OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Circuit designs for superconducting optoelectronic loop neurons
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2018
Year: 2018

Optical communication achieves high fanout and short delay advantageous for information integration in neural systems. Superconducting detectors enable signaling with single photons for maximal energy efficiency. We present designs of superconducting optoelectronic neurons based on superconducting single-photon detectors, Josephson junctions, semiconductor light sources, and multi-planar dielectric waveguides. These circuits achieve complex synaptic and neuronal functions with high energy efficiency, leveraging the strengths of light for communication and superconducting electronics for computation. The neurons send few-photon signals to synaptic connections. These signals communicate neuronal firing events as well as update synaptic weights. Spike-timing-dependent plasticity is implemented with a single photon triggering each step of the process. Microscale light-emitting diodes and waveguide networks enable connectivity from a neuron to thousands of synaptic connections, and the use of light for communication enables synchronization of neurons across an area limited only by the distance light can travel within the period of a network oscillation. Experimentally, each of the requisite circuit elements has been demonstrated, yet a hardware platform combining them all has not been attempted. Compared to digital logic or quantum computing, device tolerances are relaxed. For this neural application, optical sources providing incoherent pulses with 10,000 photons produced with efficiency of 10$^{-3}$ operating at 20\,MHz at 4.2\,K are sufficient to enable a massively scalable neural computing platform with connectivity comparable to the brain and thirty thousand times higher speed.
Exploiting the DRAM Microarchitecture to Increase Memory-Level Parallelism
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2018
Year: 2018

This paper summarizes the idea of Subarray-Level Parallelism (SALP) in DRAM, which was published in ISCA 2012, and examines the work's significance and future potential. Modern DRAMs have multiple banks to serve multiple memory requests in parallel. However, when two requests go to the same bank, they have to be served serially, exacerbating the high latency of on-chip memory. Adding more banks to the system to mitigate this problem incurs high system cost. Our goal in this work is to achieve the benefits of increasing the number of banks with a low-cost approach. To this end, we propose three new mechanisms, SALP-1, SALP-2, and MASA (Multitude of Activated Subarrays), to reduce the serialization of different requests that go to the same bank. The key observation exploited by our mechanisms is that a modern DRAM bank is implemented as a collection of subarrays that operate largely independently while sharing few global peripheral structures. Our three proposed mechanisms mitigate the negative impact of bank serialization by overlapping different components of the bank access latencies of multiple requests that go to different subarrays within the same bank. SALP-1 requires no changes to the existing DRAM structure, and needs to only reinterpret some of the existing DRAM timing parameters. SALP-2 and MASA require only modest changes (< 0.15% area overhead) to the DRAM peripheral structures, which are much less design constrained than the DRAM core. Our evaluations show that SALP-1, SALP-2 and MASA significantly improve performance for both single-core systems (7%/13%/17%) and multi-core systems (15%/16%/20%), averaged across a wide range of workloads. We also demonstrate that our mechanisms can be combined with application-aware memory request scheduling in multicore systems to further improve performance and fairness.
AutoTiering: Automatic Data Placement Manager in Multi-Tier All-Flash Datacenter
Venue: arXiv cs.PF 2018
Year: 2018

In the year of 2017, the capital expenditure of Flash-based Solid State Drivers (SSDs) keeps declining and the storage capacity of SSDs keeps increasing. As a result, the "selling point" of traditional spinning Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) as a backend storage - low cost and large capacity - is no longer unique, and eventually they will be replaced by low-end SSDs which have large capacity but perform orders of magnitude better than HDDs. Thus, it is widely believed that all-flash multi-tier storage systems will be adopted in the enterprise datacenters in the near future. However, existing caching or tiering solutions for SSD-HDD hybrid storage systems are not suitable for all-flash storage systems. This is because that all-flash storage systems do not have a large speed difference (e.g., 10x) among each tier. Instead, different specialties (such as high performance, high capacity, etc.) of each tier should be taken into consideration. Motivated by this, we develop an automatic data placement manager called "AutoTiering" to handle virtual machine disk files (VMDK) allocation and migration in an all-flash multi-tier datacenter to best utilize the storage resource, optimize the performance, and reduce the migration overhead. AutoTiering is based on an optimization framework, whose core technique is to predict VM's performance change on different tiers with different specialties without conducting real migration. As far as we know, AutoTiering is the first optimization solution designed for all-flash multi-tier datacenters. We implement AutoTiering on VMware ESXi, and experimental results show that it can significantly improve the I/O performance compared to existing solutions.
Parallel Closed-Loop Connected Vehicle Simulator for Large-Scale Transportation Network Management: Challenges, Issues, and Solution Approaches
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

The augmented scale and complexity of urban transportation networks have significantly increased the execution time and resource requirements of vehicular network simulations, exceeding the capabilities of sequential simulators. The need for a parallel and distributed simulation environment is inevitable from a smart city perspective, especially when the entire city-wide information system is expected to be integrated with numerous services and ITS applications. In this paper, we present a conceptual model of an Integrated Distributed Connected Vehicle Simulator (IDCVS) that can emulate real-time traffic in a large metro area by incorporating hardware-in-the-loop simulation together with the closed-loop coupling of SUMO and OMNET++. We also discuss the challenges, issues, and solution approaches for implementing such a parallel closed-loop transportation network simulator by addressing transportation network partitioning problems, synchronization, and scalability issues. One unique feature of the envisioned integrated simulation tool is that it utilizes the vehicle traces collected through multiple roadway sensors-DSRC onboard unit, magnetometer, loop detector, and video detector. Another major feature of the proposed model is the incorporation of hybrid parallelism in both transportation and communication simulation platforms. We identify the challenges and issues involved in IDCVS to incorporate this multi-level parallelism. We also discuss the approaches for integrating hardware-in-the-loop simulation, addressing the steps involved in preprocessing sensor data, filtering, and extrapolating missing data, managing large real-time traffic data, and handling different data formats.
Divergence Free Polar Wavelets for the Analysis and Representation of Fluid Flows
Venue: arXiv cs.NA 2018
Year: 2018

We present a Parseval tight wavelet frame for the representation and analysis of velocity vector fields of incompressible fluids. Our wavelets have closed form expressions in the frequency and spatial domains, are divergence free in the ideal, analytic sense, have a multi-resolution structure and fast transforms, and an intuitive correspondence to common flow phenomena. Our construction also allows for well defined directional selectivity, e.g. to model the behavior of divergence free vector fields in the vicinity of boundaries or to represent highly directional features like in a von Kármán vortex street. We demonstrate the practicality and efficiency of our construction by analyzing the representation of different divergence free vector fields in our wavelets.
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Playing 2.5D Fighting Games
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Deep reinforcement learning has shown its success in game playing. However, 2.5D fighting games would be a challenging task to handle due to ambiguity in visual appearances like height or depth of the characters. Moreover, actions in such games typically involve particular sequential action orders, which also makes the network design very difficult. Based on the network of Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic (A3C), we create an OpenAI-gym-like gaming environment with the game of Little Fighter 2 (LF2), and present a novel A3C+ network for learning RL agents. The introduced model includes a Recurrent Info network, which utilizes game-related info features with recurrent layers to observe combo skills for fighting. In the experiments, we consider LF2 in different settings, which successfully demonstrates the use of our proposed model for learning 2.5D fighting games.
Learning Selfie-Friendly Abstraction from Artistic Style Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Artistic style transfer can be thought as a process to generate different versions of abstraction of the original image. However, most of the artistic style transfer operators are not optimized for human faces thus mainly suffers from two undesirable features when applying them to selfies. First, the edges of human faces may unpleasantly deviate from the ones in the original image. Second, the skin color is far from faithful to the original one which is usually problematic in producing quality selfies. In this paper, we take a different approach and formulate this abstraction process as a gradient domain learning problem. We aim to learn a type of abstraction which not only achieves the specified artistic style but also circumvents the two aforementioned drawbacks thus highly applicable to selfie photography. We also show that our method can be directly generalized to videos with high inter-frame consistency. Our method is also robust to non-selfie images, and the generalization to various kinds of real-life scenes is discussed. We will make our code publicly available.
A Counter-Forensic Method for CNN-Based Camera Model Identification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

An increasing number of digital images are being shared and accessed through websites, media, and social applications. Many of these images have been modified and are not authentic. Recent advances in the use of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have facilitated the task of analyzing the veracity and authenticity of largely distributed image datasets. We examine in this paper the problem of identifying the camera model or type that was used to take an image and that can be spoofed. Due to the linear nature of CNNs and the high-dimensionality of images, neural networks are vulnerable to attacks with adversarial examples. These examples are imperceptibly different from correctly classified images but are misclassified with high confidence by CNNs. In this paper, we describe a counter-forensic method capable of subtly altering images to change their estimated camera model when they are analyzed by any CNN-based camera model detector. Our method can use both the Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) or the Jacobian-based Saliency Map Attack (JSMA) to craft these adversarial images and does not require direct access to the CNN. Our results show that even advanced deep learning architectures trained to analyze images and obtain camera model information are still vulnerable to our proposed method.
Synchronizing Random Almost-Group Automata
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper we address the question of synchronizing random automata in the critical settings of almost-group automata. Group automata are automata where all letters act as permutations on the set of states, and they are not synchronizing (unless they have one state). In almost-group automata, one of the letters acts as a permutation on $n-1$ states, and the others as permutations. We prove that this small change is enough for automata to become synchronizing with high probability. More precisely, we establish that the probability that a strongly connected almost-group automaton is not synchronizing is $\frac{2^{k-1}-1}{n^{2(k-1)}}(1+o(1))$, for a $k$-letter alphabet.
Joint CS-MRI Reconstruction and Segmentation with a Unified Deep Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

The need for fast acquisition and automatic analysis of MRI data is growing in the age of big data. Although compressed sensing magnetic resonance imaging (CS-MRI) has been studied to accelerate MRI by reducing k-space measurements, in current CS-MRI techniques MRI applications such as segmentation are overlooked when doing image reconstruction. In this paper, we test the utility of CS-MRI methods in automatic segmentation models and propose a unified deep neural network architecture called SegNetMRI which we apply to the combined CS-MRI reconstruction and segmentation problem. SegNetMRI is built upon a MRI reconstruction network with multiple cascaded blocks each containing an encoder-decoder unit and a data fidelity unit, and MRI segmentation networks having the same encoder-decoder structure. The two subnetworks are pre-trained and fine-tuned with shared reconstruction encoders. The outputs are merged into the final segmentation. Our experiments show that SegNetMRI can improve both the reconstruction and segmentation performance when using compressive measurements.
On Restricted Disjunctive Temporal Problems: Faster Algorithms and Tractability Frontier
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2018
Year: 2018

In 2005 Kumar studied the Restricted Disjunctive Temporal Problem (RDTP), a restricted but very expressive class of disjunctive temporal problems (DTPs). It was shown that that RDTPs are solvable in deterministic strongly-polynomial time by reducing them to the Connected Row-Convex (CRC) constraints problem; plus, Kumar devised a randomized algorithm whose expected running time is less than that of the deterministic one. Instead, the most general form of DTPs allows for multi-variable disjunctions of many interval constraints and it is NP-complete. This work offers a deeper comprehension on the tractability of RDTPs, leading to an elementary deterministic strongly-polynomial time algorithm for them, significantly improving the asymptotic running times of both the deterministic and randomized algorithms of Kumar. The result is obtained by reducing RDTPs to the Single-Source Shortest-Paths (SSSP) and the 2-SAT problem (jointly), instead of reducing to CRCs. In passing, we obtain a faster (quadratic-time) algorithm for RDTPs having only Type-1 and Type-2 constraints (and no Type-3 constraint). As a second main contribution, we study the tractability frontier of solving RDTPs by considering Hyper Temporal Networks (\HTNs), a strict generalization of \STNs grounded on hypergraphs: on one side, we prove that solving temporal problems having only Type-2 constraints and either only multi-tail or only multi-head hyperarc constraints lies in both NP and co-NP and it admits deterministic pseudo-polynomial time algorithms; on the other side, solving problems with Type-3 constraints and either only multi-tail or only multi-head hyperarc constraints turns strongly NP-complete.
Residual Ratio Thresholding for Model Order Selection
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

Model order selection (MOS) in linear regression models is a widely studied problem in signal processing. Techniques based on information theoretic criteria (ITC) are algorithms of choice in MOS problems. This article proposes a novel technique called residual ratio thresholding for MOS in linear regression models which is fundamentally different from the ITC based MOS criteria widely discussed in literature. This article also provides a rigorous mathematical analysis of the high signal to noise ratio (SNR) and large sample size behaviour of RRT. RRT is numerically shown to deliver a highly competitive performance when compared to popular model order selection criteria like Akaike information criterion (AIC), Bayesian information criterion (BIC), penalised adaptive likelihood (PAL) etc. especially when the sample size is small.
Active disturbance rejection for precise positioning of dual-stage hard disk drives
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

This paper presents an application of adaptive control algorithm in order to reject the external disturbances in dual-stage hard disk drives. For this purpose, a dual PID controller is first designed without the plant exposure to external disturbances. Then, an adaptive control approach based on recursive least squares adaptive (RLS) algorithm was employed to identify and reject disturbances. The performance of the proposed technique was evaluated for hard disk track-seeking through simulation experiments. Results show the feasibility and precise tracking of the designed control system.
Mobile recommender systems: Identifying the major concepts
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2018
Year: 2018

This paper identifies the factors that have an impact on mobile recommender systems. Recommender systems have become a technology that has been widely used by various online applications in situations where there is an information overload problem. Numerous applications such as e-Commerce, video platforms and social networks provide personalized recommendations to their users and this has improved the user experience and vendor revenues. The development of recommender systems has been focused mostly on the proposal of new algorithms that provide more accurate recommendations. However, the use of mobile devices and the rapid growth of the internet and networking infrastructure has brought the necessity of using mobile recommender systems. The links between web and mobile recommender systems are described along with how the recommendations in mobile environments can be improved. This work is focused on identifying the links between web and mobile recommender systems and to provide solid future directions that aim to lead in a more integrated mobile recommendation domain.
Clustering With Pairwise Relationships: A Generative Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has become important in current data analysis applications, where the amount of unlabeled data is growing exponentially and user input remains limited by logistics and expense. Constrained clustering, as a subclass of SSL, makes use of user input in the form of relationships between data points (e.g., pairs of data points belonging to the same class or different classes) and can remarkably improve the performance of unsupervised clustering in order to reflect user-defined knowledge of the relationships between particular data points. Existing algorithms incorporate such user input, heuristically, as either hard constraints or soft penalties, which are separate from any generative or statistical aspect of the clustering model; this results in formulations that are suboptimal and not sufficiently general. In this paper, we propose a principled, generative approach to probabilistically model, without ad hoc penalties, the joint distribution given by user-defined pairwise relations. The proposed model accounts for general underlying distributions without assuming a specific form and relies on expectation-maximization for model fitting. For distributions in a standard form, the proposed approach results in a closed-form solution for updated parameters.
Unified Management and Optimization of Edge-Cloud IoT Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

Internet of Things (IoT) applications have seen a phenomenal growth with estimates of growing to a 25 Billion dollar industry by 2020. With the scale of IoT applications growing and stricter requirements on latency, edge computing has piqued the interest for such environments. However, the industry is still in its infancy with no proper support for applications running across the entire edge-cloud environment, and an array of manual tedious per-application optimizations. In this work, we propose Steel, a unified framework for developing, deploying, and monitoring applications in the edge-cloud. Steel supports dynamically adapting and easily moving services back and forth between the edge and the cloud. Steel is extensible where common optimizations (but crucial for the edge) can be built as pluggable and configurable modules. We have added two very common optimizations: placement and adaptive communication, to cope with both short and long-term changes in the workload and environment.
Implementation of Stochastic Quasi-Newton's Method in PyTorch
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we implement the Stochastic Damped LBFGS (SdLBFGS) for stochastic non-convex optimization. We make two important modifications to the original SdLBFGS algorithm. First, by initializing the Hessian at each step using an identity matrix, the algorithm converges better than original algorithm. Second, by performing direction normalization we could gain stable optimization procedure without line search. Experiments on minimizing a 2D non-convex function shows that our improved algorithm converges better than original algorithm, and experiments on the CIFAR10 and MNIST datasets show that our improved algorithm works stably and gives comparable or even better testing accuracies than first order optimizers SGD, Adagrad, and second order optimizers LBFGS in PyTorch.
Quantum Circuits for Toom-Cook Multiplication
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we report efficient quantum circuits for integer multiplication using Toom-Cook algorithm. By analysing the recursive tree structure of the algorithm, we obtained a bound on the count of Toffoli gates and qubits. These bounds are further improved by employing reversible pebble games through uncomputing the intermediate results. The asymptotic bounds for different performance metrics of the proposed quantum circuit are superior to the prior implementations of multiplier circuits using schoolbook and Karatsuba algorithms.
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Page-wise Recommendations
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2018
Year: 2018

Recommender systems can mitigate the information overload problem by suggesting users' personalized items. In real-world recommendations such as e-commerce, a typical interaction between the system and its users is -- users are recommended a page of items and provide feedback; and then the system recommends a new page of items. To effectively capture such interaction for recommendations, we need to solve two key problems -- (1) how to update recommending strategy according to user's \textit{real-time feedback}, and 2) how to generate a page of items with proper display, which pose tremendous challenges to traditional recommender systems. In this paper, we study the problem of page-wise recommendations aiming to address aforementioned two challenges simultaneously. In particular, we propose a principled approach to jointly generate a set of complementary items and the corresponding strategy to display them in a 2-D page; and propose a novel page-wise recommendation framework based on deep reinforcement learning, DeepPage, which can optimize a page of items with proper display based on real-time feedback from users. The experimental results based on a real-world e-commerce dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.