OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Understanding Realistic Attacks on Airborne Collision Avoidance Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

Airborne collision avoidance systems provide an onboard safety net should normal air traffic control procedures fail to keep aircraft separated. These systems are widely deployed and have been constantly refined over the past three decades, usually in response to near misses or mid-air collisions. Recent years have seen security research increasingly focus on aviation, identifying that key wireless links---some of which are used in collision avoidance---are vulnerable to attack. In this paper, we go one step further to understand whether an attacker can remotely trigger false collision avoidance alarms. Primarily considering the next-generation Airborne Collision Avoidance System X (ACAS X), we adopt a modelling approach to extract attacker constraints from technical standards before simulating collision avoidance attacks against standardized ACAS X code. We find that in 44% of cases, an attacker can successfully trigger a collision avoidance alert which on average results in a 590 ft altitude deviation; when the aircraft is at lower altitudes, this success rate rises considerably to 79%. Furthermore, we show how our simulation approach can be used to help defend against attacks by identifying where attackers are most likely to be successful.
The Efficacy of $L_1$ Regularization in Two-Layer Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

A crucial problem in neural networks is to select the most appropriate number of hidden neurons and obtain tight statistical risk bounds. In this work, we present a new perspective towards the bias-variance tradeoff in neural networks. As an alternative to selecting the number of neurons, we theoretically show that $L_1$ regularization can control the generalization error and sparsify the input dimension. In particular, with an appropriate $L_1$ regularization on the output layer, the network can produce a statistical risk that is near minimax optimal. Moreover, an appropriate $L_1$ regularization on the input layer leads to a risk bound that does not involve the input data dimension. Our analysis is based on a new amalgamation of dimension-based and norm-based complexity analysis to bound the generalization error. A consequent observation from our results is that an excessively large number of neurons do not necessarily inflate generalization errors under a suitable regularization.
HUMAN: Hierarchical Universal Modular ANnotator
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

A lot of real-world phenomena are complex and cannot be captured by single task annotations. This causes a need for subsequent annotations, with interdependent questions and answers describing the nature of the subject at hand. Even in the case a phenomenon is easily captured by a single task, the high specialisation of most annotation tools can result in having to switch to another tool if the task only slightly changes. We introduce HUMAN, a novel web-based annotation tool that addresses the above problems by a) covering a variety of annotation tasks on both textual and image data, and b) the usage of an internal deterministic state machine, allowing the researcher to chain different annotation tasks in an interdependent manner. Further, the modular nature of the tool makes it easy to define new annotation tasks and integrate machine learning algorithms e.g., for active learning. HUMAN comes with an easy-to-use graphical user interface that simplifies the annotation task and management.
Integrated Task and Motion Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

The problem of planning for a robot that operates in environments containing a large number of objects, taking actions to move itself through the world as well as to change the state of the objects, is known as task and motion planning (TAMP). TAMP problems contain elements of discrete task planning, discrete-continuous mathematical programming, and continuous motion planning, and thus cannot be effectively addressed by any of these fields directly. In this paper, we define a class of TAMP problems and survey algorithms for solving them, characterizing the solution methods in terms of their strategies for solving the continuous-space subproblems and their techniques for integrating the discrete and continuous components of the search.
Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning for Complex Word Identification
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Complex Word Identification (CWI) is a task centered on detecting hard-to-understand words, or groups of words, in texts from different areas of expertise. The purpose of CWI is to highlight problematic structures that non-native speakers would usually find difficult to understand. Our approach uses zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot learning techniques, alongside state-of-the-art solutions for Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks (i.e., Transformers). Our aim is to provide evidence that the proposed models can learn the characteristics of complex words in a multilingual environment by relying on the CWI shared task 2018 dataset available for four different languages (i.e., English, German, Spanish, and also French). Our approach surpasses state-of-the-art cross-lingual results in terms of macro F1-score on English (0.774), German (0.782), and Spanish (0.734) languages, for the zero-shot learning scenario. At the same time, our model also outperforms the state-of-the-art monolingual result for German (0.795 macro F1-score).
AIM 2020 Challenge on Image Extreme Inpainting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

This paper reviews the AIM 2020 challenge on extreme image inpainting. This report focuses on proposed solutions and results for two different tracks on extreme image inpainting: classical image inpainting and semantically guided image inpainting. The goal of track 1 is to inpaint considerably large part of the image using no supervision but the context. Similarly, the goal of track 2 is to inpaint the image by having access to the entire semantic segmentation map of the image to inpaint. The challenge had 88 and 74 participants, respectively. 11 and 6 teams competed in the final phase of the challenge, respectively. This report gauges current solutions and set a benchmark for future extreme image inpainting methods.
Goal-GAN: Multimodal Trajectory Prediction Based on Goal Position Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we present Goal-GAN, an interpretable and end-to-end trainable model for human trajectory prediction. Inspired by human navigation, we model the task of trajectory prediction as an intuitive two-stage process: (i) goal estimation, which predicts the most likely target positions of the agent, followed by a (ii) routing module which estimates a set of plausible trajectories that route towards the estimated goal. We leverage information about the past trajectory and visual context of the scene to estimate a multi-modal probability distribution over the possible goal positions, which is used to sample a potential goal during the inference. The routing is governed by a recurrent neural network that reacts to physical constraints in the nearby surroundings and generates feasible paths that route towards the sampled goal. Our extensive experimental evaluation shows that our method establishes a new state-of-the-art on several benchmarks while being able to generate a realistic and diverse set of trajectories that conform to physical constraints.
A Pattern Sequence for Designing Blockchain-Based Healthcare Information Technology Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

Known for its decentralized and tamper-aware properties, blockchain is attractive to enhance the infrastructure of systems that have been constrained by traditionally centralized and vendor-locked environments. Although blockchain has commonly been used as the operational model behind cryptocurrency, it has far more foreseeable utilities in domains like healthcare, where efficient data flow is highly demanded. Particularly, blockchain and related technologies have been touted as foundational technologies for addressing healthcare interoperability challenges, such as promoting effective communications and securing data exchanges across various healthcare systems. Despite the increasing interests in leveraging blockchain technology to improve healthcare infrastructures, a major gap in literature is the lack of available recommendations for concrete architectural styles and design considerations for creating blockchain-based apps and systems with a healthcare focus. This research provides two contributions to bridge the gap in existing research. First, we introduce a pattern sequence for designing blockchain-based healthcare systems focused on secure and at-scale data exchange. Our approach adapts traditional software patterns and proposes novel patterns that take into account both the technical requirements specific to healthcare systems and the implications of these requirements on naive blockchain-based solutions. Second, we provide a pattern-oriented reference architecture using an example application of the pattern sequence for guiding software developers to design interoperable (on the technical level) healthcare IT systems atop blockchain-based infrastructures. The reference architecture focuses on minimizing storage requirements on-chain, preserving the privacy of sensitive information, facilitating scalable communications, and maximizing evolvability of the system.
Deep Expectation-Maximization for Semi-Supervised Lung Cancer Screening
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We present a semi-supervised algorithm for lung cancer screening in which a 3D Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is trained using the Expectation-Maximization (EM) meta-algorithm. Semi-supervised learning allows a smaller labelled data-set to be combined with an unlabeled data-set in order to provide a larger and more diverse training sample. EM allows the algorithm to simultaneously calculate a maximum likelihood estimate of the CNN training coefficients along with the labels for the unlabeled training set which are defined as a latent variable space. We evaluate the model performance of the Semi-Supervised EM algorithm for CNNs through cross-domain training of the Kaggle Data Science Bowl 2017 (Kaggle17) data-set with the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST) data-set. Our results show that the Semi-Supervised EM algorithm greatly improves the classification accuracy of the cross-domain lung cancer screening, although results are lower than a fully supervised approach with the advantage of additional labelled data from the unsupervised sample. As such, we demonstrate that Semi-Supervised EM is a valuable technique to improve the accuracy of lung cancer screening models using 3D CNNs.
FedQPL: A Language for Logical Query Plans over Heterogeneous Federations of RDF Data Sources (Extended Version)
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2020
Year: 2020

Federations of RDF data sources provide great potential when queried for answers and insights that cannot be obtained from one data source alone. A challenge for planning the execution of queries over such a federation is that the federation may be heterogeneous in terms of the types of data access interfaces provided by the federation members. This challenge has not received much attention in the literature. This paper provides a solid formal foundation for future approaches that aim to address this challenge. Our main conceptual contribution is a formal language for representing query execution plans; additionally, we identify a fragment of this language that can be used to capture the result of selecting relevant data sources for different parts of a given query. As technical contributions, we show that this fragment is more expressive than what is supported by existing source selection approaches, which effectively highlights an inherent limitation of these approaches. Moreover, we show that the source selection problem is NP-hard and in $Σ_2^\mathrm{P}$, and we provide a comprehensive set of rewriting rules that can be used as a basis for query optimization.
Leveraging Semantic and Lexical Matching to Improve the Recall of Document Retrieval Systems: A Hybrid Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2020
Year: 2020

Search engines often follow a two-phase paradigm where in the first stage (the retrieval stage) an initial set of documents is retrieved and in the second stage (the re-ranking stage) the documents are re-ranked to obtain the final result list. While deep neural networks were shown to improve the performance of the re-ranking stage in previous works, there is little literature about using deep neural networks to improve the retrieval stage. In this paper, we study the merits of combining deep neural network models and lexical models for the retrieval stage. A hybrid approach, which leverages both semantic (deep neural network-based) and lexical (keyword matching-based) retrieval models, is proposed. We perform an empirical study, using a publicly available TREC collection, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach and sheds light on the different characteristics of the semantic approach, the lexical approach, and their combination.
FPGA Implementation of Simplified Spiking Neural Network
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2020
Year: 2020

Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) are third-generation Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) which are close to the biological neural system. In recent years SNN has become popular in the area of robotics and embedded applications, therefore, it has become imperative to explore its real-time and energy-efficient implementations. SNNs are more powerful than their predecessors because they encode temporal information and use biologically plausible plasticity rules. In this paper, a simpler and computationally efficient SNN model using FPGA architecture is described. The proposed model is validated on a Xilinx Virtex 6 FPGA and analyzes a fully connected network which consists of 800 neurons and 12,544 synapses in real-time.
Decoy Allocation Games on Graphs with Temporal Logic Objectives
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2020
Year: 2020

We study a class of games, in which the adversary (attacker) is to satisfy a complex mission specified in linear temporal logic, and the defender is to prevent the adversary from achieving its goal. A deceptive defender can allocate decoys, in addition to defense actions, to create disinformation for the attacker. Thus, we focus on the problem of jointly synthesizing a decoy placement strategy and a deceptive defense strategy that maximally exploits the incomplete information the attacker about the decoy locations. We introduce a model of hypergames on graphs with temporal logic objectives to capture such adversarial interactions with asymmetric information. Using the hypergame model, we analyze the effectiveness of a given decoy placement, quantified by the set of deceptive winning states where the defender can prevent the attacker from satisfying the attack objective given its incomplete information about decoy locations. Then, we investigate how to place decoys to maximize the defender's deceptive winning region. Considering the large search space for all possible decoy allocation strategies, we incorporate the idea of compositional synthesis from formal methods and show that the objective function in the class of decoy allocation problem is monotone and non-decreasing. We derive the sufficient conditions under which the objective function for the decoy allocation problem is submodular, or supermodular, respectively. We show a sub-optimal allocation can be efficiently computed by iteratively composing the solutions of hypergames with a subset of decoys and the solution of a hypergame given a single decoy. We use a running example to illustrate the proposed method.
Stuttering Speech Disfluency Prediction using Explainable Attribution Vectors of Facial Muscle Movements
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Speech disorders such as stuttering disrupt the normal fluency of speech by involuntary repetitions, prolongations and blocking of sounds and syllables. In addition to these disruptions to speech fluency, most adults who stutter (AWS) also experience numerous observable secondary behaviors before, during, and after a stuttering moment, often involving the facial muscles. Recent studies have explored automatic detection of stuttering using Artificial Intelligence (AI) based algorithm from respiratory rate, audio, etc. during speech utterance. However, most methods require controlled environments and/or invasive wearable sensors, and are unable explain why a decision (fluent vs stuttered) was made. We hypothesize that pre-speech facial activity in AWS, which can be captured non-invasively, contains enough information to accurately classify the upcoming utterance as either fluent or stuttered. Towards this end, this paper proposes a novel explainable AI (XAI) assisted convolutional neural network (CNN) classifier to predict near future stuttering by learning temporal facial muscle movement patterns of AWS and explains the important facial muscles and actions involved. Statistical analyses reveal significantly high prevalence of cheek muscles (p<0.005) and lip muscles (p<0.005) to predict stuttering and shows a behavior conducive of arousal and anticipation to speak. The temporal study of these upper and lower facial muscles may facilitate early detection of stuttering, promote automated assessment of stuttering and have application in behavioral therapies by providing automatic non-invasive feedback in realtime.
Mining Knowledge for Natural Language Inference from Wikipedia Categories
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Accurate lexical entailment (LE) and natural language inference (NLI) often require large quantities of costly annotations. To alleviate the need for labeled data, we introduce WikiNLI: a resource for improving model performance on NLI and LE tasks. It contains 428,899 pairs of phrases constructed from naturally annotated category hierarchies in Wikipedia. We show that we can improve strong baselines such as BERT and RoBERTa by pretraining them on WikiNLI and transferring the models on downstream tasks. We conduct systematic comparisons with phrases extracted from other knowledge bases such as WordNet and Wikidata to find that pretraining on WikiNLI gives the best performance. In addition, we construct WikiNLI in other languages, and show that pretraining on them improves performance on NLI tasks of corresponding languages.
Client Selection in Federated Learning: Convergence Analysis and Power-of-Choice Selection Strategies
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Federated learning is a distributed optimization paradigm that enables a large number of resource-limited client nodes to cooperatively train a model without data sharing. Several works have analyzed the convergence of federated learning by accounting of data heterogeneity, communication and computation limitations, and partial client participation. However, they assume unbiased client participation, where clients are selected at random or in proportion of their data sizes. In this paper, we present the first convergence analysis of federated optimization for biased client selection strategies, and quantify how the selection bias affects convergence speed. We reveal that biasing client selection towards clients with higher local loss achieves faster error convergence. Using this insight, we propose Power-of-Choice, a communication- and computation-efficient client selection framework that can flexibly span the trade-off between convergence speed and solution bias. Our experiments demonstrate that Power-of-Choice strategies converge up to 3 $\times$ faster and give $10$% higher test accuracy than the baseline random selection.
CorrAttack: Black-box Adversarial Attack with Structured Search
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We present a new method for score-based adversarial attack, where the attacker queries the loss-oracle of the target model. Our method employs a parameterized search space with a structure that captures the relationship of the gradient of the loss function. We show that searching over the structured space can be approximated by a time-varying contextual bandits problem, where the attacker takes feature of the associated arm to make modifications of the input, and receives an immediate reward as the reduction of the loss function. The time-varying contextual bandits problem can then be solved by a Bayesian optimization procedure, which can take advantage of the features of the structured action space. The experiments on ImageNet and the Google Cloud Vision API demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the state of the art success rates and query efficiencies for both undefended and defended models.
Planar projections of graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2020
Year: 2020

We introduce and study a new graph representation where vertices are embedded in three or more dimensions, and in which the edges are drawn on the projections onto the axis-parallel planes. We show that the complete graph on $n$ vertices has a representation in $\lceil \sqrt{n/2}+1 \rceil$ planes. In 3 dimensions, we show that there exist graphs with $6n-15$ edges that can be projected onto two orthogonal planes, and that this is best possible. Finally, we obtain bounds in terms of parameters such as geometric thickness and linear arboricity. Using such a bound, we show that every graph of maximum degree 5 has a plane-projectable representation in 3 dimensions.
Gaussian Vector: An Efficient Solution for Facial Landmark Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Significant progress has been made in facial landmark detection with the development of Convolutional Neural Networks. The widely-used algorithms can be classified into coordinate regression methods and heatmap based methods. However, the former loses spatial information, resulting in poor performance while the latter suffers from large output size or high post-processing complexity. This paper proposes a new solution, Gaussian Vector, to preserve the spatial information as well as reduce the output size and simplify the post-processing. Our method provides novel vector supervision and introduces Band Pooling Module to convert heatmap into a pair of vectors for each landmark. This is a plug-and-play component which is simple and effective. Moreover, Beyond Box Strategy is proposed to handle the landmarks out of the face bounding box. We evaluate our method on 300W, COFW, WFLW and JD-landmark. That the results significantly surpass previous works demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach.