OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Stability is Stable: Connections between Replicability, Privacy, and Adaptive Generalization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The notion of replicable algorithms was introduced in Impagliazzo et al. [STOC '22] to describe randomized algorithms that are stable under the resampling of their inputs. More precisely, a replicable algorithm gives the same output with high probability when its randomness is fixed and it is run on a new i.i.d. sample drawn from the same distribution. Using replicable algorithms for data analysis can facilitate the verification of published results by ensuring that the results of an analysis will be the same with high probability, even when that analysis is performed on a new data set. In this work, we establish new connections and separations between replicability and standard notions of algorithmic stability. In particular, we give sample-efficient algorithmic reductions between perfect generalization, approximate differential privacy, and replicability for a broad class of statistical problems. Conversely, we show any such equivalence must break down computationally: there exist statistical problems that are easy under differential privacy, but that cannot be solved replicably without breaking public-key cryptography. Furthermore, these results are tight: our reductions are statistically optimal, and we show that any computational separation between DP and replicability must imply the existence of one-way functions. Our statistical reductions give a new algorithmic framework for translating between notions of stability, which we instantiate to answer several open questions in replicability and privacy. This includes giving sample-efficient replicable algorithms for various PAC learning, distribution estimation, and distribution testing problems, algorithmic amplification of $δ$ in approximate DP, conversions from item-level to user-level privacy, and the existence of private agnostic-to-realizable learning reductions under structured distributions.
Underwater Camouflage Object Detection Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

We have made a dataset of camouflage object detection mainly for complex seabed scenes, and named it UnderWater RGB&Sonar,or UW-RS for short. The UW-RS dataset contains a total of 1972 image data. The dataset mainly consists of two parts, namely underwater optical data part (UW-R dataset) and underwater sonar data part (UW-S dataset).
Perturbation-Resilient Sets for Dynamic Service Balancing
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Balanced and swap-robust minimal trades, introduced in [1], are important for studying the balance and stability of server access request protocols under data popularity changes. Constructions of such trades have so far relied on paired sets obtained through iterative combining of smaller sets that have provable stability guarantees, coupled with exhaustive computer search. Currently, there exists a nonnegligible gap between the resulting total dynamic balance discrepancy and the known theoretical lower bound. We present both new upper and lower bounds on the total service requests discrepancy under limited popularity changes. Our constructive near-optimal approach uses a new class of paired graphs whose vertices are two balanced sets with edges (arcs) that capture the balance and potential balance changes induced by limited-magnitude popularity changes (swaps).
Automated Federated Learning in Mobile Edge Networks -- Fast Adaptation and Convergence
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Federated Learning (FL) can be used in mobile edge networks to train machine learning models in a distributed manner. Recently, FL has been interpreted within a Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) framework, which brings FL significant advantages in fast adaptation and convergence over heterogeneous datasets. However, existing research simply combines MAML and FL without explicitly addressing how much benefit MAML brings to FL and how to maximize such benefit over mobile edge networks. In this paper, we quantify the benefit from two aspects: optimizing FL hyperparameters (i.e., sampled data size and the number of communication rounds) and resource allocation (i.e., transmit power) in mobile edge networks. Specifically, we formulate the MAML-based FL design as an overall learning time minimization problem, under the constraints of model accuracy and energy consumption. Facilitated by the convergence analysis of MAML-based FL, we decompose the formulated problem and then solve it using analytical solutions and the coordinate descent method. With the obtained FL hyperparameters and resource allocation, we design a MAML-based FL algorithm, called Automated Federated Learning (AutoFL), that is able to conduct fast adaptation and convergence. Extensive experimental results verify that AutoFL outperforms other benchmark algorithms regarding the learning time and convergence performance.
Failure-tolerant Distributed Learning for Anomaly Detection in Wireless Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The analysis of distributed techniques is often focused upon their efficiency, without considering their robustness (or lack thereof). Such a consideration is particularly important when devices or central servers can fail, which can potentially cripple distributed systems. When such failures arise in wireless communications networks, important services that they use/provide (like anomaly detection) can be left inoperable and can result in a cascade of security problems. In this paper, we present a novel method to address these risks by combining both flat- and star-topologies, combining the performance and reliability benefits of both. We refer to this method as "Tol-FL", due to its increased failure-tolerance as compared to the technique of Federated Learning. Our approach both limits device failure risks while outperforming prior methods by up to 8% in terms of anomaly detection AUROC in a range of realistic settings that consider client as well as server failure, all while reducing communication costs. This performance demonstrates that Tol-FL is a highly suitable method for distributed model training for anomaly detection, especially in the domain of wireless networks.
PointGame: Geometrically and Adaptively Masked Auto-Encoder on Point Clouds
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Self-supervised learning is attracting large attention in point cloud understanding. However, exploring discriminative and transferable features still remains challenging due to their nature of irregularity and sparsity. We propose a geometrically and adaptively masked auto-encoder for self-supervised learning on point clouds, termed \textit{PointGame}. PointGame contains two core components: GATE and EAT. GATE stands for the geometrical and adaptive token embedding module; it not only absorbs the conventional wisdom of geometric descriptors that captures the surface shape effectively, but also exploits adaptive saliency to focus on the salient part of a point cloud. EAT stands for the external attention-based Transformer encoder with linear computational complexity, which increases the efficiency of the whole pipeline. Unlike cutting-edge unsupervised learning models, PointGame leverages geometric descriptors to perceive surface shapes and adaptively mines discriminative features from training data. PointGame showcases clear advantages over its competitors on various downstream tasks under both global and local fine-tuning strategies. The code and pre-trained models will be publicly available.
Design Patterns for AI-based Systems: A Multivocal Literature Review and Pattern Repository
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Systems with artificial intelligence components, so-called AI-based systems, have gained considerable attention recently. However, many organizations have issues with achieving production readiness with such systems. As a means to improve certain software quality attributes and to address frequently occurring problems, design patterns represent proven solution blueprints. While new patterns for AI-based systems are emerging, existing patterns have also been adapted to this new context. The goal of this study is to provide an overview of design patterns for AI-based systems, both new and adapted ones. We want to collect and categorize patterns, and make them accessible for researchers and practitioners. To this end, we first performed a multivocal literature review (MLR) to collect design patterns used with AI-based systems. We then integrated the created pattern collection into a web-based pattern repository to make the patterns browsable and easy to find. As a result, we selected 51 resources (35 white and 16 gray ones), from which we extracted 70 unique patterns used for AI-based systems. Among these are 34 new patterns and 36 traditional ones that have been adapted to this context. Popular pattern categories include "architecture" (25 patterns), "deployment" (16), "implementation" (9), or "security & safety" (9). While some patterns with four or more mentions already seem established, the majority of patterns have only been mentioned once or twice (51 patterns). Our results in this emerging field can be used by researchers as a foundation for follow-up studies and by practitioners to discover relevant patterns for informing the design of AI-based systems.
A Multiple Linear Regression Analysis to Measure the Journal Contribution to the Social Attention of Research
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2023
Year: 2023

This paper proposes a three-year average of social attention as a more reliable measure of social impact for journals, since the social attention of research can vary widely among scientific articles, even within the same journal. The proposed measure is used to evaluate a journal's contribution to social attention in comparison to other bibliometric indicators. The study uses Dimensions as a data source and examines research articles from 76 disciplinary library and information science journals through multiple linear regression analysis. The study identifies socially influential journals whose contribution to social attention is twice that of scholarly impact as measured by citations. In addition, the study finds that the number of authors and open access have a moderate impact on social attention, while the journal impact factor has a negative impact and funding has a small impact.
Taking A Closer Look at Visual Relation: Unbiased Video Scene Graph Generation with Decoupled Label Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Current video-based scene graph generation (VidSGG) methods have been found to perform poorly on predicting predicates that are less represented due to the inherent biased distribution in the training data. In this paper, we take a closer look at the predicates and identify that most visual relations (e.g. sit_above) involve both actional pattern (sit) and spatial pattern (above), while the distribution bias is much less severe at the pattern level. Based on this insight, we propose a decoupled label learning (DLL) paradigm to address the intractable visual relation prediction from the pattern-level perspective. Specifically, DLL decouples the predicate labels and adopts separate classifiers to learn actional and spatial patterns respectively. The patterns are then combined and mapped back to the predicate. Moreover, we propose a knowledge-level label decoupling method to transfer non-target knowledge from head predicates to tail predicates within the same pattern to calibrate the distribution of tail classes. We validate the effectiveness of DLL on the commonly used VidSGG benchmark, i.e. VidVRD. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the DLL offers a remarkably simple but highly effective solution to the long-tailed problem, achieving the state-of-the-art VidSGG performance.
Stochastic Graph Neural Network-based Value Decomposition for MARL in Internet of Vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2023
Year: 2023

Autonomous driving has witnessed incredible advances in the past several decades, while Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) promises to satisfy the essential need of autonomous vehicle control in a wireless connected vehicle networks. In MARL, how to effectively decompose a global feedback into the relative contributions of individual agents belongs to one of the most fundamental problems. However, the environment volatility due to vehicle movement and wireless disturbance could significantly shape time-varying topological relationships among agents, thus making the Value Decomposition (VD) challenging. Therefore, in order to cope with this annoying volatility, it becomes imperative to design a dynamic VD framework. Hence, in this paper, we propose a novel Stochastic VMIX (SVMIX) methodology by taking account of dynamic topological features during the VD and incorporating the corresponding components into a multi-agent actor-critic architecture. In particular, Stochastic Graph Neural Network (SGNN) is leveraged to effectively capture underlying dynamics in topological features and improve the flexibility of VD against the environment volatility. Finally, the superiority of SVMIX is verified through extensive simulations.
Confidence-Aware and Self-Supervised Image Anomaly Localisation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Universal anomaly detection still remains a challenging problem in machine learning and medical image analysis. It is possible to learn an expected distribution from a single class of normative samples, e.g., through epistemic uncertainty estimates, auto-encoding models, or from synthetic anomalies in a self-supervised way. The performance of self-supervised anomaly detection approaches is still inferior compared to methods that use examples from known unknown classes to shape the decision boundary. However, outlier exposure methods often do not identify unknown unknowns. Here we discuss an improved self-supervised single-class training strategy that supports the approximation of probabilistic inference with loosen feature locality constraints. We show that up-scaling of gradients with histogram-equalised images is beneficial for recently proposed self-supervision tasks. Our method is integrated into several out-of-distribution (OOD) detection models and we show evidence that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art on various benchmark datasets.
Nominal Sets in Agda -- A Fresh and Immature Mechanization
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper we present our current development on a new formalization of nominal sets in Agda. Our first motivation in having another formalization was to understand better nominal sets and to have a playground for testing type systems based on nominal logic. Not surprisingly, we have independently built up the same hierarchy of types leading to nominal sets. We diverge from other formalizations in how to conceive finite permutations: in our formalization a finite permutation is a permutation (i.e. a bijection) whose domain is finite. Finite permutations have different representations, for instance as compositions of transpositions (the predominant in other formalizations) or compositions of disjoint cycles. We prove that these representations are equivalent and use them to normalize (up to composition order of independent transpositions) compositions of transpositions.
Paraconsistent Transition Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2023
Year: 2023

Often in Software Engineering, a modeling formalism has to support scenarios of inconsistency in which several requirements either reinforce or contradict each other. Paraconsistent transition systems are proposed in this paper as one such formalism: states evolve through two accessibility relations capturing weighted evidence of a transition or its absence, respectively. Their weights come from a specific residuated lattice. A category of these systems, and the corresponding algebra, is defined as providing a formal setting to model different application scenarios. One of them, dealing with the effect of quantum decoherence in quantum programs, is used for illustration purposes.
ReLo: a Dynamic Logic to Reason About Reo Circuits
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2023
Year: 2023

Critical systems require high reliability and are present in many domains. They are systems in which failure may result in financial damage or even loss of lives. Standard techniques of software engineering are not enough to ensure the absence of unacceptable failures and/or that critical requirements are fulfilled. Reo is a component-based modelling language that aims to provide a framework to build software based on existing pieces of software, which has been used in a wide variety of domains. Its formal semantics provides grounds to certify that systems based on Reo models satisfy specific requirements (i.e., absence of deadlocks). Current logical approaches for reasoning over Reo require the conversion of formal semantics into a logical framework. ReLo is a dynamic logic that naturally subsumes Reo's semantics. It provides a means to reason over Reo circuits. This work extends ReLo by introducing the iteration operator, and soundness and completeness proofs for its axiomatization.
GETT-QA: Graph Embedding based T2T Transformer for Knowledge Graph Question Answering
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

In this work, we present an end-to-end Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) system named GETT-QA. GETT-QA uses T5, a popular text-to-text pre-trained language model. The model takes a question in natural language as input and produces a simpler form of the intended SPARQL query. In the simpler form, the model does not directly produce entity and relation IDs. Instead, it produces corresponding entity and relation labels. The labels are grounded to KG entity and relation IDs in a subsequent step. To further improve the results, we instruct the model to produce a truncated version of the KG embedding for each entity. The truncated KG embedding enables a finer search for disambiguation purposes. We find that T5 is able to learn the truncated KG embeddings without any change of loss function, improving KGQA performance. As a result, we report strong results for LC-QuAD 2.0 and SimpleQuestions-Wikidata datasets on end-to-end KGQA over Wikidata.
LABRAD-OR: Lightweight Memory Scene Graphs for Accurate Bimodal Reasoning in Dynamic Operating Rooms
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Modern surgeries are performed in complex and dynamic settings, including ever-changing interactions between medical staff, patients, and equipment. The holistic modeling of the operating room (OR) is, therefore, a challenging but essential task, with the potential to optimize the performance of surgical teams and aid in developing new surgical technologies to improve patient outcomes. The holistic representation of surgical scenes as semantic scene graphs (SGG), where entities are represented as nodes and relations between them as edges, is a promising direction for fine-grained semantic OR understanding. We propose, for the first time, the use of temporal information for more accurate and consistent holistic OR modeling. Specifically, we introduce memory scene graphs, where the scene graphs of previous time steps act as the temporal representation guiding the current prediction. We design an end-to-end architecture that intelligently fuses the temporal information of our lightweight memory scene graphs with the visual information from point clouds and images. We evaluate our method on the 4D-OR dataset and demonstrate that integrating temporality leads to more accurate and consistent results achieving an +5% increase and a new SOTA of 0.88 in macro F1. This work opens the path for representing the entire surgery history with memory scene graphs and improves the holistic understanding in the OR. Introducing scene graphs as memory representations can offer a valuable tool for many temporal understanding tasks.
Considerations on the Evaluation of Biometric Quality Assessment Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Quality assessment algorithms can be used to estimate the utility of a biometric sample for the purpose of biometric recognition. "Error versus Discard Characteristic" (EDC) plots, and "partial Area Under Curve" (pAUC) values of curves therein, are generally used by researchers to evaluate the predictive performance of such quality assessment algorithms. An EDC curve depends on an error type such as the "False Non Match Rate" (FNMR), a quality assessment algorithm, a biometric recognition system, a set of comparisons each corresponding to a biometric sample pair, and a comparison score threshold corresponding to a starting error. To compute an EDC curve, comparisons are progressively discarded based on the associated samples' lowest quality scores, and the error is computed for the remaining comparisons. Additionally, a discard fraction limit or range must be selected to compute pAUC values, which can then be used to quantitatively rank quality assessment algorithms. This paper discusses and analyses various details for this kind of quality assessment algorithm evaluation, including general EDC properties, interpretability improvements for pAUC values based on a hard lower error limit and a soft upper error limit, the use of relative instead of discrete rankings, stepwise vs. linear curve interpolation, and normalisation of quality scores to a [0, 100] integer range. We also analyse the stability of quantitative quality assessment algorithm rankings based on pAUC values across varying pAUC discard fraction limits and starting errors, concluding that higher pAUC discard fraction limits should be preferred. The analyses are conducted both with synthetic data and with real face image and fingerprint data, with a focus on general modality-independent conclusions for EDC evaluations. Various EDC alternatives are discussed as well.
New Results on Single User Massive MIMO
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Achieving high bit rates is the main goal of wireless technologies like 5G and beyond. This translates to obtaining high spectral efficiencies using large number of antennas at the transmitter and receiver (single user massive multiple input multiple output or SU-MMIMO). It is possible to have a large number of antennas in the mobile handset at mm-wave frequencies in the range $30 - 300$ GHz due to the small antenna size. In this work, we investigate the bit-error-rate (BER) performance of SU-MMIMO in two scenarios (a) using serially concatenated turbo code (SCTC) in uncorrelated channel and (b) parallel concatenated turbo code (PCTC) in correlated channel. Computer simulation results indicate that the BER is quite insensitive to re-transmissions and wide variations in the number of transmit and receive antennas. Moreover, we have obtained a BER of $10^{-5}$ at an average signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR) per bit of just 1.25 dB with 512 transmit and receive antennas ($512\times 512$ SU-MMIMO system) with a spectral efficiency of 256 bits/transmission or 256 bits/sec/Hz in an uncorrelated channel. Similar BER results have been obtained for SU-MMIMO using PCTC in correlated channel. A semi-analytic approach to estimating the BER of a turbo code has been derived.
Increasing Textual Context Size Boosts Medical Image-Text Matching
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

This short technical report demonstrates a simple technique that yields state of the art results in medical image-text matching tasks. We analyze the use of OpenAI's CLIP, a general image-text matching model, and observe that CLIP's limited textual input size has negative impact on downstream performance in the medical domain where encoding longer textual contexts is often required. We thus train and release ClipMD, which is trained with a simple sliding window technique to encode textual captions. ClipMD was tested on two medical image-text datasets and compared with other image-text matching models. The results show that ClipMD outperforms other models on both datasets by a large margin. We make our code and pretrained model publicly available.