OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Improve Document Embedding for Text Categorization Through Deep Siamese Neural Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Due to the increasing amount of data on the internet, finding a highly-informative, low-dimensional representation for text is one of the main challenges for efficient natural language processing tasks including text classification. This representation should capture the semantic information of the text while retaining their relevance level for document classification. This approach maps the documents with similar topics to a similar space in vector space representation. To obtain representation for large text, we propose the utilization of deep Siamese neural networks. To embed document relevance in topics in the distributed representation, we use a Siamese neural network to jointly learn document representations. Our Siamese network consists of two sub-network of multi-layer perceptron. We examine our representation for the text categorization task on BBC news dataset. The results show that the proposed representations outperform the conventional and state-of-the-art representations in the text classification task on this dataset.
Efficient Deployment of Conversational Natural Language Interfaces over Databases
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Many users communicate with chatbots and AI assistants in order to help them with various tasks. A key component of the assistant is the ability to understand and answer a user's natural language questions for question-answering (QA). Because data can be usually stored in a structured manner, an essential step involves turning a natural language question into its corresponding query language. However, in order to train most natural language-to-query-language state-of-the-art models, a large amount of training data is needed first. In most domains, this data is not available and collecting such datasets for various domains can be tedious and time-consuming. In this work, we propose a novel method for accelerating the training dataset collection for developing the natural language-to-query-language machine learning models. Our system allows one to generate conversational multi-term data, where multiple turns define a dialogue session, enabling one to better utilize chatbot interfaces. We train two current state-of-the-art NL-to-QL models, on both an SQL and SPARQL-based datasets in order to showcase the adaptability and efficacy of our created data.
Applying support vector data description for fraud detection
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Fraud detection is an important topic that applies to various enterprises such as banking and financial sectors, insurance, government agencies, law enforcement, and more. Fraud attempts have been risen remarkably in current years, shaping fraud detection an essential topic for research. One of the main challenges in fraud detection is acquiring fraud samples which is a complex and challenging task. In order to deal with this challenge, we apply one-class classification methods such as SVDD which does not need the fraud samples for training. Also, we present our algorithm REDBSCAN which is an extension of DBSCAN to reduce the number of samples and select those that keep the shape of data. The results obtained by the implementation of the proposed method indicated that the fraud detection process was improved in both performance and speed.
In the Eye of the Beholder: Gaze and Actions in First Person Video
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

We address the task of jointly determining what a person is doing and where they are looking based on the analysis of video captured by a headworn camera. To facilitate our research, we first introduce the EGTEA Gaze+ dataset. Our dataset comes with videos, gaze tracking data, hand masks and action annotations, thereby providing the most comprehensive benchmark for First Person Vision (FPV). Moving beyond the dataset, we propose a novel deep model for joint gaze estimation and action recognition in FPV. Our method describes the participant's gaze as a probabilistic variable and models its distribution using stochastic units in a deep network. We further sample from these stochastic units, generating an attention map to guide the aggregation of visual features for action recognition. Our method is evaluated on our EGTEA Gaze+ dataset and achieves a performance level that exceeds the state-of-the-art by a significant margin. More importantly, we demonstrate that our model can be applied to larger scale FPV dataset---EPIC-Kitchens even without using gaze, offering new state-of-the-art results on FPV action recognition.
The QQUIC Transport Protocol: Quantum assisted UDP Internet Connections
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

Quantum key distribution, initialized in 1984, is a commercialized secure communication method which enables two parties to produce shared random secret key by the nature of quantum mechanics. We propose QQUIC (Quantum assisted Quick UDP Internet Connections) transport protocol, which modifies the famous QUIC transport protocol by employing the quantum key distribution instead of the original classical algorithms in the key exchanging stage. Thanks to the provable security of quantum key distribution, the security of QQUIC key does not depend on computational assumptions. Maybe surprisingly, QQUIC can reduce the network latency in some circumstance even comparing with QUIC. To achieve this, the attached quantum connections are used as the dedicated lines for key generation.
Symbol Spotting on Digital Architectural Floor Plans Using a Deep Learning-based Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

This papers focuses on symbol spotting on real-world digital architectural floor plans with a deep learning (DL)-based framework. Traditional on-the-fly symbol spotting methods are unable to address the semantic challenge of graphical notation variability, i.e. low intra-class symbol similarity, an issue that is particularly important in architectural floor plan analysis. The presence of occlusion and clutter, characteristic of real-world plans, along with a varying graphical symbol complexity from almost trivial to highly complex, also pose challenges to existing spotting methods. In this paper, we address all of the above issues by leveraging recent advances in DL and adapting an object detection framework based on the You-Only-Look-Once (YOLO) architecture. We propose a training strategy based on tiles, avoiding many issues particular to DL-based object detection networks related to the relative small size of symbols compared to entire floor plans, aspect ratios, and data augmentation. Experiments on real-world floor plans demonstrate that our method successfully detects architectural symbols with low intra-class similarity and of variable graphical complexity, even in the presence of heavy occlusion and clutter. Additional experiments on the public SESYD dataset confirm that our proposed approach can deal with various degradation and noise levels and outperforms other symbol spotting methods.
Stance in Replies and Quotes (SRQ): A New Dataset For Learning Stance in Twitter Conversations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Automated ways to extract stance (denying vs. supporting opinions) from conversations on social media are essential to advance opinion mining research. Recently, there is a renewed excitement in the field as we see new models attempting to improve the state-of-the-art. However, for training and evaluating the models, the datasets used are often small. Additionally, these small datasets have uneven class distributions, i.e., only a tiny fraction of the examples in the dataset have favoring or denying stances, and most other examples have no clear stance. Moreover, the existing datasets do not distinguish between the different types of conversations on social media (e.g., replying vs. quoting on Twitter). Because of this, models trained on one event do not generalize to other events. In the presented work, we create a new dataset by labeling stance in responses to posts on Twitter (both replies and quotes) on controversial issues. To the best of our knowledge, this is currently the largest human-labeled stance dataset for Twitter conversations with over 5200 stance labels. More importantly, we designed a tweet collection methodology that favors the selection of denial-type responses. This class is expected to be more useful in the identification of rumors and determining antagonistic relationships between users. Moreover, we include many baseline models for learning the stance in conversations and compare the performance of various models. We show that combining data from replies and quotes decreases the accuracy of models indicating that the two modalities behave differently when it comes to stance learning.
Adversarial Attacks on Reinforcement Learning based Energy Management Systems of Extended Range Electric Delivery Vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Adversarial examples are firstly investigated in the area of computer vision: by adding some carefully designed ''noise'' to the original input image, the perturbed image that cannot be distinguished from the original one by human, can fool a well-trained classifier easily. In recent years, researchers also demonstrated that adversarial examples can mislead deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents on playing video games using image inputs with similar methods. However, although DRL has been more and more popular in the area of intelligent transportation systems, there is little research investigating the impacts of adversarial attacks on them, especially for algorithms that do not take images as inputs. In this work, we investigated several fast methods to generate adversarial examples to significantly degrade the performance of a well-trained DRL- based energy management system of an extended range electric delivery vehicle. The perturbed inputs are low-dimensional state representations and close to the original inputs quantified by different kinds of norms. Our work shows that, to apply DRL agents on real-world transportation systems, adversarial examples in the form of cyber-attack should be considered carefully, especially for applications that may lead to serious safety issues.
Heart Rate Estimation from Face Videos for Student Assessment: Experiments on edBB
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

In this study we estimate the heart rate from face videos for student assessment. This information could be very valuable to track their status along time and also to estimate other data such as their attention level or the presence of stress that may be caused by cheating attempts. The recent edBBplat, a platform for student behavior modelling in remote education, is considered in this study1. This platform permits to capture several signals from a set of sensors that capture biometric and behavioral data: RGB and near infrared cameras, microphone, EEG band, mouse, smartwatch, and keyboard, among others. In the experimental framework of this study, we focus on the RGB and near-infrared video sequences for performing heart rate estimation applying remote photoplethysmography techniques. The experiments include behavioral and physiological data from 25 different students completing a collection of tasks related to e-learning. Our proposed face heart rate estimation approach is compared with the heart rate provided by the smartwatch, achieving very promising results for its future deployment in e-learning applications.
Study on Patterns and Effect of Task Diversity in Software Crowdsourcing
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

Context: The success of software crowdsourcing depends on steady tasks supply and active worker pool. Existing analysis reveals an average task failure ratio of 15.7% in software crowdsourcing market. Goal: The objective of this study is to empirically investigate patterns and effect of task diversity in software crowdsourcing platform in order to improve the success and efficiency of software crowdsourcing. Method: We propose a conceptual task diversity model, and develop an approach to measuring and analyzing task diversity.More specifically, this includes grouping similar tasks, ranking them based on their competition level and identifying the dominant attributes that distinguish among these levels, and then studying the impact of task diversity on task success and worker performance in crowdsourcing platform. The empirical study is conducted on more than one year's real-world data from TopCoder, the leading software crowdsourcing platform. Results: We identified that monetary prize and task complexity are the dominant attributes that differentiate among different competition levels. Based on these dominant attributes, we found three task diversity patterns (configurations) from workers behavior perspective: responsive to prize, responsive to prize and complexity and over responsive to prize. This study supports that1) responsive to prize configuration provides highest level of task density and workers' reliability in a platform; 2) responsive to prize and complexity configuration leads to attracting high level of trustworthy workers; 3) over responsive to prize configuration results in highest task stability and the lowest failure ratio in the platform for not high similar tasks.
CoAID: COVID-19 Healthcare Misinformation Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2020
Year: 2020

As the COVID-19 virus quickly spreads around the world, unfortunately, misinformation related to COVID-19 also gets created and spreads like wild fire. Such misinformation has caused confusion among people, disruptions in society, and even deadly consequences in health problems. To be able to understand, detect, and mitigate such COVID-19 misinformation, therefore, has not only deep intellectual values but also huge societal impacts. To help researchers combat COVID-19 health misinformation, therefore, we present CoAID (Covid-19 heAlthcare mIsinformation Dataset), with diverse COVID-19 healthcare misinformation, including fake news on websites and social platforms, along with users' social engagement about such news. CoAID includes 4,251 news, 296,000 related user engagements, 926 social platform posts about COVID-19, and ground truth labels. The dataset is available at: https://github.com/cuilimeng/CoAID.
An Explicit Formula for the Zero-Error Feedback Capacity of a Class of Finite-State Additive Noise Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

It is known that for a discrete channel with correlated additive noise, the ordinary capacity with or without feedback both equal $ \log q-\mathcal{H} (Z) $, where $ \mathcal{H}(Z) $ is the entropy rate of the noise process $ Z $ and $ q $ is the alphabet size. In this paper, a class of finite-state additive noise channels is introduced. It is shown that the zero-error feedback capacity of such channels is either zero or $C_{0f} =\log q -h (Z) $, where $ h (Z) $ is the {\em topological entropy} of the noise process. A topological condition is given when the zero-error capacity is zero, with or without feedback. Moreover, the zero-error capacity without feedback is lower-bounded by $ \log q-2 h (Z) $. We explicitly compute the zero-error feedback capacity for several examples, including channels with isolated errors and a Gilbert-Elliot channel.
A Neural Network Model of Lexical Competition during Infant Spoken Word Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Visual world studies show that upon hearing a word in a target-absent visual context containing related and unrelated items, toddlers and adults briefly direct their gaze towards phonologically related items, before shifting towards semantically and visually related ones. We present a neural network model that processes dynamic unfolding phonological representations and maps them to static internal semantic and visual representations. The model, trained on representations derived from real corpora, simulates this early phonological over semantic/visual preference. Our results support the hypothesis that incremental unfolding of a spoken word is in itself sufficient to account for the transient preference for phonological competitors over both unrelated and semantically and visually related ones. Phonological representations mapped dynamically in a bottom-up fashion to semantic-visual representations capture the early phonological preference effects reported in a visual world task. The semantic-visual preference observed later in such a trial does not require top-down feedback from a semantic or visual system.
Coded Caching for Heterogeneous Wireless Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

This chapter provides an overview of coded caching in the context of heterogeneous wireless networks. We begin by briefly describing the key idea behind coded caching and then discuss in detail the impact of various aspects such as non-uniform content popularity, multiple cache access, and interference.
Exceeding Conservative Limits: A Consolidated Analysis on Modern Hardware Margins
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2020
Year: 2020

Modern large-scale computing systems (data centers, supercomputers, cloud and edge setups and high-end cyber-physical systems) employ heterogeneous architectures that consist of multicore CPUs, general-purpose many-core GPUs, and programmable FPGAs. The effective utilization of these architectures poses several challenges, among which a primary one is power consumption. Voltage reduction is one of the most efficient methods to reduce power consumption of a chip. With the galloping adoption of hardware accelerators (i.e., GPUs and FPGAs) in large datacenters and other large-scale computing infrastructures, a comprehensive evaluation of the safe voltage reduction levels for each different chip can be employed for efficient reduction of the total power. We present a survey of recent studies in voltage margins reduction at the system level for modern CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs. The pessimistic voltage guardbands inserted by the silicon vendors can be exploited in all devices for significant power savings. On average, voltage reduction can reach 12% in multicore CPUs, 20% in manycore GPUs and 39% in FPGAs.
DPDnet: A Robust People Detector using Deep Learning with an Overhead Depth Camera
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper we propose a method based on deep learning that detects multiple people from a single overhead depth image with high reliability. Our neural network, called DPDnet, is based on two fully-convolutional encoder-decoder neural blocks based on residual layers. The Main Block takes a depth image as input and generates a pixel-wise confidence map, where each detected person in the image is represented by a Gaussian-like distribution. The refinement block combines the depth image and the output from the main block, to refine the confidence map. Both blocks are simultaneously trained end-to-end using depth images and head position labels. The experimental work shows that DPDNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods, with accuracies greater than 99% in three different publicly available datasets, without retraining not fine-tuning. In addition, the computational complexity of our proposal is independent of the number of people in the scene and runs in real time using conventional GPUs.
Is 42 the Answer to Everything in Subtitling-oriented Speech Translation?
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Subtitling is becoming increasingly important for disseminating information, given the enormous amounts of audiovisual content becoming available daily. Although Neural Machine Translation (NMT) can speed up the process of translating audiovisual content, large manual effort is still required for transcribing the source language, and for spotting and segmenting the text into proper subtitles. Creating proper subtitles in terms of timing and segmentation highly depends on information present in the audio (utterance duration, natural pauses). In this work, we explore two methods for applying Speech Translation (ST) to subtitling: a) a direct end-to-end and b) a classical cascade approach. We discuss the benefit of having access to the source language speech for improving the conformity of the generated subtitles to the spatial and temporal subtitling constraints and show that length is not the answer to everything in the case of subtitling-oriented ST.
Invariant Policy Optimization: Towards Stronger Generalization in Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

A fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning is to learn policies that generalize beyond the operating domains experienced during training. In this paper, we approach this challenge through the following invariance principle: an agent must find a representation such that there exists an action-predictor built on top of this representation that is simultaneously optimal across all training domains. Intuitively, the resulting invariant policy enhances generalization by finding causes of successful actions. We propose a novel learning algorithm, Invariant Policy Optimization (IPO), that implements this principle and learns an invariant policy during training. We compare our approach with standard policy gradient methods and demonstrate significant improvements in generalization performance on unseen domains for linear quadratic regulator and grid-world problems, and an example where a robot must learn to open doors with varying physical properties.
Introducing temporal behavior to computing science
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

The abstraction introduced by von Neumann correctly reflected the state of the art 70 years ago. Although it omitted data transmission time between components of the computer, it served as an excellent base for classic computing for decades. Modern computer components and architectures, however, require to consider their temporal behavior: data transmission time in contemporary systems may be higher than their processing time. Using the classic paradigm leaves some issues unexplained, from enormously high power consumption to days-long training of artificial neural networks to failures of some cutting-edge supercomputer projects. The paper introduces the up to now missing timely behavior (a temporal logic) into computing, while keeps the solid computing science base. The careful analysis discovers that with considering the timely behavior of components and architectural principles, the mystic issues have a trivial explanation. Some classic design principles must be revised, and the temporal logic enables us to design a more powerful and efficient computing.
Backstepping Control of Muscle Driven Systems with Redundancy Resolution
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Due to the several applications on Human-machine interaction (HMI), this area of research has become one of the most popular in recent years. This is the case for instance of advanced training machines, robots for rehabilitation, robotic surgeries and prosthesis. In order to ensure desirable performances, simulations are recommended before real-time experiments. These simulations have not been a problem in HMI on the side of the machine. However, the lack of controllers for human dynamic models suggests the existence of a gap for performing simulations for the human side. This paper offers to fulfill the previous gap by introducing a novel method based on a feedback controller for the dynamics of muscle-driven systems. The approach has been developed for trajectory tracking of systems with redundancy muscle resolution. To illustrate the validation of the method, a shoulder model actuated by a group of eight linkages, eight muscles and three degrees of freedom was used. The controller objective is to move the arm from a static position to another one through muscular activation. The results on this paper show the achievement of the arm movement, musculoskeletal dynamics and muscle activations.