OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Dynamic Control of Data-Intensive Services over Edge Computing Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

Next-generation distributed computing networks (e.g., edge and fog computing) enable the efficient delivery of delay-sensitive, compute-intensive applications by facilitating access to computation resources in close proximity to end users. Many of these applications (e.g., augmented/virtual reality) are also data-intensive: in addition to user-specific (live) data streams, they require access to (static) digital objects (e.g., image database) to complete the required processing tasks. When required objects are not available at the servers hosting the associated service functions, they must be fetched from other edge locations, incurring additional communication cost and latency. In such settings, overall service delivery performance shall benefit from jointly optimized decisions around (i) routing paths and processing locations for live data streams, together with (ii) cache selection and distribution paths for associated digital objects. In this paper, we address the problem of dynamic control of data-intensive services over edge cloud networks. We characterize the network stability region and design the first throughput-optimal control policy that coordinates processing and routing decisions for both live and static data-streams. Numerical results demonstrate the superior performance (e.g., throughput, delay, and resource consumption) obtained via the novel multi-pipeline flow control mechanism of the proposed policy, compared with state-of-the-art algorithms that lack integrated stream processing and data distribution control.
COVID-19 Literature Mining and Retrieval using Text Mining Approaches
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) began in Wuhan, China, in late 2019 and to date has infected over 148M people worldwide, resulting in 3.12M deaths. On March 10, 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared it as a global pandemic. Many academicians and researchers started to publish papers describing the latest discoveries on covid-19. The large influx of publications made it hard for other researchers to go through a large amount of data and find the appropriate one that helps their research. So, the proposed model attempts to extract relavent titles from the large corpus of research publications which makes the job easy for the researchers. Allen Institute for AI released the CORD-19 dataset, which consists of 2,00,000 journal articles related to coronavirus-related research publications from PubMed's PMC, WHO (World Health Organization), bioRxiv, and medRxiv pre-prints. Along with this document corpus, they have also provided a topics dataset named topics-rnd3 consisting of a list of topics. Each topic has three types of representations like query, question, and narrative. These Datasets are made open for research, and also they released a TREC-COVID competition on Kaggle. Using these topics like queries, our goal is to find out the relevant documents in the CORD-19 dataset. In this research, relevant documents should be recognized for the posed topics in topics-rnd3 data set. The proposed model uses Natural Language Processing(NLP) techniques like Bag-of-Words, Average Word-2-Vec, Average BERT Base model and Tf-Idf weighted Word2Vec model to fabricate vectors for query, question, narrative, and combinations of them. Similarly, fabricate vectors for titles in the CORD-19 dataset. After fabricating vectors, cosine similarity is used for finding similarities between every two vectors. Cosine similarity helps us to find relevant documents for the given topic.
Walle: An End-to-End, General-Purpose, and Large-Scale Production System for Device-Cloud Collaborative Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

To break the bottlenecks of mainstream cloud-based machine learning (ML) paradigm, we adopt device-cloud collaborative ML and build the first end-to-end and general-purpose system, called Walle, as the foundation. Walle consists of a deployment platform, distributing ML tasks to billion-scale devices in time; a data pipeline, efficiently preparing task input; and a compute container, providing a cross-platform and high-performance execution environment, while facilitating daily task iteration. Specifically, the compute container is based on Mobile Neural Network (MNN), a tensor compute engine along with the data processing and model execution libraries, which are exposed through a refined Python thread-level virtual machine (VM) to support diverse ML tasks and concurrent task execution. The core of MNN is the novel mechanisms of operator decomposition and semi-auto search, sharply reducing the workload in manually optimizing hundreds of operators for tens of hardware backends and further quickly identifying the best backend with runtime optimization for a computation graph. The data pipeline introduces an on-device stream processing framework to enable processing user behavior data at source. The deployment platform releases ML tasks with an efficient push-then-pull method and supports multi-granularity deployment policies. We evaluate Walle in practical e-commerce application scenarios to demonstrate its effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability. Extensive micro-benchmarks also highlight the superior performance of MNN and the Python thread-level VM. Walle has been in large-scale production use in Alibaba, while MNN has been open source with a broad impact in the community.
Easter2.0: Improving convolutional models for handwritten text recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have shown promising results for the task of Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) but they still fall behind Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs)/Transformer based models in terms of performance. In this paper, we propose a CNN based architecture that bridges this gap. Our work, Easter2.0, is composed of multiple layers of 1D Convolution, Batch Normalization, ReLU, Dropout, Dense Residual connection, Squeeze-and-Excitation module and make use of Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss. In addition to the Easter2.0 architecture, we propose a simple and effective data augmentation technique 'Tiling and Corruption (TACO)' relevant for the task of HTR/OCR. Our work achieves state-of-the-art results on IAM handwriting database when trained using only publicly available training data. In our experiments, we also present the impact of TACO augmentations and Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) on text recognition accuracy. We further show that Easter2.0 is suitable for few-shot learning tasks and outperforms current best methods including Transformers when trained on limited amount of annotated data. Code and model is available at: https://github.com/kartikgill/Easter2
Exploring the Open World Using Incremental Extreme Value Machines
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Dynamic environments require adaptive applications. One particular machine learning problem in dynamic environments is open world recognition. It characterizes a continuously changing domain where only some classes are seen in one batch of the training data and such batches can only be learned incrementally. Open world recognition is a demanding task that is, to the best of our knowledge, addressed by only a few methods. This work introduces a modification of the widely known Extreme Value Machine (EVM) to enable open world recognition. Our proposed method extends the EVM with a partial model fitting function by neglecting unaffected space during an update. This reduces the training time by a factor of 28. In addition, we provide a modified model reduction using weighted maximum K-set cover to strictly bound the model complexity and reduce the computational effort by a factor of 3.5 from 2.1 s to 0.6 s. In our experiments, we rigorously evaluate openness with two novel evaluation protocols. The proposed method achieves superior accuracy of about 12 % and computational efficiency in the tasks of image classification and face recognition.
Confederated Learning: Federated Learning with Decentralized Edge Servers
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Federated learning (FL) is an emerging machine learning paradigm that allows to accomplish model training without aggregating data at a central server. Most studies on FL consider a centralized framework, in which a single server is endowed with a central authority to coordinate a number of devices to perform model training in an iterative manner. Due to stringent communication and bandwidth constraints, such a centralized framework has limited scalability as the number of devices grows. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a ConFederated Learning (CFL) framework. The proposed CFL consists of multiple servers, in which each server is connected with an individual set of devices as in the conventional FL framework, and decentralized collaboration is leveraged among servers to make full use of the data dispersed throughout the network. We develop an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm for CFL. The proposed algorithm employs a random scheduling policy which randomly selects a subset of devices to access their respective servers at each iteration, thus alleviating the need of uploading a huge amount of information from devices to servers. Theoretical analysis is presented to justify the proposed method. Numerical results show that the proposed method can converge to a decent solution significantly faster than gradient-based FL algorithms, thus boasting a substantial advantage in terms of communication efficiency.
Uncertainty Quantification and Resource-Demanding Computer Vision Applications of Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Bringing deep neural networks (DNNs) into safety critical applications such as automated driving, medical imaging and finance, requires a thorough treatment of the model's uncertainties. Training deep neural networks is already resource demanding and so is also their uncertainty quantification. In this overview article, we survey methods that we developed to teach DNNs to be uncertain when they encounter new object classes. Additionally, we present training methods to learn from only a few labels with help of uncertainty quantification. Note that this is typically paid with a massive overhead in computation of an order of magnitude and more compared to ordinary network training. Finally, we survey our work on neural architecture search which is also an order of magnitude more resource demanding then ordinary network training.
The u-index: a simple metric to objectively measure academic impact of individual researchers
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2022
Year: 2022

This short paper introduces the u-index, a simple and objective metric to evaluate the impact and relevance of academic research output, as a possible alternative to widespread metrics such as the h-index or the i10-index. The proposed index is designed to address possible issues with standard metrics such as inflated ratings resulting from self-citations or by means of extended co-authorship numbers where every citation has the same impact as for works written by smaller groups, despite limited individual contributions. The new index makes also possible to differentiate scholars who would otherwise fall into the same h-index group, hence providing further insights into the actual impact of a specific individual researcher.
Deep Learning Methods for Fingerprint-Based Indoor Positioning: A Review
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Outdoor positioning systems based on the Global Navigation Satellite System have several shortcomings that have deemed their use for indoor positioning impractical. Location fingerprinting, which utilizes machine learning, has emerged as a viable method and solution for indoor positioning due to its simple concept and accurate performance. In the past, shallow learning algorithms were traditionally used in location fingerprinting. Recently, the research community started utilizing deep learning methods for fingerprinting after witnessing the great success and superiority these methods have over traditional/shallow machine learning algorithms. This paper provides a comprehensive review of deep learning methods in indoor positioning. First, the advantages and disadvantages of various fingerprint types for indoor positioning are discussed. The solutions proposed in the literature are then analyzed, categorized, and compared against various performance evaluation metrics. Since data is key in fingerprinting, a detailed review of publicly available indoor positioning datasets is presented. While incorporating deep learning into fingerprinting has resulted in significant improvements, doing so, has also introduced new challenges. These challenges along with the common implementation pitfalls are discussed. Finally, the paper is concluded with some remarks as well as future research trends.
Approximating k-Edge-Connected Spanning Subgraphs via a Near-Linear Time LP Solver
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

In the $k$-edge-connected spanning subgraph ($k$ECSS) problem, our goal is to compute a minimum-cost sub-network that is resilient against up to $k$ link failures: Given an $n$-node $m$-edge graph with a cost function on the edges, our goal is to compute a minimum-cost $k$-edge-connected spanning subgraph. This NP-hard problem generalizes the minimum spanning tree problem and is the "uniform case" of a much broader class of survival network design problems (SNDP). A factor of two has remained the best approximation ratio for polynomial-time algorithms for the whole class of SNDP, even for a special case of $2$ECSS. The fastest $2$-approximation algorithm is however rather slow, taking $O(mn k)$ time [Khuller, Vishkin, STOC'92]. A faster time complexity of $O(n^2)$ can be obtained, but with a higher approximation guarantee of $(2k-1)$ [Gabow, Goemans, Williamson, IPCO'93]. Our main contribution is an algorithm that $(1+ε)$-approximates the optimal fractional solution in $\tilde O(m/ε^2)$ time (independent of $k$), which can be turned into a $(2+ε)$ approximation algorithm that runs in time $\tilde O\left(\frac{m}{ε^2} + \frac{k^2n^{1.5}}{ε^2}\right)$ for (integral) $k$ECSS; this improves the running time of the aforementioned results while keeping the approximation ratio arbitrarily close to a factor of two.
CompleteDT: Point Cloud Completion with Dense Augment Inference Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Point cloud completion task aims to predict the missing part of incomplete point clouds and generate complete point clouds with details. In this paper, we propose a novel point cloud completion network, namely CompleteDT. Specifically, features are learned from point clouds with different resolutions, which is sampled from the incomplete input, and are converted to a series of \textit{spots} based on the geometrical structure. Then, the Dense Relation Augment Module (DRA) based on the transformer is proposed to learn features within \textit{spots} and consider the correlation among these \textit{spots}. The DRA consists of Point Local-Attention Module (PLA) and Point Dense Multi-Scale Attention Module (PDMA), where the PLA captures the local information within the local \textit{spots} by adaptively measuring weights of neighbors and the PDMA exploits the global relationship between these \textit{spots} in a multi-scale densely connected manner. Lastly, the complete shape is predicted from \textit{spots} by the Multi-resolution Point Fusion Module (MPF), which gradually generates complete point clouds from \textit{spots}, and updates \textit{spots} based on these generated point clouds. Experimental results show that, because the DRA based on the transformer can learn the expressive features from the incomplete input and the MPF can fully explore these feature to predict the complete input, our method largely outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
A reconfigurable integrated electronic tongue and its use in accelerated analysis of juices and wines
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Potentiometric electronic tongues (ETs) leveraging trends in miniaturization and internet of things (IoT) bear promise for facile mobile chemical analysis of complex multicomponent liquids, such as beverages. In this work, hand-crafted feature extraction from the transient potentiometric response of an array of low-selective miniaturized polymeric sensors is combined with a data pipeline for deployment of trained machine learning models on a cloud back-end or edge device. The sensor array demonstrated sensitivity to different organic acids and exhibited interesting performance for the fingerprinting of fruit juices and wines, including differentiation of samples through supervised learning based on sensory descriptors and prediction of consumer acceptability of aged juice samples. Product authentication, quality control and support of sensory evaluation are some of the applications that are expected to benefit from integrated electronic tongues that facilitate the characterization of complex properties of multi-component liquids.
Agnostic Physics-Driven Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

This work establishes that a physical system can perform statistical learning without gradient computations, via an Agnostic Equilibrium Propagation (Aeqprop) procedure that combines energy minimization, homeostatic control, and nudging towards the correct response. In Aeqprop, the specifics of the system do not have to be known: the procedure is based only on external manipulations, and produces a stochastic gradient descent without explicit gradient computations. Thanks to nudging, the system performs a true, order-one gradient step for each training sample, in contrast with order-zero methods like reinforcement or evolutionary strategies, which rely on trial and error. This procedure considerably widens the range of potential hardware for statistical learning to any system with enough controllable parameters, even if the details of the system are poorly known. Aeqprop also establishes that in natural (bio)physical systems, genuine gradient-based statistical learning may result from generic, relatively simple mechanisms, without backpropagation and its requirement for analytic knowledge of partial derivatives.
Meta Representation Learning with Contextual Linear Bandits
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Meta-learning seeks to build algorithms that rapidly learn how to solve new learning problems based on previous experience. In this paper we investigate meta-learning in the setting of stochastic linear bandit tasks. We assume that the tasks share a low dimensional representation, which has been partially acquired from previous learning tasks. We aim to leverage this information in order to learn a new downstream bandit task, which shares the same representation. Our principal contribution is to show that if the learned representation estimates well the unknown one, then the downstream task can be efficiently learned by a greedy policy that we propose in this work. We derive an upper bound on the regret of this policy, which is, up to logarithmic factors, of order $r\sqrt{N}(1\vee \sqrt{d/T})$, where $N$ is the horizon of the downstream task, $T$ is the number of training tasks, $d$ the ambient dimension and $r \ll d$ the dimension of the representation. We highlight that our strategy does not need to know $r$. We note that if $T> d$ our bound achieves the same rate of optimal minimax bandit algorithms using the true underlying representation. Our analysis is inspired and builds in part upon previous work on meta-learning in the i.i.d. full information setting \citep{tripuraneni2021provable,boursier2022trace}. As a separate contribution we show how to relax certain assumptions in those works, thereby improving their representation learning and risk analysis.
FLICU: A Federated Learning Workflow for Intensive Care Unit Mortality Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Although Machine Learning (ML) can be seen as a promising tool to improve clinical decision-making for supporting the improvement of medication plans, clinical procedures, diagnoses, or medication prescriptions, it remains limited by access to healthcare data. Healthcare data is sensitive, requiring strict privacy practices, and typically stored in data silos, making traditional machine learning challenging. Federated learning can counteract those limitations by training machine learning models over data silos while keeping the sensitive data localized. This study proposes a federated learning workflow for ICU mortality prediction. Hereby, the applicability of federated learning as an alternative to centralized machine learning and local machine learning is investigated by introducing federated learning to the binary classification problem of predicting ICU mortality. We extract multivariate time series data from the MIMIC-III database (lab values and vital signs), and benchmark the predictive performance of four deep sequential classifiers (FRNN, LSTM, GRU, and 1DCNN) varying the patient history window lengths (8h, 16h, 24h, 48h) and the number of FL clients (2, 4, 8). The experiments demonstrate that both centralized machine learning and federated learning are comparable in terms of AUPRC and F1-score. Furthermore, the federated approach shows superior performance over local machine learning. Thus, the federated approach can be seen as a valid and privacy-preserving alternative to centralized machine learning for classifying ICU mortality when sharing sensitive patient data between hospitals is not possible.
Accurate and Efficient Modeling of 802.15.4 Unslotted CSMA/CA through Event Chains Computation
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

Many analytical models have been proposed for evaluating the performance of event-driven 802.15.4 Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), in Non-Beacon Enabled (NBE) mode. However, existing models do not provide accurate analysis of large-scale WSNs, due to tractability issues and/or simplifying assumptions. In this paper, we propose a new approach called Event Chains Computation (ECC) to model the unslotted CSMA/CA algorithm used for channel access in NBE mode. ECC relies on the idea that outcomes of the CSMA/CA algorithm can be represented as chains of events that subsequently occur in the network. Although ECC can generate all the possible outcomes, it only considers chains with a probability to occur greater than a pre-defined threshold to reduce complexity. Furthermore, ECC parallelizes the computation by managing different chains through different threads. Our results show that, by an appropriate threshold selection, the time to derive performance metrics can be drastically reduced, with negligible impact on accuracy. We also show that the computation time decreases almost linearly with the number of employed threads. We validate our model through simulations and testbed experiments, and use it to investigate the impact of different parameters on the WSN performance, in terms of delivery ratio, latency, and energy consumption.
You Have Earned a Trophy: Characterize In-Game Achievements and Their Completions
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

Achievement systems have been actively adopted in gaming platforms to maintain players' interests. Among them, trophies in PlayStation games are one of the most successful achievement systems. While the importance of trophy design has been casually discussed in many game developers' forums, there has been no systematic study of the historical dataset of trophies yet. In this work, we construct a complete dataset of PlayStation games and their trophies and investigate them from both the developers' and players' perspectives.