OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Coalition Resilient Outcomes in Max k-Cut Games
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2018
Year: 2018

We investigate strong Nash equilibria in the \emph{max $k$-cut game}, where we are given an undirected edge-weighted graph together with a set $\{1,\ldots, k\}$ of $k$ colors. Nodes represent players and edges capture their mutual interests. The strategy set of each player $v$ consists of the $k$ colors. When players select a color they induce a $k$-coloring or simply a coloring. Given a coloring, the \emph{utility} (or \emph{payoff}) of a player $u$ is the sum of the weights of the edges $\{u,v\}$ incident to $u$, such that the color chosen by $u$ is different from the one chosen by $v$. Such games form some of the basic payoff structures in game theory, model lots of real-world scenarios with selfish agents and extend or are related to several fundamental classes of games. Very little is known about the existence of strong equilibria in max $k$-cut games. In this paper we make some steps forward in the comprehension of it. We first show that improving deviations performed by minimal coalitions can cycle, and thus answering negatively the open problem proposed in \cite{DBLP:conf/tamc/GourvesM10}. Next, we turn our attention to unweighted graphs. We first show that any optimal coloring is a 5-SE in this case. Then, we introduce $x$-local strong equilibria, namely colorings that are resilient to deviations by coalitions such that the maximum distance between every pair of nodes in the coalition is at most $x$. We prove that $1$-local strong equilibria always exist. Finally, we show the existence of strong Nash equilibria in several interesting specific scenarios.
Gradient target propagation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

We report a learning rule for neural networks that computes how much each neuron should contribute to minimize a giving cost function via the estimation of its target value. By theoretical analysis, we show that this learning rule contains backpropagation, Hebian learning, and additional terms. We also give a general technique for weights initialization. Our results are at least as good as those obtained with backpropagation. The neural networks are trained and tested in three problems: MNIST, MNIST-Fashion, and CIFAR-10 datasets. The associated code is available at https://github.com/tiago939/target.
Canonicity and normalisation for Dependent Type Theory
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2018
Year: 2018

We show canonicity and normalization for dependent type theory with a cumulative sequence of universes and a type of Boolean. The argument follows the usual notion of reducibility, going back to Godel's Dialectica interpretation and the work of Tait. A key feature of our approach is the use of a proof relevant notion of reducibility.
biggy: An Implementation of Unified Framework for Big Data Management System
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2018
Year: 2018

Various tools, softwares and systems are proposed and implemented to tackle the challenges in big data on different emphases, e.g., data analysis, data transaction, data query, data storage, data visualization, data privacy. In this paper, we propose datar, a new prospective and unified framework for Big Data Management System (BDMS) from the point of system architecture by leveraging ideas from mainstream computer structure. We introduce five key components of datar by reviewing the cur- rent status of BDMS. Datar features with configuration chain of pluggable engines, automatic dataflow on job pipelines, intelligent self-driving system management and interactive user interfaces. Moreover, we present biggy as an implementation of datar with manipulation details demonstrated by four running examples. Evaluations on efficiency and scalability are carried out to show the performance. Our work argues that the envisioned datar is a feasible solution to the unified framework of BDMS, which can manage big data pluggablly, automatically and intelligently with specific functionalities, where specific functionalities refer to input, storage, computation, control and output of big data.
Human-Competitive Awards 2018
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2018
Year: 2018

Report on Humies competition at GECCO 2018 in Japan
Monorepos: A Multivocal Literature Review
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2018
Year: 2018

Monorepos (Monolithic Repositories) are used by large companies, such as Google and Facebook, and by popular open-source projects, such as Babel and Ember. This study provides an overview on the definition and characteristics of monorepos as well as on their benefits and challenges. Thereupon, we conducted a multivocal literature review on mostly grey literature. Our findings are fourfold. First, monorepos are single repositories that contain multiple projects, related or unrelated, sharing the same dependencies. Second, centralization and standardization are some key characteristics. Third, the main benefits include simplified dependencies, coordination of cross-project changes, and easy refactoring. Fourth, code health, codebase complexity, and tooling investments for both development and execution are considered the main challenges.
Diagnostic Accuracy of Content Based Dermatoscopic Image Retrieval with Deep Classification Features
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Background: Automated classification of medical images through neural networks can reach high accuracy rates but lack interpretability. Objectives: To compare the diagnostic accuracy obtained by using content based image retrieval (CBIR) to retrieve visually similar dermatoscopic images with corresponding disease labels against predictions made by a neural network. Methods: A neural network was trained to predict disease classes on dermatoscopic images from three retrospectively collected image datasets containing 888, 2750 and 16691 images respectively. Diagnosis predictions were made based on the most commonly occurring diagnosis in visually similar images, or based on the top-1 class prediction of the softmax output from the network. Outcome measures were area under the ROC curve for predicting a malignant lesion (AUC), multiclass-accuracy and mean average precision (mAP), measured on unseen test images of the corresponding dataset. Results: In all three datasets the skin cancer predictions from CBIR (evaluating the 16 most similar images) showed AUC values similar to softmax predictions (0.842, 0.806 and 0.852 versus 0.830, 0.810 and 0.847 respectively; p-value>0.99 for all). Similarly, the multiclass-accuracy of CBIR was comparable to softmax predictions. Networks trained for detecting only 3 classes performed better on a dataset with 8 classes when using CBIR as compared to softmax predictions (mAP 0.184 vs. 0.368 and 0.198 vs. 0.403 respectively). Conclusions: Presenting visually similar images based on features from a neural network shows comparable accuracy to the softmax probability-based diagnoses of convolutional neural networks. CBIR may be more helpful than a softmax classifier in improving diagnostic accuracy of clinicians in a routine clinical setting.
Hierarchical multi-class segmentation of glioma images using networks with multi-level activation function
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

For many segmentation tasks, especially for the biomedical image, the topological prior is vital information which is useful to exploit. The containment/nesting is a typical inter-class geometric relationship. In the MICCAI Brain tumor segmentation challenge, with its three hierarchically nested classes 'whole tumor', 'tumor core', 'active tumor', the nested classes relationship is introduced into the 3D-residual-Unet architecture. The network comprises a context aggregation pathway and a localization pathway, which encodes increasingly abstract representation of the input as going deeper into the network, and then recombines these representations with shallower features to precisely localize the interest domain via a localization path. The nested-class-prior is combined by proposing the multi-class activation function and its corresponding loss function. The model is trained on the training dataset of Brats2018, and 20% of the dataset is regarded as the validation dataset to determine parameters. When the parameters are fixed, we retrain the model on the whole training dataset. The performance achieved on the validation leaderboard is 86%, 77% and 72% Dice scores for the whole tumor, enhancing tumor and tumor core classes without relying on ensembles or complicated post-processing steps. Based on the same start-of-the-art network architecture, the accuracy of nested-class (enhancing tumor) is reasonably improved from 69% to 72% compared with the traditional Softmax-based method which blind to topological prior.
Bioresorbable Scaffold Visualization in IVOCT Images Using CNNs and Weakly Supervised Localization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Bioresorbable scaffolds have become a popular choice for treatment of coronary heart disease, replacing traditional metal stents. Often, intravascular optical coherence tomography is used to assess potential malapposition after implantation and for follow-up examinations later on. Typically, the scaffold is manually reviewed by an expert, analyzing each of the hundreds of image slices. As this is time consuming, automatic stent detection and visualization approaches have been proposed, mostly for metal stent detection based on classic image processing. As bioresorbable scaffolds are harder to detect, recent approaches have used feature extraction and machine learning methods for automatic detection. However, these methods require detailed, pixel-level labels in each image slice and extensive feature engineering for the particular stent type which might limit the approaches' generalization capabilities. Therefore, we propose a deep learning-based method for bioresorbable scaffold visualization using only image-level labels. A convolutional neural network is trained to predict whether an image slice contains a metal stent, a bioresorbable scaffold, or no device. Then, we derive local stent strut information by employing weakly supervised localization using saliency maps with guided backpropagation. As saliency maps are generally diffuse and noisy, we propose a novel patch-based method with image shifting which allows for high resolution stent visualization. Our convolutional neural network model achieves a classification accuracy of 99.0 % for image-level stent classification which can be used for both high quality in-slice stent visualization and 3D rendering of the stent structure.
Two-path 3D CNNs for calibration of system parameters for OCT-based motion compensation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Automatic motion compensation and adjustment of an intraoperative imaging modality's field of view is a common problem during interventions. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is an imaging modality which is used in interventions due to its high spatial resolution of few micrometers and its temporal resolution of potentially several hundred volumes per second. However, performing motion compensation with OCT is problematic due to its small field of view which might lead to tracked objects being lost quickly. We propose a novel deep learning-based approach that directly learns input parameters of motors that move the scan area for motion compensation from optical coherence tomography volumes. We design a two-path 3D convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture that takes two volumes with an object to be tracked as its input and predicts the necessary motor input parameters to compensate the object's movement. In this way, we learn the calibration between object movement and system parameters for motion compensation with arbitrary objects. Thus, we avoid error-prone hand-eye calibration and handcrafted feature tracking from classical approaches. We achieve an average correlation coefficient of 0.998 between predicted and ground-truth motor parameters which leads to sub-voxel accuracy. Furthermore, we show that our deep learning model is real-time capable for use with the system's high volume acquisition frequency.
The Lives of Bots
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2018
Year: 2018

Automated software agents --- or bots --- have long been an important part of how Wikipedia's volunteer community of editors write, edit, update, monitor, and moderate content. In this paper, I discuss the complex social and technical environment in which Wikipedia's bots operate. This paper focuses on the establishment and role of English Wikipedia's bot policies and the Bot Approvals Group, a volunteer committee that reviews applications for new bots and helps resolve conflicts between Wikipedians about automation. In particular, I examine an early bot controversy over the first bot in Wikipedia to automatically enforce a social norm about how Wikipedian editors ought to interact in discussion spaces. As I show, bots enforce many rules in Wikipedia, but humans produce these bots and negotiate rules around their operation. Because of the openness of Wikipedia's processes around automation, we can vividly observe the often-invisible human work involved in such algorithmic systems --- in stark contrast to most other user-generated content platforms.
Correctness of Concurrent Objects under Weak Memory Models
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper we develop a theory for correctness of concurrent objects under weak memory models. Central to our definitions is the concept of observations which determine when effects of operations become visible, and hence determine the semantics of objects, under a given memory model. The resulting notion of correctness, called object refinement, is generic as it is parameterised by the memory model under consideration. Our theory enforces the minimal constraints on the placing of observations and on the semantics of objects that underlie object refinement. Object refinement is suitable as a reference for correctness when proving new proof methods for objects under weak memory models to be sound and complete.
Programming Without Refining
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2018
Year: 2018

To derive a program for a given specification R means to find an artifact P that satisfies two conditions: P is executable in some programming language; and P is correct with respect to R. Refinement-based program derivation achieves this goal in a stepwise manner by enhancing executability while preserving correctness until we achieve complete executability. In this paper, we argue that it is possible to invert these properties, and to derive a program by enhancing correctness while preserving executability (proceeding from one executable program to another) until we achieve absolute correctness. Of course, this latter process is possible only if we know how to enhance correctness.
Large scale visual place recognition with sub-linear storage growth
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Robotic and animal mapping systems share many of the same objectives and challenges, but differ in one key aspect: where much of the research in robotic mapping has focused on solving the data association problem, the grid cell neurons underlying maps in the mammalian brain appear to intentionally break data association by encoding many locations with a single grid cell neuron. One potential benefit of this intentional aliasing is both sub-linear map storage and computational requirements growth with environment size, which we demonstrated in a previous proof-of-concept study that detected and encoded mutually complementary co-prime pattern frequencies in the visual map data. In this research, we solve several of the key theoretical and practical limitations of that prototype model and achieve significantly better sub-linear storage growth, a factor reduction in storage requirements per map location, scalability to large datasets on standard compute equipment and improved robustness to environments with visually challenging appearance change. These improvements are achieved through several innovations including a flexible user-driven choice mechanism for the periodic patterns underlying the new encoding method, a parallelized chunking technique that splits the map into sub-sections processed in parallel and a novel feature selection approach that selects only the image information most relevant to the encoded temporal patterns. We evaluate our techniques on two large benchmark datasets with the comparison to the previous state-of-the-art system, as well as providing a detailed analysis of system performance with respect to parameters such as required precision performance and the number of cyclic patterns encoded.
Capacity Degradation with Modeling Hardware Impairment in Large Intelligent Surface
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we consider capacity degradations stemming from potential hardware impairments (HWI) of newly proposed Large Intelligent Surface (LIS) systems. Without HWI, the utility of surface-area (the first-order derivative of the capacity with respect to surface-area) is shown to be proportional to the inverse of it. With HWI, the capacity as well as the utility of surface-area are both degraded, due to a higher effective noise level caused by the HWI. After first modeling the HWI in a general form, we derive the effective noise density and the decrement of utility in closed-forms. With those the impacts of increasing the surface-area can be clearly seen. One interesting but also natural outcome is that both the capacity and utility can be decreased when increasing the surface-area in the cases with severe HWI. The turning points where the capacity and the utility start to decrease with HWI can be evaluated from the derived formulas for them. Further, we also consider distributed implementations of a LIS system by splitting it into multiple small LIS-Units, where the impacts of HWI can be significantly suppressed due to a smaller surface-area of each unit.
Bridging Semantic Gaps between Natural Languages and APIs with Word Embedding
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2018
Year: 2018

Developers increasingly rely on text matching tools to analyze the relation between natural language words and APIs. However, semantic gaps, namely textual mismatches between words and APIs, negatively affect these tools. Previous studies have transformed words or APIs into low-dimensional vectors for matching; however, inaccurate results were obtained due to the failure of modeling words and APIs simultaneously. To resolve this problem, two main challenges are to be addressed: the acquisition of massive words and APIs for mining and the alignment of words and APIs for modeling. Therefore, this study proposes Word2API to effectively estimate relatedness of words and APIs. Word2API collects millions of commonly used words and APIs from code repositories to address the acquisition challenge. Then, a shuffling strategy is used to transform related words and APIs into tuples to address the alignment challenge. Using these tuples, Word2API models words and APIs simultaneously. Word2API outperforms baselines by 10%-49.6% of relatedness estimation in terms of precision and NDCG. Word2API is also effective on solving typical software tasks, e.g., query expansion and API documents linking. A simple system with Word2API-expanded queries recommends up to 21.4% more related APIs for developers. Meanwhile, Word2API improves comparison algorithms by 7.9%-17.4% in linking questions in Question&Answer communities to API documents.
Bayesian Deconvolution of Scanning Electron Microscopy Images Using Point-spread Function Estimation and Non-local Regularization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Microscopy is one of the most essential imaging techniques in life sciences. High-quality images are required in order to solve (potentially life-saving) biomedical research problems. Many microscopy techniques do not achieve sufficient resolution for these purposes, being limited by physical diffraction and hardware deficiencies. Electron microscopy addresses optical diffraction by measuring emitted or transmitted electrons instead of photons, yielding nanometer resolution. Despite pushing back the diffraction limit, blur should still be taken into account because of practical hardware imperfections and remaining electron diffraction. Deconvolution algorithms can remove some of the blur in post-processing but they depend on knowledge of the point-spread function (PSF) and should accurately regularize noise. Any errors in the estimated PSF or noise model will reduce their effectiveness. This paper proposes a new procedure to estimate the lateral component of the point spread function of a 3D scanning electron microscope more accurately. We also propose a Bayesian maximum a posteriori deconvolution algorithm with a non-local image prior which employs this PSF estimate and previously developed noise statistics. We demonstrate visual quality improvements and show that applying our method improves the quality of subsequent segmentation steps.
Visual Semantic Re-ranker for Text Spotting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Many current state-of-the-art methods for text recognition are based on purely local information and ignore the semantic correlation between text and its surrounding visual context. In this paper, we propose a post-processing approach to improve the accuracy of text spotting by using the semantic relation between the text and the scene. We initially rely on an off-the-shelf deep neural network that provides a series of text hypotheses for each input image. These text hypotheses are then re-ranked using the semantic relatedness with the object in the image. As a result of this combination, the performance of the original network is boosted with a very low computational cost. The proposed framework can be used as a drop-in complement for any text-spotting algorithm that outputs a ranking of word hypotheses. We validate our approach on ICDAR'17 shared task dataset.
Human-centered manipulation and navigation with Robot DE NIRO
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2018
Year: 2018

Social assistance robots in health and elderly care have the potential to support and ease human lives. Given the macrosocial trends of aging and long-lived populations, robotics-based care research mainly focused on helping the elderly live independently. In this paper, we introduce Robot DE NIRO, a research platform that aims to support the supporter (the caregiver) and also offers direct human-robot interaction for the care recipient. Augmented by several sensors, DE NIRO is capable of complex manipulation tasks. It reliably interacts with humans and can autonomously and swiftly navigate through dynamically changing environments. We describe preliminary experiments in a demonstrative scenario and discuss DE NIRO's design and capabilities. We put particular emphases on safe, human-centered interaction procedures implemented in both hardware and software, including collision avoidance in manipulation and navigation as well as an intuitive perception stack through speech and face recognition.
Fruit and Vegetable Identification Using Machine Learning for Retail Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

This paper describes an approach of creating a system identifying fruit and vegetables in the retail market using images captured with a video camera attached to the system. The system helps the customers to label desired fruits and vegetables with a price according to its weight. The purpose of the system is to minimize the number of human computer interactions, speed up the identification process and improve the usability of the graphical user interface compared to existing manual systems. The hardware of the system is constituted by a Raspberry Pi, camera, display, load cell and a case. To classify an object, different convolutional neural networks have been tested and retrained. To test the usability, a heuristic evaluation has been performed with several users, concluding that the implemented system is more user friendly compared to existing systems.