OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Journals Titles and Mission Statements: Lexical structure, diversity and readability
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2021
Year: 2021

There is an established research agenda on dissecting an articles components, title and abstract readability and diversity, keywords, number references, and determining their association with bibliometrics performance. Yet, journals titles and their overview, aim and scope (i.e., journals mission statement, JMS(s) have not been investigated with the same diligence. This study aims to conduct a comprehensive outlook of titles and JMSs lexical structure and identify significant differences between journals prestige and type of access groups and their JMS content in the field of business, management and accounting (BMA). Lexical network analysis was used to explore journals title structure. JMS were examined through the Flesch-Kincaid grade level for readability and the Yules K for lexical diversity. Titles and JMS structural analysis reflected current and critical discussion in BMA: an obsession for counterintuitive findings and ICT tools. JMS expressed mostly target customers and markets. JMS from reputable journals showed a higher betweenness for key terms related to rigorous features, while JMS of lower reputable journals highlighted indexing attributes (i.e., Scopus). Wilcoxon rank sum and Kruskal Wallis tests showed significant differences in the JMS median diversity regarding the journals type of access and best quartiles.
Political Polarization in Online News Consumption
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2021
Year: 2021

Political polarization appears to be on the rise, as measured by voting behavior, general affect towards opposing partisans and their parties, and contents posted and consumed online. Research over the years has focused on the role of the Web as a driver of polarization. In order to further our understanding of the factors behind online polarization, in the present work we collect and analyze Web browsing histories of tens of thousands of users alongside careful measurements of the time spent browsing various news sources. We show that online news consumption follows a polarized pattern, where users' visits to news sources aligned with their own political leaning are substantially longer than their visits to other news sources. Next, we show that such preferences hold at the individual as well as the population level, as evidenced by the emergence of clear partisan communities of news domains from aggregated browsing patterns. Finally, we tackle the important question of the role of user choices in polarization. Are users simply following the links proffered by their Web environment, or do they exacerbate partisan polarization by intentionally pursuing like-minded news sources? To answer this question, we compare browsing patterns with the underlying hyperlink structure spanned by the considered news domains, finding strong evidence of polarization in partisan browsing habits beyond that which can be explained by the hyperlink structure of the Web.
Robotic needle steering in deformable tissues with extreme learning machines
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Control strategies for robotic needle steering in soft tissues must account for complex interactions between the needle and the tissue to achieve accurate needle tip positioning. Recent findings show faster robotic command rate can improve the control stability in realistic scenarios. This study proposes the use of Extreme Learning Machines to provide fast commands for robotic needle steering. A synthetic dataset based on the inverse finite element simulation control framework is used to train the model. Results show the model is capable to infer commands 66% faster than the inverse simulation and reaches acceptable precision even on previously unseen trajectories.
Don't Give Up on Large Optimization Problems; POP Them!
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

Resource allocation problems in many computer systems can be formulated as mathematical optimization problems. However, finding exact solutions to these problems using off-the-shelf solvers in an online setting is often intractable for "hyper-scale" system sizes with tight SLAs, leading system designers to rely on cheap, heuristic algorithms. In this work, we explore an alternative approach that reuses the original optimization problem formulation. By splitting the original problem into smaller, more tractable problems for subsets of the system and then coalescing resulting sub-allocations into a global solution, we achieve empirically quasi-optimal (within 1.5%) performance for multiple domains with several orders-of-magnitude improvement in runtime. Deciding how to split a large problem into smaller sub-problems, and how to coalesce split allocations into a unified allocation, needs to be performed carefully in a domain-aware way. We show common principles for splitting problems effectively across a variety of tasks, including cluster scheduling, traffic engineering, and load balancing.
Solving weakly supervised regression problem using low-rank manifold regularization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

We solve a weakly supervised regression problem. Under "weakly" we understand that for some training points the labels are known, for some unknown, and for others uncertain due to the presence of random noise or other reasons such as lack of resources. The solution process requires to optimize a certain objective function (the loss function), which combines manifold regularization and low-rank matrix decomposition techniques. These low-rank approximations allow us to speed up all matrix calculations and reduce storage requirements. This is especially crucial for large datasets. Ensemble clustering is used for obtaining the co-association matrix, which we consider as the similarity matrix. The utilization of these techniques allows us to increase the quality and stability of the solution. In the numerical section, we applied the suggested method to artificial and real datasets using Monte-Carlo modeling.
Dimension-Preserving Reductions Between SVP and CVP in Different $p$-Norms
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2021
Year: 2021

$ \newcommand{\SVP}{\textsf{SVP}} \newcommand{\CVP}{\textsf{CVP}} \newcommand{\eps}{\varepsilon} $We show a number of reductions between the Shortest Vector Problem and the Closest Vector Problem over lattices in different $\ell_p$ norms ($\SVP_p$ and $\CVP_p$ respectively). Specifically, we present the following $2^{\eps m}$-time reductions for $1 \leq p \leq q \leq \infty$, which all increase the rank $n$ and dimension $m$ of the input lattice by at most one: $\bullet$ a reduction from $\widetilde{O}(1/\eps^{1/p})γ$-approximate $\SVP_q$ to $γ$-approximate $\SVP_p$; $\bullet$ a reduction from $\widetilde{O}(1/\eps^{1/p}) γ$-approximate $\CVP_p$ to $γ$-approximate $\CVP_q$; and $\bullet$ a reduction from $\widetilde{O}(1/\eps^{1+1/p})$-$\CVP_q$ to $(1+\eps)$-unique $\SVP_p$ (which in turn trivially reduces to $(1+\eps)$-approximate $\SVP_p$). The last reduction is interesting even in the case $p = q$. In particular, this special case subsumes much prior work adapting $2^{O(m)}$-time $\SVP_p$ algorithms to solve $O(1)$-approximate $\CVP_p$. In the (important) special case when $p = q$, $1 \leq p \leq 2$, and the $\SVP_p$ oracle is exact, we show a stronger reduction, from $O(1/\eps^{1/p})\text{-}\CVP_p$ to (exact) $\SVP_p$ in $2^{\eps m}$ time. For example, taking $\eps = \log m/m$ and $p = 2$ gives a slight improvement over Kannan's celebrated polynomial-time reduction from $\sqrt{m}\text{-}\CVP_2$ to $\SVP_2$. We also note that the last two reductions can be combined to give a reduction from approximate-$\CVP_p$ to $\SVP_q$ for any $p$ and $q$, regardless of whether $p \leq q$ or $p > q$. Our techniques combine those from the recent breakthrough work of Eisenbrand and Venzin (which showed how to adapt the current fastest known algorithm for these problems in the $\ell_2$ norm to all $\ell_p$ norms) together with sparsification-based techniques.
Deep Data Density Estimation through Donsker-Varadhan Representation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Estimating the data density is one of the challenging problems in deep learning. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective method for estimating the data density using a deep neural network and the Donsker-Varadhan variational lower bound on the KL divergence. We show that the optimal critic function associated with the Donsker-Varadhan representation on the KL divergence between the data and the uniform distribution can estimate the data density. We also present the deep neural network-based modeling and its stochastic learning. The experimental results and possible applications of the proposed method demonstrate that it is competitive with the previous methods and has a lot of possibilities in applied to various applications.
Mutual Information Preserving Back-propagation: Learn to Invert for Faithful Attribution
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Back propagation based visualizations have been proposed to interpret deep neural networks (DNNs), some of which produce interpretations with good visual quality. However, there exist doubts about whether these intuitive visualizations are related to the network decisions. Recent studies have confirmed this suspicion by verifying that almost all these modified back-propagation visualizations are not faithful to the model's decision-making process. Besides, these visualizations produce vague "relative importance scores", among which low values can't guarantee to be independent of the final prediction. Hence, it's highly desirable to develop a novel back-propagation framework that guarantees theoretical faithfulness and produces a quantitative attribution score with a clear understanding. To achieve the goal, we resort to mutual information theory to generate the interpretations, studying how much information of output is encoded in each input neuron. The basic idea is to learn a source signal by back-propagation such that the mutual information between input and output should be as much as possible preserved in the mutual information between input and the source signal. In addition, we propose a Mutual Information Preserving Inverse Network, termed MIP-IN, in which the parameters of each layer are recursively trained to learn how to invert. During the inversion, forward Relu operation is adopted to adapt the general interpretations to the specific input. We then empirically demonstrate that the inverted source signal satisfies completeness and minimality property, which are crucial for a faithful interpretation. Furthermore, the empirical study validates the effectiveness of interpretations generated by MIP-IN.
Maintenance scheduling of manufacturing systems based on optimal price of the network
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2021
Year: 2021

Goods can exhibit positive externalities impacting decisions of customers in socials networks. Suppliers can integrate these externalities in their pricing strategies to increase their revenue. Besides optimizing the prize, suppliers also have to consider their production and maintenance costs. Predictive maintenance has the potential to reduce the maintenance costs and improve the system availability. To address the joint optimization of pricing with network externalities and predictive maintenance scheduling based on the condition of the system, we propose a bi-level optimization solution based on game theory. In the first level, the manufacturing company decides about the predictive maintenance scheduling of the units and the price of the goods. In the second level, the customers decide about their consumption using an optimization approach in which the objective function depends on their consumption, the consumption levels of other customers who are connected through the graph, and the price of the network which is determined by the supplier. To solve the problem, we propose the leader-multiple-followers game where the supplier as a leader predicts the strategies of the followers. Then, customers as the followers obtain their strategies based on the leader's and other followers' strategies. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method on a simulated case study. The results demonstrate that knowledge of the social network graph results in an increased revenue compared to the case when the underlying social network graph is not known. Moreover, the results demonstrate that obtaining the predictive maintenance scheduling based on the proposed optimization approach leads to an increased profit compared to the baseline decision-making (perform maintenance at the degradation limit).
Towards Explainable Multi-Party Learning: A Contrastive Knowledge Sharing Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Multi-party learning provides solutions for training joint models with decentralized data under legal and practical constraints. However, traditional multi-party learning approaches are confronted with obstacles such as system heterogeneity, statistical heterogeneity, and incentive design. How to deal with these challenges and further improve the efficiency and performance of multi-party learning has become an urgent problem to be solved. In this paper, we propose a novel contrastive multi-party learning framework for knowledge refinement and sharing with an accountable incentive mechanism. Since the existing naive model parameter averaging method is contradictory to the learning paradigm of neural networks, we simulate the process of human cognition and communication, and analogy multi-party learning as a many-to-one knowledge sharing problem. The approach is capable of integrating the acquired explicit knowledge of each client in a transparent manner without privacy disclosure, and it reduces the dependence on data distribution and communication environments. The proposed scheme achieves significant improvement in model performance in a variety of scenarios, as we demonstrated through experiments on several real-world datasets.
Noncatastrophic convolutional codes over a finite ring
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

Noncatastrophic encoders are an important class of polynomial generator matrices of convolutional codes. When these polynomials have coefficients in a finite field, these encoders have been characterized are being polynomial left prime matrices. In this paper we study the notion of noncatastrophicity in the context of convolutional codes when the polynomial matrices have entries in a finite ring. In particular, we need to introduce two different notion of primeness in order to fully characterize noncatastrophic encoders over the finite ring Z_{p^r}. The second part of the paper is devoted to investigate the notion of free and column distance in this context when the convolutional code is a free finitely generated Z_{p^r}-module. We introduce the notion of b-degree and provide new bounds on the free distances and column distance. We show that this class of convolutional codes is optimal with respect to the column distance and to the free distance if and only if its projection on Z_p is.
Global Information Guided Video Anomaly Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Video anomaly detection (VAD) is currently a challenging task due to the complexity of anomaly as well as the lack of labor-intensive temporal annotations. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end Global Information Guided (GIG) anomaly detection framework for anomaly detection using the video-level annotations (i.e., weak labels). We propose to first mine the global pattern cues by leveraging the weak labels in a GIG module. Then we build a spatial reasoning module to measure the relevance between vectors in spatial domain with the global cue vectors, and select the most related feature vectors for temporal anomaly detection. The experimental results on the CityScene challenge demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.
The role of successful human-robot interaction on trust -- Findings of an experiment with an autonomous cooperative robot
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

The foundation of this paper is an experiment of fifteen participants interacting directly with an autonomous robot. The task for the participants was to carry a table, in two different setups, together with a robot, which is intended to support older people with heavy lifting tasks. By collecting and analyzing observational, quantitative, and qualitative data the interaction was investigated with a specific emphasis on trust in the robot. The overall aim was a better understanding of people's emotional and evaluative reactions when they engage with a functioning robot in a relatable everyday scenario. This study shows that successful cooperative task completion has a positive effect on trust and other related evaluations, like the perceived adaptiveness regarding the robot's behavior.
FastS2S-VC: Streaming Non-Autoregressive Sequence-to-Sequence Voice Conversion
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2021
Year: 2021

This paper proposes a non-autoregressive extension of our previously proposed sequence-to-sequence (S2S) model-based voice conversion (VC) methods. S2S model-based VC methods have attracted particular attention in recent years for their flexibility in converting not only the voice identity but also the pitch contour and local duration of input speech, thanks to the ability of the encoder-decoder architecture with the attention mechanism. However, one of the obstacles to making these methods work in real-time is the autoregressive (AR) structure. To overcome this obstacle, we develop a method to obtain a model that is free from an AR structure and behaves similarly to the original S2S models, based on a teacher-student learning framework. In our method, called "FastS2S-VC", the student model consists of encoder, decoder, and attention predictor. The attention predictor learns to predict attention distributions solely from source speech along with a target class index with the guidance of those predicted by the teacher model from both source and target speech. Thanks to this structure, the model is freed from an AR structure and allows for parallelization. Furthermore, we show that FastS2S-VC is suitable for real-time implementation based on a sliding-window approach, and describe how to make it run in real-time. Through speaker-identity and emotional-expression conversion experiments, we confirmed that FastS2S-VC was able to speed up the conversion process by 70 to 100 times compared to the original AR-type S2S-VC methods, without significantly degrading the audio quality and similarity to target speech. We also confirmed that the real-time version of FastS2S-VC can be run with a latency of 32 ms when run on a GPU.
Fast Approximations for Rooted Connectivity in Weighted Directed Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2021
Year: 2021

We consider approximations for computing minimum weighted cuts in directed graphs. We consider both rooted and global minimum cuts, and both edge-cuts and vertex-cuts. For these problems we give randomized Monte Carlo algorithms that compute a $(1+ε)$-approximate minimum cut in $\tilde{O}(n^2 / ε^2)$ time. These results extend and build on recent work [4] that obtained exact algorithms with similar running times in directed graphs with small integer capacities.
ComBiNet: Compact Convolutional Bayesian Neural Network for Image Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Fully convolutional U-shaped neural networks have largely been the dominant approach for pixel-wise image segmentation. In this work, we tackle two defects that hinder their deployment in real-world applications: 1) Predictions lack uncertainty quantification that may be crucial to many decision-making systems; 2) Large memory storage and computational consumption demanding extensive hardware resources. To address these issues and improve their practicality we demonstrate a few-parameter compact Bayesian convolutional architecture, that achieves a marginal improvement in accuracy in comparison to related work using significantly fewer parameters and compute operations. The architecture combines parameter-efficient operations such as separable convolutions, bilinear interpolation, multi-scale feature propagation and Bayesian inference for per-pixel uncertainty quantification through Monte Carlo Dropout. The best performing configurations required fewer than 2.5 million parameters on diverse challenging datasets with few observations.
K-PLUG: Knowledge-injected Pre-trained Language Model for Natural Language Understanding and Generation in E-Commerce
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Existing pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated the effectiveness of self-supervised learning for a broad range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, most of them are not explicitly aware of domain-specific knowledge, which is essential for downstream tasks in many domains, such as tasks in e-commerce scenarios. In this paper, we propose K-PLUG, a knowledge-injected pre-trained language model based on the encoder-decoder transformer that can be transferred to both natural language understanding and generation tasks. We verify our method in a diverse range of e-commerce scenarios that require domain-specific knowledge. Specifically, we propose five knowledge-aware self-supervised pre-training objectives to formulate the learning of domain-specific knowledge, including e-commerce domain-specific knowledge-bases, aspects of product entities, categories of product entities, and unique selling propositions of product entities. K-PLUG achieves new state-of-the-art results on a suite of domain-specific NLP tasks, including product knowledge base completion, abstractive product summarization, and multi-turn dialogue, significantly outperforms baselines across the board, which demonstrates that the proposed method effectively learns a diverse set of domain-specific knowledge for both language understanding and generation tasks.
I Need Your Advice... Human Perceptions of Robot Moral Advising Behaviors
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Due to their unique persuasive power, language-capable robots must be able to both act in line with human moral norms and clearly and appropriately communicate those norms. These requirements are complicated by the possibility that humans may ascribe blame differently to humans and robots. In this work, we explore how robots should communicate in moral advising scenarios, in which the norms they are expected to follow (in a moral dilemma scenario) may be different from those their advisees are expected to follow. Our results suggest that, in fact, both humans and robots are judged more positively when they provide the advice that favors the common good over an individual's life. These results raise critical new questions regarding people's moral responses to robots and the design of autonomous moral agents.
Blockchain Machine: A Network-Attached Hardware Accelerator for Hyperledger Fabric
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we demonstrate how Hyperledger Fabric, one of the most popular permissioned blockchains, can benefit from network-attached acceleration. The scalability and peak performance of Fabric is primarily limited by the bottlenecks present in its block validation/commit phase. We propose Blockchain Machine, a hardware accelerator coupled with a hardware-friendly communication protocol, to act as the validator peer. It can be adapted to applications and their smart contracts, and is targeted for a server with network-attached FPGA acceleration card. The Blockchain Machine retrieves blocks and their transactions in hardware directly from the network interface, which are then validated through a configurable and efficient block-level and transaction-level pipeline. The validation results are then transferred to the host CPU where non-bottleneck operations are executed. From our implementation integrated with Fabric v1.4 LTS, we observed up to 12x speedup in block validation when compared to software-only validator peer, with commit throughput of up to 68,900 tps. Our work provides an acceleration platform that will foster further research on hardware acceleration of permissioned blockchains.