Modern applications, such as social networking systems and e-commerce platforms are centered around using large-scale databases for storing and retrieving data. Accesses to the database are typically enclosed in transactions that allow computations on shared data to be isolated from other concurrent computations and resilient to failures. Modern databases trade isolation for performance. The weaker the isolation level is, the more behaviors a database is allowed to exhibit and it is up to the developer to ensure that their application can tolerate those behaviors. In this work, we propose stateless model checking algorithms for studying correctness of such applications that rely on dynamic partial order reduction. These algorithms work for a number of widely-used weak isolation levels, including Read Committed, Causal Consistency, Snapshot Isolation, and Serializability. We show that they are complete, sound and optimal, and run with polynomial memory consumption in all cases. We report on an implementation of these algorithms in the context of Java Pathfinder applied to a number of challenging applications drawn from the literature of distributed systems and databases.
Boundary value problems based on the convection-diffusion equation arise naturally in models of fluid flow across a variety of engineering applications and design feasibility studies. Naturally, their efficient numerical solution has continued to be an interesting and active topic of research for decades. In the context of finite-element discretization of these boundary value problems, the Streamline Upwind Petrov-Galerkin (SUPG) technique yields accurate discretization in the singularly perturbed regime. In this paper, we propose efficient multigrid iterative solution methods for the resulting linear systems. In particular, we show that techniques from standard multigrid for anisotropic problems can be adapted to these discretizations on both tensor-product as well as semi-structured meshes. The resulting methods are demonstrated to be robust preconditioners for several standard flow benchmarks.
Existing risk-aware multi-armed bandit models typically focus on risk measures of individual options such as variance. As a result, they cannot be directly applied to important real-world online decision making problems with correlated options. In this paper, we propose a novel Continuous Mean-Covariance Bandit (CMCB) model to explicitly take into account option correlation. Specifically, in CMCB, there is a learner who sequentially chooses weight vectors on given options and observes random feedback according to the decisions. The agent's objective is to achieve the best trade-off between reward and risk, measured with option covariance. To capture different reward observation scenarios in practice, we consider three feedback settings, i.e., full-information, semi-bandit and full-bandit feedback. We propose novel algorithms with optimal regrets (within logarithmic factors), and provide matching lower bounds to validate their optimalities. The experimental results also demonstrate the superiority of our algorithms. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that considers option correlation in risk-aware bandits and explicitly quantifies how arbitrary covariance structures impact the learning performance. The novel analytical techniques we developed for exploiting the estimated covariance to build concentration and bounding the risk of selected actions based on sampling strategy properties can likely find applications in other bandit analysis and be of independent interests.
Spatiotemporal traffic data imputation (STDI), estimating the missing data from partially observed traffic data, is an inevitable and challenging task in data-driven intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Due to traffic data's multidimensional and spatiotemporal properties, we treat the missing data imputation as a tensor completion problem. Many studies have been on STDI based on tensor decomposition in the past decade. However, how to use spatiotemporal correlations and core tensor sparsity to improve the imputation performance still needs to be solved. This paper reshapes a 3rd/4th order Hankel tensor and proposes an innovative manifold regularized Tucker decomposition (ManiRTD) model for STDI. Expressly, we represent the sensory traffic state data as the 3rd/4th tensors by introducing Multiway Delay Embedding Transforms. Then, ManiRTD improves the sparsity of the Tucker core using a sparse regularization term and employs manifold regularization and temporal constraint terms of factor matrices to characterize the spatiotemporal correlations. Finally, we address the ManiRTD model through a block coordinate descent framework under alternating proximal gradient updating rules with convergence-guaranteed. Numerical experiments are conducted on real-world spatiotemporal traffic datasets (STDs). Our results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the other factorization approaches and reconstructs the STD more precisely under various missing scenarios.
Performance-based engineering for natural hazards facilitates the design and appraisal of structures with rigorous evaluation of their uncertain structural behavior under potentially extreme stochastic loads expressed in terms of failure probabilities against stated criteria. As a result, efficient stochastic simulation schemes are central to computational frameworks that aim to estimate failure probabilities associated with multiple limit states using limited sample sets. In this work, a generalized stratified sampling scheme is proposed in which two phases of sampling are involved: the first is devoted to the generation of strata-wise samples and the estimation of strata probabilities whereas the second aims at the estimation of strata-wise failure probabilities. Phase-I sampling enables the selection of a generalized stratification variable (i.e., not necessarily belonging to the input set of random variables) for which the probability distribution is not known a priori. To improve the efficiency, Markov Chain Monte Carlo Phase-I sampling is proposed when Monte Carlo simulation is deemed infeasible and optimal Phase-II sampling is implemented based on user-specified target coefficients of variation for the limit states of interest. The expressions for these coefficients are derived with due regard to the sample correlations induced by the Markov chains and the uncertainty in the estimated strata probabilities. The proposed stochastic simulation scheme reaps the benefits of near-optimal stratified sampling for a broader choice of stratification variables in high-dimensional reliability problems with a mechanism to approximately control the accuracy of the failure probability estimators. The practicality of the scheme is demonstrated using two examples involving the estimation of failure probabilities associated with highly nonlinear responses induced by wind and seismic excitations.
K-mer counting is a requisite process for DNA assembly because it speeds up its overall process. The frequency of K-mers is used for estimating the parameters of DNA assembly, error correction, etc. The process also provides a list of district K-mers which assist in searching large databases and reducing the size of de Bruijn graphs. Nonetheless, K-mer counting is a data and compute-intensive process. Hence, it is crucial to implement a lightweight data structure that occupies low memory but does fast processing of K-mers. We proposed a lightweight K-mer counting technique, called KmerCo that implements a potent counting Bloom Filter variant, called countBF. KmerCo has two phases: insertion and classification. The insertion phase inserts all K-mers into countBF and determines distinct K-mers. The classification phase is responsible for the classification of distinct K-mers into trustworthy and erroneous K-mers based on a user-provided threshold value. We also proposed a novel benchmark performance metric. We used the Hadoop MapReduce program to determine the frequency of K-mers. We have conducted rigorous experiments to prove the dominion of KmerCo compared to state-of-the-art K-mer counting techniques. The experiments are conducted using DNA sequences of four organisms. The datasets are pruned to generate four different size datasets. KmerCo is compared with Squeakr, BFCounter, and Jellyfish. KmerCo took the lowest memory, highest number of insertions per second, and a positive trustworthy rate as compared with the three above-mentioned methods.
The cyber-threat landscape has evolved tremendously in recent years, with new threat variants emerging daily, and large-scale coordinated campaigns becoming more prevalent. In this study, we propose CELEST (CollaborativE LEarning for Scalable Threat detection), a federated machine learning framework for global threat detection over HTTP, which is one of the most commonly used protocols for malware dissemination and communication. CELEST leverages federated learning in order to collaboratively train a global model across multiple clients who keep their data locally, thus providing increased privacy and confidentiality assurances. Through a novel active learning component integrated with the federated learning technique, our system continuously discovers and learns the behavior of new, evolving, and globally-coordinated cyber threats. We show that CELEST is able to expose attacks that are largely invisible to individual organizations. For instance, in one challenging attack scenario with data exfiltration malware, the global model achieves a three-fold increase in Precision-Recall AUC compared to the local model. We deploy CELEST on two university networks and show that it is able to detect the malicious HTTP communication with high precision and low false positive rates. Furthermore, during its deployment, CELEST detected a set of previously unknown 42 malicious URLs and 20 malicious domains in one day, which were confirmed to be malicious by VirusTotal.
The conjoining of dynamical systems and deep learning has become a topic of great interest. In particular, neural differential equations (NDEs) demonstrate that neural networks and differential equation are two sides of the same coin. Traditional parameterised differential equations are a special case. Many popular neural network architectures, such as residual networks and recurrent networks, are discretisations. NDEs are suitable for tackling generative problems, dynamical systems, and time series (particularly in physics, finance, ...) and are thus of interest to both modern machine learning and traditional mathematical modelling. NDEs offer high-capacity function approximation, strong priors on model space, the ability to handle irregular data, memory efficiency, and a wealth of available theory on both sides. This doctoral thesis provides an in-depth survey of the field. Topics include: neural ordinary differential equations (e.g. for hybrid neural/mechanistic modelling of physical systems); neural controlled differential equations (e.g. for learning functions of irregular time series); and neural stochastic differential equations (e.g. to produce generative models capable of representing complex stochastic dynamics, or sampling from complex high-dimensional distributions). Further topics include: numerical methods for NDEs (e.g. reversible differential equations solvers, backpropagation through differential equations, Brownian reconstruction); symbolic regression for dynamical systems (e.g. via regularised evolution); and deep implicit models (e.g. deep equilibrium models, differentiable optimisation). We anticipate this thesis will be of interest to anyone interested in the marriage of deep learning with dynamical systems, and hope it will provide a useful reference for the current state of the art.
Dynamic neural network is an emerging research topic in deep learning. Compared to static models which have fixed computational graphs and parameters at the inference stage, dynamic networks can adapt their structures or parameters to different inputs, leading to notable advantages in terms of accuracy, computational efficiency, adaptiveness, etc. In this survey, we comprehensively review this rapidly developing area by dividing dynamic networks into three main categories: 1) instance-wise dynamic models that process each instance with data-dependent architectures or parameters; 2) spatial-wise dynamic networks that conduct adaptive computation with respect to different spatial locations of image data and 3) temporal-wise dynamic models that perform adaptive inference along the temporal dimension for sequential data such as videos and texts. The important research problems of dynamic networks, e.g., architecture design, decision making scheme, optimization technique and applications, are reviewed systematically. Finally, we discuss the open problems in this field together with interesting future research directions.
Reasoning with knowledge expressed in natural language and Knowledge Bases (KBs) is a major challenge for Artificial Intelligence, with applications in machine reading, dialogue, and question answering. General neural architectures that jointly learn representations and transformations of text are very data-inefficient, and it is hard to analyse their reasoning process. These issues are addressed by end-to-end differentiable reasoning systems such as Neural Theorem Provers (NTPs), although they can only be used with small-scale symbolic KBs. In this paper we first propose Greedy NTPs (GNTPs), an extension to NTPs addressing their complexity and scalability limitations, thus making them applicable to real-world datasets. This result is achieved by dynamically constructing the computation graph of NTPs and including only the most promising proof paths during inference, thus obtaining orders of magnitude more efficient models. Then, we propose a novel approach for jointly reasoning over KBs and textual mentions, by embedding logic facts and natural language sentences in a shared embedding space. We show that GNTPs perform on par with NTPs at a fraction of their cost while achieving competitive link prediction results on large datasets, providing explanations for predictions, and inducing interpretable models. Source code, datasets, and supplementary material are available online at //github.com/uclnlp/gntp.
We survey research on self-driving cars published in the literature focusing on autonomous cars developed since the DARPA challenges, which are equipped with an autonomy system that can be categorized as SAE level 3 or higher. The architecture of the autonomy system of self-driving cars is typically organized into the perception system and the decision-making system. The perception system is generally divided into many subsystems responsible for tasks such as self-driving-car localization, static obstacles mapping, moving obstacles detection and tracking, road mapping, traffic signalization detection and recognition, among others. The decision-making system is commonly partitioned as well into many subsystems responsible for tasks such as route planning, path planning, behavior selection, motion planning, and control. In this survey, we present the typical architecture of the autonomy system of self-driving cars. We also review research on relevant methods for perception and decision making. Furthermore, we present a detailed description of the architecture of the autonomy system of the UFES's car, IARA. Finally, we list prominent autonomous research cars developed by technology companies and reported in the media.