arXiv subjects

Yu Guan

Publications and source records attributed to Yu Guan.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Towards Automated Fatigue Assessment using Wearable Sensing and Mixed-Effects Models

Fatigue is a broad, multifactorial concept that includes the subjective perception of reduced physical and mental energy levels. It is also one of the key factors that strongly affect patients' health-related quality of life. To date, most fatigue assessment methods were based on self-reporting, which may suffer from many factors such as recall bias. To address this issue, in this work, we recorded multi-modal physiological data (including ECG, accelerometer, skin temperature and respiratory rate, as well as demographic information such as age, BMI) in free-living environments and developed automated fatigue assessment models. Specifically, we extracted features from each modality and employed the random forest-based mixed-effects models, which can take advantage of the demographic information for improved performance. We conducted experiments on our collected dataset, and very promising preliminary results were achieved. Our results suggested ECG played an important role in the fatigue assessment tasks.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2021

Sovereign: User-Controlled Smart Homes

Recent years have witnessed the rapid deployment of smart homes; most of them are controlled by remote servers in the cloud. Such designs raise security and privacy concerns for end users. In this paper, we describe the design of Sovereign, a home IoT system framework that provides end users complete control of their home IoT systems. Sovereign lets home IoT devices and applications communicate via application-named data and secures data directly. This enables direct, secure, one-to-one and one-to-many device-to-device communication over wireless broadcast media. Sovereign utilizes semantic names to construct usable security solutions. We implement Sovereign as a publish-subscribe-based development platform together with a prototype home IoT controller. Our preliminary evaluation shows that Sovereign provides a systematic, easy-to-use solution to user-controlled, self-contained smart homes running on existing IoT hardware without imposing noticeable overhead.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2021

Iterative Reconstruction for Low-Dose CT using Deep Gradient Priors of Generative Model

Dose reduction in computed tomography (CT) is essential for decreasing radiation risk in clinical applications. Iterative reconstruction is one of the most promising ways to compensate for the increased noise due to reduction of photon flux. Rather than most existing prior-driven algorithms that benefit from manually designed prior functions or supervised learning schemes, in this work we integrate the data-consistency as a conditional term into the iterative generative model for low-dose CT. At the stage of prior learning, the gradient of data density is directly learned from normal-dose CT images as a prior. Then at the iterative reconstruction stage, the stochastic gradient descent is employed to update the trained prior with annealed and conditional schemes. The distance between the reconstructed image and the manifold is minimized along with data fidelity during reconstruction. Experimental comparisons demonstrated the noise reduction and detail preservation abilities of the proposed method.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2020

Invariant Deep Compressible Covariance Pooling for Aerial Scene Categorization

Learning discriminative and invariant feature representation is the key to visual image categorization. In this article, we propose a novel invariant deep compressible covariance pooling (IDCCP) to solve nuisance variations in aerial scene categorization. We consider transforming the input image according to a finite transformation group that consists of multiple confounding orthogonal matrices, such as the D4 group. Then, we adopt a Siamese-style network to transfer the group structure to the representation space, where we can derive a trivial representation that is invariant under the group action. The linear classifier trained with trivial representation will also be possessed with invariance. To further improve the discriminative power of representation, we extend the representation to the tensor space while imposing orthogonal constraints on the transformation matrix to effectively reduce feature dimensions. We conduct extensive experiments on the publicly released aerial scene image data sets and demonstrate the superiority of this method compared with state-of-the-art methods. In particular, with using ResNet architecture, our IDCCP model can reduce the dimension of the tensor representation by about 98% without sacrificing accuracy (i.e., <0.5%).

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Building Rule Hierarchies for Efficient Logical Rule Learning from Knowledge Graphs

Many systems have been developed in recent years to mine logical rules from large-scale Knowledge Graphs (KGs), on the grounds that representing regularities as rules enables both the interpretable inference of new facts, and the explanation of known facts. Among these systems, the walk-based methods that generate the instantiated rules containing constants by abstracting sampled paths in KGs demonstrate strong predictive performance and expressivity. However, due to the large volume of possible rules, these systems do not scale well where computational resources are often wasted on generating and evaluating unpromising rules. In this work, we address such scalability issues by proposing new methods for pruning unpromising rules using rule hierarchies. The approach consists of two phases. Firstly, since rule hierarchies are not readily available in walk-based methods, we have built a Rule Hierarchy Framework (RHF), which leverages a collection of subsumption frameworks to build a proper rule hierarchy from a set of learned rules. And secondly, we adapt RHF to an existing rule learner where we design and implement two methods for Hierarchical Pruning (HPMs), which utilize the generated hierarchies to remove irrelevant and redundant rules. Through experiments over four public benchmark datasets, we show that the application of HPMs is effective in removing unpromising rules, which leads to significant reductions in the runtime as well as in the number of learned rules, without compromising the predictive performance.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2020

Robust Cross-View Gait Recognition with Evidence: A Discriminant Gait GAN (DiGGAN) Approach

Gait as a biometric trait has attracted much attention in many security and privacy applications such as identity recognition and authentication, during the last few decades. Because of its nature as a long-distance biometric trait, gait can be easily collected and used to identify individuals non-intrusively through CCTV cameras. However, it is very difficult to develop robust automated gait recognition systems, since gait may be affected by many covariate factors such as clothing, walking speed, camera view angle etc. Out of them, large view angle changes has been deemed as the most challenging factor as it can alter the overall gait appearance substantially. Existing works on gait recognition are far from enough to provide satisfying performances because of such view changes. Furthermore, very few works have considered evidences -- the demonstrable information revealing the reliabilities of decisions, which are regarded as important demands in machine learning-based recognition/authentication applications. To address these issues, in this paper we propose a Discriminant Gait Generative Adversarial Network, namely DiGGAN, which can effectively extract view-invariant features for cross-view gait recognition; and more importantly, to transfer gait images to different views -- serving as evidences and showing how the decisions have been made. Quantitative experiments have been conducted on the two most popular cross-view gait datasets, the OU-MVLP and CASIA-B, where the proposed DiGGAN has outperformed state-of-the-art methods. Qualitative analysis has also been provided and demonstrates the proposed DiGGAN's capability in providing evidences.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Query Twice: Dual Mixture Attention Meta Learning for Video Summarization

Video summarization aims to select representative frames to retain high-level information, which is usually solved by predicting the segment-wise importance score via a softmax function. However, softmax function suffers in retaining high-rank representations for complex visual or sequential information, which is known as the Softmax Bottleneck problem. In this paper, we propose a novel framework named Dual Mixture Attention (DMASum) model with Meta Learning for video summarization that tackles the softmax bottleneck problem, where the Mixture of Attention layer (MoA) effectively increases the model capacity by employing twice self-query attention that can capture the second-order changes in addition to the initial query-key attention, and a novel Single Frame Meta Learning rule is then introduced to achieve more generalization to small datasets with limited training sources. Furthermore, the DMASum significantly exploits both visual and sequential attention that connects local key-frame and global attention in an accumulative way. We adopt the new evaluation protocol on two public datasets, SumMe, and TVSum. Both qualitative and quantitative experiments manifest significant improvements over the state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Fatigue Assessment using ECG and Actigraphy Sensors

Fatigue is one of the key factors in the loss of work efficiency and health-related quality of life, and most fatigue assessment methods were based on self-reporting, which may suffer from many factors such as recall bias. To address this issue, we developed an automated system using wearable sensing and machine learning techniques for objective fatigue assessment. ECG/Actigraphy data were collected from subjects in free-living environments. Preprocessing and feature engineering methods were applied, before interpretable solution and deep learning solution were introduced. Specifically, for interpretable solution, we proposed a feature selection approach which can select less correlated and high informative features for better understanding system's decision-making process. For deep learning solution, we used state-of-the-art self-attention model, based on which we further proposed a consistency self-attention (CSA) mechanism for fatigue assessment. Extensive experiments were conducted, and very promising results were achieved.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

SOFA-Net: Second-Order and First-order Attention Network for Crowd Counting

Automated crowd counting from images/videos has attracted more attention in recent years because of its wide application in smart cities. But modelling the dense crowd heads is challenging and most of the existing works become less reliable. To obtain the appropriate crowd representation, in this work we proposed SOFA-Net(Second-Order and First-order Attention Network): second-order statistics were extracted to retain selectivity of the channel-wise spatial information for dense heads while first-order statistics, which can enhance the feature discrimination for the heads' areas, were used as complementary information. Via a multi-stream architecture, the proposed second/first-order statistics were learned and transformed into attention for robust representation refinement. We evaluated our method on four public datasets and the performance reached state-of-the-art on most of them. Extensive experiments were also conducted to study the components in the proposed SOFA-Net, and the results suggested the high-capability of second/first-order statistics on modelling crowd in challenging scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first work to explore the second/first-order statistics for crowd counting.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Orchestrating the Development Lifecycle of Machine Learning-Based IoT Applications: A Taxonomy and Survey

Machine Learning (ML) and Internet of Things (IoT) are complementary advances: ML techniques unlock complete potentials of IoT with intelligence, and IoT applications increasingly feed data collected by sensors into ML models, thereby employing results to improve their business processes and services. Hence, orchestrating ML pipelines that encompasses model training and implication involved in holistic development lifecycle of an IoT application often leads to complex system integration. This paper provides a comprehensive and systematic survey on the development lifecycle of ML-based IoT application. We outline core roadmap and taxonomy, and subsequently assess and compare existing standard techniques used in individual stage.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2020

Towards Learning Instantiated Logical Rules from Knowledge Graphs

Efficiently inducing high-level interpretable regularities from knowledge graphs (KGs) is an essential yet challenging task that benefits many downstream applications. In this work, we present GPFL, a probabilistic rule learner optimized to mine instantiated first-order logic rules from KGs. Instantiated rules contain constants extracted from KGs. Compared to abstract rules that contain no constants, instantiated rules are capable of explaining and expressing concepts in more details. GPFL utilizes a novel two-stage rule generation mechanism that first generalizes extracted paths into templates that are acyclic abstract rules until a certain degree of template saturation is achieved, then specializes the generated templates into instantiated rules. Unlike existing works that ground every mined instantiated rule for evaluation, GPFL shares groundings between structurally similar rules for collective evaluation. Moreover, we reveal the presence of overfitting rules, their impact on the predictive performance, and the effectiveness of a simple validation method filtering out overfitting rules. Through extensive experiments on public benchmark datasets, we show that GPFL 1.) significantly reduces the runtime on evaluating instantiated rules; 2.) discovers much more quality instantiated rules than existing works; 3.) improves the predictive performance of learned rules by removing overfitting rules via validation; 4.) is competitive on knowledge graph completion task compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2020

Dual-reference Age Synthesis

Age synthesis methods typically take a single image as input and use a specific number to control the age of the generated image. In this paper, we propose a novel framework taking two images as inputs, named dual-reference age synthesis (DRAS), which approaches the task differently; instead of using "hard" age information, i.e. a fixed number, our model determines the target age in a "soft" way, by employing a second reference image. Specifically, the proposed framework consists of an identity agent, an age agent and a generative adversarial network. It takes two images as input - an identity reference and an age reference - and outputs a new image that shares corresponding features with each. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets (UTKFace and CACD) demonstrate the appealing performance and flexibility of the proposed framework.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Co-sleep: Designing a workplace-based wellness program for sleep deprivation

Sleep deprivation is a public health issue. Awareness of sleep deprivation has not been widely investigated in workplace-based wellness programmes. This study adopted a three-stage design process with nine participants from a local manufacturing company to help raise awareness of sleep deprivation. The common causes of sleep deprivation were identified through the deployment of technology probes and participant interviews. The study contributes smart Internet of things(IoT) workplace-based design concepts for activity tracking that may aid sleep and explore ways of sharing personal sleep data within the workplace. Through the use of co-design methods, the study also highlights prominent privacy concerns relating to use of personal data from different stakeholders' perspectives, including the unexpected use of sleep data by organisations for fatigue risk management and the evaluation of employee performance. The Actigrahy and sleep diary data can be accessed online through https://github.com/famousgrouse/pervasivehealth/

cs.HC↗

arXiv2020

AuditShare: Sensitive Data Sharing with Reliable Leaker Identification

As Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data sharing among multiple parties becomes increasingly common, so does the potential for data leakage. As required by new data protection regulations and laws, when PII leakage occurs, one must be able to reliably identify the leaking sources. Existing solutions utilize watermark technologies or data object allocation strategies to differentiate the data shared with different parties to identify potential leakers. However, these solutions lose their effectiveness under several attack scenarios, e.g., a data sender may leak the data and a receiver may deny the reception of certain shared data. Worse yet, multiple receivers might collude and apply a set of operations such as intersection, complement, and union to their received datasets before leaking them, making the task of leaker identification even more difficult. In this paper, we propose AuditShare, a PII dataset sharing system with reliable leaking source identification. Firstly, taking advantage of the intrinsic properties of PII data, AuditShare allocates data objects to individual sharing parties by PII attributes. Secondly, AuditShare obliviously transfers data between the sender and each receiver and uses a Merkle Tree as an immutable record of the sharing. Thirdly, a knowledge-based identification algorithm is proposed to identify a guilty sender or colluding/non-colluding receivers. Through our evaluation, we show that: (i) With a modest amount of leaked data, AuditShare can accurately (accuracy>99.99%) and undeniably identify all the guilty parties in different cases; (ii) It only takes 0.5 second to share 100,000 data objects in AuditShare, which is practical in real-world deployment.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2020

Effects of free-ranging livestock on sympatric herbivores at fine spatiotemporal scales

Understanding wildlife-livestock interactions is crucial for the design and management of protected areas that aim to conserve large mammal communities undergoing conflicts with humans worldwide. An example of the need to quantify the strength and direction of species interactions is the conservation of big cats in newly established protected areas in China. Currently, free-ranging livestock degrade the food and habitat of the endangered Amur tiger and Amur leopard in the forest landscapes of Northeast China, but quantitative assessments of how livestock affect the use of habitat by the major ungulate prey of these predators are very limited. Here, we examined livestock-ungulate interactions using large-scale camera-trap data in the newly established Tiger and Leopard National Park in Northeast China, which borders Russia. We used N-mixture models, two-species occupancy models and activity pattern overlap to understand the effects of cattle grazing on three ungulate species (wild boar, roe deer and sika deer) at a fine spatiotemporal scale. Our results showed that incorporating the biotic interactions with cattle had significant negative effects on encounters with three ungulates; sika deer were particularly displaced as more cattle encroached on forest habitat, as they exhibited low levels of co-occurrence with cattle in terms of habitat use. These results, combined with spatiotemporal overlap, suggested fine-scale avoidance behaviours, and they can help to refine strategies for the conservation of tigers, leopards and their prey in human-dominated transboundary landscapes. Progressively controlling cattle and the impact of cattle on biodiversity while simultaneously addressing the economic needs of local communities should be key priority actions for the Chinese government.

q-bio.PE↗

arXiv2020

Consistent User-Traffic Allocation and Load Balancing in Mobile Edge Caching

Cache-equipped Base-Stations (CBSs) is an attractive alternative to offload the rapidly growing backhaul traffic in a mobile network. New 5G technology and dense femtocell enable one user to connect to multiple base-stations simultaneously. Practical implementation requires the caches in BSs to be regarded as a cache server, but few of the existing works considered how to offload traffic, or how to schedule HTTP requests to CBSs. In this work, we propose a DNS-based HTTP traffic allocation framework. It schedules user traffic among multiple CBSs by DNS resolution, with the consideration of load-balancing, traffic allocation consistency and scheduling granularity of DNS. To address these issues, we formulate the user-traffic allocation problem in DNS-based mobile edge caching, aiming at maximizing QoS gain and allocation consistency while maintaining load balance. Then we present a simple greedy algorithm which gives a more consistent solution when user-traffic changes dynamically. Theoretical analysis proves that it is within 3/4 of the optimal solution. Extensive evaluations in numerical and trace-driven situations show that the greedy algorithm can avoid about 50% unnecessary shift in user-traffic allocation, yield more stable cache hit ratio and balance the load between CBSs without losing much of the QoS gain.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2019

Pano: Optimizing 360° Video Streaming with a Better Understanding of Quality Perception

Streaming 360° videos requires more bandwidth than non-360° videos. This is because current solutions assume that users perceive the quality of 360° videos in the same way they perceive the quality of non-360° videos. This means the bandwidth demand must be proportional to the size of the user's field of view. However, we found several qualitydetermining factors unique to 360°videos, which can help reduce the bandwidth demand. They include the moving speed of a user's viewpoint (center of the user's field of view), the recent change of video luminance, and the difference in depth-of-fields of visual objects around the viewpoint. This paper presents Pano, a 360° video streaming system that leverages the 360° video-specific factors. We make three contributions. (1) We build a new quality model for 360° videos that captures the impact of the 360° video-specific factors. (2) Pano proposes a variable-sized tiling scheme in order to strike a balance between the perceived quality and video encoding efficiency. (3) Pano proposes a new qualityadaptation logic that maximizes 360° video user-perceived quality and is readily deployable. Our evaluation (based on user study and trace analysis) shows that compared with state-of-the-art techniques, Pano can save 41-46% bandwidth without any drop in the perceived quality, or it can raise the perceived quality (user rating) by 25%-142% without using more bandwidth.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2019

Order Matters: Shuffling Sequence Generation for Video Prediction

Predicting future frames in natural video sequences is a new challenge that is receiving increasing attention in the computer vision community. However, existing models suffer from severe loss of temporal information when the predicted sequence is long. Compared to previous methods focusing on generating more realistic contents, this paper extensively studies the importance of sequential order information for video generation. A novel Shuffling sEquence gEneration network (SEE-Net) is proposed that can learn to discriminate unnatural sequential orders by shuffling the video frames and comparing them to the real video sequence. Systematic experiments on three datasets with both synthetic and real-world videos manifest the effectiveness of shuffling sequence generation for video prediction in our proposed model and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance by both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. The source code is available at https://github.com/andrewjywang/SEENet.

cs.CV↗