OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Hierarchical Attentive Knowledge Graph Embedding for Personalized Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

Knowledge graphs (KGs) have proven to be effective for high-quality recommendation, where the connectivities between users and items provide rich and complementary information to user-item interactions. Most existing methods, however, are insufficient to exploit the KGs for capturing user preferences, as they either represent the user-item connectivities via paths with limited expressiveness or implicitly model them by propagating information over the entire KG with inevitable noise. In this paper, we design a novel hierarchical attentive knowledge graph embedding (HAKG) framework to exploit the KGs for effective recommendation. Specifically, HAKG first extracts the expressive subgraphs that link user-item pairs to characterize their connectivities, which accommodate both the semantics and topology of KGs. The subgraphs are then encoded via a hierarchical attentive subgraph encoding to generate effective subgraph embeddings for enhanced user preference prediction. Extensive experiments show the superiority of HAKG against state-of-the-art recommendation methods, as well as its potential in alleviating the data sparsity issue.
Exorcising Spectres with Secure Compilers
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2021
Year: 2021

Attackers can access sensitive information of programs by exploiting the side-effects of speculatively-executed instructions using Spectre attacks. To mitigate theses attacks, popular compilers deployed a wide range of countermeasures. The security of these countermeasures, however, has not been ascertained: while some of them are believed to be secure, others are known to be insecure and result in vulnerable programs. To reason about the security guarantees of these compiler-inserted countermeasures, this paper presents a framework comprising several secure compilation criteria characterizing when compilers produce code resistant against Spectre attacks. With this framework, we perform a comprehensive security analysis of compiler-level countermeasures against Spectre attacks implemented in major compilers. This work provides sound foundations to formally reason about the security of compiler-level countermeasures against Spectre attacks as well as the first proofs of security and insecurity of said countermeasures.
Approximation capabilities of neural networks on unbounded domains
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we prove that a shallow neural network with a monotone sigmoid, ReLU, ELU, Softplus, or LeakyReLU activation function can arbitrarily well approximate any L^p(p>=2) integrable functions defined on R*[0,1]^n. We also prove that a shallow neural network with a sigmoid, ReLU, ELU, Softplus, or LeakyReLU activation function expresses no nonzero integrable function defined on the Euclidean plane. Together with a recent result that the deep ReLU network can arbitrarily well approximate any integrable function on Euclidean spaces, we provide a new perspective on the advantage of multiple hidden layers in the context of ReLU networks. Lastly, we prove that the ReLU network with depth 3 is a universal approximator in L^p(R^n).
Sparsification as a Remedy for Staleness in Distributed Asynchronous SGD
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Large scale machine learning is increasingly relying on distributed optimization, whereby several machines contribute to the training process of a statistical model. In this work we study the performance of asynchronous, distributed settings, when applying sparsification, a technique used to reduce communication overheads. In particular, for the first time in an asynchronous, non-convex setting, we theoretically prove that, in presence of staleness, sparsification does not harm SGD performance: the ergodic convergence rate matches the known result of standard SGD, that is $\mathcal{O} \left( 1/\sqrt{T} \right)$. We also carry out an empirical study to complement our theory, and confirm that the effects of sparsification on the convergence rate are negligible, when compared to 'vanilla' SGD, even in the challenging scenario of an asynchronous, distributed system.
An Efficient and Effective Second-Order Training Algorithm for LSTM-based Adaptive Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

We study adaptive (or online) nonlinear regression with Long-Short-Term-Memory (LSTM) based networks, i.e., LSTM-based adaptive learning. In this context, we introduce an efficient Extended Kalman filter (EKF) based second-order training algorithm. Our algorithm is truly online, i.e., it does not assume any underlying data generating process and future information, except that the target sequence is bounded. Through an extensive set of experiments, we demonstrate significant performance gains achieved by our algorithm with respect to the state-of-the-art methods. Here, we mainly show that our algorithm consistently provides 10 to 45\% improvement in the accuracy compared to the widely-used adaptive methods Adam, RMSprop, and DEKF, and comparable performance to EKF with a 10 to 15 times reduction in the run-time.
Towards Automated Website Classification by Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

In recent years, the interest in Big Data sources has been steadily growing within the Official Statistic community. The Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat) is currently carrying out several Big Data pilot studies. One of these studies, the ICT Big Data pilot, aims at exploiting massive amounts of textual data automatically scraped from the websites of Italian enterprises in order to predict a set of target variables (e.g. e-commerce) that are routinely observed by the traditional ICT Survey. In this paper, we show that Deep Learning techniques can successfully address this problem. Essentially, we tackle a text classification task: an algorithm must learn to infer whether an Italian enterprise performs e-commerce from the textual content of its website. To reach this goal, we developed a sophisticated processing pipeline and evaluated its performance through extensive experiments. Our pipeline uses Convolutional Neural Networks and relies on Word Embeddings to encode raw texts into grayscale images (i.e. normalized numeric matrices). Web-scraped texts are huge and have very low signal to noise ratio: to overcome these issues, we adopted a framework known as False Positive Reduction, which has seldom (if ever) been applied before to text classification tasks. Several original contributions enable our processing pipeline to reach good classification results. Empirical evidence shows that our proposal outperforms all the alternative Machine Learning solutions already tested in Istat for the same task.
Human Action Recognition in Drone Videos using a Few Aerial Training Examples
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Drones are enabling new forms of human actions surveillance due to their low cost and fast mobility. However, using deep neural networks for automatic aerial action recognition is difficult due to the need for a large number of training aerial human action videos. Collecting a large number of human action aerial videos is costly, time-consuming, and difficult. In this paper, we explore two alternative data sources to improve aerial action classification when only a few training aerial examples are available. As a first data source, we resort to video games. We collect plenty of aerial game action videos using two gaming engines. For the second data source, we leverage conditional Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks to generate aerial features from ground videos. Given that both data sources have some limitations, e.g. game videos are biased towards specific actions categories (fighting, shooting, etc.,), and it is not easy to generate good discriminative GAN-generated features for all types of actions, we need to efficiently integrate two dataset sources with few available real aerial training videos. To address this challenge of the heterogeneous nature of the data, we propose to use a disjoint multitask learning framework. We feed the network with real and game, or real and GAN-generated data in an alternating fashion to obtain an improved action classifier. We validate the proposed approach on two aerial action datasets and demonstrate that features from aerial game videos and those generated from GAN can be extremely useful for an improved action recognition in real aerial videos when only a few real aerial training examples are available.
Autoencoding with a Classifier System
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2021
Year: 2021

Autoencoders are data-specific compression algorithms learned automatically from examples. The predominant approach has been to construct single large global models that cover the domain. However, training and evaluating models of increasing size comes at the price of additional time and computational cost. Conditional computation, sparsity, and model pruning techniques can reduce these costs while maintaining performance. Learning classifier systems (LCS) are a framework for adaptively subdividing input spaces into an ensemble of simpler local approximations that together cover the domain. LCS perform conditional computation through the use of a population of individual gating/guarding components, each associated with a local approximation. This article explores the use of an LCS to adaptively decompose the input domain into a collection of small autoencoders where local solutions of different complexity may emerge. In addition to benefits in convergence time and computational cost, it is shown possible to reduce code size as well as the resulting decoder computational cost when compared with the global model equivalent.
Deep Q-Learning for Same-Day Delivery with Vehicles and Drones
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we consider same-day delivery with vehicles and drones. Customers make delivery requests over the course of the day, and the dispatcher dynamically dispatches vehicles and drones to deliver the goods to customers before their delivery deadline. Vehicles can deliver multiple packages in one route but travel relatively slowly due to the urban traffic. Drones travel faster, but they have limited capacity and require charging or battery swaps. To exploit the different strengths of the fleets, we propose a deep Q-learning approach. Our method learns the value of assigning a new customer to either drones or vehicles as well as the option to not offer service at all. In a systematic computational analysis, we show the superiority of our policy compared to benchmark policies and the effectiveness of our deep Q-learning approach. We also show that our policy can maintain effectiveness when the fleet size changes moderately. Experiments on data drawn from varied spatial/temporal distributions demonstrate that our trained policies can cope with changes in the input data.
Tensor Q-Rank: New Data Dependent Definition of Tensor Rank
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Recently, the \textit{Tensor Nuclear Norm~(TNN)} regularization based on t-SVD has been widely used in various low tubal-rank tensor recovery tasks. However, these models usually require smooth change of data along the third dimension to ensure their low rank structures. In this paper, we propose a new definition of data dependent tensor rank named \textit{tensor Q-rank} by a learnable orthogonal matrix $\mathbf{Q}$, and further introduce a unified data dependent low rank tensor recovery model. According to the low rank hypothesis, we introduce two explainable selection method of $\mathbf{Q}$, under which the data tensor may have a more significant low tensor Q-rank structure than that of low tubal-rank structure. Specifically, maximizing the variance of singular value distribution leads to Variance Maximization Tensor Q-Nuclear norm~(VMTQN), while minimizing the value of nuclear norm through manifold optimization leads to Manifold Optimization Tensor Q-Nuclear norm~(MOTQN). Moreover, we apply these two models to the low rank tensor completion problem, and then give an effective algorithm and briefly analyze why our method works better than TNN based methods in the case of complex data with low sampling rate. Finally, experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model in the tensor completion problem with respect to other tensor rank regularization models.
Secure Evaluation of Quantized Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

We investigate two questions in this paper: First, we ask to what extent "MPC friendly" models are already supported by major Machine Learning frameworks such as TensorFlow or PyTorch. Prior works provide protocols that only work on fixed-point integers and specialized activation functions, two aspects that are not supported by popular Machine Learning frameworks, and the need for these specialized model representations means that it is hard, and often impossible, to use e.g., TensorFlow to design, train and test models that later have to be evaluated securely. Second, we ask to what extent the functionality for evaluating Neural Networks already exists in general-purpose MPC frameworks. These frameworks have received more scrutiny, are better documented and supported on more platforms. Furthermore, they are typically flexible in terms of the threat model they support. In contrast, most secure evaluation protocols in the literature are targeted to a specific threat model and their implementations are only a "proof-of-concept", making it very hard for their adoption in practice. We answer both of the above questions in a positive way: We observe that the quantization techniques supported by both TensorFlow, PyTorch and MXNet can provide models in a representation that can be evaluated securely; and moreover, that this evaluation can be performed by a general purpose MPC framework. We perform extensive benchmarks to understand the exact trade-offs between different corruption models, network sizes and efficiency. These experiments provide an interesting insight into cost between active and passive security, as well as honest and dishonest majority. Our work shows then that the separating line between existing ML frameworks and existing MPC protocols may be narrower than implicitly suggested by previous works.
DEPA: Self-Supervised Audio Embedding for Depression Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2021
Year: 2021

Depression detection research has increased over the last few decades, one major bottleneck of which is the limited data availability and representation learning. Recently, self-supervised learning has seen success in pretraining text embeddings and has been applied broadly on related tasks with sparse data, while pretrained audio embeddings based on self-supervised learning are rarely investigated. This paper proposes DEPA, a self-supervised, pretrained depression audio embedding method for depression detection. An encoder-decoder network is used to extract DEPA on in-domain depressed datasets (DAIC and MDD) and out-domain (Switchboard, Alzheimer's) datasets. With DEPA as the audio embedding extracted at response-level, a significant performance gain is achieved on downstream tasks, evaluated on both sparse datasets like DAIC and large major depression disorder dataset (MDD). This paper not only exhibits itself as a novel embedding extracting method capturing response-level representation for depression detection but more significantly, is an exploration of self-supervised learning in a specific task within audio processing.
Effective Wadge Hierarchy in Computable Quasi-Polish Spaces
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2021
Year: 2021

We define and study an effective version of the Wadge hierarchy in computable quasi-Polish spaces which include most spaces of interest for computable analysis. Along with hierarchies of sets we study hierarchies of k-partitions which are interesting on their own. We show that levels of such hierarchies are preserved by the computable effectively open surjections, that if the effective Hausdorff-Kuratowski theorem holds in the Baire space then it holds in every computable quasi-Polish space, and we extend the effective Hausdorff theorem to k-partitions.
Weighted boxes fusion: Ensembling boxes from different object detection models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In this work, we present a novel method for combining predictions of object detection models: weighted boxes fusion. Our algorithm utilizes confidence scores of all proposed bounding boxes to constructs the averaged boxes. We tested method on several datasets and evaluated it in the context of the Open Images and COCO Object Detection tracks, achieving top results in these challenges. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/ZFTurbo/Weighted-Boxes-Fusion
Locally recoverable codes on surfaces
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

A linear error correcting code is a subspace of a finite-dimensional space over a finite field with a fixed coordinate system. Such a code is said to be locally recoverable with locality $r$ if, for every coordinate, its value at a codeword can be deduced from the value of (certain) $r$ other coordinates of the codeword. These codes have found many recent applications, e.g., to distributed cloud storage. We will discuss the problem of constructing good locally recoverable codes and present some constructions using algebraic surfaces that improve previous constructions and sometimes provide codes that are optimal in a precise sense. The main conceptual contribution of this paper is to consider surfaces fibered over a curve in such a way that each recovery set is constructed from points in a single fiber. This allows us to use the geometry of the fiber to guarantee the local recoverability and use the global geometry of the surface to get a hold on the standard parameters of our codes. We look in detail at situations where the fibers are rational or elliptic curves and provide many examples applying our methods.
Facial Image Deformation Based on Landmark Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In this work, we use facial landmarks to make the deformation for facial images more authentic. The deformation includes the expansion of eyes and the shrinking of noses, mouths, and cheeks. An advanced 106-point facial landmark detector is utilized to provide control points for deformation. Bilinear interpolation is used in the expansion and Moving Least Squares methods (MLS) including Affine Deformation, Similarity Deformation and Rigid Deformation are used in the shrinking. We compare the running time as well as the quality of deformed images using different MLS methods. The experimental results show that the Rigid Deformation which can keep other parts of the images unchanged performs better even if it takes the longest time.
Multi-resolution CSI Feedback with deep learning in Massive MIMO System
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

In massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system, user equipment (UE) needs to send downlink channel state information (CSI) back to base station (BS). However, the feedback becomes expensive with the growing complexity of CSI in massive MIMO system. Recently, deep learning (DL) approaches are used to improve the reconstruction efficiency of CSI feedback. In this paper, a novel feedback network named CRNet is proposed to achieve better performance via extracting CSI features on multiple resolutions. An advanced training scheme that further boosts the network performance is also introduced. Simulation results show that the proposed CRNet outperforms the state-of-the-art CsiNet under the same computational complexity without any extra information. The open source codes are available at https://github.com/Kylin9511/CRNet
Deep Learning for 2D and 3D Rotatable Data: An Overview of Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Convolutional networks are successful due to their equivariance/invariance under translations. However, rotatable data such as images, volumes, shapes, or point clouds require processing with equivariance/invariance under rotations in cases where the rotational orientation of the coordinate system does not affect the meaning of the data (e.g. object classification). On the other hand, estimation/processing of rotations is necessary in cases where rotations are important (e.g. motion estimation). There has been recent progress in methods and theory in all these regards. Here we provide an overview of existing methods, both for 2D and 3D rotations (and translations), and identify commonalities and links between them.
The Consistency of Trust-Sales Relationship in Latin-American E-commerce
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2021
Year: 2021

Customer's trust in vendors' reputation is a key factor that facilitates economic transactions in e-commerce platforms. Although the trust-sales relationship is assumed robust and consistent, its empirical evidence remains neglected for Latin American countries. This work aims to provide a data-driven comprehensive framework for extracting valuable knowledge from public data available in the leading Latin American e-commerce platform with commercial operations in 18 countries. Only Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Uruguay, and Venezuela showed the highest trust indexes among all nations analyzed. The trust-sales relationship was statistically inconsistent across nations but worked as the most important predictor of sales, followed by purchase intention and price.
Weighted Min-Cut: Sequential, Cut-Query and Streaming Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2021
Year: 2021

Consider the following 2-respecting min-cut problem. Given a weighted graph $G$ and its spanning tree $T$, find the minimum cut among the cuts that contain at most two edges in $T$. This problem is an important subroutine in Karger's celebrated randomized near-linear-time min-cut algorithm [STOC'96]. We present a new approach for this problem which can be easily implemented in many settings, leading to the following randomized min-cut algorithms for weighted graphs. * An $O(m\frac{\log^2 n}{\log\log n} + n\log^6 n)$-time sequential algorithm: This improves Karger's $O(m \log^3 n)$ and $O(m\frac{(\log^2 n)\log (n^2/m)}{\log\log n} + n\log^6 n)$ bounds when the input graph is not extremely sparse or dense. Improvements over Karger's bounds were previously known only under a rather strong assumption that the input graph is simple [Henzinger et al. SODA'17; Ghaffari et al. SODA'20]. For unweighted graphs with parallel edges, our bound can be improved to $O(m\frac{\log^{1.5} n}{\log\log n} + n\log^6 n)$. * An algorithm requiring $\tilde O(n)$ cut queries to compute the min-cut of a weighted graph: This answers an open problem by Rubinstein et al. ITCS'18, who obtained a similar bound for simple graphs. * A streaming algorithm that requires $\tilde O(n)$ space and $O(\log n)$ passes to compute the min-cut: The only previous non-trivial exact min-cut algorithm in this setting is the 2-pass $\tilde O(n)$-space algorithm on simple graphs [Rubinstein et al., ITCS'18] (observed by Assadi et al. STOC'19). In contrast to Karger's 2-respecting min-cut algorithm which deploys sophisticated dynamic programming techniques, our approach exploits some cute structural properties so that it only needs to compute the values of $\tilde O(n)$ cuts corresponding to removing $\tilde O(n)$ pairs of tree edges, an operation that can be done quickly in many settings.
A Hybrid Approach To Hierarchical Density-based Cluster Selection
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2021
Year: 2021

HDBSCAN is a density-based clustering algorithm that constructs a cluster hierarchy tree and then uses a specific stability measure to extract flat clusters from the tree. We show how the application of an additional threshold value can result in a combination of DBSCAN* and HDBSCAN clusters, and demonstrate potential benefits of this hybrid approach when clustering data of variable densities. In particular, our approach is useful in scenarios where we require a low minimum cluster size but want to avoid an abundance of micro-clusters in high-density regions. The method can directly be applied to HDBSCAN's tree of cluster candidates and does not require any modifications to the hierarchy itself. It can easily be integrated as an addition to existing HDBSCAN implementations.