OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Direct Construction of Cross Z-Complementary Sets with Flexible Lengths and Large Zero Correlation Zone
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

This letter proposes a direct construction for cross Z-complementary sets (CZCSs) with flexible lengths and a large zero correlation zone (ZCZ). CZCS is an extension of the cross Z-complementary pair (CZCP). The maximum possible ZCZ width of a CZCP is half of its sequence length. In this letter, for the first time, a generalized Boolean function based construction of CZCSs with a large number of constituent sequences and a ZCZ ratio of $2/3$ is presented. For integers $m$ and $δ$, the proposed construction produces CZCS with length expressed as $2^{m-1}+2^δ$ ($0 \leq δ<m-1,m\geq 4$), where both odd and even lengths CZCS can be obtained. Additionally, the constructed CZCS also feature a complementary set of the same length. Finally, the proposed construction is compared with the existing works.
N-LIMB: Neural Limb Optimization for Efficient Morphological Design
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

A robot's ability to complete a task is heavily dependent on its physical design. However, identifying an optimal physical design and its corresponding control policy is inherently challenging. The freedom to choose the number of links, their type, and how they are connected results in a combinatorial design space, and the evaluation of any design in that space requires deriving its optimal controller. In this work, we present N-LIMB, an efficient approach to optimizing the design and control of a robot over large sets of morphologies. Central to our framework is a universal, design-conditioned control policy capable of controlling a diverse sets of designs. This policy greatly improves the sample efficiency of our approach by allowing the transfer of experience across designs and reducing the cost to evaluate new designs. We train this policy to maximize expected return over a distribution of designs, which is simultaneously updated towards higher performing designs under the universal policy. In this way, our approach converges towards a design distribution peaked around high-performing designs and a controller that is effectively fine-tuned for those designs. We demonstrate the potential of our approach on a series of locomotion tasks across varying terrains and show the discovery novel and high-performing design-control pairs.
Towards a Sentiment-Aware Conversational Agent
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we propose an end-to-end sentiment-aware conversational agent based on two models: a reply sentiment prediction model, which leverages the context of the dialogue to predict an appropriate sentiment for the agent to express in its reply; and a text generation model, which is conditioned on the predicted sentiment and the context of the dialogue, to produce a reply that is both context and sentiment appropriate. Additionally, we propose to use a sentiment classification model to evaluate the sentiment expressed by the agent during the development of the model. This allows us to evaluate the agent in an automatic way. Both automatic and human evaluation results show that explicitly guiding the text generation model with a pre-defined set of sentences leads to clear improvements, both regarding the expressed sentiment and the quality of the generated text.
Privacy Against Inference Attacks in Vertical Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Vertical federated learning is considered, where an active party, having access to true class labels, wishes to build a classification model by utilizing more features from a passive party, which has no access to the labels, to improve the model accuracy. In the prediction phase, with logistic regression as the classification model, several inference attack techniques are proposed that the adversary, i.e., the active party, can employ to reconstruct the passive party's features, regarded as sensitive information. These attacks, which are mainly based on a classical notion of the center of a set, i.e., the Chebyshev center, are shown to be superior to those proposed in the literature. Moreover, several theoretical performance guarantees are provided for the aforementioned attacks. Subsequently, we consider the minimum amount of information that the adversary needs to fully reconstruct the passive party's features. In particular, it is shown that when the passive party holds one feature, and the adversary is only aware of the signs of the parameters involved, it can perfectly reconstruct that feature when the number of predictions is large enough. Next, as a defense mechanism, a privacy-preserving scheme is proposed that worsen the adversary's reconstruction attacks, while preserving the full benefits that VFL brings to the active party. Finally, experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed attacks and the privacy-preserving scheme.
On The Convexity Of The Effective Reproduction Number
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2022
Year: 2022

In this study we analyze the evolution of the effective reproduction number, $R$, through a SIR spreading process in heterogeneous networks; Characterizing its decay process allows to analytically study the effects of countermeasures on the progress of the virus under heterogeneity, and to optimize their policies. A striking result of recent studies has shown that heterogeneity across nodes/individuals (or, super-spreading) may have a drastic effect on the spreading process progression, which may cause a non-linear decrease of $R$ in the number of infected individuals. We account for heterogeneity and analyze the stochastic progression of the spreading process. We show that the decrease of $R$ is, in fact, convex in the number of infected individuals, where this convexity stems from heterogeneity. The analysis is based on establishing stochastic monotonic relations between the susceptible populations in varying times of the spread. We demonstrate that the convex behavior of the effective reproduction number affects the performance of countermeasures used to fight a spread of a virus. The results are applicable to the control of virus and malware spreading in computer networks as well. We examine numerically the sensitivity of the Herd Immunity Threshold (HIT) to the heterogeneity level and to the chosen policy.
Federated Graph Machine Learning: A Survey of Concepts, Techniques, and Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Graph machine learning has gained great attention in both academia and industry recently. Most of the graph machine learning models, such as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), are trained over massive graph data. However, in many real-world scenarios, such as hospitalization prediction in healthcare systems, the graph data is usually stored at multiple data owners and cannot be directly accessed by any other parties due to privacy concerns and regulation restrictions. Federated Graph Machine Learning (FGML) is a promising solution to tackle this challenge by training graph machine learning models in a federated manner. In this survey, we conduct a comprehensive review of the literature in FGML. Specifically, we first provide a new taxonomy to divide the existing problems in FGML into two settings, namely, FL with structured data and structured FL. Then, we review the mainstream techniques in each setting and elaborate on how they address the challenges under FGML. In addition, we summarize the real-world applications of FGML from different domains and introduce open graph datasets and platforms adopted in FGML. Finally, we present several limitations in the existing studies with promising research directions in this field.
Visual Perturbation-aware Collaborative Learning for Overcoming the Language Prior Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Several studies have recently pointed that existing Visual Question Answering (VQA) models heavily suffer from the language prior problem, which refers to capturing superficial statistical correlations between the question type and the answer whereas ignoring the image contents. Numerous efforts have been dedicated to strengthen the image dependency by creating the delicate models or introducing the extra visual annotations. However, these methods cannot sufficiently explore how the visual cues explicitly affect the learned answer representation, which is vital for language reliance alleviation. Moreover, they generally emphasize the class-level discrimination of the learned answer representation, which overlooks the more fine-grained instance-level patterns and demands further optimization. In this paper, we propose a novel collaborative learning scheme from the viewpoint of visual perturbation calibration, which can better investigate the fine-grained visual effects and mitigate the language prior problem by learning the instance-level characteristics. Specifically, we devise a visual controller to construct two sorts of curated images with different perturbation extents, based on which the collaborative learning of intra-instance invariance and inter-instance discrimination is implemented by two well-designed discriminators. Besides, we implement the information bottleneck modulator on latent space for further bias alleviation and representation calibration. We impose our visual perturbation-aware framework to three orthodox baselines and the experimental results on two diagnostic VQA-CP benchmark datasets evidently demonstrate its effectiveness. In addition, we also justify its robustness on the balanced VQA benchmark.
FAB: An FPGA-based Accelerator for Bootstrappable Fully Homomorphic Encryption
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

FHE offers protection to private data on third-party cloud servers by allowing computations on the data in encrypted form. However, to support general-purpose encrypted computations, all existing FHE schemes require an expensive operation known as bootstrapping. Unfortunately, the computation cost and the memory bandwidth required for bootstrapping add significant overhead to FHE-based computations, limiting the practical use of FHE. In this work, we propose FAB, an FPGA-based accelerator for bootstrappable FHE. Prior FPGA-based FHE accelerators have proposed hardware acceleration of basic FHE primitives for impractical parameter sets without support for bootstrapping. FAB, for the first time ever, accelerates bootstrapping (along with basic FHE primitives) on an FPGA for a secure and practical parameter set. The key contribution of our work is to architect a balanced FAB design, which is not memory bound. To this end, we leverage recent algorithms for bootstrapping while being cognizant of the compute and memory constraints of our FPGA. We use a minimal number of functional units for computing, operate at a low frequency, leverage high data rates to and from main memory, utilize the limited on-chip memory effectively, and perform operation scheduling carefully. For bootstrapping a fully-packed ciphertext, while operating at 300 MHz, FAB outperforms existing state-of-the-art CPU and GPU implementations by 213x and 1.5x respectively. Our target FHE application is training a logistic regression model over encrypted data. For logistic regression model training scaled to 8 FPGAs on the cloud, FAB outperforms a CPU and GPU by 456x and 6.5x and provides competitive performance when compared to the state-of-the-art ASIC design at a fraction of the cost.
Sub-Aperture Feature Adaptation in Single Image Super-resolution Model for Light Field Imaging
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

With the availability of commercial Light Field (LF) cameras, LF imaging has emerged as an up and coming technology in computational photography. However, the spatial resolution is significantly constrained in commercial microlens based LF cameras because of the inherent multiplexing of spatial and angular information. Therefore, it becomes the main bottleneck for other applications of light field cameras. This paper proposes an adaptation module in a pretrained Single Image Super Resolution (SISR) network to leverage the powerful SISR model instead of using highly engineered light field imaging domain specific Super Resolution models. The adaption module consists of a Sub aperture Shift block and a fusion block. It is an adaptation in the SISR network to further exploit the spatial and angular information in LF images to improve the super resolution performance. Experimental validation shows that the proposed method outperforms existing light field super resolution algorithms. It also achieves PSNR gains of more than 1 dB across all the datasets as compared to the same pretrained SISR models for scale factor 2, and PSNR gains 0.6 to 1 dB for scale factor 4.
Minimax Rates for Robust Community Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

In this work, we study the problem of community detection in the stochastic block model with adversarial node corruptions. Our main result is an efficient algorithm that can tolerate an $ε$-fraction of corruptions and achieves error $O(ε) + e^{-\frac{C}{2} (1 \pm o(1))}$ where $C = (\sqrt{a} - \sqrt{b})^2$ is the signal-to-noise ratio and $a/n$ and $b/n$ are the inter-community and intra-community connection probabilities respectively. These bounds essentially match the minimax rates for the SBM without corruptions. We also give robust algorithms for $\mathbb{Z}_2$-synchronization. At the heart of our algorithm is a new semidefinite program that uses global information to robustly boost the accuracy of a rough clustering. Moreover, we show that our algorithms are doubly-robust in the sense that they work in an even more challenging noise model that mixes adversarial corruptions with unbounded monotone changes, from the semi-random model.
Deep Forest with Hashing Screening and Window Screening
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

As a novel deep learning model, gcForest has been widely used in various applications. However, the current multi-grained scanning of gcForest produces many redundant feature vectors, and this increases the time cost of the model. To screen out redundant feature vectors, we introduce a hashing screening mechanism for multi-grained scanning and propose a model called HW-Forest which adopts two strategies, hashing screening and window screening. HW-Forest employs perceptual hashing algorithm to calculate the similarity between feature vectors in hashing screening strategy, which is used to remove the redundant feature vectors produced by multi-grained scanning and can significantly decrease the time cost and memory consumption. Furthermore, we adopt a self-adaptive instance screening strategy to improve the performance of our approach, called window screening, which can achieve higher accuracy without hyperparameter tuning on different datasets. Our experimental results show that HW-Forest has higher accuracy than other models, and the time cost is also reduced.
GNN Transformation Framework for Improving Efficiency and Scalability
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

We propose a framework that automatically transforms non-scalable GNNs into precomputation-based GNNs which are efficient and scalable for large-scale graphs. The advantages of our framework are two-fold; 1) it transforms various non-scalable GNNs to scale well to large-scale graphs by separating local feature aggregation from weight learning in their graph convolution, 2) it efficiently executes precomputation on GPU for large-scale graphs by decomposing their edges into small disjoint and balanced sets. Through extensive experiments with large-scale graphs, we demonstrate that the transformed GNNs run faster in training time than existing GNNs while achieving competitive accuracy to the state-of-the-art GNNs. Consequently, our transformation framework provides simple and efficient baselines for future research on scalable GNNs.
RayPC: Interactive Ray Tracing Meets Parallel Coordinates
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2022
Year: 2022

Large-scale numerical simulations of planetary interiors require dedicated visualization algorithms that are able to efficiently extract a large amount of information in an interactive and user-friendly way. Here we present a software framework for the visualization of mantle convection data. This framework combines real-time volume rendering, pathline visualization, and parallel coordinates to explore the fluid dynamics in an interactive way and to identify correlations between various output variables.
Online Reinforcement Learning for Periodic MDP
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

We study learning in periodic Markov Decision Process(MDP), a special type of non-stationary MDP where both the state transition probabilities and reward functions vary periodically, under the average reward maximization setting. We formulate the problem as a stationary MDP by augmenting the state space with the period index, and propose a periodic upper confidence bound reinforcement learning-2 (PUCRL2) algorithm. We show that the regret of PUCRL2 varies linearly with the period and as sub-linear with the horizon length. Numerical results demonstrate the efficacy of PUCRL2.
Flowsheet synthesis through hierarchical reinforcement learning and graph neural networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Process synthesis experiences a disruptive transformation accelerated by digitization and artificial intelligence. We propose a reinforcement learning algorithm for chemical process design based on a state-of-the-art actor-critic logic. Our proposed algorithm represents chemical processes as graphs and uses graph convolutional neural networks to learn from process graphs. In particular, the graph neural networks are implemented within the agent architecture to process the states and make decisions. Moreover, we implement a hierarchical and hybrid decision-making process to generate flowsheets, where unit operations are placed iteratively as discrete decisions and corresponding design variables are selected as continuous decisions. We demonstrate the potential of our method to design economically viable flowsheets in an illustrative case study comprising equilibrium reactions, azeotropic separation, and recycles. The results show quick learning in discrete, continuous, and hybrid action spaces. Due to the flexible architecture of the proposed reinforcement learning agent, the method is predestined to include large action-state spaces and an interface to process simulators in future research.
When Virtual Reality Meets Rate Splitting Multiple Access: A Joint Communication and Computation Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

Rate Splitting Multiple Access (RSMA) has emerged as an effective interference management scheme for applications that require high data rates. Although RSMA has shown advantages in rate enhancement and spectral efficiency, it has yet not to be ready for latency-sensitive applications such as virtual reality streaming, which is an essential building block of future 6G networks. Unlike conventional High-Definition streaming applications, streaming virtual reality applications requires not only stringent latency requirements but also the computation capability of the transmitter to quickly respond to dynamic users' demands. Thus, conventional RSMA approaches usually fail to address the challenges caused by computational demands at the transmitter, let alone the dynamic nature of the virtual reality streaming applications. To overcome the aforementioned challenges, we first formulate the virtual reality streaming problem assisted by RSMA as a joint communication and computation optimization problem. A novel multicast approach is then proposed to cluster users into different groups based on a Field-of-View metric and transmit multicast streams in a hierarchical manner. After that, we propose a deep reinforcement learning approach to obtain the solution for the optimization problem. Extensive simulations show that our framework can achieve the millisecond-latency requirement, which is much lower than other baseline schemes.
PirouNet: Creating Dance through Artist-Centric Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create dance choreography with intention is still at an early stage. Methods that conditionally generate dance sequences remain limited in their ability to follow choreographer-specific creative direction, often relying on external prompts or supervised learning. In the same vein, fully annotated dance datasets are rare and labor intensive. To fill this gap and help leverage deep learning as a meaningful tool for choreographers, we propose "PirouNet", a semi-supervised conditional recurrent variational autoencoder together with a dance labeling web application. PirouNet allows dance professionals to annotate data with their own subjective creative labels and subsequently generate new bouts of choreography based on their aesthetic criteria. Thanks to the proposed semi-supervised approach, PirouNet only requires a small portion of the dataset to be labeled, typically on the order of 1%. We demonstrate PirouNet's capabilities as it generates original choreography based on the "Laban Time Effort", an established dance notion describing intention for a movement's time dynamics. We extensively evaluate PirouNet's dance creations through a series of qualitative and quantitative metrics, validating its applicability as a tool for choreographers.
Generalized weights of convolutional codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

In 1997 Rosenthal and York defined generalized Hamming weights for convolutional codes, by regarding a convolutional code as an infinite dimensional linear code endowed with the Hamming metric. In this paper, we propose a new definition of generalized weights of convolutional codes, that takes into account the underlying module structure of the code. We derive the basic properties of our generalized weights and discuss the relation with the previous definition. We establish upper bounds on the weight hierarchy of MDS and MDP codes and show that that, depending on the code parameters, some or all of the generalized weights of MDS codes are determined by the length, rank, and internal degree of the code. We also prove an anticode bound for convolutional codes and define optimal anticodes as the codes which meet the anticode bound. Finally, we classify optimal anticodes and compute their weight hierarchy.
LiPI: Lightweight Privacy-Preserving Data Aggregation in IoT
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

In the modern digital world, a user of a smart system remains surrounded with as well as observed by a number of tiny IoT devices round the clock almost everywhere. Unfortunately, the ability of these devices to sense and share various physical parameters, although play a key role in these smart systems but also causes the threat of breach of the privacy of the users. Existing solutions for privacy-preserving computation for decentralized systems either use too complex cryptographic techniques or exploit an extremely high degree of message passing and hence, are not suitable for the resource-constrained IoT devices that constitute a significant fraction of a smart system. In this work, we propose a novel lightweight strategy LiPI for Privacy-Preserving Data Aggregation in low-power IoT systems. The design of the strategy is based on decentralized and collaborative data obfuscation and does not exploit any dependency on any trusted third party. In addition, besides minimizing the communication requirements, we make appropriate use of the recent advances in Synchronous-Transmission (ST)-based protocols in our design to accomplish the goal efficiently. Extensive evaluation based on comprehensive experiments in both simulation platforms and publicly available WSN/IoT testbeds demonstrates that our strategy works up to at least 51.7% faster and consumes 50.5% lesser energy compared to the existing state-of-the-art strategies.