Multitask Learning for Network Traffic Classification

Traffic classification has various applications in today's Internet, from resource allocation, billing and QoS purposes in ISPs to firewall and malware detection in clients. Classical machine learning algorithms and deep learning models have been widely used to solve the traffic classification task. However, training such models requires a large amount of labeled data. Labeling data is often the most difficult and time-consuming process in building a classifier. To solve this challenge, we reformulate the traffic classification into a multi-task learning framework where bandwidth requirement and duration of a flow are predicted along with the traffic class. The motivation of this approach is twofold: First, bandwidth requirement and duration are useful in many applications, including routing, resource allocation, and QoS provisioning. Second, these two values can be obtained from each flow easily without the need for human labeling or capturing flows in a controlled and isolated environment. We show that with a large amount of easily obtainable data samples for bandwidth and duration prediction tasks, and only a few data samples for the traffic classification task, one can achieve high accuracy. We conduct two experiment with ISCX and QUIC public datasets and show the efficacy of our approach

Listening for Sirens: Locating and Classifying Acoustic Alarms in City Scenes

This paper is about alerting acoustic event detection and sound source localisation in an urban scenario. Specifically, we are interested in spotting the presence of horns, and sirens of emergency vehicles. In order to obtain a reliable system able to operate robustly despite the presence of traffic noise, which can be copious, unstructured and unpredictable, we propose to treat the spectrograms of incoming stereo signals as images, and apply semantic segmentation, based on a Unet architecture, to extract the target sound from the background noise. In a multi-task learning scheme, together with signal denoising, we perform acoustic event classification to identify the nature of the alerting sound. Lastly, we use the denoised signals to localise the acoustic source on the horizon plane, by regressing the direction of arrival of the sound through a CNN architecture. Our experimental evaluation shows an average classification rate of 94%, and a median absolute error on the localisation of 7.5{\deg} when operating on audio frames of 0.5s, and of 2.5{\deg} when operating on frames of 2.5s. The system offers excellent performance in particularly challenging scenarios, where the noise level is remarkably high.Comment: 6 pages, 9 figure

S-OHEM: Stratified Online Hard Example Mining for Object Detection

One of the major challenges in object detection is to propose detectors with highly accurate localization of objects. The online sampling of high-loss region proposals (hard examples) uses the multitask loss with equal weight settings across all loss types (e.g, classification and localization, rigid and non-rigid categories) and ignores the influence of different loss distributions throughout the training process, which we find essential to the training efficacy. In this paper, we present the Stratified Online Hard Example Mining (S-OHEM) algorithm for training higher efficiency and accuracy detectors. S-OHEM exploits OHEM with stratified sampling, a widely-adopted sampling technique, to choose the training examples according to this influence during hard example mining, and thus enhance the performance of object detectors. We show through systematic experiments that S-OHEM yields an average precision (AP) improvement of 0.5% on rigid categories of PASCAL VOC 2007 for both the IoU threshold of 0.6 and 0.7. For KITTI 2012, both results of the same metric are 1.6%. Regarding the mean average precision (mAP), a relative increase of 0.3% and 0.5% (1% and 0.5%) is observed for VOC07 (KITTI12) using the same set of IoU threshold. Also, S-OHEM is easy to integrate with existing region-based detectors and is capable of acting with post-recognition level regressors.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, accepted by CCCV 201

Latent Multi-task Architecture Learning

Multi-task learning (MTL) allows deep neural networks to learn from related tasks by sharing parameters with other networks. In practice, however, MTL involves searching an enormous space of possible parameter sharing architectures to find (a) the layers or subspaces that benefit from sharing, (b) the appropriate amount of sharing, and (c) the appropriate relative weights of the different task losses. Recent work has addressed each of the above problems in isolation. In this work we present an approach that learns a latent multi-task architecture that jointly addresses (a)--(c). We present experiments on synthetic data and data from OntoNotes 5.0, including four different tasks and seven different domains. Our extension consistently outperforms previous approaches to learning latent architectures for multi-task problems and achieves up to 15% average error reductions over common approaches to MTL.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of AAAI 201

Panoptic Segmentation

We propose and study a task we name panoptic segmentation (PS). Panoptic segmentation unifies the typically distinct tasks of semantic segmentation (assign a class label to each pixel) and instance segmentation (detect and segment each object instance). The proposed task requires generating a coherent scene segmentation that is rich and complete, an important step toward real-world vision systems. While early work in computer vision addressed related image/scene parsing tasks, these are not currently popular, possibly due to lack of appropriate metrics or associated recognition challenges. To address this, we propose a novel panoptic quality (PQ) metric that captures performance for all classes (stuff and things) in an interpretable and unified manner. Using the proposed metric, we perform a rigorous study of both human and machine performance for PS on three existing datasets, revealing interesting insights about the task. The aim of our work is to revive the interest of the community in a more unified view of image segmentation.Comment: accepted to CVPR 201