OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
MCGKT-Net: Multi-level Context Gating Knowledge Transfer Network for Single Image Deraining
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Rain streak removal in a single image is a very challenging task due to its ill-posed nature in essence. Recently, the end-to-end learning techniques with deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) have made great progress in this task. However, the conventional DCNN-based deraining methods have struggled to exploit deeper and more complex network architectures for pursuing better performance. This study proposes a novel MCGKT-Net for boosting deraining performance, which is a naturally multi-scale learning framework being capable of exploring multi-scale attributes of rain streaks and different semantic structures of the clear images. In order to obtain high representative features inside MCGKT-Net, we explore internal knowledge transfer module using ConvLSTM unit for conducting interaction learning between different layers and investigate external knowledge transfer module for leveraging the knowledge already learned in other task domains. Furthermore, to dynamically select useful features in learning procedure, we propose a multi-scale context gating module in the MCGKT-Net using squeeze-and-excitation block. Experiments on three benchmark datasets: Rain100H, Rain100L, and Rain800, manifest impressive performance compared with state-of-the-art methods.
Improving Company Valuations with Automated Knowledge Discovery, Extraction and Fusion
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2020
Year: 2020

Performing company valuations within the domain of biotechnology, pharmacy and medical technology is a challenging task, especially when considering the unique set of risks biotech start-ups face when entering new markets. Companies specialized in global valuation services, therefore, combine valuation models and past experience with heterogeneous metrics and indicators that provide insights into a company's performance. This paper illustrates how automated knowledge discovery, extraction and data fusion can be used to (i) obtain additional indicators that provide insights into the success of a company's product development efforts, and (ii) support labor-intensive data curation processes. We apply deep web knowledge acquisition methods to identify and harvest data on clinical trials that is hidden behind proprietary search interfaces and integrate the extracted data into the industry partner's company valuation ontology. In addition, focused Web crawls and shallow semantic parsing yield information on the company's key personnel and respective contact data, notifying domain experts of relevant changes that get then incorporated into the industry partner's company data.
Dimsum @LaySumm 20: BART-based Approach for Scientific Document Summarization
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Lay summarization aims to generate lay summaries of scientific papers automatically. It is an essential task that can increase the relevance of science for all of society. In this paper, we build a lay summary generation system based on the BART model. We leverage sentence labels as extra supervision signals to improve the performance of lay summarization. In the CL-LaySumm 2020 shared task, our model achieves 46.00\% Rouge1-F1 score.
A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Health Aware Control Strategy
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

Health-aware control (HAC) has emerged as one of the domains where control synthesis is sought based upon the failure prognostics of system/component or the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) predictions of critical components. The fact that mathematical dynamic (transition) models of RUL are rarely available, makes it difficult for RUL information to be incorporated into the control paradigm. A novel framework for health aware control is presented in this paper where reinforcement learning based approach is used to learn an optimal control policy in face of component degradation by integrating global system transition data (generated by an analytical model that mimics the real system) and RUL predictions. The RUL predictions generated at each step, is tracked to a desired value of RUL. The latter is integrated within a cost function which is maximized to learn the optimal control. The proposed method is studied using simulation of a DC motor and shaft wear.
Global Attention for Name Tagging
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Many name tagging approaches use local contextual information with much success, but fail when the local context is ambiguous or limited. We present a new framework to improve name tagging by utilizing local, document-level, and corpus-level contextual information. We retrieve document-level context from other sentences within the same document and corpus-level context from sentences in other topically related documents. We propose a model that learns to incorporate document-level and corpus-level contextual information alongside local contextual information via global attentions, which dynamically weight their respective contextual information, and gating mechanisms, which determine the influence of this information. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of our approach, which achieves state-of-the-art results for Dutch, German, and Spanish on the CoNLL-2002 and CoNLL-2003 datasets.
The Capacity Constraint Physarum Solver
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2020
Year: 2020

Physarum polycephalum inspired algorithm (PPA), also known as the Physarum Solver, has attracted great attention. By modelling real-world problems into a graph with network flow and adopting proper equations to calculate the distance between the nodes in the graph, PPA could be used to solve system optimization problems or user equilibrium problems. However, some problems such as the maximum flow (MF) problem, minimum-cost-maximum-flow (MCMF) problem, and link-capacitated traffic assignment problem (CTAP), require the flow flowing through links to follow capacity constraints. Motivated by the lack of related PPA-based research, a novel framework, the capacitated physarum polycephalum inspired algorithm (CPPA), is proposed to allow capacity constraints toward link flow in the PPA. To prove the validity of the CPPA, we developed three applications of the CPPA, i.e., the CPPA for the MF problem (CPPA-MF), the CPPA for the MCFC problem, and the CPPA for the link-capacitated traffic assignment problem (CPPA-CTAP). In the experiments, all the applications of the CPPA solve the problems successfully. Some of them demonstrate efficiency compared to the baseline algorithms. The experimental results prove the validation of using the CPPA framework to control link flow in the PPA is valid. The CPPA is also very robust and easy to implement since it could be successfully applied in three different scenarios. The proposed method shows that: having the ability to control the maximum among flow flowing through links in the PPA, the CPPA could tackle more complex real-world problems in the future.
Semi-supervised Learning by Latent Space Energy-Based Model of Symbol-Vector Coupling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

This paper proposes a latent space energy-based prior model for semi-supervised learning. The model stands on a generator network that maps a latent vector to the observed example. The energy term of the prior model couples the latent vector and a symbolic one-hot vector, so that classification can be based on the latent vector inferred from the observed example. In our learning method, the symbol-vector coupling, the generator network and the inference network are learned jointly. Our method is applicable to semi-supervised learning in various data domains such as image, text, and tabular data. Our experiments demonstrate that our method performs well on semi-supervised learning tasks.
Virtual Secure Platform: A Five-Stage Pipeline Processor over TFHE
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

We present Virtual Secure Platform (VSP), the first comprehensive platform that implements a multi-opcode general-purpose sequential processor over Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) for Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC). VSP protects both the data and functions on which the data are evaluated from the adversary in a secure computation offloading situation like cloud computing. We proposed a complete processor architecture with a five-stage pipeline, which improves the performance of the VSP by providing more parallelism in circuit evaluation. In addition, we also designed a custom Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) to reduce the gate count of our processor, along with an entire set of toolchains to ensure that arbitrary C programs can be compiled into our custom ISA. In order to speed up instruction evaluation over VSP, CMUX Memory based ROM and RAM constructions over FHE are also proposed. Our experiments show that both the pipelined architecture and the CMUX Memory technique are effective in improving the performance of the proposed processor. We provide an open-source implementation of VSP which achieves a per-instruction latency of less than 1 second. We demonstrate that compared to the best existing processor over FHE, our implementation runs nearly 1,600$\times$ faster.
On the design of a Fog computing-based, driving behaviour monitoring framework
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

Recent technological improvements in vehicle manufacturing may greatly improve safety however, the individuals' driving behaviour still remains a factor of paramount importance with aggressiveness, lack of focus and carelessness being the main cause of the majority of traffic incidents. The imminent deployment of 5G networking infrastructure, paired with the advent of Fog computing and the establishment of the Internet of Things (IoT) as a reliable and cost-effective service delivery framework may provide the means for the deployment of an accurate driving monitoring solution which could be utilized to further understand the underlying reasons of peculiar road behaviour, as well as its correlation to the driver's physiological state, the vehicle condition and certain environmental parameters. This paper presents some of the fundamental attributes of Fog computing along with the functional requirements of a driving behaviour monitoring framework, followed by its high level architecture blueprint and the description of the prototype implementation process.
Normal Forms for (Semantically) Witness-Based Learners in Inductive Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We study learners (computable devices) inferring formal languages, a setting referred to as language learning in the limit or inductive inference. In particular, we require the learners we investigate to be witness-based, that is, to justify each of their mind changes. Besides being a natural requirement for a learning task, this restriction deserves special attention as it is a specialization of various important learning paradigms. In particular, with the help of witness-based learning, explanatory learners are shown to be equally powerful under these seemingly incomparable paradigms. Nonetheless, until now, witness-based learners have only been studied sparsely. In this work, we conduct a thorough study of these learners both when requiring syntactic and semantic convergence and obtain normal forms thereof. In the former setting, we extend known results such that they include witness-based learning and generalize these to hold for a variety of learners. Transitioning to behaviourally correct learning, we also provide normal forms for semantically witness-based learners. Most notably, we show that set-driven globally semantically witness-based learners are equally powerful as their Gold-style semantically conservative counterpart. Such results are key to understanding the, yet undiscovered, mutual relation between various important learning paradigms when learning behaviourally correctly.
Chance-Constrained Control with Lexicographic Deep Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

This paper proposes a lexicographic Deep Reinforcement Learning (DeepRL)-based approach to chance-constrained Markov Decision Processes, in which the controller seeks to ensure that the probability of satisfying the constraint is above a given threshold. Standard DeepRL approaches require i) the constraints to be included as additional weighted terms in the cost function, in a multi-objective fashion, and ii) the tuning of the introduced weights during the training phase of the Deep Neural Network (DNN) according to the probability thresholds. The proposed approach, instead, requires to separately train one constraint-free DNN and one DNN associated to each constraint and then, at each time-step, to select which DNN to use depending on the system observed state. The presented solution does not require any hyper-parameter tuning besides the standard DNN ones, even if the probability thresholds changes. A lexicographic version of the well-known DeepRL algorithm DQN is also proposed and validated via simulations.
Hit Song Prediction Based on Early Adopter Data and Audio Features
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2020
Year: 2020

Billions of USD are invested in new artists and songs by the music industry every year. This research provides a new strategy for assessing the hit potential of songs, which can help record companies support their investment decisions. A number of models were developed that use both audio data, and a novel feature based on social media listening behaviour. The results show that models based on early adopter behaviour perform well when predicting top 20 dance hits.
CLAR: Contrastive Learning of Auditory Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2020
Year: 2020

Learning rich visual representations using contrastive self-supervised learning has been extremely successful. However, it is still a major question whether we could use a similar approach to learn superior auditory representations. In this paper, we expand on prior work (SimCLR) to learn better auditory representations. We (1) introduce various data augmentations suitable for auditory data and evaluate their impact on predictive performance, (2) show that training with time-frequency audio features substantially improves the quality of the learned representations compared to raw signals, and (3) demonstrate that training with both supervised and contrastive losses simultaneously improves the learned representations compared to self-supervised pre-training followed by supervised fine-tuning. We illustrate that by combining all these methods and with substantially less labeled data, our framework (CLAR) achieves significant improvement on prediction performance compared to supervised approach. Moreover, compared to self-supervised approach, our framework converges faster with significantly better representations.
Against All Odds: Winning the Defense Challenge in an Evasion Competition with Diversification
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

Machine learning-based systems for malware detection operate in a hostile environment. Consequently, adversaries will also target the learning system and use evasion attacks to bypass the detection of malware. In this paper, we outline our learning-based system PEberus that got the first place in the defender challenge of the Microsoft Evasion Competition, resisting a variety of attacks from independent attackers. Our system combines multiple, diverse defenses: we address the semantic gap, use various classification models, and apply a stateful defense. This competition gives us the unique opportunity to examine evasion attacks under a realistic scenario. It also highlights that existing machine learning methods can be hardened against attacks by thoroughly analyzing the attack surface and implementing concepts from adversarial learning. Our defense can serve as an additional baseline in the future to strengthen the research on secure learning.
Teacher-Student Competition for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

With the supervision from source domain only in class-level, existing unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods mainly learn the domain-invariant representations from a shared feature extractor, which causes the source-bias problem. This paper proposes an unsupervised domain adaptation approach with Teacher-Student Competition (TSC). In particular, a student network is introduced to learn the target-specific feature space, and we design a novel competition mechanism to select more credible pseudo-labels for the training of student network. We introduce a teacher network with the structure of existing conventional UDA method, and both teacher and student networks compete to provide target pseudo-labels to constrain every target sample's training in student network. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed TSC framework significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods on Office-31 and ImageCLEF-DA benchmarks.
PySBD: Pragmatic Sentence Boundary Disambiguation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we present a rule-based sentence boundary disambiguation Python package that works out-of-the-box for 22 languages. We aim to provide a realistic segmenter which can provide logical sentences even when the format and domain of the input text is unknown. In our work, we adapt the Golden Rules Set (a language-specific set of sentence boundary exemplars) originally implemented as a ruby gem - pragmatic_segmenter - which we ported to Python with additional improvements and functionality. PySBD passes 97.92% of the Golden Rule Set exemplars for English, an improvement of 25% over the next best open-source Python tool.
MicAugment: One-shot Microphone Style Transfer
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2020
Year: 2020

A crucial aspect for the successful deployment of audio-based models "in-the-wild" is the robustness to the transformations introduced by heterogeneous acquisition conditions. In this work, we propose a method to perform one-shot microphone style transfer. Given only a few seconds of audio recorded by a target device, MicAugment identifies the transformations associated to the input acquisition pipeline and uses the learned transformations to synthesize audio as if it were recorded under the same conditions as the target audio. We show that our method can successfully apply the style transfer to real audio and that it significantly increases model robustness when used as data augmentation in the downstream tasks.
On the Robustness of Winners: Counting Briberies in Elections
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2020
Year: 2020

We study the parameterized complexity of counting variants of Swap- and Shift-Bribery problems, focusing on the parameterizations by the number of swaps and the number of voters. We show experimentally that Swap-Bribery offers a new approach to the robustness analysis of elections.
Multiple Pedestrians and Vehicles Tracking in Aerial Imagery: A Comprehensive Study
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we address various challenges in multi-pedestrian and vehicle tracking in high-resolution aerial imagery by intensive evaluation of a number of traditional and Deep Learning based Single- and Multi-Object Tracking methods. We also describe our proposed Deep Learning based Multi-Object Tracking method AerialMPTNet that fuses appearance, temporal, and graphical information using a Siamese Neural Network, a Long Short-Term Memory, and a Graph Convolutional Neural Network module for a more accurate and stable tracking. Moreover, we investigate the influence of the Squeeze-and-Excitation layers and Online Hard Example Mining on the performance of AerialMPTNet. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first in using these two for a regression-based Multi-Object Tracking. Additionally, we studied and compared the L1 and Huber loss functions. In our experiments, we extensively evaluate AerialMPTNet on three aerial Multi-Object Tracking datasets, namely AerialMPT and KIT AIS pedestrian and vehicle datasets. Qualitative and quantitative results show that AerialMPTNet outperforms all previous methods for the pedestrian datasets and achieves competitive results for the vehicle dataset. In addition, Long Short-Term Memory and Graph Convolutional Neural Network modules enhance the tracking performance. Moreover, using Squeeze-and-Excitation and Online Hard Example Mining significantly helps for some cases while degrades the results for other cases. In addition, according to the results, L1 yields better results with respect to Huber loss for most of the scenarios. The presented results provide a deep insight into challenges and opportunities of the aerial Multi-Object Tracking domain, paving the way for future research.
A Convenient Generalization of Schlick's Bias and Gain Functions
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2020
Year: 2020

We present a generalization of Schlick's bias and gain functions -- simple parametric curve-shaped functions for inputs in [0, 1]. Our single function includes both bias and gain as special cases, and is able to describe other smooth and monotonic curves with variable degrees of asymmetry.
Sparse Recovery Analysis of Generalized $J$-Minimization with Results for Sparsity Promoting Functions with Monotonic Elasticity
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper we theoretically study exact recovery of sparse vectors from compressed measurements by minimizing a general nonconvex function that can be decomposed into the sum of single variable functions belonging to a class of smooth nonconvex sparsity promoting functions. Null space property (NSP) and restricted isometry property (RIP) are used as key theoretical tools. The notion of \emph{scale function} associated to a sparsity promoting function is introduced to generalize the state-of-the-art analysis technique of the $l_p$ minimization problem. The analysis is used to derive an upper bound on the null space constant (NSC) associated to this general nonconvex minimization problem, which is further utilized to derive sufficient conditions for exact recovery as upper bounds on the restricted isometry constant (RIC), as well as bounds on optimal sparsity $K$ for which exact recovery occurs. The derived bounds are explicitly calculated when the sparsity promoting function $f$ under consideration possesses the property that the associated \emph{elasticity function}, defined as, $ψ(x)=\frac{xdf(x)/dx}{f(x)}$, is monotonic in nature. Numerical simulations are carried out to verify the efficacy of the bounds and interesting conclusions are drawn about the comparative performances of different sparsity promoting functions for the problem of $1$-sparse signal recovery.
GAMesh: Guided and Augmented Meshing for Deep Point Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

We present a new meshing algorithm called guided and augmented meshing, GAMesh, which uses a mesh prior to generate a surface for the output points of a point network. By projecting the output points onto this prior and simplifying the resulting mesh, GAMesh ensures a surface with the same topology as the mesh prior but whose geometric fidelity is controlled by the point network. This makes GAMesh independent of both the density and distribution of the output points, a common artifact in traditional surface reconstruction algorithms. We show that such a separation of geometry from topology can have several advantages especially in single-view shape prediction, fair evaluation of point networks and reconstructing surfaces for networks which output sparse point clouds. We further show that by training point networks with GAMesh, we can directly optimize the vertex positions to generate adaptive meshes with arbitrary topologies.