OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Data-Driven Approach for Autonomous Motion Planning and Control in Off-Road Driving Scenarios
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2018
Year: 2018

This paper presents a novel data-driven approach to vehicle motion planning and control in off-road driving scenarios. For autonomous off-road driving, environmental conditions impact terrain traversability as a function of weather, surface composition, and slope. Geographical information system (GIS) and National Centers for Environmental Information datasets are processed to provide this information for interactive planning and control system elements. A top-level global route planner (GRP) defines optimal waypoints using dynamic programming (DP). A local path planner (LPP) computes a desired trajectory between waypoints such that infeasible control states and collisions with obstacles are avoided. The LPP also updates the GRP with real-time sensing and control data. A low-level feedback controller applies feedback linearization to asymptotically track the specified LPP trajectory. Autonomous driving simulation results are presented for traversal of terrains in Oregon and Indiana case studies.
Virtual-Taobao: Virtualizing Real-world Online Retail Environment for Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

Applying reinforcement learning in physical-world tasks is extremely challenging. It is commonly infeasible to sample a large number of trials, as required by current reinforcement learning methods, in a physical environment. This paper reports our project on using reinforcement learning for better commodity search in Taobao, one of the largest online retail platforms and meanwhile a physical environment with a high sampling cost. Instead of training reinforcement learning in Taobao directly, we present our approach: first we build Virtual Taobao, a simulator learned from historical customer behavior data through the proposed GAN-SD (GAN for Simulating Distributions) and MAIL (multi-agent adversarial imitation learning), and then we train policies in Virtual Taobao with no physical costs in which ANC (Action Norm Constraint) strategy is proposed to reduce over-fitting. In experiments, Virtual Taobao is trained from hundreds of millions of customers' records, and its properties are compared with the real environment. The results disclose that Virtual Taobao faithfully recovers important properties of the real environment. We also show that the policies trained in Virtual Taobao can have significantly superior online performance to the traditional supervised approaches. We hope our work could shed some light on reinforcement learning applications in complex physical environments.
In Design DFM Rule Scoring and Fixing Method using ICV
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2018
Year: 2018

As compared to DRC rules, DFM rules are a list of selected recommended rules which aim to improve the design margins for better manufacturability. In GLOBALFOUNDRIES, we use DFM scoring methodology as an effective technique to analyze design quality in terms of manufacturability. Physical design engineers can perform our Manufacturability Check Deck (MCD) to asset their design quality during the sign-off stage. In the past, Synopsys users have to convert their design though milkyway database to GDSII format and execute the verification through the third party EDA tools. This method is costly and time-consuming for our Synopsys users. Today, we propose a new and easy-to-use integrated flow which leverages on the ICV engine to provide DFM scoring and in-design fixing techniques. The new methodology address DFM violations early in the design flow and achieve DFM compliance design during sign-off phase.
FLOreS - Fractional order loop shaping MATLAB toolbox
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

A novel toolbox named FLOreS is presented for intuitive design of fractional order controllers (FOC) using industry standard loop shaping technique. This will allow control engineers to use frequency response data (FRD) of the plant to design FOCs by shaping the open loop to meet the necessary specifications of stability, robustness, tracking, precision and bandwidth. FLOreS provides a graphical approach using closed-loop sensitivity functions for overall insight into system performance. The main advantage over existing optimization toolboxes for FOC is that the engineer can use prior knowledge and expertise of plant during design of FOC. Different approximation methods for fractional order filters are also included for greater freedom of final implementation. This combined with the included example plants enables additionally to be used as an educational tool. FLOreS has been used for design and implementation of both integer and fractional order controllers on a precision stage to prove industry readiness.
Unsupervisedly Training GANs for Segmenting Digital Pathology with Automatically Generated Annotations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Recently, generative adversarial networks exhibited excellent performances in semi-supervised image analysis scenarios. In this paper, we go even further by proposing a fully unsupervised approach for segmentation applications with prior knowledge of the objects' shapes. We propose and investigate different strategies to generate simulated label data and perform image-to-image translation between the image and the label domain using an adversarial model. Specifically, we assess the impact of the annotation model's accuracy as well as the effect of simulating additional low-level image features. For experimental evaluation, we consider the segmentation of the glomeruli, an application scenario from renal pathology. Experiments provide proof of concept and also confirm that the strategy for creating the simulated label data is of particular relevance considering the stability of GAN trainings.
A Sliding-Window Algorithm for Markov Decision Processes with Arbitrarily Changing Rewards and Transitions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

We consider reinforcement learning in changing Markov Decision Processes where both the state-transition probabilities and the reward functions may vary over time. For this problem setting, we propose an algorithm using a sliding window approach and provide performance guarantees for the regret evaluated against the optimal non-stationary policy. We also characterize the optimal window size suitable for our algorithm. These results are complemented by a sample complexity bound on the number of sub-optimal steps taken by the algorithm. Finally, we present some experimental results to support our theoretical analysis.
Underwater Fish Species Classification using Convolutional Neural Network and Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

The target of this paper is to recommend a way for Automated classification of Fish species. A high accuracy fish classification is required for greater understanding of fish behavior in Ichthyology and by marine biologists. Maintaining a ledger of the number of fishes per species and marking the endangered species in large and small water bodies is required by concerned institutions. Majority of available methods focus on classification of fishes outside of water because underwater classification poses challenges such as background noises, distortion of images, the presence of other water bodies in images, image quality and occlusion. This method uses a novel technique based on Convolutional Neural Networks, Deep Learning and Image Processing to achieve an accuracy of 96.29%. This method ensures considerably discrimination accuracy improvements than the previously proposed methods.
Laplacian Networks: Bounding Indicator Function Smoothness for Neural Network Robustness
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

For the past few years, Deep Neural Network (DNN) robustness has become a question of paramount importance. As a matter of fact, in sensitive settings misclassification can lead to dramatic consequences. Such misclassifications are likely to occur when facing adversarial attacks, hardware failures or limitations, and imperfect signal acquisition. To address this question, authors have proposed different approaches aiming at increasing the robustness of DNNs, such as adding regularizers or training using noisy examples. In this paper we propose a new regularizer built upon the Laplacian of similarity graphs obtained from the representation of training data at each layer of the DNN architecture. This regularizer penalizes large changes (across consecutive layers in the architecture) in the distance between examples of different classes, and as such enforces smooth variations of the class boundaries. Since it is agnostic to the type of deformations that are expected when predicting with the DNN, the proposed regularizer can be combined with existing ad-hoc methods. We provide theoretical justification for this regularizer and demonstrate its effectiveness to improve robustness of DNNs on classical supervised learning vision datasets.
MultiNet: A Scalable Multilayer Network Embedding Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2018
Year: 2018

Representation learning of networks has witnessed significant progress in recent times. Such representations have been effectively used for classic network-based machine learning tasks like node classification, link prediction, and network alignment. However, very few methods focus on capturing representations for multiplex or multilayer networks, which are more accurate and detailed representations of complex networks. In this work, we propose Multi-Net a fast and scalable embedding technique for multiplex networks. Multi-Net, effectively maps nodes to a lower-dimensional space while preserving its neighborhood properties across all the layers. We utilize four random walk strategies in our unified network embedding model, thus making our approach more robust than existing state-of-the-art models. We demonstrate superior performance of Multi-Net on four real-world datasets from different domains. In particular, we highlight the uniqueness of Multi-Net by leveraging it for the complex task of network reconstruction.
Pyramid Attention Network for Semantic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

A Pyramid Attention Network(PAN) is proposed to exploit the impact of global contextual information in semantic segmentation. Different from most existing works, we combine attention mechanism and spatial pyramid to extract precise dense features for pixel labeling instead of complicated dilated convolution and artificially designed decoder networks. Specifically, we introduce a Feature Pyramid Attention module to perform spatial pyramid attention structure on high-level output and combining global pooling to learn a better feature representation, and a Global Attention Upsample module on each decoder layer to provide global context as a guidance of low-level features to select category localization details. The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on PASCAL VOC 2012 and Cityscapes benchmarks with a new record of mIoU accuracy 84.0% on PASCAL VOC 2012, while training without COCO dataset.
Numerical methods for differential linear matrix equations via Krylov subspace methods
Venue: arXiv cs.NA 2018
Year: 2018

In the present paper, we present some numerical methods for computing approximate solutions to some large differential linear matrix equations. In the first part of this work, we deal with differential generalized Sylvester matrix equations with full rank right-hand sides using a global Galerkin and a norm-minimization approaches. In the second part, we consider large differential Lyapunov matrix equations with low rank right-hand sides and use the extended global Arnoldi process to produce low rank approximate solutions. We give some theoretical results and present some numerical experiments.
COREclust: a new package for a robust and scalable analysis of complex data
Venue: arXiv cs.MS 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we present a new R package COREclust dedicated to the detection of representative variables in high dimensional spaces with a potentially limited number of observations. Variable sets detection is based on an original graph clustering strategy denoted CORE-clustering algorithm that detects CORE-clusters, i.e. variable sets having a user defined size range and in which each variable is very similar to at least another variable. Representative variables are then robustely estimate as the CORE-cluster centers. This strategy is entirely coded in C++ and wrapped by R using the Rcpp package. A particular effort has been dedicated to keep its algorithmic cost reasonable so that it can be used on large datasets. After motivating our work, we will explain the CORE-clustering algorithm as well as a greedy extension of this algorithm. We will then present how to use it and results obtained on synthetic and real data.
Parallel Architecture and Hyperparameter Search via Successive Halving and Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

We present a simple and powerful algorithm for parallel black box optimization called Successive Halving and Classification (SHAC). The algorithm operates in $K$ stages of parallel function evaluations and trains a cascade of binary classifiers to iteratively cull the undesirable regions of the search space. SHAC is easy to implement, requires no tuning of its own configuration parameters, is invariant to the scale of the objective function and can be built using any choice of binary classifier. We adopt tree-based classifiers within SHAC and achieve competitive performance against several strong baselines for optimizing synthetic functions, hyperparameters and architectures.
An evaluation of the security of the Bitcoin Peer-to- Peer Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

Bitcoin is a decentralised digital currency that relies on cryptography rather than trusted third parties such as central banks for its security. Underpinning the operation of the currency is a peer-to-peer (P2P) network that facilitates the execution of transactions by end users, as well as the transaction confirmation process known as bitcoin mining. The security of this P2P network is vital for the currency to function and subversion of the underlying network can lead to attacks on bitcoin users including theft of bitcoins, manipulation of the mining process and denial of service (DoS). As part of this paper the network protocol and bitcoin core software are analysed, with three bitcoin message exchanges (the connection handshake, GETHEADERS/HEADERS and MEMPOOL/INV) found to be potentially vulnerable to spoofing and use in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Possible solutions to the identified weaknesses and vulnerabilities are evaluated, such as the introduction of random nonces into network messages exchanges.
Towards a glaucoma risk index based on simulated hemodynamics from fundus images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Glaucoma is the leading cause of irreversible but preventable blindness in the world. Its major treatable risk factor is the intra-ocular pressure, although other biomarkers are being explored to improve the understanding of the pathophysiology of the disease. It has been recently observed that glaucoma induces changes in the ocular hemodynamics. However, its effects on the functional behavior of the retinal arterioles have not been studied yet. In this paper we propose a first approach for characterizing those changes using computational hemodynamics. The retinal blood flow is simulated using a 0D model for a steady, incompressible non Newtonian fluid in rigid domains. The simulation is performed on patient-specific arterial trees extracted from fundus images. We also propose a novel feature representation technique to comprise the outcomes of the simulation stage into a fixed length feature vector that can be used for classification studies. Our experiments on a new database of fundus images show that our approach is able to capture representative changes in the hemodynamics of glaucomatous patients. Code and data are publicly available in https://ignaciorlando.github.io.
Advanced In-Design Auto-Fixing Flow for Cell Abutment Pattern Matching Weakpoints
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2018
Year: 2018

Pattern matching design verification has gained noticeable attention in semiconductor technologies as it can precisely identify more localized problematic areas (weakpoints) in the layout. To address these weakpoints, engineers adopt 'Rip-up and Reroute' methodology to reroute the nets and avoid these weakpoints. However, the technique is unable to address weakpoints due to the cell placement. The only present approach is to manually shift or flip the standard cells to eradicate the weakpoint. To overcome the challenge in going from a manual and laborious process to a fully automated fixing, we have proposed an in-design auto-fixing feature, tested with the commercial design tool, Synopsys IC Compiler. Our experimental result has demonstrated close to one hundred percent lithography weakpoints fixing on all of our 14nm designs.
Spine-local Type Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2018
Year: 2018

We present spine-local type inference, a partial type inference system for inferring omitted type annotations for System F terms based on local type inference. Local type inference relies on bidirectional inference rules to propagate type information into and out of adjacent nodes of the AST and restricts type-argument inference to occur only within a single node. Spine-local inference relaxes the restriction on type-argument inference by allowing it to occur only within an {application spine and improves upon it by using contextual type-argument inference. As our goal is to explore the design space of local type inference, we show that, relative to other variants, spine-local type inference enables desirable features such as first-class curried applications, partial type applications, and the ability to infer types for some terms not otherwise possible. Our approach enjoys usual properties of a bidirectional system of having a specification for our inference algorithm and predictable requirements for typing annotations, and in particular maintains some the advantages of local type inference such as a relatively simple implementation and a tendency to produce good-quality error messages when type inference fails.
Fast Policy Learning through Imitation and Reinforcement
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Imitation learning (IL) consists of a set of tools that leverage expert demonstrations to quickly learn policies. However, if the expert is suboptimal, IL can yield policies with inferior performance compared to reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we aim to provide an algorithm that combines the best aspects of RL and IL. We accomplish this by formulating several popular RL and IL algorithms in a common mirror descent framework, showing that these algorithms can be viewed as a variation on a single approach. We then propose LOKI, a strategy for policy learning that first performs a small but random number of IL iterations before switching to a policy gradient RL method. We show that if the switching time is properly randomized, LOKI can learn to outperform a suboptimal expert and converge faster than running policy gradient from scratch. Finally, we evaluate the performance of LOKI experimentally in several simulated environments.
Geographic Centroid Routing for Vehicular Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

A number of geolocation-based Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) routing protocols have been shown to perform well in selected simulation and mobility scenarios. However, the suitability of these mechanisms for vehicular networks utilizing widely-available inexpensive Global Positioning System (GPS) hardware has not been evaluated. We propose a novel geolocation-based routing primitive (Centroid Routing) that is resilient to the measurement errors commonly present in low-cost GPS devices. Using this notion of Centroids, we construct two novel routing protocols and evaluate their performance with respect to positional errors as well as traditional DTN routing metrics. We show that they outperform existing approaches by a significant margin.
Deep Watershed Detector for Music Object Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Optical Music Recognition (OMR) is an important and challenging area within music information retrieval, the accurate detection of music symbols in digital images is a core functionality of any OMR pipeline. In this paper, we introduce a novel object detection method, based on synthetic energy maps and the watershed transform, called Deep Watershed Detector (DWD). Our method is specifically tailored to deal with high resolution images that contain a large number of very small objects and is therefore able to process full pages of written music. We present state-of-the-art detection results of common music symbols and show DWD's ability to work with synthetic scores equally well as on handwritten music.
Deployment of Customized Deep Learning based Video Analytics On Surveillance Cameras
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of our customized deep learning based video analytics system in various applications focused on security, safety, customer analytics and process compliance. We describe our video analytics system comprising of Search, Summarize, Statistics and real-time alerting, and outline its building blocks. These building blocks include object detection, tracking, face detection and recognition, human and face sub-attribute analytics. In each case, we demonstrate how custom models trained using data from the deployment scenarios provide considerably superior accuracies than off-the-shelf models. Towards this end, we describe our data processing and model training pipeline, which can train and fine-tune models from videos with a quick turnaround time. Finally, since most of these models are deployed on-site, it is important to have resource constrained models which do not require GPUs. We demonstrate how we custom train resource constrained models and deploy them on embedded devices without significant loss in accuracy. To our knowledge, this is the first work which provides a comprehensive evaluation of different deep learning models on various real-world customer deployment scenarios of surveillance video analytics. By sharing our implementation details and the experiences learned from deploying customized deep learning models for various customers, we hope that customized deep learning based video analytics is widely incorporated in commercial products around the world.
Reduction of the Pareto Set in Bicriteria Asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2018
Year: 2018

We consider the bicriteria asymmetric traveling salesman problem (bi-ATSP). Optimal solution to a multicriteria problem is usually supposed to be the Pareto set, which is rather wide in real-world problems. We apply to the bi-ATSP the axiomatic approach of the Pareto set reduction proposed by V. Noghin. We identify series of "quanta of information" that guarantee the reduction of the Pareto set for particular cases of the bi-ATSP. An approximation of the Pareto set to the bi-ATSP is constructed by a new multi-objective genetic algorithm. The experimental evaluation carried out in this paper shows the degree of reduction of the Pareto set approximation for various "quanta of information" and various structures of the bi-ATSP instances generated randomly.