Video applications and analytics are routinely projected as a stressing and significant service of the Nationwide Public Safety Broadband Network. As part of a NIST PSCR funded effort, the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness and MIT Lincoln Laboratory have been developing a computer vision dataset of operational and representative public safety scenarios. The scale and scope of this dataset necessitates a hierarchical organization approach for efficient compute and storage. We overview architectural considerations using the Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Cluster as a test architecture. We then describe how we intelligently organized the dataset across LLSC and evaluated it with large scale imagery inference across terabytes of data.

A large number of engineering, science and computational problems have yet to be solved in a computationally efficient way. One of the emerging challenges is how evolving technologies grow towards autonomy and intelligent decision making. This leads to collection of large amounts of data from various sensing and measurement technologies, e.g., cameras, smart phones, health sensors, smart electricity meters, and environment sensors. Hence, it is imperative to develop efficient algorithms for generation, analysis, classification, and illustration of data. Meanwhile, data is structured purposefully through different representations, such as large-scale networks and graphs. We focus on data science as a crucial area, specifically focusing on a curse of dimensionality (CoD) which is due to the large amount of generated/sensed/collected data. This motivates researchers to think about optimization and to apply nature-inspired algorithms, such as evolutionary algorithms (EAs) to solve optimization problems. Although these algorithms look un-deterministic, they are robust enough to reach an optimal solution. Researchers do not adopt evolutionary algorithms unless they face a problem which is suffering from placement in local optimal solution, rather than global optimal solution. In this chapter, we first develop a clear and formal definition of the CoD problem, next we focus on feature extraction techniques and categories, then we provide a general overview of meta-heuristic algorithms, its terminology, and desirable properties of evolutionary algorithms.

This survey presents a review of state-of-the-art deep neural network architectures, algorithms, and systems in vision and speech applications. Recent advances in deep artificial neural network algorithms and architectures have spurred rapid innovation and development of intelligent vision and speech systems. With availability of vast amounts of sensor data and cloud computing for processing and training of deep neural networks, and with increased sophistication in mobile and embedded technology, the next-generation intelligent systems are poised to revolutionize personal and commercial computing. This survey begins by providing background and evolution of some of the most successful deep learning models for intelligent vision and speech systems to date. An overview of large-scale industrial research and development efforts is provided to emphasize future trends and prospects of intelligent vision and speech systems. Robust and efficient intelligent systems demand low-latency and high fidelity in resource constrained hardware platforms such as mobile devices, robots, and automobiles. Therefore, this survey also provides a summary of key challenges and recent successes in running deep neural networks on hardware-restricted platforms, i.e. within limited memory, battery life, and processing capabilities. Finally, emerging applications of vision and speech across disciplines such as affective computing, intelligent transportation, and precision medicine are discussed. To our knowledge, this paper provides one of the most comprehensive surveys on the latest developments in intelligent vision and speech applications from the perspectives of both software and hardware systems. Many of these emerging technologies using deep neural networks show tremendous promise to revolutionize research and development for future vision and speech systems.

In the absence of sufficient data variation (e.g., scanner and protocol variability) in annotated data, deep neural networks (DNNs) tend to overfit during training. As a result, their performance is significantly lower on data from unseen sources compared to the performance on data from the same source as the training data. Semi-supervised domain adaptation methods can alleviate this problem by tuning networks to new target domains without the need for annotated data from these domains. Adversarial domain adaptation (ADA) methods are a popular choice that aim to train networks in such a way that the features generated are domain agnostic. However, these methods require careful dataset-specific selection of hyperparameters such as the complexity of the discriminator in order to achieve a reasonable performance. We propose to use knowledge distillation (KD) -- an efficient way of transferring knowledge between different DNNs -- for semi-supervised domain adaption of DNNs. It does not require dataset-specific hyperparameter tuning, making it generally applicable. The proposed method is compared to ADA for segmentation of white matter hyperintensities (WMH) in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans generated by scanners that are not a part of the training set. Compared with both the baseline DNN (trained on source domain only and without any adaption to target domain) and with using ADA for semi-supervised domain adaptation, the proposed method achieves significantly higher WMH dice scores.

This paper describes a new method for Symbolic Regression that allows to find mathematical expressions from a dataset. This method has a strong mathematical basis. As opposed to other methods such as Genetic Programming, this method is deterministic, and does not involve the creation of a population of initial solutions. Instead of it, a simple expression is being grown until it fits the data. The experiments performed show that the results are as good as other Machine Learning methods, in a very low computational time. Another advantage of this technique is that the complexity of the expressions can be limited, so the system can return mathematical expressions that can be easily analysed by the user, in opposition to other techniques like GSGP.

A linear restriction of a function is the same function with its domain restricted to points on a given line. This paper addresses the problem of computing a succinct representation for a linear restriction of a piecewise-linear neural network. This primitive, which we call ExactLine, allows us to exactly characterize the result of applying the network to all of the infinitely many points on a line. In particular, ExactLine computes a partitioning of the given input line segment such that the network is affine on each partition. We present an efficient algorithm for computing ExactLine for networks that use ReLU, MaxPool, batch normalization, fully-connected, convolutional, and other layers, along with several applications. First, we show how to exactly determine decision boundaries of an ACAS Xu neural network, providing significantly improved confidence in the results compared to prior work that sampled finitely many points in the input space. Next, we demonstrate how to exactly compute integrated gradients, which are commonly used for neural network attributions, allowing us to show that the prior heuristic-based methods had relative errors of 25-45% and show that a better sampling method can achieve higher accuracy with less computation. Finally, we use ExactLine to empirically falsify the core assumption behind a well-known hypothesis about adversarial examples, and in the process identify interesting properties of adversarially-trained networks.

In this paper, we study the adversarial robustness of subspace learning problems. Different from the assumptions made in existing work on robust subspace learning where data samples are contaminated by gross sparse outliers or small dense noises, we consider a more powerful adversary who can first observe the data matrix and then intentionally modify the whole data matrix. We first characterize the optimal rank-one attack strategy that maximizes the subspace distance between the subspace learned from the original data matrix and that learned from the modified data matrix. We then generalize the study to the scenario without the rank constraint and characterize the corresponding optimal attack strategy. Our analysis shows that the optimal strategies depend on the singular values of the original data matrix and the adversary's energy budget. Finally, we provide numerical experiments and practical applications to demonstrate the efficiency of the attack strategies.

The recent success of natural language understanding (NLU) systems has been troubled by results highlighting the failure of these models to generalize in a systematic and robust way. In this work, we introduce a diagnostic benchmark suite, named CLUTRR, to clarify some key issues related to the robustness and systematicity of NLU systems. Motivated by classic work on inductive logic programming, CLUTRR requires that an NLU system infer kinship relations between characters in short stories. Successful performance on this task requires both extracting relationships between entities, as well as inferring the logical rules governing these relationships. CLUTRR allows us to precisely measure a model's ability for systematic generalization by evaluating on held-out combinations of logical rules, and it allows us to evaluate a model's robustness by adding curated noise facts. Our empirical results highlight a substantial performance gap between state-of-the-art NLU models (e.g., BERT and MAC) and a graph neural network model that works directly with symbolic inputs---with the graph-based model exhibiting both stronger generalization and greater robustness.

W e introduce a novel domain adaptation formulation from synthetic dataset (source domain) to real dataset (target domain) for the category of tasks with per-pixel predictions. The annotations of these tasks are relatively hard to acquire in the real world, such as single-view depth estimation or surface normal estimation. Our key idea is to introduce anchor tasks, whose annotations are (1) less expensive to acquire than the main task, such as facial landmarks and semantic segmentations; and (2) shared in availability for both synthetic and real datasets so that it serves as "anchor" between tasks; and finally (3) aligned spatially with main task annotations on a per-pixel basis so that it also serves as spatial anchor between tasks' outputs. T o further utilize spatial alignment between the anchor and main tasks, we introduce a novel freeze approach that freezes the final layers of our network after training on the source domain so that spatial and contextual relationship between tasks are maintained when adapting on the target domain. W e evaluate our methods on two pairs of datasets, performing surface normal estimation in indoor scenes and faces, using semantic segmentation and facial landmarks as anchor tasks separately. W e show the importance of using anchor tasks in both synthetic and real domains, and that the freeze approach outperforms competing approaches, reaching results in facial images on par with the state-of-the-art system that leverages detailed facial appearance model.

As the size and complexity of models and datasets grow, so does the need for communication-efficient variants of stochastic gradient descent that can be deployed on clusters to perform model fitting in parallel. Alistarh et al. (2017) describe two variants of data-parallel SGD that quantize and encode gradients to lessen communication costs. For the first variant, QSGD, they provide strong theoretical guarantees. For the second variant, which we call QSGDinf, they demonstrate impressive empirical gains for distributed training of large neural networks. Building on their work, we propose an alternative scheme for quantizing gradients and show that it yields stronger theoretical guarantees than exist for QSGD while matching the empirical performance of QSGDinf.