OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
DAMO: Deep Agile Mask Optimization for Full Chip Scale
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2020
Year: 2020

Continuous scaling of the VLSI system leaves a great challenge on manufacturing and optical proximity correction (OPC) is widely applied in conventional design flow for manufacturability optimization. Traditional techniques conducted OPC by leveraging a lithography model and suffered from prohibitive computational overhead, and mostly focused on optimizing a single clip without addressing how to tackle the full chip. In this paper, we present DAMO, a high performance and scalable deep learning-enabled OPC system for full chip scale. It is an end-to-end mask optimization paradigm which contains a Deep Lithography Simulator (DLS) for lithography modeling and a Deep Mask Generator (DMG) for mask pattern generation. Moreover, a novel layout splitting algorithm customized for DAMO is proposed to handle the full chip OPC problem. Extensive experiments show that DAMO outperforms the state-of-the-art OPC solutions in both academia and industrial commercial toolkit.
Partially Supervised Multi-Task Network for Single-View Dietary Assessment
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Food volume estimation is an essential step in the pipeline of dietary assessment and demands the precise depth estimation of the food surface and table plane. Existing methods based on computer vision require either multi-image input or additional depth maps, reducing convenience of implementation and practical significance. Despite the recent advances in unsupervised depth estimation from a single image, the achieved performance in the case of large texture-less areas needs to be improved. In this paper, we propose a network architecture that jointly performs geometric understanding (i.e., depth prediction and 3D plane estimation) and semantic prediction on a single food image, enabling a robust and accurate food volume estimation regardless of the texture characteristics of the target plane. For the training of the network, only monocular videos with semantic ground truth are required, while the depth map and 3D plane ground truth are no longer needed. Experimental results on two separate food image databases demonstrate that our method performs robustly on texture-less scenarios and is superior to unsupervised networks and structure from motion based approaches, while it achieves comparable performance to fully-supervised methods.
Public risk perception and emotion on Twitter during the Covid-19 pandemic
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2020
Year: 2020

Successful navigation of the Covid-19 pandemic is predicated on public cooperation with safety measures and appropriate perception of risk, in which emotion and attention play important roles. Signatures of public emotion and attention are present in social media data, thus natural language analysis of this text enables near-to-real-time monitoring of indicators of public risk perception. We compare key epidemiological indicators of the progression of the pandemic with indicators of the public perception of the pandemic constructed from ~20 million unique Covid-19-related tweets from 12 countries posted between 10th March -- 14th June 2020. We find evidence of psychophysical numbing: Twitter users increasingly fixate on mortality, but in a decreasingly emotional and increasingly analytic tone. Semantic network analysis based on word co-occurrences reveals changes in the emotional framing of Covid-19 casualties that are consistent with this hypothesis. We also find that the average attention afforded to national Covid-19 mortality rates is modelled accurately with the Weber-Fechner and power law functions of sensory perception. Our parameter estimates for these models are consistent with estimates from psychological experiments, and indicate that users in this dataset exhibit differential sensitivity by country to the national Covid-19 death rates. Our work illustrates the potential utility of social media for monitoring public risk perception and guiding public communication during crisis scenarios.
Adversarial Graph Representation Adaptation for Cross-Domain Facial Expression Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Data inconsistency and bias are inevitable among different facial expression recognition (FER) datasets due to subjective annotating process and different collecting conditions. Recent works resort to adversarial mechanisms that learn domain-invariant features to mitigate domain shift. However, most of these works focus on holistic feature adaptation, and they ignore local features that are more transferable across different datasets. Moreover, local features carry more detailed and discriminative content for expression recognition, and thus integrating local features may enable fine-grained adaptation. In this work, we propose a novel Adversarial Graph Representation Adaptation (AGRA) framework that unifies graph representation propagation with adversarial learning for cross-domain holistic-local feature co-adaptation. To achieve this, we first build a graph to correlate holistic and local regions within each domain and another graph to correlate these regions across different domains. Then, we learn the per-class statistical distribution of each domain and extract holistic-local features from the input image to initialize the corresponding graph nodes. Finally, we introduce two stacked graph convolution networks to propagate holistic-local feature within each domain to explore their interaction and across different domains for holistic-local feature co-adaptation. In this way, the AGRA framework can adaptively learn fine-grained domain-invariant features and thus facilitate cross-domain expression recognition. We conduct extensive and fair experiments on several popular benchmarks and show that the proposed AGRA framework achieves superior performance over previous state-of-the-art methods.
Failure Probability Analysis for Partial Extraction from Invertible Bloom Filters
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

Invertible Bloom Filter (IBF) is a data structure, which employs a small set of hash functions. An IBF allows for an efficient insertion and, with high probability, for an efficient extraction of the data. However, the success probability of the extraction depends on the storage overhead of an IBF and the amount of the data stored. In an application, such as set reconciliation, where there is a need to extract data stored in the IBF, the extraction might succeed only partially, by recovering only part of the stored data. In this work, the probability of success for a partial extraction of data from an IBF is analyzed. It is shown that partial extraction could be useful in applications, such as set reconciliation. In particular, it allows for set reconciliation by using the IBF, where the storage overhead is too small to allow full extraction. An upper bound on the number of rounds in an iterative set reconciliation protocol is presented. The numerical results are derived analytically, and confirmed by the computer simulations.
Color Texture Image Retrieval Based on Copula Multivariate Modeling in the Shearlet Domain
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, a color texture image retrieval framework is proposed based on Shearlet domain modeling using Copula multivariate model. In the proposed framework, Gaussian Copula is used to model the dependencies between different sub-bands of the Non Subsample Shearlet Transform (NSST) and non-Gaussian models are used for marginal modeling of the coefficients. Six different schemes are proposed for modeling NSST coefficients based on the four types of neighboring defined; moreover, Kullback Leibler Divergence(KLD) close form is calculated in different situations for the two Gaussian Copula and non Gaussian functions in order to investigate the similarities in the proposed retrieval framework. The Jeffery divergence (JD) criterion, which is a symmetrical version of KLD, is used for investigating similarities in the proposed framework. We have implemented our experiments on four texture image retrieval benchmark datasets, the results of which show the superiority of the proposed framework over the existing state-of-the-art methods. In addition, the retrieval time of the proposed framework is also analyzed in the two steps of feature extraction and similarity matching, which also shows that the proposed framework enjoys an appropriate retrieval time.
Explainable Face Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Explainable face recognition is the problem of explaining why a facial matcher matches faces. In this paper, we provide the first comprehensive benchmark and baseline evaluation for explainable face recognition. We define a new evaluation protocol called the ``inpainting game'', which is a curated set of 3648 triplets (probe, mate, nonmate) of 95 subjects, which differ by synthetically inpainting a chosen facial characteristic like the nose, eyebrows or mouth creating an inpainted nonmate. An explainable face matcher is tasked with generating a network attention map which best explains which regions in a probe image match with a mated image, and not with an inpainted nonmate for each triplet. This provides ground truth for quantifying what image regions contribute to face matching. Furthermore, we provide a comprehensive benchmark on this dataset comparing five state of the art methods for network attention in face recognition on three facial matchers. This benchmark includes two new algorithms for network attention called subtree EBP and Density-based Input Sampling for Explanation (DISE) which outperform the state of the art by a wide margin. Finally, we show qualitative visualization of these network attention techniques on novel images, and explore how these explainable face recognition models can improve transparency and trust for facial matchers.
AUTSL: A Large Scale Multi-modal Turkish Sign Language Dataset and Baseline Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Sign language recognition is a challenging problem where signs are identified by simultaneous local and global articulations of multiple sources, i.e. hand shape and orientation, hand movements, body posture, and facial expressions. Solving this problem computationally for a large vocabulary of signs in real life settings is still a challenge, even with the state-of-the-art models. In this study, we present a new largescale multi-modal Turkish Sign Language dataset (AUTSL) with a benchmark and provide baseline models for performance evaluations. Our dataset consists of 226 signs performed by 43 different signers and 38,336 isolated sign video samples in total. Samples contain a wide variety of backgrounds recorded in indoor and outdoor environments. Moreover, spatial positions and the postures of signers also vary in the recordings. Each sample is recorded with Microsoft Kinect v2 and contains RGB, depth, and skeleton modalities. We prepared benchmark training and test sets for user independent assessments of the models. We trained several deep learning based models and provide empirical evaluations using the benchmark; we used CNNs to extract features, unidirectional and bidirectional LSTM models to characterize temporal information. We also incorporated feature pooling modules and temporal attention to our models to improve the performances. We evaluated our baseline models on AUTSL and Montalbano datasets. Our models achieved competitive results with the state-of-the-art methods on Montalbano dataset, i.e. 96.11% accuracy. In AUTSL random train-test splits, our models performed up to 95.95% accuracy. In the proposed user-independent benchmark dataset our best baseline model achieved 62.02% accuracy. The gaps in the performances of the same baseline models show the challenges inherent in our benchmark dataset. AUTSL benchmark dataset is publicly available at https://cvml.ankara.edu.tr.
The Need for Advanced Intelligence in NFV Management and Orchestration
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

With the constant demand for connectivity at an all-time high, Network Service Providers (NSPs) are required to optimize their networks to cope with rising capital and operational expenditures required to meet the growing connectivity demand. A solution to this challenge was presented through Network Function Virtualization (NFV). As network complexity increases and futuristic networks take shape, NSPs are required to incorporate an increasing amount of operational efficiency into their NFV-enabled networks. One such technique is Machine Learning (ML), which has been applied to various entities in NFV-enabled networks, most notably in the NFV Orchestrator. While traditional ML provides tremendous operational efficiencies, including real-time and high-volume data processing, challenges such as privacy, security, scalability, transferability, and concept drift hinder its widespread implementation. Through the adoption of Advanced Intelligence techniques such as Reinforcement Learning and Federated Learning, NSPs can leverage the benefits of traditional ML while simultaneously addressing the major challenges traditionally associated with it. This work presents the benefits of adopting these advanced techniques, provides a list of potential use cases and research topics, and proposes a bottom-up micro-functionality approach to applying these methods of Advanced Intelligence to NFV Management and Orchestration.
Improving Generative Adversarial Networks with Local Coordinate Coding
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have shown remarkable success in generating realistic data from some predefined prior distribution (e.g., Gaussian noises). However, such prior distribution is often independent of real data and thus may lose semantic information (e.g., geometric structure or content in images) of data. In practice, the semantic information might be represented by some latent distribution learned from data. However, such latent distribution may incur difficulties in data sampling for GANs. In this paper, rather than sampling from the predefined prior distribution, we propose an LCCGAN model with local coordinate coding (LCC) to improve the performance of generating data. First, we propose an LCC sampling method in LCCGAN to sample meaningful points from the latent manifold. With the LCC sampling method, we can exploit the local information on the latent manifold and thus produce new data with promising quality. Second, we propose an improved version, namely LCCGAN++, by introducing a higher-order term in the generator approximation. This term is able to achieve better approximation and thus further improve the performance. More critically, we derive the generalization bound for both LCCGAN and LCCGAN++ and prove that a low-dimensional input is sufficient to achieve good generalization performance. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over existing GANs.
Accelerating Genome Analysis: A Primer on an Ongoing Journey
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2020
Year: 2020

Genome analysis fundamentally starts with a process known as read mapping, where sequenced fragments of an organism's genome are compared against a reference genome. Read mapping is currently a major bottleneck in the entire genome analysis pipeline, because state-of-the-art genome sequencing technologies are able to sequence a genome much faster than the computational techniques employed to analyze the genome. We describe the ongoing journey in significantly improving the performance of read mapping. We explain state-of-the-art algorithmic methods and hardware-based acceleration approaches. Algorithmic approaches exploit the structure of the genome as well as the structure of the underlying hardware. Hardware-based acceleration approaches exploit specialized microarchitectures or various execution paradigms (e.g., processing inside or near memory). We conclude with the challenges of adopting these hardware-accelerated read mappers.
Residual Frames with Efficient Pseudo-3D CNN for Human Action Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Human action recognition is regarded as a key cornerstone in domains such as surveillance or video understanding. Despite recent progress in the development of end-to-end solutions for video-based action recognition, achieving state-of-the-art performance still requires using auxiliary hand-crafted motion representations, e.g., optical flow, which are usually computationally demanding. In this work, we propose to use residual frames (i.e., differences between adjacent RGB frames) as an alternative "lightweight" motion representation, which carries salient motion information and is computationally efficient. In addition, we develop a new pseudo-3D convolution module which decouples 3D convolution into 2D and 1D convolution. The proposed module exploits residual information in the feature space to better structure motions, and is equipped with a self-attention mechanism that assists to recalibrate the appearance and motion features. Empirical results confirm the efficiency and effectiveness of residual frames as well as the proposed pseudo-3D convolution module.
Bet and Run for Test Case Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2020
Year: 2020

Anyone working in the technology sector is probably familiar with the question: "Have you tried turning it off and on again?", as this is usually the default question asked by tech support. Similarly, it is known in search based testing that metaheuristics might get trapped in a plateau during a search. As a human, one can look at the gradient of the fitness curve and decide to restart the search, so as to hopefully improve the results of the optimization with the next run. Trying to automate such a restart, it has to be programmatically decided whether the metaheuristic has encountered a plateau yet, which is an inherently difficult problem. To mitigate this problem in the context of theoretical search problems, the Bet and Run strategy was developed, where multiple algorithm instances are started concurrently, and after some time all but the single most promising instance in terms of fitness values are killed. In this paper, we adopt and evaluate the Bet and Run strategy for the problem of test case generation. Our work indicates that use of this restart strategy does not generally lead to gains in the quality metrics, when instantiated with the best parameters found in the literature.
Mesh Processing Strategies and Fractals for Three Dimensional Morphological Analysis of a Granitic Terrain using IRS LISS IV and Carto DEM
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2020
Year: 2020

Virtual Reality (VR) enabled applications are becoming very important to visualize the terrain features in 3D. In general 3D datasets generated from high-resolution satellites and DEM occupy large volumes of data. However, lightweight datasets are required to create better user experiences on VR platforms. So, the present study develops a methodology to generate datasets compatible with VR using Indian Remote Sensing satellite (IRS) sensors. A Linear Imaging Self-Scanning System - IV (LISS IV) with 5.8 m spatial resolution and Carto DEM are used for generating the 3D view using the Arc environment and then converted into virtual reality modeling language (VRML) format. In order to reduce the volume of the VRML dataset a quadratic edge collapse decimation method is applied which reduces the number of faces in the mesh while preserving the boundary and/or normal. A granitic terrain in the south-west part of Hyderabad comprising of dyke intrusion is considered for the generation of 3D VR dataset, as it has high elevation differences thus rendering it most suitable for the present study. Further, the enhanced geomorphological features such as hills and valleys, geological structures such as fractures, intrusive (dykes) are studied and found suitable for better interpretation.
Facets of Fairness in Search and Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2020
Year: 2020

Several recent works have highlighted how search and recommender systems exhibit bias along different dimensions. Counteracting this bias and bringing a certain amount of fairness in search is crucial to not only creating a more balanced environment that considers relevance and diversity but also providing a more sustainable way forward for both content consumers and content producers. This short paper examines some of the recent works to define relevance, diversity, and related concepts. Then, it focuses on explaining the emerging concept of fairness in various recommendation settings. In doing so, this paper presents comparisons and highlights contracts among various measures, and gaps in our conceptual and evaluative frameworks.
Including Images into Message Veracity Assessment in Social Media
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2020
Year: 2020

The extensive use of social media in the diffusion of information has also laid a fertile ground for the spread of rumors, which could significantly affect the credibility of social media. An ever-increasing number of users post news including, in addition to text, multimedia data such as images and videos. Yet, such multimedia content is easily editable due to the broad availability of simple and effective image and video processing tools. The problem of assessing the veracity of social network posts has attracted a lot of attention from researchers in recent years. However, almost all previous works have focused on analyzing textual contents to determine veracity, while visual contents, and more particularly images, remains ignored or little exploited in the literature. In this position paper, we propose a framework that explores two novel ways to assess the veracity of messages published on social networks by analyzing the credibility of both their textual and visual contents.
Mixup-CAM: Weakly-supervised Semantic Segmentation via Uncertainty Regularization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Obtaining object response maps is one important step to achieve weakly-supervised semantic segmentation using image-level labels. However, existing methods rely on the classification task, which could result in a response map only attending on discriminative object regions as the network does not need to see the entire object for optimizing the classification loss. To tackle this issue, we propose a principled and end-to-end train-able framework to allow the network to pay attention to other parts of the object, while producing a more complete and uniform response map. Specifically, we introduce the mixup data augmentation scheme into the classification network and design two uncertainty regularization terms to better interact with the mixup strategy. In experiments, we conduct extensive analysis to demonstrate the proposed method and show favorable performance against state-of-the-art approaches.