OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A probabilistic tour of visual attention and gaze shift computational models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

In this paper a number of problems are considered which are related to the modelling of eye guidance under visual attention in a natural setting. From a crude discussion of a variety of available models spelled in probabilistic terms, it appears that current approaches in computational vision are hitherto far from achieving the goal of an active observer relying upon eye guidance to accomplish real-world tasks. We argue that this challenging goal not only requires to embody, in a principled way, the problem of eye guidance within the action/perception loop, but to face the inextricable link tying up visual attention, emotion and executive control, in so far as recent neurobiological findings are weighed up.
Attribute Recognition from Adaptive Parts
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

Previous part-based attribute recognition approaches perform part detection and attribute recognition in separate steps. The parts are not optimized for attribute recognition and therefore could be sub-optimal. We present an end-to-end deep learning approach to overcome the limitation. It generates object parts from key points and perform attribute recognition accordingly, allowing adaptive spatial transform of the parts. Both key point estimation and attribute recognition are learnt jointly in a multi-task setting. Extensive experiments on two datasets verify the efficacy of proposed end-to-end approach.
On the Computational Complexities of Three Privacy Measures for Large Networks Under Active Attack
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2016
Year: 2016

With the arrival of modern internet era, large public networks of various types have come to existence to benefit the society as a whole and several research areas such as sociology, economics and geography in particular. However, the societal and research benefits of these networks have also given rise to potentially significant privacy issues in the sense that malicious entities may violate the privacy of the users of such a network by analyzing the network and deliberately using such privacy violations for deleterious purposes. Such considerations have given rise to a new active research area that deals with the quantification of privacy of users in large networks and the corresponding investigation of computational complexity issues of computing such quantified privacy measures. In this paper, we formalize three such privacy measures for large networks and provide non-trivial theoretical computational complexity results for computing these measures. Our results show the first two measures can be computed efficiently, whereas the third measure is provably hard to compute within a logarithmic approximation factor. Furthermore, we also provide computational complexity results for the case when the privacy requirement of the network is severely restricted, including an efficient logarithmic approximation.
Synthesising Strategy Improvement and Recursive Algorithms for Solving 2.5 Player Parity Games
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2016
Year: 2016

2.5 player parity games combine the challenges posed by 2.5 player reachability games and the qualitative analysis of parity games. These two types of problems are best approached with different types of algorithms: strategy improvement algorithms for 2.5 player reachability games and recursive algorithms for the qualitative analysis of parity games. We present a method that - in contrast to existing techniques - tackles both aspects with the best suited approach and works exclusively on the 2.5 player game itself. The resulting technique is powerful enough to handle games with several million states.
Empirical study of the role of the topology in spreading on communication networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2016
Year: 2016

Topological aspects, like community structure, and temporal activity patterns, like burstiness, have been shown to severly influence the speed of spreading in temporal networks. We study the influence of the topology on the susceptible-infected (SI) spreading on time stamped communication networks, as obtained from a dataset of mobile phone records. We consider city level networks with intra- and inter-city connections. The networks using only intra-city links are usually sparse, where the spreading depends mainly on the average degree. The inter-city links serve as bridges in spreading, speeding up considerably the process. We demonstrate the effect also on model simulations.
CUNet: A Compact Unsupervised Network for Image Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

In this paper, we propose a compact network called CUNet (compact unsupervised network) to counter the image classification challenge. Different from the traditional convolutional neural networks learning filters by the time-consuming stochastic gradient descent, CUNet learns the filter bank from diverse image patches with the simple K-means, which significantly avoids the requirement of scarce labeled training images, reduces the training consumption, and maintains the high discriminative ability. Besides, we propose a new pooling method named weighted pooling considering the different weight values of adjacent neurons, which helps to improve the robustness to small image distortions. In the output layer, CUNet integrates the feature maps gained in the last hidden layer, and straightforwardly computes histograms in non-overlapped blocks. To reduce feature redundancy, we implement the max-pooling operation on adjacent blocks to select the most competitive features. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the state-of-the-art classification performances with CUNet on CIFAR-10, STL-10, MNIST and Caltech101 benchmark datasets.
Indexing dif/2
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2016
Year: 2016

Many Prolog programs are unnecessarily impure because of inadequate means to express syntactic inequality. While the frequently provided built-in `dif/2` is able to correctly describe expected answers, its direct use in programs often leads to overly complex and inefficient definitions --- mainly due to the lack of adequate indexing mechanisms. We propose to overcome these problems by using a new predicate that subsumes both equality and inequality via reification. Code complexity is reduced with a monotonic, higher-order if-then-else construct based on `call/N`. For comparable correct uses of impure definitions, our approach is as determinate and similarly efficient as its impure counterparts.
Guided Alignment Training for Topic-Aware Neural Machine Translation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2016
Year: 2016

In this paper, we propose an effective way for biasing the attention mechanism of a sequence-to-sequence neural machine translation (NMT) model towards the well-studied statistical word alignment models. We show that our novel guided alignment training approach improves translation quality on real-life e-commerce texts consisting of product titles and descriptions, overcoming the problems posed by many unknown words and a large type/token ratio. We also show that meta-data associated with input texts such as topic or category information can significantly improve translation quality when used as an additional signal to the decoder part of the network. With both novel features, the BLEU score of the NMT system on a product title set improves from 18.6 to 21.3%. Even larger MT quality gains are obtained through domain adaptation of a general domain NMT system to e-commerce data. The developed NMT system also performs well on the IWSLT speech translation task, where an ensemble of four variant systems outperforms the phrase-based baseline by 2.1% BLEU absolute.
Bag of Tricks for Efficient Text Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2016
Year: 2016

This paper explores a simple and efficient baseline for text classification. Our experiments show that our fast text classifier fastText is often on par with deep learning classifiers in terms of accuracy, and many orders of magnitude faster for training and evaluation. We can train fastText on more than one billion words in less than ten minutes using a standard multicore~CPU, and classify half a million sentences among~312K classes in less than a minute.
Hierarchical Decentralized Robust Optimal Design for Homogeneous Linear Multi-Agent Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2016
Year: 2016

This paper proposes novel approaches to design hierarchical decentralized robust controllers for homogeneous linear multi-agent systems (MASs) perturbed by disturbances/noise. Firstly, based on LQR method, we present a systematic procedure to design hierarchical decentralized optimal stabilizing controllers for MASs without disturbances/noise. Next, a method for deriving reduced-order hierarchical decentralized stabilizing controllers is presented by suitable selections of the weighting matrices in the LQR performance index. Secondly, the hierarchical decentralized robust controller designs in terms of $H_{\infty}$ and $H_{2}$ norms are introduced, which include two different scenarios namely general and LQR-based synthesis. For the general synthesis, the robust controller gains are computed as solutions of a distributed convex optimization problem with LMI constraints. On the other hand, for the LQR-based design, the robust controller gains obtained from the general synthesis are further verified as LQR stabilizing gains to be unified with the LQR-based design when there are no disturbances/noise. This results in a hierarchical decentralized inverse optimal control problem, for which we will propose a new method to resolve it. Finally, several numerical examples are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.
The symbol-pair distance distribution of repeated-root cyclic codes over $\mathbb{F}_{p^m}$
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

Symbol-pair codes are proposed to protect against pair errors in symbol-pair read channels. One of the most important task in symbol-pair coding theory is to determine the minimum pair-distance of symbol-pair codes. In this paper, we investigate the symbol-pair distances of cyclic codes of length $p^e$ over $\mathbb{F}_{p^m}$. The exact symbol-pair distances of all cyclic codes of such length are determined.
Intra-cluster Characteristics of 28 GHz Wireless Channel in Urban Micro Street Canyon
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

This paper investigates intra-cluster channel characteristics of non line-of-sight (NLOS) 28 GHz channels in street canyon scenarios. These channel characteristics include cluster numbers, number of subpaths within each cluster, intra-cluster delay spreads, and intra-cluster angular spreads. Both measurement and ray tracing results are presented and compared. Furthermore, distribution fittings are performed and models and parameters for different intra-cluster channel characteristics are proposed.
Decentralised Resource Allocation and Coordination for 5G Cellular Communication Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2016
Year: 2016

In order to cope with the ever increasing traffic load that networks will need to support, a new approach for planning cellular networks deployments should be followed. Traditionally, cell association and resource allocation has been based on the received signal power but this approach seems to be inadequate regarding the brewing of heterogeneous networks. In this work, we first implement a network simulator in order to test new cell associacion and resource allocation techniques. Then, we pose the network utility maximisation problem, reformulating the Downlink and Uplink Decoupling (DUDe) scheme under the framework and tools of mathematical optimisation. We derive the explicit solution of the problem under fixed and non-fixed association policy so as to propose and develope both centralised and decentralised algorithms capable of solving cell association and resource allocation problems. We observe that the decentralised approach requires low computational effort and represents a significant gain in the overall performance of the network.
Optimizing Access Mechanisms for QoS Provisioning in Hardware Constrained Dynamic Spectrum Access
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

One of the major challenges in Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) systems is to guarantee a required level of Quality of Service (QoS) to secondary users of the spectrum. In this paper, we propose efficient algorithms for deriving optimal policies for the sensing / transmitting trade-off in hardware-constrained DSA systems. Unlike previous approaches which seek to maximize mean data rate for the secondary users, the proposed algorithms derive policies which minimize the probability of excessive queuing delays. Large Deviations (LD) asymptotics are used to approximate the probability of interest and policies maximizing the associated LD exponent are proposed. Although dynamic programming is not able to identify the optimal policy in this case, much more efficient algorithms than exhaustive search are proposed. These algorithms are based on specific properties of the optimal policy which are described and proven in this paper.
Discovering Boolean Gates in Slime Mould
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2016
Year: 2016

Slime mould of Physarum polycephalum is a large cell exhibiting rich spatial non-linear electrical characteristics. We exploit the electrical properties of the slime mould to implement logic gates using a flexible hardware platform designed for investigating the electrical properties of a substrate (MECOBO). We apply arbitrary electrical signals to `configure' the slime mould, i.e. change shape of its body and, measure the slime mould's electrical response. We show that it is possible to find configurations that allow the Physarum to act as any 2-input Boolean gate. The occurrence frequency of the gates discovered in the slime was analysed and compared to complexity hierarchies of logical gates obtained in other unconventional materials. The search for gates was performed by both sweeping across configurations in the real material as well as training a neural network-based model and searching the gates therein using gradient descent.
Toward a Robust Crowd-labeling Framework using Expert Evaluation and Pairwise Comparison
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2016
Year: 2016

Crowd-labeling emerged from the need to label large-scale and complex data, a tedious, expensive, and time-consuming task. One of the main challenges in the crowd-labeling task is to control for or determine in advance the proportion of low-quality/malicious labelers. If that proportion grows too high, there is often a phase transition leading to a steep, non-linear drop in labeling accuracy as noted by Karger et al. [2014]. To address these challenges, we propose a new framework called Expert Label Injected Crowd Estimation (ELICE) and extend it to different versions and variants that delay phase transition leading to a better labeling accuracy. ELICE automatically combines and boosts bulk crowd labels supported by labels from experts for limited number of instances from the dataset. The expert-labels help to estimate the individual ability of crowd labelers and difficulty of each instance, both of which are used to aggregate the labels. Empirical evaluation shows the superiority of ELICE as compared to other state-of-the-art methods. We also derive a lower bound on the number of expert-labeled instances needed to estimate the crowd ability and dataset difficulty as well as to get better quality labels.
Renaming Global Variables in C Mechanically Proved Correct
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2016
Year: 2016

Most integrated development environments are shipped with refactoring tools. However, their refactoring operations are often known to be unreliable. As a consequence, developers have to test their code after applying an automatic refactoring. In this article, we consider a refactoring operation (renaming of global variables in C), and we prove that its core implementation preserves the set of possible behaviors of transformed programs. That proof of correctness relies on the operational semantics of C provided by CompCert C in Coq.
Overcoming Challenges in Fixed Point Training of Deep Convolutional Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2016
Year: 2016

It is known that training deep neural networks, in particular, deep convolutional networks, with aggressively reduced numerical precision is challenging. The stochastic gradient descent algorithm becomes unstable in the presence of noisy gradient updates resulting from arithmetic with limited numeric precision. One of the well-accepted solutions facilitating the training of low precision fixed point networks is stochastic rounding. However, to the best of our knowledge, the source of the instability in training neural networks with noisy gradient updates has not been well investigated. This work is an attempt to draw a theoretical connection between low numerical precision and training algorithm stability. In doing so, we will also propose and verify through experiments methods that are able to improve the training performance of deep convolutional networks in fixed point.
Non-Central Catadioptric Cameras Pose Estimation using 3D Lines
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2016
Year: 2016

In this article we purpose a novel method for planar pose estimation of mobile robots. This method is based on an analytic solution (which we derived) for the projection of 3D straight lines, onto the mirror of Non-Central Catadioptric Cameras (NCCS). The resulting solution is rewritten as a function of the rotation and translation parameters, which is then used as an error function for a set of mirror points. Those should be the result of the projection of a set of points incident with the respective 3D lines. The camera's pose is given by minimizing the error function, with the associated constraints. The method is validated by experiments both with synthetic and real data. The latter was collected from a mobile robot equipped with a NCCS.
Multi-Agent System for Groundwater Depletion Using Game Theory
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2016
Year: 2016

Groundwater is one of the most vital of all common pool resources throughout the world. More than half of groundwater is used to grow crops. This research models groundwater depletion patterns within a multi-agent system framework. Irrigators are modeled as agents in the multi-agent system. The irrigation strategies adopted by the agents are investigated using game theory. A set of five irrigators, growing three crops: corn, sorghum and wheat, have been considered in this study. To allow groundwater flow, these agents are assumed to be located in adjoining farm lands. Irrigators are modeled selfish agents that strategize their irrigation patterns in order to maximize their own utilities, i.e. the difference between the total revenue obtained from crop sales and the costs incurred, including groundwater extraction costs. Due to groundwater flow, and have no incentive to conserve groundwater. This leads to unsustainable depletion of the resource under Nash equilibrium, when no irrigator can increase its utility by unilaterally changing its strategy. All parameters in this research are representative of Kansas. Recorded environmental and economic data of the region, along with the DSSAT software, have been used to obtain these futuristic projections. One of the emergent phenomena of the simulations is the adoption of crop rotation patterns by the irrigators to conserve groundwater. The irrigators grow corn, which is a more profitable yet water intensive crop in one year, and in the next, conserve water by growing sorghum instead. Another emergent outcome of this research is the viability of LEMAs. When the irrigators are subject to LEMA-level limits on groundwater use, there is a slight increase in the aggregate utility of the LEMA.
Learning opening books in partially observable games: using random seeds in Phantom Go
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2016
Year: 2016

Many artificial intelligences (AIs) are randomized. One can be lucky or unlucky with the random seed; we quantify this effect and show that, maybe contrarily to intuition, this is far from being negligible. Then, we apply two different existing algorithms for selecting good seeds and good probability distributions over seeds. This mainly leads to learning an opening book. We apply this to Phantom Go, which, as all phantom games, is hard for opening book learning. We improve the winning rate from 50% to 70% in 5x5 against the same AI, and from approximately 0% to 40% in 5x5, 7x7 and 9x9 against a stronger (learning) opponent.
Explaining Deep Convolutional Neural Networks on Music Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2016
Year: 2016

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been actively adopted in the field of music information retrieval, e.g. genre classification, mood detection, and chord recognition. However, the process of learning and prediction is little understood, particularly when it is applied to spectrograms. We introduce auralisation of a CNN to understand its underlying mechanism, which is based on a deconvolution procedure introduced in [2]. Auralisation of a CNN is converting the learned convolutional features that are obtained from deconvolution into audio signals. In the experiments and discussions, we explain trained features of a 5-layer CNN based on the deconvolved spectrograms and auralised signals. The pairwise correlations per layers with varying different musical attributes are also investigated to understand the evolution of the learnt features. It is shown that in the deep layers, the features are learnt to capture textures, the patterns of continuous distributions, rather than shapes of lines.
Multi-level Contextual RNNs with Attention Model for Scene Labeling
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

Context in image is crucial for scene labeling while existing methods only exploit local context generated from a small surrounding area of an image patch or a pixel, by contrast long-range and global contextual information is ignored. To handle this issue, we in this work propose a novel approach for scene labeling by exploring multi-level contextual recurrent neural networks (ML-CRNNs). Specifically, we encode three kinds of contextual cues, i.e., local context, global context and image topic context in structural recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to model long-range local and global dependencies in image. In this way, our method is able to `see' the image in terms of both long-range local and holistic views, and make a more reliable inference for image labeling. Besides, we integrate the proposed contextual RNNs into hierarchical convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and exploit dependence relationships in multiple levels to provide rich spatial and semantic information. Moreover, we novelly adopt an attention model to effectively merge multiple levels and show that it outperforms average- or max-pooling fusion strategies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves new state-of-the-art results on the CamVid, SiftFlow and Stanford-background datasets.
Database-Backed Web Applications in the Wild: How Well Do They Work?
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2016
Year: 2016

Most modern database-backed web applications are built upon Object Relational Mapping (ORM) frameworks. While ORM frameworks ease application development by abstracting persistent data as objects, such convenience often comes with a performance cost. In this paper, we present CADO, a tool that analyzes the application logic and its interaction with databases using the Ruby on Rails ORM framework. CADO includes a static program analyzer, a profiler and a synthetic data generator to extract and understand application's performance characteristics. We used CADO to analyze the performance problems of 27 real-world open-source Rails applications, covering domains such as online forums, e-commerce, project management, blogs, etc. Based on the results, we uncovered a number of issues that lead to sub-optimal application performance, ranging from issuing queries, how result sets are used, and physical design. We suggest possible remedies for each issue, and highlight new research opportunities that arise from them.