OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
ECHO: An Adaptive Orchestration Platform for Hybrid Dataflows across Cloud and Edge
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2017
Year: 2017

The Internet of Things (IoT) is offering unprecedented observational data that are used for managing Smart City utilities. Edge and Fog gateway devices are an integral part of IoT deployments to acquire real-time data and enact controls. Recently, Edge-computing is emerging as first-class paradigm to complement Cloud-centric analytics. But a key limitation is the lack of a platform-as-a-service for applications spanning Edge and Cloud. Here, we propose ECHO, an orchestration platform for dataflows across distributed resources. ECHO's hybrid dataflow composition can operate on diverse data models -- streams, micro-batches and files, and interface with native runtime engines like TensorFlow and Storm to execute them. It manages the application's lifecycle, including container-based deployment and a registry for state management. ECHO can schedule the dataflow on different Edge, Fog and Cloud resources, and also perform dynamic task migration between resources. We validate the ECHO platform for executing video analytics and sensor streams for Smart Traffic and Smart Utility applications on Raspberry Pi, NVidia TX1, ARM64 and Azure Cloud VM resources, and present our results.
Cycle-centrality in complex networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2017
Year: 2017

Networks are versatile representations of the interactions between entities in complex systems. Cycles on such networks represent feedback processes which play a central role in system dynamics. In this work, we introduce a measure of the importance of any individual cycle, as the fraction of the total information flow of the network passing through the cycle. This measure is computationally cheap, numerically well-conditioned, induces a centrality measure on arbitrary subgraphs and reduces to the eigenvector centrality on vertices. We demonstrate that this measure accurately reflects the impact of events on strategic ensembles of economic sectors, notably in the US economy. As a second example, we show that in the protein-interaction network of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana, a model based on cycle-centrality better accounts for pathogen activity than the state-of-art one. This translates into pathogen-targeted-proteins being concentrated in a small number of triads with high cycle-centrality. Algorithms for computing the centrality of cycles and subgraphs are available for download.
Development and Verification of a Flight Stack for a High-Altitude Glider in Ada/SPARK 2014
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2017
Year: 2017

SPARK 2014 is a modern programming language and a new state-of-the-art tool set for development and verification of high-integrity software. In this paper, we explore the capabilities and limitations of its latest version in the context of building a flight stack for a high-altitude unmanned glider. Towards that, we deliberately applied static analysis early and continuously during implementation, to give verification the possibility to steer the software design. In this process we have identified several limitations and pitfalls of software design and verification in SPARK, for which we give workarounds and protective actions to avoid them. Finally, we give design recommendations that have proven effective for verification, and summarize our experiences with this new language.
Study of Joint MMSE Consensus and Relay Selection Algorithms for Distributed Beamforming
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

This work presents joint minimum mean-square error (MMSE) consensus algorithm and relay selection algorithms for distributed beamforming. We propose joint MMSE consensus relay and selection schemes with a total power constraint and local communications among the relays for a network with cooperating sensors. We also devise greedy relay selection algorithms based on the MMSE consensus approach that optimize the network performance. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme and algorithms outperform existing techniques for distributed beamforming.
Automatic estimation of harmonic tension by distributed representation of chords
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2017
Year: 2017

The buildup and release of a sense of tension is one of the most essential aspects of the process of listening to music. A veridical computational model of perceived musical tension would be an important ingredient for many music informatics applications. The present paper presents a new approach to modelling harmonic tension based on a distributed representation of chords. The starting hypothesis is that harmonic tension as perceived by human listeners is related, among other things, to the expectedness of harmonic units (chords) in their local harmonic context. We train a word2vec-type neural network to learn a vector space that captures contextual similarity and expectedness, and define a quantitative measure of harmonic tension on top of this. To assess the veridicality of the model, we compare its outputs on a number of well-defined chord classes and cadential contexts to results from pertinent empirical studies in music psychology. Statistical analysis shows that the model's predictions conform very well with empirical evidence obtained from human listeners.
Logically automorphically equivalent knowledge bases
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2017
Year: 2017

Knowledge bases theory provide an important example of the field where applications of universal algebra and algebraic logic look very natural, and their interaction with practical problems arising in computer science might be very productive. In this paper we study the equivalence problem for knowledge bases. Our interest is to find out how the informational equivalence is related to the logical description of knowledge. Studying various equivalences of knowledge bases allows us to compare different knowledge bases. The main objective of this paper is logically automorphically equivalent knowledge bases. As we will see this notion gives us a good enough characterization of knowledge bases.
The City Pulse of Buenos Aires
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2017
Year: 2017

Cell phone technology generates massive amounts of data. Although this data has been gathered for billing and logging purposes, today it has a much higher value, because its volume makes it very useful for big data analyses. In this project, we analyze the viability of using cell phone records to lower the cost of urban and transportation planning, in particular, to find out how people travel in a specific city (in this case, Buenos Aires, in Argentina). We use anonymized cell phone data to estimate the distribution of the population in the city using different periods of time. We compare those results with traditional methods (urban polling) using data from Buenos Aires origin-destination surveys. Traditional polling methods have a much smaller sample, in the order of tens of thousands (or even less for smaller cities), to maintain reasonable costs. Furthermore, these studies are performed at most once per decade, in the best cases, in Argentina and many other countries. Our objective is to prove that new methods based on cell phone data are reliable, and can be used indirectly to keep a real-time track of the flow of people among different parts of a city. We also go further to explore new possibilities opened by these methods.
How Noisy Data Affects Geometric Semantic Genetic Programming
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2017
Year: 2017

Noise is a consequence of acquiring and pre-processing data from the environment, and shows fluctuations from different sources---e.g., from sensors, signal processing technology or even human error. As a machine learning technique, Genetic Programming (GP) is not immune to this problem, which the field has frequently addressed. Recently, Geometric Semantic Genetic Programming (GSGP), a semantic-aware branch of GP, has shown robustness and high generalization capability. Researchers believe these characteristics may be associated with a lower sensibility to noisy data. However, there is no systematic study on this matter. This paper performs a deep analysis of the GSGP performance over the presence of noise. Using 15 synthetic datasets where noise can be controlled, we added different ratios of noise to the data and compared the results obtained with those of a canonical GP. The results show that, as we increase the percentage of noisy instances, the generalization performance degradation is more pronounced in GSGP than GP. However, in general, GSGP is more robust to noise than GP in the presence of up to 10% of noise, and presents no statistical difference for values higher than that in the test bed.
Zero-Shot Transfer Learning for Event Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2017
Year: 2017

Most previous event extraction studies have relied heavily on features derived from annotated event mentions, thus cannot be applied to new event types without annotation effort. In this work, we take a fresh look at event extraction and model it as a grounding problem. We design a transferable neural architecture, mapping event mentions and types jointly into a shared semantic space using structural and compositional neural networks, where the type of each event mention can be determined by the closest of all candidate types . By leveraging (1)~available manual annotations for a small set of existing event types and (2)~existing event ontologies, our framework applies to new event types without requiring additional annotation. Experiments on both existing event types (e.g., ACE, ERE) and new event types (e.g., FrameNet) demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. \textit{Without any manual annotations} for 23 new event types, our zero-shot framework achieved performance comparable to a state-of-the-art supervised model which is trained from the annotations of 500 event mentions.
ShuffleNet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devices
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

We introduce an extremely computation-efficient CNN architecture named ShuffleNet, which is designed specially for mobile devices with very limited computing power (e.g., 10-150 MFLOPs). The new architecture utilizes two new operations, pointwise group convolution and channel shuffle, to greatly reduce computation cost while maintaining accuracy. Experiments on ImageNet classification and MS COCO object detection demonstrate the superior performance of ShuffleNet over other structures, e.g. lower top-1 error (absolute 7.8%) than recent MobileNet on ImageNet classification task, under the computation budget of 40 MFLOPs. On an ARM-based mobile device, ShuffleNet achieves ~13x actual speedup over AlexNet while maintaining comparable accuracy.
Analysis of the Rising Threat of Subverting Privacy Technologies
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2017
Year: 2017

Privacy technologies have become extremely prevalent in recent years from secure communication channels to the Tor network. These technologies were designed to provide privacy and security for users, but these ideals have also led to increased criminal use of the technologies. Privacy and anonymity are always sought after by criminals, making these technologies the perfect vehicles for committing crimes on the Internet. This paper will analyze the rising threat of subverting privacy technologies for criminal or nefarious use. It will look at recent research in this area and ultimately reach conclusions on the seriousness of this issue.
On Petri Nets with Hierarchical Special Arcs
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2017
Year: 2017

We investigate the decidability of termination, reachability, coverability and deadlock-freeness of Petri nets endowed with a hierarchy on places, and with inhibitor arcs, reset arcs and transfer arcs that respect this hierarchy. We also investigate what happens when we have a mix of these special arcs, some of which respect the hierarchy, while others do not. We settle the decidability status of the above four problems for all combinations of hierarchy, inhibitor, reset and transfer arcs, except the termination problem for two combinations. For both these combinations, we show that the termination problem is as hard as deciding positivity for linear recurrent sequences -- a long-standing open problem.
Complexity Metric for Code-Mixed Social Media Text
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2017
Year: 2017

An evaluation metric is an absolute necessity for measuring the performance of any system and complexity of any data. In this paper, we have discussed how to determine the level of complexity of code-mixed social media texts that are growing rapidly due to multilingual interference. In general, texts written in multiple languages are often hard to comprehend and analyze. At the same time, in order to meet the demands of analysis, it is also necessary to determine the complexity of a particular document or a text segment. Thus, in the present paper, we have discussed the existing metrics for determining the code-mixing complexity of a corpus, their advantages, and shortcomings as well as proposed several improvements on the existing metrics. The new index better reflects the variety and complexity of a multilingual document. Also, the index can be applied to a sentence and seamlessly extended to a paragraph or an entire document. We have employed two existing code-mixed corpora to suit the requirements of our study.
Model compression as constrained optimization, with application to neural nets. Part I: general framework
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

Compressing neural nets is an active research problem, given the large size of state-of-the-art nets for tasks such as object recognition, and the computational limits imposed by mobile devices. We give a general formulation of model compression as constrained optimization. This includes many types of compression: quantization, low-rank decomposition, pruning, lossless compression and others. Then, we give a general algorithm to optimize this nonconvex problem based on the augmented Lagrangian and alternating optimization. This results in a "learning-compression" algorithm, which alternates a learning step of the uncompressed model, independent of the compression type, with a compression step of the model parameters, independent of the learning task. This simple, efficient algorithm is guaranteed to find the best compressed model for the task in a local sense under standard assumptions. We present separately in several companion papers the development of this general framework into specific algorithms for model compression based on quantization, pruning and other variations, including experimental results on compressing neural nets and other models.
Per-Tone model for Common Mode sensor based alien noise cancellation for Downstream xDSL
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

For xDSL systems, alien noise cancellation using an additional common mode sensor at the downstream receiver can be thought of as interference cancellation in a Single Input Dual Output (SIDO) system. The coupling between the common mode and differential mode can be modelled as an LTI system with a long impulse response, resulting in high complexity for cancellation. Frequency domain per-tone cancellation offers a low complexity approach to the problem besides having other advantages like faster training, but suffers from loss in cancellation performance due to approximations in the per-tone model. We analyze this loss and show that it is possible to minimize it by a convenient post-training "delay" adjustment. We also show via measurements that the loss of cancellation performance due to the per-tone model is not very large for real scenarios.
Like What You Like: Knowledge Distill via Neuron Selectivity Transfer
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Despite deep neural networks have demonstrated extraordinary power in various applications, their superior performances are at expense of high storage and computational costs. Consequently, the acceleration and compression of neural networks have attracted much attention recently. Knowledge Transfer (KT), which aims at training a smaller student network by transferring knowledge from a larger teacher model, is one of the popular solutions. In this paper, we propose a novel knowledge transfer method by treating it as a distribution matching problem. Particularly, we match the distributions of neuron selectivity patterns between teacher and student networks. To achieve this goal, we devise a new KT loss function by minimizing the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) metric between these distributions. Combined with the original loss function, our method can significantly improve the performance of student networks. We validate the effectiveness of our method across several datasets, and further combine it with other KT methods to explore the best possible results. Last but not least, we fine-tune the model to other tasks such as object detection. The results are also encouraging, which confirm the transferability of the learned features.
DarkRank: Accelerating Deep Metric Learning via Cross Sample Similarities Transfer
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

We have witnessed rapid evolution of deep neural network architecture design in the past years. These latest progresses greatly facilitate the developments in various areas such as computer vision and natural language processing. However, along with the extraordinary performance, these state-of-the-art models also bring in expensive computational cost. Directly deploying these models into applications with real-time requirement is still infeasible. Recently, Hinton etal. have shown that the dark knowledge within a powerful teacher model can significantly help the training of a smaller and faster student network. These knowledge are vastly beneficial to improve the generalization ability of the student model. Inspired by their work, we introduce a new type of knowledge -- cross sample similarities for model compression and acceleration. This knowledge can be naturally derived from deep metric learning model. To transfer them, we bring the "learning to rank" technique into deep metric learning formulation. We test our proposed DarkRank method on various metric learning tasks including pedestrian re-identification, image retrieval and image clustering. The results are quite encouraging. Our method can improve over the baseline method by a large margin. Moreover, it is fully compatible with other existing methods. When combined, the performance can be further boosted.
Graph Based Recommendations: From Data Representation to Feature Extraction and Application
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2017
Year: 2017

Modeling users for the purpose of identifying their preferences and then personalizing services on the basis of these models is a complex task, primarily due to the need to take into consideration various explicit and implicit signals, missing or uncertain information, contextual aspects, and more. In this study, a novel generic approach for uncovering latent preference patterns from user data is proposed and evaluated. The approach relies on representing the data using graphs, and then systematically extracting graph-based features and using them to enrich the original user models. The extracted features encapsulate complex relationships between users, items, and metadata. The enhanced user models can then serve as an input to any recommendation algorithm. The proposed approach is domain-independent (demonstrated on data from movies, music, and business recommender systems), and is evaluated using several state-of-the-art machine learning methods, on different recommendation tasks, and using different evaluation metrics. The results show a unanimous improvement in the recommendation accuracy across tasks and domains. In addition, the evaluation provides a deeper analysis regarding the performance of the approach in special scenarios, including high sparsity and variability of ratings.
Combining Forward and Backward Abstract Interpretation of Horn Clauses
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2017
Year: 2017

Alternation of forward and backward analyses is a standard technique in abstract interpretation of programs, which is in particular useful when we wish to prove unreachability of some undesired program states. The current state-of-the-art technique for combining forward (bottom-up, in logic programming terms) and backward (top-down) abstract interpretation of Horn clauses is query-answer transformation. It transforms a system of Horn clauses, such that standard forward analysis can propagate constraints both forward, and backward from a goal. Query-answer transformation is effective, but has issues that we wish to address. For that, we introduce a new backward collecting semantics, which is suitable for alternating forward and backward abstract interpretation of Horn clauses. We show how the alternation can be used to prove unreachability of the goal and how every subsequent run of an analysis yields a refined model of the system. Experimentally, we observe that combining forward and backward analyses is important for analysing systems that encode questions about reachability in C programs. In particular, the combination that follows our new semantics improves the precision of our own abstract interpreter, including when compared to a forward analysis of a query-answer-transformed system.
Automated Experiment Design for Data-Efficient Verification of Parametric Markov Decision Processes
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

We present a new method for statistical verification of quantitative properties over a partially unknown system with actions, utilising a parameterised model (in this work, a parametric Markov decision process) and data collected from experiments performed on the underlying system. We obtain the confidence that the underlying system satisfies a given property, and show that the method uses data efficiently and thus is robust to the amount of data available. These characteristics are achieved by firstly exploiting parameter synthesis to establish a feasible set of parameters for which the underlying system will satisfy the property; secondly, by actively synthesising experiments to increase amount of information in the collected data that is relevant to the property; and finally propagating this information over the model parameters, obtaining a confidence that reflects our belief whether or not the system parameters lie in the feasible set, thereby solving the verification problem.
Employee turnover prediction and retention policies design: a case study
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2017
Year: 2017

This paper illustrates the similarities between the problems of customer churn and employee turnover. An example of employee turnover prediction model leveraging classical machine learning techniques is developed. Model outputs are then discussed to design \& test employee retention policies. This type of retention discussion is, to our knowledge, innovative and constitutes the main value of this paper.