OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Navigating Surveillance Capitalism: A Critical Analysis through philosophical perspectives in Computer Ethics
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

Surveillance capitalism is a concept that describes the practice of collecting and analyzing massive amounts of user data for the purpose of targeted advertising and other forms of monetization. The phenomenon has become increasingly prevalent in recent years, with tech companies like Google and Facebook using users' personal information to deliver personalized content and advertisements. Another example of surveillance capitalism is the use of military technology to collect and analyze data for national security purposes. In this context, surveillance capitalism involves the use of technologies like facial recognition and social media monitoring to gather information on individuals and groups deemed to be potential threats to national security. This information is then used to inform military operations and decision-making. This paper wants to analyze in a critical way the phenomenon of surveillance capitalism, proposed under two different ethical framework perspectives. Utilitarianism, a consequentialist ethical theory that judges actions based on their ability to bring about the greatest amount of happiness or pleasure for the greatest number of people, and Kantian deontology, a non-consequentialist ethical theory that emphasizes the importance of individual autonomy, freedom, and dignity. On one side, the utilitarian framework enlightens how Information Technology (IT) and the features provided offer, at first sight, all the positive perceptions to the majority of people, happiness, entertainment, and pleasure. On the other side, the Kantian deontology framework mostly focuses on the aspect of freedom and free will of the individual. This topic is particularly related to the concession of permissions to access data in change of services and the degree of influence that manipulation performed by surveillance capitalism can generate.
Towards Zero-Shot Frame Semantic Parsing with Task Agnostic Ontologies and Simple Labels
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Frame semantic parsing is an important component of task-oriented dialogue systems. Current models rely on a significant amount training data to successfully identify the intent and slots in the user's input utterance. This creates a significant barrier for adding new domains to virtual assistant capabilities, as creation of this data requires highly specialized NLP expertise. In this work we propose OpenFSP, a framework that allows for easy creation of new domains from a handful of simple labels that can be generated without specific NLP knowledge. Our approach relies on creating a small, but expressive, set of domain agnostic slot types that enables easy annotation of new domains. Given such annotation, a matching algorithm relying on sentence encoders predicts the intent and slots for domains defined by end-users. Extensive experiments on the TopV2 dataset shows that our model outperforms strong baselines in this simple labels setting.
Persistent Homology Meets Object Unity: Object Recognition in Clutter
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Recognition of occluded objects in unseen and unstructured indoor environments is a challenging problem for mobile robots. To address this challenge, we propose a new descriptor, TOPS, for point clouds generated from depth images and an accompanying recognition framework, THOR, inspired by human reasoning. The descriptor employs a novel slicing-based approach to compute topological features from filtrations of simplicial complexes using persistent homology, and facilitates reasoning-based recognition using object unity. Apart from a benchmark dataset, we report performance on a new dataset, the UW Indoor Scenes (UW-IS) Occluded dataset, curated using commodity hardware to reflect real-world scenarios with different environmental conditions and degrees of object occlusion. THOR outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both the datasets and achieves substantially higher recognition accuracy for all the scenarios of the UW-IS Occluded dataset. Therefore, THOR, is a promising step toward robust recognition in low-cost robots, meant for everyday use in indoor settings.
Adapting Transformer Language Models for Predictive Typing in Brain-Computer Interfaces
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Brain-computer interfaces (BCI) are an important mode of alternative and augmentative communication for many people. Unlike keyboards, many BCI systems do not display even the 26 letters of English at one time, let alone all the symbols in more complex systems. Using language models to make character-level predictions, therefore, can greatly speed up BCI typing (Ghosh and Kristensson, 2017). While most existing BCI systems employ character n-gram models or no LM at all, this paper adapts several wordpiece-level Transformer LMs to make character predictions and evaluates them on typing tasks. GPT-2 fares best on clean text, but different LMs react differently to noisy histories. We further analyze the effect of character positions in a word and context lengths.
Specification and verification of a linear-time logic for graph transformation
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2023
Year: 2023

We present a first-order linear-time temporal logic for reasoning about the evolution of directed graphs. Its semantics is based on the counterpart paradigm, thus allowing our logic to represent the creation, duplication, merging, and deletion of elements of a graph as well as how its topology changes over time. We then introduce a positive normal forms presentation, thus simplifying the actual process of verification. We provide the syntax and semantics of our logics with a computer-assisted formalisation using the proof assistant Agda, and we round up the paper by highlighting the crucial aspects of our formalisation and the practical use of quantified temporal logics in a constructive proof assistant.
Spatiotemporal Transformer for Stock Movement Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Financial markets are an intriguing place that offer investors the potential to gain large profits if timed correctly. Unfortunately, the dynamic, non-linear nature of financial markets makes it extremely hard to predict future price movements. Within the US stock exchange, there are a countless number of factors that play a role in the price of a company's stock, including but not limited to financial statements, social and news sentiment, overall market sentiment, political happenings and trading psychology. Correlating these factors is virtually impossible for a human. Therefore, we propose STST, a novel approach using a Spatiotemporal Transformer-LSTM model for stock movement prediction. Our model obtains accuracies of 63.707 and 56.879 percent against the ACL18 and KDD17 datasets, respectively. In addition, our model was used in simulation to determine its real-life applicability. It obtained a minimum of 10.41% higher profit than the S&P500 stock index, with a minimum annualized return of 31.24%.
Large Language Models in Sport Science & Medicine: Opportunities, Risks and Considerations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

This paper explores the potential opportunities, risks, and challenges associated with the use of large language models (LLMs) in sports science and medicine. LLMs are large neural networks with transformer style architectures trained on vast amounts of textual data, and typically refined with human feedback. LLMs can perform a large range of natural language processing tasks. In sports science and medicine, LLMs have the potential to support and augment the knowledge of sports medicine practitioners, make recommendations for personalised training programs, and potentially distribute high-quality information to practitioners in developing countries. However, there are also potential risks associated with the use and development of LLMs, including biases in the dataset used to create the model, the risk of exposing confidential data, the risk of generating harmful output, and the need to align these models with human preferences through feedback. Further research is needed to fully understand the potential applications of LLMs in sports science and medicine and to ensure that their use is ethical and beneficial to athletes, clients, patients, practitioners, and the general public.
CHAI-DT: A Framework for Prompting Conversational Generative AI Agents to Actively Participate in Co-Creation
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

This paper explores the potential for utilizing generative AI models in group-focused co-creative frameworks to enhance problem solving and ideation in business innovation and co-creation contexts, and proposes a novel prompting technique for conversational generative AI agents which employ methods inspired by traditional 'human-to-human' facilitation and instruction to enable active contribution to Design Thinking, a co-creative framework. Through experiments using this prompting technique, we gather evidence that conversational generative transformers (i.e. ChatGPT) have the capability to contribute context-specific, useful, and creative input into Design Thinking activities. We also discuss the potential benefits, limitations, and risks associated with using generative AI models in co-creative ideation and provide recommendations for future research.
Software-based Automatic Differentiation is Flawed
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Various software efforts embrace the idea that object oriented programming enables a convenient implementation of the chain rule, facilitating so-called automatic differentiation via backpropagation. Such frameworks have no mechanism for simplifying the expressions (obtained via the chain rule) before evaluating them. As we illustrate below, the resulting errors tend to be unbounded.
Mosaic: Model-based Safety Analysis Framework for AI-enabled Cyber-Physical Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are now widely deployed in many industrial domains, e.g., manufacturing systems and autonomous vehicles. To further enhance the capability and applicability of CPSs, there comes a recent trend from both academia and industry to utilize learning-based AI controllers for the system control process, resulting in an emerging class of AI-enabled cyber-physical systems (AI-CPSs). Although such AI-CPSs could achieve obvious performance enhancement from the lens of some key industrial requirement indicators, due to the random exploration nature and lack of systematic explanations for their behavior, such AI-based techniques also bring uncertainties and safety risks to the controlled system, posing an urgent need for effective safety analysis techniques for AI-CPSs. Hence in this work, we propose Mosaic, a model-based safety analysis framework for AI-CPSs. Mosaic first constructs a Markov decision process (MDP) model as an abstract model of the AI-CPS, which tries to characterize the behaviors of the original AI-CPS. Then, based on the derived abstract model, safety analysis is designed in two aspects: online safety monitoring and offline model-guided falsification. The usefulness of Mosaic is evaluated on diverse and representative industry-level AI-CPSs, the results of which demonstrate that Mosaic is effective in providing safety monitoring to AI-CPSs and enables to outperform the state-of-the-art falsification techniques, providing the basis for advanced safety analysis of AI-CPSs.
Beyond Rule-based Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction for Process Model Generation from Natural Language Text
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Process-aware information systems offer extensive advantages to companies, facilitating planning, operations, and optimization of day-to-day business activities. However, the time-consuming but required step of designing formal business process models often hampers the potential of these systems. To overcome this challenge, automated generation of business process models from natural language text has emerged as a promising approach to expedite this step. Generally two crucial subtasks have to be solved: extracting process-relevant information from natural language and creating the actual model. Approaches towards the first subtask are rule based methods, highly optimized for specific domains, but hard to adapt to related applications. To solve this issue, we present an extension to an existing pipeline, to make it entirely data driven. We demonstrate the competitiveness of our improved pipeline, which not only eliminates the substantial overhead associated with feature engineering and rule definition, but also enables adaptation to different datasets, entity and relation types, and new domains. Additionally, the largest available dataset (PET) for the first subtask, contains no information about linguistic references between mentions of entities in the process description. Yet, the resolution of these mentions into a single visual element is essential for high quality process models. We propose an extension to the PET dataset that incorporates information about linguistic references and a corresponding method for resolving them. Finally, we provide a detailed analysis of the inherent challenges in the dataset at hand.
NER-to-MRC: Named-Entity Recognition Completely Solving as Machine Reading Comprehension
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Named-entity recognition (NER) detects texts with predefined semantic labels and is an essential building block for natural language processing (NLP). Notably, recent NER research focuses on utilizing massive extra data, including pre-training corpora and incorporating search engines. However, these methods suffer from high costs associated with data collection and pre-training, and additional training process of the retrieved data from search engines. To address the above challenges, we completely frame NER as a machine reading comprehension (MRC) problem, called NER-to-MRC, by leveraging MRC with its ability to exploit existing data efficiently. Several prior works have been dedicated to employing MRC-based solutions for tackling the NER problem, several challenges persist: i) the reliance on manually designed prompts; ii) the limited MRC approaches to data reconstruction, which fails to achieve performance on par with methods utilizing extensive additional data. Thus, our NER-to-MRC conversion consists of two components: i) transform the NER task into a form suitable for the model to solve with MRC in a efficient manner; ii) apply the MRC reasoning strategy to the model. We experiment on 6 benchmark datasets from three domains and achieve state-of-the-art performance without external data, up to 11.24% improvement on the WNUT-16 dataset.
Minimum-Membership Geometric Set Cover, Revisited
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2023
Year: 2023

We revisit a natural variant of geometric set cover, called minimum-membership geometric set cover (MMGSC). In this problem, the input consists of a set $S$ of points and a set $\mathcal{R}$ of geometric objects, and the goal is to find a subset $\mathcal{R}^*\subseteq\mathcal{R}$ to cover all points in $S$ such that the \textit{membership} of $S$ with respect to $\mathcal{R}^*$, denoted by $\mathsf{memb}(S,\mathcal{R}^*)$, is minimized, where $\mathsf{memb}(S,\mathcal{R}^*)=\max_{p\in S}|\{R\in\mathcal{R}^*: p\in R\}|$. We achieve the following two main results. * We give the first polynomial-time constant-approximation algorithm for MMGSC with unit squares. This answers a question left open since the work of Erlebach and Leeuwen [SODA'08], who gave a constant-approximation algorithm with running time $n^{O(\mathsf{opt})}$ where $\mathsf{opt}$ is the optimum of the problem (i.e., the minimum membership). * We give the first polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS) for MMGSC with halfplanes. Prior to this work, it was even unknown whether the problem can be approximated with a factor of $o(\log n)$ in polynomial time, while it is well-known that the minimum-size set cover problem with halfplanes can be solved in polynomial time. We also consider a problem closely related to MMGSC, called minimum-ply geometric set cover (MPGSC), in which the goal is to find $\mathcal{R}^*\subseteq\mathcal{R}$ to cover $S$ such that the ply of $\mathcal{R}^*$ is minimized, where the ply is defined as the maximum number of objects in $\mathcal{R}^*$ which have a nonempty common intersection. Very recently, Durocher et al. gave the first constant-approximation algorithm for MPGSC with unit squares which runs in $O(n^{12})$ time. We give a significantly simpler constant-approximation algorithm with near-linear running time.
Decentralised Semi-supervised Onboard Learning for Scene Classification in Low-Earth Orbit
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Onboard machine learning on the latest satellite hardware offers the potential for significant savings in communication and operational costs. We showcase the training of a machine learning model on a satellite constellation for scene classification using semi-supervised learning while accounting for operational constraints such as temperature and limited power budgets based on satellite processor benchmarks of the neural network. We evaluate mission scenarios employing both decentralised and federated learning approaches. All scenarios achieve convergence to high accuracy (around 91% on EuroSAT RGB dataset) within a one-day mission timeframe.
Transformer-Based Hierarchical Clustering for Brain Network Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Brain networks, graphical models such as those constructed from MRI, have been widely used in pathological prediction and analysis of brain functions. Within the complex brain system, differences in neuronal connection strengths parcellate the brain into various functional modules (network communities), which are critical for brain analysis. However, identifying such communities within the brain has been a nontrivial issue due to the complexity of neuronal interactions. In this work, we propose a novel interpretable transformer-based model for joint hierarchical cluster identification and brain network classification. Extensive experimental results on real-world brain network datasets show that with the help of hierarchical clustering, the model achieves increased accuracy and reduced runtime complexity while providing plausible insight into the functional organization of brain regions. The implementation is available at https://github.com/DDVD233/THC.
Bypassing antivirus detection: old-school malware, new tricks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Being on a mushrooming spree since at least 2013, malware can take a large toll on any system. In a perpetual cat-and-mouse chase with defenders, malware writers constantly conjure new methods to hide their code so as to evade detection by security products. In this context, focusing on the MS Windows platform, this work contributes a comprehensive empirical evaluation regarding the detection capacity of popular, off-the-shelf antivirus and endpoint detection and response engines when facing legacy malware obfuscated via more or less uncommon but publicly known methods. Our experiments exploit a blend of seven traditional AV evasion techniques in 16 executables built in C++, Go, and Rust. Furthermore, we conduct an incipient study regarding the ability of the ChatGPT chatbot in assisting threat actors to produce ready-to-use malware. The derived results in terms of detection rate are highly unexpected: approximately half of the 12 tested AV engines were able to detect less than half of the malware variants, four AVs exactly half of the variants, while only two of the rest detected all but one of the variants.
Score: A Rule Engine for the Scone Knowledge Base System
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

We present Score, a rule engine designed and implemented for the Scone knowledge base system. Scone is a knowledge base system designed for storing and manipulating rich representations of general knowledge in symbolic form. It represents knowledge in the form of nodes and links in a network structure, and it can perform basic inference about the relationships between different elements efficiently. On its own, Scone acts as a sort of "smart memory" that can interface with other software systems. One area of improvement for Scone is how useful it can be in supplying knowledge to an intelligent agent that can use the knowledge to perform actions and update the knowledge base with its observations. We augment the Scone system with a production rule engine that automatically performs simple inference based on existing and newly-added structures in Scone's knowledge base, potentially improving the capabilities of any planning systems built on top of Scone. Production rule systems consist of "if-then" production rules that try to match their predicates to existing knowledge and fire their actions when their predicates are satisfied. We propose two kinds of production rules, if-added and if-needed rules, that differ in how they are checked and fired to cover multiple use cases. We then implement methods to efficiently check and fire these rules in a large knowledge base. The new rule engine is not meant to be a complex stand-alone planner, so we discuss how it fits into the context of Scone and future work on planning systems.
Shall We Trust All Relational Tuples by Open Information Extraction? A Study on Speculation Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Open Information Extraction (OIE) aims to extract factual relational tuples from open-domain sentences. Downstream tasks use the extracted OIE tuples as facts, without examining the certainty of these facts. However, uncertainty/speculation is a common linguistic phenomenon. Existing studies on speculation detection are defined at sentence level, but even if a sentence is determined to be speculative, not all tuples extracted from it may be speculative. In this paper, we propose to study speculations in OIE and aim to determine whether an extracted tuple is speculative. We formally define the research problem of tuple-level speculation detection and conduct a detailed data analysis on the LSOIE dataset which contains labels for speculative tuples. Lastly, we propose a baseline model OIE-Spec for this new research task.
Fast Blind Recovery of Linear Block Codes over Noisy Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

This paper addresses the blind recovery of the parity check matrix of an (n,k) linear block code over noisy channels by proposing a fast recovery scheme consisting of 3 parts. Firstly, this scheme performs initial error position detection among the received codewords and selects the desirable codewords. Then, this scheme conducts Gaussian elimination (GE) on a k-by-k full-rank matrix and uses a threshold and the reliability associated to verify the recovered dual words, aiming to improve the reliability of recovery. Finally, it performs decoding on the received codewords with partially recovered dual words. These three parts can be combined into different schemes for different noise level scenarios. The GEV that combines Gaussian elimination and verification has a significantly lower recovery failure probability and a much lower computational complexity than an existing Canteaut-Chabaud-based algorithm, which relies on GE on n-by-n full-rank matrices. The decoding-aided recovery (DAR) and error-detection-&-codeword-selection-&-decoding-aided recovery (EDCSDAR) schemes can improve the code recovery performance over GEV for high noise level scenarios, and their computational complexities remain much lower than the Canteaut-Chabaud-based algorithm.