OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
User Modeling for Task Oriented Dialogues
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

We introduce end-to-end neural network based models for simulating users of task-oriented dialogue systems. User simulation in dialogue systems is crucial from two different perspectives: (i) automatic evaluation of different dialogue models, and (ii) training task-oriented dialogue systems. We design a hierarchical sequence-to-sequence model that first encodes the initial user goal and system turns into fixed length representations using Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN). It then encodes the dialogue history using another RNN layer. At each turn, user responses are decoded from the hidden representations of the dialogue level RNN. This hierarchical user simulator (HUS) approach allows the model to capture undiscovered parts of the user goal without the need of an explicit dialogue state tracking. We further develop several variants by utilizing a latent variable model to inject random variations into user responses to promote diversity in simulated user responses and a novel goal regularization mechanism to penalize divergence of user responses from the initial user goal. We evaluate the proposed models on movie ticket booking domain by systematically interacting each user simulator with various dialogue system policies trained with different objectives and users.
Faster sublinear approximations of $k$-cliques for low arboricity graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2018
Year: 2018

Given query access to an undirected graph $G$, we consider the problem of computing a $(1\pmε)$-approximation of the number of $k$-cliques in $G$. The standard query model for general graphs allows for degree queries, neighbor queries, and pair queries. Let $n$ be the number of vertices, $m$ be the number of edges, and $n_k$ be the number of $k$-cliques. Previous work by Eden, Ron and Seshadhri (STOC 2018) gives an $O^*(\frac{n}{n^{1/k}_k} + \frac{m^{k/2}}{n_k})$-time algorithm for this problem (we use $O^*(\cdot)$ to suppress $\poly(\log n, 1/ε, k^k)$ dependencies). Moreover, this bound is nearly optimal when the expression is sublinear in the size of the graph. Our motivation is to circumvent this lower bound, by parameterizing the complexity in terms of \emph{graph arboricity}. The arboricity of $G$ is a measure for the graph density "everywhere". We design an algorithm for the class of graphs with arboricity at most $α$, whose running time is $O^*(\min\{\frac{nα^{k-1}}{n_k},\, \frac{n}{n_k^{1/k}}+\frac{m α^{k-2}}{n_k} \})$. We also prove a nearly matching lower bound. For all graphs, the arboricity is $O(\sqrt m)$, so this bound subsumes all previous results on sublinear clique approximation. As a special case of interest, consider minor-closed families of graphs, which have constant arboricity. Our result implies that for any minor-closed family of graphs, there is a $(1\pmε)$-approximation algorithm for $n_k$ that has running time $O^*(\frac{n}{n_k})$. Such a bound was not known even for the special (classic) case of triangle counting in planar graphs.
Pedestrian Collision Avoidance System (PeCAS): a Deep Learning Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

We propose a new deep learning based framework to identify pedestrians, and caution distracted drivers, in an effort to prevent the loss of life and property. This framework uses two Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), one which detects pedestrians and the second which predicts the onset of drowsiness in a driver, is implemented on a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, shows great promise. The algorithm for implementing such a low-cost, low-compute model is presented and the results discussed.
ReDecode Framework for Iterative Improvement in Paraphrase Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

Generating paraphrases, that is, different variations of a sentence conveying the same meaning, is an important yet challenging task in NLP. Automatically generating paraphrases has its utility in many NLP tasks like question answering, information retrieval, conversational systems to name a few. In this paper, we introduce iterative refinement of generated paraphrases within VAE based generation framework. Current sequence generation models lack the capability to (1) make improvements once the sentence is generated; (2) rectify errors made while decoding. We propose a technique to iteratively refine the output using multiple decoders, each one attending on the output sentence generated by the previous decoder. We improve current state of the art results significantly - with over 9% and 28% absolute increase in METEOR scores on Quora question pairs and MSCOCO datasets respectively. We also show qualitatively through examples that our re-decoding approach generates better paraphrases compared to a single decoder by rectifying errors and making improvements in paraphrase structure, inducing variations and introducing new but semantically coherent information.
RADS: Real-time Anomaly Detection System for Cloud Data Centres
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

Cybersecurity attacks in Cloud data centres are increasing alongside the growth of the Cloud services market. Existing research proposes a number of anomaly detection systems for detecting such attacks. However, these systems encounter a number of challenges, specifically due to the unknown behaviour of the attacks and the occurrence of genuine Cloud workload spikes, which must be distinguished from attacks. In this paper, we discuss these challenges and investigate the issues with the existing Cloud anomaly detection approaches. Then, we propose a Real-time Anomaly Detection System (RADS) for Cloud data centres, which uses a one class classification algorithm and a window-based time series analysis to address the challenges. Specifically, RADS can detect VM-level anomalies occurring due to DDoS and cryptomining attacks. We evaluate the performance of RADS by running lab-based experiments and by using real-world Cloud workload traces. Evaluation results demonstrate that RADS can achieve 90-95% accuracy with a low false positive rate of 0-3%. The results further reveal that RADS experiences fewer false positives when using its window-based time series analysis in comparison to using state-of-the-art average or entropy based analysis.
Computing discrete Morse complexes from simplicial complexes
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2018
Year: 2018

We consider the problem of efficiently computing a discrete Morse complex on simplicial complexes of arbitrary dimension and very large size. Based on a common graph-based formalism, we analyze existing data structures for simplicial complexes, and we define an efficient encoding for the discrete Morse gradient on the most compact of such representations. We theoretically compare methods based on reductions and coreductions for computing a discrete Morse gradient, proving that the combination of reductions and coreductions produces new mutually equivalent approaches. We design and implement a new algorithm for computing a discrete Morse complex on simplicial complexes. We show that our approach scales very well with the size and the dimension of the simplicial complex also through comparisons with the only existing public-domain algorithm for discrete Morse complex computation. We discuss applications to the computation of multi-parameter persistent homology and of extrema graphs for visualization of time-varying 3D scalar fields.
Identification of Internal Faults in Indirect Symmetrical Phase Shift Transformers Using Ensemble Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

This paper proposes methods to identify 40 different types of internal faults in an Indirect Symmetrical Phase Shift Transformer (ISPST). The ISPST was modeled using Power System Computer Aided Design (PSCAD)/ Electromagnetic Transients including DC (EMTDC). The internal faults were simulated by varying the transformer tapping, backward and forward phase shifts, loading, and percentage of winding faulted. Data for 960 cases of each type of fault was recorded. A series of features were extracted for a, b, and c phases from time, frequency, time-frequency, and information theory domains. The importance of the extracted features was evaluated through univariate tests which helped to reduce the number of features. The selected features were then used for training five state-of-the-art machine learning classifiers. Extremely Random Trees and Random Forest, the ensemble-based learners, achieved the accuracy of 98.76% and 97.54% respectively outperforming Multilayer Perceptron (96.13%), Logistic Regression (93.54%), and Support Vector Machines (92.60%)
Variational Community Partition with Novel Network Structure Centrality Prior
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we proposed a novel two-stage optimization method for network community partition, which is based on inherent network structure information. The introduced optimization approach utilizes the new network centrality measure of both links and vertices to construct the key affinity description of the given network, where the direct similarities between graph nodes or nodal features are not available to obtain the classical affinity matrix. Indeed, such calculated network centrality information presents the essential structure of network, hence, the proper measure for detecting network communities, which also introduces a `confidence' criterion for referencing new labeled benchmark nodes. For the resulted challenging combinatorial optimization problem of graph clustering, the proposed optimization method iteratively employs an efficient convex optimization algorithm which is developed based under a new variational perspective of primal and dual. Experiments over both artificial and real-world network datasets demonstrate that the proposed optimization strategy of community detection significantly improves result accuracy and outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of accuracy and reliability.
Learning The Invisible: A Hybrid Deep Learning-Shearlet Framework for Limited Angle Computed Tomography
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

The high complexity of various inverse problems poses a significant challenge to model-based reconstruction schemes, which in such situations often reach their limits. At the same time, we witness an exceptional success of data-based methodologies such as deep learning. However, in the context of inverse problems, deep neural networks mostly act as black box routines, used for instance for a somewhat unspecified removal of artifacts in classical image reconstructions. In this paper, we will focus on the severely ill-posed inverse problem of limited angle computed tomography, in which entire boundary sections are not captured in the measurements. We will develop a hybrid reconstruction framework that fuses model-based sparse regularization with data-driven deep learning. Our method is reliable in the sense that we only learn the part that can provably not be handled by model-based methods, while applying the theoretically controllable sparse regularization technique to the remaining parts. Such a decomposition into visible and invisible segments is achieved by means of the shearlet transform that allows to resolve wavefront sets in the phase space. Furthermore, this split enables us to assign the clear task of inferring unknown shearlet coefficients to the neural network and thereby offering an interpretation of its performance in the context of limited angle computed tomography. Our numerical experiments show that our algorithm significantly surpasses both pure model- and more data-based reconstruction methods.
Matrix Product Operator Restricted Boltzmann Machines
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

A restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) learns a probability distribution over its input samples and has numerous uses like dimensionality reduction, classification and generative modeling. Conventional RBMs accept vectorized data that dismisses potentially important structural information in the original tensor (multi-way) input. Matrix-variate and tensor-variate RBMs, named MvRBM and TvRBM, have been proposed but are all restrictive by model construction, which leads to a weak model expression power. This work presents the matrix product operator RBM (MPORBM) that utilizes a tensor network generalization of Mv/TvRBM, preserves input formats in both the visible and hidden layers, and results in higher expressive power. A novel training algorithm integrating contrastive divergence and an alternating optimization procedure is also developed. Numerical experiments compare the MPORBM with the traditional RBM and MvRBM for data classification and image completion and denoising tasks. The expressive power of the MPORBM as a function of the MPO-rank is also investigated.
Parameterized Synthetic Image Data Set for Fisheye Lens
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Based on different projection geometry, a fisheye image can be presented as a parameterized non-rectilinear image. Deep neural networks(DNN) is one of the solutions to extract parameters for fisheye image feature description. However, a large number of images are required for training a reasonable prediction model for DNN. In this paper, we propose to extend the scale of the training dataset using parameterized synthetic images. It effectively boosts the diversity of images and avoids the data scale limitation. To simulate different viewing angles and distances, we adopt controllable parameterized projection processes on transformation. The reliability of the proposed method is proved by testing images captured by our fisheye camera. The synthetic dataset is the first dataset that is able to extend to a big scale labeled fisheye image dataset. It is accessible via: http://www2.leuphana.de/misl/fisheye-data-set/.
Data Pallets: Containerizing Storage For Reproducibility and Traceability
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

Trusting simulation output is crucial for Sandia's mission objectives. We rely on these simulations to perform our high-consequence mission tasks given national treaty obligations. Other science and modeling applications, while they may have high-consequence results, still require the strongest levels of trust to enable using the result as the foundation for both practical applications and future research. To this end, the computing community has developed workflow and provenance systems to aid in both automating simulation and modeling execution as well as determining exactly how was some output was created so that conclusions can be drawn from the data. Current approaches for workflows and provenance systems are all at the user level and have little to no system level support making them fragile, difficult to use, and incomplete solutions. The introduction of container technology is a first step towards encapsulating and tracking artifacts used in creating data and resulting insights, but their current implementation is focused solely on making it easy to deploy an application in an isolated "sandbox" and maintaining a strictly read-only mode to avoid any potential changes to the application. All storage activities are still using the system-level shared storage. This project explores extending the container concept to include storage as a new container type we call \emph{data pallets}. Data Pallets are potentially writeable, auto generated by the system based on IO activities, and usable as a way to link the contained data back to the application and input deck used to create it.
Scene Parsing via Dense Recurrent Neural Networks with Attentional Selection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have shown the ability to improve scene parsing through capturing long-range dependencies among image units. In this paper, we propose dense RNNs for scene labeling by exploring various long-range semantic dependencies among image units. Different from existing RNN based approaches, our dense RNNs are able to capture richer contextual dependencies for each image unit by enabling immediate connections between each pair of image units, which significantly enhances their discriminative power. Besides, to select relevant dependencies and meanwhile to restrain irrelevant ones for each unit from dense connections, we introduce an attention model into dense RNNs. The attention model allows automatically assigning more importance to helpful dependencies while less weight to unconcerned dependencies. Integrating with convolutional neural networks (CNNs), we develop an end-to-end scene labeling system. Extensive experiments on three large-scale benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed approach can improve the baselines by large margins and outperform other state-of-the-art algorithms.
The SFS Summer Research Study at UMBC: Project-Based Learning Inspires Cybersecurity Students
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

May 30-June 2, 2017, Scholarship for Service (SFS) scholars at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) analyzed the security of a targeted aspect of the UMBC computer systems. During this hands-on study, with complete access to source code, students identified vulnerabilities, devised and implemented exploits, and suggested mitigations. As part of a pioneering program at UMBC to extend SFS scholarships to community colleges, the study helped initiate six students from two nearby community colleges, who transferred to UMBC in fall 2017 to complete their four-year degrees in computer science and information systems. The study examined the security of a set of "NetAdmin" custom scripts that enable UMBC faculty and staff to open the UMBC firewall to allow external access to machines they control for research purposes. Students discovered vulnerabilities stemming from weak architectural design, record overflow, and failure to sanitize inputs properly. For example, they implemented a record-overflow and code-injection exploit that exfiltrated the vital API key of the UMBC firewall. This report summarizes student activities and findings, and reflects on lessons learned for students, educators, and system administrators. Our students found the collaborative experience inspirational, students and educators appreciated the authentic case study, and IT administrators gained access to future employees and received free recommendations for improving the security of their systems. We hope that other universities can benefit from our motivational and educational strategy of teaming educators and system administrators to engage students in active project-based learning centering on focused questions about their university computer systems.
On the practice of classification learning for clinical diagnosis and therapy advice in oncology
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

Artificial intelligence and medicine have a longstanding and proficuous relationship. In the present work we develop a brief assessment of this relationship with specific focus on machine learning, in which we highlight some critical points which may hinder the use of machine learning techniques for clinical diagnosis and therapy advice in practice. We then suggest a conceptual framework to build successful systems to aid clinical diagnosis and therapy advice, grounded on a novel concept we have coined drifting domains. We focus on oncology to build our arguments, as this area of medicine furnishes strong evidence for the critical points we take into account here.
NeXtVLAD: An Efficient Neural Network to Aggregate Frame-level Features for Large-scale Video Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

This paper introduces a fast and efficient network architecture, NeXtVLAD, to aggregate frame-level features into a compact feature vector for large-scale video classification. Briefly speaking, the basic idea is to decompose a high-dimensional feature into a group of relatively low-dimensional vectors with attention before applying NetVLAD aggregation over time. This NeXtVLAD approach turns out to be both effective and parameter efficient in aggregating temporal information. In the 2nd Youtube-8M video understanding challenge, a single NeXtVLAD model with less than 80M parameters achieves a GAP score of 0.87846 in private leaderboard. A mixture of 3 NeXtVLAD models results in 0.88722, which is ranked 3rd over 394 teams. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/linrongc/youtube-8m.
A Team-Formation Algorithm for Faultline Minimization
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2018
Year: 2018

In recent years, the proliferation of online resumes and the need to evaluate large populations of candidates for on-site and virtual teams have led to a growing interest in automated team-formation. Given a large pool of candidates, the general problem requires the selection of a team of experts to complete a given task. Surprisingly, while ongoing research has studied numerous variations with different constraints, it has overlooked a factor with a well-documented impact on team cohesion and performance: team faultlines. Addressing this gap is challenging, as the available measures for faultlines in existing teams cannot be efficiently applied to faultline optimization. In this work, we meet this challenge with a new measure that can be efficiently used for both faultline measurement and minimization. We then use the measure to solve the problem of automatically partitioning a large population into low-faultline teams. By introducing faultlines to the team-formation literature, our work creates exciting opportunities for algorithmic work on faultline optimization, as well as on work that combines and studies the connection of faultlines with other influential team characteristics.
Improved Dynamic Memory Network for Dialogue Act Classification with Adversarial Training
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

Dialogue Act (DA) classification is a challenging problem in dialogue interpretation, which aims to attach semantic labels to utterances and characterize the speaker's intention. Currently, many existing approaches formulate the DA classification problem ranging from multi-classification to structured prediction, which suffer from two limitations: a) these methods are either handcrafted feature-based or have limited memories. b) adversarial examples can't be correctly classified by traditional training methods. To address these issues, in this paper we first cast the problem into a question and answering problem and proposed an improved dynamic memory networks with hierarchical pyramidal utterance encoder. Moreover, we apply adversarial training to train our proposed model. We evaluate our model on two public datasets, i.e., Switchboard dialogue act corpus and the MapTask corpus. Extensive experiments show that our proposed model is not only robust, but also achieves better performance when compared with some state-of-the-art baselines.
Web3D Graphics enabled through Sensor Networks for Cost-Effective Assessment and Management of Energy Efficiency in Buildings
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2018
Year: 2018

The past decade has seen the advent of numerous building energy efficiency visualization and simulation systems; however, most of them rely on theoretical thermal models to suggest building structural design for new constructions and modifications for existing ones. Sustainable methods of construction have made tremendous progress. The example of the German Energy-Plus- House technology uses a combination of (almost) zero-carbon passive heating technologies. A web-enabled X3D visualization and simulation system coupled with a cost-effective set of temperature/humidity sensors can provide valuable insights into building design, materials and construction that can lead to significant energy savings and an improved thermal comfort for residents, resulting in superior building energy efficiency. A cost-effective hardware-software prototype system is proposed in this paper that can provide real-time data driven visualization or offline simulation of 3D thermal maps for residential and/or commercial buildings on the Web.