OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Query the model: precomputations for efficient inference with Bayesian Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2021
Year: 2021

Variable Elimination is a fundamental algorithm for probabilistic inference over Bayesian networks. In this paper, we propose a novel materialization method for Variable Elimination, which can lead to significant efficiency gains when answering inference queries. We evaluate our technique using real-world Bayesian networks. Our results show that a modest amount of materialization can lead to significant improvements in the running time of queries. Furthermore, in comparison with junction tree methods that also rely on materialization, our approach achieves comparable efficiency during inference using significantly lighter materialization.
MAT-Fly: An Educational Platform for Simulating Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Aimed to Detect and Track Moving Objects
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

The main motivation of this work is to propose a simulation approach for a specific task within the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) field, i.e., the visual detection and tracking of arbitrary moving objects. In particular, it is described MAT-Fly, a numerical simulation platform for multi-rotor aircraft characterized by the ease of use and control development. The platform is based on Matlab and the MathWorks Virtual Reality (VR) and Computer Vision System (CVS) toolboxes that work together to simulate the behavior of a quad-rotor while tracking a car that moves along a nontrivial path. The VR toolbox has been chosen due to the familiarity that students have with Matlab and because it does not require a notable effort by the user for the learning and development phase thanks to its simple structure. The overall architecture is quite modular so that each block can be easily replaced with others simplifying the code reuse and the platform customization. Some simple testbeds are presented to show the validity of the approach and how the platform works. The simulator is released as open-source, making it possible to go through any part of the system, and available for educational purposes.
Two Algorithms for Computing Exact and Approximate Nash Equilibria in Bimatrix Games
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we first devise two algorithms to determine whether or not a bimatrix game has a strategically equivalent zero-sum game. If so, we propose an algorithm that computes the strategically equivalent zero-sum game. If a given bimatrix game is not strategically equivalent to a zero-sum game, we then propose an approach to compute a zero-sum game whose saddle-point equilibrium can be mapped to a well-supported approximate Nash equilibrium of the original game. We conduct extensive numerical simulation to establish the efficacy of the two algorithms.
Model Slicing for Supporting Complex Analytics with Elastic Inference Cost and Resource Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Deep learning models have been used to support analytics beyond simple aggregation, where deeper and wider models have been shown to yield great results. These models consume a huge amount of memory and computational operations. However, most of the large-scale industrial applications are often computational budget constrained. In practice, the peak workload of inference service could be 10x higher than the average cases, with the presence of unpredictable extreme cases. Lots of computational resources could be wasted during off-peak hours and the system may crash when the workload exceeds system capacity. How to support deep learning services with a dynamic workload cost-efficiently remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we address the challenge with a general and novel training scheme called model slicing, which enables deep learning models to provide predictions within the prescribed computational resource budget dynamically. Model slicing could be viewed as an elastic computation solution without requiring more computational resources. Succinctly, each layer in the model is divided into groups of a contiguous block of basic components (i.e. neurons in dense layers and channels in convolutional layers), and then partially ordered relation is introduced to these groups by enforcing that groups participated in each forward pass always starts from the first group to the dynamically-determined rightmost group. Trained by dynamically indexing the rightmost group with a single parameter slice rate, the network is engendered to build up group-wise and residual representation. Then during inference, a sub-model with fewer groups can be readily deployed for efficiency whose computation is roughly quadratic to the width controlled by the slice rate. Extensive experiments show that models trained with model slicing can effectively support on-demand workload with elastic inference cost.
On Non-Interactive Simulation of Binary Random Variables
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

We leverage proof techniques Fourier analysis and an existing result in coding theory to derive new bounds for the problem of non-interactive simulation of binary random variables. Previous bounds in the literature were derived by applying data processing inequalities concerning maximal correlation or hypercontractivity. We show that our bounds are sharp in some regimes. For a specific instance of problem parameters, our main result answers an open problem posed by E. Mossel in 2017. As by-products of our analyses, various new properties of the average distance and distance enumerator of binary block codes are established.
Event-based Access to Historical Italian War Memoirs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

The progressive digitization of historical archives provides new, often domain specific, textual resources that report on facts and events which have happened in the past; among these, memoirs are a very common type of primary source. In this paper, we present an approach for extracting information from Italian historical war memoirs and turning it into structured knowledge. This is based on the semantic notions of events, participants and roles. We evaluate quantitatively each of the key-steps of our approach and provide a graph-based representation of the extracted knowledge, which allows to move between a Close and a Distant Reading of the collection.
BAOD: Budget-Aware Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

We study the problem of object detection from a novel perspective in which annotation budget constraints are taken into consideration, appropriately coined Budget Aware Object Detection (BAOD). When provided with a fixed budget, we propose a strategy for building a diverse and informative dataset that can be used to optimally train a robust detector. We investigate both optimization and learning-based methods to sample which images to annotate and what type of annotation (strongly or weakly supervised) to annotate them with. We adopt a hybrid supervised learning framework to train the object detector from both these types of annotation. We conduct a comprehensive empirical study showing that a handcrafted optimization method outperforms other selection techniques including random sampling, uncertainty sampling and active learning. By combining an optimal image/annotation selection scheme with hybrid supervised learning to solve the BAOD problem, we show that one can achieve the performance of a strongly supervised detector on PASCAL-VOC 2007 while saving 12.8% of its original annotation budget. Furthermore, when $100\%$ of the budget is used, it surpasses this performance by 2.0 mAP percentage points.
Dynamic scheduling in a partially fluid, partially lossy queueing system
Venue: arXiv cs.PF 2021
Year: 2021

We consider a single server queueing system with two classes of jobs: eager jobs with small sizes that require service to begin almost immediately upon arrival, and tolerant jobs with larger sizes that can wait for service. While blocking probability is the relevant performance metric for the eager class, the tolerant class seeks to minimize its mean sojourn time. In this paper, we discuss the performance of each class under dynamic scheduling policies, where the scheduling of both classes depends on the instantaneous state of the system. This analysis is carried out under a certain fluid limit, where the arrival rate and service rate of the eager class are scaled to infinity, holding the offered load constant. Our performance characterizations reveal a (dynamic) pseudo-conservation law that ties the performance of both the classes to the standalone blocking probabilities of the eager class. Further, the performance is robust to other specifics of the scheduling policies. We also characterize the Pareto frontier of the achievable region of performance vectors under the same fluid limit, and identify a (two-parameter) class of Pareto-complete scheduling policies.
Properties of Inconsistency Measures for Databases
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2021
Year: 2021

How should we quantify the inconsistency of a database that violates integrity constraints? Proper measures are important for various tasks, such as progress indication and action prioritization in cleaning systems, and reliability estimation for new datasets. To choose an appropriate inconsistency measure, it is important to identify the desired properties in the application and understand which of these is guaranteed or at least expected in practice. For example, in some use cases the inconsistency should reduce if constraints are eliminated; in others it should be stable and avoid jitters and jumps in reaction to small changes in the database. We embark on a systematic investigation of properties for database inconsistency measures. We investigate a collection of basic measures that have been proposed in the past in both the Knowledge Representation and Database communities, analyze their theoretical properties, and empirically observe their behaviour in an experimental study. We also demonstrate how the framework can lead to new inconsistency measures by introducing a new measure that, in contrast to the rest, satisfies all of the properties we consider and can be computed in polynomial time.
Incentivized Blockchain-based Social Media Platforms: A Case Study of Steemit
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2021
Year: 2021

This paper presents an empirical analysis of Steemit, a key representative of the emerging incentivized social media platforms over Blockchains, to understand and evaluate the actual level of decentralization and the practical effects of cryptocurrency-driven reward system in these modern social media platforms. Similar to Bitcoin, Steemit is operated by a decentralized community, where 21 members are periodically elected to cooperatively operate the platform through the Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) consensus protocol. Our study performed on 539 million operations performed by 1.12 million Steemit users during the period 2016/03 to 2018/08 reveals that the actual level of decentralization in Steemit is far lower than the ideal level, indicating that the DPoS consensus protocol may not be a desirable approach for establishing a highly decentralized social media platform. In Steemit, users create contents as posts which get curated based on votes from other users. The platform periodically issues cryptocurrency as rewards to creators and curators of popular posts. Although such a reward system is originally driven by the desire to incentivize users to contribute to high-quality contents, our analysis of the underlying cryptocurrency transfer network on the blockchain reveals that more than 16% transfers of cryptocurrency in Steemit are sent to curators suspected to be bots and also finds the existence of an underlying supply network for the bots, both suggesting a significant misuse of the current reward system in Steemit. Our study is designed to provide insights on the current state of this emerging blockchain-based social media platform including the effectiveness of its design and the operation of the consensus protocols and the reward system.
MOSNet: Deep Learning based Objective Assessment for Voice Conversion
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2021
Year: 2021

Existing objective evaluation metrics for voice conversion (VC) are not always correlated with human perception. Therefore, training VC models with such criteria may not effectively improve naturalness and similarity of converted speech. In this paper, we propose deep learning-based assessment models to predict human ratings of converted speech. We adopt the convolutional and recurrent neural network models to build a mean opinion score (MOS) predictor, termed as MOSNet. The proposed models are tested on large-scale listening test results of the Voice Conversion Challenge (VCC) 2018. Experimental results show that the predicted scores of the proposed MOSNet are highly correlated with human MOS ratings at the system level while being fairly correlated with human MOS ratings at the utterance level. Meanwhile, we have modified MOSNet to predict the similarity scores, and the preliminary results show that the predicted scores are also fairly correlated with human ratings. These results confirm that the proposed models could be used as a computational evaluator to measure the MOS of VC systems to reduce the need for expensive human rating.
Distributed Differentially Private Computation of Functions with Correlated Noise
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Many applications of machine learning, such as human health research, involve processing private or sensitive information. Privacy concerns may impose significant hurdles to collaboration in scenarios where there are multiple sites holding data and the goal is to estimate properties jointly across all datasets. Differentially private decentralized algorithms can provide strong privacy guarantees. However, the accuracy of the joint estimates may be poor when the datasets at each site are small. This paper proposes a new framework, Correlation Assisted Private Estimation (CAPE), for designing privacy-preserving decentralized algorithms with better accuracy guarantees in an honest-but-curious model. CAPE can be used in conjunction with the functional mechanism for statistical and machine learning optimization problems. A tighter characterization of the functional mechanism is provided that allows CAPE to achieve the same performance as a centralized algorithm in the decentralized setting using all datasets. Empirical results on regression and neural network problems for both synthetic and real datasets show that differentially private methods can be competitive with non-private algorithms in many scenarios of interest.
The MineRL 2019 Competition on Sample Efficient Reinforcement Learning using Human Priors
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Though deep reinforcement learning has led to breakthroughs in many difficult domains, these successes have required an ever-increasing number of samples. As state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) systems require an exponentially increasing number of samples, their development is restricted to a continually shrinking segment of the AI community. Likewise, many of these systems cannot be applied to real-world problems, where environment samples are expensive. Resolution of these limitations requires new, sample-efficient methods. To facilitate research in this direction, we introduce the MineRL Competition on Sample Efficient Reinforcement Learning using Human Priors. The primary goal of the competition is to foster the development of algorithms which can efficiently leverage human demonstrations to drastically reduce the number of samples needed to solve complex, hierarchical, and sparse environments. To that end, we introduce: (1) the Minecraft ObtainDiamond task, a sequential decision making environment requiring long-term planning, hierarchical control, and efficient exploration methods; and (2) the MineRL-v0 dataset, a large-scale collection of over 60 million state-action pairs of human demonstrations that can be resimulated into embodied trajectories with arbitrary modifications to game state and visuals. Participants will compete to develop systems which solve the ObtainDiamond task with a limited number of samples from the environment simulator, Malmo. The competition is structured into two rounds in which competitors are provided several paired versions of the dataset and environment with different game textures. At the end of each round, competitors will submit containerized versions of their learning algorithms and they will then be trained/evaluated from scratch on a hold-out dataset-environment pair for a total of 4-days on a prespecified hardware platform.
Synthesis of Covert Actuator Attackers for Free
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we shall formulate and address a problem of covert actuator attacker synthesis for cyber-physical systems that are modelled by discrete-event systems. We assume the actuator attacker partially observes the execution of the closed-loop system and is able to modify each control command issued by the supervisor on a specified attackable subset of controllable events. We provide straightforward but in general exponential-time reductions, due to the use of subset construction procedure, from the covert actuator attacker synthesis problems to the Ramadge-Wonham supervisor synthesis problems. It then follows that it is possible to use the many techniques and tools already developed for solving the supervisor synthesis problem to solve the covert actuator attacker synthesis problem for free. In particular, we show that, if the attacker cannot attack unobservable events to the supervisor, then the reductions can be carried out in polynomial time. We also provide a brief discussion on some other conditions under which the exponential blowup in state size can be avoided. Finally, we show how the reduction based synthesis procedure can be extended for the synthesis of successful covert actuator attackers that also eavesdrop the control commands issued by the supervisor.
T-SVD Based Non-convex Tensor Completion and Robust Principal Component Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Tensor completion and robust principal component analysis have been widely used in machine learning while the key problem relies on the minimization of a tensor rank that is very challenging. A common way to tackle this difficulty is to approximate the tensor rank with the $\ell_1-$norm of singular values based on its Tensor Singular Value Decomposition (T-SVD). Besides, the sparsity of a tensor is also measured by its $\ell_1-$norm. However, the $\ell_1$ penalty is essentially biased and thus the result will deviate. In order to sidestep the bias, we propose a novel non-convex tensor rank surrogate function and a novel non-convex sparsity measure. In this new setting by using the concavity instead of the convexity, a majorization minimization algorithm is further designed for tensor completion and robust principal component analysis. Furthermore, we analyze its theoretical properties. Finally, the experiments on natural and hyperspectral images demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of our proposed method.
Path-Restore: Learning Network Path Selection for Image Restoration
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Very deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have greatly improved the performance on various image restoration tasks. However, this comes at a price of increasing computational burden, hence limiting their practical usages. We observe that some corrupted image regions are inherently easier to restore than others since the distortion and content vary within an image. To leverage this, we propose Path-Restore, a multi-path CNN with a pathfinder that can dynamically select an appropriate route for each image region. We train the pathfinder using reinforcement learning with a difficulty-regulated reward. This reward is related to the performance, complexity and "the difficulty of restoring a region". A policy mask is further investigated to jointly process all the image regions. We conduct experiments on denoising and mixed restoration tasks. The results show that our method achieves comparable or superior performance to existing approaches with less computational cost. In particular, Path-Restore is effective for real-world denoising, where the noise distribution varies across different regions on a single image. Compared to the state-of-the-art RIDNet, our method achieves comparable performance and runs 2.7x faster on the realistic Darmstadt Noise Dataset.
Enhanced IoV Security Network by Using Blockchain Governance Game
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

This paper deals with the design of the secure network in an Enhanced Internet of Vehicles by using the Blockchain Governance Game (BGG). The BGG is a system model of a stochastic game to find best strategies towards preparation of preventing a network malfunction by an attacker and the paper applies this game model into the connected vehicle security. Analytically tractable results for decision-making parameters enable to predict the moment for safety operations and to deliver the optimal combination of the number of reserved nodes with the acceptance probability of backup nodes to protect a connected car. This research helps for whom considers the enhanced secure IoV architecture with the BGG within a decentralized network.
Array BP-XOR Codes for Hierarchically Distributed Matrix Multiplication
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

A novel fault-tolerant computation technique based on array Belief Propagation (BP)-decodable XOR (BP-XOR) codes is proposed for distributed matrix-matrix multiplication. The proposed scheme is shown to be configurable and suited for modern hierarchical compute architectures such as Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) equipped with multiple nodes, whereby each has many small independent processing units with increased core-to-core communications. The proposed scheme is shown to outperform a few of the well--known earlier strategies in terms of total end-to-end execution time while in presence of slow nodes, called $stragglers$. This performance advantage is due to the careful design of array codes which distributes the encoding operation over the cluster (slave) nodes at the expense of increased master-slave communication. An interesting trade-off between end-to-end latency and total communication cost is precisely described. In addition, to be able to address an identified problem of scaling stragglers, an asymptotic version of array BP-XOR codes based on projection geometry is proposed at the expense of some computation overhead. A thorough latency analysis is conducted for all schemes to demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves order-optimal computation in both the sublinear as well as the linear regimes in the size of the computed product from an end-to-end delay perspective.
Robust Graph Data Learning via Latent Graph Convolutional Representation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Graph Convolutional Representation (GCR) has achieved impressive performance for graph data representation. However, existing GCR is generally defined on the input fixed graph which may restrict the representation capacity and also be vulnerable to the structural attacks and noises. To address this issue, we propose a novel Latent Graph Convolutional Representation (LatGCR) for robust graph data representation and learning. Our LatGCR is derived based on reformulating graph convolutional representation from the aspect of graph neighborhood reconstruction. Given an input graph $\textbf{A}$, LatGCR aims to generate a flexible latent graph $\widetilde{\textbf{A}}$ for graph convolutional representation which obviously enhances the representation capacity and also performs robustly w.r.t graph structural attacks and noises. Moreover, LatGCR is implemented in a self-supervised manner and thus provides a basic block for both supervised and unsupervised graph learning tasks. Experiments on several datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of LatGCR.