OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Automated Evaluation for Student Argumentative Writing: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

This paper surveys and organizes research works in an under-studied area, which we call automated evaluation for student argumentative writing. Unlike traditional automated writing evaluation that focuses on holistic essay scoring, this field is more specific: it focuses on evaluating argumentative essays and offers specific feedback, including argumentation structures, argument strength trait score, etc. The focused and detailed evaluation is useful for helping students acquire important argumentation skill. In this paper we organize existing works around tasks, data and methods. We further experiment with BERT on representative datasets, aiming to provide up-to-date baselines for this field.
Approaches and Challenges in Robotic Perception for Table-top Rearrangement and Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Table-top Rearrangement and Planning is a challenging problem that relies heavily on an excellent perception stack. The perception stack involves observing and registering the 3D scene on the table, detecting what objects are on the table, and how to manipulate them. Consequently, it greatly influences the system's task-planning and motion-planning stacks that follow. We present a comprehensive overview and discuss the different challenges associated with the perception module. This work is a result of our extensive involvement in the ICRA 2022 Open Cloud Robot Table Organization Challenge, in which we stood third in the final rankings.
Identifying Fixation and Saccades in Virtual Reality
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Gaze recognition can significantly reduce the amount of eye movement data for a better understanding of cognitive and visual processing. Gaze recognition is an essential precondition for eye-based interaction applications in virtual reality. However, the three-dimensional characteristics of virtual reality environments also pose new challenges to existing recognition algorithms. Based on seven evaluation metrics and the Overall score (the mean of the seven normalized metric values), we obtain optimal parameters of three existing recognition algorithms (Velocity-Threshold Identification, Dispersion-Threshold Identification, and Velocity & Dispersion-Threshold Identification) and our modified Velocity & Dispersion-Threshold Identification algorithm. We compare the performance of these four algorithms with optimal parameters. The results show that our modified Velocity & Dispersion-Threshold Identification performs the best. The impact of interface complexity on classification results is also preliminarily explored. The results show that the algorithms are not sensitive to interface complexity.
Identifying synthetic voices qualities for conversational agents
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

The present study aims to explore user acceptance and perceptions toward different quality levels of synthetical voices. To achieve this, four voices have been exploited considering two main factors: the quality of the voices (low vs high) and their gender (male and female). 186 volunteers were recruited and subsequently allocated into four groups of different ages respec-tively, adolescents, young adults, middle-aged and seniors. After having randomly listened to each voice, participants were asked to fill the Virtual Agent Voice Acceptance Questionnaire (VAVAQ). Outcomes show that the two higher quality voices of Antonio and Giulia were more appreciated than the low-quality voices of Edoardo and Clara by the whole sample in terms of pragmatic, hedonic and attractiveness qualities attributed to the voices. Concerning preferences towards differently aged voices, it clearly appeared that they varied according to participants age' ranges examined. Furthermore, in terms of suitability to perform different tasks, participants considered Antonio and Giulia equally adapt for healthcare and front office jobs. Antonio was also judged to be significantly more qualified to accomplish protection and security tasks, while Edoardo was classified as the absolute least skilled in conducting household chores.
SRv6: Is There Anybody Out There?
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

Segment routing is a modern form of source-based routing, i.e., a routing technique where all or part of the routing decision is predetermined by the source or a hop on the path. Since initial standardization efforts in 2013, segment routing seems to have garnered substantial industry and operator support. Especially segment routing over IPv6 (SRv6) is advertised as having several advantages for easy deployment and flexibility in operations in networks. Many people, however, argue that the deployment of segment routing and SRv6 in particular poses a significant security threat if not done with the utmost care. In this paper we conduct a first empirical analysis of SRv6 deployment in the Internet. First, we analyze SRv6 behavior in an emulation environment and find that different SRv6 implementations have the potential to leak information to the outside. Second, we search for signs of SRv6 deployment in publicly available route collector data, but could not find any traces. Third, we run large-scale traceroute campaigns to investigate possible SRv6 deployments. In this first empirical study on SRv6 we are unable to find traces of SRv6 deployment even for companies that claim to have it deployed in their networks. This lack of leakage might be an indication of good security practices being followed by network operators when deploying SRv6.
Towards Development with Multi-Version Models: Detecting Merge Conflicts and Checking Well-Formedness
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

Developing complex software requires that multiple views and versions of the software can be developed in parallel and merged as supported by views and managed by version control systems. In this context, this paper considers monitoring merging and related consistency problems permanently at the level of models and abstract syntax to permit early and frequent conflict detection while developing in parallel. The presented approach introduces multi-version models based on typed graphs that permit to store changes and multiple versions in one graph in a compact form and allow (1) to study well-formedness for all versions without the need to extract each version individually, (2) to report all possible merge conflicts without the need to merge all pairs of versions, and (3) to report all violations of well-formedness conditions that will result for merges of any two versions independent of any merge decisions without the need to merge all pairs of versions. The paper defines the related concepts and algorithms operating on multi-version models, proves their correctness w.r.t.~the usually employed three-way-merge, and reports on preliminary experiments concerning the scalability.
Anatomy-aware Self-supervised Learning for Anomaly Detection in Chest Radiographs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Large numbers of labeled medical images are essential for the accurate detection of anomalies, but manual annotation is labor-intensive and time-consuming. Self-supervised learning (SSL) is a training method to learn data-specific features without manual annotation. Several SSL-based models have been employed in medical image anomaly detection. These SSL methods effectively learn representations in several field-specific images, such as natural and industrial product images. However, owing to the requirement of medical expertise, typical SSL-based models are inefficient in medical image anomaly detection. We present an SSL-based model that enables anatomical structure-based unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD). The model employs the anatomy-aware pasting (AnatPaste) augmentation tool. AnatPaste employs a threshold-based lung segmentation pretext task to create anomalies in normal chest radiographs, which are used for model pretraining. These anomalies are similar to real anomalies and help the model recognize them. We evaluate our model on three opensource chest radiograph datasets. Our model exhibit area under curves (AUC) of 92.1%, 78.7%, and 81.9%, which are the highest among existing UAD models. This is the first SSL model to employ anatomical information as a pretext task. AnatPaste can be applied in various deep learning models and downstream tasks. It can be employed for other modalities by fixing appropriate segmentation. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/jun-sato/AnatPaste.
Multi-modal Semantic SLAM for Complex Dynamic Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is one of the most essential techniques in many real-world robotic applications. The assumption of static environments is common in most SLAM algorithms, which however, is not the case for most applications. Recent work on semantic SLAM aims to understand the objects in an environment and distinguish dynamic information from a scene context by performing image-based segmentation. However, the segmentation results are often imperfect or incomplete, which can subsequently reduce the quality of mapping and the accuracy of localization. In this paper, we present a robust multi-modal semantic framework to solve the SLAM problem in complex and highly dynamic environments. We propose to learn a more powerful object feature representation and deploy the mechanism of looking and thinking twice to the backbone network, which leads to a better recognition result to our baseline instance segmentation model. Moreover, both geometric-only clustering and visual semantic information are combined to reduce the effect of segmentation error due to small-scale objects, occlusion and motion blur. Thorough experiments have been conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The results show that our method can precisely identify dynamic objects under recognition imperfection and motion blur. Moreover, the proposed SLAM framework is able to efficiently build a static dense map at a processing rate of more than 10 Hz, which can be implemented in many practical applications. Both training data and the proposed method is open sourced at https://github.com/wh200720041/MMS_SLAM.
NEPTUNE: Network- and GPU-aware Management of Serverless Functions at the Edge
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

Nowadays a wide range of applications is constrained by low-latency requirements that cloud infrastructures cannot meet. Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) has been proposed as the reference architecture for executing applications closer to users and reduce latency, but new challenges arise: edge nodes are resource-constrained, the workload can vary significantly since users are nomadic, and task complexity is increasing (e.g., machine learning inference). To overcome these problems, the paper presents NEPTUNE, a serverless-based framework for managing complex MEC solutions. NEPTUNE i) places functions on edge nodes according to user locations, ii) avoids the saturation of single nodes, iii) exploits GPUs when available, and iv) allocates resources (CPU cores) dynamically to meet foreseen execution times. A prototype, built on top of K3S, was used to evaluate NEPTUNE on a set of experiments that demonstrate a significant reduction in terms of response time, network overhead, and resource consumption compared to three state-of-the-art approaches.
ISA-bEL: Intelligent Search Algorithm based on Entity Linking
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Nowadays, the way in which the people interact with computers has changed. Text- or voice-based interfaces are being widely applied in different industries. Among the most used ways of processing the user input are those based on intents or retrieval algorithms. In these solutions, important information of the user could be lost in the process. For the proposed natural language processing pipeline the entities are going to take a principal role, under the assumption that entities are where the purpose of the user resides. Entities fed with context will be projected to a specific domain supported by a knowledge graph, resulting in what has been named as linked entities. These linked entities serve then as a key for searching a top level aggregation concept within our knowledge graph.
Object Detection with Spiking Neural Networks on Automotive Event Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Automotive embedded algorithms have very high constraints in terms of latency, accuracy and power consumption. In this work, we propose to train spiking neural networks (SNNs) directly on data coming from event cameras to design fast and efficient automotive embedded applications. Indeed, SNNs are more biologically realistic neural networks where neurons communicate using discrete and asynchronous spikes, a naturally energy-efficient and hardware friendly operating mode. Event data, which are binary and sparse in space and time, are therefore the ideal input for spiking neural networks. But to date, their performance was insufficient for automotive real-world problems, such as detecting complex objects in an uncontrolled environment. To address this issue, we took advantage of the latest advancements in matter of spike backpropagation - surrogate gradient learning, parametric LIF, SpikingJelly framework - and of our new \textit{voxel cube} event encoding to train 4 different SNNs based on popular deep learning networks: SqueezeNet, VGG, MobileNet, and DenseNet. As a result, we managed to increase the size and the complexity of SNNs usually considered in the literature. In this paper, we conducted experiments on two automotive event datasets, establishing new state-of-the-art classification results for spiking neural networks. Based on these results, we combined our SNNs with SSD to propose the first spiking neural networks capable of performing object detection on the complex GEN1 Automotive Detection event dataset.
Fatigue Prediction in Outdoor Running Conditions using Audio Data
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

Although running is a common leisure activity and a core training regiment for several athletes, between $29\%$ and $79\%$ of runners sustain an overuse injury each year. These injuries are linked to excessive fatigue, which alters how someone runs. In this work, we explore the feasibility of modelling the Borg received perception of exertion (RPE) scale (range: $[6-20]$), a well-validated subjective measure of fatigue, using audio data captured in realistic outdoor environments via smartphones attached to the runners' arms. Using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on log-Mel spectrograms, we obtain a mean absolute error of $2.35$ in subject-dependent experiments, demonstrating that audio can be effectively used to model fatigue, while being more easily and non-invasively acquired than by signals from other sensors.
Applying consensus and replication securely with FLAQR
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2022
Year: 2022

Availability is crucial to the security of distributed systems, but guaranteeing availability is hard, especially when participants in the system may act maliciously. Quorum replication protocols provide both integrity and availability: data and computation is replicated at multiple independent hosts, and a quorum of these hosts must agree on the output of all operations applied to the data. Unfortunately, these protocols have high overhead and can be difficult to calibrate for a specific application's needs. Ideally, developers could use high-level abstractions for consensus and replication to write fault-tolerant code by that is secure by construction. This paper presents Flow-Limited Authorization for Quorum Replication (FLAQR), a core calculus for building distributed applications with heterogeneous quorum replication protocols while enforcing end-to-end information security. Our type system ensures that well-typed FLAQR programs cannot_fail_ (experience an unrecoverable error) in ways that violate their type-level specifications. We present noninterference theorems that characterize FLAQR's confidentiality, integrity, and availability in the presence of consensus, replication, and failures, as well as a liveness theorem for the class of majority quorum protocols under a bounded number of faults.
Spike-based building blocks for performing logic operations using Spiking Neural Networks on SpiNNaker
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2022
Year: 2022

One of the most interesting and still growing scientific fields is neuromorphic engineering, which is focused on studying and designing hardware and software with the purpose of mimicking the basic principles of biological nervous systems. Currently, there are many research groups developing practical applications based on neuroscientific knowledge. This work provides researchers with a novel toolkit of building blocks based on Spiking Neural Networks that emulate the behavior of different logic gates. These could be very useful in many spike-based applications, since logic gates are the basis of digital circuits. The designs and models proposed are presented and implemented on a SpiNNaker hardware platform. Different experiments were performed in order to validate the expected behavior, and the obtained results are discussed. The functionality of traditional logic gates and the proposed blocks is studied, and the feasibility of the presented approach is discussed.
BLINK with Elasticsearch for Efficient Entity Linking in Business Conversations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

An Entity Linking system aligns the textual mentions of entities in a text to their corresponding entries in a knowledge base. However, deploying a neural entity linking system for efficient real-time inference in production environments is a challenging task. In this work, we present a neural entity linking system that connects the product and organization type entities in business conversations to their corresponding Wikipedia and Wikidata entries. The proposed system leverages Elasticsearch to ensure inference efficiency when deployed in a resource limited cloud machine, and obtains significant improvements in terms of inference speed and memory consumption while retaining high accuracy.
MixAugment & Mixup: Augmentation Methods for Facial Expression Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Automatic Facial Expression Recognition (FER) has attracted increasing attention in the last 20 years since facial expressions play a central role in human communication. Most FER methodologies utilize Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) that are powerful tools when it comes to data analysis. However, despite their power, these networks are prone to overfitting, as they often tend to memorize the training data. What is more, there are not currently a lot of in-the-wild (i.e. in unconstrained environment) large databases for FER. To alleviate this issue, a number of data augmentation techniques have been proposed. Data augmentation is a way to increase the diversity of available data by applying constrained transformations on the original data. One such technique, which has positively contributed to various classification tasks, is Mixup. According to this, a DNN is trained on convex combinations of pairs of examples and their corresponding labels. In this paper, we examine the effectiveness of Mixup for in-the-wild FER in which data have large variations in head poses, illumination conditions, backgrounds and contexts. We then propose a new data augmentation strategy which is based on Mixup, called MixAugment. According to this, the network is trained concurrently on a combination of virtual examples and real examples; all these examples contribute to the overall loss function. We conduct an extensive experimental study that proves the effectiveness of MixAugment over Mixup and various state-of-the-art methods. We further investigate the combination of dropout with Mixup and MixAugment, as well as the combination of other data augmentation techniques with MixAugment.
Foveated Rendering: Motivation, Taxonomy, and Research Directions
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2022
Year: 2022

With the recent interest in virtual reality and augmented reality, there is a newfound demand for displays that can provide high resolution with a wide field of view (FOV). However, such displays incur significantly higher costs for rendering the larger number of pixels. This poses the challenge of rendering realistic real-time images that have a wide FOV and high resolution using limited computing resources. The human visual system does not need every pixel to be rendered at a uniformly high quality. Foveated rendering methods provide perceptually high-quality images while reducing computational workload and are becoming a crucial component for large-scale rendering. In this paper, we present key motivations, research directions, and challenges for leveraging the limitations of the human visual system as they relate to foveated rendering. We provide a taxonomy to compare and contrast various foveated techniques based on key factors. We also review aliasing artifacts arising due to foveation methods and discuss several approaches that attempt to mitigate such effects. Finally, we present several open problems and possible future research directions that can further reduce computational costs while generating perceptually high-quality renderings.
Parsing Expression GLL
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2022
Year: 2022

This paper presents an extension of the GLL parsing algorithm for context-free grammars which also supports parsing expression grammars with ordered choice and lookahead. The new PEGLL algorithm retains support for unordered choice, and thus parses a common superset of context-free grammars and parsing expression grammars. As part of this work, the authors have modified an existing GLL parser-generator to support parsing expression grammars, adding operators for common parsing expressions and modifying the lexer algorithm to better support ordered choice.
On some studies of Fraud Detection Pipeline and related issues from the scope of Ensemble Learning and Graph-based Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

The UK anti-fraud charity Fraud Advisory Panel (FAP) in their review of 2016 estimates business costs of fraud at 144 billion, and its individual counterpart at 9.7 billion. Banking, insurance, manufacturing, and government are the most common industries affected by fraud activities. Designing an efficient fraud detection system could avoid losing the money; however, building this system is challenging due to many difficult problems, e.g.imbalanced data, computing costs, etc. Over the last three decades, there are various research relates to fraud detection but no agreement on what is the best approach to build the fraud detection system. In this thesis, we aim to answer some questions such as i) how to build a simplified and effective Fraud Detection System that not only easy to implement but also providing reliable results and our proposed Fraud Detection Pipeline is a potential backbone of the system and is easy to be extended or upgraded, ii) when to update models in our system (and keep the accuracy stable) in order to reduce the cost of updating process, iii) how to deal with an extreme imbalance in big data classification problem, e.g. fraud detection, since this is the gap between two difficult problems, iv) further, how to apply graph-based semi-supervised learning to detect fraudulent transactions.