OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Strangers in the Room: Unpacking Perceptions of 'Smartness' and Related Ethical Concerns in the Home
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

The increasingly widespread use of 'smart' devices has raised multifarious ethical concerns regarding their use in domestic spaces. Previous work examining such ethical dimensions has typically either involved empirical studies of concerns raised by specific devices and use contexts, or alternatively expounded on abstract concepts like autonomy, privacy or trust in relation to 'smart homes' in general. This paper attempts to bridge these approaches by asking what features of smart devices users consider as rendering them 'smart' and how these relate to ethical concerns. Through a multimethod investigation including surveys with smart device users (n=120) and semi-structured interviews (n=15), we identify and describe eight types of smartness and explore how they engender a variety of ethical concerns including privacy, autonomy, and disruption of the social order. We argue that this middle ground, between concerns arising from particular devices and more abstract ethical concepts, can better anticipate potential ethical concerns regarding smart devices.
Distilling Spikes: Knowledge Distillation in Spiking Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2020
Year: 2020

Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) are energy-efficient computing architectures that exchange spikes for processing information, unlike classical Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). Due to this, SNNs are better suited for real-life deployments. However, similar to ANNs, SNNs also benefit from deeper architectures to obtain improved performance. Furthermore, like the deep ANNs, the memory, compute and power requirements of SNNs also increase with model size, and model compression becomes a necessity. Knowledge distillation is a model compression technique that enables transferring the learning of a large machine learning model to a smaller model with minimal loss in performance. In this paper, we propose techniques for knowledge distillation in spiking neural networks for the task of image classification. We present ways to distill spikes from a larger SNN, also called the teacher network, to a smaller one, also called the student network, while minimally impacting the classification accuracy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method with detailed experiments on three standard datasets while proposing novel distillation methodologies and loss functions. We also present a multi-stage knowledge distillation technique for SNNs using an intermediate network to obtain higher performance from the student network. Our approach is expected to open up new avenues for deploying high performing large SNN models on resource-constrained hardware platforms.
Mind the Trade-off: Debiasing NLU Models without Degrading the In-distribution Performance
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Models for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks often rely on the idiosyncratic biases of the dataset, which make them brittle against test cases outside the training distribution. Recently, several proposed debiasing methods are shown to be very effective in improving out-of-distribution performance. However, their improvements come at the expense of performance drop when models are evaluated on the in-distribution data, which contain examples with higher diversity. This seemingly inevitable trade-off may not tell us much about the changes in the reasoning and understanding capabilities of the resulting models on broader types of examples beyond the small subset represented in the out-of-distribution data. In this paper, we address this trade-off by introducing a novel debiasing method, called confidence regularization, which discourage models from exploiting biases while enabling them to receive enough incentive to learn from all the training examples. We evaluate our method on three NLU tasks and show that, in contrast to its predecessors, it improves the performance on out-of-distribution datasets (e.g., 7pp gain on HANS dataset) while maintaining the original in-distribution accuracy.
M^3VSNet: Unsupervised Multi-metric Multi-view Stereo Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

The present Multi-view stereo (MVS) methods with supervised learning-based networks have an impressive performance comparing with traditional MVS methods. However, the ground-truth depth maps for training are hard to be obtained and are within limited kinds of scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised multi-metric MVS network, named M^3VSNet, for dense point cloud reconstruction without any supervision. To improve the robustness and completeness of point cloud reconstruction, we propose a novel multi-metric loss function that combines pixel-wise and feature-wise loss function to learn the inherent constraints from different perspectives of matching correspondences. Besides, we also incorporate the normal-depth consistency in the 3D point cloud format to improve the accuracy and continuity of the estimated depth maps. Experimental results show that M3VSNet establishes the state-of-the-arts unsupervised method and achieves comparable performance with previous supervised MVSNet on the DTU dataset and demonstrates the powerful generalization ability on the Tanks and Temples benchmark with effective improvement. Our code is available at https://github.com/whubaichuan/M3VSNet
Will-They-Won't-They: A Very Large Dataset for Stance Detection on Twitter
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

We present a new challenging stance detection dataset, called Will-They-Won't-They (WT-WT), which contains 51,284 tweets in English, making it by far the largest available dataset of the type. All the annotations are carried out by experts; therefore, the dataset constitutes a high-quality and reliable benchmark for future research in stance detection. Our experiments with a wide range of recent state-of-the-art stance detection systems show that the dataset poses a strong challenge to existing models in this domain.
POWER-SUPPLaY: Leaking Data from Air-Gapped Systems by Turning the Power-Supplies Into Speakers
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

It is known that attackers can exfiltrate data from air-gapped computers through their speakers via sonic and ultrasonic waves. To eliminate the threat of such acoustic covert channels in sensitive systems, audio hardware can be disabled and the use of loudspeakers can be strictly forbidden. Such audio-less systems are considered to be \textit{audio-gapped}, and hence immune to acoustic covert channels. In this paper, we introduce a technique that enable attackers leak data acoustically from air-gapped and audio-gapped systems. Our developed malware can exploit the computer power supply unit (PSU) to play sounds and use it as an out-of-band, secondary speaker with limited capabilities. The malicious code manipulates the internal \textit{switching frequency} of the power supply and hence controls the sound waveforms generated from its capacitors and transformers. Our technique enables producing audio tones in a frequency band of 0-24khz and playing audio streams (e.g., WAV) from a computer power supply without the need for audio hardware or speakers. Binary data (files, keylogging, encryption keys, etc.) can be modulated over the acoustic signals and sent to a nearby receiver (e.g., smartphone). We show that our technique works with various types of systems: PC workstations and servers, as well as embedded systems and IoT devices that have no audio hardware at all. We provide technical background and discuss implementation details such as signal generation and data modulation. We show that the POWER-SUPPLaY code can operate from an ordinary user-mode process and doesn't need any hardware access or special privileges. Our evaluation shows that using POWER-SUPPLaY, sensitive data can be exfiltrated from air-gapped and audio-gapped systems from a distance of five meters away at a maximal bit rates of 50 bit/sec.
Investigating Class-level Difficulty Factors in Multi-label Classification Problems
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

This work investigates the use of class-level difficulty factors in multi-label classification problems for the first time. Four class-level difficulty factors are proposed: frequency, visual variation, semantic abstraction, and class co-occurrence. Once computed for a given multi-label classification dataset, these difficulty factors are shown to have several potential applications including the prediction of class-level performance across datasets and the improvement of predictive performance through difficulty weighted optimisation. Significant improvements to mAP and AUC performance are observed for two challenging multi-label datasets (WWW Crowd and Visual Genome) with the inclusion of difficulty weighted optimisation. The proposed technique does not require any additional computational complexity during training or inference and can be extended over time with inclusion of other class-level difficulty factors.
Lightweight Convolutional Neural Networks for CSI Feedback in Massive MIMO
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

In frequency division duplex mode of massive multiple-input multiple-output systems, the downlink channel state information (CSI) must be sent to the base station (BS) through a feedback link. However, transmitting CSI to the BS is costly due to the bandwidth limitation of the feedback link. Deep learning (DL) has recently achieved remarkable success in CSI feedback. Realizing high-performance and low-complexity CSI feedback is a challenge in DL based communication. We develop a DL based CSI feedback network in this study to complete the feedback of CSI effectively. However, this network cannot be effectively applied to the mobile terminal because of the excessive numbers of parameters. Therefore, we further propose a new lightweight CSI feedback network based on the developed network. Simulation results show that the proposed CSI network exhibits better reconstruction performance than that of other CsiNet-related works. Moreover, the lightweight network maintains a few parameters and parameter complexity while ensuring satisfactory reconstruction performance. These findings suggest the feasibility and potential of the proposed techniques.
An Efficient Normalisation Procedure for Linear Temporal Logic and Very Weak Alternating Automata
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2020
Year: 2020

In the mid 80s, Lichtenstein, Pnueli, and Zuck proved a classical theorem stating that every formula of Past LTL (the extension of LTL with past operators) is equivalent to a formula of the form $\bigwedge_{i=1}^n \mathbf{G}\mathbf{F} φ_i \vee \mathbf{F}\mathbf{G} ψ_i$, where $φ_i$ and $ψ_i$ contain only past operators. Some years later, Chang, Manna, and Pnueli built on this result to derive a similar normal form for LTL. Both normalisation procedures have a non-elementary worst-case blow-up, and follow an involved path from formulas to counter-free automata to star-free regular expressions and back to formulas. We improve on both points. We present a direct and purely syntactic normalisation procedure for LTL yielding a normal form, comparable to the one by Chang, Manna, and Pnueli, that has only a single exponential blow-up. As an application, we derive a simple algorithm to translate LTL into deterministic Rabin automata. The algorithm normalises the formula, translates it into a special very weak alternating automaton, and applies a simple determinisation procedure, valid only for these special automata.
Early Outbreak Detection for Proactive Crisis Management Using Twitter Data: COVID-19 a Case Study in the US
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2020
Year: 2020

During a disease outbreak, timely non-medical interventions are critical in preventing the disease from growing into an epidemic and ultimately a pandemic. However, taking quick measures requires the capability to detect the early warning signs of the outbreak. This work collects Twitter posts surrounding the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic expressing the most common symptoms of COVID-19 including cough and fever, geolocated to the United States. Through examining the variation in Twitter activities at the state level, we observed a temporal lag between the rises in the number of symptom reporting tweets and officially reported positive cases which varies between 5 to 19 days.
Getting Insights from a Large Corpus of Scientific Papers on Specialisted Comprehensive Topics -- the Case of COVID-19
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2020
Year: 2020

COVID-19 is one of the most important topic these days, specifically on search engines and news. While fake news are easily shared, scientific papers are reliable sources where information can be extracted. With about 24,000 scientific publications on COVID-19 and related research on PUBMED, automatic computer-assisted analysis is required. In this paper, we develop two methodologies to get insights on specific sub-topics of interest and latest research sub-topics. They rely on natural language processing and graph-based visualizations. We run these methodologies on two cases: the virus origin and the uses of existing drugs.
Partially-Typed NER Datasets Integration: Connecting Practice to Theory
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

While typical named entity recognition (NER) models require the training set to be annotated with all target types, each available datasets may only cover a part of them. Instead of relying on fully-typed NER datasets, many efforts have been made to leverage multiple partially-typed ones for training and allow the resulting model to cover a full type set. However, there is neither guarantee on the quality of integrated datasets, nor guidance on the design of training algorithms. Here, we conduct a systematic analysis and comparison between partially-typed NER datasets and fully-typed ones, in both theoretical and empirical manner. Firstly, we derive a bound to establish that models trained with partially-typed annotations can reach a similar performance with the ones trained with fully-typed annotations, which also provides guidance on the algorithm design. Moreover, we conduct controlled experiments, which shows partially-typed datasets leads to similar performance with the model trained with the same amount of fully-typed annotations
The Hypervolume Indicator: Problems and Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2020
Year: 2020

The hypervolume indicator is one of the most used set-quality indicators for the assessment of stochastic multiobjective optimizers, as well as for selection in evolutionary multiobjective optimization algorithms. Its theoretical properties justify its wide acceptance, particularly the strict monotonicity with respect to set dominance which is still unique of hypervolume-based indicators. This paper discusses the computation of hypervolume-related problems, highlighting the relations between them, providing an overview of the paradigms and techniques used, a description of the main algorithms for each problem, and a rundown of the fastest algorithms regarding asymptotic complexity and runtime. By providing a complete overview of the computational problems associated to the hypervolume indicator, this paper serves as the starting point for the development of new algorithms, and supports users in the identification of the most appropriate implementations available for each problem.
A Generic Framework and Library for Exploration of Small Multiples through Interactive Piling
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

Small multiples are miniature representations of visual information used generically across many domains. Handling large numbers of small multiples imposes challenges on many analytic tasks like inspection, comparison, navigation, or annotation. To address these challenges, we developed a framework and implemented a library called Piling.js for designing interactive piling interfaces. Based on the piling metaphor, such interfaces afford flexible organization, exploration, and comparison of large numbers of small multiples by interactively aggregating visual objects into piles. Based on a systematic analysis of previous work, we present a structured design space to guide the design of visual piling interfaces. To enable designers to efficiently build their own visual piling interfaces, Piling.js provides a declarative interface to avoid having to write low-level code and implements common aspects of the design space. An accompanying GUI additionally supports the dynamic configuration of the piling interface. We demonstrate the expressiveness of Piling.js with examples from machine learning, immunofluorescence microscopy, genomics, and public health.
It is Time for New Perspectives on How to Fight Bloat in GP
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2020
Year: 2020

The present and future of evolutionary algorithms depends on the proper use of modern parallel and distributed computing infrastructures. Although still sequential approaches dominate the landscape, available multi-core, many-core and distributed systems will make users and researchers to more frequently deploy parallel version of the algorithms. In such a scenario, new possibilities arise regarding the time saved when parallel evaluation of individuals are performed. And this time saving is particularly relevant in Genetic Programming. This paper studies how evaluation time influences not only time to solution in parallel/distributed systems, but may also affect size evolution of individuals in the population, and eventually will reduce the bloat phenomenon GP features. This paper considers time and space as two sides of a single coin when devising a more natural method for fighting bloat. This new perspective allows us to understand that new methods for bloat control can be derived, and the first of such a method is described and tested. Experimental data confirms the strength of the approach: using computing time as a measure of individuals' complexity allows to control the growth in size of genetic programming individuals.
Energy mu-Calculus: Symbolic Fixed-Point Algorithms for omega-Regular Energy Games
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2020
Year: 2020

$ω$-regular energy games, which are weighted two-player turn-based games with the quantitative objective to keep the energy levels non-negative, have been used in the context of verification and synthesis. The logic of modal $μ$-calculus, when applied over game graphs with $ω$-regular winning conditions, allows defining symbolic algorithms in the form of fixed-point formulas for computing the sets of winning states. In this paper, we introduce energy $μ$-calculus, a multi-valued extension of the $μ$-calculus that serves as a symbolic framework for solving $ω$-regular energy games. Energy $μ$-calculus enables the seamless reuse of existing, well-known symbolic $μ$-calculus algorithms for $ω$-regular games, to solve their corresponding energy augmented variants. We define the syntax and semantics of energy $μ$-calculus over symbolic representations of the game graphs, and show how to use it to solve the decision and the minimum credit problems for $ω$-regular energy games, for both bounded and unbounded energy level accumulations.
On the Design of Co-operating Blockchains for IoT
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

Enabling blockchain technology into IoT can help to achieve a proper distributed consensus based IoT system that overcomes disadvantages of today's centralized infrastructures, such as, among others, high cloud server maintenance costs, weakness for supporting time-critical IoT applications, security and trust issues. However, meeting requirements posed by IoT in blockchain domain is not an easy endeavour. [1] proposes Hybrid-IoT, as a step towards decentralizing IoT with the help of blockchain technology. Hybrid-IoT consists of multiple PoW sub-blockchains to achieve distributed consensus among IoT devices and an inter-connector framework, to execute transactions between sub-blockchains. In this paper, we take the first step towards designing an inter-connector for multiple blockchains for IoT that is specifically tailored for the Hybrid-IoT architecture. We also provide a detailed security discussion, in order to identify threats and we provide discussion on how to cope with threats.
GenericsKB: A Knowledge Base of Generic Statements
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

We present a new resource for the NLP community, namely a large (3.5M+ sentence) knowledge base of *generic statements*, e.g., "Trees remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere", collected from multiple corpora. This is the first large resource to contain *naturally occurring* generic sentences, as opposed to extracted or crowdsourced triples, and thus is rich in high-quality, general, semantically complete statements. All GenericsKB sentences are annotated with their topical term, surrounding context (sentences), and a (learned) confidence. We also release GenericsKB-Best (1M+ sentences), containing the best-quality generics in GenericsKB augmented with selected, synthesized generics from WordNet and ConceptNet. In tests on two existing datasets requiring multihop reasoning (OBQA and QASC), we find using GenericsKB can result in higher scores and better explanations than using a much larger corpus. This demonstrates that GenericsKB can be a useful resource for NLP applications, as well as providing data for linguistic studies of generics and their semantics. GenericsKB is available at https://allenai.org/data/genericskb.
Robust and Interpretable Grounding of Spatial References with Relation Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Learning representations of spatial references in natural language is a key challenge in tasks like autonomous navigation and robotic manipulation. Recent work has investigated various neural architectures for learning multi-modal representations for spatial concepts. However, the lack of explicit reasoning over entities makes such approaches vulnerable to noise in input text or state observations. In this paper, we develop effective models for understanding spatial references in text that are robust and interpretable, without sacrificing performance. We design a text-conditioned \textit{relation network} whose parameters are dynamically computed with a cross-modal attention module to capture fine-grained spatial relations between entities. This design choice provides interpretability of learned intermediate outputs. Experiments across three tasks demonstrate that our model achieves superior performance, with a 17\% improvement in predicting goal locations and a 15\% improvement in robustness compared to state-of-the-art systems.
UnifiedQA: Crossing Format Boundaries With a Single QA System
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Question answering (QA) tasks have been posed using a variety of formats, such as extractive span selection, multiple choice, etc. This has led to format-specialized models, and even to an implicit division in the QA community. We argue that such boundaries are artificial and perhaps unnecessary, given the reasoning abilities we seek to teach are not governed by the format. As evidence, we use the latest advances in language modeling to build a single pre-trained QA model, UnifiedQA, that performs surprisingly well across 17 QA datasets spanning 4 diverse formats. UnifiedQA performs on par with 9 different models that were trained on individual datasets themselves. Even when faced with 12 unseen datasets of observed formats, UnifiedQA performs surprisingly well, showing strong generalization from its out-of-format training data. Finally, simply fine-tuning this pre-trained QA model into specialized models results in a new state of the art on 6 datasets, establishing UnifiedQA as a strong starting point for building QA systems.