OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Best Policy Identification in Linear MDPs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

We investigate the problem of best policy identification in discounted linear Markov Decision Processes in the fixed confidence setting under a generative model. We first derive an instance-specific lower bound on the expected number of samples required to identify an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy with probability $1-δ$. The lower bound characterizes the optimal sampling rule as the solution of an intricate non-convex optimization program, but can be used as the starting point to devise simple and near-optimal sampling rules and algorithms. We devise such algorithms. One of these exhibits a sample complexity upper bounded by ${\cal O}({\frac{d}{(\varepsilon+Δ)^2}} (\log(\frac{1}δ)+d))$ where $Δ$ denotes the minimum reward gap of sub-optimal actions and $d$ is the dimension of the feature space. This upper bound holds in the moderate-confidence regime (i.e., for all $δ$), and matches existing minimax and gap-dependent lower bounds. We extend our algorithm to episodic linear MDPs.
Heterogeneous Line Graph Transformer for Math Word Problems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

This paper describes the design and implementation of a new machine learning model for online learning systems. We aim at improving the intelligent level of the systems by enabling an automated math word problem solver which can support a wide range of functions such as homework correction, difficulty estimation, and priority recommendation. We originally planned to employ existing models but realized that they processed a math word problem as a sequence or a homogeneous graph of tokens. Relationships between the multiple types of tokens such as entity, unit, rate, and number were ignored. We decided to design and implement a novel model to use such relational data to bridge the information gap between human-readable language and machine-understandable logical form. We propose a heterogeneous line graph transformer (HLGT) model that constructs a heterogeneous line graph via semantic role labeling on math word problems and then perform node representation learning aware of edge types. We add numerical comparison as an auxiliary task to improve model training for real-world use. Experimental results show that the proposed model achieves a better performance than existing models and suggest that it is still far below human performance. Information utilization and knowledge discovery is continuously needed to improve the online learning systems.
Goodness of Fit Metrics for Multi-class Predictor
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

The multi-class prediction had gained popularity over recent years. Thus measuring fit goodness becomes a cardinal question that researchers often have to deal with. Several metrics are commonly used for this task. However, when one has to decide about the right measurement, he must consider that different use-cases impose different constraints that govern this decision. A leading constraint at least in \emph{real world} multi-class problems is imbalanced data: Multi categorical problems hardly provide symmetrical data. Hence, when we observe common KPIs (key performance indicators), e.g., Precision-Sensitivity or Accuracy, one can seldom interpret the obtained numbers into the model's actual needs. We suggest generalizing Matthew's correlation coefficient into multi-dimensions. This generalization is based on a geometrical interpretation of the generalized confusion matrix.
On the Value of Behavioral Representations for Dense Retrieval
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

We consider text retrieval within dense representational space in real-world settings such as e-commerce search where (a) document popularity and (b) diversity of queries associated with a document have a skewed distribution. Most of the contemporary dense retrieval literature presents two shortcomings in these settings. (1) They learn an almost equal number of representations per document, agnostic to the fact that a few head documents are disproportionately more critical to achieving a good retrieval performance. (ii) They learn purely semantic document representations inferred from intrinsic document characteristics which may not contain adequate information to determine the queries for which the document is relevant--especially when the document is short. We propose to overcome these limitations by augmenting semantic document representations learned by bi-encoders with behavioral document representations learned by our proposed approach MVG. To do so, MVG (1) determines how to divide the total budget for behavioral representations by drawing a connection to the Pitman-Yor process, and (2) simply clusters the queries related to a given document (based on user behavior) within the representational space learned by a base bi-encoder, and treats the cluster centers as its behavioral representations. Our central contribution is the finding such a simple intuitive light-weight approach leads to substantial gains in key first-stage retrieval metrics by incurring only a marginal memory overhead. We establish this via extensive experiments over three large public datasets comparing several single-vector and multi-vector bi-encoders, a proprietary e-commerce search dataset compared to production-quality bi-encoder, and an A/B test.
Overview of CTC 2021: Chinese Text Correction for Native Speakers
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we present an overview of the CTC 2021, a Chinese text correction task for native speakers. We give detailed descriptions of the task definition and the data for training as well as evaluation. We also summarize the approaches investigated by the participants of this task. We hope the data sets collected and annotated for this task can facilitate and expedite future development in this research area. Therefore, the pseudo training data, gold standards validation data, and entire leaderboard is publicly available online at https://destwang.github.io/CTC2021-explorer/.
Quantum Deletion Codes derived from Classical Deletion Codes (Extended Abstract)
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

This manuscript is an extended abstract version of the paper entitled ``Quantum Deletion Codes derived from Classical Deletion Codes.'' The paper contributes to the fundamental theory for quantum deletion error-correcting codes. The paper proposes a code construction condition for a partition of classical deletion error-correcting codes to derive quantum deletion error-correcting codes. The construction methods in this paper give examples of quantum codes that can correct single-quantum deletion errors and have a code rate arbitrarily close to 1, while the previously known quantum deletion code rates are close to 0 for long length. This manuscript omits the proofs of the statements in the paper.
A Comprehensive Survey of Natural Language Generation Advances from the Perspective of Digital Deception
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

In recent years there has been substantial growth in the capabilities of systems designed to generate text that mimics the fluency and coherence of human language. From this, there has been considerable research aimed at examining the potential uses of these natural language generators (NLG) towards a wide number of tasks. The increasing capabilities of powerful text generators to mimic human writing convincingly raises the potential for deception and other forms of dangerous misuse. As these systems improve, and it becomes ever harder to distinguish between human-written and machine-generated text, malicious actors could leverage these powerful NLG systems to a wide variety of ends, including the creation of fake news and misinformation, the generation of fake online product reviews, or via chatbots as means of convincing users to divulge private information. In this paper, we provide an overview of the NLG field via the identification and examination of 119 survey-like papers focused on NLG research. From these identified papers, we outline a proposed high-level taxonomy of the central concepts that constitute NLG, including the methods used to develop generalised NLG systems, the means by which these systems are evaluated, and the popular NLG tasks and subtasks that exist. In turn, we provide an overview and discussion of each of these items with respect to current research and offer an examination of the potential roles of NLG in deception and detection systems to counteract these threats. Moreover, we discuss the broader challenges of NLG, including the risks of bias that are often exhibited by existing text generation systems. This work offers a broad overview of the field of NLG with respect to its potential for misuse, aiming to provide a high-level understanding of this rapidly developing area of research.
Dbias: Detecting biases and ensuring Fairness in news articles
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

Because of the increasing use of data-centric systems and algorithms in machine learning, the topic of fairness is receiving a lot of attention in the academic and broader literature. This paper introduces Dbias (https://pypi.org/project/Dbias/), an open-source Python package for ensuring fairness in news articles. Dbias can take any text to determine if it is biased. Then, it detects biased words in the text, masks them, and suggests a set of sentences with new words that are bias-free or at least less biased. We conduct extensive experiments to assess the performance of Dbias. To see how well our approach works, we compare it to the existing fairness models. We also test the individual components of Dbias to see how effective they are. The experimental results show that Dbias outperforms all the baselines in terms of accuracy and fairness. We make this package (Dbias) as publicly available for the developers and practitioners to mitigate biases in textual data (such as news articles), as well as to encourage extension of this work.
Neural Mesh-Based Graphics
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

We revisit NPBG, the popular approach to novel view synthesis that introduced the ubiquitous point feature neural rendering paradigm. We are interested in particular in data-efficient learning with fast view synthesis. We achieve this through a view-dependent mesh-based denser point descriptor rasterization, in addition to a foreground/background scene rendering split, and an improved loss. By training solely on a single scene, we outperform NPBG, which has been trained on ScanNet and then scene finetuned. We also perform competitively with respect to the state-of-the-art method SVS, which has been trained on the full dataset (DTU and Tanks and Temples) and then scene finetuned, in spite of their deeper neural renderer.
Aesthetic Visual Question Answering of Photographs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Aesthetic assessment of images can be categorized into two main forms: numerical assessment and language assessment. Aesthetics caption of photographs is the only task of aesthetic language assessment that has been addressed. In this paper, we propose a new task of aesthetic language assessment: aesthetic visual question and answering (AVQA) of images. If we give a question of images aesthetics, model can predict the answer. We use images from \textit{www.flickr.com}. The objective QA pairs are generated by the proposed aesthetic attributes analysis algorithms. Moreover, we introduce subjective QA pairs that are converted from aesthetic numerical labels and sentiment analysis from large-scale pre-train models. We build the first aesthetic visual question answering dataset, AesVQA, that contains 72,168 high-quality images and 324,756 pairs of aesthetic questions. Two methods for adjusting the data distribution have been proposed and proved to improve the accuracy of existing models. This is the first work that both addresses the task of aesthetic VQA and introduces subjectiveness into VQA tasks. The experimental results reveal that our methods outperform other VQA models on this new task.
On the Modeling of Reliability in Extreme Edge Computing Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

Extreme edge computing (EEC) refers to the endmost part of edge computing wherein computational tasks and edge services are deployed only on extreme edge devices (EEDs). EEDs are consumer or user-owned devices that offer computational resources, which may consist of wearable devices, personal mobile devices, drones, etc. Such devices are opportunistically or naturally present within the proximity of other user devices. Hence, utilizing EEDs to deploy edge services or perform computational tasks fulfills the promise of edge computing of bringing the services and computation as close as possible to the end-users. However, the lack of knowledge and control over the EEDs computational resources raises a red flag, since executing the computational tasks successfully becomes doubtful. To this end, we aim to study the EEDs randomness from the computational perspective, and how reliable is an EED in terms of executing the tasks on time. Specifically, we provide a reliability model for the EEDs that takes into account the probabilistic nature of the availability of the EEDs' computational resources. Moreover, we study the reliability of executing different types of computational tasks in EEC systems that are distributed across the EEDs. Lastly, we carry out experimental results to analyze the EEDs and the EEC systems' reliability behavior in different scenarios.
Achievement Unlocked: A Case Study on Gamifying DevOps Practices in Industry
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

Gamification is the use of game elements such as points, leaderboards, and badges in a non-game context to encourage a desired behavior from individuals interacting with an environment. Recently, gamification has found its way into software engineering contexts as a means to promote certain activities to practitioners. Previous studies investigated the use of gamification to promote the adoption of a variety of tools and practices, however, these studies were either performed in an educational environment or in small to medium-sized teams of developers in the industry. We performed a large-scale mixed-methods study on the effects of badge-based gamification in promoting the adoption of DevOps practices in a very large company and evaluated how practice adoption is associated with changes in key delivery, quality, and throughput metrics of 333 software projects. We observed an accelerated adoption of some gamified DevOps practices by at least 60%, with increased adoption rates up to 6x. We found mixed results when associating badge adoption and metric changes: teams that earned testing badges showed an increase in bug fixing commits but output fewer commits and pull requests; teams that earned code review and quality tooling badges exhibited faster delivery metrics. Finally, our empirical study was supplemented by a survey with 45 developers where 73% of respondents found badges to be helpful for learning about and adopting new standardized practices. Our results contribute to the rich knowledge on gamification with a unique and important perspective from real industry practitioners.
Design and Evaluation of IPFS: A Storage Layer for the Decentralized Web
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

Recent years have witnessed growing consolidation of web operations. For example, the majority of web traffic now originates from a few organizations, and even micro-websites often choose to host on large pre-existing cloud infrastructures. In response to this, the "Decentralized Web" attempts to distribute ownership and operation of web services more evenly. This paper describes the design and implementation of the largest and most widely used Decentralized Web platform - the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) - an open-source, content-addressable peer-to-peer network that provides distributed data storage and delivery. IPFS has millions of daily content retrievals and already underpins dozens of third-party applications. This paper evaluates the performance of IPFS by introducing a set of measurement methodologies that allow us to uncover the characteristics of peers in the IPFS network. We reveal presence in more than 2700 Autonomous Systems and 152 countries, the majority of which operate outside large central cloud providers like Amazon or Azure. We further evaluate IPFS performance, showing that both publication and retrieval delays are acceptable for a wide range of use cases. Finally, we share our datasets, experiences and lessons learned.
Optimal Transport Features for Morphometric Population Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Brain pathologies often manifest as partial or complete loss of tissue. The goal of many neuroimaging studies is to capture the location and amount of tissue changes with respect to a clinical variable of interest, such as disease progression. Morphometric analysis approaches capture local differences in the distribution of tissue or other quantities of interest in relation to a clinical variable. We propose to augment morphometric analysis with an additional feature extraction step based on unbalanced optimal transport. The optimal transport feature extraction step increases statistical power for pathologies that cause spatially dispersed tissue loss, minimizes sensitivity to shifts due to spatial misalignment or differences in brain topology, and separates changes due to volume differences from changes due to tissue location. We demonstrate the proposed optimal transport feature extraction step in the context of a volumetric morphometric analysis of the OASIS-1 study for Alzheimer's disease. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach can identify tissue changes and differences that are not otherwise measurable.
Domain-Specific Text Generation for Machine Translation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Preservation of domain knowledge from the source to target is crucial in any translation workflow. It is common in the translation industry to receive highly specialized projects, where there is hardly any parallel in-domain data. In such scenarios where there is insufficient in-domain data to fine-tune Machine Translation (MT) models, producing translations that are consistent with the relevant context is challenging. In this work, we propose a novel approach to domain adaptation leveraging state-of-the-art pretrained language models (LMs) for domain-specific data augmentation for MT, simulating the domain characteristics of either (a) a small bilingual dataset, or (b) the monolingual source text to be translated. Combining this idea with back-translation, we can generate huge amounts of synthetic bilingual in-domain data for both use cases. For our investigation, we use the state-of-the-art Transformer architecture. We employ mixed fine-tuning to train models that significantly improve translation of in-domain texts. More specifically, in both scenarios, our proposed methods achieve improvements of approximately 5-6 BLEU and 2-3 BLEU, respectively, on the Arabic-to-English and English-to-Arabic language pairs. Furthermore, the outcome of human evaluation corroborates the automatic evaluation results.
Safety and Performance, Why not Both? Bi-Objective Optimized Model Compression toward AI Software Deployment
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

The size of deep learning models in artificial intelligence (AI) software is increasing rapidly, which hinders the large-scale deployment on resource-restricted devices (e.g., smartphones). To mitigate this issue, AI software compression plays a crucial role, which aims to compress model size while keeping high performance. However, the intrinsic defects in the big model may be inherited by the compressed one. Such defects may be easily leveraged by attackers, since the compressed models are usually deployed in a large number of devices without adequate protection. In this paper, we try to address the safe model compression problem from a safety-performance co-optimization perspective. Specifically, inspired by the test-driven development (TDD) paradigm in software engineering, we propose a test-driven sparse training framework called SafeCompress. By simulating the attack mechanism as the safety test, SafeCompress can automatically compress a big model to a small one following the dynamic sparse training paradigm. Further, considering a representative attack, i.e., membership inference attack (MIA), we develop a concrete safe model compression mechanism, called MIA-SafeCompress. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate MIA-SafeCompress on five datasets for both computer vision and natural language processing tasks. The results verify the effectiveness and generalization of our method. We also discuss how to adapt SafeCompress to other attacks besides MIA, demonstrating the flexibility of SafeCompress.
WeightMom: Learning Sparse Networks using Iterative Momentum-based pruning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Deep Neural Networks have been used in a wide variety of applications with significant success. However, their highly complex nature owing to comprising millions of parameters has lead to problems during deployment in pipelines with low latency requirements. As a result, it is more desirable to obtain lightweight neural networks which have the same performance during inference time. In this work, we propose a weight based pruning approach in which the weights are pruned gradually based on their momentum of the previous iterations. Each layer of the neural network is assigned an importance value based on their relative sparsity, followed by the magnitude of the weight in the previous iterations. We evaluate our approach on networks such as AlexNet, VGG16 and ResNet50 with image classification datasets such as CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100. We found that the results outperformed the previous approaches with respect to accuracy and compression ratio. Our method is able to obtain a compression of 15% for the same degradation in accuracy on both the datasets.
Approximation-based Threshold Optimization from Single Antenna to Massive SIMO Authentication
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

In a wireless sensor network, data from various sensors are gathered to estimate the system-state of the process system. However, adversaries aim at distorting the system-state estimate, for which they may infiltrate sensors or position additional devices in the environment. To authenticate the received process values, the integrity of the measurements from different sensors can be evaluated jointly with the temporal integrity of channel measurements from each sensor. For this purpose, we design a security protocol, in which Kalman filters are used to predict the system-state and the channel-state values, and the received data are authenticated by a hypothesis test. We theoretically analyze the adversarial success probability and the reliability rate obtained in the hypothesis test in two ways, based on a chi-square approximation and on a Gaussian approximation. The two approximations are exact for small and large data vectors, respectively. The Gaussian approximation is suitable for analyzing massive single-input multiple-output (SIMO) setups. To obtain additional insights, the approximation is further adapted for the case of channel hardening, which occurs in massive SIMO fading channels. As adversaries always look for the weakest point of a system, a time-constant security level is required. To provide such a service, the approximations are used to propose time-varying threshold values for the hypothesis test, which approximately attain a constant security level. Numerical results show that a constant security level can only be achieved by a time-varying threshold choice, while a constant threshold value leads to a time-varying security level.