OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Safeguarding the Evidential Value of Forensic Cryptocurrency Investigations
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2021
Year: 2021

Analyzing cryptocurrency payment flows has become a key forensic method in law enforcement and is nowadays used to investigate a wide spectrum of criminal activities. However, despite its widespread adoption, the evidential value of obtained findings in court is still largely unclear. In this paper, we focus on the key ingredients of modern cryptocurrency analytics techniques, which are clustering heuristics and attribution tags. We identify internationally accepted standards and rules for substantiating suspicions and providing evidence in court and project them onto current cryptocurrency forensics practices. By providing an empirical analysis of CoinJoin transactions, we illustrate possible sources of misinterpretation in algorithmic clustering heuristics. Eventually, we derive a set of legal key requirements and translate them into a technical data sharing framework that fosters compliance with existing legal and technical standards in the realm of cryptocurrency forensics. Integrating the proposed framework in modern cryptocurrency analytics tools could allow more efficient and effective investigations, while safeguarding the evidential value of the analysis and the fundamental rights of affected persons.
Reaching Stable Marriage via Divorces is Hard
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2021
Year: 2021

We study the Reaching Stable Marriage via Divorces (DivorceSM) problem of deciding, given a Stable Marriage instance and an initial matching $M$ , whether there exists a stable matching which is reachable from $M$ by divorce operations as introduced by Knuth [12]. Towards answering an open question of Manlove [13] and Cechlárová et al. [3], we show that for incomplete preferences without ties, DivorceSM is NP-hard. Our hardness reduction also implies that the problem remains parameterized intractable for the number $κ$ of allowed divorce operations. It remains NP-hard even if the maximum length $d$ of the preferences is a constant. For the combined parameter ($κ$, $d$), the problem is fixed-parameter tractable.
Expression of the peak time for time-domain boundary measurements in diffuse light
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2021
Year: 2021

Light propagation through diffusive media can be described by the diffusion equation in a space-time domain. Further, fluorescence can be described by a system of coupled diffusion equations. This paper analyzes time-domain measurements, which measure the temporal point-spread function (TPSF), at a boundary of such diffusive media with a given source and detector. We focus on the temporal position of the TPSF maximum, which we refer to as the peak time. Although some unique properties of solutions of this system have been numerically studied, we give a mathematical analysis of peak time, providing proof of the existence, uniqueness, and the explicit expression of the peak time. We clearly show the relationship between the peak time and the object position in a medium.
On the Conditional Complexity of Sets of Strings
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2021
Year: 2021

Given a set X of finite strings, one interesting question to ask is whether there exists a member of X which is simple conditional to all other members of X. Conditional simplicity is measured by low conditional Kolmogorov complexity. We prove the affirmative to this question for sets that have low mutual information with the halting sequence. There are two results with respect to this question. One is dependent on the maximum conditional complexity between two elements of X, the other is dependent on the maximum expected value of the conditional complexity of a member of X relative to each member of X.
5G NR CA-Polar Maximum Likelihood Decoding by GRAND
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

CA-Polar codes have been selected for all control channel communications in 5G NR, but accurate, computationally feasible decoders are still subject to development. Here we report the performance of a recently proposed class of optimally precise Maximum Likelihood (ML) decoders, GRAND, that can be used with any block-code. As published theoretical results indicate that GRAND is computationally efficient for short-length, high-rate codes and 5G CA-Polar codes are in that class, here we consider GRAND's utility for decoding them. Simulation results indicate that decoding of 5G CA-Polar codes by GRAND, and a simple soft detection variant, is a practical possibility.
On Injectivity of Quantum Finite Automata
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2021
Year: 2021

We consider notions of freeness and ambiguity for the acceptance probability of Moore-Crutchfield Measure Once Quantum Finite Automata (MO-QFA). We study the injectivity problem of determining if the acceptance probability function of a MO-QFA is injective over all input words, i.e., giving a distinct probability for each input word. We show that the injectivity problem is undecidable for 8 state MO-QFA, even when all unitary matrices and the projection matrix are rational and the initial state vector is real algebraic. We also show undecidability of this problem when the initial vector is rational, although with a huge increase in the number of states. We utilize properties of quaternions, free rotation groups, representations of tuples of rationals as linear sums of radicals and a reduction of the mixed modification of Post's correspondence problem, as well as a new result on rational polynomial packing functions which may be of independent interest.
CS563-QA: A Collection for Evaluating Question Answering Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Question Answering (QA) is a challenging topic since it requires tackling the various difficulties of natural language understanding. Since evaluation is important not only for identifying the strong and weak points of the various techniques for QA, but also for facilitating the inception of new methods and techniques, in this paper we present a collection for evaluating QA methods over free text that we have created. Although it is a small collection, it contains cases of increasing difficulty, therefore it has an educational value and it can be used for rapid evaluation of QA systems.
Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) Based Multi-View Learning: An Overview
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Multi-view learning (MVL) is a strategy for fusing data from different sources or subsets. Canonical correlation analysis (CCA) is very important in MVL, whose main idea is to map data from different views onto a common space with maximum correlation. Traditional CCA can only be used to calculate the linear correlation of two views. Besides, it is unsupervised and the label information is wasted. Many nonlinear, supervised, or generalized extensions have been proposed to overcome these limitations. However, to our knowledge, there is no overview for these approaches. This paper provides an overview of many representative CCA-based MVL approaches.
ACNe: Attentive Context Normalization for Robust Permutation-Equivariant Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Many problems in computer vision require dealing with sparse, unordered data in the form of point clouds. Permutation-equivariant networks have become a popular solution-they operate on individual data points with simple perceptrons and extract contextual information with global pooling. This can be achieved with a simple normalization of the feature maps, a global operation that is unaffected by the order. In this paper, we propose Attentive Context Normalization (ACN), a simple yet effective technique to build permutation-equivariant networks robust to outliers. Specifically, we show how to normalize the feature maps with weights that are estimated within the network, excluding outliers from this normalization. We use this mechanism to leverage two types of attention: local and global-by combining them, our method is able to find the essential data points in high-dimensional space to solve a given task. We demonstrate through extensive experiments that our approach, which we call Attentive Context Networks (ACNe), provides a significant leap in performance compared to the state-of-the-art on camera pose estimation, robust fitting, and point cloud classification under noise and outliers. Source code: https://github.com/vcg-uvic/acne.
Artificial Intelligence: A Child's Play
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

We discuss the objectives of any endeavor in creating artificial intelligence, AI, and provide a possible alternative. Intelligence might be an unintended consequence of curiosity left to roam free, best exemplified by a frolicking infant. This suggests that our attempts at AI could have been misguided. What we actually need to strive for can be termed artificial curiosity, AC, and intelligence happens as a consequence of those efforts. For this unintentional yet welcome aftereffect to set in a foundational list of guiding principles needs to be present. We start with the intuition for this line of reasoning and formalize it with a series of definitions, assumptions, ingredients, models and iterative improvements that will be necessary to make the incubation of intelligence a reality. Our discussion provides conceptual modifications to the Turing Test and to Searle's Chinese room argument. We discuss the future implications for society as AI becomes an integral part of life. We provide a road-map for creating intelligence with the technical parts relegated to the appendix so that the article is accessible to a wide audience. The central techniques in our formal approach to creating intelligence draw upon tools and concepts widely used in physics, cognitive science, psychology, evolutionary biology, statistics, linguistics, communication systems, pattern recognition, marketing, economics, finance, information science and computational theory highlighting that solutions for creating artificial intelligence have to transcend the artificial barriers between various fields and be highly multi-disciplinary.
Understanding Teacher Gaze Patterns for Robot Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Human gaze is known to be a strong indicator of underlying human intentions and goals during manipulation tasks. This work studies gaze patterns of human teachers demonstrating tasks to robots and proposes ways in which such patterns can be used to enhance robot learning. Using both kinesthetic teaching and video demonstrations, we identify novel intention-revealing gaze behaviors during teaching. These prove to be informative in a variety of problems ranging from reference frame inference to segmentation of multi-step tasks. Based on our findings, we propose two proof-of-concept algorithms which show that gaze data can enhance subtask classification for a multi-step task up to 6% and reward inference and policy learning for a single-step task up to 67%. Our findings provide a foundation for a model of natural human gaze in robot learning from demonstration settings and present open problems for utilizing human gaze to enhance robot learning.
Peeking Behind the Ordinal Curtain: Improving Distortion via Cardinal Queries
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2021
Year: 2021

Aggregating the preferences of individuals into a collective decision is the core subject of study of social choice theory. In 2006, Procaccia and Rosenschein considered a utilitarian social choice setting, where the agents have explicit numerical values for the alternatives, yet they only report their linear orderings over them. To compare different aggregation mechanisms, Procaccia and Rosenschein introduced the notion of distortion, which quantifies the inefficiency of using only ordinal information when trying to maximize the social welfare, i.e., the sum of the underlying values of the agents for the chosen outcome. Since then, this research area has flourished and bounds on the distortion have been obtained for a wide variety of fundamental scenarios. However, the vast majority of the existing literature is focused on the case where nothing is known beyond the ordinal preferences of the agents over the alternatives. In this paper, we take a more expressive approach, and consider mechanisms that are allowed to further ask a few cardinal queries in order to gain partial access to the underlying values that the agents have for the alternatives. With this extra power, we design new deterministic mechanisms that achieve significantly improved distortion bounds and, in many cases, outperform the best-known randomized ordinal mechanisms. We paint an almost complete picture of the number of queries required by deterministic mechanisms to achieve specific distortion bounds.
FedHealth: A Federated Transfer Learning Framework for Wearable Healthcare
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

With the rapid development of computing technology, wearable devices such as smart phones and wristbands make it easy to get access to people's health information including activities, sleep, sports, etc. Smart healthcare achieves great success by training machine learning models on a large quantity of user data. However, there are two critical challenges. Firstly, user data often exists in the form of isolated islands, making it difficult to perform aggregation without compromising privacy security. Secondly, the models trained on the cloud fail on personalization. In this paper, we propose FedHealth, the first federated transfer learning framework for wearable healthcare to tackle these challenges. FedHealth performs data aggregation through federated learning, and then builds personalized models by transfer learning. It is able to achieve accurate and personalized healthcare without compromising privacy and security. Experiments demonstrate that FedHealth produces higher accuracy (5.3% improvement) for wearable activity recognition when compared to traditional methods. FedHealth is general and extensible and has the potential to be used in many healthcare applications.
Trends in Integration of Vision and Language Research: A Survey of Tasks, Datasets, and Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its applications has seen unprecedented growth in the last few years. This success can be partly attributed to the advancements made in the sub-fields of AI such as machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing. Much of the growth in these fields has been made possible with deep learning, a sub-area of machine learning that uses artificial neural networks. This has created significant interest in the integration of vision and language. In this survey, we focus on ten prominent tasks that integrate language and vision by discussing their problem formulation, methods, existing datasets, evaluation measures, and compare the results obtained with corresponding state-of-the-art methods. Our efforts go beyond earlier surveys which are either task-specific or concentrate only on one type of visual content, i.e., image or video. Furthermore, we also provide some potential future directions in this field of research with an anticipation that this survey stimulates innovative thoughts and ideas to address the existing challenges and build new applications.
Domain-Specific Priors and Meta Learning for Few-Shot First-Person Action Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

The lack of large-scale real datasets with annotations makes transfer learning a necessity for video activity understanding. We aim to develop an effective method for few-shot transfer learning for first-person action classification. We leverage independently trained local visual cues to learn representations that can be transferred from a source domain, which provides primitive action labels, to a different target domain using only a handful of examples. Visual cues we employ include object-object interactions, hand grasps and motion within regions that are a function of hand locations. We employ a framework based on meta-learning to extract the distinctive and domain invariant components of the deployed visual cues. This enables transfer of action classification models across public datasets captured with diverse scene and action configurations. We present comparative results of our transfer learning methodology and report superior results over state-of-the-art action classification approaches for both inter-class and inter-dataset transfer.
Memory Based Trajectory-conditioned Policies for Learning from Sparse Rewards
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Reinforcement learning with sparse rewards is challenging because an agent can rarely obtain non-zero rewards and hence, gradient-based optimization of parameterized policies can be incremental and slow. Recent work demonstrated that using a memory buffer of previous successful trajectories can result in more effective policies. However, existing methods may overly exploit past successful experiences, which can encourage the agent to adopt sub-optimal and myopic behaviors. In this work, instead of focusing on good experiences with limited diversity, we propose to learn a trajectory-conditioned policy to follow and expand diverse past trajectories from a memory buffer. Our method allows the agent to reach diverse regions in the state space and improve upon the past trajectories to reach new states. We empirically show that our approach significantly outperforms count-based exploration methods (parametric approach) and self-imitation learning (parametric approach with non-parametric memory) on various complex tasks with local optima. In particular, without using expert demonstrations or resetting to arbitrary states, we achieve the state-of-the-art scores under five billion number of frames, on challenging Atari games such as Montezuma's Revenge and Pitfall.
Non-Local Representation based Mutual Affine-Transfer Network for Photorealistic Stylization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Photorealistic stylization aims to transfer the style of a reference photo onto a content photo in a natural fashion, such that the stylized image looks like a real photo taken by a camera. State-of-the-art methods stylize the image locally within each matched semantic region and are prone to global color inconsistency across semantic objects/parts, making the stylized image less photorealistic. To tackle the challenging issues, we propose a non-local representation scheme, constrained with a mutual affine-transfer network (NL-MAT). Through a dictionary-based decomposition, NL-MAT is able to successfully decouple matched non-local representations and color information of the image pair, such that the context correspondence between the image pair is incorporated naturally, which largely facilitates local style transfer in a global-consistent fashion. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to address the photorealistic stylization problem with a non-local representation scheme, such that no additional models or steps for semantic matching are required during stylization. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is able to generate photorealistic results with local style transfer while preserving both the spatial structure and global color consistency of the content image.
YourAdvalue: Measuring Advertising Price Dynamics without Bankrupting User Privacy
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

The Real Time Bidding (RTB) protocol is by now more than a decade old. During this time, a handful of measurement papers have looked at bidding strategies, personal information flow, and cost of display advertising through RTB. In this paper, we present YourAdvalue, a privacy-preserving tool for displaying to end-users in a simple and intuitive manner their advertising value as seen through RTB. Using YourAdvalue, we measure desktop RTB prices in the wild, and compare them with desktop and mobile RTB prices reported by past work. We present how it estimates ad prices that are encrypted, and how it preserves user privacy while reporting results back to a data-server for analysis. We deployed our system, disseminated its browser extension, and collected data from 200 users, including 12000 ad impressions over 11 months. By analyzing this dataset, we show that desktop RTB prices have grown 4.6X over desktop RTB prices measured in 2013, and 3.8X over mobile RTB prices measured in 2015. We also study how user demographics associate with the intensity of RTB ecosystem tracking, leading to higher ad prices. We find that exchanging data between advertisers and/or data brokers through cookie-synchronization increases the median value of displayed ads by 19%. We also find that female and younger users are more targeted, suffering more tracking (via cookie synchronization) than male or elder users. As a result of this targeting in our dataset, the advertising value (i) of women is 2.4X higher than that of men, (ii) of 25-34 year-olds is 2.5X higher than that of 35-44 year-olds, (iii) is most expensive on weekends and early mornings.
IR-VIC: Unsupervised Discovery of Sub-goals for Transfer in RL
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

We propose a novel framework to identify sub-goals useful for exploration in sequential decision making tasks under partial observability. We utilize the variational intrinsic control framework (Gregor et.al., 2016) which maximizes empowerment -- the ability to reliably reach a diverse set of states and show how to identify sub-goals as states with high necessary option information through an information theoretic regularizer. Despite being discovered without explicit goal supervision, our sub-goals provide better exploration and sample complexity on challenging grid-world navigation tasks compared to supervised counterparts in prior work.
Time-Invariant Feedback Strategies Do Not Increase Capacity of AGN Channels Driven by Stable and Certain Unstable Autoregressive Noise
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

The capacity of additive Gaussian noise (AGN) channels, $Y_t=X_t+V_t, t=1, \ldots, n$, $\frac{1}{n} {\bf E}\big\{\sum_{t=1}^n |X_t|^2 \big\}\leq κ, κ\in [0,\infty)$, with time-invariant channel input feedback strategies, is characterized and conditions are identified for entropy rates, and limit of average power to exist, when the noise is described by {\it stable and unstable} autoregressive models, AR$(c)$, $V_t=cV_{t-1}+ W_t, V_0=v_0, t=1, \ldots, n$, where $c\in (-\infty,\infty)$, $W_t, t=1,\ldots, n$, is a zero mean, variance $K_W$, independent Gaussian sequence, independent of $V_0$. For stable AR$(c), c\in (-1,1)$ the conditions are necessary and sufficient for asymptotic stationarity of the processes $(X_t, Y_t), t=1, 2, \ldots$. New closed form capacity formulas and lower bounds are derived, for the AR$(c), c\in (-\infty,\infty)$ noise, which are fundamentally different from existing formulas in the literature, and illustrate multiple regimes of capacity, as a function of the parameters $(c,K_W,κ)$, as follows.\\ 1) feedback increases capacity for the regime, $c^2 \in (1, \infty),$ for $κ> \frac{K_W\big(1+\sqrt{4c^2-3}\big)}{2\big(c^2-1\big)^2}$, \\ 2) feedback does not increase capacity for the regime $c^2 \in (1, \infty)$, for $κ\leq \frac{K_W\big(1+\sqrt{4c^2-3}\big)}{2\big(c^2-1\big)^2}$, and \\ 3) feedback does not increase capacity for the regime $c \in [-1,1]$, for $ κ\in [0,\infty)$.
Extensional Higher-Order Paramodulation in Leo-III
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Leo-III is an automated theorem prover for extensional type theory with Henkin semantics and choice. Reasoning with primitive equality is enabled by adapting paramodulation-based proof search to higher-order logic. The prover may cooperate with multiple external specialist reasoning systems such as first-order provers and SMT solvers. Leo-III is compatible with the TPTP/TSTP framework for input formats, reporting results and proofs, and standardized communication between reasoning systems, enabling e.g. proof reconstruction from within proof assistants such as Isabelle/HOL. Leo-III supports reasoning in polymorphic first-order and higher-order logic, in all normal quantified modal logics, as well as in different deontic logics. Its development had initiated the ongoing extension of the TPTP infrastructure to reasoning within non-classical logics.