OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Multi-Step Prediction of Dynamic Systems with Recurrent Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2018
Year: 2018

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) can encode rich dynamics which makes them suitable for modeling dynamic systems. To train an RNN for multi-step prediction of dynamic systems, it is crucial to efficiently address the state initialization problem, which seeks proper values for the RNN initial states at the beginning of each prediction interval. In this work, the state initialization problem is addressed using Neural Networks (NNs) to effectively train a variety of RNNs for modeling two aerial vehicles, a helicopter and a quadrotor, from experimental data. It is shown that the RNN initialized by the NN-based initialization method outperforms the state of the art. Further, a comprehensive study of RNNs trained for multi-step prediction of the two aerial vehicles is presented. The multi-step prediction of the quadrotor is enhanced using a hybrid model which combines a simplified physics-based motion model of the vehicle with RNNs. While the maximum translational and rotational velocities in the quadrotor dataset are about 4 m/s and 3.8 rad/s, respectively, the hybrid model produces predictions, over 1.9 second, which remain within 9 cm/s and 0.12 rad/s of the measured translational and rotational velocities, with 99\% confidence on the test dataset
On the Metric-based Approximate Minimization of Markov Chains
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we address the approximate minimization problem of Markov Chains (MCs) from a behavioral metric-based perspective. Specifically, given a finite MC and a positive integer k, we are looking for an MC with at most k states having minimal distance to the original. The metric considered in this work is the bisimilarity distance of Desharnais et al.. For this metric we show that (1) optimal approximations always exist; (2) the problem has a bilinear program characterization; and (3) prove that its threshold problem is in PSPACE and NP-hard. In addition to the bilinear program solution, we present an approach inspired by expectation maximization techniques for computing suboptimal solutions to the problem. Experiments suggest that our method gives a practical approach that outperforms the bilinear program implementation run on state-of-the-art bilinear solvers.
Deep Curiosity Search: Intra-Life Exploration Can Improve Performance on Challenging Deep Reinforcement Learning Problems
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

Traditional exploration methods in RL require agents to perform random actions to find rewards. But these approaches struggle on sparse-reward domains like Montezuma's Revenge where the probability that any random action sequence leads to reward is extremely low. Recent algorithms have performed well on such tasks by encouraging agents to visit new states or perform new actions in relation to all prior training episodes (which we call across-training novelty). But such algorithms do not consider whether an agent exhibits intra-life novelty: doing something new within the current episode, regardless of whether those behaviors have been performed in previous episodes. We hypothesize that across-training novelty might discourage agents from revisiting initially non-rewarding states that could become important stepping stones later in training. We introduce Deep Curiosity Search (DeepCS), which encourages intra-life exploration by rewarding agents for visiting as many different states as possible within each episode, and show that DeepCS matches the performance of current state-of-the-art methods on Montezuma's Revenge. We further show that DeepCS improves exploration on Amidar, Freeway, Gravitar, and Tutankham (many of which are hard exploration games). Surprisingly, DeepCS doubles A2C performance on Seaquest, a game we would not have expected to benefit from intra-life exploration because the arena is small and already easily navigated by naive exploration techniques. In one run, DeepCS achieves a maximum training score of 80,000 points on Seaquest, higher than any methods other than Ape-X. The strong performance of DeepCS on these sparse- and dense-reward tasks suggests that encouraging intra-life novelty is an interesting, new approach for improving performance in Deep RL and motivates further research into hybridizing across-training and intra-life exploration methods.
Efficient Interactive Search for Geo-tagged Multimedia Data
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2018
Year: 2018

Due to the advances in mobile computing and multimedia techniques, there are vast amount of multimedia data with geographical information collected in multifarious applications. In this paper, we propose a novel type of image search named interactive geo-tagged image search which aims to find out a set of images based on geographical proximity and similarity of visual content, as well as the preference of users. Existing approaches for spatial keyword query and geo-image query cannot address this problem effectively since they do not consider these three type of information together for query. In order to solve this challenge efficiently, we propose the definition of interactive top-$k$ geo-tagged image query and then present a framework including candidate search stage , interaction stage and termination stage. To enhance the searching efficiency in a large-scale database, we propose the candidate search algorithm named GI-SUPER Search based on a new notion called superior relationship and GIR-Tree, a novel index structure. Furthermore, two candidate selection methods are proposed for learning the preferences of the user during the interaction. At last, the termination procedure and estimation procedure are introduced in brief. Experimental evaluation on real multimedia dataset demonstrates that our solution has a really high performance.
Detecting Adversarial Examples via Key-based Network
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Though deep neural networks have achieved state-of-the-art performance in visual classification, recent studies have shown that they are all vulnerable to the attack of adversarial examples. Small and often imperceptible perturbations to the input images are sufficient to fool the most powerful deep neural networks. Various defense methods have been proposed to address this issue. However, they either require knowledge on the process of generating adversarial examples, or are not robust against new attacks specifically designed to penetrate the existing defense. In this work, we introduce key-based network, a new detection-based defense mechanism to distinguish adversarial examples from normal ones based on error correcting output codes, using the binary code vectors produced by multiple binary classifiers applied to randomly chosen label-sets as signatures to match normal images and reject adversarial examples. In contrast to existing defense methods, the proposed method does not require knowledge of the process for generating adversarial examples and can be applied to defend against different types of attacks. For the practical black-box and gray-box scenarios, where the attacker does not know the encoding scheme, we show empirically that key-based network can effectively detect adversarial examples generated by several state-of-the-art attacks.
A Novel Framework for Recurrent Neural Networks with Enhancing Information Processing and Transmission between Units
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2018
Year: 2018

This paper proposes a novel framework for recurrent neural networks (RNNs) inspired by the human memory models in the field of cognitive neuroscience to enhance information processing and transmission between adjacent RNNs' units. The proposed framework for RNNs consists of three stages that is working memory, forget, and long-term store. The first stage includes taking input data into sensory memory and transferring it to working memory for preliminary treatment. And the second stage mainly focuses on proactively forgetting the secondary information rather than the primary in the working memory. And finally, we get the long-term store normally using some kind of RNN's unit. Our framework, which is generalized and simple, is evaluated on 6 datasets which fall into 3 different tasks, corresponding to text classification, image classification and language modelling. Experiments reveal that our framework can obviously improve the performance of traditional recurrent neural networks. And exploratory task shows the ability of our framework of correctly forgetting the secondary information.
An Interpretable Deep Hierarchical Semantic Convolutional Neural Network for Lung Nodule Malignancy Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

While deep learning methods are increasingly being applied to tasks such as computer-aided diagnosis, these models are difficult to interpret, do not incorporate prior domain knowledge, and are often considered as a "black-box." The lack of model interpretability hinders them from being fully understood by target users such as radiologists. In this paper, we present a novel interpretable deep hierarchical semantic convolutional neural network (HSCNN) to predict whether a given pulmonary nodule observed on a computed tomography (CT) scan is malignant. Our network provides two levels of output: 1) low-level radiologist semantic features, and 2) a high-level malignancy prediction score. The low-level semantic outputs quantify the diagnostic features used by radiologists and serve to explain how the model interprets the images in an expert-driven manner. The information from these low-level tasks, along with the representations learned by the convolutional layers, are then combined and used to infer the high-level task of predicting nodule malignancy. This unified architecture is trained by optimizing a global loss function including both low- and high-level tasks, thereby learning all the parameters within a joint framework. Our experimental results using the Lung Image Database Consortium (LIDC) show that the proposed method not only produces interpretable lung cancer predictions but also achieves significantly better results compared to common 3D CNN approaches.
Closed-loop Bayesian Semantic Data Fusion for Collaborative Human-Autonomy Target Search
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2018
Year: 2018

In search applications, autonomous unmanned vehicles must be able to efficiently reacquire and localize mobile targets that can remain out of view for long periods of time in large spaces. As such, all available information sources must be actively leveraged -- including imprecise but readily available semantic observations provided by humans. To achieve this, this work develops and validates a novel collaborative human-machine sensing solution for dynamic target search. Our approach uses continuous partially observable Markov decision process (CPOMDP) planning to generate vehicle trajectories that optimally exploit imperfect detection data from onboard sensors, as well as semantic natural language observations that can be specifically requested from human sensors. The key innovation is a scalable hierarchical Gaussian mixture model formulation for efficiently solving CPOMDPs with semantic observations in continuous dynamic state spaces. The approach is demonstrated and validated with a real human-robot team engaged in dynamic indoor target search and capture scenarios on a custom testbed.
Efficient Two-Level Scheduling for Concurrent Graph Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

With the rapidly growing demand of graph processing in the real scene, they have to efficiently handle massive concurrent jobs. Although existing work enable to efficiently handle single graph processing job, there are plenty of memory access redundancy caused by ignoring the characteristic of data access correlations. Motivated such an observation, we proposed two-level scheduling strategy in this paper, which enables to enhance the efficiency of data access and to accelerate the convergence speed of concurrent jobs. Firstly, correlations-aware job scheduling allows concurrent jobs to process the same graph data in Cache, which fundamentally alleviates the challenge of CPU repeatedly accessing the same graph data in memory. Secondly, multiple priority-based data scheduling provides the support of prioritized iteration for concurrent jobs, which is based on the global priority generated by individual priority of each job. Simultaneously, we adopt block priority instead of fine-grained priority to schedule graph data to decrease the computation cost. In particular, two-level scheduling significantly advance over the state-of-the-art because it works in the interlayer between data and systems.
Gemini: Reducing DRAM Cache Hit Latency by Hybrid Mappings
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2018
Year: 2018

Die-stacked DRAM caches are increasingly advocated to bridge the performance gap between on-chip Cache and main memory. It is essential to improve DRAM cache hit rate and lower cache hit latency simultaneously. Prior DRAM cache designs fall into two categories according to the data mapping polices: set-associative and direct-mapped, achieving either one. In this paper, we propose a partial direct-mapped die-stacked DRAM cache to achieve the both objectives simultaneously, called Gemini, which is motivated by the following observations: applying unified mapping policy to different blocks cannot achieve high cache hit rate and low hit latency in terms of mapping structure. Gemini cache classifies data into leading blocks and following blocks, and places them with static mapping and dynamic mapping respectively in a unified set-associative structure. Gemini also designs a replacement policy to balance the different blocks miss penalty and the recency, and provides strategies to mitigate cache thrashing due to block type transitions. Experimental results demonstrate that Gemini cache can narrow the hit latency gap with direct-mapped cache significantly, from 1.75X to 1.22X on average, and can achieve comparable hit rate with set-associative cache. Compared with the state-of-the-art baselines, i.e., enhanced Loh-Hill cache, Gemini improves the IPC by up to 20% respectively.
Advancing Hardware Security Using Polymorphic and Stochastic Spin-Hall Effect Devices
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

Protecting intellectual property (IP) in electronic circuits has become a serious challenge in recent years. Logic locking/encryption and layout camouflaging are two prominent techniques for IP protection. Most existing approaches, however, particularly those focused on CMOS integration, incur excessive design overheads resulting from their need for additional circuit structures or device-level modifications. This work leverages the innate polymorphism of an emerging spin-based device, called the giant spin-Hall effect (GSHE) switch, to simultaneously enable locking and camouflaging within a single instance. Using the GSHE switch, we propose a powerful primitive that enables cloaking all the 16 Boolean functions possible for two inputs. We conduct a comprehensive study using state-of-the-art Boolean satisfiability (SAT) attacks to demonstrate the superior resilience of the proposed primitive in comparison to several others in the literature. While we tailor the primitive for deterministic computation, it can readily support stochastic computation; we argue that stochastic behavior can break most, if not all, existing SAT attacks. Finally, we discuss the resilience of the primitive against various side-channel attacks as well as invasive monitoring at runtime, which are arguably even more concerning threats than SAT attacks.
A Framework for Speechreading Acquisition Tools
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2018
Year: 2018

At least 360 million people worldwide have disabling hearing loss that frequently causes difficulties in day-to-day conversations. Hearing aids often fail to offer enough benefits and have low adoption rates. However, people with hearing loss find that speechreading can improve their understanding during conversation. Speechreading (often called lipreading) refers to using visual information about the movements of a speaker's lips, teeth, and tongue to help understand what they are saying. Speechreading is commonly used by people with all severities of hearing loss to understand speech, and people with typical hearing also speechread (albeit subconsciously) to help them understand others. However, speechreading is a skill that takes considerable practice to acquire. Publicly-funded speechreading classes are sometimes provided, and have been shown to improve speechreading acquisition. However, classes are only provided in a handful of countries around the world and students can only practice effectively when attending class. Existing tools have been designed to help improve speechreading acquisition, but are often not effective because they have not been designed within the context of contemporary speechreading lessons or practice. To address this, in this thesis I present a novel speechreading acquisition framework that can be used to design Speechreading Acquisition Tools (SATs) - a new type of technology to improve speechreading acquisition.
Minmax Regret 1-Sink for Aggregate Evacuation Time on Path Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2018
Year: 2018

Evacuation in emergency situations can be modeled by a dynamic flow network. Two criteria have been used before: one is the evacuation completion time and the other is the aggregate evacuation time of individual evacuees. The aim of this paper is to optimize the aggregate evacuation time in the simplest case, where the network is a path and only one evacuation center (called a sink) is to be introduced. The evacuees are initially located at the vertices, but their precise numbers are unknown, and are given by upper and lower bounds. Under this assumption, we compute the sink location that minimizes the maximum "regret." We present an $O(n^2\log n)$ time algorithm to solve this problem, improving upon the previously fastest $O(n^3)$ time algorithm, where $n$ is the number of vertices.
On the Flip Side: Identifying Counterexamples in Visual Question Answering
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Visual question answering (VQA) models respond to open-ended natural language questions about images. While VQA is an increasingly popular area of research, it is unclear to what extent current VQA architectures learn key semantic distinctions between visually-similar images. To investigate this question, we explore a reformulation of the VQA task that challenges models to identify counterexamples: images that result in a different answer to the original question. We introduce two methods for evaluating existing VQA models against a supervised counterexample prediction task, VQA-CX. While our models surpass existing benchmarks on VQA-CX, we find that the multimodal representations learned by an existing state-of-the-art VQA model do not meaningfully contribute to performance on this task. These results call into question the assumption that successful performance on the VQA benchmark is indicative of general visual-semantic reasoning abilities.
Patch-Based Image Hallucination for Super Resolution with Detail Reconstruction from Similar Sample Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Image hallucination and super-resolution have been studied for decades, and many approaches have been proposed to upsample low-resolution images using information from the images themselves, multiple example images, or large image databases. However, most of this work has focused exclusively on small magnification levels because the algorithms simply sharpen the blurry edges in the upsampled images - no actual new detail is typically reconstructed in the final result. In this paper, we present a patch-based algorithm for image hallucination which, for the first time, properly synthesizes novel high frequency detail. To do this, we pose the synthesis problem as a patch-based optimization which inserts coherent, high-frequency detail from contextually-similar images of the same physical scene/subject provided from either a personal image collection or a large online database. The resulting image is visually plausible and contains coherent high frequency information. We demonstrate the robustness of our algorithm by testing it on a large number of images and show that its performance is considerably superior to all state-of-the-art approaches, a result that is verified to be statistically significant through a randomized user study.
A Structure-aware Approach for Efficient Graph Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

With the advent of the big data, graph are processed in an iterative manner, which incrementally described in the form of graph in big data applications. Most currently, graph processing methods treat the underlying map data as black boxes. However, as shown in experimental evaluation, graph structures often have diversity, different graph processing methods are very sensitive to the graph structure and show different performance for different data sets. Based on this, a graph processing method for graph structure analysis is proposed in this paper: (1) This paper calculates the vertex activity of a graph according to the in-degree and out-degree, and divide the corresponding vertices into the hot or cold partitions; (2) According to the change of graph structure caused by partial vertex convergence after iteration, this paper reclassifies the partitions, divides the lower active vertices into cold partition and reduces the frequency of calculation, which thereby reducing the cache miss rate and the I/O overhead caused by active vertices as well; (3) The partition with highest vertex status degree are given a priority calculation in this paper. In detail, more pronounced and more frequent vertices have higher processing priority. In this way, the convergence speed of the graph vertices is accelerated, and the running time of the graph algorithm in the big data environment is reduced. Our experiments show that compared with the latest system, the proposed method can double the performance of different graph algorithms and data sets.
Accurate Building Detection in VHR Remote Sensing Images using Geometric Saliency
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

This paper aims to address the problem of detecting buildings from remote sensing images with very high resolution (VHR). Inspired by the observation that buildings are always more distinguishable in geometries than in texture or spectral, we propose a new geometric building index (GBI) for accurate building detection, which relies on the geometric saliency of building structures. The geometric saliency of buildings is derived from a mid-level geometric representations based on meaningful junctions that can locally describe anisotropic geometrical structures of images. The resulting GBI is measured by integrating the derived geometric saliency of buildings. Experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that the proposed GBI achieves very promising performance, and meanwhile shows impressive generalization capability.