OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Finding Theme Communities from Database Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2019
Year: 2019

Given a database network where each vertex is associated with a transaction database, we are interested in finding theme communities. Here, a theme community is a cohesive subgraph such that a common pattern is frequent in all transaction databases associated with the vertices in the subgraph. Finding all theme communities from a database network enjoys many novel applications. However, it is challenging since even counting the number of all theme communities in a database network is #P-hard. Inspired by the observation that a theme community shrinks when the length of the pattern increases, we investigate several properties of theme communities and develop TCFI, a scalable algorithm that uses these properties to effectively prune the patterns that cannot form any theme community. We also design TC-Tree, a scalable algorithm that decomposes and indexes theme communities efficiently. Retrieving a ranked list of theme communities from a TC-Tree of hundreds of millions of theme communities takes less than 1 second. Extensive experiments and a case study demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of TCFI and TC-Tree in discovering and querying meaningful theme communities from large database networks.
Bobtail: A Proof-of-Work Target that Minimizes Blockchain Mining Variance (Draft)
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

Blockchain systems are designed to produce blocks at a constant average rate. The most popular systems currently employ a Proof of Work (PoW) algorithm as a means of creating these blocks. Bitcoin produces, on average, one block every 10 minutes. An unfortunate limitation of all deployed PoW blockchain systems is that the time between blocks has high variance. For example, 5% of the time, Bitcoin's inter-block time is at least 40 minutes. This variance impedes the consistent flow of validated transactions through the system. We propose an alternative process for PoW-based block discovery that results in an inter-block time with significantly lower variance. Our algorithm, called Bobtail, generalizes the current algorithm by comparing the mean of the k lowest order statistics to a target. We show that the variance of inter-block times decreases as k increases. If our approach were applied to Bitcoin, about 80% of blocks would be found within 7 to 12 minutes, and nearly every block would be found within 5 to 18 minutes; the average inter-block time would remain at 10 minutes. Further, we show that low-variance mining significantly thwarts doublespend and selfish mining attacks. For Bitcoin and Ethereum currently (k=1), an attacker with 40% of the mining power will succeed with 30% probability when the merchant sets up an embargo of 8 blocks; however, when k>=20, the probability of success falls to less than 1%. Similarly, for Bitcoin and Ethereum currently, a selfish miner with 40% of the mining power will claim about 66% of blocks; however, when k>=5, the same miner will find that selfish mining is less successful than honest mining. The cost of our approach is a larger block header.
Deep Haptic Model Predictive Control for Robot-Assisted Dressing
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

Robot-assisted dressing offers an opportunity to benefit the lives of many people with disabilities, such as some older adults. However, robots currently lack common sense about the physical implications of their actions on people. The physical implications of dressing are complicated by non-rigid garments, which can result in a robot indirectly applying high forces to a person's body. We present a deep recurrent model that, when given a proposed action by the robot, predicts the forces a garment will apply to a person's body. We also show that a robot can provide better dressing assistance by using this model with model predictive control. The predictions made by our model only use haptic and kinematic observations from the robot's end effector, which are readily attainable. Collecting training data from real world physical human-robot interaction can be time consuming, costly, and put people at risk. Instead, we train our predictive model using data collected in an entirely self-supervised fashion from a physics-based simulation. We evaluated our approach with a PR2 robot that attempted to pull a hospital gown onto the arms of 10 human participants. With a 0.2s prediction horizon, our controller succeeded at high rates and lowered applied force while navigating the garment around a persons fist and elbow without getting caught. Shorter prediction horizons resulted in significantly reduced performance with the sleeve catching on the participants' fists and elbows, demonstrating the value of our model's predictions. These behaviors of mitigating catches emerged from our deep predictive model and the controller objective function, which primarily penalizes high forces.
DeepER -- Deep Entity Resolution
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2019
Year: 2019

Entity resolution (ER) is a key data integration problem. Despite the efforts in 70+ years in all aspects of ER, there is still a high demand for democratizing ER - humans are heavily involved in labeling data, performing feature engineering, tuning parameters, and defining blocking functions. With the recent advances in deep learning, in particular distributed representation of words (a.k.a. word embeddings), we present a novel ER system, called DeepER, that achieves good accuracy, high efficiency, as well as ease-of-use (i.e., much less human efforts). For accuracy, we use sophisticated composition methods, namely uni- and bi-directional recurrent neural networks (RNNs) with long short term memory (LSTM) hidden units, to convert each tuple to a distributed representation (i.e., a vector), which can in turn be used to effectively capture similarities between tuples. We consider both the case where pre-trained word embeddings are available as well the case where they are not; we present ways to learn and tune the distributed representations. For efficiency, we propose a locality sensitive hashing (LSH) based blocking approach that uses distributed representations of tuples; it takes all attributes of a tuple into consideration and produces much smaller blocks, compared with traditional methods that consider only a few attributes. For ease-of-use, DeepER requires much less human labeled data and does not need feature engineering, compared with traditional machine learning based approaches which require handcrafted features, and similarity functions along with their associated thresholds. We evaluate our algorithms on multiple datasets (including benchmarks, biomedical data, as well as multi-lingual data) and the extensive experimental results show that DeepER outperforms existing solutions.
Compression of data streams down to their information content
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

According to Kolmogorov complexity, every finite binary string is compressible to a shortest code -- its information content -- from which it is effectively recoverable. We investigate the extent to which this holds for infinite binary sequences (streams). We devise a new coding method which uniformly codes every stream $X$ into an algorithmically random stream $Y$, in such a way that the first $n$ bits of $X$ are recoverable from the first $I(X\upharpoonright_n)$ bits of $Y$, where $I$ is any partial computable information content measure which is defined on all prefixes of $X$, and where $X\upharpoonright_n$ is the initial segment of $X$ of length $n$. As a consequence, if $g$ is any computable upper bound on the initial segment prefix-free complexity of $X$, then $X$ is computable from an algorithmically random $Y$ with oracle-use at most $g$. Alternatively (making no use of such a computable bound $g$) one can achieve an oracle-use bounded above by $K(X\upharpoonright_n)+\log n$. This provides a strong analogue of Shannon's source coding theorem for algorithmic information theory.
Topological Scott Convergence Theorem
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2019
Year: 2019

Recently, J. D. Lawson encouraged the domain theory community to consider the scientific program of developing domain theory in the wider context of $T_0$ spaces instead of restricting to posets. In this paper, we respond to this calling with an attempt to formulate a topological version of the Scott Convergence Theorem, i.e., an order-theoretic characterisation of those posets for which the Scott-convergence $\mathcal{S}$ is topological. To do this, we make use of the $\mathcal{ID}$ replacement principle to create topological analogues of well-known domain-theoretic concepts, e.g., $\mathcal{I}$-continuous spaces correspond to continuous posets, as $\mathcal{I}$-convergence corresponds to $\mathcal{S}$-convergence. In this paper, we consider two novel topological concepts, namely, the $\mathcal{I}$-stable spaces and the $\mathcal{DI}$ spaces, and as a result we obtain some necessary (respectively, sufficient) conditions under which the convergence structure $\mathcal{I}$ is topological.
Performance Analysis of a Cooperative Wireless Network with Adaptive Relays
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

In this work, we investigate a slotted-time relay assisted cooperative random access wireless network with multipacket (MPR) reception capabilities. MPR refers to the capability of a wireless node to successfully receive packets from more than two other modes that transmit simultaneously at the same slot. We consider a network of $N$ saturated sources that transmit packets to a common destination node with the cooperation of two infinite capacity relay nodes. The relays assist the sources by forwarding the packets that failed to reach the destination. Moreover, the relays have also packets of their own to transmit to the destination. We further assume that the relays employ a state-dependent retransmission control mechanism. In particular, a relay node accordingly adapts its transmission probability based on the status of the other relay. Such a protocol is towards self-aware networks and leads to substantial performance gains in terms of delay. We investigate the stability region and the throughput performance for the full MPR model. Moreover, for the asymmetric two-sources, two-relay case we derive the generating function of the stationary joint queue-length distribution with the aid of the theory of boundary value problems. For the symmetric case, we obtain explicit expressions for the average queueing delay in a relay node without solving a boundary value problem. Extensive numerical examples are presented and provide insights on the system performance.
Differential Privacy as a Causal Property
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

We present associative and causal views of differential privacy. Under the associative view, the possibility of dependencies between data points precludes a simple statement of differential privacy's guarantee as conditioning upon a single changed data point. However, we show that a simple characterization of differential privacy as limiting the effect of a single data point does exist under the causal view, without independence assumptions about data points. We believe this characterization resolves disagreement and confusion in prior work about the consequences of differential privacy. The associative view needing assumptions boils down to the contrapositive of the maxim that correlation doesn't imply causation: differential privacy ensuring a lack of (strong) causation does not imply a lack of (strong) association. Our characterization also opens up the possibility of applying results from statistics, experimental design, and science about causation while studying differential privacy.
An operational characterization of mutual information in algorithmic information theory
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

We show that the mutual information, in the sense of Kolmogorov complexity, of any pair of strings $x$ and $y$ is equal, up to logarithmic precision, to the length of the longest shared secret key that two parties, one having $x$ and the complexity profile of the pair and the other one having $y$ and the complexity profile of the pair, can establish via a probabilistic protocol with interaction on a public channel. For $\ell > 2$, the longest shared secret that can be established from a tuple of strings $(x_1, \ldots , x_\ell)$ by $\ell$ parties, each one having one component of the tuple and the complexity profile of the tuple, is equal, up to logarithmic precision, to the complexity of the tuple minus the minimum communication necessary for distributing the tuple to all parties. We establish the communication complexity of secret key agreement protocols that produce a secret key of maximal length, for protocols with public randomness. We also show that if the communication complexity drops below the established threshold, then only very short secret keys can be obtained.
Robust importance-weighted cross-validation under sample selection bias
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Cross-validation under sample selection bias can, in principle, be done by importance-weighting the empirical risk. However, the importance-weighted risk estimator produces sub-optimal hyperparameter estimates in problem settings where large weights arise with high probability. We study its sampling variance as a function of the training data distribution and introduce a control variate to increase its robustness to problematically large weights.
SERENADE: A Parallel Randomized Algorithm Suite for Crossbar Scheduling in Input-Queued Switches
Venue: arXiv cs.PF 2019
Year: 2019

Most of today's high-speed switches and routers adopt an input-queued crossbar switch architecture. Such a switch needs to compute a matching (crossbar schedule) between the input ports and output ports during each switching cycle (time slot). A key research challenge in designing large (in number of input/output ports $N$) input-queued crossbar switches is to develop crossbar scheduling algorithms that can compute "high quality" matchings -- i.e., those that result in high switch throughput (ideally $100\%$) and low queueing delays for packets -- at line rates. SERENA is one such algorithm: it outputs excellent matching decisions that result in $100\%$ switch throughput and reasonably good queueing delays. However, since SERENA is a centralized algorithm with $O(N)$ computational complexity, it cannot support switches that both are large and have a very high line rate per port. In this work, we propose SERENADE (SERENA, the Distributed Edition), a parallel iterative algorithm that emulates SERENA in only $O(\log N)$ iterations between input ports and output ports, and hence has a time complexity of only $O(\log N)$ per port. We prove that SERENADE can exactly emulate SERENA. We also propose an early-stop version of SERENADE, called O-SERENADE, to only approximately emulate SERENA. Through extensive simulations, we show that O-SERENADE can achieve 100\% throughput and that it has similar as or slightly better delay performance than SERENA under various load conditions and traffic patterns.
On the Computational Complexity of the Bipartizing Matching Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2019
Year: 2019

We study the problem of determining whether a given graph~$G=(V,E)$ admits a matching~$M$ whose removal destroys all odd cycles of~$G$ (or equivalently whether~$G-M$ is bipartite). This problem is equivalent to determine whether~$G$ admits a~$(2,1)$-coloring, which is a~$2$-coloring of~$V(G)$ such that each color class induces a graph of maximum degree at most~$1$. We determine a dichotomy related to the~{\sf NP}-completeness of this problem, where we show that it is~{\sf NP}-complete even for $3$-colorable planar graphs of maximum degree~$4$, while it is known that the problem can be solved in polynomial time for graphs of maximum degree at most~$3$. In addition we present polynomial-time algorithms for some graph classes, including graphs in which every odd cycle is a triangle, graphs of small dominating sets, and~$P_5$-free graphs. Additionally, we show that the problem is fixed parameter tractable when parameterized by the clique-width, which implies polynomial-time solution for many interesting graph classes, such as distance-hereditary, outerplanar, and chordal graphs. Finally, an~$O\left(2^{O\left(vc(G)\right)} \cdot n\right)$-time algorithm and a kernel of at most~$2\cdot nd(G)$ vertices are presented, where~$vc(G)$ and~$nd(G)$ are the vertex cover number and the neighborhood diversity of~$G$, respectively.
Learning With Errors and Extrapolated Dihedral Cosets
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

The hardness of the learning with errors (LWE) problem is one of the most fruitful resources of modern cryptography. In particular, it is one of the most prominent candidates for secure post-quantum cryptography. Understanding its quantum complexity is therefore an important goal. We show that under quantum polynomial time reductions, LWE is equivalent to a relaxed version of the dihedral coset problem (DCP), which we call extrapolated DCP (eDCP). The extent of extrapolation varies with the LWE noise rate. By considering different extents of extrapolation, our result generalizes Regev's famous proof that if DCP is in BQP (quantum poly-time) then so is LWE (FOCS'02). We also discuss a connection between eDCP and Childs and Van Dam's algorithm for generalized hidden shift problems (SODA'07). Our result implies that a BQP solution for LWE might not require the full power of solving DCP, but rather only a solution for its relaxed version, eDCP, which could be easier.
Faster Carry Bit Computation for Adder Circuits with Prescribed Arrival Times
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

We consider the fundamental problem of constructing fast circuits for the carry bit computation in binary addition. Up to a small additive constant, the carry bit computation reduces to computing an \aop, i.e., a formula of type $t_0 \land (t_1 \lor (t_2 \land ( \dots t_{m-1}) \dots )$ or $t_0 \lor (t_1 \land (t_2 \lor ( \dots t_{m-1}) \dots )$. We present an algorithm that computes the fastest known Boolean circuit for an \aop~ with given arrival times $a(t_0), \dotsc, a(t_{m-1})$ for the input signals. Our objective function is delay, a natural generalization of depth with respect to arrival times. The maximum delay of the circuit we compute is $\log_2 W + \log_2 \log_2 m + \log_2 \log_2 \log_2 m + 4.3$, where $W := \sum_{i = 0}^{m-1} 2^{a(t_i)}$. Note that $\lceil \log_2 W \rceil$ is a lower bound on the delay of any circuit depending on inputs $t_0, \dotsc, t_{m-1}$ with prescribed arrival times. Our method yields the fastest circuits for \aop s, carry bit computation and adders in terms of delay known so far.
Deterministic Rendezvous at a Node of Agents with Arbitrary Velocities
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

We consider the task of rendezvous in networks modeled as undirected graphs. Two mobile agents with different labels, starting at different nodes of an anonymous graph, have to meet. This task has been considered in the literature under two alternative scenarios: weak and strong. Under the weak scenario, agents may meet either at a node or inside an edge. Under the strong scenario, they have to meet at a node, and they do not even notice meetings inside an edge. Rendezvous algorithms under the strong scenario are known for synchronous agents. For asynchronous agents, rendezvous under the strong scenario is impossible even in the two-node graph, and hence only algorithms under the weak scenario were constructed. In this paper we show that rendezvous under the strong scenario is possible for agents with restricted asynchrony: agents have the same measure of time but the adversary can arbitrarily impose the speed of traversing each edge by each of the agents. We construct a deterministic rendezvous algorithm for such agents, working in time polynomial in the size of the graph, in the length of the smaller label, and in the largest edge traversal time.
Bounded Quantifier Instantiation for Checking Inductive Invariants
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2019
Year: 2019

We consider the problem of checking whether a proposed invariant $φ$ expressed in first-order logic with quantifier alternation is inductive, i.e. preserved by a piece of code. While the problem is undecidable, modern SMT solvers can sometimes solve it automatically. However, they employ powerful quantifier instantiation methods that may diverge, especially when $φ$ is not preserved. A notable difficulty arises due to counterexamples of infinite size. This paper studies Bounded-Horizon instantiation, a natural method for guaranteeing the termination of SMT solvers. The method bounds the depth of terms used in the quantifier instantiation process. We show that this method is surprisingly powerful for checking quantified invariants in uninterpreted domains. Furthermore, by producing partial models it can help the user diagnose the case when $φ$ is not inductive, especially when the underlying reason is the existence of infinite counterexamples. Our main technical result is that Bounded-Horizon is at least as powerful as instrumentation, which is a manual method to guarantee convergence of the solver by modifying the program so that it admits a purely universal invariant. We show that with a bound of 1 we can simulate a natural class of instrumentations, without the need to modify the code and in a fully automatic way. We also report on a prototype implementation on top of Z3, which we used to verify several examples by Bounded-Horizon of bound 1.
One pixel attack for fooling deep neural networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Recent research has revealed that the output of Deep Neural Networks (DNN) can be easily altered by adding relatively small perturbations to the input vector. In this paper, we analyze an attack in an extremely limited scenario where only one pixel can be modified. For that we propose a novel method for generating one-pixel adversarial perturbations based on differential evolution (DE). It requires less adversarial information (a black-box attack) and can fool more types of networks due to the inherent features of DE. The results show that 67.97% of the natural images in Kaggle CIFAR-10 test dataset and 16.04% of the ImageNet (ILSVRC 2012) test images can be perturbed to at least one target class by modifying just one pixel with 74.03% and 22.91% confidence on average. We also show the same vulnerability on the original CIFAR-10 dataset. Thus, the proposed attack explores a different take on adversarial machine learning in an extreme limited scenario, showing that current DNNs are also vulnerable to such low dimension attacks. Besides, we also illustrate an important application of DE (or broadly speaking, evolutionary computation) in the domain of adversarial machine learning: creating tools that can effectively generate low-cost adversarial attacks against neural networks for evaluating robustness.