OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Instance Flow Based Online Multiple Object Tracking
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

We present a method to perform online Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) of known object categories in monocular video data. Current Tracking-by-Detection MOT approaches build on top of 2D bounding box detections. In contrast, we exploit state-of-the-art instance aware semantic segmentation techniques to compute 2D shape representations of target objects in each frame. We predict position and shape of segmented instances in subsequent frames by exploiting optical flow cues. We define an affinity matrix between instances of subsequent frames which reflects locality and visual similarity. The instance association is solved by applying the Hungarian method. We evaluate different configurations of our algorithm using the MOT 2D 2015 train dataset. The evaluation shows that our tracking approach is able to track objects with high relative motions. In addition, we provide results of our approach on the MOT 2D 2015 test set for comparison with previous works. We achieve a MOTA score of 32.1.
Decoupled Block-Wise ILU(k) Preconditioner on GPU
Venue: arXiv cs.NA 2017
Year: 2017

This research investigates the implementation mechanism of block-wise ILU(k) preconditioner on GPU. The block-wise ILU(k) algorithm requires both the level k and the block size to be designed as variables. A decoupled ILU(k) algorithm consists of a symbolic phase and a factorization phase. In the symbolic phase, a ILU(k) nonzero pattern is established from the point-wise structure extracted from a block-wise matrix. In the factorization phase, the block-wise matrix with a variable block size is factorized into a block lower triangular matrix and a block upper triangular matrix. And a further diagonal factorization is required to perform on the block upper triangular matrix for adapting a parallel triangular solver on GPU.We also present the numerical experiments to study the preconditioner actions on different k levels and block sizes.
Generalised Discount Functions applied to a Monte-Carlo AImu Implementation
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2017
Year: 2017

In recent years, work has been done to develop the theory of General Reinforcement Learning (GRL). However, there are few examples demonstrating these results in a concrete way. In particular, there are no examples demonstrating the known results regarding gener- alised discounting. We have added to the GRL simulation platform AIXIjs the functionality to assign an agent arbitrary discount functions, and an environment which can be used to determine the effect of discounting on an agent's policy. Using this, we investigate how geometric, hyperbolic and power discounting affect an informed agent in a simple MDP. We experimentally reproduce a number of theoretical results, and discuss some related subtleties. It was found that the agent's behaviour followed what is expected theoretically, assuming appropriate parameters were chosen for the Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) planning algorithm.
Finding Likely Errors with Bayesian Specifications
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2017
Year: 2017

We present a Bayesian framework for learning probabilistic specifications from large, unstructured code corpora, and a method to use this framework to statically detect anomalous, hence likely buggy, program behavior. The distinctive insight here is to build a statistical model that correlates all specifications hidden inside a corpus with the syntax and observed behavior of programs that implement these specifications. During the analysis of a particular program, this model is conditioned into a posterior distribution that prioritizes specifications that are relevant to this program. This allows accurate program analysis even if the corpus is highly heterogeneous. The problem of finding anomalies is now framed quantitatively, as a problem of computing a distance between a "reference distribution" over program behaviors that our model expects from the program, and the distribution over behaviors that the program actually produces. We present a concrete embodiment of our framework that combines a topic model and a neural network model to learn specifications, and queries the learned models to compute anomaly scores. We evaluate this implementation on the task of detecting anomalous usage of Android APIs. Our encouraging experimental results show that the method can automatically discover subtle errors in Android applications in the wild, and has high precision and recall compared to competing probabilistic approaches.
A Synthetic Statistical MIMO PLC Channel Model Applied to an In-Home Scenario
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

This paper proposes a synthetic statistical top-down MIMO power line communications channel model based on a pure phenomenological approach. The basic idea consists of directly synthesizing the experimental channel statistical properties to obtain an extremely compact model that requires a small set of parameters. The model is derived from the analysis of the in-home 2 $\times$ 3 MIMO PLC channel data set obtained by the ETSI Specialist Task Force 410 measurement campaign in the band 1.8-100 MHz. The challenge of modeling the channel statistical correlation, exhibited among the frequencies and between the MIMO modes, in compact form is tackled and it is shown that a small set of parameters can be used to reconstruct such a correlation behavior. The model is validated and compared to the measured channels, showing a good agreement in terms of average channel gain, root-mean-square delay spread, coherence bandwidth, and channel capacity distribution.
Machine Learning Applications in Estimating Transformer Loss of Life
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2017
Year: 2017

Transformer life assessment and failure diagnostics have always been important problems for electric utility companies. Ambient temperature and load profile are the main factors which affect aging of the transformer insulation, and consequently, the transformer lifetime. The IEEE Std. C57.911995 provides a model for calculating the transformer loss of life based on ambient temperature and transformer's loading. In this paper, this standard is used to develop a data-driven static model for hourly estimation of the transformer loss of life. Among various machine learning methods for developing this static model, the Adaptive Network-Based Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) is selected. Numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness and the accuracy of the proposed ANFIS method compared with other relevant machine learning based methods to solve this problem.
Sparse Depth Sensing for Resource-Constrained Robots
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2017
Year: 2017

We consider the case in which a robot has to navigate in an unknown environment but does not have enough on-board power or payload to carry a traditional depth sensor (e.g., a 3D lidar) and thus can only acquire a few (point-wise) depth measurements. We address the following question: is it possible to reconstruct the geometry of an unknown environment using sparse and incomplete depth measurements? Reconstruction from incomplete data is not possible in general, but when the robot operates in man-made environments, the depth exhibits some regularity (e.g., many planar surfaces with only a few edges); we leverage this regularity to infer depth from a small number of measurements. Our first contribution is a formulation of the depth reconstruction problem that bridges robot perception with the compressive sensing literature in signal processing. The second contribution includes a set of formal results that ascertain the exactness and stability of the depth reconstruction in 2D and 3D problems, and completely characterize the geometry of the profiles that we can reconstruct. Our third contribution is a set of practical algorithms for depth reconstruction: our formulation directly translates into algorithms for depth estimation based on convex programming. In real-world problems, these convex programs are very large and general-purpose solvers are relatively slow. For this reason, we discuss ad-hoc solvers that enable fast depth reconstruction in real problems. The last contribution is an extensive experimental evaluation in 2D and 3D problems, including Monte Carlo runs on simulated instances and testing on multiple real datasets. Empirical results confirm that the proposed approach ensures accurate depth reconstruction, outperforms interpolation-based strategies, and performs well even when the assumption of structured environment is violated.
Skin Lesion Classification Using Deep Multi-scale Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

We present a deep learning approach to the ISIC 2017 Skin Lesion Classification Challenge using a multi-scale convolutional neural network. Our approach utilizes an Inception-v3 network pre-trained on the ImageNet dataset, which is fine-tuned for skin lesion classification using two different scales of input images.
Query Expansion Based on Crowd Knowledge for Code Search
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2017
Year: 2017

As code search is a frequent developer activity in software development practices, improving the performance of code search is a critical task. In the text retrieval based search techniques employed in the code search, the term mismatch problem is a critical language issue for retrieval effectiveness. By reformulating the queries, query expansion provides effective ways to solve the term mismatch problem. In this paper, we propose Query Expansion based on Crowd Knowledge (QECK), a novel technique to improve the performance of code search algorithms. QECK identifies software-specific expansion words from the high quality pseudo relevance feedback question and answer pairs on Stack Overflow to automatically generate the expansion queries. Furthermore, we incorporate QECK in the classic Rocchio's model, and propose QECK based code search method QECKRocchio. We conduct three experiments to evaluate our QECK technique and investigate QECKRocchio in a large-scale corpus containing real-world code snippets and a question and answer pair collection. The results show that QECK improves the performance of three code search algorithms by up to 64 percent in Precision, and 35 percent in NDCG. Meanwhile, compared with the state-of-the-art query expansion method, the improvement of QECK Rocchio is 22 percent in Precision, and 16 percent in NDCG.
Genetic CNN
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

The deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is the state-of-the-art solution for large-scale visual recognition. Following basic principles such as increasing the depth and constructing highway connections, researchers have manually designed a lot of fixed network structures and verified their effectiveness. In this paper, we discuss the possibility of learning deep network structures automatically. Note that the number of possible network structures increases exponentially with the number of layers in the network, which inspires us to adopt the genetic algorithm to efficiently traverse this large search space. We first propose an encoding method to represent each network structure in a fixed-length binary string, and initialize the genetic algorithm by generating a set of randomized individuals. In each generation, we define standard genetic operations, e.g., selection, mutation and crossover, to eliminate weak individuals and then generate more competitive ones. The competitiveness of each individual is defined as its recognition accuracy, which is obtained via training the network from scratch and evaluating it on a validation set. We run the genetic process on two small datasets, i.e., MNIST and CIFAR10, demonstrating its ability to evolve and find high-quality structures which are little studied before. These structures are also transferrable to the large-scale ILSVRC2012 dataset.
Power Control and Relay Selection in Full-Duplex Cognitive Relay Networks: Coherent versus Non-coherent Scenarios
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

This paper investigates power control and relay selection in Full Duplex Cognitive Relay Networks (FDCRNs), where the secondary-user (SU) relays can simultaneously receive and forward the signal from the SU source. We study both non-coherent and coherent scenarios. In the non-coherent case, the SU relay forwards the signal from the SU source without regulating the phase, while in the coherent scenario, the SU relay regulates the phase when forwarding the signal to minimize the interference at the primary-user (PU) receiver. We consider the problem of maximizing the transmission rate from the SU source to the SU destination subject to the interference constraint at the PU receiver and power constraints at both the SU source and SU relay. We develop low-complexity and high-performance joint power control and relay selection algorithms. The superior performance of the proposed algorithms are confirmed using extensive numerical evaluation. In particular, we demonstrate the significant gain of phase regulation at the SU relay (i.e., the gain of the coherent mechanism over the noncoherent mechanism).
Guardian of the HAN: Thwarting Mobile Attacks on Smart-Home Devices Using OS-level Situation Awareness
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2017
Year: 2017

A new development of smart-home systems is to use mobile apps to control IoT devices across a Home Area Network (HAN). Those systems tend to rely on the Wi-Fi router to authenticate other devices; as verified in our study, IoT vendors tend to trust all devices connected to the HAN. This treatment exposes them to the attack from malicious apps, particularly those running on authorized phones, which the router does not have information to control, as confirmed in our measurement study. Mitigating this threat cannot solely rely on IoT manufacturers, which may need to change the hardware on the devices to support encryption, increasing the cost of the device, or software developers who we need to trust to implement security correctly. In this work, we present a new technique to control the communication between the IoT devices and their apps in a unified, backward-compatible way. Our approach, called Hanguard, does not require any changes to the IoT devices themselves, the IoT apps or the OS of the participating phones. Hanguard achieves a fine-grained, per-app protection through bridging the OS-level situation awareness and the router-level per-flow control: each phone runs a non-system userspace Monitor app to identify the party that attempts to access the protected IoT device and inform the router through a control plane of its access decision; the router enforces the decision on the data plane after verifying whether the phone should be allowed to talk to the device. Hanguard uses a role-based access control (RBAC) schema which leverages type enforcement (TE) and multi-category security (MCS) primitives to define highly flexible access control rules. We implemented our design over both Android and iOS (>95% of mobile OS market share) and a popular router. Our study shows that Hanguard is both efficient and effective in practice.
An Unsupervised Approach for Discovering Relevant Tutorial Fragments for APIs
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2017
Year: 2017

Developers increasingly rely on API tutorials to facilitate software development. However, it remains a challenging task for them to discover relevant API tutorial fragments explaining unfamiliar APIs. Existing supervised approaches suffer from the heavy burden of manually preparing corpus-specific annotated data and features. In this study, we propose a novel unsupervised approach, namely Fragment Recommender for APIs with PageRank and Topic model (FRAPT). FRAPT can well address two main challenges lying in the task and effectively determine relevant tutorial fragments for APIs. In FRAPT, a Fragment Parser is proposed to identify APIs in tutorial fragments and replace ambiguous pronouns and variables with related ontologies and API names, so as to address the pronoun and variable resolution challenge. Then, a Fragment Filter employs a set of nonexplanatory detection rules to remove non-explanatory fragments, thus address the non-explanatory fragment identification challenge. Finally, two correlation scores are achieved and aggregated to determine relevant fragments for APIs, by applying both topic model and PageRank algorithm to the retained fragments. Extensive experiments over two publicly open tutorial corpora show that, FRAPT improves the state-of-the-art approach by 8.77% and 12.32% respectively in terms of F-Measure. The effectiveness of key components of FRAPT is also validated.
A More Accurate Model for Finding Tutorial Segments Explaining APIs
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2017
Year: 2017

Developers prefer to utilize third-party libraries when they implement some functionalities and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are frequently used by them. Facing an unfamiliar API, developers tend to consult tutorials as learning resources. Unfortunately, the segments explaining a specific API scatter across tutorials. Hence, it remains a challenging issue to find the relevant segments. In this study, we propose a more accurate model to find the exact tutorial fragments explaining APIs. This new model consists of a text classifier with domain specific features. More specifically, we discover two important indicators to complement traditional text based features, namely co-occurrence APIs and knowledge based API extensions. In addition, we incorporate Word2Vec, a semantic similarity metric to enhance the new model. Extensive experiments over two publicly available tutorial datasets show that our new model could find up to 90% fragments explaining APIs and improve the state-of-the-art model by up to 30% in terms of F-measure.
Learn-and-Adapt Stochastic Dual Gradients for Network Resource Allocation
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2017
Year: 2017

Network resource allocation shows revived popularity in the era of data deluge and information explosion. Existing stochastic optimization approaches fall short in attaining a desirable cost-delay tradeoff. Recognizing the central role of Lagrange multipliers in network resource allocation, a novel learn-and-adapt stochastic dual gradient (LA-SDG) method is developed in this paper to learn the sample-optimal Lagrange multiplier from historical data, and accordingly adapt the upcoming resource allocation strategy. Remarkably, LA-SDG only requires just an extra sample (gradient) evaluation relative to the celebrated stochastic dual gradient (SDG) method. LA-SDG can be interpreted as a foresighted learning scheme with an eye on the future, or, a modified heavy-ball iteration from an optimization viewpoint. It is established - both theoretically and empirically - that LA-SDG markedly improves the cost-delay tradeoff over state-of-the-art allocation schemes.
Tight Space-Approximation Tradeoff for the Multi-Pass Streaming Set Cover Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2017
Year: 2017

We study the classic set cover problem in the streaming model: the sets that comprise the instance are revealed one by one in a stream and the goal is to solve the problem by making one or few passes over the stream while maintaining a sublinear space $o(mn)$ in the input size; here $m$ denotes the number of the sets and $n$ is the universe size. Notice that in this model, we are mainly concerned with the space requirement of the algorithms and hence do not restrict their computation time. Our main result is a resolution of the space-approximation tradeoff for the streaming set cover problem: we show that any $α$-approximation algorithm for the set cover problem requires $\widetildeΩ(mn^{1/α})$ space, even if it is allowed polylog${(n)}$ passes over the stream, and even if the sets are arriving in a random order in the stream. This space-approximation tradeoff matches the best known bounds achieved by the recent algorithm of Har-Peled et.al. (PODS 2016) that requires only $O(α)$ passes over the stream in an adversarial order, hence settling the space complexity of approximating the set cover problem in data streams in a quite robust manner. Additionally, our approach yields tight lower bounds for the space complexity of $(1- ε)$-approximating the streaming maximum coverage problem studied in several recent works.
Montgomery curves and their arithmetic
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2017
Year: 2017

Three decades ago, Montgomery introduced a new elliptic curve model for use in Lenstra's ECM factorization algorithm. Since then, his curves and the algorithms associated with them have become foundational in the implementation of elliptic curve cryptosystems. This article surveys the theory and cryptographic applications of Montgomery curves over non-binary finite fields, including Montgomery's x-only arithmetic and Ladder algorithm, x-only Diffie--Hellman, y-coordinate recovery, and 2-dimensional and Euclidean differential addition chains such as Montgomery's PRAC algorithm.
A Physarum-inspired model for the probit-based stochastic user equilibrium problem
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2017
Year: 2017

Stochastic user equilibrium is an important issue in the traffic assignment problems, tradition models for the stochastic user equilibrium problem are designed as mathematical programming problems. In this article, a Physarum-inspired model for the probit-based stochastic user equilibrium problem is proposed. There are two main contributions of our work. On the one hand, the origin Physarum model is modified to find the shortest path in traffic direction networks with the properties of two-way traffic characteristic. On the other hand, the modified Physarum-inspired model could get the equilibrium flows when traveller's perceived transportation cost complies with normal distribution. The proposed method is constituted with a two-step procedure. First, the modified Physarum model is applied to get the auxiliary flows. Second, the auxiliary flows are averaged to obtain the equilibrium flows. Numerical examples are conducted to illustrate the performance of the proposed method, which is compared with the Method of Successive Average method.
On Von Schelling Formula for the Generalized Coupon Collector Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2017
Year: 2017

This paper gives an algebraic proof of the correctness of Von Schelling formula for the probability of the coupon collector problem waiting time for non-uniform distributions and partial collections. It introduces a theorem on sums of powers of subset probabilities which to our knowledge is new. A set of binomial coefficients is used as a basis for decomposition of these sums of powers.
Approximate Muscle Guided Beam Search for Three-Index Assignment Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2017
Year: 2017

As a well-known NP-hard problem, the Three-Index Assignment Problem (AP3) has attracted lots of research efforts for developing heuristics. However, existing heuristics either obtain less competitive solutions or consume too much time. In this paper, a new heuristic named Approximate Muscle guided Beam Search (AMBS) is developed to achieve a good trade-off between solution quality and running time. By combining the approximate muscle with beam search, the solution space size can be significantly decreased, thus the time for searching the solution can be sharply reduced. Extensive experimental results on the benchmark indicate that the new algorithm is able to obtain solutions with competitive quality and it can be employed on instances with largescale. Work of this paper not only proposes a new efficient heuristic, but also provides a promising method to improve the efficiency of beam search.