OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Learning from Negative User Feedback and Measuring Responsiveness for Sequential Recommenders
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

Sequential recommenders have been widely used in industry due to their strength in modeling user preferences. While these models excel at learning a user's positive interests, less attention has been paid to learning from negative user feedback. Negative user feedback is an important lever of user control, and comes with an expectation that recommenders should respond quickly and reduce similar recommendations to the user. However, negative feedback signals are often ignored in the training objective of sequential retrieval models, which primarily aim at predicting positive user interactions. In this work, we incorporate explicit and implicit negative user feedback into the training objective of sequential recommenders in the retrieval stage using a "not-to-recommend" loss function that optimizes for the log-likelihood of not recommending items with negative feedback. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach using live experiments on a large-scale industrial recommender system. Furthermore, we address a challenge in measuring recommender responsiveness to negative feedback by developing a counterfactual simulation framework to compare recommender responses between different user actions, showing improved responsiveness from the modeling change.
Age of Gossip on Generalized Rings
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

We consider a gossip network consisting of a source forwarding updates and $n$ nodes placed geometrically in a ring formation. Each node gossips with $f(n)$ nodes on either side, thus communicating with $2f(n)$ nodes in total. $f(n)$ is a sub-linear, non-decreasing and positive function. The source keeps updates of a process, that might be generated or observed, and shares them with the nodes in the ring network. The nodes in the ring network communicate with their neighbors and disseminate these version updates using a push-style gossip strategy. We use the version age metric to quantify the timeliness of information at the nodes. Prior to this work, it was shown that the version age scales as $O(n^{\frac{1}{2}})$ in a ring network, i.e., when $f(n)=1$, and as $O(\log{n})$ in a fully-connected network, i.e., when $2f(n)=n-1$. In this paper, we find an upper bound for the average version age for a set of nodes in such a network in terms of the number of nodes $n$ and the number of gossiped neighbors $2 f(n)$. We show that if $f(n) = Ω(\frac{n}{\log^2{n}})$, then the version age still scales as $θ(\log{n})$. We also show that if $f(n)$ is a rational function, then the version age also scales as a rational function. In particular, if $f(n)=n^α$, then version age is $O(n^\frac{1-α}{2})$. Finally, through numerical calculations we verify that, for all practical purposes, if $f(n) = Ω(n^{0.6})$, the version age scales as $O(\log{n})$.
Modeling Bends in Popular Music Guitar Tablatures
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2023
Year: 2023

Tablature notation is widely used in popular music to transcribe and share guitar musical content. As a complement to standard score notation, tablatures transcribe performance gesture information including finger positions and a variety of guitar-specific playing techniques such as slides, hammer-on/pull-off or bends.This paper focuses on bends, which enable to progressively shift the pitch of a note, therefore circumventing physical limitations of the discrete fretted fingerboard. In this paper, we propose a set of 25 high-level features, computed for each note of the tablature, to study how bend occurrences can be predicted from their past and future short-term context. Experiments are performed on a corpus of 932 lead guitar tablatures of popular music and show that a decision tree successfully predicts bend occurrences with an F1 score of 0.71 anda limited amount of false positive predictions, demonstrating promising applications to assist the arrangement of non-guitar music into guitar tablatures.
Cost-Effective Situational Awareness Through IoT COTS Radios
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

Situational awareness (SA) through encrypted connectivity in modern warfare is critical to battlefield coordination. Existing solutions provide infrastructure-less connectivity and situational awareness, but at a high cost, power consumption, and bulky form factors that limit their utility for tactical operations. We propose the Beartooth MKII radios as a cost- and power-effective, handy solution for establishing a situational awareness overlay. To integrate with military information brokers, such as the Tactical Assault Kit (TAK), we propose the Beartooth Gateway, which creates an IP network between Beartooth radios, Gateways, and other TAK-capable devices. We show that leveraging Internet of Things (IoT) Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) components for MKII and the Gateway can enhance the availability of SA and meet the user requirements in the field while ensuring compatibility with existing IP networks connected to TAK infrastructure.
Saggitarius: A DSL for Specifying Grammatical Domains
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2023
Year: 2023

Common data types like dates, addresses, phone numbers and tables can have multiple textual representations, and many heavily-used languages, such as SQL, come in several dialects. These variations can cause data to be misinterpreted, leading to silent data corruption, failure of data processing systems, or even security vulnerabilities. Saggitarius is a new language and system designed to help programmers reason about the format of data, by describing grammatical domains -- that is, sets of context-free grammars that describe the many possible representations of a datatype. We describe the design of Saggitarius via example and provide a relational semantics. We show how Saggitarius may be used to analyze a data set: given example data, it uses an algorithm based on semi-ring parsing and MaxSAT to infer which grammar in a given domain best matches that data. We evaluate the effectiveness of the algorithm on a benchmark suite of 110 example problems, and we demonstrate that our system typically returns a satisfying grammar within a few seconds with only a small number of examples. We also delve deeper into a more extensive case study on using Saggitarius for CSV dialect detection. Despite being general-purpose, we find that Saggitarius offers comparable results to hand-tuned, specialized tools; in the case of CSV, it infers grammars for 84% of benchmarks within 60 seconds, and has comparable accuracy to custom-built dialect detection tools.
Open-set Face Recognition with Neural Ensemble, Maximal Entropy Loss and Feature Augmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Open-set face recognition refers to a scenario in which biometric systems have incomplete knowledge of all existing subjects. Therefore, they are expected to prevent face samples of unregistered subjects from being identified as previously enrolled identities. This watchlist context adds an arduous requirement that calls for the dismissal of irrelevant faces by focusing mainly on subjects of interest. As a response, this work introduces a novel method that associates an ensemble of compact neural networks with a margin-based cost function that explores additional samples. Supplementary negative samples can be obtained from external databases or synthetically built at the representation level in training time with a new mix-up feature augmentation approach. Deep neural networks pre-trained on large face datasets serve as the preliminary feature extraction module. We carry out experiments on well-known LFW and IJB-C datasets where results show that the approach is able to boost closed and open-set identification rates.
FG-Net: Facial Action Unit Detection with Generalizable Pyramidal Features
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Automatic detection of facial Action Units (AUs) allows for objective facial expression analysis. Due to the high cost of AU labeling and the limited size of existing benchmarks, previous AU detection methods tend to overfit the dataset, resulting in a significant performance loss when evaluated across corpora. To address this problem, we propose FG-Net for generalizable facial action unit detection. Specifically, FG-Net extracts feature maps from a StyleGAN2 model pre-trained on a large and diverse face image dataset. Then, these features are used to detect AUs with a Pyramid CNN Interpreter, making the training efficient and capturing essential local features. The proposed FG-Net achieves a strong generalization ability for heatmap-based AU detection thanks to the generalizable and semantic-rich features extracted from the pre-trained generative model. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate within- and cross-corpus AU detection with the widely-used DISFA and BP4D datasets. Compared with the state-of-the-art, the proposed method achieves superior cross-domain performance while maintaining competitive within-domain performance. In addition, FG-Net is data-efficient and achieves competitive performance even when trained on 1000 samples. Our code will be released at \url{https://github.com/ihp-lab/FG-Net}
Inferring gender from name: a large scale performance evaluation study
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

A person's gender is a crucial piece of information when performing research across a wide range of scientific disciplines, such as medicine, sociology, political science, and economics, to name a few. However, in increasing instances, especially given the proliferation of big data, gender information is not readily available. In such cases researchers need to infer gender from readily available information, primarily from persons' names. While inferring gender from name may raise some ethical questions, the lack of viable alternatives means that researchers have to resort to such approaches when the goal justifies the means - in the majority of such studies the goal is to examine patterns and determinants of gender disparities. The necessity of name-to-gender inference has generated an ever-growing domain of algorithmic approaches and software products. These approaches have been used throughout the world in academia, industry, governmental and non-governmental organizations. Nevertheless, the existing approaches have yet to be systematically evaluated and compared, making it challenging to determine the optimal approach for future research. In this work, we conducted a large scale performance evaluation of existing approaches for name-to-gender inference. Analysis are performed using a variety of large annotated datasets of names. We further propose two new hybrid approaches that achieve better performance than any single existing approach.
Reflecting on the Use of the Policy-Process-Product Theory in Empirical Software Engineering
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

The primary theory of software engineering is that an organization's Policies and Processes influence the quality of its Products. We call this the PPP Theory. Although empirical software engineering research has grown common, it is unclear whether researchers are trying to evaluate the PPP Theory. To assess this, we analyzed half (33) of the empirical works published over the last two years in three prominent software engineering conferences. In this sample, 70% focus on policies/processes or products, not both. Only 33% provided measurements relating policy/process and products. We make four recommendations: (1) Use PPP Theory in study design; (2) Study feedback relationships; (3) Diversify the studied feedforward relationships; and (4) Disentangle policy and process. Let us remember that research results are in the context of, and with respect to, the relationship between software products, processes, and policies.
Self-Supervised Learning for Endoscopic Video Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has led to important breakthroughs in computer vision by allowing learning from large amounts of unlabeled data. As such, it might have a pivotal role to play in biomedicine where annotating data requires a highly specialized expertise. Yet, there are many healthcare domains for which SSL has not been extensively explored. One such domain is endoscopy, minimally invasive procedures which are commonly used to detect and treat infections, chronic inflammatory diseases or cancer. In this work, we study the use of a leading SSL framework, namely Masked Siamese Networks (MSNs), for endoscopic video analysis such as colonoscopy and laparoscopy. To fully exploit the power of SSL, we create sizable unlabeled endoscopic video datasets for training MSNs. These strong image representations serve as a foundation for secondary training with limited annotated datasets, resulting in state-of-the-art performance in endoscopic benchmarks like surgical phase recognition during laparoscopy and colonoscopic polyp characterization. Additionally, we achieve a 50% reduction in annotated data size without sacrificing performance. Thus, our work provides evidence that SSL can dramatically reduce the need of annotated data in endoscopy.
Towards The Ultimate Brain: Exploring Scientific Discovery with ChatGPT AI
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2023
Year: 2023

This paper presents a novel approach to scientific discovery using an artificial intelligence (AI) environment known as ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI. This is the first paper entirely generated with outputs from ChatGPT. We demonstrate how ChatGPT can be instructed through a gamification environment to define and benchmark hypothetical physical theories. Through this environment, ChatGPT successfully simulates the creation of a new improved model, called GPT$^4$, which combines the concepts of GPT in AI (generative pretrained transformer) and GPT in physics (generalized probabilistic theory). We show that GPT$^4$ can use its built-in mathematical and statistical capabilities to simulate and analyze physical laws and phenomena. As a demonstration of its language capabilities, GPT$^4$ also generates a limerick about itself. Overall, our results demonstrate the promising potential for human-AI collaboration in scientific discovery, as well as the importance of designing systems that effectively integrate AI's capabilities with human intelligence.
A Frame Stack Semantics for Sequential Core Erlang
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2023
Year: 2023

We present a small-step, frame stack style, semantics for sequential Core Erlang, a dynamically typed, impure functional programming language. The semantics and the properties that we prove are machine-checked with the Coq proof assistant. We improve on previous work by including exceptions and exception handling, as well as built-in data types and functions. Based on the semantics, we define multiple concepts of program equivalence (contextual, CIU equivalence, and equivalence based on logical relations) and prove that the definitions are all equivalent. Using this we are able to give a correctness criterion for refactorings by means of contextually equivalent symbolic expression pairs, which is one of the main motivations of this work.
An Initial Exploration: Learning to Generate Realistic Audio for Silent Video
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2023
Year: 2023

Generating realistic audio effects for movies and other media is a challenging task that is accomplished today primarily through physical techniques known as Foley art. Foley artists create sounds with common objects (e.g., boxing gloves, broken glass) in time with video as it is playing to generate captivating audio tracks. In this work, we aim to develop a deep-learning based framework that does much the same - observes video in it's natural sequence and generates realistic audio to accompany it. Notably, we have reason to believe this is achievable due to advancements in realistic audio generation techniques conditioned on other inputs (e.g., Wavenet conditioned on text). We explore several different model architectures to accomplish this task that process both previously-generated audio and video context. These include deep-fusion CNN, dilated Wavenet CNN with visual context, and transformer-based architectures. We find that the transformer-based architecture yields the most promising results, matching low-frequencies to visual patterns effectively, but failing to generate more nuanced waveforms.
DD-GCN: Directed Diffusion Graph Convolutional Network for Skeleton-based Human Action Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have been widely used in skeleton-based human action recognition. In GCN-based methods, the spatio-temporal graph is fundamental for capturing motion patterns. However, existing approaches ignore the physical dependency and synchronized spatio-temporal correlations between joints, which limits the representation capability of GCNs. To solve these problems, we construct the directed diffusion graph for action modeling and introduce the activity partition strategy to optimize the weight sharing mechanism of graph convolution kernels. In addition, we present the spatio-temporal synchronization encoder to embed synchronized spatio-temporal semantics. Finally, we propose Directed Diffusion Graph Convolutional Network (DD-GCN) for action recognition, and the experiments on three public datasets: NTU-RGB+D, NTU-RGB+D 120, and NW-UCLA, demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method.
CGMI: Configurable General Multi-Agent Interaction Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Benefiting from the powerful capabilities of large language models (LLMs), agents based on LLMs have shown the potential to address domain-specific tasks and emulate human behaviors. However, the content generated by these agents remains somewhat superficial, owing to their limited domain expertise and the absence of an effective cognitive architecture. To address this, we present the Configurable General Multi-Agent Interaction (CGMI) framework, designed to replicate human interactions in real-world scenarios. Specifically, we propose a tree-structured methodology for the assignment, detection, and maintenance of agent personality. Additionally, we designed a cognitive architecture equipped with a skill library based on the ACT* model, which contains memory, reflection, and planning modules. We have also integrated general agents to augment the virtual environment's realism. Using the CGMI framework, we simulated numerous classroom interactions between teacher and students. The experiments indicate that aspects such as the teaching methodology, curriculum, and student performance closely mirror real classroom settings. We will open source our work.
Privacy engineering through obfuscation
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Obfuscation in privacy engineering denotes a diverse set of data operations aimed at reducing the privacy loss that users incur in by participating in digital systems. Obfuscation's domain of application is vast: privacy-preserving database analysis, location-based privacy, private web search or privacy-friendly recommender systems are but a few examples of the contexts in which privacy engineers have resorted to obfuscation. Yet an understanding of the role that obfuscation, in general, plays in the engineering of privacy has so far proved elusive. Similarly, we lack a cohesive view of the wide array of privacy measures that assist the evaluation of obfuscation technologies. This paper contributes to closing these research gaps. First, we provide a general analysis framework that brings together a multiplicity of obfuscation methods under the same analytical umbrella. Second, we distinguish between mechanism-centred and attack-centred evaluation, making explicit a hierarchy of assumptions behind privacy measures that assists and demystifies obfuscation tools' evaluation. Finally, we examine the role that obfuscation technology plays in privacy engineering by introducing the concepts of personal and public utility and distinguishing between utility-degrading and utility-preserving obfuscation. We observe that public utility requirements require us to resort to utility-degrading obfuscation to arbitrarily reduce privacy loss. Conversely, personal utility requirements do not, in theory, impose such a privacy-utility trade-off, and we illustrate how to perform utility-preserving obfuscation through chaff.
Pre-trained Model-based Automated Software Vulnerability Repair: How Far are We?
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Various approaches are proposed to help under-resourced security researchers to detect and analyze software vulnerabilities. It is still incredibly time-consuming and labor-intensive for security researchers to fix vulnerabilities. The time lag between reporting and fixing a vulnerability causes software systems to suffer from significant exposure to possible attacks. Recently, some techniques have proposed applying pre-trained models to fix security vulnerabilities and have proved their success in improving repair accuracy. However, the effectiveness of existing pre-trained models has not been systematically analyzed, and little is known about their advantages and disadvantages. To bridge this gap, we perform the first extensive study on applying various pre-trained models to vulnerability repair. The results show that studied pre-trained models consistently outperform the state-of-the-art technique VRepair with a prediction accuracy of 32.94%~44.96%. We also investigate the impact of major phases in the vulnerability repair workflow. Surprisingly, a simplistic approach adopting transfer learning improves the prediction accuracy of pre-trained models by 9.40% on average. Besides, we provide additional discussion to illustrate the capacity and limitations of pre-trained models. Finally, we further pinpoint various practical guidelines for advancing pre-trained model-based vulnerability repair. Our study highlights the promising future of adopting pre-trained models to patch real-world vulnerabilities.
LORD: Leveraging Open-Set Recognition with Unknown Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Handling entirely unknown data is a challenge for any deployed classifier. Classification models are typically trained on a static pre-defined dataset and are kept in the dark for the open unassigned feature space. As a result, they struggle to deal with out-of-distribution data during inference. Addressing this task on the class-level is termed open-set recognition (OSR). However, most OSR methods are inherently limited, as they train closed-set classifiers and only adapt the downstream predictions to OSR. This work presents LORD, a framework to Leverage Open-set Recognition by exploiting unknown Data. LORD explicitly models open space during classifier training and provides a systematic evaluation for such approaches. We identify three model-agnostic training strategies that exploit background data and applied them to well-established classifiers. Due to LORD's extensive evaluation protocol, we consistently demonstrate improved recognition of unknown data. The benchmarks facilitate in-depth analysis across various requirement levels. To mitigate dependency on extensive and costly background datasets, we explore mixup as an off-the-shelf data generation technique. Our experiments highlight mixup's effectiveness as a substitute for background datasets. Lightweight constraints on mixup synthesis further improve OSR performance.