OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Novel Distributed Robust Adaptive Consensus Protocols for Linear Multi-agent Systems with Directed Graphs and External Disturbances
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2015
Year: 2015

This paper addresses the distributed consensus protocol design problem for linear multi-agent systems with directed graphs and external unmatched disturbances. A novel distributed adaptive consensus protocol is proposed to achieve leader-follower consensus for any directed graph containing a directed spanning tree with the leader as the root node. It is noted that the adaptive protocol might suffer from a problem of undesirable parameter drift phenomenon when bounded external disturbances exist. To deal with this issue, a distributed robust adaptive consensus protocol is designed to guarantee the ultimate boundedness of both the consensus error and the adaptive coupling weights in the presence of external disturbances. Both adaptive protocols are fully distributed, relying on only the agent dynamics and the relative states of neighboring agents.
Fully polynomial-time parameterized computations for graphs and matrices of low treewidth
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2015
Year: 2015

We investigate the complexity of several fundamental polynomial-time solvable problems on graphs and on matrices, when the given instance has low treewidth; in the case of matrices, we consider the treewidth of the graph formed by non-zero entries. In each of the considered cases, the best known algorithms working on general graphs run in polynomial time, however the exponent of the polynomial is large. Therefore, our main goal is to construct algorithms with running time of the form $\textrm{poly}(k)\cdot n$ or $\textrm{poly}(k)\cdot n\log n$, where $k$ is the width of the tree decomposition given on the input. Such procedures would outperform the best known algorithms for the considered problems already for moderate values of the treewidth, like $O(n^{1/c})$ for some small constant $c$. Our results include: -- an algorithm for computing the determinant and the rank of an $n\times n$ matrix using $O(k^3\cdot n)$ time and arithmetic operations; -- an algorithm for solving a system of linear equations using $O(k^3\cdot n)$ time and arithmetic operations; -- an $O(k^3\cdot n\log n)$-time randomized algorithm for finding the cardinality of a maximum matching in a graph; -- an $O(k^4\cdot n\log^2 n)$-time randomized algorithm for constructing a maximum matching in a graph; -- an $O(k^2\cdot n\log n)$-time algorithm for finding a maximum vertex flow in a directed graph. Moreover, we give an approximation algorithm for treewidth with time complexity suited to the running times as above. Namely, the algorithm, when given a graph $G$ and integer $k$, runs in time $O(k^7\cdot n\log n)$ and either correctly reports that the treewidth of $G$ is larger than $k$, or constructs a tree decomposition of $G$ of width $O(k^2)$.
Can a Mobile Game Teach Computer Users to Thwart Phishing Attacks?
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2015
Year: 2015

Phishing is an online fraudulent technique, which aims to steal sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and online banking details from its victims. To prevent this, anti-phishing education needs to be considered. This research focuses on examining the effectiveness of mobile game based learning compared to traditional online learning to thwart phishing threats. Therefore, a mobile game prototype was developed based on the design introduced by Arachchilage and Cole [3]. The game design aimed to enhance avoidance behaviour through motivation to thwart phishing threats. A website developed by Anti-Phishing Work Group (APWG) for the public Anti-phishing education initiative was used as a traditional web based learning source. A think-aloud experiment along with a pre- and post-test was conducted through a user study. The study findings revealed that the participants who played the mobile game were better able to identify fraudulent web sites compared to the participants who read the website without any training.
String Solving with Word Equations and Transducers: Towards a Logic for Analysing Mutation XSS (Full Version)
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2015
Year: 2015

We study the fundamental issue of decidability of satisfiability over string logics with concatenations and finite-state transducers as atomic operations. Although restricting to one type of operations yields decidability, little is known about the decidability of their combined theory, which is especially relevant when analysing security vulnerabilities of dynamic web pages in a more realistic browser model. On the one hand, word equations (string logic with concatenations) cannot precisely capture sanitisation functions (e.g. htmlescape) and implicit browser transductions (e.g. innerHTML mutations). On the other hand, transducers suffer from the reverse problem of being able to model sanitisation functions and browser transductions, but not string concatenations. Naively combining word equations and transducers easily leads to an undecidable logic. Our main contribution is to show that the "straight-line fragment" of the logic is decidable (complexity ranges from PSPACE to EXPSPACE). The fragment can express the program logics of straight-line string-manipulating programs with concatenations and transductions as atomic operations, which arise when performing bounded model checking or dynamic symbolic executions. We demonstrate that the logic can naturally express constraints required for analysing mutation XSS in web applications. Finally, the logic remains decidable in the presence of length, letter-counting, regular, indexOf, and disequality constraints.
Note on Perfect Forests in Digraphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2015
Year: 2015

A spanning subgraph $F$ of a graph $G$ is called {\em perfect} if $F$ is a forest, the degree $d_F(x)$ of each vertex $x$ in $F$ is odd, and each tree of $F$ is an induced subgraph of $G$. Alex Scott (Graphs \& Combin., 2001) proved that every connected graph $G$ contains a perfect forest if and only if $G$ has an even number of vertices. We consider four generalizations to directed graphs of the concept of a perfect forest. While the problem of existence of the most straightforward one is NP-hard, for the three others this problem is polynomial-time solvable. Moreover, every digraph with only one strong component contains a directed forest of each of these three generalization types. One of our results extends Scott's theorem to digraphs in a non-trivial way.
An Empirical Study on Sentiment Classification of Chinese Review using Word Embedding
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2015
Year: 2015

In this article, how word embeddings can be used as features in Chinese sentiment classification is presented. Firstly, a Chinese opinion corpus is built with a million comments from hotel review websites. Then the word embeddings which represent each comment are used as input in different machine learning methods for sentiment classification, including SVM, Logistic Regression, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and ensemble methods. These methods get better performance compared with N-gram models using Naive Bayes (NB) and Maximum Entropy (ME). Finally, a combination of machine learning methods is proposed which presents an outstanding performance in precision, recall and F1 score. After selecting the most useful methods to construct the combinational model and testing over the corpus, the final F1 score is 0.920.
Discrete Rényi Classifiers
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2015
Year: 2015

Consider the binary classification problem of predicting a target variable $Y$ from a discrete feature vector $X = (X_1,...,X_d)$. When the probability distribution $\mathbb{P}(X,Y)$ is known, the optimal classifier, leading to the minimum misclassification rate, is given by the Maximum A-posteriori Probability decision rule. However, estimating the complete joint distribution $\mathbb{P}(X,Y)$ is computationally and statistically impossible for large values of $d$. An alternative approach is to first estimate some low order marginals of $\mathbb{P}(X,Y)$ and then design the classifier based on the estimated low order marginals. This approach is also helpful when the complete training data instances are not available due to privacy concerns. In this work, we consider the problem of finding the optimum classifier based on some estimated low order marginals of $(X,Y)$. We prove that for a given set of marginals, the minimum Hirschfeld-Gebelein-Renyi (HGR) correlation principle introduced in [1] leads to a randomized classification rule which is shown to have a misclassification rate no larger than twice the misclassification rate of the optimal classifier. Then, under a separability condition, we show that the proposed algorithm is equivalent to a randomized linear regression approach. In addition, this method naturally results in a robust feature selection method selecting a subset of features having the maximum worst case HGR correlation with the target variable. Our theoretical upper-bound is similar to the recent Discrete Chebyshev Classifier (DCC) approach [2], while the proposed algorithm has significant computational advantages since it only requires solving a least square optimization problem. Finally, we numerically compare our proposed algorithm with the DCC classifier and show that the proposed algorithm results in better misclassification rate over various datasets.
Probably Approximately Optimal Query Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2015
Year: 2015

Evaluating query predicates on data samples is the only way to estimate their selectivity in certain scenarios. Finding a guaranteed optimal query plan is not a reasonable optimization goal in those cases as it might require an infinite number of samples. We therefore introduce probably approximately optimal query optimization (PAO) where the goal is to find a query plan whose cost is near-optimal with a certain probability. We will justify why PAO is a suitable formalism to model scenarios in which predicate sampling and optimization need to be interleaved. We present the first algorithm for PAO. Our algorithm is non-intrusive and uses standard query optimizers and sampling components as sub-functions. It is generic and can be applied to a wide range of scenarios. Our algorithm is iterative and calculates in each iteration a query plan together with a region in the selectivity space where the plan has near-optimal cost. It determines the confidence that the true selectivity values fall within the aforementioned region and chooses the next samples to take based on the current state if the confidence does not reach the threshold specified as problem input. We devise different algorithm variants and analyze their complexity. We experimentally compare them in terms of the number of optimizer invocations, samples, and iterations over many different query classes.
Stop Wasting My Gradients: Practical SVRG
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2015
Year: 2015

We present and analyze several strategies for improving the performance of stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) methods. We first show that the convergence rate of these methods can be preserved under a decreasing sequence of errors in the control variate, and use this to derive variants of SVRG that use growing-batch strategies to reduce the number of gradient calculations required in the early iterations. We further (i) show how to exploit support vectors to reduce the number of gradient computations in the later iterations, (ii) prove that the commonly-used regularized SVRG iteration is justified and improves the convergence rate, (iii) consider alternate mini-batch selection strategies, and (iv) consider the generalization error of the method.
Energy Efficient Resource Allocation for Control Data Separation Architecture based H-CRAN with Heterogeneous Fronthaul
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2015
Year: 2015

Control data separation architecture (CDSA) is a more efficient architecture to overcome the overhead issue than the conventional cellular networks, especially for the huge bursty traffic like Internet of Things, and over-the-top (OTT) content service. In this paper, we study the optimization issue of network energy efficiency of the CDSA-based heterogeneous cloud radio access networks (H-CRAN) networks, which has heterogeneous fronthaul between control base station (CBS) and data base stations (DBSs). We first present a modified power consumption model for the CDSA-based H-CRAN, and then formulate the optimization problem with constraint of overall capacity of wireless fronthaul. We work out the resource assignment and power allocation by the convex relaxation approach Using fractional programming method and Lagrangian dual decomposition method, we derive the close-form optimal solution and verify it by comprehensive system-level simulation. The simulation results show that our proposed algorithm has 8% EE gain compared to the static algorithm, and the CDSA-based H-CRAN networks can achieve up to 16% EE gain compared to the conventional network even under strict fronthaul capacity limit.
ExpertSeer: a Keyphrase Based Expert Recommender for Digital Libraries
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2015
Year: 2015

We describe ExpertSeer, a generic framework for expert recommendation based on the contents of a digital library. Given a query term q, ExpertSeer recommends experts of q by retrieving authors who published relevant papers determined by related keyphrases and the quality of papers. The system is based on a simple yet effective keyphrase extractor and the Bayes' rule for expert recommendation. ExpertSeer is domain independent and can be applied to different disciplines and applications since the system is automated and not tailored to a specific discipline. Digital library providers can employ the system to enrich their services and organizations can discover experts of interest within an organization. To demonstrate the power of ExpertSeer, we apply the framework to build two expert recommender systems. The first, CSSeer, utilizes the CiteSeerX digital library to recommend experts primarily in computer science. The second, ChemSeer, uses publicly available documents from the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) to recommend experts in chemistry. Using one thousand computer science terms as benchmark queries, we compared the top-n experts (n=3, 5, 10) returned by CSSeer to two other expert recommenders -- Microsoft Academic Search and ArnetMiner -- and a simulator that imitates the ranking function of Google Scholar. Although CSSeer, Microsoft Academic Search, and ArnetMiner mostly return prestigious researchers who published several papers related to the query term, it was found that different expert recommenders return moderately different recommendations. To further study their performance, we obtained a widely used benchmark dataset as the ground truth for comparison. The results show that our system outperforms Microsoft Academic Search and ArnetMiner in terms of Precision-at-k (P@k) for k=3, 5, 10. We also conducted several case studies to validate the usefulness of our system.
A Split-Reduced Successive Cancellation List Decoder for Polar Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2015
Year: 2015

This paper focuses on low complexity successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding of polar codes. In particular, using the fact that splitting may be unnecessary when the reliability of decoding the unfrozen bit is sufficiently high, a novel splitting rule is proposed. Based on this rule, it is conjectured that, if the correct path survives at some stage, it tends to survive till termination without splitting with high probability. On the other hand, the incorrect paths are more likely to split at the following stages. Motivated by these observations, a simple counter that counts the successive number of stages without splitting is introduced for each decoding path to facilitate the identification of correct and incorrect path. Specifically, any path with counter value larger than a predefined threshold ωis deemed to be the correct path, which will survive at the decoding stage, while other paths with counter value smaller than the threshold will be pruned, thereby reducing the decoding complexity. Furthermore, it is proved that there exists a unique unfrozen bit u_{N-K_1+1}, after which the successive cancellation decoder achieves the same error performance as the maximum likelihood decoder if all the prior unfrozen bits are correctly decoded, which enables further complexity reduction. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed low complexity SCL decoder attains performance similar to that of the conventional SCL decoder, while achieving substantial complexity reduction.
Iterative Eigenvalue Decomposition and Multipath-Grouping Tx/Rx Joint Beamforming for Millimeter-Wave Communication
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2015
Year: 2015

We investigate Tx/Rx joint beamforming in millimeter-wave communications (MMWC). As the multipath components (MPCs) have different steering angles and independent fadings, beamforming aims at achieving array gain as well as diversity gain in this scenario. A sub-optimal beamforming scheme is proposed to find the antenna weight vectors (AWVs) at Tx/Rx via iterative eigenvalue decomposition (EVD), provided that full channel state information (CSI) is available at both the transmitter and receiver. To make this scheme practically feasible in MMWC, a corresponding training approach is suggested to avoid the channel estimation and iterative EVD computation. As in fast fading scenario the training approach may be time-consuming due to frequent training, another beamforming scheme, which exploits the quasi-static steering angles in MMWC, is proposed to reduce the overhead and increase the system reliability by multipath grouping (MPG). The scheme first groups the MPCs and then concurrently beamforms towards multiple steering angles of the grouped MPCs, so that both array gain and diversity gain are achieved. Performance comparisons show that, compared with the corresponding state-of-the-art schemes, the iterative EVD scheme with the training approach achieves the same performance with a reduced overhead and complexity, while the MPG scheme achieves better performance with an approximately equivalent complexity.
Submodular Hamming Metrics
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2015
Year: 2015

We show that there is a largely unexplored class of functions (positive polymatroids) that can define proper discrete metrics over pairs of binary vectors and that are fairly tractable to optimize over. By exploiting submodularity, we are able to give hardness results and approximation algorithms for optimizing over such metrics. Additionally, we demonstrate empirically the effectiveness of these metrics and associated algorithms on both a metric minimization task (a form of clustering) and also a metric maximization task (generating diverse k-best lists).
Methods of Class Field Theory to Separate Logics over Finite Residue Classes and Circuit Complexity
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2015
Year: 2015

Separations among the first order logic ${\cal R}ing(0,+,*)$ of finite residue class rings, its extensions with generalized quantifiers, and in the presence of a built-in order are shown, using algebraic methods from class field theory. These methods include classification of spectra of sentences over finite residue classes as systems of congruences, and the study of their $h$-densities over the set of all prime numbers, for various functions $h$ on the natural numbers. Over ordered structures the logic of finite residue class rings and extensions are known to capture DLOGTIME-uniform circuit complexity classes ranging from $AC^0$ to $TC^0$. Separating these circuit complexity classes is directly related to classifying the $h$-density of spectra of sentences in the corresponding logics of finite residue classes. We further give general conditions under which a logic over the finite residue class rings has a sentence whose spectrum has no $h$-density. One application of this result is that in ${\cal R}ing(0,+,*,<) + M$, the logic of finite residue class rings with built-in order and extended with the majority quantifier $M$, there are sentences whose spectrum have no exponential density.
Evaluating Protein-protein Interaction Predictors with a Novel 3-Dimensional Metric
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2015
Year: 2015

In order for the predicted interactions to be directly adopted by biologists, the ma- chine learning predictions have to be of high precision, regardless of recall. This aspect cannot be evaluated or numerically represented well by traditional metrics like accuracy, ROC, or precision-recall curve. In this work, we start from the alignment in sensitivity of ROC and recall of precision-recall curve, and propose an evaluation metric focusing on the ability of a model to be adopted by biologists. This metric evaluates the ability of a machine learning algorithm to predict only new interactions, meanwhile, it eliminates the influence of test dataset. In the experiment of evaluating different classifiers with a same data set and evaluating the same predictor with different datasets, our new metric fulfills the evaluation task of our interest while two widely recognized metrics, ROC and precision-recall curve fail the tasks for different reasons.
Learning Visual Features from Large Weakly Supervised Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2015
Year: 2015

Convolutional networks trained on large supervised dataset produce visual features which form the basis for the state-of-the-art in many computer-vision problems. Further improvements of these visual features will likely require even larger manually labeled data sets, which severely limits the pace at which progress can be made. In this paper, we explore the potential of leveraging massive, weakly-labeled image collections for learning good visual features. We train convolutional networks on a dataset of 100 million Flickr photos and captions, and show that these networks produce features that perform well in a range of vision problems. We also show that the networks appropriately capture word similarity, and learn correspondences between different languages.
Joint Communication-Motion Planning in Wireless-Connected Robotic Networks: Overview and Design Guidelines
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2015
Year: 2015

Recent years have witnessed the prosperity of robots and in order to support consensus and cooperation for multi-robot system, wireless communications and networking among robots and the infrastructure have become indispensable. In this technical note, we first provide an overview of the research contributions on communication-aware motion planning (CAMP) in designing wireless-connected robotic networks (WCRNs), where the degree-of-freedom (DoF) provided by motion and communication capabilities embraced by the robots have not been fully exploited. Therefore, we propose the framework of joint communication-motion planning (JCMP) as well as the architecture for incorporating JCMP in WCRNs. The proposed architecture is motivated by the observe-orient-decision-action (OODA) model commonly adopted in robotic motion control and cognitive radio. Then, we provide an overview of the orient module that quantify the connectivity assessment. Afterwards, we highlight the JCMP module and compare it with the conventional communication-planning, where the necessity of the JCMP is validated via both theoretical analysis and simulation results of an illustrative example. Finally, a series of open problems are discussed, which picture the gap between the state-of-the-art and a practical WCRN.
Accelerating Recommender Systems using GPUs
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2015
Year: 2015

We describe GPU implementations of the matrix recommender algorithms CCD++ and ALS. We compare the processing time and predictive ability of the GPU implementations with existing multi-core versions of the same algorithms. Results on the GPU are better than the results of the multi-core versions (maximum speedup of 14.8).