OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Classical Copying versus Quantum Entanglement in Natural Language: The Case of VP-ellipsis
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

This paper compares classical copying and quantum entanglement in natural language by considering the case of verb phrase (VP) ellipsis. VP ellipsis is a non-linear linguistic phenomenon that requires the reuse of resources, making it the ideal test case for a comparative study of different copying behaviours in compositional models of natural language. Following the line of research in compositional distributional semantics set out by (Coecke et al., 2010) we develop an extension of the Lambek calculus which admits a controlled form of contraction to deal with the copying of linguistic resources. We then develop two different compositional models of distributional meaning for this calculus. In the first model, we follow the categorical approach of (Coecke et al., 2013) in which a functorial passage sends the proofs of the grammar to linear maps on vector spaces and we use Frobenius algebras to allow for copying. In the second case, we follow the more traditional approach that one finds in categorial grammars, whereby an intermediate step interprets proofs as non-linear lambda terms, using multiple variable occurrences that model classical copying. As a case study, we apply the models to derive different readings of ambiguous elliptical phrases and compare the analyses that each model provides.
Fast, High Precision Ray/Fiber Intersection using Tight, Disjoint Bounding Volumes
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2018
Year: 2018

Analyzing and identifying the shortcomings of current subdivision methods for finding intersections of rays with fibers defined by the surface of a circular contour swept along a Bézier curve, we present a new algorithm that improves precision and performance. Instead of the inefficient pruning using overlapping axis aligned bounding boxes and determining the closest point of approach of the ray and the curve, we prune using disjoint bounding volumes defined by cylinders and calculate the intersections on the limit surface. This in turn allows for computing accurate parametric position and normal in the point of intersection. The iteration requires only one bit per subdivision to avoid costly stack memory operations. At a low number of subdivisions, the performance of the high precision algorithm is competitive, while for a high number of subdivisions it dramatically outperforms the state-of-the-art. Besides an extensive mathematical analysis, source code is provided.
Transformative Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

The key to success in machine learning (ML) is the use of effective data representations. Traditionally, data representations were hand-crafted. Recently it has been demonstrated that, given sufficient data, deep neural networks can learn effective implicit representations from simple input representations. However, for most scientific problems, the use of deep learning is not appropriate as the amount of available data is limited, and/or the output models must be explainable. Nevertheless, many scientific problems do have significant amounts of data available on related tasks, which makes them amenable to multi-task learning, i.e. learning many related problems simultaneously. Here we propose a novel and general representation learning approach for multi-task learning that works successfully with small amounts of data. The fundamental new idea is to transform an input intrinsic data representation (i.e., handcrafted features), to an extrinsic representation based on what a pre-trained set of models predict about the examples. This transformation has the dual advantages of producing significantly more accurate predictions, and providing explainable models. To demonstrate the utility of this transformative learning approach, we have applied it to three real-world scientific problems: drug-design (quantitative structure activity relationship learning), predicting human gene expression (across different tissue types and drug treatments), and meta-learning for machine learning (predicting which machine learning methods work best for a given problem). In all three problems, transformative machine learning significantly outperforms the best intrinsic representation.
Credibility of Automatic Appraisal of Domain Names
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2018
Year: 2018

Both domain names and entire websites are increasingly frequently treated as assets, the value of which can be appraised. The objective of the present thesis was to verify the credibility of domain name appraisals obtained using generally available web applications in an automated, algorithmic way. In conclusions section, it was mentioned that the terms domain name appraisal and website appraisal are frequently equated. It was also shown that algorithms used in the tested applications consider parameters characterising websites. Thus, they cannot be used to verify the value of domain names themselves. Moreover, during the analysis of the pattern of operation of the appraisal websites it was noticed that they were not made available with domain name or website appraisals in mind. Their objective was to acquire and intercept online traffic. Such applications also left cookie files on recipients' devices, which were then used by advertising systems based on the re-marketing concept.
dAIrector: Automatic Story Beat Generation through Knowledge Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2018
Year: 2018

dAIrector is an automated director which collaborates with humans storytellers for live improvisational performances and writing assistance. dAIrector can be used to create short narrative arcs through contextual plot generation. In this work, we present the system architecture, a quantitative evaluation of design choices, and a case-study usage of the system which provides qualitative feedback from a professional improvisational performer. We present relevant metrics for the understudied domain of human-machine creative generation, specifically long-form narrative creation. We include, alongside publication, open-source code so that others may test, evaluate, and run the dAIrector.
A Study of Tourist Sequential Activity Patterns through Location Based Social Network (LBSN)
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2018
Year: 2018

Sequential Pattern Mining is an important component in establishing patterns and mining trends of certain activities. Insights into tourist movement and activity patterns is deemed beneficial for the tourism sector in many ways, such as designing better travel packages for tourists, maximizing the tourist activity participation and meeting the tourist demands. This research proposes to adopt mobile social media data for effective capturing of tourist activity information in Singapore and utilizes advanced data mining techniques for extracting valuable insights into tourist behavior. The proposed methods and findings of the study have the potential to support tourism managers and policy makers in making better decisions in tourism destination management.
Microscopic Nuclei Classification, Segmentation and Detection with improved Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) Approaches
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Due to cellular heterogeneity, cell nuclei classification, segmentation, and detection from pathological images are challenging tasks. In the last few years, Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) approaches have been shown state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on histopathological imaging in different studies. In this work, we have proposed different advanced DCNN models and evaluated for nuclei classification, segmentation, and detection. First, the Densely Connected Recurrent Convolutional Network (DCRN) model is used for nuclei classification. Second, Recurrent Residual U-Net (R2U-Net) is applied for nuclei segmentation. Third, the R2U-Net regression model which is named UD-Net is used for nuclei detection from pathological images. The experiments are conducted with different datasets including Routine Colon Cancer(RCC) classification and detection dataset, and Nuclei Segmentation Challenge 2018 dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed DCNN models provide superior performance compared to the existing approaches for nuclei classification, segmentation, and detection tasks. The results are evaluated with different performance metrics including precision, recall, Dice Coefficient (DC), Means Squared Errors (MSE), F1-score, and overall accuracy. We have achieved around 3.4% and 4.5% better F-1 score for nuclei classification and detection tasks compared to recently published DCNN based method. In addition, R2U-Net shows around 92.15% testing accuracy in term of DC. These improved methods will help for pathological practices for better quantitative analysis of nuclei in Whole Slide Images(WSI) which ultimately will help for better understanding of different types of cancer in clinical workflow.
CAAD 2018: Iterative Ensemble Adversarial Attack
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have recently led to significant improvements in many fields. However, DNNs are vulnerable to adversarial examples which are samples with imperceptible perturbations while dramatically misleading the DNNs. Adversarial attacks can be used to evaluate the robustness of deep learning models before they are deployed. Unfortunately, most of existing adversarial attacks can only fool a black-box model with a low success rate. To improve the success rates for black-box adversarial attacks, we proposed an iterated adversarial attack against an ensemble of image classifiers. With this method, we won the 5th place in CAAD 2018 Targeted Adversarial Attack competition.
Testing SPARUS II AUV, an open platform for industrial, scientific and academic applications
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2018
Year: 2018

This paper describes the experience of preparing and testing the SPARUS II AUV in different applications. The AUV was designed as a lightweight vehicle combining the classical torpedo-shape features with the hovering capability. The robot has a payload area to allow the integration of different equipment depending on the application. The software architecture is based on ROS, an open framework that allows an easy integration of many devices and systems. Its flexibility, easy operation and openness makes the SPARUS II AUV a multipurpose platform that can adapt to industrial, scientific and academic applications. Five units were developed in 2014, and different teams used and adapted the platform for different applications. The paper describes some of the experiences in preparing and testing this open platform to different applications.
Deep Neural Networks for Query Expansion using Word Embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2018
Year: 2018

Query expansion is a method for alleviating the vocabulary mismatch problem present in information retrieval tasks. Previous works have shown that terms selected for query expansion by traditional methods such as pseudo-relevance feedback are not always helpful to the retrieval process. In this paper, we show that this is also true for more recently proposed embedding-based query expansion methods. We then introduce an artificial neural network classifier to predict the usefulness of query expansion terms. This classifier uses term word embeddings as inputs. We perform experiments on four TREC newswire and web collections show that using terms selected by the classifier for expansion significantly improves retrieval performance when compared to competitive baselines. The results are also shown to be more robust than the baselines.
A Geometric Perspective on the Transferability of Adversarial Directions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

State-of-the-art machine learning models frequently misclassify inputs that have been perturbed in an adversarial manner. Adversarial perturbations generated for a given input and a specific classifier often seem to be effective on other inputs and even different classifiers. In other words, adversarial perturbations seem to transfer between different inputs, models, and even different neural network architectures. In this work, we show that in the context of linear classifiers and two-layer ReLU networks, there provably exist directions that give rise to adversarial perturbations for many classifiers and data points simultaneously. We show that these "transferable adversarial directions" are guaranteed to exist for linear separators of a given set, and will exist with high probability for linear classifiers trained on independent sets drawn from the same distribution. We extend our results to large classes of two-layer ReLU networks. We further show that adversarial directions for ReLU networks transfer to linear classifiers while the reverse need not hold, suggesting that adversarial perturbations for more complex models are more likely to transfer to other classifiers. We validate our findings empirically, even for deeper ReLU networks.
Adaptive Semantic Segmentation with a Strategic Curriculum of Proxy Labels
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Training deep networks for semantic segmentation requires annotation of large amounts of data, which can be time-consuming and expensive. Unfortunately, these trained networks still generalize poorly when tested in domains not consistent with the training data. In this paper, we show that by carefully presenting a mixture of labeled source domain and proxy-labeled target domain data to a network, we can achieve state-of-the-art unsupervised domain adaptation results. With our design, the network progressively learns features specific to the target domain using annotation from only the source domain. We generate proxy labels for the target domain using the network's own predictions. Our architecture then allows selective mining of easy samples from this set of proxy labels, and hard samples from the annotated source domain. We conduct a series of experiments with the GTA5, Cityscapes and BDD100k datasets on synthetic-to-real domain adaptation and geographic domain adaptation, showing the advantages of our method over baselines and existing approaches.
Modular Architecture for StarCraft II with Deep Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

We present a novel modular architecture for StarCraft II AI. The architecture splits responsibilities between multiple modules that each control one aspect of the game, such as build-order selection or tactics. A centralized scheduler reviews macros suggested by all modules and decides their order of execution. An updater keeps track of environment changes and instantiates macros into series of executable actions. Modules in this framework can be optimized independently or jointly via human design, planning, or reinforcement learning. We apply deep reinforcement learning techniques to training two out of six modules of a modular agent with self-play, achieving 94% or 87% win rates against the "Harder" (level 5) built-in Blizzard bot in Zerg vs. Zerg matches, with or without fog-of-war.
SpeedReader: Reader Mode Made Fast and Private
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2018
Year: 2018

Most popular web browsers include "reader modes" that improve the user experience by removing un-useful page elements. Reader modes reformat the page to hide elements that are not related to the page's main content. Such page elements include site navigation, advertising related videos and images, and most JavaScript. The intended end result is that users can enjoy the content they are interested in, without distraction. In this work, we consider whether the "reader mode" can be widened to also provide performance and privacy improvements. Instead of its use as a post-render feature to clean up the clutter on a page we propose SpeedReader as an alternative multistep pipeline that is part of the rendering pipeline. Once the tool decides during the initial phase of a page load that a page is suitable for reader mode use, it directly applies document tree translation before the page is rendered. Based on our measurements, we believe that SpeedReader can be continuously enabled in order to drastically improve end-user experience, especially on slower mobile connections. Combined with our approach to predicting which pages should be rendered in reader mode with 91% accuracy, it achieves drastic speedups and bandwidth reductions of up to 27x and 84x respectively on average. We further find that our novel "reader mode" approach brings with it significant privacy improvements to users. Our approach effectively removes all commonly recognized trackers, issuing 115 fewer requests to third parties, and interacts with 64 fewer trackers on average, on transformed pages.
Learning Energy Based Inpainting for Optical Flow
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Modern optical flow methods are often composed of a cascade of many independent steps or formulated as a black box neural network that is hard to interpret and analyze. In this work we seek for a plain, interpretable, but learnable solution. We propose a novel inpainting based algorithm that approaches the problem in three steps: feature selection and matching, selection of supporting points and energy based inpainting. To facilitate the inference we propose an optimization layer that allows to backpropagate through 10K iterations of a first-order method without any numerical or memory problems. Compared to recent state-of-the-art networks, our modular CNN is very lightweight and competitive with other, more involved, inpainting based methods.
VDAS: Verifiable Data Aggregation Scheme for Internet of Things
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

Along with the miniaturization of various types of sensors, a mass of intelligent terminals are gaining stronger sensing capability, which raises a deeper perception and better prospect of Internet of Things (IoT). With big sensing data, IoT provides lots of convenient services for the monitoring and management of smart cities and people's daily lives. However, there are still many security challenges influencing the further development of IoT, one of which is how to quickly verify the big data obtained from IoT terminals. Aggregate signature is an efficient approach to perform big data authentication. It can effectively reduce the computation and communication overheads. In this paper, utilizing these features, we construct a verifiable data aggregation scheme for Internet of Things, named VDAS, based on an improved certificateless aggregate signature algorithm. In VDAS, the length of the aggregated authentication message is independent of the number of IoT terminals. Then, we prove that VDAS is existentially unforgeable under adaptive chosen message attacks assuming that the computational Diffie-Hellman problem is hard. Additionally, the proposed VDAS achieves a better trade-off on the computation overheads between the resource-constrained IoT terminals and the data center.
Detecting Backdoor Attacks on Deep Neural Networks by Activation Clustering
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

While machine learning (ML) models are being increasingly trusted to make decisions in different and varying areas, the safety of systems using such models has become an increasing concern. In particular, ML models are often trained on data from potentially untrustworthy sources, providing adversaries with the opportunity to manipulate them by inserting carefully crafted samples into the training set. Recent work has shown that this type of attack, called a poisoning attack, allows adversaries to insert backdoors or trojans into the model, enabling malicious behavior with simple external backdoor triggers at inference time and only a blackbox perspective of the model itself. Detecting this type of attack is challenging because the unexpected behavior occurs only when a backdoor trigger, which is known only to the adversary, is present. Model users, either direct users of training data or users of pre-trained model from a catalog, may not guarantee the safe operation of their ML-based system. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to backdoor detection and removal for neural networks. Through extensive experimental results, we demonstrate its effectiveness for neural networks classifying text and images. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first methodology capable of detecting poisonous data crafted to insert backdoors and repairing the model that does not require a verified and trusted dataset.
Football and Beer - a Social Media Analysis on Twitter in Context of the FIFA Football World Cup 2018
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2018
Year: 2018

In many societies alcohol is a legal and common recreational substance and socially accepted. Alcohol consumption often comes along with social events as it helps people to increase their sociability and to overcome their inhibitions. On the other hand we know that increased alcohol consumption can lead to serious health issues, such as cancer, cardiovascular diseases and diseases of the digestive system, to mention a few. This work examines alcohol consumption during the FIFA Football World Cup 2018, particularly the usage of alcohol related information on Twitter. For this we analyse the tweeting behaviour and show that the tournament strongly increases the interest in beer. Furthermore we show that countries who had to leave the tournament at early stage might have done something good to their fans as the interest in beer decreased again.
Information Theoretic Bounds Based Channel Quantization Design for Emerging Memories
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

Channel output quantization plays a vital role in high-speed emerging memories such as the spin-torque transfer magnetic random access memory (STT-MRAM), where high-precision analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are not applicable. In this paper, we investigate the design of the 1-bit quantizer which is highly suitable for practical applications. We first propose a quantized channel model for STT-MRAM. We then analyze various information theoretic bounds for the quantized channel, including the channel capacity, cutoff rate, and the Polyanskiy-Poor-Verdú (PPV) finite-length performance bound. By using these channel measurements as criteria, we design and optimize the 1-bit quantizer numerically for the STT-MRAM channel. Simulation results show that the proposed quantizers significantly outperform the conventional minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) based Lloyd-Max quantizer, and can approach the performance of the 1-bit quantizer optimized by error rate simulations.
An Average of the Human Ear Canal: Recovering Acoustical Properties via Shape Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Humans are highly dependent on the ability to process audio in order to interact through conversation and navigate from sound. For this, the shape of the ear acts as a mechanical audio filter. The anatomy of the outer human ear canal to approximately 15-20 mm beyond the Tragus is well described because of its importance for customized hearing aid production. This is however not the case for the part of the ear canal that is embedded in the skull, until the typanic membrane. Due to the sensitivity of the outer ear, this part, referred to as the bony part, has only been described in a few population studies and only ex-vivo. We present a study of the entire ear canal including the bony part and the tympanic membrane. We form an average ear canal from a number of MRI scans using standard image registration methods. We show that the obtained representation is realistic in the sense that it has acoustical properties almost identical to a real ear.