OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
lifex: a flexible, high performance library for the numerical solution of complex finite element problems
Venue: arXiv cs.MS 2022
Year: 2022

Numerical simulations are ubiquitous in mathematics and computational science. Several industrial and clinical applications entail modeling complex multiphysics systems that evolve over a variety of spatial and temporal scales. This study introduces the design and capabilities of lifex, an open source C++ library for high performance finite element simulations of multiphysics, multiscale, and multidomain problems. lifex meets the emerging need for versatile, efficient computational tools that are easily accessed by users and developers. We showcase its flexibility and effectiveness on a number of illustrative examples and advanced applications of use and demonstrate its parallel performance up to thousands of cores.
Enhanced Laser-Scan Matching with Online Error Estimation for Highway and Tunnel Driving
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Lidar data can be used to generate point clouds for the navigation of autonomous vehicles or mobile robotics platforms. Scan matching, the process of estimating the rigid transformation that best aligns two point clouds, is the basis for lidar odometry, a form of dead reckoning. Lidar odometry is particularly useful when absolute sensors, like GPS, are not available. Here we propose the Iterative Closest Ellipsoidal Transform (ICET), a scan matching algorithm which provides two novel improvements over the current state-of-the-art Normal Distributions Transform (NDT). Like NDT, ICET decomposes lidar data into voxels and fits a Gaussian distribution to the points within each voxel. The first innovation of ICET reduces geometric ambiguity along large flat surfaces by suppressing the solution along those directions. The second innovation of ICET is to infer the output error covariance associated with the position and orientation transformation between successive point clouds; the error covariance is particularly useful when ICET is incorporated into a state-estimation routine such as an extended Kalman filter. We constructed a simulation to compare the performance of ICET and NDT in 2D space both with and without geometric ambiguity and found that ICET produces superior estimates while accurately predicting solution accuracy.
Unfolding Values through Systematic Guidance: Conducting a Value-Centered Participatory Workshop for a Patient-Oriented Data Donation
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

Routinely collected clinical patient data posits a valuable resource for data-driven medical innovation. Such secondary data use for medical research purposes is dependent on the patient's consent. To gain an understanding of the patients' values and needs regarding medical data donations, we developed a participatory workshop method, integrating approaches from value-sensitive and reflective design to explore patients' values and translate them into hypothetical, ideal design solutions. The data gathered in the workshop are used to derive practicable design requirements for patient-oriented data donation technologies. In this paper, we introduce the workshop process and evaluate its application.
Automatic Reward Design via Learning Motivation-Consistent Intrinsic Rewards
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Reward design is a critical part of the application of reinforcement learning, the performance of which strongly depends on how well the reward signal frames the goal of the designer and how well the signal assesses progress in reaching that goal. In many cases, the extrinsic rewards provided by the environment (e.g., win or loss of a game) are very sparse and make it difficult to train agents directly. Researchers usually assist the learning of agents by adding some auxiliary rewards in practice. However, designing auxiliary rewards is often turned to a trial-and-error search for reward settings that produces acceptable results. In this paper, we propose to automatically generate goal-consistent intrinsic rewards for the agent to learn, by maximizing which the expected accumulative extrinsic rewards can be maximized. To this end, we introduce the concept of motivation which captures the underlying goal of maximizing certain rewards and propose the motivation based reward design method. The basic idea is to shape the intrinsic rewards by minimizing the distance between the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. We conduct extensive experiments and show that our method performs better than the state-of-the-art methods in handling problems of delayed reward, exploration, and credit assignment.
Deep Reinforcement Learning for End-to-End Network Slicing: Challenges and Solutions
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

5G and beyond is expected to enable various emerging use cases with diverse performance requirements from vertical industries. To serve these use cases cost-effectively, network slicing plays a key role in dynamically creating virtual end-to-end networks according to specific resource demands. A network slice may have hundreds of configurable parameters over multiple technical domains that define the performance of the network slice, which makes it impossible to use traditional model-based solutions to orchestrate resources for network slices. In this article, we discuss how to design and deploy deep reinforcement learning (DRL), a model-free approach, to address the network slicing problem. First, we analyze the network slicing problem and present a standard-compliant system architecture that enables DRL-based solutions in 5G and beyond networks. Second, we provide an in-depth analysis of the challenges in designing and deploying DRL in network slicing systems. Third, we explore multiple promising techniques, i.e., safety and distributed DRL, and imitation learning, for automating end-to-end network slicing.
Testing Relational Understanding in Text-Guided Image Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Relations are basic building blocks of human cognition. Classic and recent work suggests that many relations are early developing, and quickly perceived. Machine models that aspire to human-level perception and reasoning should reflect the ability to recognize and reason generatively about relations. We report a systematic empirical examination of a recent text-guided image generation model (DALL-E 2), using a set of 15 basic physical and social relations studied or proposed in the literature, and judgements from human participants (N = 169). Overall, we find that only ~22% of images matched basic relation prompts. Based on a quantitative examination of people's judgments, we suggest that current image generation models do not yet have a grasp of even basic relations involving simple objects and agents. We examine reasons for model successes and failures, and suggest possible improvements based on computations observed in biological intelligence.
Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem Using Conventional and Approximation Method
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

This paper attempts to solve the famous Vehicle Routing Problem by considering multiple constraints including capacitated vehicles, single depot, and distance using two approaches namely, cluster first and route the second algorithm and using integer linear programming. A set of nodes are provided as input to the system and a feasible route is generated as output, giving clusters of nodes and the route to be traveled within the cluster. For clustering the nodes, we have adopted the DBSCAN algorithm, and the routing is done using the approximation algorithm, Christofide's algorithm. The solution generated can be employed for solving real-life situations, like delivery systems consisting of various demand nodes.
L2Fuzz: Discovering Bluetooth L2CAP Vulnerabilities Using Stateful Fuzz Testing
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Bluetooth Basic Rate/Enhanced Data Rate (BR/EDR) is a wireless technology used in billions of devices. Recently, several Bluetooth fuzzing studies have been conducted to detect vulnerabilities in Bluetooth devices, but they fall short of effectively generating malformed packets. In this paper, we propose L2FUZZ, a stateful fuzzer to detect vulnerabilities in Bluetooth BR/EDR Logical Link Control and Adaptation Protocol (L2CAP) layer. By selecting valid commands for each state and mutating only the core fields of packets, L2FUZZ can generate valid malformed packets that are less likely to be rejected by the target device. Our experimental results confirmed that: (1) L2FUZZ generates up to 46 times more malformed packets with a much less packet rejection ratio compared to the existing techniques, and (2) L2FUZZ detected five zero-day vulnerabilities from eight real-world Bluetooth devices.
Polynomial-Time Power-Sum Decomposition of Polynomials
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

We give efficient algorithms for finding power-sum decomposition of an input polynomial $P(x)= \sum_{i\leq m} p_i(x)^d$ with component $p_i$s. The case of linear $p_i$s is equivalent to the well-studied tensor decomposition problem while the quadratic case occurs naturally in studying identifiability of non-spherical Gaussian mixtures from low-order moments. Unlike tensor decomposition, both the unique identifiability and algorithms for this problem are not well-understood. For the simplest setting of quadratic $p_i$s and $d=3$, prior work of Ge, Huang and Kakade yields an algorithm only when $m \leq \tilde{O}(\sqrt{n})$. On the other hand, the more general recent result of Garg, Kayal and Saha builds an algebraic approach to handle any $m=n^{O(1)}$ components but only when $d$ is large enough (while yielding no bounds for $d=3$ or even $d=100$) and only handles an inverse exponential noise. Our results obtain a substantial quantitative improvement on both the prior works above even in the base case of $d=3$ and quadratic $p_i$s. Specifically, our algorithm succeeds in decomposing a sum of $m \sim \tilde{O}(n)$ generic quadratic $p_i$s for $d=3$ and more generally the $d$th power-sum of $m \sim n^{2d/15}$ generic degree-$K$ polynomials for any $K \geq 2$. Our algorithm relies only on basic numerical linear algebraic primitives, is exact (i.e., obtain arbitrarily tiny error up to numerical precision), and handles an inverse polynomial noise when the $p_i$s have random Gaussian coefficients. Our main tool is a new method for extracting the linear span of $p_i$s by studying the linear subspace of low-order partial derivatives of the input $P$. For establishing polynomial stability of our algorithm in average-case, we prove inverse polynomial bounds on the smallest singular value of certain correlated random matrices with low-degree polynomial entries that arise in our analyses.
Learning robot inverse dynamics using sparse online Gaussian process with forgetting mechanism
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Online Gaussian processes (GPs), typically used for learning models from time-series data, are more flexible and robust than offline GPs. Both local and sparse approximations of GPs can efficiently learn complex models online. Yet, these approaches assume that all signals are relatively accurate and that all data are available for learning without misleading data. Besides, the online learning capacity of GPs is limited for high-dimension problems and long-term tasks in practice. This paper proposes a sparse online GP (SOGP) with a forgetting mechanism to forget distant model information at a specific rate. The proposed approach combines two general data deletion schemes for the basis vector set of SOGP: The position information-based scheme and the oldest points-based scheme. We apply our approach to learn the inverse dynamics of a collaborative robot with 7 degrees of freedom under a two-segment trajectory tracking problem with task switching. Both simulations and experiments have shown that the proposed approach achieves better tracking accuracy and predictive smoothness compared with the two general data deletion schemes.
A Survey on Masked Autoencoder for Self-supervised Learning in Vision and Beyond
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Masked autoencoders are scalable vision learners, as the title of MAE \cite{he2022masked}, which suggests that self-supervised learning (SSL) in vision might undertake a similar trajectory as in NLP. Specifically, generative pretext tasks with the masked prediction (e.g., BERT) have become a de facto standard SSL practice in NLP. By contrast, early attempts at generative methods in vision have been buried by their discriminative counterparts (like contrastive learning); however, the success of mask image modeling has revived the masking autoencoder (often termed denoising autoencoder in the past). As a milestone to bridge the gap with BERT in NLP, masked autoencoder has attracted unprecedented attention for SSL in vision and beyond. This work conducts a comprehensive survey of masked autoencoders to shed insight on a promising direction of SSL. As the first to review SSL with masked autoencoders, this work focuses on its application in vision by discussing its historical developments, recent progress, and implications for diverse applications.
ELF22: A Context-based Counter Trolling Dataset to Combat Internet Trolls
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Online trolls increase social costs and cause psychological damage to individuals. With the proliferation of automated accounts making use of bots for trolling, it is difficult for targeted individual users to handle the situation both quantitatively and qualitatively. To address this issue, we focus on automating the method to counter trolls, as counter responses to combat trolls encourage community users to maintain ongoing discussion without compromising freedom of expression. For this purpose, we propose a novel dataset for automatic counter response generation. In particular, we constructed a pair-wise dataset that includes troll comments and counter responses with labeled response strategies, which enables models fine-tuned on our dataset to generate responses by varying counter responses according to the specified strategy. We conducted three tasks to assess the effectiveness of our dataset and evaluated the results through both automatic and human evaluation. In human evaluation, we demonstrate that the model fine-tuned on our dataset shows a significantly improved performance in strategy-controlled sentence generation.
Max-Min Data Rate Optimization for RIS-aided Uplink Communications with Green Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

Smart radio environments aided by reconfigurable intelligent reflecting surfaces (RIS) have attracted much research attention recently. We propose a joint optimization strategy for beamforming, RIS phases, and power allocation to maximize the minimum SINR of an uplink RIS-aided communication system. The users are subject to constraints on their transmit power. We derive a closed-form expression for the beam forming vectors and a geometric programming-based solution for power allocation. We also propose two solutions for optimizing the phase shifts at the RIS, one based on the matrix lifting method and one using an approximation for the minimum function. We also propose a heuristic algorithm for optimizing quantized phase shift values. The proposed algorithms are of practical interest for systems with constraints on the maximum allowable electromagnetic field exposure. For instance, considering $24$-element RIS, $12$-antenna BS, and $6$ users, numerical results show that the proposed algorithm achieves close to $300 \%$ gain in terms of minimum SINR compared to a scheme with random RIS phases.
A Comparative Study of Application-level Caching Recommendations at the Method Level
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

Performance and scalability requirements have a fundamental role in most large-scale software applications. To satisfy such requirements, caching is often used at various levels and infrastructure layers. Application-level caching -- or memoization -- is an increasingly used form of caching within the application boundaries, which consists of storing the results of computations in memory to avoid re-computing them. This is typically manually done by developers, who identify caching opportunities in the code and write additional code to manage the cache content. The task of identifying caching opportunities is a challenge because it requires the analysis of workloads and code locations where it is feasible and beneficial to cache objects. To aid developers in this task, there are approaches that automatically identify cacheable methods. Although such approaches have been individually evaluated, their effectiveness has not been compared. We thus in this paper present an empirical evaluation to compare the method recommendations made by the two existing application-level caching approaches at the method level, namely APLCache and MemoizeIt, using seven open-source web applications. We analyse the recommendations made by each approach as well as the hits, misses and throughput achieved with their valid caching recommendations. Our results show that the effectiveness of both approaches largely depends on the specific application, the presence of invalid recommendations and additional configurations, such as the time-to-live. By inspecting the obtained results, we observed in which cases the recommendations of each approach fail and succeed, which allowed us to derive a set of seven lessons learned that give directions for future approaches to support developers in the adoption of this type of caching.
On translating conditional statements into mathematical logic
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we highlight a profound difference between conditional statements in mathematical logic and natural languages. This difference exists even when the conditional statements are used in mathematical theorems.
Unified Automatic Control of Vehicular Systems with Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

Emerging vehicular systems with increasing proportions of automated components present opportunities for optimal control to mitigate congestion and increase efficiency. There has been a recent interest in applying deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to these nonlinear dynamical systems for the automatic design of effective control strategies. Despite conceptual advantages of DRL being model-free, studies typically nonetheless rely on training setups that are painstakingly specialized to specific vehicular systems. This is a key challenge to efficient analysis of diverse vehicular and mobility systems. To this end, this article contributes a streamlined methodology for vehicular microsimulation and discovers high performance control strategies with minimal manual design. A variable-agent, multi-task approach is presented for optimization of vehicular Partially Observed Markov Decision Processes. The methodology is experimentally validated on mixed autonomy traffic systems, where fractions of vehicles are automated; empirical improvement, typically 15-60% over a human driving baseline, is observed in all configurations of six diverse open or closed traffic systems. The study reveals numerous emergent behaviors resembling wave mitigation, traffic signaling, and ramp metering. Finally, the emergent behaviors are analyzed to produce interpretable control strategies, which are validated against the learned control strategies.
Automatically Categorising GitHub Repositories by Application Domain
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

GitHub is the largest host of open source software on the Internet. This large, freely accessible database has attracted the attention of practitioners and researchers alike. But as GitHub's growth continues, it is becoming increasingly hard to navigate the plethora of repositories which span a wide range of domains. Past work has shown that taking the application domain into account is crucial for tasks such as predicting the popularity of a repository and reasoning about project quality. In this work, we build on a previously annotated dataset of 5,000 GitHub repositories to design an automated classifier for categorising repositories by their application domain. The classifier uses state-of-the-art natural language processing techniques and machine learning to learn from multiple data sources and catalogue repositories according to five application domains. We contribute with (1) an automated classifier that can assign popular repositories to each application domain with at least 70% precision, (2) an investigation of the approach's performance on less popular repositories, and (3) a practical application of this approach to answer how the adoption of software engineering practices differs across application domains. Our work aims to help the GitHub community identify repositories of interest and opens promising avenues for future work investigating differences between repositories from different application domains.
Global Attention-based Encoder-Decoder LSTM Model for Temperature Prediction of Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motors
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Temperature monitoring is critical for electrical motors to determine if device protection measures should be executed. However, the complexity of the internal structure of Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motors (PMSM) makes the direct temperature measurement of the internal components difficult. This work pragmatically develops three deep learning models to estimate the PMSMs' internal temperature based on readily measurable external quantities. The proposed supervised learning models exploit Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) modules, bidirectional LSTM, and attention mechanism to form encoder-decoder structures to predict simultaneously the temperatures of the stator winding, tooth, yoke, and permanent magnet. Experiments were conducted in an exhaustive manner on a benchmark dataset to verify the proposed models' performances. The comparative analysis shows that the proposed global attention-based encoder-decoder (EnDec) model provides a competitive overall performance of 1.72 Mean Squared Error (MSE) and 5.34 Mean Absolute Error (MAE).
A Local-Ratio-Based Power Control Approach for Capacitated Access Points in Mobile Edge Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

Terminal devices (TDs) connect to networks through access points (APs) integrated into the edge server. This provides a prerequisite for TDs to upload tasks to cloud data centers or offload them to edge servers for execution. In this process, signal coverage, data transmission, and task execution consume energy, and the energy consumption of signal coverage increases sharply as the radius increases. Lower power leads to less energy consumption in a given time segment. Thus, power control for APs is essential for reducing energy consumption. Our objective is to determine the power assignment for each AP with same capacity constraints such that all TDs are covered, and the total power is minimized. We define this problem as a \emph{minimum power capacitated cover } (MPCC) problem and present a \emph{minimum local ratio} (MLR) power control approach for this problem to obtain accurate results in polynomial time. Power assignments are chosen in a sequence of rounds. In each round, we choose the power assignment that minimizes the ratio of its power to the number of currently uncovered TDs it contains. In the event of a tie, we pick an arbitrary power assignment that achieves the minimum ratio. We continue choosing power assignments until all TDs are covered. Finally, various experiments verify that this method can outperform another greedy-based way.