OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Error Bounds on a Mixed Entropy Inequality
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

Motivated by the entropy computations relevant to the evaluation of decrease in entropy in bit reset operations, the authors investigate the deficit in an entropic inequality involving two independent random variables, one continuous and the other discrete. In the case where the continuous random variable is Gaussian, we derive strong quantitative bounds on the deficit in the inequality. More explicitly it is shown that the decay of the deficit is sub-Gaussian with respect to the reciprocal of the standard deviation of the Gaussian variable. What is more, up to rational terms these results are shown to be sharp.
Pointly-Supervised Action Localization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

This paper strives for spatio-temporal localization of human actions in videos. In the literature, the consensus is to achieve localization by training on bounding box annotations provided for each frame of each training video. As annotating boxes in video is expensive, cumbersome and error-prone, we propose to bypass box-supervision. Instead, we introduce action localization based on point-supervision. We start from unsupervised spatio-temporal proposals, which provide a set of candidate regions in videos. While normally used exclusively for inference, we show spatio-temporal proposals can also be leveraged during training when guided by a sparse set of point annotations. We introduce an overlap measure between points and spatio-temporal proposals and incorporate them all into a new objective of a Multiple Instance Learning optimization. During inference, we introduce pseudo-points, visual cues from videos, that automatically guide the selection of spatio-temporal proposals. We outline five spatial and one temporal pseudo-point, as well as a measure to best leverage pseudo-points at test time. Experimental evaluation on three action localization datasets shows our pointly-supervised approach (i) is as effective as traditional box-supervision at a fraction of the annotation cost, (ii) is robust to sparse and noisy point annotations, (iii) benefits from pseudo-points during inference, and (iv) outperforms recent weakly-supervised alternatives. This leads us to conclude that points provide a viable alternative to boxes for action localization.
Uncertainty Gated Network for Land Cover Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

The production of thematic maps depicting land cover is one of the most common applications of remote sensing. To this end, several semantic segmentation approaches, based on deep learning, have been proposed in the literature, but land cover segmentation is still considered an open problem due to some specific problems related to remote sensing imaging. In this paper we propose a novel approach to deal with the problem of modelling multiscale contexts surrounding pixels of different land cover categories. The approach leverages the computation of a heteroscedastic measure of uncertainty when classifying individual pixels in an image. This classification uncertainty measure is used to define a set of memory gates between layers that allow a principled method to select the optimal decision for each pixel.
Classical realizability as a classifier for nondeterminism
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2018
Year: 2018

We show how the language of Krivine's classical realizability may be used to specify various forms of nondeterminism and relate them with properties of realizability models. More specifically, we introduce an abstract notion of multi-evaluation relation which allows us to finely describe various nondeterministic behaviours. This defines a hierarchy of computational models, ordered by their degree of nondeterminism, similar to Sazonov's degrees of parallelism. What we show is a duality between the structure of the characteristic Boolean algebra of a realizability model and the degree of nondeterminism in its underlying computational model. ACM Reference Format: Guillaume Geoffroy. 2018. Classical realizability as a classifier for nondeter-minism.
iLCM - A Virtual Research Infrastructure for Large-Scale Qualitative Data
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2018
Year: 2018

The iLCM project pursues the development of an integrated research environment for the analysis of structured and unstructured data in a "Software as a Service" architecture (SaaS). The research environment addresses requirements for the quantitative evaluation of large amounts of qualitative data with text mining methods as well as requirements for the reproducibility of data-driven research designs in the social sciences. For this, the iLCM research environment comprises two central components. First, the Leipzig Corpus Miner (LCM), a decentralized SaaS application for the analysis of large amounts of news texts developed in a previous Digital Humanities project. Second, the text mining tools implemented in the LCM are extended by an "Open Research Computing" (ORC) environment for executable script documents, so-called "notebooks". This novel integration allows to combine generic, high-performance methods to process large amounts of unstructured text data and with individual program scripts to address specific research requirements in computational social science and digital humanities.
Virtuously Safe Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

We show that when a third party, the adversary, steps into the two-party setting (agent and operator) of safely interruptible reinforcement learning, a trade-off has to be made between the probability of following the optimal policy in the limit, and the probability of escaping a dangerous situation created by the adversary. So far, the work on safely interruptible agents has assumed a perfect perception of the agent about its environment (no adversary), and therefore implicitly set the second probability to zero, by explicitly seeking a value of one for the first probability. We show that (1) agents can be made both interruptible and adversary-resilient, and (2) the interruptibility can be made safe in the sense that the agent itself will not seek to avoid it. We also solve the problem that arises when the agent does not go completely greedy, i.e. issues with safe exploration in the limit. Resilience to perturbed perception, safe exploration in the limit, and safe interruptibility are the three pillars of what we call \emph{virtuously safe reinforcement learning}.
Recovering short secret keys of RLCE in polynomial time
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

We present a key recovery attack against Y. Wang's Random Linear Code Encryption (RLCE) scheme recently submitted to the NIST call for post-quantum cryptography. This attack recovers the secret key for all the short key parameters proposed by the author.
Capturing Variabilities from Computed Tomography Images with Generative Adversarial Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

With the advent of Deep Learning (DL) techniques, especially Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), data augmentation and generation are quickly evolving domains that have raised much interest recently. However, the DL techniques are data demanding and since, medical data is not easily accessible, they suffer from data insufficiency. To deal with this limitation, different data augmentation techniques are used. Here, we propose a novel unsupervised data-driven approach for data augmentation that can generate 2D Computed Tomography (CT) images using a simple GAN. The generated CT images have good global and local features of a real CT image and can be used to augment the training datasets for effective learning. In this proof-of-concept study, we show that our proposed solution using GANs is able to capture some of the global and local CT variabilities. Our network is able to generate visually realistic CT images and we aim to further enhance its output by scaling it to a higher resolution and potentially from 2D to 3D.
A Long Way to the Top: Significance, Structure, and Stability of Internet Top Lists
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

A broad range of research areas including Internet measurement, privacy, and network security rely on lists of target domains to be analysed; researchers make use of target lists for reasons of necessity or efficiency. The popular Alexa list of one million domains is a widely used example. Despite their prevalence in research papers, the soundness of top lists has seldom been questioned by the community: little is known about the lists' creation, representativity, potential biases, stability, or overlap between lists. In this study we survey the extent, nature, and evolution of top lists used by research communities. We assess the structure and stability of these lists, and show that rank manipulation is possible for some lists. We also reproduce the results of several scientific studies to assess the impact of using a top list at all, which list specifically, and the date of list creation. We find that (i) top lists generally overestimate results compared to the general population by a significant margin, often even an order of magnitude, and (ii) some top lists have surprising change characteristics, causing high day-to-day fluctuation and leading to result instability. We conclude our paper with specific recommendations on the use of top lists, and how to interpret results based on top lists with caution.
Receiver Placement for Speech Enhancement using Sound Propagation Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2018
Year: 2018

A common problem in acoustic design is the placement of speakers or receivers for public address systems, telecommunications, and home smart speakers or digital personal assistants. We present a novel algorithm to automatically place a speaker or receiver in a room to improve the intelligibility of spoken phrases in a design. Our technique uses a sound propagation optimization formulation to maximize the Speech Transmission Index (STI) by computing an optimal location of the sound receiver. We use an efficient and accurate hybrid sound propagation technique on complex 3D models to compute the Room Impulse Responses (RIR) and evaluate their impact on the STI. The overall algorithm computes a globally optimal position of the receiver that reduces the effects of reverberation and noise over many source positions. We evaluate our algorithm on various indoor 3D models, all showing significant improvement in STI, based on accurate sound propagation.
Lightly-supervised Representation Learning with Global Interpretability
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

We propose a lightly-supervised approach for information extraction, in particular named entity classification, which combines the benefits of traditional bootstrapping, i.e., use of limited annotations and interpretability of extraction patterns, with the robust learning approaches proposed in representation learning. Our algorithm iteratively learns custom embeddings for both the multi-word entities to be extracted and the patterns that match them from a few example entities per category. We demonstrate that this representation-based approach outperforms three other state-of-the-art bootstrapping approaches on two datasets: CoNLL-2003 and OntoNotes. Additionally, using these embeddings, our approach outputs a globally-interpretable model consisting of a decision list, by ranking patterns based on their proximity to the average entity embedding in a given class. We show that this interpretable model performs close to our complete bootstrapping model, proving that representation learning can be used to produce interpretable models with small loss in performance.
Focal onset seizure prediction using convolutional networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Objective: This work investigates the hypothesis that focal seizures can be predicted using scalp electroencephalogram (EEG) data. Our first aim is to learn features that distinguish between the interictal and preictal regions. The second aim is to define a prediction horizon in which the prediction is as accurate and as early as possible, clearly two competing objectives. Methods: Convolutional filters on the wavelet transformation of the EEG signal are used to define and learn quantitative signatures for each period: interictal, preictal, and ictal. The optimal seizure prediction horizon is also learned from the data as opposed to making an a priori assumption. Results: Computational solutions to the optimization problem indicate a ten-minute seizure prediction horizon. This result is verified by measuring Kullback-Leibler divergence on the distributions of the automatically extracted features. Conclusion: The results on the EEG database of 204 recordings demonstrate that (i) the preictal phase transition occurs approximately ten minutes before seizure onset, and (ii) the prediction results on the test set are promising, with a sensitivity of 87.8% and a low false prediction rate of 0.142 FP/h. Our results significantly outperform a random predictor and other seizure prediction algorithms. Significance: We demonstrate that a robust set of features can be learned from scalp EEG that characterize the preictal state of focal seizures.
Automatic Identification of Arabic expressions related to future events in Lebanon's economy
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we propose a method to automatically identify future events in Lebanon's economy from Arabic texts. Challenges are threefold: first, we need to build a corpus of Arabic texts that covers Lebanon's economy; second, we need to study how future events are expressed linguistically in these texts; and third, we need to automatically identify the relevant textual segments accordingly. We will validate this method on a constructed corpus form the web and show that it has very promising results. To do so, we will be using SLCSAS, a system for semantic analysis, based on the Contextual Explorer method, and "AlKhalil Morpho Sys" system for morpho-syntactic analysis.
Coded Computation Against Distributed Straggling Channel Decoders in the Cloud for Gaussian Uplink Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

The uplink of a Cloud Radio Access Network (CRAN) architecture is studied, where decoding at the cloud takes place at distributed decoding processors. To mitigate the impact of straggling decoders in the cloud, the cloud re-encodes the received frames via a linear code before distributing them to the decoding processors. Focusing on Gaussian channels, and assuming the use of lattice codes at the users, in this paper the maximum user rate is derived such that all the servers can reliably recover the linear combinations of the messages corresponding to the employed linear code at the cloud. Furthermore, two analytical upper bounds on the frame error rate (FER) as a function of the decoding latency are developed, in order to quantify the performance of the cloud's linear code in terms of the tradeoff between FER and decoding latency at the cloud.
A Novel Multi-clustering Method for Hierarchical Clusterings, Based on Boosting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Bagging and boosting are proved to be the best methods of building multiple classifiers in classification combination problems. In the area of "flat clustering" problems, it is also recognized that multi-clustering methods based on boosting provide clusterings of an improved quality. In this paper, we introduce a novel multi-clustering method for "hierarchical clusterings" based on boosting theory, which creates a more stable hierarchical clustering of a dataset. The proposed algorithm includes a boosting iteration in which a bootstrap of samples is created by weighted random sampling of elements from the original dataset. A hierarchical clustering algorithm is then applied to selected subsample to build a dendrogram which describes the hierarchy. Finally, dissimilarity description matrices of multiple dendrogram results are combined to a consensus one, using a hierarchical-clustering-combination approach. Experiments on real popular datasets show that boosted method provides superior quality solutions compared to standard hierarchical clustering methods.
HeadOn: Real-time Reenactment of Human Portrait Videos
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

We propose HeadOn, the first real-time source-to-target reenactment approach for complete human portrait videos that enables transfer of torso and head motion, face expression, and eye gaze. Given a short RGB-D video of the target actor, we automatically construct a personalized geometry proxy that embeds a parametric head, eye, and kinematic torso model. A novel real-time reenactment algorithm employs this proxy to photo-realistically map the captured motion from the source actor to the target actor. On top of the coarse geometric proxy, we propose a video-based rendering technique that composites the modified target portrait video via view- and pose-dependent texturing, and creates photo-realistic imagery of the target actor under novel torso and head poses, facial expressions, and gaze directions. To this end, we propose a robust tracking of the face and torso of the source actor. We extensively evaluate our approach and show significant improvements in enabling much greater flexibility in creating realistic reenacted output videos.
Cellular Controlled Cooperative Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Networks with Sense-and-Send Protocol
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we consider a cellular controlled unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) sensing network in which multiple UAVs cooperatively complete each sensing task. We first propose a sense-and-send protocol where the UAVs collect sensory data of the tasks and transmit the collected data to the base station. We then formulate a joint trajectory, sensing location, and UAV scheduling optimization problem that minimizes the completion time for all the sensing tasks in the network. To solve this NP-hard problem efficiently, we decouple it into three sub-problems: trajectory optimization, sensing location optimization, and UAV scheduling. An iterative trajectory, sensing, and scheduling optimization (ITSSO) algorithm is proposed to solve these sub-problems jointly. The convergence and complexity of the ITSSO algorithm, together with the system performance are analysed. Simulation results show that the proposed ITSSO algorithm saves the task completion time by 15% compared to the non-cooperative scheme.
Detecting Data Leakage from Databases on Android Apps with Concept Drift
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

Mobile databases are the statutory backbones of many applications on smartphones, and they store a lot of sensitive information. However, vulnerabilities in the operating system or the app logic can lead to sensitive data leakage by giving the adversaries unauthorized access to the app's database. In this paper, we study such vulnerabilities to define a threat model, and we propose an OS-version independent protection mechanism that app developers can utilize to detect such attacks. To do so, we model the user behavior with the database query workload created by the original apps. Here, we model the drift in behavior by comparing probability distributions of the query workload features over time. We then use this model to determine if the app behavior drift is anomalous. We evaluate our framework on real-world workloads of three different popular Android apps, and we show that our system was able to detect more than 90% of such attacks.
Acoustic Scene Analysis Using Partially Connected Microphones Based on Graph Cepstrum
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we propose an effective and robust method for acoustic scene analysis based on spatial information extracted from partially synchronized and/or closely located distributed microphones. In the proposed method, to extract spatial information from distributed microphones while taking into account whether any pairs of microphones are synchronized and/or closely located, we derive a new cepstrum feature utilizing a graph-based basis transformation. Specifically, in the proposed graph-based cepstrum, the logarithm of the amplitude in a multichannel observation is converted to a feature vector by an inverse graph Fourier transform, which can consider whether any pair of microphones is connected. Our experimental results indicate that the proposed graph-based cepstrum effectively extracts spatial information with consideration of the microphone connections. Moreover, the results show that the proposed method more robustly classifies acoustic scenes than conventional spatial features when the observed sounds have a large synchronization mismatch between partially synchronized microphone groups.
Grow and Prune Compact, Fast, and Accurate LSTMs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Long short-term memory (LSTM) has been widely used for sequential data modeling. Researchers have increased LSTM depth by stacking LSTM cells to improve performance. This incurs model redundancy, increases run-time delay, and makes the LSTMs more prone to overfitting. To address these problems, we propose a hidden-layer LSTM (H-LSTM) that adds hidden layers to LSTM's original one level non-linear control gates. H-LSTM increases accuracy while employing fewer external stacked layers, thus reducing the number of parameters and run-time latency significantly. We employ grow-and-prune (GP) training to iteratively adjust the hidden layers through gradient-based growth and magnitude-based pruning of connections. This learns both the weights and the compact architecture of H-LSTM control gates. We have GP-trained H-LSTMs for image captioning and speech recognition applications. For the NeuralTalk architecture on the MSCOCO dataset, our three models reduce the number of parameters by 38.7x [floating-point operations (FLOPs) by 45.5x], run-time latency by 4.5x, and improve the CIDEr score by 2.6. For the DeepSpeech2 architecture on the AN4 dataset, our two models reduce the number of parameters by 19.4x (FLOPs by 23.5x), run-time latency by 15.7%, and the word error rate from 12.9% to 8.7%. Thus, GP-trained H-LSTMs can be seen to be compact, fast, and accurate.
The VIREO KIS at VBS 2018
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2018
Year: 2018

This short paper presents the video browsing tool of VIREO team which has been used in the Video Browser Showdown 2018. All added functions in the final version are introduced and experiences gained from the benchmark are also shared.
Generic CP-Supported CMSA for Binary Integer Linear Programs
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

Construct, Merge, Solve and Adapt (CMSA) is a general hybrid metaheuristic for solving combinatorial optimization problems. At each iteration, CMSA (1) constructs feasible solutions to the tackled problem instance in a probabilistic way and (2) solves a reduced problem instance (if possible) to optimality. The construction of feasible solutions is hereby problem-specific, usually involving a fast greedy heuristic. The goal of this paper is to design a problem-agnostic CMSA variant whose exclusive input is an integer linear program (ILP). In order to reduce the complexity of this task, the current study is restricted to binary ILPs. In addition to a basic problem-agnostic CMSA variant, we also present an extended version that makes use of a constraint propagation engine for constructing solutions. The results show that our technique is able to match the upper bounds of the standalone application of CPLEX in the context of rather easy-to-solve instances, while it generally outperforms the standalone application of CPLEX in the context of hard instances. Moreover, the results indicate that the support of the constraint propagation engine is useful in the context of problems for which finding feasible solutions is rather difficult.