Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
von Neumann-Morgenstern and Savage Theorems for Causal Decision Making

Decision making under uncertain conditions has been well studied when uncertainty can only be considered at the associative level of information. The classical Theorems of von Neumann-Morgenstern and Savage provide a formal criterion for rationally making choices using associative information. We provide here a previous result from Pearl and show that it can be considered as a causal version of the von Neumann-Morgenstern Theorem; furthermore, we consider the case when the true causal mechanism that controls the environment is unknown to the decision maker and propose a causal version of the Savage Theorem. As applications, we argue how previous optimal action learning methods for causal environments fit within the Causal Savage Theorem we present thus showing the utility of our result in the justification and design of learning algorithms; furthermore, we define a Causal Nash Equilibria for a strategic game in a causal environment in terms of the preferences induced by our Causal Decision Making Theorem.
A neural network with feature sparsity

We propose a neural network model with a separate linear (residual) term, that explicitly bounds the input layer weights for a feature by the linear weight for that feature. The model can be seen as a modification of so-called residual neural networks to produce a path of models that are feature-sparse, that is, use only a subset of the features. This is analogous to the solution path from the usual Lasso ($\ell_1$-regularized) linear regression. We call the proposed procedure "LassoNet" and develop a projected proximal gradient algorithm for its optimization. This approach can sometimes give as low or lower test error than a standard neural network, and its feature selection provides more interpretable solutions. We illustrate the method using both simulated and real data examples, and show that it is often able to achieve competitive performance with a much smaller number of input features.
A Deep Learning Based Attack for The Chaos-based Image Encryption

In this letter, as a proof of concept, we propose a deep learning-based approach to attack the chaos-based image encryption algorithm in \cite{guan2005chaos}. The proposed method first projects the chaos-based encrypted images into the low-dimensional feature space, where essential information of plain images has been largely preserved. With the low-dimensional features, a deconvolutional generator is utilized to regenerate perceptually similar decrypted images to approximate the plain images in the high-dimensional space. Compared with conventional image encryption attack algorithms, the proposed method does not require to manually analyze and infer keys in a time-consuming way. Instead, we directly attack the chaos-based encryption algorithms in a key-independent manner. Moreover, the proposed method can be trained end-to-end. Given the chaos-based encrypted images, a well-trained decryption model is able to automatically reconstruct plain images with high fidelity. In the experiments, we successfully attack the chaos-based algorithm \cite{guan2005chaos} and the decrypted images are visually similar to their ground truth plain images. Experimental results on both static-key and dynamic-key scenarios verify the efficacy of the proposed method.
On multidimensional stable-driven stochastic differential equations with Besov drift

We establish well-posedness results for multidimensional non degenerate $\alpha$-stable driven SDEs with time inhomogeneous singular drifts in $\mathbb{L}^r-{\mathbb B}_{p,q}^{-1+\gamma}$ with $\gamma<1$ and $\alpha$ in $(1,2]$, where $\mathbb{L}^r$ and ${\mathbb B}_{p,q}^{-1+\gamma} $ stand for Lebesgue and Besov spaces respectively. Precisely, we first prove the well-posedness of the corresponding martingale problem and then give a precise meaning to the dynamics of the SDE. Our results rely on the smoothing properties of the underlying PDE, which is investigated by combining a perturbative approach with duality results between Besov spaces.
Nonequilibrium thermodynamic functionals of diffusion processes under first-order and second-order averaging.

The paper considers general diffusion processes taking place on widely separated time scales and presents a measure-theoretic approach to analyze various general thermodynamic functionals defined on the sample paths, which satisfy fluctuation theorems and not additive. We prove that the limit of these functionals with odd and even variables under first-order and second-order averaging fails to be the one directly defined on the averaged diffusion processes after the rapid dimensions have been eliminated. The difference is called an anomalous term, the exponential of which turns out to be martingales in all cases under consideration. Sufficient and necessary conditions for the vanishing of these anomalous terms are rigorously derived. Physical applications have also been included, especially for the second-order diffusion processes under the zero-mass limit.
Jamming-Assisted Proactive Eavesdropping Over Two Suspicious Communication Links

This paper studies a new and challenging wireless surveillance problem where a legitimate monitor attempts to eavesdrop two suspicious communication links simultaneously. To facilitate concurrent eavesdropping, our multi-antenna legitimate monitor employs a proactive eavesdropping via jamming approach, by selectively jamming suspicious receivers to lower the transmission rates of the target links. In particular, we are interested in characterizing the achievable eavesdropping rate region for the minimum-mean-squared-error (MMSE) receiver case, by optimizing the legitimate monitor’s jamming transmit covariance matrix subject to its power budget. As the monitor cannot hear more than what suspicious links transmit, the achievable eavesdropping rate region is essentially the intersection of the achievable rate region for the two suspicious links and that for the two eavesdropping links. The former region can be purposely altered by the monitor’s jamming transmit covariance matrix, whereas the latter region is fixed when the MMSE receiver is employed. Therefore, we first analytically characterize the achievable rate region for the two suspicious links via optimizing the jamming transmit covariance matrix and then obtain the achievable eavesdropping rate region for the MMSE receiver case. In addition, we also consider the MMSE with successive interference cancellation (MMSE-SIC) receiver case and characterize the corresponding achievable eavesdropping rate region by jointly optimizing the time-sharing factor between different decoding orders. Furthermore, extensions to the imperfect channel state information case and the more than two suspicious links scenario are also examined. Finally, numerical results are provided to corroborate our analysis and evaluate the eavesdropping performance.
Style conditioned recommendations

We propose Style Conditioned Recommendations (SCR) and introduce style injection as a method to diversify recommendations. We use Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE) architecture, where both the encoder and decoder are conditioned on a user profile learned from item content data. This allows us to apply style transfer methodologies to the task of recommendations, which we refer to as injection. To enable style injection, user profiles are learned to be interpretable such that they express users' propensities for specific predefined styles. These are learned via label-propagation from a dataset of item content, with limited labeled points. To perform injection, the condition on the encoder is learned while the condition on the decoder is selected per explicit feedback. Explicit feedback can be taken either from a user's response to a style or interest quiz, or from item ratings. In the absence of explicit feedback, the condition at the encoder is applied to the decoder. We show a 12% improvement on NDCG@20 over the traditional VAE based approach on the task of recommendations. We show an average 22% improvement on AUC across all classes for predicting user style profiles against our best performing baseline. After injecting styles we compare the user style profile to the style of the recommendations and show that injected styles have an average +133% increase in presence. Our results show that style injection is a powerful method to diversify recommendations while maintaining personal relevance. Our main contribution is an application of a semi-supervised approach that extends item labels to interpretable user profiles.
PingPong: Packet-Level Signatures for Smart Home Device Events

Smart home devices are vulnerable to passive inference attacks based on network traffic, even in the presence of encryption. In this paper, we present PINGPONG, a tool that can automatically extract packet-level signatures for device events (e.g., light bulb turning ON/OFF) from network traffic. We evaluated PINGPONG on popular smart home devices ranging from smart plugs and thermostats to cameras, voice-activated devices, and smart TVs. We were able to: (1) automatically extract previously unknown signatures that consist of simple sequences of packet lengths and directions; (2) use those signatures to detect the devices or specific events with an average recall of more than 97%; (3) show that the signatures are unique among hundreds of millions of packets of real world network traffic; (4) show that our methodology is also applicable to publicly available datasets; and (5) demonstrate its robustness in different settings: events triggered by local and remote smartphones, as well as by homeautomation systems.
Weighted Spectral Efficiency Optimization for Hybrid Beamforming in Multiuser Massive MIMO-OFDM Systems

In this article, we consider hybrid beamforming designs for multiuser massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. Aiming at maximizing the weighted spectral efficiency, we propose one alternating maximization framework where the analog precoding is optimized by Riemannian manifold optimization. If the digital precoding is optimized by a locally optimal algorithm, we obtain a locally optimal alternating maximization algorithm. In contrast, if we use a weighted minimum mean square error (MMSE)-based iterative algorithm for digital precoding, we obtain a suboptimal alternating maximization algorithm with reduced complexity in each iteration. By characterizing the upper bound of the weighted arithmetic and geometric means of mean square errors (MSEs), it is shown that the two alternating maximization algorithms have similar performance when the user specific weights do not have big differences. Verified by numerical results, the performance gap between the two alternating maximization algorithms becomes large when the ratio of the maximal and minimal weights among users is very large. Moreover, we also propose a low-complexity closed-form method without iterations. It employs matrix decomposition for the analog beamforming and weighted MMSE for the digital beamforming. Although it is not supposed to maximize the weighted spectral efficiency, it exhibits small performance deterioration compared to the two iterative alternating maximization algorithms and it qualifies as a good initialization for iterative algorithms, saving thereby iterations.
Energy Beamforming for Wireless Information and Power Transfer in Backscatter Multiuser Networks

Wirelessly powered backscatter communication (WPBC) has been identified as a promising technology for low-power communication systems, which can reap the benefits of energy beamforming to improve energy transfer efficiency. Existing studies on energy beamforming fail to simultaneously take energy supply and information transfer in WPBC into account. This paper takes the first step to fill this gap, by considering the trade-off between the energy harvesting rate and achievable rate using estimated backscatter channel state information (BS-CSI). To ensure reliable communication and user fairness, we formulate the energy beamforming design as a max- min optimization problem by maximizing the minimum achievable rate for all tags subject to the energy constraint. We derive the closed-form expression of the energy harvesting rate, as well as the lower bound of the ergodic achievable rate. Our numerical results indicate that our scheme can significantly outperform state-of-the-art energy beamforming schemes. Additionally, the proposed scheme achieves performance comparable to that obtained via beamforming with perfect CSI.
Collaborative Filtering and Multi-Label Classification with Matrix Factorization

Machine learning techniques for Recommendation System (RS) and Classification has become a prime focus of research to tackle the problem of information overload. RS are software tools that aim at making informed decisions about the services that a user may like. On the other hand, classification technique deals with the categorization of a data object into one of the several predefined classes. In the multi-label classification problem, unlike the traditional multi-class classification setting, each instance can be simultaneously associated with a subset of labels. The focus of thesis is on the development of novel techniques for collaborative filtering and multi-label classification. We propose a novel method of constructing a hierarchical bi-level maximum margin matrix factorization to handle matrix completion of ordinal rating matrix. Taking the cue from the alternative formulation of support vector machines, a novel loss function is derived by considering proximity as an alternative criterion instead of margin maximization criterion for matrix factorization framework. We extended the concept of matrix factorization for yet another important problem of machine learning namely multi-label classification which deals with the classification of data with multiple labels. We propose a novel piecewise-linear embedding method with a low-rank constraint on parametrization to capture nonlinear intrinsic relationships that exist in the original feature and label space. We also study the embedding of labels together with the group information with an objective to build an efficient multi-label classifier. We assume the existence of a low-dimensional space onto which the feature vectors and label vectors can be embedded. We ensure that labels belonging to the same group share the same sparsity pattern in their low-rank representations.
Characterizing and Understanding Software Developer Networks in Security Development

To build secure software, developers often work together during software development and maintenance to find, fix, and prevent security vulnerabilities. Examining the nature of developer interactions in security development can provide valuable insights for improving current practices. In this work, we first conduct a large-scale empirical study to mine developer interactions in security development regarding their security introducing and fixing activities on a benchmark dataset, which involves more 1.8M commits from nine large-scale open-source software projects. We then build software developer networks with the identified developer interactions and conduct network analysis to characterize and understand security development. For our analysis, we first study the interaction patterns between developers. Second, we characterize the nature of developer interaction in security development in comparison to developer interaction in non-security development. Then, we explore the relation between developer interaction and the quality of projects regarding security. Among our findings we identify that: the dominating interaction patterns among developers in the security and non-security development are different, which may suggest the needs of differing social and communication support for security and non-security development; the distribution of interaction patterns has a correlation with the quality of software projects; different from general software development, most of the projects are non hero-centric regarding security development. We believe the findings from this study can help developers understand how vulnerabilities originate and evolve under the interaction of developers and further improve software maintenance.
Regularizing Proxies with Multi-Adversarial Training for Unsupervised Domain-Adaptive Semantic Segmentation

Training a semantic segmentation model requires a large amount of pixel-level annotation, hampering its application at scale. With computer graphics, we can generate almost unlimited training data with precise annotation. However,a deep model trained with synthetic data usually cannot directly generalize well to realistic images due to domain shift. It has been observed that highly confident labels for the unlabeled real images may be predicted relying on the labeled synthetic data. To tackle the unsupervised domain adaptation problem, we explore the possibilities to generate high-quality labels as proxy labels to supervise the training on target data. Specifically, we propose a novel proxy-based method using multi-adversarial training. We first train the model using synthetic data (source domain). Multiple discriminators are used to align the features be-tween the source and target domain (real images) at different levels. Then we focus on obtaining and selecting high-quality proxy labels by incorporating both the confidence of the class predictor and that from the adversarial discriminators. Our discriminators not only work as a regularizer to encourage feature alignment but also provide an alternative confidence measure for generating proxy labels. Relying on the generated high-quality proxies, our model can be trained in a "supervised manner" on the target do-main. On two major tasks, GTA5->Cityscapes and SYNTHIA->Cityscapes, our method achieves state-of-the-art results, outperforming the previous by a large margin.
A Two Stage GAN for High Resolution Retinal Image Generation and Segmentation

In recent years, the use of deep learning is becoming increasingly popular in computer vision. However, the effective training of deep architectures usually relies on huge sets of annotated data. This is critical in the medical field where it is difficult and expensive to obtain annotated images. In this paper, we use Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for synthesizing high quality retinal images, along with the corresponding semantic label-maps, to be used instead of real images during the training process. Differently from other previous proposals, we suggest a two step approach: first, a progressively growing GAN is trained to generate the semantic label-maps, which describe the blood vessel structure (i.e. vasculature); second, an image-to-image translation approach is used to obtain realistic retinal images from the generated vasculature. By using only a handful of training samples, our approach generates realistic high resolution images, that can be effectively used to enlarge small available datasets. Comparable results have been obtained employing the generated images in place of real data during training. The practical viability of the proposed approach has been demonstrated by applying it on two well established benchmark sets for retinal vessel segmentation, both containing a very small number of training samples. Our method obtained better performances with respect to state-of-the-art techniques.
Comparing Social Science and Computer Science Workflow Processes for Studying Group Interactions

In this article, a team of authors from the Geeks and Groupies workshop, in Leiden, the Netherlands, compare prototypical approaches to studying group interaction in social science and computer science disciplines, which we call workflows. To help social and computer science scholars understand and manage these differences, we organize workflow into three major stages: research design, data collection, and analysis. For each stage, we offer a brief overview on how scholars from each discipline work. We then compare those approaches and identify potential synergies and challenges. We conclude our article by discussing potential directions for more integrated and mutually beneficial collaboration that go beyond the producer–consumer model.
Enhanced multi‐index Monte Carlo by means of multiple semicoarsened multigrid for anisotropic diffusion problems

In many models used in engineering and science, material properties are uncertain or spatially varying. For example, in geophysics and porous media flow, in particular, the uncertain permeability of the material is modeled as a random field. These random fields can be highly anisotropic. Efficient solvers, such as the multiple semicoarsened multigrid (MSG) method are required to compute solutions for various realizations of the uncertain material. The MSG method is an extension of the classic multigrid method, which uses additional coarse grids that are coarsened in only a single coordinate direction. In this sense, it closely resembles the extension of multilevel Monte Carlo to multi‐index Monte Carlo (MIMC). We present an unbiased MIMC method that reuses the MSG coarse solutions. Our formulation of the estimator can be interpreted as the problem of learning the unknown distribution of the number of samples across all indices and unifies the previous work on adaptive MIMC and unbiased estimation. We analyze the cost of this new estimator theoretically and present numerical experiments with various anisotropic random fields, where the unknown coefficients in the covariance model are considered as hyperparameters. We illustrate its robustness and superiority over unbiased MIMC without sample reuse.
Configuration Testing: Testing Configuration Values as Code and with Code.

This paper proposes configuration testing--evaluating configuration values (to be deployed) by exercising the code that uses the values and assessing the corresponding program behavior. We advocate that configuration values should be systematically tested like software code and that configuration testing should be a key reliability engineering practice for preventing misconfigurations from production deployment. The essential advantage of configuration testing is to put the configuration values (to be deployed) in the context of the target software program under test. In this way, the dynamic effects of configuration values and the impact of configuration changes can be observed during testing. Configuration testing overcomes the fundamental limitations of de facto approaches to combatting misconfigurations, namely configuration validation and software testing--the former is disconnected from code logic and semantics, while the latter can hardly cover all possible configuration values and their combinations. Our preliminary results show the effectiveness of configuration testing in capturing real-world misconfigurations. We present the principles of writing new configuration tests and the promises of retrofitting existing software tests to be configuration tests. We discuss new adequacy and quality metrics for configuration testing. We also explore regression testing techniques to enable incremental configuration testing during continuous integration and deployment in modern software systems.