OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
From One to Hundreds: Multi-Licensing in the JavaScript Ecosystem
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2020
Year: 2020

Open source licenses create a legal framework that plays a crucial role in the widespread adoption of open source projects. Without a license, any source code available on the internet could not be openly (re)distributed. Although recent studies provide evidence that most popular open source projects have a license, developers might lack confidence or expertise when they need to combine software licenses, leading to a mistaken project license unification.This license usage is challenged by the high degree of reuse that occurs in the heart of modern software development practices, in which third-party libraries and frameworks are easily and quickly integrated into a software codebase.This scenario creates what we call "multi-licensed" projects, which happens when one project has components that are licensed under more than one license. Although these components exist at the file-level, they naturally impact licensing decisions at the project-level. In this paper, we conducted a mix-method study to shed some light on these questions. We started by parsing 1,426,263 (source code and non-source code) files available on 1,552 JavaScript projects, looking for license information. Among these projects, we observed that 947 projects (61%) employ more than one license. On average, there are 4.7 licenses per studied project (max: 256). Among the reasons for multi-licensing is to incorporate the source code of third-party libraries into the project's codebase. When doing so, we observed that 373 of the multi-licensed projects introduced at least one license incompatibility issue. We also surveyed with 83 maintainers of these projects aimed to cross-validate our findings. We observed that 63% of the surveyed maintainers are not aware of the multi-licensing implications. For those that are aware, they adopt multiple licenses mostly to conform with third-party libraries' licenses.
Scene Text Detection with Scribble Lines
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Scene text detection, which is one of the most popular topics in both academia and industry, can achieve remarkable performance with sufficient training data. However, the annotation costs of scene text detection are huge with traditional labeling methods due to the various shapes of texts. Thus, it is practical and insightful to study simpler labeling methods without harming the detection performance. In this paper, we propose to annotate the texts by scribble lines instead of polygons for text detection. It is a general labeling method for texts with various shapes and requires low labeling costs. Furthermore, a weakly-supervised scene text detection framework is proposed to use the scribble lines for text detection. The experiments on several benchmarks show that the proposed method bridges the performance gap between the weakly labeling method and the original polygon-based labeling methods, with even better performance. We will release the weak annotations of the benchmarks in our experiments and hope it will benefit the field of scene text detection to achieve better performance with simpler annotations.
MDS Symbol-Pair Codes from Repeated-Root Cyclic Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

Symbol-pair codes are proposed to combat pair-errors in symbol-pair read channels. The minimum symbol-pair distance is of significance in determining the error-correcting capability of a symbol-pair code. Maximum distance separable (MDS) symbol-pair codes are optimal in the sense that such codes can achieve the Singleton bound. In this paper, two new classes of MDS symbol-pair codes are proposed utilizing repeated-root cyclic codes over finite fields with odd characteristic. Precisely, these codes poss minimum symbol-pair distance ten or twelve, which is bigger than all the known MDS symbol-pair codes from constacyclic codes.
Could robots be regarded as humans in future?
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

With the overwhelming advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), brain science and neuroscience, robots are developing towards a direction of much more human-like and human-friendly. We can't help but wonder whether robots could be regarded as humans in future? In this article, we propose a novel perspective to analyze the essential difference between humans and robots, that is based on their respective living spaces, particularly the independent and intrinsic thinking space. We finally come to the conclusion that, only when robots own the independent and intrinsic thinking space as humans, could they have the prerequisites to be regarded as humans.
Secure Medical Image Analysis with CrypTFlow
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

We present CRYPTFLOW, a system that converts TensorFlow inference code into Secure Multi-party Computation (MPC) protocols at the push of a button. To do this, we build two components. Our first component is an end-to-end compiler from TensorFlow to a variety of MPC protocols. The second component is an improved semi-honest 3-party protocol that provides significant speedups for inference. We empirically demonstrate the power of our system by showing the secure inference of real-world neural networks such as DENSENET121 for detection of lung diseases from chest X-ray images and 3D-UNet for segmentation in radiotherapy planning using CT images. In particular, this paper provides the first evaluation of secure segmentation of 3D images, a task that requires much more powerful models than classification and is the largest secure inference task run till date.
Towards Zero-shot Cross-lingual Image Retrieval
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

There has been a recent spike in interest in multi-modal Language and Vision problems. On the language side, most of these models primarily focus on English since most multi-modal datasets are monolingual. We try to bridge this gap with a zero-shot approach for learning multi-modal representations using cross-lingual pre-training on the text side. We present a simple yet practical approach for building a cross-lingual image retrieval model which trains on a monolingual training dataset but can be used in a zero-shot cross-lingual fashion during inference. We also introduce a new objective function which tightens the text embedding clusters by pushing dissimilar texts from each other. Finally, we introduce a new 1K multi-lingual MSCOCO2014 caption test dataset (XTD10) in 7 languages that we collected using a crowdsourcing platform. We use this as the test set for evaluating zero-shot model performance across languages. XTD10 dataset is made publicly available here: https://github.com/adobe-research/Cross-lingual-Test-Dataset-XTD10
Iterative Collision Resolution for Slotted ALOHA with NOMA for Heterogeneous Devices
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, the problem of using uncoordinated multiple access (UMA) to serve a massive amount of heterogeneous users is investigated. Leveraging the heterogeneity, we propose a novel UMA protocol, called iterative collision resolution for slotted ALOHA (IRSA) with non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), to improve the conventional IRSA. In addition to the inter-slot successive interference cancellation (SIC) technique used in existing IRSA-based schemes, the proposed protocol further employs the intra-slot SIC technique that enables collision resolution for certain configurations of collided packets. A novel multi-dimensional density evolution is then proposed to analyze and to optimize the proposed protocol. Simulation results show that the proposed IRSA with NOMA protocol can efficiently exploit the heterogeneity among users and the multi-dimensional density evolution can accurately predict the throughput performance. Last, an extension of the proposed IRSA with NOMA protocol to the frame-asynchronous setting is investigated, where a boundary effect similar to that in spatially-coupled low-density parity check codes can be observed to bootstrap the decoding process.
Dynamical System Segmentation for Information Measures in Motion
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Motions carry information about the underlying task being executed. Previous work in human motion analysis suggests that complex motions may result from the composition of fundamental submovements called movemes. The existence of finite structure in motion motivates information-theoretic approaches to motion analysis and robotic assistance. We define task embodiment as the amount of task information encoded in an agent's motions. By decoding task-specific information embedded in motion, we can use task embodiment to create detailed performance assessments. We extract an alphabet of behaviors comprising a motion without \textit{a priori} knowledge using a novel algorithm, which we call dynamical system segmentation. For a given task, we specify an optimal agent, and compute an alphabet of behaviors representative of the task. We identify these behaviors in data from agent executions, and compare their relative frequencies against that of the optimal agent using the Kullback-Leibler divergence. We validate this approach using a dataset of human subjects (n=53) performing a dynamic task, and under this measure find that individuals receiving assistance better embody the task. Moreover, we find that task embodiment is a better predictor of assistance than integrated mean-squared-error.
Physics-Guided Spoof Trace Disentanglement for Generic Face Anti-Spoofing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Prior studies show that the key to face anti-spoofing lies in the subtle image pattern, termed "spoof trace", e.g., color distortion, 3D mask edge, Moire pattern, and many others. Designing a generic face anti-spoofing model to estimate those spoof traces can improve not only the generalization of the spoof detection, but also the interpretability of the model's decision. Yet, this is a challenging task due to the diversity of spoof types and the lack of ground truth in spoof traces. In this work, we design a novel adversarial learning framework to disentangle spoof faces into the spoof traces and the live counterparts. Guided by physical properties, the spoof generation is represented as a combination of additive process and inpainting process. Additive process describes spoofing as spoof material introducing extra patterns (e.g., moire pattern), where the live counterpart can be recovered by removing those patterns. Inpainting process describes spoofing as spoof material fully covering certain regions, where the live counterpart of those regions has to be "guessed". We use 3 additive components and 1 inpainting component to represent traces at different frequency bands. The disentangled spoof traces can be utilized to synthesize realistic new spoof faces after proper geometric correction, and the synthesized spoof can be used for training and improve the generalization of spoof detection. Our approach demonstrates superior spoof detection performance on 3 testing scenarios: known attacks, unknown attacks, and open-set attacks. Meanwhile, it provides a visually-convincing estimation of the spoof traces. Source code and pre-trained models will be publicly available upon publication.
Cost-Based Budget Active Learning for Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Majorly classical Active Learning (AL) approach usually uses statistical theory such as entropy and margin to measure instance utility, however it fails to capture the data distribution information contained in the unlabeled data. This can eventually cause the classifier to select outlier instances to label. Meanwhile, the loss associated with mislabeling an instance in a typical classification task is much higher than the loss associated with the opposite error. To address these challenges, we propose a Cost-Based Bugdet Active Learning (CBAL) which considers the classification uncertainty as well as instance diversity in a population constrained by a budget. A principled approach based on the min-max is considered to minimize both the labeling and decision cost of the selected instances, this ensures a near-optimal results with significantly less computational effort. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms several state-of -the-art active learning approaches.
Participatory Budgeting with Project Groups
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2020
Year: 2020

We study a generalization of the standard approval-based model of participatory budgeting (PB), in which voters are providing approval ballots over a set of predefined projects and -- in addition to a global budget limit, there are several groupings of the projects, each group with its own budget limit. We study the computational complexity of identifying project bundles that maximize voter satisfaction while respecting all budget limits. We show that the problem is generally intractable and describe efficient exact algorithms for several special cases, including instances with only few groups and instances where the group structure is close to be hierarchical, as well as efficient approximation algorithms. Our results could allow, e.g., municipalities to hold richer PB processes that are thematically and geographically inclusive.
Positional Encoding as Spatial Inductive Bias in GANs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

SinGAN shows impressive capability in learning internal patch distribution despite its limited effective receptive field. We are interested in knowing how such a translation-invariant convolutional generator could capture the global structure with just a spatially i.i.d. input. In this work, taking SinGAN and StyleGAN2 as examples, we show that such capability, to a large extent, is brought by the implicit positional encoding when using zero padding in the generators. Such positional encoding is indispensable for generating images with high fidelity. The same phenomenon is observed in other generative architectures such as DCGAN and PGGAN. We further show that zero padding leads to an unbalanced spatial bias with a vague relation between locations. To offer a better spatial inductive bias, we investigate alternative positional encodings and analyze their effects. Based on a more flexible positional encoding explicitly, we propose a new multi-scale training strategy and demonstrate its effectiveness in the state-of-the-art unconditional generator StyleGAN2. Besides, the explicit spatial inductive bias substantially improve SinGAN for more versatile image manipulation.
INetCEP: In-Network Complex Event Processing for Information-Centric Networking
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

Emerging network architectures like Information-centric Networking (ICN) offer simplicity in the data plane by addressing named data. Such flexibility opens up the possibility to move data processing inside network elements for high-performance computation, known as in-network processing. However, existing ICN architectures are limited in terms of data plane programmability due to the lack of (i) in-network processing and (ii) data plane programming abstractions. Such architectures can benefit from Complex Event Processing (CEP), an in-network processing paradigm to efficiently process data inside the data plane. Yet, it is extremely challenging to integrate CEP because the current communication model of ICN is limited to consumer-initiated interaction that comes with significant overhead in a number of requests to process continuous data streams. In contrast, a change to producer-initiated interaction, as favored by CEP, imposes severe limitations for request-reply interactions. In this paper, we propose an in-network CEP architecture, INetCEP that supports unified interaction patterns (consumer- and producer-initiated). In addition, we provide a CEP query language and facilitate CEP operations while increasing the range of applications that can be supported by ICN. We provide an open-source implementation and evaluation of INetCEP over an ICN architecture, Named Function Networking, and two applications: energy forecasting in smart homes and a disaster scenario.
MLComp: A Methodology for Machine Learning-based Performance Estimation and Adaptive Selection of Pareto-Optimal Compiler Optimization Sequences
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Embedded systems have proliferated in various consumer and industrial applications with the evolution of Cyber-Physical Systems and the Internet of Things. These systems are subjected to stringent constraints so that embedded software must be optimized for multiple objectives simultaneously, namely reduced energy consumption, execution time, and code size. Compilers offer optimization phases to improve these metrics. However, proper selection and ordering of them depends on multiple factors and typically requires expert knowledge. State-of-the-art optimizers facilitate different platforms and applications case by case, and they are limited by optimizing one metric at a time, as well as requiring a time-consuming adaptation for different targets through dynamic profiling. To address these problems, we propose the novel MLComp methodology, in which optimization phases are sequenced by a Reinforcement Learning-based policy. Training of the policy is supported by Machine Learning-based analytical models for quick performance estimation, thereby drastically reducing the time spent for dynamic profiling. In our framework, different Machine Learning models are automatically tested to choose the best-fitting one. The trained Performance Estimator model is leveraged to efficiently devise Reinforcement Learning-based multi-objective policies for creating quasi-optimal phase sequences. Compared to state-of-the-art estimation models, our Performance Estimator model achieves lower relative error (<2%) with up to 50x faster training time over multiple platforms and application domains. Our Phase Selection Policy improves execution time and energy consumption of a given code by up to 12% and 6%, respectively. The Performance Estimator and the Phase Selection Policy can be trained efficiently for any target platform and application domain.
Generative Adversarial Networks for Annotated Data Augmentation in Data Sparse NLU
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Data sparsity is one of the key challenges associated with model development in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) for conversational agents. The challenge is made more complex by the demand for high quality annotated utterances commonly required for supervised learning, usually resulting in weeks of manual labor and high cost. In this paper, we present our results on boosting NLU model performance through training data augmentation using a sequential generative adversarial network (GAN). We explore data generation in the context of two tasks, the bootstrapping of a new language and the handling of low resource features. For both tasks we explore three sequential GAN architectures, one with a token-level reward function, another with our own implementation of a token-level Monte Carlo rollout reward, and a third with sentence-level reward. We evaluate the performance of these feedback models across several sampling methodologies and compare our results to upsampling the original data to the same scale. We further improve the GAN model performance through the transfer learning of the pretrained embeddings. Our experiments reveal synthetic data generated using the sequential generative adversarial network provides significant performance boosts across multiple metrics and can be a major benefit to the NLU tasks.
Transfer Learning for Efficient Iterative Safety Validation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Safety validation is important during the development of safety-critical autonomous systems but can require significant computational effort. Existing algorithms often start from scratch each time the system under test changes. We apply transfer learning to improve the efficiency of reinforcement learning based safety validation algorithms when applied to related systems. Knowledge from previous safety validation tasks is encoded through the action value function and transferred to future tasks with a learned set of attention weights. Including a learned state and action value transformation for each source task can improve performance even when systems have substantially different failure modes. We conduct experiments on safety validation tasks in gridworld and autonomous driving scenarios. We show that transfer learning can improve the initial and final performance of validation algorithms and reduce the number of training steps.
Data-driven Competitive Algorithms for Online Knapsack and Set Cover
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2020
Year: 2020

The design of online algorithms has tended to focus on algorithms with worst-case guarantees, e.g., bounds on the competitive ratio. However, it is well-known that such algorithms are often overly pessimistic, performing sub-optimally on non-worst-case inputs. In this paper, we develop an approach for data-driven design of online algorithms that maintain near-optimal worst-case guarantees while also performing learning in order to perform well for typical inputs. Our approach is to identify policy classes that admit global worst-case guarantees, and then perform learning using historical data within the policy classes. We demonstrate the approach in the context of two classical problems, online knapsack and online set cover, proving competitive bounds for rich policy classes in each case. Additionally, we illustrate the practical implications via a case study on electric vehicle charging.
An Integrated Search Framework for Leveraging the Knowledge-Based Web Ecosystem
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2020
Year: 2020

The explosion of information constrains the judgement of search terms associated with Knowledge-Based Web Ecosystem (KBWE), making the retrieval of relevant information and its knowledge management challenging. The existing information retrieval (IR) tools and their fusion in a framework need attention, in which search results can effectively be managed. In this article, we demonstrate the effective use of information retrieval services by a variety of users and agents in various KBWE scenarios. An innovative Integrated Search Framework (ISF) is proposed, which utilises crawling strategies, web search technologies and traditional database search methods. Besides, ISF offers comprehensive, dynamic, personalized, and organization-oriented information retrieval services, ranging from the Internet, extranet, intranet, to personal desktop. In this empirical research, experiments are carried out demonstrating the improvements in the search process, as discerned in the conceptual ISF. The experimental results show improved precision compared with other popular search engines.
Preference-Based Privacy Trading
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

The question we raise through this paper is: Is it economically feasible to trade consumer personal information with their formal consent (permission) and in return provide them incentives (monetary or otherwise)?. In view of (a) the behavioral assumption that humans are `compromising' beings and have privacy preferences, (b) privacy as a good not having strict boundaries, and (c) the practical inevitability of inappropriate data leakage by data holders downstream in the data-release supply-chain, we propose a design of regulated efficient/bounded inefficient economic mechanisms for oligopoly data trading markets using a novel preference function bidding approach on a simplified sellers-broker market. Our methodology preserves the heterogeneous privacy preservation constraints (at a grouped consumer, i.e., app, level) upto certain compromise levels, and at the same time satisfies information demand (via the broker) of agencies (e.g., advertising organizations) that collect client data for the purpose of targeted behavioral advertising.