LoRa Backscatter Assisted State Estimator for Micro Aerial Vehicles with Online Initialization

The advances in agile micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) have shown great potential in replacing humans for labor-intensive or dangerous indoor investigation, such as warehouse management and fire rescue. However, the design of a state estimation system that enables autonomous flight poses fundamental challenges in such dim or smoky environments. Current dominated computer-vision based solutions only work in well-lighted texture-rich environments. This paper addresses the challenge by proposing Marvel, an RF backscatter-based state estimation system with online initialization and calibration. Marvel is nonintrusive to commercial MAVs by attaching backscatter tags to their landing gears without internal hardware modifications, and works in a plug-and-play fashion with an automatic initialization module. Marvel is enabled by three new designs, a backscatter-based pose sensing module, an online initialization and calibration module, and a backscatter-inertial super-accuracy state estimation algorithm. We demonstrate our design by programming a commercial MAV to autonomously fly in different trajectories. The results show that Marvel supports navigation within a range of 50 m or through three concrete walls, with an accuracy of 34 cm for localization and 4.99 degrees for orientation estimation. We further demonstrate our online initialization and calibration by comparing to the perfect initial parameter measurements from burdensome manual operations.

CREATe: Clinical Report Extraction and Annotation Technology

Clinical case reports are written descriptions of the unique aspects of a particular clinical case, playing an essential role in sharing clinical experiences about atypical disease phenotypes and new therapies. However, to our knowledge, there has been no attempt to develop an end-to-end system to annotate, index, or otherwise curate these reports. In this paper, we propose a novel computational resource platform, CREATe, for extracting, indexing, and querying the contents of clinical case reports. CREATe fosters an environment of sustainable resource support and discovery, enabling researchers to overcome the challenges of information science. An online video of the demonstration can be viewed at https://youtu.be/Q8owBQYTjDc.

Generating Diversified Comments via Reader-Aware Topic Modeling and Saliency Detection

Automatic comment generation is a special and challenging task to verify the model ability on news content comprehension and language generation. Comments not only convey salient and interesting information in news articles, but also imply various and different reader characteristics which we treat as the essential clues for diversity. However, most of the comment generation approaches only focus on saliency information extraction, while the reader-aware factors implied by comments are neglected. To address this issue, we propose a unified reader-aware topic modeling and saliency information detection framework to enhance the quality of generated comments. For reader-aware topic modeling, we design a variational generative clustering algorithm for latent semantic learning and topic mining from reader comments. For saliency information detection, we introduce Bernoulli distribution estimating on news content to select saliency information. The obtained topic representations as well as the selected saliency information are incorporated into the decoder to generate diversified and informative comments. Experimental results on three datasets show that our framework outperforms existing baseline methods in terms of both automatic metrics and human evaluation. The potential ethical issues are also discussed in detail.

BRECQ: Pushing the Limit of Post-Training Quantization by Block Reconstruction

We study the challenging task of neural network quantization without end-to-end retraining, called Post-training Quantization (PTQ). PTQ usually requires a small subset of training data but produces less powerful quantized models than Quantization-Aware Training (QAT). In this work, we propose a novel PTQ framework, dubbed BRECQ, which pushes the limits of bitwidth in PTQ down to INT2 for the first time. BRECQ leverages the basic building blocks in neural networks and reconstructs them one-by-one. In a comprehensive theoretical study of the second-order error, we show that BRECQ achieves a good balance between cross-layer dependency and generalization error. To further employ the power of quantization, the mixed precision technique is incorporated in our framework by approximating the inter-layer and intra-layer sensitivity. Extensive experiments on various handcrafted and searched neural architectures are conducted for both image classification and object detection tasks. And for the first time we prove that, without bells and whistles, PTQ can attain 4-bit ResNet and MobileNetV2 comparable with QAT and enjoy 240 times faster production of quantized models. Codes are available at https://github.com/yhhhli/BRECQ.

Fine-Grained Named Entity Typing over Distantly Supervised Data via Refinement in Hyperbolic Space

Fine-Grained Named Entity Typing (FG-NET) aims at classifying the entity mentions into a wide range of entity types (usually hundreds) depending upon the context. While distant supervision is the most common way to acquire supervised training data, it brings in label noise, as it assigns type labels to the entity mentions irrespective of mentions' context. In attempts to deal with the label noise, leading research on the FG-NET assumes that the fine-grained entity typing data possesses a euclidean nature, which restraints the ability of the existing models in combating the label noise. Given the fact that the fine-grained type hierarchy exhibits a hierarchal structure, it makes hyperbolic space a natural choice to model the FG-NET data. In this research, we propose FGNET-HR, a novel framework that benefits from the hyperbolic geometry in combination with the graph structures to perform entity typing in a performance-enhanced fashion. FGNET-HR initially uses LSTM networks to encode the mention in relation with its context, later it forms a graph to distill/refine the mention's encodings in the hyperbolic space. Finally, the refined mention encoding is used for entity typing. Experimentation using different benchmark datasets shows that FGNET-HR improves the performance on FG-NET by up to 3.5% in terms of strict accuracy.

A Unified Joint Maximum Mean Discrepancy for Domain Adaptation

Domain adaptation has received a lot of attention in recent years, and many algorithms have been proposed with impressive progress. However, it is still not fully explored concerning the joint probability distribution (P(X, Y)) distance for this problem, since its empirical estimation derived from the maximum mean discrepancy (joint maximum mean discrepancy, JMMD) will involve complex tensor-product operator that is hard to manipulate. To solve this issue, this paper theoretically derives a unified form of JMMD that is easy to optimize, and proves that the marginal, class conditional and weighted class conditional probability distribution distances are our special cases with different label kernels, among which the weighted class conditional one not only can realize feature alignment across domains in the category level, but also deal with imbalance dataset using the class prior probabilities. From the revealed unified JMMD, we illustrate that JMMD degrades the feature-label dependence (discriminability) that benefits to classification, and it is sensitive to the label distribution shift when the label kernel is the weighted class conditional one. Therefore, we leverage Hilbert Schmidt independence criterion and propose a novel MMD matrix to promote the dependence, and devise a novel label kernel that is robust to label distribution shift. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on several cross-domain datasets to demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of the revealed theoretical results.

A Spike Learning System for Event-driven Object Recognition

Event-driven sensors such as LiDAR and dynamic vision sensor (DVS) have found increased attention in high-resolution and high-speed applications. A lot of work has been conducted to enhance recognition accuracy. However, the essential topic of recognition delay or time efficiency is largely under-explored. In this paper, we present a spiking learning system that uses the spiking neural network (SNN) with a novel temporal coding for accurate and fast object recognition. The proposed temporal coding scheme maps each event's arrival time and data into SNN spike time so that asynchronously-arrived events are processed immediately without delay. The scheme is integrated nicely with the SNN's asynchronous processing capability to enhance time efficiency. A key advantage over existing systems is that the event accumulation time for each recognition task is determined automatically by the system rather than pre-set by the user. The system can finish recognition early without waiting for all the input events. Extensive experiments were conducted over a list of 7 LiDAR and DVS datasets. The results demonstrated that the proposed system had state-of-the-art recognition accuracy while achieving remarkable time efficiency. Recognition delay was shown to reduce by 56.3% to 91.7% in various experiment settings over the popular KITTI dataset.

Exploring Adversarial Fake Images on Face Manifold

Images synthesized by powerful generative adversarial network (GAN) based methods have drawn moral and privacy concerns. Although image forensic models have reached great performance in detecting fake images from real ones, these models can be easily fooled with a simple adversarial attack. But, the noise adding adversarial samples are also arousing suspicion. In this paper, instead of adding adversarial noise, we optimally search adversarial points on face manifold to generate anti-forensic fake face images. We iteratively do a gradient-descent with each small step in the latent space of a generative model, e.g. Style-GAN, to find an adversarial latent vector, which is similar to norm-based adversarial attack but in latent space. Then, the generated fake images driven by the adversarial latent vectors with the help of GANs can defeat main-stream forensic models. For examples, they make the accuracy of deepfake detection models based on Xception or EfficientNet drop from over 90% to nearly 0%, meanwhile maintaining high visual quality. In addition, we find manipulating style vector $z$ or noise vectors $n$ at different levels have impacts on attack success rate. The generated adversarial images mainly have facial texture or face attributes changing.

A New Weighting Scheme for Fan-beam and Circle Cone-beam CT Reconstructions

In this paper, we first present an arc based algorithm for fan-beam computed tomography (CT) reconstruction via applying Katsevich's helical CT formula to 2D fan-beam CT reconstruction. Then, we propose a new weighting function to deal with the redundant projection data. By extending the weighted arc based fan-beam algorithm to circle cone-beam geometry, we also obtain a new FDK-similar algorithm for circle cone-beam CT reconstruction. Experiments show that our methods can obtain higher PSNR and SSIM compared to the Parker-weighted conventional fan-beam algorithm and the FDK algorithm for super-short-scan trajectories.

Improving Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Reducing Bi-level Feature Redundancy

Reducing feature redundancy has shown beneficial effects for improving the accuracy of deep learning models, thus it is also indispensable for the models of unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). Nevertheless, most recent efforts in the field of UDA ignores this point. Moreover, main schemes realizing this in general independent of UDA purely involve a single domain, thus might not be effective for cross-domain tasks. In this paper, we emphasize the significance of reducing feature redundancy for improving UDA in a bi-level way. For the first level, we try to ensure compact domain-specific features with a transferable decorrelated normalization module, which preserves specific domain information whilst easing the side effect of feature redundancy on the sequel domain-invariance. In the second level, domain-invariant feature redundancy caused by domain-shared representation is further mitigated via an alternative brand orthogonality for better generalization. These two novel aspects can be easily plugged into any BN-based backbone neural networks. Specifically, simply applying them to ResNet50 has achieved competitive performance to the state-of-the-arts on five popular benchmarks. Our code will be available at https://github.com/dreamkily/gUDA.