OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Query-bag Matching with Mutual Coverage for Information-seeking Conversations in E-commerce
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

Information-seeking conversation system aims at satisfying the information needs of users through conversations. Text matching between a user query and a pre-collected question is an important part of the information-seeking conversation in E-commerce. In the practical scenario, a sort of questions always correspond to a same answer. Naturally, these questions can form a bag. Learning the matching between user query and bag directly may improve the conversation performance, denoted as query-bag matching. Inspired by such opinion, we propose a query-bag matching model which mainly utilizes the mutual coverage between query and bag and measures the degree of the content in the query mentioned by the bag, and vice verse. In addition, the learned bag representation in word level helps find the main points of a bag in a fine grade and promotes the query-bag matching performance. Experiments on two datasets show the effectiveness of our model.
Hierarchical Finite State Controllers for Generalized Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2019
Year: 2019

Finite State Controllers (FSCs) are an effective way to represent sequential plans compactly. By imposing appropriate conditions on transitions, FSCs can also represent generalized plans that solve a range of planning problems from a given domain. In this paper we introduce the concept of {\it hierarchical FSCs} for planning by allowing controllers to call other controllers. We show that hierarchical FSCs can represent generalized plans more compactly than individual FSCs. Moreover, our call mechanism makes it possible to generate hierarchical FSCs in a modular fashion, or even to apply recursion. We also introduce a compilation that enables a classical planner to generate hierarchical FSCs that solve challenging generalized planning problems. The compilation takes as input a set of planning problems from a given domain and outputs a single classical planning problem, whose solution corresponds to a hierarchical FSC.
The LIG system for the English-Czech Text Translation Task of IWSLT 2019
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we present our submission for the English to Czech Text Translation Task of IWSLT 2019. Our system aims to study how pre-trained language models, used as input embeddings, can improve a specialized machine translation system trained on few data. Therefore, we implemented a Transformer-based encoder-decoder neural system which is able to use the output of a pre-trained language model as input embeddings, and we compared its performance under three configurations: 1) without any pre-trained language model (constrained), 2) using a language model trained on the monolingual parts of the allowed English-Czech data (constrained), and 3) using a language model trained on a large quantity of external monolingual data (unconstrained). We used BERT as external pre-trained language model (configuration 3), and BERT architecture for training our own language model (configuration 2). Regarding the training data, we trained our MT system on a small quantity of parallel text: one set only consists of the provided MuST-C corpus, and the other set consists of the MuST-C corpus and the News Commentary corpus from WMT. We observed that using the external pre-trained BERT improves the scores of our system by +0.8 to +1.5 of BLEU on our development set, and +0.97 to +1.94 of BLEU on the test set. However, using our own language model trained only on the allowed parallel data seems to improve the machine translation performances only when the system is trained on the smallest dataset.
A Solution for Controlling and Managing User Profiles based on Data Privacy for IoT Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

IoT is an emerging area in which we expect to have billions of devices connected to the Internet by 2020. IoT applications can offer many benefits to environments, society and the economy through the interconnection and cooperation of smart objects. However, there are many privacy challenges, such as authentication, authorization, and confidentiality of personal data. With this in mind, we have developed a solution for managing user profiles based on privacy and evolution. For that, we define the criteria and characteristics for each environment. The contribution of the work also applies to the evolution of the UbiPri Middleware, with a module implemented and tested according to the rules of environments so that they can modify the user's profile over time according to their frequency in the environment. The modified profile can be raised, reduced and blocked. This implementation has been validated using scripts that perform probabilistic simulation and user authentication. From the rules assigned to the environments, it was possible to perceive the high adaptability of the implementation, and it can be easily adjusted to any IoT environment that wants to treat the authentication and privacy of environments and users. The results obtained were satisfactory and could be useful for both the evolution of the UbiPri Middleware and other related works.
Improved Visual Localization via Graph Smoothing
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Vision based localization is the problem of inferring the pose of the camera given a single image. One solution to this problem is to learn a deep neural network to infer the pose of a query image after learning on a dataset of images with known poses. Another more commonly used approach rely on image retrieval where the query image is compared against the database of images and its pose is inferred with the help of the retrieved images. The latter approach assumes that images taken from the same places consists of the same landmarks and, thus would have similar feature representations. These representation can be learned using full supervision to be robust to different variations in capture conditions like time of the day and weather. In this work, we introduce a framework to enhance the performance of these retrieval based localization methods by taking into account the additional information including GPS coordinates and temporal neighbourhood of the images provided by the acquisition process in addition to the descriptor similarity of pairs of images in the reference or query database which is used traditionally for localization. Our method constructs a graph based on this additional information and use it for robust retrieval by smoothing the feature representation of reference and/or query images. We show that the proposed method is able to significantly improve the localization accuracy on two large scale datasets over the baselines.
Sonovortex: Aerial Haptic Layer Rendering by Aerodynamic Vortex and Focused Ultrasound
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, a method of rendering aerial haptics that uses an aerodynamic vortex and focused ultrasound is presented. Significant research has been conducted on haptic applications based on multiple phenomena such as magnetic and electric fields, focused ultrasound, and laser plasma. By combining multiple physical quantities; the resolution, distance, and magnitude of force are enhanced. To combine multiple tactile technologies, basic experiments on resolution and discrimination threshold are required. Separate user studies were conducted using aerodynamic and ultrasonic haptics. Moreover, the perception of their superposition, in addition to their resolution, was tested. Although these fields cause no direct interference, the system enables the simultaneous perception of the tactile feedback of both stimuli. The results of this study are expected to contribute to expanding the expression of aerial haptic displays based on several principles.
CFS: A Distributed File System for Large Scale Container Platforms
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

We propose CFS, a distributed file system for large scale container platforms. CFS supports both sequential and random file accesses with optimized storage for both large files and small files, and adopts different replication protocols for different write scenarios to improve the replication performance. It employs a metadata subsystem to store and distribute the file metadata across different storage nodes based on the memory usage. This metadata placement strategy avoids the need of data rebalancing during capacity expansion. CFS also provides POSIX-compliant APIs with relaxed semantics and metadata atomicity to improve the system performance. We performed a comprehensive comparison with Ceph, a widely-used distributed file system on container platforms. Our experimental results show that, in testing 7 commonly used metadata operations, CFS gives around 3 times performance boost on average. In addition, CFS exhibits better random-read/write performance in highly concurrent environments with multiple clients and processes.
A Comprehensive Comparison of Machine Learning Based Methods Used in Bengali Question Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

QA classification system maps questions asked by humans to an appropriate answer category. A sound question classification (QC) system model is the pre-requisite of a sound QA system. This work demonstrates phases of assembling a QA type classification model. We present a comprehensive comparison (performance and computational complexity) among some machine learning based approaches used in QC for Bengali language.
Are we asking the right questions in MovieQA?
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Joint vision and language tasks like visual question answering are fascinating because they explore high-level understanding, but at the same time, can be more prone to language biases. In this paper, we explore the biases in the MovieQA dataset and propose a strikingly simple model which can exploit them. We find that using the right word embedding is of utmost importance. By using an appropriately trained word embedding, about half the Question-Answers (QAs) can be answered by looking at the questions and answers alone, completely ignoring narrative context from video clips, subtitles, and movie scripts. Compared to the best published papers on the leaderboard, our simple question + answer only model improves accuracy by 5% for video + subtitle category, 5% for subtitle, 15% for DVS and 6% higher for scripts.
Pretrained Language Models for Document-Level Neural Machine Translation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

Previous work on document-level NMT usually focuses on limited contexts because of degraded performance on larger contexts. In this paper, we investigate on using large contexts with three main contributions: (1) Different from previous work which pertrained models on large-scale sentence-level parallel corpora, we use pretrained language models, specifically BERT, which are trained on monolingual documents; (2) We propose context manipulation methods to control the influence of large contexts, which lead to comparable results on systems using small and large contexts; (3) We introduce a multi-task training for regularization to avoid models overfitting our training corpora, which further improves our systems together with a deeper encoder. Experiments are conducted on the widely used IWSLT data sets with three language pairs, i.e., Chinese--English, French--English and Spanish--English. Results show that our systems are significantly better than three previously reported document-level systems.
Low Latency Decoder for Short Blocklength Polar Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

Polar codes have been gaining a lot of interest due to it being the first coding scheme to provably achieve the symmetric capacity of a binary memoryless channel with an explicit construction. However, the main drawback of polar codes is the low throughput of its successive cancellation (SC) decoding. Simplified SC decoding algorithms of polar codes can be used to reduce the latency of the polar decode by faster processing of specific sub-codes in the polar code. By combining simplified SC with a list decoding technique, such as SC list (SCL) decoding, polar codes can cater to the two conflicting requirements of high reliability and low latency in ultra-reliable low-latency (URLLC) communication systems. Simplified SC algorithm recognizes some special nodes in the SC decoding tree, corresponding to the specific subcodes in the polar code construction, and efficiently prunes the SC decoding tree, without traversing the sub-trees and computing log-likelihood ratios (LLRs) for each child node. However, this decoding process still suffers from the latency associated with the serial nature of SC decoding. We propose some new algorithms to process new types of node patterns that appear within multiple levels of pruned sub-trees and it enables to process of certain nodes in parallel. In short blocklength polar codes, our proposed algorithm can achieve up to $13\%$ latency reduction from fast-simplified SC \cite{Sarkis2013} without any performance degradation. Furthermore, it can achieve up to $27\%$ latency reduction if small error-correcting performance degradation is allowed.
AutoIDS: Auto-encoder Based Method for Intrusion Detection System
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is one of the most effective solutions for providing primary security services. IDSs are generally working based on attack signatures or by detecting anomalies. In this paper, we have presented AutoIDS, a novel yet efficient solution for IDS, based on a semi-supervised machine learning technique. AutoIDS can distinguish abnormal packet flows from normal ones by taking advantage of cascading two efficient detectors. These detectors are two encoder-decoder neural networks that are forced to provide a compressed and a sparse representation from the normal flows. In the test phase, failing these neural networks on providing compressed or sparse representation from an incoming packet flow, means such flow does not comply with the normal traffic and thus it is considered as an intrusion. For lowering the computational cost along with preserving the accuracy, a large number of flows are just processed by the first detector. In fact, the second detector is only used for difficult samples which the first detector is not confident about them. We have evaluated AutoIDS on the NSL-KDD benchmark as a widely-used and well-known dataset. The accuracy of AutoIDS is 90.17\% showing its superiority compared to the other state-of-the-art methods.
Dynamic Deep Multi-task Learning for Caricature-Visual Face Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Rather than the visual images, the face recognition of the caricatures is far from the performance of the visual images. The challenge is the extreme non-rigid distortions of the caricatures introduced by exaggerating the facial features to strengthen the characters. In this paper, we propose dynamic multi-task learning based on deep CNNs for cross-modal caricature-visual face recognition. Instead of the conventional multi-task learning with fixed weights of the tasks, the proposed dynamic multi-task learning dynamically updates the weights of tasks according to the importance of the tasks, which enables the training of the networks focus on the hard task instead of being stuck in the overtraining of the easy task. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the dynamic multi-task learning for caricature-visual face recognition. The performance evaluated on the datasets CaVI and WebCaricature show the superiority over the state-of-art methods. The implementation code is available here.
On Incentive Compatible Role-based Reward Distribution in Algorand
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

Algorand is a recent, open-source public or permissionless blockchain system that employs a novel proof-of-stake byzantine consensus protocol to efficiently scale the distributed transaction agreement problem to billions of users. In addition to being more democratic and energy-efficient, compared to popular protocols such as Bitcoin, Algorand also touts a much high transaction throughput. This paper is the first attempt in the literature to study and address this problem. By carefully modeling the participation costs and rewards received within a strategic interaction scenario, we first empirically show that even a small number of nodes defecting to participate in the protocol tasks due to insufficiency of the available incentives can result in the Algorand network failing to compute and add new blocks of transactions. We further show that this effect can be formalized by means of a mathematical model of interaction in Algorand given its participation costs and the current (or planned) reward distribution/sharing approach envisioned by the Algorand Foundation. Specifically, on analyzing this game model we observed that mutual cooperation under the currently proposed reward sharing approach is not a Nash equilibrium. This is a significant result which could threaten the success of an otherwise robust distributed consensus mechanism. We propose a novel reward sharing approach for Algorand and formally show that it is incentive-compatible, i.e., it can guarantee cooperation within a group of selfish Algorand users. Extensive numerical and Algorand simulation results further confirm our analytical findings. Moreover, these results show that for a given distribution of stakes in the network, our reward sharing approach can guarantee cooperation with a significantly smaller reward per round.
Local Search for Group Closeness Maximization on Big Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

In network analysis and graph mining, closeness centrality is a popular measure to infer the importance of a vertex. Computing closeness efficiently for individual vertices received considerable attention. The NP-hard problem of group closeness maximization, in turn, is more challenging: the objective is to find a vertex group that is central as a whole and state-of-the-art heuristics for it do not scale to very big graphs yet. In this paper, we present new local search heuristics for group closeness maximization. By using randomized approximation techniques and dynamic data structures, our algorithms are often able to perform locally optimal decisions efficiently. The final result is a group with high (but not optimal) closeness centrality. We compare our algorithms to the current state-of-the-art greedy heuristic both on weighted and on unweighted real-world graphs. For graphs with hundreds of millions of edges, our local search algorithms take only around ten minutes, while greedy requires more than ten hours. Overall, our new algorithms are between one and two orders of magnitude faster, depending on the desired group size and solution quality. For example, on weighted graphs and $k = 10$, our algorithms yield solutions of $12,4\%$ higher quality, while also being $793,6\times$ faster. For unweighted graphs and $k = 10$, we achieve solutions within $99,4\%$ of the state-of-the-art quality while being $127,8\times$ faster.
Does the use of open, non-anonymous peer review in scholarly publishing introduce bias? Evidence from the F1000 post-publication open peer review publishing model
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2019
Year: 2019

This study examines whether there is any evidence of bias in two areas of common critique of open, non-anonymous peer review - and used in the post-publication, peer review system operated by the open-access scholarly publishing platform F1000Research. First, is there evidence of bias where a reviewer based in a specific country assesses the work of an author also based in the same country? Second, are reviewers influenced by being able to see the comments and know the origins of previous reviewer? Methods: Scrutinising the open peer review comments published on F1000Research, we assess the extent of two frequently cited potential influences on reviewers that may be the result of the transparency offered by a fully attributable, open peer review publishing model: the national affiliations of authors and reviewers, and the ability of reviewers to view previously-published reviewer reports before submitting their own. The effects of these potential influences were investigated for all first versions of articles published by 8 July 2019 to F1000Research. In 16 out of the 20 countries with the most articles, there was a tendency for reviewers based in the same country to give a more positive review. The difference was statistically significant in one. Only 3 countries had the reverse tendency. Second, there is no evidence of a conformity bias. When reviewers mentioned a previous review in their peer review report, they were not more likely to give the same overall judgement. Although reviewers who had longer to potentially read a previously published reviewer reports were slightly less likely to agree with previous reviewer judgements, this could be due to these articles being difficult to judge rather than deliberate non-conformity.
Inference with Deep Generative Priors in High Dimensions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Deep generative priors offer powerful models for complex-structured data, such as images, audio, and text. Using these priors in inverse problems typically requires estimating the input and/or hidden signals in a multi-layer deep neural network from observation of its output. While these approaches have been successful in practice, rigorous performance analysis is complicated by the non-convex nature of the underlying optimization problems. This paper presents a novel algorithm, Multi-Layer Vector Approximate Message Passing (ML-VAMP), for inference in multi-layer stochastic neural networks. ML-VAMP can be configured to compute maximum a priori (MAP) or approximate minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) estimates for these networks. We show that the performance of ML-VAMP can be exactly predicted in a certain high-dimensional random limit. Furthermore, under certain conditions, ML-VAMP yields estimates that achieve the minimum (i.e., Bayes-optimal) MSE as predicted by the replica method. In this way, ML-VAMP provides a computationally efficient method for multi-layer inference with an exact performance characterization and testable conditions for optimality in the large-system limit.
Approximation Bounds for Interpolation and Normals on Triangulated Surfaces and Manifolds
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2019
Year: 2019

How good is a triangulation as an approximation of a smooth curved surface or manifold? We provide bounds on the {\em interpolation error}, the error in the position of the surface, and the {\em normal error}, the error in the normal vectors of the surface, as approximated by a piecewise linearly triangulated surface whose vertices lie on the original, smooth surface. The interpolation error is the distance from an arbitrary point on the triangulation to the nearest point on the original, smooth manifold, or vice versa. The normal error is the angle separating the vector (or space) normal to a triangle from the vector (or space) normal to the smooth manifold (measured at a suitable point near the triangle). We also study the {\em normal variation}, the angle separating the normal vectors (or normal spaces) at two different points on a smooth manifold. Our bounds apply to manifolds of any dimension embedded in Euclidean spaces of any dimension, and our interpolation error bounds apply to simplices of any dimension, although our normal error bounds apply only to triangles. These bounds are expressed in terms of the sizes of suitable medial balls (the {\em empty ball size} or {\em local feature size} measured at certain points on the manifold), and have applications in Delaunay triangulation-based algorithms for provably good surface reconstruction and provably good mesh generation. Our bounds have better constants than the prior bounds we know of---and for several results in higher dimensions, our bounds are the first to give explicit constants.