OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Understanding Compressive Adversarial Privacy
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Designing a data sharing mechanism without sacrificing too much privacy can be considered as a game between data holders and malicious attackers. This paper describes a compressive adversarial privacy framework that captures the trade-off between the data privacy and utility. We characterize the optimal data releasing mechanism through convex optimization when assuming that both the data holder and attacker can only modify the data using linear transformations. We then build a more realistic data releasing mechanism that can rely on a nonlinear compression model while the attacker uses a neural network. We demonstrate in a series of empirical applications that this framework, consisting of compressive adversarial privacy, can preserve sensitive information.
Weakly-Supervised Learning of Metric Aggregations for Deformable Image Registration
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Deformable registration has been one of the pillars of biomedical image computing. Conventional approaches refer to the definition of a similarity criterion that, once endowed with a deformation model and a smoothness constraint, determines the optimal transformation to align two given images. The definition of this metric function is among the most critical aspects of the registration process. We argue that incorporating semantic information (in the form of anatomical segmentation maps) into the registration process will further improve the accuracy of the results. In this paper, we propose a novel weakly supervised approach to learn domain specific aggregations of conventional metrics using anatomical segmentations. This combination is learned using latent structured support vector machines (LSSVM). The learned matching criterion is integrated within a metric free optimization framework based on graphical models, resulting in a multi-metric algorithm endowed with a spatially varying similarity metric function conditioned on the anatomical structures. We provide extensive evaluation on three different datasets of CT and MRI images, showing that learned multi-metric registration outperforms single-metric approaches based on conventional similarity measures.
SOS - Securing Open Skies
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast (ADS-B) is the next generation communication technology selected for allowing commercial and military aircraft to deliver flight information to both ground base stations and other airplanes. Today, it is already on-board of 80% of commercial aircraft, and it will become mandatory by the 2020 in the US and the EU. ADS-B has been designed without any security consideration --- messages are delivered wirelessly in clear text and they are not authenticated. In this paper we propose Securing Open Skies (SOS), a lightweight and standard-compliant framework for securing ADS-B technology wireless communications. SOS leverages the well-known \muTESLA protocol, and includes some modifications necessary to deal with the severe bandwidth constraints of the ADS-B communication technology. In addition, SOS is resilient against message injection attacks, by recurring to majority voting techniques applied on central community servers. Overall, SOS emerges as a lightweight security solution, with a limited bandwidth overhead, that does not require any modification to the hardware already deployed. Further, SOS is standard compliant and able to reject active adversaries aiming at disrupting the correct functioning of the communication system. Finally, comparisons against state-of-the-art solutions do show the superior quality and viability of our solution.
Reliable and Low-Latency Fronthaul for Tactile Internet Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

With the emergence of Cloud-RAN as one of the dominant architectural solutions for next-generation mobile networks, the reliability and latency on the fronthaul (FH) segment become critical performance metrics for applications such as the Tactile Internet. Ensuring FH performance is further complicated by the switch from point-to-point dedicated FH links to packet-based multi-hop FH networks. This change is largely justified by the fact that packet-based fronthauling allows the deployment of FH networks on the existing Ethernet infrastructure. This paper proposes to improve reliability and latency of packet-based fronthauling by means of multi-path diversity and erasure coding of the MAC frames transported by the FH network. Under a probabilistic model that assumes a single service, the average latency required to obtain reliable FH transport and the reliability-latency trade-off are first investigated. The analytical results are then validated and complemented by a numerical study that accounts for the coexistence of enhanced Mobile BroadBand (eMBB) and Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency (URLLC) services in 5G networks by comparing orthogonal and non-orthogonal sharing of FH resources.
An Empirical Study of the I2P Anonymity Network and its Censorship Resistance
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

Tor and I2P are well-known anonymity networks used by many individuals to protect their online privacy and anonymity. Tor's centralized directory services facilitate the understanding of the Tor network, as well as the measurement and visualization of its structure through the Tor Metrics project. In contrast, I2P does not rely on centralized directory servers, and thus obtaining a complete view of the network is challenging. In this work, we conduct an empirical study of the I2P network, in which we measure properties including population, churn rate, router type, and the geographic distribution of I2P peers. We find that there are currently around 32K active I2P peers in the network on a daily basis. Of these peers, 14K are located behind NAT or firewalls. Using the collected network data, we examine the blocking resistance of I2P against a censor that wants to prevent access to I2P using address-based blocking techniques. Despite the decentralized characteristics of I2P, we discover that a censor can block more than 95% of peer IP addresses known by a stable I2P client by operating only 10 routers in the network. This amounts to severe network impairment: a blocking rate of more than 70% is enough to cause significant latency in web browsing activities, while blocking more than 90% of peer IP addresses can make the network unusable. Finally, we discuss the security consequences of the network being blocked, and directions for potential approaches to make I2P more resistant to blocking.
Better Safe than Sorry: Evidence Accumulation Allows for Safe Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

In the real world, agents often have to operate in situations with incomplete information, limited sensing capabilities, and inherently stochastic environments, making individual observations incomplete and unreliable. Moreover, in many situations it is preferable to delay a decision rather than run the risk of making a bad decision. In such situations it is necessary to aggregate information before taking an action; however, most state of the art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are biased towards taking actions \textit{at every time step}, even if the agent is not particularly confident in its chosen action. This lack of caution can lead the agent to make critical mistakes, regardless of prior experience and acclimation to the environment. Motivated by theories of dynamic resolution of uncertainty during decision making in biological brains, we propose a simple accumulator module which accumulates evidence in favor of each possible decision, encodes uncertainty as a dynamic competition between actions, and acts on the environment only when it is sufficiently confident in the chosen action. The agent makes no decision by default, and the burden of proof to make a decision falls on the policy to accrue evidence strongly in favor of a single decision. Our results show that this accumulator module achieves near-optimal performance on a simple guessing game, far outperforming deep recurrent networks using traditional, forced action selection policies.
Power and Energy-efficiency Roofline Model for GPUs
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

Energy consumption has been a great deal of concern in recent years and developers need to take energy-efficiency into account when they design algorithms. Their design needs to be energy-efficient and low-power while it tries to achieve attainable performance provided by underlying hardware. However, different optimization techniques have different effects on power and energy-efficiency and a visual model would assist in the selection process. In this paper, we extended the roofline model and provided a visual representation of optimization strategies for power consumption. Our model is composed of various ceilings regarding each strategy we included in our models. One roofline model for computational performance and one for memory performance is introduced. We assembled our models based on some optimization strategies for two widespread GPUs from NVIDIA: Geforce GTX 970 and Tesla K80.
On Finding the Largest Minimum Distance of Locally Recoverable Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

The (n, k, r)-Locally recoverable codes (LRC) studied in this work are (n, k) linear codes for which the value of each coordinate can be recovered by a linear combination of at most r other coordinates. In this paper, we are interested to find the largest possible minimum distance of (n,k,r)-LRCs, denoted D(n,k,r). We refer to the problem of finding the value of D(n,k,r) as the largest minimum distance (LMD) problem. LMD can be approximated within an additive term of one; it is known in the literature that D(n,k,r) is either equal to d* or d*-1, where d*=n-k-ceil(k/r) +2. Also, in the literature, LMD has been solved for some ranges of code parameters n, k and r. However, LMD is still unsolved for the general code parameters. In this work, we convert LMD to a simply stated problem in graph theory, and prove that the two problems are equivalent. In fact, we show that solving the derived graph theory problem not only solves LMD, but also directly translates to construction of optimal LRCs. Using these new results, we show how to easily derive the existing results on LMD and extend them. Furthermore, we show a close connection between LMD and a challenging open problem in extremal graph theory; an indication that LMD is perhaps difficult to solve for general code parameters.
Evaluating Fairness Metrics in the Presence of Dataset Bias
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Data-driven algorithms play a large role in decision making across a variety of industries. Increasingly, these algorithms are being used to make decisions that have significant ramifications for people's social and economic well-being, e.g. in sentencing, loan approval, and policing. Amid the proliferation of such systems there is a growing concern about their potential discriminatory impact. In particular, machine learning systems which are trained on biased data have the potential to learn and perpetuate those biases. A central challenge for practitioners is thus to determine whether their models display discriminatory bias. Here we present a case study in which we frame the issue of bias detection as a causal inference problem with observational data. We enumerate two main causes of bias, sampling bias and label bias, and we investigate the abilities of six different fairness metrics to detect each bias type. Based on these investigations, we propose a set of best practice guidelines to select the fairness metric that is most likely to detect bias if it is present. Additionally, we aim to identify the conditions in which certain fairness metrics may fail to detect bias and instead give practitioners a false belief that their biased model is making fair decisions.
Low Precision Policy Distillation with Application to Low-Power, Real-time Sensation-Cognition-Action Loop with Neuromorphic Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Low precision networks in the reinforcement learning (RL) setting are relatively unexplored because of the limitations of binary activations for function approximation. Here, in the discrete action ATARI domain, we demonstrate, for the first time, that low precision policy distillation from a high precision network provides a principled, practical way to train an RL agent. As an application, on 10 different ATARI games, we demonstrate real-time end-to-end game playing on low-power neuromorphic hardware by converting a sequence of game frames into discrete actions.
Knowledge-Aided Normalized Iterative Hard Thresholding Algorithms and Applications to Sparse Reconstruction
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

This paper deals with the problem of sparse recovery often found in compressive sensing applications exploiting a priori knowledge. In particular, we present a knowledge-aided normalized iterative hard thresholding (KA-NIHT) algorithm that exploits information about the probabilities of nonzero entries. We also develop a strategy to update the probabilities using a recursive KA-NIHT (RKA-NIHT) algorithm, which results in improved recovery. Simulation results illustrate and compare the performance of the proposed and existing algorithms.
MedAL: Deep Active Learning Sampling Method for Medical Image Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Deep learning models have been successfully used in medical image analysis problems but they require a large amount of labeled images to obtain good performance.Deep learning models have been successfully used in medical image analysis problems but they require a large amount of labeled images to obtain good performance. However, such large labeled datasets are costly to acquire. Active learning techniques can be used to minimize the number of required training labels while maximizing the model's performance.In this work, we propose a novel sampling method that queries the unlabeled examples that maximize the average distance to all training set examples in a learned feature space. We then extend our sampling method to define a better initial training set, without the need for a trained model, by using ORB feature descriptors. We validate MedAL on 3 medical image datasets and show that our method is robust to different dataset properties. MedAL is also efficient, achieving 80% accuracy on the task of Diabetic Retinopathy detection using only 425 labeled images, corresponding to a 32% reduction in the number of required labeled examples compared to the standard uncertainty sampling technique, and a 40% reduction compared to random sampling.
Triply Supervised Decoder Networks for Joint Detection and Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Joint object detection and semantic segmentation can be applied to many fields, such as self-driving cars and unmanned surface vessels. An initial and important progress towards this goal has been achieved by simply sharing the deep convolutional features for the two tasks. However, this simple scheme is unable to make full use of the fact that detection and segmentation are mutually beneficial. To overcome this drawback, we propose a framework called TripleNet where triple supervisions including detection-oriented supervision, class-aware segmentation supervision, and class-agnostic segmentation supervision are imposed on each layer of the decoder network. Class-agnostic segmentation supervision provides an objectness prior knowledge for both semantic segmentation and object detection. Besides the three types of supervisions, two light-weight modules (i.e., inner-connected module and attention skip-layer fusion) are also incorporated into each layer of the decoder. In the proposed framework, detection and segmentation can sufficiently boost each other. Moreover, class-agnostic and class-aware segmentation on each decoder layer are not performed at the test stage. Therefore, no extra computational costs are introduced at the test stage. Experimental results on the VOC2007 and VOC2012 datasets demonstrate that the proposed TripleNet is able to improve both the detection and segmentation accuracies without adding extra computational costs.
Why scatter plots suggest causality, and what we can do about it
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2018
Year: 2018

Scatter plots carry an implicit if subtle message about causality. Whether we look at functions of one variable in pure mathematics, plots of experimental measurements as a function of the experimental conditions, or scatter plots of predictor and response variables, the value plotted on the vertical axis is by convention assumed to be determined or influenced by the value on the horizontal axis. This is a problem for the public understanding of scientific results and perhaps also for professional scientists' interpretations of scatter plots. To avoid suggesting a causal relationship between the x and y values in a scatter plot, we propose a new type of data visualization, the diamond plot. Diamond plots are essentially 45 degree rotations of ordinary scatter plots; by visually jarring the viewer they clearly indicate that she should not draw the usual distinction between independent/predictor variable and dependent/response variable. Instead, she should see the relationship as purely correlative.
Path Planning and Controlled Crash Landing of a Quadcopter in case of a Rotor Failure
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2018
Year: 2018

This paper presents a framework for controlled emergency landing of a quadcopter, experiencing a rotor failure, away from sensitive areas. A complete mathematical model capturing the dynamics of the system is presented that takes the asymmetrical aerodynamic load on the propellers into account. An equilibrium state of the system is calculated around which a linear time-invariant control strategy is developed to stabilize the system. By utilizing the proposed model, a specific configuration for a quadcopter is introduced that leads to the minimum power consumption during a yaw-rate-resolved hovering after a rotor failure. Furthermore, given a 3D representation of the environment, an optimal flight trajectory towards a safe crash landing spot, while avoiding collision with obstacles, is developed using an RRT* approach. The cost function for determining the best landing spot consists of: (i) finding the safest landing spot with the largest clearance from the obstacles; and (ii) finding the most energy-efficient trajectory towards the landing spot. The performance of the proposed framework is tested via simulations.
Adaptive Resonant Beam Charging for Intelligent Wireless Power Transfer
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

As a long-range high-power wireless power transfer (WPT) technology, resonant beam charging (RBC) can transmit Watt-level power over long distance for the devices in the internet of things (IoT). Due to its open-loop architecture, RBC faces the challenge of providing dynamic current and voltage to optimize battery charging performance. In RBC, battery overcharge may cause energy waste, thermal effects, and even safety issues. On the other hand, battery undercharge may lead to charging time extension and significant battery capacity reduction. In this paper, we present an adaptive resonant beam charging (ARBC) system for battery charging optimization. Based on RBC, ARBC uses a feedback system to control the supplied power dynamically according to the battery preferred charging values. Moreover, in order to transform the received current and voltage to match the battery preferred charging values, ARBC adopts a direct current to direct current (DC-DC) conversion circuit. Relying on the analytical models for RBC power transmission, we obtain the end-to-end power transfer relationship in the approximate linear closed-form of ARBC. Thus, the battery preferred charging power at the receiver can be mapped to the supplied power at the transmitter for feedback control. Numerical evaluation demonstrates that ARBC can save 61% battery charging energy and 53%-60% supplied energy compared with RBC. Furthermore, ARBC has high energy-saving gain over RBC when the WPT is unefficient. ARBC in WPT is similar to link adaption in wireless communications. Both of them play the important roles in their respective areas.
A 5G Architecture for The Factory of the Future
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

Factory automation and production are currently undergoing massive changes, and 5G is considered being a key enabler. In this paper, we state uses cases for using 5G in the factory of the future, which are motivated by actual needs of the industry partners of the "5Gang" consortium. Based on these use cases and the ones by 3GPP, a 5G system architecture for the factory of the future is proposed. It is set in relation to existing architectural frameworks.
Co-Creative Level Design via Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

Procedural Level Generation via Machine Learning (PLGML), the study of generating game levels with machine learning, has received a large amount of recent academic attention. For certain measures these approaches have shown success at replicating the quality of existing game levels. However, it is unclear the extent to which they might benefit human designers. In this paper we present a framework for co-creative level design with a PLGML agent. In support of this framework we present results from a user study and results from a comparative study of PLGML approaches.
A Framework for Data-Driven Physical Security and Insider Threat Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

This paper presents PS0, an ontological framework and a methodology for improving physical security and insider threat detection. PS0 can facilitate forensic data analysis and proactively mitigate insider threats by leveraging rule-based anomaly detection. In all too many cases, rule-based anomaly detection can detect employee deviations from organizational security policies. In addition, PS0 can be considered a security provenance solution because of its ability to fully reconstruct attack patterns. Provenance graphs can be further analyzed to identify deceptive actions and overcome analytical mistakes that can result in bad decision-making, such as false attribution. Moreover, the information can be used to enrich the available intelligence (about intrusion attempts) that can form use cases to detect and remediate limitations in the system, such as loosely-coupled provenance graphs that in many cases indicate weaknesses in the physical security architecture. Ultimately, validation of the framework through use cases demonstrates and proves that PS0 can improve an organization's security posture in terms of physical security and insider threat detection.
Automatic brain tumor grading from MRI data using convolutional neural networks and quality assessment
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Glioblastoma Multiforme is a high grade, very aggressive, brain tumor, with patients having a poor prognosis. Lower grade gliomas are less aggressive, but they can evolve into higher grade tumors over time. Patient management and treatment can vary considerably with tumor grade, ranging from tumor resection followed by a combined radio- and chemotherapy to a "wait and see" approach. Hence, tumor grading is important for adequate treatment planning and monitoring. The gold standard for tumor grading relies on histopathological diagnosis of biopsy specimens. However, this procedure is invasive, time consuming, and prone to sampling error. Given these disadvantages, automatic tumor grading from widely used MRI protocols would be clinically important, as a way to expedite treatment planning and assessment of tumor evolution. In this paper, we propose to use Convolutional Neural Networks for predicting tumor grade directly from imaging data. In this way, we overcome the need for expert annotations of regions of interest. We evaluate two prediction approaches: from the whole brain, and from an automatically defined tumor region. Finally, we employ interpretability methodologies as a quality assurance stage to check if the method is using image regions indicative of tumor grade for classification.