OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
PS-RCNN: Detecting Secondary Human Instances in a Crowd via Primary Object Suppression
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Detecting human bodies in highly crowded scenes is a challenging problem. Two main reasons result in such a problem: 1). weak visual cues of heavily occluded instances can hardly provide sufficient information for accurate detection; 2). heavily occluded instances are easier to be suppressed by Non-Maximum-Suppression (NMS). To address these two issues, we introduce a variant of two-stage detectors called PS-RCNN. PS-RCNN first detects slightly/none occluded objects by an R-CNN module (referred as P-RCNN), and then suppress the detected instances by human-shaped masks so that the features of heavily occluded instances can stand out. After that, PS-RCNN utilizes another R-CNN module specialized in heavily occluded human detection (referred as S-RCNN) to detect the rest missed objects by P-RCNN. Final results are the ensemble of the outputs from these two R-CNNs. Moreover, we introduce a High Resolution RoI Align (HRRA) module to retain as much of fine-grained features of visible parts of the heavily occluded humans as possible. Our PS-RCNN significantly improves recall and AP by 4.49% and 2.92% respectively on CrowdHuman, compared to the baseline. Similar improvements on Widerperson are also achieved by the PS-RCNN.
Stanza: A Python Natural Language Processing Toolkit for Many Human Languages
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

We introduce Stanza, an open-source Python natural language processing toolkit supporting 66 human languages. Compared to existing widely used toolkits, Stanza features a language-agnostic fully neural pipeline for text analysis, including tokenization, multi-word token expansion, lemmatization, part-of-speech and morphological feature tagging, dependency parsing, and named entity recognition. We have trained Stanza on a total of 112 datasets, including the Universal Dependencies treebanks and other multilingual corpora, and show that the same neural architecture generalizes well and achieves competitive performance on all languages tested. Additionally, Stanza includes a native Python interface to the widely used Java Stanford CoreNLP software, which further extends its functionality to cover other tasks such as coreference resolution and relation extraction. Source code, documentation, and pretrained models for 66 languages are available at https://stanfordnlp.github.io/stanza.
Correlation between Content and Traffic of the Universities Website
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2020
Year: 2020

The purpose of this study is to analyse the correlation between content and traffic of 21,485 academic websites (universities and research institutes). The achieved result is used as an indicator which shows the performance of the websites for attracting more visitors. This inspires a best practice for developing new websites or promoting the traffic of the existing websites. At the first step, content of the site is divided into three major items which are: Size, Papers and Rich Files. Then, the Spearman correlation between traffic of the websites and these items are calculated for each country and for the world, respectively. At the next step, countries are ranked based on their correlations, also a new indicator is proposed from combining these three correlations of the countries. Results show that in most countries, correlation between traffic of the websites and Papers is less than correlations between traffic of the websites and Rich Files and Size.
Solving Area Coverage Problem with UAVs: A Vehicle Routing with Time Windows Variation
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

In real life, providing security for a set of large areas by covering the area with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is a difficult problem that consist of multiple objectives. These difficulties are even greater if the area coverage must continue throughout a specific time window. We address this by considering a Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW) variation in which capacity of agents is one and each customer (target area) must be supplied with more than one vehicles simultaneously without violating time windows. In this problem, our aim is to find a way to cover all areas with the necessary number of UAVs during the time windows, minimize the total distance traveled, and provide a fast solution by satisfying the additional constraint that each agent has limited fuel. We present a novel algorithm that relies on clustering the target areas according to their time windows, and then incrementally generating transportation problems with each cluster and the ready UAVs. Then we solve transportation problems with the simplex algorithm to generate the solution. The performance of the proposed algorithm and other implemented algorithms to compare the solution quality is evaluated on example scenarios with practical problem sizes.
Securing Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) Communication Platforms
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

Modern vehicular wireless technology enables vehicles to exchange information at any time, from any place, to any network -- forms the vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication platforms. Despite benefits, V2X applications also face great challenges to security and privacy -- a very valid concern since breaches are not uncommon in automotive communication networks and applications. In this survey, we provide an extensive overview of V2X ecosystem. We also review main security/privacy issues, current standardization activities and existing defense mechanisms proposed within the V2X domain. We then identified semantic gaps of existing security solutions and outline possible open issues.
TF-IDFC-RF: A Novel Supervised Term Weighting Scheme
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2020
Year: 2020

Sentiment Analysis is a branch of Affective Computing usually considered a binary classification task. In this line of reasoning, Sentiment Analysis can be applied in several contexts to classify the attitude expressed in text samples, for example, movie reviews, sarcasm, among others. A common approach to represent text samples is the use of the Vector Space Model to compute numerical feature vectors consisting of the weight of terms. The most popular term weighting scheme is TF-IDF (Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency). It is an Unsupervised Weighting Scheme (UWS) since it does not consider the class information in the weighting of terms. Apart from that, there are Supervised Weighting Schemes (SWS), which consider the class information on term weighting calculation. Several SWS have been recently proposed, demonstrating better results than TF-IDF. In this scenario, this work presents a comparative study on different term weighting schemes and proposes a novel supervised term weighting scheme, named as TF-IDFC-RF (Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency in Class - Relevance Frequency). The effectiveness of TF-IDFC-RF is validated with SVM (Support Vector Machine) and NB (Naive Bayes) classifiers on four commonly used Sentiment Analysis datasets. TF-IDFC-RF shows promising results, outperforming all other weighting schemes on two datasets.
An Experiment in Morphological Development for Learning ANN Based Controllers
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Morphological development is part of the way any human or animal learns. The learning processes starts with the morphology at birth and progresses through changing morphologies until adulthood is reached. Biologically, this seems to facilitate learning and make it more robust. However, when this approach is transferred to robotic systems, the results found in the literature are inconsistent: morphological development does not provide a learning advantage in every case. In fact, it can lead to poorer results than when learning with a fixed morphology. In this paper we analyze some of the issues involved by means of a simple, but very informative experiment in quadruped walking. From the results obtained an initial series of insights on when and under what conditions to apply morphological development for learning are presented.
Approximating LCS in Linear Time: Beating the $\sqrt{n}$ Barrier
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2020
Year: 2020

Longest common subsequence (LCS) is one of the most fundamental problems in combinatorial optimization. Apart from theoretical importance, LCS has enormous applications in bioinformatics, revision control systems, and data comparison programs. Although a simple dynamic program computes LCS in quadratic time, it has been recently proven that the problem admits a conditional lower bound and may not be solved in truly subquadratic time. In addition to this, LCS is notoriously hard with respect to approximation algorithms. Apart from a trivial sampling technique that obtains a $n^{x}$ approximation solution in time $O(n^{2-2x})$ nothing else is known for LCS. This is in sharp contrast to its dual problem edit distance for which several linear time solutions are obtained in the past two decades.
Metrics for Evaluating the Efficiency of Compressing Sensing Techniques
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

Compressive sensing has been receiving a great deal of interest from researchers in many areas because of its ability in speeding up data acquisition. This framework allows fast signal acquisition and compression when signals are sparse in some domains. It extracts the main information from high dimensional sparse signals using only a few samples, then the sparse signals are recovered from the few measurements. There are two main points to consider when it comes to using compressive sensing. The first one is how to design the linear measurement matrix to ensure that the compressive sensing is meeting the objectives of the application. The second is how to recover the sparse signal from few measurements. Performing compressive sensing requires analyzing and investigating the efficiency of the measurement matrix and the recovery algorithm. To date, constructing explicit measurement matrices and developing efficient recovery algorithms are still open challenges in applications. Thus, this paper describes metrics to evaluate the performance of compressive sensing techniques.
Equivalent Rewritings on Path Views with Binding Patterns
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2020
Year: 2020

A view with a binding pattern is a parameterized query on a database. Such views are used, e.g., to model Web services. To answer a query on such views, the views have to be orchestrated together in execution plans. We show how queries can be rewritten into equivalent execution plans, which are guaranteed to deliver the same results as the query on all databases. We provide a correct and complete algorithm to find these plans for path views and atomic queries. Finally, we show that our method can be used to answer queries on real-world Web services.
RSVQA: Visual Question Answering for Remote Sensing Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

This paper introduces the task of visual question answering for remote sensing data (RSVQA). Remote sensing images contain a wealth of information which can be useful for a wide range of tasks including land cover classification, object counting or detection. However, most of the available methodologies are task-specific, thus inhibiting generic and easy access to the information contained in remote sensing data. As a consequence, accurate remote sensing product generation still requires expert knowledge. With RSVQA, we propose a system to extract information from remote sensing data that is accessible to every user: we use questions formulated in natural language and use them to interact with the images. With the system, images can be queried to obtain high level information specific to the image content or relational dependencies between objects visible in the images. Using an automatic method introduced in this article, we built two datasets (using low and high resolution data) of image/question/answer triplets. The information required to build the questions and answers is queried from OpenStreetMap (OSM). The datasets can be used to train (when using supervised methods) and evaluate models to solve the RSVQA task. We report the results obtained by applying a model based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for the visual part and on a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) for the natural language part to this task. The model is trained on the two datasets, yielding promising results in both cases.
Tracking Social Media Discourse About the COVID-19 Pandemic: Development of a Public Coronavirus Twitter Data Set
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2020
Year: 2020

At the time of this writing, the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic outbreak has already put tremendous strain on many countries' citizens, resources and economies around the world. Social distancing measures, travel bans, self-quarantines, and business closures are changing the very fabric of societies worldwide. With people forced out of public spaces, much conversation about these phenomena now occurs online, e.g., on social media platforms like Twitter. In this paper, we describe a multilingual coronavirus (COVID-19) Twitter dataset that we have been continuously collecting since January 22, 2020. We are making our dataset available to the research community (https://github.com/echen102/COVID-19-TweetIDs). It is our hope that our contribution will enable the study of online conversation dynamics in the context of a planetary-scale epidemic outbreak of unprecedented proportions and implications. This dataset could also help track scientific coronavirus misinformation and unverified rumors, or enable the understanding of fear and panic -- and undoubtedly more. Ultimately, this dataset may contribute towards enabling informed solutions and prescribing targeted policy interventions to fight this global crisis.
Beyond Alice and Bob: Improved Inapproximability for Maximum Independent Set in CONGEST
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

By far the most fruitful technique for showing lower bounds for the CONGEST model is reductions to two-party communication complexity. This technique has yielded nearly tight results for various fundamental problems such as distance computations, minimum spanning tree, minimum vertex cover, and more. In this work, we take this technique a step further, and we introduce a framework of reductions to $t$-party communication complexity, for every $t\geq 2$. Our framework enables us to show improved hardness results for maximum independent set. Recently, Bachrach et al.[PODC 2019] used the two-party framework to show hardness of approximation for maximum independent set. They show that finding a $(5/6+ε)$-approximation requires $Ω(n/\log^6 n)$ rounds, and finding a $(7/8+ε)$-approximation requires $Ω(n^2/\log^7 n)$ rounds, in the CONGEST model where $n$ in the number of nodes in the network. We improve the results of Bachrach et al. by using reductions to multi-party communication complexity. Our results: (1) Any algorithm that finds a $(1/2+ε)$-approximation for maximum independent set in the CONGEST model requires $Ω(n/\log^3 n)$ rounds. (2) Any algorithm that finds a $(3/4+ε)$-approximation for maximum independent set in the CONGEST model requires $Ω(n^2/\log^3 n)$ rounds.
Duoquest: A Dual-Specification System for Expressive SQL Queries
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2020
Year: 2020

Querying a relational database is difficult because it requires users to know both the SQL language and be familiar with the schema. On the other hand, many users possess enough domain familiarity or expertise to describe their desired queries by alternative means. For such users, two major alternatives to writing SQL are natural language interfaces (NLIs) and programming-by-example (PBE). Both of these alternatives face certain pitfalls: natural language queries (NLQs) are often ambiguous, even for human interpreters, while current PBE approaches require either low-complexity queries, user schema knowledge, exact example tuples from the user, or a closed-world assumption to be tractable. Consequently, we propose dual-specification query synthesis, which consumes both a NLQ and an optional PBE-like table sketch query that enables users to express varied levels of domain-specific knowledge. We introduce the novel dual-specification Duoquest system, which leverages guided partial query enumeration to efficiently explore the space of possible queries. We present results from user studies in which Duoquest demonstrates a 62.5% absolute increase in query construction accuracy over a state-of-the-art NLI and comparable accuracy to a PBE system on a more limited workload supported by the PBE system. In a simulation study on the prominent Spider benchmark, Duoquest demonstrates a >2x increase in top-1 accuracy over both NLI and PBE.
Learnergy: Energy-based Machine Learners
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Throughout the last years, machine learning techniques have been broadly encouraged in the context of deep learning architectures. An exciting algorithm denoted as Restricted Boltzmann Machine relies on energy- and probabilistic-based nature to tackle the most diverse applications, such as classification, reconstruction, and generation of images and signals. Nevertheless, one can see they are not adequately renowned compared to other well-known deep learning techniques, e.g., Convolutional Neural Networks. Such behavior promotes the lack of researches and implementations around the literature, coping with the challenge of sufficiently comprehending these energy-based systems. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a Python-inspired framework in the context of energy-based architectures, denoted as Learnergy. Essentially, Learnergy is built upon PyTorch to provide a more friendly environment and a faster prototyping workspace and possibly the usage of CUDA computations, speeding up their computational time.
Cooperative Object Detection and Parameter Estimation Using Visible Light Communications
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

Visible light communication (VLC) systems are promising candidates for future indoor access and peer-to-peer networks. The performance of these systems, however, is vulnerable to the line of sight (LOS) link blockage due to objects inside the room. In this paper, we develop a probabilistic object detection method that takes advantage of the blockage status of the LOS links between the user devices and transceivers on the ceiling to locate those objects. The target objects are modeled as cylinders with random radii. The location and size of an object can be estimated by using a quadratic programming approach. Simulation results show that the root-mean-squared error can be less than $1$ cm and $8$ cm for estimating the center and the radius of the object, respectively.
Binary LCD Codes and Self-orthogonal Codes via Simplicial Complexes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

Due to some practical applications, linear complementary dual (LCD) codes and self-orthogonal codes have attracted wide attention in recent years. In this paper, we use simplicial complexes for construction of an infinite family of binary LCD codes and two infinite families of binary self-orthogonal codes. Moreover, we explicitly determine the weight distributions of these codes. We obtain binary LCD codes which have minimum weights two or three, and we also find some self-orthogonal codes meeting the Griesmer bound. As examples, we also present some (almost) {\it optimal} binary self-orthogonal codes and LCD {\it distance optimal} codes.
1st Place Solutions for OpenImage2019 -- Object Detection and Instance Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

This article introduces the solutions of the two champion teams, `MMfruit' for the detection track and `MMfruitSeg' for the segmentation track, in OpenImage Challenge 2019. It is commonly known that for an object detector, the shared feature at the end of the backbone is not appropriate for both classification and regression, which greatly limits the performance of both single stage detector and Faster RCNN \cite{ren2015faster} based detector. In this competition, we observe that even with a shared feature, different locations in one object has completely inconsistent performances for the two tasks. \textit{E.g. the features of salient locations are usually good for classification, while those around the object edge are good for regression.} Inspired by this, we propose the Decoupling Head (DH) to disentangle the object classification and regression via the self-learned optimal feature extraction, which leads to a great improvement. Furthermore, we adjust the soft-NMS algorithm to adj-NMS to obtain stable performance improvement. Finally, a well-designed ensemble strategy via voting the bounding box location and confidence is proposed. We will also introduce several training/inferencing strategies and a bag of tricks that give minor improvement. Given those masses of details, we train and aggregate 28 global models with various backbones, heads and 3+2 expert models, and achieves the 1st place on the OpenImage 2019 Object Detection Challenge on the both public and private leadboards. Given such good instance bounding box, we further design a simple instance-level semantic segmentation pipeline and achieve the 1st place on the segmentation challenge.
GFTE: Graph-based Financial Table Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Tabular data is a crucial form of information expression, which can organize data in a standard structure for easy information retrieval and comparison. However, in financial industry and many other fields tables are often disclosed in unstructured digital files, e.g. Portable Document Format (PDF) and images, which are difficult to be extracted directly. In this paper, to facilitate deep learning based table extraction from unstructured digital files, we publish a standard Chinese dataset named FinTab, which contains more than 1,600 financial tables of diverse kinds and their corresponding structure representation in JSON. In addition, we propose a novel graph-based convolutional neural network model named GFTE as a baseline for future comparison. GFTE integrates image feature, position feature and textual feature together for precise edge prediction and reaches overall good results.
Feedback Graph Convolutional Network for Skeleton-based Action Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Skeleton-based action recognition has attracted considerable attention in computer vision since skeleton data is more robust to the dynamic circumstance and complicated background than other modalities. Recently, many researchers have used the Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) to model spatial-temporal features of skeleton sequences by an end-to-end optimization. However, conventional GCNs are feedforward networks which are impossible for low-level layers to access semantic information in the high-level layers. In this paper, we propose a novel network, named Feedback Graph Convolutional Network (FGCN). This is the first work that introduces the feedback mechanism into GCNs and action recognition. Compared with conventional GCNs, FGCN has the following advantages: (1) a multi-stage temporal sampling strategy is designed to extract spatial-temporal features for action recognition in a coarse-to-fine progressive process; (2) A dense connections based Feedback Graph Convolutional Block (FGCB) is proposed to introduce feedback connections into the GCNs. It transmits the high-level semantic features to the low-level layers and flows temporal information stage by stage to progressively model global spatial-temporal features for action recognition; (3) The FGCN model provides early predictions. In the early stages, the model receives partial information about actions. Naturally, its predictions are relatively coarse. The coarse predictions are treated as the prior to guide the feature learning of later stages for a accurate prediction. Extensive experiments on the datasets, NTU-RGB+D, NTU-RGB+D120 and Northwestern-UCLA, demonstrate that the proposed FGCN is effective for action recognition. It achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the three datasets.