Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Dynamic Error-bounded Lossy Compression (EBLC) to Reduce the Bandwidth Requirement for Real-time Vision-based Pedestrian Safety Applications

As camera quality improves and their deployment moves to areas with limited bandwidth, communication bottlenecks can impair real-time constraints of an ITS application, such as video-based real-time pedestrian detection. Video compression reduces the bandwidth requirement to transmit the video but degrades the video quality. As the quality level of the video decreases, it results in the corresponding decreases in the accuracy of the vision-based pedestrian detection model. Furthermore, environmental conditions (e.g., rain and darkness) alter the compression ratio and can make maintaining a high pedestrian detection accuracy more difficult. The objective of this study is to develop a real-time error-bounded lossy compression (EBLC) strategy to dynamically change the video compression level depending on different environmental conditions in order to maintain a high pedestrian detection accuracy. We conduct a case study to show the efficacy of our dynamic EBLC strategy for real-time vision-based pedestrian detection under adverse environmental conditions. Our strategy selects the error tolerances dynamically for lossy compression that can maintain a high detection accuracy across a representative set of environmental conditions. Analyses reveal that our strategy increases pedestrian detection accuracy up to 14% and reduces the communication bandwidth up to 14x for adverse environmental conditions compared to the same conditions but without our dynamic EBLC strategy. Our dynamic EBLC strategy is independent of detection models and environmental conditions allowing other detection models and environmental conditions to be easily incorporated in our strategy.
ImVoteNet: Boosting 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds with Image Votes

3D object detection has seen quick progress thanks to advances in deep learning on point clouds. A few recent works have even shown state-of-the-art performance with just point clouds input (e.g. VoteNet). However, point cloud data have inherent limitations. They are sparse, lack color information and often suffer from sensor noise. Images, on the other hand, have high resolution and rich texture. Thus they can complement the 3D geometry provided by point clouds. Yet how to effectively use image information to assist point cloud based detection is still an open question. In this work, we build on top of VoteNet and propose a 3D detection architecture called ImVoteNet specialized for RGB-D scenes. ImVoteNet is based on fusing 2D votes in images and 3D votes in point clouds. Compared to prior work on multi-modal detection, we explicitly extract both geometric and semantic features from the 2D images. We leverage camera parameters to lift these features to 3D. To improve the synergy of 2D-3D feature fusion, we also propose a multi-tower training scheme. We validate our model on the challenging SUN RGB-D dataset, advancing state-of-the-art results by 5.7 mAP. We also provide rich ablation studies to analyze the contribution of each design choice.
A Scalable Framework for Quality Assessment of RDF Datasets

Over the last years, Linked Data has grown continuously. Today, we count more than 10,000 datasets being available online following Linked Data standards. These standards allow data to be machine readable and inter-operable. Nevertheless, many applications, such as data integration, search, and interlinking, cannot take full advantage of Linked Data if it is of low quality. There exist a few approaches for the quality assessment of Linked Data, but their performance degrades with the increase in data size and quickly grows beyond the capabilities of a single machine. In this paper, we present DistQualityAssessment -- an open source implementation of quality assessment of large RDF datasets that can scale out to a cluster of machines. This is the first distributed, in-memory approach for computing different quality metrics for large RDF datasets using Apache Spark. We also provide a quality assessment pattern that can be used to generate new scalable metrics that can be applied to big data. The work presented here is integrated with the SANSA framework and has been applied to at least three use cases beyond the SANSA community. The results show that our approach is more generic, efficient, and scalable as compared to previously proposed approaches.
MSE-Optimal Neural Network Initialization via Layer Fusion

Deep neural networks achieve state-of-the-art performance for a range of classification and inference tasks. However, the use of stochastic gradient descent combined with the nonconvexity of the underlying optimization problems renders parameter learning susceptible to initialization. To address this issue, a variety of methods that rely on random parameter initialization or knowledge distillation have been proposed in the past. In this paper, we propose FuseInit, a novel method to initialize shallower networks by fusing neighboring layers of deeper networks that are trained with random initialization. We develop theoretical results and efficient algorithms for mean-square error (MSE)-optimal fusion of neighboring dense-dense, convolutional-dense, and convolutional-convolutional layers. We show experiments for a range of classification and regression datasets, which suggest that deeper neural networks are less sensitive to initialization and shallower networks can perform better (sometimes as well as their deeper counterparts) if initialized with FuseInit.
Holographic entanglement negativity for disjoint subsystems in $\mathrm{AdS_{d+1}/CFT_d}$

We propose a construction to compute the holographic entanglement negativity for bipartite mixed state configurations of two disjoint subsystems in higher dimensional conformal field theories (CFT$_d$s) dual to bulk AdS$_{d+1}$ geometries. Our proposal follows from the corresponding AdS$_3$/CFT$_2$ scenario and involves an algebraic sum of the areas of bulk RT surfaces for certain combinations of subsystems. Utilizing our construction we compute the holographic entanglement negativity at the leading order through a perturbative expansion, for such bipartite mixed states of two disjoint subsystems with long rectangular strip geometries in CFT$_d$s dual to bulk pure AdS$_{d+1}$ geometries and AdS$_{d+1}$-Schwarzschild black holes.
Distal Explanations for Model-free Explainable Reinforcement Learning

In this paper we introduce and evaluate a distal explanation model for model-free reinforcement learning agents that can generate explanations for `why' and `why not' questions. Our starting point is the observation that causal models can generate opportunity chains that take the form of `A enables B and B causes C'. Using insights from an analysis of 240 explanations generated in a human-agent experiment, we define a distal explanation model that can analyse counterfactuals and opportunity chains using decision trees and causal models. A recurrent neural network is employed to learn opportunity chains, and decision trees are used to improve the accuracy of task prediction and the generated counterfactuals. We computationally evaluate the model in 6 reinforcement learning benchmarks using different reinforcement learning algorithms. From a study with 90 human participants, we show that our distal explanation model results in improved outcomes over three scenarios compared with two baseline explanation models.
Unsupervised Pre-training of Bidirectional Speech Encoders via Masked  Reconstruction

We propose an approach for pre-training speech representations via a masked reconstruction loss. Our pre-trained encoder networks are bidirectional and can therefore be used directly in typical bidirectional speech recognition models. The pre-trained networks can then be fine-tuned on a smaller amount of supervised data for speech recognition. Experiments with this approach on the LibriSpeech and Wall Street Journal corpora show promising results. We find that the main factors that lead to speech recognition improvements are: masking segments of sufficient width in both time and frequency, pre-training on a much larger amount of unlabeled data than the labeled data, and domain adaptation when the unlabeled and labeled data come from different domains. The gain from pre-training is additive to that of supervised data augmentation.
Predictive inference with Fleming--Viot-driven dependent Dirichlet processes

We consider predictive inference using a class of temporally dependent Dirichlet processes driven by Fleming--Viot diffusions, which have a natural bearing in Bayesian nonparametrics and lend the resulting family of random probability measures to analytical posterior analysis. Formulating the implied statistical model as a hidden Markov model, we fully describe the predictive distribution induced by these Fleming--Viot-driven dependent Dirichlet processes, for a sequence of observations collected at a certain time given another set of draws collected at several previous times. This is identified as a mixture of P\'olya urns, whereby the observations can be values from the baseline distribution or copies of previous draws collected at the same time as in the usual P\`olya urn, or can be sampled from a random subset of the data collected at previous times. We characterise the time-dependent weights of the mixture which select such subsets and discuss the asymptotic regimes. We describe the induced partition by means of a Chinese restaurant process metaphor with a conveyor belt, whereby new customers who do not sit at an occupied table open a new table by picking a dish either from the baseline distribution or from a time-varying offer available on the conveyor belt. We lay out explicit algorithms for exact and approximate posterior sampling of both observations and partitions, and illustrate our results on predictive problems with synthetic and real data.
How symmetric is too symmetric for large quantum speedups?

Suppose a Boolean function $f$ is symmetric under a group action $G$ acting on the $n$ bits of the input. For which $G$ does this mean $f$ does not have an exponential quantum speedup? Is there a characterization of how rich $G$ must be before the function $f$ cannot have enough structure for quantum algorithms to exploit? In this work, we make several steps towards understanding the group actions $G$ which are "quantum intolerant" in this way. We show that sufficiently transitive group actions do not allow a quantum speedup, and that a "well-shuffling" property of group actions -- which happens to be preserved by several natural transformations -- implies a lack of super-polynomial speedups for functions symmetric under the group action. Our techniques are motivated by a recent paper by Chailloux (2018), which deals with the case where $G=S_n$. Our main application is for graph symmetries: we show that any Boolean function $f$ defined on the adjacency matrix of a graph (and symmetric under relabeling the vertices of the graph) has a power $6$ relationship between its randomized and quantum query complexities, even if $f$ is a partial function. In particular, this means no graph property testing problems can have super-polynomial quantum speedups, settling an open problem of Ambainis, Childs, and Liu (2011).
The Apiza Corpus: API Usage Dialogues with a Simulated Virtual Assistant

Virtual assistant technology has the potential to make a significant impact in the field of software engineering. However, few SE-related datasets exist that would be suitable for the design or training of a virtual assistant. To help lay the groundwork for a hypothetical virtual assistant for API usage, we designed and conducted a Wizard-of-Oz study to gather this crucial data. We hired 30 professional programmers to complete a series of programming tasks by interacting with a simulated virtual assistant. Unbeknownst to the programmers, the virtual assistant was actually operated by another human expert. In this report, we describe our experimental methodology and summarize the results of the study.
aiTPR: Attribute Interaction-Tensor Product Representation for Image Caption

Region visual features enhance the generative capability of the machines based on features, however they lack proper interaction attentional perceptions and thus ends up with biased or uncorrelated sentences or pieces of misinformation. In this work, we propose Attribute Interaction-Tensor Product Representation (aiTPR) which is a convenient way of gathering more information through orthogonal combination and learning the interactions as physical entities (tensors) and improving the captions. Compared to previous works, where features are added up to undefined feature spaces, TPR helps in maintaining sanity in combinations and orthogonality helps in defining familiar spaces. We have introduced a new concept layer that defines the objects and also their interactions that can play a crucial role in determination of different descriptions. The interaction portions have contributed heavily for better caption quality and has out-performed different previous works on this domain and MSCOCO dataset. We introduced, for the first time, the notion of combining regional image features and abstracted interaction likelihood embedding for image captioning.
Deblurring for Spiral Real-Time MRI Using Convolutional Neural Networks

Spiral acquisitions are preferred in real-time MRI because of their time efficiency. A fundamental limitation of spirals is image blurring due to off-resonance, which degrades image quality significantly at air-tissue boundaries. Here, we demonstrate a simple CNN-based deblurring method for spiral real-time MRI of human speech production. We show the CNN-based deblurring is capable of restoring blurred vocal tract tissue boundaries, without a need for exam-specific field maps. Deblurring performance is superior to a current auto-calibrated method, and slightly inferior to ideal reconstruction with perfect knowledge of the field maps.
Interoperable GPU Kernels as Latency Improver for MEC

Mixed reality (MR) applications are expected to become common when 5G goes mainstream. However, the latency requirements are challenging to meet due to the resources required by video-based remoting of graphics, that is, decoding video codecs. We propose an approach towards tackling this challenge: a client-server implementation for transacting intermediate representation (IR) between a mobile UE and a MEC server instead of video codecs and this way avoiding video decoding. We demonstrate the ability to address latency bottlenecks on edge computing workloads that transact graphics. We select SPIR-V compatible GPU kernels as the intermediate representation. Our approach requires know-how in GPU architecture and GPU domain-specific languages (DSLs), but compared to video-based edge graphics, it decreases UE device delay by sevenfold. Further, we find that due to low cold-start times on both UEs and MEC servers, application migration can happen in milliseconds. We imply that graphics-based location-aware applications, such as MR, can benefit from this kind of approach.
What went wrong?: Identification of Everyday Object Manipulation Anomalies

Extending the abilities of service robots is important for expanding what they can achieve in everyday manipulation tasks. On the other hand, it is also essential to ensure them to determine what they can not achieve in certain cases due to either anomalies or permanent failures during task execution. Robots need to identify these situations, and reveal the reasons behind these cases to overcome and recover from them. In this paper, we propose and analyze a Long Short-Term Memories-based (LSTM-based) awareness approach to reveal the reasons behind an anomaly case that occurs during a manipulation episode in an unstructured environment. The proposed method takes into account the real-time observations of the robot by fusing visual, auditory and proprioceptive sensory modalities to achieve this task. We also provide a comparative analysis of our method with Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and Conditional Random Fields (CRFs). The symptoms of anomalies are first learned from a given training set, then they can be classified in real-time based on the learned models. The approaches are evaluated on a Baxter robot executing object manipulation scenarios. The results indicate that the LSTM-based method outperforms the other methods with a 0.94 classification rate in revealing causes of anomalies in case of an unexpected deviation.
Joint Geographical and Temporal Modeling based on Matrix Factorization for Point-of-Interest Recommendation

With the popularity of Location-based Social Networks, Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation has become an important task, which learns the users' preferences and mobility patterns to recommend POIs. Previous studies show that incorporating contextual information such as geographical and temporal influences is necessary to improve POI recommendation by addressing the data sparsity problem. However, existing methods model the geographical influence based on the physical distance between POIs and users, while ignoring the temporal characteristics of such geographical influences. In this paper, we perform a study on the user mobility patterns where we find out that users' check-ins happen around several centers depending on their current temporal state. Next, we propose a spatio-temporal activity-centers algorithm to model users' behavior more accurately. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed contextual model by incorporating it into the matrix factorization model under two different settings: i) static and ii) temporal. To show the effectiveness of our proposed method, which we refer to as STACP, we conduct experiments on two well-known real-world datasets acquired from Gowalla and Foursquare LBSNs. Experimental results show that the STACP model achieves a statistically significant performance improvement, compared to the state-of-the-art techniques. Also, we demonstrate the effectiveness of capturing geographical and temporal information for modeling users' activity centers and the importance of modeling them jointly.
Comparison of Syntactic and Semantic Representations of Programs in Neural Embeddings

Neural approaches to program synthesis and understanding have proliferated widely in the last few years; at the same time graph based neural networks have become a promising new tool. This work aims to be the first empirical study comparing the effectiveness of natural language models and static analysis graph based models in representing programs in deep learning systems. It compares graph convolutional networks using different graph representations in the task of program embedding. It shows that the sparsity of control flow graphs and the implicit aggregation of graph convolutional networks cause these models to perform worse than naive models. Therefore it concludes that simply augmenting purely linguistic or statistical models with formal information does not perform well due to the nuanced nature of formal properties introducing more noise than structure for graph convolutional networks.
Ternary Feature Masks: zero-forgetting for task-incremental learning

We propose an approach without any forgetting to continual learning for the task-aware regime, where at inference the task-label is known. By using ternary masks we can upgrade a model to new tasks, reusing knowledge from previous tasks while not forgetting anything about them. Using masks prevents both catastrophic forgetting and backward transfer. We argue -- and show experimentally -- that avoiding the former largely compensates for the lack of the latter, which is rarely observed in practice. In contrast to earlier works, our masks are applied to the features (activations) of each layer instead of the weights. This considerably reduces the number of mask parameters for each new task; with more than three orders of magnitude for most networks. The encoding of the ternary masks into two bits per feature creates very little overhead to the network, avoiding scalability issues. To allow already learned features to adapt to the current task without changing the behavior of these features for previous tasks, we introduce task-specific feature normalization. Extensive experiments on several finegrained datasets and ImageNet show that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art while reducing memory overhead in comparison to weight-based approaches.
Characterization of random variables with stationary digits

Let $q\ge2$ be an integer, $\{X_n\}_{n\geq 1}$ a stochastic process with state space $\{0,\ldots,q-1\}$, and $F$ the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of $\sum_{n=1}^\infty X_n q^{-n}$. We show that stationarity of $\{X_n\}_{n\geq 1}$ is equivalent to a functional equation obeyed by $F$ and use this to characterize the characteristic function of $X$ and the structure of $F$ in terms of its Lebesgue decomposition. More precisely, while the absolutely continuous component of $F$ can only be the uniform distribution on the unit interval, its discrete component can only be a countable convex combination of certain explicitly computable CDFs for probability distributions with finite support. We also show that $\mathrm{d} F$ is a Rajchman measure if and only if $F $ is the uniform CDF on $[0,1]$.
Information Compensation for Deep Conditional Generative Networks

In recent years, unsupervised/weakly-supervised conditional generative adversarial networks (GANs) have achieved many successes on the task of modeling and generating data. However, one of their weaknesses lies in their poor ability to separate, or disentangle, the different factors that characterize the representation encoded in their latent space. To address this issue, we propose a novel structure for unsupervised conditional GANs powered by a novel Information Compensation Connection (IC-Connection). The proposed IC-Connection enables GANs to compensate for information loss incurred during deconvolution operations. In addition, to quantify the degree of disentanglement on both discrete and continuous latent variables, we design a novel evaluation procedure. Our empirical results suggest that our method achieves better disentanglement compared to the state-of-the-art GANs in a conditional generation setting.
An Argumentation-Based Reasoner to Assist Digital Investigation and Attribution of Cyber-Attacks

We expect an increase in the frequency and severity of cyber-attacks that comes along with the need for efficient security countermeasures. The process of attributing a cyber-attack helps to construct efficient and targeted mitigating and preventive security measures. In this work, we propose an argumentation-based reasoner (ABR) as a proof-of-concept tool that can help a forensics analyst during the analysis of forensic evidence and the attribution process. Given the evidence collected from a cyber-attack, our reasoner can assist the analyst during the investigation process, by helping him/her to analyze the evidence and identify who performed the attack. Furthermore, it suggests to the analyst where to focus further analyses by giving hints of the missing evidence or new investigation paths to follow. ABR is the first automatic reasoner that can combine both technical and social evidence in the analysis of a cyber-attack, and that can also cope with incomplete and conflicting information. To illustrate how ABR can assist in the analysis and attribution of cyber-attacks we have used examples of cyber-attacks and their analyses as reported in publicly available reports and online literature. We do not mean to either agree or disagree with the analyses presented therein or reach attribution conclusions.