OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Vision: A Deep Learning Approach to provide walking assistance to the visually impaired
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Blind people face a lot of problems in their daily routines. They have to struggle a lot just to do their day-to-day chores. In this paper, we have proposed a system with the objective to help the visually impaired by providing audio aid guiding them to avoid obstacles, which will assist them to move in their surroundings. Object Detection using YOLO will help them detect the nearby objects and Depth Estimation using monocular vision will tell the approximate distance of the detected objects from the user. Despite a higher accuracy, stereo vision has many hardware constraints, which makes monocular vision the preferred choice for this application.
SemanticZ at SemEval-2016 Task 3: Ranking Relevant Answers in Community Question Answering Using Semantic Similarity Based on Fine-tuned Word Embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

We describe our system for finding good answers in a community forum, as defined in SemEval-2016, Task 3 on Community Question Answering. Our approach relies on several semantic similarity features based on fine-tuned word embeddings and topics similarities. In the main Subtask C, our primary submission was ranked third, with a MAP of 51.68 and accuracy of 69.94. In Subtask A, our primary submission was also third, with MAP of 77.58 and accuracy of 73.39.
Do disruption index indicators measure what they propose to measure? The comparison of several indicator variants with assessments by peers
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2019
Year: 2019

Recently, Wu, Wang, and Evans (2019) and Bu, Waltman, and Huang (2019) proposed a new family of indicators, which measure whether a scientific publication is disruptive to a field or tradition of research. Such disruptive influences are characterized by citations to a focal paper, but not its cited references. In this study, we are interested in the question of convergent validity, i.e., whether these indicators of disruption are able to measure what they propose to measure ('disruptiveness'). We used external criteria of newness to examine convergent validity: in the post-publication peer review system of F1000Prime, experts assess papers whether the reported research fulfills these criteria (e.g., reports new findings). This study is based on 120,179 papers from F1000Prime published between 2000 and 2016. In the first part of the study we discuss the indicators. Based on the insights from the discussion, we propose alternate variants of disruption indicators. In the second part, we investigate the convergent validity of the indicators and the (possibly) improved variants. Although the results of a factor analysis show that the different variants measure similar dimensions, the results of regression analyses reveal that one variant (DI5) performs slightly better than the others.
Hierarchical Average Reward Policy Gradient Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Option-critic learning is a general-purpose reinforcement learning (RL) framework that aims to address the issue of long term credit assignment by leveraging temporal abstractions. However, when dealing with extended timescales, discounting future rewards can lead to incorrect credit assignments. In this work, we address this issue by extending the hierarchical option-critic policy gradient theorem for the average reward criterion. Our proposed framework aims to maximize the long-term reward obtained in the steady-state of the Markov chain defined by the agent's policy. Furthermore, we use an ordinary differential equation based approach for our convergence analysis and prove that the parameters of the intra-option policies, termination functions, and value functions, converge to their corresponding optimal values, with probability one. Finally, we illustrate the competitive advantage of learning options, in the average reward setting, on a grid-world environment with sparse rewards.
Online Power Allocation at Energy Harvesting Transmitter for Multiple Receivers with and without Individual Rate Constraints for OMA and NOMA Transmissions
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we propose an online power allocation scheme to maximize the time averaged sum rate for multiple downlink receivers with energy harvesting transmitter. The transmitter employs non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and/or orthogonal multiple access (OMA) to transmit data to multiple users. Additionally, we consider the scenario where each individual user has a quality of service constraint on its required instantaneous rate. The decisions of total transmit power and power allocation for different users in a given time slot are obtained with the help of Lyapunov optimization technique. The proposed schemes do not require any statistical information of the channel states and the harvested energy. The proposed power allocation schemes entail in small complexity based power allocation decisions. Therefore, the proposed schemes can provide solutions in real time and are more suited for online power allocation problems where the system state parameters (e.g. channel state, harvested energy etc) change quickly. The performances of the proposed schemes are demonstrated with the help of simulation results.
Incentive-Compatible Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2019
Year: 2019

We investigate the possibility of an incentive-compatible (IC, a.k.a. strategy-proof) mechanism for the classification of agents in a network according to their reviews of each other. In the $ α$-classification problem we are interested in selecting the top $ α$ fraction of users. We give upper bounds (impossibilities) and lower bounds (mechanisms) on the worst-case coincidence between the classification of an IC mechanism and the ideal $ α$-classification. We prove bounds which depend on $ α$ and on the maximal number of reviews given by a single agent, $ Δ$. Our results show that it is harder to find a good mechanism when $ α$ is smaller and $ Δ$ is larger. In particular, if $ Δ$ is unbounded, then the best mechanism is trivial (that is, it does not take into account the reviews). On the other hand, when $ Δ$ is sublinear in the number of agents, we give a simple, natural mechanism, with a coincidence ratio of $ α$.
The dynamics of the stomatognathic system from 4D multimodal data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss methods of acquisition, visualization and analysis of the dynamics of a complex biomedical system, illustrated by the human stomatognathic system. The stomatognathic system consists of the teeth and the skull bones with the maxilla and the mandible. Its dynamics can be described by the change of mutual position of the lower/mandibular part versus the upper/maxillary one due to the physiological motion of opening, chewing and swallowing. In order to analyse the dynamics of the stomatognathic system its morphology and motion has to be digitized, which is done using static and dynamic multimodal imagery like CBCT and 3D scans data and temporal measurements of motion. The integration of multimodal data incorporates different direct and indirect methods of registration - aligning of all the data in the same coordinate system. The integrated sets of data form 4D multimodal data which can be further visualized, modeled, and subjected to multivariate time series analysis. Example results are shown. Although there is no direct method of imaging the TMJ motion, the integration of multimodal data forms an adequate tool. As medical imaging becomes ever more diverse and ever more accessible, organizing the imagery and measurements into unified, comprehensive records can deliver to the doctor the most information in the most accessible form, creating a new quality in data simulation, analysis and interpretation.
CNAK : Cluster Number Assisted K-means
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Determining the number of clusters present in a dataset is an important problem in cluster analysis. Conventional clustering techniques generally assume this parameter to be provided up front. %user supplied. %Recently, robustness of any given clustering algorithm is analyzed to measure cluster stability/instability which in turn determines the cluster number. In this paper, we propose a method which analyzes cluster stability for predicting the cluster number. Under the same computational framework, the technique also finds representatives of the clusters. The method is apt for handling big data, as we design the algorithm using \emph{Monte-Carlo} simulation. Also, we explore a few pertinent issues found to be of also clustering. Experiments reveal that the proposed method is capable of identifying a single cluster. It is robust in handling high dimensional dataset and performs reasonably well over datasets having cluster imbalance. Moreover, it can indicate cluster hierarchy, if present. Overall we have observed significant improvement in speed and quality for predicting cluster numbers as well as the composition of clusters in a large dataset.
On Using SpecAugment for End-to-End Speech Translation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

This work investigates a simple data augmentation technique, SpecAugment, for end-to-end speech translation. SpecAugment is a low-cost implementation method applied directly to the audio input features and it consists of masking blocks of frequency channels, and/or time steps. We apply SpecAugment on end-to-end speech translation tasks and achieve up to +2.2\% \BLEU on LibriSpeech Audiobooks En->Fr and +1.2% on IWSLT TED-talks En->De by alleviating overfitting to some extent. We also examine the effectiveness of the method in a variety of data scenarios and show that the method also leads to significant improvements in various data conditions irrespective of the amount of training data.
Evaluating the Transferability and Adversarial Discrimination of Convolutional Neural Networks for Threat Object Detection and Classification within X-Ray Security Imagery
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

X-ray imagery security screening is essential to maintaining transport security against a varying profile of threat or prohibited items. Particular interest lies in the automatic detection and classification of weapons such as firearms and knives within complex and cluttered X-ray security imagery. Here, we address this problem by exploring various end-to-end object detection Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures. We evaluate several leading variants spanning the Faster R-CNN, Mask R-CNN, and RetinaNet architectures to explore the transferability of such models between varying X-ray scanners with differing imaging geometries, image resolutions and material colour profiles. Whilst the limited availability of X-ray threat imagery can pose a challenge, we employ a transfer learning approach to evaluate whether such inter-scanner generalisation may exist over a multiple class detection problem. Overall, we achieve maximal detection performance using a Faster R-CNN architecture with a ResNet$_{101}$ classification network, obtaining 0.88 and 0.86 of mean Average Precision (mAP) for a three-class and two class item from varying X-ray imaging sources. Our results exhibit a remarkable degree of generalisability in terms of cross-scanner performance (mAP: 0.87, firearm detection: 0.94 AP). In addition, we examine the inherent adversarial discriminative capability of such networks using a specifically generated adversarial dataset for firearms detection - with a variable low false positive, as low as 5%, this shows both the challenge and promise of such threat detection within X-ray security imagery.
Faster Dynamic Compressed d-ary Relations
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

The $k^2$-tree is a successful compact representation of binary relations that exhibit sparseness and/or clustering properties. It can be extended to $d$ dimensions, where it is called a $k^d$-tree. The representation boils down to a long bitvector. We show that interpreting the $k^d$-tree as a dynamic trie on the Morton codes of the points, instead of as a dynamic representation of the bitvector as done in previous work, yields operation times that are below the lower bound of dynamic bitvectors and offers improved time performance in practice.
Red Dragon AI at TextGraphs 2019 Shared Task: Language Model Assisted Explanation Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

The TextGraphs-13 Shared Task on Explanation Regeneration asked participants to develop methods to reconstruct gold explanations for elementary science questions. Red Dragon AI's entries used the language of the questions and explanation text directly, rather than a constructing a separate graph-like representation. Our leaderboard submission placed us 3rd in the competition, but we present here three methods of increasing sophistication, each of which scored successively higher on the test set after the competition close.
Unsupervised Monocular Depth Prediction for Indoor Continuous Video Streams
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

This paper studies unsupervised monocular depth prediction problem. Most of existing unsupervised depth prediction algorithms are developed for outdoor scenarios, while the depth prediction work in the indoor environment is still very scarce to our knowledge. Therefore, this work focuses on narrowing the gap by firstly evaluating existing approaches in the indoor environments and then improving the state-of-the-art design of architecture. Unlike typical outdoor training dataset, such as KITTI with motion constraints, data for indoor environment contains more arbitrary camera movement and short baseline between two consecutive images, which deteriorates the network training for the pose estimation. To address this issue, we propose two methods: Firstly, we propose a novel reconstruction loss function to constraint pose estimation, resulting in accuracy improvement of the predicted disparity map; secondly, we use an ensemble learning with a flipping strategy along with a median filter, directly taking operation on the output disparity map. We evaluate our approaches on the TUM RGB-D and self-collected datasets. The results have shown that both approaches outperform the previous state-of-the-art unsupervised learning approaches.
Towards a Unified Evaluation of Explanation Methods without Ground Truth
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

This paper proposes a set of criteria to evaluate the objectiveness of explanation methods of neural networks, which is crucial for the development of explainable AI, but it also presents significant challenges. The core challenge is that people usually cannot obtain ground-truth explanations of the neural network. To this end, we design four metrics to evaluate explanation results without ground-truth explanations. Our metrics can be broadly applied to nine benchmark methods of interpreting neural networks, which provides new insights of explanation methods.
Collaborative Machine Learning Markets with Data-Replication-Robust Payments
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2019
Year: 2019

We study the problem of collaborative machine learning markets where multiple parties can achieve improved performance on their machine learning tasks by combining their training data. We discuss desired properties for these machine learning markets in terms of fair revenue distribution and potential threats, including data replication. We then instantiate a collaborative market for cases where parties share a common machine learning task and where parties' tasks are different. Our marketplace incentivizes parties to submit high quality training and true validation data. To this end, we introduce a novel payment division function that is robust-to-replication and customized output models that perform well only on requested machine learning tasks. In experiments, we validate the assumptions underlying our theoretical analysis and show that these are approximately satisfied for commonly used machine learning models.
Shapelets for earthquake detection
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

This paper introduces EQShapelets (EarthQuake Shapelets) a time-series shape-based approach embedded in machine learning to autonomously detect earthquakes. It promises to overcome the challenges in the field of seismology related to automated detection and cataloging of earthquakes. EQShapelets are amplitude and phase-independent, i.e., their detection sensitivity is irrespective of the magnitude of the earthquake and the time of occurrence. They are also robust to noise and other spurious signals. The detection capability of EQShapelets is tested on one week of continuous seismic data provided by the Northern California Seismic Network (NCSN) obtained from a station in central California near the Calaveras Fault. EQShapelets combined with a Random Forest classifier, detected all of the cataloged earthquakes and 281 uncataloged events with lower false detection rate thus offering a better performance than autocorrelation and FAST algorithms. The primary advantage of EQShapelets over competing methods is the interpretability and insight it offers. Shape-based approaches are intuitive, visually meaningful and offers immediate insight into the problem domain that goes beyond their use in accurate detection. EQShapelets, if implemented at a large scale, can significantly reduce catalog completeness magnitudes and can serve as an effective tool for near real-time earthquake monitoring and cataloging.
Feature Extraction in Augmented Reality
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2019
Year: 2019

Augmented Reality (AR) is used for various applications associated with the real world. In this paper, first, describe characteristics and essential services of AR. Brief history on Virtual Reality (VR) and AR is also mentioned in the introductory section. Then, AR Technologies along with its workflow is depicted, which includes the complete AR Process consisting of the stages of Image Acquisition, Feature Extraction, Feature Matching, Geometric Verification, and Associated Information Retrieval. Feature extraction is the essence of AR hence its details are furnished in the paper.
Object-Guided Instance Segmentation for Biological Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Instance segmentation of biological images is essential for studying object behaviors and properties. The challenges, such as clustering, occlusion, and adhesion problems of the objects, make instance segmentation a non-trivial task. Current box-free instance segmentation methods typically rely on local pixel-level information. Due to a lack of global object view, these methods are prone to over- or under-segmentation. On the contrary, the box-based instance segmentation methods incorporate object detection into the segmentation, performing better in identifying the individual instances. In this paper, we propose a new box-based instance segmentation method. Mainly, we locate the object bounding boxes from their center points. The object features are subsequently reused in the segmentation branch as a guide to separate the clustered instances within an RoI patch. Along with the instance normalization, the model is able to recover the target object distribution and suppress the distribution of neighboring attached objects. Consequently, the proposed model performs excellently in segmenting the clustered objects while retaining the target object details. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performances on three biological datasets: cell nuclei, plant phenotyping dataset, and neural cells.
Discovering Subdimensional Motifs of Different Lengths in Large-Scale Multivariate Time Series
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Detecting repeating patterns of different lengths in time series, also called variable-length motifs, has received a great amount of attention by researchers and practitioners. Despite the significant progress that has been made in recent single dimensional variable-length motif discovery work, detecting variable-length \textit{subdimensional motifs}---patterns that are simultaneously occurring only in a subset of dimensions in multivariate time series---remains a difficult task. The main challenge is scalability. On the one hand, the brute-force enumeration solution, which searches for motifs of all possible lengths, is very time consuming even in single dimensional time series. On the other hand, previous work show that index-based fixed-length approximate motif discovery algorithms such as random projection are not suitable for detecting variable-length motifs due to memory requirement. In this paper, we introduce an approximate variable-length subdimensional motif discovery algorithm called \textbf{C}ollaborative \textbf{HI}erarchy based \textbf{M}otif \textbf{E}numeration (CHIME) to efficiently detect variable-length subdimensional motifs given a minimum motif length in large-scale multivariate time series. We show that the memory cost of the approach is significantly smaller than that of random projection. Moreover, the speed of the proposed algorithm is significantly faster than that of the state-of-the-art algorithms. We demonstrate that CHIME can efficiently detect meaningful variable-length subdimensional motifs in large real world multivariate time series datasets.
A 2-approximation for the $k$-prize-collecting Steiner tree problem
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2019
Year: 2019

We consider the $k$-prize-collecting Steiner tree problem. An instance is composed of an integer $k$ and a graph $G$ with costs on edges and penalties on vertices. The objective is to find a tree spanning at least $k$ vertices which minimizes the cost of the edges in the tree plus the penalties of vertices not in the tree. This is one of the most fundamental network design problems and is a common generalization of the prize-collecting Steiner tree and the $k$-minimum spanning tree problems. Our main result is a 2-approximation algorithm, which improves on the currently best known approximation factor of 3.96 and has a faster running time. The algorithm builds on a modification of the primal-dual framework of Goemans and Williamson, and reveals interesting properties that can be applied to other similar problems.
Contextual Reinforcement Learning of Visuo-tactile Multi-fingered Grasping Policies
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

Using simulation to train robot manipulation policies holds the promise of an almost unlimited amount of training data, generated safely out of harm's way. One of the key challenges of using simulation, to date, has been to bridge the reality gap, so that policies trained in simulation can be deployed in the real world. We explore the reality gap in the context of learning a contextual policy for multi-fingered robotic grasping. We propose a Grasping Objects Approach for Tactile (GOAT) robotic hands, learning to overcome the reality gap problem. In our approach we use human hand motion demonstration to initialize and reduce the search space for learning. We contextualize our policy with the bounding cuboid dimensions of the object of interest, which allows the policy to work on a more flexible representation than directly using an image or point cloud. Leveraging fingertip touch sensors in the hand allows the policy to overcome the reduction in geometric information introduced by the coarse bounding box, as well as pose estimation uncertainty. We show our learned policy successfully runs on a real robot without any fine tuning, thus bridging the reality gap.