OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
EdgeKeeper: Resilient and Lightweight Coordination for Mobile Edge Computing Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has been gaining significant interest from first responders and tactical teams, primarily because they can employ handheld mobile devices to form a computing cluster (for computing tasks like face/scene recognition, virtual assistance) when connectivity to the cloud is not present or it is limited. High user mobility in first responder or tactical environments makes MEC challenging, as wireless links observe substantial fluctuations. Typical cloud-based coordination (e.g., ZooKeeper-based service discovery and coordination, device naming, security) needed by edge computing tasks cannot work in these environments. Driven by the need for a resilient and lightweight coordination service, in this paper, we design and implement \ek to provide cloud-like coordination for MEC systems. It provides naming, network management, application coordination, and security to distributed edge computing applications. It maintains an edge cluster among devices and intelligently stores its data on a group of replicas to guard against node failure and disconnections. We provide a full-system implementation of EdgeKeeper for Android and Linux platforms. We have integrated EdgeKeeper with existing MEC applications and performed real-world performance evaluations in a wide-area search and rescue operation conducted by first responders, which proves it to be lightweight and suitable for mobile devices.
WikiMulti: a Corpus for Cross-Lingual Summarization
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Cross-lingual summarization (CLS) is the task to produce a summary in one particular language for a source document in a different language. We introduce WikiMulti - a new dataset for cross-lingual summarization based on Wikipedia articles in 15 languages. As a set of baselines for further studies, we evaluate the performance of existing cross-lingual abstractive summarization methods on our dataset. We make our dataset publicly available here: https://github.com/tikhonovpavel/wikimulti
NFS: A Hand Gesture Recognition Based Game Using MediaPipe and PyGame
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

This paper represents a game which interacts with humans via hand gesture movement. Nowadays, apps like this seem rare, and there seems to be a window opening for this kind of application to be more prevalent and useful in the near future. This application is based on hand gesture movement instead of being dependent on a keyboard and mouse. The main issue was to figure out how to utilize machine learning to make this application work as it should be. First, two games were selected one with a traditional controller and another with hand gesture method. Then these two games based on the difficulty to use, fun elements, gameplay, and replayability were compared. Though the difficulty increases but the other three aspects improve significantly. After going through all of that a conclusion can be drawn that people are more likely to play a simple hand gesture-based game.
Data Debugging with Shapley Importance over End-to-End Machine Learning Pipelines
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Developing modern machine learning (ML) applications is data-centric, of which one fundamental challenge is to understand the influence of data quality to ML training -- "Which training examples are 'guilty' in making the trained ML model predictions inaccurate or unfair?" Modeling data influence for ML training has attracted intensive interest over the last decade, and one popular framework is to compute the Shapley value of each training example with respect to utilities such as validation accuracy and fairness of the trained ML model. Unfortunately, despite recent intensive interest and research, existing methods only consider a single ML model "in isolation" and do not consider an end-to-end ML pipeline that consists of data transformations, feature extractors, and ML training. We present DataScope (ease.ml/datascope), the first system that efficiently computes Shapley values of training examples over an end-to-end ML pipeline, and illustrate its applications in data debugging for ML training. To this end, we first develop a novel algorithmic framework that computes Shapley value over a specific family of ML pipelines that we call canonical pipelines: a positive relational algebra query followed by a K-nearest-neighbor (KNN) classifier. We show that, for many subfamilies of canonical pipelines, computing Shapley value is in PTIME, contrasting the exponential complexity of computing Shapley value in general. We then put this to practice -- given an sklearn pipeline, we approximate it with a canonical pipeline to use as a proxy. We conduct extensive experiments illustrating different use cases and utilities. Our results show that DataScope is up to four orders of magnitude faster over state-of-the-art Monte Carlo-based methods, while being comparably, and often even more, effective in data debugging.
Can Foundation Models Perform Zero-Shot Task Specification For Robot Manipulation?
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Task specification is at the core of programming autonomous robots. A low-effort modality for task specification is critical for engagement of non-expert end-users and ultimate adoption of personalized robot agents. A widely studied approach to task specification is through goals, using either compact state vectors or goal images from the same robot scene. The former is hard to interpret for non-experts and necessitates detailed state estimation and scene understanding. The latter requires the generation of desired goal image, which often requires a human to complete the task, defeating the purpose of having autonomous robots. In this work, we explore alternate and more general forms of goal specification that are expected to be easier for humans to specify and use such as images obtained from the internet, hand sketches that provide a visual description of the desired task, or simple language descriptions. As a preliminary step towards this, we investigate the capabilities of large scale pre-trained models (foundation models) for zero-shot goal specification, and find promising results in a collection of simulated robot manipulation tasks and real-world datasets.
MAP-Elites based Hyper-Heuristic for the Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2022
Year: 2022

The resource constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) is an NP-Hard combinatorial optimization problem. The objective of RCPSP is to schedule a set of activities without violating any activity precedence or resource constraints. In recent years researchers have moved away from complex solution methodologies, such as meta heuristics and exact mathematical approaches, towards more simple intuitive solutions like priority rules. This often involves using a genetic programming based hyper-heuristic (GPHH) to discover new priority rules which can be applied to new unseen cases. A common problem affecting GPHH is diversity in evolution which often leads to poor quality output. In this paper, we present a MAP-Elites based hyper-heuristic (MEHH) for the automated discovery of efficient priority rules for RCPSP. MAP-Elites uses a quality diversity based approach which explicitly maintains an archive of diverse solutions characterised along multiple feature dimensions. In order to demonstrate the benefits of our proposed hyper-heuristic, we compare the overall performance against a traditional GPHH and priority rules proposed by human experts. Our results indicate strong improvements in both diversity and performance. In particular we see major improvements for larger instances which have been under-studied in the existing literature.
Co-citation and Co-authorship Networks of Statisticians
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2022
Year: 2022

We collected and cleaned a large data set on publications in statistics. The data set consists of the coauthor relationships and citation relationships of 83, 331 papers published in 36 representative journals in statistics, probability, and machine learning, spanning 41 years. The data set allows us to construct many different networks, and motivates a number of research problems about the research patterns and trends, research impacts, and network topology of the statistics community. In this paper we focus on (i) using the citation relationships to estimate the research interests of authors, and (ii) using the coauthor relationships to study the network topology. Using co-citation networks we constructed, we discover a "statistics triangle", reminiscent of the statistical philosophy triangle (Efron, 1998). We propose new approaches to constructing the "research map" of statisticians, as well as the "research trajectory" for a given author to visualize his/her research interest evolvement. Using co-authorship networks we constructed, we discover a multi-layer community tree and produce a Sankey diagram to visualize the author migrations in different sub-areas. We also propose several new metrics for research diversity of individual authors. We find that "Bayes", "Biostatistics", and "Nonparametric" are three primary areas in statistics. We also identify 15 sub-areas, each of which can be viewed as a weighted average of the primary areas, and identify several underlying reasons for the formation of co-authorship communities. We also find that the research interests of statisticians have evolved significantly in the 41-year time window we studied: some areas (e.g., biostatistics, high-dimensional data analysis, etc.) have become increasingly more popular.
Graph Neural Network-based Early Bearing Fault Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Early detection of faults is of importance to avoid catastrophic accidents and ensure safe operation of machinery. A novel graph neural network-based fault detection method is proposed to build a bridge between AI and real-world running mechanical systems. First, the vibration signals, which are Euclidean structured data, are converted into graph (non-Euclidean structured data), so that the vibration signals, which are originally independent of each other, are correlated with each other. Second, inputs the dataset together with its corresponding graph into the GNN for training, which contains graphs in each hidden layer of the network, enabling the graph neural network to learn the feature values of itself and its neighbors, and the obtained early features have stronger discriminability. Finally, determines the top-n objects that are difficult to reconstruct in the output layer of the GNN as fault objects. A public datasets of bearings have been used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. We find that the proposed method can successfully detect faulty objects that are mixed in the normal object region.
Optimizing Task Placement and Online Scheduling for Distributed GNN Training Acceleration
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

Training Graph Neural Networks (GNN) on large graphs is resource-intensive and time-consuming, mainly due to the large graph data that cannot be fit into the memory of a single machine, but have to be fetched from distributed graph storage and processed on the go. Unlike distributed deep neural network (DNN) training, the bottleneck in distributed GNN training lies largely in large graph data transmission for constructing mini-batches of training samples. Existing solutions often advocate data-computation colocation, and do not work well with limited resources where the colocation is infeasible. The potentials of strategical task placement and optimal scheduling of data transmission and task execution have not been well explored. This paper designs an efficient algorithm framework for task placement and execution scheduling of distributed GNN training, to better resource utilization, improve execution pipelining, and expediting training completion. Our framework consists of two modules: (i) an online scheduling algorithm that schedules the execution of training tasks, and the data transmission plan; and (ii) an exploratory task placement scheme that decides the placement of each training task. We conduct thorough theoretical analysis, testbed experiments and simulation studies, and observe up to 67% training speed-up with our algorithm as compared to representative baselines.
Open-domain Dialogue Generation Grounded with Dynamic Multi-form Knowledge Fusion
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Open-domain multi-turn conversations normally face the challenges of how to enrich and expand the content of the conversation. Recently, many approaches based on external knowledge are proposed to generate rich semantic and information conversation. Two types of knowledge have been studied for knowledge-aware open-domain dialogue generation: structured triples from knowledge graphs and unstructured texts from documents. To take both advantages of abundant unstructured latent knowledge in the documents and the information expansion capabilities of the structured knowledge graph, this paper presents a new dialogue generation model, Dynamic Multi-form Knowledge Fusion based Open-domain Chatt-ing Machine (DMKCM).In particular, DMKCM applies an indexed text (a virtual Knowledge Base) to locate relevant documents as 1st hop and then expands the content of the dialogue and its 1st hop using a commonsense knowledge graph to get apposite triples as 2nd hop. To merge these two forms of knowledge into the dialogue effectively, we design a dynamic virtual knowledge selector and a controller that help to enrich and expand knowledge space. Moreover, DMKCM adopts a novel dynamic knowledge memory module that effectively uses historical reasoning knowledge to generate better responses. Experimental results indicate the effectiveness of our method in terms of dialogue coherence and informativeness.
Satellite Image Time Series Analysis for Big Earth Observation Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

The development of analytical software for big Earth observation data faces several challenges. Designers need to balance between conflicting factors. Solutions that are efficient for specific hardware architectures can not be used in other environments. Packages that work on generic hardware and open standards will not have the same performance as dedicated solutions. Software that assumes that its users are computer programmers are flexible but may be difficult to learn for a wide audience. This paper describes sits, an open-source R package for satellite image time series analysis using machine learning. To allow experts to use satellite imagery to the fullest extent, sits adopts a time-first, space-later approach. It supports the complete cycle of data analysis for land classification. Its API provides a simple but powerful set of functions. The software works in different cloud computing environments. Satellite image time series are input to machine learning classifiers, and the results are post-processed using spatial smoothing. Since machine learning methods need accurate training data, sits includes methods for quality assessment of training samples. The software also provides methods for validation and accuracy measurement. The package thus comprises a production environment for big EO data analysis. We show that this approach produces high accuracy for land use and land cover maps through a case study in the Cerrado biome, one of the world's fast moving agricultural frontiers for the year 2018.
Beyond the Quadratic Approximation: the Multiscale Structure of Neural Network Loss Landscapes
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

A quadratic approximation of neural network loss landscapes has been extensively used to study the optimization process of these networks. Though, it usually holds in a very small neighborhood of the minimum, it cannot explain many phenomena observed during the optimization process. In this work, we study the structure of neural network loss functions and its implication on optimization in a region beyond the reach of a good quadratic approximation. Numerically, we observe that neural network loss functions possesses a multiscale structure, manifested in two ways: (1) in a neighborhood of minima, the loss mixes a continuum of scales and grows subquadratically, and (2) in a larger region, the loss shows several separate scales clearly. Using the subquadratic growth, we are able to explain the Edge of Stability phenomenon [5] observed for the gradient descent (GD) method. Using the separate scales, we explain the working mechanism of learning rate decay by simple examples. Finally, we study the origin of the multiscale structure and propose that the non-convexity of the models and the non-uniformity of training data is one of the causes. By constructing a two-layer neural network problem we show that training data with different magnitudes give rise to different scales of the loss function, producing subquadratic growth and multiple separate scales.
Integrating User Experience into Agile -- An Experience Report on Lean UX and Scrum
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

The integration of Agile development and user experience (UX) has received significant attention over the past decade. The literature contains several process models and wide-ranging discussion about the benefits and challenges of this integration. However, academia has given this integration short shrift. In fact, there are very few publications covering educational courses dealing with Agile development and UX. In this paper, we report on our experience of designing and running a graduate software engineering course that covers the integration of Lean UX into Scrum and employs gamification to improve student engagement. We identified six lessons learned that new point to important aspects to be considered when integrating Agile development and UX in academia. For example, we discuss the complexity of managing Lean UX activities in short sprints or how the design of a testable and tactical hypothesis can be one of the most challenging aspects of the Lean UX process.
On the size of good-for-games Rabin automata and its link with the memory in Muller games
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we look at good-for-games Rabin automata that recognise a Muller language (a language that is entirely characterised by the set of letters that appear infinitely often in each word). We establish that minimal such automata are exactly of the same size as the minimal memory required for winning Muller games that have this language as their winning condition. We show how to effectively construct such minimal automata. Finally, we establish that these automata can be exponentially more succinct than equivalent deterministic ones, thus proving as a consequence that chromatic memory for winning a Muller game can be exponentially larger than unconstrained memory.
Applying Digital Twins in Metaverse: User Interface, Security and Privacy Challenges
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

Digital Twins (DTs) are a conventional and well-known concept, proposed in 70s, that are popular in a broad spectrum of sciences, industry innovations, and consortium alliances. However, in the last few years, the growth of digital assets and online communications has attracted attention to DTs as highly accurate twins of physical objects. Metaverse, as a digital world, is a concept proposed in 1992 and has also become a popular paradigm and hot topic in public where DTs can play critical roles. This study first presents definitions, applications, and general challenges of DT and Metaverse. It then offers a three-layer architecture linking the physical world to the Metaverse through a user interface. Further, it investigates the security and privacy challenges of using DTs in Metaverse. Finally, a conclusion, including possible solutions for mentioned challenges and future works, will be provided.
Enhancing the STIX Representation of MITRE ATT&CK for Group Filtering and Technique Prioritization
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we enhance the machine-readable representation of the ATT&CK Groups knowledge base provided by MITRE in STIX 2.1 format to make available and queryable additional types of contextual information. Such information includes the motivations of activity groups, the countries they have originated from, and the sectors and countries they have targeted. We demonstrate how to utilize the enhanced model to construct intelligible queries to filter activity groups of interest and retrieve relevant tactical intelligence.
Reliability and Latency Analysis of Sliding Network Coding With Re-Transmission
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

Future networks are expected to support various ultra-reliable low-latency communications via wireless links. To avoid the loss of packets and keep the low latency, sliding network coding (SNC) is an emerging technology by generating redundant packets that are the linear combination of the original data packets from the current block and some previous blocks. However, how to take the advantage of re-transmission for SNC is still an open problem since higher reliability could be achieved at the expense of large latency caused by round-trip time (RTT). To deal with this issue, in this paper, we consider the idea of adjusting the transmission phase and the number of the redundant packets for SNC with re-transmission. Specifically, If RTT is large, most of the redundant packets are sent at the first transmission, otherwise, re-transmission will be used. We first derive a concise and tight lower bound of the block error probability of SNC without re-transmission. Then, based on the bound, the theoretical expressions of the proposed re-transmission schemes are derived regarding the block error probability, the average code length, and the average packet latency. Results show that the proposed SNC with re-transmission improves block error probability and keeps the low latency.
Audio-Visual Scene Classification Using A Transfer Learning Based Joint Optimization Strategy
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Recently, audio-visual scene classification (AVSC) has attracted increasing attention from multidisciplinary communities. Previous studies tended to adopt a pipeline training strategy, which uses well-trained visual and acoustic encoders to extract high-level representations (embeddings) first, then utilizes them to train the audio-visual classifier. In this way, the extracted embeddings are well suited for uni-modal classifiers, but not necessarily suited for multi-modal ones. In this paper, we propose a joint training framework, using the acoustic features and raw images directly as inputs for the AVSC task. Specifically, we retrieve the bottom layers of pre-trained image models as visual encoder, and jointly optimize the scene classifier and 1D-CNN based acoustic encoder during training. We evaluate the approach on the development dataset of TAU Urban Audio-Visual Scenes 2021. The experimental results show that our proposed approach achieves significant improvement over the conventional pipeline training strategy. Moreover, our best single system outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods, yielding a log loss of 0.1517 and accuracy of 94.59% on the official test fold.
Islander: A Real-Time News Monitoring and Analysis System
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

With thousands of news articles from hundreds of sources distributed and shared every day, news consumption and information acquisition have been increasingly difficult for readers. Additionally, the content of news articles is becoming catchy or even inciting to attract readership, harming the accuracy of news reporting. We present Islander, an online news analyzing system. The system allows users to browse trending topics with articles from multiple sources and perspectives. We define several metrics as proxies for news quality, and develop algorithms for automatic estimation. The quality estimation results are delivered through a web interface to newsreaders for easy access to news and information. The website is publicly available at https://islander.cc/