OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Type-Centric Kotlin Compiler Fuzzing: Preserving Test Program Correctness by Preserving Types
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2020
Year: 2020

Kotlin is a relatively new programming language from JetBrains: its development started in 2010 with release 1.0 done in early 2016. The Kotlin compiler, while slowly and steadily becoming more and more mature, still crashes from time to time on the more tricky input programs, not least because of the complexity of its features and their interactions. This makes it a great target for fuzzing, even the basic forms of which can find a significant number of Kotlin compiler crashes. There is a problem with fuzzing, however, closely related to the cause of the crashes: generating a random, non-trivial and semantically valid Kotlin program is hard. In this paper, we talk about type-centric compiler fuzzing in the form of type-centric enumeration, an approach inspired by skeletal program enumeration and based on a combination of generative and mutation-based fuzzing, which solves this problem by focusing on program types. After creating the skeleton program, we fill the typed holes with fragments of suitable type, created via generation and enhanced by semantic-aware mutation. We implemented this approach in our Kotlin compiler fuzzing framework called Backend Bug Finder (BBF) and did an extensive evaluation, not only testing the real-world feasibility of our approach, but also comparing it to other compiler fuzzing techniques. The results show our approach to be significantly better compared to other fuzzing approaches at generating semantically valid Kotlin programs, while creating more interesting crash-inducing inputs at the same time. We managed to find more than 50 previously unknown compiler crashes, of which 18 were considered important after their triage by the compiler team.
Digital Contact Tracing: Technologies, Shortcomings, and the Path Forward
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, technology enthusiasts have pushed for digital contact tracing as a critical tool for breaking the COVID-19 transmission chains. Motivated by this push, many countries and companies have created apps that enable digital contact tracing with the goal to identify the chain of transmission from an infected individual to others and enable early quarantine. Digital contact tracing applications like AarogyaSetu in India, TraceTogether in Singapore, SwissCovid in Switzerland, and others have been downloaded hundreds of millions of times. Yet, this technology hasn't seen the impact that we envisioned at the start of the pandemic. Some countries have rolled back their apps, while others have seen low adoption. Therefore, it is prudent to ask what the technology landscape of contact-tracing looks like and what are the missing pieces. We attempt to undertake this task in this paper. We present a high-level review of technologies underlying digital contact tracing, a set of metrics that are important while evaluating different contact tracing technologies, and evaluate where the different technologies stand today on this set of metrics. Our hope is two-fold: (a) Future designers of contact tracing applications can use this review paper to understand the technology landscape, and (b) Researchers can identify and solve the missing pieces of this puzzle so that we are ready to face the rest of the COVID-19 pandemic and any future pandemics. A majority of this discussion is focused on the ability to identify contact between individuals. The questions of ethics, privacy, and security of such contact tracing are briefly mentioned but not discussed in detail.
Prediction of Hemolysis Tendency of Peptides using a Reliable Evaluation Method
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

There are numerous peptides discovered through past decades, which exhibit antimicrobial and anti-cancerous tendencies. Due to these reasons, peptides are supposed to be sound therapeutic candidates. Some peptides can pose low metabolic stability, high toxicity and high hemolity of peptides. This highlights the importance for evaluating hemolytic tendencies and toxicity of peptides, before using them for therapeutics. Traditional methods for evaluation of toxicity of peptides can be time-consuming and costly. In this study, we have extracted peptides data (Hemo-DB) from Database of Antimicrobial Activity and Structure of Peptides (DBAASP) based on certain hemolity criteria and we present a machine learning based method for prediction of hemolytic tendencies of peptides (i.e. Hemolytic or Non-Hemolytic). Our model offers significant improvement on hemolity prediction benchmarks. we also propose a reliable clustering-based train-tests splitting method which ensures that no peptide in train set is more than 40% similar to any peptide in test set. Using this train-test split, we can get reliable estimated of expected model performance on unseen data distribution or newly discovered peptides. Our model tests 0.9986 AUC-ROC (Area Under Receiver Operating Curve) and 97.79% Accuracy on test set of Hemo-DB using traditional random train-test splitting method. Moreover, our model tests AUC-ROC of 0.997 and Accuracy of 97.58% while using clustering-based train-test data split. Furthermore, we check our model on an unseen data distribution (at Hemo-PI 3) and we recorded 0.8726 AUC-ROC and 79.5% accuracy. Using the proposed method, potential therapeutic peptides can be screened, which may further in therapeutics and get reliable predictions for unseen amino acids distribution of peptides and newly discovered peptides.
OPAC: Opportunistic Actor-Critic
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Actor-critic methods, a type of model-free reinforcement learning (RL), have achieved state-of-the-art performances in many real-world domains in continuous control. Despite their success, the wide-scale deployment of these models is still a far cry. The main problems in these actor-critic methods are inefficient exploration and sub-optimal policies. Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) and Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (TD3), two cutting edge such algorithms, suffer from these issues. SAC effectively addressed the problems of sample complexity and convergence brittleness to hyper-parameters and thus outperformed all state-of-the-art algorithms including TD3 in harder tasks, whereas TD3 produced moderate results in all environments. SAC suffers from inefficient exploration owing to the Gaussian nature of its policy which causes borderline performance in simpler tasks. In this paper, we introduce Opportunistic Actor-Critic (OPAC), a novel model-free deep RL algorithm that employs better exploration policy and lesser variance. OPAC combines some of the most powerful features of TD3 and SAC and aims to optimize a stochastic policy in an off-policy way. For calculating the target Q-values, instead of two critics, OPAC uses three critics and based on the environment complexity, opportunistically chooses how the target Q-value is computed from the critics' evaluation. We have systematically evaluated the algorithm on MuJoCo environments where it achieves state-of-the-art performance and outperforms or at least equals the performance of TD3 and SAC.
Exploring Facial Expressions and Affective Domains for Parkinson Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Parkinson's Disease (PD) is a neurological disorder that affects facial movements and non-verbal communication. Patients with PD present a reduction in facial movements called hypomimia which is evaluated in item 3.2 of the MDS-UPDRS-III scale. In this work, we propose to use facial expression analysis from face images based on affective domains to improve PD detection. We propose different domain adaptation techniques to exploit the latest advances in face recognition and Face Action Unit (FAU) detection. The principal contributions of this work are: (1) a novel framework to exploit deep face architectures to model hypomimia in PD patients; (2) we experimentally compare PD detection based on single images vs. image sequences while the patients are evoked various face expressions; (3) we explore different domain adaptation techniques to exploit existing models initially trained either for Face Recognition or to detect FAUs for the automatic discrimination between PD patients and healthy subjects; and (4) a new approach to use triplet-loss learning to improve hypomimia modeling and PD detection. The results on real face images from PD patients show that we are able to properly model evoked emotions using image sequences (neutral, onset-transition, apex, offset-transition, and neutral) with accuracy improvements up to 5.5% (from 72.9% to 78.4%) with respect to single-image PD detection. We also show that our proposed affective-domain adaptation provides improvements in PD detection up to 8.9% (from 78.4% to 87.3% detection accuracy).
TF-CR: Weighting Embeddings for Text Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Text classification, as the task consisting in assigning categories to textual instances, is a very common task in information science. Methods learning distributed representations of words, such as word embeddings, have become popular in recent years as the features to use for text classification tasks. Despite the increasing use of word embeddings for text classification, these are generally used in an unsupervised manner, i.e. information derived from class labels in the training data are not exploited. While word embeddings inherently capture the distributional characteristics of words, and contexts observed around them in a large dataset, they aren't optimised to consider the distributions of words across categories in the classification dataset at hand. To optimise text representations based on word embeddings by incorporating class distributions in the training data, we propose the use of weighting schemes that assign a weight to embeddings of each word based on its saliency in each class. To achieve this, we introduce a novel weighting scheme, Term Frequency-Category Ratio (TF-CR), which can weight high-frequency, category-exclusive words higher when computing word embeddings. Our experiments on 16 classification datasets show the effectiveness of TF-CR, leading to improved performance scores over existing weighting schemes, with a performance gap that increases as the size of the training data grows.
D$^2$IM-Net: Learning Detail Disentangled Implicit Fields from Single Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

We present the first single-view 3D reconstruction network aimed at recovering geometric details from an input image which encompass both topological shape structures and surface features. Our key idea is to train the network to learn a detail disentangled reconstruction consisting of two functions, one implicit field representing the coarse 3D shape and the other capturing the details. Given an input image, our network, coined D$^2$IM-Net, encodes it into global and local features which are respectively fed into two decoders. The base decoder uses the global features to reconstruct a coarse implicit field, while the detail decoder reconstructs, from the local features, two displacement maps, defined over the front and back sides of the captured object. The final 3D reconstruction is a fusion between the base shape and the displacement maps, with three losses enforcing the recovery of coarse shape, overall structure, and surface details via a novel Laplacian term.
Protective Policy Transfer
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Being able to transfer existing skills to new situations is a key capability when training robots to operate in unpredictable real-world environments. A successful transfer algorithm should not only minimize the number of samples that the robot needs to collect in the new environment, but also prevent the robot from damaging itself or the surrounding environment during the transfer process. In this work, we introduce a policy transfer algorithm for adapting robot motor skills to novel scenarios while minimizing serious failures. Our algorithm trains two control policies in the training environment: a task policy that is optimized to complete the task of interest, and a protective policy that is dedicated to keep the robot from unsafe events (e.g. falling to the ground). To decide which policy to use during execution, we learn a safety estimator model in the training environment that estimates a continuous safety level of the robot. When used with a set of thresholds, the safety estimator becomes a classifier for switching between the protective policy and the task policy. We evaluate our approach on four simulated robot locomotion problems and a 2D navigation problem and show that our method can achieve successful transfer to notably different environments while taking the robot's safety into consideration.
Adaptive Histogram-Based Gradient Boosted Trees for Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Federated Learning (FL) is an approach to collaboratively train a model across multiple parties without sharing data between parties or an aggregator. It is used both in the consumer domain to protect personal data as well as in enterprise settings, where dealing with data domicile regulation and the pragmatics of data silos are the main drivers. While gradient boosted tree implementations such as XGBoost have been very successful for many use cases, its federated learning adaptations tend to be very slow due to using cryptographic and privacy methods and have not experienced widespread use. We propose the Party-Adaptive XGBoost (PAX) for federated learning, a novel implementation of gradient boosting which utilizes a party adaptive histogram aggregation method, without the need for data encryption. It constructs a surrogate representation of the data distribution for finding splits of the decision tree. Our experimental results demonstrate strong model performance, especially on non-IID distributions, and significantly faster training run-time across different data sets than existing federated implementations. This approach makes the use of gradient boosted trees practical in enterprise federated learning.
Human-in-the-Loop Imitation Learning using Remote Teleoperation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Imitation Learning is a promising paradigm for learning complex robot manipulation skills by reproducing behavior from human demonstrations. However, manipulation tasks often contain bottleneck regions that require a sequence of precise actions to make meaningful progress, such as a robot inserting a pod into a coffee machine to make coffee. Trained policies can fail in these regions because small deviations in actions can lead the policy into states not covered by the demonstrations. Intervention-based policy learning is an alternative that can address this issue -- it allows human operators to monitor trained policies and take over control when they encounter failures. In this paper, we build a data collection system tailored to 6-DoF manipulation settings, that enables remote human operators to monitor and intervene on trained policies. We develop a simple and effective algorithm to train the policy iteratively on new data collected by the system that encourages the policy to learn how to traverse bottlenecks through the interventions. We demonstrate that agents trained on data collected by our intervention-based system and algorithm outperform agents trained on an equivalent number of samples collected by non-interventional demonstrators, and further show that our method outperforms multiple state-of-the-art baselines for learning from the human interventions on a challenging robot threading task and a coffee making task. Additional results and videos at https://sites.google.com/stanford.edu/iwr .
Learning Multi-Arm Manipulation Through Collaborative Teleoperation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Imitation Learning (IL) is a powerful paradigm to teach robots to perform manipulation tasks by allowing them to learn from human demonstrations collected via teleoperation, but has mostly been limited to single-arm manipulation. However, many real-world tasks require multiple arms, such as lifting a heavy object or assembling a desk. Unfortunately, applying IL to multi-arm manipulation tasks has been challenging -- asking a human to control more than one robotic arm can impose significant cognitive burden and is often only possible for a maximum of two robot arms. To address these challenges, we present Multi-Arm RoboTurk (MART), a multi-user data collection platform that allows multiple remote users to simultaneously teleoperate a set of robotic arms and collect demonstrations for multi-arm tasks. Using MART, we collected demonstrations for five novel two and three-arm tasks from several geographically separated users. From our data we arrived at a critical insight: most multi-arm tasks do not require global coordination throughout its full duration, but only during specific moments. We show that learning from such data consequently presents challenges for centralized agents that directly attempt to model all robot actions simultaneously, and perform a comprehensive study of different policy architectures with varying levels of centralization on our tasks. Finally, we propose and evaluate a base-residual policy framework that allows trained policies to better adapt to the mixed coordination setting common in multi-arm manipulation, and show that a centralized policy augmented with a decentralized residual model outperforms all other models on our set of benchmark tasks. Additional results and videos at https://roboturk.stanford.edu/multiarm .
Efficient Incorporation of Multiple Latency Targets in the Once-For-All Network
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Neural Architecture Search has proven an effective method of automating architecture engineering. Recent work in the field has been to look for architectures subject to multiple objectives such as accuracy and latency to efficiently deploy them on different target hardware. Once-for-All (OFA) is one such method that decouples training and search and is able to find high-performance networks for different latency constraints. However, the search phase is inefficient at incorporating multiple latency targets. In this paper, we introduce two strategies (Top-down and Bottom-up) that use warm starting and randomized network pruning for the efficient incorporation of multiple latency targets in the OFA network. We evaluate these strategies against the current OFA implementation and demonstrate that our strategies offer significant running time performance gains while not sacrificing the accuracy of the subnetworks that were found for each latency target. We further demonstrate that these performance gains are generalized to every design space used by the OFA network.
Achieving Security and Privacy in Federated Learning Systems: Survey, Research Challenges and Future Directions
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

Federated learning (FL) allows a server to learn a machine learning (ML) model across multiple decentralized clients that privately store their own training data. In contrast with centralized ML approaches, FL saves computation to the server and does not require the clients to outsource their private data to the server. However, FL is not free of issues. On the one hand, the model updates sent by the clients at each training epoch might leak information on the clients' private data. On the other hand, the model learnt by the server may be subjected to attacks by malicious clients; these security attacks might poison the model or prevent it from converging. In this paper, we first examine security and privacy attacks to FL and critically survey solutions proposed in the literature to mitigate each attack. Afterwards, we discuss the difficulty of simultaneously achieving security and privacy protection. Finally, we sketch ways to tackle this open problem and attain both security and privacy.
Semi-supervised reward learning for offline reinforcement learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

In offline reinforcement learning (RL) agents are trained using a logged dataset. It appears to be the most natural route to attack real-life applications because in domains such as healthcare and robotics interactions with the environment are either expensive or unethical. Training agents usually requires reward functions, but unfortunately, rewards are seldom available in practice and their engineering is challenging and laborious. To overcome this, we investigate reward learning under the constraint of minimizing human reward annotations. We consider two types of supervision: timestep annotations and demonstrations. We propose semi-supervised learning algorithms that learn from limited annotations and incorporate unlabelled data. In our experiments with a simulated robotic arm, we greatly improve upon behavioural cloning and closely approach the performance achieved with ground truth rewards. We further investigate the relationship between the quality of the reward model and the final policies. We notice, for example, that the reward models do not need to be perfect to result in useful policies.
Offline Policy Selection under Uncertainty
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

The presence of uncertainty in policy evaluation significantly complicates the process of policy ranking and selection in real-world settings. We formally consider offline policy selection as learning preferences over a set of policy prospects given a fixed experience dataset. While one can select or rank policies based on point estimates of their policy values or high-confidence intervals, access to the full distribution over one's belief of the policy value enables more flexible selection algorithms under a wider range of downstream evaluation metrics. We propose BayesDICE for estimating this belief distribution in terms of posteriors of distribution correction ratios derived from stochastic constraints (as opposed to explicit likelihood, which is not available). Empirically, BayesDICE is highly competitive to existing state-of-the-art approaches in confidence interval estimation. More importantly, we show how the belief distribution estimated by BayesDICE may be used to rank policies with respect to any arbitrary downstream policy selection metric, and we empirically demonstrate that this selection procedure significantly outperforms existing approaches, such as ranking policies according to mean or high-confidence lower bound value estimates.
A Refined SVD Algorithm for Collaborative Filtering
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2020
Year: 2020

Collaborative filtering tries to predict the ratings of a user over some items based on opinions of other users with similar taste. The ratings are usually given in the form of a sparse matrix, the goal being to find the missing entries (i.e. ratings). Various approaches to collaborative filtering exist, some of the most popular ones being the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and K-means clustering. One of the challenges in the SVD approach is finding a good initialization of the unknown ratings. A possible initialization is suggested by [1]. In this paper we explain how K-means approach can be used to achieve the further refinement of this initialization for SVD. We show that our technique outperforms both initialization techniques used separately.