OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
RIS-Assisted Massive MIMO with Multi-Specular Spatially Correlated Fading
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have attracted great attention as a potential beyond 5G technology. These surfaces consist of many passive elements of metamaterials whose impedance can be controllable to change the phase, amplitude, or other characteristics of wireless signals impinging on them. Channel estimation is a critical task when it comes to the control of a large RIS when having a channel with a large number of multipath components. In this paper, we propose a novel channel estimation scheme that exploits spatial correlation characteristics at both the massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) base station and the planar RISs, and other statistical characteristics of multi-specular fading in a mobile environment. Moreover, a novel heuristic for phase-shift selection at the RISs is developed, inspired by signal processing methods that are effective in conventional massive MIMO. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed uplink RIS-aided framework improves the spectral efficiency of the cell-edge mobile users substantially in comparison to a conventional single-cell massive MIMO system.
A Case Study of Intra-library Privacy Issues on Android GPS Navigation Apps
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

The Android unrestricted application market, being of open source nature, has made it a popular platform for third-party applications reaching millions of smart devices in the world. This tremendous increase in applications with an extensive API that includes access to phone hardware, settings, and user data raises concerns regarding users privacy, as the information collected from the apps could be used for profiling purposes. In this respect, this paper focuses on the geolocation data and analyses five GPS applications to identify the privacy risks if no appropriate safeguards are present. Our results show that GPS navigation apps have access to several types of device data, while they may allow for personal data leakage towards third parties such as library providers or tracking services without providing adequate or precise information to the users. Moreover, as they are using third-party libraries, they suffer from the intra-library collusion issue, that could be exploited from advertising and analytics companies through apps and gather large amount of personal information without the explicit consent of the user.
On Recognizing Occluded Faces in the Wild
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Facial appearance variations due to occlusion has been one of the main challenges for face recognition systems. To facilitate further research in this area, it is necessary and important to have occluded face datasets collected from real-world, as synthetically generated occluded faces cannot represent the nature of the problem. In this paper, we present the Real World Occluded Faces (ROF) dataset, that contains faces with both upper face occlusion, due to sunglasses, and lower face occlusion, due to masks. We propose two evaluation protocols for this dataset. Benchmark experiments on the dataset have shown that no matter how powerful the deep face representation models are, their performance degrades significantly when they are tested on real-world occluded faces. It is observed that the performance drop is far less when the models are tested on synthetically generated occluded faces. The ROF dataset and the associated evaluation protocols are publicly available at the following link https://github.com/ekremerakin/RealWorldOccludedFaces.
Class-conditioned Domain Generalization via Wasserstein Distributional Robust Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Given multiple source domains, domain generalization aims at learning a universal model that performs well on any unseen but related target domain. In this work, we focus on the domain generalization scenario where domain shifts occur among class-conditional distributions of different domains. Existing approaches are not sufficiently robust when the variation of conditional distributions given the same class is large. In this work, we extend the concept of distributional robust optimization to solve the class-conditional domain generalization problem. Our approach optimizes the worst-case performance of a classifier over class-conditional distributions within a Wasserstein ball centered around the barycenter of the source conditional distributions. We also propose an iterative algorithm for learning the optimal radius of the Wasserstein balls automatically. Experiments show that the proposed framework has better performance on unseen target domain than approaches without domain generalization.
Unsupervised clothing change adaptive person ReID
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Clothing changes and lack of data labels are both crucial challenges in person ReID. For the former challenge, people may occur multiple times at different locations wearing different clothing. However, most of the current person ReID research works focus on the benchmarks in which a person's clothing is kept the same all the time. For the last challenge, some researchers try to make model learn information from a labeled dataset as a source to an unlabeled dataset. Whereas purely unsupervised training is less used. In this paper, we aim to solve both problems at the same time. We design a novel unsupervised model, Sync-Person-Cloud ReID, to solve the unsupervised clothing change person ReID problem. We developer a purely unsupervised clothing change person ReID pipeline with person sync augmentation operation and same person feature restriction. The person sync augmentation is to supply additional same person resources. These same person's resources can be used as part supervised input by same person feature restriction. The extensive experiments on clothing change ReID datasets show the out-performance of our methods.
BotSpot: Deep Learning Classification of Bot Accounts within Twitter
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

The openness feature of Twitter allows programs to generate and control Twitter accounts automatically via the Twitter API. These accounts, which are known as bots, can automatically perform actions such as tweeting, re-tweeting, following, unfollowing, or direct messaging other accounts, just like real people. They can also conduct malicious tasks such as spreading of fake news, spams, malicious software and other cyber-crimes. In this paper, we introduce a novel bot detection approach using deep learning, with the Multi-layer Perceptron Neural Networks and nine features of a bot account. A web crawler is developed to automatically collect data from public Twitter accounts and build the testing and training datasets, with 860 samples of human and bot accounts. After the initial training is done, the Multilayer Perceptron Neural Networks achieved an overall accuracy rate of 92%, which proves the performance of the proposed approach.
Multiscale Laplacian Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Machine learning methods have greatly changed science, engineering, finance, business, and other fields. Despite the tremendous accomplishments of machine learning and deep learning methods, many challenges still remain. In particular, the performance of machine learning methods is often severely affected in case of diverse data, usually associated with smaller data sets or data related to areas of study where the size of the data sets is constrained by the complexity and/or high cost of experiments. Moreover, data with limited labeled samples is a challenge to most learning approaches. In this paper, the aforementioned challenges are addressed by integrating graph-based frameworks, multiscale structure, modified and adapted optimization procedures and semi-supervised techniques. This results in two innovative multiscale Laplacian learning (MLL) approaches for machine learning tasks, such as data classification, and for tackling diverse data, data with limited samples and smaller data sets. The first approach, called multikernel manifold learning (MML), integrates manifold learning with multikernel information and solves a regularization problem consisting of a loss function and a warped kernel regularizer using multiscale graph Laplacians. The second approach, called the multiscale MBO (MMBO) method, introduces multiscale Laplacians to a modification of the famous classical Merriman-Bence-Osher (MBO) scheme, and makes use of fast solvers for finding the approximations to the extremal eigenvectors of the graph Laplacian. We demonstrate the performance of our methods experimentally on a variety of data sets, such as biological, text and image data, and compare them favorably to existing approaches.
A Dynamic, Hierarchical Resource Model for Converged Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

Extreme dynamic heterogeneity in high performance computing systems and the convergence of traditional HPC with new simulation, analysis, and data science approaches impose increasingly more complex requirements on resource and job management software (RJMS). However, there is a paucity of RJMS techniques that can solve key technical challenges associated with those new requirements, particularly when they are coupled. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic and multi-level resource model approach to address three key well-known challenges individually and in combination: i.e., 1) RJMS dynamism to facilitate job and workflow adaptability, 2) integration of specialized external resources (e.g. user-centric cloud bursting), and 3) scheduling cloud orchestration framework tasks. The core idea is to combine a dynamic directed graph resource model with fully hierarchical scheduling to provide a unified solution to all three key challenges. Our empirical and analytical evaluations of the solution using our prototype extension to Fluxion, a production hierarchical graph-based scheduler, suggest that our unified solution can significantly improve flexibility, performance and scalability across all three problems in comparison to limited traditional approaches.
How Camera Placement Affects Gameplay in Video Games
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2021
Year: 2021

In video games, players' perception of the game world and related information depends on their or the game designer's choice of a virtual camera model. In this paper, we attempt to answer the research question of whether it is possible to identify which camera model is preferred by, fits and best serves each player depending on where they are in a game world and the kinds of challenges they face. To this end, a special type of video game, combining challenges from different game genres, was designed and developed with Unity; thirty players could choose from four camera models at their disposal, depending on where they were in the game world, and utilize the most suitable one to proceed. Each player's preference of camera model was collected using the data platform Unity Analytics and then analyzed. The analysis of the results showed that players managed to adapt to the logic and requirements of the game challenges by choosing different cameras for each of them, depending on the spatial requirements and the presence of enemies or platforms they should jump across from.
Self- and Pseudo-self-supervised Prediction of Speaker and Key-utterance for Multi-party Dialogue Reading Comprehension
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Multi-party dialogue machine reading comprehension (MRC) brings tremendous challenge since it involves multiple speakers at one dialogue, resulting in intricate speaker information flows and noisy dialogue contexts. To alleviate such difficulties, previous models focus on how to incorporate these information using complex graph-based modules and additional manually labeled data, which is usually rare in real scenarios. In this paper, we design two labour-free self- and pseudo-self-supervised prediction tasks on speaker and key-utterance to implicitly model the speaker information flows, and capture salient clues in a long dialogue. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets have justified the effectiveness of our method over competitive baselines and current state-of-the-art models.
AppQ: Warm-starting App Recommendation Based on View Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

Current app ranking and recommendation systems are mainly based on user-generated information, e.g., number of downloads and ratings. However, new apps often have few (or even no) user feedback, suffering from the classic cold-start problem. How to quickly identify and then recommend new apps of high quality is a challenging issue. Here, a fundamental requirement is the capability to accurately measure an app's quality based on its inborn features, rather than user-generated features. Since users obtain first-hand experience of an app by interacting with its views, we speculate that the inborn features are largely related to the visual quality of individual views in an app and the ways the views switch to one another. In this work, we propose AppQ, a novel app quality grading and recommendation system that extracts inborn features of apps based on app source code. In particular, AppQ works in parallel to perform code analysis to extract app-level features as well as dynamic analysis to capture view-level layout hierarchy and the switching among views. Each app is then expressed as an attributed view graph, which is converted into a vector and fed to classifiers for recognizing its quality classes. Our evaluation with an app dataset from Google Play reports that AppQ achieves the best performance with accuracy of 85.0\%. This shows a lot of promise to warm-start app grading and recommendation systems with AppQ.
Tom: Leveraging trend of the observed gradients for faster convergence
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

The success of deep learning can be attributed to various factors such as increase in computational power, large datasets, deep convolutional neural networks, optimizers etc. Particularly, the choice of optimizer affects the generalization, convergence rate, and training stability. Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a first order iterative optimizer that updates the gradient uniformly for all parameters. This uniform update may not be suitable across the entire training phase. A rudimentary solution for this is to employ a fine-tuned learning rate scheduler which decreases learning rate as a function of iteration. To eliminate the dependency of learning rate schedulers, adaptive gradient optimizers such as AdaGrad, AdaDelta, RMSProp, Adam employ a parameter-wise scaling term for learning rate which is a function of the gradient itself. We propose Tom (Trend over Momentum) optimizer, which is a novel variant of Adam that takes into account of the trend which is observed for the gradients in the loss landscape traversed by the neural network. In the proposed Tom optimizer, an additional smoothing equation is introduced to address the trend observed during the process of optimization. The smoothing parameter introduced for the trend requires no tuning and can be used with default values. Experimental results for classification datasets such as CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and CINIC-10 image datasets show that Tom outperforms Adagrad, Adadelta, RMSProp and Adam in terms of both accuracy and has a faster convergence. The source code is publicly made available at https://github.com/AnirudhMaiya/Tom
Robust Optimal Classification Trees Against Adversarial Examples
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Decision trees are a popular choice of explainable model, but just like neural networks, they suffer from adversarial examples. Existing algorithms for fitting decision trees robust against adversarial examples are greedy heuristics and lack approximation guarantees. In this paper we propose ROCT, a collection of methods to train decision trees that are optimally robust against user-specified attack models. We show that the min-max optimization problem that arises in adversarial learning can be solved using a single minimization formulation for decision trees with 0-1 loss. We propose such formulations in Mixed-Integer Linear Programming and Maximum Satisfiability, which widely available solvers can optimize. We also present a method that determines the upper bound on adversarial accuracy for any model using bipartite matching. Our experimental results demonstrate that the existing heuristics achieve close to optimal scores while ROCT achieves state-of-the-art scores.
Follow the guides: disentangling human and algorithmic curation in online music consumption
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2021
Year: 2021

The role of recommendation systems in the diversity of content consumption on platforms is a much-debated issue. The quantitative state of the art often overlooks the existence of individual attitudes toward guidance, and eventually of different categories of users in this regard. Focusing on the case of music streaming, we analyze the complete listening history of about 9k users over one year and demonstrate that there is no blanket answer to the intertwinement of recommendation use and consumption diversity: it depends on users. First we compute for each user the relative importance of different access modes within their listening history, introducing a trichotomy distinguishing so-called `organic' use from algorithmic and editorial guidance. We thereby identify four categories of users. We then focus on two scales related to content diversity, both in terms of dispersion -- how much users consume the same content repeatedly -- and popularity -- how popular is the content they consume. We show that the two types of recommendation offered by music platforms -- algorithmic and editorial -- may drive the consumption of more or less diverse content in opposite directions, depending also strongly on the type of users. Finally, we compare users' streaming histories with the music programming of a selection of popular French radio stations during the same period. While radio programs are usually more tilted toward repetition than users' listening histories, they often program more songs from less popular artists. On the whole, our results highlight the nontrivial effects of platform-mediated recommendation on consumption, and lead us to speak of `filter niches' rather than `filter bubbles'. They hint at further ramifications for the study and design of recommendation systems.
Unsupervised Pre-training with Structured Knowledge for Improving Natural Language Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

While recent research on natural language inference has considerably benefited from large annotated datasets, the amount of inference-related knowledge (including commonsense) provided in the annotated data is still rather limited. There have been two lines of approaches that can be used to further address the limitation: (1) unsupervised pretraining can leverage knowledge in much larger unstructured text data; (2) structured (often human-curated) knowledge has started to be considered in neural-network-based models for NLI. An immediate question is whether these two approaches complement each other, or how to develop models that can bring together their advantages. In this paper, we propose models that leverage structured knowledge in different components of pre-trained models. Our results show that the proposed models perform better than previous BERT-based state-of-the-art models. Although our models are proposed for NLI, they can be easily extended to other sentence or sentence-pair classification problems.
Attributing Fair Decisions with Attention Interventions
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

The widespread use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in consequential domains, such as healthcare and parole decision-making systems, has drawn intense scrutiny on the fairness of these methods. However, ensuring fairness is often insufficient as the rationale for a contentious decision needs to be audited, understood, and defended. We propose that the attention mechanism can be used to ensure fair outcomes while simultaneously providing feature attributions to account for how a decision was made. Toward this goal, we design an attention-based model that can be leveraged as an attribution framework. It can identify features responsible for both performance and fairness of the model through attention interventions and attention weight manipulation. Using this attribution framework, we then design a post-processing bias mitigation strategy and compare it with a suite of baselines. We demonstrate the versatility of our approach by conducting experiments on two distinct data types, tabular and textual.
Multilingual Speech Recognition for Low-Resource Indian Languages using Multi-Task conformer
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Transformers have recently become very popular for sequence-to-sequence applications such as machine translation and speech recognition. In this work, we propose a multi-task learning-based transformer model for low-resource multilingual speech recognition for Indian languages. Our proposed model consists of a conformer [1] encoder and two parallel transformer decoders. We use a phoneme decoder (PHN-DEC) for the phoneme recognition task and a grapheme decoder (GRP-DEC) to predict grapheme sequence. We consider the phoneme recognition task as an auxiliary task for our multi-task learning framework. We jointly optimize the network for both phoneme and grapheme recognition tasks using Joint CTC-Attention [2] training. We use a conditional decoding scheme to inject the language information into the model before predicting the grapheme sequence. Our experiments show that our proposed approach can obtain significant improvement over previous approaches [4]. We also show that our conformer-based dual-decoder approach outperforms both the transformer-based dual-decoder approach and single decoder approach. Finally, We compare monolingual ASR models with our proposed multilingual ASR approach.
Detecting Attacks on IoT Devices using Featureless 1D-CNN
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

The generalization of deep learning has helped us, in the past, address challenges such as malware identification and anomaly detection in the network security domain. However, as effective as it is, scarcity of memory and processing power makes it difficult to perform these tasks in Internet of Things (IoT) devices. This research finds an easy way out of this bottleneck by depreciating the need for feature engineering and subsequent processing in machine learning techniques. In this study, we introduce a Featureless machine learning process to perform anomaly detection. It uses unprocessed byte streams of packets as training data. Featureless machine learning enables a low cost and low memory time-series analysis of network traffic. It benefits from eliminating the significant investment in subject matter experts and the time required for feature engineering.