OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Path Loss and Shadowing Modeling for Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications in Terrestrial TV Band
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

Vehicle platooning is considered as one of the key use cases for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications. However, its benefits can be realized only with highly reliable wireless transmission. As the 5.9GHz frequency band used for V2V suffers from high congestion, in this paper, we consider the use of the terrestrial TV frequencies for intra-platoon communications. In order to be able to evaluate the potential of the new bands fully, propagation models for V2V communications at such frequencies are needed. Therefore, this paper reports new V2V propagation measurements and their modeling results. Particularly, we propose a Double Slope Double Shadowing model as the most accurate one, based on a comparison of various models using the Bayesian Information Criteria. We also investigate the space-time autocorrelation properties of the shadowing, which turned out to be dependent on the speed of vehicles. The proposed path loss and shadowing model differs from the ones proposed for the 5.9GHz band. Mostly, in favor of the TV band, as shown by, e.g., no statistically significant impact of a blocking car.
Developers' Privacy Education: A game framework to stimulate secure coding behaviour
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Software privacy provides the ability to limit data access to unauthorized parties. Privacy is achieved through different means, such as implementing GDPR into software applications. However, previous research revealed that the lack of poor coding behaviour leads to privacy breaches such as personal data breaching. Therefore, this research proposes a novel game framework as a training intervention enabling developers to implement privacy-preserving software systems. The proposed framework was empirically investigated through a survey study (with some exit questions), which revealed the elements that should be addressed in the game design framework. The developed game framework enhances developers' secure coding behaviour to improve the privacy of the software they develop.
End-to-End Evaluation of a Spoken Dialogue System for Learning Basic Mathematics
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

The advances in language-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies applied to build educational applications can present AI for social-good opportunities with a broader positive impact. Across many disciplines, enhancing the quality of mathematics education is crucial in building critical thinking and problem-solving skills at younger ages. Conversational AI systems have started maturing to a point where they could play a significant role in helping students learn fundamental math concepts. This work presents a task-oriented Spoken Dialogue System (SDS) built to support play-based learning of basic math concepts for early childhood education. The system has been evaluated via real-world deployments at school while the students are practicing early math concepts with multimodal interactions. We discuss our efforts to improve the SDS pipeline built for math learning, for which we explore utilizing MathBERT representations for potential enhancement to the Natural Language Understanding (NLU) module. We perform an end-to-end evaluation using real-world deployment outputs from the Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Intent Recognition, and Dialogue Manager (DM) components to understand how error propagation affects the overall performance in real-world scenarios.
Adaptive Contrastive Learning on Multimodal Transformer for Review Helpfulness Predictions
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Modern Review Helpfulness Prediction systems are dependent upon multiple modalities, typically texts and images. Unfortunately, those contemporary approaches pay scarce attention to polish representations of cross-modal relations and tend to suffer from inferior optimization. This might cause harm to model's predictions in numerous cases. To overcome the aforementioned issues, we propose Multimodal Contrastive Learning for Multimodal Review Helpfulness Prediction (MRHP) problem, concentrating on mutual information between input modalities to explicitly elaborate cross-modal relations. In addition, we introduce Adaptive Weighting scheme for our contrastive learning approach in order to increase flexibility in optimization. Lastly, we propose Multimodal Interaction module to address the unalignment nature of multimodal data, thereby assisting the model in producing more reasonable multimodal representations. Experimental results show that our method outperforms prior baselines and achieves state-of-the-art results on two publicly available benchmark datasets for MRHP problem.
Hardware Security Primitives using Passive RRAM Crossbar Array: Novel TRNG and PUF Designs
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

With rapid advancements in electronic gadgets, the security and privacy aspects of these devices are significant. For the design of secure systems, physical unclonable function (PUF) and true random number generator (TRNG) are critical hardware security primitives for security applications. This paper proposes novel implementations of PUF and TRNGs on the RRAM crossbar structure. Firstly, two techniques to implement the TRNG in the RRAM crossbar are presented based on write-back and 50% switching probability pulse. The randomness of the proposed TRNGs is evaluated using the NIST test suite. Next, an architecture to implement the PUF in the RRAM crossbar is presented. The initial entropy source for the PUF is used from TRNGs, and challenge-response pairs (CRPs) are collected. The proposed PUF exploits the device variations and sneak-path current to produce unique CRPs. We demonstrate, through extensive experiments, reliability of 100%, uniqueness of 47.78%, uniformity of 49.79%, and bit-aliasing of 48.57% without any post-processing techniques. Finally, the design is compared with the literature to evaluate its implementation efficiency, which is clearly found to be superior to the state-of-the-art.
Measuring Progress on Scalable Oversight for Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

Developing safe and useful general-purpose AI systems will require us to make progress on scalable oversight: the problem of supervising systems that potentially outperform us on most skills relevant to the task at hand. Empirical work on this problem is not straightforward, since we do not yet have systems that broadly exceed our abilities. This paper discusses one of the major ways we think about this problem, with a focus on ways it can be studied empirically. We first present an experimental design centered on tasks for which human specialists succeed but unaided humans and current general AI systems fail. We then present a proof-of-concept experiment meant to demonstrate a key feature of this experimental design and show its viability with two question-answering tasks: MMLU and time-limited QuALITY. On these tasks, we find that human participants who interact with an unreliable large-language-model dialog assistant through chat -- a trivial baseline strategy for scalable oversight -- substantially outperform both the model alone and their own unaided performance. These results are an encouraging sign that scalable oversight will be tractable to study with present models and bolster recent findings that large language models can productively assist humans with difficult tasks.
An approach to standardize, automate omni-channel and AI transactional digital service creation
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

Our work is at the crossroads of two categories of technologies. On the one hand, omnichannel digit services, to address the needs of users in the most seamless way. On the other hand, low code approaches, to build simply even complex software applications. In this twofold context, we propose DSUL (Digital Service Universal Language). It allows to build omnichannel services with minimal work from their designers. We describe precisely how DSUL operates, and its innovation in regard to the state of the art. We also consider the various methods to evaluate this framework.
Seamless Link-level Redundancy to Improve Reliability of Industrial Wi-Fi Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

The adoption of wireless communications and, in particular, Wi-Fi, at the lowest level of the factory automation hierarchy has not increased as fast as expected so far, mainly because of serious issues concerning determinism. Actually, besides the random access scheme, disturbance and interference prevent reliable communication over the air and, as a matter of fact, make wireless networks unable to support distributed real-time control applications properly. Several papers recently appeared in the literature suggest that diversity could be leveraged to overcome this limitation effectively. In this paper a reference architecture is introduced, which describes how seamless link-level redundancy can be applied to Wi-Fi. The framework is general enough to serve as a basis for future protocol enhancements, and also includes two optimizations aimed at improving the quality of wireless communication by avoiding unnecessary replicated transmissions. Some relevant solutions have been analyzed by means of a thorough simulation campaign, in order to highlight their benefits when compared to conventional Wi-Fi. Results show that both packet losses and network latencies improve noticeably.
Generalized Product-of-Experts for Learning Multimodal Representations in Noisy Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

A real-world application or setting involves interaction between different modalities (e.g., video, speech, text). In order to process the multimodal information automatically and use it for an end application, Multimodal Representation Learning (MRL) has emerged as an active area of research in recent times. MRL involves learning reliable and robust representations of information from heterogeneous sources and fusing them. However, in practice, the data acquired from different sources are typically noisy. In some extreme cases, a noise of large magnitude can completely alter the semantics of the data leading to inconsistencies in the parallel multimodal data. In this paper, we propose a novel method for multimodal representation learning in a noisy environment via the generalized product of experts technique. In the proposed method, we train a separate network for each modality to assess the credibility of information coming from that modality, and subsequently, the contribution from each modality is dynamically varied while estimating the joint distribution. We evaluate our method on two challenging benchmarks from two diverse domains: multimodal 3D hand-pose estimation and multimodal surgical video segmentation. We attain state-of-the-art performance on both benchmarks. Our extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations show the advantages of our method compared to previous approaches.
Reranking Overgenerated Responses for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

End-to-end (E2E) task-oriented dialogue (ToD) systems are prone to fall into the so-called "likelihood trap", resulting in generated responses which are dull, repetitive, and often inconsistent with dialogue history. Comparing ranked lists of multiple generated responses against the "gold response" (from evaluation data) reveals a wide diversity in response quality, with many good responses placed lower in the ranked list. The main challenge, addressed in this work, is then how to reach beyond greedily generated system responses, that is, how to obtain and select such high-quality responses from the list of overgenerated responses at inference without availability of the gold response. To this end, we propose a simple yet effective reranking method which aims to select high-quality items from the lists of responses initially overgenerated by the system. The idea is to use any sequence-level (similarity) scoring function to divide the semantic space of responses into high-scoring versus low-scoring partitions. At training, the high-scoring partition comprises all generated responses whose similarity to the gold response is higher than the similarity of the greedy response to the gold response. At inference, the aim is to estimate the probability that each overgenerated response belongs to the high-scoring partition, given only previous dialogue history. We validate the robustness and versatility of our proposed method on the standard MultiWOZ dataset: our methods improve a state-of-the-art E2E ToD system by 2.0 BLEU, 1.6 ROUGE, and 1.3 METEOR scores, achieving new peak results. Additional experiments on the BiTOD dataset and human evaluation further ascertain the generalisability and effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Approximation algorithms for Node-weighted Steiner Problems: Digraphs with Additive Prizes and Graphs with Submodular Prizes
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

In the \emph{budgeted rooted node-weighted Steiner tree} problem, we are given a graph $G$ with $n$ nodes, a predefined node $r$, two weights associated to each node modelling costs and prizes. The aim is to find a tree in $G$ rooted at $r$ such that the total cost of its nodes is at most a given budget $B$ and the total prize is maximized. In the \emph{quota rooted node-weighted Steiner tree} problem, we are given a real-valued quota $Q$, instead of the budget, and we aim at minimizing the cost of a tree rooted at $r$ whose overall prize is at least $Q$. For the case of directed graphs with additive prize function, we develop a technique resorting on a standard flow-based linear programming relaxation to compute a tree with good trade-off between prize and cost, which allows us to provide very simple polynomial time approximation algorithms for both the budgeted and the quota problems. For the \emph{budgeted} problem, our algorithm achieves a bicriteria $(1+ε, O(\frac{1}{ε^2}n^{2/3}\ln{n}))$-approximation, for any $ε\in (0, 1]$. For the \emph{quota} problem, our algorithm guarantees a bicriteria approximation factor of $(2, O(n^{2/3}\ln{n}))$. Next, by using the flow-based LP, we provide a surprisingly simple polynomial time $O((1+ε)\sqrt{n} \ln {n})$-approximation algorithm for the node-weighted version of the directed Steiner tree problem, for any $ε>0$. For the case of undirected graphs with monotone submodular prize functions over subsets of nodes, we provide a polynomial time $O(\frac{1}{ε^3}\sqrt{n}\log{n})$-approximation algorithm for the budgeted problem that violates the budget constraint by a factor of at most $1+ε$, for any $ε\in (0, 1]$. Our technique allows us to provide a good approximation also for the quota problem.
Multilayer spintronic neural networks with radio-frequency connections
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2022
Year: 2022

Spintronic nano-synapses and nano-neurons perform complex cognitive computations with high accuracy thanks to their rich, reproducible and controllable magnetization dynamics. These dynamical nanodevices could transform artificial intelligence hardware, provided that they implement state-of-the art deep neural networks. However, there is today no scalable way to connect them in multilayers. Here we show that the flagship nano-components of spintronics, magnetic tunnel junctions, can be connected into multilayer neural networks where they implement both synapses and neurons thanks to their magnetization dynamics, and communicate by processing, transmitting and receiving radio frequency (RF) signals. We build a hardware spintronic neural network composed of nine magnetic tunnel junctions connected in two layers, and show that it natively classifies nonlinearly-separable RF inputs with an accuracy of 97.7%. Using physical simulations, we demonstrate that a large network of nanoscale junctions can achieve state-of the-art identification of drones from their RF transmissions, without digitization, and consuming only a few milliwatts, which is a gain of more than four orders of magnitude in power consumption compared to currently used techniques. This study lays the foundation for deep, dynamical, spintronic neural networks.
Line Search for an Oblivious Moving Target
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

Consider search on an infinite line involving an autonomous robot starting at the origin of the line and an oblivious moving target at initial distance $d \geq 1$ from it. The robot can change direction and move anywhere on the line with constant maximum speed $1$ while the target is also moving on the line with constant speed $v>0$ but is unable to change its speed or direction. The goal is for the robot to catch up to the target in as little time as possible. The classic case where $v=0$ and the target's initial distance $d$ is unknown to the robot is the well-studied ``cow-path problem''. Alpert and Gal gave an optimal algorithm for the case where a target with unknown initial distance $d$ is moving away from the robot with a known speed $v<1$. In this paper we design and analyze search algorithms for the remaining possible knowledge situations, namely, when $d$ and $v$ are known, when $v$ is known but $d$ is unknown, when $d$ is known but $v$ is unknown, and when both $v$ and $d$ are unknown. Furthermore, for each of these knowledge models we consider separately the case where the target is moving away from the origin and the case where it is moving toward the origin. We design algorithms and analyze competitive ratios for all eight cases above. The resulting competitive ratios are shown to be optimal when the target is moving towards the origin as well as when $v$ is known and the target is moving away from the origin.
A Transfer Learning Approach for UAV Path Design with Connectivity Outage Constraint
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

The connectivity-aware path design is crucial in the effective deployment of autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Recently, Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have become the popular approach to solving this type of complex problem, but RL algorithms suffer slow convergence. In this paper, we propose a Transfer Learning (TL) approach, where we use a teacher policy previously trained in an old domain to boost the path learning of the agent in the new domain. As the exploration processes and the training continue, the agent refines the path design in the new domain based on the subsequent interactions with the environment. We evaluate our approach considering an old domain at sub-6 GHz and a new domain at millimeter Wave (mmWave). The teacher path policy, previously trained at sub-6 GHz path, is the solution to a connectivity-aware path problem that we formulate as a constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP). We employ a Lyapunov-based model-free Deep Q-Network (DQN) to solve the path design at sub-6 GHz that guarantees connectivity constraint satisfaction. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for different urban environment scenarios. The results demonstrate that our proposed approach is capable of reducing the training time considerably at mmWave.
Image Completion with Heterogeneously Filtered Spectral Hints
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Image completion with large-scale free-form missing regions is one of the most challenging tasks for the computer vision community. While researchers pursue better solutions, drawbacks such as pattern unawareness, blurry textures, and structure distortion remain noticeable, and thus leave space for improvement. To overcome these challenges, we propose a new StyleGAN-based image completion network, Spectral Hint GAN (SH-GAN), inside which a carefully designed spectral processing module, Spectral Hint Unit, is introduced. We also propose two novel 2D spectral processing strategies, Heterogeneous Filtering and Gaussian Split that well-fit modern deep learning models and may further be extended to other tasks. From our inclusive experiments, we demonstrate that our model can reach FID scores of 3.4134 and 7.0277 on the benchmark datasets FFHQ and Places2, and therefore outperforms prior works and reaches a new state-of-the-art. We also prove the effectiveness of our design via ablation studies, from which one may notice that the aforementioned challenges, i.e. pattern unawareness, blurry textures, and structure distortion, can be noticeably resolved. Our code will be open-sourced at: https://github.com/SHI-Labs/SH-GAN.
Graph Contrastive Learning with Implicit Augmentations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Existing graph contrastive learning methods rely on augmentation techniques based on random perturbations (e.g., randomly adding or dropping edges and nodes). Nevertheless, altering certain edges or nodes can unexpectedly change the graph characteristics, and choosing the optimal perturbing ratio for each dataset requires onerous manual tuning. In this paper, we introduce Implicit Graph Contrastive Learning (iGCL), which utilizes augmentations in the latent space learned from a Variational Graph Auto-Encoder by reconstructing graph topological structure. Importantly, instead of explicitly sampling augmentations from latent distributions, we further propose an upper bound for the expected contrastive loss to improve the efficiency of our learning algorithm. Thus, graph semantics can be preserved within the augmentations in an intelligent way without arbitrary manual design or prior human knowledge. Experimental results on both graph-level and node-level tasks show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to other benchmarks, where ablation studies in the end demonstrate the effectiveness of modules in iGCL.
Inpainting in discrete Sobolev spaces: structural information for uncertainty reduction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

In this article, using an exemplar-based approach, we investigate the inpainting problem, introducing a new mathematical functional, whose minimization determines the quality of the reconstructions. The new functional expression takes into account of fnite differences terms, in a similar fashion to what happens in the theoretical Sobolev spaces. Moreover, we introduce a new priority index to determine the scanning order of the points to inpaint, prioritizing the uncertainty reduction in the choice. The achieved results highlight important theoretical-connected aspects of the inpainting by patch procedure.
Discrete Distribution Estimation under User-level Local Differential Privacy
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

We study discrete distribution estimation under user-level local differential privacy (LDP). In user-level $\varepsilon$-LDP, each user has $m\ge1$ samples and the privacy of all $m$ samples must be preserved simultaneously. We resolve the following dilemma: While on the one hand having more samples per user should provide more information about the underlying distribution, on the other hand, guaranteeing the privacy of all $m$ samples should make the estimation task more difficult. We obtain tight bounds for this problem under almost all parameter regimes. Perhaps surprisingly, we show that in suitable parameter regimes, having $m$ samples per user is equivalent to having $m$ times more users, each with only one sample. Our results demonstrate interesting phase transitions for $m$ and the privacy parameter $\varepsilon$ in the estimation risk. Finally, connecting with recent results on shuffled DP, we show that combined with random shuffling, our algorithm leads to optimal error guarantees (up to logarithmic factors) under the central model of user-level DP in certain parameter regimes. We provide several simulations to verify our theoretical findings.