Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
TT-TFHE: a Torus Fully Homomorphic Encryption-Friendly Neural Network Architecture

This paper presents TT-TFHE, a deep neural network Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) framework that effectively scales Torus FHE (TFHE) usage to tabular and image datasets using a recent family of convolutional neural networks called Truth-Table Neural Networks (TTnet). The proposed framework provides an easy-to-implement, automated TTnet-based design toolbox with an underlying (python-based) open-source Concrete implementation (CPU-based and implementing lookup tables) for inference over encrypted data. Experimental evaluation shows that TT-TFHE greatly outperforms in terms of time and accuracy all Homomorphic Encryption (HE) set-ups on three tabular datasets, all other features being equal. On image datasets such as MNIST and CIFAR-10, we show that TT-TFHE consistently and largely outperforms other TFHE set-ups and is competitive against other HE variants such as BFV or CKKS (while maintaining the same level of 128-bit encryption security guarantees). In addition, our solutions present a very low memory footprint (down to dozens of MBs for MNIST), which is in sharp contrast with other HE set-ups that typically require tens to hundreds of GBs of memory per user (in addition to their communication overheads). This is the first work presenting a fully practical solution of private inference (i.e. a few seconds for inference time and a few dozens MBs of memory) on both tabular datasets and MNIST, that can easily scale to multiple threads and users on server side.
Aligning Robot and Human Representations

—To act in the world, robots rely on a representation of salient task aspects: for example, to carry a cup of coffee, a robot must consider movement efﬁciency and cup orientation in its behaviour. However, if we want robots to act for and with people , their representations must not be just functional but also reﬂec-tive of what humans care about, i.e. their representations must be aligned with humans’. In this survey, we pose that current reward and imitation learning approaches suffer from representation misalignment , where the robot’s learned representation does not capture the human’s true representation. We suggest that because humans will be the ultimate evaluator of robot performance in the world, it is critical that we explicitly focus our efforts on aligning learned task representations with humans, in addition to learning the downstream task. We advocate that current representation learning approaches in robotics should be studied from the perspective of how well they accomplish the objective of representation alignment. To do so, we mathematically deﬁne the problem, identify its key desiderata, and situate current robot learning methods within this formalism. We conclude the survey by suggesting future directions for exploring open challenges.
Rethinking Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation: A Variance-Reduction Perspective

For medical image segmentation, contrastive learning is the dominant practice to improve the quality of visual representations by contrasting semantically similar and dissimilar pairs of samples. This is enabled by the observation that without accessing ground truth labels, negative examples with truly dissimilar anatomical features, if sampled, can significantly improve the performance. In reality, however, these samples may come from similar anatomical regions and the models may struggle to distinguish the minority tail-class samples, making the tail classes more prone to misclassification, both of which typically lead to model collapse. In this paper, we propose ARCO, a semi-supervised contrastive learning (CL) framework with stratified group theory for medical image segmentation. In particular, we first propose building ARCO through the concept of variance-reduced estimation and show that certain variance-reduction techniques are particularly beneficial in pixel/voxel-level segmentation tasks with extremely limited labels. Furthermore, we theoretically prove these sampling techniques are universal in variance reduction. Finally, we experimentally validate our approaches on eight benchmarks, i.e., five 2D/3D medical and three semantic segmentation datasets, with different label settings, and our methods consistently outperform state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods. Additionally, we augment the CL frameworks with these sampling techniques and demonstrate significant gains over previous methods. We believe our work is an important step towards semi-supervised medical image segmentation by quantifying the limitation of current self-supervision objectives for accomplishing such challenging safety-critical tasks.
Contact Transition Control of Nonlinear Mechanical Systems Subject to Unilateral Constraints

In this paper, contact transition control of mechanical systems subject to unilateral constraints is presented. A systematic way is proposed for designing the control laws for unilaterally constrained mechanical systems. Three phases of motion (inactive, transition, active) are formulated depending on the activation/deactivation of the constraints. Our framework describes the complete behaviour of the mechanical system under the action of unilateral constraints. We propose stable control laws for all the phases of the system. Of special interest is the contact transition problem. During this phase the dynamics is discontinuous. Stability analysis of the transition phase is conducted using nons-mooth Lyapunov stability theory. The transition phase is shown to be exponentially stable. The proposed method is successfully implemented on robots interacting with an environment, and we present results of those experiments.
Quantifying Theory in Politics: Identification, Interpretation and the Role of Structural Methods

The best empirical research in political science clearly defines substantive parameters of interest, presents a set of assumptions that guarantee its identification, and uses an appropriate estimator. We argue for the importance of explicitly integrating rigorous theory into this process and focus on the advantages of doing so. By integrating theoretical structure into one's empirical strategy, researchers can quantify the effects of competing mechanisms, consider the ex-ante effects of new policies, extrapolate findings to new environments, estimate model-specific theoretical parameters, evaluate the fit of a theoretical model, and test competing models that aim to explain the same phenomena. As a guide to such a methodology, we provide an overview of structural estimation, including formal definitions, implementation suggestions, examples, and comparisons to other methods.
KNOD: Domain Knowledge Distilled Tree Decoder for Automated Program Repair

Automated Program Repair (APR) improves soft-ware reliability by generating patches for a buggy program automatically. Recent APR techniques leverage deep learning (DL) to build models to learn to generate patches from existing patches and code corpora. While promising, DL-based APR techniques suffer from the abundant syntactically or semantically incorrect patches in the patch space. These patches often disobey the syntactic and semantic domain knowledge of source code and thus cannot be the correct patches to fix a bug. We propose a DL-based APR approach KNOD, which in-corporates domain knowledge to guide patch generation in a direct and comprehensive way. KNOD has two major novelties, including (1) a novel three-stage tree decoder, which directly generates Abstract Syntax Trees of patched code according to the inherent tree structure, and (2) a novel domain-rule distillation, which leverages syntactic and semantic rules and teacher-student distributions to explicitly inject the domain knowledge into the decoding procedure during both the training and inference phases. We evaluate KNOD on three widely-used benchmarks. KNOD fixes 72 bugs on the Defects4J v1.2, 25 bugs on the QuixBugs, and 50 bugs on the additional Defects4J v2.0 benchmarks, outperforming all existing APR tools.
Classifiers of support vector machine type with \ell1 complexity regularization

We study the binary classiﬁcation problem with hinge loss. We consider classiﬁers that are linear combinations of base functions. Instead of an ‘ 2 penalty, which is used by the support vector machine, we put an ‘ 1 penalty on the coefﬁcients. Under certain conditions on the base functions, hinge loss with this complexity penalty is shown to lead to an oracle inequality involving both model complexity and margin.
Describe, Explain, Plan and Select: Interactive Planning with Large Language Models Enables Open-World Multi-Task Agents

We investigate the challenge of task planning for multi-task embodied agents in open-world environments. Two main difficulties are identified: 1) executing plans in an open-world environment (e.g., Minecraft) necessitates accurate and multi-step reasoning due to the long-term nature of tasks, and 2) as vanilla planners do not consider how easy the current agent can achieve a given sub-task when ordering parallel sub-goals within a complicated plan, the resulting plan could be inefficient or even infeasible. To this end, we propose"$\underline{D}$escribe, $\underline{E}$xplain, $\underline{P}$lan and $\underline{S}$elect"($\textbf{DEPS}$), an interactive planning approach based on Large Language Models (LLMs). DEPS facilitates better error correction on initial LLM-generated $\textit{plan}$ by integrating $\textit{description}$ of the plan execution process and providing self-$\textit{explanation}$ of feedback when encountering failures during the extended planning phases. Furthermore, it includes a goal $\textit{selector}$, which is a trainable module that ranks parallel candidate sub-goals based on the estimated steps of completion, consequently refining the initial plan. Our experiments mark the milestone of the first zero-shot multi-task agent that can robustly accomplish 70+ Minecraft tasks and nearly double the overall performances. Further testing reveals our method's general effectiveness in popularly adopted non-open-ended domains as well (i.e., ALFWorld and tabletop manipulation). The ablation and exploratory studies detail how our design beats the counterparts and provide a promising update on the $\texttt{ObtainDiamond}$ grand challenge with our approach. The code is released at https://github.com/CraftJarvis/MC-Planner.
Convergence Analysis of Split Learning on Non-IID Data

Split Learning (SL) is one promising variant of Federated Learning (FL), where the AI model is split and trained at the clients and the server collaboratively. By oﬄoading the computation-intensive portions to the server, SL enables eﬃcient model training on resource-constrained clients. Despite its booming applications, SL still lacks rigorous convergence analysis on non-IID data, which is critical for hyperparameter selection. In this paper, we ﬁrst prove that SL exhibits an O (1 / √ R ) convergence rate for non-convex objectives on non-IID data, where R is the number of total training rounds. The derived convergence results can facilitate understanding the eﬀect of some crucial factors in SL (e.g., data heterogeneity and synchronization interval). Furthermore, comparing with the convergence result of FL, we show that the guarantee of SL is worse than FL in terms of training rounds on non-IID data. The experimental results verify our theory. More ﬁndings on the comparison between FL and SL in cross-device settings are also reported.
Low progress math in a high performing system

Math anxiety negatively relates to math performance. This negative relationship may be exacerbated in low-progress math learners. However, there are limited studies on math anxiety among low progress learners in a paradoxically high performing education system like Singapore. To fill this research gap, this research analysed the anxiety profiles of 151 students who were in the math learning support intervention program administered by the Ministry of Education, Singapore (MOE). We examined the complex relationship centred in math anxiety with relevant variables such as demographic characteristics, working memory and math performance. Limitations and future directions are discussed.
Validity of quasilinear theory: refutations and new numerical confirmation

The validity of quasilinear (QL) theory describing the weak warm beam–plasma instability has been a controversial topic for several decades. This issue is tackled anew, both analytically and by numerical simulations which benefit from the power of modern computers and from the development in the last decade of Vlasov codes endowed with both accuracy and weak numerical diffusion. Self-consistent numerical simulations within the Vlasov-wave description show that QL theory remains valid in the strong chaotic diffusion regime. However, there is a non-QL regime before saturation, which confirms previous analytical work and numerical simulation, but contradicts another analytical work. We show analytically the absence of mode coupling in the saturation regime of the instability where a plateau is present in the tail of the particle distribution function. This invalidates several analytical works trying to prove or to contradict the validity of QL theory in the strongly nonlinear regime of the weak warm beam–plasma instability.
Hyperbolic Contrastive Learning

Learning good image representations that are beneficial to downstream tasks is a challenging task in computer vision. As such, a wide variety of self-supervised learning approaches have been proposed. Among them, contrastive learning has shown competitive performance on several benchmark datasets. The embeddings of contrastive learning are arranged on a hypersphere that results in using the inner (dot) product as a distance measurement in Euclidean space. However, the underlying structure of many scientific fields like social networks, brain imaging, and computer graphics data exhibit highly non-Euclidean latent geometry. We propose a novel contrastive learning framework to learn semantic relationships in the hyperbolic space. Hyperbolic space is a continuous version of trees that naturally owns the ability to model hierarchical structures and is thus beneficial for efficient contrastive representation learning. We also extend the proposed Hyperbolic Contrastive Learning (HCL) to the supervised domain and studied the adversarial robustness of HCL. The comprehensive experiments show that our proposed method achieves better results on self-supervised pretraining, supervised classification, and higher robust accuracy than baseline methods.
Mind the Gap: Offline Policy Optimization for Imperfect Rewards

Reward function is essential in reinforcement learning (RL), serving as the guiding signal to incentivize agents to solve given tasks, however, is also notoriously difficult to design. In many cases, only imperfect rewards are available, which inflicts substantial performance loss for RL agents. In this study, we propose a unified offline policy optimization approach, \textit{RGM (Reward Gap Minimization)}, which can smartly handle diverse types of imperfect rewards. RGM is formulated as a bi-level optimization problem: the upper layer optimizes a reward correction term that performs visitation distribution matching w.r. t. some expert data; the lower layer solves a pessimistic RL problem with the corrected rewards. By exploiting the duality of the lower layer, we derive a tractable algorithm that enables sampled-based learning without any online interactions. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that RGM achieves superior performance to existing methods under diverse settings of imperfect rewards. Further, RGM can effectively correct wrong or inconsistent rewards against expert preference and retrieve useful information from biased rewards.
Relating EEG to continuous speech using deep neural networks: a review

Objective. When a person listens to continuous speech, a corresponding response is elicited in the brain and can be recorded using electroencephalography (EEG). Linear models are presently used to relate the EEG recording to the corresponding speech signal. The ability of linear models to find a mapping between these two signals is used as a measure of neural tracking of speech. Such models are limited as they assume linearity in the EEG-speech relationship, which omits the nonlinear dynamics of the brain. As an alternative, deep learning models have recently been used to relate EEG to continuous speech. Approach. This paper reviews and comments on deep-learning-based studies that relate EEG to continuous speech in single- or multiple-speakers paradigms. We point out recurrent methodological pitfalls and the need for a standard benchmark of model analysis. Main results. We gathered 29 studies. The main methodological issues we found are biased cross-validations, data leakage leading to over-fitted models, or disproportionate data size compared to the model’s complexity. In addition, we address requirements for a standard benchmark model analysis, such as public datasets, common evaluation metrics, and good practices for the match-mismatch task. Significance. We present a review paper summarizing the main deep-learning-based studies that relate EEG to speech while addressing methodological pitfalls and important considerations for this newly expanding field. Our study is particularly relevant given the growing application of deep learning in EEG-speech decoding.
FR3D: Three-dimensional Flow Reconstruction and Force Estimation for Unsteady Flows Around Arbitrary Bluff Bodies via Conformal Mapping Aided Convolutional Autoencoders

In many practical fluid dynamics experiments, measuring variables such as velocity and pressure is possible only at a limited number of sensor locations, \textcolor{black}{for a few two-dimensional planes, or for a small 3D domain in the flow}. However, knowledge of the full fields is necessary to understand the dynamics of many flows. Deep learning reconstruction of full flow fields from sparse measurements has recently garnered significant research interest, as a way of overcoming this limitation. This task is referred to as the flow reconstruction (FR) task. In the present study, we propose a convolutional autoencoder based neural network model, dubbed FR3D, which enables FR to be carried out for three-dimensional flows around extruded 3D objects with different cross-sections. An innovative mapping approach, whereby multiple fluid domains are mapped to an annulus, enables FR3D to generalize its performance to objects not encountered during training. We conclusively demonstrate this generalization capability using a dataset composed of 80 training and 20 testing geometries, all randomly generated. We show that the FR3D model reconstructs pressure and velocity components with a few percentage points of error. Additionally, using these predictions, we accurately estimate the Q-criterion fields as well lift and drag forces on the geometries.
Machine Learning-Based Early Attack Detection Using Open RAN Intelligent Controller

We design and demonstrate a method for early detection of Denial-of-Service attacks. The proposed approach takes advantage of the OpenRAN framework to collect measurements from the air interface (for attack detection) and to dynamically control the operation of the Radio Access Network (RAN). For that purpose, we developed our near-Real Time (RT) RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) interface. We apply and analyze a wide range of Machine Learning algorithms to data traffic analysis that satisfy the accuracy and latency requirements set by the near-RT RIC. Our results show that the proposed framework is able to correctly classify genuine vs. malicious traffic with high accuracy (i.e., 95%) in a realistic testbed environment, allowing us to detect attacks already at the Distributed Unit (DU), before malicious traffic even enters the Centralized Unit (CU).
On the Robustness of Randomized Ensembles to Adversarial Perturbations

Randomized ensemble classifiers (RECs), where one classifier is randomly selected during inference, have emerged as an attractive alternative to traditional ensembling methods for realizing adversarially robust classifiers with limited compute requirements. However, recent works have shown that existing methods for constructing RECs are more vulnerable than initially claimed, casting major doubts on their efficacy and prompting fundamental questions such as:"When are RECs useful? ","What are their limits? ", and"How do we train them? ". In this work, we first demystify RECs as we derive fundamental results regarding their theoretical limits, necessary and sufficient conditions for them to be useful, and more. Leveraging this new understanding, we propose a new boosting algorithm (BARRE) for training robust RECs, and empirically demonstrate its effectiveness at defending against strong $\ell_\infty$ norm-bounded adversaries across various network architectures and datasets. Our code can be found at https://github.com/hsndbk4/BARRE.
Bioformer: an efficient transformer language model for biomedical text mining

Pretrained language models such as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Recently, BERT has been adapted to the biomedical domain. Despite the effectiveness, these models have hundreds of millions of parameters and are computationally expensive when applied to large-scale NLP applications. We hypothesized that the number of parameters of the original BERT can be dramatically reduced with minor impact on performance. In this study, we present Bioformer, a compact BERT model for biomedical text mining. We pretrained two Bioformer models (named Bioformer8L and Bioformer16L) which reduced the model size by 60% compared to BERTBase. Bioformer uses a biomedical vocabulary and was pre-trained from scratch on PubMed abstracts and PubMed Central full-text articles. We thoroughly evaluated the performance of Bioformer as well as existing biomedical BERT models including BioBERT and PubMedBERT on 15 benchmark datasets of four different biomedical NLP tasks: named entity recognition, relation extraction, question answering and document classification. The results show that with 60% fewer parameters, Bioformer16L is only 0.1% less accurate than PubMedBERT while Bioformer8L is 0.9% less accurate than PubMedBERT. Both Bioformer16L and Bioformer8L outperformed BioBERTBase-v1.1. In addition, Bioformer16L and Bioformer8L are 2–3 fold as fast as PubMedBERT/BioBERTBase-v1.1. Bioformer has been successfully deployed to PubTator Central providing gene annotations over 35 million PubMed abstracts and 5 million PubMed Central full-text articles. We make Bioformer publicly available via https://github.com/WGLab/bioformer, including pre-trained models, datasets, and instructions for downstream use.
Transformers in Action Recognition: A Review on Temporal Modeling

In vision-based action recognition, spatio-temporal features from different modalities are used for recognizing activities. Temporal modeling is a long challenge of action recognition. However, there are limited methods such as pre-computed motion features, three-dimensional (3D) filters, and recurrent neural networks (RNN) for modeling motion information in deep-based approaches. Recently, transformers success in modeling long-range dependencies in natural language processing (NLP) tasks has gotten great attention from other domains; including speech, image, and video, to rely entirely on self-attention without using sequence-aligned RNNs or convolutions. Although the application of transformers to action recognition is relatively new, the amount of research proposed on this topic within the last few years is astounding. This paper especially reviews recent progress in deep learning methods for modeling temporal variations. It focuses on action recognition methods that use transformers for temporal modeling, discussing their main features, used modalities, and identifying opportunities and challenges for future research.