OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Declarativeness: the work done by something else
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2017
Year: 2017

Being declarative means that we do computer programming on higher levels of abstraction. This vague definition identifies declarativeness with the act of ignoring details, but it is a special case of abstraction. The unspecified part is some computational work. Automating computations and offloading mental processing are essentially the same concept, which is fundamental for both computational and mathematical thinking. This shows that declarativeness is not just a particular style, but it is the core idea of programming. Here we demonstrate this argument and examine its consequences for teaching by a systematic study of coding examples from an introductory programming course. The chosen language is Clojure, as it is proven to be accessible for novices.
An Energy Efficient Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Radio Wireless Sensor Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

The cognitive radio wireless sensor networks have become an integral part of communicating spectrum information to the fusion center, in a cooperative spectrum sensing environment. A group of battery operated sensors or nodes, sensing information about spectrum availability in the radio links, needs an energy efficient strategy to pass on the binary information. A proper routing method through intelligent decision making can be a good solution. In this paper, an energy efficient routing protocol has been introduced and a performance comparison is made with the existing system in terms of its energy consumption. The proposed routing technique considers both uniform and non-uniform clustering strategies and proves to be an energy efficient method of communication.
Refinement Types for Ruby
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2017
Year: 2017

Refinement types are a popular way to specify and reason about key program properties. In this paper, we introduce RTR, a new system that adds refinement types to Ruby. RTR is built on top of RDL, a Ruby type checker that provides basic type information for the verification process. RTR works by encoding its verification problems into Rosette, a solver-aided host language. RTR handles mixins through assume-guarantee reasoning and uses just-in-time verification for metaprogramming. We formalize RTR by showing a translation from a core, Ruby-like language with refinement types into Rosette. We apply RTR to check a range of functional correctness properties on six Ruby programs. We find that RTR can successfully verify key methods in these programs, taking only a few minutes to perform verification.
Adaptive Coding and Modulation for Large-Scale Antenna Array Based Aeronautical Communications in the Presence of Co-channel Interference
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

In order to meet the demands of `Internet above the clouds', we propose a multiple-antenna aided adaptive coding and modulation (ACM) for aeronautical communications. The proposed ACM scheme switches its coding and modulation mode according to the distance between the communicating aircraft, which is readily available with the aid of the airborne radar or the global positioning system. We derive an asymptotic closed-form expression of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) as the number of transmitting antennas tends to infinity, in the presence of realistic co-channel interference and channel estimation errors. The achievable transmission rates and the corresponding mode-switching distance-thresholds are readily obtained based on this closed-form SINR formula. Monte-Carlo simulation results are used to validate our theoretical analysis. For the specific example of 32 transmit antennas and 4 receive antennas communicating at a 5 GHz carrier frequency and using 6 MHz bandwidth, which are reused by multiple other pairs of communicating aircraft, the proposed distance-based ACM is capable of providing as high as 65.928 Mbps data rate when the communication distance is less than 25\,km.
In2I : Unsupervised Multi-Image-to-Image Translation Using Generative Adversarial Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

In unsupervised image-to-image translation, the goal is to learn the mapping between an input image and an output image using a set of unpaired training images. In this paper, we propose an extension of the unsupervised image-to-image translation problem to multiple input setting. Given a set of paired images from multiple modalities, a transformation is learned to translate the input into a specified domain. For this purpose, we introduce a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) based framework along with a multi-modal generator structure and a new loss term, latent consistency loss. Through various experiments we show that leveraging multiple inputs generally improves the visual quality of the translated images. Moreover, we show that the proposed method outperforms current state-of-the-art unsupervised image-to-image translation methods.
Automatic Color Image Segmentation Using a Square Elemental Region-Based Seeded Region Growing and Merging Method
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

This paper presents an efficient automatic color image segmentation method using a seeded region growing and merging method based on square elemental regions. Our segmentation method consists of the three steps: generating seed regions, merging the regions, and applying a pixel-wise boundary determination algorithm to the resultant polygonal regions. The major features of our method are as follows: the use of square elemental regions instead of pixels as the processing unit, a seed generation method based on enhanced gradient values, a seed region growing method exploiting local gradient values, a region merging method using a similarity measure including a homogeneity distance based on Tsallis entropy, and a termination condition of region merging using an estimated desired number of regions. Using square regions as the processing unit substantially reduces the time complexity of the algorithm and makes the performance stable. The experimental results show that our method exhibits stable performance for a variety of natural images, including heavily textured areas, and produces good segmentation results using the same parameter values. The results of our method are fairly comparable to, and in some respects better than, those of existing algorithms.
Visual Subpopulation Discovery and Validation in Cohort Study Data
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2017
Year: 2017

Epidemiology aims at identifying subpopulations of cohort participants that share common characteristics (e.g. alcohol consumption) to explain risk factors of diseases in cohort study data. These data contain information about the participants' health status gathered from questionnaires, medical examinations, and image acquisition. Due to the growing volume and heterogeneity of epidemiological data, the discovery of meaningful subpopulations is challenging. Subspace clustering can be leveraged to find subpopulations in large and heterogeneous cohort study datasets. In our collaboration with epidemiologists, we realized their need for a tool to validate discovered subpopulations. For this purpose, identified subpopulations should be searched for independent cohorts to check whether the findings apply there as well. In this paper we describe our interactive Visual Analytics framework S-ADVIsED for SubpopulAtion Discovery and Validation In Epidemiological Data. S-ADVIsED enables epidemiologists to explore and validate findings derived from subspace clustering. We provide a coordinated multiple view system, which includes a summary view of all subpopulations, detail views, and statistical information. Users can assess the quality of subspace clusters by considering different criteria via visualization. Furthermore, intervals for variables involved in a subspace cluster can be adjusted. This extension was suggested by epidemiologists. We investigated the replication of a selected subpopulation with multiple variables in another population by considering different measurements. As a specific result, we observed that study participants exhibiting high liver fat accumulation deviate strongly from other subpopulations and from the total study population with respect to age, body mass index, thyroid volume and thyroid-stimulating hormone.
Improved Neural Text Attribute Transfer with Non-parallel Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2017
Year: 2017

Text attribute transfer using non-parallel data requires methods that can perform disentanglement of content and linguistic attributes. In this work, we propose multiple improvements over the existing approaches that enable the encoder-decoder framework to cope with the text attribute transfer from non-parallel data. We perform experiments on the sentiment transfer task using two datasets. For both datasets, our proposed method outperforms a strong baseline in two of the three employed evaluation metrics.
Pedagogical learning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2017
Year: 2017

A common assumption in machine learning is that training data are i.i.d. samples from some distribution. Processes that generate i.i.d. samples are, in a sense, uninformative---they produce data without regard to how good this data is for learning. By contrast, cognitive science research has shown that when people generate training data for others (i.e., teaching), they deliberately select examples that are helpful for learning. Because the data is more informative, learning can require less data. Interestingly, such examples are most effective when learners know that the data were pedagogically generated (as opposed to randomly generated). We call this pedagogical learning---when a learner assumes that evidence comes from a helpful teacher. In this work, we ask how pedagogical learning might work for machine learning algorithms. Studying this question requires understanding how people actually teach complex concepts with examples, so we conducted a behavioral study examining how people teach regular expressions using example strings. We found that teachers' examples contain powerful clustering structure that can greatly facilitate learning. We then develop a model of teaching and show a proof of concept that using this model inside of a learner can improve performance.
Learning a Rotation Invariant Detector with Rotatable Bounding Box
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Detection of arbitrarily rotated objects is a challenging task due to the difficulties of locating the multi-angle objects and separating them effectively from the background. The existing methods are not robust to angle varies of the objects because of the use of traditional bounding box, which is a rotation variant structure for locating rotated objects. In this article, a new detection method is proposed which applies the newly defined rotatable bounding box (RBox). The proposed detector (DRBox) can effectively handle the situation where the orientation angles of the objects are arbitrary. The training of DRBox forces the detection networks to learn the correct orientation angle of the objects, so that the rotation invariant property can be achieved. DRBox is tested to detect vehicles, ships and airplanes on satellite images, compared with Faster R-CNN and SSD, which are chosen as the benchmark of the traditional bounding box based methods. The results shows that DRBox performs much better than traditional bounding box based methods do on the given tasks, and is more robust against rotation of input image and target objects. Besides, results show that DRBox correctly outputs the orientation angles of the objects, which is very useful for locating multi-angle objects efficiently. The code and models are available at https://github.com/liulei01/DRBox.
BL-ECD: Broad Learning based Enterprise Community Detection via Hierarchical Structure Fusion
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2017
Year: 2017

Employees in companies can be divided into di erent communities, and those who frequently socialize with each other will be treated as close friends and are grouped in the same community. In the enterprise context, a large amount of information about the employees is available in both (1) o ine company internal sources and (2) online enterprise social networks (ESNs). Each of the information sources also contain multiple categories of employees' socialization activities at the same time. In this paper, we propose to detect the social communities of the employees in companies based on the broad learning se ing with both these online and o ine information sources simultaneously, and the problem is formally called the "Broad Learning based Enterprise Community Detection" (BL-Ecd) problem. To address the problem, a novel broad learning based community detection framework named "HeterogeneoUs Multi-sOurce ClusteRing" (Humor) is introduced in this paper. Based on the various enterprise social intimacy measures introduced in this paper, Humor detects a set of micro community structures of the employees based on each of the socialization activities respectively. To obtain the (globally) consistent community structure of employees in the company, Humor further fuses these micro community structures via two broad learning phases: (1) intra-fusion of micro community structures to obtain the online and o ine (locally) consistent communities respectively, and (2) inter-fusion of the online and o ine communities to achieve the (globally) consistent community structure of employees. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world enterprise datasets demonstrate our method can perform very well in addressing the BL-Ecd problem.
Computation of the Adjoint Matrix
Venue: arXiv cs.SC 2017
Year: 2017

The best method for computing the adjoint matrix of an order $n$ matrix in an arbitrary commutative ring requires $O(n^{β+1/3}\log n \log \log n)$ operations, provided the complexity of the algorithm for multiplying two matrices is $γn^β+o(n^β)$. For a commutative domain -- and under the same assumptions -- the complexity of the best method is ${6γn^β}/{(2^β-2)}+o(n^β)$. In the present work a new method is presented for the computation of the adjoint matrix in a commutative domain. Despite the fact that the number of operations required is now 1.5 times more, than that of the best method, this new method permits a better parallelization of the computational process and may be successfully employed for computations in parallel computational systems.
An Analytical Framework for Coverage in Cellular Networks Leveraging Vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

This paper analyzes an emerging architecture of cellular network utilizing both planar base stations uniformly distributed in Euclidean plane and base stations located on roads. An example of this architecture is that where, in addition to conventional planar cellular base stations and users, vehicles also play the role of both base stations and users. A Poisson line process is used to model the road network and, conditionally on the lines, linear Poisson point processes are used to model the vehicles on the roads. The conventional planar base stations and users are modeled by independent planar Poisson point processes. The joint stationarity of the elements in this model allows one to use Palm calculus to investigate statistical properties of such a network. Specifically, this paper discusses two different Palm distributions, with respect to the user point processes depending on its type: planar or vehicular. We derive the distance to the nearest base station, the association of the typical users, and the coverage probability of the typical user in terms of integral formulas. Furthermore, this paper provides a comprehensive characterization of the performance of all possible cellular transmissions in this setting, namely vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I), infrastructure-to-vehicle (I2V), and infrastructure-to-infrastructure (I2I) communications.
Community detection algorithm evaluation with ground-truth data
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2017
Year: 2017

Community structure is of paramount importance for the understanding of complex networks. Consequently, there is a tremendous effort in order to develop efficient community detection algorithms. Unfortunately, the issue of a fair assessment of these algorithms is a thriving open question. If the ground-truth community structure is available, various clustering-based metrics are used in order to compare it versus the one discovered by these algorithms. However, these metrics defined at the node level are fairly insensitive to the variation of the overall community structure. To overcome these limitations, we propose to exploit the topological features of the 'community graphs' (where the nodes are the communities and the links represent their interactions) in order to evaluate the algorithms. To illustrate our methodology, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of overlapping community detection algorithms using a set of real-world networks with known a priori community structure. Results provide a better perception of their relative performance as compared to classical metrics. Moreover, they show that more emphasis should be put on the topology of the community structure. We also investigate the relationship between the topological properties of the community structure and the alternative evaluation measures (quality metrics and clustering metrics). It appears clearly that they present different views of the community structure and that they must be combined in order to evaluate the effectiveness of community detection algorithms.
Modeling Past and Future for Neural Machine Translation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2017
Year: 2017

Existing neural machine translation systems do not explicitly model what has been translated and what has not during the decoding phase. To address this problem, we propose a novel mechanism that separates the source information into two parts: translated Past contents and untranslated Future contents, which are modeled by two additional recurrent layers. The Past and Future contents are fed to both the attention model and the decoder states, which offers NMT systems the knowledge of translated and untranslated contents. Experimental results show that the proposed approach significantly improves translation performance in Chinese-English, German-English and English-German translation tasks. Specifically, the proposed model outperforms the conventional coverage model in both of the translation quality and the alignment error rate.
AUPCR Maximizing Matchings : Towards a Pragmatic Notion of Optimality for One-Sided Preference Matchings
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2017
Year: 2017

We consider the problem of computing a matching in a bipartite graph in the presence of one-sided preferences. There are several well studied notions of optimality which include pareto optimality, rank maximality, fairness and popularity. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth experimental study comparing different notions of optimality based on a variety of metrics like cardinality, number of rank-1 edges, popularity, to name a few. Observing certain shortcomings in the standard notions of optimality, we propose an algorithm which maximizes an alternative metric called the Area under Profile Curve ratio (AUPCR). To the best of our knowledge, the AUPCR metric was used earlier but there is no known algorithm to compute an AUPCR maximizing matching. Finally, we illustrate the superiority of the AUPCR-maximizing matching by comparing its performance against other optimal matchings on synthetic instances modeling real-world data.
Joint Cuts and Matching of Partitions in One Graph
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

As two fundamental problems, graph cuts and graph matching have been investigated over decades, resulting in vast literature in these two topics respectively. However the way of jointly applying and solving graph cuts and matching receives few attention. In this paper, we first formalize the problem of simultaneously cutting a graph into two partitions i.e. graph cuts and establishing their correspondence i.e. graph matching. Then we develop an optimization algorithm by updating matching and cutting alternatively, provided with theoretical analysis. The efficacy of our algorithm is verified on both synthetic dataset and real-world images containing similar regions or structures.
DeepChess: End-to-End Deep Neural Network for Automatic Learning in Chess
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2017
Year: 2017

We present an end-to-end learning method for chess, relying on deep neural networks. Without any a priori knowledge, in particular without any knowledge regarding the rules of chess, a deep neural network is trained using a combination of unsupervised pretraining and supervised training. The unsupervised training extracts high level features from a given position, and the supervised training learns to compare two chess positions and select the more favorable one. The training relies entirely on datasets of several million chess games, and no further domain specific knowledge is incorporated. The experiments show that the resulting neural network (referred to as DeepChess) is on a par with state-of-the-art chess playing programs, which have been developed through many years of manual feature selection and tuning. DeepChess is the first end-to-end machine learning-based method that results in a grandmaster-level chess playing performance.
PhasePack User Guide
Venue: arXiv cs.MS 2017
Year: 2017

"Phase retrieval" refers to the recovery of signals from the magnitudes (and not the phases) of linear measurements. While there has been a recent explosion in development of phase retrieval methods, the lack of a common interface has made it difficult to compare new methods against the current state-of-the-art. PhasePack is a software library that creates a common interface for a wide range of phase retrieval schemes. PhasePack also provides a test bed for phase retrieval methods using both synthetic data and publicly available empirical datasets.
Distilling a Neural Network Into a Soft Decision Tree
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

Deep neural networks have proved to be a very effective way to perform classification tasks. They excel when the input data is high dimensional, the relationship between the input and the output is complicated, and the number of labeled training examples is large. But it is hard to explain why a learned network makes a particular classification decision on a particular test case. This is due to their reliance on distributed hierarchical representations. If we could take the knowledge acquired by the neural net and express the same knowledge in a model that relies on hierarchical decisions instead, explaining a particular decision would be much easier. We describe a way of using a trained neural net to create a type of soft decision tree that generalizes better than one learned directly from the training data.
The Status of Quantum-Based Long-Term Secure Communication over the Internet
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2017
Year: 2017

Sensitive digital data, such as health information or governmental archives, are often stored for decades or centuries. The processing of such data calls for long-term security. Secure channels on the Internet require robust key establishment methods. Currently used key distribution protocols are either vulnerable to future attacks based on Shor's algorithm, or vulnerable in principle due to their reliance on computational problems. Quantum-based key distribution protocols are information-theoretically secure and offer long-term security. However, significant obstacles to their real-world use remain. This paper, which results from a multidisciplinary project involving computer scientists and physicists, systematizes knowledge about obstacles to and strategies for the realization of long-term secure Internet communication from quantum-based key distribution. We discuss performance and security particulars, consider the specific challenges arising from multi-user network settings, and identify key challenges for actual deployment.