OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Punctuation Restoration in Spanish Customer Support Transcripts using Transfer Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems typically produce unpunctuated transcripts that have poor readability. In addition, building a punctuation restoration system is challenging for low-resource languages, especially for domain-specific applications. In this paper, we propose a Spanish punctuation restoration system designed for a real-time customer support transcription service. To address the data sparsity of Spanish transcripts in the customer support domain, we introduce two transfer-learning-based strategies: 1) domain adaptation using out-of-domain Spanish text data; 2) cross-lingual transfer learning leveraging in-domain English transcript data. Our experiment results show that these strategies improve the accuracy of the Spanish punctuation restoration system.
NaviDroid: A Tool for Guiding Manual Android Testing via Hint Moves
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

Manual testing, as a complement to automated GUI testing, is the last line of defense for app quality especially in spotting usability and accessibility issues. However, the repeated actions and easy missing of some functionalities make manual testing time-consuming, labor-extensive and inefficient. Inspired by the game candy crush with flashy candies as hint moves for players, we develop a tool named NaviDroid for navigating human testers via highlighted next operations for more effective and efficient testing. Within NaviDroid, it constructs an enriched state transition graph (STG) with the trigger actions as the edges for two involved states. Based on the STG, NaviDroid utilizes the dynamic programming algorithm to plan the exploration path, and augment the run-time GUI with visualized hint moves for testers to quickly explore untested states and avoid duplication. The automated experiments demonstrate the high coverage and efficient path planning of NaviDroid. A user study further confirms its usefulness in the participants covering more states and activities, detecting more bugs within less time compared with the control group. NaviDroid demo video: https://youtu.be/lShFyg_nTA0.
StereoKG: Data-Driven Knowledge Graph Construction for Cultural Knowledge and Stereotypes
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Analyzing ethnic or religious bias is important for improving fairness, accountability, and transparency of natural language processing models. However, many techniques rely on human-compiled lists of bias terms, which are expensive to create and are limited in coverage. In this study, we present a fully data-driven pipeline for generating a knowledge graph (KG) of cultural knowledge and stereotypes. Our resulting KG covers 5 religious groups and 5 nationalities and can easily be extended to include more entities. Our human evaluation shows that the majority (59.2%) of non-singleton entries are coherent and complete stereotypes. We further show that performing intermediate masked language model training on the verbalized KG leads to a higher level of cultural awareness in the model and has the potential to increase classification performance on knowledge-crucial samples on a related task, i.e., hate speech detection.
Intelligent Transportation Systems' Orchestration: Lessons Learned & Potential Opportunities
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

The growing deployment efforts of 5G networks globally has led to the acceleration of the businesses/services' digital transformation. This growth has led to the need for new communication technologies that will promote this transformation. 6G is being proposed as the set of technologies and architectures that will achieve this target. Among the main use cases that have emerged for 5G networks and will continue to play a pivotal role in 6G networks is that of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs). With all the projected benefits of developing and deploying efficient and effective ITSs comes a group of unique challenges that need to be addressed. One prominent challenge is ITS orchestration due to the various supporting technologies and heterogeneous networks used to offer the desired ITS applications/services. To that end, this paper focuses on the ITS orchestration challenge in detail by highlighting the related previous works from the literature and listing the lessons learned from current ITS deployment orchestration efforts. It also presents multiple potential data-driven research opportunities in which paradigms such as reinforcement learning and federated learning can be deployed to offer effective and efficient ITS orchestration.
How to Tame Multiple Spending in Decentralized Cryptocurrencies
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

The last decade has seen a variety of Asset-Transfer systems designed for decentralized environments. To address the problem of double-spending, these systems inherently make strong model assumptions and spend a lot of resources. In this paper, we take a non-orthodox approach to the double-spending problem that might suit better realistic environments in which these systems are to be deployed. We consider the decentralized trust setting, where each user may independently choose who to trust by forming its local quorums. In this setting, we define $k$-Spending Asset Transfer, a relaxed version of asset transfer which bounds the number of times the same asset can be spent. We establish a precise relationship between the decentralized trust assumptions and $k$, the optimal spending number of the system.
Haptic Shared Control Improves Neural Efficiency During Myoelectric Prosthesis Use
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Clinical myoelectric prostheses lack the sensory feedback and sufficient dexterity required to complete activities of daily living efficiently and accurately. Providing haptic feedback of relevant environmental cues to the user or imbuing the prosthesis with autonomous control authority have been separately shown to improve prosthesis utility. Few studies, however, have investigated the effect of combining these two approaches in a shared control paradigm, and none have evaluated such an approach from the perspective of neural efficiency (the relationship between task performance and mental effort measured directly from the brain). In this work, we analyzed the neural efficiency of 30 non-amputee participants in a grasp-and-lift task of a brittle object. Here, a myoelectric prosthesis featuring vibrotactile feedback of grip force and autonomous control of grasping was compared with a standard myoelectric prosthesis with and without vibrotactile feedback. As a measure of mental effort, we captured the prefrontal cortex activity changes using functional near infrared spectroscopy during the experiment. Results showed that only the haptic shared control system enabled users to achieve high neural efficiency, and that vibrotactile feedback was important for grasping with the appropriate grip force. These results indicate that the haptic shared control system synergistically combines the benefits of haptic feedback and autonomous controllers, and is well-poised to inform such hybrid advancements in myoelectric prosthesis technology.
Efficient Forecasting of Large Scale Hierarchical Time Series via Multilevel Clustering
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

We propose a novel approach to the problem of clustering hierarchically aggregated time-series data, which has remained an understudied problem though it has several commercial applications. We first group time series at each aggregated level, while simultaneously leveraging local and global information. The proposed method can cluster hierarchical time series (HTS) with different lengths and structures. For common two-level hierarchies, we employ a combined objective for local and global clustering over spaces of discrete probability measures, using Wasserstein distance coupled with Soft-DTW divergence. For multi-level hierarchies, we present a bottom-up procedure that progressively leverages lower-level information for higher-level clustering. Our final goal is to improve both the accuracy and speed of forecasts for a larger number of HTS needed for a real-world application. To attain this goal, each time series is first assigned the forecast for its cluster representative, which can be considered as a "shrinkage prior" for the set of time series it represents. Then this base forecast can be quickly fine-tuned to adjust to the specifics of that time series. We empirically show that our method substantially improves performance in terms of both speed and accuracy for large-scale forecasting tasks involving much HTS.
Service Composition in Opportunistic Networks: A Load and Mobility Aware Solution
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

Pervasive networks formed by users' mobile devices have the potential to exploit a rich set of distributed service components that can be composed to provide each user with a multitude of application level services. However, in many challenging scenarios, opportunistic networking techniques are required to enable communication as devices suffer from intermittent connectivity, disconnections and partitions. This poses novel challenges to service composition techniques. While several works have discussed middleware and architectures for service composition in well-connected wired networks and in stable MANET environments, the underlying mechanism for selecting and forwarding service requests in the significantly challenging networking environment of opportunistic networks has not been entirely addressed. The problem comprises three stages: i) selecting an appropriate service sequence set out of available services to obtain the required application level service; ii) routing results of a previous stage in the composition to the next one through a multi-hop opportunistic path; and iii) routing final service outcomes back to the requester. The proposed algorithm derives efficiency and effectiveness by taking into account the estimated load at service providers and expected time to opportunistically route information between devices. Based on this information the algorithm estimates the best composition to obtain a required service. It is shown that using only local knowledge collected in a distributed manner, performance close to a real-time centralized system can be achieved. Applicability and performance guarantee of the service composition algorithm in a range of mobility characteristics are established through extensive simulations on real/synthetic traces.
Exemplar Free Class Agnostic Counting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

We tackle the task of Class Agnostic Counting, which aims to count objects in a novel object category at test time without any access to labeled training data for that category. All previous class agnostic counting methods cannot work in a fully automated setting, and require computationally expensive test time adaptation. To address these challenges, we propose a visual counter which operates in a fully automated setting and does not require any test time adaptation. Our proposed approach first identifies exemplars from repeating objects in an image, and then counts the repeating objects. We propose a novel region proposal network for identifying the exemplars. After identifying the exemplars, we obtain the corresponding count by using a density estimation based Visual Counter. We evaluate our proposed approach on FSC-147 dataset, and show that it achieves superior performance compared to the existing approaches.
Defending Against Stealthy Backdoor Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Defenses against security threats have been an interest of recent studies. Recent works have shown that it is not difficult to attack a natural language processing (NLP) model while defending against them is still a cat-mouse game. Backdoor attacks are one such attack where a neural network is made to perform in a certain way on specific samples containing some triggers while achieving normal results on other samples. In this work, we present a few defense strategies that can be useful to counter against such an attack. We show that our defense methodologies significantly decrease the performance on the attacked inputs while maintaining similar performance on benign inputs. We also show that some of our defenses have very less runtime and also maintain similarity with the original inputs.
Towards a Design Framework for TNN-Based Neuromorphic Sensory Processing Units
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2022
Year: 2022

Temporal Neural Networks (TNNs) are spiking neural networks that exhibit brain-like sensory processing with high energy efficiency. This work presents the ongoing research towards developing a custom design framework for designing efficient application-specific TNN-based Neuromorphic Sensory Processing Units (NSPUs). This paper examines previous works on NSPU designs for UCR time-series clustering and MNIST image classification applications. Current ideas for a custom design framework and tools that enable efficient software-to-hardware design flow for rapid design space exploration of application-specific NSPUs while leveraging EDA tools to obtain post-layout netlist and power-performance-area (PPA) metrics are described. Future research directions are also outlined.
Survival Analysis on Structured Data using Deep Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Survival analysis is playing a major role in manufacturing sector by analyzing occurrence of any unwanted event based on the input data. Predictive maintenance, which is a part of survival analysis, helps to find any device failure based on the current incoming data from different sensor or any equipment. Deep learning techniques were used to automate the predictive maintenance problem to some extent, but they are not very helpful in predicting the device failure for the input data which the algorithm had not learned. Since neural network predicts the output based on previous learned input features, it cannot perform well when there is more variation in input features. Performance of the model is degraded with the occurrence of changes in input data and finally the algorithm fails in predicting the device failure. This problem can be solved by our proposed method where the algorithm can predict the device failure more precisely than the existing deep learning algorithms. The proposed solution involves implementation of Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithm called Double Deep Q Network (DDQN) for classifying the device failure based on the input features. The algorithm is capable of learning different variation of the input feature and is robust in predicting whether the device will fail or not based on the input data. The proposed DDQN model is trained with limited or lesser amount of input data. The trained model predicted larger amount of test data efficiently and performed well compared to other deep learning and machine learning models.
Insights from an Industrial Collaborative Assembly Project: Lessons in Research and Collaboration
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Significant progress in robotics reveals new opportunities to advance manufacturing. Next-generation industrial automation will require both integration of distinct robotic technologies and their application to challenging industrial environments. This paper presents lessons from a collaborative assembly project between three academic research groups and an industry partner. The goal of the project is to develop a flexible, safe, and productive manufacturing cell for sub-centimeter precision assembly. Solving this problem in a high-mix, low-volume production line motivates multiple research thrusts in robotics. This work identifies new directions in collaborative robotics for industrial applications and offers insight toward strengthening collaborations between institutions in academia and industry on the development of new technologies.
GLITCH: Automated Polyglot Security Smell Detection in Infrastructure as Code
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the process of managing IT infrastructure via programmable configuration files (also called IaC scripts). Like other software artifacts, IaC scripts may contain security smells, which are coding patterns that can result in security weaknesses. Automated analysis tools to detect security smells in IaC scripts exist, but they focus on specific technologies such as Puppet, Ansible, or Chef. This means that when the detection of a new smell is implemented in one of the tools, it is not immediately available for the technologies supported by the other tools -- the only option is to duplicate the effort. This paper presents an approach that enables consistent security smell detection across different IaC technologies. We conduct a large-scale empirical study that analyzes security smells on three large datasets containing 196,755 IaC scripts and 12,281,251 LOC. We show that all categories of security smells are identified across all datasets and we identify some smells that might affect many IaC projects. To conduct this study, we developed GLITCH, a new technology-agnostic framework that enables automated polyglot smell detection by transforming IaC scripts into an intermediate representation, on which different security smell detectors can be defined. GLITCH currently supports the detection of nine different security smells in scripts written in Ansible, Chef, or Puppet. We compare GLITCH with state-of-the-art security smell detectors. The results obtained not only show that GLITCH can reduce the effort of writing security smell analyses for multiple IaC technologies, but also that it has higher precision and recall than the current state-of-the-art tools.
One-Sided Repeated-Root Two-Dimensional Cyclic and Constacyclic Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we study some repeated-root two-dimensional cyclic and constacyclic codes over a finite field $F=\mathbb{F}_q$. We obtain the generator matrices and generator polynomials of these codes and their duals. We also investigate when such codes are self-dual. Moreover, we prove that if there exists an asymptotically good family of one-sided repeated-root two-dimensional cyclic or constacyclic codes, then there exists an asymptotically good family of simple root two-dimensional cyclic or constacyclic codes with parameters at least as good as the first family. Furthermore, we show that several of the main results of the papers Rajabi and Khashyarmanesh (2018) and Sepasdar and Khashyarmanesh (2016) are not accurate and find other conditions needed for them to hold.
Feature Pyramid Attention based Residual Neural Network for Environmental Sound Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

Environmental sound classification (ESC) is a challenging problem due to the unstructured spatial-temporal relations that exist in the sound signals. Recently, many studies have focused on abstracting features from convolutional neural networks while the learning of semantically relevant frames of sound signals has been overlooked. To this end, we present an end-to-end framework, namely feature pyramid attention network (FPAM), focusing on abstracting the semantically relevant features for ESC. We first extract the feature maps of the preprocessed spectrogram of the sound waveform by a backbone network. Then, to build multi-scale hierarchical features of sound spectrograms, we construct a feature pyramid representation of the sound spectrograms by aggregating the feature maps from multi-scale layers, where the temporal frames and spatial locations of semantically relevant frames are localized by FPAM. Specifically, the multiple features are first processed by a dimension alignment module. Afterward, the pyramid spatial attention module (PSA) is attached to localize the important frequency regions spatially with a spatial attention module (SAM). Last, the processed feature maps are refined by a pyramid channel attention (PCA) to localize the important temporal frames. To justify the effectiveness of the proposed FPAM, visualization of attention maps on the spectrograms has been presented. The visualization results show that FPAM can focus more on the semantic relevant regions while neglecting the noises. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is validated on two widely used ESC datasets: the ESC-50 and ESC-10 datasets. The experimental results show that the FPAM yields comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods. A substantial performance increase has been achieved by FPAM compared with the baseline methods.
Visual Perception of Building and Household Vulnerability from Streets
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

In developing countries, building codes often are outdated or not enforced. As a result, a large portion of the housing stock is substandard and vulnerable to natural hazards and climate related events. Assessing housing quality is key to inform public policies and private investments. Standard assessment methods are typically carried out only on a sample / pilot basis due to its high costs or, when complete, tend to be obsolete due to the lack of compliance with recommended updating standards or not accessible to most users with the level of detail needed to take key policy or business decisions. Thus, we propose an evaluation framework that is cost-efficient for first capture and future updates, and is reliable at the block level. The framework complements existing work of using street view imagery combined with deep learning to automatically extract building information to assist the identification of housing characteristics. We then check its potential for scalability and higher level reliability. For that purpose, we create an index, which synthesises the highest possible level of granularity of data at the housing unit and at the household level at the block level, and assess whether the predictions made by our model could be used to approximate vulnerability conditions with a lower budget and in selected areas. Our results indicated that the predictions from the images are clearly correlated with the index.
SuperVoice: Text-Independent Speaker Verification Using Ultrasound Energy in Human Speech
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

Voice-activated systems are integrated into a variety of desktop, mobile, and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. However, voice spoofing attacks, such as impersonation and replay attacks, in which malicious attackers synthesize the voice of a victim or simply replay it, have brought growing security concerns. Existing speaker verification techniques distinguish individual speakers via the spectrographic features extracted from an audible frequency range of voice commands. However, they often have high error rates and/or long delays. In this paper, we explore a new direction of human voice research by scrutinizing the unique characteristics of human speech at the ultrasound frequency band. Our research indicates that the high-frequency ultrasound components (e.g. speech fricatives) from 20 to 48 kHz can significantly enhance the security and accuracy of speaker verification. We propose a speaker verification system, SUPERVOICE that uses a two-stream DNN architecture with a feature fusion mechanism to generate distinctive speaker models. To test the system, we create a speech dataset with 12 hours of audio (8,950 voice samples) from 127 participants. In addition, we create a second spoofed voice dataset to evaluate its security. In order to balance between controlled recordings and real-world applications, the audio recordings are collected from two quiet rooms by 8 different recording devices, including 7 smartphones and an ultrasound microphone. Our evaluation shows that SUPERVOICE achieves 0.58% equal error rate in the speaker verification task, it only takes 120 ms for testing an incoming utterance, outperforming all existing speaker verification systems. Moreover, within 91 ms processing time, SUPERVOICE achieves 0% equal error rate in detecting replay attacks launched by 5 different loudspeakers.