OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Co-clustering Vertices and Hyperedges via Spectral Hypergraph Partitioning
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2021
Year: 2021

We propose a novel method to co-cluster the vertices and hyperedges of hypergraphs with edge-dependent vertex weights (EDVWs). In this hypergraph model, the contribution of every vertex to each of its incident hyperedges is represented through an edge-dependent weight, conferring the model higher expressivity than the classical hypergraph. In our method, we leverage random walks with EDVWs to construct a hypergraph Laplacian and use its spectral properties to embed vertices and hyperedges in a common space. We then cluster these embeddings to obtain our proposed co-clustering method, of particular relevance in applications requiring the simultaneous clustering of data entities and features. Numerical experiments using real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach in comparison with state-of-the-art alternatives.
Channel Estimation and Data Detection Analysis of Massive MIMO with 1-Bit ADCs
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

We present an analytical framework for the channel estimation and the data detection in massive multiple-input multiple-output uplink systems with 1-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and i.i.d. Rayleigh fading. First, we provide closed-form expressions of the mean squared error (MSE) of the channel estimation considering the state-of-the-art linear minimum MSE estimator and the class of scaled least-squares estimators. For the data detection, we provide closed-form expressions of the expected value and the variance of the estimated symbols when maximum ratio combining is adopted, which can be exploited to efficiently implement minimum distance detection and, potentially, to design the set of transmit symbols. Our analytical findings explicitly depend on key system parameters such as the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the number of user equipments, and the pilot length, thus enabling a precise characterization of the performance of the channel estimation and the data detection with 1-bit ADCs. The proposed analysis highlights a fundamental SNR trade-off, according to which operating at the right noise level significantly enhances the system performance.
Conditional Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Text Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we propose conditional adversarial networks (CANs), a framework that explores the relationship between the shared features and the label predictions to impose more discriminability to the shared features, for multi-domain text classification (MDTC). The proposed CAN introduces a conditional domain discriminator to model the domain variance in both shared feature representations and class-aware information simultaneously and adopts entropy conditioning to guarantee the transferability of the shared features. We provide theoretical analysis for the CAN framework, showing that CAN's objective is equivalent to minimizing the total divergence among multiple joint distributions of shared features and label predictions. Therefore, CAN is a theoretically sound adversarial network that discriminates over multiple distributions. Evaluation results on two MDTC benchmarks show that CAN outperforms prior methods. Further experiments demonstrate that CAN has a good ability to generalize learned knowledge to unseen domains.
Adaptable Deformable Convolutions for Semantic Segmentation of Fisheye Images in Autonomous Driving Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems rely heavily on perception tasks such as semantic segmentation where images are captured from large field of view (FoV) cameras. State-of-the-art works have made considerable progress toward applying Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to standard (rectilinear) images. However, the large FoV cameras used in autonomous vehicles produce fisheye images characterized by strong geometric distortion. This work demonstrates that a CNN trained on standard images can be readily adapted to fisheye images, which is crucial in real-world applications where time-consuming real-time data transformation must be avoided. Our adaptation protocol mainly relies on modifying the support of the convolutions by using their deformable equivalents on top of pre-existing layers. We prove that tuning an optimal support only requires a limited amount of labeled fisheye images, as a small number of training samples is sufficient to significantly improve an existing model's performance on wide-angle images. Furthermore, we show that finetuning the weights of the network is not necessary to achieve high performance once the deformable components are learned. Finally, we provide an in-depth analysis of the effect of the deformable convolutions, bringing elements of discussion on the behavior of CNN models.
On Single-User Interactive Beam Alignment in Next Generation Systems: A Deep Learning Viewpoint
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Communication in high frequencies such as millimeter wave and terahertz suffer from high path-loss and intense shadowing which necessitates beamforming for reliable data transmission. On the other hand, at high frequencies the channels are sparse and consist of few spatial clusters. Therefore, beam alignment (BA) strategies are used to find the direction of these channel clusters and adjust the width of the beam used for data transmission. In this work, a single-user uplink scenario where the channel has one dominant cluster is considered. It is assumed that the user transmits a set of BA packets over a fixed duration. Meanwhile, the base-station (BS) uses different probing beams to scan different angular regions. Since the BS measurements are noisy, it is not possible to find a narrow beam that includes the angle of arrival (AoA) of the user with probability one. Therefore, the BS allocates a narrow beam to the user which includes the AoA of the user with a predetermined error probability while minimizing the expected beamwidth of the allocated beam. Due to intractability of this noisy BA problem, here this problem is posed as an end-to-end optimization of a deep neural network (DNN) and effects of different loss functions are discussed and investigated. It is observed that the proposed DNN based BA, at high SNRs, achieves a performance close to that of the optimal BA when there is no-noise and for all SNRs, outperforms state-of-the-art.
CDA: a Cost Efficient Content-based Multilingual Web Document Aligner
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

We introduce a Content-based Document Alignment approach (CDA), an efficient method to align multilingual web documents based on content in creating parallel training data for machine translation (MT) systems operating at the industrial level. CDA works in two steps: (i) projecting documents of a web domain to a shared multilingual space; then (ii) aligning them based on the similarity of their representations in such space. We leverage lexical translation models to build vector representations using TF-IDF. CDA achieves performance comparable with state-of-the-art systems in the WMT-16 Bilingual Document Alignment Shared Task benchmark while operating in multilingual space. Besides, we created two web-scale datasets to examine the robustness of CDA in an industrial setting involving up to 28 languages and millions of documents. The experiments show that CDA is robust, cost-effective, and is significantly superior in (i) processing large and noisy web data and (ii) scaling to new and low-resourced languages.
Discussion Tracker: Supporting Teacher Learning about Students' Collaborative Argumentation in High School Classrooms
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Teaching collaborative argumentation is an advanced skill that many K-12 teachers struggle to develop. To address this, we have developed Discussion Tracker, a classroom discussion analytics system based on novel algorithms for classifying argument moves, specificity, and collaboration. Results from a classroom deployment indicate that teachers found the analytics useful, and that the underlying classifiers perform with moderate to substantial agreement with humans.
An unbiased ray-marching transmittance estimator
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2021
Year: 2021

We present an in-depth analysis of the sources of variance in state-of-the-art unbiased volumetric transmittance estimators, and propose several new methods for improving their efficiency. These combine to produce a single estimator that is universally optimal relative to prior work, with up to several orders of magnitude lower variance at the same cost, and has zero variance for any ray with non-varying extinction. We first reduce the variance of truncated power-series estimators using a novel efficient application of U-statistics. We then greatly reduce the average expansion order of the power series and redistribute density evaluations to filter the optical depth estimates with an equidistant sampling comb. Combined with the use of an online control variate built from a sampled mean density estimate, the resulting estimator effectively performs ray marching most of the time while using rarely-sampled higher order terms to correct the bias.
End-to-end neural network approach to 3D reservoir simulation and adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Reservoir simulation and adaptation (also known as history matching) are typically considered as separate problems. While a set of models are aimed at the solution of the forward simulation problem assuming all initial geological parameters are known, the other set of models adjust geological parameters under the fixed forward simulation model to fit production data. This results in many difficulties for both reservoir engineers and developers of new efficient computation schemes. We present a unified approach to reservoir simulation and adaptation problems. A single neural network model allows a forward pass from initial geological parameters of the 3D reservoir model through dynamic state variables to well's production rates and backward gradient propagation to any model inputs and variables. The model fitting and geological parameters adaptation both become the optimization problem over specific parts of the same neural network model. Standard gradient-based optimization schemes can be used to find the optimal solution. Using real-world oilfield model and historical production rates we demonstrate that the suggested approach allows reservoir simulation and history matching with a benefit of several orders of magnitude simulation speed-up. Finally, to propagate this research we open-source a Python-based framework DeepField that allows standard processing of reservoir models and reproducing the approach presented in this paper.
Mesh Manifold based Riemannian Motion Planning for Omnidirectional Micro Aerial Vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

This paper presents a novel on-line path planning method that enables aerial robots to interact with surfaces. We present a solution to the problem of finding trajectories that drive a robot towards a surface and move along it. Triangular meshes are used as a surface map representation that is free of fixed discretization and allows for very large workspaces. We propose to leverage planar parametrization methods to obtain a lower-dimensional topologically equivalent representation of the original surface. Furthermore, we interpret the original surface and its lower-dimensional representation as manifold approximations that allow the use of Riemannian Motion Policies (RMPs), resulting in an efficient, versatile, and elegant motion generation framework. We compare against several Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT) planners, a customized CHOMP variant, and the discrete geodesic algorithm. Using extensive simulations on real-world data we show that the proposed planner can reliably plan high-quality near-optimal trajectories at minimal computational cost. The accompanying multimedia attachment demonstrates feasibility on a real OMAV. The obtained paths show less than 10% deviation from the theoretical optimum while facilitating reactive re-planning at kHz refresh rates, enabling flying robots to perform motion planning for interaction with complex surfaces.
GenFloor: Interactive Generative Space Layout System via Encoded Tree Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2021
Year: 2021

Automated floorplanning or space layout planning has been a long-standing NP-hard problem in the field of computer-aided design, with applications in integrated circuits, architecture, urbanism, and operational research. In this paper, we introduce GenFloor, an interactive design system that takes geometrical, topological, and performance goals and constraints as input and provides optimized spatial design solutions as output. As part of our work, we propose three novel permutation methods for existing space layout graph representations, namely O-Tree and B*-Tree representations. We implement our proposed floorplanning methods as a package for Dynamo, a visual programming tool, with a custom GUI and additional evaluation functionalities to facilitate designers in their generative design workflow. Furthermore, we illustrate the performance of GenFloor in two sets of case-study experiments for residential floorplanning tasks by (a) measuring the ability of the proposed system to find a known optimal solution, and (b) observing how the system can generate diverse floorplans while addressing given a constant residential design problem. Our results indicate convergence to the global optimum is achieved while offering a diverse set of solutions of a residential floorplan corresponding to the Pareto-optimums of the solution landscape.
Design of Ciphers based on the Geometric Structure of the Möbius Plane
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Till now geometric structures don't play a major role in cryptography. Gilbert, MacWilliams and Sloane introduced in 1974 an authentication scheme in the projective plane and showed its perfectness in the sense of the definition of Shannon. In this paper we will show that this authentication scheme also fulfills the requirement of completeness according to Kam and Davida and we will extend the application of geometric structures in cryptography by introducing an encryption scheme in the Möbius plane. We will further examine its properties, showing that it also fulfills the requirement of completeness and Shannon's requirement of perfectness in first approximation. The results of this paper can be used to define similar encryption schemes in the circle geometries of Laguerre and Minkowski.
SSFG: Stochastically Scaling Features and Gradients for Regularizing Graph Convolutional Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Graph convolutional networks have been successfully applied in various graph-based tasks. In a typical graph convolutional layer, node features are updated by aggregating neighborhood information. Repeatedly applying graph convolutions can cause the oversmoothing issue, i.e., node features at deep layers converge to similar values. Previous studies have suggested that oversmoothing is one of the major issues that restrict the performance of graph convolutional networks. In this paper, we propose a stochastic regularization method to tackle the oversmoothing problem. In the proposed method, we stochastically scale features and gradients (SSFG) by a factor sampled from a probability distribution in the training procedure. By explicitly applying a scaling factor to break feature convergence, the oversmoothing issue is alleviated. We show that applying stochastic scaling at the gradient level is complementary to that applied at the feature level to improve the overall performance. Our method does not increase the number of trainable parameters. When used together with ReLU, our SSFG can be seen as a stochastic ReLU activation function. We experimentally validate our SSFG regularization method on three commonly used types of graph networks. Extensive experimental results on seven benchmark datasets for four graph-based tasks demonstrate that our SSFG regularization is effective in improving the overall performance of the baseline graph networks.
Mechanism Design Powered by Social Interactions
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2021
Year: 2021

Mechanism design has traditionally assumed that the set of participants are fixed and known to the mechanism (the market owner) in advance. However, in practice, the market owner can only directly reach a small number of participants (her neighbours). Hence the owner often needs costly promotions to recruit more participants in order to get desirable outcomes such as social welfare or revenue maximization. In this paper, we propose to incentivize existing participants to invite their neighbours to attract more participants. However, they would not invite each other if they are competitors. We discuss how to utilize the conflict of interest between the participants to incentivize them to invite each other to form larger markets. We will highlight the early solutions and open the floor for discussing the fundamental open questions in the settings of auctions, coalitional games, matching and voting.
Safe and Uncertainty-Aware Robotic Motion Planning Techniques for Agile On-Orbit Assembly
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

As access to space and robotic autonomy capabilities move forward, there is simultaneously a growing interest in deploying large, complex space structures to provide new on-orbit capabilities. New space-borne observatories, large orbital outposts, and even futuristic on-orbit manufacturing will be enabled by robotic assembly of space structures using techniques like on-orbit additive manufacturing which can provide flexibility in constructing and even repairing complex hardware. However, the dynamics underlying the robotic assembler during manipulation may operate under inertial uncertainties. Thus, inertial estimation of the robot and the manipulated component system must be considered during structural assembly. The contribution of this work is to address both the motion planning and control for robotic assembly with consideration of the inertial estimation of the combined free-flying robotic assembler and additively manufactured component system. Specifically, the Linear Quadratic Regulator Rapidly-Exploring Randomized Trees (LQR-RRT*) and dynamically feasible path smoothing are used to obtain obstacle-free trajectories for the system. Further, model learning is incorporated explicitly into the planning stages via approximation of the continuous system and accompanying reward of performing safe, objective-oriented motion. Remaining uncertainty can then be dealt with using robust tube model predictive control. By obtaining controlled trajectories that consider both obstacle avoidance and learning of the inertial properties of the free-flyer and manipulated component system, the free-flyer rapidly considers and plans the construction of space structures with enhanced system knowledge. The approach naturally generalizes to repairing, refueling, and re-provisioning space structure components while providing optimal collision-free trajectories under e.g., inertial uncertainty.
Simplest Non-Regular Deterministic Context-Free Language
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2021
Year: 2021

We introduce a new notion of C-simple problems for a class C of decision problems (i.e. languages), w.r.t. a particular reduction. A problem is C-simple if it can be reduced to each problem in C. This can be viewed as a conceptual counterpart to C-hard problems to which all problems in C reduce. Our concrete example is the class of non-regular deterministic context-free languages (DCFL'), with a truth-table reduction by Mealy machines (which proves to be a preorder). The main technical result is a proof that the DCFL' language $L=\{0^n1^n; n\geq 1\}$ is DCFL'-simple, which can thus be viewed as the simplest problem in the class DCFL'. This result has already provided an application, to the computational model of neural networks 1ANN at the first level of analog neuron hierarchy. This model was proven not to recognize $L$, by using a specialized technical argument that can hardly be generalized to other languages in DCFL'. By the result that $L$ is DCFL'-simple, w.r.t. the reduction that can be implemented by 1ANN, we immediately obtain that 1ANN cannot accept any language in DCFL'. It thus seems worthwhile to explore if looking for C-simple problems in other classes C under suitable reductions could provide effective tools for expanding the lower-bound results known for single problems to the whole classes of problems.
Retrain or not retrain: Conformal test martingales for change-point detection
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

We argue for supplementing the process of training a prediction algorithm by setting up a scheme for detecting the moment when the distribution of the data changes and the algorithm needs to be retrained. Our proposed schemes are based on exchangeability martingales, i.e., processes that are martingales under any exchangeable distribution for the data. Our method, based on conformal prediction, is general and can be applied on top of any modern prediction algorithm. Its validity is guaranteed, and in this paper we make first steps in exploring its efficiency.
Spotting Silent Buffer Overflows in Execution Trace through Graph Neural Network Assisted Data Flow Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

A software vulnerability could be exploited without any visible symptoms. When no source code is available, although such silent program executions could cause very serious damage, the general problem of analyzing silent yet harmful executions is still an open problem. In this work, we propose a graph neural network (GNN) assisted data flow analysis method for spotting silent buffer overflows in execution traces. The new method combines a novel graph structure (denoted DFG+) beyond data-flow graphs, a tool to extract {\tt DFG+} from execution traces, and a modified Relational Graph Convolutional Network as the GNN model to be trained. The evaluation results show that a well-trained model can be used to analyze vulnerabilities in execution traces (of previously-unseen programs) without support of any source code. Our model achieves 94.39\% accuracy on the test data and successfully locates 29 out of 30 real-world silent buffer overflow vulnerabilities. Leveraging deep learning, the proposed method is, to our best knowledge, the first general-purpose analysis method for silent buffer overflows. It is also the first method to spot silent buffer overflows in global variables, stack variables, or heap variables without crossing the boundary of allocated chunks.
Social Networks Analysis to Retrieve Critical Comments on Online Platforms
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2021
Year: 2021

Social networks are rich source of data to analyze user habits in all aspects of life. User's behavior is decisive component of a health system in various countries. Promoting good behavior can improve the public health significantly. In this work, we develop a new model for social network analysis by using text analysis approach. We define each user reaction to global pandemic with analyzing his online behavior. Clustering a group of online users with similar habits, help to find how virus spread in different societies. Promoting the healthy life style in the high risk online users of social media have significant effect on public health and reducing the effect of global pandemic. In this work, we introduce a new approach to clustering habits based on user activities on social media in the time of pandemic and recommend a machine learning model to promote health in the online platforms.