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Shuai Shao

Publications and source records attributed to Shuai Shao.

123 records · Page 7Linked to original sources

Contraction: a Unified Perspective of Correlation Decay and Zero-Freeness of 2-Spin Systems

We study complex zeros of the partition function of 2-spin systems, viewed as a multivariate polynomial in terms of the edge interaction parameters and the uniform external field. We obtain new zero-free regions in which all these parameters are complex-valued. Crucially based on the zero-freeness, we show the existence of correlation decay in these regions. As a consequence, we obtain an FPTAS for computing the partition function of 2-spin systems on graphs of bounded degree for these parameter settings. We introduce the contraction property as a unified sufficient condition to devise FPTAS via either Weitz's algorithm or Barvinok's algorithm. Our main technical contribution is a very simple but general approach to extend any real parameter of which the 2-spin system exhibits correlation decay to its complex neighborhood where the partition function is zero-free and correlation decay still exists. This result formally establishes the inherent connection between two distinct notions of phase transition for 2-spin systems: the existence of correlation decay and the zero-freeness of the partition function via a unified perspective, contraction.

math-ph↗

Shape Robust Text Detection with Progressive Scale Expansion Network

Scene text detection has witnessed rapid progress especially with the recent development of convolutional neural networks. However, there still exists two challenges which prevent the algorithm into industry applications. On the one hand, most of the state-of-art algorithms require quadrangle bounding box which is in-accurate to locate the texts with arbitrary shape. On the other hand, two text instances which are close to each other may lead to a false detection which covers both instances. Traditionally, the segmentation-based approach can relieve the first problem but usually fail to solve the second challenge. To address these two challenges, in this paper, we propose a novel Progressive Scale Expansion Network (PSENet), which can precisely detect text instances with arbitrary shapes. More specifically, PSENet generates the different scale of kernels for each text instance, and gradually expands the minimal scale kernel to the text instance with the complete shape. Due to the fact that there are large geometrical margins among the minimal scale kernels, our method is effective to split the close text instances, making it easier to use segmentation-based methods to detect arbitrary-shaped text instances. Extensive experiments on CTW1500, Total-Text, ICDAR 2015 and ICDAR 2017 MLT validate the effectiveness of PSENet. Notably, on CTW1500, a dataset full of long curve texts, PSENet achieves a F-measure of 74.3% at 27 FPS, and our best F-measure (82.2%) outperforms state-of-art algorithms by 6.6%. The code will be released in the future.

cs.CV↗

Label Embedded Dictionary Learning for Image Classification

Recently, label consistent k-svd (LC-KSVD) algorithm has been successfully applied in image classification. The objective function of LC-KSVD is consisted of reconstruction error, classification error and discriminative sparse codes error with L0-norm sparse regularization term. The L0-norm, however, leads to NP-hard problem. Despite some methods such as orthogonal matching pursuit can help solve this problem to some extent, it is quite difficult to find the optimum sparse solution. To overcome this limitation, we propose a label embedded dictionary learning (LEDL) method to utilise the L1-norm as the sparse regularization term so that we can avoid the hard-to-optimize problem by solving the convex optimization problem. Alternating direction method of multipliers and blockwise coordinate descent algorithm are then exploited to optimize the corresponding objective function. Extensive experimental results on six benchmark datasets illustrate that the proposed algorithm has achieved superior performance compared to some conventional classification algorithms.

cs.CV↗

WIDER Face and Pedestrian Challenge 2018: Methods and Results

This paper presents a review of the 2018 WIDER Challenge on Face and Pedestrian. The challenge focuses on the problem of precise localization of human faces and bodies, and accurate association of identities. It comprises of three tracks: (i) WIDER Face which aims at soliciting new approaches to advance the state-of-the-art in face detection, (ii) WIDER Pedestrian which aims to find effective and efficient approaches to address the problem of pedestrian detection in unconstrained environments, and (iii) WIDER Person Search which presents an exciting challenge of searching persons across 192 movies. In total, 73 teams made valid submissions to the challenge tracks. We summarize the winning solutions for all three tracks. and present discussions on open problems and potential research directions in these topics.

cs.CV↗

Scene Text Detection with Supervised Pyramid Context Network

Scene text detection methods based on deep learning have achieved remarkable results over the past years. However, due to the high diversity and complexity of natural scenes, previous state-of-the-art text detection methods may still produce a considerable amount of false positives, when applied to images captured in real-world environments. To tackle this issue, mainly inspired by Mask R-CNN, we propose in this paper an effective model for scene text detection, which is based on Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) and instance segmentation. We propose a supervised pyramid context network (SPCNET) to precisely locate text regions while suppressing false positives. Benefited from the guidance of semantic information and sharing FPN, SPCNET obtains significantly enhanced performance while introducing marginal extra computation. Experiments on standard datasets demonstrate that our SPCNET clearly outperforms start-of-the-art methods. Specifically, it achieves an F-measure of 92.1% on ICDAR2013, 87.2% on ICDAR2015, 74.1% on ICDAR2017 MLT and 82.9% on Total-Text.

cs.CV↗

CrowdHuman: A Benchmark for Detecting Human in a Crowd

Human detection has witnessed impressive progress in recent years. However, the occlusion issue of detecting human in highly crowded environments is far from solved. To make matters worse, crowd scenarios are still under-represented in current human detection benchmarks. In this paper, we introduce a new dataset, called CrowdHuman, to better evaluate detectors in crowd scenarios. The CrowdHuman dataset is large, rich-annotated and contains high diversity. There are a total of $470K$ human instances from the train and validation subsets, and $~22.6$ persons per image, with various kinds of occlusions in the dataset. Each human instance is annotated with a head bounding-box, human visible-region bounding-box and human full-body bounding-box. Baseline performance of state-of-the-art detection frameworks on CrowdHuman is presented. The cross-dataset generalization results of CrowdHuman dataset demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on previous dataset including Caltech-USA, CityPersons, and Brainwash without bells and whistles. We hope our dataset will serve as a solid baseline and help promote future research in human detection tasks.

cs.CV↗

Repulsion Loss: Detecting Pedestrians in a Crowd

Detecting individual pedestrians in a crowd remains a challenging problem since the pedestrians often gather together and occlude each other in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we first explore how a state-of-the-art pedestrian detector is harmed by crowd occlusion via experimentation, providing insights into the crowd occlusion problem. Then, we propose a novel bounding box regression loss specifically designed for crowd scenes, termed repulsion loss. This loss is driven by two motivations: the attraction by target, and the repulsion by other surrounding objects. The repulsion term prevents the proposal from shifting to surrounding objects thus leading to more crowd-robust localization. Our detector trained by repulsion loss outperforms all the state-of-the-art methods with a significant improvement in occlusion cases.

cs.CV↗

Object Detection via Aspect Ratio and Context Aware Region-based Convolutional Networks

Jointly integrating aspect ratio and context has been extensively studied and shown performance improvement in traditional object detection systems such as the DPMs. It, however, has been largely ignored in deep neural network based detection systems. This paper presents a method of integrating a mixture of object models and region-based convolutional networks for accurate object detection. Each mixture component accounts for both object aspect ratio and multi-scale contextual information explicitly: (i) it exploits a mixture of tiling configurations in the RoI pooling to remedy the warping artifacts caused by a single type RoI pooling (e.g., with equally-sized 7 x 7 cells), and to respect the underlying object shapes more; (ii) it "looks from both the inside and the outside of a RoI" by incorporating contextual information at two scales: global context pooled from the whole image and local context pooled from the surrounding of a RoI. To facilitate accurate detection, this paper proposes a multi-stage detection scheme for integrating the mixture of object models, which utilizes the detection results of the model at the previous stage as the proposals for the current in both training and testing. The proposed method is called the aspect ratio and context aware region-based convolutional network (ARC-R-CNN). In experiments, ARC-R-CNN shows very competitive results with Faster R-CNN [41] and R-FCN [10] on two datasets: the PASCAL VOC and the Microsoft COCO. It obtains significantly better mAP performance using high IoU thresholds on both datasets.

cs.CV↗

Localized attack on clustering networks

Clustering network is one of which complex network attracting plenty of scholars to discuss and study the structures and cascading process. We primarily analyzed the effect of clustering coefficient to other various of the single clustering network under localized attack. These network models including double clustering network and star-like NON with clustering and random regular (RR) NON of ER networks with clustering are made up of at least two networks among which exist interdependent relation among whose degree of dependence is measured by coupling strength. We show both analytically and numerically, how the coupling strength and clustering coefficient effect the percolation threshold, size of giant component, critical coupling point where the behavior of phase transition changes from second order to first order with the increase of coupling strength between the networks. Last, we study the two types of clustering network: one type is same with double clustering network in which each subnetwork satisfies identical degree distribution and the other is that their subnetwork satisfies different degree distribution. The former type is treated both analytically and numerically while the latter is treated only numerically. In each section, we compared two results obtained from localized attack and random attack according to Shao et al:[22].

physics.soc-ph↗

On the Dual of the Coulter-Matthews Bent Functions

For any bent function, it is very interesting to determine its dual function because the dual function is also bent in certain cases. For $k$ odd and $\gcd(n, k)=1$, it is known that the Coulter-Matthews bent function $f(x)=Tr(ax^{\frac{3^k+1}{2}})$ is weakly regular bent over $\mathbb{F}_{3^n}$, where $a\in\mathbb{F}_{3^n}^{*}$, and $Tr(\cdot):\mathbb{F}_{3^n}\rightarrow\mathbb{F}_3$ is the trace function. In this paper, we investigate the dual function of $f(x)$, and dig out an universal formula. In particular, for two cases, we determine the formula explicitly: for the case of $n=3t+1$ and $k=2t+1$ with $t\geq 2$, the dual function is given by $$Tr\left(-\frac{x^{3^{2t+1}+3^{t+1}+2}}{a^{3^{2t+1}+3^{t+1}+1}}-\frac{x^{3^{2t}+1}}{a^{-3^{2t}+3^{t}+1}}+\frac{x^{2}}{a^{-3^{2t+1}+3^{t+1}+1}}\right);$$ and for the case of $n=3t+2$ and $k=2t+1$ with $t\geq 2$, the dual function is given by $$Tr\left(-\frac{x^{3^{2t+2}+1}}{a^{3^{2t+2}-3^{t+1}+3}}-\frac{x^{2\cdot3^{2t+1}+3^{t+1}+1}}{a^{3^{2t+2}+3^{t+1}+1}}+\frac{x^2}{a^{-3^{2t+2}+3^{t+1}+3}}\right).$$ As a byproduct, we find two new classes of ternary bent functions with only three terms. Moreover, we also prove that in certain cases $f(x)$ is regular bent.

cs.IT↗

The influence of the broadness of the degree distribution on network's robustness: comparing localized attack and random attack

The stability of networks is greatly influenced by their degree distributions and in particular by their broadness. Networks with broader degree distributions are usually more robust to random failures but less robust to localized attacks. To better understand the effect of the broadness of the degree distribution we study here two models where the broadness is controlled and compare their robustness against localized attacks (LA) and random attacks (RA). We study analytically and by numerical simulations the cases where the degrees in the networks follow a Bi-Poisson distribution $P(k)=αe^{-λ_1}\frac{λ_1^k}{k!}+(1-α) e^{-λ_2}\frac{λ_2^k}{k!},α\in[0,1]$, and a Gaussian distribution $P(k)=A \cdot exp{(-\frac{(k-μ)^2}{2σ^2})}$ with a normalization constant $A$ where $k\geq 0$. In the Bi-Poisson distribution the broadness is controlled by the values of $α$, $λ_1$ and $λ_2$, while in the Gaussian distribution it is controlled by the standard deviation, $σ$. We find that only for $α=0$ or $α=1$, namely degrees obeying a pure Poisson distribution, LA and RA are the same but for all other cases networks are more vulnerable under LA compared to RA. For Gaussian distribution, with an average degree $μ$ fixed, we find that when $σ^2$ is smaller than $μ$ the network is more vulnerable against random attack. However, when $σ^2$ is larger than $μ$ the network becomes more vulnerable against localized attack. Similar qualitative results are also shown for interdependent networks.

physics.soc-ph↗

Percolation of localized attack on complex networks

The robustness of complex networks against node failure and malicious attack has been of interest for decades, while most of the research has focused on random attack or hub-targeted attack. In many real-world scenarios, however, attacks are neither random nor hub-targeted, but localized, where a group of neighboring nodes in a network are attacked and fail. In this paper we develop a percolation framework to analytically and numerically study the robustness of complex networks against such localized attack. In particular, we investigate this robustness in Erdős-Rényi networks, random-regular networks, and scale-free networks. Our results provide insight into how to better protect networks, enhance cybersecurity, and facilitate the design of more robust infrastructures.

physics.soc-ph↗

Robustness of partially interdependent network formed of clustered networks

Clustering, or transitivity has been observed in real networks and its effects on their structure and function has been discussed extensively. The focus of these studies has been on clustering of single networks while the effect of clustering on the robustness of coupled networks received very little attention. Only the case of a pair of fully coupled networks with clustering has been studied recently. Here we generalize the study of clustering of a fully coupled pair of networks to the study of partially interdependent network of networks with clustering within the network components. We show both analytically and numerically, how clustering within the networks, affects the percolation properties of interdependent networks, including percolation threshold, size of giant component and critical coupling point where first order phase transition changes to second order phase transition as the coupling between the networks reduces. We study two types of clustering: one type proposed by Newman where the average degree is kept constant while changing the clustering and the other proposed by Hackett $et$ $al.$ where the degree distribution is kept constant. The first type of clustering is treated both analytically and numerically while the second one is treated only numerically.

physics.soc-ph↗

The Proof of Lin's Conjecture via the Decimation-Hadamard Transform

In 1998, Lin presented a conjecture on a class of ternary sequences with ideal 2-level autocorrelation in his Ph.D thesis. Those sequences have a very simple structure, i.e., their trace representation has two trace monomial terms. In this paper, we present a proof for the conjecture. The mathematical tools employed are the second-order multiplexing decimation-Hadamard transform, Stickelberger's theorem, the Teichmüller character, and combinatorial techniques for enumerating the Hamming weights of ternary numbers. As a by-product, we also prove that the Lin conjectured ternary sequences are Hadamard equivalent to ternary $m$-sequences.

cs.IT↗

The robustness of interdependent clustered networks

It was recently found that cascading failures can cause the abrupt breakdown of a system of interdependent networks. Using the percolation method developed for single clustered networks by Newman [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 103}, 058701 (2009)], we develop an analytical method for studying how clustering within the networks of a system of interdependent networks affects the system's robustness. We find that clustering significantly increases the vulnerability of the system, which is represented by the increased value of the percolation threshold $p_c$ in interdependent networks.

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