OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Enhancing Security Using Random Binary Weights in Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we propose a novel method for enhancing security in privacy-preserving federated learning using the Vision Transformer. In federated learning, learning is performed by collecting updated information without collecting raw data from each client. However, the problem is that this raw data may be inferred from the updated information. Conventional data-guessing countermeasures (security enhancement methods) for addressing this issue have a trade-off relationship between privacy protection strength and learning efficiency, and they generally degrade model performance. In this paper, we propose a novel method of federated learning that does not degrade model performance and that is robust against data-guessing attacks on updated information. In the proposed method, each client independently prepares a sequence of binary (0 or 1) random numbers, multiplies it by the updated information, and sends it to a server for model learning. In experiments, the effectiveness of the proposed method is confirmed in terms of model performance and resistance to the APRIL (Attention PRIvacy Leakage) restoration attack.
A large-scale operational study of fingerprint quality and demographics
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Even though a few initial works have shown on small sets of data some level of bias in the performance of fingerprint recognition technology with respect to certain demographic groups, there is still not sufficient evidence to understand the impact that certain factors such as gender, age or finger-type may have on fingerprint quality and, in turn, also on fingerprint matching accuracy. The present work addresses this still under researched topic, on a large-scale database of operational data containing 10-print impressions of almost 16,000 subjects. The results reached provide further insight into the dependency of fingerprint quality and demographics, and show that there in fact exists a certain degree of performance variability in fingerprint-based recognition systems for different segments of the population. Based on the experimental evaluation, the work points out new observations based on data-driven evidence, provides plausible hypotheses to explain such observations, and concludes with potential follow-up actions that can help to reduce the observed fingerprint quality differences. This way, the current paper can be considered as a contribution to further increase the algorithmic fairness and equality of biometric technology.
Building Touch-Less Trust in IoT Devices
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Trust mechanisms for Internet of Things (IoT) devices are commonly used by manufacturers and other ecosystem participants. However, end users face a challenge in establishing trust in devices, particularly as device encounters become more frequent thanks to the proliferation of new and unique products. Communication or even physical interaction with a device can expose a user to various threats, such as biometric theft or exploit of their own device. To address this, we propose a mechanism for verifying the integrity and trustworthiness of an IoT device before physical interaction or any significant communication has taken place.
CBAM-SwinT-BL: Small Rail Surface Defect Detection Method Based on Swin Transformer with Block Level CBAM Enhancement
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Under high-intensity rail operations, rail tracks endure considerable stresses resulting in various defects such as corrugation and spellings. Failure to effectively detect defects and provide maintenance in time would compromise service reliability and public safety. While advanced models have been developed in recent years, efficiently identifying small-scale rail defects has not yet been studied, especially for categories such as Dirt or Squat on rail surface. To address this challenge, this study utilizes Swin Transformer (SwinT) as baseline and incorporates the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) for enhancement. Our proposed method integrates CBAM successively within the swin transformer blocks, resulting in significant performance improvement in rail defect detection, particularly for categories with small instance sizes. The proposed framework is named CBAM-Enhanced Swin Transformer in Block Level (CBAM-SwinT-BL). Experiment and ablation study have proven the effectiveness of the framework. The proposed framework has a notable improvement in the accuracy of small size defects, such as dirt and dent categories in RIII dataset, with mAP-50 increasing by +23.0% and +38.3% respectively, and the squat category in MUET dataset also reaches +13.2% higher than the original model. Compares to the original SwinT, CBAM-SwinT-BL increase overall precision around +5% in the MUET dataset and +7% in the RIII dataset, reaching 69.1% and 88.1% respectively. Meanwhile, the additional module CBAM merely extend the model training speed by an average of +0.04s/iteration, which is acceptable compared to the significant improvement in system performance.
Masked Autoregressive Model for Weather Forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The growing impact of global climate change amplifies the need for accurate and reliable weather forecasting. Traditional autoregressive approaches, while effective for temporal modeling, suffer from error accumulation in long-term prediction tasks. The lead time embedding method has been suggested to address this issue, but it struggles to maintain crucial correlations in atmospheric events. To overcome these challenges, we propose the Masked Autoregressive Model for Weather Forecasting (MAM4WF). This model leverages masked modeling, where portions of the input data are masked during training, allowing the model to learn robust spatiotemporal relationships by reconstructing the missing information. MAM4WF combines the advantages of both autoregressive and lead time embedding methods, offering flexibility in lead time modeling while iteratively integrating predictions. We evaluate MAM4WF across weather, climate forecasting, and video frame prediction datasets, demonstrating superior performance on five test datasets.
Reevaluation of Inductive Link Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Within this paper, we show that the evaluation protocol currently used for inductive link prediction is heavily flawed as it relies on ranking the true entity in a small set of randomly sampled negative entities. Due to the limited size of the set of negatives, a simple rule-based baseline can achieve state-of-the-art results, which simply ranks entities higher based on the validity of their type. As a consequence of these insights, we reevaluate current approaches for inductive link prediction on several benchmarks using the link prediction protocol usually applied to the transductive setting. As some inductive methods suffer from scalability issues when evaluated in this setting, we propose and apply additionally an improved sampling protocol, which does not suffer from the problem mentioned above. The results of our evaluation differ drastically from the results reported in so far.
Improving Achievability of Cache-Aided Private Variable-Length Coding with Zero Leakage
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

A statistical cache-aided compression problem with a privacy constraint is studied, where a server has access to a database of $N$ files, $(Y_1,...,Y_N)$, each of size $F$ bits and is linked through a shared channel to $K$ users, where each has access to a local cache memory of size $MF$ bits. During the placement phase, the server fills the users' caches without prior knowledge of their demands, while the delivery phase takes place after the users send their demands to the server. We assume that each file in database $Y_i$ is arbitrarily correlated with a private attribute $X$, and an adversary is assumed to have access to the shared channel. The users and the server have access to a shared key $W$. The goal is to design the cache contents and the delivered message $\cal C$ such that the average length of $\mathcal{C}$ is minimized, while satisfying: i. The response $\cal C$ does not reveal any information about $X$, i.e., $I(X;\mathcal{C})=0$; ii. User $i$ can decode its demand, $Y_{d_i}$, by using the shared key $W$, $\cal C$, and its local cache $Z_i$. In a previous work, we have proposed a variable-length coding scheme that combines privacy-aware compression with coded caching techniques. In this paper, we propose a new achievability scheme using minimum entropy coupling concept and a greedy entropy-based algorithm. We show that the proposed scheme improves the previous results. Moreover, considering two special cases we improve the obtained bounds using the common information concept.
Pragma driven shared memory parallelism in Zig by supporting OpenMP loop directives
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

The Zig programming language, which is designed to provide performance and safety as first class concerns, has become popular in recent years. Given that Zig is built upon LLVM, and-so enjoys many of the benefits provided by the ecosystem, including access to a rich set of backends, Zig has significant potential for high performance workloads. However, it is yet to gain acceptance in HPC and one of the reasons for this is that support for the pragma driven shared memory parallelism is missing. In this paper we describe enhancing the Zig compiler to add support for OpenMP loop directives. Then exploring performance using NASA's NAS Parallel Benchmark (NPB) suite. We demonstrate that not only does our integration of OpenMP with Zig scale comparatively to Fortran and C reference implementations of NPB, but furthermore Zig provides up to a 1.25 times performance increase compared to Fortran.
ASTRA: Accurate and Scalable ANNS-based Training of Extreme Classifiers
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

`Extreme Classification'' (or XC) is the task of annotating data points (queries) with relevant labels (documents), from an extremely large set of $L$ possible labels, arising in search and recommendations. The most successful deep learning paradigm that has emerged over the last decade or so for XC is to embed the queries (and labels) using a deep encoder (e.g. DistilBERT), and use linear classifiers on top of the query embeddings. This architecture is of appeal because it enables millisecond-time inference using approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS). The key question is how do we design training algorithms that are accurate as well as scale to $O(100M)$ labels on a limited number of GPUs. State-of-the-art XC techniques that demonstrate high accuracies (e.g., DEXML, Renée, DEXA) on standard datasets have per-epoch training time that scales as $O(L)$ or employ expensive negative sampling strategies, which are prohibitive in XC scenarios. In this work, we develop an accurate and scalable XC algorithm ASTRA with two key observations: (a) building ANNS index on the classifier vectors and retrieving hard negatives using the classifiers aligns the negative sampling strategy to the loss function optimized; (b) keeping the ANNS indices current as the classifiers change through the epochs is prohibitively expensive while using stale negatives (refreshed periodically) results in poor accuracy; to remedy this, we propose a negative sampling strategy that uses a mixture of importance sampling and uniform sampling. By extensive evaluation on standard XC as well as proprietary datasets with 120M labels, we demonstrate that ASTRA achieves SOTA precision, while reducing training time by 4x-15x relative to the second best.
Choosing DAG Models Using Markov and Minimal Edge Count in the Absence of Ground Truth
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We give a novel nonparametric pointwise consistent statistical test (the Markov Checker) of the Markov condition for directed acyclic graph (DAG) or completed partially directed acyclic graph (CPDAG) models given a dataset. We also introduce the Cross-Algorithm Frugality Search (CAFS) for rejecting DAG models that either do not pass the Markov Checker test or that are not edge minimal. Edge minimality has been used previously by Raskutti and Uhler as a nonparametric simplicity criterion, though CAFS readily generalizes to other simplicity conditions. Reference to the ground truth is not necessary for CAFS, so it is useful for finding causal structure learning algorithms and tuning parameter settings that output causal models that are approximately true from a given data set. We provide a software tool for this analysis that is suitable for even quite large or dense models, provided a suitably fast pointwise consistent test of conditional independence is available. In addition, we show in simulation that the CAFS procedure can pick approximately correct models without knowing the ground truth.
Melody-Guided Music Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

We present the Melody-Guided Music Generation (MG2) model, a novel approach using melody to guide the text-to-music generation that, despite a simple method and limited resources, achieves excellent performance. Specifically, we first align the text with audio waveforms and their associated melodies using the newly proposed Contrastive Language-Music Pretraining, enabling the learned text representation fused with implicit melody information. Subsequently, we condition the retrieval-augmented diffusion module on both text prompt and retrieved melody. This allows MG2 to generate music that reflects the content of the given text description, meantime keeping the intrinsic harmony under the guidance of explicit melody information. We conducted extensive experiments on two public datasets: MusicCaps and MusicBench. Surprisingly, the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed MG2 model surpasses current open-source text-to-music generation models, achieving this with fewer than 1/3 of the parameters or less than 1/200 of the training data compared to state-of-the-art counterparts. Furthermore, we conducted comprehensive human evaluations involving three types of users and five perspectives, using newly designed questionnaires to explore the potential real-world applications of MG2.
Solution for OOD-CV Workshop SSB Challenge 2024 (Open-Set Recognition Track)
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This report provides a detailed description of the method we explored and proposed in the OSR Challenge at the OOD-CV Workshop during ECCV 2024. The challenge required identifying whether a test sample belonged to the semantic classes of a classifier's training set, a task known as open-set recognition (OSR). Using the Semantic Shift Benchmark (SSB) for evaluation, we focused on ImageNet1k as the in-distribution (ID) dataset and a subset of ImageNet21k as the out-of-distribution (OOD) dataset.To address this, we proposed a hybrid approach, experimenting with the fusion of various post-hoc OOD detection techniques and different Test-Time Augmentation (TTA) strategies. Additionally, we evaluated the impact of several base models on the final performance. Our best-performing method combined Test-Time Augmentation with the post-hoc OOD techniques, achieving a strong balance between AUROC and FPR95 scores. Our approach resulted in AUROC: 79.77 (ranked 5th) and FPR95: 61.44 (ranked 2nd), securing second place in the overall competition.
Solving Electromagnetic Scattering Problems by Isogeometric Analysis with Deep Operator Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2024
Year: 2024

We present a hybrid approach combining isogeometric analysis with deep operator networks to solve electromagnetic scattering problems. The neural network takes a computer-aided design representation as input and predicts the electromagnetic field in a de Rham conforming B-spline basis such that for example the tangential continuity of the electric field is respected. The physical problem is included in the loss function during training. Our numerical results demonstrate that a trained network accurately predicts the electric field, showing convergence to the analytical solution with optimal rate. Additionally, training on a variety of geometries highlights the network's generalization capabilities, achieving small error increases when applied to new geometries not included in the training set.
Old Optimizer, New Norm: An Anthology
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Deep learning optimizers are often motivated through a mix of convex and approximate second-order theory. We select three such methods -- Adam, Shampoo and Prodigy -- and argue that each method can instead be understood as a squarely first-order method without convexity assumptions. In fact, after switching off exponential moving averages, each method is equivalent to steepest descent under a particular norm. By generalizing this observation, we chart a new design space for training algorithms. Different operator norms should be assigned to different tensors based on the role that the tensor plays within the network. For example, while linear and embedding layers may have the same weight space of $\mathbb{R}^{m\times n}$, these layers play different roles and should be assigned different norms. We hope that this idea of carefully metrizing the neural architecture might lead to more stable, scalable and indeed faster training.
Efficient Driving Behavior Narration and Reasoning on Edge Device Using Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Deep learning architectures with powerful reasoning capabilities have driven significant advancements in autonomous driving technology. Large language models (LLMs) applied in this field can describe driving scenes and behaviors with a level of accuracy similar to human perception, particularly in visual tasks. Meanwhile, the rapid development of edge computing, with its advantage of proximity to data sources, has made edge devices increasingly important in autonomous driving. Edge devices process data locally, reducing transmission delays and bandwidth usage, and achieving faster response times. In this work, we propose a driving behavior narration and reasoning framework that applies LLMs to edge devices. The framework consists of multiple roadside units, with LLMs deployed on each unit. These roadside units collect road data and communicate via 5G NSR/NR networks. Our experiments show that LLMs deployed on edge devices can achieve satisfactory response speeds. Additionally, we propose a prompt strategy to enhance the narration and reasoning performance of the system. This strategy integrates multi-modal information, including environmental, agent, and motion data. Experiments conducted on the OpenDV-Youtube dataset demonstrate that our approach significantly improves performance across both tasks.
FireLite: Leveraging Transfer Learning for Efficient Fire Detection in Resource-Constrained Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Fire hazards are extremely dangerous, particularly in sectors such as the transportation industry, where political unrest increases the likelihood of their occurrence. By employing IP cameras to facilitate the setup of fire detection systems on transport vehicles, losses from fire events may be prevented proactively. However, the development of lightweight fire detection models is required due to the computational constraints of the embedded systems within these cameras. We introduce FireLite, a low-parameter convolutional neural network (CNN) designed for quick fire detection in contexts with limited resources, in response to this difficulty. With an accuracy of 98.77\%, our model -- which has just 34,978 trainable parameters achieves remarkable performance numbers. It also shows a validation loss of 8.74 and peaks at 98.77 for precision, recall, and F1-score measures. Because of its precision and efficiency, FireLite is a promising solution for fire detection in resource-constrained environments.
Multi-Robot Target Monitoring and Encirclement via Triggered Distributed Feedback Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

We design a distributed feedback optimization strategy, embedded into a modular ROS 2 control architecture, which allows a team of heterogeneous robots to cooperatively monitor and encircle a target while patrolling points of interest. Relying on the aggregative feedback optimization framework, we handle multi-robot dynamics while minimizing a global performance index depending on both microscopic (e.g., the location of single robots) and macroscopic variables (e.g., the spatial distribution of the team). The proposed distributed policy allows the robots to cooperatively address the global problem by employing only local measurements and neighboring data exchanges. These exchanges are performed through an asynchronous communication protocol ruled by locally-verifiable triggering conditions. We formally prove that our strategy steers the robots to a set of configurations representing stationary points of the considered optimization problem. The effectiveness and scalability of the overall strategy are tested via Monte Carlo campaigns of realistic Webots ROS 2 virtual experiments. Finally, the applicability of our solution is shown with real experiments on ground and aerial robots.
Beacon based uplink transmission for lorawan direct to satellite internet of things
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Direct-to-satellite IoT DtS IoT communication structure is a promising solution to provide connectivity and extend the coverage of traditional low-power and long-range technologies, especially for isolated and remote areas where deploying traditional infrastructure is impracticable. Despite their bounded visibility, the Low Earth Orbit LEO satellites complement the terrestrial networks, offering broader gateway coverage and terrestrial network traffic offloading. However, the dynamics of LEO and the nature of such integration come with several challenges affecting the efficacy of the network. Therefore, this paper proposes Beacon based Uplink LoRaWAN BU LoRaWAN to enhance satellite-terrestrial communication efficiency. The proposed scheme exploits the LoRaWAN class B synchronization mechanism to provide efficient uplink transmission from LoRaWAN devices placed on the ground to satellite gateways. BU LoRaWAN proposes an uplink transmission slot approach to synchronize ground devices uplink traffic with LEO based orbiting gateways. It also uses a queue data structure to buffer end devices ready to send packets until the appropriate moment. BU LoRaWAN avoids possible transmission collision by optimizing a random transmission slot for an end device within the beacon window. The proposed system is implemented and evaluated using OMNeT network simulator and FLoRaSat framework. The result demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed system. BU-LoRaWAN achieves better performance compared to the standard LoRaWAN, which manages to deliver almost double the traffic delivered by the standard one.