OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Cross-lingual RST Discourse Parsing
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2017
Year: 2017

Discourse parsing is an integral part of understanding information flow and argumentative structure in documents. Most previous research has focused on inducing and evaluating models from the English RST Discourse Treebank. However, discourse treebanks for other languages exist, including Spanish, German, Basque, Dutch and Brazilian Portuguese. The treebanks share the same underlying linguistic theory, but differ slightly in the way documents are annotated. In this paper, we present (a) a new discourse parser which is simpler, yet competitive (significantly better on 2/3 metrics) to state of the art for English, (b) a harmonization of discourse treebanks across languages, enabling us to present (c) what to the best of our knowledge are the first experiments on cross-lingual discourse parsing.
Fast mixing for Latent Dirichlet allocation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are ubiquitous in probability theory in general and in machine learning in particular. A Markov chain is devised so that its stationary distribution is some probability distribution of interest. Then one samples from the given distribution by running the Markov chain for a "long time" until it appears to be stationary and then collects the sample. However these chains are often very complex and there are no theoretical guarantees that stationarity is actually reached. In this paper we study the Gibbs sampler of the posterior distribution of a very simple case of Latent Dirichlet Allocation, the arguably most well known Bayesian unsupervised learning model for text generation and text classification. It is shown that when the corpus consists of two long documents of equal length $m$ and the vocabulary consists of only two different words, the mixing time is at most of order $m^2\log m$ (which corresponds to $m\log m$ rounds over the corpus). It will be apparent from our analysis that it seems very likely that the mixing time is not much worse in the more relevant case when the number of documents and the size of the vocabulary are also large as long as each word is represented a large number in each document, even though the computations involved may be intractable.
A Framework for Knowledge Management and Automated Reasoning Applied on Intelligent Transport Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2017
Year: 2017

Cyber-Physical Systems in general, and Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) in particular use heterogeneous data sources combined with problem solving expertise in order to make critical decisions that may lead to some form of actions e.g., driver notifications, change of traffic light signals and braking to prevent an accident. Currently, a major part of the decision process is done by human domain experts, which is time-consuming, tedious and error-prone. Additionally, due to the intrinsic nature of knowledge possession this decision process cannot be easily replicated or reused. Therefore, there is a need for automating the reasoning processes by providing computational systems a formal representation of the domain knowledge and a set of methods to process that knowledge. In this paper, we propose a knowledge model that can be used to express both declarative knowledge about the systems' components, their relations and their current state, as well as procedural knowledge representing possible system behavior. In addition, we introduce a framework for knowledge management and automated reasoning (KMARF). The idea behind KMARF is to automatically select an appropriate problem solver based on formalized reasoning expertise in the knowledge base, and convert a problem definition to the corresponding format. This approach automates reasoning, thus reducing operational costs, and enables reusability of knowledge and methods across different domains. We illustrate the approach on a transportation planning use case.
Optimal Control of Uncertain Nonlinear Quadratic Systems with Constrained Inputs
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2017
Year: 2017

This paper addresses the problem of robust and optimal control for the class of nonlinear quadratic systems subject to norm-bounded parametric uncertainties and disturbances, and in presence of some amplitude constraints on the control input. By using an approach based on the guaranteed cost control theory, a technique is proposed to design a state feedback controller ensuring for the closed-loop system: i) the local exponential stability of the zero equilibrium point; ii) the inclusion of a given region into the domain of exponential stability of the equilibrium point; iii) the satisfaction of a guaranteed level of performance, in terms of boundedness of some optimality indexes. In particular, a sufficient condition for the existence of a state feedback controller satisfying a prescribed integral-quadratic index is provided, followed by a sufficient condition for the existence of a state feedback controller satisfying a given $\mathcal L_2$-gain disturbance rejection constraint. By the proposed design procedures, the optimal control problems dealt with here can be efficiently solved as Linear Matrix Inequality (LMI) optimization problems.
Modeling Grasp Motor Imagery through Deep Conditional Generative Models
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2017
Year: 2017

Grasping is a complex process involving knowledge of the object, the surroundings, and of oneself. While humans are able to integrate and process all of the sensory information required for performing this task, equipping machines with this capability is an extremely challenging endeavor. In this paper, we investigate how deep learning techniques can allow us to translate high-level concepts such as motor imagery to the problem of robotic grasp synthesis. We explore a paradigm based on generative models for learning integrated object-action representations, and demonstrate its capacity for capturing and generating multimodal, multi-finger grasp configurations on a simulated grasping dataset.
Robust Group LASSO Over Decentralized Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2017
Year: 2017

This paper considers the recovery of group sparse signals over a multi-agent network, where the measurements are subject to sparse errors. We first investigate the robust group LASSO model and its centralized algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), which requires a central fusion center to compute a global row-support detector. To implement it in a decentralized network environment, we then adopt dynamic average consensus strategies that enable dynamic tracking of the global row-support detector. Numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.
Uncertainty Quantification of Water Distribution System Measurement Data based on a Least Squares Loop Flows State Estimator
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2017
Year: 2017

This paper presents a novel algorithm for uncertainty quantification of water distribution system measurement data including nodal demands/consumptions as well as real pressure and flow measurements. This procedure, referred to as Confidence Limit Analysis (CLA), is concerned with a deployment of a Least Squares (LS) state estimator based on the loop corrective flows and the variation of nodal demands as independent variables. The confidence limits obtained for the nodal pressures and the inflows/outflows of a water network are determined with the novel algorithm called Error Maximization (EM) method and are evaluated with respect to two other more established CLA algorithms based on an Experimental Sensitivity Matrix (ESM) and on the sensitivity matrix method obtained with the LS nodal heads equations state estimator. The estimated confidence limits obtained for two real water networks show that the proposed EM algorithm is comparable to the other two CLA benchmark algorithms but due to its computational efficiency it is more suitable for online decision support applications in water distribution systems. Both ESM and EM methods work for any operating point, whether arbitrarily or randomly chosen, for any water network although EM method has the advantage of being computationally superior and working with any sets of measurements.
Parsing Universal Dependencies without training
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2017
Year: 2017

We propose UDP, the first training-free parser for Universal Dependencies (UD). Our algorithm is based on PageRank and a small set of head attachment rules. It features two-step decoding to guarantee that function words are attached as leaf nodes. The parser requires no training, and it is competitive with a delexicalized transfer system. UDP offers a linguistically sound unsupervised alternative to cross-lingual parsing for UD, which can be used as a baseline for such systems. The parser has very few parameters and is distinctly robust to domain change across languages.
A Day Ahead Market Energy Auction for Distribution System Operation
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2017
Year: 2017

In this paper, we study a day ahead double energy auction in a distribution system involving dispatchable generation units, renewable generation units supported by battery storage systems(BSSs), fixed loads, price responsive loads, and supply from the Whole Sale Market(WSM) at Locational Marginal Price(LMP). The auction is implemented within a Distribution System Operator (DSO) premises using Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MIP). The proposed auction is cleared at the Distribution LMP (DLMP) and is observed to be weakly budget balanced if no penalty is applied for DSO's deviation from originally committed supply from the WSM. Furthermore, the dynamics of LMP and DLMP, and their effect on distribution market participants scheduled quantities as well as the WSM supply to the distribution system is investigated.
Surface Reconstruction with Data-driven Exemplar Priors
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2017
Year: 2017

In this paper, we propose a framework to reconstruct 3D models from raw scanned points by learning the prior knowledge of a specific class of objects. Unlike previous work that heuristically specifies particular regularities and defines parametric models, our shape priors are learned directly from existing 3D models under a framework based on affinity propagation. Given a database of 3D models within the same class of objects, we build a comprehensive library of 3D local shape priors. We then formulate the problem to select as-few-as-possible priors from the library, referred to as exemplar priors. These priors are sufficient to represent the 3D shapes of the whole class of objects from where they are generated. By manipulating these priors, we are able to reconstruct geometrically faithful models with the same class of objects from raw point clouds. Our framework can be easily generalized to reconstruct various categories of 3D objects that have more geometrically or topologically complex structures. Comprehensive experiments exhibit the power of our exemplar priors for gracefully solving several problems in 3D shape reconstruction such as preserving sharp features, recovering fine details and so on.
Shannon Shakes Hands with Chernoff: Big Data Viewpoint On Channel Information Measures
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

Shannon entropy is the most crucial foundation of Information Theory, which has been proven to be effective in many fields such as communications. Renyi entropy and Chernoff information are other two popular measures of information with wide applications. The mutual information is effective to measure the channel information for the fact that it reflects the relation between output variables and input variables. In this paper, we reexamine these channel information measures in big data viewpoint by means of ACE algorithm. The simulated results show us that decomposition results of Shannon and Chernoff mutual information with respect to channel parametersare almost the same. In this sense, Shannon shakes hands with Chernoff since they are different measures of the same information quantity. We also propose a conjecture that there is nature of channel information which is only decided by the channel parameters.
Finite-Length Bounds for Joint Source-Channel Coding with Markovian Source and Additive Channel Noise to Achieve Large and Moderate Deviation Bounds
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

We derive novel upper and lower finite-length bounds of the error probability in joint source-channel coding when the source obeys an ergodic Markov process and the channel is a Markovian additive channel or a Markovian conditional additive channel. These bounds are tight in the large and moderate deviation regimes.
Information-Theoretic Analysis of Refractory Effects in the P300 Speller
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

The P300 speller is a brain-computer interface that enables people with neuromuscular disorders to communicate based on eliciting event-related potentials (ERP) in electroencephalography (EEG) measurements. One challenge to reliable communication is the presence of refractory effects in the P300 ERP that induces temporal dependence in the user's EEG responses. We propose a model for the P300 speller as a communication channel with memory. By studying the maximum information rate on this channel, we gain insight into the fundamental constraints imposed by refractory effects. We construct codebooks based on the optimal input distribution, and compare them to existing codebooks in literature.
Towards a Semantics-Aware Code Transformation Toolchain for Heterogeneous Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2017
Year: 2017

Obtaining good performance when programming heterogeneous computing platforms poses significant challenges. We present a program transformation environment, implemented in Haskell, where architecture-agnostic scientific C code with semantic annotations is transformed into functionally equivalent code better suited for a given platform. The transformation steps are represented as rules that can be fired when certain syntactic and semantic conditions are fulfilled. These rules are not hard-wired into the rewriting engine: they are written in a C-like language and are automatically processed and incorporated into the rewriting engine. That makes it possible for end-users to add their own rules or to provide sets of rules that are adapted to certain specific domains or purposes.
Resilient Consensus of Second-Order Agent Networks: Asynchronous Update Rules with Delays
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2017
Year: 2017

We study the problem of resilient consensus of sampled-data multi-agent networks with double-integrator dynamics. The term resilient points to algorithms considering the presence of attacks by faulty/malicious agents in the network. Each normal agent updates its state based on a predetermined control law using its neighbors' information which may be delayed while misbehaving agents make updates arbitrarily and might threaten the consensus within the network. Assuming that the maximum number of malicious agents in the system is known, we focus on algorithms where each normal agent ignores large and small position values among its neighbors to avoid being influenced by malicious agents. The malicious agents are assumed to be omniscient in that they know the updating times and delays and can collude with each other. We deal with both synchronous and partially asynchronous cases with delayed information and derive topological conditions in terms of graph robustness.
SMARTies: Sentiment Models for Arabic Target Entities
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2017
Year: 2017

We consider entity-level sentiment analysis in Arabic, a morphologically rich language with increasing resources. We present a system that is applied to complex posts written in response to Arabic newspaper articles. Our goal is to identify important entity "targets" within the post along with the polarity expressed about each target. We achieve significant improvements over multiple baselines, demonstrating that the use of specific morphological representations improves the performance of identifying both important targets and their sentiment, and that the use of distributional semantic clusters further boosts performances for these representations, especially when richer linguistic resources are not available.
Simplified Gating in Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) Recurrent Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2017
Year: 2017

The standard LSTM recurrent neural networks while very powerful in long-range dependency sequence applications have highly complex structure and relatively large (adaptive) parameters. In this work, we present empirical comparison between the standard LSTM recurrent neural network architecture and three new parameter-reduced variants obtained by eliminating combinations of the input signal, bias, and hidden unit signals from individual gating signals. The experiments on two sequence datasets show that the three new variants, called simply as LSTM1, LSTM2, and LSTM3, can achieve comparable performance to the standard LSTM model with less (adaptive) parameters.
An OpenCL(TM) Deep Learning Accelerator on Arria 10
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2017
Year: 2017

Convolutional neural nets (CNNs) have become a practical means to perform vision tasks, particularly in the area of image classification. FPGAs are well known to be able to perform convolutions efficiently, however, most recent efforts to run CNNs on FPGAs have shown limited advantages over other devices such as GPUs. Previous approaches on FPGAs have often been memory bound due to the limited external memory bandwidth on the FPGA device. We show a novel architecture written in OpenCL(TM), which we refer to as a Deep Learning Accelerator (DLA), that maximizes data reuse and minimizes external memory bandwidth. Furthermore, we show how we can use the Winograd transform to significantly boost the performance of the FPGA. As a result, when running our DLA on Intel's Arria 10 device we can achieve a performance of 1020 img/s, or 23 img/s/W when running the AlexNet CNN benchmark. This comes to 1382 GFLOPs and is 10x faster with 8.4x more GFLOPS and 5.8x better efficiency than the state-of-the-art on FPGAs. Additionally, 23 img/s/W is competitive against the best publicly known implementation of AlexNet on nVidia's TitanX GPU.
Active Self-Paced Learning for Cost-Effective and Progressive Face Identification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

This paper aims to develop a novel cost-effective framework for face identification, which progressively maintains a batch of classifiers with the increasing face images of different individuals. By naturally combining two recently rising techniques: active learning (AL) and self-paced learning (SPL), our framework is capable of automatically annotating new instances and incorporating them into training under weak expert re-certification. We first initialize the classifier using a few annotated samples for each individual, and extract image features using the convolutional neural nets. Then, a number of candidates are selected from the unannotated samples for classifier updating, in which we apply the current classifiers ranking the samples by the prediction confidence. In particular, our approach utilizes the high-confidence and low-confidence samples in the self-paced and the active user-query way, respectively. The neural nets are later fine-tuned based on the updated classifiers. Such heuristic implementation is formulated as solving a concise active SPL optimization problem, which also advances the SPL development by supplementing a rational dynamic curriculum constraint. The new model finely accords with the "instructor-student-collaborative" learning mode in human education. The advantages of this proposed framework are two-folds: i) The required number of annotated samples is significantly decreased while the comparable performance is guaranteed. A dramatic reduction of user effort is also achieved over other state-of-the-art active learning techniques. ii) The mixture of SPL and AL effectively improves not only the classifier accuracy compared to existing AL/SPL methods but also the robustness against noisy data. We evaluate our framework on two challenging datasets, and demonstrate very promising results. (http://hcp.sysu.edu.cn/projects/aspl/)
Mobile Robotic Fabrication at 1:1 scale: the In situ Fabricator
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2017
Year: 2017

This paper presents the concept of an In situ Fabricator, a mobile robot intended for on-site manufacturing, assembly and digital fabrication. We present an overview of a prototype system, its capabilities, and highlight the importance of high-performance control, estimation and planning algorithms for achieving desired construction goals. Next, we detail on two architectural application scenarios: first, building a full-size undulating brick wall, which required a number of repositioning and autonomous localisation manoeuvres. Second, the Mesh Mould concrete process, which shows that an In situ Fabricator in combination with an innovative digital fabrication tool can be used to enable completely novel building technologies. Subsequently, important limitations and disadvantages of our approach are discussed. Based on that, we identify the need for a new type of robotic actuator, which facilitates the design of novel full-scale construction robots. We provide brief insight into the development of this actuator and conclude the paper with an outlook on the next-generation In situ Fabricator, which is currently under development.
Automatic verification and interactive theorem proving
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2017
Year: 2017

Automatic verification deals with the validation by means of computers of correctness certificates. The related tools, usually called proof assistants or interactive provers, provide an interactive environment for the creation of formal certificates whose correctness can be assessed in a purely automatic way. Such systems have applications both in mathematics, where certificates are proofs of theorems, and in computer science, where certificates testify the correctness of a given software with respect to its specification.
Online Dictionary Learning Aided Target Recognition In Cognitive GPR
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

Sparse decomposition of ground penetration radar (GPR) signals facilitates the use of compressed sensing techniques for faster data acquisition and enhanced feature extraction for target classification. In this paper, we investigate the application of an online dictionary learning (ODL) technique in the context of GPR to bring down the learning time as well as improve identification of abandoned anti-personnel landmines. Our experimental results using real data from an L-band GPR for PMN/PMA2, ERA and T72 mines show that ODL reduces learning time by 94\% and increases clutter detection by 10\% over the classical K-SVD algorithm. Moreover, the proposed methodology could be helpful in cognitive operation of the GPR where the system adapts the range sampling based on the learned dictionary.