OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Revisiting Cellular Throughput Prediction over the Edge: Collaborative Multi-device, Multi-network in-situ Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

Pervasive applications over large-scale, distributed embedded devices and the Internet of Things (IoT) demand precise coordination with the network; for example, several such applications, like collaborative video streaming and live analysis, augmented reality, etc., need continuous monitoring of network throughput and adapt the application behavior accordingly. Although the idea of network throughput prediction is not new and quite dated, in this paper, we show that the existing approaches fail to correctly infer the throughput when the network operator or the device change, and thus, not generic enough for Internet-scale applications. We propose \ourmethod, a novel approach that allows collaborative training across different client hardware by capturing throughput variations based on devices' sensitivity towards the corresponding network configurations. Rigorous evaluations show that \ourmethod{} outperforms various standard baseline algorithms with more than $80\%$ R2-score over different datasets. We also analyze the performance of \ourmethod{} over a network-aware streaming media application and demonstrate its efficacy for various application scenarios.
Evaluating the Transferability of Machine-Learned Force Fields for Material Property Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Machine-learned force fields have generated significant interest in recent years as a tool for molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, with the aim of developing accurate and efficient models that can replace classical interatomic potentials. However, before these models can be confidently applied to materials simulations, they must be thoroughly tested and validated. The existing tests on the radial distribution function and mean-squared displacements are insufficient in assessing the transferability of these models. Here we present a more comprehensive set of benchmarking tests for evaluating the transferability of machine-learned force fields. We use a graph neural network (GNN)-based force field coupled with the OpenMM package to carry out MD simulations for Argon as a test case. Our tests include computational X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy (XPCS) signals, which capture the density fluctuation at various length scales in the liquid phase, as well as phonon density-of-state in the solid phase and the liquid-solid phase transition behavior. Our results show that the model can accurately capture the behavior of the solid phase only when the configurations from the solid phase are included in the training dataset. This underscores the importance of appropriately selecting the training data set when developing machine-learned force fields. The tests presented in this work provide a necessary foundation for the development and application of machine-learned force fields for materials simulations.
Over-The-Air Adversarial Attacks on Deep Learning Wi-Fi Fingerprinting
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Empowered by deep neural networks (DNNs), Wi-Fi fingerprinting has recently achieved astonishing localization performance to facilitate many security-critical applications in wireless networks, but it is inevitably exposed to adversarial attacks, where subtle perturbations can mislead DNNs to wrong predictions. Such vulnerability provides new security breaches to malicious devices for hampering wireless network security, such as malfunctioning geofencing or asset management. The prior adversarial attack on localization DNNs uses additive perturbations on channel state information (CSI) measurements, which is impractical in Wi-Fi transmissions. To transcend this limitation, this paper presents FooLoc, which fools Wi-Fi CSI fingerprinting DNNs over the realistic wireless channel between the attacker and the victim access point (AP). We observe that though uplink CSIs are unknown to the attacker, the accessible downlink CSIs could be their reasonable substitutes at the same spot. We thoroughly investigate the multiplicative and repetitive properties of over-the-air perturbations and devise an efficient optimization problem to generate imperceptible yet robust adversarial perturbations. We implement FooLoc using commercial Wi-Fi APs and Wireless Open-Access Research Platform (WARP) v3 boards in offline and online experiments, respectively. The experimental results show that FooLoc achieves overall attack success rates of about 70% in targeted attacks and of above 90% in untargeted attacks with small perturbation-to-signal ratios of about -18dB.
Tensor Denoising via Amplification and Stable Rank Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Tensors in the form of multilinear arrays are ubiquitous in data science applications. Captured real-world data, including video, hyperspectral images, and discretized physical systems, naturally occur as tensors and often come with attendant noise. Under the additive noise model and with the assumption that the underlying clean tensor has low rank, many denoising methods have been created that utilize tensor decomposition to effect denoising through low rank tensor approximation. However, all such decomposition methods require estimating the tensor rank, or related measures such as the tensor spectral and nuclear norms, all of which are NP-hard problems. In this work we leverage our previously developed framework of $\textit{tensor amplification}$, which provides good approximations of the spectral and nuclear tensor norms, to denoising synthetic tensors of various sizes, ranks, and noise levels, along with real-world tensors derived from physiological signals. We also introduce two new notions of tensor rank -- $\textit{stable slice rank}$ and $\textit{stable }$$X$$\textit{-rank}$ -- and new denoising methods based on their estimation. The experimental results show that in the low rank context, tensor-based amplification provides comparable denoising performance in high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) settings and superior performance in noisy (i.e., low SNR) settings, while the stable $X$-rank method achieves superior denoising performance on the physiological signal data.
Scalable Time-Range k-Core Query on Temporal Graphs(Full Version)
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2023
Year: 2023

Querying cohesive subgraphs on temporal graphs with various time constraints has attracted intensive research interests recently. In this paper, we study a novel Temporal k-Core Query (TCQ) problem: given a time interval, find all distinct k-cores that exist within any subintervals from a temporal graph, which generalizes the previous historical k-core query. This problem is challenging because the number of subintervals increases quadratically to the span of time interval. For that, we propose a novel Temporal Core Decomposition (TCD) algorithm that decrementally induces temporal k-cores from the previously induced ones and thus reduces "intra-core" redundant computation significantly. Then, we introduce an intuitive concept named Tightest Time Interval (TTI) for temporal k-core, and design an optimization technique with theoretical guarantee that leverages TTI as a key to predict which subintervals will induce duplicated k-cores and prunes the subintervals completely in advance, thereby eliminating "inter-core" redundant computation. The complexity of optimized TCD (OTCD) algorithm no longer depends on the span of query time interval but only the scale of final results, which means OTCD algorithm is scalable. Moreover, we propose a compact in-memory data structure named Temporal Edge List (TEL) to implement OTCD algorithm efficiently in physical level with bounded memory requirement. TEL organizes temporal edges in a "timeline" and can be updated instantly when new edges arrive, and thus our approach can also deal with dynamic temporal graphs. We compare OTCD algorithm with the incremental historical k-core query on several real-world temporal graphs, and observe that OTCD algorithm outperforms it by three orders of magnitude, even though OTCD algorithm needs none precomputed index.
Recommending Root-Cause and Mitigation Steps for Cloud Incidents using Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Incident management for cloud services is a complex process involving several steps and has a huge impact on both service health and developer productivity. On-call engineers require significant amount of domain knowledge and manual effort for root causing and mitigation of production incidents. Recent advances in artificial intelligence has resulted in state-of-the-art large language models like GPT-3.x (both GPT-3.0 and GPT-3.5), which have been used to solve a variety of problems ranging from question answering to text summarization. In this work, we do the first large-scale study to evaluate the effectiveness of these models for helping engineers root cause and mitigate production incidents. We do a rigorous study at Microsoft, on more than 40,000 incidents and compare several large language models in zero-shot, fine-tuned and multi-task setting using semantic and lexical metrics. Lastly, our human evaluation with actual incident owners show the efficacy and future potential of using artificial intelligence for resolving cloud incidents.
Streaming Punctuation: A Novel Punctuation Technique Leveraging Bidirectional Context for Continuous Speech Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

While speech recognition Word Error Rate (WER) has reached human parity for English, continuous speech recognition scenarios such as voice typing and meeting transcriptions still suffer from segmentation and punctuation problems, resulting from irregular pausing patterns or slow speakers. Transformer sequence tagging models are effective at capturing long bi-directional context, which is crucial for automatic punctuation. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) production systems, however, are constrained by real-time requirements, making it hard to incorporate the right context when making punctuation decisions. Context within the segments produced by ASR decoders can be helpful but limiting in overall punctuation performance for a continuous speech session. In this paper, we propose a streaming approach for punctuation or re-punctuation of ASR output using dynamic decoding windows and measure its impact on punctuation and segmentation accuracy across scenarios. The new system tackles over-segmentation issues, improving segmentation F0.5-score by 13.9%. Streaming punctuation achieves an average BLEUscore improvement of 0.66 for the downstream task of Machine Translation (MT).
CDA: Contrastive-adversarial Domain Adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Recent advances in domain adaptation reveal that adversarial learning on deep neural networks can learn domain invariant features to reduce the shift between source and target domains. While such adversarial approaches achieve domain-level alignment, they ignore the class (label) shift. When class-conditional data distributions are significantly different between the source and target domain, it can generate ambiguous features near class boundaries that are more likely to be misclassified. In this work, we propose a two-stage model for domain adaptation called \textbf{C}ontrastive-adversarial \textbf{D}omain \textbf{A}daptation \textbf{(CDA)}. While the adversarial component facilitates domain-level alignment, two-stage contrastive learning exploits class information to achieve higher intra-class compactness across domains resulting in well-separated decision boundaries. Furthermore, the proposed contrastive framework is designed as a plug-and-play module that can be easily embedded with existing adversarial methods for domain adaptation. We conduct experiments on two widely used benchmark datasets for domain adaptation, namely, \textit{Office-31} and \textit{Digits-5}, and demonstrate that CDA achieves state-of-the-art results on both datasets.
From Plate to Prevention: A Dietary Nutrient-aided Platform for Health Promotion in Singapore
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Singapore has been striving to improve the provision of healthcare services to her people. In this course, the government has taken note of the deficiency in regulating and supervising people's nutrient intake, which is identified as a contributing factor to the development of chronic diseases. Consequently, this issue has garnered significant attention. In this paper, we share our experience in addressing this issue and attaining medical-grade nutrient intake information to benefit Singaporeans in different aspects. To this end, we develop the FoodSG platform to incubate diverse healthcare-oriented applications as a service in Singapore, taking into account their shared requirements. We further identify the profound meaning of localized food datasets and systematically clean and curate a localized Singaporean food dataset FoodSG-233. To overcome the hurdle in recognition performance brought by Singaporean multifarious food dishes, we propose to integrate supervised contrastive learning into our food recognition model FoodSG-SCL for the intrinsic capability to mine hard positive/negative samples and therefore boost the accuracy. Through a comprehensive evaluation, we present performance results of the proposed model and insights on food-related healthcare applications. The FoodSG-233 dataset has been released in https://foodlg.comp.nus.edu.sg/.
Channel-aware Decoupling Network for Multi-turn Dialogue Comprehension
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Training machines to understand natural language and interact with humans is one of the major goals of artificial intelligence. Recent years have witnessed an evolution from matching networks to pre-trained language models (PrLMs). In contrast to the plain-text modeling as the focus of the PrLMs, dialogue texts involve multiple speakers and reflect special characteristics such as topic transitions and structure dependencies between distant utterances. However, the related PrLM models commonly represent dialogues sequentially by processing the pairwise dialogue history as a whole. Thus the hierarchical information on either utterance interrelation or speaker roles coupled in such representations is not well addressed. In this work, we propose compositional learning for holistic interaction across the utterances beyond the sequential contextualization from PrLMs, in order to capture the utterance-aware and speaker-aware representations entailed in a dialogue history. We decouple the contextualized word representations by masking mechanisms in Transformer-based PrLM, making each word only focus on the words in current utterance, other utterances, and two speaker roles (i.e., utterances of sender and utterances of the receiver), respectively. In addition, we employ domain-adaptive training strategies to help the model adapt to the dialogue domains. Experimental results show that our method substantially boosts the strong PrLM baselines in four public benchmark datasets, achieving new state-of-the-art performance over previous methods.
Unsupervised Mandarin-Cantonese Machine Translation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Advancements in unsupervised machine translation have enabled the development of machine translation systems that can translate between languages for which there is not an abundance of parallel data available. We explored unsupervised machine translation between Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese. Despite the vast number of native speakers of Cantonese, there is still no large-scale corpus for the language, due to the fact that Cantonese is primarily used for oral communication. The key contributions of our project include: 1. The creation of a new corpus containing approximately 1 million Cantonese sentences, and 2. A large-scale comparison across different model architectures, tokenization schemes, and embedding structures. Our best model trained with character-based tokenization and a Transformer architecture achieved a character-level BLEU of 25.1 when translating from Mandarin to Cantonese and of 24.4 when translating from Cantonese to Mandarin. In this paper we discuss our research process, experiments, and results.
Maintaining Triconnected Components under Node Expansion
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2023
Year: 2023

SPQR-trees are a central component of graph drawing and are also important in many further areas of computer science. From their inception onwards, they have always had a strong relation to dynamic algorithms maintaining information, e.g., on planarity and triconnectivity, under edge insertion and, later on, also deletion. In this paper, we focus on a special kind of dynamic update, the expansion of vertices into arbitrary biconnected graphs, while maintaining the SPQR-tree and further information. This will also allow us to efficiently merge two SPQR-trees by identifying the edges incident to two vertices with each other. We do this working along an axiomatic definition lifting the SPQR-tree to a stand-alone data structure that can be modified independently from the graph it might have been derived from. Making changes to this structure, we can now observe how the graph represented by the SPQR-tree changes, instead of having to reason which updates to the SPQR-tree are necessary after a change to the represented graph. Using efficient expansions and merges allows us to improve the runtime of the Synchronized Planarity algorithm by Bläsius et al. [ESA 2021] from $O(m^2)$ to $O(m\cdot Δ)$, where $Δ$ is the maximum pipe degree. This also reduces the time for solving several constrained planarity problems, e.g. for Clustered Planarity from $O((n+d)^2)$ to $O(n+d\cdot Δ)$, where $d$ is the total number of crossings between cluster borders and edges and $Δ$ is the maximum number of edge crossings on a single cluster border.
Semi-Supervised Learning with Pseudo-Negative Labels for Image Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Semi-supervised learning frameworks usually adopt mutual learning approaches with multiple submodels to learn from different perspectives. To avoid transferring erroneous pseudo labels between these submodels, a high threshold is usually used to filter out a large number of low-confidence predictions for unlabeled data. However, such filtering can not fully exploit unlabeled data with low prediction confidence. To overcome this problem, in this work, we propose a mutual learning framework based on pseudo-negative labels. Negative labels are those that a corresponding data item does not belong. In each iteration, one submodel generates pseudo-negative labels for each data item, and the other submodel learns from these labels. The role of the two submodels exchanges after each iteration until convergence. By reducing the prediction probability on pseudo-negative labels, the dual model can improve its prediction ability. We also propose a mechanism to select a few pseudo-negative labels to feed into submodels. In the experiments, our framework achieves state-of-the-art results on several main benchmarks. Specifically, with our framework, the error rates of the 13-layer CNN model are 9.35% and 7.94% for CIFAR-10 with 1000 and 4000 labels, respectively. In addition, for the non-augmented MNIST with only 20 labels, the error rate is 0.81% by our framework, which is much smaller than that of other approaches. Our approach also demonstrates a significant performance improvement in domain adaptation.
GPU-based high-precision orbital propagation of large sets of initial conditions through Picard-Chebyshev augmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

The orbital propagation of large sets of initial conditions under high accuracy requirements is currently a bottleneck in the development of space missions, e.g. for planetary protection compliance analyses. The proposed approach can include any force source in the dynamical model through efficient Picard-Chebyshev (PC) numerical simulations. A two-level augmentation of the integration scheme is proposed, to run an arbitrary number of simulations within the same algorithm call, fully exploiting high performance and GPU (Graphics Processing Units) computing facilities. The performances obtained with implementation in C and NVIDIA CUDA programming languages are shown, on a test case taken from the optimization of a Solar Orbiter-like first resonant phase with Venus.
There is No Big Brother or Small Brother: Knowledge Infusion in Language Models for Link Prediction and Question Answering
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

The integration of knowledge graphs with deep learning is thriving in improving the performance of various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. In this paper, we focus on knowledge-infused link prediction and question answering using language models, T5, and BLOOM across three domains: Aviation, Movie, and Web. In this context, we infuse knowledge in large and small language models and study their performance, and find the performance to be similar. For the link prediction task on the Aviation Knowledge Graph, we obtain a 0.2 hits@1 score using T5-small, T5-base, T5-large, and BLOOM. Using template-based scripts, we create a set of 1 million synthetic factoid QA pairs in the aviation domain from National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) reports. On our curated QA pairs, the three models of T5 achieve a 0.7 hits@1 score. We validate out findings with the paired student t-test and Cohen's kappa scores. For link prediction on Aviation Knowledge Graph using T5-small and T5-large, we obtain a Cohen's kappa score of 0.76, showing substantial agreement between the models. Thus, we infer that small language models perform similar to large language models with the infusion of knowledge.
Rethinking Voxelization and Classification for 3D Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The main challenge in 3D object detection from LiDAR point clouds is achieving real-time performance without affecting the reliability of the network. In other words, the detecting network must be confident enough about its predictions. In this paper, we present a solution to improve network inference speed and precision at the same time by implementing a fast dynamic voxelizer that works on fast pillar-based models in the same way a voxelizer works on slow voxel-based models. In addition, we propose a lightweight detection sub-head model for classifying predicted objects and filter out false detected objects that significantly improves model precision in a negligible time and computing cost. The developed code is publicly available at: https://github.com/YoushaaMurhij/RVCDet.
Improving unlinkability in C-ITS: a methodology for optimal obfuscation
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we develop a new methodology to provide high assurance about privacy in Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS). Our focus lies on vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications enabled by Cooperative Awareness Basic Service. Our research motivation is developed based on the analysis of unlinkability provision methods indicating a gap. To address this, we propose a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) to express unlinkability for the situation where two cars are communicating with a Roadside Unit (RSU) using Cooperative Awareness Messages (CAMs). Our HMM has labeled states specifying distinct origins of the CAMs observable by a passive attacker. We then demonstrate that a high assurance about the degree of uncertainty (e.g., entropy) about labeled states can be obtained for the attacker under the assumption that he knows actual positions of the vehicles (e.g., hidden states in HMM). We further demonstrate how unlinkability can be increased in C-ITS: we propose a joint probability distribution that both drivers must use to obfuscate their actual data jointly. This obfuscated data is then encapsulated in their CAMs. Finally, our findings are incorporated into an obfuscation algorithm whose complexity is linear in the number of discrete time steps in HMM.