OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
FedorAS: Federated Architecture Search under system heterogeneity
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Federated learning (FL) has recently gained considerable attention due to its ability to learn on decentralised data while preserving client privacy. However, it also poses additional challenges related to the heterogeneity of the participating devices, both in terms of their computational capabilities and contributed data. Meanwhile, Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has been successfully used with centralised datasets, producing state-of-the-art results in constrained or unconstrained settings. However, such centralised datasets may not be always available for training. Most recent work at the intersection of NAS and FL attempts to alleviate this issue in a cross-silo federated setting, which assumes homogeneous compute environments with datacenter-grade hardware. In this paper we explore the question of whether we can design architectures of different footprints in a cross-device federated setting, where the device landscape, availability and scale are very different. To this end, we design our system, FedorAS, to discover and train promising architectures in a resource-aware manner when dealing with devices of varying capabilities holding non-IID distributed data. We present empirical evidence of its effectiveness across different settings, spanning across three different modalities (vision, speech, text), and showcase its better performance compared to state-of-the-art federated solutions, while maintaining resource efficiency.
Developing a Ranking Problem Library (RPLIB) from a data-oriented perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2022
Year: 2022

We present an improved library for the ranking problem called RPLIB. RPLIB includes the following data and features. (1) Real and artificial datasets of both pairwise data (i.e., information about the ranking of pairs of items) and feature data (i.e., a vector of features about each item to be ranked). These datasets range in size (e.g., from small $n=10$ item datasets to large datasets with hundred of items), application (e.g., from sports to economic data), and source (e.g. real versus artificially generated to have particular structures). (2) RPLIB contains code for the most common ranking algorithms such as the linear ordering optimization method and the Massey method. (3) RPLIB also has the ability for users to contribute their own data, code, and algorithms. Each RPLIB dataset has an associated .JSON model card of additional information such as the number and set of optimal rankings, the optimal objective value, and corresponding figures.
On Fuzzy Cardinal Semantic Transformations
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

The concept of fuzzy cardinal semantic transformation as a basis for creating fuzzy semantic numeration systems is introduced in this work. Both fuzziness of the initial data - cardinals of abstract entities - and fuzziness of the parameters of the cardinal semantic operators are considered. We also expressed cardinal semantic transformations for discrete fuzzy numbers and for continuous triangular fuzzy numbers. The principle of formation of the fuzzy common carry in the cardinal semantic operators with multiple inputs is formed.
ROIBIN-SZ: Fast and Science-Preserving Compression for Serial Crystallography
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

Crystallography is the leading technique to study atomic structures of proteins and produces enormous volumes of information that can place strains on the storage and data transfer capabilities of synchrotron and free-electron laser light sources. Lossy compression has been identified as a possible means to cope with the growing data volumes; however, prior approaches have not produced sufficient quality at a sufficient rate to meet scientific needs. This paper presents Region Of Interest BINning with SZ lossy compression (ROIBIN-SZ) a novel, parallel, and accelerated compression scheme that separates the dynamically selected preservation of key regions with lossy compression of background information. We perform and present an extensive evaluation of the performance and quality results made by the co-design of this compression scheme. We can achieve up to a 196x and 46.44x compression ratio on lysozyme and selenobiotinyl-streptavidin while preserving the data sufficiently to reconstruct the structure at bandwidths and scales that approach the needs of the upcoming light sources
Video Analytics in Elite Soccer: A Distributed Computing Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2022
Year: 2022

Ubiquitous sensors and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have revolutionized the sports industry, providing new methodologies for planning, effective coordination of training, and match analysis post game. New methods, including machine learning, image and video processing, have been developed for performance evaluation, allowing the analyst to track the performance of a player in real-time. Following FIFA's 2015 approval of electronics performance and tracking system during games, performance data of a single player or the entire team is allowed to be collected using GPS-based wearables. Data from practice sessions outside the sporting arena is being collected in greater numbers than ever before. Realizing the significance of data in professional soccer, this paper presents video analytics, examines recent state-of-the-art literature in elite soccer, and summarizes existing real-time video analytics algorithms. We also discuss real-time crowdsourcing of the obtained data, tactical and technical performance, distributed computing and its importance in video analytics and propose a future research perspective.
Prevent Car Accidents by Using AI
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Transportation facilities are becoming more developed as society develops, and people's travel demand is increasing, but so are the traffic safety issues that arise as a result. And car accidents are a major issue all over the world. The cost of traffic fatalities and driver injuries has a significant impact on society. The use of machine learning techniques in the field of traffic accidents is becoming increasingly popular. Machine learning classifiers are used instead of traditional data mining techniques to produce better results and accuracy. As a result, this project conducts research on existing work related to accident prediction using machine learning. We will use crash data and weather data to train machine learning models to predict crash severity and reduce crashes.
Misinformation Mitigation under Differential Propagation Rates and Temporal Penalties
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2022
Year: 2022

We propose an information propagation model that captures important temporal aspects that have been well observed in the dynamics of fake news diffusion, in contrast with the diffusion of truth. The model accounts for differential propagation rates of truth and misinformation and for user reaction times. We study a time-sensitive variant of the \textit{misinformation mitigation} problem, where $k$ seeds are to be selected to activate a truth campaign so as to minimize the number of users that adopt misinformation propagating through a social network. We show that the resulting objective is non-submodular and employ a sandwiching technique by defining submodular upper and lower bounding functions, providing data-dependent guarantees. In order to enable the use of a reverse sampling framework, we introduce a weighted version of reverse reachability sets that captures the associated differential propagation rates and establish a key equivalence between weighted set coverage probabilities and mitigation with respect to the sandwiching functions. Further, we propose an offline reverse sampling framework that provides $(1 - 1/e - ε)$-approximate solutions to our bounding functions and introduce an importance sampling technique to reduce the sample complexity of our solution. Finally, we show how our framework can provide an anytime solution to the problem. Experiments over five datasets show that our approach outperforms previous approaches and is robust to uncertainty in the model parameters.
A Hybrid Adjacency and Time-Based Data Structure for Analysis of Temporal Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2022
Year: 2022

Dynamic or temporal networks enable representation of time-varying edges between nodes. Conventional adjacency-based data structures used for storing networks such as adjacency lists were designed without incorporating time and can thus quickly retrieve all edges between two sets of nodes (a node-based slice) but cannot quickly retrieve all edges that occur within a given time interval (a time-based slice). We propose a hybrid data structure for storing temporal networks that stores edges in both an adjacency dictionary, enabling rapid node-based slices, and an interval tree, enabling rapid time-based slices. Our hybrid structure also enables compound slices, where one needs to slice both over nodes and time, either by slicing first over nodes or slicing first over time. We further propose an approach for predictive compound slicing, which attempts to predict whether a node-based or time-based compound slice is more efficient. We evaluate our hybrid data structure on many real temporal network data sets and find that they achieve much faster slice times than existing data structures with only a modest increase in creation time and memory usage.
Towards WinoQueer: Developing a Benchmark for Anti-Queer Bias in Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

This paper presents exploratory work on whether and to what extent biases against queer and trans people are encoded in large language models (LLMs) such as BERT. We also propose a method for reducing these biases in downstream tasks: finetuning the models on data written by and/or about queer people. To measure anti-queer bias, we introduce a new benchmark dataset, WinoQueer, modeled after other bias-detection benchmarks but addressing homophobic and transphobic biases. We found that BERT shows significant homophobic bias, but this bias can be mostly mitigated by finetuning BERT on a natural language corpus written by members of the LGBTQ+ community.
Algebra-Based Reasoning for Loop Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2022
Year: 2022

Provably correct software is one of the key challenges of our software-driven society. Program synthesis -- the task of constructing a program satisfying a given specification -- is one strategy for achieving this. The result of this task is then a program which is correct by design. As in the domain of program verification, handling loops is one of the main ingredients to a successful synthesis procedure. We present an algorithm for synthesizing loops satisfying a given polynomial loop invariant. The class of loops we are considering can be modeled by a system of algebraic recurrence equations with constant coefficients, encoding thus program loops with affine operations among program variables. We turn the task of loop synthesis into a polynomial constraint problem, by precisely characterizing the set of all loops satisfying the given invariant. We prove soundness of our approach, as well as its completeness with respect to an a priori fixed upper bound on the number of program variables. Our work has applications towards synthesizing loops satisfying a given polynomial loop invariant, program verification, as well as generating number sequences from algebraic relations. To understand viability of the methodology and heuristics for synthesizing loops, we implement and evaluate the method using the Absynth tool.
Rethinking Collaborative Metric Learning: Toward an Efficient Alternative without Negative Sampling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

The recently proposed Collaborative Metric Learning (CML) paradigm has aroused wide interest in the area of recommendation systems (RS) owing to its simplicity and effectiveness. Typically, the existing literature of CML depends largely on the \textit{negative sampling} strategy to alleviate the time-consuming burden of pairwise computation. However, in this work, by taking a theoretical analysis, we find that negative sampling would lead to a biased estimation of the generalization error. Specifically, we show that the sampling-based CML would introduce a bias term in the generalization bound, which is quantified by the per-user \textit{Total Variance} (TV) between the distribution induced by negative sampling and the ground truth distribution. This suggests that optimizing the sampling-based CML loss function does not ensure a small generalization error even with sufficiently large training data. Moreover, we show that the bias term will vanish without the negative sampling strategy. Motivated by this, we propose an efficient alternative without negative sampling for CML named \textit{Sampling-Free Collaborative Metric Learning} (SFCML), to get rid of the sampling bias in a practical sense. Finally, comprehensive experiments over seven benchmark datasets speak to the superiority of the proposed algorithm.
Approximating observables is as hard as counting
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2022
Year: 2022

We study the computational complexity of estimating local observables for Gibbs distributions. A simple combinatorial example is the average size of an independent set in a graph. In a recent work, we established NP-hardness of approximating the average size of an independent set utilizing hardness of the corresponding optimization problem and the related phase transition behavior. Here, we instead consider settings where the underlying optimization problem is easily solvable. Our main contribution is to classify the complexity of approximating a wide class of observables via a generic reduction from approximate counting to the problem of estimating local observables. The key idea is to use the observables to interpolate the counting problem. Using this new approach, we are able to study observables on bipartite graphs where the underlying optimization problem is easy but the counting problem is believed to be hard. The most-well studied class of graphs that was excluded from previous hardness results were bipartite graphs. We establish hardness for estimating the average size of the independent set in bipartite graphs of maximum degree 6; more generally, we show tight hardness results for general vertex-edge observables for antiferromagnetic 2-spin systems on bipartite graphs. Our techniques go beyond 2-spin systems, and for the ferromagnetic Potts model we establish hardness of approximating the number of monochromatic edges in the same region as known hardness of approximate counting results.
Waypoint Generation in Row-based Crops with Deep Learning and Contrastive Clustering
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

The development of precision agriculture has gradually introduced automation in the agricultural process to support and rationalize all the activities related to field management. In particular, service robotics plays a predominant role in this evolution by deploying autonomous agents able to navigate in fields while executing different tasks without the need for human intervention, such as monitoring, spraying and harvesting. In this context, global path planning is the first necessary step for every robotic mission and ensures that the navigation is performed efficiently and with complete field coverage. In this paper, we propose a learning-based approach to tackle waypoint generation for planning a navigation path for row-based crops, starting from a top-view map of the region-of-interest. We present a novel methodology for waypoint clustering based on a contrastive loss, able to project the points to a separable latent space. The proposed deep neural network can simultaneously predict the waypoint position and cluster assignment with two specialized heads in a single forward pass. The extensive experimentation on simulated and real-world images demonstrates that the proposed approach effectively solves the waypoint generation problem for both straight and curved row-based crops, overcoming the limitations of previous state-of-the-art methodologies.
Sufficient Statistic Memory Approximate Message Passing
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

Approximate message passing (AMP) type algorithms have been widely used in the signal reconstruction of certain large random linear systems. A key feature of the AMP-type algorithms is that their dynamics can be correctly described by state evolution. However, state evolution does not necessarily guarantee the convergence of iterative algorithms. To solve the convergence problem of AMP-type algorithms in principle, this paper proposes a memory AMP (MAMP) under a sufficient statistic condition, named sufficient statistic MAMP (SS-MAMP). We show that the covariance matrices of SS-MAMP are L-banded and convergent. Given an arbitrary MAMP, we can construct the SS-MAMP by damping, which not only ensures the convergence, but also preserves the orthogonality, i.e., its dynamics can be correctly described by state evolution.
BlazePose GHUM Holistic: Real-time 3D Human Landmarks and Pose Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

We present BlazePose GHUM Holistic, a lightweight neural network pipeline for 3D human body landmarks and pose estimation, specifically tailored to real-time on-device inference. BlazePose GHUM Holistic enables motion capture from a single RGB image including avatar control, fitness tracking and AR/VR effects. Our main contributions include i) a novel method for 3D ground truth data acquisition, ii) updated 3D body tracking with additional hand landmarks and iii) full body pose estimation from a monocular image.
NTIRE 2022 Challenge on Perceptual Image Quality Assessment
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

This paper reports on the NTIRE 2022 challenge on perceptual image quality assessment (IQA), held in conjunction with the New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement workshop (NTIRE) workshop at CVPR 2022. This challenge is held to address the emerging challenge of IQA by perceptual image processing algorithms. The output images of these algorithms have completely different characteristics from traditional distortions and are included in the PIPAL dataset used in this challenge. This challenge is divided into two tracks, a full-reference IQA track similar to the previous NTIRE IQA challenge and a new track that focuses on the no-reference IQA methods. The challenge has 192 and 179 registered participants for two tracks. In the final testing stage, 7 and 8 participating teams submitted their models and fact sheets. Almost all of them have achieved better results than existing IQA methods, and the winning method can demonstrate state-of-the-art performance.
Universal Neyman-Pearson Classification with a Known Hypothesis
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

We propose a universal classifier for binary Neyman-Pearson classification where null distribution is known while only a training sequence is available for the alternative distribution. The proposed classifier interpolates between Hoeffding's classifier and the likelihood ratio test and attains the same error probability prefactor as the likelihood ratio test, i.e., the same prefactor as if both distributions were known. In addition, like Hoeffding's universal hypothesis test, the proposed classifier is shown to attain the optimal error exponent tradeoff attained by the likelihood ratio test whenever the ratio of training to observation samples exceeds a certain value. We propose a lower bound and an upper bound to the training to observation ratio. In addition, we propose a sequential classifier that attains the optimal error exponent tradeoff.
There Ain't No Such Thing as a Free Custom Memory Allocator
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

Using custom memory allocators is an efficient performance optimization technique. However, dependency on a custom allocator can introduce several maintenance-related issues. We present lessons learned from the industry and provide critical guidance for using custom memory allocators and enumerate various challenges associated with integrating them. These recommendations are based on years of experience incorporating custom allocators into different industrial software projects.
Authentication of Copy Detection Patterns under Machine Learning Attacks: A Supervised Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Copy detection patterns (CDP) are an attractive technology that allows manufacturers to defend their products against counterfeiting. The main assumption behind the protection mechanism of CDP is that these codes printed with the smallest symbol size (1x1) on an industrial printer cannot be copied or cloned with sufficient accuracy due to data processing inequality. However, previous works have shown that Machine Learning (ML) based attacks can produce high-quality fakes, resulting in decreased accuracy of authentication based on traditional feature-based authentication systems. While Deep Learning (DL) can be used as a part of the authentication system, to the best of our knowledge, none of the previous works has studied the performance of a DL-based authentication system against ML-based attacks on CDP with 1x1 symbol size. In this work, we study such a performance assuming a supervised learning (SL) setting.
Equality cases in the Anantharam-Jog-Nair inequality
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

Anantharam, Jog and Nair recently unified the Shannon-Stam inequality and the entropic form of the Brascamp-Lieb inequalities under a common inequality. They left open the problems of extremizability and characterization of extremizers. Both questions are resolved in the present paper.
A Survey of DeFi Security: Challenges and Opportunities
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

DeFi, or Decentralized Finance, is based on a distributed ledger called blockchain technology. Using blockchain, DeFi may customize the execution of predetermined operations between parties. The DeFi system use blockchain technology to execute user transactions, such as lending and exchanging. The total value locked in DeFi decreased from \$200 billion in April 2022 to \$80 billion in July 2022, indicating that security in this area remained problematic. In this paper, we address the deficiency in DeFi security studies. To our best knowledge, our paper is the first to make a systematic analysis of DeFi security. First, we summarize the DeFi-related vulnerabilities in each blockchain layer. Additionally, application-level vulnerabilities are also analyzed. Then we classify and analyze real-world DeFi attacks based on the principles that correlate to the vulnerabilities. In addition, we collect optimization strategies from the data, network, consensus, smart contract, and application layers. And then, we describe the weaknesses and technical approaches they address. On the basis of this comprehensive analysis, we summarize several challenges and possible future directions in DeFi to offer ideas for further research.
YOLOSA: Object detection based on 2D local feature superimposed self-attention
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

We analyzed the network structure of real-time object detection models and found that the features in the feature concatenation stage are very rich. Applying an attention module here can effectively improve the detection accuracy of the model. However, the commonly used attention module or self-attention module shows poor performance in detection accuracy and inference efficiency. Therefore, we propose a novel self-attention module, called 2D local feature superimposed self-attention, for the feature concatenation stage of the neck network. This self-attention module reflects global features through local features and local receptive fields. We also propose and optimize an efficient decoupled head and AB-OTA, and achieve SOTA results. Average precisions of 49.0% (71FPS, 14ms), 46.1% (85FPS, 11.7ms), and 39.1% (107FPS, 9.3ms) were obtained for large, medium, and small-scale models built using our proposed improvements. Our models exceeded YOLOv5 by 0.8% -- 3.1% in average precision.