OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
An Inductive Synthesis Framework for Verifiable Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Despite the tremendous advances that have been made in the last decade on developing useful machine-learning applications, their wider adoption has been hindered by the lack of strong assurance guarantees that can be made about their behavior. In this paper, we consider how formal verification techniques developed for traditional software systems can be repurposed for verification of reinforcement learning-enabled ones, a particularly important class of machine learning systems. Rather than enforcing safety by examining and altering the structure of a complex neural network implementation, our technique uses blackbox methods to synthesizes deterministic programs, simpler, more interpretable, approximations of the network that can nonetheless guarantee desired safety properties are preserved, even when the network is deployed in unanticipated or previously unobserved environments. Our methodology frames the problem of neural network verification in terms of a counterexample and syntax-guided inductive synthesis procedure over these programs. The synthesis procedure searches for both a deterministic program and an inductive invariant over an infinite state transition system that represents a specification of an application's control logic. Additional specifications defining environment-based constraints can also be provided to further refine the search space. Synthesized programs deployed in conjunction with a neural network implementation dynamically enforce safety conditions by monitoring and preventing potentially unsafe actions proposed by neural policies. Experimental results over a wide range of cyber-physical applications demonstrate that software-inspired formal verification techniques can be used to realize trustworthy reinforcement learning systems with low overhead.
Evaluation of a 1-DOF Hand Exoskeleton for Neuromuscular Rehabilitation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

A low-cost 1-DOF hand exoskeleton for neuromuscular rehabilitation has been designed and assembled. It consists of a base equipped with a servo motor, an index finger part, and a thumb part, connected through three gears. The index part has a tri-axial load cell and an attached ring to measure the finger force. An admittance control scheme was designed to provide intuitive control and positive force amplification to assist the user's finger movement. To evaluate the effects of different control parameters on neuromuscular re-sponse of the fingers, we created an integrated exoskeleton-hand musculo-skeletal model to virtually simulate and optimize the control loop. The exo-skeleton is controlled by a proportional derivative controller that computes the motor torque to follow a desired joint angle of the index part, which is obtained from inverse kinematics of a virtual end-effector mass driven by the finger force. We conducted parametric simulations of the exoskeleton in action, driven by the user's closing and opening finger motion, with different proportional gains, end-effector masses, and other coefficients. We com-pared the interaction forces between the index finger and the ring in both passive and active modes. The best performing assistive controller can re-duce the force from around 1.45N (in passive mode) to only around 0.52N, more than 64% of reduction. As a result, the muscle activations of the flex-ors and extensors were reduced significantly. We also noted the admittance control scheme is versatile and can also provide resistance (e.g. for strength training) by simply increasing the virtual end-effect mass.
Fake News Detection as Natural Language Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

This report describes the entry by the Intelligent Knowledge Management (IKM) Lab in the WSDM 2019 Fake News Classification challenge. We treat the task as natural language inference (NLI). We individually train a number of the strongest NLI models as well as BERT. We ensemble these results and retrain with noisy labels in two stages. We analyze transitivity relations in the train and test sets and determine a set of test cases that can be reliably classified on this basis. The remainder of test cases are classified by our ensemble. Our entry achieves test set accuracy of 88.063% for 3rd place in the competition.
Sparse Subspace Clustering via Two-Step Reweighted L1-Minimization: Algorithm and Provable Neighbor Recovery Rates
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

Sparse subspace clustering (SSC) relies on sparse regression for accurate neighbor identification. Inspired by recent progress in compressive sensing, this paper proposes a new sparse regression scheme for SSC via two-step reweighted $\ell_1$-minimization, which also generalizes a two-step $\ell_1$-minimization algorithm introduced by E. J. Candès et al in [The Annals of Statistics, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 669-699, 2014] without incurring extra algorithmic complexity. To fully exploit the prior information offered by the computed sparse representation vector in the first step, our approach places a weight on each component of the regression vector, and solves a weighted LASSO in the second step. We propose a data weighting rule suitable for enhancing neighbor identification accuracy. Then, under the formulation of the dual problem of weighted LASSO, we study in depth the theoretical neighbor recovery rates of the proposed scheme. Specifically, an interesting connection between the locations of nonzeros of the optimal sparse solution to the weighted LASSO and the indexes of the active constraints of the dual problem is established. Afterwards, under the semi-random model, analytic probability lower/upper bounds for various neighbor recovery events are derived. Our analytic results confirm that, with the aid of data weighting and if the prior neighbor information is enough accurate, the proposed scheme with a higher probability can produce many correct neighbors and few incorrect neighbors as compared to the solution without data weighting. Computer simulations are provided to validate our analytic study and evidence the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
An Overview of Attacks and Defences on Intelligent Connected Vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

Cyber security is one of the most significant challenges in connected vehicular systems and connected vehicles are prone to different cybersecurity attacks that endanger passengers' safety. Cyber security in intelligent connected vehicles is composed of in-vehicle security and security of inter-vehicle communications. Security of Electronic Control Units (ECUs) and the Control Area Network (CAN) bus are the most significant parts of in-vehicle security. Besides, with the development of 4G LTE and 5G remote communication technologies for vehicle-toeverything (V2X) communications, the security of inter-vehicle communications is another potential problem. After giving a short introduction to the architecture of next-generation vehicles including driverless and intelligent vehicles, this review paper identifies a few major security attacks on the intelligent connected vehicles. Based on these attacks, we provide a comprehensive survey of available defences against these attacks and classify them into four categories, i.e. cryptography, network security, software vulnerability detection, and malware detection. We also explore the future directions for preventing attacks on intelligent vehicle systems.
Achieving Ultra-Reliable Communication via CRAN-Enabled Diversity Schemes
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

Internet of things is in progress to build a smart society, and wireless networks are critical enablers for many of its use cases. In this paper, we present a multi-coordinated transmission scheme to achieve ultra-reliability for critical machine-type wireless communication networks. We take advantage of diversity, which is fundamental for dealing with fading channel impairments, and for achieving ultra-reliable region of operation in order of five 9's as defined by 3GPP standardization bodies. We evaluate an interference-limited network composed of multiple remote radio heads that are allowed to cooperate, by keeping silence thus reducing interference, or by performing more elaborated strategies such as maximal ratio transmission, in order to serve a user equipment with ultra-reliability. We provide extensive numerical analysis and discuss the gains of cooperation by the centralized radio access network.
Almawave-SLU: A new dataset for SLU in Italian
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

The widespread use of conversational and question answering systems made it necessary to improve the performances of speaker intent detection and understanding of related semantic slots, i.e., Spoken Language Understanding (SLU). Often, these tasks are approached with supervised learning methods, which needs considerable labeled datasets. This paper presents the first Italian dataset for SLU. It is derived through a semi-automatic procedure and is used as a benchmark of various open source and commercial systems.
FOSNet: An End-to-End Trainable Deep Neural Network for Scene Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Scene recognition is an image recognition problem aimed at predicting the category of the place at which the image is taken. In this paper, a new scene recognition method using the convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed. The proposed method is based on the fusion of the object and the scene information in the given image and the CNN framework is named as FOS (fusion of object and scene) Net. In addition, a new loss named scene coherence loss (SCL) is developed to train the FOSNet and to improve the scene recognition performance. The proposed SCL is based on the unique traits of the scene that the 'sceneness' spreads and the scene class does not change all over the image. The proposed FOSNet was experimented with three most popular scene recognition datasets, and their state-of-the-art performance is obtained in two sets: 60.14% on Places 2 and 90.37% on MIT indoor 67. The second highest performance of 77.28% is obtained on SUN 397.
Defining Functions on Equivalence Classes
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2019
Year: 2019

A quotient construction defines an abstract type from a concrete type, using an equivalence relation to identify elements of the concrete type that are to be regarded as indistinguishable. The elements of a quotient type are \emph{equivalence classes}: sets of equivalent concrete values. Simple techniques are presented for defining and reasoning about quotient constructions, based on a general lemma library concerning functions that operate on equivalence classes. The techniques are applied to a definition of the integers from the natural numbers, and then to the definition of a recursive datatype satisfying equational constraints.
A Secure Cloud with Minimal Provider Trust
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

Bolted is a new architecture for a bare metal cloud with the goal of providing security-sensitive customers of a cloud the same level of security and control that they can obtain in their own private data centers. It allows tenants to elastically allocate secure resources within a cloud while being protected from other previous, current, and future tenants of the cloud. The provisioning of a new server to a tenant isolates a bare metal server, only allowing it to communicate with other tenant's servers once its critical firmware and software have been attested to the tenant. Tenants, rather than the provider, control the tradeoffs between security, price, and performance. A prototype demonstrates scalable end-to-end security with small overhead compared to a less secure alternative.
Cooperative Intersection Crossing over 5G
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

Autonomous driving is a safety critical application of sensing and decision-making technologies. Communication technologies extend the awareness capabilities of vehicles, beyond what is achievable with the on-board systems only. Nonetheless, issues typically related to wireless networking must be taken into account when designing safe and reliable autonomous systems. The aim of this work is to present a control algorithm and a communication paradigm over 5G networks for negotiating traffic junctions in urban areas. The proposed control framework has been shown to converge in a finite time and the supporting communication software has been designed with the objective of minimising communication delays. At the same time, the underlying network guarantees reliability of the communication. The proposed framework has been successfully deployed and tested, in partnership with Ericsson AB, at the AstaZero proving ground in Goteborg, Sweden. In our experiments, three autonomous vehicles successfully drove through an intersection of 235 square meters in a urban scenario.
The Statistical Analysis of the Live TV Bit Rate
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

This paper studies the statistical nature of TV channels streaming variable bit rate distribution and allocation. The goal of the paper is to derive the best-fit rate distribution to describe TV streaming bandwidth allocation, which can reveal traffic demands of users. Our analysis uses multiplexers channel bandwidth allocation (PID) data of 13 TV live channels. We apply 17 continuous and 3 discrete distributions to determine the best-fit distribution function for each individual channel and for the whole set of channels. We found that the generalized extreme distribution fitting most of our channels most precisely according to the Bayesian information criterion. By the same criterion tlocationscale distribution matches best for the whole system. We use these results to propose parameters for streaming server queuing model. Results are useful for streaming servers scheduling policy design process targeting to improve limited infrastructural resources, traffic engineering through dynamic routing at CDN, SDN.
Gated Recurrent Neural Network Approach for Multilabel Emotion Detection in Microblogs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

People express their opinions and emotions freely in social media posts and online reviews that contain valuable feedback for multiple stakeholders such as businesses and political campaigns. Manually extracting opinions and emotions from large volumes of such posts is an impossible task. Therefore, automated processing of these posts to extract opinions and emotions is an important research problem. However, human emotion detection is a challenging task due to the complexity and nuanced nature. To overcome these barriers, researchers have extensively used techniques such as deep learning, distant supervision, and transfer learning. In this paper, we propose a novel Pyramid Attention Network (PAN) based model for emotion detection in microblogs. The main advantage of our approach is that PAN has the capability to evaluate sentences in different perspectives to capture multiple emotions existing in a single text. The proposed model was evaluated on a recently released dataset and the results achieved the state-of-the-art accuracy of 58.9%.
Truck Traffic Monitoring with Satellite Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2019
Year: 2019

The road freight sector is responsible for a large and growing share of greenhouse gas emissions, but reliable data on the amount of freight that is moved on roads in many parts of the world are scarce. Many low- and middle-income countries have limited ground-based traffic monitoring and freight surveying activities. In this proof of concept, we show that we can use an object detection network to count trucks in satellite images and predict average annual daily truck traffic from those counts. We describe a complete model, test the uncertainty of the estimation, and discuss the transfer to developing countries.
The Mass, Fake News, and Cognition Security
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2019
Year: 2019

The wide spread of fake news in social networks is posing threats to social stability, economic development and political democracy etc. Numerous studies have explored the effective detection approaches of online fake news, while few works study the intrinsic propagation and cognition mechanisms of fake news. Since the development of cognitive science paves a promising way for the prevention of fake news, we present a new research area called Cognition Security (CogSec), which studies the potential impacts of fake news to human cognition, ranging from misperception, untrusted knowledge acquisition, targeted opinion/attitude formation, to biased decision making, and investigates the effective ways for fake news debunking. CogSec is a multidisciplinary research field that leverages knowledge from social science, psychology, cognition science, neuroscience, AI and computer science. We first propose related definitions to characterize CogSec and review the literature history. We further investigate the key research challenges and techniques of CogSec, including human-content cognition mechanism, social influence and opinion diffusion, fake news detection and malicious bot detection. Finally, we summarize the open issues and future research directions, such as early detection of fake news, explainable fake news debunking, social contagion and diffusion models of fake news, and so on.
A Novel Approach for Detection and Ranking of Trendy and Emerging Cyber Threat Events in Twitter Streams
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2019
Year: 2019

We present a new machine learning and text information extraction approach to detection of cyber threat events in Twitter that are novel (previously non-extant) and developing (marked by significance with respect to similarity with a previously detected event). While some existing approaches to event detection measure novelty and trendiness, typically as independent criteria and occasionally as a holistic measure, this work focuses on detecting both novel and developing events using an unsupervised machine learning approach. Furthermore, our proposed approach enables the ranking of cyber threat events based on an importance score by extracting the tweet terms that are characterized as named entities, keywords, or both. We also impute influence to users in order to assign a weighted score to noun phrases in proportion to user influence and the corresponding event scores for named entities and keywords. To evaluate the performance of our proposed approach, we measure the efficiency and detection error rate for events over a specified time interval, relative to human annotator ground truth.
Decoding the Style and Bias of Song Lyrics
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2019
Year: 2019

The central idea of this paper is to gain a deeper understanding of song lyrics computationally. We focus on two aspects: style and biases of song lyrics. All prior works to understand these two aspects are limited to manual analysis of a small corpus of song lyrics. In contrast, we analyzed more than half a million songs spread over five decades. We characterize the lyrics style in terms of vocabulary, length, repetitiveness, speed, and readability. We have observed that the style of popular songs significantly differs from other songs. We have used distributed representation methods and WEAT test to measure various gender and racial biases in the song lyrics. We have observed that biases in song lyrics correlate with prior results on human subjects. This correlation indicates that song lyrics reflect the biases that exist in society. Increasing consumption of music and the effect of lyrics on human emotions makes this analysis important.
Autoencoder-Based Incremental Class Learning without Retraining on Old Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Incremental class learning, a scenario in continual learning context where classes and their training data are sequentially and disjointedly observed, challenges a problem widely known as catastrophic forgetting. In this work, we propose a novel incremental class learning method that can significantly reduce memory overhead compared to previous approaches. Apart from conventional classification scheme using softmax, our model bases on an autoencoder to extract prototypes for given inputs so that no change in its output unit is required. It stores only the mean of prototypes per class to perform metric-based classification, unlike rehearsal approaches which rely on large memory or generative model. To mitigate catastrophic forgetting, regularization methods are applied on our model when a new task is encountered. We evaluate our method by experimenting on CIFAR-100 and CUB-200-2011 and show that its performance is comparable to the state-of-the-art method with much lower additional memory cost.
On the m-eternal Domination Number of Cactus Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

Given a graph $G$, guards are placed on vertices of $G$. Then vertices are subject to an infinite sequence of attacks so that each attack must be defended by a guard moving from a neighboring vertex. The m-eternal domination number is the minimum number of guards such that the graph can be defended indefinitely. In this paper we study the m-eternal domination number of cactus graphs, that is, connected graphs where each edge lies in at most two cycles, and we consider three variants of the m-eternal domination number: first variant allows multiple guards to occupy a single vertex, second variant does not allow it, and in the third variant additional "eviction" attacks must be defended. We provide a new upper bound for the m-eternal domination number of cactus graphs, and for a subclass of cactus graphs called Christmas cactus graphs, where each vertex lies in at most two cycles, we prove that these three numbers are equal. Moreover, we present a linear-time algorithm for computing them.
Preserving ON-OFF Privacy for Past and Future Requests
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

We study the ON-OFF privacy problem. At each time, the user is interested in the latest message of one of $N$ sources. Moreover, the user is assumed to be incentivized to turn privacy ON or OFF whether he/she needs it or not. When privacy is ON, the user wants to keep private which source he/she is interested in. The challenge here is that the user's behavior is correlated over time. Therefore, the user cannot simply ignore privacy when privacy is OFF, because this may leak information about his/her behavior when privacy was ON due to correlation. We model the user's requests by a Markov chain. The goal is to design ON-OFF privacy schemes with optimal download rate that ensure privacy for past and future requests. The user is assumed to know future requests within a window of positive size $ω$ and uses it to construct privacy-preserving queries. In this paper, we construct ON-OFF privacy schemes for $N=2$ sources and prove their optimality.
Analysis of a Memory-Efficient Self-Stabilizing BFS Spanning Tree
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

We present results on the last topic we collaborate with our late friend, Professor Ajoy Kumar Datta (1958-2019). In this work, we shed new light on a self-stabilizing wave algorithm proposed by Colette Johnen in 1997. This algorithm constructs a BFS spanning tree in any connected rooted network. Nowadays, it is still the best existing self-stabilizing BFS spanning tree construction in terms of memory requirement, {\em i.e.}, it only requires $Θ(1)$ bits per edge. However, it has been proven assuming a weakly fair daemon. Moreover, its stabilization time was unknown. Here, we study the slightly modified version of this algorithm, still keeping the same memory requirement. We prove the self-stabilization of this variant under the distributed unfair daemon and show a stabilization time in $O(D.n^2)$ rounds, where $D$ is the network diameter and $n$ the number of processes.