OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
American Sign Language fingerspelling recognition in the wild
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

We address the problem of American Sign Language fingerspelling recognition in the wild, using videos collected from websites. We introduce the largest data set available so far for the problem of fingerspelling recognition, and the first using naturally occurring video data. Using this data set, we present the first attempt to recognize fingerspelling sequences in this challenging setting. Unlike prior work, our video data is extremely challenging due to low frame rates and visual variability. To tackle the visual challenges, we train a special-purpose signing hand detector using a small subset of our data. Given the hand detector output, a sequence model decodes the hypothesized fingerspelled letter sequence. For the sequence model, we explore attention-based recurrent encoder-decoders and CTC-based approaches. As the first attempt at fingerspelling recognition in the wild, this work is intended to serve as a baseline for future work on sign language recognition in realistic conditions. We find that, as expected, letter error rates are much higher than in previous work on more controlled data, and we analyze the sources of error and effects of model variants.
Energy Efficient Adversarial Routing in Shared Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

We investigate routing on networks modeled as multiple access channels, when packets are injected continually. There is an energy cap understood as a bound on the number of stations that can be switched on simultaneously. Each packet is injected into some station and needs to be delivered to its destination station via the channel. A station has to be switched on in order to receive a packet when it is heard on the channel. Each station manages when it is switched on and off by way of a programmable wakeup mechanism, which is scheduled by a routing algorithm. Packet injection is governed by adversarial models that determine upper bounds on injection rates and burstiness. We develop deterministic distributed routing algorithms and assess their performance in the worst-case sense. One of the algorithms maintains bounded queues for the maximum injection rate 1 subject only to the energy cap 3. This energy cap is provably optimal, in that obtaining the same throughput with the energy cap 2 is impossible. We give algorithms subject to the minimum energy cap 2 that have latency polynomial in the total number of stations n for each fixed adversary of injection rate less than 1. An algorithm is k-energy-oblivious if at most k stations are switched on in a round and for each station the rounds when it will be switched on are determined in advance. We give a k-energy-oblivious algorithm that has packet delay O(n) for adversaries of injection rates less than (k-1)/(n-1), and show that there is no k-energy-oblivious stable algorithm against adversaries with injection rates greater than k/n. We give a k-energy-oblivious algorithm routing directly that has latency O(n^2/k) for adversaries of sufficiently small injection rates that are O(k^2/n^2). We show that no k-energy-oblivious algorithm routing directly can be stable against adversaries with injection rates greater than k(k-1)/n(n-1).
Revisiting CFR+ and Alternating Updates
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2019
Year: 2019

The CFR+ algorithm for solving imperfect information games is a variant of the popular CFR algorithm, with faster empirical performance on a range of problems. It was introduced with a theoretical upper bound on solution error, but subsequent work showed an error in one step of the proof. We provide updated proofs to recover the original bound.
Mobile Sensor Data Anonymization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Motion sensors such as accelerometers and gyroscopes measure the instant acceleration and rotation of a device, in three dimensions. Raw data streams from motion sensors embedded in portable and wearable devices may reveal private information about users without their awareness. For example, motion data might disclose the weight or gender of a user, or enable their re-identification. To address this problem, we propose an on-device transformation of sensor data to be shared for specific applications, such as monitoring selected daily activities, without revealing information that enables user identification. We formulate the anonymization problem using an information-theoretic approach and propose a new multi-objective loss function for training deep autoencoders. This loss function helps minimizing user-identity information as well as data distortion to preserve the application-specific utility. The training process regulates the encoder to disregard user-identifiable patterns and tunes the decoder to shape the output independently of users in the training set. The trained autoencoder can be deployed on a mobile or wearable device to anonymize sensor data even for users who are not included in the training dataset. Data from 24 users transformed by the proposed anonymizing autoencoder lead to a promising trade-off between utility and privacy, with an accuracy for activity recognition above 92% and an accuracy for user identification below 7%.
Handling Imbalanced Dataset in Multi-label Text Categorization using Bagging and Adaptive Boosting
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

Imbalanced dataset is occurred due to uneven distribution of data available in the real world such as disposition of complaints on government offices in Bandung. Consequently, multi-label text categorization algorithms may not produce the best performance because classifiers tend to be weighed down by the majority of the data and ignore the minority. In this paper, Bagging and Adaptive Boosting algorithms are employed to handle the issue and improve the performance of text categorization. The result is evaluated with four evaluation metrics such as hamming loss, subset accuracy, example-based accuracy and micro-averaged f-measure. Bagging ML-LP with SMO weak classifier is the best performer in terms of subset accuracy and example-based accuracy. Bagging ML-BR with SMO weak classifier has the best micro-averaged f-measure among all. In other hand, AdaBoost MH with J48 weak classifier has the lowest hamming loss value. Thus, both algorithms have high potential in boosting the performance of text categorization, but only for certain weak classifiers. However, bagging has more potential than adaptive boosting in increasing the accuracy of minority labels.
FRAMER: A Software-based Capability Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

Fine-grained memory protection for C and C++ programs must track individual objects (or pointers), and store bounds information per object (pointer). Its cost is dominated by metadata updates and lookups, making efficient metadata management the key for minimizing performance impact. Existing approaches reduce metadata management overheads by sacrificing precision, breaking binary compatibility by changing object memory layout, or wasting space by excessive alignment or large shadow memory spaces. We propose FRAMER, a software capability model for object-granularity memory protection. Its efficient per-object metadata management mechanism enables direct access to metadata by calculating their location from a tagged pointer to the object and, for large objects, a compact supplementary table. The number of bits in this tag and the size of the supplementary table are balanced to minimize both using a novel technique. FRAMER is a general proposal for object metadata management with potential applications in memory safety, type safety, thread safety and garbage collection that improves over previous solutions by (1) increasing locality of reference by having objects carry their metadata, (2) streamlining expensive metadata lookups, (3) saving space by avoiding superfluous alignment and padding, (4) avoiding internal object memory layout changes.
Asynchronous Distributed Power Control of Multi-Microgrid Systems Based on the Operator Splitting Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2019
Year: 2019

Forming (hybrid) AC/DC microgrids (MGs) has become a promising manner for the interconnection of various kinds of distributed generators that are inherently AC or DC electric sources. This paper addresses the distributed asynchronous power control problem of hybrid microgrids, considering imperfect communication due to non-identical sampling rates and communication delays. To this end, we first formulate the optimal power control problem of MGs and devise a synchronous algorithm. Then, we analyze the impact of asynchrony on optimal power control and propose an asynchronous iteration algorithm based on the synchronous version. By introducing a random clock at each iteration, different types of asynchrony are fitted into a unified framework, where the asynchronous algorithm is converted into a fixed-point problem based on the operator splitting method, leading to a convergence proof. We further provide an upper bound estimation of the time delay in the communication. Moreover, the real-time implementation of the proposed algorithm in both AC and DC MGs is introduced. By taking the power system as a solver, the controller is simplified by reducing one order and the power loss can be considered. Finally, a benchmark MG is utilized to verify the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed algorithm.
An optimal control approach of day-to-day congestion pricing for stochastic transportation networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2019
Year: 2019

Congestion pricing has become an effective instrument for traffic demand management on road networks. This paper proposes an optimal control approach for congestion pricing for day-to-day timescale that incorporates demand uncertainty and elasticity. Travelers make the decision to travel or not based on the experienced system travel time in the previous day and traffic managers take tolling decisions in order to minimize the average system travel time over a long time horizon. We formulate the problem as a Markov decision process (MDP) and analyze the problem to see if it satisfies conditions for conducting a satisfactory solution analysis. Such an analysis of MDPs is often dependent on the type of state space as well as on the boundedness of travel time functions. We do not constrain the travel time functions to be bounded and present an analysis centered around weighted sup-norm contractions that also holds for unbounded travel time functions. We find that the formulated MDP satisfies a set of assumptions to ensure Bellman's optimality condition. Through this result, the existence of the optimal average cost of the MDP is shown. A method based on approximate dynamic programming is proposed to resolve the implementation and computational issues of solving the control problem. Numerical results suggest that the proposed method efficiently solves the problem and produces accurate solutions.
Towards Principled Uncertainty Estimation for Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

When the cost of misclassifying a sample is high, it is useful to have an accurate estimate of uncertainty in the prediction for that sample. There are also multiple types of uncertainty which are best estimated in different ways, for example, uncertainty that is intrinsic to the training set may be well-handled by a Bayesian approach, while uncertainty introduced by shifts between training and query distributions may be better-addressed by density/support estimation. In this paper, we examine three types of uncertainty: model capacity uncertainty, intrinsic data uncertainty, and open set uncertainty, and review techniques that have been derived to address each one. We then introduce a unified hierarchical model, which combines methods from Bayesian inference, invertible latent density inference, and discriminative classification in a single end-to-end deep neural network topology to yield efficient per-sample uncertainty estimation in a detection context. This approach addresses all three uncertainty types and can readily accommodate prior/base rates for binary detection. We then discuss how to extend this model to a more generic multiclass recognition context.
Content Selection in Deep Learning Models of Summarization
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

We carry out experiments with deep learning models of summarization across the domains of news, personal stories, meetings, and medical articles in order to understand how content selection is performed. We find that many sophisticated features of state of the art extractive summarizers do not improve performance over simpler models. These results suggest that it is easier to create a summarizer for a new domain than previous work suggests and bring into question the benefit of deep learning models for summarization for those domains that do have massive datasets (i.e., news). At the same time, they suggest important questions for new research in summarization; namely, new forms of sentence representations or external knowledge sources are needed that are better suited to the summarization task.
Gather-Excite: Exploiting Feature Context in Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

While the use of bottom-up local operators in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) matches well some of the statistics of natural images, it may also prevent such models from capturing contextual long-range feature interactions. In this work, we propose a simple, lightweight approach for better context exploitation in CNNs. We do so by introducing a pair of operators: gather, which efficiently aggregates feature responses from a large spatial extent, and excite, which redistributes the pooled information to local features. The operators are cheap, both in terms of number of added parameters and computational complexity, and can be integrated directly in existing architectures to improve their performance. Experiments on several datasets show that gather-excite can bring benefits comparable to increasing the depth of a CNN at a fraction of the cost. For example, we find ResNet-50 with gather-excite operators is able to outperform its 101-layer counterpart on ImageNet with no additional learnable parameters. We also propose a parametric gather-excite operator pair which yields further performance gains, relate it to the recently-introduced Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks, and analyse the effects of these changes to the CNN feature activation statistics.
Shape and Margin-Aware Lung Nodule Classification in Low-dose CT Images via Soft Activation Mapping
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

A number of studies on lung nodule classification lack clinical/biological interpretations of the features extracted by convolutional neural network (CNN). The methods like class activation mapping (CAM) and gradient-based CAM (Grad-CAM) are tailored for interpreting localization and classification tasks while they ignored fine-grained features. Therefore, CAM and Grad-CAM cannot provide optimal interpretation for lung nodule categorization task in low-dose CT images, in that fine-grained pathological clues like discrete and irregular shape and margins of nodules are capable of enhancing sensitivity and specificity of nodule classification with regards to CNN. In this paper, we first develop a soft activation mapping (SAM) to enable fine-grained lung nodule shape \& margin (LNSM) feature analysis with a CNN so that it can access rich discrete features. Secondly, by combining high-level convolutional features with SAM, we further propose a high-level feature enhancement scheme (HESAM) to localize LNSM features. Experiments on the LIDC-IDRI dataset indicate that 1) SAM captures more fine-grained and discrete attention regions than existing methods, 2) HESAM localizes more accurately on LNSM features and obtains the state-of-the-art predictive performance, reducing the false positive rate, and 3) we design and conduct a visually matching experiment which incorporates radiologists study to increase the confidence level of applying our method to clinical diagnosis.
3D Traffic Simulation for Autonomous Vehicles in Unity and Python
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Over the recent years, there has been an explosion of studies on autonomous vehicles. Many collected large amount of data from human drivers. However, compared to the tedious data collection approach, building a virtual simulation of traffic makes the autonomous vehicle research more flexible, time-saving, and scalable. Our work features a 3D simulation that takes in real time position information parsed from street cameras. The simulation can easily switch between a global bird view of the traffic and a local perspective of a car. It can also filter out certain objects in its customized camera, creating various channels for objects of different categories. This provides alternative supervised or unsupervised ways to train deep neural networks. Another advantage of the 3D simulation is its conformation to physical laws. Its naturalness to accelerate and collide prepares the system for potential deep reinforcement learning needs.
Long Short-Term Attention
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Attention is an important cognition process of humans, which helps humans concentrate on critical information during their perception and learning. However, although many machine learning models can remember information of data, they have no the attention mechanism. For example, the long short-term memory (LSTM) network is able to remember sequential information, but it cannot pay special attention to part of the sequences. In this paper, we present a novel model called long short-term attention (LSTA), which seamlessly integrates the attention mechanism into the inner cell of LSTM. More than processing long short term dependencies, LSTA can focus on important information of the sequences with the attention mechanism. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LSTA outperforms LSTM and related models on the sequence learning tasks.
The 2-domination and Roman domination numbers of grid graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2019
Year: 2019

We investigate the 2-domination number for grid graphs, that is the size of a smallest set $D$ of vertices of the grid such that each vertex of the grid belongs to $D$ or has at least two neighbours in $D$. We give a closed formula giving the 2-domination number of any $n \!\times\! m$ grid, hereby confirming the results found by Lu and Xu, and Shaheen et al. for $n \leq 4$ and slightly correct the value of Shaheen et al. for $n = 5$. The proof relies on some dynamic programming algorithms, using transfer matrices in (min,+)-algebra. We also apply the method to solve the Roman domination problem on grid graphs.
Parameterized Complexity of Equitable Coloring
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2019
Year: 2019

A graph on $n$ vertices is equitably $k$-colorable if it is $k$-colorable and every color is used either $\left\lfloor n/k \right\rfloor$ or $\left\lceil n/k \right\rceil$ times. Such a problem appears to be considerably harder than vertex coloring, being $\mathsf{NP\text{-}Complete}$ even for cographs and interval graphs. In this work, we prove that it is $\mathsf{W[1]\text{-}Hard}$ for block graphs and for disjoint union of split graphs when parameterized by the number of colors; and $\mathsf{W[1]\text{-}Hard}$ for $K_{1,4}$-free interval graphs when parameterized by treewidth, number of colors and maximum degree, generalizing a result by Fellows et al. (2014) through a much simpler reduction. Using a previous result due to Dominique de Werra (1985), we establish a dichotomy for the complexity of equitable coloring of chordal graphs based on the size of the largest induced star. Finally, we show that \textsc{equitable coloring} is $\mathsf{FPT}$ when parameterized by the treewidth of the complement graph.
Semantic Modeling of Textual Relationships in Cross-Modal Retrieval
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2019
Year: 2019

Feature modeling of different modalities is a basic problem in current research of cross-modal information retrieval. Existing models typically project texts and images into one embedding space, in which semantically similar information will have a shorter distance. Semantic modeling of textural relationships is notoriously difficult. In this paper, we propose an approach to model texts using a featured graph by integrating multi-view textual relationships including semantic relations, statistical co-occurrence, and prior relations in the knowledge base. A dual-path neural network is adopted to learn multi-modal representations of information and cross-modal similarity measure jointly. We use a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) for generating relation-aware text representations, and use a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with non-linearities for image representations. The cross-modal similarity measure is learned by distance metric learning. Experimental results show that, by leveraging the rich relational semantics in texts, our model can outperform the state-of-the-art models by 3.4% and 6.3% on accuracy on two benchmark datasets.
Multiple Measurement Vectors Problem: A Decoupling Property and its Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

We study a Compressed Sensing (CS) problem known as Multiple Measurement Vectors (MMV) problem, which arises in joint estimation of multiple signal realizations when the signal samples have a common (joint) sparse support over a fixed known dictionary. Although there is a vast literature on the analysis of MMV, it is not yet fully known how the number of signal samples and their statistical correlations affects the performance of the joint estimation in MMV. Moreover, in many instances of MMV the underlying sparsifying dictionary may not be precisely known, and it is still an open problem to quantify how the dictionary mismatch may affect the estimation performance. In this paper, we focus on $\ell_{2,1}$-norm regularized least squares ($\ell_{2,1}$-LS) as a well-known and widely-used MMV algorithm in the literature. We prove an interesting decoupling property for $\ell_{2,1}$-LS, where we show that it can be decomposed into two phases: i) use all the signal samples to estimate the signal covariance matrix (coupled phase), ii) plug in the resulting covariance estimate as the true covariance matrix into the Minimum Mean Squared Error (MMSE) estimator to reconstruct each signal sample individually (decoupled phase). As a consequence of this decomposition, we are able to provide further insights on the performance of $\ell_{2,1}$-LS for MMV. In particular, we address how the signal correlations and dictionary mismatch affects its performance. Moreover, we show that by using the decoupling property one can obtain a variety of MMV algorithms with performances even better than that of $\ell_{2,1}$-LS. We also provide numerical simulations to validate our theoretical results.