OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Interpretable Models in ANNs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Artificial neural networks are often very complex and too deep for a human to understand. As a result, they are usually referred to as black boxes. For a lot of real-world problems, the underlying pattern itself is very complicated, such that an analytic solution does not exist. However, in some cases, laws of physics, for example, the pattern can be described by relatively simple mathematical expressions. In that case, we want to get a readable equation rather than a black box. In this paper, we try to find a way to explain a network and extract a human-readable equation that describes the model.
ColdGAN: Resolving Cold Start User Recommendation by using Generative Adversarial Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

Mitigating the new user cold-start problem has been critical in the recommendation system for online service providers to influence user experience in decision making which can ultimately affect the intention of users to use a particular service. Previous studies leveraged various side information from users and items; however, it may be impractical due to privacy concerns. In this paper, we present ColdGAN, an end-to-end GAN based model with no use of side information to resolve this problem. The main idea of the proposed model is to train a network that learns the rating distributions of experienced users given their cold-start distributions. We further design a time-based function to restore the preferences of users to cold-start states. With extensive experiments on two real-world datasets, the results show that our proposed method achieves significantly improved performance compared with the state-of-the-art recommenders.
Recent Progress in Appearance-based Action Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Action recognition, which is formulated as a task to identify various human actions in a video, has attracted increasing interest from computer vision researchers due to its importance in various applications. Recently, appearance-based methods have achieved promising progress towards accurate action recognition. In general, these methods mainly fulfill the task by applying various schemes to model spatial and temporal visual information effectively. To better understand the current progress of appearance-based action recognition, we provide a comprehensive review of recent achievements in this area. In particular, we summarise and discuss several dozens of related research papers, which can be roughly divided into four categories according to different appearance modelling strategies. The obtained categories include 2D convolutional methods, 3D convolutional methods, motion representation-based methods, and context representation-based methods. We analyse and discuss representative methods from each category, comprehensively. Empirical results are also summarised to better illustrate cutting-edge algorithms. We conclude by identifying important areas for future research gleaned from our categorisation.
An $O(\log^{3/2}n)$ Parallel Time Population Protocol for Majority with $O(\log n)$ States
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

In population protocols, the underlying distributed network consists of $n$ nodes (or agents), denoted by $V$, and a scheduler that continuously selects uniformly random pairs of nodes to interact. When two nodes interact, their states are updated by applying a state transition function that depends only on the states of the two nodes prior to the interaction. The efficiency of a population protocol is measured in terms of both time (which is the number of interactions until the nodes collectively have a valid output) and the number of possible states of nodes used by the protocol. By convention, we consider the parallel time cost, which is the time divided by $n$. In this paper we consider the majority problem, where each node receives as input a color that is either black or white, and the goal is to have all of the nodes output the color that is the majority of the input colors. We design a population protocol that solves the majority problem in $O(\log^{3/2}n)$ parallel time, both with high probability and in expectation, while using $O(\log n)$ states. Our protocol improves on a recent protocol of Berenbrink et al. that runs in $O(\log^{5/3}n)$ parallel time, both with high probability and in expectation, using $O(\log n)$ states.
Unsupervised learning of disentangled representations in deep restricted kernel machines with orthogonality constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We introduce Constr-DRKM, a deep kernel method for the unsupervised learning of disentangled data representations. We propose augmenting the original deep restricted kernel machine formulation for kernel PCA by orthogonality constraints on the latent variables to promote disentanglement and to make it possible to carry out optimization without first defining a stabilized objective. After illustrating an end-to-end training procedure based on a quadratic penalty optimization algorithm with warm start, we quantitatively evaluate the proposed method's effectiveness in disentangled feature learning. We demonstrate on four benchmark datasets that this approach performs similarly overall to $β$-VAE on a number of disentanglement metrics when few training points are available, while being less sensitive to randomness and hyperparameter selection than $β$-VAE. We also present a deterministic initialization of Constr-DRKM's training algorithm that significantly improves the reproducibility of the results. Finally, we empirically evaluate and discuss the role of the number of layers in the proposed methodology, examining the influence of each principal component in every layer and showing that components in lower layers act as local feature detectors capturing the broad trends of the data distribution, while components in deeper layers use the representation learned by previous layers and more accurately reproduce higher-level features.
Coalition Control Model: A Dynamic Resource Distribution Method Based on Model Predicative Control
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2020
Year: 2020

Optimization of resource distribution has been a challenging topic in current society. To explore this topic, we develop a Coalition Control Model(CCM) based on the Model Predictive Control(MPC) and test it using a fishing model with linear parameters. The fishing model focuses on the problem of distributing fishing fleets in certain regions to maximize fish caught using either exhaustive or heuristic search. Our method introduces a communication mechanism to allow fishing fleets to merge or split, after which new coalitions can be automatically formed. Having the coalition structure stabilized, the system reaches the equilibrium state through the Nash-Bargaining process. Our experiments on the hypothetical fishing model demonstrated that the CCM can dynamically distribute limited resources in complex scenarios.
Resonance: Replacing Software Constants with Context-Aware Models in Real-time Communication
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

Large software systems tune hundreds of 'constants' to optimize their runtime performance. These values are commonly derived through intuition, lab tests, or A/B tests. A 'one-size-fits-all' approach is often sub-optimal as the best value depends on runtime context. In this paper, we provide an experimental approach to replace constants with learned contextual functions for Skype - a widely used real-time communication (RTC) application. We present Resonance, a system based on contextual bandits (CB). We describe experiences from three real-world experiments: applying it to the audio, video, and transport components in Skype. We surface a unique and practical challenge of performing machine learning (ML) inference in large software systems written using encapsulation principles. Finally, we open-source FeatureBroker, a library to reduce the friction in adopting ML models in such development environments
Attention Aware Cost Volume Pyramid Based Multi-view Stereo Network for 3D Reconstruction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

We present an efficient multi-view stereo (MVS) network for 3D reconstruction from multiview images. While previous learning based reconstruction approaches performed quite well, most of them estimate depth maps at a fixed resolution using plane sweep volumes with a fixed depth hypothesis at each plane, which requires densely sampled planes for desired accuracy and therefore is difficult to achieve high resolution depth maps. In this paper we introduce a coarseto-fine depth inference strategy to achieve high resolution depth. This strategy estimates the depth map at coarsest level, while the depth maps at finer levels are considered as the upsampled depth map from previous level with pixel-wise depth residual. Thus, we narrow the depth searching range with priori information from previous level and construct new cost volumes from the pixel-wise depth residual to perform depth map refinement. Then the final depth map could be achieved iteratively since all the parameters are shared between different levels. At each level, the self-attention layer is introduced to the feature extraction block for capturing the long range dependencies for depth inference task, and the cost volume is generated using similarity measurement instead of the variance based methods used in previous work. Experiments were conducted on both the DTU benchmark dataset and recently released BlendedMVS dataset. The results demonstrated that our model could outperform most state-of-the-arts (SOTA) methods. The codebase of this project is at https://github.com/ArthasMil/AACVP-MVSNet.
Simple statistical methods for unsupervised brain anomaly detection on MRI are competitive to deep learning methods
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Statistical analysis of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can help radiologists to detect pathologies that are otherwise likely to be missed. Deep learning (DL) has shown promise in modeling complex spatial data for brain anomaly detection. However, DL models have major deficiencies: they need large amounts of high-quality training data, are difficult to design and train and are sensitive to subtle changes in scanning protocols and hardware. Here, we show that also simple statistical methods such as voxel-wise (baseline and covariance) models and a linear projection method using spatial patterns can achieve DL-equivalent (3D convolutional autoencoder) performance in unsupervised pathology detection. All methods were trained (N=395) and compared (N=44) on a novel, expert-curated multiparametric (8 sequences) head MRI dataset of healthy and pathological cases, respectively. We show that these simple methods can be more accurate in detecting small lesions and are considerably easier to train and comprehend. The methods were quantitatively compared using AUC and average precision and evaluated qualitatively on clinical use cases comprising brain atrophy, tumors (small metastases) and movement artefacts. Our results demonstrate that while DL methods may be useful, they should show a sufficiently large performance improvement over simpler methods to justify their usage. Thus, simple statistical methods should provide the baseline for benchmarks. Source code and trained models are available on GitHub (https://github.com/vsaase/simpleBAD).
Left Lyndon tree construction
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2020
Year: 2020

We extend the left-to-right Lyndon factorisation of a word to the left Lyndon tree construction of a Lyndon word. It yields an algorithm to sort the prefixes of a Lyndon word according to the infinite ordering defined by Dolce et al. (2019). A straightforward variant computes the left Lyndon forest of a word. All algorithms run in linear time on a general alphabet, that is, in the letter-comparison model.
Deep Learning-based Resource Allocation For Device-to-Device Communication
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, a deep learning (DL) framework for the optimization of the resource allocation in multi-channel cellular systems with device-to-device (D2D) communication is proposed. Thereby, the channel assignment and discrete transmit power levels of the D2D users, which are both integer variables, are optimized to maximize the overall spectral efficiency whilst maintaining the quality-of-service (QoS) of the cellular users. Depending on the availability of channel state information (CSI), two different configurations are considered, namely 1) centralized operation with full CSI and 2) distributed operation with partial CSI, where in the latter case, the CSI is encoded according to the capacity of the feedback channel. Instead of solving the resulting resource allocation problem for each channel realization, a DL framework is proposed, where the optimal resource allocation strategy for arbitrary channel conditions is approximated by deep neural network (DNN) models. Furthermore, we propose a new training strategy that combines supervised and unsupervised learning methods and a local CSI sharing strategy to achieve near-optimal performance while enforcing the QoS constraints of the cellular users and efficiently handling the integer optimization variables based on a few ground-truth labels. Our simulation results confirm that near-optimal performance can be attained with low computation time, which underlines the real-time capability of the proposed scheme. Moreover, our results show that not only the resource allocation strategy but also the CSI encoding strategy can be efficiently determined using a DNN. Furthermore, we show that the proposed DL framework can be easily extended to communications systems with different design objectives.
StyleSpace Analysis: Disentangled Controls for StyleGAN Image Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

We explore and analyze the latent style space of StyleGAN2, a state-of-the-art architecture for image generation, using models pretrained on several different datasets. We first show that StyleSpace, the space of channel-wise style parameters, is significantly more disentangled than the other intermediate latent spaces explored by previous works. Next, we describe a method for discovering a large collection of style channels, each of which is shown to control a distinct visual attribute in a highly localized and disentangled manner. Third, we propose a simple method for identifying style channels that control a specific attribute, using a pretrained classifier or a small number of example images. Manipulation of visual attributes via these StyleSpace controls is shown to be better disentangled than via those proposed in previous works. To show this, we make use of a newly proposed Attribute Dependency metric. Finally, we demonstrate the applicability of StyleSpace controls to the manipulation of real images. Our findings pave the way to semantically meaningful and well-disentangled image manipulations via simple and intuitive interfaces.
Phase retrieval with Bregman divergences: Application to audio signal recovery
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2020
Year: 2020

Phase retrieval aims to recover a signal from magnitude or power spectra measurements. It is often addressed by considering a minimization problem involving a quadratic cost function. We propose a different formulation based on Bregman divergences, which encompass divergences that are appropriate for audio signal processing applications. We derive a fast gradient algorithm to solve this problem.
Relay Selection & Power Allocation for Maximizing Sum-Throughput of a Buffered Relay Network
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

Considering two-hop cooperative communication with buffered half-duplex relays, this work jointly optimizes relay selection and transmit power at the relay to maximize the sum-throughput of the network subject to a minimum throughput requirement of each hop and transmit power constraint. The optimization problem is solved and two new buffer aware selection schemes, namely joint relay power allocation and selection scheme (JPASS) and ratio selection scheme (RSS) are proposed. Numerical results show that the average sum-throughput of both the proposed schemes is up to 40% higher compared to the existing schemes in the literature.
PS-DeVCEM: Pathology-sensitive deep learning model for video capsule endoscopy based on weakly labeled data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

We propose a novel pathology-sensitive deep learning model (PS-DeVCEM) for frame-level anomaly detection and multi-label classification of different colon diseases in video capsule endoscopy (VCE) data. Our proposed model is capable of coping with the key challenge of colon apparent heterogeneity caused by several types of diseases. Our model is driven by attention-based deep multiple instance learning and is trained end-to-end on weakly labeled data using video labels instead of detailed frame-by-frame annotation. The spatial and temporal features are obtained through ResNet50 and residual Long short-term memory (residual LSTM) blocks, respectively. Additionally, the learned temporal attention module provides the importance of each frame to the final label prediction. Moreover, we developed a self-supervision method to maximize the distance between classes of pathologies. We demonstrate through qualitative and quantitative experiments that our proposed weakly supervised learning model gives superior precision and F1-score reaching, 61.6% and 55.1%, as compared to three state-of-the-art video analysis methods respectively. We also show our model's ability to temporally localize frames with pathologies, without frame annotation information during training. Furthermore, we collected and annotated the first and largest VCE dataset with only video labels. The dataset contains 455 short video segments with 28,304 frames and 14 classes of colorectal diseases and artifacts. Dataset and code supporting this publication will be made available on our home page.
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks: A survey of the foundations, selected improvements, and some current applications
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Within the world of machine learning there exists a wide range of different methods with respective advantages and applications. This paper seeks to present and discuss one such method, namely Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). CNNs are deep neural networks that use a special linear operation called convolution. This operation represents a key and distinctive element of CNNs, and will therefore be the focus of this method paper. The discussion starts with the theoretical foundations that underlie convolutions and CNNs. Then, the discussion proceeds to discuss some improvements and augmentations that can be made to adapt the method to estimate a wider set of function classes. The paper mainly investigates two ways of improving the method: by using locally connected layers, which can make the network less invariant to translation, and tiled convolution, which allows for the learning of more complex invariances than standard convolution. Furthermore, the use of the Fast Fourier Transform can improve the computational efficiency of convolution. Subsequently, this paper discusses two applications of convolution that have proven to be very effective in practice. First, the YOLO architecture is a state of the art neural network for image object classification, which accurately predicts bounding boxes around objects in images. Second, tumor detection in mammography may be performed using CNNs, accomplishing 7.2% higher specificity than actual doctors with only .3% less sensitivity. Finally, the invention of technology that outperforms humans in different fields also raises certain ethical and regulatory questions that are briefly discussed.
LEADER: Low Overhead Rank Attack Detection for Securing RPL based IoT
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

In recent times researchers have found several security vulnerabilities in the Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy network (RPL), amongst which rank attack is a predominant one causing detrimental effects on the network by creating a fake topology. To address this concern, we propose a low-overhead rank attack detection scheme for non-storing mode of RPL used in IoT to deal with both increased and decreased rank attacks. Accordingly, we have modified the RPL Destination Oriented Directed Acyclic Graph (DODAG) formation algorithm to detect rank attacks during topology formation and maintenance. The distributed module of the algorithm runs in all the participating nodes whereas the centralized module runs in the sink. Unlike many existing schemes, instead of sending additional control message, we make the scheme low-overhead by simply modifying the DAO control message. Additionally, a lightweight Message Authentication Code (HMAC-LOCHA) is used to verify the integrity and authenticity of the control messages exchanged between nodes and the sink. The correctness of the proposed scheme is established through a concrete proof using multiple test case scenarios. Finally, the performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated both theoretically and through simulation in Contiki-based Cooja simulator. Theoretical evaluation proves the energy efficiency of the scheme. Simulation results show that our scheme outperforms over a state-of-the-art rank attack detection scheme in terms of detection accuracy, false positive or negative rate and energy consumption while also keeping acceptable network performance such as improved detection latency and at par packet delivery ratio.
RetroGNN: Approximating Retrosynthesis by Graph Neural Networks for De Novo Drug Design
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

De novo molecule generation often results in chemically unfeasible molecules. A natural idea to mitigate this problem is to bias the search process towards more easily synthesizable molecules using a proxy for synthetic accessibility. However, using currently available proxies still results in highly unrealistic compounds. We investigate the feasibility of training deep graph neural networks to approximate the outputs of a retrosynthesis planning software, and their use to bias the search process. We evaluate our method on a benchmark involving searching for drug-like molecules with antibiotic properties. Compared to enumerating over five million existing molecules from the ZINC database, our approach finds molecules predicted to be more likely to be antibiotics while maintaining good drug-like properties and being easily synthesizable. Importantly, our deep neural network can successfully filter out hard to synthesize molecules while achieving a $10^5$ times speed-up over using the retrosynthesis planning software.
Squared $\ell_2$ Norm as Consistency Loss for Leveraging Augmented Data to Learn Robust and Invariant Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Data augmentation is one of the most popular techniques for improving the robustness of neural networks. In addition to directly training the model with original samples and augmented samples, a torrent of methods regularizing the distance between embeddings/representations of the original samples and their augmented counterparts have been introduced. In this paper, we explore these various regularization choices, seeking to provide a general understanding of how we should regularize the embeddings. Our analysis suggests the ideal choices of regularization correspond to various assumptions. With an invariance test, we argue that regularization is important if the model is to be used in a broader context than the accuracy-driven setting because non-regularized approaches are limited in learning the concept of invariance, despite equally high accuracy. Finally, we also show that the generic approach we identified (squared $\ell_2$ norm regularized augmentation) outperforms several recent methods, which are each specially designed for one task and significantly more complicated than ours, over three different tasks.