OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Engagement Decision Support for Beyond Visual Range Air Combat
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

This work aims to provide an engagement decision support tool for Beyond Visual Range (BVR) air combat in the context of Defensive Counter Air (DCA) missions. In BVR air combat, engagement decision refers to the choice of the moment the pilot engages a target by assuming an offensive stance and executing corresponding maneuvers. To model this decision, we use the Brazilian Air Force's Aerospace Simulation Environment (Ambiente de Simulação Aeroespacial - ASA in Portuguese), which generated 3,729 constructive simulations lasting 12 minutes each and a total of 10,316 engagements. We analyzed all samples by an operational metric called the DCA index, which represents, based on the experience of subject matter experts, the degree of success in this type of mission. This metric considers the distances of the aircraft of the same team and the opposite team, the point of Combat Air Patrol, and the number of missiles used. By defining the engagement status right before it starts and the average of the DCA index throughout the engagement, we create a supervised learning model to determine the quality of a new engagement. An algorithm based on decision trees, working with the XGBoost library, provides a regression model to predict the DCA index with a coefficient of determination close to 0.8 and a Root Mean Square Error of 0.05 that can furnish parameters to the BVR pilot to decide whether or not to engage. Thus, using data obtained through simulations, this work contributes by building a decision support system based on machine learning for BVR air combat.
Scaffolding Sets
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Predictors map individual instances in a population to the interval $[0,1]$. For a collection $\mathcal C$ of subsets of a population, a predictor is multi-calibrated with respect to $\mathcal C$ if it is simultaneously calibrated on each set in $\mathcal C$. We initiate the study of the construction of scaffolding sets, a small collection $\mathcal S$ of sets with the property that multi-calibration with respect to $\mathcal S$ ensures correctness, and not just calibration, of the predictor. Our approach is inspired by the folk wisdom that the intermediate layers of a neural net learn a highly structured and useful data representation.
Pricing Query Complexity of Revenue Maximization
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2021
Year: 2021

The common way to optimize auction and pricing systems is to set aside a small fraction of the traffic to run experiments. This leads to the question: how can we learn the most with the smallest amount of data? For truthful auctions, this is the \emph{sample complexity} problem. For posted price auctions, we no longer have access to samples. Instead, the algorithm is allowed to choose a price $p_t$; then for a fresh sample $v_t \sim \mathcal{D}$ we learn the sign $s_t = sign(p_t - v_t) \in \{-1,+1\}$. How many pricing queries are needed to estimate a given parameter of the underlying distribution? We give tight upper and lower bounds on the number of pricing queries required to find an approximately optimal reserve price for general, regular and MHR distributions. Interestingly, for regular distributions, the pricing query and sample complexities match. But for general and MHR distributions, we show a strict separation between them. All known results on sample complexity for revenue optimization follow from a variant of using the optimal reserve price of the empirical distribution. In the pricing query complexity setting, we show that learning the entire distribution within an error of $ε$ in Levy distance requires strictly more pricing queries than to estimate the reserve. Instead, our algorithm uses a new property we identify called \emph{relative flatness} to quickly zoom into the right region of the distribution to get the optimal pricing query complexity.
Addressing Multiple Salient Object Detection via Dual-Space Long-Range Dependencies
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Salient object detection plays an important role in many downstream tasks. However, complex real-world scenes with varying scales and numbers of salient objects still pose a challenge. In this paper, we directly address the problem of detecting multiple salient objects across complex scenes. We propose a network architecture incorporating non-local feature information in both the spatial and channel spaces, capturing the long-range dependencies between separate objects. Traditional bottom-up and non-local features are combined with edge features within a feature fusion gate that progressively refines the salient object prediction in the decoder. We show that our approach accurately locates multiple salient regions even in complex scenarios. To demonstrate the efficacy of our approach to the multiple salient objects problem, we curate a new dataset containing only multiple salient objects. Our experiments demonstrate the proposed method presents state-of-the-art results on five widely used datasets without any pre-processing and post-processing. We obtain a further performance improvement against competing techniques on our multi-objects dataset. The dataset and source code are avaliable at: https://github.com/EricDengbowen/DSLRDNet.
An Empirical Study of the Effectiveness of an Ensemble of Stand-alone Sentiment Detection Tools for Software Engineering Datasets
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

Sentiment analysis in software engineering (SE) has shown promise to analyze and support diverse development activities. We report the results of an empirical study that we conducted to determine the feasibility of developing an ensemble engine by combining the polarity labels of stand-alone SE-specific sentiment detectors. Our study has two phases. In the first phase, we pick five SE-specific sentiment detection tools from two recently published papers by Lin et al. [31, 32], who first reported negative results with standalone sentiment detectors and then proposed an improved SE-specific sentiment detector, POME [31]. We report the study results on 17,581 units (sentences/documents) coming from six currently available sentiment benchmarks for SE. We find that the existing tools can be complementary to each other in 85-95% of the cases, i.e., one is wrong, but another is right. However, a majority voting-based ensemble of those tools fails to improve the accuracy of sentiment detection. We develop Sentisead, a supervised tool by combining the polarity labels and bag of words as features. Sentisead improves the performance (F1-score) of the individual tools by 4% (over Senti4SD [5]) - 100% (over POME [31]). In a second phase, we compare and improve Sentisead infrastructure using Pre-trained Transformer Models (PTMs). We find that a Sentisead infrastructure with RoBERTa as the ensemble of the five stand-alone rule-based and shallow learning SE-specific tools from Lin et al. [31, 32] offers the best F1-score of 0.805 across the six datasets, while a stand-alone RoBERTa shows an F1-score of 0.801.
Transient Performance Modelling of 5G Slicing with Mixed Numerologies for Smart Grid Traffic
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2021
Year: 2021

Network slicing enabled by fifth generation (5G) systems has the potential to satisfy diversified service requirements from different vertical industries. As a typical vertical industry, smart distribution grid poses new challenges to communication networks. This paper investigates the behavior of network slicing for smart grid applications in 5G radio access networks with heterogeneous traffic. To facilitate network slicing in such a network, we employ different 5G radio access numerologies for two traffic classes which have distinct radio resource and quality of service requirements. Three multi-dimensional Markov models are developed to assess the transient performance of network slicing for resource allocation with and without traffic priority. Through analysis and simulations, we investigate the effects of smart grid protection and control traffic on other types of parallel traffic sessions as well as on radio resource utilization.
Tight Bounds for Differentially Private Anonymized Histograms
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2021
Year: 2021

In this note, we consider the problem of differentially privately (DP) computing an anonymized histogram, which is defined as the multiset of counts of the input dataset (without bucket labels). In the low-privacy regime $ε\geq 1$, we give an $ε$-DP algorithm with an expected $\ell_1$-error bound of $O(\sqrt{n} / e^ε)$. In the high-privacy regime $ε< 1$, we give an $Ω(\sqrt{n \log(1/ε) / ε})$ lower bound on the expected $\ell_1$ error. In both cases, our bounds asymptotically match the previously known lower/upper bounds due to [Suresh, NeurIPS 2019].
Geometric construction of canonical 3D gadgets in origami extrusions
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2021
Year: 2021

In a series of our three previous papers, we presented several constructions of positive and negative 3D gadgets in origami extrusions which create with two simple outgoing pleats a top face parallel to the ambient paper and two side faces sharing a ridge, where a 3D gadget is said to be positive (resp. negative) if the top face of the resulting gadget seen from the front side lies above (resp. below) the ambient paper. For any possible set of angle parameters, we obtained an infinite number of positive 3D gadgets in our second paper, while we obtained a unique negative 3D gadget by our third construction in our third paper. In this paper we present a geometric (ruler and compass) construction of our third negative 3D gadgets, while the construction presented in our third paper was a numerical one using a rather complicated formula. Also, we prove that there exists a unique positive 3D gadget corresponding to each of our third negative ones. Thus we obtain a canonical pair of a positive and a negative 3D gadget. The proof is based on a geometric redefinition of the critical angles which we introduced in constructing our positive 3D gadgets. This redefinition also enables us to give a simplified proof of the existence theorem of our positive 3D gadgets in our second paper. As an application, we can construct a positive and a negative extrusion from a common crease pattern by using the canonical counterparts, as long as there arise no interferences.
Feature Selective Likelihood Ratio Estimator for Low- and Zero-frequency N-grams
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

In natural language processing (NLP), the likelihood ratios (LRs) of N-grams are often estimated from the frequency information. However, a corpus contains only a fraction of the possible N-grams, and most of them occur infrequently. Hence, we desire an LR estimator for low- and zero-frequency N-grams. One way to achieve this is to decompose the N-grams into discrete values, such as letters and words, and take the product of the LRs for the values. However, because this method deals with a large number of discrete values, the running time and memory usage for estimation are problematic. Moreover, use of unnecessary discrete values causes deterioration of the estimation accuracy. Therefore, this paper proposes combining the aforementioned method with the feature selection method used in document classification, and shows that our estimator provides effective and efficient estimation results for low- and zero-frequency N-grams.
A Deep Learning Generative Model Approach for Image Synthesis of Plant Leaves
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Objectives. We generate via advanced Deep Learning (DL) techniques artificial leaf images in an automatized way. We aim to dispose of a source of training samples for AI applications for modern crop management. Such applications require large amounts of data and, while leaf images are not truly scarce, image collection and annotation remains a very time--consuming process. Data scarcity can be addressed by augmentation techniques consisting in simple transformations of samples belonging to a small dataset, but the richness of the augmented data is limited: this motivates the search for alternative approaches. Methods. Pursuing an approach based on DL generative models, we propose a Leaf-to-Leaf Translation (L2L) procedure structured in two steps: first, a residual variational autoencoder architecture generates synthetic leaf skeletons (leaf profile and veins) starting from companions binarized skeletons of real images. In a second step, we perform translation via a Pix2pix framework, which uses conditional generator adversarial networks to reproduce the colorization of leaf blades, preserving the shape and the venation pattern. Results. The L2L procedure generates synthetic images of leaves with a realistic appearance. We address the performance measurement both in a qualitative and a quantitative way; for this latter evaluation, we employ a DL anomaly detection strategy which quantifies the degree of anomaly of synthetic leaves with respect to real samples. Conclusions. Generative DL approaches have the potential to be a new paradigm to provide low-cost meaningful synthetic samples for computer-aided applications. The present L2L approach represents a step towards this goal, being able to generate synthetic samples with a relevant qualitative and quantitative resemblance to real leaves.
SSA: Semantic Structure Aware Inference for Weakly Pixel-Wise Dense Predictions without Cost
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

The pixel-wise dense prediction tasks based on weakly supervisions currently use Class Attention Maps (CAM) to generate pseudo masks as ground-truth. However, the existing methods typically depend on the painstaking training modules, which may bring in grinding computational overhead and complex training procedures. In this work, the semantic structure aware inference (SSA) is proposed to explore the semantic structure information hidden in different stages of the CNN-based network to generate high-quality CAM in the model inference. Specifically, the semantic structure modeling module (SSM) is first proposed to generate the class-agnostic semantic correlation representation, where each item denotes the affinity degree between one category of objects and all the others. Then the structured feature representation is explored to polish an immature CAM via the dot product operation. Finally, the polished CAMs from different backbone stages are fused as the output. The proposed method has the advantage of no parameters and does not need to be trained. Therefore, it can be applied to a wide range of weakly-supervised pixel-wise dense prediction tasks. Experimental results on both weakly-supervised object localization and weakly-supervised semantic segmentation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, which achieves the new state-of-the-art results on these two tasks.
FedLess: Secure and Scalable Federated Learning Using Serverless Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

The traditional cloud-centric approach for Deep Learning (DL) requires training data to be collected and processed at a central server which is often challenging in privacy-sensitive domains like healthcare. Towards this, a new learning paradigm called Federated Learning (FL) has been proposed that brings the potential of DL to these domains while addressing privacy and data ownership issues. FL enables remote clients to learn a shared ML model while keeping the data local. However, conventional FL systems face several challenges such as scalability, complex infrastructure management, and wasted compute and incurred costs due to idle clients. These challenges of FL systems closely align with the core problems that serverless computing and Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) platforms aim to solve. These include rapid scalability, no infrastructure management, automatic scaling to zero for idle clients, and a pay-per-use billing model. To this end, we present a novel system and framework for serverless FL, called FedLess. Our system supports multiple commercial and self-hosted FaaS providers and can be deployed in the cloud, on-premise in institutional data centers, and on edge devices. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to enable FL across a large fabric of heterogeneous FaaS providers while providing important features like security and Differential Privacy. We demonstrate with comprehensive experiments that the successful training of DNNs for different tasks across up to 200 client functions and more is easily possible using our system. Furthermore, we demonstrate the practical viability of our methodology by comparing it against a traditional FL system and show that it can be cheaper and more resource-efficient.
DriveGuard: Robustification of Automated Driving Systems with Deep Spatio-Temporal Convolutional Autoencoder
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Autonomous vehicles increasingly rely on cameras to provide the input for perception and scene understanding and the ability of these models to classify their environment and objects, under adverse conditions and image noise is crucial. When the input is, either unintentionally or through targeted attacks, deteriorated, the reliability of autonomous vehicle is compromised. In order to mitigate such phenomena, we propose DriveGuard, a lightweight spatio-temporal autoencoder, as a solution to robustify the image segmentation process for autonomous vehicles. By first processing camera images with DriveGuard, we offer a more universal solution than having to re-train each perception model with noisy input. We explore the space of different autoencoder architectures and evaluate them on a diverse dataset created with real and synthetic images demonstrating that by exploiting spatio-temporal information combined with multi-component loss we significantly increase robustness against adverse image effects reaching within 5-6% of that of the original model on clean images.
Guaranteed blind deconvolution and demixing via hierarchically sparse reconstruction
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

The blind deconvolution problem amounts to reconstructing both a signal and a filter from the convolution of these two. It constitutes a prominent topic in mathematical and engineering literature. In this work, we analyze a sparse version of the problem: The filter $h\in \mathbb{R}^μ$ is assumed to be $s$-sparse, and the signal $b \in \mathbb{R}^n$ is taken to be $σ$-sparse, both supports being unknown. We observe a convolution between the filter and a linear transformation of the signal. Motivated by practically important multi-user communication applications, we derive a recovery guarantee for the simultaneous demixing and deconvolution setting. We achieve efficient recovery by relaxing the problem to a hierarchical sparse recovery for which we can build on a flexible framework. At the same time, for this we pay the price of some sub-optimal guarantees compared to the number of free parameters of the problem. The signal model we consider is sufficiently general to capture many applications in a number of engineering fields. Despite their practical importance, we provide first rigorous performance guarantees for efficient and simple algorithms for the bi-sparse and generalized demixing setting. We complement our analytical results by presenting results of numerical simulations. We find evidence that the sub-optimal scaling $s^2σ\log(μ)\log(n)$ of our derived sufficient condition is likely overly pessimistic and that the observed performance is better described by a scaling proportional to $ sσ$ up to log-factors.
SLA-Driven Load Scheduling in Multi-Tier Cloud Computing: Financial Impact Considerations
Venue: arXiv cs.PF 2021
Year: 2021

A cloud service provider strives to provide a high Quality of Service (QoS) to client jobs. Such jobs vary in computational and Service-Level-Agreement (SLA) obligations, as well as differ with respect to tolerating delays and SLA violations. The job scheduling plays a critical role in servicing cloud demands by allocating appropriate resources to execute client jobs. The response to such jobs is optimized by the cloud provider on a multi-tier cloud computing environment. Typically, the complex and dynamic nature of multi-tier environments incurs difficulties in meeting such demands, because tiers are dependent on each other which in turn makes bottlenecks of a tier shift to escalate in subsequent tiers. However, the optimization process of existing approaches produces single-tier-driven schedules that do not employ the differential impact of SLA violations in executing client jobs. Furthermore, the impact of schedules optimized at the tier level on the performance of schedules formulated in subsequent tiers tends to be ignored, resulting in a less than optimal performance when measured at the multi-tier level. Thus, failing in committing job obligations incurs SLA penalties that often take the form of either financial compensations, or losing future interests and motivations of unsatisfied clients in the service provided. In this paper, a scheduling and allocation approach is proposed to formulate schedules that account for differential impacts of SLA violation penalties and, thus, produce schedules that are optimal in financial performance. A queue virtualization scheme is designed to facilitate the formulation of optimal schedules at the tier and multi-tier levels of the cloud environment. Because the scheduling problem is NP-hard, a biologically inspired approach is proposed to mitigate the complexity of finding optimal schedules.
Deep-Learning Based Linear Precoding for MIMO Channels with Finite-Alphabet Signaling
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

This paper studies the problem of linear precoding for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication channels employing finite-alphabet signaling. Existing solutions typically suffer from high computational complexity due to costly computations of the constellation-constrained mutual information. In contrast to existing works, this paper takes a different path of tackling the MIMO precoding problem. Namely, a data-driven approach, based on deep learning, is proposed. In the offline training phase, a deep neural network learns the optimal solution on a set of MIMO channel matrices. This allows the reduction of the computational complexity of the precoder optimization in the online inference phase. Numerical results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed solution vis-à-vis existing precoding algorithms in terms of significantly reduced complexity and close-to-optimal performance.
Learning Formulas in Finite Variable Logics
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2021
Year: 2021

We consider grammar-restricted exact learning of formulas and terms in finite variable logics. We propose a novel and versatile automata-theoretic technique for solving such problems. We first show results for learning formulas that classify a set of positively- and negatively-labeled structures. We give algorithms for realizability and synthesis of such formulas along with upper and lower bounds. We also establish positive results using our technique for other logics and variants of the learning problem, including first-order logic with least fixed point definitions, higher-order logics, and synthesis of queries and terms with recursively-defined functions.