OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
RadSegNet: A Reliable Approach to Radar Camera Fusion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Perception systems for autonomous driving have seen significant advancements in their performance over last few years. However, these systems struggle to show robustness in extreme weather conditions because sensors like lidars and cameras, which are the primary sensors in a sensor suite, see a decline in performance under these conditions. In order to solve this problem, camera-radar fusion systems provide a unique opportunity for all weather reliable high quality perception. Cameras provides rich semantic information while radars can work through occlusions and in all weather conditions. In this work, we show that the state-of-the-art fusion methods perform poorly when camera input is degraded, which essentially results in losing the all-weather reliability they set out to achieve. Contrary to these approaches, we propose a new method, RadSegNet, that uses a new design philosophy of independent information extraction and truly achieves reliability in all conditions, including occlusions and adverse weather. We develop and validate our proposed system on the benchmark Astyx dataset and further verify these results on the RADIATE dataset. When compared to state-of-the-art methods, RadSegNet achieves a 27% improvement on Astyx and 41.46% increase on RADIATE, in average precision score and maintains a significantly better performance in adverse weather conditions
DeepTLS: comprehensive and high-performance feature extraction for encrypted traffic
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Feature extraction is critical for TLS traffic analysis using machine learning techniques, which it is also very difficult and time-consuming requiring huge engineering efforts. We designed and implemented DeepTLS, a system which extracts full spectrum of features from pcaps across meta, statistical, SPLT, byte distribution, TLS header and certificates. The backend is written in C++ to achieve high performance, which can analyze a GB-size pcap in a few minutes. DeepTLS was thoroughly evaluated against two state-of-the-art tools Joy and Zeek with four well-known malicious traffic datasets consisted of 160 pcaps. Evaluation results show DeepTLS has advantage of analyzing large pcaps with half analysis time, and identified more certificates with acceptable performance loss compared with Joy. DeepTLS can significantly accelerate machine learning pipeline by reducing feature extraction time from hours even days to minutes. The system is online at https://deeptls.com, where test artifacts can be viewed and validated. In addition, two open source tools Pysharkfeat and Tlsfeatmark are also released.
CheXRelNet: An Anatomy-Aware Model for Tracking Longitudinal Relationships between Chest X-Rays
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Despite the progress in utilizing deep learning to automate chest radiograph interpretation and disease diagnosis tasks, change between sequential Chest X-rays (CXRs) has received limited attention. Monitoring the progression of pathologies that are visualized through chest imaging poses several challenges in anatomical motion estimation and image registration, i.e., spatially aligning the two images and modeling temporal dynamics in change detection. In this work, we propose CheXRelNet, a neural model that can track longitudinal pathology change relations between two CXRs. CheXRelNet incorporates local and global visual features, utilizes inter-image and intra-image anatomical information, and learns dependencies between anatomical region attributes, to accurately predict disease change for a pair of CXRs. Experimental results on the Chest ImaGenome dataset show increased downstream performance compared to baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/PLAN-Lab/ChexRelNet
Interpretable Disentangled Parametrization of Measured BRDF with $β$-VAE
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2022
Year: 2022

Finding a low dimensional parametric representation of measured BRDF remains challenging. Currently available solutions are either not interpretable, or rely on limited analytical solutions, or require expensive test subject based investigations. In this work, we strive to establish a parametrization space that affords the data-driven representation variance of measured BRDF models while still offering the artistic control of parametric analytical BRDFs. We present a machine learning approach that generates an interpretable disentangled parameter space. A disentangled representation is one in which each parameter is responsible for a unique generative factor and is insensitive to the ones encoded by the other parameters. To that end, we resort to a $β$-Variational AutoEncoder ($β$-VAE), a specific architecture of Deep Neural Network (DNN). After training our network, we analyze the parametrization space and interpret the learned generative factors utilizing our visual perception. It should be noted that perceptual analysis is called upon downstream of the system for interpretation purposes compared to most other existing methods where it is used upfront to elaborate the parametrization. In addition to that, we do not need a test subject investigation. A novel feature of our interpretable disentangled parametrization is the post-processing capability to incorporate new parameters along with the learned ones, thus expanding the richness of producible appearances. Furthermore, our solution allows more flexible and controllable material editing possibilities than manifold exploration. Finally, we provide a rendering interface, for real-time material editing and interpolation based on the presented new parametrization system.
Optimized Design for IRS-Assisted Integrated Sensing and Communication Systems in Clutter Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we investigate an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system design in a clutter environment. Assisted by an IRS equipped with a uniform linear array (ULA), a multi-antenna base station (BS) is targeted for communicating with multiple communication users (CUs) and sensing multiple targets simultaneously. We consider the IRS-assisted ISAC design in the case with Type-I or Type-II CUs, where each Type-I and Type-II CU can and cannot cancel the interference from sensing signals, respectively. In particular, we aim to maximize the minimum sensing beampattern gain among multiple targets, by jointly optimizing the BS transmit beamforming vectors and the IRS phase shifting matrix, subject to the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) constraint for each Type-I/Type-II CU, the interference power constraint per clutter, the transmission power constraint at the BS, and the cross-correlation pattern constraint. Due to the coupling of the BS's transmit design variables and the IRS's phase shifting matrix, the formulated max-min IRS-assisted ISAC design problem in the case with Type-I/Type-II CUs is highly non-convex. As such, we propose an efficient algorithm based on the alternating-optimization and semi-definite relaxation (SDR) techniques. In the case with Type-I CUs, we show that the dedicated sensing signal at the BS is always beneficial to improve the sensing performance. By contrast, the dedicated sensing signal at the BS is not required in the case with Type-II CUs. Numerical results are provided to show that the proposed IRS-assisted ISAC design schemes achieve a significant gain over the existing benchmark schemes.
Rapid Flow Behavior Modeling of Thermal Interface Materials Using Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Thermal Interface Materials (TIMs) are widely used in electronic packaging. Increasing power density and limited assembly space pose high demands on thermal management. Large cooling surfaces need to be covered efficiently. When joining the heatsink, previously dispensed TIM spreads over the cooling surface. Recommendations on the dispensing pattern exist only for simple surface geometries such as rectangles. For more complex geometries, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations are used in combination with manual experiments. While CFD simulations offer a high accuracy, they involve simulation experts and are rather expensive to set up. We propose a lightweight heuristic to model the spreading behavior of TIM. We further speed up the calculation by training an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) on data from this model. This offers rapid computation times and further supplies gradient information. This ANN can not only be used to aid manual pattern design of TIM, but also enables an automated pattern optimization. We compare this approach against the state-of-the-art and use real product samples for validation.
Bluetooth Low Energy mesh network for power-limited, robust and reliable IoT services
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is an emerging wireless technology created for short-range control and monitoring applications that is becoming increasingly widespread among the Internet of Things (IoT) services because of its low-cost and low-energy consumption. In this paper, we propose a novel neighbor discovery scheme and failure recovery techniques for multi-path and single-path low-power and reliable BLE networks. By exploiting energy-efficient access control and fast and robust routing ideas with adaptive failure recovery, the proposed methods outperform the well-known flooding approach used by the BLE Mesh standard. We show varying improvements in packet latency and power consumption in event-driven simulations as network topology and traffic changes. The failure recovery approaches proposed are optimized and demonstrated during the simulations, showing the varying of the overall failure recovery latency and node power consumption in different use cases.
Dataset of Industrial Metal Objects
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

We present a diverse dataset of industrial metal objects. These objects are symmetric, textureless and highly reflective, leading to challenging conditions not captured in existing datasets. Our dataset contains both real-world and synthetic multi-view RGB images with 6D object pose labels. Real-world data is obtained by recording multi-view images of scenes with varying object shapes, materials, carriers, compositions and lighting conditions. This results in over 30,000 images, accurately labelled using a new public tool. Synthetic data is obtained by carefully simulating real-world conditions and varying them in a controlled and realistic way. This leads to over 500,000 synthetic images. The close correspondence between synthetic and real-world data, and controlled variations, will facilitate sim-to-real research. Our dataset's size and challenging nature will facilitate research on various computer vision tasks involving reflective materials. The dataset and accompanying resources are made available on the project website at https://pderoovere.github.io/dimo.
Template-based Abstractive Microblog Opinion Summarisation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

We introduce the task of microblog opinion summarisation (MOS) and share a dataset of 3100 gold-standard opinion summaries to facilitate research in this domain. The dataset contains summaries of tweets spanning a 2-year period and covers more topics than any other public Twitter summarisation dataset. Summaries are abstractive in nature and have been created by journalists skilled in summarising news articles following a template separating factual information (main story) from author opinions. Our method differs from previous work on generating gold-standard summaries from social media, which usually involves selecting representative posts and thus favours extractive summarisation models. To showcase the dataset's utility and challenges, we benchmark a range of abstractive and extractive state-of-the-art summarisation models and achieve good performance, with the former outperforming the latter. We also show that fine-tuning is necessary to improve performance and investigate the benefits of using different sample sizes.
Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions in a Lattice Boltzmann Method for Elastodynamics
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2022
Year: 2022

Recently, Murthy et al. [2017] and Escande et al. [2020] adopted the Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) to model the linear elastodynamic behaviour of isotropic solids. The LBM is attractive as an elastodynamic solver because it can be parallelised readily and lends itself to finely discretised dynamic continuum simulations, allowing transient phenomena such as wave propagation to be modelled efficiently. This work proposes simple local boundary rules which approximate the behaviour of Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions with an LBM for elastic solids. Both lattice-conforming and non-lattice-conforming, curved boundary geometries are considered. For validation, we compare results produced by the LBM for the sudden loading of a stationary crack with an analytical solution. Furthermore, we investigate the performance of the LBM for the transient tension loading of a plate with a circular hole, using Finite Element (FEM) simulations as a reference.
Selectively Combining Multiple Coverage Goals in Search-Based Unit Test Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

Unit testing is a critical part of software development process, ensuring the correctness of basic programming units in a program (e.g., a method). Search-based software testing (SBST) is an automated approach to generating test cases. SBST generates test cases with genetic algorithms by specifying the coverage criterion (e.g., branch coverage). However, a good test suite must have different properties, which cannot be captured by using an individual coverage criterion. Therefore, the state-of-the-art approach combines multiple criteria to generate test cases. As combining multiple coverage criteria brings multiple objectives for optimization, it hurts the test suites' coverage for certain criteria compared with using the single criterion. To cope with this problem, we propose a novel approach named \textbf{smart selection}. Based on the coverage correlations among criteria and the coverage goals' subsumption relationships, smart selection selects a subset of coverage goals to reduce the number of optimization objectives and avoid missing any properties of all criteria. We conduct experiments to evaluate smart selection on $400$ Java classes with three state-of-the-art genetic algorithms. On average, smart selection outperforms combining all goals on $65.1\%$ of the classes having significant differences between the two approaches.
Boosting Video-Text Retrieval with Explicit High-Level Semantics
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Video-text retrieval (VTR) is an attractive yet challenging task for multi-modal understanding, which aims to search for relevant video (text) given a query (video). Existing methods typically employ completely heterogeneous visual-textual information to align video and text, whilst lacking the awareness of homogeneous high-level semantic information residing in both modalities. To fill this gap, in this work, we propose a novel visual-linguistic aligning model named HiSE for VTR, which improves the cross-modal representation by incorporating explicit high-level semantics. First, we explore the hierarchical property of explicit high-level semantics, and further decompose it into two levels, i.e. discrete semantics and holistic semantics. Specifically, for visual branch, we exploit an off-the-shelf semantic entity predictor to generate discrete high-level semantics. In parallel, a trained video captioning model is employed to output holistic high-level semantics. As for the textual modality, we parse the text into three parts including occurrence, action and entity. In particular, the occurrence corresponds to the holistic high-level semantics, meanwhile both action and entity represent the discrete ones. Then, different graph reasoning techniques are utilized to promote the interaction between holistic and discrete high-level semantics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, with the aid of explicit high-level semantics, our method achieves the superior performance over state-of-the-art methods on three benchmark datasets, including MSR-VTT, MSVD and DiDeMo.
Beer2Vec : Extracting Flavors from Reviews for Thirst-Quenching Recommandations
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

This paper introduces the Beer2Vec model that allows the most popular alcoholic beverage in the world to be encoded into vectors enabling flavorful recommendations. We present our algorithm using a unique dataset focused on the analysis of craft beers. We thoroughly explain how we encode the flavors and how useful, from an empirical point of view, the beer vectors are to generate meaningful recommendations. We also present three different ways to use Beer2Vec in a real-world environment to enlighten the pool of craft beer consumers. Finally, we make our model and functionalities available to everybody through a web application.
Software Security during Modern Code Review: The Developer's Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

To avoid software vulnerabilities, organizations are shifting security to earlier stages of the software development, such as at code review time. In this paper, we aim to understand the developers' perspective on assessing software security during code review, the challenges they encounter, and the support that companies and projects provide. To this end, we conduct a two-step investigation: we interview 10 professional developers and survey 182 practitioners about software security assessment during code review. The outcome is an overview of how developers perceive software security during code review and a set of identified challenges. Our study revealed that most developers do not immediately report to focus on security issues during code review. Only after being asked about software security, developers state to always consider it during review and acknowledge its importance. Most companies do not provide security training, yet expect developers to still ensure security during reviews. Accordingly, developers report the lack of training and security knowledge as the main challenges they face when checking for security issues. In addition, they have challenges with third-party libraries and to identify interactions between parts of code that could have security implications. Moreover, security may be disregarded during reviews due to developers' assumptions about the security dynamic of the application they develop. Data and materials: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6875435
Label-Free Synthetic Pretraining of Object Detectors
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

We propose a new approach, Synthetic Optimized Layout with Instance Detection (SOLID), to pretrain object detectors with synthetic images. Our "SOLID" approach consists of two main components: (1) generating synthetic images using a collection of unlabelled 3D models with optimized scene arrangement; (2) pretraining an object detector on "instance detection" task - given a query image depicting an object, detecting all instances of the exact same object in a target image. Our approach does not need any semantic labels for pretraining and allows the use of arbitrary, diverse 3D models. Experiments on COCO show that with optimized data generation and a proper pretraining task, synthetic data can be highly effective data for pretraining object detectors. In particular, pretraining on rendered images achieves performance competitive with pretraining on real images while using significantly less computing resources. Code is available at https://github.com/princeton-vl/SOLID.
Improving performance in multi-objective decision-making in Bottles environments with soft maximin approaches
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

Balancing multiple competing and conflicting objectives is an essential task for any artificial intelligence tasked with satisfying human values or preferences. Conflict arises both from misalignment between individuals with competing values, but also between conflicting value systems held by a single human. Starting with principle of loss-aversion, we designed a set of soft maximin function approaches to multi-objective decision-making. Bench-marking these functions in a set of previously-developed environments, we found that one new approach in particular, 'split-function exp-log loss aversion' (SFELLA), learns faster than the state of the art thresholded alignment objective method (Vamplew et al, 2021) on three of four tasks it was tested on, and achieved the same optimal performance after learning. SFELLA also showed relative robustness improvements against changes in objective scale, which may highlight an advantage dealing with distribution shifts in the environment dynamics. Due to publishing rules, further work could not be presented in the preprint, but in the final published version, we will further compare SFELLA to the multi-objective reward exponentials (MORE) approach (Rolf, 2020), demonstrating that SFELLA performs similarly to MORE in a simple previously-described foraging task, but in a modified foraging environment with a new resource that was not depleted as the agent worked, SFELLA collected more of the new resource with very little cost incurred in terms of the old resource. Overall, we found SFELLA useful for avoiding problems that sometimes occur with a thresholded approach, and more reward-responsive than MORE while retaining its conservative, loss-averse incentive structure.
Exploiting Shape Cues for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) aims to produce pixel-wise class predictions with only image-level labels for training. To this end, previous methods adopt the common pipeline: they generate pseudo masks from class activation maps (CAMs) and use such masks to supervise segmentation networks. However, it is challenging to derive comprehensive pseudo masks that cover the whole extent of objects due to the local property of CAMs, i.e., they tend to focus solely on small discriminative object parts. In this paper, we associate the locality of CAMs with the texture-biased property of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Accordingly, we propose to exploit shape information to supplement the texture-biased CNN features, thereby encouraging mask predictions to be not only comprehensive but also well-aligned with object boundaries. We further refine the predictions in an online fashion with a novel refinement method that takes into account both the class and the color affinities, in order to generate reliable pseudo masks to supervise the model. Importantly, our model is end-to-end trained within a single-stage framework and therefore efficient in terms of the training cost. Through extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC 2012, we validate the effectiveness of our method in producing precise and shape-aligned segmentation results. Specifically, our model surpasses the existing state-of-the-art single-stage approaches by large margins. What is more, it also achieves a new state-of-the-art performance over multi-stage approaches, when adopted in a simple two-stage pipeline without bells and whistles.