OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
BigSR: an empirical study of real-time expressive RDF stream reasoning on modern Big Data platforms
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

The trade-off between language expressiveness and system scalability (E&S) is a well-known problem in RDF stream reasoning. Higher expressiveness supports more complex reasoning logic, however, it may also hinder system scalability. Current research mainly focuses on logical frameworks suitable for stream reasoning as well as the implementation and the evaluation of prototype systems. These systems are normally developed in a centralized setting which suffer from inherent limited scalability, while an in-depth study of applying distributed solutions to cover E&S is still missing. In this paper, we aim to explore the feasibility of applying modern distributed computing frameworks to meet E&S all together. To do so, we first propose BigSR, a technical demonstrator that supports a positive fragment of the LARS framework. For the sake of generality and to cover a wide variety of use cases, BigSR relies on the two main execution models adopted by major distributed execution frameworks: Bulk Synchronous Processing (BSP) and Record-at-A-Time (RAT). Accordingly, we implement BigSR on top of Apache Spark Streaming (BSP model) and Apache Flink (RAT model). In order to conclude on the impacts of BSP and RAT on E&S, we analyze the ability of the two models to support distributed stream reasoning and identify several types of use cases characterized by their levels of support. This classification allows for quantifying the E&S trade-off by assessing the scalability of each type of use case \wrt its level of expressiveness. Then, we conduct a series of experiments with 15 queries from 4 different datasets. Our experiments show that BigSR over both BSP and RAT generally scales up to high throughput beyond million-triples per second (with or without recursion), and RAT attains sub-millisecond delay for stateless query operators.
Transformation on Computer-Generated Facial Image to Avoid Detection by Spoofing Detector
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Making computer-generated (CG) images more difficult to detect is an interesting problem in computer graphics and security. While most approaches focus on the image rendering phase, this paper presents a method based on increasing the naturalness of CG facial images from the perspective of spoofing detectors. The proposed method is implemented using a convolutional neural network (CNN) comprising two autoencoders and a transformer and is trained using a black-box discriminator without gradient information. Over 50% of the transformed CG images were not detected by three state-of-the-art spoofing detectors. This capability raises an alarm regarding the reliability of facial authentication systems, which are becoming widely used in daily life.
QRES: Quantitative Reasoning on Encrypted Security SLAs
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

While regulators advocate for higher cloud transparency, many Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) often do not provide detailed information regarding their security implementations in their Service Level Agreements (SLAs). In practice, CSPs are hesitant to release detailed information regarding their security posture for security and proprietary reasons. This lack of transparency hinders the adoption of cloud computing by enterprises and individuals. Unless CSPs share information regarding the technical details of their security proceedings and standards, customers cannot verify which cloud provider matched their needs in terms of security and privacy guarantees. To address this problem, we propose QRES, the first system that enables (a) CSPs to disclose detailed information about their offered security services in an encrypted form to ensure data confidentiality, and (b) customers to assess the CSPs' offered security services and find those satisfying their security requirements. Our system preserves each party's privacy by leveraging a novel evaluation method based on Secure Two Party Computation (2PC) and Searchable Encryption techniques. We implement QRES and highlight its usefulness by applying it to existing standardized SLAs. The real world tests illustrate that the system runs in acceptable time for practical application even when used with a multitude of CSPs. We formally prove the security requirements of the proposed system against a strong realistic adversarial model, using an automated cryptographic protocol verifier.
Stream Runtime Monitoring on UAS
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2018
Year: 2018

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) with autonomous decision-making capabilities are of increasing interest for a wide area of applications such as logistics and disaster recovery. In order to ensure the correct behavior of the system and to recognize hazardous situations or system faults, we applied stream runtime monitoring techniques within the DLR ARTIS (Autonomous Research Testbed for Intelligent System) family of unmanned aircraft. We present our experience from specification elicitation, instrumentation, offline log-file analysis, and online monitoring on the flight computer on a test rig. The debugging and health management support through stream runtime monitoring techniques have proven highly beneficial for system design and development. At the same time, the project has identified usability improvements to the specification language, and has influenced the design of the language.
Deep Autoencoding Models for Unsupervised Anomaly Segmentation in Brain MR Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Reliably modeling normality and differentiating abnormal appearances from normal cases is a very appealing approach for detecting pathologies in medical images. A plethora of such unsupervised anomaly detection approaches has been made in the medical domain, based on statistical methods, content-based retrieval, clustering and recently also deep learning. Previous approaches towards deep unsupervised anomaly detection model patches of normal anatomy with variants of Autoencoders or GANs, and detect anomalies either as outliers in the learned feature space or from large reconstruction errors. In contrast to these patch-based approaches, we show that deep spatial autoencoding models can be efficiently used to capture normal anatomical variability of entire 2D brain MR images. A variety of experiments on real MR data containing MS lesions corroborates our hypothesis that we can detect and even delineate anomalies in brain MR images by simply comparing input images to their reconstruction. Results show that constraints on the latent space and adversarial training can further improve the segmentation performance over standard deep representation learning.
Provision for Guaranteed Inertial Response in Diesel-Wind Systems via Model Reference Control
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

Frequency performance has been a crucial issue for islanded microgrids. On the one hand, most distributed energy resources (DER) are converter-interfaced and do not inherently respond to frequency variations. On the other hand, current inertia emulation approach cannot provide guaranteed response. In this paper, a model reference control based inertia emulation strategy is proposed for diesel-wind systems. Desired inertia can be precisely emulated through the proposed strategy. A typical frequency response model with parametric inertia is set to be the reference model. A measurement at a specific location delivers the information about the disturbance acting on the diesel-wind system to the reference model. The objective is for the speed of the diesel generator to track the reference so that the desired inertial response is realized. In addition, polytopic parameter uncertainty will be considered. The control strategy is configured in different ways according to different operating points. The parameters of the reference model are scheduled to ensure adequate frequency response under a pre-defined worst case. The controller is implemented in a nonlinear three-phase diesel-wind system fed microgrid using the Simulink software platform. The results show that exact synthetic inertia can be emulated and adequate frequency response is achieved.
Expressway visibility estimation based on image entropy and piecewise stationary time series analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Vision-based methods for visibility estimation can play a critical role in reducing traffic accidents caused by fog and haze. To overcome the disadvantages of current visibility estimation methods, we present a novel data-driven approach based on Gaussian image entropy and piecewise stationary time series analysis (SPEV). This is the first time that Gaussian image entropy is used for estimating atmospheric visibility. To lessen the impact of landscape and sunshine illuminance on visibility estimation, we used region of interest (ROI) analysis and took into account relative ratios of image entropy, to improve estimation accuracy. We assume fog and haze cause blurred images and that fog and haze can be considered as a piecewise stationary signal. We used piecewise stationary time series analysis to construct the piecewise causal relationship between image entropy and visibility. To obtain a real-world visibility measure during fog and haze, a subjective assessment was established through a study with 36 subjects who performed visibility observations. Finally, a total of two million videos were used for training the SPEV model and validate its effectiveness. The videos were collected from the constantly foggy and hazy Tongqi expressway in Jiangsu, China. The contrast model of visibility estimation was used for algorithm performance comparison, and the validation results of the SPEV model were encouraging as 99.14% of the relative errors were less than 10%.
Reversible Computation in Petri Nets
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2018
Year: 2018

Reversible computation is an unconventional form of computing where any executed sequence of operations can be executed in reverse at any point during computation. It has recently been attracting increasing attention in various research communities as on the one hand it promises low-power computation and on the other hand it is inherent or of interest in a variety of applications. In this paper, we propose a reversible approach to Petri nets by introducing machinery and associated operational semantics to tackle the challenges of the three main forms of reversibility, namely, backtracking, causal reversing and out-of-causal-order reversing. Our proposal concerns a variation of Petri nets where tokens are persistent and are distinguished from each other by an identity which allows for transitions to be reversed spontaneously in or out of causal order. Our design decisions are influenced by applications in biochemistry but the methodology can be applied to a wide range of problems that feature reversibility. In particular, to demonstrate the applicability of our approach we use an example of a biochemical system and an example of a transaction-processing system both of which naturally embed reversible behaviour.
3D G-CNNs for Pulmonary Nodule Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) require a large amount of annotated data to learn from, which is often difficult to obtain in the medical domain. In this paper we show that the sample complexity of CNNs can be significantly improved by using 3D roto-translation group convolutions (G-Convs) instead of the more conventional translational convolutions. These 3D G-CNNs were applied to the problem of false positive reduction for pulmonary nodule detection, and proved to be substantially more effective in terms of performance, sensitivity to malignant nodules, and speed of convergence compared to a strong and comparable baseline architecture with regular convolutions, data augmentation and a similar number of parameters. For every dataset size tested, the G-CNN achieved a FROC score close to the CNN trained on ten times more data.
Comments on "Defeating HaTCh: Building Malicious IP Cores"
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

Recently, Haider et al. introduced the first rigorous hardware Trojan detection algorithm called HaTCh. The foundation of HaTCh is a formal framework of hardware Trojan design, which formally characterizes all the hardware Trojans based on its properties. However, Bhardwaj et al. recently published one paper "Defeating HaTCh: Building Malicious IP Cores", which incorrectly claims that their newly designed hardware Trojan can evade the detection by HaTCh. In this paper, we explain why the claim of "defeating HaTCh" is incorrect, and we clarify several common misunderstandings about HaTCh.
Precise Temporal Action Localization by Evolving Temporal Proposals
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Locating actions in long untrimmed videos has been a challenging problem in video content analysis. The performances of existing action localization approaches remain unsatisfactory in precisely determining the beginning and the end of an action. Imitating the human perception procedure with observations and refinements, we propose a novel three-phase action localization framework. Our framework is embedded with an Actionness Network to generate initial proposals through frame-wise similarity grouping, and then a Refinement Network to conduct boundary adjustment on these proposals. Finally, the refined proposals are sent to a Localization Network for further fine-grained location regression. The whole process can be deemed as multi-stage refinement using a novel non-local pyramid feature under various temporal granularities. We evaluate our framework on THUMOS14 benchmark and obtain a significant improvement over the state-of-the-arts approaches. Specifically, the performance gain is remarkable under precise localization with high IoU thresholds. Our proposed framework achieves mAP@IoU=0.5 of 34.2%.
Activity Self-Tracking with Smart Phones: How to Approach Odd Measurements?
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2018
Year: 2018

Tracking physical activity reliably is becoming central to many research efforts. In the last years specialized hardware has been proposed to measure movement. However, asking study participants to carry additional devices has drawbacks. We focus on using mobile devices as motion sensors. In the paper we detail several issues that we found while using this technique in a longitudinal study involving hundreds of participants for several months. We hope to sparkle a lively discussion at the workshop and attract interest in this method from other researchers.
Neural Trajectory Analysis of Recurrent Neural Network In Handwriting Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2018
Year: 2018

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are capable of learning to generate highly realistic, online handwritings in a wide variety of styles from a given text sequence. Furthermore, the networks can generate handwritings in the style of a particular writer when the network states are primed with a real sequence of pen movements from the writer. However, how populations of neurons in the RNN collectively achieve such performance still remains poorly understood. To tackle this problem, we investigated learned representations in RNNs by extracting low-dimensional, neural trajectories that summarize the activity of a population of neurons in the network during individual syntheses of handwritings. The neural trajectories show that different writing styles are encoded in different subspaces inside an internal space of the network. Within each subspace, different characters of the same style are represented as different state dynamics. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of analyzing the neural trajectory for intuitive understanding of how the RNNs work.
Quality Prediction in Injection Molding
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

Injection molded part quality can be improved by precise process adjustment, which could rely on in-situ measurements of part quality. Geometrical and appearance quality (visually and sensory) requirements are increasing. However, direct measurement is often not feasible industrially. Therefore, process control must rely on a prediction of parts quality attributes. This study compares prediction performances of diverse neural networks architectures with "classical" regression algorithms. Dataset comes from inline industrial measurements. Regression was performed on 97 scalar statistical features extracted from multiple acquisitions sources: thermographic images and analog signals. Haralick features were extracted. Convolutional Neural Networks were trained on thermographic images and Long Short Term Memory networks were trained on raw signals. Although the dataset was small, neural networks show better predictions scores than other regression algorithms.
Dynamic Modeling, Stability, and Control of Power Systems with Distributed Energy Resources
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

This article presents a suite of new control designs for next-generation electric smart grids. The future grid will consist of thousands of non-conventional renewable generation sources such as wind, solar, and energy storage. These new components are collectively referred to as distributed energy resources (DER). The article presents a comprehensive list of dynamic models for DERs, and shows their coupling with the conventional generators and loads. It then presents several innovative control designs that can be used for facilitating large-scale DER integration. Ideas from decentralized retrofit control and distributed sparsity-promoting optimal control are used for developing these designs, followed by illustrations on an IEEE power system test model.
Distributed Load-Side Control: Coping with Variation of Renewable Generations
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

This paper addresses the distributed frequency control problem in a multi-area power system taking into account of unknown time-varying power imbalance. Particularly, fast controllable loads are utilized to restore system frequency under changing power imbalance in an optimal manner. The imbalanced power causing frequency deviation is decomposed into three parts: a known constant part, an unknown low-frequency variation and a high-frequency residual. The known steady part is usually the prediction of power imbalance. The variation may result from the fluctuation of renewable resources, electric vehicle charging, etc., which is usually unknown to operators. The high-frequency residual is usually unknown and treated as an external disturbance. Correspondingly, in this paper, we resolve the following three problems in different timescales: 1) allocate the steady part of power imbalance economically; 2) mitigate the effect of unknown low-frequency power variation locally; 3) attenuate unknown high-frequency disturbances. To this end, a distributed controller combining consensus method with adaptive internal model control is proposed. We first prove that the closed-loop system is asymptotically stable and converges to the optimal solution of an optimization problem if the external disturbance is not included. We then prove that the power variation can be mitigated accurately. Furthermore, we show that the closed-loop system is robust against both parameter uncertainty and external disturbances. The New England system is used to verify the efficacy of our design.
Improving the Representation and Conversion of Mathematical Formulae by Considering their Textual Context
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2018
Year: 2018

Mathematical formulae represent complex semantic information in a concise form. Especially in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, mathematical formulae are crucial to communicate information, e.g., in scientific papers, and to perform computations using computer algebra systems. Enabling computers to access the information encoded in mathematical formulae requires machine-readable formats that can represent both the presentation and content, i.e., the semantics, of formulae. Exchanging such information between systems additionally requires conversion methods for mathematical representation formats. We analyze how the semantic enrichment of formulae improves the format conversion process and show that considering the textual context of formulae reduces the error rate of such conversions. Our main contributions are: (1) providing an openly available benchmark dataset for the mathematical format conversion task consisting of a newly created test collection, an extensive, manually curated gold standard and task-specific evaluation metrics; (2) performing a quantitative evaluation of state-of-the-art tools for mathematical format conversions; (3) presenting a new approach that considers the textual context of formulae to reduce the error rate for mathematical format conversions. Our benchmark dataset facilitates future research on mathematical format conversions as well as research on many problems in mathematical information retrieval. Because we annotated and linked all components of formulae, e.g., identifiers, operators and other entities, to Wikidata entries, the gold standard can, for instance, be used to train methods for formula concept discovery and recognition. Such methods can then be applied to improve mathematical information retrieval systems, e.g., for semantic formula search, recommendation of mathematical content, or detection of mathematical plagiarism.
On the Complexity of Team Logic and its Two-Variable Fragment
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2018
Year: 2018

We study the logic FO(~), the extension of first-order logic with team semantics by unrestricted Boolean negation. It was recently shown axiomatizable, but otherwise has not yet received much attention in questions of computational complexity. In this paper, we consider its two-variable fragment FO2(~) and prove that its satisfiability problem is decidable, and in fact complete for the recently introduced non-elementary class TOWER(poly). Moreover, we classify the complexity of model checking of FO(~) with respect to the number of variables and the quantifier rank, and prove a dichotomy between PSPACE- and ATIME-ALT(exp, poly)-completeness. To achieve the lower bounds, we propose a translation from modal team logic MTL to FO2(~) that extends the well-known standard translation from modal logic ML to FO2. For the upper bounds, we translate to a fragment of second-order logic.
Representing smooth functions as compositions of near-identity functions with implications for deep network optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

We show that any smooth bi-Lipschitz $h$ can be represented exactly as a composition $h_m \circ ... \circ h_1$ of functions $h_1,...,h_m$ that are close to the identity in the sense that each $\left(h_i-\mathrm{Id}\right)$ is Lipschitz, and the Lipschitz constant decreases inversely with the number $m$ of functions composed. This implies that $h$ can be represented to any accuracy by a deep residual network whose nonlinear layers compute functions with a small Lipschitz constant. Next, we consider nonlinear regression with a composition of near-identity nonlinear maps. We show that, regarding Fréchet derivatives with respect to the $h_1,...,h_m$, any critical point of a quadratic criterion in this near-identity region must be a global minimizer. In contrast, if we consider derivatives with respect to parameters of a fixed-size residual network with sigmoid activation functions, we show that there are near-identity critical points that are suboptimal, even in the realizable case. Informally, this means that functional gradient methods for residual networks cannot get stuck at suboptimal critical points corresponding to near-identity layers, whereas parametric gradient methods for sigmoidal residual networks suffer from suboptimal critical points in the near-identity region.