OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Making an Embedded DBMS JIT-friendly
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2016
Year: 2016

While database management systems (DBMSs) are highly optimized, interactions across the boundary between the programming language (PL) and the DBMS are costly, even for in-process embedded DBMSs. In this paper, we show that programs that interact with the popular embedded DBMS SQLite can be significantly optimized - by a factor of 3.4 in our benchmarks - by inlining across the PL / DBMS boundary. We achieved this speed-up by replacing parts of SQLite's C interpreter with RPython code and composing the resulting meta-tracing virtual machine (VM) - called SQPyte - with the PyPy VM. SQPyte does not compromise stand-alone SQL performance and is 2.2% faster than SQLite on the widely used TPC-H benchmark suite.
The Exploitation of Web Navigation Data: Ethical Issues and Alternative Scenarios
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2016
Year: 2016

Nowadays, the users' browsing activity on the Internet is not completely private due to many entities that collect and use such data, either for legitimate or illegal goals. The implications are serious, from a person who exposes unconsciously his private information to an unknown third party entity, to a company that is unable to control its information to the outside world. As a result, users have lost control over their private data in the Internet. In this paper, we present the entities involved in users' data collection and usage. Then, we highlight what are the ethical issues that arise for users, companies, scientists and governments. Finally, we present some alternative scenarios and suggestions for the entities to address such ethical issues.
Adaptive multi-stage integrators for optimal energy conservation in molecular simulations
Venue: arXiv cs.NA 2016
Year: 2016

We introduce a new Adaptive Integration Approach (AIA) to be used in a wide range of molecular simulations. Given a simulation problem and a step size, the method automatically chooses the optimal scheme out of an available family of numerical integrators. Although we focus on two-stage splitting integrators, the idea may be used with more general families. In each instance, the system-specific integrating scheme identified by our approach is optimal in the sense that it provides the best conservation of energy for harmonic forces. The AIA method has been implemented in the BCAM-modified GROMACS software package. Numerical tests in molecular dynamics and hybrid Monte Carlo simulations of constrained and unconstrained physical systems show that the method successfully realises the fail-safe strategy. In all experiments, and for each of the criteria employed, the AIA is at least as good as, and often significantly outperforms the standard Verlet scheme, as well as fixed parameter, optimized two-stage integrators. In particular, the sampling efficiency found in simulations using the AIA is up to 5 times better than the one achieved with other tested schemes.
Deep Learning-Based Image Kernel for Inductive Transfer
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

We propose a method to classify images from target classes with a small number of training examples based on transfer learning from non-target classes. Without using any more information than class labels for samples from non-target classes, we train a Siamese net to estimate the probability of two images to belong to the same class. With some post-processing, output of the Siamese net can be used to form a gram matrix of a Mercer kernel. Coupled with a support vector machine (SVM), such a kernel gave reasonable classification accuracy on target classes without any fine-tuning. When the Siamese net was only partially fine-tuned using a small number of samples from the target classes, the resulting classifier outperformed the state-of-the-art and other alternatives. We share class separation capabilities and insights into the learning process of such a kernel on MNIST, Dogs vs. Cats, and CIFAR-10 datasets.
A Fair Admission Control Mechanism for Efficient Utilization of Resources in On-chip Nanophotonic Crossbars
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2016
Year: 2016

Advances in CMOS-compatible photonic elements have made it plausible to exploit nanophotonic communications to overcome the limitations of traditional NoCs. Amongst various proposed nanophotonic architectures, optical crossbars have been shown to provide high performance in terms of bandwidth and latency. In general, optical crossbars provide a vast volume of network resources that are shared among all the cores within the chip. In this paper, we present a fair and efficient admission control mechanism for shared wavelengths and buffer space in optical crossbars. We model buffer management and wavelength assignment as a utility-based convex optimization problem, whose solution determines the admission control policy. Thanks to efficient convex optimization techniques, we obtain the globally optimal solution of the admission control optimization problem by using simple and yet efficient iterative algorithms. We cast our solution procedure as an iterative algorithm to be implemented a central admission controller. Our experimental results corroborate the gain that can be obtained by using such an admission controller to manage the shared resources of the system. Furthermore, they confirm that the proposed admission control algorithm works well for various traffic patterns and parameters, and evinces a tractable scalability with increase in the number of cores of the crossbar.
Compressed Dynamic Mode Decomposition for Background Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

We introduce the method of compressed dynamic mode decomposition (cDMD) for background modeling. The dynamic mode decomposition (DMD) is a regression technique that integrates two of the leading data analysis methods in use today: Fourier transforms and singular value decomposition. Borrowing ideas from compressed sensing and matrix sketching, cDMD eases the computational workload of high resolution video processing. The key principal of cDMD is to obtain the decomposition on a (small) compressed matrix representation of the video feed. Hence, the cDMD algorithm scales with the intrinsic rank of the matrix, rather then the size of the actual video (data) matrix. Selection of the optimal modes characterizing the background is formulated as a sparsity-constrained sparse coding problem. Our results show, that the quality of the resulting background model is competitive, quantified by the F-measure, Recall and Precision. A GPU (graphics processing unit) accelerated implementation is also presented which further boosts the computational efficiency of the algorithm.
The Fixed Initial Credit Problem for Partial-Observation Energy Games is Ack-complete
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2016
Year: 2016

In this paper we study two-player games with asymmetric partial observation and an energy objective. Such games are played on a weighted automaton by Eve, choosing actions, and Adam, choosing a transition labelled with the given action. Eve attempts to maintain the sum of the weights (of the transitions taken) non-negative while Adam tries to do the opposite. Eve does not know the exact state of the game, she is only given an equivalence class of states which contains it. In contrast, Adam has full observation. We show the fixed initial credit problem for these games is Ack-complete.
Generalized Turbo Signal Recovery for Nonlinear Measurements and Orthogonal Sensing Matrices
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

In this study, we propose a generalized turbo signal recovery algorithm to estimate a signal from quantized measurements, in which the sensing matrix is a row-orthogonal matrix, such as the partial discrete Fourier transform matrix. The state evolution of the proposed algorithm is derived and is shown to be consistent with that obtained with the replica method. Numerical experiments illustrate the excellent agreement of the proposed algorithm with theoretical state evolution.
Blind, Greedy, and Random: Ordinal Approximation Algorithms for Matching and Clustering
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2016
Year: 2016

We study Matching and other related problems in a partial information setting where the agents' utilities for being matched to other agents are hidden and the mechanism only has access to ordinal preference information. Our model is motivated by the fact that in many settings, agents cannot express the numerical values of their utility for different outcomes, but are still able to rank the outcomes in their order of preference. Specifically, we study problems where the ground truth exists in the form of a weighted graph, and look to design algorithms that approximate the true optimum matching using only the preference orderings for each agent (induced by the hidden weights) as input. If no restrictions are placed on the weights, then one cannot hope to do better than the simple greedy algorithm, which yields a half optimal matching. Perhaps surprisingly, we show that by imposing a little structure on the weights, we can improve upon the trivial algorithm significantly: we design a 1.6-approximation algorithm for instances where the hidden weights obey the metric inequality. Using our algorithms for matching as a black-box, we also design new approximation algorithms for other closely related problems: these include a a 3.2-approximation for the problem of clustering agents into equal sized partitions, a 4-approximation algorithm for Densest k-subgraph, and a 2.14-approximation algorithm for Max TSP. These results are the first non-trivial ordinal approximation algorithms for such problems, and indicate that we can design robust algorithms even when we are agnostic to the precise agent utilities.
Improved Balanced Flow Computation Using Parametric Flow
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2016
Year: 2016

We present a new algorithm for computing balanced flows in equality networks arising in market equilibrium computations. The current best time bound for computing balanced flows in such networks requires $O(n)$ maxflow computations, where $n$ is the number of nodes in the network [Devanur et al. 2008]. Our algorithm requires only a single parametric flow computation. The best algorithm for computing parametric flows [Gallo et al. 1989] is only by a logarithmic factor slower than the best algorithms for computing maxflows. Hence, the running time of the algorithms in [Devanur et al. 2008] and [Duan and Mehlhorn 2015] for computing market equilibria in linear Fisher and Arrow-Debreu markets improve by almost a factor of $n$.
Chinese Postman Problem on Edge-Colored Multigraphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2016
Year: 2016

It is well-known that the Chinese postman problem on undirected and directed graphs is polynomial-time solvable. We extend this result to edge-colored multigraphs. Our result is in sharp contrast to the Chinese postman problem on mixed graphs, i.e., graphs with directed and undirected edges, for which the problem is NP-hard.
Neutro-Connectedness Cut
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

Interactive image segmentation is a challenging task and receives increasing attention recently; however, two major drawbacks exist in interactive segmentation approaches. First, the segmentation performance of ROI-based methods is sensitive to the initial ROI: different ROIs may produce results with great difference. Second, most seed-based methods need intense interactions, and are not applicable in many cases. In this work, we generalize the Neutro-Connectedness (NC) to be independent of top-down priors of objects and to model image topology with indeterminacy measurement on image regions, propose a novel method for determining object and background regions, which is applied to exclude isolated background regions and enforce label consistency, and put forward a hybrid interactive segmentation method, Neutro-Connectedness Cut (NC-Cut), which can overcome the above two problems by utilizing both pixel-wise appearance information and region-based NC properties. We evaluate the proposed NC-Cut by employing two image datasets (265 images), and demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art interactive image segmentation methods (Grabcut, MILCut, One-Cut, MGC_max^sum and pPBC).
SLiMFast: Guaranteed Results for Data Fusion and Source Reliability
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2016
Year: 2016

We focus on data fusion, i.e., the problem of unifying conflicting data from data sources into a single representation by estimating the source accuracies. We propose SLiMFast, a framework that expresses data fusion as a statistical learning problem over discriminative probabilistic models, which in many cases correspond to logistic regression. In contrast to previous approaches that use complex generative models, discriminative models make fewer distributional assumptions over data sources and allow us to obtain rigorous theoretical guarantees. Furthermore, we show how SLiMFast enables incorporating domain knowledge into data fusion, yielding accuracy improvements of up to 50\% over state-of-the-art baselines. Building upon our theoretical results, we design an optimizer that obviates the need for users to manually select an algorithm for learning SLiMFast's parameters. We validate our optimizer on multiple real-world datasets and show that it can accurately predict the learning algorithm that yields the best data fusion results.
Backward and Forward Language Modeling for Constrained Sentence Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2016
Year: 2016

Recent language models, especially those based on recurrent neural networks (RNNs), make it possible to generate natural language from a learned probability. Language generation has wide applications including machine translation, summarization, question answering, conversation systems, etc. Existing methods typically learn a joint probability of words conditioned on additional information, which is (either statically or dynamically) fed to RNN's hidden layer. In many applications, we are likely to impose hard constraints on the generated texts, i.e., a particular word must appear in the sentence. Unfortunately, existing approaches could not solve this problem. In this paper, we propose a novel backward and forward language model. Provided a specific word, we use RNNs to generate previous words and future words, either simultaneously or asynchronously, resulting in two model variants. In this way, the given word could appear at any position in the sentence. Experimental results show that the generated texts are comparable to sequential LMs in quality.
S2RDF: RDF Querying with SPARQL on Spark
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2016
Year: 2016

RDF has become very popular for semantic data publishing due to its flexible and universal graph-like data model. Yet, the ever-increasing size of RDF data collections makes it more and more infeasible to store and process them on a single machine, raising the need for distributed approaches. Instead of building a standalone but closed distributed RDF store, we endorse the usage of existing infrastructures for Big Data processing, e.g. Hadoop. However, SPARQL query performance is a major challenge as these platforms are not designed for RDF processing from ground. Thus, existing Hadoop-based approaches often favor certain query pattern shape while performance drops significantly for other shapes. In this paper, we describe a novel relational partitioning schema for RDF data called ExtVP that uses a semi-join based preprocessing, akin to the concept of Join Indices in relational databases, to efficiently minimize query input size regardless of its pattern shape and diameter. Our prototype system S2RDF is built on top of Spark and uses its relational interface to execute SPARQL queries over ExtVP. We demonstrate its superior performance in comparison to state of the art SPARQL-on-Hadoop approaches using the recent WatDiv test suite. S2RDF achieves sub-second runtimes for majority of queries on a billion triples RDF graph.
Computing the $L_1$ Geodesic Diameter and Center of a Polygonal Domain
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2016
Year: 2016

For a polygonal domain with $h$ holes and a total of $n$ vertices, we present algorithms that compute the $L_1$ geodesic diameter in $O(n^2+h^4)$ time and the $L_1$ geodesic center in $O((n^4+n^2 h^4)α(n))$ time, respectively, where $α(\cdot)$ denotes the inverse Ackermann function. No algorithms were known for these problems before. For the Euclidean counterpart, the best algorithms compute the geodesic diameter in $O(n^{7.73})$ or $O(n^7(h+\log n))$ time, and compute the geodesic center in $O(n^{11}\log n)$ time. Therefore, our algorithms are significantly faster than the algorithms for the Euclidean problems. Our algorithms are based on several interesting observations on $L_1$ shortest paths in polygonal domains.
Geometric k-Center Problems with Centers Constrained to Two Lines
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2016
Year: 2016

We consider the $k$-center problem in which the centers are constrained to lie on two lines. Given a set of $n$ weighted points in the plane, we want to locate up to $k$ centers on two parallel lines. We present an $O(n\log^2 n)$ time algorithm, which minimizes the weighted distance from any point to a center. We then consider the unweighted case, where the centers are constrained to be on two perpendicular lines. Our algorithms run in $O(n\log^2 n)$ time also in this case.
Quick Brown Fox in Formal Languages
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2016
Year: 2016

Given a finite alphabet $Σ$ and a deterministic finite automaton on $Σ$, the problem of determining whether the language recognized by the automaton contains any pangram is \NP-complete. Various other language classes and problems around pangrams are analyzed.
Improving Facial Analysis and Performance Driven Animation through Disentangling Identity and Expression
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

We present techniques for improving performance driven facial animation, emotion recognition, and facial key-point or landmark prediction using learned identity invariant representations. Established approaches to these problems can work well if sufficient examples and labels for a particular identity are available and factors of variation are highly controlled. However, labeled examples of facial expressions, emotions and key-points for new individuals are difficult and costly to obtain. In this paper we improve the ability of techniques to generalize to new and unseen individuals by explicitly modeling previously seen variations related to identity and expression. We use a weakly-supervised approach in which identity labels are used to learn the different factors of variation linked to identity separately from factors related to expression. We show how probabilistic modeling of these sources of variation allows one to learn identity-invariant representations for expressions which can then be used to identity-normalize various procedures for facial expression analysis and animation control. We also show how to extend the widely used techniques of active appearance models and constrained local models through replacing the underlying point distribution models which are typically constructed using principal component analysis with identity-expression factorized representations. We present a wide variety of experiments in which we consistently improve performance on emotion recognition, markerless performance-driven facial animation and facial key-point tracking.
ePlace-3D: Electrostatics based Placement for 3D-ICs
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2016
Year: 2016

We propose a flat, analytic, mixed-size placement algorithm ePlace-3D for three-dimension integrated circuits (3D-ICs) using nonlinear optimization. Our contributions are (1) electrostatics based 3D density function with globally uniform smoothness (2) 3D numerical solution with improved spectral formulation (3) 3D nonlinear pre-conditioner for convergence acceleration (4) interleaved 2D-3D placement for efficiency enhancement. Our placer outperforms the leading work mPL6-3D and NTUplace3-3D with 6.44% and 37.15% shorter wirelength, 9.11% and 10.27% fewer 3D vertical interconnects (VI) on average of IBM-PLACE circuits. Validation on the large-scale modern mixed-size (MMS) 3D circuits shows high performance and scalability.
Simple, Robust and Optimal Ranking from Pairwise Comparisons
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2016
Year: 2016

We consider data in the form of pairwise comparisons of n items, with the goal of precisely identifying the top k items for some value of k < n, or alternatively, recovering a ranking of all the items. We analyze the Copeland counting algorithm that ranks the items in order of the number of pairwise comparisons won, and show it has three attractive features: (a) its computational efficiency leads to speed-ups of several orders of magnitude in computation time as compared to prior work; (b) it is robust in that theoretical guarantees impose no conditions on the underlying matrix of pairwise-comparison probabilities, in contrast to some prior work that applies only to the BTL parametric model; and (c) it is an optimal method up to constant factors, meaning that it achieves the information-theoretic limits for recovering the top k-subset. We extend our results to obtain sharp guarantees for approximate recovery under the Hamming distortion metric, and more generally, to any arbitrary error requirement that satisfies a simple and natural monotonicity condition.
Statistical Query Algorithms for Mean Vector Estimation and Stochastic Convex Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2016
Year: 2016

Stochastic convex optimization, where the objective is the expectation of a random convex function, is an important and widely used method with numerous applications in machine learning, statistics, operations research and other areas. We study the complexity of stochastic convex optimization given only statistical query (SQ) access to the objective function. We show that well-known and popular first-order iterative methods can be implemented using only statistical queries. For many cases of interest we derive nearly matching upper and lower bounds on the estimation (sample) complexity including linear optimization in the most general setting. We then present several consequences for machine learning, differential privacy and proving concrete lower bounds on the power of convex optimization based methods. The key ingredient of our work is SQ algorithms and lower bounds for estimating the mean vector of a distribution over vectors supported on a convex body in $\mathbb{R}^d$. This natural problem has not been previously studied and we show that our solutions can be used to get substantially improved SQ versions of Perceptron and other online algorithms for learning halfspaces.
Nonlinear PI current control of reluctance synchronous machines
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2016
Year: 2016

This paper discusses nonlinear proportional-integral (PI) current control with anti-windup of reluctance synchronous machines (RSMs) for which the flux linkage maps are known. The nonlinear controller design is based on the tuning rule "Magnitude Optimum criterion" [1]. Due to the nonlinear flux linkage, the current dynamics of RSMs are highly nonlinear and, so, the parameters of the PI controllers and the disturbance compensation feedforward control must be adjusted online (e.g., for each sampling instant). The theoretical results are illustrated and validated by simulation and measurement results.