OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
FLACOCO: Fault Localization for Java based on Industry-grade Coverage
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Fault localization is an essential step in the debugging process. Spectrum-Based Fault Localization (SBFL) is a popular fault localization family of techniques, utilizing code-coverage to predict suspicious lines of code. In this paper, we present FLACOCO, a new fault localization tool for Java. The key novelty of FLACOCO is that it is built on top of one of the most used and most reliable coverage libraries for Java, JaCoCo. FLACOCO is made available through a well-designed command-line interface and Java API and supports all Java versions. We validate FLACOCO on two use-cases from the automatic program repair domain by reproducing previous scientific experiments. We find it is capable of effectively replacing the state-of-the-art FL library. Overall, we hope that FLACOCO will help research in fault localization as well as industry adoption thanks to being founded on industry-grade code coverage. An introductory video is available at https://youtu.be/RFRyvQuwRYA
IMBENS: Ensemble Class-imbalanced Learning in Python
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

imbalanced-ensemble, abbreviated as imbens, is an open-source Python toolbox for leveraging the power of ensemble learning to address the class imbalance problem. It provides standard implementations of popular ensemble imbalanced learning (EIL) methods with extended features and utility functions. These ensemble methods include resampling-based, e.g., under/over-sampling, and reweighting-based, e.g., cost-sensitive learning. Beyond the implementation, we empower EIL algorithms with new functionalities like customizable resampling scheduler and verbose logging, thus enabling more flexible training and evaluating strategies. The package was developed under a simple, well-documented API design that follows scikit-learn for increased ease of use. imbens is released under the MIT open-source license and can be installed from Python Package Index (PyPI) or https://github.com/ZhiningLiu1998/imbalanced-ensemble.
Spatio-Temporal Joint Graph Convolutional Networks for Traffic Forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Recent studies have shifted their focus towards formulating traffic forecasting as a spatio-temporal graph modeling problem. Typically, they constructed a static spatial graph at each time step and then connected each node with itself between adjacent time steps to create a spatio-temporal graph. However, this approach failed to explicitly reflect the correlations between different nodes at different time steps, thus limiting the learning capability of graph neural networks. Additionally, those models overlooked the dynamic spatio-temporal correlations among nodes by using the same adjacency matrix across different time steps. To address these limitations, we propose a novel approach called Spatio-Temporal Joint Graph Convolutional Networks (STJGCN) for accurate traffic forecasting on road networks over multiple future time steps. Specifically, our method encompasses the construction of both pre-defined and adaptive spatio-temporal joint graphs (STJGs) between any two time steps, which represent comprehensive and dynamic spatio-temporal correlations. We further introduce dilated causal spatio-temporal joint graph convolution layers on the STJG to capture spatio-temporal dependencies from distinct perspectives with multiple ranges. To aggregate information from different ranges, we propose a multi-range attention mechanism. Finally, we evaluate our approach on five public traffic datasets and experimental results demonstrate that STJGCN is not only computationally efficient but also outperforms 11 state-of-the-art baseline methods.
A New Multifractal-based Deep Learning Model for Text Mining
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

In this world full of uncertainty, where the fabric of existence weaves patterns of complexity, multifractal emerges as beacons of insight, illuminating them. As we delve into the realm of text mining that underpins various natural language processing applications and powers a range of intelligent services, we recognize that behind the veil of text lies a manifestation of human thought and cognition, intricately intertwined with the complexities. Building upon the foundation of perceiving text as a complex system, this study embarks on a journey to unravel the hidden treasures within, armed with the proposed multifractal method that deciphers the multifractal attributes embedded within the text landscape. This endeavor culminates in the birth of our novel model, which also harnesses the power of the proposed activation function to facilitate nonlinear information transmission within its neural network architecture. The success on experiments anchored in real-world technical reports covering the extraction of technical term and classification of hazard events, stands as a testament to our endeavors. This research venture not only expands our understanding of text mining but also opens new horizons for knowledge discovery across various domains.
Emergent Graphical Conventions in a Visual Communication Game
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Humans communicate with graphical sketches apart from symbolic languages. Primarily focusing on the latter, recent studies of emergent communication overlook the sketches; they do not account for the evolution process through which symbolic sign systems emerge in the trade-off between iconicity and symbolicity. In this work, we take the very first step to model and simulate this process via two neural agents playing a visual communication game; the sender communicates with the receiver by sketching on a canvas. We devise a novel reinforcement learning method such that agents are evolved jointly towards successful communication and abstract graphical conventions. To inspect the emerged conventions, we define three fundamental properties -- iconicity, symbolicity, and semanticity -- and design evaluation methods accordingly. Our experimental results under different controls are consistent with the observation in studies of human graphical conventions. Of note, we find that evolved sketches can preserve the continuum of semantics under proper environmental pressures. More interestingly, co-evolved agents can switch between conventionalized and iconic communication based on their familiarity with referents. We hope the present research can pave the path for studying emergent communication with the modality of sketches.
Mitigating Adversarial Attacks by Distributing Different Copies to Different Users
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Machine learning models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In this paper, we consider the scenario where a model is distributed to multiple buyers, among which a malicious buyer attempts to attack another buyer. The malicious buyer probes its copy of the model to search for adversarial samples and then presents the found samples to the victim's copy of the model in order to replicate the attack. We point out that by distributing different copies of the model to different buyers, we can mitigate the attack such that adversarial samples found on one copy would not work on another copy. We observed that training a model with different randomness indeed mitigates such replication to a certain degree. However, there is no guarantee and retraining is computationally expensive. A number of works extended the retraining method to enhance the differences among models. However, a very limited number of models can be produced using such methods and the computational cost becomes even higher. Therefore, we propose a flexible parameter rewriting method that directly modifies the model's parameters. This method does not require additional training and is able to generate a large number of copies in a more controllable manner, where each copy induces different adversarial regions. Experimentation studies show that rewriting can significantly mitigate the attacks while retaining high classification accuracy. For instance, on GTSRB dataset with respect to Hop Skip Jump attack, using attractor-based rewriter can reduce the success rate of replicating the attack to 0.5% while independently training copies with different randomness can reduce the success rate to 6.5%. From this study, we believe that there are many further directions worth exploring.
Approximate Spectral Decomposition of Fisher Information Matrix for Simple ReLU Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We argue the Fisher information matrix (FIM) of one hidden layer networks with the ReLU activation function. For a network, let $W$ denote the $d \times p$ weight matrix from the $d$-dimensional input to the hidden layer consisting of $p$ neurons, and $v$ the $p$-dimensional weight vector from the hidden layer to the scalar output. We focus on the FIM of $v$, which we denote as $I$. Under certain conditions, we characterize the first three clusters of eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the FIM. Specifically, we show that 1) Since $I$ is non-negative owing to the ReLU, the first eigenvalue is the Perron-Frobenius eigenvalue. 2) For the cluster of the next maximum values, the eigenspace is spanned by the row vectors of $W$. 3) The direct sum of the eigenspace of the first eigenvalue and that of the third cluster is spanned by the set of all the vectors obtained as the Hadamard product of any pair of the row vectors of $W$. We confirmed by numerical calculation that the above is approximately correct when the number of hidden nodes is about 10000.
Object-Aware Cropping for Self-Supervised Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

A core component of the recent success of self-supervised learning is cropping data augmentation, which selects sub-regions of an image to be used as positive views in the self-supervised loss. The underlying assumption is that randomly cropped and resized regions of a given image share information about the objects of interest, which the learned representation will capture. This assumption is mostly satisfied in datasets such as ImageNet where there is a large, centered object, which is highly likely to be present in random crops of the full image. However, in other datasets such as OpenImages or COCO, which are more representative of real world uncurated data, there are typically multiple small objects in an image. In this work, we show that self-supervised learning based on the usual random cropping performs poorly on such datasets. We propose replacing one or both of the random crops with crops obtained from an object proposal algorithm. This encourages the model to learn both object and scene level semantic representations. Using this approach, which we call object-aware cropping, results in significant improvements over scene cropping on classification and object detection benchmarks. For example, on OpenImages, our approach achieves an improvement of 8.8% mAP over random scene-level cropping using MoCo-v2 based pre-training. We also show significant improvements on COCO and PASCAL-VOC object detection and segmentation tasks over the state-of-the-art self-supervised learning approaches. Our approach is efficient, simple and general, and can be used in most existing contrastive and non-contrastive self-supervised learning frameworks.
Stateful Entities: Object-oriented Cloud Applications as Distributed Dataflows
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

Although the cloud has reached a state of robustness, the burden of using its resources falls on the shoulders of programmers who struggle to keep up with ever-growing cloud infrastructure services and abstractions. As a result, state management, scaling, operation, and failure management of scalable cloud applications, require disproportionately more effort than developing the applications' actual business logic. Our vision aims to raise the abstraction level for programming scalable cloud applications by compiling stateful entities -- a programming model enabling imperative transactional programs authored in Python -- into stateful streaming dataflows. We propose a compiler pipeline that analyzes the abstract syntax tree of stateful entities and transforms them into an intermediate representation based on stateful dataflow graphs. It then compiles that intermediate representation into different dataflow engines, leveraging their exactly-once message processing guarantees to prevent state or failure management primitives from "leaking" into the level of the programming model. Preliminary experiments with a proof of concept implementation show that despite program transformation and translation to dataflows, stateful entities can perform at sub-100ms latency even for transactional workloads.
Inductive Subgraph Embedding for Link Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2023
Year: 2023

Graph representation learning (GRL) has emerged as a powerful technique for solving graph analytics tasks. It can effectively convert discrete graph data into a low-dimensional space where the graph structural information and graph properties are maximumly preserved. While there is rich literature on node and whole-graph representation learning, GRL for link is relatively less studied and less understood. One common practice in previous works is to generate link representations by directly aggregating the representations of their incident nodes, which is not capable of capturing effective link features. Moreover, common GRL methods usually rely on full-graph training, suffering from poor scalability and high resource consumption on large-scale graphs. In this paper, we design Subgraph Contrastive Link Representation Learning (SCLRL) -- a self-supervised link embedding framework, which utilizes the strong correlation between central links and their neighborhood subgraphs to characterize links. We extract the "link-centric induced subgraphs" as input, with a subgraph-level contrastive discrimination as pretext task, to learn the intrinsic and structural link features via subgraph mini-batch training. Extensive experiments conducted on five datasets demonstrate that SCLRL has significant performance advantages in link representation learning on benchmark datasets and prominent efficiency advantages in terms of training speed and memory consumption on large-scale graphs, when compared with existing link representation learning methods.
Probabilistic Approach for Road-Users Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Object detection in autonomous driving applications implies that the detection and tracking of semantic objects are commonly native to urban driving environments, as pedestrians and vehicles. One of the major challenges in state-of-the-art deep-learning based object detection are false positives which occur with overconfident scores. This is highly undesirable in autonomous driving and other critical robotic-perception domains because of safety concerns. This paper proposes an approach to alleviate the problem of overconfident predictions by introducing a novel probabilistic layer to deep object detection networks in testing. The suggested approach avoids the traditional Sigmoid or Softmax prediction layer which often produces overconfident predictions. It is demonstrated that the proposed technique reduces overconfidence in the false positives without degrading the performance on the true positives. The approach is validated on the 2D-KITTI objection detection through the YOLOV4 and SECOND (Lidar-based detector). The proposed approach enables interpretable probabilistic predictions without the requirement of re-training the network and therefore is very practical.
A Generic Graph Sparsification Framework using Deep Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The interconnectedness and interdependence of modern graphs are growing ever more complex, causing enormous resources for processing, storage, communication, and decision-making of these graphs. In this work, we focus on the task graph sparsification: an edge-reduced graph of a similar structure to the original graph is produced while various user-defined graph metrics are largely preserved. Existing graph sparsification methods are mostly sampling-based, which introduce high computation complexity in general and lack of flexibility for a different reduction objective. We present SparRL, the first generic and effective graph sparsification framework enabled by deep reinforcement learning. SparRL can easily adapt to different reduction goals and promise graph-size-independent complexity. Extensive experiments show that SparRL outperforms all prevailing sparsification methods in producing high-quality sparsified graphs concerning a variety of objectives.
VT-CLIP: Enhancing Vision-Language Models with Visual-guided Texts
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has drawn increasing attention recently for its transferable visual representation learning. However, due to the semantic gap within datasets, CLIP's pre-trained image-text alignment becomes sub-optimal on downstream tasks, which severely harms its transferring performance. To better adapt the cross-modality embedding space, we propose to enhance CLIP via Visual-guided Texts, named VT-CLIP. Specifically, we guide textual features of different categories to adaptively explore informative regions on the image and aggregate visual features by attention mechanisms. In this way, the texts become visual-guided, namely, more semantically correlated with downstream images, which greatly benefits the category-wise matching process. In few-shot settings, we evaluate our VT-CLIP on 11 well-known classification datasets to demonstrate its effectiveness.
Detecting DeFi Securities Violations from Token Smart Contract Code
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is a system of financial products and services built and delivered through smart contracts on various blockchains. In the past year, DeFi has gained popularity and market capitalization. However, it has also been connected to crime, in particular, various types of securities violations. The lack of Know Your Customer requirements in DeFi poses challenges to governments trying to mitigate potential offending in this space. This study aims to uncover whether this problem is suited to a machine learning approach, namely, whether we can identify DeFi projects potentially engaging in securities violations based on their tokens' smart contract code. We adapt prior work on detecting specific types of securities violations across Ethereum, building classifiers based on features extracted from DeFi projects' tokens' smart contract code (specifically, opcode-based features). Our final model is a random forest model that achieves an 80\% F-1 score against a baseline of 50\%. Notably, we further explore the code-based features that are most important to our model's performance in more detail, analyzing tokens' Solidity code and conducting cosine similarity analyses. We find that one element of the code our opcode-based features may be capturing is the implementation of the SafeMath library, though this does not account for the entirety of our features. Another contribution of our study is a new data set, comprised of (a) a verified ground truth data set for tokens involved in securities violations and (b) a set of legitimate tokens from a reputable DeFi aggregator. This paper further discusses the potential use of a model like ours by prosecutors in enforcement efforts and connects it to the wider legal context.
MDPFuzz: Testing Models Solving Markov Decision Processes
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

The Markov decision process (MDP) provides a mathematical framework for modeling sequential decision-making problems, many of which are crucial to security and safety, such as autonomous driving and robot control. The rapid development of artificial intelligence research has created efficient methods for solving MDPs, such as deep neural networks (DNNs), reinforcement learning (RL), and imitation learning (IL). However, these popular models solving MDPs are neither thoroughly tested nor rigorously reliable. We present MDPFuzz, the first blackbox fuzz testing framework for models solving MDPs. MDPFuzz forms testing oracles by checking whether the target model enters abnormal and dangerous states. During fuzzing, MDPFuzz decides which mutated state to retain by measuring if it can reduce cumulative rewards or form a new state sequence. We design efficient techniques to quantify the "freshness" of a state sequence using Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) and dynamic expectation-maximization (DynEM). We also prioritize states with high potential of revealing crashes by estimating the local sensitivity of target models over states. MDPFuzz is evaluated on five state-of-the-art models for solving MDPs, including supervised DNN, RL, IL, and multi-agent RL. Our evaluation includes scenarios of autonomous driving, aircraft collision avoidance, and two games that are often used to benchmark RL. During a 12-hour run, we find over 80 crash-triggering state sequences on each model. We show inspiring findings that crash-triggering states, though they look normal, induce distinct neuron activation patterns compared with normal states. We further develop an abnormal behavior detector to harden all the evaluated models and repair them with the findings of MDPFuzz to significantly enhance their robustness without sacrificing accuracy.
Physics Driven Deep Retinex Fusion for Adaptive Infrared and Visible Image Fusion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Convolutional neural networks have turned into an illustrious tool for image fusion and super-resolution. However, their excellent performance cannot work without large fixed-paired datasets; and additionally, these high-demanded ground truth data always cannot be obtained easily in fusion tasks. In this study, we show that, the structures of generative networks capture a great deal of image feature priors, and then these priors are sufficient to reconstruct high-quality fused super-resolution result using only low-resolution inputs. By this way, we propose a novel self-supervised dataset-free method for adaptive infrared (IR) and visible (VIS) image super-resolution fusion named Deep Retinex Fusion (DRF). The key idea of DRF is first generating component priors which are disentangled from physical model using our designed generative networks ZipperNet, LightingNet and AdjustingNet, then combining these priors which captured by networks via adaptive fusion loss functions based on Retinex theory, and finally reconstructing the super-resolution fusion results. Furthermore, in order to verify the effectiveness of our reported DRF, both qualitative and quantitative experiments via comparing with other state-of-the-art methods are performed using different test sets. These results prove that, comparing with large datasets trained methods, DRF which works without any dataset achieves the best super-resolution fusion performance; and more importantly, DRF can adaptively balance IR and VIS information and has good noise immunity. DRF codes are open source available at https://github.com/GuYuanjie/Deep-Retinex-fusion.