OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Introducing Three Best Known Goppa Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

The current best known $[239, 21], \, [240, 21], \, \text{and} \, [241, 21]$ binary linear codes have minimum distance 98, 98, and 99 respectively. In this article, we introduce three binary Goppa codes with Goppa polynomials $(x^{17} + 1)^6, (x^{16} + x)^6,\text{ and } (x^{15} + 1)^6$. The Goppa codes are $[239, 21, 103], \, [240, 21, 104], \, \text{and} \, [241, 21, 104]$ binary linear codes respectively. These codes have greater minimum distance than the current best known codes with the respective length and dimension. In addition, with the techniques of puncturing, shortening, and extending, we find more derived codes with a better minimum distance than the current best known codes with the respective length and dimension.
A spatial model checker in GPU (extended version)
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2020
Year: 2020

The tool voxlogica merges the state-of-the-art library of computational imaging algorithms ITK with the combination of declarative specification and optimised execution provided by spatial logic model checking. The analysis of an existing benchmark for segmentation of brain tumours via a simple logical specification reached state-of-the-art accuracy. We present a new, GPU-based version of voxlogica and discuss its implementation, scalability, and applications.
My Team Will Go On: Differentiating High and Low Viability Teams through Team Interaction
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

Understanding team viability -- a team's capacity for sustained and future success -- is essential for building effective teams. In this study, we aggregate features drawn from the organizational behavior literature to train a viability classification model over a dataset of 669 10-minute text conversations of online teams. We train classifiers to identify teams at the top decile (most viable teams), 50th percentile (above a median split), and bottom decile (least viable teams), then characterize the attributes of teams at each of these viability levels. We find that a lasso regression model achieves an accuracy of .74--.92 AUC ROC under different thresholds of classifying viability scores. From these models, we identify the use of exclusive language such as `but' and `except', and the use of second person pronouns, as the most predictive features for detecting the most viable teams, suggesting that active engagement with others' ideas is a crucial signal of a viable team. Only a small fraction of the 10-minute discussion, as little as 70 seconds, is required for predicting the viability of team interaction. This work suggests opportunities for teams to assess, track, and visualize their own viability in real time as they collaborate.
Towards Accurate Quantization and Pruning via Data-free Knowledge Transfer
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

When large scale training data is available, one can obtain compact and accurate networks to be deployed in resource-constrained environments effectively through quantization and pruning. However, training data are often protected due to privacy concerns and it is challenging to obtain compact networks without data. We study data-free quantization and pruning by transferring knowledge from trained large networks to compact networks. Auxiliary generators are simultaneously and adversarially trained with the targeted compact networks to generate synthetic inputs that maximize the discrepancy between the given large network and its quantized or pruned version. We show theoretically that the alternating optimization for the underlying minimax problem converges under mild conditions for pruning and quantization. Our data-free compact networks achieve competitive accuracy to networks trained and fine-tuned with training data. Our quantized and pruned networks achieve good performance while being more compact and lightweight. Further, we demonstrate that the compact structure and corresponding initialization from the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis can also help in data-free training.
How Research Software Engineers Can Support Scientific Software
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2020
Year: 2020

We are research software engineers and team members in the Department of Software Engineering and Research at Sandia National Laboratories, an organization which aims to advance software engineering in the domain of computational science. Our team hopes to promote processes and principles that lead to quality, rigor, correctness, and repeatability in the implementation of algorithms and applications in scientific software for high consequence applications. We use our experience to argue that there is a readily achievable set of software tools and best practices with a large return on investment that can be imparted upon scientific researchers that will remarkably improve the quality of software and, as a result, the quality of research.
Explainability for fair machine learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

As the decisions made or influenced by machine learning models increasingly impact our lives, it is crucial to detect, understand, and mitigate unfairness. But even simply determining what "unfairness" should mean in a given context is non-trivial: there are many competing definitions, and choosing between them often requires a deep understanding of the underlying task. It is thus tempting to use model explainability to gain insights into model fairness, however existing explainability tools do not reliably indicate whether a model is indeed fair. In this work we present a new approach to explaining fairness in machine learning, based on the Shapley value paradigm. Our fairness explanations attribute a model's overall unfairness to individual input features, even in cases where the model does not operate on sensitive attributes directly. Moreover, motivated by the linearity of Shapley explainability, we propose a meta algorithm for applying existing training-time fairness interventions, wherein one trains a perturbation to the original model, rather than a new model entirely. By explaining the original model, the perturbation, and the fair-corrected model, we gain insight into the accuracy-fairness trade-off that is being made by the intervention. We further show that this meta algorithm enjoys both flexibility and stability benefits with no loss in performance.
A new approach for extracting the conceptual schema of texts based on the linguistic Thematic Progression theory
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

The purpose of this article is to present a new approach for the discovery and labelling of the implicit conceptual schema of texts through the application of the Thematic Progression theory. The underlying conceptual schema is the core component for the generation of summaries that are genuinely consistent with the semantics of the text.
Bayesian Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network for Traffic Forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

In traffic forecasting, graph convolutional networks (GCNs), which model traffic flows as spatio-temporal graphs, have achieved remarkable performance. However, existing GCN-based methods heuristically define the graph structure as the physical topology of the road network, ignoring potential dependence of the graph structure over traffic data. And the defined graph structure is deterministic, which lacks investigation of uncertainty. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network (BSTGCN) for traffic prediction. The graph structure in our network is learned from the physical topology of the road network and traffic data in an end-to-end manner, which discovers a more accurate description of the relationship among traffic flows. Moreover, a parametric generative model is proposed to represent the graph structure, which enhances the generalization capability of GCNs. We verify the effectiveness of our method on two real-world datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate that BSTGCN attains superior performance compared with state-of-the-art methods.
5G-Flow: Flexible and Efficient 5G RAN Architecture Using OpenFlow
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

Convergence of multiple access technologies is one of the key enablers in providing a diverse set of services to the Fifth Generation (5G) users. Though the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) 5G standard defines a common core supporting multiple Radio Access Technologies (RATs), Radio Access Network (RAN) level decisions are taken separately across individual RATs as the existing 5G architecture lacks a unified control and management framework for a multi-RAT network. A unified access network is likely to utilize RAN resources more efficiently and provide an improved performance. To bridge these gaps, we present an OpenFlow based RAN architecture comprising multiple RATs. We refer to it as \textit{5G-Flow}. With minimal changes in the 3GPP 5G RAN and none in the core network, we are able to realize a unified and integrated multi-access 5G-Flow RAN. We simplify the existing 3GPP 5G RAN by replacing RAN nodes with OpenFlow switches and a Software-Defined Networking (SDN) controller. Moreover, a UE in the 5G-Flow network can use 5G RAN to connect to any core network (4G or 5G) or directly connect to Internet without going via the core network. We also present a simple method to realize 5G non-standalone architecture using 5G-Flow RAN. We have developed an evaluation platform to compare the performance of our architecture with the standard 3GPP 5G network. Results demonstrate significant gains in the network performance of 5G-Flow RAN architecture over the existing 3GPP 5G network.
Matched Quantized Min-Sum Decoding of Low-Density Parity-Check Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

A quantized message passing decoding algorithm for low-density parity-check codes is presented. The algorithm relies on the min approximation at the check nodes, and on modelling the variable node inbound messages as observations of an extrinsic discrete memoryless channel. The performance of the algorithm is analyzed and compared to quantized min-sum decoding by means of density evolution, and almost closes the gap with the performance of the sum-product algorithm. A stability analysis is derived, which highlights the role played by degree-$3$ variable nodes in the stability condition. Finite-length simulation results confirm large gains predicted by the asymptotic analysis.
Adversarial Images through Stega Glasses
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

This paper explores the connection between steganography and adversarial images. On the one hand, ste-ganalysis helps in detecting adversarial perturbations. On the other hand, steganography helps in forging adversarial perturbations that are not only invisible to the human eye but also statistically undetectable. This work explains how to use these information hiding tools for attacking or defending computer vision image classification. We play this cat and mouse game with state-of-art classifiers, steganalyzers, and steganographic embedding schemes. It turns out that steganography helps more the attacker than the defender.
Improving Constituency Parsing with Span Attention
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Constituency parsing is a fundamental and important task for natural language understanding, where a good representation of contextual information can help this task. N-grams, which is a conventional type of feature for contextual information, have been demonstrated to be useful in many tasks, and thus could also be beneficial for constituency parsing if they are appropriately modeled. In this paper, we propose span attention for neural chart-based constituency parsing to leverage n-gram information. Considering that current chart-based parsers with Transformer-based encoder represent spans by subtraction of the hidden states at the span boundaries, which may cause information loss especially for long spans, we incorporate n-grams into span representations by weighting them according to their contributions to the parsing process. Moreover, we propose categorical span attention to further enhance the model by weighting n-grams within different length categories, and thus benefit long-sentence parsing. Experimental results on three widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in parsing Arabic, Chinese, and English, where state-of-the-art performance is obtained by our approach on all of them.
MOTChallenge: A Benchmark for Single-Camera Multiple Target Tracking
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Standardized benchmarks have been crucial in pushing the performance of computer vision algorithms, especially since the advent of deep learning. Although leaderboards should not be over-claimed, they often provide the most objective measure of performance and are therefore important guides for research. We present MOTChallenge, a benchmark for single-camera Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) launched in late 2014, to collect existing and new data, and create a framework for the standardized evaluation of multiple object tracking methods. The benchmark is focused on multiple people tracking, since pedestrians are by far the most studied object in the tracking community, with applications ranging from robot navigation to self-driving cars. This paper collects the first three releases of the benchmark: (i) MOT15, along with numerous state-of-the-art results that were submitted in the last years, (ii) MOT16, which contains new challenging videos, and (iii) MOT17, that extends MOT16 sequences with more precise labels and evaluates tracking performance on three different object detectors. The second and third release not only offers a significant increase in the number of labeled boxes but also provide labels for multiple object classes beside pedestrians, as well as the level of visibility for every single object of interest. We finally provide a categorization of state-of-the-art trackers and a broad error analysis. This will help newcomers understand the related work and research trends in the MOT community, and hopefully shed some light on potential future research directions.
Interactive Latent Interpolation on MNIST Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

This paper will discuss the potential of dimensionality reduction with a web-based use of GANs. Throughout a variety of experiments, we show synthesizing visually-appealing samples, interpolating meaningfully between samples, and performing linear arithmetic with latent vectors. GANs have proved to be a remarkable technique to produce computer-generated images, very similar to an original image. This is primarily useful when coupled with dimensionality reduction as an effective application of our algorithm. We proposed a new architecture for GANs, which ended up not working for mathematical reasons later explained. We then proposed a new web-based GAN that still takes advantage of dimensionality reduction to speed generation in the browser to .2 milliseconds. Lastly, we made a modern UI with linear interpolation to present the work. With the speedy generation, we can generate so fast that we can create an animation type effect that we have never seen before that works on both web and mobile.
Adaptive Offline and Online Similarity-Based Caching
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

With similarity-based content delivery, the request for a content can be satisfied by delivering a related content under a dissimilarity cost. This letter addresses the joint optimization of caching and similarity-based delivery decisions across a network so as to minimize the weighted sum of average delay and dissimilarity cost. A convergent alternate gradient descent ascent algorithm is first introduced for an offline scenario with prior knowledge of the request rates, and then extended to an online setting. Numerical results validate the advantages of the approach with respect to standard per-cache solutions.
Survive the Schema Changes: Integration of Unmanaged Data Using Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2020
Year: 2020

Data is the king in the age of AI. However data integration is often a laborious task that is hard to automate. Schema change is one significant obstacle to the automation of the end-to-end data integration process. Although there exist mechanisms such as query discovery and schema modification language to handle the problem, these approaches can only work with the assumption that the schema is maintained by a database. However, we observe diversified schema changes in heterogeneous data and open data, most of which has no schema defined. In this work, we propose to use deep learning to automatically deal with schema changes through a super cell representation and automatic injection of perturbations to the training data to make the model robust to schema changes. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach is effective for two real-world data integration scenarios: coronavirus data integration, and machine log integration.
A Methodology for Ethics-by-Design AI Systems: Dealing with Human Value Conflicts
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

The introduction of artificial intelligence into activities traditionally carried out by human beings produces brutal changes. This is not without consequences for human values. This paper is about designing and implementing models of ethical behaviors in AI-based systems, and more specifically it presents a methodology for designing systems that take ethical aspects into account at an early stage while finding an innovative solution to prevent human values from being affected. Two case studies where AI-based innovations complement economic and social proposals with this methodology are presented: one in the field of culture and operated by a private company, the other in the field of scientific research and supported by a state organization.
The NeteaseGames System for Voice Conversion Challenge 2020 with Vector-quantization Variational Autoencoder and WaveNet
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2020
Year: 2020

This paper presents the description of our submitted system for Voice Conversion Challenge (VCC) 2020 with vector-quantization variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE) with WaveNet as the decoder, i.e., VQ-VAE-WaveNet. VQ-VAE-WaveNet is a nonparallel VAE-based voice conversion that reconstructs the acoustic features along with separating the linguistic information with speaker identity. The model is further improved with the WaveNet cycle as the decoder to generate the high-quality speech waveform, since WaveNet, as an autoregressive neural vocoder, has achieved the SoTA result of waveform generation. In practice, our system can be developed with VCC 2020 dataset for both Task 1 (intra-lingual) and Task 2 (cross-lingual). However, we only submit our system for the intra-lingual voice conversion task. The results of VCC 2020 demonstrate that our system VQ-VAE-WaveNet achieves: 3.04 mean opinion score (MOS) in naturalness and a 3.28 average score in similarity ( the speaker similarity percentage (Sim) of 75.99%) for Task 1. The subjective evaluations also reveal that our system gives top performance when no supervised learning is involved. What's more, our system performs well in some objective evaluations. Specifically, our system achieves an average score of 3.95 in naturalness in automatic naturalness prediction and ranked the 6th and 8th, respectively in ASV-based speaker similarity and spoofing countermeasures.
DialogueTRM: Exploring the Intra- and Inter-Modal Emotional Behaviors in the Conversation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC) is essential for building empathetic human-machine systems. Existing studies on ERC primarily focus on summarizing the context information in a conversation, however, ignoring the differentiated emotional behaviors within and across different modalities. Designing appropriate strategies that fit the differentiated multi-modal emotional behaviors can produce more accurate emotional predictions. Thus, we propose the DialogueTransformer to explore the differentiated emotional behaviors from the intra- and inter-modal perspectives. For intra-modal, we construct a novel Hierarchical Transformer that can easily switch between sequential and feed-forward structures according to the differentiated context preference within each modality. For inter-modal, we constitute a novel Multi-Grained Interactive Fusion that applies both neuron- and vector-grained feature interactions to learn the differentiated contributions across all modalities. Experimental results show that DialogueTRM outperforms the state-of-the-art by a significant margin on three benchmark datasets.
Joint Beamforming and Phase Shift Optimization for Multicell IRS-aided OFDMA-URLLC Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

This paper investigates the resource allocation algorithm design for intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) aided multiple-input single-output (MISO) orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) multicell networks, where a set of base stations cooperate to serve a set of ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) users. The IRS is deployed to enhance the communication channel and increase reliability by creating a virtual line of sight for URLLC users with unfavorable propagation conditions. This is the first study on IRS-enhanced OFDMA-URLLC systems. The resource allocation algorithm design is formulated as an optimization problem for the maximization of the weighted system sum throughput while guaranteeing the quality of service of the URLLC users. The optimization problem is non-convex and finding the globally optimal solution entails a high computational complexity which is not desirable for real-time applications. Therefore, a suboptimal iterative algorithm is proposed which \textit{jointly} optimizes all optimization variables in each iteration using a new iterative rank minimization approach. The algorithm is guaranteed to converge to a locally optimal solution of the formulated optimization problem. Our simulation results show that the proposed IRS design facilitates URLLC and yields large performance gains compared to two baseline schemes.
On the Importance of Domain Model Configuration for Automated Planning Engines
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

The development of domain-independent planners within the AI Planning community is leading to "off-the-shelf" technology that can be used in a wide range of applications. Moreover, it allows a modular approach --in which planners and domain knowledge are modules of larger software applications-- that facilitates substitutions or improvements of individual modules without changing the rest of the system. This approach also supports the use of reformulation and configuration techniques, which transform how a model is represented in order to improve the efficiency of plan generation. In this article, we investigate how the performance of domain-independent planners is affected by domain model configuration, i.e., the order in which elements are ordered in the model, particularly in the light of planner comparisons. We then introduce techniques for the online and offline configuration of domain models, and we analyse the impact of domain model configuration on other reformulation approaches, such as macros.