OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Dynamic Market Mechanisms for Wind Energy
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2017
Year: 2017

We investigate the problem of market mechanism design for wind energy. We consider a dynamic two-step model with one strategic seller with wind generation and one buyer, who trade energy through a mechanism determined by a designer. The seller has private information about his technology and wind condition, which he learns dynamically over time. We consider (static) forward and real-time mechanisms that take place at time T=1 and T=2, respectively. We also propose a dynamic mechanism that provides a coupling between the outcomes of the forward and real-time markets. We show that the dynamic mechanism outperforms the forward and real-time mechanisms for a general objective of the designer. Therefore, we demonstrate the advantage of adopting dynamic market mechanisms over static market mechanisms for wind energy. The dynamic mechanism reveals information about wind generation in advance, and also provides flexibility for incorporation of new information arriving over time. We discuss how our results generalize to environments with many strategic sellers. We also study two variants of the dynamic mechanism that guarantee no penalty risk for the seller, and/or monitor the wind condition. We illustrate our results with a numerical example.
Cross Euclidean-to-Riemannian Metric Learning with Application to Face Recognition from Video
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Riemannian manifolds have been widely employed for video representations in visual classification tasks including video-based face recognition. The success mainly derives from learning a discriminant Riemannian metric which encodes the non-linear geometry of the underlying Riemannian manifolds. In this paper, we propose a novel metric learning framework to learn a distance metric across a Euclidean space and a Riemannian manifold to fuse the average appearance and pattern variation of faces within one video. The proposed metric learning framework can handle three typical tasks of video-based face recognition: Video-to-Still, Still-to-Video and Video-to-Video settings. To accomplish this new framework, by exploiting typical Riemannian geometries for kernel embedding, we map the source Euclidean space and Riemannian manifold into a common Euclidean subspace, each through a corresponding high-dimensional Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS). With this mapping, the problem of learning a cross-view metric between the two source heterogeneous spaces can be expressed as learning a single-view Euclidean distance metric in the target common Euclidean space. By learning information on heterogeneous data with the shared label, the discriminant metric in the common space improves face recognition from videos. Extensive experiments on four challenging video face databases demonstrate that the proposed framework has a clear advantage over the state-of-the-art methods in the three classical video-based face recognition tasks.
Privacy Assessment of Software Architectures based on Static Taint Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2017
Year: 2017

Privacy analysis is critical but also a time-consuming and tedious task. We present a formalization which eases designing and auditing high-level privacy properties of software architectures. It is incorporated into a larger policy analysis and verification framework and enables the assessment of commonly accepted data protection goals of privacy. The formalization is based on static taint analysis and makes flow and processing of privacy-critical data explicit, globally as well as on the level of individual data subjects. Formally, we show equivalence to traditional label-based information flow security and prove overall soundness of our tool with Isabelle/HOL. We demonstrate applicability in two real-world case studies, thereby uncovering previously unknown violations of privacy constraints in the analyzed software architectures.
Parameterized Principal Component Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

When modeling multivariate data, one might have an extra parameter of contextual information that could be used to treat some observations as more similar to others. For example, images of faces can vary by age, and one would expect the face of a 40 year old to be more similar to the face of a 30 year old than to a baby face. We introduce a novel manifold approximation method, parameterized principal component analysis (PPCA) that models data with linear subspaces that change continuously according to the extra parameter of contextual information (e.g. age), instead of ad-hoc atlases. Special care has been taken in the loss function and the optimization method to encourage smoothly changing subspaces across the parameter values. The approach ensures that each observation's projection will share information with observations that have similar parameter values, but not with observations that have large parameter differences. We tested PPCA on artificial data based on known, smooth functions of an added parameter, as well as on three real datasets with different types of parameters. We compared PPCA to PCA, sparse PCA and to independent principal component analysis (IPCA), which groups observations by their parameter values and projects each group using PCA with no sharing of information for different groups. PPCA recovers the known functions with less error and projects the datasets' test set observations with consistently less reconstruction error than IPCA does. In some cases where the manifold is truly nonlinear, PCA outperforms all the other manifold approximation methods compared.
Quicksort Is Optimal For Many Equal Keys
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2017
Year: 2017

I prove that the average number of comparisons for median-of-$k$ Quicksort (with fat-pivot a.k.a. three-way partitioning) is asymptotically only a constant $α_k$ times worse than the lower bound for sorting random multisets with $Ω(n^\varepsilon)$ duplicates of each value (for any $\varepsilon>0$). The constant is $α_k = \ln(2) / \bigl(H_{k+1}-H_{(k+1)/2} \bigr)$, which converges to 1 as $k\to\infty$, so Quicksort is asymptotically optimal for inputs with many duplicates. This resolves a conjecture by Sedgewick and Bentley (1999, 2002) and constitutes the first progress on the analysis of Quicksort with equal elements since Sedgewick's 1977 article.
Tolerant Compressed Sensing With Partially Coherent Sensing Matrices
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

Most of compressed sensing (CS) theory to date is focused on incoherent sensing, that is, columns from the sensing matrix are highly uncorrelated. However, sensing systems with naturally occurring correlations arise in many applications, such as signal detection, motion detection and radar. Moreover, in these applications it is often not necessary to know the support of the signal exactly, but instead small errors in the support and signal are tolerable. Despite the abundance of work utilizing incoherent sensing matrices, for this type of tolerant recovery we suggest that coherence is actually beneficial. We promote the use of coherent sampling when tolerant support recovery is acceptable, and demonstrate its advantages empirically. In addition, we provide a first step towards theoretical analysis by considering a specific reconstruction method for selected signal classes.
Modeling Human Reading with Neural Attention
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2017
Year: 2017

When humans read text, they fixate some words and skip others. However, there have been few attempts to explain skipping behavior with computational models, as most existing work has focused on predicting reading times (e.g.,~using surprisal). In this paper, we propose a novel approach that models both skipping and reading, using an unsupervised architecture that combines a neural attention with autoencoding, trained on raw text using reinforcement learning. Our model explains human reading behavior as a tradeoff between precision of language understanding (encoding the input accurately) and economy of attention (fixating as few words as possible). We evaluate the model on the Dundee eye-tracking corpus, showing that it accurately predicts skipping behavior and reading times, is competitive with surprisal, and captures known qualitative features of human reading.
Inverting Variational Autoencoders for Improved Generative Accuracy
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

Recent advances in semi-supervised learning with deep generative models have shown promise in generalizing from small labeled datasets ($\mathbf{x},\mathbf{y}$) to large unlabeled ones ($\mathbf{x}$). In the case where the codomain has known structure, a large unfeatured dataset ($\mathbf{y}$) is potentially available. We develop a parameter-efficient, deep semi-supervised generative model for the purpose of exploiting this untapped data source. Empirical results show improved performance in disentangling latent variable semantics as well as improved discriminative prediction on Martian spectroscopic and handwritten digit domains.
Context Gates for Neural Machine Translation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2017
Year: 2017

In neural machine translation (NMT), generation of a target word depends on both source and target contexts. We find that source contexts have a direct impact on the adequacy of a translation while target contexts affect the fluency. Intuitively, generation of a content word should rely more on the source context and generation of a functional word should rely more on the target context. Due to the lack of effective control over the influence from source and target contexts, conventional NMT tends to yield fluent but inadequate translations. To address this problem, we propose context gates which dynamically control the ratios at which source and target contexts contribute to the generation of target words. In this way, we can enhance both the adequacy and fluency of NMT with more careful control of the information flow from contexts. Experiments show that our approach significantly improves upon a standard attention-based NMT system by +2.3 BLEU points.
An Incremental Parser for Abstract Meaning Representation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2017
Year: 2017

Meaning Representation (AMR) is a semantic representation for natural language that embeds annotations related to traditional tasks such as named entity recognition, semantic role labeling, word sense disambiguation and co-reference resolution. We describe a transition-based parser for AMR that parses sentences left-to-right, in linear time. We further propose a test-suite that assesses specific subtasks that are helpful in comparing AMR parsers, and show that our parser is competitive with the state of the art on the LDC2015E86 dataset and that it outperforms state-of-the-art parsers for recovering named entities and handling polarity.
Multi-Pair Two-Way Relay Network with Harvest-Then-Transmit Users: Resolving Pairwise Uplink-Downlink Coupling
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

While two-way relaying is a promising way to enhance the spectral efficiency of wireless networks, the imbalance of relay-user distances may lead to excessive wireless power at the nearby-users. To exploit the excessive power, the recently proposed harvest-then-transmit technique can be applied. However, it is well-known that harvest-then-transmit introduces uplink-downlink coupling for a user. Together with the co-dependent relationship between paired users and interference among multiple user pairs, wirelessly powered two-way relay network suffers from the unique pairwise uplink-downlink coupling, and the joint uplink-downlink network design is nontrivial. To this end, for the one pair users case, we show that a global optimal solution can be obtained. For the general case of multi-pair users, based on the rank-constrained difference of convex program, a convergence guaranteed iterative algorithm with an efficient initialization is proposed. Furthermore, a lower bound to the performance of the optimal solution is derived by introducing virtual receivers at relay. Numerical results on total transmit power show that the proposed algorithm achieves a transmit power value close to the lower bound.
On Clustering and Embedding Mixture Manifolds using a Low Rank Neighborhood Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Samples from intimate (non-linear) mixtures are generally modeled as being drawn from a smooth manifold. Scenarios where the data contains multiple intimate mixtures with some constituent materials in common can be thought of as manifolds which share a boundary. Two important steps in the processing of such data are (i) to identify (cluster) the different mixture-manifolds present in the data and (ii) to eliminate the non-linearities present the data by mapping each mixture-manifold into some low-dimensional euclidean space (embedding). Manifold clustering and embedding techniques appear to be an ideal tool for this task, but the present state-of-the-art algorithms perform poorly for hyperspectral data, particularly in the embedding task. We propose a novel reconstruction-based algorithm for improved clustering and embedding of mixture-manifolds. The algorithms attempts to reconstruct each target-point as an affine combination of its nearest neighbors with an additional rank penalty on the neighborhood to ensure that only neighbors on the same manifold as the target-point are used in the reconstruction. The reconstruction matrix generated by using this technique is block-diagonal and can be used for clustering (using spectral clustering) and embedding. The improved performance of the algorithms vis-a-vis its competitors is exhibited on a variety of simulated and real mixture datasets.
Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2017
Year: 2017

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are in a period of astounding growth. However, there are concerns that these technologies may be used, either with or without intention, to perpetuate the prejudice and unfairness that unfortunately characterizes many human institutions. Here we show for the first time that human-like semantic biases result from the application of standard machine learning to ordinary language---the same sort of language humans are exposed to every day. We replicate a spectrum of standard human biases as exposed by the Implicit Association Test and other well-known psychological studies. We replicate these using a widely used, purely statistical machine-learning model---namely, the GloVe word embedding---trained on a corpus of text from the Web. Our results indicate that language itself contains recoverable and accurate imprints of our historic biases, whether these are morally neutral as towards insects or flowers, problematic as towards race or gender, or even simply veridical, reflecting the {\em status quo} for the distribution of gender with respect to careers or first names. These regularities are captured by machine learning along with the rest of semantics. In addition to our empirical findings concerning language, we also contribute new methods for evaluating bias in text, the Word Embedding Association Test (WEAT) and the Word Embedding Factual Association Test (WEFAT). Our results have implications not only for AI and machine learning, but also for the fields of psychology, sociology, and human ethics, since they raise the possibility that mere exposure to everyday language can account for the biases we replicate here.
Collaborative Filtering with Recurrent Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2017
Year: 2017

We show that collaborative filtering can be viewed as a sequence prediction problem, and that given this interpretation, recurrent neural networks offer very competitive approach. In particular we study how the long short-term memory (LSTM) can be applied to collaborative filtering, and how it compares to standard nearest neighbors and matrix factorization methods on movie recommendation. We show that the LSTM is competitive in all aspects, and largely outperforms other methods in terms of item coverage and short term predictions.
TrueReview: A Platform for Post-Publication Peer Review
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2017
Year: 2017

In post-publication peer review, scientific contributions are first published in open-access forums, such as arXiv or other digital libraries, and are subsequently reviewed and possibly ranked and/or evaluated. Compared to the classical process of scientific publishing, in which review precedes publication, post-publication peer review leads to faster dissemination of ideas, and publicly-available reviews. The chief concern in post-publication reviewing consists in eliciting high-quality, insightful reviews from participants. We describe the mathematical foundations and structure of TrueReview, an open-source tool we propose to build in support of post-publication review. In TrueReview, the motivation to review is provided via an incentive system that promotes reviews and evaluations that are both truthful (they turn out to be correct in the long run) and informative (they provide significant new information). TrueReview organizes papers in venues, allowing different scientific communities to set their own submission and review policies. These venues can be manually set-up, or they can correspond to categories in well-known repositories such as arXiv. The review incentives can be used to form a reviewer ranking that can be prominently displayed alongside papers in the various disciplines, thus offering a concrete benefit to reviewers. The paper evaluations, in turn, reward the authors of the most significant papers, both via an explicit paper ranking, and via increased visibility in search.
Empirically Grounded Agent-Based Models of Innovation Diffusion: A Critical Review
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2017
Year: 2017

Innovation diffusion has been studied extensively in a variety of disciplines, including sociology, economics, marketing, ecology, and computer science. Traditional literature on innovation diffusion has been dominated by models of aggregate behavior and trends. However, the agent-based modeling (ABM) paradigm is gaining popularity as it captures agent heterogeneity and enables fine-grained modeling of interactions mediated by social and geographic networks. While most ABM work on innovation diffusion is theoretical, empirically grounded models are increasingly important, particularly in guiding policy decisions. We present a critical review of empirically grounded agent-based models of innovation diffusion, developing a categorization of this research based on types of agent models as well as applications. By connecting the modeling methodologies in the fields of information and innovation diffusion, we suggest that the maximum likelihood estimation framework widely used in the former is a promising paradigm for calibration of agent-based models for innovation diffusion. Although many advances have been made to standardize ABM methodology, we identify four major issues in model calibration and validation, and suggest potential solutions.
A statistical model of tristimulus measurements within and between OLED displays
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

We present an empirical model for noises in color measurements from OLED displays. According to measured data the noise is not isotropic in the XYZ space, instead most of the noise is along an axis that is parallel to a vector from origin to measured XYZ vector. The presented empirical model is simple and depends only on the measured XYZ values. Our tests show that the variations between multiple panels of the same type have similar distribution as the temporal noise in measurements from a single panel, but a larger magnitude.
Lopsided Approximation of Amoebas
Venue: arXiv cs.SC 2017
Year: 2017

The amoeba of a Laurent polynomial is the image of the corresponding hypersurface under the coordinatewise log absolute value map. In this article, we demonstrate that a theoretical amoeba approximation method due to Purbhoo can be used efficiently in practice. To do this, we resolve the main bottleneck in Purbhoo's method by exploiting relations between cyclic resultants. We use the same approach to give an approximation of the Log preimage of the amoeba of a Laurent polynomial using semi-algebraic sets. We also provide a SINGULAR/SAGE implementation of these algorithms, which shows a significant speedup when our specialized cyclic resultant computation is used, versus a general purpose resultant algorithm.
Dynamic Allocation of Crowd Contributions for Sentiment Analysis during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2017
Year: 2017

Opinions about the 2016 U.S. Presidential Candidates have been expressed in millions of tweets that are challenging to analyze automatically. Crowdsourcing the analysis of political tweets effectively is also difficult, due to large inter-rater disagreements when sarcasm is involved. Each tweet is typically analyzed by a fixed number of workers and majority voting. We here propose a crowdsourcing framework that instead uses a dynamic allocation of the number of workers. We explore two dynamic-allocation methods: (1) The number of workers queried to label a tweet is computed offline based on the predicted difficulty of discerning the sentiment of a particular tweet. (2) The number of crowd workers is determined online, during an iterative crowd sourcing process, based on inter-rater agreements between labels.We applied our approach to 1,000 twitter messages about the four U.S. presidential candidates Clinton, Cruz, Sanders, and Trump, collected during February 2016. We implemented the two proposed methods using decision trees that allocate more crowd efforts to tweets predicted to be sarcastic. We show that our framework outperforms the traditional static allocation scheme. It collects opinion labels from the crowd at a much lower cost while maintaining labeling accuracy.
A Novel Progressive Learning Technique for Multi-class Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

In this paper, a progressive learning technique for multi-class classification is proposed. This newly developed learning technique is independent of the number of class constraints and it can learn new classes while still retaining the knowledge of previous classes. Whenever a new class (non-native to the knowledge learnt thus far) is encountered, the neural network structure gets remodeled automatically by facilitating new neurons and interconnections, and the parameters are calculated in such a way that it retains the knowledge learnt thus far. This technique is suitable for real-world applications where the number of classes is often unknown and online learning from real-time data is required. The consistency and the complexity of the progressive learning technique are analyzed. Several standard datasets are used to evaluate the performance of the developed technique. A comparative study shows that the developed technique is superior.