OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Integrated Access and Backhaul in Cell-free Massive MIMO Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

One of the major challenges with cell-free (CF) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) networks is providing backhaul links for a large number of distributed access points (APs). In general, providing fiber optics backhaul for these APs is not cost-effective and also reduces network scalability. Wireless backhauling can be a promising solution that can be integrated with wireless access links to increase spectrum efficiency. In this paper, the application of integrated access and backhaul (IAB) technique in millimeter-wave (mmWave) CF massive MIMO systems is investigated. The access and backhaul links share a frequency spectrum in the mmWave bands, and in both, hybrid beamforming techniques are adopted for signal transmission. The bandwidth allocation (division) parameter between the two link types as well as the beamforming matrices are optimized to maximize the end-to-end data-rate. This leads to a non-convex optimization problem for which an efficient solution method is proposed. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the IAB technique and our proposed scheme in CF massive MIMO systems. These simulations also compare the proposed hybrid beamforming method with a fully digital solution in terms of the number of radio frequency (RF) chains and the volume of backhaul traffic. Finally, the effect of increasing the number of APs on the users data rates in terms of wireless access and backhaul links constraints is also examined.
Face Emotion Recognization Using Dataset Augmentation Based on Neural Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Facial expression is one of the most external indications of a person's feelings and emotions. In daily conversation, according to the psychologist, only 7% and 38% of information is communicated through words and sounds respective, while up to 55% is through facial expression. It plays an important role in coordinating interpersonal relationships. Ekman and Friesen recognized six essential emotions in the nineteenth century depending on a cross-cultural study, which indicated that people feel each basic emotion in the same fashion despite culture. As a branch of the field of analyzing sentiment, facial expression recognition offers broad application prospects in a variety of domains, including the interaction between humans and computers, healthcare, and behavior monitoring. Therefore, many researchers have devoted themselves to facial expression recognition. In this paper, an effective hybrid data augmentation method is used. This approach is operated on two public datasets, and four benchmark models see some remarkable results.
Focus Is What You Need For Chinese Grammatical Error Correction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) aims to automatically detect and correct grammatical errors contained in Chinese text. In the long term, researchers regard CGEC as a task with a certain degree of uncertainty, that is, an ungrammatical sentence may often have multiple references. However, we argue that even though this is a very reasonable hypothesis, it is too harsh for the intelligence of the mainstream models in this era. In this paper, we first discover that multiple references do not actually bring positive gains to model training. On the contrary, it is beneficial to the CGEC model if the model can pay attention to small but essential data during the training process. Furthermore, we propose a simple yet effective training strategy called OneTarget to improve the focus ability of the CGEC models and thus improve the CGEC performance. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses demonstrate the correctness of our discovery and the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Coupling User Preference with External Rewards to Enable Driver-centered and Resource-aware EV Charging Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Electric Vehicle (EV) charging recommendation that both accommodates user preference and adapts to the ever-changing external environment arises as a cost-effective strategy to alleviate the range anxiety of private EV drivers. Previous studies focus on centralized strategies to achieve optimized resource allocation, particularly useful for privacy-indifferent taxi fleets and fixed-route public transits. However, private EV driver seeks a more personalized and resource-aware charging recommendation that is tailor-made to accommodate the user preference (when and where to charge) yet sufficiently adaptive to the spatiotemporal mismatch between charging supply and demand. Here we propose a novel Regularized Actor-Critic (RAC) charging recommendation approach that would allow each EV driver to strike an optimal balance between the user preference (historical charging pattern) and the external reward (driving distance and wait time). Experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate the unique features and superior performance of our approach to the competing methods.
Span-based joint entity and relation extraction augmented with sequence tagging mechanism
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Span-based joint extraction simultaneously conducts named entity recognition (NER) and relation extraction (RE) in text span form. However, since previous span-based models rely on span-level classifications, they cannot benefit from token-level label information, which has been proven advantageous for the task. In this paper, we propose a Sequence Tagging augmented Span-based Network (STSN), a span-based joint model that can make use of token-level label information. In STSN, we construct a core neural architecture by deep stacking multiple attention layers, each of which consists of three basic attention units. On the one hand, the core architecture enables our model to learn token-level label information via the sequence tagging mechanism and then uses the information in the span-based joint extraction; on the other hand, it establishes a bi-directional information interaction between NER and RE. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets show that STSN consistently outperforms the strongest baselines in terms of F1, creating new state-of-the-art results.
An Interpretable Deep Semantic Segmentation Method for Earth Observation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Earth observation is fundamental for a range of human activities including flood response as it offers vital information to decision makers. Semantic segmentation plays a key role in mapping the raw hyper-spectral data coming from the satellites into a human understandable form assigning class labels to each pixel. In this paper, we introduce a prototype-based interpretable deep semantic segmentation (IDSS) method, which is highly accurate as well as interpretable. Its parameters are in orders of magnitude less than the number of parameters used by deep networks such as U-Net and are clearly interpretable by humans. The proposed here IDSS offers a transparent structure that allows users to inspect and audit the algorithm's decision. Results have demonstrated that IDSS could surpass other algorithms, including U-Net, in terms of IoU (Intersection over Union) total water and Recall total water. We used WorldFloods data set for our experiments and plan to use the semantic segmentation results combined with masks for permanent water to detect flood events.
Towards Real-Time Text2Video via CLIP-Guided, Pixel-Level Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

We introduce an approach to generating videos based on a series of given language descriptions. Frames of the video are generated sequentially and optimized by guidance from the CLIP image-text encoder; iterating through language descriptions, weighting the current description higher than others. As opposed to optimizing through an image generator model itself, which tends to be computationally heavy, the proposed approach computes the CLIP loss directly at the pixel level, achieving general content at a speed suitable for near real-time systems. The approach can generate videos in up to 720p resolution, variable frame-rates, and arbitrary aspect ratios at a rate of 1-2 frames per second. Please visit our website to view videos and access our open-source code: https://pschaldenbrand.github.io/text2video/ .
A Stack-Free Traversal Algorithm for Left-Balanced k-d Trees
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

We present an algorithm that allows for find-closest-point and kNN-style traversals of left-balanced k-d trees, without the need for either recursion or software-managed stacks; instead using only current and last previously traversed node to compute which node to traverse next.
Tight relative estimation in the mean of Bernoulli random variables
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Given a stream of Bernoulli random variables, consider the problem of estimating the mean of the random variable within a specified relative error with a specified probability of failure. Until now, the Gamma Bernoulli Approximation Scheme (GBAS) was the method that accomplished this goal using the smallest number of average samples. In this work, a new method is introduced that is faster when the mean is bounded away from zero. The process uses a two-stage process together with some simple inequalities to get rigorous bounds on the error probability.
Imbalanced Class Data Performance Evaluation and Improvement using Novel Generative Adversarial Network-based Approach: SSG and GBO
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Class imbalance in a dataset is one of the major challenges that can significantly impact the performance of machine learning models resulting in biased predictions. Numerous techniques have been proposed to address class imbalanced problems, including, but not limited to, Oversampling, Undersampling, and cost-sensitive approaches. Due to its ability to generate synthetic data, oversampling techniques such as the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) is among the most widely used methodology by researchers. However, one of SMOTE's potential disadvantages is that newly created minor samples may overlap with major samples. As an effect, the probability of ML models' biased performance towards major classes increases. Recently, generative adversarial network (GAN) has garnered much attention due to its ability to create almost real samples. However, GAN is hard to train even though it has much potential. This study proposes two novel techniques: GAN-based Oversampling (GBO) and Support Vector Machine-SMOTE-GAN (SSG) to overcome the limitations of the existing oversampling approaches. The preliminary computational result shows that SSG and GBO performed better on the expanded imbalanced eight benchmark datasets than the original SMOTE. The study also revealed that the minor sample generated by SSG demonstrates Gaussian distributions, which is often difficult to achieve using original SMOTE.
A Secure Design Pattern Approach Toward Tackling Lateral-Injection Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Software weaknesses that create attack surfaces for adversarial exploits, such as lateral SQL injection (LSQLi) attacks, are usually introduced during the design phase of software development. Security design patterns are sometimes applied to tackle these weaknesses. However, due to the stealthy nature of lateral-based attacks, employing traditional security patterns to address these threats is insufficient. Hence, we present SEAL, a secure design that extrapolates architectural, design, and implementation abstraction levels to delegate security strategies toward tackling LSQLi attacks. We evaluated SEAL using case study software, where we assumed the role of an adversary and injected several attack vectors tasked with compromising the confidentiality and integrity of its database. Our evaluation of SEAL demonstrated its capacity to address LSQLi attacks.
IDD-3D: Indian Driving Dataset for 3D Unstructured Road Scenes
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Autonomous driving and assistance systems rely on annotated data from traffic and road scenarios to model and learn the various object relations in complex real-world scenarios. Preparation and training of deploy-able deep learning architectures require the models to be suited to different traffic scenarios and adapt to different situations. Currently, existing datasets, while large-scale, lack such diversities and are geographically biased towards mainly developed cities. An unstructured and complex driving layout found in several developing countries such as India poses a challenge to these models due to the sheer degree of variations in the object types, densities, and locations. To facilitate better research toward accommodating such scenarios, we build a new dataset, IDD-3D, which consists of multi-modal data from multiple cameras and LiDAR sensors with 12k annotated driving LiDAR frames across various traffic scenarios. We discuss the need for this dataset through statistical comparisons with existing datasets and highlight benchmarks on standard 3D object detection and tracking tasks in complex layouts. Code and data available at https://github.com/shubham1810/idd3d_kit.git
SpikeSim: An end-to-end Compute-in-Memory Hardware Evaluation Tool for Benchmarking Spiking Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2022
Year: 2022

SNNs are an active research domain towards energy efficient machine intelligence. Compared to conventional ANNs, SNNs use temporal spike data and bio-plausible neuronal activation functions such as Leaky-Integrate Fire/Integrate Fire (LIF/IF) for data processing. However, SNNs incur significant dot-product operations causing high memory and computation overhead in standard von-Neumann computing platforms. Today, In-Memory Computing (IMC) architectures have been proposed to alleviate the "memory-wall bottleneck" prevalent in von-Neumann architectures. Although recent works have proposed IMC-based SNN hardware accelerators, the following have been overlooked- 1) the adverse effects of crossbar non-ideality on SNN performance due to repeated analog dot-product operations over multiple time-steps, 2) hardware overheads of essential SNN-specific components such as the LIF/IF and data communication modules. To this end, we propose SpikeSim, a tool that can perform realistic performance, energy, latency and area evaluation of IMC-mapped SNNs. SpikeSim consists of a practical monolithic IMC architecture called SpikeFlow for mapping SNNs. Additionally, the non-ideality computation engine (NICE) and energy-latency-area (ELA) engine performs hardware-realistic evaluation of SpikeFlow-mapped SNNs. Based on 65nm CMOS implementation and experiments on CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and TinyImagenet datasets, we find that the LIF/IF neuronal module has significant area contribution (>11% of the total hardware area). We propose SNN topological modifications leading to 1.24x and 10x reduction in the neuronal module's area and the overall energy-delay-product value, respectively. Furthermore, in this work, we perform a holistic comparison between IMC implemented ANN and SNNs and conclude that lower number of time-steps are the key to achieve higher throughput and energy-efficiency for SNNs compared to 4-bit ANNs.
Event-Centric Question Answering via Contrastive Learning and Invertible Event Transformation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Human reading comprehension often requires reasoning of event semantic relations in narratives, represented by Event-centric Question-Answering (QA). To address event-centric QA, we propose a novel QA model with contrastive learning and invertible event transformation, call TranCLR. Our proposed model utilizes an invertible transformation matrix to project semantic vectors of events into a common event embedding space, trained with contrastive learning, and thus naturally inject event semantic knowledge into mainstream QA pipelines. The transformation matrix is fine-tuned with the annotated event relation types between events that occurred in questions and those in answers, using event-aware question vectors. Experimental results on the Event Semantic Relation Reasoning (ESTER) dataset show significant improvements in both generative and extractive settings compared to the existing strong baselines, achieving over 8.4% gain in the token-level F1 score and 3.0% gain in Exact Match (EM) score under the multi-answer setting. Qualitative analysis reveals the high quality of the generated answers by TranCLR, demonstrating the feasibility of injecting event knowledge into QA model learning. Our code and models can be found at https://github.com/LuJunru/TranCLR.
OLLA: Optimizing the Lifetime and Location of Arrays to Reduce the Memory Usage of Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

The size of deep neural networks has grown exponentially in recent years. Unfortunately, hardware devices have not kept pace with the rapidly increasing memory requirements. To cope with this, researchers have turned to techniques such as spilling and recomputation, which increase training time, or reduced precision and model pruning, which can affect model accuracy. We present OLLA, an algorithm that optimizes the lifetime and memory location of the tensors used to train neural networks. Our method reduces the memory usage of existing neural networks, without needing any modification to the models or their training procedures. We formulate the problem as a joint integer linear program (ILP). We present several techniques to simplify the encoding of the problem, and enable our approach to scale to the size of state-of-the-art neural networks using an off-the-shelf ILP solver. We experimentally demonstrate that OLLA only takes minutes if not seconds to allow the training of neural networks using one-third less memory on average.
TIARA: Multi-grained Retrieval for Robust Question Answering over Large Knowledge Bases
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown their effectiveness in multiple scenarios. However, KBQA remains challenging, especially regarding coverage and generalization settings. This is due to two main factors: i) understanding the semantics of both questions and relevant knowledge from the KB; ii) generating executable logical forms with both semantic and syntactic correctness. In this paper, we present a new KBQA model, TIARA, which addresses those issues by applying multi-grained retrieval to help the PLM focus on the most relevant KB contexts, viz., entities, exemplary logical forms, and schema items. Moreover, constrained decoding is used to control the output space and reduce generation errors. Experiments over important benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. TIARA outperforms previous SOTA, including those using PLMs or oracle entity annotations, by at least 4.1 and 1.1 F1 points on GrailQA and WebQuestionsSP, respectively.
Ares: A System-Oriented Wargame Framework for Adversarial ML
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Since the discovery of adversarial attacks against machine learning models nearly a decade ago, research on adversarial machine learning has rapidly evolved into an eternal war between defenders, who seek to increase the robustness of ML models against adversarial attacks, and adversaries, who seek to develop better attacks capable of weakening or defeating these defenses. This domain, however, has found little buy-in from ML practitioners, who are neither overtly concerned about these attacks affecting their systems in the real world nor are willing to trade off the accuracy of their models in pursuit of robustness against these attacks. In this paper, we motivate the design and implementation of Ares, an evaluation framework for adversarial ML that allows researchers to explore attacks and defenses in a realistic wargame-like environment. Ares frames the conflict between the attacker and defender as two agents in a reinforcement learning environment with opposing objectives. This allows the introduction of system-level evaluation metrics such as time to failure and evaluation of complex strategies such as moving target defenses. We provide the results of our initial exploration involving a white-box attacker against an adversarially trained defender.
The Case for Accelerating BFT Protocols Using In-Network Ordering
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

Mission critical systems deployed in data centers today are facing more sophisticated failures. Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) protocols are capable of masking these types of failures, but are rarely deployed due to their performance cost and complexity. In this work, we propose a new approach to designing high performance BFT protocols in data centers. By re-examining the ordering responsibility between the network and the BFT protocol, we advocate a new abstraction offered by the data center network infrastructure. Concretely, we design a new authenticated ordered multicast primitive (AOM) that provides transferable authentication and non-equivocation guarantees. Feasibility of the design is demonstrated by two hardware implementations of AOM -- one using HMAC and the other using public key cryptography for authentication -- on new-generation programmable switches. We then co-design a new BFT protocol, Matrix, that leverages the guarantees of AOM to eliminate cross-replica coordination and authentication in the common case. Evaluation results show that Matrix outperforms state-of-the-art protocols on both latency and throughput metrics by a wide margin, demonstrating the benefit of our new network ordering abstraction for BFT systems.
Non-Contrastive Learning-based Behavioural Biometrics for Smart IoT Devices
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Behaviour biometrics are being explored as a viable alternative to overcome the limitations of traditional authentication methods such as passwords and static biometrics. Also, they are being considered as a viable authentication method for IoT devices such as smart headsets with AR/VR capabilities, wearables, and erables, that do not have a large form factor or the ability to seamlessly interact with the user. Recent behavioural biometric solutions use deep learning models that require large amounts of annotated training data. Collecting such volumes of behaviour biometrics data raises privacy and usability concerns. To this end, we propose using SimSiam-based non-contrastive self-supervised learning to improve the label efficiency of behavioural biometric systems. The key idea is to use large volumes of unlabelled (and anonymised) data to build good feature extractors that can be subsequently used in supervised settings. Using two EEG datasets, we show that at lower amounts of labelled data, non-contrastive learning performs 4%-11% more than conventional methods such as supervised learning and data augmentation. We also show that, in general, self-supervised learning methods perform better than other baselines. Finally, through careful experimentation, we show various modifications that can be incorporated into the non-contrastive learning process to archive high performance.
Are Current Decoding Strategies Capable of Facing the Challenges of Visual Dialogue?
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Decoding strategies play a crucial role in natural language generation systems. They are usually designed and evaluated in open-ended text-only tasks, and it is not clear how different strategies handle the numerous challenges that goal-oriented multimodal systems face (such as grounding and informativeness). To answer this question, we compare a wide variety of different decoding strategies and hyper-parameter configurations in a Visual Dialogue referential game. Although none of them successfully balance lexical richness, accuracy in the task, and visual grounding, our in-depth analysis allows us to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each decoding strategy. We believe our findings and suggestions may serve as a starting point for designing more effective decoding algorithms that handle the challenges of Visual Dialogue tasks.