OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Trust Aware Emergency Response for A Resilient Human-Swarm Cooperative System
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

A human-swarm cooperative system, which mixes multiple robots and a human supervisor to form a heterogeneous team, is widely used for emergent scenarios such as criminal tracking in social security and victim assistance in a natural disaster. These emergent scenarios require a cooperative team to quickly terminate the current task and transit the system to a new task, bringing difficulty in motion planning. Moreover, due to the immediate task transitions, uncertainty from both physical systems and prior tasks is accumulated to decrease swarm performance, causing robot failures and influencing the cooperation effectiveness between the human and the robot swarm. Therefore, given the quick-transition requirements and the introduced uncertainty, it is challenging for a human-swarm system to respond to emergent tasks, compared with executing normal tasks where a gradual transition between tasks is allowed. Human trust reveals the behavior expectations of others and is used to adjust unsatisfactory behaviors for better cooperation. Inspired by human trust, in this paper, a trust-aware reflective control (Trust-R) is developed to dynamically calibrate human-swarm cooperation. Trust-R, based on a weighted mean subsequence reduced algorithm (WMSR) and human trust modeling, helps a swarm to self-reflect its performance from the perspective of human trust; then proactively correct its faulty behaviors in an early stage before a human intervenes. One typical task scenario {emergency response} was designed in the real-gravity simulation environment, and a human user study with 145 volunteers was conducted. Trust-R's effectiveness in correcting faulty behaviors in emergency response was validated by the improved swarm performance and increased trust scores.
Kernel Density Estimation based Factored Relevance Model for Multi-Contextual Point-of-Interest Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

An automated contextual suggestion algorithm is likely to recommend contextually appropriate and personalized 'points-of-interest' (POIs) to a user, if it can extract information from the user's preference history (exploitation) and effectively blend it with the user's current contextual information (exploration) to predict a POI's 'appropriateness' in the current context. To balance this trade-off between exploitation and exploration, we propose an unsupervised, generic framework involving a factored relevance model (FRLM), constituting two distinct components, one pertaining to historical contexts, and the other corresponding to the current context. We further generalize the proposed FRLM by incorporating the semantic relationships between terms in POI descriptors using kernel density estimation (KDE) on embedded word vectors. Additionally, we show that trip-qualifiers, (e.g. 'trip-type', 'accompanied-by') are potentially useful information sources that could be used to improve the recommendation effectiveness. Using such information is not straight forward since users' texts/reviews of visited POIs typically do not explicitly contain such annotations. We undertake a weakly supervised approach to predict the associations between the review-texts in a user profile and the likely trip contexts. Our experiments, conducted on the TREC contextual suggestion 2016 dataset, demonstrate that factorization, KDE-based generalizations, and trip-qualifier enriched contexts of the relevance model improve POI recommendation.
Calculating Great Britains half-hourly electrical demand from publicly available data
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2021
Year: 2021

Here we present a method to combine half-hourly publicly available electrical generation and interconnector operational data for Great Britain to create a timeseries that approximates its electrical demand. We term the calculated electrical demand ESPENI that is an acronym for Elexon Sum Plus Embedded Net Imports. The method adds value to the original data by combining both transmission and distribution generation data into a single dataset and adding ISO 8601 compatible datetimes to increase interoperability with other timeseries data. Data cleansing is undertaken by visually flagging data errors and then using simple linear interpolation to impute values to replace the flagged data. Publishing the method allows it to be further enhanced or adapted and to be considered and critiqued by a wider community. In addition, the published raw and cleaned data is a valuable resource that saves researchers considerable time in repeating the steps presented in the method to prepare the data for further analysis. The data is a public record of the decarbonisation of Great Britains electrical system since late 2008, widely seen as an example of rapid decarbonisation of an electrical system away from fossil fuel generation to lower carbon sources.
Deep Probabilistic Accelerated Evaluation: A Robust Certifiable Rare-Event Simulation Methodology for Black-Box Safety-Critical Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Evaluating the reliability of intelligent physical systems against rare safety-critical events poses a huge testing burden for real-world applications. Simulation provides a useful platform to evaluate the extremal risks of these systems before their deployments. Importance Sampling (IS), while proven to be powerful for rare-event simulation, faces challenges in handling these learning-based systems due to their black-box nature that fundamentally undermines its efficiency guarantee, which can lead to under-estimation without diagnostically detected. We propose a framework called Deep Probabilistic Accelerated Evaluation (Deep-PrAE) to design statistically guaranteed IS, by converting black-box samplers that are versatile but could lack guarantees, into one with what we call a relaxed efficiency certificate that allows accurate estimation of bounds on the safety-critical event probability. We present the theory of Deep-PrAE that combines the dominating point concept with rare-event set learning via deep neural network classifiers, and demonstrate its effectiveness in numerical examples including the safety-testing of an intelligent driving algorithm.
Conditional Classification: A Solution for Computational Energy Reduction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Deep convolutional neural networks have shown high efficiency in computer visions and other applications. However, with the increase in the depth of the networks, the computational complexity is growing exponentially. In this paper, we propose a novel solution to reduce the computational complexity of convolutional neural network models used for many class image classification. Our proposed technique breaks the classification task into two steps: 1) coarse-grain classification, in which the input samples are classified among a set of hyper-classes, 2) fine-grain classification, in which the final labels are predicted among those hyper-classes detected at the first step. We illustrate that our proposed classifier can reach the level of accuracy reported by the best in class classification models with less computational complexity (Flop Count) by only activating parts of the model that are needed for the image classification.
A Comprehensive Performance Analysis for mm-Wave Massive MIMO Hybrid Beamforming under PA Nonlinearities
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we develop a framework to investigate the performances of different hybrid beamforming architectures for massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems impaired by power amplifier (PA) nonlinearities. Indirect learning architecture based on feedback after anti-beamforming is adopted in design of digital pre-distortion (DPD) in order to compensate the nonlinear distortion caused by PA. In addition, we propose a novel analog beamformer design for partially connected architecture based on generalized eigen-beamformer (GEB) approach. In literature, the effects of nonlinear PA's on the out-of-band (OOB) radiation and achieved signal-to-interfence-plus-noise ratio (SINR) are investigated. However, these studies are limitted to fully digital or partially connected hybrid beamforming architectures while deploying Bussgang decompostion on a PA basis without considering the array architecture type in performance analysis. In this study, we derived an analytical bit-error-rate (BER) expression based on spatio-temporal Bussgang decompostion in matrix form, and mismatched decoding capacity via Generalized Mutual Information (GMI) is obtained under PA nonlinearity for different hybrid Massive MIMO architectures. Analytical results show that the nonlinear distortion significantly affects the system performance, and DPD can reduce these effects to some extend. Finally, obtained analytical BER expression is verified via numerical results.
A privacy-preserving tests optimization algorithm for epidemics containment
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2021
Year: 2021

The SARS-CoV-2 outbreak changed the everyday life of almost all the people over the world.Currently, we are facing with the problem of containing the spread of the virus both using the more effective forced lockdown, which has the drawback of slowing down the economy of the involved countries, and by identifying and isolating the positive individuals, which, instead, is an hard task in general due to the lack of information. For this specific disease, the identificato of the infected is particularly challenging since there exists cathegories, namely the asymptomatics, who are positive and potentially contagious, but do not show any of the symptoms of SARS-CoV-2. Until the developement and distribution of a vaccine is not yet ready, we need to design ways of selecting those individuals which are most likely infected, given the limited amount of tests which are available each day. In this paper, we make use of available data collected by the so called contact tracing apps to develop an algorithm, namely PPTO, that identifies those individuals that are most likely positive and, therefore, should be tested. While in the past these analysis have been conducted by centralized algorithms, requiring that all the app users data are gathered in a single database, our protocol is able to work on a device level, by exploiting the communication of anonymized information to other devices.
Natural Backdoor Attack on Text Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Recently, advanced NLP models have seen a surge in the usage of various applications. This raises the security threats of the released models. In addition to the clean models' unintentional weaknesses, {\em i.e.,} adversarial attacks, the poisoned models with malicious intentions are much more dangerous in real life. However, most existing works currently focus on the adversarial attacks on NLP models instead of positioning attacks, also named \textit{backdoor attacks}. In this paper, we first propose the \textit{natural backdoor attacks} on NLP models. Moreover, we exploit the various attack strategies to generate trigger on text data and investigate different types of triggers based on modification scope, human recognition, and special cases. Last, we evaluate the backdoor attacks, and the results show the excellent performance of with 100\% backdoor attacks success rate and sacrificing of 0.83\% on the text classification task.
COAX: Correlation-Aware Indexing on Multidimensional Data with Soft Functional Dependencies
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2021
Year: 2021

Recent work proposed learned index structures, which learn the distribution of the underlying dataset to improve performance. The initial work on learned indexes has shown that by learning the cumulative distribution function of the data, index structures such as the B-Tree can improve their performance by one order of magnitude while having a smaller memory footprint. In this paper, we present COAX, a learned index for multidimensional data that, instead of learning the distribution of keys, learns the correlations between attributes of the dataset. Our approach is driven by the observation that in many datasets, values of two (or multiple) attributes are correlated. COAX exploits these correlations to reduce the dimensionality of the datasets. More precisely, we learn how to infer one (or multiple) attribute $C_d$ from the remaining attributes and hence no longer need to index attribute $C_d$. This reduces the dimensionality and hence makes the index smaller and more efficient. We theoretically investigate the effectiveness of the proposed technique based on the predictability of the FD attributes. We further show experimentally that by predicting correlated attributes in the data, we can improve the query execution time and reduce the memory overhead of the index. In our experiments, we reduce the execution time by 25% while reducing the memory footprint of the index by four orders of magnitude.
Object Detection Under Rainy Conditions for Autonomous Vehicles: A Review of State-of-the-Art and Emerging Techniques
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Advanced automotive active-safety systems, in general, and autonomous vehicles, in particular, rely heavily on visual data to classify and localize objects such as pedestrians, traffic signs and lights, and other nearby cars, to assist the corresponding vehicles maneuver safely in their environments. However, the performance of object detection methods could degrade rather significantly under challenging weather scenarios including rainy conditions. Despite major advancements in the development of deraining approaches, the impact of rain on object detection has largely been understudied, especially in the context of autonomous driving. The main objective of this paper is to present a tutorial on state-of-the-art and emerging techniques that represent leading candidates for mitigating the influence of rainy conditions on an autonomous vehicle's ability to detect objects. Our goal includes surveying and analyzing the performance of object detection methods trained and tested using visual data captured under clear and rainy conditions. Moreover, we survey and evaluate the efficacy and limitations of leading deraining approaches, deep-learning based domain adaptation, and image translation frameworks that are being considered for addressing the problem of object detection under rainy conditions. Experimental results of a variety of the surveyed techniques are presented as part of this tutorial.
Random Partitioning Forest for Point-Wise and Collective Anomaly Detection -- Application to Intrusion Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we propose DiFF-RF, an ensemble approach composed of random partitioning binary trees to detect point-wise and collective (as well as contextual) anomalies. Thanks to a distance-based paradigm used at the leaves of the trees, this semi-supervised approach solves a drawback that has been identified in the isolation forest (IF) algorithm. Moreover, taking into account the frequencies of visits in the leaves of the random trees allows to significantly improve the performance of DiFF-RF when considering the presence of collective anomalies. DiFF-RF is fairly easy to train, and excellent performance can be obtained by using a simple semi-supervised procedure to setup the extra hyper-parameter that is introduced. We first evaluate DiFF-RF on a synthetic data set to i) verify that the limitation of the IF algorithm is overcome, ii) demonstrate how collective anomalies are actually detected and iii) to analyze the effect of the meta-parameters it involves. We assess the DiFF-RF algorithm on a large set of datasets from the UCI repository, as well as two benchmarks related to intrusion detection applications. Our experiments show that DiFF-RF almost systematically outperforms the IF algorithm, but also challenges the one-class SVM baseline and a deep learning variational auto-encoder architecture. Furthermore, our experience shows that DiFF-RF can work well in the presence of small-scale learning data, which is conversely difficult for deep neural architectures. Finally, DiFF-RF is computationally efficient and can be easily parallelized on multi-core architectures.
Coded Caching for Broadcast Networks with User Cooperation
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we investigate the transmission delay of cache-aided broadcast networks with user cooperation. Novel coded caching schemes are proposed for both centralized and decentralized caching settings, by efficiently exploiting time and cache resources and creating parallel data delivery at the server and users. We derive a lower bound on the transmission delay and show that the proposed centralized coded caching scheme is \emph{order-optimal} in the sense that it achieves a constant multiplicative gap within the lower bound. Our decentralized coded caching scheme is also order-optimal when each user's cache size is larger than the threshold $N(1-\sqrt[{K-1}]{ {1}/{(K+1)}})$ (approaching 0 as $K\to \infty$), where $K$ is the total number of users and $N$ is the size of file library. Moreover, for both the centralized and decentralized caching settings, our schemes obtain an additional \emph{cooperation gain} offered by user cooperation and an additional \emph{parallel gain} offered by the parallel transmission among the server and users. It is shown that in order to reduce the transmission delay, the number of users parallelly sending signals should be appropriately chosen according to user's cache size, and alway letting more users parallelly send information could cause high transmission delay.
Feature Extraction for Novelty Detection in Network Traffic
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2021
Year: 2021

Data representation plays a critical role in the performance of novelty detection (or ``anomaly detection'') methods in machine learning. The data representation of network traffic often determines the effectiveness of these models as much as the model itself. The wide range of novel events that network operators need to detect (e.g., attacks, malware, new applications, changes in traffic demands) introduces the possibility for a broad range of possible models and data representations. In each scenario, practitioners must spend significant effort extracting and engineering features that are most predictive for that situation or application. While anomaly detection is well-studied in computer networking, much existing work develops specific models that presume a particular representation -- often IPFIX/NetFlow. Yet, other representations may result in higher model accuracy, and the rise of programmable networks now makes it more practical to explore a broader range of representations. To facilitate such exploration, we develop a systematic framework, open-source toolkit, and public Python library that makes it both possible and easy to extract and generate features from network traffic and perform and end-to-end evaluation of these representations across most prevalent modern novelty detection models. We first develop and publicly release an open-source tool, an accompanying Python library (NetML), and end-to-end pipeline for novelty detection in network traffic. Second, we apply this tool to five different novelty detection problems in networking, across a range of scenarios from attack detection to novel device detection. Our findings general insights and guidelines concerning which features appear to be more appropriate for particular situations.
Variable Selection via Thompson Sampling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Thompson sampling is a heuristic algorithm for the multi-armed bandit problem which has a long tradition in machine learning. The algorithm has a Bayesian spirit in the sense that it selects arms based on posterior samples of reward probabilities of each arm. By forging a connection between combinatorial binary bandits and spike-and-slab variable selection, we propose a stochastic optimization approach to subset selection called Thompson Variable Selection (TVS). TVS is a framework for interpretable machine learning which does not rely on the underlying model to be linear. TVS brings together Bayesian reinforcement and machine learning in order to extend the reach of Bayesian subset selection to non-parametric models and large datasets with very many predictors and/or very many observations. Depending on the choice of a reward, TVS can be deployed in offline as well as online setups with streaming data batches. Tailoring multiplay bandits to variable selection, we provide regret bounds without necessarily assuming that the arm mean rewards be unrelated. We show a very strong empirical performance on both simulated and real data. Unlike deterministic optimization methods for spike-and-slab variable selection, the stochastic nature makes TVS less prone to local convergence and thereby more robust.
Multimodal Text Style Transfer for Outdoor Vision-and-Language Navigation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

One of the most challenging topics in Natural Language Processing (NLP) is visually-grounded language understanding and reasoning. Outdoor vision-and-language navigation (VLN) is such a task where an agent follows natural language instructions and navigates a real-life urban environment. Due to the lack of human-annotated instructions that illustrate intricate urban scenes, outdoor VLN remains a challenging task to solve. This paper introduces a Multimodal Text Style Transfer (MTST) learning approach and leverages external multimodal resources to mitigate data scarcity in outdoor navigation tasks. We first enrich the navigation data by transferring the style of the instructions generated by Google Maps API, then pre-train the navigator with the augmented external outdoor navigation dataset. Experimental results show that our MTST learning approach is model-agnostic, and our MTST approach significantly outperforms the baseline models on the outdoor VLN task, improving task completion rate by 8.7% relatively on the test set.
Motivations, Benefits, and Issues for Adopting Micro-Frontends: A Multivocal Literature Review
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

[Context] Micro-Frontends are increasing in popularity, being adopted by several large companies, such as DAZN, Ikea, Starbucks and may others. Micro-Frontends enable splitting of monolithic frontends into independent and smaller micro applications. However, many companies are still hesitant to adopt Micro-Frontends, due to the lack of knowledge concerning their benefits. Additionally, provided online documentation is often times perplexed and contradictory. [Objective] The goal of this work is to map the existing knowledge on Micro-Frontends, by understanding the motivations of companies when adopting such applications as well as possible benefits and issues. [Method] We conducted a Multivocal Literature Review, analyzing 43 sources , and classifying motivations, benefits and issues. [Results] The results show that existing architectural options to build web applications are cumbersome if the application and development team grows, and if multiple teams need to develop the same frontend application. The application of the Micro-Frontend, confirmed the expected benefits, and Micro-Frontends resulted to provide the same benefits as microservices on the back end side, combining the development team into a fully cross-functional development team that can scale processes when needed. However, Micro-Frontends also showed some issues, such as the increased payload size of the application, increased code duplication and coupling between teams, and monitoring complexity. [Conclusions] Micro-Frontends allow companies to scale development according to business needs in the same way microservices do with the back end side. In addition, ...