OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Performance evaluation of job schedulers on Hadoop YARN
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

To solve the limitation of Hadoop on scalability, resource sharing, and application support, the open-source community proposes the next generation of Hadoop's compute platform called Yet Another Resource Negotiator (YARN) by separating resource management functions from the programming model. This separation enables various application types to run on YARN in parallel. To achieve fair resource sharing and high resource utilization, YARN provides the capacity scheduler and the fair scheduler. However, the performance impacts of the two schedulers are not clear when mixed applications run on a YARN cluster. Therefore, in this paper, we study four scheduling-policy combinations (SPCs for short) derived from the two schedulers and then evaluate the four SPCs in extensive scenarios, which consider not only four application types, but also three different queue structures for organizing applications. The experimental results enable YARN managers to comprehend the influences of different SPCs and different queue structures on mixed applications. The results also help them to select a proper SPC and an appropriate queue structure to achieve better application execution performance.
Trajectory Tracking Control of a Flexible Spine Robot, With and Without a Reference Input
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

The Underactuated Lightweight Tensegrity Robotic Assistive Spine (ULTRA Spine) project is an ongoing effort to develop a flexible, actuated backbone for quadruped robots. In this work, model-predictive control is used to track a trajectory in the robot's state space, in simulation. The state trajectory used here corresponds to a bending motion of the spine, with translations and rotations of the moving vertebrae. Two different controllers are presented in this work: one that does not use a reference input but includes smoothing constrants, and a second one that uses a reference input without smoothing. For the smoothing controller, without reference inputs, the error converges to zero, while the simpler-to-tune controller with an input reference shows small errors but not complete convergence. It is expected that this controller will converge as it is improved further.
When You Should Use Lists in Haskell (Mostly, You Should Not)
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2018
Year: 2018

We comment on the over-use of lists in functional programming. With this respect, we review history of Haskell and some of its libraries, and hint at current developments.
Theory-Driven Automated Content Analysis of Suicidal Tweets : Using Typicality-Based Classification for LDA Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2018
Year: 2018

This study provides a methodological framework for the computer to classify tweets according to variables of the Theory of Planned Behavior. We present a sequential process of automated text analysis which combined supervised approach and unsupervised approach in order to make the computer to detect one of TPB variables in each tweet. We conducted Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), Nearest Neighbor, and then assessed "typicality" of newly labeled tweets in order to predict classification boundary. Furthermore, this study reports findings from a content analysis of suicide-related tweets which identify traits of information environment in Twitter. Consistent with extant literature about suicide coverage, the findings demonstrate that tweets often contain information which prompt perceived behavior control of committing suicide, while rarely provided deterring information on suicide. We conclude by highlighting implications for methodological advances and empirical theory studies.
Fusion++: Volumetric Object-Level SLAM
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

We propose an online object-level SLAM system which builds a persistent and accurate 3D graph map of arbitrary reconstructed objects. As an RGB-D camera browses a cluttered indoor scene, Mask-RCNN instance segmentations are used to initialise compact per-object Truncated Signed Distance Function (TSDF) reconstructions with object size-dependent resolutions and a novel 3D foreground mask. Reconstructed objects are stored in an optimisable 6DoF pose graph which is our only persistent map representation. Objects are incrementally refined via depth fusion, and are used for tracking, relocalisation and loop closure detection. Loop closures cause adjustments in the relative pose estimates of object instances, but no intra-object warping. Each object also carries semantic information which is refined over time and an existence probability to account for spurious instance predictions. We demonstrate our approach on a hand-held RGB-D sequence from a cluttered office scene with a large number and variety of object instances, highlighting how the system closes loops and makes good use of existing objects on repeated loops. We quantitatively evaluate the trajectory error of our system against a baseline approach on the RGB-D SLAM benchmark, and qualitatively compare reconstruction quality of discovered objects on the YCB video dataset. Performance evaluation shows our approach is highly memory efficient and runs online at 4-8Hz (excluding relocalisation) despite not being optimised at the software level.
Saliency Detection via Bidirectional Absorbing Markov Chain
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Traditional saliency detection via Markov chain only considers boundaries nodes. However, in addition to boundaries cues, background prior and foreground prior cues play a complementary role to enhance saliency detection. In this paper, we propose an absorbing Markov chain based saliency detection method considering both boundary information and foreground prior cues. The proposed approach combines both boundaries and foreground prior cues through bidirectional Markov chain. Specifically, the image is first segmented into superpixels and four boundaries nodes (duplicated as virtual nodes) are selected. Subsequently, the absorption time upon transition node's random walk to the absorbing state is calculated to obtain foreground possibility. Simultaneously, foreground prior as the virtual absorbing nodes is used to calculate the absorption time and obtain the background possibility. Finally, two obtained results are fused to obtain the combined saliency map using cost function for further optimization at multi-scale. Experimental results demonstrate the outperformance of our proposed model on 4 benchmark datasets as compared to 17 state-of-the-art methods.
Inductive Learning of Answer Set Programs from Noisy Examples
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

In recent years, non-monotonic Inductive Logic Programming has received growing interest. Specifically, several new learning frameworks and algorithms have been introduced for learning under the answer set semantics, allowing the learning of common-sense knowledge involving defaults and exceptions, which are essential aspects of human reasoning. In this paper, we present a noise-tolerant generalisation of the learning from answer sets framework. We evaluate our ILASP3 system, both on synthetic and on real datasets, represented in the new framework. In particular, we show that on many of the datasets ILASP3 achieves a higher accuracy than other ILP systems that have previously been applied to the datasets, including a recently proposed differentiable learning framework.
Deep Emotion: A Computational Model of Emotion Using Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

Emotions are very important for human intelligence. For example, emotions are closely related to the appraisal of the internal bodily state and external stimuli. This helps us to respond quickly to the environment. Another important perspective in human intelligence is the role of emotions in decision-making. Moreover, the social aspect of emotions is also very important. Therefore, if the mechanism of emotions were elucidated, we could advance toward the essential understanding of our natural intelligence. In this study, a model of emotions is proposed to elucidate the mechanism of emotions through the computational model. Furthermore, from the viewpoint of partner robots, the model of emotions may help us to build robots that can have empathy for humans. To understand and sympathize with people's feelings, the robots need to have their own emotions. This may allow robots to be accepted in human society. The proposed model is implemented using deep neural networks consisting of three modules, which interact with each other. Simulation results reveal that the proposed model exhibits reasonable behavior as the basic mechanism of emotion.
Deep-Learning Ensembles for Skin-Lesion Segmentation, Analysis, Classification: RECOD Titans at ISIC Challenge 2018
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

This extended abstract describes the participation of RECOD Titans in parts 1 to 3 of the ISIC Challenge 2018 "Skin Lesion Analysis Towards Melanoma Detection" (MICCAI 2018). Although our team has a long experience with melanoma classification and moderate experience with lesion segmentation, the ISIC Challenge 2018 was the very first time we worked on lesion attribute detection. For each task we submitted 3 different ensemble approaches, varying combinations of models and datasets. Our best results on the official testing set, regarding the official metric of each task, were: 0.728 (segmentation), 0.344 (attribute detection) and 0.803 (classification). Those submissions reached, respectively, the 56th, 14th and 9th places.
Data Motifs: A Lens Towards Fully Understanding Big Data and AI Workloads
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

The complexity and diversity of big data and AI workloads make understanding them difficult and challenging. This paper proposes a new approach to modelling and characterizing big data and AI workloads. We consider each big data and AI workload as a pipeline of one or more classes of units of computation performed on different initial or intermediate data inputs. Each class of unit of computation captures the common requirements while being reasonably divorced from individual implementations, and hence we call it a data motif. For the first time, among a wide variety of big data and AI workloads, we identify eight data motifs that take up most of the run time of those workloads, including Matrix, Sampling, Logic, Transform, Set, Graph, Sort and Statistic. We implement the eight data motifs on different software stacks as the micro benchmarks of an open-source big data and AI benchmark suite ---BigDataBench 4.0 (publicly available from http://prof.ict.ac.cn/BigDataBench), and perform comprehensive characterization of those data motifs from perspective of data sizes, types, sources, and patterns as a lens towards fully understanding big data and AI workloads. We believe the eight data motifs are promising abstractions and tools for not only big data and AI benchmarking, but also domain-specific hardware and software co-design.
Rain Streak Removal for Single Image via Kernel Guided CNN
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Rain streak removal is an important issue and has recently been investigated extensively. Existing methods, especially the newly emerged deep learning methods, could remove the rain streaks well in many cases. However the essential factor in the generative procedure of the rain streaks, i.e., the motion blur, which leads to the line pattern appearances, were neglected by the deep learning rain streaks approaches and this resulted in over-derain or under-derain results. In this paper, we propose a novel rain streak removal approach using a kernel guided convolutional neural network (KGCNN), achieving the state-of-the-art performance with simple network architectures. We first model the rain streak interference with its motion blur mechanism. Then, our framework starts with learning the motion blur kernel, which is determined by two factors including angle and length, by a plain neural network, denoted as parameter net, from a patch of the texture component. Then, after a dimensionality stretching operation, the learned motion blur kernel is stretched into a degradation map with the same spatial size as the rainy patch. The stretched degradation map together with the texture patch is subsequently input into a derain convolutional network, which is a typical ResNet architecture and trained to output the rain streaks with the guidance of the learned motion blur kernel. Experiments conducted on extensive synthetic and real data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, which preserves the texture and the contrast while removing the rain streaks.
Patch-based Contour Prior Image Denoising for Salt and Pepper Noise
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2018
Year: 2018

The salt and pepper noise brings a significant challenge to image denoising technology, i.e. how to removal the noise clearly and retain the details effectively? In this paper, we propose a patch-based contour prior denoising approach for salt and pepper noise. First, noisy image is cut into patches as basic representation unit, a discrete total variation model is designed to extract contour structures; Second, a weighted Euclidean distance is designed to search the most similar patches, then, corresponding contour stencils are extracted from these similar patches; At the last, we build filter from contour stencils in the framework of regression. Numerical results illustrate that the proposed method is competitive with the state-of-the-art methods in terms of the peak signal-to-noise (PSNR) and visual effects.
Multi-Level Network Embedding with Boosted Low-Rank Matrix Approximation
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2018
Year: 2018

As opposed to manual feature engineering which is tedious and difficult to scale, network representation learning has attracted a surge of research interests as it automates the process of feature learning on graphs. The learned low-dimensional node vector representation is generalizable and eases the knowledge discovery process on graphs by enabling various off-the-shelf machine learning tools to be directly applied. Recent research has shown that the past decade of network embedding approaches either explicitly factorize a carefully designed matrix to obtain the low-dimensional node vector representation or are closely related to implicit matrix factorization, with the fundamental assumption that the factorized node connectivity matrix is low-rank. Nonetheless, the global low-rank assumption does not necessarily hold especially when the factorized matrix encodes complex node interactions, and the resultant single low-rank embedding matrix is insufficient to capture all the observed connectivity patterns. In this regard, we propose a novel multi-level network embedding framework BoostNE, which can learn multiple network embedding representations of different granularity from coarse to fine without imposing the prevalent global low-rank assumption. The proposed BoostNE method is also in line with the successful gradient boosting method in ensemble learning as multiple weak embeddings lead to a stronger and more effective one. We assess the effectiveness of the proposed BoostNE framework by comparing it with existing state-of-the-art network embedding methods on various datasets, and the experimental results corroborate the superiority of the proposed BoostNE network embedding framework.
Remote Biofeedback Sharing, Opportunities and Challenges
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2018
Year: 2018

Biofeedback is commonly used to regulate one's state, for example to manage stress. The underlying idea is that by perceiving a feedback about their physiological activity, a user can act upon it. In this paper we describe through two recent projects how biofeedback could be leveraged to share one's state at distance. Such extension of biofeedback could answer to the need of belonging, further widening the applications of the technology in terms of well-being.
Comparing Attention-based Convolutional and Recurrent Neural Networks: Success and Limitations in Machine Reading Comprehension
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

We propose a machine reading comprehension model based on the compare-aggregate framework with two-staged attention that achieves state-of-the-art results on the MovieQA question answering dataset. To investigate the limitations of our model as well as the behavioral difference between convolutional and recurrent neural networks, we generate adversarial examples to confuse the model and compare to human performance. Furthermore, we assess the generalizability of our model by analyzing its differences to human inference,
Sparsity in Deep Neural Networks - An Empirical Investigation with TensorQuant
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Deep learning is finding its way into the embedded world with applications such as autonomous driving, smart sensors and aug- mented reality. However, the computation of deep neural networks is demanding in energy, compute power and memory. Various approaches have been investigated to reduce the necessary resources, one of which is to leverage the sparsity occurring in deep neural networks due to the high levels of redundancy in the network parameters. It has been shown that sparsity can be promoted specifically and the achieved sparsity can be very high. But in many cases the methods are evaluated on rather small topologies. It is not clear if the results transfer onto deeper topologies. In this paper, the TensorQuant toolbox has been extended to offer a platform to investigate sparsity, especially in deeper models. Several practical relevant topologies for varying classification problem sizes are investigated to show the differences in sparsity for activations, weights and gradients.
Theoretical Foundations of the A2RD Project: Part I
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

This article identifies and discusses the theoretical foundations that were considered in the design of the A2RD model. In addition to the points considered, references are made to the studies available and considered in the approach.
An Empirical Study of Architecting for Continuous Delivery and Deployment
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2018
Year: 2018

Recently, many software organizations have been adopting Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment (CD) practices to develop and deliver quality software more frequently and reliably. Whilst an increasing amount of the literature covers different aspects of CD, little is known about the role of software architecture in CD and how an application should be (re-) architected to enable and support CD. We have conducted a mixed-methods empirical study that collected data through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 21 industrial practitioners from 19 organizations, and a survey of 91 professional software practitioners. Based on a systematic and rigorous analysis of the gathered qualitative and quantitative data, we present a conceptual framework to support the process of (re-) architecting for CD. We provide evidence-based insights about practicing CD within monolithic systems and characterize the principle of "small and independent deployment units" as an alternative to the monoliths. Our framework supplements the architecting process in a CD context through introducing the quality attributes (e.g., resilience) that require more attention and demonstrating the strategies (e.g., prioritizing operations concerns) to design operations-friendly architectures. We discuss the key insights (e.g., monoliths and CD are not intrinsically oxymoronic) gained from our study and draw implications for research and practice.
Piecewise Linear Approximation in Data Streaming: Algorithmic Implementations and Experimental Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

Piecewise Linear Approximation (PLA) is a well-established tool to reduce the size of the representation of time series by approximating the series by a sequence of line segments while keeping the error introduced by the approximation within some predetermined threshold. With the recent rise of edge computing, PLA algorithms find a complete new set of applications with the emphasis on reducing the volume of streamed data. In this study, we identify two scenarios set in a data-stream processing context: data reduction in sensor transmissions and datacenter storage. In connection to those scenarios, we identify several streaming metrics and propose streaming protocols as algorithmic implementations of several state of the art PLA techniques. In an experimental evaluation, we measure the quality of the reviewed methods and protocols and evaluate their performance against those streaming statistics. All known methods have deficiencies when it comes to handling streaming-like data, e.g. inflation of the input stream, high latency or poor average error. Our experimental results highlight the challenges raised when transferring those classical methods into the stream processing world and present alternative techniques to overcome them and balance the related trade-offs.
Improved Breast Mass Segmentation in Mammograms with Conditional Residual U-net
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

We explore the use of deep learning for breast mass segmentation in mammograms. By integrating the merits of residual learning and probabilistic graphical modelling with standard U-Net, we propose a new deep network, Conditional Residual U-Net (CRU-Net), to improve the U-Net segmentation performance. Benefiting from the advantage of probabilistic graphical modelling in the pixel-level labelling, and the structure insights of a deep residual network in the feature extraction, the CRU-Net provides excellent mass segmentation performance. Evaluations based on INbreast and DDSM-BCRP datasets demonstrate that the CRU-Net achieves the best mass segmentation performance compared to the state-of-art methodologies. Moreover, neither tedious pre-processing nor post-processing techniques are not required in our algorithm.
Fair redistricting is hard
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2018
Year: 2018

Gerrymandering is a long-standing issue within the U.S. political system, and it has received scrutiny recently by the U.S. Supreme Court. In this note, we prove that deciding whether there exists a fair redistricting among legal maps is NP-hard. To make this precise, we use simplified notions of "legal" and "fair" that account for desirable traits such as geographic compactness of districts and sufficient representation of voters. The proof of our result is inspired by the work of Mahanjan, Minbhorkar and Varadarajan that proves that planar k-means is NP-hard.
Behavior Trees as a Representation for Medical Procedures
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2018
Year: 2018

Objective: Effective collaboration between machines and clinicians requires flexible data structures to represent medical processes and clinical practice guidelines. Such a data structure could enable effective turn-taking between human and automated components of a complex treatment, accurate on-line monitoring of clinical treatments (for example to detect medical errors), or automated treatment systems (such as future medical robots) whose overall treatment plan is understandable and auditable by human experts. Materials and Methods: Behavior trees (BTs) emerged from video game development as a graphical language for modeling intelligent agent behavior. BTs have several properties which are attractive for modeling medical procedures including human-readability, authoring tools, and composability. Results: This paper will illustrate construction of BTs for exemplary medical procedures and clinical protocols. Discussion and Conclusion: Behavior Trees thus form a useful, and human authorable/readable bridge between clinical practice guidelines and AI systems.