OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Fast Distribution Grid Line Outage Identification with $μ$PMU
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

The growing integration of distributed energy resources (DERs) in urban distribution grids raises various reliability issues due to DER's uncertain and complex behaviors. With a large-scale DER penetration, traditional outage detection methods, which rely on customers making phone calls and smart meters' "last gasp" signals, will have limited performance, because the renewable generators can supply powers after line outages and many urban grids are mesh so line outages do not affect power supply. To address these drawbacks, we propose a data-driven outage monitoring approach based on the stochastic time series analysis from micro phasor measurement unit ($μ$PMU). Specifically, we prove via power flow analysis that the dependency of time-series voltage measurements exhibits significant statistical changes after line outages. This makes the theory on optimal change-point detection suitable to identify line outages via $μ$PMUs with fast and accurate sampling. However, existing change point detection methods require post-outage voltage distribution unknown in distribution systems. Therefore, we design a maximum likelihood-based method to directly learn the distribution parameters from $μ$PMU data. We prove that the estimated parameters-based detection still achieves the optimal performance, making it extremely useful for distribution grid outage identifications. Simulation results show highly accurate outage identification in eight distribution grids with 14 configurations with and without DERs using $μ$PMU data.
Leveraging Aspect Phrase Embeddings for Cross-Domain Review Rating Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

Online review platforms are a popular way for users to post reviews by expressing their opinions towards a product or service, as well as they are valuable for other users and companies to find out the overall opinions of customers. These reviews tend to be accompanied by a rating, where the star rating has become the most common approach for users to give their feedback in a quantitative way, generally as a likert scale of 1-5 stars. In other social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter, an automated review rating prediction system can be useful to determine the rating that a user would have given to the product or service. Existing work on review rating prediction focuses on specific domains, such as restaurants or hotels. This, however, ignores the fact that some review domains which are less frequently rated, such as dentists, lack sufficient data to build a reliable prediction model. In this paper, we experiment on 12 datasets pertaining to 12 different review domains of varying level of popularity to assess the performance of predictions across different domains. We introduce a model that leverages aspect phrase embeddings extracted from the reviews, which enables the development of both in-domain and cross-domain review rating prediction systems. Our experiments show that both of our review rating prediction systems outperform all other baselines. The cross-domain review rating prediction system is particularly significant for the least popular review domains, where leveraging training data from other domains leads to remarkable improvements in performance. The in-domain review rating prediction system is instead more suitable for popular review domains, provided that a model built from training data pertaining to the target domain is more suitable when this data is abundant.
A Radiomics Approach to Traumatic Brain Injury Prediction in CT Scans
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Computer Tomography (CT) is the gold standard technique for brain damage evaluation after acute Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). It allows identification of most lesion types and determines the need of surgical or alternative therapeutic procedures. However, the traditional approach for lesion classification is restricted to visual image inspection. In this work, we characterize and predict TBI lesions by using CT-derived radiomics descriptors. Relevant shape, intensity and texture biomarkers characterizing the different lesions are isolated and a lesion predictive model is built by using Partial Least Squares. On a dataset containing 155 scans (105 train, 50 test) the methodology achieved 89.7 % accuracy over the unseen data. When a model was build using only texture features, a 88.2 % accuracy was obtained. Our results suggest that selected radiomics descriptors could play a key role in brain injury prediction. Besides, the proposed methodology is close to reproduce radiologists decision making. These results open new possibilities for radiomics-inspired brain lesion detection, segmentation and prediction.
AMGCL: an Efficient, Flexible, and Extensible Algebraic Multigrid Implementation
Venue: arXiv cs.MS 2018
Year: 2018

The paper presents AMGCL -- an opensource C++ library implementing the algebraic multigrid method (AMG) for solution of large sparse linear systems of equations, usually arising from discretization of partial differential equations on an unstructured grid. The library supports both shared and distributed memory computation, allows to utilize modern massively parallel processors via OpenMP, OpenCL, or CUDA technologies, has minimal dependencies, and is easily extensible. The design principles behind AMGCL are discussed and it is shown that the code performance is on par with alternative implementations.
Rice-Marlin Codes: Tiny and Efficient Variable-to-Fixed Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2018
Year: 2018

Marlin is a Variable-to-Fixed (VF) codec optimized for high decoding speed through the use of small sized dictionaries that fit in the L1 cache of most CPUs. While the size of Marlin dictionaries is adequate for decoding, they are still too large to be encoded fast. We address this problem by proposing two techniques to reduce the alphabet size. The first technique is to encode rare symbols in their own segment, and the second is to combine Marlin dictionaries with Rice encoding, hence our name Rice-Marlin for our new codec. Using those techniques, we are able to reduce the size of Marlin dictionaries by a factor of 16, not only enabling faster encoding speed, but also achieving better compression efficiency.
LoANs: Weakly Supervised Object Detection with Localizer Assessor Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Recently, deep neural networks have achieved remarkable performance on the task of object detection and recognition. The reason for this success is mainly grounded in the availability of large scale, fully annotated datasets, but the creation of such a dataset is a complicated and costly task. In this paper, we propose a novel method for weakly supervised object detection that simplifies the process of gathering data for training an object detector. We train an ensemble of two models that work together in a student-teacher fashion. Our student (localizer) is a model that learns to localize an object, the teacher (assessor) assesses the quality of the localization and provides feedback to the student. The student uses this feedback to learn how to localize objects and is thus entirely supervised by the teacher, as we are using no labels for training the localizer. In our experiments, we show that our model is very robust to noise and reaches competitive performance compared to a state-of-the-art fully supervised approach. We also show the simplicity of creating a new dataset, based on a few videos (e.g. downloaded from YouTube) and artificially generated data.
Fake Comment Detection Based on Sentiment Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

With the development of the E-commerce and reviews website, the comment information is influencing people's life. More and more users share their consumption experience and evaluate the quality of commodity by comment. When people make a decision, they will refer these comments. The dependency of the comments make the fake comment appear. The fake comment is that for profit and other bad motivation, business fabricate untrue consumption experience and they preach or slander some products. The fake comment is easy to mislead users' opinion and decision. The accuracy of humans identifying fake comment is low. It's meaningful to detect fake comment using natural language processing technology for people getting true comment information. This paper uses the sentimental analysis to detect fake comment.
The ADAPT System Description for the IWSLT 2018 Basque to English Translation Task
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper we present the ADAPT system built for the Basque to English Low Resource MT Evaluation Campaign. Basque is a low-resourced, morphologically-rich language. This poses a challenge for Neural Machine Translation models which usually achieve better performance when trained with large sets of data. Accordingly, we used synthetic data to improve the translation quality produced by a model built using only authentic data. Our proposal uses back-translated data to: (a) create new sentences, so the system can be trained with more data; and (b) translate sentences that are close to the test set, so the model can be fine-tuned to the document to be translated.
Domain Randomization for Scene-Specific Car Detection and Pose Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

We address the issue of domain gap when making use of synthetic data to train a scene-specific object detector and pose estimator. While previous works have shown that the constraints of learning a scene-specific model can be leveraged to create geometrically and photometrically consistent synthetic data, care must be taken to design synthetic content which is as close as possible to the real-world data distribution. In this work, we propose to solve domain gap through the use of appearance randomization to generate a wide range of synthetic objects to span the space of realistic images for training. An ablation study of our results is presented to delineate the individual contribution of different components in the randomization process. We evaluate our method on VIRAT, UA-DETRAC, EPFL-Car datasets, where we demonstrate that using scene specific domain randomized synthetic data is better than fine-tuning off-the-shelf models on limited real data.
Virtual Net: a Decentralized Architecture for Interaction in Mobile Virtual Worlds
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2018
Year: 2018

With the development of mobile technology, mobile virtual worlds have attracted massive users. To improve scalability, a peer-to-peer virtual world provides the solution to accommodate more users without increasing hardware investment. In mobile settings, however, existing P2P solutions are not applicable due to the unreliability of mobile devices and the instability of mobile networks. To address the issue, a novel infrastructure model, called Virtual Net, is proposed to provide fault-tolerance in managing user content and object state. In this paper, the key problem, namely object state update, is resolved to maintain state consistency and high interaction responsiveness. This work is important in implementing a scalable mobile virtual world.
Jointly Learning to Label Sentences and Tokens
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

Learning to construct text representations in end-to-end systems can be difficult, as natural languages are highly compositional and task-specific annotated datasets are often limited in size. Methods for directly supervising language composition can allow us to guide the models based on existing knowledge, regularizing them towards more robust and interpretable representations. In this paper, we investigate how objectives at different granularities can be used to learn better language representations and we propose an architecture for jointly learning to label sentences and tokens. The predictions at each level are combined together using an attention mechanism, with token-level labels also acting as explicit supervision for composing sentence-level representations. Our experiments show that by learning to perform these tasks jointly on multiple levels, the model achieves substantial improvements for both sentence classification and sequence labeling.
Dynamic Behavior Control of Induction Motor with STATCOM
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

STATCOMs is used widely in power systems these days. Traditionally, this converter was controlled using a double-loop control or Direct Output Voltage (DOV) controller. But DOV controller do not function properly during a three-phase fault and has a lot of overshoot. Also, the number of PI controllers used in double-loop control is high, which led to complexities when adjusting the coefficients. Therefore, in this paper, an improved DOV method is proposed which, in addition to a reduced number of PI controllers, has a higher speed, lower overshoots and a higher stability in a wider range. By validating the proposed DOV method for controlling the STATCOMs, it has been attempted to improve the dynamical behaviors of induction motor using Matlab/Simulink, and the results indicate a better performance of the proposed method as compared to the other methods.
Communication-Optimal Distributed Dynamic Graph Clustering
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2018
Year: 2018

We consider the problem of clustering graph nodes over large-scale dynamic graphs, such as citation networks, images and web networks, when graph updates such as node/edge insertions/deletions are observed distributively. We propose communication-efficient algorithms for two well-established communication models namely the message passing and the blackboard models. Given a graph with $n$ nodes that is observed at $s$ remote sites over time $[1,t]$, the two proposed algorithms have communication costs $\tilde{O}(ns)$ and $\tilde{O}(n+s)$ ($\tilde{O}$ hides a polylogarithmic factor), almost matching their lower bounds, $Ω(ns)$ and $Ω(n+s)$, respectively, in the message passing and the blackboard models. More importantly, we prove that at each time point in $[1,t]$ our algorithms generate clustering quality nearly as good as that of centralizing all updates up to that time and then applying a standard centralized clustering algorithm. We conducted extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-life datasets which confirmed the communication efficiency of our approach over baseline algorithms while achieving comparable clustering results.
Improving Skin Condition Classification with a Question Answering Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

We present a skin condition classification methodology based on a sequential pipeline of a pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and a Question Answering (QA) model. This method enables us to not only increase the classification confidence and accuracy of the deployed CNN system, but also enables the emulation of the conventional approach of doctors asking the relevant questions in refining the ultimate diagnosis and differential. By combining the CNN output in the form of classification probabilities as a prior to the QA model and the image textual description, we greedily ask the best symptom that maximizes the information gain over symptoms. We demonstrate that combining the QA model with the CNN increases the accuracy up to 10% as compared to the CNN alone, and more than 30% as compared to the QA model alone.
Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda: Counterfactually-Guided Policy Search
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Learning policies on data synthesized by models can in principle quench the thirst of reinforcement learning algorithms for large amounts of real experience, which is often costly to acquire. However, simulating plausible experience de novo is a hard problem for many complex environments, often resulting in biases for model-based policy evaluation and search. Instead of de novo synthesis of data, here we assume logged, real experience and model alternative outcomes of this experience under counterfactual actions, actions that were not actually taken. Based on this, we propose the Counterfactually-Guided Policy Search (CF-GPS) algorithm for learning policies in POMDPs from off-policy experience. It leverages structural causal models for counterfactual evaluation of arbitrary policies on individual off-policy episodes. CF-GPS can improve on vanilla model-based RL algorithms by making use of available logged data to de-bias model predictions. In contrast to off-policy algorithms based on Importance Sampling which re-weight data, CF-GPS leverages a model to explicitly consider alternative outcomes, allowing the algorithm to make better use of experience data. We find empirically that these advantages translate into improved policy evaluation and search results on a non-trivial grid-world task. Finally, we show that CF-GPS generalizes the previously proposed Guided Policy Search and that reparameterization-based algorithms such Stochastic Value Gradient can be interpreted as counterfactual methods.
Sketch based Reduced Memory Hough Transform
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

This paper proposes using sketch algorithms to represent the votes in Hough transforms. Replacing the accumulator array with a sketch (Sketch Hough Transform - SHT) significantly reduces the memory needed to compute a Hough transform. We also present a new sketch, Count Median Update, which works better than known sketch methods for replacing the accumulator array in the Hough Transform.
End-to-End Learning for Answering Structured Queries Directly over Text
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

Structured queries expressed in languages (such as SQL, SPARQL, or XQuery) offer a convenient and explicit way for users to express their information needs for a number of tasks. In this work, we present an approach to answer these directly over text data without storing results in a database. We specifically look at the case of knowledge bases where queries are over entities and the relations between them. Our approach combines distributed query answering (e.g. Triple Pattern Fragments) with models built for extractive question answering. Importantly, by applying distributed querying answering we are able to simplify the model learning problem. We train models for a large portion (572) of the relations within Wikidata and achieve an average 0.70 F1 measure across all models. We also present a systematic method to construct the necessary training data for this task from knowledge graphs and describe a prototype implementation.
Impedance Network of Interconnected Power Electronics Systems: Impedance Operator and Stability Criterion
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

Impedance is an intuitive and efficient way for dynamic representation of power electronics devices. One of the evident strengths, when compared to other small-signal methods, is the natural association with circuit theory. This makes them possible to be connected through basic circuit laws. However, careful attention should be paid when making this association since the impedances obtained through linearization are local variables, often referred to locally defined reference frames. To allow the operations of these impedances using basic circuit laws, a unified reference has to be defined. Though this issue was properly addressed on the state-space models, a thorough analysis and a clarification regarding the unified impedances and stability effects are still missing. This paper aims to bridge this gap by introducing the Impedance Operator (IO) and associated properties to the development of impedance networks. First, the IO for both the AC coupled and AC/DC coupled systems are presented and verified through impedance measurements in PSCAD. Then, three types of impedance network-based stability criterions are presented along with a clarification on the consistency of stability conclusions. Finally, the Nyquist-based analysis is explored, regarding the sensitivity to partition points, to open the discussion on the identification of systems weak points.
Physical Signal Classification Via Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

A Deep Neural Network is applied to classify physical signatures obtained from physical sensor measurements of running gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles and other devices. The classification provides information on the target identities as to vehicle type and even vehicle model. The physical measurements include acoustic, acceleration (vibration), geophonic, and magnetic.
Temporal viability regulation for control affine systems with applications to mobile vehicle coordination under time-varying motion constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2018
Year: 2018

Controlled invariant set and viability regulation of dynamical control systems have played important roles in many control and coordination applications. In this paper we develop a temporal viability regulation theory for general dynamical control systems, and in particular for control affine systems. The time-varying viable set is parameterized by time-varying constraint functions, with the aim to regulate a dynamical control system to be invariant in the time-varying viable set so that temporal state-dependent constraints are enforced. We consider both time-varying equality and inequality constraints in defining a temporal viable set. We also present sufficient conditions for the existence of feasible control input for the control affine systems. The developed temporal viability regulation theory is applied to mobile vehicle coordination.
Senior Project Management System: Requirements, Specification, and Design Issues
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2018
Year: 2018

Senior project is a typical essential course in computing educational programs. The course involves the selection of a project problem, the submission of various documents, and intensive communication among the project team members and between them and the course instructors. To facilitate all these tasks, we introduce the senior project management system (SPMS) that organizes and manages previous, current, and proposed senior projects in all of their stages along with proper ways of communication between the students and course instructors. This paper explains the system requirements and specifications and discusses related design issues. The paper shows the importance of well documenting the specifications and requirements of software systems and paying considerable attention to system design, which has a positive impact on implementing high quality systems.
Modelling student online behaviour in a virtual learning environment
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2018
Year: 2018

In recent years, distance education has enjoyed a major boom. Much work at The Open University (OU) has focused on improving retention rates in these modules by providing timely support to students who are at risk of failing the module. In this paper we explore methods for analysing student activity in online virtual learning environment (VLE) -- General Unary Hypotheses Automaton (GUHA) and Markov chain-based analysis -- and we explain how this analysis can be relevant for module tutors and other student support staff. We show that both methods are a valid approach to modelling student activities. An advantage of the Markov chain-based approach is in its graphical output and in the possibility to model time dependencies of the student activities.