OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Continual Interactive Behavior Learning With Traffic Divergence Measurement: A Dynamic Gradient Scenario Memory Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Developing autonomous vehicles (AVs) helps improve the road safety and traffic efficiency of intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Accurately predicting the trajectories of traffic participants is essential to the decision-making and motion planning of AVs in interactive scenarios. Recently, learning-based trajectory predictors have shown state-of-the-art performance in highway or urban areas. However, most existing learning-based models trained with fixed datasets may perform poorly in continuously changing scenarios. Specifically, they may not perform well in learned scenarios after learning the new one. This phenomenon is called "catastrophic forgetting". Few studies investigate trajectory predictions in continuous scenarios, where catastrophic forgetting may happen. To handle this problem, first, a novel continual learning (CL) approach for vehicle trajectory prediction is proposed in this paper. Then, inspired by brain science, a dynamic memory mechanism is developed by utilizing the measurement of traffic divergence between scenarios, which balances the performance and training efficiency of the proposed CL approach. Finally, datasets collected from different locations are used to design continual training and testing methods in experiments. Experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves consistently high prediction accuracy in continuous scenarios without re-training, which mitigates catastrophic forgetting compared to non-CL approaches. The implementation of the proposed approach is publicly available at https://github.com/BIT-Jack/D-GSM
Do NFTs' Owners Really Possess their Assets? A First Look at the NFT-to-Asset Connection Fragility
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) have experienced an explosive growth and their record-breaking prices have been witnessed. Typically, the assets that NFTs represent are stored off-chain with a pointer, e.g., multi-hop URLs, due to the costly on-chain storage. Hence, this paper aims to answer the question: Is the NFT-to-Asset connection fragile? This paper makes a first step towards this end by characterizing NFT-to-Asset connections of 12,353 Ethereum NFT Contracts (6,234,141 NFTs in total) from three perspectives, storage, accessibility and duplication. In order to overcome challenges of affecting the measurement accuracy, e.g., IPFS instability and the changing availability of both IPFS and servers' data, we propose to leverage multiple gateways to enlarge the data coverage and extend a longer measurement period with non-trivial efforts. Results of our extensive study show that such connection is very fragile in practice. The loss, unavailability, or duplication of off-chain assets could render value of NFTs worthless. For instance, we find that assets of 25.24% of Ethereum NFT contracts are not accessible, and 21.48% of Ethereum NFT contracts include duplicated assets. Our work sheds light on the fragility along the NFT-to-Asset connection, which could help the NFT community to better enhance the trust of off-chain assets.
Fair Must Testing for I/O Automata
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2022
Year: 2022

The concept of must testing is naturally parametrised with a chosen completeness criterion or fairness assumption. When taking weak fairness as used in I/O automata, I show that it characterises exactly the fair preorder on I/O automata as defined by Lynch & Tuttle.
Generalized Decoding for Pixel, Image, and Language
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

We present X-Decoder, a generalized decoding model that can predict pixel-level segmentation and language tokens seamlessly. X-Decodert takes as input two types of queries: (i) generic non-semantic queries and (ii) semantic queries induced from text inputs, to decode different pixel-level and token-level outputs in the same semantic space. With such a novel design, X-Decoder is the first work that provides a unified way to support all types of image segmentation and a variety of vision-language (VL) tasks. Further, our design enables seamless interactions across tasks at different granularities and brings mutual benefits by learning a common and rich pixel-level visual-semantic understanding space, without any pseudo-labeling. After pretraining on a mixed set of a limited amount of segmentation data and millions of image-text pairs, X-Decoder exhibits strong transferability to a wide range of downstream tasks in both zero-shot and finetuning settings. Notably, it achieves (1) state-of-the-art results on open-vocabulary segmentation and referring segmentation on eight datasets; (2) better or competitive finetuned performance to other generalist and specialist models on segmentation and VL tasks; and (3) flexibility for efficient finetuning and novel task composition (e.g., referring captioning and image editing). Code, demo, video, and visualization are available at https://x-decoder-vl.github.io.
Advanced Baseline for 3D Human Pose Estimation: A Two-Stage Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Human pose estimation has been widely applied in various industries. While recent decades have witnessed the introduction of many advanced two-dimensional (2D) human pose estimation solutions, three-dimensional (3D) human pose estimation is still an active research field in computer vision. Generally speaking, 3D human pose estimation methods can be divided into two categories: single-stage and two-stage. In this paper, we focused on the 2D-to-3D lifting process in the two-stage methods and proposed a more advanced baseline model for 3D human pose estimation, based on the existing solutions. Our improvements include optimization of machine learning models and multiple parameters, as well as introduction of a weighted loss to the training model. Finally, we used the Human3.6M benchmark to test the final performance and it did produce satisfactory results.
Contrastive Distillation Is a Sample-Efficient Self-Supervised Loss Policy for Transfer Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Traditional approaches to RL have focused on learning decision policies directly from episodic decisions, while slowly and implicitly learning the semantics of compositional representations needed for generalization. While some approaches have been adopted to refine representations via auxiliary self-supervised losses while simultaneously learning decision policies, learning compositional representations from hand-designed and context-independent self-supervised losses (multi-view) still adapts relatively slowly to the real world, which contains many non-IID subspaces requiring rapid distribution shift in both time and spatial attention patterns at varying levels of abstraction. In contrast, supervised language model cascades have shown the flexibility to adapt to many diverse manifolds, and hints of self-learning needed for autonomous task transfer. However, to date, transfer methods for language models like few-shot learning and fine-tuning still require human supervision and transfer learning using self-learning methods has been underexplored. We propose a self-supervised loss policy called contrastive distillation which manifests latent variables with high mutual information with both source and target tasks from weights to tokens. We show how this outperforms common methods of transfer learning and suggests a useful design axis of trading off compute for generalizability for online transfer. Contrastive distillation is improved through sampling from memory and suggests a simple algorithm for more efficiently sampling negative examples for contrastive losses than random sampling.
A Non-linear MPC Local Planner for Tractor-Trailer Vehicles in Forward and Backward Maneuvering
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Designing a local planner to control tractor-trailer vehicles in forward and backward maneuvering is a challenging control problem in the research community of autonomous driving systems. Considering a critical situation in the stability of tractor-trailer systems, a practical and novel approach is presented to design a non-linear MPC(NMPC) local planner for tractor-trailer autonomous vehicles in both forward and backward maneuvering. The tractor velocity and steering angle are considered to be control variables. The proposed NMPC local planner is designed to handle jackknife situations, avoiding multiple static obstacles, and path following in both forward and backward maneuvering. The challenges mentioned above are converted into a constrained problem that can be handled simultaneously by the proposed NMPC local planner. The direct multiple shooting approach is used to convert the optimal control problem(OCP) into a non-linear programming problem(NLP) that IPOPT solvers can solve in CasADi. The controller performance is evaluated through different backup and forward maneuvering scenarios in the Gazebo simulation environment in real-time. It achieves asymptotic stability in avoiding static obstacles and accurate tracking performance while respecting path constraints. Finally, the proposed NMPC local planner is integrated with an open-source autonomous driving software stack called AutowareAi.
CAMeMBERT: Cascading Assistant-Mediated Multilingual BERT
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Large language models having hundreds of millions, and even billions, of parameters have performed extremely well on a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Their widespread use and adoption, however, is hindered by the lack of availability and portability of sufficiently large computational resources. This paper proposes a knowledge distillation (KD) technique building on the work of LightMBERT, a student model of multilingual BERT (mBERT). By repeatedly distilling mBERT through increasingly compressed toplayer distilled teacher assistant networks, CAMeMBERT aims to improve upon the time and space complexities of mBERT while keeping loss of accuracy beneath an acceptable threshold. At present, CAMeMBERT has an average accuracy of around 60.1%, which is subject to change after future improvements to the hyperparameters used in fine-tuning.
IPProtect: protecting the intellectual property of visual datasets during data valuation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Data trading is essential to accelerate the development of data-driven machine learning pipelines. The central problem in data trading is to estimate the utility of a seller's dataset with respect to a given buyer's machine learning task, also known as data valuation. Typically, data valuation requires one or more participants to share their raw dataset with others, leading to potential risks of intellectual property (IP) violations. In this paper, we tackle the novel task of preemptively protecting the IP of datasets that need to be shared during data valuation. First, we identify and formalize two kinds of novel IP risks in visual datasets: data-item (image) IP and statistical (dataset) IP. Then, we propose a novel algorithm to convert the raw dataset into a sanitized version, that provides resistance to IP violations, while at the same time allowing accurate data valuation. The key idea is to limit the transfer of information from the raw dataset to the sanitized dataset, thereby protecting against potential intellectual property violations. Next, we analyze our method for the likely existence of a solution and immunity against reconstruction attacks. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on three computer vision datasets demonstrating the advantages of our method in comparison to other baselines.
CHEM: Efficient Secure Aggregation with Cached Homomorphic Encryption in Federated Machine Learning Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Although homomorphic encryption can be incorporated into neural network layers for securing machine learning tasks, such as confidential inference over encrypted data samples and encrypted local models in federated learning, the computational overhead has been an Achilles heel. This paper proposes a caching protocol, namely CHEM, such that tensor ciphertexts can be constructed from a pool of cached radixes rather than carrying out expensive encryption operations. From a theoretical perspective, we demonstrate that CHEM is semantically secure and can be parameterized with straightforward analysis under practical assumptions. Experimental results on three popular public data sets show that adopting CHEM only incurs sub-second overhead and yet reduces the encryption cost by 48%--89% for encoding input data samples in confidential inference and 67%--87% for encoding local models in federated learning, respectively.
Over-the-Air Federated Learning with Enhanced Privacy
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising learning paradigm in which only local model parameters (gradients) are shared. Private user data never leaves the local devices thus preserving data privacy. However, recent research has shown that even when local data is never shared by a user, exchanging model parameters without protection can also leak private information. Moreover, in wireless systems, the frequent transmission of model parameters can cause tremendous bandwidth consumption and network congestion when the model is large. To address this problem, we propose a new FL framework with efficient over-the-air parameter aggregation and strong privacy protection of both user data and models. We achieve this by introducing pairwise cancellable random artificial noises (PCR-ANs) on end devices. As compared to existing over-the-air computation (AirComp) based FL schemes, our design provides stronger privacy protection. We analytically show the secrecy capacity and the convergence rate of the proposed wireless FL aggregation algorithm.
Group Sparse Coding for Image Denoising
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Group sparse representation has shown promising results in image debulrring and image inpainting in GSR [3] , the main reason that lead to the success is by exploiting Sparsity and Nonlocal self-similarity (NSS) between patches on natural images, and solve a regularized optimization problem. However, directly adapting GSR[3] in image denoising yield very unstable and non-satisfactory results, to overcome these issues, this paper proposes a progressive image denoising algorithm that successfully adapt GSR [3] model and experiments shows the superior performance than some of the state-of-the-art methods.
Accelerating Barnes-Hut t-SNE Algorithm by Efficient Parallelization on Multi-Core CPUs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

t-SNE remains one of the most popular embedding techniques for visualizing high-dimensional data. Most standard packages of t-SNE, such as scikit-learn, use the Barnes-Hut t-SNE (BH t-SNE) algorithm for large datasets. However, existing CPU implementations of this algorithm are inefficient. In this work, we accelerate the BH t-SNE on CPUs via cache optimizations, SIMD, parallelizing sequential steps, and improving parallelization of multithreaded steps. Our implementation (Acc-t-SNE) is up to 261x and 4x faster than scikit-learn and the state-of-the-art BH t-SNE implementation from daal4py, respectively, on a 32-core Intel(R) Icelake cloud instance.
Supervised Anomaly Detection Method Combining Generative Adversarial Networks and Three-Dimensional Data in Vehicle Inspections
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

The external visual inspections of rolling stock's underfloor equipment are currently being performed via human visual inspection. In this study, we attempt to partly automate visual inspection by investigating anomaly inspection algorithms that use image processing technology. As the railroad maintenance studies tend to have little anomaly data, unsupervised learning methods are usually preferred for anomaly detection; however, training cost and accuracy is still a challenge. Additionally, a researcher created anomalous images from normal images by adding noise, etc., but the anomalous targeted in this study is the rotation of piping cocks that was difficult to create using noise. Therefore, in this study, we propose a new method that uses style conversion via generative adversarial networks on three-dimensional computer graphics and imitates anomaly images to apply anomaly detection based on supervised learning. The geometry-consistent style conversion model was used to convert the image, and because of this the color and texture of the image were successfully made to imitate the real image while maintaining the anomalous shape. Using the generated anomaly images as supervised data, the anomaly detection model can be easily trained without complex adjustments and successfully detects anomalies.
AsyncFLEO: Asynchronous Federated Learning for LEO Satellite Constellations with High-Altitude Platforms
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) constellations, each comprising a large number of satellites, have become a new source of big data "from the sky". Downloading such data to a ground station (GS) for big data analytics demands very high bandwidth and involves large propagation delays. Federated Learning (FL) offers a promising solution because it allows data to stay in-situ (never leaving satellites) and it only needs to transmit machine learning model parameters (trained on the satellites' data). However, the conventional, synchronous FL process can take several days to train a single FL model in the context of satellite communication (Satcom), due to a bottleneck caused by straggler satellites. In this paper, we propose an asynchronous FL framework for LEO constellations called AsyncFLEO to improve FL efficiency in Satcom. Not only does AsynFLEO address the bottleneck (idle waiting) in synchronous FL, but it also solves the issue of model staleness caused by straggler satellites. AsyncFLEO utilizes high-altitude platforms (HAPs) positioned "in the sky" as parameter servers, and consists of three technical components: (1) a ring-of-stars communication topology, (2) a model propagation algorithm, and (3) a model aggregation algorithm with satellite grouping and staleness discounting. Our extensive evaluation with both IID and non-IID data shows that AsyncFLEO outperforms the state of the art by a large margin, cutting down convergence delay by 22 times and increasing accuracy by 40%.
Ultra-High-Definition Low-Light Image Enhancement: A Benchmark and Transformer-Based Method
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

As the quality of optical sensors improves, there is a need for processing large-scale images. In particular, the ability of devices to capture ultra-high definition (UHD) images and video places new demands on the image processing pipeline. In this paper, we consider the task of low-light image enhancement (LLIE) and introduce a large-scale database consisting of images at 4K and 8K resolution. We conduct systematic benchmarking studies and provide a comparison of current LLIE algorithms. As a second contribution, we introduce LLFormer, a transformer-based low-light enhancement method. The core components of LLFormer are the axis-based multi-head self-attention and cross-layer attention fusion block, which significantly reduces the linear complexity. Extensive experiments on the new dataset and existing public datasets show that LLFormer outperforms state-of-the-art methods. We also show that employing existing LLIE methods trained on our benchmark as a pre-processing step significantly improves the performance of downstream tasks, e.g., face detection in low-light conditions. The source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/TaoWangzj/LLFormer.
Role of Cybersecurity and Blockchain in Battlefield of Things
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

The Internet of Things is an essential component in the growth of an ecosystem that enables quick and precise judgments to be made for communication on the battleground. The usage of the battlefield of things (BoT) is, however, subject to several restrictions for a variety of reasons. There is a potential for instances of replay, data manipulation, breaches of privacy, and other similar occurrences. As a direct result of this, the implementation of a security mechanism to protect the communication that occurs within BoT has turned into an absolute requirement. To this aim, we propose a blockchain-based solution that is both safe and private for use in communications inside the BoT ecosystem. In addition, research is conducted on the benefits of integrating blockchain technology and cybersecurity into BoT application implementations. This work elaborates on the importance of integrating cybersecurity and blockchain-based tools, techniques and methodologies for BoT.
Code Vectorization and Sequence of Accesses Strategies for Monolith Microservices Identification
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

Migrating a monolith application into a microservices architecture can benefit from automation methods, which speed up the migration and improve the decomposition results. One of the current approaches that guide software architects on the migration is to group monolith domain entities into microservices, using the sequences of accesses of the monolith functionalities to the domain entities. In this paper, we enrich the sequence of accesses solution by applying code vectorization to the monolith, using the \textit{Code2Vec} neural network model. We apply \textit{Code2Vec} to vectorize the monolith functionalities. We propose two strategies to represent a functionality, one by aggregating its call graph methods vectors, and the other by extending the sequence of accesses approach with vectorization of the accessed entities. To evaluate these strategies, we compare the proposed strategies with the sequence of accesses strategy and an existing approach that uses class vectorization. We run all these strategies over a large set of codebases, and then compare the results of their decompositions in terms of cohesion, coupling, and complexity.
Evaluation for Change
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Evaluation is the central means for assessing, understanding, and communicating about NLP models. In this position paper, we argue evaluation should be more than that: it is a force for driving change, carrying a sociological and political character beyond its technical dimensions. As a force, evaluation's power arises from its adoption: under our view, evaluation succeeds when it achieves the desired change in the field. Further, by framing evaluation as a force, we consider how it competes with other forces. Under our analysis, we conjecture that the current trajectory of NLP suggests evaluation's power is waning, in spite of its potential for realizing more pluralistic ambitions in the field. We conclude by discussing the legitimacy of this power, who acquires this power and how it distributes. Ultimately, we hope the research community will more aggressively harness evaluation for change.
Co-clustering based exploratory analysis of mixed-type data tables
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Co-clustering is a class of unsupervised data analysis techniques that extract the existing underlying dependency structure between the instances and variables of a data table as homogeneous blocks. Most of those techniques are limited to variables of the same type. In this paper, we propose a mixed data co-clustering method based on a two-step methodology. In the first step, all the variables are binarized according to a number of bins chosen by the analyst, by equal frequency discretization in the numerical case, or keeping the most frequent values in the categorical case. The second step applies a co-clustering to the instances and the binary variables, leading to groups of instances and groups of variable parts. We apply this methodology on several data sets and compare with the results of a Multiple Correspondence Analysis applied to the same data.