OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Approximation algorithms for connectivity augmentation problems
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2020
Year: 2020

In Connectivity Augmentation problems we are given a graph $H=(V,E_H)$ and an edge set $E$ on $V$, and seek a min-size edge set $J \subseteq E$ such that $H \cup J$ has larger edge/node connectivity than $H$. In the Edge-Connectivity Augmentation problem we need to increase the edge-connectivity by $1$. In the Block-Tree Augmentation problem $H$ is connected and $H \cup S$ should be $2$-connected. In Leaf-to-Leaf Connectivity Augmentation problems every edge in $E$ connects minimal deficient sets. For this version we give a simple combinatorial approximation algorithm with ratio $5/3$, improving the previous $1.91$ approximation that applies for the general case. We also show by a simple proof that if the Steiner Tree problem admits approximation ratio $α$ then the general version admits approximation ratio $1+\ln(4-x)+ε$, where $x$ is the solution to the equation $1+\ln(4-x)=α+(α-1)x$. For the currently best value of $α=\ln 4+ε$ this gives ratio $1.942$. This is slightly worse than the best ratio $1.91$, but has the advantage of using Steiner Tree approximation as a "black box", giving ratio $< 1.9$ if ratio $α\leq 1.35$ can be achieved. In the Element Connectivity Augmentation problem we are given a graph $G=(V,E)$, $S \subseteq V$, and connectivity requirements $\{r(u,v):u,v \in S\}$. The goal is to find a min-size set $J$ of new edges on $S$ such that for all $u,v \in S$ the graph $G \cup J$ contains $r(u,v)$ $uv$-paths such that no two of them have an edge or a node in $V \setminus S$ in common. The problem is NP-hard even when $\max_{u,v \in S} r(u,v)=2$. We obtain approximation ratio $3/2$, improving the previous ratio $7/4$.
Disentangled Neural Architecture Search
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Neural architecture search has shown its great potential in various areas recently. However, existing methods rely heavily on a black-box controller to search architectures, which suffers from the serious problem of lacking interpretability. In this paper, we propose disentangled neural architecture search (DNAS) which disentangles the hidden representation of the controller into semantically meaningful concepts, making the neural architecture search process interpretable. Based on systematical study, we discover the correlation between network architecture and its performance, and propose a dense-sampling strategy to conduct a targeted search in promising regions that may generate well-performing architectures. We show that: 1) DNAS successfully disentangles the architecture representations, including operation selection, skip connections, and number of layers. 2) Benefiting from interpretability, DNAS can find excellent architectures under different FLOPS restrictions flexibly. 3) Dense-sampling leads to neural architecture search with higher efficiency and better performance. On the NASBench-101 dataset, DNAS achieves state-of-the-art performance of 94.21% using less than 1/13 computational cost of baseline methods. On ImageNet dataset, DNAS discovers the competitive architectures that achieves 22.7% test error. our method provides a new perspective of understanding neural architecture search.
Embedding and generation of indoor climbing routes with variational autoencoder
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Recent increase in popularity of indoor climbing allows possible applications of deep learning algorthms to classify and generate climbing routes. In this work, we employ a variational autoencoder to climbing routes in a standardized training apparatus MoonBoard, a well-known training tool within the climbing community. By sampling the encoded latent space, it is observed that the algorithm can generate high quality climbing routes. 22 generated problems are uploaded to the Moonboard app for user review. This algorithm could serve as a first step to facilitate indoor climbing route setting.
Virtual Proximity Citation (VCP): A Supervised Deep Learning Method to Relate Uncited Papers On Grounds of Citation Proximity
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2020
Year: 2020

Citation based approaches have seen good progress for recommending research papers using citations in the paper. Citation proximity analysis which uses the in-text citation proximity to find relatedness between two research papers is better than co-citation analysis and bibliographic analysis. However, one common problem which exists in each approach is that paper should be well cited. If documents are not cited properly or not cited at all, then using these approaches will not be helpful. To overcome the problem, this paper discusses the approach Virtual Citation Proximity (VCP) which uses Siamese Neural Network along with the notion of citation proximity analysis and content-based filtering. To train this model, the actual distance between the two citations in a document is used as ground truth, this distance is the word count between the two citations. VCP is trained on Wikipedia articles for which the actual word count is available which is used to calculate the similarity between the documents. This can be used to calculate relatedness between two documents in a way they would have been cited in the proximity even if the documents are uncited. This approach has shown a great improvement in predicting proximity with basic neural networks over the approach which uses the Average Citation Proximity index value as the ground truth. This can be improved by using a complex neural network and proper hyper tuning of parameters.
Cuid: A new study of perceived image quality and its subjective assessment
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Research on image quality assessment (IQA) remains limited mainly due to our incomplete knowledge about human visual perception. Existing IQA algorithms have been designed or trained with insufficient subjective data with a small degree of stimulus variability. This has led to challenges for those algorithms to handle complexity and diversity of real-world digital content. Perceptual evidence from human subjects serves as a grounding for the development of advanced IQA algorithms. It is thus critical to acquire reliable subjective data with controlled perception experiments that faithfully reflect human behavioural responses to distortions in visual signals. In this paper, we present a new study of image quality perception where subjective ratings were collected in a controlled lab environment. We investigate how quality perception is affected by a combination of different categories of images and different types and levels of distortions. The database will be made publicly available to facilitate calibration and validation of IQA algorithms.
RS-MetaNet: Deep meta metric learning for few-shot remote sensing scene classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Training a modern deep neural network on massive labeled samples is the main paradigm in solving the scene classification problem for remote sensing, but learning from only a few data points remains a challenge. Existing methods for few-shot remote sensing scene classification are performed in a sample-level manner, resulting in easy overfitting of learned features to individual samples and inadequate generalization of learned category segmentation surfaces. To solve this problem, learning should be organized at the task level rather than the sample level. Learning on tasks sampled from a task family can help tune learning algorithms to perform well on new tasks sampled in that family. Therefore, we propose a simple but effective method, called RS-MetaNet, to resolve the issues related to few-shot remote sensing scene classification in the real world. On the one hand, RS-MetaNet raises the level of learning from the sample to the task by organizing training in a meta way, and it learns to learn a metric space that can well classify remote sensing scenes from a series of tasks. We also propose a new loss function, called Balance Loss, which maximizes the generalization ability of the model to new samples by maximizing the distance between different categories, providing the scenes in different categories with better linear segmentation planes while ensuring model fit. The experimental results on three open and challenging remote sensing datasets, UCMerced\_LandUse, NWPU-RESISC45, and Aerial Image Data, demonstrate that our proposed RS-MetaNet method achieves state-of-the-art results in cases where there are only 1-20 labeled samples.
A Study on Lip Localization Techniques used for Lip reading from a Video
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper some of the different techniques used to localize the lips from the face are discussed and compared along with its processing steps. Lip localization is the basic step needed to read the lips for extracting visual information from the video input. The techniques could be applied on asymmetric lips and also on the mouth with visible teeth, tongue & mouth with moustache. In the process of Lip reading the following steps are generally used. They are, initially locating lips in the first frame of the video input, then tracking the lips in the following frames using the resulting pixel points of initial step and at last converting the tracked lip model to its corresponding matched letter to give the visual information. A new proposal is also initiated from the discussed techniques. The lip reading is useful in Automatic Speech Recognition when the audio is absent or present low with or without noise in the communication systems. Human Computer communication also will require speech recognition.
EIS -- a family of activation functions combining Exponential, ISRU, and Softplus
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Activation functions play a pivotal role in the function learning using neural networks. The non-linearity in the learned function is achieved by repeated use of the activation function. Over the years, numerous activation functions have been proposed to improve accuracy in several tasks. Basic functions like ReLU, Sigmoid, Tanh, or Softplus have been favorite among the deep learning community because of their simplicity. In recent years, several novel activation functions arising from these basic functions have been proposed, which have improved accuracy in some challenging datasets. We propose a five hyper-parameters family of activation functions, namely EIS, defined as, \[ \frac{x(\ln(1+e^x))^α}{\sqrt{β+γx^2}+δe^{-θx}}. \] We show examples of activation functions from the EIS family which outperform widely used activation functions on some well known datasets and models. For example, $\frac{x\ln(1+e^x)}{x+1.16e^{-x}}$ beats ReLU by 0.89\% in DenseNet-169, 0.24\% in Inception V3 in CIFAR100 dataset while 1.13\% in Inception V3, 0.13\% in DenseNet-169, 0.94\% in SimpleNet model in CIFAR10 dataset. Also, $\frac{x\ln(1+e^x)}{\sqrt{1+x^2}}$ beats ReLU by 1.68\% in DenseNet-169, 0.30\% in Inception V3 in CIFAR100 dataset while 1.0\% in Inception V3, 0.15\% in DenseNet-169, 1.13\% in SimpleNet model in CIFAR10 dataset.
Afro-MNIST: Synthetic generation of MNIST-style datasets for low-resource languages
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

We present Afro-MNIST, a set of synthetic MNIST-style datasets for four orthographies used in Afro-Asiatic and Niger-Congo languages: Ge`ez (Ethiopic), Vai, Osmanya, and N'Ko. These datasets serve as "drop-in" replacements for MNIST. We also describe and open-source a method for synthetic MNIST-style dataset generation from single examples of each digit. These datasets can be found at https://github.com/Daniel-Wu/AfroMNIST. We hope that MNIST-style datasets will be developed for other numeral systems, and that these datasets vitalize machine learning education in underrepresented nations in the research community.
Visual Pivoting for (Unsupervised) Entity Alignment
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

This work studies the use of visual semantic representations to align entities in heterogeneous knowledge graphs (KGs). Images are natural components of many existing KGs. By combining visual knowledge with other auxiliary information, we show that the proposed new approach, EVA, creates a holistic entity representation that provides strong signals for cross-graph entity alignment. Besides, previous entity alignment methods require human labelled seed alignment, restricting availability. EVA provides a completely unsupervised solution by leveraging the visual similarity of entities to create an initial seed dictionary (visual pivots). Experiments on benchmark data sets DBP15k and DWY15k show that EVA offers state-of-the-art performance on both monolingual and cross-lingual entity alignment tasks. Furthermore, we discover that images are particularly useful to align long-tail KG entities, which inherently lack the structural contexts necessary for capturing the correspondences.
Learning Knowledge Bases with Parameters for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Task-oriented dialogue systems are either modularized with separate dialogue state tracking (DST) and management steps or end-to-end trainable. In either case, the knowledge base (KB) plays an essential role in fulfilling user requests. Modularized systems rely on DST to interact with the KB, which is expensive in terms of annotation and inference time. End-to-end systems use the KB directly as input, but they cannot scale when the KB is larger than a few hundred entries. In this paper, we propose a method to embed the KB, of any size, directly into the model parameters. The resulting model does not require any DST or template responses, nor the KB as input, and it can dynamically update its KB via fine-tuning. We evaluate our solution in five task-oriented dialogue datasets with small, medium, and large KB size. Our experiments show that end-to-end models can effectively embed knowledge bases in their parameters and achieve competitive performance in all evaluated datasets.
Montage: A General System for Buffered Durably Linearizable Data Structures
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

The recent emergence of fast, dense, nonvolatile main memory suggests that certain long-lived data might remain in its natural pointer-rich format across program runs and hardware reboots. Operations on such data must be instrumented with explicit write-back and fence instructions to ensure consistency in the wake of a crash. Techniques to minimize the cost of this instrumentation are an active topic of research. We present what we believe to be the first general-purpose approach to building buffered durably linearizable persistent data structures, and a system, Montage, to support that approach. Montage is built on top of the Ralloc nonblocking persistent allocator. It employs a slow-ticking epoch clock, and ensures that no operation appears to span an epoch boundary. It also arranges to persist only that data minimally required to reconstruct the structure after a crash. If a crash occurs in epoch $e$, all work performed in epochs $e$ and $e-1$ is lost, but work from prior epochs is preserved. We describe the implementation of Montage, argue its correctness, and report unprecedented throughput for persistent queues, sets/mappings, and general graphs.
Semi-Supervised Node Classification by Graph Convolutional Networks and Extracted Side Information
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

The nodes of a graph existing in a cluster are more likely to connect to each other than with other nodes in the graph. Then revealing some information about some nodes, the structure of the graph (graph edges) provides this opportunity to know more information about other nodes. From this perspective, this paper revisits the node classification task in a semi-supervised scenario by graph convolutional networks (GCNs). The goal is to benefit from the flow of information that circulates around the revealed node labels. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, this paper provides a method for extracting side information from a graph realization. Then a new GCN architecture is presented that combines the output of traditional GCN and the extracted side information. Another contribution of this paper is relevant to non-graph observations (independent side information) that exists beside a graph realization in many applications. Indeed, the extracted side information can be replaced by a sequence of side information that is independent of the graph structure. For both cases, the experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed model achieves a higher prediction accuracy in comparison to the existing state-of-the-art methods for the node classification task.
MetaMix: Improved Meta-Learning with Interpolation-based Consistency Regularization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) and its variants are popular few-shot classification methods. They train an initializer across a variety of sampled learning tasks (also known as episodes) such that the initialized model can adapt quickly to new tasks. However, current MAML-based algorithms have limitations in forming generalizable decision boundaries. In this paper, we propose an approach called MetaMix. It generates virtual feature-target pairs within each episode to regularize the backbone models. MetaMix can be integrated with any of the MAML-based algorithms and learn the decision boundaries generalizing better to new tasks. Experiments on the mini-ImageNet, CUB, and FC100 datasets show that MetaMix improves the performance of MAML-based algorithms and achieves state-of-the-art result when integrated with Meta-Transfer Learning.
SwiftFace: Real-Time Face Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Computer vision is a field of artificial intelligence that trains computers to interpret the visual world in a way similar to that of humans. Due to the rapid advancements in technology and the increasing availability of sufficiently large training datasets, the topics within computer vision have experienced a steep growth in the last decade. Among them, one of the most promising fields is face detection. Being used daily in a wide variety of fields; from mobile apps and augmented reality for entertainment purposes, to social studies and security cameras; designing high-performance models for face detection is crucial. On top of that, with the aforementioned growth in face detection technologies, precision and accuracy are no longer the only relevant factors: for real-time face detection, speed of detection is essential. SwiftFace is a novel deep learning model created solely to be a fast face detection model. By focusing only on detecting faces, SwiftFace performs 30% faster than current state-of-the-art face detection models. Code available at https://github.com/leo7r/swiftface
Neural Retrieval for Question Answering with Cross-Attention Supervised Data Augmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Neural models that independently project questions and answers into a shared embedding space allow for efficient continuous space retrieval from large corpora. Independently computing embeddings for questions and answers results in late fusion of information related to matching questions to their answers. While critical for efficient retrieval, late fusion underperforms models that make use of early fusion (e.g., a BERT based classifier with cross-attention between question-answer pairs). We present a supervised data mining method using an accurate early fusion model to improve the training of an efficient late fusion retrieval model. We first train an accurate classification model with cross-attention between questions and answers. The accurate cross-attention model is then used to annotate additional passages in order to generate weighted training examples for a neural retrieval model. The resulting retrieval model with additional data significantly outperforms retrieval models directly trained with gold annotations on Precision at $N$ (P@N) and Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR).
An Image Processing Pipeline for Automated Packaging Structure Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Dispatching and receiving logistics goods, as well as transportation itself, involve a high amount of manual efforts. The transported goods, including their packaging and labeling, need to be double-checked, verified or recognized at many supply chain network points. These processes hold automation potentials, which we aim to exploit using computer vision techniques. More precisely, we propose a cognitive system for the fully automated recognition of packaging structures for standardized logistics shipments based on single RGB images. Our contribution contains descriptions of a suitable system design and its evaluation on relevant real-world data. Further, we discuss our algorithmic choices.
EEMC: Embedding Enhanced Multi-tag Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

The recently occurred representation learning make an attractive performance in NLP and complex network, it is becoming a fundamental technology in machine learning and data mining. How to use representation learning to improve the performance of classifiers is a very significance research direction. We using representation learning technology to map raw data(node of graph) to a low-dimensional feature space. In this space, each raw data obtained a lower dimensional vector representation, we do some simple linear operations for those vectors to produce some virtual data, using those vectors and virtual data to training multi-tag classifier. After that we measured the performance of classifier by F1 score(Macro% F1 and Micro% F1). Our method make Macro F1 rise from 28 % - 450% and make average F1 score rise from 12 % - 224%. By contrast, we trained the classifier directly with the lower dimensional vector, and measured the performance of classifiers. We validate our algorithm on three public data sets, we found that the virtual data helped the classifier greatly improve the F1 score. Therefore, our algorithm is a effective way to improve the performance of classifier. These result suggest that the virtual data generated by simple linear operation, in representation space, still retains the information of the raw data. It's also have great significance to the learning of small sample data sets.
MAB-based Client Selection for Federated Learning with Uncertain Resources in Mobile Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

This paper proposes a client selection method for federated learning (FL) when the computation and communication resource of clients cannot be estimated; the method trains a machine learning (ML) model using the rich data and computational resources of mobile clients without collecting their data in central systems. Conventional FL with client selection estimates the required time for an FL round from a given clients' computation power and throughput and determines a client set to reduce time consumption in FL rounds. However, it is difficult to obtain accurate resource information for all clients before the FL process is conducted because the available computation and communication resources change easily based on background computation tasks, background traffic, bottleneck links, etc. Consequently, the FL operator must select clients through exploration and exploitation processes. This paper proposes a multi-armed bandit (MAB)-based client selection method to solve the exploration and exploitation trade-off and reduce the time consumption for FL in mobile networks. The proposed method balances the selection of clients for which the amount of resources is uncertain and those known to have a large amount of resources. The simulation evaluation demonstrated that the proposed scheme requires less learning time than the conventional method in the resource fluctuating scenario.