OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Deep 2.5D Vehicle Classification with Sparse SfM Depth Prior for Automated Toll Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Automated toll systems rely on proper classification of the passing vehicles. This is especially difficult when the images used for classification only cover parts of the vehicle. To obtain information about the whole vehicle. we reconstruct the vehicle as 3D object and exploit this additional information within a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). However, when using deep networks for 3D object classification, large amounts of dense 3D models are required for good accuracy, which are often neither available nor feasible to process due to memory requirements. Therefore, in our method we reproject the 3D object onto the image plane using the reconstructed points, lines or both. We utilize this sparse depth prior within an auxiliary network branch that acts as a regularizer during training. We show that this auxiliary regularizer helps to improve accuracy compared to 2D classification on a real-world dataset. Furthermore due to the design of the network, at test time only the 2D camera images are required for classification which enables the usage in portable computer vision systems.
Solving Sudoku with Ant Colony Optimisation
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper we present a new Ant Colony Optimisation-based algorithm for Sudoku, which out-performs existing methods on large instances. Our method includes a novel anti-stagnation operator, which we call Best Value Evaporation.
On Visual Hallmarks of Robustness to Adversarial Malware
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

A central challenge of adversarial learning is to interpret the resulting hardened model. In this contribution, we ask how robust generalization can be visually discerned and whether a concise view of the interactions between a hardened decision map and input samples is possible. We first provide a means of visually comparing a hardened model's loss behavior with respect to the adversarial variants generated during training versus loss behavior with respect to adversarial variants generated from other sources. This allows us to confirm that the association of observed flatness of a loss landscape with generalization that is seen with naturally trained models extends to adversarially hardened models and robust generalization. To complement these means of interpreting model parameter robustness we also use self-organizing maps to provide a visual means of superimposing adversarial and natural variants on a model's decision space, thus allowing the model's global robustness to be comprehensively examined.
Time Reversed Delay Differential Equation Based Modeling Of Journal Influence In An Emerging Area
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2018
Year: 2018

A recent independent study resulted in a ranking system which ranked Astronomy and Computing (ASCOM) much higher than most of the older journals highlighting its niche prominence. We investigate the notable ascendancy in reputation of ASCOM by proposing a novel differential equation based modeling. The modeling is a consequence of knowledge discovery from big data methods, namely L1-SVD. We propose a growth model by accounting for the behavior of parameters that contribute to the growth of a field. It is worthwhile to spend some time in analyzing the cause and control variables behind rapid rise in the reputation of a journal in a niche area. We intend to identify and probe the parameters responsible for its growing influence. Delay differential equations are used to model the change of influence on a journal's status by exploiting the effects of historical data. The manuscript justifies the use of implicit control variables and models those accordingly that demonstrate certain behavior in the journal influence.
Personal space of autonomous car's passengers sitting in the driver's seat
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2018
Year: 2018

This article deals with the specific context of an autonomous car navigating in an urban center within a shared space between pedestrians and cars. The driver delegates the control to the autonomous system while remaining seated in the driver's seat. The proposed study aims at giving a first insight into the definition of human perception of space applied to vehicles by testing the existence of a personal space around the car.It aims at measuring proxemic information about the driver's comfort zone in such conditions.Proxemics, or human perception of space, has been largely explored when applied to humans or to robots, leading to the concept of personal space, but poorly when applied to vehicles. In this article, we highlight the existence and the characteristics of a zone of comfort around the car which is not correlated to the risk of a collision between the car and other road users. Our experiment includes 19 volunteers using a virtual reality headset to look at 30 scenarios filmed in 360{\textdegree} from the point of view of a passenger sitting in the driver's seat of an autonomous car.They were asked to say "stop" when they felt discomfort visualizing the scenarios.As said, the scenarios voluntarily avoid collision effect as we do not want to measure fear but discomfort.The scenarios involve one or three pedestrians walking past the car at different distances from the wings of the car, relative to the direction of motion of the car, on both sides. The car is either static or moving straight forward at different speeds.The results indicate the existence of a comfort zone around the car in which intrusion causes discomfort.The size of the comfort zone is sensitive neither to the side of the car where the pedestrian passes nor to the number of pedestrians. In contrast, the feeling of discomfort is relative to the car's motion (static or moving).Another outcome from this study is an illustration of the usage of first person 360{\textdegree} video and a virtual reality headset to evaluate feelings of a passenger within an autonomous car.
Priority Evacuation from a Disk Using Mobile Robots
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2018
Year: 2018

We introduce and study a new search-type problem with ($n+1$)-robots on a disk. The searchers (robots) all start from the center of the disk, have unit speed, and can communicate wirelessly. The goal is for a distinguished robot (the queen) to reach and evacuate from an exit that is hidden on the perimeter of the disk in as little time as possible. The remaining $n$ robots (servants) are there to facilitate the queen's objective and are not required to reach the hidden exit. We provide upper and lower bounds for the time required to evacuate the queen from a unit disk. Namely, we propose an algorithm specifying the trajectories of the robots which guarantees evacuation of the queen in time always better than $2 + 4(\sqrt{2}-1) \fracπ{n}$ for $n \geq 4$ servants. We also demonstrate that for $n \geq 4$ servants the queen cannot be evacuated in time less than $2+\fracπ{n}+\frac{2}{n^2}$.
A Novel PMU Fog based Early Anomaly Detection for an Efficient Wide Area PMU Network
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

Based on phasor measurement units (PMUs), a synchronphasor system is widely recognized as a promising smart grid measurement system. It is able to provide high-frequency, high-accuracy phasor measurements sampling for Wide Area Monitoring and Control (WAMC) applications. However, the high sampling frequency of measurement data under strict latency constraints introduces new challenges for real time communication. It would be very helpful if the collected data can be prioritized according to its importance such that the existing quality of service (QoS) mechanisms in the communication networks can be leveraged. To achieve this goal, certain anomaly detection functions should be conducted by the PMUs. Inspired by the recent emerging edge-fog-cloud computing hierarchical architecture, which allows computing tasks to be conducted at the network edge, a novel PMU fog is proposed in this paper. Two anomaly detection approaches, Singular Spectrum Analysis (SSA) and K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), are evaluated in the PMU fog using the IEEE 16-machine 68-bus system. The simulation experiments based on Riverbed Modeler demonstrate that the proposed PMU fog can effectively reduce the data flow end-to-end (ETE) delay without sacrificing data completeness.
Towards Mixed Gr{ö}bner Basis Algorithms: the Multihomogeneous and Sparse Case
Venue: arXiv cs.SC 2018
Year: 2018

One of the biggest open problems in computational algebra is the design of efficient algorithms for Gr{ö}bner basis computations that take into account the sparsity of the input polynomials. We can perform such computations in the case of unmixed polynomial systems, that is systems with polynomials having the same support, using the approach of Faug{è}re, Spaenlehauer, and Svartz [ISSAC'14]. We present two algorithms for sparse Gr{ö}bner bases computations for mixed systems. The first one computes with mixed sparse systems and exploits the supports of the polynomials. Under regularity assumptions, it performs no reductions to zero. For mixed, square, and 0-dimensional multihomogeneous polynomial systems, we present a dedicated, and potentially more efficient, algorithm that exploits different algebraic properties that performs no reduction to zero. We give an explicit bound for the maximal degree appearing in the computations.
Phase retrieval for Fourier Ptychography under varying amount of measurements
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Fourier Ptychography is a recently proposed imaging technique that yields high-resolution images by computationally transcending the diffraction blur of an optical system. At the crux of this method is the phase retrieval algorithm, which is used for computationally stitching together low-resolution images taken under varying illumination angles of a coherent light source. However, the traditional iterative phase retrieval technique relies heavily on the initialization and also need a good amount of overlap in the Fourier domain for the successively captured low-resolution images, thus increasing the acquisition time and data. We show that an auto-encoder based architecture can be adaptively trained for phase retrieval under both low overlap, where traditional techniques completely fail, and at higher levels of overlap. For the low overlap case we show that a supervised deep learning technique using an autoencoder generator is a good choice for solving the Fourier ptychography problem. And for the high overlap case, we show that optimizing the generator for reducing the forward model error is an appropriate choice. Using simulations for the challenging case of uncorrelated phase and amplitude, we show that our method outperforms many of the previously proposed Fourier ptychography phase retrieval techniques.
Parallel Programming for FPGAs
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2018
Year: 2018

This book focuses on the use of algorithmic high-level synthesis (HLS) to build application-specific FPGA systems. Our goal is to give the reader an appreciation of the process of creating an optimized hardware design using HLS. Although the details are, of necessity, different from parallel programming for multicore processors or GPUs, many of the fundamental concepts are similar. For example, designers must understand memory hierarchy and bandwidth, spatial and temporal locality of reference, parallelism, and tradeoffs between computation and storage. This book is a practical guide for anyone interested in building FPGA systems. In a university environment, it is appropriate for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses. At the same time, it is also useful for practicing system designers and embedded programmers. The book assumes the reader has a working knowledge of C/C++ and includes a significant amount of sample code. In addition, we assume familiarity with basic computer architecture concepts (pipelining, speedup, Amdahl's Law, etc.). A knowledge of the RTL-based FPGA design flow is helpful, although not required.
Self-Stabilizing Task Allocation In Spite of Noise
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2018
Year: 2018

We study the problem of distributed task allocation inspired by the behavior of social insects, which perform task allocation in a setting of limited capabilities and noisy environment feedback. We assume that each task has a demand that should be satisfied but not exceeded, i.e., there is an optimal number of ants that should be working on this task at a given time. The goal is to assign a near-optimal number of workers to each task in a distributed manner and without explicit access to the values of the demands nor the number of ants working on the task. We seek to answer the question of how the quality of task allocation depends on the accuracy of assessing whether too many (overload) or not enough (lack) ants are currently working on a given task. Concretely, we address the open question of solving task allocation in the model where each ant receives feedback that depends on the deficit defined as the (possibly negative) difference between the optimal demand and the current number of workers in the task. The feedback is modeled as a random variable that takes value lack or overload with probability given by a sigmoid of the deficit. Each ants receives the feedback independently, but the higher the overload or lack of workers for a task, the more likely it is that all the ants will receive the same, correct feedback from this task; the closer the deficit is to zero, the less reliable the feedback becomes. We measure the performance of task allocation algorithms using the notion of regret, defined as the absolute value of the deficit summed over all tasks and summed over time. We propose a simple, constant-memory, self-stabilizing, distributed algorithm that quickly converges from any initial distribution to a near-optimal assignment. We also show that our algorithm works not only under stochastic noise but also in an adversarial noise setting.
Incorporating Subword Information into Matrix Factorization Word Embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

The positive effect of adding subword information to word embeddings has been demonstrated for predictive models. In this paper we investigate whether similar benefits can also be derived from incorporating subwords into counting models. We evaluate the impact of different types of subwords (n-grams and unsupervised morphemes), with results confirming the importance of subword information in learning representations of rare and out-of-vocabulary words.
Creative Invention Benchmark
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper we present the Creative Invention Benchmark (CrIB), a 2000-problem benchmark for evaluating a particular facet of computational creativity. Specifically, we address combinational p-creativity, the creativity at play when someone combines existing knowledge to achieve a solution novel to that individual. We present generation strategies for the five problem categories of the benchmark and a set of initial baselines.
Dwarfs on Accelerators: Enhancing OpenCL Benchmarking for Heterogeneous Computing Architectures
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

For reasons of both performance and energy efficiency, high-performance computing (HPC) hardware is becoming increasingly heterogeneous. The OpenCL framework supports portable programming across a wide range of computing devices and is gaining influence in programming next-generation accelerators. To characterize the performance of these devices across a range of applications requires a diverse, portable and configurable benchmark suite, and OpenCL is an attractive programming model for this purpose. We present an extended and enhanced version of the OpenDwarfs OpenCL benchmark suite, with a strong focus placed on the robustness of applications, curation of additional benchmarks with an increased emphasis on correctness of results and choice of problem size. Preliminary results and analysis are reported for eight benchmark codes on a diverse set of architectures -- three Intel CPUs, five Nvidia GPUs, six AMD GPUs and a Xeon Phi.
Scaling Nakamoto Consensus to Thousands of Transactions per Second
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

This paper presents Conflux, a fast, scalable and decentralized blockchain system that optimistically process concurrent blocks without discarding any as forks. The Conflux consensus protocol represents relationships between blocks as a direct acyclic graph and achieves consensus on a total order of the blocks. Conflux then, from the block order, deterministically derives a transaction total order as the blockchain ledger. We evaluated Conflux on Amazon EC2 clusters with up to 20k full nodes. Conflux achieves a transaction throughput of 5.76GB/h while confirming transactions in 4.5-7.4 minutes. The throughput is equivalent to 6400 transactions per second for typical Bitcoin transactions. Our results also indicate that when running Conflux, the consensus protocol is no longer the throughput bottleneck. The bottleneck is instead at the processing capability of individual nodes.
Scaling associative classification for very large datasets
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Supervised learning algorithms are nowadays successfully scaling up to datasets that are very large in volume, leveraging the potential of in-memory cluster-computing Big Data frameworks. Still, massive datasets with a number of large-domain categorical features are a difficult challenge for any classifier. Most off-the-shelf solutions cannot cope with this problem. In this work we introduce DAC, a Distributed Associative Classifier. DAC exploits ensemble learning to distribute the training of an associative classifier among parallel workers and improve the final quality of the model. Furthermore, it adopts several novel techniques to reach high scalability without sacrificing quality, among which a preventive pruning of classification rules in the extraction phase based on Gini impurity. We ran experiments on Apache Spark, on a real large-scale dataset with more than 4 billion records and 800 million distinct categories. The results showed that DAC improves on a state-of-the-art solution in both prediction quality and execution time. Since the generated model is human-readable, it can not only classify new records, but also allow understanding both the logic behind the prediction and the properties of the model, becoming a useful aid for decision makers.
Enhancing HEVC Compressed Videos with a Partition-masked Convolutional Neural Network
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we propose a partition-masked Convolution Neural Network (CNN) to achieve compressed-video enhancement for the state-of-the-art coding standard, High Efficiency Video Coding (HECV). More precisely, our method utilizes the partition information produced by the encoder to guide the quality enhancement process. In contrast to existing CNN-based approaches, which only take the decoded frame as the input to the CNN, the proposed approach considers the coding unit (CU) size information and combines it with the distorted decoded frame such that the degradation introduced by HEVC is reduced more efficiently. Experimental results show that our approach leads to over 9.76% BD-rate saving on benchmark sequences, which achieves the state-of-the-art performance.
Towards a universal neural network encoder for time series
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

We study the use of a time series encoder to learn representations that are useful on data set types with which it has not been trained on. The encoder is formed of a convolutional neural network whose temporal output is summarized by a convolutional attention mechanism. This way, we obtain a compact, fixed-length representation from longer, variable-length time series. We evaluate the performance of the proposed approach on a well-known time series classification benchmark, considering full adaptation, partial adaptation, and no adaptation of the encoder to the new data type. Results show that such strategies are competitive with the state-of-the-art, often outperforming conceptually-matching approaches. Besides accuracy scores, the facility of adaptation and the efficiency of pre-trained encoders make them an appealing option for the processing of scarcely- or non-labeled time series.
MPI+X: task-based parallelization and dynamic load balance of finite element assembly
Venue: arXiv cs.MS 2018
Year: 2018

The main computing tasks of a finite element code(FE) for solving partial differential equations (PDE's) are the algebraic system assembly and the iterative solver. This work focuses on the first task, in the context of a hybrid MPI+X paradigm. Although we will describe algorithms in the FE context, a similar strategy can be straightforwardly applied to other discretization methods, like the finite volume method. The matrix assembly consists of a loop over the elements of the MPI partition to compute element matrices and right-hand sides and their assemblies in the local system to each MPI partition. In a MPI+X hybrid parallelism context, X has consisted traditionally of loop parallelism using OpenMP. Several strategies have been proposed in the literature to implement this loop parallelism, like coloring or substructuring techniques to circumvent the race condition that appears when assembling the element system into the local system. The main drawback of the first technique is the decrease of the IPC due to bad spatial locality. The second technique avoids this issue but requires extensive changes in the implementation, which can be cumbersome when several element loops should be treated. We propose an alternative, based on the task parallelism of the element loop using some extensions to the OpenMP programming model. The taskification of the assembly solves both aforementioned problems. In addition, dynamic load balance will be applied using the DLB library, especially efficient in the presence of hybrid meshes, where the relative costs of the different elements is impossible to estimate a priori. This paper presents the proposed methodology, its implementation and its validation through the solution of large computational mechanics problems up to 16k cores.
Exploiting Row-Level Temporal Locality in DRAM to Reduce the Memory Access Latency
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2018
Year: 2018

This paper summarizes the idea of ChargeCache, which was published in HPCA 2016 [51], and examines the work's significance and future potential. DRAM latency continues to be a critical bottleneck for system performance. In this work, we develop a low-cost mechanism, called ChargeCache, that enables faster access to recently-accessed rows in DRAM, with no modifications to DRAM chips. Our mechanism is based on the key observation that a recently-accessed row has more charge and thus the following access to the same row can be performed faster. To exploit this observation, we propose to track the addresses of recently-accessed rows in a table in the memory controller. If a later DRAM request hits in that table, the memory controller uses lower timing parameters, leading to reduced DRAM latency. Row addresses are removed from the table after a specified duration to ensure rows that have leaked too much charge are not accessed with lower latency. We evaluate ChargeCache on a wide variety of workloads and show that it provides significant performance and energy benefits for both single-core and multi-core systems.