OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
SDCL: Self-Distillation Contrastive Learning for Chinese Spell Checking
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Due to the ambiguity of homophones, Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) has widespread applications. Existing systems typically utilize BERT for text encoding. However, CSC requires the model to account for both phonetic and graphemic information. To adapt BERT to the CSC task, we propose a token-level self-distillation contrastive learning method. We employ BERT to encode both the corrupted and corresponding correct sentence. Then, we use contrastive learning loss to regularize corrupted tokens' hidden states to be closer to counterparts in the correct sentence. On three CSC datasets, we confirmed our method provides a significant improvement above baselines.
Using Locality-sensitive Hashing for Rendezvous Search
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

The multichannel rendezvous problem is a fundamental problem for neighbor discovery in many IoT applications. The existing works in the literature focus mostly on improving the worst-case performance, and the average-case performance is often not as good as that of the random algorithm. As IoT devices (users) are close to each other, their available channel sets, though they might be different, are similar. Using the locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) technique in data mining, we propose channel hopping algorithms that exploit the similarity between the two available channel sets to increase the rendezvous probability. For the synchronous setting, our algorithms have the expected time-to-rendezvous (ETTR) inversely proportional to a well-known similarity measure called the Jaccard index. For the asynchronous setting, we use dimensionality reduction to speed up the rendezvous process. Our numerical results show that our algorithms can outperform the random algorithm in terms of ETTR.
Deep Gaussian Process-based Multi-fidelity Bayesian Optimization for Simulated Chemical Reactors
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2022
Year: 2022

New manufacturing techniques such as 3D printing have recently enabled the creation of previously infeasible chemical reactor designs. Optimizing the geometry of the next generation of chemical reactors is important to understand the underlying physics and to ensure reactor feasibility in the real world. This optimization problem is computationally expensive, nonlinear, and derivative-free making it challenging to solve. In this work, we apply deep Gaussian processes (DGPs) to model multi-fidelity coiled-tube reactor simulations in a Bayesian optimization setting. By applying a multi-fidelity Bayesian optimization method, the search space of reactor geometries is explored through an amalgam of different fidelity simulations which are chosen based on prediction uncertainty and simulation cost, maximizing the use of computational budget. The use of DGPs provides an end-to-end model for five discrete mesh fidelities, enabling less computational effort to gain good solutions during optimization. The accuracy of simulations for these five fidelities is determined against experimental data obtained from a 3D printed reactor configuration, providing insights into appropriate hyper-parameters. We hope this work provides interesting insight into the practical use of DGP-based multi-fidelity Bayesian optimization for engineering discovery.
Towards Zero-Shot and Few-Shot Table Question Answering using GPT-3
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

We present very early results on using GPT-3 to perform question answering on tabular data. We find that stock pre-trained GPT-3 is able to zero-shot learn the table structure from a serialized JSON array-of-arrays representation, and able to answer lookup queries and simple comparison questions in natural language without any fine-tuning. We further find that simple prompt engineering to include few-shot static Q&A examples significantly improves accuracy. Lastly, we find that intermixing passage text improves accuracy even further on heterogeneous data. We apply our approach on a novel dataset of simple tables in newspaper infographics with promising results. Overall, we find much cause for optimism in this basic approach.
In-Flight Energy-Driven Composition of Drone Swarm Services
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

We propose a novel framework for swarm-based drone delivery services with in-flight energy recharging. The framework aims to enhance the delivery time of multiple packages by reducing the number of stops and recharging times at intermediate stations. The proposed framework considers various intrinsic and extrinsic delivery constraints. We propose to use support drones whose sole purpose is to recharge other drones in the swarm during their flight. In this respect, we compute the optimal set of optimal support drones to minimize the probability of delivery services and recharging time at the next stations. We also use two settings to position the support drones in a flight formation for comparative purposes. Two novel energy sharing methods are proposed, namely, Priority-based and Fairness-based methods. A re-ordering method of the delivery drones is presented to facilitate the in-flight energy composition process. An enhanced A* algorithm is implemented to compose the optimal services in terms of delivery time. Experimental results prove the efficiency of our proposed approach.
A deep scalable neural architecture for soil properties estimation from spectral information
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper we propose an adaptive deep neural architecture for the prediction of multiple soil characteristics from the analysis of hyperspectral signatures. The proposed method overcomes the limitations of previous methods in the state of art: (i) it allows to predict multiple soil variables at once; (ii) it permits to backtrace the spectral bands that most contribute to the estimation of a given variable; (iii) it is based on a flexible neural architecture capable of automatically adapting to the spectral library under analysis. The proposed architecture is experimented on LUCAS, a large laboratory dataset and on a dataset achieved by simulating PRISMA hyperspectral sensor. 'Results, compared with other state-of-the-art methods confirm the effectiveness of the proposed solution.
Trends in Energy Estimates for Computing in AI/Machine Learning Accelerators, Supercomputers, and Compute-Intensive Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2022
Year: 2022

We examine the computational energy requirements of different systems driven by the geometrical scaling law, and increasing use of Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning (AI-ML) over the last decade. With more scientific and technology applications based on data-driven discovery, machine learning methods, especially deep neural networks, have become widely used. In order to enable such applications, both hardware accelerators and advanced AI-ML methods have led to the introduction of new architectures, system designs, algorithms, and software. Our analysis of energy trends indicates three important observations: 1) Energy efficiency due to geometrical scaling is slowing down; 2) The energy efficiency at the bit-level does not translate into efficiency at the instruction-level, or at the system-level for a variety of systems, especially for large-scale AI-ML accelerators or supercomputers; 3) At the application level, general-purpose AI-ML methods can be computationally energy intensive, off-setting the gains in energy from geometrical scaling and special purpose accelerators. Further, our analysis provides specific pointers for integrating energy efficiency with performance analysis for enabling high-performance and sustainable computing in the future.
HARRIS: Hybrid Ranking and Regression Forests for Algorithm Selection
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

It is well known that different algorithms perform differently well on an instance of an algorithmic problem, motivating algorithm selection (AS): Given an instance of an algorithmic problem, which is the most suitable algorithm to solve it? As such, the AS problem has received considerable attention resulting in various approaches - many of which either solve a regression or ranking problem under the hood. Although both of these formulations yield very natural ways to tackle AS, they have considerable weaknesses. On the one hand, correctly predicting the performance of an algorithm on an instance is a sufficient, but not a necessary condition to produce a correct ranking over algorithms and in particular ranking the best algorithm first. On the other hand, classical ranking approaches often do not account for concrete performance values available in the training data, but only leverage rankings composed from such data. We propose HARRIS- Hybrid rAnking and RegRessIon foreSts - a new algorithm selector leveraging special forests, combining the strengths of both approaches while alleviating their weaknesses. HARRIS' decisions are based on a forest model, whose trees are created based on splits optimized on a hybrid ranking and regression loss function. As our preliminary experimental study on ASLib shows, HARRIS improves over standard algorithm selection approaches on some scenarios showing that combining ranking and regression in trees is indeed promising for AS.
Robust MelGAN: A robust universal neural vocoder for high-fidelity TTS
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

In current two-stage neural text-to-speech (TTS) paradigm, it is ideal to have a universal neural vocoder, once trained, which is robust to imperfect mel-spectrogram predicted from the acoustic model. To this end, we propose Robust MelGAN vocoder by solving the original multi-band MelGAN's metallic sound problem and increasing its generalization ability. Specifically, we introduce a fine-grained network dropout strategy to the generator. With a specifically designed over-smooth handler which separates speech signal intro periodic and aperiodic components, we only perform network dropout to the aperodic components, which alleviates metallic sounding and maintains good speaker similarity. To further improve generalization ability, we introduce several data augmentation methods to augment fake data in the discriminator, including harmonic shift, harmonic noise and phase noise. Experiments show that Robust MelGAN can be used as a universal vocoder, significantly improving sound quality in TTS systems built on various types of data.
IoT System Case Study: Personal Office Energy Monitor (POEM)
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

This paper describes the design, implementation, and user evaluation of an IoT project focused on monitoring and management of user comfort and energy usage in office buildings. The objective is to depict an instructive use case and to illustrate experiences with all major phases of designing and running a fairly complex IoT system. The design part includes motivation and outline of the problem statement, the resulting definition of data to be collected, system implementation, and subsequent changes resulting from the additional insights that it provided. The user experience part describes quantitative findings as well as key results of the extensive human factors study with over 70 office users participating in two major pilots in France and Japan. The original idea for this project came out from a diverse group of companies exploring challenges of designing and operating smart buildings with net-positive energy balance. Members included companies involved in the design and construction of smart buildings, building-management and automation systems, computer design, energy systems, and office furniture and space design. One of the early insights was that maximum energy efficiency in office buildings cannot be achieved and sustained without the awareness and active participation of building occupants. The resulting project explored and evaluated several ways to engage and empower users in ways that benefit them and makes them the willing and active participants.
Explainable Deep Learning to Profile Mitochondrial Disease Using High Dimensional Protein Expression Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Mitochondrial diseases are currently untreatable due to our limited understanding of their pathology. We study the expression of various mitochondrial proteins in skeletal myofibres (SM) in order to discover processes involved in mitochondrial pathology using Imaging Mass Cytometry (IMC). IMC produces high dimensional multichannel pseudo-images representing spatial variation in the expression of a panel of proteins within a tissue, including subcellular variation. Statistical analysis of these images requires semi-automated annotation of thousands of SMs in IMC images of patient muscle biopsies. In this paper we investigate the use of deep learning (DL) on raw IMC data to analyse it without any manual pre-processing steps, statistical summaries or statistical models. For this we first train state-of-art computer vision DL models on all available image channels, both combined and individually. We observed better than expected accuracy for many of these models. We then apply state-of-the-art explainable techniques relevant to computer vision DL to find the basis of the predictions of these models. Some of the resulting visual explainable maps highlight features in the images that appear consistent with the latest hypotheses about mitochondrial disease progression within myofibres.
Analysis and Detection of Singing Techniques in Repertoires of J-POP Solo Singers
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we focus on singing techniques within the scope of music information retrieval research. We investigate how singers use singing techniques using real-world recordings of famous solo singers in Japanese popular music songs (J-POP). First, we built a new dataset of singing techniques. The dataset consists of 168 commercial J-POP songs, and each song is annotated using various singing techniques with timestamps and vocal pitch contours. We also present descriptive statistics of singing techniques on the dataset to clarify what and how often singing techniques appear. We further explored the difficulty of the automatic detection of singing techniques using previously proposed machine learning techniques. In the detection, we also investigate the effectiveness of auxiliary information (i.e., pitch and distribution of label duration), not only providing the baseline. The best result achieves 40.4% at macro-average F-measure on nine-way multi-class detection. We provide the annotation of the dataset and its detail on the appendix website 0 .
Safe and Efficient Manoeuvring for Emergency Vehicles in Autonomous Traffic using Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimisation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Manoeuvring in the presence of emergency vehicles is still a major issue for vehicle autonomy systems. Most studies that address this topic are based on rule-based methods, which cannot cover all possible scenarios that can take place in autonomous traffic. Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimisation (MAPPO) has recently emerged as a powerful method for autonomous systems because it allows for training in thousands of different situations. In this study, we present an approach based on MAPPO to guarantee the safe and efficient manoeuvring of autonomous vehicles in the presence of an emergency vehicle. We introduce a risk metric that summarises the potential risk of collision in a single index. The proposed method generates cooperative policies allowing the emergency vehicle to go at $15 \%$ higher average speed while maintaining high safety distances. Moreover, we explore the trade-off between safety and traffic efficiency and assess the performance in a competitive scenario.
Do You Really Need to Disguise Normal Servers as Honeypots?
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

A honeypot, which is a kind of deception strategy, has been widely used for at least 20 years to mitigate cyber threats. Decision-makers have believed that honeypot strategies are intuitive and effective, since honeypots have successfully protected systems from Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks to Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) in real-world cases. Nonetheless, there is a lack of research on the appropriate level of honeypot technique application to choose real-world operations. We examine and contrast three attack-defense games with respect to honeypot detection techniques in this paper. In particular, we specifically design and contrast two stages of honeypot technology one by one, starting with a game without deception. We demonstrate that the return for a defender using honeypots is higher than for a defender without them, albeit the defender may not always benefit financially from using more honeypot deception strategies. Particularly, disguising regular servers as honeypots does not provide defenders with a better reward. Furthermore, we take in consideration that fake honeypots can make maintaining normal nodes more costly. Our research offers a theoretical foundation for the real-world operator's decision of honeypot deception tactics and the required number of honeypot nodes.
Deep Model Reassembly
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we explore a novel knowledge-transfer task, termed as Deep Model Reassembly (DeRy), for general-purpose model reuse. Given a collection of heterogeneous models pre-trained from distinct sources and with diverse architectures, the goal of DeRy, as its name implies, is to first dissect each model into distinctive building blocks, and then selectively reassemble the derived blocks to produce customized networks under both the hardware resource and performance constraints. Such ambitious nature of DeRy inevitably imposes significant challenges, including, in the first place, the feasibility of its solution. We strive to showcase that, through a dedicated paradigm proposed in this paper, DeRy can be made not only possibly but practically efficiently. Specifically, we conduct the partitions of all pre-trained networks jointly via a cover set optimization, and derive a number of equivalence set, within each of which the network blocks are treated as functionally equivalent and hence interchangeable. The equivalence sets learned in this way, in turn, enable picking and assembling blocks to customize networks subject to certain constraints, which is achieved via solving an integer program backed up with a training-free proxy to estimate the task performance. The reassembled models, give rise to gratifying performances with the user-specified constraints satisfied. We demonstrate that on ImageNet, the best reassemble model achieves 78.6% top-1 accuracy without fine-tuning, which could be further elevated to 83.2% with end-to-end training. Our code is available at https://github.com/Adamdad/DeRy
Adversarial Domain Adaptation for Action Recognition Around the Clock
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Due to the numerous potential applications in visual surveillance and nighttime driving, recognizing human action in low-light conditions remains a difficult problem in computer vision. Existing methods separate action recognition and dark enhancement into two distinct steps to accomplish this task. However, isolating the recognition and enhancement impedes end-to-end learning of the space-time representation for video action classification. This paper presents a domain adaptation-based action recognition approach that uses adversarial learning in cross-domain settings to learn cross-domain action recognition. Supervised learning can train it on a large amount of labeled data from the source domain (daytime action sequences). However, it uses deep domain invariant features to perform unsupervised learning on many unlabelled data from the target domain (night-time action sequences). The resulting augmented model, named 3D-DiNet can be trained using standard backpropagation with an additional layer. It achieves SOTA performance on InFAR and XD145 actions datasets.
Chronic pain patient narratives allow for the estimation of current pain intensity
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Chronic pain is a multi-dimensional experience, and pain intensity plays an important part, impacting the patients emotional balance, psychology, and behaviour. Standard self-reporting tools, such as the Visual Analogue Scale for pain, fail to capture this burden. Moreover, this type of tools is susceptible to a degree of subjectivity, dependent on the patients clear understanding of how to use it, social biases, and their ability to translate a complex experience to a scale. To overcome these and other self-reporting challenges, pain intensity estimation has been previously studied based on facial expressions, electroencephalograms, brain imaging, and autonomic features. However, to the best of our knowledge, it has never been attempted to base this estimation on the patient narratives of the personal experience of chronic pain, which is what we propose in this work. Indeed, in the clinical assessment and management of chronic pain, verbal communication is essential to convey information to physicians that would otherwise not be easily accessible through standard reporting tools, since language, sociocultural, and psychosocial variables are intertwined. We show that language features from patient narratives indeed convey information relevant for pain intensity estimation, and that our computational models can take advantage of that. Specifically, our results show that patients with mild pain focus more on the use of verbs, whilst moderate and severe pain patients focus on adverbs, and nouns and adjectives, respectively, and that these differences allow for the distinction between these three pain classes.
Leveraging Pre-trained Models for Failure Analysis Triplets Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Pre-trained Language Models recently gained traction in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) domain for text summarization, generation and question-answering tasks. This stems from the innovation introduced in Transformer models and their overwhelming performance compared with Recurrent Neural Network Models (Long Short Term Memory (LSTM)). In this paper, we leverage the attention mechanism of pre-trained causal language models such as Transformer model for the downstream task of generating Failure Analysis Triplets (FATs) - a sequence of steps for analyzing defected components in the semiconductor industry. We compare different transformer models for this generative task and observe that Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 (GPT2) outperformed other transformer model for the failure analysis triplet generation (FATG) task. In particular, we observe that GPT2 (trained on 1.5B parameters) outperforms pre-trained BERT, BART and GPT3 by a large margin on ROUGE. Furthermore, we introduce Levenshstein Sequential Evaluation metric (LESE) for better evaluation of the structured FAT data and show that it compares exactly with human judgment than existing metrics.
Compressed IF-TEM: Time Encoding Analog-To-Digital Compression
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

An integrate-and-fire time-encoding-machine (IF-TEM) is an energy-efficient asynchronous sampler. Utilizing the IF-TEM sampler for bandlimited signals, we introduce designs for time encoding and decoding with analog compression prior to the quantization phase. Before the quantizer, efficient analog compression is conducted based on the stationarity of the encoded signal, which is a fundamental characteristic of IF-TEM processing. Low-bit-rate reconstruction is achieved by subdividing the known IF-TEM dynamic range into tighter windows, which can be either fixed size or dynamically changed, and detecting in which window the sample resides. We demonstrate empirically that employing the same number of samples and up to 7% additional bits than the conventional IF-TEM results in a 5-20dB improvement in MSE. Fixing the reconstruction MSE target and the number of samples, using the compressed IF-TEM enables the use of 1-2 fewer bits compared to the classical IF-TEM.