OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Computational Method for Evaluating UI Patterns
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2018
Year: 2018

UI design languages, such as Google's Material Design, make applications both easier to develop and easier to learn by providing a set of standard UI components. Nonetheless, it is hard to assess the impact of design languages in the wild. Moreover, designers often get stranded by strong-opinionated debates around the merit of certain UI components, such as the Floating Action Button and the Navigation Drawer. To address these challenges, this short paper introduces a method for measuring the impact of design languages and informing design debates through analyzing a dataset consisting of view hierarchies, screenshots, and app metadata for more than 9,000 mobile apps. Our data analysis shows that use of Material Design is positively correlated to app ratings, and to some extent, also the number of installs. Furthermore, we show that use of UI components vary by app category, suggesting a more nuanced view needed in design debates.
Morse Code Datasets for Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

We present an algorithm to generate synthetic datasets of tunable difficulty on classification of Morse code symbols for supervised machine learning problems, in particular, neural networks. The datasets are spatially one-dimensional and have a small number of input features, leading to high density of input information content. This makes them particularly challenging when implementing network complexity reduction methods. We explore how network performance is affected by deliberately adding various forms of noise and expanding the feature set and dataset size. Finally, we establish several metrics to indicate the difficulty of a dataset, and evaluate their merits. The algorithm and datasets are open-source.
Automated Vulnerability Detection in Source Code Using Deep Representation Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Increasing numbers of software vulnerabilities are discovered every year whether they are reported publicly or discovered internally in proprietary code. These vulnerabilities can pose serious risk of exploit and result in system compromise, information leaks, or denial of service. We leveraged the wealth of C and C++ open-source code available to develop a large-scale function-level vulnerability detection system using machine learning. To supplement existing labeled vulnerability datasets, we compiled a vast dataset of millions of open-source functions and labeled it with carefully-selected findings from three different static analyzers that indicate potential exploits. The labeled dataset is available at: https://osf.io/d45bw/. Using these datasets, we developed a fast and scalable vulnerability detection tool based on deep feature representation learning that directly interprets lexed source code. We evaluated our tool on code from both real software packages and the NIST SATE IV benchmark dataset. Our results demonstrate that deep feature representation learning on source code is a promising approach for automated software vulnerability detection.
Will it Blend? Composing Value Functions in Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

An important property for lifelong-learning agents is the ability to combine existing skills to solve unseen tasks. In general, however, it is unclear how to compose skills in a principled way. We provide a "recipe" for optimal value function composition in entropy-regularised reinforcement learning (RL) and then extend this to the standard RL setting. Composition is demonstrated in a video game environment, where an agent with an existing library of policies is able to solve new tasks without the need for further learning.
STRICT: Information Retrieval Based Search Term Identification for Concept Location
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2018
Year: 2018

During maintenance, software developers deal with numerous change requests that are written in an unstructured fashion using natural language. Such natural language texts illustrate the change requirement involving various domain related concepts. Software developers need to find appropriate search terms from those concepts so that they could locate the possible locations in the source code using a search technique. Once such locations are identified, they can implement the requested changes there. Studies suggest that developers often perform poorly in coming up with good search terms for a change task. In this paper, we propose a novel technique--STRICT--that automatically identifies suitable search terms for a software change task by analyzing its task description using two information retrieval (IR) techniques-- TextRank and POSRank. These IR techniques determine a term's importance based on not only its co-occurrences with other important terms but also its syntactic relationships with them. Experiments using 1,939 change requests from eight subject systems report that STRICT can identify better quality search terms than baseline terms from 52%--62% of the requests with 30%--57% Top-10 retrieval accuracy which are promising. Comparison with two state-of-the-art techniques not only validates our empirical findings and but also demonstrates the superiority of our technique.
The Impact of Feature Selection on Predicting the Number of Bugs
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2018
Year: 2018

Bug prediction is the process of training a machine learning model on software metrics and fault information to predict bugs in software entities. While feature selection is an important step in building a robust prediction model, there is insufficient evidence about its impact on predicting the number of bugs in software systems. We study the impact of both correlation-based feature selection (CFS) filter methods and wrapper feature selection methods on five widely-used prediction models and demonstrate how these models perform with or without feature selection to predict the number of bugs in five different open source Java software systems. Our results show that wrappers outperform the CFS filter; they improve prediction accuracy by up to 33% while eliminating more than half of the features. We also observe that though the same feature selection method chooses different feature subsets in different projects, this subset always contains a mix of source code and change metrics.
Video Saliency Detection by 3D Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Different from salient object detection methods for still images, a key challenging for video saliency detection is how to extract and combine spatial and temporal features. In this paper, we present a novel and effective approach for salient object detection for video sequences based on 3D convolutional neural networks. First, we design a 3D convolutional network (Conv3DNet) with the input as three video frame to learn the spatiotemporal features for video sequences. Then, we design a 3D deconvolutional network (Deconv3DNet) to combine the spatiotemporal features to predict the final saliency map for video sequences. Experimental results show that the proposed saliency detection model performs better in video saliency prediction compared with the state-of-the-art video saliency detection methods.
Shannon and Rényi entropy rates of stationary vector valued Gaussian random processes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

We derive expressions for the Shannon and Rényi entropy rates of stationary vector valued Gaussian random processes using the block matrix version of Szegö's theorem.
Deep Learning for Imbalance Data Classification using Class Expert Generative Adversarial Network
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Without any specific way for imbalance data classification, artificial intelligence algorithm cannot recognize data from minority classes easily. In general, modifying the existing algorithm by assuming that the training data is imbalanced, is the only way to handle imbalance data. However, for a normal data handling, this way mostly produces a deficient result. In this research, we propose a class expert generative adversarial network (CE-GAN) as the solution for imbalance data classification. CE-GAN is a modification in deep learning algorithm architecture that does not have an assumption that the training data is imbalance data. Moreover, CE-GAN is designed to identify more detail about the character of each class before classification step. CE-GAN has been proved in this research to give a good performance for imbalance data classification.
Virtualizing the Stampede2 Supercomputer with Applications to HPC in the Cloud
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

Methods developed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) are described and demonstrated for automating the construction of an elastic, virtual cluster emulating the Stampede2 high performance computing (HPC) system. The cluster can be built and/or scaled in a matter of minutes on the Jetstream self-service cloud system and shares many properties of the original Stampede2, including: i) common identity management, ii) access to the same file systems, iii) equivalent software application stack and module system, iv) similar job scheduling interface via Slurm. We measure time-to-solution for a number of common scientific applications on our virtual cluster against equivalent runs on Stampede2 and develop an application profile where performance is similar or otherwise acceptable. For such applications, the virtual cluster provides an effective form of "cloud bursting" with the potential to significantly improve overall turnaround time, particularly when Stampede2 is experiencing long queue wait times. In addition, the virtual cluster can be used for test and debug without directly impacting Stampede2. We conclude with a discussion of how science gateways can leverage the TACC Jobs API web service to incorporate this cloud bursting technique transparently to the end user.
A Sharp Condition for Exact Support Recovery of Sparse Signals With Orthogonal Matching Pursuit
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

Support recovery of sparse signals from noisy measurements with orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) has been extensively studied in the literature. In this paper, we show that for any $K$-sparse signal $\x$, if the sensing matrix $\A$ satisfies the restricted isometry property (RIP) of order $K + 1$ with restricted isometry constant (RIC) $δ_{K+1} < 1/\sqrt {K+1}$, then under some constraint on the minimum magnitude of the nonzero elements of $\x$, the OMP algorithm exactly recovers the support of $\x$ from the measurements $\y=\A\x+\v$ in $K$ iterations, where $\v$ is the noise vector. This condition is sharp in terms of $δ_{K+1}$ since for any given positive integer $K\geq 2$ and any $1/\sqrt{K+1}\leq t<1$, there always exist a $K$-sparse $\x$ and a matrix $\A$ satisfying $δ_{K+1}=t$ for which OMP may fail to recover the signal $\x$ in $K$ iterations. Moreover, the constraint on the minimum magnitude of the nonzero elements of $\x$ is weaker than existing results.
Algorithms that Remember: Model Inversion Attacks and Data Protection Law
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Many individuals are concerned about the governance of machine learning systems and the prevention of algorithmic harms. The EU's recent General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been seen as a core tool for achieving better governance of this area. While the GDPR does apply to the use of models in some limited situations, most of its provisions relate to the governance of personal data, while models have traditionally been seen as intellectual property. We present recent work from the information security literature around `model inversion' and `membership inference' attacks, which indicate that the process of turning training data into machine learned systems is not one-way, and demonstrate how this could lead some models to be legally classified as personal data. Taking this as a probing experiment, we explore the different rights and obligations this would trigger and their utility, and posit future directions for algorithmic governance and regulation.
One-Log Call Iterative Solution of the Colebrook Equation for Flow Friction Based on Pade Polynomials
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2018
Year: 2018

The 80 year-old empirical Colebrook function, widely used as an informal standard for hydraulic resistance, relates implicitly the unknown flow friction factor, with the known Reynolds number and the known relative roughness of a pipe inner surface. It is based on logarithmic law in the form that captures the unknown flow friction factor in a way that it cannot be extracted analytically. As an alternative to the explicit approximations or to the iterative procedures that require at least a few evaluations of computationally expensive logarithmic function or non-integer powers, this paper offers an accurate and computationally cheap iterative algorithm based on Pade polynomials with only one log-call in total for the whole procedure (expensive log-calls are substituted with Pade polynomials in each iteration with the exception of the first). The proposed modification is computationally less demanding compared with the standard approaches of engineering practice, but does not influence the accuracy or the number of iterations required to reach the final balanced solution.
Social Networks and Construction of Culture: A Socio-Semantic Analysis of Art Groups
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2018
Year: 2018

This paper explores the relations between social ties and cultural constructs in small groups. The analysis uses cross-sectional data comprising both social networks within three art groups and semantic networks based on verbal expressions of their members. We examine how positions of actors in the intragroup social networks associate with the properties of cultural constructs they create jointly with other group members accounting for different roles actors play in collective culture constructing. We find that social popularity rather hinders sharing of cultural concepts, while those individuals who socially bridge their groups come to share many concepts with others. Moreover, focusing and, especially, integration of cultural constructs, rather than mere thickness of those, accompany intense interactions between the leaders and the followers.
Symbolic Verification of Cache Side-channel Freedom
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2018
Year: 2018

Cache timing attacks allow third-party observers to retrieve sensitive information from program executions. But, is it possible to automatically check the vulnerability of a program against cache timing attacks and then, automatically shield program executions against these attacks? For a given program, a cache configuration and an attack model, our CACHEFIX framework either verifies the cache side-channel freedom of the program or synthesizes a series of patches to ensure cache side-channel freedom during program execution. At the core of our framework is a novel symbolic verification technique based on automated abstraction refinement of cache semantics. The power of such a framework is to allow symbolic reasoning over counterexample traces and to combine it with runtime monitoring for eliminating cache side channels during program execution. Our evaluation with routines from OpenSSL, libfixedtimefixedpoint, GDK and FourQlib libraries reveals that our CACHEFIX approach (dis)proves cache sidechannel freedom within an average of 75 seconds. Besides, in all except one case, CACHEFIX synthesizes all patches within 20 minutes to ensure cache side-channel freedom of the respective routines during execution.
LandmarkBoost: Efficient Visual Context Classifiers for Robust Localization
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2018
Year: 2018

The growing popularity of autonomous systems creates a need for reliable and efficient metric pose retrieval algorithms. Currently used approaches tend to rely on nearest neighbor search of binary descriptors to perform the 2D-3D matching and guarantee realtime capabilities on mobile platforms. These methods struggle, however, with the growing size of the map, changes in viewpoint or appearance, and visual aliasing present in the environment. The rigidly defined descriptor patterns only capture a limited neighborhood of the keypoint and completely ignore the overall visual context. We propose LandmarkBoost - an approach that, in contrast to the conventional 2D-3D matching methods, casts the search problem as a landmark classification task. We use a boosted classifier to classify landmark observations and directly obtain correspondences as classifier scores. We also introduce a formulation of visual context that is flexible, efficient to compute, and can capture relationships in the entire image plane. The original binary descriptors are augmented with contextual information and informative features are selected by the boosting framework. Through detailed experiments, we evaluate the retrieval quality and performance of LandmarkBoost, demonstrating that it outperforms common state-of-the-art descriptor matching methods.
Computational Complexity of Games and Puzzles
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2018
Year: 2018

In this thesis, we survey techniques and results from the study of Complexity Theory and Games. We then apply these techniques to obtain new results for previously unstudied games. Our contributions in the games Hexiom, Cut the Rope, and Back to Bed may be helpful in further studies by exploiting structure common to several games. We also highlight some interesting paths for further study related to uncertainty that have yet to receive thorough study given their prevalence in today's games.
Decentralized Multi-UAV Routing in the Presence of Disturbances
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

We introduce a decentralized and online path planning technique for a network of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the presence of weather disturbances. In our problem setting, the group of UAVs are required to collaboratively visit a set of goals scattered in a 2-dimensional area. Each UAV will have to spend energy to reach these goals, but due to unforeseen disturbances, the required energy may vary over time and does not necessarily conform with the initial forecast and/or pre-computed optimal paths. Thus, we are dealing with two fundamental interrelated problems to find a global optimum at each point of time: (1) energy consumption prediction based on disturbances and, hence, online path replanning, and (2) distributed agreement among all UAVs to divide the remaining unvisited goals based on their positions and energy requirements. Our approach consists of four main components: (i) a distributed algorithm that periodically divides the unvisited goals among all the UAVs based on the current energy requirements of the UAVs, (ii) a local (i.e., UAV-level) $\AStar$-based algorithm that computes the {\em desirable} path for each UAV to reach the nodes assigned to it, (iii) a local PID controller that {\em predicts} the inputs to the UAV (i.e., thrust and moments), and (iv) a planner that computes the required energy and the replanning time period. We validate our proposed solution through a rich set of simulations and show that our approach is significantly more efficient than a best-effort algorithm that directs each idle UAV to visit the closest unvisited goal.
Disjoint Mapping Network for Cross-modal Matching of Voices and Faces
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

We propose a novel framework, called Disjoint Mapping Network (DIMNet), for cross-modal biometric matching, in particular of voices and faces. Different from the existing methods, DIMNet does not explicitly learn the joint relationship between the modalities. Instead, DIMNet learns a shared representation for different modalities by mapping them individually to their common covariates. These shared representations can then be used to find the correspondences between the modalities. We show empirically that DIMNet is able to achieve better performance than other current methods, with the additional benefits of being conceptually simpler and less data-intensive.
Modeling and Analysis of D2D Millimeter-Wave Networks with Poisson Cluster Processes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

This paper investigates the performance of millimeter wave (mmWave) communications in clustered device-to-device (D2D) networks. The locations of D2D transceivers are modeled as a Poisson Cluster Process (PCP). In each cluster, devices are equipped with multiple antennas, and the active D2D transmitter (D2D-Tx) utilizes mmWave to serve one of the proximate D2D receivers (D2D-Rxs). Specifically, we introduce three user association strategies: 1) Uniformly distributed D2D-Tx model; 2) Nearest D2D-Tx model; 3) Closest line-of-site (LOS) D2D-Tx model. To characterize the performance of the considered scenarios, we derive new analytical expressions for the coverage probability and area spectral efficiency (ASE). Additionally, in order to efficiently illustrating the general trends of our system, a closed-form lower bound for the special case interfered by intra-cluster LOS links is derived. We provide Monte Carlo simulations to corroborate the theoretical results and show that: 1) The coverage probability is mainly affected by the intra-cluster interference with LOS links; 2) There exists an optimum number of simultaneously active D2D-Txs in each cluster for maximizing ASE; and 3) Closest LOS model outperforms the other two scenarios but at the cost of extra system overhead.
Parameterized Distributed Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

In this work, we initiate a thorough study of parameterized graph optimization problems in the distributed setting. In a parameterized problem, an algorithm decides whether a solution of size bounded by a \emph{parameter} $k$ exists and if so, it finds one. We study fundamental problems, including Minimum Vertex Cover (MVC), Maximum Independent Set (MaxIS), Maximum Matching (MaxM), and many others, in both the LOCAL and CONGEST distributed computation models. We present lower bounds for the round complexity of solving parameterized problems in both models, together with optimal and near-optimal upper bounds. Our results extend beyond the scope of parameterized problems. We show that any LOCAL $(1+ε)$-approximation algorithm for the above problems must take $Ω(ε^{-1})$ rounds. Joined with the algorithm of [GKM17] and the $Ω(\sqrt{\frac{\log n}{\log\log n}})$ lower bound of [KMW16], this settles the complexity of $(1+ε)$-approximating MVC, MaxM and MaxIS at $(ε^{-1}\log n)^{Θ(1)}$. We also show that our parameterized approach reduces the runtime of exact and approximate CONGEST algorithms for MVC and MaxM if the optimal solution is small, without knowing its size beforehand. Finally, we propose the first deterministic $o(n^2)$ rounds CONGEST algorithms that approximate MVC and MaxM within a factor strictly smaller than $2$.