OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A TOCTOU Attack on DICE Attestation
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

A major security challenge for modern Internet of Things (IoT) deployments is to ensure that the devices run legitimate firmware free from malware. This challenge can be addressed through a security primitive called attestation which allows a remote backend to verify the firmware integrity of the devices it manages. In order to accelerate broad attestation adoption in the IoT domain the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) has introduced the Device Identifier Composition Engine (DICE) series of specifications. DICE is a hardware-software architecture for constrained, e.g., microcontroller-based IoT devices where the firmware is divided into successively executed layers. In this paper, we demonstrate a remote Time-Of-Check Time-Of-Use (TOCTOU) attack on DICE-based attestation. We demonstrate that it is possible to install persistent malware in the flash memory of a constrained microcontroller that cannot be detected through DICE-based attestation. The main idea of our attack is to install malware during runtime of application logic in the top firmware layer. The malware reads the valid attestation key and stores it on the device's flash memory. After reboot, the malware uses the previously stored key for all subsequent attestations to the backend. We conduct the installation of malware and copying of the key through Return-Oriented Programming (ROP). As a platform for our demonstration, we use the Cortex-M-based nRF52840 microcontroller. We provide a discussion of several possible countermeasures which can mitigate the shortcomings of the DICE specifications.
Taxonomy of Security Weaknesses in Java and Kotlin Android Apps
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Android is nowadays the most popular operating system in the world, not only in the realm of mobile devices, but also when considering desktop and laptop computers. Such a popularity makes it an attractive target for security attacks, also due to the sensitive information often manipulated by mobile apps. The latter are going through a transition in which the Android ecosystem is moving from the usage of Java as the official language for developing apps, to the adoption of Kotlin as the first choice supported by Google. While previous studies have partially studied security weaknesses affecting Java Android apps, there is no comprehensive empirical investigation studying software security weaknesses affecting Android apps considering (and comparing) the two main languages used for their development, namely Java and Kotlin. We present an empirical study in which we: (i) manually analyze 681 commits including security weaknesses fixed by developers in Java and Kotlin apps, with the goal of defining a taxonomy highlighting the types of software security weaknesses affecting Java and Kotlin Android apps; (ii) survey 43 Android developers to validate and complement our taxonomy. Based on our findings, we propose a list of future actions that could be performed by researchers and practitioners to improve the security of Android apps.
Consolidated learning -- a domain-specific model-free optimization strategy with examples for XGBoost and MIMIC-IV
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

For many machine learning models, a choice of hyperparameters is a crucial step towards achieving high performance. Prevalent meta-learning approaches focus on obtaining good hyperparameters configurations with a limited computational budget for a completely new task based on the results obtained from the prior tasks. This paper proposes a new formulation of the tuning problem, called consolidated learning, more suited to practical challenges faced by model developers, in which a large number of predictive models are created on similar data sets. In such settings, we are interested in the total optimization time rather than tuning for a single task. We show that a carefully selected static portfolio of hyperparameters yields good results for anytime optimization, maintaining ease of use and implementation. Moreover, we point out how to construct such a portfolio for specific domains. The improvement in the optimization is possible due to more efficient transfer of hyperparameter configurations between similar tasks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach through an empirical study for XGBoost algorithm and the collection of predictive tasks extracted from the MIMIC-IV medical database; however, consolidated learning is applicable in many others fields.
Resource Provisioning in Edge Computing for Latency Sensitive Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

Low-Latency IoT applications such as autonomous vehicles, augmented/virtual reality devices and security applications require high computation resources to make decisions on the fly. However, these kinds of applications cannot tolerate offloading their tasks to be processed on a cloud infrastructure due to the experienced latency. Therefore, edge computing is introduced to enable low latency by moving the tasks processing closer to the users at the edge of the network. The edge of the network is characterized by the heterogeneity of edge devices forming it; thus, it is crucial to devise novel solutions that take into account the different physical resources of each edge device. In this paper, we propose a resource representation scheme, allowing each edge device to expose its resource information to the supervisor of the edge node through the mobile edge computing application programming interfaces proposed by European Telecommunications Standards Institute. The information about the edge device resource is exposed to the supervisor of the EN each time a resource allocation is required. To this end, we leverage a Lyapunov optimization framework to dynamically allocate resources at the edge devices. To test our proposed model, we performed intensive theoretical and experimental simulations on a testbed to validate the proposed scheme and its impact on different system's parameters. The simulations have shown that our proposed approach outperforms other benchmark approaches and provides low latency and optimal resource consumption.
Discriminative Supervised Subspace Learning for Cross-modal Retrieval
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Nowadays the measure between heterogeneous data is still an open problem for cross-modal retrieval. The core of cross-modal retrieval is how to measure the similarity between different types of data. Many approaches have been developed to solve the problem. As one of the mainstream, approaches based on subspace learning pay attention to learning a common subspace where the similarity among multi-modal data can be measured directly. However, many of the existing approaches only focus on learning a latent subspace. They ignore the full use of discriminative information so that the semantically structural information is not well preserved. Therefore satisfactory results can not be achieved as expected. We in this paper propose a discriminative supervised subspace learning for cross-modal retrieval(DS2L), to make full use of discriminative information and better preserve the semantically structural information. Specifically, we first construct a shared semantic graph to preserve the semantic structure within each modality. Subsequently, the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion(HSIC) is introduced to preserve the consistence between feature-similarity and semantic-similarity of samples. Thirdly, we introduce a similarity preservation term, thus our model can compensate for the shortcomings of insufficient use of discriminative data and better preserve the semantically structural information within each modality. The experimental results obtained on three well-known benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and competitiveness of the proposed method against the compared classic subspace learning approaches.
Identifying Emergent Leadership in OSS Projects Based on Communication Styles
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

In open source software (OSS) communities, existing leadership indicators are dominantly measured by code contribution or community influence. Recent studies on emergent leadership shed light on additional dimensions such as intellectual stimulation in collaborative communications. To that end, this paper proposes an automated approach, named iLead, to mine communication styles and identify emergent leadership behaviors in OSS communities, using issue comments data. We start with the construction of 6 categories of leadership behaviors based on existing leadership studies. Then, we manually label leadership behaviors in 10,000 issue comments from 10 OSS projects, and extract 304 heuristic linguistic patterns which represent different types of emergent leadership behaviors in flexible and concise manners. Next, an automated algorithm is developed to merge and consolidate different pattern sets extracted from multiple projects into a final pattern ranking list, which can be applied for the automatic leadership identification. The evaluation results show that iLead can achieve a median precision of 0.82 and recall of 0.78, outperforming ten machine/deep learning baselines. To demonstrate practical usefulness, we also conduct empirical analysis and human evaluation of the identified leadership behaviors from iLead. We argue that emergent leadership behaviors in issue discussion should be taken into consideration to broaden existing OSS leadership viewpoints. Practical insights on community building and leadership skill development are offered for OSS community and individual developers, respectively.
Constraint-based Formation of Drone Swarms
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Drone swarms are required for the simultaneous delivery of multiple packages. We demonstrate a multi-stop drone swarm-based delivery in a smart city. We leverage formation flying to conserve energy and increase the flight range of a drone swarm. An adaptive formation is presented in which a swarm adjusts to extrinsic constraints and changes the formation pattern in-flight. We utilize the existing building rooftops in a city and build a line-of-sight skyway network to safely operate the swarms. We use a heuristic-based A* algorithm to route a drone swarm in a skyway network.
Higher Order Correlation Analysis for Multi-View Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Multi-view learning is frequently used in data science. The pairwise correlation maximization is a classical approach for exploring the consensus of multiple views. Since the pairwise correlation is inherent for two views, the extensions to more views can be diversified and the intrinsic interconnections among views are generally lost. To address this issue, we propose to maximize higher order correlations. This can be formulated as a low rank approximation problem with the higher order correlation tensor of multi-view data. We use the generating polynomial method to solve the low rank approximation problem. Numerical results on real multi-view data demonstrate that this method consistently outperforms prior existing methods.
Generalized Visual Quality Assessment of GAN-Generated Face Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Recent years have witnessed the dramatically increased interest in face generation with generative adversarial networks (GANs). A number of successful GAN algorithms have been developed to produce vivid face images towards different application scenarios. However, little work has been dedicated to automatic quality assessment of such GAN-generated face images (GFIs), even less have been devoted to generalized and robust quality assessment of GFIs generated with unseen GAN model. Herein, we make the first attempt to study the subjective and objective quality towards generalized quality assessment of GFIs. More specifically, we establish a large-scale database consisting of GFIs from four GAN algorithms, the pseudo labels from image quality assessment (IQA) measures, as well as the human opinion scores via subjective testing. Subsequently, we develop a quality assessment model that is able to deliver accurate quality predictions for GFIs from both available and unseen GAN algorithms based on meta-learning. In particular, to learn shared knowledge from GFIs pairs that are born of limited GAN algorithms, we develop the convolutional block attention (CBA) and facial attributes-based analysis (ABA) modules, ensuring that the learned knowledge tends to be consistent with human visual perception. Extensive experiments exhibit that the proposed model achieves better performance compared with the state-of-the-art IQA models, and is capable of retaining the effectiveness when evaluating GFIs from the unseen GAN algorithms.
Transfering Hierarchical Structure with Dual Meta Imitation Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Hierarchical Imitation Learning (HIL) is an effective way for robots to learn sub-skills from long-horizon unsegmented demonstrations. However, the learned hierarchical structure lacks the mechanism to transfer across multi-tasks or to new tasks, which makes them have to learn from scratch when facing a new situation. Transferring and reorganizing modular sub-skills require fast adaptation ability of the whole hierarchical structure. In this work, we propose Dual Meta Imitation Learning (DMIL), a hierarchical meta imitation learning method where the high-level network and sub-skills are iteratively meta-learned with model-agnostic meta-learning. DMIL uses the likelihood of state-action pairs from each sub-skill as the supervision for the high-level network adaptation, and use the adapted high-level network to determine different data set for each sub-skill adaptation. We theoretically prove the convergence of the iterative training process of DMIL and establish the connection between DMIL and Expectation-Maximization algorithm. Empirically, we achieve state-of-the-art few-shot imitation learning performance on the Meta-world \cite{metaworld} benchmark and competitive results on long-horizon tasks of Kitchen environments.
Unfolding a blurred image
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

We present a solution for the goal of extracting a video from a single motion blurred image to sequentially reconstruct the clear views of a scene as beheld by the camera during the time of exposure. We first learn motion representation from sharp videos in an unsupervised manner through training of a convolutional recurrent video autoencoder network that performs a surrogate task of video reconstruction. Once trained, it is employed for guided training of a motion encoder for blurred images. This network extracts embedded motion information from the blurred image to generate a sharp video in conjunction with the trained recurrent video decoder. As an intermediate step, we also design an efficient architecture that enables real-time single image deblurring and outperforms competing methods across all factors: accuracy, speed, and compactness. Experiments on real scenes and standard datasets demonstrate the superiority of our framework over the state-of-the-art and its ability to generate a plausible sequence of temporally consistent sharp frames.
A MADM method for network selection in heterogeneous wireless networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

The coexistence of different Radio Access Technologies (RATs) in the same area has enabled the researchers to get profit from the available networks by the selection of the best RAT at each moment to satisfy the user requirements. The challenge is to achieve the Always Best Connected (ABC) concept; the main issue is the automatic choice of the suitable Radio Access Technology (RAT) from the list of the available RATs. This decision is called network selection (NS). In this paper, we propose a modified Simple Additive Weigh (modified-SAW) function to deal with the drawbacks of the existing solutions. Indeed, the existing Multiple Attribute Decision Making (MADM) methods suffer mainly from the famous problem of rank reversal once an alternative is added or removed, other problems occur in the legacy MADMs. We modify the SAW method intelligently and we use it to solve the NS problem. Finally, we compare the performance of our solution with the previous works in different scenarios; the simulations show that our proposal outperforms the other existing methods
Puppeteer: A Random Forest-based Manager for Hardware Prefetchers across the Memory Hierarchy
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2022
Year: 2022

Over the years, processor throughput has steadily increased. However, the memory throughput has not increased at the same rate, which has led to the memory wall problem in turn increasing the gap between effective and theoretical peak processor performance. To cope with this, there has been an abundance of work in the area of data/instruction prefetcher designs. Broadly, prefetchers predict future data/instruction address accesses and proactively fetch data/instructions in the memory hierarchy with the goal of lowering data/instruction access latency. To this end, one or more prefetchers are deployed at each level of the memory hierarchy, but typically, each prefetcher gets designed in isolation without comprehensively accounting for other prefetchers in the system. As a result, individual prefetchers do not always complement each other, and that leads to lower average performance gains and/or many negative outliers. In this work, we propose Puppeteer, which is a hardware prefetcher manager that uses a suite of random forest regressors to determine at runtime which prefetcher should be ON at each level in the memory hierarchy, such that the prefetchers complement each other and we reduce the data/instruction access latency. Compared to a design with no prefetchers, using Puppeteer we improve IPC by 46.0% in 1 Core (1C), 25.8% in 4 Core (4C), and 11.9% in 8 Core (8C) processors on average across traces generated from SPEC2017, SPEC2006, and Cloud suites with ~10KB overhead. Moreover, we also reduce the number of negative outliers by over 89%, and the performance loss of the worst-case negative outlier from 25% to only 5% compared to the state-of-the-art.
What is Legitimate Decision Support?
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

Decision support is the science and associated practice that consist in providing recommendations to decision makers facing problems, based on available theoretical knowledge and empirical data. Although this activity is often seen as being concerned with solving mathematical problems and conceiving algorithms, it is essentially an empirical and socially framed activity, where interactions between clients and analysts, and between them and concerned third parties, play a crucial role. Since the 80s, two concepts have structured the literature devoted to analysing this aspect of decision support: validity and legitimacy. Whereas validity is focused on the interactions between the client and the analyst, legitimacy refers to the broader picture: the organisational context, the overall problem situation, the environment, culture, history. Despite its importance, this concept has not received the attention it deserves in the literature in decision support. The present paper aims at filling this gap. For that purpose, we review the literature in other disciplines relevant to elaborate a concept of legitimacy useful in decision support contexts. Based on this review, we propose a general theory of legitimacy, adapted to decision support contexts, encompassing the relevant contributions we found in the literature. According to this general theory, a legitimate decision support intervention is one for which the decision support provider produces a justification that satisfies two conditions: (i) it effectively convinces the decision support provider's interlocutors (effectiveness condition) and (ii) it is organised around the active elicitation of as many and as diverse counterarguments as possible (truthfulness condition). Despite its conceptual simplicity, legitimacy, understood in this sense, is a very exacting requirement, opening ambitious research avenues that we delineate.
Impact of Phase-Noise and Spatial Correlation on Double-RIS-Assisted Multiuser MISO Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

We study the performance of a phase-noise impaired double reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided multiuser (MU) multiple-input single-output (MISO) system under spatial correlation at both RISs and base-station (BS). The downlink achievable rate is derived in closed-form under maximum ratio transmission (MRT) precoding. In addition, we obtain the optimal phase-shift design at both RISs in closed-form for the considered channel and phase-noise models. Numerical results validate the analytical expressions, and highlight the effects of different system parameters on the achievable rate. Our analysis shows that phase-noise can severely degrade the performance when users do not have direct links to both RISs, and can only be served via the double-reflection link. Also, we show that high spatial correlation at RISs is essential for high achievable rates.
O-ViT: Orthogonal Vision Transformer
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Inspired by the tremendous success of the self-attention mechanism in natural language processing, the Vision Transformer (ViT) creatively applies it to image patch sequences and achieves incredible performance. However, the scaled dot-product self-attention of ViT brings about scale ambiguity to the structure of the original feature space. To address this problem, we propose a novel method named Orthogonal Vision Transformer (O-ViT), to optimize ViT from the geometric perspective. O-ViT limits parameters of self-attention blocks to be on the norm-keeping orthogonal manifold, which can keep the geometry of the feature space. Moreover, O-ViT achieves both orthogonal constraints and cheap optimization overhead by adopting a surjective mapping between the orthogonal group and its Lie algebra.We have conducted comparative experiments on image recognition tasks to demonstrate O-ViT's validity and experiments show that O-ViT can boost the performance of ViT by up to 3.6%.
Reducing language context confusion for end-to-end code-switching automatic speech recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Code-switching deals with alternative languages in communication process. Training end-to-end (E2E) automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems for code-switching is especially challenging as code-switching training data are always insufficient to combat the increased multilingual context confusion due to the presence of more than one language. We propose a language-related attention mechanism to reduce multilingual context confusion for the E2E code-switching ASR model based on the Equivalence Constraint (EC) Theory. The linguistic theory requires that any monolingual fragment that occurs in the code-switching sentence must occur in one of the monolingual sentences. The theory establishes a bridge between monolingual data and code-switching data. We leverage this linguistics theory to design the code-switching E2E ASR model. The proposed model efficiently transfers language knowledge from rich monolingual data to improve the performance of the code-switching ASR model. We evaluate our model on ASRU 2019 Mandarin-English code-switching challenge dataset. Compared to the baseline model, our proposed model achieves a 17.12% relative error reduction.