OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Ordinal Regression via Binary Preference vs Simple Regression: Statistical and Experimental Perspectives
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Ordinal regression with anchored reference samples (ORARS) has been proposed for predicting the subjective Mean Opinion Score (MOS) of input stimuli automatically. The ORARS addresses the MOS prediction problem by pairing a test sample with each of the pre-scored anchored reference samples. A trained binary classifier is then used to predict which sample, test or anchor, is better statistically. Posteriors of the binary preference decision are then used to predict the MOS of the test sample. In this paper, rigorous framework, analysis, and experiments to demonstrate that ORARS are advantageous over simple regressions are presented. The contributions of this work are: 1) Show that traditional regression can be reformulated into multiple preference tests to yield a better performance, which is confirmed with simulations experimentally; 2) Generalize ORARS to other regression problems and verify its effectiveness; 3) Provide some prerequisite conditions which can insure proper application of ORARS.
fybrrChat: A Distributed Chat Application for Secure P2P Messaging
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2022
Year: 2022

The growing demand for connecting with each other across the world has proved to be a boon to the growth of social media platforms. But when it comes to ensuring the privacy and security of the platform, the control is in hands of few monopolies. Some claim to provide a secure medium of communication but their exploitation of users and misusing users' data with their centralized control over the policies has led to various controversies. Lack of trust towards these organisations have made people skeptical towards using these applications for extremely secure communication use-cases. Thus, a system with no central organisation in control and a trustless network is required. A trustless network is a network which does not requires the participants (users) to trust any central authority. These nodes themselves, as a group, can be trusted to make a decision which aligns with the interests of all. This is accompanied by a distributed network, where peers are connected to each other to form a mesh-like network called Swarm. This distributed network of connected peers is often attributed as the internet of tomorrow. The total number of monthly active users on the top 3 chat applications surpassed 4 billion users in July 2019. As of Oct 2020, WhatsApp alone has 2 billion monthly active users sending around 100 billion messages per day. With such vast number of people relying on chat applications, making these applications highly secure becomes a task of paramount importance.
RIDS : Real-time Intrusion Detection System for WPA3 enabled Enterprise Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

With the advent of new IEEE 802.11ax (WiFi 6) devices, enabling security is a priority. Since previous versions were found to have security vulnerabilities, to fix the most common security flaws, the WiFi Protected Access 3 (WPA3) got introduced. Although WPA3 is an improvement over its predecessor in terms of security, recently it was found that WPA3 has a few security vulnerabilities as well. In this paper, we have mentioned the previously known vulnerabilities in WPA3 and WPA2. In addition to that, we have created our own dataset based on WPA3 attacks (Section III). We have proposed a two-stage solution for the detection of an intrusion in the network. The two-stage approach will help ease computational processing burden of an AP and WLAN Controller. First, AP will perform a lightweight simple operation for some duration (say 500ms) at certain time interval. Upon discovering any abnormality in the flow of traffic an ML-based solution at the controller will detect the type of attack. Our approach is to utilize resources on AP as well as the back-end controller with certain level of optimization. We have achieved over 99% accuracy in attack detection using an ML-based solution. We have also publicly provided our code and dataset for the open-source research community, so that it can contribute for future research work.
A Kubernetes 'Bridge' operator between cloud and external resources
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

Many scientific workflows require dedicated compute resources, including HPC clusters with optimized software, quantum resources, and dedicated hardware cluster systems like Ray, for example. At the same time, many scientific workflows today are built on Kubernetes leveraging growing support for workflow and support tools. To address the growing demand to support workflows on both cloud and dedicated compute resources we present the Bridge Operator, a software extension for container orchestration in Kubernetes which facilitates the submission and monitoring of long running processes on external systems which have their own cluster resources manager (SLURM, LSF, quantum services and Ray). The Bridge Operator consists of a custom Kubernetes controller that employs a Kubernetes Custom Resource Definition to manage applications. We present controller logic to manage the cloud container orchestration and external resource workload manager interface, a resource definition to submit HTTP/HTTPS requests to the external resource, and a controller pod communicating with the external resource manager to submit and manage job execution. The implementation allows us to mirror the external resource in Kubernetes pods, which allows the operator to use these pods as proxies to control the external system. The implementation is agnostic to the choice of resource manager but assumes the system exposes a HTTP/HTTPS API for its control/management. The Bridge Operator automates the role of a human operator running jobs on a black box external resource as part of a complex hybrid workflow on the Cloud.
Light-weight spatio-temporal graphs for segmentation and ejection fraction prediction in cardiac ultrasound
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Accurate and consistent predictions of echocardiography parameters are important for cardiovascular diagnosis and treatment. In particular, segmentations of the left ventricle can be used to derive ventricular volume, ejection fraction (EF) and other relevant measurements. In this paper we propose a new automated method called EchoGraphs for predicting ejection fraction and segmenting the left ventricle by detecting anatomical keypoints. Models for direct coordinate regression based on Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) are used to detect the keypoints. GCNs can learn to represent the cardiac shape based on local appearance of each keypoint, as well as global spatial and temporal structures of all keypoints combined. We evaluate our EchoGraphs model on the EchoNet benchmark dataset. Compared to semantic segmentation, GCNs show accurate segmentation and improvements in robustness and inference runtime. EF is computed simultaneously to segmentations and our method also obtains state-of-the-art ejection fraction estimation. Source code is available online: https://github.com/guybenyosef/EchoGraphs.
Partial Residuated Implications Derived from Partial Triangular Norms and Partial Residuated Lattices
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we reveal some relations between fuzzy logic and quantum logic, and mainly study the partial residuated implications (PRIs) derived from partial triangular norms (partial t-norms) and partial residuated lattices (PRLs), and expand some results in the article "material implication in lattice effect algebra". Firstly, according to the concept of partial triangular norms given by Borzooei, we introduce the connection between lattice effect algebra and partial t-norms, and prove that partial operations in any commutative quasiresiduated lattice are partial t-norms. Secondly, we give the general form of partial residuated implications and the concept of partial fuzzy implications (PFIs), and the condition that partial residuated implication is a fuzzy implication is given. We also prove that each partial residuated implication is a partial fuzzy implication. Thirdly, we propose the partial residuated lattice and study their basic properties, to discuss the corresponding relationship between PRLs and lattice effect algebras (LEAs), to further reveal the relationship between LEAs and residuated partial algebras. In addition, like the definition of partial t-norms, we also propose the concepts of partial triangular conorms (partial t-conorms) and corresponding partial co-residuated lattices (PcRLs). Finally, based on partial residuated lattices, we give the definition of well partial residuated lattices (wPRLs), study the filter of well partial residuated lattices, and then construct quotient structure of partial residuated lattices.
Knowing Earlier what Right Means to You: A Comprehensive VQA Dataset for Grounding Relative Directions via Multi-Task Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Spatial reasoning poses a particular challenge for intelligent agents and is at the same time a prerequisite for their successful interaction and communication in the physical world. One such reasoning task is to describe the position of a target object with respect to the intrinsic orientation of some reference object via relative directions. In this paper, we introduce GRiD-A-3D, a novel diagnostic visual question-answering (VQA) dataset based on abstract objects. Our dataset allows for a fine-grained analysis of end-to-end VQA models' capabilities to ground relative directions. At the same time, model training requires considerably fewer computational resources compared with existing datasets, yet yields a comparable or even higher performance. Along with the new dataset, we provide a thorough evaluation based on two widely known end-to-end VQA architectures trained on GRiD-A-3D. We demonstrate that within a few epochs, the subtasks required to reason over relative directions, such as recognizing and locating objects in a scene and estimating their intrinsic orientations, are learned in the order in which relative directions are intuitively processed.
Effective and Efficient Training for Sequential Recommendation using Recency Sampling
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

Many modern sequential recommender systems use deep neural networks, which can effectively estimate the relevance of items but require a lot of time to train. Slow training increases expenses, hinders product development timescales and prevents the model from being regularly updated to adapt to changing user preferences. Training such sequential models involves appropriately sampling past user interactions to create a realistic training objective. The existing training objectives have limitations. For instance, next item prediction never uses the beginning of the sequence as a learning target, thereby potentially discarding valuable data. On the other hand, the item masking used by BERT4Rec is only weakly related to the goal of the sequential recommendation; therefore, it requires much more time to obtain an effective model. Hence, we propose a novel Recency-based Sampling of Sequences training objective that addresses both limitations. We apply our method to various recent and state-of-the-art model architectures - such as GRU4Rec, Caser, and SASRec. We show that the models enhanced with our method can achieve performances exceeding or very close to stateof-the-art BERT4Rec, but with much less training time.
Reconfigurable Refractive Surfaces: An Energy-Efficient Way to Holographic MIMO
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

Holographic Multiple Input Multiple Output (HMIMO), which integrates massive antenna elements into a compact space to achieve a spatially continuous aperture, plays an important role in future wireless networks. With numerous antenna elements, it is hard to implement the HMIMO via phased arrays due to unacceptable power consumption. To address this issue, reconfigurable refractive surface (RRS) is an energy efficient enabler of HMIMO since the surface is free of expensive phase shifters. Unlike traditional metasurfaces working as passive relays, the RRS is used as transmit antennas, where the far-field approximation does not hold anymore, urging a new performance analysis framework. In this letter, we first derive the data rate of an RRS-based single-user downlink system, and then compare its power consumption with the phased array. Simulation results verify our analysis and show that the RRS is an energy-efficient way to HMIMO.
Team PKU-WICT-MIPL PIC Makeup Temporal Video Grounding Challenge 2022 Technical Report
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

In this technical report, we briefly introduce the solutions of our team `PKU-WICT-MIPL' for the PIC Makeup Temporal Video Grounding (MTVG) Challenge in ACM-MM 2022. Given an untrimmed makeup video and a step query, the MTVG aims to localize a temporal moment of the target makeup step in the video. To tackle this task, we propose a phrase relationship mining framework to exploit the temporal localization relationship relevant to the fine-grained phrase and the whole sentence. Besides, we propose to constrain the localization results of different step sentence queries to not overlap with each other through a dynamic programming algorithm. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our final submission ranked 2nd on the leaderboard, with only a 0.55\% gap from the first.
STVGFormer: Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding with Static-Dynamic Cross-Modal Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

In this technical report, we introduce our solution to human-centric spatio-temporal video grounding task. We propose a concise and effective framework named STVGFormer, which models spatiotemporal visual-linguistic dependencies with a static branch and a dynamic branch. The static branch performs cross-modal understanding in a single frame and learns to localize the target object spatially according to intra-frame visual cues like object appearances. The dynamic branch performs cross-modal understanding across multiple frames. It learns to predict the starting and ending time of the target moment according to dynamic visual cues like motions. Both the static and dynamic branches are designed as cross-modal transformers. We further design a novel static-dynamic interaction block to enable the static and dynamic branches to transfer useful and complementary information from each other, which is shown to be effective to improve the prediction on hard cases. Our proposed method achieved 39.6% vIoU and won the first place in the HC-STVG track of the 4th Person in Context Challenge.
Lessons Learnt from Deploying ARI in Residential Care
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

This paper describes the final prototype of an assistive robot used for increasing engagement of older adults in the context of SHAPES project. It then highlights lessons learned from hands-on training during the first phases of the pilots at Clinica Humana and Can Granada residence in Mallorca (Spain).
A Survey of Recent Machine Learning Solutions for Ship Collision Avoidance and Mission Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Machine Learning (ML) techniques have gained significant traction as a means of improving the autonomy of marine vehicles over the last few years. This article surveys the recent ML approaches utilised for ship collision avoidance (COLAV) and mission planning. Following an overview of the ever-expanding ML exploitation for maritime vehicles, key topics in the mission planning of ships are outlined. Notable papers with direct and indirect applications to the COLAV subject are technically reviewed and compared. Critiques, challenges, and future directions are also identified. The outcome clearly demonstrates the thriving research in this field, even though commercial marine ships incorporating machine intelligence able to perform autonomously under all operating conditions are still a long way off.
RoVaR: Robust Multi-agent Tracking through Dual-layer Diversity in Visual and RF Sensor Fusion
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

The plethora of sensors in our commodity devices provides a rich substrate for sensor-fused tracking. Yet, today's solutions are unable to deliver robust and high tracking accuracies across multiple agents in practical, everyday environments - a feature central to the future of immersive and collaborative applications. This can be attributed to the limited scope of diversity leveraged by these fusion solutions, preventing them from catering to the multiple dimensions of accuracy, robustness (diverse environmental conditions) and scalability (multiple agents) simultaneously. In this work, we take an important step towards this goal by introducing the notion of dual-layer diversity to the problem of sensor fusion in multi-agent tracking. We demonstrate that the fusion of complementary tracking modalities, - passive/relative (e.g., visual odometry) and active/absolute tracking (e.g., infrastructure-assisted RF localization) offer a key first layer of diversity that brings scalability while the second layer of diversity lies in the methodology of fusion, where we bring together the complementary strengths of algorithmic (for robustness) and data-driven (for accuracy) approaches. RoVaR is an embodiment of such a dual-layer diversity approach that intelligently attends to cross-modal information using algorithmic and data-driven techniques that jointly share the burden of accurately tracking multiple agents in the wild. Extensive evaluations reveal RoVaR's multi-dimensional benefits in terms of tracking accuracy (median of 15cm), robustness (in unseen environments), light weight (runs in real-time on mobile platforms such as Jetson Nano/TX2), to enable practical multi-agent immersive applications in everyday environments.
A multi-task network approach for calculating discrimination-free insurance prices
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

In applications of predictive modeling, such as insurance pricing, indirect or proxy discrimination is an issue of major concern. Namely, there exists the possibility that protected policyholder characteristics are implicitly inferred from non-protected ones by predictive models, and are thus having an undesirable (or illegal) impact on prices. A technical solution to this problem relies on building a best-estimate model using all policyholder characteristics (including protected ones) and then averaging out the protected characteristics for calculating individual prices. However, such approaches require full knowledge of policyholders' protected characteristics, which may in itself be problematic. Here, we address this issue by using a multi-task neural network architecture for claim predictions, which can be trained using only partial information on protected characteristics, and it produces prices that are free from proxy discrimination. We demonstrate the use of the proposed model and we find that its predictive accuracy is comparable to a conventional feedforward neural network (on full information). However, this multi-task network has clearly superior performance in the case of partially missing policyholder information.
Non-Adaptive Edge Counting and Sampling via Bipartite Independent Set Queries
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

We study the problem of estimating the number of edges in an $n$-vertex graph, accessed via the Bipartite Independent Set query model introduced by Beame et al. (ITCS '18). In this model, each query returns a Boolean, indicating the existence of at least one edge between two specified sets of nodes. We present a non-adaptive algorithm that returns a $(1\pm ε)$ relative error approximation to the number of edges, with query complexity $\tilde O(ε^{-5}\log^{5} n )$, where $\tilde O(\cdot)$ hides $\textrm{poly}(\log \log n)$ dependencies. This is the first non-adaptive algorithm in this setting achieving $\textrm{poly}(1/ε,\log n)$ query complexity. Prior work requires $Ω(\log^2 n)$ rounds of adaptivity. We avoid this by taking a fundamentally different approach, inspired by work on single-pass streaming algorithms. Moreover, for constant $ε$, our query complexity significantly improves on the best known adaptive algorithm due to Bhattacharya et al. (STACS '22), which requires $O(ε^{-2} \log^{11} n)$ queries. Building on our edge estimation result, we give the first non-adaptive algorithm for outputting a nearly uniformly sampled edge with query complexity $\tilde O(ε^{-6} \log^{6} n)$, improving on the works of Dell et al. (SODA '20) and Bhattacharya et al. (STACS '22), which require $Ω(\log^3 n)$ rounds of adaptivity. Finally, as a consequence of our edge sampling algorithm, we obtain a $\tilde O(n\log^ 8 n)$ query algorithm for connectivity, using two rounds of adaptivity. This improves on a three-round algorithm of Assadi et al. (ESA '21) and is tight; there is no non-adaptive algorithm for connectivity making $o(n^2)$ queries.
Machine Learning Model Sizes and the Parameter Gap
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

We study trends in model size of notable machine learning systems over time using a curated dataset. From 1950 to 2018, model size in language models increased steadily by seven orders of magnitude. The trend then accelerated, with model size increasing by another five orders of magnitude in just 4 years from 2018 to 2022. Vision models grew at a more constant pace, totaling 7 orders of magnitude of growth between 1950 and 2022. We also identify that, since 2020, there have been many language models below 20B parameters, many models above 70B parameters, but a scarcity of models in the 20-70B parameter range. We refer to that scarcity as the parameter gap. We provide some stylized facts about the parameter gap and propose a few hypotheses to explain it. The explanations we favor are: (a) increasing model size beyond 20B parameters requires adopting different parallelism techniques, which makes mid-sized models less cost-effective, (b) GPT-3 was one order of magnitude larger than previous language models, and researchers afterwards primarily experimented with bigger models to outperform it. While these dynamics likely exist, and we believe they play some role in generating the gap, we don't have high confidence that there are no other, more important dynamics at play.
Ant Hill Colonization optimization algorithm(AHCOA) for controlling the side lobe of a uniform linear array
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2022
Year: 2022

This paper aims to introduce the Ant hill colonization optimization algorithm(AHCOA) to the electromagnetics and antenna community. The ant hill is built by special species of ants known as formicas ants(also meadow ants, fire ants and harvester ants). AHCOA is a novel new nature inspired algorithm mimicking how the ants built and sustain the ant hill for their survival and sustenance for many years. This problem solves constrained and unconstrained optimization problems with wide capability in diverse fields. AHCOA is used by writing equations of volumetric analysis of the ant hill mould the manner in which the structure is architected. In this paper, we have shown how AHCOA is better than the previous paper on ant lion optimizer for controlling side lobe in antenna pattern synthesis in paper [1]. The potential of AHCOA in synthesizing and analyzing for d/ varying from 1.1,0.6,0.5,0.3 and 0.1 linear array is also illustrated. Antenna side lobe level minimization is compared with ant lion optimizer showing why AHCOA is better than the previously simulated ant lion optimizer for side lobe control. The results show why linear arrays are better synthesized for AHCOA then other algorithms used in planar arrays. This paper shows why AHCOA is a strong candidate for antenna optimization used in linear arrays.