OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Dealing with Label Scarcity in Computational Pathology: A Use Case in Prostate Cancer Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Large amounts of unlabelled data are commonplace for many applications in computational pathology, whereas labelled data is often expensive, both in time and cost, to acquire. We investigate the performance of unsupervised and supervised deep learning methods when few labelled data are available. Three methods are compared: clustering autoencoder latent vectors (unsupervised), a single layer classifier combined with a pre-trained autoencoder (semi-supervised), and a supervised CNN. We apply these methods on hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) stained prostatectomy images to classify tumour versus non-tumour tissue. Results show that semi-/unsupervised methods have an advantage over supervised learning when few labels are available. Additionally, we show that incorporating immunohistochemistry (IHC) stained data provides an increase in performance over only using H&E.
Fast TLB Simulation for RISC-V Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2019
Year: 2019

Address translation and protection play important roles in today's processors, supporting multiprocessing and enforcing security. Historically, the design of the address translation mechanisms has been closely tied to the instruction set. In contrast, RISC-V defines its privileged specification in a way that permits a variety of designs. An important part of the design space is the organisation of Translation Lookaside Buffers (TLBs). This paper presents our recent work on simulating TLB behaviours in multi-core RISC-V systems. Our TLB simulation framework allows rapid, flexible and versatile prototyping of various hardware TLB design choices, and enables validation, profiling and benchmarking of software running on RISC-V systems. We show how this framework can be integrated with the dynamic binary translated emulator QEMU to perform online simulation. When simulating complicated multi-level shared TLB designs, the framework runs at around 400 million instructions per second (MIPS) when simulating an 8-core system. The performance overhead compared to unmodified QEMU is only 18% when the benchmark's L1 TLB miss rate is 1%. We also demonstrate how this tool can be used to explore the instruction-set level design space. We test a shared last-level TLB design that is not currently permitted by the RISC-V's privileged specification. We then propose an extension to RISC-V's virtual memory system design based on these experimental results.
Design and Experimental Validation of Tube-based MPC for Timed-constrained Robot Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2019
Year: 2019

This paper deals with the design and experimental validation of a state-of-the art tube-based Model Predictive Control (MPC) for achieving time-constrained tasks. Given the uncertain nonlinear dynamics of the robot as well as a high-level task written in Metric Interval Temporal Logic (MITL), the goal is to design a feedback control law that guarantees the satisfaction of the task. The workspace is divided into Regions of Interest (RoI) and contains also unsafe regions (obstacles) that the robot should not visit. The feedback control law consists of two terms: a control input which is the outcome of a Finite Horizon Optimal Control (FHOCP); and a state feedback law that guarantees that the nominal trajectories are bounded within a tube centered along the nominal trajectories. The aforementioned control law guarantees that the robot is safely navigated through the RoI within certain time bounds. The proposed framework can handle the rich expressiveness of MITL and is experimentally tested with a Nexus mobile robot in our lab facilities. The experimental results show that the proposed framework is promising for solving real-life robotic as well as industrial problems.
Blockchain-based Data Provenance for the Internet of Things
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

As more and more applications and services depend on data collected and provided by Internet of Things (IoT) devices, it is of importance that such data can be trusted. Data provenance solutions together with blockchain technology are one way to make data more trustworthy. However, current solutions do not address the heterogeneous nature of IoT applications and their data. In this work, we identify functional and non-functional requirements for a generic IoT data provenance framework, and conceptualise the framework as a layered architecture. Using a proof-of-concept implementation based on Ethereum smart contracts, data provenance can be realised for a wide range of IoT use cases. Benefits of a generic framework include simplified adoption and a more rapid implementation of data provenance for the IoT.
Better Security Bug Report Classification via Hyperparameter Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2019
Year: 2019

When security bugs are detected, they should be (a)~discussed privately by security software engineers; and (b)~not mentioned to the general public until security patches are available. Software engineers usually report bugs to bug tracking system, and label them as security bug reports (SBRs) or not-security bug reports (NSBRs), while SBRs have a higher priority to be fixed before exploited by attackers than NSBRs. Yet suspected security bug reports are often publicly disclosed because the mislabelling issues ( i.e., mislabel security bug reports as not-security bug report). The goal of this paper is to aid software developers to better classify bug reports that identify security vulnerabilities as security bug reports through parameter tuning of learners and data pre-processor. Previous work has applied text analytics and machine learning learners to classify which reported bugs are security related. We improve on that work, as shown by our analysis of five open source projects. We apply hyperparameter optimization to (a)~the control parameters of a learner; and (b)~the data pre-processing methods that handle the case where the target class is a small fraction of all the data. We show that optimizing the pre-processor is more useful than optimizing the learners. We also show that improvements gained from our approach can be very large. For example, using the same data sets as recently analyzed by our baseline approach, we show that adjusting the data pre-processing results in improvements to classification recall of 35% to 65% (median to max) with moderate increment of false positive rate.
Efficient Deep Gaussian Process Models for Variable-Sized Input
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Deep Gaussian processes (DGP) have appealing Bayesian properties, can handle variable-sized data, and learn deep features. Their limitation is that they do not scale well with the size of the data. Existing approaches address this using a deep random feature (DRF) expansion model, which makes inference tractable by approximating DGPs. However, DRF is not suitable for variable-sized input data such as trees, graphs, and sequences. We introduce the GP-DRF, a novel Bayesian model with an input layer of GPs, followed by DRF layers. The key advantage is that the combination of GP and DRF leads to a tractable model that can both handle a variable-sized input as well as learn deep long-range dependency structures of the data. We provide a novel efficient method to simultaneously infer the posterior of GP's latent vectors and infer the posterior of DRF's internal weights and random frequencies. Our experiments show that GP-DRF outperforms the standard GP model and DRF model across many datasets. Furthermore, they demonstrate that GP-DRF enables improved uncertainty quantification compared to GP and DRF alone, with respect to a Bhattacharyya distance assessment. Source code is available at https://github.com/IssamLaradji/GP_DRF.
Making ethical decisions for the immersive web
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2019
Year: 2019

Mixed reality (MR) ethics occupies a space that intersects with web ethics, emerging tech ethics, healthcare ethics and product ethics (among others). This paper focuses on how we can build an immersive web that encourages ethical development and usage. The technology is beyond emerging (footnote: generally, the ethics of emerging technologies are focused on ethical assessments of research and innovation), but not quite entrenched. We're still in a position to intervene in the development process, instead of attempting to retrofit ethical decisions into an established design. While we have a wider range of data to analyze than most emerging technologies, we're still in a much more speculative state than entrenched technologies. This space is a challenge and an opportunity.
Utilizing Deep Learning Towards Multi-modal Bio-sensing and Vision-based Affective Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

In recent years, the use of bio-sensing signals such as electroencephalogram (EEG), electrocardiogram (ECG), etc. have garnered interest towards applications in affective computing. The parallel trend of deep-learning has led to a huge leap in performance towards solving various vision-based research problems such as object detection. Yet, these advances in deep-learning have not adequately translated into bio-sensing research. This work applies novel deep-learning-based methods to various bio-sensing and video data of four publicly available multi-modal emotion datasets. For each dataset, we first individually evaluate the emotion-classification performance obtained by each modality. We then evaluate the performance obtained by fusing the features from these modalities. We show that our algorithms outperform the results reported by other studies for emotion/valence/arousal/liking classification on DEAP and MAHNOB-HCI datasets and set up benchmarks for the newer AMIGOS and DREAMER datasets. We also evaluate the performance of our algorithms by combining the datasets and by using transfer learning to show that the proposed method overcomes the inconsistencies between the datasets. Hence, we do a thorough analysis of multi-modal affective data from more than 120 subjects and 2,800 trials. Finally, utilizing a convolution-deconvolution network, we propose a new technique towards identifying salient brain regions corresponding to various affective states.
An Empirical View on Content Provider Fairness
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

Congestion control is an indispensable component of transport protocols to prevent congestion collapse. As such, it distributes the available bandwidth among all competing flows, ideally in a fair manner. However, there exists a constantly evolving set of congestion control algorithms, each addressing different performance needs and providing the potential for custom parametrizations. In particular, content providers such as CDNs are known to tune TCP stacks for performance gains. In this paper, we thus empirically investigate if current Internet traffic generated by content providers still adheres to the conventional understanding of fairness. Our study compares fairness properties of testbed hosts to actual traffic of six major content providers subject to different bandwidths, RTTs, queue sizes, and queueing disciplines in a home-user setting. We find that some employed congestion control algorithms lead to significantly asymmetric bandwidth shares, however, AQMs such as FQ_CoDel are able to alleviate such unfairness.
CNN-based Cost Volume Analysis as Confidence Measure for Dense Matching
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Due to its capability to identify erroneous disparity assignments in dense stereo matching, confidence estimation is beneficial for a wide range of applications, e.g. autonomous driving, which needs a high degree of confidence as mandatory prerequisite. Especially, the introduction of deep learning based methods resulted in an increasing popularity of this field in recent years, caused by a significantly improved accuracy. Despite this remarkable development, most of these methods rely on features learned from disparity maps only, not taking into account the corresponding 3-dimensional cost volumes. However, it was already demonstrated that with conventional methods based on hand-crafted features this additional information can be used to further increase the accuracy. In order to combine the advantages of deep learning and cost volume based features, in this paper, we propose a novel Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture to directly learn features for confidence estimation from volumetric 3D data. An extensive evaluation on three datasets using three common dense stereo matching techniques demonstrates the generality and state-of-the-art accuracy of the proposed method.
The Essential Deployment Metamodel: A Systematic Review of Deployment Automation Technologies
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2019
Year: 2019

In recent years, a plethora of deployment technologies evolved, many following a declarative approach to automate the delivery of software components. Even if such technologies share the same purpose, they differ in features and supported mechanisms. Thus, it is difficult to compare and select deployment automation technologies as well as to migrate from one technology to another. Hence, we present a systematic review of declarative deployment technologies and introduce the Essential Deployment Metamodel (EDMM) by extracting the essential parts that are supported by all these technologies. Thereby, the EDMM enables a common understanding of declarative deployment models by facilitating the comparison, selection, and migration of technologies. Moreover, it provides a technology-independent baseline for further deployment automation research.
Contrastive Fairness in Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Was it fair that Harry was hired but not Barry? Was it fair that Pam was fired instead of Sam? How can one ensure fairness when an intelligent algorithm takes these decisions instead of a human? How can one ensure that the decisions were taken based on merit and not on protected attributes like race or sex? These are the questions that must be answered now that many decisions in real life can be made through machine learning. However research in fairness of algorithms has focused on the counterfactual questions "what if?" or "why?", whereas in real life most subjective questions of consequence are contrastive: "why this but not that?". We introduce concepts and mathematical tools using causal inference to address contrastive fairness in algorithmic decision-making with illustrative examples.
REPLAB: A Reproducible Low-Cost Arm Benchmark Platform for Robotic Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

Standardized evaluation measures have aided in the progress of machine learning approaches in disciplines such as computer vision and machine translation. In this paper, we make the case that robotic learning would also benefit from benchmarking, and present the "REPLAB" platform for benchmarking vision-based manipulation tasks. REPLAB is a reproducible and self-contained hardware stack (robot arm, camera, and workspace) that costs about 2000 USD, occupies a cuboid of size 70x40x60 cm, and permits full assembly within a few hours. Through this low-cost, compact design, REPLAB aims to drive wide participation by lowering the barrier to entry into robotics and to enable easy scaling to many robots. We envision REPLAB as a framework for reproducible research across manipulation tasks, and as a step in this direction, we define a template for a grasping benchmark consisting of a task definition, evaluation protocol, performance measures, and a dataset of 92k grasp attempts. We implement, evaluate, and analyze several previously proposed grasping approaches to establish baselines for this benchmark. Finally, we also implement and evaluate a deep reinforcement learning approach for 3D reaching tasks on our REPLAB platform. Project page with assembly instructions, code, and videos: https://goo.gl/5F9dP4.
Speeding up the Karatsuba algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

This paper describes an $\sim {\cal O}(n)$ pre-compute technique to speed up the Karatsuba algorithm for multiplying two numbers.
Optimizing Sequential Medical Treatments with Auto-Encoding Heuristic Search in POMDPs
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2019
Year: 2019

Health-related data is noisy and stochastic in implying the true physiological states of patients, limiting information contained in single-moment observations for sequential clinical decision making. We model patient-clinician interactions as partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) and optimize sequential treatment based on belief states inferred from history sequence. To facilitate inference, we build a variational generative model and boost state representation with a recurrent neural network (RNN), incorporating an auxiliary loss from sequence auto-encoding. Meanwhile, we optimize a continuous policy of drug levels with an actor-critic method where policy gradients are obtained from a stablized off-policy estimate of advantage function, with the value of belief state backed up by parallel best-first suffix trees. We exploit our methodology in optimizing dosages of vasopressor and intravenous fluid for sepsis patients using a retrospective intensive care dataset and evaluate the learned policy with off-policy policy evaluation (OPPE). The results demonstrate that modelling as POMDPs yields better performance than MDPs, and that incorporating heuristic search improves sample efficiency.
Incentive Design for Efficient Federated Learning in Mobile Networks: A Contract Theory Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

To strengthen data privacy and security, federated learning as an emerging machine learning technique is proposed to enable large-scale nodes, e.g., mobile devices, to distributedly train and globally share models without revealing their local data. This technique can not only significantly improve privacy protection for mobile devices, but also ensure good performance of the trained results collectively. Currently, most the existing studies focus on optimizing federated learning algorithms to improve model training performance. However, incentive mechanisms to motivate the mobile devices to join model training have been largely overlooked. The mobile devices suffer from considerable overhead in terms of computation and communication during the federated model training process. Without well-designed incentive, self-interested mobile devices will be unwilling to join federated learning tasks, which hinders the adoption of federated learning. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we adopt the contract theory to design an effective incentive mechanism for simulating the mobile devices with high-quality (i.e., high-accuracy) data to participate in federated learning. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism is efficient for federated learning with improved learning accuracy.
Aeronautical Ad Hoc Networking for the Internet-Above-The-Clouds
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

The engineering vision of relying on the ``smart sky" for supporting air traffic and the ``Internet above the clouds" for in-flight entertainment has become imperative for the future aircraft industry. Aeronautical ad hoc Networking (AANET) constitutes a compelling concept for providing broadband communications above clouds by extending the coverage of Air-to-Ground (A2G) networks to oceanic and remote airspace via autonomous and self-configured wireless networking amongst commercial passenger airplanes. The AANET concept may be viewed as a new member of the family of Mobile ad hoc Networks (MANETs) in action above the clouds. However, AANETs have more dynamic topologies, larger and more variable geographical network size, stricter security requirements and more hostile transmission conditions. These specific characteristics lead to more grave challenges in aircraft mobility modeling, aeronautical channel modeling and interference mitigation as well as in network scheduling and routing. This paper provides an overview of AANET solutions by characterizing the associated scenarios, requirements and challenges. Explicitly, the research addressing the key techniques of AANETs, such as their mobility models, network scheduling and routing, security and interference are reviewed. Furthermore, we also identify the remaining challenges associated with developing AANETs and present their prospective solutions as well as open issues. The design framework of AANETs and the key technical issues are investigated along with some recent research results. Furthermore, a range of performance metrics optimized in designing AANETs and a number of representative multi-objective optimization algorithms are outlined.
Strong equivalence for $\rm LP^{MLN}$ programs
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2019
Year: 2019

Strong equivalence is a well-studied and important concept in answer set programming (ASP). $\rm LP^{MLN}$ is a probabilistic extension of answer set programs with the weight scheme adapted from Markov Logic. Because of the semantic differences, strong equivalence for ASP does not simply carry over to $\rm LP^{MLN}$. I study the concept of strong equivalence in $\rm LP^{MLN}$ with the goal of extending strong equivalence to $\rm LP^{MLN}$ programs. My study shows that the verification of strong equivalence in $\rm LP^{MLN}$ can be reduced to equivalence checking in classical logic plus weight consideration.The result allows us to leverage an answer set solver for checking strong equivalence in $\rm LP^{MLN}$. Furthermore, this study also suggests us a few reformulations of the $\rm LP^{MLN}$ semantics using choice rules, logic of here and there, and the second-order logic. I will present my work result of strong equivalence for $\rm LP^{MLN}$ and talk about my next steps for research: one is approximately strong equivalence, and another is the integration of fuzzy logic with neural network.
The Curious Case of Machine Learning In Malware Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we argue that machine learning techniques are not ready for malware detection in the wild. Given the current trend in malware development and the increase of unconventional malware attacks, we expect that dynamic malware analysis is the future for antimalware detection and prevention systems. A comprehensive review of machine learning for malware detection is presented. Then, we discuss how malware detection in the wild present unique challenges for the current state-of-the-art machine learning techniques. We defined three critical problems that limit the success of malware detectors powered by machine learning in the wild. Next, we discuss possible solutions to these challenges and present the requirements of next-generation malware detection. Finally, we outline potential research directions in machine learning for malware detection.
A Case Study: Exploiting Neural Machine Translation to Translate CUDA to OpenCL
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

The sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model for neural machine translation has significantly improved the accuracy of language translation. There have been new efforts to use this seq2seq model for program language translation or program comparisons. In this work, we present the detailed steps of using a seq2seq model to translate CUDA programs to OpenCL programs, which both have very similar programming styles. Our work shows (i) a training input set generation method, (ii) pre/post processing, and (iii) a case study using Polybench-gpu-1.0, NVIDIA SDK, and Rodinia benchmarks.