OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
ViZDoom: DRQN with Prioritized Experience Replay, Double-Q Learning, & Snapshot Ensembling
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

ViZDoom is a robust, first-person shooter reinforcement learning environment, characterized by a significant degree of latent state information. In this paper, double-Q learning and prioritized experience replay methods are tested under a certain ViZDoom combat scenario using a competitive deep recurrent Q-network (DRQN) architecture. In addition, an ensembling technique known as snapshot ensembling is employed using a specific annealed learning rate to observe differences in ensembling efficacy under these two methods. Annealed learning rates are important in general to the training of deep neural network models, as they shake up the status-quo and counter a model's tending towards local optima. While both variants show performance exceeding those of built-in AI agents of the game, the known stabilizing effects of double-Q learning are illustrated, and priority experience replay is again validated in its usefulness by showing immediate results early on in agent development, with the caveat that value overestimation is accelerated in this case. In addition, some unique behaviors are observed to develop for priority experience replay (PER) and double-Q (DDQ) variants, and snapshot ensembling of both PER and DDQ proves a valuable method for improving performance of the ViZDoom Marine.
ARTEMIS: Neutralizing BGP Hijacking within a Minute
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

BGP prefix hijacking is a critical threat to Internet organizations and users. Despite the availability of several defense approaches (ranging from RPKI to popular third-party services), none of them solves the problem adequately in practice. In fact, they suffer from: (i) lack of detection comprehensiveness, allowing sophisticated attackers to evade detection, (ii) limited accuracy, especially in the case of third-party detection, (iii) delayed verification and mitigation of incidents, reaching up to days, and (iv) lack of privacy and of flexibility in post-hijack counteractions, on the side of network operators. In this work, we propose ARTEMIS (Automatic and Real-Time dEtection and MItigation System), a defense approach (a) based on accurate and fast detection operated by the AS itself, leveraging the pervasiveness of publicly available BGP monitoring services and their recent shift towards real-time streaming, thus (b) enabling flexible and fast mitigation of hijacking events. Compared to previous work, our approach combines characteristics desirable to network operators such as comprehensiveness, accuracy, speed, privacy, and flexibility. Finally, we show through real-world experiments that, with the ARTEMIS approach, prefix hijacking can be neutralized within a minute.
Learning from Pseudo-Randomness With an Artificial Neural Network - Does God Play Pseudo-Dice?
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Inspired by the fact that the neural network, as the mainstream for machine learning, has brought successes in many application areas, here we propose to use this approach for decoding hidden correlation among pseudo-random data and predicting events accordingly. With a simple neural network structure and a typical training procedure, we demonstrate the learning and prediction power of the neural network in extremely random environment. Finally, we postulate that the high sensitivity and efficiency of the neural network may allow to critically test if there could be any fundamental difference between quantum randomness and pseudo randomness, which is equivalent to the question: Does God play dice?
Dynamic Co-Simulation Methods for Combined Transmission-Distribution System and Integration Time Step Impact on Convergence
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

Combined Transmission and Distribution Systems (CoTDS) simulation for power systems requires development of algorithms and software that are numerically stable and at the same time accurately simulate dynamic events that can occur in practical systems. The dynamic behavior of transmission and distribution systems are vastly different, especially with the increased deployment of distribution generation. The time scales of simulation can be orders of magnitude apart making the combined simulation extremely challenging. This has led to increased research in applying co-simulation techniques for integrated simulation of the two systems. In this paper, a rigorous mathematical analysis on convergence of numerical methods in co-simulation is presented. Two methods for co-simulation of CoTDS are proposed using parallel and series computation of the transmission system and distribution systems. Both these co-simulation methods are validated against total system simulation in a single time-domain simulation environment. The series computation co-simulation method is shown to have better numerical stability at larger integration time steps. The series computation co-simulation method is additionally validated against commercial EMTP software and the results show remarkable correspondence.
A Decision-theoretic Approach to Detection-based Target Search with a UAV
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

Search and rescue missions and surveillance require finding targets in a large area. These tasks often use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with cameras to detect and move towards a target. However, common UAV approaches make two simplifying assumptions. First, they assume that observations made from different heights are deterministically correct. In practice, observations are noisy, with the noise increasing as the height used for observations increases. Second, they assume that a motion command executes correctly, which may not happen due to wind and other environmental factors. To address these, we propose a sequential algorithm that determines actions in real time based on observations, using partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). Our formulation handles both observations and motion uncertainty and errors. We run offline simulations and learn a policy. This policy is run on a UAV to find the target efficiently. We employ a novel compact formulation to represent the coordinates of the drone relative to the target coordinates. Our POMDP policy finds the target up to 3.4 times faster when compared to a heuristic policy.
Modular Networks for Validating Community Detection Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2018
Year: 2018

How can we accurately compare different community detection algorithms? These algorithms cluster nodes in a given network, and their performance is often validated on benchmark networks with explicit ground-truth communities. Given the lack of cluster labels in real-world networks, a model that generates realistic networks is required for accurate evaluation of these algorithm. In this paper, we present a simple, intuitive, and flexible benchmark generator to generate intrinsically modular networks for community validation. We show how the generated networks closely comply with the characteristics observed for real networks; whereas their characteristics could be directly controlled to match wide range of real world networks. We further show how common community detection algorithms rank differently when being evaluated on these benchmarks compared to current available alternatives.
Improving the Closed-Loop Tracking Performance Using the First-Order Hold Sensing Technique with Experiments
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

This paper proposes a new perspective in the enhancement of the closed-loop tracking performance by using the first-order hold (FOH) sensing technique. Firstly, the literature review and fundamentals of the FOH are outlined. Secondly, the performance of the most commonly used zero-order hold (ZOH) and that of the FOH are compared. Lastly, the detailed implementation of the FOH on a pendulum tracking setup is presented to verify the superiority of the FOH over the ZOH in terms of the steady state tracking error. The results of the simulation and the experiment are in agreement.
Learning automata based SVM for intrusion detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

As an indispensable defensive measure of network security, the intrusion detection is a process of monitoring the events occurring in a computer system or network and analyzing them for signs of possible incidents. It is a classifier to judge the event is normal or malicious. The information used for intrusion detection contains some redundant features which would increase the difficulty of training the classifier for intrusion detection and increase the time of making predictions. To simplify the training process and improve the efficiency of the classifier, it is necessary to remove these dispensable features. in this paper, we propose a novel LA-SVM scheme to automatically remove redundant features focusing on intrusion detection. This is the first application of learning automata for solving dimension reduction problems. The simulation results indicate that the LA-SVM scheme achieves a higher accuracy and is more efficient in making predictions compared with traditional SVM.
Implementation of Deep Convolutional Neural Network in Multi-class Categorical Image Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Convolutional Neural Networks has been implemented in many complex machine learning takes such as image classification, object identification, autonomous vehicle and robotic vision tasks. However, ConvNet architecture efficiency and accuracy depend on a large number of fac- tors. Also, the complex architecture requires a significant amount of data to train and involves with a large number of hyperparameters that increases the computational expenses and difficul- ties. Hence, it is necessary to address the limitations and techniques to overcome the barriers to ensure that the architecture performs well in complex visual tasks. This article is intended to develop an efficient ConvNet architecture for multi-class image categorical classification applica- tion. In the development of the architecture, large pool of grey scale images are taken as input information images and split into training and test datasets. The numerously available technique is implemented to reduce the overfitting and poor generalization of the network. The hyperpa- rameters of determined by Bayesian Optimization with Gaussian Process prior algorithm. ReLu non-linear activation function is implemented after the convolutional layers. Max pooling op- eration is carried out to downsampling the data points in pooling layers. Cross-entropy loss function is used to measure the performance of the architecture where the softmax is used in the classification layer. Mini-batch gradient descent with Adam optimizer algorithm is used for backpropagation. Developed architecture is validated with confusion matrix and classification report.
Practical Challenges in Explicit Ethical Machine Reasoning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

We examine implemented systems for ethical machine reasoning with a view to identifying the practical challenges (as opposed to philosophical challenges) posed by the area. We identify a need for complex ethical machine reasoning not only to be multi-objective, proactive, and scrutable but that it must draw on heterogeneous evidential reasoning. We also argue that, in many cases, it needs to operate in real time and be verifiable. We propose a general architecture involving a declarative ethical arbiter which draws upon multiple evidential reasoners each responsible for a particular ethical feature of the system's environment. We claim that this architecture enables some separation of concerns among the practical challenges that ethical machine reasoning poses.
Deep Anticipation: Light Weight Intelligent Mobile Sensing in IoT by Recurrent Architecture
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

The rapid growth of IoT era is shaping the future of mobile services. Advanced communication technology enables a heterogeneous connectivity where mobile devices broadcast information to everything. Mobile applications such as robotics and vehicles connecting to cloud and surroundings transfer the short-range on-board sensor perception system to long-range mobile-sensing perception system. However, the mobile sensing perception brings new challenges for how to efficiently analyze and intelligently interpret the deluge of IoT data in mission- critical services. In this article, we model the challenges as latency, packet loss and measurement noise which severely deteriorate the reliability and quality of IoT data. We integrate the artificial intelligence into IoT to tackle these challenges. We propose a novel architecture that leverages recurrent neural networks (RNN) and Kalman filtering to anticipate motions and interac- tions between objects. The basic idea is to learn environment dynamics by recurrent networks. To improve the robustness of IoT communication, we use the idea of Kalman filtering and deploy a prediction and correction step. In this way, the architecture learns to develop a biased belief between prediction and measurement in the different situation. We demonstrate our approach with synthetic and real-world datasets with noise that mimics the challenges of IoT communications. Our method brings a new level of IoT intelligence. It is also lightweight compared to other state-of-the-art convolutional recurrent architecture and is ideally suitable for the resource-limited mobile applications.
A Large Dataset for Improving Patch Matching
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

We propose a new dataset for learning local image descriptors which can be used for significantly improved patch matching. Our proposed dataset consists of an order of magnitude more number of scenes, images, and positive and negative correspondences compared to the currently available Multi-View Stereo (MVS) dataset from Brown et al. The new dataset also has better coverage of the overall viewpoint, scale, and lighting changes in comparison to the MVS dataset. Our dataset also provides supplementary information like RGB patches with scale and rotations values, and intrinsic and extrinsic camera parameters which as shown later can be used to customize training data as per application. We train an existing state-of-the-art model on our dataset and evaluate on publicly available benchmarks such as HPatches dataset and Strecha et al.\cite{strecha} to quantify the image descriptor performance. Experimental evaluations show that the descriptors trained using our proposed dataset outperform the current state-of-the-art descriptors trained on MVS by 8%, 4% and 10% on matching, verification and retrieval tasks respectively on the HPatches dataset. Similarly on the Strecha dataset, we see an improvement of 3-5% for the matching task in non-planar scenes.
DENSER: Deep Evolutionary Network Structured Representation
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2018
Year: 2018

Deep Evolutionary Network Structured Representation (DENSER) is a novel approach to automatically design Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) using Evolutionary Computation. The algorithm not only searches for the best network topology (e.g., number of layers, type of layers), but also tunes hyper-parameters, such as, learning parameters or data augmentation parameters. The automatic design is achieved using a representation with two distinct levels, where the outer level encodes the general structure of the network, i.e., the sequence of layers, and the inner level encodes the parameters associated with each layer. The allowed layers and range of the hyper-parameters values are defined by means of a human-readable Context-Free Grammar. DENSER was used to evolve ANNs for CIFAR-10, obtaining an average test accuracy of 94.13%. The networks evolved for the CIFA--10 are tested on the MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CIFAR-100; the results are highly competitive, and on the CIFAR-100 we report a test accuracy of 78.75%. To the best of our knowledge, our CIFAR-100 results are the highest performing models generated by methods that aim at the automatic design of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), and are amongst the best for manually designed and fine-tuned CNNs.
LoopSmart: Smart Visual SLAM Through Surface Loop Closure
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

We present a visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) framework of closing surface loops. It combines both sparse feature matching and dense surface alignment. Sparse feature matching is used for visual odometry and globally camera pose fine-tuning when dense loops are detected, while dense surface alignment is the way of closing large loops and solving surface mismatching problem. To achieve smart dense surface loop closure, a highly efficient CUDA-based global point cloud registration method and a map content dependent loop verification method are proposed. We run extensive experiments on different datasets, our method outperforms state-of-the-art ones in terms of both camera trajectory and surface reconstruction accuracy.
Deep learning for word-level handwritten Indic script identification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

We propose a novel method that uses convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for feature extraction. Not just limited to conventional spatial domain representation, we use multilevel 2D discrete Haar wavelet transform, where image representations are scaled to a variety of different sizes. These are then used to train different CNNs to select features. To be precise, we use 10 different CNNs that select a set of 10240 features, i.e. 1024/CNN. With this, 11 different handwritten scripts are identified, where 1K words per script are used. In our test, we have achieved the maximum script identification rate of 94.73% using multi-layer perceptron (MLP). Our results outperform the state-of-the-art techniques.
Understanding Android Obfuscation Techniques: A Large-Scale Investigation in the Wild
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we seek to better understand Android obfuscation and depict a holistic view of the usage of obfuscation through a large-scale investigation in the wild. In particular, we focus on four popular obfuscation approaches: identifier renaming, string encryption, Java reflection, and packing. To obtain the meaningful statistical results, we designed efficient and lightweight detection models for each obfuscation technique and applied them to our massive APK datasets (collected from Google Play, multiple third-party markets, and malware databases). We have learned several interesting facts from the result. For example, malware authors use string encryption more frequently, and more apps on third-party markets than Google Play are packed. We are also interested in the explanation of each finding. Therefore we carry out in-depth code analysis on some Android apps after sampling. We believe our study will help developers select the most suitable obfuscation approach, and in the meantime help researchers improve code analysis systems in the right direction.
Energy Efficiency Maximization for CoMP Joint Transmission with Non-Ideal Power Amplifiers
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

Coordinated multipoint (CoMP) joint transmission (JT) can save a great deal of energy especially for cell-edge users due to strengthened received signal, but at the cost of deploying and coordinating cooperative nodes, which degrades energy efficiency (EE), particularly when considerable amount of energy is consumed by nonideal hardware circuit. In this paper, we study energyefficient cooperation establishment, including cooperative nodes selection (CNS) and power allocation, to satisfy a required data rate in coherent JT-CoMP networks with non-ideal power amplifiers (PAs) and circuit power. The selection priority lemma is proved first, and then the formulated discrete combinatorial EE optimization is resolved by proposing node selection criterion and deriving closedform expressions of optimal transmission power. Therefore, an efficient algorithm is provided and its superiority is validated by Monte Carlo simulations, which also show the effects of non-ideal PA and the data rate demand on EE and optimal number of active nodes.
Initialization-free Privacy-guaranteed Distributed Algorithm for Economic Dispatch Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

This paper considers the economic dispatch problem for a network of power generators and customers. In particular, our aim is to minimize the total generation cost under the power supply-demand balance and the individual generation capacity constraints. This problem is solved in a distributed manner, i.e., a dual gradient-based continuous-time distributed algorithm is proposed in which only a single dual variable is communicated with the neighbors and no private information of the node is disclosed. The proposed algorithm is simple and no specific initialization is necessary, and this in turn allows on-line change of network structure, demand, generation constraints, and even the participating nodes. The algorithm also exhibits a special behavior when the problem becomes infeasible so that each node can detect over-demand or under-demand situation of the power network. Simulation results on IEEE 118 bus system confirm robustness against variations in power grids.
Energy Efficiency Analysis of Heterogeneous Cellular Networks With Extra Cell Range Expansion
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

The split control and user plane is key to the future heterogeneous cellular network (HCN), where the small cells are dedicated for the most data transmission while the macrocells are mainly responsible for the control signaling. Adapting to this technology, we propose a general and tractable framework of extra cell range expansion (CRE) by introducing an additional bias factor to enlarge the range of small cells flexibly for the extra offloaded macrousers in a two-tier HCN, where the macrocell and small cell users have different required data rates. Using stochastic geometry, we analyze the energy efficiency (EE) of the extra CRE with joint low power transmission and resource partitioning, where the coverages of EE and data rate are formulated theoretically. Numerical simulations verify that the proposed extra CRE can improve the EE performance of HCN, and also show that deploying more small cells can provide benefits for EE coverage, but the EE improvement becomes saturated if the small cell density exceeds a threshold. Instead of establishing the detail configuration, this paper can provide some valuable insights and guidelines to the practical design of future networks, especially for the traffic offloading in HCN.
Efficient Image Evidence Analysis of CNN Classification Results
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) define the current state-of-the-art for image recognition. With their emerging popularity, especially for critical applications like medical image analysis or self-driving cars, confirmability is becoming an issue. The black-box nature of trained predictors make it difficult to trace failure cases or to understand the internal reasoning processes leading to results. In this paper we introduce a novel efficient method to visualise evidence that lead to decisions in CNNs. In contrast to network fixation or saliency map methods, our method is able to illustrate the evidence for or against a classifier's decision in input pixel space approximately 10 times faster than previous methods. We also show that our approach is less prone to noise and can focus on the most relevant input regions, thus making it more accurate and interpretable. Moreover, by making simplifications we link our method with other visualisation methods, providing a general explanation for gradient-based visualisation techniques. We believe that our work makes network introspection more feasible for debugging and understanding deep convolutional networks. This will increase trust between humans and deep learning models.