OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
The Multi-Lane Capsule Network (MLCN)
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

We introduce Multi-Lane Capsule Networks (MLCN), which are a separable and resource efficient organization of Capsule Networks (CapsNet) that allows parallel processing, while achieving high accuracy at reduced cost. A MLCN is composed of a number of (distinct) parallel lanes, each contributing to a dimension of the result, trained using the routing-by-agreement organization of CapsNet. Our results indicate similar accuracy with a much reduced cost in number of parameters for the Fashion-MNIST and Cifar10 datsets. They also indicate that the MLCN outperforms the original CapsNet when using a proposed novel configuration for the lanes. MLCN also has faster training and inference times, being more than two-fold faster than the original CapsNet in the same accelerator.
Diversity of Ensembles for Data Stream Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

When constructing a classifier ensemble, diversity among the base classifiers is one of the important characteristics. Several studies have been made in the context of standard static data, in particular, when analyzing the relationship between a high ensemble predictive performance and the diversity of its components. Besides, ensembles of learning machines have been performed to learn in the presence of concept drift and adapt to it. However, diversity measures have not received much research interest in evolving data streams. Only a few researchers directly consider promoting diversity while constructing an ensemble or rebuilding them in the moment of detecting drifts. In this paper, we present a theoretical analysis of different diversity measures and relate them to the success of ensemble learning algorithms for streaming data. The analysis provides a deeper understanding of the concept of diversity and its impact on online ensemble Learning in the presence of concept drift. More precisely, we are interested in answering the following research question; Which commonly used diversity measures are used in the context of static-data ensembles and how far are they applicable in the context of streaming data ensembles?
Effective 3D Humerus and Scapula Extraction using Low-contrast and High-shape-variability MR Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

For the initial shoulder preoperative diagnosis, it is essential to obtain a three-dimensional (3D) bone mask from medical images, e.g., magnetic resonance (MR). However, obtaining high-resolution and dense medical scans is both costly and time-consuming. In addition, the imaging parameters for each 3D scan may vary from time to time and thus increase the variance between images. Therefore, it is practical to consider the bone extraction on low-resolution data which may influence imaging contrast and make the segmentation work difficult. In this paper, we present a joint segmentation for the humerus and scapula bones on a small dataset with low-contrast and high-shape-variability 3D MR images. The proposed network has a deep end-to-end architecture to obtain the initial 3D bone masks. Because the existing scarce and inaccurate human-labeled ground truth, we design a self-reinforced learning strategy to increase performance. By comparing with the non-reinforced segmentation and a classical multi-atlas method with joint label fusion, the proposed approach obtains better results.
Data-Aided Secure Massive MIMO Transmission under the Pilot Contamination Attack
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we study the design of secure communication for time division duplex multi-cell multi-user massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with active eavesdropping. We assume that the eavesdropper actively attacks the uplink pilot transmission and the uplink data transmission before eavesdropping the downlink data transmission of the users. We exploit both the received pilots and the received data signals for uplink channel estimation. We show analytically that when the number of transmit antennas and the length of the data vector both tend to infinity, the signals of the desired user and the eavesdropper lie in different eigenspaces of the received signal matrix at the base station provided that their signal powers are different. This finding reveals that decreasing (instead of increasing) the desired user's signal power might be an effective approach to combat a strong active attack from an eavesdropper. Inspired by this observation, we propose a data-aided secure downlink transmission scheme and derive an asymptotic achievable secrecy sum-rate expression for the proposed design. For the special case of a single-cell single-user system with independent and identically distributed fading, the obtained expression reveals that the secrecy rate scales logarithmically with the number of transmit antennas. This is the same scaling law as for the achievable rate of a single-user massive MIMO system in the absence of eavesdroppers. Numerical results indicate that the proposed scheme achieves significant secrecy rate gains compared to alternative approaches based on matched filter precoding with artificial noise generation and null space transmission.
Skew Constacyclic and LCD Codes over $ \mathbb{F}_{q}+v \mathbb{F}_{q} $
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

The aim of this paper is to give conditions for the equivalency between skew constacyclic codes, skew cyclic codes and skew negacyclic codes defined over semi-local rings. Also, we provide construction and an enumeration of Euclidean and Hermitian skew LCD cyclic codes over $ \mathbb{F}_{p^{t}}+ v \mathbb{F}_{p^{t}} $. Several optimal LCD codes are obtained from Gray images of LCD skew codes over semi-local rings.
Topology and dynamics of narratives on Brexit propagated by UK press during 2016 and 2017
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2019
Year: 2019

This article identifies and characterises political narratives regarding Europe and broadcasted in UK press during 2016 and 2017. A new theoretical and operational framework is proposed for typifying discourse narratives propagated in the public opinion space, based on the social constructivism and structural linguistics approaches, and the mathematical theory of hypernetworks, where elementary units are aggregated into high-level entities. In this line of thought, a narrative is understood as a social construct where a related and coherent aggregate of terms within public discourse is repeated and propagated on media until it can be identified as a communication pattern, embodying meaning in a way that provides individuals some interpretation of their world. An inclusive methodology, with state-of-the-art technologies on natural language processing and network theory, implements this concept of narrative. A corpus from the Observatorium database, including articles from six UK newspapers and incorporating far-right, right-wing, and left-wing narratives, is analysed. The research revealed clear distinctions between narratives along the political spectrum. In 2016 far-right was particularly focused on emigration and refugees. Namely, during the referendum campaign, Europe was related to attacks on women and children, sexual offences, and terrorism. Right-wing was manly focused on internal politics, while left-wing was remarkably mentioning a diversity of non-political topics, such as sports, side by side with economics. During 2017, in general terrorism was less mentioned, and negotiations with EU, namely regarding economics, finance, and Ireland, became central.
Regression-based Inverter Control for Decentralized Optimal Power Flow and Voltage Regulation
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2019
Year: 2019

Electronic power inverters are capable of quickly delivering reactive power to maintain customer voltages within operating tolerances and to reduce system losses in distribution grids. This paper proposes a systematic and data-driven approach to determine reactive power inverter output as a function of local measurements in a manner that obtains near optimal results. First, we use a network model and historic load and generation data and do optimal power flow to compute globally optimal reactive power injections for all controllable inverters in the network. Subsequently, we use regression to find a function for each inverter that maps its local historical data to an approximation of its optimal reactive power injection. The resulting functions then serve as decentralized controllers in the participating inverters to predict the optimal injection based on a new local measurements. The method achieves near-optimal results when performing voltage- and capacity-constrained loss minimization and voltage flattening, and allows for an efficient volt-VAR optimization (VVO) scheme in which legacy control equipment collaborates with existing inverters to facilitate safe operation of distribution networks with higher levels of distributed generation.
Decentralized Coordinate-Descent Data Detection and Precoding for Massive MU-MIMO
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

Massive multiuser (MU) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) promises significant improvements in spectral efficiency compared to small-scale MIMO. Typical massive MU-MIMO base-station (BS) designs rely on centralized linear data detectors and precoders which entail excessively high complexity, interconnect data rates, and chip input/output (I/O) bandwidth when executed on a single computing fabric. To resolve these complexity and bandwidth bottlenecks, we propose new decentralized algorithms for data detection and precoding that use coordinate descent. Our methods parallelize computations across multiple computing fabrics, while minimizing interconnect and I/O bandwidth. The proposed decentralized algorithms achieve near-optimal error-rate performance and multi-Gbps throughput at sub-1 ms latency when implemented on a multi-GPU cluster with half-precision floating-point arithmetic.
GANSynth: Adversarial Neural Audio Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2019
Year: 2019

Efficient audio synthesis is an inherently difficult machine learning task, as human perception is sensitive to both global structure and fine-scale waveform coherence. Autoregressive models, such as WaveNet, model local structure at the expense of global latent structure and slow iterative sampling, while Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), have global latent conditioning and efficient parallel sampling, but struggle to generate locally-coherent audio waveforms. Herein, we demonstrate that GANs can in fact generate high-fidelity and locally-coherent audio by modeling log magnitudes and instantaneous frequencies with sufficient frequency resolution in the spectral domain. Through extensive empirical investigations on the NSynth dataset, we demonstrate that GANs are able to outperform strong WaveNet baselines on automated and human evaluation metrics, and efficiently generate audio several orders of magnitude faster than their autoregressive counterparts.
Parallel Rendering and Large Data Visualization
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2019
Year: 2019

We are living in the big data age: An ever increasing amount of data is being produced through data acquisition and computer simulations. While large scale analysis and simulations have received significant attention for cloud and high-performance computing, software to efficiently visualise large data sets is struggling to keep up. Visualization has proven to be an efficient tool for understanding data, in particular visual analysis is a powerful tool to gain intuitive insight into the spatial structure and relations of 3D data sets. Large-scale visualization setups are becoming ever more affordable, and high-resolution tiled display walls are in reach even for small institutions. Virtual reality has arrived in the consumer space, making it accessible to a large audience. This thesis addresses these developments by advancing the field of parallel rendering. We formalise the design of system software for large data visualization through parallel rendering, provide a reference implementation of a parallel rendering framework, introduce novel algorithms to accelerate the rendering of large amounts of data, and validate this research and development with new applications for large data visualization. Applications built using our framework enable domain scientists and large data engineers to better extract meaning from their data, making it feasible to explore more data and enabling the use of high-fidelity visualization installations to see more detail of the data.
Fully Automatic, Verified Classification of all Frankl-Complete (FC(6)) Set Families
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2019
Year: 2019

The Frankl's conjecture, formulated in 1979. and still open, states that in every family of sets closed for unions there is an element contained in at least half of the sets. A family Fc is called Frankl-complete (or FC-family) if in every union-closed family F containing Fc, one of the elements of union Fc occurs in at least half of the elements of F (so F satisfies the Frankl's condition). FC-families play an important role in attacking the Frankl's conjecture, since they enable significant search space pruning. We extend previous work by giving a total characterization of all FC-families over a 6-element universe, by defining and enumerating all minimal FC and maximal nonFC-families. We use a fully automated, computer assisted approach, formally verified within the proof-assistant Isabelle/HOL.
Optimal Resource Allocation for Wireless Powered Mobile Edge Computing with Dynamic Task Arrivals
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

This paper considers a wireless powered multiuser mobile edge computing (MEC) system, where a multi-antenna access point (AP) employs the radio-frequency (RF) signal based wireless power transfer (WPT) to charge a number of distributed users, and each user utilizes the harvested energy to execute computation tasks via local computing and task offloading. We consider the frequency division multiple access (FDMA) protocol to support simultaneous task offloading from multiple users to the AP. Different from previous works that considered one-shot optimization with static task models, we study the joint computation and wireless resource allocation optimization with dynamic task arrivals over a finite time horizon consisting of multiple slots. Under this setup, our objective is to minimize the system energy consumption including the AP's transmission energy and the MEC server's computing energy over the whole horizon, by jointly optimizing the transmit energy beamforming at the AP, and the local computing and task offloading strategies at the users over different time slots. To characterize the fundamental performance limit of such systems, we focus on the offline optimization by assuming the task and channel information are known a-priori at the AP. In this case, the energy minimization problem corresponds to a convex optimization problem. Leveraging the Lagrange duality method, we obtain the optimal solution to this problem in a well structure. It is shown that in order to maximize the system energy efficiency, the optimal number of task input-bits at each user and the AP are monotonically increasing over time, and the offloading strategies at different users depend on both the wireless channel conditions and the task load at the AP. Numerical results demonstrate the benefit of the proposed joint-WPT-MEC design over alternative benchmark schemes without such joint design.
A Deep, Information-theoretic Framework for Robust Biometric Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Deep neural networks (DNN) have been a de facto standard for nowadays biometric recognition solutions. A serious, but still overlooked problem in these DNN-based recognition systems is their vulnerability against adversarial attacks. Adversarial attacks can easily cause the output of a DNN system to greatly distort with only tiny changes in its input. Such distortions can potentially lead to an unexpected match between a valid biometric and a synthetic one constructed by a strategic attacker, raising security issue. In this work, we show how this issue can be resolved by learning robust biometric features through a deep, information-theoretic framework, which builds upon the recent deep variational information bottleneck method but is carefully adapted to biometric recognition tasks. Empirical evaluation demonstrates that our method not only offers stronger robustness against adversarial attacks but also provides better recognition performance over state-of-the-art approaches.
Experimental Study on CTL model checking using Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2019
Year: 2019

The existing core methods, which are employed by the popular CTL model checking tools, are facing the famous state explode problem. In our previous study, a method based on the Machine Learning (ML) algorithms was proposed to address this problem. However, the accuracy is not satisfactory. First, we conduct a comprehensive experiment on Graph Lab to seek the optimal accuracy using the five machine learning algorithms. Second, given the optimal accuracy, the average time is seeked. The results show that the Logistic Regressive (LR)-based approach can simulate CTL model checking with the accuracy of 98.8%, and its average efficiency is 459 times higher than that of the existing method, as well as the Boosted Tree (BT)-based approach can simulate CTL model checking with the accuracy of 98.7%, and its average efficiency is 639 times higher than that of the existing method.
Identifying Malicious Web Domains Using Machine Learning Techniques with Online Credibility and Performance Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

Malicious web domains represent a big threat to web users' privacy and security. With so much freely available data on the Internet about web domains' popularity and performance, this study investigated the performance of well-known machine learning techniques used in conjunction with this type of online data to identify malicious web domains. Two datasets consisting of malware and phishing domains were collected to build and evaluate the machine learning classifiers. Five single classifiers and four ensemble classifiers were applied to distinguish malicious domains from benign ones. In addition, a binary particle swarm optimisation (BPSO) based feature selection method was used to improve the performance of single classifiers. Experimental results show that, based on the web domains' popularity and performance data features, the examined machine learning techniques can accurately identify malicious domains in different ways. Furthermore, the BPSO-based feature selection procedure is shown to be an effective way to improve the performance of classifiers.
Deep Learning Approach on Information Diffusion in Heterogeneous Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2019
Year: 2019

There are many real-world knowledge based networked systems with multi-type interacting entities that can be regarded as heterogeneous networks including human connections and biological evolutions. One of the main issues in such networks is to predict information diffusion such as shape, growth and size of social events and evolutions in the future. While there exist a variety of works on this topic mainly using a threshold-based approach, they suffer from the local viewpoint on the network and sensitivity to the threshold parameters. In this paper, information diffusion is considered through a latent representation learning of the heterogeneous networks to encode in a deep learning model. To this end, we propose a novel meta-path representation learning approach, Heterogeneous Deep Diffusion(HDD), to exploit meta-paths as main entities in networks. At first, the functional heterogeneous structures of the network are learned by a continuous latent representation through traversing meta-paths with the aim of global end-to-end viewpoint. Then, the well-known deep learning architectures are employed on our generated features to predict diffusion processes in the network. The proposed approach enables us to apply it on different information diffusion tasks such as topic diffusion and cascade prediction. We demonstrate the proposed approach on benchmark network datasets through the well-known evaluation measures. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms the earlier state-of-the-art methods.
Fast Distributed Backup Placement in Sparse and Dense Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

We consider the Backup Placement problem in networks in the $\mathcal{CONGEST}$ distributed setting. Given a network graph $G = (V,E)$, the goal of each vertex $v \in V$ is selecting a neighbor, such that the maximum number of vertices in $V$ that select the same vertex is minimized. The backup placement problem was introduced by Halldorsson, Kohler, Patt-Shamir, and Rawitz, who obtained an $O(\log n/ \log \log n)$ approximation with randomized polylogarithmic time. Their algorithm remained the state-of-the-art for general graphs, as well as specific graph topologies. In this paper we obtain significantly improved algorithms for various graph topologies. Specifically, we show that $O(1)$-approximation to optimal backup placement can be computed deterministically in $O(1)$ rounds in graphs that model wireless networks, certain social networks, claw-free graphs, and more generally, in any graph with neighborhood independence bounded by a constant. At the other end, we consider sparse graphs, such as trees, forests, planar graphs and graphs of constant arboricity, and obtain a constant approximation to optimal backup placement in $O(\log n)$ deterministic rounds. Clearly, our constant-time algorithms for graphs with constant neighborhood independence are asymptotically optimal. Moreover, we show that our algorithms for sparse graphs are not far from optimal as well, by proving several lower bounds. Specifically, optimal backup placement of unoriented trees requires $Ω(\log n)$ time, and approximate backup placement with a polylogarithmic approximation factor requires $Ω(\sqrt {\log n / \log \log n})$ time. Our results extend the knowledge regarding the question of "what can be computed locally?", and reveal surprising gaps between complexities of distributed symmetry breaking problems.
The ARIEL-CMU Systems for LoReHLT18
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

This paper describes the ARIEL-CMU submissions to the Low Resource Human Language Technologies (LoReHLT) 2018 evaluations for the tasks Machine Translation (MT), Entity Discovery and Linking (EDL), and detection of Situation Frames in Text and Speech (SF Text and Speech).
Training GANs with Centripetal Acceleration
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Training generative adversarial networks (GANs) often suffers from cyclic behaviors of iterates. Based on a simple intuition that the direction of centripetal acceleration of an object moving in uniform circular motion is toward the center of the circle, we present the Simultaneous Centripetal Acceleration (SCA) method and the Alternating Centripetal Acceleration (ACA) method to alleviate the cyclic behaviors. Under suitable conditions, gradient descent methods with either SCA or ACA are shown to be linearly convergent for bilinear games. Numerical experiments are conducted by applying ACA to existing gradient-based algorithms in a GAN setup scenario, which demonstrate the superiority of ACA.