arXiv subjects

Jie Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Jie Chen.

At least 505 records · Page 28Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

On Faster Convergence of Scaled Sign Gradient Descent

Communication has been seen as a significant bottleneck in industrial applications over large-scale networks. To alleviate the communication burden, sign-based optimization algorithms have gained popularity recently in both industrial and academic communities, which is shown to be closely related to adaptive gradient methods, such as Adam. Along this line, this paper investigates faster convergence for a variant of sign-based gradient descent, called scaled signGD, in three cases: 1) the objective function is strongly convex; 2) the objective function is nonconvex but satisfies the Polyak-Lojasiewicz (PL) inequality; 3) the gradient is stochastic, called scaled signGD in this case. For the first two cases, it can be shown that the scaled signGD converges at a linear rate. For case 3), the algorithm is shown to converge linearly to a neighborhood of the optimal value when a constant learning rate is employed, and the algorithm converges at a rate of $O(1/k)$ when using a diminishing learning rate, where $k$ is the iteration number. The results are also extended to the distributed setting by majority vote in a parameter-server framework. Finally, numerical experiments on logistic regression are performed to corroborate the theoretical findings.

math.OC↗

arXiv2021

CodeNet: A Large-Scale AI for Code Dataset for Learning a Diversity of Coding Tasks

Over the last several decades, software has been woven into the fabric of every aspect of our society. As software development surges and code infrastructure of enterprise applications ages, it is now more critical than ever to increase software development productivity and modernize legacy applications. Advances in deep learning and machine learning algorithms have enabled numerous breakthroughs, motivating researchers to leverage AI techniques to improve software development efficiency. Thus, the fast-emerging research area of AI for Code has garnered new interest and gathered momentum. In this paper, we present a large-scale dataset CodeNet, consisting of over 14 million code samples and about 500 million lines of code in 55 different programming languages, which is aimed at teaching AI to code. In addition to its large scale, CodeNet has a rich set of high-quality annotations to benchmark and help accelerate research in AI techniques for a variety of critical coding tasks, including code similarity and classification, code translation between a large variety of programming languages, and code performance (runtime and memory) improvement techniques. Additionally, CodeNet provides sample input and output test sets for 98.5% of the code samples, which can be used as an oracle for determining code correctness and potentially guide reinforcement learning for code quality improvements. As a usability feature, we provide several pre-processing tools in CodeNet to transform source code into representations that can be readily used as inputs into machine learning models. Results of code classification and code similarity experiments using the CodeNet dataset are provided as a reference. We hope that the scale, diversity and rich, high-quality annotations of CodeNet will offer unprecedented research opportunities at the intersection of AI and Software Engineering.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2021

Identifying Aggregation Artery Architecture of constrained Origin-Destination flows using Manhattan L-function

The movement of humans and goods in cities can be represented by constrained flow, which is defined as the movement of objects between origin and destination in road networks. Flow aggregation, namely origins and destinations aggregated simultaneously, is one of the most common patterns, say the aggregated origin-to-destination flows between two transport hubs may indicate the great traffic demand between two sites. Developing a clustering method for constrained flows is crucial for determining urban flow aggregation. Among existing methods about identifying flow aggregation, L-function of flows is the major one. Nevertheless, this method depends on the aggregation scale, the key parameter detected by Euclidean L-function, it does not adapt to road network. The extracted aggregation may be overestimated and dispersed. Therefore, we propose a clustering method based on L-function of Manhattan space, which consists of three major steps. The first is to detect aggregation scales by Manhattan L-function. The second is to determine core flows possessing highest local L-function values at different scales. The final step is to take the intersection of core flows neighbourhoods, the extent of which depends on corresponding scale. By setting the number of core flows, we could concentrate the aggregation and thus highlight Aggregation Artery Architecture (AAA), which depicts road sections that contain the projection of key flow cluster on the road networks. Experiment using taxi flows showed that AAA could clarify resident movement type of identified aggregated flows. Our method also helps selecting locations for distribution sites, thereby supporting accurate analysis of urban interactions.

cs.CG↗

arXiv2021

No-regret distributed learning in subnetwork zero-sum games

In this paper, we consider a distributed learning problem in a subnetwork zero-sum game, where agents are competing in different subnetworks. These agents are connected through time-varying graphs where each agent has its own cost function and can receive information from its neighbors. We propose a distributed mirror descent algorithm for computing a Nash equilibrium and establish a sublinear regret bound on the sequence of iterates when the graphs are uniformly strongly connected and the cost functions are convex-concave. Moreover, we prove its convergence with suitably selected diminishing stepsizes for a strictly convex-concave cost function. We also consider a constant step-size variant of the algorithm and establish an asymptotic error bound between the cost function values of running average actions and a Nash equilibrium. In addition, we apply the algorithm to compute a mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium in subnetwork zero-sum finite-strategy games, which have merely convex-concave (to be specific, multilinear) cost functions, and obtain a final-iteration convergence result and an ergodic convergence result, respectively, under different assumptions.

math.OC↗

arXiv2021

ReCU: Reviving the Dead Weights in Binary Neural Networks

Binary neural networks (BNNs) have received increasing attention due to their superior reductions of computation and memory. Most existing works focus on either lessening the quantization error by minimizing the gap between the full-precision weights and their binarization or designing a gradient approximation to mitigate the gradient mismatch, while leaving the "dead weights" untouched. This leads to slow convergence when training BNNs. In this paper, for the first time, we explore the influence of "dead weights" which refer to a group of weights that are barely updated during the training of BNNs, and then introduce rectified clamp unit (ReCU) to revive the "dead weights" for updating. We prove that reviving the "dead weights" by ReCU can result in a smaller quantization error. Besides, we also take into account the information entropy of the weights, and then mathematically analyze why the weight standardization can benefit BNNs. We demonstrate the inherent contradiction between minimizing the quantization error and maximizing the information entropy, and then propose an adaptive exponential scheduler to identify the range of the "dead weights". By considering the "dead weights", our method offers not only faster BNN training, but also state-of-the-art performance on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet, compared with recent methods. Code can be available at https://github.com/z-hXu/ReCU.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

CoLA: Weakly-Supervised Temporal Action Localization with Snippet Contrastive Learning

Weakly-supervised temporal action localization (WS-TAL) aims to localize actions in untrimmed videos with only video-level labels. Most existing models follow the "localization by classification" procedure: locate temporal regions contributing most to the video-level classification. Generally, they process each snippet (or frame) individually and thus overlook the fruitful temporal context relation. Here arises the single snippet cheating issue: "hard" snippets are too vague to be classified. In this paper, we argue that learning by comparing helps identify these hard snippets and we propose to utilize snippet Contrastive learning to Localize Actions, CoLA for short. Specifically, we propose a Snippet Contrast (SniCo) Loss to refine the hard snippet representation in feature space, which guides the network to perceive precise temporal boundaries and avoid the temporal interval interruption. Besides, since it is infeasible to access frame-level annotations, we introduce a Hard Snippet Mining algorithm to locate the potential hard snippets. Substantial analyses verify that this mining strategy efficaciously captures the hard snippets and SniCo Loss leads to more informative feature representation. Extensive experiments show that CoLA achieves state-of-the-art results on THUMOS'14 and ActivityNet v1.2 datasets. CoLA code is publicly available at https://github.com/zhang-can/CoLA.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Distributed stochastic gradient tracking algorithm with variance reduction for non-convex optimization

This paper proposes a distributed stochastic algorithm with variance reduction for general smooth non-convex finite-sum optimization, which has wide applications in signal processing and machine learning communities. In distributed setting, large number of samples are allocated to multiple agents in the network. Each agent computes local stochastic gradient and communicates with its neighbors to seek for the global optimum. In this paper, we develop a modified variance reduction technique to deal with the variance introduced by stochastic gradients. Combining gradient tracking and variance reduction techniques, this paper proposes a distributed stochastic algorithm, GT-VR, to solve large-scale non-convex finite-sum optimization over multi-agent networks. A complete and rigorous proof shows that the GT-VR algorithm converges to first-order stationary points with $O(\frac{1}{k})$ convergence rate. In addition, we provide the complexity analysis of the proposed algorithm. Compared with some existing first-order methods, the proposed algorithm has a lower $\mathcal{O}(PMε^{-1})$ gradient complexity under some mild condition. By comparing state-of-the-art algorithms and GT-VR in experimental simulations, we verify the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.

math.OC↗

arXiv2021

Efficient proximal gradient algorithms for joint graphical lasso

We consider learning an undirected graphical model from sparse data. While several efficient algorithms have been proposed for graphical lasso (GL), the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is the main approach taken concerning for joint graphical lasso (JGL). We propose proximal gradient procedures with and without a backtracking option for the JGL. These procedures are first-order and relatively simple, and the subproblems are solved efficiently in closed form. We further show the boundedness for the solution of the JGL problem and the iterations in the algorithms. The numerical results indicate that the proposed algorithms can achieve high accuracy and precision, and their efficiency is competitive with state-of-the-art algorithms.

math.OC↗

arXiv2021

Attention-Guided Progressive Neural Texture Fusion for High Dynamic Range Image Restoration

High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging via multi-exposure fusion is an important task for most modern imaging platforms. In spite of recent developments in both hardware and algorithm innovations, challenges remain over content association ambiguities caused by saturation, motion, and various artifacts introduced during multi-exposure fusion such as ghosting, noise, and blur. In this work, we propose an Attention-guided Progressive Neural Texture Fusion (APNT-Fusion) HDR restoration model which aims to address these issues within one framework. An efficient two-stream structure is proposed which separately focuses on texture feature transfer over saturated regions and multi-exposure tonal and texture feature fusion. A neural feature transfer mechanism is proposed which establishes spatial correspondence between different exposures based on multi-scale VGG features in the masked saturated HDR domain for discriminative contextual clues over the ambiguous image areas. A progressive texture blending module is designed to blend the encoded two-stream features in a multi-scale and progressive manner. In addition, we introduce several novel attention mechanisms, i.e., the motion attention module detects and suppresses the content discrepancies among the reference images; the saturation attention module facilitates differentiating the misalignment caused by saturation from those caused by motion; and the scale attention module ensures texture blending consistency between different coder/decoder scales. We carry out comprehensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations and ablation studies, which validate that these novel modules work coherently under the same framework and outperform state-of-the-art methods.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2021

Graph Universal Adversarial Attacks: A Few Bad Actors Ruin Graph Learning Models

Deep neural networks, while generalize well, are known to be sensitive to small adversarial perturbations. This phenomenon poses severe security threat and calls for in-depth investigation of the robustness of deep learning models. With the emergence of neural networks for graph structured data, similar investigations are urged to understand their robustness. It has been found that adversarially perturbing the graph structure and/or node features may result in a significant degradation of the model performance. In this work, we show from a different angle that such fragility similarly occurs if the graph contains a few bad-actor nodes, which compromise a trained graph neural network through flipping the connections to any targeted victim. Worse, the bad actors found for one graph model severely compromise other models as well. We call the bad actors ``anchor nodes'' and propose an algorithm, named GUA, to identify them. Thorough empirical investigations suggest an interesting finding that the anchor nodes often belong to the same class; and they also corroborate the intuitive trade-off between the number of anchor nodes and the attack success rate. For the dataset Cora which contains 2708 nodes, as few as six anchor nodes will result in an attack success rate higher than 80\% for GCN and other three models.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Composition and Application of Current Advanced Driving Assistance System: A Review

Due to the growing awareness of driving safety and the development of sophisticated technologies, advanced driving assistance system (ADAS) has been equipped in more and more vehicles with higher accuracy and lower price. The latest progress in this field has called for a review to sum up the conventional knowledge of ADAS, the state-of-the-art researches, and novel applications in real-world. With the help of this kind of review, newcomers in this field can get basic knowledge easier and other researchers may be inspired with potential future development possibility. This paper makes a general introduction about ADAS by analyzing its hardware support and computation algorithms. Different types of perception sensors are introduced from their interior feature classifications, installation positions, supporting ADAS functions, and pros and cons. The comparisons between different sensors are concluded and illustrated from their inherent characters and specific usages serving for each ADAS function. The current algorithms for ADAS functions are also collected and briefly presented in this paper from both traditional methods and novel ideas. Additionally, discussions about the definition of ADAS from different institutes are reviewed in this paper, and future approaches about ADAS in China are introduced in particular.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2021

Barocaloric thermal batteries

Nowadays the world is facing a prominent paradox regarding thermal energy. The production of heat accounts for more than 50% of global final energy consumption while the waste heat potential analysis reveals that 72% of the global primary energy consumption is lost after conversion mainly in the form of heat. Towards global decarbonization, it is of vital importance to establish a solution to thermal energy utilization under full control. Here, we propose and realize an unprecedented concept -- barocaloric thermal batteries based on the inverse colossal barocaloric effect of NH4SCN. Thermal charging is initialized upon pressurization through an order-to-disorder phase transition below 364 K and in turn the discharging of 43 J g-1, which are eleven times more than the input mechanical energy, occurs on demand at depressurization at lower temperatures. The discharging is also manifested as a directly measured temperature rise of 12 K. The thermodynamic equilibrium nature of the pressure-restrained heat-carrying phase guarantees stable storage and/or transport over a variety of temporal and/or spatial scales. The barocaloric thermal batteries reinforced by their solid microscopic mechanism are expected to significantly advance the ability to take advantage of waste heat.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2021

Graph coarsening: From scientific computing to machine learning

The general method of graph coarsening or graph reduction has been a remarkably useful and ubiquitous tool in scientific computing and it is now just starting to have a similar impact in machine learning. The goal of this paper is to take a broad look into coarsening techniques that have been successfully deployed in scientific computing and see how similar principles are finding their way in more recent applications related to machine learning. In scientific computing, coarsening plays a central role in algebraic multigrid methods as well as the related class of multilevel incomplete LU factorizations. In machine learning, graph coarsening goes under various names, e.g., graph downsampling or graph reduction. Its goal in most cases is to replace some original graph by one which has fewer nodes, but whose structure and characteristics are similar to those of the original graph. As will be seen, a common strategy in these methods is to rely on spectral properties to define the coarse graph.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Scale-Consistent Fusion: from Heterogeneous Local Sampling to Global Immersive Rendering

Image-based geometric modeling and novel view synthesis based on sparse, large-baseline samplings are challenging but important tasks for emerging multimedia applications such as virtual reality and immersive telepresence. Existing methods fail to produce satisfactory results due to the limitation on inferring reliable depth information over such challenging reference conditions. With the popularization of commercial light field (LF) cameras, capturing LF images (LFIs) is as convenient as taking regular photos, and geometry information can be reliably inferred. This inspires us to use a sparse set of LF captures to render high-quality novel views globally. However, fusion of LF captures from multiple angles is challenging due to the scale inconsistency caused by various capture settings. To overcome this challenge, we propose a novel scale-consistent volume rescaling algorithm that robustly aligns the disparity probability volumes (DPV) among different captures for scale-consistent global geometry fusion. Based on the fused DPV projected to the target camera frustum, novel learning-based modules have been proposed (i.e., the attention-guided multi-scale residual fusion module, and the disparity field guided deep re-regularization module) which comprehensively regularize noisy observations from heterogeneous captures for high-quality rendering of novel LFIs. Both quantitative and qualitative experiments over the Stanford Lytro Multi-view LF dataset show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods significantly under different experiment settings for disparity inference and LF synthesis.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Performance of Domain-Wall Encoding for Quantum Annealing

In this paper we experimentally test the performance of the recently proposed domain-wall encoding of discrete variables from [Chancellor Quantum Sci. Technol. 4 045004] on Ising model flux qubit quantum annealers. We compare this encoding with the traditional one-hot methods and find that they outperform the one-hot encoding for three different problems at different sizes both of the problem and of the variables. From these results we conclude that the domain-wall encoding yields superior performance against a variety of metrics furthermore, we do not find a single metric by which one hot performs better. We even find that a 2000Q quantum annealer with a drastically less connected hardware graph but using the domain-wall encoding can outperform the next generation Advantage processor if that processor uses one-hot encoding.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2021

GearV: A Two-Gear Hypervisor for Mixed-Criticality IoT Systems

This paper presents GearV, a two-gear lightweight hypervisor architecture to address the some known challenges. By dividing hypervisor into some partitions, and dividing scheduling policies into Gear1 and Gear2 respectively, GearV creates a consolidated platform to run best-effort system and safety-critical system simultaneously with managed engineering effort. The two-gears architecture also simplifies retrofitting the virtualization systems. We believe that GearV can serves as a reasonable hypervisor architecture for the mix-critical IoT systems.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2021

Energy-based time derivative damage accumulation model under uniaxial and multiaxial random loadings

A new fatigue life prediction method using the energy-based approach under uniaxial and multiaxial random loadings is proposed in this paper. One unique characteristic of the proposed method is that it uses time-derivative damage accumulation model compared to the classical cycle-based damage accumulation model. Thus, damage under arbitrary random loading can be directly obtained using time-domain integration without cycle counting (e.g., rain-flow cycle counting method in classical fatigue analysis). First, a brief review of existing models is given focusing on their applicability to uniaxial/multiaxial, constant/random, and high cycle fatigue/low cycle fatigue loading regimes. It is observed that most existing models are only applicable to certain loading conditions and many of them are not applicable/validated under random loadings. Next, a time-derivative damage accumulation model under uniaxial random loading is proposed. The proposed damage function is inspired by a time-domain fatigue crack growth model. The fatigue life is obtained by integrating the damage function following random energy loading histories. Following this, an equivalent energy concept for general multiaxial loading conditions is used to convert the random multiaxial loading to an equivalent random uniaxial loading, where the time-derivative damage model can be used. Finally, the proposed model is validated with extensive experimental data from open literature and in-house testing data under various constant and random spectrum loadings. Conclusions and future work are suggested based on the findings from this study.

physics.app-ph↗

arXiv2021

Decentralized Online Learning for Noncooperative Games in Dynamic Environments

Decentralized online learning for seeking generalized Nash equilibrium (GNE) of noncooperative games in dynamic environments is studied in this paper. Each player aims at selfishly minimizing its own time-varying cost function subject to time-varying coupled constraints and local feasible set constraints. Only local cost functions and local constraints are available to individual players, who can receive their neighbors' information through a fixed and connected graph. In addition, players have no prior knowledge of cost functions and local constraint functions in the future time. In this setting, a novel distributed online learning algorithm for seeking GNE of the studied game is devised based on mirror descent and a primal-dual strategy. It is shown that the presented algorithm can achieve sublinearly bounded dynamic regrets and constraint violation by appropriately choosing decreasing stepsizes. Finally, the obtained theoretical result is corroborated by a numerical simulation.

math.OC↗