OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Transient Delay Bounds for Multi-Hop Wireless Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

In this article, we investigate the transient behavior of a sequence of packets/bits traversing a multi-hop wireless network. Our work is motivated by novel applications from the domain of process automation, Machine-Type Communication (MTC) and cyber-physical systems, where short messages are communicated and statistical guarantees need to be provided on a per-message level. In order to optimize such a network, apart from understanding the stationary system dynamics, an understanding of the short-term dynamics (i.e., transient behavior) is also required. To this end, we derive novel Wireless Transient Bounds (WTB) for end-to-end delay and backlog in a multi-hop wireless network using stochastic network calculus approach. WTB depends on the initial backlog at each node as well as the instantaneous channel states. We numerically compare WTB with State-Of-The-Art Transient bounds (SOTAT), that can be obtained by adapting existing stationary bounds, as well as simulation of the network. While SOTAT and stationary bounds are not able to capture the short-term system dynamics well, WTB provides relatively tight upper bound and has a decay rate that closely matches the simulation. This is achieved by WTB only with a slight increase in the computational complexity, by a factor of O(T + N), where T is the duration of the arriving sequence and N is the number of hops in the network. We believe that the presented analysis and the bounds can be used as base for future work on transient network optimization, e.g., in massive MTC, critical MTC, edge computing and autonomous vehicle.
A Content-Based Late Fusion Approach Applied to Pedestrian Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

The variety of pedestrians detectors proposed in recent years has encouraged some works to fuse pedestrian detectors to achieve a more accurate detection. The intuition behind is to combine the detectors based on its spatial consensus. We propose a novel method called Content-Based Spatial Consensus (CSBC), which, in addition to relying on spatial consensus, considers the content of the detection windows to learn a weighted-fusion of pedestrian detectors. The result is a reduction in false alarms and an enhancement in the detection. In this work, we also demonstrate that there is small influence of the feature used to learn the contents of the windows of each detector, which enables our method to be efficient even employing simple features. The CSBC overcomes state-of-the-art fusion methods in the ETH dataset and in the Caltech dataset. Particularly, our method is more efficient since fewer detectors are necessary to achieve expressive results.
Self-Stabilizing and Private Distributed Shared Atomic Memory in Seldomly Fair Message Passing Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

We study the problem of privately emulating shared memory in message-passing networks. The system includes clients that store and retrieve replicated information on N servers, out of which e are malicious. When a client access a malicious server, the data field of that server response might be different than the value it originally stored. However, all other control variables in the server reply and protocol actions are according to the server algorithm. For the coded atomic storage (CAS) algorithms by Cadambe et al., we present an enhancement that ensures no information leakage and malicious fault-tolerance. We also consider recovery after the occurrence of transient faults that violate the assumptions according to which the system is to behave. After their last occurrence, transient faults leave the system in an arbitrary state (while the program code stays intact). We present a self-stabilizing algorithm, which recovers after the occurrence of transient faults. This addition to Cadambe et al. considers asynchronous settings as long as no transient faults occur. The recovery from transient faults that bring the system counters (close) to their maximal values may include the use of a global reset procedure, which requires the system run to be controlled by a fair scheduler. After the recovery period, the safety properties are provided for asynchronous system runs that are not necessarily controlled by fair schedulers. Since the recovery period is bounded and the occurrence of transient faults is extremely rare, we call this design criteria self-stabilization in the presence of seldom fairness. Our self-stabilizing algorithm uses a bounded storage during asynchronous executions (that are not necessarily fair). To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to address privacy and self-stabilization in the context of emulating atomic shared memory in networked systems.
Feature Pyramid Network for Multi-Class Land Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Semantic segmentation is in-demand in satellite imagery processing. Because of the complex environment, automatic categorization and segmentation of land cover is a challenging problem. Solving it can help to overcome many obstacles in urban planning, environmental engineering or natural landscape monitoring. In this paper, we propose an approach for automatic multi-class land segmentation based on a fully convolutional neural network of feature pyramid network (FPN) family. This network is consisted of pre-trained on ImageNet Resnet50 encoder and neatly developed decoder. Based on validation results, leaderboard score and our own experience this network shows reliable results for the DEEPGLOBE - CVPR 2018 land cover classification sub-challenge. Moreover, this network moderately uses memory that allows using GTX 1080 or 1080 TI video cards to perform whole training and makes pretty fast predictions.
Improving the Reliability of Mobility Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2018
Year: 2018

The Android platform was introduced by Google in 2008 as an operating system for mobile devices. Android's SDK provides a wide support for programming and extensive examples and documentation. Reliability is an increasing concern for Smart Phone applications since they often feature personal information and data. Therefore, techniques and tools for checking the correct behavior of apps are required. This paper shows how the Event-B method can be used to reason and to verify the design of Android apps and how this can be used to document implementation decisions. Our approach consists in modeling the core functionality of the app in Event-B and using the evidence shown by the Proof Obligations generated to reason about the design and the implementation of the app. Although we do not propose a novel approach, we prove that heavyweight Formal Methods (FMs) techniques with Event-B can effectively be used to support the development of correct Android apps. We present a case study in which we design the core functionality of WhatsApp in Event-B, we encode it over three machine refinements modeling basic functionality (chatting, deleting content, forwarding content, deleting a chat session, etc.), read and unread status of chat sessions, and implementation details, respectively. We report and discuss on underlying challenges in the design and implementation of the core functionality.
UAV-Enabled Communication Using NOMA
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be deployed as flying base stations (BSs) to leverage the strength of line-of-sight connections and effectively support the coverage and throughput of wireless communication. This paper considers a multiuser communication system, in which a single-antenna UAV-BS serves a large number of ground users by employing non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA). The max-min rate optimization problem is formulated under total power, total bandwidth, UAV altitude, and antenna beamwdith constraints. The objective of max-min rate optimization is non-convex in all optimization variables, i.e. UAV altitude, transmit antenna beamwidth, power allocation and bandwidth allocation for multiple users. A path-following algorithm is proposed to solve the formulated problem. Next, orthogonal multiple access (OMA) and dirty paper coding (DPC)-based max-min rate optimization problems are formulated and respective path-following algorithms are developed to solve them. Numerical results show that NOMA outperforms OMA and achieves rates similar to those attained by DPC. In addition, a clear rate gain is observed by jointly optimizing all the parameters rather than optimizing a subset of parameters, which confirms the desirability of their joint optimization.
Transformationally Identical and Invariant Convolutional Neural Networks through Symmetric Element Operators
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Mathematically speaking, a transformationally invariant operator, such as a transformationally identical (TI) matrix kernel (i.e., K= T{K}), commutes with the transformation (T{.}) itself when they operate on the first operand matrix. We found that by consistently applying the same type of TI kernels in a convolutional neural networks (CNN) system, the commutative property holds throughout all layers of convolution processes with and without involving an activation function and/or a 1D convolution across channels within a layer. We further found that any CNN possessing the same TI kernel property for all convolution layers followed by a flatten layer with weight sharing among their transformation corresponding elements would output the same result for all transformation versions of the original input vector. In short, CNN[ Vi ] = CNN[ T{Vi} ] providing every K = T{K} in CNN, where Vi denotes input vector and CNN[.] represents the whole CNN process as a function of input vector that produces an output vector. With such a transformationally identical CNN (TI-CNN) system, each transformation, that is not associated with a predefined TI used in data augmentation, would inherently include all of its corresponding transformation versions of the input vector for the training. Hence the use of same TI property for every kernel in the CNN would serve as an orientation or a translation independent training guide in conjunction with the error-backpropagation during the training. This TI kernel property is desirable for applications requiring a highly consistent output result from corresponding transformation versions of an input. Several C programming routines are provided to facilitate interested parties of using the TI-CNN technique which is expected to produce a better generalization performance than its ordinary CNN counterpart.
Data-Driven Optimal Control Using Perron-Frobenius Operator
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we propose a data-driven approach for control of nonlinear dynamical systems. The proposed data-driven approach relies on transfer Koopman and Perron-Frobenius (P-F) operators for linear representation and control of such systems. Systematic model-based frameworks involving linear transfer P-F operator were proposed for almost everywhere stability analysis and control design of a nonlinear dynamical system in previous works [1-3]. Lyapunov measure can be used as a tool to provide linear programming-based computational framework for stability analysis and almost everywhere stabilizing control design of a nonlinear system. In this paper, we show that those frameworks can be extended to a data-driven setting, where the finite dimensional approximation of linear transfer P-F operator and stabilizing feedback controller can be obtained from time-series data. We exploit the positivity and Markov property of these operators and their finite-dimensional approximation to provide {\it linear programming} based approach for designing an optimally stabilizing feedback controller.
The Impact of Humanoid Affect Expression on Human Behavior in a Game-Theoretic Setting
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2018
Year: 2018

With the rapid development of robot and other intelligent and autonomous agents, how a human could be influenced by a robot's expressed mood when making decisions becomes a crucial question in human-robot interaction. In this pilot study, we investigate (1) in what way a robot can express a certain mood to influence a human's decision making behavioral model; (2) how and to what extent the human will be influenced in a game theoretic setting. More specifically, we create an NLP model to generate sentences that adhere to a specific affective expression profile. We use these sentences for a humanoid robot as it plays a Stackelberg security game against a human. We investigate the behavioral model of the human player.
Unsupervised Video-to-Video Translation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Unsupervised image-to-image translation is a recently proposed task of translating an image to a different style or domain given only unpaired image examples at training time. In this paper, we formulate a new task of unsupervised video-to-video translation, which poses its own unique challenges. Translating video implies learning not only the appearance of objects and scenes but also realistic motion and transitions between consecutive frames.We investigate the performance of per-frame video-to-video translation using existing image-to-image translation networks, and propose a spatio-temporal 3D translator as an alternative solution to this problem. We evaluate our 3D method on multiple synthetic datasets, such as moving colorized digits, as well as the realistic segmentation-to-video GTA dataset and a new CT-to-MRI volumetric images translation dataset. Our results show that frame-wise translation produces realistic results on a single frame level but underperforms significantly on the scale of the whole video compared to our three-dimensional translation approach, which is better able to learn the complex structure of video and motion and continuity of object appearance.
Joint Beamforming and Power Allocation in Downlink NOMA Multiuser MIMO Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, a novel joint design of beamforming and power allocation is proposed for a multi-cell multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) network. In this network, base stations (BSs) adopt coordinated multipoint (CoMP) for downlink transmission. We study a new scenario where the users are divided into two groups according to their quality-of-service (QoS) requirements, rather than their channel qualities as investigated in the literature. Our proposed joint design aims to maximize the sum-rate of the users in one group with the best-effort while guaranteeing the minimum required target rates of the users in the other group. The joint design is formulated as a non-convex NP-hard problem. To make the problem tractable, a series of transformations are adopted to simplify the design problem. Then, an iterative suboptimal resource allocation algorithm based on successive convex approximation is proposed. In each iteration, a rank-constrained optimization problem is solved optimally via semidefinite program relaxation. Numerical results reveal that the proposed scheme offers significant sum-rate gains compared to the existing schemes and converges fast to a suboptimal solution.
Greybox fuzzing as a contextual bandits problem
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2018
Year: 2018

Greybox fuzzing is one of the most useful and effective techniques for the bug detection in large scale application programs. It uses minimal amount of instrumentation. American Fuzzy Lop (AFL) is a popular coverage based evolutionary greybox fuzzing tool. AFL performs extremely well in fuzz testing large applications and finding critical vulnerabilities, but AFL involves a lot of heuristics while deciding the favored test case(s), skipping test cases during fuzzing, assigning fuzzing iterations to test case(s). In this work, we aim at replacing the heuristics the AFL uses while assigning the fuzzing iterations to a test case during the random fuzzing. We formalize this problem as a `contextual bandit problem' and we propose an algorithm to solve this problem. We have implemented our approach on top of the AFL. We modify the AFL's heuristics with our learned model through the policy gradient method. Our learning algorithm selects the multiplier of the number of fuzzing iterations to be assigned to a test case during random fuzzing, given a fixed length substring of the test case to be fuzzed. We fuzz the substring with this new energy value and continuously updates the policy based upon the interesting test cases it produces on fuzzing.
HetNetAligner: Design and Implementation of an algorithm for heterogeneous network alignment on Apache Spark
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

The importance of the use of networks to model and analyse biological data and the interplay of bio-molecules is widely recognised. Consequently, many algorithms for the analysis and the comparison of networks (such as alignment algorithms) have been developed in the past. Recently, many different approaches tried to integrate into a single model the interplay of different molecules, such as genes, transcription factors and microRNAs. A possible formalism to model such scenario comes from node coloured networks (or heterogeneous networks) implemented as node/ edge-coloured graphs. Consequently, the need for the introduction of alignment algorithms able to analyse heterogeneous networks arises. To the best of our knowledge, all the existing algorithms are not able to mine heterogeneous networks. We propose a two-step alignment strategy that receives as input two heterogeneous networks (node-coloured graphs) and a similarity function among nodes of two networks extending the previous formulations. We first build a single alignment graph. Then we mine this graph extracting relevant subgraphs. Despite this simple approach, the analysis of such networks relies on graph and subgraph isomorphism and the size of the data is still growing. Therefore the use of high-performance data analytics framework is needed. We here present HetNetAligner a framework built on top of Apache Spark. We also implemented our algorithm, and we tested it on some selected heterogeneous biological networks. Preliminary results confirm that our method may extract relevant knowledge from biological data reducing the computational time.
Object detection and tracking benchmark in industry based on improved correlation filter
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Real-time object detection and tracking have shown to be the basis of intelligent production for industrial 4.0 applications. It is a challenging task because of various distorted data in complex industrial setting. The correlation filter (CF) has been used to trade off the low-cost computation and high performance. However, traditional CF training strategy can not get satisfied performance for the various industrial data; because the simple sampling(bagging) during training process will not find the exact solutions in a data space with a large diversity. In this paper, we propose Dijkstra-distance based correlation filters (DBCF), which establishes a new learning framework that embeds distribution-related constraints into the multi-channel correlation filters (MCCF). DBCF is able to handle the huge variations existing in the industrial data by improving those constraints based on the shortest path among all solutions. To evaluate DBCF, we build a new dataset as the benchmark for industrial 4.0 application. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DBCF produces high performance and exceeds the state-of-the-art methods. The dataset and source code can be found at https://github.com/bczhangbczhang
Interdependent Values without Single-Crossing
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2018
Year: 2018

We consider a setting where an auctioneer sells a single item to $n$ potential agents with {\em interdependent values}. That is, each agent has her own private signal, and the valuation of each agent is a known function of all $n$ private signals. This captures settings such as valuations for artwork, oil drilling rights, broadcast rights, and many more. In the interdependent value setting, all previous work has assumed a so-called {\sl single-crossing condition}. Single-crossing means that the impact of agent $i$'s private signal, $s_i$, on her own valuation is greater than the impact of $s_i$ on the valuation of any other agent. It is known that without the single-crossing condition an efficient outcome cannot be obtained. We study welfare maximization for interdependent valuations through the lens of approximation. We show that, in general, without the single-crossing condition, one cannot hope to approximate the optimal social welfare any better than the approximation given by assigning the item to a random bidder. Consequently, we introduce a relaxed version of single-crossing, {\sl $c$-single-crossing}, parameterized by $c\geq 1$, which means that the impact of $s_i$ on the valuation of agent $i$ is at least $1/c$ times the impact of $s_i$ on the valuation of any other agent ($c=1$ is single-crossing). Using this parameterized notion, we obtain a host of positive results. We propose a prior-free deterministic mechanism that gives an $(n-1)c$-approximation guarantee to welfare. We then show that a random version of the proposed mechanism gives a prior-free universally truthful $2c$-approximation to the optimal welfare for any concave $c$-single crossing setting (and a $2\sqrt{n}c^{3/2}$-approximation in the absence of concavity). We extend this mechanism to a universally truthful mechanism that gives $O(c^2)$-approximation to the optimal revenue.
When and where do feed-forward neural networks learn localist representations?
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2018
Year: 2018

According to parallel distributed processing (PDP) theory in psychology, neural networks (NN) learn distributed rather than interpretable localist representations. This view has been held so strongly that few researchers have analysed single units to determine if this assumption is correct. However, recent results from psychology, neuroscience and computer science have shown the occasional existence of local codes emerging in artificial and biological neural networks. In this paper, we undertake the first systematic survey of when local codes emerge in a feed-forward neural network, using generated input and output data with known qualities. We find that the number of local codes that emerge from a NN follows a well-defined distribution across the number of hidden layer neurons, with a peak determined by the size of input data, number of examples presented and the sparsity of input data. Using a 1-hot output code drastically decreases the number of local codes on the hidden layer. The number of emergent local codes increases with the percentage of dropout applied to the hidden layer, suggesting that the localist encoding may offer a resilience to noisy networks. This data suggests that localist coding can emerge from feed-forward PDP networks and suggests some of the conditions that may lead to interpretable localist representations in the cortex. The findings highlight how local codes should not be dismissed out of hand.