OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Optical Font Recognition in Smartphone-Captured Images, and its Applicability for ID Forgery Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we consider the problem of detecting counterfeit identity documents in images captured with smartphones. As the number of documents contain special fonts, we study the applicability of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for detection of the conformance of the fonts used with the ones, corresponding to the government standards. Here, we use multi-task learning to differentiate samples by both fonts and characters and compare the resulting classifier with its analogue trained for binary font classification. We train neural networks for authenticity estimation of the fonts used in machine-readable zones and ID numbers of the Russian national passport and test them on samples of individual characters acquired from 3238 images of the Russian national passport. Our results show that the usage of multi-task learning increases sensitivity and specificity of the classifier. Moreover, the resulting CNNs demonstrate high generalization ability as they correctly classify fonts which were not present in the training set. We conclude that the proposed method is sufficient for authentication of the fonts and can be used as a part of the forgery detection system for images acquired with a smartphone camera.
Toward a Uniform Approach to the Unfolding of Nets
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper we introduce the notion of spread net. Spread nets are (safe) Petri nets equipped with vector clocks on places and with ticking functions on transitions, and are such that vector clocks are consistent with the ticking of transitions. Such nets generalize previous families of nets like unfoldings, merged processes and trellis processes, and can thus be used to represent runs of a net in a true concurrency semantics through an operation called the spreading of a net. By contrast with previous constructions, which may identify conflicts, spread nets allow loops in time
Dynamic Channel Allocation for QoS Provisioning in Visible Light Communication
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

In visible light communication (VLC) diverse types of traffic are supported while the number of optical channels is limited. In this paper we propose a dynamic channel reservation scheme for higher priority calls that does not reduce the channel utilization. The number of reserved channels for each traffic class is calculated using real time observation of the call arrival rates of each traffic classes. The numerical results show that the proposed scheme is able to reduce the call blocking probability of the higher priority user within a reasonable range without sacrificing channel utilization.
A Training-based Identification Approach to VIN Adversarial Examples
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

With the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the problem of AI security has gradually emerged. Most existing machine learning algorithms may be attacked by adversarial examples. An adversarial example is a slightly modified input sample that can lead to a false result of machine learning algorithms. The adversarial examples pose a potential security threat for many AI application areas, especially in the domain of robot path planning. In this field, the adversarial examples obstruct the algorithm by adding obstacles to the normal maps, resulting in multiple effects on the predicted path. However, there is no suitable approach to automatically identify them. To our knowledge, all previous work uses manual observation method to estimate the attack results of adversarial maps, which is time-consuming. Aiming at the existing problem, this paper explores a method to automatically identify the adversarial examples in Value Iteration Networks (VIN), which has a strong generalization ability. We analyze the possible scenarios caused by the adversarial maps. We propose a training-based identification approach to VIN adversarial examples by combing the path feature comparison and path image classification. We evaluate our method using the adversarial maps dataset, show that our method can achieve a high-accuracy and faster identification than manual observation method.
Discourse Embellishment Using a Deep Encoder-Decoder Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

We suggest a new NLG task in the context of the discourse generation pipeline of computational storytelling systems. This task, textual embellishment, is defined by taking a text as input and generating a semantically equivalent output with increased lexical and syntactic complexity. Ideally, this would allow the authors of computational storytellers to implement just lightweight NLG systems and use a domain-independent embellishment module to translate its output into more literary text. We present promising first results on this task using LSTM Encoder-Decoder networks trained on the WikiLarge dataset. Furthermore, we introduce "Compiled Computer Tales", a corpus of computationally generated stories, that can be used to test the capabilities of embellishment algorithms.
Enabling Hard Service Guarantees in Software-Defined Smart Grid Infrastructures
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructures play a key role in the evolution from traditional power systems to Smart Grids. Increasingly fluctuating power flows, sparked by the transition towards sustainable energy generation, become a major issue for power grid stability. To deal with this challenge, future Smart Grids require precise monitoring and control, which in turn demand for reliable, real-time capable and cost-efficient communications. For this purpose, we propose applying Software-Defined Networking (SDN) to handle the manifold requirements of Smart Grid communications. To achieve reliability, our approach encompasses fast recovery after failures in the communication network and dynamic service-aware network (re-)configuration. Network Calculus (NC) logic is embedded into our SDN controller for meeting latency requirements imposed by the standard IEC 61850 of the International Electrotechnical Committee (IEC). Thus, routing provides delay-optimal paths under consideration of existing cross traffic. Also, continuous latency bound compliance is ensured by combining NC delay supervision with means of flexible reconfiguration. For evaluation we consider the well-known Nordic 32 test system, on which we map a corresponding communication network in both experiment and emulation. The described functionalities are validated, employing realistic IEC 61850 transmissions and distributed control traffic. Our results show that hard service guarantees can be ensured with the help of the proposed SDN solution. On this basis, we derive extremely time critical services, which must not be subjected to flexible reconfiguration.
TS-CNN: Text Steganalysis from Semantic Space Based on Convolutional Neural Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

Steganalysis has been an important research topic in cybersecurity that helps to identify covert attacks in public network. With the rapid development of natural language processing technology in the past two years, coverless steganography has been greatly developed. Previous text steganalysis methods have shown unsatisfactory results on this new steganography technique and remain an unsolved challenge. Different from all previous text steganalysis methods, in this paper, we propose a text steganalysis method(TS-CNN) based on semantic analysis, which uses convolutional neural network(CNN) to extract high-level semantic features of texts, and finds the subtle distribution differences in the semantic space before and after embedding the secret information. To train and test the proposed model, we collected and released a large text steganalysis(CT-Steg) dataset, which contains a total number of 216,000 texts with various lengths and various embedding rates. Experimental results show that the proposed model can achieve nearly 100\% precision and recall, outperforms all the previous methods. Furthermore, the proposed model can even estimate the capacity of the hidden information inside. These results strongly support that using the subtle changes in the semantic space before and after embedding the secret information to conduct text steganalysis is feasible and effective.
Ratio List Decoding
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

We extend the notion of list decoding to {\em ratio list decoding} which involves a list decoder whose list size is specified as a function of the number of messages $M_n$ and the block length $n$. We present necessary and sufficient conditions on $M_n$ for the existence of code sequences which enable reliable list decoding with respect to the desired list size $L(M_n,n)$. It is shown that the ratio-capacity, defined as the supremum of achievable normalized logarithms of the ratio $r(M_n,n)=M_n/L(M_n,n)$ is equal to the Shannon channel capacity $C$, for both stochastic and deterministic encoding. Allowing for random list size, we are able to deduce some properties of identification codes, where the decoder's output can be viewed as a list of messages corresponding to decision regions that include the channel output. We further address the regime of mismatched list decoding, in which the list constitutes of the codewords that accumulate the highest score values (jointly with the channel output) according to some given function. We study the case of deterministic encoding and mismatched ratio list decoding. We establish similar necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of code sequences which enable reliable mismatched list decoding with respect to the desired list size $L(M_n,n)$, and we show that the ratio-capacity with mismatched decoding is equal to the mismatch capacity. Focusing on the case of an exponential list size $L_n=e^{n Θ}$, its comparison with ordinary mismatched decoding shows that the increase in capacity is by $Θ$ bits per channel use for all channels and decoding metrics. Several properties of the average error probability in the setup of mismatched list decoding with deterministic list size are provided.
Micro-Browsing Models for Search Snippets
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Click-through rate (CTR) is a key signal of relevance for search engine results, both organic and sponsored. CTR of a result has two core components: (a) the probability of examination of a result by a user, and (b) the perceived relevance of the result given that it has been examined by the user. There has been considerable work on user browsing models, to model and analyze both the examination and the relevance components of CTR. In this paper, we propose a novel formulation: a micro-browsing model for how users read result snippets. The snippet text of a result often plays a critical role in the perceived relevance of the result. We study how particular words within a line of snippet can influence user behavior. We validate this new micro-browsing user model by considering the problem of predicting which snippet will yield higher CTR, and show that classification accuracy is dramatically higher with our micro-browsing user model. The key insight in this paper is that varying relatively few words within a snippet, and even their location within a snippet, can have a significant influence on the clickthrough of a snippet.
CURE-OR: Challenging Unreal and Real Environments for Object Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we introduce a large-scale, controlled, and multi-platform object recognition dataset denoted as Challenging Unreal and Real Environments for Object Recognition (CURE-OR). In this dataset, there are 1,000,000 images of 100 objects with varying size, color, and texture that are positioned in five different orientations and captured using five devices including a webcam, a DSLR, and three smartphone cameras in real-world (real) and studio (unreal) environments. The controlled challenging conditions include underexposure, overexposure, blur, contrast, dirty lens, image noise, resizing, and loss of color information. We utilize CURE-OR dataset to test recognition APIs-Amazon Rekognition and Microsoft Azure Computer Vision- and show that their performance significantly degrades under challenging conditions. Moreover, we investigate the relationship between object recognition and image quality and show that objective quality algorithms can estimate recognition performance under certain photometric challenging conditions. The dataset is publicly available at https://ghassanalregib.com/cure-or/.
Zero-Forcing Per-Group Precoding (ZF-PGP) for Robust Optimized Downlink Massive MIMO Performance
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we propose a new, combined Zero-Forcing Per-Group Precoding (ZF-PGP) method that achieves very high gains in comparison to ZF Precoding techniques, while it simultaneously offers individually separate streams to reach individual User Equipment (UE), i.e., it obliterates the need for coordinated, joint decoding by the group's UEs. Although ZF-PGP in general experiences a performance loss in comparison to the near-optimal Per-Group Precoding within groups (PGP-WG), it is much simpler to implement than PGP-WG. The method works extremely well in conjunction with Combined Frequency and Space Division and Multiplexing (CFSDM) in correlated channels or in cases in which the group's total number of antennas is greater than the group's available Virtual Channel Model Beams (VCMB) number. As we show by multiple examples, for a Uniform Linear Array (ULA), by combining the proposed technique with massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) and Joint Spatial Division and Multiplexing for Finite Alphabets (JSDM-FA) type hybrid precoding or CFSDM a very efficient, near-optimal design with reduced complexity at the UEs is achieved, while each UE decodes its received data independently, without interference from data destined for other UEs. Due to JSDM-FA Statistical Channel State Information (SCSI) inner beamforming, the groups are easily identified. We show that the combined ZF-PGP scheme achieves very high gains in comparison to ZF and Regularized ZF (RZF) precoding and other modified sub-optimal techniques investigated, while its complexity is still relatively low due to PGP-WG. We also demonstrate the robustness of the proposed precoding techniques to channel estimation errors, showing minimal performance loss.
Learning Multi-Layer Transform Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Learned data models based on sparsity are widely used in signal processing and imaging applications. A variety of methods for learning synthesis dictionaries, sparsifying transforms, etc., have been proposed in recent years, often imposing useful structures or properties on the models. In this work, we focus on sparsifying transform learning, which enjoys a number of advantages. We consider multi-layer or nested extensions of the transform model, and propose efficient learning algorithms. Numerical experiments with image data illustrate the behavior of the multi-layer transform learning algorithm and its usefulness for image denoising. Multi-layer models provide better denoising quality than single layer schemes.
Temporal Action Detection by Joint Identification-Verification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Temporal action detection aims at not only recognizing action category but also detecting start time and end time for each action instance in an untrimmed video. The key challenge of this task is to accurately classify the action and determine the temporal boundaries of each action instance. In temporal action detection benchmark: THUMOS 2014, large variations exist in the same action category while many similarities exist in different action categories, which always limit the performance of temporal action detection. To address this problem, we propose to use joint Identification-Verification network to reduce the intra-action variations and enlarge inter-action differences. The joint Identification-Verification network is a siamese network based on 3D ConvNets, which can simultaneously predict the action categories and the similarity scores for the input pairs of video proposal segments. Extensive experimental results on the challenging THUMOS 2014 dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method compared to the existing state-of-art methods for temporal action detection in untrimmed videos.
Saliency guided deep network for weakly-supervised image segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Weakly-supervised image segmentation is an important task in computer vision. A key problem is how to obtain high quality objects location from image-level category. Classification activation mapping is a common method which can be used to generate high-precise object location cues. However these location cues are generally very sparse and small such that they can not provide effective information for image segmentation. In this paper, we propose a saliency guided image segmentation network to resolve this problem. We employ a self-attention saliency method to generate subtle saliency maps, and render the location cues grow as seeds by seeded region growing method to expand pixel-level labels extent. In the process of seeds growing, we use the saliency values to weight the similarity between pixels to control the growing. Therefore saliency information could help generate discriminative object regions, and the effects of wrong salient pixels can be suppressed efficiently. Experimental results on a common segmentation dataset PASCAL VOC2012 demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Planification par fusions incrémentales de graphes
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we introduce a generic and fresh model for distributed planning called "Distributed Planning Through Graph Merging" ({\sf DPGM}). This model unifies the different steps of the distributed planning process into a single step. Our approach is based on a planning graph structure for the agent reasoning and a CSP mechanism for the individual plan extraction and the coordination. We assume that no agent can reach the global goal alone. Therefore the agents must cooperate, {\it i.e.,} take in into account potential positive interactions between their activities to reach their common shared goal. The originality of our model consists in considering as soon as possible, {\it i.e.,} in the individual planning process, the positive and the negative interactions between agents activities in order to reduce the search cost of a global coordinated solution plan.
DigiLock: User-controlled and Server-aware Digital Locker System
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

The growing popularity of digital systems have paved the way for digital locker that ensures security and safety of the digital documents in store. While facilitating this system to user and availing its services offered by service provider, non-repudiation of service offered and service consumed is an important security requirement in the digital locker system. In this paper, we present a digital locker system that addresses the aspect of confidentiality, integrity, and non-repudiation along with other security properties. The proposed protocol ensures the confirmed participation of the user as well as the service provider while accessing the digital locker. The protocol is analyzed against potential threats in the context of safety and security of the digital locker system.
On the optimality of likelihood ratio test for prospect theory based binary hypothesis testing
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

In this letter, the optimality of the likelihood ratio test (LRT) is investigated for binary hypothesis testing problems in the presence of a behavioral decision-maker. By utilizing prospect theory, a behavioral decision-maker is modeled to cognitively distort probabilities and costs based on some weight and value functions, respectively. It is proved that the LRT may or may not be an optimal decision rule for prospect theory based binary hypothesis testing and conditions are derived to specify different scenarios. In addition, it is shown that when the LRT is an optimal decision rule, it corresponds to a randomized decision rule in some cases; i.e., nonrandomized LRTs may not be optimal. This is unlike Bayesian binary hypothesis testing in which the optimal decision rule can always be expressed in the form of a nonrandomized LRT. Finally, it is proved that the optimal decision rule for prospect theory based binary hypothesis testing can always be represented by a decision rule that randomizes at most two LRTs. Two examples are presented to corroborate the theoretical results.
Coming: a Tool for Mining Change Pattern Instances from Git Commits
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2018
Year: 2018

Software repositories such as Git have become a relevant source of information for software engineer researcher. For instance, the detection of Commits that fulfill a given criterion (e.g., bugfixing commits) is one of the most frequent tasks done to understand the software evolution. However, to our knowledge, there is not open-source tools that, given a Git repository, returns all the instances of a given change pattern. In this paper we present Coming, a tool that takes an input a Git repository and mines instances of change patterns on each commit. For that, Coming computes fine-grained changes between two consecutive revisions, analyzes those changes to detect if they correspond to an instance of a change pattern (specified by the user using XML), and finally, after analyzing all the commits, it presents a) the frequency of code changes and b) the instances found on each commit. We evaluate Coming on a set of 28 pairs of revisions from Defects4J, finding instances of change patterns that involve If conditions on 26 of them.
Supervising strong learners by amplifying weak experts
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Many real world learning tasks involve complex or hard-to-specify objectives, and using an easier-to-specify proxy can lead to poor performance or misaligned behavior. One solution is to have humans provide a training signal by demonstrating or judging performance, but this approach fails if the task is too complicated for a human to directly evaluate. We propose Iterated Amplification, an alternative training strategy which progressively builds up a training signal for difficult problems by combining solutions to easier subproblems. Iterated Amplification is closely related to Expert Iteration (Anthony et al., 2017; Silver et al., 2017), except that it uses no external reward function. We present results in algorithmic environments, showing that Iterated Amplification can efficiently learn complex behaviors.
Leveraging Product as an Activation Function in Deep Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2018
Year: 2018

Product unit neural networks (PUNNs) are powerful representational models with a strong theoretical basis, but have proven to be difficult to train with gradient-based optimizers. We present windowed product unit neural networks (WPUNNs), a simple method of leveraging product as a nonlinearity in a neural network. Windowing the product tames the complex gradient surface and enables WPUNNs to learn effectively, solving the problems faced by PUNNs. WPUNNs use product layers between traditional sum layers, capturing the representational power of product units and using the product itself as a nonlinearity. We find the result that this method works as well as traditional nonlinearities like ReLU on the MNIST dataset. We demonstrate that WPUNNs can also generalize gated units in recurrent neural networks, yielding results comparable to LSTM networks.