OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Novel mapping for visual to auditory sensory substitution
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2021
Year: 2021

visual information can be converted into audio stream via sensory substitution devices in order to give visually impaired people the chance of perception of their surrounding easily and simultaneous to performing everyday tasks. In this study, visual environmental features namely, coordinate, type of objects and their size are assigned to audio features related to music tones such as frequency, time duration and note permutations. Results demonstrated that this new method has more training time efficiency in comparison with our previous method named VBTones which sinusoidal tones were applied. Moreover, results in blind object recognition for real objects was achieved 88.05 on average.
Can Explainable AI Explain Unfairness? A Framework for Evaluating Explainable AI
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2021
Year: 2021

Many ML models are opaque to humans, producing decisions too complex for humans to easily understand. In response, explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) tools that analyze the inner workings of a model have been created. Despite these tools' strength in translating model behavior, critiques have raised concerns about the impact of XAI tools as a tool for `fairwashing` by misleading users into trusting biased or incorrect models. In this paper, we created a framework for evaluating explainable AI tools with respect to their capabilities for detecting and addressing issues of bias and fairness as well as their capacity to communicate these results to their users clearly. We found that despite their capabilities in simplifying and explaining model behavior, many prominent XAI tools lack features that could be critical in detecting bias. Developers can use our framework to suggest modifications needed in their toolkits to reduce issues likes fairwashing.
Throughput Maximization Leveraging Just-Enough SNR Margin and Channel Spacing Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2021
Year: 2021

Flexible optical network is a promising technology to accommodate high-capacity demands in next-generation networks. To ensure uninterrupted communication, existing lightpath provisioning schemes are mainly done with the assumption of worst-case resource under-provisioning and fixed channel spacing, which preserves an excessive signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) margin. However, under a resource over-provisioning scenario, the excessive SNR margin restricts the transmission bit-rate or transmission reach, leading to physical layer resource waste and stranded transmission capacity. To tackle this challenging problem, we leverage an iterative feedback tuning algorithm to provide a just-enough SNR margin, so as to maximize the network throughput. Specifically, the proposed algorithm is implemented in three steps. First, starting from the high SNR margin setup, we establish an integer linear programming model as well as a heuristic algorithm to maximize the network throughput by solving the problem of routing, modulation format, forward error correction, baud-rate selection, and spectrum assignment. Second, we optimize the channel spacing of the lightpaths obtained from the previous step, thereby increasing the available physical layer resources. Finally, we iteratively reduce the SNR margin of each lightpath until the network throughput cannot be increased. Through numerical simulations, we confirm the throughput improvement in different networks and with different baud-rates. In particular, we find that our algorithm enables over 20\% relative gain when network resource is over-provisioned, compared to the traditional method preserving an excessive SNR margin.
Evaluating Various Tokenizers for Arabic Text Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

The first step in any NLP pipeline is to split the text into individual tokens. The most obvious and straightforward approach is to use words as tokens. However, given a large text corpus, representing all the words is not efficient in terms of vocabulary size. In the literature, many tokenization algorithms have emerged to tackle this problem by creating subwords which in turn limits the vocabulary size in a given text corpus. Most tokenization techniques are language-agnostic i.e they don't incorporate the linguistic features of a given language. Not to mention the difficulty of evaluating such techniques in practice. In this paper, we introduce three new tokenization algorithms for Arabic and compare them to three other baselines using unsupervised evaluations. In addition to that, we compare all the six algorithms by evaluating them on three supervised classification tasks which are sentiment analysis, news classification and poetry classification using six publicly available datasets. Our experiments show that none of the tokenization technique is the best choice overall and that the performance of a given tokenization algorithm depends on the size of the dataset, type of the task, and the amount of morphology that exists in the dataset. However, some tokenization techniques are better overall as compared to others on various text classification tasks.
Dataset for eye-tracking tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In recent years many different deep neural networks were developed, but due to a large number of layers in deep networks, their training requires a long time and a large number of datasets. Today is popular to use trained deep neural networks for various tasks, even for simple ones in which such deep networks are not required. The well-known deep networks such as YoloV3, SSD, etc. are intended for tracking and monitoring various objects, therefore their weights are heavy and the overall accuracy for a specific task is low. Eye-tracking tasks need to detect only one object - an iris in a given area. Therefore, it is logical to use a neural network only for this task. But the problem is the lack of suitable datasets for training the model. In the manuscript, we presented a dataset that is suitable for training custom models of convolutional neural networks for eye-tracking tasks. Using data set data, each user can independently pre-train the convolutional neural network models for eye-tracking tasks. This dataset contains annotated 10,000 eye images in an extension of 416 by 416 pixels. The table with annotation information shows the coordinates and radius of the eye for each image. This manuscript can be considered as a guide for the preparation of datasets for eye-tracking devices
Artificial Perceptual Learning: Image Categorization with Weak Supervision
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Machine learning has achieved much success on supervised learning tasks with large sets of well-annotated training samples. However, in many practical situations, such strong and high-quality supervision provided by training data is unavailable due to the expensive and labor-intensive labeling process. Automatically identifying and recognizing object categories in a large volume of unlabeled images with weak supervision remains an important, yet unsolved challenge in computer vision. In this paper, we propose a novel machine learning framework, artificial perceptual learning (APL), to tackle the problem of weakly supervised image categorization. The proposed APL framework is constructed using state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms as building blocks to mimic the cognitive development process known as infant categorization. We develop and illustrate the proposed framework by implementing a wide-field fine-grain ecological survey of tree species over an 8,000-hectare area of the El Yunque rainforest in Puerto Rico. It is based on unlabeled high-resolution aerial images of the tree canopy. Misplaced ground-based labels were available for less than 1% of these images, which serve as the only weak supervision for this learning framework. We validate the proposed framework using a small set of images with high quality human annotations and show that the proposed framework attains human-level cognitive economy.
Direct Servo Control from In-Sensor CNN Inference with A Pixel Processor Array
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

This work demonstrates direct visual sensory-motor control using high-speed CNN inference via a SCAMP-5 Pixel Processor Array (PPA). We demonstrate how PPAs are able to efficiently bridge the gap between perception and action. A binary Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is used for a classic rock, paper, scissors classification problem at over 8000 FPS. Control instructions are directly sent to a servo motor from the PPA according to the CNN's classification result without any other intermediate hardware.
EPICURE Ensemble Pretrained Models for Extracting Cancer Mutations from Literature
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

To interpret the genetic profile present in a patient sample, it is necessary to know which mutations have important roles in the development of the corresponding cancer type. Named entity recognition is a core step in the text mining pipeline which facilitates mining valuable cancer information from the scientific literature. However, due to the scarcity of related datasets, previous NER attempts in this domain either suffer from low performance when deep learning based models are deployed, or they apply feature based machine learning models or rule based models to tackle this problem, which requires intensive efforts from domain experts, and limit the model generalization capability. In this paper, we propose EPICURE, an ensemble pre trained model equipped with a conditional random field pattern layer and a span prediction pattern layer to extract cancer mutations from text. We also adopt a data augmentation strategy to expand our training set from multiple datasets. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets show competitive results compared to the baseline models.
Can BERT Dig It? -- Named Entity Recognition for Information Retrieval in the Archaeology Domain
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

The amount of archaeological literature is growing rapidly. Until recently, these data were only accessible through metadata search. We implemented a text retrieval engine for a large archaeological text collection ($\sim 658$ Million words). In archaeological IR, domain-specific entities such as locations, time periods, and artefacts, play a central role. This motivated the development of a named entity recognition (NER) model to annotate the full collection with archaeological named entities. In this paper, we present ArcheoBERTje, a BERT model pre-trained on Dutch archaeological texts. We compare the model's quality and output on a Named Entity Recognition task to a generic multilingual model and a generic Dutch model. We also investigate ensemble methods for combining multiple BERT models, and combining the best BERT model with a domain thesaurus using Conditional Random Fields (CRF). We find that ArcheoBERTje outperforms both the multilingual and Dutch model significantly with a smaller standard deviation between runs, reaching an average F1 score of 0.735. The model also outperforms ensemble methods combining the three models. Combining ArcheoBERTje predictions and explicit domain knowledge from the thesaurus did not increase the F1 score. We quantitatively and qualitatively analyse the differences between the vocabulary and output of the BERT models on the full collection and provide some valuable insights in the effect of fine-tuning for specific domains. Our results indicate that for a highly specific text domain such as archaeology, further pre-training on domain-specific data increases the model's quality on NER by a much larger margin than shown for other domains in the literature, and that domain-specific pre-training makes the addition of domain knowledge from a thesaurus unnecessary.
FedNILM: Applying Federated Learning to NILM Applications at the Edge
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) helps disaggregate the household's main electricity consumption to energy usages of individual appliances, thus greatly cutting down the cost in fine-grained household load monitoring. To address the arisen privacy concern in NILM applications, federated learning (FL) could be leveraged for NILM model training and sharing. When applying the FL paradigm in real-world NILM applications, however, we are faced with the challenges of edge resource restriction, edge model personalization and edge training data scarcity. In this paper we present FedNILM, a practical FL paradigm for NILM applications at the edge client. Specifically, FedNILM is designed to deliver privacy-preserving and personalized NILM services to large-scale edge clients, by leveraging i) secure data aggregation through federated learning, ii) efficient cloud model compression via filter pruning and multi-task learning, and iii) personalized edge model building with unsupervised transfer learning. Our experiments on real-world energy data show that, FedNILM is able to achieve personalized energy disaggregation with the state-of-the-art accuracy, while ensuring privacy preserving at the edge client.
Optimization-friendly generic mechanisms without money
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2021
Year: 2021

The goal of this paper is to develop a generic framework for converting modern optimization algorithms into mechanisms where inputs come from self-interested agents. We focus on aggregating preferences from $n$ players in a context without money. Special cases of this setting include voting, allocation of items by lottery, and matching. Our key technical contribution is a new meta-algorithm we call \apex (Adaptive Pricing Equalizing Externalities). The framework is sufficiently general to be combined with any optimization algorithm that is based on local search. We outline an agenda for studying the algorithm's properties and its applications. As a special case of applying the framework to the problem of one-sided assignment with lotteries, we obtain a strengthening of the 1979 result by Hylland and Zeckhauser on allocation via a competitive equilibrium from equal incomes (CEEI). The [HZ79] result posits that there is a (fractional) allocation and a set of item prices such that the allocation is a competitive equilibrium given prices. We further show that there is always a reweighing of the players' utility values such that running unit-demand VCG with reweighed utilities leads to a HZ-equilibrium prices. Interestingly, not all HZ competitive equilibria come from VCG prices. As part of our proof, we re-prove the [HZ79] result using only Brouwer's fixed point theorem (and not the more general Kakutani's theorem). This may be of independent interest.
Counterfactual Explanations as Interventions in Latent Space
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is a set of techniques that allows the understanding of both technical and non-technical aspects of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. XAI is crucial to help satisfying the increasingly important demand of \emph{trustworthy} Artificial Intelligence, characterized by fundamental characteristics such as respect of human autonomy, prevention of harm, transparency, accountability, etc. Within XAI techniques, counterfactual explanations aim to provide to end users a set of features (and their corresponding values) that need to be changed in order to achieve a desired outcome. Current approaches rarely take into account the feasibility of actions needed to achieve the proposed explanations, and in particular they fall short of considering the causal impact of such actions. In this paper, we present Counterfactual Explanations as Interventions in Latent Space (CEILS), a methodology to generate counterfactual explanations capturing by design the underlying causal relations from the data, and at the same time to provide feasible recommendations to reach the proposed profile. Moreover, our methodology has the advantage that it can be set on top of existing counterfactuals generator algorithms, thus minimising the complexity of imposing additional causal constrains. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with a set of different experiments using synthetic and real datasets (including a proprietary dataset of the financial domain).
Launching into clinical space with medspaCy: a new clinical text processing toolkit in Python
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Despite impressive success of machine learning algorithms in clinical natural language processing (cNLP), rule-based approaches still have a prominent role. In this paper, we introduce medspaCy, an extensible, open-source cNLP library based on spaCy framework that allows flexible integration of rule-based and machine learning-based algorithms adapted to clinical text. MedspaCy includes a variety of components that meet common cNLP needs such as context analysis and mapping to standard terminologies. By utilizing spaCy's clear and easy-to-use conventions, medspaCy enables development of custom pipelines that integrate easily with other spaCy-based modules. Our toolkit includes several core components and facilitates rapid development of pipelines for clinical text.
Site-Agnostic 3D Dose Distribution Prediction with Deep Learning Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Typically, the current dose prediction models are limited to small amounts of data and require re-training for a specific site, often leading to suboptimal performance. We propose a site-agnostic, 3D dose distribution prediction model using deep learning that can leverage data from any treatment site, thus increasing the total data available to train the model. Applying our proposed model to a new target treatment site requires only a brief fine-tuning of the model to the new data and involves no modifications to the model input channels or its parameters. Thus, it can be efficiently adapted to a different treatment site, even with a small training dataset.
Temporal Consistency Checks to Detect LiDAR Spoofing Attacks on Autonomous Vehicle Perception
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

LiDAR sensors are used widely in Autonomous Vehicles for better perceiving the environment which enables safer driving decisions. Recent work has demonstrated serious LiDAR spoofing attacks with alarming consequences. In particular, model-level LiDAR spoofing attacks aim to inject fake depth measurements to elicit ghost objects that are erroneously detected by 3D Object Detectors, resulting in hazardous driving decisions. In this work, we explore the use of motion as a physical invariant of genuine objects for detecting such attacks. Based on this, we propose a general methodology, 3D Temporal Consistency Check (3D-TC2), which leverages spatio-temporal information from motion prediction to verify objects detected by 3D Object Detectors. Our preliminary design and implementation of a 3D-TC2 prototype demonstrates very promising performance, providing more than 98% attack detection rate with a recall of 91% for detecting spoofed Vehicle (Car) objects, and is able to achieve real-time detection at 41Hz
Code Integrity Attestation for PLCs using Black Box Neural Network Predictions
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are widespread in critical domains, and significant damage can be caused if an attacker is able to modify the code of their programmable logic controllers (PLCs). Unfortunately, traditional techniques for attesting code integrity (i.e. verifying that it has not been modified) rely on firmware access or roots-of-trust, neither of which proprietary or legacy PLCs are likely to provide. In this paper, we propose a practical code integrity checking solution based on privacy-preserving black box models that instead attest the input/output behaviour of PLC programs. Using faithful offline copies of the PLC programs, we identify their most important inputs through an information flow analysis, execute them on multiple combinations to collect data, then train neural networks able to predict PLC outputs (i.e. actuator commands) from their inputs. By exploiting the black box nature of the model, our solution maintains the privacy of the original PLC code and does not assume that attackers are unaware of its presence. The trust instead comes from the fact that it is extremely hard to attack the PLC code and neural networks at the same time and with consistent outcomes. We evaluated our approach on a modern six-stage water treatment plant testbed, finding that it could predict actuator states from PLC inputs with near-100% accuracy, and thus could detect all 120 effective code mutations that we subjected the PLCs to. Finally, we found that it is not practically possible to simultaneously modify the PLC code and apply discreet adversarial noise to our attesters in a way that leads to consistent (mis-)predictions.
Evading Malware Classifiers via Monte Carlo Mutant Feature Discovery
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

The use of Machine Learning has become a significant part of malware detection efforts due to the influx of new malware, an ever changing threat landscape, and the ability of Machine Learning methods to discover meaningful distinctions between malicious and benign software. Antivirus vendors have also begun to widely utilize malware classifiers based on dynamic and static malware analysis features. Therefore, a malware author might make evasive binary modifications against Machine Learning models as part of the malware development life cycle to execute an attack successfully. This makes the studying of possible classifier evasion strategies an essential part of cyber defense against malice. To this extent, we stage a grey box setup to analyze a scenario where the malware author does not know the target classifier algorithm, and does not have access to decisions made by the classifier, but knows the features used in training. In this experiment, a malicious actor trains a surrogate model using the EMBER-2018 dataset to discover binary mutations that cause an instance to be misclassified via a Monte Carlo tree search. Then, mutated malware is sent to the victim model that takes the place of an antivirus API to test whether it can evade detection.
Domain Adaptive SiamRPN++ for Object Tracking in the Wild
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Benefit from large-scale training data, recent advances in Siamese-based object tracking have achieved compelling results on the normal sequences. Whilst Siamese-based trackers assume training and test data follow an identical distribution. Suppose there is a set of foggy or rainy test sequences, it cannot be guaranteed that the trackers trained on the normal images perform well on the data belonging to other domains. The problem of domain shift among training and test data has already been discussed in object detection and semantic segmentation areas, which, however, has not been investigated for visual tracking. To this end, based on SiamRPN++, we introduce a Domain Adaptive SiamRPN++, namely DASiamRPN++, to improve the cross-domain transferability and robustness of a tracker. Inspired by A-distance theory, we present two domain adaptive modules, Pixel Domain Adaptation (PDA) and Semantic Domain Adaptation (SDA). The PDA module aligns the feature maps of template and search region images to eliminate the pixel-level domain shift caused by weather, illumination, etc. The SDA module aligns the feature representations of the tracking target's appearance to eliminate the semantic-level domain shift. PDA and SDA modules reduce the domain disparity by learning domain classifiers in an adversarial training manner. The domain classifiers enforce the network to learn domain-invariant feature representations. Extensive experiments are performed on the standard datasets of two different domains, including synthetic foggy and TIR sequences, which demonstrate the transferability and domain adaptability of the proposed tracker.