OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A differential memristive synapse circuit for on-line learning in neuromorphic computing systems
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2017
Year: 2017

Spike-based learning with memristive devices in neuromorphic computing architectures typically uses learning circuits that require overlapping pulses from pre- and post-synaptic nodes. This imposes severe constraints on the length of the pulses transmitted in the network, and on the network's throughput. Furthermore, most of these circuits do not decouple the currents flowing through memristive devices from the one stimulating the target neuron. This can be a problem when using devices with high conductance values, because of the resulting large currents. In this paper we propose a novel circuit that decouples the current produced by the memristive device from the one used to stimulate the post-synaptic neuron, by using a novel differential scheme based on the Gilbert normalizer circuit. We show how this circuit is useful for reducing the effect of variability in the memristive devices, and how it is ideally suited for spike-based learning mechanisms that do not require overlapping pre- and post-synaptic pulses. We demonstrate the features of the proposed synapse circuit with SPICE simulations, and validate its learning properties with high-level behavioral network simulations which use a stochastic gradient descent learning rule in two classification tasks.
Hybrid Optimization Method for Reconfiguration of AC/DC Microgrids in All-Electric Ships
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2017
Year: 2017

Since the limited power capacity, finite inertia, and dynamic loads make the shipboard power system (SPS) vulnerable, the automatic reconfiguration for failure recovery in SPS is an extremely significant but still challenging problem. It is not only required to operate accurately and optimally, but also to satisfy operating constraints. In this paper, we consider the reconfiguration optimization for hybrid AC/DC microgrids in all-electric ships. Firstly, the multi-zone medium voltage DC (MVDC) SPS model is presented. In this model, the DC power flow for reconfiguration and a generalized AC/DC converter are modeled for accurate reconfiguration. Secondly, since this problem is mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP), a hybrid method based on Newton Raphson and Biogeography based Optimization (NRBBO) is designed according to the characteristics of system, loads, and faults. This method facilitates to maximize the weighted load restoration while satisfying operating constraints. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate this method has advantages in terms of power restoration and convergence speed.
Performance Evaluation of Spatial Complementary Code Keying Modulation in MIMO Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

Spatial complementary code keying modulation (SCCKM) is proposed as a novel block coding modulation scheme. An input binary sequence is modulated based on the different lengths of complementary code keying (CCK) modulation and then spread across the transmit antennas (spatial domain) in a multiple input multiple output (MIMO) system exploiting orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). At the receiver side, zero forcing equalization is applied to the OFDM modulated data to mitigate the effect of the multipath fast fading channel and then followed by maximum likelihood (ML) detection to retrieve the input sequence. The performance of SCCKM in different MIMO systems is compared to that of spatial modulation (SM) as a baseline scheme. Simulation results show that for the same spectral efficiency, SCCKM is able to substantially improve the bit error rate (BER).
Deep Automated Multi-task Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

Multi-task learning (MTL) has recently contributed to learning better representations in service of various NLP tasks. MTL aims at improving the performance of a primary task, by jointly training on a secondary task. This paper introduces automated tasks, which exploit the sequential nature of the input data, as secondary tasks in an MTL model. We explore next word prediction, next character prediction, and missing word completion as potential automated tasks. Our results show that training on a primary task in parallel with a secondary automated task improves both the convergence speed and accuracy for the primary task. We suggest two methods for augmenting an existing network with automated tasks and establish better performance in topic prediction, sentiment analysis, and hashtag recommendation. Finally, we show that the MTL models can perform well on datasets that are small and colloquial by nature.
Markov Brains: A Technical Introduction
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2017
Year: 2017

Markov Brains are a class of evolvable artificial neural networks (ANN). They differ from conventional ANNs in many aspects, but the key difference is that instead of a layered architecture, with each node performing the same function, Markov Brains are networks built from individual computational components. These computational components interact with each other, receive inputs from sensors, and control motor outputs. The function of the computational components, their connections to each other, as well as connections to sensors and motors are all subject to evolutionary optimization. Here we describe in detail how a Markov Brain works, what techniques can be used to study them, and how they can be evolved.
MOL-Eye: A New Metric for the Performance Evaluation of a Molecular Signal
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2017
Year: 2017

Inspired by the eye diagram in classical radio frequency (RF) based communications, the MOL-Eye diagram is proposed for the performance evaluation of a molecular signal within the context of molecular communication. Utilizing various features of this diagram, three new metrics for the performance evaluation of a molecular signal, namely the maximum eye height, standard deviation of received molecules, and counting SNR (CSNR) are introduced. The applicability of these performance metrics in this domain is verified by comparing the performance of binary concentration shift keying (BCSK) and BCSK with consecutive power adjustment (BCSK-CPA) modulation techniques in a vessel-like environment with laminar flow. The results show that, in addition to classical performance metrics such as bit-error rate and channel capacity, these performance metrics can also be used to show the advantage of an efficient modulation technique over a simpler one.
Safe & Robust Reachability Analysis of Hybrid Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2017
Year: 2017

Hybrid systems - more precisely, their mathematical models - can exhibit behaviors, like Zeno behaviors, that are absent in purely discrete or purely continuous systems. First, we observe that, in this context, the usual definition of reachability - namely, the reflexive and transitive closure of a transition relation - can be unsafe, ie, it may compute a proper subset of the set of states reachable in finite time from a set of initial states. Therefore, we propose safe reachability, which always computes a superset of the set of reachable states. Second, in safety analysis of hybrid and continuous systems, it is important to ensure that a reachability analysis is also robust wrt small perturbations to the set of initial states and to the system itself, since discrepancies between a system and its mathematical models are unavoidable. We show that, under certain conditions, the best Scott continuous approximation of an analysis A is also its best robust approximation. Finally, we exemplify the gap between the set of reachable states and the supersets computed by safe reachability and its best robust approximation.
Lexico-minimum Replica Placement in Multitrees
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2017
Year: 2017

In this work, we consider the problem of placing replicas in a data center or storage area network, represented as a digraph, so as to lexico-minimize a previously proposed reliability measure which minimizes the impact of all failure events in the model in decreasing order of severity. Prior work focuses on the special case in which the digraph is an arborescence. In this work, we consider the broader class of multitrees: digraphs in which the subgraph induced by vertices reachable from a fixed node forms a tree. We parameterize multitrees by their number of "roots" (nodes with in-degree zero), and rule out membership in the class of fixed-parameter tractable problems (FPT) by showing that finding optimal replica placements in multitrees with 3 roots is NP-hard. On the positive side, we show that the problem of finding optimal replica placements in the class of \emph{untangled} multitrees is FPT, as parameterized by the replication factor $ρ$ and the number of roots $k$. Our approach combines dynamic programming (DP) with a novel tree decomposition to find an optimal placement of $ρ$ replicas on the leaves of a multitree with $n$ nodes and $k$ roots in $O(n^2ρ^{2k+3})$ time.
Settling Payments Fast and Private: Efficient Decentralized Routing for Path-Based Transactions
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2017
Year: 2017

Path-based transaction (PBT) networks, which settle payments from one user to another via a path of intermediaries, are a growing area of research. They overcome the scalability and privacy issues in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum by replacing expensive and slow on-chain blockchain operations with inexpensive and fast off-chain transfers. In the form of credit networks such as Ripple and Stellar, they also enable low-price real-time gross settlements across different currencies. For example, SilentWhsipers is a recently proposed fully distributed credit network relying on path-based transactions for secure and in particular private payments without a public ledger. At the core of a decentralized PBT network is a routing algorithm that discovers transaction paths between payer and payee. During the last year, a number of routing algorithms have been proposed. However, the existing ad hoc efforts lack either efficiency or privacy. In this work, we first identify several efficiency concerns in SilentWhsipers. Armed with this knowledge, we design and evaluate SpeedyMurmurs, a novel routing algorithm for decentralized PBT networks using efficient and flexible embedding-based path discovery and on-demand efficient stabilization to handle the dynamics of a PBT network. Our simulation study, based on real-world data from the currently deployed Ripple credit network, indicates that SpeedyMurmurs reduces the overhead of stabilization by up to two orders of magnitude and the overhead of routing a transaction by more than a factor of two. Furthermore, using SpeedyMurmurs maintains at least the same success ratio as decentralized landmark routing, while providing lower delays. Finally, SpeedyMurmurs achieves key privacy goals for routing in PBT networks.
Where to Focus: Deep Attention-based Spatially Recurrent Bilinear Networks for Fine-Grained Visual Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Fine-grained visual recognition typically depends on modeling subtle difference from object parts. However, these parts often exhibit dramatic visual variations such as occlusions, viewpoints, and spatial transformations, making it hard to detect. In this paper, we present a novel attention-based model to automatically, selectively and accurately focus on critical object regions with higher importance against appearance variations. Given an image, two different Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are constructed, where the outputs of two CNNs are correlated through bilinear pooling to simultaneously focus on discriminative regions and extract relevant features. To capture spatial distributions among the local regions with visual attention, soft attention based spatial Long-Short Term Memory units (LSTMs) are incorporated to realize spatially recurrent yet visually selective over local input patterns. All the above intuitions equip our network with the following novel model: two-stream CNN layers, bilinear pooling layer, spatial recurrent layer with location attention are jointly trained via an end-to-end fashion to serve as the part detector and feature extractor, whereby relevant features are localized and extracted attentively. We show the significance of our network against two well-known visual recognition tasks: fine-grained image classification and person re-identification.
Minimal Effort Back Propagation for Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

As traditional neural network consumes a significant amount of computing resources during back propagation, \citet{Sun2017mePropSB} propose a simple yet effective technique to alleviate this problem. In this technique, only a small subset of the full gradients are computed to update the model parameters. In this paper we extend this technique into the Convolutional Neural Network(CNN) to reduce calculation in back propagation, and the surprising results verify its validity in CNN: only 5\% of the gradients are passed back but the model still achieves the same effect as the traditional CNN, or even better. We also show that the top-$k$ selection of gradients leads to a sparse calculation in back propagation, which may bring significant computational benefits for high computational complexity of convolution operation in CNN.
Integration of 5G Technologies in LEO Mega-Constellations
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2017
Year: 2017

3GPP is finalising the first release of the 5G New Radio physical layer. To cope with the demanding 5G requirements on global connectivity and large throughput, Satellite Communications might be a valuable resource to extend and complement terrestrial networks. In this context, we introduce an integrated architecture for 5G-based LEO mega-constellations and assess the impact of large Doppler shifts and delays on both the 5G waveform and the PHY/MAC layer procedures.
Stable Recovery of Structured Signals From Corrupted Sub-Gaussian Measurements
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

This paper studies the problem of accurately recovering a structured signal from a small number of corrupted sub-Gaussian measurements. We consider three different procedures to reconstruct signal and corruption when different kinds of prior knowledge are available. In each case, we provide conditions (in terms of the number of measurements) for stable signal recovery from structured corruption with added unstructured noise. Our results theoretically demonstrate how to choose the regularization parameters in both partially and fully penalized recovery procedures and shed some light on the relationships among the three procedures. The key ingredient in our analysis is an extended matrix deviation inequality for isotropic sub-Gaussian matrices, which implies a tight lower bound for the restricted singular value of the extended sensing matrix. Numerical experiments are presented to verify our theoretical results.
Continuous Multimodal Emotion Recognition Approach for AVEC 2017
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

This paper reports the analysis of audio and visual features in predicting the continuous emotion dimensions under the seventh Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge (AVEC 2017), which was done as part of a B.Tech. 2nd year internship project. For visual features we used the HOG (Histogram of Gradients) features, Fisher encodings of SIFT (Scale-Invariant Feature Transform) features based on Gaussian mixture model (GMM) and some pretrained Convolutional Neural Network layers as features; all these extracted for each video clip. For audio features we used the Bag-of-audio-words (BoAW) representation of the LLDs (low-level descriptors) generated by openXBOW provided by the organisers of the event. Then we trained fully connected neural network regression model on the dataset for all these different modalities. We applied multimodal fusion on the output models to get the Concordance correlation coefficient on Development set as well as Test set.
Combinational neural network using Gabor filters for the classification of handwritten digits
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

A classification algorithm that combines the components of k-nearest neighbours and multilayer neural networks has been designed and tested. With this method the computational time required for training the dataset has been reduced substancially. Gabor filters were used for the feature extraction to ensure a better performance. This algorithm is tested with MNIST dataset and it will be integrated as a module in the object recognition software which is currently under development.
Non-Clairvoyant Scheduling to Minimize Max Flow Time on a Machine with Setup Times
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2017
Year: 2017

Consider a problem in which $n$ jobs that are classified into $k$ types arrive over time at their release times and are to be scheduled on a single machine so as to minimize the maximum flow time. The machine requires a setup taking $s$ time units whenever it switches from processing jobs of one type to jobs of a different type. We consider the problem as an online problem where each job is only known to the scheduler as soon as it arrives and where the processing time of a job only becomes known upon its completion (non-clairvoyance). We are interested in the potential of simple "greedy-like" algorithms. We analyze a modification of the FIFO strategy and show its competitiveness to be $Θ(\sqrt{n})$, which is optimal for the considered class of algorithms. For $k=2$ types it achieves a constant competitiveness. Our main insight is obtained by an analysis of the smoothed competitiveness. If processing times $p_j$ are independently perturbed to $\hat p_j = (1+X_j)p_j$, we obtain a competitiveness of $O(σ^{-2} \log^2 n)$ when $X_j$ is drawn from a uniform or a (truncated) normal distribution with standard deviation $σ$. The result proves that bad instances are fragile and "practically" one might expect a much better performance than given by the $Ω(\sqrt{n})$-bound.
Institutionally Distributed Deep Learning Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Deep learning has become a promising approach for automated medical diagnoses. When medical data samples are limited, collaboration among multiple institutions is necessary to achieve high algorithm performance. However, sharing patient data often has limitations due to technical, legal, or ethical concerns. In such cases, sharing a deep learning model is a more attractive alternative. The best method of performing such a task is unclear, however. In this study, we simulate the dissemination of learning deep learning network models across four institutions using various heuristics and compare the results with a deep learning model trained on centrally hosted patient data. The heuristics investigated include ensembling single institution models, single weight transfer, and cyclical weight transfer. We evaluated these approaches for image classification in three independent image collections (retinal fundus photos, mammography, and ImageNet). We find that cyclical weight transfer resulted in a performance (testing accuracy = 77.3%) that was closest to that of centrally hosted patient data (testing accuracy = 78.7%). We also found that there is an improvement in the performance of cyclical weight transfer heuristic with high frequency of weight transfer.
Multi-Task Learning for Segmentation of Building Footprints with Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

The increased availability of high resolution satellite imagery allows to sense very detailed structures on the surface of our planet. Access to such information opens up new directions in the analysis of remote sensing imagery. However, at the same time this raises a set of new challenges for existing pixel-based prediction methods, such as semantic segmentation approaches. While deep neural networks have achieved significant advances in the semantic segmentation of high resolution images in the past, most of the existing approaches tend to produce predictions with poor boundaries. In this paper, we address the problem of preserving semantic segmentation boundaries in high resolution satellite imagery by introducing a new cascaded multi-task loss. We evaluate our approach on Inria Aerial Image Labeling Dataset which contains large-scale and high resolution images. Our results show that we are able to outperform state-of-the-art methods by 8.3\% without any additional post-processing step.
A General Framework for Flexible Multi-Cue Photometric Point Cloud Registration
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

The ability to build maps is a key functionality for the majority of mobile robots. A central ingredient to most mapping systems is the registration or alignment of the recorded sensor data. In this paper, we present a general methodology for photometric registration that can deal with multiple different cues. We provide examples for registering RGBD as well as 3D LIDAR data. In contrast to popular point cloud registration approaches such as ICP our method does not rely on explicit data association and exploits multiple modalities such as raw range and image data streams. Color, depth, and normal information are handled in an uniform manner and the registration is obtained by minimizing the pixel-wise difference between two multi-channel images. We developed a flexible and general framework and implemented our approach inside that framework. We also released our implementation as open source C++ code. The experiments show that our approach allows for an accurate registration of the sensor data without requiring an explicit data association or model-specific adaptations to datasets or sensors. Our approach exploits the different cues in a natural and consistent way and the registration can be done at framerate for a typical range or imaging sensor.
Why Pay More When You Can Pay Less: A Joint Learning Framework for Active Feature Acquisition and Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

We consider the problem of active feature acquisition, where we sequentially select the subset of features in order to achieve the maximum prediction performance in the most cost-effective way. In this work, we formulate this active feature acquisition problem as a reinforcement learning problem, and provide a novel framework for jointly learning both the RL agent and the classifier (environment). We also introduce a more systematic way of encoding subsets of features that can properly handle innate challenge with missing entries in active feature acquisition problems, that uses the orderless LSTM-based set encoding mechanism that readily fits in the joint learning framework. We evaluate our model on a carefully designed synthetic dataset for the active feature acquisition as well as several real datasets such as electric health record (EHR) datasets, on which it outperforms all baselines in terms of prediction performance as well feature acquisition cost.