OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
De-biased Representation Learning for Fairness with Unreliable Labels
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Removing bias while keeping all task-relevant information is challenging for fair representation learning methods since they would yield random or degenerate representations w.r.t. labels when the sensitive attributes correlate with labels. Existing works proposed to inject the label information into the learning procedure to overcome such issues. However, the assumption that the observed labels are clean is not always met. In fact, label bias is acknowledged as the primary source inducing discrimination. In other words, the fair pre-processing methods ignore the discrimination encoded in the labels either during the learning procedure or the evaluation stage. This contradiction puts a question mark on the fairness of the learned representations. To circumvent this issue, we explore the following question: \emph{Can we learn fair representations predictable to latent ideal fair labels given only access to unreliable labels?} In this work, we propose a \textbf{D}e-\textbf{B}iased \textbf{R}epresentation Learning for \textbf{F}airness (DBRF) framework which disentangles the sensitive information from non-sensitive attributes whilst keeping the learned representations predictable to ideal fair labels rather than observed biased ones. We formulate the de-biased learning framework through information-theoretic concepts such as mutual information and information bottleneck. The core concept is that DBRF advocates not to use unreliable labels for supervision when sensitive information benefits the prediction of unreliable labels. Experiment results over both synthetic and real-world data demonstrate that DBRF effectively learns de-biased representations towards ideal labels.
The Many Facets of Trust in AI: Formalizing the Relation Between Trust and Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

Efforts to promote fairness, accountability, and transparency are assumed to be critical in fostering Trust in AI (TAI), but extant literature is frustratingly vague regarding this 'trust'. The lack of exposition on trust itself suggests that trust is commonly understood, uncomplicated, or even uninteresting. But is it? Our analysis of TAI publications reveals numerous orientations which differ in terms of who is doing the trusting (agent), in what (object), on the basis of what (basis), in order to what (objective), and why (impact). We develop an ontology that encapsulates these key axes of difference to a) illuminate seeming inconsistencies across the literature and b) more effectively manage a dizzying number of TAI considerations. We then reflect this ontology through a corpus of publications exploring fairness, accountability, and transparency to examine the variety of ways that TAI is considered within and between these approaches to promoting trust.
A 23 $μ$W Keyword Spotting IC with Ring-Oscillator-Based Time-Domain Feature Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2022
Year: 2022

This article presents the first keyword spotting (KWS) IC which uses a ring-oscillator-based time-domain processing technique for its analog feature extractor (FEx). Its extensive usage of time-encoding schemes allows the analog audio signal to be processed in a fully time-domain manner except for the voltage-to-time conversion stage of the analog front-end. Benefiting from fundamental building blocks based on digital logic gates, it offers a better technology scalability compared to conventional voltage-domain designs. Fabricated in a 65 nm CMOS process, the prototyped KWS IC occupies 2.03mm$^{2}$ and dissipates 23 $μ$W power consumption including analog FEx and digital neural network classifier. The 16-channel time-domain FEx achieves 54.89 dB dynamic range for 16 ms frame shift size while consuming 9.3 $μ$W. The measurement result verifies that the proposed IC performs a 12-class KWS task on the Google Speech Command Dataset (GSCD) with >86% accuracy and 12.4 ms latency.
Safe Policy Improvement Approaches and their Limitations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Safe Policy Improvement (SPI) is an important technique for offline reinforcement learning in safety critical applications as it improves the behavior policy with a high probability. We classify various SPI approaches from the literature into two groups, based on how they utilize the uncertainty of state-action pairs. Focusing on the Soft-SPIBB (Safe Policy Improvement with Soft Baseline Bootstrapping) algorithms, we show that their claim of being provably safe does not hold. Based on this finding, we develop adaptations, the Adv-Soft-SPIBB algorithms, and show that they are provably safe. A heuristic adaptation, Lower-Approx-Soft-SPIBB, yields the best performance among all SPIBB algorithms in extensive experiments on two benchmarks. We also check the safety guarantees of the provably safe algorithms and show that huge amounts of data are necessary such that the safety bounds become useful in practice.
Performing Stateful Logic Using Spin-Orbit Torque (SOT) MRAM
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2022
Year: 2022

Stateful logic is a promising processing-in-memory (PIM) paradigm to perform logic operations using emerging nonvolatile memory cells. While most stateful logic circuits to date focused on technologies such as resistive RAM, we propose two approaches to designing stateful logic using spin orbit torque (SOT) MRAM. The first approach utilizes the separation of read and write paths in SOT devices to perform logic operations. In contrast to previous work, our method utilizes a standard memory structure, and each row can be used as input or output. The second approach uses voltage-gated SOT switching to allow stateful logic in denser memory arrays. We present array structures to support the two approaches and evaluate their functionality using SPICE simulations in the presence of process variation and device mismatch.
Efficient Long-Text Understanding with Short-Text Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Transformer-based pretrained language models (LMs) are ubiquitous across natural language understanding, but cannot be applied to long sequences such as stories, scientific articles and long documents, due to their quadratic complexity. While a myriad of efficient transformer variants have been proposed, they are typically based on custom implementations that require expensive pretraining from scratch. In this work, we propose SLED: SLiding-Encoder and Decoder, a simple approach for processing long sequences that re-uses and leverages battle-tested short-text pretrained LMs. Specifically, we partition the input into overlapping chunks, encode each with a short-text LM encoder and use the pretrained decoder to fuse information across chunks (fusion-in-decoder). We illustrate through controlled experiments that SLED offers a viable strategy for long text understanding and evaluate our approach on SCROLLS, a benchmark with seven datasets across a wide range of language understanding tasks. We find that SLED is competitive with specialized models that are up to 50x larger and require a dedicated and expensive pretraining step.
Pavementscapes: a large-scale hierarchical image dataset for asphalt pavement damage segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Pavement damage segmentation has benefited enormously from deep learning. % and large-scale datasets. However, few current public datasets limit the potential exploration of deep learning in the application of pavement damage segmentation. To address this problem, this study has proposed Pavementscapes, a large-scale dataset to develop and evaluate methods for pavement damage segmentation. Pavementscapes is comprised of 4,000 images with a resolution of $1024 \times 2048$, which have been recorded in the real-world pavement inspection projects with 15 different pavements. A total of 8,680 damage instances are manually labeled with six damage classes at the pixel level. The statistical study gives a thorough investigation and analysis of the proposed dataset. The numeral experiments propose the top-performing deep neural networks capable of segmenting pavement damages, which provides the baselines of the open challenge for pavement inspection. The experiment results also indicate the existing problems for damage segmentation using deep learning, and this study provides potential solutions.
SFILES 2.0: An extended text-based flowsheet representation
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2022
Year: 2022

SFILES is a text-based notation for chemical process flowsheets. It was originally proposed by d'Anterroches (2006) who was inspired by the text-based SMILES notation for molecules. The text-based format has several advantages compared to flowsheet images regarding the storage format, computational accessibility, and eventually for data analysis and processing. However, the original SFILES version cannot describe essential flowsheet configurations unambiguously, such as the distinction between top and bottom products. Neither is it capable of describing the control structure required for the safe and reliable operation of chemical processes. Also, there is no publicly available software for decoding or encoding chemical process topologies to SFILES. We propose the SFILES 2.0 with a complete description of the extended notation and naming conventions. Additionally, we provide open-source software for the automated conversion between flowsheet graphs and SFILES 2.0 strings. This way, we hope to encourage researchers and engineers to publish their flowsheet topologies as SFILES 2.0 strings. The ultimate goal is to set the standards for creating a FAIR database of chemical process flowsheets, which would be of great value for future data analysis and processing.
Tree edit distance for hierarchical data compatible with HMIL paradigm
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2022
Year: 2022

We define edit distance for hierarchically structured data compatible with the hierarchical multi-instance learning paradigm. Example of such data is dataset represented in JSON format where inner Array objects are interpreted as unordered bags of elements. We prove correct analytical properties of the defined distance.
Jazz Contrafact Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

In jazz, a contrafact is a new melody composed over an existing, but often reharmonized chord progression. Because reharmonization can introduce a wide range of variations, detecting contrafacts is a challenging task. This paper develops a novel vector-space model to represent chord progressions, and uses it for contrafact detection. The process applies principles from music theory to reduce the dimensionality of chord space, determine a common key signature representation, and compute a chordal co-occurrence matrix. The rows of the matrix form a basis for the vector space in which chord progressions are represented as piecewise linear functions, and harmonic similarity is evaluated by computing the membrane area, a novel distance metric. To illustrate our method's effectiveness, we apply it to the Impro-Visor corpus of 2,612 chord progressions, and present examples demonstrating its ability to account for reharmonizations and find contrafacts.
Dynamic Batch Adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Current deep learning adaptive optimizer methods adjust the step magnitude of parameter updates by altering the effective learning rate used by each parameter. Motivated by the known inverse relation between batch size and learning rate on update step magnitudes, we introduce a novel training procedure that dynamically decides the dimension and the composition of the current update step. Our procedure, Dynamic Batch Adaptation (DBA) analyzes the gradients of every sample and selects the subset that best improves certain metrics such as gradient variance for each layer of the network. We present results showing DBA significantly improves the speed of model convergence. Additionally, we find that DBA produces an increased improvement over standard optimizers when used in data scarce conditions where, in addition to convergence speed, it also significantly improves model generalization, managing to train a network with a single fully connected hidden layer using only 1% of the MNIST dataset to reach 97.79% test accuracy. In an even more extreme scenario, it manages to reach 97.44% test accuracy using only 10 samples per class. These results represent a relative error rate reduction of 81.78% and 88.07% respectively, compared to the standard optimizers, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and Adam.
Safe Perception -- A Hierarchical Monitor Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Our transportation world is rapidly transforming induced by an ever increasing level of autonomy. However, to obtain license of fully automated vehicles for widespread public use, it is necessary to assure safety of the entire system, which is still a challenge. This holds in particular for AI-based perception systems that have to handle a diversity of environmental conditions and road users, and at the same time should robustly detect all safety relevant objects (i.e no detection misses should occur). Yet, limited training and validation data make a proof of fault-free operation hardly achievable, as the perception system might be exposed to new, yet unknown objects or conditions on public roads. Hence, new safety approaches for AI-based perception systems are required. For this reason we propose in this paper a novel hierarchical monitoring approach that is able to validate the object list from a primary perception system, can reliably detect detection misses, and at the same time has a very low false alarm rate.
Digital Twin Assisted Task Offloading for Aerial Edge Computing and Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

Considering the user mobility and unpredictable mobile edge computing (MEC) environments, this paper studies the intelligent task offloading problem in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled MEC with the assistance of digital twin (DT). We aim at minimizing the energy consumption of the entire MEC system by jointly optimizing mobile terminal users (MTUs) association, UAV trajectory, transmission power distribution and computation capacity allocation while respecting the constraints of mission maximum processing delays. Specifically, double deep Q-network (DDQN) algorithm stemming from deep reinforcement learning is first proposed to effectively solve the problem of MTUs association and UAV trajectory. Then, the closed-form expression is employed to handle the problem of transmission power distribution and the computation capacity allocation problem is further addressed via an iterative algorithm. Numerical results show that our proposed scheme is able to converge and significantly reduce the total energy consumption of the MEC system compared to the benchmark schemes.
Guidance on the Safety Assurance of Autonomous Systems in Complex Environments (SACE)
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

Autonomous systems (AS) are systems that have the capability to take decisions free from direct human control. AS are increasingly being considered for adoption for applications where their behaviour may cause harm, such as when used for autonomous driving, medical applications or in domestic environments. For such applications, being able to ensure and demonstrate (assure) the safety of the operation of the AS is crucial for their adoption. This can be particularly challenging where AS operate in complex and changing real-world environments. Establishing justified confidence in the safety of AS requires the creation of a compelling safety case. This document introduces a methodology for the Safety Assurance of Autonomous Systems in Complex Environments (SACE). SACE comprises a set of safety case patterns and a process for (1) systematically integrating safety assurance into the development of the AS and (2) for generating the evidence base for explicitly justifying the acceptable safety of the AS.
ATCA: an Arc Trajectory Based Model with Curvature Attention for Video Frame Interpolation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Video frame interpolation is a classic and challenging low-level computer vision task. Recently, deep learning based methods have achieved impressive results, and it has been proven that optical flow based methods can synthesize frames with higher quality. However, most flow-based methods assume a line trajectory with a constant velocity between two input frames. Only a little work enforces predictions with curvilinear trajectory, but this requires more than two frames as input to estimate the acceleration, which takes more time and memory to execute. To address this problem, we propose an arc trajectory based model (ATCA), which learns motion prior from only two consecutive frames and also is lightweight. Experiments show that our approach performs better than many SOTA methods with fewer parameters and faster inference speed.
Analysing Parallel Complexity of Term Rewriting
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2022
Year: 2022

We revisit parallel-innermost term rewriting as a model of parallel computation on inductive data structures and provide a corresponding notion of runtime complexity parametric in the size of the start term. We propose automatic techniques to derive both upper and lower bounds on parallel complexity of rewriting that enable a direct reuse of existing techniques for sequential complexity. The applicability and the precision of the method are demonstrated by the relatively light effort in extending the program analysis tool AProVE and by experiments on numerous benchmarks from the literature.
Dyadic Movement Synchrony Estimation Under Privacy-preserving Conditions
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Movement synchrony refers to the dynamic temporal connection between the motions of interacting people. The applications of movement synchrony are wide and broad. For example, as a measure of coordination between teammates, synchrony scores are often reported in sports. The autism community also identifies movement synchrony as a key indicator of children's social and developmental achievements. In general, raw video recordings are often used for movement synchrony estimation, with the drawback that they may reveal people's identities. Furthermore, such privacy concern also hinders data sharing, one major roadblock to a fair comparison between different approaches in autism research. To address the issue, this paper proposes an ensemble method for movement synchrony estimation, one of the first deep-learning-based methods for automatic movement synchrony assessment under privacy-preserving conditions. Our method relies entirely on publicly shareable, identity-agnostic secondary data, such as skeleton data and optical flow. We validate our method on two datasets: (1) PT13 dataset collected from autism therapy interventions and (2) TASD-2 dataset collected from synchronized diving competitions. In this context, our method outperforms its counterpart approaches, both deep neural networks and alternatives.
Energy-Efficient Backscatter-Assisted Coded Cooperative-NOMA for B5G Wireless Communications
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

In this manuscript, we propose an alternating optimization framework to maximize the energy efficiency of a backscatter-enabled cooperative Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system by optimizing the transmit power of the source, power allocation coefficients (PAC), and power of the relay node under imperfect successive interference cancellation (SIC) decoding. A three-stage low-complexity energy-efficient alternating optimization algorithm is introduced which optimizes the transmit power, PAC, and relay power by considering the quality of service (QoS), power budget, and cooperation constraints. Subsequently, a joint channel coding framework is introduced to enhance the performance of far user which has no direct communication link with the base station (BS) and has bad channel conditions. In the destination node, the far user data is jointly decoded using a Sum-product algorithm (SPA) based joint iterative decoder realized by jointly-designed Quasi-cyclic Low-density parity-check (QC-LDPC) codes. Simulation results evince that the proposed backscatter-enabled cooperative NOMA system outperforms its counterpart by providing an efficient performance in terms of energy efficiency. Also, proposed jointly-designed QC-LDPC codes provide an excellent bit-error-rate (BER) performance by jointly decoding the far user data for considered BSC cooperative NOMA system with only a few decoding iterations.
Vertical GaN Diode BV Maximization through Rapid TCAD Simulation and ML-enabled Surrogate Model
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, two methodologies are used to speed up the maximization of the breakdown volt-age (BV) of a vertical GaN diode that has a theoretical maximum BV of ~2100V. Firstly, we demonstrated a 5X faster accurate simulation method in Technology Computer-Aided-Design (TCAD). This allows us to find 50% more numbers of high BV (>1400V) designs at a given simulation time. Secondly, a machine learning (ML) model is developed using TCAD-generated data and used as a surrogate model for differential evolution optimization. It can inversely design an out-of-the-training-range structure with BV as high as 1887V (89% of the ideal case) compared to ~1100V designed with human domain expertise.
A Feasibility Study on Image Inpainting for Non-cleft Lip Generation from Patients with Cleft Lip
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

A Cleft lip is a congenital abnormality requiring surgical repair by a specialist. The surgeon must have extensive experience and theoretical knowledge to perform surgery, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) method has been proposed to guide surgeons in improving surgical outcomes. If AI can be used to predict what a repaired cleft lip would look like, surgeons could use it as an adjunct to adjust their surgical technique and improve results. To explore the feasibility of this idea while protecting patient privacy, we propose a deep learning-based image inpainting method that is capable of covering a cleft lip and generating a lip and nose without a cleft. Our experiments are conducted on two real-world cleft lip datasets and are assessed by expert cleft lip surgeons to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method.
Bring the BitCODE -- Moving Compute and Data in Distributed Heterogeneous Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we present a framework for moving compute and data between processing elements in a distributed heterogeneous system. The implementation of the framework is based on the LLVM compiler toolchain combined with the UCX communication framework. The framework can generate binary machine code or LLVM bitcode for multiple CPU architectures and move the code to remote machines while dynamically optimizing and linking the code on the target platform. The remotely injected code can recursively propagate itself to other remote machines or generate new code. The goal of this paper is threefold: (a) to present an architecture and implementation of the framework that provides essential infrastructure to program a new class of disaggregated systems wherein heterogeneous programming elements such as compute nodes and data processing units (DPUs) are distributed across the system, (b) to demonstrate how the framework can be integrated with modern, high-level programming languages such as Julia, and (c) to demonstrate and evaluate a new class of eXtended Remote Direct Memory Access (X-RDMA) communication operations that are enabled by this framework. To evaluate the capabilities of the framework, we used a cluster with Fujitsu CPUs and heterogeneous cluster with Intel CPUs and BlueField-2 DPUs interconnected using high-performance RDMA fabric. We demonstrated an X-RDMA pointer chase application that outperforms an RDMA GET-based implementation by 70% and is as fast as Active Messages, but does not require function predeployment on remote platforms.