OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Decoding Chinese phonemes from intracortical brain signals with hyperbolic-space neural representations
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Speech brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), which translate brain signals into spoken words or sentences, have shown significant potential for high-performance BCI communication. Phonemes are the fundamental units of pronunciation in most languages. While existing speech BCIs have largely focused on English, where words contain diverse compositions of phonemes, Chinese Mandarin is a monosyllabic language, with words typically consisting of a consonant and a vowel. This feature makes it feasible to develop high-performance Mandarin speech BCIs by decoding phonemes directly from neural signals. This study aimed to decode spoken Mandarin phonemes using intracortical neural signals. We observed that phonemes with similar pronunciations were often represented by inseparable neural patterns, leading to confusion in phoneme decoding. This finding suggests that the neural representation of spoken phonemes has a hierarchical structure. To account for this, we proposed learning the neural representation of phoneme pronunciation in a hyperbolic space, where the hierarchical structure could be more naturally optimized. Experiments with intracortical neural signals from a Chinese participant showed that the proposed model learned discriminative and interpretable hierarchical phoneme representations from neural signals, significantly improving Chinese phoneme decoding performance and achieving state-of-the-art. The findings demonstrate the feasibility of constructing high-performance Chinese speech BCIs based on phoneme decoding.
AcroMonk: A Minimalist Underactuated Brachiating Robot
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Brachiation is a dynamic, coordinated swinging maneuver of body and arms used by monkeys and apes to move between branches. As a unique underactuated mode of locomotion, it is interesting to study from a robotics perspective since it can broaden the deployment scenarios for humanoids and animaloids. While several brachiating robots of varying complexity have been proposed in the past, this paper presents the simplest possible prototype of a brachiation robot, using only a single actuator and unactuated grippers. The novel passive gripper design allows it to snap on and release from monkey bars, while guaranteeing well defined start and end poses of the swing. The brachiation behavior is realized in three different ways, using trajectory optimization via direct collocation and stabilization by a model-based time-varying linear quadratic regulator (TVLQR) or model-free proportional derivative (PD) control, as well as by a reinforcement learning (RL) based control policy. The three control schemes are compared in terms of robustness to disturbances, mass uncertainty, and energy consumption. The system design and controllers have been open-sourced. Due to its minimal and open design, the system can serve as a canonical underactuated platform for education and research.
More Like Real World Game Challenge for Partially Observable Multi-Agent Cooperation
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2023
Year: 2023

Some standardized environments have been designed for partially observable multi-agent cooperation, but we find most current environments are synchronous, whereas real-world agents often have their own action spaces leading to asynchrony. Furthermore, fixed agents number limits the scalability of action space, whereas in reality agents number can change resulting in a flexible action space. In addition, current environments are balanced, which is not always the case in the real world where there may be an ability gap between different parties leading to asymmetry. Finally, current environments tend to have less stochasticity with simple state transitions, whereas real-world environments can be highly stochastic and result in extremely risky. To address this gap, we propose WarGame Challenge (WGC) inspired by the Wargame. WGC is a lightweight, flexible, and easy-to-use environment with a clear framework that can be easily configured by users. Along with the benchmark, we provide MARL baseline algorithms such as QMIX and a toolkit to help algorithms complete performance tests on WGC. Finally, we present baseline experiment results, which demonstrate the challenges of WGC. We think WGC enrichs the partially observable multi-agent cooperation domain and introduces more challenges that better reflect the real-world characteristics. Code is release in http://turingai.ia.ac.cn/data\_center/show/10.
A Sweep-plane Algorithm for Calculating the Isolation of Mountains
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2023
Year: 2023

One established metric to classify the significance of a mountain peak is its isolation. It specifies the distance between a peak and the closest point of higher elevation. Peaks with high isolation dominate their surroundings and provide a nice view from the top. With the availability of worldwide Digital Elevation Models (DEMs), the isolation of all mountain peaks can be computed automatically. Previous algorithms run in worst case time that is quadratic in the input size. We present a novel sweep-plane algorithm that runs in time $\mathcal{O}(n\log n+p T_{NN})$ where $n$ is the input size, $p$ the number of considered peaks and $T_{NN}$ the time for a 2D nearest-neighbor query in an appropriate geometric search tree. We refine this to a two-level approach that has high locality and good parallel scalability. Our implementation reduces the time for calculating the isolation of every peak on earth from hours to minutes while improving precision.
Sum Secrecy Rate Maximization for IRS-aided Multi-Cluster MIMO-NOMA Terahertz Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a promising technique to extend the network coverage and improve spectral efficiency. This paper investigates an IRS-assisted terahertz (THz) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)-nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system based on hybrid precoding with the presence of eavesdropper. Two types of sparse RF chain antenna structures are adopted, i.e., sub-connected structure and fully connected structure. First, cluster heads are selected for each beam, and analog precoding based on discrete phase is designed. Then, users are clustered based on channel correlation, and NOMA technology is employed to serve the users. In addition, a low-complexity forced-zero method is utilized to design digital precoding in order to eliminate inter-cluster interference. On this basis, we propose a secure transmission scheme to maximize the sum secrecy rate by jointly optimizing the power allocation and phase shifts of IRS subject to the total transmit power budget, minimal achievable rate requirement of each user, and IRS reflection coefficients. Due to multiple coupled variables, the formulated problem leads to a non-convex issue. We apply the Taylor series expansion and semidefinite programming to convert the original non-convex problem into a convex one. Then, an alternating optimization algorithm is developed to obtain a feasible solution of the original problem. Simulation results verify the convergence of the proposed algorithm, and deploying IRS can bring significant beamforming gains to suppress the eavesdropping.
Characterization of Plotkin-optimal two-weight codes over finite chain rings and related applications
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Few-weight codes over finite chain rings are associated with combinatorial objects such as strongly regular graphs (SRGs), strongly walk-regular graphs (SWRGs) and finite geometries, and are also widely used in data storage systems and secret sharing schemes. The first objective of this paper is to characterize all possible parameters of Plotkin-optimal two-homogeneous weight regular projective codes over finite chain rings, as well as their weight distributions. We show the existence of codes with these parameters by constructing an infinite family of two-homogeneous weight codes. The parameters of their Gray images have the same weight distribution as that of the two-weight codes of type SU1 in the sense of Calderbank and Kantor (Bull Lond Math Soc 18: 97-122, 1986). Further, we also construct three-homogeneous weight regular projective codes over finite chain rings combined with some known results. Finally, we study applications of our constructed codes in secret sharing schemes and graph theory. In particular, infinite families of SRGs and SWRGs with non-trivial parameters are obtained.
Humans, AI, and Context: Understanding End-Users' Trust in a Real-World Computer Vision Application
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Trust is an important factor in people's interactions with AI systems. However, there is a lack of empirical studies examining how real end-users trust or distrust the AI system they interact with. Most research investigates one aspect of trust in lab settings with hypothetical end-users. In this paper, we provide a holistic and nuanced understanding of trust in AI through a qualitative case study of a real-world computer vision application. We report findings from interviews with 20 end-users of a popular, AI-based bird identification app where we inquired about their trust in the app from many angles. We find participants perceived the app as trustworthy and trusted it, but selectively accepted app outputs after engaging in verification behaviors, and decided against app adoption in certain high-stakes scenarios. We also find domain knowledge and context are important factors for trust-related assessment and decision-making. We discuss the implications of our findings and provide recommendations for future research on trust in AI.
ESAFL: Efficient Secure Additively Homomorphic Encryption for Cross-Silo Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Cross-silo federated learning (FL) enables multiple clients to collaboratively train a machine learning model without sharing training data, but privacy in FL remains a major challenge. Techniques using homomorphic encryption (HE) have been designed to solve this but bring their own challenges. Many techniques using single-key HE (SKHE) require clients to fully trust each other to prevent privacy disclosure between clients. However, fully trusted clients are hard to ensure in practice. Other techniques using multi-key HE (MKHE) aim to protect privacy from untrusted clients but lead to the disclosure of training results in public channels by untrusted third parties, e.g., the public cloud server. Besides, MKHE has higher computation and communication complexity compared with SKHE. We present a new FL protocol ESAFL that leverages a novel efficient and secure additively HE (ESHE) based on the hard problem of ring learning with errors. ESAFL can ensure the security of training data between untrusted clients and protect the training results against untrusted third parties. In addition, theoretical analyses present that ESAFL outperforms current techniques using MKHE in computation and communication, and intensive experiments show that ESAFL achieves approximate 204 times-953 times and 11 times-14 times training speedup while reducing the communication burden by 77 times-109 times and 1.25 times-2 times compared with the state-of-the-art FL models using SKHE.
European 5G Security in the Wild: Reality versus Expectations
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

5G cellular systems are slowly being deployed worldwide delivering the promised unprecedented levels of throughput and latency to hundreds of millions of users. At such scale security is crucial, and consequently, the 5G standard includes a new series of features to improve the security of its predecessors (i.e., 3G and 4G). In this work, we evaluate the actual deployment in practice of the promised 5G security features by analysing current commercial 5G networks from several European operators. By collecting 5G signalling traffic in the wild in several cities in Spain, we i) fact-check which 5G security enhancements are actually implemented in current deployments, ii) provide a rich overview of the implementation status of each 5G security feature in a wide range of 5G commercial networks in Europe and compare it with previous results in China, iii) analyse the implications of optional features not being deployed, and iv) discuss on the still remaining 4G-inherited vulnerabilities. Our results show that in European 5G commercial networks, the deployment of the 5G security features is still on the works. This is well aligned with results previously reported from China [16] and keeps these networks vulnerable to some 4G attacks, during their migration period from 4G to 5G.
Unsupervised Sentence Representation Learning with Frequency-induced Adversarial Tuning and Incomplete Sentence Filtering
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Pre-trained Language Model (PLM) is nowadays the mainstay of Unsupervised Sentence Representation Learning (USRL). However, PLMs are sensitive to the frequency information of words from their pre-training corpora, resulting in anisotropic embedding space, where the embeddings of high-frequency words are clustered but those of low-frequency words disperse sparsely. This anisotropic phenomenon results in two problems of similarity bias and information bias, lowering the quality of sentence embeddings. To solve the problems, we fine-tune PLMs by leveraging the frequency information of words and propose a novel USRL framework, namely Sentence Representation Learning with Frequency-induced Adversarial tuning and Incomplete sentence filtering (SLT-FAI). We calculate the word frequencies over the pre-training corpora of PLMs and assign words thresholding frequency labels. With them, (1) we incorporate a similarity discriminator used to distinguish the embeddings of high-frequency and low-frequency words, and adversarially tune the PLM with it, enabling to achieve uniformly frequency-invariant embedding space; and (2) we propose a novel incomplete sentence detection task, where we incorporate an information discriminator to distinguish the embeddings of original sentences and incomplete sentences by randomly masking several low-frequency words, enabling to emphasize the more informative low-frequency words. Our SLT-FAI is a flexible and plug-and-play framework, and it can be integrated with existing USRL techniques. We evaluate SLT-FAI with various backbones on benchmark datasets. Empirical results indicate that SLT-FAI can be superior to the existing USRL baselines. Our code is released in \url{https://github.com/wangbing1416/SLT-FAI}.
CompSuite: A Dataset of Java Library Upgrade Incompatibility Issues
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Modern software systems heavily rely on external libraries developed by third-parties to ensure efficient development. However, frequent library upgrades can lead to compatibility issues between the libraries and their client systems. In this paper, we introduce CompSuite, a dataset that includes 123 real-world Java client-library pairs where upgrading the library causes an incompatibility issue in the corresponding client. Each incompatibility issue in CompSuite is associated with a test case authored by the developers, which can be used to reproduce the issue. The dataset also provides a command-line interface that simplifies the execution and validation of each issue. With this infrastructure, users can perform an inspection of any incompatibility issue with the push of a button, or reproduce an issue step-by-step for a more detailed investigation. We make CompSuite publicly available to promote open science. We believe that various software analysis techniques, such as compatibility checking, debugging, and regression test selection, can benefit from CompSuite.
A Reproducible Extraction of Training Images from Diffusion Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Recently, Carlini et al. demonstrated the widely used model Stable Diffusion can regurgitate real training samples, which is troublesome from a copyright perspective. In this work, we provide an efficient extraction attack on par with the recent attack, with several order of magnitudes less network evaluations. In the process, we expose a new phenomena, which we dub template verbatims, wherein a diffusion model will regurgitate a training sample largely in tact. Template verbatims are harder to detect as they require retrieval and masking to correctly label. Furthermore, they are still generated by newer systems, even those which de-duplicate their training set, and we give insight into why they still appear during generation. We extract training images from several state of the art systems, including Stable Diffusion 2.0, Deep Image Floyd, and finally Midjourney v4. We release code to verify our extraction attack, perform the attack, as well as all extracted prompts at \url{https://github.com/ryanwebster90/onestep-extraction}.
Schema-adaptable Knowledge Graph Construction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Conventional Knowledge Graph Construction (KGC) approaches typically follow the static information extraction paradigm with a closed set of pre-defined schema. As a result, such approaches fall short when applied to dynamic scenarios or domains, whereas a new type of knowledge emerges. This necessitates a system that can handle evolving schema automatically to extract information for KGC. To address this need, we propose a new task called schema-adaptable KGC, which aims to continually extract entity, relation, and event based on a dynamically changing schema graph without re-training. We first split and convert existing datasets based on three principles to build a benchmark, i.e., horizontal schema expansion, vertical schema expansion, and hybrid schema expansion; then investigate the schema-adaptable performance of several well-known approaches such as Text2Event, TANL, UIE and GPT-3.5. We further propose a simple yet effective baseline dubbed \textsc{AdaKGC}, which contains schema-enriched prefix instructor and schema-conditioned dynamic decoding to better handle evolving schema. Comprehensive experimental results illustrate that AdaKGC can outperform baselines but still have room for improvement. We hope the proposed work can deliver benefits to the community. Code and datasets available at https://github.com/zjunlp/AdaKGC.
M$^{6}$Doc: A Large-Scale Multi-Format, Multi-Type, Multi-Layout, Multi-Language, Multi-Annotation Category Dataset for Modern Document Layout Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Document layout analysis is a crucial prerequisite for document understanding, including document retrieval and conversion. Most public datasets currently contain only PDF documents and lack realistic documents. Models trained on these datasets may not generalize well to real-world scenarios. Therefore, this paper introduces a large and diverse document layout analysis dataset called $M^{6}Doc$. The $M^6$ designation represents six properties: (1) Multi-Format (including scanned, photographed, and PDF documents); (2) Multi-Type (such as scientific articles, textbooks, books, test papers, magazines, newspapers, and notes); (3) Multi-Layout (rectangular, Manhattan, non-Manhattan, and multi-column Manhattan); (4) Multi-Language (Chinese and English); (5) Multi-Annotation Category (74 types of annotation labels with 237,116 annotation instances in 9,080 manually annotated pages); and (6) Modern documents. Additionally, we propose a transformer-based document layout analysis method called TransDLANet, which leverages an adaptive element matching mechanism that enables query embedding to better match ground truth to improve recall, and constructs a segmentation branch for more precise document image instance segmentation. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of $M^{6}Doc$ with various layout analysis methods and demonstrate its effectiveness. TransDLANet achieves state-of-the-art performance on $M^{6}Doc$ with 64.5% mAP. The $M^{6}Doc$ dataset will be available at https://github.com/HCIILAB/M6Doc.
Learning More Discriminative Local Descriptors for Few-shot Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Few-shot learning for image classification comes up as a hot topic in computer vision, which aims at fast learning from a limited number of labeled images and generalize over the new tasks. In this paper, motivated by the idea of Fisher Score, we propose a Discriminative Local Descriptors Attention (DLDA) model that adaptively selects the representative local descriptors and does not introduce any additional parameters, while most of the existing local descriptors based methods utilize the neural networks that inevitably involve the tedious parameter tuning. Moreover, we modify the traditional $k$-NN classification model by adjusting the weights of the $k$ nearest neighbors according to their distances from the query point. Experiments on four benchmark datasets show that our method not only achieves higher accuracy compared with the state-of-art approaches for few-shot learning, but also possesses lower sensitivity to the choices of $k$.
Fast and Attributed Change Detection on Dynamic Graphs with Density of States
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

How can we detect traffic disturbances from international flight transportation logs or changes to collaboration dynamics in academic networks? These problems can be formulated as detecting anomalous change points in a dynamic graph. Current solutions do not scale well to large real-world graphs, lack robustness to large amounts of node additions/deletions, and overlook changes in node attributes. To address these limitations, we propose a novel spectral method: Scalable Change Point Detection (SCPD). SCPD generates an embedding for each graph snapshot by efficiently approximating the distribution of the Laplacian spectrum at each step. SCPD can also capture shifts in node attributes by tracking correlations between attributes and eigenvectors. Through extensive experiments using synthetic and real-world data, we show that SCPD (a) achieves state-of-the art performance, (b) is significantly faster than the state-of-the-art methods and can easily process millions of edges in a few CPU minutes, (c) can effectively tackle a large quantity of node attributes, additions or deletions and (d) discovers interesting events in large real-world graphs. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/shenyangHuang/SCPD.git
Transactional Python for Durable Machine Learning: Vision, Challenges, and Feasibility
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2023
Year: 2023

In machine learning (ML), Python serves as a convenient abstraction for working with key libraries such as PyTorch, scikit-learn, and others. Unlike DBMS, however, Python applications may lose important data, such as trained models and extracted features, due to machine failures or human errors, leading to a waste of time and resources. Specifically, they lack four essential properties that could make ML more reliable and user-friendly -- durability, atomicity, replicability, and time-versioning (DART). This paper presents our vision of Transactional Python that provides DART without any code modifications to user programs or the Python kernel, by non-intrusively monitoring application states at the object level and determining a minimal amount of information sufficient to reconstruct a whole application. Our evaluation of a proof-of-concept implementation with public PyTorch and scikit-learn applications shows that DART can be offered with overheads ranging 1.5%--15.6%.