OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Context-Aware Semantic Inpainting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Recently image inpainting has witnessed rapid progress due to generative adversarial networks (GAN) that are able to synthesize realistic contents. However, most existing GAN-based methods for semantic inpainting apply an auto-encoder architecture with a fully connected layer, which cannot accurately maintain spatial information. In addition, the discriminator in existing GANs struggle to understand high-level semantics within the image context and yield semantically consistent content. Existing evaluation criteria are biased towards blurry results and cannot well characterize edge preservation and visual authenticity in the inpainting results. In this paper, we propose an improved generative adversarial network to overcome the aforementioned limitations. Our proposed GAN-based framework consists of a fully convolutional design for the generator which helps to better preserve spatial structures and a joint loss function with a revised perceptual loss to capture high-level semantics in the context. Furthermore, we also introduce two novel measures to better assess the quality of image inpainting results. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state of the art under a wide range of criteria.
Indoor Sound Source Localization with Probabilistic Neural Network
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2017
Year: 2017

It is known that adverse environments such as high reverberation and low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) pose a great challenge to indoor sound source localization. To address this challenge, in this paper, we propose a sound source localization algorithm based on probabilistic neural network, namely Generalized cross correlation Classification Algorithm (GCA). Experimental results for adverse environments with high reverberation time T60 up to 600ms and low SNR such as -10dB show that, the average azimuth angle error and elevation angle error by GCA are only 4.6 degrees and 3.1 degrees respectively. Compared with three recently published algorithms, GCA has increased the success rate on direction of arrival estimation significantly with good robustness to environmental changes. These results show that the proposed GCA can localize accurately and robustly for diverse indoor applications where the site acoustic features can be studied prior to the localization stage.
On the Information Dimension of Multivariate Gaussian Processes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

The authors have recently defined the Rényi information dimension rate $d(\{X_t\})$ of a stationary stochastic process $\{X_t,\,t\in\mathbb{Z}\}$ as the entropy rate of the uniformly-quantized process divided by minus the logarithm of the quantizer step size $1/m$ in the limit as $m\to\infty$ (B. Geiger and T. Koch, "On the information dimension rate of stochastic processes," in Proc. IEEE Int. Symp. Inf. Theory (ISIT), Aachen, Germany, June 2017). For Gaussian processes with a given spectral distribution function $F_X$, they showed that the information dimension rate equals the Lebesgue measure of the set of harmonics where the derivative of $F_X$ is positive. This paper extends this result to multivariate Gaussian processes with a given matrix-valued spectral distribution function $F_{\mathbf{X}}$. It is demonstrated that the information dimension rate equals the average rank of the derivative of $F_{\mathbf{X}}$. As a side result, it is shown that the scale and translation invariance of information dimension carries over from random variables to stochastic processes.
Improvements to Inference Compilation for Probabilistic Programming in Large-Scale Scientific Simulators
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2017
Year: 2017

We consider the problem of Bayesian inference in the family of probabilistic models implicitly defined by stochastic generative models of data. In scientific fields ranging from population biology to cosmology, low-level mechanistic components are composed to create complex generative models. These models lead to intractable likelihoods and are typically non-differentiable, which poses challenges for traditional approaches to inference. We extend previous work in "inference compilation", which combines universal probabilistic programming and deep learning methods, to large-scale scientific simulators, and introduce a C++ based probabilistic programming library called CPProb. We successfully use CPProb to interface with SHERPA, a large code-base used in particle physics. Here we describe the technical innovations realized and planned for this library.
Rate-Distributed Spatial Filtering Based Noise Reduction in Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2017
Year: 2017

In wireless acoustic sensor networks (WASNs), sensors typically have a limited energy budget as they are often battery driven. Energy efficiency is therefore essential to the design of algorithms in WASNs. One way to reduce energy costs is to only select the sensors which are most informative, a problem known as {\it sensor selection}. In this way, only sensors that significantly contribute to the task at hand will be involved. In this work, we consider a more general approach, which is based on rate-distributed spatial filtering. Together with the distance over which transmission takes place, bit rate directly influences the energy consumption. We try to minimize the battery usage due to transmission, while constraining the noise reduction performance. This results in an efficient rate allocation strategy, which depends on the underlying signal statistics, as well as the distance from sensors to a fusion center (FC). Under the utilization of a linearly constrained minimum variance (LCMV) beamformer, the problem is derived as a semi-definite program. Furthermore, we show that rate allocation is more general than sensor selection, and sensor selection can be seen as a special case of the presented rate-allocation solution, e.g., the best microphone subset can be determined by thresholding the rates. Finally, numerical simulations for the application of estimating several target sources in a WASN demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the microphone subset selection based approaches in the sense of energy usage, and we find that the sensors close to the FC and close to point sources are allocated with higher rates.
Joint Transportation and Charging Scheduling in Public Vehicle Systems - A Game Theoretic Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2017
Year: 2017

Public vehicle (PV) systems are promising transportation systems for future smart cities which provide dynamic ride-sharing services according to passengers' requests. PVs are driverless/self-driving electric vehicles which require frequent recharging from smart grids. For such systems, the challenge lies in both the efficient scheduling scheme to satisfy transportation demands with service guarantee and the cost-effective charging strategy under the real-time electricity pricing. In this paper, we study the joint transportation and charging scheduling for PV systems to balance the transportation and charging demands, ensuring the long-term operation. We adopt a cake cutting game model to capture the interactions among PV groups, the cloud and smart grids. The cloud announces strategies to coordinate the allocation of transportation and energy resources among PV groups. All the PV groups try to maximize their joint transportation and charging utilities. We propose an algorithm to obtain the unique normalized Nash equilibrium point for this problem. Simulations are performed to confirm the effects of our scheme under the real taxi and power grid data sets of New York City. Our results show that our scheme achieves almost the same transportation performance compared with a heuristic scheme, namely, transportation with greedy charging; however, the average energy price of the proposed scheme is 10.86% lower than the latter one.
Siamese Neural Networks for One-shot detection of Railway Track Switches
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Deep Learning methods have been extensively used to analyze video data to extract valuable information by classifying image frames and detecting objects. We describe a unique approach for using video feed from a moving Locomotive to continuously monitor the Railway Track and detect significant assets like Switches on the Track. The technique used here is called Siamese Networks, which uses 2 identical networks to learn the similarity between of 2 images. Here we will use a Siamese network to continuously compare Track images and detect any significant difference in the Track. Switch will be one of those images that will be different and we will find a mapping that clearly distinguishes the Switch from other possible Track anomalies. The same method will then be extended to detect any abnormalities on the Railway Track. Railway Transportation is unique in the sense that is has wheeled vehicles, Trains pulled by Locomotives, running on guided Rails at very high speeds nearing 200 mph. Multiple Tracks on the Rail network are connected to each other using an equipment called Switch or a Turnout. Switch is either operated manually or automatically through command from a Control center and it governs the movement of Trains on different Tracks of the network. Accurate location of these Switches is very important for the railroad and getting a true picture of their state in field is important. Modern trains use high definition video cameras facing the Track that continuously record video from track. Using a Siamese network and comparing to benchmark images, we describe a method to monitor the Track and highlight anomalies.
AVEID: Automatic Video System for Measuring Engagement In Dementia
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2017
Year: 2017

Engagement in dementia is typically measured using behavior observational scales (BOS) that are tedious and involve intensive manual labor to annotate, and are therefore not easily scalable. We propose AVEID, a low cost and easy-to-use video-based engagement measurement tool to determine the engagement level of a person with dementia (PwD) during digital interaction. We show that the objective behavioral measures computed via AVEID correlate well with subjective expert impressions for the popular MPES and OME BOS, confirming its viability and effectiveness. Moreover, AVEID measures can be obtained for a variety of engagement designs, thereby facilitating large-scale studies with PwD populations.
Fault Localization in Large-Scale Network Policy Deployment
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2017
Year: 2017

The recent advances in network management automation and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) are easing network policy management tasks. At the same time, these new technologies create a new mode of failure in the management cycle itself. Network policies are presented in an abstract model at a centralized controller and deployed as low-level rules across network devices. Thus, any software and hardware element in that cycle can be a potential cause of underlying network problems. In this paper, we present and solve a network policy fault localization problem that arises in operating policy management frameworks for a production network. We formulate our problem via risk modeling and propose a greedy algorithm that quickly localizes faulty policy objects in the network policy. We then design and develop SCOUT---a fully-automated system that produces faulty policy objects and further pinpoints physical-level failures which made the objects faulty. Evaluation results using a real testbed and extensive simulations demonstrate that SCOUT detects faulty objects with small false positives and false negatives.
A Fast Algorithm for Separated Sparsity via Perturbed Lagrangians
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2017
Year: 2017

Sparsity-based methods are widely used in machine learning, statistics, and signal processing. There is now a rich class of structured sparsity approaches that expand the modeling power of the sparsity paradigm and incorporate constraints such as group sparsity, graph sparsity, or hierarchical sparsity. While these sparsity models offer improved sample complexity and better interpretability, the improvements come at a computational cost: it is often challenging to optimize over the (non-convex) constraint sets that capture various sparsity structures. In this paper, we make progress in this direction in the context of separated sparsity -- a fundamental sparsity notion that captures exclusion constraints in linearly ordered data such as time series. While prior algorithms for computing a projection onto this constraint set required quadratic time, we provide a perturbed Lagrangian relaxation approach that computes provably exact projection in only nearly-linear time. Although the sparsity constraint is non-convex, our perturbed Lagrangian approach is still guaranteed to find a globally optimal solution. In experiments, our new algorithms offer a 10$\times$ speed-up already on moderately-size inputs.
Multi-task learning of time series and its application to the travel demand
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

We address the problem of modeling and prediction of a set of temporal events in the context of intelligent transportation systems. To leverage the information shared by different events, we propose a multi-task learning framework. We develop a support vector regression model for joint learning of mutually dependent time series. It is the regularization-based multi-task learning previously developed for the classification case and extended to time series. We discuss the relatedness of observed time series and first deploy the dynamic time warping distance measure to identify groups of similar series. Then we take into account both time and scale warping and propose to align multiple time series by inferring their common latent representation. We test the proposed models on the problem of travel demand prediction in Nancy (France) public transport system and analyze the benefits of multi-task learning.
Choreographic and Somatic Approaches for the Development of Expressive Robotic Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2017
Year: 2017

As robotic systems are moved out of factory work cells into human-facing environments questions of choreography become central to their design, placement, and application. With a human viewer or counterpart present, a system will automatically be interpreted within context, style of movement, and form factor by human beings as animate elements of their environment. The interpretation by this human counterpart is critical to the success of the system's integration: knobs on the system need to make sense to a human counterpart; an artificial agent should have a way of notifying a human counterpart of a change in system state, possibly through motion profiles; and the motion of a human counterpart may have important contextual clues for task completion. Thus, professional choreographers, dance practitioners, and movement analysts are critical to research in robotics. They have design methods for movement that align with human audience perception, can identify simplified features of movement for human-robot interaction goals, and have detailed knowledge of the capacity of human movement. This article provides approaches employed by one research lab, specific impacts on technical and artistic projects within, and principles that may guide future such work. The background section reports on choreography, somatic perspectives, improvisation, the Laban/Bartenieff Movement System, and robotics. From this context methods including embodied exercises, writing prompts, and community building activities have been developed to facilitate interdisciplinary research. The results of this work is presented as an overview of a smattering of projects in areas like high-level motion planning, software development for rapid prototyping of movement, artistic output, and user studies that help understand how people interpret movement. Finally, guiding principles for other groups to adopt are posited.
Understanding and Improving the Latency of DRAM-Based Memory Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2017
Year: 2017

Over the past two decades, the storage capacity and access bandwidth of main memory have improved tremendously, by 128x and 20x, respectively. These improvements are mainly due to the continuous technology scaling of DRAM (dynamic random-access memory), which has been used as the physical substrate for main memory. In stark contrast with capacity and bandwidth, DRAM latency has remained almost constant, reducing by only 1.3x in the same time frame. Therefore, long DRAM latency continues to be a critical performance bottleneck in modern systems. Increasing core counts, and the emergence of increasingly more data-intensive and latency-critical applications further stress the importance of providing low-latency memory access. In this dissertation, we identify three main problems that contribute significantly to long latency of DRAM accesses. To address these problems, we present a series of new techniques. Our new techniques significantly improve both system performance and energy efficiency. We also examine the critical relationship between supply voltage and latency in modern DRAM chips and develop new mechanisms that exploit this voltage-latency trade-off to improve energy efficiency. The key conclusion of this dissertation is that augmenting DRAM architecture with simple and low-cost features, and developing a better understanding of manufactured DRAM chips together lead to significant memory latency reduction as well as energy efficiency improvement. We hope and believe that the proposed architectural techniques and the detailed experimental data and observations on real commodity DRAM chips presented in this dissertation will enable development of other new mechanisms to improve the performance, energy efficiency, or reliability of future memory systems.
Triple Scoring Using a Hybrid Fact Validation Approach - The Catsear Triple Scorer at WSDM Cup 2017
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2017
Year: 2017

With the continuous increase of data daily published in knowledge bases across the Web, one of the main issues is regarding information relevance. In most knowledge bases, a triple (i.e., a statement composed by subject, predicate, and object) can be only true or false. However, triples can be assigned a score to have information sorted by relevance. In this work, we describe the participation of the Catsear team in the Triple Scoring Challenge at the WSDM Cup 2017. The Catsear approach scores triples by combining the answers coming from three different sources using a linear regression classifier. We show how our approach achieved an Accuracy2 value of 79.58% and the overall 4th place.
Ranking Triples using Entity Links in a Large Web Crawl - The Chicory Triple Scorer at WSDM Cup 2017
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2017
Year: 2017

This paper describes the participation of team Chicory in the Triple Ranking Challenge of the WSDM Cup 2017. Our approach deploys a large collection of entity tagged web data to estimate the correctness of the relevance relation expressed by the triples, in combination with a baseline approach using Wikipedia abstracts following [1]. Relevance estimations are drawn from ClueWeb12 annotated by Google's entity linker, available publicly as the FACC1 dataset. Our implementation is automatically generated from a so-called 'search strategy' that specifies declaratively how the input data are combined into a final ranking of triples.
Predicting Relevance Scores for Triples from Type-Like Relations using Neural Embedding - The Cabbage Triple Scorer at WSDM Cup 2017
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2017
Year: 2017

The WSDM Cup 2017 Triple scoring challenge is aimed at calculating and assigning relevance scores for triples from type-like relations. Such scores are a fundamental ingredient for ranking results in entity search. In this paper, we propose a method that uses neural embedding techniques to accurately calculate an entity score for a triple based on its nearest neighbor. We strive to develop a new latent semantic model with a deep structure that captures the semantic and syntactic relations between words. Our method has been ranked among the top performers with accuracy - 0.74, average score difference - 1.74, and average Kendall's Tau - 0.35.
Music Genre Classification with Paralleling Recurrent Convolutional Neural Network
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2017
Year: 2017

Deep learning has been demonstrated its effectiveness and efficiency in music genre classification. However, the existing achievements still have several shortcomings which impair the performance of this classification task. In this paper, we propose a hybrid architecture which consists of the paralleling CNN and Bi-RNN blocks. They focus on spatial features and temporal frame orders extraction respectively. Then the two outputs are fused into one powerful representation of musical signals and fed into softmax function for classification. The paralleling network guarantees the extracting features robust enough to represent music. Moreover, the experiments prove our proposed architecture improve the music genre classification performance and the additional Bi-RNN block is a supplement for CNNs.
On Reduced Input-Output Dynamic Mode Decomposition
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2017
Year: 2017

The identification of reduced-order models from high-dimensional data is a challenging task, and even more so if the identified system should not only be suitable for a certain data set, but generally approximate the input-output behavior of the data source. In this work, we consider the input-output dynamic mode decomposition method for system identification. We compare excitation approaches for the data-driven identification process and describe an optimization-based stabilization strategy for the identified systems.
Training and Testing Object Detectors with Virtual Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

In the area of computer vision, deep learning has produced a variety of state-of-the-art models that rely on massive labeled data. However, collecting and annotating images from the real world has a great demand for labor and money investments and is usually too passive to build datasets with specific characteristics, such as small area of objects and high occlusion level. Under the framework of Parallel Vision, this paper presents a purposeful way to design artificial scenes and automatically generate virtual images with precise annotations. A virtual dataset named ParallelEye is built, which can be used for several computer vision tasks. Then, by training the DPM (Deformable Parts Model) and Faster R-CNN detectors, we prove that the performance of models can be significantly improved by combining ParallelEye with publicly available real-world datasets during the training phase. In addition, we investigate the potential of testing the trained models from a specific aspect using intentionally designed virtual datasets, in order to discover the flaws of trained models. From the experimental results, we conclude that our virtual dataset is viable to train and test the object detectors.