OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Neuromodulated Patience for Robot and Self-Driving Vehicle Navigation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

Robots and self-driving vehicles face a number of challenges when navigating through real environments. Successful navigation in dynamic environments requires prioritizing subtasks and monitoring resources. Animals are under similar constraints. It has been shown that the neuromodulator serotonin regulates impulsiveness and patience in animals. In the present paper, we take inspiration from the serotonergic system and apply it to the task of robot navigation. In a set of outdoor experiments, we show how changing the level of patience can affect the amount of time the robot will spend searching for a desired location. To navigate GPS compromised environments, we introduce a deep reinforcement learning paradigm in which the robot learns to follow sidewalks. This may further regulate a tradeoff between a smooth long route and a rough shorter route. Using patience as a parameter may be beneficial for autonomous systems under time pressure.
Optimized Routing and Spectrum Assignment for Video Communication over an Elastic Optical Network
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

Elastic optical network (EON) efficiently utilize spectral resources for optical fiber communication by allocating the minimum necessary bandwidth to client demands. On the other hand, network traffic has been continuously increasing due to the wide penetration of video streaming services, so the efficient and cost-effective use of available bandwidth plays an important role in improving service provisioning. In this work, we formulate and solve an optimization problem to perform routing and spectrum assignment (RSA) in EON with focus on video streaming. In this formulation, EON and video constraints such as spectrum fragmentation and received video quality are considered jointly. In this way, we utilize a machine learning (ML) technique to estimate the video quality versus channel state. The proposed algorithm is evaluated over two benchmarks fiber-optic network, namely NSFNET and US-backbone using numerical simulations based on random traffic models. The results reveal that the mean optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) for video content data in the receiver is remarkably higher than in non-video data. This is while the blocking ratio is the same for both data types.
Node Injection Attacks on Graphs via Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Real-world graph applications, such as advertisements and product recommendations make profits based on accurately classify the label of the nodes. However, in such scenarios, there are high incentives for the adversaries to attack such graph to reduce the node classification performance. Previous work on graph adversarial attacks focus on modifying existing graph structures, which is infeasible in most real-world applications. In contrast, it is more practical to inject adversarial nodes into existing graphs, which can also potentially reduce the performance of the classifier. In this paper, we study the novel node injection poisoning attacks problem which aims to poison the graph. We describe a reinforcement learning based method, namely NIPA, to sequentially modify the adversarial information of the injected nodes. We report the results of experiments using several benchmark data sets that show the superior performance of the proposed method NIPA, relative to the existing state-of-the-art methods.
Unclogging Our Arteries: Using Human-Inspired Signals to Disambiguate Navigational Intentions
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

People are proficient at communicating their intentions in order to avoid conflicts when navigating in narrow, crowded environments. In many situations mobile robots lack both the ability to interpret human intentions and the ability to clearly communicate their own intentions to people sharing their space. This work addresses the second of these points, leveraging insights about how people implicitly communicate with each other through observations of behaviors such as gaze to provide mobile robots with better social navigation skills. In a preliminary human study, the importance of gaze as a signal used by people to interpret each-other's intentions during navigation of a shared space is observed. This study is followed by the development of a virtual agent head which is mounted to the top of the chassis of the BWIBot mobile robot platform. Contrasting the performance of the virtual agent head against an LED turn signal demonstrates that the naturalistic, implicit gaze cue is more easily interpreted than the LED turn signal.
Reversible Models for Wireless Multi-Channel Multiple Access
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

This paper presents a network layer model for a wireless multiple access system with both persistent and non-persistent users. There is a single access point with multiple identical channels. Each user who wants to send a file first scans a subset of the channels to find one that is idle. If at least one idle channel is found, the user transmits a file over that channel. If no idle channel is found, a persistent user will repeat the access attempt at a later time, while a non-persistent user will leave. This is a useful mathematical model for "coffee shop" situations where a group of persistent users stay near an access point for an extended period of time while non-persistent users come and go. Users have heterogeneous activity behavior, file upload rates, and service durations. The system is a complex multi-dimensional Markov chain. The steady state probabilities are found by exploiting a latent reversibility property. This enables simple expressions for throughput and blocking probability.
Plackett-Luce model for learning-to-rank task
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2019
Year: 2019

List-wise based learning to rank methods are generally supposed to have better performance than point- and pair-wise based. However, in real-world applications, state-of-the-art systems are not from list-wise based camp. In this paper, we propose a new non-linear algorithm in the list-wise based framework called ListMLE, which uses the Plackett-Luce (PL) loss. Our experiments are conducted on the two largest publicly available real-world datasets, Yahoo challenge 2010 and Microsoft 30K. This is the first time in the single model level for a list-wise based system to match or overpass state-of-the-art systems in real-world datasets.
Emu: Enhancing Multilingual Sentence Embeddings with Semantic Specialization
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

We present Emu, a system that semantically enhances multilingual sentence embeddings. Our framework fine-tunes pre-trained multilingual sentence embeddings using two main components: a semantic classifier and a language discriminator. The semantic classifier improves the semantic similarity of related sentences, whereas the language discriminator enhances the multilinguality of the embeddings via multilingual adversarial training. Our experimental results based on several language pairs show that our specialized embeddings outperform the state-of-the-art multilingual sentence embedding model on the task of cross-lingual intent classification using only monolingual labeled data.
Multitask Learning to Improve Egocentric Action Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

In this work we employ multitask learning to capitalize on the structure that exists in related supervised tasks to train complex neural networks. It allows training a network for multiple objectives in parallel, in order to improve performance on at least one of them by capitalizing on a shared representation that is developed to accommodate more information than it otherwise would for a single task. We employ this idea to tackle action recognition in egocentric videos by introducing additional supervised tasks. We consider learning the verbs and nouns from which action labels consist of and predict coordinates that capture the hand locations and the gaze-based visual saliency for all the frames of the input video segments. This forces the network to explicitly focus on cues from secondary tasks that it might otherwise have missed resulting in improved inference. Our experiments on EPIC-Kitchens and EGTEA Gaze+ show consistent improvements when training with multiple tasks over the single-task baseline. Furthermore, in EGTEA Gaze+ we outperform the state-of-the-art in action recognition by 3.84%. Apart from actions, our method produces accurate hand and gaze estimations as side tasks, without requiring any additional input at test time other than the RGB video clips.
Physical Layer Security in UAV Systems: Challenges and Opportunities
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) wireless communications have experienced an upsurge of interest in both military and civilian applications, due to its high mobility, low cost, on-demand deployment, and inherent line-of-sight (LoS) air-to-ground channels. However, these benefits also make UAV wireless communication systems vulnerable to malicious eavesdropping attacks. In this article, we aim to examine the physical layer security issues in UAV systems. In particular, passive and active eavesdroppings are two primary attacks in UAV systems. We provide an overview on emerging techniques, such as trajectory design, resource allocation, and cooperative UAVs, to fight against both types of eavesdroppings in UAV wireless communication systems. Moreover, the applications of non-orthogonal multiple access, multiple-input and multiple-output, and millimeter wave in UAV systems are also proposed to improve the system spectral efficiency and to guarantee security simultaneously. Finally, we discuss some potential research directions and challenges in terms of physical layer security in UAV systems.
Centrality in dynamic competition networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2019
Year: 2019

Competition networks are formed via adversarial interactions between actors. The Dynamic Competition Hypothesis predicts that influential actors in competition networks should have a large number of common out-neighbors with many other nodes. We empirically study this idea as a centrality score and find the measure predictive of importance in several real-world networks including food webs, conflict networks, and voting data from Survivor.
Hijacking Routes in Payment Channel Networks: A Predictability Tradeoff
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

Off-chain transaction networks can mitigate the scalability issues of today's trustless electronic cash systems such as Bitcoin. However, these peer-to-peer networks also introduce a new attack surface which is not well-understood today. This paper identifies and analyzes, a novel Denial-of-Service attack which is based on route hijacking, i.e., which exploits the way transactions are routed and executed along the created channels of the network. This attack is conceptually interesting as even a limited attacker that manipulates the topology through the creation of new channels can navigate tradeoffs related to the way it attacks the network. Furthermore, the attack also highlights a fundamental design tradeoff for the defender (who determines its own routes): to become less predictable and hence secure, a rational node has to pay higher fees to nodes that forward its payments. We find that the three most common implementations for payment channels in Bitcoin (lnd, C-lightning, Eclair) approach routing differently. We begin by surveying the current state of the Lightning network and explore the routes chosen by these implementations. We find that in the current network nearly 60\% of all routes pass through only five nodes, while 80\% go through only 10 nodes. Thus, a relatively small number of colluding nodes can deny service to a large fraction of the network. We then turn to study an external attacker who creates links to the network and draws more routes through its nodes by asking for lower fees. We find that just five new links are enough to draw the majority (65\% - 75\%) of the traffic regardless of the implementation being used. The cost of creating these links is very low. We discuss the differences between implementations and eventually derive our own suggested routing policy, which is based on a novel combination of existing approaches.
A Stochastic Proximal Point Algorithm for Saddle-Point Problems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

We consider saddle point problems which objective functions are the average of $n$ strongly convex-concave individual components. Recently, researchers exploit variance reduction methods to solve such problems and achieve linear-convergence guarantees. However, these methods have a slow convergence when the condition number of the problem is very large. In this paper, we propose a stochastic proximal point algorithm, which accelerates the variance reduction method SAGA for saddle point problems. Compared with the catalyst framework, our algorithm reduces a logarithmic term of condition number for the iteration complexity. We adopt our algorithm to policy evaluation and the empirical results show that our method is much more efficient than state-of-the-art methods.
Discovering the Sweet Spot of Human-Computer Configurations: A Case Study in Information Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2019
Year: 2019

Interactive intelligent systems, i.e., interactive systems that employ AI technologies, are currently present in many parts of our social, public and political life. An issue reoccurring often in the development of these systems is the question regarding the level of appropriate human and computer contributions. Engineers and designers lack a way of systematically defining and delimiting possible options for designing such systems in terms of levels of automation. In this paper, we propose, apply and reflect on a method for human-computer configuration design. It supports the systematic investigation of the design space for developing an interactive intelligent system. We illustrate our method with a use case in the context of collaborative ideation. Here, we developed a tool for information extraction from idea content. A challenge was to find the right level of algorithmic support, whereby the quality of the information extraction should be as high as possible, but, at the same time, the human effort should be low. Such contradicting goals are often an issue in system development; thus, our method proposed helped us to conceptualize and explore the design space. Based on a critical reflection on our method application, we want to offer a complementary perspective to the value-centered design of interactive intelligent systems. Our overarching goal is to contribute to the design of so-called hybrid systems where humans and computers are partners.
Hybrid Neural Models For Sequence Modelling: The Best Of Three Worlds
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

We propose a neural architecture with the main characteristics of the most successful neural models of the last years: bidirectional RNNs, encoder-decoder, and the Transformer model. Evaluation on three sequence labelling tasks yields results that are close to the state-of-the-art for all tasks and better than it for some of them, showing the pertinence of this hybrid architecture for this kind of tasks.
TextSR: Content-Aware Text Super-Resolution Guided by Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Scene text recognition has witnessed rapid development with the advance of convolutional neural networks. Nonetheless, most of the previous methods may not work well in recognizing text with low resolution which is often seen in natural scene images. An intuitive solution is to introduce super-resolution techniques as pre-processing. However, conventional super-resolution methods in the literature mainly focus on reconstructing the detailed texture of natural images, which typically do not work well for text due to the unique characteristics of text. To tackle these problems, in this work, we propose a content-aware text super-resolution network to generate the information desired for text recognition. In particular, we design an end-to-end network that can perform super-resolution and text recognition simultaneously. Different from previous super-resolution methods, we use the loss of text recognition as the Text Perceptual Loss to guide the training of the super-resolution network, and thus it pays more attention to the text content, rather than the irrelevant background area. Extensive experiments on several challenging benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in restoring a sharp high-resolution image from a small blurred one, and show that the recognition performance clearly boosts up the performance of text recognizer. To our knowledge, this is the first work focusing on text super-resolution. Code will be released in https://github.com/xieenze/TextSR.
Exploring the Behavior of Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI) on IBM Power8+ Architecture and FlashSystem 900
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

The Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI) is a general term for the infrastructure that provides high throughput and low latency path to the flash storage connected to the IBM POWER 8+ System. CAPI accelerator card is attached coherently as a peer to the Power8+ processor. This removes the overhead and complexity of the IO subsystem and allows the accelerator to operate as part of an application. In this paper, we present the results of experiments on IBM FlashSystem900 (FS900) with CAPI accelerator card using the "CAPI-Flash IBM Data Engine for NoSQL Software" Library. This library provides the application, a direct access to the underlying flash storage through user space APIs, to manage and access the data in flash. This offloads kernel IO driver functionality to dedicated CAPI FPGA accelerator hardware. We conducted experiments to analyze the performance of FS900 with CAPI accelerator card, using the Key Value Layer APIs, employing NASA's MODIS Land Surface Reflectance dataset as a large dataset use case. We performed Read and Write operations on datasets of size ranging from 1MB to 3TB by varying the number of threads. We then compared this performance with other heterogeneous storage and memory devices such as NVM, SSD and RAM, without using the CAPI Accelerator in synchronous and asynchronous file IO modes of operations. The results indicate that FS900 & CAPI, together with the metadata cache in RAM, delivers the highest IO/s and OP/s for read operations. This was higher than just using RAM, along with utilizing lesser CPU resources. Among FS900, SSD and NVM, FS900 had the highest write IO/s. Another important observation is that, when the size of the input dataset exceeds the capacity of RAM, and when the data access is non-uniform and sparse, FS900 with CAPI would be a cost-effective alternative.
Efficient multiscale methods for the semiclassical Schrödinger equation with time-dependent potentials
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2019
Year: 2019

The semiclassical Schrödinger equation with time-dependent potentials is an important model to study electron dynamics under external controls in the mean-field picture. In this paper, we propose two multiscale finite element methods to solve this problem. In the offline stage, for the first approach, the localized multiscale basis functions are constructed using sparse compression of the Hamiltonian operator at the initial time; for the latter, basis functions are further enriched using a greedy algorithm for the sparse compression of the Hamiltonian operator at later times. In the online stage, the Schrödinger equation is approximated by these localized multiscale basis in space and is solved by the Crank-Nicolson method in time. These multiscale basis have compact supports in space, leading to the sparsity of stiffness matrix, and thus the computational complexity of these two methods in the online stage is comparable to that of the standard finite element method. However, the spatial mesh size in multiscale finite element methods is $ H=\mathcal{O}(ε) $, while $H=\mathcal{O}(ε^{3/2})$ in the standard finite element method, where $ε$ is the semiclassical parameter. By a number of numerical examples in 1D and 2D, for approximately the same number of basis, we show that the approximation error of the multiscale finite element method is at least two orders of magnitude smaller than that of the standard finite element method, and the enrichment further reduces the error by another one order of magnitude.
Situational Awareness Enhanced through Social Media Analytics: A Survey of First Responders
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2019
Year: 2019

Social media data has been increasingly used to facilitate situational awareness during events and emergencies such as natural disasters. While researchers have investigated several methods to summarize, visualize or mine the data for analysis, first responders have not been able to fully leverage research advancements largely due to the gap between academic research and deployed, functional systems. In this paper, we explore the opportunities and barriers for the effective use of social media data from first responders' perspective. We present the summary of several detailed interviews with first responders on their use of social media for situational awareness. We further assess the impact of SMART-a social media visual analytics system-on first responder operations.
A prototype for a serious digital game to teach linguistic ontologies
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2019
Year: 2019

The objective of ontologies is to increase the compression of a given domain by eliminating interpretation problems. Among kinds of ontologies are linguistics ontologies which are ontologies used to simplify the interface between domain knowledge and linguistic components. Digital games have received increasing interest from educators in recent years for their potential to enhance the language learning and linguistic learning experience. Within the literature are games to teach ontologies of a specific domain, and games that use ontologies to facilitate the understanding of a given domain. Other educational games teach linguistics or vocabulary in contexts in which language is useful and meaningful. Although games help to understand difficult topics, the use of games that seek to meet the learning objectives of linguistics is not very popular and those focused on teaching linguistic ontologies are scarce. To solve the lack of the recreational resource for teaching linguistics in this document a prototype of a digital game called onto-ling is proposed. The goal is for the player to learn the relationship between concepts according to semantics, types of concepts and relationships through a game of levels.
On the design of an innovative solution for increasing hazardous materials transportation safety
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2019
Year: 2019

Transportation of hazardous materials represent a high risk operation all over the world. Flammable substances such as oil, kerosene, hydrocarbons, ammonium nitrate or toxic products are shipped every day on busy roads by trucks. An innovative solution for increasing hazardous materials transportation safety is presented in this paper. The solution integrates three systems: one mounted on the truck that can alert authorities in case of an accident, one portable system for quick identification of the carried substances and intervention method and a component for real-time road monitoring. The proposed solution is based on RFID card with a special memory structure presented in this paper