OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Cover attacks for elliptic curves with prime order
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

We give a new approach to the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem over cubic extension fields $\mathbb{F}_{q^3}$. It is based on a transfer: First an $\mathbb{F}_q$-rational $(\ell,\ell,\ell)$-isogeny from the Weil restriction of the elliptic curve under consideration with respect to $\mathbb{F}_{q^3}/\mathbb{F}_q$ to the Jacobian variety of a genus three curve over $\mathbb{F}_q$ is applied and then the problem is solved in the Jacobian via the index-calculus attacks. Although using no covering maps in the construction of the desired homomorphism, this method is, in a sense, a kind of cover attack. As a result, it is possible to solve the discrete logarithm problem in some elliptic curve groups of prime order over $\mathbb{F}_{q^3}$ in a time of $\tilde{O}(q)$.
Bayes DistNet -- A Robust Neural Network for Algorithm Runtime Distribution Predictions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Randomized algorithms are used in many state-of-the-art solvers for constraint satisfaction problems (CSP) and Boolean satisfiability (SAT) problems. For many of these problems, there is no single solver which will dominate others. Having access to the underlying runtime distributions (RTD) of these solvers can allow for better use of algorithm selection, algorithm portfolios, and restart strategies. Previous state-of-the-art methods directly try to predict a fixed parametric distribution that the input instance follows. In this paper, we extend RTD prediction models into the Bayesian setting for the first time. This new model achieves robust predictive performance in the low observation setting, as well as handling censored observations. This technique also allows for richer representations which cannot be achieved by the classical models which restrict their output representations. Our model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art model in settings in which data is scarce, and can make use of censored data such as lower bound time estimates, where that type of data would otherwise be discarded. It can also quantify its uncertainty in its predictions, allowing for algorithm portfolio models to make better informed decisions about which algorithm to run on a particular instance.
TDAF: Top-Down Attention Framework for Vision Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Human attention mechanisms often work in a top-down manner, yet it is not well explored in vision research. Here, we propose the Top-Down Attention Framework (TDAF) to capture top-down attentions, which can be easily adopted in most existing models. The designed Recursive Dual-Directional Nested Structure in it forms two sets of orthogonal paths, recursive and structural ones, where bottom-up spatial features and top-down attention features are extracted respectively. Such spatial and attention features are nested deeply, therefore, the proposed framework works in a mixed top-down and bottom-up manner. Empirical evidence shows that our TDAF can capture effective stratified attention information and boost performance. ResNet with TDAF achieves 2.0% improvements on ImageNet. For object detection, the performance is improved by 2.7% AP over FCOS. For pose estimation, TDAF improves the baseline by 1.6%. And for action recognition, the 3D-ResNet adopting TDAF achieves improvements of 1.7% accuracy.
Towards Accurate Spatiotemporal COVID-19 Risk Scores using High Resolution Real-World Mobility Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

As countries look towards re-opening of economic activities amidst the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, ensuring public health has been challenging. While contact tracing only aims to track past activities of infected users, one path to safe reopening is to develop reliable spatiotemporal risk scores to indicate the propensity of the disease. Existing works which aim to develop risk scores either rely on compartmental model-based reproduction numbers (which assume uniform population mixing) or develop coarse-grain spatial scores based on reproduction number (R0) and macro-level density-based mobility statistics. Instead, in this paper, we develop a Hawkes process-based technique to assign relatively fine-grain spatial and temporal risk scores by leveraging high-resolution mobility data based on cell-phone originated location signals. While COVID-19 risk scores also depend on a number of factors specific to an individual, including demography and existing medical conditions, the primary mode of disease transmission is via physical proximity and contact. Therefore, we focus on developing risk scores based on location density and mobility behaviour. We demonstrate the efficacy of the developed risk scores via simulation based on real-world mobility data. Our results show that fine-grain spatiotemporal risk scores based on high-resolution mobility data can provide useful insights and facilitate safe re-opening.
Learning Category-level Shape Saliency via Deep Implicit Surface Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

This paper is motivated from a fundamental curiosity on what defines a category of object shapes. For example, we may have the common knowledge that a plane has wings, and a chair has legs. Given the large shape variations among different instances of a same category, we are formally interested in developing a quantity defined for individual points on a continuous object surface; the quantity specifies how individual surface points contribute to the formation of the shape as the category. We term such a quantity as category-level shape saliency or shape saliency for short. Technically, we propose to learn saliency maps for shape instances of a same category from a deep implicit surface network; sensible saliency scores for sampled points in the implicit surface field are predicted by constraining the capacity of input latent code. We also enhance the saliency prediction with an additional loss of contrastive training. We expect such learned surface maps of shape saliency to have the properties of smoothness, symmetry, and semantic representativeness. We verify these properties by comparing our method with alternative ways of saliency computation. Notably, we show that by leveraging the learned shape saliency, we are able to reconstruct either category-salient or instance-specific parts of object surfaces; semantic representativeness of the learned saliency is also reflected in its efficacy to guide the selection of surface points for better point cloud classification.
LRC-BERT: Latent-representation Contrastive Knowledge Distillation for Natural Language Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

The pre-training models such as BERT have achieved great results in various natural language processing problems. However, a large number of parameters need significant amounts of memory and the consumption of inference time, which makes it difficult to deploy them on edge devices. In this work, we propose a knowledge distillation method LRC-BERT based on contrastive learning to fit the output of the intermediate layer from the angular distance aspect, which is not considered by the existing distillation methods. Furthermore, we introduce a gradient perturbation-based training architecture in the training phase to increase the robustness of LRC-BERT, which is the first attempt in knowledge distillation. Additionally, in order to better capture the distribution characteristics of the intermediate layer, we design a two-stage training method for the total distillation loss. Finally, by verifying 8 datasets on the General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE) benchmark, the performance of the proposed LRC-BERT exceeds the existing state-of-the-art methods, which proves the effectiveness of our method.
Mind the Gap: On the Relationship Between Automatically Measured and Self-Reported Productivity
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2020
Year: 2020

To improve software developers' productivity has been the holy grail of software engineering research. But before we can claim to have improved it, we must first be able to measure productivity. This is far from trivial. In fact, two separate research lines on software engineers' productivity have co-existed almost in complete isolation for a long time: automated product and process measures on the one hand and self-reported or perceived productivity on the other hand. In this article, we bridge the gap between the two with an empirical study of 81 software developers at Microsoft.
Pyramid-Focus-Augmentation: Medical Image Segmentation with Step-Wise Focus
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Segmentation of findings in the gastrointestinal tract is a challenging but also an important task which is an important building stone for sufficient automatic decision support systems. In this work, we present our solution for the Medico 2020 task, which focused on the problem of colon polyp segmentation. We present our simple but efficient idea of using an augmentation method that uses grids in a pyramid-like manner (large to small) for segmentation. Our results show that the proposed methods work as indented and can also lead to comparable results when competing with other methods.
Privacy Preserving Demand Forecasting to Encourage Consumer Acceptance of Smart Energy Meters
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

In this proposal paper we highlight the need for privacy preserving energy demand forecasting to allay a major concern consumers have about smart meter installations. High resolution smart meter data can expose many private aspects of a consumer's household such as occupancy, habits and individual appliance usage. Yet smart metering infrastructure has the potential to vastly reduce carbon emissions from the energy sector through improved operating efficiencies. We propose the application of a distributed machine learning setting known as federated learning for energy demand forecasting at various scales to make load prediction possible whilst retaining the privacy of consumers' raw energy consumption data.
FedHome: Cloud-Edge based Personalized Federated Learning for In-Home Health Monitoring
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

In-home health monitoring has attracted great attention for the ageing population worldwide. With the abundant user health data accessed by Internet of Things (IoT) devices and recent development in machine learning, smart healthcare has seen many successful stories. However, existing approaches for in-home health monitoring do not pay sufficient attention to user data privacy and thus are far from being ready for large-scale practical deployment. In this paper, we propose FedHome, a novel cloud-edge based federated learning framework for in-home health monitoring, which learns a shared global model in the cloud from multiple homes at the network edges and achieves data privacy protection by keeping user data locally. To cope with the imbalanced and non-IID distribution inherent in user's monitoring data, we design a generative convolutional autoencoder (GCAE), which aims to achieve accurate and personalized health monitoring by refining the model with a generated class-balanced dataset from user's personal data. Besides, GCAE is lightweight to transfer between the cloud and edges, which is useful to reduce the communication cost of federated learning in FedHome. Extensive experiments based on realistic human activity recognition data traces corroborate that FedHome significantly outperforms existing widely-adopted methods.
A Canine Census to Influence Public Policy
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

The potential threat that domestic animals pose to the health of human populations tends to be overlooked. We posit that positive steps forward can be made in this area, via suitable state-wide public policy. In this paper, we describe the data collection process that took place in Casilda (a city in Argentina), in the context of a canine census. We outline preliminary findings emerging from the data, based on a number of perspectives, along with implications of these findings in terms of informing public policy.
Meta learning to classify intent and slot labels with noisy few shot examples
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Recently deep learning has dominated many machine learning areas, including spoken language understanding (SLU). However, deep learning models are notorious for being data-hungry, and the heavily optimized models are usually sensitive to the quality of the training examples provided and the consistency between training and inference conditions. To improve the performance of SLU models on tasks with noisy and low training resources, we propose a new SLU benchmarking task: few-shot robust SLU, where SLU comprises two core problems, intent classification (IC) and slot labeling (SL). We establish the task by defining few-shot splits on three public IC/SL datasets, ATIS, SNIPS, and TOP, and adding two types of natural noises (adaptation example missing/replacing and modality mismatch) to the splits. We further propose a novel noise-robust few-shot SLU model based on prototypical networks. We show the model consistently outperforms the conventional fine-tuning baseline and another popular meta-learning method, Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML), in terms of achieving better IC accuracy and SL F1, and yielding smaller performance variation when noises are present.
Movie Summarization via Sparse Graph Construction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

We summarize full-length movies by creating shorter videos containing their most informative scenes. We explore the hypothesis that a summary can be created by assembling scenes which are turning points (TPs), i.e., key events in a movie that describe its storyline. We propose a model that identifies TP scenes by building a sparse movie graph that represents relations between scenes and is constructed using multimodal information. According to human judges, the summaries created by our approach are more informative and complete, and receive higher ratings, than the outputs of sequence-based models and general-purpose summarization algorithms. The induced graphs are interpretable, displaying different topology for different movie genres.
Sentiment analysis in Bengali via transfer learning using multi-lingual BERT
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Sentiment analysis (SA) in Bengali is challenging due to this Indo-Aryan language's highly inflected properties with more than 160 different inflected forms for verbs and 36 different forms for noun and 24 different forms for pronouns. The lack of standard labeled datasets in the Bengali domain makes the task of SA even harder. In this paper, we present manually tagged 2-class and 3-class SA datasets in Bengali. We also demonstrate that the multi-lingual BERT model with relevant extensions can be trained via the approach of transfer learning over those novel datasets to improve the state-of-the-art performance in sentiment classification tasks. This deep learning model achieves an accuracy of 71\% for 2-class sentiment classification compared to the current state-of-the-art accuracy of 68\%. We also present the very first Bengali SA classifier for the 3-class manually tagged dataset, and our proposed model achieves an accuracy of 60\%. We further use this model to analyze the sentiment of public comments in the online daily newspaper. Our analysis shows that people post negative comments for political or sports news more often, while the religious article comments represent positive sentiment. The dataset and code is publicly available at https://github.com/KhondokerIslam/Bengali\_Sentiment.
Decoupled Self Attention for Accurate One Stage Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

As the scale of object detection dataset is smaller than that of image recognition dataset ImageNet, transfer learning has become a basic training method for deep learning object detection models, which will pretrain the backbone network of object detection model on ImageNet dataset to extract features for classification and localization subtasks. However, the classification task focuses on the salient region features of object, while the location task focuses on the edge features of object, so there is certain deviation between the features extracted by pretrained backbone network and the features used for localization task. In order to solve this problem, a decoupled self attention(DSA) module is proposed for one stage object detection models in this paper. DSA includes two decoupled self-attention branches, so it can extract appropriate features for different tasks. It is located between FPN and head networks of subtasks, so it is used to extract global features based on FPN fused features for different tasks independently. Although the network of DSA module is simple, but it can effectively improve the performance of object detection, also it can be easily embedded in many detection models. Our experiments are based on the representative one-stage detection model RetinaNet. In COCO dataset, when ResNet50 and ResNet101 are used as backbone networks, the detection performances can be increased by 0.4% AP and 0.5% AP respectively. When DSA module and object confidence task are applied in RetinaNet together, the detection performances based on ResNet50 and ResNet101 can be increased by 1.0% AP and 1.4% AP respectively. The experiment results show the effectiveness of DSA module. Code is at: https://github.com/chenzuge1/DSANet.git.
A Comparative Analysis of the Ensemble Methods for Drug Design
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) is a computer modeling technique for identifying relationships between the structural properties of chemical compounds and biological activity. QSAR modeling is necessary for drug discovery, but it has many limitations. Ensemble-based machine learning approaches have been used to overcome limitations and generate reliable predictions. Ensemble learning creates a set of diverse models and combines them. In our comparative analysis, each ensemble algorithm was paired with each of the basic algorithms, but the basic algorithms were also investigated separately. In this configuration, 57 algorithms were developed and compared on 4 different datasets. Thus, a technique for complex ensemble method is proposed that builds diversified models and integrates them. The proposed individual models did not show impressive results as a unified model, but it was considered the most important predictor when combined. We assessed whether ensembles always give better results than individual algorithms. The Python code written to get experimental results in this article has been uploaded to Github (https://github.com/rifqat/Comparative-Analysis).
Constraints on Hebbian and STDP learned weights of a spiking neuron
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We analyse mathematically the constraints on weights resulting from Hebbian and STDP learning rules applied to a spiking neuron with weight normalisation. In the case of pure Hebbian learning, we find that the normalised weights equal the promotion probabilities of weights up to correction terms that depend on the learning rate and are usually small. A similar relation can be derived for STDP algorithms, where the normalised weight values reflect a difference between the promotion and demotion probabilities of the weight. These relations are practically useful in that they allow checking for convergence of Hebbian and STDP algorithms. Another application is novelty detection. We demonstrate this using the MNIST dataset.
Back in control -- An extensible middle-box on your phone
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

The closed design of mobile devices -- with the increased security and consistent user interfaces -- is in large part responsible for their becoming the dominant platform for accessing the Internet. These benefits, however, are not without a cost. Their operation of mobile devices and their apps is not easy to understand by either users or operators. We argue for recovering transparency and control on mobile devices through an extensible platform that can intercept and modify traffic before leaving the device or, on arrival, before it reaches the operating system. Conceptually, this is the same view of the traffic that a traditional middlebox would have at the far end of the first link in the network path. We call this platform ``middlebox zero'' or MBZ. By being on-board, MBZ also leverages local context as it processes the traffic and complements the network-wide view of standard middleboxes. We discuss the challenges of the MBZ approach, sketch a working design, and illustrate its potential with some concrete examples.
Concerning Iterative Graph Normalization and Maximum Weight Independent Sets
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2020
Year: 2020

We consider a very simple dynamical system on weighted graphs which we call Iterative Graph Normalization (IGN) and a variant in which we apply a non-linear activation function to the weights after each normalization. We show that the indicator vectors of the Maximal Independent Sets of the graph are the only binary fixed points of IGN, that they are attractive under simple conditions on the activation function and we characterize their basins of attraction. We enumerate a number of other fixed points and we prove repulsivity for some classes. Based on extensive experiments and different theoretical arguments we conjecture that IGN always converges and converges to a binary solution for non-linear activations. If our conjectures are correct, IGN would thus be a differentiable approximation algorithm for the Maximum Weight Independent Set problem (MWIS), a central NP-hard optimization problem with numerous applications. IGN is closely related to a greedy approximation algorithm of MWIS by Kako et al. which has a proven approximation ratio. Experimental results show that IGN provides solutions of very similar quality. In the context of the Assignment Problem, IGN corresponds to an iterative matrix normalization scheme which is closely related to the Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm except that it projects to a permutation matrix instead of a doubly stochastic matrix. We relate our scheme to the Softassign algorithm and provide comparative results. As Graph Normalization is differentiable, its iterations can be embedded into a machine learning framework and used to train end-to-end any model which includes a graphical optimization step which can be cast as a maximum weight independent set problem. This includes problems such as graph and hypergraph matching, sequence alignment, clustering, ranking, etc. with applications in multiple domains.
Vilio: State-of-the-art Visio-Linguistic Models applied to Hateful Memes
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

This work presents Vilio, an implementation of state-of-the-art visio-linguistic models and their application to the Hateful Memes Dataset. The implemented models have been fitted into a uniform code-base and altered to yield better performance. The goal of Vilio is to provide a user-friendly starting point for any visio-linguistic problem. An ensemble of 5 different V+L models implemented in Vilio achieves 2nd place in the Hateful Memes Challenge out of 3,300 participants. The code is available at https://github.com/Muennighoff/vilio.