OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Age of Information in Physical-Layer Network Coding Enabled Two-Way Relay Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

This paper investigates the information freshness of two-way relay networks (TWRN) operated with physical-layer network coding (PNC). Information freshness is quantified by age of information (AoI), defined as the time elapsed since the generation time of the latest received information update. PNC reduces communication latency of TWRNs by turning superimposed electromagnetic waves into network-coded messages so that end users can send update packets to each other via the relay more frequently. Although sending update packets more frequently is potential to reduce AoI, how to deal with packet corruption has not been well investigated. Specifically, if old packets are corrupted in any hop of a TWRN, one needs to decide the old packets to be dropped or to be retransmitted, e.g., new packets have recent information, but may require more time to be delivered. We study the average AoI with and without ARQ in PNC-enabled TWRNs. We first consider a non-ARQ scheme where old packets are always dropped when corrupted, referred to once-lost-then-drop (OLTD), and a classical ARQ scheme with no packet lost, referred to as reliable packet transmission (RPT). Interestingly, our analysis shows that neither the non-ARQ scheme nor the pure ARQ scheme achieves good average AoI. We then put forth an uplink-lost-then-drop (ULTD) protocol that combines packet drop and ARQ. Experiments on software-defined radio indicate that ULTD significantly outperforms OLTD and RPT in terms of average AoI. Although this paper focuses on TWRNs, we believe the insight of ULTD applies generally to other two-hop networks. Our insight is that to achieve high information freshness, when packets are corrupted in the first hop, new packets should be generated and sent (i.e., old packets are discarded); when packets are corrupted in the second hop, old packets should be retransmitted until successful reception.
The I-ADOPT Interoperability Framework for FAIRer data descriptions of biodiversity
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Biodiversity, the variation within and between species and ecosystems, is essential for human well-being and the equilibrium of the planet. It is critical for the sustainable development of human society and is an important global challenge. Biodiversity research has become increasingly data-intensive and it deals with heterogeneous and distributed data made available by global and regional initiatives, such as GBIF, ILTER, LifeWatch, BODC, PANGAEA, and TERN, that apply different data management practices. In particular, a variety of metadata and semantic resources have been produced by these initiatives to describe biodiversity observations, introducing interoperability issues across data management systems. To address these challenges, the InteroperAble Descriptions of Observable Property Terminology WG (I-ADOPT WG) was formed by a group of international terminology providers and data center managers in 2019 with the aim to build a common approach to describe what is observed, measured, calculated, or derived. Based on an extensive analysis of existing semantic representations of variables, the WG has recently published the I-ADOPT framework ontology to facilitate interoperability between existing semantic resources and support the provision of machine-readable variable descriptions whose components are mapped to FAIR vocabulary terms. The I-ADOPT framework ontology defines a set of high level semantic components that can be used to describe a variety of patterns commonly found in scientific observations. This contribution will focus on how the I-ADOPT framework can be applied to represent variables commonly used in the biodiversity domain.
Domain Generalization with Pseudo-Domain Label for Face Anti-Spoofing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Face anti-spoofing (FAS) plays an important role in protecting face recognition systems from face representation attacks. Many recent studies in FAS have approached this problem with domain generalization technique. Domain generalization aims to increase generalization performance to better detect various types of attacks and unseen attacks. However, previous studies in this area have defined each domain simply as an anti-spoofing datasets and focused on developing learning techniques. In this paper, we proposed a method that enables network to judge its domain by itself with the clustered convolutional feature statistics from intermediate layers of the network, without labeling domains as datasets. We obtained pseudo-domain labels by not only using the network extracting features, but also using depth estimators, which were previously used only as an auxiliary task in FAS. In our experiments, we trained with three datasets and evaluated the performance with the remaining one dataset to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method by conducting a total of four sets of experiments.
Multi-Label Generalized Zero Shot Learning for the Classification of Disease in Chest Radiographs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Despite the success of deep neural networks in chest X-ray (CXR) diagnosis, supervised learning only allows the prediction of disease classes that were seen during training. At inference, these networks cannot predict an unseen disease class. Incorporating a new class requires the collection of labeled data, which is not a trivial task, especially for less frequently-occurring diseases. As a result, it becomes inconceivable to build a model that can diagnose all possible disease classes. Here, we propose a multi-label generalized zero shot learning (CXR-ML-GZSL) network that can simultaneously predict multiple seen and unseen diseases in CXR images. Given an input image, CXR-ML-GZSL learns a visual representation guided by the input's corresponding semantics extracted from a rich medical text corpus. Towards this ambitious goal, we propose to map both visual and semantic modalities to a latent feature space using a novel learning objective. The objective ensures that (i) the most relevant labels for the query image are ranked higher than irrelevant labels, (ii) the network learns a visual representation that is aligned with its semantics in the latent feature space, and (iii) the mapped semantics preserve their original inter-class representation. The network is end-to-end trainable and requires no independent pre-training for the offline feature extractor. Experiments on the NIH Chest X-ray dataset show that our network outperforms two strong baselines in terms of recall, precision, f1 score, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/nyuad-cai/CXR-ML-GZSL.git
QoS-Aware Scheduling in New Radio Using Deep Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2021
Year: 2021

Fifth-generation (5G) New Radio (NR) cellular networks support a wide range of new services, many of which require an application-specific quality of service (QoS), e.g. in terms of a guaranteed minimum bit-rate or a maximum tolerable delay. Therefore, scheduling multiple parallel data flows, each serving a unique application instance, is bound to become an even more challenging task compared to the previous generations. Leveraging recent advances in deep reinforcement learning, in this paper, we propose a QoS-Aware Deep Reinforcement learning Agent (QADRA) scheduler for NR networks. In contrast to state-of-the-art scheduling heuristics, the QADRA scheduler explicitly optimizes for the QoS satisfaction rate while simultaneously maximizing the network performance. Moreover, we train our algorithm end-to-end on these objectives. We evaluate QADRA in a full scale, near-product, system level NR simulator and demonstrate a significant boost in network performance. In our particular evaluation scenario, the QADRA scheduler improves network throughput by 30% while simultaneously maintaining the QoS satisfaction rate of VoIP users served by the network, compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
Self-Determined Reciprocal Recommender System with Strong Privacy Guarantees
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Recommender systems are widely used. Usually, recommender systems are based on a centralized client-server architecture. However, this approach implies drawbacks regarding the privacy of users. In this paper, we propose a distributed reciprocal recommender system with strong, self-determined privacy guarantees, i.e., local differential privacy. More precisely, users randomize their profiles locally and exchange them via a peer-to-peer network. Recommendations are then computed and ranked locally by estimating similarities between profiles. We evaluate recommendation accuracy of a job recommender system and demonstrate that our method provides acceptable utility under strong privacy requirements.
Financial Network Games
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2021
Year: 2021

We study financial systems from a game-theoretic standpoint. A financial system is represented by a network, where nodes correspond to firms, and directed labeled edges correspond to debt contracts between them. The existence of cycles in the network indicates that a payment of a firm to one of its lenders might result to some incoming payment. So, if a firm cannot fully repay its debt, then the exact (partial) payments it makes to each of its creditors can affect the cash inflow back to itself. We naturally assume that the firms are interested in their financial well-being (utility) which is aligned with the amount of incoming payments they receive from the network. This defines a game among the firms, that can be seen as utility-maximizing agents who can strategize over their payments. We are the first to study financial network games that arise under a natural set of payment strategies called priority-proportional payments. We investigate the existence and (in)efficiency of equilibrium strategies, under different assumptions on how the firms' utility is defined, on the types of debt contracts allowed between the firms, and on the presence of other financial features that commonly arise in practice. Surprisingly, even if all firms' strategies are fixed, the existence of a unique payment profile is not guaranteed. So, we also investigate the existence and computation of valid payment profiles for fixed payment strategies.
ParCourE: A Parallel Corpus Explorer for a Massively Multilingual Corpus
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

With more than 7000 languages worldwide, multilingual natural language processing (NLP) is essential both from an academic and commercial perspective. Researching typological properties of languages is fundamental for progress in multilingual NLP. Examples include assessing language similarity for effective transfer learning, injecting inductive biases into machine learning models or creating resources such as dictionaries and inflection tables. We provide ParCourE, an online tool that allows to browse a word-aligned parallel corpus, covering 1334 languages. We give evidence that this is useful for typological research. ParCourE can be set up for any parallel corpus and can thus be used for typological research on other corpora as well as for exploring their quality and properties.
Procedural Content Generation using Behavior Trees (PCGBT)
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Behavior trees (BTs) are a popular method for modeling NPC and enemy AI behavior and have been widely used in commercial games. In this work, rather than use BTs to model game playing agents, we use them for modeling game design agents, defining behaviors as content generation tasks rather than in-game actions. Similar to how traditional BTs enable modeling behaviors in a modular and dynamic manner, BTs for PCG enable simple subtrees for generating parts of levels to be combined modularly to form complex trees for generating whole levels as well as generators that can dynamically vary the generated content. We refer to this approach as Procedural Content Generation using Behavior Trees, or PCGBT, and demonstrate it by using BTs to model generators for Super Mario Bros., Mega Man and Metroid levels as well as dungeon layouts and discuss several ways in which this paradigm could be applied and extended in the future.
Trustworthy AI: A Computational Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

In the past few decades, artificial intelligence (AI) technology has experienced swift developments, changing everyone's daily life and profoundly altering the course of human society. The intention of developing AI is to benefit humans, by reducing human labor, bringing everyday convenience to human lives, and promoting social good. However, recent research and AI applications show that AI can cause unintentional harm to humans, such as making unreliable decisions in safety-critical scenarios or undermining fairness by inadvertently discriminating against one group. Thus, trustworthy AI has attracted immense attention recently, which requires careful consideration to avoid the adverse effects that AI may bring to humans, so that humans can fully trust and live in harmony with AI technologies. Recent years have witnessed a tremendous amount of research on trustworthy AI. In this survey, we present a comprehensive survey of trustworthy AI from a computational perspective, to help readers understand the latest technologies for achieving trustworthy AI. Trustworthy AI is a large and complex area, involving various dimensions. In this work, we focus on six of the most crucial dimensions in achieving trustworthy AI: (i) Safety & Robustness, (ii) Non-discrimination & Fairness, (iii) Explainability, (iv) Privacy, (v) Accountability & Auditability, and (vi) Environmental Well-Being. For each dimension, we review the recent related technologies according to a taxonomy and summarize their applications in real-world systems. We also discuss the accordant and conflicting interactions among different dimensions and discuss potential aspects for trustworthy AI to investigate in the future.
Opportunities and challenges of Blockchain-Oriented systems in the tourism industry
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2021
Year: 2021

The tourism industry is increasingly influenced by the evolution of information and communication technologies (ICT), which are revolutionizing the way people travel. In this work we want to nvestigate the use of innovative IT technologies by DMOs (Destination Management Organizations), focusing on blockchain technology, both from the point of view of research in the field, and in the study of the most relevant software projects. In particular, we intend to verify the benefits offered by these IT tools in the management and monitoring of a destination, without forgetting the implications for the other stakeholders involved. These technologies, in fact, can offer a wide range of services that can be useful throughout the life cycle of the destination.
BiSTF: Bilateral-Branch Self-Training Framework for Semi-Supervised Large-scale Fine-Grained Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Semi-supervised Fine-Grained Recognition is a challenge task due to the difficulty of data imbalance, high inter-class similarity and domain mismatch. Recent years, this field has witnessed great progress and many methods has gained great performance. However, these methods can hardly generalize to the large-scale datasets, such as Semi-iNat, as they are prone to suffer from noise in unlabeled data and the incompetence for learning features from imbalanced fine-grained data. In this work, we propose Bilateral-Branch Self-Training Framework (BiSTF), a simple yet effective framework to improve existing semi-supervised learning methods on class-imbalanced and domain-shifted fine-grained data. By adjusting the update frequency through stochastic epoch update, BiSTF iteratively retrains a baseline SSL model with a labeled set expanded by selectively adding pseudo-labeled samples from an unlabeled set, where the distribution of pseudo-labeled samples are the same as the labeled data. We show that BiSTF outperforms the existing state-of-the-art SSL algorithm on Semi-iNat dataset.
A Review-based Taxonomy for Secure Health Care Monitoring: Wireless Smart Cameras
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Health records data security is one of the main challenges in e-health systems. Authentication is one of the essential security services to support the stored data confidentiality, integrity, and availability. This research focuses on the secure storage of patient and medical records in the healthcare sector where data security and unauthorized access is an ongoing issue. A potential solution comes from biometrics, although their use may be time-consuming and can slow down data retrieval. This research aims to overcome these challenges and enhance data access control in the healthcare sector through the addition of biometrics in the form of fingerprints. The proposed model for application in the healthcare sector consists of Collection, Network communication, and Authentication (CNA) using biometrics, which replaces an existing password-based access control method. A sensor then collects data and by using a network (wireless or Zig-bee), a connection is established, after connectivity analytics and data management work which processes and aggregate the data. Subsequently, access is granted to authenticated users of the application. This IoT-based biometric authentication system facilitates effective recognition and ensures confidentiality, integrity, and reliability of patients, records and other sensitive data. The proposed solution provides reliable access to healthcare data and enables secure access through the process of user and device authentication. The proposed model has been developed for access control to data through the authentication of users in healthcare to reduce data manipulation or theft.
FST: the FAIR Speech Translation System for the IWSLT21 Multilingual Shared Task
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we describe our end-to-end multilingual speech translation system submitted to the IWSLT 2021 evaluation campaign on the Multilingual Speech Translation shared task. Our system is built by leveraging transfer learning across modalities, tasks and languages. First, we leverage general-purpose multilingual modules pretrained with large amounts of unlabelled and labelled data. We further enable knowledge transfer from the text task to the speech task by training two tasks jointly. Finally, our multilingual model is finetuned on speech translation task-specific data to achieve the best translation results. Experimental results show our system outperforms the reported systems, including both end-to-end and cascaded based approaches, by a large margin. In some translation directions, our speech translation results evaluated on the public Multilingual TEDx test set are even comparable with the ones from a strong text-to-text translation system, which uses the oracle speech transcripts as input.
Solving sparse linear systems with approximate inverse preconditioners on analog devices
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2021
Year: 2021

Sparse linear system solvers are computationally expensive kernels that lie at the heart of numerous applications. This paper proposes a flexible preconditioning framework to substantially reduce the time and energy requirements of this task by utilizing a hybrid architecture that combines conventional digital microprocessors with analog crossbar array accelerators. Our analysis and experiments with a simulator for analog hardware demonstrate that an order of magnitude speedup is readily attainable without much impact on convergence, despite the noise in analog computations.
Look who's watching: platform labels and user engagement on state-backed media outlets
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2021
Year: 2021

Recently, social media platforms have introduced several measures to counter misleading information. Among these measures are state media labels which help users identify and evaluate the credibility of state-backed news. YouTube was the first platform to introduce labels that provide information about state-backed news channels. While previous work has examined the efficiency of information labels in controlled lab settings, few studies have examined how state media labels affect user perceptions of content from state-backed outlets. This paper proposes new methodological and theoretical approaches to investigate the effect of state media labels on user engagement with content. Drawing on a content analysis of 8,071 YouTube comments posted before and after the labelling of five state-funded channels (Al Jazeera English, CGTN, RT, TRT World, and Voice of America), this paper analyses the effect state media labels had on user engagement with state-backed media content. We found the labels had no impact on the amount of likes videos received before and after the policy introduction, except for RT which received less likes after it was labelled. However, for RT, comments left by users were associated with 30 percent decrease in the likelihood of observing a critical comment following the policy implementation, and a 70 percent decrease in likelihood of observing a critical comment about RT as a media source. While other state-funded broadcasters, like Al Jazeera English and VOA News, received fewer critical comments after YouTube introduced its policy; this relationship was associated with how political the video was, rather than the policy change. Our study contributes to the ongoing discussion on the efficacy of platform governance in relation to state-backed media, showing that audience preferences impact the effectiveness of labels.
Finding Significant Features for Few-Shot Learning using Dimensionality Reduction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Few-shot learning is a relatively new technique that specializes in problems where we have little amounts of data. The goal of these methods is to classify categories that have not been seen before with just a handful of samples. Recent approaches, such as metric learning, adopt the meta-learning strategy in which we have episodic tasks conformed by support (training) data and query (test) data. Metric learning methods have demonstrated that simple models can achieve good performance by learning a similarity function to compare the support and the query data. However, the feature space learned by a given metric learning approach may not exploit the information given by a specific few-shot task. In this work, we explore the use of dimension reduction techniques as a way to find task-significant features helping to make better predictions. We measure the performance of the reduced features by assigning a score based on the intra-class and inter-class distance, and selecting a feature reduction method in which instances of different classes are far away and instances of the same class are close. This module helps to improve the accuracy performance by allowing the similarity function, given by the metric learning method, to have more discriminative features for the classification. Our method outperforms the metric learning baselines in the miniImageNet dataset by around 2% in accuracy performance.
Low-Rank Temporal Attention-Augmented Bilinear Network for financial time-series forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Financial market analysis, especially the prediction of movements of stock prices, is a challenging problem. The nature of financial time-series data, being non-stationary and nonlinear, is the main cause of these challenges. Deep learning models have led to significant performance improvements in many problems coming from different domains, including prediction problems of financial time-series data. Although the prediction performance is the main goal of such models, dealing with ultra high-frequency data sets restrictions in terms of the number of model parameters and its inference speed. The Temporal Attention-Augmented Bilinear network was recently proposed as an efficient and high-performing model for Limit Order Book time-series forecasting. In this paper, we propose a low-rank tensor approximation of the model to further reduce the number of trainable parameters and increase its speed.