OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
It's Good to Relax: Fast Profit Approximation for Virtual Networks with Latency Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2021
Year: 2021

This paper proposes a new approximation algorithm for the offline Virtual Network Embedding Problem (VNEP) with latency constraints. Given is a set of virtual networks with computational demands on nodes and bandwidth demands together with latency bounds on the edges. The VNEP's task is to feasibly embed a subset of virtual networks on a shared physical infrastructure, e.g., a data center, while maximizing the attained profit. In contrast to existing works, our approximation algorithm AFlex allows for (slight) violations of the latency constraints in order to greatly lower the runtime. To obtain this result, we use a reduction to the Restricted Shortest Path Problem (RSP) and leverage a classic result by Goel et al. We complement our formal analysis with an extensive simulation study demonstrating the computational benefits of our approach empirically. Notably, our results generalize to any other additive edge metric besides latency, including loss probability.
Asymptotic analysis of the sojourn time of a batch in an $M^{[X]}/M/1$ Processor Sharing Queue
Venue: arXiv cs.PF 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we exploit results obtained in an earlier study for the Laplace transform of the sojourn time $Ω$ of an entire batch in the $M^{[X]}/M/1$ Processor Sharing (PS) queue in order to derive the asymptotic behavior of the complementary probability distribution function of this random variable, namely the behavior of $P(Ω>x)$ when $x$ tends to infinity. We precisely show that up to a multiplying factor, the behavior of $P(Ω>x)$ for large $x$ is of the same order of magnitude as $P(ω>x)$, where $ω$ is the sojourn time of an arbitrary job is the system. From a practical point of view, this means that if a system has to be dimensioned to guarantee processing time for jobs then the system can also guarantee processing times for entire batches by introducing a marginal amount of processing capacity.
Transcriptome-wide prediction of prostate cancer gene expression from histopathology images using co-expression based convolutional neural networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Molecular phenotyping by gene expression profiling is common in contemporary cancer research and in molecular diagnostics. However, molecular profiling remains costly and resource intense to implement, and is just starting to be introduced into clinical diagnostics. Molecular changes, including genetic alterations and gene expression changes, occuring in tumors cause morphological changes in tissue, which can be observed on the microscopic level. The relationship between morphological patterns and some of the molecular phenotypes can be exploited to predict molecular phenotypes directly from routine haematoxylin and eosin (H&E) stained whole slide images (WSIs) using deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In this study, we propose a new, computationally efficient approach for disease specific modelling of relationships between morphology and gene expression, and we conducted the first transcriptome-wide analysis in prostate cancer, using CNNs to predict bulk RNA-sequencing estimates from WSIs of H&E stained tissue. The work is based on the TCGA PRAD study and includes both WSIs and RNA-seq data for 370 patients. Out of 15586 protein coding and sufficiently frequently expressed transcripts, 6618 had predicted expression significantly associated with RNA-seq estimates (FDR-adjusted p-value < 1*10-4) in a cross-validation. 5419 (81.9%) of these were subsequently validated in a held-out test set. We also demonstrate the ability to predict a prostate cancer specific cell cycle progression score directly from WSIs. These findings suggest that contemporary computer vision models offer an inexpensive and scalable solution for prediction of gene expression phenotypes directly from WSIs, providing opportunity for cost-effective large-scale research studies and molecular diagnostics.
On Learning-Assisted Content-Based Secure Image Transmission for Delay-Aware Systems with Randomly-Distributed Eavesdroppers -- Extended Version
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, a learning-aided content-based wireless image transmission scheme is proposed, where a multi-antenna-aided source wishes to securely deliver an image to a legitimate destination in the presence of randomly distributed eavesdroppers (Eves). We take into account the fact that not all regions of an image have the same importance from the security perspective. Hence, we propose a transmission scheme, where the source employs a hybrid method to realize both the error-free data delivery of public regions containing less-important pixels; and an artificial noise (AN)-aided transmission scheme to provide security for the regions containing large amount of information. Moreover, in order to reinforce system's security, fountain-based packet delivery is adopted: First, the source node encodes image packets into fountain-like packets prior to sending them over the air. The secrecy of our proposed scheme will be achieved if the legitimate destination correctly receives the entire image source packets, while conforming to the latency limits of the system, before Eves can obtain the important regions. Accordingly, the secrecy performance of our scheme is characterized by deriving the closed-form expression for the quality-of-security (QoSec) violation probability. Moreover, our proposed wireless image delivery scheme leverages the deep neural network (DNN) and learns to maintain optimized transmission parameters, while achieving a low QoSec violation probability. Simulation results are provided with some useful engineering insights which illustrate that our proposed learning-assisted scheme outperforms the state-of-the-arts by achieving considerable gains in terms of security and the delay requirement.
Using Machine Learning at Scale in HPC Simulations with SmartSim: An Application to Ocean Climate Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2021
Year: 2021

We demonstrate the first climate-scale, numerical ocean simulations improved through distributed, online inference of Deep Neural Networks (DNN) using SmartSim. SmartSim is a library dedicated to enabling online analysis and Machine Learning (ML) for traditional HPC simulations. In this paper, we detail the SmartSim architecture and provide benchmarks including online inference with a shared ML model on heterogeneous HPC systems. We demonstrate the capability of SmartSim by using it to run a 12-member ensemble of global-scale, high-resolution ocean simulations, each spanning 19 compute nodes, all communicating with the same ML architecture at each simulation timestep. In total, 970 billion inferences are collectively served by running the ensemble for a total of 120 simulated years. Finally, we show our solution is stable over the full duration of the model integrations, and that the inclusion of machine learning has minimal impact on the simulation runtimes.
A Hierarchical Coding Scheme for Glasses-free 3D Displays Based on Scalable Hybrid Layered Representation of Real-World Light Fields
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

This paper presents a novel hierarchical coding scheme for light fields based on transmittance patterns of low-rank multiplicative layers and Fourier disparity layers. The proposed scheme learns stacked multiplicative layers from subsets of light field views determined from different scanning orders. The multiplicative layers are optimized using a fast data-driven convolutional neural network (CNN). The spatial correlation in layer patterns is exploited with varying low ranks in factorization derived from singular value decomposition on a Krylov subspace. Further, encoding with HEVC efficiently removes intra-view and inter-view correlation in low-rank approximated layers. The initial subset of approximated decoded views from multiplicative representation is used to construct Fourier disparity layer (FDL) representation. The FDL model synthesizes second subset of views which is identified by a pre-defined hierarchical prediction order. The correlations between the prediction residue of synthesized views is further eliminated by encoding the residual signal. The set of views obtained from decoding the residual is employed in order to refine the FDL model and predict the next subset of views with improved accuracy. This hierarchical procedure is repeated until all light field views are encoded. The critical advantage of proposed hybrid layered representation and coding scheme is that it utilizes not just spatial and temporal redundancies, but efficiently exploits the strong intrinsic similarities among neighboring sub-aperture images in both horizontal and vertical directions as specified by different predication orders. Besides, the scheme is flexible to realize a range of multiple bitrates at the decoder within a single integrated system. The compression performance analyzed with real light field shows substantial bitrate savings, maintaining good reconstruction quality.
Local Pair and Bundle Discovery over Co-Evolving Time Series
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2021
Year: 2021

Time series exploration and mining has many applications across several industrial and scientific domains. In this paper, we consider the problem of detecting locally similar pairs and groups, called bundles, over co-evolving time series. These are pairs or groups of subsequences whose values do not differ by more than ε for at least delta consecutive timestamps, thus indicating common local patterns and trends. We first present a baseline algorithm that performs a sweep line scan across all timestamps to identify matches. Then, we propose a filter-verification technique that only examines candidate matches at judiciously chosen checkpoints across time. Specifically, we introduce two block scanning algorithms for discovering local pairs and bundles respectively, which leverage the potential of checkpoints to aggressively prune the search space. We experimentally evaluate our methods against real-world and synthetic datasets, demonstrating a speed-up in execution time by an order of magnitude over the baseline. This paper has been published in the 16th International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases (SSTD19).
A Choreographed Outline Instrumentation Algorithm for Asynchronous Components
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

The runtime analysis of decentralised software requires instrumentation methods that are scalable, but also minimally invasive. This paper presents a new algorithm that instruments choreographed outline monitors. Our instrumentation algorithm scales and reorganises monitors dynamically as the system executes. We demonstrate the implementability of choreographed outline instrumentation and compare it to inline instrumentation, subject to rigorous and comprehensive benchmarking. Our results debunk the general notion that outline monitoring is necessarily infeasible, and show that our implementation induces runtime overhead comparable to that of its inline counterpart for many practical cases.
What can human minimal videos tell us about dynamic recognition models?
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In human vision objects and their parts can be visually recognized from purely spatial or purely temporal information but the mechanisms integrating space and time are poorly understood. Here we show that human visual recognition of objects and actions can be achieved by efficiently combining spatial and motion cues in configurations where each source on its own is insufficient for recognition. This analysis is obtained by identifying minimal videos: these are short and tiny video clips in which objects, parts, and actions can be reliably recognized, but any reduction in either space or time makes them unrecognizable. State-of-the-art deep networks for dynamic visual recognition cannot replicate human behavior in these configurations. This gap between humans and machines points to critical mechanisms in human dynamic vision that are lacking in current models.
Few-shot learning via tensor hallucination
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Few-shot classification addresses the challenge of classifying examples given only limited labeled data. A powerful approach is to go beyond data augmentation, towards data synthesis. However, most of data augmentation/synthesis methods for few-shot classification are overly complex and sophisticated, e.g. training a wGAN with multiple regularizers or training a network to transfer latent diversities from known to novel classes. We make two contributions, namely we show that: (1) using a simple loss function is more than enough for training a feature generator in the few-shot setting; and (2) learning to generate tensor features instead of vector features is superior. Extensive experiments on miniImagenet, CUB and CIFAR-FS datasets show that our method sets a new state of the art, outperforming more sophisticated few-shot data augmentation methods.
A Framework using Contrastive Learning for Classification with Noisy Labels
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

We propose a framework using contrastive learning as a pre-training task to perform image classification in the presence of noisy labels. Recent strategies such as pseudo-labeling, sample selection with Gaussian Mixture models, weighted supervised contrastive learning have been combined into a fine-tuning phase following the pre-training. This paper provides an extensive empirical study showing that a preliminary contrastive learning step brings a significant gain in performance when using different loss functions: non-robust, robust, and early-learning regularized. Our experiments performed on standard benchmarks and real-world datasets demonstrate that: i) the contrastive pre-training increases the robustness of any loss function to noisy labels and ii) the additional fine-tuning phase can further improve accuracy but at the cost of additional complexity.
Probing Commonsense Explanation in Dialogue Response Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Humans use commonsense reasoning (CSR) implicitly to produce natural and coherent responses in conversations. Aiming to close the gap between current response generation (RG) models and human communication abilities, we want to understand why RG models respond as they do by probing RG model's understanding of commonsense reasoning that elicits proper responses. We formalize the problem by framing commonsense as a latent variable in the RG task and using explanations for responses as textual form of commonsense. We collect 6k annotated explanations justifying responses from four dialogue datasets and ask humans to verify them and propose two probing settings to evaluate RG models' CSR capabilities. Probing results show that models fail to capture the logical relations between commonsense explanations and responses and fine-tuning on in-domain data and increasing model sizes do not lead to understanding of CSR for RG. We hope our study motivates more research in making RG models emulate the human reasoning process in pursuit of smooth human-AI communication.
Semantic Knowledge Discovery and Discussion Mining of Incel Online Community: Topic modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Online forums provide a unique opportunity for online users to share comments and exchange information on a particular topic. Understanding user behaviour is valuable to organizations and has applications for social and security strategies, for instance, identifying user opinions within a community or predicting future behaviour. Discovering the semantic aspects in Incel forums are the main goal of this research; we apply Natural language processing techniques based on topic modeling to latent topic discovery and opinion mining of users from a popular online Incel discussion forum. To prepare the input data for our study, we extracted the comments from Incels.co. The research experiments show that Artificial Intelligence (AI) based on NLP models can be effective for semantic and emotion knowledge discovery and retrieval of useful information from the Incel community. For example, we discovered semantic-related words that describe issues within a large volume of Incel comments, which is difficult with manual methods.
ASFM-Net: Asymmetrical Siamese Feature Matching Network for Point Completion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

We tackle the problem of object completion from point clouds and propose a novel point cloud completion network employing an Asymmetrical Siamese Feature Matching strategy, termed as ASFM-Net. Specifically, the Siamese auto-encoder neural network is adopted to map the partial and complete input point cloud into a shared latent space, which can capture detailed shape prior. Then we design an iterative refinement unit to generate complete shapes with fine-grained details by integrating prior information. Experiments are conducted on the PCN dataset and the Completion3D benchmark, demonstrating the state-of-the-art performance of the proposed ASFM-Net. Our method achieves the 1st place in the leaderboard of Completion3D and outperforms existing methods with a large margin, about 12%. The codes and trained models are released publicly at https://github.com/Yan-Xia/ASFM-Net.
MELOPPR: Software/Hardware Co-design for Memory-efficient Low-latency Personalized PageRank
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

Personalized PageRank (PPR) is a graph algorithm that evaluates the importance of the surrounding nodes from a source node. Widely used in social network related applications such as recommender systems, PPR requires real-time responses (latency) for a better user experience. Existing works either focus on algorithmic optimization for improving precision while neglecting hardware implementations or focus on distributed global graph processing on large-scale systems for improving throughput rather than response time. Optimizing low-latency local PPR algorithm with a tight memory budget on edge devices remains unexplored. In this work, we propose a memory-efficient, low-latency PPR solution, namely MeLoPPR, with largely reduced memory requirement and a flexible trade-off between latency and precision. MeLoPPR is composed of stage decomposition and linear decomposition and exploits the node score sparsity: Through stage and linear decomposition, MeLoPPR breaks the computation on a large graph into a set of smaller sub-graphs, that significantly saves the computation memory; Through sparsity exploitation, MeLoPPR selectively chooses the sub-graphs that contribute the most to the precision to reduce the required computation. In addition, through software/hardware co-design, we propose a hardware implementation on a hybrid CPU and FPGA accelerating platform, that further speeds up the sub-graph computation. We evaluate the proposed MeLoPPR on memory-constrained devices including a personal laptop and Xilinx Kintex-7 KC705 FPGA using six real-world graphs. First, MeLoPPR demonstrates significant memory saving by 1.5x to 13.4x on CPU and 73x to 8699x on FPGA. Second, MeLoPPR allows flexible trade-offs between precision and execution time: when the precision is 80%, the speedup on CPU is up to 15x and up to 707x on FPGA; when the precision is around 90%, the speedup is up to 70x on FPGA.
Engineering Sketch Generation for Computer-Aided Design
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Engineering sketches form the 2D basis of parametric Computer-Aided Design (CAD), the foremost modeling paradigm for manufactured objects. In this paper we tackle the problem of learning based engineering sketch generation as a first step towards synthesis and composition of parametric CAD models. We propose two generative models, CurveGen and TurtleGen, for engineering sketch generation. Both models generate curve primitives without the need for a sketch constraint solver and explicitly consider topology for downstream use with constraints and 3D CAD modeling operations. We find in our perceptual evaluation using human subjects that both CurveGen and TurtleGen produce more realistic engineering sketches when compared with the current state-of-the-art for engineering sketch generation.
"Don't quote me on that": Finding Mixtures of Sources in News Articles
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Journalists publish statements provided by people, or \textit{sources} to contextualize current events, help voters make informed decisions, and hold powerful individuals accountable. In this work, we construct an ontological labeling system for sources based on each source's \textit{affiliation} and \textit{role}. We build a probabilistic model to infer these attributes for named sources and to describe news articles as mixtures of these sources. Our model outperforms existing mixture modeling and co-clustering approaches and correctly infers source-type in 80\% of expert-evaluated trials. Such work can facilitate research in downstream tasks like opinion and argumentation mining, representing a first step towards machine-in-the-loop \textit{computational journalism} systems.
Inferring Drop-in Binary Parsers from Program Executions
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2021
Year: 2021

We present BIEBER (Byte-IdEntical Binary parsER), the first system to model and regenerate a full working parser from instrumented program executions. To achieve this, BIEBER exploits the regularity (e.g., header fields and array-like data structures) that is commonly found in file formats. Key generalization steps derive strided loops that parse input file data and rewrite concrete loop bounds with expressions over input file header bytes. These steps enable BIEBER to generalize parses of specific input files to obtain parsers that operate over input files of arbitrary size. BIEBER also incrementally and efficiently infers a decision tree that reads file header bytes to route input files of different types to inferred parsers of the appropriate type. The inferred parsers and decision tree are expressed in an IR; separate backends (C and Perl in our prototype) can translate the IR into the same language as the original program (for a safer drop-in replacement), or automatically port to a different language. An empirical evaluation shows that BIEBER can successfully regenerate parsers for six file formats (waveform audio [1654 files], MT76x0 .BIN firmware containers [5 files], OS/2 1.x bitmap images [9 files], Windows 3.x bitmaps [9971 files], Windows 95/NT4 bitmaps [133 files], and Windows 98/2000 bitmaps [859 files]), correctly parsing 100% (>= 99.98% when using standard held-out cross-validation) of the corresponding corpora. The regenerated parsers contain automatically inserted safety checks that eliminate common classes of errors such as memory errors. We find that BIEBER can help reverse-engineer file formats, because it automatically identifies predicates for the decision tree that relate to key semantics of the file format. We also discuss how BIEBER helped us detect and fix two new bugs in stb_image as well as independently rediscover and fix a known bug.