OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Beyond Roll-Up's and Drill-Down's: An Intentional Analytics Model to Reinvent OLAP (long-version)
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2020
Year: 2020

This paper structures a novel vision for OLAP by fundamentally redefining several of the pillars on which OLAP has been based for the last 20 years. We redefine OLAP queries, in order to move to higher degrees of abstraction from roll-up's and drill-down's, and we propose a set of novel intentional OLAP operators, namely, describe, assess, explain, predict, and suggest, which express the user's need for results. We fundamentally redefine what a query answer is, and escape from the constraint that the answer is a set of tuples; on the contrary, we complement the set of tuples with models (typically, but not exclusively, results of data mining algorithms over the involved data) that concisely represent the internal structure or correlations of the data. Due to the diverse nature of the involved models, we come up (for the first time ever, to the best of our knowledge) with a unifying framework for them, that places its pillars on the extension of each data cell of a cube with information about the models that pertain to it -- practically converting the small parts that build up the models to data that annotate each cell. We exploit this data-to-model mapping to provide highlights of the data, by isolating data and models that maximize the delivery of new information to the user. We introduce a novel method for assessing the surprise that a new query result brings to the user, with respect to the information contained in previous results the user has seen via a new interestingness measure. The individual parts of our proposal are integrated in a new data model for OLAP, which we call the Intentional Analytics Model. We complement our contribution with a list of significant open problems for the community to address.
Matheuristics to optimize refueling and maintenance planning of nuclear power plants
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

Planning the maintenance of nuclear power plants is a complex optimization problem, involving a joint optimization of maintenance dates, fuel constraints and power production decisions. This paper investigates Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) matheuristics for this problem, to tackle large size instances used in operations with a time scope of five years, and few restrictions with time window constraints for the latest maintenance operations. Several constructive matheuristics and a Variable Neighborhood Descent local search are designed. The matheuristics are shown to be accurately effective for medium and large size instances. The matheuristics give also results on the design of MILP formulations and neighborhoods for the problem. Contributions for the operational applications are also discussed. It is shown that the restriction of time windows, which was used to ease computations, induces large over-costs and that this restriction is not required anymore with the capabilities of matheuristics or local search to solve such size of instances. Our matheuristics can be extended to a bi-objective optimization extension with stability costs, for the monthly re-optimization of the maintenance planning in the real-life application.
A Survey on Deep Learning for Named Entity Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Named entity recognition (NER) is the task to identify mentions of rigid designators from text belonging to predefined semantic types such as person, location, organization etc. NER always serves as the foundation for many natural language applications such as question answering, text summarization, and machine translation. Early NER systems got a huge success in achieving good performance with the cost of human engineering in designing domain-specific features and rules. In recent years, deep learning, empowered by continuous real-valued vector representations and semantic composition through nonlinear processing, has been employed in NER systems, yielding stat-of-the-art performance. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review on existing deep learning techniques for NER. We first introduce NER resources, including tagged NER corpora and off-the-shelf NER tools. Then, we systematically categorize existing works based on a taxonomy along three axes: distributed representations for input, context encoder, and tag decoder. Next, we survey the most representative methods for recent applied techniques of deep learning in new NER problem settings and applications. Finally, we present readers with the challenges faced by NER systems and outline future directions in this area.
SNAS: Stochastic Neural Architecture Search
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We propose Stochastic Neural Architecture Search (SNAS), an economical end-to-end solution to Neural Architecture Search (NAS) that trains neural operation parameters and architecture distribution parameters in same round of back-propagation, while maintaining the completeness and differentiability of the NAS pipeline. In this work, NAS is reformulated as an optimization problem on parameters of a joint distribution for the search space in a cell. To leverage the gradient information in generic differentiable loss for architecture search, a novel search gradient is proposed. We prove that this search gradient optimizes the same objective as reinforcement-learning-based NAS, but assigns credits to structural decisions more efficiently. This credit assignment is further augmented with locally decomposable reward to enforce a resource-efficient constraint. In experiments on CIFAR-10, SNAS takes less epochs to find a cell architecture with state-of-the-art accuracy than non-differentiable evolution-based and reinforcement-learning-based NAS, which is also transferable to ImageNet. It is also shown that child networks of SNAS can maintain the validation accuracy in searching, with which attention-based NAS requires parameter retraining to compete, exhibiting potentials to stride towards efficient NAS on big datasets. We have released our implementation at https://github.com/SNAS-Series/SNAS-Series.
GASP Codes for Secure Distributed Matrix Multiplication
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

We consider the problem of secure distributed matrix multiplication (SDMM) in which a user wishes to compute the product of two matrices with the assistance of honest but curious servers. We construct polynomial codes for SDMM by studying a combinatorial problem on a special type of addition table, which we call the degree table. The codes are based on arithmetic progressions, and are thus named GASP (Gap Additive Secure Polynomial) Codes. GASP Codes are shown to outperform all previously known polynomial codes for secure distributed matrix multiplication in terms of download rate.
PPD: Permutation Phase Defense Against Adversarial Examples in Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Deep neural networks have demonstrated cutting edge performance on various tasks including classification. However, it is well known that adversarially designed imperceptible perturbation of the input can mislead advanced classifiers. In this paper, Permutation Phase Defense (PPD), is proposed as a novel method to resist adversarial attacks. PPD combines random permutation of the image with phase component of its Fourier transform. The basic idea behind this approach is to turn adversarial defense problems analogously into symmetric cryptography, which relies solely on safekeeping of the keys for security. In PPD, safe keeping of the selected permutation ensures effectiveness against adversarial attacks. Testing PPD on MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets yielded state-of-the-art robustness against the most powerful adversarial attacks currently available.
The CORAL+ Algorithm for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of PLDA
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

State-of-the-art speaker recognition systems comprise an x-vector (or i-vector) speaker embedding front-end followed by a probabilistic linear discriminant analysis (PLDA) backend. The effectiveness of these components relies on the availability of a large collection of labeled training data. In practice, it is common that the domains (e.g., language, demographic) in which the system are deployed differs from that we trained the system. To close the gap due to the domain mismatch, we propose an unsupervised PLDA adaptation algorithm to learn from a small amount of unlabeled in-domain data. The proposed method was inspired by a prior work on feature-based domain adaptation technique known as the correlation alignment (CORAL). We refer to the model-based adaptation technique proposed in this paper as CORAL+. The efficacy of the proposed technique is experimentally validated on the recent NIST 2016 and 2018 Speaker Recognition Evaluation (SRE'16, SRE'18) datasets.
Distributions of Matching Distances in Topological Data Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2020
Year: 2020

In topological data analysis, we want to discern topological and geometric structure of data, and to understand whether or not certain features of data are significant as opposed to simply random noise. While progress has been made on statistical techniques for single-parameter persistence, the case of two-parameter persistence, which is highly desirable for real-world applications, has been less studied. This paper provides an accessible introduction to two-parameter persistent homology and presents results about matching distance between 2-D persistence modules obtained from families of point clouds. Results include observations of how differences in geometric structure of point clouds affect the matching distance between persistence modules. We offer these results as a starting point for the investigation of more complex data.
Secure Polar Coding with Delayed Wiretapping Information
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we investigate the secure coding issue for a wiretap channel model with fixed main channel and varying wiretap channel, by assuming that legitimate parties can obtain the wiretapping channel state information (CSI) after some time delay. For the symmetric degraded delay CSI case, we present an explicit weak security scheme by constructing secure polar codes on a one-time pad chaining structure, and prove its weak security, reliability and capability of approaching the secrecy capacity of perfect CSI case with delay CSI assumption. Further for the symmetric no-degraded delay CSI case, we present a modified multi-block chaining structure in which the original subset of frozen bit is designed for conveying functional random bits securely. Then we combine this modified multi-block chaining structure with the weak security scheme to construct an explicit strong security polar coding scheme, and prove its strong security, reliability and also the capability of approaching the secrecy capacity of perfect CSI case with delay CSI assumption. At last, we carry out stimulations to prove the performance of both secure schemes.
Explaining Aggregates for Exploratory Analytics
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2020
Year: 2020

Analysts wishing to explore multivariate data spaces, typically pose queries involving selection operators, i.e., range or radius queries, which define data subspaces of possible interest and then use aggregation functions, the results of which determine their exploratory analytics interests. However, such aggregate query (AQ) results are simple scalars and as such, convey limited information about the queried subspaces for exploratory analysis. We address this shortcoming aiding analysts to explore and understand data subspaces by contributing a novel explanation mechanism coined XAXA: eXplaining Aggregates for eXploratory Analytics. XAXA's novel AQ explanations are represented using functions obtained by a three-fold joint optimization problem. Explanations assume the form of a set of parametric piecewise-linear functions acquired through a statistical learning model. A key feature of the proposed solution is that model training is performed by only monitoring AQs and their answers on-line. In XAXA, explanations for future AQs can be computed without any database (DB) access and can be used to further explore the queried data subspaces, without issuing any more queries to the DB. We evaluate the explanation accuracy and efficiency of XAXA through theoretically grounded metrics over real-world and synthetic datasets and query workloads.
Inference under Information Constraints I: Lower Bounds from Chi-Square Contraction
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2020
Year: 2020

Multiple players are each given one independent sample, about which they can only provide limited information to a central referee. Each player is allowed to describe its observed sample to the referee using a channel from a family of channels $\mathcal{W}$, which can be instantiated to capture both the communication- and privacy-constrained settings and beyond. The referee uses the messages from players to solve an inference problem for the unknown distribution that generated the samples. We derive lower bounds for sample complexity of learning and testing discrete distributions in this information-constrained setting. Underlying our bounds is a characterization of the contraction in chi-square distances between the observed distributions of the samples when information constraints are placed. This contraction is captured in a local neighborhood in terms of chi-square and decoupled chi-square fluctuations of a given channel, two quantities we introduce. The former captures the average distance between distributions of channel output for two product distributions on the input, and the latter for a product distribution and a mixture of product distribution on the input. Our bounds are tight for both public- and private-coin protocols. Interestingly, the sample complexity of testing is order-wise higher when restricted to private-coin protocols.
Pull out all the stops: Textual analysis via punctuation sequences
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Whether enjoying the lucid prose of a favorite author or slogging through some other writer's cumbersome, heavy-set prattle (full of parentheses, em dashes, compound adjectives, and Oxford commas), readers will notice stylistic signatures not only in word choice and grammar, but also in punctuation itself. Indeed, visual sequences of punctuation from different authors produce marvelously different (and visually striking) sequences. Punctuation is a largely overlooked stylistic feature in "stylometry", the quantitative analysis of written text. In this paper, we examine punctuation sequences in a corpus of literary documents and ask the following questions: Are the properties of such sequences a distinctive feature of different authors? Is it possible to distinguish literary genres based on their punctuation sequences? Do the punctuation styles of authors evolve over time? Are we on to something interesting in trying to do stylometry without words, or are we full of sound and fury (signifying nothing)?
Weights Adaptation Optimization of Heterogeneous Epidemic Spreading Networks: A Constrained Cooperative Coevolution Strategy
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, the dynamic constrained optimization problem of weights adaptation for heterogeneous epidemic spreading networks is investigated. Due to the powerful ability of searching global optimum, evolutionary algorithms are employed as the optimizers. One major difficulty is that the dimension of the problem is increasing exponentially with the network size and most existing evolutionary algorithms cannot achieve satisfiable performance on large-scale optimization problems. To address this issue, a novel constrained cooperative coevolution ($C^3$) strategy, which can separate the original large-scale problem into different subcomponents, is employed to achieve the trade-off between the constraint and objective function.
QFlow: A Learning Approach to High QoE Video Streaming at the Wireless Edge
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

The predominant use of wireless access networks is for media streaming applications, which are only gaining popularity as ever more devices become available for this purpose. However, current access networks treat all packets identically, and lack the agility to determine which clients are most in need of service at a given time. Software reconfigurability of networking devices has seen wide adoption, and this in turn implies that agile control policies can be now instantiated on access networks. The goal of this work is to design, develop and demonstrate QFlow, a learning approach to create a value chain from the application on one side, to algorithms operating over reconfigurable infrastructure on the other, so that applications are able to obtain necessary resources for optimal performance. Using YouTube video streaming as an example, we illustrate how QFlow is able to adaptively provide such resources and attain a high QoE for all clients at a wireless access point.
On the Utility of Model Learning in HRI
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Fundamental to robotics is the debate between model-based and model-free learning: should the robot build an explicit model of the world, or learn a policy directly? In the context of HRI, part of the world to be modeled is the human. One option is for the robot to treat the human as a black box and learn a policy for how they act directly. But it can also model the human as an agent, and rely on a "theory of mind" to guide or bias the learning (grey box). We contribute a characterization of the performance of these methods for an autonomous driving task under the optimistic case of having an ideal theory of mind, as well as under different scenarios in which the assumptions behind the robot's theory of mind for the human are wrong, as they inevitably will be in practice.
Poincaré Wasserstein Autoencoder
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

This work presents a reformulation of the recently proposed Wasserstein autoencoder framework on a non-Euclidean manifold, the Poincaré ball model of the hyperbolic space. By assuming the latent space to be hyperbolic, we can use its intrinsic hierarchy to impose structure on the learned latent space representations. We demonstrate the model in the visual domain to analyze some of its properties and show competitive results on a graph link prediction task.
Tencent ML-Images: A Large-Scale Multi-Label Image Database for Visual Representation Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In existing visual representation learning tasks, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are often trained on images annotated with single tags, such as ImageNet. However, a single tag cannot describe all important contents of one image, and some useful visual information may be wasted during training. In this work, we propose to train CNNs from images annotated with multiple tags, to enhance the quality of visual representation of the trained CNN model. To this end, we build a large-scale multi-label image database with 18M images and 11K categories, dubbed Tencent ML-Images. We efficiently train the ResNet-101 model with multi-label outputs on Tencent ML-Images, taking 90 hours for 60 epochs, based on a large-scale distributed deep learning framework,i.e.,TFplus. The good quality of the visual representation of the Tencent ML-Images checkpoint is verified through three transfer learning tasks, including single-label image classification on ImageNet and Caltech-256, object detection on PASCAL VOC 2007, and semantic segmentation on PASCAL VOC 2012. The Tencent ML-Images database, the checkpoints of ResNet-101, and all the training codehave been released at https://github.com/Tencent/tencent-ml-images. It is expected to promote other vision tasks in the research and industry community.
JECL: Joint Embedding and Cluster Learning for Image-Text Pairs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We propose JECL, a method for clustering image-caption pairs by training parallel encoders with regularized clustering and alignment objectives, simultaneously learning both representations and cluster assignments. These image-caption pairs arise frequently in high-value applications where structured training data is expensive to produce, but free-text descriptions are common. JECL trains by minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the distribution of the images and text to that of a combined joint target distribution and optimizing the Jensen-Shannon divergence between the soft cluster assignments of the images and text. Regularizers are also applied to JECL to prevent trivial solutions. Experiments show that JECL outperforms both single-view and multi-view methods on large benchmark image-caption datasets, and is remarkably robust to missing captions and varying data sizes.
Optimization of Solidification in Die Casting using Numerical Simulations and Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we demonstrate the combination of machine learning and three dimensional numerical simulations for multi-objective optimization of low pressure die casting. The cooling of molten metal inside the mold is achieved typically by passing water through the cooling lines in the die. Depending on the cooling line location, coolant flow rate and die geometry, nonuniform temperatures are imposed on the molten metal at the mold wall. This boundary condition along with the initial molten metal temperature affect the product quality quantified in terms of micro-structure parameters and yield strength. A finite volume based numerical solver is used to determine the temperature-time history and correlate the inputs to outputs. The objective of this research is to develop and demonstrate a procedure to obtain the initial and wall temperatures so as to optimize the product quality. The non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) is used for multi-objective optimization in this work. The number of function evaluations required for NSGA-II can be of the order of millions and hence, the finite volume solver cannot be used directly for optimization. Therefore, a multilayer perceptron feed-forward neural network is first trained using the results from the numerical solution of the fluid flow and energy equations and is subsequently used as a surrogate model. As an assessment, simplified versions of the actual problem are designed to first verify results of the genetic algorithm. An innovative local sensitivity based approach is then used to rank the final Pareto optimal solutions and select a single best design.
Change Detection and Notification of Webpages: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2020
Year: 2020

Majority of the currently available webpages are dynamic in nature and are changing frequently. New content gets added to webpages and existing content gets updated or deleted. Hence, people find it useful to be alert for changes in webpages which contain information valuable to them. In the current context, keeping track of these webpages and getting alerts about different changes have become significantly challenging. Change Detection and Notification (CDN) systems were introduced to automate this monitoring process and notify users when changes occur in webpages. This survey classifies and analyzes different aspects of CDN systems and different techniques used for each aspect. Furthermore, the survey highlights the current challenges and areas of improvement present within the field of research.