OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Epidemiological Approach for Data Survivability in Unattended Wireless Sensor Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2016
Year: 2016

Unattended Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) are Wireless Sensor Networks characterized by sporadic sink presence and operation in hostile settings. The absence of the sink for period of time, prevents sensor nodes to offload data in real time and offer greatly increased opportunities for attacks resulting in erasure, modification, or disclosure of sensor-collected data. In this paper, we focus on UWSNs where sensor nodes collect and store data locally and try to upload all the information once the sink becomes available. One of the most relevant issues pertaining UWSNs is to guarantee a certain level of information survivability in an unreliable network and even in presence of a powerful attackers. In this paper, we first introduce an epidemic-domain inspired approach to model the information survivability in UWSN. Next, we derive a fully distributed algorithm that supports these models and give the correctness proofs.
KidsTube: Detection, Characterization and Analysis of Child Unsafe Content & Promoters on YouTube
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2016
Year: 2016

YouTube draws large number of users who contribute actively by uploading videos or commenting on existing videos. However, being a crowd sourced and large content pushed onto it, there is limited control over the content. This makes malicious users push content (videos and comments) which is inappropriate (unsafe), particularly when such content is placed around cartoon videos which are typically watched by kids. In this paper, we focus on presence of unsafe content for children and users who promote it. For detection of child unsafe content and its promoters, we perform two approaches, one based on supervised classification which uses an extensive set of video-level, user-level and comment-level features and another based Convolutional Neural Network using video frames. Detection accuracy of 85.7% is achieved which can be leveraged to build a system to provide a safe YouTube experience for kids. Through detailed characterization studies, we are able to successfully conclude that unsafe content promoters are less popular and engage less as compared with other users. Finally, using a network of unsafe content promoters and other users based on their engagements (likes, subscription and playlist addition) and other factors, we find that unsafe content is present very close to safe content and unsafe content promoters form very close knit communities with other users, thereby further increasing the likelihood of a child getting getting exposed to unsafe content.
STFCN: Spatio-Temporal FCN for Semantic Video Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

This paper presents a novel method to involve both spatial and temporal features for semantic video segmentation. Current work on convolutional neural networks(CNNs) has shown that CNNs provide advanced spatial features supporting a very good performance of solutions for both image and video analysis, especially for the semantic segmentation task. We investigate how involving temporal features also has a good effect on segmenting video data. We propose a module based on a long short-term memory (LSTM) architecture of a recurrent neural network for interpreting the temporal characteristics of video frames over time. Our system takes as input frames of a video and produces a correspondingly-sized output; for segmenting the video our method combines the use of three components: First, the regional spatial features of frames are extracted using a CNN; then, using LSTM the temporal features are added; finally, by deconvolving the spatio-temporal features we produce pixel-wise predictions. Our key insight is to build spatio-temporal convolutional networks (spatio-temporal CNNs) that have an end-to-end architecture for semantic video segmentation. We adapted fully some known convolutional network architectures (such as FCN-AlexNet and FCN-VGG16), and dilated convolution into our spatio-temporal CNNs. Our spatio-temporal CNNs achieve state-of-the-art semantic segmentation, as demonstrated for the Camvid and NYUDv2 datasets.
Social Networks Analysis in Discovering the Narrative Structure of Literary Fiction
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2016
Year: 2016

In our paper we would like to make a cross-disciplinary leap and use the tools of network theory to understand and explore narrative structure in literary fiction, an approach that is still underestimated. However, the systems in fiction are sensitive to readers subjectivity and attention must to be paid to different methods of extracting networks. The project aims at investigating into different ways social interactions are read in texts by comparing networks produced by automated algorithms-natural language processing with those created by surveying more subjective human responses. Conversation networks from fiction have been already extracted by scientists, but the more general framework surrounding these interactions was missing. We propose several NLP methods for detecting interactions and test them against a range of human perceptions. In doing so, we have pointed to some limitations of using network analysis to test literary theory, e.g. interaction, which corresponds to the plot, does not form climax.
The Symmetry of a Simple Optimization Problem in Lasso Screening
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2016
Year: 2016

Recently dictionary screening has been proposed as an effective way to improve the computational efficiency of solving the lasso problem, which is one of the most commonly used method for learning sparse representations. To address today's ever increasing large dataset, effective screening relies on a tight region bound on the solution to the dual lasso. Typical region bounds are in the form of an intersection of a sphere and multiple half spaces. One way to tighten the region bound is using more half spaces, which however, adds to the overhead of solving the high dimensional optimization problem in lasso screening. This paper reveals the interesting property that the optimization problem only depends on the projection of features onto the subspace spanned by the normals of the half spaces. This property converts an optimization problem in high dimension to much lower dimension, and thus sheds light on reducing the computation overhead of lasso screening based on tighter region bounds.
Domain Separation Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

The cost of large scale data collection and annotation often makes the application of machine learning algorithms to new tasks or datasets prohibitively expensive. One approach circumventing this cost is training models on synthetic data where annotations are provided automatically. Despite their appeal, such models often fail to generalize from synthetic to real images, necessitating domain adaptation algorithms to manipulate these models before they can be successfully applied. Existing approaches focus either on mapping representations from one domain to the other, or on learning to extract features that are invariant to the domain from which they were extracted. However, by focusing only on creating a mapping or shared representation between the two domains, they ignore the individual characteristics of each domain. We suggest that explicitly modeling what is unique to each domain can improve a model's ability to extract domain-invariant features. Inspired by work on private-shared component analysis, we explicitly learn to extract image representations that are partitioned into two subspaces: one component which is private to each domain and one which is shared across domains. Our model is trained not only to perform the task we care about in the source domain, but also to use the partitioned representation to reconstruct the images from both domains. Our novel architecture results in a model that outperforms the state-of-the-art on a range of unsupervised domain adaptation scenarios and additionally produces visualizations of the private and shared representations enabling interpretation of the domain adaptation process.
Energy Efficient Cooperative Network Coding with Joint Relay Scheduling and Power Allocation
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

The energy efficiency (EE) of a multi-user multi-relay system with the maximum diversity network coding (MDNC) is studied. We explicitly find the connection among the outage probability, energy consumption and EE and formulate the maximizing EE problem under the outage probability constraints. Relay scheduling (RS) and power allocation (PA) are applied to schedule the relay states (transmitting, sleeping, \emph{etc}) and optimize the transmitting power under the practical channel and power consumption models. Since the optimization problem is NP-hard, to reduce computational complexity, the outage probability is first tightly approximated to a log-convex form. Further, the EE is converted into a subtractive form based on the fractional programming. Then a convex mixed-integer nonlinear problem (MINLP) is eventually obtained. With a generalized outer approximation (GOA) algorithm, RS and PA are solved in an iterative manner. The Pareto-optimal curves between the EE and the target outage probability show the EE gains from PA and RS. Moreover, by comparing with the no network coding (NoNC) scenario, we conclude that with the same number of relays, MDNC can lead to EE gains. However, if RS is implemented, NoNC can outperform MDNC in terms of the EE when more relays are needed in the MDNC scheme.
Surprisal-Driven Feedback in Recurrent Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2016
Year: 2016

Recurrent neural nets are widely used for predicting temporal data. Their inherent deep feedforward structure allows learning complex sequential patterns. It is believed that top-down feedback might be an important missing ingredient which in theory could help disambiguate similar patterns depending on broader context. In this paper we introduce surprisal-driven recurrent networks, which take into account past error information when making new predictions. This is achieved by continuously monitoring the discrepancy between most recent predictions and the actual observations. Furthermore, we show that it outperforms other stochastic and fully deterministic approaches on enwik8 character level prediction task achieving 1.37 BPC on the test portion of the text.
Uniform Generalization, Concentration, and Adaptive Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2016
Year: 2016

One fundamental goal in any learning algorithm is to mitigate its risk for overfitting. Mathematically, this requires that the learning algorithm enjoys a small generalization risk, which is defined either in expectation or in probability. Both types of generalization are commonly used in the literature. For instance, generalization in expectation has been used to analyze algorithms, such as ridge regression and SGD, whereas generalization in probability is used in the VC theory, among others. Recently, a third notion of generalization has been studied, called uniform generalization, which requires that the generalization risk vanishes uniformly in expectation across all bounded parametric losses. It has been shown that uniform generalization is, in fact, equivalent to an information-theoretic stability constraint, and that it recovers classical results in learning theory. It is achievable under various settings, such as sample compression schemes, finite hypothesis spaces, finite domains, and differential privacy. However, the relationship between uniform generalization and concentration remained unknown. In this paper, we answer this question by proving that, while a generalization in expectation does not imply a generalization in probability, a uniform generalization in expectation does imply concentration. We establish a chain rule for the uniform generalization risk of the composition of hypotheses and use it to derive a large deviation bound. Finally, we prove that the bound is tight.
A Combined Dependability and Security Approach for Third Party Software in Space Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2016
Year: 2016

Software components for on-board architectures in the space domain are increasingly reliant on Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS), Open Source (OSS) or other third party software products. However, these software components often have not been built with mission critical requirements in mind. Development project teams incorporating these products have limited knowledge of or control over the processes applied during the design, implementation, testing and maintenance of selected COTS/OSS software products. These constraints generate uncertainty of potential software induced failures. Moreover, the lack of information regarding security vulnerabilities increases the risks of their usage, since their exploitation might lead to undesired behaviour of the software and therefore to a system failure. The purpose of this paper is to present a combined approach that takes into account reliability and security enhancements for third party software, based on Time-Space Partitioning and Multiple Levels of Security.
Multiple objects tracking in surveillance video using color and Hu moments
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

Multiple objects tracking finds its applications in many high level vision analysis like object behaviour interpretation and gait recognition. In this paper, a feature based method to track the multiple moving objects in surveillance video sequence is proposed. Object tracking is done by extracting the color and Hu moments features from the motion segmented object blob and establishing the association of objects in the successive frames of the video sequence based on Chi-Square dissimilarity measure and nearest neighbor classifier. The benchmark IEEE PETS and IEEE Change Detection datasets has been used to show the robustness of the proposed method. The proposed method is assessed quantitatively using the precision and recall accuracy metrics. Further, comparative evaluation with related works has been carried out to exhibit the efficacy of the proposed method.
Multi-Sensor Prognostics using an Unsupervised Health Index based on LSTM Encoder-Decoder
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2016
Year: 2016

Many approaches for estimation of Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of a machine, using its operational sensor data, make assumptions about how a system degrades or a fault evolves, e.g., exponential degradation. However, in many domains degradation may not follow a pattern. We propose a Long Short Term Memory based Encoder-Decoder (LSTM-ED) scheme to obtain an unsupervised health index (HI) for a system using multi-sensor time-series data. LSTM-ED is trained to reconstruct the time-series corresponding to healthy state of a system. The reconstruction error is used to compute HI which is then used for RUL estimation. We evaluate our approach on publicly available Turbofan Engine and Milling Machine datasets. We also present results on a real-world industry dataset from a pulverizer mill where we find significant correlation between LSTM-ED based HI and maintenance costs.
Modeling Cellular Networks with Full Duplex D2D Communication: A Stochastic Geometry Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

Full-duplex (FD) communication is optimistically promoted to double the spectral efficiency if sufficient self-interference cancellation (SIC) is achieved. However, this is not true when deploying FD-communication in a large-scale setup due to the induced mutual interference. Therefore, a large-scale study is necessary to draw legitimate conclusions about gains associated with FD-communication. This paper studies the FD operation for underlay device-to-device (D2D) communication sharing the uplink resources in cellular networks. We propose a disjoint fine-tuned selection criterion for the D2D and FD modes of operation. Then, we develop a tractable analytical paradigm, based on stochastic geometry, to calculate the outage probability and rate for cellular and D2D users. The results reveal that even in the case of perfect SIC, due to the increased interference injected to the network by FD-D2D communication, having all proximity UEs transmit in FD-D2D is not beneficial for the network. However, if the system parameters are carefully tuned, non-trivial network spectral-efficiency gains (64 shown) can be harvested. We also investigate the effects of imperfect SIC and D2D-link distance distribution on the harvested FD gains.
CrowdNet: A Deep Convolutional Network for Dense Crowd Counting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

Our work proposes a novel deep learning framework for estimating crowd density from static images of highly dense crowds. We use a combination of deep and shallow, fully convolutional networks to predict the density map for a given crowd image. Such a combination is used for effectively capturing both the high-level semantic information (face/body detectors) and the low-level features (blob detectors), that are necessary for crowd counting under large scale variations. As most crowd datasets have limited training samples (<100 images) and deep learning based approaches require large amounts of training data, we perform multi-scale data augmentation. Augmenting the training samples in such a manner helps in guiding the CNN to learn scale invariant representations. Our method is tested on the challenging UCF_CC_50 dataset, and shown to outperform the state of the art methods.
ASIC Design of a Noisy Gradient Descent Bit Flip Decoder for 10GBASE-T Ethernet Standard
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

In this paper, the NGDBF algorithm is implemented on a code that is deployed in the IEEE 802.3an Ethernet standard. The design employs a fully parallel architecture and operates in two-phases: start-up phase and decoding phase. The two phase operation keeps the high latency operations off-line, thereby reducing the decoding latency during the decoding phase. The design is bench-marked with other state-of-the-art designs on the same code that employ different algorithms and architectures. The results indicate that the NGDBF decoder has a better area efficiency and a better energy efficiency compared to other state-of-art decoders. When the design is operated in medium to high signal to noise ratios, the design is able to provide greater than the required minimum throughput of 10Gbps. The design consumes 0.81mm2 of area and has an energy efficiency of 1.7pJ/bit, which are the lowest in the reported literature. The design also provides better error performance compared to other simplified decoder implementations and consumes lesser wire-length compared to a recently proposed design.
Fundamental principles of cortical computation: unsupervised learning with prediction, compression and feedback
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

There has been great progress in understanding of anatomical and functional microcircuitry of the primate cortex. However, the fundamental principles of cortical computation - the principles that allow the visual cortex to bind retinal spikes into representations of objects, scenes and scenarios - have so far remained elusive. In an attempt to come closer to understanding the fundamental principles of cortical computation, here we present a functional, phenomenological model of the primate visual cortex. The core part of the model describes four hierarchical cortical areas with feedforward, lateral, and recurrent connections. The three main principles implemented in the model are information compression, unsupervised learning by prediction, and use of lateral and top-down context. We show that the model reproduces key aspects of the primate ventral stream of visual processing including Simple and Complex cells in V1, increasingly complicated feature encoding, and increased separability of object representations in higher cortical areas. The model learns representations of the visual environment that allow for accurate classification and state-of-the-art visual tracking performance on novel objects.
LFADS - Latent Factor Analysis via Dynamical Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2016
Year: 2016

Neuroscience is experiencing a data revolution in which many hundreds or thousands of neurons are recorded simultaneously. Currently, there is little consensus on how such data should be analyzed. Here we introduce LFADS (Latent Factor Analysis via Dynamical Systems), a method to infer latent dynamics from simultaneously recorded, single-trial, high-dimensional neural spiking data. LFADS is a sequential model based on a variational auto-encoder. By making a dynamical systems hypothesis regarding the generation of the observed data, LFADS reduces observed spiking to a set of low-dimensional temporal factors, per-trial initial conditions, and inferred inputs. We compare LFADS to existing methods on synthetic data and show that it significantly out-performs them in inferring neural firing rates and latent dynamics.
Formalization of Fault Trees in Higher-order Logic: A Deep Embedding Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2016
Year: 2016

Fault Tree (FT) is a standard failure modeling technique that has been extensively used to predict reliability, availability and safety of many complex engineering systems. In order to facilitate the formal analysis of FT based analyses, a higher-order-logic formalization of FTs has been recently proposed. However, this formalization is quite limited in terms of handling large systems and transformation of FT models into their corresponding Reliability Block Diagram (RBD) structures, i.e., a frequently used transformation in reliability and availability analyses. In order to overcome these limitations, we present a deep embedding based formalization of FTs. In particular, the paper presents a formalization of AND, OR and NOT FT gates, which are in turn used to formalize other commonly used FT gates, i.e., NAND, NOR, XOR, Inhibit, Comparator and majority Voting, and the formal verification of their failure probability expressions. For illustration purposes, we present a formal failure analysis of a communication gateway software for the next generation air traffic management system.
Failure Detection for Facial Landmark Detectors
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

Most face applications depend heavily on the accuracy of the face and facial landmarks detectors employed. Prediction of attributes such as gender, age, and identity usually completely fail when the faces are badly aligned due to inaccurate facial landmark detection. Despite the impressive recent advances in face and facial landmark detection, little study is on the recovery from and detection of failures or inaccurate predictions. In this work we study two top recent facial landmark detectors and devise confidence models for their outputs. We validate our failure detection approaches on standard benchmarks (AFLW, HELEN) and correctly identify more than 40% of the failures in the outputs of the landmark detectors. Moreover, with our failure detection we can achieve a 12% error reduction on a gender estimation application at the cost of a small increase in computation.
Warehousing Complex Archaeological Objects
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2016
Year: 2016

Data organization is a difficult and essential component in cultural heritage applications. Over the years, a great amount of archaeological ceramic data have been created and processed by various methods and devices. Such ceramic data are stored in databases that concur to increase the amount of available information rapidly. However , such databases typically focus on one type of ceramic descriptors, e.g., qualitative textual descriptions, petrographic or chemical analysis results, and do not interoperate. Thus, research involving archaeological ceramics cannot easily take advantage of combining all these types of information. In this application paper, we introduce an evolution of the Ceramom database that includes text descriptors of archaeological features, chemical analysis results, and various images, including petrographic and fabric images. To illustrate what new analyses are permitted by such a database, we source it to a data warehouse and present a sample on-line analysis processing (OLAP) scenario to gain deep understanding of ceramic context.