OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
SPADA: A Toolbox of Designing Soft Pneumatic Actuators for Shape Matching based on Surrogate Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Soft pneumatic actuators (SPAs) produce motions for soft robots with simple pressure input, however they require to be appropriately designed to fit the target application. Available design methods employ kinematic models and optimization to estimate the actuator response and the optimal design parameters, to achieve a target actuator's shape. Within SPAs, Bellow-SPAs excel in rapid prototyping and large deformation, yet their kinematic models often lack accuracy due to the geometry complexity and the material nonlinearity. Furthermore, existing shape-matching algorithms are not providing an end-to-end solution from the desired shape to the actuator. In addition, despite the availability of computational design pipelines, an accessible and user-friendly toolbox for direct application remains elusive. This paper addresses these challenges, offering an end-to-end shape-matching design framework for bellow-SPAs to streamline the design process, and the open-source toolbox SPADA (Soft Pneumatic Actuator Design frAmework) implementing the framework with a GUI for easy access. It provides a kinematic model grounded on a modular design to improve accuracy, Finite Element Method (FEM) simulations, and piecewise constant curvature (PCC) approximation. An Artificial Neural Network-trained surrogate model, based on FEM simulation data, is trained for fast computation in optimization. A shape-matching algorithm, merging 3D PCC segmentation and a surrogate model-based genetic algorithm, identifies optimal actuator design parameters for desired shapes. The toolbox, implementing the proposed design framework, has proven its end-to-end capability in designing actuators to precisely match 2D shapes with root-mean-square errors of 4.16, 2.70, and 2.51mm, and demonstrating its potential by designing a 3D deformable actuator.
Efficiency-Improved Inter-Rollup Transfer System Leveraging Batch Settlement Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

As the significance of blockchain innovation grows and the focus on scalability intensifies, rollup technology has emerged as a promising approach to tackle these scalability concerns. Nonetheless, rollups encounter restrictions when interacting with other rollups, leading to diminished throughput, increased latency, higher fees, and a complex user experience in transactions between rollups. In this paper, we put forth a novel system that employs batch settlement techniques to augment the efficiency of transfers between rollups. Our proposed system comprises a settlement rollup responsible for batch settling transfers among rollups and a smart contract structure that carries out the settlements. Notably, we utilize a zero-knowledge proof algorithm to guarantee the computational integrity of the settlement rollup while ensuring security through Ethereum smart contracts for proof verification and settlement execution. By implementing this approach, the proposed system can effectively and securely execute asset transfers between rollups, ultimately improving their scalability and usability. Consequently, our research provides a fresh perspective on resolving the challenges of throughput, latency, and fees associated with transfer systems.
About Decisiveness of Dynamic Probabilistic Models
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2023
Year: 2023

Decisiveness of infinite Markov chains with respect to some (finite or infinite) target set of states is a key property that allows to compute the reachability probability of this set up to an arbitrary precision. Most of the existing works assume constant weights for defining the probability of a transition in the considered models. However numerous probabilistic modelings require (dynamic) weights that depend on both the current state and the transition. So we introduce a dynamic probabilistic version of counter machine (pCM). After establishing that decisiveness is undecidable for pCMs even with constant weights, we study the decidability of decisiveness for subclasses of pCM. We show that, without restrictions on dynamic weights, decisiveness is undecidable with a single state and single counter pCM. On the contrary with polynomial weights, decisiveness becomes decidable for single counter pCMs under mild conditions. Then we show that decisiveness of probabilistic Petri nets (pPNs) with polynomial weights is undecidable even when the target set is upward-closed unlike the case of constant weights. Finally we prove that the standard subclass of pPNs with a regular language is decisive with respect to a finite set whatever the kind of weights.
Explainable AI for Malnutrition Risk Prediction from m-Health and Clinical Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Malnutrition is a serious and prevalent health problem in the older population, and especially in hospitalised or institutionalised subjects. Accurate and early risk detection is essential for malnutrition management and prevention. M-health services empowered with Artificial Intelligence (AI) may lead to important improvements in terms of a more automatic, objective, and continuous monitoring and assessment. Moreover, the latest Explainable AI (XAI) methodologies may make AI decisions interpretable and trustworthy for end users. This paper presents a novel AI framework for early and explainable malnutrition risk detection based on heterogeneous m-health data. We performed an extensive model evaluation including both subject-independent and personalised predictions, and the obtained results indicate Random Forest (RF) and Gradient Boosting as the best performing classifiers, especially when incorporating body composition assessment data. We also investigated several benchmark XAI methods to extract global model explanations. Model-specific explanation consistency assessment indicates that each selected model privileges similar subsets of the most relevant predictors, with the highest agreement shown between SHapley Additive ExPlanations (SHAP) and feature permutation method. Furthermore, we performed a preliminary clinical validation to verify that the learned feature-output trends are compliant with the current evidence-based assessment.
Unveiling Cross Modality Bias in Visual Question Answering: A Causal View with Possible Worlds VQA
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

To increase the generalization capability of VQA systems, many recent studies have tried to de-bias spurious language or vision associations that shortcut the question or image to the answer. Despite these efforts, the literature fails to address the confounding effect of vision and language simultaneously. As a result, when they reduce bias learned from one modality, they usually increase bias from the other. In this paper, we first model a confounding effect that causes language and vision bias simultaneously, then propose a counterfactual inference to remove the influence of this effect. The model trained in this strategy can concurrently and efficiently reduce vision and language bias. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to reduce biases resulting from confounding effects of vision and language in VQA, leveraging causal explain-away relations. We accompany our method with an explain-away strategy, pushing the accuracy of the questions with numerical answers results compared to existing methods that have been an open problem. The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in VQA-CP v2 datasets.
The Quantum Frontier of Software Engineering: A Systematic Mapping Study
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Context. Quantum computing is becoming a reality, and quantum software engineering (QSE) is emerging as a new discipline to enable developers to design and develop quantum programs. Objective. This paper presents a systematic mapping study of the current state of QSE research, aiming to identify the most investigated topics, the types and number of studies, the main reported results, and the most studied quantum computing tools/frameworks. Additionally, the study aims to explore the research community's interest in QSE, how it has evolved, and any prior contributions to the discipline before its formal introduction through the Talavera Manifesto. Method. We searched for relevant articles in several databases and applied inclusion and exclusion criteria to select the most relevant studies. After evaluating the quality of the selected resources, we extracted relevant data from the primary studies and analyzed them. Results. We found that QSE research has primarily focused on software testing, with little attention given to other topics, such as software engineering management. The most commonly studied technology for techniques and tools is Qiskit, although, in most studies, either multiple or none specific technologies were employed. The researchers most interested in QSE are interconnected through direct collaborations, and several strong collaboration clusters have been identified. Most articles in QSE have been published in non-thematic venues, with a preference for conferences. Conclusions. The study's implications are providing a centralized source of information for researchers and practitioners in the field, facilitating knowledge transfer, and contributing to the advancement and growth of QSE.
Off-By-One Implementation Error in J-UNIWARD
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

J-UNIWARD is a popular steganography method for hiding secret messages in JPEG cover images. As a content-adaptive method, J-UNIWARD aims to embed into textured image regions where changes are difficult to detect. To this end, J-UNIWARD first assigns to each DCT coefficient an embedding cost calculated based on the image's Wavelet residual, and then uses a coding method that minimizes the cost while embedding the desired payload. Changing one DCT coefficient affects a 23x23 window of Wavelet coefficients. To speed up the costmap computation, the original implementation pre-computes the Wavelet residual and then considers per changed DCT coefficient a 23x23 window of the Wavelet residual. However, the implementation accesses a window accidentally shifted by one pixel to the bottom right. In this report, we evaluate the effect of this off-by-one error on the resulting costmaps. Some image blocks are over-priced while other image blocks are under-priced, but the difference is relatively small. The off-by-one error seems to make little difference for learning-based steganalysis.
IDAS: Intent Discovery with Abstractive Summarization
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Intent discovery is the task of inferring latent intents from a set of unlabeled utterances, and is a useful step towards the efficient creation of new conversational agents. We show that recent competitive methods in intent discovery can be outperformed by clustering utterances based on abstractive summaries, i.e., "labels", that retain the core elements while removing non-essential information. We contribute the IDAS approach, which collects a set of descriptive utterance labels by prompting a Large Language Model, starting from a well-chosen seed set of prototypical utterances, to bootstrap an In-Context Learning procedure to generate labels for non-prototypical utterances. The utterances and their resulting noisy labels are then encoded by a frozen pre-trained encoder, and subsequently clustered to recover the latent intents. For the unsupervised task (without any intent labels) IDAS outperforms the state-of-the-art by up to +7.42% in standard cluster metrics for the Banking, StackOverflow, and Transport datasets. For the semi-supervised task (with labels for a subset of intents) IDAS surpasses 2 recent methods on the CLINC benchmark without even using labeled data.
A Hybrid Blockchain-Edge Architecture for Electronic Health Records Management with Attribute-based Cryptographic Mechanisms
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

This paper presents a hybrid blockchain-edge architecture for managing Electronic Health Records (EHRs) with attribute-based cryptographic mechanisms. The architecture introduces a novel attribute-based signature aggregation (ABSA) scheme and multi-authority attribute-based encryption (MA-ABE) integrated with Paillier homomorphic encryption (HE) to protect patients' anonymity and safeguard their EHRs. All the EHR activities and access control events are recorded permanently as blockchain transactions. We develop the ABSA module on Hyperledger Ursa cryptography library, MA-ABE module on OpenABE toolset, and blockchain network on Hyperledger Fabric. We measure the execution time of ABSA's signing and verification functions, MA-ABE with different access policies and homomorphic encryption schemes, and compare the results with other existing blockchain-based EHR systems. We validate the access activities and authentication events recorded in blockchain transactions and evaluate the transaction throughput and latency using Hyperledger Caliper. The results show that the performance meets real-world scenarios' requirements while safeguarding EHR and is robust against unauthorized retrievals.
Aggregated Zero-knowledge Proof and Blockchain-Empowered Authentication for Autonomous Truck Platooning
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Platooning technologies enable trucks to drive cooperatively and automatically, providing benefits including less fuel consumption, greater road capacity, and safety. This paper introduces an aggregated zero-knowledge proof and blockchain-empowered system for privacy-preserving identity verification in the mixed fleet platooning environment. The correctness proof and the security analysis of the proposed authentication scheme are provided, highlighting its increased security and fast performance in comparison to a single-proof design. The blockchain performs the role of verifier within the authentication scheme, reducing unnecessary communication overhead. Moreover, the blockchain improves system resilience by providing fault tolerance to the decentralized verification process. Platooning records are stored directly on the digital ledger to guarantee data immutability and integrity, while the programmable access control policies ensure data privacy. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can perform authentication on the order of milliseconds, regardless of the number of proofs, highlighting feasibility for real-world deployment in truck platooning.
Spectal Harmonics: Bridging Spectral Embedding and Matrix Completion in Self-Supervised Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Self-supervised methods received tremendous attention thanks to their seemingly heuristic approach to learning representations that respect the semantics of the data without any apparent supervision in the form of labels. A growing body of literature is already being published in an attempt to build a coherent and theoretically grounded understanding of the workings of a zoo of losses used in modern self-supervised representation learning methods. In this paper, we attempt to provide an understanding from the perspective of a Laplace operator and connect the inductive bias stemming from the augmentation process to a low-rank matrix completion problem. To this end, we leverage the results from low-rank matrix completion to provide theoretical analysis on the convergence of modern SSL methods and a key property that affects their downstream performance.
An Empirical Study of Federated Learning on IoT-Edge Devices: Resource Allocation and Heterogeneity
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Nowadays, billions of phones, IoT and edge devices around the world generate data continuously, enabling many Machine Learning (ML)-based products and applications. However, due to increasing privacy concerns and regulations, these data tend to reside on devices (clients) instead of being centralized for performing traditional ML model training. Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed approach in which a single server and multiple clients collaboratively build an ML model without moving data away from clients. Whereas existing studies on FL have their own experimental evaluations, most experiments were conducted using a simulation setting or a small-scale testbed. This might limit the understanding of FL implementation in realistic environments. In this empirical study, we systematically conduct extensive experiments on a large network of IoT and edge devices (called IoT-Edge devices) to present FL real-world characteristics, including learning performance and operation (computation and communication) costs. Moreover, we mainly concentrate on heterogeneous scenarios, which is the most challenging issue of FL. By investigating the feasibility of on-device implementation, our study provides valuable insights for researchers and practitioners, promoting the practicality of FL and assisting in improving the current design of real FL systems.
TPDM: Selectively Removing Positional Information for Zero-shot Translation via Token-Level Position Disentangle Module
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Due to Multilingual Neural Machine Translation's (MNMT) capability of zero-shot translation, many works have been carried out to fully exploit the potential of MNMT in zero-shot translation. It is often hypothesized that positional information may hinder the MNMT from outputting a robust encoded representation for decoding. However, previous approaches treat all the positional information equally and thus are unable to selectively remove certain positional information. In sharp contrast, this paper investigates how to learn to selectively preserve useful positional information. We describe the specific mechanism of positional information influencing MNMT from the perspective of linguistics at the token level. We design a token-level position disentangle module (TPDM) framework to disentangle positional information at the token level based on the explanation. Our experiments demonstrate that our framework improves zero-shot translation by a large margin while reducing the performance loss in the supervised direction compared to previous works.
Multi-Channel Operation for the Release 2 of ETSI Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

Vehicles and road infrastructure are starting to be equipped with vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication solutions to increase road safety and provide new services to drivers and passengers. In Europe, the deployment is based on a set of Release 1 standards developed by ETSI to support basic use cases for cooperative intelligent transport systems (C-ITS). For them, the capacity of a single 10 MHz channel in the ITS band at 5.9 GHz is considered sufficient. At the same time, the ITS stakeholders are working towards several advanced use cases, which imply a significant increment of data traffic and the need for multiple channels. To address this issue, ETSI has recently standardized a new multi-channel operation (MCO) concept for flexible, efficient, and future-proof use of multiple channels. This new concept is defined in a set of new specifications that represent the foundation for the future releases of C-ITS standards. The present paper provides a comprehensive review of the new set of specifications, describing the main entities extending the C-ITS architecture at the different layers of the protocol stack, In addition, the paper provides representative examples that describe how these MCO standards will be used in the future and discusses some of the main open issues arising. The review and analysis of this paper facilitate the understanding and motivation of the new set of Release 2 ETSI specifications for MCO and the identification of new research opportunities.
Constraint Programming and Constructive Heuristics for Parallel Machine Scheduling with Sequence-Dependent Setups and Common Servers
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2023
Year: 2023

This paper examines scheduling problem denoted as $P|seq, ser|C_{max}$ in Graham's notation; in other words, scheduling of tasks on parallel identical machines ($P$) with sequence-dependent setups ($seq$) each performed by one of the available servers ($ser$). The goal is to minimize the makespan ($C_{max}$). We propose a Constraint Programming (CP) model for finding the optimal solution and constructive heuristics suitable for large problem instances. These heuristics are also used to provide a feasible starting solution to the proposed CP model, significantly improving its efficiency. This combined approach constructs solutions for benchmark instances of up to 20 machines and 500 tasks in 10 seconds, with makespans 3-11.5% greater than the calculated lower bounds with a 5% average. The extensive experimental comparison also shows that our proposed approaches outperform the existing ones.
Joint Adaptive Representations for Image-Language Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Image-language learning has made unprecedented progress in visual understanding. These developments have come at high costs, as contemporary vision-language models require large model scales and amounts of data. We here propose a much easier recipe for image-language learning, which produces effective models, outperforming bigger and more expensive ones, often trained on orders of magnitude larger datasets. Our key finding is the joint learning of a compact vision and language representation, which adaptively and iteratively fuses the multi-modal features. This results in a more effective image-language learning, greatly lowering the FLOPs by combining and reducing the number of tokens for both text and images, e.g. a 33\% reduction in FLOPs is achieved, compared to baseline fusion techniques used by popular image-language models, while improving performance. This also allows the model to scale without a large increase in FLOPs or memory. In addition, we propose adaptive pre-training data sampling which improves the data efficiency. The proposed approach achieves competitive performance compared to much larger models, and does so with significantly less data and FLOPs. With only 40M training examples and with 39 GFLOPs our lightweight model outperforms many times larger state-of-the-art models of 2-20x more FLOPs and using bigger datasets some of which with close to 1B training examples.
Metropolis-Hastings algorithm in joint-attention naming game: Experimental semiotics study
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

In this study, we explore the emergence of symbols during interactions between individuals through an experimental semiotic study. Previous studies investigate how humans organize symbol systems through communication using artificially designed subjective experiments. In this study, we have focused on a joint attention-naming game (JA-NG) in which participants independently categorize objects and assign names while assuming their joint attention. In the theory of the Metropolis-Hastings naming game (MHNG), listeners accept provided names according to the acceptance probability computed using the Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm. The theory of MHNG suggests that symbols emerge as an approximate decentralized Bayesian inference of signs, which is represented as a shared prior variable if the conditions of MHNG are satisfied. This study examines whether human participants exhibit behavior consistent with MHNG theory when playing JA-NG. By comparing human acceptance decisions of a partner's naming with acceptance probabilities computed in the MHNG, we tested whether human behavior is consistent with the MHNG theory. The main contributions of this study are twofold. First, we reject the null hypothesis that humans make acceptance judgments with a constant probability, regardless of the acceptance probability calculated by the MH algorithm. This result suggests that people followed the acceptance probability computed by the MH algorithm to some extent. Second, the MH-based model predicted human acceptance/rejection behavior more accurately than the other four models: Constant, Numerator, Subtraction, and Binary. This result indicates that symbol emergence in JA-NG can be explained using MHNG and is considered an approximate decentralized Bayesian inference.