OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Contributive Social Capital Extraction From Different Types of Online Data Sources
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2019
Year: 2019

It is a recurring problem of online communication that the properties of unknown people are hard to assess. This may lead to various issues such as the spread of `fake news' from untrustworthy sources. In sociology the sum of (social) resources available to a person through their social network is often described as social capital. In this article, we look at social capital from a different angle. Instead of evaluating the advantage that people have because of their membership in a certain group, we investigate various ways to infer the social capital a person adds or may add to the network, their contributive social capital (CSC). As there is no consensus in the literature on what the social capital of a person exactly consists of, we look at various related properties: expertise, reputation, trustworthiness, and influence. The analysis of these features is investigated for five different sources of online data: microblogging (e.g., Twitter), social networking platforms (e.g., Facebook), direct communication (e.g., email), scientometrics, and threaded discussion boards (e.g., Reddit). In each field we discuss recent publications and put a focus on the data sources used, the algorithms implemented, and the performance evaluation. The findings are compared and set in context to contributive social capital extraction. The analysis algorithms are based on individual features (e.g., followers on Twitter), ratios thereof, or a person's centrality measures (e.g., PageRank). The machine learning approaches, such as straightforward classifiers (e.g., support vector machines) use ground truths that are connected to social capital. The discussion of these methods is intended to facilitate research on the topic by identifying relevant data sources and the best suited algorithms, and by providing tested methods for the evaluation of findings.
Random Search and Reproducibility for Neural Architecture Search
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Neural architecture search (NAS) is a promising research direction that has the potential to replace expert-designed networks with learned, task-specific architectures. In this work, in order to help ground the empirical results in this field, we propose new NAS baselines that build off the following observations: (i) NAS is a specialized hyperparameter optimization problem; and (ii) random search is a competitive baseline for hyperparameter optimization. Leveraging these observations, we evaluate both random search with early-stopping and a novel random search with weight-sharing algorithm on two standard NAS benchmarks---PTB and CIFAR-10. Our results show that random search with early-stopping is a competitive NAS baseline, e.g., it performs at least as well as ENAS, a leading NAS method, on both benchmarks. Additionally, random search with weight-sharing outperforms random search with early-stopping, achieving a state-of-the-art NAS result on PTB and a highly competitive result on CIFAR-10. Finally, we explore the existing reproducibility issues of published NAS results. We note the lack of source material needed to exactly reproduce these results, and further discuss the robustness of published results given the various sources of variability in NAS experimental setups. Relatedly, we provide all information (code, random seeds, documentation) needed to exactly reproduce our results, and report our random search with weight-sharing results for each benchmark on multiple runs.
Balancing Queueing and Retransmission: Latency-Optimal Massive MIMO Design
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

One fundamental challenge in 5G URLLC is how to optimize massive MIMO systems for achieving low latency and high reliability. A natural design choice to maximize reliability and minimize retransmission is to select the lowest allowed target error rate. However, the overall latency is the sum of queueing latency and retransmission latency, hence choosing the lowest target error rate does not always minimize the overall latency. In this paper, we minimize the overall latency by jointly designing the target error rate and transmission rate adaptation, which leads to a fundamental tradeoff point between queueing and retransmission latency. This design problem can be formulated as a Markov decision process, which is theoretically optimal, but its complexity is prohibitively high for real-system deployments. We managed to develop a low-complexity closed-form policy named Large-arraY Reliability and Rate Control (LYRRC), which is proven to be asymptotically latency-optimal as the number of antennas increases. In LYRRC, the transmission rate is twice of the arrival rate, and the target error rate is a function of the antenna number, arrival rate, and channel estimation error. With simulated and measured channels, our evaluations find LYRRC satisfies the latency and reliability requirements of URLLC in all the tested scenarios.
World Discovery Models
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2019
Year: 2019

As humans we are driven by a strong desire for seeking novelty in our world. Also upon observing a novel pattern we are capable of refining our understanding of the world based on the new information---humans can discover their world. The outstanding ability of the human mind for discovery has led to many breakthroughs in science, art and technology. Here we investigate the possibility of building an agent capable of discovering its world using the modern AI technology. In particular we introduce NDIGO, Neural Differential Information Gain Optimisation, a self-supervised discovery model that aims at seeking new information to construct a global view of its world from partial and noisy observations. Our experiments on some controlled 2-D navigation tasks show that NDIGO outperforms state-of-the-art information-seeking methods in terms of the quality of the learned representation. The improvement in performance is particularly significant in the presence of white or structured noise where other information-seeking methods follow the noise instead of discovering their world.
Founded World Views with Autoepistemic Equilibrium Logic
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2019
Year: 2019

Defined by Gelfond in 1991 (G91), epistemic specifications (or programs) are an extension of logic programming under stable models semantics that introducessubjective literals. A subjective literal al-lows checking whether some regular literal is true in all (or in some of) the stable models of the program, being those models collected in a setcalledworld view. One epistemic program may yield several world views but, under the original G91 semantics, some of them resulted from self-supported derivations. During the last eight years, several alternative approaches have been proposed to get rid of these self-supported worldviews. Unfortunately, their success could only be measured by studying their behaviour on a set of common examples in the literature, since no formal property of "self-supportedness" had been defined. To fill this gap, we extend in this paper the idea of unfounded set from standard logic programming to the epistemic case. We define when a world view is founded with respect to some program and propose the foundedness property for any semantics whose world views are always founded. Using counterexamples, we explain that the previous approaches violate foundedness, and proceed to propose a new semantics based on a combination of Moore's Autoepistemic Logic and Pearce's Equilibrium Logic. The main result proves that this new semantics precisely captures the set of founded G91 world views.
Empathic Autonomous Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2019
Year: 2019

Identifying and resolving conflicts of interests is a key challenge when designing autonomous agents. For example, such conflicts often occur when complex information systems interact persuasively with humans and are in the future likely to arise in non-human agent-to-agent interaction. We introduce a theoretical framework for an empathic autonomous agent that proactively identifies potential conflicts of interests in interactions with other agents (and humans) by considering their utility functions and comparing them with its own preferences using a system of shared values to find a solution all agents consider acceptable. To illustrate how empathic autonomous agents work, we provide running examples and a simple prototype implementation in a general-purpose programing language. To give a high-level overview of our work, we propose a reasoning-loop architecture for our empathic agent.
On the Statistics of the Ratio of Non-Constrained Arbitrary α-μ Random Variables: a General Framework and Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we derive closed-form exact expressions for the main statistics of the ratio of squared alpha-mu random variables, which are of interest in many scenarios for future wireless networks where generalized distributions are more suitable to fit with field data. Importantly, different from previous proposals, our expressions are general in the sense that are valid for non constrained arbitrary values of the parameters of the alpha-mu distribution. Thus, the probability density function, cumulative distribution function, moment generating function, and higher order moments are given in terms of both (i) theFox H-function for which we provide a portable and efficient Wolfram Mathematica code and (ii) easily computable series expansions. Our expressions can be used straightforwardly in the performance analysis of a number of wireless communication systems, including either interference-limited scenarios, spectrum sharing, full-duplex or physical-layer security networks, for which we present the application of the proposed framework. Moreover, closed-form expressions for some classical distributions, derived as special cases from the alpha-mu distribution, are provided as byproducts. The validity of the proposed expressions is confirmed via Monte Carlo simulations.
The Markovian Price of Information
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

Suppose there are $n$ Markov chains and we need to pay a per-step \emph{price} to advance them. The "destination" states of the Markov chains contain rewards; however, we can only get rewards for a subset of them that satisfy a combinatorial constraint, e.g., at most $k$ of them, or they are acyclic in an underlying graph. What strategy should we choose to advance the Markov chains if our goal is to maximize the total reward \emph{minus} the total price that we pay? In this paper we introduce a Markovian price of information model to capture settings such as the above, where the input parameters of a combinatorial optimization problem are given via Markov chains. We design optimal/approximation algorithms that jointly optimize the value of the combinatorial problem and the total paid price. We also study \emph{robustness} of our algorithms to the distribution parameters and how to handle the \emph{commitment} constraint. Our work brings together two classical lines of investigation: getting optimal strategies for Markovian multi-armed bandits, and getting exact and approximation algorithms for discrete optimization problems using combinatorial as well as linear-programming relaxation ideas.
Survivable Networks via UAV Swarms Guided by Decentralized Real-Time Evolutionary Computation
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2019
Year: 2019

The survivable network concept refers to contexts where the wireless communication between ground agents needs to be maintained as much as possible at all times, regardless of any adverse conditions that may arise. In this paper we propose a nature-inspired approach to survivable networks, in which we bring together swarm intelligence and evolutionary computation. We use an on-line real-time Genetic Algorithm to optimize the movements of an UAV swarm towards maintaining communication between the ground agents. The proposed approach models the ground agents and the UAVs as boids-based swarms, and optimizes the movement of the UAVs using different instances of the GA running independently on each UAV. The UAV coordination mechanism is an implicit one, embedded in the fitness function of the Genetic Algorithm instances. The behaviors of the individual UAVs emerge into an aggregated optimization of the overall network survivability. The results show that the proposed approach is able to maintain satisfactory network survivability levels regardless of the ground agents' movements, including for cases as complex as random walks.
Evaluation of Algorithms for Multi-Modality Whole Heart Segmentation: An Open-Access Grand Challenge
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Knowledge of whole heart anatomy is a prerequisite for many clinical applications. Whole heart segmentation (WHS), which delineates substructures of the heart, can be very valuable for modeling and analysis of the anatomy and functions of the heart. However, automating this segmentation can be arduous due to the large variation of the heart shape, and different image qualities of the clinical data. To achieve this goal, a set of training data is generally needed for constructing priors or for training. In addition, it is difficult to perform comparisons between different methods, largely due to differences in the datasets and evaluation metrics used. This manuscript presents the methodologies and evaluation results for the WHS algorithms selected from the submissions to the Multi-Modality Whole Heart Segmentation (MM-WHS) challenge, in conjunction with MICCAI 2017. The challenge provides 120 three-dimensional cardiac images covering the whole heart, including 60 CT and 60 MRI volumes, all acquired in clinical environments with manual delineation. Ten algorithms for CT data and eleven algorithms for MRI data, submitted from twelve groups, have been evaluated. The results show that many of the deep learning (DL) based methods achieved high accuracy, even though the number of training datasets was limited. A number of them also reported poor results in the blinded evaluation, probably due to overfitting in their training. The conventional algorithms, mainly based on multi-atlas segmentation, demonstrated robust and stable performance, even though the accuracy is not as good as the best DL method in CT segmentation. The challenge, including the provision of the annotated training data and the blinded evaluation for submitted algorithms on the test data, continues as an ongoing benchmarking resource via its homepage (\url{www.sdspeople.fudan.edu.cn/zhuangxiahai/0/mmwhs/}).
Continuous Outlier Mining of Streaming Data in Flink
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2019
Year: 2019

In this work, we focus on distance-based outliers in a metric space, where the status of an entity as to whether it is an outlier is based on the number of other entities in its neighborhood. In recent years, several solutions have tackled the problem of distance-based outliers in data streams, where outliers must be mined continuously as new elements become available. An interesting research problem is to combine the streaming environment with massively parallel systems to provide scalable streambased algorithms. However, none of the previously proposed techniques refer to a massively parallel setting. Our proposal fills this gap and investigates the challenges in transferring state-of-the-art techniques to Apache Flink, a modern platform for intensive streaming analytics. We thoroughly present the technical challenges encountered and the alternatives that may be applied. We show speed-ups of up to 117 (resp. 2076) times over a naive parallel (resp. non-parallel) solution in Flink, by using just an ordinary four-core machine and a real-world dataset. When moving to a three-machine cluster, due to less contention, we manage to achieve both better scalability in terms of the window slide size and the data dimensionality, and even higher speed-ups, e.g., by a factor of 510. Overall, our results demonstrate that oulier mining can be achieved in an efficient and scalable manner. The resulting techniques have been made publicly available as open-source software.
Robust Power Scheduling for Microgrids with Uncertainty in Renewable Energy Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2019
Year: 2019

A robust power scheduling algorithm is proposed to schedule power flow between the main electricity grid and a microgird with solar energy generation and battery energy storage subject to uncertainty in solar energy production. To avoid over-conservatism in power scheduling while guaranteeing robustness against uncertainties, time-varying "soft" constraints on the State of Charge (SoC) of the battery are proposed. These soft constraints allow SoC limit violation at steps far from the current step but aim to minimize such violations in a controlled manner. The model predictive formulation of the problem over a receding time horizon ensures that the resulting solution eventually conforms to the hard SoC limits of the system at every step. The optimization problem for each step is formulated as a quadratic programming problem that is solved iteratively to find the soft constraints that are closest to the hard ones and still yield a feasible solution. Optimization results demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.
Analysis of Recent Attacks based on Social Engineering Techniques
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

This paper attempts to strengthen the pursued research on social engineering (SE) threat identification, and control, by means of the author's illustrated classification, which includes attack types, determining the degree of possible harm to each types of possible, known attacks, countermeasures by types of threats that leads to loss of personal or corporate confidential information (user id, passwords, closed documentation). Further, this analytical study will become the starting point for deeper, practically oriented and tested research.
Cloud-Based Autonomous Indoor Navigation: A Case Study
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

In this case study, we design, integrate and implement a cloud-enabled autonomous robotic navigation system. The system has the following features: map generation and robot coordination via cloud service and video streaming to allow online monitoring and control in case of emergency. The system has been tested to generate a map for a long corridor using two modes: manual and autonomous. The autonomous mode has shown more accurate map. In addition, the field experiments confirm the benefit of offloading the heavy computation to the cloud by significantly shortening the time required to build the map.
Strategyproof Facility Location for Three Agents on a Circle
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2019
Year: 2019

We consider the facility location problem in a metric space, focusing on the case of three agents. We show that selecting the reported location of each agent with probability proportional to the distance between the other two agents results in a mechanism that is strategyproof in expectation, and dominates the random dictator mechanism in terms of utilitarian social welfare. We further improve the upper bound for three agents on a circle to 7/6 (whereas random dictator obtains 4/3); and provide the first lower bounds for randomized strategyproof facility location in any metric space, using linear programming.
Boundary-weighted Domain Adaptive Neural Network for Prostate MR Image Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Accurate segmentation of the prostate from magnetic resonance (MR) images provides useful information for prostate cancer diagnosis and treatment. However, automated prostate segmentation from 3D MR images still faces several challenges. For instance, a lack of clear edge between the prostate and other anatomical structures makes it challenging to accurately extract the boundaries. The complex background texture and large variation in size, shape and intensity distribution of the prostate itself make segmentation even further complicated. With deep learning, especially convolutional neural networks (CNNs), emerging as commonly used methods for medical image segmentation, the difficulty in obtaining large number of annotated medical images for training CNNs has become much more pronounced that ever before. Since large-scale dataset is one of the critical components for the success of deep learning, lack of sufficient training data makes it difficult to fully train complex CNNs. To tackle the above challenges, in this paper, we propose a boundary-weighted domain adaptive neural network (BOWDA-Net). To make the network more sensitive to the boundaries during segmentation, a boundary-weighted segmentation loss (BWL) is proposed. Furthermore, an advanced boundary-weighted transfer leaning approach is introduced to address the problem of small medical imaging datasets. We evaluate our proposed model on the publicly available MICCAI 2012 Prostate MR Image Segmentation (PROMISE12) challenge dataset. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model is more sensitive to boundary information and outperformed other state-of-the-art methods.
A Dictionary Based Generalization of Robust PCA
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

We analyze the decomposition of a data matrix, assumed to be a superposition of a low-rank component and a component which is sparse in a known dictionary, using a convex demixing method. We provide a unified analysis, encompassing both undercomplete and overcomplete dictionary cases, and show that the constituent components can be successfully recovered under some relatively mild assumptions up to a certain $\textit{global}$ sparsity level. Further, we corroborate our theoretical results by presenting empirical evaluations in terms of phase transitions in rank and sparsity for various dictionary sizes.
Latent Translation: Crossing Modalities by Bridging Generative Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

End-to-end optimization has achieved state-of-the-art performance on many specific problems, but there is no straight-forward way to combine pretrained models for new problems. Here, we explore improving modularity by learning a post-hoc interface between two existing models to solve a new task. Specifically, we take inspiration from neural machine translation, and cast the challenging problem of cross-modal domain transfer as unsupervised translation between the latent spaces of pretrained deep generative models. By abstracting away the data representation, we demonstrate that it is possible to transfer across different modalities (e.g., image-to-audio) and even different types of generative models (e.g., VAE-to-GAN). We compare to state-of-the-art techniques and find that a straight-forward variational autoencoder is able to best bridge the two generative models through learning a shared latent space. We can further impose supervised alignment of attributes in both domains with a classifier in the shared latent space. Through qualitative and quantitative evaluations, we demonstrate that locality and semantic alignment are preserved through the transfer process, as indicated by high transfer accuracies and smooth interpolations within a class. Finally, we show this modular structure speeds up training of new interface models by several orders of magnitude by decoupling it from expensive retraining of base generative models.