OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Technical Analysis of Security Infrastructure in RFID Technology
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2015
Year: 2015

The paper is a technical analysis of the security infrastructure in the field of RFID technology. The paper briefly discusses the architecture of the RFID technology. Then it analyses the various features and advantages RFID technology has over the existing technologies like bar codes. This is followed by a discussion of the various disadvantages and security drawbacks of RFID technology that prevents its widespread adoption in the mainstream market. The paper concludes with a brief analysis of some of the security measures that are implemented within the RFID technology for securing up the whole infrastructure. The main aim of the paper is to focus on the drawbacks of the pre-existing security measures in RFID technology as well as to discuss the direction in which further research has to be carried out without the compromise on its unique features.
Instance Optimal Geometric Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2015
Year: 2015

We prove the existence of an algorithm $A$ for computing 2-d or 3-d convex hulls that is optimal for every point set in the following sense: for every sequence $σ$ of $n$ points and for every algorithm $A'$ in a certain class $\mathcal{A}$, the running time of $A$ on input $σ$ is at most a constant factor times the maximum running time of $A'$ on the worst possible permutation of $σ$ for $A'$. We establish a stronger property: for every sequence $σ$ of points and every algorithm $A'$, the running time of $A$ on $σ$ is at most a constant factor times the average running time of $A'$ over all permutations of $σ$. We call algorithms satisfying these properties instance-optimal in the order-oblivious and random-order setting. Such instance-optimal algorithms simultaneously subsume output-sensitive algorithms and distribution-dependent average-case algorithms, and all algorithms that do not take advantage of the order of the input or that assume the input is given in a random order. The class $\mathcal{A}$ under consideration consists of all algorithms in a decision tree model where the tests involve only multilinear functions with a constant number of arguments. To establish an instance-specific lower bound, we deviate from traditional Ben-Or-style proofs and adopt a new adversary argument. For 2-d convex hulls, we prove that a version of the well known algorithm by Kirkpatrick and Seidel (1986) or Chan, Snoeyink, and Yap (1995) already attains this lower bound. For 3-d convex hulls, we propose a new algorithm. We further obtain instance-optimal results for a few other standard problems in computational geometry. Our framework also reveals connection to distribution-sensitive data structures and yields new results as a byproduct, for example, on on-line orthogonal range searching in 2-d and on-line halfspace range reporting in 2-d and 3-d.
An Effective Algorithmic Framework for Near Optimal Multi-Robot Path Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2015
Year: 2015

We present a centralized algorithmic framework for solving multi-robot path planning problems in general, two-dimensional, continuous environments while minimizing globally the task completion time. The framework obtains high levels of effectiveness through the composition of an optimal discretization of the continuous environment and the subsequent fast, near-optimal resolution of the resulting discrete planning problem. This principled approach achieves orders of magnitudes better performance with respect to both speed and the supported robot density. For a wide variety of environments, our method is shown to compute globally near-optimal solutions for fifty robots in seconds with robots packed close to each other. In the extreme, the method can consistently solve problems with hundreds of robots that occupy over 30% of the free space.
Probabilistic Object Tracking using a Range Camera
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2015
Year: 2015

We address the problem of tracking the 6-DoF pose of an object while it is being manipulated by a human or a robot. We use a dynamic Bayesian network to perform inference and compute a posterior distribution over the current object pose. Depending on whether a robot or a human manipulates the object, we employ a process model with or without knowledge of control inputs. Observations are obtained from a range camera. As opposed to previous object tracking methods, we explicitly model self-occlusions and occlusions from the environment, e.g, the human or robotic hand. This leads to a strongly non-linear observation model and additional dependencies in the Bayesian network. We employ a Rao-Blackwellised particle filter to compute an estimate of the object pose at every time step. In a set of experiments, we demonstrate the ability of our method to accurately and robustly track the object pose in real-time while it is being manipulated by a human or a robot.
Image Segmentation by Size-Dependent Single Linkage Clustering of a Watershed Basin Graph
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2015
Year: 2015

We present a method for hierarchical image segmentation that defines a disaffinity graph on the image, over-segments it into watershed basins, defines a new graph on the basins, and then merges basins with a modified, size-dependent version of single linkage clustering. The quasilinear runtime of the method makes it suitable for segmenting large images. We illustrate the method on the challenging problem of segmenting 3D electron microscopic brain images.
Object-Scene Convolutional Neural Networks for Event Recognition in Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2015
Year: 2015

Event recognition from still images is of great importance for image understanding. However, compared with event recognition in videos, there are much fewer research works on event recognition in images. This paper addresses the issue of event recognition from images and proposes an effective method with deep neural networks. Specifically, we design a new architecture, called Object-Scene Convolutional Neural Network (OS-CNN). This architecture is decomposed into object net and scene net, which extract useful information for event understanding from the perspective of objects and scene context, respectively. Meanwhile, we investigate different network architectures for OS-CNN design, and adapt the deep (AlexNet) and very-deep (GoogLeNet) networks to the task of event recognition. Furthermore, we find that the deep and very-deep networks are complementary to each other. Finally, based on the proposed OS-CNN and comparative study of different network architectures, we come up with a solution of five-stream CNN for the track of cultural event recognition at the ChaLearn Looking at People (LAP) challenge 2015. Our method obtains the performance of 85.5% and ranks the $1^{st}$ place in this challenge.
ReNet: A Recurrent Neural Network Based Alternative to Convolutional Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2015
Year: 2015

In this paper, we propose a deep neural network architecture for object recognition based on recurrent neural networks. The proposed network, called ReNet, replaces the ubiquitous convolution+pooling layer of the deep convolutional neural network with four recurrent neural networks that sweep horizontally and vertically in both directions across the image. We evaluate the proposed ReNet on three widely-used benchmark datasets; MNIST, CIFAR-10 and SVHN. The result suggests that ReNet is a viable alternative to the deep convolutional neural network, and that further investigation is needed.
Kernel Spectral Clustering and applications
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2015
Year: 2015

In this chapter we review the main literature related to kernel spectral clustering (KSC), an approach to clustering cast within a kernel-based optimization setting. KSC represents a least-squares support vector machine based formulation of spectral clustering described by a weighted kernel PCA objective. Just as in the classifier case, the binary clustering model is expressed by a hyperplane in a high dimensional space induced by a kernel. In addition, the multi-way clustering can be obtained by combining a set of binary decision functions via an Error Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) encoding scheme. Because of its model-based nature, the KSC method encompasses three main steps: training, validation, testing. In the validation stage model selection is performed to obtain tuning parameters, like the number of clusters present in the data. This is a major advantage compared to classical spectral clustering where the determination of the clustering parameters is unclear and relies on heuristics. Once a KSC model is trained on a small subset of the entire data, it is able to generalize well to unseen test points. Beyond the basic formulation, sparse KSC algorithms based on the Incomplete Cholesky Decomposition (ICD) and $L_0$, $L_1, L_0 + L_1$, Group Lasso regularization are reviewed. In that respect, we show how it is possible to handle large scale data. Also, two possible ways to perform hierarchical clustering and a soft clustering method are presented. Finally, real-world applications such as image segmentation, power load time-series clustering, document clustering and big data learning are considered.
Proving Looping and Non-Looping Non-Termination by Finite Automata
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2015
Year: 2015

A new technique is presented to prove non-termination of term rewriting. The basic idea is to find a non-empty regular language of terms that is closed under rewriting and does not contain normal forms. It is automated by representing the language by a tree automaton with a fixed number of states, and expressing the mentioned requirements in a SAT formula. Satisfiability of this formula implies non-termination. Our approach succeeds for many examples where all earlier techniques fail, for instance for the S-rule from combinatory logic.
Limited Feedback in Multiple-Antenna Systems with One-Bit Quantization
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2015
Year: 2015

Communication systems with low-resolution analog-to-digital-converters (ADCs) can exploit channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) and receiver. This paper presents initial results on codebook design and performance analysis for limited feedback systems with one-bit ADCs. Different from the high-resolution case, the absolute phase at the receiver is important to align the phase of the received signals when the received signal is sliced by one-bit ADCs. A new codebook design for the beamforming case is proposed that separately quantizes the channel direction and the residual phase.
EXIT Chart Analysis of Turbo Compressed Sensing Using Message Passing De-Quantization
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2015
Year: 2015

We propose an iterative decoding method, which we call turbo-CS, for the reception of concatenated source-channel encoded sparse signals transmitted over an AWGN channel. The turbo-CS encoder applies 1-bit compressed sensing as a source encoder concatenated serially with a convolutional channel encoder. At the turbo-CS decoder, an iterative joint source-channel decoding method is proposed for signal reconstruction. We analyze, for the first time, the convergence of turbo-CS decoder by determining an EXIT chart of the constituent decoders. We modify the soft-outputs of the decoder to improve the signal reconstruction performance of turbo-CS decoder. For a fixed signal reconstruction performance RSNR of 10 dB, we achieve more than 5 dB of improvement in the channel SNR after 6 iterations of the turbo-CS. Alternatively, for a fixed SNR of -1 dB, we achieve a 10 dB improvement in RSNR.
Iterative Detection and Decoding Algorithms using LDPC Codes for MIMO Systems in Block-Fading Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2015
Year: 2015

We propose iterative detection and decoding (IDD) algorithms with Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes for Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) systems operating in block-fading and fast Rayleigh fading channels. Soft-input soft-output minimum mean-square error receivers with successive interference cancellation are considered. In particular, we devise a novel strategy to improve the bit error rate (BER) performance of IDD schemes, which takes into account the soft \textit{a posteriori} output of the decoder in a block-fading channel when Root-Check LDPC codes are used. A MIMO IDD receiver with soft information processing that exploits the code structure and the behavior of the log likelihood ratios is also developed. Moreover, we present a scheduling algorithm for decoding LDPC codes in block-fading channels. Simulations show that the proposed techniques result in significant gains in terms of BER for both block-fading and fast-fading channels.
Large Scale Discovery of Seasonal Music From User Data
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2015
Year: 2015

The consumption history of online media content such as music and video offers a rich source of data from which to mine information. Trends in this data are of particular interest because they reflect user preferences as well as associated cultural contexts that can be exploited in systems such as recommendation or search. This paper classifies songs as seasonal using a large, real-world dataset of user listening data. Results show strong performance of classification of Christmas music with Gaussian Mixture Models.
Modeling Representation of Videos for Anomaly Detection using Deep Learning: A Review
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2015
Year: 2015

This review article surveys the current progresses made toward video-based anomaly detection. We address the most fundamental aspect for video anomaly detection, that is, video feature representation. Much research works have been done in finding the right representation to perform anomaly detection in video streams accurately with an acceptable false alarm rate. However, this is very challenging due to large variations in environment and human movement, and high space-time complexity due to huge dimensionality of video data. The weakly supervised nature of deep learning algorithms can help in learning representations from the video data itself instead of manually designing the right feature for specific scenes. In this paper, we would like to review the existing methods of modeling video representations using deep learning techniques for the task of anomaly detection and action recognition.
Learning Document Image Binarization from Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2015
Year: 2015

In this paper we present a fully trainable binarization solution for degraded document images. Unlike previous attempts that often used simple features with a series of pre- and post-processing, our solution encodes all heuristics about whether or not a pixel is foreground text into a high-dimensional feature vector and learns a more complicated decision function. In particular, we prepare features of three types: 1) existing features for binarization such as intensity [1], contrast [2], [3], and Laplacian [4], [5]; 2) reformulated features from existing binarization decision functions such those in [6] and [7]; and 3) our newly developed features, namely the Logarithm Intensity Percentile (LIP) and the Relative Darkness Index (RDI). Our initial experimental results show that using only selected samples (about 1.5% of all available training data), we can achieve a binarization performance comparable to those fine-tuned (typically by hand), state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, the trained document binarization classifier shows good generalization capabilities on out-of-domain data.
Activity recognition from videos with parallel hypergraph matching on GPUs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2015
Year: 2015

In this paper, we propose a method for activity recognition from videos based on sparse local features and hypergraph matching. We benefit from special properties of the temporal domain in the data to derive a sequential and fast graph matching algorithm for GPUs. Traditionally, graphs and hypergraphs are frequently used to recognize complex and often non-rigid patterns in computer vision, either through graph matching or point-set matching with graphs. Most formulations resort to the minimization of a difficult discrete energy function mixing geometric or structural terms with data attached terms involving appearance features. Traditional methods solve this minimization problem approximately, for instance with spectral techniques. In this work, instead of solving the problem approximatively, the exact solution for the optimal assignment is calculated in parallel on GPUs. The graphical structure is simplified and regularized, which allows to derive an efficient recursive minimization algorithm. The algorithm distributes subproblems over the calculation units of a GPU, which solves them in parallel, allowing the system to run faster than real-time on medium-end GPUs.
On the Threshold of Intractability
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2015
Year: 2015

We study the computational complexity of the graph modification problems Threshold Editing and Chain Editing, adding and deleting as few edges as possible to transform the input into a threshold (or chain) graph. In this article, we show that both problems are NP-complete, resolving a conjecture by Natanzon, Shamir, and Sharan (Discrete Applied Mathematics, 113(1):109--128, 2001). On the positive side, we show the problem admits a quadratic vertex kernel. Furthermore, we give a subexponential time parameterized algorithm solving Threshold Editing in $2^{O(\surd k \log k)} + \text{poly}(n)$ time, making it one of relatively few natural problems in this complexity class on general graphs. These results are of broader interest to the field of social network analysis, where recent work of Brandes (ISAAC, 2014) posits that the minimum edit distance to a threshold graph gives a good measure of consistency for node centralities. Finally, we show that all our positive results extend to the related problem of Chain Editing, as well as the completion and deletion variants of both problems.
Using higher-order Fourier analysis over general fields
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2015
Year: 2015

Higher-order Fourier analysis, developed over prime fields, has been recently used in different areas of computer science, including list decoding, algorithmic decomposition and testing. We extend the tools of higher-order Fourier analysis to analyze functions over general fields. Using these new tools, we revisit the results in the above areas. * For any fixed finite field $\mathbb{K}$, we show that the list decoding radius of the generalized Reed Muller code over $\mathbb{K}$ equals the minimum distance of the code. Previously, this had been proved over prime fields [BL14] and for the case when $|\mathbb{K}|-1$ divides the order of the code [GKZ08]. * For any fixed finite field $\mathbb{K}$, we give a polynomial time algorithm to decide whether a given polynomial $P: \mathbb{K}^n \to \mathbb{K}$ can be decomposed as a particular composition of lesser degree polynomials. This had been previously established over prime fields [Bha14, BHT15]. * For any fixed finite field $\mathbb{K}$, we prove that all locally characterized affine-invariant properties of functions $f: \mathbb{K}^n \to \mathbb{K}$ are testable with one-sided error. The same result was known when $\mathbb{K}$ is prime [BFHHL13] and when the property is linear [KS08]. Moreover, we show that for any fixed finite field $\mathbb{F}$, an affine-invariant property of functions $f: \mathbb{K}^n \to \mathbb{F}$, where $\mathbb{K}$ is a growing field extension over $\mathbb{F}$, is testable if it is locally characterized by constraints of bounded weight.
Optimal Learning via the Fourier Transform for Sums of Independent Integer Random Variables
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2015
Year: 2015

We study the structure and learnability of sums of independent integer random variables (SIIRVs). For $k \in \mathbb{Z}_{+}$, a $k$-SIIRV of order $n \in \mathbb{Z}_{+}$ is the probability distribution of the sum of $n$ independent random variables each supported on $\{0, 1, \dots, k-1\}$. We denote by ${\cal S}_{n,k}$ the set of all $k$-SIIRVs of order $n$. In this paper, we tightly characterize the sample and computational complexity of learning $k$-SIIRVs. More precisely, we design a computationally efficient algorithm that uses $\widetilde{O}(k/ε^2)$ samples, and learns an arbitrary $k$-SIIRV within error $ε,$ in total variation distance. Moreover, we show that the {\em optimal} sample complexity of this learning problem is $Θ((k/ε^2)\sqrt{\log(1/ε)}).$ Our algorithm proceeds by learning the Fourier transform of the target $k$-SIIRV in its effective support. Its correctness relies on the {\em approximate sparsity} of the Fourier transform of $k$-SIIRVs -- a structural property that we establish, roughly stating that the Fourier transform of $k$-SIIRVs has small magnitude outside a small set. Along the way we prove several new structural results about $k$-SIIRVs. As one of our main structural contributions, we give an efficient algorithm to construct a sparse {\em proper} $ε$-cover for ${\cal S}_{n,k},$ in total variation distance. We also obtain a novel geometric characterization of the space of $k$-SIIRVs. Our characterization allows us to prove a tight lower bound on the size of $ε$-covers for ${\cal S}_{n,k}$, and is the key ingredient in our tight sample complexity lower bound. Our approach of exploiting the sparsity of the Fourier transform in distribution learning is general, and has recently found additional applications.
Rate Allocation for Decentralized Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2015
Year: 2015

We consider the problem of decentralized detection where peripheral nodes make noisy observations of a phenomenon and send quantized information about the phenomenon towards a fusion center over a sum-rate constrained multiple access channel. The fusion center then makes a decision about the state of the phenomenon based on the aggregate received data. Using the Chernoff information as a performance metric, Chamberland and Veeravalli previously studied the structure of optimal rate allocation strategies for this scenario under the assumption of an unlimited number of sensors. Our key contribution is to extend these result to the case where there is a constraint on the maximum number of active sensors. In particular, we find sufficient conditions under which the uniform rate allocation is an optimal strategy, and then numerically verify that these conditions are satisfied for some relevant sensor design rules under a Gaussian observation model.
Dual Failure Resilient BFS Structure
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2015
Year: 2015

We study {\em breadth-first search (BFS)} spanning trees, and address the problem of designing a sparse {\em fault-tolerant} BFS structure, or {\em FT-BFS } for short, resilient to the failure of up to two edges in the given undirected unweighted graph $G$, i.e., a sparse subgraph $H$ of $G$ such that subsequent to the failure of up to two edges, the surviving part $H'$ of $H$ still contains a BFS spanning tree for (the surviving part of) $G$. FT-BFS structures, as well as the related notion of replacement paths, have been studied so far for the restricted case of a single failure. It has been noted widely that when concerning shortest-paths in a variety of contexts, there is a sharp qualitative difference between a single failure and two or more failures. Our main results are as follows. We present an algorithm that for every $n$-vertex unweighted undirected graph $G$ and source node $s$ constructs a (two edge failure) FT-BFS structure rooted at $s$ with $O(n^{5/3})$ edges. To provide a useful theory of shortest paths avoiding 2 edges failures, we take a principled approach to classifying the arrangement these paths. We believe that the structural analysis provided in this paper may decrease the barrier for understanding the general case of $f\geq 2$ faults and pave the way to the future design of $f$-fault resilient structures for $f \geq 2$. We also provide a matching lower bound, which in fact holds for the general case of $f \geq 1$ and multiple sources $S \subseteq V$. It shows that for every $f\geq 1$, and integer $1 \leq σ\leq n$, there exist $n$-vertex graphs with a source set $S \subseteq V$ of cardinality $σ$ for which any FT-BFS structure rooted at each $s \in S$, resilient to up to $f$-edge faults has $Ω(σ^{1/(f+1)} \cdot n^{2-1/(f+1)})$ edges.