OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Mobile Teleoperation: Feasibility of Wireless Wearable Sensing of the Operator's Arm Motion
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Teleoperation platforms often require the user to be situated at a fixed location to both visualize and control the movement of the robot and thus do not provide the operator with much mobility. One example is in existing robotic surgery solutions that require the surgeons to be away from the patient, attached to consoles where their heads must be fixed and their arms can only move in a limited space. This creates a barrier between physicians and patients that does not exist in normal surgery. To address this issue, we propose a mobile telesurgery solution where the surgeons are no longer mechanically limited to control consoles and are able to teleoperate the robots from the patient bedside, using their arms equipped with wireless sensors and viewing the endoscope video via optical see-through head-mounted displays (HMDs). We evaluate the feasibility and efficiency of our user interaction method compared to a standard surgical robotic manipulator via two tasks with different levels of required dexterity. The results indicate that with sufficient training our proposed platform can attain similar efficiency while providing added mobility for the operator.
BLOWN: A Blockchain Protocol for Single-Hop Wireless Networks under Adversarial SINR
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Known as a distributed ledger technology (DLT), blockchain has attracted much attention due to its properties such as decentralization, security, immutability and transparency, and its potential of servicing as an infrastructure for various applications. Blockchain can empower wireless networks with identity management, data integrity, access control, and high-level security. However, previous studies on blockchain-enabled wireless networks mostly focus on proposing architectures or building systems with popular blockchain protocols. Nevertheless, such existing protocols have obvious shortcomings when adopted in wireless networks where nodes may have limited physical resources, may fall short of well-established reliable channels, or may suffer from variable bandwidths impacted by environments or jamming attacks. In this paper, we propose a novel consensus protocol named Proof-of-Channel (PoC) leveraging the natural properties of wireless communications, and develop a permissioned BLOWN protocol (BLOckchain protocol for Wireless Networks) for single-hop wireless networks under an adversarial SINR model. We formalize BLOWN with the universal composition framework and prove its security properties, namely persistence and liveness, as well as its strengths in countering against adversarial jamming, double-spending, and Sybil attacks, which are also demonstrated by extensive simulation studies.
Megha: Decentralized Global Fair Scheduling for Federated Clusters
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

Increasing scale and heterogeneity in data centers have led to the development of federated clusters such as KubeFed, Hydra, and Pigeon, that federate individual data center clusters. In our work, we introduce Megha, a novel decentralized resource management framework for such federated clusters. Megha employs flexible logical partitioning of clusters to distribute its scheduling load, ensuring that the requirements of the workload are satisfied with very low scheduling overheads. It uses a distributed global scheduler that does not rely on a centralized data store but, instead, works with eventual consistency, unlike other schedulers that use a tiered architecture or rely on centralized databases. Our experiments with Megha show that it can schedule tasks taking into account fairness and placement constraints with low resource allocation times - in the order of tens of milliseconds.
Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning Framework for Stochastic Spaceflight Campaign Design
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

This paper develops a hierarchical reinforcement learning architecture for multimission spaceflight campaign design under uncertainty, including vehicle design, infrastructure deployment planning, and space transportation scheduling. This problem involves a high-dimensional design space and is challenging especially with uncertainty present. To tackle this challenge, the developed framework has a hierarchical structure with reinforcement learning and network-based mixed-integer linear programming (MILP), where the former optimizes campaign-level decisions (e.g., design of the vehicle used throughout the campaign, destination demand assigned to each mission in the campaign), whereas the latter optimizes the detailed mission-level decisions (e.g., when to launch what from where to where). The framework is applied to a set of human lunar exploration campaign scenarios with uncertain in situ resource utilization performance as a case study. The main value of this work is its integration of the rapidly growing reinforcement learning research and the existing MILP-based space logistics methods through a hierarchical framework to handle the otherwise intractable complexity of space mission design under uncertainty. This unique framework is expected to be a critical steppingstone for the emerging research direction of artificial intelligence for space mission design.
Scalable Hypergraph Embedding System
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2022
Year: 2022

Many problems such as node classification and link prediction in network data can be solved using graph embeddings. However, it is difficult to use graphs to capture non-binary relations such as communities of nodes. These kinds of complex relations are expressed more naturally as hypergraphs. While hypergraphs are a generalization of graphs, state-of-the-art graph embedding techniques are not adequate for solving prediction and classification tasks on large hypergraphs accurately in reasonable time. In this paper, we introduce HyperNetVec, a novel hierarchical framework for scalable unsupervised hypergraph embedding. HyperNetVec exploits shared-memory parallelism and is capable of generating high quality embeddings for real-world hypergraphs with millions of nodes and hyperedges in only a couple of minutes while existing hypergraph systems either fail for such large hypergraphs or may take days to produce the embeddings.
Consistency-based Active Learning for Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Active learning aims to improve the performance of task model by selecting the most informative samples with a limited budget. Unlike most recent works that focused on applying active learning for image classification, we propose an effective Consistency-based Active Learning method for object Detection (CALD), which fully explores the consistency between original and augmented data. CALD has three appealing benefits. (i) CALD is systematically designed by investigating the weaknesses of existing active learning methods, which do not take the unique challenges of object detection into account. (ii) CALD unifies box regression and classification with a single metric, which is not concerned by active learning methods for classification. CALD also focuses on the most informative local region rather than the whole image, which is beneficial for object detection. (iii) CALD not only gauges individual information for sample selection, but also leverages mutual information to encourage a balanced data distribution. Extensive experiments show that CALD significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art task-agnostic and detection-specific active learning methods on general object detection datasets. Based on the Faster R-CNN detector, CALD consistently surpasses the baseline method (random selection) by 2.9/2.8/0.8 mAP on average on PASCAL VOC 2007, PASCAL VOC 2012, and MS COCO. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/we1pingyu/CALD}
A massively parallel evolutionary algorithm for the partial Latin square extension problem
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

The partial Latin square extension problem is to fill as many as possible empty cells of a partially filled Latin square. This problem is a useful model for a wide range of applications in diverse domains. This paper presents the first massively parallel evolutionary algorithm algorithm for this computationally challenging problem based on a transformation of the problem to partial graph coloring. The algorithm features the following original elements. Based on a very large population (with more than $10^4$ individuals) and modern graphical processing units, the algorithm performs many local searches in parallel to ensure an intensive exploitation of the search space. The algorithm employs a dedicated crossover with a specific parent matching strategy to create a large number of diversified and information-preserving offspring at each generation. Extensive experiments on 1800 benchmark instances show a high competitiveness of the algorithm compared to the current best performing methods. Competitive results are also reported on the related Latin square completion problem. Analyses are performed to shed lights on the roles of the main algorithmic components. The code of the algorithm will be made publicly available.
Zero-Delay Lossy Coding of Linear Vector Markov Sources: Optimality of Stationary Codes and Near Optimality of Finite Memory Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

Optimal zero-delay coding (quantization) of $\mathbb{R}^d$-valued linearly generated Markov sources is studied under quadratic distortion. The structure and existence of deterministic and stationary coding policies that are optimal for the infinite horizon average cost (distortion) problem are established. Prior results studying the optimality of zero-delay codes for Markov sources for infinite horizons either considered finite alphabet sources or, for the $\mathbb{R}^d$-valued case, only showed the existence of deterministic and non-stationary Markov coding policies or those which are randomized. In addition to existence results, for finite blocklength (horizon) $T$ the performance of an optimal coding policy is shown to approach the infinite time horizon optimum at a rate $O(\frac{1}{T})$. This gives an explicit rate of convergence that quantifies the near-optimality of finite window (finite-memory) codes among all optimal zero-delay codes.
Building Specifications in the Event-B Institution
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2022
Year: 2022

This paper describes a formal semantics for the Event-B specification language using the theory of institutions. We define an institution for Event-B, EVT, and prove that it meets the validity requirements for satisfaction preservation and model amalgamation. We also present a series of functions that show how the constructs of the Event-B specification language can be mapped into our institution. Our semantics sheds new light on the structure of the Event-B language, allowing us to clearly delineate three constituent sub-languages: the superstructure, infrastructure and mathematical languages. One of the principal goals of our semantics is to provide access to the generic modularisation constructs available in institutions, including specification-building operators for parameterisation and refinement. We demonstrate how these features subsume and enhance the corresponding features already present in Event-B through a detailed study of their use in a worked example. We have implemented our approach via a parser and translator for Event-B specifications, EBtoEVT, which also provides a gateway to the Hets toolkit for heterogeneous specification.
Round and Communication Balanced Protocols for Oblivious Evaluation of Finite State Machines
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

We propose protocols for obliviously evaluating finite-state machines, i.e., the evaluation is shared between the provider of the finite-state machine and the provider of the input string in such a manner that neither party learns the other's input, and the states being visited are hidden from both. For alphabet size $|Σ|$, number of states $|Q|$, and input length $n$, previous solutions have either required a number of rounds linear in $n$ or communication $Ω(n|Σ||Q|\log|Q|)$. Our solutions require 2 rounds with communication $O(n(|Σ|+|Q|\log|Q|))$. We present two different solutions to this problem, a two-party one and a setting with an untrusted but non-colluding helper.
Learning Calibrated-Guidance for Object Detection in Aerial Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Object detection is one of the most fundamental yet challenging research topics in the domain of computer vision. Recently, the study on this topic in aerial images has made tremendous progress. However, complex background and worse imaging quality are obvious problems in aerial object detection. Most state-of-the-art approaches tend to develop elaborate attention mechanisms for the space-time feature calibrations with arduous computational complexity, while surprisingly ignoring the importance of feature calibrations in channel-wise. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective Calibrated-Guidance (CG) scheme to enhance channel communications in a feature transformer fashion, which can adaptively determine the calibration weights for each channel based on the global feature affinity correlations. Specifically, for a given set of feature maps, CG first computes the feature similarity between each channel and the remaining channels as the intermediary calibration guidance. Then, re-representing each channel by aggregating all the channels weighted together via the guidance operation. Our CG is a general module that can be plugged into any deep neural networks, which is named as CG-Net. To demonstrate its effectiveness and efficiency, extensive experiments are carried out on both oriented object detection task and horizontal object detection task in aerial images. Experimental results on two challenging benchmarks (DOTA and HRSC2016) demonstrate that our CG-Net can achieve the new state-of-the-art performance in accuracy with a fair computational overhead. The source code has been open sourced at https://github.com/WeiZongqi/CG-Net
Conditional Frechet Inception Distance
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

We consider distance functions between conditional distributions. We focus on the Wasserstein metric and its Gaussian case known as the Frechet Inception Distance (FID). We develop conditional versions of these metrics, analyze their relations and provide a closed form solution to the conditional FID (CFID) metric. We numerically compare the metrics in the context of performance evaluation of modern conditional generative models. Our results show the advantages of CFID compared to the classical FID and mean squared error (MSE) measures. In contrast to FID, CFID is useful in identifying failures where realistic outputs which are not related to their inputs are generated. On the other hand, compared to MSE, CFID is useful in identifying failures where a single realistic output is generated even though there is a diverse set of equally probable outputs.
iRotate: Active Visual SLAM for Omnidirectional Robots
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we present an active visual SLAM approach for omnidirectional robots. The goal is to generate control commands that allow such a robot to simultaneously localize itself and map an unknown environment while maximizing the amount of information gained and consuming as low energy as possible. Leveraging the robot's independent translation and rotation control, we introduce a multi-layered approach for active V-SLAM. The top layer decides on informative goal locations and generates highly informative paths to them. The second and third layers actively re-plan and execute the path, exploiting the continuously updated map and local features information. Moreover, we introduce two utility formulations to account for the presence of obstacles in the field of view and the robot's location. Through rigorous simulations, real robot experiments, and comparisons with state-of-the-art methods, we demonstrate that our approach achieves similar coverage results with lesser overall map entropy. This is obtained while keeping the traversed distance up to 39% shorter than the other methods and without increasing the wheels' total rotation amount. Code and implementation details are provided as open-source, and all the generated data is available on-line for consultation.
Monitoring Covid-19 on social media using a novel triage and diagnosis approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Objective: This study aims to develop an end-to-end natural language processing pipeline for triage and diagnosis of COVID-19 from patient-authored social media posts, in order to provide researchers and public health practitioners with additional information on the symptoms, severity and prevalence of the disease rather than to provide an actionable decision at the individual level. Materials and Methods: The text processing pipeline first extracts COVID-19 symptoms and related concepts such as severity, duration, negations, and body parts from patients' posts using conditional random fields. An unsupervised rule-based algorithm is then applied to establish relations between concepts in the next step of the pipeline. The extracted concepts and relations are subsequently used to construct two different vector representations of each post. These vectors are applied separately to build support vector machine learning models to triage patients into three categories and diagnose them for COVID-19. Results: We report that macro- and micro-averaged F1 scores in the range of 71-96% and 61-87%, respectively, for the triage and diagnosis of COVID-19, when the models are trained on human labelled data. Our experimental results indicate that similar performance can be achieved when the models are trained using predicted labels from concept extraction and rule-based classifiers, thus yielding end-to-end machine learning. Also, we highlight important features uncovered by our diagnostic machine learning models and compare them with the most frequent symptoms revealed in another COVID-19 dataset. In particular, we found that the most important features are not always the most frequent ones.
Instance-level Image Retrieval using Reranking Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Instance-level image retrieval is the task of searching in a large database for images that match an object in a query image. To address this task, systems usually rely on a retrieval step that uses global image descriptors, and a subsequent step that performs domain-specific refinements or reranking by leveraging operations such as geometric verification based on local features. In this work, we propose Reranking Transformers (RRTs) as a general model to incorporate both local and global features to rerank the matching images in a supervised fashion and thus replace the relatively expensive process of geometric verification. RRTs are lightweight and can be easily parallelized so that reranking a set of top matching results can be performed in a single forward-pass. We perform extensive experiments on the Revisited Oxford and Paris datasets, and the Google Landmarks v2 dataset, showing that RRTs outperform previous reranking approaches while using much fewer local descriptors. Moreover, we demonstrate that, unlike existing approaches, RRTs can be optimized jointly with the feature extractor, which can lead to feature representations tailored to downstream tasks and further accuracy improvements. The code and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/uvavision/RerankingTransformer.
Enhanced Spatio-Temporal Interaction Learning for Video Deraining: A Faster and Better Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Video deraining is an important task in computer vision as the unwanted rain hampers the visibility of videos and deteriorates the robustness of most outdoor vision systems. Despite the significant success which has been achieved for video deraining recently, two major challenges remain: 1) how to exploit the vast information among continuous frames to extract powerful spatio-temporal features across both the spatial and temporal domains, and 2) how to restore high-quality derained videos with a high-speed approach. In this paper, we present a new end-to-end video deraining framework, named Enhanced Spatio-Temporal Interaction Network (ESTINet), which considerably boosts current state-of-the-art video deraining quality and speed. The ESTINet takes the advantage of deep residual networks and convolutional long short-term memory, which can capture the spatial features and temporal correlations among continuing frames at the cost of very little computational source. Extensive experiments on three public datasets show that the proposed ESTINet can achieve faster speed than the competitors, while maintaining better performance than the state-of-the-art methods.
Evaluation of the Sensitivity of RRAM Cells to Optical Fault Injection Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Resistive Random Access Memory (RRAM) is a type of Non-Volatile Memory (NVM). In this paper we investigate the sensitivity of the TiN/Ti/Al:HfO2/TiN-based 1T-1R RRAM cells implemented in a 250 nm CMOS IHP technology to the laser irradiation in detail. Experimental results show the feasibility to influence the state of the cells under laser irradiation, i.e. successful optical Fault Injection. We focus on the selection of the parameters of the laser station and their influence on the success of optical Fault Injections.
Deep KKL: Data-driven Output Prediction for Non-Linear Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

We address the problem of output prediction, ie. designing a model for autonomous nonlinear systems capable of forecasting their future observations. We first define a general framework bringing together the necessary properties for the development of such an output predictor. In particular, we look at this problem from two different viewpoints, control theory and data-driven techniques (machine learning), and try to formulate it in a consistent way, reducing the gap between the two fields. Building on this formulation and problem definition, we propose a predictor structure based on the Kazantzis-Kravaris/Luenberger (KKL) observer and we show that KKL fits well into our general framework. Finally, we propose a constructive solution for this predictor that solely relies on a small set of trajectories measured from the system. Our experiments show that our solution allows to obtain an efficient predictor over a subset of the observation space.
DeepBF: Malicious URL detection using Learned Bloom Filter and Evolutionary Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Malicious URL detection is an emerging research area due to continuous modernization of various systems, for instance, Edge Computing. In this article, we present a novel malicious URL detection technique, called deepBF (deep learning and Bloom Filter). deepBF is presented in two-fold. Firstly, we propose a learned Bloom Filter using 2-dimensional Bloom Filter. We experimentally decide the best non-cryptography string hash function. Then, we derive a modified non-cryptography string hash function from the selected hash function for deepBF by introducing biases in the hashing method and compared among the string hash functions. The modified string hash function is compared to other variants of diverse non-cryptography string hash functions. It is also compared with various filters, particularly, counting Bloom Filter, Kirsch \textit{et al.}, and Cuckoo Filter using various use cases. The use cases unearth weakness and strength of the filters. Secondly, we propose a malicious URL detection mechanism using deepBF. We apply the evolutionary convolutional neural network to identify the malicious URLs. The evolutionary convolutional neural network is trained and tested with malicious URL datasets. The output is tested in deepBF for accuracy. We have achieved many conclusions from our experimental evaluation and results and are able to reach various conclusive decisions which are presented in the article.