OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Interventional Experiment Design for Causal Structure Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

It is known that from purely observational data, a causal DAG is identifiable only up to its Markov equivalence class, and for many ground truth DAGs, the direction of a large portion of the edges will be remained unidentified. The golden standard for learning the causal DAG beyond Markov equivalence is to perform a sequence of interventions in the system and use the data gathered from the interventional distributions. We consider a setup in which given a budget $k$, we design $k$ interventions non-adaptively. We cast the problem of finding the best intervention target set as an optimization problem which aims to maximize the number of edges whose directions are identified due to the performed interventions. First, we consider the case that the underlying causal structure is a tree. For this case, we propose an efficient exact algorithm for the worst-case gain setup, as well as an approximate algorithm for the average gain setup. We then show that the proposed approach for the average gain setup can be extended to the case of general causal structures. In this case, besides the design of interventions, calculating the objective function is also challenging. We propose an efficient exact calculator as well as two estimators for this task. We evaluate the proposed methods using synthetic as well as real data.
eCNN: A Block-Based and Highly-Parallel CNN Accelerator for Edge Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently demonstrated superior quality for computational imaging applications. Therefore, they have great potential to revolutionize the image pipelines on cameras and displays. However, it is difficult for conventional CNN accelerators to support ultra-high-resolution videos at the edge due to their considerable DRAM bandwidth and power consumption. Therefore, finding a further memory- and computation-efficient microarchitecture is crucial to speed up this coming revolution. In this paper, we approach this goal by considering the inference flow, network model, instruction set, and processor design jointly to optimize hardware performance and image quality. We apply a block-based inference flow which can eliminate all the DRAM bandwidth for feature maps and accordingly propose a hardware-oriented network model, ERNet, to optimize image quality based on hardware constraints. Then we devise a coarse-grained instruction set architecture, FBISA, to support power-hungry convolution by massive parallelism. Finally,we implement an embedded processor---eCNN---which accommodates to ERNet and FBISA with a flexible processing architecture. Layout results show that it can support high-quality ERNets for super-resolution and denoising at up to 4K Ultra-HD 30 fps while using only DDR-400 and consuming 6.94W on average. By comparison, the state-of-the-art Diffy uses dual-channel DDR3-2133 and consumes 54.3W to support lower-quality VDSR at Full HD 30 fps. Lastly, we will also present application examples of high-performance style transfer and object recognition to demonstrate the flexibility of eCNN.
A Coding-free Software Framework of Developing Web Data Management Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2019
Year: 2019

More and more enterprises recently intend to deploy data management systems in the cloud. Due to the professionalism of software development, it has still been difficult for non-programmers to develop this kind of systems, even a small one. However, the development of SaaS brings forth the more feasibility of coding-free software development than before. Based on the SaaS architecture, this paper presents a set of theory and method for coding-free construction of a data management system, on which our contributions involve in a practical application platform, a set of construction method and a set of interface on data exchange. By abstracting the common features of data management systems, we design a universal web platform to quickly generate and publish customized system instances. Moreover, we propose a kind of method to develop a data management system using a specific requirements table in spreadsheet. The corresponding platform maps the requirements table into a system instance through parsing the table model and implementing the objective system in the running stage. Finally, we implement the proposed framework and deploy it on web. The empirical result demonstrates the feasibility and availability of the coding-free method in developing web data management systems.
Correlations between submission and acceptance of papers in peer review journals
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2019
Year: 2019

This paper provides a comparative study about seasonal influence on editorial decisions for papers submitted to two peer review journals. We distinguish a specialized one, the Journal of the Serbian Chemical Society (JSCS) and an interdisciplinary one, Entropy. Dates of electronic submission for about 600 papers to JSCS and 2500 to Entropy have been recorded over 3 recent years. Time series of either accepted or rejected papers are subsequently analyzed. We take either editors or authors view points into account, thereby considering magnitudes and probabilities. In this sample, it is found that there are distinguishable peaks and dips in the time series, demonstrating preferred months for the submission of papers. It is also found that papers are more likely accepted if they are submitted during a few specific months, - these depending on the journal. The probability of having a rejected paper also appears to be seasonally biased. In view of clarifying reports with contradictory findings, we discuss previously proposed conjectures for such effects, like holiday effects and the desk rejection by editors. We conclude that, in this sample, the type of journal, specialized or multidisciplinary, seems to be the drastic criterion for distinguishing the outcomes rates.
Granular Multimodal Attention Networks for Visual Dialog
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Vision and language tasks have benefited from attention. There have been a number of different attention models proposed. However, the scale at which attention needs to be applied has not been well examined. Particularly, in this work, we propose a new method Granular Multi-modal Attention, where we aim to particularly address the question of the right granularity at which one needs to attend while solving the Visual Dialog task. The proposed method shows improvement in both image and text attention networks. We then propose a granular Multi-modal Attention network that jointly attends on the image and text granules and shows the best performance. With this work, we observe that obtaining granular attention and doing exhaustive Multi-modal Attention appears to be the best way to attend while solving visual dialog.
Collective Link Prediction Oriented Network Embedding with Hierarchical Graph Attention
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2019
Year: 2019

To enjoy more social network services, users nowadays are usually involved in multiple online sites at the same time. Aligned social networks provide more information to alleviate the problem of data insufficiency. In this paper, we target on the collective link prediction problem and aim to predict both the intra-network social links as well as the inter-network anchor links across multiple aligned social networks. It is not an easy task, and the major challenges involve the network characteristic difference problem and different directivity properties of the social and anchor links to be predicted. To address the problem, we propose an application oriented network embedding framework, Hierarchical Graph Attention based Network Embedding (HGANE), for collective link prediction over directed aligned networks. Very different from the conventional general network embedding models, HGANE effectively incorporates the collective link prediction task objectives into consideration. It learns the representations of nodes by aggregating information from both the intra-network neighbors (connected by social links) and inter-network partners (connected by anchor links). What's more, we introduce a hierarchical graph attention mechanism for the intra-network neighbors and inter-network partners respectively, which resolves the network characteristic differences and the link directivity challenges effectively. Extensive experiments have been conducted on real-world aligned networks datasets to demonstrate that our model outperformed the state-of-the-art baseline methods in addressing the collective link prediction problem by a large margin.
Real-Time and Embedded Deep Learning on FPGA for RF Signal Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

We designed and implemented a deep learning based RF signal classifier on the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) of an embedded software-defined radio platform, DeepRadio, that classifies the signals received through the RF front end to different modulation types in real time and with low power. This classifier implementation successfully captures complex characteristics of wireless signals to serve critical applications in wireless security and communications systems such as identifying spoofing signals in signal authentication systems, detecting target emitters and jammers in electronic warfare (EW) applications, discriminating primary and secondary users in cognitive radio networks, interference hunting, and adaptive modulation. Empowered by low-power and low-latency embedded computing, the deep neural network runs directly on the FPGA fabric of DeepRadio, while maintaining classifier accuracy close to the software performance. We evaluated the performance when another SDR (USRP) transmits signals with different modulation types at different power levels and DeepRadio receives the signals and classifies them in real time on its FPGA. A smartphone with a mobile app is connected to DeepRadio to initiate the experiment and visualize the classification results. With real radio transmissions over the air, we show that the classifier implemented on DeepRadio achieves high accuracy with low latency (microsecond per sample) and low energy consumption (microJoule per sample), and this performance is not matched by other embedded platforms such as embedded graphics processing unit (GPU).
Interpretable Deep Neural Networks for Dimensional and Categorical Emotion Recognition in-the-wild
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Emotions play an important role in people's life. Understanding and recognising is not only important for interpersonal communication, but also has promising applications in Human-Computer Interaction, automobile safety and medical research. This project focuses on extending the emotion recognition database, and training the CNN + RNN emotion recognition neural networks with emotion category representation and valence \& arousal representation. The combined models are constructed by training the two representations simultaneously. The comparison and analysis between the three types of model are discussed. The inner-relationship between two emotion representations and the interpretability of the neural networks are investigated. The findings suggest that categorical emotion recognition performance can benefit from training with a combined model. And the mapping of emotion category and valence \& arousal values can explain this phenomenon.
The Role of Embedding Complexity in Domain-invariant Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Unsupervised domain adaptation aims to generalize the hypothesis trained in a source domain to an unlabeled target domain. One popular approach to this problem is to learn domain-invariant embeddings for both domains. In this work, we study, theoretically and empirically, the effect of the embedding complexity on generalization to the target domain. In particular, this complexity affects an upper bound on the target risk; this is reflected in experiments, too. Next, we specify our theoretical framework to multilayer neural networks. As a result, we develop a strategy that mitigates sensitivity to the embedding complexity, and empirically achieves performance on par with or better than the best layer-dependent complexity tradeoff.
In Search of a Fast and Efficient Serverless DAG Engine
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

Python-written data analytics applications can be modeled as and compiled into a directed acyclic graph (DAG) based workflow, where the nodes are fine-grained tasks and the edges are task dependencies. Such analytics workflow jobs are increasingly characterized by short, fine-grained tasks with large fan-outs. These characteristics make them well-suited for a new cloud computing model called serverless computing or Function-as-a-Service (FaaS), which has become prevalent in recent years. The auto-scaling property of serverless computing platforms accommodates short tasks and bursty workloads, while the pay-per-use billing model of serverless computing providers keeps the cost of short tasks low. In this paper, we thoroughly investigate the problem space of DAG scheduling in serverless computing. We identify and evaluate a set of techniques to make DAG schedulers serverless-aware. These techniques have been implemented in Wukong, a serverless, DAG scheduler attuned to AWS Lambda. Wukong provides decentralized scheduling through a combination of static and dynamic scheduling. We present the results of an empirical study in which Wukong is applied to a range of microbenchmark and real-world DAG applications. Results demonstrate the efficacy of Wukong in minimizing the performance overhead introduced by AWS Lambda --- Wukong achieves competitive performance compared to a serverful DAG scheduler, while improving the performance of real-world DAG jobs by as much as 3.1X at larger scale.
Density-Aware Convolutional Networks with Context Encoding for Airborne LiDAR Point Cloud Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

To better address challenging issues of the irregularity and inhomogeneity inherently present in 3D point clouds, researchers have been shifting their focus from the design of hand-craft point feature towards the learning of 3D point signatures using deep neural networks for 3D point cloud classification. Recent proposed deep learning based point cloud classification methods either apply 2D CNN on projected feature images or apply 1D convolutional layers directly on raw point sets. These methods cannot adequately recognize fine-grained local structures caused by the uneven density distribution of the point cloud data. In this paper, to address this challenging issue, we introduced a density-aware convolution module which uses the point-wise density to re-weight the learnable weights of convolution kernels. The proposed convolution module is able to fully approximate the 3D continuous convolution on unevenly distributed 3D point sets. Based on this convolution module, we further developed a multi-scale fully convolutional neural network with downsampling and upsampling blocks to enable hierarchical point feature learning. In addition, to regularize the global semantic context, we implemented a context encoding module to predict a global context encoding and formulated a context encoding regularizer to enforce the predicted context encoding to be aligned with the ground truth one. The overall network can be trained in an end-to-end fashion with the raw 3D coordinates as well as the height above ground as inputs. Experiments on the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) 3D labeling benchmark demonstrated the superiority of the proposed method for point cloud classification. Our model achieved a new state-of-the-art performance with an average F1 score of 71.2% and improved the performance by a large margin on several categories.
Multi-view consensus CNN for 3D facial landmark placement
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

The rapid increase in the availability of accurate 3D scanning devices has moved facial recognition and analysis into the 3D domain. 3D facial landmarks are often used as a simple measure of anatomy and it is crucial to have accurate algorithms for automatic landmark placement. The current state-of-the-art approaches have yet to gain from the dramatic increase in performance reported in human pose tracking and 2D facial landmark placement due to the use of deep convolutional neural networks (CNN). Development of deep learning approaches for 3D meshes has given rise to the new subfield called geometric deep learning, where one topic is the adaptation of meshes for the use of deep CNNs. In this work, we demonstrate how methods derived from geometric deep learning, namely multi-view CNNs, can be combined with recent advances in human pose tracking. The method finds 2D landmark estimates and propagates this information to 3D space, where a consensus method determines the accurate 3D face landmark position. We utilise the method on a standard 3D face dataset and show that it outperforms current methods by a large margin. Further, we demonstrate how models trained on 3D range scans can be used to accurately place anatomical landmarks in magnetic resonance images.
Negative closed walks in signed graphs: A note
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2019
Year: 2019

Recently Naserasr, Sopena, and Zaslavsky [R. Naserasr, É. Sopena, T. Zaslavsky,Homomorphisms of signed graphs: An update, arXiv: 1909.05982v1 [math.CO] 12 Sep 2019.] published a report on closed walks in signed graphs. They gave a characterization of the sets of closed walks in a graph $G$ which corespond to the set of negative walks in some signed graph on $G$. In this note we show that their characterization is not valid and give a new characterization.
A Hybrid Control Scheme for Adaptive Live Streaming
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2019
Year: 2019

The live streaming is more challenging than on-demand streaming, because the low latency is also a strong requirement in addition to the trade-off between video quality and jitters in playback. To balance several inherently conflicting performance metrics and improve the overall quality of experience (QoE), many adaptation schemes have been proposed. Bitrate adaptation is one of the major solutions for video streaming under time-varying network conditions, which works even better combining with some latency control methods, such as adaptive playback rate control and frame dropping. However, it still remains a challenging problem to design an algorithm to combine these adaptation schemes together. To tackle this problem, we propose a hybrid control scheme for adaptive live streaming, namely HYSA, based on heuristic playback rate control, latency-constrained bitrate control and QoE-oriented adaptive frame dropping. The proposed scheme utilizes Kaufman's Adaptive Moving Average (KAMA) to predict segment bitrates for better rate decisions. Extensive simulations demonstrate that HYSA outperforms most of the existing adaptation schemes on overall QoE.
Eavesdrop the Composition Proportion of Training Labels in Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Federated learning (FL) has recently emerged as a new form of collaborative machine learning, where a common model can be learned while keeping all the training data on local devices. Although it is designed for enhancing the data privacy, we demonstrated in this paper a new direction in inference attacks in the context of FL, where valuable information about training data can be obtained by adversaries with very limited power. In particular, we proposed three new types of attacks to exploit this vulnerability. The first type of attack, Class Sniffing, can detect whether a certain label appears in training. The other two types of attacks can determine the quantity of each label, i.e., Quantity Inference attack determines the composition proportion of the training label owned by the selected clients in a single round, while Whole Determination attack determines that of the whole training process. We evaluated our attacks on a variety of tasks and datasets with different settings, and the corresponding results showed that our attacks work well generally. Finally, we analyzed the impact of major hyper-parameters to our attacks and discussed possible defenses.
The PGM-index: a multicriteria, compressed and learned approach to data indexing
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

The recent introduction of learned indexes has shaken the foundations of the decades-old field of indexing data structures. Combining, or even replacing, classic design elements such as B-tree nodes with machine learning models has proven to give outstanding improvements in the space footprint and time efficiency of data systems. However, these novel approaches are based on heuristics, thus they lack any guarantees both in their time and space requirements. We propose the Piecewise Geometric Model index (shortly, PGM-index), which achieves guaranteed I/O-optimality in query operations, learns an optimal number of linear models, and its peculiar recursive construction makes it a purely learned data structure, rather than a hybrid of traditional and learned indexes (such as RMI and FITing-tree). We show that the PGM-index improves the space of the FITing-tree by 63.3% and of the B-tree by more than four orders of magnitude, while achieving their same or even better query time efficiency. We complement this result by proposing three variants of the PGM-index. First, we design a compressed PGM-index that further reduces its space footprint by exploiting the repetitiveness at the level of the learned linear models it is composed of. Second, we design a PGM-index that adapts itself to the distribution of the queries, thus resulting in the first known distribution-aware learned index to date. Finally, given its flexibility in the offered space-time trade-offs, we propose the multicriteria PGM-index that efficiently auto-tune itself in a few seconds over hundreds of millions of keys to the possibly evolving space-time constraints imposed by the application of use. We remark to the reader that this paper is an extended and improved version of our previous paper titled "Superseding traditional indexes by orchestrating learning and geometry" (arXiv:1903.00507).
Dynamic Complexity Meets Parameterised Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2019
Year: 2019

Dynamic Complexity studies the maintainability of queries with logical formulas in a setting where the underlying structure or database changes over time. Most often, these formulas are from first-order logic, giving rise to the dynamic complexity class DynFO. This paper investigates extensions of DynFO in the spirit of parameterised algorithms. In this setting structures come with a parameter $k$ and the extensions allow additional "space" of size $f(k)$ (in the form of an additional structure of this size) or additional time $f(k)$ (in the form of iterations of formulas) or both. The resulting classes are compared with their non-dynamic counterparts and other classes. The main part of the paper explores the applicability of methods for parameterised algorithms to this setting through case studies for various well-known parameterised problems.
A Glimpse of the Matrix (Extended Version): Scalability Issues of a New Message-Oriented Data Synchronization Middleware
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

Matrix is a new message-oriented data synchronization middleware, used as a federated platform for near real-time decentralized applications. It features a novel approach for inter-server communication based on synchronizing message history by using a replicated data structure. We measured the structure of public parts in the Matrix federation as a basis to analyze the middleware's scalability. We confirm that users are currently cumulated on a single large server, but find more small servers than expected. We then analyze network load distribution in the measured structure and identify scalability issues of Matrix' group communication mechanism in structurally diverse federations.