers, IT staff and healthcare technicians. Although there are a few solutions that try to accomplish this goal, they are unable to deal with certain situations that require user input. Furthermore, these cases usually require the setup of a working environment, which makes the sharing of validation information more difficult. This article proposes and describes the development of a Web DICOM validation service for the community. This solution requires no configuration by the user, promotes validation results share-ability in the community and preserves patient data privacy since files are de-identified on the client side.
Stroke-based Character Reconstruction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Background elimination for noisy character images or character images from real scene is still a challenging problem, due to the bewildering backgrounds, uneven illumination, low resolution and different distortions. We propose a stroke-based character reconstruction(SCR) method that use a weighted quadratic Bezier curve(WQBC) to represent strokes of a character. Only training on our synthetic data, our stroke extractor can achieve excellent reconstruction effect in real scenes. Meanwhile. It can also help achieve great ability in defending adversarial attacks of character recognizers.
Context-aware Failure-oblivious Computing as a Means of Preventing Buffer Overflows
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

In languages like C, buffer overflows are widespread. A common mitigation technique is to use tools that detect them during execution and abort the program to prevent the leakage of data or the diversion of control flow. However, for server applications, it would be desirable to prevent such errors while maintaining availability of the system. To this end, we present an approach to handle buffer overflows without aborting the program. This approach involves implementing a continuation logic in library functions based on an introspection function that allows querying the size of a buffer. We demonstrate that introspection can be implemented in popular bug-finding and bug-mitigation tools such as LLVM's AddressSanitizer, SoftBound, and Intel-MPX-based bounds checking. We evaluated our approach in a case study of real-world bugs and show that for tools that explicitly track bounds data, introspection results in a low performance overhead.
CT-image Super Resolution Using 3D Convolutional Neural Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Computed Tomography (CT) imaging technique is widely used in geological exploration, medical diagnosis and other fields. In practice, however, the resolution of CT image is usually limited by scanning devices and great expense. Super resolution (SR) methods based on deep learning have achieved surprising performance in two-dimensional (2D) images. Unfortunately, there are few effective SR algorithms for three-dimensional (3D) images. In this paper, we proposed a novel network named as three-dimensional super resolution convolutional neural network (3DSRCNN) to realize voxel super resolution for CT images. To solve the practical problems in training process such as slow convergence of network training, insufficient memory, etc., we utilized adjustable learning rate, residual-learning, gradient clipping, momentum stochastic gradient descent (SGD) strategies to optimize training procedure. In addition, we have explored the empirical guidelines to set appropriate number of layers of network and how to use residual learning strategy. Additionally, previous learning-based algorithms need to separately train for different scale factors for reconstruction, yet our single model can complete the multi-scale SR. At last, our method has better performance in terms of PSNR, SSIM and efficiency compared with conventional methods.
The Perception of Humanoid Robots for Domestic Use in Saudi Arabia
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2018
Year: 2018

We propose a research to investigate Saudi peoples' perception of humanoid domestic robots and attitude towards the possibility of having one in their house. Through a series of questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and participatory design sessions, this research will explore Saudi peoples' level of acceptance towards domestic robots, the tasks and responsibilities they would feel comfortable assigning to these robots, their preferred appearance of domestic robots, and the cultural stereotypes they feel a domestic robot must mimic.