OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Pandora's Problem with Nonobligatory Inspection: Optimal Structure and a PTAS
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

Weitzman introduced Pandora's box problem as a mathematical model of sequential search with inspection costs, in which a searcher is allowed to select a prize from one of $n$ alternatives. Several decades later, Doval introduced a close version of the problem, where the searcher does not need to incur the inspection cost of an alternative, and can select it uninspected. Unlike the original problem, the optimal solution to the nonobligatory inspection variant is proved to need adaptivity, and by recent work of [FLL22], finding the optimal solution is NP-hard. Our first main result is a structural characterization of the optimal policy: We show there exists an optimal policy that follows only two different pre-determined orders of inspection, and transitions from one to the other at most once. Our second main result is a polynomial time approximation scheme (PTAS). Our proof involves a novel reduction to a framework developed by [FLX18], utilizing our optimal two-phase structure. Furthermore, we show Pandora's problem with nonobligatory inspection belongs to class NP, which by using the hardness result of [FLL22], settles the computational complexity class of the problem. Finally, we provide a tight 0.8 approximation and a novel proof for committing policies [BK19] (informally, the set of nonadaptive policies) for general classes of distributions, which was previously shown only for discrete and finite distributions [GMS08].
Leveraging Angular Information Between Feature and Classifier for Long-tailed Learning: A Prediction Reformulation Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Deep neural networks still struggle on long-tailed image datasets, and one of the reasons is that the imbalance of training data across categories leads to the imbalance of trained model parameters. Motivated by the empirical findings that trained classifiers yield larger weight norms in head classes, we propose to reformulate the recognition probabilities through included angles without re-balancing the classifier weights. Specifically, we calculate the angles between the data feature and the class-wise classifier weights to obtain angle-based prediction results. Inspired by the performance improvement of the predictive form reformulation and the outstanding performance of the widely used two-stage learning framework, we explore the different properties of this angular prediction and propose novel modules to improve the performance of different components in the framework. Our method is able to obtain the best performance among peer methods without pretraining on CIFAR10/100-LT and ImageNet-LT. Source code will be made publicly available.
AdaCM: Adaptive ColorMLP for Real-Time Universal Photo-realistic Style Transfer
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Photo-realistic style transfer aims at migrating the artistic style from an exemplar style image to a content image, producing a result image without spatial distortions or unrealistic artifacts. Impressive results have been achieved by recent deep models. However, deep neural network based methods are too expensive to run in real-time. Meanwhile, bilateral grid based methods are much faster but still contain artifacts like overexposure. In this work, we propose the \textbf{Adaptive ColorMLP (AdaCM)}, an effective and efficient framework for universal photo-realistic style transfer. First, we find the complex non-linear color mapping between input and target domain can be efficiently modeled by a small multi-layer perceptron (ColorMLP) model. Then, in \textbf{AdaCM}, we adopt a CNN encoder to adaptively predict all parameters for the ColorMLP conditioned on each input content and style image pair. Experimental results demonstrate that AdaCM can generate vivid and high-quality stylization results. Meanwhile, our AdaCM is ultrafast and can process a 4K resolution image in 6ms on one V100 GPU.
Computer and Internet Literacy Course of the College of Computer Science for the Municipality of Agoo, La Union
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

The main objective of the study is to provide ICT awareness, literacy and skills development to the barangay officials of Agoo, La Union. Specifically, it aimed the following objectives: 1) to determine the profile of the respondents in terms of personal information, educational background and availability of computer unit and background in using computer; 2) to determine the effectiveness of the CILC in terms of services delivered, timeliness of the service, and improvement on the computer and internet knowledge of the trainees; and 3) to determine the level of relevance of the training sessions of the CILC. The study used a descriptive design. Data were gathered by using survey questionnaire and were analyzed by using statistical treatments such as frequency count, percentage and mean. As to the profile of the trainees, the study found that most of the trainees are female (88%); 84% are married, and 56% of them are at the age bracket of 30-39 years old. In terms of educational background, many are high school graduate (n= 17; 68%). In addition, most of them (84%) have background in computer. The result also shows that the CILC is at the high level of effectiveness (4.67) in terms of services delivered and is much relevant (4.45) in terms of its relevance.
Calibration and generalizability of probabilistic models on low-data chemical datasets with DIONYSUS
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2022
Year: 2022

Deep learning models that leverage large datasets are often the state of the art for modelling molecular properties. When the datasets are smaller (< 2000 molecules), it is not clear that deep learning approaches are the right modelling tool. In this work we perform an extensive study of the calibration and generalizability of probabilistic machine learning models on small chemical datasets. Using different molecular representations and models, we analyse the quality of their predictions and uncertainties in a variety of tasks (binary, regression) and datasets. We also introduce two simulated experiments that evaluate their performance: (1) Bayesian optimization guided molecular design, (2) inference on out-of-distribution data via ablated cluster splits. We offer practical insights into model and feature choice for modelling small chemical datasets, a common scenario in new chemical experiments. We have packaged our analysis into the DIONYSUS repository, which is open sourced to aid in reproducibility and extension to new datasets.
Multi-view deep learning based molecule design and structural optimization accelerates the SARS-CoV-2 inhibitor discovery
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

In this work, we propose MEDICO, a Multi-viEw Deep generative model for molecule generation, structural optimization, and the SARS-CoV-2 Inhibitor disCOvery. To the best of our knowledge, MEDICO is the first-of-this-kind graph generative model that can generate molecular graphs similar to the structure of targeted molecules, with a multi-view representation learning framework to sufficiently and adaptively learn comprehensive structural semantics from targeted molecular topology and geometry. We show that our MEDICO significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in generating valid, unique, and novel molecules under benchmarking comparisons. In particular, we showcase the multi-view deep learning model enables us to generate not only the molecules structurally similar to the targeted molecules but also the molecules with desired chemical properties, demonstrating the strong capability of our model in exploring the chemical space deeply. Moreover, case study results on targeted molecule generation for the SARS-CoV-2 main protease (Mpro) show that by integrating molecule docking into our model as chemical priori, we successfully generate new small molecules with desired drug-like properties for the Mpro, potentially accelerating the de novo design of Covid-19 drugs. Further, we apply MEDICO to the structural optimization of three well-known Mpro inhibitors (N3, 11a, and GC376) and achieve ~88% improvement in their binding affinity to Mpro, demonstrating the application value of our model for the development of therapeutics for SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Box2Mask: Box-supervised Instance Segmentation via Level-set Evolution
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

In contrast to fully supervised methods using pixel-wise mask labels, box-supervised instance segmentation takes advantage of simple box annotations, which has recently attracted increasing research attention. This paper presents a novel single-shot instance segmentation approach, namely Box2Mask, which integrates the classical level-set evolution model into deep neural network learning to achieve accurate mask prediction with only bounding box supervision. Specifically, both the input image and its deep features are employed to evolve the level-set curves implicitly, and a local consistency module based on a pixel affinity kernel is used to mine the local context and spatial relations. Two types of single-stage frameworks, i.e., CNN-based and transformer-based frameworks, are developed to empower the level-set evolution for box-supervised instance segmentation, and each framework consists of three essential components: instance-aware decoder, box-level matching assignment and level-set evolution. By minimizing the level-set energy function, the mask map of each instance can be iteratively optimized within its bounding box annotation. The experimental results on five challenging testbeds, covering general scenes, remote sensing, medical and scene text images, demonstrate the outstanding performance of our proposed Box2Mask approach for box-supervised instance segmentation. In particular, with the Swin-Transformer large backbone, our Box2Mask obtains 42.4% mask AP on COCO, which is on par with the recently developed fully mask-supervised methods. The code is available at: https://github.com/LiWentomng/boxlevelset.
It Is Not Where You Are, It Is Where You Are Registered: IoT Location Impact
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

This paper investigates how and with whom IoT devices communicate and how their location affects their communication patterns. Specifically, the endpoints an IoT device communicates with can be defined as a small set of domains. To study how the location of the device affects its domain set, we distinguish between the location based on its IP address and the location defined by the user when registering the device. We show, unlike common wisdom, that IP-based location has little to no effect on the set of domains, while the user-defined location changes the set significantly. Unlike common approaches to resolving domains to IP addresses at close-by geo-locations (such as anycast), we present a distinctive way to use the ECS field of EDNS to achieve the same differentiation between user-defined locations. Our solution streamlines the network design of IoT manufacturers and makes it easier for security appliances to monitor IoT traffic. Finally, we show that with one domain for all locations, one can achieve succinct descriptions of the traffic of the IoT device across the globe. We will discuss the implications of such description on security appliances and specifically, on the ones using the Manufacturer Usage Description (MUD) framework.
Parameterized Approximation for Maximum Weight Independent Set of Rectangles and Segments
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

In the Maximum Weight Independent Set of Rectangles problem (MWISR) we are given a weighted set of $n$ axis-parallel rectangles in the plane. The task is to find a subset of pairwise non-overlapping rectangles with the maximum possible total weight. This problem is NP-hard and the best-known polynomial-time approximation algorithm, due to by Chalermsook and Walczak (SODA 2021), achieves approximation factor $O(\log\log n )$. While in the unweighted setting, constant factor approximation algorithms are known, due to Mitchell (FOCS 2021) and to Gálvez et al. (SODA 2022), it remains open to extend these techniques to the weighted setting. In this paper, we consider MWISR through the lens of parameterized approximation. Grandoni et al. (ESA 2019) gave a $(1-ε)$-approximation algorithm with running time $k^{O(k/ε^8)} n^{O(1/ε^8)}$ time, where $k$ is the number of rectangles in an optimum solution. Unfortunately, their algorithm works only in the unweighted setting and they left it as an open problem to give a parameterized approximation scheme in the weighted setting. Our contribution is a partial answer to the open question of Grandoni et al. (ESA 2019). We give a parameterized approximation algorithm for MWISR that given a parameter $k$, finds a set of non-overlapping rectangles of weight at least $(1-ε) \text{opt}_k$ in $2^{O(k \log(k/ε))} n^{O(1/ε)}$ time, where $\text{opt}_k$ is the maximum weight of a solution of cardinality at most $k$. Note that thus, our algorithm may return a solution consisting of more than $k$ rectangles. To complement this apparent weakness, we also propose a parameterized approximation scheme with running time $2^{O(k^2 \log(k/ε))} n^{O(1)}$ that finds a solution with cardinality at most $k$ and total weight at least $(1-ε)\text{opt}_k$ for the special case of axis-parallel segments.
Learning Detail-Structure Alternative Optimization for Blind Super-Resolution
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Existing convolutional neural networks (CNN) based image super-resolution (SR) methods have achieved impressive performance on bicubic kernel, which is not valid to handle unknown degradations in real-world applications. Recent blind SR methods suggest to reconstruct SR images relying on blur kernel estimation. However, their results still remain visible artifacts and detail distortion due to the estimation errors. To alleviate these problems, in this paper, we propose an effective and kernel-free network, namely DSSR, which enables recurrent detail-structure alternative optimization without blur kernel prior incorporation for blind SR. Specifically, in our DSSR, a detail-structure modulation module (DSMM) is built to exploit the interaction and collaboration of image details and structures. The DSMM consists of two components: a detail restoration unit (DRU) and a structure modulation unit (SMU). The former aims at regressing the intermediate HR detail reconstruction from LR structural contexts, and the latter performs structural contexts modulation conditioned on the learned detail maps at both HR and LR spaces. Besides, we use the output of DSMM as the hidden state and design our DSSR architecture from a recurrent convolutional neural network (RCNN) view. In this way, the network can alternatively optimize the image details and structural contexts, achieving co-optimization across time. Moreover, equipped with the recurrent connection, our DSSR allows low- and high-level feature representations complementary by observing previous HR details and contexts at every unrolling time. Extensive experiments on synthetic datasets and real-world images demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art against existing methods. The source code can be found at https://github.com/Arcananana/DSSR.
Generating Synthetic Data in a Secure Federated General Adversarial Networks for a Consortium of Health Registries
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

In this work, we review the architecture design of existing federated General Adversarial Networks (GAN) solutions and highlight the security and trust-related weaknesses in the existing designs. We then describe how these weaknesses make existing designs unsuitable for the requirements needed for a consortium of health registries working towards generating synthetic datasets for research purposes. Moreover, we propose how these weaknesses can be addressed with our novel architecture solution. Our novel architecture solution combines several building blocks to generate synthetic data in a decentralised setting. Consortium blockchains, secure multi-party computations, and homomorphic encryption are the core building blocks of our proposed architecture solution to address the weaknesses in the existing design of federated GANs. Finally, we discuss our proposed solution's advantages and future research directions.
Global memory transformer for processing long documents
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Transformer variants dominate the state-of-the-art in different natural language processing tasks such as translation, reading comprehension and summarization. Our paper is more directed to use general memory slots added to the inputs and studying the results of adding these slots. This paper is a go on study of general memory slots rule that were added to the input of the proposed model in previous work. We have two main tasks;1) pretraining task using masked language modeling and b) fine tuning task using HotpotQA . This study aims to verify the ability of the proposed model to handle chunks as if they were one chunk comparing with the base model. As baseline we used T5 transformer. We studied the rule of memory slots augmented to each input chunk and studied the model performance without selector. We found that adding memory to input chunks helped the proposed model to overcome the baseline on Masked language modeling task with specific training parameters. Ablation study reveals the ability of using the compressed input chunks with a degradation in performance.
Modeling Mobile Visualization for Medical Reports of Complex Chronic Diseases
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

Visualizing medical histories of patients with complex chronic diseases (e.g., discordant chronic comorbidities (DCCs)) is a challenge for patients, their healthcare providers, and their support network. DCCs are health conditions in which patients have multiple, often unrelated, chronic illnesses that may need to be addressed concurrently but may also be associated with conflicting treatment instructions. Future work targeting to reduce treatment conflicts and improve patient quality of life and care should carefully examine and visualize DCCs medical reports, symptoms, and treatment recommendations. In this study, we explore various visualization models and paradigms. We analyze how these models and paradigms are applied to visualize multifaceted medical data. We then propose a model for transforming the unstructured data into temporal slices and depict them in a single graphic model. We report how we carefully moved multifaceted DCC records into; structured data tables, visualization graphs, and various hardware devices.
Harnessing label semantics to extract higher performance under noisy label for Company to Industry matching
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

Assigning appropriate industry tag(s) to a company is a critical task in a financial institution as it impacts various financial machineries. Yet, it remains a complex task. Typically, such industry tags are to be assigned by Subject Matter Experts (SME) after evaluating company business lines against the industry definitions. It becomes even more challenging as companies continue to add new businesses and newer industry definitions are formed. Given the periodicity of the task it is reasonable to assume that an Artificial Intelligent (AI) agent could be developed to carry it out in an efficient manner. While this is an exciting prospect, the challenges appear from the need of historical patterns of such tag assignments (or Labeling). Labeling is often considered the most expensive task in Machine Learning (ML) due its dependency on SMEs and manual efforts. Therefore, often, in enterprise set up, an ML project encounters noisy and dependent labels. Such labels create technical hindrances for ML Models to produce robust tag assignments. We propose an ML pipeline which uses semantic similarity matching as an alternative to multi label text classification, while making use of a Label Similarity Matrix and a minimum labeling strategy. We demonstrate this pipeline achieves significant improvements over the noise and exhibit robust predictive capabilities.
LDL: A Defense for Label-Based Membership Inference Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

The data used to train deep neural network (DNN) models in applications such as healthcare and finance typically contain sensitive information. A DNN model may suffer from overfitting. Overfitted models have been shown to be susceptible to query-based attacks such as membership inference attacks (MIAs). MIAs aim to determine whether a sample belongs to the dataset used to train a classifier (members) or not (nonmembers). Recently, a new class of label based MIAs (LAB MIAs) was proposed, where an adversary was only required to have knowledge of predicted labels of samples. Developing a defense against an adversary carrying out a LAB MIA on DNN models that cannot be retrained remains an open problem. We present LDL, a light weight defense against LAB MIAs. LDL works by constructing a high-dimensional sphere around queried samples such that the model decision is unchanged for (noisy) variants of the sample within the sphere. This sphere of label-invariance creates ambiguity and prevents a querying adversary from correctly determining whether a sample is a member or a nonmember. We analytically characterize the success rate of an adversary carrying out a LAB MIA when LDL is deployed, and show that the formulation is consistent with experimental observations. We evaluate LDL on seven datasets -- CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, GTSRB, Face, Purchase, Location, and Texas -- with varying sizes of training data. All of these datasets have been used by SOTA LAB MIAs. Our experiments demonstrate that LDL reduces the success rate of an adversary carrying out a LAB MIA in each case. We empirically compare LDL with defenses against LAB MIAs that require retraining of DNN models, and show that LDL performs favorably despite not needing to retrain the DNNs.
Precise Energy Consumption Measurements of Heterogeneous Artificial Intelligence Workloads
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

With the rise of AI in recent years and the increase in complexity of the models, the growing demand in computational resources is starting to pose a significant challenge. The need for higher compute power is being met with increasingly more potent accelerators and the use of large compute clusters. However, the gain in prediction accuracy from large models trained on distributed and accelerated systems comes at the price of a substantial increase in energy demand, and researchers have started questioning the environmental friendliness of such AI methods at scale. Consequently, energy efficiency plays an important role for AI model developers and infrastructure operators alike. The energy consumption of AI workloads depends on the model implementation and the utilized hardware. Therefore, accurate measurements of the power draw of AI workflows on different types of compute nodes is key to algorithmic improvements and the design of future compute clusters and hardware. To this end, we present measurements of the energy consumption of two typical applications of deep learning models on different types of compute nodes. Our results indicate that 1. deriving energy consumption directly from runtime is not accurate, but the consumption of the compute node needs to be considered regarding its composition; 2. neglecting accelerator hardware on mixed nodes results in overproportional inefficiency regarding energy consumption; 3. energy consumption of model training and inference should be considered separately - while training on GPUs outperforms all other node types regarding both runtime and energy consumption, inference on CPU nodes can be comparably efficient. One advantage of our approach is that the information on energy consumption is available to all users of the supercomputer, enabling an easy transfer to other workloads alongside a raise in user-awareness of energy consumption.