OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
UAV-Aided Jamming for Secure Ground Communication with Unknown Eavesdropper Location
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

This paper investigates unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-aided jamming technique for enabling physical layer keyless security in scenarios where the exact eavesdropper location is unknown. We assume that the unknown eavesdropper location is within an ellipse characterizing the coverage region of the transmitter. By sequentially optimizing the transmit power, the flight path of the UAV and its jamming power, we aim at maximizing the average secrecy rate with arbitrary eavesdropper location. Simulation results demonstrate that the optimal flight path obtains better secrecy rate performance compared to that using direct UAV flight path encasing the transmitter and the legitimate receiver. Most importantly, even with the unknown eavesdropper location, we obtained a secrecy rate that is comparable to a scenario when the eavesdropper's location is known. However, the average secrecy rate with the unknown eavesdropper location varies depending on the proximity of the eavesdropper to the known location of the transmitter. We also observe that due to the UAV-aided jamming, the average secrecy rate stabilizes at some point even though the average received envelope power of the eavesdropper increases. This essentially demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.
LogPlayer: Fault-tolerant Exactly-once Delivery using gRPC Asynchronous Streaming
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we present the design of our LogPlayer that is a component responsible for fault-tolerant delivery of transactional mutations recorded on a WAL to the backend storage shards. LogPlayer relies on gRPC for asynchronous streaming. However, the design provided in this paper can be used with other asynchronous streaming platforms. We model check the correctness of LogPlayer by TLA+. In particular, our TLA+ specification shows that LogPlayer guarantees in-order exactly-once delivery of WAL entries to the storage shards, even in the presence of shards or LogPlayer failures. Our experiments show LogPlayer is capable of efficient delivery with sub-millisecond latency, and it is significantly more efficient than Apache Kafka for designing a WAL system with exactly-once guarantee.
Drivers affecting cloud ERP deployment decisions: an Australian study
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2019
Year: 2019

Cloud-based Enterprise Resources Planning (Cloud ERP) is hosting an ERP system through the cloud environment. Cloud ERP is responsible for organisational business processes such as purchasing, financial, and human resource by providing a real-time infrastructure for the enterprise. With the development of technology, cloud ERP is noticed by more and more enterprises. Currently, limited researches have been conducted for cloud ERP systems in the Australian context. Furthermore, no studies have indicated how different perspectives (client company & consultant company) bring insights into the deployment decisions on cloud ERP. Hence, this research intends to understand drivers affecting cloud ERP deployment decisions from both the client company and the consultant company perspective in an Australian context. This paper identifies 31 relevant literature on cloud ERP adoption; 79 critical drivers affecting cloud ERP deployment decisions were identified from the selected literature, and those drivers are then categorized using the Technology-Organisation-Environment (TOE) framework to develop the initial theoretical model. By conducting a Case Study Approach using a semi-structured interview and secondary resources analysis, findings are then compared to the theoretical model. As a result, an empirically validated model on drivers affecting cloud ERP deployment decisions from both client company and consultant company perspectives has been developed; this model contains 15 drivers and 7 of them are new. The theoretical and practical contributions of the findings are then outlined.
Effective Decoding in Graph Auto-Encoder using Triadic Closure
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

The (variational) graph auto-encoder and its variants have been popularly used for representation learning on graph-structured data. While the encoder is often a powerful graph convolutional network, the decoder reconstructs the graph structure by only considering two nodes at a time, thus ignoring possible interactions among edges. On the other hand, structured prediction, which considers the whole graph simultaneously, is computationally expensive. In this paper, we utilize the well-known triadic closure property which is exhibited in many real-world networks. We propose the triad decoder, which considers and predicts the three edges involved in a local triad together. The triad decoder can be readily used in any graph-based auto-encoder. In particular, we incorporate this to the (variational) graph auto-encoder. Experiments on link prediction, node clustering and graph generation show that the use of triads leads to more accurate prediction, clustering and better preservation of the graph characteristics.
Index-Based Scheduling for Parallel State Machine Replication
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

State Machine Replication (SMR) is a fundamental approach to designing service with fault tolerance. However, its requirement for the deterministic execution of transactions often results in single-threaded replicas, which cannot fully exploit the multicore capabilities of today's processors. Therefore, parallel SMR has become a hot topic of recent research. The basic idea behind it is that independent transactions can be executed in parallel, while dependent transactions must be executed in their relative order to ensure consistency among replicas. The dependency detection of existing parallel SMR methods is mainly based on pairwise transaction comparison or batch comparison. These methods cannot simultaneously guarantee both effective detection and concurrent execution. Moreover, the scheduling process cannot execute concurrently, which introduces extra scheduling overhead as well. In order to further reduce scheduling overhead and ensure the parallel execution of transactions, we propose an efficient scheduler based on a specific index structure. The index is composed of a Bloom Filter and the associated transaction queues, which provides an efficient dependency detection and preserve necessary dependency information respectively. Based on the index structure, we further devise an elaborated concurrent scheduling process. The experimental results show that the proposed scheduler is more efficient, scalable and robust than the comparison methods.
Pseudo-deterministic Streaming
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2019
Year: 2019

A pseudo-deterministic algorithm is a (randomized) algorithm which, when run multiple times on the same input, with high probability outputs the same result on all executions. Classic streaming algorithms, such as those for finding heavy hitters, approximate counting, $\ell_2$ approximation, finding a nonzero entry in a vector (for turnstile algorithms) are not pseudo-deterministic. For example, in the instance of finding a nonzero entry in a vector, for any known low-space algorithm $A$, there exists a stream $x$ so that running $A$ twice on $x$ (using different randomness) would with high probability result in two different entries as the output. In this work, we study whether it is inherent that these algorithms output different values on different executions. That is, we ask whether these problems have low-memory pseudo-deterministic algorithms. For instance, we show that there is no low-memory pseudo-deterministic algorithm for finding a nonzero entry in a vector (given in a turnstile fashion), and also that there is no low-dimensional pseudo-deterministic sketching algorithm for $\ell_2$ norm estimation. We also exhibit problems which do have low memory pseudo-deterministic algorithms but no low memory deterministic algorithm, such as outputting a nonzero row of a matrix, or outputting a basis for the row-span of a matrix. We also investigate multi-pseudo-deterministic algorithms: algorithms which with high probability output one of a few options. We show the first lower bounds for such algorithms. This implies that there are streaming problems such that every low space algorithm for the problem must have inputs where there are many valid outputs, all with a significant probability of being outputted.
Text2FaceGAN: Face Generation from Fine Grained Textual Descriptions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Powerful generative adversarial networks (GAN) have been developed to automatically synthesize realistic images from text. However, most existing tasks are limited to generating simple images such as flowers from captions. In this work, we extend this problem to the less addressed domain of face generation from fine-grained textual descriptions of face, e.g., "A person has curly hair, oval face, and mustache". We are motivated by the potential of automated face generation to impact and assist critical tasks such as criminal face reconstruction. Since current datasets for the task are either very small or do not contain captions, we generate captions for images in the CelebA dataset by creating an algorithm to automatically convert a list of attributes to a set of captions. We then model the highly multi-modal problem of text to face generation as learning the conditional distribution of faces (conditioned on text) in same latent space. We utilize the current state-of-the-art GAN (DC-GAN with GAN-CLS loss) for learning conditional multi-modality. The presence of more fine-grained details and variable length of the captions makes the problem easier for a user but more difficult to handle compared to the other text-to-image tasks. We flipped the labels for real and fake images and added noise in discriminator. Generated images for diverse textual descriptions show promising results. In the end, we show how the widely used inceptions score is not a good metric to evaluate the performance of generative models used for synthesizing faces from text.
Cracking In-Memory Database Index A Case Study for Adaptive Radix Tree Index
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2019
Year: 2019

Indexes provide a method to access data in databases quickly. It can improve the response speed of subsequent queries by building a complete index in advance. However, it also leads to a huge overhead of the continuous updating during creating the index. An in-memory database usually has a higher query processing performance than disk databases and is more suitable for real-time query processing. Therefore, there is an urgent need to reduce the index creation and update cost for in-memory databases. Database cracking technology is currently recognized as an effective method to reduce the index initialization time. However, conventional cracking algorithms are focused on simple column data structure rather than those complex index structure for in-memory databases. In order to show the feasibility of in-memory database index cracking and promote to future more extensive research, this paper conducted a case study on the Adaptive Radix Tree (ART), a popular tree index structure of in-memory databases. On the basis of carefully examining the ART index construction overhead, an algorithm using auxiliary data structures to crack the ART index is proposed.
LaFIn: Generative Landmark Guided Face Inpainting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

It is challenging to inpaint face images in the wild, due to the large variation of appearance, such as different poses, expressions and occlusions. A good inpainting algorithm should guarantee the realism of output, including the topological structure among eyes, nose and mouth, as well as the attribute consistency on pose, gender, ethnicity, expression, etc. This paper studies an effective deep learning based strategy to deal with these issues, which comprises of a facial landmark predicting subnet and an image inpainting subnet. Concretely, given partial observation, the landmark predictor aims to provide the structural information (e.g. topological relationship and expression) of incomplete faces, while the inpaintor is to generate plausible appearance (e.g. gender and ethnicity) conditioned on the predicted landmarks. Experiments on the CelebA-HQ and CelebA datasets are conducted to reveal the efficacy of our design and, to demonstrate its superiority over state-of-the-art alternatives both qualitatively and quantitatively. In addition, we assume that high-quality completed faces together with their landmarks can be utilized as augmented data to further improve the performance of (any) landmark predictor, which is corroborated by experimental results on the 300W and WFLW datasets.
Multi-View Multiple Clusterings using Deep Matrix Factorization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Multi-view clustering aims at integrating complementary information from multiple heterogeneous views to improve clustering results. Existing multi-view clustering solutions can only output a single clustering of the data. Due to their multiplicity, multi-view data, can have different groupings that are reasonable and interesting from different perspectives. However, how to find multiple, meaningful, and diverse clustering results from multi-view data is still a rarely studied and challenging topic in multi-view clustering and multiple clusterings. In this paper, we introduce a deep matrix factorization based solution (DMClusts) to discover multiple clusterings. DMClusts gradually factorizes multi-view data matrices into representational subspaces layer-by-layer and generates one clustering in each layer. To enforce the diversity between generated clusterings, it minimizes a new redundancy quantification term derived from the proximity between samples in these subspaces. We further introduce an iterative optimization procedure to simultaneously seek multiple clusterings with quality and diversity. Experimental results on benchmark datasets confirm that DMClusts outperforms state-of-the-art multiple clustering solutions.
SemEval-2015 Task 3: Answer Selection in Community Question Answering
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

Community Question Answering (cQA) provides new interesting research directions to the traditional Question Answering (QA) field, e.g., the exploitation of the interaction between users and the structure of related posts. In this context, we organized SemEval-2015 Task 3 on "Answer Selection in cQA", which included two subtasks: (a) classifying answers as "good", "bad", or "potentially relevant" with respect to the question, and (b) answering a YES/NO question with "yes", "no", or "unsure", based on the list of all answers. We set subtask A for Arabic and English on two relatively different cQA domains, i.e., the Qatar Living website for English, and a Quran-related website for Arabic. We used crowdsourcing on Amazon Mechanical Turk to label a large English training dataset, which we released to the research community. Thirteen teams participated in the challenge with a total of 61 submissions: 24 primary and 37 contrastive. The best systems achieved an official score (macro-averaged F1) of 57.19 and 63.7 for the English subtasks A and B, and 78.55 for the Arabic subtask A.
Control-Tutored Reinforcement Learning: an application to the Herding Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

In this extended abstract we introduce a novel control-tutored Q-learning approach (CTQL) as part of the ongoing effort in developing model-based and safe RL for continuous state spaces. We validate our approach by applying it to a challenging multi-agent herding control problem.
FCA2VEC: Embedding Techniques for Formal Concept Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Embedding large and high dimensional data into low dimensional vector spaces is a necessary task to computationally cope with contemporary data sets. Superseding latent semantic analysis recent approaches like word2vec or node2vec are well established tools in this realm. In the present paper we add to this line of research by introducing fca2vec, a family of embedding techniques for formal concept analysis (FCA). Our investigation contributes to two distinct lines of research. First, we enable the application of FCA notions to large data sets. In particular, we demonstrate how the cover relation of a concept lattice can be retrieved from a computational feasible embedding. Secondly, we show an enhancement for the classical node2vec approach in low dimension. For both directions the overall constraint of FCA of explainable results is preserved. We evaluate our novel procedures by computing fca2vec on different data sets like, wiki44 (a dense part of the Wikidata knowledge graph), the Mushroom data set and a publication network derived from the FCA community.
Feature-Rich Part-of-speech Tagging for Morphologically Complex Languages: Application to Bulgarian
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

We present experiments with part-of-speech tagging for Bulgarian, a Slavic language with rich inflectional and derivational morphology. Unlike most previous work, which has used a small number of grammatical categories, we work with 680 morpho-syntactic tags. We combine a large morphological lexicon with prior linguistic knowledge and guided learning from a POS-annotated corpus, achieving accuracy of 97.98%, which is a significant improvement over the state-of-the-art for Bulgarian.
WSOD with PSNet and Box Regression
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Weakly supervised object detection(WSOD) task uses only image-level annotations to train object detection task. WSOD does not require time-consuming instance-level annotations, so the study of this task has attracted more and more attention. Previous weakly supervised object detection methods iteratively update detectors and pseudo-labels, or use feature-based mask-out methods. Most of these methods do not generate complete and accurate proposals, often only the most discriminative parts of the object, or too many background areas. To solve this problem, we added the box regression module to the weakly supervised object detection network and proposed a proposal scoring network (PSNet) to supervise it. The box regression module modifies proposal to improve the IoU of proposal and ground truth. PSNet scores the proposal output from the box regression network and utilize the score to improve the box regression module. In addition, we take advantage of the PRS algorithm for generating a more accurate pseudo label to train the box regression module. Using these methods, we train the detector on the PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2012 and obtain significantly improved results.
Neural Machine Translation with Explicit Phrase Alignment
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

While neural machine translation (NMT) has achieved state-of-the-art translation performance, it is unable to capture the alignment between the input and output during the translation process. The lack of alignment in NMT models leads to three problems: it is hard to (1) interpret the translation process, (2) impose lexical constraints, and (3) impose structural constraints. To alleviate these problems, we propose to introduce explicit phrase alignment into the translation process of arbitrary NMT models. The key idea is to build a search space similar to that of phrase-based statistical machine translation for NMT where phrase alignment is readily available. We design a new decoding algorithm that can easily impose lexical and structural constraints. Experiments show that our approach makes the translation process of NMT more interpretable without sacrificing translation quality. In addition, our approach achieves significant improvements in lexically and structurally constrained translation tasks.
Electricity Load Forecasting -- An Evaluation of Simple 1D-CNN Network Structures
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

This paper presents a convolutional neural network (CNN) which can be used for forecasting electricity load profiles 36 hours into the future. In contrast to well established CNN architectures, the input data is one-dimensional. A parameter scanning of network parameters is conducted in order to gain information about the influence of the kernel size, number of filters, and dense size. The results show that a good forecast quality can already be achieved with basic CNN architectures.The method works not only for smooth sum loads of many hundred consumers, but also for the load of apartment buildings.
A discriminative condition-aware backend for speaker verification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

We present a scoring approach for speaker verification that mimics the standard PLDA-based backend process used in most current speaker verification systems. However, unlike the standard backends, all parameters of the model are jointly trained to optimize the binary cross-entropy for the speaker verification task. We further integrate the calibration stage inside the model, making the parameters of this stage depend on metadata vectors that represent the conditions of the signals. We show that the proposed backend has excellent out-of-the-box calibration performance on most of our test sets, making it an ideal approach for cases in which the test conditions are not known and development data is not available for training a domain-specific calibration model.
Fast Fibonacci heaps with worst case extensions
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

We are concentrating on reducing overhead of heaps based on comparisons with optimal worstcase behaviour. The paper is inspired by Strict Fibonacci Heaps [1], where G. S. Brodal, G. Lagogiannis, and R. E. Tarjan implemented the heap with DecreaseKey and Meld interface in assymptotically optimal worst case times (based on key comparisons). In the paper [2], the ideas were elaborated and it was shown that the same asymptotical times could be achieved with a strategy loosing much less information from previous comparisons. There is big overhead with maintainance of violation lists in these heaps. We propose simple alternative reducing this overhead. It allows us to implement fast amortized Fibonacci heaps, where user could call some methods in variants guaranting worst case time. If he does so, the heaps are not guaranted to be Fibonacci until an amortized version of a method is called. Of course we could call worst case versions all the time, but as there is an overhead with the guarantee, calling amortized versions is prefered choice if we are not concentrated on complexity of the separate operation. We have shown, we could implement full DecreaseKey-Meld interface, but Meld interface is not natural for these heaps, so if Meld is not needed, much simpler implementation suffices. As I don't know application requiring Meld, we would concentrate on noMeld variant, but we will show the changes could be applied on Meld including variant as well. The papers [1], [2] shown the heaps could be implemented on pointer machine model. For fast practical implementations we would rather use arrays. Our goal is to reduce number of pointer manipulations. Maintainance of ranks by pointers to rank lists would be unnecessary overhead.
PIQA: Reasoning about Physical Commonsense in Natural Language
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

To apply eyeshadow without a brush, should I use a cotton swab or a toothpick? Questions requiring this kind of physical commonsense pose a challenge to today's natural language understanding systems. While recent pretrained models (such as BERT) have made progress on question answering over more abstract domains - such as news articles and encyclopedia entries, where text is plentiful - in more physical domains, text is inherently limited due to reporting bias. Can AI systems learn to reliably answer physical common-sense questions without experiencing the physical world? In this paper, we introduce the task of physical commonsense reasoning and a corresponding benchmark dataset Physical Interaction: Question Answering or PIQA. Though humans find the dataset easy (95% accuracy), large pretrained models struggle (77%). We provide analysis about the dimensions of knowledge that existing models lack, which offers significant opportunities for future research.