OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Innovation and informal knowledge exchanges between firms
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2022
Year: 2022

Firm clusters are seen as having a positive effect on innovations, what can be interpreted as economies of scale or knowledge spillovers. The processes underlying the success of these clusters remain difficult to isolate. We propose in this paper a stylised agent-based model to test the role of geographical proximity and informal knowledge exchanges between firms on the emergence of innovations. The model is run on synthetic firm clusters. Sensitivity analysis and systematic model exploration unveil a strong impact of interaction distance on innovations, with a qualitative shift when spatial interactions are more intense. Model bi-objective optimisation shows a compromise between innovation and product diversity, suggesting trade-offs for clusters in practice. This model provides thus a first basis to systematically explore the interplay between firm cluster geography and innovation, from an evolutionary perspective.
Simulating BFT Protocol Implementations at Scale
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

The novel blockchain generation of Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) state machine replication (SMR) protocols focuses on scalability and performance to meet requirements of distributed ledger technology (DLT), e.g., decentralization and geographic dispersion. Validating scalability and performance of BFT protocol implementations requires careful evaluation. While experiments with real protocol deployments usually offer the best realism, they are costly and time-consuming. In this paper, we explore simulation of unmodified BFT protocol implementations as as a method for cheap and rapid protocol evaluation: We can accurately forecast the performance of a BFT protocol while experimentally scaling its environment, i.e., by varying the number of nodes or geographic dispersion. Our approach is resource-friendly and preserves application-realism, since existing BFT frameworks can be simply plugged into the simulation engine without requiring code modifications or re-implementation.
Computing all-vs-all MEMs in run-length encoded collections of HiFi reads
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

We describe an algorithm to find maximal exact matches (MEMs) among HiFi reads with homopolymer errors. The main novelty in our work is that we resort to run-length compression to help deal with errors. Our method receives as input a run-length-encoded string collection containing the HiFi reads along with their reverse complements. Subsequently, it splits the encoding into two arrays, one storing the sequence of symbols for equal-symbol runs and another storing the run lengths. The purpose of the split is to get the BWT of the run symbols and reorder their lengths accordingly. We show that this special BWT, as it encodes the HiFi reads and their reverse complements, supports bi-directional queries for the HiFi reads. Then, we propose a variation of the MEM algorithm of Belazzougui et al. (2013) that exploits the run-length encoding and the implicit bi-directional property of our BWT to compute approximate MEMs. Concretely, if the algorithm finds that two substrings, $a_1 \ldots a_p$ and $b_1 \ldots b_p$, have a MEM, then it reports the MEM only if their corresponding length sequences, $\ell^{a}_1 \ldots \ell^{a}_p$ and $\ell^{b}_1 \ldots \ell^{b}_p$, do not differ beyond an input threshold. We use a simple metric to calculate the similarity of the length sequences that we call the {\em run-length excess}. Our technique facilitates the detection of MEMs with homopolymer errors as it does not require dynamic programming to find approximate matches where the only edits are the lengths of the equal-symbol runs. Finally, we present a method that relies on a geometric data structure to report the text occurrences of the MEMs detected by our algorithm.
Predicting Flaky Tests Categories using Few-Shot Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

Flaky tests are tests that yield different outcomes when run on the same version of a program. This non-deterministic behaviour plagues continuous integration with false signals, wasting developers' time and reducing their trust in test suites. Studies highlighted the importance of keeping tests flakiness-free. Recently, the research community has been pushing forward the detection of flaky tests by suggesting many static and dynamic approaches. While promising, those approaches mainly focus on classifying tests as flaky or not and, even when high performances are reported, it remains challenging to understand the cause of flakiness. This part is crucial for researchers and developers that aim to fix it. To help with the comprehension of a given flaky test, we propose FlakyCat, the first approach for classifying flaky tests based on their root cause category. FlakyCat relies on CodeBERT for code representation and leverages a Siamese network-based Few-Shot learning method to train a multi-class classifier with few data. We train and evaluate FlakyCat on a set of 343 flaky tests collected from open-source Java projects. Our evaluation shows that FlakyCat categorises flaky tests accurately, with a weighted F1 score of 70%. Furthermore, we investigate the performance of our approach for each category, revealing that Async waits, Unordered collections and Time-related flaky tests are accurately classified, while Concurrency-related flaky tests are more challenging to predict. Finally, to facilitate the comprehension of FlakyCat's predictions, we present a new technique for CodeBERT-based model interpretability that highlights code statements influencing the categorization.
Domain Shift-oriented Machine Anomalous Sound Detection Model Based on Self-Supervised Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

Thanks to the development of deep learning, research on machine anomalous sound detection based on self-supervised learning has made remarkable achievements. However, there are differences in the acoustic characteristics of the test set and the training set under different operating conditions of the same machine (domain shifts). It is challenging for the existing detection methods to learn the domain shifts features stably with low computation overhead. To address these problems, we propose a domain shift-oriented machine anomalous sound detection model based on self-supervised learning (TranSelf-DyGCN) in this paper. Firstly, we design a time-frequency domain feature modeling network to capture global and local spatial and time-domain features, thus improving the stability of machine anomalous sound detection stability under domain shifts. Then, we adopt a Dynamic Graph Convolutional Network (DyGCN) to model the inter-dependence relationship between domain shifts features, enabling the model to perceive domain shifts features efficiently. Finally, we use a Domain Adaptive Network (DAN) to compensate for the performance decrease caused by domain shifts, making the model adapt to anomalous sound better in the self-supervised environment. The performance of the suggested model is validated on DCASE 2020 task 2 and DCASE 2022 task 2.
Predicting spatial distribution of Palmer Drought Severity Index
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

The probability of a drought for a particular region is crucial when making decisions related to agriculture. Forecasting this probability is critical for management and challenging at the same time. The prediction model should consider multiple factors with complex relationships across the region of interest and neighbouring regions. We approach this problem by presenting an end-to-end solution based on a spatio-temporal neural network. The model predicts the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) for subregions of interest. Predictions by climate models provide an additional source of knowledge of the model leading to more accurate drought predictions. Our model has better accuracy than baseline Gradient boosting solutions, as the $R^2$ score for it is $0.90$ compared to $0.85$ for Gradient boosting. Specific attention is on the range of applicability of the model. We examine various regions across the globe to validate them under different conditions. We complement the results with an analysis of how future climate changes for different scenarios affect the PDSI and how our model can help to make better decisions and more sustainable economics.
Listen2YourHeart: A Self-Supervised Approach for Detecting Murmur in Heart-Beat Sounds
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Heart murmurs are abnormal sounds present in heartbeats, caused by turbulent blood flow through the heart. The PhysioNet 2022 challenge targets automatic detection of murmur from audio recordings of the heart and automatic detection of normal vs. abnormal clinical outcome. The recordings are captured from multiple locations around the heart. Our participation investigates the effectiveness of selfsupervised learning for murmur detection. We train the layers of a backbone CNN in a self-supervised way with data from both this year's and the 2016 challenge. We use two different augmentations on each training sample, and normalized temperature-scaled cross-entropy loss. We experiment with different augmentations to learn effective phonocardiogram representations. To build the final detectors we train two classification heads, one for each challenge task. We present evaluation results for all combinations of the available augmentations, and for our multipleaugmentation approach. Our team's, Listen2YourHeart, SSL murmur detection classifier received a weighted accuracy score of 0.737 (ranked 13th out of 40 teams) and an outcome identification challenge cost score of 11946 (ranked 7th out of 39 teams) on the hidden test set.
ViA: View-invariant Skeleton Action Representation Learning via Motion Retargeting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Current self-supervised approaches for skeleton action representation learning often focus on constrained scenarios, where videos and skeleton data are recorded in laboratory settings. When dealing with estimated skeleton data in real-world videos, such methods perform poorly due to the large variations across subjects and camera viewpoints. To address this issue, we introduce ViA, a novel View-Invariant Autoencoder for self-supervised skeleton action representation learning. ViA leverages motion retargeting between different human performers as a pretext task, in order to disentangle the latent action-specific `Motion' features on top of the visual representation of a 2D or 3D skeleton sequence. Such `Motion' features are invariant to skeleton geometry and camera view and allow ViA to facilitate both, cross-subject and cross-view action classification tasks. We conduct a study focusing on transfer-learning for skeleton-based action recognition with self-supervised pre-training on real-world data (e.g., Posetics). Our results showcase that skeleton representations learned from ViA are generic enough to improve upon state-of-the-art action classification accuracy, not only on 3D laboratory datasets such as NTU-RGB+D 60 and NTU-RGB+D 120, but also on real-world datasets where only 2D data are accurately estimated, e.g., Toyota Smarthome, UAV-Human and Penn Action.
On Poisoned Wardrop Equilibrium in Congestion Games
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2022
Year: 2022

Recent years have witnessed a growing number of attack vectors against increasingly interconnected traffic networks. Informational attacks have emerged as the prominent ones that aim to poison traffic data, misguide users, and manipulate traffic patterns. To study the impact of this class of attacks, we propose a game-theoretic framework where the attacker, as a Stackelberg leader, falsifies the traffic conditions to change the traffic pattern predicted by the Wardrop traffic equilibrium, achieved by the users, or the followers. The intended shift of the Wardrop equilibrium is a consequence of strategic informational poisoning. Leveraging game-theoretic and sensitivity analysis, we quantify the system-level impact of the attack by characterizing the concept of poisoned Price of Anarchy, which compares the poisoned Wardrop equilibrium and its non-poisoned system optimal counterpart. We use an evacuation case study to show that the Stackelberg equilibrium can be found through a two-time scale zeroth-order learning process and demonstrate the disruptive effects of informational poisoning, indicating a compelling need for defense policies to mitigate such security threats.
Evaluating generative audio systems and their metrics
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

Recent years have seen considerable advances in audio synthesis with deep generative models. However, the state-of-the-art is very difficult to quantify; different studies often use different evaluation methodologies and different metrics when reporting results, making a direct comparison to other systems difficult if not impossible. Furthermore, the perceptual relevance and meaning of the reported metrics in most cases unknown, prohibiting any conclusive insights with respect to practical usability and audio quality. This paper presents a study that investigates state-of-the-art approaches side-by-side with (i) a set of previously proposed objective metrics for audio reconstruction, and with (ii) a listening study. The results indicate that currently used objective metrics are insufficient to describe the perceptual quality of current systems.
The Quest for Omnioculars: Embedded Visualization for Augmenting Basketball Game Viewing Experiences
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

Sports game data is becoming increasingly complex, often consisting of multivariate data such as player performance stats, historical team records, and athletes' positional tracking information. While numerous visual analytics systems have been developed for sports analysts to derive insights, few tools target fans to improve their understanding and engagement of sports data during live games. By presenting extra data in the actual game views, embedded visualization has the potential to enhance fans' game-viewing experience. However, little is known about how to design such kinds of visualizations embedded into live games. In this work, we present a user-centered design study of developing interactive embedded visualizations for basketball fans to improve their live game-watching experiences. We first conducted a formative study to characterize basketball fans' in-game analysis behaviors and tasks. Based on our findings, we propose a design framework to inform the design of embedded visualizations based on specific data-seeking contexts. Following the design framework, we present five novel embedded visualization designs targeting five representative contexts identified by the fans, including shooting, offense, defense, player evaluation, and team comparison. We then developed Omnioculars, an interactive basketball game-viewing prototype that features the proposed embedded visualizations for fans' in-game data analysis. We evaluated Omnioculars in a simulated basketball game with basketball fans. The study results suggest that our design supports personalized in-game data analysis and enhances game understanding and engagement.
Public Parking Spot Detection And Geo-localization Using Transfer Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

In cities around the world, locating public parking lots with vacant parking spots is a major problem, costing commuters time and adding to traffic congestion. This work illustrates how a dataset of Geo-tagged images from a mobile phone camera, can be used in navigating to the most convenient public parking lot in Johannesburg with an available parking space, detected by a neural network powered-public camera. The images are used to fine-tune a Detectron2 model pre-trained on the ImageNet dataset to demonstrate detection and segmentation of vacant parking spots, we then add the parking lot's corresponding longitude and latitude coordinates to recommend the most convenient parking lot to the driver based on the Haversine distance and number of available parking spots. Using the VGG Image Annotation (VIA) we use images from an expanding dataset of images, and annotate these with polygon outlines of the four different types of objects of interest: cars, open parking spots, people, and car number plates. We use the segmentation model to ensure number plates can be occluded in production for car registration anonymity purposes. We get an 89% and 82% intersection over union cover score on cars and parking spaces respectively. This work has the potential to help reduce the amount of time commuters spend searching for free public parking, hence easing traffic congestion in and around shopping complexes and other public places, and maximize people's utility with respect to driving on public roads.
ByteStore: Hybrid Layouts for Main-Memory Column Stores
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2022
Year: 2022

The performance of main memory column stores highly depends on the scan and lookup operations on the base column layouts. Existing column-stores adopt a homogeneous column layout, leading to sub-optimal performance on real workloads since different columns possess different data characteristics. In this paper, we propose ByteStore, a column store that uses different storage layouts for different columns. We first present a novel data-conscious column layout, PP-VBS (Prefix-Preserving Variable Byte Slice). PP-VBS exploits data skew to accelerate scans without sacrificing lookup performance. Then, we present an experiment-driven column layout advisor to select individual column layouts for a workload. Extensive experiments on real data show that ByteStore outperforms homogeneous storage engines by up to 5.2X.
Adversarial for Social Privacy: A Poisoning Strategy to Degrade User Identity Linkage
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2022
Year: 2022

Privacy issues on social networks have been extensively discussed in recent years. The user identity linkage (UIL) task, aiming at finding corresponding users across different social networks, would be a threat to privacy if unethically applied. The sensitive user information might be detected through connected identities. A promising and novel solution to this issue is to design an adversarial strategy to degrade the matching performance of UIL models. However, most existing adversarial attacks on graphs are designed for models working in a single network, while UIL is a cross-network learning task. Meanwhile, privacy protection against UIL works unilaterally in real-world scenarios, i.e., the service provider can only add perturbations to its own network to protect its users from being linked. To tackle these challenges, this paper proposes a novel adversarial attack strategy that poisons one target network to prevent its nodes from being linked to other networks by UIL algorithms. Specifically, we reformalize the UIL problem in the perspective of kernelized topology consistency and convert the attack objective to maximizing the structural changes within the target network before and after attacks. A novel graph kernel is then defined with Earth mover's distance (EMD) on the edge-embedding space. In terms of efficiency, a fast attack strategy is proposed by greedy searching and replacing EMD with its lower bound. Results on three real-world datasets indicate that the proposed attacks can best fool a wide range of UIL models and reach a balance between attack effectiveness and imperceptibility.
mc-mujoco: Simulating Articulated Robots with FSM Controllers in MuJoCo
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

For safe and reliable deployment of any robot controller on the real hardware platform, it is generally a necessary practice to comprehensively assess the performance of the controller with the specific robot in a realistic simulation environment beforehand. While there exist several software solutions that can provide the core physics engine for this purpose, it is often a cumbersome and error-prone effort to interface the simulation environment with the robot controller being evaluated. The controller may have a complex structure consisting of multiple states and transitions within a finite-state machine (FSM), and may even require input through a GUI. In this work, we present mc-mujoco -- an open-source software framework that forms an interface between the MuJoCo physics simulator and the mc-rtc robot control framework. We provide implementation details and describe the process for adding support for essentially any new robot. We also demonstrate and publish a sample FSM controller for bipedal locomotion and stable grasping of a rigid object by the HRP-5P humanoid robot in MuJoCo. The code and usage instructions for mc-mujoco, the developed robot modules, and the FSM controller are available online.
Enhancing Semantic Understanding with Self-supervised Methods for Abstractive Dialogue Summarization
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Contextualized word embeddings can lead to state-of-the-art performances in natural language understanding. Recently, a pre-trained deep contextualized text encoder such as BERT has shown its potential in improving natural language tasks including abstractive summarization. Existing approaches in dialogue summarization focus on incorporating a large language model into summarization task trained on large-scale corpora consisting of news articles rather than dialogues of multiple speakers. In this paper, we introduce self-supervised methods to compensate shortcomings to train a dialogue summarization model. Our principle is to detect incoherent information flows using pretext dialogue text to enhance BERT's ability to contextualize the dialogue text representations. We build and fine-tune an abstractive dialogue summarization model on a shared encoder-decoder architecture using the enhanced BERT. We empirically evaluate our abstractive dialogue summarizer with the SAMSum corpus, a recently introduced dataset with abstractive dialogue summaries. All of our methods have contributed improvements to abstractive summary measured in ROUGE scores. Through an extensive ablation study, we also present a sensitivity analysis to critical model hyperparameters, probabilities of switching utterances and masking interlocutors.
Large-Scale Auto-Regressive Modeling Of Street Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

We present a novel generative method for the creation of city-scale road layouts. While the output of recent methods is limited in both size of the covered area and diversity, our framework produces large traversable graphs of high quality consisting of vertices and edges representing complete street networks covering 400 square kilometers or more. While our framework can process general 2D embedded graphs, we focus on street networks due to the wide availability of training data. Our generative framework consists of a transformer decoder that is used in a sliding window manner to predict a field of indices, with each index encoding a representation of the local neighborhood. The semantics of each index is determined by a dictionary of context vectors. The index field is then input to a decoder to compute the street graph. Using data from OpenStreetMap, we train our system on whole cities and even across large countries such as the US, and finally compare it to the state of the art.