OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Verifiably Safe Off-Model Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2019
Year: 2019

The desire to use reinforcement learning in safety-critical settings has inspired a recent interest in formal methods for learning algorithms. Existing formal methods for learning and optimization primarily consider the problem of constrained learning or constrained optimization. Given a single correct model and associated safety constraint, these approaches guarantee efficient learning while provably avoiding behaviors outside the safety constraint. Acting well given an accurate environmental model is an important pre-requisite for safe learning, but is ultimately insufficient for systems that operate in complex heterogeneous environments. This paper introduces verification-preserving model updates, the first approach toward obtaining formal safety guarantees for reinforcement learning in settings where multiple environmental models must be taken into account. Through a combination of design-time model updates and runtime model falsification, we provide a first approach toward obtaining formal safety proofs for autonomous systems acting in heterogeneous environments.
Distributed Processes and Scalability in Sub-networks of Large-Scale Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

Performance of standard processes over large distributed networks typically scales with the size of the network. For example, in planar topologies where nodes communicate with their natural neighbors, the scaling factor is $O(n)$, where $n$ is the number of nodes. As the size of the network increases, this makes global convergence over the entire network less practical. On the other hand, for several applications, such as load balancing or detection of local events, global convergence may not be necessary or even relevant. We introduce simple distributed iterative processes which limit the scope of the computational task to a smaller subnetwork of the entire network. This is achieved using one additional local parameter which controls the size of the subnetwork. We establish termination and convergence rate of such processes in theory, in experiment, in comparison to the well understood behavior of Markov processes, and for a variety of network topologies and initial conditions.
Multi-target Position and Velocity Estimation Using OFDM Communication Signals
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we consider a passive radar system that estimates the positions and velocities of multiple moving targets by using OFDM signals transmitted by a totally un-coordinated and un-synchronizated illuminator and multiple receivers. It is assumed that data demodulation is performed separately based on the direct-path signal, and the error-prone estimated data symbols are made available to the passive radar receivers, which estimate the positions and velocities of the targets in two stages. First, we formulate a problem of joint estimation of the delay-Doppler of reflectors and the demodulation errors, by exploiting two types of sparsities of the system, namely, the numbers of reflectors (i.e., targets and clutters) and demodulation errors are both small. This problem is non-convex and a conjugate gradient descent method is proposed to solve it. Then in the second stage we determine the positions and velocities of targets based on the estimated delay-Doppler in the first stage. And two methods are proposed: the first is based on numerically solving a set of nonlinear equations, while the second is based on the back propagation neural network, which is more efficient. The performance of the proposed passive OFDM radar receiver algorithm is evaluated through extensive simulations.
TMAV: Temporal Motionless Analysis of Video using CNN in MPSoC
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Analyzing video for traffic categorization is an important pillar of Intelligent Transport Systems. However, it is difficult to analyze and predict traffic based on image frames because the representation of each frame may vary significantly within a short time period. This also would inaccurately represent the traffic over a longer period of time such as the case of video. We propose a novel bio-inspired methodology that integrates analysis of the previous image frames of the video to represent the analysis of the current image frame, the same way a human being analyzes the current situation based on past experience. In our proposed methodology, called IRON-MAN (Integrated Rational prediction and Motionless ANalysis), we utilize Bayesian update on top of the individual image frame analysis in the videos and this has resulted in highly accurate prediction of Temporal Motionless Analysis of the Videos (TMAV) for most of the chosen test cases. The proposed approach could be used for TMAV using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for applications where the number of objects in an image is the deciding factor for prediction and results also show that our proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art for the chosen test case. We also introduce a new metric named, Energy Consumption per Training Image (ECTI). Since, different CNN based models have different training capability and computing resource utilization, some of the models are more suitable for embedded device implementation than the others, and ECTI metric is useful to assess the suitability of using a CNN model in multi-processor systems-on-chips (MPSoCs) with a focus on energy consumption and reliability in terms of lifespan of the embedded device using these MPSoCs.
Massively Parallel Benders Decomposition for Correlation Clustering
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

We tackle the problem of graph partitioning for image segmentation using correlation clustering (CC), which we treat as an integer linear program (ILP). We reformulate optimization in the ILP so as to admit efficient optimization via Benders decomposition, a classic technique from operations research. Our Benders decomposition formulation has many subproblems, each associated with a node in the CC instance's graph, which are solved in parallel. Each Benders subproblem enforces the cycle inequalities corresponding to the negative weight edges attached to its corresponding node in the CC instance. We generate Magnanti-Wong Benders rows in addition to standard Benders rows, to accelerate optimization. Our Benders decomposition approach provides a promising new avenue to accelerate optimization for CC, and allows for massive parallelization.
Breaking the Spatio-Angular Trade-off for Light Field Super-Resolution via LSTM Modelling on Epipolar Plane Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Light-field cameras (LFC) have received increasing attention due to their wide-spread applications. However, current LFCs suffer from the well-known spatio-angular trade-off, which is considered as an inherent and fundamental limit for LFC designs. In this paper, by doing a detailed geometrical optical analysis of the sampling process in an LFC, we show that the effective sampling resolution is generally higher than the number of micro-lenses. This contribution makes it theoretically possible to break the resolution trade-off. Our second contribution is an epipolar plane image (EPI) based super-resolution method, which can super-resolve the spatial and angular dimensions simultaneously. We prove that the light field is a 2D series, thus, a specifically designed CNN-LSTM network is proposed to capture the continuity property of the EPI. Rather than leveraging semantic information, our network focuses on extracting geometric continuity in the EPI. This gives our method an improved generalization ability and makes it applicable to a wide range of previously unseen scenes. Experiments on both synthetic and real light fields demonstrate the improvements over state-of-the-art, especially in large disparity areas.
Crime Analysis using Open Source Information
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we present a method of crime analysis from open source information. We employed un-supervised methods of data mining to explore the facts regarding the crimes of an area of interest. The analysis is based on well known clustering and association techniques. The results show that the proposed method of crime analysis is efficient and gives a broad picture of the crimes of an area to analyst without much effort. The analysis is evaluated using manual approach, which reveals that the results produced by the proposed approach are comparable to the manual analysis, while a great amount of time is saved.
Lightweight Feature Fusion Network for Single Image Super-Resolution
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Single image super-resolution(SISR) has witnessed great progress as convolutional neural network(CNN) gets deeper and wider. However, enormous parameters hinder its application to real world problems. In this letter, We propose a lightweight feature fusion network (LFFN) that can fully explore multi-scale contextual information and greatly reduce network parameters while maximizing SISR results. LFFN is built on spindle blocks and a softmax feature fusion module (SFFM). Specifically, a spindle block is composed of a dimension extension unit, a feature exploration unit and a feature refinement unit. The dimension extension layer expands low dimension to high dimension and implicitly learns the feature maps which is suitable for the next unit. The feature exploration unit performs linear and nonlinear feature exploration aimed at different feature maps. The feature refinement layer is used to fuse and refine features. SFFM fuses the features from different modules in a self-adaptive learning manner with softmax function, making full use of hierarchical information with a small amount of parameter cost. Both qualitative and quantitative experiments on benchmark datasets show that LFFN achieves favorable performance against state-of-the-art methods with similar parameters.
Efficient Deep Learning of GMMs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

We show that a collection of Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) in $R^{n}$ can be optimally classified using $O(n)$ neurons in a neural network with two hidden layers (deep neural network), whereas in contrast, a neural network with a single hidden layer (shallow neural network) would require at least $O(\exp(n))$ neurons or possibly exponentially large coefficients. Given the universality of the Gaussian distribution in the feature spaces of data, e.g., in speech, image and text, our result sheds light on the observed efficiency of deep neural networks in practical classification problems.
Shepherding Hordes of Markov Chains
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2019
Year: 2019

This paper considers large families of Markov chains (MCs) that are defined over a set of parameters with finite discrete domains. Such families occur in software product lines, planning under partial observability, and sketching of probabilistic programs. Simple questions, like `does at least one family member satisfy a property?', are NP-hard. We tackle two problems: distinguish family members that satisfy a given quantitative property from those that do not, and determine a family member that satisfies the property optimally, i.e., with the highest probability or reward. We show that combining two well-known techniques, MDP model checking and abstraction refinement, mitigates the computational complexity. Experiments on a broad set of benchmarks show that in many situations, our approach is able to handle families of millions of MCs, providing superior scalability compared to existing solutions.
Optimizing the SSD Burst Buffer by Traffic Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

Currently, Burst buffer has been proposed to manage the SSD buffering of bursty write requests. Although burst buffer can improve I/O performance in many cases, we find that it has some limitations such as requiring large SSD capacity and harmonious overlapping between computation phase and data flushing phase. In this paper, we propose a scheme, called SSDUP+1. SSDUP+ aims to improve the burst buffer by addressing the above limitations. First, in order to reduce the demand for the SSD capacity, we develop a novel method to detect and quantify the data randomness in the write traffic. Further, an adaptive algorithm is proposed to classify the random writes dynamically. By doing so, much less SSD capacity is required to achieve the similar performance as other burst buffer schemes. Next, in order to overcome the difficulty of perfectly overlapping the computation phase and the flushing phase, we propose a pipeline mechanism for the SSD buffer, in which data buffering and flushing are performed in pipeline. In addition, in order to improve the I/O throughput, we adopt a traffic-aware flushing strategy to reduce the I/O interference in HDD. Finally, in order to further improve the performance of buffering random writes in SSD, SSDUP+ transforms the random writes to sequential writes in SSD by storing the data with a log structure. Further, SSDUP+ uses the AVL tree structure to store the sequence information of the data. We have implemented a prototype of SSDUP+ based on OrangeFS and conducted extensive experiments. The experimental results show that our proposed SSDUP+ can save an average of 50% SSD space, while delivering almost the same performance as other common burst buffer schemes. In addition, SSDUP+ can save about 20% SSD space compared with the previous version of this work, SSDUP, while achieving 20%-30% higher I/O throughput than SSDUP.
A Convolutional Network for Sleep Stages Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Sleep stages classification is a crucial task in the context of sleep studies. It involves the simultaneous analysis of multiple signals recorded during sleep. However, it is complex and tedious, and even the trained expert can spend several hours scoring a single night recording. Multiple automatic methods have tried to solve these problems in the past, most of them by classifying a feature vector that is engineered for a specific dataset. In this work, we avoid this bias using a deep learning model that learns relevant features without human intervention. Particularly, we propose an ensemble of 5 convolutional networks that achieves a kappa index of 0.83 when classifying a dataset of 500 sleep recordings.
A Somewhat Homomorphic Encryption Scheme based on Multivariate Polynomial Evaluation
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

We propose a symmetric key homomorphic encryption scheme based on the evaluation of multivariate polynomials over a finite field. The proposed scheme is somewhat homomorphic with respect to addition and multiplication. Further, we define a generalization of the Learning with Errors problem called the Hidden Subspace Membership problem and show that the semantic security of the proposed scheme can be reduced to the hardness of this problem.
Unsupervised shape and motion analysis of 3822 cardiac 4D MRIs of UK Biobank
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

We perform unsupervised analysis of image-derived shape and motion features extracted from 3822 cardiac 4D MRIs of the UK Biobank. First, with a feature extraction method previously published based on deep learning models, we extract from each case 9 feature values characterizing both the cardiac shape and motion. Second, a feature selection is performed to remove highly correlated feature pairs. Third, clustering is carried out using a Gaussian mixture model on the selected features. After analysis, we identify two small clusters which probably correspond to two pathological categories. Further confirmation using a trained classification model and dimensionality reduction tools is carried out to support this discovery. Moreover, we examine the differences between the other large clusters and compare our measures with the ground-truth.
A 2/3-Approximation Algorithm for Vertex-weighted Matching
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

We consider the maximum vertex-weighted matching problem (MVM) for non-bipartite graphs. In earlier work we have described a 2/3-approximation algorithm for the MVM on bipartite graphs (Dobrian, Halappanavar, Pothen and Al-Herz, SIAM J. Scientific Computing, 2019). Here we show that a 2/3-approximation algorithm for MVM on non-bipartite graphs can be obtained by restricting the length of augmenting paths to at most three. The algorithm has time complexity $O(m \log Δ+ n \log n)$, where $n$ is the number of vertices, $m$ is the number of edges, and $Δ$ is the maximum degree of a vertex. The approximation ratio of the algorithm is obtained by considering failed vertices, i.e., vertices that the approximation algorithm fails to match but the exact algorithm does. We show that there are two distinct heavier matched vertices that we can charge each failed vertex to. Our proof techniques characterize the structure of augmenting paths in a novel way. We have implemented the 2/3-approximation algorithm and show that it runs in under a minute on graphs with tens of millions of vertices and hundreds of millions of edges. We compare its performance with five other algorithms: an exact algorithm for MVM, an exact algorithm for the maximum edge-weighted matching (MEM) problem, as well as three approximation algorithms. In our test set of nineteen problems, there are graphs on which the exact algorithms fail to terminate in 100 hours. The new 2/3-approximation algorithm for MVM outperforms the other approximation algorithms by either being faster (often by orders of magnitude) or obtaining better weights.
Persistent Homology of Geospatial Data: A Case Study with Voting
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2019
Year: 2019

A crucial step in the analysis of persistent homology is the transformation of data into an appropriate topological object (in our case, a simplicial complex). Modern packages for persistent homology often construct Vietoris--Rips or other distance-based simplicial complexes on point clouds because they are relatively easy to compute. We investigate alternative methods of constructing these complexes and the effects of making associated choices during simplicial-complex construction on the output of persistent-homology algorithms. We present two new methods for constructing simplicial complexes from two-dimensional geospatial data (such as maps). We apply these methods to a California precinct-level voting data set, demonstrating that our new constructions can capture geometric characteristics that are missed by distance-based constructions. Our new constructions can thus yield more interpretable persistence modules and barcodes for geospatial data. In particular, they are able to distinguish short-persistence features that occur only for a narrow range of distance scales (e.g., voting behaviors in densely populated cities) from short-persistence noise by incorporating information about other spatial relationships between precincts.
Reactive Liquid: Optimized Liquid Architecture for Elastic and Resilient Distributed Data Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

Today's most prominent IT companies are built on the extraction of insight from data, and data processing has become crucial in data-intensive businesses. Nevertheless, the size of data which should be processed is growing significantly fast. The pace of the data growing has changed the nature of data processing. Today, data-intensive industries demand highly scalable and fault tolerant data processing architectures which can handle the massive amount of data. In this paper, we presented a distributed architecture for elastic and resilient data processing based on the Liquid which is a nearline and offline big data architecture. We used the Reactive Manifesto to design the architecture highly reactive to workload changes and failures. We evaluate our architecture by drawing some numerical comparisons between our architecture prototype and the Liquid prototype. The performed evaluation shows that our architecture can be more scalable against workload and more resilient against failures than the Liquid architecture is.
Heterogeneous Coexistence of Cognitive Radio Networks in TV White Space
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

Wireless standards (e.g., IEEE 802.11af and 802.22) have been developed for enabling opportunistic access in TV white space (TVWS) using cognitive radio (CR) technology. When heterogeneous CR networks that are based on different wireless standards operate in the same TVWS, coexistence issues can potentially cause major problems. Enabling collaborative coexistence via direct coordination between heterogeneous CR networks is very challenging, due to incompatible MAC/PHY designs of coexisting networks, requirement of an over-the-air common control channel for inter-network communications, and time synchronization across devices from different networks. Moreover, such a coexistence scheme would require competing networks or service providers to exchange sensitive control information that may raise conflict of interest issues and customer privacy concerns. In this paper, we present an architecture for enabling collaborative coexistence of heterogeneous CR networks over TVWS, called Symbiotic Heterogeneous coexistence ARchitecturE (SHARE). Define "indirect coordination" first before using it. Because coexistence cannot avoid coordination By mimicking the symbiotic relationships between heterogeneous organisms in a stable ecosystem, SHARE establishes an indirect coordination mechanism between heterogeneous CR networks via a mediator system, which avoids the drawbacks of direct coordination. SHARE includes two spectrum sharing algorithms whose designs were inspired by well-known models and theories from theoretical ecology, viz, the interspecific competition model and the ideal free distribution model.
PT-ISABB: A Hybrid Tree-based Complete Algorithm to Solve Asymmetric Distributed Constraint Optimization Problems
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2019
Year: 2019

Asymmetric Distributed Constraint Optimization Problems (ADCOPs) have emerged as an important formalism in multi-agent community due to their ability to capture personal preferences. However, the existing search-based complete algorithms for ADCOPs can only use local knowledge to compute lower bounds, which leads to inefficient pruning and prohibits them from solving large scale problems. On the other hand, inference-based complete algorithms (e.g., DPOP) for Distributed Constraint Optimization Problems (DCOPs) require only a linear number of messages, but they cannot be directly applied into ADCOPs due to a privacy concern. Therefore, in the paper, we consider the possibility of combining inference and search to effectively solve ADCOPs at an acceptable loss of privacy. Specifically, we propose a hybrid complete algorithm called PT-ISABB which uses a tailored inference algorithm to provide tight lower bounds and a tree-based complete search algorithm to exhaust the search space. We prove the correctness of our algorithm and the experimental results demonstrate its superiority over other state-of-the-art complete algorithms.