OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Exploiting Errors for Efficiency: A Survey from Circuits to Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2018
Year: 2018

When a computational task tolerates a relaxation of its specification or when an algorithm tolerates the effects of noise in its execution, hardware, programming languages, and system software can trade deviations from correct behavior for lower resource usage. We present, for the first time, a synthesis of research results on computing systems that only make as many errors as their users can tolerate, from across the disciplines of computer aided design of circuits, digital system design, computer architecture, programming languages, operating systems, and information theory. Rather than over-provisioning resources at each layer to avoid errors, it can be more efficient to exploit the masking of errors occurring at one layer which can prevent them from propagating to a higher layer. We survey tradeoffs for individual layers of computing systems from the circuit level to the operating system level and illustrate the potential benefits of end-to-end approaches using two illustrative examples. To tie together the survey, we present a consistent formalization of terminology, across the layers, which does not significantly deviate from the terminology traditionally used by research communities in their layer of focus.
A Study on Shared Steering Control in Driving Experience Perspective: How Strong and How Soon Should Intervention Be?
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2018
Year: 2018

The lane keeping assistance system (LKAS), a representative of the advanced driver assistance system (ADAS), comprises a shared control that cooperates with the driver to achieve a common goal. The experience of the driver through the steering wheel may vary significantly depending on the steering control strategy of the system. In this study, we examine how driving experience changes according to various steering control strategies. Based on the preliminary study and typical LKAS parameters, nine control strategies (3 torque amounts (TOR) x 3 deviations to start control (DEV)) were designed as a prototype. Eighteen participants participated in evaluating each strategy in a highway environment provided by a driving simulator. Two-way repeated measure ANOVA was used to assess the effects of the system. Both the objective measures (standard deviation of lane position, steering reversal rate, and root mean square of lateral speed) and subjective measures (pleasure and arousal of emotion, trust, disturbance, and satisfaction) are analyzed. The experimental results demonstrate that all dependent measures are significant. As the TOR increased, SDLP decreased. However, no difference is observed between the 2-Nm and 3-Nm TOR in terms of trust and satisfaction. The high disturbance and negative emotion in 3 Nm appear to be the cause. In terms of the DEV, the high level of the root mean square of the lateral speed is observed at 0.8 m. Further, negative effects are found in pleasure, trust, and satisfaction. There is little difference at all dependent measures between 0.0-m and 0.4-m DEV. In the regression model analyzed from the aspect of satisfaction, the 2.32-Nm TOR and 0.27-m DEV are the optimal values. We expect our research on shared steering control with an assistance system to be applied to the experience design of a lateral semi-autonomous vehicle.
A Data Analytics Framework for Aggregate Data Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

In many contexts, we have access to aggregate data, but individual level data is unavailable. For example, medical studies sometimes report only aggregate statistics about disease prevalence because of privacy concerns. Even so, many a time it is desirable, and in fact could be necessary to infer individual level characteristics from aggregate data. For instance, other researchers who want to perform more detailed analysis of disease characteristics would require individual level data. Similar challenges arise in other fields too including politics, and marketing. In this paper, we present an end-to-end pipeline for processing of aggregate data to derive individual level statistics, and then using the inferred data to train machine learning models to answer questions of interest. We describe a novel algorithm for reconstructing fine-grained data from summary statistics. This step will create multiple candidate datasets which will form the input to the machine learning models. The advantage of the highly parallel architecture we propose is that uncertainty in the generated fine-grained data will be compensated by the use of multiple candidate fine-grained datasets. Consequently, the answers derived from the machine learning models will be more valid and usable. We validate our approach using data from a challenging medical problem called Acute Traumatic Coagulopathy.
A Storm in an IoT Cup: The Emergence of Cyber-Physical Social Machines
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2018
Year: 2018

The concept of social machines is increasingly being used to characterise various socio-cognitive spaces on the Web. Social machines are human collectives using networked digital technology which initiate real-world processes and activities including human communication, interactions and knowledge creation. As such, they continuously emerge and fade on the Web. The relationship between humans and machines is made more complex by the adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and devices. The scale, automation, continuous sensing, and actuation capabilities of these devices add an extra dimension to the relationship between humans and machines making it difficult to understand their evolution at either the systemic or the conceptual level. This article describes these new socio-technical systems, which we term Cyber-Physical Social Machines, through different exemplars, and considers the associated challenges of security and privacy.
UAV Pose Estimation using Cross-view Geolocalization with Satellite Imagery
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2018
Year: 2018

We propose an image-based cross-view geolocalization method that estimates the global pose of a UAV with the aid of georeferenced satellite imagery. Our method consists of two Siamese neural networks that extract relevant features despite large differences in viewpoints. The input to our method is an aerial UAV image and nearby satellite images, and the output is the weighted global pose estimate of the UAV camera. We also present a framework to integrate our cross-view geolocalization output with visual odometry through a Kalman filter. We build a dataset of simulated UAV images and satellite imagery to train and test our networks. We show that our method performs better than previous camera pose estimation methods, and we demonstrate our networks ability to generalize well to test datasets with unseen images. Finally, we show that integrating our method with visual odometry significantly reduces trajectory estimation errors.
Transparency and Explanation in Deep Reinforcement Learning Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Autonomous AI systems will be entering human society in the near future to provide services and work alongside humans. For those systems to be accepted and trusted, the users should be able to understand the reasoning process of the system, i.e. the system should be transparent. System transparency enables humans to form coherent explanations of the system's decisions and actions. Transparency is important not only for user trust, but also for software debugging and certification. In recent years, Deep Neural Networks have made great advances in multiple application areas. However, deep neural networks are opaque. In this paper, we report on work in transparency in Deep Reinforcement Learning Networks (DRLN). Such networks have been extremely successful in accurately learning action control in image input domains, such as Atari games. In this paper, we propose a novel and general method that (a) incorporates explicit object recognition processing into deep reinforcement learning models, (b) forms the basis for the development of "object saliency maps", to provide visualization of internal states of DRLNs, thus enabling the formation of explanations and (c) can be incorporated in any existing deep reinforcement learning framework. We present computational results and human experiments to evaluate our approach.
Object-sensitive Deep Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Deep reinforcement learning has become popular over recent years, showing superiority on different visual-input tasks such as playing Atari games and robot navigation. Although objects are important image elements, few work considers enhancing deep reinforcement learning with object characteristics. In this paper, we propose a novel method that can incorporate object recognition processing to deep reinforcement learning models. This approach can be adapted to any existing deep reinforcement learning frameworks. State-of-the-art results are shown in experiments on Atari games. We also propose a new approach called "object saliency maps" to visually explain the actions made by deep reinforcement learning agents.
Seuillage par hystérésis pour le test de photo-consistance des voxels dans le cadre de la reconstruction 3D
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Voxel coloring is a popular method of reconstructing a three-dimensional surface model from a set of calibrated 2D images. However, the reconstruction quality is largely dependent on a thresholding procedure allowing the authors to decide, for each voxel, whether it is photo-consistent or not. Even so, this method is widely used because of its simplicity and low computational cost. We have returned to this method in order to propose an improvement in the thresholding step which will be fully automated. Indeed, the geometrical information is implicitly integrated using an hysteresis thresholding which takes into account the spatial coherence of color voxels. Moreover, the ambiguity of choosing the thresholds is extremely minimized by defining a fuzzy degree of membership of each voxel into the class of consistent voxels. Also, there is no need for preset thresholds since the hysteresis ones are defined automatically and adaptively depending on the number of images that the voxel isprojected onto. Preliminary results are very promising and demonstrate that the proposed method performs automatically precise and smooth volumetric scene reconstruction.
The Serverless Scheduling Problem and NOAH
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

The serverless scheduling problem poses a new challenge to Cloud service platform providers because it is rather a job scheduling problem than a traditional resource allocation or request load balancing problem. Traditionally, elastic cloud applications use managed virtual resource allocation and employ request load balancers to orchestrate the deployment. With serverless, the provider needs to solve both the load balancing and the allocation. This work reviews the current Apache OpenWhisk serverless event load balancing and a noncooperative game-theoretic load balancing approach for response time minimization in distributed systems. It is shown by simulation that neither performs well under high system utilization which inspired a noncooperative online allocation heuristic that allows tuning the trade-off between for response time and resource cost of each serverless function.
cf2vec: Collaborative Filtering algorithm selection using graph distributed representations
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2018
Year: 2018

Algorithm selection using Metalearning aims to find mappings between problem characteristics (i.e. metafeatures) with relative algorithm performance to predict the best algorithm(s) for new datasets. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance that the metafeatures used are informative. In Collaborative Filtering, recent research has created an extensive collection of such metafeatures. However, since these are created based on the practitioner's understanding of the problem, they may not capture the most relevant aspects necessary to properly characterize the problem. We propose to overcome this problem by taking advantage of Representation Learning, which is able to create an alternative problem characterizations by having the data guide the design of the representation instead of the practitioner's opinion. Our hypothesis states that such alternative representations can be used to replace standard metafeatures, hence hence leading to a more robust approach to Metalearning. We propose a novel procedure specially designed for Collaborative Filtering algorithm selection. The procedure models Collaborative Filtering as graphs and extracts distributed representations using graph2vec. Experimental results show that the proposed procedure creates representations that are competitive with state-of-the-art metafeatures, while requiring significantly less data and without virtually any human input.
A Deep Learning Framework for Unsupervised Affine and Deformable Image Registration
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Image registration, the process of aligning two or more images, is the core technique of many (semi-)automatic medical image analysis tasks. Recent studies have shown that deep learning methods, notably convolutional neural networks (ConvNets), can be used for image registration. Thus far training of ConvNets for registration was supervised using predefined example registrations. However, obtaining example registrations is not trivial. To circumvent the need for predefined examples, and thereby to increase convenience of training ConvNets for image registration, we propose the Deep Learning Image Registration (DLIR) framework for \textit{unsupervised} affine and deformable image registration. In the DLIR framework ConvNets are trained for image registration by exploiting image similarity analogous to conventional intensity-based image registration. After a ConvNet has been trained with the DLIR framework, it can be used to register pairs of unseen images in one shot. We propose flexible ConvNets designs for affine image registration and for deformable image registration. By stacking multiple of these ConvNets into a larger architecture, we are able to perform coarse-to-fine image registration. We show for registration of cardiac cine MRI and registration of chest CT that performance of the DLIR framework is comparable to conventional image registration while being several orders of magnitude faster.
Dynamics Estimation Using Recurrent Neural Network
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

There is a plenty of research going on in field of robotics. One of the most important task is dynamic estimation of response during motion. One of the main applications of this research topics is the task of pouring, which is performed daily and is commonly used while cooking. We present an approach to estimate response to a sequence of manipulation actions. We are experimenting with pouring motion and the response is the change of the amount of water in the pouring cup. The pouring motion is represented by rotation angle and the amount of water is represented by its weight. We are using recurrent neural networks for building the neural network model to train on sequences which represents 1307 trails of pouring. The model gives great results on unseen test data which does not too different with training data in terms of dimensions of the cup used for pouring and receiving. The loss obtained with this test data is 4.5920. The model does not give good results on generalization experiments when we provide a test set which has dimensions of the cup very different from those in training data.
Deploying South African Social Honeypots on Twitter
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2018
Year: 2018

Inspired by the simple, yet effective, method of tweeting gibberish to attract automated social agents (bots), we attempt to create localised honeypots in the South African political context. We produce a series of defined techniques and combine them to generate interactions from users on Twitter. The paper offers two key contributions. Conceptually, an argument is made that honeypots should not be confused for bot detection methods, but are rather methods to capture low-quality users. Secondly, we successfully generate a list of 288 local low quality users active in the political context.
Player Experience Extraction from Gameplay Video
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

The ability to extract the sequence of game events for a given player's play-through has traditionally required access to the game's engine or source code. This serves as a barrier to researchers, developers, and hobbyists who might otherwise benefit from these game logs. In this paper we present two approaches to derive game logs from game video via convolutional neural networks and transfer learning. We evaluate the approaches in a Super Mario Bros. clone, Mega Man and Skyrim. Our results demonstrate our approach outperforms random forest and other transfer baselines.
An Automatic Method for Complete Brain Matter Segmentation from Multislice CT scan
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Computed tomography imaging is well accepted for its imaging speed, image contrast & resolution and cost. Thus it has wide use in detection and diagnosis of brain diseases. But unfortunately reported works on CT segmentation is not very significant. In this paper, a robust automatic segmentation system is presented which is capable of segment complete brain matter from CT slices, without any lose in information. The proposed method is simple, fast, accurate and completely automatic. It can handle multislice CT scan in single run. From a given multislice CT dataset, one slice is selected automatically to form masks for segmentation. Two types of masks are created to handle nasal slices in a better way. Masks are created from selected reference slice using automatic seed point selection and region growing technique. One mask is designed for brain matter and another includes the skull of the reference slice. This second mask is used as global reference mask for all slices whereas the brain matter mask is implemented on only adjacent slices and continuously modified for better segmentation. Slices in given dataset are divided into two batches, before reference slice and after reference slice. Each batch segmented separately. Successive propagation of brain matter mask has demonstrated very high potential in reported segmentation. Presented result shows highest sensitivity and more than 96% accuracy in all cases. Resulted segmented images can be used for any brain disease diagnosis or further image analysis.
FormuLog: Datalog for static analysis involving logical formulae
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2018
Year: 2018

Datalog has become a popular language for writing static analyses. Because Datalog is very limited, some implementations of Datalog for static analysis have extended it with new language features. However, even with these features it is hard or impossible to express a large class of analyses because they use logical formulae to represent program state. FormuLog fills this gap by extending Datalog to represent, manipulate, and reason about logical formulae. We have used FormuLog to implement declarative versions of symbolic execution and abstract model checking, analyses previously out of the scope of Datalog-based languages. While this paper focuses on the design of FormuLog and one of the analyses we have implemented in it, it also touches on a prototype implementation of the language and identifies performance optimizations that we believe will be necessary to scale FormuLog to real-world static analysis problems.
Resisting Selfish Mining Attacks in the Bicomp
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

Selfish mining, which is an attack on the integrity of the Bitcoin network, was first proposed by Cornell researchers Emin Gun Sirer and Ittay Eyal in 2013. Selfish mining attack also exists in most Nakamoto consensus protocols. Generally speaking, selfish mining strategy can comprise a Nakamoto consensus system with less than 25% mining power of the whole system. We have discussed how the Bicomp can resist selfish mining in our former paper "Bicomp: A Bilayer Scalable Nakamoto Consensus Protocol". In this technical report, we give a detailed derivation on the conditions a selfish attacker should meet to earn more revenues through selfish mining. And we also get a conclusion that through adjusting macroblock difficulties together with tenure lengths, the Bicomp protocol has high resistant towards selfish mining.
Automata Guided Reinforcement Learning With Demonstrations
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

Tasks with complex temporal structures and long horizons pose a challenge for reinforcement learning agents due to the difficulty in specifying the tasks in terms of reward functions as well as large variances in the learning signals. We propose to address these problems by combining temporal logic (TL) with reinforcement learning from demonstrations. Our method automatically generates intrinsic rewards that align with the overall task goal given a TL task specification. The policy resulting from our framework has an interpretable and hierarchical structure. We validate the proposed method experimentally on a set of robotic manipulation tasks.
Talk to Me: A Case Study on Coordinating Expertise in Large-Scale Scientific Software Projects
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2018
Year: 2018

Large-scale collaborative scientific software projects require more knowledge than any one person typically possesses. This makes coordination and communication of knowledge and expertise a key factor in creating and safeguarding software quality, without which we cannot have sustainable software. However, as researchers attempt to scale up the production of software, they are confronted by problems of awareness and understanding. This presents an opportunity to develop better practices and tools that directly address these challenges. To that end, we conducted a case study of developers of the Trilinos project. We surveyed the software development challenges addressed and show how those problems are connected with what they know and how they communicate. Based on these data, we provide a series of practicable recommendations, and outline a path forward for future research.
Verification of High-Level Transformations with Inductive Refinement Types
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2018
Year: 2018

High-level transformation languages like Rascal include expressive features for manipulating large abstract syntax trees: first-class traversals, expressive pattern matching, backtracking and generalized iterators. We present the design and implementation of an abstract interpretation tool, Rabit, for verifying inductive type and shape properties for transformations written in such languages. We describe how to perform abstract interpretation based on operational semantics, specifically focusing on the challenges arising when analyzing the expressive traversals and pattern matching. Finally, we evaluate Rabit on a series of transformations (normalization, desugaring, refactoring, code generators, type inference, etc.) showing that we can effectively verify stated properties.