OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Report on the energy consumption of the IOTA 2.0 prototype network (GoShimmer 0.8.3) under different testing scenarios
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

The high energy consumption of proof of work-based distributed ledgers has become an important environmental concern. Bitcoin, for example, consumes as much energy in a year as a developed country. Alternative consensus mechanisms, such as proof of stake, have been shown to use drastically less energy than proof of work-based DLTs. For example, the IOTA DLT, built upon a directed acyclic graph (DAG) architecture, uses an alternative consensus mechanism that requires significantly less energy than other DLTs. Because the (DLT) space is constantly and rapidly evolving, the question of how much energy DLTs actually consume demands to be continuously studied and answered. Previous research into the energy consumption of the IOTA network has shown that an optimization in the overall protocol correlates to an optimization in energy consumption. The planned IOTA 2.0 update, built upon the GoShimmer research prototype, promises to further optimize the protocol by removing the network's centralized Coordinator. This report presents the results of measuring the energy consumption of a private GoShimmer network while comparing these findings to previous research into the current mainnet, which is called Chrysalis. The main findings of this report are that the IOTA 2.0 research prototype shows both improvements and increase in the energy consumption metrics compared to the Chrysalis network. Additionally, this report defines a model to estimate the total annual energy consumption of an IOTA network. This model should be significant for future research as it enables a way to estimate the total cost of running the IOTA network as well as its carbon emissions. Moreover, having an annual power consumption metric allows for better objective comparisons to different DLTs.
Unsupervised Anomaly Detection for Auditing Data and Impact of Categorical Encodings
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we introduce the Vehicle Claims dataset, consisting of fraudulent insurance claims for automotive repairs. The data belongs to the more broad category of Auditing data, which includes also Journals and Network Intrusion data. Insurance claim data are distinctively different from other auditing data (such as network intrusion data) in their high number of categorical attributes. We tackle the common problem of missing benchmark datasets for anomaly detection: datasets are mostly confidential, and the public tabular datasets do not contain relevant and sufficient categorical attributes. Therefore, a large-sized dataset is created for this purpose and referred to as Vehicle Claims (VC) dataset. The dataset is evaluated on shallow and deep learning methods. Due to the introduction of categorical attributes, we encounter the challenge of encoding them for the large dataset. As One Hot encoding of high cardinal dataset invokes the "curse of dimensionality", we experiment with GEL encoding and embedding layer for representing categorical attributes. Our work compares competitive learning, reconstruction-error, density estimation and contrastive learning approaches for Label, One Hot, GEL encoding and embedding layer to handle categorical values.
SPAD-Based Optical Wireless Communication with ACO-OFDM
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

The sensitivity of the optical wireless communication (OWC) can be effectively improved by employing the highly sensitive single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) arrays. However, the nonlinear distortion introduced by the dead time strongly limits the throughput of the SPAD-based OWC systems. Optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) can be employed in the systems with SPAD arrays to improve the spectral efficiency. In this work, a theoretical performance analysis of SPAD-based OWC system with asymmetrically-clipped optical OFDM (ACO-OFDM) is presented. The impact of the SPAD nonlinearity on the system performance is investigated. In addition, the comparison of the considered scheme with direct-current-biased optical OFDM (DCO-OFDM) is presented showing the distinct reliable operation regimes of the two schemes. In the low power regimes, ACO-OFDM outperforms DCO-OFDM; whereas, the latter is more preferable in the high power regimes.
Food Ingredients Recognition through Multi-label Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

The ability to recognize various food-items in a generic food plate is a key determinant for an automated diet assessment system. This study motivates the need for automated diet assessment and proposes a framework to achieve this. Within this framework, we focus on one of the core functionalities to visually recognize various ingredients. To this end, we employed a deep multi-label learning approach and evaluated several state-of-the-art neural networks for their ability to detect an arbitrary number of ingredients in a dish image. The models evaluated in this work follow a definite meta-structure, consisting of an encoder and a decoder component. Two distinct decoding schemes, one based on global average pooling and the other on attention mechanism, are evaluated and benchmarked. Whereas for encoding, several well-known architectures, including DenseNet, EfficientNet, MobileNet, Inception and Xception, were employed. We present promising preliminary results for deep learning-based ingredients detection, using a challenging dataset, Nutrition5K, and establish a strong baseline for future explorations.
Weakly Supervised Data Augmentation Through Prompting for Dialogue Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Dialogue understanding tasks often necessitate abundant annotated data to achieve good performance and that presents challenges in low-resource settings. To alleviate this barrier, we explore few-shot data augmentation for dialogue understanding by prompting large pre-trained language models and present a novel approach that iterates on augmentation quality by applying weakly-supervised filters. We evaluate our methods on the emotion and act classification tasks in DailyDialog and the intent classification task in Facebook Multilingual Task-Oriented Dialogue. Models fine-tuned on our augmented data mixed with few-shot ground truth data are able to approach or surpass existing state-of-the-art performance on both datasets. For DailyDialog specifically, using 10% of the ground truth data we outperform the current state-of-the-art model which uses 100% of the data.
Causal Information Bottleneck Boosts Adversarial Robustness of Deep Neural Network
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

The information bottleneck (IB) method is a feasible defense solution against adversarial attacks in deep learning. However, this method suffers from the spurious correlation, which leads to the limitation of its further improvement of adversarial robustness. In this paper, we incorporate the causal inference into the IB framework to alleviate such a problem. Specifically, we divide the features obtained by the IB method into robust features (content information) and non-robust features (style information) via the instrumental variables to estimate the causal effects. With the utilization of such a framework, the influence of non-robust features could be mitigated to strengthen the adversarial robustness. We make an analysis of the effectiveness of our proposed method. The extensive experiments in MNIST, FashionMNIST, and CIFAR-10 show that our method exhibits the considerable robustness against multiple adversarial attacks. Our code would be released.
Dynamic Speech Endpoint Detection with Regression Targets
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

Interactive voice assistants have been widely used as input interfaces in various scenarios, e.g. on smart homes devices, wearables and on AR devices. Detecting the end of a speech query, i.e. speech end-pointing, is an important task for voice assistants to interact with users. Traditionally, speech end-pointing is based on pure classification methods along with arbitrary binary targets. In this paper, we propose a novel regression-based speech end-pointing model, which enables an end-pointer to adjust its detection behavior based on context of user queries. Specifically, we present a pause modeling method and show its effectiveness for dynamic end-pointing. Based on our experiments with vendor-collected smartphone and wearables speech queries, our strategy shows a better trade-off between endpointing latency and accuracy, compared to the traditional classification-based method. We further discuss the benefits of this model and generalization of the framework in the paper.
Classification and Self-Supervised Regression of Arrhythmic ECG Signals Using Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Interpretation of electrocardiography (ECG) signals is required for diagnosing cardiac arrhythmia. Recently, machine learning techniques have been applied for automated computer-aided diagnosis. Machine learning tasks can be divided into regression and classification. Regression can be used for noise and artifacts removal as well as resolve issues of missing data from low sampling frequency. Classification task concerns the prediction of output diagnostic classes according to expert-labeled input classes. In this work, we propose a deep neural network model capable of solving regression and classification tasks. Moreover, we combined the two approaches, using unlabeled and labeled data, to train the model. We tested the model on the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database. Our method showed high effectiveness in detecting cardiac arrhythmia based on modified Lead II ECG records, as well as achieved high quality of ECG signal approximation. For the former, our method attained overall accuracy of 87:33% and balanced accuracy of 80:54%, on par with reference approaches. For the latter, application of self-supervised learning allowed for training without the need for expert labels. The regression model yielded satisfactory performance with fairly accurate prediction of QRS complexes. Transferring knowledge from regression to the classification task, our method attained higher overall accuracy of 87:78%.
Leveraging Open Data and Task Augmentation to Automated Behavioral Coding of Psychotherapy Conversations in Low-Resource Scenarios
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

In psychotherapy interactions, the quality of a session is assessed by codifying the communicative behaviors of participants during the conversation through manual observation and annotation. Developing computational approaches for automated behavioral coding can reduce the burden on human coders and facilitate the objective evaluation of the intervention. In the real world, however, implementing such algorithms is associated with data sparsity challenges since privacy concerns lead to limited available in-domain data. In this paper, we leverage a publicly available conversation-based dataset and transfer knowledge to the low-resource behavioral coding task by performing an intermediate language model training via meta-learning. We introduce a task augmentation method to produce a large number of "analogy tasks" - tasks similar to the target one - and demonstrate that the proposed framework predicts target behaviors more accurately than all the other baseline models.
ANACONDA: An Improved Dynamic Regret Algorithm for Adaptive Non-Stationary Dueling Bandits
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

We study the problem of non-stationary dueling bandits and provide the first adaptive dynamic regret algorithm for this problem. The only two existing attempts in this line of work fall short across multiple dimensions, including pessimistic measures of non-stationary complexity and non-adaptive parameter tuning that requires knowledge of the number of preference changes. We develop an elimination-based rescheduling algorithm to overcome these shortcomings and show a near-optimal $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{S^{\texttt{CW}} T})$ dynamic regret bound, where $S^{\texttt{CW}}$ is the number of times the Condorcet winner changes in $T$ rounds. This yields the first near-optimal dynamic regret algorithm for unknown $S^{\texttt{CW}}$. We further study other related notions of non-stationarity for which we also prove near-optimal dynamic regret guarantees under additional assumptions on the underlying preference model.
The Championship Simulator: Architectural Simulation for Education and Competition
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2022
Year: 2022

Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the microarchitectural complexity of processors. This increase in complexity presents a twofold challenge for the field of computer architecture. First, no individual architect can fully comprehend the complexity of the entire microarchitecture of the core. This leads to increasingly specialized architects, who treat parts of the core outside their particular expertise as black boxes. Second, with increasing complexity, the field becomes decreasingly accessible to new students of the field. When learning core microarchitecture, new students must first learn the big picture of how the system works in order to understand how the pieces all fit together. The tools used to study microarchitecture experience a similar struggle. As with the microarchitectures they simulate, an increase in complexity reduces accessibility to new users. In this work, we present ChampSim. ChampSim uses a modular design and configurable structure to achieve a low barrier to entry into the field of microarchitecural simulation. ChampSim has shown itself to be useful in multiple areas of research, competition, and education. In this way, we seek to promote access and inclusion despite the increasing complexity of the field of computer architecture.
Enhancing Product Safety in E-Commerce with NLP
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Ensuring safety of the products offered to the customers is of paramount importance to any e- commerce platform. Despite stringent quality and safety checking of products listed on these platforms, occasionally customers might receive a product that can pose a safety issue arising out of its use. In this paper, we present an innovative mechanism of how a large scale multinational e-commerce platform, Zalando, uses Natural Language Processing techniques to assist timely investigation of the potentially unsafe products mined directly from customer written claims in unstructured plain text. We systematically describe the types of safety issues that concern Zalando customers. We demonstrate how we map this core business problem into a supervised text classification problem with highly imbalanced, noisy, multilingual data in a AI-in-the-loop setup with a focus on Key Performance Indicator (KPI) driven evaluation. Finally, we present detailed ablation studies to show a comprehensive comparison between different classification techniques. We conclude the work with how this NLP model was deployed.
Deploying a Retrieval based Response Model for Task Oriented Dialogues
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Task-oriented dialogue systems in industry settings need to have high conversational capability, be easily adaptable to changing situations and conform to business constraints. This paper describes a 3-step procedure to develop a conversational model that satisfies these criteria and can efficiently scale to rank a large set of response candidates. First, we provide a simple algorithm to semi-automatically create a high-coverage template set from historic conversations without any annotation. Second, we propose a neural architecture that encodes the dialogue context and applicable business constraints as profile features for ranking the next turn. Third, we describe a two-stage learning strategy with self-supervised training, followed by supervised fine-tuning on limited data collected through a human-in-the-loop platform. Finally, we describe offline experiments and present results of deploying our model with human-in-the-loop to converse with live customers online.
Can Transformer Attention Spread Give Insights Into Uncertainty of Detected and Tracked Objects?
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Transformers have recently been utilized to perform object detection and tracking in the context of autonomous driving. One unique characteristic of these models is that attention weights are computed in each forward pass, giving insights into the model's interior, in particular, which part of the input data it deemed interesting for the given task. Such an attention matrix with the input grid is available for each detected (or tracked) object in every transformer decoder layer. In this work, we investigate the distribution of these attention weights: How do they change through the decoder layers and through the lifetime of a track? Can they be used to infer additional information about an object, such as a detection uncertainty? Especially in unstructured environments, or environments that were not common during training, a reliable measure of detection uncertainty is crucial to decide whether the system can still be trusted or not.
Modeling the Graphotactics of Low-Resource Languages Using Sequential GANs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been shown to aid in the creation of artificial data in situations where large amounts of real data are difficult to come by. This issue is especially salient in the computational linguistics space, where researchers are often tasked with modeling the complex morphologic and grammatical processes of low-resource languages. This paper will discuss the implementation and testing of a GAN that attempts to model and reproduce the graphotactics of a language using only 100 example strings. These artificial, yet graphotactically compliant, strings are meant to aid in modeling the morphological inflection of low-resource languages.
$N$-gram Is Back: Residual Learning of Neural Text Generation with $n$-gram Language Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

$N$-gram language models (LM) have been largely superseded by neural LMs as the latter exhibits better performance. However, we find that $n$-gram models can achieve satisfactory performance on a large proportion of testing cases, indicating they have already captured abundant knowledge of the language with relatively low computational cost. With this observation, we propose to learn a neural LM that fits the residual between an $n$-gram LM and the real-data distribution. The combination of $n$-gram and neural LMs not only allows the neural part to focus on the deeper understanding of language but also provides a flexible way to customize an LM by switching the underlying $n$-gram model without changing the neural model. Experimental results on three typical language tasks (i.e., language modeling, machine translation, and summarization) demonstrate that our approach attains additional performance gains over popular standalone neural models consistently. We also show that our approach allows for effective domain adaptation by simply switching to a domain-specific $n$-gram model, without any extra training. Our code is released at https://github.com/ghrua/NgramRes.
Towards Automatically Extracting UML Class Diagrams from Natural Language Specifications
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

In model-driven engineering (MDE), UML class diagrams serve as a way to plan and communicate between developers. However, it is complex and resource-consuming. We propose an automated approach for the extraction of UML class diagrams from natural language software specifications. To develop our approach, we create a dataset of UML class diagrams and their English specifications with the help of volunteers. Our approach is a pipeline of steps consisting of the segmentation of the input into sentences, the classification of the sentences, the generation of UML class diagram fragments from sentences, and the composition of these fragments into one UML class diagram. We develop a quantitative testing framework specific to UML class diagram extraction. Our approach yields low precision and recall but serves as a benchmark for future research.
Two-stage dimensional emotion recognition by fusing predictions of acoustic and text networks using SVM
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

Automatic speech emotion recognition (SER) by a computer is a critical component for more natural human-machine interaction. As in human-human interaction, the capability to perceive emotion correctly is essential to take further steps in a particular situation. One issue in SER is whether it is necessary to combine acoustic features with other data such as facial expressions, text, and motion capture. This research proposes to combine acoustic and text information by applying a late-fusion approach consisting of two steps. First, acoustic and text features are trained separately in deep learning systems. Second, the prediction results from the deep learning systems are fed into a support vector machine (SVM) to predict the final regression score. Furthermore, the task in this research is dimensional emotion modeling because it can enable a deeper analysis of affective states. Experimental results show that this two-stage, late-fusion approach, obtains higher performance than that of any one-stage processing, with a linear correlation from one-stage to two-stage processing. This late-fusion approach improves previous early fusion results measured in concordance correlation coefficients score.
Parallel Gated Neural Network With Attention Mechanism For Speech Enhancement
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

Deep learning algorithm are increasingly used for speech enhancement (SE). In supervised methods, global and local information is required for accurate spectral mapping. A key restriction is often poor capture of key contextual information. To leverage long-term for target speakers and compensate distortions of cleaned speech, this paper adopts a sequence-to-sequence (S2S) mapping structure and proposes a novel monaural speech enhancement system, consisting of a Feature Extraction Block (FEB), a Compensation Enhancement Block (ComEB) and a Mask Block (MB). In the FEB a U-net block is used to extract abstract features using complex-valued spectra with one path to suppress the background noise in the magnitude domain using masking methods and the MB takes magnitude features from the FEBand compensates the lost complex-domain features produced from ComEB to restore the final cleaned speech. Experiments are conducted on the Librispeech dataset and results show that the proposed model obtains better performance than recent models in terms of ESTOI and PESQ scores.