OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Explainable Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs for Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2018
Year: 2018

Incorporating knowledge graph into recommender systems has attracted increasing attention in recent years. By exploring the interlinks within a knowledge graph, the connectivity between users and items can be discovered as paths, which provide rich and complementary information to user-item interactions. Such connectivity not only reveals the semantics of entities and relations, but also helps to comprehend a user's interest. However, existing efforts have not fully explored this connectivity to infer user preferences, especially in terms of modeling the sequential dependencies within and holistic semantics of a path. In this paper, we contribute a new model named Knowledge-aware Path Recurrent Network (KPRN) to exploit knowledge graph for recommendation. KPRN can generate path representations by composing the semantics of both entities and relations. By leveraging the sequential dependencies within a path, we allow effective reasoning on paths to infer the underlying rationale of a user-item interaction. Furthermore, we design a new weighted pooling operation to discriminate the strengths of different paths in connecting a user with an item, endowing our model with a certain level of explainability. We conduct extensive experiments on two datasets about movie and music, demonstrating significant improvements over state-of-the-art solutions Collaborative Knowledge Base Embedding and Neural Factorization Machine.
Visual Saliency Maps Can Apply to Facial Expression Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Human eyes concentrate different facial regions during distinct cognitive activities. We study utilising facial visual saliency maps to classify different facial expressions into different emotions. Our results show that our novel method of merely using facial saliency maps can achieve a descent accuracy of 65\%, much higher than the chance level of $1/7$. Furthermore, our approach is of semi-supervision, i.e., our facial saliency maps are generated from a general saliency prediction algorithm that is not explicitly designed for face images. We also discovered that the classification accuracies of each emotional class using saliency maps demonstrate a strong positive correlation with the accuracies produced by face images. Our work implies that humans may look at different facial areas in order to perceive different emotions.
Hallucinating very low-resolution and obscured face images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Most of the face hallucination methods are designed for complete inputs. They will not work well if the inputs are very tiny or contaminated by large occlusion. Inspired by this fact, we propose an obscured face hallucination network(OFHNet). The OFHNet consists of four parts: an inpainting network, an upsampling network, a discriminative network, and a fixed facial landmark detection network. The inpainting network restores the low-resolution(LR) obscured face images. The following upsampling network is to upsample the output of inpainting network. In order to ensure the generated high-resolution(HR) face images more photo-realistic, we utilize the discriminative network and the facial landmark detection network to better the result of upsampling network. In addition, we present a semantic structure loss, which makes the generated HR face images more pleasing. Extensive experiments show that our framework can restore the appealing HR face images from 1/4 missing area LR face images with a challenging scaling factor of 8x.
What is my data worth? From data properties to data value
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2018
Year: 2018

Data today fuels both the economy and advances in machine learning and AI. All aspects of decision making, at the personal and enterprise level and in governments are increasingly data-driven. In this context, however, there are still some fundamental questions that remain unanswered with respect to data. \textit{What is meant by data value? How can it be quantified, in a general sense?}. The "value" of data is not understood quantitatively until it is used in an application and output is evaluated, and hence currently it is not possible to assess the value of large amounts of data that companies hold, categorically. Further, there is overall consensus that good data is important for any analysis but there is no independent definition of what constitutes good data. In our paper we try to address these gaps in the valuation of data and present a framework for users who wish to assess the value of data in a categorical manner. Our approach is to view the data as composed of various attributes or characteristics, which we refer to as facets, and which in turn comprise many sub-facets. We define the notion of values that each sub-facet may take, and provide a seed scoring mechanism for the different values. The person assessing the data is required to fill in the values of the various sub-facets that are relevant for the data set under consideration, through a questionnaire that attempts to list them exhaustively. Based on the scores assigned for each set of values, the data set can now be quantified in terms of its properties. This provides a basis for the comparison of the relative merits of two or more data sets in a structured manner, independent of context. The presence of context adds additional information that improves the quantification of the data value.
Modeling Conceptual Characteristics of Virtual Machines for CPU Utilization Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

Cloud services have grown rapidly in recent years, which provide high flexibility for cloud users to fulfill their computing requirements on demand. To wisely allocate computing resources in the cloud, it is inevitably important for cloud service providers to be aware of the potential utilization of various resources in the future. This paper focuses on predicting CPU utilization of virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud. We conduct empirical analysis on Microsoft Azure's VM workloads and identify important conceptual characteristics of CPU utilization among VMs, including locality, periodicity and tendency. We propose a neural network method, named Time-aware Residual Networks (T-ResNet), to model the observed conceptual characteristics with expanded network depth for CPU utilization prediction. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed method and the results show that T-ResNet consistently outperforms baseline approaches in various metrics including RMSE, MAE and MAPE.
Fast Beam Alignment for Millimeter Wave Communications: A Sparse Encoding and Phaseless Decoding Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we studied the problem of beam alignment for millimeter wave (mmWave) communications, in which we assume a hybrid analog and digital beamforming structure is employed at the transmitter (i.e. base station), and an omni-directional antenna or an antenna array is used at the receiver (i.e. user). By exploiting the sparse scattering nature of mmWave channels, the beam alignment problem is formulated as a sparse encoding and phaseless decoding problem. More specifically, the problem of interest involves finding a sparse sensing matrix and an efficient recovery algorithm to recover the support and magnitude of the sparse signal from compressive phaseless measurements. A sparse bipartite graph coding (SBG-Coding) algorithm is developed for sparse encoding and phaseless decoding. Our theoretical analysis shows that, in the noiseless case, our proposed algorithm can perfectly recover the support and magnitude of the sparse signal with probability exceeding a pre-specified value from $\mathcal{O}(K^2)$ measurements, where $K$ is the number of nonzero entries of the sparse signal. The proposed algorithm has a simple decoding procedure which is computationally efficient and noise-robust. Simulation results show that our proposed method renders a reliable beam alignment in the low and moderate signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regimes and presents a clear performance advantage over existing methods.
Reasoning From Data in the Mathematical Theory of Evidence
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

Mathematical Theory of Evidence (MTE) is known as a foundation for reasoning when knowledge is expressed at various levels of detail. Though much research effort has been committed to this theory since its foundation, many questions remain open. One of the most important open questions seems to be the relationship between frequencies and the Mathematical Theory of Evidence. The theory is blamed to leave frequencies outside (or aside of) its framework. The seriousness of this accusation is obvious: no experiment may be run to compare the performance of MTE-based models of real world processes against real world data. In this paper we develop a frequentist model of the MTE bringing to fall the above argument against MTE. We describe, how to interpret data in terms of MTE belief functions, how to reason from data about conditional belief functions, how to generate a random sample out of a MTE model, how to derive MTE model from data and how to compare results of reasoning in MTE model and reasoning from data. It is claimed in this paper that MTE is suitable to model some types of destructive processes
Quantum-inspired sublinear classical algorithms for solving low-rank linear systems
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2018
Year: 2018

We present classical sublinear-time algorithms for solving low-rank linear systems of equations. Our algorithms are inspired by the HHL quantum algorithm for solving linear systems and the recent breakthrough by Tang of dequantizing the quantum algorithm for recommendation systems. Let $A \in \mathbb{C}^{m \times n}$ be a rank-$k$ matrix, and $b \in \mathbb{C}^m$ be a vector. We present two algorithms: a "sampling" algorithm that provides a sample from $A^{-1}b$ and a "query" algorithm that outputs an estimate of an entry of $A^{-1}b$, where $A^{-1}$ denotes the Moore-Penrose pseudo-inverse. Both of our algorithms have query and time complexity $O(\mathrm{poly}(k, κ, \|A\|_F, 1/ε)\,\mathrm{polylog}(m, n))$, where $κ$ is the condition number of $A$ and $ε$ is the precision parameter. Note that the algorithms we consider are sublinear time, so they cannot write and read the whole matrix or vectors. In this paper, we assume that $A$ and $b$ come with well-known low-overhead data structures such that entries of $A$ and $b$ can be sampled according to some natural probability distributions. Alternatively, when $A$ is positive semidefinite, our algorithms can be adapted so that the sampling assumption on $b$ is not required.
CQASUMM: Building References for Community Question Answering Summarization Corpora
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

Community Question Answering forums such as Quora, Stackoverflow are rich knowledge resources, often catering to information on topics overlooked by major search engines. Answers submitted to these forums are often elaborated, contain spam, are marred by slurs and business promotions. It is difficult for a reader to go through numerous such answers to gauge community opinion. As a result summarization becomes a prioritized task for CQA forums. While a number of efforts have been made to summarize factoid CQA, little work exists in summarizing non-factoid CQA. We believe this is due to the lack of a considerably large, annotated dataset for CQA summarization. We create CQASUMM, the first huge annotated CQA summarization dataset by filtering the 4.4 million Yahoo! Answers L6 dataset. We sample threads where the best answer can double up as a reference summary and build hundred word summaries from them. We treat other answers as candidates documents for summarization. We provide a script to generate the dataset and introduce the new task of Community Question Answering Summarization. Multi document summarization has been widely studied with news article datasets, especially in the DUC and TAC challenges using news corpora. However documents in CQA have higher variance, contradicting opinion and lesser amount of overlap. We compare the popular multi document summarization techniques and evaluate their performance on our CQA corpora. We look into the state-of-the-art and understand the cases where existing multi document summarizers (MDS) fail. We find that most MDS workflows are built for the entirely factual news corpora, whereas our corpus has a fair share of opinion based instances too. We therefore introduce OpinioSumm, a new MDS which outperforms the best baseline by 4.6% w.r.t ROUGE-1 score.
Focusing on the Big Picture: Insights into a Systems Approach to Deep Learning for Satellite Imagery
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Deep learning tasks are often complicated and require a variety of components working together efficiently to perform well. Due to the often large scale of these tasks, there is a necessity to iterate quickly in order to attempt a variety of methods and to find and fix bugs. While participating in IARPA's Functional Map of the World challenge, we identified challenges along the entire deep learning pipeline and found various solutions to these challenges. In this paper, we present the performance, engineering, and deep learning considerations with processing and modeling data, as well as underlying infrastructure considerations that support large-scale deep learning tasks. We also discuss insights and observations with regard to satellite imagery and deep learning for image classification.
Multi-encoder multi-resolution framework for end-to-end speech recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

Attention-based methods and Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) network have been promising research directions for end-to-end Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). The joint CTC/Attention model has achieved great success by utilizing both architectures during multi-task training and joint decoding. In this work, we present a novel Multi-Encoder Multi-Resolution (MEMR) framework based on the joint CTC/Attention model. Two heterogeneous encoders with different architectures, temporal resolutions and separate CTC networks work in parallel to extract complimentary acoustic information. A hierarchical attention mechanism is then used to combine the encoder-level information. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model, experiments are conducted on Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and CHiME-4, resulting in relative Word Error Rate (WER) reduction of 18.0-32.1%. Moreover, the proposed MEMR model achieves 3.6% WER in the WSJ eval92 test set, which is the best WER reported for an end-to-end system on this benchmark.
Boosting Model Performance through Differentially Private Model Aggregation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

A key factor in developing high performing machine learning models is the availability of sufficiently large datasets. This work is motivated by applications arising in Software as a Service (SaaS) companies where there exist numerous similar yet disjoint datasets from multiple client companies. To overcome the challenges of insufficient data without explicitly aggregating the clients' datasets due to privacy concerns, one solution is to collect more data for each individual client, another is to privately aggregate information from models trained on each client's data. In this work, two approaches for private model aggregation are proposed that enable the transfer of knowledge from existing models trained on other companies' datasets to a new company with limited labeled data while protecting each client company's underlying individual sensitive information. The two proposed approaches are based on state-of-the-art private learning algorithms: Differentially Private Permutation-based Stochastic Gradient Descent and Approximate Minima Perturbation. We empirically show that by leveraging differentially private techniques, we can enable private model aggregation and augment data utility while providing provable mathematical guarantees on privacy. The proposed methods thus provide significant business value for SaaS companies and their clients, specifically as a solution for the cold-start problem.
Molecular computers
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2018
Year: 2018

We propose the chemlambda artificial chemistry, whose behavior strongly suggests that real molecules which embed Interaction Nets patterns and real chemical reactions which resemble Interaction Nets graph rewrites could be a realistic path towards molecular computers, in the sense explained in the article.
Generalized Ternary Connect: End-to-End Learning and Compression of Multiplication-Free Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

The use of deep neural networks in edge computing devices hinges on the balance between accuracy and complexity of computations. Ternary Connect (TC) \cite{lin2015neural} addresses this issue by restricting the parameters to three levels $-1, 0$, and $+1$, thus eliminating multiplications in the forward pass of the network during prediction. We propose Generalized Ternary Connect (GTC), which allows an arbitrary number of levels while at the same time eliminating multiplications by restricting the parameters to integer powers of two. The primary contribution is that GTC learns the number of levels and their values for each layer, jointly with the weights of the network in an end-to-end fashion. Experiments on MNIST and CIFAR-10 show that GTC naturally converges to an `almost binary' network for deep classification networks (e.g. VGG-16) and deep variational auto-encoders, with negligible loss of classification accuracy and comparable visual quality of generated samples respectively. We demonstrate superior compression and similar accuracy of GTC in comparison to several state-of-the-art methods for neural network compression. We conclude with simulations showing the potential benefits of GTC in hardware.
Dynamic Control of Pneumatic Muscle Actuators
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2018
Year: 2018

Pneumatic muscle actuators (PMA) are easy-to-fabricate, lightweight, compliant, and have high power-to-weight ratio, thus making them the ideal actuation choice for many soft and continuum robots. But so far, limited work has been carried out in dynamic control of PMAs. One reason is that PMAs are highly hysteretic. Coupled with their high compliance and response lag, PMAs are challenging to control, particularly when subjected to external loads. The hysteresis models proposed to-date rely on many physical and mechanical parameters that are difficult to measure reliably and therefore of limited use for implementing dynamic control. In this work, we employ a Bouc-Wen hysteresis modeling approach to account for the hysteresis of PMAs and use the model for implementing dynamic control. The controller is then compared to PID feedback control for a number of dynamic position tracking tests. The dynamic control based on the Bouc-Wen hysteresis model shows significantly better tracking performance. This work lays the foundation towards implementing dynamic control for PMA-powered high degrees of freedom soft and continuum robots.
A Fine-Grained Approach for Automated Conversion of JUnit Assertions to English
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2018
Year: 2018

Converting source or unit test code to English has been shown to improve the maintainability, understandability, and analysis of software and tests. Code summarizers identify important statements in the source/tests and convert them to easily understood English sentences using static analysis and NLP techniques. However, current test summarization approaches handle only a subset of the variation and customization allowed in the JUnit assert API (a critical component of test cases) which may affect the accuracy of conversions. In this paper, we present our work towards improving JUnit test summarization with a detailed process for converting a total of 45 unique JUnit assertions to English, including 37 previously-unhandled variations of the assertThat method. This process has also been implemented and released as the AssertConvert tool. Initial evaluations have shown that this tool generates English conversions that accurately represent a wide variety of assertion statements which could be used for code summarization or other NLP analyses.
You Only Live Multiple Times: A Blackbox Solution for Reusing Crash-Stop Algorithms In Realistic Crash-Recovery Settings
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

Distributed agreement-based algorithms are often specified in a crash-stop asynchronous model augmented by Chandra and Toueg's unreliable failure detectors. In such models, correct nodes stay up forever, incorrect nodes eventually crash and remain down forever, and failure detectors behave correctly forever eventually, However, in reality, nodes as well as communication links both crash and recover without deterministic guarantees to remain in some state forever. In this paper, we capture this realistic temporary and probabilitic behaviour in a simple new system model. Moreover, we identify a large algorithm class for which we devis a property-preserving transformation. Using this transformation, many algorithms written for the asynchronous crash-stop model run correctly and unchanged in real systems.
LookinGood: Enhancing Performance Capture with Real-time Neural Re-Rendering
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Motivated by augmented and virtual reality applications such as telepresence, there has been a recent focus in real-time performance capture of humans under motion. However, given the real-time constraint, these systems often suffer from artifacts in geometry and texture such as holes and noise in the final rendering, poor lighting, and low-resolution textures. We take the novel approach to augment such real-time performance capture systems with a deep architecture that takes a rendering from an arbitrary viewpoint, and jointly performs completion, super resolution, and denoising of the imagery in real-time. We call this approach neural (re-)rendering, and our live system "LookinGood". Our deep architecture is trained to produce high resolution and high quality images from a coarse rendering in real-time. First, we propose a self-supervised training method that does not require manual ground-truth annotation. We contribute a specialized reconstruction error that uses semantic information to focus on relevant parts of the subject, e.g. the face. We also introduce a salient reweighing scheme of the loss function that is able to discard outliers. We specifically design the system for virtual and augmented reality headsets where the consistency between the left and right eye plays a crucial role in the final user experience. Finally, we generate temporally stable results by explicitly minimizing the difference between two consecutive frames. We tested the proposed system in two different scenarios: one involving a single RGB-D sensor, and upper body reconstruction of an actor, the second consisting of full body 360 degree capture. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate how our system generalizes across unseen sequences and subjects. The supplementary video is available at http://youtu.be/Md3tdAKoLGU.