OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Learning Articulated Motions From Visual Demonstration
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2015
Year: 2015

Many functional elements of human homes and workplaces consist of rigid components which are connected through one or more sliding or rotating linkages. Examples include doors and drawers of cabinets and appliances; laptops; and swivel office chairs. A robotic mobile manipulator would benefit from the ability to acquire kinematic models of such objects from observation. This paper describes a method by which a robot can acquire an object model by capturing depth imagery of the object as a human moves it through its range of motion. We envision that in future, a machine newly introduced to an environment could be shown by its human user the articulated objects particular to that environment, inferring from these "visual demonstrations" enough information to actuate each object independently of the user. Our method employs sparse (markerless) feature tracking, motion segmentation, component pose estimation, and articulation learning; it does not require prior object models. Using the method, a robot can observe an object being exercised, infer a kinematic model incorporating rigid, prismatic and revolute joints, then use the model to predict the object's motion from a novel vantage point. We evaluate the method's performance, and compare it to that of a previously published technique, for a variety of household objects.
Use of Modality and Negation in Semantically-Informed Syntactic MT
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2015
Year: 2015

This paper describes the resource- and system-building efforts of an eight-week Johns Hopkins University Human Language Technology Center of Excellence Summer Camp for Applied Language Exploration (SCALE-2009) on Semantically-Informed Machine Translation (SIMT). We describe a new modality/negation (MN) annotation scheme, the creation of a (publicly available) MN lexicon, and two automated MN taggers that we built using the annotation scheme and lexicon. Our annotation scheme isolates three components of modality and negation: a trigger (a word that conveys modality or negation), a target (an action associated with modality or negation) and a holder (an experiencer of modality). We describe how our MN lexicon was semi-automatically produced and we demonstrate that a structure-based MN tagger results in precision around 86% (depending on genre) for tagging of a standard LDC data set. We apply our MN annotation scheme to statistical machine translation using a syntactic framework that supports the inclusion of semantic annotations. Syntactic tags enriched with semantic annotations are assigned to parse trees in the target-language training texts through a process of tree grafting. While the focus of our work is modality and negation, the tree grafting procedure is general and supports other types of semantic information. We exploit this capability by including named entities, produced by a pre-existing tagger, in addition to the MN elements produced by the taggers described in this paper. The resulting system significantly outperformed a linguistically naive baseline model (Hiero), and reached the highest scores yet reported on the NIST 2009 Urdu-English test set. This finding supports the hypothesis that both syntactic and semantic information can improve translation quality.
Randomness of Spritz via DieHarder testing
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2015
Year: 2015

RC4 is a stream cipher included in the TLS protocol, and widely used for encrypting network traffic during the last decades. Spritz is a possible candidate for replacing RC4. Spritz is based on a sponge construction and preserves the byte-oriented behaviour existing in RC4, but introduces an interface that provides encryption, hashing or MAC-generation functionalities. We present here the results obtained after applying several statistical tests on the keystreams generated by Spritz when used in the cipher mode. Our methodology makes use of 1024 keystreams of 2^25 bits. The algorithm was tested against the DieHarder test suite. None of the tests failed. Few tests produced weak results that were corrected when the number of samples increased.
Crowded Scene Analysis: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2015
Year: 2015

Automated scene analysis has been a topic of great interest in computer vision and cognitive science. Recently, with the growth of crowd phenomena in the real world, crowded scene analysis has attracted much attention. However, the visual occlusions and ambiguities in crowded scenes, as well as the complex behaviors and scene semantics, make the analysis a challenging task. In the past few years, an increasing number of works on crowded scene analysis have been reported, covering different aspects including crowd motion pattern learning, crowd behavior and activity analysis, and anomaly detection in crowds. This paper surveys the state-of-the-art techniques on this topic. We first provide the background knowledge and the available features related to crowded scenes. Then, existing models, popular algorithms, evaluation protocols, as well as system performance are provided corresponding to different aspects of crowded scene analysis. We also outline the available datasets for performance evaluation. Finally, some research problems and promising future directions are presented with discussions.
Hierarchical Maximum-Margin Clustering
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2015
Year: 2015

We present a hierarchical maximum-margin clustering method for unsupervised data analysis. Our method extends beyond flat maximum-margin clustering, and performs clustering recursively in a top-down manner. We propose an effective greedy splitting criteria for selecting which cluster to split next, and employ regularizers that enforce feature sharing/competition for capturing data semantics. Experimental results obtained on four standard datasets show that our method outperforms flat and hierarchical clustering baselines, while forming clean and semantically meaningful cluster hierarchies.
Generalized Inpainting Method for Hyperspectral Image Acquisition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2015
Year: 2015

A recently designed hyperspectral imaging device enables multiplexed acquisition of an entire data volume in a single snapshot thanks to monolithically-integrated spectral filters. Such an agile imaging technique comes at the cost of a reduced spatial resolution and the need for a demosaicing procedure on its interleaved data. In this work, we address both issues and propose an approach inspired by recent developments in compressed sensing and analysis sparse models. We formulate our superresolution and demosaicing task as a 3-D generalized inpainting problem. Interestingly, the target spatial resolution can be adjusted for mitigating the compression level of our sensing. The reconstruction procedure uses a fast greedy method called Pseudo-inverse IHT. We also show on simulations that a random arrangement of the spectral filters on the sensor is preferable to regular mosaic layout as it improves the quality of the reconstruction. The efficiency of our technique is demonstrated through numerical experiments on both synthetic and real data as acquired by the snapshot imager.
A Comparison Study of Coupled and Decoupled Uplink Heterogeneous Cellular Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2015
Year: 2015

The evolution of mobile cellular networks has brought great changes of network architecture. For example, heterogeneous cellular network (HetNet) and Ultra dense network (UDN) have been proposed as promising techniques for 5G systems. Dense deployment of base stations (BSs) allows a mobile user to be able to access multiple BSs. Meanwhile the unbalance between UL and DL in HetNets, such as different received SINR threshold and traffic load, etc., becomes increasingly obvious. All these factors naturally inspire us to consider decoupling of uplink and downlink in radio access network. An interesting question is that whether the decoupled uplink (UL) /downlink (DL) access (DUDA) mode outperforms traditional coupled uplink (UL)/downlink (DL) access (CUDA) mode or not, and how big is the performance difference in terms of system rate, spectrum efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE), etc. in HetNets. In this paper, we aim at thoroughly comparing the performance of the two modes based on stochastic geometry theory. In our analytical model, we take into account dynamic transmit power control in UL communication. Specifically, we employ fractional power control (FPC) to model a location-dependent channel state. Numerical results reveals that DUDA mode significantly outperforms CUDA mode in system rate, SE and EE in HetNets. In addition, DUDA mode improves load balance and potential fairness for both different type BSs and associated UEs.
Interactive 3D Face Stylization Using Sculptural Abstraction
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2015
Year: 2015

Sculptors often deviate from geometric accuracy in order to enhance the appearance of their sculpture. These subtle stylizations may emphasize anatomy, draw the viewer's focus to characteristic features of the subject, or symbolize textures that might not be accurately reproduced in a particular sculptural medium, while still retaining fidelity to the unique proportions of an individual. In this work we demonstrate an interactive system for enhancing face geometry using a class of stylizations based on visual decomposition into abstract semantic regions, which we call sculptural abstraction. We propose an interactive two-scale optimization framework for stylization based on sculptural abstraction, allowing real-time adjustment of both global and local parameters. We demonstrate this system's effectiveness in enhancing physical 3D prints of scans from various sources.
Optimal Haplotype Assembly from High-Throughput Mate-Pair Reads
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2015
Year: 2015

Humans have $23$ pairs of homologous chromosomes. The homologous pairs are almost identical pairs of chromosomes. For the most part, differences in homologous chromosome occur at certain documented positions called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). A haplotype of an individual is the pair of sequences of SNPs on the two homologous chromosomes. In this paper, we study the problem of inferring haplotypes of individuals from mate-pair reads of their genome. We give a simple formula for the coverage needed for haplotype assembly, under a generative model. The analysis here leverages connections of this problem with decoding convolutional codes.
Secondary Outage Analysis of Amplify-and-Forward Cognitive Relays with Direct Link and Primary Interference
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2015
Year: 2015

The use of cognitive relays is an emerging and promising solution to overcome the problem of spectrum underutilization while achieving the spatial diversity. In this paper, we perform an outage analysis of the secondary system with amplify-and-forward relays in a spectrum sharing scenario, where a secondary transmitter communicates with a secondary destination over a direct link as well as the best relay. Specifically, under the peak power constraint, we derive a closed-form expression of the secondary outage probability provided that the primary outage probability remains below a predefined value. We also take into account the effect of primary interference on the secondary outage performance. Finally, we validate the analysis by simulation results.
Exploiting the power of multiplicity: a holistic survey of network-layer multipath
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2015
Year: 2015

The Internet is inherently a multipath network---for an underlying network with only a single path connecting various nodes would have been debilitatingly fragile. Unfortunately, traditional Internet technologies have been designed around the restrictive assumption of a single working path between a source and a destination. The lack of native multipath support constrains network performance even as the underlying network is richly connected and has redundant multiple paths. Computer networks can exploit the power of multiplicity to unlock the inherent redundancy of the Internet. This opens up a new vista of opportunities promising increased throughput (through concurrent usage of multiple paths) and increased reliability and fault-tolerance (through the use of multiple paths in backup/ redundant arrangements). There are many emerging trends in networking that signify that the Internet's future will be unmistakably multipath, including the use of multipath technology in datacenter computing; multi-interface, multi-channel, and multi-antenna trends in wireless; ubiquity of mobile devices that are multi-homed with heterogeneous access networks; and the development and standardization of multipath transport protocols such as MP-TCP. The aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive survey of the literature on network-layer multipath solutions. We will present a detailed investigation of two important design issues, namely the control plane problem of how to compute and select the routes, and the data plane problem of how to split the flow on the computed paths. The main contribution of this paper is a systematic articulation of the main design issues in network-layer multipath routing along with a broad-ranging survey of the vast literature on network-layer multipathing. We also highlight open issues and identify directions for future work.
Hyperparameter Search in Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2015
Year: 2015

We introduce the hyperparameter search problem in the field of machine learning and discuss its main challenges from an optimization perspective. Machine learning methods attempt to build models that capture some element of interest based on given data. Most common learning algorithms feature a set of hyperparameters that must be determined before training commences. The choice of hyperparameters can significantly affect the resulting model's performance, but determining good values can be complex; hence a disciplined, theoretically sound search strategy is essential.
A class of cyclic codes whose dual have five zeros
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2015
Year: 2015

In this paper, a family of cyclic codes over $\mathbb{F}_{p}$ whose duals have five zeros is presented, where $p$ is an odd prime. Furthermore, the weight distributions of these cyclic codes are determined.
Secretary Problems with Non-Uniform Arrival Order
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2015
Year: 2015

For many online problems, it is known that the uniform arrival order enables the design of algorithms with much better performance guarantees than under worst-case. The quintessential example is the secretary problem. If the sequence of elements is presented in uniformly random order there is an algorithm that picks the maximum value with probability 1/e, whereas no non-trivial performance guarantee is possible if the elements arrive in worst-case order. This work initiates an investigation into relaxations of the random-ordering hypothesis in online algorithms, by focusing on the secretary problems. We present two sets of properties of distributions over permutations as sufficient conditions, called the block-independence property and uniform-induced-ordering property. We show these two are asymptotically equivalent by borrowing some techniques from the approximation theory. Moreover, we show they both imply the existence of secretary algorithms with constant probability of correct selection, approaching the optimal constant 1/e in the limit. We substantiate our idea by providing several constructions of distributions that satisfy block-independence. We also show that Θ(log log n) is the minimum entropy of any permutation distribution that permits constant probability of correct selection in the secretary problem with n elements. While our block-independence condition is sufficient for constant probability of correct selection, it is not necessary; however, we present complexity-theoretic evidence that no simple necessary and sufficient criterion exists. Finally, we explore the extent to which the performance guarantees of other algorithms are preserved when one relaxes the uniform random ordering assumption, obtaining a positive result for Kleinberg's multiple-choice secretary algorithm and a negative result for the weighted bipartite matching algorithm of Korula and Pal.
Multilayer Hadamard Decomposition of Discrete Hartley Transforms
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2015
Year: 2015

Discrete transforms such as the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) or the discrete Hartley transform (DHT) furnish an indispensable tool in signal processing. The successful application of transform techniques relies on the existence of the so-called fast transforms. In this paper some fast algorithms are derived which meet the lower bound on the multiplicative complexity of the DFT/DHT. The approach is based on a decomposition of the DHT into layers of Walsh-Hadamard transforms. In particular, fast algorithms for short block lengths such as $N \in \{4, 8, 12, 24\}$ are presented.
Person Re-identification Meets Image Search
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2015
Year: 2015

For long time, person re-identification and image search are two separately studied tasks. However, for person re-identification, the effectiveness of local features and the "query-search" mode make it well posed for image search techniques. In the light of recent advances in image search, this paper proposes to treat person re-identification as an image search problem. Specifically, this paper claims two major contributions. 1) By designing an unsupervised Bag-of-Words representation, we are devoted to bridging the gap between the two tasks by integrating techniques from image search in person re-identification. We show that our system sets up an effective yet efficient baseline that is amenable to further supervised/unsupervised improvements. 2) We contribute a new high quality dataset which uses DPM detector and includes a number of distractor images. Our dataset reaches closer to realistic settings, and new perspectives are provided. Compared with approaches that rely on feature-feature match, our method is faster by over two orders of magnitude. Moreover, on three datasets, we report competitive results compared with the state-of-the-art methods.
Hierarchical Dirichlet process for tracking complex topical structure evolution and its application to autism research literature
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2015
Year: 2015

In this paper we describe a novel framework for the discovery of the topical content of a data corpus, and the tracking of its complex structural changes across the temporal dimension. In contrast to previous work our model does not impose a prior on the rate at which documents are added to the corpus nor does it adopt the Markovian assumption which overly restricts the type of changes that the model can capture. Our key technical contribution is a framework based on (i) discretization of time into epochs, (ii) epoch-wise topic discovery using a hierarchical Dirichlet process-based model, and (iii) a temporal similarity graph which allows for the modelling of complex topic changes: emergence and disappearance, evolution, and splitting and merging. The power of the proposed framework is demonstrated on the medical literature corpus concerned with the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) - an increasingly important research subject of significant social and healthcare importance. In addition to the collected ASD literature corpus which we will make freely available, our contributions also include two free online tools we built as aids to ASD researchers. These can be used for semantically meaningful navigation and searching, as well as knowledge discovery from this large and rapidly growing corpus of literature.
A geometric approach for the upper bound theorem for Minkowski sums of convex polytopes
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2015
Year: 2015

We derive tight expressions for the maximum number of $k$-faces, $0\le{}k\le{}d-1$, of the Minkowski sum, $P_1+...+P_r$, of $r$ convex $d$-polytopes $P_1,...,P_r$ in $\mathbb{R}^d$, where $d\ge{}2$ and $r<d$, as a (recursively defined) function on the number of vertices of the polytopes. Our results coincide with those recently proved by Adiprasito and Sanyal [2]. In contrast to Adiprasito and Sanyal's approach, which uses tools from Combinatorial Commutative Algebra, our approach is purely geometric and uses basic notions such as $f$- and $h$-vector calculus and shellings, and generalizes the methodology used in [15] and [14] for proving upper bounds on the $f$-vector of the Minkowski sum of two and three convex polytopes, respectively. The key idea behind our approach is to express the Minkowski sum $P_1+...+P_r$ as a section of the Cayley polytope $\mathcal{C}$ of the summands; bounding the $k$-faces of $P_1+...+P_r$ reduces to bounding the subset of the $(k+r-1)$-faces of $\mathcal{C}$ that contain vertices from each of the $r$ polytopes. We end our paper with a sketch of an explicit construction that establishes the tightness of the upper bounds.
User-space Multipath UDP in Mosh
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2015
Year: 2015

In many network topologies, hosts have multiple IP addresses, and may choose among multiple network paths by selecting the source and destination addresses of the packets that they send. This can happen with multihomed hosts (hosts connected to multiple networks), or in multihomed networks using source-specific routing. A number of efforts have been made to dynamically choose between multiple addresses in order to improve the reliability or the performance of network applications, at the network layer, as in Shim6, or at the transport layer, as in MPTCP. In this paper, we describe our experience of implementing dynamic address selection at the application layer within the Mobile Shell. While our work is specific to Mosh, we hope that it is generic enough to serve as a basis for designing UDP-based multipath applications or even more general APIs.
YesWorkflow: A User-Oriented, Language-Independent Tool for Recovering Workflow Information from Scripts
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2015
Year: 2015

Scientific workflow management systems offer features for composing complex computational pipelines from modular building blocks, for executing the resulting automated workflows, and for recording the provenance of data products resulting from workflow runs. Despite the advantages such features provide, many automated workflows continue to be implemented and executed outside of scientific workflow systems due to the convenience and familiarity of scripting languages (such as Perl, Python, R, and MATLAB), and to the high productivity many scientists experience when using these languages. YesWorkflow is a set of software tools that aim to provide such users of scripting languages with many of the benefits of scientific workflow systems. YesWorkflow requires neither the use of a workflow engine nor the overhead of adapting code to run effectively in such a system. Instead, YesWorkflow enables scientists to annotate existing scripts with special comments that reveal the computational modules and dataflows otherwise implicit in these scripts. YesWorkflow tools extract and analyze these comments, represent the scripts in terms of entities based on the typical scientific workflow model, and provide graphical renderings of this workflow-like view of the scripts. Future versions of YesWorkflow also will allow the prospective provenance of the data products of these scripts to be queried in ways similar to those available to users of scientific workflow systems.