OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Visual Question Answering as a Meta Learning Task
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

The predominant approach to Visual Question Answering (VQA) demands that the model represents within its weights all of the information required to answer any question about any image. Learning this information from any real training set seems unlikely, and representing it in a reasonable number of weights doubly so. We propose instead to approach VQA as a meta learning task, thus separating the question answering method from the information required. At test time, the method is provided with a support set of example questions/answers, over which it reasons to resolve the given question. The support set is not fixed and can be extended without retraining, thereby expanding the capabilities of the model. To exploit this dynamically provided information, we adapt a state-of-the-art VQA model with two techniques from the recent meta learning literature, namely prototypical networks and meta networks. Experiments demonstrate the capability of the system to learn to produce completely novel answers (i.e. never seen during training) from examples provided at test time. In comparison to the existing state of the art, the proposed method produces qualitatively distinct results with higher recall of rare answers, and a better sample efficiency that allows training with little initial data. More importantly, it represents an important step towards vision-and-language methods that can learn and reason on-the-fly.
A novel JXTA-based architecture for implementing heterogenous Networks of Things
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2017
Year: 2017

This paper presents EmbJXTAChord, a novel peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture that integrates the good features of different sources, such as JXTA, EXI, CoAP, combining and augmenting them to provide a framework that is specifically devised for developing IoT applications over heterogeneous networks. EmbJXTAChord provides for several interesting properties, such as, distributed and fault-tolerant resource discovery, transparent routing over subnetworks, application protocol independence from the transport protocol in narrowband WSN, thus eliminating the need for using dedicated software or configuring custom gateways to achieve these functionalities. Moreover, EmbJXTAChord offers native support not only for TCP/HTTP, but also for Bluetooth RFCOMM and 6LoWPAN, thus opening to a broad range of IoT devices in supernetworks composed of networks using different interconnection technologies, not necessarily IP-based. In addition, EmbJXTAChord offers security over heterogeneous networks providing support for secure peergroups (even nested) and for group encryption, thus allowing for unicast and multicast communication between groups of objects sharing the same resources. Finally, EmbJXTAChord provides jxCOAP-E, a new CoAP implementation that leverages on the transport mechanisms for heterogeneous networks offered by EmbJXTAChord. jxCOAP-E enables to realize a RESTful service architecture for peer-to-peer narrowband or broadband networks composed of devices connected via Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, BLE or IEEE 802.15.4. Differently from CoAP, jxCOAP-E provides a distributed and fault-tolerant service discovery mechanism and support for secure multicast communications. The paper presents EmbJXTAChord, discusses all the relevant design challenges and presents a comparative experimental performance assessment with state-of-the-art solutions on commercial-off-the-shelf devices.
Depth Control of Model-Free AUVs via Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2017
Year: 2017

In this paper, we consider depth control problems of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) for tracking the desired depth trajectories. Due to the unknown dynamical model of the AUV, the problems cannot be solved by most of model-based controllers. To this purpose, we formulate the depth control problems of the AUV as continuous-state, continuous-action Markov decision processes (MDPs) under unknown transition probabilities. Based on deterministic policy gradient (DPG) and neural network approximation, we propose a model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that learns a state-feedback controller from sampled trajectories of the AUV. To improve the performance of the RL algorithm, we further propose a batch-learning scheme through replaying previous prioritized trajectories. We illustrate with simulations that our model-free method is even comparable to the model-based controllers as LQI and NMPC. Moreover, we validate the effectiveness of the proposed RL algorithm on a seafloor data set sampled from the South China Sea.
An influence-based fast preceding questionnaire model for elderly assessments
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2017
Year: 2017

To improve the efficiency of elderly assessments, an influence-based fast preceding questionnaire model (FPQM) is proposed. Compared with traditional assessments, the FPQM optimizes questionnaires by reordering their attributes. The values of low-ranking attributes can be predicted by the values of the high-ranking attributes. Therefore, the number of attributes can be reduced without redesigning the questionnaires. A new function for calculating the influence of the attributes is proposed based on probability theory. Reordering and reducing algorithms are given based on the attributes' influences. The model is verified through a practical application. The practice in an elderly-care company shows that the FPQM can reduce the number of attributes by 90.56% with a prediction accuracy of 98.39%. Compared with other methods, such as the Expert Knowledge, Rough Set and C4.5 methods, the FPQM achieves the best performance. In addition, the FPQM can also be applied to other questionnaires.
Neuron-level Selective Context Aggregation for Scene Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Contextual information provides important cues for disambiguating visually similar pixels in scene segmentation. In this paper, we introduce a neuron-level Selective Context Aggregation (SCA) module for scene segmentation, comprised of a contextual dependency predictor and a context aggregation operator. The dependency predictor is implicitly trained to infer contextual dependencies between different image regions. The context aggregation operator augments local representations with global context, which is aggregated selectively at each neuron according to its on-the-fly predicted dependencies. The proposed mechanism enables data-driven inference of contextual dependencies, and facilitates context-aware feature learning. The proposed method improves strong baselines built upon VGG16 on challenging scene segmentation datasets, which demonstrates its effectiveness in modeling context information.
Automated Analysis of Topic-Actor Networks on Twitter: New approach to the analysis of socio-semantic networks
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2017
Year: 2017

Social-media data provides increasing opportunities for automated analysis of large sets of textual documents. So far, automated tools have been developed to account for either the social networks between the participants of the debates, or to analyze the content of those debates. Less attention has been paid to mapping co-occurring actors (participants) and topics (content) in online debates that form socio-semantic networks. We propose a new, automated approach that uses a whole matrix approach of co-addressed topics and the actors. We show the advantages of the new approach with the analysis of a large set of English-language Twitter messages at the Rio+20 meeting, in June 2012 (72,077 tweets), and a smaller data set of Dutch-language Twitter messages on bird flu related to poultry farming in 2015-2017 (2,139 tweets). We discuss the theoretical, methodological and substantive implications of our approach, also for the analysis of other social-media data.
Hybrid Analog and Digital Beamforming for mmWave OFDM Large-Scale Antenna Arrays
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

Hybrid analog and digital beamforming is a promising candidate for large-scale mmWave MIMO systems because of its ability to significantly reduce the hardware complexity of the conventional fully-digital beamforming schemes while being capable of approaching the performance of fully-digital schemes. Most of the prior work on hybrid beamforming considers narrowband channels. However, broadband systems such as mmWave systems are frequency-selective. In broadband systems, it is desirable to design common analog beamformer for the entire band while employing different digital beamformers in different frequency sub-bands. This paper considers hybrid beamforming design for systems with OFDM modulation. First, for a SU-MIMO system where the hybrid beamforming architecture is employed at both transmitter and receiver, we show that hybrid beamforming with a small number of RF chains can asymptotically approach the performance of fully-digital beamforming for a sufficiently large number of transceiver antennas due to the sparse nature of the mmWave channels. For systems with a practical number of antennas, we then propose a unified heuristic design for two different hybrid beamforming structures, the fully-connected and the partially-connected structures, to maximize the overall spectral efficiency of a mmWave MIMO system. Numerical results are provided to show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing hybrid beamforming methods and for the fully-connected architecture the proposed algorithm can achieve spectral efficiency very close to that of the optimal fully-digital beamforming but with much fewer RF chains. Second, for the MU-MISO case, we propose a heuristic hybrid percoding design to maximize the weighted sum rate in the downlink and show numerically that the proposed algorithm with practical number of RF chains can already approach the performance of fully-digital beamforming.
Combating Computational Heterogeneity in Large-Scale Distributed Computing via Work Exchange
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2017
Year: 2017

Owing to data-intensive large-scale applications, distributed computation systems have gained significant recent interest, due to their ability of running such tasks over a large number of commodity nodes in a time efficient manner. One of the major bottlenecks that adversely impacts the time efficiency is the computational heterogeneity of distributed nodes, often limiting the task completion time due to the slowest worker. In this paper, we first present a lower bound on the expected computation time based on the work-conservation principle. We then present our approach of work exchange to combat the latency problem, in which faster workers can be reassigned additional leftover computations that were originally assigned to slower workers. We present two variations of the work exchange approach: a) when the computational heterogeneity knowledge is known a priori; and b) when heterogeneity is unknown and is estimated in an online manner to assign tasks to distributed workers. As a baseline, we also present and analyze the use of an optimized Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) coded distributed computation scheme over heterogeneous nodes. Simulation results also compare the proposed approach of work exchange, the baseline MDS coded scheme and the lower bound obtained via work-conservation principle. We show that the work exchange scheme achieves time for computation which is very close to the lower bound with limited coordination and communication overhead even when the knowledge about heterogeneity levels is not available.
Key management system for WSNs based on hash functions and elliptic curve cryptography
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2017
Year: 2017

Due to hostile environment and wireless communication channel, security mechanisms are essential for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Existence of a pair of shared key is a prerequisite for many of these security mechanisms; a task that key management system addresses. Recently, an energy efficient method based on public key cryptography (PKC) was proposed. We analyze this protocol and show that it is vulnerable to denial of service (DOS) attacks and adversary can exhaust memory and battery of nodes. Then, we analyze this protocol and show that using a more knowledgeable BS this vulnerability can be solved very efficiently. Based on this observation we propose a modified version of the protocol that achieves immediate authentication and can prevent DOS attacks. We show that the improved protocol achieves immediate authentication at the expense of 1.82 mj extra energy consumption while retaining other desirable characteristics of the basic method.
Markov chain Hebbian learning algorithm with ternary synaptic units
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2017
Year: 2017

In spite of remarkable progress in machine learning techniques, the state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms often keep machines from real-time learning (online learning) due in part to computational complexity in parameter optimization. As an alternative, a learning algorithm to train a memory in real time is proposed, which is named as the Markov chain Hebbian learning algorithm. The algorithm pursues efficient memory use during training in that (i) the weight matrix has ternary elements (-1, 0, 1) and (ii) each update follows a Markov chain--the upcoming update does not need past weight memory. The algorithm was verified by two proof-of-concept tasks (handwritten digit recognition and multiplication table memorization) in which numbers were taken as symbols. Particularly, the latter bases multiplication arithmetic on memory, which may be analogous to humans' mental arithmetic. The memory-based multiplication arithmetic feasibly offers the basis of factorization, supporting novel insight into the arithmetic.
Interpolating between $k$-Median and $k$-Center: Approximation Algorithms for Ordered $k$-Median
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2017
Year: 2017

We consider a generalization of $k$-median and $k$-center, called the {\em ordered $k$-median} problem. In this problem, we are given a metric space $(\mathcal{D},\{c_{ij}\})$ with $n=|\mathcal{D}|$ points, and a non-increasing weight vector $w\in\mathbb{R}_+^n$, and the goal is to open $k$ centers and assign each point each point $j\in\mathcal{D}$ to a center so as to minimize $w_1\cdot\text{(largest assignment cost)}+w_2\cdot\text{(second-largest assignment cost)}+\ldots+w_n\cdot\text{($n$-th largest assignment cost)}$. We give an $(18+ε)$-approximation algorithm for this problem. Our algorithms utilize Lagrangian relaxation and the primal-dual schema, combined with an enumeration procedure of Aouad and Segev. For the special case of $\{0,1\}$-weights, which models the problem of minimizing the $\ell$ largest assignment costs that is interesting in and of by itself, we provide a novel reduction to the (standard) $k$-median problem showing that LP-relative guarantees for $k$-median translate to guarantees for the ordered $k$-median problem; this yields a nice and clean $(8.5+ε)$-approximation algorithm for $\{0,1\}$ weights.
Region-based Quality Estimation Network for Large-scale Person Re-identification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

One of the major restrictions on the performance of video-based person re-id is partial noise caused by occlusion, blur and illumination. Since different spatial regions of a single frame have various quality, and the quality of the same region also varies across frames in a tracklet, a good way to address the problem is to effectively aggregate complementary information from all frames in a sequence, using better regions from other frames to compensate the influence of an image region with poor quality. To achieve this, we propose a novel Region-based Quality Estimation Network (RQEN), in which an ingenious training mechanism enables the effective learning to extract the complementary region-based information between different frames. Compared with other feature extraction methods, we achieved comparable results of 92.4%, 76.1% and 77.83% on the PRID 2011, iLIDS-VID and MARS, respectively. In addition, to alleviate the lack of clean large-scale person re-id datasets for the community, this paper also contributes a new high-quality dataset, named "Labeled Pedestrian in the Wild (LPW)" which contains 7,694 tracklets with over 590,000 images. Despite its relatively large scale, the annotations also possess high cleanliness. Moreover, it's more challenging in the following aspects: the age of characters varies from childhood to elderhood; the postures of people are diverse, including running and cycling in addition to the normal walking state.
Improvised Comedy as a Turing Test
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2017
Year: 2017

The best improvisational theatre actors can make any scene partner, of any skill level or ability, appear talented and proficient in the art form, and thus "make them shine". To challenge this improvisational paradigm, we built an artificial intelligence (AI) trained to perform live shows alongside human actors for human audiences. Over the course of 30 performances to a combined audience of almost 3000 people, we have refined theatrical games which involve combinations of human and (at times, adversarial) AI actors. We have developed specific scene structures to include audience participants in interesting ways. Finally, we developed a complete show structure that submitted the audience to a Turing test and observed their suspension of disbelief, which we believe is key for human/non-human theatre co-creation.
Bounded Expectations: Resource Analysis for Probabilistic Programs
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2017
Year: 2017

This paper presents a new static analysis for deriving upper bounds on the expected resource consumption of probabilistic programs. The analysis is fully automatic and derives symbolic bounds that are multivariate polynomials of the inputs. The new technique combines manual state-of-the-art reasoning techniques for probabilistic programs with an effective method for automatic resource-bound analysis of deterministic programs. It can be seen as both, an extension of automatic amortized resource analysis (AARA) to probabilistic programs and an automation of manual reasoning for probabilistic programs that is based on weakest preconditions. As a result, bound inference can be reduced to off-the-shelf LP solving in many cases and automatically-derived bounds can be interactively extended with standard program logics if the automation fails. Building on existing work, the soundness of the analysis is proved with respect to an operational semantics that is based on Markov decision processes. The effectiveness of the technique is demonstrated with a prototype implementation that is used to automatically analyze 39 challenging probabilistic programs and randomized algorithms. Experimental results indicate that the derived constant factors in the bounds are very precise and even optimal for many programs.
Feature Selective Networks for Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Objects for detection usually have distinct characteristics in different sub-regions and different aspect ratios. However, in prevalent two-stage object detection methods, Region-of-Interest (RoI) features are extracted by RoI pooling with little emphasis on these translation-variant feature components. We present feature selective networks to reform the feature representations of RoIs by exploiting their disparities among sub-regions and aspect ratios. Our network produces the sub-region attention bank and aspect ratio attention bank for the whole image. The RoI-based sub-region attention map and aspect ratio attention map are selectively pooled from the banks, and then used to refine the original RoI features for RoI classification. Equipped with a light-weight detection subnetwork, our network gets a consistent boost in detection performance based on general ConvNet backbones (ResNet-101, GoogLeNet and VGG-16). Without bells and whistles, our detectors equipped with ResNet-101 achieve more than 3% mAP improvement compared to counterparts on PASCAL VOC 2007, PASCAL VOC 2012 and MS COCO datasets.
Technology Aware Training in Memristive Neuromorphic Systems based on non-ideal Synaptic Crossbars
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2017
Year: 2017

The advances in the field of machine learning using neuromorphic systems have paved the pathway for extensive research on possibilities of hardware implementations of neural networks. Various memristive technologies such as oxide-based devices, spintronics and phase change materials have been explored to implement the core functional units of neuromorphic systems, namely the synaptic network, and the neuronal functionality, in a fast and energy efficient manner. However, various non-idealities in the crossbar implementations of the synaptic arrays can significantly degrade performance of neural networks and hence, impose restrictions on feasible crossbar sizes. In this work, we build mathematical models of various non-idealities that occur in crossbar implementations such as source resistance, neuron resistance and chip-to-chip device variations and analyze their impact on the classification accuracy of a fully connected network (FCN) and convolutional neural network (CNN) trained with standard training algorithm. We show that a network trained under ideal conditions can suffer accuracy degradation as large as 59.84% for FCNs and 62.4% for CNNs when implemented on non-ideal crossbars for relevant non-ideality ranges. This severely constrains the sizes for crossbars. As a solution, we propose a technology aware training algorithm which incorporates the mathematical models of the non-idealities in the standard training algorithm. We demonstrate that our proposed methodology achieves significant recovery of testing accuracy within 1.9% of the ideal accuracy for FCNs and 1.5% for CNNs. We further show that our proposed training algorithm can potentially allow the use of significantly larger crossbar arrays of sizes 784$\times$500 for FCNs and 4096$\times$512 for CNNs with a minor or no trade-off in accuracy
Deep Cross-Modal Correlation Learning for Audio and Lyrics in Music Retrieval
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2017
Year: 2017

Little research focuses on cross-modal correlation learning where temporal structures of different data modalities such as audio and lyrics are taken into account. Stemming from the characteristic of temporal structures of music in nature, we are motivated to learn the deep sequential correlation between audio and lyrics. In this work, we propose a deep cross-modal correlation learning architecture involving two-branch deep neural networks for audio modality and text modality (lyrics). Different modality data are converted to the same canonical space where inter modal canonical correlation analysis is utilized as an objective function to calculate the similarity of temporal structures. This is the first study on understanding the correlation between language and music audio through deep architectures for learning the paired temporal correlation of audio and lyrics. Pre-trained Doc2vec model followed by fully-connected layers (fully-connected deep neural network) is used to represent lyrics. Two significant contributions are made in the audio branch, as follows: i) pre-trained CNN followed by fully-connected layers is investigated for representing music audio. ii) We further suggest an end-to-end architecture that simultaneously trains convolutional layers and fully-connected layers to better learn temporal structures of music audio. Particularly, our end-to-end deep architecture contains two properties: simultaneously implementing feature learning and cross-modal correlation learning, and learning joint representation by considering temporal structures. Experimental results, using audio to retrieve lyrics or using lyrics to retrieve audio, verify the effectiveness of the proposed deep correlation learning architectures in cross-modal music retrieval.