OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
ResFPN: Residual Skip Connections in Multi-Resolution Feature Pyramid Networks for Accurate Dense Pixel Matching
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Dense pixel matching is required for many computer vision algorithms such as disparity, optical flow or scene flow estimation. Feature Pyramid Networks (FPN) have proven to be a suitable feature extractor for CNN-based dense matching tasks. FPN generates well localized and semantically strong features at multiple scales. However, the generic FPN is not utilizing its full potential, due to its reasonable but limited localization accuracy. Thus, we present ResFPN -- a multi-resolution feature pyramid network with multiple residual skip connections, where at any scale, we leverage the information from higher resolution maps for stronger and better localized features. In our ablation study, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our novel architecture with clearly higher accuracy than FPN. In addition, we verify the superior accuracy of ResFPN in many different pixel matching applications on established datasets like KITTI, Sintel, and FlyingThings3D.
Pix2Vox++: Multi-scale Context-aware 3D Object Reconstruction from Single and Multiple Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Recovering the 3D shape of an object from single or multiple images with deep neural networks has been attracting increasing attention in the past few years. Mainstream works (e.g. 3D-R2N2) use recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to sequentially fuse feature maps of input images. However, RNN-based approaches are unable to produce consistent reconstruction results when given the same input images with different orders. Moreover, RNNs may forget important features from early input images due to long-term memory loss. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework for single-view and multi-view 3D object reconstruction, named Pix2Vox++. By using a well-designed encoder-decoder, it generates a coarse 3D volume from each input image. A multi-scale context-aware fusion module is then introduced to adaptively select high-quality reconstructions for different parts from all coarse 3D volumes to obtain a fused 3D volume. To further correct the wrongly recovered parts in the fused 3D volume, a refiner is adopted to generate the final output. Experimental results on the ShapeNet, Pix3D, and Things3D benchmarks show that Pix2Vox++ performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and efficiency.
Duality-based approximation algorithms for depth queries and maximum depth
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2020
Year: 2020

We design an efficient data structure for computing a suitably defined approximate depth of any query point in the arrangement $\mathcal{A}(S)$ of a collection $S$ of $n$ halfplanes or triangles in the plane or of halfspaces or simplices in higher dimensions. We then use this structure to find a point of an approximate maximum depth in $\mathcal{A}(S)$. Specifically, given an error parameter $ε>0$, we compute, for any query point $q$, an underestimate $d^-(q)$ of the depth of $q$, that counts only objects containing $q$, but is allowed to exclude objects when $q$ is $ε$-close to their boundary. Similarly, we compute an overestimate $d^+(q)$ that counts all objects containing $q$ but may also count objects that do not contain $q$ but $q$ is $ε$-close to their boundary. Our algorithms for halfplanes and halfspaces are linear in the number of input objects and in the number of queries, and the dependence of their running time on $ε$ is considerably better than that of earlier techniques. Our improvements are particularly substantial for triangles and in higher dimensions.
Randomly Weighted, Untrained Neural Tensor Networks Achieve Greater Relational Expressiveness
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Neural Tensor Networks (NTNs), which are structured to encode the degree of relationship among pairs of entities, are used in Logic Tensor Networks (LTNs) to facilitate Statistical Relational Learning (SRL) in first-order logic. In this paper, we propose Randomly Weighted Tensor Networks (RWTNs), which incorporate randomly drawn, untrained tensors into an NTN encoder network with a trained decoder network. We show that RWTNs meet or surpass the performance of traditionally trained LTNs for Semantic Image Interpretation (SII) tasks that have been used as a representative example of how LTNs utilize reasoning over first-order logic to exceed the performance of solely data-driven methods. We demonstrate that RWTNs outperform LTNs for the detection of the relevant part-of relations between objects, and we show that RWTNs can achieve similar performance as LTNs for object classification while using fewer parameters for learning. Furthermore, we demonstrate that because the randomized weights do not depend on the data, several decoder networks can share a single NTN, giving RWTNs a unique economy of spatial scale for simultaneous classification tasks.
How fair can we go in machine learning? Assessing the boundaries of fairness in decision trees
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Fair machine learning works have been focusing on the development of equitable algorithms that address discrimination of certain groups. Yet, many of these fairness-aware approaches aim to obtain a unique solution to the problem, which leads to a poor understanding of the statistical limits of bias mitigation interventions. We present the first methodology that allows to explore those limits within a multi-objective framework that seeks to optimize any measure of accuracy and fairness and provides a Pareto front with the best feasible solutions. In this work, we focus our study on decision tree classifiers since they are widely accepted in machine learning, are easy to interpret and can deal with non-numerical information naturally. We conclude experimentally that our method can optimize decision tree models by being fairer with a small cost of the classification error. We believe that our contribution will help stakeholders of sociotechnical systems to assess how far they can go being fair and accurate, thus serving in the support of enhanced decision making where machine learning is used.
A Step Towards Interpretable Authorship Verification
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

A central problem that has been researched for many years in the field of digital text forensics is the question whether two documents were written by the same author. Authorship verification (AV) is a research branch in this field that deals with this question. Over the years, research activities in the context of AV have steadily increased, which has led to a variety of approaches trying to solve this problem. Many of these approaches, however, make use of features that are related to or influenced by the topic of the documents. Therefore, it may accidentally happen that their verification results are based not on the writing style (the actual focus of AV), but on the topic of the documents. To address this problem, we propose an alternative AV approach that considers only topic-agnostic features in its classification decision. In addition, we present a post-hoc interpretation method that allows to understand which particular features have contributed to the prediction of the proposed AV method. To evaluate the performance of our AV method, we compared it with ten competing baselines (including the current state of the art) on four challenging data sets. The results show that our approach outperforms all baselines in two cases (with a maximum accuracy of 84%), while in the other two cases it performs as well as the strongest baseline.
Open-Domain Conversational Agents: Current Progress, Open Problems, and Future Directions
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

We present our view of what is necessary to build an engaging open-domain conversational agent: covering the qualities of such an agent, the pieces of the puzzle that have been built so far, and the gaping holes we have not filled yet. We present a biased view, focusing on work done by our own group, while citing related work in each area. In particular, we discuss in detail the properties of continual learning, providing engaging content, and being well-behaved -- and how to measure success in providing them. We end with a discussion of our experience and learnings, and our recommendations to the community.
Drive-Net: Convolutional Network for Driver Distraction Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

To help prevent motor vehicle accidents, there has been significant interest in finding an automated method to recognize signs of driver distraction, such as talking to passengers, fixing hair and makeup, eating and drinking, and using a mobile phone. In this paper, we present an automated supervised learning method called Drive-Net for driver distraction detection. Drive-Net uses a combination of a convolutional neural network (CNN) and a random decision forest for classifying images of a driver. We compare the performance of our proposed Drive-Net to two other popular machine-learning approaches: a recurrent neural network (RNN), and a multi-layer perceptron (MLP). We test the methods on a publicly available database of images acquired under a controlled environment containing about 22425 images manually annotated by an expert. Results show that Drive-Net achieves a detection accuracy of 95%, which is 2% more than the best results obtained on the same database using other methods
An Efficient Smoothing Proximal Gradient Algorithm for Convex Clustering
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Cluster analysis organizes data into sensible groupings and is one of fundamental modes of understanding and learning. The widely used K-means and hierarchical clustering methods can be dramatically suboptimal due to local minima. Recently introduced convex clustering approach formulates clustering as a convex optimization problem and ensures a globally optimal solution. However, the state-of-the-art convex clustering algorithms, based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) or the alternating minimization algorithm (AMA), require large computation and memory space, which limits their applications. In this paper, we develop a very efficient smoothing proximal gradient algorithm (Sproga) for convex clustering. Our Sproga is faster than ADMM- or AMA-based convex clustering algorithms by one to two orders of magnitude. The memory space required by Sproga is less than that required by ADMM and AMA by at least one order of magnitude. Computer simulations and real data analysis show that Sproga outperforms several well known clustering algorithms including K-means and hierarchical clustering. The efficiency and superior performance of our algorithm will help convex clustering to find its wide application.
Exploring Software Naturalness through Neural Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

The Software Naturalness hypothesis argues that programming languages can be understood through the same techniques used in natural language processing. We explore this hypothesis through the use of a pre-trained transformer-based language model to perform code analysis tasks. Present approaches to code analysis depend heavily on features derived from the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) while our transformer-based language models work on raw source code. This work is the first to investigate whether such language models can discover AST features automatically. To achieve this, we introduce a sequence labeling task that directly probes the language models understanding of AST. Our results show that transformer based language models achieve high accuracy in the AST tagging task. Furthermore, we evaluate our model on a software vulnerability identification task. Importantly, we show that our approach obtains vulnerability identification results comparable to graph based approaches that rely heavily on compilers for feature extraction.
Blockchain for Academic Credentials
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

Academic credentials are documents that attest to successful completion of any test, exam or act as a validation of an individual's skill. Currently, the domain of academic credential management suffers from large time consumption, high cost, dependence on third-party and a lack of transparency. A blockchain based solution tries to resolve these pain-points by allowing any recruiter or company to verify the user credentials without dependence on any centralized third party. Our decentralized application is based off of BlockCerts, an MIT project that acts as an open standard for blockchain credentials. The project talks about the implementation details of the decentralized application built for BlockCerts Wallet. It is an attempt to leverage the power of the blockchain technology as a global notary for the verification of digital records.
An Efficient PTAS for Stochastic Load Balancing with Poisson Jobs
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2020
Year: 2020

We give the first polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS) for the stochastic load balancing problem when the job sizes follow Poisson distributions. This improves upon the 2-approximation algorithm due to Goel and Indyk (FOCS'99). Moreover, our approximation scheme is an efficient PTAS that has a running time double exponential in $1/ε$ but nearly-linear in $n$, where $n$ is the number of jobs and $ε$ is the target error. Previously, a PTAS (not efficient) was only known for jobs that obey exponential distributions (Goel and Indyk, FOCS'99). Our algorithm relies on several probabilistic ingredients including some (seemingly) new results on scaling and the so-called "focusing effect" of maximum of Poisson random variables which might be of independent interest.
Risk-Sensitive Reinforcement Learning: a Martingale Approach to Reward Uncertainty
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We introduce a novel framework to account for sensitivity to rewards uncertainty in sequential decision-making problems. While risk-sensitive formulations for Markov decision processes studied so far focus on the distribution of the cumulative reward as a whole, we aim at learning policies sensitive to the uncertain/stochastic nature of the rewards, which has the advantage of being conceptually more meaningful in some cases. To this end, we present a new decomposition of the randomness contained in the cumulative reward based on the Doob decomposition of a stochastic process, and introduce a new conceptual tool - the \textit{chaotic variation} - which can rigorously be interpreted as the risk measure of the martingale component associated to the cumulative reward process. We innovate on the reinforcement learning side by incorporating this new risk-sensitive approach into model-free algorithms, both policy gradient and value function based, and illustrate its relevance on grid world and portfolio optimization problems.
A Study on Impacts of Multiple Factors on Video Qualify of Experience
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2020
Year: 2020

HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) has become a cost-effective means for multimedia delivery nowadays. However, how the quality of experience (QoE) is jointly affected by 1) varying perceptual quality and 2) interruptions is not well-understood. In this paper, we present the first attempt to quantitatively quantify the relative impacts of these factors on the QoE of streaming sessions. To achieve this purpose, we first model the impacts of the factors using histograms, which represent the frequency distributions of the individual factors in a session. By using a large dataset, various insights into the relative impacts of these factors are then provided, serving as suggestions to improve the QoE of streaming sessions.
PoseGAN: A Pose-to-Image Translation Framework for Camera Localization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Camera localization is a fundamental requirement in robotics and computer vision. This paper introduces a pose-to-image translation framework to tackle the camera localization problem. We present PoseGANs, a conditional generative adversarial networks (cGANs) based framework for the implementation of pose-to-image translation. PoseGANs feature a number of innovations including a distance metric based conditional discriminator to conduct camera localization and a pose estimation technique for generated camera images as a stronger constraint to improve camera localization performance. Compared with learning-based regression methods such as PoseNet, PoseGANs can achieve better performance with model sizes that are 70% smaller. In addition, PoseGANs introduce the view synthesis technique to establish the correspondence between the 2D images and the scene, \textit{i.e.}, given a pose, PoseGANs are able to synthesize its corresponding camera images. Furthermore, we demonstrate that PoseGANs differ in principle from structure-based localization and learning-based regressions for camera localization, and show that PoseGANs exploit the geometric structures to accomplish the camera localization task, and is therefore more stable than and superior to learning-based regressions which rely on local texture features instead. In addition to camera localization and view synthesis, we also demonstrate that PoseGANs can be successfully used for other interesting applications such as moving object elimination and frame interpolation in video sequences.
Unsupervised Evaluation of Interactive Dialog with DialoGPT
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

It is important to define meaningful and interpretable automatic evaluation metrics for open-domain dialog research. Standard language generation metrics have been shown to be ineffective for dialog. This paper introduces the FED metric (fine-grained evaluation of dialog), an automatic evaluation metric which uses DialoGPT, without any fine-tuning or supervision. It also introduces the FED dataset which is constructed by annotating a set of human-system and human-human conversations with eighteen fine-grained dialog qualities. The FED metric (1) does not rely on a ground-truth response, (2) does not require training data and (3) measures fine-grained dialog qualities at both the turn and whole dialog levels. FED attains moderate to strong correlation with human judgement at both levels.
Graph Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning on Attributed Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Attributed networks nowadays are ubiquitous in a myriad of high-impact applications, such as social network analysis, financial fraud detection, and drug discovery. As a central analytical task on attributed networks, node classification has received much attention in the research community. In real-world attributed networks, a large portion of node classes only contain limited labeled instances, rendering a long-tail node class distribution. Existing node classification algorithms are unequipped to handle the \textit{few-shot} node classes. As a remedy, few-shot learning has attracted a surge of attention in the research community. Yet, few-shot node classification remains a challenging problem as we need to address the following questions: (i) How to extract meta-knowledge from an attributed network for few-shot node classification? (ii) How to identify the informativeness of each labeled instance for building a robust and effective model? To answer these questions, in this paper, we propose a graph meta-learning framework -- Graph Prototypical Networks (GPN). By constructing a pool of semi-supervised node classification tasks to mimic the real test environment, GPN is able to perform \textit{meta-learning} on an attributed network and derive a highly generalizable model for handling the target classification task. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior capability of GPN in few-shot node classification.
A Framework for Fairness in Two-Sided Marketplaces
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

Many interesting problems in the Internet industry can be framed as a two-sided marketplace problem. Examples include search applications and recommender systems showing people, jobs, movies, products, restaurants, etc. Incorporating fairness while building such systems is crucial and can have a deep social and economic impact (applications include job recommendations, recruiters searching for candidates, etc.). In this paper, we propose a definition and develop an end-to-end framework for achieving fairness while building such machine learning systems at scale. We extend prior work to develop an optimization framework that can tackle fairness constraints from both the source and destination sides of the marketplace, as well as dynamic aspects of the problem. The framework is flexible enough to adapt to different definitions of fairness and can be implemented in very large-scale settings. We perform simulations to show the efficacy of our approach.
Maximizing Submodular or Monotone Functions under Partition Matroid Constraints by Multi-objective Evolutionary Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2020
Year: 2020

Many important problems can be regarded as maximizing submodular functions under some constraints. A simple multi-objective evolutionary algorithm called GSEMO has been shown to achieve good approximation for submodular functions efficiently. While there have been many studies on the subject, most of existing run-time analyses for GSEMO assume a single cardinality constraint. In this work, we extend the theoretical results to partition matroid constraints which generalize cardinality constraints, and show that GSEMO can generally guarantee good approximation performance within polynomial expected run time. Furthermore, we conducted experimental comparison against a baseline GREEDY algorithm in maximizing undirected graph cuts on random graphs, under various partition matroid constraints. The results show GSEMO tends to outperform GREEDY in quadratic run time.
Statistical Modeling of the Impact of Underwater Bubbles on an Optical Wireless Channel
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

In underwater wireless optical communications (UWOC), the random obstruction of light propagation by air bubbles can cause fluctuations in the incoming light intensity of a receiver. In this paper, we propose a statistical model for determining the received power by a receiver in the presence of air bubbles. First, based on real experiments of the behavior of air bubbles underwater, we propose statistical models for the generation, size, and horizontal distribution of each air bubble. Second, we mathematically derive the obstruction caused by the shadow of each bubble as it passes over the beam area. We then compute the combined obstruction of all generated air bubbles to determine the total obstructed power, which is a random variable due to the randomness of bubble behavior. Next, we find the first and second moments of the total obstructed power to model the statistical distribution of the obstructed received power by using the method of moments, which shows that the Weibull distribution suitably matches the simulation data. We also estimate the shape and scale parameters by using two derived moments. Furthermore, we also construct a statistical model of the received power with complete blockage in the presence of air bubbles and we derive the distribution of the composite channel model combining the proposed bubble-obstruction model with a Gamma-Gamma turbulence model. Finally, we obtain and verify the analytic forms of the average bit error rate and the capacity of UWOC systems under this newly proposed composite channel model.