OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Hit the KeyJack: stealing data from your daily wireless devices incognito
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2016
Year: 2016

Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the most fast-growing field in high technologies nowadays. Therefore, lots of electronic devices include wireless connections with several communication protocols (WiFi, ZigBee, Sigfox, LoRa and so on). Nevertheless, designers of such components do not take care of security features most of the time while focusing on communication reliability (speed, throughput and low power consumption). As a consequence, several wireless IoT devices transmit data in plaintext creating lots of security breaches for both eavesdropping and data injection attacks. This work introduces KeyJack, a preliminary proof-of-concept of a solution aiming to eavesdrop wireless devices and hopefully perform injection attacks afterwards. KeyJack operates on widely-used devices: our keyboards! This solution is based on low-cost embedded electronics and gives an attacker or a white hat hacker the possibility to retrieve data from John Doe's computer. This work also shows that this approach could be used to any wireless device using 2.4GHz radio chips like the NRF24L01 from Nordic Semiconductor.
Evolving the Structure of Evolution Strategies
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2016
Year: 2016

Various variants of the well known Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) have been proposed recently, which improve the empirical performance of the original algorithm by structural modifications. However, in practice it is often unclear which variation is best suited to the specific optimization problem at hand. As one approach to tackle this issue, algorithmic mechanisms attached to CMA-ES variants are considered and extracted as functional \emph{modules}, allowing for combinations of them. This leads to a configuration space over ES structures, which enables the exploration of algorithm structures and paves the way toward novel algorithm generation. Specifically, eleven modules are incorporated in this framework with two or three alternative configurations for each module, resulting in $4\,608$ algorithms. A self-adaptive Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used to efficiently evolve effective ES-structures for given classes of optimization problems, outperforming any classical CMA-ES variants from literature. The proposed approach is evaluated on noiseless functions from BBOB suite. Furthermore, such an observation is again confirmed on different function groups and dimensionality, indicating the feasibility of ES configuration on real-world problem classes.
Shortcuts to quantum network routing
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2016
Year: 2016

A quantum network promises to enable long distance quantum communication, and assemble small quantum devices into a large quantum computing cluster. Each network node can thereby be seen as a small few qubit quantum computer. Qubits can be sent over direct physical links connecting nearby quantum nodes, or by means of teleportation over pre-established entanglement amongst distant network nodes. Such pre-shared entanglement effectively forms a shortcut - a virtual quantum link - which can be used exactly once. Here, we present an abstraction of a quantum network that allows ideas from computer science to be applied to the problem of routing qubits, and manage entanglement in the network. Specifically, we consider a scenario in which each quantum network node can create EPR pairs with its immediate neighbours over a physical connection, and perform entanglement swapping operations in order to create long distance virtual quantum links. We proceed to discuss the features unique to quantum networks, which call for the development of new routing techniques. As an example, we present two simple hierarchical routing schemes for a quantum network of N nodes for a ring and sphere topology. For these topologies we present efficient routing algorithms requiring O(log N) qubits to be stored at each network node, O(polylog N) time and space to perform routing decisions, and O(log N) timesteps to replenish the virtual quantum links in a model of entanglement generation.
Rule Extraction Algorithm for Deep Neural Networks: A Review
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

Despite the highest classification accuracy in wide varieties of application areas, artificial neural network has one disadvantage. The way this Network comes to a decision is not easily comprehensible. The lack of explanation ability reduces the acceptability of neural network in data mining and decision system. This drawback is the reason why researchers have proposed many rule extraction algorithms to solve the problem. Recently, Deep Neural Network (DNN) is achieving a profound result over the standard neural network for classification and recognition problems. It is a hot machine learning area proven both useful and innovative. This paper has thoroughly reviewed various rule extraction algorithms, considering the classification scheme: decompositional, pedagogical, and eclectics. It also presents the evaluation of these algorithms based on the neural network structure with which the algorithm is intended to work. The main contribution of this review is to show that there is a limited study of rule extraction algorithm from DNN.
A Tensor Network Kalman filter with an application in recursive MIMO Volterra system identification
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2016
Year: 2016

This article introduces a Tensor Network Kalman filter, which can estimate state vectors that are exponentially large without ever having to explicitly construct them. The Tensor Network Kalman filter also easily accommodates the case where several different state vectors need to be estimated simultaneously. The key lies in rewriting the standard Kalman equations as tensor equations and then implementing them using Tensor Networks, which effectively transforms the exponential storage cost and computational complexity into a linear one. We showcase the power of the proposed framework through an application in recursive nonlinear system identification of high-order discrete-time multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) Volterra systems. The identification problem is transformed into a linear state estimation problem wherein the state vector contains all Volterra kernel coefficients and is estimated using the Tensor Network Kalman filter. The accuracy and robustness of the scheme are demonstrated via numerical experiments, which show that updating the Kalman filter estimate of a state vector of length $10^9$ and its covariance matrix takes about 0.007s on a standard desktop computer in Matlab.
Team Delft's Robot Winner of the Amazon Picking Challenge 2016
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2016
Year: 2016

This paper describes Team Delft's robot, which won the Amazon Picking Challenge 2016, including both the Picking and the Stowing competitions. The goal of the challenge is to automate pick and place operations in unstructured environments, specifically the shelves in an Amazon warehouse. Team Delft's robot is based on an industrial robot arm, 3D cameras and a customized gripper. The robot's software uses ROS to integrate off-the-shelf components and modules developed specifically for the competition, implementing Deep Learning and other AI techniques for object recognition and pose estimation, grasp planning and motion planning. This paper describes the main components in the system, and discusses its performance and results at the Amazon Picking Challenge 2016 finals.
SYSTRAN's Pure Neural Machine Translation Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2016
Year: 2016

Since the first online demonstration of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) by LISA, NMT development has recently moved from laboratory to production systems as demonstrated by several entities announcing roll-out of NMT engines to replace their existing technologies. NMT systems have a large number of training configurations and the training process of such systems is usually very long, often a few weeks, so role of experimentation is critical and important to share. In this work, we present our approach to production-ready systems simultaneously with release of online demonstrators covering a large variety of languages (12 languages, for 32 language pairs). We explore different practical choices: an efficient and evolutive open-source framework; data preparation; network architecture; additional implemented features; tuning for production; etc. We discuss about evaluation methodology, present our first findings and we finally outline further work. Our ultimate goal is to share our expertise to build competitive production systems for "generic" translation. We aim at contributing to set up a collaborative framework to speed-up adoption of the technology, foster further research efforts and enable the delivery and adoption to/by industry of use-case specific engines integrated in real production workflows. Mastering of the technology would allow us to build translation engines suited for particular needs, outperforming current simplest/uniform systems.
Identifiability and Transportability in Dynamic Causal Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2016
Year: 2016

In this paper we propose a causal analog to the purely observational Dynamic Bayesian Networks, which we call Dynamic Causal Networks. We provide a sound and complete algorithm for identification of Dynamic Causal Net- works, namely, for computing the effect of an intervention or experiment, based on passive observations only, whenever possible. We note the existence of two types of confounder variables that affect in substantially different ways the iden- tification procedures, a distinction with no analog in either Dynamic Bayesian Networks or standard causal graphs. We further propose a procedure for the transportability of causal effects in Dynamic Causal Network settings, where the re- sult of causal experiments in a source domain may be used for the identification of causal effects in a target domain.
Do Price Ranges Increase Click-throughs?
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2016
Year: 2016

An important goal of online comparison shopping services is to "convert" a viewer from general product category pages (for example product groups such as "smartphones" or "air-conditioners") to detailed product pages and ultimately to order pages. Comparison shopping websites provide a familiar web interface as well as a chance for consumers to purchase items at competitive prices. In return for providing access to a large market of potential consumers, the comparison shopping service usually receives financial compensation for product clicks and orders. This study looked at 2.5 million product listing visits at price.com.hk to determine whether a modification in the way prices are displayed on general category pages resulted in more "conversions" to product detail pages. We found a statistically significant improvement over-all as a result of the new price display resulting in 3.6% more product clicks over all categories. Additional analysis showed that the effect is heterogeneous among different categories, and in a few cases there may be some categories negatively affected by the display modification.
Deep Amortized Inference for Probabilistic Programs
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2016
Year: 2016

Probabilistic programming languages (PPLs) are a powerful modeling tool, able to represent any computable probability distribution. Unfortunately, probabilistic program inference is often intractable, and existing PPLs mostly rely on expensive, approximate sampling-based methods. To alleviate this problem, one could try to learn from past inferences, so that future inferences run faster. This strategy is known as amortized inference; it has recently been applied to Bayesian networks and deep generative models. This paper proposes a system for amortized inference in PPLs. In our system, amortization comes in the form of a parameterized guide program. Guide programs have similar structure to the original program, but can have richer data flow, including neural network components. These networks can be optimized so that the guide approximately samples from the posterior distribution defined by the original program. We present a flexible interface for defining guide programs and a stochastic gradient-based scheme for optimizing guide parameters, as well as some preliminary results on automatically deriving guide programs. We explore in detail the common machine learning pattern in which a 'local' model is specified by 'global' random values and used to generate independent observed data points; this gives rise to amortized local inference supporting global model learning.
Finite Computational Structures and Implementations
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2016
Year: 2016

What is computable with limited resources? How can we verify the correctness of computations? How to measure computational power with precision? Despite the immense scientific and engineering progress in computing, we still have only partial answers to these questions. In order to make these problems more precise, we describe an abstract algebraic definition of classical computation, generalizing traditional models to semigroups. The mathematical abstraction also allows the investigation of different computing paradigms (e.g. cellular automata, reversible computing) in the same framework. Here we summarize the main questions and recent results of the research of finite computation.
Learning Quadrotor Dynamics Using Neural Network for Flight Control
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2016
Year: 2016

Traditional learning approaches proposed for controlling quadrotors or helicopters have focused on improving performance for specific trajectories by iteratively improving upon a nominal controller, for example learning from demonstrations, iterative learning, and reinforcement learning. In these schemes, however, it is not clear how the information gathered from the training trajectories can be used to synthesize controllers for more general trajectories. Recently, the efficacy of deep learning in inferring helicopter dynamics has been shown. Motivated by the generalization capability of deep learning, this paper investigates whether a neural network based dynamics model can be employed to synthesize control for trajectories different than those used for training. To test this, we learn a quadrotor dynamics model using only translational and only rotational training trajectories, each of which can be controlled independently, and then use it to simultaneously control the yaw and position of a quadrotor, which is non-trivial because of nonlinear couplings between the two motions. We validate our approach in experiments on a quadrotor testbed.
Gender differences in scientific collaborations: Women are more egalitarian than men
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2016
Year: 2016

By analyzing a unique dataset of more than 270,000 scientists, we discovered substantial gender differences in scientific collaborations. While men are more likely to collaborate with other men, women are more egalitarian. This is consistently observed over all fields and regardless of the number of collaborators a scientist has. The only exception is observed in the field of engineering, where this gender bias disappears with increasing number of collaborators. We also found that the distribution of the number of collaborators follows a truncated power law with a cut-off that is gender dependent and related to the gender differences in the number of published papers. Considering interdisciplinary research, our analysis shows that men and women behave similarly across fields, except in the case of natural sciences, where women with many collaborators are more likely to have collaborators from other fields.
D-OAMP: A Denoising-based Signal Recovery Algorithm for Compressed Sensing
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

Approximate message passing (AMP) is an efficient iterative signal recovery algorithm for compressed sensing (CS). For sensing matrices with independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) Gaussian entries, the behavior of AMP can be asymptotically described by a scaler recursion called state evolution. Orthogonal AMP (OAMP) is a variant of AMP that imposes a divergence-free constraint on the denoiser. In this paper, we extend OAMP to incorporate generic denoisers, hence the name D-OAMP. Our numerical results show that state evolution predicts the performance of D-OAMP well for generic denoisers when i.i.d. Gaussian or partial orthogonal sensing matrices are involved. We compare the performances of denosing-AMP (D-AMP) and D-OAMP for recovering natural images from CS measurements. Simulation results show that D-OAMP outperforms D-AMP in both convergence speed and recovery accuracy for partial orthogonal sensing matrices.
Fairness as a Program Property
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2016
Year: 2016

We explore the following question: Is a decision-making program fair, for some useful definition of fairness? First, we describe how several algorithmic fairness questions can be phrased as program verification problems. Second, we discuss an automated verification technique for proving or disproving fairness of decision-making programs with respect to a probabilistic model of the population.
Explicit linear kernels for packing problems
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2016
Year: 2016

During the last years, several algorithmic meta-theorems have appeared (Bodlaender et al. [FOCS 2009], Fomin et al. [SODA 2010], Kim et al. [ICALP 2013]) guaranteeing the existence of linear kernels on sparse graphs for problems satisfying some generic conditions. The drawback of such general results is that it is usually not clear how to derive from them constructive kernels with reasonably low explicit constants. To fill this gap, we recently presented [STACS 2014] a framework to obtain explicit linear kernels for some families of problems whose solutions can be certified by a subset of vertices. In this article we enhance our framework to deal with packing problems, that is, problems whose solutions can be certified by collections of subgraphs of the input graph satisfying certain properties. ${\mathcal F}$-Packing is a typical example: for a family ${\mathcal F}$ of connected graphs that we assume to contain at least one planar graph, the task is to decide whether a graph $G$ contains $k$ vertex-disjoint subgraphs such that each of them contains a graph in ${\mathcal F}$ as a minor. We provide explicit linear kernels on sparse graphs for the following two orthogonal generalizations of ${\mathcal F}$-Packing: for an integer $\ell \geq 1$, one aims at finding either minor-models that are pairwise at distance at least $\ell$ in $G$ ($\ell$-${\mathcal F}$-Packing), or such that each vertex in $G$ belongs to at most $\ell$ minors-models (${\mathcal F}$-Packing with $\ell$-Membership). Finally, we also provide linear kernels for the versions of these problems where one wants to pack subgraphs instead of minors.
A Reinforcement Learning Approach to the View Planning Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

We present a Reinforcement Learning (RL) solution to the view planning problem (VPP), which generates a sequence of view points that are capable of sensing all accessible area of a given object represented as a 3D model. In doing so, the goal is to minimize the number of view points, making the VPP a class of set covering optimization problem (SCOP). The SCOP is NP-hard, and the inapproximability results tell us that the greedy algorithm provides the best approximation that runs in polynomial time. In order to find a solution that is better than the greedy algorithm, (i) we introduce a novel score function by exploiting the geometry of the 3D model, (ii) we model an intuitive human approach to VPP using this score function, and (iii) we cast VPP as a Markovian Decision Process (MDP), and solve the MDP in RL framework using well-known RL algorithms. In particular, we use SARSA, Watkins-Q and TD with function approximation to solve the MDP. We compare the results of our method with the baseline greedy algorithm in an extensive set of test objects, and show that we can out-perform the baseline in almost all cases.
The DRAT format and DRAT-trim checker
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2016
Year: 2016

This document describes the DRAT format for clausal proofs and the DRAT-trim proof checker.
A Classification Engine for Image Ballistics of Social Data
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2016
Year: 2016

Image Forensics has already achieved great results for the source camera identification task on images. Standard approaches for data coming from Social Network Platforms cannot be applied due to different processes involved (e.g., scaling, compression, etc.). Over 1 billion images are shared each day on the Internet and obtaining information about their history from the moment they were acquired could be exploited for investigation purposes. In this paper, a classification engine for the reconstruction of the history of an image, is presented. Specifically, exploiting K-NN and decision trees classifiers and a-priori knowledge acquired through image analysis, we propose an automatic approach that can understand which Social Network Platform has processed an image and the software application used to perform the image upload. The engine makes use of proper alterations introduced by each platform as features. Results, in terms of global accuracy on a dataset of 2720 images, confirm the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.
It is indeed a fundamental construction of all linear codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

Linear codes are widely employed in communication systems, consumer electronics, and storage devices. All linear codes over finite fields can be generated by a generator matrix. Due to this, the generator matrix approach is called a fundamental construction of linear codes. This is the only known construction method that can produce all linear codes over finite fields. Recently, a defining-set construction of linear codes over finite fields has attracted a lot of attention, and have been employed to produce a huge number of classes of linear codes over finite fields. It was claimed that this approach can also generate all linear codes over finite fields. But so far, no proof of this claim is given in the literature. The objective of this paper is to prove this claim, and confirm that the defining-set approach is indeed a fundamental approach to constructing all linear codes over finite fields. As a byproduct, a trace representation of all linear codes over finite fields is presented.
Anfrage-getriebener Wissenstransfer zur Unterstuetzung von Datenanalysten
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2016
Year: 2016

In larger organizations, multiple teams of data scientists have to integrate data from heterogeneous data sources as preparation for data analysis tasks. Writing effective analytical queries requires data scientists to have in-depth knowledge of the existence, semantics, and usage context of data sources. Once gathered, such knowledge is informally shared within a specific team of data scientists, but usually is neither formalized nor shared with other teams. Potential synergies remain unused. We therefore introduce a novel approach which extends data management systems with additional knowledge-sharing capabilities to facilitate user collaboration without altering established data analysis workflows. Relevant collective knowledge from the query log is extracted to support data source discovery and incremental data integration. Extracted knowledge is formalized and provided at query time.