OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Spectral Efficiency of Mixed-ADC Receivers for Massive MIMO Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

This paper investigated the uplink of multi-user massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems with a mixed analog-to-digital converter (ADC) receiver architecture, in which some antennas are equipped with costly full-resolution ADCs and others with less expensive low-resolution ADCs. A closed-form approximation of the achievable spectral efficiency (SE) with the maximum-ratio combining (MRC) detector is derived. Based on this approximated result, the effects of the number of base station antennas, the transmit power, the proportion of full-resolution ADCs in the mixed-ADC structure, and the number of quantization bits of the low-resolution ADCs are revealed. Results showcase that the achievable SE increases with the number of BS antennas and quantization bits, and it converges to a saturated value in the high user power regime or the full ADC resolution case. Most important, this work efficiency verifies that for massive MIMO, the mixed-ADC receiver with a small fraction of full-resolution ADCs can have comparable SE performance with the receiver with all full-resolution ADCs but at a considerably lower hardware cost.
Discovering Latent States for Model Learning: Applying Sensorimotor Contingencies Theory and Predictive Processing to Model Context
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2016
Year: 2016

Autonomous robots need to be able to adapt to unforeseen situations and to acquire new skills through trial and error. Reinforcement learning in principle offers a suitable methodological framework for this kind of autonomous learning. However current computational reinforcement learning agents mostly learn each individual skill entirely from scratch. How can we enable artificial agents, such as robots, to acquire some form of generic knowledge, which they could leverage for the learning of new skills? This paper argues that, like the brain, the cognitive system of artificial agents has to develop a world model to support adaptive behavior and learning. Inspiration is taken from two recent developments in the cognitive science literature: predictive processing theories of cognition, and the sensorimotor contingencies theory of perception. Based on these, a hypothesis is formulated about what the content of information might be that is encoded in an internal world model, and how an agent could autonomously acquire it. A computational model is described to formalize this hypothesis, and is evaluated in a series of simulation experiments.
Exploring the Front Touch Interface for Virtual Reality Headsets
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2016
Year: 2016

In this paper, we propose a new interface for virtual reality headset: a touchpad in front of the headset. To demonstrate the feasibility of the front touch interface, we built a prototype device, explored VR UI design space expansion, and performed various user studies. We started with preliminary tests to see how intuitively and accurately people can interact with the front touchpad. Then, we further experimented various user interfaces such as a binary selection, a typical menu layout, and a keyboard. Two-Finger and Drag-n-Tap were also explored to find the appropriate selection technique. As a low-cost, light-weight, and in low power budget technology, a touch sensor can make an ideal interface for mobile headset. Also, front touch area can be large enough to allow wide range of interaction types such as multi-finger interactions. With this novel front touch interface, we paved a way to new virtual reality interaction methods.
Supervised Classification of RADARSAT-2 Polarimetric Data for Different Land Features
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

The pixel percentage belonging to the user defined area that are assigned to cluster in a confusion matrix for RADARSAT-2 over Vancouver area has been analysed for classification. In this study, supervised Wishart and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers over RADARSAT-2 (RS2) fine quadpol mode Single Look Complex (SLC) product data is computed and compared. In comparison with conventional single channel or dual channel polarization, RADARSAT-2 is fully polarimetric, making it to offer better land feature contrast for classification operation.
TorBricks: Blocking-Resistant Tor Bridge Distribution
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2016
Year: 2016

Tor is currently the most popular network for anonymous Internet access. It critically relies on volunteer nodes called bridges for relaying Internet traffic when a user's ISP blocks connections to Tor. Unfortunately, current methods for distributing bridges are vulnerable to malicious users who obtain and block bridge addresses. In this paper, we propose TorBricks, a protocol for distributing Tor bridges to n users, even when an unknown number t < n of these users are controlled by a malicious adversary. TorBricks distributes O(tlog(n)) bridges and guarantees that all honest users can connect to Tor with high probability after O(log(t)) rounds of communication with the distributor. We also extend our algorithm to perform privacy-preserving bridge distribution when run among multiple untrusted distributors. This not only prevents the distributors from learning bridge addresses and bridge assignment information, but also provides resistance against malicious attacks from a m/3 fraction of the distributors, where m is the number of distributors.
An end-to-end network slicing framework for 5G wireless communication systems
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2016
Year: 2016

Wireless industry nowadays is facing two major challenges: 1) how to support the vertical industry applications so that to expand the wireless industry market and 2) how to further enhance device capability and user experience. In this paper, we propose a technology framework to address these challenges. The proposed technology framework is based on end-to-end vertical and horizontal slicing, where vertical slicing enables vertical industry and services and horizontal slicing improves system capacity and user experience. The technology development on vertical slicing has already started in late 4G and early 5G and is mostly focused on slicing the core network. We envision this trend to continue with the development of vertical slicing in the radio access network and the air interface. Moving beyond vertical slicing, we propose to horizontally slice the computation and communication resources to form virtual computation platforms for solving the network capacity scaling problem and enhancing device capability and user experience. In this paper, we explain the concept of vertical and horizontal slicing and illustrate the slicing techniques in the air interface, the radio access network, the core network and the computation platform. This paper aims to initiate the discussion on the long-range technology roadmap and spur development on the solutions for E2E network slicing in 5G and beyond.
Recursion-Free Online Multiple Incremental/Decremental Analysis Based on Ridge Support Vector Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2016
Year: 2016

This study presents a rapid multiple incremental and decremental mechanism based on Weight-Error Curves (WECs) for support-vector analysis. Recursion-free computation is proposed for predicting the Lagrangian multipliers of new samples. This study examines Ridge Support Vector Models, subsequently devising a recursion-free function derived from WECs. With the proposed function, all the new Lagrangian multipliers can be computed at once without using any gradual step sizes. Moreover, such a function relaxes a constraint, where the increment of new multiple Lagrangian multipliers should be the same in the previous work, thereby easily satisfying the requirement of KKT conditions. The proposed mechanism no longer requires typical bookkeeping strategies, which compute the step size by checking all the training samples in each incremental round.
Multi-task Prediction of Disease Onsets from Longitudinal Lab Tests
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2016
Year: 2016

Disparate areas of machine learning have benefited from models that can take raw data with little preprocessing as input and learn rich representations of that raw data in order to perform well on a given prediction task. We evaluate this approach in healthcare by using longitudinal measurements of lab tests, one of the more raw signals of a patient's health state widely available in clinical data, to predict disease onsets. In particular, we train a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network and two novel convolutional neural networks for multi-task prediction of disease onset for 133 conditions based on 18 common lab tests measured over time in a cohort of 298K patients derived from 8 years of administrative claims data. We compare the neural networks to a logistic regression with several hand-engineered, clinically relevant features. We find that the representation-based learning approaches significantly outperform this baseline. We believe that our work suggests a new avenue for patient risk stratification based solely on lab results.
Can Active Learning Experience Be Transferred?
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2016
Year: 2016

Active learning is an important machine learning problem in reducing the human labeling effort. Current active learning strategies are designed from human knowledge, and are applied on each dataset in an immutable manner. In other words, experience about the usefulness of strategies cannot be updated and transferred to improve active learning on other datasets. This paper initiates a pioneering study on whether active learning experience can be transferred. We first propose a novel active learning model that linearly aggregates existing strategies. The linear weights can then be used to represent the active learning experience. We equip the model with the popular linear upper- confidence-bound (LinUCB) algorithm for contextual bandit to update the weights. Finally, we extend our model to transfer the experience across datasets with the technique of biased regularization. Empirical studies demonstrate that the learned experience not only is competitive with existing strategies on most single datasets, but also can be transferred across datasets to improve the performance on future learning tasks.
Report on the NSF Workshop on Formal Methods for Security
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2016
Year: 2016

Report on the NSF Workshop on Formal Methods for Security, held 19-20 November 2015.
Green Data Centers: A Survey, Perspectives, and Future Directions
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2016
Year: 2016

At present, a major concern regarding data centers is their extremely high energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions. However, because of the over-provisioning of resources, the utilization of existing data centers is, in fact, remarkably low, leading to considerable energy waste. Therefore, over the past few years, many research efforts have been devoted to increasing efficiency for the construction of green data centers. The goal of these efforts is to efficiently utilize available resources and to reduce energy consumption and thermal cooling costs. In this paper, we provide a survey of the state-of-the-art research on green data center techniques, including energy efficiency, resource management, thermal control and green metrics. Additionally, we present a detailed comparison of the reviewed proposals. We further discuss the key challenges for future research and highlight some future research issues for addressing the problem of building green data centers.
Derived-Term Automata of Multitape Rational Expressions (Long version)
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2016
Year: 2016

We introduce (weighted) rational expressions to denote series over Cartesian products of monoids. To this end, we propose the operator $|$ to build multitape expressions such as $(a^+|x + b^+|y)^*$. We define expansions, which generalize the concept of derivative of a rational expression, but relieved from the need of a free monoid. We propose an algorithm based on expansions to build multitape automata from multitape expressions.
Effective Capacity of Receive Antenna Selection MIMO-OSTBC Systems in Co-Channel Interference
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

In this paper, delay constrained performance of a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication system in a dense environment with co-channel interference is investigated. We apply orthogonal space-time block coding (OSTBC) at the transmitter, and for alleviating the high complexity and cost of the MIMO system, receive antenna selection (RAS) scheme is employed in the downlink. Here, for simple and cheap mobile handsets, one antenna is chosen at the receiver in each utilization of the channel. Under these assumptions, a maximum constant arrival rate with the delay quality-of-service (QoS) guarantee in a wireless channel is extracted. We obtain a closed-form solution for the effective capacity of the MIMO-OSTBC channel with the RAS scheme in a quasi-static Rayleigh fading conditions and co-channel interference. After all, the numerical simulations are provided and verified the theoretical results.
Efficient Algebraic Effect Handlers for Prolog
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2016
Year: 2016

Recent work has provided delimited control for Prolog to dynamically manipulate the program control-flow, and to implement a wide range of control-flow and dataflow effects on top of. Unfortunately, delimited control is a rather primitive language feature that is not easy to use. As a remedy, this work introduces algebraic effect handlers for Prolog, as a high-level and structured way of defining new side-effects in a modular fashion. We illustrate the expressive power of the feature and provide an implementation by means of elaboration into the delimited control primitives. The latter add a non-negligible performance overhead when used extensively. To address this issue, we present an optimised compilation approach that combines partial evaluation with dedicated rewrite rules. The rewrite rules are driven by a lightweight effect inference that analyses what effect operations may be called by a goal. We illustrate the effectiveness of this approach on a range of benchmarks. This article is under consideration for acceptance in TPLP.
Semantic Representations of Word Senses and Concepts
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2016
Year: 2016

Representing the semantics of linguistic items in a machine-interpretable form has been a major goal of Natural Language Processing since its earliest days. Among the range of different linguistic items, words have attracted the most research attention. However, word representations have an important limitation: they conflate different meanings of a word into a single vector. Representations of word senses have the potential to overcome this inherent limitation. Indeed, the representation of individual word senses and concepts has recently gained in popularity with several experimental results showing that a considerable performance improvement can be achieved across different NLP applications upon moving from word level to the deeper sense and concept levels. Another interesting point regarding the representation of concepts and word senses is that these models can be seamlessly applied to other linguistic items, such as words, phrases and sentences.
Justifications for Programs with Disjunctive and Causal-choice Rules
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2016
Year: 2016

In this paper, we study an extension of the stable model semantics for disjunctive logic programs where each true atom in a model is associated with an algebraic expression (in terms of rule labels) that represents its justifications. As in our previous work for non-disjunctive programs, these justifications are obtained in a purely semantic way, by algebraic operations (product, addition and application) on a lattice of causal values. Our new definition extends the concept of causal stable model to disjunctive logic programs and satisfies that each (standard) stable model corresponds to a disjoint class of causal stable models sharing the same truth assignments, but possibly varying the obtained explanations. We provide a pair of illustrative examples showing the behaviour of the new semantics and discuss the need of introducing a new type of rule, which we call causal-choice. This type of rule intuitively captures the idea of "$A$ may cause $B$" and, when causal information is disregarded, amounts to a usual choice rule under the standard stable model semantics. (Under consideration for publication in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming)
Lock-free atom garbage collection for multithreaded Prolog
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2016
Year: 2016

The runtime system of dynamic languages such as Prolog or Lisp and their derivatives contain a symbol table, in Prolog often called the atom table. A simple dynamically resizing hash-table used to be an adequate way to implement this table. As Prolog becomes fashionable for 24x7 server processes we need to deal with atom garbage collection and concurrent access to the atom table. Classical lock-based implementations to ensure consistency of the atom table scale poorly and a stop-the-world approach to implement atom garbage collection quickly becomes a bottle-neck, making Prolog unsuitable for soft real-time applications. In this article we describe a novel implementation for the atom table using lock-free techniques where the atom-table remains accessible even during atom garbage collection. Relying only on CAS (Compare And Swap) and not on external libraries, the implementation is straightforward and portable. Under consideration for acceptance in TPLP.
The robustness of interdependent networks under the interplay between cascading failures and virus propagation
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2016
Year: 2016

Cascading failures and epidemic dynamics, as two successful application realms of network science, are usually investigated separately. How do they affect each other is still one open, interesting problem. In this letter, we couple both processes and put them into the framework of interdependent networks, where each network only supports one dynamical process. Of particular interest, they spontaneously form a feedback loop: virus propagation triggers cascading failures of systems while cascading failures suppress virus propagation. Especially, there exists crucial threshold of virus transmissibility, above which the interdependent networks collapse completely. In addition, the interdependent networks will be more vulnerable if the network supporting virus propagation has denser connections; otherwise the interdependent systems are robust against the change of connections in other layer(s). This discovery differs from previous framework of cascading failure in interdependent networks, where better robustness usually needs denser connections. Finally, to protect interdependent networks we also propose the control measures based on the identification capability. The larger this capability, more robustness the interdependent networks will be.
Dynamic User Clustering and Power Allocation for Uplink and Downlink Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

In this paper, first we briefly describe the differences in the working principles of uplink and downlink NOMA transmissions. Then, for both uplink and downlink NOMA, we formulate a sum-throughput maximization problem in a cell such that the user clustering (i.e., grouping users into a single cluster or multiple clusters) and power allocations in NOMA cluster(s) can be optimized under transmission power constraints, minimum rate requirements of the users, and SIC constraints. Due to the combinatorial nature of the formulated mixed integer non-linear programming (MINLP) problem, we solve the problem in two steps, i.e., by first grouping users into clusters and then optimizing their respective power allocations. In particular, we propose a low-complexity sub-optimal user grouping scheme. The proposed scheme exploits the channel gain differences among users in a NOMA cluster and group them into a single cluster or multiple clusters in order to enhance the sum-throughput of the system. For a given set of NOMA clusters, we then derive the optimal power allocation policy that maximizes the sum throughput per NOMA cluster and in turn maximizes the overall system throughput. Using KKT optimality conditions, closed-form solutions for optimal power allocations are derived for any cluster size, considering both uplink and downlink NOMA systems. Numerical results compare the performance of NOMA over orthogonal multiple access (OMA) and illustrate the significance of NOMA in various network scenarios.
Learning a Driving Simulator
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2016
Year: 2016

Comma.ai's approach to Artificial Intelligence for self-driving cars is based on an agent that learns to clone driver behaviors and plans maneuvers by simulating future events in the road. This paper illustrates one of our research approaches for driving simulation. One where we learn to simulate. Here we investigate variational autoencoders with classical and learned cost functions using generative adversarial networks for embedding road frames. Afterwards, we learn a transition model in the embedded space using action conditioned Recurrent Neural Networks. We show that our approach can keep predicting realistic looking video for several frames despite the transition model being optimized without a cost function in the pixel space.
Low-Dimensional Shaping for High-Dimensional Lattice Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2016
Year: 2016

We propose two low-complexity lattice code constructions that have competitive coding and shaping gains. The first construction, named systematic Voronoi shaping, maps short blocks of integers to the dithered Voronoi integers, which are dithered integers that are uniformly distributed over the Voronoi region of a low-dimensional shaping lattice. Then, these dithered Voronoi integers are encoded using a high-dimensional lattice retaining the same shaping and coding gains of low and high-dimensional lattices. A drawback to this construction is that there is no isomorphism between the underlying message and the lattice code, preventing its use in applications such as compute-and- forward. Therefore we propose a second construction, called mixed nested lattice codes, in which a high-dimensional coding lattice is nested inside a concatenation of low-dimensional shaping lattices. This construction not only retains the same shaping/coding gains as first construction but also provides the desired algebraic structure. We numerically study these methods, for point-to-point channels as well as compute-and-forward using low-density lattice codes (LDLCs) as coding lattices and E8 and Barnes-Wall as shaping lattices. Numerical results indicate a shaping gain of up to 0.86 dB, compared to the state-of-the-art of 0.4 dB; furthermore, the proposed method has lower complexity than state-of-the-art approaches.
Retinal Vessel Segmentation Using A New Topological Method
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2016
Year: 2016

A novel topological segmentation of retinal images represents blood vessels as connected regions in the continuous image plane, having shape-related analytic and geometric properties. This paper presents topological segmentation results from the DRIVE retinal image database.