OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Learning to Attend via Word-Aspect Associative Fusion for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2017
Year: 2017

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) tries to predict the polarity of a given document with respect to a given aspect entity. While neural network architectures have been successful in predicting the overall polarity of sentences, aspect-specific sentiment analysis still remains as an open problem. In this paper, we propose a novel method for integrating aspect information into the neural model. More specifically, we incorporate aspect information into the neural model by modeling word-aspect relationships. Our novel model, \textit{Aspect Fusion LSTM} (AF-LSTM) learns to attend based on associative relationships between sentence words and aspect which allows our model to adaptively focus on the correct words given an aspect term. This ameliorates the flaws of other state-of-the-art models that utilize naive concatenations to model word-aspect similarity. Instead, our model adopts circular convolution and circular correlation to model the similarity between aspect and words and elegantly incorporates this within a differentiable neural attention framework. Finally, our model is end-to-end differentiable and highly related to convolution-correlation (holographic like) memories. Our proposed neural model achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets, outperforming ATAE-LSTM by $4\%-5\%$ on average across multiple datasets.
Mining Sandboxes for Linux Containers
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2017
Year: 2017

A container is a group of processes isolated from other groups via distinct kernel namespaces and resource allocation quota. Attacks against containers often leverage kernel exploits through system call interface. In this paper, we present an approach that mines sandboxes for containers. We first explore the behaviors of a container by leveraging automatic testing, and extract the set of system calls accessed during testing. The set of system calls then results as a sandbox of the container. The mined sandbox restricts the container's access to system calls which are not seen during testing and thus reduces the attack surface. In the experiment, our approach requires less than eleven minutes to mine sandbox for each of the containers. The enforcement of mined sandboxes does not impact the regular functionality of a container and incurs low performance overhead.
Soft Seeded SSL Graphs for Unsupervised Semantic Similarity-based Retrieval
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2017
Year: 2017

Semantic similarity based retrieval is playing an increasingly important role in many IR systems such as modern web search, question-answering, similar document retrieval etc. Improvements in retrieval of semantically similar content are very significant to applications like Quora, Stack Overflow, Siri etc. We propose a novel unsupervised model for semantic similarity based content retrieval, where we construct semantic flow graphs for each query, and introduce the concept of "soft seeding" in graph based semi-supervised learning (SSL) to convert this into an unsupervised model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on an equivalent question retrieval problem on the Stack Exchange QA dataset, where our unsupervised approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised models, and produces comparable results to the best supervised models. Our research provides a method to tackle semantic similarity based retrieval without any training data, and allows seamless extension to different domain QA communities, as well as to other semantic equivalence tasks.
Influence of the SIPG penalisation on the numerical properties of linear systems for elastic wave propagation
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2017
Year: 2017

Interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin discretisations (IPDG) and especially the symmetric variant (SIPG) for time-domain wave propagation problems are broadly accepted and widely used due to their advantageous properties. Linear systems with block structure arise by applying space-time discretisations and reducing the global system to time-slab problems. The design of efficient and robust iterative solvers for linear systems from interior penalty discretisations for hyperbolic wave equations is still a challenging task and relies on understanding the properties of the systems. In this work the numerical properties such as the condition number and the distribution of eigenvalues of different representations of the linear systems coming from space-time discretisations for elastic wave propagation are numerically studied. These properties for interior penalty discretisations depend on the penalisation and on the time interval length.
Automated Image Analysis Framework for the High-Throughput Determination of Grapevine Berry Sizes Using Conditional Random Fields
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

The berry size is one of the most important fruit traits in grapevine breeding. Non-invasive, image-based phenotyping promises a fast and precise method for the monitoring of the grapevine berry size. In the present study an automated image analyzing framework was developed in order to estimate the size of grapevine berries from images in a high-throughput manner. The framework includes (i) the detection of circular structures which are potentially berries and (ii) the classification of these into the class 'berry' or 'non-berry' by utilizing a conditional random field. The approach used the concept of a one-class classification, since only the target class 'berry' is of interest and needs to be modeled. Moreover, the classification was carried out by using an automated active learning approach, i.e no user interaction is required during the classification process and in addition, the process adapts automatically to changing image conditions, e.g. illumination or berry color. The framework was tested on three datasets consisting in total of 139 images. The images were taken in an experimental vineyard at different stages of grapevine growth according to the BBCH scale. The mean berry size of a plant estimated by the framework correlates with the manually measured berry size by $0.88$.
Lightweight Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

Most of the weights in a Lightweight Neural Network have a value of zero, while the remaining ones are either +1 or -1. These universal approximators require approximately 1.1 bits/weight of storage, posses a quick forward pass and achieve classification accuracies similar to conventional continuous-weight networks. Their training regimen focuses on error reduction initially, but later emphasizes discretization of weights. They ignore insignificant inputs, remove unnecessary weights, and drop unneeded hidden neurons. We have successfully tested them on the MNIST, credit card fraud, and credit card defaults data sets using networks having 2 to 16 hidden layers and up to 4.4 million weights.
Results for the maximum weight planar subgraph problem
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2017
Year: 2017

The problem of finding the maximum-weight, planar subgraph of a finite, simple graph with nonnegative real edge weights is well known in industrial and electrical engineering, systems biology, sociology and finance. As the problem is known to be NP-hard, much research effort has been devoted over the years to attempt to improve a given approximate solution to the problem by using local moves applied to a planar embedding of the solution. It has long been established that any feasible solution to the problem, a maximal planar graph, can be transformed into any other (having the same vertex set) in a finite sequence of local moves of based on: (i) edge substitution and (ii) vertex relocation and it has been conjectured that moves of only type (i) are sufficient. In this note we settle this conjecture in the affirmative. Furthermore, contrary to recent supposition, we demonstrate that any maximal spanning tree of the original graph is not necessarily a part of any optimal solution to the problem. We hope these results will be useful in the design of future approximate methods for the problem.
Optimal top dag compression
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2017
Year: 2017

It is shown that for a given ordered node-labelled tree of size $n$ and with $s$ many different node labels, one can construct in linear time a top dag of height $O(\log n)$ and size $O(n / \log_σn) \cap O(d \cdot \log n)$, where $σ= \max\{ 2, s\}$ and $d$ is the size of the minimal dag. The size bound $O(n / \log_σn)$ is optimal and improves on previous bounds.
Uncertainty in Cyber Security Investments
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2017
Year: 2017

When undertaking cyber security risk assessments, we must assign numeric values to metrics to compute the final expected loss that represents the risk that an organization is exposed to due to cyber threats. Even if risk assessment is motivated from real-world observations and data, there is always a high chance of assigning inaccurate values due to different uncertainties involved (e.g., evolving threat landscape, human errors) and the natural difficulty of quantifying risk per se. Our previous work has proposed a model and a software tool that empowers organizations to compute optimal cyber security strategies given their financial constraints, i.e., available cyber security budget. We have also introduced a general game-theoretic model with uncertain payoffs (probability-distribution-valued payoffs) showing that such uncertainty can be incorporated in the game-theoretic model by allowing payoffs to be random. In this paper, we combine our aforesaid works and we conclude that although uncertainties in cyber security risk assessment lead, on average, to different cyber security strategies, they do not play significant role into the final expected loss of the organization when using our model and methodology to derive this strategies. We show that our tool is capable of providing effective decision support. To the best of our knowledge this is the first paper that investigates how uncertainties on various parameters affect cyber security investments.
NSML: A Machine Learning Platform That Enables You to Focus on Your Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

Machine learning libraries such as TensorFlow and PyTorch simplify model implementation. However, researchers are still required to perform a non-trivial amount of manual tasks such as GPU allocation, training status tracking, and comparison of models with different hyperparameter settings. We propose a system to handle these tasks and help researchers focus on models. We present the requirements of the system based on a collection of discussions from an online study group comprising 25k members. These include automatic GPU allocation, learning status visualization, handling model parameter snapshots as well as hyperparameter modification during learning, and comparison of performance metrics between models via a leaderboard. We describe the system architecture that fulfills these requirements and present a proof-of-concept implementation, NAVER Smart Machine Learning (NSML). We test the system and confirm substantial efficiency improvements for model development.
Optimal Cross Slice Orchestration for 5G Mobile Services
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2017
Year: 2017

5G mobile networks encompass the capabilities of hosting a variety of services such as mobile social networks, multimedia delivery, healthcare, transportation, and public safety. Therefore, the major challenge in designing the 5G networks is how to support different types of users and applications with different quality-of-service requirements under a single physical network infrastructure. Recently, network slicing has been introduced as a promising solution to address this challenge. Network slicing allows programmable network instances which match the service requirements by using network virtualization technologies. However, how to efficiently allocate resources across network slices has not been well studied in the literature. Therefore, in this paper, we first introduce a model for orchestrating network slices based on the service requirements and available resources. Then, we propose a Markov decision process framework to formulate and determine the optimal policy that manages cross-slice admission control and resource allocation for the 5G networks. Through simulation results, we show that the proposed framework and solution are efficient not only in providing slice-as-a-service based on the service requirements, but also in maximizing the provider's revenue.
Using Machine Learning to Enhance Vehicles Traffic in ATN (PRT) Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2017
Year: 2017

This paper discusses new techniques to enhance Automated Transit Networks (ATN, previously called Personal Rapid Transit - PRT) based on Artificial Intelligence tools. The main direction is improvement of the cooperation of autonomous modules that use negotiation protocols, following the IoT paradigm. One of the goals is to increase ATN system throughput by tuning up autonomous vehicles cooperation. Machine learning (ML) was used to improve algorithms designed by human programmers. We used "existing controls" corresponding to near-optimal solutions and built refinement models to more accurately relate a system's dynamics to its performance. A mechanism that mostly influences ATN performance is Empty Vehicle Management (EVM). The algorithms designed by human programmers was used: calls to empty vehicles for waiting passengers and balancing based on reallocation of empty vehicles to achieve better regularity of their settlement. In this paper we discuss how we can improve these algorithms (and tune them to current conditions) by using ML to tailor individual behavioral policies. Using ML techniques was possible because our algorithm is based on a set of parameters. A number of weights and thresholds could be tuned up to give better decisions on moving empty vehicles across the track.
Avoiding Synchronization in First-Order Methods for Sparse Convex Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2017
Year: 2017

Parallel computing has played an important role in speeding up convex optimization methods for big data analytics and large-scale machine learning (ML). However, the scalability of these optimization methods is inhibited by the cost of communicating and synchronizing processors in a parallel setting. Iterative ML methods are particularly sensitive to communication cost since they often require communication every iteration. In this work, we extend well-known techniques from Communication-Avoiding Krylov subspace methods to first-order, block coordinate descent methods for Support Vector Machines and Proximal Least-Squares problems. Our Synchronization-Avoiding (SA) variants reduce the latency cost by a tunable factor of $s$ at the expense of a factor of $s$ increase in flops and bandwidth costs. We show that the SA-variants are numerically stable and can attain large speedups of up to $5.1\times$ on a Cray XC30 supercomputer.
Towards the 1G of Mobile Power Network: RF, Signal and System Designs to Make Smart Objects Autonomous
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

This article reviews some recent promising approaches to make mobile power closer to reality. In contrast with articles commonly published by the microwave community and the communication/signal processing community that separately emphasize RF, circuit and antenna solutions for WPT on one hand and communications, signal and system designs for WPT on the other hand, this review article uniquely bridges RF, signal and system designs in order to bring those communities closer to each other and get a better understanding of the fundamental building blocks of an efficient WPT network architecture. We start by reviewing the engineering requirements and design challenges of making mobile power a reality. We then review the state-of-the-art in a wide range of areas spanning sensors and devices, RF design for wireless power and wireless communications. We identify their limitations and make critical observations before providing some fresh new look and promising avenues on signal and system designs for WPT.
Oscillation energy based sensitivity analysis and control for multi-mode oscillation systems
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2017
Year: 2017

This paper describes a novel approach to analyze and control systems with multi-mode oscillation problems. Traditional single dominant mode analysis fails to provide effective control actions when several modes have similar low damping ratios. This work addresses this problem by considering all modes in the formulation of the system kinetic oscillation energy. The integral of energy over time defines the total action as a measure of dynamic performance, and its sensitivity allows comparing the performance of different actuators/locations in the system to select the most effective one to damp the oscillation energy. Time domain simulations in the IEEE 9-bus system and IEEE 39-bus system verify the findings obtained by the oscillation energy based analysis. Applications of the proposed method in control and system planning are discussed.
Organic Visualization of Document Evolution
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2017
Year: 2017

Recent availability of data of writing processes at keystroke-granularity has enabled research on the evolution of document writing. A natural step is to develop systems that can actually show this data and make it understandable. Here we propose a data structure that captures a document's fine-grained history and an organic visualization that serves as an interface to it. We evaluate a proof-of-concept implementation of the system through a pilot study with documents written by students at a public university. Our results are promising and reveal facets such as general strategies adopted, local edition density and hierarchical structure of the final text.
Error-Tolerant Big Data Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2017
Year: 2017

Real-world data contains various kinds of errors. Before analyzing data, one usually needs to process the raw data. However, traditional data processing based on exactly match often misses lots of valid information. To get high-quality analysis results and fit in the big data era, this thesis studies the error-tolerant big data processing. As most of the data in real world can be represented as a sequence or a set, this thesis utilizes the widely-used sequence-based and set-based similar functions to tolerate errors in data processing and studies the approximate entity extraction, similarity join and similarity search problems. The main contributions of this thesis include: 1. This thesis proposes a unified framework to support approximate entity extraction with both sequence-based and set-based similarity functions simultaneously. The experiments show that the unified framework can improve the state-of-the-art methods by 1 to 2 orders of magnitude. 2. This thesis designs two methods respectively for the sequence and the set similarity joins. For the sequence similarity join, this thesis proposes to evenly partition the sequences to segments. It is guaranteed that two sequences are similar only if one sequence has a subsequence identical to a segment of another sequence. For the set similarity join, this thesis proposes to partition all the sets into segments based on the universe. This thesis further extends the two partition-based methods to support the large-scale data processing framework, Map-Reduce and Spark. The partition-based method won the string similarity join competition held by EDBT and beat the second place by 10 times. 3. This thesis proposes a pivotal prefix filter technique to solve the sequence similarity search problem. This thesis shows that the pivotal prefix filter has stronger pruning power and less filtering cost compared to the state-of-the-art filters.
Index Modulation for 5G: Striving to Do More with Less
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

The fifth generation (5G) wireless communications brag both high spectrum efficiency and high energy efficiency. To meet the requirements, various new techniques have been proposed. Among these, the recently-emerging index modulation has attracted significant interests. By judiciously activating a subset of certain communication {building blocks, such as} antenna, subcarrier and time slot, index modulation is claimed to have the potential to meet the challenging 5G needs. In this article, we will discuss index modulation and its general and specific representations, enhancements, and potential applications in various 5G scenarios. The objective is to reveal whether, and how, index modulation may strive for more performance gains with less medium resource occupation.
Crack detection in beam structures with a novel Laplace based Wavelet Finite Element method
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2017
Year: 2017

Beam structure is one of the most widely used structures in mechanical engineering and civil engineering. Ultrasonic guided wave based crack identification is one of the most important and accepted approaches applied to detect unseen small flaws in structures. Numerical simulations of ultrasonic guided wave propagation have caught more and more attention due to the fast development of hardware and software in the last few years. From all the numerical simulation methods, wavelet based finite element method has been proved to be one of the most efficient methods due to its better spatial resolution, which means it needs fewer elements to get the same accuracy and it can improve the calculation cost significantly. However, it needs a very small time interval. Laplace transform can easily convert the time domain into a frequency domain and then revert it back to a time domain. Laplace transform has thus the advantage of finding better results with a very large time interval. which can save a lot of time cost. This paper will present an innovative method combining Laplace transform and the B-spline wavelet on interval (BSWI) finite element method. This novel method allows to get results with the same accuracy and with a significantly lower time cost, which would not only decrease the total number of elements in the structure but also increase the time integration interval. The numerical Laplace transform and BSWI finite element will be introduced. Moreover, this innovative method is applied to simulate the ultrasonic wave propagation in a beam structure in different materials. Numerical examples for crack identification in beam structures have been studied for verification.
A Chinese Dataset with Negative Full Forms for General Abbreviation Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2017
Year: 2017

Abbreviation is a common phenomenon across languages, especially in Chinese. In most cases, if an expression can be abbreviated, its abbreviation is used more often than its fully expanded forms, since people tend to convey information in a most concise way. For various language processing tasks, abbreviation is an obstacle to improving the performance, as the textual form of an abbreviation does not express useful information, unless it's expanded to the full form. Abbreviation prediction means associating the fully expanded forms with their abbreviations. However, due to the deficiency in the abbreviation corpora, such a task is limited in current studies, especially considering general abbreviation prediction should also include those full form expressions that do not have valid abbreviations, namely the negative full forms (NFFs). Corpora incorporating negative full forms for general abbreviation prediction are few in number. In order to promote the research in this area, we build a dataset for general Chinese abbreviation prediction, which needs a few preprocessing steps, and evaluate several different models on the built dataset. The dataset is available at https://github.com/lancopku/Chinese-abbreviation-dataset