OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
LAMP: Learn A Motion Pattern for Few-Shot-Based Video Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

With the impressive progress in diffusion-based text-to-image generation, extending such powerful generative ability to text-to-video raises enormous attention. Existing methods either require large-scale text-video pairs and a large number of training resources or learn motions that are precisely aligned with template videos. It is non-trivial to balance a trade-off between the degree of generation freedom and the resource costs for video generation. In our study, we present a few-shot-based tuning framework, LAMP, which enables text-to-image diffusion model Learn A specific Motion Pattern with 8~16 videos on a single GPU. Specifically, we design a first-frame-conditioned pipeline that uses an off-the-shelf text-to-image model for content generation so that our tuned video diffusion model mainly focuses on motion learning. The well-developed text-to-image techniques can provide visually pleasing and diverse content as generation conditions, which highly improves video quality and generation freedom. To capture the features of temporal dimension, we expand the pretrained 2D convolution layers of the T2I model to our novel temporal-spatial motion learning layers and modify the attention blocks to the temporal level. Additionally, we develop an effective inference trick, shared-noise sampling, which can improve the stability of videos with computational costs. Our method can also be flexibly applied to other tasks, e.g. real-world image animation and video editing. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LAMP can effectively learn the motion pattern on limited data and generate high-quality videos. The code and models are available at https://rq-wu.github.io/projects/LAMP.
Demystifying Poisoning Backdoor Attacks from a Statistical Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

The growing dependence on machine learning in real-world applications emphasizes the importance of understanding and ensuring its safety. Backdoor attacks pose a significant security risk due to their stealthy nature and potentially serious consequences. Such attacks involve embedding triggers within a learning model with the intention of causing malicious behavior when an active trigger is present while maintaining regular functionality without it. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of any backdoor attack incorporating a constant trigger, by establishing tight lower and upper boundaries for the performance of the compromised model on both clean and backdoor test data. The developed theory answers a series of fundamental but previously underexplored problems, including (1) what are the determining factors for a backdoor attack's success, (2) what is the direction of the most effective backdoor attack, and (3) when will a human-imperceptible trigger succeed. Our derived understanding applies to both discriminative and generative models. We also demonstrate the theory by conducting experiments using benchmark datasets and state-of-the-art backdoor attack scenarios.
State Machine Frameworks for Website Fingerprinting Defenses: Maybe Not
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Tor is an anonymity network used by millions of people every day to evade censorship and protect their browsing activity from privacy threats such as mass surveillance. Unfortunately, Tor has been shown to be vulnerable to website fingerprinting attacks, in which an adversary observes the connection between a user and the Tor network and uses features of the encrypted traffic, such as the timing and volume of packets, to identify the websites that are being visited. In response, researchers have proposed a number of defenses against website fingerprinting attacks, and a "circuit padding framework" has been added to the Tor software which supports the implementation of defenses. However, many proposed defenses are not supported by this framework, and no defenses are currently present in Tor. As Arti, a reimplementation of Tor in Rust, is being developed, the issue arises of whether a new state machine framework should be included or if alternative models should instead be considered for future defense implementation. We address this question by using an improved Rust-based state machine framework, Maybenot, to implement three state-of-the-art website fingerprinting defenses. Through our evaluation, we demonstrate the potential of state machine frameworks to support effective defenses, and we highlight important features that they should contain to do so. However, our evaluation also raises uncertainty about the long-term feasibility of state machine frameworks for defense implementation. We recommend enhancements to Maybenot and substantial further evaluation, along with consideration of alternative designs, before any decision is made regarding a mechanism for implementing website fingerprinting defenses in Arti.
Three Quantum Programming Language Parser Implementations for the Web
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2023
Year: 2023

IBM has developed a quantum assembly (QASM) language particular to gate model quantum computing since 2017 [CBSG17]. Version 3.0 which adds timing, pulse control, and gate modifiers is currently undergoing finalization in 2023 [CJA+21]. In a similar vein, Pakin of Los Alamos National Laboratory published a quantum macro assembler (QMASM) for D-Wave quantum annealers in 2016 [Pak16]. This assembler specifically targets quantum annealers like D-Wave's. A comparable technology that targets continuous-variable (CV) quantum computing is the Blackbird language developed by Xanadu since 2018 [KIQ+19]. We implement parsers for each of these languages in TypeScript with a singular approach. In the cases of Blackbird and QMASM these are the first parser implementations that are web compatible and so bring these languages to a new audience and to new runtimes. This makes the parsing and execution of QMASM, QASM and Blackbird possible in web and mobile environments that don't have access to heavy compile toolchains, enabling adoption and scientific research.
Filling the Holes on 3D Heritage Object Surface based on Automatic Segmentation Algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Reconstructing and processing the 3D objects are popular activities in the research field of computer graphics, image processing and computer vision. The 3D objects are processed based on the methods like geometric modeling, a branch of applied mathematics and computational geometry, or the machine learning algorithms based on image processing. The computation of geometrical objects includes processing the curves and surfaces, subdivision, simplification, meshing, holes filling, reconstructing, and refining the 3D surface objects on both point cloud data and triangular mesh. While the machine learning methods are developed using deep learning models. With the support of 3D laser scan devices and Lidar techniques, the obtained dataset is close to original shape of the real objects. Besides, the photography and its application based on the modern techniques in recent years help us collect data and process the 3D models more precise. This article proposes an improved method for filling holes on the 3D object surface based on an automatic segmentation. Instead of filling the hole directly as the existing methods, we now subdivide the hole before filling it. The hole is first determined and segmented automatically based on computation of its local curvature. It is then filled on each part of the hole to match its local curvature shape. The method can work on both 3D point cloud surfaces and triangular mesh surface. Comparing to the state of the art methods, our proposed method obtained higher accuracy of the reconstructed 3D objects.
Using Audio Data to Facilitate Depression Risk Assessment in Primary Health Care
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Telehealth is a valuable tool for primary health care (PHC), where depression is a common condition. PHC is the first point of contact for most people with depression, but about 25% of diagnoses made by PHC physicians are inaccurate. Many other barriers also hinder depression detection and treatment in PHC. Artificial intelligence (AI) may help reduce depression misdiagnosis in PHC and improve overall diagnosis and treatment outcomes. Telehealth consultations often have video issues, such as poor connectivity or dropped calls. Audio-only telehealth is often more practical for lower-income patients who may lack stable internet connections. Thus, our study focused on using audio data to predict depression risk. The objectives were to: 1) Collect audio data from 24 people (12 with depression and 12 without mental health or major health condition diagnoses); 2) Build a machine learning model to predict depression risk. TPOT, an autoML tool, was used to select the best machine learning algorithm, which was the K-nearest neighbors classifier. The selected model had high performance in classifying depression risk (Precision: 0.98, Recall: 0.93, F1-Score: 0.96). These findings may lead to a range of tools to help screen for and treat depression. By developing tools to detect depression risk, patients can be routed to AI-driven chatbots for initial screenings. Partnerships with a range of stakeholders are crucial to implementing these solutions. Moreover, ethical considerations, especially around data privacy and potential biases in AI models, need to be at the forefront of any AI-driven intervention in mental health care.
MASON-NLP at eRisk 2023: Deep Learning-Based Detection of Depression Symptoms from Social Media Texts
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Depression is a mental health disorder that has a profound impact on people's lives. Recent research suggests that signs of depression can be detected in the way individuals communicate, both through spoken words and written texts. In particular, social media posts are a rich and convenient text source that we may examine for depressive symptoms. The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) Questionnaire, which is frequently used to gauge the severity of depression, is one instrument that can aid in this study. We can narrow our study to only those symptoms since each BDI question is linked to a particular depressive symptom. It's important to remember that not everyone with depression exhibits all symptoms at once, but rather a combination of them. Therefore, it is extremely useful to be able to determine if a sentence or a piece of user-generated content is pertinent to a certain condition. With this in mind, the eRisk 2023 Task 1 was designed to do exactly that: assess the relevance of different sentences to the symptoms of depression as outlined in the BDI questionnaire. This report is all about how our team, Mason-NLP, participated in this subtask, which involved identifying sentences related to different depression symptoms. We used a deep learning approach that incorporated MentalBERT, RoBERTa, and LSTM. Despite our efforts, the evaluation results were lower than expected, underscoring the challenges inherent in ranking sentences from an extensive dataset about depression, which necessitates both appropriate methodological choices and significant computational resources. We anticipate that future iterations of this shared task will yield improved results as our understanding and techniques evolve.
Stealthy Terrain-Aware Multi-Agent Active Search
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2023
Year: 2023

Stealthy multi-agent active search is the problem of making efficient sequential data-collection decisions to identify an unknown number of sparsely located targets while adapting to new sensing information and concealing the search agents' location from the targets. This problem is applicable to reconnaissance tasks wherein the safety of the search agents can be compromised as the targets may be adversarial. Prior work usually focuses either on adversarial search, where the risk of revealing the agents' location to the targets is ignored or evasion strategies where efficient search is ignored. We present the Stealthy Terrain-Aware Reconnaissance (STAR) algorithm, a multi-objective parallelized Thompson sampling-based algorithm that relies on a strong topographical prior to reason over changing visibility risk over the course of the search. The STAR algorithm outperforms existing state-of-the-art multi-agent active search methods on both rate of recovery of targets as well as minimising risk even when subject to noisy observations, communication failures and an unknown number of targets.
Deep Learning based Spatially Dependent Acoustical Properties Recovery
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The physics-informed neural network (PINN) is capable of recovering partial differential equation (PDE) coefficients that remain constant throughout the spatial domain directly from physical measurements. In this work, we propose a spatially dependent physics-informed neural network (SD-PINN), which enables the recovery of coefficients in spatially-dependent PDEs using a single neural network, eliminating the requirement for domain-specific physical expertise. We apply the SD-PINN to spatially-dependent wave equation coefficients recovery to reveal the spatial distribution of acoustical properties in the inhomogeneous medium. The proposed method exhibits robustness to noise owing to the incorporation of a loss function for the physical constraint that the assumed PDE must be satisfied. For the coefficients recovery of spatially two-dimensional PDEs, we store the PDE coefficients at all locations in the 2D region of interest into a matrix and incorporate the low-rank assumption for such a matrix to recover the coefficients at locations without available measurements.
Why Do Students Drop Out? University Dropout Prediction and Associated Factor Analysis Using Machine Learning Techniques
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Graduation and dropout rates have always been a serious consideration for educational institutions and students. High dropout rates negatively impact both the lives of individual students and institutions. To address this problem, this study examined university dropout prediction using academic, demographic, socioeconomic, and macroeconomic data types. Additionally, we performed associated factor analysis to analyze which type of data would be most influential on the performance of machine learning models in predicting graduation and dropout status. These features were used to train four binary classifiers to determine if students would graduate or drop out. The overall performance of the classifiers in predicting dropout status had an average ROC-AUC score of 0.935. The data type most influential to the model performance was found to be academic data, with the average ROC-AUC score dropping from 0.935 to 0.811 when excluding all academic-related features from the data set. Preliminary results indicate that a correlation does exist between data types and dropout status.
Accelerating Scalable Graph Neural Network Inference with Node-Adaptive Propagation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have exhibited exceptional efficacy in a diverse array of applications. However, the sheer size of large-scale graphs presents a significant challenge to real-time inference with GNNs. Although existing Scalable GNNs leverage linear propagation to preprocess the features and accelerate the training and inference procedure, these methods still suffer from scalability issues when making inferences on unseen nodes, as the feature preprocessing requires the graph to be known and fixed. To further accelerate Scalable GNNs inference in this inductive setting, we propose an online propagation framework and two novel node-adaptive propagation methods that can customize the optimal propagation depth for each node based on its topological information and thereby avoid redundant feature propagation. The trade-off between accuracy and latency can be flexibly managed through simple hyper-parameters to accommodate various latency constraints. Moreover, to compensate for the inference accuracy loss caused by the potential early termination of propagation, we further propose Inception Distillation to exploit the multi-scale receptive field information within graphs. The rigorous and comprehensive experimental study on public datasets with varying scales and characteristics demonstrates that the proposed inference acceleration framework outperforms existing state-of-the-art graph inference acceleration methods in terms of accuracy and efficiency. Particularly, the superiority of our approach is notable on datasets with larger scales, yielding a 75x inference speedup on the largest Ogbn-products dataset.
Compatible Transformer for Irregularly Sampled Multivariate Time Series
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

To analyze multivariate time series, most previous methods assume regular subsampling of time series, where the interval between adjacent measurements and the number of samples remain unchanged. Practically, data collection systems could produce irregularly sampled time series due to sensor failures and interventions. However, existing methods designed for regularly sampled multivariate time series cannot directly handle irregularity owing to misalignment along both temporal and variate dimensions. To fill this gap, we propose Compatible Transformer (CoFormer), a transformer-based encoder to achieve comprehensive temporal-interaction feature learning for each individual sample in irregular multivariate time series. In CoFormer, we view each sample as a unique variate-time point and leverage intra-variate/inter-variate attentions to learn sample-wise temporal/interaction features based on intra-variate/inter-variate neighbors. With CoFormer as the core, we can analyze irregularly sampled multivariate time series for many downstream tasks, including classification and prediction. We conduct extensive experiments on 3 real-world datasets and validate that the proposed CoFormer significantly and consistently outperforms existing methods.
Diagrammatic Modelling of Causality and Causal Relations
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

It has been stated that the notion of cause and effect is one object of study that sciences and engineering revolve around. Lately, in software engineering, diagrammatic causal inference methods (e.g., Pearl s model) have gained popularity (e.g., analyzing causes and effects of change in software requirement development). This paper concerns diagrammatical (graphic) models of causal relationships. Specifically, we experiment with using the conceptual language of thinging machines (TMs) as a tool in this context. This would benefit works on causal relationships in requirements engineering, enhance our understanding of the TM modeling, and contribute to the study of the philosophical notion of causality. To specify the causality in a system s description is to constrain the system s behavior and thus exclude some possible chronologies of events. The notion of causality has been studied based on tools to express causal questions in diagrammatic and algebraic forms. Causal models deploy diagrammatic models, structural equations, and counterfactual and interventional logic. Diagrammatic models serve as a language for representing what we know about the world. The research methodology in the paper focuses on converting causal graphs into TM models and contrasts the two types of representation. The results show that the TM depiction of causality is more complete and therefore can provide a foundation for causal graphs.
MeKB-Rec: Personal Knowledge Graph Learning for Cross-Domain Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

It is a long-standing challenge in modern recommender systems to effectively make recommendations for new users, namely the cold-start problem. Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) has been proposed to address this challenge, but current ways to represent users' interests across systems are still severely limited. We introduce Personal Knowledge Graph (PKG) as a domain-invariant interest representation, and propose a novel CDR paradigm named MeKB-Rec. We first link users and entities in a knowledge base to construct a PKG of users' interests, named MeKB. Then we learn a semantic representation of MeKB for the cross-domain recommendation. To efficiently utilize limited training data in CDR, MeKB-Rec employs Pretrained Language Models to inject world knowledge into understanding users' interests. Beyond most existing systems, our approach builds a semantic mapping across domains which breaks the requirement for in-domain user behaviors, enabling zero-shot recommendations for new users in a low-resource domain. We experiment MeKB-Rec on well-established public CDR datasets, and demonstrate that the new formulation % is more powerful than previous approaches, achieves a new state-of-the-art that significantly improves HR@10 and NDCG@10 metrics over best previous approaches by 24\%--91\%, with a 105\% improvement for HR@10 of zero-shot users with no behavior in the target domain. We deploy MeKB-Rec in WeiXin recommendation scenarios and achieve significant gains in core online metrics. MeKB-Rec is now serving hundreds of millions of users in real-world products.
Sparse-DySta: Sparsity-Aware Dynamic and Static Scheduling for Sparse Multi-DNN Workloads
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

Running multiple deep neural networks (DNNs) in parallel has become an emerging workload in both edge devices, such as mobile phones where multiple tasks serve a single user for daily activities, and data centers, where various requests are raised from millions of users, as seen with large language models. To reduce the costly computational and memory requirements of these workloads, various efficient sparsification approaches have been introduced, resulting in widespread sparsity across different types of DNN models. In this context, there is an emerging need for scheduling sparse multi-DNN workloads, a problem that is largely unexplored in previous literature. This paper systematically analyses the use-cases of multiple sparse DNNs and investigates the opportunities for optimizations. Based on these findings, we propose Dysta, a novel bi-level dynamic and static scheduler that utilizes both static sparsity patterns and dynamic sparsity information for the sparse multi-DNN scheduling. Both static and dynamic components of Dysta are jointly designed at the software and hardware levels, respectively, to improve and refine the scheduling approach. To facilitate future progress in the study of this class of workloads, we construct a public benchmark that contains sparse multi-DNN workloads across different deployment scenarios, spanning from mobile phones and AR/VR wearables to data centers. A comprehensive evaluation on the sparse multi-DNN benchmark demonstrates that our proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods with up to 10% decrease in latency constraint violation rate and nearly 4X reduction in average normalized turnaround time. Our artifacts and code are publicly available at: https://github.com/SamsungLabs/Sparse-Multi-DNN-Scheduling.