OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
An Ensemble Model for Sentiment Analysis of Hindi-English Code-Mixed Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

In multilingual societies like India, code-mixed social media texts comprise the majority of the Internet. Detecting the sentiment of the code-mixed user opinions plays a crucial role in understanding social, economic and political trends. In this paper, we propose an ensemble of character-trigrams based LSTM model and word-ngrams based Multinomial Naive Bayes (MNB) model to identify the sentiments of Hindi-English (Hi-En) code-mixed data. The ensemble model combines the strengths of rich sequential patterns from the LSTM model and polarity of keywords from the probabilistic ngram model to identify sentiments in sparse and inconsistent code-mixed data. Experiments on reallife user code-mixed data reveals that our approach yields state-of-the-art results as compared to several baselines and other deep learning based proposed methods.
Impersonation: Modeling Persona in Smart Responses to Email
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we present design, implementation, and effectiveness of generating personalized suggestions for email replies. To personalize email responses based on users style and personality, we model the users persona based on her past responses to emails. This model is added to the language-based model created across users using past responses of the all user emails. A users model captures the typical responses of the user given a particular context. The context includes the email received, recipient of the email, and other external signals such as calendar activities, preferences, etc. The context along with users personality (e.g., extrovert, formal, reserved, etc.) is used to suggest responses. These responses can be a mixture of multiple modes: email replies (textual), audio clips, etc. This helps in making responses mimic the user as much as possible and helps the user to be more productive while retaining her mark in the responses.
Next generation portal for federated testbeds MySlice v2: from prototype to production
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

A number of projects in computer science around the world have contributed to build federated experimental facilities providing access to a large set of distributed compute, storage and network resources for the research community. Several tools have been developed to provide users an easy access to the federated testbeds. This paper presents the architecture of the new version of the MySlice web portal, that has evolved from a prototype to a production ready software.
Combining Model-Free Q-Ensembles and Model-Based Approaches for Informed Exploration
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Q-Ensembles are a model-free approach where input images are fed into different Q-networks and exploration is driven by the assumption that uncertainty is proportional to the variance of the output Q-values obtained. They have been shown to perform relatively well compared to other exploration strategies. Further, model-based approaches, such as encoder-decoder models have been used successfully for next frame prediction given previous frames. This paper proposes to integrate the model-free Q-ensembles and model-based approaches with the hope of compounding the benefits of both and achieving superior exploration as a result. Results show that a model-based trajectory memory approach when combined with Q-ensembles produces superior performance when compared to only using Q-ensembles.
Swendsen-Wang Dynamics for General Graphs in the Tree Uniqueness Region
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2018
Year: 2018

The Swendsen-Wang dynamics is a popular algorithm for sampling from the Gibbs distribution for the ferromagnetic Ising model on a graph $G=(V,E)$. The dynamics is a "global" Markov chain which is conjectured to converge to equilibrium in $O(|V|^{1/4})$ steps for any graph $G$ at any (inverse) temperature $β$. It was recently proved by Guo and Jerrum (2017) that the Swendsen-Wang dynamics has polynomial mixing time on any graph at all temperatures, yet there are few results providing $o(|V|)$ upper bounds on its convergence time. We prove fast convergence of the Swendsen-Wang dynamics on general graphs in the tree uniqueness region of the ferromagnetic Ising model. In particular, when $β< β_c(d)$ where $β_c(d)$ denotes the uniqueness/non-uniqueness threshold on infinite $d$-regular trees, we prove that the relaxation time (i.e., the inverse spectral gap) of the Swendsen-Wang dynamics is $Θ(1)$ on any graph of maximum degree $d \geq 3$. Our proof utilizes a version of the Swendsen-Wang dynamics which only updates isolated vertices. We establish that this variant of the Swendsen-Wang dynamics has mixing time $O(\log{|V|})$ and relaxation time $Θ(1)$ on any graph of maximum degree $d$ for all $β< β_c(d)$. We believe that this Markov chain may be of independent interest, as it is a monotone Swendsen-Wang type chain. As part of our proofs, we provide modest extensions of the technology of Mossel and Sly (2013) for analyzing mixing times and of the censoring result of Peres and Winkler (2013). Both of these results are for the Glauber dynamics, and we extend them here to general monotone Markov chains. This class of dynamics includes for example the heat-bath block dynamics, for which we obtain new tight mixing time bounds.
Predicting Citation Counts with a Neural Network
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2018
Year: 2018

We here describe and present results of a simple neural network that predicts individual researchers' future citation counts based on a variety of data from the researchers' past. For publications available on the open access-server arXiv.org we find a higher predictability than previous studies.
Adversarial Attacks on Variational Autoencoders
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Adversarial attacks are malicious inputs that derail machine-learning models. We propose a scheme to attack autoencoders, as well as a quantitative evaluation framework that correlates well with the qualitative assessment of the attacks. We assess --- with statistically validated experiments --- the resistance to attacks of three variational autoencoders (simple, convolutional, and DRAW) in three datasets (MNIST, SVHN, CelebA), showing that both DRAW's recurrence and attention mechanism lead to better resistance. As autoencoders are proposed for compressing data --- a scenario in which their safety is paramount --- we expect more attention will be given to adversarial attacks on them.
RepMet: Representative-based metric learning for classification and one-shot object detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Distance metric learning (DML) has been successfully applied to object classification, both in the standard regime of rich training data and in the few-shot scenario, where each category is represented by only a few examples. In this work, we propose a new method for DML that simultaneously learns the backbone network parameters, the embedding space, and the multi-modal distribution of each of the training categories in that space, in a single end-to-end training process. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods for DML-based object classification on a variety of standard fine-grained datasets. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the problem of few-shot object detection, by incorporating the proposed DML architecture as a classification head into a standard object detection model. We achieve the best results on the ImageNet-LOC dataset compared to strong baselines, when only a few training examples are available. We also offer the community a new episodic benchmark based on the ImageNet dataset for the few-shot object detection task.
Minimum Shared-Power Edge Cut
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2018
Year: 2018

We introduce a problem called the Minimum Shared-Power Edge Cut (MSPEC). The input to the problem is an undirected edge-weighted graph with distinguished vertices s and t, and the goal is to find an s-t cut by assigning "powers" at the vertices and removing an edge if the sum of the powers at its endpoints is at least its weight. The objective is to minimize the sum of the assigned powers. MSPEC is a graph generalization of a barrier coverage problem in a wireless sensor network: given a set of unit disks with centers in a rectangle, what is the minimum total amount by which we must shrink the disks to permit an intruder to cross the rectangle undetected, i.e. without entering any disc. This is a more sophisticated measure of barrier coverage than the minimum number of disks whose removal breaks the barrier. We develop a fully polynomial time approximation scheme (FPTAS) for MSPEC. We give polynomial time algorithms for the special cases where the edge weights are uniform, or the power values are restricted to a bounded set. Although MSPEC is related to network flow and matching problems, its computational complexity (in P or NP-hard) remains open.
A Holistic Framework for Open Low-Power Internet of Things Technology Ecosystems
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2018
Year: 2018

The low-power Internet of Things (IoT) has been thriving because of the recent technological advancement and ecosystems meeting the vertical application requirements and market needs. An open IoT technology ecosystem of the low-power IoT has become increasingly important to all the players and stakeholders and to the research community. However, there are several mainstream low-power IoT ecosystems available out of industry consortia or research projects and there are different models implied in them. We need to identify the working framework behind the scene and find out the principle of driving the future trends in the industry and research community. With a close look at these IoT technology ecosystems, four major business models are identified that can lead to the proposed ecosystem framework. The framework considers the technical building blocks, market needs, and business vertical segments, where these parts are making the IoT evolve as a whole for the years to come.
Towards Theoretical Understanding of Weak Supervision for Information Retrieval
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2018
Year: 2018

Neural network approaches have recently shown to be effective in several information retrieval (IR) tasks. However, neural approaches often require large volumes of training data to perform effectively, which is not always available. To mitigate the shortage of labeled data, training neural IR models with weak supervision has been recently proposed and received considerable attention in the literature. In weak supervision, an existing model automatically generates labels for a large set of unlabeled data, and a machine learning model is further trained on the generated "weak" data. Surprisingly, it has been shown in prior art that the trained neural model can outperform the weak labeler by a significant margin. Although these obtained improvements have been intuitively justified in previous work, the literature still lacks theoretical justification for the observed empirical findings. In this position paper, we propose to theoretically study weak supervision, in particular for IR tasks, e.g., learning to rank. We briefly review a set of our recent theoretical findings that shed light on learning from weakly supervised data, and provide guidelines on how train learning to rank models with weak supervision.
When Regression Verification Meets CEGAR
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2018
Year: 2018

Software systems evolve throughout their life cycles. Many revisions are produced over time. Model checking each revision of the software is impractical. Regression verification suggests reusing intermediate results from the previous verification runs. This paper proposes a fully automatic regression verification technique in the context of CEGAR. Procedure summaries, which describe the input/output behaviors of a procedure, are proposed as the intermediate results to be reused. Procedure summaries are reasonably small to store, technically easy to process, and do not require much extra computation effort to be reused. Reusing procedure summaries saves much analysis effort on the corresponding procedures. By combining regression verification and CEGAR, we propose a technique that is able to reuse procedure summaries across different abstract precisions and different program revisions. We performed extensive experiments on a large number of industrial programs (534 revisions of 89 Linux kernel device drivers). The results show that our approach can significantly improve the performance of regression verification.
Interpretable Partitioned Embedding for Customized Fashion Outfit Composition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Intelligent fashion outfit composition becomes more and more popular in these years. Some deep learning based approaches reveal competitive composition recently. However, the unexplainable characteristic makes such deep learning based approach cannot meet the the designer, businesses and consumers' urge to comprehend the importance of different attributes in an outfit composition. To realize interpretable and customized fashion outfit compositions, we propose a partitioned embedding network to learn interpretable representations from clothing items. The overall network architecture consists of three components: an auto-encoder module, a supervised attributes module and a multi-independent module. The auto-encoder module serves to encode all useful information into the embedding. In the supervised attributes module, multiple attributes labels are adopted to ensure that different parts of the overall embedding correspond to different attributes. In the multi-independent module, adversarial operation are adopted to fulfill the mutually independent constraint. With the interpretable and partitioned embedding, we then construct an outfit composition graph and an attribute matching map. Given specified attributes description, our model can recommend a ranked list of outfit composition with interpretable matching scores. Extensive experiments demonstrate that 1) the partitioned embedding have unmingled parts which corresponding to different attributes and 2) outfits recommended by our model are more desirable in comparison with the existing methods.
The IQ of Artificial Intelligence
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

All it takes to identify the computer programs which are Artificial Intelligence is to give them a test and award AI to those that pass the test. Let us say that the scores they earn at the test will be called IQ. We cannot pinpoint a minimum IQ threshold that a program has to cover in order to be AI, however, we will choose a certain value. Thus, our definition for AI will be any program the IQ of which is above the chosen value. While this idea has already been implemented in [3], here we will revisit this construct in order to introduce certain improvements.
Compositional abstractions of networks of stochastic hybrid systems under randomly switched topologies
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

In this work, we derive conditions under which abstractions of networks of stochastic hybrid systems can be constructed compositionally. Proposed conditions leverage the interconnection topology, switching randomly between P different interconnection topologies, and the joint dissipativity-type properties of subsystems and their abstractions. The random switching of the interconnection is modelled by a Markov chain. In the proposed framework, the abstraction, itself a stochastic hybrid system (possibly with a lower dimension), can be used as a substitute of the original system in the controller design process. Finally, we provide an example illustrating the effectiveness of the proposed results by designing a controller enforcing some logic properties over the interconnected abstraction and then refining it to the original interconnected system.
Convolutional sparse coding for capturing high speed video content
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2018
Year: 2018

Video capture is limited by the trade-off between spatial and temporal resolution: when capturing videos of high temporal resolution, the spatial resolution decreases due to bandwidth limitations in the capture system. Achieving both high spatial and temporal resolution is only possible with highly specialized and very expensive hardware, and even then the same basic trade-off remains. The recent introduction of compressive sensing and sparse reconstruction techniques allows for the capture of single-shot high-speed video, by coding the temporal information in a single frame, and then reconstructing the full video sequence from this single coded image and a trained dictionary of image patches. In this paper, we first analyze this approach, and find insights that help improve the quality of the reconstructed videos. We then introduce a novel technique, based on convolutional sparse coding (CSC), and show how it outperforms the state-of-the-art, patch-based approach in terms of flexibility and efficiency, due to the convolutional nature of its filter banks. The key idea for CSC high-speed video acquisition is extending the basic formulation by imposing an additional constraint in the temporal dimension, which enforces sparsity of the first-order derivatives over time.
Convolutional Sparse Coding for High Dynamic Range Imaging
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Current HDR acquisition techniques are based on either (i) fusing multibracketed, low dynamic range (LDR) images, (ii) modifying existing hardware and capturing different exposures simultaneously with multiple sensors, or (iii) reconstructing a single image with spatially-varying pixel exposures. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm to recover high-quality HDRI images from a single, coded exposure. The proposed reconstruction method builds on recently-introduced ideas of convolutional sparse coding (CSC); this paper demonstrates how to make CSC practical for HDR imaging. We demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves higher-quality reconstructions than alternative methods, we evaluate optical coding schemes, analyze algorithmic parameters, and build a prototype coded HDR camera that demonstrates the utility of convolutional sparse HDRI coding with a custom hardware platform.
An intuitive control space for material appearance
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2018
Year: 2018

Many different techniques for measuring material appearance have been proposed in the last few years. These have produced large public datasets, which have been used for accurate, data-driven appearance modeling. However, although these datasets have allowed us to reach an unprecedented level of realism in visual appearance, editing the captured data remains a challenge. In this paper, we present an intuitive control space for predictable editing of captured BRDF data, which allows for artistic creation of plausible novel material appearances, bypassing the difficulty of acquiring novel samples. We first synthesize novel materials, extending the existing MERL dataset up to 400 mathematically valid BRDFs. We then design a large-scale experiment, gathering 56,000 subjective ratings on the high-level perceptual attributes that best describe our extended dataset of materials. Using these ratings, we build and train networks of radial basis functions to act as functionals mapping the perceptual attributes to an underlying PCA-based representation of BRDFs. We show that our functionals are excellent predictors of the perceived attributes of appearance. Our control space enables many applications, including intuitive material editing of a wide range of visual properties, guidance for gamut mapping, analysis of the correlation between perceptual attributes, or novel appearance similarity metrics. Moreover, our methodology can be used to derive functionals applicable to classic analytic BRDF representations. We release our code and dataset publicly, in order to support and encourage further research in this direction.
Comparing Fairness Criteria Based on Social Outcome
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

Fairness in algorithmic decision-making processes is attracting increasing concern. When an algorithm is applied to human-related decision-making an estimator solely optimizing its predictive power can learn biases on the existing data, which motivates us the notion of fairness in machine learning. while several different notions are studied in the literature, little studies are done on how these notions affect the individuals. We demonstrate such a comparison between several policies induced by well-known fairness criteria, including the color-blind (CB), the demographic parity (DP), and the equalized odds (EO). We show that the EO is the only criterion among them that removes group-level disparity. Empirical studies on the social welfare and disparity of these policies are conducted.
Detecting Speech Act Types in Developer Question/Answer Conversations During Bug Repair
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2018
Year: 2018

This paper targets the problem of speech act detection in conversations about bug repair. We conduct a "Wizard of Oz" experiment with 30 professional programmers, in which the programmers fix bugs for two hours, and use a simulated virtual assistant for help. Then, we use an open coding manual annotation procedure to identify the speech act types in the conversations. Finally, we train and evaluate a supervised learning algorithm to automatically detect the speech act types in the conversations. In 30 two-hour conversations, we made 2459 annotations and uncovered 26 speech act types. Our automated detection achieved 69% precision and 50% recall. The key application of this work is to advance the state of the art for virtual assistants in software engineering. Virtual assistant technology is growing rapidly, though applications in software engineering are behind those in other areas, largely due to a lack of relevant data and experiments. This paper targets this problem in the area of developer Q/A conversations about bug repair.
Learning to Communicate in UAV-aided Wireless Networks: Map-based Approaches
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

We consider a scenario where an UAV-mounted flying base station is providing data communication services to a number of radio nodes spread over the ground. We focus on the problem of resource-constrained UAV trajectory design with (i) optimal channel parameters learning and (ii) optimal data throughput as key objectives, respectively. While the problem of throughput optimized trajectories has been addressed in prior works, the formulation of an optimized trajectory to efficiently discover the propagation parameters has not yet been addressed. When it comes to the communication phase, the advantage of this work comes from the exploitation of a 3D city map. Unfortunately, the communication trajectory design based on the raw map data leads to an intractable optimization problem. To solve this issue, we introduce a map compression method that allows us to tackle the problem with standard optimization tools. The trajectory optimization is then combined with a node scheduling algorithm. The advantages of the learning-optimized trajectory and of the map compression method are illustrated in the context of intelligent IoT data harvesting.