OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Automatic Feature Weight Determination using Indexing and Pseudo-Relevance Feedback for Multi-feature Content-Based Image Retrieval
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) is one of the most active research areas in multimedia information retrieval. Given a query image, the task is to search relevant images in a repository. Low level features like color, texture, and shape feature vectors of an image are always considered to be an important attribute in CBIR system. Thus the performance of the CBIR system can be enhanced by combining these feature vectors. In this paper, we propose a novel CBIR framework by applying to index using multiclass SVM and finding the appropriate weights of the individual features automatically using the relevance ratio and mean difference. We have taken four feature descriptors to represent color, texture and shape features. During retrieval, feature vectors of query image are combined, weighted and compared with feature vectors of images in the database to rank order the results. Experiments were performed on four benchmark datasets and performance is compared with existing techniques to validate the superiority of our proposed framework.
A Non-iterative Parallelizable Eigenbasis Algorithm for Johnson Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2018
Year: 2018

We present a new $O(k^2 \binom{n}{k}^2)$ method for generating an orthogonal basis of eigenvectors for the Johnson graph $J(n,k)$. Unlike standard methods for computing a full eigenbasis of sparse symmetric matrices, the algorithm presented here is non-iterative, and produces exact results under an infinite-precision computation model. In addition, our method is highly parallelizable; given access to unlimited parallel processors, the eigenbasis can be constructed in only $O(n)$ time given n and k. We also present an algorithm for computing projections onto the eigenspaces of $J(n,k)$ in parallel time $O(n)$.
Intelligence-based Cybersecurity Awareness Training- an Exploratory Project
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

Cybersecurity training should be adaptable to evolving the cyber threat landscape, cost effective and integrated well with other enterprise management components. Unfortunately, very few cybersecurity training platforms can satisfy such requirements. This paper proposes a new and novel model for conducting cybersecurity training with three main objectives: (i) training should be initiated by emerging relevant threats and delivered first to the most vulnerable members (ii) the process has to be agile (iii) training results must be able to provide actionable intelligence. For the first time, this paper establishes a type system (ontology and associated relationships) that links the domain of cybersecurity awareness training with that of cyber threat intelligence. Powered by IBM Watson Knowledge Studio platform, the proposed method was found to be practical and scalable. Main contributions such as exports of the type system, the manually annotated corpus of 100 threat reports and 127 cybersecurity assessment results, the dictionaries for pre-annotation, etc were made publicly available.
LZRR: LZ77 Parsing with Right Reference
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2018
Year: 2018

Lossless data compression has been widely studied in computer science. One of the most widely used lossless data compressions is Lempel-Zip(LZ) 77 parsing, which achieves a high compression ratio. Bidirectional (a.k.a. macro) parsing is a lossless data compression and computes a sequence of phrases copied from another substring (target phrase) on either the left or the right position in an input string. Gagie et al.(LATIN 2018) recently showed that a large gap exists between the number of smallest bidirectional phrases of a given string and that of LZ77 phrases. In addition, finding the smallest bidirectional parse of a given text is NP-complete. Several variants of bidirectional parsing have been proposed thus far, but no prior work for bidirectional parsing has achieved high compression that is smaller than that of LZ77 phrasing for any string. In this paper, we present the first practical bidirectional parsing named LZ77 parsing with right reference (LZRR), in which the number of LZRR phrases is theoretically guaranteed to be smaller than the number of LZ77 phrases. Experimental results using benchmark strings show the number of LZRR phrases is approximately five percent smaller than that of LZ77 phrases.
A cascaded multiple-speaker localization and tracking system
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2018
Year: 2018

This paper presents an online multiple-speaker localization and tracking method, as the INRIA-Perception contribution to the LOCATA Challenge 2018. First, the recursive least-square method is used to adaptively estimate the direct-path relative transfer function as an interchannel localization feature. The feature is assumed to associate with a single speaker at each time-frequency bin. Second, a complex Gaussian mixture model (CGMM) is used as a generative model of the features. The weight of each CGMM component represents the probability that this component corresponds to an active speaker, and is adaptively estimated with an online optimization algorithm. Finally, taking the CGMM component weights as observations, a Bayesian multiple-speaker tracking method based on the variational expectation maximization algorithm is used. The tracker accounts for the variation of active speakers and the localization miss measurements, by introducing speaker birth and sleeping processes. The experiments carried out on the development dataset of the challenge are reported.
Blended smoothing splines on Riemannian manifolds
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

We present a method to compute a fitting curve B to a set of data points d0,...,dm lying on a manifold M. That curve is obtained by blending together Euclidean Bézier curves obtained on different tangent spaces. The method guarantees several properties among which B is C1 and is the natural cubic smoothing spline when M is the Euclidean space. We show examples on the sphere S2 as a proof of concept.
Semi-supervised dual graph regularized dictionary learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised dictionary learning method that uses both the information in labelled and unlabelled data and jointly trains a linear classifier embedded on the sparse codes. The manifold structure of the data in the sparse code space is preserved using the same approach as the Locally Linear Embedding method (LLE). This enables one to enforce the predictive power of the unlabelled data sparse codes. We show that our approach provides significant improvements over other methods. The results can be further improved by training a simple nonlinear classifier as SVM on the sparse codes.
Low Congestion Cycle Covers and their Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

A cycle cover of a bridgeless graph $G$ is a collection of simple cycles in $G$ such that each edge $e$ appears on at least one cycle. The common objective in cycle cover computation is to minimize the total lengths of all cycles. Motivated by applications to distributed computation, we introduce the notion of \emph{low-congestion} cycle covers, in which all cycles in the cycle collection are both \emph{short} and nearly \emph{edge-disjoint}. Formally, a $(d,c)$-cycle cover of a graph $G$ is a collection of cycles in $G$ in which each cycle is of length at most $d$ and each edge participates in at least one cycle and at most $c$ cycles. A-priori, it is not clear that cycle covers that enjoy both a small overlap and a short cycle length even exist, nor if it is possible to efficiently find them. Perhaps quite surprisingly, we prove the following: Every bridgeless graph of diameter $D$ admits a $(d,c)$-cycle cover where $d = \tilde{O}(D)$ and $c=\tilde{O}(1)$. These parameters are existentially tight up to polylogarithmic terms. Furthermore, we show how to extend our result to achieve universally optimal cycle covers. Let $C_e$ is the length of the shortest cycle that covers $e$, and let $OPT(G)= \max_{e \in G} C_e$. We show that every bridgeless graph admits a $(d,c)$-cycle cover where $d = \tilde{O}(OPT(G))$ and $c=\tilde{O}(1)$. We demonstrate the usefulness of low congestion cycle covers in different settings of resilient computation. For instance, we consider a Byzantine fault model where in each round, the adversary chooses a single message and corrupt in an arbitrarily manner. We provide a compiler that turns any $r$-round distributed algorithm for a graph $G$ with diameter $D$, into an equivalent fault tolerant algorithm with $r\cdot poly(D)$ rounds.
Task Offloading and Replication for Vehicular Cloud Computing: A Multi-Armed Bandit Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

Vehicular Cloud Computing (VCC) is a new technological shift which exploits the computation and storage resources on vehicles for computational service provisioning. Spare on-board resources are pooled by a VCC operator, e.g. a roadside unit, to complete task requests using the vehicle-as-a-resource framework. In this paper, we investigate timely service provisioning for deadline-constrained tasks in VCC systems by leveraging the task replication technique (i.e., allowing one task to be executed by several server vehicles). A learning-based algorithm, called DATE-V (Deadline-Aware Task rEplication for Vehicular Cloud), is proposed to address the special issues in VCC systems including uncertainty of vehicle movements, volatile vehicle members, and large vehicle population. The proposed algorithm is developed based on a novel Contextual-Combinatorial Multi-Armed Bandit (CC-MAB) learning framework. DATE-V is `contextual' because it utilizes side information (context) of vehicles and tasks to infer the completion probability of a task replication under random vehicle movements. DATE-V is `combinatorial' because it aims to replicate the received task and send the task replications to multiple server vehicles to guarantee the service timeliness. We rigorously prove that our learning algorithm achieves a sublinear regret bound compared to an oracle algorithm that knows the exact completion probability of any task replications. Simulations are carried out based on real-world vehicle movement traces and the results show that DATE-V significantly outperforms benchmark solutions.
Reproduction Report on "Learn to Pay Attention"
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

We have successfully implemented the "Learn to Pay Attention" model of attention mechanism in convolutional neural networks, and have replicated the results of the original paper in the categories of image classification and fine-grained recognition.
Text Data Augmentation Made Simple By Leveraging NLP Cloud APIs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

In practice, it is common to find oneself with far too little text data to train a deep neural network. This "Big Data Wall" represents a challenge for minority language communities on the Internet, organizations, laboratories and companies that compete the GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft). While most of the research effort in text data augmentation aims on the long-term goal of finding end-to-end learning solutions, which is equivalent to "using neural networks to feed neural networks", this engineering work focuses on the use of practical, robust, scalable and easy-to-implement data augmentation pre-processing techniques similar to those that are successful in computer vision. Several text augmentation techniques have been experimented. Some existing ones have been tested for comparison purposes such as noise injection or the use of regular expressions. Others are modified or improved techniques like lexical replacement. Finally more innovative ones, such as the generation of paraphrases using back-translation or by the transformation of syntactic trees, are based on robust, scalable, and easy-to-use NLP Cloud APIs. All the text augmentation techniques studied, with an amplification factor of only 5, increased the accuracy of the results in a range of 4.3% to 21.6%, with significant statistical fluctuations, on a standardized task of text polarity prediction. Some standard deep neural network architectures were tested: the multilayer perceptron (MLP), the long short-term memory recurrent network (LSTM) and the bidirectional LSTM (biLSTM). Classical XGBoost algorithm has been tested with up to 2.5% improvements.
Sentence-wise Smooth Regularization for Sequence to Sequence Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

Maximum-likelihood estimation (MLE) is widely used in sequence to sequence tasks for model training. It uniformly treats the generation/prediction of each target token as multi-class classification, and yields non-smooth prediction probabilities: in a target sequence, some tokens are predicted with small probabilities while other tokens are with large probabilities. According to our empirical study, we find that the non-smoothness of the probabilities results in low quality of generated sequences. In this paper, we propose a sentence-wise regularization method which aims to output smooth prediction probabilities for all the tokens in the target sequence. Our proposed method can automatically adjust the weights and gradients of each token in one sentence to ensure the predictions in a sequence uniformly well. Experiments on three neural machine translation tasks and one text summarization task show that our method outperforms conventional MLE loss on all these tasks and achieves promising BLEU scores on WMT14 English-German and WMT17 Chinese-English translation task.
Lévy Flight Foraging Hypothesis-based Autonomous Memoryless Search Under Sparse Rewards
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2018
Year: 2018

Autonomous robots are commonly tasked with the problem of area exploration and search for certain targets or artifacts of interest to be tracked. Traditionally, the problem formulation considered is that of complete search and thus - ideally - identification of all targets of interest. An important problem however which is not often addressed is that of time-efficient memoryless search under sparse rewards that may be worth visited any number of items. In this paper we specifically address the largely understudied problem of optimizing the "time-of-arrival" or "time-of-detection" to robotically search for sparsely distributed rewards (detect targets of interest) within large-scale environments and subject to memoryless exploration. At the core of the proposed solution is the fact that a search-based Lévy walk consisting of a constant velocity search following a Lévy flight path is optimal for searching sparse and randomly distributed target regions in the lack of map memory. A set of results accompany the presentation of the method, demonstrate its properties and justify the purpose of its use towards large-scale area exploration autonomy.
Analysis of Location Data Leakage in the Internet Traffic of Android-based Mobile Devices
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

In recent years we have witnessed a shift towards personalized, context-based applications and services for mobile device users. A key component of many of these services is the ability to infer the current location and predict the future location of users based on location sensors embedded in the devices. Such knowledge enables service providers to present relevant and timely offers to their users and better manage traffic congestion control, thus increasing customer satisfaction and engagement. However, such services suffer from location data leakage which has become one of today's most concerning privacy issues for smartphone users. In this paper we focus specifically on location data that is exposed by Android applications via Internet network traffic in plaintext (i.e., without encryption) without the user's awareness. We present an empirical evaluation, involving the network traffic of real mobile device users, aimed at: (1) measuring the extent of location data leakage in the Internet traffic of Android-based smartphone devices; and (2) understanding the value of this data by inferring users' points of interests (POIs). This was achieved by analyzing the Internet traffic recorded from the smartphones of a group of 71 participants for an average period of 37 days. We also propose a procedure for mining and filtering location data from raw network traffic and utilize geolocation clustering methods to infer users' POIs. The key findings of this research center on the extent of this phenomenon in terms of both ubiquity and severity; we found that over 85\% of devices of users are leaking location data, and the exposure rate of users' POIs, derived from the relatively sparse leakage indicators, is around 61%.
Robust Point Light Source Estimation Using Differentiable Rendering
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Illumination estimation is often used in mixed reality to re-render a scene from another point of view, to change the color/texture of an object, or to insert a virtual object consistently lit into a real video or photograph. Specifically, the estimation of a point light source is required for the shadows cast by the inserted object to be consistent with the real scene. We tackle the problem of illumination retrieval given an RGBD image of the scene as an inverse problem: we aim to find the illumination that minimizes the photometric error between the rendered image and the observation. In particular we propose a novel differentiable renderer based on the Blinn-Phong model with cast shadows. We compare our differentiable renderer to state-of-the-art methods and demonstrate its robustness to an incorrect reflectance estimation.
Automatic individual pig detection and tracking in surveillance videos
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Individual pig detection and tracking is an important requirement in many video-based pig monitoring applications. However, it still remains a challenging task in complex scenes, due to problems of light fluctuation, similar appearances of pigs, shape deformations and occlusions. To tackle these problems, we propose a robust real time multiple pig detection and tracking method which does not require manual marking or physical identification of the pigs, and works under both daylight and infrared light conditions. Our method couples a CNN-based detector and a correlation filter-based tracker via a novel hierarchical data association algorithm. The detector gains the best accuracy/speed trade-off by using the features derived from multiple layers at different scales in a one-stage prediction network. We define a tag-box for each pig as the tracking target, and the multiple object tracking is conducted in a key-points tracking manner using learned correlation filters. Under challenging conditions, the tracking failures are modelled based on the relations between responses of detector and tracker, and the data association algorithm allows the detection hypotheses to be refined, meanwhile the drifted tracks can be corrected by probing the tracking failures followed by the re-initialization of tracking. As a result, the optimal tracklets can sequentially grow with on-line refined detections, and tracking fragments are correctly integrated into respective tracks while keeping the original identifications. Experiments with a dataset captured from a commercial farm show that our method can robustly detect and track multiple pigs under challenging conditions. The promising performance of the proposed method also demonstrates a feasibility of long-term individual pig tracking in a complex environment and thus promises a commercial potential.
CFUN: Combining Faster R-CNN and U-net Network for Efficient Whole Heart Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we propose a novel heart segmentation pipeline Combining Faster R-CNN and U-net Network (CFUN). Due to Faster R-CNN's precise localization ability and U-net's powerful segmentation ability, CFUN needs only one-step detection and segmentation inference to get the whole heart segmentation result, obtaining good results with significantly reduced computational cost. Besides, CFUN adopts a new loss function based on edge information named 3D Edge-loss as an auxiliary loss to accelerate the convergence of training and improve the segmentation results. Extensive experiments on the public dataset show that CFUN exhibits competitive segmentation performance in a sharply reduced inference time. Our source code and the model are publicly available at https://github.com/Wuziyi616/CFUN.
Enhancing Selection Hyper-heuristics via Feature Transformations
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

Hyper-heuristics are a novel tool. They deal with complex optimization problems where standalone solvers exhibit varied performance. Among such a tool reside selection hyper-heuristics. By combining the strengths of each solver, this kind of hyper-heuristic offers a more robust tool. However, their effectiveness is highly dependent on the 'features' used to link them with the problem that is being solved. Aiming at enhancing selection hyper-heuristics, in this paper we propose two types of transformation: explicit and implicit. The first one directly changes the distribution of critical points within the feature domain while using a Euclidean distance to measure proximity. The second one operates indirectly by preserving the distribution of critical points but changing the distance metric through a kernel function. We focus on analyzing the effect of each kind of transformation, and of their combinations. We test our ideas in the domain of constraint satisfaction problems because of their popularity and many practical applications. In this work, we compare the performance of our proposals against those of previously published data. Furthermore, we expand on previous research by increasing the number of analyzed features. We found that, by incorporating transformations into the model of selection hyper-heuristics, overall performance can be improved, yielding more stable results. However, combining implicit and explicit transformations was not as fruitful. Additionally, we ran some confirmatory tests on the domain of knapsack problems. Again, we observed improved stability, leading to the generation of hyper-heuristics whose profit had a standard deviation between 20% and 30% smaller.
Estimating Position Bias without Intrusive Interventions
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2018
Year: 2018

Presentation bias is one of the key challenges when learning from implicit feedback in search engines, as it confounds the relevance signal. While it was recently shown how counterfactual learning-to-rank (LTR) approaches \cite{Joachims/etal/17a} can provably overcome presentation bias when observation propensities are known, it remains to show how to effectively estimate these propensities. In this paper, we propose the first method for producing consistent propensity estimates without manual relevance judgments, disruptive interventions, or restrictive relevance modeling assumptions. First, we show how to harvest a specific type of intervention data from historic feedback logs of multiple different ranking functions, and show that this data is sufficient for consistent propensity estimation in the position-based model. Second, we propose a new extremum estimator that makes effective use of this data. In an empirical evaluation, we find that the new estimator provides superior propensity estimates in two real-world systems -- Arxiv Full-text Search and Google Drive Search. Beyond these two points, we find that the method is robust to a wide range of settings in simulation studies.