OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
KNN-enhanced Deep Learning Against Noisy Labels
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Supervised learning on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) is data hungry. Optimizing performance of DNN in the presence of noisy labels has become of paramount importance since collecting a large dataset will usually bring in noisy labels. Inspired by the robustness of K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) against data noise, in this work, we propose to apply deep KNN for label cleanup. Our approach leverages DNNs for feature extraction and KNN for ground-truth label inference. We iteratively train the neural network and update labels to simultaneously proceed towards higher label recovery rate and better classification performance. Experiment results show that under the same setting, our approach outperforms existing label correction methods and achieves better accuracy on multiple datasets, e.g.,76.78% on Clothing1M dataset.
Texture Transform Attention for Realistic Image Inpainting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Over the last few years, the performance of inpainting to fill missing regions has shown significant improvements by using deep neural networks. Most of inpainting work create a visually plausible structure and texture, however, due to them often generating a blurry result, final outcomes appear unrealistic and make feel heterogeneity. In order to solve this problem, the existing methods have used a patch based solution with deep neural network, however, these methods also cannot transfer the texture properly. Motivated by these observation, we propose a patch based method. Texture Transform Attention network(TTA-Net) that better produces the missing region inpainting with fine details. The task is a single refinement network and takes the form of U-Net architecture that transfers fine texture features of encoder to coarse semantic features of decoder through skip-connection. Texture Transform Attention is used to create a new reassembled texture map using fine textures and coarse semantics that can efficiently transfer texture information as a result. To stabilize training process, we use a VGG feature layer of ground truth and patch discriminator. We evaluate our model end-to-end with the publicly available datasets CelebA-HQ and Places2 and demonstrate that images of higher quality can be obtained to the existing state-of-the-art approaches.
Learning to Generate Content-Aware Dynamic Detectors
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Model efficiency is crucial for object detection. Mostprevious works rely on either hand-crafted design or auto-search methods to obtain a static architecture, regardless ofthe difference of inputs. In this paper, we introduce a newperspective of designing efficient detectors, which is automatically generating sample-adaptive model architectureon the fly. The proposed method is named content-aware dynamic detectors (CADDet). It first applies a multi-scale densely connected network with dynamic routing as the supernet. Furthermore, we introduce a course-to-fine strat-egy tailored for object detection to guide the learning of dynamic routing, which contains two metrics: 1) dynamic global budget constraint assigns data-dependent expectedbudgets for individual samples; 2) local path similarity regularization aims to generate more diverse routing paths. With these, our method achieves higher computational efficiency while maintaining good performance. To the best of our knowledge, our CADDet is the first work to introduce dynamic routing mechanism in object detection. Experiments on MS-COCO dataset demonstrate that CADDet achieves 1.8 higher mAP with 10% fewer FLOPs compared with vanilla routing strategy. Compared with the models based upon similar building blocks, CADDet achieves a 42% FLOPs reduction with a competitive mAP.
UnrealPerson: An Adaptive Pipeline towards Costless Person Re-identification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

The main difficulty of person re-identification (ReID) lies in collecting annotated data and transferring the model across different domains. This paper presents UnrealPerson, a novel pipeline that makes full use of unreal image data to decrease the costs in both the training and deployment stages. Its fundamental part is a system that can generate synthesized images of high-quality and from controllable distributions. Instance-level annotation goes with the synthesized data and is almost free. We point out some details in image synthesis that largely impact the data quality. With 3,000 IDs and 120,000 instances, our method achieves a 38.5% rank-1 accuracy when being directly transferred to MSMT17. It almost doubles the former record using synthesized data and even surpasses previous direct transfer records using real data. This offers a good basis for unsupervised domain adaption, where our pre-trained model is easily plugged into the state-of-the-art algorithms towards higher accuracy. In addition, the data distribution can be flexibly adjusted to fit some corner ReID scenarios, which widens the application of our pipeline. We will publish our data synthesis toolkit and synthesized data in https://github.com/FlyHighest/UnrealPerson.
StacMR: Scene-Text Aware Cross-Modal Retrieval
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Recent models for cross-modal retrieval have benefited from an increasingly rich understanding of visual scenes, afforded by scene graphs and object interactions to mention a few. This has resulted in an improved matching between the visual representation of an image and the textual representation of its caption. Yet, current visual representations overlook a key aspect: the text appearing in images, which may contain crucial information for retrieval. In this paper, we first propose a new dataset that allows exploration of cross-modal retrieval where images contain scene-text instances. Then, armed with this dataset, we describe several approaches which leverage scene text, including a better scene-text aware cross-modal retrieval method which uses specialized representations for text from the captions and text from the visual scene, and reconcile them in a common embedding space. Extensive experiments confirm that cross-modal retrieval approaches benefit from scene text and highlight interesting research questions worth exploring further. Dataset and code are available at http://europe.naverlabs.com/stacmr
Planning Optical Networks for Unexpected Traffic Growth
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

A lightpath configuration algorithm considering a multi-period traffic model is presented and evaluated to a realistic German core network study.~Strategically exploiting BVT excess capacity, we show that offered traffic can be carried up to an additional five years in all traffic growth scenarios.
LAMP: Label Augmented Multimodal Pretraining
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2020
Year: 2020

Multi-modal representation learning by pretraining has become an increasing interest due to its easy-to-use and potential benefit for various Visual-and-Language~(V-L) tasks. However its requirement of large volume and high-quality vision-language pairs highly hinders its values in practice. In this paper, we proposed a novel label-augmented V-L pretraining model, named LAMP, to address this problem. Specifically, we leveraged auto-generated labels of visual objects to enrich vision-language pairs with fine-grained alignment and correspondingly designed a novel pretraining task. Besides, we also found such label augmentation in second-stage pretraining would further universally benefit various downstream tasks. To evaluate LAMP, we compared it with some state-of-the-art models on four downstream tasks. The quantitative results and analysis have well proven the value of labels in V-L pretraining and the effectiveness of LAMP.
Dartmouth CS at WNUT-2020 Task 2: Informative COVID-19 Tweet Classification Using BERT
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

We describe the systems developed for the WNUT-2020 shared task 2, identification of informative COVID-19 English Tweets. BERT is a highly performant model for Natural Language Processing tasks. We increased BERT's performance in this classification task by fine-tuning BERT and concatenating its embeddings with Tweet-specific features and training a Support Vector Machine (SVM) for classification (henceforth called BERT+). We compared its performance to a suite of machine learning models. We used a Twitter specific data cleaning pipeline and word-level TF-IDF to extract features for the non-BERT models. BERT+ was the top performing model with an F1-score of 0.8713.
Improvements and Extensions on Metaphor Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Metaphors are ubiquitous in human language. The metaphor detection task (MD) aims at detecting and interpreting metaphors from written language, which is crucial in natural language understanding (NLU) research. In this paper, we introduce a pre-trained Transformer-based model into MD. Our model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art models by large margins in our evaluations, with relative improvements on the F-1 score from 5.33% to 28.39%. Second, we extend MD to a classification task about the metaphoricity of an entire piece of text to make MD applicable in more general NLU scenes. Finally, we clean up the improper or outdated annotations in one of the MD benchmark datasets and re-benchmark it with our Transformer-based model. This approach could be applied to other existing MD datasets as well, since the metaphoricity annotations in these benchmark datasets may be outdated. Future research efforts are also necessary to build an up-to-date and well-annotated dataset consisting of longer and more complex texts.
Discovering key topics from short, real-world medical inquiries via natural language processing and unsupervised learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Millions of unsolicited medical inquiries are received by pharmaceutical companies every year. It has been hypothesized that these inquiries represent a treasure trove of information, potentially giving insight into matters regarding medicinal products and the associated medical treatments. However, due to the large volume and specialized nature of the inquiries, it is difficult to perform timely, recurrent, and comprehensive analyses. Here, we propose a machine learning approach based on natural language processing and unsupervised learning to automatically discover key topics in real-world medical inquiries from customers. This approach does not require ontologies nor annotations. The discovered topics are meaningful and medically relevant, as judged by medical information specialists, thus demonstrating that unsolicited medical inquiries are a source of valuable customer insights. Our work paves the way for the machine-learning-driven analysis of medical inquiries in the pharmaceutical industry, which ultimately aims at improving patient care.
Models, Pixels, and Rewards: Evaluating Design Trade-offs in Visual Model-Based Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) methods have shown strong sample efficiency and performance across a variety of tasks, including when faced with high-dimensional visual observations. These methods learn to predict the environment dynamics and expected reward from interaction and use this predictive model to plan and perform the task. However, MBRL methods vary in their fundamental design choices, and there is no strong consensus in the literature on how these design decisions affect performance. In this paper, we study a number of design decisions for the predictive model in visual MBRL algorithms, focusing specifically on methods that use a predictive model for planning. We find that a range of design decisions that are often considered crucial, such as the use of latent spaces, have little effect on task performance. A big exception to this finding is that predicting future observations (i.e., images) leads to significant task performance improvement compared to only predicting rewards. We also empirically find that image prediction accuracy, somewhat surprisingly, correlates more strongly with downstream task performance than reward prediction accuracy. We show how this phenomenon is related to exploration and how some of the lower-scoring models on standard benchmarks (that require exploration) will perform the same as the best-performing models when trained on the same training data. Simultaneously, in the absence of exploration, models that fit the data better usually perform better on the downstream task as well, but surprisingly, these are often not the same models that perform the best when learning and exploring from scratch. These findings suggest that performance and exploration place important and potentially contradictory requirements on the model.
Access Control Mechanisms in Named Data Networks: A Comprehensive Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has recently emerged as a prominent candidate for the Future Internet Architecture (FIA) that addresses existing issues with the host-centric communication model of the current TCP/IP-based Internet. Named Data Networking (NDN) is one of the most recent and active ICN architectures that provides a clean slate approach for Internet communication. NDN provides intrinsic content security where security is directly provided to the content instead of communication channel. Among other security aspects, Access Control (AC) rules specify the privileges for the entities that can access the content. In TCP/IP-based AC systems, due to the client-server communication model, the servers control which client can access a particular content. In contrast, ICN-based networks use content names to drive communication and decouple the content from its original location. This phenomenon leads to the loss of control over the content causing different challenges for the realization of efficient AC mechanisms. To date, considerable efforts have been made to develop various AC mechanisms in NDN. In this paper, we provide a detailed and comprehensive survey of the AC mechanisms in NDN. We follow a holistic approach towards AC in NDN where we first summarize the ICN paradigm, describe the changes from channel-based security to content-based security and highlight different cryptographic algorithms and security protocols in NDN. We then classify the existing AC mechanisms into two main categories: Encryption-based AC and Encryption-independent AC. Each category has different classes based on the working principle of AC (e.g., Attribute-based AC, Name-based AC, Identity-based AC, etc). Finally, we present the lessons learned from the existing AC mechanisms and identify the challenges of NDN-based AC at large, highlighting future research directions for the community.
CASTing Your Model: Learning to Localize Improves Self-Supervised Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Recent advances in self-supervised learning (SSL) have largely closed the gap with supervised ImageNet pretraining. Despite their success these methods have been primarily applied to unlabeled ImageNet images, and show marginal gains when trained on larger sets of uncurated images. We hypothesize that current SSL methods perform best on iconic images, and struggle on complex scene images with many objects. Analyzing contrastive SSL methods shows that they have poor visual grounding and receive poor supervisory signal when trained on scene images. We propose Contrastive Attention-Supervised Tuning(CAST) to overcome these limitations. CAST uses unsupervised saliency maps to intelligently sample crops, and to provide grounding supervision via a Grad-CAM attention loss. Experiments on COCO show that CAST significantly improves the features learned by SSL methods on scene images, and further experiments show that CAST-trained models are more robust to changes in backgrounds.
Mutual Information Decay Curves and Hyper-Parameter Grid Search Design for Recurrent Neural Architectures
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We present an approach to design the grid searches for hyper-parameter optimization for recurrent neural architectures. The basis for this approach is the use of mutual information to analyze long distance dependencies (LDDs) within a dataset. We also report a set of experiments that demonstrate how using this approach, we obtain state-of-the-art results for DilatedRNNs across a range of benchmark datasets.
Predicting seasonal influenza using supermarket retail records
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2020
Year: 2020

Increased availability of epidemiological data, novel digital data streams, and the rise of powerful machine learning approaches have generated a surge of research activity on real-time epidemic forecast systems. In this paper, we propose the use of a novel data source, namely retail market data to improve seasonal influenza forecasting. Specifically, we consider supermarket retail data as a proxy signal for influenza, through the identification of sentinel baskets, i.e., products bought together by a population of selected customers. We develop a nowcasting and forecasting framework that provides estimates for influenza incidence in Italy up to 4 weeks ahead. We make use of the Support Vector Regression (SVR) model to produce the predictions of seasonal flu incidence. Our predictions outperform both a baseline autoregressive model and a second baseline based on product purchases. The results show quantitatively the value of incorporating retail market data in forecasting models, acting as a proxy that can be used for the real-time analysis of epidemics.
Locally optimal detection of stochastic targeted universal adversarial perturbations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Deep learning image classifiers are known to be vulnerable to small adversarial perturbations of input images. In this paper, we derive the locally optimal generalized likelihood ratio test (LO-GLRT) based detector for detecting stochastic targeted universal adversarial perturbations (UAPs) of the classifier inputs. We also describe a supervised training method to learn the detector's parameters, and demonstrate better performance of the detector compared to other detection methods on several popular image classification datasets.
Emergence of Different Modes of Tool Use in a Reaching and Dragging Task
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Tool use is an important milestone in the evolution of intelligence. In this paper, we investigate different modes of tool use that emerge in a reaching and dragging task. In this task, a jointed arm with a gripper must grab a tool (T, I, or L-shaped) and drag an object down to the target location (the bottom of the arena). The simulated environment had real physics such as gravity and friction. We trained a deep-reinforcement learning based controller (with raw visual and proprioceptive input) with minimal reward shaping information to tackle this task. We observed the emergence of a wide range of unexpected behaviors, not directly encoded in the motor primitives or reward functions. Examples include hitting the object to the target location, correcting error of initial contact, throwing the tool toward the object, as well as normal expected behavior such as wide sweep. Also, we further analyzed these behaviors based on the type of tool and the initial position of the target object. Our results show a rich repertoire of behaviors, beyond the basic built-in mechanisms of the deep reinforcement learning method we used.
Promoting Semantics in Multi-objective Genetic Programming based on Decomposition
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2020
Year: 2020

The study of semantics in Genetic Program (GP) deals with the behaviour of a program given a set of inputs and has been widely reported in helping to promote diversity in GP for a range of complex problems ultimately improving evolutionary search. The vast majority of these studies have focused their attention in single-objective GP, with just a few exceptions where Pareto-based dominance algorithms such as NSGA-II and SPEA2 have been used as frameworks to test whether highly popular semantics-based methods, such as Semantic Similarity-based Crossover (SSC), helps or hinders evolutionary search. Surprisingly it has been reported that the benefits exhibited by SSC in SOGP are not seen in Pareto-based dominance Multi-objective GP. In this work, we are interested in studying if the same carries out in Multi-objective Evolutionary Algorithms based on Decomposition (MOEA/D). By using the MNIST dataset, a well-known dataset used in the machine learning community, we show how SSC in MOEA/D promotes semantic diversity yielding better results compared to when this is not present in canonical MOEA/D.
A Deep Marginal-Contrastive Defense against Adversarial Attacks on 1D Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

Deep learning algorithms have been recently targeted by attackers due to their vulnerability. Several research studies have been conducted to address this issue and build more robust deep learning models. Non-continuous deep models are still not robust against adversarial, where most of the recent studies have focused on developing attack techniques to evade the learning process of the models. One of the main reasons behind the vulnerability of such models is that a learning classifier is unable to slightly predict perturbed samples. To address this issue, we propose a novel objective/loss function, the so-called marginal contrastive, which enforces the features to lie under a specified margin to facilitate their prediction using deep convolutional networks (i.e., Char-CNN). Extensive experiments have been conducted on continuous cases (e.g., UNSW NB15 dataset) and discrete ones (i.e, eight-large-scale datasets [32]) to prove the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results revealed that the regularization of the learning process based on the proposed loss function can improve the performance of Char-CNN.
Graph-Based Generative Representation Learning of Semantically and Behaviorally Augmented Floorplans
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Floorplans are commonly used to represent the layout of buildings. In computer aided-design (CAD) floorplans are usually represented in the form of hierarchical graph structures. Research works towards computational techniques that facilitate the design process, such as automated analysis and optimization, often use simple floorplan representations that ignore the semantics of the space and do not take into account usage related analytics. We present a floorplan embedding technique that uses an attributed graph to represent the geometric information as well as design semantics and behavioral features of the inhabitants as node and edge attributes. A Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Variational Autoencoder (VAE) architecture is proposed and trained to embed attributed graphs as vectors in a continuous space. A user study is conducted to evaluate the coupling of similar floorplans retrieved from the embedding space with respect to a given input (e.g., design layout). The qualitative, quantitative and user-study evaluations show that our embedding framework produces meaningful and accurate vector representations for floorplans. In addition, our proposed model is a generative model. We studied and showcased its effectiveness for generating new floorplans. We also release the dataset that we have constructed and which, for each floorplan, includes the design semantics attributes as well as simulation generated human behavioral features for further study in the community.