OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
ReMP: Rectified Metric Propagation for Few-Shot Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Few-shot learning features the capability of generalizing from a few examples. In this paper, we first identify that a discriminative feature space, namely a rectified metric space, that is learned to maintain the metric consistency from training to testing, is an essential component to the success of metric-based few-shot learning. Numerous analyses indicate that a simple modification of the objective can yield substantial performance gains. The resulting approach, called rectified metric propagation (ReMP), further optimizes an attentive prototype propagation network, and applies a repulsive force to make confident predictions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed ReMP is effective and efficient, and outperforms the state of the arts on various standard few-shot learning datasets.
A Methodology for Deriving Evaluation Criteria for Software Solutions
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2020
Year: 2020

Finding a suited software solution for a company poses a resource-intensive task in an ever-widening market. Software should solve the technical task at hand as perfectly as possible and, at the same time, match the company strategy. Based on these two dimensions, domain knowledge and industry context, we propose a methodology for deriving individually tailored evaluation criteria for software solutions to make them assessable. The approach is formalized as a three-layer model, that ensures the encoding of said dimensions, where each layer holds a more refined and individualized criteria list, starting from a general softwareagnostic catalogue we composed. Finally, we exemplarily demonstrate our method for Machine-Learning-as-a-Service platforms (MaaS) for small and medium-sized enterprises (SME).
PiPoMonitor: Mitigating Cross-core Cache Attacks Using the Auto-Cuckoo Filter
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

Cache side channel attacks obtain victim cache line access footprint to infer security-critical information. Among them, cross-core attacks exploiting the shared last level cache are more threatening as their simplicity to set up and high capacity. Stateful approaches of detection-based mitigation observe precise cache behaviors and protect specific cache lines that are suspected of being attacked. However, their recording structures incur large storage overhead and are vulnerable to reverse engineering attacks. Exploring the intrinsic non-determinate layout of a traditional Cuckoo filter, this paper proposes a space efficient Auto-Cuckoo filter to record access footprints, which succeed to decrease storage overhead and resist reverse engineering attacks at the same time. With Auto-Cuckoo filter, we propose PiPoMonitor to detect \textit{Ping-Pong patterns} and prefetch specific cache line to interfere with adversaries' cache probes. Security analysis shows the PiPoMonitor can effectively mitigate cross-core attacks and the Auto-Cuckoo filter is immune to reverse engineering attacks. Evaluation results indicate PiPoMonitor has negligible impact on performance and the storage overhead is only 0.37$\%$, an order of magnitude lower than previous stateful approaches.
Tagging Real-World Scenarios for the Assessment of Autonomous Vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

The development of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) has made significant progress in the last years. An essential aspect in the development of AVs is the assessment of quality and performance aspects of the AVs, such as safety, comfort, and efficiency. Among other methods, a scenario-based approach has been proposed. With scenario-based testing, the AV is subjected to a collection of scenarios that represent real-world situations. The collection of scenarios needs to cover the variety of what an AV can encounter in real traffic. As a result, many different scenarios are considered, that are grouped into so-called scenario categories. We propose a method for defining the scenario categories using a system of tags, where each tag describes a particular characteristic of a scenario category. There is a balance between having generic scenario categories - very specific set of scenarios, while for another system one might be interested in a set of scenarios with a high variety. To accommodate this, tags are structured in trees. The different layers of the trees can be regarded as different abstraction levels. Next to presenting the method for describing scenario categories using tags, we will illustrate the method by showing applicable trees of tags using concrete examples in the Singapore traffic system. Trees of tags are shown for the vehicle under test, the dynamic environment (e.g., the other road users), the static environment (e.g., the road layout), and the environmental conditions (weather and lighting conditions). Few examples are presented to illustrate the proposed method for defining the scenario categories using tags.
Continuous Subject-in-the-Loop Integration: Centering AI on Marginalized Communities
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

Despite its utopian promises as a disruptive equalizer, AI - like most tools deployed under the guise of neutrality - has tended to simply reinforce existing social structures. To counter this trend, radical AI calls for centering on the marginalized. We argue that gaps in key infrastructure are preventing the widespread adoption of radical AI, and propose a guiding principle for both identifying these infrastructure gaps and evaluating whether proposals for new infrastructure effectively center marginalized voices.
Smarter Password Guessing Techniques Leveraging Contextual Information and OSINT
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

In recent decades, criminals have increasingly used the web to research, assist and perpetrate criminal behaviour. One of the most important ways in which law enforcement can battle this growing trend is through accessing pertinent information about suspects in a timely manner. A significant hindrance to this is the difficulty of accessing any system a suspect uses that requires authentication via password. Password guessing techniques generally consider common user behaviour while generating their passwords, as well as the password policy in place. Such techniques can offer a modest success rate considering a large/average population. However, they tend to fail when focusing on a single target -- especially when the latter is an educated user taking precautions as a savvy criminal would be expected to do. Open Source Intelligence is being increasingly leveraged by Law Enforcement in order to gain useful information about a suspect, but very little is currently being done to integrate this knowledge in an automated way within password cracking. The purpose of this research is to delve into the techniques that enable the gathering of the necessary context about a suspect and find ways to leverage this information within password guessing techniques.
Assessing the Influencing Factors on the Accuracy of Underage Facial Age Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Swift response to the detection of endangered minors is an ongoing concern for law enforcement. Many child-focused investigations hinge on digital evidence discovery and analysis. Automated age estimation techniques are needed to aid in these investigations to expedite this evidence discovery process, and decrease investigator exposure to traumatic material. Automated techniques also show promise in decreasing the overflowing backlog of evidence obtained from increasing numbers of devices and online services. A lack of sufficient training data combined with natural human variance has been long hindering accurate automated age estimation -- especially for underage subjects. This paper presented a comprehensive evaluation of the performance of two cloud age estimation services (Amazon Web Service's Rekognition service and Microsoft Azure's Face API) against a dataset of over 21,800 underage subjects. The objective of this work is to evaluate the influence that certain human biometric factors, facial expressions, and image quality (i.e. blur, noise, exposure and resolution) have on the outcome of automated age estimation services. A thorough evaluation allows us to identify the most influential factors to be overcome in future age estimation systems.
Convening during COVID-19: Lessons learnt from organizing virtual workshops in 2020
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

This report is an account of the authors' experiences as organizers of WiML's "Un-Workshop" event at ICML 2020. Un-workshops focus on participant-driven structured discussions on a pre-selected topic. For clarity, this event was different from the "WiML Workshop", which is usually co-located with NeurIPS. In this manuscript, organizers, share their experiences with the hope that it will help future organizers to host a successful virtual event under similar conditions. Women in Machine Learning (WiML)'s mission is creating connections within a small community of women working in machine learning, in order to encourage mentorship, networking, and interchange of ideas and increase the impact of women in the community.
Black Loans Matter: Distributionally Robust Fairness for Fighting Subgroup Discrimination
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

Algorithmic fairness in lending today relies on group fairness metrics for monitoring statistical parity across protected groups. This approach is vulnerable to subgroup discrimination by proxy, carrying significant risks of legal and reputational damage for lenders and blatantly unfair outcomes for borrowers. Practical challenges arise from the many possible combinations and subsets of protected groups. We motivate this problem against the backdrop of historical and residual racism in the United States polluting all available training data and raising public sensitivity to algorithimic bias. We review the current regulatory compliance protocols for fairness in lending and discuss their limitations relative to the contributions state-of-the-art fairness methods may afford. We propose a solution for addressing subgroup discrimination, while adhering to existing group fairness requirements, from recent developments in individual fairness methods and corresponding fair metric learning algorithms.
Learning to Characterize Matching Experts
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2020
Year: 2020

Matching is a task at the heart of any data integration process, aimed at identifying correspondences among data elements. Matching problems were traditionally solved in a semi-automatic manner, with correspondences being generated by matching algorithms and outcomes subsequently validated by human experts. Human-in-the-loop data integration has been recently challenged by the introduction of big data and recent studies have analyzed obstacles to effective human matching and validation. In this work we characterize human matching experts, those humans whose proposed correspondences can mostly be trusted to be valid. We provide a novel framework for characterizing matching experts that, accompanied with a novel set of features, can be used to identify reliable and valuable human experts. We demonstrate the usefulness of our approach using an extensive empirical evaluation. In particular, we show that our approach can improve matching results by filtering out inexpert matchers.
Exploring and comparing temporal clustering methods
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2020
Year: 2020

Description of temporal networks and detection of dynamic communities have been hot topics of research for the last decade. However, no consensual answers to these challenges have been found due to the complexity of the task. Static communities are not well defined objects, and adding a temporal dimension renders the description even more difficult. In this article, we propose a coherent temporal clustering method: the Best Combination of Local Communities (BCLC). Our method aims at finding a good balance between two conflicting objectives : closely following the short time evolution by finding optimal partitions at each time step and temporal smoothness, which privileges historical continuity.
Generating Descriptions for Sequential Images with Local-Object Attention and Global Semantic Context Modelling
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we propose an end-to-end CNN-LSTM model for generating descriptions for sequential images with a local-object attention mechanism. To generate coherent descriptions, we capture global semantic context using a multi-layer perceptron, which learns the dependencies between sequential images. A paralleled LSTM network is exploited for decoding the sequence descriptions. Experimental results show that our model outperforms the baseline across three different evaluation metrics on the datasets published by Microsoft.
Top-1 CORSMAL Challenge 2020 Submission: Filling Mass Estimation Using Multi-modal Observations of Human-robot Handovers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Human-robot object handover is a key skill for the future of human-robot collaboration. CORSMAL 2020 Challenge focuses on the perception part of this problem: the robot needs to estimate the filling mass of a container held by a human. Although there are powerful methods in image processing and audio processing individually, answering such a problem requires processing data from multiple sensors together. The appearance of the container, the sound of the filling, and the depth data provide essential information. We propose a multi-modal method to predict three key indicators of the filling mass: filling type, filling level, and container capacity. These indicators are then combined to estimate the filling mass of a container. Our method obtained Top-1 overall performance among all submissions to CORSMAL 2020 Challenge on both public and private subsets while showing no evidence of overfitting. Our source code is publicly available: https://github.com/v-iashin/CORSMAL
Improving Solution Quality of Bounded Max-Sum Algorithm to Solve DCOPs involving Hard and Soft Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

Bounded Max-Sum (BMS) is a message-passing algorithm that provides approximation solution to a specific form of de-centralized coordination problems, namely Distributed Constrained Optimization Problems (DCOPs). In particular, BMS algorithm is able to solve problems of this type having large search space at the expense of low computational cost. Notably, the traditional DCOP formulation does not consider those constraints that must be satisfied(also known as hard constraints), rather it concentrates only on soft constraints. Hence, although the presence of both types of constraints are observed in a number of real-world applications, the BMS algorithm does not actively capitalize on the hard constraints. To address this issue, we tailor BMS in such a way that can deal with DCOPs having both type constraints. In so doing, our approach improves the solution quality of the algorithm. The empirical results exhibit a marked improvement in the quality of the solutions of large DCOPs.
Constructing Segmented Differentiable Quadratics to Determine Algorithmic Run Times and Model Non-Polynomial Functions
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2020
Year: 2020

We propose an approach to determine the continual progression of algorithmic efficiency, as an alternative to standard calculations of time complexity, likely, but not exclusively, when dealing with data structures with unknown maximum indexes and with algorithms that are dependent on multiple variables apart from just input size. The proposed method can effectively determine the run time behavior $F$ at any given index $x$ , as well as $\frac{\partial F}{\partial x}$, as a function of only one or multiple arguments, by combining $\frac{n}{2}$ quadratic segments, based upon the principles of Lagrangian Polynomials and their respective secant lines. Although the approach used is designed for analyzing the efficacy of computational algorithms, the proposed method can be used within the pure mathematical field as a novel way to construct non-polynomial functions, such as $\log_2{n}$ or $\frac{n+1}{n-2}$, as a series of segmented differentiable quadratics to model functional behavior and reoccurring natural patterns. After testing, our method had an average accuracy of above of 99\% with regard to functional resemblance.
Distributed Machine Learning for Wireless Communication Networks: Techniques, Architectures, and Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Distributed machine learning (DML) techniques, such as federated learning, partitioned learning, and distributed reinforcement learning, have been increasingly applied to wireless communications. This is due to improved capabilities of terminal devices, explosively growing data volume, congestion in the radio interfaces, and increasing concern of data privacy. The unique features of wireless systems, such as large scale, geographically dispersed deployment, user mobility, and massive amount of data, give rise to new challenges in the design of DML techniques. There is a clear gap in the existing literature in that the DML techniques are yet to be systematically reviewed for their applicability to wireless systems. This survey bridges the gap by providing a contemporary and comprehensive survey of DML techniques with a focus on wireless networks. Specifically, we review the latest applications of DML in power control, spectrum management, user association, and edge cloud computing. The optimality, scalability, convergence rate, computation cost, and communication overhead of DML are analyzed. We also discuss the potential adversarial attacks faced by DML applications, and describe state-of-the-art countermeasures to preserve privacy and security. Last but not least, we point out a number of key issues yet to be addressed, and collate potentially interesting and challenging topics for future research.
DecisiveNets: Training Deep Associative Memories to Solve Complex Machine Learning Problems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Learning deep representations to solve complex machine learning tasks has become the prominent trend in the past few years. Indeed, Deep Neural Networks are now the golden standard in domains as various as computer vision, natural language processing or even playing combinatorial games. However, problematic limitations are hidden behind this surprising universal capability. Among other things, explainability of the decisions is a major concern, especially since deep neural networks are made up of a very large number of trainable parameters. Moreover, computational complexity can quickly become a problem, especially in contexts constrained by real time or limited resources. Therefore, understanding how information is stored and the impact this storage can have on the system remains a major and open issue. In this chapter, we introduce a method to transform deep neural network models into deep associative memories, with simpler, more explicable and less expensive operations. We show through experiments that these transformations can be done without penalty on predictive performance. The resulting deep associative memories are excellent candidates for artificial intelligence that is easier to theorize and manipulate.
Efficient Packet Transmission in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks with Partially Informed Nodes
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

One formal way of studying cooperation and incentive mechanisms in wireless ad hoc networks is to use game theory. In this respect, simple interaction models such as the forwarder's dilemma have been proposed and used successfully. However, this type of models is not suited to account for possible fluctuations of the wireless links of the network. Additionally, it does not allow one to study the way a node transmits its own packets. At last, the repeated game models used in the related literature do not allow the important scenario of nodes with partial information (about the link state and nodes actions) to be studied. One of the contributions of the present work is precisely to provide a general approach to integrate all of these aspects. Second, the best performance the nodes can achieve under partial information is fully characterized for a general form of utilities. Third, we derive an equilibrium transmission strategy which allows a node to adapt its transmit power levels and packet forwarding rate to link fluctuations and other nodes actions. The derived results are illustrated through a detailed numerical analysis for a network model built from a generalized version of the forwarder's dilemma. The analysis shows in particular that the proposed strategy is able to operate in presence of channel fluctuations and to perform significantly better than existing transmission mechanisms (e.g., in terms of consumed network energy).
COVID-19 Contact Tracing and Privacy: A Longitudinal Study of Public Opinion
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

There is growing use of technology-enabled contact tracing, the process of identifying potentially infected COVID-19 patients by notifying all recent contacts of an infected person. Governments, technology companies, and research groups alike have been working towards releasing smartphone apps, using IoT devices, and distributing wearable technology to automatically track "close contacts" and identify prior contacts in the event an individual tests positive. However, there has been significant public discussion about the tensions between effective technology-based contact tracing and the privacy of individuals. To inform this discussion, we present the results of seven months of online surveys focused on contact tracing and privacy, each with 100 participants. Our first surveys were on April 1 and 3, before the first peak of the virus in the US, and we continued to conduct the surveys weekly for 10 weeks (through June), and then fortnightly through November, adding topical questions to reflect current discussions about contact tracing and COVID-19. Our results present the diversity of public opinion and can inform policy makers, technologists, researchers, and public health experts on whether and how to leverage technology to reduce the spread of COVID-19, while considering potential privacy concerns. We are continuing to conduct longitudinal measurements and will update this report over time; citations to this version of the report should reference Report Version 2.0, December 4, 2020.
The 10 Research Topics in the Internet of Things
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

Since the term first coined in 1999 by Kevin Ashton, the Internet of Things (IoT) has gained significant momentum as a technology to connect physical objects to the Internet and to facilitate machine-to-human and machine-to-machine communications. Over the past two decades, IoT has been an active area of research and development endeavours by many technical and commercial communities. Yet, IoT technology is still not mature and many issues need to be addressed. In this paper, we identify 10 key research topics and discuss the research problems and opportunities within these topics.