OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Applications of Artificial Intelligence to Network Security
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

Attacks to networks are becoming more complex and sophisticated every day. Beyond the so-called script-kiddies and hacking newbies, there is a myriad of professional attackers seeking to make serious profits infiltrating in corporate networks. Either hostile governments, big corporations or mafias are constantly increasing their resources and skills in cybercrime in order to spy, steal or cause damage more effectively. traditional approaches to Network Security seem to start hitting their limits and it is being recognized the need for a smarter approach to threat detections. This paper provides an introduction on the need for evolution of Cyber Security techniques and how Artificial Intelligence could be of application to help solving some of the problems. It provides also, a high-level overview of some state of the art AI Network Security techniques, to finish analysing what is the foreseeable future of the application of AI to Network Security.
Cryptanalysis of a Chaotic Image Encryption Algorithm Based on Information Entropy
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

Recently, a chaotic image encryption algorithm based on information entropy (IEAIE) was proposed. This paper scrutinizes the security properties of the algorithm and evaluates the validity of the used quantifiable security metrics. When the round number is only one, the equivalent secret key of every basic operation of IEAIE can be recovered with a differential attack separately. Some common insecurity problems in the field of chaotic image encryption are found in IEAIE, e.g. the short orbits of the digital chaotic system and the invalid sensitivity mechanism built on information entropy of the plain image. Even worse, each security metric is questionable, which undermines the security credibility of IEAIE. Hence, IEAIE can only serve as a counterexample for illustrating common pitfalls in designing secure communication method for image data.
On Dispersable Book Embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2018
Year: 2018

In a dispersable book embedding, the vertices of a given graph $G$ must be ordered along a line l, called spine, and the edges of G must be drawn at different half-planes bounded by l, called pages of the book, such that: (i) no two edges of the same page cross, and (ii) the graphs induced by the edges of each page are 1-regular. The minimum number of pages needed by any dispersable book embedding of $G$ is referred to as the dispersable book thickness $dbt(G)$ of $G$. Graph $G$ is called dispersable if $dbt(G) = Δ(G)$ holds (note that $Δ(G) \leq dbt(G)$ always holds). Back in 1979, Bernhart and Kainen conjectured that any $k$-regular bipartite graph $G$ is dispersable, i.e., $dbt(G)=k$. In this paper, we disprove this conjecture for the cases $k=3$ (with a computer-aided proof), and $k=4$ (with a purely combinatorial proof). In particular, we show that the Gray graph, which is 3-regular and bipartite, has dispersable book thickness four, while the Folkman graph, which is 4-regular and bipartite, has dispersable book thickness five. On the positive side, we prove that 3-connected 3-regular bipartite planar graphs are dispersable, and conjecture that this property holds, even if 3-connectivity is relaxed.
A Game-Theoretic Approach to Information-Flow Control via Protocol Composition
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

In the inference attacks studied in Quantitative Information Flow (QIF), the attacker typically tries to interfere with the system in the attempt to increase its leakage of secret information. The defender, on the other hand, typically tries to decrease leakage by introducing some controlled noise. This noise introduction can be modeled as a type of protocol composition, i.e., a probabilistic choice among different protocols, and its effect on the amount of leakage depends heavily on whether or not this choice is visible to the attacker. In this work, we consider operators for modeling visible and hidden choice in protocol composition, and we study their algebraic properties. We then formalize the interplay between defender and attacker in a game-theoretic framework adapted to the specific issues of QIF, where the payoff is information leakage. We consider various kinds of leakage games, depending on whether players act simultaneously or sequentially, and on whether or not the choices of the defender are visible to the attacker. In the case of sequential games, the choice of the second player is generally a function of the choice of the first player, and his/her probabilistic choice can be either over the possible functions (mixed strategy) or it can be on the result of the function (behavioral strategy). We show that when the attacker moves first in a sequential game with a hidden choice, then behavioral strategies are more advantageous for the defender than mixed strategies. This contrasts with the standard game theory, where the two types of strategies are equivalent. Finally, we establish a hierarchy of these games in terms of their information leakage and provide methods for finding optimal strategies (at the points of equilibrium) for both attacker and defender in the various cases.
You are your Metadata: Identification and Obfuscation of Social Media Users using Metadata Information
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

Metadata are associated to most of the information we produce in our daily interactions and communication in the digital world. Yet, surprisingly, metadata are often still catergorized as non-sensitive. Indeed, in the past, researchers and practitioners have mainly focused on the problem of the identification of a user from the content of a message. In this paper, we use Twitter as a case study to quantify the uniqueness of the association between metadata and user identity and to understand the effectiveness of potential obfuscation strategies. More specifically, we analyze atomic fields in the metadata and systematically combine them in an effort to classify new tweets as belonging to an account using different machine learning algorithms of increasing complexity. We demonstrate that through the application of a supervised learning algorithm, we are able to identify any user in a group of 10,000 with approximately 96.7% accuracy. Moreover, if we broaden the scope of our search and consider the 10 most likely candidates we increase the accuracy of the model to 99.22%. We also found that data obfuscation is hard and ineffective for this type of data: even after perturbing 60% of the training data, it is still possible to classify users with an accuracy higher than 95%. These results have strong implications in terms of the design of metadata obfuscation strategies, for example for data set release, not only for Twitter, but, more generally, for most social media platforms.
MAC level Throughput comparison: 802.11ax vs. 802.11ac
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper we compare between the maximum Throughputs received in IEEE 802.11ax and IEEE 802.11ac in a scenario where a single user continuously transmits to another one. The comparison is done as a function of the Modulation/Coding scheme in use. In IEEE 802.11ax we consider two modes of operation where in one Acknowledgment frame up to 64 or 256 frames are acknowledged respectively. IEEE 802.11ax outperforms IEEE 802.11ac by at most 48% and 29% in unreliable and reliable channels respectively.
PIE: A Domain-Specific Language for Interactive Software Development Pipelines
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2018
Year: 2018

Context. Software development pipelines are used for automating essential parts of software engineering processes, such as build automation and continuous integration testing. In particular, interactive pipelines, which process events in a live environment such as an IDE, require timely results for low-latency feedback, and persistence to retain low-latency feedback between restarts. Inquiry. Developing an incrementalized and persistent version of a pipeline is one way to reduce feedback latency, but requires dependency tracking, cache invalidation, and other complicated techniques. Therefore, interactivity complicates pipeline development if timeliness and persistence become responsibilities of the pipeline programmer, rather than being supported by the underlying system. Approach. We develop Pipelines for Interactive Environments (PIE), a Domain-Specific Language (DSL), API, and runtime for developing interactive software development pipelines, where ease of development is a focus. Knowledge. PIE provides a straightforward programming model that enables direct and concise expression of pipelines without boilerplate, reducing the development and maintenance effort of pipelines. Compiled pipeline programs can be embedded into interactive environments such as code editors and IDEs, enabling timely feedback at a low cost. Grounding. Compared to the state of the art, PIE reduces the code required to express an interactive pipeline by a factor of 6 in a case study on syntax-aware editors. Furthermore, we evaluate PIE in two case studies of complex interactive software development scenarios, demonstrating that PIE can handle complex interactive pipelines in a straightforward and concise way.
Forward-Backward Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Goals for reinforcement learning problems are typically defined through hand-specified rewards. To design such problems, developers of learning algorithms must inherently be aware of what the task goals are, yet we often require agents to discover them on their own without any supervision beyond these sparse rewards. While much of the power of reinforcement learning derives from the concept that agents can learn with little guidance, this requirement greatly burdens the training process. If we relax this one restriction and endow the agent with knowledge of the reward function, and in particular of the goal, we can leverage backwards induction to accelerate training. To achieve this, we propose training a model to learn to take imagined reversal steps from known goal states. Rather than training an agent exclusively to determine how to reach a goal while moving forwards in time, our approach travels backwards to jointly predict how we got there. We evaluate our work in Gridworld and Towers of Hanoi and empirically demonstrate that it yields better performance than standard DDQN.
Guarded by Gamora: How Access Control Balances Out Waiting Times in Transport Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

A transport system with passengers traveling between stations in periodically arriving cabins is considered. We propose and evaluate an access control algorithm that dynamically limits the number of passengers who are allowed to board the current cabin. Simulation of a ski lift using empirical passenger data suggests that such access control can balance out the average waiting times at different stations. The algorithm works well with estimated values of the passengers' arrival and de-boarding rates.
How Developers Iterate on Machine Learning Workflows -- A Survey of the Applied Machine Learning Literature
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Machine learning workflow development is anecdotally regarded to be an iterative process of trial-and-error with humans-in-the-loop. However, we are not aware of quantitative evidence corroborating this popular belief. A quantitative characterization of iteration can serve as a benchmark for machine learning workflow development in practice, and can aid the development of human-in-the-loop machine learning systems. To this end, we conduct a small-scale survey of the applied machine learning literature from five distinct application domains. We collect and distill statistics on the role of iteration within machine learning workflow development, and report preliminary trends and insights from our investigation, as a starting point towards this benchmark. Based on our findings, we finally describe desiderata for effective and versatile human-in-the-loop machine learning systems that can cater to users in diverse domains.
Proving Equivalence Between Imperative and MapReduce Implementations Using Program Transformations
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2018
Year: 2018

Distributed programs are often formulated in popular functional frameworks like MapReduce, Spark and Thrill, but writing efficient algorithms for such frameworks is usually a non-trivial task. As the costs of running faulty algorithms at scale can be severe, it is highly desirable to verify their correctness. We propose to employ existing imperative reference implementations as specifications for MapReduce implementations. To this end, we present a novel verification approach in which equivalence between an imperative and a MapReduce implementation is established by a series of program transformations. In this paper, we present how the equivalence framework can be used to prove equivalence between an imperative implementation of the PageRank algorithm and its MapReduce variant. The eight individual transformation steps are individually presented and explained.
Exploiting Residual Resources to Support High Throughput with Resource Allocation
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

Residual radio resources are abundant in wireless networks due to dynamic traffic load, which can be exploited to support high throughput for serving non-real-time (NRT) traffic. In this paper, we investigate how to achieve this by resource allocation with predicted time-average rate, which can be obtained from predicted average residual bandwidth after serving real-time traffic and predicted average channel gains of NRT mobile users. We show the connection between the statistics of their prediction errors. We formulate an optimization problem to make a resource allocation plan within a prediction window for NRT users that randomly initiate requests, which aims to fully use residual resources with ensured quality of service (QoS). To show the benefit of knowing the contents to be requested and the request arrival time in advance, we consider two types of NRT services, video on demand and video on reservation. The optimal solution is obtained, and an online policy is developed that can transmit according to the plan after instantaneous channel gains are available. Simulation and numerical results validate our analysis and show a dramatic gain of the proposed method in supporting high arrival rate of NRT requests with given tolerance on QoS.
Modeling Game Avatar Synergy and Opposition through Embedding in Multiplayer Online Battle Arena Games
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2018
Year: 2018

Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games have received increasing worldwide popularity recently. In such games, players compete in teams against each other by controlling selected game avatars, each of which is designed with different strengths and weaknesses. Intuitively, putting together game avatars that complement each other (synergy) and suppress those of opponents (opposition) would result in a stronger team. In-depth understanding of synergy and opposition relationships among game avatars benefits player in making decisions in game avatar drafting and gaining better prediction of match events. However, due to intricate design and complex interactions between game avatars, thorough understanding of their relationships is not a trivial task. In this paper, we propose a latent variable model, namely Game Avatar Embedding (GAE), to learn avatars' numerical representations which encode synergy and opposition relationships between pairs of avatars. The merits of our model are twofold: (1) the captured synergy and opposition relationships are sensible to experienced human players' perception; (2) the learned numerical representations of game avatars allow many important downstream tasks, such as similar avatar search, match outcome prediction, and avatar pick recommender. To our best knowledge, no previous model is able to simultaneously support both features. Our quantitative and qualitative evaluations on real match data from three commercial MOBA games illustrate the benefits of our model.
A Better Resource Allocation Algorithm with Semi-Bandit Feedback
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

We study a sequential resource allocation problem between a fixed number of arms. On each iteration the algorithm distributes a resource among the arms in order to maximize the expected success rate. Allocating more of the resource to a given arm increases the probability that it succeeds, yet with a cut-off. We follow Lattimore et al. (2014) and assume that the probability increases linearly until it equals one, after which allocating more of the resource is wasteful. These cut-off values are fixed and unknown to the learner. We present an algorithm for this problem and prove a regret upper bound of $O(\log n)$ improving over the best known bound of $O(\log^2 n)$. Lower bounds we prove show that our upper bound is tight. Simulations demonstrate the superiority of our algorithm.
Siamese Cookie Embedding Networks for Cross-Device User Matching
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2018
Year: 2018

Over the last decade, the number of devices per person has increased substantially. This poses a challenge for cookie-based personalization applications, such as online search and advertising, as it narrows the personalization signal to a single device environment. A key task is to find which cookies belong to the same person to recover a complete cross-device user journey. Recent work on the topic has shown the benefits of using unsupervised embeddings learned on user event sequences. In this paper, we extend this approach to a supervised setting and introduce the Siamese Cookie Embedding Network (SCEmNet), a siamese convolutional architecture that leverages the multi-modal aspect of sequences, and show significant improvement over the state-of-the-art.
Active Metric Learning for Supervised Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Clustering and classification critically rely on distance metrics that provide meaningful comparisons between data points. We present mixed-integer optimization approaches to find optimal distance metrics that generalize the Mahalanobis metric extensively studied in the literature. Additionally, we generalize and improve upon leading methods by removing reliance on pre-designated "target neighbors," "triplets," and "similarity pairs." Another salient feature of our method is its ability to enable active learning by recommending precise regions to sample after an optimal metric is computed to improve classification performance. This targeted acquisition can significantly reduce computational burden by ensuring training data completeness, representativeness, and economy. We demonstrate classification and computational performance of the algorithms through several simple and intuitive examples, followed by results on real image and medical datasets.
Intertwiners between Induced Representations (with Applications to the Theory of Equivariant Neural Networks)
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Group equivariant and steerable convolutional neural networks (regular and steerable G-CNNs) have recently emerged as a very effective model class for learning from signal data such as 2D and 3D images, video, and other data where symmetries are present. In geometrical terms, regular G-CNNs represent data in terms of scalar fields ("feature channels"), whereas the steerable G-CNN can also use vector or tensor fields ("capsules") to represent data. In algebraic terms, the feature spaces in regular G-CNNs transform according to a regular representation of the group G, whereas the feature spaces in Steerable G-CNNs transform according to the more general induced representations of G. In order to make the network equivariant, each layer in a G-CNN is required to intertwine between the induced representations associated with its input and output space. In this paper we present a general mathematical framework for G-CNNs on homogeneous spaces like Euclidean space or the sphere. We show, using elementary methods, that the layers of an equivariant network are convolutional if and only if the input and output feature spaces transform according to an induced representation. This result, which follows from G.W. Mackey's abstract theory on induced representations, establishes G-CNNs as a universal class of equivariant network architectures, and generalizes the important recent work of Kondor & Trivedi on the intertwiners between regular representations.
Unreasonable Effectivness of Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

We show how well known rules of back propagation arise from a weighted combination of finite automata. By redefining a finite automata as a predictor we combine the set of all $k$-state finite automata using a weighted majority algorithm. This aggregated prediction algorithm can be simplified using symmetry, and we prove the equivalence of an algorithm that does this. We demonstrate that this algorithm is equivalent to a form of a back propagation acting in a completely connected $k$-node neural network. Thus the use of the weighted majority algorithm allows a bound on the general performance of deep learning approaches to prediction via known results from online statistics. The presented framework opens more detailed questions about network topology; it is a bridge to the well studied techniques of semigroup theory and applying these techniques to answer what specific network topologies are capable of predicting. This informs both the design of artificial networks and the exploration of neuroscience models.
Sensitivity Analysis of Continuous-Time Systems based on Power Spectral Density
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

Bode integrals of sensitivity and sensitivity-like functions along with complementary sensitivity and complementary sensitivity-like functions are conventionally used for describing performance limitations of a feedback control system. In this paper, we show that in the case when the disturbance is a wide sense stationary process the (complementary) sensitivity Bode integral and the (complementary) sensitivity-like Bode integral are identical. A lower bound of the continuous-time complementary sensitivity-like Bode integral is also derived and examined with the linearized flight-path angle tracking control problem of an F-16 aircraft.
Dynamic Power Distribution System Management With a Locally Connected Communication Network
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

Coordinated optimization and control of distribution-level assets can enable a reliable and optimal integration of massive amount of distributed energy resources (DERs) and facilitate distribution system management (DSM). Accordingly, the objective is to coordinate the power injection at the DERs to maintain certain quantities across the network, e.g., voltage magnitude, line flows, or line losses, to be close to a desired profile. By and large, the performance of the DSM algorithms has been challenged by two factors: i) the possibly non strongly connected communication network over DERs that hinders the coordination; ii) the dynamics of the real system caused by the DERs with heterogeneous capabilities, time-varying operating conditions, and real-time measurement mismatches. In this paper, we investigate the modeling and algorithm design and analysis with the consideration of these two factors. In particular, a game-theoretic characterization is first proposed to account for a locally connected communication network over DERs, along with the analysis of the existence and uniqueness of the Nash equilibrium (NE) therein. To achieve the equilibrium in a distributed fashion, a projected-gradient-based asynchronous DSM algorithm is then advocated. The algorithm performance, including the convergence speed and the tracking error, is analytically guaranteed under the dynamic setting. Extensive numerical tests on both synthetic and realistic cases corroborate the analytical results derived.