pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Network entity characterization and attack prediction
Authors: Vaclav Bartos, Martin Zadnik, Sheikh Mahbub Habib, Emmanouil Vasilomanolakis
Date: 2019-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

The devastating effects of cyber-attacks, highlight the need for novel attack detection and prevention techniques. Over the last years, considerable work has been done in the areas of attack detection as well as in collaborative defense. However, an analysis of the state of the art suggests that many challenges exist in prioritizing alert data and in studying the relation between a recently discovered attack and the probability of it occurring again. In this article, we propose a system that is intended for characterizing network entities and the likelihood that they will behave maliciously in the future. Our system, namely Network Entity Reputation Database System (NERDS), takes into account all the available information regarding a network entity (e. g. IP address) to calculate the probability that it will act maliciously. The latter part is achieved via the utilization of machine learning. Our experimental results show that it is indeed possible to precisely estimate the probability of future attacks from each entity using information about its previous malicious behavior and other characteristics. Ranking the entities by this probability has practical applications in alert prioritization, assembly of highly effective blacklists of a limited length and other use cases.
Compositional uncertainty in deep Gaussian processes
Authors: Ivan Ustyuzhaninov, Ieva Kazlauskaite, Markus Kaiser, Erik Bodin, Neill D. F. Campbell, Carl Henrik Ek
Date: 2019-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Gaussian Processes, Variational Inference

Gaussian processes (GPs) are nonparametric priors over functions. Fitting a GP implies computing a posterior distribution of functions consistent with the observed data. Similarly, deep Gaussian processes (DGPs) should allow us to compute a posterior distribution of compositions of multiple functions giving rise to the observations. However, exact Bayesian inference is intractable for DGPs, motivating the use of various approximations. We show that the application of simplifying mean-field assumptions across the hierarchy leads to the layers of a DGP collapsing to near-deterministic transformations. We argue that such an inference scheme is suboptimal, not taking advantage of the potential of the model to discover the compositional structure in the data. To address this issue, we examine alternative variational inference schemes allowing for dependencies across different layers and discuss their advantages and limitations.
ICDAR 2019 Competition on Large-scale Street View Text with Partial Labeling -- RRC-LSVT
Authors: Yipeng Sun, Zihan Ni, Chee-Kheng Chng, Yuliang Liu, Canjie Luo, Chun Chet Ng, Junyu Han, Errui Ding, Jingtuo Liu, Dimosthenis Karatzas, Chee Seng Chan, Lianwen Jin
Date: 2019-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Detection, Text Spotting, valid

Robust text reading from street view images provides valuable information for various applications. Performance improvement of existing methods in such a challenging scenario heavily relies on the amount of fully annotated training data, which is costly and in-efficient to obtain. To scale up the amount of training data while keeping the labeling procedure cost-effective, this competition introduces a new challenge on Large-scale Street View Text with Partial Labeling (LSVT), providing 50, 000 and 400, 000 images in full and weak annotations, respectively. This competition aims to explore the abilities of state-of-the-art methods to detect and recognize text instances from large-scale street view images, closing the gap between research benchmarks and real applications. During the competition period, a total of 41 teams participated in the two proposed tasks with 132 valid submissions, i.e., text detection and end-to-end text spotting. This paper includes dataset descriptions, task definitions, evaluation protocols and results summaries of the ICDAR 2019-LSVT challenge.
Adversarial Feature Training for Generalizable Robotic Visuomotor Control
Authors: Xi Chen, Ali Ghadirzadeh, Mårten Björkman, Patric Jensfelt
Date: 2019-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Transfer Learning

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has enabled training action-selection policies, end-to-end, by learning a function which maps image pixels to action outputs. However, it's application to visuomotor robotic policy training has been limited because of the challenge of large-scale data collection when working with physical hardware. A suitable visuomotor policy should perform well not just for the task-setup it has been trained for, but also for all varieties of the task, including novel objects at different viewpoints surrounded by task-irrelevant objects. However, it is impractical for a robotic setup to sufficiently collect interactive samples in a RL framework to generalize well to novel aspects of a task. In this work, we demonstrate that by using adversarial training for domain transfer, it is possible to train visuomotor policies based on RL frameworks, and then transfer the acquired policy to other novel task domains. We propose to leverage the deep RL capabilities to learn complex visuomotor skills for uncomplicated task setups, and then exploit transfer learning to generalize to new task domains provided only still images of the task in the target domain. We evaluate our method on two real robotic tasks, picking and pouring, and compare it to a number of prior works, demonstrating its superiority.
Span-based Joint Entity and Relation Extraction with Transformer Pre-training
Authors: Markus Eberts, Adrian Ulges
Date: 2019-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Joint Entity and Relation Extraction, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Relation, Relation Classification, Relation Extraction, Sentence

We introduce SpERT, an attention model for span-based joint entity and relation extraction. Our key contribution is a light-weight reasoning on BERT embeddings, which features entity recognition and filtering, as well as relation classification with a localized, marker-free context representation. The model is trained using strong within-sentence negative samples, which are efficiently extracted in a single BERT pass. These aspects facilitate a search over all spans in the sentence. In ablation studies, we demonstrate the benefits of pre-training, strong negative sampling and localized context. Our model outperforms prior work by up to 2.6% F1 score on several datasets for joint entity and relation extraction.
A machine vision meta-algorithm for automated recognition of underwater objects using sidescan sonar imagery
Authors: Guillaume Labbe-Morissette, Sylvain Gauthier
Date: 2019-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Descriptive, Retrieval

This paper details a new method to recognize and detect underwater objects in real-time sidescan sonar data imagery streams, with case-studies of applications for underwater archeology, and ghost fishing gear retrieval. We first synthesize images from sidescan data, apply geometric and radiometric corrections, then use 2D feature detection algorithms to identify point clouds of descriptive visual microfeatures such as corners and edges in the sonar images. We then apply a clustering algorithm on the feature point clouds to group feature sets into regions of interest, reject false positives, yielding a georeferenced inventory of objects.
Single-shot 3D shape reconstruction using deep convolutional neural networks
Authors: Hieu Nguyen, Hui Li, Qiang Qiu, Yuzeng Wang, Zhao-Yang Wang
Date: 2019-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Shape Reconstruction

A robust single-shot 3D shape reconstruction technique integrating the fringe projection profilometry (FPP) technique with the deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is proposed in this letter. The input of the proposed technique is a single FPP image, and the training and validation data sets are prepared by using the conventional multi-frequency FPP technique. Unlike the conventional 3D shape reconstruction methods which involve complex algorithms and intensive computation, the proposed approach uses an end-to-end network architecture to directly carry out the transformation of a 2D images to its corresponding 3D shape. Experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the validity and robustness of the proposed technique. It is capable of satisfying various 3D shape reconstruction demands in scientific research and engineering applications.
High Resolution Forecasting of Heat Waves impacts on Leaf Area Index by Multiscale Multitemporal Deep Learning
Authors: Andrea Gobbi, Marco Cristoforetti, Giuseppe Jurman, Cesare Furlanello
Date: 2019-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Climate change impacts could cause progressive decrease of crop quality and yield, up to harvest failures. In particular, heat waves and other climate extremes can lead to localized food shortages and even threaten food security of communities worldwide. In this study, we apply a deep learning architecture for high resolution forecasting (300 m, 10 days) of the Leaf Area Index (LAI), whose dynamics has been widely used to model the growth phase of crops and impact of heat waves. LAI models can be computed at 0.1 degree spatial resolution with an auto regressive component adjusted with weather conditions, validated with remote sensing measurements. However model actionability is poor in regions of varying terrain morphology at this scale (about 8 km at the Alps latitude). Our deep learning model aims instead at forecasting LAI by training multiscale multitemporal (MSMT) data from the Copernicus Global Land Service (CGLS) project for all Europe at 300m resolution and medium-resolution historical weather data. Further, the deep learning model inputs integrate high-resolution land surface features, known to improve forecasts of agricultural productivity. The historical weather data are then replaced with forecast values to predict LAI values at 10 day horizon on Europe. We propose the MSMT model to develop a high resolution crop-specific warning system for mitigating damage due to heat waves and other extreme events.
Chinese Street View Text: Large-scale Chinese Text Reading with Partially Supervised Learning
Authors: Yipeng Sun, Jiaming Liu, Wei Liu, Junyu Han, Errui Ding, Jingtuo Liu
Date: 2019-09-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10

Most existing text reading benchmarks make it difficult to evaluate the performance of more advanced deep learning models in large vocabularies due to the limited amount of training data. To address this issue, we introduce a new large-scale text reading benchmark dataset named Chinese Street View Text (C-SVT) with 430,000 street view images, which is at least 14 times as large as the existing Chinese text reading benchmarks. To recognize Chinese text in the wild while keeping large-scale datasets labeling cost-effective, we propose to annotate one part of the CSVT dataset (30,000 images) in locations and text labels as full annotations and add 400,000 more images, where only the corresponding text-of-interest in the regions is given as weak annotations. To exploit the rich information from the weakly annotated data, we design a text reading network in a partially supervised learning framework, which enables to localize and recognize text, learn from fully and weakly annotated data simultaneously. To localize the best matched text proposals from weakly labeled images, we propose an online proposal matching module incorporated in the whole model, spotting the keyword regions by sharing parameters for end-to-end training. Compared with fully supervised training algorithms, this model can improve the end-to-end recognition performance remarkably by 4.03% in F-score at the same labeling cost. The proposed model can also achieve state-of-the-art results on the ICDAR 2017-RCTW dataset, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed partially supervised learning framework.
CrypTFlow: Secure TensorFlow Inference
Authors: Nishant Kumar, Mayank Rathee, Nishanth Chandran, Divya Gupta, Aseem Rastogi, Rahul Sharma
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00

We present CrypTFlow, a first of its kind system that converts TensorFlow inference code into Secure Multi-party Computation (MPC) protocols at the push of a button. To do this, we build three components. Our first component, Athos, is an end-to-end compiler from TensorFlow to a variety of semi-honest MPC protocols. The second component, Porthos, is an improved semi-honest 3-party protocol that provides significant speedups for TensorFlow like applications. Finally, to provide malicious secure MPC protocols, our third component, Aramis, is a novel technique that uses hardware with integrity guarantees to convert any semi-honest MPC protocol into an MPC protocol that provides malicious security. The malicious security of the protocols output by Aramis relies on integrity of the hardware and semi-honest security of MPC. Moreover, our system matches the inference accuracy of plaintext TensorFlow. We experimentally demonstrate the power of our system by showing the secure inference of real-world neural networks such as ResNet50 and DenseNet121 over the ImageNet dataset with running times of about 30 seconds for semi-honest security and under two minutes for malicious security. Prior work in the area of secure inference has been limited to semi-honest security of small networks over tiny datasets such as MNIST or CIFAR. Even on MNIST/CIFAR, CrypTFlow outperforms prior work.
Particle reconstruction of volumetric particle image velocimetry with strategy of machine learning
Authors: Qi Gao, Shaowu Pan, Hongping Wang, Runjie Wei, Jinjun Wang
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Three-dimensional particle reconstruction with limited two-dimensional projections is an under-determined inverse problem that the exact solution is often difficult to be obtained. In general, approximate solutions can be obtained by iterative optimization methods. In the current work, a practical particle reconstruction method based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) with geometry-informed features is proposed. The proposed technique can refine the particle reconstruction from a very coarse initial guess of particle distribution generated by any traditional algebraic reconstruction technique (ART) based methods. Compared with available ART-based algorithms, the novel technique makes significant improvements in terms of reconstruction quality, {robustness to noises}, and at least an order of magnitude faster in the offline stage.
DeepDriveMD: Deep-Learning Driven Adaptive Molecular Simulations for Protein Folding
Authors: Hyungro Lee, Heng Ma, Matteo Turilli, Debsindhu Bhowmik, Shantenu Jha, Arvind Ramanathan
Date: 2019-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Protein Folding

Simulations of biological macromolecules play an important role in understanding the physical basis of a number of complex processes such as protein folding. Even with increasing computational power and evolution of specialized architectures, the ability to simulate protein folding at atomistic scales still remains challenging. This stems from the dual aspects of high dimensionality of protein conformational landscapes, and the inability of atomistic molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to sufficiently sample these landscapes to observe folding events. Machine learning/deep learning (ML/DL) techniques, when combined with atomistic MD simulations offer the opportunity to potentially overcome these limitations by: (1) effectively reducing the dimensionality of MD simulations to automatically build latent representations that correspond to biophysically relevant reaction coordinates (RCs), and (2) driving MD simulations to automatically sample potentially novel conformational states based on these RCs. We examine how coupling DL approaches with MD simulations can fold small proteins effectively on supercomputers. In particular, we study the computational costs and effectiveness of scaling DL-coupled MD workflows by folding two prototypical systems, viz., Fs-peptide and the fast-folding variant of the villin head piece protein. We demonstrate that a DL driven MD workflow is able to effectively learn latent representations and drive adaptive simulations. Compared to traditional MD-based approaches, our approach achieves an effective performance gain in sampling the folded states by at least 2.3x. Our study provides a quantitative basis to understand how DL driven MD simulations, can lead to effective performance gains and reduced times to solution on supercomputing resources.
Data Centers Job Scheduling with Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Sisheng Liang, Zhou Yang, Fang Jin, Yong Chen
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Scheduling

Efficient job scheduling on data centers under heterogeneous complexity is crucial but challenging since it involves the allocation of multi-dimensional resources over time and space. To adapt the complex computing environment in data centers, we proposed an innovative Advantage Actor-Critic (A2C) deep reinforcement learning based approach called A2cScheduler for job scheduling. A2cScheduler consists of two agents, one of which, dubbed the actor, is responsible for learning the scheduling policy automatically and the other one, the critic, reduces the estimation error. Unlike previous policy gradient approaches, A2cScheduler is designed to reduce the gradient estimation variance and to update parameters efficiently. We show that the A2cScheduler can achieve competitive scheduling performance using both simulated workloads and real data collected from an academic data center.
[Extended version] Rethinking Deep Neural Network Ownership Verification: Embedding Passports to Defeat Ambiguity Attacks
Authors: Lixin Fan, Kam Woh Ng, Chee Seng Chan
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00

With substantial amount of time, resources and human (team) efforts invested to explore and develop successful deep neural networks (DNN), there emerges an urgent need to protect these inventions from being illegally copied, redistributed, or abused without respecting the intellectual properties of legitimate owners. Following recent progresses along this line, we investigate a number of watermark-based DNN ownership verification methods in the face of ambiguity attacks, which aim to cast doubts on the ownership verification by forging counterfeit watermarks. It is shown that ambiguity attacks pose serious threats to existing DNN watermarking methods. As remedies to the above-mentioned loophole, this paper proposes novel passport-based DNN ownership verification schemes which are both robust to network modifications and resilient to ambiguity attacks. The gist of embedding digital passports is to design and train DNN models in a way such that, the DNN inference performance of an original task will be significantly deteriorated due to forged passports. In other words, genuine passports are not only verified by looking for the predefined signatures, but also reasserted by the unyielding DNN model inference performances. Extensive experimental results justify the effectiveness of the proposed passport-based DNN ownership verification schemes. Code and models are available at https://github.com/kamwoh/DeepIPR
Multimodal Multitask Representation Learning for Pathology Biobank Metadata Prediction
Authors: Wei-Hung Weng, Yuannan Cai, Angela Lin, Fraser Tan, Po-Hsuan Cameron Chen
Date: 2019-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Prediction, Representation Learning

Metadata are general characteristics of the data in a well-curated and condensed format, and have been proven to be useful for decision making, knowledge discovery, and also heterogeneous data organization of biobank. Among all data types in the biobank, pathology is the key component of the biobank and also serves as the gold standard of diagnosis. To maximize the utility of biobank and allow the rapid progress of biomedical science, it is essential to organize the data with well-populated pathology metadata. However, manual annotation of such information is tedious and time-consuming. In the study, we develop a multimodal multitask learning framework to predict four major slide-level metadata of pathology images. The framework learns generalizable representations across tissue slides, pathology reports, and case-level structured data. We demonstrate improved performance across all four tasks with the proposed method compared to a single modal single task baseline on two test sets, one external test set from a distinct data source (TCGA) and one internal held-out test set (TTH). In the test sets, the performance improvements on the averaged area under receiver operating characteristic curve across the four tasks are 16.48% and 9.05% on TCGA and TTH, respectively. Such pathology metadata prediction system may be adopted to mitigate the effort of expert annotation and ultimately accelerate the data-driven research by better utilization of the pathology biobank.
Walling up Backdoors in Intrusion Detection Systems
Authors: Maximilian Bachl, Alexander Hartl, Joachim Fabini, Tanja Zseby
Date: 2019-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Intrusion Detection

Interest in poisoning attacks and backdoors recently resurfaced for Deep Learning (DL) applications. Several successful defense mechanisms have been recently proposed for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), for example in the context of autonomous driving. We show that visualization approaches can aid in identifying a backdoor independent of the used classifier. Surprisingly, we find that common defense mechanisms fail utterly to remove backdoors in DL for Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs). Finally, we devise pruning-based approaches to remove backdoors for Decision Trees (DTs) and Random Forests (RFs) and demonstrate their effectiveness for two different network security datasets.
Estimating Glycemic Impact of Cooking Recipes via Online Crowdsourcing and Machine Learning
Authors: Helena Lee, Palakorn Achananuparp, Yue Liu, Ee-Peng Lim, Lav R. Varshney
Date: 2019-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Consumption of diets with low glycemic impact is highly recommended for diabetics and pre-diabetics as it helps maintain their blood glucose levels. However, laboratory analysis of dietary glycemic potency is time-consuming and expensive. In this paper, we explore a data-driven approach utilizing online crowdsourcing and machine learning to estimate the glycemic impact of cooking recipes. We show that a commonly used healthiness metric may not always be effective in determining recipes suitable for diabetics, thus emphasizing the importance of the glycemic-impact estimation task. Our best classification model, trained on nutritional and crowdsourced data obtained from Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), can accurately identify recipes which are unhealthful for diabetics.
Graph Nets for Partial Charge Prediction
Authors: Yuanqing Wang, Josh Fass, Chaya D. Stern, Kun Luo, John Chodera
Date: 2019-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

Atomic partial charges are crucial parameters for Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations, molecular mechanics calculations, and virtual screening, as they determine the electrostatic contributions to interaction energies. Current methods for calculating partial charges, however, are either slow and scale poorly with molecular size (quantum chemical methods) or unreliable (empirical methods). Here, we present a new charge derivation method based on Graph Nets---a set of update and aggregate functions that operate on molecular topologies and propagate information thereon---that could approximate charges derived from Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculations with high accuracy and an over 500-fold speed up.