OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A TDMA-like Access Scheme with Splitting Request and Transmission for Vehicular Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we consider safety message transmission in a dense vehicular network. With increasing vehicular network density, the collision rate increases when multiple vehicles transmit safety messages simultaneously. To address this issue, we propose a request-transmission split time division multiple access (TDMA) scheme, referred to as RTS-TDMA. In our scheme, we divide a frame into three phases, i.e., a contention access phase, a broadcast feedback phase, and a contention-free transmission phase. Each vehicle selects a repetition rate according to a given probability distribution and repeats the transmission of its request packet to improve the reliability of the request. In addition, a roadside unit acts as the coordinator and uses a successive interference cancellation technique to resolve request collisions. RTS-TDMA also reduces the request time percentage by containing only the vehicle identity in each request packet. Both theoretical analysis and numerical results verify that the RTS-TDMA scheme can provide higher throughput than the coded slotted ALOHA scheme.
Joint Power Control and Rate Allocation enabling Ultra-Reliability and Energy Efficiency in SIMO Wireless Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

Coming cellular systems are envisioned to open up to new services with stringent reliability and energy efficiency requirements. In this paper we focus on the joint power control and rate allocation problem in Single-Input Multiple-Output (SIMO) wireless systems with Rayleigh fading and stringent reliability constraints. We propose an allocation scheme that maximizes the energy efficiency of the system while making use only of average statistics of the signal and interference, and the number of antennas $M$ that are available at the receiver side. We show the superiority of the Maximum Ratio Combining (MRC) scheme over Selection Combining (SC) in terms of energy efficiency, and prove that the gap between the optimum allocated resources converges to $(M!)^(1/(2M))$ as the reliability constraint becomes more stringent. Meanwhile, in most cases MRC was also shown to be more energy efficient than Switch and Stay Combining (SSC) scheme, although this does not hold only when operating with extremely large $M$, extremely high/small average signal/interference power and/or highly power consuming receiving circuitry. Numerical results show the feasibility of the ultra-reliable operation when $M$ increases, while greater the fixed power consumption and/or drain efficiency of the transmit amplifier is, the greater the optimum transmit power and rate.
Revisiting Precision and Recall Definition for Generative Model Evaluation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

In this article we revisit the definition of Precision-Recall (PR) curves for generative models proposed by Sajjadi et al. (arXiv:1806.00035). Rather than providing a scalar for generative quality, PR curves distinguish mode-collapse (poor recall) and bad quality (poor precision). We first generalize their formulation to arbitrary measures, hence removing any restriction to finite support. We also expose a bridge between PR curves and type I and type II error rates of likelihood ratio classifiers on the task of discriminating between samples of the two distributions. Building upon this new perspective, we propose a novel algorithm to approximate precision-recall curves, that shares some interesting methodological properties with the hypothesis testing technique from Lopez-Paz et al (arXiv:1610.06545). We demonstrate the interest of the proposed formulation over the original approach on controlled multi-modal datasets.
Assessing the Difficulty of Classifying ConceptNet Relations in a Multi-Label Classification Setting
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

Commonsense knowledge relations are crucial for advanced NLU tasks. We examine the learnability of such relations as represented in CONCEPTNET, taking into account their specific properties, which can make relation classification difficult: a given concept pair can be linked by multiple relation types, and relations can have multi-word arguments of diverse semantic types. We explore a neural open world multi-label classification approach that focuses on the evaluation of classification accuracy for individual relations. Based on an in-depth study of the specific properties of the CONCEPTNET resource, we investigate the impact of different relation representations and model variations. Our analysis reveals that the complexity of argument types and relation ambiguity are the most important challenges to address. We design a customized evaluation method to address the incompleteness of the resource that can be expanded in future work.
A Dynamic Evolutionary Framework for Timeline Generation based on Distributed Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

Given the collection of timestamped web documents related to the evolving topic, timeline summarization (TS) highlights its most important events in the form of relevant summaries to represent the development of a topic over time. Most of the previous work focuses on fully-observable ranking models and depends on hand-designed features or complex mechanisms that may not generalize well. We present a novel dynamic framework for evolutionary timeline generation leveraging distributed representations, which dynamically finds the most likely sequence of evolutionary summaries in the timeline, called the Viterbi timeline, and reduces the impact of events that irrelevant or repeated to the topic. The assumptions of the coherence and the global view run through our model. We explore adjacent relevance to constrain timeline coherence and make sure the events evolve on the same topic with a global view. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework is feasible to extract summaries for timeline generation, outperforms various competitive baselines, and achieves the state-of-the-art performance as an unsupervised approach.
Lessons Learned from Real-World Experiments with DyRET: the Dynamic Robot for Embodied Testing
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

Robots are used in more and more complex environments, and are expected to be able to adapt to changes and unknown situations. The easiest and quickest way to adapt is to change the control system of the robot, but for increasingly complex environments one should also change the body of the robot -- its morphology -- to better fit the task at hand. The theory of Embodied Cognition states that control is not the only source of cognition, and the body, environment, interaction between these and the mind all contribute as cognitive resources. Taking advantage of these concepts could lead to improved adaptivity, robustness, and versatility, however, executing these concepts on real-world robots puts additional requirements on the hardware and has several challenges when compared to learning just control. In contrast to the majority of work in Evolutionary Robotics, Eiben argues for real-world experiments in his `Grand Challenges for Evolutionary Robotics'. This requires robust hardware platforms that are capable of repeated experiments which should at the same time be flexible when unforeseen demands arise. In this paper, we introduce our unique robot platform with self-adaptive morphology. We discuss the challenges we have faced when designing it, and the lessons learned from real-world testing and learning.
"Tom" pet robot applied to urban autism
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2019
Year: 2019

With the fast development of network information technology, more and more people are immersed in the virtual community environment brought by the network, ignoring the social interaction in real life. The consequent urban autism problem has become more and more serious. Promoting offline communication between people " and "eliminating loneliness through emotional communication between pet robots and breeders" to solve this problem, and has developed a design called "Tom". "Tom" is a smart pet robot with a pet robot-based social mechanism Called "Tom-Talker". The main contribution of this paper is to propose a social mechanism called "Tom-Talker" that encourages users to socialize offline. And "Tom-Talker" also has a corresponding reward mechanism and a friend recommendation algorithm. It also proposes a pet robot named "Tom" with an emotional interaction algorithm to recognize users' emotions, simulate animal emotions and communicate emotionally with use s. This paper designs experiments and analyzes the results. The results show that our pet robots have a good effect on solving urban autism problems.
ZombieLoad: Cross-Privilege-Boundary Data Sampling
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

In early 2018, Meltdown first showed how to read arbitrary kernel memory from user space by exploiting side-effects from transient instructions. While this attack has been mitigated through stronger isolation boundaries between user and kernel space, Meltdown inspired an entirely new class of fault-driven transient execution attacks. Particularly, over the past year, Meltdown-type attacks have been extended to not only leak data from the L1 cache but also from various other microarchitectural structures, including the FPU register file and store buffer. In this paper, we present the ZombieLoad attack which uncovers a novel Meltdown-type effect in the processor's previously unexplored fill-buffer logic. Our analysis shows that faulting load instructions (i.e., loads that have to be re-issued for either architectural or microarchitectural reasons) may transiently dereference unauthorized destinations previously brought into the fill buffer by the current or a sibling logical CPU. Hence, we report data leakage of recently loaded stale values across logical cores. We demonstrate ZombieLoad's effectiveness in a multitude of practical attack scenarios across CPU privilege rings, OS processes, virtual machines, and SGX enclaves. We discuss both short and long-term mitigation approaches and arrive at the conclusion that disabling hyperthreading is the only possible workaround to prevent this extremely powerful attack on current processors.
A Learning based Branch and Bound for Maximum Common Subgraph Problems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Branch-and-bound (BnB) algorithms are widely used to solve combinatorial problems, and the performance crucially depends on its branching heuristic.In this work, we consider a typical problem of maximum common subgraph (MCS), and propose a branching heuristic inspired from reinforcement learning with a goal of reaching a tree leaf as early as possible to greatly reduce the search tree size.Extensive experiments show that our method is beneficial and outperforms current best BnB algorithm for the MCS.
Variational Regret Bounds for Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

We consider undiscounted reinforcement learning in Markov decision processes (MDPs) where both the reward functions and the state-transition probabilities may vary (gradually or abruptly) over time. For this problem setting, we propose an algorithm and provide performance guarantees for the regret evaluated against the optimal non-stationary policy. The upper bound on the regret is given in terms of the total variation in the MDP. This is the first variational regret bound for the general reinforcement learning setting.
Budget-aware Semi-Supervised Semantic and Instance Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Methods that move towards less supervised scenarios are key for image segmentation, as dense labels demand significant human intervention. Generally, the annotation burden is mitigated by labeling datasets with weaker forms of supervision, e.g. image-level labels or bounding boxes. Another option are semi-supervised settings, that commonly leverage a few strong annotations and a huge number of unlabeled/weakly-labeled data. In this paper, we revisit semi-supervised segmentation schemes and narrow down significantly the annotation budget (in terms of total labeling time of the training set) compared to previous approaches. With a very simple pipeline, we demonstrate that at low annotation budgets, semi-supervised methods outperform by a wide margin weakly-supervised ones for both semantic and instance segmentation. Our approach also outperforms previous semi-supervised works at a much reduced labeling cost. We present results for the Pascal VOC benchmark and unify weakly and semi-supervised approaches by considering the total annotation budget, thus allowing a fairer comparison between methods.
Diagonal Acceleration for Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategies
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2019
Year: 2019

We introduce an acceleration for covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategies (CMA-ES) by means of adaptive diagonal decoding (dd-CMA). This diagonal acceleration endows the default CMA-ES with the advantages of separable CMA-ES without inheriting its drawbacks. Technically, we introduce a diagonal matrix D that expresses coordinate-wise variances of the sampling distribution in DCD form. The diagonal matrix can learn a rescaling of the problem in the coordinates within linear number of function evaluations. Diagonal decoding can also exploit separability of the problem, but, crucially, does not compromise the performance on non-separable problems. The latter is accomplished by modulating the learning rate for the diagonal matrix based on the condition number of the underlying correlation matrix. dd-CMA-ES not only combines the advantages of default and separable CMA-ES, but may achieve overadditive speedup: it improves the performance, and even the scaling, of the better of default and separable CMA-ES on classes of non-separable test functions that reflect, arguably, a landscape feature commonly observed in practice. The paper makes two further secondary contributions: we introduce two different approaches to guarantee positive definiteness of the covariance matrix with active CMA, which is valuable in particular with large population size; we revise the default parameter setting in CMA-ES, proposing accelerated settings in particular for large dimension. All our contributions can be viewed as independent improvements of CMA-ES, yet they are also complementary and can be seamlessly combined. In numerical experiments with dd-CMA-ES up to dimension 5120, we observe remarkable improvements over the original covariance matrix adaptation on functions with coordinate-wise ill-conditioning. The improvement is observed also for large population sizes up to about dimension squared.
Pareto-Optimal Allocation of Transactive Energy at Market Equilibrium in Distribution Systems: A Constrained Vector Optimization Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2019
Year: 2019

In a grid constrained transactive distribution system market, distribution locational marginal pricing DLMP is influenced by the distance from the substation to an energy user, thereby causing households that are further away from the substation to be charged more. The Jain index of fairness, which has been recently applied to alleviate this undesirable effect of inefficient energy allocations, is used in this research to quantify fairness. It is shown that the Jain index is strictly quasi-concave. A bilevel distributed mechanism is proposed, where at the lower level, auction mechanisms are invoked simultaneously at each aggregator to obtain energy costs under market equilibrium conditions. A constrained multi gradient ascent algorithm, Augmented Lagrangian Multigradient Approach ALMA, is proposed for implementation at the upper level to attain energy allocations that represent tradeoffs between efficiency and fairness. Theoretical issues pertaining to ALMA as a generic algorithm for constrained vector optimization are considered. It is shown that when the objectives are restricted to be strictly quasi concave functions and if the feasible region is convex, ALMA converges towards global Pareto optimality. The overall effectiveness of the proposed approach is confirmed through a set of MATLAB simulations implemented on a modified IEEE 37-bus system platform.
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Scheduling in Cellular Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into wireless networks has drawn significant interest in both industry and academia. A common solution is to replace partial or even all modules in the conventional systems, which is often lack of efficiency and robustness due to their ignoring of expert knowledge. In this paper, we take deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based scheduling as an example to investigate how expert knowledge can help with AI module in cellular networks. A simulation platform, which has considered link adaption, feedback and other practical mechanisms, is developed to facilitate the investigation. Besides the traditional way, which is learning directly from the environment, for training DRL agent, we propose two novel methods, i.e., learning from a dual AI module and learning from the expert solution. The results show that, for the considering scheduling problem, DRL training procedure can be improved on both performance and convergence speed by involving the expert knowledge. Hence, instead of replacing conventional scheduling module in the system, adding a newly introduced AI module, which is capable to interact with the conventional module and provide more flexibility, is a more feasible solution.
An Energy-Efficient Controller for Wirelessly-Powered Communication Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

In a wirelessly-powered communication network (WPCN), an energy access point (E-AP) supplies the energy needs of the network nodes through radio frequency wave transmission, and the nodes store their received energy in their batteries for possible data transmission. In this paper, we propose an online control policy for energy transfer from the E-AP to the wireless nodes and for data transfer among the nodes. With our proposed control policy, all data queues of the nodes are stable, while the average energy consumption of the network is shown to be within a bounded gap of the minimum energy required for stabilizing the network. Our proposed policy is designed using a quadratic Lyapunov function to capture the limitations on the energy consumption of the nodes imposed by their battery levels. We show that under the proposed control policy, the backlog level in the data queues and the stored energy level in the batteries fluctuate in small intervals around some constant levels. Consequently, by imposing negligible average data drop rate, the data buffer size and the battery capacity of the nodes can be significantly reduced.
Deep Kinship Verification via Appearance-shape Joint Prediction and Adaptation-based Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Kinship verification aims to identify the kin relation between two given face images. It is a very challenging problem due to the lack of training data and facial similarity variations between kinship pairs. In this work, we build a novel appearance and shape based deep learning pipeline. First we adopt the knowledge learned from general face recognition network to learn general facial features. Afterwards, we learn kinship oriented appearance and shape features from kinship pairs and combine them for the final prediction. We have evaluated the model performance on a widely used popular benchmark and demonstrated the superiority over the state-of-the-art.
Autonomous Penetration Testing using Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

Penetration testing (pentesting) involves performing a controlled attack on a computer system in order to assess it's security. Although an effective method for testing security, pentesting requires highly skilled practitioners and currently there is a growing shortage of skilled cyber security professionals. One avenue for alleviating this problem is automate the pentesting process using artificial intelligence techniques. Current approaches to automated pentesting have relied on model-based planning, however the cyber security landscape is rapidly changing making maintaining up-to-date models of exploits a challenge. This project investigated the application of model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) to automated pentesting. Model-free RL has the key advantage over model-based planning of not requiring a model of the environment, instead learning the best policy through interaction with the environment. We first designed and built a fast, low compute simulator for training and testing autonomous pentesting agents. We did this by framing pentesting as a Markov Decision Process with the known configuration of the network as states, the available scans and exploits as actions, the reward determined by the value of machines on the network. We then used this simulator to investigate the application of model-free RL to pentesting. We tested the standard Q-learning algorithm using both tabular and neural network based implementations. We found that within the simulated environment both tabular and neural network implementations were able to find optimal attack paths for a range of different network topologies and sizes without having a model of action behaviour. However, the implemented algorithms were only practical for smaller networks and numbers of actions. Further work is needed in developing scalable RL algorithms and testing these algorithms in larger and higher fidelity environments.
Deep reinforcement learning for scheduling in large-scale networked control systems
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2019
Year: 2019

This work considers the problem of control and resource scheduling in networked systems. We present DIRA, a Deep reinforcement learning based Iterative Resource Allocation algorithm, which is scalable and control-aware. Our algorithm is tailored towards large-scale problems where control and scheduling need to act jointly to optimize performance. DIRA can be used to schedule general time-domain optimization based controllers. In the present work, we focus on control designs based on suitably adapted linear quadratic regulators. We apply our algorithm to networked systems with correlated fading communication channels. Our simulations show that DIRA scales well to large scheduling problems.
Statistical Learning Based Congestion Control for Real-time Video Communication
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2019
Year: 2019

With the increasing demands on interactive video applications, how to adapt video bit rate to avoid network congestion has become critical, since congestion results in self-inflicted delay and packet loss which deteriorate the quality of real-time video service. The existing congestion control is hard to simultaneously achieve low latency, high throughput, good adaptability and fair bandwidth allocation, mainly because of the hardwired control strategy and egocentric convergence objective. To address these issues, we propose an end-to-end statistical learning based congestion control, named Iris. By exploring the underlying principles of self-inflicted delay, we reveal that congestion delay is determined by sending rate, receiving rate and network status, which inspires us to control video bit rate using a statistical-learning congestion control model. The key idea of Iris is to force all flows to converge to the same queue load, and adjust the bit rate by the model. All flows keep a small and fixed number of packets queuing in the network, thus the fair bandwidth allocation and low latency are both achieved. Besides, the adjustment step size of sending rate is updated by online learning, to better adapt to dynamically changing networks. We carried out extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of Iris, with the implementations of transport layer (UDP) and application layer (QUIC) respectively. The testing environment includes emulated network, real-world Internet and commercial LTE networks. Compared against TCP flavors and state-of-the-art protocols, Iris is able to achieve high bandwidth utilization, low latency and good fairness concurrently. Especially over QUIC, Iris is able to increase the video bitrate up to 25%, and PSNR up to 1dB.