OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Total Recall: Understanding Traffic Signs using Deep Hierarchical Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Recognizing Traffic Signs using intelligent systems can drastically reduce the number of accidents happening world-wide. With the arrival of Self-driving cars it has become a staple challenge to solve the automatic recognition of Traffic and Hand-held signs in the major streets. Various machine learning techniques like Random Forest, SVM as well as deep learning models has been proposed for classifying traffic signs. Though they reach state-of-the-art performance on a particular data-set, but fall short of tackling multiple Traffic Sign Recognition benchmarks. In this paper, we propose a novel and one-for-all architecture that aces multiple benchmarks with better overall score than the state-of-the-art architectures. Our model is made of residual convolutional blocks with hierarchical dilated skip connections joined in steps. With this we score 99.33% Accuracy in German sign recognition benchmark and 99.17% Accuracy in Belgian traffic sign classification benchmark. Moreover, we propose a newly devised dilated residual learning representation technique which is very low in both memory and computational complexity.
Directed Exploration in PAC Model-Free Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

We study an exploration method for model-free RL that generalizes the counter-based exploration bonus methods and takes into account long term exploratory value of actions rather than a single step look-ahead. We propose a model-free RL method that modifies Delayed Q-learning and utilizes the long-term exploration bonus with provable efficiency. We show that our proposed method finds a near-optimal policy in polynomial time (PAC-MDP), and also provide experimental evidence that our proposed algorithm is an efficient exploration method.
Exploring Time Flexibility in Wireless Data Plans
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2018
Year: 2018

Recently, the mobile network operators (MNOs) are exploring more time flexibility with the rollover data plan, which allows the unused data from the previous month to be used in the current month. Motivated by this industry trend, we propose a general framework for designing and optimizing the mobile data plan with time flexibility. Such a framework includes the traditional data plan, two existing rollover data plans, and a new credit data plan as special cases. Under this framework, we formulate a monopoly MNO's optimal data plan design as a three-stage Stackelberg game: In Stage I, the MNO decides the data mechanism; In Stage II, the MNO further decides the corresponding data cap, subscription fee, and the per-unit fee; Finally in Stage III, users make subscription decisions based on their own characteristics. Through backward induction, we analytically characterize the MNO's profit-maximizing data plan and the corresponding users' subscriptions. Furthermore, we conduct a market survey to estimate the distribution of users' two-dimensional characteristics, and evaluate the performance of different data mechanisms using the real data. We find that a more time-flexible data mechanism increases MNO's profit and users' payoffs, hence improves the social welfare.
AISHELL-2: Transforming Mandarin ASR Research Into Industrial Scale
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

AISHELL-1 is by far the largest open-source speech corpus available for Mandarin speech recognition research. It was released with a baseline system containing solid training and testing pipelines for Mandarin ASR. In AISHELL-2, 1000 hours of clean read-speech data from iOS is published, which is free for academic usage. On top of AISHELL-2 corpus, an improved recipe is developed and released, containing key components for industrial applications, such as Chinese word segmentation, flexible vocabulary expension and phone set transformation etc. Pipelines support various state-of-the-art techniques, such as time-delayed neural networks and Lattic-Free MMI objective funciton. In addition, we also release dev and test data from other channels(Android and Mic). For research community, we hope that AISHELL-2 corpus can be a solid resource for topics like transfer learning and robust ASR. For industry, we hope AISHELL-2 recipe can be a helpful reference for building meaningful industrial systems and products.
Content-based feature exploration for transparent music recommendation using self-attentive genre classification
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2018
Year: 2018

Interpretation of retrieved results is an important issue in music recommender systems, particularly from a user perspective. In this study, we investigate the methods for providing interpretability of content features using self-attention. We extract lyric features with the self-attentive genre classification model trained on 140,000 tracks of lyrics. Likewise, we extract acoustic features using the acoustic model with self-attention trained on 120,000 tracks of acoustic signals. The experimental results show that the proposed methods provide the characteristics that are interpretable in terms of both lyrical and musical contents. We demonstrate this by visualizing the attention weights, and by presenting the most similar songs found using lyric or audio features.
Graph reduction with spectral and cut guarantees
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2018
Year: 2018

Can one reduce the size of a graph without significantly altering its basic properties? The graph reduction problem is hereby approached from the perspective of restricted spectral approximation, a modification of the spectral similarity measure used for graph sparsification. This choice is motivated by the observation that restricted approximation carries strong spectral and cut guarantees, and that it implies approximation results for unsupervised learning problems relying on spectral embeddings. The paper then focuses on coarsening---the most common type of graph reduction. Sufficient conditions are derived for a small graph to approximate a larger one in the sense of restricted similarity. These findings give rise to nearly-linear algorithms that, compared to both standard and advanced graph reduction methods, find coarse graphs of improved quality, often by a large margin, without sacrificing speed.
Empilements compacts avec trois tailles de disque
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2018
Year: 2018

Discs form a compact packing of the plane if they are interior disjoint and the graph which connects the center of mutually tangent discs is triangulated. There is only one compact packing by discs all of the same size, called hexagonal compact packing. It has been previously proven that there are exactly $9$ values of $r$ such that there exists a compact packing with discs of radius $1$ and $r$. This paper shows that there are exactly $164$ pairs $(r,s)$ such that there exists a compact packing with discs of radius $1$, $r$ and $s$. In all these $164$ cases, there exists a periodic packing.
TeSSLa: Temporal Stream-based Specification Language
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2018
Year: 2018

Runtime verification is concerned with monitoring program traces. In particular, stream runtime verification (SRV) takes the program trace as input streams and incrementally derives output streams. SRV can check logical properties and compute temporal metrics and statistics from the trace. We present TeSSLa, a temporal stream-based specification language for SRV. TeSSLa supports timestamped events natively and is hence suitable for streams that are both sparse and fine-grained, which often occur in practice. We prove results on TeSSLa's expressiveness and compare different TeSSLa fragments to (timed) automata, thereby inheriting various decidability results. Finally, we present a monitor implementation and prove its correctness.
MMDF2018 Workshop Report
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2018
Year: 2018

Driven by the recent advances in smart, miniaturized, and mass produced sensors, networked systems, and high-speed data communication and computing, the ability to collect and process larger volumes of higher veracity real-time data from a variety of modalities is expanding. However, despite research thrusts explored since the late 1990's, to date no standard, generalizable solutions have emerged for effectively integrating and processing multimodal data, and consequently practitioners across a wide variety of disciplines must still follow a trial-and-error process to identify the optimum procedure for each individual application and data sources. A deeper understanding of the utility and capabilities (as well as the shortcomings and challenges) of existing multimodal data fusion methods as a function of data and challenge characteristics has the potential to deliver better data analysis tools across all sectors, therein enabling more efficient and effective automated manufacturing, patient care, infrastructure maintenance, environmental understanding, transportation networks, energy systems, etc. There is therefore an urgent need to identify the underlying patterns that can be used to determine a priori which techniques will be most useful for any specific dataset or application. This next stage of understanding and discovery (i.e., the development of generalized solutions) can only be achieved via a high level cross-disciplinary aggregation of learnings, and this workshop was proposed at an opportune time as many domains have already started exploring use of multimodal data fusion techniques in a wide range of application-specific contexts.
Using a Game Engine to Simulate Critical Incidents and Data Collection by Autonomous Drones
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

Using a game engine, we have developed a virtual environment which models important aspects of critical incident scenarios. We focused on modelling phenomena relating to the identification and gathering of key forensic evidence, in order to develop and test a system which can handle chemical, biological, radiological/nuclear or explosive (CBRNe) events autonomously. This allows us to build and validate AI-based technologies, which can be trained and tested in our custom virtual environment before being deployed in real-world scenarios. We have used our virtual scenario to rapidly prototype a system which can use simulated Remote Aerial Vehicles (RAVs) to gather images from the environment for the purpose of mapping. Our environment provides us with an effective medium through which we can develop and test various AI methodologies for critical incident scene assessment, in a safe and controlled manner
The MeMAD Submission to the WMT18 Multimodal Translation Task
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

This paper describes the MeMAD project entry to the WMT Multimodal Machine Translation Shared Task. We propose adapting the Transformer neural machine translation (NMT) architecture to a multi-modal setting. In this paper, we also describe the preliminary experiments with text-only translation systems leading us up to this choice. We have the top scoring system for both English-to-German and English-to-French, according to the automatic metrics for flickr18. Our experiments show that the effect of the visual features in our system is small. Our largest gains come from the quality of the underlying text-only NMT system. We find that appropriate use of additional data is effective.
Improve Blockchain Performance using Graph Data Structure and Parallel Mining
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

Blockchain technology is ushering in another break-out year, the challenge of blockchain still remains to be solved. This paper analyzes the features of Bitcoin and Bitcoin-NG system based on blockchain, proposes an improved method of implementing blockchain systems by replacing the structure of the original chain with the graph data structure. It was named GraphChain. Each block represents a transaction and contains the balance status of the traders. Additionally, as everyone knows all the transactions in Bitcoin system will be baled by only one miner that will result in a lot of wasted effort, so another way to improve resource utilization is to change the original way to compete for miner to election and parallel mining. Researchers simulated blockchain with graph structure and parallel mining through python, and suggested the conceptual new graph model which can improve both capacity and performance.
Finite LTL Synthesis with Environment Assumptions and Quality Measures
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we investigate the problem of synthesizing strategies for linear temporal logic (LTL) specifications that are interpreted over finite traces -- a problem that is central to the automated construction of controllers, robot programs, and business processes. We study a natural variant of the finite LTL synthesis problem in which strategy guarantees are predicated on specified environment behavior. We further explore a quantitative extension of LTL that supports specification of quality measures, utilizing it to synthesize high-quality strategies. We propose new notions of optimality and associated algorithms that yield strategies that best satisfy specified quality measures. Our algorithms utilize an automata-game approach, positioning them well for future implementation via existing state-of-the-art techniques.
Diversity, Topology, and the Risk of Node Re-identification in Labeled Social Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2018
Year: 2018

Real network datasets provide significant benefits for understanding phenomena such as information diffusion or network evolution. Yet the privacy risks raised from sharing real graph datasets, even when stripped of user identity information, are significant. When nodes have associated attributes, the privacy risks increase. In this paper we quantitatively study the impact of binary node attributes on node privacy by employing machine-learning-based re-identification attacks and exploring the interplay between graph topology and attribute placement. Our experiments show that the population's diversity on the binary attribute consistently degrades anonymity.
Exploiting the Shape of CAN Data for In-Vehicle Intrusion Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

Modern vehicles rely on scores of electronic control units (ECUs) broadcasting messages over a few controller area networks (CANs). Bereft of security features, in-vehicle CANs are exposed to cyber manipulation and multiple researches have proved viable, life-threatening cyber attacks. Complicating the issue, CAN messages lack a common mapping of functions to commands, so packets are observable but not easily decipherable. We present a transformational approach to CAN IDS that exploits the geometric properties of CAN data to inform two novel detectors--one based on distance from a learned, lower dimensional manifold and the other on discontinuities of the manifold over time. Proof-of-concept tests are presented by implementing a potential attack approach on a driving vehicle. The initial results suggest that (1) the first detector requires additional refinement but does hold promise; (2) the second detector gives a clear, strong indicator of the attack; and (3) the algorithms keep pace with high-speed CAN messages. As our approach is data-driven it provides a vehicle-agnostic IDS that eliminates the need to reverse engineer CAN messages and can be ported to an after-market plugin.
On the Area-Universality of Triangulations
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2018
Year: 2018

We study straight-line drawings of planar graphs with prescribed face areas. A plane graph is 'area-universal' if for every area assignment on the inner faces, there exists a straight-line drawing realizing the prescribed areas. For triangulations with a special vertex order, we present a sufficient criterion for area-universality that only requires the investigation of one area assignment. Moreover, if the sufficient criterion applies to one plane triangulation, then all embeddings of the underlying planar graph are also area-universal. Until now, it is open whether area-universality is a property of a plane or planar graph. We use the developed machinery to present area-universal families of triangulations. Among them we characterize area-universality of accordion graphs showing that area-universal and non-area-universal graphs may be structural very similar.
Admission and Congestion Control for 5G Network Slicing
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

Network Slicing has been widely accepted as essential feature of future 5th Generation (5G) mobile communication networks. Accounting the potentially dense demand of network slices as a cloud service and the limited resource of mobile network operators (MNOs), an efficient inter-slice management and orchestration plays a key role in 5G networks. This calls advanced solutions for slice admission and congestion control. This paper proposes a novel approach of inter-slice control that well copes with existing pre-standardized 5G architectures
Understanding Neural Pathways in Zebrafish through Deep Learning and High Resolution Electron Microscope Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

The tracing of neural pathways through large volumes of image data is an incredibly tedious and time-consuming process that significantly encumbers progress in neuroscience. We are exploring deep learning's potential to automate segmentation of high-resolution scanning electron microscope (SEM) image data to remove that barrier. We have started with neural pathway tracing through 5.1GB of whole-brain serial-section slices from larval zebrafish collected by the Center for Brain Science at Harvard University. This kind of manual image segmentation requires years of careful work to properly trace the neural pathways in an organism as small as a zebrafish larva (approximately 5mm in total body length). In automating this process, we would vastly improve productivity, leading to faster data analysis and breakthroughs in understanding the complexity of the brain. We will build upon prior attempts to employ deep learning for automatic image segmentation extending methods for unconventional deep learning data.
Robust 3D Distributed Formation Control with Application to Quadrotors
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2018
Year: 2018

We present a distributed control strategy for a team of quadrotors to autonomously achieve a desired 3D formation. Our approach is based on local relative position measurements and does not require global position information or inter-vehicle communication. We assume that quadrotors have a common sense of direction, which is chosen as the direction of gravitational force measured by their onboard IMU sensors. However, this assumption is not crucial, and our approach is robust to inaccuracies and effects of acceleration on gravitational measurements. In particular, converge to the desired formation is unaffected if each quadrotor has a velocity vector that projects positively onto the desired velocity vector provided by the formation control strategy. We demonstrate the validity of proposed approach in an experimental setup and show that a team of quadrotors achieve a desired 3D formation.
Vision-Based Distributed Formation Control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2018
Year: 2018

We present a novel control strategy for a team of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to autonomously achieve a desired formation using only visual feedback provided by the UAV's onboard cameras. This effectively eliminates the need for global position measurements. The proposed pipeline is fully distributed and encompasses a collision avoidance scheme. In our approach, each UAV extracts feature points from captured images and communicates their pixel coordinates and descriptors among its neighbors. These feature points are used in our novel pose estimation algorithm, QuEst, to localize the neighboring UAVs. Compared to existing methods, QuEst has better estimation accuracy and is robust to feature point degeneracies. We demonstrate the proposed pipeline in a high-fidelity simulation environment and show that UAVs can achieve a desired formation in a natural environment without any fiducial markers.
Attentive Crowd Flow Machines
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Traffic flow prediction is crucial for urban traffic management and public safety. Its key challenges lie in how to adaptively integrate the various factors that affect the flow changes. In this paper, we propose a unified neural network module to address this problem, called Attentive Crowd Flow Machine~(ACFM), which is able to infer the evolution of the crowd flow by learning dynamic representations of temporally-varying data with an attention mechanism. Specifically, the ACFM is composed of two progressive ConvLSTM units connected with a convolutional layer for spatial weight prediction. The first LSTM takes the sequential flow density representation as input and generates a hidden state at each time-step for attention map inference, while the second LSTM aims at learning the effective spatial-temporal feature expression from attentionally weighted crowd flow features. Based on the ACFM, we further build a deep architecture with the application to citywide crowd flow prediction, which naturally incorporates the sequential and periodic data as well as other external influences. Extensive experiments on two standard benchmarks (i.e., crowd flow in Beijing and New York City) show that the proposed method achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-art methods.
Contextual Encoding for Translation Quality Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

The task of word-level quality estimation (QE) consists of taking a source sentence and machine-generated translation, and predicting which words in the output are correct and which are wrong. In this paper, propose a method to effectively encode the local and global contextual information for each target word using a three-part neural network approach. The first part uses an embedding layer to represent words and their part-of-speech tags in both languages. The second part leverages a one-dimensional convolution layer to integrate local context information for each target word. The third part applies a stack of feed-forward and recurrent neural networks to further encode the global context in the sentence before making the predictions. This model was submitted as the CMU entry to the WMT2018 shared task on QE, and achieves strong results, ranking first in three of the six tracks.
Test Case Prioritization Using Test Similarities
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2018
Year: 2018

A classical heuristic in software testing is to reward diversity, which implies that a higher priority must be assigned to test cases that differ the most from those already prioritized. This approach is commonly known as similarity-based test prioritization (SBTP) and can be realized using a variety of techniques. The objective of our study is to investigate whether SBTP is more effective at finding defects than random permutation, as well as determine which SBTP implementations lead to better results. To achieve our objective, we implemented five different techniques from the literature and conducted an experiment using the defects4j dataset, which contains 395 real faults from six real-world open-source Java programs. Findings indicate that running the most dissimilar test cases early in the process is largely more effective than random permutation (Vargha-Delaney A [VDA]: 0.76-0.99 observed using normalized compression distance). No technique was found to be superior with respect to the effectiveness. Locality-sensitive hashing was, to a small extent, less effective than other SBTP techniques (VDA: 0.38 observed in comparison to normalized compression distance), but its speed largely outperformed the other techniques (i.e., it was approximately 5-111 times faster). Our results bring to mind the well-known adage, "don't put all your eggs in one basket". To effectively consume a limited testing budget, one should spread it evenly across different parts of the system by running the most dissimilar test cases early in the testing process.