OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Collision Free Navigation of a Multi-Robot Team for Intruder Interception
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

In this report, we propose a decentralised motion control algorithm for the mobile robots to intercept an intruder entering (k-intercepting) or escaping (e-intercepting) a protected region. In continuation, we propose a decentralized navigation strategy (dynamic-intercepting) for a multi-robot team known as predators to intercept the intruders or in the other words, preys, from escaping a siege ring which is created by the predators. A necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a solution of this problem is obtained. Furthermore, we propose an intelligent game-based decision-making algorithm (IGD) for a fleet of mobile robots to maximize the probability of detection in a bounded region. We prove that the proposed decentralised cooperative and non-cooperative game-based decision-making algorithm enables each robot to make the best decision to choose the shortest path with minimum local information. Then we propose a leader-follower based collision-free navigation control method for a fleet of mobile robots to traverse an unknown cluttered environment where is occupied by multiple obstacles to trap a target. We prove that each individual team member is able to traverse safely in the region, which is cluttered by many obstacles with any shapes to trap the target while using the sensors in some indefinite switching points and not continuously, which leads to saving energy consumption and increasing the battery life of the robots consequently. And finally, we propose a novel navigation strategy for a unicycle mobile robot in a cluttered area with moving obstacles based on virtual field force algorithm. The mathematical proof of the navigation laws and the computer simulations are provided to confirm the validity, robustness, and reliability of the proposed methods.
Hierarchical Characteristic Set Merging for Optimizing SPARQL Queries in Heterogeneous RDF
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2018
Year: 2018

Characteristic sets (CS) organize RDF triples based on the set of properties characterizing their subject nodes. This concept is recently used in indexing techniques, as it can capture the implicit schema of RDF data. While most CS-based approaches yield significant improvements in space and query performance, they fail to perform well in the presence of schema heterogeneity, i.e., when the number of CSs becomes very large, resulting in a highly partitioned data organization. In this paper, we address this problem by introducing a novel technique, for merging CSs based on their hierarchical structure. Our technique employs a lattice to capture the hierarchical relationships between CSs, identifies dense CSs and merges dense CSs with their ancestors, thus reducing the size of the CSs as well as the links between them. We implemented our algorithm on top of a relational backbone, where each merged CS is stored in a relational table, and we performed an extensive experimental study to evaluate the performance and impact of merging to the storage and querying of RDF datasets, indicating significant improvements.
Infinite Curriculum Learning for Efficiently Detecting Gastric Ulcers in WCE Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

The Wireless Capsule Endoscopy (WCE) is becoming a popular way of screening gastrointestinal system diseases and cancer. However, the time-consuming process in inspecting WCE data limits its applications and increases the cost of examinations. This paper considers WCE-based gastric ulcer detection, in which the major challenge is to detect the lesions in a local region. We propose an approach named infinite curriculum learning, which generalizes curriculum learning to an infinite sampling space by approximately measuring the difficulty of each patch by its scale. This allows us to adapt our model from local patches to global images gradually, leading to a consistent accuracy gain. Experiments are performed on a large dataset with more than 3 million WCE images. Our approach achieves a binary classification accuracy of 87%, and is able to detect some lesions mis-annotated by the physicians. In a real-world application, our approach can reduce the workload of a physician by 90%-98% in gastric ulcer screening.
On Underlay-Aware Self-Stabilizing Overlay Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

We present a self-stabilizing protocol for an overlay network that constructs the Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) for an underlay that is modeled by a weighted tree. The weight of an overlay edge between two nodes is the weighted length of their shortest path in the tree. We rigorously prove that our protocol works correctly under asynchronous and non-FIFO message delivery. Further, the protocol stabilizes after $\mathcal{O}(N^2)$ asynchronous rounds where $N$ is the number of nodes in the overlay.
Optimizing deep video representation to match brain activity
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2018
Year: 2018

The comparison of observed brain activity with the statistics generated by artificial intelligence systems is useful to probe brain functional organization under ecological conditions. Here we study fMRI activity in ten subjects watching color natural movies and compute deep representations of these movies with an architecture that relies on optical flow and image content. The association of activity in visual areas with the different layers of the deep architecture displays complexity-related contrasts across visual areas and reveals a striking foveal/peripheral dichotomy.
BiasedWalk: Biased Sampling for Representation Learning on Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Network embedding algorithms are able to learn latent feature representations of nodes, transforming networks into lower dimensional vector representations. Typical key applications, which have effectively been addressed using network embeddings, include link prediction, multilabel classification and community detection. In this paper, we propose BiasedWalk, a scalable, unsupervised feature learning algorithm that is based on biased random walks to sample context information about each node in the network. Our random-walk based sampling can behave as Breath-First-Search (BFS) and Depth-First-Search (DFS) samplings with the goal to capture homophily and role equivalence between the nodes in the network. We have performed a detailed experimental evaluation comparing the performance of the proposed algorithm against various baseline methods, on several datasets and learning tasks. The experiment results show that the proposed method outperforms the baseline ones in most of the tasks and datasets.
Differentially Private Continual Release of Graph Statistics
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

Motivated by understanding the dynamics of sensitive social networks over time, we consider the problem of continual release of statistics in a network that arrives online, while preserving privacy of its participants. For our privacy notion, we use differential privacy -- the gold standard in privacy for statistical data analysis. The main challenge in this problem is maintaining a good privacy-utility tradeoff; naive solutions that compose across time, as well as solutions suited to tabular data either lead to poor utility or do not directly apply. In this work, we show that if there is a publicly known upper bound on the maximum degree of any node in the entire network sequence, then we can release many common graph statistics such as degree distributions and subgraph counts continually with a better privacy-accuracy tradeoff. Code available at https://bitbucket.org/shs037/graphprivacycode
Cyber-Security in Smart Grid: Survey and Challenges
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

Smart grid uses the power of information technology to intelligently deliver energy to customers by using a two-way communication, and wisely meet the environmental requirements by facilitating the integration of green technologies. Although smart grid addresses several problems of the traditional grid, it faces a number of security challenges. Because communication has been incorporated into the electrical power with its inherent weaknesses, it has exposed the system to numerous risks. Several research papers have discussed these problems. However, most of them classified attacks based on confidentiality, integrity, and availability, and they excluded attacks which compromise other security criteria such as accountability. In addition, the existed security countermeasures focus on countering some specific attacks or protecting some specific components, but there is no global approach which combines these solutions to secure the entire system. The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive overview of the relevant published works. First, we review the security requirements. Then, we investigate in depth a number of important cyber-attacks in smart grid to diagnose the potential vulnerabilities along with their impact. In addition, we proposed a cyber security strategy as a solution to address breaches, counter attacks, and deploy appropriate countermeasures. Finally, we provide some future research directions.
GANs for generating EFT models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

We initiate a way of generating models by the computer, satisfying both experimental and theoretical constraints. In particular, we present a framework which allows the generation of effective field theories. We use Generative Adversarial Networks to generate these models and we generate examples which go beyond the examples known to the machine. As a starting point, we apply this idea to the generation of supersymmetric field theories. In this case, the machine knows consistent examples of supersymmetric field theories with a single field and generates new examples of such theories. In the generated potentials we find distinct properties, here the number of minima in the scalar potential, with values not found in the training data. We comment on potential further applications of this framework.
A general-purpose hierarchical mesh partitioning method with node balancing strategies for large-scale numerical simulations
Venue: arXiv cs.MS 2018
Year: 2018

Large-scale parallel numerical simulations are essential for a wide range of engineering problems that involve complex, coupled physical processes interacting across a broad range of spatial and temporal scales. The data structures involved in such simulations (meshes, sparse matrices, etc.) are frequently represented as graphs, and these graphs must be optimally partitioned across the available computational resources in order for the underlying calculations to scale efficiently. Partitions which minimize the number of graph edges that are cut (edge-cuts) while simultaneously maintaining a balance in the amount of work (i.e. graph nodes) assigned to each processor core are desirable, and the performance of most existing partitioning software begins to degrade in this metric for partitions with more than than $O(10^3)$ processor cores. In this work, we consider a general-purpose hierarchical partitioner which takes into account the existence of multiple processor cores and shared memory in a compute node while partitioning a graph into an arbitrary number of subgraphs. We demonstrate that our algorithms significantly improve the preconditioning efficiency and overall performance of realistic numerical simulations running on up to 32,768 processor cores with nearly $10^9$ unknowns.
Unsupervised Sentence Compression using Denoising Auto-Encoders
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

In sentence compression, the task of shortening sentences while retaining the original meaning, models tend to be trained on large corpora containing pairs of verbose and compressed sentences. To remove the need for paired corpora, we emulate a summarization task and add noise to extend sentences and train a denoising auto-encoder to recover the original, constructing an end-to-end training regime without the need for any examples of compressed sentences. We conduct a human evaluation of our model on a standard text summarization dataset and show that it performs comparably to a supervised baseline based on grammatical correctness and retention of meaning. Despite being exposed to no target data, our unsupervised models learn to generate imperfect but reasonably readable sentence summaries. Although we underperform supervised models based on ROUGE scores, our models are competitive with a supervised baseline based on human evaluation for grammatical correctness and retention of meaning.
Coupled IGMM-GANs for deep multimodal anomaly detection in human mobility data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Detecting anomalous activity in human mobility data has a number of applications including road hazard sensing, telematic based insurance, and fraud detection in taxi services and ride sharing. In this paper we address two challenges that arise in the study of anomalous human trajectories: 1) a lack of ground truth data on what defines an anomaly and 2) the dependence of existing methods on significant pre-processing and feature engineering. While generative adversarial networks seem like a natural fit for addressing these challenges, we find that existing GAN based anomaly detection algorithms perform poorly due to their inability to handle multimodal patterns. For this purpose we introduce an infinite Gaussian mixture model coupled with (bi-directional) generative adversarial networks, IGMM-GAN, that is able to generate synthetic, yet realistic, human mobility data and simultaneously facilitates multimodal anomaly detection. Through estimation of a generative probability density on the space of human trajectories, we are able to generate realistic synthetic datasets that can be used to benchmark existing anomaly detection methods. The estimated multimodal density also allows for a natural definition of outlier that we use for detecting anomalous trajectories. We illustrate our methodology and its improvement over existing GAN anomaly detection on several human mobility datasets, along with MNIST.
Operations Guided Neural Networks for High Fidelity Data-To-Text Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

Recent neural models for data-to-text generation are mostly based on data-driven end-to-end training over encoder-decoder networks. Even though the generated texts are mostly fluent and informative, they often generate descriptions that are not consistent with the input structured data. This is a critical issue especially in domains that require inference or calculations over raw data. In this paper, we attempt to improve the fidelity of neural data-to-text generation by utilizing pre-executed symbolic operations. We propose a framework called Operation-guided Attention-based sequence-to-sequence network (OpAtt), with a specifically designed gating mechanism as well as a quantization module for operation results to utilize information from pre-executed operations. Experiments on two sports datasets show our proposed method clearly improves the fidelity of the generated texts to the input structured data.
Exploration on Grounded Word Embedding: Matching Words and Images with Image-Enhanced Skip-Gram Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

Word embedding is designed to represent the semantic meaning of a word with low dimensional vectors. The state-of-the-art methods of learning word embeddings (word2vec and GloVe) only use the word co-occurrence information. The learned embeddings are real number vectors, which are obscure to human. In this paper, we propose an Image-Enhanced Skip-Gram Model to learn grounded word embeddings by representing the word vectors in the same hyper-plane with image vectors. Experiments show that the image vectors and word embeddings learned by our model are highly correlated, which indicates that our model is able to provide a vivid image-based explanation to the word embeddings.
Adversarial Learning for Image Forensics Deep Matching with Atrous Convolution
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Constrained image splicing detection and localization (CISDL) is a newly proposed challenging task for image forensics, which investigates two input suspected images and identifies whether one image has suspected regions pasted from the other. In this paper, we propose a novel adversarial learning framework to train the deep matching network for CISDL. Our framework mainly consists of three building blocks: 1) the deep matching network based on atrous convolution (DMAC) aims to generate two high-quality candidate masks which indicate the suspected regions of the two input images, 2) the detection network is designed to rectify inconsistencies between the two corresponding candidate masks, 3) the discriminative network drives the DMAC network to produce masks that are hard to distinguish from ground-truth ones. In DMAC, atrous convolution is adopted to extract features with rich spatial information, the correlation layer based on the skip architecture is proposed to capture hierarchical features, and atrous spatial pyramid pooling is constructed to localize tampered regions at multiple scales. The detection network and the discriminative network act as the losses with auxiliary parameters to supervise the training of DMAC in an adversarial way. Extensive experiments, conducted on 21 generated testing sets and two public datasets, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and the superior performance of DMAC.
Extracting and Analyzing Semantic Relatedness between Cities Using News Articles
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2018
Year: 2018

News articles capture a variety of topics about our society. They reflect not only the socioeconomic activities that happened in our physical world, but also some of the cultures, human interests, and public concerns that exist only in the perceptions of people. Cities are frequently mentioned in news articles, and two or more cities may co-occur in the same article. Such co-occurrence often suggests certain relatedness between the mentioned cities, and the relatedness may be under different topics depending on the contents of the news articles. We consider the relatedness under different topics as semantic relatedness. By reading news articles, one can grasp the general semantic relatedness between cities, yet, given hundreds of thousands of news articles, it is very difficult, if not impossible, for anyone to manually read them. This paper proposes a computational framework which can "read" a large number of news articles and extract the semantic relatedness between cities. This framework is based on a natural language processing model and employs a machine learning process to identify the main topics of news articles. We describe the overall structure of this framework and its individual modules, and then apply it to an experimental dataset with more than 500,000 news articles covering the top 100 U.S. cities spanning a 10-year period. We perform exploratory visualization of the extracted semantic relatedness under different topics and over multiple years. We also analyze the impact of geographic distance on semantic relatedness and find varied distance decay effects. The proposed framework can be used to support large-scale content analysis in city network research.
Directional Frame Timing Synchronization in Wideband Millimeter-Wave Systems with Low-Resolution ADCs
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we propose and evaluate a novel beamforming strategy for directional frame timing synchronization in wideband millimeter-wave (mmWave) systems operating with low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). In the employed system model, we assume multiple radio frequency chains equipped at the base station to simultaneously form multiple synchronization beams in the analog domain. We formulate the corresponding directional frame timing synchronization problem as a max-min multicast beamforming problem under low-resolution quantization. We first show that the formulated problem cannot be effectively solved by conventional single-stream beamforming based approaches due to large quantization loss and limited beam codebook resolution. We then develop a new multi-beam probing based directional synchronization strategy, targeting at maximizing the minimum received synchronization signal-to-quantization-plus-noise ratio (SQNR) among all users. Leveraging a common synchronization signal structure design, the proposed approach synthesizes an effective composite beam from the simultaneously probed beams to better trade off the beamforming gain and the quantization distortion. Numerical results reveal that for wideband mmWave systems with low-resolution ADCs, the timing synchronization performance of our proposed method outperforms the existing approaches due to the improvement in the received synchronization SQNR.
Dependency Graph Approach for Multiprocessor Real-Time Synchronization
Venue: arXiv cs.OS 2018
Year: 2018

Over the years, many multiprocessor locking protocols have been designed and analyzed. However, the performance of these protocols highly depends on how the tasks are partitioned and prioritized and how the resources are shared locally and globally. This paper answers a few fundamental questions when real-time tasks share resources in multiprocessor systems. We explore the fundamental difficulty of the multiprocessor synchronization problem and show that a very simplified version of this problem is ${\mathcal NP}$-hard in the strong sense regardless of the number of processors and the underlying scheduling paradigm. Therefore, the allowance of preemption or migration does not reduce the computational complexity. For the positive side, we develop a dependency-graph approach, that is specifically useful for frame-based real-time tasks, in which all tasks have the same period and release their jobs always at the same time. We present a series of algorithms with speedup factors between $2$ and $3$ under semi-partitioned scheduling. We further explore methodologies and tradeoffs of preemptive against non-preemptive scheduling algorithms and partitioned against semi-partitioned scheduling algorithms. The approach is extended to periodic tasks under certain conditions.
Discriminator-Actor-Critic: Addressing Sample Inefficiency and Reward Bias in Adversarial Imitation Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

We identify two issues with the family of algorithms based on the Adversarial Imitation Learning framework. The first problem is implicit bias present in the reward functions used in these algorithms. While these biases might work well for some environments, they can also lead to sub-optimal behavior in others. Secondly, even though these algorithms can learn from few expert demonstrations, they require a prohibitively large number of interactions with the environment in order to imitate the expert for many real-world applications. In order to address these issues, we propose a new algorithm called Discriminator-Actor-Critic that uses off-policy Reinforcement Learning to reduce policy-environment interaction sample complexity by an average factor of 10. Furthermore, since our reward function is designed to be unbiased, we can apply our algorithm to many problems without making any task-specific adjustments.