OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Collaborative Perception for Autonomous Driving: Current Status and Future Trend
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Perception is one of the crucial module of the autonomous driving system, which has made great progress recently. However, limited ability of individual vehicles results in the bottleneck of improvement of the perception performance. To break through the limits of individual perception, collaborative perception has been proposed which enables vehicles to share information to perceive the environments beyond line-of-sight and field-of-view. In this paper, we provide a review of the related work about the promising collaborative perception technology, including introducing the fundamental concepts, generalizing the collaboration modes and summarizing the key ingredients and applications of collaborative perception. Finally, we discuss the open challenges and issues of this research area and give some potential further directions.
Graph Connectivity with Noisy Queries
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

Graph connectivity is a fundamental combinatorial optimization problem that arises in many practical applications, where usually a spanning subgraph of a network is used for its operation. However, in the real world, links may fail unexpectedly deeming the networks non-operational, while checking whether a link is damaged is costly and possibly erroneous. After an event that has damaged an arbitrary subset of the edges, the network operator must find a spanning tree of the network using non-damaged edges by making as few checks as possible. Motivated by such questions, we study the problem of finding a spanning tree in a network, when we only have access to noisy queries of the form "Does edge e exist?". We design efficient algorithms, even when edges fail adversarially, for all possible error regimes; 2-sided error (where any answer might be erroneous), false positives (where "no" answers are always correct) and false negatives (where "yes" answers are always correct). In the first two regimes we provide efficient algorithms and give matching lower bounds for general graphs. In the False Negative case we design efficient algorithms for large interesting families of graphs (e.g. bounded treewidth, sparse). Using the previous results, we provide tight algorithms for the practically useful family of planar graphs in all error regimes.
Patient-level Microsatellite Stability Assessment from Whole Slide Images By Combining Momentum Contrast Learning and Group Patch Embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Assessing microsatellite stability status of a patient's colorectal cancer is crucial in personalizing treatment regime. Recently, convolutional-neural-networks (CNN) combined with transfer-learning approaches were proposed to circumvent traditional laboratory testing for determining microsatellite status from hematoxylin and eosin stained biopsy whole slide images (WSI). However, the high resolution of WSI practically prevent direct classification of the entire WSI. Current approaches bypass the WSI high resolution by first classifying small patches extracted from the WSI, and then aggregating patch-level classification logits to deduce the patient-level status. Such approaches limit the capacity to capture important information which resides at the high resolution WSI data. We introduce an effective approach to leverage WSI high resolution information by momentum contrastive learning of patch embeddings along with training a patient-level classifier on groups of those embeddings. Our approach achieves up to 7.4\% better accuracy compared to the straightforward patch-level classification and patient level aggregation approach with a higher stability (AUC, $0.91 \pm 0.01$ vs. $0.85 \pm 0.04$, p-value$<0.01$). Our code can be found at https://github.com/TechnionComputationalMRILab/colorectal_cancer_ai.
Membership-Doctor: Comprehensive Assessment of Membership Inference Against Machine Learning Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Machine learning models are prone to memorizing sensitive data, making them vulnerable to membership inference attacks in which an adversary aims to infer whether an input sample was used to train the model. Over the past few years, researchers have produced many membership inference attacks and defenses. However, these attacks and defenses employ a variety of strategies and are conducted in different models and datasets. The lack of comprehensive benchmark, however, means we do not understand the strengths and weaknesses of existing attacks and defenses. We fill this gap by presenting a large-scale measurement of different membership inference attacks and defenses. We systematize membership inference through the study of nine attacks and six defenses and measure the performance of different attacks and defenses in the holistic evaluation. We then quantify the impact of the threat model on the results of these attacks. We find that some assumptions of the threat model, such as same-architecture and same-distribution between shadow and target models, are unnecessary. We are also the first to execute attacks on the real-world data collected from the Internet, instead of laboratory datasets. We further investigate what determines the performance of membership inference attacks and reveal that the commonly believed overfitting level is not sufficient for the success of the attacks. Instead, the Jensen-Shannon distance of entropy/cross-entropy between member and non-member samples correlates with attack performance much better. This gives us a new way to accurately predict membership inference risks without running the attack. Finally, we find that data augmentation degrades the performance of existing attacks to a larger extent, and we propose an adaptive attack using augmentation to train shadow and attack models that improve attack performance.
Shapelet-Based Counterfactual Explanations for Multivariate Time Series
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

As machine learning and deep learning models have become highly prevalent in a multitude of domains, the main reservation in their adoption for decision-making processes is their black-box nature. The Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) paradigm has gained a lot of momentum lately due to its ability to reduce models opacity. XAI methods have not only increased stakeholders' trust in the decision process but also helped developers ensure its fairness. Recent efforts have been invested in creating transparent models and post-hoc explanations. However, fewer methods have been developed for time series data, and even less when it comes to multivariate datasets. In this work, we take advantage of the inherent interpretability of shapelets to develop a model agnostic multivariate time series (MTS) counterfactual explanation algorithm. Counterfactuals can have a tremendous impact on making black-box models explainable by indicating what changes have to be performed on the input to change the final decision. We test our approach on a real-life solar flare prediction dataset and prove that our approach produces high-quality counterfactuals. Moreover, a comparison to the only MTS counterfactual generation algorithm shows that, in addition to being visually interpretable, our explanations are superior in terms of proximity, sparsity, and plausibility.
Enhancing level set-based topology optimization with anisotropic graded meshes
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2022
Year: 2022

We propose a new algorithm for the design of topologically optimized lightweight structures, under a minimum compliance requirement. The new process enhances a standard level set formulation in terms of computational efficiency, thanks to the employment of a strategic computational mesh. We pursue a twofold goal, i.e., to deliver a final layout characterized by a smooth contour and reliable mechanical properties. The smoothness of the optimized structure is ensured by the employment of an anisotropic adapted mesh, which sharply captures the material/void interface. A robust mechanical performance is guaranteed by a uniform tessellation of the internal part of the optimized configuration. A thorough numerical investigation corroborates the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm as a reliable and computationally affordable design tool, both in two- and three-dimensional contexts.
On the characteristic polynomial of the $A_α$-matrix for some operations of graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2022
Year: 2022

Let G be a graph of order $n$ with adjacency matrix $A(G)$ and diagonal matrix of degree $D(G)$. For every $α\in [0,1]$, Nikiforov \cite{VN17} defined the matrix $A_α(G) = αD(G) + (1-α)A(G)$. In this paper we present the $A_α(G)$-characteristic polynomial when $G$ is obtained by coalescing two graphs, and if $G$ is a semi-regular bipartite graph we obtain the $A_α$-characteristic polynomial of the line graph associated to $G$. Moreover, if $G$ is a regular graph we exhibit the $A_α$-characteristic polynomial for the graphs obtained from some operations.
Exploring Interactions with Printed Data Visualizations in Augmented Reality
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

This paper presents a design space of interaction techniques to engage with visualizations that are printed on paper and augmented through Augmented Reality. Paper sheets are widely used to deploy visualizations and provide a rich set of tangible affordances for interactions, such as touch, folding, tilting, or stacking. At the same time, augmented reality can dynamically update visualization content to provide commands such as pan, zoom, filter, or detail on demand. This paper is the first to provide a structured approach to mapping possible actions with the paper to interaction commands. This design space and the findings of a controlled user study have implications for future designs of augmented reality systems involving paper sheets and visualizations. Through workshops (N=20) and ideation, we identified 81 interactions that we classify in three dimensions: 1) commands that can be supported by an interaction, 2) the specific parameters provided by an (inter)action with paper, and 3) the number of paper sheets involved in an interaction. We tested user preference and viability of 11 of these interactions with a prototype implementation in a controlled study (N=12, HoloLens 2) and found that most of the interactions are intuitive and engaging to use. We summarized interactions (e.g., tilt to pan) that have strong affordance to complement "point" for data exploration, physical limitations and properties of paper as a medium, cases requiring redundancy and shortcuts, and other implications for design.
Low Complexity Classification Approach for Faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) Signalling Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

Faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) signaling can improve the spectral efficiency (SE); however, at the expense of high computational complexity to remove the introduced intersymbol interference (ISI). Motivated by the recent success of ML in physical layer (PHY) problems, in this paper we investigate the use of ML in reducing the detection complexity of FTN signaling. In particular, we view the FTN signaling detection problem as a classification task, where the received signal is considered as an unlabeled class sample that belongs to a set of all possible classes samples. If we use an off-shelf classifier, then the set of all possible classes samples belongs to an $N$-dimensional space, where $N$ is the transmission block length, which has a huge computational complexity. We propose a low-complexity classifier (LCC) that exploits the ISI structure of FTN signaling to perform the classification task in $N_p \ll N$-dimension space. The proposed LCC consists of two stages: 1) offline pre-classification that constructs the labeled classes samples in the $N_p$-dimensional space and 2) online classification where the detection of the received samples occurs. The proposed LCC is extended to produce soft-outputs as well. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed LCC in balancing performance and complexity.
Fall Detection from Audios with Audio Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

Fall detection for the elderly is a well-researched problem with several proposed solutions, including wearable and non-wearable techniques. While the existing techniques have excellent detection rates, their adoption by the target population is lacking due to the need for wearing devices and user privacy concerns. Our paper provides a novel, non-wearable, non-intrusive, and scalable solution for fall detection, deployed on an autonomous mobile robot equipped with a microphone. The proposed method uses ambient sound input recorded in people's homes. We specifically target the bathroom environment as it is highly prone to falls and where existing techniques cannot be deployed without jeopardizing user privacy. The present work develops a solution based on a Transformer architecture that takes noisy sound input from bathrooms and classifies it into fall/no-fall class with an accuracy of 0.8673. Further, the proposed approach is extendable to other indoor environments, besides bathrooms and is suitable for deploying in elderly homes, hospitals, and rehabilitation facilities without requiring the user to wear any device or be constantly "watched" by the sensors.
Faint Features Tell: Automatic Vertebrae Fracture Screening Assisted by Contrastive Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Long-term vertebral fractures severely affect the life quality of patients, causing kyphotic, lumbar deformity and even paralysis. Computed tomography (CT) is a common clinical examination to screen for this disease at early stages. However, the faint radiological appearances and unspecific symptoms lead to a high risk of missed diagnosis, especially for the mild vertebral fractures. In this paper, we argue that reinforcing the faint fracture features to encourage the inter-class separability is the key to improving the accuracy. Motivated by this, we propose a supervised contrastive learning based model to estimate Genent's Grade of vertebral fracture with CT scans. The supervised contrastive learning, as an auxiliary task, narrows the distance of features within the same class while pushing others away, enhancing the model's capability of capturing subtle features of vertebral fractures. Our method has a specificity of 99% and a sensitivity of 85% in binary classification, and a macro-F1 of 77% in multi-class classification, indicating that contrastive learning significantly improves the accuracy of vertebrae fracture screening. Considering the lack of datasets in this field, we construct a database including 208 samples annotated by experienced radiologists. Our desensitized data and codes will be made publicly available for the community.
String-based Molecule Generation via Multi-decoder VAE
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we investigate the problem of string-based molecular generation via variational autoencoders (VAEs) that have served a popular generative approach for various tasks in artificial intelligence. We propose a simple, yet effective idea to improve the performance of VAE for the task. Our main idea is to maintain multiple decoders while sharing a single encoder, i.e., it is a type of ensemble techniques. Here, we first found that training each decoder independently may not be effective as the bias of the ensemble decoder increases severely under its auto-regressive inference. To maintain both small bias and variance of the ensemble model, our proposed technique is two-fold: (a) a different latent variable is sampled for each decoder (from estimated mean and variance offered by the shared encoder) to encourage diverse characteristics of decoders and (b) a collaborative loss is used during training to control the aggregated quality of decoders using different latent variables. In our experiments, the proposed VAE model particularly performs well for generating a sample from out-of-domain distribution.
Lexicase Selection at Scale
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2022
Year: 2022

Lexicase selection is a semantic-aware parent selection method, which assesses individual test cases in a randomly-shuffled data stream. It has demonstrated success in multiple research areas including genetic programming, genetic algorithms, and more recently symbolic regression and deep learning. One potential drawback of lexicase selection and its variants is that the selection procedure requires evaluating training cases in a single data stream, making it difficult to handle tasks where the evaluation is computationally heavy or the dataset is large-scale, e.g., deep learning. In this work, we investigate how the weighted shuffle methods can be employed to improve the efficiency of lexicase selection. We propose a novel method, fast lexicase selection, which incorporates lexicase selection and weighted shuffle with partial evaluation. Experiments on both classic genetic programming and deep learning tasks indicate that the proposed method can significantly reduce the number of evaluation steps needed for lexicase selection to select an individual, improving its efficiency while maintaining the performance.
Security and Reliability Analysis of Satellite-Terrestrial Multi-Relay Networks with Imperfect CSI
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

This work investigates the security and reliability analysis for a novel satellite-terrestrial (SatTer) network. Specifically, a satellite attempts to transmit confidential information to a ground user (GU) via the support of multiple relay nodes in the presence of an eavesdropper that tries to overhear the information. A friendly jammer is deployed to improve the secure transmission between the satellite and the relays. Furthermore, satellite-to-relay generalized Rician fading channels and imperfect channel state information (CSI) are deployed to examine a general system model. In this context, the closed-formed expressions for the outage probability (OP) and intercept probability (IP) are derived corresponding to an amplify-and-forward (AF)-based relaying scheme, which is challenging and has not been studied before. Finally, the exactness of the mathematical analyses is validated through Monte Carlo simulations. Furthermore, the effects of various key parameters (e.g., channel estimation errors, satellite's transmit power, relay's transmit power, number of relays, and fading severity parameter) are examined.
Learning More May Not Be Better: Knowledge Transferability in Vision and Language Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Is more data always better to train vision-and-language models? We study knowledge transferability in multi-modal tasks. The current tendency in machine learning is to assume that by joining multiple datasets from different tasks their overall performance will improve. However, we show that not all the knowledge transfers well or has a positive impact on related tasks, even when they share a common goal. We conduct an exhaustive analysis based on hundreds of cross-experiments on 12 vision-and-language tasks categorized in 4 groups. Whereas tasks in the same group are prone to improve each other, results show that this is not always the case. Other factors such as dataset size or pre-training stage have also a great impact on how well the knowledge is transferred.
Object Detection in Aerial Images with Uncertainty-Aware Graph Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

In this work, we propose a novel uncertainty-aware object detection framework with a structured-graph, where nodes and edges are denoted by objects and their spatial-semantic similarities, respectively. Specifically, we aim to consider relationships among objects for effectively contextualizing them. To achieve this, we first detect objects and then measure their semantic and spatial distances to construct an object graph, which is then represented by a graph neural network (GNN) for refining visual CNN features for objects. However, refining CNN features and detection results of every object are inefficient and may not be necessary, as that include correct predictions with low uncertainties. Therefore, we propose to handle uncertain objects by not only transferring the representation from certain objects (sources) to uncertain objects (targets) over the directed graph, but also improving CNN features only on objects regarded as uncertain with their representational outputs from the GNN. Furthermore, we calculate a training loss by giving larger weights on uncertain objects, to concentrate on improving uncertain object predictions while maintaining high performances on certain objects. We refer to our model as Uncertainty-Aware Graph network for object DETection (UAGDet). We then experimentally validate ours on the challenging large-scale aerial image dataset, namely DOTA, that consists of lots of objects with small to large sizes in an image, on which ours improves the performance of the existing object detection network.
AppGNN: Approximation-Aware Functional Reverse Engineering using Graph Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

The globalization of the Integrated Circuit (IC) market is attracting an ever-growing number of partners, while remarkably lengthening the supply chain. Thereby, security concerns, such as those imposed by functional Reverse Engineering (RE), have become quintessential. RE leads to disclosure of confidential information to competitors, potentially enabling the theft of intellectual property. Traditional functional RE methods analyze a given gate-level netlist through employing pattern matching towards reconstructing the underlying basic blocks, and hence, reverse engineer the circuit's function. In this work, we are the first to demonstrate that applying Approximate Computing (AxC) principles to circuits significantly improves the resiliency against RE. This is attributed to the increased complexity in the underlying pattern-matching process. The resiliency remains effective even for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) that are presently one of the most powerful state-of-the-art techniques in functional RE. Using AxC, we demonstrate a substantial reduction in GNN average classification accuracy-- from 98% to a mere 53%. To surmount the challenges introduced by AxC in RE, we propose the highly promising AppGNN platform, which enables GNNs (still being trained on exact circuits) to: (i) perform accurate classifications, and (ii) reverse engineer the circuit functionality, notwithstanding the applied approximation technique. AppGNN accomplishes this by implementing a novel graph-based node sampling approach that mimics generic approximation methodologies, requiring zero knowledge of the targeted approximation type. We perform an extensive evaluation and show that, using our method, we can improve the classification accuracy from 53% to 81% when classifying approximate adder circuits that have been generated using evolutionary algorithms, which our method is oblivious of.
A Provably Efficient Model-Free Posterior Sampling Method for Episodic Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Thompson Sampling is one of the most effective methods for contextual bandits and has been generalized to posterior sampling for certain MDP settings. However, existing posterior sampling methods for reinforcement learning are limited by being model-based or lack worst-case theoretical guarantees beyond linear MDPs. This paper proposes a new model-free formulation of posterior sampling that applies to more general episodic reinforcement learning problems with theoretical guarantees. We introduce novel proof techniques to show that under suitable conditions, the worst-case regret of our posterior sampling method matches the best known results of optimization based methods. In the linear MDP setting with dimension, the regret of our algorithm scales linearly with the dimension as compared to a quadratic dependence of the existing posterior sampling-based exploration algorithms.