OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Multi-Scale Asset Distribution Model for Dynamic Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2022
Year: 2022

In many self-organising systems the ability to extract necessary resources from the external environment is essential to the system's growth and survival. Examples include the extraction of sunlight and nutrients in organic plants, of monetary income in business organisations and of mobile robots in swarm intelligence actions. When operating within competitive, ever-changing environments, such systems must distribute their internal assets wisely so as to improve and adapt their ability to extract available resources. As the system size increases, the asset-distribution process often gets organised around a multi-scale control topology. This topology may be static (fixed) or dynamic (enabling growth and structural adaptation) depending on the system's internal constraints and adaptive mechanisms. In this paper, we expand on a plant-inspired asset-distribution model and introduce a more general multi-scale model applicable across a wider range of natural and artificial system domains. We study the impact that the topology of the multi-scale control process has upon the system's ability to self-adapt asset distribution when resource availability changes within the environment. Results show how different topological characteristics and different competition levels between system branches impact overall system profitability, adaptation delays and disturbances when environmental changes occur. These findings provide a basis for system designers to select the most suitable topology and configuration for their particular application and execution environment.
Multi-Scale RAFT: Combining Hierarchical Concepts for Learning-based Optical FLow Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Many classical and learning-based optical flow methods rely on hierarchical concepts to improve both accuracy and robustness. However, one of the currently most successful approaches -- RAFT -- hardly exploits such concepts. In this work, we show that multi-scale ideas are still valuable. More precisely, using RAFT as a baseline, we propose a novel multi-scale neural network that combines several hierarchical concepts within a single estimation framework. These concepts include (i) a partially shared coarse-to-fine architecture, (ii) multi-scale features, (iii) a hierarchical cost volume and (iv) a multi-scale multi-iteration loss. Experiments on MPI Sintel and KITTI clearly demonstrate the benefits of our approach. They show not only substantial improvements compared to RAFT, but also state-of-the-art results -- in particular in non-occluded regions. Code will be available at https://github.com/cv-stuttgart/MS_RAFT.
On the Relation Between Opinion Change and Information Consumption on Reddit
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2022
Year: 2022

While much attention has been devoted to the causes of opinion change, little is known about its consequences. Our study sheds a light on the relationship between one user's opinion change episode and subsequent behavioral change on an online social media, Reddit. In particular, we look at r/ChangeMyView, an online community dedicated to debating one's own opinions. Interestingly, this forum adopts a well-codified schema for explicitly self-reporting opinion change. Starting from this ground truth, we analyze changes in future online information consumption behavior that arise after a self-reported opinion change on sociopolitical topics; and in particular, operationalized in this work as the participation to sociopolitical subreddits. Such participation profile is important as it represents one's information diet, and is a reliable proxy for, e.g., political affiliation or health choices. We find that people who report an opinion change are significantly more likely to change their future participation in a specific subset of online communities. We characterize which communities are more likely to be abandoned after opinion change, and find a significant association (r=0.46) between propaganda-like language used in a community and the increase in chances of leaving it. We find comparable results (r=0.39) for the opposite direction, i.e., joining a community. This finding suggests how propagandistic communities act as a first gateway to internalize a shift in one's sociopolitical opinion. Finally, we show that the textual content of the discussion associated with opinion change is indicative of which communities are going to be subject to a participation change. In fact, a predictive model based only on the opinion change post is able to pinpoint these communities with an AP@5 of 0.20, similar to what can be reached by using all the past history of participation in communities.
Low complexity, low probability patterns and consequences for algorithmic probability applications
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2022
Year: 2022

Developing new ways to estimate probabilities can be valuable for science, statistics, and engineering. By considering the information content of different output patterns, recent work invoking algorithmic information theory has shown that a priori probability predictions based on pattern complexities can be made in a broad class of input-output maps. These algorithmic probability predictions do not depend on a detailed knowledge of how output patterns were produced, or historical statistical data. Although quantitatively fairly accurate, a main weakness of these predictions is that they are given as an upper bound on the probability of a pattern, but many low complexity, low probability patterns occur, for which the upper bound has little predictive value. Here we study this low complexity, low probability phenomenon by looking at example maps, namely a finite state transducer, natural time series data, RNA molecule structures, and polynomial curves. Some mechanisms causing low complexity, low probability behaviour are identified, and we argue this behaviour should be assumed as a default in the real world algorithmic probability studies. Additionally, we examine some applications of algorithmic probability and discuss some implications of low complexity, low probability patterns for several research areas including simplicity in physics and biology, a priori probability predictions, Solomonoff induction and Occam's razor, machine learning, and password guessing.
Accessing and Interpreting OPC UA Event Traces based on Semantic Process Descriptions
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

The analysis of event data from production systems is the basis for many applications associated with Industry 4.0. However, heterogeneous and disjoint data is common in this domain. As a consequence, contextual information of an event might be incomplete or improperly interpreted which results in suboptimal analysis results. This paper proposes an approach to access a production systems' event data based on the event data's context (such as the product type, process type or process parameters). The approach extracts filtered event logs from a database system by combining: 1) a semantic model of a production system's hierarchical structure, 2) a formalized process description and 3) an OPC UA information model. As a proof of concept we demonstrate our approach using a sample server based on OPC UA for Machinery Companion Specifications.
Lifelong Machine Learning of Functionally Compositional Structures
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

A hallmark of human intelligence is the ability to construct self-contained chunks of knowledge and reuse them in novel combinations for solving different problems. Learning such compositional structures has been a challenge for artificial systems, due to the underlying combinatorial search. To date, research into compositional learning has largely proceeded separately from work on lifelong or continual learning. This dissertation integrated these two lines of work to present a general-purpose framework for lifelong learning of functionally compositional structures. The framework separates the learning into two stages: learning how to combine existing components to assimilate a novel problem, and learning how to adapt the existing components to accommodate the new problem. This separation explicitly handles the trade-off between stability and flexibility. This dissertation instantiated the framework into various supervised and reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Supervised learning evaluations found that 1) compositional models improve lifelong learning of diverse tasks, 2) the multi-stage process permits lifelong learning of compositional knowledge, and 3) the components learned by the framework represent self-contained and reusable functions. Similar RL evaluations demonstrated that 1) algorithms under the framework accelerate the discovery of high-performing policies, and 2) these algorithms retain or improve performance on previously learned tasks. The dissertation extended one lifelong compositional RL algorithm to the nonstationary setting, where the task distribution varies over time, and found that modularity permits individually tracking changes to different elements in the environment. The final contribution of this dissertation was a new benchmark for compositional RL, which exposed that existing methods struggle to discover the compositional properties of the environment.
Online Adaptive Personalization for Face Anti-spoofing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Face authentication systems require a robust anti-spoofing module as they can be deceived by fabricating spoof images of authorized users. Most recent face anti-spoofing methods rely on optimized architectures and training objectives to alleviate the distribution shift between train and test users. However, in real online scenarios, past data from a user contains valuable information that could be used to alleviate the distribution shift. We thus introduce OAP (Online Adaptive Personalization): a lightweight solution which can adapt the model online using unlabeled data. OAP can be applied on top of most anti-spoofing methods without the need to store original biometric images. Through experimental evaluation on the SiW dataset, we show that OAP improves recognition performance of existing methods on both single video setting and continual setting, where spoof videos are interleaved with live ones to simulate spoofing attacks. We also conduct ablation studies to confirm the design choices for our solution.
Unsupervised Hebbian Learning on Point Sets in StarCraft II
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2022
Year: 2022

Learning the evolution of real-time strategy (RTS) game is a challenging problem in artificial intelligent (AI) system. In this paper, we present a novel Hebbian learning method to extract the global feature of point sets in StarCraft II game units, and its application to predict the movement of the points. Our model includes encoder, LSTM, and decoder, and we train the encoder with the unsupervised learning method. We introduce the concept of neuron activity aware learning combined with k-Winner-Takes-All. The optimal value of neuron activity is mathematically derived, and experiments support the effectiveness of the concept over the downstream task. Our Hebbian learning rule benefits the prediction with lower loss compared to self-supervised learning. Also, our model significantly saves the computational cost such as activations and FLOPs compared to a frame-based approach.
Automatic Fair Exchanges
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

In a decentralized environment, exchanging resources requires users to bargain until an agreement is found. Moreover, human agreements involve a combination of collaborative and selfish behavior and often induce circularity, complicating the evaluation of exchange requests. We introduce MuAC, a policy language that allows users to state in isolation under which conditions they are open to grant their resources and what they require in return. In MuAC, exchange requests are evaluated automatically with the guarantee that the only exchanges that will take place are those that mutually satisfy users' conditions. Moreover, MuAC can be used as an enforcement mechanism to prevent users from cheating. As a proof of concept, we implement a blockchain smart contract that allows users to exchange their non-fungible tokens.
Developing Optimal Causal Cyber-Defence Agents via Cyber Security Simulation
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper we explore cyber security defence, through the unification of a novel cyber security simulator with models for (causal) decision-making through optimisation. Particular attention is paid to a recently published approach: dynamic causal Bayesian optimisation (DCBO). We propose that DCBO can act as a blue agent when provided with a view of a simulated network and a causal model of how a red agent spreads within that network. To investigate how DCBO can perform optimal interventions on host nodes, in order to reduce the cost of intrusions caused by the red agent. Through this we demonstrate a complete cyber-simulation system, which we use to generate observational data for DCBO and provide numerical quantitative results which lay the foundations for future work in this space.
Self-Distilled Vision Transformer for Domain Generalization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

In the recent past, several domain generalization (DG) methods have been proposed, showing encouraging performance, however, almost all of them build on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). There is little to no progress on studying the DG performance of vision transformers (ViTs), which are challenging the supremacy of CNNs on standard benchmarks, often built on i.i.d assumption. This renders the real-world deployment of ViTs doubtful. In this paper, we attempt to explore ViTs towards addressing the DG problem. Similar to CNNs, ViTs also struggle in out-of-distribution scenarios and the main culprit is overfitting to source domains. Inspired by the modular architecture of ViTs, we propose a simple DG approach for ViTs, coined as self-distillation for ViTs. It reduces the overfitting of source domains by easing the learning of input-output mapping problem through curating non-zero entropy supervisory signals for intermediate transformer blocks. Further, it does not introduce any new parameters and can be seamlessly plugged into the modular composition of different ViTs. We empirically demonstrate notable performance gains with different DG baselines and various ViT backbones in five challenging datasets. Moreover, we report favorable performance against recent state-of-the-art DG methods. Our code along with pre-trained models are publicly available at: https://github.com/maryam089/SDViT.
UrduFake@FIRE2020: Shared Track on Fake News Identification in Urdu
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

This paper gives the overview of the first shared task at FIRE 2020 on fake news detection in the Urdu language. This is a binary classification task in which the goal is to identify fake news using a dataset composed of 900 annotated news articles for training and 400 news articles for testing. The dataset contains news in five domains: (i) Health, (ii) Sports, (iii) Showbiz, (iv) Technology, and (v) Business. 42 teams from 6 different countries (India, China, Egypt, Germany, Pakistan, and the UK) registered for the task. 9 teams submitted their experimental results. The participants used various machine learning methods ranging from feature-based traditional machine learning to neural network techniques. The best performing system achieved an F-score value of 0.90, showing that the BERT-based approach outperforms other machine learning classifiers.
Overwatch: Learning Patterns in Code Edit Sequences
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2022
Year: 2022

Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) provide tool support to automate many source code editing tasks. Traditionally, IDEs use only the spatial context, i.e., the location where the developer is editing, to generate candidate edit recommendations. However, spatial context alone is often not sufficient to confidently predict the developer's next edit, and thus IDEs generate many suggestions at a location. Therefore, IDEs generally do not actively offer suggestions and instead, the developer is usually required to click on a specific icon or menu and then select from a large list of potential suggestions. As a consequence, developers often miss the opportunity to use the tool support because they are not aware it exists or forget to use it. To better understand common patterns in developer behavior and produce better edit recommendations, we can additionally use the temporal context, i.e., the edits that a developer was recently performing. To enable edit recommendations based on temporal context, we present Overwatch, a novel technique for learning edit sequence patterns from traces of developers' edits performed in an IDE. Our experiments show that Overwatch has 78% precision and that Overwatch not only completed edits when developers missed the opportunity to use the IDE tool support but also predicted new edits that have no tool support in the IDE.
Nested Active-Time Scheduling
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

The active-time scheduling problem considers the problem of scheduling preemptible jobs with windows (release times and deadlines) on a parallel machine that can schedule up to $g$ jobs during each timestep. The goal in the active-time problem is to minimize the number of active steps, i.e., timesteps in which at least one job is scheduled. In this way, the active time models parallel scheduling when there is a fixed cost for turning the machine on at each discrete step. This paper presents a 9/5-approximation algorithm for a special case of the active-time scheduling problem in which job windows are laminar (nested). This result improves on the previous best 2-approximation for the general case.
DialCrowd 2.0: A Quality-Focused Dialog System Crowdsourcing Toolkit
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Dialog system developers need high-quality data to train, fine-tune and assess their systems. They often use crowdsourcing for this since it provides large quantities of data from many workers. However, the data may not be of sufficiently good quality. This can be due to the way that the requester presents a task and how they interact with the workers. This paper introduces DialCrowd 2.0 to help requesters obtain higher quality data by, for example, presenting tasks more clearly and facilitating effective communication with workers. DialCrowd 2.0 guides developers in creating improved Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) and is directly applicable to the workflows used currently by developers and researchers.
A Retrospective on ICSE 2022
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

The 44th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2022) was held in person from May 22 to May 27, 2022 in Pittsburgh, PA, USA. Here, we summarize themes of research and the direction of research in the field of software engineering and testing that we observed at the conference.
Time-invariant prefix-free source coding for MIMO LQG control
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

In this work we consider discrete-time multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) linear-quadratic-Gaussian (LQG) control where the feedback consists of variable length binary codewords. To simplify the decoder architecture, we enforce a strict prefix constraint on the codewords. We develop a data compression architecture that provably achieves a near minimum time-average expected bitrate for a fixed constraint on the LQG performance. The architecture conforms to the strict prefix constraint and does not require time-varying lossless source coding, in contrast to the prior art.
Efficient and Accurate Skeleton-Based Two-Person Interaction Recognition Using Inter- and Intra-body Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Skeleton-based two-person interaction recognition has been gaining increasing attention as advancements are made in pose estimation and graph convolutional networks. Although the accuracy has been gradually improving, the increasing computational complexity makes it more impractical for a real-world environment. There is still room for accuracy improvement as the conventional methods do not fully represent the relationship between inter-body joints. In this paper, we propose a lightweight model for accurately recognizing two-person interactions. In addition to the architecture, which incorporates middle fusion, we introduce a factorized convolution technique to reduce the weight parameters of the model. We also introduce a network stream that accounts for relative distance changes between inter-body joints to improve accuracy. Experiments using two large-scale datasets, NTU RGB+D 60 and 120, show that our method simultaneously achieved the highest accuracy and relatively low computational complexity compared with the conventional methods.
Time Majority Voting, a PC-based EEG Classifier for Non-expert Users
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Using Machine Learning and Deep Learning to predict cognitive tasks from electroencephalography (EEG) signals is a rapidly advancing field in Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI). In contrast to the fields of computer vision and natural language processing, the data amount of these trials is still rather tiny. Developing a PC-based machine learning technique to increase the participation of non-expert end-users could help solve this data collection issue. We created a novel algorithm for machine learning called Time Majority Voting (TMV). In our experiment, TMV performed better than cutting-edge algorithms. It can operate efficiently on personal computers for classification tasks involving the BCI. These interpretable data also assisted end-users and researchers in comprehending EEG tests better.
Introduction to Functional Classes in CS1
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

Students introduced to programming using a design-based approach and a functional programming language become familiar with first-class functions. They rarely, however, connect first-class functions to objects and object-oriented program design. This is a missed opportunity because students inevitably go on to courses using an object-oriented programming language. This article describes how students are introduced to objects within the setting of a design-based introduction to programming that uses a functional language. The methodology exposes students to interfaces, classes, objects, and polymorphic dispatch. Initial student feedback suggests that students benefit from the approach.
Teaching Programming to Novices Using the codeBoot Online Environment
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2022
Year: 2022

Teaching programming to novices is best done with tools with simpler user interfaces than professional IDEs that are tailored for experienced programmers. In a distance learning situation it is also important to have a development environment that is easy to explain and use, and that integrates well with the variety of course material used (slides, homework, etc). In this paper we give an experience report on teaching programming with codeBoot, an online programming environment we designed specifically for novices.