OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Hybrid Machine Learning Modeling of Engineering Systems -- A Probabilistic Perspective Tested on a Multiphase Flow Modeling Case Study
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

To operate process engineering systems in a safe and reliable manner, predictive models are often used in decision making. In many cases, these are mechanistic first principles models which aim to accurately describe the process. In practice, the parameters of these models need to be tuned to the process conditions at hand. If the conditions change, which is common in practice, the model becomes inaccurate and needs to be re-tuned. In this paper, we propose a hybrid modeling machine learning framework that allows tuning first principles models to process conditions using two different types of Bayesian Neural Networks. Our approach not only estimates the expected values of the first principles model parameters but also quantifies the uncertainty of these estimates. Such an approach of hybrid machine learning modeling is not yet well described in the literature, so we believe this paper will provide an additional angle at which hybrid machine learning modeling of physical systems can be considered. As an example, we choose a multiphase pipe flow process for which we constructed a three-phase steady state model based on the drift-flux approach which can be used for modeling of pipe and well flow behavior in oil and gas production systems with or without the neural network tuning. In the simulation results, we show how uncertainty estimates of the resulting hybrid models can be used to make better operation decisions.
Mobility Support for Millimeter Wave Communications: Opportunities and Challenges
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication technology offers a potential and promising solution to support 5G and B5G wireless networks in dynamic scenarios and applications. However, mobility introduces many challenges as well as opportunities to mmWave applications. To address these problems, we conduct a survey of the opportunities and technologies to support mmWave communications in mobile scenarios. Firstly, we summarize the mobile scenarios where mmWave communications are exploited, including indoor wireless local area network (WLAN) or wireless personal area network (WPAN), cellular access, vehicle-to-everything (V2X), high speed train (HST), unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), and the new space-air-ground-sea communication scenarios. Then, to address users' mobility impact on the system performance in different application scenarios, we introduce several representative mobility models in mmWave systems, including human mobility, vehicular mobility, high speed train mobility and ship mobility. Next we survey the key challenges and existing solutions to mmWave applications, such as channel modeling, channel estimation, anti-blockage, and capacity improvement. Lastly, we discuss the open issues concerning mobility-aware mmWave communications that deserve further investigation. In particular, we highlight future heterogeneous mobile networks, dynamic resource management, artificial intelligence (AI) for mobility and integration of geographical information, deployment of large intelligent surface and reconfigurable antenna technology, and finally, the evolution to Terahertz (THz) communications.
ExploitWP2Docker: a Platform for Automating the Generation of Vulnerable WordPress Environments for Cyber Ranges
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

A cyber range is a realistic simulation of an organization's network infrastructure, commonly used for cyber security training purposes. It provides a safe environment to assess competencies in both offensive and defensive techniques. An important step during the realization of a cyber range is the generation of vulnerable machines. This step is challenging and requires a laborious manual configuration. Several works aim to reduce this overhead, but the current state-of-the-art focuses on generating network services without considering the effort required to build vulnerable environments for web applications. A cyber range should represent a real system, and nowadays, almost all the companies develop their company site by using WordPress, a common Content Management System (CMS), which is also one of the most critical attackers' entry points. The presented work proposes an approach to automatically create and configure vulnerable WordPress applications by using the information presented in public exploits. Our platform automatically extracts information from the most well-known publicly available exploit database in order to generate and configure vulnerable environments. The container-based virtualization is used to generate lightweight and easily deployable infrastructures. A final evaluation highlights promising results regarding the possibility of automating the generation of vulnerable environments through our approach.
A Mutually Exciting Latent Space Hawkes Process Model for Continuous-time Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Networks and temporal point processes serve as fundamental building blocks for modeling complex dynamic relational data in various domains. We propose the latent space Hawkes (LSH) model, a novel generative model for continuous-time networks of relational events, using a latent space representation for nodes. We model relational events between nodes using mutually exciting Hawkes processes with baseline intensities dependent upon the distances between the nodes in the latent space and sender and receiver specific effects. We demonstrate that our proposed LSH model can replicate many features observed in real temporal networks including reciprocity and transitivity, while also achieving superior prediction accuracy and providing more interpretable fits than existing models.
FedILC: Weighted Geometric Mean and Invariant Gradient Covariance for Federated Learning on Non-IID Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Federated learning is a distributed machine learning approach which enables a shared server model to learn by aggregating the locally-computed parameter updates with the training data from spatially-distributed client silos. Though successfully possessing advantages in both scale and privacy, federated learning is hurt by domain shift problems, where the learning models are unable to generalize to unseen domains whose data distribution is non-i.i.d. with respect to the training domains. In this study, we propose the Federated Invariant Learning Consistency (FedILC) approach, which leverages the gradient covariance and the geometric mean of Hessians to capture both inter-silo and intra-silo consistencies of environments and unravel the domain shift problems in federated networks. The benchmark and real-world dataset experiments bring evidence that our proposed algorithm outperforms conventional baselines and similar federated learning algorithms. This is relevant to various fields such as medical healthcare, computer vision, and the Internet of Things (IoT). The code is released at https://github.com/mikemikezhu/FedILC.
Support-set based Multi-modal Representation Enhancement for Video Captioning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Video captioning is a challenging task that necessitates a thorough comprehension of visual scenes. Existing methods follow a typical one-to-one mapping, which concentrates on a limited sample space while ignoring the intrinsic semantic associations between samples, resulting in rigid and uninformative expressions. To address this issue, we propose a novel and flexible framework, namely Support-set based Multi-modal Representation Enhancement (SMRE) model, to mine rich information in a semantic subspace shared between samples. Specifically, we propose a Support-set Construction (SC) module to construct a support-set to learn underlying connections between samples and obtain semantic-related visual elements. During this process, we design a Semantic Space Transformation (SST) module to constrain relative distance and administrate multi-modal interactions in a self-supervised way. Extensive experiments on MSVD and MSR-VTT datasets demonstrate that our SMRE achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Mip-NeRF RGB-D: Depth Assisted Fast Neural Radiance Fields
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Neural scene representations, such as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), are based on training a multilayer perceptron (MLP) using a set of color images with known poses. An increasing number of devices now produce RGB-D(color + depth) information, which has been shown to be very important for a wide range of tasks. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to investigate what improvements can be made to these promising implicit representations by incorporating depth information with the color images. In particular, the recently proposed Mip-NeRF approach, which uses conical frustums instead of rays for volume rendering, allows one to account for the varying area of a pixel with distance from the camera center. The proposed method additionally models depth uncertainty. This allows to address major limitations of NeRF-based approaches including improving the accuracy of geometry, reduced artifacts, faster training time, and shortened prediction time. Experiments are performed on well-known benchmark scenes, and comparisons show improved accuracy in scene geometry and photometric reconstruction, while reducing the training time by 3 - 5 times.
Sparse Adversarial Attack in Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (cMARL) has many real applications, but the policy trained by existing cMARL algorithms is not robust enough when deployed. There exist also many methods about adversarial attacks on the RL system, which implies that the RL system can suffer from adversarial attacks, but most of them focused on single agent RL. In this paper, we propose a \textit{sparse adversarial attack} on cMARL systems. We use (MA)RL with regularization to train the attack policy. Our experiments show that the policy trained by the current cMARL algorithm can obtain poor performance when only one or a few agents in the team (e.g., 1 of 8 or 5 of 25) were attacked at a few timesteps (e.g., attack 3 of total 40 timesteps).
GitRanking: A Ranking of GitHub Topics for Software Classification using Active Sampling
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

GitHub is the world's largest host of source code, with more than 150M repositories. However, most of these repositories are not labeled or inadequately so, making it harder for users to find relevant projects. There have been various proposals for software application domain classification over the past years. However, these approaches lack a well-defined taxonomy that is hierarchical, grounded in a knowledge base, and free of irrelevant terms. This work proposes GitRanking, a framework for creating a classification ranked into discrete levels based on how general or specific their meaning is. We collected 121K topics from GitHub and considered $60\%$ of the most frequent ones for the ranking. GitRanking 1) uses active sampling to ensure a minimal number of required annotations; and 2) links each topic to Wikidata, reducing ambiguities and improving the reusability of the taxonomy. Our results show that developers, when annotating their projects, avoid using terms with a high degree of specificity. This makes the finding and discovery of their projects more challenging for other users. Furthermore, we show that GitRanking can effectively rank terms according to their general or specific meaning. This ranking would be an essential asset for developers to build upon, allowing them to complement their annotations with more precise topics. Finally, we show that GitRanking is a dynamically extensible method: it can currently accept further terms to be ranked with a minimum number of annotations ($\sim$ 15). This paper is the first collective attempt to build a ground-up taxonomy of software domains.
Smart Material Implication Using Spin-Transfer Torque Magnetic Tunnel Junctions for Logic-in-Memory Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2022
Year: 2022

Smart material implication (SIMPLY) logic has been recently proposed for the design of energy-efficient Logic-in-Memory (LIM) architectures based on non-volatile resistive memory devices. The SIMPLY logic is enabled by adding a comparator to the conventional IMPLY scheme. This allows performing a preliminary READ operation and hence the SET operation only in the case it is actually required. This work explores the SIMPLY logic scheme using nanoscale spin-transfer torque magnetic tunnel junction (STT-MTJ) devices. The performance of the STT-MTJ based SIMPLY architecture is analyzed by varying the load resistor and applied voltages to implement both READ and SET operations, while also investigating the effect of temperature on circuit operation. Obtained results show an existing tradeoff between error rate and energy consumption, which can be effectively managed by properly setting the values of load resistor and applied voltages. In addition, our analysis proves that tracking the temperature dependence of the MTJ properties through a proportional to absolute temperature (PTAT) reference voltage at the input of the comparator is beneficial to mitigate the reliability degradation under temperature variations.
Predictive Maintenance using Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Predictive maintenance (PdM) is a concept, which is implemented to effectively manage maintenance plans of the assets by predicting their failures with data driven techniques. In these scenarios, data is collected over a certain period of time to monitor the state of equipment. The objective is to find some correlations and patterns that can help predict and ultimately prevent failures. Equipment in manufacturing industry are often utilized without a planned maintenance approach. Such practise frequently results in unexpected downtime, owing to certain unexpected failures. In scheduled maintenance, the condition of the manufacturing equipment is checked after fixed time interval and if any fault occurs, the component is replaced to avoid unexpected equipment stoppages. On the flip side, this leads to increase in time for which machine is non-functioning and cost of carrying out the maintenance. The emergence of Industry 4.0 and smart systems have led to increasing emphasis on predictive maintenance (PdM) strategies that can reduce the cost of downtime and increase the availability (utilization rate) of manufacturing equipment. PdM also has the potential to bring about new sustainable practices in manufacturing by fully utilizing the useful lives of components.
Neural ODEs with Irregular and Noisy Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Measurement noise is an integral part while collecting data of a physical process. Thus, noise removal is necessary to draw conclusions from these data, and it often becomes essential to construct dynamical models using these data. We discuss a methodology to learn differential equation(s) using noisy and irregular sampled measurements. In our methodology, the main innovation can be seen in the integration of deep neural networks with the neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs) approach. Precisely, we aim at learning a neural network that provides (approximately) an implicit representation of the data and an additional neural network that models the vector fields of the dependent variables. We combine these two networks by constraining using neural ODEs. The proposed framework to learn a model describing the vector field is highly effective under noisy measurements. The approach can handle scenarios where dependent variables are not available at the same temporal grid. Moreover, a particular structure, e.g., second-order with respect to time, can easily be incorporated. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for learning models using data obtained from various differential equations and present a comparison with the neural ODE method that does not make any special treatment to noise.
Dockerized Android: a container-based platform to build mobile Android scenarios for Cyber Ranges
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

The best way to train people about security is through Cyber Ranges, i.e., the virtual platform used by cyber-security experts to learn new skills and attack vectors. In order to realize such virtual scenarios, container-based virtualization is commonly adopted, as it provides several benefits in terms of performance, resource usage, and portability. Unfortunately, the current generation of Cyber Ranges does not consider mobile devices, which nowadays are ubiquitous in our daily lives. Such devices do often represent the very first entry point for hackers into target networks. It is thus important to make available tools allowing to emulate mobile devices in a safe environment without incurring the risk of causing any damage in the real world. This work aims to propose Dockerized Android, i.e., a framework that addresses the problem of realizing vulnerable environments for mobile devices in the next generation of Cyber Ranges. We show the platform's design and implementation and show how it is possible to use the implemented features to realize complex virtual mobile kill-chains scenarios.
Learning Feature Fusion for Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Person Re-identification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Unsupervised domain adaptive (UDA) person re-identification (ReID) has gained increasing attention for its effectiveness on the target domain without manual annotations. Most fine-tuning based UDA person ReID methods focus on encoding global features for pseudo labels generation, neglecting the local feature that can provide for the fine-grained information. To handle this issue, we propose a Learning Feature Fusion (LF2) framework for adaptively learning to fuse global and local features to obtain a more comprehensive fusion feature representation. Specifically, we first pre-train our model within a source domain, then fine-tune the model on unlabeled target domain based on the teacher-student training strategy. The average weighting teacher network is designed to encode global features, while the student network updating at each iteration is responsible for fine-grained local features. By fusing these multi-view features, multi-level clustering is adopted to generate diverse pseudo labels. In particular, a learnable Fusion Module (FM) for giving prominence to fine-grained local information within the global feature is also proposed to avoid obscure learning of multiple pseudo labels. Experiments show that our proposed LF2 framework outperforms the state-of-the-art with 73.5% mAP and 83.7% Rank1 on Market1501 to DukeMTMC-ReID, and achieves 83.2% mAP and 92.8% Rank1 on DukeMTMC-ReID to Market1501.
SDS-200: A Swiss German Speech to Standard German Text Corpus
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

We present SDS-200, a corpus of Swiss German dialectal speech with Standard German text translations, annotated with dialect, age, and gender information of the speakers. The dataset allows for training speech translation, dialect recognition, and speech synthesis systems, among others. The data was collected using a web recording tool that is open to the public. Each participant was given a text in Standard German and asked to translate it to their Swiss German dialect before recording it. To increase the corpus quality, recordings were validated by other participants. The data consists of 200 hours of speech by around 4000 different speakers and covers a large part of the Swiss-German dialect landscape. We release SDS-200 alongside a baseline speech translation model, which achieves a word error rate (WER) of 30.3 and a BLEU score of 53.1 on the SDS-200 test set. Furthermore, we use SDS-200 to fine-tune a pre-trained XLS-R model, achieving 21.6 WER and 64.0 BLEU.
Defending Against Adversarial Attacks by Energy Storage Facility
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Adversarial attacks on data-driven algorithms applied in the power system will be a new type of threat to grid security. Literature has demonstrated that the adversarial attack on the deep-neural network can significantly mislead the load fore-cast of a power system. However, it is unclear how the new type of attack impacts the operation of the grid system. In this research, we manifest that the adversarial algorithm attack induces a significant cost-increase risk which will be exacerbated by the growing penetration of intermittent renewable energy. In Texas, a 5% adversarial attack can increase the total generation cost by 17% in a quarter, which accounts for around $20 million. When wind-energy penetration increases to over 40%, the 5% adversarial attack will inflate the genera-tion cost by 23%. Our research discovers a novel approach to defending against the adversarial attack: investing in the energy-storage system. All current literature focuses on developing algorithms to defend against adversarial attacks. We are the first research revealing the capability of using the facility in a physical system to defend against the adversarial algorithm attack in a system of the Internet of Things, such as a smart grid system.
Mobility, Communication and Computation Aware Federated Learning for Internet of Vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

While privacy concerns entice connected and automated vehicles to incorporate on-board federated learning (FL) solutions, an integrated vehicle-to-everything communication with heterogeneous computation power aware learning platform is urgently necessary to make it a reality. Motivated by this, we propose a novel mobility, communication and computation aware online FL platform that uses on-road vehicles as learning agents. Thanks to the advanced features of modern vehicles, the on-board sensors can collect data as vehicles travel along their trajectories, while the on-board processors can train machine learning models using the collected data. To take the high mobility of vehicles into account, we consider the delay as a learning parameter and restrict it to be less than a tolerable threshold. To satisfy this threshold, the central server accepts partially trained models, the distributed roadside units (a) perform downlink multicast beamforming to minimize global model distribution delay and (b) allocate optimal uplink radio resources to minimize local model offloading delay, and the vehicle agents conduct heterogeneous local model training. Using real-world vehicle trace datasets, we validate our FL solutions. Simulation shows that the proposed integrated FL platform is robust and outperforms baseline models. With reasonable local training episodes, it can effectively satisfy all constraints and deliver near ground truth multi-horizon velocity and vehicle-specific power predictions.
Jacobian Granger Causal Neural Networks for Analysis of Stationary and Nonstationary Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Granger causality is a commonly used method for uncovering information flow and dependencies in a time series. Here we introduce JGC (Jacobian Granger Causality), a neural network-based approach to Granger causality using the Jacobian as a measure of variable importance, and propose a thresholding procedure for inferring Granger causal variables using this measure. The resulting approach performs consistently well compared to other approaches in identifying Granger causal variables, the associated time lags, as well as interaction signs. Lastly, through the inclusion of a time variable, we show that this approach is able to learn the temporal dependencies for nonstationary systems whose Granger causal structures change in time.