OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Study on the Evaluation of Generative Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Implicit generative models, which do not return likelihood values, such as generative adversarial networks and diffusion models, have become prevalent in recent years. While it is true that these models have shown remarkable results, evaluating their performance is challenging. This issue is of vital importance to push research forward and identify meaningful gains from random noise. Currently, heuristic metrics such as the Inception score (IS) and Frechet Inception Distance (FID) are the most common evaluation metrics, but what they measure is not entirely clear. Additionally, there are questions regarding how meaningful their score actually is. In this work, we study the evaluation metrics of generative models by generating a high-quality synthetic dataset on which we can estimate classical metrics for comparison. Our study shows that while FID and IS do correlate to several f-divergences, their ranking of close models can vary considerably making them problematic when used for fain-grained comparison. We further used this experimental setting to study which evaluation metric best correlates with our probabilistic metrics. Lastly, we look into the base features used for metrics such as FID.
Evaluation of Embedding Models for Automatic Extraction and Classification of Acknowledged Entities in Scientific Documents
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Acknowledgments in scientific papers may give an insight into aspects of the scientific community, such as reward systems, collaboration patterns, and hidden research trends. The aim of the paper is to evaluate the performance of different embedding models for the task of automatic extraction and classification of acknowledged entities from the acknowledgment text in scientific papers. We trained and implemented a named entity recognition (NER) task using the Flair NLP-framework. The training was conducted using three default Flair NER models with two differently-sized corpora. The Flair Embeddings model trained on the larger training corpus showed the best accuracy of 0.77. Our model is able to recognize six entity types: funding agency, grant number, individuals, university, corporation and miscellaneous. The model works more precise for some entity types than the others, thus, individuals and grant numbers showed very good F1-Score over 0.9. Most of the previous works on acknowledgement analysis were limited by the manual evaluation of data and therefore by the amount of processed data. This model can be applied for the comprehensive analysis of the acknowledgement texts and may potentially make a great contribution to the field of automated acknowledgement analysis.
The Influence of Local Search over Genetic Algorithms with Balanced Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2022
Year: 2022

We continue the study of Genetic Algorithms (GA) on combinatorial optimization problems where the candidate solutions need to satisfy a balancedness constraint. It has been observed that the reduction of the search space size granted by ad-hoc crossover and mutation operators does not usually translate to a substantial improvement of the GA performances. There is still no clear explanation of this phenomenon, although it is suspected that a balanced representation might yield a more irregular fitness landscape, where it could be more difficult for GA to converge to a global optimum. In this paper, we investigate this issue by adding a local search step to a GA with balanced operators, and use it to evolve highly nonlinear balanced Boolean functions. In particular, we organize our experiments around two research questions, namely if local search (1) improves the convergence speed of GA, and (2) decreases the population diversity. Surprisingly, while our results answer affirmatively the first question, they also show that adding local search actually \emph{increases} the diversity among the individuals in the population. We link these findings to some recent results on fitness landscape analysis for problems on Boolean functions.
SEnti-Analyzer: Joint Sentiment Analysis For Text-Based and Verbal Communication in Software Projects
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

Social aspects in software development teams are of particular importance for a successful project closure. To analyze sentiments in software projects, there are several tools and approaches available. These tools analyze text-based communication based on the used words to predict whether they appear to be positive, negative, or neutral for the receiver of the message. In the research project ComContA, we investigate so-called sentiment analysis striving to analyze the content of text-based communication in development teams with regard to the statement's polarity. That is, we analyze whether the communication appears to be adequate (i.e., positive or neutral) or negative. In a workshop paper, we presented a tool called SEnti-Analyzer that allows to apply sentiment analysis to verbal communication in meetings of software projects. In this technical report, we present the extended functionalities of the SEnti-Analyzer by also allowing the analysis of text-based communication, we improve the prediction of the tool by including established sentiment analysis tools, and we evaluate the tool with respect to its accuracy. We evaluate the tool by comparing the prediction of the SEnti-Analyzer to pre-labeled established data sets used for sentiment analysis in software engineering and to perceptions of computer scientists. Our results indicate that in almost all cases at least two of the three votes coincide, but in only about half of the cases all three votes coincide. Our results raise the question of the "ultimate truth" of sentiment analysis outcomes: What do we want to predict with sentiment analysis tools? The pre-defined labels of established data sets? The perception of computer scientists? Or the perception of single computer scientists which appears to be the most meaningful objective?
Neural Networks as Paths through the Space of Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Deep neural networks implement a sequence of layer-by-layer operations that are each relatively easy to understand, but the resulting overall computation is generally difficult to understand. We consider a simple hypothesis for interpreting the layer-by-layer construction of useful representations: perhaps the role of each layer is to reformat information to reduce the "distance" to the desired outputs. With this framework, the layer-wise computation implemented by a deep neural network can be viewed as a path through a high-dimensional representation space. We formalize this intuitive idea of a "path" by leveraging recent advances in *metric* representational similarity. We extend existing representational distance methods by computing geodesics, angles, and projections of representations, going beyond mere layer distances. We then demonstrate these tools by visualizing and comparing the paths taken by ResNet and VGG architectures on CIFAR-10. We conclude by sketching additional ways that this kind of representational geometry can be used to understand and interpret network training, and to describe novel kinds of similarities between different models.
Weakly-Supervised Temporal Action Localization by Progressive Complementary Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Weakly Supervised Temporal Action Localization (WSTAL) aims to localize and classify action instances in long untrimmed videos with only video-level category labels. Due to the lack of snippet-level supervision for indicating action boundaries, previous methods typically assign pseudo labels for unlabeled snippets. However, since some action instances of different categories are visually similar, it is non-trivial to exactly label the (usually) one action category for a snippet, and incorrect pseudo labels would impair the localization performance. To address this problem, we propose a novel method from a category exclusion perspective, named Progressive Complementary Learning (ProCL), which gradually enhances the snippet-level supervision. Our method is inspired by the fact that video-level labels precisely indicate the categories that all snippets surely do not belong to, which is ignored by previous works. Accordingly, we first exclude these surely non-existent categories by a complementary learning loss. And then, we introduce the background-aware pseudo complementary labeling in order to exclude more categories for snippets of less ambiguity. Furthermore, for the remaining ambiguous snippets, we attempt to reduce the ambiguity by distinguishing foreground actions from the background. Extensive experimental results show that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on two popular benchmarks, namely THUMOS14 and ActivityNet1.3.
Can you meaningfully consent in eight seconds? Identifying Ethical Issues with Verbal Consent for Voice Assistants
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

Determining how voice assistants should broker consent to share data with third party software has proven to be a complex problem. Devices often require users to switch to companion smartphone apps in order to navigate permissions menus for their otherwise hands-free voice assistant. More in line with smartphone app stores, Alexa now offers "voice-forward consent", allowing users to grant skills access to personal data mid-conversation using speech. While more usable and convenient than opening a companion app, asking for consent 'on the fly' can undermine several concepts core to the informed consent process. The intangible nature of voice interfaces further blurs the boundary between parts of an interaction controlled by third-party developers from the underlying platforms. This provocation paper highlights key issues with current verbal consent implementations, outlines directions for potential solutions, and presents five open questions to the research community. In so doing, we hope to help shape the development of usable and effective verbal consent for voice assistants and similar conversational user interfaces.
Dynamic Restrained Uncertainty Weighting Loss for Multitask Learning of Vocal Expression
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

We propose a novel Dynamic Restrained Uncertainty Weighting Loss to experimentally handle the problem of balancing the contributions of multiple tasks on the ICML ExVo 2022 Challenge. The multitask aims to recognize expressed emotions and demographic traits from vocal bursts jointly. Our strategy combines the advantages of Uncertainty Weight and Dynamic Weight Average, by extending weights with a restraint term to make the learning process more explainable. We use a lightweight multi-exit CNN architecture to implement our proposed loss approach. The experimental H-Mean score (0.394) shows a substantial improvement over the baseline H-Mean score (0.335).
Transformer Neural Networks Attending to Both Sequence and Structure for Protein Prediction Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

The increasing number of protein sequences decoded from genomes is opening up new avenues of research on linking protein sequence to function with transformer neural networks. Recent research has shown that the number of known protein sequences supports learning useful, task-agnostic sequence representations via transformers. In this paper, we posit that learning joint sequence-structure representations yields better representations for function-related prediction tasks. We propose a transformer neural network that attends to both sequence and tertiary structure. We show that such joint representations are more powerful than sequence-based representations only, and they yield better performance on superfamily membership across various metrics.
Blockchain Function Virtualization: A New Approach for Mobile Networks Beyond 5G
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

Many of the key enabling technologies of the fifth-generation (5G), such as network slicing, spectrum sharing, and federated learning, rely on a centralized authority. This may lead to pitfalls in terms of security or single point of failure. Distributed ledger technology, specifically blockchain, is currently employed by different applications related to the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G to address the drawbacks of centralized systems. For this reason, mobile blockchain networks (MBNs) have recently attracted a great deal of attention. To add a transaction to the blockchain in MBNs, mobile or IoT users must perform various tasks like encryption, decryption, and mining. These tasks require energy and processing power, which impose limitations on mobile and IoT users' performance because they are usually battery powered and have a low processing power. One possible solution is to perform the tasks virtually on commodity servers provided by mobile edge computing (MEC) or cloud computing. To do so, all tasks needed to add a transaction to the blockchain can be treated as virtual blockchain functions that can be executed on commodity servers. We introduce a blockchain virtualization framework called blockchain function virtualization (BFV), through which all blockchain functions can be performed virtually by MEC or cloud computing. Furthermore, we describe applications of the BFV framework and resource allocation challenges brought by the BFV framework in mobile networks. In addition, to illustrate the advantages of BFV, we define an optimization problem to simultaneously minimize the energy consumption cost and maximize miners' rewards. Finally, simulation results show the performance of the proposed framework in terms of total energy consumption, transaction confirmation rate, and miners' average profit.
Motion Gait: Gait Recognition via Motion Excitation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Gait recognition, which can realize long-distance and contactless identification, is an important biometric technology. Recent gait recognition methods focus on learning the pattern of human movement or appearance during walking, and construct the corresponding spatio-temporal representations. However, different individuals have their own laws of movement patterns, simple spatial-temporal features are difficult to describe changes in motion of human parts, especially when confounding variables such as clothing and carrying are included, thus distinguishability of features is reduced. In this paper, we propose the Motion Excitation Module (MEM) to guide spatio-temporal features to focus on human parts with large dynamic changes, MEM learns the difference information between frames and intervals, so as to obtain the representation of temporal motion changes, it is worth mentioning that MEM can adapt to frame sequences with uncertain length, and it does not add any additional parameters. Furthermore, we present the Fine Feature Extractor (FFE), which independently learns the spatio-temporal representations of human body according to different horizontal parts of individuals. Benefiting from MEM and FFE, our method innovatively combines motion change information, significantly improving the performance of the model under cross appearance conditions. On the popular dataset CASIA-B, our proposed Motion Gait is better than the existing gait recognition methods.
Explanation-based Counterfactual Retraining(XCR): A Calibration Method for Black-box Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

With the rapid development of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), a long line of past work has shown concerns about the Out-of-Distribution (OOD) problem in perturbation-based post-hoc XAI models and explanations are socially misaligned. We explore the limitations of post-hoc explanation methods that use approximators to mimic the behavior of black-box models. Then we propose eXplanation-based Counterfactual Retraining (XCR), which extracts feature importance fastly. XCR applies the explanations generated by the XAI model as counterfactual input to retrain the black-box model to address OOD and social misalignment problems. Evaluation of popular image datasets shows that XCR can improve model performance when only retaining 12.5% of the most crucial features without changing the black-box model structure. Furthermore, the evaluation of the benchmark of corruption datasets shows that the XCR is very helpful for improving model robustness and positively impacts the calibration of OOD problems. Even though not calibrated in the validation set like some OOD calibration methods, the corrupted data metric outperforms existing methods. Our method also beats current OOD calibration methods on the OOD calibration metric if calibration on the validation set is applied.
A Novel Three-Dimensional Navigation Method for the Visually Impaired
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

According to the World Health Organization, visual impairment is estimated to affect approximately 2.2 billion people worldwide. The visually impaired must currently rely on navigational aids to replace their sense of sight, like a white cane or GPS (Global Positioning System) based navigation, both of which fail to work well indoors. The white cane cannot be used to determine a user's position within a room, while GPS can often lose connection indoors and does not provide orientation information, making both approaches unsuitable for indoor use. Therefore, this research seeks to develop a 3D-imaging solution that enables contactless navigation through a complex indoor environment. The device can pinpoint a user's position and orientation with 31% less error compared to previous approaches while requiring only 53.1% of the memory, and processing 125% faster. The device can also detect obstacles with 60.2% more accuracy than the previous state-of-the-art models while requiring only 41% of the memory and processing 260% faster. When testing with human participants, the device allows for a 94.5% reduction in collisions with obstacles in the environment and allows for a 48.3% increase in walking speed, showing that my device enables safer and more rapid navigation for the visually impaired. All in all, this research demonstrates a 3D-based navigation system for the visually impaired. The approach can be used by a wide variety of mobile low-power devices, like cell phones, ensuring this research remains accessible to all.
reStructured Pre-training
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

In this work, we try to decipher the internal connection of NLP technology development in the past decades, searching for essence, which rewards us with a (potential) new learning paradigm for NLP tasks, dubbed as reStructured Pre-training (RST). In such a paradigm, the role of data will be re-emphasized, and model pre-training and fine-tuning of downstream tasks are viewed as a process of data storing and accessing. Based on that, we operationalize the simple principle that a good storage mechanism should not only have the ability to cache a large amount of data but also consider the ease of access. We achieve this by pre-training models over restructured data that consist of a variety of valuable information instead of raw data after overcoming several engineering challenges. Experimentally, RST models not only surpass strong competitors (e.g., T0) on 52/55 popular datasets from a variety of NLP tasks, but also achieve superior performance in National College Entrance Examination - English (Gaokao-English),the most authoritative examination in China. Specifically, the proposed system Qin achieves 40 points higher than the average scores made by students and 15 points higher than GPT3 with 1/16 parameters. In particular, Qin gets a high score of 138.5 (the full mark is 150) in the 2018 English exam (national paper III). We have released the Gaokao Benchmark with an online submission platform. In addition, we test our model in the 2022 College Entrance Examination English that happened a few days ago (2022.06.08), and it gets a total score of 134 (v.s. GPT3's 108).
Attack Techniques and Threat Identification for Vulnerabilities
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Modern organizations struggle with insurmountable number of vulnerabilities that are discovered and reported by their network and application vulnerability scanners. Therefore, prioritization and focus become critical, to spend their limited time on the highest risk vulnerabilities. In doing this, it is important for these organizations not only to understand the technical descriptions of the vulnerabilities, but also to gain insights into attackers' perspectives. In this work, we use machine learning and natural language processing techniques, as well as several publicly available data sets to provide an explainable mapping of vulnerabilities to attack techniques and threat actors. This work provides new security intelligence, by predicting which attack techniques are most likely to be used to exploit a given vulnerability and which threat actors are most likely to conduct the exploitation. Lack of labeled data and different vocabularies make mapping vulnerabilities to attack techniques at scale a challenging problem that cannot be addressed easily using supervised or unsupervised (similarity search) learning techniques. To solve this problem, we first map the vulnerabilities to a standard set of common weaknesses, and then common weaknesses to the attack techniques. This approach yields a Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) of 0.95, an accuracy comparable with those reported for state-of-the-art systems. Our solution has been deployed to IBM Security X-Force Red Vulnerability Management Services, and in production since 2021. The solution helps security practitioners to assist customers to manage and prioritize their vulnerabilities, providing them with an explainable mapping of vulnerabilities to attack techniques and threat actors
General Univariate Estimation-of-Distribution Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2022
Year: 2022

We propose a general formulation of a univariate estimation-of-distribution algorithm (EDA). It naturally incorporates the three classic univariate EDAs \emph{compact genetic algorithm}, \emph{univariate marginal distribution algorithm} and \emph{population-based incremental learning} as well as the \emph{max-min ant system} with iteration-best update. Our unified description of the existing algorithms allows a unified analysis of these; we demonstrate this by providing an analysis of genetic drift that immediately gives the existing results proven separately for the four algorithms named above. Our general model also includes EDAs that are more efficient than the existing ones and these may not be difficult to find as we demonstrate for the OneMax and LeadingOnes benchmarks.
Optimally Weighted Ensembles of Regression Models: Exact Weight Optimization and Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Automated model selection is often proposed to users to choose which machine learning model (or method) to apply to a given regression task. In this paper, we show that combining different regression models can yield better results than selecting a single ('best') regression model, and outline an efficient method that obtains optimally weighted convex linear combination from a heterogeneous set of regression models. More specifically, in this paper, a heuristic weight optimization, used in a preceding conference paper, is replaced by an exact optimization algorithm using convex quadratic programming. We prove convexity of the quadratic programming formulation for the straightforward formulation and for a formulation with weighted data points. The novel weight optimization is not only (more) exact but also more efficient. The methods we develop in this paper are implemented and made available via github-open source. They can be executed on commonly available hardware and offer a transparent and easy to interpret interface. The results indicate that the approach outperforms model selection methods on a range of data sets, including data sets with mixed variable type from drug discovery applications.