OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Dual Learning for Large Vocabulary On-Device ASR
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Dual learning is a paradigm for semi-supervised machine learning that seeks to leverage unsupervised data by solving two opposite tasks at once. In this scheme, each model is used to generate pseudo-labels for unlabeled examples that are used to train the other model. Dual learning has seen some use in speech processing by pairing ASR and TTS as dual tasks. However, these results mostly address only the case of using unpaired examples to compensate for very small supervised datasets, and mostly on large, non-streaming models. Dual learning has not yet been proven effective for using unsupervised data to improve realistic on-device streaming models that are already trained on large supervised corpora. We provide this missing piece though an analysis of an on-device-sized streaming conformer trained on the entirety of Librispeech, showing relative WER improvements of 10.7%/5.2% without an LM and 11.7%/16.4% with an LM.
Determinate Node Selection for Semi-supervised Classification Oriented Graph Convolutional Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have been proved successful in the field of semi-supervised node classification by extracting structural information from graph data. However, the random selection of labeled nodes used by GCNs may lead to unstable generalization performance of GCNs. In this paper, we propose an efficient method for the deterministic selection of labeled nodes: the Determinate Node Selection (DNS) algorithm. The DNS algorithm identifies two categories of representative nodes in the graph: typical nodes and divergent nodes. These labeled nodes are selected by exploring the structure of the graph and determining the ability of the nodes to represent the distribution of data within the graph. The DNS algorithm can be applied quite simply on a wide range of semi-supervised graph neural network models for node classification tasks. Through extensive experimentation, we have demonstrated that the incorporation of the DNS algorithm leads to a remarkable improvement in the average accuracy of the model and a significant decrease in the standard deviation, as compared to the original method.
Adaptive Data Path Selection for Durable Transaction in GPU Persistent Memory
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2023
Year: 2023

The new non-volatile memory technology relies on data recoverability to achieve the promise of byte-addressable persistence in computer applications. The durable transaction (e.g. logging) is one of the major persistency programming models to provide recoverable data structures. To achieve performant failure-atomic transactional updates to PM, multi-data-path architectures that separate the data paths for persists are recently explored for CPUs. Considering the importance of GPU as a key computing platform for many application domains, we investigate the multi-data-path architecture for durable transactions to PM in GPU. Our solution, AGPM, exploits an adaptative data-path-selection strategy for the log updates to PM. AGPM reduces the GPU kernels' execution time by at least 24.37% (at most 66.44%) compared to the state-of-the-art designs.
Resynthesis-based Attacks Against Logic Locking
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Logic locking has been a promising solution to many hardware security threats, such as intellectual property infringement and overproduction. Due to the increased attention that threats have received, many efficient specialized attacks against logic locking have been introduced over the years. However, the ability of an adversary to manipulate a locked netlist prior to mounting an attack has not been investigated thoroughly. This paper introduces a resynthesis-based strategy that utilizes the strength of a commercial electronic design automation (EDA) tool to reveal the vulnerabilities of a locked circuit. To do so, in a pre-attack step, a locked netlist is resynthesized using different synthesis parameters in a systematic way, leading to a large number of functionally equivalent but structurally different locked circuits. Then, under the oracle-less threat model, where it is assumed that the adversary only possesses the locked circuit, not the original circuit to query, a prominent attack is applied to these generated netlists collectively, from which a large number of key bits are deciphered. Nevertheless, this paper also describes how the proposed oracle-less attack can be integrated with an oracle-guided attack. The feasibility of the proposed approach is demonstrated for several benchmarks, including remarkable results for breaking a recently proposed provably secure logic locking method and deciphering values of a large number of key bits of the CSAW'19 circuits with very high accuracy.
Heterogeneous Tri-stream Clustering Network
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Contrastive deep clustering has recently gained significant attention with its ability of joint contrastive learning and clustering via deep neural networks. Despite the rapid progress, previous works mostly require both positive and negative sample pairs for contrastive clustering, which rely on a relative large batch-size. Moreover, they typically adopt a two-stream architecture with two augmented views, which overlook the possibility and potential benefits of multi-stream architectures (especially with heterogeneous or hybrid networks). In light of this, this paper presents a new end-to-end deep clustering approach termed Heterogeneous Tri-stream Clustering Network (HTCN). The tri-stream architecture in HTCN consists of three main components, including two weight-sharing online networks and a target network, where the parameters of the target network are the exponential moving average of that of the online networks. Notably, the two online networks are trained by simultaneously (i) predicting the instance representations of the target network and (ii) enforcing the consistency between the cluster representations of the target network and that of the two online networks. Experimental results on four challenging image datasets demonstrate the superiority of HTCN over the state-of-the-art deep clustering approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/dengxiaozhi/HTCN.
Pruning Compact ConvNets for Efficient Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Neural network pruning is frequently used to compress over-parameterized networks by large amounts, while incurring only marginal drops in generalization performance. However, the impact of pruning on networks that have been highly optimized for efficient inference has not received the same level of attention. In this paper, we analyze the effect of pruning for computer vision, and study state-of-the-art ConvNets, such as the FBNetV3 family of models. We show that model pruning approaches can be used to further optimize networks trained through NAS (Neural Architecture Search). The resulting family of pruned models can consistently obtain better performance than existing FBNetV3 models at the same level of computation, and thus provide state-of-the-art results when trading off between computational complexity and generalization performance on the ImageNet benchmark. In addition to better generalization performance, we also demonstrate that when limited computation resources are available, pruning FBNetV3 models incur only a fraction of GPU-hours involved in running a full-scale NAS.
A Deployment-First Methodology to Mechanism Design and Refinement in Distributed Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

Catalyzed by the popularity of blockchain technology, there has recently been a renewed interest in the design, implementation and evaluation of decentralized systems. Most of these systems are intended to be deployed at scale and in heterogeneous environments with real users and unpredictable workloads. Nevertheless, most research in this field evaluates such systems in controlled environments that poorly reflect the complex conditions of real-world environments. In this work, we argue that deployment is crucial to understanding decentralized mechanisms in a real-world environment and an enabler to building more robust and sustainable systems. We highlight the merits of deployment by comparing this approach with other experimental setups and show how our lab applied a deployment-first methodology. We then outline how we use Tribler, our peer-to-peer file-sharing application, to deploy and monitor decentralized mechanisms at scale. We illustrate the application of our methodology by describing a deployment trial in experimental tokenomics. Finally, we summarize four lessons learned from multiple deployment trials where we applied our methodology.
Exploring the Approximation Capabilities of Multiplicative Neural Networks for Smooth Functions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Multiplication layers are a key component in various influential neural network modules, including self-attention and hypernetwork layers. In this paper, we investigate the approximation capabilities of deep neural networks with intermediate neurons connected by simple multiplication operations. We consider two classes of target functions: generalized bandlimited functions, which are frequently used to model real-world signals with finite bandwidth, and Sobolev-Type balls, which are embedded in the Sobolev Space $\mathcal{W}^{r,2}$. Our results demonstrate that multiplicative neural networks can approximate these functions with significantly fewer layers and neurons compared to standard ReLU neural networks, with respect to both input dimension and approximation error. These findings suggest that multiplicative gates can outperform standard feed-forward layers and have potential for improving neural network design.
Padding Module: Learning the Padding in Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

During the last decades, many studies have been dedicated to improving the performance of neural networks, for example, the network architectures, initialization, and activation. However, investigating the importance and effects of learnable padding methods in deep learning remains relatively open. To mitigate the gap, this paper proposes a novel trainable Padding Module that can be placed in a deep learning model. The Padding Module can optimize itself without requiring or influencing the model's entire loss function. To train itself, the Padding Module constructs a ground truth and a predictor from the inputs by leveraging the underlying structure in the input data for supervision. As a result, the Padding Module can learn automatically to pad pixels to the border of its input images or feature maps. The padding contents are realistic extensions to its input data and simultaneously facilitate the deep learning model's downstream task. Experiments have shown that the proposed Padding Module outperforms the state-of-the-art competitors and the baseline methods. For example, the Padding Module has 1.23% and 0.44% more classification accuracy than the zero padding when tested on the VGG16 and ResNet50.
TinyHD: Efficient Video Saliency Prediction with Heterogeneous Decoders using Hierarchical Maps Distillation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Video saliency prediction has recently attracted attention of the research community, as it is an upstream task for several practical applications. However, current solutions are particularly computationally demanding, especially due to the wide usage of spatio-temporal 3D convolutions. We observe that, while different model architectures achieve similar performance on benchmarks, visual variations between predicted saliency maps are still significant. Inspired by this intuition, we propose a lightweight model that employs multiple simple heterogeneous decoders and adopts several practical approaches to improve accuracy while keeping computational costs low, such as hierarchical multi-map knowledge distillation, multi-output saliency prediction, unlabeled auxiliary datasets and channel reduction with teacher assistant supervision. Our approach achieves saliency prediction accuracy on par or better than state-of-the-art methods on DFH1K, UCF-Sports and Hollywood2 benchmarks, while enhancing significantly the efficiency of the model. Code is on https://github.com/feiyanhu/tinyHD
Deep Axial Hypercomplex Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Over the past decade, deep hypercomplex-inspired networks have enhanced feature extraction for image classification by enabling weight sharing across input channels. Recent works make it possible to improve representational capabilities by using hypercomplex-inspired networks which consume high computational costs. This paper reduces this cost by factorizing a quaternion 2D convolutional module into two consecutive vectormap 1D convolutional modules. Also, we use 5D parameterized hypercomplex multiplication based fully connected layers. Incorporating both yields our proposed hypercomplex network, a novel architecture that can be assembled to construct deep axial-hypercomplex networks (DANs) for image classifications. We conduct experiments on CIFAR benchmarks, SVHN, and Tiny ImageNet datasets and achieve better performance with fewer trainable parameters and FLOPS. Our proposed model achieves almost 2% higher performance for CIFAR and SVHN datasets, and more than 3% for the ImageNet-Tiny dataset and takes six times fewer parameters than the real-valued ResNets. Also, it shows state-of-the-art performance on CIFAR benchmarks in hypercomplex space.
Deep Residual Axial Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) demonstrate outstanding performance on computer vision tasks, their computational costs remain high. Several techniques are used to reduce these costs, like reducing channel count, and using separable and depthwise separable convolutions. This paper reduces computational costs by introducing a novel architecture, axial CNNs, which replaces spatial 2D convolution operations with two consecutive depthwise separable 1D operations. The axial CNNs are predicated on the assumption that the dataset supports approximately separable convolution operations with little or no loss of training accuracy. Deep axial separable CNNs still suffer from gradient problems when training deep networks. We modify the construction of axial separable CNNs with residual connections to improve the performance of deep axial architectures and introduce our final novel architecture namely residual axial networks (RANs). Extensive benchmark evaluation shows that RANs achieve at least 1% higher performance with about 77%, 86%, 75%, and 34% fewer parameters and about 75%, 80%, 67%, and 26% fewer flops than ResNets, wide ResNets, MobileNets, and SqueezeNexts on CIFAR benchmarks, SVHN, and Tiny ImageNet image classification datasets. Moreover, our proposed RANs improve deep recursive residual networks performance with 94% fewer parameters on the image super-resolution dataset.
AGMN: Association Graph-based Graph Matching Network for Coronary Artery Semantic Labeling on Invasive Coronary Angiograms
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Semantic labeling of coronary arterial segments in invasive coronary angiography (ICA) is important for automated assessment and report generation of coronary artery stenosis in the computer-aided diagnosis of coronary artery disease (CAD). Inspired by the training procedure of interventional cardiologists for interpreting the structure of coronary arteries, we propose an association graph-based graph matching network (AGMN) for coronary arterial semantic labeling. We first extract the vascular tree from invasive coronary angiography (ICA) and convert it into multiple individual graphs. Then, an association graph is constructed from two individual graphs where each vertex represents the relationship between two arterial segments. Using the association graph, the AGMN extracts the vertex features by the embedding module, aggregates the features from adjacent vertices and edges by graph convolution network, and decodes the features to generate the semantic mappings between arteries. By learning the mapping of arterial branches between two individual graphs, the unlabeled arterial segments are classified by the labeled segments to achieve semantic labeling. A dataset containing 263 ICAs was employed to train and validate the proposed model, and a five-fold cross-validation scheme was performed. Our AGMN model achieved an average accuracy of 0.8264, an average precision of 0.8276, an average recall of 0.8264, and an average F1-score of 0.8262, which significantly outperformed existing coronary artery semantic labeling methods. In conclusion, we have developed and validated a new algorithm with high accuracy, interpretability, and robustness for coronary artery semantic labeling on ICAs.
Semantic Web Enabled Geographic Question Answering Framework: GeoTR
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

With the considerable growth of linked data, researchers have focused on how to increase the availability of semantic web technologies to provide practical usages for real life systems. Question answering systems are an example of real-life systems that communicate directly with end users, understand user intention and generate answers. End users do not care about the structural query language or the vocabulary of the knowledge base where the point of a problem arises. In this study, a question answering framework that converts Turkish natural language input into SPARQL queries in the geographical domain is proposed. Additionally, a novel Turkish ontology, which covers a 10th grade geography lesson named Spatial Synthesis Turkey, has been developed to be used as a linked data provider. Moreover, a gap in the literature on Turkish question answering systems, which utilizes linked data in the geographical domain, is addressed. A hybrid system architecture that combines natural language processing techniques with linked data technologies to generate answers is also proposed. Further related research areas are suggested.
Cache-Aided $K$-User Broadcast Channels with State Information at Receivers
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

We study a $K$-user coded-caching broadcast problem in a joint source-channel coding framework. The transmitter observes a database of files that are being generated at a certain rate per channel use, and each user has a cache, which can store a fixed fraction of the generated symbols. In the delivery phase, the transmitter broadcasts a message so that the users can decode their desired files using the received signal and their cache content. The communication between the transmitter and the receivers happens over a (deterministic) \textit{time-varying} erasure broadcast channel, and the channel state information is only available to the users. We characterize the maximum achievable source rate for the $2$-user and the degraded $K$-user problems. We provide an upper bound for any caching strategy's achievable source rates. Finally, we present a linear programming formulation to show that the upper bound is not a sharp characterization. Closing the gap between the achievable rate and the optimum rate remains open.
Predictive World Models from Real-World Partial Observations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Cognitive scientists believe adaptable intelligent agents like humans perform reasoning through learned causal mental simulations of agents and environments. The problem of learning such simulations is called predictive world modeling. Recently, reinforcement learning (RL) agents leveraging world models have achieved SOTA performance in game environments. However, understanding how to apply the world modeling approach in complex real-world environments relevant to mobile robots remains an open question. In this paper, we present a framework for learning a probabilistic predictive world model for real-world road environments. We implement the model using a hierarchical VAE (HVAE) capable of predicting a diverse set of fully observed plausible worlds from accumulated sensor observations. While prior HVAE methods require complete states as ground truth for learning, we present a novel sequential training method to allow HVAEs to learn to predict complete states from partially observed states only. We experimentally demonstrate accurate spatial structure prediction of deterministic regions achieving 96.21 IoU, and close the gap to perfect prediction by 62% for stochastic regions using the best prediction. By extending HVAEs to cases where complete ground truth states do not exist, we facilitate continual learning of spatial prediction as a step towards realizing explainable and comprehensive predictive world models for real-world mobile robotics applications. Code is available at https://github.com/robin-karlsson0/predictive-world-models.
Language Cognition and Language Computation -- Human and Machine Language Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Language understanding is a key scientific issue in the fields of cognitive and computer science. However, the two disciplines differ substantially in the specific research questions. Cognitive science focuses on analyzing the specific mechanism of the brain and investigating the brain's response to language; few studies have examined the brain's language system as a whole. By contrast, computer scientists focus on the efficiency of practical applications when choosing research questions but may ignore the most essential laws of language. Given these differences, can a combination of the disciplines offer new insights for building intelligent language models and studying language cognitive mechanisms? In the following text, we first review the research questions, history, and methods of language understanding in cognitive and computer science, focusing on the current progress and challenges. We then compare and contrast the research of language understanding in cognitive and computer sciences. Finally, we review existing work that combines insights from language cognition and language computation and offer prospects for future development trends.
Real-time FPGA implementation of the Semi-Global Matching stereo vision algorithm for a 4K/UHD video stream
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we propose a real-time FPGA implementation of the Semi-Global Matching (SGM) stereo vision algorithm. The designed module supports a 4K/Ultra HD (3840 x 2160 pixels @ 30 frames per second) video stream in a 4 pixel per clock (ppc) format and a 64-pixel disparity range. The baseline SGM implementation had to be modified to process pixels in the 4ppc format and meet the timing constrains, however, our version provides results comparable to the original design. The solution has been positively evaluated on the Xilinx VC707 development board with a Virtex-7 FPGA device.
Naturalistic Static Program Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2023
Year: 2023

Static program analysis development is a non-trivial and time-consuming task. We present a framework through which developers can define static program analyses in natural language. We show the application of this framework to identify cryptography misuses in Java programs, and we discuss how it facilitates static program analysis development for developers.