OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Traffic Light Control in Vehicular Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Existing inefficient traffic light control causes numerous problems, such as long delay and waste of energy. To improve efficiency, taking real-time traffic information as an input and dynamically adjusting the traffic light duration accordingly is a must. In terms of how to dynamically adjust traffic signals' duration, existing works either split the traffic signal into equal duration or extract limited traffic information from the real data. In this paper, we study how to decide the traffic signals' duration based on the collected data from different sensors and vehicular networks. We propose a deep reinforcement learning model to control the traffic light. In the model, we quantify the complex traffic scenario as states by collecting data and dividing the whole intersection into small grids. The timing changes of a traffic light are the actions, which are modeled as a high-dimension Markov decision process. The reward is the cumulative waiting time difference between two cycles. To solve the model, a convolutional neural network is employed to map the states to rewards. The proposed model is composed of several components to improve the performance, such as dueling network, target network, double Q-learning network, and prioritized experience replay. We evaluate our model via simulation in the Simulation of Urban MObility (SUMO) in a vehicular network, and the simulation results show the efficiency of our model in controlling traffic lights.
The process of purely event-driven programs
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2018
Year: 2018

Using process algebra, this paper describes the formalisation of the process/semantics behind the purely event-driven programming language.
Prefix-Free Parsing for Building Big BWTs
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2018
Year: 2018

High-throughput sequencing technologies have led to explosive growth of genomic databases; one of which will soon reach hundreds of terabytes. For many applications we want to build and store indexes of these databases but constructing such indexes is a challenge. Fortunately, many of these genomic databases are highly-repetitive---a characteristic that can be exploited to ease the computation of the Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT), which underlies many popular indexes. In this paper, we introduce a preprocessing algorithm, referred to as {\em prefix-free parsing}, that takes a text $T$ as input, and in one-pass generates a dictionary $D$ and a parse $P$ of $T$ with the property that the BWT of $T$ can be constructed from $D$ and $P$ using workspace proportional to their total size and $O (|T|)$-time. Our experiments show that $D$ and $P$ are significantly smaller than $T$ in practice, and thus, can fit in a reasonable internal memory even when $T$ is very large. In particular, we show that with prefix-free parsing we can build an 131-megabyte run-length compressed FM-index (restricted to support only counting and not locating) for 1000 copies of human chromosome 19 in 2 hours using 21 gigabytes of memory, suggesting that we can build a 6.73 gigabyte index for 1000 complete human-genome haplotypes in approximately 102 hours using about 1 terabyte of memory.
How an Electrical Engineer Became an Artificial Intelligence Researcher, a Multiphase Active Contours Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

This essay examines how what is considered to be artificial intelligence (AI) has changed over time and come to intersect with the expertise of the author. Initially, AI developed on a separate trajectory, both topically and institutionally, from pattern recognition, neural information processing, decision and control systems, and allied topics by focusing on symbolic systems within computer science departments rather than on continuous systems in electrical engineering departments. The separate evolutions continued throughout the author's lifetime, with some crossover in reinforcement learning and graphical models, but were shocked into converging by the virality of deep learning, thus making an electrical engineer into an AI researcher. Now that this convergence has happened, opportunity exists to pursue an agenda that combines learning and reasoning bridged by interpretable machine learning models.
High Capacity Image Data Hiding of Scanned Text Documents Using Improved Quadtree
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, an effective method was introduced to steganography of text document in the host image. In the available steganography methods, the message has a random form. Therefore, the embedding capacity is generally low. In the proposed method, the main underlying idea was the sparse property of scanned documents. The scanned documents were converted from gray-level form to binary values by halftoning idea and then the information-included parts were extracted using the improved quadtree and separated from document context. Next, in order to compress the extracted parts, an algorithm was proposed based on reading the binary string bits, ignoring the zero behind the number, and converting them to decimal values. Embedding capacity of the proposed method is higher than that of other available methods with a random-based message. Therefore, the proposed method can be used in the secure and intangible transfer of text documents in the host image.
Discovering Student Behavior Patterns from Event Logs: Preliminary Results on A Novel Probabilistic Latent Variable Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2018
Year: 2018

Digital platforms enable the observation of learning behaviors through fine-grained log traces, offering more detailed clues for analysis. In addition to previous descriptive and predictive log analysis, this study aims to simultaneously model learner activities, event time spans, and interaction levels using the proposed Hidden Behavior Traits Model (HBTM). We evaluated model performance and explored their capability of clustering learners on a public dataset, and tried to interpret the machine recognized latent behavior patterns. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrated the promising value of HBTM. Results of this study can contribute to the literature of online learner modeling and learning service planning.
Fine-Grained Attention Mechanism for Neural Machine Translation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

Neural machine translation (NMT) has been a new paradigm in machine translation, and the attention mechanism has become the dominant approach with the state-of-the-art records in many language pairs. While there are variants of the attention mechanism, all of them use only temporal attention where one scalar value is assigned to one context vector corresponding to a source word. In this paper, we propose a fine-grained (or 2D) attention mechanism where each dimension of a context vector will receive a separate attention score. In experiments with the task of En-De and En-Fi translation, the fine-grained attention method improves the translation quality in terms of BLEU score. In addition, our alignment analysis reveals how the fine-grained attention mechanism exploits the internal structure of context vectors.
GradAscent at EmoInt-2017: Character- and Word-Level Recurrent Neural Network Models for Tweet Emotion Intensity Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

The WASSA 2017 EmoInt shared task has the goal to predict emotion intensity values of tweet messages. Given the text of a tweet and its emotion category (anger, joy, fear, and sadness), the participants were asked to build a system that assigns emotion intensity values. Emotion intensity estimation is a challenging problem given the short length of the tweets, the noisy structure of the text and the lack of annotated data. To solve this problem, we developed an ensemble of two neural models, processing input on the character. and word-level with a lexicon-driven system. The correlation scores across all four emotions are averaged to determine the bottom-line competition metric, and our system ranks place forth in full intensity range and third in 0.5-1 range of intensity among 23 systems at the time of writing (June 2017).
Joint Communication, Computation, Caching, and Control in Big Data Multi-access Edge Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

The concept of multi-access edge computing (MEC) has been recently introduced to supplement cloud computing by deploying MEC servers to the network edge so as to reduce the network delay and alleviate the load on cloud data centers. However, compared to a resourceful cloud, an MEC server has limited resources. When each MEC server operates independently, it cannot handle all of the computational and big data demands stemming from the users devices. Consequently, the MEC server cannot provide significant gains in overhead reduction due to data exchange between users devices and remote cloud. Therefore, joint computing, caching, communication, and control (4C) at the edge with MEC server collaboration is strongly needed for big data applications. In order to address these challenges, in this paper, the problem of joint 4C in big data MEC is formulated as an optimization problem whose goal is to maximize the bandwidth saving while minimizing delay, subject to the local computation capability of user devices, computation deadline, and MEC resource constraints. However, the formulated problem is shown to be non-convex. To make this problem convex, a proximal upper bound problem of the original formulated problem that guarantees descent to the original problem is proposed. To solve the proximal upper bound problem, a block successive upper bound minimization (BSUM) method is applied. Simulation results show that the proposed approach increases bandwidth-saving and minimizes delay while satisfying the computation deadlines.
Substitute Teacher Networks: Learning with Almost No Supervision
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Learning through experience is time-consuming, inefficient and often bad for your cortisol levels. To address this problem, a number of recently proposed teacher-student methods have demonstrated the benefits of private tuition, in which a single model learns from an ensemble of more experienced tutors. Unfortunately, the cost of such supervision restricts good representations to a privileged minority. Unsupervised learning can be used to lower tuition fees, but runs the risk of producing networks that require extracurriculum learning to strengthen their CVs and create their own LinkedIn profiles. Inspired by the logo on a promotional stress ball at a local recruitment fair, we make the following three contributions. First, we propose a novel almost no supervision training algorithm that is effective, yet highly scalable in the number of student networks being supervised, ensuring that education remains affordable. Second, we demonstrate our approach on a typical use case: learning to bake, developing a method that tastily surpasses the current state of the art. Finally, we provide a rigorous quantitive analysis of our method, proving that we have access to a calculator. Our work calls into question the long-held dogma that life is the best teacher.
Overview: A Hierarchical Framework for Plan Generation and Execution in Multi-Robot Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

The authors present an overview of a hierarchical framework for coordinating task- and motion-level operations in multirobot systems. Their framework is based on the idea of using simple temporal networks to simultaneously reason about precedence/causal constraints required for task-level coordination and simple temporal constraints required to take some kinematic constraints of robots into account. In the plan-generation phase, the framework provides a computationally scalable method for generating plans that achieve high-level tasks for groups of robots and take some of their kinematic constraints into account. In the plan-execution phase, the framework provides a method for absorbing an imperfect plan execution to avoid time-consuming re-planning in many cases. The authors use the multirobot path-planning problem as a case study to present the key ideas behind their framework for the long-term autonomy of multirobot systems.
Graph Convolutional Neural Networks via Scattering
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

We generalize the scattering transform to graphs and consequently construct a convolutional neural network on graphs. We show that under certain conditions, any feature generated by such a network is approximately invariant to permutations and stable to graph manipulations. Numerical results demonstrate competitive performance on relevant datasets.
Quantitative Evaluation of Style Transfer
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Style transfer methods produce a transferred image which is a rendering of a content image in the manner of a style image. There is a rich literature of variant methods. However, evaluation procedures are qualitative, mostly involving user studies. We describe a novel quantitative evaluation procedure. One plots effectiveness (a measure of the extent to which the style was transferred) against coherence (a measure of the extent to which the transferred image decomposes into objects in the same way that the content image does) to obtain an EC plot. We construct EC plots comparing a number of recent style transfer methods. Most methods control within-layer gram matrices, but we also investigate a method that controls cross-layer gram matrices. These EC plots reveal a number of intriguing properties of recent style transfer methods. The style used has a strong effect on the outcome, for all methods. Using large style weights does not necessarily improve effectiveness, and can produce worse results. Cross-layer gram matrices easily beat all other methods, but some styles remain difficult for all methods. Ensemble methods show real promise. It is likely that, for current methods, each style requires a different choice of weights to obtain the best results, so that automated weight setting methods are desirable. Finally, we show evidence comparing our EC evaluations to human evaluations.
Hardware design of LIF with Latency neuron model with memristive STDP synapses
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, the hardware implementation of a neuromorphic system is presented. This system is composed of a Leaky Integrate-and-Fire with Latency (LIFL) neuron and a Spike-Timing Dependent Plasticity (STDP) synapse. LIFL neuron model allows to encode more information than the common Integrate-and-Fire models, typically considered for neuromorphic implementations. In our system LIFL neuron is implemented using CMOS circuits while memristor is used for the implementation of the STDP synapse. A description of the entire circuit is provided. Finally, the capabilities of the proposed architecture have been evaluated by simulating a motif composed of three neurons and two synapses. The simulation results confirm the validity of the proposed system and its suitability for the design of more complex spiking neural networks
A Subpixel Registration Algorithm for Low PSNR Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

This paper presents a fast algorithm for obtaining high-accuracy subpixel translation of low PSNR images. Instead of locating the maximum point on the upsampled images or fitting the peak of correlation surface, the proposed algorithm is based on the measurement of centroid on the cross correlation surface by Modified Moment method. Synthetic images, real solar images and standard testing images with white Gaussian noise added were tested, and the results show that the accuracies of our algorithm are comparable with other subpixel registration techniques and the processing speed is higher. The drawback is also discussed at the end of this paper.
The Impact of Quantum Computing on Present Cryptography
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

The aim of this paper is to elucidate the implications of quantum computing in present cryptography and to introduce the reader to basic post-quantum algorithms. In particular the reader can delve into the following subjects: present cryptographic schemes (symmetric and asymmetric), differences between quantum and classical computing, challenges in quantum computing, quantum algorithms (Shor's and Grover's), public key encryption schemes affected, symmetric schemes affected, the impact on hash functions, and post quantum cryptography. Specifically, the section of Post-Quantum Cryptography deals with different quantum key distribution methods and mathematicalbased solutions, such as the BB84 protocol, lattice-based cryptography, multivariate-based cryptography, hash-based signatures and code-based cryptography.
Training Tips for the Transformer Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

This article describes our experiments in neural machine translation using the recent Tensor2Tensor framework and the Transformer sequence-to-sequence model (Vaswani et al., 2017). We examine some of the critical parameters that affect the final translation quality, memory usage, training stability and training time, concluding each experiment with a set of recommendations for fellow researchers. In addition to confirming the general mantra "more data and larger models", we address scaling to multiple GPUs and provide practical tips for improved training regarding batch size, learning rate, warmup steps, maximum sentence length and checkpoint averaging. We hope that our observations will allow others to get better results given their particular hardware and data constraints.
SampleAhead: Online Classifier-Sampler Communication for Learning from Synthesized Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

State-of-the-art techniques of artificial intelligence, in particular deep learning, are mostly data-driven. However, collecting and manually labeling a large scale dataset is both difficult and expensive. A promising alternative is to introduce synthesized training data, so that the dataset size can be significantly enlarged with little human labor. But, this raises an important problem in active vision: given an {\bf infinite} data space, how to effectively sample a {\bf finite} subset to train a visual classifier? This paper presents an approach for learning from synthesized data effectively. The motivation is straightforward -- increasing the probability of seeing difficult training data. We introduce a module named {\bf SampleAhead} to formulate the learning process into an online communication between a {\em classifier} and a {\em sampler}, and update them iteratively. In each round, we adjust the sampling distribution according to the classification results, and train the classifier using the data sampled from the updated distribution. Experiments are performed by introducing synthesized images rendered from ShapeNet models to assist PASCAL3D+ classification. Our approach enjoys higher classification accuracy, especially in the scenario of a limited number of training samples. This demonstrates its efficiency in exploring the infinite data space.
Attentional Multilabel Learning over Graphs: A Message Passing Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

We address a largely open problem of multilabel classification over graphs. Unlike traditional vector input, a graph has rich variable-size substructures which are related to the labels in some ways. We believe that uncovering these relations might hold the key to classification performance and explainability. We introduce GAML (Graph Attentional Multi-Label learning), a novel graph neural network that can handle this problem effectively. GAML regards labels as auxiliary nodes and models them in conjunction with the input graph. By applying message passing and attention mechanisms to both the label nodes and the input nodes iteratively, GAML can capture the relations between the labels and the input subgraphs at various resolution scales. Moreover, our model can take advantage of explicit label dependencies. It also scales linearly with the number of labels and graph size thanks to our proposed hierarchical attention. We evaluate GAML on an extensive set of experiments with both graph-structured inputs and classical unstructured inputs. The results show that GAML significantly outperforms other competing methods. Importantly, GAML enables intuitive visualizations for better understanding of the label-substructure relations and explanation of the model behaviors.
Investigation of Performance in Integrated Access and Backhaul Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

Wireless backhaul allows densification of mobile networks without incurring additional fiber deployment cost. This, in turn, leads to high spatial reuse, which is a significant tool to meet increasing wireless demand in 5G networks. Integrated access and backhaul (IAB), where access and backhaul network share the same standard wireless technology (e.g. 5G new radio (NR) standard), allows interoperability among different IAB manufacturers and flexible operation between access and backhaul. This paper investigates joint resource allocation and relay selection in a multi-hop IAB network to maximize geometric mean of UE rates. Our study illustrates several advantages and features of IAB. First, IAB significantly improves UE rates compared to access only networks and can provide an important intermediate solution during incremental fiber deployment. Second, IAB networks with optimal mesh outperforms IAB networks with RSRP based spanning tree both in terms of rate and latency.
Unsupervised Correlation Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Linking between two data sources is a basic building block in numerous computer vision problems. In this paper, we set to answer a fundamental cognitive question: are prior correspondences necessary for linking between different domains? One of the most popular methods for linking between domains is Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA). All current CCA algorithms require correspondences between the views. We introduce a new method Unsupervised Correlation Analysis (UCA), which requires no prior correspondences between the two domains. The correlation maximization term in CCA is replaced by a combination of a reconstruction term (similar to autoencoders), full cycle loss, orthogonality and multiple domain confusion terms. Due to lack of supervision, the optimization leads to multiple alternative solutions with similar scores and we therefore introduce a consensus-based mechanism that is often able to recover the desired solution. Remarkably, this suffices in order to link remote domains such as text and images. We also present results on well accepted CCA benchmarks, showing that performance far exceeds other unsupervised baselines, and approaches supervised performance in some cases.