OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Light-Weight Object Detection Framework with FPA Module for Optical Remote Sensing Imagery
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

With the development of remote sensing technology, the acquisition of remote sensing images is easier and easier, which provides sufficient data resources for the task of detecting remote sensing objects. However, how to detect objects quickly and accurately from many complex optical remote sensing images is a challenging hot issue. In this paper, we propose an efficient anchor free object detector, CenterFPANet. To pursue speed, we use a lightweight backbone and introduce the asymmetric revolution block. To improve the accuracy, we designed the FPA module, which links the feature maps of different levels, and introduces the attention mechanism to dynamically adjust the weights of each level of feature maps, which solves the problem of detection difficulty caused by large size range of remote sensing objects. This strategy can improve the accuracy of remote sensing image object detection without reducing the detection speed. On the DOTA dataset, CenterFPANet mAP is 64.00%, and FPS is 22.2, which is close to the accuracy of the anchor-based methods currently used and much faster than them. Compared with Faster RCNN, mAP is 6.76% lower but 60.87% faster. All in all, CenterFPANet achieves a balance between speed and accuracy in large-scale optical remote sensing object detection.
Scaling up Differentially Private Deep Learning with Fast Per-Example Gradient Clipping
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Recent work on Renyi Differential Privacy has shown the feasibility of applying differential privacy to deep learning tasks. Despite their promise, however, differentially private deep networks often lag far behind their non-private counterparts in accuracy, showing the need for more research in model architectures, optimizers, etc. One of the barriers to this expanded research is the training time -- often orders of magnitude larger than training non-private networks. The reason for this slowdown is a crucial privacy-related step called "per-example gradient clipping" whose naive implementation undoes the benefits of batch training with GPUs. By analyzing the back-propagation equations we derive new methods for per-example gradient clipping that are compatible with auto-differentiation (e.g., in PyTorch and TensorFlow) and provide better GPU utilization. Our implementation in PyTorch showed significant training speed-ups (by factors of 54x - 94x for training various models with batch sizes of 128). These techniques work for a variety of architectural choices including convolutional layers, recurrent networks, attention, residual blocks, etc.
Why Not Simply Translate? A First Swedish Evaluation Benchmark for Semantic Similarity
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

This paper presents the first Swedish evaluation benchmark for textual semantic similarity. The benchmark is compiled by simply running the English STS-B dataset through the Google machine translation API. This paper discusses potential problems with using such a simple approach to compile a Swedish evaluation benchmark, including translation errors, vocabulary variation, and productive compounding. Despite some obvious problems with the resulting dataset, we use the benchmark to compare the majority of the currently existing Swedish text representations, demonstrating that native models outperform multilingual ones, and that simple bag of words performs remarkably well.
Supporting the Problem-Solving Loop: Designing Highly Interactive Optimisation Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

Efficient optimisation algorithms have become important tools for finding high-quality solutions to hard, real-world problems such as production scheduling, timetabling, or vehicle routing. These algorithms are typically "black boxes" that work on mathematical models of the problem to solve. However, many problems are difficult to fully specify, and require a "human in the loop" who collaborates with the algorithm by refining the model and guiding the search to produce acceptable solutions. Recently, the Problem-Solving Loop was introduced as a high-level model of such interactive optimisation. Here, we present and evaluate nine recommendations for the design of interactive visualisation tools supporting the Problem-Solving Loop. They range from the choice of visual representation for solutions and constraints to the use of a solution gallery to support exploration of alternate solutions. We first examined the applicability of the recommendations by investigating how well they had been supported in previous interactive optimisation tools. We then evaluated the recommendations in the context of the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW). To do so we built a sophisticated interactive visual system for solving VRPTW that was informed by the recommendations. Ten participants then used this system to solve a variety of routing problems. We report on participant comments and interaction patterns with the tool. These showed the tool was regarded as highly usable and the results generally supported the usefulness of the underlying recommendations.
An Algorithm for Automatically Updating a Forsyth-Edwards Notation String Without an Array Board Representation
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

We present an algorithm that correctly updates the Forsyth-Edwards Notation (FEN) chessboard character string after any move is made without the need for an intermediary array representation of the board. In particular, this relates to software that have to do with chess, certain chess variants and possibly even similar board games with comparable position representation. Even when performance may be equal or inferior to using arrays, the algorithm still provides an accurate and viable alternative to accomplishing the same thing, or when there may be a need for additional or side processing in conjunction with arrays. Furthermore, the end result (i.e. an updated FEN string) is immediately ready for export to any other internal module or external program, unlike with an intermediary array which needs to be first converted into a FEN string for export purposes. The algorithm is especially useful when there are no existing array-based modules to represent a visual board as it can do without them entirely. We provide examples that demonstrate the correctness of the algorithm given a variety of positions involving castling, en passant and pawn promotion.
Integrating Egocentric Localization for More Realistic Point-Goal Navigation Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Recent work has presented embodied agents that can navigate to point-goal targets in novel indoor environments with near-perfect accuracy. However, these agents are equipped with idealized sensors for localization and take deterministic actions. This setting is practically sterile by comparison to the dirty reality of noisy sensors and actuations in the real world -- wheels can slip, motion sensors have error, actuations can rebound. In this work, we take a step towards this noisy reality, developing point-goal navigation agents that rely on visual estimates of egomotion under noisy action dynamics. We find these agents outperform naive adaptions of current point-goal agents to this setting as well as those incorporating classic localization baselines. Further, our model conceptually divides learning agent dynamics or odometry (where am I?) from task-specific navigation policy (where do I want to go?). This enables a seamless adaption to changing dynamics (a different robot or floor type) by simply re-calibrating the visual odometry model -- circumventing the expense of re-training of the navigation policy. Our agent was the runner-up in the PointNav track of CVPR 2020 Habitat Challenge.
DApp for Rating
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

Lots of existing web applications include a component for rating internet resources (e.g., social media platforms include mechanisms for rating videos or posts). Based on the obtained rating, the most popular internet resources can generate large amounts of money from advertising. One issue here is that the existing rating systems resources are entirely controlled by a single entity (e.g., social media platforms). In this paper we present a blockchain-based decentralized application for rating internet resources. The proposed solution provides a transparent rating mechanism, since no central authority is involved and the rating operations are handled by a specialised smart contract. We provide an implementation of our idea, where we combine existing authentication methods with blockchain specific features so that anonymity is preserved. We show that this approach is better than existing rating components present in various web applications.
Personalized Review Ranking for Improving Shopper's Decision Making: A Term Frequency based Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2020
Year: 2020

User-generated reviews serve as crucial references in shopper's decision-making process. Moreover, they improve product sales and validate the reputation of the website as a whole. Thus, it becomes important to design reviews ranking methods that help shoppers make informed decisions quickly. However, reviews ranking has its unique challenges. First, there is no relevance labels for reviews. A relevant review for shopper A might not be relevant to shopper B. Second, since shoppers cannot click on reviews, we have no ways of getting relevance feedback. Eventually, reviews ranking suffers from the lack of ground truth due to the variability in the standard of relevance for different users. In this paper, we aim to address the challenges of helping users to find information they might be interested in from the sea of customer reviews. Using the Amazon Customer Reviews Dataset collected and organized by UCSD, we first constructed user profiles based on user's personal web trails, recent shopping history and previous reviews, incorporated user profiles into our ranking algorithm, and assigned higher ranks to reviews that address individual shopper's concerns to the largest extent. Also, we leveraged user profiles to recommend products based on reviews texts. We evaluated our model based on both empirical evaluations and numerical evaluations of review scores. The results from both evaluation methods reveal a significant increase in the quality of top reviews as well as user satisfaction for over 1000 products. Our reviews based recommendation system also suggests that there's a large chance of user viewing and liking the product we recommend. Our work shows the basic steps of developing a ranking method that learns from a particular end-user's preferences.
Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Systems: Roadmap for Theory to Deployment
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) are being increasingly deployed for commercial, civilian, and military applications. The current UAS state-of-the-art still depends on a remote human controller with robust wireless links to perform several of these applications. The lack of autonomy restricts the domains of application and tasks for which a UAS can be deployed. Enabling autonomy and intelligence to the UAS will help overcome this hurdle and expand its use improving safety and efficiency. The exponential increase in computing resources and the availability of large amount of data in this digital era has led to the resurgence of machine learning from its last winter. Therefore, in this chapter, we discuss how some of the advances in machine learning, specifically deep learning and reinforcement learning can be leveraged to develop next-generation autonomous UAS. We first begin motivating this chapter by discussing the application, challenges, and opportunities of the current UAS in the introductory section. We then provide an overview of some of the key deep learning and reinforcement learning techniques discussed throughout this chapter. A key area of focus that will be essential to enable autonomy to UAS is computer vision. Accordingly, we discuss how deep learning approaches have been used to accomplish some of the basic tasks that contribute to providing UAS autonomy. Then we discuss how reinforcement learning is explored for using this information to provide autonomous control and navigation for UAS. Next, we provide the reader with directions to choose appropriate simulation suites and hardware platforms that will help to rapidly prototype novel machine learning based solutions for UAS. We additionally discuss the open problems and challenges pertaining to each aspect of developing autonomous UAS solutions to shine light on potential research areas.
Probabilistic analysis of algorithms for cost constrained minimum weighted combinatorial objects
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2020
Year: 2020

We consider cost constrained versions of the minimum spanning tree problem and the assignment problem. We assume edge weights are independent copies of a continuous random variable $Z$ that satisfies $F(x)=\Pr(Z\leq x)\approx x^α$ as $x\to0$, where $α\geq 1$. Also, there are $r=O(1)$ budget constraints with edge costs chosen from the same distribution. We use Lagrangean duality to construct polynomial time algorithms that produce asymptotically optimal solutions. For the spanning tree problem, we allow $r>1$, but for the assignment problem we can only analyse the case $r=1$.
Horus: Using Sensor Fusion to Combine Infrastructure and On-board Sensing to Improve Autonomous Vehicle Safety
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Studies predict that demand for autonomous vehicles will increase tenfold between 2019 and 2026. However, recent high-profile accidents have significantly impacted consumer confidence in this technology. The cause for many of these accidents can be traced back to the inability of these vehicles to correctly sense the impending danger. In response, manufacturers have been improving the already extensive on-vehicle sensor packages to ensure that the system always has access to the data necessary to ensure safe navigation. However, these sensor packages only provide a view from the vehicle's perspective and, as a result, autonomous vehicles still require frequent human intervention to ensure safety. To address this issue, I developed a system, called Horus, that combines on-vehicle and infrastructure-based sensors to provide a more complete view of the environment, including areas not visible from the vehicle. I built a small-scale experimental testbed as a proof of concept. My measurements of the impact of sensor failures showed that even short outages (1 second) at slow speeds (25 km/hr scaled velocity) prevents vehicles that rely on on-vehicle sensors from navigating properly. My experiments also showed that Horus dramatically improves driving safety and that the sensor fusion algorithm selected plays a significant role in the quality of the navigation. With just a pair of infrastructure sensors, Horus could tolerate sensors that fail 40% of the time and still navigate safely. These results are a promising first step towards safer autonomous vehicles.
LaSOT: A High-quality Large-scale Single Object Tracking Benchmark
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Despite great recent advances in visual tracking, its further development, including both algorithm design and evaluation, is limited due to lack of dedicated large-scale benchmarks. To address this problem, we present LaSOT, a high-quality Large-scale Single Object Tracking benchmark. LaSOT contains a diverse selection of 85 object classes, and offers 1,550 totaling more than 3.87 million frames. Each video frame is carefully and manually annotated with a bounding box. This makes LaSOT, to our knowledge, the largest densely annotated tracking benchmark. Our goal in releasing LaSOT is to provide a dedicated high quality platform for both training and evaluation of trackers. The average video length of LaSOT is around 2,500 frames, where each video contains various challenge factors that exist in real world video footage,such as the targets disappearing and re-appearing. These longer video lengths allow for the assessment of long-term trackers. To take advantage of the close connection between visual appearance and natural language, we provide language specification for each video in LaSOT. We believe such additions will allow for future research to use linguistic features to improve tracking. Two protocols, full-overlap and one-shot, are designated for flexible assessment of trackers. We extensively evaluate 48 baseline trackers on LaSOT with in-depth analysis, and results reveal that there still exists significant room for improvement. The complete benchmark, tracking results as well as analysis are available at http://vision.cs.stonybrook.edu/~lasot/.
An optimal mode selection algorithm for scalable video coding
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2020
Year: 2020

Scalable video coding (SVC) is extended from its predecessor advanced video coding (AVC) because of its flexible transmission to all type of gadgets. However, SVC is more flexible and scalable than AVC, but it is more complex in determining the computations than AVC. The traditional full search method in the standard H.264 SVC consumes more encoding time for computation. This complexity in computation need to be reduced and many fast mode decision (FMD) algorithms were developed, but many fail to balance in all the three measures such as peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), encoding time and bit rate. In this paper, the proposed optimal mode selection algorithm based on the orientation of pixels achieves better time saving, good PSNR and coding efficiency. The proposed algorithm is compared with the standard H.264 JSVM reference software and found to be 57.44% time saving, 0.43 dB increments in PSNR and 0.23% compression in bit rate.
Empirical Strategy for Stretching Probability Distribution in Neural-network-based Regression
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

In regression analysis under artificial neural networks, the prediction performance depends on determining the appropriate weights between layers. As randomly initialized weights are updated during back-propagation using the gradient descent procedure under a given loss function, the loss function structure can affect the performance significantly. In this study, we considered the distribution error, i.e., the inconsistency of two distributions (those of the predicted values and label), as the prediction error, and proposed weighted empirical stretching (WES) as a novel loss function to increase the overlap area of the two distributions. The function depends on the distribution of a given label, thus, it is applicable to any distribution shape. Moreover, it contains a scaling hyperparameter such that the appropriate parameter value maximizes the common section of the two distributions. To test the function capability, we generated ideal distributed curves (unimodal, skewed unimodal, bimodal, and skewed bimodal) as the labels, and used the Fourier-extracted input data from the curves under a feedforward neural network. In general, WES outperformed loss functions in wide use, and the performance was robust to the various noise levels. The improved results in RMSE for the extreme domain (i.e., both tail regions of the distribution) are expected to be utilized for prediction of abnormal events in non-linear complex systems such as natural disaster and financial crisis.
Sequential Subspace Search for Functional Bayesian Optimization Incorporating Experimenter Intuition
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We propose an algorithm for Bayesian functional optimisation - that is, finding the function to optimise a process - guided by experimenter beliefs and intuitions regarding the expected characteristics (length-scale, smoothness, cyclicity etc.) of the optimal solution encoded into the covariance function of a Gaussian Process. Our algorithm generates a sequence of finite-dimensional random subspaces of functional space spanned by a set of draws from the experimenter's Gaussian Process. Standard Bayesian optimisation is applied on each subspace, and the best solution found used as a starting point (origin) for the next subspace. Using the concept of effective dimensionality, we analyse the convergence of our algorithm and provide a regret bound to show that our algorithm converges in sub-linear time provided a finite effective dimension exists. We test our algorithm in simulated and real-world experiments, namely blind function matching, finding the optimal precipitation-strengthening function for an aluminium alloy, and learning rate schedule optimisation for deep networks.
A Deep Learning-Based Autonomous RobotManipulator for Sorting Application
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Robot manipulation and grasping mechanisms have received considerable attention in the recent past, leading to the development of wide range of industrial applications. This paper proposes the development of an autonomous robotic grasping system for object sorting application. RGB-D data is used by the robot for performing object detection, pose estimation, trajectory generation, and object sorting tasks. The proposed approach can also handle grasping certain objects chosen by users. Trained convolutional neural networks are used to perform object detection and determine the corresponding point cloud cluster of the object to be grasped. From the selected point cloud data, a grasp generator algorithm outputs potential grasps. A grasp filter then scores these potential grasps, and the highest-scored grasp is chosen to execute on a real robot. A motion planner generates collision-free trajectories to execute the chosen grasp. The experiments on AUBO robotic manipulator show the potentials of the proposed approach in the context of autonomous object sorting with robust and fast sorting performance.
Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning via Cooperative Coevolutionary Negatively Correlated Search
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2020
Year: 2020

Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have been successfully applied to optimize the policies for Reinforcement Learning (RL) tasks due to their exploration ability. The recently proposed Negatively Correlated Search (NCS) provides a distinct parallel exploration search behavior and is expected to facilitate RL more effectively. Considering that the commonly adopted neural policies usually involves millions of parameters to be optimized, the direct application of NCS to RL may face a great challenge of the large-scale search space. To address this issue, this paper presents an NCS-friendly Cooperative Coevolution (CC) framework to scale-up NCS while largely preserving its parallel exploration search behavior. The issue of traditional CC that can deteriorate NCS is also discussed. Empirical studies on 10 popular Atari games show that the proposed method can significantly outperform three state-of-the-art deep RL methods with 50% less computational time by effectively exploring a 1.7 million-dimensional search space.
Wireless sensor networks simulators and testbeds
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have emerged as one of the most promising technologies for the current era. Researchers have studied them for several years ago, but more work still needed to be made since open opportunities to integrate new technologies are added to this field. One challenging task is WSN deployment. Yet, this is done by real deployment with testbeds platforms or by simulation tools when real deployment could be costly and time-consuming. In this paper, we review the implementation and evaluation process in WSNs. We then describe relevant testbeds and simulation tools, and their features. Lastly, we conduct an experimentation study using these testbeds and simulations to highlight their pro and cons. As a use case, we implement a localization protocol. This work gives clarity to future-work for better implementation in order to improve reliability, accuracy and time consumed.