OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
An Efficient Approach for Reviewing Security-Related Aspects in Agile Requirements Specifications of Web Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2020
Year: 2020

Defects in requirements specifications can have severe consequences during the software development lifecycle. Some of them may result in poor product quality and/or time and budget overruns due to incorrect or missing quality characteristics, such as security. This characteristic requires special attention in web applications because they have become a target for manipulating sensible data. Several concerns make security difficult to deal with. For instance, security requirements are often misunderstood and improperly specified due to lack of security expertise and emphasis on security during early stages of software development. This often leads to unspecified or ill-defined security-related aspects. These concerns become even more challenging in agile contexts, where lightweight documentation is typically produced. To tackle this problem, we designed an approach for reviewing security-related aspects in agile requirements specifications of web applications. Our proposal considers user stories and security specifications as inputs and relates those user stories to security properties via Natural Language Processing. Based on the related security properties, our approach identifies high-level security requirements from the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) to be verified, and generates a reading technique to support reviewers in detecting defects. We evaluate our approach via three experiment trials conducted with 56 novice software engineers, measuring effectiveness, efficiency, usefulness, and ease of use. We compare our approach against using: (1) the OWASP high-level security requirements, and (2) a perspective-based approach as proposed in contemporary state of the art. The results strengthen our confidence that using our approach has a positive impact (with large effect size) on the performance of inspectors in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.
Finding Diverse Trees, Paths, and More
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2020
Year: 2020

Mathematical modeling is a standard approach to solve many real-world problems and {\em diversity} of solutions is an important issue, emerging in applying solutions obtained from mathematical models to real-world problems. Many studies have been devoted to finding diverse solutions. Baste et al. (Algorithms 2019, IJCAI 2020) recently initiated the study of computing diverse solutions of combinatorial problems from the perspective of fixed-parameter tractability. They considered problems of finding $r$ solutions that maximize some diversity measures (the minimum or sum of the pairwise Hamming distances among them) and gave some fixed-parameter tractable algorithms for the diverse version of several well-known problems, such as {\sc Vertex Cover}, {\sc Feedback Vertex Set}, {\sc $d$-Hitting Set}, and problems on bounded-treewidth graphs. In this work, we investigate the (fixed-parameter) tractability of problems of finding diverse spanning trees, paths, and several subgraphs. In particular, we show that, given a graph $G$ and an integer $r$, the problem of computing $r$ spanning trees of $G$ maximizing the sum of the pairwise Hamming distances among them can be solved in polynomial time. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first polynomial-time solvable case for finding diverse solutions of unbounded size.
Efficient Quantification of Profile Matching Risk in Social Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

Anonymous data sharing has been becoming more challenging in today's interconnected digital world, especially for individuals that have both anonymous and identified online activities. The most prominent example of such data sharing platforms today are online social networks (OSNs). Many individuals have multiple profiles in different OSNs, including anonymous and identified ones (depending on the nature of the OSN). Here, the privacy threat is profile matching: if an attacker links anonymous profiles of individuals to their real identities, it can obtain privacy-sensitive information which may have serious consequences, such as discrimination or blackmailing. Therefore, it is very important to quantify and show to the OSN users the extent of this privacy risk. Existing attempts to model profile matching in OSNs are inadequate and computationally inefficient for real-time risk quantification. Thus, in this work, we develop algorithms to efficiently model and quantify profile matching attacks in OSNs as a step towards real-time privacy risk quantification. For this, we model the profile matching problem using a graph and develop a belief propagation (BP)-based algorithm to solve this problem in a significantly more efficient and accurate way compared to the state-of-the-art. We evaluate the proposed framework on three real-life datasets (including data from four different social networks) and show how users' profiles in different OSNs can be matched efficiently and with high probability. We show that the proposed model generation has linear complexity in terms of number of user pairs, which is significantly more efficient than the state-of-the-art (which has cubic complexity). Furthermore, it provides comparable accuracy, precision, and recall compared to state-of-the-art.
ERNIE at SemEval-2020 Task 10: Learning Word Emphasis Selection by Pre-trained Language Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

This paper describes the system designed by ERNIE Team which achieved the first place in SemEval-2020 Task 10: Emphasis Selection For Written Text in Visual Media. Given a sentence, we are asked to find out the most important words as the suggestion for automated design. We leverage the unsupervised pre-training model and finetune these models on our task. After our investigation, we found that the following models achieved an excellent performance in this task: ERNIE 2.0, XLM-ROBERTA, ROBERTA and ALBERT. We combine a pointwise regression loss and a pairwise ranking loss which is more close to the final M atchm metric to finetune our models. And we also find that additional feature engineering and data augmentation can help improve the performance. Our best model achieves the highest score of 0.823 and ranks first for all kinds of metrics
Latency and Throughput Optimization in Modern Networks: A Comprehensive Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

Modern applications are highly sensitive to communication delays and throughput. This paper surveys major attempts on reducing latency and increasing the throughput. These methods are surveyed on different networks and surroundings such as wired networks, wireless networks, application layer transport control, Remote Direct Memory Access, and machine learning based transport control.
Highly Accurate CNN Inference Using Approximate Activation Functions over Homomorphic Encryption
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

In the big data era, cloud-based machine learning as a service (MLaaS) has attracted considerable attention. However, when handling sensitive data, such as financial and medical data, a privacy issue emerges, because the cloud server can access clients' raw data. A common method of handling sensitive data in the cloud uses homomorphic encryption, which allows computation over encrypted data without decryption. Previous research usually adopted a low-degree polynomial mapping function, such as the square function, for data classification. However, this technique results in low classification accuracy. In this study, we seek to improve the classification accuracy for inference processing in a convolutional neural network (CNN) while using homomorphic encryption. We adopt an activation function that approximates Google's Swish activation function while using a fourth-order polynomial. We also adopt batch normalization to normalize the inputs for the Swish function to fit the input range to minimize the error. We implemented CNN inference labeling over homomorphic encryption using the Microsoft's Simple Encrypted Arithmetic Library for the Cheon-Kim-Kim-Song (CKKS) scheme. The experimental evaluations confirmed classification accuracies of 99.22% and 80.48% for MNIST and CIFAR-10, respectively, which entails 0.04% and 4.11% improvements, respectively, over previous methods.
Improving Engagement of Animated Visualization with Visual Foreshadowing
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

Animated visualization is becoming increasingly popular as a compelling way to illustrate changes in time series data. However, maintaining the viewer's focus throughout the entire animation is difficult because of its time-consuming nature. Viewers are likely to become bored and distracted during the ever-changing animated visualization. Informed by the role of foreshadowing that builds the expectation in film and literature, we introduce visual foreshadowing to improve the engagement of animated visualizations. In specific, we propose designs of visual foreshadowing that engage the audience while watching the animation. To demonstrate our approach, we built a proof-of-concept animated visualization authoring tool that incorporates visual foreshadowing techniques with various styles. Our user study indicates the effectiveness of our foreshadowing techniques on improving engagement for animated visualization.
Understanding Compositional Structures in Art Historical Images using Pose and Gaze Priors
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Image compositions as a tool for analysis of artworks is of extreme significance for art historians. These compositions are useful in analyzing the interactions in an image to study artists and their artworks. Max Imdahl in his work called Ikonik, along with other prominent art historians of the 20th century, underlined the aesthetic and semantic importance of the structural composition of an image. Understanding underlying compositional structures within images is challenging and a time consuming task. Generating these structures automatically using computer vision techniques (1) can help art historians towards their sophisticated analysis by saving lot of time; providing an overview and access to huge image repositories and (2) also provide an important step towards an understanding of man made imagery by machines. In this work, we attempt to automate this process using the existing state of the art machine learning techniques, without involving any form of training. Our approach, inspired by Max Imdahl's pioneering work, focuses on two central themes of image composition: (a) detection of action regions and action lines of the artwork; and (b) pose-based segmentation of foreground and background. Currently, our approach works for artworks comprising of protagonists (persons) in an image. In order to validate our approach qualitatively and quantitatively, we conduct a user study involving experts and non-experts. The outcome of the study highly correlates with our approach and also demonstrates its domain-agnostic capability. We have open-sourced the code at https://github.com/image-compostion-canvas-group/image-compostion-canvas.
Trajectory Based Podcast Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Podcast recommendation is a growing area of research that presents new challenges and opportunities. Individuals interact with podcasts in a way that is distinct from most other media; and primary to our concerns is distinct from music consumption. We show that successful and consistent recommendations can be made by viewing users as moving through the podcast library sequentially. Recommendations for future podcasts are then made using the trajectory taken from their sequential behavior. Our experiments provide evidence that user behavior is confined to local trends, and that listening patterns tend to be found over short sequences of similar types of shows. Ultimately, our approach gives a450%increase in effectiveness over a collaborative filtering baseline.
Procedural Generation of STEM Quizzes
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

Electronic quizzes are used extensively for summative and formative assessment. Current Learning Management Systems (LMS) allow instructors to create quizzes through a Graphical User Interface. Despite having a smooth learning curve, question generation/editing process with such interfaces is often slow and the creation of question variants is mostly limited to random parameters. In this paper we argue that procedural question generation greatly facilitates the task of creating varied, formative, up-to-date, adaptive question banks for STEM quizzes. We present and evaluate a proof-of-concept Python API for script-based question generation, and propose different question design patterns that greatly facilitate question authoring. The API supports questions including mathematical formulas, dynamically generated images and videos, as well as interactive content such as 3D model viewers. Output questions can be imported in major LMS. For basic usage, the required programming skills are minimal. More advanced uses do require some programming knowledge, but at a level that is common in STEM instructors. A side advantage of our system is that the question bank is actually embedded in Python code, making collaboration, version control, and maintenance tasks very easy. We demonstrate the benefits of script-based generation over traditional GUI-based approaches, in terms of question richness, authoring speed and content re-usability.
Metis: Multi-Agent Based Crisis Simulation System
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2020
Year: 2020

With the advent of the computational technologies (Graphics Processing Units - GPUs) and Machine Learning, the research domain of crowd simulation for crisis management has flourished. Along with the new techniques and methodologies that have been proposed all those years, aiming to increase the realism of crowd simulation, several crisis simulation systems/tools have been developed, but most of them focus on special cases without providing users the ability to adapt them based on their needs. Towards these directions, in this paper, we introduce a novel multi-agent-based crisis simulation system for indoor cases. The main advantage of the system is its ease of use feature, focusing on non-expert users (users with little to no programming skills) that can exploit its capabilities a, adapt the entire environment based on their needs (Case studies) and set up building evacuation planning experiments with some of the most popular Reinforcement Learning algorithms. Simply put, the system's features focus on dynamic environment design and crisis management, interconnection with popular Reinforcement Learning libraries, agents with different characteristics (behaviors), fire propagation parameterization, realistic physics based on popular game engine, GPU-accelerated agents training and simulation end conditions. A case study exploiting a popular reinforcement learning algorithm, for training of the agents, presents the dynamics and the capabilities of the proposed systems and the paper is concluded with the highlights of the system and some future directions.
Analyzing Cooperative Monitoring and Dissemination of Critical Mobile Events by VANETs
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

The treatment of mobile and simultaneous critical urban events requires effective actions by the appropriate authorities. Additionally it implies communication challenges in the speed and accuracy of their occurrence by the entities, as well as dealing with the dynamics and speed in these environments. Cooperative solutions with shared resources that address these challenges become a real option in helping to handle these events. This paper presents an evaluation of dynamic monitoring and collaborative dissemination supported by vehicular groups. It aims to analyze the impact of multiple mobile and fixed events in an urban environment on information propagation, considering barriers imposed by the events and the environment. Differently from other studies in the literature, this work takes into account both fixed and mobile events, as well as simultaneous events. NS3 results show that the evaluated system monitored at least 87% and 51.5% of the time for mobile and fixed events respectively, and delivered information over 77% and 50% of the time for those events, with average delay remains close to 0.3s in most scenarios. The results also reveal that a more continuous monitoring of the mobile events is highly dependent on the orientation of the vehicles. The main contribution of this work consists of the performance analysis of both fixed and mobile simultaneous events to support studies on how moving events impact on the dissemination and delivery of real-time data, and thus encouraging the development of new data dissemination protocols for VANETs.
Anticipatory Human-Robot Path Planning for Search and Rescue
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

In this work, our goal is to extend the existing search and rescue paradigm by allowing teams of autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to collaborate effectively with human searchers on the ground. We derive a framework that includes a simulated lost person behavior model, as well as a human searcher behavior model that is informed by data collected from past search tasks. These models are used together to create a probabilistic heatmap of the lost person's position and anticipated searcher trajectories. We then use Gaussian processes with a Gibbs' kernel to accurately model a limited field-of-view (FOV) sensor, e.g., thermal cameras, from which we derive a risk metric that drives UAV path optimization. Our framework finally computes a set of search paths for a team of UAVs to autonomously complement human searchers' efforts.
GPA: A GPU Performance Advisor Based on Instruction Sampling
Venue: arXiv cs.PF 2020
Year: 2020

Developing efficient GPU kernels can be difficult because of the complexity of GPU architectures and programming models. Existing performance tools only provide coarse-grained suggestions at the kernel level, if any. In this paper, we describe GPA, a performance advisor for NVIDIA GPUs that suggests potential code optimization opportunities at a hierarchy of levels, including individual lines, loops, and functions. To relieve users of the burden of interpreting performance counters and analyzing bottlenecks, GPA uses data flow analysis to approximately attribute measured instruction stalls to their root causes and uses information about a program's structure and the GPU to match inefficiency patterns with suggestions for optimization. To quantify each suggestion's potential benefits, we developed PC sampling-based performance models to estimate its speedup. Our experiments with benchmarks and applications show that GPA provides an insightful report to guide performance optimization. Using GPA, we obtained speedups on a Volta V100 GPU ranging from 1.01$\times$ to 3.53$\times$, with a geometric mean of 1.22$\times$.
Going Deep: Using deep learning techniques with simplified mathematical models against XOR BR and TBR PUFs (Attacks and Countermeasures)
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

This paper contributes to the study of PUFs vulnerability against modeling attacks by evaluating the security of XOR BR PUFs, XOR TBR PUFs, and obfuscated architectures of XOR BR PUF using a simplified mathematical model and deep learning (DL) techniques. Obtained results show that DL modeling attacks could easily break the security of 4-input XOR BR PUFs and 4-input XOR TBR PUFs with modeling accuracy $\sim$ 99%. Similar attacks were executed using single-layer neural networks (NN) and support vector machines (SVM) with polynomial kernel and the obtained results showed that single NNs failed to break the PUF security. Furthermore, SVM results confirmed the same modeling accuracy reported in previous research ($\sim$ 50%). For the first time, this research empirically shows that DL networks can be used as powerful modeling techniques against these complex PUF architectures for which previous conventional machine learning techniques had failed. Furthermore, a detailed scalability analysis is conducted on the DL networks with respect to PUFs' stage size and complexity. The analysis shows that the number of layers and hidden neurons inside every layer has a linear relationship with PUFs' stage size, which agrees with the theoretical findings in deep learning. Consequently, A new obfuscated architecture is introduced as a first step to counter DL modeling attacks and it showed significant resistance against such attacks (16% - 40% less accuracy). This research provides an important step towards prioritizing the efforts to introduce new PUF architectures that are more secure and invulnerable to modeling attacks. Moreover, it triggers future discussions on the removal of influential bits and the level of obfuscation needed to confirm that a specific PUF architecture is resistant against powerful DL modeling attacks.
Adaptive driver-automation shared steering control via forearm surface electromyography measurement
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

Shared steering control has been developed to reduce driver workload while keeping the driver in the control loop. A driver could integrate visual sensory information from the road ahead and haptic sensory information from the steering wheel to achieve better driving performance. Previous studies suggest that, compared with adaptive automation authority, fixed automation authority is not always appropriate with respect to human factors. This paper focuses on designing an adaptive shared steering control system via sEMG (surface electromyography) measurement from the forearm of the driver, and evaluates the effect of the system on driver behavior during a double lane change task. The shared steering control was achieved through a haptic guidance system which provided active assistance torque on the steering wheel. Ten subjects participated in a high-fidelity driving simulator experiment. Two types of adaptive algorithms were investigated: haptic guidance decreases when driver grip strength increases (HG-Decrease), and haptic guidance increases when driver grip strength increases (HG-Increase). These two algorithms were compared to manual driving and two levels of fixed authority haptic guidance, for a total of five experimental conditions. Evaluation of the driving systems was based on two sets of dependent variables: objective measures of driver behavior and subjective measures of driver workload. The results indicate that the adaptive authority of HG-Decrease yielded lower driver workload and reduced the lane departure risk compared to manual driving and fixed authority haptic guidance.