OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Formalizing and Guaranteeing* Human-Robot Interaction
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Robot capabilities are maturing across domains, from self-driving cars, to bipeds and drones. As a result, robots will soon no longer be confined to safety-controlled industrial settings; instead, they will directly interact with the general public. The growing field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) studies various aspects of this scenario - from social norms to joint action to human-robot teams and more. Researchers in HRI have made great strides in developing models, methods, and algorithms for robots acting with and around humans, but these "computational HRI" models and algorithms generally do not come with formal guarantees and constraints on their operation. To enable human-interactive robots to move from the lab to real-world deployments, we must address this gap. This article provides an overview of verification, validation and synthesis techniques used to create demonstrably trustworthy systems, describes several HRI domains that could benefit from such techniques, and provides a roadmap for the challenges and the research needed to create formalized and guaranteed human-robot interaction.
Optimal Rates of Distributed Regression with Imperfect Kernels
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Distributed machine learning systems have been receiving increasing attentions for their efficiency to process large scale data. Many distributed frameworks have been proposed for different machine learning tasks. In this paper, we study the distributed kernel regression via the divide and conquer approach. This approach has been proved asymptotically minimax optimal if the kernel is perfectly selected so that the true regression function lies in the associated reproducing kernel Hilbert space. However, this is usually, if not always, impractical because kernels that can only be selected via prior knowledge or a tuning process are hardly perfect. Instead it is more common that the kernel is good enough but imperfect in the sense that the true regression can be well approximated by but does not lie exactly in the kernel space. We show distributed kernel regression can still achieves capacity independent optimal rate in this case. To this end, we first establish a general framework that allows to analyze distributed regression with response weighted base algorithms by bounding the error of such algorithms on a single data set, provided that the error bounds has factored the impact of the unexplained variance of the response variable. Then we perform a leave one out analysis of the kernel ridge regression and bias corrected kernel ridge regression, which in combination with the aforementioned framework allows us to derive sharp error bounds and capacity independent optimal rates for the associated distributed kernel regression algorithms. As a byproduct of the thorough analysis, we also prove the kernel ridge regression can achieve rates faster than $N^{-1}$ (where $N$ is the sample size) in the noise free setting which, to our best knowledge, are first observed and novel in regression learning.
Federated Mutual Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Federated learning (FL) enables collaboratively training deep learning models on decentralized data. However, there are three types of heterogeneities in FL setting bringing about distinctive challenges to the canonical federated learning algorithm (FedAvg). First, due to the Non-IIDness of data, the global shared model may perform worse than local models that solely trained on their private data; Second, the objective of center server and clients may be different, where center server seeks for a generalized model whereas client pursue a personalized model, and clients may run different tasks; Third, clients may need to design their customized model for various scenes and tasks; In this work, we present a novel federated learning paradigm, named Federated Mutual Leaning (FML), dealing with the three heterogeneities. FML allows clients training a generalized model collaboratively and a personalized model independently, and designing their private customized models. Thus, the Non-IIDness of data is no longer a bug but a feature that clients can be personally served better. The experiments show that FML can achieve better performance than alternatives in typical FL setting, and clients can be benefited from FML with different models and tasks.
Adaptive SpMV/SpMSpV on GPUs for Input Vectors of Varied Sparsity
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

Despite numerous efforts for optimizing the performance of Sparse Matrix and Vector Multiplication (SpMV) on modern hardware architectures, few works are done to its sparse counterpart, Sparse Matrix and Sparse Vector Multiplication (SpMSpV), not to mention dealing with input vectors of varied sparsity. The key challenge is that depending on the sparsity levels, distribution of data, and compute platform, the optimal choice of SpMV/SpMSpV kernel can vary, and a static choice does not suffice. In this paper, we propose an adaptive SpMV/SpMSpV framework, which can automatically select the appropriate SpMV/SpMSpV kernel on GPUs for any sparse matrix and vector at the runtime. Based on systematic analysis on key factors such as computing pattern, workload distribution and write-back strategy, eight candidate SpMV/SpMSpV kernels are encapsulated into the framework to achieve high performance in a seamless manner. A comprehensive study on machine learning based kernel selector is performed to choose the kernel and adapt with the varieties of both the input and hardware from both accuracy and overhead perspectives. Experiments demonstrate that the adaptive framework can substantially outperform the previous state-of-the-art in real-world applications on NVIDIA Tesla K40m, P100 and V100 GPUs.
An energy efficient service composition mechanism using a hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm in a mobile cloud environment
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

By increasing mobile devices in technology and human life, using a runtime and mobile services has gotten more complex along with the composition of a large number of atomic services. Different services are provided by mobile cloud components to represent the non-functional properties as Quality of Service (QoS), which is applied by a set of standards. On the other hand, the growth of the energy-source heterogeneity in mobile clouds is an emerging challenge according to the energy-saving problem in mobile nodes. To mobile cloud service composition as an NP-Hard problem, an efficient selection method should be taken by problem using optimal energy-aware methods that can extend the deployment and interoperability of mobile cloud components. Also, an energy-aware service composition mechanism is required to preserve high energy saving scenarios for mobile cloud components. In this paper, an energy-aware mechanism is applied to optimize mobile cloud service composition using a hybrid Shuffled Frog Leaping Algorithm and Genetic Algorithm (SFGA). Experimental results capture that the proposed mechanism improves the feasibility of the service composition with minimum energy consumption, response time, and cost for mobile cloud components against some current algorithms.
Leveraging Temporal Information for 3D Detection and Domain Adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Ever since the prevalent use of the LiDARs in autonomous driving, tremendous improvements have been made to the learning on the point clouds. However, recent progress largely focuses on detecting objects in a single 360-degree sweep, without extensively exploring the temporal information. In this report, we describe a simple way to pass such information in the learning pipeline by adding timestamps to the point clouds, which shows consistent improvements across all three classes.
A Systematic Review of the Digital Interventions for Fighting COVID-19: The Bangladesh Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

The objective of this paper is to synthesize the digital interventions initiatives to fight against COVID-19 in Bangladesh and compare with other countries. In order to obtain our research objective, we conducted a systematic review of the online content. We first reviewed the digital interventions that have been used to fight against COVID-19 across the globe. We then reviewed the initiatives that have been taken place in Bangladesh. Thereafter, we present a comparative analysis between the initiatives taken in Bangladesh and the other countries. Our findings show that while Bangladesh is capable to take benefits of the digital intervention approaches, tighter cooperation between government and private organizations as well as universities would be needed to get the most benefits. Furthermore, the government needs to make sure that the privacy of its citizens are protected.
Complexity of modification problems for best match graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2020
Year: 2020

Best match graphs (BMGs) are vertex-colored directed graphs that were introduced to model the relationships of genes (vertices) from different species (colors) given an underlying evolutionary tree that is assumed to be unknown. In real-life applications, BMGs are estimated from sequence similarity data. Measurement noise and approximation errors usually result in empirically determined graphs that in general violate characteristic properties of BMGs. The arc modification problems for BMGs aim at correcting such violations and thus provide a means to improve the initial estimates of best match data. We show here that the arc deletion, arc completion and arc editing problems for BMGs are NP-complete and that they can be formulated and solved as integer linear programs. To this end, we provide a novel characterization of BMGs in terms of triples (binary trees on three leaves) and a characterization of BMGs with two colors in terms of forbidden subgraphs.
Firmware Insider: Bluetooth Randomness is Mostly Random
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

Bluetooth chips must include a Random Number Generator (RNG). This RNG is used internally within cryptographic primitives but also exposed to the operating system for chip-external applications. In general, it is a black box with security-critical authentication and encryption mechanisms depending on it. In this paper, we evaluate the quality of RNGs in various Broadcom and Cypress Bluetooth chips. We find that the RNG implementation significantly changed over the last decade. Moreover, most devices implement an insecure Pseudo-Random Number Generator (PRNG) fallback. Multiple popular devices, such as the Samsung Galaxy S8 and its variants as well as an iPhone, rely on the weak fallback due to missing a Hardware Random Number Generator (HRNG). We statistically evaluate the output of various HRNGs in chips used by hundreds of millions of devices. While the Broadcom and Cypress HRNGs pass advanced tests, it remains indistinguishable for users if a Bluetooth chip implements a secure RNG without an extensive analysis as in this paper. We describe our measurement methods and publish our tools to enable further public testing.
Traceability Support for Multi-Lingual Software Projects
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2020
Year: 2020

Software traceability establishes associations between diverse software artifacts such as requirements, design, code, and test cases. Due to the non-trivial costs of manually creating and maintaining links, many researchers have proposed automated approaches based on information retrieval techniques. However, many globally distributed software projects produce software artifacts written in two or more languages. The use of intermingled languages reduces the efficacy of automated tracing solutions. In this paper, we first analyze and discuss patterns of intermingled language use across multiple projects, and then evaluate several different tracing algorithms including the Vector Space Model (VSM), Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), and various models that combine mono- and cross-lingual word embeddings with the Generative Vector Space Model (GVSM). Based on an analysis of 14 Chinese-English projects, our results show that best performance is achieved using mono-lingual word embeddings integrated into GVSM with machine translation as a preprocessing step.
Bucking the Trend: An Agentive Perspective of Managerial Influence on Blogs Attractiveness
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2020
Year: 2020

Blog management is central to the digitalization of work. However, existing theories tend to focus on environmental influence rather than managerial control of a blogs attractiveness at a microlevel. This study provides an agentive account of the adaptive behaviours exerted by the bloggers through the ways they use contents of their blogs to locate and harness their structural network positions of a blogosphere. We collated individual characteristics of 165 bloggers who blogged about economics, and then analysed the ways they maintained the contents of their blogs. We used network analysis and monomial logistic regression to test our model predictions. Our findings show that in contrast to less attractive blogs, bloggers who are mindful of their peers contents as a means of maintaining network positions attract a significantly higher level of traffic to their blogs. This agentive perspective offers practical insights into how nodal preferences can be reversed in blog management. We conclude the paper by discussing contributions to theory and future research.
Algebraic models of simple type theories: a polynomial approach
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2020
Year: 2020

We develop algebraic models of simple type theories, laying out a framework that extends universal algebra to incorporate both algebraic sorting and variable binding. Examples of simple type theories include the unityped and simply-typed $λ$-calculi, the computational $λ$-calculus, and predicate logic. Simple type theories are given models in presheaf categories, with structure specified by algebras of polynomial endofunctors that correspond to natural deduction rules. Initial models, which we construct, abstractly describe the syntax of simple type theories. Taking substitution structure into consideration, we further provide sound and complete semantics in structured cartesian multicategories. This development generalises Lambek's correspondence between the simply-typed $λ$-calculus and cartesian-closed categories, to arbitrary simple type theories.
Data Science: Challenges and Directions
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

While data science has emerged as a contentious new scientific field, enormous debates and discussions have been made on it why we need data science and what makes it as a science. In reviewing hundreds of pieces of literature which include data science in their titles, we find that the majority of the discussions essentially concern statistics, data mining, machine learning, big data, or broadly data analytics, and only a limited number of new data-driven challenges and directions have been explored. In this paper, we explore the intrinsic challenges and directions inspired by comprehensively exploring the complexities and intelligence embedded in data science problems. We focus on the research and innovation challenges inspired by the nature of data science problems as complex systems, and the methodologies for handling such systems.
Self-Supervised Learning of a Biologically-Inspired Visual Texture Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

We develop a model for representing visual texture in a low-dimensional feature space, along with a novel self-supervised learning objective that is used to train it on an unlabeled database of texture images. Inspired by the architecture of primate visual cortex, the model uses a first stage of oriented linear filters (corresponding to cortical area V1), consisting of both rectified units (simple cells) and pooled phase-invariant units (complex cells). These responses are processed by a second stage (analogous to cortical area V2) consisting of convolutional filters followed by half-wave rectification and pooling to generate V2 'complex cell' responses. The second stage filters are trained on a set of unlabeled homogeneous texture images, using a novel contrastive objective that maximizes the distance between the distribution of V2 responses to individual images and the distribution of responses across all images. When evaluated on texture classification, the trained model achieves substantially greater data-efficiency than a variety of deep hierarchical model architectures. Moreover, we show that the learned model exhibits stronger representational similarity to texture responses of neural populations recorded in primate V2 than pre-trained deep CNNs.
Data-driven Regularization via Racecar Training for Generalizing Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

We propose a novel training approach for improving the generalization in neural networks. We show that in contrast to regular constraints for orthogonality, our approach represents a {\em data-dependent} orthogonality constraint, and is closely related to singular value decompositions of the weight matrices. We also show how our formulation is easy to realize in practical network architectures via a reverse pass, which aims for reconstructing the full sequence of internal states of the network. Despite being a surprisingly simple change, we demonstrate that this forward-backward training approach, which we refer to as {\em racecar} training, leads to significantly more generic features being extracted from a given data set. Networks trained with our approach show more balanced mutual information between input and output throughout all layers, yield improved explainability and, exhibit improved performance for a variety of tasks and task transfers.
Twitter and Census Data Analytics to Explore Socioeconomic Factors for Post-COVID-19 Reopening Sentiment
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2020
Year: 2020

Investigating and classifying sentiments of social media users towards an item, situation, and system are very popular among the researchers. However, they rarely discuss the underlying socioeconomic factor associations for such sentiments. This study attempts to explore the factors associated with positive and negative sentiments of the people about reopening the economy, in the United States (US) amidst the COVID-19 global crisis. It takes into consideration the situational uncertainties (i.e., changes in work and travel pattern due to lockdown policies), economic downturn and associated trauma, and emotional factors such as depression. To understand the sentiment of the people about the reopening economy, Twitter data was collected, representing the 51 states including Washington DC of the US. State-wide socioeconomic characteristics of the people, built environment data, and the number of COVID-19 related cases were collected and integrated with Twitter data to perform the analysis. A binary logit model was used to identify the factors that influence people toward a positive or negative sentiment. The results from the logit model demonstrate that family households, people with low education levels, people in the labor force, low-income people, and people with higher house rent are more interested in reopening the economy. In contrast, households with a high number of members and high income are less interested to reopen the economy. The model can correctly classify 56.18% of the sentiments. The Pearson chi2 test indicates that overall this model has high goodness-of-fit. This study provides a clear indication to the policymakers where to allocate resources and what policy options they can undertake to improve the socioeconomic situations of the people and mitigate the impacts of pandemics in the current situation and as well as in the future.
SParSH-AMG: A library for hybrid CPU-GPU algebraic multigrid and preconditioned iterative methods
Venue: arXiv cs.MS 2020
Year: 2020

Hybrid CPU-GPU algorithms for Algebraic Multigrid methods (AMG) to efficiently utilize both CPU and GPU resources are presented. In particular, hybrid AMG framework focusing on minimal utilization of GPU memory with performance on par with GPU-only implementations is developed. The hybrid AMG framework can be tuned to operate at a significantly lower GPU-memory, consequently, enables to solve large algebraic systems. Combining the hybrid AMG framework as a preconditioner with Krylov Subspace solvers like Conjugate Gradient, BiCG methods provides a solver stack to solve a large class of problems. The performance of the proposed hybrid AMG framework is analysed for an array of matrices with different properties and size. Further, the performance of CPU-GPU algorithms are compared with the GPU-only implementations to illustrate the significantly lower memory requirements.
Continuous-Time Multi-Armed Bandits with Controlled Restarts
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Time-constrained decision processes have been ubiquitous in many fundamental applications in physics, biology and computer science. Recently, restart strategies have gained significant attention for boosting the efficiency of time-constrained processes by expediting the completion times. In this work, we investigate the bandit problem with controlled restarts for time-constrained decision processes, and develop provably good learning algorithms. In particular, we consider a bandit setting where each decision takes a random completion time, and yields a random and correlated reward at the end, with unknown values at the time of decision. The goal of the decision-maker is to maximize the expected total reward subject to a time constraint $τ$. As an additional control, we allow the decision-maker to interrupt an ongoing task and forgo its reward for a potentially more rewarding alternative. For this problem, we develop efficient online learning algorithms with $O(\log(τ))$ and $O(\sqrt{τ\log(τ)})$ regret in a finite and continuous action space of restart strategies, respectively. We demonstrate an applicability of our algorithm by using it to boost the performance of SAT solvers.
Graph Neural Networks Including Sparse Interpretability
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are versatile, powerful machine learning methods that enable graph structure and feature representation learning, and have applications across many domains. For applications critically requiring interpretation, attention-based GNNs have been leveraged. However, these approaches either rely on specific model architectures or lack a joint consideration of graph structure and node features in their interpretation. Here we present a model-agnostic framework for interpreting important graph structure and node features, Graph neural networks Including SparSe inTerpretability (GISST). With any GNN model, GISST combines an attention mechanism and sparsity regularization to yield an important subgraph and node feature subset related to any graph-based task. Through a single self-attention layer, a GISST model learns an importance probability for each node feature and edge in the input graph. By including these importance probabilities in the model loss function, the probabilities are optimized end-to-end and tied to the task-specific performance. Furthermore, GISST sparsifies these importance probabilities with entropy and L1 regularization to reduce noise in the input graph topology and node features. Our GISST models achieve superior node feature and edge explanation precision in synthetic datasets, as compared to alternative interpretation approaches. Moreover, our GISST models are able to identify important graph structure in real-world datasets. We demonstrate in theory that edge feature importance and multiple edge types can be considered by incorporating them into the GISST edge probability computation. By jointly accounting for topology, node features, and edge features, GISST inherently provides simple and relevant interpretations for any GNN models and tasks.