OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Comparison of Multi-View Learning Strategies for Satellite Image-Based Real Estate Appraisal
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In the house credit process, banks and lenders rely on a fast and accurate estimation of a real estate price to determine the maximum loan value. Real estate appraisal is often based on relational data, capturing the hard facts of the property. Yet, models benefit strongly from including image data, capturing additional soft factors. The combination of the different data types requires a multi-view learning method. Therefore, the question arises which strengths and weaknesses different multi-view learning strategies have. In our study, we test multi-kernel learning, multi-view concatenation and multi-view neural networks on real estate data and satellite images from Asheville, NC. Our results suggest that multi-view learning increases the predictive performance up to 13% in MAE. Multi-view neural networks perform best, however result in intransparent black-box models. For users seeking interpretability, hybrid multi-view neural networks or a boosting strategy are a suitable alternative.
Scaling Migrations and Replications of Virtual Network Functions based on Network Traffic Forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2021
Year: 2021

Migration and replication of virtual network functions (VNFs) are well-known mechanisms to face dynamic resource requests in Internet Service Provider (ISP) edge networks. They are not only used to reallocate resources in carrier networks, but in case of excessive traffic churns also to offloading VNFs to third party cloud providers. We propose to study how traffic forecasting can help to reduce the number of required migrations and replications when the traffic dynamically changes in the network. We analyze and compare three scenarios for the VNF migrations and replications based on: (i) the current observed traffic demands only, (ii) specific maximum traffic demand value observed in the past, or (iii) predictive traffic values. For the prediction of traffic demand values, we use an LSTM model which is proven to be one of the most accurate methods in time series forecasting problems. Based the traffic prediction model, we then use a Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model as well as a greedy algorithm to solve this optimization problem that considers migrations and replications of VNFs. The results show that LSTM-based traffic prediction can reduce the number of migrations up to 45\% when there is enough available resources to allocate replicas, while less cloud-based offloading is required compared to overprovisioning.
Let There be Light: Improved Traffic Surveillance via Detail Preserving Night-to-Day Transfer
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In recent years, image and video surveillance have made considerable progresses to the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) with the help of deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). As one of the state-of-the-art perception approaches, detecting the interested objects in each frame of video surveillance is widely desired by ITS. Currently, object detection shows remarkable efficiency and reliability in standard scenarios such as daytime scenes with favorable illumination conditions. However, in face of adverse conditions such as the nighttime, object detection loses its accuracy significantly. One of the main causes of the problem is the lack of sufficient annotated detection datasets of nighttime scenes. In this paper, we propose a framework to alleviate the accuracy decline when object detection is taken to adverse conditions by using image translation method. We propose to utilize style translation based StyleMix method to acquire pairs of day time image and nighttime image as training data for following nighttime to daytime image translation. To alleviate the detail corruptions caused by Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), we propose to utilize Kernel Prediction Network (KPN) based method to refine the nighttime to daytime image translation. The KPN network is trained with object detection task together to adapt the trained daytime model to nighttime vehicle detection directly. Experiments on vehicle detection verified the accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Optimal Seat Allocation Under Social Distancing Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2021
Year: 2021

The Covid-19 pandemic introduces new challenges and constraints for return to work business planning. We describe a space allocation problem that incorporates social distancing constraints while optimising the number of available safe workspaces in a return to work scenario. We propose and demonstrate a graph based approach that solves the optimisation problem via modelling as a bipartite graph of disconnected components over a graph of constraints. We compare results obtained with a constrained random walk and a linear programming approach.
BikNN: Anomaly Estimation in Bilateral Domains with k-Nearest Neighbors
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, a novel framework for anomaly estimation is proposed. The basic idea behind our method is to reduce the data into a two-dimensional space and then rank each data point in the reduced space. We attempt to estimate the degree of anomaly in both spatial and density domains. Specifically, we transform the data points into a density space and measure the distances in density domain between each point and its k-Nearest Neighbors in spatial domain. Then, an anomaly coordinate system is built by collecting two unilateral anomalies from k-nearest neighbors of each point. Further more, we introduce two schemes to model their correlation and combine them to get the final anomaly score. Experiments performed on the synthetic and real world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method performs well and achieve highest average performance. We also show that the proposed method can provide visualization and classification of the anomalies in a simple manner. Due to the complexity of the anomaly, none of the existing methods can perform best on all benchmark datasets. Our method takes into account both the spatial domain and the density domain and can be adapted to different datasets by adjusting a few parameters manually.
DeepLight: Robust & Unobtrusive Real-time Screen-Camera Communication for Real-World Displays
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

The paper introduces a novel, holistic approach for robust Screen-Camera Communication (SCC), where video content on a screen is visually encoded in a human-imperceptible fashion and decoded by a camera capturing images of such screen content. We first show that state-of-the-art SCC techniques have two key limitations for in-the-wild deployment: (a) the decoding accuracy drops rapidly under even modest screen extraction errors from the captured images, and (b) they generate perceptible flickers on common refresh rate screens even with minimal modulation of pixel intensity. To overcome these challenges, we introduce DeepLight, a system that incorporates machine learning (ML) models in the decoding pipeline to achieve humanly-imperceptible, moderately high SCC rates under diverse real-world conditions. Deep-Light's key innovation is the design of a Deep Neural Network (DNN) based decoder that collectively decodes all the bits spatially encoded in a display frame, without attempting to precisely isolate the pixels associated with each encoded bit. In addition, DeepLight supports imperceptible encoding by selectively modulating the intensity of only the Blue channel, and provides reasonably accurate screen extraction (IoU values >= 83%) by using state-of-the-art object detection DNN pipelines. We show that a fully functional DeepLight system is able to robustly achieve high decoding accuracy (frame error rate < 0.2) and moderately-high data goodput (>=0.95Kbps) using a human-held smartphone camera, even over larger screen-camera distances (approx =2m).
COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy on Social Media: Building a Public Twitter Dataset of Anti-vaccine Content, Vaccine Misinformation and Conspiracies
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2021
Year: 2021

False claims about COVID-19 vaccines can undermine public trust in ongoing vaccination campaigns, thus posing a threat to global public health. Misinformation originating from various sources has been spreading online since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we present a dataset of Twitter posts that exhibit a strong anti-vaccine stance. The dataset consists of two parts: a) a streaming keyword-centered data collection with more than 1.8 million tweets, and b) a historical account-level collection with more than 135 million tweets. The former leverages the Twitter streaming API to follow a set of specific vaccine-related keywords starting from mid-October 2020. The latter consists of all historical tweets of 70K accounts that were engaged in the active spreading of anti-vaccine narratives. We present descriptive analyses showing the volume of activity over time, geographical distributions, topics, news sources, and inferred account political leaning. This dataset can be used in studying anti-vaccine misinformation on social media and enable a better understanding of vaccine hesitancy. In compliance with Twitter's Terms of Service, our anonymized dataset is publicly available at: https://github.com/gmuric/avax-tweets-dataset
The Smoothed Likelihood of Doctrinal Paradox
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2021
Year: 2021

When aggregating logically interconnected judgments from $n$ agents, the result might be inconsistent with the logical connection. This inconsistency is known as the doctrinal paradox, which plays a central role in the field of judgment aggregation. Despite a large body of literature on the worst-case analysis of the doctrinal paradox, little is known about its likelihood under natural statistical models, except for a few i.i.d. distributions [List, 2005]. In this paper, we characterize the likelihood of the doctrinal paradox under a much more general and realistic model called the smoothed social choice framework [Xia, 2020b], where agents' ground truth judgments are arbitrarily correlated while the noises are independent. Our main theorem states that under mild conditions, the smoothed likelihood of the doctrinal paradox is either $0$, $\exp(-Θ(n))$, $Θ(n^{-1/2})$ or $Θ(1)$. This not only answers open questions by List [2005] for i.i.d. distributions but also draws clear lines between situations with frequent and with vanishing paradoxes.
Improved Approximate Rips Filtrations with Shifted Integer Lattices and Cubical Complexes
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2021
Year: 2021

Rips complexes are important structures for analyzing topological features of metric spaces. Unfortunately, generating these complexes is expensive because of a combinatorial explosion in the complex size. For $n$ points in $\mathbb{R}^d$, we present a scheme to construct a $2$-approximation of the filtration of the Rips complex in the $L_\infty$-norm, which extends to a $2d^{0.25}$-approximation in the Euclidean case. The $k$-skeleton of the resulting approximation has a total size of $n2^{O(d\log k +d)}$. The scheme is based on the integer lattice and simplicial complexes based on the barycentric subdivision of the $d$-cube. We extend our result to use cubical complexes in place of simplicial complexes by introducing cubical maps between complexes. We get the same approximation guarantee as the simplicial case, while reducing the total size of the approximation to only $n2^{O(d)}$ (cubical) cells. There are two novel techniques that we use in this paper. The first is the use of acyclic carriers for proving our approximation result. In our application, these are maps which relate the Rips complex and the approximation in a relatively simple manner and greatly reduce the complexity of showing the approximation guarantee. The second technique is what we refer to as scale balancing, which is a simple trick to improve the approximation ratio under certain conditions.
Stochastic Formulation of Causal Digital Twin: Kalman Filter Algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

We provide some basic and sensible definitions of different types of digital twins and recommendations on when and how to use them. Following up on our recent publication of the Learning Causal Digital Twin, this article reports on a stochastic formulation and solution of the problem. Structural Vector Autoregressive Model (SVAR) for Causal estimation is recast as a state-space model. Kalman filter (and smoother) is then employed to estimate causal factors in a system of connected machine bearings. The previous neural network algorithm and Kalman Smoother produced very similar results; however, Kalman Filter/Smoother may show better performance for noisy data from industrial IoT sources.
Unsupervised Representation Learning from Pathology Images with Multi-directional Contrastive Predictive Coding
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Digital pathology tasks have benefited greatly from modern deep learning algorithms. However, their need for large quantities of annotated data has been identified as a key challenge. This need for data can be countered by using unsupervised learning in situations where data are abundant but access to annotations is limited. Feature representations learned from unannotated data using contrastive predictive coding (CPC) have been shown to enable classifiers to obtain state of the art performance from relatively small amounts of annotated computer vision data. We present a modification to the CPC framework for use with digital pathology patches. This is achieved by introducing an alternative mask for building the latent context and using a multi-directional PixelCNN autoregressor. To demonstrate our proposed method we learn feature representations from the Patch Camelyon histology dataset. We show that our proposed modification can yield improved deep classification of histology patches.
Few-Shot Learning by Integrating Spatial and Frequency Representation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Human beings can recognize new objects with only a few labeled examples, however, few-shot learning remains a challenging problem for machine learning systems. Most previous algorithms in few-shot learning only utilize spatial information of the images. In this paper, we propose to integrate the frequency information into the learning model to boost the discrimination ability of the system. We employ Discrete Cosine Transformation (DCT) to generate the frequency representation, then, integrate the features from both the spatial domain and frequency domain for classification. The proposed strategy and its effectiveness are validated with different backbones, datasets, and algorithms. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the frequency information is complementary to the spatial representations in few-shot classification. The classification accuracy is boosted significantly by integrating features from both the spatial and frequency domains in different few-shot learning tasks.
A Stronger Lower Bound on Parametric Minimum Spanning Trees
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2021
Year: 2021

We prove that, for an undirected graph with $n$ vertices and $m$ edges, each labeled with a linear function of a parameter $λ$, the number of different minimum spanning trees obtained as the parameter varies can be $Ω(m\log n)$.
Maximizing the Value of Enterprise Human-Computer Interaction Standards: Strategies and Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2021
Year: 2021

Human factors/ergonomics (HFE) standards are not only a useful reference for experienced HFE practitioners but can also provide guidance for organizations that are inexperienced in HFE design practice. HFE standards can give credibility to the value of introducing user centered methods. As computing technologies advance, knowledge of HFE has spread to the computing related work, and the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) has grown rapidly. Accordingly, HCI standards have evolved for guiding practice. There is great deal of literature concerned with the development and practice of international standards (e.g., International Organization for Standardization/ISO) and national (e.g., The American National Standards Institute/ANSI) HFE or HCI standards, but little on the practice of HCI standards at lower levels, such as at the level of enterprise. This chapter will focus on the practice of HCI standards there. It intends to assess the challenges of enterprise HCI standards from strategy, development, and governance perspectives. Specifically, we discuss the practices at Intel Corporation, a high-tech enterprise environment.
Indoor positioning systems: Smart fusion of a variety of sensor readings
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

Robust and versatile localization techniques are key to the success of the next industrial revolution. Yet, it is uncertain which combination of sensors will be the most robust and valuable. Thus, we present a versatile and reproducible measurement system incorporating a manifold number of state-of-the art sensors to compare and fuse the raw input data. It is shown that some techniques show very good results on the same scenario and data-set, but fall apart on translating to a slightly different scenario. In general we show that the vanilla approach to fuse the raw data achieves reasonable results in the generalization domain, demonstrating that radiofrequency (RF) localization techniques in combination with an inertial measurement unit (IMU) could result in a very robust and promising candidate for solving this challenging task.
Learning a Skill-sequence-dependent Policy for Long-horizon Manipulation Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

In recent years, the robotics community has made substantial progress in robotic manipulation using deep reinforcement learning (RL). Effectively learning of long-horizon tasks remains a challenging topic. Typical RL-based methods approximate long-horizon tasks as Markov decision processes and only consider current observation (images or other sensor information) as input state. However, such approximation ignores the fact that skill-sequence also plays a crucial role in long-horizon tasks. In this paper, we take both the observation and skill sequences into account and propose a skill-sequence-dependent hierarchical policy for solving a typical long-horizon task. The proposed policy consists of a high-level skill policy (utilizing skill sequences) and a low-level parameter policy (responding to observation) with corresponding training methods, which makes the learning much more sample-efficient. Experiments in simulation demonstrate that our approach successfully solves a long-horizon task and is significantly faster than Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and the task schema methods.
A Consensual Collaborative Learning Method for Remote Sensing Image Classification Under Noisy Multi-Labels
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Collecting a large number of reliable training images annotated by multiple land-cover class labels in the framework of multi-label classification is time-consuming and costly in remote sensing (RS). To address this problem, publicly available thematic products are often used for annotating RS images with zero-labeling-cost. However, such an approach may result in constructing a training set with noisy multi-labels, distorting the learning process. To address this problem, we propose a Consensual Collaborative Multi-Label Learning (CCML) method. The proposed CCML identifies, ranks and corrects training images with noisy multi-labels through four main modules: 1) discrepancy module; 2) group lasso module; 3) flipping module; and 4) swap module. The discrepancy module ensures that the two networks learn diverse features, while obtaining the same predictions. The group lasso module detects the potentially noisy labels by estimating the label uncertainty based on the aggregation of two collaborative networks. The flipping module corrects the identified noisy labels, whereas the swap module exchanges the ranking information between the two networks. The experimental results confirm the success of the proposed CCML under high (synthetically added) multi-label noise rates. The code of the proposed method is publicly available at https://noisy-labels-in-rs.org
Bayesian variational regularization on the ball
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

We develop variational regularization methods which leverage sparsity-promoting priors to solve severely ill posed inverse problems defined on the 3D ball (i.e. the solid sphere). Our method solves the problem natively on the ball and thus does not suffer from discontinuities that plague alternate approaches where each spherical shell is considered independently. Additionally, we leverage advances in probability density theory to produce Bayesian variational methods which benefit from the computational efficiency of advanced convex optimization algorithms, whilst supporting principled uncertainty quantification. We showcase these variational regularization and uncertainty quantification techniques on an illustrative example. The C++ code discussed throughout is provided under a GNU general public license.
An Efficient Matrix Multiplication with Enhanced Privacy Protection in Cloud Computing and Its Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

As one of the most important basic operations, matrix multiplication computation (MMC) has varieties of applications in the scientific and engineering community such as linear regression, k-nearest neighbor classification and biometric identification. However handling these tasks with large-scale datasets will lead to huge computation beyond resource-constrained client s computation power. With the rapid development of cloud computing, outsourcing intensive tasks to cloud server has become a promising method. While the cloud server is generally out of the control of clients, there are still many challenges concerned with the privacy security of clients sensitive data. Motivated by this, Lei et al. presented an efficient encryption scheme based on random permutation to protect the privacy of client s data in outsourcing MMC task. Nevertheless, there exists inherent security flaws in their scheme, revealing the statistic information of zero elements in the original data thus not satisfying the computational indistinguishability (IND-ZEA). Aiming to enhance the security of the outsourcing MMC task, we propose a new encryption scheme based on subtly designed invertible matrix where the additive perturbation is introduced besides the multiplicative perturbation. Furthermore, we show that the proposed encryption scheme can be applied to not only MMC task but also other kinds of outsourced tasks such as linear regression and principal component analysis. Theoretical analyses and experiments indicate that our methods are more secure in terms of data privacy, with comparable performance to the state-of-the-art scheme based on matrix transformation.
Discrete representations in neural models of spoken language
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

The distributed and continuous representations used by neural networks are at odds with representations employed in linguistics, which are typically symbolic. Vector quantization has been proposed as a way to induce discrete neural representations that are closer in nature to their linguistic counterparts. However, it is not clear which metrics are the best-suited to analyze such discrete representations. We compare the merits of four commonly used metrics in the context of weakly supervised models of spoken language. We compare the results they show when applied to two different models, while systematically studying the effect of the placement and size of the discretization layer. We find that different evaluation regimes can give inconsistent results. While we can attribute them to the properties of the different metrics in most cases, one point of concern remains: the use of minimal pairs of phoneme triples as stimuli disadvantages larger discrete unit inventories, unlike metrics applied to complete utterances. Furthermore, while in general vector quantization induces representations that correlate with units posited in linguistics, the strength of this correlation is only moderate.