OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
DiagNet: towards a generic, Internet-scale root cause analysis solution
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

Diagnosing problems in Internet-scale services remains particularly difficult and costly for both content providers and ISPs. Because the Internet is decentralized, the cause of such problems might lie anywhere between an end-user's device and the service datacenters. Further, the set of possible problems and causes is not known in advance, making it impossible in practice to train a classifier with all combinations of problems, causes and locations. In this paper, we explore how different machine learning techniques can be used for Internet-scale root cause analysis using measurements taken from end-user devices. We show how to build generic models that (i) are agnostic to the underlying network topology, (ii) do not require to define the full set of possible causes during training, and (iii) can be quickly adapted to diagnose new services. Our solution, DiagNet, adapts concepts from image processing research to handle network and system metrics. We evaluate DiagNet with a multi-cloud deployment of online services with injected faults and emulated clients with automated browsers. We demonstrate promising root cause analysis capabilities, with a recall of 73.9% including causes only being introduced at inference time.
Knife and Threat Detectors
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Despite rapid advances in image-based machine learning, the threat identification of a knife wielding attacker has not garnered substantial academic attention. This relative research gap appears less understandable given the high knife assault rate (>100,000 annually) and the increasing availability of public video surveillance to analyze and forensically document. We present three complementary methods for scoring automated threat identification using multiple knife image datasets, each with the goal of narrowing down possible assault intentions while minimizing misidentifying false positives and risky false negatives. To alert an observer to the knife-wielding threat, we test and deploy classification built around MobileNet in a sparse and pruned neural network with a small memory requirement (< 2.2 megabytes) and 95% test accuracy. We secondly train a detection algorithm (MaskRCNN) to segment the hand from the knife in a single image and assign probable certainty to their relative location. This segmentation accomplishes both localization with bounding boxes but also relative positions to infer overhand threats. A final model built on the PoseNet architecture assigns anatomical waypoints or skeletal features to narrow the threat characteristics and reduce misunderstood intentions. We further identify and supplement existing data gaps that might blind a deployed knife threat detector such as collecting innocuous hand and fist images as important negative training sets. When automated on commodity hardware and software solutions one original research contribution is this systematic survey of timely and readily available image-based alerts to task and prioritize crime prevention countermeasures prior to a tragic outcome.
A white-box analysis on the writer-independent dichotomy transformation applied to offline handwritten signature verification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

High number of writers, small number of training samples per writer with high intra-class variability and heavily imbalanced class distributions are among the challenges and difficulties of the offline Handwritten Signature Verification (HSV) problem. A good alternative to tackle these issues is to use a writer-independent (WI) framework. In WI systems, a single model is trained to perform signature verification for all writers from a dissimilarity space generated by the dichotomy transformation. Among the advantages of this framework is its scalability to deal with some of these challenges and its ease in managing new writers, and hence of being used in a transfer learning context. In this work, we present a white-box analysis of this approach highlighting how it handles the challenges, the dynamic selection of references through fusion function, and its application for transfer learning. All the analyses are carried out at the instance level using the instance hardness (IH) measure. The experimental results show that, using the IH analysis, we were able to characterize "good" and "bad" quality skilled forgeries as well as the frontier region between positive and negative samples. This enables futures investigations on methods for improving discrimination between genuine signatures and skilled forgeries by considering these characterizations.
Granular Computing: An Augmented Scheme of Degranulation Through a Modified Partition Matrix
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

As an important technology in artificial intelligence Granular Computing (GrC) has emerged as a new multi-disciplinary paradigm and received much attention in recent years. Information granules forming an abstract and efficient characterization of large volumes of numeric data have been considered as the fundamental constructs of GrC. By generating prototypes and partition matrix, fuzzy clustering is a commonly encountered way of information granulation. Degranulation involves data reconstruction completed on a basis of the granular representatives. Previous studies have shown that there is a relationship between the reconstruction error and the performance of the granulation process. Typically, the lower the degranulation error is, the better performance of granulation is. However, the existing methods of degranulation usually cannot restore the original numeric data, which is one of the important reasons behind the occurrence of the reconstruction error. To enhance the quality of degranulation, in this study, we develop an augmented scheme through modifying the partition matrix. By proposing the augmented scheme, we dwell on a novel collection of granulation-degranulation mechanisms. In the constructed approach, the prototypes can be expressed as the product of the dataset matrix and the partition matrix. Then, in the degranulation process, the reconstructed numeric data can be decomposed into the product of the partition matrix and the matrix of prototypes. Both the granulation and degranulation are regarded as generalized rotation between the data subspace and the prototype subspace with the partition matrix and the fuzzification factor. By modifying the partition matrix, the new partition matrix is constructed through a series of matrix operations. We offer a thorough analysis of the developed scheme. The experimental results are in agreement with the underlying conceptual framework
Combined Cleaning and Resampling Algorithm for Multi-Class Imbalanced Data with Label Noise
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

The imbalanced data classification is one of the most crucial tasks facing modern data analysis. Especially when combined with other difficulty factors, such as the presence of noise, overlapping class distributions, and small disjuncts, data imbalance can significantly impact the classification performance. Furthermore, some of the data difficulty factors are known to affect the performance of the existing oversampling strategies, in particular SMOTE and its derivatives. This effect is especially pronounced in the multi-class setting, in which the mutual imbalance relationships between the classes complicate even further. Despite that, most of the contemporary research in the area of data imbalance focuses on the binary classification problems, while their more difficult multi-class counterparts are relatively unexplored. In this paper, we propose a novel oversampling technique, a Multi-Class Combined Cleaning and Resampling (MC-CCR) algorithm. The proposed method utilizes an energy-based approach to modeling the regions suitable for oversampling, less affected by small disjuncts and outliers than SMOTE. It combines it with a simultaneous cleaning operation, the aim of which is to reduce the effect of overlapping class distributions on the performance of the learning algorithms. Finally, by incorporating a dedicated strategy of handling the multi-class problems, MC-CCR is less affected by the loss of information about the inter-class relationships than the traditional multi-class decomposition strategies. Based on the results of experimental research carried out for many multi-class imbalanced benchmark datasets, the high robust of the proposed approach to noise was shown, as well as its high quality compared to the state-of-art methods.
Emergent Language Generalization and Acquisition Speed are not tied to Compositionality
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Studies of discrete languages emerging when neural agents communicate to solve a joint task often look for evidence of compositional structure. This stems for the expectation that such a structure would allow languages to be acquired faster by the agents and enable them to generalize better. We argue that these beneficial properties are only loosely connected to compositionality. In two experiments, we demonstrate that, depending on the task, non-compositional languages might show equal, or better, generalization performance and acquisition speed than compositional ones. Further research in the area should be clearer about what benefits are expected from compositionality, and how the latter would lead to them.
Learning Individual Models for Imputation (Technical Report)
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2020
Year: 2020

Missing numerical values are prevalent, e.g., owing to unreliable sensor reading, collection and transmission among heterogeneous sources. Unlike categorized data imputation over a limited domain, the numerical values suffer from two issues: (1) sparsity problem, the incomplete tuple may not have sufficient complete neighbors sharing the same/similar values for imputation, owing to the (almost) infinite domain; (2) heterogeneity problem, different tuples may not fit the same (regression) model. In this study, enlightened by the conditional dependencies that hold conditionally over certain tuples rather than the whole relation, we propose to learn a regression model individually for each complete tuple together with its neighbors. Our IIM, Imputation via Individual Models, thus no longer relies on sharing similar values among the k complete neighbors for imputation, but utilizes their regression results by the aforesaid learned individual (not necessary the same) models. Remarkably, we show that some existing methods are indeed special cases of our IIM, under the extreme settings of the number l of learning neighbors considered in individual learning. In this sense, a proper number l of neighbors is essential to learn the individual models (avoid over-fitting or under-fitting). We propose to adaptively learn individual models over various number l of neighbors for different complete tuples. By devising efficient incremental computation, the time complexity of learning a model reduces from linear to constant. Experiments on real data demonstrate that our IIM with adaptive learning achieves higher imputation accuracy than the existing approaches.
Binary and Multiclass Classifiers based on Multitaper Spectral Features for Epilepsy Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological disorders that can be diagnosed through electroencephalogram (EEG), in which the following epileptic events can be observed: pre-ictal, ictal, post-ictal, and interictal. In this paper, we present a novel method for epilepsy detection into two differentiation contexts: binary and multiclass classification. For feature extraction, a total of 105 measures were extracted from power spectrum, spectrogram, and bispectrogram. For classifier building, eight different machine learning algorithms were used. Our method was applied in a widely used EEG database. As a result, random forest and backpropagation based on multilayer perceptron algorithms reached the highest accuracy for binary (98.75%) and multiclass (96.25%) classification problems, respectively. Subsequently, the statistical tests did not find a model that would achieve a better performance than the other classifiers. In the evaluation based on confusion matrices, it was also not possible to identify a classifier that stands out in relation to other models for EEG classification. Even so, our results are promising and competitive with the findings in the literature.
An Algorithm for Context-Free Path Queries over Graph Databases
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2020
Year: 2020

RDF (Resource Description Framework) is a standard language to represent graph databases. Query languages for RDF databases usually include primitives to support path queries, linking pairs of vertices of the graph that are connected by a path of labels belonging to a given language. Languages such as SPARQL include support for paths defined by regular languages (by means of Regular Expressions). A context-free path query is a path query whose language can be defined by a context-free grammar. Context-free path queries can be used to implement queries such as the "same generation queries", that are not expressible by Regular Expressions. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm for context-free path query processing. We prove the correctness of our approach and show its run-time and memory complexity. We show the viability of our approach by means of a prototype implemented in Go. We run our prototype using the same cases of study as proposed in recent works, comparing our results with another, recently published algorithm. The experiments include both synthetic and real RDF databases. Our algorithm can be seen as a step forward, towards the implementation of more expressive query languages.
Automated Utterance Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Conversational AI assistants are becoming popular and question-answering is an important part of any conversational assistant. Using relevant utterances as features in question-answering has shown to improve both the precision and recall for retrieving the right answer by a conversational assistant. Hence, utterance generation has become an important problem with the goal of generating relevant utterances (sentences or phrases) from a knowledge base article that consists of a title and a description. However, generating good utterances usually requires a lot of manual effort, creating the need for an automated utterance generation. In this paper, we propose an utterance generation system which 1) uses extractive summarization to extract important sentences from the description, 2) uses multiple paraphrasing techniques to generate a diverse set of paraphrases of the title and summary sentences, and 3) selects good candidate paraphrases with the help of a novel candidate selection algorithm.
On the Complexity of Learning from Label Proportions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

In the problem of learning with label proportions, which we call LLP learning, the training data is unlabeled, and only the proportions of examples receiving each label are given. The goal is to learn a hypothesis that predicts the proportions of labels on the distribution underlying the sample. This model of learning is applicable to a wide variety of settings, including predicting the number of votes for candidates in political elections from polls. In this paper, we formally define this class and resolve foundational questions regarding the computational complexity of LLP and characterize its relationship to PAC learning. Among our results, we show, perhaps surprisingly, that for finite VC classes what can be efficiently LLP learned is a strict subset of what can be leaned efficiently in PAC, under standard complexity assumptions. We also show that there exist classes of functions whose learnability in LLP is independent of ZFC, the standard set theoretic axioms. This implies that LLP learning cannot be easily characterized (like PAC by VC dimension).
Neural Analogical Matching
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

Analogy is core to human cognition. It allows us to solve problems based on prior experience, it governs the way we conceptualize new information, and it even influences our visual perception. The importance of analogy to humans has made it an active area of research in the broader field of artificial intelligence, resulting in data-efficient models that learn and reason in human-like ways. While cognitive perspectives of analogy and deep learning have generally been studied independently of one another, the integration of the two lines of research is a promising step towards more robust and efficient learning techniques. As part of a growing body of research on such an integration, we introduce the Analogical Matching Network: a neural architecture that learns to produce analogies between structured, symbolic representations that are largely consistent with the principles of Structure-Mapping Theory.
Feature Pyramid Grids
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Feature pyramid networks have been widely adopted in the object detection literature to improve feature representations for better handling of variations in scale. In this paper, we present Feature Pyramid Grids (FPG), a deep multi-pathway feature pyramid, that represents the feature scale-space as a regular grid of parallel bottom-up pathways which are fused by multi-directional lateral connections. FPG can improve single-pathway feature pyramid networks by significantly increasing its performance at similar computation cost, highlighting importance of deep pyramid representations. In addition to its general and uniform structure, over complicated structures that have been found with neural architecture search, it also compares favorably against such approaches without relying on search. We hope that FPG with its uniform and effective nature can serve as a strong component for future work in object recognition.
Re-translation versus Streaming for Simultaneous Translation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

There has been great progress in improving streaming machine translation, a simultaneous paradigm where the system appends to a growing hypothesis as more source content becomes available. We study a related problem in which revisions to the hypothesis beyond strictly appending words are permitted. This is suitable for applications such as live captioning an audio feed. In this setting, we compare custom streaming approaches to re-translation, a straightforward strategy where each new source token triggers a distinct translation from scratch. We find re-translation to be as good or better than state-of-the-art streaming systems, even when operating under constraints that allow very few revisions. We attribute much of this success to a previously proposed data-augmentation technique that adds prefix-pairs to the training data, which alongside wait-k inference forms a strong baseline for streaming translation. We also highlight re-translation's ability to wrap arbitrarily powerful MT systems with an experiment showing large improvements from an upgrade to its base model.
pAElla: Edge-AI based Real-Time Malware Detection in Data Centers
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

The increasing use of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices for monitoring a wide spectrum of applications, along with the challenges of "big data" streaming support they often require for data analysis, is nowadays pushing for an increased attention to the emerging edge computing paradigm. In particular, smart approaches to manage and analyze data directly on the network edge, are more and more investigated, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered edge computing is envisaged to be a promising direction. In this paper, we focus on Data Centers (DCs) and Supercomputers (SCs), where a new generation of high-resolution monitoring systems is being deployed, opening new opportunities for analysis like anomaly detection and security, but introducing new challenges for handling the vast amount of data it produces. In detail, we report on a novel lightweight and scalable approach to increase the security of DCs/SCs, that involves AI-powered edge computing on high-resolution power consumption. The method -- called pAElla -- targets real-time Malware Detection (MD), it runs on an out-of-band IoT-based monitoring system for DCs/SCs, and involves Power Spectral Density of power measurements, along with AutoEncoders. Results are promising, with an F1-score close to 1, and a False Alarm and Malware Miss rate close to 0%. We compare our method with State-of-the-Art MD techniques and show that, in the context of DCs/SCs, pAElla can cover a wider range of malware, significantly outperforming SoA approaches in terms of accuracy. Moreover, we propose a methodology for online training suitable for DCs/SCs in production, and release open dataset and code.
Satirical News Detection with Semantic Feature Extraction and Game-theoretic Rough Sets
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Satirical news detection is an important yet challenging task to prevent spread of misinformation. Many feature based and end-to-end neural nets based satirical news detection systems have been proposed and delivered promising results. Existing approaches explore comprehensive word features from satirical news articles, but lack semantic metrics using word vectors for tweet form satirical news. Moreover, the vagueness of satire and news parody determines that a news tweet can hardly be classified with a binary decision, that is, satirical or legitimate. To address these issues, we collect satirical and legitimate news tweets, and propose a semantic feature based approach. Features are extracted by exploring inconsistencies in phrases, entities, and between main and relative clauses. We apply game-theoretic rough set model to detect satirical news, in which probabilistic thresholds are derived by game equilibrium and repetition learning mechanism. Experimental results on the collected dataset show the robustness and improvement of the proposed approach compared with Pawlak rough set model and SVM.
Bao: Learning to Steer Query Optimizers
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2020
Year: 2020

Query optimization remains one of the most challenging problems in data management systems. Recent efforts to apply machine learning techniques to query optimization challenges have been promising, but have shown few practical gains due to substantive training overhead, inability to adapt to changes, and poor tail performance. Motivated by these difficulties and drawing upon a long history of research in multi-armed bandits, we introduce Bao (the BAndit Optimizer). Bao takes advantage of the wisdom built into existing query optimizers by providing per-query optimization hints. Bao combines modern tree convolutional neural networks with Thompson sampling, a decades-old and well-studied reinforcement learning algorithm. As a result, Bao automatically learns from its mistakes and adapts to changes in query workloads, data, and schema. Experimentally, we demonstrate that Bao can quickly (an order of magnitude faster than previous approaches) learn strategies that improve end-to-end query execution performance, including tail latency. In cloud environments, we show that Bao can offer both reduced costs and better performance compared with a sophisticated commercial system.