OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Survey on Bias and Fairness in Natural Language Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

As NLP models become more integrated with the everyday lives of people, it becomes important to examine the social effect that the usage of these systems has. While these models understand language and have increased accuracy on difficult downstream tasks, there is evidence that these models amplify gender, racial and cultural stereotypes and lead to a vicious cycle in many settings. In this survey, we analyze the origins of biases, the definitions of fairness, and how different subfields of NLP mitigate bias. We finally discuss how future studies can work towards eradicating pernicious biases from NLP algorithms.
Preventing technical debt with the TAP framework for Technical Debt Aware Management
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

Context. Technical Debt (TD) is a metaphor for technical problems that are not visible to users and customers but hinder developers in their work, making future changes more difficult. TD is often incurred due to tight project deadlines and can make future changes more costly or impossible. Project Management usually focuses on customer benefits and pays less attention to their IT systems' internal quality. TD prevention should be preferred over TD repayment because subsequent refactoring and re-engineering are expensive. Objective. This paper evaluates a framework focusing on both TD prevention and TD repayment in the context of agile-managed projects. The framework was developed and applied in an IT unit of a publishing house. The unique contribution of this framework is the integration of TD management into project management. Method. The evaluation was performed as a comparative case study based on ticket statistics and two structured surveys. The surveys were conducted in the observed IT unit using the framework and a comparison unit not using the framework. The first survey targeted team members, the second one IT managers. Results. The evaluation shows that in this IT unit, the TAP framework led to a raised awareness for the incurrence of TD. Decisions to incur TD are intentional, and TD is repaid timelier. Unintentional TD incurred by unconscious decisions is prevented. Furthermore, better communication and better planning of the project pipeline can be observed. Conclusions. We provide an insight into practitioners' ways to identify, monitor, prevent and repay TD. The presented framework includes a feasible method for TD prevention despite tight timelines by making TD repayment part of project management.
SurvLatent ODE : A Neural ODE based time-to-event model with competing risks for longitudinal data improves cancer-associated Venous Thromboembolism (VTE) prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Effective learning from electronic health records (EHR) data for prediction of clinical outcomes is often challenging because of features recorded at irregular timesteps and loss to follow-up as well as competing events such as death or disease progression. To that end, we propose a generative time-to-event model, SurvLatent ODE, which adopts an Ordinary Differential Equation-based Recurrent Neural Networks (ODE-RNN) as an encoder to effectively parameterize dynamics of latent states under irregularly sampled input data. Our model then utilizes the resulting latent embedding to flexibly estimate survival times for multiple competing events without specifying shapes of event-specific hazard function. We demonstrate competitive performance of our model on MIMIC-III, a freely-available longitudinal dataset collected from critical care units, on predicting hospital mortality as well as the data from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) on predicting onset of Venous Thromboembolism (VTE), a life-threatening complication for patients with cancer, with death as a competing event. SurvLatent ODE outperforms the current clinical standard Khorana Risk scores for stratifying VTE risk groups, while providing clinically meaningful and interpretable latent representations.
Clotho-AQA: A Crowdsourced Dataset for Audio Question Answering
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

Audio question answering (AQA) is a multimodal translation task where a system analyzes an audio signal and a natural language question, to generate a desirable natural language answer. In this paper, we introduce Clotho-AQA, a dataset for Audio question answering consisting of 1991 audio files each between 15 to 30 seconds in duration selected from the Clotho dataset. For each audio file, we collect six different questions and corresponding answers by crowdsourcing using Amazon Mechanical Turk. The questions and answers are produced by different annotators. Out of the six questions for each audio, two questions each are designed to have 'yes' and 'no' as answers, while the remaining two questions have other single-word answers. For each question, we collect answers from three different annotators. We also present two baseline experiments to describe the usage of our dataset for the AQA task - an LSTM-based multimodal binary classifier for 'yes' or 'no' type answers and an LSTM-based multimodal multi-class classifier for 828 single-word answers. The binary classifier achieved an accuracy of 62.7% and the multi-class classifier achieved a top-1 accuracy of 54.2% and a top-5 accuracy of 93.7%. Clotho-AQA dataset is freely available online at https://zenodo.org/record/6473207.
Design and Development of Rule-based open-domain Question-Answering System on SQuAD v2.0 Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Human mind is the palace of curious questions that seek answers. Computational resolution of this challenge is possible through Natural Language Processing techniques. Statistical techniques like machine learning and deep learning require a lot of data to train and despite that they fail to tap into the nuances of language. Such systems usually perform best on close-domain datasets. We have proposed development of a rule-based open-domain question-answering system which is capable of answering questions of any domain from a corresponding context passage. We have used 1000 questions from SQuAD 2.0 dataset for testing the developed system and it gives satisfactory results. In this paper, we have described the structure of the developed system and have analyzed the performance.
Recent Progress in Conversational AI
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming an increasingly popular topic among industry and academia. With the fast development of neural network-based models, a lot of neural-based conversational AI system are developed. We will provide a brief review of the recent progress in the Conversational AI, including the commonly adopted techniques, notable works, famous competitions from academia and industry and widely used datasets.
ARLIF-IDS -- Attention augmented Real-Time Isolation Forest Intrusion Detection System
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic. Emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things and Software Defined Networking leverage lightweight strategies for the early detection of DDoS attacks. Previous literature demonstrates the utility of lower number of significant features for intrusion detection. Thus, it is essential to have a fast and effective security identification model based on low number of features. In this work, a novel Attention-based Isolation Forest Intrusion Detection System is proposed. The model considerably reduces training time and memory consumption of the generated model. For performance assessment, the model is assessed over two benchmark datasets, the NSL-KDD dataset & the KDDCUP'99 dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed attention augmented model achieves a significant reduction in execution time, by 91.78%, and an average detection F1-Score of 0.93 on the NSL-KDD and KDDCUP'99 dataset. The results of performance evaluation show that the proposed methodology has low complexity and requires less processing time and computational resources, outperforming other current IDS based on machine learning algorithms.
Res-CNN-BiLSTM Network for overcoming Mental Health Disturbances caused due to Cyberbullying through Social Media
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Mental Health Disturbance has many reasons and cyberbullying is one of the major causes that does exploitation using social media as an instrument. The cyberbullying is done on the basis of Religion, Ethnicity, Age and Gender which is a sensitive psychological issue. This can be addressed using Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning, since social media is the medium and it generates massive form of data in textual form. Such data can be leveraged to find the semantics and derive what type of cyberbullying is done and who are the people involved for early measures. Since deriving semantics is essential we proposed a Hybrid Deep Learning Model named 1-Dimensional CNN-Bidirectional-LSTMs with Residuals shortly known as Res-CNN-BiLSTM. In this paper we have proposed the architecture and compared its performance with different approaches of Embedding Deep Learning Algorithms.
Time-based Self-supervised Learning for Wireless Capsule Endoscopy
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

State-of-the-art machine learning models, and especially deep learning ones, are significantly data-hungry; they require vast amounts of manually labeled samples to function correctly. However, in most medical imaging fields, obtaining said data can be challenging. Not only the volume of data is a problem, but also the imbalances within its classes; it is common to have many more images of healthy patients than of those with pathology. Computer-aided diagnostic systems suffer from these issues, usually over-designing their models to perform accurately. This work proposes using self-supervised learning for wireless endoscopy videos by introducing a custom-tailored method that does not initially need labels or appropriate balance. We prove that using the inferred inherent structure learned by our method, extracted from the temporal axis, improves the detection rate on several domain-specific applications even under severe imbalance.
SciTS: A Benchmark for Time-Series Databases in Scientific Experiments and Industrial Internet of Things
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2022
Year: 2022

Time-series data has an increasingly growing usage in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and large-scale scientific experiments. Managing time-series data needs a storage engine that can keep up with their constantly growing volumes while providing an acceptable query latency. While traditional ACID databases favor consistency over performance, many time-series databases with novel storage engines have been developed to provide better ingestion performance and lower query latency. To understand how the unique design of a time-series database affects its performance, we design SciTS, a highly extensible and parameterizable benchmark for time-series data. The benchmark studies the data ingestion capabilities of time-series databases especially as they grow larger in size. It also studies the latencies of 5 practical queries from the scientific experiments use case. We use SciTS to evaluate the performance of 4 databases of 4 distinct storage engines: ClickHouse, InfluxDB, TimescaleDB, and PostgreSQL.
Sample-Based Bounds for Coherent Risk Measures: Applications to Policy Synthesis and Verification
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

The dramatic increase of autonomous systems subject to variable environments has given rise to the pressing need to consider risk in both the synthesis and verification of policies for these systems. This paper aims to address a few problems regarding risk-aware verification and policy synthesis, by first developing a sample-based method to bound the risk measure evaluation of a random variable whose distribution is unknown. These bounds permit us to generate high-confidence verification statements for a large class of robotic systems. Second, we develop a sample-based method to determine solutions to non-convex optimization problems that outperform a large fraction of the decision space of possible solutions. Both sample-based approaches then permit us to rapidly synthesize risk-aware policies that are guaranteed to achieve a minimum level of system performance. To showcase our approach in simulation, we verify a cooperative multi-agent system and develop a risk-aware controller that outperforms the system's baseline controller. We also mention how our approach can be extended to account for any $g$-entropic risk measure - the subset of coherent risk measures on which we focus.
A Masked Image Reconstruction Network for Document-level Relation Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Document-level relation extraction aims to extract relations among entities within a document. Compared with its sentence-level counterpart, Document-level relation extraction requires inference over multiple sentences to extract complex relational triples. Previous research normally complete reasoning through information propagation on the mention-level or entity-level document-graphs, regardless of the correlations between the relationships. In this paper, we propose a novel Document-level Relation Extraction model based on a Masked Image Reconstruction network (DRE-MIR), which models inference as a masked image reconstruction problem to capture the correlations between relationships. Specifically, we first leverage an encoder module to get the features of entities and construct the entity-pair matrix based on the features. After that, we look on the entity-pair matrix as an image and then randomly mask it and restore it through an inference module to capture the correlations between the relationships. We evaluate our model on three public document-level relation extraction datasets, i.e. DocRED, CDR, and GDA. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on these three datasets and has excellent robustness against the noises during the inference process.
Persistent-Transient Duality in Human Behavior Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

We propose to model the persistent-transient duality in human behavior using a parent-child multi-channel neural network, which features a parent persistent channel that manages the global dynamics and children transient channels that are initiated and terminated on-demand to handle detailed interactive actions. The short-lived transient sessions are managed by a proposed Transient Switch. The neural framework is trained to discover the structure of the duality automatically. Our model shows superior performances in human-object interaction motion prediction.
Non-autoregressive Model for Full-line Code Completion
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

Code completion tools are frequently used by software developers to accelerate software development by suggesting the following code elements. Completing a sequence of code tokens (e.g., a full line of code) has been proved more efficient than predicting a single token at a time. To complete the code sequence, researchers are employing AutoRegressive (AR) decoders to generate tokens in a left-to-right, token-by-token fashion. Consequently, the prediction of the next token depends on all previously generated tokens, which leads to high latency in inference. To improve the efficiency and accuracy of full-line code completion, in this paper, we propose a Non-AutoRegressive (NAR) model for code completion boosted by a syntax-aware sampling strategy. Our experimental results on two widely used datasets suggest that our model outperforms both AR and NAR baselines on full-line code completion, and it is faster than the AR model with up to 9 times speed-up.
Learning to Purification for Unsupervised Person Re-identification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Unsupervised person re-identification is a challenging and promising task in computer vision. Nowadays unsupervised person re-identification methods have achieved great progress by training with pseudo labels. However, how to purify feature and label noise is less explicitly studied in the unsupervised manner. To purify the feature, we take into account two types of additional features from different local views to enrich the feature representation. The proposed multi-view features are carefully integrated into our cluster contrast learning to leverage more discriminative cues that the global feature easily ignored and biased. To purify the label noise, we propose to take advantage of the knowledge of teacher model in an offline scheme. Specifically, we first train a teacher model from noisy pseudo labels, and then use the teacher model to guide the learning of our student model. In our setting, the student model could converge fast with the supervision of the teacher model thus reduce the interference of noisy labels as the teacher model greatly suffered. After carefully handling the noise and bias in the feature learning, our purification modules are proven to be very effective for unsupervised person re-identification. Extensive experiments on three popular person re-identification datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method. Especially, our approach achieves a state-of-the-art accuracy 85.8\% @mAP and 94.5\% @Rank-1 on the challenging Market-1501 benchmark with ResNet-50 under the fully unsupervised setting. The code will be released.
Active Learning of Discriminative Subgraph Patterns for API Misuse Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

A common cause of bugs and vulnerabilities are the violations of usage constraints associated with Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). API misuses are common in software projects, and while there have been techniques proposed to detect such misuses, studies have shown that they fail to reliably detect misuses while reporting many false positives. One limitation of prior work is the inability to reliably identify correct patterns of usage. Many approaches confuse a usage pattern's frequency for correctness. Due to the variety of alternative usage patterns that may be uncommon but correct, anomaly detection-based techniques have limited success in identifying misuses. We address these challenges and propose ALP (Actively Learned Patterns), reformulating API misuse detection as a classification problem. After representing programs as graphs, ALP mines discriminative subgraphs. While still incorporating frequency information, through limited human supervision, we reduce the reliance on the assumption relating frequency and correctness. The principles of active learning are incorporated to shift human attention away from the most frequent patterns. Instead, ALP samples informative and representative examples while minimizing labeling effort. In our empirical evaluation, ALP substantially outperforms prior approaches on both MUBench, an API Misuse benchmark, and a new dataset that we constructed from real-world software projects.
Using consumer feedback from location-based services in PoI recommender systems for people with autism
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

When suggesting Points of Interest (PoIs) to people with autism spectrum disorders, we must take into account that they have idiosyncratic sensory aversions to noise, brightness and other features that influence the way they perceive places. Therefore, recommender systems must deal with these aspects. However, the retrieval of sensory data about PoIs is a real challenge because most geographical information servers fail to provide this data. Moreover, ad-hoc crowdsourcing campaigns do not guarantee to cover large geographical areas and lack sustainability. Thus, we investigate the extraction of sensory data about places from the consumer feedback collected by location-based services, on which people spontaneously post reviews from all over the world. Specifically, we propose a model for the extraction of sensory data from the reviews about PoIs, and its integration in recommender systems to predict item ratings by considering both user preferences and compatibility information. We tested our approach with autistic and neurotypical people by integrating it into diverse recommendation algorithms. For the test, we used a dataset built in a crowdsourcing campaign and another one extracted from TripAdvisor reviews. The results show that the algorithms obtain the highest accuracy and ranking capability when using TripAdvisor data. Moreover, by jointly using these two datasets, the algorithms further improve their performance. These results encourage the use of consumer feedback as a reliable source of information about places in the development of inclusive recommender systems.
Computational Design of Kinesthetic Garments
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2022
Year: 2022

Kinesthetic garments provide physical feedback on body posture and motion through tailored distributions of reinforced material. Their ability to selectively stiffen a garment's response to specific motions makes them appealing for rehabilitation, sports, robotics, and many other application fields. However, finding designs that distribute a given amount of reinforcement material to maximally stiffen the response to specified motions is a challenging problem. In this work, we propose an optimization-driven approach for automated design of reinforcement patterns for kinesthetic garments. Our main contribution is to cast this design task as an on-body topology optimization problem. Our method allows designers to explore a continuous range of designs corresponding to various amounts of reinforcement coverage. Our model captures both tight contact and lift-off separation between cloth and body. We demonstrate our method on a variety of reinforcement design problems for different body sites and motions. Optimal designs lead to a two- to threefold improvement in performance in terms of energy density. A set of manufactured designs were consistently rated as providing more resistance than baselines in a comparative user study
M3triCity: Visualizing Evolving Software & Data Cities
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

The city metaphor for visualizing software systems in 3D has been widely explored and has led to many diverse implementations and approaches. Common among all approaches is a focus on the software artifacts, while the aspects pertaining to the data and information (stored both in databases and files) used by a system are seldom taken into account. We present M3triCity, an interactive web application whose goal is to visualize object-oriented software systems, their evolution, and the way they access data and information. We illustrate how it can be used for program comprehension and evolution analysis of data-intensive software systems. Demo video URL: https://youtu.be/uBMvZFIlWtk