Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
A novel and efficient data point neighborhood construction algorithm based on Apollonius circle

Neighborhood construction models are important in finding connection among the data points, which helps demonstrate interrelations among the information. Hence, employing a new approach to find neighborhood among the data points is a challenging issue. The methods, suggested so far, are not useful for simultaneous analysis of distances and precise examination of the geometric position of the data as well as their geometric relationships. Moreover, most of the suggested algorithms depend on regulating parameters including number of neighborhoods and limitations in fixed regions. The purpose of the proposed algorithm is to detect and offer an applied geometric pattern among the data through data mining. Precise geometric patterns are examined according to the relationships among the data in neighborhood space. These patterns can reveal the behavioural discipline and similarity across the data. It is assumed that there is no prior information about the data sets at hand. The aim of the present research study is to locate the precise neighborhood using Apollonius circle, which can help us identify the neighborhood state of data points. High efficiency of Apollonius structure in assessing local similarities among the observations has opened a new field of the science of geometry in data mining. In order to assess the proposed algorithm, its precision is compared with the state-of-the-art and well-known (k-Nearest Neighbor and epsilon-neighborhood) algorithms.
SUMNet: Fully Convolutional Model For Fast Segmentation of Anatomical Structures in Ultrasound Volumes

Ultrasound imaging is generally employed for real-time investigation of internal anatomy of the human body for disease identification. Delineation of the anatomical boundary of organs and pathological lesions is quite challenging due to the stochastic nature of speckle intensity in the images, which also introduces visual fatigue for the observer. This paper introduces a fully convolutional neural network based method to segment organ and pathologies in ultrasound volume by learning the spatial-relationship between closely related classes in the presence of stochastically varying speckle intensity. We propose a convolutional encoder-decoder like framework with (i) feature concatenation across matched layers in encoder and decoder and (ii) index passing based unpooling at the decoder for semantic segmentation of ultrasound volumes. We have experimentally evaluated the performance on publicly available datasets consisting of 10 intravascular ultrasound pullback acquired at 20 MHz and 16 freehand thyroid ultrasound volumes acquired 11 - 16 MHz. We have obtained a dice score of 0.93 + 0.08 and 0.92 + 0.06 respectively, following a 10-fold cross-validation experiment while processing frame of 256 × 384 pixel in 0.035s and a volume of 256 × 384 × 384 voxel in 13.44s.
Pornographic Image Recognition via Weighted Multiple Instance Learning

In the era of Internet, recognizing pornographic images is of great significance for protecting children's physical and mental health. However, this task is very challenging as the key pornographic contents (e.g., breast and private part) in an image often lie in local regions of small size. In this paper, we model each image as a bag of regions, and follow a multiple instance learning (MIL) approach to train a generic region-based recognition model. Specifically, we take into account the regions' degree of pornography, and make three main contributions. First, we show that based on very few annotations of the key pornographic contents in a training image, we can generate a bag of properly sized regions, among which the potential positive regions usually contain useful contexts that can aid recognition. Second, we present a simple quantitative measure of a region's degree of pornography, which can be used to weigh the importance of different regions in a positive image. Third, we formulate the recognition task as a weighted MIL problem under the convolutional neural network framework, with a bag probability function introduced to combine the importance of different regions. Experiments on our newly collected large scale dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, achieving an accuracy with 97.52% true positive rate at 1% false positive rate, tested on 100K pornographic images and 100K normal images.
Data Augmentation for Low Resource Sentiment Analysis Using Generative Adversarial Networks

Sentiment analysis is a task that may suffer from a lack of data in certain cases, as the datasets are often generated and annotated by humans. In cases where data is inadequate for training discriminative models, generate models may aid training via data augmentation. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are one such model that has advanced the state of the art in several tasks, including as image and text generation. In this paper, I train GAN models on low resource datasets, then use them for the purpose of data augmentation towards improving sentiment classifier generalization. Given the constraints of limited data, I explore various techniques to train the GAN models. I also present an analysis of the quality of generated GAN data as more training data for the GAN is made available. In this analysis, the generated data is evaluated as a test set (against a model trained on real data points) as well as a training set to train classification models. Finally, I also conduct a visual analysis by projecting the generated and the real data into a two-dimensional space using the t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) method.
Bayesian Networks for Max-Linear Models

We study Bayesian networks based on max-linear structural equations as introduced in Gissibl and Klüppelberg (2018) and provide a summary of their independence properties. In particular, we emphasize that distributions for such networks are generally not faithful to the independence model determined by their associated directed acyclic graph. In addition, we consider some of the basic issues of estimation and discuss generalized maximum likelihood estimation of the coefficients, using the concept of a generalized likelihood ratio for non-dominated families as introduced by Kiefer and Wolfowitz (1956). Finally, we argue that the structure of a minimal network asymptotically can be identified completely from observational data.
Novel event analysis for human-machine collaborative underwater exploration

One of the main task for deep sea submersible is for human-machine collaborative scientific exploration, e.g., human ourselves drive the submersible and monitor cameras around the submersible to observe new species fish or strange topography in a tedious way. In this paper, by defining novel marine animals or any extreme events as novel events, we design a new deep sea novel visual event analysis framework to improve the efficiency of human-machine collaboration and improve the accuracy simultaneously. Specifically, our visual framework concerns diverse functions than most state-of-the-arts, including novel event detection, tracking and summarization. Due to the power and computation resource limitation of the submersible, we design an efficient deep learning based visual saliency method for novel event detection and propose an online object tracking strategy as well. All the experiments are depending on Chinese Jiaolong, the manned deep sea submersible, which mounts several PanCtiltCzoom (PTZ) camera and static cameras. We build a new novel deep sea event dataset and the results justify that our human-machine collaborative visual observation framework can automatically detect, track and summarize the novel deep sea event.
What Does 2D Geometric Information Really Tell Us About 3D Face Shape?

A face image contains geometric cues in the form of configurational information and contours that can be used to estimate 3D face shape. While it is clear that 3D reconstruction from 2D points is highly ambiguous if no further constraints are enforced, one might expect that the face-space constraint solves this problem. We show that this is not the case and that geometric information is an ambiguous cue. There are two sources for this ambiguity. The first is that, within the space of 3D face shapes, there are flexibility modes that remain when some parts of the face are fixed. The second occurs only under perspective projection and is a result of perspective transformation as camera distance varies. Two different faces, when viewed at different distances, can give rise to the same 2D geometry. To demonstrate these ambiguities, we develop new algorithms for fitting a 3D morphable model to 2D landmarks or contours under either orthographic or perspective projection and show how to compute flexibility modes for both cases. We show that both fitting problems can be posed as a separable nonlinear least squares problem and solved efficiently. We demonstrate both quantitatively and qualitatively that the ambiguity is present in reconstructions from geometric information alone but also in reconstructions from a state-of-the-art CNN-based method.
Unsupervised speaker adaptation for speaker independent acoustic to articulatory speech inversion

Speech inversion is a well-known ill-posed problem and addition of speaker differences typically makes it even harder. Normalizing the speaker differences is essential to effectively using multi-speaker articulatory data for training a speaker independent speech inversion system. This paper explores a vocal tract length normalization (VTLN) technique to transform the acoustic features of different speakers to a target speaker acoustic space such that speaker specific details are minimized. The speaker normalized features are then used to train a deep feed-forward neural network based speech inversion system. The acoustic features are parameterized as time-contextualized mel-frequency cepstral coefficients. The articulatory features are represented by six tract-variable (TV) trajectories, which are relatively speaker invariant compared to flesh point data. Experiments are performed with ten speakers from the University of Wisconsin X-ray microbeam database. Results show that the proposed speaker normalization approach provides an 8.15% relative improvement in correlation between actual and estimated TVs as compared to the system where speaker normalization was not performed. To determine the efficacy of the method across datasets, cross speaker evaluations were performed across speakers from the Multichannel Articulatory-TIMIT and EMA-IEEE datasets. Results prove that the VTLN approach provides improvement in performance even across datasets.
Sparse graphical representation based discriminant analysis for heterogeneous face recognition

Face images captured in heterogeneous environments, e.g., sketches generated by the artists or composite-generation software, photos taken by common cameras and infrared images captured by corresponding infrared imaging devices, are usually subject to large texture (i.e., style) differences. This results in heavily degraded performance of conventional face recognition methods directly applied on heterogeneous face images. In this paper, we propose a novel sparse graphical representation based discriminant analysis (SGR-DA) approach to address aforementioned cross-modality face recognition scenarios. An adaptive sparse graphical representation scheme is designed to represent face images from different modalities, where a Markov networks model is constructed to generate adaptive sparse vectors. To handle the complex facial structure and further improve the discriminability, a spatial partition-based discriminant analysis framework is presented to refine the adaptive sparse vectors for face matching. We conducted experiments on six commonly used heterogeneous face datasets and experimental comparison with both traditional and deep learning based approaches illustrated the superiority of our proposed SGR-DA.
On the Diversity of Software Package Popularity Metrics: An Empirical Study of npm

Software systems often leverage on open source software libraries to reuse functionalities. Such libraries are readily available through software package managers like npm for JavaScript. Due to the huge amount of packages available in such package distributions, developers often decide to rely on or contribute to a software package based on its popularity. Moreover, it is a common practice for researchers to depend on popularity metrics for data sampling and choosing the right candidates for their studies. However, the meaning of popularity is relative and can be defined and measured in a diversity of ways, that might produce different outcomes even when considered for the same studies. In this paper, we show evidence of how different is the meaning of popularity in software engineering research. Moreover, we empirically analyse the relationship between different software popularity measures. As a case study, for a large dataset of 175k npm packages, we computed and extracted 9 different popularity metrics from three open source tracking systems: libraries.io, npmjs.com and GitHub. We found that indeed popularity can be measured with different unrelated metrics, each metric can be defined within a specific context. This indicates a need for a generic framework that would use a portfolio of popularity metrics drawing from different concepts.
Scalable Bayesian Nonparametric Clustering and Classification

We develop a scalable multistep Monte Carlo algorithm for inference under a large class of nonparametric Bayesian models for clustering and classification. Each step is “embarrassingly parallel” and can be implemented using the same Markov chain Monte Carlo sampler. The simplicity and generality of our approach make inference for a wide range of Bayesian nonparametric mixture models applicable to large datasets. Specifically, we apply the approach to inference under a product partition model with regression on covariates. We show results for inference with two motivating datasets: a large set of electronic health records and a bank telemarketing dataset. We find interesting clusters and competitive classification performance relative to other widely used competing classifiers. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.
SketchSegNet+: An End-to-End Learning of RNN for Multi-Class Sketch Semantic Segmentation

We investigate the problem of stroke-level sketch segmentation, which is to automatically assign strokes of a given sketch with semantic labels. Solving the problem of sketch segmentation opens the door for fine-grained sketch interpretation, which can benefit many novel sketch-based applications, including sketch recognition and sketch-based image retrieval. In this paper, we propose an approach for multi-class sketch semantic segmentation by considering it as a sequence-to-sequence generation problem. Specifically, an end-to-end learned network <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">SketchSegNet</i> +, built on recurrent neural networks (RNN), is presented to translate a sequence of strokes into a sequence of semantic labels. In addition, a large-scale stroke-level sketch segmentation dataset is constructed for the first time, which is composed of 150K annotated free-hand human sketch selected from <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">QuickDraw</i> . The dataset will be released publicly. The experimental results of stroke-level sketch semantic segmentation on this novel dataset and the SPG dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
A Temporally-Aware Interpolation Network for Video Frame Inpainting

In this work, we explore video frame inpainting, a task that lies at the intersection of general video inpainting, frame interpolation, and video prediction. Although our problem can be addressed by applying methods from other video interpolation or extrapolation tasks, doing so fails to leverage the additional context information that our problem provides. To this end, we devise a method specifically designed for video frame inpainting that is composed of two modules: a bidirectional video prediction module and a temporally-aware frame interpolation module. The prediction module makes two intermediate predictions of the missing frames, each conditioned on the preceding and following frames respectively, using a shared convolutional LSTM-based encoder-decoder. The interpolation module blends the intermediate predictions by using time information and hidden activations from the video prediction module to resolve disagreements between the predictions. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach produces smoother and more accurate results than state-of-the-art methods for general video inpainting, frame interpolation, and video prediction.
Neuro-Inspired Eye Tracking With Eye Movement Dynamics

Generalizing eye tracking to new subjects/environments remains challenging for existing appearance-based methods. To address this issue, we propose to leverage on eye movement dynamics inspired by neurological studies. Studies show that there exist several common eye movement types, independent of viewing contents and subjects, such as fixation, saccade, and smooth pursuits. Incorporating generic eye movement dynamics can therefore improve the generalization capabilities. In particular, we propose a novel Dynamic Gaze Transition Network (DGTN) to capture the underlying eye movement dynamics and serve as the topdown gaze prior. Combined with the bottom-up gaze measurements from the deep convolutional neural network, our method achieves better performance for both within-dataset and cross-dataset evaluations compared to state-of-the-art. In addition, a new DynamicGaze dataset is also constructed to study eye movement dynamics and eye gaze estimation.
Event-triggered natural hazard monitoring with convolutional neural networks on the edge

In natural hazard warning systems fast decision making is vital to avoid catastrophes. Decision making at the edge of a wireless sensor network promises fast response times but is limited by the availability of energy, data transfer speed, processing and memory constraints. In this work we present a realization of a wireless sensor network for hazard monitoring based on an array of event-triggered single-channel micro-seismic sensors with advanced signal processing and characterization capabilities based on a novel co-detection technique. On the one hand we leverage an ultra-low power, threshold-triggering circuit paired with on-demand digital signal acquisition capable of extracting relevant information exactly and efficiently at times when it matters most and consequentially not wasting precious resources when nothing can be observed. On the other hand we utilize machine-learning-based classification implemented on low-power, off-the-shelf microcontrollers to avoid false positive warnings and to actively identify humans in hazard zones. The sensors' response time and memory requirement is substantially improved by quantizing and pipelining the inference of a convolutional neural network. In this way, convolutional neural networks that would not run unmodified on a memory constrained device can be executed in real-time and at scale on low-power embedded devices. A field study with our system is running on the rockfall scarp of the Matterhorn Hörnligrat at 3500 m a.s.l. since 08/2018.
GAPLE: Generalizable Approaching Policy LEarning for Robotic Object Searching in Indoor Environment

We study the problem of learning a generalizable action policy for an intelligent agent to actively approach an object of interest, in an indoor environment, solely from its visual inputs. While scene-driven or recognition-driven visual navigation has been widely studied, prior efforts suffer severely from the limited generalization capability. In this letter, we first argue the object searching task is environment-dependent while the approaching ability is general. To learn a generalizable approaching policy, we present a novel solution dubbed as Generalizable Approaching Policy LEarning, which adopts two channels of visual features: depth and semantic segmentation, as the inputs to the policy learning module. The empirical studies conducted on the House3D dataset and on a physical platform in a real-world scenario validate our hypothesis, and we further provide in-depth qualitative analysis.
An Annealed Sequential Monte Carlo Method for Bayesian Phylogenetics

We describe an "embarrassingly parallel" method for Bayesian phylogenetic inference, annealed Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC), based on recent advances in the SMC literature such as adaptive determination of annealing parameters. The algorithm provides an approximate posterior distribution over trees and evolutionary parameters as well as an unbiased estimator for the marginal likelihood. This unbiasedness property can be used for the purpose of testing the correctness of posterior simulation software. We evaluate the performance of phylogenetic annealed SMC by reviewing and comparing with other computational Bayesian phylogenetic methods, in particular, different marginal likelihood estimation methods. Unlike previous SMC methods in phylogenetics, our annealed method can utilize standard Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) tree moves and hence benefit from the large inventory of such moves available in the literature. Consequently, the annealed SMC method should be relatively easy to incorporate into existing phylogenetic software packages based on MCMC algorithms. We illustrate our method using simulation studies and real data analysis.
Checking is Believing: Event-Aware Program Anomaly Detection in Cyber-Physical Systems

Securing cyber-physical systems (CPS) against malicious attacks is of paramount importance because these attacks may cause irreparable damages to physical systems. Recent studies have revealed that control programs running on CPS devices suffer from both control-oriented attacks (e.g., code-injection or code-reuse attacks) and data-oriented attacks (e.g., non-control data attacks). Unfortunately, existing detection mechanisms are insufficient to detect runtime data-oriented exploits, due to the lack of runtime execution semantics checking. In this work, we propose Orpheus, a new security methodology for defending against data-oriented attacks by enforcing cyber-physical execution semantics. We first present a general method for reasoning cyber-physical execution semantics of a control program (i.e., causal dependencies between the physical context/event and program control flows), including the event identification and dependence analysis. As an instantiation of Orpheus, we then present a new program behavior model, i.e., the event-aware finite-state automaton (eFSA). eFSA takes advantage of the event-driven nature of CPS control programs and incorporates event checking in anomaly detection. It detects data-oriented exploits if a specific physical event is missing along with the corresponding event dependent state transition. We evaluate our prototype's performance by conducting case studies under data-oriented attacks. Results show that eFSA can successfully detect different runtime attacks. Our prototype on Raspberry Pi incurs a low overhead, taking 0.0001s for each state transition integrity checking, and 0.063s~0.211s for the cyber-physical contextual consistency checking.