OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Focus Areas, Themes, and Objectives of Non-Functional Requirements in DevOps: A Systematic Mapping Study
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

Software non-functional requirements address a multitude of objectives, expectations, and even liabilities that must be considered during development and operation. Typically, these non-functional requirements originate from different domains and their concrete scope, notion, and demarcation to functional requirements is often ambiguous. In this study we seek to categorize and analyze relevant work related to software engineering in a DevOps context in order to clarify the different focus areas, themes, and objectives underlying non-functional requirements and also to identify future research directions in this field. We conducted a systematic mapping study, including 142 selected primary studies, extracted the focus areas, and synthesized the themes and objectives of the described NFRs. In order to examine non-engineering-focused studies related to non-functional requirements in DevOps, we conducted a backward snowballing step and additionally included 17 primary studies. Our analysis revealed 7 recurrent focus areas and 41 themes that characterize NFRs in DevOps, along with typical objectives for these themes. Overall, the focus areas and themes of NFRs in DevOps are very diverse and reflect the different perspectives required to align software engineering with technical quality, business, compliance, and organizational considerations. The lack of methodological support for specifying, measuring, and evaluating fulfillment of these NFRs in DevOps-driven projects offers ample opportunities for future research in this field. Particularly, there is a need for empirically validated approaches for operationalizing non-engineering-focused objectives of software.
Event-Based Beam Tracking with Dynamic Beamwidth Adaptation in Terahertz (THz) Communications
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

Terahertz (THz) communication will be a key enabler for next-generation wireless systems. While THz frequency bands provide abundant bandwidth and extremely high data rates, their effective operation is inhibited by short communication ranges and narrow beams, thus, leading to major challenges pertaining to user mobility, beam alignment, and handover. In particular, there is a strong need for novel beam tracking methods that consider the tradeoff between enhancing the received signal strength via increasing beam directivity, and increasing the coverage probability by widening the beam. In this paper, a multi-objective optimization problem is formulated with the goal of jointly maximizing the expected rate and minimizing the outage probability subject to transmit power and overhead constraints. Subsequently, a novel parameterized beamformer with dynamic beamwidth adaptation is proposed. In addition to the precoder, an event-based beam tracking approach is introduced that efficiently prevents outages caused by beam misalignment and dynamic blockage while maintaining a low pilot overhead. Simulation results show that the proposed beamforming scheme improves average rate performance and reduces the amount of outages caused by the brittle THz misalignment process and the particularly severe path loss in the THz band. Moreover, the proposed event-triggered THz channel estimation approach enables connectivity with minimal overhead and reliable communication at THz bands.
Paired compressed cover trees guarantee a near linear parametrized complexity for all $k$-nearest neighbors search in an arbitrary metric space
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2022
Year: 2022

This paper studies the important problem of finding all $k$-nearest neighbors to points of a query set $Q$ in another reference set $R$ within any metric space. Our previous work defined compressed cover trees and corrected the key arguments in several past papers for challenging datasets. In 2009 Ram, Lee, March, and Gray attempted to improve the time complexity by using pairs of cover trees on the query and reference sets. In 2015 Curtin with the above co-authors used extra parameters to finally prove a time complexity for $k=1$. The current work fills all previous gaps and improves the nearest neighbor search based on pairs of new compressed cover trees. The novel imbalance parameter of paired trees allowed us to prove a better time complexity for any number of neighbors $k\geq 1$.
PerPaDa: A Persian Paraphrase Dataset based on Implicit Crowdsourcing Data Collection
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper we introduce PerPaDa, a Persian paraphrase dataset that is collected from users' input in a plagiarism detection system. As an implicit crowdsourcing experience, we have gathered a large collection of original and paraphrased sentences from Hamtajoo; a Persian plagiarism detection system, in which users try to conceal cases of text re-use in their documents by paraphrasing and re-submitting manuscripts for analysis. The compiled dataset contains 2446 instances of paraphrasing. In order to improve the overall quality of the collected data, some heuristics have been used to exclude sentences that don't meet the proposed criteria. The introduced corpus is much larger than the available datasets for the task of paraphrase identification in Persian. Moreover, there is less bias in the data compared to the similar datasets, since the users did not try some fixed predefined rules in order to generate similar texts to their original inputs.
Free Lunch for Testing: Fuzzing Deep-Learning Libraries from Open Source
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

Deep learning (DL) systems can make our life much easier, and thus are gaining more and more attention from both academia and industry. Meanwhile, bugs in DL systems can be disastrous, and can even threaten human lives in safety-critical applications. To date, a huge body of research efforts have been dedicated to testing DL models. However, interestingly, there is still limited work for testing the underlying DL libraries, which are the foundation for building, optimizing, and running DL models. One potential reason is that test generation for the underlying DL libraries can be rather challenging since their public APIs are mainly exposed in Python, making it even hard to automatically determine the API input parameter types due to dynamic typing. In this paper, we propose FreeFuzz, the first approach to fuzzing DL libraries via mining from open source. More specifically, FreeFuzz obtains code/models from three different sources: 1) code snippets from the library documentation, 2) library developer tests, and 3) DL models in the wild. Then, FreeFuzz automatically runs all the collected code/models with instrumentation to trace the dynamic information for each covered API, including the types and values of each parameter during invocation, and shapes of input/output tensors. Lastly, FreeFuzz will leverage the traced dynamic information to perform fuzz testing for each covered API. The extensive study of FreeFuzz on PyTorch and TensorFlow, two of the most popular DL libraries, shows that FreeFuzz is able to automatically trace valid dynamic information for fuzzing 1158 popular APIs, 9X more than state-of-the-art LEMON with 3.5X lower overhead than LEMON. To date, FreeFuzz has detected 49 bugs for PyTorch and TensorFlow (with 38 already confirmed by developers as previously unknown).
Proactive Query Expansion for Streaming Data Using External Source
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

Query expansion is the process of reformulating the original query by adding relevant words. Choosing which terms to add in order to improve the performance of the query expansion methods or to enhance the quality of the retrieved results is an important aspect of any information retrieval system. Adding words that can positively impact the quality of the search query or are informative enough play an important role in returning or gathering relevant documents that cover a certain topic can result in improving the efficiency of the information retrieval system. Typically, query expansion techniques are used to add or substitute words to a given search query to collect relevant data. In this paper, we design and implement a pipeline of automated query expansion. We outline several tools using different methods to expand the query. Our methods depend on targeting emergent events in streaming data over time and finding the hidden topics from targeted documents using probabilistic topic models. We employ Dynamic Eigenvector Centrality to trigger the emergent events, and the Latent Dirichlet Allocation to discover the topics. Also, we use an external data source as a secondary stream to supplement the primary stream with relevant words and expand the query using the words from both primary and secondary streams. An experimental study is performed on Twitter data (primary stream) related to the events that happened during protests in Baltimore in 2015. The quality of the retrieved results was measured using a quality indicator of the streaming data: tweets count, hashtag count, and hashtag clustering.
Planning Not to Talk: Multiagent Systems that are Robust to Communication Loss
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2022
Year: 2022

In a cooperative multiagent system, a collection of agents executes a joint policy in order to achieve some common objective. The successful deployment of such systems hinges on the availability of reliable inter-agent communication. However, many sources of potential disruption to communication exist in practice, such as radio interference, hardware failure, and adversarial attacks. In this work, we develop joint policies for cooperative multiagent systems that are robust to potential losses in communication. More specifically, we develop joint policies for cooperative Markov games with reach-avoid objectives. First, we propose an algorithm for the decentralized execution of joint policies during periods of communication loss. Next, we use the total correlation of the state-action process induced by a joint policy as a measure of the intrinsic dependencies between the agents. We then use this measure to lower-bound the performance of a joint policy when communication is lost. Finally, we present an algorithm that maximizes a proxy to this lower bound in order to synthesize minimum-dependency joint policies that are robust to communication loss. Numerical experiments show that the proposed minimum-dependency policies require minimal coordination between the agents while incurring little to no loss in performance; the total correlation value of the synthesized policy is one fifth of the total correlation value of the baseline policy which does not take potential communication losses into account. As a result, the performance of the minimum-dependency policies remains consistently high regardless of whether or not communication is available. By contrast, the performance of the baseline policy decreases by twenty percent when communication is lost.
Fast and Heavy Disjoint Weighted Matchings for Demand-Aware Datacenter Topologies
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

Reconfigurable optical topologies promise to improve the performance in datacenters by dynamically optimizing the physical network in a demand-aware manner. State-of-the-art optical technologies allow to establish and update direct connectivity (in the form of edge-disjoint matchings) between top-of-rack switches within microseconds or less. However, to fully exploit temporal structure in the demand, such fine-grained reconfigurations also require fast algorithms for optimizing the interconnecting matchings. Motivated by the desire to offload a maximum amount of demand to the reconfigurable network, this paper initiates the study of fast algorithms to find k disjoint heavy matchings in graphs. We present and analyze six algorithms, based on iterative matchings, b-matching, edge coloring, and node-rankings. We show that the problem is generally NP-hard and study the achievable approximation ratios. An extensive empirical evaluation of our algorithms on both real-world and synthetic traces (88 in total), including traces collected in Facebook datacenters and in HPC clusters reveals that all our algorithms provide high-quality matchings, and also very fast ones come within 95% or more of the best solution. However, the running times differ significantly and what is the best algorithm depends on k and the acceptable runtime-quality tradeoff.
Generalization in Supervised Learning Through Riemannian Contraction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

We prove that Riemannian contraction in a supervised learning setting implies generalization. Specifically, we show that if an optimizer is contracting in some Riemannian metric with rate $λ> 0$, it is uniformly algorithmically stable with rate $\mathcal{O}(1/λn)$, where $n$ is the number of labelled examples in the training set. The results hold for stochastic and deterministic optimization, in both continuous and discrete-time, for convex and non-convex loss surfaces. The associated generalization bounds reduce to well-known results in the particular case of gradient descent over convex or strongly convex loss surfaces. They can be shown to be optimal in certain linear settings, such as kernel ridge regression under gradient flow.
Unpaired Referring Expression Grounding via Bidirectional Cross-Modal Matching
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Referring expression grounding is an important and challenging task in computer vision. To avoid the laborious annotation in conventional referring grounding, unpaired referring grounding is introduced, where the training data only contains a number of images and queries without correspondences. The few existing solutions to unpaired referring grounding are still preliminary, due to the challenges of learning image-text matching and lack of the top-down guidance with unpaired data. In this paper, we propose a novel bidirectional cross-modal matching (BiCM) framework to address these challenges. Particularly, we design a query-aware attention map (QAM) module that introduces top-down perspective via generating query-specific visual attention maps. A cross-modal object matching (COM) module is further introduced, which exploits the recently emerged image-text matching pretrained model, CLIP, to predict the target objects from a bottom-up perspective. The top-down and bottom-up predictions are then integrated via a similarity funsion (SF) module. We also propose a knowledge adaptation matching (KAM) module that leverages unpaired training data to adapt pretrained knowledge to the target dataset and task. Experiments show that our framework outperforms previous works by 6.55% and 9.94% on two popular grounding datasets.
Flat Teams Drive Scientific Innovation
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2022
Year: 2022

With teams growing in all areas of scientific and scholarly research, we explore the relationship between team structure and the character of knowledge they produce. Drawing on 89,575 self-reports of team member research activity underlying scientific publications, we show how individual activities cohere into broad roles of (1) leadership through the direction and presentation of research and (2) support through data collection, analysis and discussion. The hidden hierarchy of a scientific team is characterized by its lead (or L)-ratio of members playing leadership roles to total team size. The L-ratio is validated through correlation with imputed contributions to the specific paper and to science as a whole, which we use to effectively extrapolate the L-ratio for 16,397,750 papers where roles are not explicit. We find that relative to flat, egalitarian teams, tall, hierarchical teams produce less novelty and more often develop existing ideas; increase productivity for those on top and decrease it for those beneath; increase short-term citations but decrease long-term influence. These effects hold within-person -- the same person on the same-sized team produces science much more likely to disruptively innovate if they work on a flat, high L-ratio team. These results suggest the critical role flat teams play for sustainable scientific advance and the training and advancement of scientists.
HashSet -- A Dataset For Hashtag Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Hashtag segmentation is the task of breaking a hashtag into its constituent tokens. Hashtags often encode the essence of user-generated posts, along with information like topic and sentiment, which are useful in downstream tasks. Hashtags prioritize brevity and are written in unique ways -- transliterating and mixing languages, spelling variations, creative named entities. Benchmark datasets used for the hashtag segmentation task -- STAN, BOUN -- are small in size and extracted from a single set of tweets. However, datasets should reflect the variations in writing styles of hashtags and also account for domain and language specificity, failing which the results will misrepresent model performance. We argue that model performance should be assessed on a wider variety of hashtags, and datasets should be carefully curated. To this end, we propose HashSet, a dataset comprising of: a) 1.9k manually annotated dataset; b) 3.3M loosely supervised dataset. HashSet dataset is sampled from a different set of tweets when compared to existing datasets and provides an alternate distribution of hashtags to build and validate hashtag segmentation models. We show that the performance of SOTA models for Hashtag Segmentation drops substantially on proposed dataset, indicating that the proposed dataset provides an alternate set of hashtags to train and assess models.
Hierarchical Neural Network Approaches for Long Document Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Text classification algorithms investigate the intricate relationships between words or phrases and attempt to deduce the document's interpretation. In the last few years, these algorithms have progressed tremendously. Transformer architecture and sentence encoders have proven to give superior results on natural language processing tasks. But a major limitation of these architectures is their applicability for text no longer than a few hundred words. In this paper, we explore hierarchical transfer learning approaches for long document classification. We employ pre-trained Universal Sentence Encoder (USE) and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) in a hierarchical setup to capture better representations efficiently. Our proposed models are conceptually simple where we divide the input data into chunks and then pass this through base models of BERT and USE. Then output representation for each chunk is then propagated through a shallow neural network comprising of LSTMs or CNNs for classifying the text data. These extensions are evaluated on 6 benchmark datasets. We show that USE + CNN/LSTM performs better than its stand-alone baseline. Whereas the BERT + CNN/LSTM performs on par with its stand-alone counterpart. However, the hierarchical BERT models are still desirable as it avoids the quadratic complexity of the attention mechanism in BERT. Along with the hierarchical approaches, this work also provides a comparison of different deep learning algorithms like USE, BERT, HAN, Longformer, and BigBird for long document classification. The Longformer approach consistently performs well on most of the datasets.
Leaving No One Behind: A Multi-Scenario Multi-Task Meta Learning Approach for Advertiser Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Advertisers play an essential role in many e-commerce platforms like Taobao and Amazon. Fulfilling their marketing needs and supporting their business growth is critical to the long-term prosperity of platform economies. However, compared with extensive studies on user modeling such as click-through rate predictions, much less attention has been drawn to advertisers, especially in terms of understanding their diverse demands and performance. Different from user modeling, advertiser modeling generally involves many kinds of tasks (e.g. predictions of advertisers' expenditure, active-rate, or total impressions of promoted products). In addition, major e-commerce platforms often provide multiple marketing scenarios (e.g. Sponsored Search, Display Ads, Live Streaming Ads) while advertisers' behavior tend to be dispersed among many of them. This raises the necessity of multi-task and multi-scenario consideration in comprehensive advertiser modeling, which faces the following challenges: First, one model per scenario or per task simply doesn't scale; Second, it is particularly hard to model new or minor scenarios with limited data samples; Third, inter-scenario correlations are complicated, and may vary given different tasks. To tackle these challenges, we propose a multi-scenario multi-task meta learning approach (M2M) which simultaneously predicts multiple tasks in multiple advertising scenarios.
Hardware-Efficient Deconvolution-Based GAN for Edge Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) are cutting-edge algorithms for generating new data samples based on the learned data distribution. However, its performance comes at a significant cost in terms of computation and memory requirements. In this paper, we proposed an HW/SW co-design approach for training quantized deconvolution GAN (QDCGAN) implemented on FPGA using a scalable streaming dataflow architecture capable of achieving higher throughput versus resource utilization trade-off. The developed accelerator is based on an efficient deconvolution engine that offers high parallelism with respect to scaling factors for GAN-based edge computing. Furthermore, various precisions, datasets, and network scalability were analyzed for low-power inference on resource-constrained platforms. Lastly, an end-to-end open-source framework is provided for training, implementation, state-space exploration, and scaling the inference using Vivado high-level synthesis for Xilinx SoC-FPGAs, and a comparison testbed with Jetson Nano.
Examining Autocompletion as a Basic Concept for Interaction with Generative AI
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

Autocompletion is an approach that extends and continues partial user input. We propose to interpret autocompletion as a basic interaction concept in human-AI interaction. We first describe the concept of autocompletion and dissect its user interface and interaction elements, using the well-established textual autocompletion in search engines as an example. We then highlight how these elements reoccur in other application domains, such as code completion, GUI sketching, and layouting. This comparison and transfer highlights an inherent role of such intelligent systems to extend and complete user input, in particular useful for designing interactions with and for generative AI. We reflect on and discuss our conceptual analysis of autocompletion to provide inspiration and a conceptual lens on current challenges in designing for human-AI interaction.