OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Improved Reinforcement Learning Coordinated Control of a Mobile Manipulator using Joint Clamping
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Many robotic path planning problems are continuous, stochastic, and high-dimensional. The ability of a mobile manipulator to coordinate its base and manipulator in order to control its whole-body online is particularly challenging when self and environment collision avoidance is required. Reinforcement Learning techniques have the potential to solve such problems through their ability to generalise over environments. We study joint penalties and joint limits of a state-of-the-art mobile manipulator whole-body controller that uses LIDAR sensing for obstacle collision avoidance. We propose directions to improve the reinforcement learning method. Our agent achieves significantly higher success rates than the baseline in a goal-reaching environment and it can solve environments that require coordinated whole-body control which the baseline fails.
Fessonia: a Method for Real-Time Estimation of Human Operator Workload Using Behavioural Entropy
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

This paper addresses the problem of the human operator cognitive workload estimation while controlling a robot. Being capable of assessing, in real-time, the operator's workload could help prevent calamitous events from occurring. This workload estimation could enable an AI to make informed decisions to assist or advise the operator, in an advanced human-robot interaction framework. We propose a method, named Fessonia, for real-time cognitive workload estimation from multiple parameters of an operator's driving behaviour via the use of behavioural entropy. Fessonia is comprised of: a method to calculate the entropy (i.e. unpredictability) of the operator driving behaviour profile; the Driver Profile Update algorithm which adapts the entropy calculations to the evolving driving profile of individual operators; and a Warning And Indication System that uses workload estimations to issue advice to the operator. Fessonia is evaluated in a robot teleoperation scenario that incorporated cognitively demanding secondary tasks to induce varying degrees of workload. The results demonstrate the ability of Fessonia to estimate different levels of imposed workload. Additionally, it is demonstrated that our approach is able to detect and adapt to the evolving driving profile of the different operators. Lastly, based on data obtained, a decrease in entropy is observed when a warning indication is issued, suggesting a more attentive approach focused on the primary navigation task.
Using Elasticsearch for entity recognition in affiliation disambiguation
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2021
Year: 2021

Automatic recognition of affiliations in the metadata of scholarly publications is a key point for monitoring and analyzing trends in scientific production, especially in an open science context. We propose an automatic alignment method on registries, based on Elasticsearch. The proposed method is modular and leaves the choice of the alignment criteria to the user, allowing him to keep control over the precision and recall of the method. An implementation is proposed for an automatic alignment on three registries: countries, GRID.ac and RNSR (research laboratory directory in France) on the Github https://github.com/dataesr/matcher and the performances are analyzed in this paper.
Evaluating Tooling and Methodology when Analysing Bitcoin Mixing Services After Forensic Seizure
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Little or no research has been directed to analysis and researching forensic analysis of the Bitcoin mixing or 'tumbling' service themselves. This work is intended to examine effective tooling and methodology for recovering forensic artifacts from two privacy focused mixing services namely Obscuro which uses the secure enclave on intel chips to provide enhanced confidentiality and Wasabi wallet which uses CoinJoin to mix and obfuscate crypto currencies. These wallets were set up on VMs and then several forensic tools used to examine these VM images for relevant forensic artifacts. These forensic tools were able to recover a broad range of forensic artifacts and found both network forensics and logging files to be a useful source of artifacts to deanonymize these mixing services.
Lifted Reed-Solomon Codes and Lifted Multiplicity Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

Lifted Reed-Solomon and multiplicity codes are classes of codes, constructed from specific sets of $m$-variate polynomials. These codes allow for the design of high-rate codes that can recover every codeword or information symbol from many disjoint sets. Recently, the underlying approaches have been combined for the bi-variate case to construct lifted multiplicity codes, a generalization of lifted codes that can offer further rate improvements. We continue the study of these codes by first establishing new lower bounds on the rate of lifted Reed-Solomon codes for any number of variables $m$, which improve upon the known bounds for any $m\ge 4$. Next, we use these results to provide lower bounds on the rate and distance of lifted multiplicity codes obtained from polynomials in an arbitrary number of variables, which improve upon the known results for any $m\ge 3$. Specifically, we investigate a subcode of a lifted multiplicity code formed by the linear span of $m$-variate monomials whose restriction to an arbitrary line in $\mathbb{F}_q^m$ is equivalent to a low-degree univariate polynomial. We find the tight asymptotic behavior of the fraction of such monomials when the number of variables $m$ is fixed and the alphabet size $q=2^\ell$ is large. Using these results, we give a new explicit construction of batch codes utilizing lifted Reed-Solomon codes. For some parameter regimes, these codes have a better trade-off between parameters than previously known batch codes. Further, we show that lifted multiplicity codes have a better trade-off between redundancy and the number of disjoint recovering sets for every codeword or information symbol than previously known constructions, thereby providing the best known PIR codes for some parameter regimes. Additionally, we present a new local self-correction algorithm for lifted multiplicity codes.
Solving even-parity problems using traceless genetic programming
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2021
Year: 2021

A genetic programming (GP) variant called traceless genetic programming (TGP) is proposed in this paper. TGP is a hybrid method combining a technique for building individuals and a technique for representing individuals. The main difference between TGP and other GP techniques is that TGP does not explicitly store the evolved computer programs. Two genetic operators are used in conjunction with TGP: crossover and insertion. TGP is applied for evolving digital circuits for the even-parity problem. Numerical experiments show that TGP outperforms standard GP with several orders of magnitude.
AEROS: Adaptive RObust least-Squares for Graph-Based SLAM
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

In robot localisation and mapping, outliers are unavoidable when loop-closure measurements are taken into account. A single false-positive loop-closure can have a very negative impact on SLAM problems causing an inferior trajectory to be produced or even for the optimisation to fail entirely. To address this issue, popular existing approaches define a hard switch for each loop-closure constraint. This paper presents AEROS, a novel approach to adaptively solve a robust least-squares minimisation problem by adding just a single extra latent parameter. It can be used in the back-end component of the SLAM problem to enable generalised robust cost minimisation by simultaneously estimating the continuous latent parameter along with the set of sensor poses in a single joint optimisation. This leads to a very closely curve fitting on the distribution of the residuals, thereby reducing the effect of outliers. Additionally, we formulate the robust optimisation problem using standard Gaussian factors so that it can be solved by direct application of popular incremental estimation approaches such as iSAM. Experimental results on publicly available synthetic datasets and real LiDAR-SLAM datasets collected from the 2D and 3D LiDAR systems show the competitiveness of our approach with the state-of-the-art techniques and its superiority on real world scenarios.
An Approach of Replicating Multi-Staged Cyber-Attacks and Countermeasures in a Smart Grid Co-Simulation Environment
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

While the digitization of power distribution grids brings many benefits, it also introduces new vulnerabilities for cyber-attacks. To maintain secure operations in the emerging threat landscape, detecting and implementing countermeasures against cyber-attacks are paramount. However, due to the lack of publicly available attack data against Smart Grids (SGs) for countermeasure development, simulation-based data generation approaches offer the potential to provide the needed data foundation. Therefore, our proposed approach provides flexible and scalable replication of multi-staged cyber-attacks in an SG Co-Simulation Environment (COSE). The COSE consists of an energy grid simulator, simulators for Operation Technology (OT) devices, and a network emulator for realistic IT process networks. Focusing on defensive and offensive use cases in COSE, our simulated attacker can perform network scans, find vulnerabilities, exploit them, gain administrative privileges, and execute malicious commands on OT devices. As an exemplary countermeasure, we present a built-in Intrusion Detection System (IDS) that analyzes generated network traffic using anomaly detection with Machine Learning (ML) approaches. In this work, we provide an overview of the SG COSE, present a multi-stage attack model with the potential to disrupt grid operations, and show exemplary performance evaluations of the IDS in specific scenarios.
ur-iw-hnt at GermEval 2021: An Ensembling Strategy with Multiple BERT Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

This paper describes our approach (ur-iw-hnt) for the Shared Task of GermEval2021 to identify toxic, engaging, and fact-claiming comments. We submitted three runs using an ensembling strategy by majority (hard) voting with multiple different BERT models of three different types: German-based, Twitter-based, and multilingual models. All ensemble models outperform single models, while BERTweet is the winner of all individual models in every subtask. Twitter-based models perform better than GermanBERT models, and multilingual models perform worse but by a small margin.
Notarial timestamps savings in logs management via Merkle trees and Key Derivation Functions
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Nowadays log files handling imposes to ISPs (intended in their widest scope) strict normative duties apart from common technological issues. This work analyses how retention time policies and timestamping are deeply interlinked from the point of view of service providers, possibly leading to costs rise. A new schema is proposed trying to mitigate the need for third-party suppliers, enforcing cryptographic primitives well established in other fields of Information Technology but perhaps not yet widespread in logs management. The foundations of timestamping are recapped, and properties of cryptographic primitives introduced as a natural way to bypass legacy schema inefficiency and as an extra level of protection: these choices are justified by savings estimation (with regard to different ISP magnitudes) and by some basic security considerations.
Noisy Feature Mixup
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

We introduce Noisy Feature Mixup (NFM), an inexpensive yet effective method for data augmentation that combines the best of interpolation based training and noise injection schemes. Rather than training with convex combinations of pairs of examples and their labels, we use noise-perturbed convex combinations of pairs of data points in both input and feature space. This method includes mixup and manifold mixup as special cases, but it has additional advantages, including better smoothing of decision boundaries and enabling improved model robustness. We provide theory to understand this as well as the implicit regularization effects of NFM. Our theory is supported by empirical results, demonstrating the advantage of NFM, as compared to mixup and manifold mixup. We show that residual networks and vision transformers trained with NFM have favorable trade-offs between predictive accuracy on clean data and robustness with respect to various types of data perturbation across a range of computer vision benchmark datasets.
Analyzing the Impact of COVID-19 on Economy from the Perspective of Users Reviews
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

One of the most important incidents in the world in 2020 is the outbreak of the Coronavirus. Users on social networks publish a large number of comments about this event. These comments contain important hidden information of public opinion regarding this pandemic. In this research, a large number of Coronavirus-related tweets are considered and analyzed using natural language processing and information retrieval science. Initially, the location of the tweets is determined using a dictionary prepared through the Geo-Names geographic database, which contains detailed and complete information of places such as city names, streets, and postal codes. Then, using a large dictionary prepared from the terms of economics, related tweets are extracted and sentiments corresponded to tweets are analyzed with the help of the RoBERTa language-based model, which has high accuracy and good performance. Finally, the frequency chart of tweets related to the economy and their sentiment scores (positive and negative tweets) is plotted over time for the entire world and the top 10 economies. From the analysis of the charts, we learn that the reason for publishing economic tweets is not only the increase in the number of people infected with the Coronavirus but also imposed restrictions and lockdowns in countries. The consequences of these restrictions include the loss of millions of jobs and the economic downturn.
CNFET-based design of efficient ternary half adder and 1-trit multiplier circuits using dynamic logic
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2021
Year: 2021

This paper presents a ternary half adder and a 1-trit multiplier using carbon nanotube transistors. The proposed circuits are designed using pass transistor logic and dynamic logic. Ternary logic uses less connections than binary logic, and less voltage changes are required for the same amount of data transmission. Carbon nanotube transistors have advantages over MOSFETs, such as the same mobility for electrons and holes, the ability to adjust the threshold voltage by changing the nanotube diameter, and less leakage power. The proposed half adder has lower power consumption, delay, and fewer transistors compared to recent ternary half adders that use similar design methods. The proposed 1-trit multiplier also has a lower delay than other designs. Moreover, these advantages are achieved over a wide supply voltage range, operating temperatures, and output loads. The design is also more robust to process variations than the nearest design in terms of PDP.
An Exploration of the Mentorship Needs of Research Software Engineers
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

As a newly designated professional title, research software engineers (RSEs) link the two worlds of software engineering and research science. They lack clear development and training opportunities, particularly in the realm of mentoring. In this paper, we discuss mentorship as it pertains to the unique needs of RSEs and propose ways in which organizations and institutions can support mentor/mentee relationships for RSEs
An Overview of the Drone Open-Source Ecosystem
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Unmanned aerial systems capable of beyond visual line of sight operation can be organized into a top-down hierarchy of layers including flight supervision, command and control, simulation of systems, operating systems, and physical hardware. Flight supervision includes unmanned air traffic management, flight planning, authorization, and remote identification. Command and control ensure drones can be piloted safely. Simulation of systems concerns how drones may react to different environments and how changing conditions and information provide input to a piloting system. Electronic hardware controlling drone operation is typically accessed using an operating system. Each layer in the hierarchy has an ecosystem of open-source solutions. In this brief survey we describe representative open-source examples for each level of the hierarchy.
Prediction of the Facial Growth Direction is Challenging
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Facial dysmorphology or malocclusion is frequently associated with abnormal growth of the face. The ability to predict facial growth (FG) direction would allow clinicians to prepare individualized therapy to increase the chance for successful treatment. Prediction of FG direction is a novel problem in the machine learning (ML) domain. In this paper, we perform feature selection and point the attribute that plays a central role in the abovementioned problem. Then we successfully apply data augmentation (DA) methods and improve the previously reported classification accuracy by 2.81%. Finally, we present the results of two experienced clinicians that were asked to solve a similar task to ours and show how tough is solving this problem for human experts.
Simultaneously Transmitting and Reflecting (STAR)-RISs: A Coupled Phase-Shift Model
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

A simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) aided communication system is investigated, where an access point sends information to two users located on each side of the STAR-RIS. Different from current works assuming that the phase-shift coefficients for transmission and reflection can be independently adjusted, which is non-trivial to realize for purely passive STAR-RISs, a coupled transmission and reflection phase-shift model is considered. Based on this model, a power consumption minimization problem is formulated for both non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and orthogonal multiple access (OMA). In particular, the amplitude and phase-shift coefficients for transmission and reflection are jointly optimized, subject to the rate constraints of the users. To solve this non-convex problem, an efficient element-wise alternating optimization algorithm is developed to find a high-quality suboptimal solution, whose complexity scales only linearly with the number of STAR elements. Finally, numerical results are provided for both NOMA and OMA to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm by comparing its performance with that of STAR-RISs using the independent phase-shift model and conventional reflecting/transmitting-only RISs.
Word Acquisition in Neural Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

We investigate how neural language models acquire individual words during training, extracting learning curves and ages of acquisition for over 600 words on the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (Fenson et al., 2007). Drawing on studies of word acquisition in children, we evaluate multiple predictors for words' ages of acquisition in LSTMs, BERT, and GPT-2. We find that the effects of concreteness, word length, and lexical class are pointedly different in children and language models, reinforcing the importance of interaction and sensorimotor experience in child language acquisition. Language models rely far more on word frequency than children, but like children, they exhibit slower learning of words in longer utterances. Interestingly, models follow consistent patterns during training for both unidirectional and bidirectional models, and for both LSTM and Transformer architectures. Models predict based on unigram token frequencies early in training, before transitioning loosely to bigram probabilities, eventually converging on more nuanced predictions. These results shed light on the role of distributional learning mechanisms in children, while also providing insights for more human-like language acquisition in language models.
What is A Wireless UAV? A Design Blueprint for 6G Flying Wireless Nodes
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2021
Year: 2021

Wireless Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) were introduced in the world of 4th generation networks (4G) as cellular users, and have attracted the interest of the wireless community ever since. In~5G, UAVs operate also as flying Base Stations providing service to ground users. They can also implement independent off-the-grid UAV networks. In~6G networks, wireless UAVs will connect ground users to in-orbit wireless infrastructure. As the design and prototyping of wireless UAVs are on the rise, the time is ripe for introducing a more precise definition of what is a wireless UAV. In doing so, we revise the major design challenges in the prototyping of wireless UAVs for future 6G spectrum research. We then introduce a new wireless UAV prototype that addresses these challenges. The design of our wireless UAV prototype will be made public and freely available to other researchers.
Blind Super-resolution via Projected Gradient Descent
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

Blind super-resolution can be cast as low rank matrix recovery problem by exploiting the inherent simplicity of the signal. In this paper, we develop a simple yet efficient nonconvex method for this problem based on the low rank structure of the vectorized Hankel matrix associated with the target matrix. Theoretical guarantees have been established under the similar conditions as convex approaches. Numerical experiments are also conducted to demonstrate its performance.
Efficient Multi-agent Epistemic Planning: Teaching Planners About Nested Belief
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Many AI applications involve the interaction of multiple autonomous agents, requiring those agents to reason about their own beliefs, as well as those of other agents. However, planning involving nested beliefs is known to be computationally challenging. In this work, we address the task of synthesizing plans that necessitate reasoning about the beliefs of other agents. We plan from the perspective of a single agent with the potential for goals and actions that involve nested beliefs, non-homogeneous agents, co-present observations, and the ability for one agent to reason as if it were another. We formally characterize our notion of planning with nested belief, and subsequently demonstrate how to automatically convert such problems into problems that appeal to classical planning technology for solving efficiently. Our approach represents an important step towards applying the well-established field of automated planning to the challenging task of planning involving nested beliefs of multiple agents.
Data-Centric AI Requires Rethinking Data Notion
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

The transition towards data-centric AI requires revisiting data notions from mathematical and implementational standpoints to obtain unified data-centric machine learning packages. Towards this end, this work proposes unifying principles offered by categorical and cochain notions of data, and discusses the importance of these principles in data-centric AI transition. In the categorical notion, data is viewed as a mathematical structure that we act upon via morphisms to preserve this structure. As for cochain notion, data can be viewed as a function defined in a discrete domain of interest and acted upon via operators. While these notions are almost orthogonal, they provide a unifying definition to view data, ultimately impacting the way machine learning packages are developed, implemented, and utilized by practitioners.