OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
SUPER: A Novel Lane Detection System
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

AI-based lane detection algorithms were actively studied over the last few years. Many have demonstrated superior performance compared with traditional feature-based methods. The accuracy, however, is still generally in the low 80% or high 90%, or even lower when challenging images are used. In this paper, we propose a real-time lane detection system, called Scene Understanding Physics-Enhanced Real-time (SUPER) algorithm. The proposed method consists of two main modules: 1) a hierarchical semantic segmentation network as the scene feature extractor and 2) a physics enhanced multi-lane parameter optimization module for lane inference. We train the proposed system using heterogeneous data from Cityscapes, Vistas and Apollo, and evaluate the performance on four completely separate datasets (that were never seen before), including Tusimple, Caltech, URBAN KITTI-ROAD, and X-3000. The proposed approach performs the same or better than lane detection models already trained on the same dataset and performs well even on datasets it was never trained on. Real-world vehicle tests were also conducted. Preliminary test results show promising real-time lane-detection performance compared with the Mobileye.
Investigating Bias in Deep Face Analysis: The KANFace Dataset and Empirical Study
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Deep learning-based methods have pushed the limits of the state-of-the-art in face analysis. However, despite their success, these models have raised concerns regarding their bias towards certain demographics. This bias is inflicted both by limited diversity across demographics in the training set, as well as the design of the algorithms. In this work, we investigate the demographic bias of deep learning models in face recognition, age estimation, gender recognition and kinship verification. To this end, we introduce the most comprehensive, large-scale dataset of facial images and videos to date. It consists of 40K still images and 44K sequences (14.5M video frames in total) captured in unconstrained, real-world conditions from 1,045 subjects. The data are manually annotated in terms of identity, exact age, gender and kinship. The performance of state-of-the-art models is scrutinized and demographic bias is exposed by conducting a series of experiments. Lastly, a method to debias network embeddings is introduced and tested on the proposed benchmarks.
Nearest Neighbor and Contact Distance Distribution for Binomial Point Process on Spherical Surfaces
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

This letter characterizes the statistics of the contact distance and the nearest neighbor (NN) distance for binomial point processes (BPP) spatially-distributed on spherical surfaces. We consider a setup of $n$ concentric spheres, with each sphere $S_k$ has a radius $r_k$ and $N_k$ points that are uniformly distributed on its surface. For that setup, we obtain the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the distance to the nearest point from two types o observation points: (i) the observation point is not a part of the point process and located on a concentric sphere with a radius $r_e<r_k\forall k$, which corresponds to the contact distance distribution, and (ii) the observation point belongs to the point process, which corresponds to the nearest-neighbor (NN) distance distribution.
Decoding of NB-LDPC codes over Subfields
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

The non-binary low-density parity-check (NB-LDPC) codes can offer promising performance advantages but suffer from high decoding complexity. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, we consider NB-LDPC codes over finite fields as codes over \textit{subfields} as a means of reducing decoding complexity. In particular, our approach is based on a novel method of expanding a non-binary Tanner graph over a finite field into a graph over a subfield. This approach offers several decoding strategies for a single NB-LDPC code, with varying levels of performance-complexity trade-offs. Simulation results demonstrate that in a majority of cases, performance loss is minimal when compared with the complexity gains.
Improving Neuroevolution Using Island Extinction and Repopulation
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2020
Year: 2020

Neuroevolution commonly uses speciation strategies to better explore the search space of neural network architectures. One such speciation strategy is through the use of islands, which are also popular in improving performance and convergence of distributed evolutionary algorithms. However, in this approach some islands can become stagnant and not find new best solutions. In this paper, we propose utilizing extinction events and island repopulation to avoid premature convergence. We explore this with the Evolutionary eXploration of Augmenting Memory Models (EXAMM) neuro-evolution algorithm. In this strategy, all members of the worst performing island are killed of periodically and repopulated with mutated versions of the global best genome. This island based strategy is additionally compared to NEAT's (NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies) speciation strategy. Experiments were performed using two different real world time series datasets (coal-fired power plant and aviation flight data). The results show that with statistical significance, this island extinction and repopulation strategy evolves better global best genomes than both EXAMM's original island based strategy and NEAT's speciation strategy.
Verifying Hyperliveness
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2020
Year: 2020

HyperLTL is an extension of linear-time temporal logic for the specification of hyperproperties, i.e., temporal properties that relate multiple computation traces. HyperLTL can express information flow policies as well as properties like symmetry in mutual exclusion algorithms or Hamming distances in error-resistant transmission protocols. Previous work on HyperLTL model checking has focussed on the alternation-free fragment of HyperLTL, where verification reduces to checking a standard trace property over an appropriate self-composition of the system. The alternation-free fragment does, however, not cover general hyperliveness properties. Universal formulas, for example, cannot express the secrecy requirement that for every possible value of a secret variable there exists a computation where the value is different while the observations made by the external observer are the same. In this paper, we study the more difficult case of hyperliveness properties expressed as HyperLTL formulas with quantifier alternation. We reduce existential quantification to strategic choice and show that synthesis algorithms can be used to eliminate the existential quantifiers automatically. We furthermore show that this approach can be extended to reactive system synthesis, i.e., to automatically construct a reactive system that is guaranteed to satisfy a given HyperLTL formula.
Factors in the Portability of Tokenized Assets on Distributed Ledgers
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

The tokenization of assets deployed to distributed ledger technology is increasingly cited to revolutionize financial services by allowing traditionally illiquid assets to be bought and sold on primary and secondary markets increasing asset liquidity, transparency and reducing transaction completion time. To realize these benefits it is important the token is transferrable, that is, portable from one distributed ledger to another. In this paper we survey current interoperability architectures and smart contract languages, identifying factors affecting the portability of tokenized assets. We propose a portability maturity model that can be used to help assess the current state of technology and supporting market infrastructure.
A Peer-to-Peer Distributed Secured Sustainable Large Scale Identity Document Verification System With BitTorrent Network And Hash Function
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

Verifying identity documents from a large Central Identity Database (CIDB) is always challenging and it get more challenging when we need to verify a large number of documents at the same time. Usually most of the time we setup a gateway server connected to the CIDB and it serve all the identity document verification requests. Though it work well, there are still chances that this model will collapse in high traffic. We obviously can tune the system to be sustainable, but the process is economically expensive. In this paper we propose an economically cheaper way to verify ID documents with private BitTorrent network and hash function.
Literature Review and Implementation Overview: High Performance Computing with Graphics Processing Units for Classroom and Research Use
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

In this report, I discuss the history and current state of GPU HPC systems. Although high-power GPUs have only existed a short time, they have found rapid adoption in deep learning applications. I also discuss an implementation of a commodity-hardware NVIDIA GPU HPC cluster for deep learning research and academic teaching use.
An Alternative C++ based HPC system for Hadoop MapReduce
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

MapReduce is a technique used to vastly improve distributed processing of data and can massively speed up computation. Hadoop and its MapReduce relies on JVM and Java which is expensive on memory. High Performance Computing based MapReduce framework could be used that can perform more memory-efficiently and faster than the standard MapReduce. This paper explores an entirely C++ based approach to the MapReduce and its feasibility on multiple factors like developer friendliness, deployment interface, efficiency and scalability. This paper also introduces Delayed Reduction and deployment techniques that can speed up MapReduce in a compiled environment.
An Evaluation of Recent Neural Sequence Tagging Models in Turkish Named Entity Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Named entity recognition (NER) is an extensively studied task that extracts and classifies named entities in a text. NER is crucial not only in downstream language processing applications such as relation extraction and question answering but also in large scale big data operations such as real-time analysis of online digital media content. Recent research efforts on Turkish, a less studied language with morphologically rich nature, have demonstrated the effectiveness of neural architectures on well-formed texts and yielded state-of-the art results by formulating the task as a sequence tagging problem. In this work, we empirically investigate the use of recent neural architectures (Bidirectional long short-term memory and Transformer-based networks) proposed for Turkish NER tagging in the same setting. Our results demonstrate that transformer-based networks which can model long-range context overcome the limitations of BiLSTM networks where different input features at the character, subword, and word levels are utilized. We also propose a transformer-based network with a conditional random field (CRF) layer that leads to the state-of-the-art result (95.95\% f-measure) on a common dataset. Our study contributes to the literature that quantifies the impact of transfer learning on processing morphologically rich languages.
Generative Adversarial Networks for photo to Hayao Miyazaki style cartoons
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2020
Year: 2020

This paper takes on the problem of transferring the style of cartoon images to real-life photographic images by implementing previous work done by CartoonGAN. We trained a Generative Adversial Network(GAN) on over 60 000 images from works by Hayao Miyazaki at Studio Ghibli. To evaluate our results, we conducted a qualitative survey comparing our results with two state-of-the-art methods. 117 survey results indicated that our model on average outranked state-of-the-art methods on cartoon-likeness.
Uncovering Gender Bias in Media Coverage of Politicians with Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

This paper presents research uncovering systematic gender bias in the representation of political leaders in the media, using artificial intelligence. Newspaper coverage of Irish ministers over a fifteen year period was gathered and analysed with natural language processing techniques and machine learning. Findings demonstrate evidence of gender bias in the portrayal of female politicians, the kind of policies they were associated with and how they were evaluated in terms of their performance as political leaders. This paper also sets out a methodology whereby media content may be analysed on a large scale utilising techniques from artificial intelligence within a theoretical framework founded in gender theory and feminist linguistics.
Scones: Towards Conversational Authoring of Sketches
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

Iteratively refining and critiquing sketches are crucial steps to developing effective designs. We introduce Scones, a mixed-initiative, machine-learning-driven system that enables users to iteratively author sketches from text instructions. Scones is a novel deep-learning-based system that iteratively generates scenes of sketched objects composed with semantic specifications from natural language. Scones exceeds state-of-the-art performance on a text-based scene modification task, and introduces a mask-conditioned sketching model that can generate sketches with poses specified by high-level scene information. In an exploratory user evaluation of Scones, participants reported enjoying an iterative drawing task with Scones, and suggested additional features for further applications. We believe Scones is an early step towards automated, intelligent systems that support human-in-the-loop applications for communicating ideas through sketching in art and design.
S-ADDOPT: Decentralized stochastic first-order optimization over directed graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

In this report, we study decentralized stochastic optimization to minimize a sum of smooth and strongly convex cost functions when the functions are distributed over a directed network of nodes. In contrast to the existing work, we use gradient tracking to improve certain aspects of the resulting algorithm. In particular, we propose the~\textbf{\texttt{S-ADDOPT}} algorithm that assumes a stochastic first-order oracle at each node and show that for a constant step-size~$α$, each node converges linearly inside an error ball around the optimal solution, the size of which is controlled by~$α$. For decaying step-sizes~$\mathcal{O}(1/k)$, we show that~\textbf{\texttt{S-ADDOPT}} reaches the exact solution sublinearly at~$\mathcal{O}(1/k)$ and its convergence is asymptotically network-independent. Thus the asymptotic behavior of~\textbf{\texttt{S-ADDOPT}} is comparable to the centralized stochastic gradient descent. Numerical experiments over both strongly convex and non-convex problems illustrate the convergence behavior and the performance comparison of the proposed algorithm.
WW-Nets: Dual Neural Networks for Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

We propose a new deep convolutional neural network framework that uses object location knowledge implicit in network connection weights to guide selective attention in object detection tasks. Our approach is called What-Where Nets (WW-Nets), and it is inspired by the structure of human visual pathways. In the brain, vision incorporates two separate streams, one in the temporal lobe and the other in the parietal lobe, called the ventral stream and the dorsal stream, respectively. The ventral pathway from primary visual cortex is dominated by "what" information, while the dorsal pathway is dominated by "where" information. Inspired by this structure, we have proposed an object detection framework involving the integration of a "What Network" and a "Where Network". The aim of the What Network is to provide selective attention to the relevant parts of the input image. The Where Network uses this information to locate and classify objects of interest. In this paper, we compare this approach to state-of-the-art algorithms on the PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2012 and COCO object detection challenge datasets. Also, we compare out approach to human "ground-truth" attention. We report the results of an eye-tracking experiment on human subjects using images from PASCAL VOC 2007, and we demonstrate interesting relationships between human overt attention and information processing in our WW-Nets. Finally, we provide evidence that our proposed method performs favorably in comparison to other object detection approaches, often by a large margin. The code and the eye-tracking ground-truth dataset can be found at: https://github.com/mkebrahimpour.
Broadcasting on trees near criticality
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

We revisit the problem of broadcasting on $d$-ary trees: starting from a Bernoulli$(1/2)$ random variable $X_0$ at a root vertex, each vertex forwards its value across binary symmetric channels $\mathrm{BSC}_δ$ to $d$ descendants. The goal is to reconstruct $X_0$ given the vector $X_{L_h}$ of values of all variables at depth $h$. It is well known that reconstruction (better than a random guess) is possible as $h\to \infty$ if and only if $δ< δ_c(d)$. In this paper, we study the behavior of the mutual information and the probability of error when $δ$ is slightly subcritical. The innovation of our work is application of the recently introduced "less-noisy" channel comparison techniques. For example, we are able to derive the positive part of the phase transition (reconstructability when $δ<δ_c$) using purely information-theoretic ideas. This is in contrast with previous derivations, which explicitly analyze distribution of the Hamming weight of $X_{L_h}$ (a so-called Kesten-Stigum bound).
Low Complexity Sequential Search with Size-Dependent Measurement Noise
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

This paper considers a target localization problem where at any given time an agent can choose a region to query for the presence of the target in that region. The measurement noise is assumed to be increasing with the size of the query region the agent chooses. Motivated by practical applications such as initial beam alignment in array processing, heavy hitter detection in networking, and visual search in robotics, we consider practically important complexity constraints/metrics: \textit{time complexity}, \textit{computational and memory complexity}, and the complexity of possible query sets in terms of geometry and cardinality. Two novel search strategy, $dyaPM$ and $hiePM$, are proposed. Pertinent to the practicality of out solutions, $dyaPM$ and $hiePM$ are of a connected query geometry (i.e. query set is always a connected set) implemented with low computational and memory complexity. Additionally, $hiePM$ has a hierarchical structure and, hence, a further reduction in the cardinality of possible query sets, making $hiePM$ practically suitable for applications such as beamforming in array processing where memory limitations favors a smaller codebook size. Through a unified analysis with Extrinsic Jensen Shannon (EJS) Divergence, $dyaPM$ is shown to be asymptotically optimal in search time complexity (asymptotic in both resolution (rate) and error (reliability)). On the other hand, $hiePM$ is shown to be near-optimal in rate. In addition, both $hiePM$ and $dyaPM$ are shown to outperform prior work in the non-asymptotic regime.
KEIS@JUST at SemEval-2020 Task 12: Identifying Multilingual Offensive Tweets Using Weighted Ensemble and Fine-Tuned BERT
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

This research presents our team KEIS@JUST participation at SemEval-2020 Task 12 which represents shared task on multilingual offensive language. We participated in all the provided languages for all subtasks except sub-task-A for the English language. Two main approaches have been developed the first is performed to tackle both languages Arabic and English, a weighted ensemble consists of Bi-GRU and CNN followed by Gaussian noise and global pooling layer multiplied by weights to improve the overall performance. The second is performed for other languages, a transfer learning from BERT beside the recurrent neural networks such as Bi-LSTM and Bi-GRU followed by a global average pooling layer. Word embedding and contextual embedding have been used as features, moreover, data augmentation has been used only for the Arabic language.
Joint Progressive Knowledge Distillation and Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Currently, the divergence in distributions of design and operational data, and large computational complexity are limiting factors in the adoption of CNNs in real-world applications. For instance, person re-identification systems typically rely on a distributed set of cameras, where each camera has different capture conditions. This can translate to a considerable shift between source (e.g. lab setting) and target (e.g. operational camera) domains. Given the cost of annotating image data captured for fine-tuning in each target domain, unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) has become a popular approach to adapt CNNs. Moreover, state-of-the-art deep learning models that provide a high level of accuracy often rely on architectures that are too complex for real-time applications. Although several compression and UDA approaches have recently been proposed to overcome these limitations, they do not allow optimizing a CNN to simultaneously address both. In this paper, we propose an unexplored direction -- the joint optimization of CNNs to provide a compressed model that is adapted to perform well for a given target domain. In particular, the proposed approach performs unsupervised knowledge distillation (KD) from a complex teacher model to a compact student model, by leveraging both source and target data. It also improves upon existing UDA techniques by progressively teaching the student about domain-invariant features, instead of directly adapting a compact model on target domain data. Our method is compared against state-of-the-art compression and UDA techniques, using two popular classification datasets for UDA -- Office31 and ImageClef-DA. In both datasets, results indicate that our method can achieve the highest level of accuracy while requiring a comparable or lower time complexity.
Generalizing The Davenport-Mahler-Mignotte Bound -- The Weighted Case
Venue: arXiv cs.SC 2020
Year: 2020

Root separation bounds play an important role as a complexity measure in understanding the behaviour of various algorithms in computational algebra, e.g., root isolation algorithms. A classic result in the univariate setting is the Davenport-Mahler-Mignotte (DMM) bound. One way to state the bound is to consider a directed acyclic graph $(V,E)$ on a subset of roots of a degree $d$ polynomial $f(z) \in \mathbb{C}[z]$, where the edges point from a root of smaller absolute value to one of larger absolute, and the in-degrees of all vertices is at most one. Then the DMM bound is an amortized lower bound on the following product: $\prod_{(α,β) \in E}|α-β|$. However, the lower bound involves the discriminant of the polynomial $f$, and becomes trivial if the polynomial is not square-free. This was resolved by Eigenwillig, (2008), by using a suitable subdiscriminant instead of the discriminant. Escorcielo-Perrucci, 2016, further dropped the in-degree constraint on the graph by using the theory of finite differences. Emiris et al., 2019, have generalized their result to handle the case where the exponent of the term $|α-β|$ in the product is at most the multiplicity of either of the roots. In this paper, we generalize these results by allowing arbitrary positive integer weights on the edges of the graph, i.e., for a weight function $w: E \rightarrow \mathbb{Z}_{>0}$, we derive an amortized lower bound on $\prod_{(α,β) \in E}|α-β|^{w(α,β)}$. Such a product occurs in the complexity estimates of some recent algorithms for root clustering (e.g., Becker et al., 2016), where the weights are usually some function of the multiplicity of the roots. Because of its amortized nature, our bound is arguably better than the bounds obtained by manipulating existing results to accommodate the weights.