Abstract

Location-based services (LBS), which provide personalized and timely information, entail privacy concerns such as unwanted leak of current user locations to potential stalkers. Existing works have proposed dummy generation techniques by creating a cloaking region (CR) such that the user’s location is at a fixed distance from the center of CR. Hence, if the adversary somehow knows the location of the center of CR, the user’s location would be vulnerable to attack. We propose an improved dummy generation approach for facilitating improved location privacy for mobile users. Our performance study demonstrates that our proposed approach is indeed effective in improving user location privacy.

Abstract

Time series classification is an important model in data mining. It involves assigning a class label to a test instance based on the training data with known class labels. Most previous studies developed time series classifiers by disregarding the fuzzy nature of events (i.e., events with similar values may belong to different classes) within the data. Consequently, these studies suffered from performance issues, including decreased accuracy and increased memory, runtime, and energy requirements. With this motivation, this paper proposes a novel fuzzy nearest neighbor classifier for time series data. The basic idea of our classifier is to transform the very large training data into a relatively small representative training data and use it to label a test instance by employing a new fuzzy distance measure known as Ravi. Experimental results on real world benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed classifier …

Abstract

While the problems of fnding the shortest path and k-shortest paths have been extensively researched, the research community has been shifting its focus towards discovering and identifying paths based on user preferences. Since users naturally follow some of the paths more than other paths, the popularity of a given path often refects such user preferences. Given a set of user traversals in a road network and a set of paths between a given source and destination pair, we address the problem of performing top-k ranking of the paths in that set based on path popularity. In this paper, we introduce a new model for computing the popularity scores of paths. Our main contributions are threefold. First, we propose a framework for modeling user traversals in a road network as transactions. Second, we present an approach for efciently computing the popularity score of any path based on the itemsets extracted from the transactions using pattern mining techniques. Third, we conducted an extensive performance evaluation with two real datasets to demonstrate the efectiveness of the proposed scheme.

Abstract

Placement of items on the shelf space of retail stores significantly impacts the revenue of the retailer. Since customers typically tend to buy sets of items (i.e., itemsets) together, several research efforts have been undertaken towards facilitating itemset placement in retail stores for improving retailer revenue. However, they fail to consider that the time-period of expiry can vary across items i.e., some items expire sooner than others. This leads to loss of opportunity towards improving retailer revenue. Hence, we propose PEAR, which is a Product Expiry-Aware and Revenue-conscious itemset placement scheme for improving retailer revenue. Our key contributions are three-fold. First, we introduce the problem of addressing retail itemset placement when the items can be associated with different time-periods of expiry. Second, we propose the expiry-aware PEAR scheme for efficiently identifying and placing high …

Abstract

Retailer revenue is significantly impacted by item placement in retail stores. Notably, placement of items in the premium slots (i.e., slots with increased visibility/accessibility) improves the probability of sale w.r.t. item placement in non-premium slots. Moreover, customers often tend to buy sets of items (i.e., itemsets) instead of individual purchases. In this paper, we address the problem of maximizing retailer revenue by determining the placement of itemsets in different types of slots with varied premiumness. Our key contributions are as follows. First, we introduce the notion of premiumness of retail slots and discuss the issue of itemset placement in slots with varied premiumness. Second, we propose two efficient schemes, namely Premiumness and Revenue-based Itemset Placement (PRIP) and Premiumness and Average Revenue-based Itemset Placement (PARIP), for placing itemsets with varying revenue in slots with varied premiumness. Third, we perform a detailed performance analysis using both real and synthetic datasets to showcase the effectiveness of our proposed schemes. We also perform a comprehensive mathematical analysis of our proposed schemes w.r.t. the complexity analysis.

Abstract

Segmentation of sub-cortical structures from MRI scans is of interest in many neurological diagnosis. Since this is a laborious task machine learning and specifically deep learning (DL) methods have become explored. The structural complexity of the brain demands a large, high quality segmentation dataset to develop good DL-based solutions for sub-cortical structure segmentation. Towards this, we are releasing a set of 114, 1.5 Tesla, T1 MRI scans with manual delineations for 14 sub-cortical structures. The scans in the dataset were acquired from healthy young (21-30 years) subjects ( 58 male and 56 female) and all the structures are manually delineated by experienced radiology experts. Segmentation experiments have been conducted with this dataset and results demonstrate that accurate results can be obtained with deep-learning methods.

Abstract

We introduce MeronymNet, a novel hierarchical approach for controllable, part-based generation of multi-category objects using a single unified model. We adopt a guided coarse-to-fine strategy involving semantically conditioned generation of bounding box layouts, pixel-level part layouts and ultimately, the object depictions themselves. We use Graph Convolutional Networks, Deep Recurrent Networks along with custom-designed Conditional Variational Autoencoders to enable flexible, diverse and category-aware generation of 2-D objects in a controlled manner. The performance scores for generated objects reflect MeronymNet’s superior performance compared to multiple strong baselines and ablative variants.

Abstract

The lack of fine-grained joints (facial joints, hand fingers) is a fundamental performance bottleneck for state of the art skeleton action recognition models. Despite this bottleneck, community’s efforts seem to be invested only in coming up with novel architectures. To specifically address this bottleneck, we introduce two new pose based human action datasets - NTU60-X and NTU120-X. Our datasets extend the largest existing action recognition dataset, NTU-RGBD. In addition to the 25 body joints for each skeleton as in NTU-RGBD, NTU60-X and NTU120-X dataset includes finger and facial joints, enabling a richer skeleton representation. We appropriately modify the state of the art approaches to enable training using the introduced datasets. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of these NTU-X datasets in overcoming the aforementioned bottleneck and improve state of the art performance, overall and on previously worst performing action categories. Code and pretrained models can be found at https://github.com/skelemoa/ntu-x

Abstract

main generalization (DG) of machine learning algorithms is defined as their ability to learn a domain agnostic hypothesis from multiple training distributions, which generalizes onto data from an unseen domain. DG is vital in scenarios where the target domain with distinct characteristics has sparse data for training. Aligning with recent work [9], we find that a straightforward Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) baseline consistently outperforms existing DG methods. We present ablation studies indicating that the choice of backbone, data augmentation, and optimization algorithms overshadows the many tricks and trades explored in the prior art. Our work leads to a new state of the art on the four popular DG datasets, surpassing previous methods by large margins. Furthermore, as a key contribution, we propose a classwise-DG formulation, where for each class, we randomly select one of the domains and keep it aside for testing. We argue that this benchmarking is closer to human learning and relevant in real-world scenarios. We comprehensively benchmark classwise-DG on the DomainBed [9] and propose a method combining ERM and reverse gradients to achieve the state-of-the-art results. To our surprise, despite being exposed to all domains during training, the classwise DG is more challenging than traditional DG evaluation and motivates more fundamental rethinking on the problem of DG.

Abstract

Recent efforts in multi-domain learning for semantic segmentation attempt to learn multiple geographical datasets in a universal, joint model. A simple fine-tuning experiment performed sequentially on three popular road scene segmentation datasets demonstrates that existing segmentation frameworks fail at incrementally learning on a series of visually disparate geographical domains. When learning a new domain, the model catastrophically forgets previously learned knowledge. In this work, we pose the problem of multi-domain incremental learning for semantic segmentation. Given a model trained on a particular geographical domain, the goal is to (i) incrementally learn a new geographical domain, (ii) while retaining performance on the old domain, (iii) given that the previous domain’s dataset is not accessible. We propose a dynamic architecture that assigns universally shared, domain-invariant parameters to capture homogeneous semantic features present in all domains, while dedicated domain-specific parameters learn the statistics of each domain. Our novel optimization strategy helps achieve a good balance between retention of old knowledge (stability) and acquiring new knowledge (plasticity). We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed solution on domain incremental settings pertaining to realworld driving scenes from roads of Germany (Cityscapes), the United States (BDD100k), and India (IDD). 1