OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Control of nonlinear, complex and black-boxed greenhouse system with reinforcement learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Modern control theories such as systems engineering approaches try to solve nonlinear system problems by revelation of causal relationship or co-relationship among the components; most of those approaches focus on control of sophisticatedly modeled white-boxed systems. We suggest an application of actor-critic reinforcement learning approach to control a nonlinear, complex and black-boxed system. We demonstrated this approach on artificial green-house environment simulator all of whose control inputs have several side effects so human cannot figure out how to control this system easily. Our approach succeeded to maintain the circumstance at least 20 times longer than PID and Deep Q Learning.
EVO* 2019 -- Late-Breaking Abstracts Volume
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2019
Year: 2019

This volume contains the Late-Breaking Abstracts submitted to the EVO* 2019 Conference, that took place in Leipzig, from 24 to 26 of April. These papers where presented as short talks and also at the poster session of the conference together with other regular submissions. All of them present ongoing research and preliminary results investigating on the application of different approaches of Evolutionary Computation to different problems, most of them real world ones.
Model-Free Unsupervised Learning for Optimization Problems with Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

In many optimization problems in wireless communications, the expressions of objective function or constraints are hard or even impossible to derive, which makes the solutions difficult to find. In this paper, we propose a model-free learning framework to solve constrained optimization problems without the supervision of the optimal solution. Neural networks are used respectively for parameterizing the function to be optimized, parameterizing the Lagrange multiplier associated with instantaneous constraints, and approximating the unknown objective function or constraints. We provide learning algorithms to train all the neural networks simultaneously, and reveal the connections of the proposed framework with reinforcement learning. Numerical and simulation results validate the proposed framework and demonstrate the efficiency of model-free learning by taking power control problem as an example.
A Robust Algorithm for Sniffing BLE Long-Lived Connections in Real-time
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) has become an intrinsic wireless technology for the Internet of Things (IoT). With the proliferation of BLE-embedded IoT devices, it is important to study the security and privacy implications of BLE. The forefront attack to BLE devices is the wireless sniffing attack, which would lead to more detrimental threats like jamming, encryption cracking or system penetration. Existing sniffing attacks are based on the correct detection of BLE connection initiation state, but they become ineffective for BLE long-lived connections. In this paper, we focus on the adversary setting with a low-cost single radio and develop a suite of real-time algorithms to determine the key parameters necessary to follow and sniff a BLE connection in the connected state. We implement our algorithms in the open source platform -Ubertooth One and evaluate its performance in terms of sniffing overhead and accuracy. By comparing with state-of-the-art schemes, experimental results show that our sniffer achieves much higher sniffing accuracy (over 80\%) and better stability to BLE operational dynamics.
Towards Pure End-to-End Learning for Recognizing Multiple Text Sequences from an Image
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Here we address a challenging problem: recognizing multiple text sequences from an image by pure end-to-end learning. It is twofold: 1) Multiple text sequences recognition. Each image may contain multiple text sequences of different content, location and orientation, and we try to recognize all the text sequences contained in the image. 2) Pure end-to-end (PEE) learning.We solve the problem in a pure end-to-end learning way where each training image is labeled by only text transcripts of all contained sequences, without any geometric annotations. Most existing works recognize multiple text sequences from an image in a non-end-to-end (NEE) or quasi-end-to-end (QEE) way, in which each image is trained with both text transcripts and text locations.Only recently, a PEE method was proposed to recognize text sequences from an image where the text sequence was split to several lines in the image. However, it cannot be directly applied to recognizing multiple text sequences from an image. So in this paper, we propose a pure end-to-end learning method to recognize multiple text sequences from an image. Our method directly learns multiple sequences of probability distribution conditioned on each input image, and outputs multiple text transcripts with a well-designed decoding strategy.To evaluate the proposed method, we constructed several datasets mainly based on an existing public dataset andtwo real application scenarios. Experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively recognize multiple text sequences from images, and outperforms CTC-based and attention-based baseline methods.
An artifcial life approach to studying niche differentiation in soundscape ecology
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2019
Year: 2019

Artificial life simulations are an important tool in the study of ecological phenomena that can be difficult to examine directly in natural environments. Recent work has established the soundscape as an ecologically important resource and it has been proposed that the differentiation of animal vocalizations within a soundscape is driven by the imperative of intraspecies communication. The experiments in this paper test that hypothesis in a simulated soundscape in order to verify the feasibility of intraspecies communication as a driver of acoustic niche differentiation. The impact of intraspecies communication is found to be a significant factor in the division of a soundscape's frequency spectrum when compared to simulations where the need to identify signals from conspecifics does not drive the evolution of signalling. The method of simulating the effects of interspecies interactions on the soundscape is positioned as a tool for developing artificial life agents that can inhabit and interact with physical ecosystems and soundscapes.
2D and 3D Segmentation of uncertain local collagen fiber orientations in SHG microscopy
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Collagen fiber orientations in bones, visible with Second Harmonic Generation (SHG) microscopy, represent the inner structure and its alteration due to influences like cancer. While analyses of these orientations are valuable for medical research, it is not feasible to analyze the needed large amounts of local orientations manually. Since we have uncertain borders for these local orientations only rough regions can be segmented instead of a pixel-wise segmentation. We analyze the effect of these uncertain borders on human performance by a user study. Furthermore, we compare a variety of 2D and 3D methods such as classical approaches like Fourier analysis with state-of-the-art deep neural networks for the classification of local fiber orientations. We present a general way to use pretrained 2D weights in 3D neural networks, such as Inception-ResNet-3D a 3D extension of Inception-ResNet-v2. In a 10 fold cross-validation our two stage segmentation based on Inception-ResNet-3D and transferred 2D ImageNet weights achieves a human comparable accuracy.
Safe Augmentation: Learning Task-Specific Transformations from Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Data augmentation is widely used as a part of the training process applied to deep learning models, especially in the computer vision domain. Currently, common data augmentation techniques are designed manually. Therefore they require expert knowledge and time. Moreover, augmentations are dataset-specific, and the optimal augmentations set on a specific dataset has limited transferability to others. We present a simple and explainable method called $\textbf{Safe Augmentation}$ that can learn task-specific data augmentation techniques that do not change the data distribution and improve the generalization of the model. We propose to use safe augmentation in two ways: for model fine-tuning and along with other augmentation techniques. Our method is model-agnostic, easy to implement, and achieves better accuracy on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN, Tiny ImageNet, and Cityscapes datasets comparing to baseline augmentation techniques. The code is available at $\href{https://github.com/Irynei/SafeAugmentation}{https://github.com/Irynei/SafeAugmentation}$.
EmoCo: Visual Analysis of Emotion Coherence in Presentation Videos
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Emotions play a key role in human communication and public presentations. Human emotions are usually expressed through multiple modalities. Therefore, exploring multimodal emotions and their coherence is of great value for understanding emotional expressions in presentations and improving presentation skills. However, manually watching and studying presentation videos is often tedious and time-consuming. There is a lack of tool support to help conduct an efficient and in-depth multi-level analysis. Thus, in this paper, we introduce EmoCo, an interactive visual analytics system to facilitate efficient analysis of emotion coherence across facial, text, and audio modalities in presentation videos. Our visualization system features a channel coherence view and a sentence clustering view that together enable users to obtain a quick overview of emotion coherence and its temporal evolution. In addition, a detail view and word view enable detailed exploration and comparison from the sentence level and word level, respectively. We thoroughly evaluate the proposed system and visualization techniques through two usage scenarios based on TED Talk videos and interviews with two domain experts. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our system in gaining insights into emotion coherence in presentations.
Attention Filtering for Multi-person Spatiotemporal Action Detection on Deep Two-Stream CNN Architectures
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Action detection and recognition tasks have been the target of much focus in the computer vision community due to their many applications, namely, security, robotics and recommendation systems. Recently, datasets like AVA, provide multi-person, multi-label, spatiotemporal action detection and recognition challenges. Being unable to discern which portions of the input to use for classification is a limitation of two-stream CNN approaches, once the vision task involves several people with several labels. We address this limitation and improve the state-of-the-art performance of two-stream CNNs. In this paper we present four contributions: our fovea attention filtering that highlights targets for classification without discarding background; a generalized binary loss function designed for the AVA dataset; miniAVA, a partition of AVA that maintains temporal continuity and class distribution with only one tenth of the dataset size; and ablation studies on alternative attention filters. Our method, using fovea attention filtering and our generalized binary loss, achieves a relative video mAP improvement of 20% over the two-stream baseline in AVA, and is competitive with the state-of-the-art in the UCF101-24. We also show a relative video mAP improvement of 12.6% when using our generalized binary loss over the standard sum-of-sigmoids.
Tracking Holistic Object Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Recent advances in visual tracking are based on siamese feature extractors and template matching. For this category of trackers, latest research focuses on better feature embeddings and similarity measures. In this work, we focus on building holistic object representations for tracking. We propose a framework that is designed to be used on top of previous trackers without any need for further training of the siamese network. The framework leverages the idea of obtaining additional object templates during the tracking process. Since the number of stored templates is limited, our method only keeps the most diverse ones. We achieve this by providing a new diversity measure in the space of siamese features. The obtained representation contains information beyond the ground truth object location provided to the system. It is then useful for tracking itself but also for further tasks which require a visual understanding of objects. Strong empirical results on tracking benchmarks indicate that our method can improve the performance and robustness of the underlying trackers while barely reducing their speed. In addition, our method is able to match current state-of-the-art results, while using a simpler and older network architecture and running three times faster.
Unifying Structure Analysis and Surrogate-driven Function Regression for Glaucoma OCT Image Screening
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) imaging plays an important role in glaucoma diagnosis in clinical practice. Early detection and timely treatment can prevent glaucoma patients from permanent vision loss. However, only a dearth of automated methods has been developed based on OCT images for glaucoma study. In this paper, we present a novel framework to effectively classify glaucoma OCT images from normal ones. A semi-supervised learning strategy with smoothness assumption is applied for surrogate assignment of missing function regression labels. Besides, the proposed multi-task learning network is capable of exploring the structure and function relationship from the OCT image and visual field measurement simultaneously, which contributes to classification performance boosting. Essentially, we are the first to unify the structure analysis and function regression for glaucoma screening. It is also worth noting that we build the largest glaucoma OCT image dataset involving 4877 volumes to develop and evaluate the proposed method. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework outperforms the baseline methods and two glaucoma experts by a large margin, achieving 93.2%, 93.2% and 97.8% on accuracy, F1 score and AUC, respectively.
Preterm infants' limb-pose estimation from depth images using convolutional neural networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Preterm infants' limb-pose estimation is a crucial but challenging task, which may improve patients' care and facilitate clinicians in infant's movements monitoring. Work in the literature either provides approaches to whole-body segmentation and tracking, which, however, has poor clinical value, or retrieve a posteriori limb pose from limb segmentation, increasing computational costs and introducing inaccuracy sources. In this paper, we address the problem of limb-pose estimation under a different point of view. We proposed a 2D fully-convolutional neural network for roughly detecting limb joints and joint connections, followed by a regression convolutional neural network for accurate joint and joint-connection position estimation. Joints from the same limb are then connected with a maximum bipartite matching approach. Our analysis does not require any prior modeling of infants' body structure, neither any manual interventions. For developing and testing the proposed approach, we built a dataset of four videos (video length = 90 s) recorded with a depth sensor in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) during the actual clinical practice, achieving median root mean square distance [pixels] of 10.790 (right arm), 10.542 (left arm), 8.294 (right leg), 11.270 (left leg) with respect to the ground-truth limb pose. The idea of estimating limb pose directly from depth images may represent a future paradigm for addressing the problem of preterm-infants' movement monitoring and offer all possible support to clinicians in NICUs.
FingerNet: Pushing The Limits of Fingerprint Recognition Using Convolutional Neural Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Fingerprint recognition has been utilized for cellphone authentication, airport security and beyond. Many different features and algorithms have been proposed to improve fingerprint recognition. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end deep learning framework for fingerprint recognition using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) which can jointly learn the feature representation and perform recognition. We train our model on a large-scale fingerprint recognition dataset, and improve over previous approaches in terms of accuracy. Our proposed model is able to achieve a very high recognition accuracy on a well-known fingerprint dataset. We believe this framework can be widely used for biometrics recognition tasks, making more scalable and accurate systems possible. We have also used a visualization technique to highlight the important areas in an input fingerprint image, that mostly impact the recognition results.
Towards Using Data to Inform Decisions in Agile Software Development: Views of Available Data
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2019
Year: 2019

Software development comprises complex tasks which are performed by humans. It involves problem solving, domain understanding and communication skills as well as knowledge of a broad variety of technologies, architectures, and solution approaches. As such, software development projects include many situations where crucial decisions must be made. Making the appropriate organizational or technical choices for a given software team building a product can make the difference between project success or failure. Software development methods have introduced frameworks and sets of best practices for certain contexts, providing practitioners with established guidelines for these important choices. Current Agile methods employed in modern software development have highlighted the importance of the human factors in software development. These methods rely on short feedback loops and the self-organization of teams to enable collaborative decision making. While Agile methods stress the importance of empirical process control, i.e. relying on data to make decisions, they do not prescribe in detail how this goal should be achieved. In this paper, we describe the types and abstraction levels of data and decisions within modern software development teams and identify the benefits that usage of this data enables. We argue that the principles of data-driven decision making are highly applicable, yet underused, in modern Agile software development.
Deep Learning architectures for generalized immunofluorescence based nuclear image segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Separating and labeling each instance of a nucleus (instance-aware segmentation) is the key challenge in segmenting single cell nuclei on fluorescence microscopy images. Deep Neural Networks can learn the implicit transformation of a nuclear image into a probability map indicating the class membership of each pixel (nucleus or background), but the use of post-processing steps to turn the probability map into a labeled object mask is error-prone. This especially accounts for nuclear images of tissue sections and nuclear images across varying tissue preparations. In this work, we aim to evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art deep learning architectures to segment nuclei in fluorescence images of various tissue origins and sample preparation types without post-processing. We compare architectures that operate on pixel to pixel translation and an architecture that operates on object detection and subsequent locally applied segmentation. In addition, we propose a novel strategy to create artificial images to extend the training set. We evaluate the influence of ground truth annotation quality, image scale and segmentation complexity on segmentation performance. Results show that three out of four deep learning architectures (U-Net, U-Net with ResNet34 backbone, Mask R-CNN) can segment fluorescent nuclear images on most of the sample preparation types and tissue origins with satisfactory segmentation performance. Mask R-CNN, an architecture designed to address instance aware segmentation tasks, outperforms other architectures. Equal nuclear mean size, consistent nuclear annotations and the use of artificially generated images result in overall acceptable precision and recall across different tissues and sample preparation types.
DuTongChuan: Context-aware Translation Model for Simultaneous Interpreting
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we present DuTongChuan, a novel context-aware translation model for simultaneous interpreting. This model allows to constantly read streaming text from the Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) model and simultaneously determine the boundaries of Information Units (IUs) one after another. The detected IU is then translated into a fluent translation with two simple yet effective decoding strategies: partial decoding and context-aware decoding. In practice, by controlling the granularity of IUs and the size of the context, we can get a good trade-off between latency and translation quality easily. Elaborate evaluation from human translators reveals that our system achieves promising translation quality (85.71% for Chinese-English, and 86.36% for English-Chinese), specially in the sense of surprisingly good discourse coherence. According to an End-to-End (speech-to-speech simultaneous interpreting) evaluation, this model presents impressive performance in reducing latency (to less than 3 seconds at most times). Furthermore, we successfully deploy this model in a variety of Baidu's products which have hundreds of millions of users, and we release it as a service in our AI platform.
Runtime QoS service for application-driven adaptation in network computing
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

A distributed application executing on a Network of Workstations (NOW) needs to be resource state aware to possibly adapt itself accordingly in order to keep satisfying the desired Quality of Service (QoS) demands throughout its lifespan. We implemented a QoS service to enable application-driven adaptation for performance and fault tolerance at runtime. The service is associated with lightweight middleware that monitors the state and load of all application entities (e.g., machines, tasks, and logical network links). Moreover, it makes its services available to an application task via an anonymous and simple to use QoS API. We present a Manager-Worker application that uses our fault tolerance QoS API to adapt for Worker faults in order to avoid application deadlock at runtime. Moreover, we show how a dynamic application-level scheduler can easily utilize the QoS API to find efficient schedules. Furthermore, we quantified the overhead of the QoS middleware in various scenarios to demonstrate that it has minor impact on the performance of the application it is servicing.
Kernels on fuzzy sets: an overview
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

This paper introduces the concept of kernels on fuzzy sets as a similarity measure for $[0,1]$-valued functions, a.k.a. \emph{membership functions of fuzzy sets}. We defined the following classes of kernels: the cross product, the intersection, the non-singleton and the distance-based kernels on fuzzy sets. Applicability of those kernels are on machine learning and data science tasks where uncertainty in data has an ontic or epistemistic interpretation.