Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Learning Cross-lingual Mappings for Data Augmentation to Improve Low-Resource Speech Recognition

Exploiting cross-lingual resources is an effective way to compensate for data scarcity of low resource languages. Recently, a novel multilingual model fusion technique has been proposed where a model is trained to learn cross-lingual acoustic-phonetic similarities as a mapping function. However, handcrafted lexicons have been used to train hybrid DNN-HMM ASR systems. To remove this dependency, we extend the concept of learnable cross-lingual mappings for end-to-end speech recognition. Furthermore, mapping models are employed to transliterate the source languages to the target language without using parallel data. Finally, the source audio and its transliteration is used for data augmentation to retrain the target language ASR. The results show that any source language ASR model can be used for a low-resource target language recognition followed by proposed mapping model. Furthermore, data augmentation results in a relative gain up to 5% over baseline monolingual model.
Transferring Knowledge for Food Image Segmentation using Transformers and Convolutions

Food image segmentation is an important task that has ubiquitous applications, such as estimating the nutritional value of a plate of food. Although machine learning models have been used for segmentation in this domain, food images pose several challenges. One challenge is that food items can overlap and mix, making them difficult to distinguish. Another challenge is the degree of inter-class similarity and intra-class variability, which is caused by the varying preparation methods and dishes a food item may be served in. Additionally, class imbalance is an inevitable issue in food datasets. To address these issues, two models are trained and compared, one based on convolutional neural networks and the other on Bidirectional Encoder representation for Image Transformers (BEiT). The models are trained and valuated using the FoodSeg103 dataset, which is identified as a robust benchmark for food image segmentation. The BEiT model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art model by achieving a mean intersection over union of 49.4 on FoodSeg103. This study provides insights into transfering knowledge using convolution and Transformer-based approaches in the food image domain.
Dark Web Activity Classification Using Deep Learning

In contemporary times, people rely heavily on the internet and search engines to obtain information, either directly or indirectly. However, the information accessible to users constitutes merely 4% of the overall information present on the internet, which is commonly known as the surface web. The remaining information that eludes search engines is called the deep web. The deep web encompasses deliberately hidden information, such as personal email accounts, social media accounts, online banking accounts, and other confidential data. The deep web contains several critical applications, including databases of universities, banks, and civil records, which are off-limits and illegal to access. The dark web is a subset of the deep web that provides an ideal platform for criminals and smugglers to engage in illicit activities, such as drug trafficking, weapon smuggling, selling stolen bank cards, and money laundering. In this article, we propose a search engine that employs deep learning to detect the titles of activities on the dark web. We focus on five categories of activities, including drug trading, weapon trading, selling stolen bank cards, selling fake IDs, and selling illegal currencies. Our aim is to extract relevant images from websites with a". onion"extension and identify the titles of websites without images by extracting keywords from the text of the pages. Furthermore, we introduce a dataset of images called Darkoob, which we have gathered and used to evaluate our proposed method. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves an accuracy rate of 94% on the test dataset.
Batches Stabilize the Minimum Norm Risk in High Dimensional Overparameterized Linear Regression

Learning algorithms that divide the data into batches are prevalent in many machine-learning applications, typically offering useful trade-offs between computational efficiency and performance. In this paper, we examine the benefits of batch-partitioning through the lens of a minimum-norm overparameterized linear regression model with isotropic Gaussian features. We suggest a natural small-batch version of the minimum-norm estimator, and derive an upper bound on its quadratic risk, showing it is inversely proportional to the noise level as well as to the overparameterization ratio, for the optimal choice of batch size. In contrast to minimum-norm, our estimator admits a stable risk behavior that is monotonically increasing in the overparameterization ratio, eliminating both the blowup at the interpolation point and the double-descent phenomenon. Interestingly, we observe that this implicit regularization offered by the batch partition is partially explained by feature overlap between the batches. Our bound is derived via a novel combination of techniques, in particular normal approximation in the Wasserstein metric of noisy projections over random subspaces.
Prompt Performance Prediction for Image Generation

The ability to predict the performance of a query before results are returned has been a longstanding challenge in Information Retrieval (IR) systems. Inspired by this task, we introduce, in this paper, a novel task called"Prompt Performance Prediction"(PPP) that aims to predict the performance of a prompt, before obtaining the actual generated images. We demonstrate the plausibility of our task by measuring the correlation coefficient between predicted and actual performance scores across: three datasets containing pairs of prompts and generated images AND three art domain datasets of real images and real user appreciation ratings. Our results show promising performance prediction capabilities, suggesting potential applications for optimizing user prompts.
Definition Modeling : To model definitions. Generating Definitions With Little to No Semantics

Definition Modeling, the task of generating definitions, was first proposed as a means to evaluate the semantic quality of word embeddings—a coherent lexical semantic representations of a word in context should contain all the information necessary to generate its definition. The relative novelty of this task entails that we do not know which factors are actually relied upon by a Definition Modeling system. In this paper, we present evidence that the task may not involve as much semantics as one might expect: we show how an earlier model from the literature is both rather insensitive to semantic aspects such as explicit polysemy, as well as reliant on formal similarities between headwords and words occurring in its glosses, casting doubt on the validity of the task as a means to evaluate embeddings.
Semantic-Based Neural Network Repair

Recently, neural networks have spread into numerous fields including many safety-critical systems. Neural networks are built (and trained) by programming in frameworks such as TensorFlow and PyTorch. Developers apply a rich set of pre-defined layers to manually program neural networks or to automatically generate them (e.g., through AutoML). Composing neural networks with different layers is error-prone due to the non-trivial constraints that must be satisfied in order to use those layers. In this work, we propose an approach to automatically repair erroneous neural networks. The challenge is in identifying a minimal modification to the network so that it becomes valid. Modifying a layer might have cascading effects on subsequent layers and thus our approach must search recursively to identify a ''globally'' minimal modification. Our approach is based on an executable semantics of deep learning layers and focuses on four kinds of errors which are common in practice. We evaluate our approach for two usage scenarios, i.e., repairing automatically generated neural networks and manually written ones suffering from common model bugs. The results show that we are able to repair 100% of a set of randomly generated neural networks (which are produced with an existing AI framework testing approach) effectively and efficiently (with an average repair time of 21.08s) and 93.75% of a collection of real neural network bugs (with an average time of 3min 40s).
A Graph Data Structure to Optimize Dynamic Graph Processing on GPUs

Graph processing on GPUs is gaining momentum due to the high throughputs observed compared to traditional CPUs, attributed to the vast number of processing cores on GPUs that can exploit parallelism in graph analytics. This paper discusses a graph data structure for dynamic graph processing on GPUs. Unlike static graphs, dynamic graphs mutate over their lifetime through vertex and/or edge batch updates. The proposed work aims to provide fast batch updates and graph querying without consuming too much GPU memory. Experimental results show improved initialization timings by 1968-1269024%, improved batch edge insert timings by 30-30047%, and improved batch edge delete timings by 50-25262% while consuming less memory when the batch size is large.
Reconstruction of potential flight paths for the January 2015 “Gimbal” UAP

The Gimbal video is a well-known footage of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). Recorded in January 2015 off the coast of Florida by a U.S. Navy F/A-18F Super Hornet's targeting pod, the video shows an infrared-significant object skimming over clouds. Towards the end of the 34-second clip, the object appears to stop and rotate in mid-air. Naval aviators who participated in the event indicate that: (1) The UAP was within 10 nautical miles of the F/A-18F, (2) that, from the perspective of the aircrew's top-down radar display, it was seen to stop and reverse direction with no radius of turn, and (3) that the UAP was accompanied by a formation of 4-6 other unknown objects. Using data from the ATFLIR video, it is possible to reconstruct potential flight paths for the object as a function of distance. We show that, at the range provided by the aviators, potential flight paths align with eyewitness accounts: The object decelerates from a few hundred knots before rapidly reversing direction in a vertical U-turn. Such a maneuver would have been observed on the overhead radar display as an abrupt reversal of direction with no radius of turn. The highly anomalous flight path found at the range provided by the aircrew, along with the remarkable match between the reconstructed flight path, eyewitness recollections, and the object's rotation, raises intriguing questions about the nature of the object. This is especially the case because, at this distance, no wings or infrared signatures consistent with conventional means of propulsion are visible. An alternative hypothesis, which proposes that Gimbal shows infrared glare from the exhaust of a conventional jet aircraft viewed approximately tail-on 30 nautical miles from the F/A-18F, is also discussed. Our goal is to provide an overview of analyses of the Gimbal encounter, and encourage aeronautics professionals to share their expertise.
Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence Framework for Proactive Detection and Risk Explanation of Cyber Attacks in Smart Grid

The rapid growth of distributed energy resources (DERs), such as renewable energy sources, generators, consumers, and prosumers in the smart grid infrastructure, poses significant cybersecurity and trust challenges to the grid controller. Consequently, it is crucial to identify adversarial tactics and measure the strength of the attacker’s DER. To enable a trustworthy smart grid controller, this work investigates a trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI) mechanism for proactive identification and explanation of the cyber risk caused by the control/status message of DERs. Thus, proposing and developing a trustworthy AI framework to facilitate the deployment of any AI algorithms for detecting potential cyber threats and analyzing root causes based on Shapley value interpretation while dynamically quantifying the risk of an attack based on Ward’s minimum variance formula. The experiment with a state-of-the-art dataset establishes the proposed framework as a trustworthy AI by fulfilling the capabilities of reliability, fairness, explainability, transparency, reproducibility, and accountability.
CoverHunter: Cover Song Identification with Refined Attention and Alignments

Cover Song Identification (CSI) focuses on finding the same music with different versions in reference anchors given a query track. In this paper, we propose a novel system named CoverHunter that overcomes the shortcomings of existing detection schemes by exploring richer features with refined attention and alignments. CoverHunter contains three key modules: 1) A convolution-augmented transformer (e.g. Conformer) structure that captures both local and global feature interactions in contrast to previous methods mainly relying on convolutional neural networks; 2) An attention-based time pooling module that further exploits the attention in the time dimension; 3) A novel coarse-to-fine training scheme that first trains a network to roughly align the song chunks and then refines the network by training on the aligned chunks. At the same time, we also summarize some important training tricks used in our system to achieve better results. Experiments on several standard CSI datasets show that our method significantly improves over state-of-the-art methods with an embedding size of 128 (2.3% on SHS100K-TEST and 17.7% on DaTacos).
Bridging the Gap between Decision and Logits in Decision-based Knowledge Distillation for Pre-trained Language Models

Conventional knowledge distillation (KD) methods require access to the internal information of teachers, e.g., logits. However, such information may not always be accessible for large pre-trained language models (PLMs). In this work, we focus on decision-based KD for PLMs, where only teacher decisions (i.e., top-1 labels) are accessible. Considering the information gap between logits and decisions, we propose a novel method to estimate logits from the decision distributions. Specifically, decision distributions can be both derived as a function of logits theoretically and estimated with test-time data augmentation empirically. By combining the theoretical and empirical estimations of the decision distributions together, the estimation of logits can be successfully reduced to a simple root-finding problem. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly outperforms strong baselines on both natural language understanding and machine reading comprehension datasets.
The Assessment of Human Gait Function Based on Wavelet Entropy

Objective To seek a useful index for assessing the change of human gait function based on the application of wavelet entropy in the gait data analysis.Methods The ground reaction force(GRF)gait data of 2 groups(10 young and 10 elderly subjects)were acquired with Bertec 3 dimensional force measured system(a strain gauge force platform)during normal walking.The orthogonal discrete wavelet transform was used for decomposing the collected gait data.The relative wavelet energy and wavelet entropy were defined and calculated respectively.They were statistically analyzed with t-test technique respectively to evaluate the change of human gait function.Results There was significant difference between the relative wavelet energy from GRF gait data of the two subject groups.The average values of wavelet entropy from the GRF gait data of elderly subject group were obviously less than those from the GRF gait data of young subject group.With the value of significance level of t-test P0.05,there was significant difference between wavelet entropy of 2 groups.Conclusion The relative wavelet energy can provide the detailed information associated with the change of human gait function in gait data,and the wavelet entropy is able to characterize the degree of the intrinsic change of the human locomotive system.The wavelet entropy can serve as a new index to describe the change of human gait function in future clinical application.
Detecting Misuses of Security APIs: A Systematic Review

Security Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) play a vital role in ensuring software security. However, misuse of security APIs may introduce vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers. API design complexities, inadequate documentation and insufficient security training are some of the reasons for misusing security APIs. In order to help developers and organizations, software security community have devised and evaluated several approaches to detecting misuses of security APIs. We rigorously analyzed and synthesized the literature on security APIs misuses for building a body of knowledge on the topic. Our review has identified and discussed the security APIs studied from misuse perspective, the types of reported misuses and the approaches developed to detect misuses and how the proposed approaches have been evaluated. Our review has also highlighted the open research issues for advancing the state-of-the-art of detecting misuse of security APIs.
Reward-Free Curricula for Training Robust World Models

There has been a recent surge of interest in developing generally-capable agents that can adapt to new tasks without additional training in the environment. Learning world models from reward-free exploration is a promising approach, and enables policies to be trained using imagined experience for new tasks. However, achieving a general agent requires robustness across different environments. In this work, we address the novel problem of generating curricula in the reward-free setting to train robust world models. We consider robustness in terms of minimax regret over all environment instantiations and show that the minimax regret can be connected to minimising the maximum error in the world model across environment instances. This result informs our algorithm, WAKER: Weighted Acquisition of Knowledge across Environments for Robustness. WAKER selects environments for data collection based on the estimated error of the world model for each environment. Our experiments demonstrate that WAKER outperforms several baselines, resulting in improved robustness, efficiency, and generalisation.
Accelerating Dynamic Network Embedding with Billions of Parameter Updates to Milliseconds

Network embedding, a graph representation learning method illustrating network topology by mapping nodes into lower-dimension vectors, is challenging to accommodate the ever-changing dynamic graphs in practice. Existing research is mainly based on node-by-node embedding modifications, which falls into the dilemma of efficient calculation and accuracy. Observing that the embedding dimensions are usually much smaller than the number of nodes, we break this dilemma with a novel dynamic network embedding paradigm that rotates and scales the axes of embedding space instead of a node-by-node update. Specifically, we propose the Dynamic Adjacency Matrix Factorization (DAMF) algorithm, which achieves an efficient and accurate dynamic network embedding by rotating and scaling the coordinate system where the network embedding resides with no more than the number of edge modifications changes of node embeddings. Moreover, a dynamic Personalized PageRank is applied to the obtained network embeddings to enhance node embeddings and capture higher-order neighbor information dynamically. Experiments of node classification, link prediction, and graph reconstruction on different-sized dynamic graphs suggest that DAMF advances dynamic network embedding. Further, we unprecedentedly expand dynamic network embedding experiments to billion-edge graphs, where DAMF updates billion-level parameters in less than 10ms.
Opinion Tree Parsing for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

Extracting sentiment elements using pre-trained generative models has recently led to large improvements in aspect-based sentiment analysis benchmarks. However, these models always need large-scale computing resources, and they also ignore explicit modeling of structure between sentiment elements. To address these challenges, we propose an opinion tree parsing model, aiming to parse all the sentiment elements from an opinion tree, which is much faster, and can explicitly reveal a more comprehensive and complete aspect-level sentiment structure. In particular, we first introduce a novel context-free opinion grammar to normalize the opinion tree structure. We then employ a neural chart-based opinion tree parser to fully explore the correlations among sentiment elements and parse them into an opinion tree structure. Extensive experiments show the superiority of our proposed model and the capacity of the opinion tree parser with the proposed context-free opinion grammar. More importantly, the results also prove that our model is much faster than previous models.
Operationalising Representation in Natural Language Processing

Despite its centrality in the philosophy of cognitive science, there has been little prior philosophical work engaging with the notion of representation in contemporary NLP practice. This paper attempts to fill that lacuna: drawing on ideas from cognitive science, I introduce a framework for evaluating the representational claims made about components of neural NLP models, proposing three criteria with which to evaluate whether a component of a model represents a property and operationalising these criteria using probing classifiers, a popular analysis technique in NLP (and deep learning more broadly). The project of operationalising a philosophically-informed notion of representation should be of interest to both philosophers of science and NLP practitioners. It affords philosophers a novel testing-ground for claims about the nature of representation, and helps NLPers organise the large literature on probing experiments, suggesting novel avenues for empirical research.
Description-Enhanced Label Embedding Contrastive Learning for Text Classification

Text classification is one of the fundamental tasks in natural language processing, which requires an agent to determine the most appropriate category for input sentences. Recently, deep neural networks have achieved impressive performance in this area, especially pretrained language models (PLMs). Usually, these methods concentrate on input sentences and corresponding semantic embedding generation. However, for another essential component: labels, most existing works either treat them as meaningless one-hot vectors or use vanilla embedding methods to learn label representations along with model training, underestimating the semantic information and guidance that these labels reveal. To alleviate this problem and better exploit label information, in this article, we employ self-supervised learning (SSL) in model learning process and design a novel self-supervised relation of relation (R 2 ) classification task for label utilization from a one-hot manner perspective. Then, we propose a novel () for text classification, in which text classification and R 2 classification are treated as optimization targets. Meanwhile, triplet loss is employed to enhance the analysis of differences and connections among labels. Moreover, considering that one-hot usage is still short of exploiting label information, we incorporate external knowledge from WordNet to obtain multiaspect descriptions for label semantic learning and extend to a novel () from a label embedding perspective. One step further, since these fine-grained descriptions may introduce unexpected noise, we develop a mutual interaction module to select appropriate parts from input sentences and labels simultaneously based on contrastive learning (CL) for noise mitigation. Extensive experiments on different text classification tasks reveal that can effectively improve the classification performance and can make better use of label information and further improve the performance. As a byproduct, we have released the codes to facilitate other research.