nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
Approximating Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces with bicubic patches

We present a simple and computationally efficient algorithm for approximating Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces using a minimal set of bicubic patches. For each quadrilateral face of the control mesh, we construct a geometry patch and a pair of tangent patches. The geometry patches approximate the shape and silhouette of the Catmull-Clark surface and are smooth everywhere except along patch edges containing an extraordinary vertex where the patches are C0. To make the patch surface appear smooth, we provide a pair of tangent patches that approximate the tangent fields of the Catmull-Clark surface. These tangent patches are used to construct a continuous normal field (through their cross-product) for shading and displacement mapping. Using this bifurcated representation, we are able to define an accurate proxy for Catmull-Clark surfaces that is efficient to evaluate on next-generation GPU architectures that expose a programmable tessellation unit.
Navigation Strategies for Exploring Indoor Environments

In this paper, we investigate safe and efficient map-building strategies for a mobile robot with imperfect control and sensing. In the implementation, a robot equipped with a range sensor builds a polygonal map (layout) of a previously unknown indoor environment. The robot explores the environment and builds the map concurrently by patching together the local models acquired by the sensor into a global map. A well-studied and related problem is the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem, where the goal is to integrate the information collected during navigation into the most accurate map possible. However, SLAM does not address the sensorplacement portion of the map-building task. That is, given the map built so far, where should the robot go next? This is the main question addressed in this paper. Concretely, an algorithm is proposed to guide the robot through a series of “good” positions, where “good” refers to the expected amount and quality of the information that will be revealed at each new location. This is similar to the nextbest-view (NBV) problem studied in computer vision and graphics. However, in mobile robotics the problem is complicated by several issues, two of which are particularly crucial. One is to achieve safe navigation despite an incomplete knowledge of the environment and sensor limitations (e.g., in range and incidence). The other issue is the need to ensure sufficient overlap between each new local model and the current map, in order to allow registration of successive views under positioning uncertainties inherent to mobile robots. To address both issues in a coherent framework, in this paper we introduce the concept of a safe region, defined as the largest region that is guaranteed to be free of obstacles given the sensor readings made so far. The construction of a safe region takes sensor limitations into account. In this paper we also describe an NBV algorithm that uses the safe-region concept to select the next robot position at each step. The  21, No. 10–11, October-November 2002, pp. 829-848,  The new position is chosen within the safe region in order to maximize the expected gain of information under the constraint that the local model at this new position must have a minimal overlap with the current global map. In the future, NBV and SLAM algorithms should reinforce each other. While a SLAM algorithm builds a map by making the best use of the available sensory data, an NBV algorithm, such as that proposed here, guides the navigation of the robot through positions selected to provide the best sensory inputs. next-best view, safe region, online exploration, incidence constraints, map building
Explicit Modeling of Human-Object Interactions in Realistic Videos

We introduce an approach for learning human actions as interactions between persons and objects in realistic videos. Previous work typically represents actions with low-level features such as image gradients or optical flow. In contrast, we explicitly localize in space and track over time both the object and the person, and represent an action as the trajectory of the object w.r.t. to the person position. Our approach relies on state-of-the-art techniques for human detection [32], object detection , and tracking . We show that this results in human and object tracks of sufficient quality to model and localize human-object interactions in realistic videos. Our human-object interaction features capture the relative trajectory of the object w.r.t. the human. Experimental results on the Coffee and Cigarettes dataset , the video dataset of [19], and the Rochester Daily Activities dataset [29] show that 1) our explicit human-object model is an informative cue for action recognition; 2) it is complementary to traditional low-level descriptors such as 3D--HOG [23] extracted over human tracks. We show that combining our human-object interaction features with 3D-HOG improves compared to their individual performance as well as over the state of the art [23], [29].
Avatar: Mobile Distributed Computing in the Cloud

Avatar is a system that leverages cloud resources to support fast, scalable, reliable, and energy efficient distributed computing over mobile devices. An avatar is a per-user software entity in the cloud that runs apps on behalf of the user's mobile devices. The avatars are instantiated as virtual machines in the cloud that run the same operating system with the mobile devices. In this way, avatars provide resource isolation and execute unmodified app components, which simplifies technology adoption. Avatar apps execute over distributed and synchronized (mobile device, avatar) pairs to achieve a global goal. The three main challenges that must be overcome by the Avatar system are: creating a high-level programming model and a middleware that enable effective execution of distributed applications on a combination of mobile devices and avatars, re-designing the cloud architecture and protocols to support billions of mobile users and mobile apps with very different characteristics from the current cloud workloads, and explore new approaches that balance privacy guarantees with app efficiency/usability. We have built a basic Avatar prototype on Android devices and Android x86 virtual machines. An application that searches for a lost child by analyzing the photos taken by people at a crowded public event runs on top of this prototype.
Analysis and Enhancement of Wikification for Microblogs with Context Expansion

Disambiguation to Wikipedia (D2W) is the task of linking mentions of concepts in text to their corresponding Wikipedia entries. Most previous work has focused on linking terms in formal texts (e.g. newswire) to Wikipedia. Linking terms in short informal texts (e.g. tweets) is difficult for systems and humans alike as they lack a rich disambiguation context. We first evaluate an existing Twitter dataset as well as the D2W task in general. We then test the effects of two tweet context expansion methods, based on tweet authorship and topic-based clustering, on a state-of-the-art D2W system and evaluate the results.  deritzo testuetan aurkitutako kontzeptuen aipamenak Wikipedian dagozkien sarrerei lotzeari. Aurreko lan gehienek testu formalak (newswire, esate baterako) lotu dituzte Wikipediarekin. Testu informalak (tweet-ak, esate baterako) lotzea, ordea, zaila da bai sistementzat eta baita gizakiontzat ere, argipena erraztuko luketen testuingururik ez dutelako. Lehenik eta behin, Twitter-en gainean sortutako datu-sorta bat, eta D2W ataza bera ebaluatzen ditugu. Ondoren, egungo D2W sistema baten gainean testuingurua hedatzeko bi teknika aztertu eta ebaluatzen ditugu. Bi teknika hauek tweet-aren egilean eta gaikako multzokatze metodo batean oinarritzen dira.
Spintronic Nanodevices for Bioinspired Computing

Bioinspired hardware holds the promise of low-energy, intelligent, and highly adaptable computing systems. Applications span from automatic classification for big data management, through unmanned vehicle control, to control for biomedical prosthesis. However, one of the major challenges of fabricating bioinspired hardware is building ultrahigh-density networks out of complex processing units interlinked by tunable connections. Nanometer-scale devices exploiting spin electronics (or spintronics) can be a key technology in this context. In particular, magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) are well suited for this purpose because of their multiple tunable functionalities. One such functionality, nonvolatile memory, can provide massive embedded memory in unconventional circuits, thus escaping the von-Neumann bottleneck arising when memory and processors are located separately. Other features of spintronic devices that could be beneficial for bioinspired computing include tunable fast nonlinear dynamics, controlled stochasticity, and the ability of single devices to change functions in different operating conditions. Large networks of interacting spintronic nanodevices can have their interactions tuned to induce complex dynamics such as synchronization, chaos, soliton diffusion, phase transitions, criticality, and convergence to multiple metastable states. A number of groups have recently proposed bioinspired architectures that include one or several types of spintronic nanodevices. In this paper, we show how spintronics can be used for bioinspired computing. We review the different approaches that have been proposed, the recent advances in this direction, and the challenges toward fully integrated spintronics complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) bioinspired hardware.
Improving Hypernymy Detection with an Integrated Path-based and Distributional Method

Detecting hypernymy relations is a key task in NLP, which is addressed in the literature using two complementary approaches. Distributional methods, whose supervised variants are the current best performers, and path-based methods who receive less research attention. We suggest an improved path-based algorithm, in which the dependency paths are encoded using a recurrent neural network, and achieve results comparable to distributional methods. We then extend the approach to integrate both path-based and distributional signals, significantly improving the state-of-the-art on this task.
Image Super-Resolution Via Sparse Representation

This paper presents a new approach to single-image superresolution, based upon sparse signal representation. Research on image statistics suggests that image patches can be well-represented as a sparse linear combination of elements from an appropriately chosen over-complete dictionary. Inspired by this observation, we seek a sparse representation for each patch of the low-resolution input, and then use the coefficients of this representation to generate the high-resolution output. Theoretical results from compressed sensing suggest that under mild conditions, the sparse representation can be correctly recovered from the downsampled signals. By jointly training two dictionaries for the low- and high-resolution image patches, we can enforce the similarity of sparse representations between the low-resolution and high-resolution image patch pair with respect to their own dictionaries. Therefore, the sparse representation of a low-resolution image patch can be applied with the high-resolution image patch dictionary to generate a high-resolution image patch. The learned dictionary pair is a more compact representation of the patch pairs, compared to previous approaches, which simply sample a large amount of image patch pairs , reducing the computational cost substantially. The effectiveness of such a sparsity prior is demonstrated for both general image super-resolution (SR) and the special case of face hallucination. In both cases, our algorithm generates high-resolution images that are competitive or even superior in quality to images produced by other similar SR methods. In addition, the local sparse modeling of our approach is naturally robust to noise, and therefore the proposed algorithm can handle SR with noisy inputs in a more unified framework.
Query Relaxation for Entity-Relationship Search

Entity-relationship-structured data is becoming more important on the Web. For example, large knowledge bases have been automatically constructed by information extraction from Wikipedia and other Web sources. Entities and relationships can be represented by subject-property-object triples in the RDF model, and can then be precisely searched by structured query languages like SPARQL. Because of their Boolean-match semantics, such queries often return too few or even no results. To improve recall, it is thus desirable to support users by automatically relaxing or reformulating queries in such a way that the intention of the original user query is preserved while returning a sufficient number of ranked results. In this paper we describe comprehensive methods to relax SPARQL-like triplepattern queries in a fully automated manner. Our framework produces a set of relaxations by means of statistical language models for structured RDF data and queries. The query processing algorithms merge the results of different relaxations into a unified result list, with ranking based on any ranking function for structured queries over RDF-data. Our experimental evaluation, with two different datasets about movies and books, shows the effectiveness of the automatically generated relaxations and the improved quality of query results based on assessments collected on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform.
Style Transfer Via Texture Synthesis

Style transfer is a process of migrating a style from a given image to the content of another, synthesizing a new image, which is an artistic mixture of the two. Recent work on this problem adopting convolutional neural-networks (CNN) ignited a renewed interest in this field, due to the very impressive results obtained. There exists an alternative path toward handling the style transfer task, via the generalization of texture synthesis algorithms. This approach has been proposed over the years, but its results are typically less impressive compared with the CNN ones. In this paper, we propose a novel style transfer algorithm that extends the texture synthesis work of Kwatra et al. (2005), while aiming to get stylized images that are closer in quality to the CNN ones. We modify Kwatra’s algorithm in several key ways in order to achieve the desired transfer, with emphasis on a consistent way for keeping the content intact in selected regions, while producing hallucinated and rich style in others. The results obtained are visually pleasing and diverse, shown to be competitive with the recent CNN style transfer algorithms. The proposed algorithm is fast and flexible, being able to process any pair of content + style images.
Predictive Blacklisting as an Implicit Recommendation System

A widely used defense practice against malicious traffic on the Internet is through blacklists: lists of prolific attack sources are compiled and shared. The goal of blacklists is to predict and block future attack sources. Existing blacklisting techniques have focused on the most prolific attack sources and, more recently, on collaborative blacklisting. In this paper, we formulate the problem of forecasting attack sources (also referred to as "predictive blacklisting") based on shared attack logs, as an implicit recommendation system. We compare the performance of existing approaches against the upper bound for prediction and we demonstrate that there is much room for improvement. Inspired by the recent NetFlix competition, we propose a multi-level collaborative filtering model that is adjusted and tuned specifically for the attack forecasting problem. Our model captures and combines various factors namely: attacker-victim history (using time-series) and attackers and/or victims interactions (using neighborhood models). We evaluate our combined method on one month of logs from Dshield.org and demonstrate that it improves significantly the prediction rate over state-of-the-art methods as well as the robustness against poisoning attacks.
An Empirical Evaluation of Current Convolutional Architectures’ Ability to Manage Nuisance Location and Scale Variability

We conduct an empirical study to test the ability of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to reduce the effects of nuisance transformations of the input data, such as location, scale and aspect ratio. We isolate factors by adopting a common convolutional architecture either deployed globally on the image to compute class posterior distributions, or restricted locally to compute class conditional distributions given location, scale and aspect ratios of bounding boxes determined by proposal heuristics. In theory, averaging the latter should yield inferior performance compared to proper marginalization. Yet empirical evidence suggests the converse, leading us to conclude that - at the current level of complexity of convolutional architectures and scale of the data sets used to train them - CNNs are not very effective at marginalizing nuisance variability. We also quantify the effects of context on the overall classification task and its impact on the performance of CNNs, and propose improved sampling techniques for heuristic proposal schemes that improve end-to-end performance to state-of-the-art levels. We test our hypothesis on a classification task using the ImageNet Challenge benchmark and on a wide-baseline matching task using the Oxford and Fischer's datasets.
Machine Learning in Computer Vision

Computer vision is the science and technology of making machines that see. It is concerned with the theory, design and implementation of algorithms that can automatically process visual data to recognize objects, track and recover their shape and spatial layout. The International Computer Vision Summer School ICVSS was established in 2007 to provide both an objective and clear overview and an in-depth analysis of the state-of-the-art research in Computer Vision. The courses are delivered by world renowned experts in the field, from both academia and industry, and cover both theoretical and practical aspects of real Computer Vision problems. The school is organized every year by University of Cambridge ( and University of Catania (Image Processing Lab). Different topics are covered each year. A summary of the past Computer Vision Summer Schools can be found at: http:// www.dmi.unict.it/icvss This edited volume contains a selection of articles covering some of the talks and tutorials held during the last editions of the school. The chapters provide an in-depth overview of challenging areas with key references to the existing literature.
Conversational Contextual Cues: The Case of Personalization and History for Response Ranking

We investigate the task of modeling opendomain, multi-turn, unstructured, multiparticipant, conversational dialogue. We specifically study the effect of incorporating different elements of the conversation. Unlike previous efforts, which focused on modeling messages and responses, we extend the modeling to long context and participant’s history. Our system does not rely on handwritten rules or engineered features; instead, we train deep neural networks on a large conversational dataset. In particular, we exploit the structure of Reddit comments and posts to extract 2.1 billion messages and 133 million conversations. We evaluate our models on the task of predicting the next response in a conversation, and we find that modeling both context and participants improves prediction accuracy.
Characterization and management of exfoliative cheilitis: a single-center experience.

Exfoliative cheilitis (EC) is a rare inflammatory condition affecting the vermilion of the lips and characterized by production of a thick keratin scale. Given the limited available data, the approach to optimal management of EC remains unclear. The objective of this retrospective study was to characterize the clinical features, management, and outcomes of a series of patients with EC. Fifteen patients with a median age of 59 years and a female-to-male ratio of 2:1 were diagnosed with EC from 2000 to 2010. Parafunctional lip licking (53%) and a history of psychiatric disorders (40%) were common. Ten patients (66%) returned for follow-up, with an overall response rate (partial or complete) of 80% at a median of 2 months, most frequently associated with the use of topical calcineurin inhibitors or moisturizing agents. Management of EC with topical calcineurin inhibitors and moisturizing agents is associated with clinical improvement, but prospective trials are needed.
On Load Shedding in Complex Event Processing

Complex Event Processing (CEP) is a stream processing model that focuses on detecting event patterns in continuous event streams. While the CEP model has gained popularity in the research communities and commercial technologies, the problem of gracefully degrading performance under heavy load in the presence of resource constraints, or load shedding, has been largely overlooked. CEP is similar to “classical” stream data management, but addresses a substantially different class of queries. This unfortunately renders the load shedding algorithms developed for stream data processing inapplicable. In this paper we study CEP load shedding under various resource constraints. We formalize broad classes of CEP load-shedding scenarios as different optimization problems. We demonstrate an array of complexity results that reveal the hardness of these problems and construct shedding algorithms with performance guarantees. Our results shed some light on the difficulty of developing load-shedding algorithms that maximize utility.
Harnessing web page directories for large-scale classification of tweets

Classification is paramount for an optimal processing of tweets, albeit performance of classifiers is hindered by the need of large sets of training data to encompass the diversity of contents one can find on Twitter. In this paper, we introduce an inexpensive way of labeling large sets of tweets, which can be easily regenerated or updated when needed. We use human-edited web page directories to infer categories from URLs contained in tweets. By experimenting with a large set of more than 5 million tweets categorized accordingly, we show that our proposed model for tweet classification can achieve 82% in accuracy, performing only 12.2% worse than for web page classification.