OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
ADARES: Adaptive Resource Management for Virtual Machines
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

Virtual execution environments allow for consolidation of multiple applications onto the same physical server, thereby enabling more efficient use of server resources. However, users often statically configure the resources of virtual machines through guesswork, resulting in either insufficient resource allocations that hinder VM performance, or excessive allocations that waste precious data center resources. In this paper, we first characterize real-world resource allocation and utilization of VMs through the analysis of an extensive dataset, consisting of more than 250k VMs from over 3.6k private enterprise clusters. Our large-scale analysis confirms that VMs are often misconfigured, either overprovisioned or underprovisioned, and that this problem is pervasive across a wide range of private clusters. We then propose ADARES, an adaptive system that dynamically adjusts VM resources using machine learning techniques. In particular, ADARES leverages the contextual bandits framework to effectively manage the adaptations. Our system exploits easily collectible data, at the cluster, node, and VM levels, to make more sensible allocation decisions, and uses transfer learning to safely explore the configurations space and speed up training. Our empirical evaluation shows that ADARES can significantly improve system utilization without sacrificing performance. For instance, when compared to threshold and prediction-based baselines, it achieves more predictable VM-level performance and also reduces the amount of virtual CPUs and memory provisioned by up to 35% and 60% respectively for synthetic workloads on real clusters.
An enhanced computational feature selection method for medical synonym identification via bilingualism and multi-corpus training
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

Medical synonym identification has been an important part of medical natural language processing (NLP). However, in the field of Chinese medical synonym identification, there are problems like low precision and low recall rate. To solve the problem, in this paper, we propose a method for identifying Chinese medical synonyms. We first selected 13 features including Chinese and English features. Then we studied the synonym identification results of each feature alone and different combinations of the features. Through the comparison among identification results, we present an optimal combination of features for Chinese medical synonym identification. Experiments show that our selected features have achieved 97.37% precision rate, 96.00% recall rate and 97.33% F1 score.
MedSim: A Novel Semantic Similarity Measure in Bio-medical Knowledge Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

We present MedSim, a novel semantic SIMilarity method based on public well-established bio-MEDical knowledge graphs (KGs) and large-scale corpus, to study the therapeutic substitution of antibiotics. Besides hierarchy and corpus of KGs, MedSim further interprets medicine characteristics by constructing multi-dimensional medicine-specific feature vectors. Dataset of 528 antibiotic pairs scored by doctors is applied for evaluation and MedSim has produced statistically significant improvement over other semantic similarity methods. Furthermore, some promising applications of MedSim in drug substitution and drug abuse prevention are presented in case study.
Approach for Semi-automatic Construction of Anti-infective Drug Ontology Based on Entity Linking
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

Ontology can be used for the interpretation of natural language. To construct an anti-infective drug ontology, one needs to design and deploy a methodological step to carry out the entity discovery and linking. Medical synonym resources have been an important part of medical natural language processing (NLP). However, there are problems such as low precision and low recall rate. In this study, an NLP approach is adopted to generate candidate entities. Open ontology is analyzed to extract semantic relations. Six-word vector features and word-level features are selected to perform the entity linking. The extraction results of synonyms with a single feature and different combinations of features are studied. Experiments show that our selected features have achieved a precision rate of 86.77%, a recall rate of 89.03% and an F1 score of 87.89%. This paper finally presents the structure of the proposed ontology and its relevant statistical data.
An Empirical Study towards Understanding How Deep Convolutional Nets Recognize Falls
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Detecting unintended falls is essential for ambient intelligence and healthcare of elderly people living alone. In recent years, deep convolutional nets are widely used in human action analysis, based on which a number of fall detection methods have been proposed. Despite their highly effective performances, the behaviors of how the convolutional nets recognize falls are still not clear. In this paper, instead of proposing a novel approach, we perform a systematical empirical study, attempting to investigate the underlying fall recognition process. We propose four tasks to investigate, which involve five types of input modalities, seven net instances and different training samples. The obtained quantitative and qualitative results reveal the patterns that the nets tend to learn, and several factors that can heavily influence the performances on fall recognition. We expect that our conclusions are favorable to proposing better deep learning solutions to fall detection systems.
Training Competitive Binary Neural Networks from Scratch
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Convolutional neural networks have achieved astonishing results in different application areas. Various methods that allow us to use these models on mobile and embedded devices have been proposed. Especially binary neural networks are a promising approach for devices with low computational power. However, training accurate binary models from scratch remains a challenge. Previous work often uses prior knowledge from full-precision models and complex training strategies. In our work, we focus on increasing the performance of binary neural networks without such prior knowledge and a much simpler training strategy. In our experiments we show that we are able to achieve state-of-the-art results on standard benchmark datasets. Further, to the best of our knowledge, we are the first to successfully adopt a network architecture with dense connections for binary networks, which lets us improve the state-of-the-art even further.
VideoMem: Constructing, Analyzing, Predicting Short-term and Long-term Video Memorability
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Humans share a strong tendency to memorize/forget some of the visual information they encounter. This paper focuses on providing computational models for the prediction of the intrinsic memorability of visual content. To address this new challenge, we introduce a large scale dataset (VideoMem) composed of 10,000 videos annotated with memorability scores. In contrast to previous work on image memorability -- where memorability was measured a few minutes after memorization -- memory performance is measured twice: a few minutes after memorization and again 24-72 hours later. Hence, the dataset comes with short-term and long-term memorability annotations. After an in-depth analysis of the dataset, we investigate several deep neural network based models for the prediction of video memorability. Our best model using a ranking loss achieves a Spearman's rank correlation of 0.494 for short-term memorability prediction, while our proposed model with attention mechanism provides insights of what makes a content memorable. The VideoMem dataset with pre-extracted features is publicly available.
An Efficient Nonlinear Fourier Transform Algorithm for Detection of Eigenvalues from Continuous Spectrum
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

We present an efficient, fast and robust Nonlinear Fourier Transform (NFT) algorithm to detect eigenvalues of the discrete spectrum. It outperforms other known NFT algorithms as it detects the eigenvalues from the continuous spectrum, the numerically more robust part of the nonlinear spectrum.
Truly Autonomous Machines Are Ethical
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

While many see the prospect of autonomous machines as threatening, autonomy may be exactly what we want in a superintelligent machine. There is a sense of autonomy, deeply rooted in the ethical literature, in which an autonomous machine is necessarily an ethical one. Development of the theory underlying this idea not only reveals the advantages of autonomy, but it sheds light on a number of issues in the ethics of artificial intelligence. It helps us to understand what sort of obligations we owe to machines, and what obligations they owe to us. It clears up the issue of assigning responsibility to machines or their creators. More generally, a concept of autonomy that is adequate to both human and artificial intelligence can lead to a more adequate ethical theory for both.
Evolution of $k$-mer Frequencies and Entropy in Duplication and Substitution Mutation Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

Genomic evolution can be viewed as string-editing processes driven by mutations. An understanding of the statistical properties resulting from these mutation processes is of value in a variety of tasks related to biological sequence data, e.g., estimation of model parameters and compression. At the same time, due to the complexity of these processes, designing tractable stochastic models and analyzing them are challenging. In this paper, we study two kinds of systems, each representing a set of mutations. In the first system, tandem duplications and substitution mutations are allowed and in the other, interspersed duplications. We provide stochastic models and, via stochastic approximation, study the evolution of substring frequencies for these two systems separately. Specifically, we show that $k$-mer frequencies converge almost surely and determine the limit set. Furthermore, we present a method for finding upper bounds on entropy for such systems.
When Homomorphic Cryptosystem Meets Differential Privacy: Training Machine Learning Classifier with Privacy Protection
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

Machine learning (ML) classifiers are invaluable building blocks that have been used in many fields. High quality training dataset collected from multiple data providers is essential to train accurate classifiers. However, it raises concern about data privacy due to potential leakage of sensitive information in training dataset. Existing studies have proposed many solutions to privacy-preserving training of ML classifiers, but it remains a challenging task to strike a balance among accuracy, computational efficiency, and security. In this paper, we propose Heda, an efficient privacypreserving scheme for training ML classifiers. By combining homomorphic cryptosystem (HC) with differential privacy (DP), Heda obtains the tradeoffs between efficiency and accuracy, and enables flexible switch among different tradeoffs by parameter tuning. In order to make such combination efficient and feasible, we present novel designs based on both HC and DP: A library of building blocks based on partially HC are proposed to construct complex training algorithms without introducing a trusted thirdparty or computational relaxation; A set of theoretical methods are proposed to determine appropriate privacy budget and to reduce sensitivity. Security analysis demonstrates that our solution can construct complex ML training algorithm securely. Extensive experimental results show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed scheme.
A case study : Influence of Dimension Reduction on regression trees-based Algorithms -Predicting Aeronautics Loads of a Derivative Aircraft
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

In aircraft industry, market needs evolve quickly in a high competitiveness context. This requires adapting a given aircraft model in minimum time considering for example an increase of range or the number of passengers (cf A330 NEO family). The computation of loads and stress to resize the airframe is on the critical path of this aircraft variant definition: this is a consuming and costly process, one of the reason being the high dimen-sionality and the large amount of data. This is why Airbus has invested since a couple of years in Big Data approaches (statistic methods up to machine learning) to improve the speed, the data value extraction and the responsiveness of this process. This paper presents recent advances in this work made in cooperation between Airbus, ENAC and Institut de Math{é}-matiques de Toulouse in the framework of a proof of value sprint project. It compares the influence of three dimensional reduction techniques (PCA, polynomial fitting, combined) on the extrapolation capabilities of Regression Trees based algorithms for loads prediction. It shows that AdaBoost with Random Forest offers promising results in average in terms of accuracy and computational time to estimate loads on which a PCA is applied only on the outputs.
IoT-Based Secure Embedded Scheme for Insulin Pump Data Acquisition and Monitoring
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2018
Year: 2018

This paper introduces an Internet of Things (IoT)-based data acquisition and monitoring scheme for insulin pumps. The proposed work employs embedded system hardware (Keil LPC1768-board) for data acquisition and monitoring. The hardware is used as an abstract layer between the insulin pump and the cloud. Diabetes data are secured before they are sent to the cloud for storage. Each patient's record is digitally signed using a secure hash algorithm mechanism. The proposed work will protect the patient's records from being breached from unauthorized entities, and authenticates them from improper modifications. The design is tested and verified using $μ$Vision studio, the Keil board mentioned above, and an ALARIS 8100 infusion pump. Moreover, a test case for a real cloud example is presented with the help of the Center of Computationally Assisted System and Technology. This center provided the infrastructure service to test our work.
Auto-Encoding Scene Graphs for Image Captioning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

We propose Scene Graph Auto-Encoder (SGAE) that incorporates the language inductive bias into the encoder-decoder image captioning framework for more human-like captions. Intuitively, we humans use the inductive bias to compose collocations and contextual inference in discourse. For example, when we see the relation `person on bike', it is natural to replace `on' with `ride' and infer `person riding bike on a road' even the `road' is not evident. Therefore, exploiting such bias as a language prior is expected to help the conventional encoder-decoder models less likely overfit to the dataset bias and focus on reasoning. Specifically, we use the scene graph --- a directed graph ($\mathcal{G}$) where an object node is connected by adjective nodes and relationship nodes --- to represent the complex structural layout of both image ($\mathcal{I}$) and sentence ($\mathcal{S}$). In the textual domain, we use SGAE to learn a dictionary ($\mathcal{D}$) that helps to reconstruct sentences in the $\mathcal{S}\rightarrow \mathcal{G} \rightarrow \mathcal{D} \rightarrow \mathcal{S}$ pipeline, where $\mathcal{D}$ encodes the desired language prior; in the vision-language domain, we use the shared $\mathcal{D}$ to guide the encoder-decoder in the $\mathcal{I}\rightarrow \mathcal{G}\rightarrow \mathcal{D} \rightarrow \mathcal{S}$ pipeline. Thanks to the scene graph representation and shared dictionary, the inductive bias is transferred across domains in principle. We validate the effectiveness of SGAE on the challenging MS-COCO image captioning benchmark, e.g., our SGAE-based single-model achieves a new state-of-the-art $127.8$ CIDEr-D on the Karpathy split, and a competitive $125.5$ CIDEr-D (c40) on the official server even compared to other ensemble models.
Time-Discounting Convolution for Event Sequences with Ambiguous Timestamps
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

This paper proposes a method for modeling event sequences with ambiguous timestamps, a time-discounting convolution. Unlike in ordinary time series, time intervals are not constant, small time-shifts have no significant effect, and inputting timestamps or time durations into a model is not effective. The criteria that we require for the modeling are providing robustness against time-shifts or timestamps uncertainty as well as maintaining the essential capabilities of time-series models, i.e., forgetting meaningless past information and handling infinite sequences. The proposed method handles them with a convolutional mechanism across time with specific parameterizations, which efficiently represents the event dependencies in a time-shift invariant manner while discounting the effect of past events, and a dynamic pooling mechanism, which provides robustness against the uncertainty in timestamps and enhances the time-discounting capability by dynamically changing the pooling window size. In our learning algorithm, the decaying and dynamic pooling mechanisms play critical roles in handling infinite and variable length sequences. Numerical experiments on real-world event sequences with ambiguous timestamps and ordinary time series demonstrated the advantages of our method.
Binaural Source Localization based on Modulation-Domain Features and Decision Pooling
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2018
Year: 2018

In this work we apply Amplitude Modulation Spectrum (AMS) features to the source localization problem. Our approach computes 36 bilateral features for 2s long signal segments and estimates the azimuthal directions of a sound source through a binaurally trained classifier. This directional information of a sound source could be e.g. used to steer the beamformer in a hearing aid to the source of interest in order to increase the SNR. We evaluated our approach on the development set of the IEEE-AASP Challenge on sound source localization and tracking (LOCATA) and achieved a 4.25° smaller MAE than the baseline approach. Additionally, our approach is computationally less complex.
The Role of Normware in Trustworthy and Explainable AI
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

For being potentially destructive, in practice incomprehensible and for the most unintelligible, contemporary technology is setting high challenges on our society. New conception methods are urgently required. Reorganizing ideas and discussions presented in AI and related fields, this position paper aims to highlight the importance of normware--that is, computational artifacts specifying norms--with respect to these issues, and argues for its irreducibility with respect to software by making explicit its neglected ecological dimension in the decision-making cycle.
A Proactive Flow Admission and Re-Routing Scheme for Load Balancing and Mitigation of Congestion Propagation in SDN Data Plane
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

The centralized architecture in software-defined network (SDN) provides a global view of the underlying network, paving the way for enormous research in the area of SDN traffic engineering (SDN TE). This research focuses on the load balancing aspects of SDN TE, given that the existing reactive methods for data-plane load balancing eventually result in packet loss and proactive schemes for data plane load balancing do not address congestion propagation. In the proposed work, the SDN controller periodically monitors flow level statistics and utilization on each link in the network and over-utilized links that cause network congestion and packet loss are identified as bottleneck links. For load balancing the identified largest flow and further traffic through these bottleneck links are rerouted through the lightly-loaded alternate path. The proposed scheme models a Bayesian Network using the observed port utilization and residual bandwidth to decide whether the newly computed alternate path can handle the new flow load before flow admission which in turn reduces congestion propagation. The simulation results show that when the network traffic increases the proposed method efficiently re-routes the flows and balance the network load which substantially improves the network efficiency and the quality of service (QoS) parameters.
Binary Document Image Super Resolution for Improved Readability and OCR Performance
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

There is a need for information retrieval from large collections of low-resolution (LR) binary document images, which can be found in digital libraries across the world, where the high-resolution (HR) counterpart is not available. This gives rise to the problem of binary document image super-resolution (BDISR). The objective of this paper is to address the interesting and challenging problem of super resolution of binary Tamil document images for improved readability and better optical character recognition (OCR). We propose multiple deep neural network architectures to address this problem and analyze their performance. The proposed models are all single image super-resolution techniques, which learn a generalized spatial correspondence between the LR and HR binary document images. We employ convolutional layers for feature extraction followed by transposed convolution and sub-pixel convolution layers for upscaling the features. Since the outputs of the neural networks are gray scale, we utilize the advantage of power law transformation as a post-processing technique to improve the character level pixel connectivity. The performance of our models is evaluated by comparing the OCR accuracies and the mean opinion scores given by human evaluators on LR images and the corresponding model-generated HR images.
A Parallel Divide-and-Conquer based Evolutionary Algorithm for Large-scale Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2018
Year: 2018

Large-scale optimization problems that involve thousands of decision variables have extensively arisen from various industrial areas. As a powerful optimization tool for many real-world applications, evolutionary algorithms (EAs) fail to solve the emerging large-scale problems both effectively and efficiently. In this paper, we propose a novel Divide-and-Conquer (DC) based EA that can not only produce high-quality solution by solving sub-problems separately, but also highly utilizes the power of parallel computing by solving the sub-problems simultaneously. Existing DC-based EAs that were deemed to enjoy the same advantages of the proposed algorithm, are shown to be practically incompatible with the parallel computing scheme, unless some trade-offs are made by compromising the solution quality.
Observing the Population Dynamics in GE by means of the Intrinsic Dimension
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2018
Year: 2018

We explore the use of Intrinsic Dimension (ID) for gaining insights in how populations evolve in Evolutionary Algorithms. ID measures the minimum number of dimensions needed to accurately describe a dataset and its estimators are being used more and more in Machine Learning to cope with large datasets. We postulate that ID can provide information about population which is complimentary w.r.t.\ what (a simple measure of) diversity tells. We experimented with the application of ID to populations evolved with a recent variant of Grammatical Evolution. The preliminary results suggest that diversity and ID constitute two different points of view on the population dynamics.