OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Performance Analysis of Cooperative Relaying for Multi-Antenna RF Transmissions over THz Wireless Link
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

Recent research has focused on single antenna radio-frequency (RF) and terahertz (THz) wireless systems to mix the access link with the backhaul. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of a mixed RF-THz system employing multiple antenna-assisted access point (AP) for the RF link and single-antenna THz transmissions. We employ an equal gain combining (EGC) receiver at the AP and use the fixed-gain amplify and forward (AF) relaying protocol to interface the RF and THz links. We derive analytical expressions for probability density function (PDF) and cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the end-to-end SNR for the considered system assuming independent and non-identically distributed (i.ni.d.) $α$-$μ$ distribution to model for both RF and THz channels and pointing errors in the THz link. We analyze the system performance using the outage probability, average bit error rate (BER), and ergodic capacity involving bivariate Fox's H-function. We use the residue method to develop asymptotic analysis using Gamma functions to show the impact of the various channel and system parameters on the outage probability and average BER in the high SNR regime. We use computer simulations to depict the scaling of the performance with an increase in the number of antennas at the AP for signal reception in the access link.
Adversarial Plannning
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Planning algorithms are used in computational systems to direct autonomous behavior. In a canonical application, for example, planning for autonomous vehicles is used to automate the static or continuous planning towards performance, resource management, or functional goals (e.g., arriving at the destination, managing fuel fuel consumption). Existing planning algorithms assume non-adversarial settings; a least-cost plan is developed based on available environmental information (i.e., the input instance). Yet, it is unclear how such algorithms will perform in the face of adversaries attempting to thwart the planner. In this paper, we explore the security of planning algorithms used in cyber- and cyber-physical systems. We present two $\textit{adversarial planning}$ algorithms-one static and one adaptive-that perturb input planning instances to maximize cost (often substantially so). We evaluate the performance of the algorithms against two dominant planning algorithms used in commercial applications (D* Lite and Fast Downward) and show both are vulnerable to extremely limited adversarial action. Here, experiments show that an adversary is able to increase plan costs in 66.9% of instances by only removing a single action from the actions space (D* Lite) and render 70% of instances from an international planning competition unsolvable by removing only three actions (Fast Forward). Finally, we show that finding an optimal perturbation in any search-based planning system is NP-hard.
Budgeted Classification with Rejection: An Evolutionary Method with Multiple Objectives
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2022
Year: 2022

Classification systems are often deployed in resource-constrained settings where labels must be assigned to inputs on a budget of time, memory, etc. Budgeted, sequential classifiers (BSCs) address these scenarios by processing inputs through a sequence of partial feature acquisition and evaluation steps with early-exit options. This allows for an efficient evaluation of inputs that prevents unneeded feature acquisition. To approximate an intractable combinatorial problem, current approaches to budgeted classification rely on well-behaved loss functions that account for two primary objectives (processing cost and error). These approaches offer improved efficiency over traditional classifiers but are limited by analytic constraints in formulation and do not manage additional performance objectives. Notably, such methods do not explicitly account for an important aspect of real-time detection systems -- the fraction of "accepted" predictions satisfying a confidence criterion imposed by a risk-averse monitor. We propose a problem-specific genetic algorithm to build budgeted, sequential classifiers with confidence-based reject options. Three objectives -- accuracy, processing time/cost, and coverage -- are considered. The algorithm emphasizes Pareto efficiency while accounting for a notion of aggregate performance via a unique scalarization. Experiments show our method can quickly find globally Pareto optimal solutions in very large search spaces and is competitive with existing approaches while offering advantages for selective, budgeted deployment scenarios.
Extracting Symbolic Models of Collective Behaviors with Graph Neural Networks and Macro-Micro Evolution
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2022
Year: 2022

Collective behaviors are typically hard to model. The scale of the swarm, the large number of interactions, and the richness and complexity of the behaviors are factors that make it difficult to distill a collective behavior into simple symbolic expressions. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to symbolic regression designed to facilitate such modeling. Using raw and post-processed data as an input, our approach produces viable symbolic expressions that closely model the target behavior. Our approach is composed of two phases. In the first, a graph neural network (GNN) is trained to extract an approximation of the target behavior. In the second phase, the GNN is used to produce data for a nested evolutionary algorithm called macro-micro evolution (MME). The macro layer of this algorithm selects candidate symbolic expressions, while the micro layer tunes its parameters. Experimental evaluation shows that our approach outperforms competing solutions for symbolic regression, making it possible to extract compact expressions for complex swarm behaviors.
Simple Techniques Work Surprisingly Well for Neural Network Test Prioritization and Active Learning (Replicability Study)
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Test Input Prioritizers (TIP) for Deep Neural Networks (DNN) are an important technique to handle the typically very large test datasets efficiently, saving computation and labeling costs. This is particularly true for large-scale, deployed systems, where inputs observed in production are recorded to serve as potential test or training data for the next versions of the system. Feng et. al. propose DeepGini, a very fast and simple TIP, and show that it outperforms more elaborate techniques such as neuron- and surprise coverage. In a large-scale study (4 case studies, 8 test datasets, 32'200 trained models) we verify their findings. However, we also find that other comparable or even simpler baselines from the field of uncertainty quantification, such as the predicted softmax likelihood or the entropy of the predicted softmax likelihoods perform equally well as DeepGini.
Jam or Cream First? Modeling Ambiguity in Neural Machine Translation with SCONES
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

The softmax layer in neural machine translation is designed to model the distribution over mutually exclusive tokens. Machine translation, however, is intrinsically uncertain: the same source sentence can have multiple semantically equivalent translations. Therefore, we propose to replace the softmax activation with a multi-label classification layer that can model ambiguity more effectively. We call our loss function Single-label Contrastive Objective for Non-Exclusive Sequences (SCONES). We show that the multi-label output layer can still be trained on single reference training data using the SCONES loss function. SCONES yields consistent BLEU score gains across six translation directions, particularly for medium-resource language pairs and small beam sizes. By using smaller beam sizes we can speed up inference by a factor of 3.9x and still match or improve the BLEU score obtained using softmax. Furthermore, we demonstrate that SCONES can be used to train NMT models that assign the highest probability to adequate translations, thus mitigating the "beam search curse". Additional experiments on synthetic language pairs with varying levels of uncertainty suggest that the improvements from SCONES can be attributed to better handling of ambiguity.
FedDKD: Federated Learning with Decentralized Knowledge Distillation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

The performance of federated learning in neural networks is generally influenced by the heterogeneity of the data distribution. For a well-performing global model, taking a weighted average of the local models, as done by most existing federated learning algorithms, may not guarantee consistency with local models in the space of neural network maps. In this paper, we propose a novel framework of federated learning equipped with the process of decentralized knowledge distillation (FedDKD) (i.e., without data on the server). The FedDKD introduces a module of decentralized knowledge distillation (DKD) to distill the knowledge of the local models to train the global model by approaching the neural network map average based on the metric of divergence defined in the loss function, other than only averaging parameters as done in literature. Numeric experiments on various heterogeneous datasets reveal that FedDKD outperforms the state-of-the-art methods with more efficient communication and training in a few DKD steps, especially on some extremely heterogeneous datasets.
Result and Congestion Aware Optimal Routing and Partial Offloading in Collaborative Edge Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

Collaborative edge computing (CEC) is an emerging paradigm where heterogeneous edge devices (stakeholders) collaborate to fulfill computation tasks, such as model training or video processing, by sharing communication and computation resources. Nevertheless, the optimal data/result routing and computation offloading strategy in CEC with arbitrary topology still remains an open problem. In this paper, we formulate a partial-offloading and multi-hop routing model for arbitrarily divisible tasks. Each node individually decides the computation of the received data and the forwarding of data/result traffic. In contrast to most existing works, our model applies to tasks with non-negligible result size, and enables separable data sources and result destinations. We propose a network-wide cost minimization problem with congestion-aware cost to jointly optimize routing and computation offloading. This problem covers various performance metrics and constraints, such as average queueing delay with limited processor capacity. Although the problem is non-convex, we provide non-trivial necessary and sufficient conditions for the global-optimal solution, and devise a fully distributed algorithm that converges to the optimum in polynomial time, allows asynchronous individual updating, and is adaptive to changes in network topology or task pattern. Numerical evaluation shows that our proposed method significantly outperforms other baseline algorithms in multiple network instances, especially in congested scenarios.
Measuring DNS over TCP in the Era of Increasing DNS Response Sizes: A View from the Edge
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

The Domain Name System (DNS) is one of the most crucial parts of the Internet. Although the original standard defined the usage of DNS over UDP (DoUDP) as well as DNS over TCP (DoTCP), UDP has become the predominant protocol used in the DNS. With the introduction of new Resource Records (RRs), the sizes of DNS responses have increased considerably. Since this can lead to truncation or IP fragmentation, the fallback to DoTCP as required by the standard ensures successful DNS responses by overcoming the size limitations of DoUDP. However, the effects of the usage of DoTCP by stub resolvers are not extensively studied to this date. We close this gap by presenting a view at DoTCP from the Edge, issuing 12.1M DNS requests from 2,500 probes toward Public as well as Probe DNS recursive resolvers. In our measurement study, we observe that DoTCP is generally slower than DoUDP, where the relative increase in Response Time is less than 37% for most resolvers. While optimizations to DoTCP can be leveraged to further reduce the response times, we show that support on Public resolvers is still missing, hence leaving room for optimizations in the future. Moreover, we also find that Public resolvers generally have comparable reliability for DoTCP and DoUDP. However, Probe resolvers show a significantly different behavior: DoTCP queries targeting Probe resolvers fail in 3 out of 4 cases, and, therefore, do not comply with the standard. This problem will only aggravate in the future: As DNS response sizes will continue to grow, the need for DoTCP will solidify.
Dashboard Design Patterns
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

This paper introduces design patterns for dashboards to inform dashboard design processes. Despite a growing number of public examples, case studies, and general guidelines there is surprisingly little design guidance for dashboards. Such guidance is necessary to inspire designs and discuss tradeoffs in, e.g., screenspace, interaction, or information shown. Based on a systematic review of 144 dashboards, we report on eight groups of design patterns that provide common solutions in dashboard design. We discuss combinations of these patterns in dashboard genres such as narrative, analytical, or embedded dashboard. We ran a 2-week dashboard design workshop with 23 participants of varying expertise working on their own data and dashboards. We discuss the application of patterns for the dashboard design processes, as well as general design tradeoffs and common challenges. Our work complements previous surveys and aims to support dashboard designers and researchers in co-creation, structured design decisions, as well as future user evaluations about dashboard design guidelines. Detailed pattern descriptions and workshop material can be found online: https://dashboarddesignpatterns.github.io
BSRA: Block-based Super Resolution Accelerator with Hardware Efficient Pixel Attention
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2022
Year: 2022

Increasingly, convolution neural network (CNN) based super resolution models have been proposed for better reconstruction results, but their large model size and complicated structure inhibit their real-time hardware implementation. Current hardware designs are limited to a plain network and suffer from lower quality and high memory bandwidth requirements. This paper proposes a super resolution hardware accelerator with hardware efficient pixel attention that just needs 25.9K parameters and simple structure but achieves 0.38dB better reconstruction images than the widely used FSRCNN. The accelerator adopts full model block wise convolution for full model layer fusion to reduce external memory access to model input and output only. In addition, CNN and pixel attention are well supported by PE arrays with distributed weights. The final implementation can support full HD image reconstruction at 30 frames per second with TSMC 40nm CMOS process.
TuGeBiC: A Turkish German Bilingual Code-Switching Corpus
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper we describe the process of collection, transcription, and annotation of recordings of spontaneous speech samples from Turkish-German bilinguals, and the compilation of a corpus called TuGeBiC. Participants in the study were adult Turkish-German bilinguals living in Germany or Turkey at the time of recording in the first half of the 1990s. The data were manually tokenised and normalised, and all proper names (names of participants and places mentioned in the conversations) were replaced with pseudonyms. Token-level automatic language identification was performed, which made it possible to establish the proportions of words from each language. The corpus is roughly balanced between both languages. We also present quantitative information about the number of code-switches, and give examples of different types of code-switching found in the data. The resulting corpus has been made freely available to the research community.
The Application of Energy and Laplacian Energy of Hesitancy Fuzzy Graph Based on Similarity Measures in Decision Making Problems
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

In this article, a new hesitancy fuzzy similarity measure is defined and then used to develop the matrix of hesitancy fuzzy similarity measures, which is subsequently used to classify hesitancy fuzzy graph using the working procedure. We build a working procedure (Algorithm) for estimating the eligible reputation scores values of experts by applying hesitancy fuzzy preference relationships (HFPRs) and the usual similarity degree of one distinct HFPRs to each other's. As the last step, we provide real time numerical examples to demonstrate and validate our working procedure.
Hierarchical Decompositions of Stochastic Pursuit-Evasion Games
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2022
Year: 2022

In this work we present a hierarchical framework for solving discrete stochastic pursuit-evasion games (PEGs) in large grid worlds. With a partition of the grid world into superstates (e.g., "rooms"), the proposed approach creates a two-resolution decision-making process, which consists of a set of local PEGs at the original state level and an aggregated PEG at the superstate level. Having much smaller cardinality, both the local games and the aggregated game can be easily solved to a Nash equilibrium. To connect the decision-making at the two resolutions, we use the Nash values of the local PEGs as the rewards for the aggregated game. Through numerical simulations, we show that the proposed hierarchical framework significantly reduces the computation overhead, while still maintaining a satisfactory level of performance when competing against the flat Nash policies.
Low-Complexity Designs of Symbol-Level Precoding for MU-MISO Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

Symbol-level precoding (SLP), which converts the harmful multi-user interference (MUI) into beneficial signals, can significantly improve symbol-error-rate (SER) performance in multi-user communication systems. While enjoying symbolic gain, however, the complicated non-linear symbol-by-symbol precoder design suffers high computational complexity exponential with the number of users, which is unaffordable in realistic systems. In this paper, we propose a novel low-complexity grouped SLP (G-SLP) approach and develop efficient design algorithms for typical max-min fairness and power minimization problems. In particular, after dividing all users into several groups, the precoders for each group are separately designed on a symbol-by-symbol basis by only utilizing the symbol information of the users in that group, in which the intra-group MUI is exploited using the concept of constructive interference (CI) and the inter-group MUI is also effectively suppressed. In order to further reduce the computational complexity, we utilize the Lagrangian dual, Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions and the majorization-minimization (MM) method to transform the resulting problems into more tractable forms, and develop efficient algorithms for obtaining closed-form solutions to them. Extensive simulation results illustrate that the proposed G-SLP strategy and design algorithms dramatically reduce the computational complexity without causing significant performance loss compared with the traditional SLP schemes.
FastGCL: Fast Self-Supervised Learning on Graphs via Contrastive Neighborhood Aggregation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Graph contrastive learning (GCL), as a popular approach to graph self-supervised learning, has recently achieved a non-negligible effect. To achieve superior performance, the majority of existing GCL methods elaborate on graph data augmentation to construct appropriate contrastive pairs. However, existing methods place more emphasis on the complex graph data augmentation which requires extra time overhead, and pay less attention to developing contrastive schemes specific to encoder characteristics. We argue that a better contrastive scheme should be tailored to the characteristics of graph neural networks (e.g., neighborhood aggregation) and propose a simple yet effective method named FastGCL. Specifically, by constructing weighted-aggregated and non-aggregated neighborhood information as positive and negative samples respectively, FastGCL identifies the potential semantic information of data without disturbing the graph topology and node attributes, resulting in faster training and convergence speeds. Extensive experiments have been conducted on node classification and graph classification tasks, showing that FastGCL has competitive classification performance and significant training speedup compared to existing state-of-the-art methods.
Leaf Tar Spot Detection Using RGB Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Tar spot disease is a fungal disease that appears as a series of black circular spots containing spores on corn leaves. Tar spot has proven to be an impactful disease in terms of reducing crop yield. To quantify disease progression, experts usually have to visually phenotype leaves from the plant. This process is very time-consuming and is difficult to incorporate in any high-throughput phenotyping system. Deep neural networks could provide quick, automated tar spot detection with sufficient ground truth. However, manually labeling tar spots in images to serve as ground truth is also tedious and time-consuming. In this paper we first describe an approach that uses automated image analysis tools to generate ground truth images that are then used for training a Mask R-CNN. We show that a Mask R-CNN can be used effectively to detect tar spots in close-up images of leaf surfaces. We additionally show that the Mask R-CNN can also be used for in-field images of whole leaves to capture the number of tar spots and area of the leaf infected by the disease.
Demographic-Reliant Algorithmic Fairness: Characterizing the Risks of Demographic Data Collection in the Pursuit of Fairness
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

Most proposed algorithmic fairness techniques require access to data on a "sensitive attribute" or "protected category" (such as race, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality) in order to make performance comparisons and standardizations across groups, however this data is largely unavailable in practice, hindering the widespread adoption of algorithmic fairness. Through this paper, we consider calls to collect more data on demographics to enable algorithmic fairness and challenge the notion that discrimination can be overcome with smart enough technical methods and sufficient data alone. We show how these techniques largely ignore broader questions of data governance and systemic oppression when categorizing individuals for the purpose of fairer algorithmic processing. In this work, we explore under what conditions demographic data should be collected and used to enable algorithmic fairness methods by characterizing a range of social risks to individuals and communities. For the risks to individuals we consider the unique privacy risks associated with the sharing of sensitive attributes likely to be the target of fairness analysis, the possible harms stemming from miscategorizing and misrepresenting individuals in the data collection process, and the use of sensitive data beyond data subjects' expectations. Looking more broadly, the risks to entire groups and communities include the expansion of surveillance infrastructure in the name of fairness, misrepresenting and mischaracterizing what it means to be part of a demographic group or to hold a certain identity, and ceding the ability to define for themselves what constitutes biased or unfair treatment. We argue that, by confronting these questions before and during the collection of demographic data, algorithmic fairness methods are more likely to actually mitigate harmful treatment disparities without reinforcing systems of oppression.