OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
ATM: Black-box Test Case Minimization based on Test Code Similarity and Evolutionary Search
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

Executing large test suites is time and resource consuming, sometimes impossible, and such test suites typically contain many redundant test cases. Hence, test case minimization is used to remove redundant test cases that are unlikely to detect new faults. However, most test case (suite) minimization techniques rely on code coverage (white-box), model-based features, or requirements specifications, which are not always accessible by test engineers. Recently, a set of novel techniques was proposed, called FAST-R, relying solely on test case code for test case minimization, which appeared to be much more efficient than white-box techniques. However, it achieved a comparable low fault detection capability for Java projects, making its application challenging in practice. This paper proposes ATM (AST-based Test case Minimizer), a similarity-based, search-based test case minimization technique, taking a specific budget as input, that also relies exclusively on the source code of test cases but attempts to achieve higher fault detection through finer-grained similarity analysis and a dedicated search algorithm. ATM transforms test case code into Abstract Syntax Trees (AST) and relies on four tree-based similarity measures to apply evolutionary search, specifically genetic algorithms, to minimize test cases. We evaluated the effectiveness and efficiency of ATM on a large dataset of 16 Java projects with 661 faulty versions using three budgets ranging from 25% to 75% of test suites. ATM achieved significantly higher fault detection rates (0.82 on average), compared to FAST-R (0.61 on average) and random minimization (0.52 on average), when running only 50% of the test cases, within practically acceptable time (1.1-4.3 hours, on average), given that minimization is only occasionally applied when many new test cases are created (major releases). Results achieved for other budgets were consistent.
Multi-feature Dataset for Windows PE Malware Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

This paper describes a multi-feature dataset for training machine learning classifiers for detecting malicious Windows Portable Executable (PE) files. The dataset includes four feature sets from 18,551 binary samples belonging to five malware families including Spyware, Ransomware, Downloader, Backdoor and Generic Malware. The feature sets include the list of DLLs and their functions, values of different fields of PE Header and Sections. First, we explain the data collection and creation phase and then we explain how did we label the samples in it using VirusTotal's services. Finally, we explore the dataset to describe how this dataset can benefit the researchers for static malware analysis. The dataset is made public in the hope that it will help inspire machine learning research for malware detection.
Hierarchical Automatic Power Plane Generation with Genetic Optimization and Multilayer Perceptron
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2022
Year: 2022

We present an automatic multilayer power plane generation method to accelerate the design of printed circuit boards (PCB). In PCB design, while automatic solvers have been developed to predict important indicators such as the IR-drop, power integrity, and signal integrity, the generation of the power plane itself still largely relies on laborious manual methods. Our automatic power plane generation approach is based on genetic optimization combined with a multilayer perceptron and is able to automatically generate power planes across a diverse set of problems with varying levels of difficulty. Our method GOMLP consists of an outer loop genetic optimizer (GO) and an inner loop multi-layer perceptron (MLP) that generate power planes automatically. The critical elements of our approach include contour detection, feature expansion, and a distance measure to enable island-minimizing complex power plane generation. We compare our approach to a baseline solution based on A*. The A* method consisting of a sequential island generation and merging process which can produce less than ideal solutions. Our experimental results show that on single layer power plane problems, our method outperforms A* in 71% of the problems with varying levels of board layout difficulty. We further describe H-GOMLP, which extends GOMLP to multilayer power plane problems using hierarchical clustering and net similarities based on the Hausdorff distance.
Parallel Breadth-First Search and Exact Shortest Paths and Stronger Notions for Approximate Distances
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

We introduce stronger notions for approximate single-source shortest-path distances, show how to efficiently compute them from weaker standard notions, and demonstrate the algorithmic power of these new notions and transformations. One application is the first work-efficient parallel algorithm for computing exact single-source shortest paths graphs -- resolving a major open problem in parallel computing. Given a source vertex in a directed graph with polynomially-bounded nonnegative integer lengths, the algorithm computes an exact shortest path tree in $m \log^{O(1)} n$ work and $n^{1/2+o(1)}$ depth. Previously, no parallel algorithm improving the trivial linear depths of Dijkstra's algorithm without significantly increasing the work was known, even for the case of undirected and unweighted graphs (i.e., for computing a BFS-tree). Our main result is a black-box transformation that uses $\log^{O(1)} n$ standard approximate distance computations to produce approximate distances which also satisfy the subtractive triangle inequality (up to a $(1+\varepsilon)$ factor) and even induce an exact shortest path tree in a graph with only slightly perturbed edge lengths. These strengthened approximations are algorithmically significantly more powerful and overcome well-known and often encountered barriers for using approximate distances. In directed graphs they can even be boosted to exact distances. This results in a black-box transformation of any (parallel or distributed) algorithm for approximate shortest paths in directed graphs into an algorithm computing exact distances at essentially no cost. Applying this to the recent breakthroughs of Fineman et al. for compute approximate SSSP-distances via approximate hopsets gives new parallel and distributed algorithm for exact shortest paths.
Proposal of FPGA logic change after service launch for environment adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

In order to make full use of heterogeneous hardware, it is necessary to have a technical skill of hardware such as OpenCL, and the current situation is that the barrier is high. Based on this background, I have proposed environment-adaptive software that enables high-performance operation by automatically converting application code written for normal CPUs by engineers according to the deployed environment and setting appropriate amount of resources. Until now, I only considered conversions and settings before the start of operation. In this paper, I verify that the logic is reconfigured according to the usage characteristics during operation. I confirm that the application running on the FPGA is reconfigured into another application according to the usage characteristics.
Transferability-based Chain Motion Mapping from Humans to Humanoids for Teleoperation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Although data-driven motion mapping methods are promising to allow intuitive robot control and teleoperation that generate human-like robot movement, they normally require tedious pair-wise training for each specific human and robot pair. This paper proposes a transferability-based mapping scheme to allow new robot and human input systems to leverage the mapping of existing trained pairs to form a mapping transfer chain, which will reduce the number of new pair-specific mappings that need to be generated. The first part of the mapping schematic is the development of a Synergy Mapping via Dual-Autoencoder (SyDa) method. This method uses the latent features from two autoencoders to extract the common synergy of the two agents. Secondly, a transferability metric is created that approximates how well the mapping between a pair of agents will perform compared to another pair before creating the motion mapping models. Thus, it can guide the formation of an optimal mapping chain for the new human-robot pair. Experiments with human subjects and a Pepper robot demonstrated 1) The SyDa method improves the accuracy and generalizability of the pair mappings, 2) the SyDa method allows for bidirectional mapping that does not prioritize the direction of mapping motion, and 3) the transferability metric measures how compatible two agents are for accurate teleoperation. The combination of the SyDa method and transferability metric creates generalizable and accurate mapping need to create the transfer mapping chain.
GowFed -- A novel Federated Network Intrusion Detection System
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Network intrusion detection systems are evolving into intelligent systems that perform data analysis while searching for anomalies in their environment. Indeed, the development of deep learning techniques paved the way to build more complex and effective threat detection models. However, training those models may be computationally infeasible in most Edge or IoT devices. Current approaches rely on powerful centralized servers that receive data from all their parties - violating basic privacy constraints and substantially affecting response times and operational costs due to the huge communication overheads. To mitigate these issues, Federated Learning emerged as a promising approach, where different agents collaboratively train a shared model, without exposing training data to others or requiring a compute-intensive centralized infrastructure. This work presents GowFed, a novel network threat detection system that combines the usage of Gower Dissimilarity matrices and Federated averaging. Different approaches of GowFed have been developed based on state-of the-art knowledge: (1) a vanilla version; and (2) a version instrumented with an attention mechanism. Furthermore, each variant has been tested using simulation oriented tools provided by TensorFlow Federated framework. In the same way, a centralized analogous development of the Federated systems is carried out to explore their differences in terms of scalability and performance - across a set of designed experiments/scenarios. Overall, GowFed intends to be the first stepping stone towards the combined usage of Federated Learning and Gower Dissimilarity matrices to detect network threats in industrial-level networks.
Curiosity-Driven Multi-Agent Exploration with Mixed Objectives
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

Intrinsic rewards have been increasingly used to mitigate the sparse reward problem in single-agent reinforcement learning. These intrinsic rewards encourage the agent to look for novel experiences, guiding the agent to explore the environment sufficiently despite the lack of extrinsic rewards. Curiosity-driven exploration is a simple yet efficient approach that quantifies this novelty as the prediction error of the agent's curiosity module, an internal neural network that is trained to predict the agent's next state given its current state and action. We show here, however, that naively using this curiosity-driven approach to guide exploration in sparse reward cooperative multi-agent environments does not consistently lead to improved results. Straightforward multi-agent extensions of curiosity-driven exploration take into consideration either individual or collective novelty only and thus, they do not provide a distinct but collaborative intrinsic reward signal that is essential for learning in cooperative multi-agent tasks. In this work, we propose a curiosity-driven multi-agent exploration method that has the mixed objective of motivating the agents to explore the environment in ways that are individually and collectively novel. First, we develop a two-headed curiosity module that is trained to predict the corresponding agent's next observation in the first head and the next joint observation in the second head. Second, we design the intrinsic reward formula to be the sum of the individual and joint prediction errors of this curiosity module. We empirically show that the combination of our curiosity module architecture and intrinsic reward formulation guides multi-agent exploration more efficiently than baseline approaches, thereby providing the best performance boost to MARL algorithms in cooperative navigation environments with sparse rewards.
The isotropy group of the matrix multiplication tensor
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2022
Year: 2022

By an {\em isotropy group} of a tensor $t\in V_1 \otimes V_2\otimes V_3=\widetilde V$ we mean the group of all invertible linear transformations of $\widetilde V$ that leave $t$ invariant and are compatible (in an obvious sense) with the structure of tensor product on~$\widetilde V$. We consider the case where $t$ is the structure tensor of multiplication map of rectangular matrices. The isotropy group of this tensor was studied in 1970s by de Groote, Strassen, and Brockett-Dobkin. In the present work we enlarge, make more precise, expose in the language of group actions on tensor spaces, and endow with proofs the results previously known. This is necessary for studying the algorithms of fast matrix multiplication admitting symmetries. The latter seems to be a promising new way for constructing fast algorithms.
DeFIX: Detecting and Fixing Failure Scenarios with Reinforcement Learning in Imitation Learning Based Autonomous Driving
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Safely navigating through an urban environment without violating any traffic rules is a crucial performance target for reliable autonomous driving. In this paper, we present a Reinforcement Learning (RL) based methodology to DEtect and FIX (DeFIX) failures of an Imitation Learning (IL) agent by extracting infraction spots and re-constructing mini-scenarios on these infraction areas to train an RL agent for fixing the shortcomings of the IL approach. DeFIX is a continuous learning framework, where extraction of failure scenarios and training of RL agents are executed in an infinite loop. After each new policy is trained and added to the library of policies, a policy classifier method effectively decides on which policy to activate at each step during the evaluation. It is demonstrated that even with only one RL agent trained on failure scenario of an IL agent, DeFIX method is either competitive or does outperform state-of-the-art IL and RL based autonomous urban driving benchmarks. We trained and validated our approach on the most challenging map (Town05) of CARLA simulator which involves complex, realistic, and adversarial driving scenarios. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/data-and-decision-lab/DeFIX
SearchTrack: Multiple Object Tracking with Object-Customized Search and Motion-Aware Features
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

The paper presents a new method, SearchTrack, for multiple object tracking and segmentation (MOTS). To address the association problem between detected objects, SearchTrack proposes object-customized search and motion-aware features. By maintaining a Kalman filter for each object, we encode the predicted motion into the motion-aware feature, which includes both motion and appearance cues. For each object, a customized fully convolutional search engine is created by SearchTrack by learning a set of weights for dynamic convolutions specific to the object. Experiments demonstrate that our SearchTrack method outperforms competitive methods on both MOTS and MOT tasks, particularly in terms of association accuracy. Our method achieves 71.5 HOTA (car) and 57.6 HOTA (pedestrian) on the KITTI MOTS and 53.4 HOTA on MOT17. In terms of association accuracy, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance among 2D online methods on the KITTI MOTS. Our code is available at https://github.com/qa276390/SearchTrack.
Track2Vec: fairness music recommendation with a GPU-free customizable-driven framework
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

Recommendation systems have illustrated the significant progress made in characterizing users' preferences based on their past behaviors. Despite the effectiveness of recommending accurately, there exist several factors that are essential but unexplored for evaluating various facets of recommendation systems, e.g., fairness, diversity, and limited resources. To address these issues, we propose Track2Vec, a GPU-free customizable-driven framework for fairness music recommendation. In order to take both accuracy and fairness into account, our solution consists of three modules, a customized fairness-aware groups for modeling different features based on configurable settings, a track representation learning module for learning better user embedding, and an ensemble module for ranking the recommendation results from different track representation learning modules. Moreover, inspired by TF-IDF which has been widely used in natural language processing, we introduce a metric called Miss Rate - Inverse Ground Truth Frequency (MR-ITF) to measure the fairness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves a 4th price ranking in a GPU-free environment on the leaderboard in the EvalRS @ CIKM 2022 challenge, which is superior to the official baseline by about 200% in terms of the official scores. In addition, the ablation study illustrates the necessity of ensembling each group to acquire both accurate and fair recommendations.
an intelligent security centered resource-efficient resource management model for cloud computing environments
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

This paper proposes a conceptual model for a secure and performance-efficient workload management model in cloud environments. In this model, a resource management unit is employed for energy and performance proficient allocation of virtual machines while ensuring the secure processing of users' applications by defending against data breaches due to unauthorized access to virtual machines in real-time. The resource management unit is guided by a secure virtual machine management unit which is designed to generate information regarding unauthorized access or inter-communication links among active virtual machines. Also, a workload analyzer unit operates concurrently to estimate resource utilization information to assist the resource management unit in the performance-efficient allocation of virtual machines. Contrary to prior works which engage access control mechanisms, encryption, and decryption of data before the transfer and the use of tunneling for prevention of unauthorized access to virtual machines which raises excess computational cost overhead, the proposed model operates diversely for efficiently serving the same purpose.
A Critical Reflection and Forward Perspective on Empathy and Natural Language Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

We review the state of research on empathy in natural language processing and identify the following issues: (1) empathy definitions are absent or abstract, which (2) leads to low construct validity and reproducibility. Moreover, (3) emotional empathy is overemphasized, skewing our focus to a narrow subset of simplified tasks. We believe these issues hinder research progress and argue that current directions will benefit from a clear conceptualization that includes operationalizing cognitive empathy components. Our main objectives are to provide insight and guidance on empathy conceptualization for NLP research objectives and to encourage researchers to pursue the overlooked opportunities in this area, highly relevant, e.g., for clinical and educational sectors.
GRACE: Loss-Resilient Real-Time Video Communication Using Data-Scalable Autoencoder
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2022
Year: 2022

Across many real-time video applications, we see a growing need (especially in long delays and dynamic bandwidth) to allow clients to decode each frame once any (non-empty) subset of its packets is received and improve quality with each new packet. We call it data-scalable delivery. Unfortunately, existing techniques (e.g., FEC, RS and Fountain Codes) fall short: they require either delivery of a minimum number of packets to decode frames, and/or pad video data with redundancy in anticipation of packet losses, which hurts video quality if no packets get lost. This work explores a new approach, inspired by recent advances of neural-network autoencoders, which make data-scalable delivery possible. We present Grace, a concrete data-scalable real-time video system. With the same video encoding, Grace's quality is slightly lower than traditional codec without redundancy when no packet is lost, but with each missed packet, its quality degrades much more gracefully than existing solutions, allowing clients to flexibly trade between frame delay and video quality. Grace makes two contributions: (1) it trains new custom autoencoders to balance compression efficiency and resilience against a wide range of packet losses; and (2) it uses a new transmission scheme to deliver autoencoder-coded frames as individually decodable packets. We test Grace (and traditional loss-resilient schemes and codecs) on real network traces and videos, and show that while Grace's compression efficiency is slightly worse than heavily engineered video codecs, it significantly reduces tail video frame delay (by 2$\times$ at the 95th percentile) with the marginally lowered video quality
On the Need of Neuromorphic Twins to Detect Denial-of-Service Attacks on Communication Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

As we are more and more dependent on the communication technologies, resilience against any attacks on communication networks is important to guarantee the digital sovereignty of our society. New developments of communication networks tackle the problem of resilience by in-network computing approaches for higher protocol layers, while the physical layer remains an open problem. This is particularly true for wireless communication systems which are inherently vulnerable to adversarial attacks due to the open nature of the wireless medium. In denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, an active adversary is able to completely disrupt the communication and it has been shown that Turing machines are incapable of detecting such attacks. As Turing machines provide the fundamental limits of digital information processing and therewith of digital twins, this implies that even the most powerful digital twins that preserve all information of the physical network error-free are not capable of detecting such attacks. This stimulates the question of how powerful the information processing hardware must be to enable the detection of DoS attacks. Therefore, in the paper the need of neuromorphic twins is advocated and by the use of Blum-Shub-Smale machines a first implementation that enables the detection of DoS attacks is shown. This result holds for both cases of with and without constraints on the input and jamming sequences of the adversary.