OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Beyond Surveys: Analyzing Software Development Artifacts to Assess Teaching Efforts
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2019
Year: 2019

This Innovative Practice Full Paper presents an approach of using software development artifacts to gauge student behavior and the effectiveness of changes to curriculum design. There is an ongoing need to adapt university courses to changing requirements and shifts in industry. As an educator it is therefore vital to have access to methods, with which to ascertain the effects of curriculum design changes. In this paper, we present our approach of analyzing software repositories in order to gauge student behavior during project work. We evaluate this approach in a case study of a university undergraduate software development course teaching agile development methodologies. Surveys revealed positive attitudes towards the course and the change of employed development methodology from Scrum to Kanban. However, surveys were not usable to ascertain the degree to which students had adapted their workflows and whether they had done so in accordance with course goals. Therefore, we analyzed students' software repository data, which represents information that can be collected by educators to reveal insights into learning successes and detailed student behavior. We analyze the software repositories created during the last five courses, and evaluate differences in workflows between Kanban and Scrum usage.
Resilient Synchronization of Distributed Multi-agent Systems under Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we first address adverse effects of cyber-physical attacks on distributed synchronization of multi-agent systems, by providing conditions under which an attacker can destabilize the underlying network, as well as another set of conditions under which local neighborhood tracking errors of intact agents converge to zero. Based on this analysis, we propose a Kullback-Liebler divergence based criterion in view of which each agent detects its neighbors' misbehavior and, consequently, forms a self-belief about the trustworthiness of the information it receives. Agents continuously update their self-beliefs and communicate them with their neighbors to inform them of the significance of their outgoing information. Moreover, if the self-belief of an agent is low, it forms trust on its neighbors. Agents incorporate their neighbors' self-beliefs and their own trust values on their control protocols to slow down and mitigate attacks. We show that using the proposed resilient approach, an agent discards the information it receives from a neighbor only if its neighbor is compromised, and not solely based on the discrepancy among neighbors' information, which might be caused by legitimate changes, and not attacks. The proposed approach is guaranteed to work under mild connectivity assumptions.
Automatic Classification of Defective Photovoltaic Module Cells in Electroluminescence Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Electroluminescence (EL) imaging is a useful modality for the inspection of photovoltaic (PV) modules. EL images provide high spatial resolution, which makes it possible to detect even finest defects on the surface of PV modules. However, the analysis of EL images is typically a manual process that is expensive, time-consuming, and requires expert knowledge of many different types of defects. In this work, we investigate two approaches for automatic detection of such defects in a single image of a PV cell. The approaches differ in their hardware requirements, which are dictated by their respective application scenarios. The more hardware-efficient approach is based on hand-crafted features that are classified in a Support Vector Machine (SVM). To obtain a strong performance, we investigate and compare various processing variants. The more hardware-demanding approach uses an end-to-end deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that runs on a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). Both approaches are trained on 1,968 cells extracted from high resolution EL intensity images of mono- and polycrystalline PV modules. The CNN is more accurate, and reaches an average accuracy of 88.42%. The SVM achieves a slightly lower average accuracy of 82.44%, but can run on arbitrary hardware. Both automated approaches make continuous, highly accurate monitoring of PV cells feasible.
Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks for Glucose Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Control of blood glucose is essential for diabetes management. Current digital therapeutic approaches for subjects with Type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) such as the artificial pancreas and insulin bolus calculators leverage machine learning techniques for predicting subcutaneous glucose for improved control. Deep learning has recently been applied in healthcare and medical research to achieve state-of-the-art results in a range of tasks including disease diagnosis, and patient state prediction among others. In this work, we present a deep learning model that is capable of forecasting glucose levels with leading accuracy for simulated patient cases (RMSE = 9.38$\pm$0.71 [mg/dL] over a 30-minute horizon, RMSE = 18.87$\pm$2.25 [mg/dL] over a 60-minute horizon) and real patient cases (RMSE = 21.07$\pm$2.35 [mg/dL] for 30-minute, RMSE = 33.27$\pm$4.79\% for 60-minute). In addition, the model provides competitive performance in providing effective prediction horizon ($PH_{eff}$) with minimal time lag both in a simulated patient dataset ($PH_{eff}$ = 29.0$\pm$0.7 for 30-min and $PH_{eff}$ = 49.8$\pm$2.9 for 60-min) and in a real patient dataset ($PH_{eff}$ = 19.3$\pm$3.1 for 30-min and $PH_{eff}$ = 29.3$\pm$9.4 for 60-min). This approach is evaluated on a dataset of 10 simulated cases generated from the UVa/Padova simulator and a clinical dataset of 10 real cases each containing glucose readings, insulin bolus, and meal (carbohydrate) data. Performance of the recurrent convolutional neural network is benchmarked against four algorithms. The proposed algorithm is implemented on an Android mobile phone, with an execution time of $6$ms on a phone compared to an execution time of $780$ms on a laptop.
Beyond Pixels: Image Provenance Analysis Leveraging Metadata
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Creative works, whether paintings or memes, follow unique journeys that result in their final form. Understanding these journeys, a process known as "provenance analysis", provides rich insights into the use, motivation, and authenticity underlying any given work. The application of this type of study to the expanse of unregulated content on the Internet is what we consider in this paper. Provenance analysis provides a snapshot of the chronology and validity of content as it is uploaded, re-uploaded, and modified over time. Although still in its infancy, automated provenance analysis for online multimedia is already being applied to different types of content. Most current works seek to build provenance graphs based on the shared content between images or videos. This can be a computationally expensive task, especially when considering the vast influx of content that the Internet sees every day. Utilizing non-content-based information, such as timestamps, geotags, and camera IDs can help provide important insights into the path a particular image or video has traveled during its time on the Internet without large computational overhead. This paper tests the scope and applicability of metadata-based inferences for provenance graph construction in two different scenarios: digital image forensics and cultural analytics.
Evolving Multimodal Robot Behavior via Many Stepping Stones with the Combinatorial Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2019
Year: 2019

An important challenge in reinforcement learning, including evolutionary robotics, is to solve multimodal problems, where agents have to act in qualitatively different ways depending on the circumstances. Because multimodal problems are often too difficult to solve directly, it is helpful to take advantage of staging, where a difficult task is divided into simpler subtasks that can serve as stepping stones for solving the overall problem. Unfortunately, choosing an effective ordering for these subtasks is difficult, and a poor ordering can reduce the speed and performance of the learning process. Here, we provide a thorough introduction and investigation of the Combinatorial Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm (CMOEA), which avoids ordering subtasks by allowing all combinations of subtasks to be explored simultaneously. We compare CMOEA against two algorithms that can similarly optimize on multiple subtasks simultaneously: NSGA-II and Lexicase Selection. The algorithms are tested on a multimodal robotics problem with six subtasks as well as a maze navigation problem with a hundred subtasks. On these problems, CMOEA either outperforms or is competitive with the controls. Separately, we show that adding a linear combination over all objectives can improve the ability of NSGA-II to solve these multimodal problems. Lastly, we show that, in contrast to NSGA-II and Lexicase Selection, CMOEA can effectively leverage secondary objectives to achieve state-of-the-art results on the robotics task. In general, our experiments suggest that CMOEA is a promising, state-of-the-art algorithm for solving multimodal problems.
Capacity of Two-Way Channels with Symmetry Properties
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we make use of channel symmetry properties to determine the capacity region of three types of two-way networks: (a) two-user memoryless two-way channels (TWCs), (b) two-user TWCs with memory, and (c) three-user multiaccess/degraded broadcast (MA/DB) TWCs. For each network, symmetry conditions under which a Shannon-type random coding inner bound (under independent non-adaptive inputs) is tight are given. For two-user memoryless TWCs, prior results are substantially generalized by viewing a TWC as two interacting state-dependent one-way channels. The capacity of symmetric TWCs with memory, whose outputs are functions of the inputs and independent stationary and ergodic noise processes, is also obtained. Moreover, various channel symmetry properties under which the Shannon-type inner bound is tight are identified for three-user MA/DB TWCs. The results not only enlarge the class of symmetric TWCs whose capacity region can be exactly determined but also imply that interactive adaptive coding, not improving capacity, is unnecessary for such channels.
A Game-Based Approximate Verification of Deep Neural Networks with Provable Guarantees
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Despite the improved accuracy of deep neural networks, the discovery of adversarial examples has raised serious safety concerns. In this paper, we study two variants of pointwise robustness, the maximum safe radius problem, which for a given input sample computes the minimum distance to an adversarial example, and the feature robustness problem, which aims to quantify the robustness of individual features to adversarial perturbations. We demonstrate that, under the assumption of Lipschitz continuity, both problems can be approximated using finite optimisation by discretising the input space, and the approximation has provable guarantees, i.e., the error is bounded. We then show that the resulting optimisation problems can be reduced to the solution of two-player turn-based games, where the first player selects features and the second perturbs the image within the feature. While the second player aims to minimise the distance to an adversarial example, depending on the optimisation objective the first player can be cooperative or competitive. We employ an anytime approach to solve the games, in the sense of approximating the value of a game by monotonically improving its upper and lower bounds. The Monte Carlo tree search algorithm is applied to compute upper bounds for both games, and the Admissible A* and the Alpha-Beta Pruning algorithms are, respectively, used to compute lower bounds for the maximum safety radius and feature robustness games. When working on the upper bound of the maximum safe radius problem, our tool demonstrates competitive performance against existing adversarial example crafting algorithms. Furthermore, we show how our framework can be deployed to evaluate pointwise robustness of neural networks in safety-critical applications such as traffic sign recognition in self-driving cars.
A Hardware-Software Blueprint for Flexible Deep Learning Specialization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Specialized Deep Learning (DL) acceleration stacks, designed for a specific set of frameworks, model architectures, operators, and data types, offer the allure of high performance while sacrificing flexibility. Changes in algorithms, models, operators, or numerical systems threaten the viability of specialized hardware accelerators. We propose VTA, a programmable deep learning architecture template designed to be extensible in the face of evolving workloads. VTA achieves this flexibility via a parametrizable architecture, two-level ISA, and a JIT compiler. The two-level ISA is based on (1) a task-ISA that explicitly orchestrates concurrent compute and memory tasks and (2) a microcode-ISA which implements a wide variety of operators with single-cycle tensor-tensor operations. Next, we propose a runtime system equipped with a JIT compiler for flexible code-generation and heterogeneous execution that enables effective use of the VTA architecture. VTA is integrated and open-sourced into Apache TVM, a state-of-the-art deep learning compilation stack that provides flexibility for diverse models and divergent hardware backends. We propose a flow that performs design space exploration to generate a customized hardware architecture and software operator library that can be leveraged by mainstream learning frameworks. We demonstrate our approach by deploying optimized deep learning models used for object classification and style transfer on edge-class FPGAs.
Local Popularity and Time in top-N Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2019
Year: 2019

Items popularity is a strong signal in recommendation algorithms. It strongly affects collaborative filtering approaches and it has been proven to be a very good baseline in terms of results accuracy. Even though we miss an actual personalization, global popularity can be effectively used to recommend items to users. In this paper we introduce the idea of a time-aware personalized popularity in recommender systems by considering both items popularity among neighbors and how it changes over time. An experimental evaluation shows a highly competitive behavior of the proposed approach, compared to state of the art model-based collaborative approaches, in terms of results accuracy.
The importance of being dissimilar in Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2019
Year: 2019

Similarity measures play a fundamental role in memory-based nearest neighbors approaches. They recommend items to a user based on the similarity of either items or users in a neighborhood. In this paper we argue that, although it keeps a leading importance in computing recommendations, similarity between users or items should be paired with a value of dissimilarity (computed not just as the complement of the similarity one). We formally modeled and injected this notion in some of the most used similarity measures and evaluated our approach showing its effectiveness in terms of accuracy results.
A Framework for Vehicle Routing Approximation Schemes in Trees
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

We develop a general framework for designing polynomial-time approximation schemes (PTASs) for various vehicle routing problems in trees. In these problems, the goal is to optimally route a fleet of vehicles, originating at a depot, to serve a set of clients, subject to various constraints. For example, in Minimum Makespan Vehicle Routing, the number of vehicles is fixed, and the objective is to minimize the longest distance traveled by a single vehicle. Our main insight is that we can often greatly restrict the set of potential solutions without adding too much to the optimal solution cost. This simplification relies on partitioning the tree into clusters such that there exists a near-optimal solution in which every vehicle that visits a given cluster takes on one of a few forms. In particular, only a small number of vehicles serve clients in any given cluster. By using these coarser building blocks, a dynamic programming algorithm can find a near-optimal solution in polynomial time. We show that the framework is flexible enough to give PTASs for many problems, including Minimum Makespan Vehicle Routing, Distance-Constrained Vehicle Routing, Capacitated Vehicle Routing, and School Bus Routing, and can be extended to the multiple depot setting.
Aggregate Fluctuations in Networks with Drift-Diffusion Models Driven by Stable Non-Gaussian Disturbances
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2019
Year: 2019

The focus of this paper is to quantify measures of aggregate fluctuations for a class of consensus-seeking multiagent networks subject to exogenous noise with alpha-stable distributions. This type of noise is generated by a class of random measures with heavy-tailed probability distributions. We define a cumulative scale parameter using scale parameters of probability distributions of the output variables, as a measure of aggregate fluctuation. Although this class of measures can be characterized implicitly in closed-form in steady-state, finding their explicit forms in terms of network parameters is, in general, almost impossible. We obtain several tractable upper bounds in terms of Laplacian spectrum and statistics of the input noise. Our results suggest that relying on Gaussian-based optimal design algorithms will result in non-optimal solutions for networks that are driven by non-Gaussian noise inputs with alpha-stable distributions. The manuscript has been submitted for publication to IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems. It is the extended version of preliminary paper included in the proceedings of the 2018 American Control Conference.
Unique Informations and Deficiencies
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

Given two channels that convey information about the same random variable, we introduce two measures of the unique information of one channel with respect to the other. The two quantities are based on the notion of generalized weighted Le Cam deficiencies and differ on whether one channel can approximate the other by a randomization at either its input or output. We relate the proposed quantities to an existing measure of unique information which we call the minimum-synergy unique information. We give an operational interpretation of the latter in terms of an upper bound on the one-way secret key rate and discuss the role of the unique informations in the context of nonnegative mutual information decompositions into unique, redundant and synergistic components.
Discrete Morse Theory for Computing Zigzag Persistence
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2019
Year: 2019

We introduce a theoretical and computational framework to use discrete Morse theory as an efficient preprocessing in order to compute zigzag persistent homology. From a zigzag filtration of complexes $(K_i)$, we introduce a zigzag Morse filtration whose complexes $(A_i)$ are Morse reductions of the original complexes $(K_i)$, and we prove that they both have same persistent homology. This zigzag Morse filtration generalizes the filtered Morse complex of Mischaikow and Nanda, defined for standard persistence. The maps in the zigzag Morse filtration are forward and backward inclusions, as is standard in zigzag persistence, as well as a new type of map inducing non trivial changes in the boundary operator of the Morse complex. We study in details this last map, and design algorithms to compute the update both at the complex level and at the homology matrix level when computing zigzag persistence. We deduce an algorithm to compute the zigzag persistence of a filtration that depends mostly on the number of critical cells of the complexes, and show experimentally that it performs better in practice.
Image Classification for Arabic: Assessing the Accuracy of Direct English to Arabic Translations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Image classification is an ongoing research challenge. Most of the available research focuses on image classification for the English language, however there is very little research on image classification for the Arabic language. Expanding image classification to Arabic has several applications. The present study investigated a method for generating Arabic labels for images of objects. The method used in this study involved a direct English to Arabic translation of the labels that are currently available on ImageNet, a database commonly used in image classification research. The purpose of this study was to test the accuracy of this method. In this study, 2,887 labeled images were randomly selected from ImageNet. All of the labels were translated from English to Arabic using Google Translate. The accuracy of the translations was evaluated. Results indicated that that 65.6% of the Arabic labels were accurate. This study makes three important contributions to the image classification literature: (1) it determined the baseline level of accuracy for algorithms that provide Arabic labels for images, (2) it provided 1,895 images that are tagged with accurate Arabic labels, and (3) provided the accuracy of translations of image labels from English to Arabic.
Markets Beyond Nash Welfare for Leontief Utilities
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2019
Year: 2019

We study the allocation of divisible goods to competing agents via a market mechanism, focusing on agents with Leontief utilities. The majority of the economics and mechanism design literature has focused on \emph{linear} prices, meaning that the cost of a good is proportional to the quantity purchased. Equilibria for linear prices are known to be exactly the maximum Nash welfare allocations. \emph{Price curves} allow the cost of a good to be any (increasing) function of the quantity purchased. We show that price curve equilibria are not limited to maximum Nash welfare allocations with two main results. First, we show that an allocation can be supported by strictly increasing price curves if and only if it is \emph{group-domination-free}. A similarly characterization holds for weakly increasing price curves. We use this to show that given any allocation, we can compute strictly (or weakly) increasing price curves that support it (or show that none exist) in polynomial time. These results involve a connection to the \emph{agent-order matrix} of an allocation, which may have other applications. Second, we use duality to show that in the bandwidth allocation setting, any allocation maximizing a CES welfare function can be supported by price curves.
Generative Adversarial Privacy
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

We present a data-driven framework called generative adversarial privacy (GAP). Inspired by recent advancements in generative adversarial networks (GANs), GAP allows the data holder to learn the privatization mechanism directly from the data. Under GAP, finding the optimal privacy mechanism is formulated as a constrained minimax game between a privatizer and an adversary. We show that for appropriately chosen adversarial loss functions, GAP provides privacy guarantees against strong information-theoretic adversaries. We also evaluate GAP's performance on the GENKI face database.