OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
An Empirical Study of Batch Normalization and Group Normalization in Conditional Computation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Batch normalization has been widely used to improve optimization in deep neural networks. While the uncertainty in batch statistics can act as a regularizer, using these dataset statistics specific to the training set impairs generalization in certain tasks. Recently, alternative methods for normalizing feature activations in neural networks have been proposed. Among them, group normalization has been shown to yield similar, in some domains even superior performance to batch normalization. All these methods utilize a learned affine transformation after the normalization operation to increase representational power. Methods used in conditional computation define the parameters of these transformations as learnable functions of conditioning information. In this work, we study whether and where the conditional formulation of group normalization can improve generalization compared to conditional batch normalization. We evaluate performances on the tasks of visual question answering, few-shot learning, and conditional image generation.
Simultaneous Iris and Periocular Region Detection Using Coarse Annotations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

In this work, we propose to detect the iris and periocular regions simultaneously using coarse annotations and two well-known object detectors: YOLOv2 and Faster R-CNN. We believe coarse annotations can be used in recognition systems based on the iris and periocular regions, given the much smaller engineering effort required to manually annotate the training images. We manually made coarse annotations of the iris and periocular regions (122K images from the visible (VIS) spectrum and 38K images from the near-infrared (NIR) spectrum). The iris annotations in the NIR databases were generated semi-automatically by first applying an iris segmentation CNN and then performing a manual inspection. These annotations were made for 11 well-known public databases (3 NIR and 8 VIS) designed for the iris-based recognition problem and are publicly available to the research community. Experimenting our proposal on these databases, we highlight two results. First, the Faster R-CNN + Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) model reported an Intersection over Union (IoU) higher than YOLOv2 (91.86% vs 85.30%). Second, the detection of the iris and periocular regions being performed simultaneously is as accurate as performed separately, but with a lower computational cost, i.e., two tasks were carried out at the cost of one.
Session-Based Hotel Recommendations: Challenges and Future Directions
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2019
Year: 2019

In the year 2019, the Recommender Systems Challenge deals with a real-world task from the area of e-tourism for the first time, namely the recommendation of hotels in booking sessions. In this context, this article aims at identifying and investigating what we believe are important domain-specific challenges recommendation systems research in hotel search is facing, from both academic and industry perspectives. We focus on three main challenges, namely dealing with (1) multiple stakeholders and value-awareness in recommendations, (2) sparsity of user data and the extensive cold-start problem, and (3) dynamic input data and computational requirements. To this end, we review the state of the art toward solving these challenges and discuss shortcomings. We detail possible future directions and visions we contemplate for the further evolution of the field. This article should, therefore, serve two purposes: giving the interested reader an overview of current challenges in the field and inspiring new approaches for the ACM Recommender Systems Challenge 2019 and beyond.
Why Does My Model Fail? Contrastive Local Explanations for Retail Forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2019
Year: 2019

In various business settings, there is an interest in using more complex machine learning techniques for sales forecasting. It is difficult to convince analysts, along with their superiors, to adopt these techniques since the models are considered to be "black boxes," even if they perform better than current models in use. We examine the impact of contrastive explanations about large errors on users' attitudes towards a "black-box'" model. We propose an algorithm, Monte Carlo Bounds for Reasonable Predictions. Given a large error, MC-BRP determines (1) feature values that would result in a reasonable prediction, and (2) general trends between each feature and the target, both based on Monte Carlo simulations. We evaluate on a real dataset with real users by conducting a user study with 75 participants to determine if explanations generated by MC-BRP help users understand why a prediction results in a large error, and if this promotes trust in an automatically-learned model. Our study shows that users are able to answer objective questions about the model's predictions with overall 81.1% accuracy when provided with these contrastive explanations. We show that users who saw MC-BRP explanations understand why the model makes large errors in predictions significantly more than users in the control group. We also conduct an in-depth analysis on the difference in attitudes between Practitioners and Researchers, and confirm that our results hold when conditioning on the users' background.
OCT Fingerprints: Resilience to Presentation Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Optical coherent tomography (OCT) fingerprint technology provides rich depth information, including internal fingerprint (papillary junction) and sweat (eccrine) glands, in addition to imaging any fake layers (presentation attacks) placed over finger skin. Unlike 2D surface fingerprint scans, additional depth information provided by the cross-sectional OCT depth profile scans are purported to thwart fingerprint presentation attacks. We develop and evaluate a presentation attack detector (PAD) based on deep convolutional neural network (CNN). Input data to CNN are local patches extracted from the cross-sectional OCT depth profile scans captured using THORLabs Telesto series spectral-domain fingerprint reader. The proposed approach achieves a TDR of 99.73% @ FDR of 0.2% on a database of 3,413 bonafide and 357 PA OCT scans, fabricated using 8 different PA materials. By employing a visualization technique, known as CNN-Fixations, we are able to identify the regions in the OCT scan patches that are crucial for fingerprint PAD detection.
Personalized, Health-Aware Recipe Recommendation: An Ensemble Topic Modeling Based Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2019
Year: 2019

Food choices are personal and complex and have a significant impact on our long-term health and quality of life. By helping users to make informed and satisfying decisions, Recommender Systems (RS) have the potential to support users in making healthier food choices. Intelligent users-modeling is a key challenge in achieving this potential. This paper investigates Ensemble Topic Modelling (EnsTM) based Feature Identification techniques for efficient user-modeling and recipe recommendation. It builds on findings in EnsTM to propose a reduced data representation format and a smart user-modeling strategy that makes capturing user-preference fast, efficient and interactive. This approach enables personalization, even in a cold-start scenario. This paper proposes two different EnsTM based and one Hybrid EnsTM based recommenders. We compared all three EnsTM based variations through a user study with 48 participants, using a large-scale,real-world corpus of 230,876 recipes, and compare against a conventional Content Based (CB) approach. EnsTM based recommenders performed significantly better than the CB approach. Besides acknowledging multi-domain contents such as taste, demographics and cost, our proposed approach also considers user's nutritional preference and assists them finding recipes under diverse nutritional categories. Furthermore, it provides excellent coverage and enables implicit understanding of user's food practices. Subsequent analysis also exposed correlation between certain features and a healthier lifestyle.
Hateful People or Hateful Bots? Detection and Characterization of Bots Spreading Religious Hatred in Arabic Social Media
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2019
Year: 2019

Arabic Twitter space is crawling with bots that fuel political feuds, spread misinformation, and proliferate sectarian rhetoric. While efforts have long existed to analyze and detect English bots, Arabic bot detection and characterization remains largely understudied. In this work, we contribute new insights into the role of bots in spreading religious hatred on Arabic Twitter and introduce a novel regression model that can accurately identify Arabic language bots. Our assessment shows that existing tools that are highly accurate in detecting English bots don't perform as well on Arabic bots. We identify the possible reasons for this poor performance, perform a thorough analysis of linguistic, content, behavioral and network features, and report on the most informative features that distinguish Arabic bots from humans as well as the differences between Arabic and English bots. Our results mark an important step toward understanding the behavior of malicious bots on Arabic Twitter and pave the way for a more effective Arabic bot detection tools.
A True $O(n \log{n}) $ Algorithm for the All-k-Nearest-Neighbors Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper we examined an algorithm for the All-k-Nearest-Neighbor problem proposed in 1980s, which was claimed to have an $O(n\log{n})$ upper bound on the running time. We find the algorithm actually exceeds the so claimed upper bound, and prove that it has an $Ω(n^2)$ lower bound on the time complexity. Besides, we propose a new algorithm that truly achieves the $O(n\log{n})$ bound. Detailed and rigorous theoretical proofs are provided to show the proposed algorithm runs exactly in $$O(n\log{n})$$ time.
Supervised Learning of the Global Risk Network Activation from Media Event Reports
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2019
Year: 2019

The World Economic Forum (WEF) publishes annual reports on global risks which have the high impact on the world's economy. Currently, many researchers analyze the modeling and evolution of risks. However, few studies focus on validation of the global risk networks published by the WEF. In this paper, we first create a risk knowledge graph from the annotated risk events crawled from the Wikipedia. Then, we compare the relational dependencies of risks in the WEF and Wikipedia networks, and find that they share over 50% of their edges. Moreover, the edges unique to each network signify the different perspectives of the experts and the public on global risks. To reduce the cost of manual annotation of events triggering risk activation, we build an auto-detection tool which filters out over 80% media reported events unrelated to the global risks. In the process of filtering, our tool also continuously learns keywords relevant to global risks from the event sentences. Using locations of events extracted from the risk knowledge graph, we find characteristics of geographical distributions of the categories of global risks.
EcoLens: Visual Analysis of Urban Region Dynamics Using Traffic Data
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2019
Year: 2019

The rapid development of urbanization during the past decades has significantly improved people's lives but also introduced new challenges on effective functional urban planning and transportation management. The functional regions defined based on a static boundary rarely reflect an individual's daily experience of the space in which they live and visit for a variety of purposes. Fortunately, the increasing availability of spatiotemporal data provides unprecedented opportunities for understanding the structure of an urban area in terms of people's activity pattern and how they form the latent regions over time. These ecological regions, where people temporarily share a similar moving behavior during a short period of time, could provide insights into urban planning and smart-city services. However, existing solutions are limited in their capacity of capturing the evolutionary patterns of dynamic latent regions within urban context. In this work, we introduce an interactive visual analysis approach, EcoLens, that allows analysts to progressively explore and analyze the complex dynamic segmentation patterns of a city using traffic data. We propose an extended non-negative Matrix Factorization based algorithm smoothed over both spatial and temporal dimensions to capture the spatiotemporal dynamics of the city. The algorithm also ensures the orthogonality of its result to facilitate the interpretation of different patterns. A suite of visualizations is designed to illustrate the dynamics of city segmentation and the corresponding interactions are added to support the exploration of the segmentation patterns over time. We evaluate the effectiveness of our system via case studies using a real-world dataset and a qualitative interview with the domain expert.
KiloGrams: Very Large N-Grams for Malware Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

N-grams have been a common tool for information retrieval and machine learning applications for decades. In nearly all previous works, only a few values of $n$ are tested, with $n > 6$ being exceedingly rare. Larger values of $n$ are not tested due to computational burden or the fear of overfitting. In this work, we present a method to find the top-$k$ most frequent $n$-grams that is 60$\times$ faster for small $n$, and can tackle large $n\geq1024$. Despite the unprecedented size of $n$ considered, we show how these features still have predictive ability for malware classification tasks. More important, large $n$-grams provide benefits in producing features that are interpretable by malware analysis, and can be used to create general purpose signatures compatible with industry standard tools like Yara. Furthermore, the counts of common $n$-grams in a file may be added as features to publicly available human-engineered features that rival efficacy of professionally-developed features when used to train gradient-boosted decision tree models on the EMBER dataset.
Pilot-Based Channel Estimation Design in Covert Wireless Communication
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

In this work, for the first time, we tackle channel estimation design with pilots in the context of covert wireless communication. Specifically, we consider Rayleigh fading for the communication channel from a transmitter to a receiver and additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) for the detection channel from the transmitter to a warden. Before transmitting information signals, the transmitter has to send pilots to enable channel estimation at the receiver. Using a lower bound on the detection error probability, we first prove that transmitting pilot and information signals with equal power can minimize the detection performance at the warden, which is confirmed by the minimum detection error probability achieved by the optimal detector based on likelihood ratio test. This motivates us to consider the equal transmit power in the channel estimation and then optimize channel use allocation between pilot and information signals in covert wireless communication. Our analysis shows that the optimal number of the channel uses allocated to pilots increases as the covertness constraint becomes tighter. In addition, our examination shows that the optimal percentage of all the available channel uses allocated to channel estimation decreases as the total number of channel uses increases.
Runtime Mitigation of Packet Drop Attacks in Fault-tolerant Networks-on-Chip
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2019
Year: 2019

Fault-tolerant routing (FTR) in Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) has become a common practice to sustain the performance of multi-core systems with an increasing number of faults on a chip. On the other hand, usage of third-party intellectual property blocks has made security a primary concern in modern day designs. This article presents a mechanism to mitigate a denial-of-service attack, namely packet drop attack, which may arise due to the hardware Trojans (HTs) in NoCs that adopt FTR algorithms. HTs, associated with external kill switches, are conditionally triggered to enable the attack scenario. Security modules, such as authentication unit, buffer shuffler, and control unit, have been proposed to thwart the attack in runtime and restore secure packet flow in the NoC. These units work together as a shield to safeguard the packets from proceeding towards the output ports with faulty links. Synthesis results show that the proposed secure FT router, when compared with a baseline FT router, has area and power overheads of at most 4.04% and 0.90%, respectively. Performance evaluation shows that SeFaR has acceptable overheads in the execution time, energy consumption, average packet latency, and power-latency product metrics when compared with a baseline FT router while running real benchmarks, as well as synthetic traffic. Further, a possible design of a comprehensive secure router has been presented with a view to addressing and mitigating multiple attacks that can arise in the NoC routers.
Sentiment Analysis at SEPLN (TASS)-2019: Sentiment Analysis at Tweet level using Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

This paper describes the system submitted to "Sentiment Analysis at SEPLN (TASS)-2019" shared task. The task includes sentiment analysis of Spanish tweets, where the tweets are in different dialects spoken in Spain, Peru, Costa Rica, Uruguay and Mexico. The tweets are short (up to 240 characters) and the language is informal, i.e., it contains misspellings, emojis, onomatopeias etc. Sentiment analysis includes classification of the tweets into 4 classes, viz., Positive, Negative, Neutral and None. For preparing the proposed system, we use Deep Learning networks like LSTMs.
An SPQR-Tree-Like Embedding Representation for Upward Planarity
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

The SPQR-tree is a data structure that compactly represents all planar embeddings of a biconnected planar graph. It plays a key role in constrained planarity testing. We develop a similar data structure, called the UP-tree, that compactly represents all upward planar embeddings of a biconnected single-source directed graph. We demonstrate the usefulness of the UP-tree by solving the upward planar embedding extension problem for biconnected single-source directed graphs.
Quality Assessment of In-the-Wild Videos
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2019
Year: 2019

Quality assessment of in-the-wild videos is a challenging problem because of the absence of reference videos and shooting distortions. Knowledge of the human visual system can help establish methods for objective quality assessment of in-the-wild videos. In this work, we show two eminent effects of the human visual system, namely, content-dependency and temporal-memory effects, could be used for this purpose. We propose an objective no-reference video quality assessment method by integrating both effects into a deep neural network. For content-dependency, we extract features from a pre-trained image classification neural network for its inherent content-aware property. For temporal-memory effects, long-term dependencies, especially the temporal hysteresis, are integrated into the network with a gated recurrent unit and a subjectively-inspired temporal pooling layer. To validate the performance of our method, experiments are conducted on three publicly available in-the-wild video quality assessment databases: KoNViD-1k, CVD2014, and LIVE-Qualcomm, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms five state-of-the-art methods by a large margin, specifically, 12.39%, 15.71%, 15.45%, and 18.09% overall performance improvements over the second-best method VBLIINDS, in terms of SROCC, KROCC, PLCC and RMSE, respectively. Moreover, the ablation study verifies the crucial role of both the content-aware features and the modeling of temporal-memory effects. The PyTorch implementation of our method is released at https://github.com/lidq92/VSFA.
Classification of Cognitive Load and Expertise for Adaptive Simulation using Deep Multitask Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2019
Year: 2019

Simulations are a pedagogical means of enabling a risk-free way for healthcare practitioners to learn, maintain, or enhance their knowledge and skills. Such simulations should provide an optimum amount of cognitive load to the learner and be tailored to their levels of expertise. However, most current simulations are a one-type-fits-all tool used to train different learners regardless of their existing skills, expertise, and ability to handle cognitive load. To address this problem, we propose an end-to-end framework for a trauma simulation that actively classifies a participant's level of cognitive load and expertise for the development of a dynamically adaptive simulation. To facilitate this solution, trauma simulations were developed for the collection of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals of both novice and expert practitioners. A multitask deep neural network was developed to utilize this data and classify high and low cognitive load, as well as expert and novice participants. A leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) validation was used to evaluate the effectiveness of our model, achieving an accuracy of 89.4% and 96.6% for classification of cognitive load and expertise, respectively.
Sampling on networks: estimating eigenvector centrality on incomplete graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2019
Year: 2019

We develop a new sampling method to estimate eigenvector centrality on incomplete networks. Our goal is to estimate this global centrality measure having at disposal a limited amount of data. This is the case in many real-world scenarios where data collection is expensive, the network is too big for data storage capacity or only partial information is available. The sampling algorithm is theoretically grounded by results derived from spectral approximation theory. We studied the problem on both synthetic and real data and tested the performance comparing with traditional methods, such as random walk and uniform sampling. We show that approximations obtained from such methods are not always reliable and that our algorithm, while preserving computational scalability, improves performance under different error measures.
A compression based framework for the detection of anomalies in heterogeneous data sources
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

Nowadays, information and communications technology systems are fundamental assets of our social and economical model, and thus they should be properly protected against the malicious activity of cybercriminals. Defence mechanisms are generally articulated around tools that trace and store information in several ways, the simplest one being the generation of plain text files coined as security logs. This log files are usually inspected, in a semi-automatic way, by security analysts to detect events that may affect system integrity. On this basis, we propose a parameter-free methodology to detect security incidents from structured text regardless its nature. We use the Normalized Compression Distance to obtain a set of features that can be used by a Support Vector Machine to classify events from a heterogeneous cybersecurity environment. In specific, we explore and validate the application of our methodology in four different cybersecurity domains: HTTP anomaly identification, spam detection, Domain Generation Algorithms tracking and sentiment analysis. The results obtained show the validity and flexibility of our approach in different security scenarios with a low configuration burden.