OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Teaching on a Budget in Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2019
Year: 2019

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms can solve complex sequential decision tasks successfully. However, they have a major drawback of having poor sample efficiency which can often be tackled by knowledge reuse. In Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) this drawback becomes worse, but at the same time, a new set of opportunities to leverage knowledge are also presented through agent interactions. One promising approach among these is peer-to-peer action advising through a teacher-student framework. Despite being introduced for single-agent RL originally, recent studies show that it can also be applied to multi-agent scenarios with promising empirical results. However, studies in this line of research are currently very limited. In this paper, we propose heuristics-based action advising techniques in cooperative decentralised MARL, using a nonlinear function approximation based task-level policy. By adopting Random Network Distillation technique, we devise a measurement for agents to assess their knowledge in any given state and be able to initiate the teacher-student dynamics with no prior role assumptions. Experimental results in a gridworld environment show that such an approach may indeed be useful and needs to be further investigated.
A multi-agent system approach in evaluating human spatio-temporal vulnerability to seismic risk using social attachment
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2019
Year: 2019

Social attachment theory states that individuals seek the proximity of attachment figures (e.g. family members, friends, colleagues, familiar places or objects) when faced with threat. During disasters, this means that family members may seek each other before evacuating, gather personal property before heading to familiar exits and places, or follow groups/crowds, etc. This hard-wired human tendency should be considered in the assessment of risk and the creation of disaster management plans. Doing so may result in more realistic evacuation procedures and may minimise the number of casualties and injuries. In this context, a dynamic spatio-temporal analysis of seismic risk is presented using SOLACE, a multi-agent model of pedestrian behaviour based on social attachment theory implemented using the Belief-Desire-Intention approach. The model focuses on the influence of human, social, physical and temporal factors on successful evacuation. Human factors considered include perception and mobility defined by age. Social factors are defined by attachment bonds, social groups, population distribution, and cultural norms. Physical factors refer to the location of the epicentre of the earthquake, spatial distribution/layout and attributes of environmental objects such as buildings, roads, barriers (cars), placement of safe areas, evacuation routes, and the resulting debris/damage from the earthquake. Experiments tested the influence of time of the day, presence of disabled persons and earthquake intensity. Initial results show that factors that influence arrivals in safe areas include (a) human factors (age, disability, speed), (b) pre-evacuation behaviours, (c) perception distance (social attachment, time of day), (d) social interaction during evacuation, and (e) physical and spatial aspects, such as limitations imposed by debris (damage), and the distance to safe areas. To validate the results, scenarios will be designed with stakeholders, who will also take part in the definition of a serious game. The recommendation of this research is that both social and physical aspects should be considered when defining vulnerability in the analysis of risk.
FlowSAN: Privacy-enhancing Semi-Adversarial Networks to Confound Arbitrary Face-based Gender Classifiers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Privacy concerns in the modern digital age have prompted researchers to develop techniques that allow users to selectively suppress certain information in collected data while allowing for other information to be extracted. In this regard, Semi-Adversarial Networks (SAN) have recently emerged as a method for imparting soft-biometric privacy to face images. SAN enables modifications of input face images so that the resulting face images can still be reliably used by arbitrary conventional face matchers for recognition purposes, while attribute classifiers, such as gender classifiers, are confounded. However, the generalizability of SANs across arbitrary gender classifiers has remained an open concern. In this work, we propose a new method, FlowSAN, for allowing SANs to generalize to multiple unseen gender classifiers. We propose combining a diverse set of SAN models to compensate each other's weaknesses, thereby, forming a robust model with improved generalization capability. Extensive experiments using different unseen gender classifiers and face matchers demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed paradigm in imparting gender privacy to face images.
Pandora's Problem with Nonobligatory Inspection
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2019
Year: 2019

Martin Weitzman's "Pandora's problem" furnishes the mathematical basis for optimal search theory in economics. Nearly 40 years later, Laura Doval introduced a version of the problem in which the searcher is not obligated to pay the cost of inspecting an alternative's value before selecting it. Unlike the original Pandora's problem, the version with nonobligatory inspection cannot be solved optimally by any simple ranking-based policy, and it is unknown whether there exists any polynomial-time algorithm to compute the optimal policy. This motivates the study of approximately optimal policies that are simple and computationally efficient. In this work we provide the first non-trivial approximation guarantees for this problem. We introduce a family of "committing policies" such that it is computationally easy to find and implement the optimal committing policy. We prove that the optimal committing policy is guaranteed to approximate the fully optimal policy within a $1-\frac1e = 0.63\ldots$ factor, and for the special case of two boxes we improve this factor to 4/5 and show that this approximation is tight for the class of committing policies.
Passive Beamforming and Information Transfer via Large Intelligent Surface
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

Large intelligent surface (LIS) has emerged as a promising new solution to improve the energy and spectrum efficiency of wireless networks. A LIS, composed of a large number of low-cost and energy-efficient reconfigurable passive reflecting elements, enhances wireless communications by reflecting impinging electro-magnetic waves. In this paper, we propose a novel passive beamforming and information transfer (PBIT) technique, in which the LIS simultaneously enhances the primary communication and sends information to the receiver. We develop a passive beamforming method to improve the average receive signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).We also establish a two-step approach at the receiver to retrieve the information from both the transmitter and the LIS. Numerical results show that the proposed PBIT system, especially with the optimized passive beamforming, significantly outperforms the system without LIS enhancement. Furthermore, a tradeoff between the passive-beamforming gain and the information rate of the LIS has been demonstrated.
DynComm R Package -- Dynamic Community Detection for Evolving Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2019
Year: 2019

Nowadays, the analysis of dynamics in networks represents a great deal in the Social Network Analysis research area. To support students, teachers, developers, and researchers in this work we introduce a novel R package, namely DynComm. It is designed to be a multi-language package, that can be used for community detection and analysis on dynamic networks. The package introduces interfaces to facilitate further developments and the addition of new and future developed algorithms to deal with community detection in evolving networks. This new package has the goal of abstracting the programmatic interface of the algorithms, whether they are written in R or other languages, and expose them as functions in R.
Latent Unexpected and Useful Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2019
Year: 2019

Providing unexpected recommendations is an important task for recommender systems. To do this, we need to start from the expectations of users and deviate from these expectations when recommending items. Previously proposed approaches model user expectations in the feature space, making them limited to the items that the user has visited or expected by the deduction of associated rules, without including the items that the user could also expect from the latent, complex and heterogeneous interactions between users, items and entities. In this paper, we define unexpectedness in the latent space rather than in the feature space and develop a novel Latent Convex Hull (LCH) method to provide unexpected recommendations. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model that significantly outperforms alternative state-of-the-art unexpected recommendation methods in terms of unexpectedness measures while achieving the same level of accuracy.
A Similarity Measure for Material Appearance
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2019
Year: 2019

We present a model to measure the similarity in appearance between different materials, which correlates with human similarity judgments. We first create a database of 9,000 rendered images depicting objects with varying materials, shape and illumination. We then gather data on perceived similarity from crowdsourced experiments; our analysis of over 114,840 answers suggests that indeed a shared perception of appearance similarity exists. We feed this data to a deep learning architecture with a novel loss function, which learns a feature space for materials that correlates with such perceived appearance similarity. Our evaluation shows that our model outperforms existing metrics. Last, we demonstrate several applications enabled by our metric, including appearance-based search for material suggestions, database visualization, clustering and summarization, and gamut mapping.
Stability Control of Walking Biped Robots based on Total Momentum
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

Principle Equation of Motion (for walkers) is derived that later results in introducing two piecewise-continuous dynamical systems namely Simplified Walking Model (SWM) and Complete Walking Model (CWM) which both describe the behavior of walker with emphasis on the motion in horizontal plane. By making some realistic assumptions based on human natural walking, a simplified equation of motion named Step-to-Step Equation of Walking is formulated. By imposing repetition condition on this equation, we reach to a significant finding named Simple and Compound Motion Cycles as general solutions of steady walking. Among motion cycles, Simple Forward Motion Cycle represents normal walking pattern. These cycles have marginal stability that in practice cause the motion to diverge exponentially even under slight disturbance. By defining stabilization of walking as guidance of a motion initiated from arbitrary initial states to a desired motion cycle and controlling the motion about it, two major strategies are presented for stability control of the walkers; 1) Continuous altering of Center of Pressure (CoP) within support polygon, and 2) Continual planning of the step length and duration. Using these two strategies and based on Simplified Walking Model (SWM), four methods of stability control named generally as Motion Cycle Stabilizers are proposed and their theoretical aspects are inspected. To consider the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed stabilizers on Complete Model of Walking (CWM), some simulations are performed on a physical model with realistic constraints. to overcome the deficiencies of the Stabilizers, method of Optimal Stability Control is proposed to complete the solution. Simulations show that the proposed approach for stabilization of biped walkers provides us with a more robust solution compared to traditional approaches and maximally guarantee the stability of walkers.
Learning Graph Neural Networks with Noisy Labels
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

We study the robustness to symmetric label noise of GNNs training procedures. By combining the nonlinear neural message-passing models (e.g. Graph Isomorphism Networks, GraphSAGE, etc.) with loss correction methods, we present a noise-tolerant approach for the graph classification task. Our experiments show that test accuracy can be improved under the artificial symmetric noisy setting.
Optimization-based Decentralized Coded Caching for Files and Caches with Arbitrary Size
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

Existing decentralized coded caching solutions cannot guarantee small loads in the general scenario with arbitrary file sizes and cache sizes. In this paper, we propose an optimization framework for decentralized coded caching in the general scenario to minimize the worst-case load and average load (under an arbitrary file popularity), respectively. Specifically, we first propose a class of decentralized coded caching schemes for the general scenario, which are specified by a general caching parameter and include several known schemes as special cases. Then, we optimize the caching parameter to minimize the worst-case load and average load, respectively. Each of the two optimization problems is a challenging nonconvex problem with a nondifferentiable objective function. For each optimization problem, we develop an iterative algorithm to obtain a stationary point using techniques for solving Complementary Geometric Programming (GP). We also obtain a low-complexity approximate solution by solving an approximate problem with a differentiable objective function which is an upper bound on the original nondifferentiable one, and characterize the performance loss caused by the approximation. Finally, we present two information-theoretic converse bounds on the worst-case load and average load (under an arbitrary file popularity) in the general scenario, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that provides optimization-based decentralized coded caching schemes and information-theoretic converse bounds for the general scenario.
A Typedriven Vector Semantics for Ellipsis with Anaphora using Lambek Calculus with Limited Contraction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

We develop a vector space semantics for verb phrase ellipsis with anaphora using type-driven compositional distributional semantics based on the Lambek calculus with limited contraction (LCC) of Jäger (2006). Distributional semantics has a lot to say about the statistical collocation-based meanings of content words, but provides little guidance on how to treat function words. Formal semantics on the other hand, has powerful mechanisms for dealing with relative pronouns, coordinators, and the like. Type-driven compositional distributional semantics brings these two models together. We review previous compositional distributional models of relative pronouns, coordination and a restricted account of ellipsis in the DisCoCat framework of Coecke et al. (2010, 2013). We show how DisCoCat cannot deal with general forms of ellipsis, which rely on copying of information, and develop a novel way of connecting typelogical grammar to distributional semantics by assigning vector interpretable lambda terms to derivations of LCC in the style of Muskens & Sadrzadeh (2016). What follows is an account of (verb phrase) ellipsis in which word meanings can be copied: the meaning of a sentence is now a program with non-linear access to individual word embeddings. We present the theoretical setting, work out examples, and demonstrate our results on a toy distributional model motivated by data.
New Item Consumption Prediction Using Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Recommendation systems have become ubiquitous in today's online world and are an integral part of practically every e-commerce platform. While traditional recommender systems use customer history, this approach is not feasible in 'cold start' scenarios. Such scenarios include the need to produce recommendations for new or unregistered users and the introduction of new items. In this study, we present the Purchase Intent Session-bAsed (PISA) algorithm, a content-based algorithm for predicting the purchase intent for cold start session-based scenarios. Our approach employs deep learning techniques both for modeling the content and purchase intent prediction. Our experiments show that PISA outperforms a well-known deep learning baseline when new items are introduced. In addition, while content-based approaches often fail to perform well in highly imbalanced datasets, our approach successfully handles such cases. Finally, our experiments show that combining PISA with the baseline in non-cold start scenarios further improves performance.
Better the Devil you Know: An Analysis of Evasion Attacks using Out-of-Distribution Adversarial Examples
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

A large body of recent work has investigated the phenomenon of evasion attacks using adversarial examples for deep learning systems, where the addition of norm-bounded perturbations to the test inputs leads to incorrect output classification. Previous work has investigated this phenomenon in closed-world systems where training and test inputs follow a pre-specified distribution. However, real-world implementations of deep learning applications, such as autonomous driving and content classification are likely to operate in the open-world environment. In this paper, we demonstrate the success of open-world evasion attacks, where adversarial examples are generated from out-of-distribution inputs (OOD adversarial examples). In our study, we use 11 state-of-the-art neural network models trained on 3 image datasets of varying complexity. We first demonstrate that state-of-the-art detectors for out-of-distribution data are not robust against OOD adversarial examples. We then consider 5 known defenses for adversarial examples, including state-of-the-art robust training methods, and show that against these defenses, OOD adversarial examples can achieve up to 4$\times$ higher target success rates compared to adversarial examples generated from in-distribution data. We also take a quantitative look at how open-world evasion attacks may affect real-world systems. Finally, we present the first steps towards a robust open-world machine learning system.
Intrinsically Motivated Autonomy in Human-Robot Interaction: Human Perception of Predictive Information in Robots
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper we present a fully autonomous and intrinsically motivated robot usable for HRI experiments. We argue that an intrinsically motivated approach based on the Predictive Information formalism, like the one presented here, could provide us with a pathway towards autonomous robot behaviour generation, that is capable of producing behaviour interesting enough for sustaining the interaction with humans and without the need for a human operator in the loop. We present a possible reactive baseline behaviour for comparison for future research. Participants perceive the baseline and the adaptive, intrinsically motivated behaviour differently. In our exploratory study we see evidence that participants perceive an intrinsically motivated robot as less intelligent than the reactive baseline behaviour. We argue that is mostly due to the high adaptation rate chosen and the design of the environment. However, we also see that the adaptive robot is perceived as more warm, a factor which carries more weight in interpersonal interaction than competence.
Interaction with Formal Mathematical Documents in Isabelle/PIDE
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2019
Year: 2019

Isabelle/PIDE has emerged over more than 10 years as the standard Prover IDE for interactive theorem proving in Isabelle. The well-established Archive of Formal Proofs (AFP) testifies the success of such applications of formalized mathematics in Isabelle/HOL. More recently, the scope of PIDE has widened towards languages that are not connected to logic and proof in Isabelle, but taken from a broader repertoire of mathematics on the computer. The present paper provides a general overview of the PIDE project and its underlying document model, with built-in parallel evaluation and asynchronous interaction. There is also some discussion of original aims and approaches, successes and failures, later changes to the plan, and ideas for the future.
Privacy-Preserving Deep Neural Networks with Pixel-based Image Encryption Considering Data Augmentation in the Encrypted Domain
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

We present a novel privacy-preserving scheme for deep neural networks (DNNs) that enables us not to only apply images without visual information to DNNs for both training and testing but to also consider data augmentation in the encrypted domain for the first time. In this paper, a novel pixel-based image encryption method is first proposed for privacy-preserving DNNs. In addition, a novel adaptation network is considered that reduces the influence of image encryption. In an experiment, the proposed method is applied to a well-known network, ResNet-18, for image classification. The experimental results demonstrate that conventional privacy-preserving machine learning methods including the state-of-the-arts cannot be applied to data augmentation in the encrypted domain and that the proposed method outperforms them in terms of classification accuracy.
UFRGS Participation on the WMT Biomedical Translation Shared Task
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

This paper describes the machine translation systems developed by the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) team for the biomedical translation shared task. Our systems are based on statistical machine translation and neural machine translation, using the Moses and OpenNMT toolkits, respectively. We participated in four translation directions for the English/Spanish and English/Portuguese language pairs. To create our training data, we concatenated several parallel corpora, both from in-domain and out-of-domain sources, as well as terminological resources from UMLS. Our systems achieved the best BLEU scores according to the official shared task evaluation.
Scaling limits for random triangulations on the torus
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2019
Year: 2019

We study the scaling limit of essentially simple triangulations on the torus. We consider, for every $n\geq 1$, a uniformly random triangulation $G_n$ over the set of (appropriately rooted) essentially simple triangulations on the torus with $n$ vertices. We view $G_n$ as a metric space by endowing its set of vertices with the graph distance denoted by $d_{G_n}$ and show that the random metric space $(V(G_n),n^{-1/4}d_{G_n})$ converges in distribution in the Gromov-Hausdorff sense when $n$ goes to infinity, at least along subsequences, toward a random metric space. One of the crucial steps in the argument is to construct a simple labeling on the map and show its convergence to an explicit scaling limit. We moreover show that this labeling approximates the distance to the root up to a uniform correction of order $o(n^{1/4})$.
Nonsingular (Vertex-Weighted) Block Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2019
Year: 2019

A graph $G$ is \emph{nonsingular (singular)} if its adjacency matrix $A(G)$ is nonsingular (singular). In this article, we consider the nonsingularity of block graphs, i.e., graphs in which every block is a clique. Extending the problem, we characterize nonsingular vertex-weighted block graphs in terms of reduced vertex-weighted graphs resulting after successive deletion and contraction of pendant blocks. Special cases where nonsingularity of block graphs may be directly determined are discussed.