OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Collision Resolution and Interference Elimination in Multiaccess Communication Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2017
Year: 2017

We define a multiaccess communication scheme that effectively eliminates interference and resolves collisions in many-to-one and many-to-many communication scenarios. Each transmitter is uniquely identified by a steering vector. All signals issued from a specific transmitter will be steered into the same single-dimensional or double-dimensional subspace at all receivers hearing this transmission. This subspace is orthogonal to the noise subspace at a receiver and the signals within the subspace can be extracted using the root-MUSIC method. At high SNR, local channel knowledge and strict synchronization, the algorithm asymptotically achieves full network capacity on condition that a channel remains constant within a single time slot. Without synchronization, the worst case asymptotic performance is still greater than the $50\%$ throughput achieved by collision resolution algorithms and interference management techniques like interference alignment.
Performance and Portability of Accelerated Lattice Boltzmann Applications with OpenACC
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2017
Year: 2017

An increasingly large number of HPC systems rely on heterogeneous architectures combining traditional multi-core CPUs with power efficient accelerators. Designing efficient applications for these systems has been troublesome in the past as accelerators could usually be programmed using specific programming languages threatening maintainability, portability and correctness. Several new programming environments try to tackle this problem. Among them, OpenACC offers a high-level approach based on compiler directive clauses to mark regions of existing C, C++ or Fortran codes to run on accelerators. This approach directly addresses code portability, leaving to compilers the support of each different accelerator, but one has to carefully assess the relative costs of portable approaches versus computing efficiency. In this paper we address precisely this issue, using as a test-bench a massively parallel Lattice Boltzmann algorithm. We first describe our multi-node implementation and optimization of the algorithm, using OpenACC and MPI. We then benchmark the code on a variety of processors, including traditional CPUs and GPUs, and make accurate performance comparisons with other GPU implementations of the same algorithm using CUDA and OpenCL. We also asses the performance impact associated to portable programming, and the actual portability and performance-portability of OpenACC-based applications across several state-of-the- art architectures.
Lower Bounds on Exponential Moments of the Quadratic Error in Parameter Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

Considering the problem of risk-sensitive parameter estimation, we propose a fairly wide family of lower bounds on the exponential moments of the quadratic error, both in the Bayesian and the non--Bayesian regime. This family of bounds, which is based on a change of measures, offers considerable freedom in the choice of the reference measure, and our efforts are devoted to explore this freedom to a certain extent. Our focus is mostly on signal models that are relevant to communication problems, namely, models of a parameter-dependent signal (modulated signal) corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise, but the methodology proposed is also applicable to other types of parametric families, such as models of linear systems driven by random input signals (white noise, in most cases), and others. In addition to the well known motivations of the risk-sensitive cost function (i.e., the exponential quadratic cost function), which is most notably, the robustness to model uncertainty, we also view this cost function as a tool for studying fundamental limits concerning the tail behavior of the estimation error. Another interesting aspect, that we demonstrate in a certain parametric model, is that the risk-sensitive cost function may be subjected to phase transitions, owing to some analogies with statistical mechanics.
Incorporating Intra-Class Variance to Fine-Grained Visual Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Fine-grained visual recognition aims to capture discriminative characteristics amongst visually similar categories. The state-of-the-art research work has significantly improved the fine-grained recognition performance by deep metric learning using triplet network. However, the impact of intra-category variance on the performance of recognition and robust feature representation has not been well studied. In this paper, we propose to leverage intra-class variance in metric learning of triplet network to improve the performance of fine-grained recognition. Through partitioning training images within each category into a few groups, we form the triplet samples across different categories as well as different groups, which is called Group Sensitive TRiplet Sampling (GS-TRS). Accordingly, the triplet loss function is strengthened by incorporating intra-class variance with GS-TRS, which may contribute to the optimization objective of triplet network. Extensive experiments over benchmark datasets CompCar and VehicleID show that the proposed GS-TRS has significantly outperformed state-of-the-art approaches in both classification and retrieval tasks.
Two New Contributions to the Visualization of AMR Grids: I. Interactive Rendering of Extreme-Scale 2-Dimensional Grids II. Novel Selection Filters in Arbitrary Dimension
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2017
Year: 2017

We present here the result of continuation work, performed to further fulfill the vision we outlined in [Harel,Lekien,Pébaÿ-2017] for the visualization and analysis of tree-based adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) simulations, using the hypertree grid paradigm which we proposed. The first filter presented hereafter implements an adaptive approach in order to accelerate the rendering of 2-dimensional AMR grids, hereby solving the problem posed by the loss of interactivity that occurs when dealing with large and/or deeply refined meshes. Specifically, view parameters are taken into account, in order to: on one hand, avoid creating surface elements that are outside of the view area; on the other hand, utilize level-of-detail properties to cull those cells that are deemed too small to be visible with respect to the given view parameters. This adaptive approach often results in a massive increase in rendering performance. In addition, two new selection filters provide data analysis capabilities, by means of allowing for the extraction of those cells within a hypertree grid that are deemed relevant in some sense, either geometrically or topologically. After a description of these new algorithms, we illustrate their use within the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) in which we implemented them. This note ends with some suggestions for subsequent work.
Stochastic Development Regression on Non-Linear Manifolds
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2017
Year: 2017

We introduce a regression model for data on non-linear manifolds. The model describes the relation between a set of manifold valued observations, such as shapes of anatomical objects, and Euclidean explanatory variables. The approach is based on stochastic development of Euclidean diffusion processes to the manifold. Defining the data distribution as the transition distribution of the mapped stochastic process, parameters of the model, the non-linear analogue of design matrix and intercept, are found via maximum likelihood. The model is intrinsically related to the geometry encoded in the connection of the manifold. We propose an estimation procedure which applies the Laplace approximation of the likelihood function. A simulation study of the performance of the model is performed and the model is applied to a real dataset of Corpus Callosum shapes.
Multi-stage Neural Networks with Single-sided Classifiers for False Positive Reduction and its Evaluation using Lung X-ray CT Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Lung nodule classification is a class imbalanced problem because nodules are found with much lower frequency than non-nodules. In the class imbalanced problem, conventional classifiers tend to be overwhelmed by the majority class and ignore the minority class. We therefore propose cascaded convolutional neural networks to cope with the class imbalanced problem. In the proposed approach, multi-stage convolutional neural networks that perform as single-sided classifiers filter out obvious non-nodules. Successively, a convolutional neural network trained with a balanced data set calculates nodule probabilities. The proposed method achieved the sensitivity of 92.4\% and 94.5% at 4 and 8 false positives per scan in Free Receiver Operating Characteristics (FROC) curve analysis, respectively.
Perturb-and-MPM: Quantifying Segmentation Uncertainty in Dense Multi-Label CRFs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

This paper proposes a novel approach for uncertainty quantification in dense Conditional Random Fields (CRFs). The presented approach, called Perturb-and-MPM, enables efficient, approximate sampling from dense multi-label CRFs via random perturbations. An analytic error analysis was performed which identified the main cause of approximation error as well as showed that the error is bounded. Spatial uncertainty maps can be derived from the Perturb-and-MPM model, which can be used to visualize uncertainty in image segmentation results. The method is validated on synthetic and clinical Magnetic Resonance Imaging data. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated on the challenging problem of segmenting the tumor core in glioblastoma. We found that areas of high uncertainty correspond well to wrongly segmented image regions. Furthermore, we demonstrate the potential use of uncertainty maps to refine imaging biomarkers in the case of extent of resection and residual tumor volume in brain tumor patients.
What Does The Crowd Say About You? Evaluating Aggregation-based Location Privacy
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2017
Year: 2017

Information about people's movements and the locations they visit enables an increasing number of mobility analytics applications, e.g., in the context of urban and transportation planning, In this setting, rather than collecting or sharing raw data, entities often use aggregation as a privacy protection mechanism, aiming to hide individual users' location traces. Furthermore, to bound information leakage from the aggregates, they can perturb the input of the aggregation or its output to ensure that these are differentially private. In this paper, we set to evaluate the impact of releasing aggregate location time-series on the privacy of individuals contributing to the aggregation. We introduce a framework allowing us to reason about privacy against an adversary attempting to predict users' locations or recover their mobility patterns. We formalize these attacks as inference problems, and discuss a few strategies to model the adversary's prior knowledge based on the information she may have access to. We then use the framework to quantify the privacy loss stemming from aggregate location data, with and without the protection of differential privacy, using two real-world mobility datasets. We find that aggregates do leak information about individuals' punctual locations and mobility profiles. The density of the observations, as well as timing, play important roles, e.g., regular patterns during peak hours are better protected than sporadic movements. Finally, our evaluation shows that both output and input perturbation offer little additional protection, unless they introduce large amounts of noise ultimately destroying the utility of the data.
Factoring Odd Integers without Multiplication and Division
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2017
Year: 2017

A method of determining two factors of an odd integer without need of multiplication or division operation in iterative portion of computation is presented. It is feasible for an implementing algorithm to use only integer addition and subtraction throughout. Presentation of material is non-theoretical; intended to be accessible to a broader audience of non academic and theoretical practitioners.
A Hypercat-enabled Semantic Internet of Things Data Hub: Technical Report
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2017
Year: 2017

An increasing amount of information is generated from the rapidly increasing number of sensor networks and smart devices. A wide variety of sources generate and publish information in different formats, thus highlighting interoperability as one of the key prerequisites for the success of Internet of Things (IoT). The BT Hypercat Data Hub provides a focal point for the sharing and consumption of available datasets from a wide range of sources. In this work, we propose a semantic enrichment of the BT Hypercat Data Hub, using well-accepted Semantic Web standards and tools. We propose an ontology that captures the semantics of the imported data and present the BT SPARQL Endpoint by means of a mapping between SPARQL and SQL queries. Furthermore, federated SPARQL queries allow queries over multiple hub-based and external data sources. Finally, we provide two use cases in order to illustrate the advantages afforded by our semantic approach.
Repair Strategies for Storage on Mobile Clouds
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2017
Year: 2017

We study the data reliability problem for a community of devices forming a mobile cloud storage system. We consider the application of regenerating codes for file maintenance within a geographically-limited area. Such codes require lower bandwidth to regenerate lost data fragments compared to file replication or reconstruction. We investigate threshold-based repair strategies where data repair is initiated after a threshold number of data fragments have been lost due to node mobility. We show that at a low departure-to-repair rate regime, a lazy repair strategy in which repairs are initiated after several nodes have left the system outperforms eager repair in which repairs are initiated after a single departure. This optimality is reversed when nodes are highly mobile. We further compare distributed and centralized repair strategies and derive the optimal repair threshold for minimizing the average repair cost per unit of time, as a function of underlying code parameters. In addition, we examine cooperative repair strategies and show performance improvements compared to non-cooperative codes. We investigate several models for the time needed for node repair including a simple fixed time model that allows for the computation of closed-form expressions and a more realistic model that takes into account the number of repaired nodes. We derive the conditions under which the former model approximates the latter. Finally, an extended model where additional failures are allowed during the repair process is investigated. Overall, our results establish the joint effect of code design and repair algorithms on the maintenance cost of distributed storage systems.
A Distortion Based Approach for Protecting Inferences
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

Eavesdropping attacks in inference systems aim to learn not the raw data, but the system inferences to predict and manipulate system actions. We argue that conventional information security measures can be ambiguous on the adversary's estimation abilities, and adopt instead a distortion based framework that enables to operate over a metric space. We show that requiring perfect distortion-based security is more frugal than requiring perfect information-theoretic secrecy even for block length one codes, offering in some cases unbounded gains. Within this framework, we design algorithms that enable to efficiently use shared randomness, and show that each bit of shared random key is exponentially useful in security.
The Loopix Anonymity System
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2017
Year: 2017

We present Loopix, a low-latency anonymous communication system that provides bi-directional 'third-party' sender and receiver anonymity and unobservability. Loopix leverages cover traffic and brief message delays to provide anonymity and achieve traffic analysis resistance, including against a global network adversary. Mixes and clients self-monitor the network via loops of traffic to provide protection against active attacks, and inject cover traffic to provide stronger anonymity and a measure of sender and receiver unobservability. Service providers mediate access in and out of a stratified network of Poisson mix nodes to facilitate accounting and off-line message reception, as well as to keep the number of links in the system low, and to concentrate cover traffic. We provide a theoretical analysis of the Poisson mixing strategy as well as an empirical evaluation of the anonymity provided by the protocol and a functional implementation that we analyze in terms of scalability by running it on AWS EC2. We show that a Loopix relay can handle upwards of 300 messages per second, at a small delay overhead of less than 1.5 ms on top of the delays introduced into messages to provide security. Overall message latency is in the order of seconds - which is low for a mix-system. Furthermore, many mix nodes can be securely added to a stratified topology to scale throughput without sacrificing anonymity.
TumorNet: Lung Nodule Characterization Using Multi-View Convolutional Neural Network with Gaussian Process
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Characterization of lung nodules as benign or malignant is one of the most important tasks in lung cancer diagnosis, staging and treatment planning. While the variation in the appearance of the nodules remains large, there is a need for a fast and robust computer aided system. In this work, we propose an end-to-end trainable multi-view deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for nodule characterization. First, we use median intensity projection to obtain a 2D patch corresponding to each dimension. The three images are then concatenated to form a tensor, where the images serve as different channels of the input image. In order to increase the number of training samples, we perform data augmentation by scaling, rotating and adding noise to the input image. The trained network is used to extract features from the input image followed by a Gaussian Process (GP) regression to obtain the malignancy score. We also empirically establish the significance of different high level nodule attributes such as calcification, sphericity and others for malignancy determination. These attributes are found to be complementary to the deep multi-view CNN features and a significant improvement over other methods is obtained.
Real-time public transport service-level monitoring using passive WiFi: a spectral clustering approach for train timetable estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2017
Year: 2017

A new area in which passive WiFi analytics have promise for delivering value is the real-time monitoring of public transport systems. One example is determining the true (as opposed to the published) timetable of a public transport system in real-time. In most cases, there are no other publicly-available sources for this information. Yet, it is indispensable for the real-time monitoring of public transport service levels. Furthermore, this information, if accurate and temporally fine-grained, can be used for very low-latency incident detection. In this work, we propose using spectral clustering based on trajectories derived from passive WiFi traces of users of a public transport system to infer the true timetable and two key performance indicators of the transport service, namely public transport vehicle headway and in-station dwell time. By detecting anomalous dwell times or headways, we demonstrate that a fast and accurate real-time incident-detection procedure can be obtained. The method we introduce makes use of the advantages of the high-frequency WiFi data, which provides very low-latency, universally-accessible information, while minimizing the impact of the noise in the data.
Sampling Variations of Lead Sheets
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2017
Year: 2017

Machine-learning techniques have been recently used with spectacular results to generate artefacts such as music or text. However, these techniques are still unable to capture and generate artefacts that are convincingly structured. In this paper we present an approach to generate structured musical sequences. We introduce a mechanism for sampling efficiently variations of musical sequences. Given a input sequence and a statistical model, this mechanism samples a set of sequences whose distance to the input sequence is approximately within specified bounds. This mechanism is implemented as an extension of belief propagation, and uses local fields to bias the generation. We show experimentally that sampled sequences are indeed closely correlated to the standard musical similarity measure defined by Mongeau and Sankoff. We then show how this mechanism can used to implement composition strategies that enforce arbitrary structure on a musical lead sheet generation problem.
Lock-Free Parallel Perceptron for Graph-based Dependency Parsing
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2017
Year: 2017

Dependency parsing is an important NLP task. A popular approach for dependency parsing is structured perceptron. Still, graph-based dependency parsing has the time complexity of $O(n^3)$, and it suffers from slow training. To deal with this problem, we propose a parallel algorithm called parallel perceptron. The parallel algorithm can make full use of a multi-core computer which saves a lot of training time. Based on experiments we observe that dependency parsing with parallel perceptron can achieve 8-fold faster training speed than traditional structured perceptron methods when using 10 threads, and with no loss at all in accuracy.
A Generic Online Parallel Learning Framework for Large Margin Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2017
Year: 2017

To speed up the training process, many existing systems use parallel technology for online learning algorithms. However, most research mainly focus on stochastic gradient descent (SGD) instead of other algorithms. We propose a generic online parallel learning framework for large margin models, and also analyze our framework on popular large margin algorithms, including MIRA and Structured Perceptron. Our framework is lock-free and easy to implement on existing systems. Experiments show that systems with our framework can gain near linear speed up by increasing running threads, and with no loss in accuracy.
Unsupervised Steganalysis Based on Artificial Training Sets
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2017
Year: 2017

In this paper, an unsupervised steganalysis method that combines artificial training setsand supervised classification is proposed. We provide a formal framework for unsupervisedclassification of stego and cover images in the typical situation of targeted steganalysis (i.e.,for a known algorithm and approximate embedding bit rate). We also present a completeset of experiments using 1) eight different image databases, 2) image features based on RichModels, and 3) three different embedding algorithms: Least Significant Bit (LSB) matching,Highly undetectable steganography (HUGO) and Wavelet Obtained Weights (WOW). Weshow that the experimental results outperform previous methods based on Rich Models inthe majority of the tested cases. At the same time, the proposed approach bypasses theproblem of Cover Source Mismatch -when the embedding algorithm and bit rate are known-, since it removes the need of a training database when we have a large enough testing set.Furthermore, we provide a generic proof of the proposed framework in the machine learningcontext. Hence, the results of this paper could be extended to other classification problemssimilar to steganalysis.