OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
SMURF: Efficient and Scalable Metadata Access for Distributed Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

In parallel with big data processing and analysis dominating the usage of distributed and cloud infrastructures, the demand for distributed metadata access and transfer has increased. In many application domains, the volume of data generated exceeds petabytes, while the corresponding metadata amounts to terabytes or even more. This paper proposes a novel solution for efficient and scalable metadata access for distributed applications across wide-area networks, dubbed SMURF. Our solution combines novel pipelining and concurrent transfer mechanisms with reliability, provides distributed continuum caching and prefetching strategies to sidestep fetching latency, and achieves scalable and high-performance metadata fetch/prefetch services in the cloud. We also study the phenomenon of semantic locality in real trace logs, which is not well utilized in metadata access prediction. We implement a novel prefetch predictor based on this observation and compare it with three existing state-of-the-art prefetch schemes on Yahoo! Hadoop audit traces. By effectively caching and prefetching metadata based on the access patterns, our continuum caching and prefetching mechanism significantly improves local cache hit rate and reduces the average fetching latency. We replayed approximately 20 Million metadata access operations from real audit traces, in which our system achieved 90% accuracy during prefetch prediction and reduced the average fetch latency by 50% compared to the state-of-the-art mechanisms.
NeuralLog: Natural Language Inference with Joint Neural and Logical Reasoning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Deep learning (DL) based language models achieve high performance on various benchmarks for Natural Language Inference (NLI). And at this time, symbolic approaches to NLI are receiving less attention. Both approaches (symbolic and DL) have their advantages and weaknesses. However, currently, no method combines them in a system to solve the task of NLI. To merge symbolic and deep learning methods, we propose an inference framework called NeuralLog, which utilizes both a monotonicity-based logical inference engine and a neural network language model for phrase alignment. Our framework models the NLI task as a classic search problem and uses the beam search algorithm to search for optimal inference paths. Experiments show that our joint logic and neural inference system improves accuracy on the NLI task and can achieve state-of-art accuracy on the SICK and MED datasets.
Improved, Extended, and Total Impact Factor of a Journal
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2021
Year: 2021

In this short paper we recall the (Garfield) Impact Factor of a Journal, we improve and extend it, and eventually we present the Total Impact Factor that reflects the most accurate impact factor.
RaspberryPI for mosquito neutralization by power laser
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In this article for the first time, comprehensive studies of mosquito neutralization using machine vision and a 1 W power laser are considered. Developed laser installation with Raspberry Pi that changing the direction of the laser with a galvanometer. We developed a program for mosquito tracking in real. The possibility of using deep neural networks, Haar cascades, machine learning for mosquito recognition was considered. We considered in detail the classification problems of mosquitoes in images. A recommendation is given for the implementation of this device based on a microcontroller for subsequent use as part of an unmanned aerial vehicle. Any harmful insects in the fields can be used as objects for control.
A Survey of Performance Optimization in Neural Network-Based Video Analytics Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Video analytics systems perform automatic events, movements, and actions recognition in a video and make it possible to execute queries on the video. As a result of a large number of video data that need to be processed, optimizing the performance of video analytics systems has become an important research topic. Neural networks are the state-of-the-art for performing video analytics tasks such as video annotation and object detection. Prior survey papers consider application-specific video analytics techniques that improve accuracy of the results; however, in this survey paper, we provide a review of the techniques that focus on optimizing the performance of Neural Network-Based Video Analytics Systems.
Towards a General Many-Sorted Framework for Describing Certain Kinds of Legal Statutes with a Potential Computational Realization
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Examining a 20th-century Scandinavian legal theoretical tradition, we can extract an ontological naturalistic, a logical empiristic, and a modern idealistic rationale. We introduce the mathematical syntactic figure present in the `logical empiricism' in a contemporary mathematical logic. A new formal framework for describing explicit purchase statutes (Sweden) is gradually developed and subsequently proposed. This new framework is based on a many-sorted first-order logic (MFOL) approach, where the semantics are grounded in concrete `physical' objects and situations with a legal relevance. Specifically, we present a concrete formal syntactic translation of one of the central statutes of Swedish legislation for the purchase of immovable property. Additionally, we discuss the potential implications that a subsequent development of such formalisations would have for constructing artificial agents (e.g., software) that can be used as `co-creative' legal assistance for solving highly complex legal issues concerning the transfer of property, among others.
The Privacy Paradox and Optimal Bias-Variance Trade-offs in Data Acquisition
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2021
Year: 2021

While users claim to be concerned about privacy, often they do little to protect their privacy in their online actions. One prominent explanation for this "privacy paradox" is that when an individual shares her data, it is not just her privacy that is compromised; the privacy of other individuals with correlated data is also compromised. This information leakage encourages oversharing of data and significantly impacts the incentives of individuals in online platforms. In this paper, we study the design of mechanisms for data acquisition in settings with information leakage and verifiable data. We design an incentive compatible mechanism that optimizes the worst-case trade-off between bias and variance of the estimation subject to a budget constraint, where the worst-case is over the unknown correlation between costs and data. Additionally, we characterize the structure of the optimal mechanism in closed form and study monotonicity and non-monotonicity properties of the marketplace.
Automatically Locating ARM Instructions Deviation between Real Devices and CPU Emulators
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Emulator is widely used to build dynamic analysis frameworks due to its fine-grained tracing capability, full system monitoring functionality, and scalability of running on different operating systemsand architectures. However, whether the emulator is consistent with real devices is unknown. To understand this problem, we aim to automatically locate inconsistent instructions, which behave differently between emulators and real devices. We target ARM architecture, which provides machine readable specification. Based on the specification, we propose a test case generator by designing and implementing the first symbolic execution engine for ARM architecture specification language (ASL). We generate 2,774,649 representative instruction streams and conduct differential testing with these instruction streams between four ARM real devices in different architecture versions (i.e., ARMv5, ARMv6, ARMv7-a, and ARMv8-a) and the state-of-the-art emulators (i.e., QEMU). We locate 155,642 inconsistent instruction streams, which cover 30% of all instruction encodings and 47.8% of the instructions. We find undefined implementation in ARM manual and implementation bugs of QEMU are the major causes of inconsistencies. Furthermore, we discover four QEMU bugs, which are confirmed and patched by thedevelopers, covering 13 instruction encodings including the most commonly used ones (e.g.,STR,BLX). With the inconsistent instructions, we build three security applications and demonstrate thecapability of these instructions on detecting emulators, anti-emulation, and anti-fuzzing.
Automatic CT Segmentation from Bounding Box Annotations using Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Accurate segmentation for medical images is important for clinical diagnosis. Existing automatic segmentation methods are mainly based on fully supervised learning and have an extremely high demand for precise annotations, which are very costly and time-consuming to obtain. To address this problem, we proposed an automatic CT segmentation method based on weakly supervised learning, by which one could train an accurate segmentation model only with weak annotations in the form of bounding boxes. The proposed method is composed of two steps: 1) generating pseudo masks with bounding box annotations by k-means clustering, and 2) iteratively training a 3D U-Net convolutional neural network as a segmentation model. Some data pre-processing methods are used to improve performance. The method was validated on four datasets containing three types of organs with a total of 627 CT volumes. For liver, spleen and kidney segmentation, it achieved an accuracy of 95.19%, 92.11%, and 91.45%, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that our method is accurate, efficient, and suitable for clinical use.
Implementing a foveal-pit inspired filter in a Spiking Convolutional Neural Network: a preliminary study
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

We have presented a Spiking Convolutional Neural Network (SCNN) that incorporates retinal foveal-pit inspired Difference of Gaussian filters and rank-order encoding. The model is trained using a variant of the backpropagation algorithm adapted to work with spiking neurons, as implemented in the Nengo library. We have evaluated the performance of our model on two publicly available datasets - one for digit recognition task, and the other for vehicle recognition task. The network has achieved up to 90% accuracy, where loss is calculated using the cross-entropy function. This is an improvement over around 57% accuracy obtained with the alternate approach of performing the classification without any kind of neural filtering. Overall, our proof-of-concept study indicates that introducing biologically plausible filtering in existing SCNN architecture will work well with noisy input images such as those in our vehicle recognition task. Based on our results, we plan to enhance our SCNN by integrating lateral inhibition-based redundancy reduction prior to rank-ordering, which will further improve the classification accuracy by the network.
A Spectral-Spatial-Dependent Global Learning Framework for Insufficient and Imbalanced Hyperspectral Image Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Deep learning techniques have been widely applied to hyperspectral image (HSI) classification and have achieved great success. However, the deep neural network model has a large parameter space and requires a large number of labeled data. Deep learning methods for HSI classification usually follow a patchwise learning framework. Recently, a fast patch-free global learning (FPGA) architecture was proposed for HSI classification according to global spatial context information. However, FPGA has difficulty extracting the most discriminative features when the sample data is imbalanced. In this paper, a spectral-spatial dependent global learning (SSDGL) framework based on global convolutional long short-term memory (GCL) and global joint attention mechanism (GJAM) is proposed for insufficient and imbalanced HSI classification. In SSDGL, the hierarchically balanced (H-B) sampling strategy and the weighted softmax loss are proposed to address the imbalanced sample problem. To effectively distinguish similar spectral characteristics of land cover types, the GCL module is introduced to extract the long short-term dependency of spectral features. To learn the most discriminative feature representations, the GJAM module is proposed to extract attention areas. The experimental results obtained with three public HSI datasets show that the SSDGL has powerful performance in insufficient and imbalanced sample problems and is superior to other state-of-the-art methods. Code can be obtained at: https://github.com/dengweihuan/SSDGL.
Three-dimensional multimodal medical imaging system based on free-hand ultrasound and structured light
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

We propose a three-dimensional (3D) multimodal medical imaging system that combines freehand ultrasound and structured light 3D reconstruction in a single coordinate system without requiring registration. To the best of our knowledge, these techniques have not been combined before as a multimodal imaging technique. The system complements the internal 3D information acquired with ultrasound, with the external surface measured with the structure light technique. Moreover, the ultrasound probe's optical tracking for pose estimation was implemented based on a convolutional neural network. Experimental results show the system's high accuracy and reproducibility, as well as its potential for preoperative and intraoperative applications. The experimental multimodal error, or the distance from two surfaces obtained with different modalities, was 0.12 mm. The code is available as a Github repository.
PPT: A Privacy-Preserving Global Model Training Protocol for Federated Learning in P2P Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

The concept of Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a convergence of machine learning, information, and communication technology. It is vital to the development of machine learning, which is expected to be fully decentralized, privacy-preserving, secure, and robust. However, general federated learning settings with a central server can't meet requirements in decentralized environment. In this paper, we propose a decentralized, secure and privacy-preserving global model training protocol, named PPT, for federated learning in Peer-to-peer (P2P) Networks. PPT uses a one-hop communication form to aggregate local model update parameters and adopts the symmetric cryptosystem to ensure security. It is worth mentioning that PPT modifies the Eschenauer-Gligor (E-G) scheme to distribute keys for encryption. In terms of privacy preservation, PPT generates random noise to disturb local model update parameters. The noise is eliminated ultimately, which ensures the global model performance compared with other noise-based privacy-preserving methods in FL, e.g., differential privacy. PPT also adopts Game Theory to resist collusion attacks. Through extensive analysis, we demonstrate that PPT various security threats and preserve user privacy. Ingenious experiments demonstrate the utility and efficiency as well.
ICDAR 2021 Competition on Scientific Table Image Recognition to LaTeX
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

Tables present important information concisely in many scientific documents. Visual features like mathematical symbols, equations, and spanning cells make structure and content extraction from tables embedded in research documents difficult. This paper discusses the dataset, tasks, participants' methods, and results of the ICDAR 2021 Competition on Scientific Table Image Recognition to LaTeX. Specifically, the task of the competition is to convert a tabular image to its corresponding LaTeX source code. We proposed two subtasks. In Subtask 1, we ask the participants to reconstruct the LaTeX structure code from an image. In Subtask 2, we ask the participants to reconstruct the LaTeX content code from an image. This report describes the datasets and ground truth specification, details the performance evaluation metrics used, presents the final results, and summarizes the participating methods. Submission by team VCGroup got the highest Exact Match accuracy score of 74% for Subtask 1 and 55% for Subtask 2, beating previous baselines by 5% and 12%, respectively. Although improvements can still be made to the recognition capabilities of models, this competition contributes to the development of fully automated table recognition systems by challenging practitioners to solve problems under specific constraints and sharing their approaches; the platform will remain available for post-challenge submissions at https://competitions.codalab.org/competitions/26979 .
Logspace Sequential Quadratic Programming for Design Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2021
Year: 2021

A novel approach to exploiting the log-convex structure present in many design problems is developed by modifying the classical Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP) algorithm. The modified algorithm, Logspace Sequential Quadratic Programming (LSQP), inherits some of the computational efficiency exhibited by log-convex methods such as Geometric Programing and Signomial Programing, but retains the the natural integration of black box analysis methods from SQP. As a result, significant computational savings is achieved without the need to invasively modify existing black box analysis methods prevalent in practical design problems. In the cases considered here, the LSQP algorithm shows a 40-70% reduction in number of iterations compared to SQP.
CSCAD: Correlation Structure-based Collective Anomaly Detection in Complex System
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Detecting anomalies in large complex systems is a critical and challenging task. The difficulties arise from several aspects. First, collecting ground truth labels or prior knowledge for anomalies is hard in real-world systems, which often lead to limited or no anomaly labels in the dataset. Second, anomalies in large systems usually occur in a collective manner due to the underlying dependency structure among devices or sensors. Lastly, real-time anomaly detection for high-dimensional data requires efficient algorithms that are capable of handling different types of data (i.e. continuous and discrete). We propose a correlation structure-based collective anomaly detection (CSCAD) model for high-dimensional anomaly detection problem in large systems, which is also generalizable to semi-supervised or supervised settings. Our framework utilize graph convolutional network combining a variational autoencoder to jointly exploit the feature space correlation and reconstruction deficiency of samples to perform anomaly detection. We propose an extended mutual information (EMI) metric to mine the internal correlation structure among different data features, which enhances the data reconstruction capability of CSCAD. The reconstruction loss and latent standard deviation vector of a sample obtained from reconstruction network can be perceived as two natural anomalous degree measures. An anomaly discriminating network can then be trained using low anomalous degree samples as positive samples, and high anomalous degree samples as negative samples. Experimental results on five public datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms all the competing baselines.
CLEVE: Contrastive Pre-training for Event Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Event extraction (EE) has considerably benefited from pre-trained language models (PLMs) by fine-tuning. However, existing pre-training methods have not involved modeling event characteristics, resulting in the developed EE models cannot take full advantage of large-scale unsupervised data. To this end, we propose CLEVE, a contrastive pre-training framework for EE to better learn event knowledge from large unsupervised data and their semantic structures (e.g. AMR) obtained with automatic parsers. CLEVE contains a text encoder to learn event semantics and a graph encoder to learn event structures respectively. Specifically, the text encoder learns event semantic representations by self-supervised contrastive learning to represent the words of the same events closer than those unrelated words; the graph encoder learns event structure representations by graph contrastive pre-training on parsed event-related semantic structures. The two complementary representations then work together to improve both the conventional supervised EE and the unsupervised "liberal" EE, which requires jointly extracting events and discovering event schemata without any annotated data. Experiments on ACE 2005 and MAVEN datasets show that CLEVE achieves significant improvements, especially in the challenging unsupervised setting. The source code and pre-trained checkpoints can be obtained from https://github.com/THU-KEG/CLEVE.
Generating Ten BCI Commands Using Four Simple Motor Imageries
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2021
Year: 2021

The brain computer interface (BCI) systems are utilized for transferring information among humans and computers by analyzing electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings.The process of mentally previewing a motor movement without generating the corporal output can be described as motor imagery (MI).In this emerging research field, the number of commands is also limited in relation to the number of MI tasks; in the current literature, mostly two or four commands (classes) are studied. As a solution to this problem, it is recommended to use mental tasks as well as MI tasks. Unfortunately, the use of this approach reduces the classification performance of MI EEG signals. The fMRI analyses show that the resources in the brain associated with the motor imagery can be activated independently. It is assumed that the brain activity induced by the MI of the combination of body parts corresponds to the superposition of the activities generated during each body parts's simple MI. In this study, in order to create more than four BCI commands, we suggest to generate combined MI EEG signals artificially by using left hand, right hand, tongue, and feet motor imageries in pairs. A maximum of ten different BCI commands can be generated by using four motor imageries in pairs.This study aims to achieve high classification performances for BCI commands produced from four motor imageries by implementing a small-sized deep neural network (DNN).The presented method is evaluated on the four-class datasets of BCI Competitions III and IV, and an average classification performance of 81.8% is achieved for ten classes. The above assumption is also validated on a different dataset which consists of simple and combined MI EEG signals acquired in real time. Trained with the artificially generated combined MI EEG signals, DivFE resulted in an average of 76.5% success rate for the combined MI EEG signals acquired in real-time.