OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
GRAIMATTER Green Paper: Recommendations for disclosure control of trained Machine Learning (ML) models from Trusted Research Environments (TREs)
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

TREs are widely, and increasingly used to support statistical analysis of sensitive data across a range of sectors (e.g., health, police, tax and education) as they enable secure and transparent research whilst protecting data confidentiality. There is an increasing desire from academia and industry to train AI models in TREs. The field of AI is developing quickly with applications including spotting human errors, streamlining processes, task automation and decision support. These complex AI models require more information to describe and reproduce, increasing the possibility that sensitive personal data can be inferred from such descriptions. TREs do not have mature processes and controls against these risks. This is a complex topic, and it is unreasonable to expect all TREs to be aware of all risks or that TRE researchers have addressed these risks in AI-specific training. GRAIMATTER has developed a draft set of usable recommendations for TREs to guard against the additional risks when disclosing trained AI models from TREs. The development of these recommendations has been funded by the GRAIMATTER UKRI DARE UK sprint research project. This version of our recommendations was published at the end of the project in September 2022. During the course of the project, we have identified many areas for future investigations to expand and test these recommendations in practice. Therefore, we expect that this document will evolve over time.
Distributed Reconfiguration of Spanning Trees
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

In a reconfiguration problem, given a problem and two feasible solutions of the problem, the task is to find a sequence of transformations to reach from one solution to the other such that every intermediate state is also a feasible solution to the problem. In this paper, we study the distributed spanning tree reconfiguration problem and we define a new reconfiguration step, called $k$-simultaneous add and delete, in which every node is allowed to add at most $k$ edges and delete at most $k$ edges such that multiple nodes do not add or delete the same edge. We first observe that, if the two input spanning trees are rooted, then we can do the reconfiguration using a single $1$-simultaneous add and delete step in one round in the CONGEST model. Therefore, we focus our attention towards unrooted spanning trees and show that transforming an unrooted spanning tree into another using a single $1$-simultaneous add and delete step requires $Ω(n)$ rounds in the LOCAL model. We additionally show that transforming an unrooted spanning tree into another using a single $2$-simultaneous add and delete step can be done in $O(\log n)$ rounds in the CONGEST model.
Feedback is Good, Active Feedback is Better: Block Attention Active Feedback Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

Deep neural network (DNN)-assisted channel coding designs, such as low-complexity neural decoders for existing codes, or end-to-end neural-network-based auto-encoder designs are gaining interest recently due to their improved performance and flexibility; particularly for communication scenarios in which high-performing structured code designs do not exist. Communication in the presence of feedback is one such communication scenario, and practical code design for feedback channels has remained an open challenge in coding theory for many decades. Recently, DNN-based designs have shown impressive results in exploiting feedback. In particular, generalized block attention feedback (GBAF) codes, which utilizes the popular transformer architecture, achieved significant improvement in terms of the block error rate (BLER) performance. However, previous works have focused mainly on passive feedback, where the transmitter observes a noisy version of the signal at the receiver. In this work, we show that GBAF codes can also be used for channels with active feedback. We implement a pair of transformer architectures, at the transmitter and the receiver, which interact with each other sequentially, and achieve a new state-of-the-art BLER performance, especially in the low SNR regime.
Resource-aware Deep Learning for Wireless Fingerprinting Localization
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

Location based services, already popular with end users, are now inevitably becoming part of new wireless infrastructures and emerging business processes. The increasingly popular Deep Learning (DL) artificial intelligence methods perform very well in wireless fingerprinting localization based on extensive indoor radio measurement data. However, with the increasing complexity these methods become computationally very intensive and energy hungry, both for their training and subsequent operation. Considering only mobile users, estimated to exceed 7.4 billion by the end of 2025, and assuming that the networks serving these users will need to perform only one localization per user per hour on average, the machine learning models used for the calculation would need to perform $65 \times 10^{12}$ predictions per year. Add to this equation tens of billions of other connected devices and applications that rely heavily on more frequent location updates, and it becomes apparent that localization will contribute significantly to carbon emissions unless more energy-efficient models are developed and used. In this Chapter, we discuss the latest results and trends in wireless localization and look at paths towards achieving more sustainable AI. We then elaborate on a methodology for computing DL model complexity, energy consumption and carbon footprint and show on a concrete example how to develop a more resource-aware model for fingerprinting. We finally compare relevant works in terms of complexity and training CO$_2$ footprint.
Rethinking Hierarchies in Pre-trained Plain Vision Transformer
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Self-supervised pre-training vision transformer (ViT) via masked image modeling (MIM) has been proven very effective. However, customized algorithms should be carefully designed for the hierarchical ViTs, e.g., GreenMIM, instead of using the vanilla and simple MAE for the plain ViT. More importantly, since these hierarchical ViTs cannot reuse the off-the-shelf pre-trained weights of the plain ViTs, the requirement of pre-training them leads to a massive amount of computational cost, thereby incurring both algorithmic and computational complexity. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a novel idea of disentangling the hierarchical architecture design from the self-supervised pre-training. We transform the plain ViT into a hierarchical one with minimal changes. Technically, we change the stride of linear embedding layer from 16 to 4 and add convolution (or simple average) pooling layers between the transformer blocks, thereby reducing the feature size from 1/4 to 1/32 sequentially. Despite its simplicity, it outperforms the plain ViT baseline in classification, detection, and segmentation tasks on ImageNet, MS COCO, Cityscapes, and ADE20K benchmarks, respectively. We hope this preliminary study could draw more attention from the community on developing effective (hierarchical) ViTs while avoiding the pre-training cost by leveraging the off-the-shelf checkpoints. The code and models will be released at https://github.com/ViTAE-Transformer/HPViT.
Common Information, Noise Stability, and Their Extensions
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

Common information (CI) is ubiquitous in information theory and related areas such as theoretical computer science and discrete probability. However, because there are multiple notions of CI, a unified understanding of the deep interconnections between them is lacking. This monograph seeks to fill this gap by leveraging a small set of mathematical techniques that are applicable across seemingly disparate problems. In Part I, we review the operational tasks and properties associated with Wyner's and Gács-Körner-Witsenhausen's (GKW's) CI. In PartII, we discuss extensions of the former from the perspective of distributed source simulation. This includes the Rényi CI which forms a bridge between Wyner's CI and the exact CI. Via a surprising equivalence between the Rényi CI of order~$\infty$ and the exact CI, we demonstrate the existence of a joint source in which the exact CI strictly exceeds Wyner's CI. Other closely related topics discussed in Part II include the channel synthesis problem and the connection of Wyner's and exact CI to the nonnegative rank of matrices. In Part III, we examine GKW's CI with a more refined lens via the noise stability or NICD problem in which we quantify the agreement probability of extracted bits from a bivariate source. We then extend this to the $k$-user NICD and $q$-stability problems, and discuss various conjectures in information theory and discrete probability, such as the Courtade-Kumar, Li-Médard and Mossell-O'Donnell conjectures. Finally, we consider hypercontractivity and Brascamp-Lieb inequalities, which further generalize noise stability via replacing the Boolean functions therein by nonnnegative functions. The key ideas behind the proofs in Part III can be presented in a pedagogically coherent manner and unified via information-theoretic and Fourier-analytic methods.
ImageNet-X: Understanding Model Mistakes with Factor of Variation Annotations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Deep learning vision systems are widely deployed across applications where reliability is critical. However, even today's best models can fail to recognize an object when its pose, lighting, or background varies. While existing benchmarks surface examples challenging for models, they do not explain why such mistakes arise. To address this need, we introduce ImageNet-X, a set of sixteen human annotations of factors such as pose, background, or lighting the entire ImageNet-1k validation set as well as a random subset of 12k training images. Equipped with ImageNet-X, we investigate 2,200 current recognition models and study the types of mistakes as a function of model's (1) architecture, e.g. transformer vs. convolutional, (2) learning paradigm, e.g. supervised vs. self-supervised, and (3) training procedures, e.g., data augmentation. Regardless of these choices, we find models have consistent failure modes across ImageNet-X categories. We also find that while data augmentation can improve robustness to certain factors, they induce spill-over effects to other factors. For example, strong random cropping hurts robustness on smaller objects. Together, these insights suggest to advance the robustness of modern vision models, future research should focus on collecting additional data and understanding data augmentation schemes. Along with these insights, we release a toolkit based on ImageNet-X to spur further study into the mistakes image recognition systems make.
The Polyhedral Geometry of Truthful Auctions
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2022
Year: 2022

The difference set of an outcome in an auction is the set of types that the auction mechanism maps to the outcome. We give a complete characterization of the geometry of the difference sets that can appear for a dominant strategy incentive compatible multi-unit auction showing that they correspond to regular subdivisions of the unit cube. This observation is then used to construct mechanisms that are robust in the sense that the set of items allocated to a player does change only slightly when the player's reported type is changed slightly.
A New Agent-Based Intelligent Network Architecture
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

The advent of 5G and the design of its architecture has become possible because of the previous individual scientific works and standardization efforts on cloud computing and network softwarization. Software-defined Networking and Network Function Virtualization started separately to find their convolution into 5G network architecture. Then, the ongoing design of the future beyond 5G (B5G) and 6G network architecture cannot overlook the pivotal inputs of different independent standardization efforts about autonomic networking, service-based communication systems, and multi-access edge computing. This article provides the design and the characteristics of an agent-based, softwarized, and intelligent architecture, which coherently condenses and merges the independent proposed architectural works by different standardization working groups and bodies. This novel work is a helpful means for the design and standardization process of the futureB5G and 6G network architecture.
MPI-based Evaluation of Coordinator Election Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we detail how two types of distributed coordinator election algorithms can be compared in terms of performance based on an evaluation on the High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure. An experimental approach based on an MPI (Message Passing Interface) implementation is presented, with the goal to characterize the relevant evaluation metrics based on statistical processing of the results. The presented approach can be used to learn master students of a course on distributed software the basics of algorithms for coordinator election, and how to conduct an experimental performance evaluation study. Finally, use cases where distributed coordinator election algorithms are useful are presented.
DyOb-SLAM : Dynamic Object Tracking SLAM System
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Simultaneous Localization & Mapping (SLAM) is the process of building a mutual relationship between localization and mapping of the subject in its surrounding environment. With the help of different sensors, various types of SLAM systems have developed to deal with the problem of building the relationship between localization and mapping. A limitation in the SLAM process is the lack of consideration of dynamic objects in the mapping of the environment. We propose the Dynamic Object Tracking SLAM (DyOb-SLAM), which is a Visual SLAM system that can localize and map the surrounding dynamic objects in the environment as well as track the dynamic objects in each frame. With the help of a neural network and a dense optical flow algorithm, dynamic objects and static objects in an environment can be differentiated. DyOb-SLAM creates two separate maps for both static and dynamic contents. For the static features, a sparse map is obtained. For the dynamic contents, a trajectory global map is created as output. As a result, a frame to frame real-time based dynamic object tracking system is obtained. With the pose calculation of the dynamic objects and camera, DyOb-SLAM can estimate the speed of the dynamic objects with time. The performance of DyOb-SLAM is observed by comparing it with a similar Visual SLAM system, VDO-SLAM and the performance is measured by calculating the camera and object pose errors as well as the object speed error.
Unlocking the potential of two-point cells for energy-efficient and resilient training of deep nets
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2022
Year: 2022

Context-sensitive two-point layer 5 pyramidal cells (L5PCs) were discovered as long ago as 1999. However, the potential of this discovery to provide useful neural computation has yet to be demonstrated. Here we show for the first time how a transformative L5PCs-driven deep neural network (DNN), termed the multisensory cooperative computing (MCC) architecture, can effectively process large amounts of heterogeneous real-world audio-visual (AV) data, using far less energy compared to best available 'point' neuron-driven DNNs. A novel highly-distributed parallel implementation on a Xilinx UltraScale+ MPSoC device estimates energy savings up to 245759 $ \times $ 50000 $μ$J (i.e., 62% less than the baseline model in a semi-supervised learning setup) where a single synapse consumes $8e^{-5}μ$J. In a supervised learning setup, the energy-saving can potentially reach up to 1250x less (per feedforward transmission) than the baseline model. The significantly reduced neural activity in MCC leads to inherently fast learning and resilience against sudden neural damage. This remarkable performance in pilot experiments demonstrates the embodied neuromorphic intelligence of our proposed cooperative L5PC that receives input from diverse neighbouring neurons as context to amplify the transmission of most salient and relevant information for onward transmission, from overwhelmingly large multimodal information utilised at the early stages of on-chip training. Our proposed approach opens new cross-disciplinary avenues for future on-chip DNN training implementations and posits a radical shift in current neuromorphic computing paradigms.
Spiking Variational Graph Auto-Encoders for Efficient Graph Representation Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2022
Year: 2022

Graph representation learning is a fundamental research issue and benefits a wide range of applications on graph-structured data. Conventional artificial neural network-based methods such as graph neural networks (GNNs) and variational graph auto-encoders (VGAEs) have achieved promising results in learning on graphs, but they suffer from extremely high energy consumption during training and inference stages. Inspired by the bio-fidelity and energy-efficiency of spiking neural networks (SNNs), recent methods attempt to adapt GNNs to the SNN framework by substituting spiking neurons for the activation functions. However, existing SNN-based GNN methods cannot be applied to the more general multi-node representation learning problem represented by link prediction. Moreover, these methods did not fully exploit the bio-fidelity of SNNs, as they still require costly multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations, which severely harm the energy efficiency. To address the above issues and improve energy efficiency, in this paper, we propose an SNN-based deep generative method, namely the Spiking Variational Graph Auto-Encoders (S-VGAE) for efficient graph representation learning. To deal with the multi-node problem, we propose a probabilistic decoder that generates binary latent variables as spiking node representations and reconstructs graphs via the weighted inner product. To avoid the MAC operations for energy efficiency, we further decouple the propagation and transformation layers of conventional GNN aggregators. We conduct link prediction experiments on multiple benchmark graph datasets, and the results demonstrate that our model consumes significantly lower energy with the performances superior or comparable to other ANN- and SNN-based methods for graph representation learning.
An agent-based approach to procedural city generation incorporating Land Use and Transport Interaction models
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2022
Year: 2022

We apply the knowledge of urban settings established with the study of Land Use and Transport Interaction (LUTI) models to develop reward functions for an agent-based system capable of planning realistic artificial cities. The system aims to replicate in the micro scale the main components of real settlements, such as zoning and accessibility in a road network. Moreover, we propose a novel representation for the agent's environment that efficiently combines the road graph with a discrete model for the land. Our system starts from an empty map consisting only of the road network graph, and the agent incrementally expands it by building new sites while distinguishing land uses between residential, commercial, industrial, and recreational.
Machine Learning Methods for Device Identification Using Wireless Fingerprinting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) systems increasingly rely on wireless communication standards. In a common industrial scenario, indoor wireless IoT devices communicate with access points to deliver data collected from industrial sensors, robots and factory machines. Due to static or quasi-static locations of IoT devices and access points, historical observations of IoT device channel conditions provide a possibility to precisely identify the device without observing its traditional identifiers (e.g., MAC or IP address). Such device identification methods based on wireless fingerprinting gained increased attention lately as an additional cyber-security mechanism for critical IoT infrastructures. In this paper, we perform a systematic study of a large class of machine learning algorithms for device identification using wireless fingerprints for the most popular cellular and Wi-Fi IoT technologies. We design, implement, deploy, collect relevant data sets, train and test a multitude of machine learning algorithms, as a part of the complete end-to-end solution design for device identification via wireless fingerprinting. The proposed solution is currently being deployed in a real-world industrial IoT environment as part of H2020 project COLLABS.
Combining Contrastive and Non-Contrastive Losses for Fine-Tuning Pretrained Models in Speech Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Embedding paralinguistic properties is a challenging task as there are only a few hours of training data available for domains such as emotional speech. One solution to this problem is to pretrain a general self-supervised speech representation model on large amounts of unlabeled speech. This pretrained model is then finetuned to a specific task. Paralinguistic properties however have notoriously high class variance, making the finetuning ineffective. In this work, we propose a two step approach to this. First we improve the embedding space, then we train an adapter to bridge the gap from the embedding space to a classification task. In order to improve the class invariance we use a combination of contrastive and non-contrastive losses to explicitly optimize for class invariant, yet discriminative features. Our approach consistently outperforms baselines that are finetuned end-to-end on multiple tasks and surpasses a benchmark on state-of-the-art emotion classification.
Quantifying Model Uncertainty for Semantic Segmentation using Operators in the RKHS
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Deep learning models for semantic segmentation are prone to poor performance in real-world applications due to the highly challenging nature of the task. Model uncertainty quantification (UQ) is one way to address this issue of lack of model trustworthiness by enabling the practitioner to know how much to trust a segmentation output. Current UQ methods in this application domain are mainly restricted to Bayesian based methods which are computationally expensive and are only able to extract central moments of uncertainty thereby limiting the quality of their uncertainty estimates. We present a simple framework for high-resolution predictive uncertainty quantification of semantic segmentation models that leverages a multi-moment functional definition of uncertainty associated with the model's feature space in the reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). The multiple uncertainty functionals extracted from this framework are defined by the local density dynamics of the model's feature space and hence automatically align themselves at the tail-regions of the intrinsic probability density function of the feature space (where uncertainty is the highest) in such a way that the successively higher order moments quantify the more uncertain regions. This leads to a significantly more accurate view of model uncertainty than conventional Bayesian methods. Moreover, the extraction of such moments is done in a single-shot computation making it much faster than Bayesian and ensemble approaches (that involve a high number of forward stochastic passes of the model to quantify its uncertainty). We demonstrate these advantages through experimental evaluations of our framework implemented over four different state-of-the-art model architectures that are trained and evaluated on two benchmark road-scene segmentation datasets (Camvid and Cityscapes).