OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Masked Spectrogram Prediction For Self-Supervised Audio Pre-Training
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

Transformer-based models attain excellent results and generalize well when trained on sufficient amounts of data. However, constrained by the limited data available in the audio domain, most transformer-based models for audio tasks are finetuned from pre-trained models in other domains (e.g. image), which has a notable gap with the audio domain. Other methods explore the self-supervised learning approaches directly in the audio domain but currently do not perform well in the downstream tasks. In this paper, we present a novel self-supervised learning method for transformer-based audio models, called masked spectrogram prediction (MaskSpec), to learn powerful audio representations from unlabeled audio data (AudioSet used in this paper). Our method masks random patches of the input spectrogram and reconstructs the masked regions with an encoder-decoder architecture. Without using extra model weights or supervision, experimental results on multiple downstream datasets demonstrate MaskSpec achieves a significant performance gain against the supervised methods and outperforms the previous pre-trained models. In particular, our best model reaches the performance of 0.471 (mAP) on AudioSet, 0.854 (mAP) on OpenMIC2018, 0.982 (accuracy) on ESC-50, 0.976 (accuracy) on SCV2, and 0.823 (accuracy) on DCASE2019 Task1A respectively.
Run Time Analysis for Random Local Search on Generalized Majority Functions
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2022
Year: 2022

Run time analysis of evolutionary algorithms recently makes significant progress in linking algorithm performance to algorithm parameters. However, settings that study the impact of problem parameters are rare. The recently proposed W-model provides a good framework for such analyses, generating pseudo-Boolean optimization problems with tunable properties. We initiate theoretical research of the W-model by studying how one of its properties -- neutrality -- influences the run time of random local search. Neutrality creates plateaus in the search space by first performing a majority vote for subsets of the solution candidate and then evaluating the smaller-dimensional string via a low-level fitness function. We prove upper bounds for the expected run time of random local search on this MAJORITY problem for its entire parameter spectrum. To this end, we provide a theorem, applicable to many optimization algorithms, that links the run time of MAJORITY with its symmetric version HASMAJORITY, where a sufficient majority is needed to optimize the subset. We also introduce a generalized version of classic drift theorems as well as a generalized version of Wald's equation, both of which we believe to be of independent interest.
An Empirical Evaluation of Flow Based Programming in the Machine Learning Deployment Context
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

As use of data driven technologies spreads, software engineers are more often faced with the task of solving a business problem using data-driven methods such as machine learning (ML) algorithms. Deployment of ML within large software systems brings new challenges that are not addressed by standard engineering practices and as a result businesses observe high rate of ML deployment project failures. Data Oriented Architecture (DOA) is an emerging approach that can support data scientists and software developers when addressing such challenges. However, there is a lack of clarity about how DOA systems should be implemented in practice. This paper proposes to consider Flow-Based Programming (FBP) as a paradigm for creating DOA applications. We empirically evaluate FBP in the context of ML deployment on four applications that represent typical data science projects. We use Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) as a baseline for comparison. Evaluation is done with respect to different application domains, ML deployment stages, and code quality metrics. Results reveal that FBP is a suitable paradigm for data collection and data science tasks, and is able to simplify data collection and discovery when compared with SOA. We discuss the advantages of FBP as well as the gaps that need to be addressed to increase FBP adoption as a standard design paradigm for DOA.
LyS_ACoruña at SemEval-2022 Task 10: Repurposing Off-the-Shelf Tools for Sentiment Analysis as Semantic Dependency Parsing
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

This paper addressed the problem of structured sentiment analysis using a bi-affine semantic dependency parser, large pre-trained language models, and publicly available translation models. For the monolingual setup, we considered: (i) training on a single treebank, and (ii) relaxing the setup by training on treebanks coming from different languages that can be adequately processed by cross-lingual language models. For the zero-shot setup and a given target treebank, we relied on: (i) a word-level translation of available treebanks in other languages to get noisy, unlikely-grammatical, but annotated data (we release as much of it as licenses allow), and (ii) merging those translated treebanks to obtain training data. In the post-evaluation phase, we also trained cross-lingual models that simply merged all the English treebanks and did not use word-level translations, and yet obtained better results. According to the official results, we ranked 8th and 9th in the monolingual and cross-lingual setups.
Maritime Communications: A Survey on Enabling Technologies, Opportunities, and Challenges
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2022
Year: 2022

Water covers 71% of the Earth's surface, where the steady increase in oceanic activities has promoted the need for reliable maritime communication technologies. The existing maritime communication systems involve terrestrial, aerial, and satellite networks. This paper presents a holistic overview of the different forms of maritime communications and provides the latest advances in various marine technologies. The paper first introduces the different techniques used for maritime communications over the RF and optical bands. Then, we present the channel models for RF and optical bands, modulation and coding schemes, coverage and capacity, and radio resource management in maritime communications. After that, the paper presents some emerging use cases of maritime networks, such as the Internet of Ships (IoS) and the ship-to-underwater Internet of things (IoT). Finally, we highlight a few exciting open challenges and identify a set of future research directions for maritime communication, including bringing broadband connectivity to the deep sea, using THz and visible light signals for on-board applications, and data-driven modeling for radio and optical marine propagation.
BBBD: Bounding Box Based Detector for Occlusion Detection and Order Recovery
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Occlusion handling is one of the challenges of object detection and segmentation, and scene understanding. Because objects appear differently when they are occluded in varying degree, angle, and locations. Therefore, determining the existence of occlusion between objects and their order in a scene is a fundamental requirement for semantic understanding. Existing works mostly use deep learning based models to retrieve the order of the instances in an image or for occlusion detection. This requires labelled occluded data and it is time consuming. In this paper, we propose a simpler and faster method that can perform both operations without any training and only requires the modal segmentation masks. For occlusion detection, instead of scanning the two objects entirely, we only focus on the intersected area between their bounding boxes. Similarly, we use the segmentation mask inside the same area to recover the depth-ordering. When tested on COCOA dataset, our method achieves +8% and +5% more accuracy than the baselines in order recovery and occlusion detection respectively.
Prediction Approach against DDoS Attack based on Machine Learning Multiclassfier
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

DDoS attacks, also known as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, have emerged as one of the most serious and fastest-growing threats on the Internet. Denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are an example of cyber attacks that target a specific system or network in an attempt to render it inaccessible or unusable for a period of time. As a result, improving the detection of diverse types of DDoS cyber threats with better algorithms and higher accuracy while keeping the computational cost under control has become the most significant component of detecting DDoS cyber threats. In order to properly defend the targeted network or system, it is critical to first determine the sort of DDoS assault that has been launched against it. A number of ensemble classification techniques are presented in this paper, which combines the performance of various algorithms. They are then compared to existing Machine Learning Algorithms in terms of their effectiveness in detecting different types of DDoS attacks using accuracy, F1 scores, and ROC curves. The results show high accuracy and good performance.
Memory-Disaggregated In-Memory Object Store Framework for Big Data Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

The concept of memory disaggregation has recently been gaining traction in research. With memory disaggregation, data center compute nodes can directly access memory on adjacent nodes and are therefore able to overcome local memory restrictions, introducing a new data management paradigm for distributed computing. This paper proposes and demonstrates a memory disaggregated in-memory object store framework for big data applications by leveraging the newly introduced ThymesisFlow memory disaggregation system. The framework extends the functionality of the pre-existing Apache Arrow Plasma object store framework to distributed systems by enabling clients to easily and efficiently produce and consume data objects across multiple compute nodes. This allows big data applications to increasingly leverage parallel processing at reduced development costs. In addition, the paper includes latency and throughput measurements that indicate only a modest performance penalty is incurred for remote disaggregated memory access as opposed to local (~6.5 vs ~5.75 GiB/s). The results can be used to guide the design of future systems that leverage memory disaggregation as well as the newly presented framework. This work is open-source and publicly accessible at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6368998.
Characterizing Visualization Insights through Entity-Based Interaction: An Exploratory Study
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

One of the primary purposes of visualization is to assist users in discovering insights. While there has been much research in information visualization aiming at complex data transformation and novel presentation techniques, relatively little has been done to understand how users derive insights through interactive visualization of data. This paper presents a crowdsourced study with 158 participants investigating the relation between entity-based interaction (an action + its target entity) and the resulting insight. To this end, we generalized the interaction with an existing CO2 Explorer as entity-based interaction and enabled users to input notes and refer to relevant entities to assist their narratives. We logged interactions of users freely exploring the visualization and characterized their externalized insights about the data. Using entity-based interactions and references to infer insight characteristics (category, overview versus detail, and prior knowledge), we found evidence that compared with interactions, entity references improved insight characterization from slight/fair to fair/moderate agreements. To interpret prediction outcomes, feature importance and correlation analysis indicated that, e.g., detailed insights tended to have more mouse-overs in the chart area and cite the vertical reference lines in the line chart as evidence. We discuss study limitations and implications on knowledge-assisted visualization, e.g., insight recommendations based on user exploration.
A Survey on Formal Verification Approaches for Dependable Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

The complexity of digital embedded systems has been increasing in different safety-critical applications such as industrial automation, process control, transportation, and medical digital devices. The correct operation of these systems relies too heavily on the behavior of the embedded digital device. As a result, any mistake or error made during the design stage of the embedded device can change the overall functionality of the critical system and cause catastrophic consequences. To detect these errors and eliminate their effects on the system, new error detection approaches must be innovated and used in the design of the digital system. However, these methods require enormous costs and time. One of these methods being employed to solve this issue is called Verification and Validation (V&V) which confirms that the system behavior meets the requirements early in the development process, before moving on to the implementation phase. Because of their benefits and importance in the building of complex digital systems, the employment of formal V&V methods has recently attracted a lot of attention. This paper focuses on presenting various studies on formal verification approaches and how the V&V can be achieved for developing high dependable digital embedded systems
GypSum: Learning Hybrid Representations for Code Summarization
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

Code summarization with deep learning has been widely studied in recent years. Current deep learning models for code summarization generally follow the principle in neural machine translation and adopt the encoder-decoder framework, where the encoder learns the semantic representations from source code and the decoder transforms the learnt representations into human-readable text that describes the functionality of code snippets. Despite they achieve the new state-of-the-art performance, we notice that current models often either generate less fluent summaries, or fail to capture the core functionality, since they usually focus on a single type of code representations. As such we propose GypSum, a new deep learning model that learns hybrid representations using graph attention neural networks and a pre-trained programming and natural language model. We introduce particular edges related to the control flow of a code snippet into the abstract syntax tree for graph construction, and design two encoders to learn from the graph and the token sequence of source code, respectively. We modify the encoder-decoder sublayer in the Transformer's decoder to fuse the representations and propose a dual-copy mechanism to facilitate summary generation. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of GypSum over existing code summarization models.
Domain Knowledge-Infused Deep Learning for Automated Analog/Radio-Frequency Circuit Parameter Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

The design automation of analog circuits is a longstanding challenge. This paper presents a reinforcement learning method enhanced by graph learning to automate the analog circuit parameter optimization at the pre-layout stage, i.e., finding device parameters to fulfill desired circuit specifications. Unlike all prior methods, our approach is inspired by human experts who rely on domain knowledge of analog circuit design (e.g., circuit topology and couplings between circuit specifications) to tackle the problem. By originally incorporating such key domain knowledge into policy training with a multimodal network, the method best learns the complex relations between circuit parameters and design targets, enabling optimal decisions in the optimization process. Experimental results on exemplary circuits show it achieves human-level design accuracy (99%) 1.5X efficiency of existing best-performing methods. Our method also shows better generalization ability to unseen specifications and optimality in circuit performance optimization. Moreover, it applies to design radio-frequency circuits on emerging semiconductor technologies, breaking the limitations of prior learning methods in designing conventional analog circuits.
Towards assessing agricultural land suitability with causal machine learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Understanding the suitability of agricultural land for applying specific management practices is of great importance for sustainable and resilient agriculture against climate change. Recent developments in the field of causal machine learning enable the estimation of intervention impacts on an outcome of interest, for samples described by a set of observed characteristics. We introduce an extensible data-driven framework that leverages earth observations and frames agricultural land suitability as a geospatial impact assessment problem, where the estimated effects of agricultural practices on agroecosystems serve as a land suitability score and guide decision making. We formulate this as a causal machine learning task and discuss how this approach can be used for agricultural planning in a changing climate. Specifically, we extract the agricultural management practices of "crop rotation" and "landscape crop diversity" from crop type maps, account for climate and land use data, and use double machine learning to estimate their heterogeneous effect on Net Primary Productivity (NPP), within the Flanders region of Belgium from 2010 to 2020. We find that the effect of crop rotation was insignificant, while landscape crop diversity had a small negative effect on NPP. Finally, we observe considerable effect heterogeneity in space for both practices and analyze it.
Binding Actions to Objects in World Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

We study the problem of binding actions to objects in object-factored world models using action-attention mechanisms. We propose two attention mechanisms for binding actions to objects, soft attention and hard attention, which we evaluate in the context of structured world models for five environments. Our experiments show that hard attention helps contrastively-trained structured world models to learn to separate individual objects in an object-based grid-world environment. Further, we show that soft attention increases performance of factored world models trained on a robotic manipulation task. The learned action attention weights can be used to interpret the factored world model as the attention focuses on the manipulated object in the environment.
High-quality Conversational Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

Conversational systems or chatbots are an example of AI-Infused Applications (AIIA). Chatbots are especially important as they are often the first interaction of clients with a business and are the entry point of a business into the AI (Artificial Intelligence) world. The quality of the chatbot is, therefore, key. However, as is the case in general with AIIAs, it is especially challenging to assess and control the quality of chatbot systems. Beyond the inherent statistical nature of these systems, where occasional failure is acceptable, we identify two major challenges. The first is to release an initial system that is of sufficient quality such that humans will interact with it. The second is to maintain the quality, enhance its capabilities, improve it and make necessary adjustments based on changing user requests or drift. These challenges exist because it is impossible to predict the real distribution of user requests and the natural language they will use to express these requests. Moreover, any empirical distribution of requests is likely to change over time. This may be due to periodicity, changing usage, and drift of topics. We provide a methodology and set of technologies to address these challenges and to provide automated assistance through a human-in-the-loop approach. We notice that it is crucial to connect between the different phases in the lifecycle of the chatbot development and to make sure it provides its expected business value. For example, that it frees human agents to deal with tasks other than answering human users. Our methodology and technologies apply during chatbot training in the pre-production phase, through to chatbot usage in the field in the post-production phase. They implement the `test first' paradigm by assisting in agile design, and support continuous integration through actionable insights.
On the Relationship Between Explanations, Fairness Perceptions, and Decisions
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

It is known that recommendations of AI-based systems can be incorrect or unfair. Hence, it is often proposed that a human be the final decision-maker. Prior work has argued that explanations are an essential pathway to help human decision-makers enhance decision quality and mitigate bias, i.e., facilitate human-AI complementarity. For these benefits to materialize, explanations should enable humans to appropriately rely on AI recommendations and override the algorithmic recommendation when necessary to increase distributive fairness of decisions. The literature, however, does not provide conclusive empirical evidence as to whether explanations enable such complementarity in practice. In this work, we (a) provide a conceptual framework to articulate the relationships between explanations, fairness perceptions, reliance, and distributive fairness, (b) apply it to understand (seemingly) contradictory research findings at the intersection of explanations and fairness, and (c) derive cohesive implications for the formulation of research questions and the design of experiments.
Improving Multimodal Speech Recognition by Data Augmentation and Speech Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

Multimodal speech recognition aims to improve the performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems by leveraging additional visual information that is usually associated to the audio input. While previous approaches make crucial use of strong visual representations, e.g. by finetuning pretrained image recognition networks, significantly less attention has been paid to its counterpart: the speech component. In this work, we investigate ways of improving the base speech recognition system by following similar techniques to the ones used for the visual encoder, namely, transferring representations and data augmentation. First, we show that starting from a pretrained ASR significantly improves the state-of-the-art performance; remarkably, even when building upon a strong unimodal system, we still find gains by including the visual modality. Second, we employ speech data augmentation techniques to encourage the multimodal system to attend to the visual stimuli. This technique replaces previously used word masking and comes with the benefits of being conceptually simpler and yielding consistent improvements in the multimodal setting. We provide empirical results on three multimodal datasets, including the newly introduced Localized Narratives.