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Application-specific, Dynamic Reservation of 5G Compute and Network Resources by using Reinforcement Learning

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5G services and applications explicitly reserve compute and network resources in today’s complex and dynamic infrastructure of multi-tiered computing and cellular networking to ensure application-specific service quality metrics, and the infrastructure providers charge the 5G services for the resources reserved. A static, one-time reservation of resources at service deployment typically results in extended periods of under-utilization of reserved resources during the lifetime of the service operation. This is due to a plethora of reasons like changes in content from the IoT sensors (for example, change in number of people in the field of view of a camera) or a change in the environmental conditions around the IoT sensors (for example, time of the day, rain or fog can affect data acquisition by sensors). Under-utilization of a specific resource like compute can also be due to temporary inadequate availability of another resource like the network bandwidth in a dynamic 5G infrastructure. We propose a novel Reinforcement Learning-based online method to dynamically adjust an application’s compute and network resource reservations to minimize under-utilization of requested resources, while ensuring acceptable service quality metrics. We observe that a complex application-specific coupling exists between the compute and network usage of an application. Our proposed method learns this coupling during the operation of the service, and dynamically modulates the compute and network resource requests to mimimize under-utilization of reserved resources. Through experimental evaluation using real-world video analytics application, we show that our technique is able to capture complex compute-network coupling relationship in an online manner i.e. while the application is running, and dynamically adapts and saves up to 65% compute and 93% network resources on average (over multiple runs), without significantly impacting application accuracy.

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GLoSH: Global-Local Spherical Harmonics for Intrinsic Image Decomposition

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Traditional intrinsic image decomposition focuses on decomposing images into reflectance and shading, leaving surfaces normals and lighting entangled in shading. In this work, we propose a Global-Local Spherical Harmonics (GLoSH) lighting model to improve the lighting component, and jointly predict reflectance and surface normals. The global SH models the holistic lighting while local SH account for the spatial variation of lighting. Also, a novel non-negative lighting constraint is proposed to encourage the estimated SH to be physically meaningful. To seamlessly reflect the GLoSH model, we design a coarse-to-fine network structure. The coarse network predicts global SH, reflectance and normals, and the fine network predicts their local residuals. Lacking labels for reflectance and lighting, we apply synthetic data for model pre-training and fine-tune the model with real data in a self-supervised way. Compared to the state-of-the-art methods only targeting normals or reflectance and shading, our method recovers all components and achieves consistently better results on three real datasets, IIW, SAW and NYUv2.

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Zero-Shot Object Detection

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We introduce and tackle the problem of zero-shot object detection (ZSD), which aims to detect object classes which are not observed during training. We work with a challenging set of object classes, not restricting ourselves to similar and/or fine-grained categories as in prior works on zero-shot classification. We present a principled approach by first adapting visual-semantic embeddings for ZSD. We then discuss the problems associated with selecting a background class and motivate two background-aware approaches for learning robust detectors. One of these models uses a fixed background class and the other is based on iterative latent assignments. We also outline the challenge associated with using a limited number of training classes and propose a solution based on dense sampling of the semantic label space using auxiliary data with a large number of categories. We propose novel splits of two standard detection datasets – MSCOCO and VisualGenome, and present extensive empirical results in both the traditional and generalized zero-shot settings to highlight the benefits of the proposed methods. We provide useful insights into the algorithm and conclude by posing some open questions to encourage further research.

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