OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
DSL: Discriminative Subgraph Learning via Sparse Self-Representation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

The goal in network state prediction (NSP) is to classify the global state (label) associated with features embedded in a graph. This graph structure encoding feature relationships is the key distinctive aspect of NSP compared to classical supervised learning. NSP arises in various applications: gene expression samples embedded in a protein-protein interaction (PPI) network, temporal snapshots of infrastructure or sensor networks, and fMRI coherence network samples from multiple subjects to name a few. Instances from these domains are typically ``wide'' (more features than samples), and thus, feature sub-selection is required for robust and generalizable prediction. How to best employ the network structure in order to learn succinct connected subgraphs encompassing the most discriminative features becomes a central challenge in NSP. Prior work employs connected subgraph sampling or graph smoothing within optimization frameworks, resulting in either large variance of quality or weak control over the connectivity of selected subgraphs. In this work we propose an optimization framework for discriminative subgraph learning (DSL) which simultaneously enforces (i) sparsity, (ii) connectivity and (iii) high discriminative power of the resulting subgraphs of features. Our optimization algorithm is a single-step solution for the NSP and the associated feature selection problem. It is rooted in the rich literature on maximal-margin optimization, spectral graph methods and sparse subspace self-representation. DSL simultaneously ensures solution interpretability and superior predictive power (up to 16% improvement in challenging instances compared to baselines), with execution times up to an hour for large instances.
Making Neural Machine Reading Comprehension Faster
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

This study aims at solving the Machine Reading Comprehension problem where questions have to be answered given a context passage. The challenge is to develop a computationally faster model which will have improved inference time. State of the art in many natural language understanding tasks, BERT model, has been used and knowledge distillation method has been applied to train two smaller models. The developed models are compared with other models which have been developed with the same intention.
COCO_TS Dataset: Pixel-level Annotations Based on Weak Supervision for Scene Text Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

The absence of large scale datasets with pixel-level supervisions is a significant obstacle for the training of deep convolutional networks for scene text segmentation. For this reason, synthetic data generation is normally employed to enlarge the training dataset. Nonetheless, synthetic data cannot reproduce the complexity and variability of natural images. In this paper, a weakly supervised learning approach is used to reduce the shift between training on real and synthetic data. Pixel-level supervisions for a text detection dataset (i.e. where only bounding-box annotations are available) are generated. In particular, the COCO-Text-Segmentation (COCO_TS) dataset, which provides pixel-level supervisions for the COCO-Text dataset, is created and released. The generated annotations are used to train a deep convolutional neural network for semantic segmentation. Experiments show that the proposed dataset can be used instead of synthetic data, allowing us to use only a fraction of the training samples and significantly improving the performances.
Thyroid Cancer Malignancy Prediction From Whole Slide Cytopathology Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

We consider preoperative prediction of thyroid cancer based on ultra-high-resolution whole-slide cytopathology images. Inspired by how human experts perform diagnosis, our approach first identifies and classifies diagnostic image regions containing informative thyroid cells, which only comprise a tiny fraction of the entire image. These local estimates are then aggregated into a single prediction of thyroid malignancy. Several unique characteristics of thyroid cytopathology guide our deep-learning-based approach. While our method is closely related to multiple-instance learning, it deviates from these methods by using a supervised procedure to extract diagnostically relevant regions. Moreover, we propose to simultaneously predict thyroid malignancy, as well as a diagnostic score assigned by a human expert, which further allows us to devise an improved training strategy. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves performance comparable to human experts, and demonstrate the potential of using the algorithm for screening and as an assistive tool for the improved diagnosis of indeterminate cases.
Deep, spatially coherent Inverse Sensor Models with Uncertainty Incorporation using the evidential Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

To perform high speed tasks, sensors of autonomous cars have to provide as much information in as few time steps as possible. However, radars, one of the sensor modalities autonomous cars heavily rely on, often only provide sparse, noisy detections. These have to be accumulated over time to reach a high enough confidence about the static parts of the environment. For radars, the state is typically estimated by accumulating inverse detection models (IDMs). We employ the recently proposed evidential convolutional neural networks which, in contrast to IDMs, compute dense, spatially coherent inference of the environment state. Moreover, these networks are able to incorporate sensor noise in a principled way which we further extend to also incorporate model uncertainty. We present experimental results that show This makes it possible to obtain a denser environment perception in fewer time steps.
ZETH: On Integrating Zerocash on Ethereum
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

Transaction privacy is a hard problem on an account-based blockchain such as Ethereum. While Ben-Sasson et al. presented the Zerocash protocol [BCG+14] as a decentralized anonymous payment (DAP) scheme standing on top of Bitcoin, no study about the integration of such DAP on top of a ledger defined in the account model was provided. In this paper we aim to fill this gap and propose ZETH, an adaptation of Zerocash that can be deployed on top of Ethereum without making any change to the base layer. Our study shows that not only ZETH could be used to transfer Ether, the base currency of Ethereum, but it could also be used to transfer other types of smart contract-based digital assets. We propose an analysis of ZETH's privacy promises and argue that information leakages intrinsic to the use of this protocol are controlled and well-defined, which makes it a viable solution to support private transactions in the context of public and permissioned chains.
STYLE-ANALYZER: fixing code style inconsistencies with interpretable unsupervised algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Source code reviews are manual, time-consuming, and expensive. Human involvement should be focused on analyzing the most relevant aspects of the program, such as logic and maintainability, rather than amending style, syntax, or formatting defects. Some tools with linting capabilities can format code automatically and report various stylistic violations for supported programming languages. They are based on rules written by domain experts, hence, their configuration is often tedious, and it is impractical for the given set of rules to cover all possible corner cases. Some machine learning-based solutions exist, but they remain uninterpretable black boxes. This paper introduces STYLE-ANALYZER, a new open source tool to automatically fix code formatting violations using the decision tree forest model which adapts to each codebase and is fully unsupervised. STYLE-ANALYZER is built on top of our novel assisted code review framework, Lookout. It accurately mines the formatting style of each analyzed Git repository and expresses the found format patterns with compact human-readable rules. STYLE-ANALYZER can then suggest style inconsistency fixes in the form of code review comments. We evaluate the output quality and practical relevance of STYLE-ANALYZER by demonstrating that it can reproduce the original style with high precision, measured on 19 popular JavaScript projects, and by showing that it yields promising results in fixing real style mistakes. STYLE-ANALYZER includes a web application to visualize how the rules are triggered. We release STYLE-ANALYZER as a reusable and extendable open source software package on GitHub for the benefit of the community.
Early Diagnosis of Pneumonia with Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Pneumonia has been one of the fatal diseases and has the potential to result in severe consequences within a short period of time, due to the flow of fluid in lungs, which leads to drowning. If not acted upon by drugs at the right time, pneumonia may result in death of individuals. Therefore, the early diagnosis is a key factor along the progress of the disease. This paper focuses on the biological progress of pneumonia and its detection by x-ray imaging, overviews the studies conducted on enhancing the level of diagnosis, and presents the methodology and results of an automation of xray images based on various parameters in order to detect the disease at very early stages. In this study we propose our deep learning architecture for the classification task, which is trained with modified images, through multiple steps of preprocessing. Our classification method uses convolutional neural networks and residual network architecture for classifying the images. Our findings yield an accuracy of 78.73%, surpassing the previously top scoring accuracy of 76.8%.
Distributed Metropolis Sampler with Optimal Parallelism
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

The Metropolis-Hastings algorithm is a fundamental Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for sampling and inference. With the advent of Big Data, distributed and parallel variants of MCMC methods are attracting increased attention. In this paper, we give a distributed algorithm that can correctly simulate sequential single-site Metropolis chains without any bias in a fully asynchronous message-passing model. Furthermore, if a natural Lipschitz condition is satisfied by the Metropolis filters, our algorithm can simulate $N$-step Metropolis chains within $O(N/n+\log n)$ rounds of asynchronous communications, where $n$ is the number of variables. For sequential single-site dynamics, whose mixing requires $Ω(n\log n)$ steps, this achieves an optimal linear speedup. For several well-studied important graphical models, including proper graph coloring, hardcore model, and Ising model, our condition for linear speedup is weaker than the respective uniqueness (mixing) conditions. The novel idea in our algorithm is to resolve updates in advance: the local Metropolis filters can often be executed correctly before the full information about neighboring spins is available. This achieves optimal parallelism without introducing any bias.
Computer simulations in science and engineering - Concepts - Practices - Perspectives
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2019
Year: 2019

The ubiquitous presence of computer simulations in all kinds of research areas evidence their role as the new driving force for the advancement of science and engineering research. Nothing seems to escape the image of success that computer simulations project onto the research community and the general public. One simple way to illustrate this consists of asking ourselves how would contemporary science and engineering look like without the use of computer simulations. The answer would certainly diverge from the current image we have of scientific and engineering research. As much as computer simulations are successful, they are also methods that fail in their purpose of inquiring about the world; and as much as researchers make use of them, computer simulations raise important questions that are at the heart of contemporary science and engineering practice. In this respect, computer simulations make a fantastic subject of research for the natural sciences, the social sciences, engineering and, as in our case, also for philosophy. Studies on computer simulations touch upon many different facets of scientific and engineering research and evoke philosophically inclined questions of interpretation with close ties to problems in experimental settings and engineering applications (...)
Data warehouse on Manpower Employment for Decision Support System
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2019
Year: 2019

Since the use of computers in the business world, data collection has become one of the most important issues due to the available knowledge in the data; such data has been stored in the database. The database system was developed which led to the evolvement of hierarchical and relational database followed by Standard Query Language (SQL). As data size increases, the need for more control and information retrieval increase. These increases lead to the development of data mining systems and data warehouses. This paper focuses on the use of a data warehouse as a supporting tool in decision making. We to study the effectiveness of data warehouse techniques in the sense of time and flexibility in our case study (Manpower Employment). The study will conclude with a comparison of traditional relational database and the use of data warehouse. The fundamental role of a data warehouse is to provide data for supporting the decision-making process. Data in a data warehouse environment is a multidimensional data store. We can simply say that data warehouse is a process, not a product, for assembling and managing data from various sources for the purpose of gaining a single detailed view of part or all an establishment. The data warehouse concept has changed the nature of the decision support system, by adding new benefits for improving and expanding the scope, accuracy, and accessibility of data.
Thickened 2D Networks for Efficient 3D Medical Image Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

There has been a debate in 3D medical image segmentation on whether to use 2D or 3D networks, where both pipelines have advantages and disadvantages. 2D methods enjoy a low inference time and greater transfer-ability while 3D methods are superior in performance for hard targets requiring contextual information. This paper investigates efficient 3D segmentation from another perspective, which uses 2D networks to mimic 3D segmentation. To compensate the lack of contextual information in 2D manner, we propose to thicken the 2D network inputs by feeding multiple slices as multiple channels into 2D networks and thus 3D contextual information is incorporated. We also put forward to use early-stage multiplexing and slice sensitive attention to solve the confusion problem of information loss which occurs when 2D networks face thickened inputs. With this design, we achieve a higher performance while maintaining a lower inference latency on a few abdominal organs from CT scans, in particular when the organ has a peculiar 3D shape and thus strongly requires contextual information, demonstrating our method's effectiveness and ability in capturing 3D information. We also point out that "thickened" 2D inputs pave a new method of 3D segmentation, and look forward to more efforts in this direction. Experiments on segmenting a few abdominal targets in particular blood vessels which require strong 3D contexts demonstrate the advantages of our approach.
Lower Bounds for Matrix Factorization
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2019
Year: 2019

We study the problem of constructing explicit families of matrices which cannot be expressed as a product of a few sparse matrices. In addition to being a natural mathematical question on its own, this problem appears in various incarnations in computer science; the most significant being in the context of lower bounds for algebraic circuits which compute linear transformations, matrix rigidity and data structure lower bounds. We first show, for every constant $d$, a deterministic construction in subexponential time of a family $\{M_n\}$ of $n \times n$ matrices which cannot be expressed as a product $M_n = A_1 \cdots A_d$ where the total sparsity of $A_1,\ldots,A_d$ is less than $n^{1+1/(2d)}$. In other words, any depth-$d$ linear circuit computing the linear transformation $M_n\cdot x$ has size at least $n^{1+Ω(1/d)}$. This improves upon the prior best lower bounds for this problem, which are barely super-linear, and were obtained by a long line of research based on the study of super-concentrators (albeit at the cost of a blow up in the time required to construct these matrices). We then outline an approach for proving improved lower bounds through a certain derandomization problem, and use this approach to prove asymptotically optimal quadratic lower bounds for natural special cases, which generalize many of the common matrix decompositions.
On the Analysis of the Revocable-Storage Identity-Based Encryption Scheme
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

Cloud computing can provide a flexible way to effectively share data among multiple users since it can overcome the time and location constraints of computing resource usage. However, the users of cloud computing are still reluctant to share sensitive data to a cloud server since the cloud server should be treated as an untrusted entity. In order to support secure and efficient data sharing in cloud computing environment, Wei et al. recently extended the concept of identity-based encryption (IBE) to support key revocation and ciphertext update functionalities, and proposed a revocable-storage identity-based encryption (RS-IBE) scheme. In this paper, we show that the RS-IBE scheme of Wei et al. does not satisfy the correctness property of RS-IBE. In addition, we propose a method to modify the existing RS-IBE scheme to be a correct and secure scheme.
DNS-Morph: UDP-Based Bootstrapping Protocol For Tor
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

Tor is one of the most popular systems for anonymous communication and censorship circumvention on the web, currently used by millions of users every day. This puts Tor as a target for attacks by organizations and governmental bodies whose goal is to hinder users' ability to connect to it. These attacks include deep packet inspection (DPI) to classify Tor traffic as well as legitimate Tor client impersonation (active probing) to expose Tor bridges. As a response to Tor-blocking attempts, the Tor community has developed Pluggable Transports (PTs), tools that transform the appearance of Tor's traffic flow. In this paper we introduce a new approach aiming to enhance the PT's resistance against active probing attacks, as well as white-listing censorship by partitioning the handshake of the PT from its encrypted communication. Thus, allowing mixing different PTs, e.g., ScrambleSuit for the handshake and FTE for the traffic itself. We claim that this separation reduces the possibility of marking Tor related communications. To illustrate our claim, we introduce DNS-Morph: a new method of transforming the handshake data of a PT by imitating a sequence of DNS queries and responses. Using DNS-Morph, the Tor client acts as a DNS client which sends DNS queries to the Tor bridge, and receives DNS responses from it. We implemented and successfully tested DNS-Morph using one of the PTs (ScrambleSuit), and verified its capabilities.
Learning a Partitioning Advisor with Deep Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2019
Year: 2019

Commercial data analytics products such as Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse or Amazon Redshift provide ready-to-use scale-out database solutions for OLAP-style workloads in the cloud. While the provisioning of a database cluster is usually fully automated by cloud providers, customers typically still have to make important design decisions which were traditionally made by the database administrator such as selecting the partitioning schemes. In this paper we introduce a learned partitioning advisor for analytical OLAP-style workloads based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). The main idea is that a DRL agent learns its decisions based on experience by monitoring the rewards for different workloads and partitioning schemes. We evaluate our learned partitioning advisor in an experimental evaluation with different databases schemata and workloads of varying complexity. In the evaluation, we show that our advisor is not only able to find partitionings that outperform existing approaches for automated partitioning design but that it also can easily adjust to different deployments. This is especially important in cloud setups where customers can easily migrate their cluster to a new set of (virtual) machines.
FKIMNet: A Finger Dorsal Image Matching Network Comparing Component (Major, Minor and Nail) Matching with Holistic (Finger Dorsal) Matching
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Current finger knuckle image recognition systems, often require users to place fingers' major or minor joints flatly towards the capturing sensor. To extend these systems for user non-intrusive application scenarios, such as consumer electronics, forensic, defence etc, we suggest matching the full dorsal fingers, rather than the major/ minor region of interest (ROI) alone. In particular, this paper makes a comprehensive study on the comparisons between full finger and fusion of finger ROI's for finger knuckle image recognition. These experiments suggest that using full-finger, provides a more elegant solution. Addressing the finger matching problem, we propose a CNN (convolutional neural network) which creates a $128$-D feature embedding of an image. It is trained via. triplet loss function, which enforces the L2 distance between the embeddings of the same subject to be approaching zero, whereas the distance between any 2 embeddings of different subjects to be at least a margin. For precise training of the network, we use dynamic adaptive margin, data augmentation, and hard negative mining. In distinguished experiments, the individual performance of finger, as well as weighted sum score level fusion of major knuckle, minor knuckle, and nail modalities have been computed, justifying our assumption to consider full finger as biometrics instead of its counterparts. The proposed method is evaluated using two publicly available finger knuckle image datasets i.e., PolyU FKP dataset and PolyU Contactless FKI Datasets.
A Message-Passing Interpretation of Adjoint Logic
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2019
Year: 2019

We present a system of session types based on adjoint logic which generalize standard binary session types. Our system allows us to uniformly capture several new behaviors in the space of asynchronous message-passing communication, including multicast, where a process sends a single message to multiple clients, replicable services, which have multiple clients and replicate themselves on-demand to handle requests from those clients, and cancellation, where a process discards a channel without communicating along it. We provide session fidelity and deadlock-freedom results for this system, from which we then derive a logically justified form of garbage collection.
Disaggregation for Improved Efficiency in Fog Computing Era
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

This paper evaluates the impact of using disaggregated servers in the near-edge of telecom networks (metro central offices, radio cell sites and enterprise branch office which form part of a Fog as a Service system) to minimize the number of fog nodes required in the far-edge of telecom networks. We formulated a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model to this end. Our results show that replacing traditional servers with disaggregated servers in the near-edge of the telecom network can reduce the number of far-edge fog nodes required by up to 50% if access to near-edge computing resources is not limited by network bottlenecks. This improved efficiency is achieved at the cost of higher average hop count between workload sources and processing locations and marginal increases in overall metro and access networks traffic and power consumption.