OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Smart Automotive Technology Adherence to the Law: (De)Constructing Road Rules for Autonomous System Development, Verification and Safety
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Driving is an intuitive task that requires skills, constant alertness and vigilance for unexpected events. The driving task also requires long concentration spans focusing on the entire task for prolonged periods, and sophisticated negotiation skills with other road users, including wild animals. These requirements are particularly important when approaching intersections, overtaking, giving way, merging, turning and while adhering to the vast body of road rules. Modern motor vehicles now include an array of smart assistive and autonomous driving systems capable of subsuming some, most, or in limited cases, all of the driving task. The UK Department of Transport's response to the Safe Use of Automated Lane Keeping System consultation proposes that these systems are tested for compliance with relevant traffic rules. Building these smart automotive systems requires software developers with highly technical software engineering skills, and now a lawyer's in-depth knowledge of traffic legislation as well. These skills are required to ensure the systems are able to safely perform their tasks while being observant of the law. This paper presents an approach for deconstructing the complicated legalese of traffic law and representing its requirements and flow. The approach (de)constructs road rules in legal terminology and specifies them in structured English logic that is expressed as Boolean logic for automation and Lawmaps for visualisation. We demonstrate an example using these tools leading to the construction and validation of a Bayesian Network model. We strongly believe these tools to be approachable by programmers and the general public, and capable of use in developing Artificial Intelligence to underpin motor vehicle smart systems, and in validation to ensure these systems are considerate of the law when making decisions.
POW-HOW: An enduring timing side-channel to evade online malware sandboxes
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Online malware scanners are one of the best weapons in the arsenal of cybersecurity companies and researchers. A fundamental part of such systems is the sandbox that provides an instrumented and isolated environment (virtualized or emulated) for any user to upload and run unknown artifacts and identify potentially malicious behaviors. The provided API and the wealth of information inthe reports produced by these services have also helped attackers test the efficacy of numerous techniques to make malware hard to detect.The most common technique used by malware for evading the analysis system is to monitor the execution environment, detect the presence of any debugging artifacts, and hide its malicious behavior if needed. This is usually achieved by looking for signals suggesting that the execution environment does not belong to a the native machine, such as specific memory patterns or behavioral traits of certain CPU instructions. In this paper, we show how an attacker can evade detection on such online services by incorporating a Proof-of-Work (PoW) algorithm into a malware sample. Specifically, we leverage the asymptotic behavior of the computational cost of PoW algorithms when they run on some classes of hardware platforms to effectively detect a non bare-metal environment of the malware sandbox analyzer. To prove the validity of this intuition, we design and implement the POW-HOW framework, a tool to automatically implement sandbox detection strategies and embed a test evasion program into an arbitrary malware sample. Our empirical evaluation shows that the proposed evasion technique is durable, hard to fingerprint, and reduces existing malware detection rate by a factor of 10. Moreover, we show how bare-metal environments cannot scale with actual malware submissions rates for consumer services.
Versa: A Dataflow-Centric Multiprocessor with 36 Systolic ARM Cortex-M4F Cores and a Reconfigurable Crossbar-Memory Hierarchy in 28nm
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2021
Year: 2021

We present Versa, an energy-efficient processor with 36 systolic ARM Cortex-M4F cores and a runtime-reconfigurable memory hierarchy. Versa exploits algorithm-specific characteristics in order to optimize bandwidth, access latency, and data reuse. Measured on a set of kernels with diverse data access, control, and synchronization characteristics, reconfiguration between different Versa modes yields median energy-efficiency improvements of 11.6x and 37.2x over mobile CPU and GPU baselines, respectively.
On the Effective Rate of NOMA in Underlay Spectrum Sharing
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we present the delay-constrained performance analysis of a multi-antenna-assisted multiuser non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) based spectrum sharing system over Rayleigh fading channels. We derive analytical expressions for the sum effective rate (ER) for the downlink NOMA system under a peak interference constraint. In particular, we show the effect of the availability of different levels of channel state information (instantaneous and statistical) on the system performance. We also show the effect of different parameters of interest, including the peak tolerable interference power, the delay exponent, the number of antennas and the number of users, on the sum ER of the system under consideration. An excellent agreement between simulation and theoretical results confirms the accuracy of the analysis.
Modelling Strategic Deceptive Planning in Adversarial Multi-Agent Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2021
Year: 2021

Deception is virtually ubiquitous in warfare, and should be a central consideration for military operations research. However, studies of agent behaviour in simulated operations have typically neglected to include explicit models of deception. This paper proposes that a computational model that approximates the human deceptive planning process would enable the authentic representation of strategic deception in multi-agent systems. The proposed deceptive planning model provides a framework for studying, explaining, and discovering deceptive behaviours, enabling the generation of novel solutions to adversarial planning problems.
Efficient Instruction Scheduling using Real-time Load Delay Tracking
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2021
Year: 2021

Many hardware structures in today's high-performance out-of-order processors do not scale in an efficient way. To address this, different solutions have been proposed that build execution schedules in an energy-efficient manner. Issue time prediction processors are one such solution that use data-flow dependencies and predefined instruction latencies to predict issue times of repeated instructions. In this work, we aim to improve their accuracy, and consequently their performance, in an energy efficient way. We accomplish this by taking advantage of two key observations. First, memory accesses often take additional time to arrive than the static, predefined access latency that is used to describe these systems. Second, we find that these memory access delays often repeat across iterations of the same code. This, in turn, allows us to predict the arrival time of these accesses. In this work, we introduce a new processor microarchitecture, that replaces a complex reservation-station-based scheduler with an efficient, scalable alternative. Our proposed scheduling technique tracks real-time delays of loads to accurately predict instruction issue times, and uses a reordering mechanism to prioritize instructions based on that prediction, achieving close-to-out-of-order processor performance. To accomplish this in an energy-efficient manner we introduce: (1) an instruction delay learning mechanism that monitors repeated load instructions and learns their latest delay, (2) an issue time predictor that uses learned delays and data-flow dependencies to predict instruction issue times and (3) priority queues that reorder instructions based on their issue time prediction. Together, our processor achieves 86.2% of the performance of a traditional out-of-order processor, higher than previous efficient scheduler proposals, while still consuming 30% less power.
When differential privacy meets NLP: The devil is in the detail
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Differential privacy provides a formal approach to privacy of individuals. Applications of differential privacy in various scenarios, such as protecting users' original utterances, must satisfy certain mathematical properties. Our contribution is a formal analysis of ADePT, a differentially private auto-encoder for text rewriting (Krishna et al, 2021). ADePT achieves promising results on downstream tasks while providing tight privacy guarantees. Our proof reveals that ADePT is not differentially private, thus rendering the experimental results unsubstantiated. We also quantify the impact of the error in its private mechanism, showing that the true sensitivity is higher by at least factor 6 in an optimistic case of a very small encoder's dimension and that the amount of utterances that are not privatized could easily reach 100% of the entire dataset. Our intention is neither to criticize the authors, nor the peer-reviewing process, but rather point out that if differential privacy applications in NLP rely on formal guarantees, these should be outlined in full and put under detailed scrutiny.
ExCode-Mixed: Explainable Approaches towards Sentiment Analysis on Code-Mixed Data using BERT models
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

The increasing use of social media sites in countries like India has given rise to large volumes of code-mixed data. Sentiment analysis of this data can provide integral insights into people's perspectives and opinions. Developing robust explainability techniques which explain why models make their predictions becomes essential. In this paper, we propose an adequate methodology to integrate explainable approaches into code-mixed sentiment analysis.
Fruit-CoV: An Efficient Vision-based Framework for Speedy Detection and Diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 Infections Through Recorded Cough Sounds
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2021
Year: 2021

SARS-CoV-2 is colloquially known as COVID-19 that had an initial outbreak in December 2019. The deadly virus has spread across the world, taking part in the global pandemic disease since March 2020. In addition, a recent variant of SARS-CoV-2 named Delta is intractably contagious and responsible for more than four million deaths over the world. Therefore, it is vital to possess a self-testing service of SARS-CoV-2 at home. In this study, we introduce Fruit-CoV, a two-stage vision framework, which is capable of detecting SARS-CoV-2 infections through recorded cough sounds. Specifically, we convert sounds into Log-Mel Spectrograms and use the EfficientNet-V2 network to extract its visual features in the first stage. In the second stage, we use 14 convolutional layers extracted from the large-scale Pretrained Audio Neural Networks for audio pattern recognition (PANNs) and the Wavegram-Log-Mel-CNN to aggregate feature representations of the Log-Mel Spectrograms. Finally, we use the combined features to train a binary classifier. In this study, we use a dataset provided by the AICovidVN 115M Challenge, which includes a total of 7371 recorded cough sounds collected throughout Vietnam, India, and Switzerland. Experimental results show that our proposed model achieves an AUC score of 92.8% and ranks the 1st place on the leaderboard of the AICovidVN Challenge. More importantly, our proposed framework can be integrated into a call center or a VoIP system to speed up detecting SARS-CoV-2 infections through online/recorded cough sounds.
Rethinking Common Assumptions to Mitigate Racial Bias in Face Recognition Datasets
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Many existing works have made great strides towards reducing racial bias in face recognition. However, most of these methods attempt to rectify bias that manifests in models during training instead of directly addressing a major source of the bias, the dataset itself. Exceptions to this are BUPT-Balancedface/RFW and Fairface, but these works assume that primarily training on a single race or not racially balancing the dataset are inherently disadvantageous. We demonstrate that these assumptions are not necessarily valid. In our experiments, training on only African faces induced less bias than training on a balanced distribution of faces and distributions skewed to include more African faces produced more equitable models. We additionally notice that adding more images of existing identities to a dataset in place of adding new identities can lead to accuracy boosts across racial categories. Our code is available at https://github.com/j-alex-hanson/rethinking-race-face-datasets.
Effective and interpretable dispatching rules for dynamic job shops via guided empirical learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

The emergence of Industry 4.0 is making production systems more flexible and also more dynamic. In these settings, schedules often need to be adapted in real-time by dispatching rules. Although substantial progress was made until the '90s, the performance of these rules is still rather limited. The machine learning literature is developing a variety of methods to improve them, but the resulting rules are difficult to interpret and do not generalise well for a wide range of settings. This paper is the first major attempt at combining machine learning with domain problem reasoning for scheduling. The idea consists of using the insights obtained with the latter to guide the empirical search of the former. Our hypothesis is that this guided empirical learning process should result in dispatching rules that are effective and interpretable and which generalise well to different instance classes. We test our approach in the classical dynamic job shop scheduling problem minimising tardiness, which is one of the most well-studied scheduling problems. Nonetheless, results suggest that our approach was able to find new state-of-the-art rules, which significantly outperform the existing literature in the vast majority of settings, from loose to tight due dates and from low utilisation conditions to congested shops. Overall, the average improvement is 19%. Moreover, the rules are compact, interpretable, and generalise well to extreme, unseen scenarios.
Real-World Adversarial Examples involving Makeup Application
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Deep neural networks have developed rapidly and have achieved outstanding performance in several tasks, such as image classification and natural language processing. However, recent studies have indicated that both digital and physical adversarial examples can fool neural networks. Face-recognition systems are used in various applications that involve security threats from physical adversarial examples. Herein, we propose a physical adversarial attack with the use of full-face makeup. The presence of makeup on the human face is a reasonable possibility, which possibly increases the imperceptibility of attacks. In our attack framework, we combine the cycle-adversarial generative network (cycle-GAN) and a victimized classifier. The Cycle-GAN is used to generate adversarial makeup, and the architecture of the victimized classifier is VGG 16. Our experimental results show that our attack can effectively overcome manual errors in makeup application, such as color and position-related errors. We also demonstrate that the approaches used to train the models can influence physical attacks; the adversarial perturbations crafted from the pre-trained model are affected by the corresponding training data.
Federated Learning Beyond the Star: Local D2D Model Consensus with Global Cluster Sampling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Federated learning has emerged as a popular technique for distributing model training across the network edge. Its learning architecture is conventionally a star topology between the devices and a central server. In this paper, we propose two timescale hybrid federated learning (TT-HF), which migrates to a more distributed topology via device-to-device (D2D) communications. In TT-HF, local model training occurs at devices via successive gradient iterations, and the synchronization process occurs at two timescales: (i) macro-scale, where global aggregations are carried out via device-server interactions, and (ii) micro-scale, where local aggregations are carried out via D2D cooperative consensus formation in different device clusters. Our theoretical analysis reveals how device, cluster, and network-level parameters affect the convergence of TT-HF, and leads to a set of conditions under which a convergence rate of O(1/t) is guaranteed. Experimental results demonstrate the improvements in convergence and utilization that can be obtained by TT-HF over state-of-the-art federated learning baselines.
IceClave: A Trusted Execution Environment for In-Storage Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2021
Year: 2021

In-storage computing with modern solid-state drives (SSDs) enables developers to offload programs from the host to the SSD. It has been proven to be an effective approach to alleviate the I/O bottleneck. To facilitate in-storage computing, many frameworks have been proposed. However, few of them treat the in-storage security as the first citizen. Specifically, since modern SSD controllers do not have a trusted execution environment, an offloaded (malicious) program could steal, modify, and even destroy the data stored in the SSD. In this paper, we first investigate the attacks that could be conducted by offloaded in-storage programs. To defend against these attacks, we build a lightweight trusted execution environment, named IceClave for in-storage computing. IceClave enables security isolation between in-storage programs and flash management functions that include flash address translation, data access control, and garbage collection, with TrustZone extensions. IceClave also achieves security isolation between in-storage programs by enforcing memory integrity verification of in-storage DRAM with low overhead. To protect data loaded from flash chips, IceClave develops a lightweight data encryption/decryption mechanism in flash controllers. We develop IceClave with a full system simulator. We evaluate IceClave with a variety of data-intensive applications such as databases. Compared to state-of-the-art in-storage computing approaches, IceClave introduces only 7.6% performance overhead, while enforcing security isolation in the SSD controller with minimal hardware cost. IceClave still keeps the performance benefit of in-storage computing by delivering up to 2.31$\times$ better performance than the conventional host-based trusted computing approach.
Malware Squid: A Novel IoT Malware Traffic Analysis Framework using Convolutional Neural Network and Binary Visualisation
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Internet of Things devices have seen a rapid growth and popularity in recent years with many more ordinary devices gaining network capability and becoming part of the ever growing IoT network. With this exponential growth and the limitation of resources, it is becoming increasingly harder to protect against security threats such as malware due to its evolving faster than the defence mechanisms can handle with. The traditional security systems are not able to detect unknown malware as they use signature-based methods. In this paper, we aim to address this issue by introducing a novel IoT malware traffic analysis approach using neural network and binary visualisation. The prime motivation of the proposed approach is to faster detect and classify new malware (zero-day malware). The experiment results show that our method can satisfy the accuracy requirement of practical application.
Visual Sensation and Perception Computational Models for Deep Learning: State of the art, Challenges and Prospects
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Visual sensation and perception refers to the process of sensing, organizing, identifying, and interpreting visual information in environmental awareness and understanding. Computational models inspired by visual perception have the characteristics of complexity and diversity, as they come from many subjects such as cognition science, information science, and artificial intelligence. In this paper, visual perception computational models oriented deep learning are investigated from the biological visual mechanism and computational vision theory systematically. Then, some points of view about the prospects of the visual perception computational models are presented. Finally, this paper also summarizes the current challenges of visual perception and predicts its future development trends. Through this survey, it will provide a comprehensive reference for research in this direction.
Master Face Attacks on Face Recognition Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Face authentication is now widely used, especially on mobile devices, rather than authentication using a personal identification number or an unlock pattern, due to its convenience. It has thus become a tempting target for attackers using a presentation attack. Traditional presentation attacks use facial images or videos of the victim. Previous work has proven the existence of master faces, i.e., faces that match multiple enrolled templates in face recognition systems, and their existence extends the ability of presentation attacks. In this paper, we perform an extensive study on latent variable evolution (LVE), a method commonly used to generate master faces. We run an LVE algorithm for various scenarios and with more than one database and/or face recognition system to study the properties of the master faces and to understand in which conditions strong master faces could be generated. Moreover, through analysis, we hypothesize that master faces come from some dense areas in the embedding spaces of the face recognition systems. Last but not least, simulated presentation attacks using generated master faces generally preserve the false-matching ability of their original digital forms, thus demonstrating that the existence of master faces poses an actual threat.
RGB-D Salient Object Detection with Ubiquitous Target Awareness
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Conventional RGB-D salient object detection methods aim to leverage depth as complementary information to find the salient regions in both modalities. However, the salient object detection results heavily rely on the quality of captured depth data which sometimes are unavailable. In this work, we make the first attempt to solve the RGB-D salient object detection problem with a novel depth-awareness framework. This framework only relies on RGB data in the testing phase, utilizing captured depth data as supervision for representation learning. To construct our framework as well as achieving accurate salient detection results, we propose a Ubiquitous Target Awareness (UTA) network to solve three important challenges in RGB-D SOD task: 1) a depth awareness module to excavate depth information and to mine ambiguous regions via adaptive depth-error weights, 2) a spatial-aware cross-modal interaction and a channel-aware cross-level interaction, exploiting the low-level boundary cues and amplifying high-level salient channels, and 3) a gated multi-scale predictor module to perceive the object saliency in different contextual scales. Besides its high performance, our proposed UTA network is depth-free for inference and runs in real-time with 43 FPS. Experimental evidence demonstrates that our proposed network not only surpasses the state-of-the-art methods on five public RGB-D SOD benchmarks by a large margin, but also verifies its extensibility on five public RGB SOD benchmarks.