OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Recommending Insurance products by using Users' Sentiments
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

In today's tech-savvy world every industry is trying to formulate methods for recommending products by combining several techniques and algorithms to form a pool that would bring forward the most enhanced models for making the predictions. Building on these lines is our paper focused on the application of sentiment analysis for recommendation in the insurance domain. We tried building the following Machine Learning models namely, Logistic Regression, Multinomial Naive Bayes, and the mighty Random Forest for analyzing the polarity of a given feedback line given by a customer. Then we used this polarity along with other attributes like Age, Gender, Locality, Income, and the list of other products already purchased by our existing customers as input for our recommendation model. Then we matched the polarity score along with the user's profiles and generated the list of insurance products to be recommended in descending order. Despite our model's simplicity and the lack of the key data sets, the results seemed very logical and realistic. So, by developing the model with more enhanced methods and with access to better and true data gathered from an insurance industry may be the sector could be very well benefitted from the amalgamation of sentiment analysis with a recommendation.
MINT -- Mainstream and Independent News Text Corpus
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Most corpora approach misinformation as a binary problem, classifying texts as real or fake. However, they fail to consider the diversity of existing textual genres and types, which present different properties usually associated with credibility. To address this problem, we created MINT, a comprehensive corpus of news articles collected from mainstream and independent Portuguese media sources, over a full year period. MINT includes five categories of content: hard news, opinion articles, soft news, satirical news, and conspiracy theories. This paper presents a set of linguistic metrics for characterization of the articles in each category, based on the analysis of an annotation initiative performed by online readers. The results show that (i) conspiracy theories and opinion articles present similar levels of subjectivity, and make use of fallacious arguments; (ii) irony and sarcasm are not only prevalent in satirical news, but also in conspiracy and opinion news articles; and (iii) hard news differ from soft news by resorting to more sources of information, and presenting a higher degree of objectivity.
A simple lower bound for ARRIVAL
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2021
Year: 2021

The ARRIVIAL problem introduced by Dohrau, Gärtner, Kohler, Matoušek and Welzl concerns a train moving on a directed graph proceeding along outward edges according to the position of 'switches' at each vertex, which in turn are toggled whenever the train passes through them. The problem asks whether the train every reaches a designated destination vertex. It is known that ARRIVAL is contained in UP $\cap$ coUP, while the previously best published lower bound is that it is NL-hard. In this note we provide a simple reduction to the $\mathsf{DIGICOMP}_\mathsf{EXP}$ problem considered by Aaronson. It follows in particular that ARRIVAL is both CC-hard and PL-hard.
An ML-style Record Calculus with Extensible Records
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2021
Year: 2021

In this work, we develop a polymorphic record calculus with extensible records. Extensible records are records that can have new fields added to them, or preexisting fields removed from them. We also develop a static type system for this calculus and a sound and complete type inference algorithm. Most ML-style polymorphic record calculi that support extensible records are based on row variables. We present an alternative construction based on the polymorphic record calculus developed by Ohori. Ohori based his polymorphic record calculus on the idea of kind restrictions. This allowed him to express polymorphic operations on records such as field selection and modification. With the addition of extensible types, we were able to extend Ohori's original calculus with other powerful operations on records such as field addition and removal.
A Dataset for Answering Time-Sensitive Questions
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Time is an important dimension in our physical world. Lots of facts can evolve with respect to time. For example, the U.S. President might change every four years. Therefore, it is important to consider the time dimension and empower the existing QA models to reason over time. However, the existing QA datasets contain rather few time-sensitive questions, hence not suitable for diagnosing or benchmarking the model's temporal reasoning capability. In order to promote research in this direction, we propose to construct a time-sensitive QA dataset. The dataset is constructed by 1) mining time-evolving facts from WikiData and aligning them to their corresponding Wikipedia page, 2) employing crowd workers to verify and calibrate these noisy facts, 3) generating question-answer pairs based on the annotated time-sensitive facts. Our dataset poses challenges in the aspect of both temporal understanding and temporal reasoning. We evaluate different SoTA long-document QA systems like BigBird and FiD on our dataset. The best-performing model FiD can only achieve 46\% accuracy, still far behind the human performance of 87\%. We demonstrate that these models are still lacking the ability to perform consistent temporal reasoning. Therefore, we believe that our dataset could serve as a benchmark to develop NLP models more sensitive to temporal shifts. The dataset and code are released in~\url{https://github.com/wenhuchen/Time-Sensitive-QA}.
Augmenting Decompiler Output with Learned Variable Names and Types
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

A common tool used by security professionals for reverse-engineering binaries found in the wild is the decompiler. A decompiler attempts to reverse compilation, transforming a binary to a higher-level language such as C. High-level languages ease reasoning about programs by providing useful abstractions such as loops, typed variables, and comments, but these abstractions are lost during compilation. Decompilers are able to deterministically reconstruct structural properties of code, but comments, variable names, and custom variable types are technically impossible to recover. In this paper we present DIRTY (DecompIled variable ReTYper), a novel technique for improving the quality of decompiler output that automatically generates meaningful variable names and types. Empirical evaluation on a novel dataset of C code mined from GitHub shows that DIRTY outperforms prior work approaches by a sizable margin, recovering the original names written by developers 66.4% of the time and the original types 75.8% of the time.
Time Transitive Functions for Zero Knowledge Proofs
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Verifiable delay functions have found a lot of applications in blockchain technology in recent times. Continuous verifiable delay functions are an improvement over the basic notion of VDFs with recursive capabilities. We are proposing the application of VDF for constructing more space time-efficient provers and simulators required for the iterative non-interactive zero-knowledge systems.
Planning with Incomplete Information in Quantified Answer Set Programming
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

We present a general approach to planning with incomplete information in Answer Set Programming (ASP). More precisely, we consider the problems of conformant and conditional planning with sensing actions and assumptions. We represent planning problems using a simple formalism where logic programs describe the transition function between states, the initial states and the goal states. For solving planning problems, we use Quantified Answer Set Programming (QASP), an extension of ASP with existential and universal quantifiers over atoms that is analogous to Quantified Boolean Formulas (QBFs). We define the language of quantified logic programs and use it to represent the solutions to different variants of conformant and conditional planning. On the practical side, we present a translation-based QASP solver that converts quantified logic programs into QBFs and then executes a QBF solver, and we evaluate experimentally the approach on conformant and conditional planning benchmarks. Under consideration for acceptance in TPLP.
FrankMocap: A Monocular 3D Whole-Body Pose Estimation System via Regression and Integration
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Most existing monocular 3D pose estimation approaches only focus on a single body part, neglecting the fact that the essential nuance of human motion is conveyed through a concert of subtle movements of face, hands, and body. In this paper, we present FrankMocap, a fast and accurate whole-body 3D pose estimation system that can produce 3D face, hands, and body simultaneously from in-the-wild monocular images. The core idea of FrankMocap is its modular design: We first run 3D pose regression methods for face, hands, and body independently, followed by composing the regression outputs via an integration module. The separate regression modules allow us to take full advantage of their state-of-the-art performances without compromising the original accuracy and reliability in practice. We develop three different integration modules that trade off between latency and accuracy. All of them are capable of providing simple yet effective solutions to unify the separate outputs into seamless whole-body pose estimation results. We quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrate that our modularized system outperforms both the optimization-based and end-to-end methods of estimating whole-body pose.
Focusing on Persons: Colorizing Old Images Learning from Modern Historical Movies
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In industry, there exist plenty of scenarios where old gray photos need to be automatically colored, such as video sites and archives. In this paper, we present the HistoryNet focusing on historical person's diverse high fidelity clothing colorization based on fine grained semantic understanding and prior. Colorization of historical persons is realistic and practical, however, existing methods do not perform well in the regards. In this paper, a HistoryNet including three parts, namely, classification, fine grained semantic parsing and colorization, is proposed. Classification sub-module supplies classifying of images according to the eras, nationalities and garment types; Parsing sub-network supplies the semantic for person contours, clothing and background in the image to achieve more accurate colorization of clothes and persons and prevent color overflow. In the training process, we integrate classification and semantic parsing features into the coloring generation network to improve colorization. Through the design of classification and parsing subnetwork, the accuracy of image colorization can be improved and the boundary of each part of image can be more clearly. Moreover, we also propose a novel Modern Historical Movies Dataset (MHMD) containing 1,353,166 images and 42 labels of eras, nationalities, and garment types for automatic colorization from 147 historical movies or TV series made in modern time. Various quantitative and qualitative comparisons demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art colorization methods, especially on military uniforms, which has correct colors according to the historical literatures.
Data Generation for Learning to Grasp in a Bin-picking Scenario
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

The rise of deep learning has greatly transformed the pipeline of robotic grasping from model-based approach to data-driven stream. Along this line, a large scale of grasping data either collected from simulation or from real world examples become extremely important. In this paper, we present our recent work on data generation in simulation for a bin-picking scene. 77 objects from the YCB object data sets are used to generate the dataset with PyBullet, where different environment conditions are taken into account including lighting, camera pose, sensor noise and so on. In all, 100K data samples are collected in terms of ground truth segmentation, RGB, 6D pose and point cloud. All the data examples including the source code are made available online.
Security Assessment Rating Framework for Enterprises using MITRE ATT&CK Matrix
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Threats targeting cyberspace are becoming more prominent and intelligent day by day. This inherently leads to a dire demand for continuous security validation and testing. Using this paper, we aim to provide a holistic and precise security analysis rating framework for organizations that increases the overall coherency of the outcomes of such testing. This scorecard is based on the security assessment performed following the globally accessible knowledge base of adversary tactics and techniques called the MITRE ATTACK matrix. The scorecard for an evaluation is generated by ingesting the security testing results into our framework, which provides an organizations overall risk assessment rating and the risk related to each of the different tactics from the ATTACK matrix.
Data Type Inference for Logic Programming
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper we present a new static data type inference algorithm for logic programming. Without the need of declaring types for predicates, our algorithm is able to automatically assign types to predicates which, in most cases, correspond to the data types processed by their intended meaning. The algorithm is also able to infer types given data type definitions similar to data definitions in Haskell and, in this case, the inferred types are more informative in general. We present the type inference algorithm, prove some properties and finally, we evaluate our approach on example programs that deal with different data structures.
Unravelling the Effect of Image Distortions for Biased Prediction of Pre-trained Face Recognition Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Identifying and mitigating bias in deep learning algorithms has gained significant popularity in the past few years due to its impact on the society. Researchers argue that models trained on balanced datasets with good representation provide equal and unbiased performance across subgroups. However, \textit{can seemingly unbiased pre-trained model become biased when input data undergoes certain distortions?} For the first time, we attempt to answer this question in the context of face recognition. We provide a systematic analysis to evaluate the performance of four state-of-the-art deep face recognition models in the presence of image distortions across different \textit{gender} and \textit{race} subgroups. We have observed that image distortions have a relationship with the performance gap of the model across different subgroups.
Few-Sample Named Entity Recognition for Security Vulnerability Reports by Fine-Tuning Pre-Trained Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Public security vulnerability reports (e.g., CVE reports) play an important role in the maintenance of computer and network systems. Security companies and administrators rely on information from these reports to prioritize tasks on developing and deploying patches to their customers. Since these reports are unstructured texts, automatic information extraction (IE) can help scale up the processing by converting the unstructured reports to structured forms, e.g., software names and versions and vulnerability types. Existing works on automated IE for security vulnerability reports often rely on a large number of labeled training samples. However, creating massive labeled training set is both expensive and time consuming. In this work, for the first time, we propose to investigate this problem where only a small number of labeled training samples are available. In particular, we investigate the performance of fine-tuning several state-of-the-art pre-trained language models on our small training dataset. The results show that with pre-trained language models and carefully tuned hyperparameters, we have reached or slightly outperformed the state-of-the-art system on this task. Consistent with previous two-step process of first fine-tuning on main category and then transfer learning to others as in [7], if otherwise following our proposed approach, the number of required labeled samples substantially decrease in both stages: 90% reduction in fine-tuning from 5758 to 576,and 88.8% reduction in transfer learning with 64 labeled samples per category. Our experiments thus demonstrate the effectiveness of few-sample learning on NER for security vulnerability report. This result opens up multiple research opportunities for few-sample learning for security vulnerability reports, which is discussed in the paper. Code: https://github.com/guanqun-yang/FewVulnerability.
Offline-Online Reinforcement Learning for Energy Pricing in Office Demand Response: Lowering Energy and Data Costs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Our team is proposing to run a full-scale energy demand response experiment in an office building. Although this is an exciting endeavor which will provide value to the community, collecting training data for the reinforcement learning agent is costly and will be limited. In this work, we examine how offline training can be leveraged to minimize data costs (accelerate convergence) and program implementation costs. We present two approaches to doing so: pretraining our model to warm start the experiment with simulated tasks, and using a planning model trained to simulate the real world's rewards to the agent. We present results that demonstrate the utility of offline reinforcement learning to efficient price-setting in the energy demand response problem.
Unsupervised Disentanglement without Autoencoding: Pitfalls and Future Directions
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Disentangled visual representations have largely been studied with generative models such as Variational AutoEncoders (VAEs). While prior work has focused on generative methods for disentangled representation learning, these approaches do not scale to large datasets due to current limitations of generative models. Instead, we explore regularization methods with contrastive learning, which could result in disentangled representations that are powerful enough for large scale datasets and downstream applications. However, we find that unsupervised disentanglement is difficult to achieve due to optimization and initialization sensitivity, with trade-offs in task performance. We evaluate disentanglement with downstream tasks, analyze the benefits and disadvantages of each regularization used, and discuss future directions.
B-Splines
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

BSplines are one of the most promising curves in computer graphics. They are blessed with some superior geometric properties which make them an ideal candidate for several applications in computer aided design industry. In this article, some basic properties of B-Spline curves are presented. Two significant B-Spline properties viz convex hull property and repeated points effects are discussed. The BSplines computation in computational devices is also illustrated. An industry application based on image processing where B-Spline curve reconstructs the 3D surfaces for CT image datasets of inner organs further highlights the strength of these curves
Adaptive Selection of Informative Path Planning Strategies via Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

In our previous work, we designed a systematic policy to prioritize sampling locations to lead significant accuracy improvement in spatial interpolation by using the prediction uncertainty of Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) as "attraction force" to deployed robots in path planning. Although the integration with Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) solvers was also shown to produce relatively short travel distance, we here hypothesise several factors that could decrease the overall prediction precision as well because sub-optimal locations may eventually be included in their paths. To address this issue, in this paper, we first explore "local planning" approaches adopting various spatial ranges within which next sampling locations are prioritized to investigate their effects on the prediction performance as well as incurred travel distance. Also, Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based high-level controllers are trained to adaptively produce blended plans from a particular set of local planners to inherit unique strengths from that selection depending on latest prediction states. Our experiments on use cases of temperature monitoring robots demonstrate that the dynamic mixtures of planners can not only generate sophisticated, informative plans that a single planner could not create alone but also ensure significantly reduced travel distances at no cost of prediction reliability without any assist of additional modules for shortest path calculation.
A Survey on GAN Acceleration Using Memory Compression Technique
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Since its invention, Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have shown outstanding results in many applications. Generative Adversarial Networks are powerful yet, resource-hungry deep-learning models. Their main difference from ordinary deep learning models is the nature of their output. For example, GAN output can be a whole image versus other models detecting objects or classifying images. Thus, the architecture and numeric precision of the network affect the quality and speed of the solution. Hence, accelerating GANs is pivotal. Accelerating GANs can be classified into three main tracks: (1) Memory compression, (2) Computation optimization, and (3) Data-flow optimization. Because data transfer is the main source of energy usage, memory compression leads to the most savings. Thus, in this paper, we survey memory compression techniques for CNN-Based GANs. Additionally, the paper summarizes opportunities and challenges in GANs acceleration and suggests open research problems to be further investigated.
Spatial Temporal Analysis of 40,000,000,000,000 Internet Darkspace Packets
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2021
Year: 2021

The Internet has never been more important to our society, and understanding the behavior of the Internet is essential. The Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) Telescope observes a continuous stream of packets from an unsolicited darkspace representing 1/256 of the Internet. During 2019 and 2020 over 40,000,000,000,000 unique packets were collected representing the largest ever assembled public corpus of Internet traffic. Using the combined resources of the Supercomputing Centers at UC San Diego, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and MIT, the spatial temporal structure of anonymized source-destination pairs from the CAIDA Telescope data has been analyzed with GraphBLAS hierarchical hypersparse matrices. These analyses provide unique insight on this unsolicited Internet darkspace traffic with the discovery of many previously unseen scaling relations. The data show a significant sustained increase in unsolicited traffic corresponding to the start of the COVID19 pandemic, but relatively little change in the underlying scaling relations associated with unique sources, source fan-outs, unique links, destination fan-ins, and unique destinations. This work provides a demonstration of the practical feasibility and benefit of the safe collection and analysis of significant quantities of anonymized Internet traffic.