OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Enhancing Model Robustness and Fairness with Causality: A Regularization Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Recent work has raised concerns on the risk of spurious correlations and unintended biases in statistical machine learning models that threaten model robustness and fairness. In this paper, we propose a simple and intuitive regularization approach to integrate causal knowledge during model training and build a robust and fair model by emphasizing causal features and de-emphasizing spurious features. Specifically, we first manually identify causal and spurious features with principles inspired from the counterfactual framework of causal inference. Then, we propose a regularization approach to penalize causal and spurious features separately. By adjusting the strength of the penalty for each type of feature, we build a predictive model that relies more on causal features and less on non-causal features. We conduct experiments to evaluate model robustness and fairness on three datasets with multiple metrics. Empirical results show that the new models built with causal awareness significantly improve model robustness with respect to counterfactual texts and model fairness with respect to sensitive attributes.
Does deep learning model calibration improve performance in class-imbalanced medical image classification?
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

In medical image classification tasks, it is common to find that the number of normal samples far exceeds the number of abnormal samples. In such class-imbalanced situations, reliable training of deep neural networks continues to be a major challenge. Under these circumstances, the predicted class probabilities may be biased toward the majority class. Calibration has been suggested to alleviate some of these effects. However, there is insufficient analysis explaining when and whether calibrating a model would be beneficial in improving performance. In this study, we perform a systematic analysis of the effect of model calibration on its performance on two medical image modalities, namely, chest X-rays and fundus images, using various deep learning classifier backbones. For this, we study the following variations: (i) the degree of imbalances in the dataset used for training; (ii) calibration methods; and (iii) two classification thresholds, namely, default decision threshold of 0.5, and optimal threshold from precision-recall curves. Our results indicate that at the default operating threshold of 0.5, the performance achieved through calibration is significantly superior (p < 0.05) to using uncalibrated probabilities. However, at the PR-guided threshold, these gains are not significantly different (p > 0.05). This finding holds for both image modalities and at varying degrees of imbalance.
PL-EESR: Perceptual Loss Based END-TO-END Robust Speaker Representation Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2021
Year: 2021

Speech enhancement aims to improve the perceptual quality of the speech signal by suppression of the background noise. However, excessive suppression may lead to speech distortion and speaker information loss, which degrades the performance of speaker embedding extraction. To alleviate this problem, we propose an end-to-end deep learning framework, dubbed PL-EESR, for robust speaker representation extraction. This framework is optimized based on the feedback of the speaker identification task and the high-level perceptual deviation between the raw speech signal and its noisy version. We conducted speaker verification tasks in both noisy and clean environment respectively to evaluate our system. Compared to the baseline, our method shows better performance in both clean and noisy environments, which means our method can not only enhance the speaker relative information but also avoid adding distortions.
Unsupervised paradigm for information extraction from transcripts using BERT
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

Audio call transcripts are one of the valuable sources of information for multiple downstream use cases such as understanding the voice of the customer and analyzing agent performance. However, these transcripts are noisy in nature and in an industry setting, getting tagged ground truth data is a challenge. In this paper, we present a solution implemented in the industry using BERT Language Models as part of our pipeline to extract key topics and multiple open intents discussed in the call. Another problem statement we looked at was the automatic tagging of transcripts into predefined categories, which traditionally is solved using supervised approach. To overcome the lack of tagged data, all our proposed approaches use unsupervised methods to solve the outlined problems. We evaluate the results by quantitatively comparing the automatically extracted topics, intents and tagged categories with human tagged ground truth and by qualitatively measuring the valuable concepts and intents that are not present in the ground truth. We achieved near human accuracy in extraction of these topics and intents using our novel approach
Fingerprint Matching using the Onion Peeling Approach and Turning Function
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Fingerprint, as one of the most popular and robust biometric traits, can be used in automatic identification and verification systems to identify individuals. Fingerprint matching is a vital and challenging issue in fingerprint recognition systems. Most fingerprint matching algorithms are minutiae-based. The minutiae in fingerprints can be determined by their discontinuity. Ridge ending and ridge bifurcation are two frequently used minutiae in most fingerprint-based matching algorithms. This paper presents a new minutiae-based fingerprint matching using the onion peeling approach. In the proposed method, fingerprints are aligned to find the matched minutiae points. Then, the nested convex polygons of matched minutiae points are constructed and the comparison between peer-to-peer polygons is performed by the turning function distance. Simplicity, accuracy, and low time complexity of the Onion peeling approach are three important factors that make it a standard method for fingerprint matching purposes. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated on the database $FVC2002$. The results show that fingerprints of the same fingers have higher scores than different fingers. Since the fingerprints that the difference between the number of their layers is more than $2$ and the minutiae matching score lower than 0.15 are ignored, the better results are obtained.
Be Aware of Your Leaders
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

Advances in blockchains have influenced the State-Machine-Replication (SMR) world and many state-of-the-art blockchain-SMR solutions are based on two pillars: Chaining and Leader-rotation. A predetermined round-robin mechanism used for Leader-rotation, however, has an undesirable behavior: crashed parties become designated leaders infinitely often, slowing down overall system performance. In this paper, we provide a new Leader-Aware SMR framework that, among other desirable properties, formalizes a Leader-utilization requirement that bounds the number of rounds whose leaders are faulty in crash-only executions. We introduce Carousel, a novel, reputation-based Leader-rotation solution to achieve Leader-Aware SMR. The challenge in adaptive Leader-rotation is that it cannot rely on consensus to determine a leader, since consensus itself needs a leader. Carousel uses the available on-chain information to determine a leader locally and achieves Liveness despite this difficulty. A HotStuff implementation fitted with Carousel demonstrates drastic performance improvements: it increases throughput over 2x in faultless settings and provided a 20x throughput increase and 5x latency reduction in the presence of faults.
Project Debater APIs: Decomposing the AI Grand Challenge
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Project Debater was revealed in 2019 as the first AI system that can debate human experts on complex topics. Engaging in a live debate requires a diverse set of skills, and Project Debater has been developed accordingly as a collection of components, each designed to perform a specific subtask. Project Debater APIs provide access to many of these capabilities, as well as to more recently developed ones. This diverse set of web services, publicly available for academic use, includes core NLP services, argument mining and analysis capabilities, and higher-level services for content summarization. We describe these APIs and their performance, and demonstrate how they can be used for building practical solutions. In particular, we will focus on Key Point Analysis, a novel technology that identifies the main points and their prevalence in a collection of texts such as survey responses and user reviews.
Is this the simplest (and most surprising) sorting algorithm ever?
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2021
Year: 2021

We present an extremely simple sorting algorithm. It may look like it is obviously wrong, but we prove that it is in fact correct. We compare it with other simple sorting algorithms, and analyse some of its curious properties.
BLEnD: Improving NDN Performance Over Wireless Links Using Interest Bundling
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2021
Year: 2021

Named Data Networking (NDN) employs small-sized Interest packets to retrieve large-sized Data packets. Given the half-duplex nature of wireless links, Interest packets frequently contend for the channel with Data packets, leading to throughput degradation. In this work, we present a novel idea called BLEnD, an Interest-bundling technique that encodes multiple Interests into one at the sender and decodes at the receiver. The major design challenges are to reduce the number of Interest transmissions without impacting the one-Interest one-Data principle embedded everywhere in NDN architecture and implementation, and support flow/congestion control mechanisms that usually use Interest packets as signals. BLEnD achieves these by bundling/unbundling Interests at the link adaptation layer, keeping all NDN components unaware and unaffected. Over a one-hop WiFi link, BLEnD improves application throughput by 30%. It may also be used over multiple hops and be improved in a number of ways.
A New Acceleration Paradigm for Discrete CosineTransform and Other Fourier-Related Transforms
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

Discrete cosine transform (DCT) and other Fourier-related transforms have broad applications in scientific computing. However, off-the-shelf high-performance multi-dimensional DCT (MD DCT) libraries are not readily available in parallel computing systems. Public MD DCT implementations leverage a straightforward method that decomposes the computation into multiple 1D DCTs along every single dimension, which inevitably has non-optimal performance due to low computational efficiency, parallelism, and locality. In this paper, we propose a new acceleration paradigm for MD DCT. A three-stage procedure is proposed to factorize MD DCT into MD FFT and highly-optimized preprocessing/postprocessing with efficient computation and high arithmetic intensity. Our paradigm can be easily extended to other Fourier-related transforms and other parallel computing systems. Experimental results show that our 2D DCT/IDCT CUDA implementation has a stable, FFT-comparable execution time, which is $2\times$ faster than the previous row-column method. Several case studies demonstrate that a promising efficiency improvement can be achieved with our paradigm. The implementations are available at https://github.com/JeremieMelo/dct_cuda/tree/reconstruct.
An Unconditionally Stable Conformal LOD-FDTD Method For Curved PEC Objects and Its Application to EMC Problems
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2021
Year: 2021

The traditional finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method is constrained by the Courant-Friedrich-Levy (CFL) condition and suffers from the notorious staircase error in electromagnetic simulations. This paper proposes a three-dimensional conformal locally-one-dimensional FDTD (CLOD-FDTD) method to address the two issues for modeling perfectly electrical conducting (PEC) objects. By considering the partially filled cells, the proposed CLOD-FDTD method can significantly improve the accuracy compared with the traditional LOD-FDTD method and the FDTD method. At the same time, the proposed method preserves unconditional stability, which is analyzed and numerically validated using the Von-Neuman method. Significant gains in Central Processing Unit (CPU) time are achieved by using large time steps without sacrificing accuracy. Two numerical examples include a PEC cylinder and a missile are used to verify its accuracy and efficiency with different meshes and time steps. It can be found from these examples, the CLOD-FDTD method show better accuracy and can improve the efficiency compared with those of the traditional FDTD method and the traditional LOD-FDTD method.
BPFNet: A Unified Framework for Bimodal Palmprint Alignment and Fusion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Bimodal palmprint recognition leverages palmprint and palm vein images simultaneously,which achieves high accuracy by multi-model information fusion and has strong anti-falsification property. In the recognition pipeline, the detection of palm and the alignment of region-of-interest (ROI) are two crucial steps for accurate matching. Most existing methods localize palm ROI by keypoint detection algorithms, however the intrinsic difficulties of keypoint detection tasks make the results unsatisfactory. Besides, the ROI alignment and fusion algorithms at image-level are not fully investigaged.To bridge the gap, in this paper, we propose Bimodal Palmprint Fusion Network (BPFNet) which focuses on ROI localization, alignment and bimodal image fusion.BPFNet is an end-to-end framework containing two subnets: The detection network directly regresses the palmprint ROIs based on bounding box prediction and conducts alignment by translation estimation.In the downstream,the bimodal fusion network implements bimodal ROI image fusion leveraging a novel proposed cross-modal selection scheme. To show the effectiveness of BPFNet,we carry out experiments on the large-scale touchless palmprint datasets CUHKSZ-v1 and TongJi and the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performances.
DenDrift: A Drift-Aware Algorithm for Host Profiling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Detecting and reacting to unauthorized actions is an essential task in security monitoring. What make this task challenging are the large number and various categories of hosts and processes to monitor. To these we should add the lack of an exact definition of normal behavior for each category. Host profiling using stream clustering algorithms is an effective means of analyzing hosts' behaviors, categorizing them, and identifying atypical ones. However, unforeseen changes in behavioral data (i.e. concept drift) make the obtained profiles unreliable. DenStream is a well-known stream clustering algorithm, which can be effectively used for host profiling. This algorithm is an incremental extension of DBSCAN which is a non-parametric algorithm widely used in real-world clustering applications. Recent experimental studies indicate that DenStream is not robust against concept drift. In this paper, we present DenDrift as a drift-aware host profiling algorithm based on DenStream. DenDrift relies on non-negative matrix factorization for dimensionality reduction and Page-Hinckley test for drift detection. We have done experiments on both synthetic and industrial datasets and the results affirm the robustness of DenDrift against abrupt, gradual and incremental drifts.
Consistency Regularization Can Improve Robustness to Label Noise
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Consistency regularization is a commonly-used technique for semi-supervised and self-supervised learning. It is an auxiliary objective function that encourages the prediction of the network to be similar in the vicinity of the observed training samples. Hendrycks et al. (2020) have recently shown such regularization naturally brings test-time robustness to corrupted data and helps with calibration. This paper empirically studies the relevance of consistency regularization for training-time robustness to noisy labels. First, we make two interesting and useful observations regarding the consistency of networks trained with the standard cross entropy loss on noisy datasets which are: (i) networks trained on noisy data have lower consistency than those trained on clean data, and(ii) the consistency reduces more significantly around noisy-labelled training data points than correctly-labelled ones. Then, we show that a simple loss function that encourages consistency improves the robustness of the models to label noise on both synthetic (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100) and real-world (WebVision) noise as well as different noise rates and types and achieves state-of-the-art results.
Geometric Atlas of the Middle Ear and Paranasal Sinuses for Robotic Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

In otolaryngologic surgery, more and more robots are being studied to meet the clinical needs of operating rooms. However, to help design and optimize these robots, the workspace must be precisely defined taking into account patient variability. The aim of this work is to define a geometric atlas of the middle ear and paranasal sinuses for endoscopic robotic applications. Scans of several patients of different ages and sexes were used to determine the average size of these workspaces, which are linked by the similar use of endoscopes in surgery.
GenCo: Generative Co-training for Generative Adversarial Networks with Limited Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Training effective Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) requires large amounts of training data, without which the trained models are usually sub-optimal with discriminator over-fitting. Several prior studies address this issue by expanding the distribution of the limited training data via massive and hand-crafted data augmentation. We handle data-limited image generation from a very different perspective. Specifically, we design GenCo, a Generative Co-training network that mitigates the discriminator over-fitting issue by introducing multiple complementary discriminators that provide diverse supervision from multiple distinctive views in training. We instantiate the idea of GenCo in two ways. The first way is Weight-Discrepancy Co-training (WeCo) which co-trains multiple distinctive discriminators by diversifying their parameters. The second way is Data-Discrepancy Co-training (DaCo) which achieves co-training by feeding discriminators with different views of the input images (e.g., different frequency components of the input images). Extensive experiments over multiple benchmarks show that GenCo achieves superior generation with limited training data. In addition, GenCo also complements the augmentation approach with consistent and clear performance gains when combined.
On the Complexity of Intersection Non-emptiness for Star-Free Language Classes
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2021
Year: 2021

In the Intersection Non-Emptiness problem, we are given a list of finite automata $A_1,A_2,\dots,A_m$ over a common alphabet $Σ$ as input, and the goal is to determine whether some string $w\in Σ^*$ lies in the intersection of the languages accepted by the automata in the list. We analyze the complexity of the Intersection Non-Emptiness problem under the promise that all input automata accept a language in some level of the dot-depth hierarchy, or some level of the Straubing-Thérien hierarchy. Automata accepting languages from the lowest levels of these hierarchies arise naturally in the context of model checking. We identify a dichotomy in the dot-depth hierarchy by showing that the problem is already NP-complete when all input automata accept languages of the levels zero or one half and already PSPACE-hard when all automata accept a language from the level one. Conversely, we identify a tetrachotomy in the Straubing-Thérien hierarchy. More precisely, we show that the problem is in AC$^0$ when restricted to level zero; complete for LOGSPACE or NLOGSPACE, depending on the input representation, when restricted to languages in the level one half; NP-complete when the input is given as DFAs accepting a language in from level one or three half; and finally, PSPACE-complete when the input automata accept languages in level two or higher. Moreover, we show that the proof technique used to show containment in NP for DFAs accepting languages in the Straubing-Thérien hierarchy levels one ore three half does not generalize to the context of NFAs. To prove this, we identify a family of languages that provide an exponential separation between the state complexity of general NFAs and that of partially ordered NFAs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first superpolynomial separation between these two models of computation.
What is understandable in Bayesian network explanations?
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Explaining predictions from Bayesian networks, for example to physicians, is non-trivial. Various explanation methods for Bayesian network inference have appeared in literature, focusing on different aspects of the underlying reasoning. While there has been a lot of technical research, there is very little known about how well humans actually understand these explanations. In this paper, we present ongoing research in which four different explanation approaches were compared through a survey by asking a group of human participants to interpret the explanations.
3d sequential image mosaicing for underwater navigation and mapping
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Although fully autonomous mapping methods are becoming more and more common and reliable, still the human operator is regularly employed in many 3D surveying missions. In a number of underwater applications, divers or pilots of remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) are still considered irreplaceable, and tools for real-time visualization of the mapped scene are essential to support and maximize the navigation and surveying efforts. For underwater exploration, image mosaicing has proved to be a valid and effective approach to visualize large mapped areas, often employed in conjunction with autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and ROVs. In this work, we propose the use of a modified image mosaicing algorithm that coupled with image-based real-time navigation and mapping algorithms provides two visual navigation aids. The first is a classic image mosaic, where the recorded and processed images are incrementally added, named 2D sequential image mosaicing (2DSIM). The second one geometrically transform the images so that they are projected as planar point clouds in the 3D space providing an incremental point cloud mosaicing, named 3D sequential image plane projection (3DSIP). In the paper, the implemented procedure is detailed, and experiments in different underwater scenarios presented and discussed. Technical considerations about computational efforts, frame rate capabilities and scalability to different and more compact architectures (i.e. embedded systems) is also provided.
Enabling Blockchain Scalability and Interoperability with Mobile Computing through LayerOne.X
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

Interoperability and scalability are currently the bottlenecks preventing mass adoption of blockchain technology. Development of an interoperable and scalable network that promotes a truly decentralised, permissionless and secure blockchain as well as one that enables micro validation is the main goal of this project. Layer-One.X, a truly decentralised ledger which utilises para-sharding, Directed Acyclic Graphs, Proof of Participation consensus mechanism, mobile computing, flash contracts and nucleus scripting is introduced in this paper. The conceptual framework including tokenomics is also explained along with a number of use cases. The framework facilitates the growing need of transaction per second enabling micro based payments and value transfer through tokenisation.