OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Mammography Assessment using Multi-Scale Deep Classifiers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Applying deep learning methods to mammography assessment has remained a challenging topic. Dense noise with sparse expressions, mega-pixel raw data resolution, lack of diverse examples have all been factors affecting performance. The lack of pixel-level ground truths have especially limited segmentation methods in pushing beyond approximately bounding regions. We propose a classification approach grounded in high performance tissue assessment as an alternative to all-in-one localization and assessment models that is also capable of pinpointing the causal pixels. First, the objective of the mammography assessment task is formalized in the context of local tissue classifiers. Then, the accuracy of a convolutional neural net is evaluated on classifying patches of tissue with suspicious findings at varying scales, where highest obtained AUC is above $0.9$. The local evaluations of one such expert tissue classifier is used to augment the results of a heatmap regression model and additionally recover the exact causal regions at high resolution as a saliency image suitable for clinical settings.
Robust Text-to-SQL Generation with Execution-Guided Decoding
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

We consider the problem of neural semantic parsing, which translates natural language questions into executable SQL queries. We introduce a new mechanism, execution guidance, to leverage the semantics of SQL. It detects and excludes faulty programs during the decoding procedure by conditioning on the execution of partially generated program. The mechanism can be used with any autoregressive generative model, which we demonstrate on four state-of-the-art recurrent or template-based semantic parsing models. We demonstrate that execution guidance universally improves model performance on various text-to-SQL datasets with different scales and query complexity: WikiSQL, ATIS, and GeoQuery. As a result, we achieve new state-of-the-art execution accuracy of 83.8% on WikiSQL.
The importance and need for system monitoring and analysis in HPC operations and research
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

In this work, system monitoring and analysis are discussed in terms of their significance and benefits for operations and research in the field of high-performance computing (HPC). HPC systems deliver unique insights to computational scientists from different disciplines. It is argued that research in HPC is also computational in nature, given the massive amounts of monitoring data collected at various levels of an HPC system. The vision of a comprehensive system model developed based on holistic monitoring and analysis is also presented. The goal and expected outcome of such a model is an improved understanding of the intricate interactions between today's software and hardware, and their diverse usage patterns. The associated modeling, monitoring, and analysis challenges are reviewed and discussed. The envisioned comprehensive system model will provide the ability to design future systems that are better understood before use, easier to maintain and monitor, more efficient, more reliable, and, therefore, more productive. The paper is concluded with a number of recommendations towards realizing the envisioned system model.
A new ultrasound despeckling method through adaptive threshold
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

An efficient despeckling method using a quantum-inspired adaptive threshold function is presented for reducing noise of ultrasound images. In the first step, the ultrasound image is decorrelated by an spectrum equalization procedure due to the fact that speckle noise is neither Gaussian nor white. In fact, a linear filter is exploited to flatten the power spectral density (PSD) of the ultrasound image. Then, the proposed method shrinks complex wavelet coefficients based on the quantum-inspired adaptive threshold function. The proposed approach has been used to denoise both real and simulated data sets and compare with other widely adopted techniques. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has a competitive performance to remove speckle noise and can preserve details and textures of medical ultrasound images.
The CodRep Machine Learning on Source Code Competition
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2018
Year: 2018

CodRep is a machine learning competition on source code data. It is carefully designed so that anybody can enter the competition, whether professional researchers, students or independent scholars, without specific knowledge in machine learning or program analysis. In particular, it aims at being a common playground on which the machine learning and the software engineering research communities can interact. The competition has started on April 14th 2018 and has ended on October 14th 2018. The CodRep data is hosted at https://github.com/KTH/CodRep-competition/.
FHIRChain: Applying Blockchain to Securely and Scalably Share Clinical Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2018
Year: 2018

Secure and scalable data sharing is essential for collaborative clinical decision making. Conventional clinical data efforts are often siloed, however, which creates barriers to efficient information exchange and impedes effective treatment decision made for patients. This paper provides four contributions to the study of applying blockchain technology to clinical data sharing in the context of technical requirements defined in the "Shared Nationwide Interoperability Roadmap" from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC). First, we analyze the ONC requirements and their implications for blockchain-based systems. Second, we present FHIRChain, which is a blockchain-based architecture designed to meet ONC requirements by encapsulating the HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard for shared clinical data. Third, we demonstrate a FHIRChain-based decentralized app using digital health identities to authenticate participants in a case study of collaborative decision making for remote cancer care. Fourth, we highlight key lessons learned from our case study.
A Comparative Study on using Principle Component Analysis with Different Text Classifiers
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2018
Year: 2018

Text categorization (TC) is the task of automatically organizing a set of documents into a set of pre-defined categories. Over the last few years, increased attention has been paid to the use of documents in digital form and this makes text categorization becomes a challenging issue. The most significant problem of text categorization is its huge number of features. Most of these features are redundant, noisy and irrelevant that cause over fitting with most of the classifiers. Hence, feature extraction is an important step to improve the overall accuracy and the performance of the text classifiers. In this paper, we will provide an overview of using principle component analysis (PCA) as a feature extraction with various classifiers. It was observed that the performance rate of the classifiers after using PCA to reduce the dimension of data improved. Experiments are conducted on three UCI data sets, Classic03, CNAE-9 and DBWorld e-mails. We compare the classification performance results of using PCA with popular and well-known text classifiers. Results show that using PCA encouragingly enhances classification performance on most of the classifiers.
Pooling Pyramid Network for Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

We'd like to share a simple tweak of Single Shot Multibox Detector (SSD) family of detectors, which is effective in reducing model size while maintaining the same quality. We share box predictors across all scales, and replace convolution between scales with max pooling. This has two advantages over vanilla SSD: (1) it avoids score miscalibration across scales; (2) the shared predictor sees the training data over all scales. Since we reduce the number of predictors to one, and trim all convolutions between them, model size is significantly smaller. We empirically show that these changes do not hurt model quality compared to vanilla SSD.
LTL Store: Repository of LTL formulae from literature and case studies
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2018
Year: 2018

This continuously extended technical report collects and compares commonly used formulae from the literature and provides them in a machine readable way.
Data Mining in Scientometrics: usage analysis for academic publications
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2018
Year: 2018

We perform a statistical analysis of scientific-publication data with a goal to provide quantitative analysis of scientific process. Such an investigation belongs to the newly established field of scientometrics: a branch of the general science of science that covers all quantitative methods to analyze science and research process. As a case study we consider download and citation statistics of the journal `Europhysics Letters' (EPL), as Europe's flagship letters journal of broad interest to the physics community. While citations are usually considered as an indicator of academic impact, downloads reflect rather the level of attractiveness or popularity of a publication. We discuss peculiarities of both processes and correlations between them.
HDFD --- A High Deformation Facial Dynamics Benchmark for Evaluation of Non-Rigid Surface Registration and Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Objects that undergo non-rigid deformation are common in the real world. A typical and challenging example is the human faces. While various techniques have been developed for deformable shape registration and classification, benchmarks with detailed labels and landmarks suitable for evaluating such techniques are still limited. In this paper, we present a novel facial dynamic dataset HDFD which addresses the gap of existing datasets, including 4D funny faces with substantial non-isometric deformation, and 4D visual-audio faces of spoken phrases in a minority language (Welsh). Both datasets are captured from 21 participants. The sequences are manually landmarked, with the spoken phrases further rated by a Welsh expert for level of fluency. These are useful for quantitative evaluation of both registration and classification tasks. We further develop a methodology to evaluate several recent non-rigid surface registration techniques, using our dynamic sequences as test cases. The study demonstrates the significance and usefulness of our new dataset --- a challenging benchmark dataset for future techniques.
Talk the Walk: Navigating New York City through Grounded Dialogue
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

We introduce "Talk The Walk", the first large-scale dialogue dataset grounded in action and perception. The task involves two agents (a "guide" and a "tourist") that communicate via natural language in order to achieve a common goal: having the tourist navigate to a given target location. The task and dataset, which are described in detail, are challenging and their full solution is an open problem that we pose to the community. We (i) focus on the task of tourist localization and develop the novel Masked Attention for Spatial Convolutions (MASC) mechanism that allows for grounding tourist utterances into the guide's map, (ii) show it yields significant improvements for both emergent and natural language communication, and (iii) using this method, we establish non-trivial baselines on the full task.
An Attention Model for group-level emotion recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper we propose a new approach for classifying the global emotion of images containing groups of people. To achieve this task, we consider two different and complementary sources of information: i) a global representation of the entire image (ii) a local representation where only faces are considered. While the global representation of the image is learned with a convolutional neural network (CNN), the local representation is obtained by merging face features through an attention mechanism. The two representations are first learned independently with two separate CNN branches and then fused through concatenation in order to obtain the final group-emotion classifier. For our submission to the EmotiW 2018 group-level emotion recognition challenge, we combine several variations of the proposed model into an ensemble, obtaining a final accuracy of 64.83% on the test set and ranking 4th among all challenge participants.
A New Variational Model for Binary Classification in the Supervised Learning Context
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

We examine the supervised learning problem in its continuous setting and give a general optimality condition through techniques of functional analysis and the calculus of variations. This enables us to solve the optimality condition for the desired function u numerically and make several comparisons with other widely utilized supervised learning models. We employ the accuracy and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve as metrics of the performance. Finally, 3 analyses are conducted based on these two mentioned metrics where we compare the models and make conclusions to determine whether or not our method is competitive.
Easing Embedding Learning by Comprehensive Transcription of Heterogeneous Information Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2018
Year: 2018

Heterogeneous information networks (HINs) are ubiquitous in real-world applications. In the meantime, network embedding has emerged as a convenient tool to mine and learn from networked data. As a result, it is of interest to develop HIN embedding methods. However, the heterogeneity in HINs introduces not only rich information but also potentially incompatible semantics, which poses special challenges to embedding learning in HINs. With the intention to preserve the rich yet potentially incompatible information in HIN embedding, we propose to study the problem of comprehensive transcription of heterogeneous information networks. The comprehensive transcription of HINs also provides an easy-to-use approach to unleash the power of HINs, since it requires no additional supervision, expertise, or feature engineering. To cope with the challenges in the comprehensive transcription of HINs, we propose the HEER algorithm, which embeds HINs via edge representations that are further coupled with properly-learned heterogeneous metrics. To corroborate the efficacy of HEER, we conducted experiments on two large-scale real-words datasets with an edge reconstruction task and multiple case studies. Experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed HEER model and the utility of edge representations and heterogeneous metrics. The code and data are available at https://github.com/GentleZhu/HEER.
Recovering affine features from orientation- and scale-invariant ones
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

An approach is proposed for recovering affine correspondences (ACs) from orientation- and scale-invariant, e.g. SIFT, features. The method calculates the affine parameters consistent with a pre-estimated epipolar geometry from the point coordinates and the scales and rotations which the feature detector obtains. The closed-form solution is given as the roots of a quadratic polynomial equation, thus having two possible real candidates and fast procedure, i.e. <1 millisecond. It is shown, as a possible application, that using the proposed algorithm allows us to estimate a homography for every single correspondence independently. It is validated both in our synthetic environment and on publicly available real world datasets, that the proposed technique leads to accurate ACs. Also, the estimated homographies have similar accuracy to what the state-of-the-art methods obtain, but due to requiring only a single correspondence, the robust estimation, e.g. by locally optimized RANSAC, is an order of magnitude faster.
A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Jointly Adapt Vehicular Communications and Planning for Optimized Driving
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

Our premise is that autonomous vehicles must optimize communications and motion planning jointly. Specifically, a vehicle must adapt its motion plan staying cognizant of communications rate related constraints and adapt the use of communications while being cognizant of motion planning related restrictions that may be imposed by the on-road environment. To this end, we formulate a reinforcement learning problem wherein an autonomous vehicle jointly chooses (a) a motion planning action that executes on-road and (b) a communications action of querying sensed information from the infrastructure. The goal is to optimize the driving utility of the autonomous vehicle. We apply the Q-learning algorithm to make the vehicle learn the optimal policy, which makes the optimal choice of planning and communications actions at any given time. We demonstrate the ability of the optimal policy to smartly adapt communications and planning actions, while achieving large driving utilities, using simulations.
Deep Underwater Image Enhancement
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

In an underwater scene, wavelength-dependent light absorption and scattering degrade the visibility of images, causing low contrast and distorted color casts. To address this problem, we propose a convolutional neural network based image enhancement model, i.e., UWCNN, which is trained efficiently using a synthetic underwater image database. Unlike the existing works that require the parameters of underwater imaging model estimation or impose inflexible frameworks applicable only for specific scenes, our model directly reconstructs the clear latent underwater image by leveraging on an automatic end-to-end and data-driven training mechanism. Compliant with underwater imaging models and optical properties of underwater scenes, we first synthesize ten different marine image databases. Then, we separately train multiple UWCNN models for each underwater image formation type. Experimental results on real-world and synthetic underwater images demonstrate that the presented method generalizes well on different underwater scenes and outperforms the existing methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. Besides, we conduct an ablation study to demonstrate the effect of each component in our network.
Soft-TTL: Time-Varying Fractional Caching
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

Standard Time-to-Live (TTL) cache management prescribes the storage of entire files, or possibly fractions thereof, for a given amount of time after a request. As a generalization of this approach, this work proposes the storage of a time-varying, diminishing, fraction of a requested file. Accordingly, the cache progressively evicts parts of the file over an interval of time following a request. The strategy, which is referred to as soft-TTL, is justified by the fact that traffic traces are often characterized by arrival processes that display a decreasing, but non-negligible, probability of observing a request as the time elapsed since the last request increases. An optimization-based analysis of soft-TTL is presented, demonstrating the important role played by the hazard function of the inter-arrival request process, which measures the likelihood of observing a request as a function of the time since the most recent request.
A strategic framework for identifying the critical factors of 4G technology diffusion in I.R. Iran - A Fuzzy DEMATEL approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2018
Year: 2018

As the most prominent representative of 4G, Long term evolution (LTE) technology has become a focal point for mobile network operators all over the world. However, although Iranian main operators like MCI and Irancell have hugely invested on deployment of this technology, its diffusion has been very slow with a penetration rate of 0.06 at the end of spring 2017. Nevertheless, if this rate doesn't increase, it will yield some negative unintended consequences for telecom operators such as (I) Failure to provide a large number of high quality services (II) Inability to compete with OTT technologies (III) Loss of many revenue opportunities (IV) Prolongation of payback period and (V) The lack of technological integrability with fifth generation networks (5G) and loss of many IOT opportunities. Through discussing the literature of technology adoption and diffusion both generally and specifically, identifying the major limitations of these studies and establishing a comprehensive factor set based on four major groups of (I) mobile handset and operators-related factors (II) subscribers-related biological factors, (III) subscribers-related perceptual factors and (IV) subscribers-related contextual factors, a novel fuzzy DEMATEL model has been developed by which all ICT policy makers can not only get a clear knowledge of factors influencing technology adoption but also know the critical success factors (CSFs) influencing Iranians' mindsets towards LTE adoption. Therefore, they can make effective and actionable policies to scale up LTE diffusion or other ICT-related technologies throughout the society.
An Empirical Approach For Probing the Definiteness of Kernels
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Models like support vector machines or Gaussian process regression often require positive semi-definite kernels. These kernels may be based on distance functions. While definiteness is proven for common distances and kernels, a proof for a new kernel may require too much time and effort for users who simply aim at practical usage. Furthermore, designing definite distances or kernels may be equally intricate. Finally, models can be enabled to use indefinite kernels. This may deteriorate the accuracy or computational cost of the model. Hence, an efficient method to determine definiteness is required. We propose an empirical approach. We show that sampling as well as optimization with an evolutionary algorithm may be employed to determine definiteness. We provide a proof-of-concept with 16 different distance measures for permutations. Our approach allows to disprove definiteness if a respective counter-example is found. It can also provide an estimate of how likely it is to obtain indefinite kernel matrices. This provides a simple, efficient tool to decide whether additional effort should be spent on designing/selecting a more suitable kernel or algorithm.
Enriching Knowledge Bases with Counting Quantifiers
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

Information extraction traditionally focuses on extracting relations between identifiable entities, such as <Monterey, locatedIn, California>. Yet, texts often also contain Counting information, stating that a subject is in a specific relation with a number of objects, without mentioning the objects themselves, for example, "California is divided into 58 counties". Such counting quantifiers can help in a variety of tasks such as query answering or knowledge base curation, but are neglected by prior work. This paper develops the first full-fledged system for extracting counting information from text, called CINEX. We employ distant supervision using fact counts from a knowledge base as training seeds, and develop novel techniques for dealing with several challenges: (i) non-maximal training seeds due to the incompleteness of knowledge bases, (ii) sparse and skewed observations in text sources, and (iii) high diversity of linguistic patterns. Experiments with five human-evaluated relations show that CINEX can achieve 60% average precision for extracting counting information. In a large-scale experiment, we demonstrate the potential for knowledge base enrichment by applying CINEX to 2,474 frequent relations in Wikidata. CINEX can assert the existence of 2.5M facts for 110 distinct relations, which is 28% more than the existing Wikidata facts for these relations.