OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Optimal Data Placement for Data-Sharing Scientific Workflows in Heterogeneous Edge-Cloud Computing Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

The heterogeneous edge-cloud computing paradigm can provide a more optimal direction to deploy scientific workflows than traditional distributed computing or cloud computing environments. Due to the different sizes of scientific datasets and some of these datasets must keep private, it is still a difficult problem to finding an data placement strategy that can minimize data transmission as well as placement cost. To address this issue, this paper combines advantages of both edge and cloud computing to construct a data placement model, which can balance data transfer time and data placement cost using intelligent computation. The most difficult research challenge the model solved is to consider many constrain in this hybrid computing environments, which including shared datasets within individual and among multiple workflows across various geographical regions. According to the constructed model, the study propose a new data placement strategy named DE-DPSO-DPS, which using a discrete particle swarm optimization algorithm with differential evolution (DE-DPSO-DPA) to distribute these scientific datasets. The strategy also not only consider the characteristics such as the number and storage capacity of edge micro-datacenters, the bandwidth between different datacenters and the proportion of private datasets, but also analysis the performance of algorithm during the workflows execution. Comprehensive experiments are designed in simulated heterogeneous edge-cloud computing environments demonstrate that the data placement strategy can effectively reduce the data transmission time and placement cost as compared to traditional strategies for data-sharing scientific workflows.
On Minimax Detection of Gaussian Stochastic Sequences and Gaussian Stationary Signals
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

Minimax detection of Gaussian stochastic sequences (signals) with unknown covariance matrices is studied. For a fixed false alarm probability (1-st kind error probability), the performance of the minimax detection is being characterized by the best exponential decay rate of the miss probability (2-nd kind error probability) as the length of the observation interval tends to infinity. Our goal is to find the largest set of covariance matrices such that the minimax robust testing of this set (composite hypothesis) can be replaced with testing of only one specific covariance matrix (simple hypothesis) without any loss in detection characteristics. In this paper, we completely describe this maximal set of covariance matrices. Some corollaries address minimax detection of the Gaussian stochastic signals embedded in the White Gaussian noise and detection of the Gaussian stationary signals.
Gradient-based Adversarial Deep Modulation Classification with Data-driven Subsampling
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2021
Year: 2021

Automatic modulation classification can be a core component for intelligent spectrally efficient wireless communication networks, and deep learning techniques have recently been shown to deliver superior performance to conventional model-based strategies, particularly when distinguishing between a large number of modulation types. However, such deep learning techniques have also been recently shown to be vulnerable to gradient-based adversarial attacks that rely on subtle input perturbations, which would be particularly feasible in a wireless setting via jamming. One such potent attack is the one known as the Carlini-Wagner attack, which we consider in this work. We further consider a data-driven subsampling setting, where several recently introduced deep-learning-based algorithms are employed to select a subset of samples that lead to reducing the final classifier's training time with minimal loss in accuracy. In this setting, the attacker has to make an assumption about the employed subsampling strategy, in order to calculate the loss gradient. Based on state of the art techniques available to both the attacker and defender, we evaluate best strategies under various assumptions on the knowledge of the other party's strategy. Interestingly, in presence of knowledgeable attackers, we identify computational cost reduction opportunities for the defender with no or minimal loss in performance.
Single Image Depth Estimation: An Overview
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

We review solutions to the problem of depth estimation, arguably the most important subtask in scene understanding. We focus on the single image depth estimation problem. Due to its properties, the single image depth estimation problem is currently best tackled with machine learning methods, most successfully with convolutional neural networks. We provide an overview of the field by examining key works. We examine non-deep learning approaches that mostly predate deep learning and utilize hand-crafted features and assumptions, and more recent works that mostly use deep learning techniques. The single image depth estimation problem is tackled first in a supervised fashion with absolute or relative depth information acquired from human or sensor-labeled data, or in an unsupervised way using unlabelled stereo images or video datasets. We also study multitask approaches that combine the depth estimation problem with related tasks such as semantic segmentation and surface normal estimation. Finally, we discuss investigations into the mechanisms, principles, and failure cases of contemporary solutions.
Can a Transformer Pass the Wug Test? Tuning Copying Bias in Neural Morphological Inflection Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Deep learning sequence models have been successfully applied to the task of morphological inflection. The results of the SIGMORPHON shared tasks in the past several years indicate that such models can perform well, but only if the training data cover a good amount of different lemmata, or if the lemmata that are inflected at test time have also been seen in training, as has indeed been largely the case in these tasks. Surprisingly, standard models such as the Transformer almost completely fail at generalizing inflection patterns when asked to inflect previously unseen lemmata -- i.e. under "wug test"-like circumstances. While established data augmentation techniques can be employed to alleviate this shortcoming by introducing a copying bias through hallucinating synthetic new word forms using the alphabet in the language at hand, we show that, to be more effective, the hallucination process needs to pay attention to substrings of syllable-like length rather than individual characters or stems. We report a significant performance improvement with our substring-based hallucination model over previous data hallucination methods when training and test data do not overlap in their lemmata.
Trust and Safety
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Robotics in Australia have a long history of conforming with safety standards and risk managed practices. This chapter articulates the current state of trust and safety in robotics including society's expectations, safety management systems and system safety as well as emerging issues and methods for ensuring safety in increasingly autonomous robotics. The future of trust and safety will combine standards with iterative, adaptive and responsive regulatory and assurance methods for diverse applications of robotics, autonomous systems and artificial intelligence (RAS-AI). Robotics will need novel technical and social approaches to achieve assurance, particularly for game-changing innovations. The ability for users to easily update algorithms and software, which alters the performance of a system, implies that traditional machine assurance performed prior to deployment or sale, will no longer be viable. Moreover, the high frequency of updates implies that traditional certification that requires substantial time will no longer be practical. To alleviate these difficulties, automation of assurance will likely be needed; something like 'ASsurance-as-a-Service' (ASaaS), where APIs constantly ping RAS-AI to ensure abidance with various rules, frameworks and behavioural expectations. There are exceptions to this, such as in contested or communications denied environments, or in underground or undersea mining; and these systems need their own risk assessments and limitations imposed. Indeed, self-monitors are already operating within some systems. To ensure safe operations of future robotics systems, Australia needs to invest in RAS-AI assurance research, stakeholder engagement and continued development and refinement of robust frameworks, methods, guidelines and policy in order to educate and prepare its technology developers, certifiers, and general population.
NPE: An FPGA-based Overlay Processor for Natural Language Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2021
Year: 2021

In recent years, transformer-based models have shown state-of-the-art results for Natural Language Processing (NLP). In particular, the introduction of the BERT language model brought with it breakthroughs in tasks such as question answering and natural language inference, advancing applications that allow humans to interact naturally with embedded devices. FPGA-based overlay processors have been shown as effective solutions for edge image and video processing applications, which mostly rely on low precision linear matrix operations. In contrast, transformer-based NLP techniques employ a variety of higher precision nonlinear operations with significantly higher frequency. We present NPE, an FPGA-based overlay processor that can efficiently execute a variety of NLP models. NPE offers software-like programmability to the end user and, unlike FPGA designs that implement specialized accelerators for each nonlinear function, can be upgraded for future NLP models without requiring reconfiguration. We demonstrate that NPE can meet real-time conversational AI latency targets for the BERT language model with $4\times$ lower power than CPUs and $6\times$ lower power than GPUs. We also show NPE uses $3\times$ fewer FPGA resources relative to comparable BERT network-specific accelerators in the literature. NPE provides a cost-effective and power-efficient FPGA-based solution for Natural Language Processing at the edge.
A Semi-Supervised Classification Method of Apicomplexan Parasites and Host Cell Using Contrastive Learning Strategy
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

A common shortfall of supervised learning for medical imaging is the greedy need for human annotations, which is often expensive and time-consuming to obtain. This paper proposes a semi-supervised classification method for three kinds of apicomplexan parasites and non-infected host cells microscopic images, which uses a small number of labeled data and a large number of unlabeled data for training. There are two challenges in microscopic image recognition. The first is that salient structures of the microscopic images are more fuzzy and intricate than natural images' on a real-world scale. The second is that insignificant textures, like background staining, lightness, and contrast level, vary a lot in samples from different clinical scenarios. To address these challenges, we aim to learn a distinguishable and appearance-invariant representation by contrastive learning strategy. On one hand, macroscopic images, which share similar shape characteristics in morphology, are introduced to contrast for structure enhancement. On the other hand, different appearance transformations, including color distortion and flittering, are utilized to contrast for texture elimination. In the case where only 1% of microscopic images are labeled, the proposed method reaches an accuracy of 94.90% in a generalized testing set.
AR-LSAT: Investigating Analytical Reasoning of Text
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Analytical reasoning is an essential and challenging task that requires a system to analyze a scenario involving a set of particular circumstances and perform reasoning over it to make conclusions. In this paper, we study the challenge of analytical reasoning of text and introduce a new dataset consisting of questions from the Law School Admission Test from 1991 to 2016. We analyze what knowledge understanding and reasoning abilities are required to do well on this task. Furthermore, to address this reasoning challenge, we design two different baselines: (1) a Transformer-based method which leverages the state-of-the-art pre-trained language models and (2) Analytical Reasoning Machine (ARM), a logical-level reasoning framework extracting symbolic knowledge (e.g, participants, facts, logical functions) to deduce legitimate solutions. In our experiments, we find that the Transformer-based models struggle to solve this task as their performance is close to random guess and ARM achieves better performance by leveraging symbolic knowledge and interpretable reasoning steps. Results show that both methods still lag far behind human performance, which leave further space for future research.
Mitigating the Effects of Reading Interruptions by Providing Reviews and Previews
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2021
Year: 2021

As reading on mobile devices is becoming more ubiquitous, content is consumed in shorter intervals and is punctuated by frequent interruptions. In this work, we explore the best way to mitigate the effects of reading interruptions on longer text passages. Our hypothesis is that short summaries of either previously read content (reviews) or upcoming content (previews) will help the reader re-engage with the reading task. Our target use case is for students who study using electronic textbooks and who are frequently mobile. We present a series of pilot studies that examine the benefits of different types of summaries and their locations, with respect to variations in text content and participant cohorts. We find that users prefer reviews after an interruption, but that previews shown after interruptions have a larger positive influence on comprehension. Our work is a first step towards smart reading applications that proactively provide text summaries to mitigate interruptions on the go.
Search to aggregate neighborhood for graph neural network
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Recent years have witnessed the popularity and success of graph neural networks (GNN) in various scenarios. To obtain data-specific GNN architectures, researchers turn to neural architecture search (NAS), which has made impressive success in discovering effective architectures in convolutional neural networks. However, it is non-trivial to apply NAS approaches to GNN due to challenges in search space design and the expensive searching cost of existing NAS methods. In this work, to obtain the data-specific GNN architectures and address the computational challenges facing by NAS approaches, we propose a framework, which tries to Search to Aggregate NEighborhood (SANE), to automatically design data-specific GNN architectures. By designing a novel and expressive search space, we propose a differentiable search algorithm, which is more efficient than previous reinforcement learning based methods. Experimental results on four tasks and seven real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of SANE compared to existing GNN models and NAS approaches in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. (Code is available at: https://github.com/AutoML-4Paradigm/SANE).
GSEIM: A General-purpose Simulator with Explicit and Implicit Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2021
Year: 2021

A new simulation package, GSEIM, for solving a set of ordinary differential equations is presented. The organisation of the program is illustrated with the help of a block diagram. Various features of GSEIM are discussed. Two ways of incorporating new elements in GSEIM, viz., as a template and as a subcircuit, are explained by taking a specific example. Simulation examples are described to bring out the capabilities of GSEIM.
Decoupled Spatial-Temporal Transformer for Video Inpainting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Video inpainting aims to fill the given spatiotemporal holes with realistic appearance but is still a challenging task even with prosperous deep learning approaches. Recent works introduce the promising Transformer architecture into deep video inpainting and achieve better performance. However, it still suffers from synthesizing blurry texture as well as huge computational cost. Towards this end, we propose a novel Decoupled Spatial-Temporal Transformer (DSTT) for improving video inpainting with exceptional efficiency. Our proposed DSTT disentangles the task of learning spatial-temporal attention into 2 sub-tasks: one is for attending temporal object movements on different frames at same spatial locations, which is achieved by temporally-decoupled Transformer block, and the other is for attending similar background textures on same frame of all spatial positions, which is achieved by spatially-decoupled Transformer block. The interweaving stack of such two blocks makes our proposed model attend background textures and moving objects more precisely, and thus the attended plausible and temporally-coherent appearance can be propagated to fill the holes. In addition, a hierarchical encoder is adopted before the stack of Transformer blocks, for learning robust and hierarchical features that maintain multi-level local spatial structure, resulting in the more representative token vectors. Seamless combination of these two novel designs forms a better spatial-temporal attention scheme and our proposed model achieves better performance than state-of-the-art video inpainting approaches with significant boosted efficiency.
Smart City Data Analysis via Visualization of Correlated Attribute Patterns
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2021
Year: 2021

Urban conditions are monitored by a wide variety of sensors that measure several attributes, such as temperature and traffic volume. The correlations of sensors help to analyze and understand the urban conditions accurately. The correlated attribute pattern (CAP) mining discovers correlations among multiple attributes from the sets of sensors spatially close to each other and temporally correlated in their measurements. In this paper, we develop a visualization system for CAP mining and demonstrate analysis of smart city data. Our visualization system supports an intuitive understanding of mining results via sensor locations on maps and temporal changes of their measurements. In our demonstration scenarios, we provide four smart city datasets collected from China and Santander, Spain. We demonstrate that our system helps interactive analysis of smart city data.
Natural-Language Multi-Agent Simulations of Argumentative Opinion Dynamics
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

This paper develops a natural-language agent-based model of argumentation (ABMA). Its artificial deliberative agents (ADAs) are constructed with the help of so-called neural language models recently developed in AI and computational linguistics. ADAs are equipped with a minimalist belief system and may generate and submit novel contributions to a conversation. The natural-language ABMA allows us to simulate collective deliberation in English, i.e. with arguments, reasons, and claims themselves -- rather than with their mathematical representations (as in formal models). This paper uses the natural-language ABMA to test the robustness of formal reason-balancing models of argumentation [Maes & Flache 2013, Singer et al. 2019]: First of all, as long as ADAs remain passive, confirmation bias and homophily updating trigger polarization, which is consistent with results from formal models. However, once ADAs start to actively generate new contributions, the evolution of a conservation is dominated by properties of the agents *as authors*. This suggests that the creation of new arguments, reasons, and claims critically affects a conversation and is of pivotal importance for understanding the dynamics of collective deliberation. The paper closes by pointing out further fruitful applications of the model and challenges for future research.
Engineering Predecessor Data Structures for Dynamic Integer Sets
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2021
Year: 2021

We present highly optimized data structures for the dynamic predecessor problem, where the task is to maintain a set $S$ of $w$-bit numbers under insertions, deletions, and predecessor queries (return the largest element in $S$ no larger than a given key). The problem of finding predecessors can be viewed as a generalized form of the membership problem, or as a simple version of the nearest neighbour problem. It lies at the core of various real-world problems such as internet routing. In this work, we engineer (1) a simple implementation of the idea of universe reduction, similar to van-Emde-Boas trees (2) variants of y-fast tries [Willard, IPL'83], and (3) B-trees with different strategies for organizing the keys contained in the nodes, including an implementation of dynamic fusion nodes [Pǎtraşcu and Thorup, FOCS'14]. We implement our data structures for $w=32,40,64$, which covers most typical scenarios. Our data structures finish workloads faster than previous approaches while being significantly more space-efficient, e.g., they clearly outperform standard implementations of the STL by finishing up to four times as fast using less than a third of the memory. Our tests also provide more general insights on data structure design, such as how small sets should be stored and handled and if and when new CPU instructions such as advanced vector extensions pay off.
Dewarping Document Image By Displacement Flow Estimation with Fully Convolutional Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

As camera-based documents are increasingly used, the rectification of distorted document images becomes a need to improve the recognition performance. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for both rectifying distorted document image and removing background finely, by estimating pixel-wise displacements using a fully convolutional network (FCN). The document image is rectified by transformation according to the displacements of pixels. The FCN is trained by regressing displacements of synthesized distorted documents, and to control the smoothness of displacements, we propose a Local Smooth Constraint (LSC) in regularization. Our approach is easy to implement and consumes moderate computing resource. Experiments proved that our approach can dewarp document images effectively under various geometric distortions, and has achieved the state-of-the-art performance in terms of local details and overall effect.
Privacy-preserving Federated Learning based on Multi-key Homomorphic Encryption
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

With the advance of machine learning and the internet of things (IoT), security and privacy have become key concerns in mobile services and networks. Transferring data to a central unit violates privacy as well as protection of sensitive data while increasing bandwidth demands.Federated learning mitigates this need to transfer local data by sharing model updates only. However, data leakage still remains an issue. In this paper, we propose xMK-CKKS, a multi-key homomorphic encryption protocol to design a novel privacy-preserving federated learning scheme. In this scheme, model updates are encrypted via an aggregated public key before sharing with a server for aggregation. For decryption, collaboration between all participating devices is required. This scheme prevents privacy leakage from publicly shared information in federated learning, and is robust to collusion between $k<N-1$ participating devices and the server. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that the scheme preserves model accuracy against traditional federated learning as well as secure federated learning with homomorphic encryption (MK-CKKS, Paillier) and reduces computational cost compared to Paillier based federated learning. The average energy consumption is 2.4 Watts, so that it is suited to IoT scenarios.