OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Streaming convolutional neural networks for end-to-end learning with multi-megapixel images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Due to memory constraints on current hardware, most convolution neural networks (CNN) are trained on sub-megapixel images. For example, most popular datasets in computer vision contain images much less than a megapixel in size (0.09MP for ImageNet and 0.001MP for CIFAR-10). In some domains such as medical imaging, multi-megapixel images are needed to identify the presence of disease accurately. We propose a novel method to directly train convolutional neural networks using any input image size end-to-end. This method exploits the locality of most operations in modern convolutional neural networks by performing the forward and backward pass on smaller tiles of the image. In this work, we show a proof of concept using images of up to 66-megapixels (8192x8192), saving approximately 50GB of memory per image. Using two public challenge datasets, we demonstrate that CNNs can learn to extract relevant information from these large images and benefit from increasing resolution. We improved the area under the receiver-operating characteristic curve from 0.580 (4MP) to 0.706 (66MP) for metastasis detection in breast cancer (CAMELYON17). We also obtained a Spearman correlation metric approaching state-of-the-art performance on the TUPAC16 dataset, from 0.485 (1MP) to 0.570 (16MP). Code to reproduce a subset of the experiments is available at https://github.com/DIAGNijmegen/StreamingCNN.
Hardware-aware Pruning of DNNs using LFSR-Generated Pseudo-Random Indices
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been emerged as the state-of-the-art algorithms in broad range of applications. To reduce the memory foot-print of DNNs, in particular for embedded applications, sparsification techniques have been proposed. Unfortunately, these techniques come with a large hardware overhead. In this paper, we present a hardware-aware pruning method where the locations of non-zero weights are derived in real-time from a Linear Feedback Shift Registers (LFSRs). Using the proposed method, we demonstrate a total saving of energy and area up to 63.96% and 64.23% for VGG-16 network on down-sampled ImageNet, respectively for iso-compression-rate and iso-accuracy.
Tool Substitution with Shape and Material Reasoning Using Dual Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

This paper explores the problem of tool substitution, namely, identifying substitute tools for performing a task from a given set of candidate tools. We introduce a novel approach to tool substitution, that unlike prior work in the area, combines both shape and material reasoning to effectively identify substitute tools. Our approach combines the use of visual and spectral reasoning using dual neural networks. It takes as input, the desired action to be performed, and outputs a ranking of the available candidate tools based on their suitability for performing the action. Our results on a test set of 30 real-world objects show that our approach is able to effectively match shape and material similarities, with improved tool substitution performance when combining both.
Shorter Distances between Papers over Time are Due to More Cross-Field References and Increased Citation Rate to Higher Impact Papers
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2019
Year: 2019

The exponential increase in the number of scientific publications raises the question of whether the sciences are expanding into a fractured structure, making cross-field communication difficult. On the other hand, scientists may be motivated to learn extensively across fields to enhance their innovative capacity, and this may offset the negative effects of fragmentation. Through an investigation of the distances within and clustering of cross-sectional citation networks, this study presents evidence that fields of science become more integrated over time. The average citation distance between papers published in the same year decreased from approximately 5.33 to 3.18 steps between 1950 and 2018. This observation is attributed to the growth of cross-field communication throughout the entire period as well as the growing importance of high impact papers to bridge networks in the same year. Three empirical findings support this conclusion. First, distances decreased between almost all disciplines throughout the time period. Second, inequality in the number of citations received by papers increased, and as a consequence the shortest paths in the network depend more on high impact papers later in the period. Third, the dispersion of connections between fields increased continually. Moreover, these changes did not entail a lower level of clustering of citations. Both within- and cross-field citations show a similar rate of slowly growing clustering values in all years. The latter findings suggest that domain spanning scholarly communication is partly enabled by new fields that connect disciplines.
A Framework of Transferring Structures Across Large-scale Information Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2019
Year: 2019

The existing domain-specific methods for mining information networks in machine learning aims to represent the nodes of an information network into a vector format. However, the real-world large-scale information network cannot make well network representations by one network. When the information of the network structure transferred from one network to another network, the performance of network representation might decrease sharply. To achieve these ends, we propose a novel framework to transfer useful information across relational large-scale information networks (FTLSIN). The framework consists of a 2-layer random walks to measure the relations between two networks and predict links across them. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.
Prediction of Bottleneck Points for Manipulation Planning in Cluttered Environment using a 3D Convolutional Neural Network
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

Latest research in industrial robotics is aimed at making human robot collaboration possible seamlessly. For this purpose, industrial robots are expected to work on the fly in unstructured and cluttered environments and hence the subject of perception driven motion planning plays a vital role. Sampling based motion planners are proven to be the most effective for such high dimensional planning problems with real time constraints. Unluckily random stochastic samplers suffer from the phenomenon of 'narrow passages' or bottleneck regions which need targeted sampling to improve their convergence rate. Also identifying these bottleneck regions in a diverse set of planning problems is a challenge. In this paper an attempt has been made to address these two problems by designing an intelligent 'bottleneck guided' heuristic for a Rapidly Exploring Random Tree Star (RRT*) planner which is based on relevant context extracted from the planning scenario using a 3D Convolutional Neural Network and it is also proven that the proposed technique generalises to unseen problem instances. This paper benchmarks the technique (bottleneck guided RRT*) against a 10% Goal biased RRT star planner, shows significant improvement in planning time and memory requirement and uses ABB 1410 industrial manipulator as a platform for implantation and validation of the results.
SlingDrone: Mixed Reality System for Pointing and Interaction Using a Single Drone
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

We propose SlingDrone, a novel Mixed Reality interaction paradigm that utilizes a micro-quadrotor as both pointing controller and interactive robot with a slingshot motion type. The drone attempts to hover at a given position while the human pulls it in desired direction using a hand grip and a leash. Based on the displacement, a virtual trajectory is defined. To allow for intuitive and simple control, we use virtual reality (VR) technology to trace the path of the drone based on the displacement input. The user receives force feedback propagated through the leash. Force feedback from SlingDrone coupled with visualized trajectory in VR creates an intuitive and user friendly pointing device. When the drone is released, it follows the trajectory that was shown in VR. Onboard payload (e.g. magnetic gripper) can perform various scenarios for real interaction with the surroundings, e.g. manipulation or sensing. Unlike HTC Vive controller, SlingDrone does not require handheld devices, thus it can be used as a standalone pointing technology in VR.
Scalable BFT Consensus Mechanism Through Aggregated Signature Gossip
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we present a new BFT consensus mechanism which enables thousands of nodes to participate in the consensus process, and supports very high transaction throughput. This is achieved via an aggregated signature gossip protocol which can significantly reduce the messaging complexity and thus allows a large number of nodes to reach consensus quickly. The proposed aggregated signature gossip protocol leverages a non-interactive leaderless BLS signature aggregation scheme. We have proven the correctness of the protocol, and analyzed its efficiency. In our analysis, each node only needs to send and receive O(logn) messages to reach agreement, where each message just contains a couple kilobytes of data.
Exact Amplitude Distributions of Sums of Stochastic Sinusoidals and their Application in Bit Error Rate Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

We consider a model applicable in many communication systems where the sum of n stochastic sinusoidal signals of the same frequency, but with random amplitudes as well as phase angles is present. The exact probability distribution of the resulting signal's amplitude is of particular interest in many important applications, however the general problem has remained open. We derive new general formulae for the resultant amplitude's distribution, in terms of any given general joint density of the random variables involved. New exact probability densities of cases of interest follow from the general formulae which are applied to the problem of the exact evaluation of the bit error rate performance in narrowband multipath fading channels that consist of a small number of jointly dependent resolvable multipath components. The numerical results are compared with those of the currently popular method of Gaussian approximation. These are consistent with simulations, and show significant increase in accuracy particularly for small number of components.
Recognizing Facial Expressions of Occluded Faces using Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we present an approach based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for facial expression recognition in a difficult setting with severe occlusions. More specifically, our task is to recognize the facial expression of a person wearing a virtual reality (VR) headset which essentially occludes the upper part of the face. In order to accurately train neural networks for this setting, in which faces are severely occluded, we modify the training examples by intentionally occluding the upper half of the face. This forces the neural networks to focus on the lower part of the face and to obtain better accuracy rates than models trained on the entire faces. Our empirical results on two benchmark data sets, FER+ and AffectNet, show that our CNN models' predictions on lower-half faces are up to 13% higher than the baseline CNN models trained on entire faces, proving their suitability for the VR setting. Furthermore, our models' predictions on lower-half faces are no more than 10% under the baseline models' predictions on full faces, proving that there are enough clues in the lower part of the face to accurately predict facial expressions.
Challenging On Car Racing Problem from OpenAI gym
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2019
Year: 2019

This project challenges the car racing problem from OpenAI gym environment. The problem is very challenging since it requires computer to finish the continuous control task by learning from pixels. To tackle this challenging problem, we explored two approaches including evolutionary algorithm based genetic multi-layer perceptron and double deep Q-learning network. The result shows that the genetic multi-layer perceptron can converge fast but when training many episodes, double deep Q-learning can get better score. We analyze the result and draw a conclusion that for limited hardware resources, using genetic multi-layer perceptron sometimes can be more efficient.
Network Classifiers With Output Smoothing
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2019
Year: 2019

This work introduces two strategies for training network classifiers with heterogeneous agents. One strategy promotes global smoothing over the graph and a second strategy promotes local smoothing over neighbourhoods. It is assumed that the feature sizes can vary from one agent to another, with some agents observing insufficient attributes to be able to make reliable decisions on their own. As a result, cooperation with neighbours is necessary. However, due to the fact that the feature dimensions are different across the agents, their classifier dimensions will also be different. This means that cooperation cannot rely on combining the classifier parameters. We instead propose smoothing the outputs of the classifiers, which are the predicted labels. By doing so, the dynamics that describes the evolution of the network classifier becomes more challenging than usual because the classifier parameters end up appearing as part of the regularization term as well. We illustrate performance by means of computer simulations.
Comparing Efficiency of Expert Data Aggregation Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2019
Year: 2019

Expert estimation of objects takes place when there are no benchmark values of object weights, but these weights still have to be defined. That is why it is problematic to define the efficiency of expert estimation methods. We propose to define efficiency of such methods based on stability of their results under perturbations of input data. We compare two modifications of combinatorial method of expert data aggregation (spanning tree enumeration). Using the example of these two methods, we illustrate two approaches to efficiency evaluation. The first approach is based on usage of real data, obtained through estimation of a set of model objects by a group of experts. The second approach is based on simulation of the whole expert examination cycle (including expert estimates). During evaluation of efficiency of the two listed modifications of combinatorial expert data aggregation method the simulation-based approach proved more robust and credible. Our experimental study confirms that if weights of spanning trees are taken into consideration, the results of combinatorial data aggregation method become more stable. So, weighted spanning tree enumeration method has an advantage over non-weighted method (and, consequently, over logarithmic least squares and row geometric mean methods).
Recursive Filter for Space-Variant Variance Reduction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

We propose a method to reduce non-uniform sample variance to a predetermined target level. The proposed space-variant filter can equalize variance of the non-stationary signal, or vary filtering strength based on image features, such as edges, etc., as shown by applications in this work. This approach computes variance reduction ratio at each point of the image, based on the given target variance. Then, a space-variant filter with matching variance reduction power is applied. A mathematical framework of atomic kernels is developed to facilitate stable and fast computation of the filter bank kernels. Recursive formulation allows using small kernel size, which makes the space-variant filter more suitable for fast parallel implementation. Despite the small kernel size, the recursive filter possesses strong variance reduction power. Filter accuracy is measured by the variance reduction against the target variance; testing demonstrated high accuracy of variance reduction of the recursive filter compared to the fixed-size filter. The proposed filter was applied to adaptive filtering in image reconstruction and edge-preserving denoising.
Efficient Planning under Partial Observability with Unnormalized Q Functions and Spectral Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2019
Year: 2019

Learning and planning in partially-observable domains is one of the most difficult problems in reinforcement learning. Traditional methods consider these two problems as independent, resulting in a classical two-stage paradigm: first learn the environment dynamics and then plan accordingly. This approach, however, disconnects the two problems and can consequently lead to algorithms that are sample inefficient and time consuming. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm that combines learning and planning together. Our algorithm is closely related to the spectral learning algorithm for predicitive state representations and offers appealing theoretical guarantees and time complexity. We empirically show on two domains that our approach is more sample and time efficient compared to classical methods.
Fully-Dynamic Space-Efficient Dictionaries and Filters with Constant Number of Memory Accesses
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

A fully-dynamic dictionary is a data structure for maintaining sets that supports insertions, deletions and membership queries. A filter approximates membership queries with a one-sided error. We present two designs: 1. The first space-efficient fully-dynamic dictionary that maintains both sets and random multisets and supports queries, insertions, and deletions with a constant number of memory accesses in the worst case with high probability. The comparable dictionary of Arbitman, Naor, and Segev [FOCS 2010] works only for sets. 2. By a reduction from our dictionary for random multisets, we obtain a space-efficient fully-dynamic filter that supports queries, insertions, and deletions with a constant number of memory accesses in the worst case with high probability (as long as the false positive probability is $2^{-O(w)}$, where $w$ denotes the word length). This is the first in-memory space-efficient fully-dynamic filter design that provably achieves these properties. We also present an application of the techniques used to design our dictionary to the static Retrieval Problem.
Incentivized Exploration for Multi-Armed Bandits under Reward Drift
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

We study incentivized exploration for the multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem where the players receive compensation for exploring arms other than the greedy choice and may provide biased feedback on reward. We seek to understand the impact of this drifted reward feedback by analyzing the performance of three instantiations of the incentivized MAB algorithm: UCB, $\varepsilon$-Greedy, and Thompson Sampling. Our results show that they all achieve $\mathcal{O}(\log T)$ regret and compensation under the drifted reward, and are therefore effective in incentivizing exploration. Numerical examples are provided to complement the theoretical analysis.
All It Takes is 20 Questions!: A Knowledge Graph Based Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2019
Year: 2019

20 Questions (20Q) is a two-player game. One player is the answerer, and the other is a questioner. The answerer chooses an entity from a specified domain and does not reveal this to the other player. The questioner can ask at most 20 questions to the answerer to guess the entity. The answerer can reply to the questions asked by saying yes/no/maybe. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on the knowledge graph for designing the 20Q game on Bollywood movies. The system assumes the role of the questioner and asks questions to predict the movie thought by the answerer. It uses a probabilistic learning model for template-based question generation and answers prediction. A dataset of interrelated entities is represented as a weighted knowledge graph, which updates as the game progresses by asking questions. An evolutionary approach helps the model to gain a better understanding of user choices and predicts the answer in fewer questions over time. Experimental results show that our model was able to predict the correct movie in less than 10 questions for more than half of the times the game was played. This kind of model can be used to design applications that can detect diseases by asking questions based on symptoms, improving recommendation systems, etc.
Expression Analysis Based on Face Regions in Read-world Conditions
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Facial emotion recognition is an essential and important aspect of the field of human-machine interaction. Past research on facial emotion recognition focuses on the laboratory environment. However, it faces many challenges in real-world conditions, i.e., illumination changes, large pose variations and partial or full occlusions. Those challenges lead to different face areas with different degrees of sharpness and completeness. Inspired by this fact, we focus on the authenticity of predictions generated by different <emotion, region> pairs. For example, if only the mouth areas are available and the emotion classifier predicts happiness, then there is a question of how to judge the authenticity of predictions. This problem can be converted into the contribution of different face areas to different emotions. In this paper, we divide the whole face into six areas: nose areas, mouth areas, eyes areas, nose to mouth areas, nose to eyes areas and mouth to eyes areas. To obtain more convincing results, our experiments are conducted on three different databases: facial expression recognition + ( FER+), real-world affective faces database (RAF-DB) and expression in-the-wild (ExpW) dataset. Through analysis of the classification accuracy, the confusion matrix and the class activation map (CAM), we can establish convincing results. To sum up, the contributions of this paper lie in two areas: 1) We visualize concerned areas of human faces in emotion recognition; 2) We analyze the contribution of different face areas to different emotions in real-world conditions through experimental analysis. Our findings can be combined with findings in psychology to promote the understanding of emotional expressions.
Fast Glare Detection in Document Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Glare is a phenomenon that occurs when the scene has a reflection of a light source or has one in it. This luminescence can hide useful information from the image, making text recognition virtually impossible. In this paper, we propose an approach to detect glare in images taken by users via mobile devices. Our method divides the document into blocks and collects luminance features from the original image and black-white strokes histograms of the binarized image. Finally, glare is detected using a convolutional neural network on the aforementioned histograms and luminance features. The network consists of several feature extraction blocks, one for each type of input, and the detection block, which calculates the resulting glare heatmap based on the output of the extraction part. The proposed solution detects glare with high recall and f-score.