OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Distributed Energy Management and Demand Response in Smart Grids: A Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2022
Year: 2022

This paper presents a multi-agent Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) framework for autonomous control and integration of renewable energy resources into smart power grid systems. In particular, the proposed framework jointly considers demand response (DR) and distributed energy management (DEM) for residential end-users. DR has a widely recognized potential for improving power grid stability and reliability, while at the same time reducing end-users energy bills. However, the conventional DR techniques come with several shortcomings, such as the inability to handle operational uncertainties while incurring end-user disutility, which prevents widespread adoption in real-world applications. The proposed framework addresses these shortcomings by implementing DR and DEM based on real-time pricing strategy that is achieved using deep reinforcement learning. Furthermore, this framework enables the power grid service provider to leverage distributed energy resources (i.e., PV rooftop panels and battery storage) as dispatchable assets to support the smart grid during peak hours, thus achieving management of distributed energy resources. Simulation results based on the Deep Q-Network (DQN) demonstrate significant improvements of the 24-hour accumulative profit for both prosumers and the power grid service provider, as well as major reductions in the utilization of the power grid reserve generators.
Peano: Learning Formal Mathematical Reasoning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

General mathematical reasoning is computationally undecidable, but humans routinely solve new problems. Moreover, discoveries developed over centuries are taught to subsequent generations quickly. What structure enables this, and how might that inform automated mathematical reasoning? We posit that central to both puzzles is the structure of procedural abstractions underlying mathematics. We explore this idea in a case study on 5 sections of beginning algebra on the Khan Academy platform. To define a computational foundation, we introduce Peano, a theorem-proving environment where the set of valid actions at any point is finite. We use Peano to formalize introductory algebra problems and axioms, obtaining well-defined search problems. We observe existing reinforcement learning methods for symbolic reasoning to be insufficient to solve harder problems. Adding the ability to induce reusable abstractions ("tactics") from its own solutions allows an agent to make steady progress, solving all problems. Furthermore, these abstractions induce an order to the problems, seen at random during training. The recovered order has significant agreement with the expert-designed Khan Academy curriculum, and second-generation agents trained on the recovered curriculum learn significantly faster. These results illustrate the synergistic role of abstractions and curricula in the cultural transmission of mathematics.
Simultaneous Estimation of Hand Configurations and Finger Joint Angles using Forearm Ultrasound
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

With the advancement in computing and robotics, it is necessary to develop fluent and intuitive methods for interacting with digital systems, augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR) interfaces, and physical robotic systems. Hand motion recognition is widely used to enable these interactions. Hand configuration classification and MCP joint angle detection is important for a comprehensive reconstruction of hand motion. sEMG and other technologies have been used for the detection of hand motions. Forearm ultrasound images provide a musculoskeletal visualization that can be used to understand hand motion. Recent work has shown that these ultrasound images can be classified using machine learning to estimate discrete hand configurations. Estimating both hand configuration and MCP joint angles based on forearm ultrasound has not been addressed in the literature. In this paper, we propose a CNN based deep learning pipeline for predicting the MCP joint angles. The results for the hand configuration classification were compared by using different machine learning algorithms. SVC with different kernels, MLP, and the proposed CNN have been used to classify the ultrasound images into 11 hand configurations based on activities of daily living. Forearm ultrasound images were acquired from 6 subjects instructed to move their hands according to predefined hand configurations. Motion capture data was acquired to get the finger angles corresponding to the hand movements at different speeds. Average classification accuracy of 82.7% for the proposed CNN and over 80% for SVC for different kernels was observed on a subset of the dataset. An average RMSE of 7.35 degrees was obtained between the predicted and the true MCP joint angles. A low latency (6.25 - 9.1 Hz) pipeline has been proposed for estimating both MCP joint angles and hand configuration aimed at real-time control of human-machine interfaces.
Adap DP-FL: Differentially Private Federated Learning with Adaptive Noise
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Federated learning seeks to address the issue of isolated data islands by making clients disclose only their local training models. However, it was demonstrated that private information could still be inferred by analyzing local model parameters, such as deep neural network model weights. Recently, differential privacy has been applied to federated learning to protect data privacy, but the noise added may degrade the learning performance much. Typically, in previous work, training parameters were clipped equally and noises were added uniformly. The heterogeneity and convergence of training parameters were simply not considered. In this paper, we propose a differentially private scheme for federated learning with adaptive noise (Adap DP-FL). Specifically, due to the gradient heterogeneity, we conduct adaptive gradient clipping for different clients and different rounds; due to the gradient convergence, we add decreasing noises accordingly. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our Adap DP-FL outperforms previous methods significantly.
Equivalence Between SE(3) Equivariant Networks via Steerable Kernels and Group Convolution
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2022
Year: 2022

A wide range of techniques have been proposed in recent years for designing neural networks for 3D data that are equivariant under rotation and translation of the input. Most approaches for equivariance under the Euclidean group $\mathrm{SE}(3)$ of rotations and translations fall within one of the two major categories. The first category consists of methods that use $\mathrm{SE}(3)$-convolution which generalizes classical $\mathbb{R}^3$-convolution on signals over $\mathrm{SE}(3)$. Alternatively, it is possible to use \textit{steerable convolution} which achieves $\mathrm{SE}(3)$-equivariance by imposing constraints on $\mathbb{R}^3$-convolution of tensor fields. It is known by specialists in the field that the two approaches are equivalent, with steerable convolution being the Fourier transform of $\mathrm{SE}(3)$ convolution. Unfortunately, these results are not widely known and moreover the exact relations between deep learning architectures built upon these two approaches have not been precisely described in the literature on equivariant deep learning. In this work we provide an in-depth analysis of both methods and their equivalence and relate the two constructions to multiview convolutional networks. Furthermore, we provide theoretical justifications of separability of $\mathrm{SE}(3)$ group convolution, which explain the applicability and success of some recent approaches. Finally, we express different methods using a single coherent formalism and provide explicit formulas that relate the kernels learned by different methods. In this way, our work helps to unify different previously-proposed techniques for achieving roto-translational equivariance, and helps to shed light on both the utility and precise differences between various alternatives. We also derive new TFN non-linearities from our equivalence principle and test them on practical benchmark datasets.
Low-overhead Beam Training Scheme for Extremely Large-Scale RIS in Near-field
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

Extremely large-scale reconfigurable intelligent surface (XL-RIS) has recently been proposed and is recognized as a promising technology that can further enhance the capacity of communication systems and compensate for severe path loss . However, the pilot overhead of beam training in XL-RIS-assisted wireless communication systems is enormous because the near-field channel model needs to be taken into account, and the number of candidate codewords in the codebook increases dramatically accordingly. To tackle this problem, we propose two deep learning-based near-field beam training schemes in XL-RIS-assisted communication systems, where deep residual networks are employed to determine the optimal near-field RIS codeword. Specifically, we first propose a far-field beam-based beam training (FBT) scheme in which the received signals of all far-field RIS codewords are fed into the neural network to estimate the optimal near-field RIS codeword. In order to further reduce the pilot overhead, a partial near-field beam-based beam training (PNBT) scheme is proposed, where only the received signals corresponding to the partial near-field XL-RIS codewords are served as input to the neural network. Moreover, we further propose an improved PNBT scheme to enhance the performance of beam training by fully exploring the neural network's output. Finally, simulation results show that the proposed schemes outperform the existing beam training schemes and can reduce the beam sweeping overhead by approximately 95%.
Similarity Distribution based Membership Inference Attack on Person Re-identification
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

While person Re-identification (Re-ID) has progressed rapidly due to its wide real-world applications, it also causes severe risks of leaking personal information from training data. Thus, this paper focuses on quantifying this risk by membership inference (MI) attack. Most of the existing MI attack algorithms focus on classification models, while Re-ID follows a totally different training and inference paradigm. Re-ID is a fine-grained recognition task with complex feature embedding, and model outputs commonly used by existing MI like logits and losses are not accessible during inference. Since Re-ID focuses on modelling the relative relationship between image pairs instead of individual semantics, we conduct a formal and empirical analysis which validates that the distribution shift of the inter-sample similarity between training and test set is a critical criterion for Re-ID membership inference. As a result, we propose a novel membership inference attack method based on the inter-sample similarity distribution. Specifically, a set of anchor images are sampled to represent the similarity distribution conditioned on a target image, and a neural network with a novel anchor selection module is proposed to predict the membership of the target image. Our experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on both the Re-ID task and conventional classification task.
Backdoor Vulnerabilities in Normally Trained Deep Learning Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

We conduct a systematic study of backdoor vulnerabilities in normally trained Deep Learning models. They are as dangerous as backdoors injected by data poisoning because both can be equally exploited. We leverage 20 different types of injected backdoor attacks in the literature as the guidance and study their correspondences in normally trained models, which we call natural backdoor vulnerabilities. We find that natural backdoors are widely existing, with most injected backdoor attacks having natural correspondences. We categorize these natural backdoors and propose a general detection framework. It finds 315 natural backdoors in the 56 normally trained models downloaded from the Internet, covering all the different categories, while existing scanners designed for injected backdoors can at most detect 65 backdoors. We also study the root causes and defense of natural backdoors.
Balanced Semi-Supervised Generative Adversarial Network for Damage Assessment from Low-Data Imbalanced-Class Regime
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

In recent years, applying deep learning (DL) to assess structural damages has gained growing popularity in vision-based structural health monitoring (SHM). However, both data deficiency and class-imbalance hinder the wide adoption of DL in practical applications of SHM. Common mitigation strategies include transfer learning, over-sampling, and under-sampling, yet these ad-hoc methods only provide limited performance boost that varies from one case to another. In this work, we introduce one variant of the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), named the balanced semi-supervised GAN (BSS-GAN). It adopts the semi-supervised learning concept and applies balanced-batch sampling in training to resolve low-data and imbalanced-class problems. A series of computer experiments on concrete cracking and spalling classification were conducted under the low-data imbalanced-class regime with limited computing power. The results show that the BSS-GAN is able to achieve better damage detection in terms of recall and $F_β$ score than other conventional methods, indicating its state-of-the-art performance.
UDE: A Unified Driving Engine for Human Motion Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Generating controllable and editable human motion sequences is a key challenge in 3D Avatar generation. It has been labor-intensive to generate and animate human motion for a long time until learning-based approaches have been developed and applied recently. However, these approaches are still task-specific or modality-specific\cite {ahuja2019language2pose}\cite{ghosh2021synthesis}\cite{ferreira2021learning}\cite{li2021ai}. In this paper, we propose ``UDE", the first unified driving engine that enables generating human motion sequences from natural language or audio sequences (see Fig.~\ref{fig:teaser}). Specifically, UDE consists of the following key components: 1) a motion quantization module based on VQVAE that represents continuous motion sequence as discrete latent code\cite{van2017neural}, 2) a modality-agnostic transformer encoder\cite{vaswani2017attention} that learns to map modality-aware driving signals to a joint space, and 3) a unified token transformer (GPT-like\cite{radford2019language}) network to predict the quantized latent code index in an auto-regressive manner. 4) a diffusion motion decoder that takes as input the motion tokens and decodes them into motion sequences with high diversity. We evaluate our method on HumanML3D\cite{Guo_2022_CVPR} and AIST++\cite{li2021learn} benchmarks, and the experiment results demonstrate our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Project website: \url{https://github.com/zixiangzhou916/UDE/
Better Generalized Few-Shot Learning Even Without Base Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

This paper introduces and studies zero-base generalized few-shot learning (zero-base GFSL), which is an extreme yet practical version of few-shot learning problem. Motivated by the cases where base data is not available due to privacy or ethical issues, the goal of zero-base GFSL is to newly incorporate the knowledge of few samples of novel classes into a pretrained model without any samples of base classes. According to our analysis, we discover the fact that both mean and variance of the weight distribution of novel classes are not properly established, compared to those of base classes. The existing GFSL methods attempt to make the weight norms balanced, which we find helps only the variance part, but discard the importance of mean of weights particularly for novel classes, leading to the limited performance in the GFSL problem even with base data. In this paper, we overcome this limitation by proposing a simple yet effective normalization method that can effectively control both mean and variance of the weight distribution of novel classes without using any base samples and thereby achieve a satisfactory performance on both novel and base classes. Our experimental results somewhat surprisingly show that the proposed zero-base GFSL method that does not utilize any base samples even outperforms the existing GFSL methods that make the best use of base data. Our implementation is available at: https://github.com/bigdata-inha/Zero-Base-GFSL.
Construction of Multiple Constrained DNA Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

DNA sequences are prone to creating secondary structures by folding back on themselves by non-specific hybridization among its nucleotides. The formation of secondary structures makes the sequences chemically inactive towards synthesis and sequencing processes. In this letter, our goal is to tackle the problems due to the creation of secondary structures in DNA sequences along with constraints such as not having a large homopolymer run length. In this paper, we have presented families of DNA codes with secondary structures of stem length at most two and homopolymer run length at most four. By mapping the error correcting codes over $\Z_{11}$ to DNA nucleotides, we obtained DNA codes with rates $0.5765$ times the rate of corresponding code over $\Z_{11}$, which include some new secondary structure free and better-performing codes for DNA based data storage and DNA computing purposes.
Peculiarities of gender disambiguation and ordering of non-English authors' names for Economic papers beyond core databases
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2022
Year: 2022

This paper presents the results of further exploration of Crossref data related to Ukrainian Economics research (the first part can be found in [Mryglod, O., Nazarovets, S. & Kozmenko, S. (2021) Scientometrics, 126, 8187]). Our purpose is to supplement the quantitative portrait of Ukrainian Economics discipline with the results of gender and author ordering analysis at the level of individual authors, special methods of working with bibliographic data with a predominant share of non-English authors are used. The properties of gender mixing, the likelihood of male and female authors occupying the first position in the authorship list, as well as the arrangements of names are studied. A data set containing bibliographic records related to Ukrainian journal publications in the field of Economics is constructed using Crossref metadata. The described stages for working with such specific data help to work at the level of authors and analyse, in particular, gender issues. Despite the larger number of female authors, gender equality is more likely to be reported at the individual level for the discipline of Ukrainian Economics. The tendencies towards collaborative or solo-publications and gender mixing patterns are found to be dependent on the journal: the differences for publications indexed in Scopus and/or Web of Science databases are found. It has also been found that Ukrainian Economics research is characterized by rather a non-alphabetical order of authors. To our knowledge, this is the first large-scale quantitative study of Ukrainian Economic discipline. The results obtained are valuable not only at the national level, but also contribute to general knowledge about Economic research, gender issues and authors' names ordering. Here, for the first time, attention is drawn to the explicit use of the features of the Slavic authors' names.
Fair Division with Prioritized Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2022
Year: 2022

We consider the fair division problem of indivisible items. It is well-known that an envy-free allocation may not exist, and a relaxed version of envy-freeness, envy-freeness up to one item (EF1), has been widely considered. In an EF1 allocation, an agent may envy others' allocated shares, but only up to one item. In many applications, we may wish to specify a subset of prioritized agents where strict envy-freeness needs to be guaranteed from these agents to the remaining agents, while ensuring the whole allocation is still EF1. Prioritized agents may be those agents who are envious in a previous EF1 allocation, those agents who belong to underrepresented groups, etc. Motivated by this, we propose a new fairness notion named envy-freeness with prioritized agents "EFPrior", and study the existence and the algorithmic aspects for the problem of computing an EFPrior allocation. With additive valuations, the simple round-robin algorithm is able to compute an EFPrior allocation. In this paper, we mainly focus on general valuations. In particular, we present a polynomial-time algorithm that outputs an EFPrior allocation with most of the items allocated. When all the items need to be allocated, we also present polynomial-time algorithms for some well-motivated special cases.
Learnings from Technological Interventions in a Low Resource Language: Enhancing Information Access in Gondi
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

The primary obstacle to developing technologies for low-resource languages is the lack of representative, usable data. In this paper, we report the deployment of technology-driven data collection methods for creating a corpus of more than 60,000 translations from Hindi to Gondi, a low-resource vulnerable language spoken by around 2.3 million tribal people in south and central India. During this process, we help expand information access in Gondi across 2 different dimensions (a) The creation of linguistic resources that can be used by the community, such as a dictionary, children's stories, Gondi translations from multiple sources and an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) based mass awareness platform; (b) Enabling its use in the digital domain by developing a Hindi-Gondi machine translation model, which is compressed by nearly 4 times to enable it's edge deployment on low-resource edge devices and in areas of little to no internet connectivity. We also present preliminary evaluations of utilizing the developed machine translation model to provide assistance to volunteers who are involved in collecting more data for the target language. Through these interventions, we not only created a refined and evaluated corpus of 26,240 Hindi-Gondi translations that was used for building the translation model but also engaged nearly 850 community members who can help take Gondi onto the internet.
Rao-Burbea centroids applied to the statistical characterisation of time series and images through ordinal patterns
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

Divergences or similarity measures between probability distributions have become a very useful tool for studying different aspects of statistical objects such as time series, networks and images. Notably not every divergence provides identical results when applied to the same problem. Therefore it is convenient to have the widest possible set of divergences to be applied to the problems under study. Besides this choice an essential step in the analysis of every statistical object is the mapping of each one of their representing values into an alphabet of symbols conveniently chosen. In this work we attack both problems, that is, the choice of a family of divergences and the way to do the map into a symbolic sequence. For advancing in the first task we work with the family of divergences known as the Burbea-Rao centroids (BRC) and for the second one we proceed by mapping the original object into a symbolic sequence through the use of ordinal patterns. Finally we apply our proposals to analyse simulated and real time series and to real textured images. The main conclusion of our work is that the best BRC, at least in the studied cases, is the Jensen Shannon divergence, besides the fact that it verifies some interesting formal properties.