OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Discovering space - Grounding spatial topology and metric regularity in a naive agent's sensorimotor experience
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2018
Year: 2018

In line with the sensorimotor contingency theory, we investigate the problem of the perception of space from a fundamental sensorimotor perspective. Despite its pervasive nature in our perception of the world, the origin of the concept of space remains largely mysterious. For example in the context of artificial perception, this issue is usually circumvented by having engineers pre-define the spatial structure of the problem the agent has to face. We here show that the structure of space can be autonomously discovered by a naive agent in the form of sensorimotor regularities, that correspond to so called compensable sensory experiences: these are experiences that can be generated either by the agent or its environment. By detecting such compensable experiences the agent can infer the topological and metric structure of the external space in which its body is moving. We propose a theoretical description of the nature of these regularities and illustrate the approach on a simulated robotic arm equipped with an eye-like sensor, and which interacts with an object. Finally we show how these regularities can be used to build an internal representation of the sensor's external spatial configuration.
Fundamental Concepts of Cyber Resilience: Introduction and Overview
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

Given the rapid evolution of threats to cyber systems, new management approaches are needed that address risk across all interdependent domains (i.e., physical, information, cognitive, and social) of cyber systems. Further, the traditional approach of hardening of cyber systems against identified threats has proven to be impossible. Therefore, in the same way that biological systems develop immunity as a way to respond to infections and other attacks, so too must cyber systems adapt to ever-changing threats that continue to attack vital system functions, and to bounce back from the effects of the attacks. Here, we explain the basic concepts of resilience in the context of systems, discuss related properties, and make business case of cyber resilience. We also offer a brief summary of ways to assess cyber resilience of a system, and approaches to improving cyber resilience.
Hybrid Precoding Architecture for Massive Multiuser MIMO with Dissipation: Sub-Connected or Fully-Connected Structures?
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we study the hybrid precoding structures over limited feedback channels for massive multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. We focus on the system performance of hybrid precoding under a more realistic hardware network model, particularly, with inevitable dissipation. The effect of quantized analog and digital precoding is characterized. We investigate the spectral efficiencies of two typical hybrid precoding structures, i.e., the sub-connected structure and the fully-connected structure. It is revealed that increasing signal power can compensate the performance loss incurred by quantized analog precoding. In addition, by capturing the nature of the effective channels for hybrid processing, we employ a channel correlation-based codebook and demonstrate that the codebook shows a great advantage over the conventional random vector quantization (RVQ) codebook. It is also discovered that, if the channel correlation-based codebook is utilized, the sub-connected structure always outperforms the fully-connected structure in either massive MIMO or low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) scenarios; otherwise, the fully-connected structrue achieves better performance. Simulation results under both Rayleigh fading channels and millimeter wave (mmWave) channels verify the conclusions above.
Convolutional Video Steganography with Temporal Residual Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2018
Year: 2018

Steganography represents the art of unobtrusively concealing a secrete message within some cover data. The key scope of this work is about visual steganography techniques that hide a full-sized color image / video within another. A majority of existing works are devoted to the image case, where both secret and cover data are images. We empirically validate that image steganography model does not naturally extend to the video case (i.e., hiding a video into another video), mainly because it completely ignores the temporal redundancy within consecutive video frames. Our work proposes a novel solution to the problem of video steganography. The technical contributions are two-fold: first, the residual between two consecutive frames tends to zero at most pixels. Hiding such highly-sparse data is significantly easier than hiding the original frames. Motivated by this fact, we propose to explicitly consider inter-frame residuals rather than blindly applying image steganography model on every video frame. Specifically, our model contains two branches, one of which is specially designed for hiding inter-frame difference into a cover video frame and the other instead hides the original secret frame. A simple thresholding method determines which branch a secret video frame shall choose. When revealing the concealed secret video, two decoders are devised, revealing difference or frame respectively. Second, we develop the model based on deep convolutional neural networks, which is the first of its kind in the literature of video steganography. In experiments, comprehensive evaluations are conducted to compare our model with both classic least significant bit (LSB) method and pure image steganography models. All results strongly suggest that the proposed model enjoys advantages over previous methods. We also carefully investigate key factors in the success of our deep video steganography model.
Locating the boundaries of Pareto fronts: A Many-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm Based on Corner Solution Search
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, an evolutionary many-objective optimization algorithm based on corner solution search (MaOEA-CS) was proposed. MaOEA-CS implicitly contains two phases: the exploitative search for the most important boundary optimal solutions - corner solutions, at the first phase, and the use of angle-based selection [1] with the explorative search for the extension of PF approximation at the second phase. Due to its high efficiency and robustness to the shapes of PFs, it has won the CEC'2017 Competition on Evolutionary Many-Objective Optimization. In addition, MaOEA-CS has also been applied on two real-world engineering optimization problems with very irregular PFs. The experimental results show that MaOEA-CS outperforms other six state-of-the-art compared algorithms, which indicates it has the ability to handle real-world complex optimization problems with irregular PFs.
Robust Node Generation for Meshfree Discretizations on Irregular Domains and Surfaces
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2018
Year: 2018

We present a new algorithm for the automatic one-shot generation of scattered node sets on irregular 2D and 3D domains using Poisson disk sampling coupled to novel parameter-free, high-order parametric Spherical Radial Basis Function (SBF)-based geometric modeling of irregular domain boundaries. Our algorithm also automatically modifies the scattered node sets locally for time-varying embedded boundaries in the domain interior. We derive complexity estimates for our node generator in 2D and 3D that establish its scalability, and verify these estimates with timing experiments. We explore the influence of Poisson disk sampling parameters on both quasi-uniformity in the node sets and errors in an RBF-FD discretization of the heat equation. In all cases, our framework requires only a small number of "seed" nodes on domain boundaries. The entire framework exhibits O(N) complexity in both 2D and 3D.
Unsupervised Feature Learning Toward a Real-time Vehicle Make and Model Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Vehicle Make and Model Recognition (MMR) systems provide a fully automatic framework to recognize and classify different vehicle models. Several approaches have been proposed to address this challenge, however they can perform in restricted conditions. Here, we formulate the vehicle make and model recognition as a fine-grained classification problem and propose a new configurable on-road vehicle make and model recognition framework. We benefit from the unsupervised feature learning methods and in more details we employ Locality constraint Linear Coding (LLC) method as a fast feature encoder for encoding the input SIFT features. The proposed method can perform in real environments of different conditions. This framework can recognize fifty models of vehicles and has an advantage to classify every other vehicle not belonging to one of the specified fifty classes as an unknown vehicle. The proposed MMR framework can be configured to become faster or more accurate based on the application domain. The proposed approach is examined on two datasets including Iranian on-road vehicle dataset and CompuCar dataset. The Iranian on-road vehicle dataset contains images of 50 models of vehicles captured in real situations by traffic cameras in different weather and lighting conditions. Experimental results show superiority of the proposed framework over the state-of-the-art methods on Iranian on-road vehicle datatset and comparable results on CompuCar dataset with 97.5% and 98.4% accuracies, respectively.
On Interference Dynamics in Matérn Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

A thorough understanding of the temporal dynamics of interference in wireless networks is crucial for the design of communication protocols, scheduling, and interference management. This paper applies stochastic geometry to investigate interference dynamics for the first time in a network with nodes that use carrier sense multiple access. This type of networks is approximated by a Matérn hard-core point process of type II with Nakagami fading. We derive and analyze expressions for the variance, covariance, and correlation of the interference power at a given point in space. Results show that even though the commonly used Poisson approximation to carrier sense multiple access may have the same average interference than the Matérn model, the three interference dynamics measurements investigated behave significantly different.
Deep multi-scale architectures for monocular depth estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

This paper aims at understanding the role of multi-scale information in the estimation of depth from monocular images. More precisely, the paper investigates four different deep CNN architectures, designed to explicitly make use of multi-scale features along the network, and compare them to a state-of-the-art single-scale approach. The paper also shows that involving multi-scale features in depth estimation not only improves the performance in terms of accuracy, but also gives qualitatively better depth maps. Experiments are done on the widely used NYU Depth dataset, on which the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Efficient Resource Allocation for On-Demand Mobile-Edge Cloud Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

Mobile-edge cloud computing is a new paradigm to provide cloud computing capabilities at the edge of pervasive radio access networks in close proximity to mobile users. Aiming at provisioning flexible on-demand mobile-edge cloud service, in this paper we propose a comprehensive framework consisting of a resource-efficient computation offloading mechanism for users and a joint communication and computation (JCC) resource allocation mechanism for network operator. Specifically, we first study the resource-efficient computation offloading problem for a user, in order to reduce user's resource occupation by determining its optimal communication and computation resource profile with minimum resource occupation and meanwhile satisfying the QoS constraint. We then tackle the critical problem of user admission control for JCC resource allocation, in order to properly select the set of users for resource demand satisfaction. We show the admission control problem is NP-hard, and hence develop an efficient approximation solution of a low complexity by carefully designing the user ranking criteria and rigourously derive its performance guarantee. To prevent the manipulation that some users may untruthfully report their valuations in acquiring mobile-edge cloud service, we further resort to the powerful tool of critical value approach to design truthful pricing scheme for JCC resource allocation. Extensive performance evaluation demonstrates that the proposed schemes can achieve superior performance for on-demand mobile-edge cloud computing.
Automatic Identification of Research Fields in Scientific Papers
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2018
Year: 2018

The TERRE-ISTEX project aims to identify scientific research dealing with specific geographical territories areas based on heterogeneous digital content available in scientific papers. The project is divided into three main work packages: (1) identification of the periods and places of empirical studies, and which reflect the publications resulting from the analyzed text samples, (2) identification of the themes which appear in these documents, and (3) development of a web-based geographical information retrieval tool (GIR). The first two actions combine Natural Language Processing patterns with text mining methods. The integration of the spatial, thematic and temporal dimensions in a GIR contributes to a better understanding of what kind of research has been carried out, of its topics and its geographical and historical coverage. Another originality of the TERRE-ISTEX project is the heterogeneous character of the corpus, including PhD theses and scientific articles from the ISTEX digital libraries and the CIRAD research center.
Fidelity-based Probabilistic Q-learning for Control of Quantum Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

The balance between exploration and exploitation is a key problem for reinforcement learning methods, especially for Q-learning. In this paper, a fidelity-based probabilistic Q-learning (FPQL) approach is presented to naturally solve this problem and applied for learning control of quantum systems. In this approach, fidelity is adopted to help direct the learning process and the probability of each action to be selected at a certain state is updated iteratively along with the learning process, which leads to a natural exploration strategy instead of a pointed one with configured parameters. A probabilistic Q-learning (PQL) algorithm is first presented to demonstrate the basic idea of probabilistic action selection. Then the FPQL algorithm is presented for learning control of quantum systems. Two examples (a spin- 1/2 system and a lamda-type atomic system) are demonstrated to test the performance of the FPQL algorithm. The results show that FPQL algorithms attain a better balance between exploration and exploitation, and can also avoid local optimal policies and accelerate the learning process.
Data-driven Analytics for Business Architectures: Proposed Use of Graph Theory
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2018
Year: 2018

Business Architecture (BA) plays a significant role in helping organizations understand enterprise structures and processes, and align them with strategic objectives. However, traditional BAs are represented in fixed structure with static model elements and fail to dynamically capture business insights based on internal and external data. To solve this problem, this paper introduces the graph theory into BAs with aim of building extensible data-driven analytics and automatically generating business insights. We use IBM's Component Business Model (CBM) as an example to illustrate various ways in which graph theory can be leveraged for data-driven analytics, including what and how business insights can be obtained. Future directions for applying graph theory to business architecture analytics are discussed.
(In)Secure Configuration Practices of WPA2 Enterprise Supplicants
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

WPA2 Enterprise is a fundamental technology for secure communication in enterprise wireless networks. A key requirement of this technology is that WiFi-enabled devices (i.e., supplicants) be correctly configured before connecting to the enterprise wireless network. Supplicants that are not configured correctly may fall prey of attacks aimed at stealing the network credentials very easily. Such credentials have an enormous value because they usually unlock access to all enterprise services. In this work we investigate whether users and technicians are aware of these important and widespread risks. We conducted two extensive analyses: a survey among approximately 1000 users about how they configured their WiFi devices for enterprise network access; and, a review of approximately 310 network configuration guides made available by enterprise network administrators. The results provide strong indications that the key requirement of WPA2 Enterprise is violated systematically and thus can no longer be considered realistic.
In-vehicle data recording, storage and access management in autonomous vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2018
Year: 2018

Transport sector is in the process of being rapidly and fundamentally reshaped by autonomous and collaborative driving technologies. This reshaping promises huge economic and social benefits as well as challenges in terms of developing and deploying secure and safe transportations systems, their smooth integration to social fabric. We have employed Policy Scan and Technology Strategy Design methodology in order to identify concrete societal expectations and problems and map them with mitigating technological availabilities in the domain of autonomous driving and smart mobility. Event Data Recorder for Autonomous Driving (EDR/AD) is an envisioned subsystem of a vehicular Controller Area Network which ensures the confidentiality, integrity and availability of data related to operation of a vehicle in order to permit recovery of exact situation following the occurrence of an event or on demand. The exact technical and regulatory requirements for the device are still in the development internationally, but it is clear that it will be included into vehicle type-approval requirements at UNECE level. We present an analysis of the context of the usage of the EDR/AD in collaborative intelligent transport systems, related security, data provenance and privacy, other regulatory and technical issues considering many interest groups and stakeholders involved. We present a concrete proposal for developing a EDR/AD proof of the concept prototype with clear market deployment potential and urge security researchers, vehicle manufacturers, and component suppliers to form a collaboration towards implementing important technology for making future autonomous vehicles more socially acceptable and legally compliant. Furthermore, EDR/AD technology, apart from its immediate use in autonomous driving and smart mobility domain has a potential to be extended to general autonomous robot and AI applications.
Ten Years of Research on Intelligent Educational Games for Learning Spelling and Mathematics
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2018
Year: 2018

In this article, we present our findings from ten years of research on intelligent educational games. We discuss the architecture of our training environments for learning spelling and mathematics, and specifically focus on the representation of the content and the controller that enables personalized trainings. We first show the multi-modal representation that reroutes information through multiple perceptual cues and discuss the game structure. We then present the data-driven student model that is used for a personalized, adaptive presentation of the content. We further leverage machine learning for analytics and visualization tools targeted at teachers and experts. A large data set consisting of training sessions of more than 20,000 children allows statistical interpretations and insights into the nature of learning.
DBBRBF- Convalesce optimization for software defect prediction problem using hybrid distribution base balance instance selection and radial basis Function classifier
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2018
Year: 2018

Software is becoming an indigenous part of human life with the rapid development of software engineering, demands the software to be most reliable. The reliability check can be done by efficient software testing methods using historical software prediction data for development of a quality software system. Machine Learning plays a vital role in optimizing the prediction of defect-prone modules in real life software for its effectiveness. The software defect prediction data has class imbalance problem with a low ratio of defective class to non-defective class, urges an efficient machine learning classification technique which otherwise degrades the performance of the classification. To alleviate this problem, this paper introduces a novel hybrid instance-based classification by combining distribution base balance based instance selection and radial basis function neural network classifier model (DBBRBF) to obtain the best prediction in comparison to the existing research. Class imbalanced data sets of NASA, Promise and Softlab were used for the experimental analysis. The experimental results in terms of Accuracy, F-measure, AUC, Recall, Precision, and Balance show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Finally, Statistical significance tests are carried out to understand the suitability of the proposed model.
DMCNN: Dual-Domain Multi-Scale Convolutional Neural Network for Compression Artifacts Removal
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

JPEG is one of the most commonly used standards among lossy image compression methods. However, JPEG compression inevitably introduces various kinds of artifacts, especially at high compression rates, which could greatly affect the Quality of Experience (QoE). Recently, convolutional neural network (CNN) based methods have shown excellent performance for removing the JPEG artifacts. Lots of efforts have been made to deepen the CNNs and extract deeper features, while relatively few works pay attention to the receptive field of the network. In this paper, we illustrate that the quality of output images can be significantly improved by enlarging the receptive fields in many cases. One step further, we propose a Dual-domain Multi-scale CNN (DMCNN) to take full advantage of redundancies on both the pixel and DCT domains. Experiments show that DMCNN sets a new state-of-the-art for the task of JPEG artifact removal.