OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Machine Learning-Based Soft Sensors for Vacuum Distillation Unit
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Product quality assessment in the petroleum processing industry can be difficult and time-consuming, e.g. due to a manual collection of liquid samples from the plant and subsequent chemical laboratory analysis of the samples. The product quality is an important property that informs whether the products of the process are within the specifications. In particular, the delays caused by sample processing (collection, laboratory measurements, results analysis, reporting) can lead to detrimental economic effects. One of the strategies to deal with this problem is soft sensors. Soft sensors are a collection of models that can be used to predict and forecast some infrequently measured properties (such as laboratory measurements of petroleum products) based on more frequent measurements of quantities like temperature, pressure and flow rate provided by physical sensors. Soft sensors short-cut the pathway to obtain relevant information about the product quality, often providing measurements as frequently as every minute. One of the applications of soft sensors is for the real-time optimization of a chemical process by a targeted adaptation of operating parameters. Models used for soft sensors can have various forms, however, among the most common are those based on artificial neural networks (ANNs). While soft sensors can deal with some of the issues in the refinery processes, their development and deployment can pose other challenges that are addressed in this paper. Firstly, it is important to enhance the quality of both sets of data (laboratory measurements and physical sensors) in a data pre-processing stage (as described in Methodology section). Secondly, once the data sets are pre-processed, different models need to be tested against prediction error and the model's interpretability. In this work, we present a framework for soft sensor development from raw data to ready-to-use models.
Model-agnostic bias mitigation methods with regressor distribution control for Wasserstein-based fairness metrics
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

This article is a companion paper to our earlier work Miroshnikov et al. (2021) on fairness interpretability, which introduces bias explanations. In the current work, we propose a bias mitigation methodology based upon the construction of post-processed models with fairer regressor distributions for Wasserstein-based fairness metrics. By identifying the list of predictors contributing the most to the bias, we reduce the dimensionality of the problem by mitigating the bias originating from those predictors. The post-processing methodology involves reshaping the predictor distributions by balancing the positive and negative bias explanations and allows for the regressor bias to decrease. We design an algorithm that uses Bayesian optimization to construct the bias-performance efficient frontier over the family of post-processed models, from which an optimal model is selected. Our novel methodology performs optimization in low-dimensional spaces and avoids expensive model retraining.
Improving Next-Application Prediction with Deep Personalized-Attention Neural Network
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

Recently, due to the ubiquity and supremacy of E-recruitment platforms, job recommender systems have been largely studied. In this paper, we tackle the next job application problem, which has many practical applications. In particular, we propose to leverage next-item recommendation approaches to consider better the job seeker's career preference to discover the next relevant job postings (referred to jobs for short) they might apply for. Our proposed model, named Personalized-Attention Next-Application Prediction (PANAP), is composed of three modules. The first module learns job representations from textual content and metadata attributes in an unsupervised way. The second module learns job seeker representations. It includes a personalized-attention mechanism that can adapt the importance of each job in the learned career preference representation to the specific job seeker's profile. The attention mechanism also brings some interpretability to learned representations. Then, the third module models the Next-Application Prediction task as a top-K search process based on the similarity of representations. In addition, the geographic location is an essential factor that affects the preferences of job seekers in the recruitment domain. Therefore, we explore the influence of geographic location on the model performance from the perspective of negative sampling strategies. Experiments on the public CareerBuilder12 dataset show the interest in our approach.
An efficient branch-and-cut algorithm for the parallel drone scheduling traveling salesman problem
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2021
Year: 2021

We propose an efficient branch-and-cut algorithm to exactly solve the parallel drone scheduling traveling salesman problem. Our algorithm can find optimal solutions for all but two existing instances with up to 229 customers in a reasonable running time. To make the problem more challenging for future methods, we introduce two new sets of 120 larger instances with the number of customers varying from 318 to 783 and test our algorithm and investigate the performance of state-of-the-art metaheuristics on these instances.
Towards Improving Embedding Based Models of Social Network Alignment via Pseudo Anchors
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2021
Year: 2021

Social network alignment aims at aligning person identities across social networks. Embedding based models have been shown effective for the alignment where the structural proximity preserving objective is typically adopted for the model training. With the observation that ``overly-close'' user embeddings are unavoidable for such models causing alignment inaccuracy, we propose a novel learning framework which tries to enforce the resulting embeddings to be more widely apart among the users via the introduction of carefully implanted pseudo anchors. We further proposed a meta-learning algorithm to guide the updating of the pseudo anchor embeddings during the learning process. The proposed intervention via the use of pseudo anchors and meta-learning allows the learning framework to be applicable to a wide spectrum of network alignment methods. We have incorporated the proposed learning framework into several state-of-the-art models. Our experimental results demonstrate its efficacy where the methods with the pseudo anchors implanted can outperform their counterparts without pseudo anchors by a fairly large margin, especially when there only exist very few labeled anchors.
DLVGen: A Dual Latent Variable Approach to Personalized Dialogue Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

The generation of personalized dialogue is vital to natural and human-like conversation. Typically, personalized dialogue generation models involve conditioning the generated response on the dialogue history and a representation of the persona/personality of the interlocutor. As it is impractical to obtain the persona/personality representations for every interlocutor, recent works have explored the possibility of generating personalized dialogue by finetuning the model with dialogue examples corresponding to a given persona instead. However, in real-world implementations, a sufficient number of corresponding dialogue examples are also rarely available. Hence, in this paper, we propose a Dual Latent Variable Generator (DLVGen) capable of generating personalized dialogue in the absence of any persona/personality information or any corresponding dialogue examples. Unlike prior work, DLVGen models the latent distribution over potential responses as well as the latent distribution over the agent's potential persona. During inference, latent variables are sampled from both distributions and fed into the decoder. Empirical results show that DLVGen is capable of generating diverse responses which accurately incorporate the agent's persona.
Turbo Autoencoder with a Trainable Interleaver
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

A critical aspect of reliable communication involves the design of codes that allow transmissions to be robustly and computationally efficiently decoded under noisy conditions. Advances in the design of reliable codes have been driven by coding theory and have been sporadic. Recently, it is shown that channel codes that are comparable to modern codes can be learned solely via deep learning. In particular, Turbo Autoencoder (TURBOAE), introduced by Jiang et al., is shown to achieve the reliability of Turbo codes for Additive White Gaussian Noise channels. In this paper, we focus on applying the idea of TURBOAE to various practical channels, such as fading channels and chirp noise channels. We introduce TURBOAE-TI, a novel neural architecture that combines TURBOAE with a trainable interleaver design. We develop a carefully-designed training procedure and a novel interleaver penalty function that are crucial in learning the interleaver and TURBOAE jointly. We demonstrate that TURBOAE-TI outperforms TURBOAE and LTE Turbo codes for several channels of interest. We also provide interpretation analysis to better understand TURBOAE-TI.
Benchmarking Detection Transfer Learning with Vision Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Object detection is a central downstream task used to test if pre-trained network parameters confer benefits, such as improved accuracy or training speed. The complexity of object detection methods can make this benchmarking non-trivial when new architectures, such as Vision Transformer (ViT) models, arrive. These difficulties (e.g., architectural incompatibility, slow training, high memory consumption, unknown training formulae, etc.) have prevented recent studies from benchmarking detection transfer learning with standard ViT models. In this paper, we present training techniques that overcome these challenges, enabling the use of standard ViT models as the backbone of Mask R-CNN. These tools facilitate the primary goal of our study: we compare five ViT initializations, including recent state-of-the-art self-supervised learning methods, supervised initialization, and a strong random initialization baseline. Our results show that recent masking-based unsupervised learning methods may, for the first time, provide convincing transfer learning improvements on COCO, increasing box AP up to 4% (absolute) over supervised and prior self-supervised pre-training methods. Moreover, these masking-based initializations scale better, with the improvement growing as model size increases.
RedCaps: web-curated image-text data created by the people, for the people
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Large datasets of paired images and text have become increasingly popular for learning generic representations for vision and vision-and-language tasks. Such datasets have been built by querying search engines or collecting HTML alt-text -- since web data is noisy, they require complex filtering pipelines to maintain quality. We explore alternate data sources to collect high quality data with minimal filtering. We introduce RedCaps -- a large-scale dataset of 12M image-text pairs collected from Reddit. Images and captions from Reddit depict and describe a wide variety of objects and scenes. We collect data from a manually curated set of subreddits, which give coarse image labels and allow us to steer the dataset composition without labeling individual instances. We show that captioning models trained on RedCaps produce rich and varied captions preferred by humans, and learn visual representations that transfer to many downstream tasks.
Florence: A New Foundation Model for Computer Vision
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Automated visual understanding of our diverse and open world demands computer vision models to generalize well with minimal customization for specific tasks, similar to human vision. Computer vision foundation models, which are trained on diverse, large-scale dataset and can be adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks, are critical for this mission to solve real-world computer vision applications. While existing vision foundation models such as CLIP, ALIGN, and Wu Dao 2.0 focus mainly on mapping images and textual representations to a cross-modal shared representation, we introduce a new computer vision foundation model, Florence, to expand the representations from coarse (scene) to fine (object), from static (images) to dynamic (videos), and from RGB to multiple modalities (caption, depth). By incorporating universal visual-language representations from Web-scale image-text data, our Florence model can be easily adapted for various computer vision tasks, such as classification, retrieval, object detection, VQA, image caption, video retrieval and action recognition. Moreover, Florence demonstrates outstanding performance in many types of transfer learning: fully sampled fine-tuning, linear probing, few-shot transfer and zero-shot transfer for novel images and objects. All of these properties are critical for our vision foundation model to serve general purpose vision tasks. Florence achieves new state-of-the-art results in majority of 44 representative benchmarks, e.g., ImageNet-1K zero-shot classification with top-1 accuracy of 83.74 and the top-5 accuracy of 97.18, 62.4 mAP on COCO fine tuning, 80.36 on VQA, and 87.8 on Kinetics-600.
Scalar Gaussian Wiretap Channel with Peak Amplitude Constraint: Numerical Computation of the Optimal Input Distribution
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

This paper studies a scalar Gaussian wiretap channel where instead of an average input power constraint, we consider a peak amplitude constraint on the input. The goal is to obtain insights into the secrecy-capacity and the structure of the secrecy-capacity-achieving distribution. Capitalizing on the recent theoretical progress on the structure of the secrecy-capacity-achieving distribution, this paper develops a numerical procedure, based on the gradient ascent algorithm and a version of the Blahut-Arimoto algorithm, for computing the secrecy-capacity and the secrecy-capacity-achieving input and output distributions.
Threat Modeling and Security Analysis of Containers: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Traditionally, applications that are used in large and small enterprises were deployed on "bare metal" servers installed with operating systems. Recently, the use of multiple virtual machines (VMs) on the same physical server was adopted due to cost reduction and flexibility. Nowadays, containers have become popular for application deployment due to smaller footprints than the VMs, their ability to start and stop more quickly, and their capability to pack the application binaries and their dependencies in standalone units for seamless portability. A typical container ecosystem includes a code repository (e.g., GitHub) where the container images are built from the codes and libraries and then pushed to the image registry (e.g., Docker Hub) for subsequent deployment as application containers. However, the pervasive use of containers also leads to a wide-range of security breaches, such as stealing credentials and sensitive data from image registry and code repository, carrying out DoS attacks, and gaining root access to the underlying host. In this paper, we first perform threat modeling on the containers ecosystem using the popular threat modeling framework, called STRIDE. Using STRIDE, we identify the vulnerabilities in each system component, and investigate potential security threats and their consequences. Then, we conduct a comprehensive survey on the existing countermeasures designed against the identified threats and vulnerabilities. In particular, we assess the strengths and weaknesses of the existing mitigation strategies designed against such threats. We believe that this work will help researchers and practitioners to gain a deeper understanding of the threat landscape in containers and the state-of-the-art countermeasures. We also discuss open research problems and future research directions in containers security, which may ignite further research to be done in this area.
Blockchain-based Recommender Systems: Applications, Challenges and Future Opportunities
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

Recommender systems have been widely used in different application domains including energy-preservation, e-commerce, healthcare, social media, etc. Such applications require the analysis and mining of massive amounts of various types of user data, including demographics, preferences, social interactions, etc. in order to develop accurate and precise recommender systems. Such datasets often include sensitive information, yet most recommender systems are focusing on the models' accuracy and ignore issues related to security and the users' privacy. Despite the efforts to overcome these problems using different risk reduction techniques, none of them has been completely successful in ensuring cryptographic security and protection of the users' private information. To bridge this gap, the blockchain technology is presented as a promising strategy to promote security and privacy preservation in recommender systems, not only because of its security and privacy salient features, but also due to its resilience, adaptability, fault tolerance and trust characteristics. This paper presents a holistic review of blockchain-based recommender systems covering challenges, open issues and solutions. Accordingly, a well-designed taxonomy is introduced to describe the security and privacy challenges, overview existing frameworks and discuss their applications and benefits when using blockchain before indicating opportunities for future research.
On Data-centric Myths
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

The community lacks theory-informed guidelines for building good data sets. We analyse theoretical directions relating to what aspects of the data matter and conclude that the intuitions derived from the existing literature are incorrect and misleading. Using empirical counter-examples, we show that 1) data dimension should not necessarily be minimised and 2) when manipulating data, preserving the distribution is inessential. This calls for a more data-aware theoretical understanding. Although not explored in this work, we propose the study of the impact of data modification on learned representations as a promising research direction.
Learnable Structural Semantic Readout for Graph Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

With the great success of deep learning in various domains, graph neural networks (GNNs) also become a dominant approach to graph classification. By the help of a global readout operation that simply aggregates all node (or node-cluster) representations, existing GNN classifiers obtain a graph-level representation of an input graph and predict its class label using the representation. However, such global aggregation does not consider the structural information of each node, which results in information loss on the global structure. Particularly, it limits the discrimination power by enforcing the same weight parameters of the classifier for all the node representations; in practice, each of them contributes to target classes differently depending on its structural semantic. In this work, we propose structural semantic readout (SSRead) to summarize the node representations at the position-level, which allows to model the position-specific weight parameters for classification as well as to effectively capture the graph semantic relevant to the global structure. Given an input graph, SSRead aims to identify structurally-meaningful positions by using the semantic alignment between its nodes and structural prototypes, which encode the prototypical features of each position. The structural prototypes are optimized to minimize the alignment cost for all training graphs, while the other GNN parameters are trained to predict the class labels. Our experimental results demonstrate that SSRead significantly improves the classification performance and interpretability of GNN classifiers while being compatible with a variety of aggregation functions, GNN architectures, and learning frameworks.
On Fair Division with Binary Valuations Respecting Social Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2021
Year: 2021

We study the computational complexity of finding fair allocations of indivisible goods in the setting where a social network on the agents is given. Notions of fairness in this context are "localized", that is, agents are only concerned about the bundles allocated to their neighbors, rather than every other agent in the system. We comprehensively address the computational complexity of finding locally envy-free and Pareto efficient allocations in the setting where the agents have binary valuations for the goods and the underlying social network is modeled by an undirected graph. We study the problem in the framework of parameterized complexity. We show that the problem is computationally intractable even in fairly restricted scenarios, for instance, even when the underlying graph is a path. We show NP-hardness for settings where the graph has only two distinct valuations among the agents. We demonstrate W-hardness with respect to the number of goods or the size of the vertex cover of the underlying graph. We also consider notions of proportionality that respect the structure of the underlying graph and show that two natural versions of this notion have different complexities: allocating according to the notion that accounts for locality to the greatest degree turns out to be computationally intractable, while for other notions, the allocation problem can be modeled as a structured ILP which can be solved efficiently.
Camera Measurement of Physiological Vital Signs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

The need for remote tools for healthcare monitoring has never been more apparent. Camera measurement of vital signs leverages imaging devices to compute physiological changes by analyzing images of the human body. Building on advances in optics, machine learning, computer vision and medicine these techniques have progressed significantly since the invention of digital cameras. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of camera measurement of physiological vital signs, describing they vital signs that can be measured and the computational techniques for doing so. I cover both clinical and non-clinical applications and the challenges that need to be overcome for these applications to advance from proofs-of-concept. Finally, I describe the current resources (datasets and code) available to the research community and provide a comprehensive webpage (https://cameravitals.github.io/) with links to these resource and a categorized list of all the papers referenced in this article.
Semi-Supervised Learning with Taxonomic Labels
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

We propose techniques to incorporate coarse taxonomic labels to train image classifiers in fine-grained domains. Such labels can often be obtained with a smaller effort for fine-grained domains such as the natural world where categories are organized according to a biological taxonomy. On the Semi-iNat dataset consisting of 810 species across three Kingdoms, incorporating Phylum labels improves the Species level classification accuracy by 6% in a transfer learning setting using ImageNet pre-trained models. Incorporating the hierarchical label structure with a state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning algorithm called FixMatch improves the performance further by 1.3%. The relative gains are larger when detailed labels such as Class or Order are provided, or when models are trained from scratch. However, we find that most methods are not robust to the presence of out-of-domain data from novel classes. We propose a technique to select relevant data from a large collection of unlabeled images guided by the hierarchy which improves the robustness. Overall, our experiments show that semi-supervised learning with coarse taxonomic labels are practical for training classifiers in fine-grained domains.