OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Architectural Partitioning and Deployment Modeling on Hybrid Clouds
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

The hybrid cloud idea is increasingly gaining momentum because it brings distinct advantages as a hosting platform for complex software systems. However, there are several challenges that need to be surmounted before hybrid hosting can become pervasive and penetrative. One main problem is to architecturally partition workloads across permutations of feasible cloud and non-cloud deployment choices to yield the best-fit hosting combination. Another is to predict the effort estimate to deliver such an advantageous hybrid deployment. In this paper, we describe a heuristic solution to address the said obstacles and converge on the ideal hybrid cloud deployment architecture, based on properties and characteristics of workloads that are sought to be hosted. We next propose a model to represent such a hybrid cloud deployment, and demonstrate a method to estimate the effort required to implement and sustain that deployment. We also validate our model through dozens of case studies spanning several industry verticals and record results pertaining to how the industrial grouping of a software system can impact the aforementioned hybrid deployment model.
Are Quantum Computers Practical Yet? A Case for Feature Selection in Recommender Systems using Tensor Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

Collaborative filtering models generally perform better than content-based filtering models and do not require careful feature engineering. However, in the cold-start scenario collaborative information may be scarce or even unavailable, whereas the content information may be abundant, but also noisy and expensive to acquire. Thus, selection of particular features that improve cold-start recommendations becomes an important and non-trivial task. In the recent approach by Nembrini et al., the feature selection is driven by the correlational compatibility between collaborative and content-based models. The problem is formulated as a Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) which, due to its NP-hard complexity, is solved using Quantum Annealing on a quantum computer provided by D-Wave. Inspired by the reported results, we contend the idea that current quantum annealers are superior for this problem and instead focus on classical algorithms. In particular, we tackle QUBO via TTOpt, a recently proposed black-box optimizer based on tensor networks and multilinear algebra. We show the computational feasibility of this method for large problems with thousands of features, and empirically demonstrate that the solutions found are comparable to the ones obtained with D-Wave across all examined datasets.
TinyGenius: Intertwining Natural Language Processing with Microtask Crowdsourcing for Scholarly Knowledge Graph Creation
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2022
Year: 2022

As the number of published scholarly articles grows steadily each year, new methods are needed to organize scholarly knowledge so that it can be more efficiently discovered and used. Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques are able to autonomously process scholarly articles at scale and to create machine readable representations of the article content. However, autonomous NLP methods are by far not sufficiently accurate to create a high-quality knowledge graph. Yet quality is crucial for the graph to be useful in practice. We present TinyGenius, a methodology to validate NLP-extracted scholarly knowledge statements using microtasks performed with crowdsourcing. The scholarly context in which the crowd workers operate has multiple challenges. The explainability of the employed NLP methods is crucial to provide context in order to support the decision process of crowd workers. We employed TinyGenius to populate a paper-centric knowledge graph, using five distinct NLP methods. In the end, the resulting knowledge graph serves as a digital library for scholarly articles.
Image2Gif: Generating Continuous Realistic Animations with Warping NODEs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Generating smooth animations from a limited number of sequential observations has a number of applications in vision. For example, it can be used to increase number of frames per second, or generating a new trajectory only based on first and last frames, e.g. a motion of face emotions. Despite the discrete observed data (frames), the problem of generating a new trajectory is a continues problem. In addition, to be perceptually realistic, the domain of an image should not alter drastically through the trajectory of changes. In this paper, we propose a new framework, Warping Neural ODE, for generating a smooth animation (video frame interpolation) in a continuous manner, given two ("farther apart") frames, denoting the start and the end of the animation. The key feature of our framework is utilizing the continuous spatial transformation of the image based on the vector field, derived from a system of differential equations. This allows us to achieve the smoothness and the realism of an animation with infinitely small time steps between the frames. We show the application of our work in generating an animation given two frames, in different training settings, including Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and with $L_2$ loss.
Characterizing the country-wide adoption and evolution of the Jodel messaging app in Saudi Arabia
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2022
Year: 2022

Social media is subject to constant growth and evolution, yet little is known about their early phases of adoption. To shed light on this aspect, this paper empirically characterizes the initial and country-wide adoption of a new type of social media in Saudi Arabia that happened in 2017. Unlike established social media, the studied network Jodel is anonymous and location-based to form hundreds of independent communities country-wide whose adoption pattern we compare. We take a detailed and full view from the operators perspective on the temporal and geographical dimension on the evolution of these different communities -- from their very first the first months of establishment to saturation. This way, we make the early adoption of a new type of social media visible, a process that is often invisible due to the lack of data covering the first days of a new network.
Composite IG/FTR Channel Performance in Wireless Communication Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

We present a composite wireless fading model encompassing multipath fading and shadowing based on fluctuating two-ray (FTR) fading and inverse gamma (IG) shadowing. We first determine an alternative framework for the statistical characterization and performance evaluation of the FTR fading model, which is based on the fact that the FTR fading distribution can be described as an underlying Rician Shadowed (RS) distribution with continuously varying parameter Kr (ratio of specular to diffuse components). We demonstrate that this new formulation permits to obtain a closed-form expression of the generalized moment generating function (GMGF) of the FTR model, from which the PDF and CDF of the composite IG/FTR model can be obtained in closed-form. The exact and asymptotic outage probability of the IG/FTR model are analyzed and verified by Monte Carlo simulations.
A Unified Model for Reverse Dictionary and Definition Modelling
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

We build a dual-way neural dictionary to retrieve words given definitions, and produce definitions for queried words. The model learns the two tasks simultaneously and handles unknown words via embeddings. It casts a word or a definition to the same representation space through a shared layer, then generates the other form in a multi-task fashion. Our method achieves promising automatic scores on previous benchmarks without extra resources. Human annotators prefer the model's outputs in both reference-less and reference-based evaluation, indicating its practicality. Analysis suggests that multiple objectives benefit learning.
Towards Intersectionality in Machine Learning: Including More Identities, Handling Underrepresentation, and Performing Evaluation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Research in machine learning fairness has historically considered a single binary demographic attribute; however, the reality is of course far more complicated. In this work, we grapple with questions that arise along three stages of the machine learning pipeline when incorporating intersectionality as multiple demographic attributes: (1) which demographic attributes to include as dataset labels, (2) how to handle the progressively smaller size of subgroups during model training, and (3) how to move beyond existing evaluation metrics when benchmarking model fairness for more subgroups. For each question, we provide thorough empirical evaluation on tabular datasets derived from the US Census, and present constructive recommendations for the machine learning community. First, we advocate for supplementing domain knowledge with empirical validation when choosing which demographic attribute labels to train on, while always evaluating on the full set of demographic attributes. Second, we warn against using data imbalance techniques without considering their normative implications and suggest an alternative using the structure in the data. Third, we introduce new evaluation metrics which are more appropriate for the intersectional setting. Overall, we provide substantive suggestions on three necessary (albeit not sufficient!) considerations when incorporating intersectionality into machine learning.
Burning Number for the Points in the Plane
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2022
Year: 2022

The burning process on a graph $G$ starts with a single burnt vertex, and at each subsequent step, burns the neighbors of the currently burnt vertices, as well as one other unburnt vertex. The burning number of $G$ is the smallest number of steps required to burn all the vertices of the graph. In this paper, we examine the problem of computing the burning number in a geometric setting. The input is a set of points $P$ in the Euclidean plane. The burning process starts with a single burnt point, and at each subsequent step, burns all the points that are within a distance of one unit from the currently burnt points and one other unburnt point. The burning number of $P$ is the smallest number of steps required to burn all the points of $P$. We call this variant \emph{point burning}. We consider another variant called \emph{anywhere burning}, where we are allowed to burn any point of the plane. We show that point burning and anywhere burning problems are both NP-complete, but $(2+\varepsilon)$ approximable for every $\varepsilon>0$. Moreover, if we put a restriction on the number of burning sources that can be used, then the anywhere burning problem becomes NP-hard to approximate within a factor of $\frac{2}{\sqrt{3}}-\varepsilon$.
A 14uJ/Decision Keyword Spotting Accelerator with In-SRAM-Computing and On Chip Learning for Customization
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2022
Year: 2022

Keyword spotting has gained popularity as a natural way to interact with consumer devices in recent years. However, because of its always-on nature and the variety of speech, it necessitates a low-power design as well as user customization. This paper describes a low-power, energy-efficient keyword spotting accelerator with SRAM based in-memory computing (IMC) and on-chip learning for user customization. However, IMC is constrained by macro size, limited precision, and non-ideal effects. To address the issues mentioned above, this paper proposes bias compensation and fine-tuning using an IMC-aware model design. Furthermore, because learning with low-precision edge devices results in zero error and gradient values due to quantization, this paper proposes error scaling and small gradient accumulation to achieve the same accuracy as ideal model training. The simulation results show that with user customization, we can recover the accuracy loss from 51.08\% to 89.76\% with compensation and fine-tuning and further improve to 96.71\% with customization. The chip implementation can successfully run the model with only 14$uJ$ per decision. When compared to the state-of-the-art works, the presented design has higher energy efficiency with additional on-chip model customization capabilities for higher accuracy.
Real-Time Wearable Gait Phase Segmentation For Running And Walking
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Previous gait phase detection as convolutional neural network (CNN) based classification task requires cumbersome manual setting of time delay or heavy overlapped sliding windows to accurately classify each phase under different test cases, which is not suitable for streaming Inertial-Measurement-Unit (IMU) sensor data and fails to adapt to different scenarios. This paper presents a segmentation based gait phase detection with only a single six-axis IMU sensor, which can easily adapt to both walking and running at various speeds. The proposed segmentation uses CNN with gait phase aware receptive field setting and IMU oriented processing order, which can fit to high sampling rate of IMU up to 1000Hz for high accuracy and low sampling rate down to 20Hz for real time calculation. The proposed model on the 20Hz sampling rate data can achieve average error of 8.86 ms in swing time, 9.12 ms in stance time and 96.44\% accuracy of gait phase detection and 99.97\% accuracy of stride detection. Its real-time implementation on mobile phone only takes 36 ms for 1 second length of sensor data.
Improving genetic risk prediction across diverse population by disentangling ancestry representations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Risk prediction models using genetic data have seen increasing traction in genomics. However, most of the polygenic risk models were developed using data from participants with similar (mostly European) ancestry. This can lead to biases in the risk predictors resulting in poor generalization when applied to minority populations and admixed individuals such as African Americans. To address this bias, largely due to the prediction models being confounded by the underlying population structure, we propose a novel deep-learning framework that leverages data from diverse population and disentangles ancestry from the phenotype-relevant information in its representation. The ancestry disentangled representation can be used to build risk predictors that perform better across minority populations. We applied the proposed method to the analysis of Alzheimer's disease genetics. Comparing with standard linear and nonlinear risk prediction methods, the proposed method substantially improves risk prediction in minority populations, particularly for admixed individuals.
Constant approximation for fault-tolerant median problems via iterative rounding
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we study the fault-tolerant matroid median and fault-tolerant knapsack median problems. These two problems generalize many fundamental clustering and facility location problems, such as uniform fault-tolerant $k$-median, uniform fault-tolerant facility location, matroid median, knapsack median, etc. We present a versatile iterative rounding framework and obtain a unifying constant-factor approximation algorithm.
Spatio-Temporal Transformer for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition in the Wild
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Previous methods for dynamic facial expression in the wild are mainly based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), whose local operations ignore the long-range dependencies in videos. To solve this problem, we propose the spatio-temporal Transformer (STT) to capture discriminative features within each frame and model contextual relationships among frames. Spatio-temporal dependencies are captured and integrated by our unified Transformer. Specifically, given an image sequence consisting of multiple frames as input, we utilize the CNN backbone to translate each frame into a visual feature sequence. Subsequently, the spatial attention and the temporal attention within each block are jointly applied for learning spatio-temporal representations at the sequence level. In addition, we propose the compact softmax cross entropy loss to further encourage the learned features have the minimum intra-class distance and the maximum inter-class distance. Experiments on two in-the-wild dynamic facial expression datasets (i.e., DFEW and AFEW) indicate that our method provides an effective way to make use of the spatial and temporal dependencies for dynamic facial expression recognition. The source code and the training logs will be made publicly available.
WG-VITON: Wearing-Guide Virtual Try-On for Top and Bottom Clothes
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Studies of virtual try-on (VITON) have been shown their effectiveness in utilizing the generative neural network for virtually exploring fashion products, and some of recent researches of VITON attempted to synthesize human image wearing given multiple types of garments (e.g., top and bottom clothes). However, when replacing the top and bottom clothes of the target human, numerous wearing styles are possible with a certain combination of the clothes. In this paper, we address the problem of variation in wearing style when simultaneously replacing the top and bottom clothes of the model. We introduce Wearing-Guide VITON (i.e., WG-VITON) which utilizes an additional input binary mask to control the wearing styles of the generated image. Our experiments show that WG-VITON effectively generates an image of the model wearing given top and bottom clothes, and create complicated wearing styles such as partly tucking in the top to the bottom
Automorphism Shuffles for Graphs and Hypergraphs and Its Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

In card-based cryptography, a deck of physical cards is used to achieve secure computation. A shuffle, which randomly permutes a card-sequence along with some probability distribution, ensures the security of a card-based protocol. The authors proposed a new class of shuffles called graph shuffles, which randomly permutes a card-sequence by an automorphism of a directed graph (New Generation Computing 2022). For a directed graph $G$ with $n$ vertices and $m$ edges, such a shuffle could be implemented with pile-scramble shuffles with $2(n+m)$ cards. In this paper, we study graph shuffles and give an implementation, an application, and a slight generalization of them. First, we propose a new protocol for graph shuffles with $2n+m$ cards. Second, as a new application of graph shuffles, we show that any cyclic group shuffle, which is a shuffle over a cyclic group, is a graph shuffle associated with some graph. Third, we define a hypergraph shuffle, which is a shuffle by an automorphism of a hypergraph, and show that any hypergraph shuffle can also be implemented with pile-scramble shuffles.
SYNFI: Pre-Silicon Fault Analysis of an Open-Source Secure Element
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Fault attacks are active, physical attacks that an adversary can leverage to alter the control-flow of embedded devices to gain access to sensitive information or bypass protection mechanisms. Due to the severity of these attacks, manufacturers deploy hardware-based fault defenses into security-critical systems, such as secure elements. The development of these countermeasures is a challenging task due to the complex interplay of circuit components and because contemporary design automation tools tend to optimize inserted structures away, thereby defeating their purpose. Hence, it is critical that such countermeasures are rigorously verified post-synthesis. As classical functional verification techniques fall short of assessing the effectiveness of countermeasures, developers have to resort to methods capable of injecting faults in a simulation testbench or into a physical chip. However, developing test sequences to inject faults in simulation is an error-prone task and performing fault attacks on a chip requires specialized equipment and is incredibly time-consuming. To that end, this paper introduces SYNFI, a formal pre-silicon fault verification framework that operates on synthesized netlists. SYNFI can be used to analyze the general effect of faults on the input-output relationship in a circuit and its fault countermeasures, and thus enables hardware designers to assess and verify the effectiveness of embedded countermeasures in a systematic and semi-automatic way. To demonstrate that SYNFI is capable of handling unmodified, industry-grade netlists synthesized with commercial and open tools, we analyze OpenTitan, the first open-source secure element. In our analysis, we identified critical security weaknesses in the unprotected AES block, developed targeted countermeasures, reassessed their security, and contributed these countermeasures back to the OpenTitan repository.
Neural Networks with Different Initialization Methods for Depression Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2022
Year: 2022

As a common mental disorder, depression is a leading cause of various diseases worldwide. Early detection and treatment of depression can dramatically promote remission and prevent relapse. However, conventional ways of depression diagnosis require considerable human effort and cause economic burden, while still being prone to misdiagnosis. On the other hand, recent studies report that physical characteristics are major contributors to the diagnosis of depression, which inspires us to mine the internal relationship by neural networks instead of relying on clinical experiences. In this paper, neural networks are constructed to predict depression from physical characteristics. Two initialization methods are examined - Xaiver and Kaiming initialization. Experimental results show that a 3-layers neural network with Kaiming initialization achieves $83\%$ accuracy.
Non-Isometric Shape Matching via Functional Maps on Landmark-Adapted Bases
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

We propose a principled approach for non-isometric landmark-preserving non-rigid shape matching. Our method is based on the functional maps framework, but rather than promoting isometries we focus instead on near-conformal maps that preserve landmarks exactly. We achieve this, first, by introducing a novel landmark-adapted basis using an intrinsic Dirichlet-Steklov eigenproblem. Second, we establish the functional decomposition of conformal maps expressed in this basis. Finally, we formulate a conformally-invariant energy that promotes high-quality landmark-preserving maps, and show how it can be solved via a variant of the recently proposed ZoomOut method that we extend to our setting. Our method is descriptor-free, efficient and robust to significant mesh variability. We evaluate our approach on a range of benchmark datasets and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on non-isometric benchmarks and near state-of-the-art performance on isometric ones.
Bridging the prosody GAP: Genetic Algorithm with People to efficiently sample emotional prosody
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

The human voice effectively communicates a range of emotions with nuanced variations in acoustics. Existing emotional speech corpora are limited in that they are either (a) highly curated to induce specific emotions with predefined categories that may not capture the full extent of emotional experiences, or (b) entangled in their semantic and prosodic cues, limiting the ability to study these cues separately. To overcome this challenge, we propose a new approach called 'Genetic Algorithm with People' (GAP), which integrates human decision and production into a genetic algorithm. In our design, we allow creators and raters to jointly optimize the emotional prosody over generations. We demonstrate that GAP can efficiently sample from the emotional speech space and capture a broad range of emotions, and show comparable results to state-of-the-art emotional speech corpora. GAP is language-independent and supports large crowd-sourcing, thus can support future large-scale cross-cultural research.