OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Scalable Model for Secure Multiparty Authentication
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

Distributed system architectures such as cloud computing or the emergent architectures of the Internet Of Things, present significant challenges for security and privacy. Specifically, in a complex application there is a need to securely delegate access control mechanisms to one or more parties, who in turn can govern methods that enable multiple other parties to be authenticated in relation to the services that they wish to consume. We identify shortcomings in an existing proposal by Xu et al for multiparty authentication and evaluate a novel model from Al-Aqrabi et al that has been designed specifically for complex multiple security realm environments. The adoption of a Session Authority Cloud ensures that resources for authentication requests are scalable, whilst permitting the necessary architectural abstraction for myriad hardware IoT devices such as actuators and sensor networks, etc. In addition, the ability to ensure that session credentials are confirmed with the relevant resource principles means that the essential rigour for multiparty authentication is established.
Cricket stroke extraction: Towards creation of a large-scale cricket actions dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we deal with the problem of temporal action localization for a large-scale untrimmed cricket videos dataset. Our action of interest for cricket videos is a cricket stroke played by a batsman, which is, usually, covered by cameras placed at the stands of the cricket ground at both ends of the cricket pitch. After applying a sequence of preprocessing steps, we have ~73 million frames for 1110 videos in the dataset at constant frame rate and resolution. The method of localization is a generalized one which applies a trained random forest model for CUTs detection(using summed up grayscale histogram difference features) and two linear SVM camera models(CAM1 and CAM2) for first frame detection, trained on HOG features of CAM1 and CAM2 video shots. CAM1 and CAM2 are assumed to be part of the cricket stroke. At the predicted boundary positions, the HOG features of the first frames are computed and a simple algorithm was used to combine the positively predicted camera shots. In order to make the process as generic as possible, we did not consider any domain specific knowledge, such as tracking or specific shape and motion features. The detailed analysis of our methodology is provided along with the metrics used for evaluation of individual models, and the final predicted segments. We achieved a weighted mean TIoU of 0.5097 over a small sample of the test set.
Cosine-similarity penalty to discriminate sound classes in weakly-supervised sound event detection
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2019
Year: 2019

The design of new methods and models when only weakly-labeled data are available is of paramount importance in order to reduce the costs of manual annotation and the considerable human effort associated with it. In this work, we address Sound Event Detection in the case where a weakly annotated dataset is available for training. The weak annotations provide tags of audio events but do not provide temporal boundaries. The objective is twofold: 1) audio tagging, i.e. multi-label classification at recording level, 2) sound event detection, i.e. localization of the event boundaries within the recordings. This work focuses mainly on the second objective. We explore an approach inspired by Multiple Instance Learning, in which we train a convolutional recurrent neural network to give predictions at frame-level, using a custom loss function based on the weak labels and the statistics of the frame-based predictions. Since some sound classes cannot be distinguished with this approach, we improve the method by penalizing similarity between the predictions of the positive classes during training. On the test set used in the DCASE 2018 challenge, consisting of 288 recordings and 10 sound classes, the addition of a penalty resulted in a localization F-score of 34.75%, and brought 10% relative improvement compared to not using the penalty. Our best model achieved a 26.20% F-score on the DCASE-2018 official Eval subset close to the 10-system ensemble approach that ranked second in the challenge with a 29.9% F-score.
6G: The Next Frontier
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

The current development of 5G networks represents a breakthrough in the design of communication networks, for its ability to provide a single platform enabling a variety of different services, from enhanced mobile broadband communications, automated driving, Internet-of-Things, with its huge number of connected devices, etc. Nevertheless, looking at the current development of technologies and new services, it is already possible to envision the need to move beyond 5G with a new architecture incorporating new services and technologies. The goal of this paper is to motivate the need to move to a sixth generation (6G) of mobile communication networks, starting from a gap analysis of 5G, and predicting a new synthesis of near future services, like hologram interfaces, ambient sensing intelligence, a pervasive introduction of artificial intelligence and the incorporation of technologies, like TeraHertz (THz) or Visible Light Communications (VLC), 3-dimensional coverage.
Reverse-Engineering Satire, or "Paper on Computational Humor Accepted Despite Making Serious Advances"
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2019
Year: 2019

Humor is an essential human trait. Efforts to understand humor have called out links between humor and the foundations of cognition, as well as the importance of humor in social engagement. As such, it is a promising and important subject of study, with relevance for artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. Previous computational work on humor has mostly operated at a coarse level of granularity, e.g., predicting whether an entire sentence, paragraph, document, etc., is humorous. As a step toward deep understanding of humor, we seek fine-grained models of attributes that make a given text humorous. Starting from the observation that satirical news headlines tend to resemble serious news headlines, we build and analyze a corpus of satirical headlines paired with nearly identical but serious headlines. The corpus is constructed via Unfun.me, an online game that incentivizes players to make minimal edits to satirical headlines with the goal of making other players believe the results are serious headlines. The edit operations used to successfully remove humor pinpoint the words and concepts that play a key role in making the original, satirical headline funny. Our analysis reveals that the humor tends to reside toward the end of headlines, and primarily in noun phrases, and that most satirical headlines follow a certain logical pattern, which we term false analogy. Overall, this paper deepens our understanding of the syntactic and semantic structure of satirical news headlines and provides insights for building humor-producing systems.
Protograph-Based LDPC Code Design for Probabilistic Shaping with On-Off Keying
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

This work investigates protograph-based LDPC codes for the AWGN channel with OOK modulation. A non-uniform distribution of the OOK modulation symbols is considered to improve the power efficiency especially for low SNRs. To this end, a specific transmitter architecture based on time sharing is proposed that allows probabilistic shaping of (some) OOK modulation symbols. Tailored protograph-based LDPC code designs outperform standard schemes with uniform signaling and off-the-shelf codes by 1.1 dB for a transmission rate of 0.25 bits/channel use.
Catalog of Energy Patterns for Mobile Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2019
Year: 2019

Software engineers make use of design patterns for reasons that range from performance to code comprehensibility. Several design patterns capturing the body of knowledge of best practices have been proposed in the past, namely creational, structural and behavioral patterns. However, with the advent of mobile devices, it becomes a necessity a catalog of design patterns for energy efficiency. In this work, we inspect commits, issues and pull requests of 1027 Android and 756 iOS apps to identify common practices when improving energy efficiency. This analysis yielded a catalog, available online, with 22 design patterns related to improving the energy efficiency of mobile apps. We argue that this catalog might be of relevance to other domains such as Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things. As a side contribution, an analysis of the differences between Android and iOS devices shows that the Android community is more energy-aware.
Sclera Force Control in Robot-assisted Eye Surgery: Adaptive Force Control vs. Auditory Feedback
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

Surgeon hand tremor limits human capability during microsurgical procedures such as those that treat the eye. In contrast, elimination of hand tremor through the introduction of microsurgical robots diminishes the surgeon's tactile perception of useful and familiar tool-to-sclera forces. While the large mass and inertia of eye surgical robot prevents surgeon microtremor, loss of perception of small scleral forces may put the sclera at risk of injury. In this paper, we have applied and compared two different methods to assure the safety of sclera tissue during robot-assisted eye surgery. In the active control method, an adaptive force control strategy is implemented on the Steady-Hand Eye Robot in order to control the magnitude of scleral forces when they exceed safe boundaries. This autonomous force compensation is then compared to a passive force control method in which the surgeon performs manual adjustments in response to the provided audio feedback proportional to the magnitude of sclera force. A pilot study with three users indicate that the active control method is potentially more efficient.
A New Tensioning Method using Deep Reinforcement Learning for Surgical Pattern Cutting
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

Surgeons normally need surgical scissors and tissue grippers to cut through a deformable surgical tissue. The cutting accuracy depends on the skills to manipulate these two tools. Such skills are part of basic surgical skills training as in the Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery. The gripper is used to pinch a point on the surgical sheet and pull the tissue to a certain direction to maintain the tension while the scissors cut through a trajectory. As the surgical materials are deformable, it requires a comprehensive tensioning policy to yield appropriate tensioning direction at each step of the cutting process. Automating a tensioning policy for a given cutting trajectory will support not only the human surgeons but also the surgical robots to improve the cutting accuracy and reliability. This paper presents a multiple pinch point approach to modelling an autonomous tensioning planner based on a deep reinforcement learning algorithm. Experiments on a simulator show that the proposed method is superior to existing methods in terms of both performance and robustness.
On the Descriptive Complexity of Color Coding
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2019
Year: 2019

Color coding is an algorithmic technique used in parameterized complexity theory to detect "small" structures inside graphs. The idea is to derandomize algorithms that first randomly color a graph and then search for an easily-detectable, small color pattern. We transfer color coding to the world of descriptive complexity theory by characterizing -- purely in terms of the syntactic structure of describing formulas -- when the powerful second-order quantifiers representing a random coloring can be replaced by equivalent, simple first-order formulas. Building on this result, we identify syntactic properties of first-order quantifiers that can be eliminated from formulas describing parameterized problems. The result applies to many packing and embedding problems, but also to the long path problem. Together with a new result on the parameterized complexity of formula families involving only a fixed number of variables, we get that many problems lie in FPT just because of the way they are commonly described using logical formulas.
Broadcasting Information subject to State Masking over a MIMO State Dependent Gaussian Channel
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

The problem of channel coding over the Gaussian multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) broadcast channel (BC) with additive independent Gaussian states is considered. The states are known in a noncausal manner to the encoder, and it wishes to minimize the amount of information that the receivers can learn from the channel outputs about the state sequence. The state leakage rate is measured as a normalized blockwise mutual information between the state sequence and the channel outputs' sequences. We employ a new version of a state-dependent extremal inequality and show that Gaussian input maximizes the state-dependent version of Marton's outer bound. Further we show that our inner bound coincides with the outer bound. Our result generalizes previously studied scalar Gaussian BC with state and MIMO BC without state.
Collaborative Privacy for Web Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

Real-time, online-editing web apps provide free and convenient services for collaboratively editing, sharing and storing files. The benefits of these web applications do not come for free: not only do service providers have full access to the users' files, but they also control access, transmission, and storage mechanisms for them. As a result, user data may be at risk of data mining, third-party interception, or even manipulation. To combat this, we propose a new system for helping to preserve the privacy of user data within collaborative environments. There are several distinct challenges in producing such a system, including developing an encryption mechanism that does not interfere with the back-end (and often proprietary) control mechanisms utilized by the service, and identifying transparent code hooks through which to obfuscate user data. Toward the first challenge, we develop a character-level encryption scheme that is more resilient to the types of attacks that plague classical substitution ciphers. For the second challenge, we design a browser extension that robustly demonstrates the feasibility of our approach, and show a concrete implementation for Google Chrome and the widely-used Google Docs platform. Our example tangibly demonstrates how several users with a shared key can collaboratively and transparently edit a Google Docs document without revealing the plaintext directly to Google.
Handcrafted vs Deep Learning Classification for Scalable Video QoE Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2019
Year: 2019

Mobile video traffic is dominant in cellular and enterprise wireless networks. With the advent of diverse applications, network administrators face the challenge to provide high QoE in the face of diverse wireless conditions and application contents. Yet, state-of-the-art networks lack analytics for QoE, as this requires support from the application or user feedback. While there are existing techniques to map QoS to QoE by training machine learning models without requiring user feedback, these techniques are limited to only few applications, due to insufficient QoE ground-truth annotation for ML. To address these limitations, we focus on video telephony applications and model key artefacts of spatial and temporal video QoE. Our key contribution is designing content- and device-independent metrics and training across diverse WiFi conditions. We show that our metrics achieve a median 90% accuracy by comparing with mean-opinion-score from more than 200 users and 800 video samples over three popular video telephony applications -- Skype, FaceTime and Google Hangouts. We further extend our metrics by using deep neural networks, more specifically we use a combined CNN and LSTM model. We achieve a median accuracy of 95% by combining our QoE metrics with the deep learning model, which is a 38% improvement over the state-of-the-art well known techniques.
Stroke-based sketched symbol reconstruction and segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2019
Year: 2019

Hand-drawn objects usually consist of multiple semantically meaningful parts. For example, a stick figure consists of a head, a torso, and pairs of legs and arms. Efficient and accurate identification of these subparts promises to significantly improve algorithms for stylization, deformation, morphing and animation of 2D drawings. In this paper, we propose a neural network model that segments symbols into stroke-level components. Our segmentation framework has two main elements: a fixed feature extractor and a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) network that identifies a component based on the feature. As the feature extractor we utilize an encoder of a stroke-rnn, which is our newly proposed generative Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) model that reconstructs symbols on a stroke by stroke basis. Experiments show that a single encoder could be reused for segmenting multiple categories of sketched symbols with negligible effects on segmentation accuracies. Our segmentation scores surpass existing methodologies on an available small state of the art dataset. Moreover, extensive evaluations on our newly annotated big dataset demonstrate that our framework obtains significantly better accuracies as compared to baseline models. We release the dataset to the community.
User Intent Prediction in Information-seeking Conversations
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2019
Year: 2019

Conversational assistants are being progressively adopted by the general population. However, they are not capable of handling complicated information-seeking tasks that involve multiple turns of information exchange. Due to the limited communication bandwidth in conversational search, it is important for conversational assistants to accurately detect and predict user intent in information-seeking conversations. In this paper, we investigate two aspects of user intent prediction in an information-seeking setting. First, we extract features based on the content, structural, and sentiment characteristics of a given utterance, and use classic machine learning methods to perform user intent prediction. We then conduct an in-depth feature importance analysis to identify key features in this prediction task. We find that structural features contribute most to the prediction performance. Given this finding, we construct neural classifiers to incorporate context information and achieve better performance without feature engineering. Our findings can provide insights into the important factors and effective methods of user intent prediction in information-seeking conversations.
On Event Causality Detection in Tweets
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2019
Year: 2019

Nowadays, Twitter has become a great source of user-generated information about events. Very often people report causal relationships between events in their tweets. Automatic detection of causality information in these events might play an important role in predictive event analytics. Existing approaches include both rule-based and data-driven supervised methods. However, it is challenging to correctly identify event causality using only linguistic rules due to the highly unstructured nature and grammatical incorrectness of social media short text such as tweets. Also, it is difficult to develop a data-driven supervised method for event causality detection in tweets due to insufficient contextual information. This paper proposes a novel event context word extension technique based on background knowledge. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed event context word extension technique, we develop a feed-forward neural network based approach to detect event causality from tweets. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach.
Mitigating Jamming Attacks Using Energy Harvesting
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

The use of energy harvesting as a counter-jamming measure is investigated on the premise that part of the harmful interference can be harvested to increase the transmit power. We formulate the strategic interaction between a pair of legitimate nodes and a malicious jammer as a zero-sum game. Our analysis demonstrates that the legitimate nodes are able to neutralize the jammer. However, this policy is not necessarily a Nash equilibrium and hence is sub-optimal. Instead, harvesting the jamming interference can lead to relative gains of up to 95%, on average, in terms of Shannon capacity, when the jamming interference is high.
Retrieving Similar E-Commerce Images Using Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we propose a deep convolutional neural network for learning the embeddings of images in order to capture the notion of visual similarity. We present a deep siamese architecture that when trained on positive and negative pairs of images learn an embedding that accurately approximates the ranking of images in order of visual similarity notion. We also implement a novel loss calculation method using an angular loss metrics based on the problems requirement. The final embedding of the image is combined representation of the lower and top-level embeddings. We used fractional distance matrix to calculate the distance between the learned embeddings in n-dimensional space. In the end, we compare our architecture with other existing deep architecture and go on to demonstrate the superiority of our solution in terms of image retrieval by testing the architecture on four datasets. We also show how our suggested network is better than the other traditional deep CNNs used for capturing fine-grained image similarities by learning an optimum embedding.
Feature Fusion for Robust Patch Matching With Compact Binary Descriptors
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

This work addresses the problem of learning compact yet discriminative patch descriptors within a deep learning framework. We observe that features extracted by convolutional layers in the pixel domain are largely complementary to features extracted in a transformed domain. We propose a convolutional network framework for learning binary patch descriptors where pixel domain features are fused with features extracted from the transformed domain. In our framework, while convolutional and transformed features are distinctly extracted, they are fused and provided to a single classifier which thus jointly operates on convolutional and transformed features. We experiment at matching patches from three different datasets, showing that our feature fusion approach outperforms multiple state-of-the-art approaches in terms of accuracy, rate, and complexity.
Learning Manipulation States and Actions for Efficient Non-prehensile Rearrangement Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

This paper addresses non-prehensile rearrangement planning problems where a robot is tasked to rearrange objects among obstacles on a planar surface. We present an efficient planning algorithm that is designed to impose few assumptions on the robot's non-prehensile manipulation abilities and is simple to adapt to different robot embodiments. For this, we combine sampling-based motion planning with reinforcement learning and generative modeling. Our algorithm explores the composite configuration space of objects and robot as a search over robot actions, forward simulated in a physics model. This search is guided by a generative model that provides robot states from which an object can be transported towards a desired state, and a learned policy that provides corresponding robot actions. As an efficient generative model, we apply Generative Adversarial Networks. We implement and evaluate our approach for robots endowed with configuration spaces in SE(2). We demonstrate empirically the efficacy of our algorithm design choices and observe more than 2x speedup in planning time on various test scenarios compared to a state-of-the-art approach.