OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Risk Bounds for Unsupervised Cross-Domain Mapping with IPMs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

The recent empirical success of unsupervised cross-domain mapping algorithms, between two domains that share common characteristics, is not well-supported by theoretical justifications. This lacuna is especially troubling, given the clear ambiguity in such mappings. We work with adversarial training methods based on IPMs and derive a novel risk bound, which upper bounds the risk between the learned mapping $h$ and the target mapping $y$, by a sum of three terms: (i) the risk between $h$ and the most distant alternative mapping that was learned by the same cross-domain mapping algorithm, (ii) the minimal discrepancy between the target domain and the domain obtained by applying a hypothesis $h^*$ on the samples of the source domain, where $h^*$ is a hypothesis selectable by the same algorithm. The bound is directly related to Occam's razor and encourages the selection of the minimal architecture that supports a small mapping discrepancy and (iii) an approximation error term that decreases as the complexity of the class of discriminators increases and is empirically shown to be small. The bound leads to multiple algorithmic consequences, including a method for hyperparameters selection and for early stopping in cross-domain mapping GANs. We also demonstrate a novel capability for unsupervised learning of estimating confidence in the mapping of every specific sample.
Joint Anchor-Feature Refinement for Real-Time Accurate Object Detection in Images and Videos
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Object detection has been vigorously investigated for years but fast accurate detection for real-world scenes remains a very challenging problem. Overcoming drawbacks of single-stage detectors, we take aim at precisely detecting objects for static and temporal scenes in real time. Firstly, as a dual refinement mechanism, a novel anchor-offset detection is designed, which includes an anchor refinement, a feature location refinement, and a deformable detection head. This new detection mode is able to simultaneously perform two-step regression and capture accurate object features. Based on the anchor-offset detection, a dual refinement network (DRNet) is developed for high-performance static detection, where a multi-deformable head is further designed to leverage contextual information for describing objects. As for temporal detection in videos, temporal refinement networks (TRNet) and temporal dual refinement networks (TDRNet) are developed by propagating the refinement information across time. We also propose a soft refinement strategy to temporally match object motion with the previous refinement. Our proposed methods are evaluated on PASCAL VOC, COCO, and ImageNet VID datasets. Extensive comparisons on static and temporal detection verify the superiority of DRNet, TRNet, and TDRNet. Consequently, our developed approaches run in a fairly fast speed, and in the meantime achieve a significantly enhanced detection accuracy, i.e., 84.4% mAP on VOC 2007, 83.6% mAP on VOC 2012, 69.4% mAP on VID 2017, and 42.4% AP on COCO. Ultimately, producing encouraging results, our methods are applied to online underwater object detection and grasping with an autonomous system. Codes are publicly available at https://github.com/SeanChenxy/TDRN.
Video Storytelling: Textual Summaries for Events
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2020
Year: 2020

Bridging vision and natural language is a longstanding goal in computer vision and multimedia research. While earlier works focus on generating a single-sentence description for visual content, recent works have studied paragraph generation. In this work, we introduce the problem of video storytelling, which aims at generating coherent and succinct stories for long videos. Video storytelling introduces new challenges, mainly due to the diversity of the story and the length and complexity of the video. We propose novel methods to address the challenges. First, we propose a context-aware framework for multimodal embedding learning, where we design a Residual Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Network to leverage contextual information from past and future. Second, we propose a Narrator model to discover the underlying storyline. The Narrator is formulated as a reinforcement learning agent which is trained by directly optimizing the textual metric of the generated story. We evaluate our method on the Video Story dataset, a new dataset that we have collected to enable the study. We compare our method with multiple state-of-the-art baselines, and show that our method achieves better performance, in terms of quantitative measures and user study.
Parallel Minimum Cuts in Near-linear Work and Low Depth
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

We present the first near-linear work and poly-logarithmic depth algorithm for computing a minimum cut in a graph, while previous parallel algorithms with poly-logarithmic depth required at least quadratic work in the number of vertices. In a graph with $n$ vertices and $m$ edges, our algorithm computes the correct result with high probability in $O(m {\log}^4 n)$ work and $O({\log}^3 n)$ depth. This result is obtained by parallelizing a data structure that aggregates weights along paths in a tree and by exploiting the connection between minimum cuts and approximate maximum packings of spanning trees. In addition, our algorithm improves upon bounds on the number of cache misses incurred to compute a minimum cut.
A note on the Grinberg condition in the cycle spaces
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2020
Year: 2020

Finding a Hamilton graph from simple connected graphs is an important problem in discrete mathematics and computer science. Grinberg Theorem is a well-known necessary condition for planar Hamilton graphs. It divides a plane into two parts: inside and outside faces. The sum of inside faces in a Hamilton graph is a Hamilton cycle. In this paper, using a basis of the cycle space to represent a graph and by the Inclusion-Exclusion Principle, we derive the equality with respect to the inside faces that can be also obtained from Grinberg Theorem. By further investigating the cycle structure of inside faces, we give a new combinatorial interpretation to Grinberg's condition, which explains why Grinberg Theorem is not sufficient for Hamilton graphs. Our results will improve deriving an efficient condition for Hamilton graphs.
RADIS: Remote Attestation of Distributed IoT Services
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

Remote attestation is a security technique through which a remote trusted party (i.e., Verifier) checks the trustworthiness of a potentially untrusted device (i.e., Prover). In the Internet of Things (IoT) systems, the existing remote attestation protocols propose various approaches to detect the modified software and physical tampering attacks. However, in an interoperable IoT system, in which IoT devices interact autonomously among themselves, an additional problem arises: a compromised IoT service can influence the genuine operation of other invoked service, without changing the software of the latter. In this paper, we propose a protocol for Remote Attestation of Distributed IoT Services (RADIS), which verifies the trustworthiness of distributed IoT services. Instead of attesting the complete memory content of the entire interoperable IoT devices, RADIS attests only the services involved in performing a certain functionality. RADIS relies on a control-flow attestation technique to detect IoT services that perform an unexpected operation due to their interactions with a malicious remote service. Our experiments show the effectiveness of our protocol in validating the integrity status of a distributed IoT service.
PROPEL: Probabilistic Parametric Regression Loss for Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In recent years, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have enabled significant advancements to the state-of-the-art in computer vision. For classification tasks, CNNs have widely employed probabilistic output and have shown the significance of providing additional confidence for predictions. However, such probabilistic methodologies are not widely applicable for addressing regression problems using CNNs, as regression involves learning unconstrained continuous and, in many cases, multi-variate target variables. We propose a PRObabilistic Parametric rEgression Loss (PROPEL) that facilitates CNNs to learn parameters of probability distributions for addressing probabilistic regression problems. PROPEL is fully differentiable and, hence, can be easily incorporated for end-to-end training of existing CNN regression architectures using existing optimization algorithms. The proposed method is flexible as it enables learning complex unconstrained probabilities while being generalizable to higher dimensional multi-variate regression problems. We utilize a PROPEL-based CNN to address the problem of learning hand and head orientation from uncalibrated color images. Our experimental validation and comparison with existing CNN regression loss functions show that PROPEL improves the accuracy of a CNN by enabling probabilistic regression, while significantly reducing required model parameters by $10 \times$, resulting in improved generalization as compared to the existing state-of-the-art.
Beetle Swarm Optimization Algorithm:Theory and Application
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, a new meta-heuristic algorithm, called beetle swarm optimization algorithm, is proposed by enhancing the performance of swarm optimization through beetle foraging principles. The performance of 23 benchmark functions is tested and compared with widely used algorithms, including particle swarm optimization algorithm, genetic algorithm (GA) and grasshopper optimization algorithm . Numerical experiments show that the beetle swarm optimization algorithm outperforms its counterparts. Besides, to demonstrate the practical impact of the proposed algorithm, two classic engineering design problems, namely, pressure vessel design problem and himmelblaus optimization problem, are also considered and the proposed beetle swarm optimization algorithm is shown to be competitive in those applications.
Numerical Asymptotic Results in Game Theory Using Sergeyev's Infinity Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2020
Year: 2020

Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) is a widely studied game that plays an important role in Game Theory. This paper aims at extending PD Tournaments to the case of infinite, finite or infinitesimal payoffs using Sergeyev's Infinity Computing (IC). By exploiting IC, we are able to show the limits of the classical approach to PD Tournaments analysis of the classical theory, extending both the sets of the feasible and numerically computable tournaments. In particular we provide a numerical computation of the exact outcome of a simple PD Tournament where one player meets every other an infinite number of times, for both its deterministic and stochastic formulations.
Online Aggregation of Unbounded Losses Using Shifting Experts with Confidence
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We develop the setting of sequential prediction based on shifting experts and on a "smooth" version of the method of specialized experts. To aggregate experts predictions, we use the AdaHedge algorithm, which is a version of the Hedge algorithm with adaptive learning rate, and extend it by the meta-algorithm Fixed Share. Due to this, we combine the advantages of both algorithms: (1) we use the shifting regret which is a more optimal characteristic of the algorithm; (2) regret bounds are valid in the case of signed unbounded losses of the experts. Also, (3) we incorporate in this scheme a "smooth" version of the method of specialized experts which allows us to make more flexible and accurate predictions. All results are obtained in the adversarial setting -- no assumptions are made about the nature of data source. We present results of numerical experiments for short-term forecasting of electricity consumption based on a real data.
Improper Signaling versus Time-Sharing in the Two-User Gaussian Interference Channel with TIN
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

So-called improper complex signals have been shown to be beneficial in the single-antenna two-user Gaussian interference channel under the assumptions that all input signals are Gaussian and that we treat interference as noise (TIN). This result has been obtained under a restriction to pure strategies without time-sharing, and it was extended to the case where the rates, but not the transmit powers, may be averaged over several transmit strategies. In this paper, we drop such restrictions and discuss the most general case of coded time-sharing, where both the rates and the powers may be averaged. Since coded time-sharing can in general not be expressed by means of a convex hull of the rate region, we have to account for the possibility of time-sharing already during the optimization of the transmit strategy. By means of a novel channel enhancement argument, we prove a surprising result: proper signals are optimal if coded time-sharing is allowed. In addition to establishing this result, we present an algorithm to compute the corresponding achievable rate region.
Stealth Attacks on the Smart Grid
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

Random attacks that jointly minimize the amount of information acquired by the operator about the state of the grid and the probability of attack detection are presented. The attacks minimize the information acquired by the operator by minimizing the mutual information between the observations and the state variables describing the grid. Simultaneously, the attacker aims to minimize the probability of attack detection by minimizing the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the distribution when the attack is present and the distribution under normal operation. The resulting cost function is the weighted sum of the mutual information and the KL divergence mentioned above. The tradeoff between the probability of attack detection and the reduction of mutual information is governed by the weighting parameter on the KL divergence term in the cost function. The probability of attack detection is evaluated as a function of the weighting parameter. A sufficient condition on the weighting parameter is given for achieving an arbitrarily small probability of attack detection. The attack performance is numerically assessed on the IEEE 30-Bus and 118-Bus test systems.
Applying the Closed World Assumption to SUMO-based FOL Ontologies for Effective Commonsense Reasoning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

Most commonly, the Open World Assumption is adopted as a standard strategy for the design, construction and use of ontologies. This strategy limits the inferencing capabilities of any system because non-asserted statements (missing knowledge) could be assumed to be alternatively true or false. As we will demonstrate, this is especially the case of first-order logic (FOL) ontologies where non-asserted statements is nowadays one of the main obstacles to its practical application in automated commonsense reasoning tasks. In this paper, we investigate the application of the Closed World Assumption (CWA) to enable a better exploitation of FOL ontologies by using state-of-the-art automated theorem provers. To that end, we explore different CWA formulations for the structural knowledge encoded in a FOL translation of the SUMO ontology, discovering that almost 30 % of the structural knowledge is missing. We evaluate these formulations on a practical experimentation using a very large commonsense benchmark obtained from WordNet through its mapping to SUMO. The results show that the competency of the ontology improves more than 50 % when reasoning under the CWA. Thus, applying the CWA automatically to FOL ontologies reduces their ambiguity and more commonsense questions can be answered
SimGNN: A Neural Network Approach to Fast Graph Similarity Computation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Graph similarity search is among the most important graph-based applications, e.g. finding the chemical compounds that are most similar to a query compound. Graph similarity computation, such as Graph Edit Distance (GED) and Maximum Common Subgraph (MCS), is the core operation of graph similarity search and many other applications, but very costly to compute in practice. Inspired by the recent success of neural network approaches to several graph applications, such as node or graph classification, we propose a novel neural network based approach to address this classic yet challenging graph problem, aiming to alleviate the computational burden while preserving a good performance. The proposed approach, called SimGNN, combines two strategies. First, we design a learnable embedding function that maps every graph into a vector, which provides a global summary of a graph. A novel attention mechanism is proposed to emphasize the important nodes with respect to a specific similarity metric. Second, we design a pairwise node comparison method to supplement the graph-level embeddings with fine-grained node-level information. Our model achieves better generalization on unseen graphs, and in the worst case runs in quadratic time with respect to the number of nodes in two graphs. Taking GED computation as an example, experimental results on three real graph datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach. Specifically, our model achieves smaller error rate and great time reduction compared against a series of baselines, including several approximation algorithms on GED computation, and many existing graph neural network based models. To the best of our knowledge, we are among the first to adopt neural networks to explicitly model the similarity between two graphs, and provide a new direction for future research on graph similarity computation and graph similarity search.
Compressive Sensing for cut improvement and local clustering
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

We show how one can phrase the cut improvement problem for graphs as a sparse recovery problem, whence one can use algorithms originally developed for use in compressive sensing (such as SubspacePursuit or CoSaMP) to solve it. We show that this approach to cut improvement is fast, both in theory and practice and moreover enjoys statistical guarantees of success when applied to graphs drawn from probabilistic models such as the Stochastic Block Model. Using this new cut improvement approach, which we call ClusterPursuit, as an algorithmic primitive we then propose new methods for local clustering and semi-supervised clustering, which enjoy similar guarantees of success and speed. Finally, we verify the promise of our approach with extensive numerical benchmarking.
Community detection in networks without observing edges
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2020
Year: 2020

We develop a Bayesian hierarchical model to identify communities in networks for which we do not observe the edges directly, but instead observe a series of interdependent signals for each of the nodes. Fitting the model provides an end-to-end community detection algorithm that does not extract information as a sequence of point estimates but propagates uncertainties from the raw data to the community labels. Our approach naturally supports multiscale community detection as well as the selection of an optimal scale using model comparison. We study the properties of the algorithm using synthetic data and apply it to daily returns of constituents of the S&P100 index as well as climate data from US cities.
A Tutorial on Clique Problems in Communications and Signal Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

Since its first use by Euler on the problem of the seven bridges of Königsberg, graph theory has shown excellent abilities in solving and unveiling the properties of multiple discrete optimization problems. The study of the structure of some integer programs reveals equivalence with graph theory problems making a large body of the literature readily available for solving and characterizing the complexity of these problems. This tutorial presents a framework for utilizing a particular graph theory problem, known as the clique problem, for solving communications and signal processing problems. In particular, the paper aims to illustrate the structural properties of integer programs that can be formulated as clique problems through multiple examples in communications and signal processing. To that end, the first part of the tutorial provides various optimal and heuristic solutions for the maximum clique, maximum weight clique, and $k$-clique problems. The tutorial, further, illustrates the use of the clique formulation through numerous contemporary examples in communications and signal processing, mainly in maximum access for non-orthogonal multiple access networks, throughput maximization using index and instantly decodable network coding, collision-free radio frequency identification networks, and resource allocation in cloud-radio access networks. Finally, the tutorial sheds light on the recent advances of such applications, and provides technical insights on ways of dealing with mixed discrete-continuous optimization problems.
Adversaries monitoring Tor traffic crossing their jurisdictional border and reconstructing Tor circuits
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

We model and analyze passive adversaries that monitors Tor traffic crossing the border of a jurisdiction an adversary is controlling. We show that a single adversary is able to connect incoming and outgoing traffic of their border, tracking the traffic, and cooperating adversaries are able to reconstruct parts of the Tor network, revealing user-server relationships. In our analysis we created two algorithms to estimate the capabilities of the adversaries. The first generates Tor-like traffic and the second analyzes and reconstructs the simulated data.
RxNN: A Framework for Evaluating Deep Neural Networks on Resistive Crossbars
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2020
Year: 2020

Resistive crossbars designed with non-volatile memory devices have emerged as promising building blocks for Deep Neural Network (DNN) hardware, due to their ability to compactly and efficiently realize vector-matrix multiplication (VMM), the dominant computational kernel in DNNs. However, a key challenge with resistive crossbars is that they suffer from a range of device and circuit level non-idealities such as interconnect parasitics, peripheral circuits, sneak paths, and process variations. These non-idealities can lead to errors in VMMs, eventually degrading the DNN's accuracy. It is therefore critical to study the impact of crossbar non-idealities on the accuracy of large-scale DNNs. However, this is challenging because existing device and circuit models are too slow to use in application-level evaluations. We present RxNN, a fast and accurate simulation framework to evaluate large-scale DNNs on resistive crossbar systems. RxNN splits and maps the computations involved in each DNN layer into crossbar operations, and evaluates them using a Fast Crossbar Model (FCM) that accurately captures the errors arising due to crossbar non-idealities while being four-to-five orders of magnitude faster than circuit simulation. FCM models a crossbar-based VMM operation using three stages - non-linear models for the input and output peripheral circuits (DACs and ADCs), and an equivalent non-ideal conductance matrix for the core crossbar array. We implement RxNN by extending the Caffe machine learning framework and use it to evaluate a suite of six large-scale DNNs developed for the ImageNet Challenge. Our experiments reveal that resistive crossbar non-idealities can lead to significant accuracy degradations (9.6%-32%) for these large-scale DNNs. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first quantitative evaluation of the accuracy of large-scale DNNs on resistive crossbar based hardware.