OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Opinion influence and evolution in social networks: a Markovian agents model
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, the effect on collective opinions of filtering algorithms managed by social network platforms is modeled and investigated. A stochastic multi-agent model for opinion dynamics is proposed, that accounts for a centralized tuning of the strength of interaction between individuals. The evolution of each individual opinion is described by a Markov chain, whose transition rates are affected by the opinions of the neighbors through influence parameters. The properties of this model are studied in a general setting as well as in interesting special cases. A general result is that the overall model of the social network behaves like a high-dimensional Markov chain, which is viable to Monte Carlo simulation. Under the assumption of identical agents and unbiased influence, it is shown that the influence intensity affects the variance, but not the expectation, of the number of individuals sharing a certain opinion. Moreover, a detailed analysis is carried out for the so-called Peer Assembly, which describes the evolution of binary opinions in a completely connected graph of identical agents. It is shown that the Peer Assembly can be lumped into a birth-death chain that can be given a complete analytical characterization. Both analytical results and simulation experiments are used to highlight the emergence of particular collective behaviours, e.g. consensus and herding, depending on the centralized tuning of the influence parameters.
A topology-oblivious routing protocol for NDN-VANETs
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) are characterized by intermittent connectivity, which leads to failures of end-to-end paths between nodes. Named Data Networking (NDN) is a network paradigm that deals with such problems, since information is forwarded based on content and not on the location of the hosts. In this work, we propose an enhanced routing protocol of our previous topology-oblivious Multihop, Multipath, and Multichannel NDN for VANETs (MMM-VNDN) routing strategy that exploits several paths to achieve more efficient content retrieval. Our new enhanced protocol, i mproved MMM-VNDN (iMMM-VNDN), creates paths between a requester node and a provider by broadcasting Interest messages. When a provider responds with a Data message to a broadcast Interest message, we create unicast routes between nodes, by using the MAC address(es) as the distinct address(es) of each node. iMMM-VNDN extracts and thus creates routes based on the MAC addresses from the strategy layer of an NDN node. Simulation results show that our routing strategy performs better than other state of the art strategies in terms of Interest Satisfaction Rate, while keeping the latency and jitter of messages low.
Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access for mmWave Drones with Multi-Antenna Transmission
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be deployed as aerial base stations (BSs) for rapid establishment of communication networks during temporary events and after disasters. Since UAV-BSs are low power nodes, achieving high spectral and energy efficiency are of paramount importance. In this paper, we introduce non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) transmission for millimeter-wave (mmWave) drones serving as flying BSs at a large stadium potentially with several hundreds or thousands of mobile users. In particular, we make use of multi-antenna techniques specifically taking into consideration the physical constraints of the antenna array, to generate directional beams. Multiple users are then served within the same beam employing NOMA transmission. If the UAV beam can not cover entire region where users are distributed, we introduce beam scanning to maximize outage sum rates. The simulation results reveal that, with NOMA transmission the spectral efficiency of the UAV based communication can be greatly enhanced compared to orthogonal multiple access (OMA) transmission. Further, the analysis shows that there is an optimum transmit power value for NOMA beyond which outage sum rates do not improve further.
Recurrent Segmentation for Variable Computational Budgets
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

State-of-the-art systems for semantic image segmentation use feed-forward pipelines with fixed computational costs. Building an image segmentation system that works across a range of computational budgets is challenging and time-intensive as new architectures must be designed and trained for every computational setting. To address this problem we develop a recurrent neural network that successively improves prediction quality with each iteration. Importantly, the RNN may be deployed across a range of computational budgets by merely running the model for a variable number of iterations. We find that this architecture is uniquely suited for efficiently segmenting videos. By exploiting the segmentation of past frames, the RNN can perform video segmentation at similar quality but reduced computational cost compared to state-of-the-art image segmentation methods. When applied to static images in the PASCAL VOC 2012 and Cityscapes segmentation datasets, the RNN traces out a speed-accuracy curve that saturates near the performance of state-of-the-art segmentation methods.
Visualisation and 'diagnostic classifiers' reveal how recurrent and recursive neural networks process hierarchical structure
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

We investigate how neural networks can learn and process languages with hierarchical, compositional semantics. To this end, we define the artificial task of processing nested arithmetic expressions, and study whether different types of neural networks can learn to compute their meaning. We find that recursive neural networks can find a generalising solution to this problem, and we visualise this solution by breaking it up in three steps: project, sum and squash. As a next step, we investigate recurrent neural networks, and show that a gated recurrent unit, that processes its input incrementally, also performs very well on this task. To develop an understanding of what the recurrent network encodes, visualisation techniques alone do not suffice. Therefore, we develop an approach where we formulate and test multiple hypotheses on the information encoded and processed by the network. For each hypothesis, we derive predictions about features of the hidden state representations at each time step, and train 'diagnostic classifiers' to test those predictions. Our results indicate that the networks follow a strategy similar to our hypothesised 'cumulative strategy', which explains the high accuracy of the network on novel expressions, the generalisation to longer expressions than seen in training, and the mild deterioration with increasing length. This is turn shows that diagnostic classifiers can be a useful technique for opening up the black box of neural networks. We argue that diagnostic classification, unlike most visualisation techniques, does scale up from small networks in a toy domain, to larger and deeper recurrent networks dealing with real-life data, and may therefore contribute to a better understanding of the internal dynamics of current state-of-the-art models in natural language processing.
Hardness Results on Finding Leafless Elementary Trapping Sets and Elementary Absorbing Sets of LDPC Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

Leafless elementary trapping sets (LETSs) are known to be the problematic structures in the error floor region of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes over the additive white Gaussian (AWGN) channel under iterative decoding algorithms. While problems involving the general category of trapping sets, and the subcategory of elementary trapping sets (ETSs), have been shown to be NP-hard, similar results for LETSs, which are a subset of ETSs are not available. In this paper, we prove that, for a general LDPC code, finding a LETS of a given size a with minimum number of unsatisfied check nodes b is NP-hard to approximate with any guaranteed precision. We also prove that finding the minimum size a of a LETS with a given b is NP-hard to approximate. Similar results are proved for elementary absorbing sets, a popular subcategory of LETSs.
Patch Correspondences for Interpreting Pixel-level CNNs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

We present compositional nearest neighbors (CompNN), a simple approach to visually interpreting distributed representations learned by a convolutional neural network (CNN) for pixel-level tasks (e.g., image synthesis and segmentation). It does so by reconstructing both a CNN's input and output image by copy-pasting corresponding patches from the training set with similar feature embeddings. To do so efficiently, it makes of a patch-match-based algorithm that exploits the fact that the patch representations learned by a CNN for pixel level tasks vary smoothly. Finally, we show that CompNN can be used to establish semantic correspondences between two images and control properties of the output image by modifying the images contained in the training set. We present qualitative and quantitative experiments for semantic segmentation and image-to-image translation that demonstrate that CompNN is a good tool for interpreting the embeddings learned by pixel-level CNNs.
Latent Factor Interpretations for Collaborative Filtering
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2018
Year: 2018

Many machine learning systems utilize latent factors as internal representations for making predictions. Since these latent factors are largely uninterpreted, however, predictions made using them are opaque. Collaborative filtering via matrix factorization is a prime example of such an algorithm that uses uninterpreted latent features, and yet has seen widespread adoption for many recommendation tasks. We present Latent Factor Interpretation (LFI), a method for interpreting models by leveraging interpretations of latent factors in terms of human-understandable features. The interpretation of latent factors can then replace the uninterpreted latent factors, resulting in a new model that expresses predictions in terms of interpretable features. This new model can then be interpreted using recently developed model explanation techniques. In this paper we develop LFI for collaborative filtering based recommender systems. We illustrate the use of LFI interpretations on the MovieLens dataset, integrating auxiliary features from IMDB and DB tropes, and show that latent factors can be predicted with sufficient accuracy for replicating the predictions of the true model.
Partitioned Successive-Cancellation Flip Decoding of Polar Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

Polar codes are a class of channel capacity achieving codes that has been selected for the next generation of wireless communication standards. Successive-cancellation (SC) is the first proposed decoding algorithm, suffering from mediocre error-correction performance at moderate code length. In order to improve the error-correction performance of SC, two approaches are available: (i) SC-List decoding which keeps a list of candidates by running a number of SC decoders in parallel, thus increasing the implementation complexity, and (ii) SC-Flip decoding that relies on a single SC module, and keeps the computational complexity close to SC. In this work, we propose the partitioned SC-Flip (PSCF) decoding algorithm, which outperforms SC-Flip in terms of error-correction performance and average computational complexity, leading to higher throughput and reduced energy consumption per codeword. We also introduce a partitioning scheme that best suits our PSCF decoder. Simulation results show that at equivalent frame error rate, PSCF has up to $5 \times$ less computational complexity than the SC-Flip decoder. At equivalent average number of iterations, the error-correction performance of PSCF outperforms SC-Flip by up to $0.15$ dB at frame error rate of $10^{-3}$.
3DContextNet: K-d Tree Guided Hierarchical Learning of Point Clouds Using Local and Global Contextual Cues
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Classification and segmentation of 3D point clouds are important tasks in computer vision. Because of the irregular nature of point clouds, most of the existing methods convert point clouds into regular 3D voxel grids before they are used as input for ConvNets. Unfortunately, voxel representations are highly insensitive to the geometrical nature of 3D data. More recent methods encode point clouds to higher dimensional features to cover the global 3D space. However, these models are not able to sufficiently capture the local structures of point clouds. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a method that exploits both local and global contextual cues imposed by the k-d tree. The method is designed to learn representation vectors progressively along the tree structure. Experiments on challenging benchmarks show that the proposed model provides discriminative point set features. For the task of 3D scene semantic segmentation, our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art on the Stanford Large-Scale 3D Indoor Spaces Dataset (S3DIS).
Sum of squares lower bounds from symmetry and a good story
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we develop machinery which makes it much easier to prove sum of squares lower bounds when the problem is symmetric under permutations of $[1,n]$ and the unsatisfiability of our problem comes from integrality arguments, i.e. arguments that an expression must be an integer. Roughly speaking, to prove SOS lower bounds with our machinery it is sufficient to verify that the answer to the following three questions is yes: 1. Are there natural pseudo-expectation values for the problem? 2. Are these pseudo-expectation values rational functions of the problem parameters? 3. Are there sufficiently many values of the parameters for which these pseudo-expectation values correspond to the actual expected values over a distribution of solutions which is the uniform distribution over permutations of a single solution? We demonstrate our machinery on three problems, the knapsack problem analyzed by Grigoriev, the MOD 2 principle (which says that the complete graph $K_n$ has no perfect matching when $n$ is odd), and the following Turan type problem: Minimize the number of triangles in a graph $G$ with a given edge density. For knapsack, we recover Grigoriev's lower bound exactly. For the MOD 2 principle, we tighten Grigoriev's linear degree sum of squares lower bound, making it exact. Finally, for the triangle problem, we prove a sum of squares lower bound for finding the minimum triangle density. This lower bound is completely new and gives a simple example where constant degree sum of squares methods have a constant factor error in estimating graph densities.
Understanding Service Integration of Online Social Networks: A Data-Driven Study
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2018
Year: 2018

The cross-site linking function is widely adopted by online social networks (OSNs). This function allows a user to link her account on one OSN to her accounts on other OSNs. Thus, users are able to sign in with the linked accounts, share contents among these accounts and import friends from them. It leads to the service integration of different OSNs. This integration not only provides convenience for users to manage accounts of different OSNs, but also introduces usefulness to OSNs that adopt the cross-site linking function. In this paper, we investigate this usefulness based on users' data collected from a popular OSN called Medium. We conduct a thorough analysis on its social graph, and find that the service integration brought by the cross-site linking function is able to change Medium's social graph structure and attract a large number of new users. However, almost none of the new users would become high PageRank users (PageRank is used to measure a user's influence in an OSN). To solve this problem, we build a machine-learning-based model to predict high PageRank users in Medium based on their Twitter data only. This model achieves a high F1-score of 0.942 and a high area under the curve (AUC) of 0.986. Based on it, we design a system to assist new OSNs to identify and attract high PageRank users from other well-established OSNs through the cross-site linking function.
Residential Energy Storage Management with Bidirectional Energy Control
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

We consider the residential energy storage management system with integrated renewable generation, with the availability of bidirectional energy flow from and to the grid thorough buying and selling. We propose a real-time bidirectional energy control algorithm, aiming to minimize the net system cost, due to energy buying and selling and battery deterioration and inefficiency from storage activities, within a given time period, subject to the battery operational constraints and energy buying and selling constraints. We formulate the problem as a stochastic control optimization problem. We then modify and transform this difficult problem into one that enables us to develop the real-time energy control algorithm through Lyapunov optimization. Our developed algorithm is applicable to arbitrary and unknown statistics of renewable generation, load, and electricity prices. It provides a simple closed-form control solution only based on current system states with minimum complexity for real-time implementation. Furthermore, the solution structure reveals how the battery energy level and energy prices affect the decision on energy flow and storage. The proposed algorithm possesses a bounded performance guarantee to that of the optimal non-causal T-slot look-ahead control policy. Simulation shows the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm as compared with alternative real-time and non-causal algorithms, as well as the effect of selling-to-buying price ratio and battery inefficiency on the storage behavior and system cost.
Deep Neural Network Architectures for Modulation Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

In this work, we investigate the value of employing deep learning for the task of wireless signal modulation recognition. Recently in [1], a framework has been introduced by generating a dataset using GNU radio that mimics the imperfections in a real wireless channel, and uses 10 different modulation types. Further, a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture was developed and shown to deliver performance that exceeds that of expert-based approaches. Here, we follow the framework of [1] and find deep neural network architectures that deliver higher accuracy than the state of the art. We tested the architecture of [1] and found it to achieve an accuracy of approximately 75% of correctly recognizing the modulation type. We first tune the CNN architecture of [1] and find a design with four convolutional layers and two dense layers that gives an accuracy of approximately 83.8% at high SNR. We then develop architectures based on the recently introduced ideas of Residual Networks (ResNet [2]) and Densely Connected Networks (DenseNet [3]) to achieve high SNR accuracies of approximately 83.5% and 86.6%, respectively. Finally, we introduce a Convolutional Long Short-term Deep Neural Network (CLDNN [4]) to achieve an accuracy of approximately 88.5% at high SNR.
Feature Agglomeration Networks for Single Stage Face Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Recent years have witnessed promising results of face detection using deep learning. Despite making remarkable progresses, face detection in the wild remains an open research challenge especially when detecting faces at vastly different scales and characteristics. In this paper, we propose a novel simple yet effective framework of "Feature Agglomeration Networks" (FANet) to build a new single stage face detector, which not only achieves state-of-the-art performance but also runs efficiently. As inspired by Feature Pyramid Networks (FPN), the key idea of our framework is to exploit inherent multi-scale features of a single convolutional neural network by aggregating higher-level semantic feature maps of different scales as contextual cues to augment lower-level feature maps via a hierarchical agglomeration manner at marginal extra computation cost. We further propose a Hierarchical Loss to effectively train the FANet model. We evaluate the proposed FANet detector on several public face detection benchmarks, including PASCAL face, FDDB and WIDER FACE datasets and achieved state-of-the-art results. Our detector can run in real time for VGA-resolution images on GPU.
V2X Content Distribution Based on Batched Network Coding with Distributed Scheduling
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

Content distribution is an application in intelligent transportation system to assist vehicles in acquiring information such as digital maps and entertainment materials. In this paper, we consider content distribution from a single roadside infrastructure unit to a group of vehicles passing by it. To combat the short connection time and the lossy channel quality, the downloaded contents need to be further shared among vehicles after the initial broadcasting phase. To this end, we propose a joint infrastructure-to-vehicle (I2V) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication scheme based on batched sparse (BATS) coding to minimize the traffic overhead and reduce the total transmission delay. In the I2V phase, the roadside unit (RSU) encodes the original large-size file into a number of batches in a rateless manner, each containing a fixed number of coded packets, and sequentially broadcasts them during the I2V connection time. In the V2V phase, vehicles perform the network coded cooperative sharing by re-encoding the received packets. We propose a utility-based distributed algorithm to efficiently schedule the V2V cooperative transmissions, hence reducing the transmission delay. A closed-form expression for the expected rank distribution of the proposed content distribution scheme is derived, which is used to design the optimal BATS code. The performance of the proposed content distribution scheme is evaluated by extensive simulations that consider multi-lane road and realistic vehicular traffic settings, and shown to significantly outperform the existing content distribution protocols.
Energy-Efficient Sensor Censoring for Compressive Distributed Sparse Signal Recovery
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

To strike a balance between energy efficiency and data quality control, this paper proposes a sensor censoring scheme for distributed sparse signal recovery via compressive-sensing based wireless sensor networks. In the proposed approach, each sensor node employs a sparse sensing vector with known support for data compression, meanwhile enabling making local inference about the unknown support of the sparse signal vector of interest. This naturally leads to a ternary censoring protocol, whereby each sensor (i) directly transmits the real-valued compressed data if the sensing vector support is detected to be overlapped with the signal support, (ii) sends a one-bit hard decision if empty support overlap is inferred, (iii) keeps silent if the measurement is judged to be uninformative. Our design then aims at minimizing the error probability that empty support overlap is decided but otherwise is true, subject to the constraints on a tolerable false-alarm probability that non-empty support overlap is decided but otherwise is true, and a target censoring rate. We derive a closed-form formula of the optimal censoring rule; a low complexity implementation using bi-section search is also developed. In addition, the average communication cost is analyzed. To aid global signal reconstruction under the proposed censoring framework, we propose a modified l_1-minimization based algorithm, which exploits certain sparse nature of the hard decision vector received at the fusion center. Analytic performance guarantees, characterized in terms of the restricted isometry property, are also derived. Computer simulations are used to illustrate the performance of the proposed scheme.