OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Faster Data-access in Large-scale Systems: Network-scale Latency Analysis under General Service-time Distributions
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

In cloud storage systems with a large number of servers, files are typically not stored in single servers. Instead, they are split, replicated (to ensure reliability in case of server malfunction) and stored in different servers. We analyze the mean latency of such a split-and-replicate cloud storage system under general sub-exponential service time. We present a novel scheduling scheme that utilizes the load-balancing policy of the \textit{power of $d$ $(\geq 2)$} choices. An alternative to split-and-replicate is to use erasure-codes, and recently, it has been observed that they can reduce latency in data access (see \cite{longbo_delay} for details). We argue that under high redundancy (integer redundancy factor strictly greater than or equal to 2) regime, the mean latency of a coded system is upper bounded by that of a split-and-replicate system (with same replication factor) and the gap between these two is small. We validate this claim numerically under different service distributions such as exponential, shift plus exponential and the heavy-tailed Weibull distribution and compare the mean latency to that of an unsplit-replicated system. We observe that the coded system outperforms the unsplit-replication system by at least $20\%$. Furthermore, we consider the mean latency for an erasure coded system with low redundancy (fractional redundancy factor between 1 and 2), a scenario which is more pragmatic, given the storage constraints (\cite{rashmi_thesis}). However under this regime, we restrict ourselves to the special case of exponential service time distribution and use the randomized load balancing policy namely \textit{batch-sampling}. We obtain an upper bound on mean delay that depends on the order statistics of the queue lengths, which, we further smooth out via a discrete to continuous approximation.
Singing Style Transfer Using Cycle-Consistent Boundary Equilibrium Generative Adversarial Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2018
Year: 2018

Can we make a famous rap singer like Eminem sing whatever our favorite song? Singing style transfer attempts to make this possible, by replacing the vocal of a song from the source singer to the target singer. This paper presents a method that learns from unpaired data for singing style transfer using generative adversarial networks.
Parallel Convolutional Networks for Image Recognition via a Discriminator
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we introduce a simple but quite effective recognition framework dubbed D-PCN, aiming at enhancing feature extracting ability of CNN. The framework consists of two parallel CNNs, a discriminator and an extra classifier which takes integrated features from parallel networks and gives final prediction. The discriminator is core which drives parallel networks to focus on different regions and learn different representations. The corresponding training strategy is introduced to ensures utilization of discriminator. We validate D-PCN with several CNN models on benchmark datasets: CIFAR-100, and ImageNet, D-PCN enhances all models. In particular it yields state of the art performance on CIFAR-100 compared with related works. We also conduct visualization experiment on fine-grained Stanford Dogs dataset to verify our motivation. Additionally, we apply D-PCN for segmentation on PASCAL VOC 2012 and also find promotion.
CoMID: Context-based Multi-Invariant Detection for Monitoring Cyber-Physical Software
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2018
Year: 2018

Cyber-physical software continually interacts with its physical environment for adaptation in order to deliver smart services. However, the interactions can be subject to various errors when the software's assumption on its environment no longer holds, thus leading to unexpected misbehavior or even failure. To address this problem, one promising way is to conduct runtime monitoring of invariants, so as to prevent cyber-physical software from entering such errors (a.k.a. abnormal states). To effectively detect abnormal states, we in this article present an approach, named Context-based Multi-Invariant Detection (CoMID), which consists of two techniques: context-based trace grouping and multi-invariant detection. The former infers contexts to distinguish different effective scopes for CoMID's derived invariants, and the latter conducts ensemble evaluation of multiple invariants to detect abnormal states. We experimentally evaluate CoMID on real-world cyber-physical software. The results show that CoMID achieves a 5.7-28.2% higher true-positive rate and a 6.8-37.6% lower false-positive rate in detecting abnormal states, as compared with state-of-the-art approaches (i.e., Daikon and ZoomIn). When deployed in field tests, CoMID's runtime monitoring improves the success rate of cyber-physical software in its task executions by 15.3-31.7%.
z-TORCH: An Automated NFV Orchestration and Monitoring Solution
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

Autonomous management and orchestration (MANO) of virtualized resources and services, especially in large-scale Network Function Virtualization (NFV) environments, is a big challenge owing to the stringent delay and performance requirements expected of a variety of network services. The Quality-of-Decisions (QoD) of a Management and Orchestration (MANO) system depends on the quality and timeliness of the information received from the underlying monitoring system. The data generated by monitoring systems is a significant contributor to the network and processing load of MANO systems, impacting thus their performance. This raises a unique challenge: how to jointly optimize the QoD of MANO systems while at the same minimizing their monitoring loads at runtime? This is the main focus of this paper. In this context, we propose a novel automated NFV orchestration solution, namely z-TORCH (zero Touch Orchestration) that jointly optimizes the orchestration and monitoring processes by exploiting machine-learning-based techniques. The objective is to enhance the QoD of MANO systems achieving a near-optimal placement of Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) at minimum monitoring costs.
Testing Untestable Neural Machine Translation: An Industrial Case
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has been widely adopted recently due to its advantages compared with the traditional Statistical Machine Translation (SMT). However, an NMT system still often produces translation failures due to the complexity of natural language and sophistication in designing neural networks. While in-house black-box system testing based on reference translations (i.e., examples of valid translations) has been a common practice for NMT quality assurance, an increasingly critical industrial practice, named in-vivo testing, exposes unseen types or instances of translation failures when real users are using a deployed industrial NMT system. To fill the gap of lacking test oracle for in-vivo testing of an NMT system, in this paper, we propose a new approach for automatically identifying translation failures, without requiring reference translations for a translation task; our approach can directly serve as a test oracle for in-vivo testing. Our approach focuses on properties of natural language translation that can be checked systematically and uses information from both the test inputs (i.e., the texts to be translated) and the test outputs (i.e., the translations under inspection) of the NMT system. Our evaluation conducted on real-world datasets shows that our approach can effectively detect targeted property violations as translation failures. Our experiences on deploying our approach in both production and development environments of WeChat (a messenger app with over one billion monthly active users) demonstrate high effectiveness of our approach along with high industry impact.
Evolution of natural patterns from random fields
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2018
Year: 2018

In the article a transition from pattern evolution equation of reaction-diffusion type to a cellular automaton (CA) is described. The applicability of CA is demonstrated by generating patterns of complex irregular structure on a hexagonal and quadratic lattice. With this aim a random initial field is transformed by a sequence of CA actions into a new pattern. On the hexagonal lattice this pattern resembles a lizard skin. The properties of CA are specified by the most simple majority rule that adapts selected cell state to the most frequent state of cells in its surrounding. The method could be of interest for manufacturing of textiles as well as for modeling of patterns on skin of various animals.
Development of a sensory-neural network for medical diagnosing
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2018
Year: 2018

Performance of a sensory-neural network developed for diagnosing of diseases is described. Information about patient's condition is provided by answers to the questionnaire. Questions correspond to sensors generating signals when patients acknowledge symptoms. These signals excite neurons in which characteristics of the diseases are represented by synaptic weights associated with indicators of symptoms. The disease corresponding to the most excited neuron is proposed as the result of diagnosing. Its reliability is estimated by the likelihood defined by the ratio of excitation of the most excited neuron and the complete neural network.
CAIL2018: A Large-Scale Legal Dataset for Judgment Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we introduce the \textbf{C}hinese \textbf{AI} and \textbf{L}aw challenge dataset (CAIL2018), the first large-scale Chinese legal dataset for judgment prediction. \dataset contains more than $2.6$ million criminal cases published by the Supreme People's Court of China, which are several times larger than other datasets in existing works on judgment prediction. Moreover, the annotations of judgment results are more detailed and rich. It consists of applicable law articles, charges, and prison terms, which are expected to be inferred according to the fact descriptions of cases. For comparison, we implement several conventional text classification baselines for judgment prediction and experimental results show that it is still a challenge for current models to predict the judgment results of legal cases, especially on prison terms. To help the researchers make improvements on legal judgment prediction, both \dataset and baselines will be released after the CAIL competition\footnote{http://cail.cipsc.org.cn/}.
Design of Low-Complexity Convolutional Codes over GF(q)
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

This paper proposes a new family of recursive systematic convolutional codes, defined in the non-binary domain over different Galois fields GF(q) and intended to be used as component codes for the design of non-binary turbo codes. A general framework for the design of the best codes over different GF(q) is described. The designed codes offer better performance than the non-binary convolutional codes found in the literature. They also outperform their binary counterparts when combined with their corresponding QAM modulation or with lower order modulations.
M-ADDA: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Deep Metric Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Unsupervised domain adaptation techniques have been successful for a wide range of problems where supervised labels are limited. The task is to classify an unlabeled `target' dataset by leveraging a labeled `source' dataset that comes from a slightly similar distribution. We propose metric-based adversarial discriminative domain adaptation (M-ADDA) which performs two main steps. First, it uses a metric learning approach to train the source model on the source dataset by optimizing the triplet loss function. This results in clusters where embeddings of the same label are close to each other and those with different labels are far from one another. Next, it uses the adversarial approach (as that used in ADDA \cite{2017arXiv170205464T}) to make the extracted features from the source and target datasets indistinguishable. Simultaneously, we optimize a novel loss function that encourages the target dataset's embeddings to form clusters. While ADDA and M-ADDA use similar architectures, we show that M-ADDA performs significantly better on the digits adaptation datasets of MNIST and USPS. This suggests that using metric-learning for domain adaptation can lead to large improvements in classification accuracy for the domain adaptation task. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/IssamLaradji/M-ADDA}.
Deep Learning for Launching and Mitigating Wireless Jamming Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

An adversarial machine learning approach is introduced to launch jamming attacks on wireless communications and a defense strategy is presented. A cognitive transmitter uses a pre-trained classifier to predict the current channel status based on recent sensing results and decides whether to transmit or not, whereas a jammer collects channel status and ACKs to build a deep learning classifier that reliably predicts the next successful transmissions and effectively jams them. This jamming approach is shown to reduce the transmitter's performance much more severely compared with random or sensing-based jamming. The deep learning classification scores are used by the jammer for power control subject to an average power constraint. Next, a generative adversarial network (GAN) is developed for the jammer to reduce the time to collect the training dataset by augmenting it with synthetic samples. As a defense scheme, the transmitter deliberately takes a small number of wrong actions in spectrum access (in form of a causative attack against the jammer) and therefore prevents the jammer from building a reliable classifier. The transmitter systematically selects when to take wrong actions and adapts the level of defense to mislead the jammer into making prediction errors and consequently increase its throughput.
Quasi-Dilemmas for Artificial Moral Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper we describe moral quasi-dilemmas (MQDs): situations similar to moral dilemmas, but in which an agent is unsure whether exploring the plan space or the world may reveal a course of action that satisfies all moral requirements. We argue that artificial moral agents (AMAs) should be built to handle MQDs (in particular, by exploring the plan space rather than immediately accepting the inevitability of the moral dilemma), and that MQDs may be useful for evaluating AMA architectures.
Gradient Hyperalignment for multi-subject fMRI data alignment
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Multi-subject fMRI data analysis is an interesting and challenging problem in human brain decoding studies. The inherent anatomical and functional variability across subjects make it necessary to do both anatomical and functional alignment before classification analysis. Besides, when it comes to big data, time complexity becomes a problem that cannot be ignored. This paper proposes Gradient Hyperalignment (Gradient-HA) as a gradient-based functional alignment method that is suitable for multi-subject fMRI datasets with large amounts of samples and voxels. The advantage of Gradient-HA is that it can solve independence and high dimension problems by using Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and Stochastic Gradient Ascent (SGA). Validation using multi-classification tasks on big data demonstrates that Gradient-HA method has less time complexity and better or comparable performance compared with other state-of-the-art functional alignment methods.
Core2Vec: A core-preserving feature learning framework for networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2018
Year: 2018

Recent advances in the field of network representation learning are mostly attributed to the application of the skip-gram model in the context of graphs. State-of-the-art analogues of skip-gram model in graphs define a notion of neighbourhood and aim to find the vector representation for a node, which maximizes the likelihood of preserving this neighborhood. In this paper, we take a drastic departure from the existing notion of neighbourhood of a node by utilizing the idea of coreness. More specifically, we utilize the well-established idea that nodes with similar core numbers play equivalent roles in the network and hence induce a novel and an organic notion of neighbourhood. Based on this idea, we propose core2vec, a new algorithmic framework for learning low dimensional continuous feature mapping for a node. Consequently, the nodes having similar core numbers are relatively closer in the vector space that we learn. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of core2vec by comparing word similarity scores obtained by our method where the node representations are drawn from standard word association graphs against scores computed by other state-of-the-art network representation techniques like node2vec, DeepWalk and LINE. Our results always outperform these existing methods
Recommender system for learning SQL using hints
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

Today's software industry requires individuals who are proficient in as many programming languages as possible. Structured query language (SQL), as an adopted standard, is no exception, as it is the most widely used query language to retrieve and manipulate data. However, the process of learning SQL turns out to be challenging. The need for a computer-aided solution to help users learn SQL and improve their proficiency is vital. In this study, we present a new approach to help users conceptualize basic building blocks of the language faster and more efficiently. The adaptive design of the proposed approach aids users in learning SQL by supporting their own path to the solution and employing successful previous attempts, while not enforcing the ideal solution provided by the instructor. Furthermore, we perform an empirical evaluation with 93 participants and demonstrate that the employment of hints is successful, being especially beneficial for users with lower prior knowledge.
When Work Matters: Transforming Classical Network Structures to Graph CNN
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Numerous pattern recognition applications can be formed as learning from graph-structured data, including social network, protein-interaction network, the world wide web data, knowledge graph, etc. While convolutional neural network (CNN) facilitates great advances in gridded image/video understanding tasks, very limited attention has been devoted to transform these successful network structures (including Inception net, Residual net, Dense net, etc.) to establish convolutional networks on graph, due to its irregularity and complexity geometric topologies (unordered vertices, unfixed number of adjacent edges/vertices). In this paper, we aim to give a comprehensive analysis of when work matters by transforming different classical network structures to graph CNN, particularly in the basic graph recognition problem. Specifically, we firstly review the general graph CNN methods, especially in its spectral filtering operation on the irregular graph data. We then introduce the basic structures of ResNet, Inception and DenseNet into graph CNN and construct these network structures on graph, named as G_ResNet, G_Inception, G_DenseNet. In particular, it seeks to help graph CNNs by shedding light on how these classical network structures work and providing guidelines for choosing appropriate graph network frameworks. Finally, we comprehensively evaluate the performance of these different network structures on several public graph datasets (including social networks and bioinformatic datasets), and demonstrate how different network structures work on graph CNN in the graph recognition task.
A Supervised Geometry-Aware Mapping Approach for Classification of Hyperspectral Images
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

The lack of proper class discrimination among the Hyperspectral (HS) data points poses a potential challenge in HS classification. To address this issue, this paper proposes an optimal geometry-aware transformation for enhancing the classification accuracy. The underlying idea of this method is to obtain a linear projection matrix by solving a nonlinear objective function based on the intrinsic geometrical structure of the data. The objective function is constructed to quantify the discrimination between the points from dissimilar classes on the projected data space. Then the obtained projection matrix is used to linearly map the data to more discriminative space. The effectiveness of the proposed transformation is illustrated with three benchmark real-world HS data sets. The experiments reveal that the classification and dimensionality reduction methods on the projected discriminative space outperform their counterpart in the original space.
VPKIaaS: A Highly-Available and Dynamically-Scalable Vehicular Public-Key Infrastructure
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

The central building block of secure and privacy-preserving Vehicular Communication (VC) systems is a Vehicular Public-Key Infrastructure (VPKI), which provides vehicles with multiple anonymized credentials, termed pseudonyms. These pseudonyms are used to ensure message authenticity and integrity while preserving vehicle (and thus passenger) privacy. In the light of emerging large-scale multi-domain VC environments, the efficiency of the VPKI and, more broadly, its scalability are paramount. In this extended abstract, we leverage the state-of-the-art VPKI system and enhance its functionality towards a highly-available and dynamically-scalable design, this ensures that the system remains operational in the presence of benign failures or any resource depletion attack, and that it dynamically scales out, or possibly scales in, according to the requests' arrival rate. Our full-blown implementation on the Google Cloud Platform shows that deploying a VPKI for a large-scale scenario can be cost-effective, while efficiently issuing pseudonyms for the requesters.
Towards Multi-class Object Detection in Unconstrained Remote Sensing Imagery
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Automatic multi-class object detection in remote sensing images in unconstrained scenarios is of high interest for several applications including traffic monitoring and disaster management. The huge variation in object scale, orientation, category, and complex backgrounds, as well as the different camera sensors pose great challenges for current algorithms. In this work, we propose a new method consisting of a novel joint image cascade and feature pyramid network with multi-size convolution kernels to extract multi-scale strong and weak semantic features. These features are fed into rotation-based region proposal and region of interest networks to produce object detections. Finally, rotational non-maximum suppression is applied to remove redundant detections. During training, we minimize joint horizontal and oriented bounding box loss functions, as well as a novel loss that enforces oriented boxes to be rectangular. Our method achieves 68.16% mAP on horizontal and 72.45% mAP on oriented bounding box detection tasks on the challenging DOTA dataset, outperforming all published methods by a large margin (+6% and +12% absolute improvement, respectively). Furthermore, it generalizes to two other datasets, NWPU VHR-10 and UCAS-AOD, and achieves competitive results with the baselines even when trained on DOTA. Our method can be deployed in multi-class object detection applications, regardless of the image and object scales and orientations, making it a great choice for unconstrained aerial and satellite imagery.