OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Analytic Solution of a Delay Differential Equation Arising in Cost Functionals for Systems with Distributed Delays
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2019
Year: 2019

The solvability of a delay differential equation arising in the construction of quadratic cost functionals, i.e. Lyapunov functionals, for a linear time-delay system with a constant and a distributed delay is investigated. We present a delay-free auxiliary ordinary differential equation system with algebraically coupled split-boundary conditions, that characterizes the solutions of the delay differential equation and is used for solution synthesis. A spectral property of the time-delay system yields a necessary and sufficient condition for existence and uniqueness of solutions to the auxiliary system, equivalently the delay differential equation. The result is a tractable analytic solution framework to the delay differential equation.
Mapping Images to Psychological Similarity Spaces Using Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

The cognitive framework of conceptual spaces bridges the gap between symbolic and subsymbolic AI by proposing an intermediate conceptual layer where knowledge is represented geometrically. There are two main approaches for obtaining the dimensions of this conceptual similarity space: using similarity ratings from psychological experiments and using machine learning techniques. In this paper, we propose a combination of both approaches by using psychologically derived similarity ratings to constrain the machine learning process. This way, a mapping from stimuli to conceptual spaces can be learned that is both supported by psychological data and allows generalization to unseen stimuli. The results of a first feasibility study support our proposed approach.
Weights which respect support and NN-decoding
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

In this work we explore a family of metrics over finite fields which respect the support of vectors. We show how these metrics can be obtained from the edge-weighted Hamming cube and, based on this representation we give a description of a group of linear isometries (with respect to the metric). Next we introduce the concept of conditional sum of metrics and determine what conditions determine a metric respecting support, out of two such given metrics. Finally we introduce the labeled-poset block metrics, a new family of metrics which respects support of vector, filling a gap existing in the known such metrics. For this family we give a full description of the group of linear isometries and determine necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a MacWilliams identity.
HandyNet: A One-stop Solution to Detect, Segment, Localize & Analyze Driver Hands
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Tasks related to human hands have long been part of the computer vision community. Hands being the primary actuators for humans, convey a lot about activities and intents, in addition to being an alternative form of communication/interaction with other humans and machines. In this study, we focus on training a single feedforward convolutional neural network (CNN) capable of executing many hand related tasks that may be of use in autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles of the future. The resulting network, which we refer to as HandyNet, is capable of detecting, segmenting and localizing (in 3D) driver hands inside a vehicle cabin. The network is additionally trained to identify handheld objects that the driver may be interacting with. To meet the data requirements to train such a network, we propose a method for cheap annotation based on chroma-keying, thereby bypassing weeks of human effort required to label such data. This process can generate thousands of labeled training samples in an efficient manner, and may be replicated in new environments with relative ease.
Communication channels in safety analysis: An industrial exploratory case study
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2019
Year: 2019

Context: Safety analysis is a predominant activity in developing safety-critical systems. It is a highly cooperative task among multiple functional departments due to increasingly sophisticated safety-critical systems and close-knit development processes. Communication occurs pervasively. Motivation: Effective communication channels among multiple functional departments influence safety analysis, quality as well as a safe product delivery. However, the use of communication channels during safety analysis is sometimes arbitrary and poses challenges. Objective: Investige the existing communication channels, their usage frequencies, their purposes and challenges during safety analysis in industry.. Method: Multiple case study of experts (survey: 39, interview: 21) in safety-critical companies including software developers, quality engineers and functional safety managers. Direct observations and documentation review were also conducted. Results: Popular communication channels during safety analysis include formal meetings, project coordination tools, documentation and telephone. Email, personal discussion, training, internal communication software and boards are also in use. Training involving safety analysis happens 1-4 times per year, while other aforementioned communication channels happen ranges from 1-4 times per day to 1-4 times per month. We summarise 28 purposes for these communication channels. Communication happens mostly for the purpose of clarifying safety requirements, fixing temporary problems, conflicts and obstacles and sharing safety knowledge. The top challenges are reported. Conclusion: During safety analysis, to use communication channels effectively and avoid challenges, a clear purpose of communication during safety analysis should be established at the beginning. To derive countermeasures of fixing the top 10 challenges are potential next steps.
WhoTracks .Me: Shedding light on the opaque world of online tracking
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2019
Year: 2019

Online tracking has become of increasing concern in recent years, however our understanding of its extent to date has been limited to snapshots from web crawls. Previous at-tempts to measure the tracking ecosystem, have been done using instrumented measurement platforms, which are not able to accurately capture how people interact with the web. In this work we present a method for the measurement of tracking in the web through a browser extension, as well as a method for the aggregation and collection of this information which protects the privacy of participants. We deployed this extension to more than 5 million users, enabling measurement across multiple countries, ISPs and browser configurations, to give an accurate picture of real-world tracking. The result is the largest and longest measurement of online tracking to date based on real users, covering 1.5 billion page loads gathered over 12 months. The data, detailing tracking behaviour over a year, is made publicly available to help drive transparency around online tracking practices.
Half-Space Power Diagrams and Discrete Surface Offsets
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2019
Year: 2019

We present an efficient, trivially parallelizable algorithm to compute offset surfaces of shapes discretized using a dexel data structure. Our algorithm is based on a two-stage sweeping procedure that is simple to implement and efficient, entirely avoiding volumetric distance field computations typical of existing methods. Our construction is based on properties of half-space power diagrams, where each seed is only visible by a half-space, which were never used before for the computation of surface offsets. The primary application of our method is interactive modeling for digital fabrication. Our technique enables a user to interactively process high-resolution models. It is also useful in a plethora of other geometry processing tasks requiring fast, approximate offsets, such as topology optimization, collision detection, and skeleton extraction. We present experimental timings, comparisons with previous approaches, and provide a reference implementation in the supplemental material.
Realistic Evaluation of Deep Semi-Supervised Learning Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) provides a powerful framework for leveraging unlabeled data when labels are limited or expensive to obtain. SSL algorithms based on deep neural networks have recently proven successful on standard benchmark tasks. However, we argue that these benchmarks fail to address many issues that these algorithms would face in real-world applications. After creating a unified reimplementation of various widely-used SSL techniques, we test them in a suite of experiments designed to address these issues. We find that the performance of simple baselines which do not use unlabeled data is often underreported, that SSL methods differ in sensitivity to the amount of labeled and unlabeled data, and that performance can degrade substantially when the unlabeled dataset contains out-of-class examples. To help guide SSL research towards real-world applicability, we make our unified reimplemention and evaluation platform publicly available.
SegMap: 3D Segment Mapping using Data-Driven Descriptors
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

When performing localization and mapping, working at the level of structure can be advantageous in terms of robustness to environmental changes and differences in illumination. This paper presents SegMap: a map representation solution to the localization and mapping problem based on the extraction of segments in 3D point clouds. In addition to facilitating the computationally intensive task of processing 3D point clouds, working at the level of segments addresses the data compression requirements of real-time single- and multi-robot systems. While current methods extract descriptors for the single task of localization, SegMap leverages a data-driven descriptor in order to extract meaningful features that can also be used for reconstructing a dense 3D map of the environment and for extracting semantic information. This is particularly interesting for navigation tasks and for providing visual feedback to end-users such as robot operators, for example in search and rescue scenarios. These capabilities are demonstrated in multiple urban driving and search and rescue experiments. Our method leads to an increase of area under the ROC curve of 28.3% over current state of the art using eigenvalue based features. We also obtain very similar reconstruction capabilities to a model specifically trained for this task. The SegMap implementation will be made available open-source along with easy to run demonstrations at www.github.com/ethz-asl/segmap. A video demonstration is available at https://youtu.be/CMk4w4eRobg.
A Nonlinear Spectral Method for Core--Periphery Detection in Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2019
Year: 2019

We derive and analyse a new iterative algorithm for detecting network core--periphery structure. Using techniques in nonlinear Perron-Frobenius theory, we prove global convergence to the unique solution of a relaxed version of a natural discrete optimization problem. On sparse networks, the cost of each iteration scales linearly with the number of nodes, making the algorithm feasible for large-scale problems. We give an alternative interpretation of the algorithm from the perspective of maximum likelihood reordering of a new logistic core--periphery random graph model. This viewpoint also gives a new basis for quantitatively judging a core--periphery detection algorithm. We illustrate the algorithm on a range of synthetic and real networks, and show that it offers advantages over the current state-of-the-art.
Who witnesses The Witness? Finding witnesses in The Witness is hard and sometimes impossible
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2019
Year: 2019

We analyze the computational complexity of the many types of pencil-and-paper-style puzzles featured in the 2016 puzzle video game The Witness. In all puzzles, the goal is to draw a simple path in a rectangular grid graph from a start vertex to a destination vertex. The different puzzle types place different constraints on the path: preventing some edges from being visited (broken edges); forcing some edges or vertices to be visited (hexagons); forcing some cells to have certain numbers of incident path edges (triangles); or forcing the regions formed by the path to be partially monochromatic (squares), have exactly two special cells (stars), or be singly covered by given shapes (polyominoes) and/or negatively counting shapes (antipolyominoes). We show that any one of these clue types (except the first) is enough to make path finding NP-complete ("witnesses exist but are hard to find"), even for rectangular boards. Furthermore, we show that a final clue type (antibody), which necessarily "cancels" the effect of another clue in the same region, makes path finding $Σ_2$-complete ("witnesses do not exist"), even with a single antibody (combined with many anti/polyominoes), and the problem gets no harder with many antibodies. On the positive side, we give a polynomial-time algorithm for monomino clues, by reducing to hexagon clues on the boundary of the puzzle, even in the presence of broken edges, and solving "subset Hamiltonian path" for terminals on the boundary of an embedded planar graph in polynomial time.
dhSegment: A generic deep-learning approach for document segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

In recent years there have been multiple successful attempts tackling document processing problems separately by designing task specific hand-tuned strategies. We argue that the diversity of historical document processing tasks prohibits to solve them one at a time and shows a need for designing generic approaches in order to handle the variability of historical series. In this paper, we address multiple tasks simultaneously such as page extraction, baseline extraction, layout analysis or multiple typologies of illustrations and photograph extraction. We propose an open-source implementation of a CNN-based pixel-wise predictor coupled with task dependent post-processing blocks. We show that a single CNN-architecture can be used across tasks with competitive results. Moreover most of the task-specific post-precessing steps can be decomposed in a small number of simple and standard reusable operations, adding to the flexibility of our approach.
Rate-Splitting Multiple Access for Coordinated Multi-Point Joint Transmission
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

As a promising downlink multiple access scheme, Rate-Splitting Multiple Access (RSMA) has been shown to achieve superior spectral and energy efficiencies compared with Space-Division Multiple Access (SDMA) and Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) in downlink single-cell systems. By relying on linearly precoded rate-splitting at the transmitter and successive interference cancellation at the receivers, RSMA has the capability of partially decoding the interference and partially treating the interference as noise, and therefore copes with a wide range of user deployments and network loads. In this work, we further study RSMA in downlink Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) Joint Transmission (JT) networks by investigating the optimal beamformer design to maximize the Weighted Sum-Rate (WSR) of all users subject to individual Quality of Service (QoS) rate constraints and per base station power constraints. Numerical results show that, in CoMP JT, RSMA achieves significant WSR improvement over SDMA and NOMA in a wide range of inter-user and inter-cell channel strength disparities. Specifically, SDMA (resp. NOMA) is more suited to deployments with little (resp. large) inter-user channel strength disparity and large (resp. little) inter-cell channel disparity, while RSMA is suited to any deployment. We conclude that RSMA provides rate, robustness and QoS enhancements over SDMA and NOMA in CoMP JT networks.
Generative Steganography by Sampling
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, a novel data-driven information hiding scheme called generative steganography by sampling (GSS) is proposed. Unlike in traditional modification-based steganography, in our method the stego image is directly sampled by a powerful generator: no explicit cover is used. Both parties share a secret key used for message embedding and extraction. The Jensen-Shannon divergence is introduced as a new criterion for evaluating the security of generative steganography. Based on these principles, we propose a simple practical generative steganography method that uses semantic image inpainting. The message is written in advance to an uncorrupted region that needs to be retained in the corrupted image. Then, the corrupted image with the secret message is fed into a Generator trained by a generative adversarial network (GAN) for semantic completion. Message loss and prior loss terms are proposed for penalizing message extraction error and unrealistic stego image. In our design, we first train a generator whose training target is the generation of new data samples from the same distribution as that of existing training data. Next, for the trained generator, backpropagation to the message and prior loss are introduced to optimize the coding of the input noise data for the generator. The presented experiments demonstrate the potential of the proposed framework based on both qualitative and quantitative evaluations of the generated stego images.
Resolving SINR Queries in a Dynamic Setting
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2019
Year: 2019

We consider a set of transmitters broadcasting simultaneously on the same frequency under the SINR model. Transmission power may vary from one transmitter to another, and a transmitter's signal strength at a given point is modeled by the transmitter's power divided by some constant power $α$ of the distance it traveled. Roughly, a receiver at a given location can hear a specific transmitter only if the transmitter's signal is stronger by a specified ratio than the signals of all other transmitters combined. An SINR query is to determine whether a receiver at a given location can hear any transmitter, and if yes, which one. An approximate answer to an SINR query is such that one gets a definite YES or definite NO, when the ratio between the strongest signal and all other signals combined is well above or well below the reception threshold, while the answer in the intermediate range is allowed to be either YES or NO. We describe compact data structures that support approximate SINR queries in the plane in a dynamic context, i.e., where transmitters may be inserted and deleted over time. We distinguish between two main variants --- uniform power and non-uniform power. In both variants the preprocessing time is $O(n \mathop{\textrm{polylog}} n)$ and the amortized update time is $O(\mathop{\textrm{polylog}} n)$, while the query time is $O(\mathop{\textrm{polylog}} n)$ for uniform power, and randomized time $O(\sqrt{n} \mathop{\textrm{polylog}} n)$ with high probability for non-uniform power. Finally, we observe that in the static context the latter data structure can be implemented differently, so that the query time is also $O(\mathop{\textrm{polylog}} n)$, thus significantly improving all previous results for this problem.
Joint Shape Representation and Classification for Detecting PDAC
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

We aim to detect pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) in abdominal CT scans, which sheds light on early diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. This is a 3D volume classification task with little training data. We propose a two-stage framework, which first segments the pancreas into a binary mask, then compresses the mask into a shape vector and performs abnormality classification. Shape representation and classification are performed in a joint manner, both to exploit the knowledge that PDAC often changes the shape of the pancreas and to prevent over-fitting. Experiments are performed on 300 normal scans and 136 PDAC cases. We achieve a specificity of 90.2% (false alarm occurs on less than 1/10 normal cases) at a sensitivity of 80.2% (less than 1/5 PDAC cases are not detected), which show promise for clinical applications.
Deep Affect Prediction in-the-wild: Aff-Wild Database and Challenge, Deep Architectures, and Beyond
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Automatic understanding of human affect using visual signals is of great importance in everyday human-machine interactions. Appraising human emotional states, behaviors and reactions displayed in real-world settings, can be accomplished using latent continuous dimensions (e.g., the circumplex model of affect). Valence (i.e., how positive or negative is an emotion) & arousal (i.e., power of the activation of the emotion) constitute popular and effective affect representations. Nevertheless, the majority of collected datasets this far, although containing naturalistic emotional states, have been captured in highly controlled recording conditions. In this paper, we introduce the Aff-Wild benchmark for training and evaluating affect recognition algorithms. We also report on the results of the First Affect-in-the-wild Challenge that was organized in conjunction with CVPR 2017 on the Aff-Wild database and was the first ever challenge on the estimation of valence and arousal in-the-wild. Furthermore, we design and extensively train an end-to-end deep neural architecture which performs prediction of continuous emotion dimensions based on visual cues. The proposed deep learning architecture, AffWildNet, includes convolutional & recurrent neural network layers, exploiting the invariant properties of convolutional features, while also modeling temporal dynamics that arise in human behavior via the recurrent layers. The AffWildNet produced state-of-the-art results on the Aff-Wild Challenge. We then exploit the AffWild database for learning features, which can be used as priors for achieving best performances both for dimensional, as well as categorical emotion recognition, using the RECOLA, AFEW-VA and EmotiW datasets, compared to all other methods designed for the same goal. The database and emotion recognition models are available at http://ibug.doc.ic.ac.uk/resources/first-affect-wild-challenge.
Lifting Coalgebra Modalities and $\mathsf{MELL}$ Model Structure to Eilenberg-Moore Categories
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2019
Year: 2019

A categorical model of the multiplicative and exponential fragments of intuitionistic linear logic ($\mathsf{MELL}$), known as a \emph{linear category}, is a symmetric monoidal closed category with a monoidal coalgebra modality (also known as a linear exponential comonad). Inspired by Blute and Scott's work on categories of modules of Hopf algebras as models of linear logic, we study categories of algebras of monads (also known as Eilenberg-Moore categories) as models of $\mathsf{MELL}$. We define a $\mathsf{MELL}$ lifting monad on a linear category as a Hopf monad -- in the Brugui{è}res, Lack, and Virelizier sense -- with a special kind of mixed distributive law over the monoidal coalgebra modality. As our main result, we show that the linear category structure lifts to the category of algebras of $\mathsf{MELL}$ lifting monads. We explain how groups in the category of coalgebras of the monoidal coalgebra modality induce $\mathsf{MELL}$ lifting monads and provide a source for such groups from enrichment over abelian groups. Along the way we also define mixed distributive laws of symmetric comonoidal monads over symmetric monoidal comonads and lifting differential category structure.