OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Exploring Viable Algorithmic Options for Automatically Creating and Reconfiguring Component-based Software Systems: A Computational Complexity Approach (Full Version)
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

Component-Based Development (CBD) is a popular approach to mitigating the costs of creating software systems. However, it is not clear to what extent the core component selection and adaptation activities of CBD can be implemented to operate automatically in an efficient and reliable manner or in what situations (if any) CBD is preferable to other approaches to software development. In this paper, we use computational complexity analysis to determine and compare the computational characteristics of fully automatic component-based software system creation and reconfiguration by de novo design, component selection, and component selection with adaptation. Our results show that none of these approaches can be implemented to operate both efficiently and reliably in a fully automatic manner either in general or relative to a number of restrictions on software systems, system requirements, components, and component adaptation. We also give restrictions under which all of these approaches can be implemented to operate both efficiently and reliably. As such, this paper illustrates how different types of computational complexity analysis (in particular, parameterized complexity analysis) can be used to systematically explore the algorithmic options for implementing automatic activities in software engineering.
A Tale of Two Markets: Investigating the Ransomware Payments Economy
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Ransomware attacks are among the most severe cyber threats. They have made headlines in recent years by threatening the operation of governments, critical infrastructure, and corporations. Collecting and analyzing ransomware data is an important step towards understanding the spread of ransomware and designing effective defense and mitigation mechanisms. We report on our experience operating Ransomwhere, an open crowdsourced ransomware payment tracker to collect information from victims of ransomware attacks. With Ransomwhere, we have gathered 13.5k ransom payments to more than 87 ransomware criminal actors with total payments of more than $101 million. Leveraging the transparent nature of Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency used for most ransomware payments, we characterize the evolving ransomware criminal structure and ransom laundering strategies. Our analysis shows that there are two parallel ransomware criminal markets: commodity ransomware and Ransomware as a Service (RaaS). We notice that there are striking differences between the two markets in the way that cryptocurrency resources are utilized, revenue per transaction, and ransom laundering efficiency. Although it is relatively easy to identify choke points in commodity ransomware payment activity, it is more difficult to do the same for RaaS.
A Quantitative Symbolic Approach to Individual Human Reasoning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

Cognitive theories for reasoning are about understanding how humans come to conclusions from a set of premises. Starting from hypothetical thoughts, we are interested which are the implications behind basic everyday language and how do we reason with them. A widely studied topic is whether cognitive theories can account for typical reasoning tasks and be confirmed by own empirical experiments. This paper takes a different view and we do not propose a theory, but instead take findings from the literature and show how these, formalized as cognitive principles within a logical framework, can establish a quantitative notion of reasoning, which we call plausibility. For this purpose, we employ techniques from non-monotonic reasoning and computer science, namely, a solving paradigm called answer set programming (ASP). Finally, we can fruitfully use plausibility reasoning in ASP to test the effects of an existing experiment and explain different majority responses.
Brazilian COVID-19 data streaming
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2022
Year: 2022

We collected individualized (unidentifiable) and aggregated openly available data from various sources related to suspected/confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infections, vaccinations, non-pharmaceutical government interventions, human mobility, and levels of population inequality in Brazil. In addition, a data structure allowing real-time data collection, curation, integration, and extract-transform-load processes for different objectives was developed. The granularity of this dataset (state- and municipality-wide) enables its application to individualized and ecological epidemiological studies, statistical, mathematical, and computational modeling, data visualization as well as the scientific dissemination of information on the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil.
MM-RealSR: Metric Learning based Interactive Modulation for Real-World Super-Resolution
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Interactive image restoration aims to restore images by adjusting several controlling coefficients, which determine the restoration strength. Existing methods are restricted in learning the controllable functions under the supervision of known degradation types and levels. They usually suffer from a severe performance drop when the real degradation is different from their assumptions. Such a limitation is due to the complexity of real-world degradations, which can not provide explicit supervision to the interactive modulation during training. However, how to realize the interactive modulation in real-world super-resolution has not yet been studied. In this work, we present a Metric Learning based Interactive Modulation for Real-World Super-Resolution (MM-RealSR). Specifically, we propose an unsupervised degradation estimation strategy to estimate the degradation level in real-world scenarios. Instead of using known degradation levels as explicit supervision to the interactive mechanism, we propose a metric learning strategy to map the unquantifiable degradation levels in real-world scenarios to a metric space, which is trained in an unsupervised manner. Moreover, we introduce an anchor point strategy in the metric learning process to normalize the distribution of metric space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed MM-RealSR achieves excellent modulation and restoration performance in real-world super-resolution. Codes are available at https://github.com/TencentARC/MM-RealSR.
Tensor-based Collaborative Filtering With Smooth Ratings Scale
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

Conventional collaborative filtering techniques don't take into consideration the effect of discrepancy in users' rating perception. Some users may rarely give 5 stars to items while others almost always assign 5 stars to the chosen item. Even if they had experience with the same items this systematic discrepancy in their evaluation style will lead to the systematic errors in the ability of recommender system to effectively extract right patterns from data. To mitigate this problem we introduce the ratings' similarity matrix which represents the dependency between different values of ratings on the population level. Hence, if on average the correlations between ratings exist, it is possible to improve the quality of proposed recommendations by off-setting the effect of either shifted down or shifted up users' rates.
Modeling Operational Fairness of Hybrid Cloud Brokerage
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

Cloud service brokerage is an emerging technology that attempts to simplify the consumption and operation of hybrid clouds. Today's cloud brokers attempt to insulate consumers from the vagaries of multiple clouds. To achieve the insulation, the modern cloud broker needs to disguise itself as the end-provider to consumers by creating and operating a virtual data center construct that we call a meta-cloud, which is assembled on top of a set of participating supplier clouds. It is crucial for such a cloud broker to be considered a trusted partner both by cloud consumers and by the underpinning cloud suppliers. A fundamental tenet of brokerage trust is vendor neutrality. On the one hand, cloud consumers will be comfortable if a cloud broker guarantees that they will not be led through a preferred path. And on the other hand, cloud suppliers would be more interested in partnering with a cloud broker who promises a fair apportioning of client provisioning requests. Because consumer and supplier trust on a meta-cloud broker stems from the assumption of being agnostic to supplier clouds, there is a need for a test strategy that verifies the fairness of cloud brokerage. In this paper, we propose a calculus of fairness that defines the rules to determine the operational behavior of a cloud broker. The calculus uses temporal logic to model the fact that fairness is a trait that has to be ascertained over time; it is not a characteristic that can be judged at a per-request fulfillment level. Using our temporal calculus of fairness as the basis, we propose an algorithm to determine the fairness of a broker probabilistically, based on its observed request apportioning policies. Our model for the fairness of cloud broker behavior also factors in inter-provider variables such as cost divergence and capacity variance.
Human Language Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Natural language is generated by people, yet traditional language modeling views words or documents as if generated independently. Here, we propose human language modeling (HuLM), a hierarchical extension to the language modeling problem whereby a human-level exists to connect sequences of documents (e.g. social media messages) and capture the notion that human language is moderated by changing human states. We introduce, HaRT, a large-scale transformer model for the HuLM task, pre-trained on approximately 100,000 social media users, and demonstrate its effectiveness in terms of both language modeling (perplexity) for social media and fine-tuning for 4 downstream tasks spanning document- and user-levels: stance detection, sentiment classification, age estimation, and personality assessment. Results on all tasks meet or surpass the current state-of-the-art.
The Move Borrow Checker
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2022
Year: 2022

The Move language provides abstractions for programming with digital assets via a mix of value semantics and reference semantics. Ensuring memory safety in programs with references that access a shared, mutable global ledger is difficult, yet essential for the use-cases targeted by Move. The language meets this challenge with a novel memory model and a modular, intraprocedural static reference safety analysis that leverages key properties of the memory. The analysis ensures the absence of memory safety violations in all Move programs (including ones that link against untrusted code) by running as part of a load-time bytecode verification pass similar to the JVM [12] and CLR [15]. We formalize the static analysis and prove that it enjoys three desirable properties: absence of dangling references, referential transparency for immutable references, and absence of memory leaks.
Multifidelity data fusion in convolutional encoder/decoder networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

We analyze the regression accuracy of convolutional neural networks assembled from encoders, decoders and skip connections and trained with multifidelity data. Besides requiring significantly less trainable parameters than equivalent fully connected networks, encoder, decoder, encoder-decoder or decoder-encoder architectures can learn the mapping between inputs to outputs of arbitrary dimensionality. We demonstrate their accuracy when trained on a few high-fidelity and many low-fidelity data generated from models ranging from one-dimensional functions to Poisson equation solvers in two-dimensions. We finally discuss a number of implementation choices that improve the reliability of the uncertainty estimates generated by Monte Carlo DropBlocks, and compare uncertainty estimates among low-, high- and multifidelity approaches.
Multiplexed Immunofluorescence Brain Image Analysis Using Self-Supervised Dual-Loss Adaptive Masked Autoencoder
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Reliable large-scale cell detection and segmentation is the fundamental first step to understanding biological processes in the brain. The ability to phenotype cells at scale can accelerate preclinical drug evaluation and system-level brain histology studies. The impressive advances in deep learning offer a practical solution to cell image detection and segmentation. Unfortunately, categorizing cells and delineating their boundaries for training deep networks is an expensive process that requires skilled biologists. This paper presents a novel self-supervised Dual-Loss Adaptive Masked Autoencoder (DAMA) for learning rich features from multiplexed immunofluorescence brain images. DAMA's objective function minimizes the conditional entropy in pixel-level reconstruction and feature-level regression. Unlike existing self-supervised learning methods based on a random image masking strategy, DAMA employs a novel adaptive mask sampling strategy to maximize mutual information and effectively learn brain cell data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort to develop a self-supervised learning method for multiplexed immunofluorescence brain images. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that DAMA features enable superior cell detection, segmentation, and classification performance without requiring many annotations.
Deep Learning-based Channel Estimation for Wideband Hybrid MmWave Massive MIMO
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

Hybrid analog-digital (HAD) architecture is widely adopted in practical millimeter wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems to reduce hardware cost and energy consumption. However, channel estimation in the context of HAD is challenging due to only limited radio frequency (RF) chains at transceivers. Although various compressive sensing (CS) algorithms have been developed to solve this problem by exploiting inherent channel sparsity and sparsity structures, practical effects, such as power leakage and beam squint, can still make the real channel features deviate from the assumed models and result in performance degradation. Also, the high complexity of CS algorithms caused by a large number of iterations hinders their applications in practice. To tackle these issues, we develop a deep learning (DL)-based channel estimation approach where the sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) algorithm is unfolded into a deep neural network (DNN). In each SBL layer, Gaussian variance parameters of the sparse angular domain channel are updated by a tailored DNN, which is able to effectively capture complicated channel sparsity structures in various domains. Besides, the measurement matrix is jointly optimized for performance improvement. Then, the proposed approach is extended to the multi-block case where channel correlation in time is further exploited to adaptively predict the measurement matrix and facilitate the update of Gaussian variance parameters. Based on simulation results, the proposed approaches significantly outperform existing approaches but with reduced complexity.
Salient Object Detection via Bounding-box Supervision
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

The success of fully supervised saliency detection models depends on a large number of pixel-wise labeling. In this paper, we work on bounding-box based weakly-supervised saliency detection to relieve the labeling effort. Given the bounding box annotation, we observe that pixels inside the bounding box may contain extensive labeling noise. However, as a large amount of background is excluded, the foreground bounding box region contains a less complex background, making it possible to perform handcrafted features-based saliency detection with only the cropped foreground region. As the conventional handcrafted features are not representative enough, leading to noisy saliency maps, we further introduce structure-aware self-supervised loss to regularize the structure of the prediction. Further, we claim that pixels outside the bounding box should be background, thus partial cross-entropy loss function can be used to accurately localize the accurate background region. Experimental results on six benchmark RGB saliency datasets illustrate the effectiveness of our model.
Evaluation Gaps in Machine Learning Practice
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Forming a reliable judgement of a machine learning (ML) model's appropriateness for an application ecosystem is critical for its responsible use, and requires considering a broad range of factors including harms, benefits, and responsibilities. In practice, however, evaluations of ML models frequently focus on only a narrow range of decontextualized predictive behaviours. We examine the evaluation gaps between the idealized breadth of evaluation concerns and the observed narrow focus of actual evaluations. Through an empirical study of papers from recent high-profile conferences in the Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing communities, we demonstrate a general focus on a handful of evaluation methods. By considering the metrics and test data distributions used in these methods, we draw attention to which properties of models are centered in the field, revealing the properties that are frequently neglected or sidelined during evaluation. By studying these properties, we demonstrate the machine learning discipline's implicit assumption of a range of commitments which have normative impacts; these include commitments to consequentialism, abstractability from context, the quantifiability of impacts, the limited role of model inputs in evaluation, and the equivalence of different failure modes. Shedding light on these assumptions enables us to question their appropriateness for ML system contexts, pointing the way towards more contextualized evaluation methodologies for robustly examining the trustworthiness of ML models
Error Rate Analysis for Grant-free Massive Random Access with Short-Packet Transmission
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

Grant-free massive random access (RA) is a promising protocol to support the massive machine-type communications (mMTC) scenario in 5G and beyond networks. In this paper, we focus on the error rate analysis in grant-free massive RA, which is critical for practical deployment but has not been well studied. We consider a two-phase frame structure, with a pilot transmission phase for activity detection and channel estimation, followed by a data transmission phase with coded data symbols. Considering the characteristics of short-packet transmission, we analyze the block error rate (BLER) in the finite blocklength regime to characterize the data transmission performance. The analysis involves characterizing the activity detection and channel estimation errors as well as applying the random matrix theory (RMT) to analyze the distribution of the post-processing signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). As a case study, the derived BLER expression is further simplified to optimize the pilot length. Simulation results verify our analysis and demonstrate its effectiveness in pilot length optimization.
An Efficient Summation Algorithm for the Accuracy, Convergence and Reproducibility of Parallel Numerical Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Nowadays, parallel computing is ubiquitous in several application fields, both in engineering and science. The computations rely on the floating-point arithmetic specified by the IEEE754 Standard. In this context, an elementary brick of computation, used everywhere, is the sum of a sequence of numbers. This sum is subject to many numerical errors in floating-point arithmetic. To alleviate this issue, we have introduced a new parallel algorithm for summing a sequence of floating-point numbers. This algorithm which scales up easily with the number of processors, adds numbers of the same exponents first. In this article, our main contribution is an extensive analysis of its efficiency with respect to several properties: accuracy, convergence and reproducibility. In order to show the usefulness of our algorithm, we have chosen a set of representative numerical methods which are Simpson, Jacobi, LU factorization and the Iterated power method.
Pre-trained Language Models as Re-Annotators
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Annotation noise is widespread in datasets, but manually revising a flawed corpus is time-consuming and error-prone. Hence, given the prior knowledge in Pre-trained Language Models and the expected uniformity across all annotations, we attempt to reduce annotation noise in the corpus through two tasks automatically: (1) Annotation Inconsistency Detection that indicates the credibility of annotations, and (2) Annotation Error Correction that rectifies the abnormal annotations. We investigate how to acquire semantic sensitive annotation representations from Pre-trained Language Models, expecting to embed the examples with identical annotations to the mutually adjacent positions even without fine-tuning. We proposed a novel credibility score to reveal the likelihood of annotation inconsistencies based on the neighbouring consistency. Then, we fine-tune the Pre-trained Language Models based classifier with cross-validation for annotation correction. The annotation corrector is further elaborated with two approaches: (1) soft labelling by Kernel Density Estimation and (2) a novel distant-peer contrastive loss. We study the re-annotation in relation extraction and create a new manually revised dataset, Re-DocRED, for evaluating document-level re-annotation. The proposed credibility scores show promising agreement with human revisions, achieving a Binary F1 of 93.4 and 72.5 in detecting inconsistencies on TACRED and DocRED respectively. Moreover, the neighbour-aware classifiers based on distant-peer contrastive learning and uncertain labels achieve Macro F1 up to 66.2 and 57.8 in correcting annotations on TACRED and DocRED respectively. These improvements are not merely theoretical: Rather, automatically denoised training sets demonstrate up to 3.6% performance improvement for state-of-the-art relation extraction models.
An Objective Method for Pedestrian Occlusion Level Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Pedestrian detection is among the most safety-critical features of driver assistance systems for autonomous vehicles. One of the most complex detection challenges is that of partial occlusion, where a target object is only partially available to the sensor due to obstruction by another foreground object. A number of current pedestrian detection benchmarks provide annotation for partial occlusion to assess algorithm performance in these scenarios, however each benchmark varies greatly in their definition of the occurrence and severity of occlusion. In addition, current occlusion level annotation methods contain a high degree of subjectivity by the human annotator. This can lead to inaccurate or inconsistent reporting of an algorithm's detection performance for partially occluded pedestrians, depending on which benchmark is used. This research presents a novel, objective method for pedestrian occlusion level classification for ground truth annotation. Occlusion level classification is achieved through the identification of visible pedestrian keypoints and through the use of a novel, effective method of 2D body surface area estimation. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method reflects the pixel-wise occlusion level of pedestrians in images and is effective for all forms of occlusion, including challenging edge cases such as self-occlusion, truncation and inter-occluding pedestrians.