OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
SCR-Graph: Spatial-Causal Relationships based Graph Reasoning Network for Human Action Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Technologies to predict human actions are extremely important for applications such as human robot cooperation and autonomous driving. However, a majority of the existing algorithms focus on exploiting visual features of the videos and do not consider the mining of relationships, which include spatial relationships between human and scene elements as well as causal relationships in temporal action sequences. In fact, human beings are good at using spatial and causal relational reasoning mechanism to predict the actions of others. Inspired by this idea, we proposed a Spatial and Causal Relationship based Graph Reasoning Network (SCR-Graph), which can be used to predict human actions by modeling the action-scene relationship, and causal relationship between actions, in spatial and temporal dimensions respectively. Here, in spatial dimension, a hierarchical graph attention module is designed by iteratively aggregating the features of different kinds of scene elements in different level. In temporal dimension, we designed a knowledge graph based causal reasoning module and map the past actions to temporal causal features through Diffusion RNN. Finally, we integrated the causality features into the heterogeneous graph in the form of shadow node, and introduced a self-attention module to determine the time when the knowledge graph information should be activated. Extensive experimental results on the VIRAT datasets demonstrate the favorable performance of the proposed framework.
Event Outcome Prediction using Sentiment Analysis and Crowd Wisdom in Microblog Feeds
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Sentiment Analysis of microblog feeds has attracted considerable interest in recent times. Most of the current work focuses on tweet sentiment classification. But not much work has been done to explore how reliable the opinions of the mass (crowd wisdom) in social network microblogs such as twitter are in predicting outcomes of certain events such as election debates. In this work, we investigate whether crowd wisdom is useful in predicting such outcomes and whether their opinions are influenced by the experts in the field. We work in the domain of multi-label classification to perform sentiment classification of tweets and obtain the opinion of the crowd. This learnt sentiment is then used to predict outcomes of events such as: US Presidential Debate winners, Grammy Award winners, Super Bowl Winners. We find that in most of the cases, the wisdom of the crowd does indeed match with that of the experts, and in cases where they don't (particularly in the case of debates), we see that the crowd's opinion is actually influenced by that of the experts.
RDSNet: A New Deep Architecture for Reciprocal Object Detection and Instance Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Object detection and instance segmentation are two fundamental computer vision tasks. They are closely correlated but their relations have not yet been fully explored in most previous work. This paper presents RDSNet, a novel deep architecture for reciprocal object detection and instance segmentation. To reciprocate these two tasks, we design a two-stream structure to learn features on both the object level (i.e., bounding boxes) and the pixel level (i.e., instance masks) jointly. Within this structure, information from the two streams is fused alternately, namely information on the object level introduces the awareness of instance and translation variance to the pixel level, and information on the pixel level refines the localization accuracy of objects on the object level in return. Specifically, a correlation module and a cropping module are proposed to yield instance masks, as well as a mask based boundary refinement module for more accurate bounding boxes. Extensive experimental analyses and comparisons on the COCO dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of RDSNet. The source code is available at https://github.com/wangsr126/RDSNet.
Bottleneck detection by slope difference distribution: a robust approach for separating overlapped cells
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

To separate the overlapped cells, a bottleneck detection approach is proposed in this paper. The cell image is segmented by slope difference distribution (SDD) threshold selection. For each segmented binary clump, its one-dimensional boundary is computed as the distance distribution between its centroid and each point on the two-dimensional boundary. The bottleneck points of the one-dimensional boundary is detected by SDD and then transformed back into two-dimensional bottleneck points. Two largest concave parts of the binary clump are used to select the valid bottleneck points. Two bottleneck points from different concave parts with the minimum Euclidean distance is connected to separate the binary clump with minimum-cut. The binary clumps are separated iteratively until the number of computed concave parts is smaller than two. We use four types of open-accessible cell datasets to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach and experimental results showed that the proposed approach is significantly more robust than state of the art methods.
Entropy Regularization with Discounted Future State Distribution in Policy Gradient Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

The policy gradient theorem is defined based on an objective with respect to the initial distribution over states. In the discounted case, this results in policies that are optimal for one distribution over initial states, but may not be uniformly optimal for others, no matter where the agent starts from. Furthermore, to obtain unbiased gradient estimates, the starting point of the policy gradient estimator requires sampling states from a normalized discounted weighting of states. However, the difficulty of estimating the normalized discounted weighting of states, or the stationary state distribution, is quite well-known. Additionally, the large sample complexity of policy gradient methods is often attributed to insufficient exploration, and to remedy this, it is often assumed that the restart distribution provides sufficient exploration in these algorithms. In this work, we propose exploration in policy gradient methods based on maximizing entropy of the discounted future state distribution. The key contribution of our work includes providing a practically feasible algorithm to estimate the normalized discounted weighting of states, i.e, the \textit{discounted future state distribution}. We propose that exploration can be achieved by entropy regularization with the discounted state distribution in policy gradients, where a metric for maximal coverage of the state space can be based on the entropy of the induced state distribution. The proposed approach can be considered as a three time-scale algorithm and under some mild technical conditions, we prove its convergence to a locally optimal policy. Experimentally, we demonstrate usefulness of regularization with the discounted future state distribution in terms of increased state space coverage and faster learning on a range of complex tasks.
Improving Neural Protein-Protein Interaction Extraction with Knowledge Selection
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

Protein-protein interaction (PPI) extraction from published scientific literature provides additional support for precision medicine efforts. Meanwhile, knowledge bases (KBs) contain huge amounts of structured information of protein entities and their relations, which can be encoded in entity and relation embeddings to help PPI extraction. However, the prior knowledge of protein-protein pairs must be selectively used so that it is suitable for different contexts. This paper proposes a Knowledge Selection Model (KSM) to fuse the selected prior knowledge and context information for PPI extraction. Firstly, two Transformers encode the context sequence of a protein pair according to each protein embedding, respectively. Then, the two outputs are fed to a mutual attention to capture the important context features towards the protein pair. Next, the context features are used to distill the relation embedding by a knowledge selector. Finally, the selected relation embedding and the context features are concatenated for PPI extraction. Experiments on the BioCreative VI PPI dataset show that KSM achieves a new state-of-the-art performance (38.08% F1-score) by adding knowledge selection.
Energy-aware Scheduling of Jobs in Heterogeneous Cluster Systems Using Deep Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

Energy consumption is one of the most critical concerns in designing computing devices, ranging from portable embedded systems to computer cluster systems. Furthermore, in the past decade, cluster systems have increasingly risen as popular platforms to run computing-intensive real-time applications in which the performance is of great importance. However, due to different characteristics of real-time workloads, developing general job scheduling solutions that efficiently address both energy consumption and performance in real-time cluster systems is a challenging problem. In this paper, inspired by recent advances in applying deep reinforcement learning for resource management problems, we present the Deep-EAS scheduler that learns efficient energy-aware scheduling strategies for workloads with different characteristics without initially knowing anything about the scheduling task at hand. Results show that Deep-EAS converges quickly, and performs better compared to standard manually-tuned heuristics, especially in heavy load conditions.
TANet: Robust 3D Object Detection from Point Clouds with Triple Attention
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we focus on exploring the robustness of the 3D object detection in point clouds, which has been rarely discussed in existing approaches. We observe two crucial phenomena: 1) the detection accuracy of the hard objects, e.g., Pedestrians, is unsatisfactory, 2) when adding additional noise points, the performance of existing approaches decreases rapidly. To alleviate these problems, a novel TANet is introduced in this paper, which mainly contains a Triple Attention (TA) module, and a Coarse-to-Fine Regression (CFR) module. By considering the channel-wise, point-wise and voxel-wise attention jointly, the TA module enhances the crucial information of the target while suppresses the unstable cloud points. Besides, the novel stacked TA further exploits the multi-level feature attention. In addition, the CFR module boosts the accuracy of localization without excessive computation cost. Experimental results on the validation set of KITTI dataset demonstrate that, in the challenging noisy cases, i.e., adding additional random noisy points around each object,the presented approach goes far beyond state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, for the 3D object detection task of the KITTI benchmark, our approach ranks the first place on Pedestrian class, by using the point clouds as the only input. The running speed is around 29 frames per second.
BERT has a Moral Compass: Improvements of ethical and moral values of machines
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

Allowing machines to choose whether to kill humans would be devastating for world peace and security. But how do we equip machines with the ability to learn ethical or even moral choices? Jentzsch et al.(2019) showed that applying machine learning to human texts can extract deontological ethical reasoning about "right" and "wrong" conduct by calculating a moral bias score on a sentence level using sentence embeddings. The machine learned that it is objectionable to kill living beings, but it is fine to kill time; It is essential to eat, yet one might not eat dirt; it is important to spread information, yet one should not spread misinformation. However, the evaluated moral bias was restricted to simple actions -- one verb -- and a ranking of actions with surrounding context. Recently BERT ---and variants such as RoBERTa and SBERT--- has set a new state-of-the-art performance for a wide range of NLP tasks. But has BERT also a better moral compass? In this paper, we discuss and show that this is indeed the case. Thus, recent improvements of language representations also improve the representation of the underlying ethical and moral values of the machine. We argue that through an advanced semantic representation of text, BERT allows one to get better insights of moral and ethical values implicitly represented in text. This enables the Moral Choice Machine (MCM) to extract more accurate imprints of moral choices and ethical values.
Video Person Re-ID: Fantastic Techniques and Where to Find Them
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

The ability to identify the same person from multiple camera views without the explicit use of facial recognition is receiving commercial and academic interest. The current status-quo solutions are based on attention neural models. In this paper, we propose Attention and CL loss, which is a hybrid of center and Online Soft Mining (OSM) loss added to the attention loss on top of a temporal attention-based neural network. The proposed loss function applied with bag-of-tricks for training surpasses the state of the art on the common person Re-ID datasets, MARS and PRID 2011. Our source code is publicly available on github.
Multiple criteria hierarchy process for sorting problems under uncertainty applied to the evaluation of the operational maturity of research institutions
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2019
Year: 2019

Despite the availability of qualified research personnel, up-to-date research facilities and experience in developing applied research and innovation, many worldwide research institutions face difficulties when managing contracted Research and Development (R&D) projects due to expectations from Industry (private sector). Such difficulties have motivated funding agents to create evaluation processes to check whether the operational procedures of funded research institutions are sufficient to provide timely answers to demand for innovation from industry and also to identify aspects that require quality improvement in research development. For this purpose, several multiple criteria decision-making approaches can be applied. Among the available multiple criteria approaches, sorting methods are one prominent tool to evaluate the operational capacity. However, the first difficulty in applying multiple criteria sorting methods is the need to hierarchically structure multiple criteria in order to represent the intended decision process. Additional challenges include the elicitation of the preference information and the definition of criteria evaluation, since these are frequently affected by some imprecision. In this paper, a new sorting method is proposed to deal with all of those critical points simultaneously. To consider multiple levels for the decision criteria, the FlowSort method is extended to account for hierarchical criteria. To deal with imprecise data, the FlowSort is integrated with fuzzy approaches. To yield solutions that consider fluctuations from imprecise weights, the Stochastic Multicriteria Acceptability Analysis is used. Finally, the proposed method is applied to the evaluation of research institutions, classifying them according to their operational maturity for development of applied research.
Parting with Illusions about Deep Active Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Active learning aims to reduce the high labeling cost involved in training machine learning models on large datasets by efficiently labeling only the most informative samples. Recently, deep active learning has shown success on various tasks. However, the conventional evaluation scheme used for deep active learning is below par. Current methods disregard some apparent parallel work in the closely related fields. Active learning methods are quite sensitive w.r.t. changes in the training procedure like data augmentation. They improve by a large-margin when integrated with semi-supervised learning, but barely perform better than the random baseline. We re-implement various latest active learning approaches for image classification and evaluate them under more realistic settings. We further validate our findings for semantic segmentation. Based on our observations, we realistically assess the current state of the field and propose a more suitable evaluation protocol.
AugFPN: Improving Multi-scale Feature Learning for Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Current state-of-the-art detectors typically exploit feature pyramid to detect objects at different scales. Among them, FPN is one of the representative works that build a feature pyramid by multi-scale features summation. However, the design defects behind prevent the multi-scale features from being fully exploited. In this paper, we begin by first analyzing the design defects of feature pyramid in FPN, and then introduce a new feature pyramid architecture named AugFPN to address these problems. Specifically, AugFPN consists of three components: Consistent Supervision, Residual Feature Augmentation, and Soft RoI Selection. AugFPN narrows the semantic gaps between features of different scales before feature fusion through Consistent Supervision. In feature fusion, ratio-invariant context information is extracted by Residual Feature Augmentation to reduce the information loss of feature map at the highest pyramid level. Finally, Soft RoI Selection is employed to learn a better RoI feature adaptively after feature fusion. By replacing FPN with AugFPN in Faster R-CNN, our models achieve 2.3 and 1.6 points higher Average Precision (AP) when using ResNet50 and MobileNet-v2 as backbone respectively. Furthermore, AugFPN improves RetinaNet by 1.6 points AP and FCOS by 0.9 points AP when using ResNet50 as backbone. Codes will be made available.
Just Add Functions: A Neural-Symbolic Language Model
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Neural network language models (NNLMs) have achieved ever-improving accuracy due to more sophisticated architectures and increasing amounts of training data. However, the inductive bias of these models (formed by the distributional hypothesis of language), while ideally suited to modeling most running text, results in key limitations for today's models. In particular, the models often struggle to learn certain spatial, temporal, or quantitative relationships, which are commonplace in text and are second-nature for human readers. Yet, in many cases, these relationships can be encoded with simple mathematical or logical expressions. How can we augment today's neural models with such encodings? In this paper, we propose a general methodology to enhance the inductive bias of NNLMs by incorporating simple functions into a neural architecture to form a hierarchical neural-symbolic language model (NSLM). These functions explicitly encode symbolic deterministic relationships to form probability distributions over words. We explore the effectiveness of this approach on numbers and geographic locations, and show that NSLMs significantly reduce perplexity in small-corpus language modeling, and that the performance improvement persists for rare tokens even on much larger corpora. The approach is simple and general, and we discuss how it can be applied to other word classes beyond numbers and geography.
Spectral Domain Decomposition Method for Natural Lighting and Medieval Glass Rendering
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we use an original ray-tracing domain decomposition method to address image rendering of naturally lighted scenes. This new method allows to particularly analyze rendering problems on parallel architectures, in the case of interactions between light-rays and glass material. Numerical experiments, for medieval glass rendering within the church of the Royaumont abbey, illustrate the performance of the proposed ray-tracing domain decomposition method (DDM) on multi-cores and multi-processors architectures. On one hand, applying domain decomposition techniques increases speedups obtained by parallelizing the computation. On the other hand, for a fixed number of parallel processes, we notice that speedups increase as the number of sub-domains do.
Distance Distributions of Cyclic Orbit Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

The distance distribution of a code is the vector whose $i^\text{th}$ entry is the number of pairs of codewords with distance $i$. We investigate the structure of the distance distribution for cyclic orbit codes, which are subspace codes generated by the action of $\mathbb{F}_{q^n}^*$ on an $\mathbb{F}_q$-subspace $U$ of $\mathbb{F}_{q^n}$. We show that for optimal full-length orbit codes the distance distribution depends only on $q,\,n$, and the dimension of $U$. For full-length orbit codes with lower minimum distance, we provide partial results towards a characterization of the distance distribution, especially in the case that any two codewords intersect in a space of dimension at most 2. Finally, we briefly address the distance distribution of a union of optimal full-length orbit codes.
Content Generation for Workforce Training
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2019
Year: 2019

Efficient workforce training is needed in today's world in which technology is continually changing the nature of work. Students need to be prepared to enter the workforce. Employees need to become lifelong learners to stay up-to-date in their work and to adapt when job functions are eliminated. The training needs are across all industries - including manufacturing, construction, and healthcare. Computing systems, in particular Virtual/Augmented Reality systems, have been adopted in many training application and show even more promise in the future. However, there are fundamental limitations in today's systems that limit the domains where computing systems can be applied and the extent to which they can be deployed. These limitations need to be addressed by new computing research. In particular research is needed at multiple levels: - Application Data Collection Level Requiring High Security and Privacy Protections - Training Material Authoring Level - Software Systems Level - Hardware Level To accomplish these research goals, a training community needs to be established to do research in end-to-end training systems and to create a community of learning and domain experts available for consulting for in depth computing research on individual system components.
Discriminative Dimension Reduction based on Mutual Information
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

The "curse of dimensionality" is a well-known problem in pattern recognition. A widely used approach to tackling the problem is a group of subspace methods, where the original features are projected onto a new space. The lower dimensional subspace is then used to approximate the original features for classification. However, most subspace methods were not originally developed for classification. We believe that direct adoption of these subspace methods for pattern classification should not be considered best practice. In this paper, we present a new information theory based algorithm for selecting subspaces, which can always result in superior performance over conventional methods. This paper makes the following main contributions: i) it improves a common practice widely used by practitioners in the field of pattern recognition, ii) it develops an information theory based technique for systematically selecting the subspaces that are discriminative and therefore are suitable for pattern recognition/classification purposes, iii) it presents extensive experimental results on a variety of computer vision and pattern recognition tasks to illustrate that the subspaces selected based on maximum mutual information criterion will always enhance performance regardless of the classification techniques used.