OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Automated False Positive Filtering for esNetwork Alerts
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

An Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is one of the security tools that can automatically analyze network traffic and detect suspicious activities. They are widely implemented as security guarantee tools in various business networks. However, the high rate of false-positive alerts creates an overwhelming number of unnecessary alerts for security analysts to sift through. The esNetwork is an IDS product by eSentire Inc. This project focuses on reducing the false-positive alerts generated by esNetwork with the help of a Random Forest (RF) classifier. The RF model was built to classify the alerts as high and low and only pass high likelihood alerts to the analysts. As a result of evaluation experiments, this model can achieve an accuracy of 97% for training validation, 88% for testing with the recent data, and 58% with Security Operation Centre (SOC) reviewed events. The evaluation result of the proposed model is intermediate because of the deficiency of clearly labeled data for training as well as the SOC-reviewed events for evaluation. The model still needs time to be fine-tuned to meet the industry deployment requirement.
Adaptively-weighted Integral Space for Fast Multiview Clustering
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Multiview clustering has been extensively studied to take advantage of multi-source information to improve the clustering performance. In general, most of the existing works typically compute an n * n affinity graph by some similarity/distance metrics (e.g. the Euclidean distance) or learned representations, and explore the pairwise correlations across views. But unfortunately, a quadratic or even cubic complexity is often needed, bringing about difficulty in clustering largescale datasets. Some efforts have been made recently to capture data distribution in multiple views by selecting view-wise anchor representations with k-means, or by direct matrix factorization on the original observations. Despite the significant success, few of them have considered the view-insufficiency issue, implicitly holding the assumption that each individual view is sufficient to recover the cluster structure. Moreover, the latent integral space as well as the shared cluster structure from multiple insufficient views is not able to be simultaneously discovered. In view of this, we propose an Adaptively-weighted Integral Space for Fast Multiview Clustering (AIMC) with nearly linear complexity. Specifically, view generation models are designed to reconstruct the view observations from the latent integral space with diverse adaptive contributions. Meanwhile, a centroid representation with orthogonality constraint and cluster partition are seamlessly constructed to approximate the latent integral space. An alternate minimizing algorithm is developed to solve the optimization problem, which is proved to have linear time complexity w.r.t. the sample size. Extensive experiments conducted on several realworld datasets confirm the superiority of the proposed AIMC method compared with the state-of-the-art methods.
Improving the Efficiency of Gradient Descent Algorithms Applied to Optimization Problems with Dynamical Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

We introduce two block coordinate descent algorithms for solving optimization problems with ordinary differential equations (ODEs) as dynamical constraints. The algorithms do not need to implement direct or adjoint sensitivity analysis methods to evaluate loss function gradients. They results from reformulation of the original problem as an equivalent optimization problem with equality constraints. The algorithms naturally follow from steps aimed at recovering the gradient-decent algorithm based on ODE solvers that explicitly account for sensitivity of the ODE solution. In our first proposed algorithm we avoid explicitly solving the ODE by integrating the ODE solver as a sequence of implicit constraints. In our second algorithm, we use an ODE solver to reset the ODE solution, but no direct are adjoint sensitivity analysis methods are used. Both algorithm accepts mini-batch implementations and show significant efficiency benefits from GPU-based parallelization. We demonstrate the performance of the algorithms when applied to learning the parameters of the Cucker-Smale model. The algorithms are compared with gradient descent algorithms based on ODE solvers endowed with sensitivity analysis capabilities, for various number of state size, using Pytorch and Jax implementations. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms are at least 4x faster than the Pytorch implementations, and at least 16x faster than Jax implementations. For large versions of the Cucker-Smale model, the Jax implementation is thousands of times faster than the sensitivity analysis-based implementation. In addition, our algorithms generate more accurate results both on training and test data. Such gains in computational efficiency is paramount for algorithms that implement real time parameter estimations, such as diagnosis algorithms.
Efficiently Computing the Shapley Value of Connectivity Games in Low-Treewidth Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2022
Year: 2022

The Shapley value is the solution concept in cooperative game theory that is most used in both theoretical as practical settings. Unfortunately, computing the Shapley value is computationally intractable in general. This paper focuses on computing the Shapley value of (weighted) connectivity games. For these connectivity games, that are defined on an underlying (weighted) graph, computing the Shapley value is #P-hard, and thus (likely) intractable even for graphs with a moderate number of vertices. We present an algorithm that can efficiently compute the Shapley value if the underlying graph has bounded treewidth. Next, we apply our algorithm to several real-world (covert) networks. We show that our algorithm can compute exact Shapley values for these networks quickly, whereas in prior work these values could only be approximated using a heuristic method. Finally, it is shown that our algorithm can also compute the Shapley value time efficiently for several larger (artificial) benchmark graphs from the PACE 2018 challenge.
Combinations of Affinity Functions for Different Community Detection Algorithms in Social Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2022
Year: 2022

Social network analysis is a popular discipline among the social and behavioural sciences, in which the relationships between different social entities are modelled as a network. One of the most popular problems in social network analysis is finding communities in its network structure. Usually, a community in a social network is a functional sub-partition of the graph. However, as the definition of community is somewhat imprecise, many algorithms have been proposed to solve this task, each of them focusing on different social characteristics of the actors and the communities. In this work we propose to use novel combinations of affinity functions, which are designed to capture different social mechanics in the network interactions. We use them to extend already existing community detection algorithms in order to combine the capacity of the affinity functions to model different social interactions than those exploited by the original algorithms.
Randomised Composition and Small-Bias Minimax
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2022
Year: 2022

We prove two results about randomised query complexity $\mathrm{R}(f)$. First, we introduce a "linearised" complexity measure $\mathrm{LR}$ and show that it satisfies an inner-optimal composition theorem: $\mathrm{R}(f\circ g) \geq Ω(\mathrm{R}(f) \mathrm{LR}(g))$ for all partial $f$ and $g$, and moreover, $\mathrm{LR}$ is the largest possible measure with this property. In particular, $\mathrm{LR}$ can be polynomially larger than previous measures that satisfy an inner composition theorem, such as the max-conflict complexity of Gavinsky, Lee, Santha, and Sanyal (ICALP 2019). Our second result addresses a question of Yao (FOCS 1977). He asked if $ε$-error expected query complexity $\bar{\mathrm{R}}_ε(f)$ admits a distributional characterisation relative to some hard input distribution. Vereshchagin (TCS 1998) answered this question affirmatively in the bounded-error case. We show that an analogous theorem fails in the small-bias case $ε=1/2-o(1)$.
xCloth: Extracting Template-free Textured 3D Clothes from a Monocular Image
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Existing approaches for 3D garment reconstruction either assume a predefined template for the garment geometry (restricting them to fixed clothing styles) or yield vertex colored meshes (lacking high-frequency textural details). Our novel framework co-learns geometric and semantic information of garment surface from the input monocular image for template-free textured 3D garment digitization. More specifically, we propose to extend PeeledHuman representation to predict the pixel-aligned, layered depth and semantic maps to extract 3D garments. The layered representation is further exploited to UV parametrize the arbitrary surface of the extracted garment without any human intervention to form a UV atlas. The texture is then imparted on the UV atlas in a hybrid fashion by first projecting pixels from the input image to UV space for the visible region, followed by inpainting the occluded regions. Thus, we are able to digitize arbitrarily loose clothing styles while retaining high-frequency textural details from a monocular image. We achieve high-fidelity 3D garment reconstruction results on three publicly available datasets and generalization on internet images.
TSGN: Transaction Subgraph Networks Assisting Phishing Detection in Ethereum
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Due to the decentralized and public nature of the Blockchain ecosystem, the malicious activities on the Ethereum platform impose immeasurable losses for the users. Existing phishing scam detection methods mostly rely only on the analysis of original transaction networks, which is difficult to dig deeply into the transaction patterns hidden in the network structure of transaction interaction. In this paper, we propose a \underline{T}ransaction \underline{S}ub\underline{G}raph \underline{N}etwork (TSGN) based phishing accounts identification framework for Ethereum. We first extract transaction subgraphs for target accounts and then expand these subgraphs into corresponding TSGNs based on the different mapping mechanisms. In order to make our model incorporate more important information about real transactions, we encode the transaction attributes into the modeling process of TSGNs, yielding two variants of TSGN, i.e., Directed-TSGN and Temporal-TSGN, which can be applied to the different attributed networks. Especially, by introducing TSGN into multi-edge transaction networks, the Multiple-TSGN model proposed is able to preserve the temporal transaction flow information and capture the significant topological pattern of phishing scams, while reducing the time complexity of modeling large-scale networks. Extensive experimental results show that TSGN models can provide more potential information to improve the performance of phishing detection by incorporating graph representation learning.
Actor-identified Spatiotemporal Action Detection -- Detecting Who Is Doing What in Videos
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

The success of deep learning on video Action Recognition (AR) has motivated researchers to progressively promote related tasks from the coarse level to the fine-grained level. Compared with conventional AR which only predicts an action label for the entire video, Temporal Action Detection (TAD) has been investigated for estimating the start and end time for each action in videos. Taking TAD a step further, Spatiotemporal Action Detection (SAD) has been studied for localizing the action both spatially and temporally in videos. However, who performs the action, is generally ignored in SAD, while identifying the actor could also be important. To this end, we propose a novel task, Actor-identified Spatiotemporal Action Detection (ASAD), to bridge the gap between SAD and actor identification. In ASAD, we not only detect the spatiotemporal boundary for instance-level action but also assign the unique ID to each actor. To approach ASAD, Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) and Action Classification (AC) are two fundamental elements. By using MOT, the spatiotemporal boundary of each actor is obtained and assigned to a unique actor identity. By using AC, the action class is estimated within the corresponding spatiotemporal boundary. Since ASAD is a new task, it poses many new challenges that cannot be addressed by existing methods: i) no dataset is specifically created for ASAD, ii) no evaluation metrics are designed for ASAD, iii) current MOT performance is the bottleneck to obtain satisfactory ASAD results. To address those problems, we contribute to i) annotate a new ASAD dataset, ii) propose ASAD evaluation metrics by considering multi-label actions and actor identification, iii) improve the data association strategies in MOT to boost the MOT performance, which leads to better ASAD results. The code is available at https://github.com/fandulu/ASAD.
Kuchibashi: 3D-Printed Tweezers Bioinspired by the New Caledonian Crow's Beak
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

In this study we implemented Kuchibashi, the New Caledonian Crow beak-like tweezers, and conducted a user study to evaluate the prototype's usability. We proved that Kuchibashi is superior in interacting with large spherical objects than hands and tweezers. Also, impressions of security and safeness were perceived positively by the participants.
BlueTiSCH: A Multi-PHY Simulation of Low-Power 6TiSCH IoT Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

Low-power wireless IoT networks have traditionally operated over a single physical layer (PHY) -- many based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. However, recent low-power wireless chipsets offer both the IEEE 802.15.4 and all four PHYs of the Bluetooth 5 (BT 5) standard. This introduces the intriguing possibility that IoT solutions might not necessarily be bound by the limits of a single PHY, and could actively or proactively adapt their PHY depending on RF or networking conditions (e.g., to offer a higher throughput or a longer radio range). Several recent studies have explored such use-cases. However, these studies lack comprehensive evaluation over various metrics (such as reliability, latency, and energy) with regards to scalability and the Radio Frequency (RF) environment. In this work we evaluate the performance of IEEE 802.15.4 and the four BT 5 2.4GHz PHY options for the recently completed IETF 6TiSCH low-power wireless standard. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to directly compare these PHYs in identical settings. Specifically, we use a recently released 6TiSCH simulator, TSCH-Sim, to compare these PHY options in networks of up to 250 nodes over different RF environments (home, industrial, and outdoor), and highlight from these results how different PHY options might be better suited to particular application use-cases.
MyMigrationBot: A Cloud-based Facebook Social Chatbot for Migrant Populations
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

We present the design, implementation and evaluation of a new cloud-based social chatbot called MyMigrationBot, that is deployed to Facebook. The system asks and answers questions related to user's personality traits and person-job competency fit to give feedback, and potentially support migrant populations. The chatbot's response database is based on reputable socio-psychological tools and can be customised. The system's backend is written with Node.js, deployed to AWS and Twilio, and joined with Facebook through Graph and Messenger APIs. To our knowledge this is the first multilingual social chatbot deployed to Facebook and designed to research and support migrant populations with feedback in Europe. It does not have personality like other bots, but it can study and feedback on migrants' personality and on other customised questionnaires e.g., job-competency fit. The aim of a social chatbot in our research project is to help engage migrants with social research using feedback information tailored to them. It can help migrants to get knowledge about their psycho-social resources and therefore to facilitate their integration process into a receiving labour market. We evaluated the chatbot on a group of 53 people, incl. 23 migrants, and we present the results.
AesUST: Towards Aesthetic-Enhanced Universal Style Transfer
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Recent studies have shown remarkable success in universal style transfer which transfers arbitrary visual styles to content images. However, existing approaches suffer from the aesthetic-unrealistic problem that introduces disharmonious patterns and evident artifacts, making the results easy to spot from real paintings. To address this limitation, we propose AesUST, a novel Aesthetic-enhanced Universal Style Transfer approach that can generate aesthetically more realistic and pleasing results for arbitrary styles. Specifically, our approach introduces an aesthetic discriminator to learn the universal human-delightful aesthetic features from a large corpus of artist-created paintings. Then, the aesthetic features are incorporated to enhance the style transfer process via a novel Aesthetic-aware Style-Attention (AesSA) module. Such an AesSA module enables our AesUST to efficiently and flexibly integrate the style patterns according to the global aesthetic channel distribution of the style image and the local semantic spatial distribution of the content image. Moreover, we also develop a new two-stage transfer training strategy with two aesthetic regularizations to train our model more effectively, further improving stylization performance. Extensive experiments and user studies demonstrate that our approach synthesizes aesthetically more harmonious and realistic results than state of the art, greatly narrowing the disparity with real artist-created paintings. Our code is available at https://github.com/EndyWon/AesUST.
RL-DistPrivacy: Privacy-Aware Distributed Deep Inference for low latency IoT systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Although Deep Neural Networks (DNN) have become the backbone technology of several ubiquitous applications, their deployment in resource-constrained machines, e.g., Internet of Things (IoT) devices, is still challenging. To satisfy the resource requirements of such a paradigm, collaborative deep inference with IoT synergy was introduced. However, the distribution of DNN networks suffers from severe data leakage. Various threats have been presented, including black-box attacks, where malicious participants can recover arbitrary inputs fed into their devices. Although many countermeasures were designed to achieve privacy-preserving DNN, most of them result in additional computation and lower accuracy. In this paper, we present an approach that targets the security of collaborative deep inference via re-thinking the distribution strategy, without sacrificing the model performance. Particularly, we examine different DNN partitions that make the model susceptible to black-box threats and we derive the amount of data that should be allocated per device to hide proprieties of the original input. We formulate this methodology, as an optimization, where we establish a trade-off between the latency of co-inference and the privacy-level of data. Next, to relax the optimal solution, we shape our approach as a Reinforcement Learning (RL) design that supports heterogeneous devices as well as multiple DNNs/datasets.
QoS-based Packet Scheduling Algorithms for Heterogeneous LTE-Advanced Networks, Concepts and a Literature Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

The number of LTE users and their applications has increased significantly in the last decade, which increased the demand on the mobile network. LTE-Advanced comes with many features that can support this increasing demand. LTE-Advanced supports Heterogeneous Networks deployment, in which it consists of a mix of macro-cells, remote radio heads, and low power nodes such as Pico-cells, and Femto-cells. Embedding this mix of base-stations in a macro-cellular network allows for achieving significant gains in coverage, throughput and system capacity compared to the use of macro-cells only. These base-stations can operate on the same wireless channel as the macro-cellular network, which will provide higher spatial reuse via cell splitting. Also, it allows network operators to support higher data traffic by offloading it to smaller cells, such as Femto-cells. Hence, it enables network operators to provide their growing number of users with the required Quality of Service that meets with their service demands. In-order for the network operators to make the best out of the heterogeneous LTE-Advanced network, they need to use QoS-based packet scheduling algorithms that can efficiently manage the spectrum resources in the heterogeneous deployment. In this paper, we survey Quality of Service based packet scheduling algorithms that were proposed in the literature for the use of packet scheduling in Heterogeneous LTE-Advanced Networks. We start by explaining the concepts of QoS in LTE, heterogeneous LTE-Advanced networks, and how traffic is classified within a packet scheduling architecture for heterogeneous LTE-Advanced networks. Then, by summarising the proposed QoS-based packet scheduling algorithms in the literature for heterogeneous LTE-Advanced Networks, and for Femtocells LTE-Advanced Networks. And finally, we provide some concluding remarks in the last section.
Label-Efficient Self-Training for Attribute Extraction from Semi-Structured Web Documents
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

Extracting structured information from HTML documents is a long-studied problem with a broad range of applications, including knowledge base construction, faceted search, and personalized recommendation. Prior works rely on a few human-labeled web pages from each target website or thousands of human-labeled web pages from some seed websites to train a transferable extraction model that generalizes on unseen target websites. Noisy content, low site-level consistency, and lack of inter-annotator agreement make labeling web pages a time-consuming and expensive ordeal. We develop LEAST -- a Label-Efficient Self-Training method for Semi-Structured Web Documents to overcome these limitations. LEAST utilizes a few human-labeled pages to pseudo-annotate a large number of unlabeled web pages from the target vertical. It trains a transferable web-extraction model on both human-labeled and pseudo-labeled samples using self-training. To mitigate error propagation due to noisy training samples, LEAST re-weights each training sample based on its estimated label accuracy and incorporates it in training. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to propose end-to-end training for transferable web extraction models utilizing only a few human-labeled pages. Experiments on a large-scale public dataset show that using less than ten human-labeled pages from each seed website for training, a LEAST-trained model outperforms previous state-of-the-art by more than 26 average F1 points on unseen websites, reducing the number of human-labeled pages to achieve similar performance by more than 10x.