OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Some Pragmatic Prevention's Guidelines regarding SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 in Latin-America inspired by mixed Machine Learning Techniques and Artificial Mathematical Intelligence. Case Study: Colombia
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2021
Year: 2021

We use an enhanced methodology combining specific forms of AI techniques, opinion mining and artificial mathematical intelligence (AMI), with public data on the spread of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 and the incidence of COVID-19 disease in Colombia during the first three months since the first reported positive case. The results obtained, together with conceptual tools coming from the global taxonomy of fundamental cognitive mechanisms emerging in AMI and with suitable contextual information from Colombian public health and mainstream social media, allowed us to stating specific preventive guidelines for a better restructuring of initial safe and stable life conditions in Colombia, and in an extended manner in similar Latin American Countries. More specifically, we describe three major guidelines: 1) regular creative visualization and effective planning, 2) the continuous use of constructive linguistic frameworks, and 3) frequent and moderate use of kinesthetic routines. They should be understood as effective tools from a cognitive and behavioural perspective, rather than from a biological one. Even more, the first two guidelines should be acknowledged in integral cooperation with the third one regarding the global effect of COVID-19 in human beings as a whole, this includes the mind and body.
AutoMate: A Dataset and Learning Approach for Automatic Mating of CAD Assemblies
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Assembly modeling is a core task of computer aided design (CAD), comprising around one third of the work in a CAD workflow. Optimizing this process therefore represents a huge opportunity in the design of a CAD system, but current research of assembly based modeling is not directly applicable to modern CAD systems because it eschews the dominant data structure of modern CAD: parametric boundary representations (BREPs). CAD assembly modeling defines assemblies as a system of pairwise constraints, called mates, between parts, which are defined relative to BREP topology rather than in world coordinates common to existing work. We propose SB-GCN, a representation learning scheme on BREPs that retains the topological structure of parts, and use these learned representations to predict CAD type mates. To train our system, we compiled the first large scale dataset of BREP CAD assemblies, which we are releasing along with benchmark mate prediction tasks. Finally, we demonstrate the compatibility of our model with an existing commercial CAD system by building a tool that assists users in mate creation by suggesting mate completions, with 72.2% accuracy.
Bayesian Nonparametric Reinforcement Learning in LTE and Wi-Fi Coexistence
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

With the formation of next generation wireless communication, a growing number of new applications like internet of things, autonomous car, and drone is crowding the unlicensed spectrum. Licensed network such as the long-term evolution (LTE) also comes to the unlicensed spectrum for better providing high-capacity contents with low cost. However, LTE was not designed for sharing spectrum with others. A cooperation center for these networks is costly because they possess heterogeneous properties and everyone can enter and leave the spectrum unrestrictedly, so the design will be challenging. Since it is infeasible to incorporate potentially infinite scenarios with one unified design, an alternative solution is to let each network learn its own coexistence policy. Previous solutions only work on fixed scenarios. In this work a reinforcement learning algorithm is presented to cope with the coexistence between Wi-Fi and LTE agents in 5 GHz unlicensed spectrum. The coexistence problem was modeled as a decentralized partially observable Markov decision process (Dec-POMDP) and Bayesian approach was adopted for policy learning with nonparametric prior to accommodate the uncertainty of policy for different agents. A fairness measure was introduced in the reward function to encourage fair sharing between agents. The reinforcement learning was turned into an optimization problem by transforming the value function as likelihood and variational inference for posterior approximation. Simulation results demonstrate that this algorithm can reach high value with compact policy representations, and stay computationally efficient when applying to agent set.
Smoothed Analysis of Population Protocols
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

In this work, we initiate the study of \emph{smoothed analysis} of population protocols. We consider a population protocol model where an adaptive adversary dictates the interactions between agents, but with probability $p$ every such interaction may change into an interaction between two agents chosen uniformly at random. That is, $p$-fraction of the interactions are random, while $(1-p)$-fraction are adversarial. The aim of our model is to bridge the gap between a uniformly random scheduler (which is too idealistic) and an adversarial scheduler (which is too strict). We focus on the fundamental problem of leader election in population protocols. We show that, for a population of size $n$, the leader election problem can be solved in $O(p^{-2}n \log^3 n)$ steps with high probability, using $O((\log^2 n) \cdot (\log (n/p)))$ states per agent, for \emph{all} values of $p\leq 1$. Although our result does not match the best known running time of $O(n \log n)$ for the uniformly random scheduler ($p=1$), we are able to present a \emph{smooth transition} between a running time of $O(n \cdot \mathrm{polylog} n)$ for $p=1$ and an infinite running time for the adversarial scheduler ($p=0$), where the problem cannot be solved. The key technical contribution of our work is a novel \emph{phase clock} algorithm for our model. This is a key primitive for much-studied fundamental population protocol algorithms (leader election, majority), and we believe it is of independent interest.
Wireless Charging Power Side-Channel Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

This paper shows that today's wireless charging interface is vulnerable to power side-channel attacks; a smartphone charging wirelessly leaks private information about its activity to the wireless charger (charging transmitter). We present a website fingerprinting attack through the wireless charging side-channel for both iOS and Android devices. The attack monitors the current drawn by the wireless charging transmitter while 20 webpages from the Alexa top sites list are loaded on a charging smartphone. We implement a classifier that correctly identifies unlabeled current traces with an accuracy of 87% on average for an iPhone 11 and 95% on average for a Google Pixel 4. This represents a considerable security threat because wireless charging does not require any user permission if the phone is within the range of a charging transmitter. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first to introduce and demonstrate a power side-channel attack through wireless charging. Additionally, this study compares the wireless charging side-channel with the wired USB charging power side-channel, showing that they are comparable. We find that the performance of the attack deteriorates as the contents of websites change over time. Furthermore, we discover that the amount of information leakage through both wireless and wired charging interfaces heavily depends on the battery level; minimal information is leaked at low battery levels.
Vericom: A Verification and Communication Architecture for IoT-based Blockchain
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Blockchain has received tremendous attention as a secure, distributed, and anonymous framework for the Internet of Things (IoT). As a distributed system, blockchain trades off scalability for distribution, which limits the technologys adaptation for large scale networks such as IoT. All transactions and blocks must be broadcast and verified by all participants which limits scalability and incurs computational and communication overheads. The existing solutions to scale blockchains have so far led to partial recentralization, limiting the technologys original appeal. In this paper, we introduce a distributed yet scalable Verification and Communication architecture for blockchain referred to as Vericom. Vericom concurrently achieves high scalability and distribution using hash function outputs to shift blockchains from broadcast to multicast communication. Unlike conventional blockchains where all nodes must verify new transactions/blocks, Vericom uses the hash of IoT traffic to randomly select a set of nodes to verify transactions/blocks which in turn reduces the processing overhead. Vericom incorporates two layers: i) transmission layer where a randomized multicasting method is introduced along with a backbone network to route traffic, i.e., transactions and blocks, from the source to the destination, and ii) verification layer where a set of randomly selected nodes are allocated to verify each transaction or block. The performance evaluation shows that Vericom reduces the packet and processing overhead as compared with conventional blockchains. In the worst case, packet overhead in Vericom scales linearly with the number of nodes while the processing overhead remains scale-independent.
FINNger -- Applying artificial intelligence to ease math learning for children
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Kids have an amazing capacity to use modern electronic devices such as tablets, smartphones, etc. This has been incredibly boosted by the ease of access of these devices given the expansion of such devices through the world, reaching even third world countries. Also, it is well known that children tend to have difficulty learning some subjects at pre-school. We as a society focus extensively on alphabetization, but in the end, children end up having differences in another essential area: Mathematics. With this work, we create the basis for an intuitive application that could join the fact that children have a lot of ease when using such technological applications, trying to shrink the gap between a fun and enjoyable activity with something that will improve the children knowledge and ability to understand concepts when in a low age, by using a novel convolutional neural network to achieve so, named FINNger.
Operator Autoencoders: Learning Physical Operations on Encoded Molecular Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Molecular dynamics simulations produce data with complex nonlinear dynamics. If the timestep behavior of such a dynamic system can be represented by a linear operator, future states can be inferred directly without expensive simulations. The use of an autoencoder in combination with a physical timestep operator allows both the relevant structural characteristics of the molecular graphs and the underlying physics of the system to be isolated during the training process. In this work, we develop a pipeline for establishing graph-structured representations of time-series volumetric data from molecular dynamics simulations. We then train an autoencoder to find nonlinear mappings to a latent space where future timesteps can be predicted through application of a linear operator trained in tandem with the autoencoder. Increasing the dimensionality of the autoencoder output is shown to improve the accuracy of the physical timestep operator.
SGPT: Semantic Graphs based Pre-training for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Previous studies show effective of pre-trained language models for sentiment analysis. However, most of these studies ignore the importance of sentimental information for pre-trained models.Therefore, we fully investigate the sentimental information for pre-trained models and enhance pre-trained language models with semantic graphs for sentiment analysis.In particular, we introduce Semantic Graphs based Pre-training(SGPT) using semantic graphs to obtain synonym knowledge for aspect-sentiment pairs and similar aspect/sentiment terms.We then optimize the pre-trained language model with the semantic graphs.Empirical studies on several downstream tasks show that proposed model outperforms strong pre-trained baselines. The results also show the effectiveness of proposed semantic graphs for pre-trained model.
PSGAN++: Robust Detail-Preserving Makeup Transfer and Removal
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we address the makeup transfer and removal tasks simultaneously, which aim to transfer the makeup from a reference image to a source image and remove the makeup from the with-makeup image respectively. Existing methods have achieved much advancement in constrained scenarios, but it is still very challenging for them to transfer makeup between images with large pose and expression differences, or handle makeup details like blush on cheeks or highlight on the nose. In addition, they are hardly able to control the degree of makeup during transferring or to transfer a specified part in the input face. In this work, we propose the PSGAN++, which is capable of performing both detail-preserving makeup transfer and effective makeup removal. For makeup transfer, PSGAN++ uses a Makeup Distill Network to extract makeup information, which is embedded into spatial-aware makeup matrices. We also devise an Attentive Makeup Morphing module that specifies how the makeup in the source image is morphed from the reference image, and a makeup detail loss to supervise the model within the selected makeup detail area. On the other hand, for makeup removal, PSGAN++ applies an Identity Distill Network to embed the identity information from with-makeup images into identity matrices. Finally, the obtained makeup/identity matrices are fed to a Style Transfer Network that is able to edit the feature maps to achieve makeup transfer or removal. To evaluate the effectiveness of our PSGAN++, we collect a Makeup Transfer In the Wild dataset that contains images with diverse poses and expressions and a Makeup Transfer High-Resolution dataset that contains high-resolution images. Experiments demonstrate that PSGAN++ not only achieves state-of-the-art results with fine makeup details even in cases of large pose/expression differences but also can perform partial or degree-controllable makeup transfer.
Epistemic Uncertainty Aware Semantic Localization and Mapping for Inference and Belief Space Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

We investigate the problem of autonomous object classification and semantic SLAM, which in general exhibits a tight coupling between classification, metric SLAM and planning under uncertainty. We contribute a unified framework for inference and belief space planning (BSP) that addresses prominent sources of uncertainty in this context: classification aliasing (classier cannot distinguish between candidate classes from certain viewpoints), classifier epistemic uncertainty (classifier receives data "far" from its training set), and localization uncertainty (camera and object poses are uncertain). Specifically, we develop two methods for maintaining a joint distribution over robot and object poses, and over posterior class probability vector that considers epistemic uncertainty in a Bayesian fashion. The first approach is Multi-Hybrid (MH), where multiple hybrid beliefs over poses and classes are maintained to approximate the joint belief over poses and posterior class probability. The second approach is Joint Lambda Pose (JLP), where the joint belief is maintained directly using a novel JLP factor. Furthermore, we extend both methods to BSP, planning while reasoning about future posterior epistemic uncertainty indirectly, or directly via a novel information-theoretic reward function. Both inference methods utilize a novel viewpoint-dependent classifier uncertainty model that leverages the coupling between poses and classification scores and predicts the epistemic uncertainty from certain viewpoints. In addition, this model is used to generate predicted measurements during planning. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that reasons about classifier epistemic uncertainty within semantic SLAM and BSP.
User Grouping and Reflective Beamforming for IRS-Aided URLLC
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

This paper studies an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided downlink ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (URLLC) system, in which an IRS is dedicatedly deployed to assist a base station (BS) to send individual short-packet messages to multiple users. To enhance the URLLC performance, the users are divided into different groups and the messages for users in each group are encoded into a single codeword. By considering the time division multiple access (TDMA) protocol among different groups, our objective is to minimize the total latency for all users subject to their individual reliability requirements, via jointly optimizing the user grouping and block-length allocation at the BS together with the reflective beamforming at the IRS. We solve the latency minimization problem via the alternating optimization, in which the blocklengths and the reflective beamforming are optimized by using the techniques of successive convex approximation (SCA) and semi-definite relaxation (SDR), while the user grouping is updated by K-means and greedy-based methods. Numerical results show that the proposed designs can significantly reduce the communication latency, as compared to various benchmark schemes, which unveil the importance of user grouping and reflective beamforming optimization for exploiting the joint encoding gain and enhancing the worst-case user performance.
The Impact of Dormant Defects on Defect Prediction: a Study of 19 Apache Projects
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

Defect prediction models can be beneficial to prioritize testing, analysis, or code review activities, and has been the subject of a substantial effort in academia, and some applications in industrial contexts. A necessary precondition when creating a defect prediction model is the availability of defect data from the history of projects. If this data is noisy, the resulting defect prediction model could result to be unreliable. One of the causes of noise for defect datasets is the presence of "dormant defects", i.e., of defects discovered several releases after their introduction. This can cause a class to be labeled as defect-free while it is not, and is, therefore "snoring". In this paper, we investigate the impact of snoring on classifiers' accuracy and the effectiveness of a possible countermeasure, i.e., dropping too recent data from a training set. We analyze the accuracy of 15 machine learning defect prediction classifiers, on data from more than 4,000 defects and 600 releases of 19 open source projects from the Apache ecosystem. Our results show that on average across projects: (i) the presence of dormant defects decreases the recall of defect prediction classifiers, and (ii) removing from the training set the classes that in the last release are labeled as not defective significantly improves the accuracy of the classifiers. In summary, this paper provides insights on how to create defects datasets by mitigating the negative effect of dormant defects on defect prediction.
Anomaly Detection and Failure Root Cause Analysis in (Micro)Service-Based Cloud Applications: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

The momentum gained by microservices and cloud-native software architecture pushed nowadays enterprise IT towards multi-service applications. The proliferation of services and service interactions within applications, often consisting of hundreds of interacting services, makes it harder to detect failures and to identify their possible root causes, which is on the other hand crucial to promptly recover and fix applications. Various techniques have been proposed to promptly detect failures based on their symptoms, viz., observing anomalous behaviour in one or more application services, as well as to analyse logs or monitored performance of such services to determine the possible root causes for observed anomalies. The objective of this survey is to provide a structured overview and a qualitative analysis of currently available techniques for anomaly detection and root cause analysis in modern multi-service applications. Some open challenges and research directions stemming out from the analysis are also discussed.
Learning to Detect Fortified Areas
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

High resolution data models like grid terrain models made from LiDAR data are a prerequisite for modern day Geographic Information Systems applications. Besides providing the foundation for the very accurate digital terrain models, LiDAR data is also extensively used to classify which parts of the considered surface comprise relevant elements like water, buildings and vegetation. In this paper we consider the problem of classifying which areas of a given surface are fortified by for instance, roads, sidewalks, parking spaces, paved driveways and terraces. We consider using LiDAR data and orthophotos, combined and alone, to show how well the modern machine learning algorithms Gradient Boosted Trees and Convolutional Neural Networks are able to detect fortified areas on large real world data. The LiDAR data features, in particular the intensity feature that measures the signal strength of the return, that we consider in this project are heavily dependent on the actual LiDAR sensor that made the measurement. This is highly problematic, in particular for the generalisation capability of pattern matching algorithms, as this means that data features for test data may be very different from the data the model is trained on. We propose an algorithmic solution to this problem by designing a neural net embedding architecture that transforms data from all the different sensor systems into a new common representation that works as well as if the training data and test data originated from the same sensor. The final algorithm result has an accuracy above 96 percent, and an AUC score above 0.99.
Receptive Field Regularization Techniques for Audio Classification and Tagging with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we study the performance of variants of well-known Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures on different audio tasks. We show that tuning the Receptive Field (RF) of CNNs is crucial to their generalization. An insufficient RF limits the CNN's ability to fit the training data. In contrast, CNNs with an excessive RF tend to over-fit the training data and fail to generalize to unseen testing data. As state-of-the-art CNN architectures-in computer vision and other domains-tend to go deeper in terms of number of layers, their RF size increases and therefore they degrade in performance in several audio classification and tagging tasks. We study well-known CNN architectures and how their building blocks affect their receptive field. We propose several systematic approaches to control the RF of CNNs and systematically test the resulting architectures on different audio classification and tagging tasks and datasets. The experiments show that regularizing the RF of CNNs using our proposed approaches can drastically improve the generalization of models, out-performing complex architectures and pre-trained models on larger datasets. The proposed CNNs achieve state-of-the-art results in multiple tasks, from acoustic scene classification to emotion and theme detection in music to instrument recognition, as demonstrated by top ranks in several pertinent challenges (DCASE, MediaEval).