OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Exploiting Underlay Spectrum Sharing in Cell-Free Massive MIMO Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

We investigate the coexistence of underlay spectrum sharing in cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. A primary system with geographically distributed primary access points (P-APs) serves a multitude of primary users (PUs), while a secondary system serves a large number of secondary users (SUs) in the same primary/licensed spectrum by exploiting the underlay spectrum sharing. To mitigate the secondary co-channel interference inflected at PUs, stringent secondary transmit power constraints are defined for the secondary access points (S-APs). A generalized pilots sharing scheme is used to locally estimate the uplink channels at P-APs/S-APs, and thereby, conjugate precoders are adopted to serve PUs/SUs in the same time-frequency resource element. Moreover, the effect of a user-centric AP clustering scheme is investigated by assigning a suitable set of APs to a particular user. The impact of estimated downlink (DL) channels at PUs/SUs via DL pilots beamformed by P-APs/S-APs is investigated. The achievable primary/secondary rates at PUs/SUs are derived for the statistical DL and estimated DL CSI cases. User-fairness for PUs/SUs is achieved by designing efficient transmit power control policies based on a multi-objective optimization problem formulation of joint underlay spectrum sharing and max-min criteria. The proposed orthogonal multiple-access based analytical framework is also extended to facilitate non-orthogonal multiple-access. Our analysis and numerical results manifest that the primary/secondary performance of underlay spectrum sharing can be boosted by virtue of the average reduction of transmit powers/path-losses, uniform coverage/service, and macro-diversity gains, which are inherent to distributed transmissions/receptions of cell-free massive MIMO.
Estimating Traffic Speeds using Probe Data: A Deep Neural Network Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

This paper presents a dedicated Deep Neural Network (DNN) architecture that reconstructs space-time traffic speeds on freeways given sparse data. The DNN is constructed in such a way, that it learns heterogeneous congestion patterns using a large dataset of sparse speed data, in particular from probe vehicles. Input to the DNN are two equally sized input matrices: one containing raw measurement data, and the other indicates the cells occupied with data. The DNN, comprising multiple stacked convolutional layers with an encoding-decoding structure and feed-forward paths, transforms the input into a full matrix of traffic speeds. The proposed DNN architecture is evaluated with respect to its ability to accurately reconstruct heterogeneous congestion patterns under varying input data sparsity. Therefore, a large set of empirical Floating-Car Data (FCD) collected on German freeway A9 during two months is utilized. In total, 43 congestion distinct scenarios are observed which comprise moving and stationary congestion patterns. A data augmentation technique is applied to generate input-output samples of the data, which makes the DNN shift-invariant as well as capable of managing varying data sparsities. The DNN is trained and subsequently applied to sparse data of an unseen congestion scenario. The results show that the DNN is able to apply learned patterns, and reconstructs moving as well as stationary congested traffic with high accuracy; even given highly sparse input data. Reconstructed speeds are compared qualitatively and quantitatively with the results of several state-of-the-art methods such as the Adaptive Smoothing Method (ASM), the Phase-Based Smoothing Method (PSM) and a standard Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture. As a result, the DNN outperforms the other methods significantly.
Neural Tree Expansion for Multi-Robot Planning in Non-Cooperative Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

We present a self-improving, Neural Tree Expansion (NTE) method for multi-robot online planning in non-cooperative environments, where each robot attempts to maximize its cumulative reward while interacting with other self-interested robots. Our algorithm adapts the centralized, perfect information, discrete-action space method from AlphaZero to a decentralized, partial information, continuous action space setting for multi-robot applications. Our method has three interacting components: (i) a centralized, perfect-information "expert" Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with large computation resources that provides expert demonstrations, (ii) a decentralized, partial-information "learner" MCTS with small computation resources that runs in real-time and provides self-play examples, and (iii) policy & value neural networks that are trained with the expert demonstrations and bias both the expert and the learner tree growth. Our numerical experiments demonstrate Neural Tree Expansion's computational advantage by finding better solutions than a MCTS with 20 times more resources. The resulting policies are dynamically sophisticated, demonstrate coordination between robots, and play the Reach-Target-Avoid differential game significantly better than the state-of-the-art control-theoretic baseline for multi-robot, double-integrator systems. Our hardware experiments on an aerial swarm demonstrate the computational advantage of Neural Tree Expansion, enabling online planning at 20Hz with effective policies in complex scenarios.
Query-by-Sketch: Scaling Shortest Path Graph Queries on Very Large Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2021
Year: 2021

Computing shortest paths is a fundamental operation in processing graph data. In many real-world applications, discovering shortest paths between two vertices empowers us to make full use of the underlying structure to understand how vertices are related in a graph, e.g. the strength of social ties between individuals in a social network. In this paper, we study the shortest-path-graph problem that aims to efficiently compute a shortest path graph containing exactly all shortest paths between any arbitrary pair of vertices on complex networks. Our goal is to design an exact solution that can scale to graphs with millions or billions of vertices and edges. To achieve high scalability, we propose a novel method, Query-by-Sketch (QbS), which efficiently leverages offline labelling (i.e., precomputed labels) to guide online searching through a fast sketching process that summarizes the important structural aspects of shortest paths in answering shortest-path-graph queries. We theoretically prove the correctness of this method and analyze its computational complexity. To empirically verify the efficiency of QbS, we conduct experiments on 12 real-world datasets, among which the largest dataset has 1.7 billion vertices and 7.8 billion edges. The experimental results show that QbS can answer shortest-path graph queries in microseconds for million-scale graphs and less than half a second for billion-scale graphs.
Seed Word Selection for Weakly-Supervised Text Classification with Unsupervised Error Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Weakly-supervised text classification aims to induce text classifiers from only a few user-provided seed words. The vast majority of previous work assumes high-quality seed words are given. However, the expert-annotated seed words are sometimes non-trivial to come up with. Furthermore, in the weakly-supervised learning setting, we do not have any labeled document to measure the seed words' efficacy, making the seed word selection process "a walk in the dark". In this work, we remove the need for expert-curated seed words by first mining (noisy) candidate seed words associated with the category names. We then train interim models with individual candidate seed words. Lastly, we estimate the interim models' error rate in an unsupervised manner. The seed words that yield the lowest estimated error rates are added to the final seed word set. A comprehensive evaluation of six binary classification tasks on four popular datasets demonstrates that the proposed method outperforms a baseline using only category name seed words and obtained comparable performance as a counterpart using expert-annotated seed words.
Deep Learning based Efficient Symbol-Level Precoding Design for MU-MISO Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

The recently emerged symbol-level precoding (SLP) technique has been regarded as a promising solution in multi-user wireless communication systems, since it can convert harmful multi-user interference (MUI) into beneficial signals for enhancing system performance. However, the tremendous computational complexity of conventional symbol-level precoding designs severely hinders the practical implementations. In order to tackle this difficulty, we propose a novel deep learning (DL) based approach to efficiently design the symbol-level precoders. Particularly, in this correspondence, we consider a multi-user multi-input single-output (MU-MISO) downlink system. An efficient precoding neural network (EPNN) is introduced to optimize the symbol-level precoders for maximizing the minimum quality-of-service (QoS) of all users under the power constraint. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed EPNN based SLP design can dramatically reduce the computing time at the price of slight performance loss compared with the conventional convex optimization based SLP design.
WASSA@IITK at WASSA 2021: Multi-task Learning and Transformer Finetuning for Emotion Classification and Empathy Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

This paper describes our contribution to the WASSA 2021 shared task on Empathy Prediction and Emotion Classification. The broad goal of this task was to model an empathy score, a distress score and the overall level of emotion of an essay written in response to a newspaper article associated with harm to someone. We have used the ELECTRA model abundantly and also advanced deep learning approaches like multi-task learning. Additionally, we also leveraged standard machine learning techniques like ensembling. Our system achieves a Pearson Correlation Coefficient of 0.533 on sub-task I and a macro F1 score of 0.5528 on sub-task II. We ranked 1st in Emotion Classification sub-task and 3rd in Empathy Prediction sub-task
Passive, Transparent, and Selective TLS Decryption for Network Security Monitoring
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Internet traffic is increasingly encrypted. While this protects the confidentiality and integrity of communication, it prevents network monitoring systems (NMS) and intrusion detection systems (IDSs) from effectively analyzing the now encrypted payloads. Therefore, many enterprise networks have deployed man-in-the-middle (MitM) proxies that intercept TLS connections at the network border to examine packet payloads and thus retain some visibility. However, recent studies have shown that TLS interception often reduces connection security and potentially introduces additional attack vectors to the network. In this paper, we present a cooperative approach in which end-hosts as cryptographic endpoints selectively provide TLS key material to NMS for decryption. This enables endpoints to control who can decrypt which content and lets users retain privacy for chosen connections. We implement a prototype based on the Zeek NMS that is able to receive key material from hosts, decrypt TLS connections and perform analyzes on the cleartext. The patch is freely available and we plan to upstream our changes to Zeek once they are mature enough. In our evaluation, we discuss how our approach conceptually requires significantly less computational resources compared to the commonly deployed MitM proxies. Our experimental results indicate, that TLS decryption increases a runtime overhead of about 2.5 times of the original runtime on cleartext. Additionally, we show that the latency for transmitting keys between hosts and the NMS can be effectively addressed by buffering traffic at the NMS for at least 40ms, allowing successful decryption of 99.99% of all observed TLS connections.
Distill on the Go: Online knowledge distillation in self-supervised learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Self-supervised learning solves pretext prediction tasks that do not require annotations to learn feature representations. For vision tasks, pretext tasks such as predicting rotation, solving jigsaw are solely created from the input data. Yet, predicting this known information helps in learning representations useful for downstream tasks. However, recent works have shown that wider and deeper models benefit more from self-supervised learning than smaller models. To address the issue of self-supervised pre-training of smaller models, we propose Distill-on-the-Go (DoGo), a self-supervised learning paradigm using single-stage online knowledge distillation to improve the representation quality of the smaller models. We employ deep mutual learning strategy in which two models collaboratively learn from each other to improve one another. Specifically, each model is trained using self-supervised learning along with distillation that aligns each model's softmax probabilities of similarity scores with that of the peer model. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets, learning objectives, and architectures to demonstrate the potential of our proposed method. Our results show significant performance gain in the presence of noisy and limited labels and generalization to out-of-distribution data.
Multilevel Polar Coded Space-Shift Keying
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

Multilevel coding (MLC) is a coded modulation technique which can achieve excellent performance over a range of communication channels. Polar codes have been shown to be quite compatible with communication systems using MLC, as the rate allocation of the component polar codes follows the natural polarization inherent in polar codes. MLC based techniques have not yet been studied in systems that use spatial modulation (SM). SM makes the polar code design difficult as the spatial bits actually select a channel index for transmission. To solve this problem, we propose a Monte Carlo based evaluation of the ergodic capacities for the individual bit levels under the capacity rule for a space-shift keying (SSK) system, where we also make use of a single antenna activation to approximate the transmission channel for the design of the multilevel polar code. Our simulation results show that the multilevel polar coded 16 $\times$ 1 SSK system outperforms the corresponding system that uses bit-interleaved polar coded modulation by 2.9 dB at a bit-error rate (BER) of $10^{-4}$.
Data-driven vehicle speed detection from synthetic driving simulator images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Despite all the challenges and limitations, vision-based vehicle speed detection is gaining research interest due to its great potential benefits such as cost reduction, and enhanced additional functions. As stated in a recent survey [1], the use of learning-based approaches to address this problem is still in its infancy. One of the main difficulties is the need for a large amount of data, which must contain the input sequences and, more importantly, the output values corresponding to the actual speed of the vehicles. Data collection in this context requires a complex and costly setup to capture the images from the camera synchronized with a high precision speed sensor to generate the ground truth speed values. In this paper we explore, for the first time, the use of synthetic images generated from a driving simulator (e.g., CARLA) to address vehicle speed detection using a learning-based approach. We simulate a virtual camera placed over a stretch of road, and generate thousands of images with variability corresponding to multiple speeds, different vehicle types and colors, and lighting and weather conditions. Two different approaches to map the sequence of images to an output speed (regression) are studied, including CNN-GRU and 3D-CNN. We present preliminary results that support the high potential of this approach to address vehicle speed detection.
Semantic Segmentation by Improved Generative Adversarial Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

While most existing segmentation methods usually combined the powerful feature extraction capabilities of CNNs with Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) post-processing, the result always limited by the fault of CRFs . Due to the notoriously slow calculation speeds and poor efficiency of CRFs, in recent years, CRFs post-processing has been gradually eliminated. In this paper, an improved Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for image semantic segmentation task (semantic segmentation by GANs, Seg-GAN) is proposed to facilitate further segmentation research. In addition, we introduce Convolutional CRFs (ConvCRFs) as an effective improvement solution for the image semantic segmentation task. Towards the goal of differentiating the segmentation results from the ground truth distribution and improving the details of the output images, the proposed discriminator network is specially designed in a full convolutional manner combined with cascaded ConvCRFs. Besides, the adversarial loss aggressively encourages the output image to be close to the distribution of the ground truth. Our method not only learns an end-to-end mapping from input image to corresponding output image, but also learns a loss function to train this mapping. The experiments show that our method achieves better performance than state-of-the-art methods.
Prospective Artificial Intelligence Approaches for Active Cyber Defence
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Cybercriminals are rapidly developing new malicious tools that leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to enable new classes of adaptive and stealthy attacks. New defensive methods need to be developed to counter these threats. Some cybersecurity professionals are speculating AI will enable corresponding new classes of active cyber defence measures -- is this realistic, or currently mostly hype? The Alan Turing Institute, with expert guidance from the UK National Cyber Security Centre and Defence Science Technology Laboratory, published a research roadmap for AI for ACD last year. This position paper updates the roadmap for two of the most promising AI approaches -- reinforcement learning and causal inference - and describes why they could help tip the balance back towards defenders.
Federated Learning for Malware Detection in IoT Devices
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

This work investigates the possibilities enabled by federated learning concerning IoT malware detection and studies security issues inherent to this new learning paradigm. In this context, a framework that uses federated learning to detect malware affecting IoT devices is presented. N-BaIoT, a dataset modeling network traffic of several real IoT devices while affected by malware, has been used to evaluate the proposed framework. Both supervised and unsupervised federated models (multi-layer perceptron and autoencoder) able to detect malware affecting seen and unseen IoT devices of N-BaIoT have been trained and evaluated. Furthermore, their performance has been compared to two traditional approaches. The first one lets each participant locally train a model using only its own data, while the second consists of making the participants share their data with a central entity in charge of training a global model. This comparison has shown that the use of more diverse and large data, as done in the federated and centralized methods, has a considerable positive impact on the model performance. Besides, the federated models, while preserving the participant's privacy, show similar results as the centralized ones. As an additional contribution and to measure the robustness of the federated approach, an adversarial setup with several malicious participants poisoning the federated model has been considered. The baseline model aggregation averaging step used in most federated learning algorithms appears highly vulnerable to different attacks, even with a single adversary. The performance of other model aggregation functions acting as countermeasures is thus evaluated under the same attack scenarios. These functions provide a significant improvement against malicious participants, but more efforts are still needed to make federated approaches robust.
Continuum Deformation Coordination of Multi-Agent Systems Using Cooperative Localization
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2021
Year: 2021

This paper studies the problem of decentralized continuum deformation coordination of multi-agent systems aided by cooperative localization. We treat agents as particles inside a triangular continuum (deformable body) in a2-D motion space and let the continuum deformation coordination be defined by three leaders located at vertices of a triangle, called the leading triangle. The leaders desired trajectories are assigned as the solution of a constrained optimal control problem such that safety requirements are satisfied in the presence of disturbance and measurement noise. Followers distributed inside the leading tri-angle acquire continuum deformation in a decentralized fashion by integrating cooperative localization and local communication. Specifically, cooperative localization estimates the global positions of all agents using relative position measurements based primarily on proximity of agents. Simulation results are presented for a network of ten agents.
A Decentralized Shared CAV System Design and Application
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

In this study, we propose a novel heuristic two-step algorithm for shared ridehailing in which users can share their rides with only one more user. The algorithm, which is centrally formulated, starts with matching users and creating a set of passenger pairs in step 1 and is followed by solving an assignment problem to assign passenger pairs to the vehicles. To solve the problem of high computational time in dynamic ride-matching problems, we propose a distributed system that is based on vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) and infrastructure to infrastructure (I2I) communication. To evaluate the distributed system's performance, we compare it with the proposed centralized ridehailing algorithm. Both centralized and distributed systems are implemented in a micro-traffic simulator to assess their performance and their impact on traffic congestion. Downtown Toronto road network was chosen as the study area. Based on our obtained results, the service rate of the distributed system was 91.59% which is close to 95.80% in the centralized system. However, the distributed system yielded much lower computational time compared to centralized. Furthermore, the scalability of the distributed system was shown by testing it on a small network and comparing with the entire network.