OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Mek: Mechanics Prototyping Tool for 2D Tile-Based Turn-Based Deterministic Games
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2019
Year: 2019

There are few digital tools to help designers create game mechanics. A general language to express game mechanics is necessary for rapid game design iteration. The first iteration of a mechanics-focused language, together with its interfacing tool, are introduced in this paper. The language is restricted to two-dimensional, turn-based, tile-based, deterministic, complete-information games. The tool is compared to the existing alternatives for game mechanics prototyping and shown to be capable of succinctly implementing a range of well-known game mechanics.
Long-Term Vehicle Localization by Recursive Knowledge Distillation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Most of the current state-of-the-art frameworks for cross-season visual place recognition (CS-VPR) focus on domain adaptation (DA) to a single specific season. From the viewpoint of long-term CS-VPR, such frameworks do not scale well to sequential multiple domains (e.g., spring - summer - autumn - winter - ... ). The goal of this study is to develop a novel long-term ensemble learning (LEL) framework that allows for a constant cost retraining in long-term sequential-multi-domain CS-VPR (SMD-VPR), which only requires the memorization of a small constant number of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and can retrain the CNN ensemble of every season at a small constant time/space cost. We frame our task as the multi-teacher multi-student knowledge distillation (MTMS-KD), which recursively compresses all the previous season's knowledge into a current CNN ensemble. We further address the issue of teacher-student-assignment (TSA) to achieve a good generalization/specialization tradeoff. Experimental results on SMD-VPR tasks validate the efficacy of the proposed approach.
The Role of Interactivity in Local Differential Privacy
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

We study the power of interactivity in local differential privacy. First, we focus on the difference between fully interactive and sequentially interactive protocols. Sequentially interactive protocols may query users adaptively in sequence, but they cannot return to previously queried users. The vast majority of existing lower bounds for local differential privacy apply only to sequentially interactive protocols, and before this paper it was not known whether fully interactive protocols were more powerful. We resolve this question. First, we classify locally private protocols by their compositionality, the multiplicative factor $k \geq 1$ by which the sum of a protocol's single-round privacy parameters exceeds its overall privacy guarantee. We then show how to efficiently transform any fully interactive $k$-compositional protocol into an equivalent sequentially interactive protocol with an $O(k)$ blowup in sample complexity. Next, we show that our reduction is tight by exhibiting a family of problems such that for any $k$, there is a fully interactive $k$-compositional protocol which solves the problem, while no sequentially interactive protocol can solve the problem without at least an $\tilde Ω(k)$ factor more examples. We then turn our attention to hypothesis testing problems. We show that for a large class of compound hypothesis testing problems --- which include all simple hypothesis testing problems as a special case --- a simple noninteractive test is optimal among the class of all (possibly fully interactive) tests.
Recovering Faces from Portraits with Auxiliary Facial Attributes
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Recovering a photorealistic face from an artistic portrait is a challenging task since crucial facial details are often distorted or completely lost in artistic compositions. To handle this loss, we propose an Attribute-guided Face Recovery from Portraits (AFRP) that utilizes a Face Recovery Network (FRN) and a Discriminative Network (DN). FRN consists of an autoencoder with residual block-embedded skip-connections and incorporates facial attribute vectors into the feature maps of input portraits at the bottleneck of the autoencoder. DN has multiple convolutional and fully-connected layers, and its role is to enforce FRN to generate authentic face images with corresponding facial attributes dictated by the input attribute vectors. %Leveraging on the spatial transformer networks, FRN automatically compensates for misalignments of portraits. % and generates aligned face images. For the preservation of identities, we impose the recovered and ground-truth faces to share similar visual features. Specifically, DN determines whether the recovered image looks like a real face and checks if the facial attributes extracted from the recovered image are consistent with given attributes. %Our method can recover high-quality photorealistic faces from unaligned portraits while preserving the identity of the face images as well as it can reconstruct a photorealistic face image with a desired set of attributes. Our method can recover photorealistic identity-preserving faces with desired attributes from unseen stylized portraits, artistic paintings, and hand-drawn sketches. On large-scale synthesized and sketch datasets, we demonstrate that our face recovery method achieves state-of-the-art results.
Beamforming Design for Large-Scale Antenna Arrays Using Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

Beamforming (BF) design for large-scale antenna arrays with limited radio frequency chains and the phase-shifter-based analog BF architecture, has been recognized as a key issue in millimeter wave communication systems. It becomes more challenging with imperfect channel state information (CSI). In this letter, we propose a deep learning based BF design approach and develop a BF neural network (BFNN) which can be trained to learn how to optimize the beamformer for maximizing the spectral efficiency with hardware limitation and imperfect CSI. Simulation results show that the proposed BFNN achieves significant performance improvement and strong robustness to imperfect CSI over the conventional BF algorithms.
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Multispectral Pedestrian Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Multimodal information (e.g., visible and thermal) can generate robust pedestrian detections to facilitate around-the-clock computer vision applications, such as autonomous driving and video surveillance. However, it still remains a crucial challenge to train a reliable detector working well in different multispectral pedestrian datasets without manual annotations. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised domain adaptation framework for multispectral pedestrian detection, by iteratively generating pseudo annotations and updating the parameters of our designed multispectral pedestrian detector on target domain. Pseudo annotations are generated using the detector trained on source domain, and then updated by fixing the parameters of detector and minimizing the cross entropy loss without back-propagation. Training labels are generated using the pseudo annotations by considering the characteristics of similarity and complementarity between well-aligned visible and infrared image pairs. The parameters of detector are updated using the generated labels by minimizing our defined multi-detection loss function with back-propagation. The optimal parameters of detector can be obtained after iteratively updating the pseudo annotations and parameters. Experimental results show that our proposed unsupervised multimodal domain adaptation method achieves significantly higher detection performance than the approach without domain adaptation, and is competitive with the supervised multispectral pedestrian detectors.
A Novel Apex-Time Network for Cross-Dataset Micro-Expression Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

The automatic recognition of micro-expression has been boosted ever since the successful introduction of deep learning approaches. As researchers working on such topics are moving to learn from the nature of micro-expression, the practice of using deep learning techniques has evolved from processing the entire video clip of micro-expression to the recognition on apex frame. Using the apex frame is able to get rid of redundant video frames, but the relevant temporal evidence of micro-expression would be thereby left out. This paper proposes a novel Apex-Time Network (ATNet) to recognize micro-expression based on spatial information from the apex frame as well as on temporal information from the respective-adjacent frames. Through extensive experiments on three benchmarks, we demonstrate the improvement achieved by learning such temporal information. Specially, the model with such temporal information is more robust in cross-dataset validations.
ANTNets: Mobile Convolutional Neural Networks for Resource Efficient Image Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Deep convolutional neural networks have achieved remarkable success in computer vision. However, deep neural networks require large computing resources to achieve high performance. Although depthwise separable convolution can be an efficient module to approximate a standard convolution, it often leads to reduced representational power of networks. In this paper, under budget constraints such as computational cost (MAdds) and the parameter count, we propose a novel basic architectural block, ANTBlock. It boosts the representational power by modeling, in a high dimensional space, interdependency of channels between a depthwise convolution layer and a projection layer in the ANTBlocks. Our experiments show that ANTNet built by a sequence of ANTBlocks, consistently outperforms state-of-the-art low-cost mobile convolutional neural networks across multiple datasets. On CIFAR100, our model achieves 75.7% top-1 accuracy, which is 1.5% higher than MobileNetV2 with 8.3% fewer parameters and 19.6% less computational cost. On ImageNet, our model achieves 72.8% top-1 accuracy, which is 0.8% improvement, with 157.7ms (20% faster) on iPhone 5s over MobileNetV2.
Adversarial Audio: A New Information Hiding Method and Backdoor for DNN-based Speech Recognition Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

Audio is an important medium in people's daily life, hidden information can be embedded into audio for covert communication. Current audio information hiding techniques can be roughly classed into time domain-based and transform domain-based techniques. Time domain-based techniques have large hiding capacity but low imperceptibility. Transform domain-based techniques have better imperceptibility, but the hiding capacity is poor. This paper proposes a new audio information hiding technique which shows high hiding capacity and good imperceptibility. The proposed audio information hiding method takes the original audio signal as input and obtains the audio signal embedded with hidden information (called stego audio) through the training of our private automatic speech recognition (ASR) model. Without knowing the internal parameters and structure of the private model, the hidden information can be extracted by the private model but cannot be extracted by public models. We use four other ASR models to extract the hidden information on the stego audios to evaluate the security of the private model. The experimental results show that the proposed audio information hiding technique has a high hiding capacity of 48 cps with good imperceptibility and high security. In addition, our proposed adversarial audio can be used to activate an intrinsic backdoor of DNN-based ASR models, which brings a serious threat to intelligent speakers.
On the Learnability of Deep Random Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper we study the learnability of deep random networks from both theoretical and practical points of view. On the theoretical front, we show that the learnability of random deep networks with sign activation drops exponentially with its depth. On the practical front, we find that the learnability drops sharply with depth even with the state-of-the-art training methods, suggesting that our stylized theoretical results are closer to reality.
VayuAnukulani: Adaptive Memory Networks for Air Pollution Forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Air pollution is the leading environmental health hazard globally due to various sources which include factory emissions, car exhaust and cooking stoves. As a precautionary measure, air pollution forecast serves as the basis for taking effective pollution control measures, and accurate air pollution forecasting has become an important task. In this paper, we forecast fine-grained ambient air quality information for 5 prominent locations in Delhi based on the historical and real-time ambient air quality and meteorological data reported by Central Pollution Control board. We present VayuAnukulani system, a novel end-to-end solution to predict air quality for next 24 hours by estimating the concentration and level of different air pollutants including nitrogen dioxide ($NO_2$), particulate matter ($PM_{2.5}$ and $PM_{10}$) for Delhi. Extensive experiments on data sources obtained in Delhi demonstrate that the proposed adaptive attention based Bidirectional LSTM Network outperforms several baselines for classification and regression models. The accuracy of the proposed adaptive system is $\sim 15 - 20\%$ better than the same offline trained model. We compare the proposed methodology on several competing baselines, and show that the network outperforms conventional methods by $\sim 3 - 5 \%$.
Import2vec - Learning Embeddings for Software Libraries
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2019
Year: 2019

We consider the problem of developing suitable learning representations (embeddings) for library packages that capture semantic similarity among libraries. Such representations are known to improve the performance of downstream learning tasks (e.g. classification) or applications such as contextual search and analogical reasoning. We apply word embedding techniques from natural language processing (NLP) to train embeddings for library packages ("library vectors"). Library vectors represent libraries by similar context of use as determined by import statements present in source code. Experimental results obtained from training such embeddings on three large open source software corpora reveals that library vectors capture semantically meaningful relationships among software libraries, such as the relationship between frameworks and their plug-ins and libraries commonly used together within ecosystems such as big data infrastructure projects (in Java), front-end and back-end web development frameworks (in JavaScript) and data science toolkits (in Python).
Comparative Analysis of Distributed and Parallel File Systems' Internal Techniques
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

A file system optimization is the most common task in the file system field. Usually, it is seen as the key file system problem. Moreover, it is possible to state that optimization is dominant in commercial development. A problem of a new file system architecture development arises more frequently in academia. End-user can treat file system performance as the key problem of file system evolving as technology. Such understanding arises from common treatment of persistent memory as slow subsystem. As a result, problem of improving performance of data processing treats as a problem of file system performance optimization. However, evolution of physical technologies of persistent data storage requires significant changing of concepts and approaches of file systems' internal techniques. Generally speaking, only trying to improve the file system efficiency cannot resolve all issue of file systems as technological direction. Moreover, it can impede evolution of file system technology at whole. It is impossible to satisfy end-user's expectations by means of file systems optimization only. New persistent storage technologies can question about file systems necessity at whole without suggestion of revolutionary new file system's approaches. However, file system contains paradigm of information structuring that is very important for end-user as a human being. It needs to distinguish the two classes of tasks: (1) optimization task; (2) task of elaboration a new architecture vision or paradigm. But, frequently, project goal degenerates into optimization task which is meant really elaboration of a new paradigm. End-user expectations are complex and contradictory set of requirements. Only optimization tasks cannot resolve the all current needs of end-user in the file system field. End-user's expectations require resolving tasks of a new architecture vision or paradigm elaboration.
Modelling PM10 Crisis Peaks Using Multi-Agent based Simulation: Application to Annaba City, North-East Algeria
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2019
Year: 2019

The paper describes a MAS (multi-agent system) simulation approach for controlling PM10 (Particulate Matter) crisis peaks. A dispersion model is used with an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to predict the PM10 concentration level. The dispersion and ANN models are integrated into a MAS system. PM10 source controllers are modelled as software agents. The MAS is composed of agents that cooperate with each other for reducing their emissions and control the air pollution peaks. Different control strategies are simulated and compared using data from Annaba (North-East Algeria). The simulator helps to compare and assess the efficiency of policies to control peaks in PM10.
Smart systems, the fourth industrial revolution and new challenges in distributed computing
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

Smart systems and the smart world concept are addressed in the framework of the fourth industrial revolution. New challenges in distributed autonomous robots and computing are considered. An illustration of a new kind of smart and reconfigurable distributed modular robot system is given. A prototype is also presented as well as the associated distributed algorithm.
Quality-Aware Broadcasting Strategies for Position Estimation in VANETs
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

The dissemination of vehicle position data all over the network is a fundamental task in Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) operations, as applications often need to know the position of other vehicles over a large area. In such cases, inter-vehicular communications should be exploited to satisfy application requirements, although congestion control mechanisms are required to minimize the packet collision probability. In this work, we face the issue of achieving accurate vehicle position estimation and prediction in a VANET scenario. State of the art solutions to the problem try to broadcast the positioning information periodically, so that vehicles can ensure that the information their neighbors have about them is never older than the inter-transmission period. However, the rate of decay of the information is not deterministic in complex urban scenarios: the movements and maneuvers of vehicles can often be erratic and unpredictable, making old positioning information inaccurate or downright misleading. To address this problem, we propose to use the Quality of Information (QoI) as the decision factor for broadcasting. We implement a threshold-based strategy to distribute position information whenever the positioning error passes a reference value, thereby shifting the objective of the network to limiting the actual positioning error and guaranteeing quality across the VANET. The threshold-based strategy can reduce the network load by avoiding the transmission of redundant messages, as well as improving the overall positioning accuracy by more than 20% in realistic urban scenarios.
Infinite families of 3-designs from APN functions
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

Combinatorial $t$-designs have nice applications in coding theory, finite geometries and several engineering areas. The objective of this paper is to study how to obtain $3$-designs with $2$-transitive permutation groups. The incidence structure formed by the orbits of a base block under the action of the general affine groups, which are $2$-transitive, is considered. A characterization of such incidence structure to be a $3$-design is presented, and a sufficient condition for the stabilizer of a base block to be trivial is given. With these general results, infinite families of $3$-designs are constructed by employing APN functions. Some $3$-designs presented in this paper give rise to self-dual binary codes or linear codes with optimal or best parameters known. Several conjectures on $3$-designs and binary codes are also presented.
An Unknown Input Multi-Observer Approach for Estimation and Control under Adversarial Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2019
Year: 2019

We address the problem of state estimation, attack isolation, and control of discrete-time linear time-invariant systems under (potentially unbounded) actuator and sensor false data injection attacks. Using a bank of unknown input observers, each observer leading to an exponentially stable estimation error (in the attack-free case), we propose an observer-based estimator that provides exponential estimates of the system state in spite of actuator and sensor attacks. Exploiting sensor and actuator redundancy, the estimation scheme is guaranteed to work if a sufficiently small subset of sensors and actuators are under attack. Using the proposed estimator, we provide tools for reconstructing and isolating actuator and sensor attacks; and a control scheme capable of stabilizing the closed-loop dynamics by switching off isolated actuators. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the performance of our tools.
Learning Backtrackless Aligned-Spatial Graph Convolutional Networks for Graph Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we develop a novel Backtrackless Aligned-Spatial Graph Convolutional Network (BASGCN) model to learn effective features for graph classification. Our idea is to transform arbitrary-sized graphs into fixed-sized backtrackless aligned grid structures and define a new spatial graph convolution operation associated with the grid structures. We show that the proposed BASGCN model not only reduces the problems of information loss and imprecise information representation arising in existing spatially-based Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) models, but also bridges the theoretical gap between traditional Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models and spatially-based GCN models. Furthermore, the proposed BASGCN model can both adaptively discriminate the importance between specified vertices during the convolution process and reduce the notorious tottering problem of existing spatially-based GCNs related to the Weisfeiler-Lehman algorithm, explaining the effectiveness of the proposed model. Experiments on standard graph datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.