OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Development and Testing of a Smart Bin toward Automated Rearing of Black Soldier Fly Larvae
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

The Black Soldier Fly (BSF), can be an effective alternative to traditional disposal of food and agricultural waste (biowaste) such as landfills because its larvae are able to quickly transform biowaste into ready-to-use biomass. However, several challenges remain to ensure that BSF farming is economically viable at different scales and can be widely implemented. Manual labor is required to ensure optimal conditions to rear the larvae, from aerating the feeding substrate to monitoring abiotic conditions during the growth cycle. This paper introduces a proof-of-concept automated method of rearing BSF larvae to ensure optimal growing conditions while at the same time reducing manual labor. We retrofit existing BSF rearing bins with a "smart lid," named as such due to the hot-swappable nature of the lid with multiple bins. The system automatically aerates the larvae-diet substrate and provides bio-information of the larvae to users in real time. The proposed solution uses a custom aeration method and an array of sensors to create a soft real time system. Growth of larvae is monitored using thermal imaging and classical computer vision techniques. Experimental testing reveals that our automated approach produces BSF larvae on par with manual techniques.
The $q$-ary Golay complementary arrays of size $\mathbf{2}^{(m)}$ are standard
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

To find the non-standard binary Golay complementary sequences (GCSs) of length $2^{m}$ or theoretically prove the nonexistence of them are still open. Since it has been shown that all the standard $q$-ary (where $q$ is even) GCSs of length $2^m$ can be obtained by standard $q$-ary Golay complementary array pair (GAP) of dimension $m$ and size $2\times 2 \times \cdots \times 2$ (abbreviated to size $\mathbf{2}^{(m)}$), it's natural to ask whether all the $q$-ary GAP of size $\mathbf{2}^{(m)}$ are standard. We give a positive answer to this question.
Radiomics-Guided Global-Local Transformer for Weakly Supervised Pathology Localization in Chest X-Rays
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Before the recent success of deep learning methods for automated medical image analysis, practitioners used handcrafted radiomic features to quantitatively describe local patches of medical images. However, extracting discriminative radiomic features relies on accurate pathology localization, which is difficult to acquire in real-world settings. Despite advances in disease classification and localization from chest X-rays, many approaches fail to incorporate clinically-informed domain knowledge. For these reasons, we propose a Radiomics-Guided Transformer (RGT) that fuses \textit{global} image information with \textit{local} knowledge-guided radiomics information to provide accurate cardiopulmonary pathology localization and classification \textit{without any bounding box annotations}. RGT consists of an image Transformer branch, a radiomics Transformer branch, and fusion layers that aggregate image and radiomic information. Using the learned self-attention of its image branch, RGT extracts a bounding box for which to compute radiomic features, which are further processed by the radiomics branch; learned image and radiomic features are then fused and mutually interact via cross-attention layers. Thus, RGT utilizes a novel end-to-end feedback loop that can bootstrap accurate pathology localization only using image-level disease labels. Experiments on the NIH ChestXRay dataset demonstrate that RGT outperforms prior works in weakly supervised disease localization (by an average margin of 3.6\% over various intersection-over-union thresholds) and classification (by 1.1\% in average area under the receiver operating characteristic curve). We publicly release our codes and pre-trained models at \url{https://github.com/VITA-Group/chext}.
The Price of Stability for First Price Auction
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2022
Year: 2022

This paper establishes the Price of Stability (PoS) for First Price Auctions, for all equilibrium concepts that have been studied in the literature: Bayes Nash Equilibrium $\subsetneq$ Bayes Correlated Equilibrium $\subsetneq$ Bayes Coarse Correlated Equilibrium} $\bullet$ Bayes Nash Equilibrium: For independent valuations, the tight PoS is $1 - 1/ e^{2} \approx 0.8647$, matching the counterpart Price of Anarchy (PoA) bound \cite{JL22}. For correlated valuations, the tight $\PoS$ is $1 - 1 / e \approx 0.6321$, matching the counterpart PoA bound \cite{ST13,S14}. This result indicates that, in the worst cases, efficiency degradation depends not on different selections among Bayes Nash Equilibria. $\bullet$ Bayesian Coarse Correlated Equilibrium: For independent or correlated valuations, the tight PoS is always $1 = 100\%$, i.e., no efficiency degradation, different from the counterpart PoA bound $1 - 1 / e \approx 0.6321$ \cite{ST13,S14}. This result indicates that First Price Auctions can be fully efficient when we allow the more general equilibrium concepts.
A Decentralised Real Estate Transfer Verification Based on Self-Sovereign Identity and Smart Contracts
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Since its first introduction in late 90s, the use of marketplaces has continued to grow, today virtually everything from physical assets to services can be purchased on digital marketplaces, real estate is not an exception. Some marketplaces allow acclaimed asset owners to advertise their products, to which the services gets commission/percentage from proceeds of sale/lease. Despite the success recorded in the use of the marketplaces, they are not without limitations which include identity and property fraud, impersonation and the use of centralised technology with trusted parties that are prone to single point of failures (SPOF). Being one of the most valuable assets, real estate has been a target for marketplace fraud as impersonators take pictures of properties they do not own, upload them on marketplace with promising prices that lures innocent or naive buyers. This paper addresses these issues by proposing a self sovereign identity (SSI) and smart contract based framework for identity verification and verified transaction management on secure digital marketplaces. First, the use of SSI technology enable methods for acquiring verified credential (VC) that are verifiable on a decentralised blockchain registry to identify both real estate owner(s) and real estate property. Second, the smart contracts are used to negotiate the secure transfer of real estate property deeds on the marketplace. To assess the viability of our proposal we define an application scenario and compare our work with other approaches
Sparse Pairwise Re-ranking with Pre-trained Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

Pairwise re-ranking models predict which of two documents is more relevant to a query and then aggregate a final ranking from such preferences. This is often more effective than pointwise re-ranking models that directly predict a relevance value for each document. However, the high inference overhead of pairwise models limits their practical application: usually, for a set of $k$ documents to be re-ranked, preferences for all $k^2-k$ comparison pairs excluding self-comparisons are aggregated. We investigate whether the efficiency of pairwise re-ranking can be improved by sampling from all pairs. In an exploratory study, we evaluate three sampling methods and five preference aggregation methods. The best combination allows for an order of magnitude fewer comparisons at an acceptable loss of retrieval effectiveness, while competitive effectiveness is already achieved with about one third of the comparisons.
Scaling up ML-based Black-box Planning with Partial STRIPS Models
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

A popular approach for sequential decision-making is to perform simulator-based search guided with Machine Learning (ML) methods like policy learning. On the other hand, model-relaxation heuristics can guide the search effectively if a full declarative model is available. In this work, we consider how a practitioner can improve ML-based black-box planning on settings where a complete symbolic model is not available. We show that specifying an incomplete STRIPS model that describes only part of the problem enables the use of relaxation heuristics. Our findings on several planning domains suggest that this is an effective way to improve ML-based black-box planning beyond collecting more data or tuning ML architectures.
FairDistillation: Mitigating Stereotyping in Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Large pre-trained language models are successfully being used in a variety of tasks, across many languages. With this ever-increasing usage, the risk of harmful side effects also rises, for example by reproducing and reinforcing stereotypes. However, detecting and mitigating these harms is difficult to do in general and becomes computationally expensive when tackling multiple languages or when considering different biases. To address this, we present FairDistillation: a cross-lingual method based on knowledge distillation to construct smaller language models while controlling for specific biases. We found that our distillation method does not negatively affect the downstream performance on most tasks and successfully mitigates stereotyping and representational harms. We demonstrate that FairDistillation can create fairer language models at a considerably lower cost than alternative approaches.
A polynomial-time approximation to a minimum dominating set in a graph
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2022
Year: 2022

A {\em dominating set} of a graph $G=(V,E)$ is a subset of vertices $S\subseteq V$ such that every vertex $v\in V\setminus S$ has at least one neighbor in $S$. Finding a dominating set with the minimum cardinality in a connected graph $G=(V,E)$ is known to be NP-hard. A polynomial-time approximation algorithm for this problem, described here, works in two stages. At the first stage a dominant set is generated by a greedy algorithm, and at the second stage this dominating set is purified (reduced). The reduction is achieved by the analysis of the flowchart of the algorithm of the first stage and a special kind of clustering of the dominating set generated at the first stage. The clustering of the dominating set naturally leads to a special kind of a spanning forest of graph $G$, which serves as a basis for the second purification stage. We expose some types of graphs for which the algorithm of the first stage already delivers an optimal solution and derive sufficient conditions when the overall algorithm constructs an optimal solution. We give three alternative approximation ratios for the algorithm of the first stage, two of which are expressed in terms of solely invariant problem instance parameters, and we also give one additional approximation ratio for the overall two-stage algorithm. The greedy algorithm of the first stage turned out to be essentially the same as the earlier known state-of-the-art algorithms for the set cover and dominating set problem Chvátal \cite{chvatal} and Parekh \cite{parekh}. The second purification stage results in a significant reduction of the dominant set created at the first stage, in practice. The practical behavior of both stages was verified for randomly generated problem instances. The computational experiments emphasize the gap between a solution of Stage 1 and a solution of Stage 2.
SIMC 2.0: Improved Secure ML Inference Against Malicious Clients
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we study the problem of secure ML inference against a malicious client and a semi-trusted server such that the client only learns the inference output while the server learns nothing. This problem is first formulated by Lehmkuhl \textit{et al.} with a solution (MUSE, Usenix Security'21), whose performance is then substantially improved by Chandran et al.'s work (SIMC, USENIX Security'22). However, there still exists a nontrivial gap in these efforts towards practicality, giving the challenges of overhead reduction and secure inference acceleration in an all-round way. We propose SIMC 2.0, which complies with the underlying structure of SIMC, but significantly optimizes both the linear and non-linear layers of the model. Specifically, (1) we design a new coding method for homomorphic parallel computation between matrices and vectors. It is custom-built through the insight into the complementarity between cryptographic primitives in SIMC. As a result, it can minimize the number of rotation operations incurred in the calculation process, which is very computationally expensive compared to other homomorphic operations e.g., addition, multiplication). (2) We reduce the size of the garbled circuit (GC) (used to calculate nonlinear activation functions, e.g., ReLU) in SIMC by about two thirds. Then, we design an alternative lightweight protocol to perform tasks that are originally allocated to the expensive GCs. Compared with SIMC, our experiments show that SIMC 2.0 achieves a significant speedup by up to $17.4\times $ for linear layer computation, and at least $1.3\times$ reduction of both the computation and communication overheads in the implementation of non-linear layers under different data dimensions. Meanwhile, SIMC 2.0 demonstrates an encouraging runtime boost by $2.3\sim 4.3\times$ over SIMC on different state-of-the-art ML models.
Learning Closed-loop Dough Manipulation Using a Differentiable Reset Module
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Deformable object manipulation has many applications such as cooking and laundry folding in our daily lives. Manipulating elastoplastic objects such as dough is particularly challenging because dough lacks a compact state representation and requires contact-rich interactions. We consider the task of flattening a piece of dough into a specific shape from RGB-D images. While the task is seemingly intuitive for humans, there exist local optima for common approaches such as naive trajectory optimization. We propose a novel trajectory optimizer that optimizes through a differentiable "reset" module, transforming a single-stage, fixed-initialization trajectory into a multistage, multi-initialization trajectory where all stages are optimized jointly. We then train a closed-loop policy on the demonstrations generated by our trajectory optimizer. Our policy receives partial point clouds as input, allowing ease of transfer from simulation to the real world. We show that our policy can perform real-world dough manipulation, flattening a ball of dough into a target shape.
A Dual-Polarization Information Guided Network for SAR Ship Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

How to fully utilize polarization to enhance synthetic aperture radar (SAR) ship classification remains an unresolved issue. Thus, we propose a dual-polarization information guided network (DPIG-Net) to solve it.
No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Driven by the goal of eradicating language barriers on a global scale, machine translation has solidified itself as a key focus of artificial intelligence research today. However, such efforts have coalesced around a small subset of languages, leaving behind the vast majority of mostly low-resource languages. What does it take to break the 200 language barrier while ensuring safe, high quality results, all while keeping ethical considerations in mind? In No Language Left Behind, we took on this challenge by first contextualizing the need for low-resource language translation support through exploratory interviews with native speakers. Then, we created datasets and models aimed at narrowing the performance gap between low and high-resource languages. More specifically, we developed a conditional compute model based on Sparsely Gated Mixture of Experts that is trained on data obtained with novel and effective data mining techniques tailored for low-resource languages. We propose multiple architectural and training improvements to counteract overfitting while training on thousands of tasks. Critically, we evaluated the performance of over 40,000 different translation directions using a human-translated benchmark, Flores-200, and combined human evaluation with a novel toxicity benchmark covering all languages in Flores-200 to assess translation safety. Our model achieves an improvement of 44% BLEU relative to the previous state-of-the-art, laying important groundwork towards realizing a universal translation system. Finally, we open source all contributions described in this work, accessible at https://github.com/facebookresearch/fairseq/tree/nllb.
Exploring Contextual Relationships for Cervical Abnormal Cell Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Cervical abnormal cell detection is a challenging task as the morphological discrepancies between abnormal and normal cells are usually subtle. To determine whether a cervical cell is normal or abnormal, cytopathologists always take surrounding cells as references to identify its abnormality. To mimic these behaviors, we propose to explore contextual relationships to boost the performance of cervical abnormal cell detection. Specifically, both contextual relationships between cells and cell-to-global images are exploited to enhance features of each region of interest (RoI) proposals. Accordingly, two modules, dubbed as RoI-relationship attention module (RRAM) and global RoI attention module (GRAM), are developed and their combination strategies are also investigated. We establish a strong baseline by using Double-Head Faster R-CNN with feature pyramid network (FPN) and integrate our RRAM and GRAM into it to validate the effectiveness of the proposed modules. Experiments conducted on a large cervical cell detection dataset reveal that the introduction of RRAM and GRAM both achieves better average precision (AP) than the baseline methods. Moreover, when cascading RRAM and GRAM, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Furthermore, we also show the proposed feature enhancing scheme can facilitate both image-level and smear-level classification. The code and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/CVIU-CSU/CR4CACD.
A Baselined Gated Attention Recurrent Network for Request Prediction in Ridesharing
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Ridesharing has received global popularity due to its convenience and cost efficiency for both drivers and passengers and its strong potential to contribute to the implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. As a result, recent years have witnessed an explosion of research interest in the RSODP (Origin-Destination Prediction for Ridesharing) problem with the goal of predicting the future ridesharing requests and providing schedules for vehicles ahead of time. Most of the existing prediction models utilise Deep Learning. However, they fail to effectively consider both spatial and temporal dynamics. In this paper the Baselined Gated Attention Recurrent Network (BGARN), is proposed, which uses graph convolution with multi-head gated attention to extract spatial features, a recurrent module to extract temporal features, and a baselined transferring layer to calculate the final results. The model is implemented with PyTorch and DGL (Deep Graph Library) and is experimentally evaluated using the New York Taxi Demand Dataset. The results show that BGARN outperforms all the other existing models in terms of prediction accuracy.
Hybrid Skip: A Biologically Inspired Skip Connection for the UNet Architecture
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

In this work we introduce a biologically inspired long-range skip connection for the UNet architecture that relies on the perceptual illusion of hybrid images, being images that simultaneously encode two images. The fusion of early encoder features with deeper decoder ones allows UNet models to produce finer-grained dense predictions. While proven in segmentation tasks, the network's benefits are down-weighted for dense regression tasks as these long-range skip connections additionally result in texture transfer artifacts. Specifically for depth estimation, this hurts smoothness and introduces false positive edges which are detrimental to the task due to the depth maps' piece-wise smooth nature. The proposed HybridSkip connections show improved performance in balancing the trade-off between edge preservation, and the minimization of texture transfer artifacts that hurt smoothness. This is achieved by the proper and balanced exchange of information that Hybrid-Skip connections offer between the high and low frequency, encoder and decoder features, respectively.
Multimodal Multi-objective Optimization: Comparative Study of the State-of-the-Art
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2022
Year: 2022

Multimodal multi-objective problems (MMOPs) commonly arise in real-world problems where distant solutions in decision space correspond to very similar objective values. To obtain all solutions for MMOPs, many multimodal multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MMEAs) have been proposed. For now, few studies have encompassed most of the recently proposed representative MMEAs and made a comparative comparison. In this study, we first review the related works during the last two decades. Then, we choose 12 state-of-the-art algorithms that utilize different diversity-maintaining techniques and compared their performance on existing test suites. Experimental results indicate the strengths and weaknesses of different techniques on different types of MMOPs, thus providing guidance on how to select/design MMEAs in specific scenarios.
Global Cellular Automata GCA -- A Massively Parallel Computing Model
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2022
Year: 2022

The Global Cellular Automata (GCA) Model is a generalization of the Cellular Automata (CA) Model. The GCA model consists of a collection of cells which change their states depending on the states of their neighbors, like in the classical CA model. In generalization of the CA model, the neighbors are no longer fixed and local, they are variable and global. In the basic GCA model, a cell is structured into a data part and a pointer part. The pointer part consists of several pointers that hold addresses to global neighbors. The data rule defines the new data state, and the pointer rule define the new pointer states. The cell's state is synchronously or asynchronously updated using the new data and new pointer states. Thereby the global neighbors can be changed from generation to generation. Similar to the CA model, only the own cell's state is modified. Thereby write conflicts cannot occur, all cells can work in parallel which makes it a massively parallel model. The GCA model is related to the CROW (concurrent read owners write) model, a specific PRAM (parallel random access machine) model. Therefore many of the well-studied PRAM algorithms can be transformed into GCA algorithms. Moreover, the GCA model allows to describe a large number of data parallel applications in a suitable way. The GCA model can easily be implemented in software, efficiently interpreted on standard parallel architectures, and synthesized / configured into special hardware target architectures. This article reviews the model, applications, and hardware architectures.