OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Dual Control Memory Augmented Neural Networks for Treatment Recommendations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Machine-assisted treatment recommendations hold a promise to reduce physician time and decision errors. We formulate the task as a sequence-to-sequence prediction model that takes the entire time-ordered medical history as input, and predicts a sequence of future clinical procedures and medications. It is built on the premise that an effective treatment plan may have long-term dependencies from previous medical history. We approach the problem by using a memory-augmented neural network, in particular, by leveraging the recent differentiable neural computer that consists of a neural controller and an external memory module. But differing from the original model, we use dual controllers, one for encoding the history followed by another for decoding the treatment sequences. In the encoding phase, the memory is updated as new input is read; at the end of this phase, the memory holds not only the medical history but also the information about the current illness. During the decoding phase, the memory is write-protected. The decoding controller generates a treatment sequence, one treatment option at a time. The resulting dual controller write-protected memory-augmented neural network is demonstrated on the MIMIC-III dataset on two tasks: procedure prediction and medication prescription. The results show improved performance over both traditional bag-of-words and sequence-to-sequence methods.
Tree-to-tree Neural Networks for Program Translation
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

Program translation is an important tool to migrate legacy code in one language into an ecosystem built in a different language. In this work, we are the first to employ deep neural networks toward tackling this problem. We observe that program translation is a modular procedure, in which a sub-tree of the source tree is translated into the corresponding target sub-tree at each step. To capture this intuition, we design a tree-to-tree neural network to translate a source tree into a target one. Meanwhile, we develop an attention mechanism for the tree-to-tree model, so that when the decoder expands one non-terminal in the target tree, the attention mechanism locates the corresponding sub-tree in the source tree to guide the expansion of the decoder. We evaluate the program translation capability of our tree-to-tree model against several state-of-the-art approaches. Compared against other neural translation models, we observe that our approach is consistently better than the baselines with a margin of up to 15 points. Further, our approach can improve the previous state-of-the-art program translation approaches by a margin of 20 points on the translation of real-world projects.
Edge-Host Partitioning of Deep Neural Networks with Feature Space Encoding for Resource-Constrained Internet-of-Things Platforms
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

This paper introduces partitioning an inference task of a deep neural network between an edge and a host platform in the IoT environment. We present a DNN as an encoding pipeline, and propose to transmit the output feature space of an intermediate layer to the host. The lossless or lossy encoding of the feature space is proposed to enhance the maximum input rate supported by the edge platform and/or reduce the energy of the edge platform. Simulation results show that partitioning a DNN at the end of convolutional (feature extraction) layers coupled with feature space encoding enables significant improvement in the energy-efficiency and throughput over the baseline configurations that perform the entire inference at the edge or at the host.
PRIL: Perceptron Ranking Using Interval Labeled Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we propose an online learning algorithm PRIL for learning ranking classifiers using interval labeled data and show its correctness. We show its convergence in finite number of steps if there exists an ideal classifier such that the rank given by it for an example always lies in its label interval. We then generalize this mistake bound result for the general case. We also provide regret bound for the proposed algorithm. We propose a multiplicative update algorithm for PRIL called M-PRIL. We provide its correctness and convergence results. We show the effectiveness of PRIL by showing its performance on various datasets.
Test Agents: Adaptive, Autonomous and Intelligent Test Cases
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2018
Year: 2018

Growth of software size, lack of resources to perform regression testing, and failure to detect bugs faster have seen increased reliance on continuous integration and test automation. Even with greater hardware and software resources dedicated to test automation, software testing is faced with enormous challenges, resulting in increased dependence on complex mechanisms for automated test case selection and prioritization as part of a continuous integration framework. These mechanisms are currently using simple entities called test cases that are concretely realized as executable scripts. Our key idea is to provide test cases with more reasoning, adaptive behavior and learning capabilities by using the concepts of intelligent software agents. We refer to such test cases as test agents. The model that underlie a test agent is capable of flexible and autonomous actions in order to meet overall testing objectives. Our goal is to increase the decentralization of regression testing by letting test agents to know for themselves when they should be executing, how they should update their purpose, and when they should interact with each other. In this paper, we envision software test agents that display such adaptive autonomous behavior. Emerging developments and challenges regarding the use of test agents are explored-in particular, new research that seeks to use adaptive autonomous agents in software testing.
Frobenius Additive Fast Fourier Transform
Venue: arXiv cs.SC 2018
Year: 2018

In ISSAC 2017, van der Hoeven and Larrieu showed that evaluating a polynomial P in GF(q)[x] of degree <n at all n-th roots of unity in GF($q^d$) can essentially be computed d-time faster than evaluating Q in GF($q^d$)[x] at all these roots, assuming GF($q^d$) contains a primitive n-th root of unity. Termed the Frobenius FFT, this discovery has a profound impact on polynomial multiplication, especially for multiplying binary polynomials, which finds ample application in coding theory and cryptography. In this paper, we show that the theory of Frobenius FFT beautifully generalizes to a class of additive FFT developed by Cantor and Gao-Mateer. Furthermore, we demonstrate the power of Frobenius additive FFT for q=2: to multiply two binary polynomials whose product is of degree <256, the new technique requires only 29,005 bit operations, while the best result previously reported was 33,397. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that FFT-based multiplication outperforms Karatsuba and the like at such a low degree in terms of bit-operation count.
Object Detection with Mask-based Feature Encoding
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Region-based Convolutional Neural Networks (R-CNNs) have achieved great success in the field of object detection. The existing R-CNNs usually divide a Region-of-Interest (ROI) into grids, and then localize objects by utilizing the spatial information reflected by the relative position of each grid in the ROI. In this paper, we propose a novel feature-encoding approach, where spatial information is represented through the spatial distributions of visual patterns. In particular, we design a Mask Weight Network (MWN) to learn a set of masks and then apply channel-wise masking operations to ROI feature map, followed by a global pooling and a cheap fully-connected layer. We integrate the newly designed feature encoder into the Faster R-CNN architecture. The resulting new Faster R-CNNs can preserve the object-detection accuracy of the standard Faster R-CNNs by using substantially fewer parameters. Compared to R-FCNs using state-of-art PS ROI pooling and deformable PS ROI pooling, the new Faster R-CNNs can produce higher object-detection accuracy with good run-time efficiency. We also show that a specifically designed and learned MWN can capture global contextual information and further improve the object-detection accuracy. Validation experiments are conducted on both PASCAL VOC and MS COCO datasets.
Integration of Absolute Orientation Measurements in the KinectFusion Reconstruction pipeline
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we show how absolute orientation measurements provided by low-cost but high-fidelity IMU sensors can be integrated into the KinectFusion pipeline. We show that integration improves both runtime, robustness and quality of the 3D reconstruction. In particular, we use this orientation data to seed and regularize the ICP registration technique. We also present a technique to filter the pairs of 3D matched points based on the distribution of their distances. This filter is implemented efficiently on the GPU. Estimating the distribution of the distances helps control the number of iterations necessary for the convergence of the ICP algorithm. Finally, we show experimental results that highlight improvements in robustness, a speed-up of almost 12%, and a gain in tracking quality of 53% for the ATE metric on the Freiburg benchmark.
Distinguishing Question Subjectivity from Difficulty for Improved Crowdsourcing
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

The questions in a crowdsourcing task typically exhibit varying degrees of difficulty and subjectivity. Their joint effects give rise to the variation in responses to the same question by different crowd-workers. This variation is low when the question is easy to answer and objective, and high when it is difficult and subjective. Unfortunately, current quality control methods for crowdsourcing consider only the question difficulty to account for the variation. As a result,these methods cannot distinguish workers personal preferences for different correct answers of a partially subjective question from their ability/expertise to avoid objectively wrong answers for that question. To address this issue, we present a probabilistic model which (i) explicitly encodes question difficulty as a model parameter and (ii) implicitly encodes question subjectivity via latent preference factors for crowd-workers. We show that question subjectivity induces grouping of crowd-workers, revealed through clustering of their latent preferences. Moreover, we develop a quantitative measure of the subjectivity of a question. Experiments show that our model(1) improves the performance of both quality control for crowd-sourced answers and next answer prediction for crowd-workers,and (2) can potentially provide coherent rankings of questions in terms of their difficulty and subjectivity, so that task providers can refine their designs of the crowdsourcing tasks, e.g. by removing highly subjective questions or inappropriately difficult questions.
Introducer Concepts in n-Dimensional Contexts
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

Concept lattices are well-known conceptual structures that organise interesting patterns-the concepts-extracted from data. In some applications, such as software engineering or data mining, the size of the lattice can be a problem, as it is often too large to be efficiently computed, and too complex to be browsed. For this reason, the Galois Sub-Hierarchy, a restriction of the concept lattice to introducer concepts, has been introduced as a smaller alternative. In this paper, we generalise the Galois Sub-Hierarchy to n-lattices, conceptual structures obtained from multidimensional data in the same way that concept lattices are obtained from binary relations.
Advertising in the IoT Era: Vision and Challenges
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2018
Year: 2018

The Internet of Things (IoT) extends the idea of interconnecting computers to a plethora of different devices, collectively referred to as smart devices. These are physical items - i.e., "things" - such as wearable devices, home appliances, and vehicles, enriched with computational and networking capabilities. Due to the huge set of devices involved - and therefore, its pervasiveness - IoT is a great platform to leverage for building new applications and services or extending existing ones. In this regard, expanding online advertising into the IoT realm is an under-investigated yet promising research direction, especially considering that traditional Internet advertising market is already worth hundreds of billions of dollars. In this paper, we first propose the architecture of an IoT advertising platform inspired by the well-known business ecosystem, which the traditional Internet advertising is based on. Additionally, we discuss the key challenges to implement such a platform with a special focus on issues related to architecture, advertisement content delivery, security, and privacy of the users.
Driving Simulator Platform for Development and Evaluation of Safety and Emergency Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2018
Year: 2018

According to data from the United Nations, more than 3000 people have died each day in the world due to road traffic collision. Considering recent researches, the human error may be considered as the main responsible for these fatalities. Because of this, researchers seek alternatives to transfer the vehicle control from people to autonomous systems. However, providing this technological innovation for the people may demand complex challenges in the legal, economic and technological areas. Consequently, carmakers and researchers have divided the driving automation in safety and emergency systems that improve the driver perception on the road. This may reduce the human error. Therefore, the main contribution of this study is to propose a driving simulator platform to develop and evaluate safety and emergency systems, in the first design stage. This driving simulator platform has an advantage: a flexible software structure.This allows in the simulation one adaptation for development or evaluation of a system. The proposed driving simulator platform was tested in two applications: cooperative vehicle system development and the influence evaluation of a Driving Assistance System (\textit{DAS}) on a driver. In the cooperative vehicle system development, the results obtained show that the increment of the time delay in the communication among vehicles ($V2V$) is determinant for the system performance. On the other hand, in the influence evaluation of a \textit{DAS} in a driver, it was possible to conclude that the \textit{DAS'} model does not have the level of influence necessary in a driver to avoid an accident.
Design a multicultural blended e-learning system
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2018
Year: 2018

Most universities in developing countries are using a teaching and learning approach known as blended e-learning, however, there was no multicultural-based blended e-learning framework. Furthermore, there is no research to show the impact of multicultural blended e-learning on satisfaction of learners. This research employed two categories of students, the Iranian students and the Iraqi students studying at Razi University of Iran. These two groups were taught using the multicultural blended e-learning approach. We utilized an open source application named Claroline. Questionnaires were designed and administered to students to collect information about the level of satisfaction and the optimal mix of tools that go into blended multicultural-based e-learning. The collected information was analyzed using SPSS. We found that blended multicultural based e-learning improves the level of satisfaction of learners. In addition, the optimal mix of multicultural blended learning should be comprised 19% still pictures, audio files 23%, video files 31% and text files 27%.
Smart energy management as a means towards improved energy efficiency
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2018
Year: 2018

The costs associated with refrigerator equipment often represent more than half of the total energy costs in supermarkets. This presents a good motivation for running these systems efficiently. In this study, we investigate different ways to construct a reference behavior, which can serve as a baseline for judging the performance of energy consumption. We used 3 distinct learning models: Multiple Linear Regression, Random Forests, and Artificial Neural Networks. During our experiments we used a variation of the sliding window method in combination with learning curves. We applied this approach on five different supermarkets, across Portugal. We are able to create baselines using off-the-shelf data mining techniques. Moreover, we found a way to create them based on short term historical data. We believe that our research will serve as a base for future studies, for which we provide interesting directions.
Hierarchical Learning for Modular Robots
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2018
Year: 2018

We argue that hierarchical methods can become the key for modular robots achieving reconfigurability. We present a hierarchical approach for modular robots that allows a robot to simultaneously learn multiple tasks. Our evaluation results present an environment composed of two different modular robot configurations, namely 3 degrees-of-freedom (DoF) and 4DoF with two corresponding targets. During the training, we switch between configurations and targets aiming to evaluate the possibility of training a neural network that is able to select appropriate motor primitives and robot configuration to achieve the target. The trained neural network is then transferred and executed on a real robot with 3DoF and 4DoF configurations. We demonstrate how this technique generalizes to robots with different configurations and tasks.
Network community detection via iterative edge removal in a flocking-like system
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2018
Year: 2018

We present a network community-detection technique based on properties that emerge from a nature-inspired system of aligning particles. Initially, each vertex is assigned a random-direction unit vector. A nonlinear dynamic law is established so that neighboring vertices try to become aligned with each other. After some time, the system stops and edges that connect the least-aligned pairs of vertices are removed. Then the evolution starts over without the removed edges, and after enough number of removal rounds, each community becomes a connected component. The proposed approach is evaluated using widely-accepted benchmarks and real-world networks. Experimental results reveal that the method is robust and excels on a wide variety of networks. Moreover, for large sparse networks, the edge-removal process runs in quasilinear time, which enables application in large-scale networks.
Fast Interactive Image Retrieval using large-scale unlabeled data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

An interactive image retrieval system learns which images in the database belong to a user's query concept, by analyzing the example images and feedback provided by the user. The challenge is to retrieve the relevant images with minimal user interaction. In this work, we propose to solve this problem by posing it as a binary classification task of classifying all images in the database as being relevant or irrelevant to the user's query concept. Our method combines active learning with graph-based semi-supervised learning (GSSL) to tackle this problem. Active learning reduces the number of user interactions by querying the labels of the most informative points and GSSL allows to use abundant unlabeled data along with the limited labeled data provided by the user. To efficiently find the most informative point, we use an uncertainty sampling based method that queries the label of the point nearest to the decision boundary of the classifier. We estimate this decision boundary using our heuristic of adaptive threshold. To utilize huge volumes of unlabeled data we use an efficient approximation based method that reduces the complexity of GSSL from $O(n^3)$ to $O(n)$, making GSSL scalable. We make the classifier robust to the diversity and noisy labels associated with images in large databases by incorporating information from multiple modalities such as visual information extracted from deep learning based models and semantic information extracted from the WordNet. High F1 scores within few relevance feedback rounds in our experiments with concepts defined on AnimalWithAttributes and Imagenet (1.2 million images) datasets indicate the effectiveness and scalability of our approach.
Antenna Selection in Full-Duplex Cooperative NOMA Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

We investigate the problem of antenna selection (AS) in full-duplex (FD) cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems, where a multi-antenna FD relay assists transmission from a multi-antenna base station (BS) to a far user, while at the same, the BS transmits to a near user. Specifically, based on the end-to-end signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio at the near and far users, two AS schemes to select a single transmit antenna at both the BS and the relay, respectively, as well as a single receive antenna at relay are proposed. In order to study the ergodic sum rate and outage probability of these AS schemes, we have derived closed-form expressions assuming Rayleigh fading channels. The sum rate and outage probability of the AS schemes are also compared with the optimum selection scheme that maximizes the performance as well as with a random AS scheme. Our results show that the proposed AS schemes can deliver a near-optimal performance for near and far users, respectively.
Buy your coffee with bitcoin: Real-world deployment of a bitcoin point of sale terminal
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper we discuss existing approaches for Bitcoin payments, as suitable for a small business for small-value transactions. We develop an evaluation framework utilizing security, usability, deployability criteria,, examine several existing systems, tools. Following a requirements engineering approach, we designed, implemented a new Point of Sale (PoS) system that satisfies an optimal set of criteria within our evaluation framework. Our open source system, Aunja PoS, has been deployed in a real world cafe since October 2014.