OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
SPINN: Synergistic Progressive Inference of Neural Networks over Device and Cloud
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Despite the soaring use of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in mobile applications, uniformly sustaining high-performance inference on mobile has been elusive due to the excessive computational demands of modern CNNs and the increasing diversity of deployed devices. A popular alternative comprises offloading CNN processing to powerful cloud-based servers. Nevertheless, by relying on the cloud to produce outputs, emerging mission-critical and high-mobility applications, such as drone obstacle avoidance or interactive applications, can suffer from the dynamic connectivity conditions and the uncertain availability of the cloud. In this paper, we propose SPINN, a distributed inference system that employs synergistic device-cloud computation together with a progressive inference method to deliver fast and robust CNN inference across diverse settings. The proposed system introduces a novel scheduler that co-optimises the early-exit policy and the CNN splitting at run time, in order to adapt to dynamic conditions and meet user-defined service-level requirements. Quantitative evaluation illustrates that SPINN outperforms its state-of-the-art collaborative inference counterparts by up to 2x in achieved throughput under varying network conditions, reduces the server cost by up to 6.8x and improves accuracy by 20.7% under latency constraints, while providing robust operation under uncertain connectivity conditions and significant energy savings compared to cloud-centric execution.
Can determinism and compositionality coexist in RML? (extended version)
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2020
Year: 2020

Runtime verification (RV) consists in dynamically verifying that the event traces generated by single runs of a system under scrutiny (SUS) are compliant with the formal specification of its expected properties. RML (Runtime Monitoring Language) is a simple but expressive Domain Specific Language for RV; its semantics is based on a trace calculus formalized by a deterministic rewriting system which drives the implementation of the interpreter of the monitors generated by the RML compiler from the specifications. While determinism of the trace calculus ensures better performances of the generated monitors, it makes the semantics of its operators less intuitive. In this paper we move a first step towards a compositional semantics of the RML trace calculus, by interpreting its basic operators as operations on sets of instantiated event traces and by proving that such an interpretation is equivalent to the operational semantics of the calculus.
Making Distributed Mobile Applications SAFE: Enforcing User Privacy Policies on Untrusted Applications with Secure Application Flow Enforcement
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

Today's mobile devices sense, collect, and store huge amounts of personal information, which users share with family and friends through a wide range of applications. Once users give applications access to their data, they must implicitly trust that the apps correctly maintain data privacy. As we know from both experience and all-too-frequent press articles, that trust is often misplaced. While users do not trust applications, they do trust their mobile devices and operating systems. Unfortunately, sharing applications are not limited to mobile clients but must also run on cloud services to share data between users. In this paper, we leverage the trust that users have in their mobile OSes to vet cloud services. To do so, we define a new Secure Application Flow Enforcement (SAFE) framework, which requires cloud services to attest to a system stack that will enforce policies provided by the mobile OS for user data. We implement a mobile OS that enforces SAFE policies on unmodified mobile apps and two systems for enforcing policies on untrusted cloud services. Using these prototypes, we demonstrate that it is possible to enforce existing user privacy policies on unmodified applications.
Toward an End-to-End Auto-tuning Framework in HPC PowerStack
Venue: arXiv cs.PF 2020
Year: 2020

Efficiently utilizing procured power and optimizing performance of scientific applications under power and energy constraints are challenging. The HPC PowerStack defines a software stack to manage power and energy of high-performance computing systems and standardizes the interfaces between different components of the stack. This survey paper presents the findings of a working group focused on the end-to-end tuning of the PowerStack. First, we provide a background on the PowerStack layer-specific tuning efforts in terms of their high-level objectives, the constraints and optimization goals, layer-specific telemetry, and control parameters, and we list the existing software solutions that address those challenges. Second, we propose the PowerStack end-to-end auto-tuning framework, identify the opportunities in co-tuning different layers in the PowerStack, and present specific use cases and solutions. Third, we discuss the research opportunities and challenges for collective auto-tuning of two or more management layers (or domains) in the PowerStack. This paper takes the first steps in identifying and aggregating the important R&D challenges in streamlining the optimization efforts across the layers of the PowerStack.
Are Smart Home Devices Abandoning IPV Victims?
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

Smart home devices have brought us many benefits such as advanced security, convenience, and entertainment. However, these devices also have made unintended consequences like giving ultimate power for devices' owners over their intimate partners in the same household which might lead to tech-facilitated domestic abuse (tech-abuse) as recent research has shown. In this paper, we systematize findings on tech-abuse in smart homes. We show that domestic abuse and Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) in smart homes is more effective and less risky for abusers. Victims find it more harmful and more challenging to protect themselves from. We articulate a comprehensive analysis of all the phases of abuse in smart homes and categorize risks and needs in each phase. Technical analysis of current smart home technologies is conducted to shed light upon their limitations. We also summarize recent recommendations to combat tech-abuse in smart homes and focus on their potentials and shortcomings. Unsurprisingly, we find that many recommendations conflict with each other due to a lack of understanding of phases of abuse in smart homes. Desirable properties to design abuse-resistant smart home devices are proposed for all the phases of abuse. The research community benefits from our analysis and recommendations to move forward with a focus on filling the blind spots of existing smart home devices' safety measures and building appropriate safety measures that consider tech-abuse threats in smart homes.
Autonomous Braking and Throttle System: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach for Naturalistic Driving
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

Autonomous Braking and Throttle control is key in developing safe driving systems for the future. There exists a need for autonomous vehicles to negotiate a multi-agent environment while ensuring safety and comfort. A Deep Reinforcement Learning based autonomous throttle and braking system is presented. For each time step, the proposed system makes a decision to apply the brake or throttle. The throttle and brake are modelled as continuous action space values. We demonstrate 2 scenarios where there is a need for a sophisticated braking and throttle system, i.e when there is a static obstacle in front of our agent like a car, stop sign. The second scenario consists of 2 vehicles approaching an intersection. The policies for brake and throttle control are learned through computer simulation using Deep deterministic policy gradients. The experiment shows that the system not only avoids a collision, but also it ensures that there is smooth change in the values of throttle/brake as it gets out of the emergency situation and abides by the speed regulations, i.e the system resembles human driving.
Primary-Space Adaptive Control Variates using Piecewise-Polynomial Approximations
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2020
Year: 2020

We present an unbiased numerical integration algorithm that handles both low-frequency regions and high frequency details of multidimensional integrals. It combines quadrature and Monte Carlo integration, by using a quadrature-base approximation as a control variate of the signal. We adaptively build the control variate constructed as a piecewise polynomial, which can be analytically integrated, and accurately reconstructs the low frequency regions of the integrand. We then recover the high-frequency details missed by the control variate by using Monte Carlo integration of the residual. Our work leverages importance sampling techniques by working in primary space, allowing the combination of multiple mappings; this enables multiple importance sampling in quadrature-based integration. Our algorithm is generic, and can be applied to any complex multidimensional integral. We demonstrate its effectiveness with four applications with low dimensionality: transmittance estimation in heterogeneous participating media, low-order scattering in homogeneous media, direct illumination computation, and rendering of distributed effects. Finally, we show how our technique is extensible to integrands of higher dimensionality, by computing the control variate on Monte Carlo estimates of the high-dimensional signal, and accounting for such additional dimensionality on the residual as well. In all cases, we show accurate results and faster convergence compared to previous approaches.
Smart Voltage Monitoring: Centralised and Blockchain-based Decentralised Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

Voltage controls the majority of the processes around us, starting from lighting an incandescent lamp to running huge machines in industries. Therefore, voltage monitoring becomes essential, which demands efficient measurement and storage of voltage data. However, there is hardly any system till date that fulfils both the goals of voltage monitoring and voltage data storage. To achieve this goal, we propose the application of the Internet of Things along with the server-based framework and Distributed Ledger Technology to build systems for smart voltage monitoring. Two models - a centralised model and a decentralised model have been presented and analysed thoroughly in this paper. The centralised model is built on client-server architecture, whereas the decentralised model is based on a peer-to-peer architecture. Blockchain and InterPlanetary File System have been used for the implementation of the decentralised system. Potential improvements to make these systems robust have also been discussed. The methods proposed in this paper for voltage monitoring are novel; ensure efficient data storage and can be used for IoT data storage of any form.
Skyline: Interactive In-Editor Computational Performance Profiling for Deep Neural Network Training
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

Training a state-of-the-art deep neural network (DNN) is a computationally-expensive and time-consuming process, which incentivizes deep learning developers to debug their DNNs for computational performance. However, effectively performing this debugging requires intimate knowledge about the underlying software and hardware systems---something that the typical deep learning developer may not have. To help bridge this gap, we present Skyline: a new interactive tool for DNN training that supports in-editor computational performance profiling, visualization, and debugging. Skyline's key contribution is that it leverages special computational properties of DNN training to provide (i) interactive performance predictions and visualizations, and (ii) directly manipulatable visualizations that, when dragged, mutate the batch size in the code. As an in-editor tool, Skyline allows users to leverage these diagnostic features to debug the performance of their DNNs during development. An exploratory qualitative user study of Skyline produced promising results; all the participants found Skyline to be useful and easy to use.
How Search Engine Advertising Affects Sales over Time: An Empirical Investigation
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

As a mainstream marketing channel on the Internet, Search Engine Advertising (SEA) has a huge business impact and attracts a plethora of attention from both academia and industry. One important goal of advertising is to increase sales. Nevertheless, while previous research has studied multiple factors that are potentially related to the outcome of SEA campaigns, effects of these factors on actual sales generated by SEA remain understudied. It is also unclear whether and how such effects change over time in highly dynamic SEA campaigns. As the first empirical investigation of the dynamic advertisement-sales relationship in SEA, this study builds an advertising response model within a time-varying coefficient (TVC) modeling framework, and estimates the model using a unique dataset from a large E-Commerce retailer in the United States. Results reveal the effects of the advertising expenditure, consumer behaviors and advertisement characteristics on realized sales, and demonstrate that such effects on sales do change over time in non-linear ways. More importantly, we find that carryover has a stronger effect in generating sales than direct response does, conversion rate is much more important than click-through rate, and ad position does not have significant effects on sales. These findings have direct implications for advertisers to launch more effective SEA campaigns.
SGG: Spinbot, Grammarly and GloVe based Fake News Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Recently, news consumption using online news portals has increased exponentially due to several reasons, such as low cost and easy accessibility. However, such online platforms inadvertently also become the cause of spreading false information across the web. They are being misused quite frequently as a medium to disseminate misinformation and hoaxes. Such malpractices call for a robust automatic fake news detection system that can keep us at bay from such misinformation and hoaxes. We propose a robust yet simple fake news detection system, leveraging the tools for paraphrasing, grammar-checking, and word-embedding. In this paper, we try to the potential of these tools in jointly unearthing the authenticity of a news article. Notably, we leverage Spinbot (for paraphrasing), Grammarly (for grammar-checking), and GloVe (for word-embedding) tools for this purpose. Using these tools, we were able to extract novel features that could yield state-of-the-art results on the Fake News AMT dataset and comparable results on Celebrity datasets when combined with some of the essential features. More importantly, the proposed method is found to be more robust empirically than the existing ones, as revealed in our cross-domain analysis and multi-domain analysis.
Adaptive Signal Variances: CNN Initialization Through Modern Architectures
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) have achieved the unwavering confidence in its performance on image processing tasks. The CNN architecture constitutes a variety of different types of layers including the convolution layer and the max-pooling layer. CNN practitioners widely understand the fact that the stability of learning depends on how to initialize the model parameters in each layer. Nowadays, no one doubts that the de facto standard scheme for initialization is the so-called Kaiming initialization that has been developed by He et al. The Kaiming scheme was derived from a much simpler model than the currently used CNN structure having evolved since the emergence of the Kaiming scheme. The Kaiming model consists only of the convolution and fully connected layers, ignoring the max-pooling layer and the global average pooling layer. In this study, we derived the initialization scheme again not from the simplified Kaiming model, but precisely from the modern CNN architectures, and empirically investigated how the new initialization method performs compared to the de facto standard ones that are widely used today.
Context-aware Feature Generation for Zero-shot Semantic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Existing semantic segmentation models heavily rely on dense pixel-wise annotations. To reduce the annotation pressure, we focus on a challenging task named zero-shot semantic segmentation, which aims to segment unseen objects with zero annotations. This task can be accomplished by transferring knowledge across categories via semantic word embeddings. In this paper, we propose a novel context-aware feature generation method for zero-shot segmentation named CaGNet. In particular, with the observation that a pixel-wise feature highly depends on its contextual information, we insert a contextual module in a segmentation network to capture the pixel-wise contextual information, which guides the process of generating more diverse and context-aware features from semantic word embeddings. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results on three benchmark datasets for zero-shot segmentation. Codes are available at: https://github.com/bcmi/CaGNet-Zero-Shot-Semantic-Segmentation.
Visually Aware Skip-Gram for Image Based Recommendations
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2020
Year: 2020

The visual appearance of a product significantly influences purchase decisions on e-commerce websites. We propose a novel framework VASG (Visually Aware Skip-Gram) for learning user and product representations in a common latent space using product image features. Our model is an amalgamation of the Skip-Gram architecture and a deep neural network based Decoder. Here the Skip-Gram attempts to capture user preference by optimizing user-product co-occurrence in a Heterogeneous Information Network while the Decoder simultaneously learns a mapping to transform product image features to the Skip-Gram embedding space. This architecture is jointly optimized in an end-to-end, multitask fashion. The proposed framework enables us to make personalized recommendations for cold-start products which have no purchase history. Experiments conducted on large real-world datasets show that the learned embeddings can generate effective recommendations using nearest neighbour searches.
In-situ Workflow Auto-tuning via Combining Performance Models of Component Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

In-situ parallel workflows couple multiple component applications, such as simulation and analysis, via streaming data transfer. in order to avoid data exchange via shared file systems. Such workflows are challenging to configure for optimal performance due to the large space of possible configurations. Expert experience is rarely sufficient to identify optimal configurations, and existing empirical auto-tuning approaches are inefficient due to the high cost of obtaining training data for machine learning models. It is also infeasible to optimize individual components independently, due to component interactions. We propose here a new auto-tuning method, Component-based Ensemble Active Learning (CEAL), that combines machine learning techniques with knowledge of in-situ workflow structure to enable automated workflow configuration with a limited number of performance measurements.
Learning Disentangled Expression Representations from Facial Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Face images are subject to many different factors of variation, especially in unconstrained in-the-wild scenarios. For most tasks involving such images, e.g. expression recognition from video streams, having enough labeled data is prohibitively expensive. One common strategy to tackle such a problem is to learn disentangled representations for the different factors of variation of the observed data using adversarial learning. In this paper, we use a formulation of the adversarial loss to learn disentangled representations for face images. The used model facilitates learning on single-task datasets and improves the state-of-the-art in expression recognition with an accuracy of60.53%on the AffectNetdataset, without using any additional data.
AutoPose: Searching Multi-Scale Branch Aggregation for Pose Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

We present AutoPose, a novel neural architecture search(NAS) framework that is capable of automatically discovering multiple parallel branches of cross-scale connections towards accurate and high-resolution 2D human pose estimation. Recently, high-performance hand-crafted convolutional networks for pose estimation show growing demands on multi-scale fusion and high-resolution representations. However, current NAS works exhibit limited flexibility on scale searching, they dominantly adopt simplified search spaces of single-branch architectures. Such simplification limits the fusion of information at different scales and fails to maintain high-resolution representations. The presentedAutoPose framework is able to search for multi-branch scales and network depth, in addition to the cell-level microstructure. Motivated by the search space, a novel bi-level optimization method is presented, where the network-level architecture is searched via reinforcement learning, and the cell-level search is conducted by the gradient-based method. Within 2.5 GPU days, AutoPose is able to find very competitive architectures on the MS COCO dataset, that are also transferable to the MPII dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/VITA-Group/AutoPose.
Oriented Object Detection in Aerial Images with Box Boundary-Aware Vectors
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Oriented object detection in aerial images is a challenging task as the objects in aerial images are displayed in arbitrary directions and are usually densely packed. Current oriented object detection methods mainly rely on two-stage anchor-based detectors. However, the anchor-based detectors typically suffer from a severe imbalance issue between the positive and negative anchor boxes. To address this issue, in this work we extend the horizontal keypoint-based object detector to the oriented object detection task. In particular, we first detect the center keypoints of the objects, based on which we then regress the box boundary-aware vectors (BBAVectors) to capture the oriented bounding boxes. The box boundary-aware vectors are distributed in the four quadrants of a Cartesian coordinate system for all arbitrarily oriented objects. To relieve the difficulty of learning the vectors in the corner cases, we further classify the oriented bounding boxes into horizontal and rotational bounding boxes. In the experiment, we show that learning the box boundary-aware vectors is superior to directly predicting the width, height, and angle of an oriented bounding box, as adopted in the baseline method. Besides, the proposed method competes favorably with state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/yijingru/BBAVectors-Oriented-Object-Detection.
Video Region Annotation with Sparse Bounding Boxes
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Video analysis has been moving towards more detailed interpretation (e.g. segmentation) with encouraging progresses. These tasks, however, increasingly rely on densely annotated training data both in space and time. Since such annotation is labour-intensive, few densely annotated video data with detailed region boundaries exist. This work aims to resolve this dilemma by learning to automatically generate region boundaries for all frames of a video from sparsely annotated bounding boxes of target regions. We achieve this with a Volumetric Graph Convolutional Network (VGCN), which learns to iteratively find keypoints on the region boundaries using the spatio-temporal volume of surrounding appearance and motion. The global optimization of VGCN makes it significantly stronger and generalize better than existing solutions. Experimental results using two latest datasets (one real and one synthetic), including ablation studies, demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method.