OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Lower Bound on the Optimal Access Bandwidth of ($K+2,K,2$)-MDS Array Code with Degraded Read Friendly
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

Accessing the data in the failed disk (degraded read) with low latency is crucial for an erasure-coded storage system. In this work, the maximum distance separable (MDS) array code with the property of degraded-read friendly (DRF) is discussed. For the DRF MDS array code with 2 redundant nodes and the sub-packetization level of 2, the lower bound of its access bandwidth is derived.
Deep Face Fuzzy Vault: Implementation and Performance
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Biometric technologies, especially face recognition, have become an essential part of identity management systems worldwide. In deployments of biometrics, secure storage of biometric information is necessary in order to protect the users' privacy. In this context, biometric cryptosystems are designed to meet key requirements of biometric information protection enabling a privacy-preserving storage and comparison of biometric data. This work investigates the application of a well-known biometric cryptosystem, i.e. the improved fuzzy vault scheme, to facial feature vectors extracted through deep convolutional neural networks. To this end, a feature transformation method is introduced which maps fixed-length real-valued deep feature vectors to integer-valued feature sets. As part of said feature transformation, a detailed analysis of different feature quantisation and binarisation techniques is conducted. At key binding, obtained feature sets are locked in an unlinkable improved fuzzy vault. For key retrieval, the efficiency of different polynomial reconstruction techniques is investigated. The proposed feature transformation method and template protection scheme are agnostic of the biometric characteristic. In experiments, an unlinkable improved deep face fuzzy vault-based template protection scheme is constructed employing features extracted with a state-of-the-art deep convolutional neural network trained with the additive angular margin loss (ArcFace). For the best configuration, a false non-match rate below 1% at a false match rate of 0.01%, is achieved in cross-database experiments on the FERET and FRGCv2 face databases. On average, a security level of up to approximately 28 bits is obtained. This work presents an effective face-based fuzzy vault scheme providing privacy protection of facial reference data as well as digital key derivation from face.
Keep it Simple: Data-efficient Learning for Controlling Complex Systems with Simple Models
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

When manipulating a novel object with complex dynamics, a state representation is not always available, for example for deformable objects. Learning both a representation and dynamics from observations requires large amounts of data. We propose Learned Visual Similarity Predictive Control (LVSPC), a novel method for data-efficient learning to control systems with complex dynamics and high-dimensional state spaces from images. LVSPC leverages a given simple model approximation from which image observations can be generated. We use these images to train a perception model that estimates the simple model state from observations of the complex system online. We then use data from the complex system to fit the parameters of the simple model and learn where this model is inaccurate, also online. Finally, we use Model Predictive Control and bias the controller away from regions where the simple model is inaccurate and thus where the controller is less reliable. We evaluate LVSPC on two tasks; manipulating a tethered mass and a rope. We find that our method performs comparably to state-of-the-art reinforcement learning methods with an order of magnitude less data. LVSPC also completes the rope manipulation task on a real robot with 80% success rate after only 10 trials, despite using a perception system trained only on images from simulation.
FuzzSplore: Visualizing Feedback-Driven Fuzzing Techniques
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Fuzz Testing techniques are the state of the art in software testing for security issues nowadays. Their great effectiveness attracted the attention of researchers and hackers and involved them in developing a lot of new techniques to improve Fuzz Testing. The evaluation and the cross-comparison of these techniques is an almost open problem. In this paper, we propose a human-driven approach to this problem based on information visualization. We developed a prototype upon the AFL++ fuzzing framework, FuzzSplore, that an analyst can use to get useful insights about different fuzzing configurations applied to a specific target in order to choose or tune the best technique during a fuzzing campaign.
Decoding of Space-Symmetric Rank Errors
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

This paper investigates the decoding of certain Gabidulin codes that were transmitted over a channel with space-symmetric errors. Space-symmetric errors are additive error matrices that have the property that their column and row spaces are equal. We show that for channels restricted to space-symmetric errors, with high probability errors of rank up to 2(n-k)/3 can be decoded with a Gabidulin code of length n and dimension k, using a weak-self orthogonal basis as code locators.
Strategyproof Facility Location Mechanisms on Discrete Trees
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2021
Year: 2021

We address the problem of strategyproof (SP) facility location mechanisms on discrete trees. Our main result is a full characterization of onto and SP mechanisms. In particular, we prove that when a single agent significantly affects the outcome, the trajectory of the facility is almost contained in the trajectory of the agent, and both move in the same direction along the common edges. We show tight relations of our characterization to previous results on discrete lines and on continuous trees. We then derive further implications of the main result for infinite discrete lines.
Deep Autoencoder-based Fuzzy C-Means for Topic Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

Topic detection is a process for determining topics from a collection of textual data. One of the topic detection methods is a clustering-based method, which assumes that the centroids are topics. The clustering method has the advantage that it can process data with negative representations. Therefore, the clustering method allows a combination with a broader representation learning method. In this paper, we adopt deep learning for topic detection by using a deep autoencoder and fuzzy c-means called deep autoencoder-based fuzzy c-means (DFCM). The encoder of the autoencoder performs a lower-dimensional representation learning. Fuzzy c-means groups the lower-dimensional representation to identify the centroids. The autoencoder's decoder transforms back the centroids into the original representation to be interpreted as the topics. Our simulation shows that DFCM improves the coherence score of eigenspace-based fuzzy c-means (EFCM) and is comparable to the leading standard methods, i.e., nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) or latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA).
Pick the Right Edge Device: Towards Power and Performance Estimation of CUDA-based CNNs on GPGPUs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

The emergence of Machine Learning (ML) as a powerful technique has been helping nearly all fields of business to increase operational efficiency or to develop new value propositions. Besides the challenges of deploying and maintaining ML models, picking the right edge device (e.g., GPGPUs) to run these models (e.g., CNN with the massive computational process) is one of the most pressing challenges faced by organizations today. As the cost of renting (on Cloud) or purchasing an edge device is directly connected to the cost of final products or services, choosing the most efficient device is essential. However, this decision making requires deep knowledge about performance and power consumption of the ML models running on edge devices that must be identified at the early stage of ML workflow. In this paper, we present a novel ML-based approach that provides ML engineers with the early estimation of both power consumption and performance of CUDA-based CNNs on GPGPUs. The proposed approach empowers ML engineers to pick the most efficient GPGPU for a given CNN model at the early stage of development.
An Evaluation of Cryptocurrency Payment Channel Networks and Their Privacy Implications
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Cryptocurrencies redefined how money can be stored and transferred among users. However, independent of the amount being sent, public blockchain-based cryptocurrencies suffer from high transaction waiting times and fees. These drawbacks hinder the wide use of cryptocurrencies by masses. To address these challenges, payment channel network concept is touted as the most viable solution to be used for micro-payments. The idea is exchanging the ownership of money by keeping the state of the accounts locally. The users inform the blockchain rarely, which decreases the load on the blockchain. Specifically, payment channel networks can provide transaction approvals in seconds by charging a nominal fee proportional to the payment amount. Such attraction on payment channel networks inspired many recent studies which focus on how to design them and allocate channels such that the transactions will be secure and efficient. However, as payment channel networks are emerging and reaching large number of users, privacy issues are becoming more relevant that raise concerns about exposing not only individual habits but also businesses' revenues. In this paper, we first propose a categorization of the existing payment networks formed on top of blockchain-backed cryptocurrencies. After discussing several emerging attacks on user/business privacy in these payment channel networks, we qualitatively evaluate them based on a number of privacy metrics that relate to our case. Based on the discussions on the strengths and weaknesses of the approaches, we offer possible directions for research for the future of privacy based payment channel networks.
Digital twins based on bidirectional LSTM and GAN for modelling the COVID-19 pandemic
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

The outbreak of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has now spread throughout the globe infecting over 150 million people and causing the death of over 3.2 million people. Thus, there is an urgent need to study the dynamics of epidemiological models to gain a better understanding of how such diseases spread. While epidemiological models can be computationally expensive, recent advances in machine learning techniques have given rise to neural networks with the ability to learn and predict complex dynamics at reduced computational costs. Here we introduce two digital twins of a SEIRS model applied to an idealised town. The SEIRS model has been modified to take account of spatial variation and, where possible, the model parameters are based on official virus spreading data from the UK. We compare predictions from a data-corrected Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory network and a predictive Generative Adversarial Network. The predictions given by these two frameworks are accurate when compared to the original SEIRS model data. Additionally, these frameworks are data-agnostic and could be applied to towns, idealised or real, in the UK or in other countries. Also, more compartments could be included in the SEIRS model, in order to study more realistic epidemiological behaviour.
Hierarchical Multi-head Attentive Network for Evidence-aware Fake News Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

The widespread of fake news and misinformation in various domains ranging from politics, economics to public health has posed an urgent need to automatically fact-check information. A recent trend in fake news detection is to utilize evidence from external sources. However, existing evidence-aware fake news detection methods focused on either only word-level attention or evidence-level attention, which may result in suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a Hierarchical Multi-head Attentive Network to fact-check textual claims. Our model jointly combines multi-head word-level attention and multi-head document-level attention, which aid explanation in both word-level and evidence-level. Experiments on two real-word datasets show that our model outperforms seven state-of-the-art baselines. Improvements over baselines are from 6\% to 18\%. Our source code and datasets are released at \texttt{\url{https://github.com/nguyenvo09/EACL2021}}.
Instance-based learning using the Half-Space Proximal Graph
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

The primary example of instance-based learning is the $k$-nearest neighbor rule (kNN), praised for its simplicity and the capacity to adapt to new unseen data and toss away old data. The main disadvantages often mentioned are the classification complexity, which is $O(n)$, and the estimation of the parameter $k$, the number of nearest neighbors to be used. The use of indexes at classification time lifts the former disadvantage, while there is no conclusive method for the latter. This paper presents a parameter-free instance-based learning algorithm using the {\em Half-Space Proximal} (HSP) graph. The HSP neighbors simultaneously possess proximity and variety concerning the center node. To classify a given query, we compute its HSP neighbors and apply a simple majority rule over them. In our experiments, the resulting classifier bettered $KNN$ for any $k$ in a battery of datasets. This improvement sticks even when applying weighted majority rules to both kNN and HSP classifiers. Surprisingly, when using a probabilistic index to approximate the HSP graph and consequently speeding-up the classification task, our method could {\em improve} its accuracy in stark contrast with the kNN classifier, which worsens with a probabilistic index.
Egalitarian Judgment Aggregation
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Egalitarian considerations play a central role in many areas of social choice theory. Applications of egalitarian principles range from ensuring everyone gets an equal share of a cake when deciding how to divide it, to guaranteeing balance with respect to gender or ethnicity in committee elections. Yet, the egalitarian approach has received little attention in judgment aggregation -- a powerful framework for aggregating logically interconnected issues. We make the first steps towards filling that gap. We introduce axioms capturing two classical interpretations of egalitarianism in judgment aggregation and situate these within the context of existing axioms in the pertinent framework of belief merging. We then explore the relationship between these axioms and several notions of strategyproofness from social choice theory at large. Finally, a novel egalitarian judgment aggregation rule stems from our analysis; we present complexity results concerning both outcome determination and strategic manipulation for that rule.
Controlling Hallucinations at Word Level in Data-to-Text Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Data-to-Text Generation (DTG) is a subfield of Natural Language Generation aiming at transcribing structured data in natural language descriptions. The field has been recently boosted by the use of neural-based generators which exhibit on one side great syntactic skills without the need of hand-crafted pipelines; on the other side, the quality of the generated text reflects the quality of the training data, which in realistic settings only offer imperfectly aligned structure-text pairs. Consequently, state-of-art neural models include misleading statements - usually called hallucinations - in their outputs. The control of this phenomenon is today a major challenge for DTG, and is the problem addressed in the paper. Previous work deal with this issue at the instance level: using an alignment score for each table-reference pair. In contrast, we propose a finer-grained approach, arguing that hallucinations should rather be treated at the word level. Specifically, we propose a Multi-Branch Decoder which is able to leverage word-level labels to learn the relevant parts of each training instance. These labels are obtained following a simple and efficient scoring procedure based on co-occurrence analysis and dependency parsing. Extensive evaluations, via automated metrics and human judgment on the standard WikiBio benchmark, show the accuracy of our alignment labels and the effectiveness of the proposed Multi-Branch Decoder. Our model is able to reduce and control hallucinations, while keeping fluency and coherence in generated texts. Further experiments on a degraded version of ToTTo show that our model could be successfully used on very noisy settings.
Building Representative Corpora from Illiterate Communities: A Review of Challenges and Mitigation Strategies for Developing Countries
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Most well-established data collection methods currently adopted in NLP depend on the assumption of speaker literacy. Consequently, the collected corpora largely fail to represent swathes of the global population, which tend to be some of the most vulnerable and marginalised people in society, and often live in rural developing areas. Such underrepresented groups are thus not only ignored when making modeling and system design decisions, but also prevented from benefiting from development outcomes achieved through data-driven NLP. This paper aims to address the under-representation of illiterate communities in NLP corpora: we identify potential biases and ethical issues that might arise when collecting data from rural communities with high illiteracy rates in Low-Income Countries, and propose a set of practical mitigation strategies to help future work.
Low-Power Status Updates via Sleep-Wake Scheduling
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

We consider the problem of optimizing the freshness of status updates that are sent from a large number of low-power sources to a common access point. The source nodes utilize carrier sensing to reduce collisions and adopt an asynchronized sleep-wake scheduling strategy to achieve a target network lifetime (e.g., 10 years). We use age of information (AoI) to measure the freshness of status updates, and design sleep-wake parameters for minimizing the weighted-sum peak AoI of the sources, subject to per-source battery lifetime constraints. When the sensing time (i.e., the time duration of carrier sensing) is zero, this sleep-wake design problem can be solved by resorting to a two-layer nested convex optimization procedure; however, for positive sensing times, the problem is non-convex. We devise a low-complexity solution to solve this problem and prove that, for practical sensing times that are short, the solution is within a small gap from the optimum AoI performance. When the mean transmission time of status-update packets is unknown, we devise a reinforcement learning algorithm that adaptively performs the following two tasks in an ``efficient way'': a) it learns the unknown parameter, b) it also generates efficient controls that make channel access decisions. We analyze its performance by quantifying its ``regret'', i.e., the sub-optimality gap between its average performance and the average performance of a controller that knows the mean transmission time. Our numerical and NS-3 simulation results show that our solution can indeed elongate the batteries lifetime of information sources, while providing a competitive AoI performance.
Undecidability of Underfitting in Learning Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Using recent machine learning results that present an information-theoretic perspective on underfitting and overfitting, we prove that deciding whether an encodable learning algorithm will always underfit a dataset, even if given unlimited training time, is undecidable. We discuss the importance of this result and potential topics for further research, including information-theoretic and probabilistic strategies for bounding learning algorithm fit.
Learning the Update Operator for 2D/3D Image Registration
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Image guidance in minimally invasive interventions is usually provided using live 2D X-ray imaging. To enhance the information available during the intervention, the preoperative volume can be overlaid over the 2D images using 2D/3D image registration. Recently, deep learning-based 2D/3D registration methods have shown promising results by improving computational efficiency and robustness. However, there is still a gap in terms of registration accuracy compared to traditional optimization-based methods. We aim to address this gap by incorporating traditional methods in deep neural networks using known operator learning. As an initial step in this direction, we propose to learn the update step of an iterative 2D/3D registration framework based on the Point-to-Plane Correspondence model. We embed the Point-to-Plane Correspondence model as a known operator in our deep neural network and learn the update step for the iterative registration. We show an improvement of 1.8 times in terms of registration accuracy for the update step prediction compared to learning without the known operator.
Ivy: Templated Deep Learning for Inter-Framework Portability
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

We introduce Ivy, a templated Deep Learning (DL) framework which abstracts existing DL frameworks. Ivy unifies the core functions of these frameworks to exhibit consistent call signatures, syntax and input-output behaviour. New high-level framework-agnostic functions and classes, which are usable alongside framework-specific code, can then be implemented as compositions of the unified low-level Ivy functions. Ivy currently supports TensorFlow, PyTorch, MXNet, Jax and NumPy. We also release four pure-Ivy libraries for mechanics, 3D vision, robotics, and differentiable environments. Through our evaluations, we show that Ivy can significantly reduce lines of code with a runtime overhead of less than 1% in most cases. We welcome developers to join the Ivy community by writing their own functions, layers and libraries in Ivy, maximizing their audience and helping to accelerate DL research through inter-framework codebases. More information can be found at https://ivy-dl.org.
Automated Rip Current Detection with Region based Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

This paper presents a machine learning approach for the automatic identification of rip currents with breaking waves. Rip currents are dangerous fast moving currents of water that result in many deaths by sweeping people out to sea. Most people do not know how to recognize rip currents in order to avoid them. Furthermore, efforts to forecast rip currents are hindered by lack of observations to help train and validate hazard models. The presence of web cams and smart phones have made video and still imagery of the coast ubiquitous and provide a potential source of rip current observations. These same devices could aid public awareness of the presence of rip currents. What is lacking is a method to detect the presence or absence of rip currents from coastal imagery. This paper provides expert labeled training and test data sets for rip currents. We use Faster-RCNN and a custom temporal aggregation stage to make detections from still images or videos with higher measured accuracy than both humans and other methods of rip current detection previously reported in the literature.