OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Neural Based Statement Classification for Biased Language
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

Biased language commonly occurs around topics which are of controversial nature, thus, stirring disagreement between the different involved parties of a discussion. This is due to the fact that for language and its use, specifically, the understanding and use of phrases, the stances are cohesive within the particular groups. However, such cohesiveness does not hold across groups. In collaborative environments or environments where impartial language is desired (e.g. Wikipedia, news media), statements and the language therein should represent equally the involved parties and be neutrally phrased. Biased language is introduced through the presence of inflammatory words or phrases, or statements that may be incorrect or one-sided, thus violating such consensus. In this work, we focus on the specific case of phrasing bias, which may be introduced through specific inflammatory words or phrases in a statement. For this purpose, we propose an approach that relies on a recurrent neural networks in order to capture the inter-dependencies between words in a phrase that introduced bias. We perform a thorough experimental evaluation, where we show the advantages of a neural based approach over competitors that rely on word lexicons and other hand-crafted features in detecting biased language. We are able to distinguish biased statements with a precision of P=0.92, thus significantly outperforming baseline models with an improvement of over 30%. Finally, we release the largest corpus of statements annotated for biased language.
Parser Extraction of Triples in Unstructured Text
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

The web contains vast repositories of unstructured text. We investigate the opportunity for building a knowledge graph from these text sources. We generate a set of triples which can be used in knowledge gathering and integration. We define the architecture of a language compiler for processing subject-predicate-object triples using the OpenNLP parser. We implement a depth-first search traversal on the POS tagged syntactic tree appending predicate and object information. A parser enables higher precision and higher recall extractions of syntactic relationships across conjunction boundaries. We are able to extract 2-2.5 times the correct extractions of ReVerb. The extractions are used in a variety of semantic web applications and question answering. We verify extraction of 50,000 triples on the ClueWeb dataset.
Internal Wiring of Cartesian Verbs and Prepositions
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

Categorical compositional distributional semantics (CCDS) allows one to compute the meaning of phrases and sentences from the meaning of their constituent words. A type-structure carried over from the traditional categorial model of grammar a la Lambek becomes a 'wire-structure' that mediates the interaction of word meanings. However, CCDS has a much richer logical structure than plain categorical semantics in that certain words can also be given an 'internal wiring' that either provides their entire meaning or reduces the size their meaning space. Previous examples of internal wiring include relative pronouns and intersective adjectives. Here we establish the same for a large class of well-behaved transitive verbs to which we refer as Cartesian verbs, and reduce the meaning space from a ternary tensor to a unary one. Some experimental evidence is also provided.
Computing the Minkowski Sum of Convex Polytopes in $\Re^d$
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2018
Year: 2018

We propose a method to efficiently compute the Minkowski sum, denoted by binary operator $\oplus$ in the paper, of convex polytopes in $\Re^d$ using their face lattice structures as input. In plane, the Minkowski sum of convex polygons can be computed in linear time of the total number of vertices of the polygons. In $\Re^d$, we first show how to compute the Minkowski sum, $P \oplus Q$, of two convex polytopes $P$ and $Q$ of input size $n$ and $m$ respectively in time $O(nm)$. Then we generalize the method to compute the Minkowski sum of $n$ convex polytopes, $P_1 \oplus P_2 \oplus \cdots \oplus P_n$, in $\Re^d$ in time $O(\prod_{i}^{n}N_i)$, where $P_1$, $P_2$, $\dots$, $P_n$ are $n$ input convex polytopes and for each $i$, $N_i$ is size of the face lattice structure of $P_i$. Our algorithm for Minkowski sum of two convex polytopes is optimal in the worst case since the output face lattice structure of $P\oplus Q$ for convex polytopes in $\Re^d$ can be $O(nm)$ in worst case.
A localization approach for autonomous underwater vehicles: A ROS-Gazebo framework
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2018
Year: 2018

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) have the ability to operate in harsh underwater environments without endangering human lives in the process. Nevertheless, just like their ground and aerial counterparts, AUVs need to be able to estimate their own position. Yet, unlike ground and aerial robots, estimating the pose of AUVs is very challenging, with only a few high-cost technological solutions available in the market. In this paper, we present the development of a realistic underwater acoustic model, implemented within the Robot Operating System (ROS) and the Gazebo simulator framework, for localization of AUVs using a set of water surface robots, time of flight of underwater propagated acoustic waves, and a multilateration genetic algorithm approach.
UtilCache: Effectively and Practicably Reducing Link Cost in Information-Centric Network
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

Minimizing total link cost in Information-Centric Network (ICN) by optimizing content placement is challenging in both effectiveness and practicality. To attain better performance, upstream link cost caused by a cache miss should be considered in addition to content popularity. To make it more practicable, a content placement strategy is supposed to be distributed, adaptive, with low coordination overhead as well as low computational complexity. In this paper, we present such a content placement strategy, UtilCache, that is both effective and practicable. UtilCache is compatible with any cache replacement policy. When the cache replacement policy tends to maintain popular contents, UtilCache attains low link cost. In terms of practicality, UtilCache introduces little coordination overhead because of piggybacked collaborative messages, and its computational complexity depends mainly on content replacement policy, which means it can be O(1) when working with LRU. Evaluations prove the effectiveness of UtilCache, as it saves nearly 40% link cost more than current ICN design.
Development of Real-time ADAS Object Detector for Deployment on CPU
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

In this work, we outline the set of problems, which any Object Detection CNN faces when its development comes to the deployment stage and propose methods to deal with such difficulties. We show that these practices allow one to get Object Detection network, which can recognize two classes: vehicles and pedestrians and achieves more than 60 frames per second inference speed on Core$^{TM}$ i5-6500 CPU. The proposed model is built on top of the popular Single Shot MultiBox Object Detection framework but with substantial improvements, which were inspired by the discovered problems. The network has just 1.96 GMAC complexity and less than 7 MB model size. It is publicly available as a part of Intel$\circledR$ OpenVINO$^{TM}$ Toolkit.
Human-like machine learning: limitations and suggestions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

This paper attempts to address the issues of machine learning in its current implementation. It is known that machine learning algorithms require a significant amount of data for training purposes, whereas recent developments in deep learning have increased this requirement dramatically. The performance of an algorithm depends on the quality of data and hence, algorithms are as good as the data they are trained on. Supervised learning is developed based on human learning processes by analysing named (i.e. annotated) objects, scenes and actions. Whether training on large quantities of data (i.e. big data) is the right or the wrong approach, is debatable. The fact is, that training algorithms the same way we learn ourselves, comes with limitations. This paper discusses the issues around applying a human-like approach to train algorithms and the implications of this approach when using limited data. Several current studies involving non-data-driven algorithms and natural examples are also discussed and certain alternative approaches are suggested.
Predictive Modeling with Delayed Information: a Case Study in E-commerce Transaction Fraud Control
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

In Business Intelligence, accurate predictive modeling is the key for providing adaptive decisions. We studied predictive modeling problems in this research which was motivated by real-world cases that Microsoft data scientists encountered while dealing with e-commerce transaction fraud control decisions using transaction streaming data in an uncertain probabilistic decision environment. The values of most online transactions related features can return instantly, while the true fraud labels only return after a stochastic delay. Using partially mature data directly for predictive modeling in an uncertain probabilistic decision environment would lead to significant inaccuracy on risk decision-making. To improve accurate estimation of the probabilistic prediction environment, which leads to more accurate predictive modeling, two frameworks, Current Environment Inference (CEI) and Future Environment Inference (FEI), are proposed. These frameworks generated decision environment related features using long-term fully mature and short-term partially mature data, and the values of those features were estimated using varies of learning methods, including linear regression, random forest, gradient boosted tree, artificial neural network, and recurrent neural network. Performance tests were conducted using some e-commerce transaction data from Microsoft. Testing results suggested that proposed frameworks significantly improved the accuracy of decision environment estimation.
Layered Belief Propagation for Low-complexity Large MIMO Detection Based on Statistical Beams
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

This paper proposes a novel layered belief propagation (BP) detector with a concatenated structure of two different BP layers for low-complexity large multi-user multi-input multi-output (MU-MIMO) detection based on statistical beams. To reduce the computational burden and the circuit scale on the base station (BS) side, the two-stage signal processing consisting of slow varying outer beamformer (OBF) and group-specific MU detection (MUD) for fast channel variations is effective. However, the dimensionality reduction of the equivalent channel based on the OBF results in significant performance degradation in subsequent spatial filtering detection. To compensate for the drawback, the proposed layered BP detector, which is designed for improving the detection capability by suppressing the intra- and inter-group interference in stages, is introduced as the post-stage processing of the OBF. Finally, we demonstrate the validity of our proposed method in terms of the bit error rate (BER) performance and the computational complexity.
Real-time Power System State Estimation and Forecasting via Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Contemporary power grids are being challenged by rapid voltage fluctuations that are caused by large-scale deployment of renewable generation, electric vehicles, and demand response programs. In this context, monitoring the grid's operating conditions in real time becomes increasingly critical. With the emergent large scale and nonconvexity however, the existing power system state estimation (PSSE) schemes become computationally expensive or yield suboptimal performance. To bypass these hurdles, this paper advocates deep neural networks (DNNs) for real-time power system monitoring. By unrolling an iterative physics-based prox-linear solver, a novel model-specific DNN is developed for real-time PSSE with affordable training and minimal tuning effort. To further enable system awareness even ahead of the time horizon, as well as to endow the DNN-based estimator with resilience, deep recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are also pursued for power system state forecasting. Deep RNNs leverage the long-term nonlinear dependencies present in the historical voltage time series to enable forecasting, and they are easy to implement. Numerical tests showcase improved performance of the proposed DNN-based estimation and forecasting approaches compared with existing alternatives. In real load data experiments on the IEEE 118-bus benchmark system, the novel model-specific DNN-based PSSE scheme outperforms nearly by an order-of-magnitude the competing alternatives, including the widely adopted Gauss-Newton PSSE solver.
GaitSet: Regarding Gait as a Set for Cross-View Gait Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

As a unique biometric feature that can be recognized at a distance, gait has broad applications in crime prevention, forensic identification and social security. To portray a gait, existing gait recognition methods utilize either a gait template, where temporal information is hard to preserve, or a gait sequence, which must keep unnecessary sequential constraints and thus loses the flexibility of gait recognition. In this paper we present a novel perspective, where a gait is regarded as a set consisting of independent frames. We propose a new network named GaitSet to learn identity information from the set. Based on the set perspective, our method is immune to permutation of frames, and can naturally integrate frames from different videos which have been filmed under different scenarios, such as diverse viewing angles, different clothes/carrying conditions. Experiments show that under normal walking conditions, our single-model method achieves an average rank-1 accuracy of 95.0% on the CASIA-B gait dataset and an 87.1% accuracy on the OU-MVLP gait dataset. These results represent new state-of-the-art recognition accuracy. On various complex scenarios, our model exhibits a significant level of robustness. It achieves accuracies of 87.2% and 70.4% on CASIA-B under bag-carrying and coat-wearing walking conditions, respectively. These outperform the existing best methods by a large margin. The method presented can also achieve a satisfactory accuracy with a small number of frames in a test sample, e.g., 82.5% on CASIA-B with only 7 frames. The source code has been released at https://github.com/AbnerHqC/GaitSet.
Intervention Aided Reinforcement Learning for Safe and Practical Policy Optimization in Navigation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2018
Year: 2018

Combining deep neural networks with reinforcement learning has shown great potential in the next-generation intelligent control. However, there are challenges in terms of safety and cost in practical applications. In this paper, we propose the Intervention Aided Reinforcement Learning (IARL) framework, which utilizes human intervened robot-environment interaction to improve the policy. We used the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) as the test platform. We built neural networks as our policy to map sensor readings to control signals on the UAV. Our experiment scenarios cover both simulation and reality. We show that our approach substantially reduces the human intervention and improves the performance in autonomous navigation, at the same time it ensures safety and keeps training cost acceptable.
Maximum-Width Empty Square and Rectangular Annulus
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2018
Year: 2018

An annulus is, informally, a ring-shaped region, often described by two concentric circles. The maximum-width empty annulus problem asks to find an annulus of a certain shape with the maximum possible width that avoids a given set of $n$ points in the plane. This problem can also be interpreted as the problem of finding an optimal location of a ring-shaped obnoxious facility among the input points. In this paper, we study square and rectangular variants of the maximum-width empty anuulus problem, and present first nontrivial algorithms. Specifically, our algorithms run in $O(n^3)$ and $O(n^2 \log n)$ time for computing a maximum-width empty axis-parallel square and rectangular annulus, respectively. Both algorithms use only $O(n)$ space.
Effect of data reduction on sequence-to-sequence neural TTS
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

Recent speech synthesis systems based on sampling from autoregressive neural networks models can generate speech almost undistinguishable from human recordings. However, these models require large amounts of data. This paper shows that the lack of data from one speaker can be compensated with data from other speakers. The naturalness of Tacotron2-like models trained on a blend of 5k utterances from 7 speakers is better than that of speaker dependent models trained on 15k utterances, but in terms of stability multi-speaker models are always more stable. We also demonstrate that models mixing only 1250 utterances from a target speaker with 5k utterances from another 6 speakers can produce significantly better quality than state-of-the-art DNN-guided unit selection systems trained on more than 10 times the data from the target speaker.
MIMO Beampattern and Waveform Design with Low Resolution DACs
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

Digital beamforming and waveform generation techniques in MIMO radar offer enormous advantages in terms of flexibility and performance compared to conventional radar systems based on analog implementations. To allow for such fully digital design with an efficient hardware complexity, we consider the use of low resolution digital-to-analog converters (DACs) while maintaining a separate radio-frequency chain per antenna. A sum of squared residuals (SSR) formulation for the beampattern and spectral shaping problem is solved based on the Generalized Approximate Message Passing (GAMP) algorithm. Numerical results demonstrate good performance in terms of spectral shaping as well as cross-correlation properties of the different probing waveforms even with just 2-bit resolution per antenna.
Revisiting the generalized Łoś-Tarski theorem
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2018
Year: 2018

We present a new proof of the generalized Łoś-Tarski theorem ($\mathsf{GLT}(k)$) introduced in [1], over arbitrary structures. Instead of using $λ$-saturation as in [1], we construct just the "required saturation" directly using ascending chains of structures. We also strengthen the failure of $\mathsf{GLT}(k)$ in the finite shown in [2], by strengthening the failure of the Łoś-Tarski theorem in this context. In particular, we prove that not just universal sentences, but for each fixed $k$, even $Σ^0_2$ sentences containing $k$ existential quantifiers fail to capture hereditariness in the finite. We conclude with two problems as future directions, concerning the Łoś-Tarski theorem and $\mathsf{GLT}(k)$, both in the context of all finite structures. [1] 10.1016/j.apal.2015.11.001 ; [2] 10.1007/978-3-642-32621-9\_22
Exploring the Deep Feature Space of a Cell Classification Neural Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we present contemporary techniques for visualising the feature space of a deep learning image classification neural network. These techniques are viewed in the context of a feed-forward network trained to classify low resolution fluorescence images of white blood cells captured using optofluidic imaging. The model has two output classes corresponding to two different cell types, which are often difficult to distinguish by eye. This paper has two major sections. The first looks to develop the information space presented by dimension reduction techniques, such as t-SNE, used to embed high-dimensional pre-softmax layer activations into a two-dimensional plane. The second section looks at feature visualisation by optimisation to generate feature images representing the learned features of the network. Using and developing these techniques we visualise class separation and structures within the dataset at various depths using clustering algorithms and feature images; track the development of feature complexity as we ascend the network; and begin to extract the features the network has learnt by modulating single-channel feature images with up-scaled neuron activation maps to distinguish their most salient parts.
Tight Bayesian Ambiguity Sets for Robust MDPs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Robustness is important for sequential decision making in a stochastic dynamic environment with uncertain probabilistic parameters. We address the problem of using robust MDPs (RMDPs) to compute policies with provable worst-case guarantees in reinforcement learning. The quality and robustness of an RMDP solution is determined by its ambiguity set. Existing methods construct ambiguity sets that lead to impractically conservative solutions. In this paper, we propose RSVF, which achieves less conservative solutions with the same worst-case guarantees by 1) leveraging a Bayesian prior, 2) optimizing the size and location of the ambiguity set, and, most importantly, 3) relaxing the requirement that the set is a confidence interval. Our theoretical analysis shows the safety of RSVF, and the empirical results demonstrate its practical promise.
On transfer learning using a MAC model variant
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

We introduce a variant of the MAC model (Hudson and Manning, ICLR 2018) with a simplified set of equations that achieves comparable accuracy, while training faster. We evaluate both models on CLEVR and CoGenT, and show that, transfer learning with fine-tuning results in a 15 point increase in accuracy, matching the state of the art. Finally, in contrast, we demonstrate that improper fine-tuning can actually reduce a model's accuracy as well.
A note on hyperparameters in black-box adversarial examples
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

Since Biggio et al. (2013) and Szegedy et al. (2013) first drew attention to adversarial examples, there has been a flood of research into defending and attacking machine learning models. However, almost all proposed attacks assume white-box access to a model. In other words, the attacker is assumed to have perfect knowledge of the models weights and architecture. With this insider knowledge, a white-box attack can leverage gradient information to craft adversarial examples. Black-box attacks assume no knowledge of the model weights or architecture. These attacks craft adversarial examples using information only contained in the logits or hard classification label. Here, we assume the attacker can use the logits in order to find an adversarial example. Empirically, we show that 2-sided stochastic gradient estimation techniques are not sensitive to scaling parameters, and can be used to mount powerful black-box attacks requiring relatively few model queries.
Cybercasing 2.0: You Get What You Pay For
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

Under U.S. law, marketing databases exist under almost no legal restrictions concerning accuracy, access, or confidentiality. We explore the possible (mis)use of these databases in a criminal context by conducting two experiments. First, we show how this data can be used for "cybercasing" by using this data to resolve the physical addresses of individuals who are likely to be on vacation. Second, we evaluate the utility of a "bride to be" mailing list augmented with data obtained by searching both Facebook and a bridal registry aggregator. We conclude that marketing data is not necessarily harmless and can represent a fruitful target for criminal misuse.