OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Towards Symbolic Pointers Reasoning in Dynamic Symbolic Execution
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Dynamic symbolic execution is a widely used technique for automated software testing, designed for execution paths exploration and program errors detection. A hybrid approach has recently become widespread, when the main goal of symbolic execution is helping fuzzer increase program coverage. The more branches symbolic executor can invert, the more useful it is for fuzzer. A program control flow often depends on memory values, which are obtained by computing address indexes from user input. However, most DSE tools don't support such dependencies, so they miss some desired program branches. We implement symbolic addresses reasoning on memory reads in our dynamic symbolic execution tool Sydr. Possible memory access regions are determined by either analyzing memory address symbolic expressions, or binary searching with SMT-solver. We propose an enhanced linearization technique to model memory accesses. Different memory modeling methods are compared on the set of programs. Our evaluation shows that symbolic addresses handling allows to discover new symbolic branches and increase the program coverage.
Towards Efficient Synchronous Federated Training: A Survey on System Optimization Strategies
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

The increasing demand for privacy-preserving collaborative learning has given rise to a new computing paradigm called federated learning (FL), in which clients collaboratively train a machine learning (ML) model without revealing their private training data. Given an acceptable level of privacy guarantee, the goal of FL is to minimize the time-to-accuracy of model training. Compared with distributed ML in data centers, there are four distinct challenges to achieving short time-to-accuracy in FL training, namely the lack of information for optimization, the tradeoff between statistical and system utility, client heterogeneity, and large configuration space. In this paper, we survey recent works in addressing these challenges and present them following a typical training workflow through three phases: client selection, configuration, and reporting. We also review system works including measurement studies and benchmarking tools that aim to support FL developers.
Keeping an Eye on Things: Deep Learned Features for Long-Term Visual Localization
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we learn visual features that we use to first build a map and then localize a robot driving autonomously across a full day of lighting change, including in the dark. We train a neural network to predict sparse keypoints with associated descriptors and scores that can be used together with a classical pose estimator for localization. Our training pipeline includes a differentiable pose estimator such that training can be supervised with ground truth poses from data collected earlier, in our case from 2016 and 2017 gathered with multi-experience Visual Teach and Repeat (VT&R). We insert the learned features into the existing VT&R pipeline to perform closed-loop path following in unstructured outdoor environments. We show successful path following across all lighting conditions despite the robot's map being constructed using daylight conditions. Moreover, we explore generalizability of the features by driving the robot across all lighting conditions in new areas not present in the feature training dataset. In all, we validated our approach with 35.5 km of autonomous path following experiments in challenging conditions.
Double-Scale Self-Supervised Hypergraph Learning for Group Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

With the prevalence of social media, there has recently been a proliferation of recommenders that shift their focus from individual modeling to group recommendation. Since the group preference is a mixture of various predilections from group members, the fundamental challenge of group recommendation is to model the correlations among members. Existing methods mostly adopt heuristic or attention-based preference aggregation strategies to synthesize group preferences. However, these models mainly focus on the pairwise connections of users and ignore the complex high-order interactions within and beyond groups. Besides, group recommendation suffers seriously from the problem of data sparsity due to severely sparse group-item interactions. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised hypergraph learning framework for group recommendation to achieve two goals: (1) capturing the intra- and inter-group interactions among users; (2) alleviating the data sparsity issue with the raw data itself. Technically, for (1), a hierarchical hypergraph convolutional network based on the user- and group-level hypergraphs is developed to model the complex tuplewise correlations among users within and beyond groups. For (2), we design a double-scale node dropout strategy to create self-supervision signals that can regularize user representations with different granularities against the sparsity issue. The experimental analysis on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrates the superiority of the proposed model and also elucidates the rationality of the hypergraph modeling and the double-scale self-supervision.
Eliciting Truthful Reports with Partial Signals in Repeated Games
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2022
Year: 2022

We consider a repeated game where a player self-reports her usage of a service and is charged a payment accordingly by a center. The center observes a partial signal, representing part of the player's true consumption, which is generated from a publicly known distribution. The player can report any value that does not contradict the signal and the center issues a payment based on the reported information. Such problems find application in net metering billing in the electricity market, where a customer's actual consumption of the electricity network is masked and complete verification is impractical. When the underlying true value is relatively constant, we propose a penalty mechanism that elicits truthful self-reports. Namely, besides charging the player the reported value, the mechanism charges a penalty proportional to her inconsistent reports. We show how fear of the uncertainty in the future incentivizes the player to be truthful today. For Bernoulli distributions, we give the complete analysis and optimal strategies given any penalty. Since complete truthfulness is not possible for continuous distributions, we give approximate truthful results by a reduction from Bernoulli distributions. We also extend our mechanism to a multi-player cost sharing setting and give equilibrium results.
Preservational Learning Improves Self-supervised Medical Image Models by Reconstructing Diverse Contexts
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Preserving maximal information is one of principles of designing self-supervised learning methodologies. To reach this goal, contrastive learning adopts an implicit way which is contrasting image pairs. However, we believe it is not fully optimal to simply use the contrastive estimation for preservation. Moreover, it is necessary and complemental to introduce an explicit solution to preserve more information. From this perspective, we introduce Preservational Learning to reconstruct diverse image contexts in order to preserve more information in learned representations. Together with the contrastive loss, we present Preservational Contrastive Representation Learning (PCRL) for learning self-supervised medical representations. PCRL provides very competitive results under the pretraining-finetuning protocol, outperforming both self-supervised and supervised counterparts in 5 classification/segmentation tasks substantially.
Fine Manipulation and Dynamic Interaction in Haptic Teleoperation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

The teleoperation of robots enables remote intervention in distant and dangerous tasks without putting the operator in harm's way. However, remote operation faces fundamental challenges due to limits in communication delays. The proposed work improves the performances of teleoperation architecture based on Fractal Impedance Controller (FIC) by integrating into the haptic teleoperation pipeline a postural optimisation that also accounts for the replica robots' physical limitations. This update improves dynamic interactions by trading off tracking accuracy to maintain the system within its power limits. Thus, allowing fine manipulation without renouncing the robustness of the FIC controller. Additionally, the proposed method allows an online trade-off between tracking the autonomous trajectory and executing the teleoperated command, allowing their safe superimposition. The validated experimental results show that the proposed method is robust to increased communication delays. Moreover, we demonstrated that the remote teleoperated robot remains stable and safe to interact with, even when the communication with the master side is abruptly interrupted. with, even when the communication with the master side is abruptly interrupted.
Parameterized inapproximability of Morse matching
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2022
Year: 2022

We study the problem of minimizing the number of critical simplices from the point of view of inapproximability and parameterized complexity. We first show inapproximability of Min-Morse Matching within a factor of $2^{\log^{(1-ε)}n}$. Our second result shows that Min-Morse Matching is ${\bf W{[P]}}$-hard with respect to the standard parameter. Next, we show that Min-Morse Matching with standard parameterization has no FPT approximation algorithm for any approximation factor $ρ$. The above hardness results are applicable to complexes of dimension $\ge 2$. On the positive side, we provide a factor $O(\frac{n}{\log n})$ approximation algorithm for Min-Morse Matching on $2$-complexes, noting that no such algorithm is known for higher dimensional complexes. Finally, we devise discrete gradients with very few critical simplices for typical instances drawn from a fairly wide range of parameter values of the Costa-Farber model of random complexes.
SanitAIs: Unsupervised Data Augmentation to Sanitize Trojaned Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Self-supervised learning (SSL) methods have resulted in broad improvements to neural network performance by leveraging large, untapped collections of unlabeled data to learn generalized underlying structure. In this work, we harness unsupervised data augmentation (UDA), an SSL technique, to mitigate backdoor or Trojan attacks on deep neural networks. We show that UDA is more effective at removing trojans than current state-of-the-art methods for both feature space and point triggers, over a range of model architectures, trojans, and data quantities provided for trojan removal. These results demonstrate that UDA is both an effective and practical approach to mitigating the effects of backdoors on neural networks.
On the validity of pre-trained transformers for natural language processing in the software engineering domain
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

Transformers are the current state-of-the-art of natural language processing in many domains and are using traction within software engineering research as well. Such models are pre-trained on large amounts of data, usually from the general domain. However, we only have a limited understanding regarding the validity of transformers within the software engineering domain, i.e., how good such models are at understanding words and sentences within a software engineering context and how this improves the state-of-the-art. Within this article, we shed light on this complex, but crucial issue. We compare BERT transformer models trained with software engineering data with transformers based on general domain data in multiple dimensions: their vocabulary, their ability to understand which words are missing, and their performance in classification tasks. Our results show that for tasks that require understanding of the software engineering context, pre-training with software engineering data is valuable, while general domain models are sufficient for general language understanding, also within the software engineering domain.
Improving Multilingual Translation by Representation and Gradient Regularization
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (NMT) enables one model to serve all translation directions, including ones that are unseen during training, i.e. zero-shot translation. Despite being theoretically attractive, current models often produce low quality translations -- commonly failing to even produce outputs in the right target language. In this work, we observe that off-target translation is dominant even in strong multilingual systems, trained on massive multilingual corpora. To address this issue, we propose a joint approach to regularize NMT models at both representation-level and gradient-level. At the representation level, we leverage an auxiliary target language prediction task to regularize decoder outputs to retain information about the target language. At the gradient level, we leverage a small amount of direct data (in thousands of sentence pairs) to regularize model gradients. Our results demonstrate that our approach is highly effective in both reducing off-target translation occurrences and improving zero-shot translation performance by +5.59 and +10.38 BLEU on WMT and OPUS datasets respectively. Moreover, experiments show that our method also works well when the small amount of direct data is not available.
GPA-Teleoperation: Gaze Enhanced Perception-aware Safe Assistive Aerial Teleoperation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Gaze is an intuitive and direct way to represent the intentions of an individual. However, when it comes to assistive aerial teleoperation which aims to perform operators' intention, rare attention has been paid to gaze. Existing methods obtain intention directly from the remote controller (RC) input, which is inaccurate, unstable, and unfriendly to non-professional operators. Further, most teleoperation works do not consider environment perception which is vital to guarantee safety. In this paper, we present GPA-Teleoperation, a gaze enhanced perception-aware assistive teleoperation framework, which addresses the above issues systematically. We capture the intention utilizing gaze information, and generate a topological path matching it. Then we refine the path into a safe and feasible trajectory which simultaneously enhances the perception awareness to the environment operators are interested in. Additionally, the proposed method is integrated into a customized quadrotor system. Extensive challenging indoor and outdoor real-world experiments and benchmark comparisons verify that the proposed system is reliable, robust and applicable to even unskilled users. We will release the source code of our system to benefit related researches.
Winding Through: Crowd Navigation via Topological Invariance
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

We focus on robot navigation in crowded environments. The challenge of predicting the motion of a crowd around a robot makes it hard to ensure human safety and comfort. Recent approaches often employ end-to-end techniques for robot control or deep architectures for high-fidelity human motion prediction. While these methods achieve important performance benchmarks in simulated domains, dataset limitations and high sample complexity tend to prevent them from transferring to real-world environments. Our key insight is that a low-dimensional representation that captures critical features of crowd-robot dynamics could be sufficient to enable a robot to wind through a crowd smoothly. To this end, we mathematically formalize the act of passing between two agents as a rotation, using a notion of topological invariance. Based on this formalism, we design a cost functional that favors robot trajectories contributing higher passing progress and penalizes switching between different sides of a human. We incorporate this functional into a model predictive controller that employs a simple constant-velocity model of human motion prediction. This results in robot motion that accomplishes statistically significantly higher clearances from the crowd compared to state-of-the-art baselines while maintaining competitive levels of efficiency, across extensive simulations and challenging real-world experiments on a self-balancing robot.
Almost Universally Optimal Distributed Laplacian Solvers via Low-Congestion Shortcuts
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we refine the (almost) \emph{existentially optimal} distributed Laplacian solver recently developed by Forster, Goranci, Liu, Peng, Sun, and Ye (FOCS `21) into an (almost) \emph{universally optimal} distributed Laplacian solver. Specifically, when the topology is known, we show that any Laplacian system on an $n$-node graph with \emph{shortcut quality} $\text{SQ}(G)$ can be solved within $n^{o(1)} \text{SQ}(G) \log(1/\varepsilon)$ rounds, where $\varepsilon$ is the required accuracy. This almost matches our lower bound which guarantees that any correct algorithm on $G$ requires $\widetildeΩ(\text{SQ}(G))$ rounds, even for a crude solution with $\varepsilon \le 1/2$. Even in the unknown-topology case (i.e., standard CONGEST), the same bounds also hold in most networks of interest. Furthermore, conditional on conjectured improvements in state-of-the-art constructions of low-congestion shortcuts, the CONGEST results will match the known-topology ones. Moreover, following a recent line of work in distributed algorithms, we consider a hybrid communication model which enhances CONGEST with limited global power in the form of the node-capacitated clique (NCC) model. In this model, we show the existence of a Laplacian solver with round complexity $n^{o(1)} \log(1/\varepsilon)$. The unifying thread of these results, and our main technical contribution, is the study of novel \emph{congested} generalization of the standard \emph{part-wise aggregation} problem. We develop near-optimal algorithms for this primitive in the Supported-CONGEST model, almost-optimal algorithms in (standard) CONGEST, as well as a very simple algorithm for bounded-treewidth graphs with slightly worse bounds. This primitive can be readily used to accelerate the FOCS`21 Laplacian solver. We believe this primitive will find further independent applications.
Joint Debiased Representation Learning and Imbalanced Data Clustering
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

One of the most promising approaches for unsupervised learning is combining deep representation learning and deep clustering. Some recent works propose to simultaneously learn representation using deep neural networks and perform clustering by defining a clustering loss on top of embedded features. However, these approaches are sensitive to imbalanced data and out-of-distribution samples. As a consequence, these methods optimize clustering by pushing data close to randomly initialized cluster centers. This is problematic when the number of instances varies largely in different classes or a cluster with few samples has less chance to be assigned a good centroid. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a new unsupervised framework for joint debiased representation learning and image clustering. We simultaneously train two deep learning models, a deep representation network that captures the data distribution, and a deep clustering network that learns embedded features and performs clustering. Specifically, the clustering network and learning representation network both take advantage of our proposed statistics pooling block that represents mean, variance, and cardinality to handle the out-of-distribution samples and class imbalance. Our experiments show that using these representations, one can considerably improve results on imbalanced image clustering across a variety of image datasets. Moreover, the learned representations generalize well when transferred to the out-of-distribution dataset.
Competitive Driving of Autonomous Vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

This paper describes Ariel Team's autonomous racing controller for the Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) simulation race. IAC is the first multi-vehicle autonomous head-to-head competition, reaching speeds of 300 km/h along an oval track, modeled after the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (IMS). Our racing controller attempts to maximize progress along the track while avoiding collisions with opponent vehicles and obeying the race rules. To this end, the racing controller first computes a race line offline. Then, it repeatedly computes online a small set of dynamically feasible maneuver candidates, each tested for collision with the opponent vehicles. Finally, it selects the maneuver that maximizes progress along the track, taking into account the race line. The maneuver candidates, as well as the predicted trajectories of the opponent vehicles, are approximated using a point mass model. Despite the simplicity of this racing controller, it managed to drive competitively and with no collision with any of the opponent vehicles in the IAC final simulation race.
Direct Random Search for Fine Tuning of Deep Reinforcement Learning Policies
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Researchers have demonstrated that Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a powerful tool for finding policies that perform well on complex robotic systems. However, these policies are often unpredictable and can induce highly variable behavior when evaluated with only slightly different initial conditions. Training considerations constrain DRL algorithm designs in that most algorithms must use stochastic policies during training. The resulting policy used during deployment, however, can and frequently is a deterministic one that uses the Maximum Likelihood Action (MLA) at each step. In this work, we show that a direct random search is very effective at fine-tuning DRL policies by directly optimizing them using deterministic rollouts. We illustrate this across a large collection of reinforcement learning environments, using a wide variety of policies obtained from different algorithms. Our results show that this method yields more consistent and higher performing agents on the environments we tested. Furthermore, we demonstrate how this method can be used to extend our previous work on shrinking the dimensionality of the reachable state space of closed-loop systems run under Deep Neural Network (DNN) policies.
Learning to Predict Diverse Human Motions from a Single Image via Mixture Density Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Human motion prediction, which plays a key role in computer vision, generally requires a past motion sequence as input. However, in real applications, a complete and correct past motion sequence can be too expensive to achieve. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to predicting future human motions from a much weaker condition, i.e., a single image, with mixture density networks (MDN) modeling. Contrary to most existing deep human motion prediction approaches, the multimodal nature of MDN enables the generation of diverse future motion hypotheses, which well compensates for the strong stochastic ambiguity aggregated by the single input and human motion uncertainty. In designing the loss function, we further introduce the energy-based formulation to flexibly impose prior losses over the learnable parameters of MDN to maintain motion coherence as well as improve the prediction accuracy by customizing the energy functions. Our trained model directly takes an image as input and generates multiple plausible motions that satisfy the given condition. Extensive experiments on two standard benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in terms of prediction diversity and accuracy.