OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Novel CropdocNet for Automated Potato Late Blight Disease Detection from the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-based Hyperspectral Imagery
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Late blight disease is one of the most destructive diseases in potato crop, leading to serious yield losses globally. Accurate diagnosis of the disease at early stage is critical for precision disease control and management. Current farm practices in crop disease diagnosis are based on manual visual inspection, which is costly, time consuming, subject to individual bias. Recent advances in imaging sensors (e.g. RGB, multiple spectral and hyperspectral cameras), remote sensing and machine learning offer the opportunity to address this challenge. Particularly, hyperspectral imagery (HSI) combining with machine learning/deep learning approaches is preferable for accurately identifying specific plant diseases because the HSI consists of a wide range of high-quality reflectance information beyond human vision, capable of capturing both spectral-spatial information. The proposed method considers the potential disease specific reflectance radiation variance caused by the canopy structural diversity, introduces the multiple capsule layers to model the hierarchical structure of the spectral-spatial disease attributes with the encapsulated features to represent the various classes and the rotation invariance of the disease attributes in the feature space. We have evaluated the proposed method with the real UAV-based HSI data under the controlled field conditions. The effectiveness of the hierarchical features has been quantitatively assessed and compared with the existing representative machine learning/deep learning methods. The experiment results show that the proposed model significantly improves the accuracy performance when considering hierarchical-structure of spectral-spatial features, comparing to the existing methods only using spectral, or spatial or spectral-spatial features without consider hierarchical-structure of spectral-spatial features.
From Monopoly to Competition: Optimal Contests Prevail
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2021
Year: 2021

We study competition among contests in a general model that allows for an arbitrary and heterogeneous space of contest design, where the goal of the contest designers is to maximize the contestants' sum of efforts. Our main result shows that optimal contests in the monopolistic setting (i.e., those that maximize the sum of efforts in a model with a single contest) form an equilibrium in the model with competition among contests. Under a very natural assumption these contests are in fact dominant, and the equilibria that they form are unique. Moreover, equilibria with the optimal contests are Pareto-optimal even in cases where other equilibria emerge. In many natural cases, they also maximize the social welfare.
Bottom-Up Derivatives of Tree Expressions
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we extend the notion of (word) derivatives and partial derivatives due to (respectively) Brzozowski and Antimirov to tree derivatives using already known inductive formulae of quotients. We define a new family of extended regular tree expressions (using negation or intersection operators), and we show how to compute a Brzozowski-like inductive tree automaton; the fixed point of this construction, when it exists, is the derivative tree automaton. Such a deterministic tree automaton can be used to solve the membership test efficiently: the whole structure is not necessarily computed, and the derivative computations can be performed in parallel. We also show how to solve the membership test using our (Bottom-Up) partial derivatives, without computing an automaton.
Adaptation and Generalization for Unknown Sensitive Factors of Variations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Assured AI in unrestricted settings is a critical problem. Our framework addresses AI assurance challenges lying at the intersection of domain adaptation, fairness, and counterfactuals analysis, operating via the discovery and intervention on factors of variations in data (e.g. weather or illumination conditions) that significantly affect the robustness of AI models. Robustness is understood here as insensitivity of the model performance to variations in sensitive factors. Sensitive factors are traditionally set in a supervised setting, whereby factors are known a-priori (e.g. for fairness this could be factors like sex or race). In contrast, our motivation is real-life scenarios where less, or nothing, is actually known a-priori about certain factors that cause models to fail. This leads us to consider various settings (unsupervised, domain generalization, semi-supervised) that correspond to different degrees of incomplete knowledge about those factors. Therefore, our two step approach works by a) discovering sensitive factors that cause AI systems to fail in a unsupervised fashion, and then b) intervening models to lessen these factor's influence. Our method considers 3 interventions consisting of Augmentation, Coherence, and Adversarial Interventions (ACAI). We demonstrate the ability for interventions on discovered/source factors to generalize to target/real factors. We also demonstrate how adaptation to real factors of variations can be performed in the semi-supervised case where some target factor labels are known, via automated intervention selection. Experiments show that our approach improves on baseline models, with regard to achieving optimal utility vs. sensitivity/robustness tradeoffs.
Beyond SDLC: Process Modeling and Documentation Using Thinging Machines
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

The software development life cycle (SDLC) is a procedure used to develop a software system that meets both the customer s needs and real-world requirements. The first phase of the SDLC involves creating a conceptual model that represents the involved domain in reality. In requirements engineering, building such a model is considered a bridge to the design and construction phases. However, this type of model can also serve as a basic model for identifying business processes and how these processes are interconnected to achieve the final result. This paper focuses on process modeling in organizations, per se, beyond its application in the SDLC when an organization needs further documentation to meet its growth needs and address regular changes over time. The resultant process documentation is created alongside the daily operations of the business process. The model provides process visualization and documentation to assist in defining work patterns, avoiding redundancy, or even designing new processes. In this paper, a proposed diagrammatic representation models each process using one diagram comprising five actions and two types of relationships to build three levels of depiction. These levels consist of a static description, events, and the behavior of the modeled process. The viability of a thinging machine is demonstrated by re-modeling some examples from the literature.
Sign and Search: Sign Search Functionality for Sign Language Lexica
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Sign language lexica are a useful resource for researchers and people learning sign languages. Current implementations allow a user to search a sign either by its gloss or by selecting its primary features such as handshape and location. This study focuses on exploring a reverse search functionality where a user can sign a query sign in front of a webcam and retrieve a set of matching signs. By extracting different body joints combinations (upper body, dominant hand's arm and wrist) using the pose estimation framework OpenPose, we compare four techniques (PCA, UMAP, DTW and Euclidean distance) as distance metrics between 20 query signs, each performed by eight participants on a 1200 sign lexicon. The results show that UMAP and DTW can predict a matching sign with an 80\% and 71\% accuracy respectively at the top-20 retrieved signs using the movement of the dominant hand arm. Using DTW and adding more sign instances from other participants in the lexicon, the accuracy can be raised to 90\% at the top-10 ranking. Our results suggest that our methodology can be used with no training in any sign language lexicon regardless of its size.
Load Balancing: The Long Road from Theory to Practice
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2021
Year: 2021

There is a long history of approximation schemes for the problem of scheduling jobs on identical machines to minimize the makespan. Such a scheme grants a $(1+ε)$-approximation solution for every $ε> 0$, but the running time grows exponentially in $1/ε$. For a long time, these schemes seemed like a purely theoretical concept. Even solving instances for moderate values of $ε$ seemed completely illusional. In an effort to bridge theory and practice, we refine recent ILP techniques to develop the fastest known approximation scheme for this problem. An implementation of this algorithm reaches values of $ε$ lower than $2/11\approx 18.2\%$ within a reasonable timespan. This is the approximation guarantee of MULTIFIT, which, to the best of our knowledge, has the best proven guarantee of any non-scheme algorithm.
Investigating Text Simplification Evaluation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Modern text simplification (TS) heavily relies on the availability of gold standard data to build machine learning models. However, existing studies show that parallel TS corpora contain inaccurate simplifications and incorrect alignments. Additionally, evaluation is usually performed by using metrics such as BLEU or SARI to compare system output to the gold standard. A major limitation is that these metrics do not match human judgements and the performance on different datasets and linguistic phenomena vary greatly. Furthermore, our research shows that the test and training subsets of parallel datasets differ significantly. In this work, we investigate existing TS corpora, providing new insights that will motivate the improvement of existing state-of-the-art TS evaluation methods. Our contributions include the analysis of TS corpora based on existing modifications used for simplification and an empirical study on TS models performance by using better-distributed datasets. We demonstrate that by improving the distribution of TS datasets, we can build more robust TS models.
Bi-Bimodal Modality Fusion for Correlation-Controlled Multimodal Sentiment Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Multimodal sentiment analysis aims to extract and integrate semantic information collected from multiple modalities to recognize the expressed emotions and sentiment in multimodal data. This research area's major concern lies in developing an extraordinary fusion scheme that can extract and integrate key information from various modalities. However, one issue that may restrict previous work to achieve a higher level is the lack of proper modeling for the dynamics of the competition between the independence and relevance among modalities, which could deteriorate fusion outcomes by causing the collapse of modality-specific feature space or introducing extra noise. To mitigate this, we propose the Bi-Bimodal Fusion Network (BBFN), a novel end-to-end network that performs fusion (relevance increment) and separation (difference increment) on pairwise modality representations. The two parts are trained simultaneously such that the combat between them is simulated. The model takes two bimodal pairs as input due to the known information imbalance among modalities. In addition, we leverage a gated control mechanism in the Transformer architecture to further improve the final output. Experimental results on three datasets (CMU-MOSI, CMU-MOSEI, and UR-FUNNY) verifies that our model significantly outperforms the SOTA. The implementation of this work is available at https://github.com/declare-lab/multimodal-deep-learning.
Deeper Learning By Doing: Integrating Hands-On Research Projects Into a Machine Learning Course
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2021
Year: 2021

Machine learning has seen a vast increase of interest in recent years, along with an abundance of learning resources. While conventional lectures provide students with important information and knowledge, we also believe that additional project-based learning components can motivate students to engage in topics more deeply. In addition to incorporating project-based learning in our courses, we aim to develop project-based learning components aligned with real-world tasks, including experimental design and execution, report writing, oral presentation, and peer-reviewing. This paper describes the organization of our project-based machine learning courses with a particular emphasis on the class project components and shares our resources with instructors who would like to include similar elements in their courses.
Qualities of Quality: A Tertiary Review of Software Quality Measurement Research
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

This paper presents a tertiary review of software quality measurement research. To conduct this review, we examined an initial dataset of 7,811 articles and found 75 relevant and high-quality secondary analyses of software quality research. Synthesizing this body of work, we offer an overview of perspectives, measurement approaches, and trends. We identify five distinct perspectives that conceptualize quality as heuristic, as maintainability, as a holistic concept, as structural features of software, and as dependability. We also identify three key challenges. First, we find widespread evidence of validity questions with common measures. Second, we observe the application of machine learning methods without adequate evaluation. Third, we observe the use of aging datasets. Finally, from these observations, we sketch a path toward a theoretical framework that will allow software engineering researchers to systematically confront these weaknesses while remaining grounded in the experiences of developers and the real world in which code is ultimately deployed.
P4COM: In-Network Computation with Programmable Switches
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2021
Year: 2021

Traditionally, switches only provide forwarding services and have no credits on computation in distributed computing frameworks. The emerging programmable switches make in-network computing (INC) possible, i.e., offloading some computation to the switch data plane. While some proposals have attempted to offload computation onto special hardwares (e.g., NetFPGA), many practical issues have not been addressed. Therefore, we propose P4COM - a user-friendly, memory-efficient, and fault-tolerant framework realizing in-network computation (e.g., MapReduce) with programmable switches. P4COM consists of three modules. First, P4COM automatically translates application logic to switch data plane programs with a lightweight interpreter. Second, P4COM adopts a memory management policy to efficiently utilize the limited switch on-chip memory. Third, P4COM provides a cutting-payload mechanism to handle packet losses. We have built a P4COM prototype with a Barefoot Tofino switch and multiple commodity servers. Through a combination of testbed experiments and large-scale simulations, we show that P4COM is able to achieve line-rate processing at 10Gbps links, and can increase the data shuffling throughput by 2-5 times for the MapReduce-style applications.
Abnormal Behavior Detection Based on Target Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Abnormal behavior detection in surveillance video is a pivotal part of the intelligent city. Most existing methods only consider how to detect anomalies, with less considering to explain the reason of the anomalies. We investigate an orthogonal perspective based on the reason of these abnormal behaviors. To this end, we propose a multivariate fusion method that analyzes each target through three branches: object, action and motion. The object branch focuses on the appearance information, the motion branch focuses on the distribution of the motion features, and the action branch focuses on the action category of the target. The information that these branches focus on is different, and they can complement each other and jointly detect abnormal behavior. The final abnormal score can then be obtained by combining the abnormal scores of the three branches.
Profile to Frontal Face Recognition in the Wild Using Coupled Conditional GAN
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In recent years, with the advent of deep-learning, face recognition has achieved exceptional success. However, many of these deep face recognition models perform much better in handling frontal faces compared to profile faces. The major reason for poor performance in handling of profile faces is that it is inherently difficult to learn pose-invariant deep representations that are useful for profile face recognition. In this paper, we hypothesize that the profile face domain possesses a latent connection with the frontal face domain in a latent feature subspace. We look to exploit this latent connection by projecting the profile faces and frontal faces into a common latent subspace and perform verification or retrieval in the latent domain. We leverage a coupled conditional generative adversarial network (cpGAN) structure to find the hidden relationship between the profile and frontal images in a latent common embedding subspace. Specifically, the cpGAN framework consists of two conditional GAN-based sub-networks, one dedicated to the frontal domain and the other dedicated to the profile domain. Each sub-network tends to find a projection that maximizes the pair-wise correlation between the two feature domains in a common embedding feature subspace. The efficacy of our approach compared with the state-of-the-art is demonstrated using the CFP, CMU Multi-PIE, IJB-A, and IJB-C datasets. Additionally, we have also implemented a coupled convolutional neural network (cpCNN) and an adversarial discriminative domain adaptation network (ADDA) for profile to frontal face recognition. We have evaluated the performance of cpCNN and ADDA and compared it with the proposed cpGAN. Finally, we have also evaluated our cpGAN for reconstruction of frontal faces from input profile faces contained in the VGGFace2 dataset.
Digital Forensic Readiness Implementation in SDN: Issues and Challenges
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

The continued evolution in computer network technologies has seen the introduction of new paradigms like Software Defined Networking (SDN) which has altered many traditional networking principles in todays business environments. SDN has brought about unprecedented change to the way organisations plan, develop, and enact their networking technology and infrastructure strategies. However, SDN does not only offer new opportunities and abilities for organisations to redesign their entire network infrastructure but also presents a different set of issues and challenges that need to be resolved. One such challenge is the implementation of Digital Forensic Readiness (DFR) in SDN environments. This paper, therefore, examines existing literature and highlights the different issues and challenges impacting the implementation of DFR in SDN. However, the paper also goes further to offer insights on the different countermeasures that organisations can embrace to enhance their ability to respond to cybersecurity incidents as well as help them in implementing DFR in SDN environments
Term Expansion and FinBERT fine-tuning for Hypernym and Synonym Ranking of Financial Terms
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Hypernym and synonym matching are one of the mainstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. In this paper, we present systems that attempt to solve this problem. We designed these systems to participate in the FinSim-3, a shared task of FinNLP workshop at IJCAI-2021. The shared task is focused on solving this problem for the financial domain. We experimented with various transformer based pre-trained embeddings by fine-tuning these for either classification or phrase similarity tasks. We also augmented the provided dataset with abbreviations derived from prospectus provided by the organizers and definitions of the financial terms from DBpedia [Auer et al., 2007], Investopedia, and the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO). Our best performing system uses both FinBERT [Araci, 2019] and data augmentation from the afore-mentioned sources. We observed that term expansion using data augmentation in conjunction with semantic similarity is beneficial for this task and could be useful for the other tasks that deal with short phrases. Our best performing model (Accuracy: 0.917, Rank: 1.156) was developed by fine-tuning SentenceBERT [Reimers et al., 2019] (with FinBERT at the backend) over an extended labelled set created using the hierarchy of labels present in FIBO.
Bayesian Optimization for Min Max Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

A solution that is only reliable under favourable conditions is hardly a safe solution. Min Max Optimization is an approach that returns optima that are robust against worst case conditions. We propose algorithms that perform Min Max Optimization in a setting where the function that should be optimized is not known a priori and hence has to be learned by experiments. Therefore we extend the Bayesian Optimization setting, which is tailored to maximization problems, to Min Max Optimization problems. While related work extends the two acquisition functions Expected Improvement and Gaussian Process Upper Confidence Bound; we extend the two acquisition functions Entropy Search and Knowledge Gradient. These acquisition functions are able to gain knowledge about the optimum instead of just looking for points that are supposed to be optimal. In our evaluation we show that these acquisition functions allow for better solutions - converging faster to the optimum than the benchmark settings.
HAFLO: GPU-Based Acceleration for Federated Logistic Regression
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

In recent years, federated learning (FL) has been widely applied for supporting decentralized collaborative learning scenarios. Among existing FL models, federated logistic regression (FLR) is a widely used statistic model and has been used in various industries. To ensure data security and user privacy, FLR leverages homomorphic encryption (HE) to protect the exchanged data among different collaborative parties. However, HE introduces significant computational overhead (i.e., the cost of data encryption/decryption and calculation over encrypted data), which eventually becomes the performance bottleneck of the whole system. In this paper, we propose HAFLO, a GPU-based solution to improve the performance of FLR. The core idea of HAFLO is to summarize a set of performance-critical homomorphic operators (HO) used by FLR and accelerate the execution of these operators through a joint optimization of storage, IO, and computation. The preliminary results show that our acceleration on FATE, a popular FL framework, achieves a 49.9$\times$ speedup for heterogeneous LR and 88.4$\times$ for homogeneous LR.
Mesosome Avoidance
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2021
Year: 2021

We consider avoiding mesosomes -- that is, words of the form $xx'$ with $x'$ a conjugate of $x$ that is different from $x$ -- over a binary alphabet. We give a structure theorem for mesosome-avoiding words, count how many there are, characterize all the infinite mesosome-avoiding words, and determine the minimal forbidden words.