OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Bridging the Gap between Semantics and Multimedia Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we give an overview of the semantic gap problem in multimedia and discuss how machine learning and symbolic AI can be combined to narrow this gap. We describe the gap in terms of a classical architecture for multimedia processing and discuss a structured approach to bridge it. This approach combines machine learning (for mapping signals to objects) and symbolic AI (for linking objects to meanings). Our main goal is to raise awareness and discuss the challenges involved in this structured approach to multimedia understanding, especially in the view of the latest developments in machine learning and symbolic AI.
Biology and Compositionality: Empirical Considerations for Emergent-Communication Protocols
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Significant advances have been made in artificial systems by using biological systems as a guide. However, there is often little interaction between computational models for emergent communication and biological models of the emergence of language. Many researchers in language origins and emergent communication take compositionality as their primary target for explaining how simple communication systems can become more like natural language. However, there is reason to think that compositionality is the wrong target on the biological side, and so too the wrong target on the machine-learning side. As such, the purpose of this paper is to explore this claim. This has theoretical implications for language origins research more generally, but the focus here will be the implications for research on emergent communication in computer science and machine learning---specifically regarding the types of programmes that might be expected to work and those which will not. I further suggest an alternative approach for future research which focuses on reflexivity, rather than compositionality, as a target for explaining how simple communication systems may become more like natural language. I end by providing some reference to the language origins literature that may be of some use to researchers in machine learning.
3D IC optimal layout design. A parallel and distributed topological approach
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2019
Year: 2019

The task of 3D ICs layout design involves the assembly of millions of components taking into account many different requirements and constraints such as topological, wiring or manufacturability ones. It is a NP-hard problem that requires new non-deterministic and heuristic algorithms. Considering the time complexity, the commonly applied Fiduccia-Mattheyses partitioning algorithm is superior to any other local search method. Nevertheless, it can often miss to reach a quasi-optimal solution in 3D spaces. The presented approach uses an original 3D layout graph partitioning heuristics implemented with use of the extremal optimization method. The goal is to minimize the total wire-length in the chip. In order to improve the time complexity a parallel and distributed Java implementation is applied. Inside one Java Virtual Machine separate optimization algorithms are executed by independent threads. The work may also be shared among different machines by means of The Java Remote Method Invocation system.
A Preliminary Study of Disentanglement With Insights on the Inadequacy of Metrics
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Disentangled encoding is an important step towards a better representation learning. However, despite the numerous efforts, there still is no clear winner that captures the independent features of the data in an unsupervised fashion. In this work we empirically evaluate the performance of six unsupervised disentanglement approaches on the mpi3d toy dataset curated and released for the NeurIPS 2019 Disentanglement Challenge. The methods investigated in this work are Beta-VAE, Factor-VAE, DIP-I-VAE, DIP-II-VAE, Info-VAE, and Beta-TCVAE. The capacities of all models were progressively increased throughout the training and the hyper-parameters were kept intact across experiments. The methods were evaluated based on five disentanglement metrics, namely, DCI, Factor-VAE, IRS, MIG, and SAP-Score. Within the limitations of this study, the Beta-TCVAE approach was found to outperform its alternatives with respect to the normalized sum of metrics. However, a qualitative study of the encoded latents reveal that there is not a consistent correlation between the reported metrics and the disentanglement potential of the model.
GOOL: A Generic Object-Oriented Language (extended version)
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2019
Year: 2019

We present GOOL, a Generic Object-Oriented Language. It demonstrates that a language, with the right abstractions, can capture the essence of object-oriented programs. We show how GOOL programs can be used to generate human-readable, documented and idiomatic source code in multiple languages. Moreover, in GOOL, it is possible to express common programming idioms and patterns, from simple library-level functions, to simple tasks (command-line arguments, list processing, printing), to more complex patterns, such as methods with a mixture of input, output and in-out parameters, and finally Design Patterns (such as Observer, State and Strategy). GOOL is an embedded DSL in Haskell that can generate code in Python, Java, C# and C++.
Single Sample Feature Importance: An Interpretable Algorithm for Low-Level Feature Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Have you ever wondered how your feature space is impacting the prediction of a specific sample in your dataset? In this paper, we introduce Single Sample Feature Importance (SSFI), which is an interpretable feature importance algorithm that allows for the identification of the most important features that contribute to the prediction of a single sample. When a dataset can be learned by a Random Forest classifier or regressor, SSFI shows how the Random Forest's prediction path can be utilized for low-level feature importance calculation. SSFI results in a relative ranking of features, highlighting those with the greatest impact on a data point's prediction. We demonstrate these results both numerically and visually on four different datasets.
A Scalable Framework for Solving Fractional Diffusion Equations
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

The study of fractional order differential operators is receiving renewed attention in many scientific fields. In order to accommodate researchers doing work in these areas, there is a need for highly scalable numerical methods for solving partial differential equations that involve fractional order operators on complex geometries. These operators have desirable special properties that also change the computational considerations in such a way that undermines traditional methods and makes certain other approaches more appealing. We have developed a scalable framework for solving fractional diffusion equations using one such method, specifically the method of eigenfunction expansion. In this paper, we will discuss the specific parallelization strategies used to efficiently compute the full set of eigenvalues and eigenvectors for a discretized Laplace eigenvalue problem and apply them to construct approximate solutions to our fractional order model problems. Additionally, we demonstrate the performance of the method on the Frontera computing cluster and the accuracy of the method on simple geometries using known exact solutions.
Approximating Permanent of Random Matrices with Vanishing Mean: Made Better and Simpler
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

The algorithm and complexity of approximating the permanent of a matrix is an extensively studied topic. Recently, its connection with quantum supremacy and more specifically BosonSampling draws special attention to the average-case approximation problem of the permanent of random matrices with zero or small mean value for each entry. Eldar and Mehraban (FOCS 2018) gave a quasi-polynomial time algorithm for random matrices with mean at least $1/\mathbf{\mathrm{polyloglog}} (n)$. In this paper, we improve the result by designing a deterministic quasi-polynomial time algorithm and a PTAS for random matrices with mean at least $1/\mathbf{\mathrm{polylog}}(n)$. We note that if it can be further improved to $1/\mathbf{\mathrm{poly}}(n)$, it will disprove a central conjecture for quantum supremacy. Our algorithm is also much simpler and has a better and flexible trade-off for running time. The running time can be quasi-polynomial in both $n$ and $1/ε$, or PTAS (polynomial in $n$ but exponential in $1/ε$), where $ε$ is the approximation parameter.
An Efficient Machine Learning-based Elderly Fall Detection Algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Falling is a commonly occurring mishap with elderly people, which may cause serious injuries. Thus, rapid fall detection is very important in order to mitigate the severe effects of fall among the elderly people. Many fall monitoring systems based on the accelerometer have been proposed for the fall detection. However, many of them mistakenly identify the daily life activities as fall or fall as daily life activity. To this aim, an efficient machine learning-based fall detection algorithm has been proposed in this paper. The proposed algorithm detects fall with efficient sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy as compared to the state-of-the-art techniques. A publicly available dataset with a very simple and computationally efficient set of features is used to accurately detect the fall incident. The proposed algorithm reports and accuracy of 99.98% with the Support Vector Machine(SVM) classifier.
Locality Aware Appearance Metric for Multi-Target Multi-Camera Tracking
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Multi-target multi-camera tracking (MTMCT) systems track targets across cameras. Due to the continuity of target trajectories, tracking systems usually restrict their data association within a local neighborhood. In single camera tracking, local neighborhood refers to consecutive frames; in multi-camera tracking, it refers to neighboring cameras that the target may appear successively. For similarity estimation, tracking systems often adopt appearance features learned from the re-identification (re-ID) perspective. Different from tracking, re-ID usually does not have access to the trajectory cues that can limit the search space to a local neighborhood. Due to its global matching property, the re-ID perspective requires to learn global appearance features. We argue that the mismatch between the local matching procedure in tracking and the global nature of re-ID appearance features may compromise MTMCT performance. To fit the local matching procedure in MTMCT, in this work, we introduce locality aware appearance metric (LAAM). Specifically, we design an intra-camera metric for single camera tracking, and an inter-camera metric for multi-camera tracking. Both metrics are trained with data pairs sampled from their corresponding local neighborhoods, as opposed to global sampling in the re-ID perspective. We show that the locally learned metrics can be successfully applied on top of several globally learned re-ID features. With the proposed method, we report new state-of-the-art performance on the DukeMTMC dataset, and a substantial improvement on the CityFlow dataset.
Benefitting from the Grey Literature in Software Engineering Research
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2019
Year: 2019

Researchers generally place the most trust in peer-reviewed, published information, such as journals and conference papers. By contrast, software engineering (SE) practitioners typically do not have the time, access or expertise to review and benefit from such publications. As a result, practitioners are more likely to turn to other sources of information that they trust, e.g., trade magazines, online blog-posts, survey results or technical reports, collectively referred to as Grey Literature (GL). Furthermore, practitioners also share their ideas and experiences as GL, which can serve as a valuable data source for research. While GL itself is not a new topic in SE, using, benefitting and synthesizing knowledge from the GL in SE is a contemporary topic in empirical SE research and we are seeing that researchers are increasingly benefitting from the knowledge available within GL. The goal of this chapter is to provide an overview to GL in SE, together with insights on how SE researchers can effectively use and benefit from the knowledge and evidence available in the vast amount of GL.
Residual Bi-Fusion Feature Pyramid Network for Accurate Single-shot Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

State-of-the-art (SoTA) models have improved the accuracy of object detection with a large margin via a FP (feature pyramid). FP is a top-down aggregation to collect semantically strong features to improve scale invariance in both two-stage and one-stage detectors. However, this top-down pathway cannot preserve accurate object positions due to the shift-effect of pooling. Thus, the advantage of FP to improve detection accuracy will disappear when more layers are used. The original FP lacks a bottom-up pathway to offset the lost information from lower-layer feature maps. It performs well in large-sized object detection but poor in small-sized object detection. A new structure "residual feature pyramid" is proposed in this paper. It is bidirectional to fuse both deep and shallow features towards more effective and robust detection for both small-sized and large-sized objects. Due to the "residual" nature, it can be easily trained and integrated to different backbones (even deeper or lighter) than other bi-directional methods. One important property of this residual FP is: accuracy improvement is still found even if more layers are adopted. Extensive experiments on VOC and MS COCO datasets showed the proposed method achieved the SoTA results for highly-accurate and efficient object detection..
Grapy-ML: Graph Pyramid Mutual Learning for Cross-dataset Human Parsing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Human parsing, or human body part semantic segmentation, has been an active research topic due to its wide potential applications. In this paper, we propose a novel GRAph PYramid Mutual Learning (Grapy-ML) method to address the cross-dataset human parsing problem, where the annotations are at different granularities. Starting from the prior knowledge of the human body hierarchical structure, we devise a graph pyramid module (GPM) by stacking three levels of graph structures from coarse granularity to fine granularity subsequently. At each level, GPM utilizes the self-attention mechanism to model the correlations between context nodes. Then, it adopts a top-down mechanism to progressively refine the hierarchical features through all the levels. GPM also enables efficient mutual learning. Specifically, the network weights of the first two levels are shared to exchange the learned coarse-granularity information across different datasets. By making use of the multi-granularity labels, Grapy-ML learns a more discriminative feature representation and achieves state-of-the-art performance, which is demonstrated by extensive experiments on the three popular benchmarks, e.g. CIHP dataset. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Charleshhy/Grapy-ML.
Vectorizing Quantum Turbulence Vortex-Core Lines for Real-Time Visualization
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2019
Year: 2019

Vectorizing vortex-core lines is crucial for high-quality visualization and analysis of turbulence. While several techniques exist in the literature, they can only be applied to classical fluids. Recently, quantum fluids with turbulence get more and more attention in physics. It is thus desirable that vortex-core lines can also be well extracted and visualized for quantum fluids. In this paper, we aim for this goal and developed an efficient vortex-core line vectorization method for quantum fluids, which enables real-time visualization of high-resolution quantum turbulence structure. Given the datasets by simulation, our technique is developed from the vortices identified by the circulation-based method. To vectorize the vortex-core lines enclosed by those vortices, we propose a novel graph-based data structure, with iterative graph reduction and density-guided local optimization, to locate more precisely sub-grid-scale vortex-core line samples, which are then vectorized by continuous curves. This not only represents vortex-core line structures continuously, but also naturally preserves complex topology, such as branching during reconnection. By vectorization, the memory consumption can be largely reduced by orders of magnitude, enabling real-time rendering performance. Different types of interactive visualizations are demonstrated to show the effectiveness of our technique, which could assist further research on quantum turbulence.
Findings of the 2016 WMT Shared Task on Cross-lingual Pronoun Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

We describe the design, the evaluation setup, and the results of the 2016 WMT shared task on cross-lingual pronoun prediction. This is a classification task in which participants are asked to provide predictions on what pronoun class label should replace a placeholder value in the target-language text, provided in lemmatised and PoS-tagged form. We provided four subtasks, for the English-French and English-German language pairs, in both directions. Eleven teams participated in the shared task; nine for the English-French subtask, five for French-English, nine for English-German, and six for German-English. Most of the submissions outperformed two strong language-model based baseline systems, with systems using deep recurrent neural networks outperforming those using other architectures for most language pairs.
Interactivity and Transparency in Medical Risk Assessment with Supersparse Linear Integer Models
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2019
Year: 2019

Scoring systems are linear classification models that only require users to add or subtract a few small numbers in order to make a prediction. They are used for example by clinicians to assess the risk of medical conditions. This work focuses on our approach to implement an intuitive user interface to allow a clinician to generate such scoring systems interactively, based on the RiskSLIM machine learning library. We describe the technical architecture which allows a medical professional who is not specialised in developing and applying machine learning algorithms to create competitive transparent supersparse linear integer models in an interactive way. We demonstrate our prototype machine learning system in the nephrology domain, where doctors can interactively sub-select datasets to compute models, explore scoring tables that correspond to the learned models, and check the quality of the transparent solutions from a medical perspective.
City2City: Translating Place Representations across Cities
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Large mobility datasets collected from various sources have allowed us to observe, analyze, predict and solve a wide range of important urban challenges. In particular, studies have generated place representations (or embeddings) from mobility patterns in a similar manner to word embeddings to better understand the functionality of different places within a city. However, studies have been limited to generating such representations of cities in an individual manner and has lacked an inter-city perspective, which has made it difficult to transfer the insights gained from the place representations across different cities. In this study, we attempt to bridge this research gap by treating \textit{cities} and \textit{languages} analogously. We apply methods developed for unsupervised machine language translation tasks to translate place representations across different cities. Real world mobility data collected from mobile phone users in 2 cities in Japan are used to test our place representation translation methods. Translated place representations are validated using landuse data, and results show that our methods were able to accurately translate place representations from one city to another.
Literature Review of Action Recognition in the Wild
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

The literature review presented below on Action Recognition in the wild is the in-depth study of Research Papers. Action Recognition problem in the untrimmed videos is a challenging task and most of the papers have tackled this problem using hand-crafted features with shallow learning techniques and sophisticated end-to-end deep learning techniques.
Automated Peer-to-peer Negotiation for Energy Contract Settlements in Residential Cooperatives
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2019
Year: 2019

This paper presents an automated peer-to-peer negotiation strategy for settling energy contracts among prosumers in a Residential Energy Cooperative considering heterogeneity prosumer preferences. The heterogeneity arises from prosumers' evaluation of energy contracts through multiple societal and environmental criteria and the prosumers' private preferences over those criteria. The prosumers engage in bilateral negotiations with peers to mutually agree on periodical energy contracts/loans consisting of the energy volume to be exchanged at that period and the return time of the exchanged energy. The negotiating prosumers navigate through a common negotiation domain consisting of potential energy contracts and evaluate those contracts from their valuations on the entailed criteria against a utility function that is robust against generation and demand uncertainty. From the repeated interactions, a prosumer gradually learns about the compatibility of its peers in reaching energy contracts that are closer to Nash solutions. Empirical evaluation on real demand, generation and storage profiles -- in multiple system scales -- illustrates that the proposed negotiation based strategy can increase the system efficiency (measured by utilitarian social welfare) and fairness (measured by Nash social welfare) over a baseline strategy and an individual flexibility control strategy representing the status quo strategy. We thus elicit system benefits from peer-to-peer flexibility exchange already without any central coordination and market operator, providing a simple yet flexible and effective paradigm that complements existing markets.
Android Botnet Detection using Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2019
Year: 2019

Today, Android devices are able to provide various services. They support applications for different purposes such as entertainment, business, health, education, and banking services. Because of the functionality and popularity of Android devices as well as the open-source policy of Android OS, they have become a suitable target for attackers. Android Botnet is one of the most dangerous malwares because an attacker called Botmaster can control that remotely to perform destructive attacks. A number of researchers have used different well-known Machine Learning (ML) methods to recognize Android Botnets from benign applications. However, these conventional methods are not able to detect new sophisticated Android Botnets. In this paper, we propose a novel method based on Android permissions and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to classify Botnets and benign Android applications. Being the first developed method that uses CNNs for this aim, we also proposed a novel method to represent each application as an image which is constructed based on the co-occurrence of used permissions in that application. The proposed CNN is a binary classifier that is trained using these images. Evaluating the proposed method on 5450 Android applications consist of Botnet and benign samples, the obtained results show the accuracy of 97.2% and recall of 96% which is a promising result just using Android permissions.