OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Quantitative Flavour of Robust Reachability
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2022
Year: 2022

Many software analysis techniques attempt to determine whether bugs are reachable, but for security purpose this is only part of the story as it does not indicate whether the bugs found could be easily triggered by an attacker. The recently introduced notion of robust reachability aims at filling this gap by distinguishing the input controlled by the attacker from those that are not. Yet, this qualitative notion may be too strong in practice, leaving apart bugs which are mostly but not fully replicable. We aim here at proposing a quantitative version of robust reachability, more flexible and still amenable to automation. We propose quantitative robustness, a metric expressing how easily an attacker can trigger a bug while taking into account that he can only influence part of the program input, together with a dedicated quantitative symbolic execution technique (QRSE). Interestingly, QRSE relies on a variant of model counting (namely, functional E-MAJSAT) unseen so far in formal verification, but which has been studied in AI domains such as Bayesian network, knowledge representation and probabilistic planning. Yet, the existing solving methods from these fields turn out to be unsatisfactory for formal verification purpose, leading us to propose a novel parametric method. These results have been implemented and evaluated over two security-relevant case studies, allowing to demonstrate the feasibility and relevance of our ideas.
Towards Scale Balanced 6-DoF Grasp Detection in Cluttered Scenes
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we focus on the problem of feature learning in the presence of scale imbalance for 6-DoF grasp detection and propose a novel approach to especially address the difficulty in dealing with small-scale samples. A Multi-scale Cylinder Grouping (MsCG) module is presented to enhance local geometry representation by combining multi-scale cylinder features and global context. Moreover, a Scale Balanced Learning (SBL) loss and an Object Balanced Sampling (OBS) strategy are designed, where SBL enlarges the gradients of the samples whose scales are in low frequency by apriori weights while OBS captures more points on small-scale objects with the help of an auxiliary segmentation network. They alleviate the influence of the uneven distribution of grasp scales in training and inference respectively. In addition, Noisy-clean Mix (NcM) data augmentation is introduced to facilitate training, aiming to bridge the domain gap between synthetic and raw scenes in an efficient way by generating more data which mix them into single ones at instance-level. Extensive experiments are conducted on the GraspNet-1Billion benchmark and competitive results are reached with significant gains on small-scale cases. Besides, the performance of real-world grasping highlights its generalization ability. Our code is available at https://github.com/mahaoxiang822/Scale-Balanced-Grasp.
A Hybrid Brain-Computer Interface Using Motor Imagery and SSVEP Based on Convolutional Neural Network
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

The key to electroencephalography (EEG)-based brain-computer interface (BCI) lies in neural decoding, and its accuracy can be improved by using hybrid BCI paradigms, that is, fusing multiple paradigms. However, hybrid BCIs usually require separate processing processes for EEG signals in each paradigm, which greatly reduces the efficiency of EEG feature extraction and the generalizability of the model. Here, we propose a two-stream convolutional neural network (TSCNN) based hybrid brain-computer interface. It combines steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) and motor imagery (MI) paradigms. TSCNN automatically learns to extract EEG features in the two paradigms in the training process, and improves the decoding accuracy by 25.4% compared with the MI mode, and 2.6% compared with SSVEP mode in the test data. Moreover, the versatility of TSCNN is verified as it provides considerable performance in both single-mode (70.2% for MI, 93.0% for SSVEP) and hybrid-mode scenarios (95.6% for MI-SSVEP hybrid). Our work will facilitate the real-world applications of EEG-based BCI systems.
Characterizing human collective behaviours of COVID-19 in Hong Kong
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2022
Year: 2022

People are likely to engage in collective behaviour online during extreme events, such as the COVID-19 crisis, to express their awareness, actions and concerns. Hong Kong has implemented stringent public health and social measures (PHSMs) to curb COVID-19 epidemic waves since the first COVID-19 case was confirmed on 22 January 2020. People are likely to engage in collective behaviour online during extreme events, such as the COVID-19 crisis, to express their awareness, actions and concerns. Here, we offer a framework to evaluate interactions among individuals emotions, perception, and online behaviours in Hong Kong during the first two waves (February to June 2020) and found a strong correlation between online behaviours of Google search and the real-time reproduction numbers. To validate the model output of risk perception, we conducted 10 rounds of cross-sectional telephone surveys from February 1 through June 20 in 2020 to quantify risk perception levels over time. Compared with the survey results, the estimates of the risk perception of individuals using our network-based mechanistic model capture 80% of the trend of people risk perception (individuals who worried about being infected) during the studied period. We may need to reinvigorate the public by engaging people as part of the solution to live their lives with reduced risk.
A systematic literature review on cyber threat hunting
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Since the term "Cyber threat hunting" was introduced in 2016, there have been a rising trend of proactive defensive measure to create more cyber security. This research will look into peer reviewed literature on the subject of cyber threat hunting. Our study shows an increase in the field with methods of machine learning.\\ Keywords: Cyber threat, Cyber security, threat hunting , security system, data driven, Intel, analytic driven, TTPs
MORTY: Structured Summarization for Targeted Information Extraction from Scholarly Articles
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Information extraction from scholarly articles is a challenging task due to the sizable document length and implicit information hidden in text, figures, and citations. Scholarly information extraction has various applications in exploration, archival, and curation services for digital libraries and knowledge management systems. We present MORTY, an information extraction technique that creates structured summaries of text from scholarly articles. Our approach condenses the article's full-text to property-value pairs as a segmented text snippet called structured summary. We also present a sizable scholarly dataset combining structured summaries retrieved from a scholarly knowledge graph and corresponding publicly available scientific articles, which we openly publish as a resource for the research community. Our results show that structured summarization is a suitable approach for targeted information extraction that complements other commonly used methods such as question answering and named entity recognition.
Bypassing Content-based internet packages with an SSL/TLS Tunnel, SNI Spoofing, and DNS spoofing
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are increasingly offering content-based packages to their clients. These packages offer access to a range of online content, such as Facebook, YouTube, Messenger, Zoom, and many other popular services, for a fixed price. This allows users to access all the content they want without worrying about data caps or overage charges. These packages are way cheaper than regular internet packages. Even some ISPs offer unlimited content-based packages for a low price. When using these packages, network traffic is continuously filtered by the ISP, and the user will be charged separately for using other services which are not included in the content-based package. Some internet users are using HTTP injector Software to bypass ISP's Network traffic filters and access other resources available on the internet using content-based package data quotes. This research aims to find an alternative method to bypass ISP's Network traffic filters without using an HTTP injector.
Comprehensive Complexity Assessment of Emerging Learned Image Compression on CPU and GPU
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2022
Year: 2022

Learned Compression (LC) is the emerging technology for compressing image and video content, using deep neural networks. Despite being new, LC methods have already gained a compression efficiency comparable to state-of-the-art image compression, such as HEVC or even VVC. However, the existing solutions often require a huge computational complexity, which discourages their adoption in international standards or products. This paper provides a comprehensive complexity assessment of several notable methods, that shed light on the matter, and guide the future development of this field by presenting key findings. To do so, six existing methods have been evaluated for both encoding and decoding, on CPU and GPU platforms. Various aspects of complexity such as the overall complexity, share of each coding module, number of operations, number of parameters, most demanding GPU kernels, and memory requirements have been measured and compared on Kodak dataset. The reported results (1) quantify the complexity of LC methods, (2) fairly compare different methods, and (3) a major contribution of the work is identifying and quantifying the key factors affecting the complexity.
SEPT: Towards Scalable and Efficient Visual Pre-Training
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Recently, the self-supervised pre-training paradigm has shown great potential in leveraging large-scale unlabeled data to improve downstream task performance. However, increasing the scale of unlabeled pre-training data in real-world scenarios requires prohibitive computational costs and faces the challenge of uncurated samples. To address these issues, we build a task-specific self-supervised pre-training framework from a data selection perspective based on a simple hypothesis that pre-training on the unlabeled samples with similar distribution to the target task can bring substantial performance gains. Buttressed by the hypothesis, we propose the first yet novel framework for Scalable and Efficient visual Pre-Training (SEPT) by introducing a retrieval pipeline for data selection. SEPT first leverage a self-supervised pre-trained model to extract the features of the entire unlabeled dataset for retrieval pipeline initialization. Then, for a specific target task, SEPT retrievals the most similar samples from the unlabeled dataset based on feature similarity for each target instance for pre-training. Finally, SEPT pre-trains the target model with the selected unlabeled samples in a self-supervised manner for target data finetuning. By decoupling the scale of pre-training and available upstream data for a target task, SEPT achieves high scalability of the upstream dataset and high efficiency of pre-training, resulting in high model architecture flexibility. Results on various downstream tasks demonstrate that SEPT can achieve competitive or even better performance compared with ImageNet pre-training while reducing the size of training samples by one magnitude without resorting to any extra annotations.
3D LiDAR Aided GNSS NLOS Mitigation for Reliable GNSS-RTK Positioning in Urban Canyons
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

GNSS and LiDAR odometry are complementary as they provide absolute and relative positioning, respectively. Their integration in a loosely-coupled manner is straightforward but is challenged in urban canyons due to the GNSS signal reflections. Recent proposed 3D LiDAR-aided (3DLA) GNSS methods employ the point cloud map to identify the non-line-of-sight (NLOS) reception of GNSS signals. This facilitates the GNSS receiver to obtain improved urban positioning but not achieve a sub-meter level. GNSS real-time kinematics (RTK) uses carrier phase measurements to obtain decimeter-level positioning. In urban areas, the GNSS RTK is not only challenged by multipath and NLOS-affected measurement but also suffers from signal blockage by the building. The latter will impose a challenge in solving the ambiguity within the carrier phase measurements. In the other words, the model observability of the ambiguity resolution (AR) is greatly decreased. This paper proposes to generate virtual satellite (VS) measurements using the selected LiDAR landmarks from the accumulated 3D point cloud maps (PCM). These LiDAR-PCM-made VS measurements are tightly-coupled with GNSS pseudorange and carrier phase measurements. Thus, the VS measurements can provide complementary constraints, meaning providing low-elevation-angle measurements in the across-street directions. The implementation is done using factor graph optimization to solve an accurate float solution of the ambiguity before it is fed into LAMBDA. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been validated by the evaluation conducted on our recently open-sourced challenging dataset, UrbanNav. The result shows the fix rate of the proposed 3DLA GNSS RTK is about 30% while the conventional GNSS-RTK only achieves about 14%. In addition, the proposed method achieves sub-meter positioning accuracy in most of the data collected in challenging urban areas.
Designing Human-Centered Algorithms for the Public Sector: A Case Study of the U.S. Child-Welfare System
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

The U.S. Child Welfare System (CWS) is increasingly seeking to emulate business models of the private sector centered in efficiency, cost reduction, and innovation through the adoption of algorithms. These data-driven systems purportedly improve decision-making, however, the public sector poses its own set of challenges with respect to the technical, theoretical, cultural, and societal implications of algorithmic decision-making. To fill these gaps, my dissertation comprises four studies that examine: 1) how caseworkers interact with algorithms in their day-to-day discretionary work, 2) the impact of algorithmic decision-making on the nature of practice, organization, and street-level decision-making, 3) how casenotes can help unpack patterns of invisible labor and contextualize decision-making processes, and 4) how casenotes can help uncover deeper systemic constraints and risk factors that are hard to quantify but directly impact families and street-level decision-making. My goal for this research is to investigate systemic disparities and design and develop algorithmic systems that are centered in the theory of practice and improve the quality of human discretionary work. These studies have provided actionable steps for human-centered algorithm design in the public sector.
Context-aware 6D Pose Estimation of Known Objects using RGB-D data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

6D object pose estimation has been a research topic in the field of computer vision and robotics. Many modern world applications like robot grasping, manipulation, autonomous navigation etc, require the correct pose of objects present in a scene to perform their specific task. It becomes even harder when the objects are placed in a cluttered scene and the level of occlusion is high. Prior works have tried to overcome this problem but could not achieve accuracy that can be considered reliable in real-world applications. In this paper, we present an architecture that, unlike prior work, is context-aware. It utilizes the context information available to us about the objects. Our proposed architecture treats the objects separately according to their types i.e; symmetric and non-symmetric. A deeper estimator and refiner network pair is used for non-symmetric objects as compared to symmetric due to their intrinsic differences. Our experiments show an enhancement in the accuracy of about 3.2% over the LineMOD dataset, which is considered a benchmark for pose estimation in the occluded and cluttered scenes, against the prior state-of-the-art DenseFusion. Our results also show that the inference time we got is sufficient for real-time usage.
A new PCA-based utility measure for synthetic data evaluation
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2022
Year: 2022

Data synthesis is a privacy enhancing technology aiming to produce realistic and timely data when real data is hard to obtain. Utility of synthetic data generators (SDGs) has been investigated through different utility metrics. These metrics have been found to generate conflicting conclusions making direct comparison of SDGs surprisingly difficult. Moreover, prior research found no correlation between popular metrics, concluding they tackle different utility-dimensions. This paper aggregates four popular utility metrics (representing different utility dimensions) into one using principal-component-analysis and checks whether the new measure can generate synthetic data that perform well in real-life. The new measure is used to compare four well-recognized SDGs.
Spatial-temporal traffic modeling with a fusion graph reconstructed by tensor decomposition
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Accurate spatial-temporal traffic flow forecasting is essential for helping traffic managers to take control measures and drivers to choose the optimal travel routes. Recently, graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have been widely used in traffic flow prediction owing to their powerful ability to capture spatial-temporal dependencies. The design of the spatial-temporal graph adjacency matrix is a key to the success of GCNs, and it is still an open question. This paper proposes reconstructing the binary adjacency matrix via tensor decomposition, and a traffic flow forecasting method is proposed. First, we reformulate the spatial-temporal fusion graph adjacency matrix into a three-way adjacency tensor. Then, we reconstructed the adjacency tensor via Tucker decomposition, wherein more informative and global spatial-temporal dependencies are encoded. Finally, a Spatial-temporal Synchronous Graph Convolutional module for localized spatial-temporal correlations learning and a Dilated Convolution module for global correlations learning are assembled to aggregate and learn the comprehensive spatial-temporal dependencies of the road network. Experimental results on four open-access datasets demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of the prediction performance and computational cost.
Fighting Malicious Media Data: A Survey on Tampering Detection and Deepfake Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Online media data, in the forms of images and videos, are becoming mainstream communication channels. However, recent advances in deep learning, particularly deep generative models, open the doors for producing perceptually convincing images and videos at a low cost, which not only poses a serious threat to the trustworthiness of digital information but also has severe societal implications. This motivates a growing interest of research in media tampering detection, i.e., using deep learning techniques to examine whether media data have been maliciously manipulated. Depending on the content of the targeted images, media forgery could be divided into image tampering and Deepfake techniques. The former typically moves or erases the visual elements in ordinary images, while the latter manipulates the expressions and even the identity of human faces. Accordingly, the means of defense include image tampering detection and Deepfake detection, which share a wide variety of properties. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of the current media tampering detection approaches, and discuss the challenges and trends in this field for future research.
An Integrated LiDAR-SLAM System for Complex Environment with Noisy Point Clouds
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

The current LiDAR SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) system suffers greatly from low accuracy and limited robustness when faced with complicated circumstances. From our experiments, we find that current LiDAR SLAM systems have limited performance when the noise level in the obtained point clouds is large. Therefore, in this work, we propose a general framework to tackle the problem of denoising and loop closure for LiDAR SLAM in complex environments with many noises and outliers caused by reflective materials. Current approaches for point clouds denoising are mainly designed for small-scale point clouds and can not be extended to large-scale point clouds scenes. In this work, we firstly proposed a lightweight network for large-scale point clouds denoising. Subsequently, we have also designed an efficient loop closure network for place recognition in global optimization to improve the localization accuracy of the whole system. Finally, we have demonstrated by extensive experiments and benchmark studies that our method can have a significant boost on the localization accuracy of the LiDAR SLAM system when faced with noisy point clouds, with a marginal increase in computational cost.
A Roadmap to Domain Knowledge Integration in Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Many machine learning algorithms have been developed in recent years to enhance the performance of a model in different aspects of artificial intelligence. But the problem persists due to inadequate data and resources. Integrating knowledge in a machine learning model can help to overcome these obstacles up to a certain degree. Incorporating knowledge is a complex task though because of various forms of knowledge representation. In this paper, we will give a brief overview of these different forms of knowledge integration and their performance in certain machine learning tasks.
Feature Calibration Network for Occluded Pedestrian Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Pedestrian detection in the wild remains a challenging problem especially for scenes containing serious occlusion. In this paper, we propose a novel feature learning method in the deep learning framework, referred to as Feature Calibration Network (FC-Net), to adaptively detect pedestrians under various occlusions. FC-Net is based on the observation that the visible parts of pedestrians are selective and decisive for detection, and is implemented as a self-paced feature learning framework with a self-activation (SA) module and a feature calibration (FC) module. In a new self-activated manner, FC-Net learns features which highlight the visible parts and suppress the occluded parts of pedestrians. The SA module estimates pedestrian activation maps by reusing classifier weights, without any additional parameter involved, therefore resulting in an extremely parsimony model to reinforce the semantics of features, while the FC module calibrates the convolutional features for adaptive pedestrian representation in both pixel-wise and region-based ways. Experiments on CityPersons and Caltech datasets demonstrate that FC-Net improves detection performance on occluded pedestrians up to 10% while maintaining excellent performance on non-occluded instances.