OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Horizontal and Vertical Attention in Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Transformers are built upon multi-head scaled dot-product attention and positional encoding, which aim to learn the feature representations and token dependencies. In this work, we focus on enhancing the distinctive representation by learning to augment the feature maps with the self-attention mechanism in Transformers. Specifically, we propose the horizontal attention to re-weight the multi-head output of the scaled dot-product attention before dimensionality reduction, and propose the vertical attention to adaptively re-calibrate channel-wise feature responses by explicitly modelling inter-dependencies among different channels. We demonstrate the Transformer models equipped with the two attentions have a high generalization capability across different supervised learning tasks, with a very minor additional computational cost overhead. The proposed horizontal and vertical attentions are highly modular, which can be inserted into various Transformer models to further improve the performance. Our code is available in the supplementary material.
LM-Nav: Robotic Navigation with Large Pre-Trained Models of Language, Vision, and Action
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Goal-conditioned policies for robotic navigation can be trained on large, unannotated datasets, providing for good generalization to real-world settings. However, particularly in vision-based settings where specifying goals requires an image, this makes for an unnatural interface. Language provides a more convenient modality for communication with robots, but contemporary methods typically require expensive supervision, in the form of trajectories annotated with language descriptions. We present a system, LM-Nav, for robotic navigation that enjoys the benefits of training on unannotated large datasets of trajectories, while still providing a high-level interface to the user. Instead of utilizing a labeled instruction following dataset, we show that such a system can be constructed entirely out of pre-trained models for navigation (ViNG), image-language association (CLIP), and language modeling (GPT-3), without requiring any fine-tuning or language-annotated robot data. We instantiate LM-Nav on a real-world mobile robot and demonstrate long-horizon navigation through complex, outdoor environments from natural language instructions. For videos of our experiments, code release, and an interactive Colab notebook that runs in your browser, please check out our project page https://sites.google.com/view/lmnav
Multilingual Persuasion Detection: Video Games as an Invaluable Data Source for NLP
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Role-playing games (RPGs) have a considerable amount of text in video game dialogues. Quite often this text is semi-annotated by the game developers. In this paper, we extract a multilingual dataset of persuasive dialogue from several RPGs. We show the viability of this data in building a persuasion detection system using a natural language processing (NLP) model called BERT. We believe that video games have a lot of unused potential as a datasource for a variety of NLP tasks. The code and data described in this paper are available on Zenodo.
Progressively-connected Light Field Network for Efficient View Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

This paper presents a Progressively-connected Light Field network (ProLiF), for the novel view synthesis of complex forward-facing scenes. ProLiF encodes a 4D light field, which allows rendering a large batch of rays in one training step for image- or patch-level losses. Directly learning a neural light field from images has difficulty in rendering multi-view consistent images due to its unawareness of the underlying 3D geometry. To address this problem, we propose a progressive training scheme and regularization losses to infer the underlying geometry during training, both of which enforce the multi-view consistency and thus greatly improves the rendering quality. Experiments demonstrate that our method is able to achieve significantly better rendering quality than the vanilla neural light fields and comparable results to NeRF-like rendering methods on the challenging LLFF dataset and Shiny Object dataset. Moreover, we demonstrate better compatibility with LPIPS loss to achieve robustness to varying light conditions and CLIP loss to control the rendering style of the scene. Project page: https://totoro97.github.io/projects/prolif.
FIB: A Method for Evaluation of Feature Impact Balance in Multi-Dimensional Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Errors might not have the same consequences depending on the task at hand. Nevertheless, there is limited research investigating the impact of imbalance in the contribution of different features in an error vector. Therefore, we propose the Feature Impact Balance (FIB) score. It measures whether there is a balanced impact of features in the discrepancies between two vectors. We designed the FIB score to lie in [0, 1]. Scores close to 0 indicate that a small number of features contribute to most of the error, and scores close to 1 indicate that most features contribute to the error equally. We experimentally study the FIB on different datasets, using AutoEncoders and Variational AutoEncoders. We show how the feature impact balance varies during training and showcase its usability to support model selection for single output and multi-output tasks.
Developing an AI-enabled IIoT platform -- Lessons learned from early use case validation
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

For a broader adoption of AI in industrial production, adequate infrastructure capabilities are crucial. This includes easing the integration of AI with industrial devices, support for distributed deployment, monitoring, and consistent system configuration. Existing IIoT platforms still lack required capabilities to flexibly integrate reusable AI services and relevant standards such as Asset Administration Shells or OPC UA in an open, ecosystem-based manner. This is exactly what our next level Intelligent Industrial Production Ecosphere (IIP-Ecosphere) platform addresses, employing a highly configurable low-code based approach. In this paper, we introduce the design of this platform and discuss an early evaluation in terms of a demonstrator for AI-enabled visual quality inspection. This is complemented by insights and lessons learned during this early evaluation activity.
HEGrid: A High Efficient Multi-Channel Radio Astronomical Data Gridding Framework in Heterogeneous Computing Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

The challenge to fully exploit the potential of existing and upcoming scientific instruments like large single-dish radio telescopes is to process the collected massive data effectively and efficiently. As a "quasi 2D stencil computation" with the "Moore neighborhood pattern," gridding is the most computationally intensive step in data reduction pipeline for radio astronomy studies, enabling astronomers to create correct sky images for further analysis. However, the existing gridding frameworks can either only run on multi-core CPU architecture or do not support high-concurrency, multi-channel data gridding. Their performance is then limited, and there are emerging needs for innovative gridding frameworks to process data from large single-dish radio telescopes like the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST). To address those challenges, we developed a High Efficient Gridding framework, HEGrid, by overcoming the above limitations. Specifically, we propose and construct the gridding pipeline in heterogeneous computing environments and achieve multi-pipeline concurrency for high performance multi-channel processing. Furthermore, we propose pipeline-based co-optimization to alleviate the potential negative performance impact of possible intra- and inter-pipeline low computation and I/O utilization, including component share-based redundancy elimination, thread-level data reuse and overlapping I/O and computation. Our experiments are based on both simulated datasets and actual FAST observational datasets. The results show that HEGrid outperforms other state-of-the-art gridding frameworks by up to 5.5x and has robust hardware portability, including AMD Radeon Instinct GPU and NVIDIA GPU.
Some Discussions on PHY Security in DF Relay
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

Physical layer (PHY) security in decode-and-forward (DF) relay systems is discussed. Based on the types of wiretap links, the secrecy performance of three typical secure DF relay models is analyzed. Different from conventional works in this field, rigorous derivations of the secrecy channel capacity are provided from an information-theoretic perspective. Meanwhile, closed-form expressions are derived to characterize the secrecy outage probability (SOP). For the sake of unveiling more system insights, asymptotic analyses are performed on the SOP for a sufficiently large signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The analytical results are validated by computer simulations and are in excellent agreement.
Adaptive Fine-Grained Predicates Learning for Scene Graph Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

The performance of current Scene Graph Generation (SGG) models is severely hampered by hard-to-distinguish predicates, e.g., woman-on/standing on/walking on-beach. As general SGG models tend to predict head predicates and re-balancing strategies prefer tail categories, none of them can appropriately handle hard-to-distinguish predicates. To tackle this issue, inspired by fine-grained image classification, which focuses on differentiating hard-to-distinguish objects, we propose an Adaptive Fine-Grained Predicates Learning (FGPL-A) which aims at differentiating hard-to-distinguish predicates for SGG. First, we introduce an Adaptive Predicate Lattice (PL-A) to figure out hard-to-distinguish predicates, which adaptively explores predicate correlations in keeping with model's dynamic learning pace. Practically, PL-A is initialized from SGG dataset, and gets refined by exploring model's predictions of current mini-batch. Utilizing PL-A, we propose an Adaptive Category Discriminating Loss (CDL-A) and an Adaptive Entity Discriminating Loss (EDL-A), which progressively regularize model's discriminating process with fine-grained supervision concerning model's dynamic learning status, ensuring balanced and efficient learning process. Extensive experimental results show that our proposed model-agnostic strategy significantly boosts performance of benchmark models on VG-SGG and GQA-SGG datasets by up to 175% and 76% on Mean Recall@100, achieving new state-of-the-art performance. Moreover, experiments on Sentence-to-Graph Retrieval and Image Captioning tasks further demonstrate practicability of our method.
On the Principles of Parsimony and Self-Consistency for the Emergence of Intelligence
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

Ten years into the revival of deep networks and artificial intelligence, we propose a theoretical framework that sheds light on understanding deep networks within a bigger picture of Intelligence in general. We introduce two fundamental principles, Parsimony and Self-consistency, that address two fundamental questions regarding Intelligence: what to learn and how to learn, respectively. We believe the two principles are the cornerstones for the emergence of Intelligence, artificial or natural. While these two principles have rich classical roots, we argue that they can be stated anew in entirely measurable and computable ways. More specifically, the two principles lead to an effective and efficient computational framework, compressive closed-loop transcription, that unifies and explains the evolution of modern deep networks and many artificial intelligence practices. While we mainly use modeling of visual data as an example, we believe the two principles will unify understanding of broad families of autonomous intelligent systems and provide a framework for understanding the brain.
Fast Density-Peaks Clustering: Multicore-based Parallelization Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2022
Year: 2022

Clustering multi-dimensional points is a fundamental task in many fields, and density-based clustering supports many applications as it can discover clusters of arbitrary shapes. This paper addresses the problem of Density-Peaks Clustering (DPC), a recently proposed density-based clustering framework. Although DPC already has many applications, its straightforward implementation incurs a quadratic time computation to the number of points in a given dataset, thereby does not scale to large datasets. To enable DPC on large datasets, we propose efficient algorithms for DPC. Specifically, we propose an exact algorithm, Ex-DPC, and two approximation algorithms, Approx-DPC and S-Approx-DPC. Under a reasonable assumption about a DPC parameter, our algorithms are sub-quadratic, i.e., break the quadratic barrier. Besides, Approx-DPC does not require any additional parameters and can return the same cluster centers as those of Ex-DPC, rendering an accurate clustering result. S-Approx-DPC requires an approximation parameter but can speed up its computational efficiency. We further present that their efficiencies can be accelerated by leveraging multicore processing. We conduct extensive experiments using synthetic and real datasets, and our experimental results demonstrate that our algorithms are efficient, scalable, and accurate.
What Your Wearable Devices Revealed About You and Possibilities of Non-Cooperative 802.11 Presence Detection During Your Last IPIN Visit
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

The focus on privacy-related measures regarding wireless networks grew in last couple of years. This is especially important with technologies like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, which are all around us and our smartphones use them not just for connection to the internet or other devices, but for localization purposes as well. In this paper, we analyze and evaluate probe request frames of 802.11 wireless protocol captured during the 11th international conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN) 2021. We explore the temporal occupancy of the conference space during four days of the conference as well as non-cooperatively track the presence of devices in the proximity of the session rooms using 802.11 management frames, with and without using MAC address randomization. We carried out this analysis without trying to identify/reveal the identity of the users or in any way reverse the MAC address randomization. As a result of the analysis, we detected that there are still many devices not adopting MAC randomization, because either it is not implemented, or users disabled it. In addition, many devices can be easily tracked despite employing MAC randomization.
On the Age of Information for AMP based Grant-Free Random Access
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

With the rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT), massive devices are deployed, which poses severe challenges on access networks due to limited communication resources. When massive users contend for access, the information freshness gets worse caused by increasing collisions. It could be fatal for information freshness sensing scenarios, such as remote monitoring systems or self-driving systems, in which information freshness plays a critical part. In this paper, by taking the Age of Information (AoI) as the primary performance indicator, the information freshness using AMP-based grant-free scheme is investigated and compared with grant-based scheme. Base on the analysis, a user scheduling strategy with sleep threshold and forcing active threshold is proposed to further reduce average AoI (AAoI). Numerical results reveal that the AMP-based grant-free scheme can provide sufficient access capability with less pilot resources, and it is robust to the fluctuation of the number of active users. That ensures that the AMP-based grant-free scheme can keep the AAoI at a low level. It is also shown that the proposed threshold strategy can effectively improve the information freshness.
PowerDuck: A GOOSE Data Set of Cyberattacks in Substations
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Power grids worldwide are increasingly victims of cyberattacks, where attackers can cause immense damage to critical infrastructure. The growing digitalization and networking in power grids combined with insufficient protection against cyberattacks further exacerbate this trend. Hence, security engineers and researchers must counter these new risks by continuously improving security measures. Data sets of real network traffic during cyberattacks play a decisive role in analyzing and understanding such attacks. Therefore, this paper presents PowerDuck, a publicly available security data set containing network traces of GOOSE communication in a physical substation testbed. The data set includes recordings of various scenarios with and without the presence of attacks. Furthermore, all network packets originating from the attacker are clearly labeled to facilitate their identification. We thus envision PowerDuck improving and complementing existing data sets of substations, which are often generated synthetically, thus enhancing the security of power grids.
Exploiting Different Symmetries for Trajectory Tracking Control with Application to Quadrotors
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

High performance trajectory tracking control of quadrotor vehicles is an important challenge in aerial robotics. Symmetry is a fundamental property of physical systems and offers the potential to provide a tool to design high-performance control algorithms. We propose a design methodology that takes any given symmetry, linearises the associated error in a single set of coordinates, and uses LQR design to obtain a high performance control; an approach we term Equivariant Regulator design. We show that quadrotor vehicles admit several different symmetries: the direct product symmetry, the extended pose symmetry and the pose and velocity symmetry, and show that each symmetry can be used to define a global error. We compare the linearised systems via simulation and find that the extended pose and pose and velocity symmetries outperform the direct product symmetry in the presence of large disturbances. This suggests that choices of equivariant and group affine symmetries have improved linearisation error.
Fingerprint Liveness Detection Based on Quality Measures
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

A new fingerprint parameterization for liveness detection based on quality measures is presented. The novel feature set is used in a complete liveness detection system and tested on the development set of the LivDET competition, comprising over 4,500 real and fake images acquired with three different optical sensors. The proposed solution proves to be robust to the multi-sensor scenario, and presents an overall rate of 93% of correctly classified samples. Furthermore, the liveness detection method presented has the added advantage over previously studied techniques of needing just one image from a finger to decide whether it is real or fake.
Improved Soft-aided Decoding of Product Codes with Adaptive Performance-Complexity Trade-off
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

We propose an improved soft-aided decoding scheme for product codes that approaches the decoding performance of conventional soft-decision TPD with only a 0.2 dB gap while keeping the complexity and internal decoder data flow similarly low as in hard decision decoders.
Ternary and Quaternary CNTFET Full Adders are less efficient than the Binary Ones for Carry-Propagate Adders
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2022
Year: 2022

In Carry Propagate Adders, carry propagation is the critical delay. The most efficient scheme is to generate Cout0 (Cin=0) and Cout1(Cin=1) and multiplex the correct output according to Cin. For any radix, the carry output is always 0/1. We present two versions of ternary adders with Cin = (0V, Vdd/2) and Cin = (0V, Vdd) and two versions of quaternary adders with Cin = (0V, Vdd/3) and Cin = (0V, Vdd). Using full swing Vdd for Cin reduces the propagation delays for ternary and quaternary adders. 6-bit, 4-trit and 3-quit CPAs are then compared.
An optimal MOO strategy
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2022
Year: 2022

We calculated a fixed strategy that minimizes the average number of guesses (minimum strategy) for the number-guessing game MOO by exhaustive search. Although the minimum strategy for a similar game, mastermind, has been reported, this study seems to be the first to find the minimum strategy for MOO with a larger search space. When two players play against each other in MOO, the minimum strategy is not always the strongest fixed strategy. First, we compute a fixed strategy that has the maximum winning rate when played against the minimum strategy. Then we confirm that there is no fixed strategy with a winning rate exceeding 0.5 against this strategy. This result shows that MOO is a game with the strongest fixed strategy.
Simple and complex spiking neurons: perspectives and analysis in a simple STDP scenario
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2022
Year: 2022

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are largely inspired by biology and neuroscience and leverage ideas and theories to create fast and efficient learning systems. Spiking neuron models are adopted as core processing units in neuromorphic systems because they enable event-based processing. The integrate-and-fire (I&F) models are often adopted, with the simple Leaky I&F (LIF) being the most used. The reason for adopting such models is their efficiency and/or biological plausibility. Nevertheless, rigorous justification for adopting LIF over other neuron models for use in artificial learning systems has not yet been studied. This work considers various neuron models in the literature and then selects computational neuron models that are single-variable, efficient, and display different types of complexities. From this selection, we make a comparative study of three simple I&F neuron models, namely the LIF, the Quadratic I&F (QIF) and the Exponential I&F (EIF), to understand whether the use of more complex models increases the performance of the system and whether the choice of a neuron model can be directed by the task to be completed. Neuron models are tested within an SNN trained with Spike-Timing Dependent Plasticity (STDP) on a classification task on the N-MNIST and DVS Gestures datasets. Experimental results reveal that more complex neurons manifest the same ability as simpler ones to achieve high levels of accuracy on a simple dataset (N-MNIST), albeit requiring comparably more hyper-parameter tuning. However, when the data possess richer Spatio-temporal features, the QIF and EIF neuron models steadily achieve better results. This suggests that accurately selecting the model based on the richness of the feature spectrum of the data could improve the whole system's performance. Finally, the code implementing the spiking neurons in the SpykeTorch framework is made publicly available.
Bio-inspired Machine Learning: programmed death and replication
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2022
Year: 2022

We analyze algorithmic and computational aspects of biological phenomena, such as replication and programmed death, in the context of machine learning. We use two different measures of neuron efficiency to develop machine learning algorithms for adding neurons to the system (i.e. replication algorithm) and removing neurons from the system (i.e. programmed death algorithm). We argue that the programmed death algorithm can be used for compression of neural networks and the replication algorithm can be used for improving performance of the already trained neural networks. We also show that a combined algorithm of programmed death and replication can improve the learning efficiency of arbitrary machine learning systems. The computational advantages of the bio-inspired algorithms are demonstrated by training feedforward neural networks on the MNIST dataset of handwritten images.