OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Characteristic Function-based Algorithm for Geodesic Active Contours
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Active contour models have been widely used in image segmentation, and the level set method (LSM) is the most popular approach for solving the models, via implicitly representing the contour by a level set function. However, the LSM suffers from high computational burden and numerical instability, requiring additional regularization terms or re-initialization techniques. In this paper, we use characteristic functions to implicitly represent the contours, propose a new representation to the geodesic active contours and derive an efficient algorithm termed as the iterative convolution-thresholding method (ICTM). Compared to the LSM, the ICTM is simpler and much more efficient. In addition, the ICTM enjoys most desired features of the level set-based methods. Extensive experiments, on 2D synthetic, 2D ultrasound, 3D CT, and 3D MR images for nodule, organ and lesion segmentation, demonstrate that the proposed method not only obtains comparable or even better segmentation results (compared to the LSM) but also achieves significant acceleration.
Using Affective Features from Media Content Metadata for Better Movie Recommendations
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

This paper investigates the causality in the decision making of movie recommendations through the users' affective profiles. We advocate a method of assigning emotional tags to a movie by the auto-detection of the affective features in the movie's overview. We apply a text-based Emotion Detection and Recognition model, which trained by tweets short messages and transfers the learned model to detect movie overviews' implicit affective features. We vectorized the affective movie tags to represent the mood embeddings of the movie. We obtain the user's emotional features by taking the average of all the movies' affective vectors the user has watched. We apply five-distance metrics to rank the Top-N movie recommendations against the user's emotion profile. We found Cosine Similarity distance metrics performed better than other distance metrics measures. We conclude that by replacing the top-N recommendations generated by the Recommender with the reranked recommendations list made by the Cosine Similarity distance metrics, the user will effectively get affective aware top-N recommendations while making the Recommender feels like an Emotion Aware Recommender.
Signal Encryption Strategy based on Domain change of the Fractional Fourier Transform
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

This paper provides a double encryption algorithm that uses the lack of invertibility of the fractional Fourier transform (FRFT) on $L^{1}$. One encryption key is a function, which maps a ``good" $L^{2}$-signal to a ``bad" $L^{1}$-signal. The FRFT parameter which describes the rotation associated with this operator on the time-frequency plane provides the other encryption key. With the help of approximate identities, such as of the Abel and Gauss means of the FRFT established in \cite{CFGW}, we recover the encrypted signal on the FRFT domain. This design of an encryption algorithm seems new even when using the classical Fourier transform. Finally, the feasibility of the new strategy is verified by simulation and audio examples.
Assessing the Use of Insecure ICS Protocols via IXP Network Traffic Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Modern Industrial Control Systems (ICSs) allow remote communication through the Internet using industrial protocols that were not designed to work with external networks. To understand security issues related to this practice, prior work usually relies on active scans by researchers or services such as Shodan. While such scans can identify publicly open ports, they cannot identify legitimate use of insecure industrial traffic. In particular, source-based filtering in Network Address Translation or Firewalls prevent detection by active scanning, but do not ensure that insecure communication is not manipulated in transit. In this work, we compare Shodan-only analysis with large-scale traffic analysis at a local Internet Exchange Point (IXP), based on sFlow sampling. This setup allows us to identify ICS endpoints actually exchanging industrial traffic over the Internet. Besides, we are able to detect scanning activities and what other type of traffic is exchanged by the systems (i.e., IT traffic). We find that Shodan only listed less than 2% of hosts that we identified as exchanging industrial traffic, and only 7% of hosts identified by Shodan actually exchange industrial traffic. Therefore, Shodan do not allow to understand the actual use of insecure industrial protocols on the Internet and the current security practices in ICS communications. We show that 75.6% of ICS hosts still rely on unencrypted communications without integrity protection, leaving those critical systems vulnerable to malicious attacks.
Interactive Knowledge Distillation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Knowledge distillation is a standard teacher-student learning framework to train a light-weight student network under the guidance of a well-trained large teacher network. As an effective teaching strategy, interactive teaching has been widely employed at school to motivate students, in which teachers not only provide knowledge but also give constructive feedback to students upon their responses, to improve their learning performance. In this work, we propose an InterActive Knowledge Distillation (IAKD) scheme to leverage the interactive teaching strategy for efficient knowledge distillation. In the distillation process, the interaction between teacher and student networks is implemented by a swapping-in operation: randomly replacing the blocks in the student network with the corresponding blocks in the teacher network. In the way, we directly involve the teacher's powerful feature transformation ability to largely boost the student's performance. Experiments with typical settings of teacher-student networks demonstrate that the student networks trained by our IAKD achieve better performance than those trained by conventional knowledge distillation methods on diverse image classification datasets.
DICE: Automatic Emulation of DMA Input Channels for Dynamic Firmware Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Microcontroller-based embedded devices are at the core of Internet-of-Things and Cyber-Physical Systems. The security of these devices is of paramount importance. Among the approaches to securing embedded devices, dynamic firmware analysis gained great attention lately, thanks to its offline nature and low false-positive rates. However, regardless of the analysis and emulation techniques used, existing dynamic firmware analyzers share a major limitation, namely the inability to handle firmware using DMA. It severely limits the types of devices supported and firmware code coverage. We present DICE, a drop-in solution for firmware analyzers to emulate DMA input channels and generate or manipulate DMA inputs. DICE is designed to be hardware-independent, and compatible with common MCU firmware and embedded architectures. DICE identifies DMA input channels as the firmware writes the source and destination DMA transfer pointers into the DMA controller. Then DICE manipulates the input transferred through DMA on behalf of the firmware analyzer. We integrated DICE to the firmware analyzer P2IM (Cortex-M architecture) and a PIC32 emulator (MIPS M4K/M-Class architecture). We evaluated it on 83 benchmarks and sample firmware, representing 9 different DMA controllers from 5 different vendors. DICE detected 33 out of 37 DMA input channels, with 0 false positives. It correctly supplied DMA inputs to 21 out of 22 DMA buffers, which previous firmware analyzers cannot achieve due to the lack of DMA emulation. DICE's overhead is fairly low, it adds 3.4% on average to P2IM execution time. We also fuzz-tested 7 real-world firmware using DICE and compared the results with the original P2IM. DICE uncovered tremendously more execution paths (as much as 79X) and found 5 unique previously-unknown bugs that are unreachable without DMA emulation. All our source code and dataset are publicly available.
PPaaS: Privacy Preservation as a Service
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Personally identifiable information (PII) can find its way into cyberspace through various channels, and many potential sources can leak such information. Data sharing (e.g. cross-agency data sharing) for machine learning and analytics is one of the important components in data science. However, due to privacy concerns, data should be enforced with strong privacy guarantees before sharing. Different privacy-preserving approaches were developed for privacy preserving data sharing; however, identifying the best privacy-preservation approach for the privacy-preservation of a certain dataset is still a challenge. Different parameters can influence the efficacy of the process, such as the characteristics of the input dataset, the strength of the privacy-preservation approach, and the expected level of utility of the resulting dataset (on the corresponding data mining application such as classification). This paper presents a framework named \underline{P}rivacy \underline{P}reservation \underline{a}s \underline{a} \underline{S}ervice (PPaaS) to reduce this complexity. The proposed method employs selective privacy preservation via data perturbation and looks at different dynamics that can influence the quality of the privacy preservation of a dataset. PPaaS includes pools of data perturbation methods, and for each application and the input dataset, PPaaS selects the most suitable data perturbation approach after rigorous evaluation. It enhances the usability of privacy-preserving methods within its pool; it is a generic platform that can be used to sanitize big data in a granular, application-specific manner by employing a suitable combination of diverse privacy-preserving algorithms to provide a proper balance between privacy and utility.
Deep Active Learning via Open Set Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

In many applications, data is easy to acquire but expensive and time-consuming to label prominent examples include medical imaging and NLP. This disparity has only grown in recent years as our ability to collect data improves. Under these constraints, it makes sense to select only the most informative instances from the unlabeled pool and request an oracle (e.g., a human expert) to provide labels for those samples. The goal of active learning is to infer the informativeness of unlabeled samples so as to minimize the number of requests to the oracle. Here, we formulate active learning as an open-set recognition problem. In this paradigm, only some of the inputs belong to known classes; the classifier must identify the rest as unknown. More specifically, we leverage variational neural networks (VNNs), which produce high-confidence (i.e., low-entropy) predictions only for inputs that closely resemble the training data. We use the inverse of this confidence measure to select the samples that the oracle should label. Intuitively, unlabeled samples that the VNN is uncertain about are more informative for future training. We carried out an extensive evaluation of our novel, probabilistic formulation of active learning, achieving state-of-the-art results on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100. Additionally, unlike current active learning methods, our algorithm can learn tasks without the need for task labels. As our experiments show, when the unlabeled pool consists of a mixture of samples from multiple datasets, our approach can automatically distinguish between samples from seen vs. unseen tasks.
Meta-Learning Divergences of Variational Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Variational inference (VI) plays an essential role in approximate Bayesian inference due to its computational efficiency and broad applicability. Crucial to the performance of VI is the selection of the associated divergence measure, as VI approximates the intractable distribution by minimizing this divergence. In this paper we propose a meta-learning algorithm to learn the divergence metric suited for the task of interest, automating the design of VI methods. In addition, we learn the initialization of the variational parameters without additional cost when our method is deployed in the few-shot learning scenarios. We demonstrate our approach outperforms standard VI on Gaussian mixture distribution approximation, Bayesian neural network regression, image generation with variational autoencoders and recommender systems with a partial variational autoencoder.
Leveraging Class Hierarchies with Metric-Guided Prototype Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

In many classification tasks, the set of target classes can be organized into a hierarchy. This structure induces a semantic distance between classes, and can be summarised under the form of a cost matrix, which defines a finite metric on the class set. In this paper, we propose to model the hierarchical class structure by integrating this metric in the supervision of a prototypical network. Our method relies on jointly learning a feature-extracting network and a set of class prototypes whose relative arrangement in the embedding space follows an hierarchical metric. We show that this approach allows for a consistent improvement of the error rate weighted by the cost matrix when compared to traditional methods and other prototype-based strategies. Furthermore, when the induced metric contains insight on the data structure, our method improves the overall precision as well. Experiments on four different public datasets - from agricultural time series classification to depth image semantic segmentation - validate our approach.
Wasserstein Distances for Stereo Disparity Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Existing approaches to depth or disparity estimation output a distribution over a set of pre-defined discrete values. This leads to inaccurate results when the true depth or disparity does not match any of these values. The fact that this distribution is usually learned indirectly through a regression loss causes further problems in ambiguous regions around object boundaries. We address these issues using a new neural network architecture that is capable of outputting arbitrary depth values, and a new loss function that is derived from the Wasserstein distance between the true and the predicted distributions. We validate our approach on a variety of tasks, including stereo disparity and depth estimation, and the downstream 3D object detection. Our approach drastically reduces the error in ambiguous regions, especially around object boundaries that greatly affect the localization of objects in 3D, achieving the state-of-the-art in 3D object detection for autonomous driving. Our code will be available at https://github.com/Div99/W-Stereo-Disp.
AEGCN: An Autoencoder-Constrained Graph Convolutional Network
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

We propose a novel neural network architecture, called autoencoder-constrained graph convolutional network, to solve node classification task on graph domains. As suggested by its name, the core of this model is a convolutional network operating directly on graphs, whose hidden layers are constrained by an autoencoder. Comparing with vanilla graph convolutional networks, the autoencoder step is added to reduce the information loss brought by Laplacian smoothing. We consider applying our model on both homogeneous graphs and heterogeneous graphs. For homogeneous graphs, the autoencoder approximates to the adjacency matrix of the input graph by taking hidden layer representations as encoder and another one-layer graph convolutional network as decoder. For heterogeneous graphs, since there are multiple adjacency matrices corresponding to different types of edges, the autoencoder approximates to the feature matrix of the input graph instead, and changes the encoder to a particularly designed multi-channel pre-processing network with two layers. In both cases, the error occurred in the autoencoder approximation goes to the penalty term in the loss function. In extensive experiments on citation networks and other heterogeneous graphs, we demonstrate that adding autoencoder constraints significantly improves the performance of graph convolutional networks. Further, we notice that our technique can be applied on graph attention network to improve the performance as well. This reveals the wide applicability of the proposed autoencoder technique.
Ridge Regression with Over-Parametrized Two-Layer Networks Converge to Ridgelet Spectrum
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Characterization of local minima draws much attention in theoretical studies of deep learning. In this study, we investigate the distribution of parameters in an over-parametrized finite neural network trained by ridge regularized empirical square risk minimization (RERM). We develop a new theory of ridgelet transform, a wavelet-like integral transform that provides a powerful and general framework for the theoretical study of neural networks involving not only the ReLU but general activation functions. We show that the distribution of the parameters converges to a spectrum of the ridgelet transform. This result provides a new insight into the characterization of the local minima of neural networks, and the theoretical background of an inductive bias theory based on lazy regimes. We confirm the visual resemblance between the parameter distribution trained by SGD, and the ridgelet spectrum calculated by numerical integration through numerical experiments with finite models.
Device-Clustering and Rate-Splitting Enabled Device-to-Device Cooperation Framework in Fog Radio Access Network
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

Resource allocation is investigated to enhance the performance of device-to-device (D2D) cooperation in a fog radio access network (F-RAN) architecture. Our envisioned framework enables two D2D links to share certain orthogonal radio resource blocks (RRBs) by forming device-clusters. In each device-cluster, both content-holder device-users (DUs) transmit to the content-requester DUs via an enhanced remote radio head (eRRH) over the same RRBs. Such RRBs are shared with the uplink F-RAN as well. The intra device-cluster interference is mitigated by exploiting both uplink and downlink rate-splitting schemes, and the inter device-cluster interference is mitigated by using an orthogonal RRB allocation strategy. Our objective is to maximize the end-to-end sum-rate of the device-clusters while reducing the interference between D2D cooperation and the uplink F-RAN over the shared RRBs. Towards this objective, a joint optimization of device-clustering, transmit power allocations, assignment of device-clusters to the eRRHs, and allocation of RRBs among the device-clusters is presented. Since the joint optimization is NP-hard and intractable, it is decomposed into device-clustering and resource allocation sub-problems, and efficient solutions to both sub-problems are developed. Based on the solutions to the sub-problems, a semi-distributed and convergent algorithm, entitled rate-splitting for multi-hop D2D (RSMD), is proposed to obtain the device-clusters and resource allocation for these device-clusters. Through extensive simulations, efficiency of the proposed RSMD algorithm over several benchmark schemes is demonstrated
Making Adversarial Examples More Transferable and Indistinguishable
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Fast gradient sign attack series are popular methods that are used to generate adversarial examples. However, most of the approaches based on fast gradient sign attack series cannot balance the indistinguishability and transferability due to the limitations of the basic sign structure. To address this problem, we propose a method, called Adam Iterative Fast Gradient Tanh Method (AI-FGTM), to generate indistinguishable adversarial examples with high transferability. Besides, smaller kernels and dynamic step size are also applied to generate adversarial examples for further increasing the attack success rates. Extensive experiments on an ImageNet-compatible dataset show that our method generates more indistinguishable adversarial examples and achieves higher attack success rates without extra running time and resource. Our best transfer-based attack NI-TI-DI-AITM can fool six classic defense models with an average success rate of 89.3% and three advanced defense models with an average success rate of 82.7%, which are higher than the state-of-the-art gradient-based attacks. Additionally, our method can also reduce nearly 20% mean perturbation. We expect that our method will serve as a new baseline for generating adversarial examples with better transferability and indistinguishability.
PathGAN: Local Path Planning with Attentive Generative Adversarial Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

To achieve autonomous driving without high-definition maps, we present a model capable of generating multiple plausible paths from egocentric images for autonomous vehicles. Our generative model comprises two neural networks: the feature extraction network (FEN) and path generation network (PGN). The FEN extracts meaningful features from an egocentric image, whereas the PGN generates multiple paths from the features, given a driving intention and speed. To ensure that the paths generated are plausible and consistent with the intention, we introduce an attentive discriminator and train it with the PGN under generative adversarial networks framework. We also devise an interaction model between the positions in the paths and the intentions hidden in the positions and design a novel PGN architecture that reflects the interaction model, resulting in the improvement of the accuracy and diversity of the generated paths. Finally, we introduce ETRIDriving, a dataset for autonomous driving in which the recorded sensor data are labeled with discrete high-level driving actions, and demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of the proposed model on ETRIDriving in terms of accuracy and diversity.
Secure Distributed Matrix Computation with Discrete Fourier Transform
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

We consider the problem of secure distributed matrix computation (SDMC), where a \textit{user} queries a function of data matrices generated at distributed \textit{source} nodes. We assume the availability of $N$ honest but curious computation servers, which are connected to the sources, the user, and each other through orthogonal and reliable communication links. Our goal is to minimize the amount of data that must be transmitted from the sources to the servers, called the \textit{upload cost}, while guaranteeing that no $T$ colluding servers can learn any information about the source matrices, and the user cannot learn any information beyond the computation result. We first focus on secure distributed matrix multiplication (SDMM), considering two matrices, and propose a novel polynomial coding scheme using the properties of finite field discrete Fourier transform, which achieves an upload cost significantly lower than the existing results in the literature. We then generalize the proposed scheme to include straggler mitigation, and to the multiplication of multiple matrices while keeping the input matrices, the intermediate computation results, as well as the final result secure against any $T$ colluding servers. We also consider a special case, called computation with own data, where the data matrices used for computation belong to the user. In this case, we drop the security requirement against the user, and show that the proposed scheme achieves the minimal upload cost. We then propose methods for performing other common matrix computations securely on distributed servers, including changing the parameters of secret sharing, matrix transpose, matrix exponentiation, solving a linear system, and matrix inversion, which are then used to show how arbitrary matrix polynomials can be computed securely on distributed servers using the proposed procedure.