OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Modeling and Analysis of Unmanned Remote Guided Vehicle on Rough and Loose Snow Terrain
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Survival in remote snow bounded areas is unsafe and risky for mankind. Many problems like arthritis, frostbite, asthma, starvation can caused and lead to death. Indian Military provides transportation vehicles which are heavily built and needs manpower for monitoring. Hence it necessitates facilitating compact transportation to fulfill all requirements. This research aimed at design and analysis of mobile unmanned vehicle for transportation & providing medical help, food and other essential things necessary for surviving in such areas. This can also be used for military services to save the life of solider with less risk. It is typical medium weight, high speed vehicle which carries up to 35 kg load and can negotiate through loose snow, rough terrain with use of caterpillar track. The noteworthy feature of the vehicle is that it constitutes of spiral blades and V shape snowplow to make its way through snow. Hence it will repel the snow in outward direction for self-extraction. It also incorporates skis and hubs for changing the direction and smooth suspension. 3D model of the vehicle is drafted in CATIA and structural analysis is carried out in ANSYS. Control system design and mechatronics integration is proposed to develop the prototype by assembling various components.
EventAnchor: Reducing Human Interactions in Event Annotation of Racket Sports Videos
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2021
Year: 2021

The popularity of racket sports (e.g., tennis and table tennis) leads to high demands for data analysis, such as notational analysis, on player performance. While sports videos offer many benefits for such analysis, retrieving accurate information from sports videos could be challenging. In this paper, we propose EventAnchor, a data analysis framework to facilitate interactive annotation of racket sports video with the support of computer vision algorithms. Our approach uses machine learning models in computer vision to help users acquire essential events from videos (e.g., serve, the ball bouncing on the court) and offers users a set of interactive tools for data annotation. An evaluation study on a table tennis annotation system built on this framework shows significant improvement of user performances in simple annotation tasks on objects of interest and complex annotation tasks requiring domain knowledge.
Deep Attention-based Representation Learning for Heart Sound Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2021
Year: 2021

Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of deaths and severely threaten human health in daily life. On the one hand, there have been dramatically increasing demands from both the clinical practice and the smart home application for monitoring the heart status of subjects suffering from chronic cardiovascular diseases. On the other hand, experienced physicians who can perform an efficient auscultation are still lacking in terms of number. Automatic heart sound classification leveraging the power of advanced signal processing and machine learning technologies has shown encouraging results. Nevertheless, human hand-crafted features are expensive and time-consuming. To this end, we propose a novel deep representation learning method with an attention mechanism for heart sound classification. In this paradigm, high-level representations are learnt automatically from the recorded heart sound data. Particularly, a global attention pooling layer improves the performance of the learnt representations by estimating the contribution of each unit in feature maps. The Heart Sounds Shenzhen (HSS) corpus (170 subjects involved) is used to validate the proposed method. Experimental results validate that, our approach can achieve an unweighted average recall of 51.2% for classifying three categories of heart sounds, i. e., normal, mild, and moderate/severe annotated by cardiologists with the help of Echocardiography.
Flatness Based Control of an Industrial Robot Joint Using Secondary Encoders
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Due to their compliant structure, industrial robots without precision-enhancing measures are only to a limited extent suitable for machining applications. Apart from structural, thermal and bearing deformations, the main cause for compliant structure is backlash of transmission drives. This paper proposes a method to improve trajectory tracking accuracy by using secondary encoders and applying a feedback and a flatness based feed forward control strategy. For this purpose, a novel nonlinear, continuously differentiable dynamical model of a flexible robot joint is presented. The robot joint is modeled as a two-mass oscillator with pose-dependent inertia, nonlinear friction and nonlinear stiffness, including backlash. A flatness based feed forward control is designed to improve the guiding behaviour and a feedback controller, based on secondary encoders, is implemented for disturbance compensation. Using Automatic Differentiation, the nonlinear feed forward controller can be computed in a few microseconds online. Finally, the proposed algorithms are evaluated in simulations and experimentally on a real KUKA Quantec KR300 Ultra SE.
Learning to Focus: Cascaded Feature Matching Network for Few-shot Image Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Deep networks can learn to accurately recognize objects of a category by training on a large number of annotated images. However, a meta-learning challenge known as a low-shot image recognition task comes when only a few images with annotations are available for learning a recognition model for one category. The objects in testing/query and training/support images are likely to be different in size, location, style, and so on. Our method, called Cascaded Feature Matching Network (CFMN), is proposed to solve this problem. We train the meta-learner to learn a more fine-grained and adaptive deep distance metric by focusing more on the features that have high correlations between compared images by the feature matching block which can align associated features together and naturally ignore those non-discriminative features. By applying the proposed feature matching block in different layers of the few-shot recognition network, multi-scale information among the compared images can be incorporated into the final cascaded matching feature, which boosts the recognition performance further and generalizes better by learning on relationships. The experiments for few-shot learning on two standard datasets, \emph{mini}ImageNet and Omniglot, have confirmed the effectiveness of our method. Besides, the multi-label few-shot task is first studied on a new data split of COCO which further shows the superiority of the proposed feature matching network when performing few-shot learning in complex images. The code will be made publicly available.
End-to-End Speaker Height and age estimation using Attention Mechanism with LSTM-RNN
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2021
Year: 2021

Automatic height and age estimation of speakers using acoustic features is widely used for the purpose of human-computer interaction, forensics, etc. In this work, we propose a novel approach of using attention mechanism to build an end-to-end architecture for height and age estimation. The attention mechanism is combined with Long Short-Term Memory(LSTM) encoder which is able to capture long-term dependencies in the input acoustic features. We modify the conventionally used Attention -- which calculates context vectors the sum of attention only across timeframes -- by introducing a modified context vector which takes into account total attention across encoder units as well, giving us a new cross-attention mechanism. Apart from this, we also investigate a multi-task learning approach for jointly estimating speaker height and age. We train and test our model on the TIMIT corpus. Our model outperforms several approaches in the literature. We achieve a root mean square error (RMSE) of 6.92cm and6.34cm for male and female heights respectively and RMSE of 7.85years and 8.75years for male and females ages respectively. By tracking the attention weights allocated to different phones, we find that Vowel phones are most important whistlestop phones are least important for the estimation task.
Mutation Analysis for Cyber-Physical Systems: Scalable Solutions and Results in the Space Domain
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

On-board embedded software developed for spaceflight systems (space software) must adhere to stringent software quality assurance procedures. For example, verification and validation activities are typically performed and assessed by third party organizations. To further minimize the risk of human mistakes, space agencies, such as the European Space Agency (ESA), are looking for automated solutions for the assessment of software testing activities, which play a crucial role in this context. Over the years, mutation analysis has shown to be a promising solution for the automated assessment of test suites; it consists of measuring the quality of a test suite in terms of the percentage of injected faults leading to a test failure. A number of optimization techniques, addressing scalability and accuracy problems, have been proposed to facilitate the industrial adoption of mutation analysis. However, to date, two major problems prevent space agencies from enforcing mutation analysis in space software development. In this paper, we enhance mutation analysis optimization techniques to enable their applicability to embedded software and propose a pipeline that successfully integrates them to address scalability and accuracy issues in this context, as described above. Further, we report on the largest study involving embedded software systems in the mutation analysis literature. Our research is part of a research project funded by ESA ESTEC involving private companies (GomSpace Luxembourg and LuxSpace) in the space sector. These industry partners provided the case studies reported in this paper; they include an on-board software system managing a microsatellite currently on-orbit, a set of libraries used in deployed cubesats, and a mathematical library certified by ESA.
Overlapping Community Detection in Temporal Text Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2021
Year: 2021

Analyzing the groups in the network based on same attributes, functions or connections between nodes is a way to understand network information. The task of discovering a series of node groups is called community detection. Generally, two types of information can be utilized to fulfill this task, i.e., the link structures and the node attributes. The temporal text network is a special kind of network that contains both sources of information. Typical representatives include online blog networks, the World Wide Web (WWW) and academic citation networks. In this paper, we study the problem of overlapping community detection in temporal text network. By examining 32 large temporal text networks, we find a lot of edges connecting two nodes with no common community and discover that nodes in the same community share similar textual contents. This scenario cannot be quantitatively modeled by practically all existing community detection methods. Motivated by these empirical observations, we propose MAGIC (Model Affiliation Graph with Interacting Communities), a generative model which captures community interactions and considers the information from both link structures and node attributes. Our experiments on 3 types of datasets show that MAGIC achieves large improvements over 4 state-of-the-art methods in terms of 4 widely-used metrics.
MHT-X: Offline Multiple Hypothesis Tracking with Algorithm X
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

An efficient and versatile implementation of offline multiple hypothesis tracking with Algorithm X for optimal association search was developed using Python. The code is intended for scientific applications that do not require online processing. Directed graph framework is used and multiple scans with progressively increasing time window width are used for edge construction for maximum likelihood trajectories. The current version of the code was developed for applications in multiphase hydrodynamics, e.g. bubble and particle tracking, and is capable of resolving object motion, merges and splits. Feasible object associations and trajectory graph edge likelihoods are determined using weak mass and momentum conservation laws translated to statistical functions for object properties. The code is compatible with n-dimensional motion with arbitrarily many tracked object properties. This framework is easily extendable beyond the present application by replacing the currently used heuristics with ones more appropriate for the problem at hand. The code is open-source and will be continuously developed further.
On consistency scores in text data with an implementation in R
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we introduce a reproducible cleaning process for the text extracted from PDFs using n-gram models. Our approach compares the originally extracted text with the text generated from, or expected by, these models using earlier text as stimulus. To guide this process, we introduce the notion of a consistency score, which refers to the proportion of text that is expected by the model. This is used to monitor changes during the cleaning process, and across different corpuses. We illustrate our process on text from the book Jane Eyre and introduce both a Shiny application and an R package to make our process easier for others to adopt.
Moderation Challenges in Voice-based Online Communities on Discord
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2021
Year: 2021

Online community moderators are on the front lines of combating problems like hate speech and harassment, but new modes of interaction can introduce unexpected challenges. In this paper, we consider moderation practices and challenges in the context of real-time, voice-based communication through 25 in-depth interviews with moderators on Discord. Our findings suggest that the affordances of voice-based online communities change what it means to moderate content and interactions. Not only are there new ways to break rules that moderators of text-based communities find unfamiliar, such as disruptive noise and voice raiding, but acquiring evidence of rule-breaking behaviors is also more difficult due to the ephemerality of real-time voice. While moderators have developed new moderation strategies, these strategies are limited and often based on hearsay and first impressions, resulting in problems ranging from unsuccessful moderation to false accusations. Based on these findings, we discuss how voice communication complicates current understandings and assumptions about moderation, and outline ways that platform designers and administrators can design technology to facilitate moderation.
Toward Data Cleaning with a Target Accuracy: A Case Study for Value Normalization
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2021
Year: 2021

Many applications need to clean data with a target accuracy. As far as we know, this problem has not been studied in depth. In this paper we take the first step toward solving it. We focus on value normalization (VN), the problem of replacing all string that refer to the same entity with a unique string. VN is ubiquitous, and we often want to do VN with 100% accuracy. This is typically done today in industry by automatically clustering the strings then asking a user to verify and clean the clusters, until reaching 100% accuracy. This solution has significant limitations. It does not tell the users how to verify and clean the clusters. This part also often takes a lot of time, e.g., days. Further, there is no effective way for multiple users to collaboratively verify and clean. In this paper we address these challenges. Overall, our work advances the state of the art in data cleaning by introducing a novel cleaning problem and describing a promising solution template.
Preferential Mixture-of-Experts: Interpretable Models that Rely on Human Expertise as much as Possible
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

We propose Preferential MoE, a novel human-ML mixture-of-experts model that augments human expertise in decision making with a data-based classifier only when necessary for predictive performance. Our model exhibits an interpretable gating function that provides information on when human rules should be followed or avoided. The gating function is maximized for using human-based rules, and classification errors are minimized. We propose solving a coupled multi-objective problem with convex subproblems. We develop approximate algorithms and study their performance and convergence. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of Preferential MoE on two clinical applications for the treatment of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and management of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD).
Application of Failure Modes and Effects Analysis in the Engineering Design Process
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

Failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) is one of the most practical design tools implemented in the product design to analyze the possible failures and to improve the design. The use of FMEA is diversified, and different approaches are proposed by various organizations and researchers from one application to another. The question is how to use the features of FMEA along with the design process. This research focuses on different types of FMEA in the design process, which is considered as the mapping between customer requirements, design components, and product functions. These three elements of design are the foundation of the integration model proposed in this research. The objective of this research is to understand an integrated approach of FMEA in the design process. Significantly, an integration framework is developed to integrate the design process and FMEA. Then, a step-by-step FMEA-facilitated design process is proposed to apply FMEA along with the design process.
Understanding the Role of Scene Graphs in Visual Question Answering
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is of tremendous interest to the research community with important applications such as aiding visually impaired users and image-based search. In this work, we explore the use of scene graphs for solving the VQA task. We conduct experiments on the GQA dataset which presents a challenging set of questions requiring counting, compositionality and advanced reasoning capability, and provides scene graphs for a large number of images. We adopt image + question architectures for use with scene graphs, evaluate various scene graph generation techniques for unseen images, propose a training curriculum to leverage human-annotated and auto-generated scene graphs, and build late fusion architectures to learn from multiple image representations. We present a multi-faceted study into the use of scene graphs for VQA, making this work the first of its kind.
Road Surface Translation Under Snow-covered and Semantic Segmentation for Snow Hazard Index
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In 2020, there was a record heavy snowfall owing to climate change. In reality, 2,000 vehicles were stuck on the highway for three days. Because of the freezing of the road surface, 10 vehicles had a billiard accident. Road managers are required to provide indicators to alert drivers regarding snow cover at hazardous locations. This study proposes a deep learning application with live image post-processing to automatically calculate a snow hazard ratio indicator. First, the road surface hidden under snow is translated using a generative adversarial network, pix2pix. Second, snow-covered and road surface classes are detected by semantic segmentation using DeepLabv3+ with MobileNet as a backbone. Based on these trained networks, we automatically compute the road to snow rate hazard index, indicating the amount of snow covered on the road surface. We demonstrate the applied results to 1,155 live snow images of the cold region in Japan. We mention the usefulness and the practical robustness of our study.
Untargeted, Targeted and Universal Adversarial Attacks and Defenses on Time Series
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Deep learning based models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. These attacks can be much more harmful in case of targeted attacks, where an attacker tries not only to fool the deep learning model, but also to misguide the model to predict a specific class. Such targeted and untargeted attacks are specifically tailored for an individual sample and require addition of an imperceptible noise to the sample. In contrast, universal adversarial attack calculates a special imperceptible noise which can be added to any sample of the given dataset so that, the deep learning model is forced to predict a wrong class. To the best of our knowledge these targeted and universal attacks on time series data have not been studied in any of the previous works. In this work, we have performed untargeted, targeted and universal adversarial attacks on UCR time series datasets. Our results show that deep learning based time series classification models are vulnerable to these attacks. We also show that universal adversarial attacks have good generalization property as it need only a fraction of the training data. We have also performed adversarial training based adversarial defense. Our results show that models trained adversarially using Fast gradient sign method (FGSM), a single step attack, are able to defend against FGSM as well as Basic iterative method (BIM), a popular iterative attack.
$C^3DRec$: Cloud-Client Cooperative Deep Learning for Temporal Recommendation in the Post-GDPR Era
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

Mobile devices enable users to retrieve information at any time and any place. Considering the occasional requirements and fragmentation usage pattern of mobile users, temporal recommendation techniques are proposed to improve the efficiency of information retrieval on mobile devices by means of accurately recommending items via learning temporal interests with short-term user interaction behaviors. However, the enforcement of privacy-preserving laws and regulations, such as GDPR, may overshadow the successful practice of temporal recommendation. The reason is that state-of-the-art recommendation systems require to gather and process the user data in centralized servers but the interaction behaviors data used for temporal recommendation are usually non-transactional data that are not allowed to gather without the explicit permission of users according to GDPR. As a result, if users do not permit services to gather their interaction behaviors data, the temporal recommendation fails to work. To realize the temporal recommendation in the post-GDPR era, this paper proposes $C^3DRec$, a cloud-client cooperative deep learning framework of mining interaction behaviors for recommendation while preserving user privacy. $C^3DRec$ constructs a global recommendation model on centralized servers using data collected before GDPR and fine-tunes the model directly on individual local devices using data collected after GDPR. We design two modes to accomplish the recommendation, i.e. pull mode where candidate items are pulled down onto the devices and fed into the local model to get recommended items, and push mode where the output of the local model is pushed onto the server and combined with candidate items to get recommended ones. Evaluation results show that $C^3DRec$ achieves comparable recommendation accuracy to the centralized approaches, with minimal privacy concern.