OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
dpUGC: Learn Differentially Private Representation for User Generated Contents
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

This paper firstly proposes a simple yet efficient generalized approach to apply differential privacy to text representation (i.e., word embedding). Based on it, we propose a user-level approach to learn personalized differentially private word embedding model on user generated contents (UGC). To our best knowledge, this is the first work of learning user-level differentially private word embedding model from text for sharing. The proposed approaches protect the privacy of the individual from re-identification, especially provide better trade-off of privacy and data utility on UGC data for sharing. The experimental results show that the trained embedding models are applicable for the classic text analysis tasks (e.g., regression). Moreover, the proposed approaches of learning differentially private embedding models are both framework- and data- independent, which facilitates the deployment and sharing. The source code is available at https://github.com/sonvx/dpText.
Interplay Between NOMA and Other Emerging Technologies: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been widely recognized as a promising way to scale up the number of users, enhance the spectral efficiency, and improve the user fairness in wireless networks, by allowing more than one user to share one wireless resource. NOMA can be flexibly combined with many existing wireless technologies and emerging ones including multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), massive MIMO, millimeter wave communications, cognitive and cooperative communications, visible light communications, physical layer security, energy harvesting, wireless caching, and so on. Combination of NOMA with these technologies can further increase scalability, spectral efficiency, energy efficiency, and greenness of future communication networks. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the interplay between NOMA and the above technologies. The emphasis is on how the above techniques can benefit from NOMA and vice versa. Moreover, challenges and future research directions are identified.
Learning Embodied Semantics via Music and Dance Semiotic Correlations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Music semantics is embodied, in the sense that meaning is biologically mediated by and grounded in the human body and brain. This embodied cognition perspective also explains why music structures modulate kinetic and somatosensory perception. We leverage this aspect of cognition, by considering dance as a proxy for music perception, in a statistical computational model that learns semiotic correlations between music audio and dance video. We evaluate the ability of this model to effectively capture underlying semantics in a cross-modal retrieval task. Quantitative results, validated with statistical significance testing, strengthen the body of evidence for embodied cognition in music and show the model can recommend music audio for dance video queries and vice-versa.
Next Steps in Quantum Computing: Computer Science's Role
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2019
Year: 2019

The computing ecosystem has always had deep impacts on society and technology and profoundly changed our lives in myriads of ways. Despite decades of impressive Moore's Law performance scaling and other growth in the computing ecosystem there are nonetheless still important potential applications of computing that remain out of reach of current or foreseeable conventional computer systems. Specifically, there are computational applications whose complexity scales super-linearly, even exponentially, with the size of their input data such that the computation time or memory requirements for these problems become intractably large to solve for useful data input sizes. Such problems can have memory requirements that exceed what can be built on the most powerful supercomputers, and/or runtimes on the order of tens of years or more. Quantum computing (QC) is viewed by many as a possible future option for tackling these high-complexity or seemingly-intractable problems by complementing classical computing with a fundamentally different compute paradigm. There is a huge gap between the problems for which a quantum computer might be useful and what we can currently build, program, and run. The goal of the QC research community is to close the gap such that useful algorithms can be run in practical amounts of time on reliable real-world QC hardware. In particular, the goal of this Computing Community Consortium (CCC) workshop was to articulate the central role that the computer science (CS) research communities plays in closing this gap. CS researchers bring invaluable expertise in the design of programming languages, in techniques for systems building, scalability and verification, and in architectural approaches that can bring practical QC from the future to the present. This report introduces issues and recommendations across a range of technical and non-technical topic areas.
Don't Pick the Cherry: An Evaluation Methodology for Android Malware Detection Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

In evaluating detection methods, the malware research community relies on scan results obtained from online platforms such as VirusTotal. Nevertheless, given the lack of standards on how to interpret the obtained data to label apps, researchers hinge on their intuitions and adopt different labeling schemes. The dynamicity of VirusTotal's results along with adoption of different labeling schemes significantly affect the accuracies achieved by any given detection method even on the same dataset, which gives subjective views on the method's performance and hinders the comparison of different malware detection techniques. In this paper, we demonstrate the effect of varying (1) time, (2) labeling schemes, and (3) attack scenarios on the performance of an ensemble of Android repackaged malware detection methods, called dejavu, using over 30,000 real-world Android apps. Our results vividly show the impact of varying the aforementioned 3 dimensions on dejavu's performance. With such results, we encourage the adoption of a standard methodology that takes into account those 3 dimensions in evaluating newly-devised methods to detect Android (repackaged) malware.
Simulation-Based Analytics for Fabrication Quality-Associated Decision Support
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2019
Year: 2019

Automated, data-driven quality management systems, which facilitate the transformation of data into useable information, are desired to enhance decision-making processes. Integration of accurate, reliable, and straightforward approaches that measure uncertainty of inspection processes are instrumental for the successful implementation of automated, data-driven quality management systems. This research has addressed these needs by exploring and adapting Bayesian statistics-based approaches for fraction nonconforming posterior distribution derivation purposes. Using these accurate and reliable inputs, this research further develops novel, analytically-based approaches to improve the practical function of traditional construction fabrication quality management systems. Multiple descriptive and predictive analytical functionalities are developed to support and augment quality-associated decision-making processes. Multi-relational databases (e.g., quality management system, engineering design system, and cost management system) from an industrial company in Edmonton, Canada, are investigated and mapped to implement the novel system proposed. This research has contributed to academic literature and practice by: (1) advancing decision-support systems for construction management by developing a dynamic simulation environment that uses real-time data to enhance simulation predictability; (2) developing integrated analytical methods for improved modeling in fabrication quality-associated decision making; and (3) creating reliable and interpretable decision-support metrics for quality performance measurement, complexity analysis, and rework cost management to reduce the data interpretation load of practitioners and to uncover valuable knowledge and information from available data sources.
Design and Construction of Unmanned Ground Vehicles for Sub-Canopy Plant Phenotyping
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

Unmanned ground vehicles can capture a sub-canopy perspective for plant phenotyping, but their design and construction can be a challenge for scientists unfamiliar with robotics. Here we describe the necessary components and provide guidelines for designing and constructing an autonomous ground robot that can be used for plant phenotyping.
A Probabilistic Bitwise Genetic Algorithm for B-Spline based Image Deformation Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

We propose a novel genetic algorithm to solve the image deformation estimation problem by preserving the genetic diversity. As a classical problem, there is always a trade-off between the complexity of deformation models and the difficulty of parameters search in image deformation. 2D cubic B-spline surface is a highly free-form deformation model and is able to handle complex deformations such as fluid image distortions. However, it is challenging to estimate an apposite global solution. To tackle this problem, we develop a genetic operation named probabilistic bitwise operation (PBO) to replace the crossover and mutation operations, which can preserve the diversity during generation iteration and achieve better coverage ratio of the solution space. Furthermore, a selection strategy named annealing selection is proposed to control the convergence. Qualitative and quantitative results on synthetic data show the effectiveness of our method.
Trait of Gait: A Survey on Gait Biometrics
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Gait analysis is the study of the systematic methods that assess and quantify animal locomotion. The research on gait analysis has considerably evolved through time. It was an ancient art, and it still finds its application today in modern science and medicine. This paper describes how one's gait can be used as a biometric. It shall diversely cover salient research done within the field and explain the nuances and advances in each type of gait analysis. The prominent methods of gait recognition from the early era to the state of the art are covered. This survey also reviews the various gait datasets. The overall aim of this study is to provide a concise roadmap for anyone who wishes to do research in the field of gait biometrics.
Controlled Recurrence of a Biped with Torso
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2019
Year: 2019

We have recently used a symbolic reachability method for controlling the stability of special hybrid systems called 'sampled switched systems'. We show here how the method can be extended in order to control the stability of more general hybrid systems with guard conditions and state resets. We illustrate the method through the example of a biped robot with 6 state variables, using a proportional-derivative (PD) controller. More specifically, we isolate a state region R such that, starting from a state located in R just after a footstep, the PD-control makes the robot state return to R at the end of the following footstep.
Micro-expression detection in long videos using optical flow and recurrent neural networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Facial micro-expressions are subtle and involuntary expressions that can reveal concealed emotions. Micro-expressions are an invaluable source of information in application domains such as lie detection, mental health, sentiment analysis and more. One of the biggest challenges in this field of research is the small amount of available spontaneous micro-expression data. However, spontaneous data collection is burdened by time-consuming and expensive annotation. Hence, methods are needed which can reduce the amount of data that annotators have to review. This paper presents a novel micro-expression spotting method using a recurrent neural network (RNN) on optical flow features. We extract Histogram of Oriented Optical Flow (HOOF) features to encode the temporal changes in selected face regions. Finally, the RNN spots short intervals which are likely to contain occurrences of relevant facial micro-movements. The proposed method is evaluated on the SAMM database. Any chance of subject bias is eliminated by training the RNN using Leave-One-Subject-Out cross-validation. Comparing the spotted intervals with the labeled data shows that the method produced 1569 false positives while obtaining a recall of 0.4654. The initial results show that the proposed method would reduce the video length by a factor of 3.5, while still retaining almost half of the relevant micro-movements. Lastly, as the model gets more data, it becomes better at detecting intervals, which makes the proposed method suitable for supporting the annotation process.
Recognition of Pyralidae Insects Using Intelligent Monitoring Autonomous Robot Vehicle in Natural Farm Scene
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

The Pyralidae pests, such as corn borer and rice leaf roller, are main pests in economic crops. The timely detection and identification of Pyralidae pests is a critical task for agriculturists and farmers. However, the traditional identification of pests by humans is labor intensive and inefficient. To tackle the challenges, a pest monitoring autonomous robot vehicle and a method to recognize Pyralidae pests are presented in this paper. Firstly, the robot on autonomous vehicle collects images by performing camera sensing in natural farm scene. Secondly, the total probability image can be obtained by using inverse histogram mapping, and then the object contour of Pyralidae pests can be extracted quickly and accurately with the constrained Otsu method. Finally, by employing Hu moment and the perimeter and area characteristics, the correct contours of objects can be drawn, and the recognition results can be obtained by comparing them with the reference templates of Pyralidae pests. Additionally, the moving speed of the mechanical arms on the vehicle can be adjusted adaptively by interacting with the recognition algorithm. The experimental results demonstrate that the robot vehicle can automatically capture pest images, and can achieve 94.3$\%$ recognition accuracy in natural farm planting scene.
Data-Driven Microstructure Property Relations
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2019
Year: 2019

An image based prediction of the effective heat conductivity for highly heterogeneous microstructured materials is presented. The synthetic materials under consideration show different inclusion morphology, orientation, volume fraction and topology. The prediction of the effective property is made exclusively based on image data with the main emphasis being put on the 2-point spatial correlation function. This task is implemented using both unsupervised and supervised machine learning methods. First, a snapshot proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) is used to analyze big sets of random microstructures and thereafter compress significant characteristics of the microstructure into a low-dimensional feature vector. In order to manage the related amount of data and computations, three different incremental snapshot POD methods are proposed. In the second step, the obtained feature vector is used to predict the effective material property by using feed forward neural networks. Numerical examples regarding the incremental basis identification and the prediction accuracy of the approach are presented. A Python code illustrating the application of the surrogate is freely available.
Active Stacking for Heart Rate Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Heart rate estimation from electrocardiogram signals is very important for the early detection of cardiovascular diseases. However, due to large individual differences and varying electrocardiogram signal quality, there does not exist a single reliable estimation algorithm that works well on all subjects. Every algorithm may break down on certain subjects, resulting in a significant estimation error. Ensemble regression, which aggregates the outputs of multiple base estimators for more reliable and stable estimates, can be used to remedy this problem. Moreover, active learning can be used to optimally select a few trials from a new subject to label, based on which a stacking ensemble regression model can be trained to aggregate the base estimators. This paper proposes four active stacking approaches, and demonstrates that they all significantly outperform three common unsupervised ensemble regression approaches, and a supervised stacking approach which randomly selects some trials to label. Remarkably, our active stacking approaches only need three or four labeled trials from each subject to achieve an average root mean squared estimation error below three beats per minute, making them very convenient for real-world applications. To our knowledge, this is the first research on active stacking, and its application to heart rate estimation.
Switched Max-Link Relay Selection Algorithms for Buffer-Aided Relay Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we investigate relay selection for cooperative multiple-antenna systems that are equipped with buffers, which increase the reliability of wireless links. In particular, we present a novel relay selection technique based on switching and the selection of the best link, that is named Switched Max-Link. We also introduce a novel relay selection criterion based on the Maximum Likelihood (ML) principle and the Pairwise Error Probability (PEP) denoted Maximum Minimum Distance (MMD) that is incorporated into the proposed Switched Max-Link protocol. We compare the proposed MMD to the existing Quadratic Norm (QN), in terms of PEP and computational complexity. Simulations are then employed to evaluate the performance of the proposed and existing techniques.
Agile Software Development Method, A Comparative Review1
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2019
Year: 2019

Although agile software development methods have caught the attention of software engineers and researchers worldwide, scientific research still remains quite scarce. The aim of this study is to order and make sense of the different agile approaches that have been proposed. This comparative review is performed from the standpoint of using the following features as the analytical perspectives: project management support, life-cycle coverage, type of practical guidance, adaptability in actual use, type of research objectives and existence of empirical evidence. The results show that agile software development methods cover, without offering any rationale, different phases of the software development life-cycle and that most of these methods fail to provide adequate project management support. Moreover, quite a few methods continue to offer little concrete guidance on how to use their solutions or how to adapt them in different development situations. Empirical evidence after ten years of application remains quite limited. Based on the results, new directions on agile methods are outlined.
Language Model Adaptation for Language and Dialect Identification of Text
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

This article describes an unsupervised language model adaptation approach that can be used to enhance the performance of language identification methods. The approach is applied to a current version of the HeLI language identification method, which is now called HeLI 2.0. We describe the HeLI 2.0 method in detail. The resulting system is evaluated using the datasets from the German dialect identification and Indo-Aryan language identification shared tasks of the VarDial workshops 2017 and 2018. The new approach with language identification provides considerably higher F1-scores than the previous HeLI method or the other systems which participated in the shared tasks. The results indicate that unsupervised language model adaptation should be considered as an option in all language identification tasks, especially in those where encountering out-of-domain data is likely.
Optimize TSK Fuzzy Systems for Regression Problems: Mini-Batch Gradient Descent with Regularization, DropRule and AdaBound (MBGD-RDA)
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Takagi-Sugeno-Kang (TSK) fuzzy systems are very useful machine learning models for regression problems. However, to our knowledge, there has not existed an efficient and effective training algorithm that ensures their generalization performance, and also enables them to deal with big data. Inspired by the connections between TSK fuzzy systems and neural networks, we extend three powerful neural network optimization techniques, i.e., mini-batch gradient descent, regularization, and AdaBound, to TSK fuzzy systems, and also propose three novel techniques (DropRule, DropMF, and DropMembership) specifically for training TSK fuzzy systems. Our final algorithm, mini-batch gradient descent with regularization, DropRule and AdaBound (MBGD-RDA), can achieve fast convergence in training TSK fuzzy systems, and also superior generalization performance in testing. It can be used for training TSK fuzzy systems on datasets of any size; however, it is particularly useful for big datasets, on which currently no other efficient training algorithms exist.
Sparse Learning for Variable Selection with Structures and Nonlinearities
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

In this thesis we discuss machine learning methods performing automated variable selection for learning sparse predictive models. There are multiple reasons for promoting sparsity in the predictive models. By relying on a limited set of input variables the models naturally counteract the overfitting problem ubiquitous in learning from finite sets of training points. Sparse models are cheaper to use for predictions, they usually require lower computational resources and by relying on smaller sets of inputs can possibly reduce costs for data collection and storage. Sparse models can also contribute to better understanding of the investigated phenomenons as they are easier to interpret than full models.
Improved robustness of reinforcement learning policies upon conversion to spiking neuronal network platforms applied to ATARI games
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) demonstrates excellent performance on tasks that can be solved by trained policy. It plays a dominant role among cutting-edge machine learning approaches using multi-layer Neural networks (NNs). At the same time, Deep RL suffers from high sensitivity to noisy, incomplete, and misleading input data. Following biological intuition, we involve Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) to address some deficiencies of deep RL solutions. Previous studies in image classification domain demonstrated that standard NNs (with ReLU nonlinearity) trained using supervised learning can be converted to SNNs with negligible deterioration in performance. In this paper, we extend those conversion results to the domain of Q-Learning NNs trained using RL. We provide a proof of principle of the conversion of standard NN to SNN. In addition, we show that the SNN has improved robustness to occlusion in the input image. Finally, we introduce results with converting full-scale Deep Q-network to SNN, paving the way for future research to robust Deep RL applications.
Deep Learning and Word Embeddings for Tweet Classification for Crisis Response
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

Tradition tweet classification models for crisis response focus on convolutional layers and domain-specific word embeddings. In this paper, we study the application of different neural networks with general-purpose and domain-specific word embeddings to investigate their ability to improve the performance of tweet classification models. We evaluate four tweet classification models on CrisisNLP dataset and obtain comparable results which indicates that general-purpose word embedding such as GloVe can be used instead of domain-specific word embedding especially with Bi-LSTM where results reported the highest performance of 62.04% F1 score.