OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Reaching Data Confidentiality and Model Accountability on the CalTrain
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

Distributed collaborative learning (DCL) paradigms enable building joint machine learning models from distrusting multi-party participants. Data confidentiality is guaranteed by retaining private training data on each participant's local infrastructure. However, this approach to achieving data confidentiality makes today's DCL designs fundamentally vulnerable to data poisoning and backdoor attacks. It also limits DCL's model accountability, which is key to backtracking the responsible "bad" training data instances/contributors. In this paper, we introduce CALTRAIN, a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) based centralized multi-party collaborative learning system that simultaneously achieves data confidentiality and model accountability. CALTRAIN enforces isolated computation on centrally aggregated training data to guarantee data confidentiality. To support building accountable learning models, we securely maintain the links between training instances and their corresponding contributors. Our evaluation shows that the models generated from CALTRAIN can achieve the same prediction accuracy when compared to the models trained in non-protected environments. We also demonstrate that when malicious training participants tend to implant backdoors during model training, CALTRAIN can accurately and precisely discover the poisoned and mislabeled training data that lead to the runtime mispredictions.
Neural Abstract Style Transfer for Chinese Traditional Painting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Chinese traditional painting is one of the most historical artworks in the world. It is very popular in Eastern and Southeast Asia due to being aesthetically appealing. Compared with western artistic painting, it is usually more visually abstract and textureless. Recently, neural network based style transfer methods have shown promising and appealing results which are mainly focused on western painting. It remains a challenging problem to preserve abstraction in neural style transfer. In this paper, we present a Neural Abstract Style Transfer method for Chinese traditional painting. It learns to preserve abstraction and other style jointly end-to-end via a novel MXDoG-guided filter (Modified version of the eXtended Difference-of-Gaussians) and three fully differentiable loss terms. To the best of our knowledge, there is little work study on neural style transfer of Chinese traditional painting. To promote research on this direction, we collect a new dataset with diverse photo-realistic images and Chinese traditional paintings. In experiments, the proposed method shows more appealing stylized results in transferring the style of Chinese traditional painting than state-of-the-art neural style transfer methods.
SANTIS: Sampling-Augmented Neural neTwork with Incoherent Structure for MR image reconstruction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Deep learning holds great promise in the reconstruction of undersampled Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) data, providing new opportunities to escalate the performance of rapid MRI. In existing deep learning-based reconstruction methods, supervised training is performed using artifact-free reference images and their corresponding undersampled pairs. The undersampled images are generated by a fixed undersampling pattern in the training, and the trained network is then applied to reconstruct new images acquired with the same pattern in the inference. While such a training strategy can maintain a favorable reconstruction for a pre-selected undersampling pattern, the robustness of the trained network against any discrepancy of undersampling schemes is typically poor. We developed a novel deep learning-based reconstruction framework called SANTIS for efficient MR image reconstruction with improved robustness against sampling pattern discrepancy. SANTIS uses a data cycle-consistent adversarial network combining efficient end-to-end convolutional neural network mapping, data fidelity enforcement and adversarial training for reconstructing accelerated MR images more faithfully. A training strategy employing sampling augmentation with extensive variation of undersampling patterns was further introduced to promote the robustness of the trained network. Compared to conventional reconstruction and standard deep learning methods, SANTIS achieved consistent better reconstruction performance, with lower errors, greater image sharpness and higher similarity with respect to the reference regardless of the undersampling patterns during inference. This novel concept behind SANTIS can particularly be useful towards improving the robustness of deep learning-based image reconstruction against discrepancy between training and evaluation, which is currently an important but less studied open question.
From Electric Circuits to Chemical Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

Electric circuits manipulate electric charge and magnetic flux via a small set of discrete components to implement useful functionality over continuous time-varying signals represented by currents and voltages. Much of the same functionality is useful to biological organisms, where it is implemented by a completely different set of discrete components (typically proteins) and signal representations (typically via concentrations). We describe how to take a linear electric circuit and systematically convert it to a chemical reaction network of the same functionality, as a dynamical system. Both the structure and the components of the electric circuit are dissolved in the process, but the resulting chemical network is intelligible. This approach provides access to a large library of well-studied devices, from analog electronics, whose chemical network realization can be compared to natural biochemical networks, or used to engineer synthetic biochemical networks.
Learning Montezuma's Revenge from a Single Demonstration
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

We propose a new method for learning from a single demonstration to solve hard exploration tasks like the Atari game Montezuma's Revenge. Instead of imitating human demonstrations, as proposed in other recent works, our approach is to maximize rewards directly. Our agent is trained using off-the-shelf reinforcement learning, but starts every episode by resetting to a state from a demonstration. By starting from such demonstration states, the agent requires much less exploration to learn a game compared to when it starts from the beginning of the game at every episode. We analyze reinforcement learning for tasks with sparse rewards in a simple toy environment, where we show that the run-time of standard RL methods scales exponentially in the number of states between rewards. Our method reduces this to quadratic scaling, opening up many tasks that were previously infeasible. We then apply our method to Montezuma's Revenge, for which we present a trained agent achieving a high-score of 74,500, better than any previously published result.
Applying Nature-Inspired Optimization Algorithms for Selecting Important Timestamps to Reduce Time Series Dimensionality
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2018
Year: 2018

Time series data account for a major part of data supply available today. Time series mining handles several tasks such as classification, clustering, query-by-content, prediction, and others. Performing data mining tasks on raw time series is inefficient as these data are high-dimensional by nature. Instead, time series are first pre-processed using several techniques before different data mining tasks can be performed on them. In general, there are two main approaches to reduce time series dimensionality, the first is what we call landmark methods. These methods are based on finding characteristic features in the target time series. The second is based on data transformations. These methods transform the time series from the original space into a reduced space, where they can be managed more efficiently. The method we present in this paper applies a third approach, as it projects a time series onto a lower-dimensional space by selecting important points in the time series. The novelty of our method is that these points are not chosen according to a geometric criterion, which is subjective in most cases, but through an optimization process. The other important characteristic of our method is that these important points are selected on a dataset-level and not on a single time series-level. The direct advantage of this strategy is that the distance defined on the low-dimensional space lower bounds the original distance applied to raw data. This enables us to apply the popular GEMINI algorithm. The promising results of our experiments on a wide variety of time series datasets, using different optimizers, and applied to the two major data mining tasks, validate our new method.
Theory of Curriculum Learning, with Convex Loss Functions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Curriculum Learning - the idea of teaching by gradually exposing the learner to examples in a meaningful order, from easy to hard, has been investigated in the context of machine learning long ago. Although methods based on this concept have been empirically shown to improve performance of several learning algorithms, no theoretical analysis has been provided even for simple cases. To address this shortfall, we start by formulating an ideal definition of difficulty score - the loss of the optimal hypothesis at a given datapoint. We analyze the possible contribution of curriculum learning based on this score in two convex problems - linear regression, and binary classification by hinge loss minimization. We show that in both cases, the expected convergence rate decreases monotonically with the ideal difficulty score, in accordance with earlier empirical results. We also prove that when the ideal difficulty score is fixed, the convergence rate is monotonically increasing with respect to the loss of the current hypothesis at each point. We discuss how these results bring to term two apparently contradicting heuristics: curriculum learning on the one hand, and hard data mining on the other.
Adversarial Sparse-View CBCT Artifact Reduction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

We present an effective post-processing method to reduce the artifacts from sparsely reconstructed cone-beam CT (CBCT) images. The proposed method is based on the state-of-the-art, image-to-image generative models with a perceptual loss as regulation. Unlike the traditional CT artifact-reduction approaches, our method is trained in an adversarial fashion that yields more perceptually realistic outputs while preserving the anatomical structures. To address the streak artifacts that are inherently local and appear across various scales, we further propose a novel discriminator architecture based on feature pyramid networks and a differentially modulated focus map to induce the adversarial training. Our experimental results show that the proposed method can greatly correct the cone-beam artifacts from clinical CBCT images reconstructed using 1/3 projections, and outperforms strong baseline methods both quantitatively and qualitatively.
On balanced clustering with tree-like structures over clusters
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2018
Year: 2018

The article addresses balanced clustering problems with an additional requirement as a tree-like structure over the obtained balanced clusters. This kind of clustering problems can be useful in some applications (e.g., network design, management and routing). Various types of the initial elements are considered. Four basic greedy-like solving strategies (design framework) are considered: balancing-spanning strategy, spanning-balancing strategy, direct strategy, and design of layered structures with balancing. An extended description of the spanning-balancing strategy is presented including four solving schemes and an illustrative numerical example.
Spatial Knowledge Distillation to aid Visual Reasoning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

For tasks involving language and vision, the current state-of-the-art methods tend not to leverage any additional information that might be present to gather relevant (commonsense) knowledge. A representative task is Visual Question Answering where large diagnostic datasets have been proposed to test a system's capability of answering questions about images. The training data is often accompanied by annotations of individual object properties and spatial locations. In this work, we take a step towards integrating this additional privileged information in the form of spatial knowledge to aid in visual reasoning. We propose a framework that combines recent advances in knowledge distillation (teacher-student framework), relational reasoning and probabilistic logical languages to incorporate such knowledge in existing neural networks for the task of Visual Question Answering. Specifically, for a question posed against an image, we use a probabilistic logical language to encode the spatial knowledge and the spatial understanding about the question in the form of a mask that is directly provided to the teacher network. The student network learns from the ground-truth information as well as the teachers prediction via distillation. We also demonstrate the impact of predicting such a mask inside the teachers network using attention. Empirically, we show that both the methods improve the test accuracy over a state-of-the-art approach on a publicly available dataset.
Statement networks: a power structure narrative as depicted by newspapers
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2018
Year: 2018

We report a data mining pipeline and subsequent analysis to understand the core periphery power structure created in three national newspapers in Bangladesh, as depicted by statements made by people appearing in news. Statements made by one actor about another actor can be considered a form of public conversation. Named entity recognition techniques can be used to create a temporal actor network from such conversations, which shows some unique structure, and reveals much room for improvement in news reporting and also the top actors' conversation preferences. Our results indicate there is a presence of cliquishness between powerful political leaders when it comes to their appearance in news. We also show how these cohesive cores form through the news articles, and how, over a decade, news cycles change the actors belonging in these groups.
Serverless Computing: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

Serverless computing offers the potential to program the cloud in an autoscaling, pay-as-you go manner. In this paper we address critical gaps in first-generation serverless computing, which place its autoscaling potential at odds with dominant trends in modern computing: notably data-centric and distributed computing, but also open source and custom hardware. Put together, these gaps make current serverless offerings a bad fit for cloud innovation and particularly bad for data systems innovation. In addition to pinpointing some of the main shortfalls of current serverless architectures, we raise a set of challenges we believe must be met to unlock the radical potential that the cloud---with its exabytes of storage and millions of cores---should offer to innovative developers.
Investigating Key User Experiencing Engineering Aspects in Software-as-a-Service Service Delivery Model
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2018
Year: 2018

Software as a Service (SaaS) is well established as an effective model for the development, deployment and customization of software. As it continues to gain more momentum in the IT industry, many user experience challenges and issues are being reported by the experts and end users.
Coherence-Based Performance Guarantee of Regularized $\ell_{1}$-Norm Minimization and Beyond
Venue: arXiv cs.NA 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we consider recovering the signal $\bm{x}\in\mathbb{R}^{n}$ from its few noisy measurements $\bm{b}=A\bm{x}+\bm{z}$, where $A\in\mathbb{R}^{m\times n}$ with $m\ll n$ is the measurement matrix, and $\bm{z}\in\mathbb{R}^{m}$ is the measurement noise/error. We first establish a coherence-based performance guarantee for a regularized $\ell_{1}$-norm minimization model to recover such signals $\bm{x}$ in the presence of the $\ell_{2}$-norm bounded noise, i.e., $\|\bm{z}\|_{2}\leqε$, and then extend these theoretical results to guarantee the robust recovery of the signals corrupted with the Dantzig Selector (DS) type noise, i.e., $\|A^{T}\bm{z}\|_{\infty}\leqε$, and the structured block-sparse signal recovery in the presence of the bounded noise. To the best of our knowledge, we first extend nontrivially the sharp uniform recovery condition derived by Cai, Wang and Xu (2010) for the constrained $\ell_{1}$-norm minimization model, which takes the form of \begin{align*} μ<\frac{1}{2k-1}, \end{align*} where $μ$ is defined as the (mutual) coherence of $A$, to two unconstrained regularized $\ell_{1}$-norm minimization models to guarantee the robust recovery of any signals (not necessary to be $k$-sparse) under the $\ell_{2}$-norm bounded noise and the DS type noise settings, respectively. Besides, a uniform recovery condition and its two resulting error estimates are also established for the first time to our knowledge, for the robust block-sparse signal recovery using a regularized mixed $\ell_{2}/\ell_{1}$-norm minimization model, and these results well complement the existing theoretical investigation on this model which focuses on the non-uniform recovery conditions and/or the robust signal recovery in presence of the random noise.
Inflo: News Categorization and Keyphrase Extraction for Implementation in an Aggregation System
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2018
Year: 2018

The work herein describes a system for automatic news category and keyphrase labeling, presented in the context of our motivation to improve the speed at which a user can find relevant and interesting content within an aggregation platform. A set of 12 discrete categories were applied to over 500,000 news articles for training a neural network, to be used to facilitate the more in-depth task of extracting the most significant keyphrases. The latter was done using three methods: statistical, graphical and numerical, using the pre-identified category label to improve relevance of extracted phrases. The results are presented in a demo in which the articles are pre-populated via News API, and upon being selected, the category and keyphrase labels will be computed via the methods explained herein.
Hierarchical Bipartite Graph Convolution Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Recently, graph neural networks have been adopted in a wide variety of applications ranging from relational representations to modeling irregular data domains such as point clouds and social graphs. However, the space of graph neural network architectures remains highly fragmented impeding the development of optimized implementations similar to what is available for convolutional neural networks. In this work, we present BiGraphNet, a graph neural network architecture that generalizes many popular graph neural network models and enables new efficient operations similar to those supported by ConvNets. By explicitly separating the input and output nodes, BiGraphNet: (i) generalizes the graph convolution to support new efficient operations such as coarsened graph convolutions (similar to strided convolution in convnets), multiple input graphs convolution and graph expansions (unpooling) which can be used to implement various graph architectures such as graph autoencoders, and graph residual nets; and (ii) accelerates and scales the computations and memory requirements in hierarchical networks by performing computations only at specified output nodes.
Toward the Engineering of Virtuous Machines
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

While various traditions under the 'virtue ethics' umbrella have been studied extensively and advocated by ethicists, it has not been clear that there exists a version of virtue ethics rigorous enough to be a target for machine ethics (which we take to include the engineering of an ethical sensibility in a machine or robot itself, not only the study of ethics in the humans who might create artificial agents). We begin to address this by presenting an embryonic formalization of a key part of any virtue-ethics theory: namely, the learning of virtue by a focus on exemplars of moral virtue. Our work is based in part on a computational formal logic previously used to formally model other ethical theories and principles therein, and to implement these models in artificial agents.
Facial Landmark Machines: A Backbone-Branches Architecture with Progressive Representation Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Facial landmark localization plays a critical role in face recognition and analysis. In this paper, we propose a novel cascaded backbone-branches fully convolutional neural network~(BB-FCN) for rapidly and accurately localizing facial landmarks in unconstrained and cluttered settings. Our proposed BB-FCN generates facial landmark response maps directly from raw images without any preprocessing. BB-FCN follows a coarse-to-fine cascaded pipeline, which consists of a backbone network for roughly detecting the locations of all facial landmarks and one branch network for each type of detected landmark for further refining their locations. Furthermore, to facilitate the facial landmark localization under unconstrained settings, we propose a large-scale benchmark named SYSU16K, which contains 16000 faces with large variations in pose, expression, illumination and resolution. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that our proposed BB-FCN can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art under both constrained (i.e., within detected facial regions only) and unconstrained settings. We further confirm that high-quality facial landmarks localized with our proposed network can also improve the precision and recall of face detection.
Visual Depth Mapping from Monocular Images using Recurrent Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

A reliable sense-and-avoid system is critical to enabling safe autonomous operation of unmanned aircraft. Existing sense-and-avoid methods often require specialized sensors that are too large or power intensive for use on small unmanned vehicles. This paper presents a method to estimate object distances based on visual image sequences, allowing for the use of low-cost, on-board monocular cameras as simple collision avoidance sensors. We present a deep recurrent convolutional neural network and training method to generate depth maps from video sequences. Our network is trained using simulated camera and depth data generated with Microsoft's AirSim simulator. Empirically, we show that our model achieves superior performance compared to models generated using prior methods.We further demonstrate that the method can be used for sense-and-avoid of obstacles in simulation.
Deep Learning Based Joint Pilot Design and Channel Estimation for Multiuser MIMO Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we propose a joint pilot design and channel estimation scheme based on the deep learning (DL) technique for multiuser multiple-input multiple output (MIMO) channels. To this end, we construct a pilot designer using two-layer neural networks (TNNs) and a channel estimator using deep neural networks (DNNs), which are jointly trained to minimize the mean square error (MSE) of channel estimation. To effectively reduce the interference among the multiple users, we also use the successive interference cancellation (SIC) technique in the channel estimation process. The numerical results demonstrate that the proposed scheme considerably outperforms the state-of-the-art linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) based channel estimation scheme.