OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Automatic Identification of AltLexes using Monolingual Parallel Corpora
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2017
Year: 2017

The automatic identification of discourse relations is still a challenging task in natural language processing. Discourse connectives, such as "since" or "but", are the most informative cues to identify explicit relations; however discourse parsers typically use a closed inventory of such connectives. As a result, discourse relations signaled by markers outside these inventories (i.e. AltLexes) are not detected as effectively. In this paper, we propose a novel method to leverage parallel corpora in text simplification and lexical resources to automatically identify alternative lexicalizations that signal discourse relation. When applied to the Simple Wikipedia and Newsela corpora along with WordNet and the PPDB, the method allowed the automatic discovery of 91 AltLexes.
Convolutional Neural Networks for Font Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Classifying pages or text lines into font categories aids transcription because single font Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is generally more accurate than omni-font OCR. We present a simple framework based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), where a CNN is trained to classify small patches of text into predefined font classes. To classify page or line images, we average the CNN predictions over densely extracted patches. We show that this method achieves state-of-the-art performance on a challenging dataset of 40 Arabic computer fonts with 98.8\% line level accuracy. This same method also achieves the highest reported accuracy of 86.6% in predicting paleographic scribal script classes at the page level on medieval Latin manuscripts. Finally, we analyze what features are learned by the CNN on Latin manuscripts and find evidence that the CNN is learning both the defining morphological differences between scribal script classes as well as overfitting to class-correlated nuisance factors. We propose a novel form of data augmentation that improves robustness to text darkness, further increasing classification performance.
Energy saving for building heating via a simple and efficient model-free control design: First steps with computer simulations
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2017
Year: 2017

The model-based control of building heating systems for energy saving encounters severe physical, mathematical and calibration difficulties in the numerous attempts that has been published until now. This topic is addressed here via a new model-free control setting, where the need of any mathematical description disappears. Several convincing computer simulations are presented. Comparisons with classic PI controllers and flatness-based predictive control are provided.
Principle of Need-to-Act
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2017
Year: 2017

In this paper, we have introduced the notion of "Principle of Need-to- Act". This principle is essential towards developing secure systems, security solutions and analyzing security of a solution.
Dimension Reduction for Polynomials over Gaussian Space and Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2017
Year: 2017

We introduce a new technique for reducing the dimension of the ambient space of low-degree polynomials in the Gaussian space while preserving their relative correlation structure, analogous to the Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma. As applications, we address the following problems: 1. Computability of Approximately Optimal Noise Stable function over Gaussian space: The goal is to find a partition of $\mathbb{R}^n$ into $k$ parts, that maximizes the noise stability. An $δ$-optimal partition is one which is within additive $δ$ of the optimal noise stability. De, Mossel & Neeman (CCC 2017) raised the question of proving a computable bound on the dimension $n_0(δ)$ in which we can find an $δ$-optimal partition. While De et al. provide such a bound, using our new technique, we obtain improved explicit bounds on the dimension $n_0(δ)$. 2. Decidability of Non-Interactive Simulation of Joint Distributions: A "non-interactive simulation" problem is specified by two distributions $P(x,y)$ and $Q(u,v)$: The goal is to determine if two players that observe sequences $X^n$ and $Y^n$ respectively where $\{(X_i, Y_i)\}_{i=1}^n$ are drawn i.i.d. from $P(x,y)$ can generate pairs $U$ and $V$ respectively (without communicating with each other) with a joint distribution that is arbitrarily close in total variation to $Q(u,v)$. Even when $P$ and $Q$ are extremely simple, it is open in several cases if $P$ can simulate $Q$. In the special where $Q$ is a joint distribution over $\{0,1\} \times \{0,1\}$, Ghazi, Kamath and Sudan (FOCS 2016) proved a computable bound on the number of samples $n_0(δ)$ that can be drawn from $P(x,y)$ to get $δ$-close to $Q$ (if it is possible at all). Recently De, Mossel & Neeman obtained such bounds when $Q$ is a distribution over $[k] \times [k]$ for any $k \ge 2$. We recover this result with improved explicit bounds on $n_0(δ)$.
Mass Displacement Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Despite the large improvements in performance attained by using deep learning in computer vision, one can often further improve results with some additional post-processing that exploits the geometric nature of the underlying task. This commonly involves displacing the posterior distribution of a CNN in a way that makes it more appropriate for the task at hand, e.g. better aligned with local image features, or more compact. In this work we integrate this geometric post-processing within a deep architecture, introducing a differentiable and probabilistically sound counterpart to the common geometric voting technique used for evidence accumulation in vision. We refer to the resulting neural models as Mass Displacement Networks (MDNs), and apply them to human pose estimation in two distinct setups: (a) landmark localization, where we collapse a distribution to a point, allowing for precise localization of body keypoints and (b) communication across body parts, where we transfer evidence from one part to the other, allowing for a globally consistent pose estimate. We evaluate on large-scale pose estimation benchmarks, such as MPII Human Pose and COCO datasets, and report systematic improvements when compared to strong baselines.
Visualizing the context of citations referencing papers published by Eugene Garfield: A new type of keyword co-occurrence analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2017
Year: 2017

During Eugene Garfield's (EG's) lengthy career as information scientist, he published about 1,500 papers. In this study, we use the impressive oeuvre of EG to introduce a new type of bibliometric networks: keyword co-occurrences networks based on the context of citations, which are referenced in a certain paper set (here: the papers published by EG). The citation context is defined by the words which are located around a specific citation. We retrieved the citation context from Microsoft Academic. To interpret and compare the results of the new network type, we generated two further networks: co-occurrence networks which are based on title and abstract keywords from (1) EG's papers and (2) the papers citing EG's publications. The comparison of the three networks suggests that papers of EG and citation contexts of papers citing EG are semantically more closely related to each other than to titles and abstracts of papers citing EG. This result accords with the use of citations in research evaluation that is based on the premise that citations reflect the cognitive influence of the cited on the citing publication.
Joint Beamforming Design and Power Allocation for Full-Duplex NOMA Cognitive Relay Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

In this paper, we consider a non-orthogonal multiple access cognitive radio network, where a full-duplex multi-antenna relay assists transmission from a base station (BS) to a cognitive far user, whereas, at the same time, the BS transmits to a cognitive near user. Our objective is to enlarge the far-near user rate region by maximizing the rate of the near user under a constraint that the rate of the far user is above a certain threshold. To this end, a non-convex joint optimization problem of relay beamforming and the transmit powers at the BS and cognitive relay is solved as a semi-definite relaxation problem, in conjunction with an efficiently solvable line-search approach. For comparisons, we also consider low complexity fixed beamformer design, where the optimum power allocation between the BS and cognitive relay is solved. Our results demonstrate that the proposed joint optimization can significantly reduce the impact of the residual self-interference at the FD relay and inter-user interference in the near user case.
PSSE Redux: Convex Relaxation, Decentralized, Robust, and Dynamic Approaches
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2017
Year: 2017

This chapter aspires to glean some of the recent advances in power system state estimation (PSSE), though our collection is not exhaustive by any means. The Cram{é}r-Rao bound, a lower bound on the (co)variance of any unbiased estimator, is first derived for the PSSE setup. After reviewing the classical Gauss-Newton iterations, contemporary PSSE solvers leveraging relaxations to convex programs and successive convex approximations are explored. A disciplined paradigm for distributed and decentralized schemes is subsequently exemplified under linear(ized) and exact grid models. Novel bad data processing models and fresh perspectives linking critical measurements to cyber-attacks on the state estimator are presented. Finally, spurred by advances in online convex optimization, model-free and model-based state trackers are reviewed.
Kinship Verification from Videos using Spatio-Temporal Texture Features and Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Automatic kinship verification using facial images is a relatively new and challenging research problem in computer vision. It consists in automatically predicting whether two persons have a biological kin relation by examining their facial attributes. While most of the existing works extract shallow handcrafted features from still face images, we approach this problem from spatio-temporal point of view and explore the use of both shallow texture features and deep features for characterizing faces. Promising results, especially those of deep features, are obtained on the benchmark UvA-NEMO Smile database. Our extensive experiments also show the superiority of using videos over still images, hence pointing out the important role of facial dynamics in kinship verification. Furthermore, the fusion of the two types of features (i.e. shallow spatio-temporal texture features and deep features) shows significant performance improvements compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Robustness in Chinese Remainder Theorem
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) has been widely studied with its applications in frequency estimation, phase unwrapping, coding theory and distributed data storage. Since traditional CRT is greatly sensitive to the errors in residues due to noises, the problem of robustly reconstructing integers via the erroneous residues has been intensively studied in the literature. In order to robustly reconstruct integers, there are two kinds of traditional methods: the one is to introduce common divisors in the moduli and the other is to directly decrease the dynamic range. In this paper, we take further insight into the geometry property of the linear space associated with CRT. Echoing both ways to introduce redundancy, we propose a pseudo metric to analyze the trade-off between the error bound and the dynamic range for robust CRT in general. Furthermore, we present the first robust CRT for multiple numbers to solve the problem of the CRT-based undersampling frequency estimation in general cases. Based on symmetric polynomials, we proved that in most cases, the problem can be solved in polynomial time efficiently. The work in this paper is towards a complete theoretical solution to the open problem over 20 years.
Context-based Normalization of Histological Stains using Deep Convolutional Features
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

While human observers are able to cope with variations in color and appearance of histological stains, digital pathology algorithms commonly require a well-normalized setting to achieve peak performance, especially when a limited amount of labeled data is available. This work provides a fully automated, end-to-end learning-based setup for normalizing histological stains, which considers the texture context of the tissue. We introduce Feature Aware Normalization, which extends the framework of batch normalization in combination with gating elements from Long Short-Term Memory units for normalization among different spatial regions of interest. By incorporating a pretrained deep neural network as a feature extractor steering a pixelwise processing pipeline, we achieve excellent normalization results and ensure a consistent representation of color and texture. The evaluation comprises a comparison of color histogram deviations, structural similarity and measures the color volume obtained by the different methods.
A branch, price and remember algorithm for the U shaped assembly line balancing problem
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2017
Year: 2017

In this paper we propose a branch, price and remember algorithm to solve the U shaped assembly line balancing problem. Our proposed algorithm uses a column generation approach to obtain tight lower bounds for this problem. It also stores generated columns in memory to enhance the speed of column generation approach. We also develop a modification of Hoffman algorithm to obtain high quality upper bounds. Our computational results show that our proposed algorithm is able to optimally solve 255 of Scholl's well-known 269 benchmark problems. Previous best known exact algorithm, ULINO, is able to solve 233 of the 269 benchmark problems. We also examined our algorithm on a new data set and the results show that our algorithm is able to solve 96.48 percent of all available benchmark problems.
Reproducibility of Benchmarked Deep Reinforcement Learning Tasks for Continuous Control
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

Policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning have become increasingly prevalent for state-of-the-art performance in continuous control tasks. Novel methods typically benchmark against a few key algorithms such as deep deterministic policy gradients and trust region policy optimization. As such, it is important to present and use consistent baselines experiments. However, this can be difficult due to general variance in the algorithms, hyper-parameter tuning, and environment stochasticity. We investigate and discuss: the significance of hyper-parameters in policy gradients for continuous control, general variance in the algorithms, and reproducibility of reported results. We provide guidelines on reporting novel results as comparisons against baseline methods such that future researchers can make informed decisions when investigating novel methods.
Fast-Forward Video Based on Semantic Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Thanks to the low operational cost and large storage capacity of smartphones and wearable devices, people are recording many hours of daily activities, sport actions and home videos. These videos, also known as egocentric videos, are generally long-running streams with unedited content, which make them boring and visually unpalatable, bringing up the challenge to make egocentric videos more appealing. In this work we propose a novel methodology to compose the new fast-forward video by selecting frames based on semantic information extracted from images. The experiments show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art as far as semantic information is concerned and that it is also able to produce videos that are more pleasant to be watched.
A scalable multi-core architecture with heterogeneous memory structures for Dynamic Neuromorphic Asynchronous Processors (DYNAPs)
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2017
Year: 2017

Neuromorphic computing systems comprise networks of neurons that use asynchronous events for both computation and communication. This type of representation offers several advantages in terms of bandwidth and power consumption in neuromorphic electronic systems. However, managing the traffic of asynchronous events in large scale systems is a daunting task, both in terms of circuit complexity and memory requirements. Here we present a novel routing methodology that employs both hierarchical and mesh routing strategies and combines heterogeneous memory structures for minimizing both memory requirements and latency, while maximizing programming flexibility to support a wide range of event-based neural network architectures, through parameter configuration. We validated the proposed scheme in a prototype multi-core neuromorphic processor chip that employs hybrid analog/digital circuits for emulating synapse and neuron dynamics together with asynchronous digital circuits for managing the address-event traffic. We present a theoretical analysis of the proposed connectivity scheme, describe the methods and circuits used to implement such scheme, and characterize the prototype chip. Finally, we demonstrate the use of the neuromorphic processor with a convolutional neural network for the real-time classification of visual symbols being flashed to a dynamic vision sensor (DVS) at high speed.
Learning to Plan Chemical Syntheses
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2017
Year: 2017

From medicines to materials, small organic molecules are indispensable for human well-being. To plan their syntheses, chemists employ a problem solving technique called retrosynthesis. In retrosynthesis, target molecules are recursively transformed into increasingly simpler precursor compounds until a set of readily available starting materials is obtained. Computer-aided retrosynthesis would be a highly valuable tool, however, past approaches were slow and provided results of unsatisfactory quality. Here, we employ Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to efficiently discover retrosynthetic routes. MCTS was combined with an expansion policy network that guides the search, and an "in-scope" filter network to pre-select the most promising retrosynthetic steps. These deep neural networks were trained on 12 million reactions, which represents essentially all reactions ever published in organic chemistry. Our system solves almost twice as many molecules and is 30 times faster in comparison to the traditional search method based on extracted rules and hand-coded heuristics. Finally after a 60 year history of computer-aided synthesis planning, chemists can no longer distinguish between routes generated by a computer system and real routes taken from the scientific literature. We anticipate that our method will accelerate drug and materials discovery by assisting chemists to plan better syntheses faster, and by enabling fully automated robot synthesis.
On Bounds of Spectral Efficiency of Optimally Beamformed NLOS Millimeter Wave Links
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

Beamforming is an indispensable feature for millimeter wave (mmWave) wireless communications in order to compensate for the severe path loss incurred due to high frequency operation. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework to evaluate the spectral efficiency (SE) of non-line-of-sight(NLOS) mmWave links with optimal analog beamforming. Optimality here implies the joint selection of antenna beams at the transmitter and receiver which simultaneously maximize the received power. We develop a mathematical framework based on the extended Saleh-Valenzuela channel model to embody the impact of optimal analog beamforming into the performance metrics for NLOS mmWave links. Practical mmWave channels are characterized by sparsity in terms of number of multi-path components; we exploit this feature to derive upper and lower bounds on SE of beamformed directional links. Simulation results reveal that the proposed approach is fairly accurate to model beamformed links in most practical operating scenarios. We also study the impact of overhead due to antenna beam training on the throughput (TP) of a link and obtain an approximate solution for optimal antenna half power beamwidth which maximizes TP.
MHTN: Modal-adversarial Hybrid Transfer Network for Cross-modal Retrieval
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2017
Year: 2017

Cross-modal retrieval has drawn wide interest for retrieval across different modalities of data. However, existing methods based on DNN face the challenge of insufficient cross-modal training data, which limits the training effectiveness and easily leads to overfitting. Transfer learning is for relieving the problem of insufficient training data, but it mainly focuses on knowledge transfer only from large-scale datasets as single-modal source domain to single-modal target domain. Such large-scale single-modal datasets also contain rich modal-independent semantic knowledge that can be shared across different modalities. Besides, large-scale cross-modal datasets are very labor-consuming to collect and label, so it is significant to fully exploit the knowledge in single-modal datasets for boosting cross-modal retrieval. This paper proposes modal-adversarial hybrid transfer network (MHTN), which to the best of our knowledge is the first work to realize knowledge transfer from single-modal source domain to cross-modal target domain, and learn cross-modal common representation. It is an end-to-end architecture with two subnetworks: (1) Modal-sharing knowledge transfer subnetwork is proposed to jointly transfer knowledge from a large-scale single-modal dataset in source domain to all modalities in target domain with a star network structure, which distills modal-independent supplementary knowledge for promoting cross-modal common representation learning. (2) Modal-adversarial semantic learning subnetwork is proposed to construct an adversarial training mechanism between common representation generator and modality discriminator, making the common representation discriminative for semantics but indiscriminative for modalities to enhance cross-modal semantic consistency during transfer process. Comprehensive experiments on 4 widely-used datasets show its effectiveness and generality.
An ELU Network with Total Variation for Image Denoising
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

In this paper, we propose a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) for image denoising, which uses exponential linear unit (ELU) as the activation function. We investigate the suitability by analyzing ELU's connection with trainable nonlinear reaction diffusion model (TNRD) and residual denoising. On the other hand, batch normalization (BN) is indispensable for residual denoising and convergence purpose. However, direct stacking of BN and ELU degrades the performance of CNN. To mitigate this issue, we design an innovative combination of activation layer and normalization layer to exploit and leverage the ELU network, and discuss the corresponding rationale. Moreover, inspired by the fact that minimizing total variation (TV) can be applied to image denoising, we propose a TV regularized L2 loss to evaluate the training effect during the iterations. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments, showing that our model outperforms some recent and popular approaches on Gaussian denoising with specific or randomized noise levels for both gray and color images.