OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Object Perception and Grasping in Open-Ended Domains
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

Nowadays service robots are leaving the structured and completely known environments and entering human-centric settings. For these robots, object perception and grasping are two challenging tasks due to the high demand for accurate and real-time responses. Although many problems have already been understood and solved successfully, many challenges still remain. Open-ended learning is one of these challenges waiting for many improvements. Cognitive science revealed that humans learn to recognize object categories and grasp affordances ceaselessly over time. This ability allows adapting to new environments by enhancing their knowledge from the accumulation of experiences and the conceptualization of new object categories. Inspired by this, an autonomous robot must have the ability to process visual information and conduct learning and recognition tasks in an open-ended fashion. In this context, "open-ended" implies that the set of object categories to be learned is not known in advance, and the training instances are extracted from online experiences of a robot, and become gradually available over time, rather than being completely available at the beginning of the learning process. In my research, I mainly focus on interactive open-ended learning approaches to recognize multiple objects and their grasp affordances concurrently. In particular, I try to address the following research questions: (i) What is the importance of open-ended learning for autonomous robots? (ii) How robots could learn incrementally from their own experiences as well as from interaction with humans? (iii) What are the limitations of Deep Learning approaches to be used in an open-ended manner? (iv) How to evaluate open-ended learning approaches and what are the right metrics to do so?
OPPLOAD: Offloading Computational Workflows in Opportunistic Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

Computation offloading is often used in mobile cloud, edge, and/or fog computing to cope with resource limitations of mobile devices in terms of computational power, storage, and energy. Computation offloading is particularly challenging in situations where network connectivity is intermittent or error-prone. In this paper, we present OPPLOAD, a novel framework for offloading computational workflows in opportunistic networks. The individual tasks forming a workflow can be assigned to particular remote execution platforms (workers) either preselected ahead of time or decided just in time where a matching worker will automatically be assigned for the next task. Tasks are only assigned to capable workers that announce their capabilities. Furthermore, tasks of a workflow can be executed on multiple workers that are automatically selected to balance the load. Our Python implementation of OPPLOAD is publicly available as open source software. The results of our experimental evaluation demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.
Enumerating Range Modes
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

We consider the range mode problem where given a sequence and a query range in it, we want to find items with maximum frequency in the range. We give time- and space- efficient algorithms for this problem. Our algorithms are efficient for small maximum frequency cases. We also consider a natural generalization of the problem: the range mode enumeration problem, for which there has been no known efficient algorithms. Our algorithms have query time complexities which is linear to the output size plus small terms.
Deciding Fast Termination for Probabilistic VASS with Nondeterminism
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2019
Year: 2019

A probabilistic vector addition system with states (pVASS) is a finite state Markov process augmented with non-negative integer counters that can be incremented or decremented during each state transition, blocking any behaviour that would cause a counter to decrease below zero. The pVASS can be used as abstractions of probabilistic programs with many decidable properties. The use of pVASS as abstractions requires the presence of nondeterminism in the model. In this paper, we develop techniques for checking fast termination of pVASS with nondeterminism. That is, for every initial configuration of size n, we consider the worst expected number of transitions needed to reach a configuration with some counter negative (the expected termination time). We show that the problem whether the asymptotic expected termination time is linear is decidable in polynomial time for a certain natural class of pVASS with nondeterminism. Furthermore, we show the following dichotomy: if the asymptotic expected termination time is not linear, then it is at least quadratic, i.e., in $Ω(n^2)$.
DeepDrawing: A Deep Learning Approach to Graph Drawing
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2019
Year: 2019

Node-link diagrams are widely used to facilitate network explorations. However, when using a graph drawing technique to visualize networks, users often need to tune different algorithm-specific parameters iteratively by comparing the corresponding drawing results in order to achieve a desired visual effect. This trial and error process is often tedious and time-consuming, especially for non-expert users. Inspired by the powerful data modelling and prediction capabilities of deep learning techniques, we explore the possibility of applying deep learning techniques to graph drawing. Specifically, we propose using a graph-LSTM-based approach to directly map network structures to graph drawings. Given a set of layout examples as the training dataset, we train the proposed graph-LSTM-based model to capture their layout characteristics. Then, the trained model is used to generate graph drawings in a similar style for new networks. We evaluated the proposed approach on two special types of layouts (i.e., grid layouts and star layouts) and two general types of layouts (i.e., ForceAtlas2 and PivotMDS) in both qualitative and quantitative ways. The results provide support for the effectiveness of our approach. We also conducted a time cost assessment on the drawings of small graphs with 20 to 50 nodes. We further report the lessons we learned and discuss the limitations and future work.
MDS coding is better than replication for job completion times
Venue: arXiv cs.PF 2019
Year: 2019

In a multi-server system, how can one get better performance than random assignment of jobs to servers if queue-states cannot be queried by the dispatcher? A replication strategy has recently been proposed where $d$ copies of each arriving job are sent to servers chosen at random. The job's completion time is the first time that the service of any of its copies is complete. On completion, redundant copies of the job are removed from other queues so as not to overburden the system. For digital jobs, where the objects to be served can be algebraically manipulated, and for servers whose output is a linear function of their input, here we consider an alternate strategy: Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) codes. For every batch of $n$ digital jobs that arrive, $n+m$ linear combinations are created over the reals or a large finite field, and each coded job is sent to a random server. The batch completion time is the first time that any $n$ of the $n+m$ coded jobs are served, as the evaluation of $n$ original jobs can be recovered by Gaussian elimination. If redundant jobs can be removed from queues on batch completion, we establish that in order to get the improved response-time performance of sending $d$ copies of each of $n$ jobs via the replication strategy, with the MDS methodology it suffices to send $n+d$ jobs. That is, while replication is multiplicative, MDS is linear.
Semisupervised Adversarial Neural Networks for Cyber Security Transfer Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

On the path to establishing a global cybersecurity framework where each enterprise shares information about malicious behavior, an important question arises. How can a machine learning representation characterizing a cyber attack on one network be used to detect similar attacks on other enterprise networks if each networks has wildly different distributions of benign and malicious traffic? We address this issue by comparing the results of naively transferring a model across network domains and using CORrelation ALignment, to our novel adversarial Siamese neural network. Our proposed model learns attack representations that are more invariant to each network's particularities via an adversarial approach. It uses a simple ranking loss that prioritizes the labeling of the most egregious malicious events correctly over average accuracy. This is appropriate for driving an alert triage workflow wherein an analyst only has time to inspect the top few events ranked highest by the model. In terms of accuracy, the other approaches fail completely to detect any malicious events when models were trained on one dataset are evaluated on another for the first 100 events. While, the method presented here retrieves sizable proportions of malicious events, at the expense of some training instabilities due in adversarial modeling. We evaluate these approaches using 2 publicly available networking datasets, and suggest areas for future research.
The Strong 3SUM-INDEXING Conjecture is False
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

In the 3SUM-Indexing problem the goal is to preprocess two lists of elements from $U$, $A=(a_1,a_2,\ldots,a_n)$ and $B=(b_1,b_2,...,b_n)$, such that given an element $c\in U$ one can quickly determine whether there exists a pair $(a,b)\in A \times B$ where $a+b=c$. Goldstein et al.~[WADS'2017] conjectured that there is no algorithm for 3SUM-Indexing which uses $n^{2-Ω(1)}$ space and $n^{1-Ω(1)}$ query time. We show that the conjecture is false by reducing the 3SUM-Indexing problem to the problem of inverting functions, and then applying an algorithm of Fiat and Naor [SICOMP'1999] for inverting functions.
Exhaustive Exact String Matching: The Analysis of the Full Human Genome
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

Exact string matching has been a fundamental problem in computer science for decades because of many practical applications. Some are related to common procedures, such as searching in files and text editors, or, more recently, to more advanced problems such as pattern detection in Artificial Intelligence and Bioinformatics. Tens of algorithms and methodologies have been developed for pattern matching and several programming languages, packages, applications and online systems exist that can perform exact string matching in biological sequences. These techniques, however, are limited to searching for specific and predefined strings in a sequence. In this paper a novel methodology (called Ex2SM) is presented, which is a pipeline of execution of advanced data structures and algorithms, explicitly designed for text mining, that can detect every possible repeated string in multivariate biological sequences. In contrast to known algorithms in literature, the methodology presented here is string agnostic, i.e., it does not require an input string to search for it, rather it can detect every string that exists at least twice, regardless of its attributes such as length, frequency, alphabet, overlapping etc. The complexity of the problem solved and the potential of the proposed methodology is demonstrated with the experimental analysis performed on the entire human genome. More specifically, all repeated strings with a length of up to 50 characters have been detected, an achievement which is practically impossible using other algorithms due to the exponential number of possible permutations of such long strings.
Towards meta-learning for multi-target regression problems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Several multi-target regression methods were devel-oped in the last years aiming at improving predictive performanceby exploring inter-target correlation within the problem. However, none of these methods outperforms the others for all problems. This motivates the development of automatic approachesto recommend the most suitable multi-target regression method. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning system to recommend the best predictive method for a given multi-target regression problem. We performed experiments with a meta-dataset generated by a total of 648 synthetic datasets. These datasets were created to explore distinct inter-targets characteristics toward recommending the most promising method. In experiments, we evaluated four different algorithms with different biases as meta-learners. Our meta-dataset is composed of 58 meta-features, based on: statistical information, correlation characteristics, linear landmarking, from the distribution and smoothness of the data, and has four different meta-labels. Results showed that induced meta-models were able to recommend the best methodfor different base level datasets with a balanced accuracy superior to 70% using a Random Forest meta-model, which statistically outperformed the meta-learning baselines.
DABNet: Depth-wise Asymmetric Bottleneck for Real-time Semantic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

As a pixel-level prediction task, semantic segmentation needs large computational cost with enormous parameters to obtain high performance. Recently, due to the increasing demand for autonomous systems and robots, it is significant to make a tradeoff between accuracy and inference speed. In this paper, we propose a novel Depthwise Asymmetric Bottleneck (DAB) module to address this dilemma, which efficiently adopts depth-wise asymmetric convolution and dilated convolution to build a bottleneck structure. Based on the DAB module, we design a Depth-wise Asymmetric Bottleneck Network (DABNet) especially for real-time semantic segmentation, which creates sufficient receptive field and densely utilizes the contextual information. Experiments on Cityscapes and CamVid datasets demonstrate that the proposed DABNet achieves a balance between speed and precision. Specifically, without any pretrained model and postprocessing, it achieves 70.1% Mean IoU on the Cityscapes test dataset with only 0.76 million parameters and a speed of 104 FPS on a single GTX 1080Ti card.
MVB: A Large-Scale Dataset for Baggage Re-Identification and Merged Siamese Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we present a novel dataset named MVB (Multi View Baggage) for baggage ReID task which has some essential differences from person ReID. The features of MVB are three-fold. First, MVB is the first publicly released large-scale dataset that contains 4519 baggage identities and 22660 annotated baggage images as well as its surface material labels. Second, all baggage images are captured by specially-designed multi-view camera system to handle pose variation and occlusion, in order to obtain the 3D information of baggage surface as complete as possible. Third, MVB has remarkable inter-class similarity and intra-class dissimilarity, considering the fact that baggage might have very similar appearance while the data is collected in two real airport environments, where imaging factors varies significantly from each other. Moreover, we proposed a merged Siamese network as baseline model and evaluated its performance. Experiments and case study are conducted on MVB.
Challenges in Community Discovery on Temporal Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2019
Year: 2019

Community discovery is one of the most studied problems in network science. In recent years, many works have focused on discovering communities in temporal networks, thus identifying dynamic communities. Interestingly, dynamic communities are not mere sequences of static ones; new challenges arise from their dynamic nature. In this chapter, we will discuss some of these challenges and recent propositions to tackle them. We will, among other topics, discuss on the question of community events in gradually evolving networks, on the notion of identity through change, on dynamic communities in link streams, on the smoothness of dynamic communities, and on the different types of complexity of algorithms for their discovery.
ServerMix: Tradeoffs and Challenges of Serverless Data Analytics
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

Serverless computing has become very popular today since it largely simplifies cloud programming. Developers do not need to longer worry about provisioning or operating servers, and they pay only for the compute resources used when their code is run. This new cloud paradigm suits well for many applications, and researchers have already begun investigating the feasibility of serverless computing for data analytics. Unfortunately, today's serverless computing presents important limitations that make it really difficult to support all sorts of analytics workloads. This paper first starts by analyzing three fundamental trade-offs of today's serverless computing model and their relationship with data analytics. It studies how by relaxing disaggregation, isolation, and simple scheduling, it is possible to increase the overall computing performance, but at the expense of essential aspects of the model such as elasticity, security, or sub-second activations, respectively. The consequence of these trade-offs is that analytics applications may well end up embracing hybrid systems composed of serverless and serverful components, which we call Servermix in this paper. We will review the existing related work to show that most applications can be actually categorized as Servermix. Finally, this paper will introduce the major challenges of the CloudButton research project to manage these trade-offs.
Single Level Feature-to-Feature Forecasting with Deformable Convolutions
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Future anticipation is of vital importance in autonomous driving and other decision-making systems. We present a method to anticipate semantic segmentation of future frames in driving scenarios based on feature-to-feature forecasting. Our method is based on a semantic segmentation model without lateral connections within the upsampling path. Such design ensures that the forecasting addresses only the most abstract features on a very coarse resolution. We further propose to express feature-to-feature forecasting with deformable convolutions. This increases the modelling power due to being able to represent different motion patterns within a single feature map. Experiments show that our models with deformable convolutions outperform their regular and dilated counterparts while minimally increasing the number of parameters. Our method achieves state of the art performance on the Cityscapes validation set when forecasting nine timesteps into the future.
Personality is Revealed During Weekends: Towards Data Minimisation for Smartphone Based Personality Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2019
Year: 2019

Previous literature has explored automatic personality modelling using smartphone data for its potential to personalise mobile services. Although passive modelling of personality removes the burden of completing lengthy questionnaires, the fact that such models typically require a few weeks or months of personal data can negatively impact user's engagement. In this study, we explore the feasibility of reducing the duration of data collection in the context of personality classification. We found that only one or two weekends can suffice for achieving state-of-the-art accuracy between 66% and 71% for classifying the five personality traits. These results provide lessons for practicing "data minimisation" - a key principle of privacy laws.
Weakly Supervised Domain Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper we introduce domain detection as a new natural language processing task. We argue that the ability to detect textual segments which are domain-heavy, i.e., sentences or phrases which are representative of and provide evidence for a given domain could enhance the robustness and portability of various text classification applications. We propose an encoder-detector framework for domain detection and bootstrap classifiers with multiple instance learning (MIL). The model is hierarchically organized and suited to multilabel classification. We demonstrate that despite learning with minimal supervision, our model can be applied to text spans of different granularities, languages, and genres. We also showcase the potential of domain detection for text summarization.
Validating and Updating GRASP: A New Evidence-Based Framework for Grading and Assessment of Clinical Predictive Tools
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2019
Year: 2019

Background: When selecting predictive tools, for implementation in clinical practice or for recommendation in guidelines, clinicians are challenged with an overwhelming and ever-growing number of tools. Many of these have never been implemented or evaluated for comparative effectiveness. The authors developed an evidence-based framework for grading and assessment of predictive tools (GRASP), based on critical appraisal of published evidence. The objective of this study is to validate, update GRASP, and evaluate its reliability. Methods: We aimed at validating and updating GRASP through surveying a wide international group of experts then evaluating GRASP reliability. Results: Out of 882 invited experts, 81 valid responses were received. Experts overall strongly agreed to GRASP evaluation criteria of predictive tools (4.35/5). Experts strongly agreed to six criteria; predictive performance (4.87/5), predictive performance levels (4.44/5), usability (4.68/5), potential effect (4.61/5), post-implementation impact (4.78/5) and evidence direction (4.26/5). Experts somewhat agreed to one criterion; post-implementation impact levels (4.16/5). Experts were neutral about one criterion; usability is higher than potential effect (2.97/5). Experts also provided recommendations to six open-ended questions regarding adding, removing or changing evaluation criteria. The GRASP concept and its detailed report were updated then the interrater reliability of GRASP was tested and found to be reliable. Discussion and Conclusion: The GRASP framework grades predictive tools based on the critical appraisal of the published evidence across three dimensions: 1) Phase of evaluation; 2) Level of evidence; and 3) Direction of evidence. The final grade of a tool is based on the highest phase of evaluation, supported by the highest level of positive evidence, or mixed evidence that supports positive conclusion.
Neural Dynamic Successive Cancellation Flip Decoding of Polar Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

Dynamic successive cancellation flip (DSCF) decoding of polar codes is a powerful algorithm that can achieve the error correction performance of successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding, with a complexity that is close to that of successive cancellation (SC) decoding at practical signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regimes. However, DSCF decoding requires costly transcendental computations which adversely affect its implementation complexity. In this paper, we first show that a direct application of common approximation schemes on the conventional DSCF decoding results in significant error-correction performance loss. We then introduce a training parameter and propose an approximation scheme which completely removes the need to perform transcendental computations in DSCF decoding, with almost no error-correction performance degradation.