OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Face Sketch Synthesis with Style Transfer using Pyramid Column Feature
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we propose a novel framework based on deep neural networks for face sketch synthesis from a photo. Imitating the process of how artists draw sketches, our framework synthesizes face sketches in a cascaded manner. A content image is first generated that outlines the shape of the face and the key facial features. Textures and shadings are then added to enrich the details of the sketch. We utilize a fully convolutional neural network (FCNN) to create the content image, and propose a style transfer approach to introduce textures and shadings based on a newly proposed pyramid column feature. We demonstrate that our style transfer approach based on the pyramid column feature can not only preserve more sketch details than the common style transfer method, but also surpasses traditional patch based methods. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations suggest that our framework outperforms other state-of-the-arts methods, and can also generalize well to different test images. Codes are available at https://github.com/chaofengc/Face-Sketch
A Visual Language for Composable Inductive Programming
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2020
Year: 2020

We present Zoea Visual which is a visual programming language based on the Zoea composable inductive programming language. Zoea Visual allows users to create software directly from a specification that resembles a set of functional test cases. Programming with Zoea Visual involves the definition of a data flow model of test case inputs, optional intermediate values, and outputs. Data elements are represented visually and can be combined to create structures of any complexity. Data flows between elements provide additional information that allows the Zoea compiler to generate larger programs in less time. This paper includes an overview of the language. The benefits of the approach and some possible future enhancements are also discussed.
Pose Correction Algorithm for Relative Frames between Keyframes in SLAM
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

With the dominance of keyframe-based SLAM in the field of robotics, the relative frame poses between keyframes have typically been sacrificed for a faster algorithm to achieve online applications. However, those approaches can become insufficient for applications that may require refined poses of all frames, not just keyframes which are relatively sparse compared to all input frames. This paper proposes a novel algorithm to correct the relative frames between keyframes after the keyframes have been updated by a back-end optimization process. The correction model is derived using conservation of the measurement constraint between landmarks and the robot pose. The proposed algorithm is designed to be easily integrable to existing keyframe-based SLAM systems while exhibiting robust and accurate performance superior to existing interpolation methods. The algorithm also requires low computational resources and hence has a minimal burden on the whole SLAM pipeline. We provide the evaluation of the proposed pose correction algorithm in comparison to existing interpolation methods in various vector spaces, and our method has demonstrated excellent accuracy in both KITTI and EuRoC datasets.
Online Knowledge Base for Designing Shape-changing Interfaces using Modular Workshop Elements
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

Building and maintaining knowledge about specific interface technologies is a challenge. Current solutions include standard file-based document repositories, wikis, and other online tools. However, these solutions are often only available in intranets, become outdated and do not support the acquisition of knowledge in an efficient manner. The effort to gain an overview and detailed knowledge about novel interface technologies can be overwhelming and requires to research and read many technical reports and scientific publications. We propose to implement open source online knowledge bases that include building blocks for creating custom workshops to understand and apply the contained knowledge. We demonstrate this concept with a knowledge base for shape-changing interfaces (SCI-KB). The SCI-KB is hosted online at GitHub and fosters collaborative creation of knowledge elements accompanied by practical exercises and workshop elements that can be combined and adapted by individuals or groups of people new to the topic of shape-changing interfaces.
The Boon and Bane of Cross-Signing: Shedding Light on a Common Practice in Public Key Infrastructures
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

Public Key Infrastructures (PKIs) with their trusted Certificate Authorities (CAs) provide the trust backbone for the Internet: CAs sign certificates which prove the identity of servers, applications, or users. To be trusted by operating systems and browsers, a CA has to undergo lengthy and costly validation processes. Alternatively, trusted CAs can cross-sign other CAs to extend their trust to them. In this paper, we systematically analyze the present and past state of cross-signing in the Web PKI. Our dataset (derived from passive TLS monitors and public CT logs) encompasses more than 7 years and 225 million certificates with 9.3 billion trust paths. We show benefits and risks of cross-signing. We discuss the difficulty of revoking trusted CA certificates where, worrisome, cross-signing can result in valid trust paths to remain after revocation; a problem for non-browser software that often blindly trusts all CA certificates and ignores revocations. However, cross-signing also enables fast bootstrapping of new CAs, e.g., Let's Encrypt, and achieves a non-disruptive user experience by providing backward compatibility. In this paper, we propose new rules and guidance for cross-signing to preserve its positive potential while mitigating its risks.
HDGlab: An open-source implementation of the hybridisable discontinuous Galerkin method in MATLAB
Venue: arXiv cs.MS 2020
Year: 2020

This paper presents HDGlab, an open source MATLAB implementation of the hybridisable discontinuous Galerkin (HDG) method. The main goal is to provide a detailed description of both the HDG method for elliptic problems and its implementation available in HDGlab. Ultimately, this is expected to make this relatively new advanced discretisation method more accessible to the computational engineering community. HDGlab presents some features not available in other implementations of the HDG method that can be found in the free domain. First, it implements high-order polynomial shape functions up to degree nine, with both equally-spaced and Fekete nodal distributions. Second, it supports curved isoparametric simplicial elements in two and three dimensions. Third, it supports non-uniform degree polynomial approximations and it provides a flexible structure to devise degree adaptivity strategies. Finally, an interface with the open-source high-order mesh generator Gmsh is provided to facilitate its application to practical engineering problems.
Blocking total dominating sets via edge contractions
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we study the problem of deciding whether the total domination number of a given graph $G$ can be reduced using exactly one edge contraction (called 1-Edge Contraction($γ_t$)). We focus on several graph classes and determine the computational complexity of this problem. By putting together these results, we manage to obtain a complete dichotomy for $H$-free graphs.
An Enhanced Convolutional Neural Network in Side-Channel Attacks and Its Visualization
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

In recent years, the convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have received a lot of interest in the side-channel community. The previous work has shown that CNNs have the potential of breaking the cryptographic algorithm protected with masking or desynchronization. Before, several CNN models have been exploited, reaching the same or even better level of performance compared to the traditional side-channel attack (SCA). In this paper, we investigate the architecture of Residual Network and build a new CNN model called attention network. To enhance the power of the attention network, we introduce an attention mechanism - Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) and incorporate CBAM into the CNN architecture. CBAM points out the informative points of the input traces and makes the attention network focus on the relevant leakages of the measurements. It is able to improve the performance of the CNNs. Because the irrelevant points will introduce the extra noises and cause a worse performance of attacks. We compare our attention network with the one designed for the masking AES implementation called ASCAD network in this paper. We show that the attention network has a better performance than the ASCAD network. Finally, a new visualization method, named Class Gradient Visualization (CGV) is proposed to recognize which points of the input traces have a positive influence on the predicted result of the neural networks. In another aspect, it can explain why the attention network is superior to the ASCAD network. We validate the attention network through extensive experiments on four public datasets and demonstrate that the attention network is efficient in different AES implementations.
Image Captioning with Attention for Smart Local Tourism using EfficientNet
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Smart systems have been massively developed to help humans in various tasks. Deep Learning technologies push even further in creating accurate assistant systems due to the explosion of data lakes. One of the smart system tasks is to disseminate users needed information. This is crucial in the tourism sector to promote local tourism destinations. In this research, we design a model of local tourism specific image captioning, which later will support the development of AI-powered systems that assist various users. The model is developed using a visual Attention mechanism and uses the state-of-the-art feature extractor architecture EfficientNet. A local tourism dataset is collected and is used in the research, along with two different kinds of captions. Captions that describe the image literally and captions that represent human logical responses when seeing the image. This is done to make the captioning model more humane when implemented in the assistance system. We compared the performance of two different models using EfficientNet architectures (B0 and B4) with other well known VGG16 and InceptionV3. The best BLEU scores we get are 73.39 and 24.51 for the training set and the validation set respectively, using EfficientNetB0. The captioning result using the developed model shows that the model can produce logical caption for local tourism-related images
C-Balancer: A System for Container Profiling and Scheduling
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

Linux containers have gained high popularity in recent times. This popularity is significantly due to various advantages of containers over Virtual Machines (VM). The containers are lightweight, occupy lesser storage, have fast boot-up time, easy to deploy and have faster auto-scaling. The key reason behind the popularity of containers is that they leverage the mechanism of micro-service style software development, where applications are designed as independently deployable services. There are various container orchestration tools for deploying and managing the containers in the cluster. The prominent among them are Docker Swarm and Kubernetes. However, they do not address the effects of resource contention when multiple containers are deployed on a node. Moreover, they do not provide support for container migration in the event of an attack or increased resource contention. To address such issues, we propose C-Balancer, a scheduling framework for efficient placement of containers in the cluster environment. C-Balancer works by periodically profiling the containers and deciding the optimal container to node placement. Our proposed approach improves the performance of containers in terms of resource utilization and throughput. Experiments using a workload mix of Stress-NG and iPerf benchmark shows that our proposed approach achieves a maximum performance improvement of 58% for the workload mix. Our approach also reduces the variance in resource utilization across the cluster by 60% on average.
Multi-Objective Parameter-less Population Pyramid for Solving Industrial Process Planning Problems
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2020
Year: 2020

Evolutionary methods are effective tools for obtaining high-quality results when solving hard practical problems. Linkage learning may increase their effectiveness. One of the state-of-the-art methods that employ linkage learning is the Parameter-less Population Pyramid (P3). P3 is dedicated to solving single-objective problems in discrete domains. Recent research shows that P3 is highly competitive when addressing problems with so-called overlapping blocks, which are typical for practical problems. In this paper, we consider a multi-objective industrial process planning problem that arises from practice and is NP-hard. To handle it, we propose a multi-objective version of P3. The extensive research shows that our proposition outperforms the competing methods for the considered practical problem and typical multi-objective benchmarks.
Exploiting Heterogeneity in Operational Neural Networks by Synaptic Plasticity
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2020
Year: 2020

The recently proposed network model, Operational Neural Networks (ONNs), can generalize the conventional Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) that are homogenous only with a linear neuron model. As a heterogenous network model, ONNs are based on a generalized neuron model that can encapsulate any set of non-linear operators to boost diversity and to learn highly complex and multi-modal functions or spaces with minimal network complexity and training data. However, the default search method to find optimal operators in ONNs, the so-called Greedy Iterative Search (GIS) method, usually takes several training sessions to find a single operator set per layer. This is not only computationally demanding, also the network heterogeneity is limited since the same set of operators will then be used for all neurons in each layer. To address this deficiency and exploit a superior level of heterogeneity, in this study the focus is drawn on searching the best-possible operator set(s) for the hidden neurons of the network based on the Synaptic Plasticity paradigm that poses the essential learning theory in biological neurons. During training, each operator set in the library can be evaluated by their synaptic plasticity level, ranked from the worst to the best, and an elite ONN can then be configured using the top ranked operator sets found at each hidden layer. Experimental results over highly challenging problems demonstrate that the elite ONNs even with few neurons and layers can achieve a superior learning performance than GIS-based ONNs and as a result the performance gap over the CNNs further widens.
HyperFair: A Soft Approach to Integrating Fairness Criteria
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2020
Year: 2020

Recommender systems are being employed across an increasingly diverse set of domains that can potentially make a significant social and individual impact. For this reason, considering fairness is a critical step in the design and evaluation of such systems. In this paper, we introduce HyperFair, a general framework for enforcing soft fairness constraints in a hybrid recommender system. HyperFair models integrate variations of fairness metrics as a regularization of a joint inference objective function. We implement our approach using probabilistic soft logic and show that it is particularly well-suited for this task as it is expressive and structural constraints can be added to the system in a concise and interpretable manner. We propose two ways to employ the methods we introduce: first as an extension of a probabilistic soft logic recommender system template; second as a fair retrofitting technique that can be used to improve the fairness of predictions from a black-box model. We empirically validate our approach by implementing multiple HyperFair hybrid recommenders and compare them to a state-of-the-art fair recommender. We also run experiments showing the effectiveness of our methods for the task of retrofitting a black-box model and the trade-off between the amount of fairness enforced and the prediction performance.
Exploiting Diversity for Ultra-Reliable and Low-Latency Wireless Control
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

This paper introduces a wireless communication protocol for industrial control systems that uses channel quality awareness to dynamically create network-device cooperation and assist the nodes in momentary poor channel conditions. To that point, channel state information is used to identify nodes with strong and weak channel conditions. We show that strong nodes in the network are best to be served in a single-hop transmission with transmission rate adapted to their instantaneous channel conditions. Meanwhile, the remainder of time-frequency resources is used to serve the nodes with weak channel condition using a two-hop transmission with cooperative communication among all the nodes to meet the target reliability in their communication with the controller. We formulate the achievable multi-user and multi-antenna diversity gain in the low-latency regime, and propose a new scheme for exploiting those on demand, in favor of reliability and efficiency. The proposed transmission scheme is therefore dubbed adaptive network-device cooperation (ANDCoop), since it is able to adaptively allocate cooperation resources while enjoying the multi-user diversity gain of the network. We formulate the optimization problem of associating nodes to each group and dividing resources between the two groups. Numerical solutions show significant improvement in spectral efficiency and system reliability compared to the existing schemes in the literature. System design incorporating the proposed transmission strategy can thus reduce infrastructure cost for future private wireless networks.
AI-Driven Interface Design for Intelligent Tutoring System Improves Student Engagement
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

An Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) has been shown to improve students' learning outcomes by providing a personalized curriculum that addresses individual needs of every student. However, despite the effectiveness and efficiency that ITS brings to students' learning process, most of the studies in ITS research have conducted less effort to design the interface of ITS that promotes students' interest in learning, motivation and engagement by making better use of AI features. In this paper, we explore AI-driven design for the interface of ITS describing diagnostic feedback for students' problem-solving process and investigate its impacts on their engagement. We propose several interface designs powered by different AI components and empirically evaluate their impacts on student engagement through Santa, an active mobile ITS. Controlled A/B tests conducted on more than 20K students in the wild show that AI-driven interface design improves the factors of engagement by up to 25.13%.
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Closed-Loop Blood Glucose Control
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

People with type 1 diabetes (T1D) lack the ability to produce the insulin their bodies need. As a result, they must continually make decisions about how much insulin to self-administer to adequately control their blood glucose levels. Longitudinal data streams captured from wearables, like continuous glucose monitors, can help these individuals manage their health, but currently the majority of the decision burden remains on the user. To relieve this burden, researchers are working on closed-loop solutions that combine a continuous glucose monitor and an insulin pump with a control algorithm in an `artificial pancreas.' Such systems aim to estimate and deliver the appropriate amount of insulin. Here, we develop reinforcement learning (RL) techniques for automated blood glucose control. Through a series of experiments, we compare the performance of different deep RL approaches to non-RL approaches. We highlight the flexibility of RL approaches, demonstrating how they can adapt to new individuals with little additional data. On over 2.1 million hours of data from 30 simulated patients, our RL approach outperforms baseline control algorithms: leading to a decrease in median glycemic risk of nearly 50% from 8.34 to 4.24 and a decrease in total time hypoglycemic of 99.8%, from 4,610 days to 6. Moreover, these approaches are able to adapt to predictable meal times (decreasing average risk by an additional 24% as meals increase in predictability). This work demonstrates the potential of deep RL to help people with T1D manage their blood glucose levels without requiring expert knowledge. All of our code is publicly available, allowing for replication and extension.
A Distributed Framework to Orchestrate Video Analytics Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

The concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) is a reality now. This paradigm shift has caught everyones attention in a large class of applications, including IoT-based video analytics using smart doorbells. Due to its growing application segments, various efforts exist in scientific literature and many video-based doorbell solutions are commercially available in the market. However, contemporary offerings are bespoke, offering limited composability and reusability of a smart doorbell framework. Second, they are monolithic and proprietary, which means that the implementation details remain hidden from the users. We believe that a transparent design can greatly aid in the development of a smart doorbell, enabling its use in multiple application domains. To address the above-mentioned challenges, we propose a distributed framework to orchestrate video analytics across Edge and Cloud resources. We investigate trade-offs in the distribution of different software components over a bespoke/full system, where components over Edge and Cloud are treated generically. This paper evaluates the proposed framework as well as the state-of-the-art models and presents comparative analysis of them on various metrics (such as overall model accuracy, latency, memory, and CPU usage). The evaluation result demonstrates our intuition very well, showcasing that the AWS-based approach exhibits reasonably high object-detection accuracy, low memory, and CPU usage when compared to the state-of-the-art approaches, but high latency.
Measurement in AI Policy: Opportunities and Challenges
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

As artificial intelligence increasingly influences our world, it becomes crucial to assess its technical progress and societal impact. This paper surveys problems and opportunities in the measurement of AI systems and their impact, based on a workshop held at Stanford University in the fall of 2019. We identify six summary challenges inherent to measuring the progress and impact of AI, and summarize over 40 presentations and associated discussions from the workshop. We hope this can inspire research agendas in this crucial area.