OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Targetless Extrinsic Calibration of Stereo Cameras, Thermal Cameras, and Laser Sensors in the Wild
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

The fusion of multi-modal sensors has become increasingly popular in autonomous driving and intelligent robots since it can provide richer information than any single sensor, enhance reliability in complex environments. Multi-sensor extrinsic calibration is one of the key factors of sensor fusion. However, such calibration is difficult due to the variety of sensor modalities and the requirement of calibration targets and human labor. In this paper, we demonstrate a new targetless cross-modal calibration framework by focusing on the extrinsic transformations among stereo cameras, thermal cameras, and laser sensors. Specifically, the calibration between stereo and laser is conducted in 3D space by minimizing the registration error, while the thermal extrinsic to the other two sensors is estimated by optimizing the alignment of the edge features. Our method requires no dedicated targets and performs the multi-sensor calibration in a single shot without human interaction. Experimental results show that the calibration framework is accurate and applicable in general scenes.
Following the Data, Not the Function: Rethinking Function Orchestration in Serverless Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

Serverless applications are typically composed of function workflows in which multiple short-lived functions are triggered to exchange data in response to events or state changes. Current serverless platforms coordinate and trigger functions by following high-level invocation dependencies but are oblivious to the underlying data exchanges between functions. This design is neither efficient nor easy to use in orchestrating complex workflows -- developers often have to manage complex function interactions by themselves, with customized implementation and unsatisfactory performance. In this paper, we argue that function orchestration should follow a data-centric approach. In our design, the platform provides a data bucket abstraction to hold the intermediate data generated by functions. Developers can use a rich set of data trigger primitives to control when and how the output of each function should be passed to the next functions in a workflow. By making data consumption explicit and allowing it to trigger functions and drive the workflow, complex function interactions can be easily and efficiently supported. We present Pheromone -- a scalable, low-latency serverless platform following this data-centric design. Compared to well-established commercial and open-source platforms, Pheromone cuts the latencies of function interactions and data exchanges by orders of magnitude, scales to large workflows, and enables easy implementation of complex applications.
Generalising the achromatic number to Zaslavsky's colourings of signed graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2022
Year: 2022

The chromatic number, which refers to the minimum number of colours required to colour the vertices of graphs properly, is one of the most central notions of the graph chromatic theory. Several of its aspects of interest have been investigated in the literature, including variants for modifications of proper colourings. These variants include, notably, the achromatic number of graphs, which is the maximum number of colours required to colour the vertices of graphs properly so that each possible combination of distinct colours is assigned along some edge. The behaviours of this parameter have led to many investigations of interest, bringing to light both similarities and discrepancies with the chromatic number. This work takes place in a recent trend aiming at extending the chromatic theory of graphs to the realm of signed graphs, and, in particular, at investigating how classic results adapt to the signed context. Most of the works done in that line to date are with respect to two main generalisations of proper colourings of signed graphs, attributed to Zaslavsky and Guenin. Generalising the achromatic number to signed graphs was initiated recently by Lajou, his investigations being related to Guenin's colourings. We here pursue this line of research, but with taking Zaslavsky's colourings as our notion of proper colourings. We study the general behaviour of our resulting variant of the achromatic number, mainly by investigating how known results on the classic achromatic number generalise to our context. Our results cover, notably, bounds, standard operations on graphs, and complexity aspects.
Might I Get Pwned: A Second Generation Compromised Credential Checking Service
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Credential stuffing attacks use stolen passwords to log into victim accounts. To defend against these attacks, recently deployed compromised credential checking (C3) services provide APIs that help users and companies check whether a username, password pair is exposed. These services however only check if the exact password is leaked, and therefore do not mitigate credential tweaking attacks - attempts to compromise a user account with variants of a user's leaked passwords. Recent work has shown credential tweaking attacks can compromise accounts quite effectively even when the credential stuffing countermeasures are in place. We initiate work on C3 services that protect users from credential tweaking attacks. The core underlying challenge is how to identify passwords that are similar to their leaked passwords while preserving honest clients' privacy and also preventing malicious clients from extracting breach data from the service. We formalize the problem and explore ways to measure password similarity that balance efficacy, performance, and security. Based on this study, we design "Might I Get Pwned" (MIGP), a new kind of breach alerting service. Our simulations show that MIGP reduces the efficacy of state-of-the-art 1000-guess credential tweaking attacks by 94%. MIGP preserves user privacy and limits potential exposure of sensitive breach entries. We show that the protocol is fast, with response time close to existing C3 services. We worked with Cloudflare to deploy MIGP in practice.
Impact of Channel Variation on One-Class Learning for Spoof Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Margin-based losses, especially one-class classification loss, have improved the generalization capabilities of countermeasure systems (CMs), but their reliability is not tested with spoofing attacks degraded with channel variation. Our experiments aim to tackle this in two ways: first, by investigating the impact of various codec simulations and their corresponding parameters, namely bit-rate, discontinuous transmission (DTX), and loss, on the performance of the one-class classification-based CM system; second, by testing the efficacy of the various settings of margin-based losses for training and evaluating our CM system on codec simulated data. Multi-conditional training (MCT) along with various data-feeding and custom mini-batching strategies were also explored to handle the added variability in the new data setting and to find an optimal setting to carry out the above experiments. Our experimental results reveal that a strict restrain over the embedding space degrades the performance of the one-class classification model. MCT relatively improves performance by 35.55\%, and custom mini-batching captures more generalized features for the new data setting. Whereas varying the codec parameters made a significant impact on the performance of the countermeasure system.
SsAG: Summarization and sparsification of Attributed Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2022
Year: 2022

We present SsAG, an efficient and scalable lossy graph summarization method that retains the essential structure of the original graph. SsAG computes a sparse representation (summary) of the input graph and also caters to graphs with node attributes. The summary of a graph $G$ is stored as a graph on supernodes (subsets of vertices of $G$), and a weighted superedge connects two supernodes. The proposed method constructs a summary graph on $k$ supernodes that minimize the reconstruction error (difference between the original graph and the graph reconstructed from the summary) and maximum homogeneity with respect to attributes. We construct the summary by iteratively merging a pair of nodes. We derive a closed-form expression to efficiently compute the reconstruction error after merging a pair and approximate this score in constant time. To reduce the search space for selecting the best pair for merging, we assign a weight to each supernode that closely quantifies the contribution of the node in the score of the pairs containing it. We choose the best pair for merging from a random sample of supernodes selected with probability proportional to their weights. A logarithmic-sized sample yields a comparable summary based on various quality measures with weighted sampling. We propose a sparsification step for the constructed summary to reduce the storage cost to a given target size with a marginal increase in reconstruction error. Empirical evaluation on several real-world graphs and comparison with state-of-the-art methods shows that SsAG is up to $5\times$ faster and generates summaries of comparable quality.
A simple Sign-Bit Probabilistic Shaping Scheme
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

We propose a new shaping scheme for the Gaussian channel whose complexity is approximately half the one of a binary distribution matcher (DM). The result is obtained as follows: We first show that most of the shaping gain can be obtained via a simplified version of sign-bit shaping, which uses only two non-uniform binary sources. This is achieved by considering a stepwise Maxwell-Boltzmann-like distribution of the symbols. One of the two binary sources has a parameter $p$ close to 0. Hence, we then describe a binary DM which explicitly takes advantage of this aspect and has a negligible complexity. Since the two binary sources are used alternately with equal probability, the complexity of the proposed shaping scheme is half the one of the second binary DM.
State Complexity of Protocols With Leaders
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2022
Year: 2022

Population protocols are a model of computation in which an arbitrary number of anonymous finite-memory agents are interacting in order to decide by stable consensus a predicate. In this paper, we focus on the counting predicates that asks, given an initial configuration, whether the number of agents in some initial state $i$ is at least $n$. In 2018, Blondin, Esparza, and Jaax shown that with a fix number of leaders and interaction-width, there exists infinitely many $n$ for which the counting predicate is stably computable by a protocol with at most $O(\log\log(n))$ states. We provide in this paper a matching lower-bound (up to a square root) that improves the inverse-Ackermannian lower-bound presented at PODC in 2021.
Federated Dropout -- A Simple Approach for Enabling Federated Learning on Resource Constrained Devices
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Federated learning (FL) is a popular framework for training an AI model using distributed mobile data in a wireless network. It features data parallelism by distributing the learning task to multiple edge devices while attempting to preserve their local-data privacy. One main challenge confronting practical FL is that resource constrained devices struggle with the computation intensive task of updating of a deep-neural network model. To tackle the challenge, in this paper, a federated dropout (FedDrop) scheme is proposed building on the classic dropout scheme for random model pruning. Specifically, in each iteration of the FL algorithm, several subnets are independently generated from the global model at the server using dropout but with heterogeneous dropout rates (i.e., parameter-pruning probabilities),each of which is adapted to the state of an assigned channel. The subnets are downloaded to associated devices for updating. Thereby, FedDrop reduces both the communication overhead and devices' computation loads compared with the conventional FL while outperforming the latter in the case of overfitting and also the FL scheme with uniform dropout (i.e., identical subnets).
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for LiDAR Panoptic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Scene understanding is a pivotal task for autonomous vehicles to safely navigate in the environment. Recent advances in deep learning enable accurate semantic reconstruction of the surroundings from LiDAR data. However, these models encounter a large domain gap while deploying them on vehicles equipped with different LiDAR setups which drastically decreases their performance. Fine-tuning the model for every new setup is infeasible due to the expensive and cumbersome process of recording and manually labeling new data. Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) techniques are thus essential to fill this domain gap and retain the performance of models on new sensor setups without the need for additional data labeling. In this paper, we propose AdaptLPS, a novel UDA approach for LiDAR panoptic segmentation that leverages task-specific knowledge and accounts for variation in the number of scan lines, mounting position, intensity distribution, and environmental conditions. We tackle the UDA task by employing two complementary domain adaptation strategies, data-based and model-based. While data-based adaptations reduce the domain gap by processing the raw LiDAR scans to resemble the scans in the target domain, model-based techniques guide the network in extracting features that are representative for both domains. Extensive evaluations on three pairs of real-world autonomous driving datasets demonstrate that AdaptLPS outperforms existing UDA approaches by up to 6.41 pp in terms of the PQ score.
Inequality and Inequity in Network-based Ranking and Recommendation Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2022
Year: 2022

Though algorithms promise many benefits including efficiency, objectivity and accuracy, they may also introduce or amplify biases. Here we study two well-known algorithms, namely PageRank and Who-to-Follow (WTF), and show to what extent their ranks produce inequality and inequity when applied to directed social networks. To this end, we propose a directed network model with preferential attachment and homophily (DPAH) and demonstrate the influence of network structure on the rank distributions of these algorithms. Our main findings suggest that (i) inequality is positively correlated with inequity, (ii) inequality is driven by the interplay between preferential attachment, homophily, node activity and edge density, and (iii) inequity is driven by the interplay between homophily and minority size. In particular, these two algorithms reduce, replicate and amplify the representation of minorities in top ranks when majorities are homophilic, neutral and heterophilic, respectively. Moreover, when this representation is reduced, minorities may improve their visibility in the rank by connecting strategically in the network. For instance, by increasing their out-degree or homophily when majorities are also homophilic. These findings shed light on the social and algorithmic mechanisms that hinder equality and equity in network-based ranking and recommendation algorithms.
Vision-Only Robot Navigation in a Neural Radiance World
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for the representation of natural, complex 3D scenes. NeRFs represent continuous volumetric density and RGB values in a neural network, and generate photo-realistic images from unseen camera viewpoints through ray tracing. We propose an algorithm for navigating a robot through a 3D environment represented as a NeRF using only an on-board RGB camera for localization. We assume the NeRF for the scene has been pre-trained offline, and the robot's objective is to navigate through unoccupied space in the NeRF to reach a goal pose. We introduce a trajectory optimization algorithm that avoids collisions with high-density regions in the NeRF based on a discrete time version of differential flatness that is amenable to constraining the robot's full pose and control inputs. We also introduce an optimization based filtering method to estimate 6DoF pose and velocities for the robot in the NeRF given only an onboard RGB camera. We combine the trajectory planner with the pose filter in an online replanning loop to give a vision-based robot navigation pipeline. We present simulation results with a quadrotor robot navigating through a jungle gym environment, the inside of a church, and Stonehenge using only an RGB camera. We also demonstrate an omnidirectional ground robot navigating through the church, requiring it to reorient to fit through the narrow gap. Videos of this work can be found at https://mikh3x4.github.io/nerf-navigation/ .
An Exact, Linear Time Barabási-Albert Algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

This paper presents the development of a new class of algorithms that accurately implement the preferential attachment mechanism of the Barabási-Albert (BA) model to generate scale-free graphs. Contrary to existing approximate preferential attachment schemes, our methods are exact in terms of the proportionality of the vertex selection probabilities to their degree and run in linear time with respect to the order of the generated graph. Our algorithms utilize a series of precise, diverse, weighted and unweighted random sampling steps to engineer the desired properties of the graph generator. We analytically show that they obey the definition of the original BA model that generates scale-free graphs and discuss their higher-order properties. The proposed methods additionally include options to manipulate one dimension of control over the joint inclusion of groups of vertices.
Personalized Rehabilitation Robotics based on Online Learning Control
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

The use of rehabilitation robotics in clinical applications gains increasing importance, due to therapeutic benefits and the ability to alleviate labor-intensive works. However, their practical utility is dependent on the deployment of appropriate control algorithms, which adapt the level of task-assistance according to each individual patient's need. Generally, the required personalization is achieved through manual tuning by clinicians, which is cumbersome and error-prone. In this work we propose a novel online learning control architecture, which is able to personalize the control force at run time to each individual user. To this end, we deploy Gaussian process-based online learning with previously unseen prediction and update rates. Finally, we evaluate our method in an experimental user study, where the learning controller is shown to provide personalized control, while also obtaining safe interaction forces.
A survey on datasets for fairness-aware machine learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

As decision-making increasingly relies on Machine Learning (ML) and (big) data, the issue of fairness in data-driven Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems is receiving increasing attention from both research and industry. A large variety of fairness-aware machine learning solutions have been proposed which involve fairness-related interventions in the data, learning algorithms and/or model outputs. However, a vital part of proposing new approaches is evaluating them empirically on benchmark datasets that represent realistic and diverse settings. Therefore, in this paper, we overview real-world datasets used for fairness-aware machine learning. We focus on tabular data as the most common data representation for fairness-aware machine learning. We start our analysis by identifying relationships between the different attributes, particularly w.r.t. protected attributes and class attribute, using a Bayesian network. For a deeper understanding of bias in the datasets, we investigate the interesting relationships using exploratory analysis.
One-Bit Matrix Completion with Differential Privacy
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

As a prevailing collaborative filtering method for recommendation systems, one-bit matrix completion requires data collected by users to provide personalized service. Due to insidious attacks and unexpected inference, the release of users' data often raises serious privacy concerns. To address this issue, differential privacy(DP) has been widely used in standard matrix completion models. To date, however, little has been known about how to apply DP to achieve privacy protection in one-bit matrix completion. In this paper, we propose a unified framework for ensuring a strong privacy guarantee of one-bit matrix completion with DP. In our framework, we develop four different private perturbation mechanisms corresponding to different stages of one-bit matrix completion. For each mechanism, we design a privacy-preserving algorithm and provide a theoretical recovery error bound under the proper conditions. Numerical experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal. Compared to the one-bit matrix completion without privacy protection, our proposed mechanisms can maintain high-level privacy protection with marginal loss of completion accuracy.
Matching Models for Graph Retrieval
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

Graph Retrieval has witnessed continued interest and progress in the past few years. In thisreport, we focus on neural network based approaches for Graph matching and retrieving similargraphs from a corpus of graphs. We explore methods which can soft predict the similaritybetween two graphs. Later, we gauge the power of a particular baseline (Shortest Path Kernel)and try to model it in our product graph random walks setting while making it more generalised.
Multi-Document Keyphrase Extraction: Dataset, Baselines and Review
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Keyphrase extraction has been extensively researched within the single-document setting, with an abundance of methods, datasets and applications. In contrast, multi-document keyphrase extraction has been infrequently studied, despite its utility for describing sets of documents, and its use in summarization. Moreover, no prior dataset exists for multi-document keyphrase extraction, hindering the progress of the task. Recent advances in multi-text processing make the task an even more appealing challenge to pursue. To stimulate this pursuit, we present here the first dataset for the task, MK-DUC-01, which can serve as a new benchmark, and test multiple keyphrase extraction baselines on our data. In addition, we provide a brief, yet comprehensive, literature review of the task.
Aerial Base Station Placement: A Tutorial Introduction
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

The deployment of Aerial Base Stations (ABSs) mounted on board Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is emerging as a promising technology to provide connectivity in areas where terrestrial infrastructure is insufficient or absent. This may occur for example in remote areas, large events, emergency situations, or areas affected by a natural disaster such as a wildfire or a tsunami. To successfully materialize this goal, it is required that ABSs are placed at locations in 3D space that ensure a high quality of service (QoS) to the ground terminals. This paper provides a tutorial introduction to this ABS placement problem where the fundamental challenges and trade-offs are first investigated by means of a toy application example. Next, the different approaches in the literature to address the aforementioned challenges in both 2D or 3D space will be introduced and a discussion on adaptive placement will be provided. The paper is concluded by discussing future research directions.