OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Routing Unmanned Vehicles in GPS-Denied Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2017
Year: 2017

Most of the routing algorithms for unmanned vehicles, that arise in data gathering and monitoring applications in the literature, rely on the Global Positioning System (GPS) information for localization. However, disruption of GPS signals either intentionally or unintentionally could potentially render these algorithms not applicable. In this article, we present a novel method to address this difficulty by combining methods from cooperative localization and routing. In particular, the article formulates a fundamental combinatorial optimization problem to plan routes for an unmanned vehicle in a GPS-restricted environment while enabling localization for the vehicle. We also develop algorithms to compute optimal paths for the vehicle using the proposed formulation. Extensive simulation results are also presented to corroborate the effectiveness and performance of the proposed formulation and algorithms.
Motion Feature Augmented Recurrent Neural Network for Skeleton-based Dynamic Hand Gesture Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Dynamic hand gesture recognition has attracted increasing interests because of its importance for human computer interaction. In this paper, we propose a new motion feature augmented recurrent neural network for skeleton-based dynamic hand gesture recognition. Finger motion features are extracted to describe finger movements and global motion features are utilized to represent the global movement of hand skeleton. These motion features are then fed into a bidirectional recurrent neural network (RNN) along with the skeleton sequence, which can augment the motion features for RNN and improve the classification performance. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed method is effective and outperforms start-of-the-art methods.
Multicarrier Relay Selection for Full-Duplex Relay-Assisted OFDM D2D Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

In this paper, we propose a full-duplex orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) device-to-device (D2D) system in two-hop networks, where multiple full-duplex decode-and-forward (DF) relays assist the transmission from D2D user equipment (DUE) transmitter to DUE receiver. By such a transmission mechanism, the signal transmitted by the DUE transmitter does not need to go through a base station (BS). Meanwhile, due to the adoption of underlay D2D communication protocol, power control mechanisms are thereby necessary to be applied to mitigate the interference to conventional cellular communications. Based on these considerations, we analyze the outage performance of the proposed system, and derive the exact expressions of outage probabilities when bulk and per-subcarrier relay selection criteria are applied. Furthermore, closed-form expressions of outage probabilities are also obtained for special cases when the instantaneous channel state information (CSI) between BS and cellular user equipments (CUEs) is not accessible, so that a static power control mechanism is applied. Subsequently, we also investigate the outage performance optimization problem by coordinating transmit power among DUE transmitter and relays, and provide a suboptimal solution, which is capable of improving the outage performance. All analysis is substantiated by numerical results provided by Monte Carlo simulations. The analytical and numerical results demonstrated in this paper can provide an insight into the full-duplex relay-assisted OFDM D2D systems, and serve as a guideline for its implementation in next generation networks.
Outage Performance of Two-Hop OFDM Systems with Spatially Random Decode-and-Forward Relays
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

In this paper, we analyze the outage performance of different multicarrier relay selection schemes for two-hop orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems in a Poisson field of relays. In particular, special emphasis is placed on decode-and-forward (DF) relay systems, equipped with bulk and per-subcarrier selection schemes, respectively. The exact expressions for outage probability are derived in integrals for general cases. In addition, asymptotic expressions for outage probability in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region in the finite circle relay distribution region are determined in closed forms for both relay selection schemes. Also, the outage probabilities for free space in the infinite relay distribution region are derived in closed forms. Meanwhile, a series of important properties related to cooperative systems in random networks are investigated, including diversity, outage probability ratio of two selection schemes and optimization of the number of subcarriers in terms of system throughput. All analysis is numerically verified by simulations. Finally, a framework for analyzing the outage performance of OFDM systems with spatially random relays is constructed, which can be easily modified to analyze other similar cases with different forwarding protocols, location distributions and/or channel conditions.
Bidirectional User Throughput Maximization Based on Feedback Reduction in LiFi Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

Channel adaptive signalling, which is based on feedback, can result in almost any performance metric enhancement. Unlike the radio frequency (RF) channel, the optical wireless communications (OWCs) channel is fairly static. This feature enables a potential improvement of the bidirectional user throughput by reducing the amount of feedback. Light-Fidelity (LiFi) is a subset of OWCs, and it is a bidirectional, high-speed and fully networked wireless communication technology where visible light and infrared are used in downlink and uplink respectively. In this paper, two techniques for reducing the amount of feedback in LiFi cellular networks are proposed, i) Limited-content feedback (LCF) scheme based on reducing the content of feedback information and ii) Limited-frequency feedback (LFF) based on the update interval scheme that lets the receiver to transmit feedback information after some data frames transmission. Furthermore, based on the random waypoint (RWP) mobility model, the optimum update interval which provides maximum bidirectional user equipment (UE) throughput, has been derived. Results show that the proposed schemes can achieve better average overall throughput compared to the benchmark one-bit feedback and full-feedback mechanisms.
Topical Behavior Prediction from Massive Logs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

In this paper, we study the topical behavior in a large scale. We use the network logs where each entry contains the entity ID, the timestamp, and the meta data about the activity. Both the temporal and the spatial relationships of the behavior are explored with the deep learning architectures combing the recurrent neural network (RNN) and the convolutional neural network (CNN). To make the behavioral data appropriate for the spatial learning in the CNN, we propose several reduction steps to form the topical metrics and to place them homogeneously like pixels in the images. The experimental result shows both temporal and spatial gains when compared against a multilayer perceptron (MLP) network. A new learning framework called the spatially connected convolutional networks (SCCN) is introduced to predict the topical metrics more efficiently.
Product Matrix MSR Codes with Bandwidth Adaptive Exact Repair
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

In a distributed storage systems (DSS) with $k$ systematic nodes, robustness against node failure is commonly provided by storing redundancy in a number of other nodes and performing repair mechanism to reproduce the content of the failed nodes. Efficiency is then achieved by minimizing the storage overhead and the amount of data transmission required for data reconstruction and repair, provided by coding solutions such as regenerating codes [1]. Common explicit regenerating code constructions enable efficient repair through accessing a predefined number, $d$, of arbitrary chosen available nodes, namely helpers. In practice, however, the state of the system dynamically changes based on the request load, the link traffic, etc., and the parameters which optimize system's performance vary accordingly. It is then desirable to have coding schemes which are able to operate optimally under a range of different parameters simultaneously. Specifically, adaptivity in the number of helper nodes for repair is of interest. While robustness requires capability of performing repair with small number of helpers, it is desirable to use as many helpers as available to reduce the transmission delay and total repair traffic. In this work we focus on the minimum storage regenerating (MSR) codes, where each node is supposed to store $α$ information units, and the source data of size $kα$ could be recovered from any arbitrary set of $k$ nodes. We introduce a class MSR codes that realize optimal repair bandwidth simultaneously with a set of different choices for the number of helpers, namely $D=\{d_{1}, \cdots, d_δ\}$. Our coding scheme follows the Product Matrix (PM) framework introduced in [2], and could be considered as a generalization of the PM MSR code presented in [2], such that any $d_{i} = (i+1)(k-1)$ helpers can perform an optimal repair. ...
N-gram and Neural Language Models for Discriminating Similar Languages
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2017
Year: 2017

This paper describes our submission (named clac) to the 2016 Discriminating Similar Languages (DSL) shared task. We participated in the closed Sub-task 1 (Set A) with two separate machine learning techniques. The first approach is a character based Convolution Neural Network with a bidirectional long short term memory (BiLSTM) layer (CLSTM), which achieved an accuracy of 78.45% with minimal tuning. The second approach is a character-based n-gram model. This last approach achieved an accuracy of 88.45% which is close to the accuracy of 89.38% achieved by the best submission, and allowed us to rank #7 overall.
Combinatorial Optimization by Decomposition on Hybrid CPU--non-CPU Solver Architectures
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2017
Year: 2017

The advent of new special-purpose hardware such as FPGA or ASIC-based annealers and quantum processors has shown potential in solving certain families of complex combinatorial optimization problems more efficiently than conventional CPUs. We show that to address an industrial optimization problem, a hybrid architecture of CPUs and non-CPU devices is inevitable. In this paper, we propose problem decomposition as an effective method for designing a hybrid CPU--non-CPU optimization solver. We introduce the required algorithmic elements for making problem decomposition a viable approach in meeting the real-world constraints such as communication time and the potential higher cost of using non-CPU hardware. We then turn to the well-known maximum clique problem, and propose a new method of decomposition for this problem. Our method enables us to solve the maximum clique problem on very large graphs using non-CPU hardware that is considerably smaller than the size of the graph. As an example, we show that the maximum clique problem on the com-Amazon graph, with 334,863 vertices and 925,872 edges, can be solved with a single call to a device that can embed a fully connected graph of size at least 21 nodes, such as the D-Wave 2000Q. We also show that our proposed problem decomposition approach can improve the runtime of two of the best-known classical algorithms for large, sparse graphs, namely PMC and BBMCSP, by orders of magnitude. In the light of our study, we believe that new non-CPU hardware that is small in size could become competitive with CPUs if it could be either mass produced and highly parallelized, or able to provide high-quality solutions to specific, small-sized problems significantly faster than CPUs.
Unified Neural Architecture for Drug, Disease and Clinical Entity Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2017
Year: 2017

Most existing methods for biomedical entity recognition task rely on explicit feature engineering where many features either are specific to a particular task or depends on output of other existing NLP tools. Neural architectures have been shown across various domains that efforts for explicit feature design can be reduced. In this work we propose an unified framework using bi-directional long short term memory network (BLSTM) for named entity recognition (NER) tasks in biomedical and clinical domains. Three important characteristics of the framework are as follows - (1) model learns contextual as well as morphological features using two different BLSTM in hierarchy, (2) model uses first order linear conditional random field (CRF) in its output layer in cascade of BLSTM to infer label or tag sequence, (3) model does not use any domain specific features or dictionary, i.e., in another words, same set of features are used in the three NER tasks, namely, disease name recognition (Disease NER), drug name recognition (Drug NER) and clinical entity recognition (Clinical NER). We compare performance of the proposed model with existing state-of-the-art models on the standard benchmark datasets of the three tasks. We show empirically that the proposed framework outperforms all existing models. Further our analysis of CRF layer and word-embedding obtained using character based embedding show their importance.
Key exchange with the help of a public ledger
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2017
Year: 2017

Blockchains and other public ledger structures promise a new way to create globally consistent event logs and other records. We make use of this consistency property to detect and prevent man-in-the-middle attacks in a key exchange such as Diffie-Hellman or ECDH. Essentially, the MitM attack creates an inconsistency in the world views of the two honest parties, and they can detect it with the help of the ledger. Thus, there is no need for prior knowledge or trusted third parties apart from the distributed ledger. To prevent impersonation attacks, we require user interaction. It appears that, in some applications, the required user interaction is reduced in comparison to other user-assisted key-exchange protocols.
Preconditioning immersed isogeometric finite element methods with application to flow problems
Venue: arXiv cs.NA 2017
Year: 2017

Immersed finite element methods generally suffer from conditioning problems when cut elements intersect the physical domain only on a small fraction of their volume. De Prenter et al. [Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, 316 (2017) pp. 297-327] present an analysis for symmetric positive definite (SPD) immersed problems, and for this class of problems an algebraic preconditioner is developed. In this contribution the conditioning analysis is extended to immersed finite element methods for systems that are not SPD and the preconditioning technique is generalized to a connectivity-based preconditioner inspired by Additive-Schwarz preconditioning. This Connectivity-based Additive-Schwarz (CbAS) preconditioner is applicable to problems that are not SPD and to mixed problems, such as the Stokes and Navier-Stokes equations. A detailed numerical investigation of the effectivity of the CbAS preconditioner to a range of flow problems is presented.
Intra-Library Collusion: A Potential Privacy Nightmare on Smartphones
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2017
Year: 2017

Smartphones contain a trove of sensitive personal data including our location, who we talk to, our habits, and our interests. Smartphone users trade access to this data by permitting apps to use it, and in return obtain functionality provided by the apps. In many cases, however, users fail to appreciate the scale or sensitivity of the data that they share with third-parties when they use apps. To this end, prior work has looked at the threat to privacy posed by apps and the third-party libraries that they embed. Prior work, however, fails to paint a realistic picture of the full threat to smartphone users, as it has typically examined apps and third-party libraries in isolation. In this paper, we describe a novel and potentially devastating privilege escalation attack that can be performed by third-party libraries. This attack, which we call intra-library collusion, occurs when a single library embedded in more than one app on a device leverages the combined set of permissions available to it to pilfer sensitive user data. The possibility for intra-library collusion exists because libraries obtain the same privileges as their host app and popular libraries will likely be used by more than one app on a device. Using a real-world dataset of over 30,000 smartphones, we find that many popular third-party libraries have the potential to aggregate significant sensitive data from devices by using intra-library collusion. We demonstrate that several popular libraries already collect enough data to facilitate this attack. Using historical data, we show that risks from intra-library collusion have increased significantly over the last two-and-a-half years. We conclude with recommendations for mitigating the aforementioned problems.
Semantic Word Clouds with Background Corpus Normalization and t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2017
Year: 2017

Many word clouds provide no semantics to the word placement, but use a random layout optimized solely for aesthetic purposes. We propose a novel approach to model word significance and word affinity within a document, and in comparison to a large background corpus. We demonstrate its usefulness for generating more meaningful word clouds as a visual summary of a given document. We then select keywords based on their significance and construct the word cloud based on the derived affinity. Based on a modified t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE), we generate a semantic word placement. For words that cooccur significantly, we include edges, and cluster the words according to their cooccurrence. For this we designed a scalable and memory-efficient sketch-based approach usable on commodity hardware to aggregate the required corpus statistics needed for normalization, and for identifying keywords as well as significant cooccurences. We empirically validate our approch using a large Wikipedia corpus.
Emotion Intensities in Tweets
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2017
Year: 2017

This paper examines the task of detecting intensity of emotion from text. We create the first datasets of tweets annotated for anger, fear, joy, and sadness intensities. We use a technique called best--worst scaling (BWS) that improves annotation consistency and obtains reliable fine-grained scores. We show that emotion-word hashtags often impact emotion intensity, usually conveying a more intense emotion. Finally, we create a benchmark regression system and conduct experiments to determine: which features are useful for detecting emotion intensity, and, the extent to which two emotions are similar in terms of how they manifest in language.
Cross-Sentence N-ary Relation Extraction with Graph LSTMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2017
Year: 2017

Past work in relation extraction has focused on binary relations in single sentences. Recent NLP inroads in high-value domains have sparked interest in the more general setting of extracting n-ary relations that span multiple sentences. In this paper, we explore a general relation extraction framework based on graph long short-term memory networks (graph LSTMs) that can be easily extended to cross-sentence n-ary relation extraction. The graph formulation provides a unified way of exploring different LSTM approaches and incorporating various intra-sentential and inter-sentential dependencies, such as sequential, syntactic, and discourse relations. A robust contextual representation is learned for the entities, which serves as input to the relation classifier. This simplifies handling of relations with arbitrary arity, and enables multi-task learning with related relations. We evaluate this framework in two important precision medicine settings, demonstrating its effectiveness with both conventional supervised learning and distant supervision. Cross-sentence extraction produced larger knowledge bases. and multi-task learning significantly improved extraction accuracy. A thorough analysis of various LSTM approaches yielded useful insight the impact of linguistic analysis on extraction accuracy.
Calipso: Physics-based Image and Video Editing through CAD Model Proxies
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2017
Year: 2017

We present Calipso, an interactive method for editing images and videos in a physically-coherent manner. Our main idea is to realize physics-based manipulations by running a full physics simulation on proxy geometries given by non-rigidly aligned CAD models. Running these simulations allows us to apply new, unseen forces to move or deform selected objects, change physical parameters such as mass or elasticity, or even add entire new objects that interact with the rest of the underlying scene. In Calipso, the user makes edits directly in 3D; these edits are processed by the simulation and then transfered to the target 2D content using shape-to-image correspondences in a photo-realistic rendering process. To align the CAD models, we introduce an efficient CAD-to-image alignment procedure that jointly minimizes for rigid and non-rigid alignment while preserving the high-level structure of the input shape. Moreover, the user can choose to exploit image flow to estimate scene motion, producing coherent physical behavior with ambient dynamics. We demonstrate Calipso's physics-based editing on a wide range of examples producing myriad physical behavior while preserving geometric and visual consistency.
Direct-Manipulation Visualization of Deep Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

The recent successes of deep learning have led to a wave of interest from non-experts. Gaining an understanding of this technology, however, is difficult. While the theory is important, it is also helpful for novices to develop an intuitive feel for the effect of different hyperparameters and structural variations. We describe TensorFlow Playground, an interactive, open sourced visualization that allows users to experiment via direct manipulation rather than coding, enabling them to quickly build an intuition about neural nets.
Kill Two Birds With One Stone: Boosting Both Object Detection Accuracy and Speed With adaptive Patch-of-Interest Composition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Object detection is an important yet challenging task in video understanding & analysis, where one major challenge lies in the proper balance between two contradictive factors: detection accuracy and detection speed. In this paper, we propose a new adaptive patch-of-interest composition approach for boosting both the accuracy and speed for object detection. The proposed approach first extracts patches in a video frame which have the potential to include objects-of-interest. Then, an adaptive composition process is introduced to compose the extracted patches into an optimal number of sub-frames for object detection. With this process, we are able to maintain the resolution of the original frame during object detection (for guaranteeing the accuracy), while minimizing the number of inputs in detection (for boosting the speed). Experimental results on various datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.