OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Genomic Data Sharing under Dependent Local Differential Privacy
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Privacy-preserving genomic data sharing is prominent to increase the pace of genomic research, and hence to pave the way towards personalized genomic medicine. In this paper, we introduce ($ε, T$)-dependent local differential privacy (LDP) for privacy-preserving sharing of correlated data and propose a genomic data sharing mechanism under this privacy definition. We first show that the original definition of LDP is not suitable for genomic data sharing, and then we propose a new mechanism to share genomic data. The proposed mechanism considers the correlations in data during data sharing, eliminates statistically unlikely data values beforehand, and adjusts the probability distributions for each shared data point accordingly. By doing so, we show that we can avoid an attacker from inferring the correct values of the shared data points by utilizing the correlations in the data. By adjusting the probability distributions of the shared states of each data point, we also improve the utility of shared data for the data collector. Furthermore, we develop a greedy algorithm that strategically identifies the processing order of the shared data points with the aim of maximizing the utility of the shared data. Considering the interdependent privacy risks while sharing genomic data, we also analyze the information gain of an attacker about genomes of a donor's family members by observing perturbed data of the genome donor and we propose a mechanism to select the privacy budget (i.e., $ε$ parameter of LDP) of the donor by also considering privacy preferences of her family members. Our evaluation results on a real-life genomic dataset show the superiority of the proposed mechanism compared to the randomized response mechanism (a widely used technique to achieve LDP).
Generating Structured Adversarial Attacks Using Frank-Wolfe Method
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

White box adversarial perturbations are generated via iterative optimization algorithms most often by minimizing an adversarial loss on a $\ell_p$ neighborhood of the original image, the so-called distortion set. Constraining the adversarial search with different norms results in disparately structured adversarial examples. Here we explore several distortion sets with structure-enhancing algorithms. These new structures for adversarial examples might provide challenges for provable and empirical robust mechanisms. Because adversarial robustness is still an empirical field, defense mechanisms should also reasonably be evaluated against differently structured attacks. Besides, these structured adversarial perturbations may allow for larger distortions size than their $\ell_p$ counter-part while remaining imperceptible or perceptible as natural distortions of the image. We will demonstrate in this work that the proposed structured adversarial examples can significantly bring down the classification accuracy of adversarialy trained classifiers while showing low $\ell_2$ distortion rate. For instance, on ImagNet dataset the structured attacks drop the accuracy of adversarial model to near zero with only 50\% of $\ell_2$ distortion generated using white-box attacks like PGD. As a byproduct, our finding on structured adversarial examples can be used for adversarial regularization of models to make models more robust or improve their generalization performance on datasets which are structurally different.
MatchKAT: An Algebraic Foundation For Match-Action
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2021
Year: 2021

We present MatchKAT, an algebraic language for modeling match-action packet processing in network switches. Although the match-action paradigm has remained a popular low-level programming model for specifying packet forwarding behavior, little has been done towards giving it formal semantics. With MatchKAT, we hope to embark on the first steps in exploring how network programs compiled to match-action rules can be reasoned about formally in a reliable, algebraic way. In this paper, we give details of MatchKAT and its metatheory, as well as a formal treatment of match expressions on binary strings that form the basis of "match" in match-action. Through a correspondence with NetKAT, we show that MatchKAT's equational theory is sound and complete with regards to a similar packet filtering semantics. We also demonstrate the complexity of deciding equivalence in MatchKAT is PSPACE-complete.
Secure Hybrid ITS Communication with Data Protection
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

In the future world of safe traffic, intelligent transportation systems play a vital role. The connections between traffic participants and systems on the one and infrastructure and service providers on the other side are a necessary prerequisite for informed and safe driving. The key for the connection between all stakeholders is a reliable and secure connection. Reliability can be achieved in different ways. For the information exchange, we utilize hybrid communication technologies in different scenarios. This includes long-range technologies like DAB+ and cellular networks and short- and medium-range technologies like ETSI ITS G5 or RFID. Those technologies can only be used if messages transmitted via the wireless communication links are protected. Protection not only means encryption but most importantly means to verify if the data was sent by a legit sender. This is a necessary requirement for a recipient to trust the data received. In ITS, transmitted data could be used for user tracing and collection of user data. Therefore, a communication system should be designed in such a way that personal user data is protected. The user must be untraceable, but nevertheless able to use all services without limitations. In this paper, we describe the approach and ideas we took to design a secure hybrid communication architecture that is at the same time data protection friendly.
Creepy Technology: What Is It and How Do You Measure It?
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2021
Year: 2021

Interactive technologies are getting closer to our bodies and permeate the infrastructure of our homes. While such technologies offer many benefits, they can also cause an initial feeling of unease in users. It is important for Human-Computer Interaction to manage first impressions and avoid designing technologies that appear creepy. To that end, we developed the Perceived Creepiness of Technology Scale (PCTS), which measures how creepy a technology appears to a user in an initial encounter with a new artefact. The scale was developed based on past work on creepiness and a set of ten focus groups conducted with users from diverse backgrounds. We followed a structured process of analytically developing and validating the scale. The PCTS is designed to enable designers and researchers to quickly compare interactive technologies and ensure that they do not design technologies that produce initial feelings of creepiness in users.
ScrofaZero: Mastering Trick-taking Poker Game Gongzhu by Deep Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2021
Year: 2021

People have made remarkable progress in game AIs, especially in domain of perfect information game. However, trick-taking poker game, as a popular form of imperfect information game, has been regarded as a challenge for a long time. Since trick-taking game requires high level of not only reasoning, but also inference to excel, it can be a new milestone for imperfect information game AI. We study Gongzhu, a trick-taking game analogous to, but slightly simpler than contract bridge. Nonetheless, the strategies of Gongzhu are complex enough for both human and computer players. We train a strong Gongzhu AI ScrofaZero from \textit{tabula rasa} by deep reinforcement learning, while few previous efforts on solving trick-taking poker game utilize the representation power of neural networks. Also, we introduce new techniques for imperfect information game including stratified sampling, importance weighting, integral over equivalent class, Bayesian inference, etc. Our AI can achieve human expert level performance. The methodologies in building our program can be easily transferred into a wide range of trick-taking games.
GradPIM: A Practical Processing-in-DRAM Architecture for Gradient Descent
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we present GradPIM, a processing-in-memory architecture which accelerates parameter updates of deep neural networks training. As one of processing-in-memory techniques that could be realized in the near future, we propose an incremental, simple architectural design that does not invade the existing memory protocol. Extending DDR4 SDRAM to utilize bank-group parallelism makes our operation designs in processing-in-memory (PIM) module efficient in terms of hardware cost and performance. Our experimental results show that the proposed architecture can improve the performance of DNN training and greatly reduce memory bandwidth requirement while posing only a minimal amount of overhead to the protocol and DRAM area.
Distributed Online Learning for Joint Regret with Communication Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

We consider distributed online learning for joint regret with communication constraints. In this setting, there are multiple agents that are connected in a graph. Each round, an adversary first activates one of the agents to issue a prediction and provides a corresponding gradient, and then the agents are allowed to send a $b$-bit message to their neighbors in the graph. All agents cooperate to control the joint regret, which is the sum of the losses of the activated agents minus the losses evaluated at the best fixed common comparator parameters $u$. We observe that it is suboptimal for agents to wait for gradients that take too long to arrive. Instead, the graph should be partitioned into local clusters that communicate among themselves. Our main result is a new method that can adapt to the optimal graph partition for the adversarial activations and gradients, where the graph partition is selected from a set of candidate partitions. A crucial building block along the way is a new algorithm for online convex optimization with delayed gradient information that is comparator-adaptive, meaning that its joint regret scales with the norm of the comparator $||u||$. We further provide near-optimal gradient compression schemes depending on the ratio of $b$ and the dimension times the diameter of the graph.
Beyond QUIC v1: A First Look at Recent Transport Layer IETF Standardization Efforts
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2021
Year: 2021

The transport layer is ossified. With most of the research and deployment efforts in the past decade focussing on the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and its extensions, the QUIC standardization by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is to be finalized in early 2021. In addition to addressing the most urgent issues of TCP, QUIC ensures its future extendibility and is destined to drastically change the transport protocol landscape. In this work, we present a first look at emerging protocols and their IETF standardization efforts beyond QUIC v1. While multiple proposed extensions improve on QUIC itself, Multiplexed Application Substrate over QUIC Encryption (MASQUE) as well as WebTransport present different approaches to address long-standing problems, and their interplay extends on QUIC's take to address transport layer ossification challenges.
Crowdsourcing Parallel Corpus for English-Oromo Neural Machine Translation using Community Engagement Platform
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Even though Afaan Oromo is the most widely spoken language in the Cushitic family by more than fifty million people in the Horn and East Africa, it is surprisingly resource-scarce from a technological point of view. The increasing amount of various useful documents written in English language brings to investigate the machine that can translate those documents and make it easily accessible for local language. The paper deals with implementing a translation of English to Afaan Oromo and vice versa using Neural Machine Translation. But the implementation is not very well explored due to the limited amount and diversity of the corpus. However, using a bilingual corpus of just over 40k sentence pairs we have collected, this study showed a promising result. About a quarter of this corpus is collected via Community Engagement Platform (CEP) that was implemented to enrich the parallel corpus through crowdsourcing translations.
Large coverage fluctuations in Google Scholar: a case study
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2021
Year: 2021

Unlike other academic bibliographic databases, Google Scholar intentionally operates in a way that does not maintain coverage stability: documents that stop being available to Google Scholar's crawlers are removed from the system. This can also affect Google Scholar's citation graph (citation counts can decrease). Furthermore, because Google Scholar is not transparent about its coverage, the only way to directly observe coverage loss is through regular monitorization of Google Scholar data. Because of this, few studies have empirically documented this phenomenon. This study analyses a large decrease in coverage of documents in the field of Astronomy and Astrophysics that took place in 2019 and its subsequent recovery, using longitudinal data from previous analyses and a new dataset extracted in 2020. Documents from most of the larger publishers in the field disappeared from Google Scholar despite continuing to be available on the Web, which suggests an error on Google Scholar's side. Disappeared documents did not reappear until the following index-wide update, many months after the problem was discovered. The slowness with which Google Scholar is currently able to resolve indexing errors is a clear limitation of the platform both for literature search and bibliometric use cases.
Machine Learning Model Development from a Software Engineering Perspective: A Systematic Literature Review
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

Data scientists often develop machine learning models to solve a variety of problems in the industry and academy but not without facing several challenges in terms of Model Development. The problems regarding Machine Learning Development involves the fact that such professionals do not realize that they usually perform ad-hoc practices that could be improved by the adoption of activities presented in the Software Engineering Development Lifecycle. Of course, since machine learning systems are different from traditional Software systems, some differences in their respective development processes are to be expected. In this context, this paper is an effort to investigate the challenges and practices that emerge during the development of ML models from the software engineering perspective by focusing on understanding how software developers could benefit from applying or adapting the traditional software engineering process to the Machine Learning workflow.
User Embedding based Neighborhood Aggregation Method for Inductive Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

We consider the problem of learning latent features (aka embedding) for users and items in a recommendation setting. Given only a user-item interaction graph, the goal is to recommend items for each user. Traditional approaches employ matrix factorization-based collaborative filtering methods. Recent methods using graph convolutional networks (e.g., LightGCN) achieve state-of-the-art performance. They learn both user and item embedding. One major drawback of most existing methods is that they are not inductive; they do not generalize for users and items unseen during training. Besides, existing network models are quite complex, difficult to train and scale. Motivated by LightGCN, we propose a graph convolutional network modeling approach for collaborative filtering CF-GCN. We solely learn user embedding and derive item embedding using light variant CF-LGCN-U performing neighborhood aggregation, making it scalable due to reduced model complexity. CF-LGCN-U models naturally possess the inductive capability for new items, and we propose a simple solution to generalize for new users. We show how the proposed models are related to LightGCN. As a by-product, we suggest a simple solution to make LightGCN inductive. We perform comprehensive experiments on several benchmark datasets and demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed approach. Experimental results show that similar or better generalization performance is achievable than the state of the art methods in both transductive and inductive settings.
Seeing by haptic glance: reinforcement learning-based 3D object Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Human is able to conduct 3D recognition by a limited number of haptic contacts between the target object and his/her fingers without seeing the object. This capability is defined as `haptic glance' in cognitive neuroscience. Most of the existing 3D recognition models were developed based on dense 3D data. Nonetheless, in many real-life use cases, where robots are used to collect 3D data by haptic exploration, only a limited number of 3D points could be collected. In this study, we thus focus on solving the intractable problem of how to obtain cognitively representative 3D key-points of a target object with limited interactions between the robot and the object. A novel reinforcement learning based framework is proposed, where the haptic exploration procedure (the agent iteratively predicts the next position for the robot to explore) is optimized simultaneously with the objective 3D recognition with actively collected 3D points. As the model is rewarded only when the 3D object is accurately recognized, it is driven to find the sparse yet efficient haptic-perceptual 3D representation of the object. Experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms the state of the art models.
Real-time tracking of COVID-19 and coronavirus research updates through text mining
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

The novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) which causes COVID-19 is an ongoing pandemic. There are ongoing studies with up to hundreds of publications uploaded to databases daily. We are exploring the use-case of artificial intelligence and natural language processing in order to efficiently sort through these publications. We demonstrate that clinical trial information, preclinical studies, and a general topic model can be used as text mining data intelligence tools for scientists all over the world to use as a resource for their own research. To evaluate our method, several metrics are used to measure the information extraction and clustering results. In addition, we demonstrate that our workflow not only have a use-case for COVID-19, but for other disease areas as well. Overall, our system aims to allow scientists to more efficiently research coronavirus. Our automatically updating modules are available on our information portal at https://ghddi-ailab.github.io/Targeting2019-nCoV/ for public viewing.
Freudian and Newtonian Recurrent Cell for Sequential Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

A sequential recommender system aims to recommend attractive items to users based on behaviour patterns. The predominant sequential recommendation models are based on natural language processing models, such as the gated recurrent unit, that embed items in some defined space and grasp the user's long-term and short-term preferences based on the item embeddings. However, these approaches lack fundamental insight into how such models are related to the user's inherent decision-making process. To provide this insight, we propose a novel recurrent cell, namely FaNC, from Freudian and Newtonian perspectives. FaNC divides the user's state into conscious and unconscious states, and the user's decision process is modelled by Freud's two principles: the pleasure principle and reality principle. To model the pleasure principle, i.e., free-floating user's instinct, we place the user's unconscious state and item embeddings in the same latent space and subject them to Newton's law of gravitation. Moreover, to recommend items to users, we model the reality principle, i.e., balancing the conscious and unconscious states, via a gating function. Based on extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets, this paper provides insight into the characteristics of the proposed model. FaNC initiates a new direction of sequential recommendations at the convergence of psychoanalysis and recommender systems.
Uncertainty quantification and exploration-exploitation trade-off in humans
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

The main objective of this paper is to outline a theoretical framework to analyse how humans' decision-making strategies under uncertainty manage the trade-off between information gathering (exploration) and reward seeking (exploitation). A key observation, motivating this line of research, is the awareness that human learners are amazingly fast and effective at adapting to unfamiliar environments and incorporating upcoming knowledge: this is an intriguing behaviour for cognitive sciences as well as an important challenge for Machine Learning. The target problem considered is active learning in a black-box optimization task and more specifically how the exploration/exploitation dilemma can be modelled within Gaussian Process based Bayesian Optimization framework, which is in turn based on uncertainty quantification. The main contribution is to analyse humans' decisions with respect to Pareto rationality where the two objectives are improvement expected and uncertainty quantification. According to this Pareto rationality model, if a decision set contains a Pareto efficient (dominant) strategy, a rational decision maker should always select the dominant strategy over its dominated alternatives. The distance from the Pareto frontier determines whether a choice is (Pareto) rational (i.e., lays on the frontier) or is associated to "exasperate" exploration. However, since the uncertainty is one of the two objectives defining the Pareto frontier, we have investigated three different uncertainty quantification measures and selected the one resulting more compliant with the Pareto rationality model proposed. The key result is an analytical framework to characterize how deviations from "rationality" depend on uncertainty quantifications and the evolution of the reward seeking process.
Securing Connected Vehicle Applications with an Efficient Dual Cyber-Physical Blockchain Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

While connected vehicle (CV) applications have the potential to revolutionize traditional transportation system, cyber and physical attacks on them could be devastating. In this work, we propose an efficient dual cyber-physical blockchain framework to build trust and secure communication for CV applications. Our approach incorporates blockchain technology and physical sensing capabilities of vehicles to quickly react to attacks in a large-scale vehicular network, with low resource overhead. We explore the application of our framework to three CV applications, i.e., highway merging, intelligent intersection management, and traffic network with route choices. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our blockchain-based framework in defending against spoofing attacks, bad mouthing attacks, and Sybil and voting attacks. We also provide analysis to demonstrate the timing efficiency of our framework and the low computation, communication, and storage overhead for its implementation.