OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Simple Unsupervised Similarity-Based Aspect Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

In the context of sentiment analysis, there has been growing interest in performing a finer granularity analysis focusing on the specific aspects of the entities being evaluated. This is the goal of Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) which basically involves two tasks: aspect extraction and polarity detection. The first task is responsible for discovering the aspects mentioned in the review text and the second task assigns a sentiment orientation (positive, negative, or neutral) to that aspect. Currently, the state-of-the-art in ABSA consists of the application of deep learning methods such as recurrent, convolutional and attention neural networks. The limitation of these techniques is that they require a lot of training data and are computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose a simple approach called SUAEx for aspect extraction. SUAEx is unsupervised and relies solely on the similarity of word embeddings. Experimental results on datasets from three different domains have shown that SUAEx achieves results that can outperform the state-of-the-art attention-based approach at a fraction of the time.
Confidence-aware Adversarial Learning for Self-supervised Semantic Matching
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we aim to address the challenging task of semantic matching where matching ambiguity is difficult to resolve even with learned deep features. We tackle this problem by taking into account the confidence in predictions and develop a novel refinement strategy to correct partial matching errors. Specifically, we introduce a Confidence-Aware Semantic Matching Network (CAMNet) which instantiates two key ideas of our approach. First, we propose to estimate a dense confidence map for a matching prediction through self-supervised learning. Second, based on the estimated confidence, we refine initial predictions by propagating reliable matching to the rest of locations on the image plane. In addition, we develop a new hybrid loss in which we integrate a semantic alignment loss with a confidence loss, and an adversarial loss that measures the quality of semantic correspondence. We are the first that exploit confidence during refinement to improve semantic matching accuracy and develop an end-to-end self-supervised adversarial learning procedure for the entire matching network. We evaluate our method on two public benchmarks, on which we achieve top performance over the prior state of the art. We will release our source code at https://github.com/ShuaiyiHuang/CAMNet.
AgingMapGAN (AMGAN): High-Resolution Controllable Face Aging with Spatially-Aware Conditional GANs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Existing approaches and datasets for face aging produce results skewed towards the mean, with individual variations and expression wrinkles often invisible or overlooked in favor of global patterns such as the fattening of the face. Moreover, they offer little to no control over the way the faces are aged and can difficultly be scaled to large images, thus preventing their usage in many real-world applications. To address these limitations, we present an approach to change the appearance of a high-resolution image using ethnicity-specific aging information and weak spatial supervision to guide the aging process. We demonstrate the advantage of our proposed method in terms of quality, control, and how it can be used on high-definition images while limiting the computational overhead.
On Course, But Not There Yet: Enterprise Architecture Conformance and Benefits in Systems Development
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

Various claims have been made regarding the benefits that Enterprise Architecture (EA) delivers for both individual systems development projects and the organization as a whole. This paper presents the statistical findings of a survey study (n=293) carried out to empirically test these claims. First, we investigated which techniques are used in practice to stimulate conformance to EA. Secondly, we studied which benefits are actually gained. Thirdly, we verified whether EA creators (e.g. enterprise architects) and EA users (e.g. project members) differ in their perceptions regarding EA. Finally, we investigated which of the applied techniques most effectively increase project conformance to and effectiveness of EA. A multivariate regression analysis demonstrates that three techniques have a major impact on conformance: carrying out compliance assessments, management propagation of EA and providing assistance to projects. Although project conformance plays a central role in reaping various benefits at both the organizational and the project level, it is shown that a number of important benefits have not yet been fully achieved.
Using the discrete radon transformation for grayscale image moments
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Image moments are weighted sums over pixel values in a given image and are used in object detection and localization. Raw image moments are derived directly from the image and are fundamental in deriving moment invariants quantities. The current general algorithm for raw image moments is computationally expensive and the number of multiplications needed scales with the number of pixels in the image. For an image of size (N,M), it has O(NM) multiplications. In this paper we outline an algorithm using the Discrete Radon Transformation for computing the raw image moments of a grayscale image. It reduces two dimensional moment calculations to linear combinations of one dimensional moment calculations. We show that the number of multiplications needed scales as O(N + M), making it faster then the most widely used algorithm of raw image moments.
LED wristbands for Cell-based Crowd Evacuation: an Adaptive Exit-choice Guidance System Architecture
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2020
Year: 2020

Cell-based crowd evacuation systems provide adaptive or static exit-choice indications that favor a coordinated group dynamic, improving evacuation time and safety. While a great effort has been made to modeling its control logic by assuming an ideal communication and positioning infrastructure, the architectural dimension and the influence of pedestrian positioning uncertainty have been largely overlooked. In our previous research, a Cell-based crowd evacuation system (CellEVAC) was proposed that dynamically allocates exit gates to pedestrians in a cell-based pedestrian positioning infrastructure. This system provides optimal exit-choice indications through color-based indications and a control logic module built upon an optimized discrete-choice model. Here, we investigate how location-aware technologies and wearable devices can be used for a realistic deployment of CellEVAC. We consider a simulated real evacuation scenario (Madrid Arena) and propose a system architecture for CellEVAC that includes: a controller node, a radio-controlled LED wristband subsystem, and a cell-node network equipped with active Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) devices. These subsystems coordinate to provide control, display and positioning capabilities. We quantitatively study the sensitivity of evacuation time and safety to uncertainty in the positioning system. Results showed that CellEVAC was operational within a limited range of positioning uncertainty. Further analyses revealed that reprogramming the control logic module through a simulation-optimization process, simulating the positioning system's expected uncertainty level, improved the CellEVAC performance in scenarios with poor positioning systems.
Spatiotemporal Action Recognition in Restaurant Videos
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Spatiotemporal action recognition is the task of locating and classifying actions in videos. Our project applies this task to analyzing video footage of restaurant workers preparing food, for which potential applications include automated checkout and inventory management. Such videos are quite different from the standardized datasets that researchers are used to, as they involve small objects, rapid actions, and notoriously unbalanced data classes. We explore two approaches. The first approach involves the familiar object detector You Only Look Once, and another applying a recently proposed analogue for action recognition, You Only Watch Once. In the first, we design and implement a novel, recurrent modification of YOLO using convolutional LSTMs and explore the various subtleties in the training of such a network. In the second, we study the ability of YOWOs three dimensional convolutions to capture the spatiotemporal features of our unique dataset
Accelerating Force-Directed Graph Drawing with RT Cores
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2020
Year: 2020

Graph drawing with spring embedders employs a V x V computation phase over the graph's vertex set to compute repulsive forces. Here, the efficacy of forces diminishes with distance: a vertex can effectively only influence other vertices in a certain radius around its position. Therefore, the algorithm lends itself to an implementation using search data structures to reduce the runtime complexity. NVIDIA RT cores implement hierarchical tree traversal in hardware. We show how to map the problem of finding graph layouts with force-directed methods to a ray tracing problem that can subsequently be implemented with dedicated ray tracing hardware. With that, we observe speedups of 4x to 13x over a CUDA software implementation.
What Do We Actually Learn from Evaluations in the "Heroic Era" of Visualization?
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

We often point to the relative increase in the amount and sophistication of evaluations of visualization systems versus the earliest days of the field as evidence that we are maturing as a field. I am not so convinced. In particular, I feel that evaluations of visualizations, as they are ordinarily performed in the field or asked for by reviewers, fail to tell us very much that is useful or transferable about visualization systems, regardless of the statistical rigor or ecological validity of the evaluation. Through a series of thought experiments, I show how our current conceptions of visualization evaluations can be incomplete, capricious, or useless for the goal of furthering the field, more in line with the "heroic age" of medical science than the rigorous evidence-based field we might aspire to be. I conclude by suggesting that our models for designing evaluations, and our priorities as a field, should be revisited.
Differentiating a Tensor Language
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2020
Year: 2020

How does one compile derivatives of tensor programs, such that the resulting code is purely functional (hence easier to optimize and parallelize) and provably efficient relative to the original program? We show that naively differentiating tensor code---as done in popular systems like Tensorflow and PyTorch---can cause asymptotic slowdowns in pathological cases, violating the Cheap Gradients Principle. However, all existing automatic differentiation methods that guarantee this principle (for variable size data) do so by relying on += mutation through aliases/pointers---which complicates downstream optimization. We provide the first purely functional, provably efficient, adjoint/reverse-mode derivatives of array/tensor code by explicitly accounting for sparsity. We do this by focusing on the indicator function from Iverson's APL. We also introduce a new "Tensor SSA" normal form and a new derivation of reverse-mode automatic differentiation based on the universal property of inner-products.
Delay-Efficient and Reliable Data Relaying in Ultra Dense Networks using Rateless Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

We investigate the problem of delay-efficient and reliable data delivery in ultra-dense networks (UDNs) that constitute macro base stations (MBSs), small base stations (SBSs), and mobile users. Considering a two-hop data delivery system, we propose a partial decode-and-forward (PDF) relaying strategy together with a simple and intuitive amicable encoding scheme for rateless codes to significantly improve user experience in terms of end-to-end delay. Simulation results verify that our amicable encoding scheme is efficient in improving the intermediate performance of rateless codes. It also verifies that our proposed PDF significantly improves the performance of the decode-and-forward (DF) strategy, and that PDF is much more robust against channel degradation. Overall, the proposed strategy and encoding scheme are efficient towards delay-sensitive data delivery in the UDN scenarios.
Transductive Information Maximization For Few-Shot Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We introduce Transductive Infomation Maximization (TIM) for few-shot learning. Our method maximizes the mutual information between the query features and their label predictions for a given few-shot task, in conjunction with a supervision loss based on the support set. Furthermore, we propose a new alternating-direction solver for our mutual-information loss, which substantially speeds up transductive-inference convergence over gradient-based optimization, while yielding similar accuracy. TIM inference is modular: it can be used on top of any base-training feature extractor. Following standard transductive few-shot settings, our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that TIM outperforms state-of-the-art methods significantly across various datasets and networks, while used on top of a fixed feature extractor trained with simple cross-entropy on the base classes, without resorting to complex meta-learning schemes. It consistently brings between 2% and 5% improvement in accuracy over the best performing method, not only on all the well-established few-shot benchmarks but also on more challenging scenarios,with domain shifts and larger numbers of classes.
Likelihood Landscapes: A Unifying Principle Behind Many Adversarial Defenses
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Convolutional Neural Networks have been shown to be vulnerable to adversarial examples, which are known to locate in subspaces close to where normal data lies but are not naturally occurring and of low probability. In this work, we investigate the potential effect defense techniques have on the geometry of the likelihood landscape - likelihood of the input images under the trained model. We first propose a way to visualize the likelihood landscape leveraging an energy-based model interpretation of discriminative classifiers. Then we introduce a measure to quantify the flatness of the likelihood landscape. We observe that a subset of adversarial defense techniques results in a similar effect of flattening the likelihood landscape. We further explore directly regularizing towards a flat landscape for adversarial robustness.
TradAO: A Visual Analytics System for Trading Algorithm Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

With the wide applications of algorithmic trading, it has become critical for traders to build a winning trading algorithm to beat the market. However, due to the lack of efficient tools, traders mainly rely on their memory to manually compare the algorithm instances of a trading algorithm and further select the best trading algorithm instance for the real trading deployment. We work closely with industry practitioners to discover and consolidate user requirements and develop an interactive visual analytics system for trading algorithm optimization. Structured expert interviews are conducted to evaluateTradAOand a representative case study is documented for illustrating the system effectiveness. To the best of our knowledge, previous financial data visual analyses have mainly aimed to assist investment managers in investment portfolio analysis but have neglected the need of traders in developing trading algorithms for portfolio execution.TradAOis the first visual analytics system that assists users in comprehensively exploring the performances of a trading algorithm with different parameter settings.
8 Steps to 3.7 TFLOP/s on NVIDIA V100 GPU: Roofline Analysis and Other Tricks
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

Performance optimization can be a daunting task especially as the hardware architecture becomes more and more complex. This paper takes a kernel from the Materials Science code BerkeleyGW, and demonstrates a few performance analysis and optimization techniques. Despite challenges such as high register usage, low occupancy, complex data access patterns, and the existence of several long-latency instructions, we have achieved 3.7 TFLOP/s of double-precision performance on an NVIDIA V100 GPU, with 8 optimization steps. This is 55% of the theoretical peak, 6.7 TFLOP/s, at nominal frequency 1312 MHz, and 70% of the more customized peak based on our 58% FMA ratio, 5.3 TFLOP/s. An array of techniques used to analyze this OpenACC kernel and optimize its performance are shown, including the use of hierarchical Roofline performance model and the performance tool Nsight Compute. This kernel exhibits computational characteristics that are commonly seen in many high-performance computing (HPC) applications, and are expected to be very helpful to a general audience of HPC developers and computational scientists, as they pursue more performance on NVIDIA GPUs.
Secure Two-Way Communications via Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

In this letter, we propose to exploit an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) to secure multiuser two-way communications. Specifically, two end users simultaneously transmit their signals, where the signal of one user is exploited as information jamming to disrupt the reception of the other user's signal at an eavesdropper. A simple user scheduling scheme is developed to improve the secrecy rate. Analytical results in terms of a lower bound on the average secrecy rate and its scaling laws are derived to evaluate the secrecy performance and obtain valuable design insights. Simulation results are provided to confirm the accuracy of the theoretical analysis and validate the secrecy improvement of the proposed scheme over other baseline schemes.
An Energy Efficient Authentication Scheme using Chebyshev Chaotic Map for Smart Grid Environment
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

As one of the important applications of Smart grid, charging between electric vehicles has attracted much attention. However, authentication between vehicle users and an aggregator may be vulnerable to various attacks due to the usage of wireless communications. In order to reduce the computational costs yet preserve required security, the Chebyshev chaotic map based authentication schemes are proposed. However, the security requirements of Chebyshev polynomials bring a new challenge to the design of authentication schemes based on Chebyshev chaotic maps. To solve this issue, we propose a practical Chebyshev polynomial algorithm by using a binary exponentiation algorithm based on square matrix to achieve secure and efficient Chebyshev polynomial computation. We further apply the proposed algorithm to construct an energy-efficient authentication and key agreement scheme for smart grid environments. Compared with state-of-the-art schemes, the proposed authentication scheme effectively reduces the computational costs and communication costs by adopting the proposed Chebyshev polynomial algorithm. Furthermore, the ProVerif tool is employed to analyze the security of the proposed authentication scheme. Our experimental results justified that our proposed authentication scheme can outperform state-of-the-art schemes in terms of the computational overhead while achieving privacy protection.
Mitigating the Latency-Area Tradeoffs for DRAM Design with Coarse-Grained Monolithic 3D (M3D) Integration
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2020
Year: 2020

Over the years, the DRAM latency has not scaled proportionally with its density due to the cost-centric mindset of the DRAM industry. Prior work has shown that this shortcoming can be overcome by reducing the critical length of DRAM access path. However, doing so decreases DRAM area-efficiency, exacerbating the latency-area tradeoffs for DRAM design. In this paper, we show that reorganizing DRAM cell-arrays using the emerging monolithic 3D (M3D) integration technology can mitigate these fundamental latency-area tradeoffs. Based on our evaluation results for PARSEC benchmarks, our designed M3D DRAM cell-array organizations can yield up to 9.56% less latency, up to 4.96% less power consumption, and up to 21.21% less energy-delay product (EDP), with up to 14% less DRAM die area, com-pared to the conventional 2D DDR4 DRAM.
Decision Tree J48 at SemEval-2020 Task 9: Sentiment Analysis for Code-Mixed Social Media Text (Hinglish)
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

This paper discusses the design of the system used for providing a solution for the problem given at SemEval-2020 Task 9 where sentiment analysis of code-mixed language Hindi and English needed to be performed. This system uses Weka as a tool for providing the classifier for the classification of tweets and python is used for loading the data from the files provided and cleaning it. Only part of the training data was provided to the system for classifying the tweets in the test data set on which evaluation of the system was done. The system performance was assessed using the official competition evaluation metric F1-score. Classifier was trained on two sets of training data which resulted in F1 scores of 0.4972 and 0.5316.
Making Neural Networks Interpretable with Attribution: Application to Implicit Signals Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Explaining recommendations enables users to understand whether recommended items are relevant to their needs and has been shown to increase their trust in the system. More generally, if designing explainable machine learning models is key to check the sanity and robustness of a decision process and improve their efficiency, it however remains a challenge for complex architectures, especially deep neural networks that are often deemed "black-box". In this paper, we propose a novel formulation of interpretable deep neural networks for the attribution task. Differently to popular post-hoc methods, our approach is interpretable by design. Using masked weights, hidden features can be deeply attributed, split into several input-restricted sub-networks and trained as a boosted mixture of experts. Experimental results on synthetic data and real-world recommendation tasks demonstrate that our method enables to build models achieving close predictive performances to their non-interpretable counterparts, while providing informative attribution interpretations.
The Effects of Quantum Randomness on a System Exhibiting Computational Creativity
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

We present experimental results on the effects of using quantum or 'truly' random numbers, as opposed to pseudorandom numbers, in a system that exhibits computational creativity (given its ability to compose original chess problems). The results indicate that using quantum random numbers too often or too seldom in the composing process does not have any positive effect on the output generated. Interestingly, there is a 'sweet spot' of using quantum random numbers 15% of the time that results in fewer statistical outliers. Overall, it would appear that there may indeed be a slight advantage to using quantum random numbers in such a system and this may also be true in other systems that exhibit computational creativity. The benefits of doing so should, however, be weighed against the overhead of obtaining quantum random numbers in contrast to a pseudorandom number generator that is likely more convenient to incorporate.