OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Using Twitter to Analyze Political Polarization During National Crises
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

Democrats and Republicans have seemed to grow apart in the past three decades. Since the United States as we know it today is undeniably bipartisan, this phenomenon would not appear as a surprise to most. However, there are triggers which can cause spikes in disagreements between Democrats and Republicans at a higher rate than how the two parties have been growing apart gradually over time. This study has analyzed the idea that national events which generally are detrimental to all individuals can be one of those triggers. By testing polarization before and after three events (Hurricane Sandy [2012], N. Korea Missile Test Surge [2019], COVID-19 [2020]) using Twitter data, we show that a measurable spike in polarization occurs between the Democrat and Republican party. In order to measure polarization, sentiments of Twitter users aligned to the Democrat and Republican parties are compared on identical entities (events, people, locations, etc.). Using hundreds of thousands of data samples, a 2.8% increase in polarization was measured during times of crisis compared to times where no crises were occurring. Regardless of the reasoning that the gap between political parties can increase so much during times of suffering and stress, it is definitely alarming to see that among other aspects of life, the partisan gap worsens during detrimental national events.
On the Failure of the Smart Approach of the GPT Cryptosystem
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

This paper describes a new algorithm for breaking the smart approach of the GPT cryptosystem. We show that by puncturing the public code several times on specific positions, we get a public code on which applying the Frobenius operator appropriately allows to build an alternative secret key.
LSTM for Model-Based Anomaly Detection in Cyber-Physical Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Anomaly detection is the task of detecting data which differs from the normal behaviour of a system in a given context. In order to approach this problem, data-driven models can be learned to predict current or future observations. Oftentimes, anomalous behaviour depends on the internal dynamics of the system and looks normal in a static context. To address this problem, the model should also operate depending on state. Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural networks have been shown to be particularly useful to learn time sequences with varying length of temporal dependencies and are therefore an interesting general purpose approach to learn the behaviour of arbitrarily complex Cyber-Physical Systems. In order to perform anomaly detection, we slightly modify the standard norm 2 error to incorporate an estimate of model uncertainty. We analyse the approach on artificial and real data.
Recurrent Neural Networks for video object detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

There is lots of scientific work about object detection in images. For many applications like for example autonomous driving the actual data on which classification has to be done are videos. This work compares different methods, especially those which use Recurrent Neural Networks to detect objects in videos. We differ between feature-based methods, which feed feature maps of different frames into the recurrent units, box-level methods, which feed bounding boxes with class probabilities into the recurrent units and methods which use flow networks. This study indicates common outcomes of the compared methods like the benefit of including the temporal context into object detection and states conclusions and guidelines for video object detection networks.
Recursive Random Contraction Revisited
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2020
Year: 2020

In this note, we revisit the recursive random contraction algorithm of Karger and Stein for finding a minimum cut in a graph. Our revisit is occasioned by a paper of Fox, Panigrahi, and Zhang which gives an extension of the Karger-Stein algorithm to minimum cuts and minimum $k$-cuts in hypergraphs. When specialized to the case of graphs, the algorithm is somewhat different than the original Karger-Stein algorithm. We show that the analysis becomes particularly clean in this case: we can prove that the probability that a fixed minimum cut in an $n$ node graph is returned by the algorithm is bounded below by $1/(2H_n-2)$, where $H_n$ is the $n$th harmonic number. We also consider other similar variants of the algorithm, and show that no such algorithm can achieve an asymptotically better probability of finding a fixed minimum cut.
Around the diameter of AT-free graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2020
Year: 2020

A graph algorithm is truly subquadratic if it runs in ${\cal O}(m^b)$ time on connected $m$-edge graphs, for some positive $b < 2$. Roditty and Vassilevska Williams (STOC'13) proved that under plausible complexity assumptions, there is no truly subquadratic algorithm for computing the diameter of general graphs. In this work, we present positive and negative results on the existence of such algorithms for computing the diameter on some special graph classes. Specifically, three vertices in a graph form an asteroidal triple (AT) if between any two of them there exists a path that avoids the closed neighbourhood of the third one. We call a graph AT-free if it does not contain an AT. We first prove that for all $m$-edge AT-free graphs, one can compute all the eccentricities in truly subquadratic ${\cal O}(m^{3/2})$ time. Then, we extend our study to several subclasses of chordal graphs -- all of them generalizing interval graphs in various ways --, as an attempt to understand which of the properties of AT-free graphs, or natural generalizations of the latter, can help in the design of fast algorithms for the diameter problem on broader graph classes. For instance, for all chordal graphs with a dominating shortest path, there is a linear-time algorithm for computing a diametral pair if the diameter is at least four. However, already for split graphs with a dominating edge, under plausible complexity assumptions, there is no truly subquadratic algorithm for deciding whether the diameter is either $2$ or $3$.
SANS: Self-sovereign Authentication for Network Slices
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

5G communications proposed significant improvements over 4G in terms of efficiency and security. Among these novelties, the 5G Network Slicing seems to have a prominent role: deploy multiple virtual network slices, each providing a different service with different needs and features. Like this, a Slice Operator (SO) ruling a specific slice may want to offer a service for users meeting some requirements. It is of paramount importance to provide a robust authentication protocol, able to ensure that users meet the requirements, but providing at the same time a privacy-by-design architecture. This makes even more sense having a growing density of Internet of Things (IoT) devices exchanging private information over the network. In this paper, we improve the 5G network slicing authentication using a Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) scheme: granting users full control over their data. We introduce an approach to allow a user to prove his right to access a specific service without leaking any information about him. Such an approach is SANS, a protocol that provides non-linkable protection for any issued information, preventing an SO or an eavesdropper from tracking users' activity and relating it with their real identities. Furthermore, our protocol is scalable and can be taken as a framework for improving related technologies in similar scenarios, like authentication in the 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) or other wireless networks and services. Such features can be achieved using cryptographic primitives called Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP). Upon implementing our solution using a state-of-the-art ZKP library and performing several experiments, we provide benchmarks demonstrating that our approach is affordable in speed and memory consumption.
netrd: A library for network reconstruction and graph distances
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2020
Year: 2020

Over the last two decades, alongside the increased availability of large network datasets, we have witnessed the rapid rise of network science. For many systems, however, the data we have access to is not a direct description of the underlying network. More and more, we see the drive to study networks that have been inferred or reconstructed from non-network data---in particular, using time series data from the nodes in a system to infer likely connections between them. Selecting the most appropriate technique for this task is a challenging problem in network science. Different reconstruction techniques usually have different assumptions, and their performance varies from system to system in the real world. One way around this problem could be to use several different reconstruction techniques and compare the resulting networks. However, network comparison is also not an easy problem, as it is not obvious how best to quantify the differences between two networks, in part because of the diversity of tools for doing so. The netrd Python package seeks to address these two parallel problems in network science by providing, to our knowledge, the most extensive collection of both network reconstruction techniques and network comparison techniques (often referred to as graph distances) in a single library (https://github.com/netsiphd/netrd). In this article, we detail the two main functionalities of the netrd package. Along the way, we describe some of its other useful features. This package builds on commonly used Python packages and is already a widely used resource for network scientists and other multidisciplinary researchers. With ongoing open-source development, we see this as a tool that will continue to be used by all sorts of researchers to come.
Semantic Labeling Using a Deep Contextualized Language Model
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Generating schema labels automatically for column values of data tables has many data science applications such as schema matching, and data discovery and linking. For example, automatically extracted tables with missing headers can be filled by the predicted schema labels which significantly minimizes human effort. Furthermore, the predicted labels can reduce the impact of inconsistent names across multiple data tables. Understanding the connection between column values and contextual information is an important yet neglected aspect as previously proposed methods treat each column independently. In this paper, we propose a context-aware semantic labeling method using both the column values and context. Our new method is based on a new setting for semantic labeling, where we sequentially predict labels for an input table with missing headers. We incorporate both the values and context of each data column using the pre-trained contextualized language model, BERT, that has achieved significant improvements in multiple natural language processing tasks. To our knowledge, we are the first to successfully apply BERT to solve the semantic labeling task. We evaluate our approach using two real-world datasets from different domains, and we demonstrate substantial improvements in terms of evaluation metrics over state-of-the-art feature-based methods.
Do Users Care about Ad's Performance Costs? Exploring the Effects of the Performance Costs of In-App Ads on User Experience
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2020
Year: 2020

Context: In-app advertising is the primary source of revenue for many mobile apps. The cost of advertising (ad cost) is non-negligible for app developers to ensure a good user experience and continuous profits. Previous studies mainly focus on addressing the hidden performance costs generated by ads, including consumption of memory, CPU, data traffic, and battery. However, there is no research onanalyzing users' perceptions of ads' performance costs to our knowledge. Objective: To fill this gap and better understand the effects of performance costs of in-app ads on user experience, we conduct a study on analyzing user concerns about ads' performance costs. Method: First, we propose RankMiner, an approach to quantify user concerns about specific appissues, including performance costs. Then, based on the usage traces of 20 subject apps, we measure the performance costs of ads. Finally, we conduct correlation analysis on the performance costs and quantified user concerns to explore whether users complain more for higher performance costs. Results: Our findings include the following: (1) RankMiner can quantify users' concerns better than baselines by an improvement of 214% and 2.5% in terms of Pearson correlation coefficient (a metricfor computing correlations between two variables) and NDCG score (a metric for computing accuracyin prioritizing issues), respectively. (2) The performance costs of the with-ads versions are statistically significantly larger than those of no-ads versions with negligible effect size; (3) Users are moreconcerned about the battery costs of ads, and tend to be insensitive to ads' data traffic costs. Conclusion: Our study is complementary to previous work on in-app ads, and can encourage devel-opers to pay more attention to alleviating the most user-concerned performance costs, such as battery cost.
PyraPose: Feature Pyramids for Fast and Accurate Object Pose Estimation under Domain Shift
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Object pose estimation enables robots to understand and interact with their environments. Training with synthetic data is necessary in order to adapt to novel situations. Unfortunately, pose estimation under domain shift, i.e., training on synthetic data and testing in the real world, is challenging. Deep learning-based approaches currently perform best when using encoder-decoder networks but typically do not generalize to new scenarios with different scene characteristics. We argue that patch-based approaches, instead of encoder-decoder networks, are more suited for synthetic-to-real transfer because local to global object information is better represented. To that end, we present a novel approach based on a specialized feature pyramid network to compute multi-scale features for creating pose hypotheses on different feature map resolutions in parallel. Our single-shot pose estimation approach is evaluated on multiple standard datasets and outperforms the state of the art by up to 35%. We also perform grasping experiments in the real world to demonstrate the advantage of using synthetic data to generalize to novel environments.
Bayesian Optimization Meets Laplace Approximation for Robotic Introspection
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

In robotics, deep learning (DL) methods are used more and more widely, but their general inability to provide reliable confidence estimates will ultimately lead to fragile and unreliable systems. This impedes the potential deployments of DL methods for long-term autonomy. Therefore, in this paper we introduce a scalable Laplace Approximation (LA) technique to make Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) more introspective, i.e. to enable them to provide accurate assessments of their failure probability for unseen test data. In particular, we propose a novel Bayesian Optimization (BO) algorithm to mitigate their tendency of under-fitting the true weight posterior, so that both the calibration and the accuracy of the predictions can be simultaneously optimized. We demonstrate empirically that the proposed BO approach requires fewer iterations for this when compared to random search, and we show that the proposed framework can be scaled up to large datasets and architectures.
Time-position characterization of conflicts: a case study of collaborative editing
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

Collaborative editing (CE) became increasingly common, often compulsory in academia and industry where people work in teams and are distributed across space and time. We aim to study collabora-tive editing behavior in terms of collaboration patterns users adopt and in terms of a characterisation of conflicts, i.e. edits from different users that occur close in time and position in the document. The process of a CE can be split into several editing 'sessions' which are performed by a single author ('single-authored session') or several authors ('co-authored session'). This fragmentation process requires a pre-defined 'maximum time gap' between sessions which is not yet well defined in previous studies. In this study, we analysed CE logs of 108 collaboratively edited documents. We show how to establish a suitable 'maximum time gap' to split CE activities into sessions by evaluating the distribution of the time distance between two adjacent sessions. We studied editing activities inside each 'co-author session' in order to define potential conflicts in terms of time and position dimensions before they occur in the document. We also analysed how many of these potential conflicts become real conflicts. Findings show that potential conflicting cases are few. However, they are more likely to become real conflicts.
Small Noisy and Perspective Face Detection using Deformable Symmetric Gabor Wavelet Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Face detection and tracking in low resolution image is not a trivial task due to the limitation in the appearance features for face characterization. Moreover, facial expression gives additional distortion on this small and noisy face. In this paper, we propose deformable symmetric Gabor wavelet network face model for face detection in low resolution image. Our model optimizes the rotation, translation, dilation, perspective and partial deformation amount of the face model with symmetry constraints. Symmetry constraints help our model to be more robust to noise and distortion. Experimental results on our low resolution face image dataset and videos show promising face detection and tracking results under various challenging conditions.
AudVowelConsNet: A Phoneme-Level Based Deep CNN Architecture for Clinical Depression Diagnosis
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2020
Year: 2020

Depression is a common and serious mood disorder that negatively affects the patient's capacity of functioning normally in daily tasks. Speech is proven to be a vigorous tool in depression diagnosis. Research in psychiatry concentrated on performing fine-grained analysis on word-level speech components contributing to the manifestation of depression in speech and revealed significant variations at the phoneme-level in depressed speech. On the other hand, research in Machine Learning-based automatic recognition of depression from speech focused on the exploration of various acoustic features for the detection of depression and its severity level. Few have focused on incorporating phoneme-level speech components in automatic assessment systems. In this paper, we propose an Artificial Intelligence (AI) based application for clinical depression recognition and assessment from speech. We investigate the acoustic characteristics of phoneme units, specifically vowels and consonants for depression recognition via Deep Learning. We present and compare three spectrogram-based Deep Neural Network architectures, trained on phoneme consonant and vowel units and their fusion respectively. Our experiments show that the deep learned consonant-based acoustic characteristics lead to better recognition results than vowel-based ones. The fusion of vowel and consonant speech characteristics through a deep network significantly outperforms the single space networks as well as the state-of-art deep learning approaches on the DAIC-WOZ database.
Capture the Bot: Using Adversarial Examples to Improve CAPTCHA Robustness to Bot Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

To this date, CAPTCHAs have served as the first line of defense preventing unauthorized access by (malicious) bots to web-based services, while at the same time maintaining a trouble-free experience for human visitors. However, recent work in the literature has provided evidence of sophisticated bots that make use of advancements in machine learning (ML) to easily bypass existing CAPTCHA-based defenses. In this work, we take the first step to address this problem. We introduce CAPTURE, a novel CAPTCHA scheme based on adversarial examples. While typically adversarial examples are used to lead an ML model astray, with CAPTURE, we attempt to make a "good use" of such mechanisms. Our empirical evaluations show that CAPTURE can produce CAPTCHAs that are easy to solve by humans while at the same time, effectively thwarting ML-based bot solvers.
"Thy algorithm shalt not bear false witness": An Evaluation of Multiclass Debiasing Methods on Word Embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

With the vast development and employment of artificial intelligence applications, research into the fairness of these algorithms has been increased. Specifically, in the natural language processing domain, it has been shown that social biases persist in word embeddings and are thus in danger of amplifying these biases when used. As an example of social bias, religious biases are shown to persist in word embeddings and the need for its removal is highlighted. This paper investigates the state-of-the-art multiclass debiasing techniques: Hard debiasing, SoftWEAT debiasing and Conceptor debiasing. It evaluates their performance when removing religious bias on a common basis by quantifying bias removal via the Word Embedding Association Test (WEAT), Mean Average Cosine Similarity (MAC) and the Relative Negative Sentiment Bias (RNSB). By investigating the religious bias removal on three widely used word embeddings, namely: Word2Vec, GloVe, and ConceptNet, it is shown that the preferred method is ConceptorDebiasing. Specifically, this technique manages to decrease the measured religious bias on average by 82,42%, 96,78% and 54,76% for the three word embedding sets respectively.
The Combinatorial Multi-Bandit Problem and its Application to Energy Management
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We study a Combinatorial Multi-Bandit Problem motivated by applications in energy systems management. Given multiple probabilistic multi-arm bandits with unknown outcome distributions, the task is to optimize the value of a combinatorial objective function mapping the vector of individual bandit outcomes to a single scalar reward. Unlike in single-bandit problems with multi-dimensional action space, the outcomes of the individual bandits are observable in our setting and the objective function is known. Guided by the hypothesis that individual observability enables better trade-offs between exploration and exploitation, we generalize the lower regret bound for single bandits, showing that indeed for multiple bandits it admits parallelized exploration. For our energy management application we propose a range of algorithms that combine exploration principles for multi-arm bandits with mathematical programming. In an experimental study we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach to learn action assignments for 150 bandits, each having 24 actions, within a horizon of 365 episodes.
Learning Vision-based Reactive Policies for Obstacle Avoidance
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we address the problem of vision-based obstacle avoidance for robotic manipulators. This topic poses challenges for both perception and motion generation. While most work in the field aims at improving one of those aspects, we provide a unified framework for approaching this problem. The main goal of this framework is to connect perception and motion by identifying the relationship between the visual input and the corresponding motion representation. To this end, we propose a method for learning reactive obstacle avoidance policies. We evaluate our method on goal-reaching tasks for single and multiple obstacles scenarios. We show the ability of the proposed method to efficiently learn stable obstacle avoidance strategies at a high success rate, while maintaining closed-loop responsiveness required for critical applications like human-robot interaction.