OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Adversarial Attacks to Machine Learning-Based Smart Healthcare Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

The increasing availability of healthcare data requires accurate analysis of disease diagnosis, progression, and realtime monitoring to provide improved treatments to the patients. In this context, Machine Learning (ML) models are used to extract valuable features and insights from high-dimensional and heterogeneous healthcare data to detect different diseases and patient activities in a Smart Healthcare System (SHS). However, recent researches show that ML models used in different application domains are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In this paper, we introduce a new type of adversarial attacks to exploit the ML classifiers used in a SHS. We consider an adversary who has partial knowledge of data distribution, SHS model, and ML algorithm to perform both targeted and untargeted attacks. Employing these adversarial capabilities, we manipulate medical device readings to alter patient status (disease-affected, normal condition, activities, etc.) in the outcome of the SHS. Our attack utilizes five different adversarial ML algorithms (HopSkipJump, Fast Gradient Method, Crafting Decision Tree, Carlini & Wagner, Zeroth Order Optimization) to perform different malicious activities (e.g., data poisoning, misclassify outputs, etc.) on a SHS. Moreover, based on the training and testing phase capabilities of an adversary, we perform white box and black box attacks on a SHS. We evaluate the performance of our work in different SHS settings and medical devices. Our extensive evaluation shows that our proposed adversarial attack can significantly degrade the performance of a ML-based SHS in detecting diseases and normal activities of the patients correctly, which eventually leads to erroneous treatment.
Regularized Inverse Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) aims to facilitate a learner's ability to imitate expert behavior by acquiring reward functions that explain the expert's decisions. Regularized IRL applies strongly convex regularizers to the learner's policy in order to avoid the expert's behavior being rationalized by arbitrary constant rewards, also known as degenerate solutions. We propose tractable solutions, and practical methods to obtain them, for regularized IRL. Current methods are restricted to the maximum-entropy IRL framework, limiting them to Shannon-entropy regularizers, as well as proposing the solutions that are intractable in practice. We present theoretical backing for our proposed IRL method's applicability for both discrete and continuous controls, empirically validating our performance on a variety of tasks.
Moving Target Defense for Robust Monitoring of Electric Grid Transformers in Adversarial Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2020
Year: 2020

Electric power grid components, such as high voltage transformers (HVTs), generating stations, substations, etc. are expensive to maintain and, in the event of failure, replace. Thus, regularly monitoring the behavior of such components is of utmost importance. Furthermore, the recent increase in the number of cyberattacks on such systems demands that such monitoring strategies should be robust. In this paper, we draw inspiration from work in Moving Target Defense (MTD) and consider a dynamic monitoring strategy that makes it difficult for an attacker to prevent unique identification of behavioral signals that indicate the status of HVTs. We first formulate the problem of finding a differentially immune configuration set for an MTD in the context of power grids and then propose algorithms to compute it. To find the optimal movement strategy, we model the MTD as a two-player game and consider the Stackelberg strategy. With the help of IEEE test cases, we show the efficacy and scalability of our proposed approaches.
Cascaded WLAN-FWA Networking and Computing Architecture for Pervasive In-Home Healthcare
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

Pervasive healthcare is a promising assisted-living solution for chronic patients. However, current cutting-edge communication technologies are not able to strictly meet the requirements of these applications, especially in the case of life-threatening events. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes a new architecture to support indoor healthcare monitoring, with a focus on epileptic patients. Several novel elements are introduced. The first element is the cascading of a WLAN and a cellular network, where IEEE 802.11ax is used for the wireless local area network to collect physiological and environmental data in-home and 5G-enabled Fixed Wireless Access links transfer them to a remote hospital. The second element is the extension of the network slicing concept to the WLAN, and the introduction of two new slice types to support both regular monitoring and emergency handling. Moreover, the inclusion of local computing capabilities at the WLAN router, together with a mobile edge computing resource, represents a further architectural enhancement. Local computation is required to trigger not only health-related alarms, but also the network slicing change in case of emergency: in fact, proper radio resource scheduling is necessary for the cascaded networks to handle healthcare traffic together with other promiscuous everyday communication services. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach while highlighting the performance gain achieved with respect to baseline solutions.
Flipping the Perspective in Contact Tracing
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

We introduce a fundamentally different paradigm for contact tracing: for each positive case, do not only ask direct contacts to quarantine; instead, tell everyone how many relationships away the disease just struck (so, "2" is a close physical contact of a close physical contact). This new approach, which has already been deployed in a publicly downloadable app, brings a new tool to bear on pandemic control, powered by network theory. Like a weather satellite providing early warning of incoming hurricanes, it empowers individuals to see transmission approaching from far away, and incites behavior change to directly avoid exposure. This flipped perspective engages natural self-interested instincts of self-preservation, reducing reliance on altruism, and the resulting caution reduces pandemic spread in the social vicinity of each infection. Consequently, our new system solves the behavior coordination problem which has hampered many other app-based interventions to date. We also provide a heuristic mathematical analysis that shows how our system already achieves critical mass from the user perspective at very low adoption thresholds (likely below 10% in some common types of communities as indicated empirically in the first practical deployment); after that point, the design of our system naturally accelerates further adoption, while also alerting even non-users of the app. This article seeks to lay the theoretical foundation for our approach, and to open the area for further research along many dimensions.
Test-Cost Sensitive Methods for Identifying Nearby Points
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Real-world applications that involve missing values are often constrained by the cost to obtain data. Test-cost sensitive, or costly feature, methods additionally consider the cost of acquiring features. Such methods have been extensively studied in the problem of classification. In this paper, we study a related problem of test-cost sensitive methods to identify nearby points from a large set, given a new point with some unknown feature values. We present two models, one based on a tree and another based on Deep Reinforcement Learning. In our simulations, we show that the models outperform random agents on a set of five real-world data sets.
Effects of Model Misspecification on Bayesian Bandits: Case Studies in UX Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Bayesian bandits using Thompson Sampling have seen increasing success in recent years. Yet existing value models (of rewards) are misspecified on many real-world problem. We demonstrate this on the User Experience Optimization (UXO) problem, providing a novel formulation as a restless, sleeping bandit with unobserved confounders plus optional stopping. Our case studies show how common misspecifications can lead to sub-optimal rewards, and we provide model extensions to address these, along with a scientific model building process practitioners can adopt or adapt to solve their own unique problems. To our knowledge, this is the first study showing the effects of overdispersion on bandit explore/exploit efficacy, tying the common notions of under- and over-confidence to over- and under-exploration, respectively. We also present the first model to exploit cointegration in a restless bandit, demonstrating that finite regret and fast and consistent optional stopping are possible by moving beyond simpler windowing, discounting, and drift models.
Yield Optimization using Hybrid Gaussian Process Regression and a Genetic Multi-Objective Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Quantification and minimization of uncertainty is an important task in the design of electromagnetic devices, which comes with high computational effort. We propose a hybrid approach combining the reliability and accuracy of a Monte Carlo analysis with the efficiency of a surrogate model based on Gaussian Process Regression. We present two optimization approaches. An adaptive Newton-MC to reduce the impact of uncertainty and a genetic multi-objective approach to optimize performance and robustness at the same time. For a dielectrical waveguide, used as a benchmark problem, the proposed methods outperform classic approaches.
Fairness in Machine Learning: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

As Machine Learning technologies become increasingly used in contexts that affect citizens, companies as well as researchers need to be confident that their application of these methods will not have unexpected social implications, such as bias towards gender, ethnicity, and/or people with disabilities. There is significant literature on approaches to mitigate bias and promote fairness, yet the area is complex and hard to penetrate for newcomers to the domain. This article seeks to provide an overview of the different schools of thought and approaches to mitigating (social) biases and increase fairness in the Machine Learning literature. It organises approaches into the widely accepted framework of pre-processing, in-processing, and post-processing methods, subcategorizing into a further 11 method areas. Although much of the literature emphasizes binary classification, a discussion of fairness in regression, recommender systems, unsupervised learning, and natural language processing is also provided along with a selection of currently available open source libraries. The article concludes by summarising open challenges articulated as four dilemmas for fairness research.
Low-Complexity ZF/MMSE Receivers for MIMO-OTFS Systems With Imperfect CSI
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

Orthogonal time-frequency space (OTFS) scheme, which transforms a time and frequency selective channel into an almost non-selective channel in the delay-Doppler domain, establishes reliable wireless communication for high-speed moving devices. This work designs and analyzes low-complexity zero-forcing (LZ) and minimum mean square error (LM) receivers for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)-OTFS systems with perfect and imperfect receive channel state information (CSI). The proposed receivers provide exactly the same solution as that of the conventional counterparts, and reduce the complexity by exploiting the doubly-circulant nature of the MIMO-OTFS channel matrix, the block-wise inverse, and Schur complement. We also derive, by exploiting the Taylor expansion and results from random matrix theory, a tight approximation of the post-processing signal-to-noise-plus-interference-ratio (SINR) expressions in closed-form for both LZ and LM receivers. We show that the derived SINR expressions, when averaged over multiple channel realizations, accurately characterize their respective bit error rate (BER) of both perfect and imperfect receive CSI. We numerically show the lower BER and lower complexity of the proposed designs over state-of-the-art exiting solutions.
Temporally-smooth Antialiasing and Lens Distortion with Rasterization Map
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2020
Year: 2020

Current GPU rasterization procedure is limited to narrow views in rectilinear perspective. While industries demand curvilinear perspective in wide-angle views, like Virtual Reality and Virtual Film Production industry. This paper delivers new rasterization method using industry-standard STMaps. Additionally new antialiasing rasterization method is proposed, which outperforms MSAA in both quality and performance. It is an improvement upon previous solutions found in paper Perspective picture from Visual Sphere by yours truly.
On Performance Characterization of Cascaded Multiwire-PLC/MIMO-RF Communication System
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

The flexibility of radio frequency (RF) systems and the omnipresence of power cables potentially make the cascaded power line communication (PLC)/RF system an efficient and cost-effective solution in terms of wide coverage and high-speed transmission. This letter proposes an opportunistic decode-and-forward (DF)-based multi-wire/RF relaying system to exploit the advantages of both techniques. The outage probability, bit error rate, and system channel capacity are correspondingly chosen to analyze the properties of the proposed system, which are derived in closed-form expressions and validated via Monte-Carlo simulations. One can observe that our proposed system outperforms the wireless-only system in terms of coverage and data rate, especially when there exists a non-line-of-sight (NLoS) connection between the transmitter and receiver pair.
Automatic generation of reviews of scientific papers
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

With an ever-increasing number of scientific papers published each year, it becomes more difficult for researchers to explore a field that they are not closely familiar with already. This greatly inhibits the potential for cross-disciplinary research. A traditional introduction into an area may come in the form of a review paper. However, not all areas and sub-areas have a current review. In this paper, we present a method for the automatic generation of a review paper corresponding to a user-defined query. This method consists of two main parts. The first part identifies key papers in the area by their bibliometric parameters, such as a graph of co-citations. The second stage uses a BERT based architecture that we train on existing reviews for extractive summarization of these key papers. We describe the general pipeline of our method and some implementation details and present both automatic and expert evaluations on the PubMed dataset.
PoinT-5: Pointer Network and T-5 based Financial NarrativeSummarisation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Companies provide annual reports to their shareholders at the end of the financial year that describes their operations and financial conditions. The average length of these reports is 80, and it may extend up to 250 pages long. In this paper, we propose our methodology PoinT-5 (the combination of Pointer Network and T-5 (Test-to-text transfer Transformer) algorithms) that we used in the Financial Narrative Summarisation (FNS) 2020 task. The proposed method uses pointer networks to extract important narrative sentences from the report, and then T-5 is used to paraphrase extracted sentences into a concise yet informative sentence. We evaluate our method using ROUGE-N (1,2), L, and SU4. The proposed method achieves the highest precision scores in all the metrics and highest F1 scores in ROUGE1, and LCS and the only solution to cross the MUSE solution baseline in ROUGE-LCS metrics.
Efficient Real-Time Radial Distortion Correction for UAVs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper we present a novel algorithm for onboard radial distortion correction for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with an inertial measurement unit (IMU), that runs in real-time. This approach makes calibration procedures redundant, thus allowing for exchange of optics extemporaneously. By utilizing the IMU data, the cameras can be aligned with the gravity direction. This allows us to work with fewer degrees of freedom, and opens up for further intrinsic calibration. We propose a fast and robust minimal solver for simultaneously estimating the focal length, radial distortion profile and motion parameters from homographies. The proposed solver is tested on both synthetic and real data, and perform better or on par with state-of-the-art methods relying on pre-calibration procedures.
Provable Fictitious Play for General Mean-Field Games
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We propose a reinforcement learning algorithm for stationary mean-field games, where the goal is to learn a pair of mean-field state and stationary policy that constitutes the Nash equilibrium. When viewing the mean-field state and the policy as two players, we propose a fictitious play algorithm which alternatively updates the mean-field state and the policy via gradient-descent and proximal policy optimization, respectively. Our algorithm is in stark contrast with previous literature which solves each single-agent reinforcement learning problem induced by the iterates mean-field states to the optimum. Furthermore, we prove that our fictitious play algorithm converges to the Nash equilibrium at a sublinear rate. To the best of our knowledge, this seems the first provably convergent single-loop reinforcement learning algorithm for mean-field games based on iterative updates of both mean-field state and policy.
Ensemble Hyperspectral Band Selection for Detecting Nitrogen Status in Grape Leaves
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

The large data size and dimensionality of hyperspectral data demands complex processing and data analysis. Multispectral data do not suffer the same limitations, but are normally restricted to blue, green, red, red edge, and near infrared bands. This study aimed to identify the optimal set of spectral bands for nitrogen detection in grape leaves using ensemble feature selection on hyperspectral data from over 3,000 leaves from 150 Flame Seedless table grapevines. Six machine learning base rankers were included in the ensemble: random forest, LASSO, SelectKBest, ReliefF, SVM-RFE, and chaotic crow search algorithm (CCSA). The pipeline identified less than 0.45% of the bands as most informative about grape nitrogen status. The selected violet, yellow-orange, and shortwave infrared bands lie outside of the typical blue, green, red, red edge, and near infrared bands of commercial multispectral cameras, so the potential improvement in remote sensing of nitrogen in grapevines brought forth by a customized multispectral sensor centered at the selected bands is promising and worth further investigation. The proposed pipeline may also be used for application-specific multispectral sensor design in domains other than agriculture.
On the Role of Style in Parsing Speech with Neural Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

The differences in written text and conversational speech are substantial; previous parsers trained on treebanked text have given very poor results on spontaneous speech. For spoken language, the mismatch in style also extends to prosodic cues, though it is less well understood. This paper re-examines the use of written text in parsing speech in the context of recent advances in neural language processing. We show that neural approaches facilitate using written text to improve parsing of spontaneous speech, and that prosody further improves over this state-of-the-art result. Further, we find an asymmetric degradation from read vs. spontaneous mismatch, with spontaneous speech more generally useful for training parsers.
Analysis of Disfluency in Children's Speech
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Disfluencies are prevalent in spontaneous speech, as shown in many studies of adult speech. Less is understood about children's speech, especially in pre-school children who are still developing their language skills. We present a novel dataset with annotated disfluencies of spontaneous explanations from 26 children (ages 5--8), interviewed twice over a year-long period. Our preliminary analysis reveals significant differences between children's speech in our corpus and adult spontaneous speech from two corpora (Switchboard and CallHome). Children have higher disfluency and filler rates, tend to use nasal filled pauses more frequently, and on average exhibit longer reparandums than repairs, in contrast to adult speakers. Despite the differences, an automatic disfluency detection system trained on adult (Switchboard) speech transcripts performs reasonably well on children's speech, achieving an F1 score that is 10\% higher than the score on an adult out-of-domain dataset (CallHome).
Proactive Serverless Function Resource Management
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

This paper introduces a new primitive to serverless language runtimes called freshen. With freshen, developers or providers specify functionality to perform before a given function executes. This proactive technique allows for overheads associated with serverless functions to be mitigated at execution time, which improves function responsiveness. We show various predictive opportunities exist to run freshen within reasonable time windows. A high-level design and implementation are described, along with preliminary results to show the potential benefits of our scheme.
MMGSD: Multi-Modal Gaussian Shape Descriptors for Correspondence Matching in 1D and 2D Deformable Objects
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

We explore learning pixelwise correspondences between images of deformable objects in different configurations. Traditional correspondence matching approaches such as SIFT, SURF, and ORB can fail to provide sufficient contextual information for fine-grained manipulation. We propose Multi-Modal Gaussian Shape Descriptor (MMGSD), a new visual representation of deformable objects which extends ideas from dense object descriptors to predict all symmetric correspondences between different object configurations. MMGSD is learned in a self-supervised manner from synthetic data and produces correspondence heatmaps with measurable uncertainty. In simulation, experiments suggest that MMGSD can achieve an RMSE of 32.4 and 31.3 for square cloth and braided synthetic nylon rope respectively. The results demonstrate an average of 47.7% improvement over a provided baseline based on contrastive learning, symmetric pixel-wise contrastive loss (SPCL), as opposed to MMGSD which enforces distributional continuity.