OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Dr.Aid: Supporting Data-governance Rule Compliance for Decentralized Collaboration in an Automated Way
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2021
Year: 2021

Collaboration across institutional boundaries is widespread and increasing today. It depends on federations sharing data that often have governance rules or external regulations restricting their use. However, the handling of data governance rules (aka. data-use policies) remains manual, time-consuming and error-prone, limiting the rate at which collaborations can form and respond to challenges and opportunities, inhibiting citizen science and reducing data providers' trust in compliance. Using an automated system to facilitate compliance handling reduces substantially the time needed for such non-mission work, thereby accelerating collaboration and improving productivity. We present a framework, Dr.Aid, that helps individuals, organisations and federations comply with data rules, using automation to track which rules are applicable as data is passed between processes and as derived data is generated. It encodes data-governance rules using a formal language and performs reasoning on multi-input-multi-output data-flow graphs in decentralised contexts. We test its power and utility by working with users performing cyclone tracking and earthquake modelling to support mitigation and emergency response. We query standard provenance traces to detach Dr.Aid from details of the tools and systems they are using, as these inevitably vary across members of a federation and through time. We evaluate the model in three aspects by encoding real-life data-use policies from diverse fields, showing its capability for real-world usage and its advantages compared with traditional frameworks. We argue that this approach will lead to more agile, more productive and more trustworthy collaborations and show that the approach can be adopted incrementally. This, in-turn, will allow more appropriate data policies to emerge opening up new forms of collaboration.
Architecture of Network Camera Photo Authentication Scheme using Steganography Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

The aim of integrity protection process is not only to secure the send message, but also ensures that the original message is not modified during sending the message. In this paper, a novel proposed model is proposed to verify that the sent message was not modified. The proposed model starting with encrypting the original message and applying one of the hash functions on the message. The ciphered message, private key, and the output of hash function was reshaped to apply Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), Zig-zag ordering, and Huffman coding to obtain a compressed text, this compressed text is then hidden in an image. The same steps with a reverse order are applied on the receiver to obtain the decrypted message and then apply the same hash function to verify that the message was not changed. Different experiments were conducted and the results demonstrated that the proposed model achieved high integrity protection.
A Unified 3D Beam Training and Tracking Procedure for Terahertz Communication
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

Terahertz (THz) communication is considered as an attractive way to overcome the bandwidth bottleneck and satisfy the ever-increasing capacity demand in the future. Due to the high directivity and propagation loss of THz waves, a massive MIMO system using beamforming is envisioned as a promising technology in THz communication to realize high-gain and directional transmission. However, pilots, which are the fundamentals for many beamforming schemes, are challenging to be accurately detected in the THz band owing to the severe propagation loss. In this paper, a unified 3D beam training and tracking procedure is proposed to effectively realize the beamforming in THz communications, by considering the line-of-sight (LoS) propagation. In particular, a novel quadruple-uniform planar array (QUPA) architecture is analyzed to enlarge the signal coverage, increase the beam gain, and reduce the beam squint loss. Then, a new 3D grid-based (GB) beam training is developed with low complexity, including the design of the 3D codebook and training protocol. Finally, a simple yet effective grid-based hybrid (GBH) beam tracking is investigated to support THz beamforming in an efficient manner. The communication framework based on this procedure can dynamically trigger beam training/tracking depending on the real-time quality of service. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the superiority of our proposed beam training and tracking over the benchmark methods.
Heterogeneous Dual-Core Overlay Processor for Light-Weight CNNs
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2021
Year: 2021

Light-weight convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have small complexity and are good candidates for low-power, high-throughput inference. Such networks are heterogeneous in terms of computation-to-communication (CTC) ratios and computation patterns between layers, especially for different layer types. Yet, existing AI processors either use homogeneous processing elements (PEs), resulting in low runtime PE efficiency, or run different layers on heterogeneous PEs in sequential, introducing resource redundancy. This paper proposes a heterogeneous dual-core architecture (dual-OPU), where one core is optimized for regular convolution layers and the other for depthwise convolution layers. PEs are homogeneous with each core. To make full use of dual-core parallelism, we develop a scheduling algorithm to concurrently execute layers for different input images on dual-core and balance parallel workload. Meanwhile, we automatically tune the PE number for a core and tune the input size for each PE to maximize throughput. Compared with a single-core processor with the same area for a single network, heterogeneous dual-OPU on average improves runtime PE efficiency and throughput by 11% and 31%, respectively. For a workload of multiple networks, dual-OPU improves average throughput by 11% compared with the state-of-the-art processors scaled to the same area. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first in-depth study on the heterogeneous dual-core processor for light-weight CNNs.
On the Interplay Between Sparsity, Naturalness, Intelligibility, and Prosody in Speech Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2021
Year: 2021

Are end-to-end text-to-speech (TTS) models over-parametrized? To what extent can these models be pruned, and what happens to their synthesis capabilities? This work serves as a starting point to explore pruning both spectrogram prediction networks and vocoders. We thoroughly investigate the tradeoffs between sparsity and its subsequent effects on synthetic speech. Additionally, we explored several aspects of TTS pruning: amount of finetuning data versus sparsity, TTS-Augmentation to utilize unspoken text, and combining knowledge distillation and pruning. Our findings suggest that not only are end-to-end TTS models highly prunable, but also, perhaps surprisingly, pruned TTS models can produce synthetic speech with equal or higher naturalness and intelligibility, with similar prosody. All of our experiments are conducted on publicly available models, and findings in this work are backed by large-scale subjective tests and objective measures. Code and 200 pruned models are made available to facilitate future research on efficiency in TTS.
TLDR9+: A Large Scale Resource for Extreme Summarization of Social Media Posts
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Recent models in developing summarization systems consist of millions of parameters and the model performance is highly dependent on the abundance of training data. While most existing summarization corpora contain data in the order of thousands to one million, generation of large-scale summarization datasets in order of couple of millions is yet to be explored. Practically, more data is better at generalizing the training patterns to unseen data. In this paper, we introduce TLDR9+ -- a large-scale summarization dataset -- containing over 9 million training instances extracted from Reddit discussion forum (https://github.com/sajastu/reddit_collector). This dataset is specifically gathered to perform extreme summarization (i.e., generating one-sentence summary in high compression and abstraction) and is more than twice larger than the previously proposed dataset. We go one step further and with the help of human annotations, we distill a more fine-grained dataset by sampling High-Quality instances from TLDR9+ and call it TLDRHQ dataset. We further pinpoint different state-of-the-art summarization models on our proposed datasets.
Leaked-Web: Accurate and Efficient Machine Learning-Based Website Fingerprinting Attack through Hardware Performance Counters
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Users' website browsing history contains sensitive information, like health conditions, political interests, financial situations, etc. Some recent studies have demonstrated the possibility of inferring website fingerprints based on important usage information such as traffic, cache usage, memory usage, CPU activity, power consumption, and hardware performance counters information. However, existing website fingerprinting attacks demand a high sampling rate which causes high performance overheads and large network traffic, and/or they require launching an additional malicious website by the user, which is not guaranteed. As a result, such drawbacks make the existing attacks more noticeable to users and corresponding fingerprinting detection mechanisms. In response, in this work, we propose Leaked-Web, a novel accurate and efficient machine learning-based website fingerprinting attack through processor's Hardware Performance Counters (HPCs). Leaked-Web efficiently collects hardware performance counters in users' computer systems at a significantly low granularity monitoring rate and sends the samples to the remote attack's server for further classification. Leaked-Web examines the web browsers' microarchitectural features using various advanced machine learning algorithms ranging from classical, boosting, deep learning, and time-series models. Our experimental results indicate that Leaked-Web based on a LogitBoost ML classifier using only the top 4 HPC features achieves 91% classification accuracy outperforming the state-of-the-art attacks by nearly 5%. Furthermore, our proposed attack obtains a negligible performance overhead (only <1%), around 12% lower than the existing hardware-assisted website fingerprinting attacks.
Audio Captioning Using Sound Event Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2021
Year: 2021

This technical report proposes an audio captioning system for DCASE 2021 Task 6 audio captioning challenge. Our proposed model is based on an encoder-decoder architecture with bi-directional Gated Recurrent Units (BiGRU) using pretrained audio features and sound event detection. A pretrained neural network (PANN) is used to extract audio features and Word2Vec is selected with the aim of extracting word embeddings from the audio captions. To create semantically meaningful captions, we extract sound events from the audio clips and feed the encoder-decoder architecture with sound events in addition to PANNs features. Our experiments on the Clotho dataset show that our proposed method significantly achieves better results than the challenge baseline model across all evaluation metrics.
Identifiability in Two-Layer Sparse Matrix Factorization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Sparse matrix factorization is the problem of approximating a matrix $\mathbf{Z}$ by a product of $J$ sparse factors $\mathbf{X}^{(J)} \mathbf{X}^{(J-1)} \ldots \mathbf{X}^{(1)}$. This paper focuses on identifiability issues that appear in this problem, in view of better understanding under which sparsity constraints the problem is well-posed. We give conditions under which the problem of factorizing a matrix into \emph{two} sparse factors admits a unique solution, up to unavoidable permutation and scaling equivalences. Our general framework considers an arbitrary family of prescribed sparsity patterns, allowing us to capture more structured notions of sparsity than simply the count of nonzero entries. These conditions are shown to be related to essential uniqueness of exact matrix decomposition into a sum of rank-one matrices, with structured sparsity constraints. In particular, in the case of fixed-support sparse matrix factorization, we give a general sufficient condition for identifiability based on rank-one matrix completability, and we derive from it a completion algorithm that can verify if this sufficient condition is satisfied, and recover the entries in the two sparse factors if this is the case. A companion paper further exploits these conditions to derive identifiability properties and theoretically sound factorization methods for multi-layer sparse matrix factorization with support constraints associated to some well-known fast transforms such as the Hadamard or the Discrete Fourier Transforms.
Scaling Graph-based Deep Learning models to larger networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2021
Year: 2021

Graph Neural Networks (GNN) have shown a strong potential to be integrated into commercial products for network control and management. Early works using GNN have demonstrated an unprecedented capability to learn from different network characteristics that are fundamentally represented as graphs, such as the topology, the routing configuration, or the traffic that flows along a series of nodes in the network. In contrast to previous solutions based on Machine Learning (ML), GNN enables to produce accurate predictions even in other networks unseen during the training phase. Nowadays, GNN is a hot topic in the Machine Learning field and, as such, we are witnessing great efforts to leverage its potential in many different fields (e.g., chemistry, physics, social networks). In this context, the Graph Neural Networking challenge 2021 brings a practical limitation of existing GNN-based solutions for networking: the lack of generalization to larger networks. This paper approaches the scalability problem by presenting a GNN-based solution that can effectively scale to larger networks including higher link capacities and aggregated traffic on links.
Collective eXplainable AI: Explaining Cooperative Strategies and Agent Contribution in Multiagent Reinforcement Learning with Shapley Values
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

While Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is increasingly expanding more areas of application, little has been applied to make deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) more comprehensible. As RL becomes ubiquitous and used in critical and general public applications, it is essential to develop methods that make it better understood and more interpretable. This study proposes a novel approach to explain cooperative strategies in multiagent RL using Shapley values, a game theory concept used in XAI that successfully explains the rationale behind decisions taken by Machine Learning algorithms. Through testing common assumptions of this technique in two cooperation-centered socially challenging multi-agent environments environments, this article argues that Shapley values are a pertinent way to evaluate the contribution of players in a cooperative multi-agent RL context. To palliate the high overhead of this method, Shapley values are approximated using Monte Carlo sampling. Experimental results on Multiagent Particle and Sequential Social Dilemmas show that Shapley values succeed at estimating the contribution of each agent. These results could have implications that go beyond games in economics, (e.g., for non-discriminatory decision making, ethical and responsible AI-derived decisions or policy making under fairness constraints). They also expose how Shapley values only give general explanations about a model and cannot explain a single run, episode nor justify precise actions taken by agents. Future work should focus on addressing these critical aspects.
Analysis of the relation between smartphone usage changes during the COVID-19 pandemic and usage preferences on apps
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2021
Year: 2021

Since the World Health Organization announced the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, curbing the spread of the virus has become an international priority. It has greatly affected people's lifestyles. In this article, we observe and analyze the impact of the pandemic on people's lives using changes in smartphone application usage. First, through observing the daily usage change trends of all users during the pandemic, we can understand and analyze the effects of restrictive measures and policies during the pandemic on people's lives. In addition, it is also helpful for the government and health departments to take more appropriate restrictive measures in the case of future pandemics. Second, we defined the usage change features and found 9 different usage change patterns during the pandemic according to clusters of users and show the diversity of daily usage changes. It helps to understand and analyze the different impacts of the pandemic and restrictive measures on different types of people in more detail. Finally, according to prediction models, we discover the main related factors of each usage change type from user preferences and demographic information. It helps to predict changes in smartphone activity during future pandemics or when other restrictive measures are implemented, which may become a new indicator to judge and manage the risks of measures or events.
RED++ : Data-Free Pruning of Deep Neural Networks via Input Splitting and Output Merging
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Pruning Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) is a prominent field of study in the goal of inference runtime acceleration. In this paper, we introduce a novel data-free pruning protocol RED++. Only requiring a trained neural network, and not specific to DNN architecture, we exploit an adaptive data-free scalar hashing which exhibits redundancies among neuron weight values. We study the theoretical and empirical guarantees on the preservation of the accuracy from the hashing as well as the expected pruning ratio resulting from the exploitation of said redundancies. We propose a novel data-free pruning technique of DNN layers which removes the input-wise redundant operations. This algorithm is straightforward, parallelizable and offers novel perspective on DNN pruning by shifting the burden of large computation to efficient memory access and allocation. We provide theoretical guarantees on RED++ performance and empirically demonstrate its superiority over other data-free pruning methods and its competitiveness with data-driven ones on ResNets, MobileNets and EfficientNets.
MedPerf: Open Benchmarking Platform for Medical Artificial Intelligence using Federated Evaluation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Medical AI has tremendous potential to advance healthcare by supporting the evidence-based practice of medicine, personalizing patient treatment, reducing costs, and improving provider and patient experience. We argue that unlocking this potential requires a systematic way to measure the performance of medical AI models on large-scale heterogeneous data. To meet this need, we are building MedPerf, an open framework for benchmarking machine learning in the medical domain. MedPerf will enable federated evaluation in which models are securely distributed to different facilities for evaluation, thereby empowering healthcare organizations to assess and verify the performance of AI models in an efficient and human-supervised process, while prioritizing privacy. We describe the current challenges healthcare and AI communities face, the need for an open platform, the design philosophy of MedPerf, its current implementation status, and our roadmap. We call for researchers and organizations to join us in creating the MedPerf open benchmarking platform.
Delayed Asynchronous Iterative Graph Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

Iterative graph algorithms often compute intermediate values and update them as computation progresses. Updated output values are used as inputs for computations in current or subsequent iterations; hence the number of iterations required for values to converge can potentially reduce if the newest values are asynchronously made available to other updates computed in the same iteration. In a multi-threaded shared memory system, the immediate propagation of updated values can cause memory contention that may offset the benefit of propagating updates sooner. In some cases, the benefit of a smaller number of iterations may be diminished by each iteration taking longer. Our key idea is to combine the low memory contention that synchronous approaches have with the faster information sharing of asynchronous approaches. Our hybrid approach buffers updates from threads locally before committing them to the global store to control how often threads may cause conflicts for others while still sharing data within one iteration and hence speeding convergence. On a 112-thread CPU system, our hybrid approach attains up to 4.5% - 19.4% speedup over an asynchronous approach for Pagerank and up to 1.9% - 17% speedup over asynchronous Bellman Ford SSSP. Further, our hybrid approach attains 2.56x better performance than the synchronous approach. Finally, we provide insights as to why delaying updates is not helpful on certain graphs where connectivity is clustered on the main diagonal of the adjacency matrix.
A review of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and its applications in a wide variety of disciplines -- From Medical to Remote Sensing
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

We look into Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), its prevalent variants and applications in a number of sectors. GANs combine two neural networks that compete against one another using zero-sum game theory, allowing them to create much crisper and discrete outputs. GANs can be used to perform image processing, video generation and prediction, among other computer vision applications. GANs can also be utilised for a variety of science-related activities, including protein engineering, astronomical data processing, remote sensing image dehazing, and crystal structure synthesis. Other notable fields where GANs have made gains include finance, marketing, fashion design, sports, and music. Therefore in this article we provide a comprehensive overview of the applications of GANs in a wide variety of disciplines. We first cover the theory supporting GAN, GAN variants, and the metrics to evaluate GANs. Then we present how GAN and its variants can be applied in twelve domains, ranging from STEM fields, such as astronomy and biology, to business fields, such as marketing and finance, and to arts, such as music. As a result, researchers from other fields may grasp how GANs work and apply them to their own study. To the best of our knowledge, this article provides the most comprehensive survey of GAN's applications in different fields.