OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Efficient and Expressive Bytecode-Level Instrumentation for Java Programs
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2021
Year: 2021

We present an efficient and expressive tool for the instrumentation of Java programs at the bytecode-level. BISM (Bytecode-Level Instrumentation for Software Monitoring) is a light-weight Java bytecode instrumentation tool that features an expressive high-level control-flow-aware instrumentation language. The language is inspired by the aspect-oriented programming paradigm in modularizing instrumentation into separate transformers, that encapsulate joinpoint selection and advice inlining. BISM allows capturing joinpoints ranging from bytecode instructions to methods execution and provides comprehensive static and dynamic context information. It runs in two instrumentation modes: build-time and load-time. BISM also provides a mechanism to compose transformers and automatically detect their collision in the base program. Transformers in a composition can control the visibility of their advice and other instructions from the base program. We show several example applications for BISM and demonstrate its effectiveness using three experiments: a security scenario, a financial transaction system, and a general runtime verification case. The results show that BISM instrumentation incurs low runtime and memory overheads.
MOBS (Matrices Over Bit Strings) public key exchange
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

We use matrices over bit strings as platforms for Diffie-Hellman-like public key exchange protocols. When multiplying matrices like that, we use Boolean OR operation on bit strings in place of addition and Boolean AND operation in place of multiplication. As a result, (1) computations with these matrices are very efficient; (2) standard methods of attacking Diffie-Hellman-like protocols are not applicable.
Controlled Update of Software Components using Concurrent Exection of Patched and Unpatched Versions
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Software patching is a common method of removing vulnerabilities in software components to make IT systems more secure. However, there are many cases where software patching is not possible due to the critical nature of the application, especially when the vendor providing the application guarantees correct operation only in a specific configuration. In this paper, we propose a method to solve this problem. The idea is to run unpatched and patched application instances concurrently, with the unpatched one having complete control and the output of the patched one being used only for comparison, to watch for differences that are consequences of introduced bugs. To test this idea, we developed a system that allows us to run web applications in parallel and tested three web applications. The experiments have shown that the idea is promising for web applications from the technical side. Furthermore, we discuss the potential limitations of this system and the idea in general, how long two instances should run in order to be able to claim with some probability that the patched version has not introduced any new bugs, other potential use cases of the proposed system where two application instances run concurrently, and finally the potential uses of this system with different types of applications, such as SCADA systems.
On the approximation ratio of LZ-End to LZ77
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2021
Year: 2021

A family of Lempel-Ziv factorizations is a well-studied string structure. The LZ-End factorization is a member of the family that achieved faster extraction of any substrings (Kreft & Navarro, TCS 2013). One of the interests for LZ-End factorizations is the possible difference between the size of LZ-End and LZ77 factorizations. They also showed families of strings where the approximation ratio of the number of LZ-End phrases to the number of LZ77 phrases asymptotically approaches 2. However, the alphabet size of these strings is unbounded. In this paper, we analyze the LZ-End factorization of the period-doubling sequence. We also show that the approximation ratio for the period-doubling sequence asymptotically approaches 2 for the binary alphabet.
Hybrid Ensemble optimized algorithm based on Genetic Programming for imbalanced data classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

One of the most significant current discussions in the field of data mining is classifying imbalanced data. In recent years, several ways are proposed such as algorithm level (internal) approaches, data level (external) techniques, and cost-sensitive methods. Although extensive research has been carried out on imbalanced data classification, however, several unsolved challenges remain such as no attention to the importance of samples to balance, determine the appropriate number of classifiers, and no optimization of classifiers in the combination of classifiers. The purpose of this paper is to improve the efficiency of the ensemble method in the sampling of training data sets, especially in the minority class, and to determine better basic classifiers for combining classifiers than existing methods. We proposed a hybrid ensemble algorithm based on Genetic Programming (GP) for two classes of imbalanced data classification. In this study uses historical data from UCI Machine Learning Repository to assess minority classes in imbalanced datasets. The performance of our proposed algorithm is evaluated by Rapid-miner studio v.7.5. Experimental results show the performance of the proposed method on the specified data sets in the size of the training set shows 40% and 50% better accuracy than other dimensions of the minority class prediction.
ImVoxelNet: Image to Voxels Projection for Monocular and Multi-View General-Purpose 3D Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we introduce the task of multi-view RGB-based 3D object detection as an end-to-end optimization problem. To address this problem, we propose ImVoxelNet, a novel fully convolutional method of 3D object detection based on monocular or multi-view RGB images. The number of monocular images in each multi-view input can variate during training and inference; actually, this number might be unique for each multi-view input. ImVoxelNet successfully handles both indoor and outdoor scenes, which makes it general-purpose. Specifically, it achieves state-of-the-art results in car detection on KITTI (monocular) and nuScenes (multi-view) benchmarks among all methods that accept RGB images. Moreover, it surpasses existing RGB-based 3D object detection methods on the SUN RGB-D dataset. On ScanNet, ImVoxelNet sets a new benchmark for multi-view 3D object detection. The source code and the trained models are available at https://github.com/saic-vul/imvoxelnet.
A Unified Generative Framework for Various NER Subtasks
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is the task of identifying spans that represent entities in sentences. Whether the entity spans are nested or discontinuous, the NER task can be categorized into the flat NER, nested NER, and discontinuous NER subtasks. These subtasks have been mainly solved by the token-level sequence labelling or span-level classification. However, these solutions can hardly tackle the three kinds of NER subtasks concurrently. To that end, we propose to formulate the NER subtasks as an entity span sequence generation task, which can be solved by a unified sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) framework. Based on our unified framework, we can leverage the pre-trained Seq2Seq model to solve all three kinds of NER subtasks without the special design of the tagging schema or ways to enumerate spans. We exploit three types of entity representations to linearize entities into a sequence. Our proposed framework is easy-to-implement and achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) or near SoTA performance on eight English NER datasets, including two flat NER datasets, three nested NER datasets, and three discontinuous NER datasets.
Data augmentation and pre-trained networks for extremely low data regimes unsupervised visual inspection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

The use of deep features coming from pre-trained neural networks for unsupervised anomaly detection purposes has recently gathered momentum in the computer vision field. In particular, industrial inspection applications can take advantage of such features, as demonstrated by the multiple successes of related methods on the MVTec Anomaly Detection (MVTec AD) dataset. These methods make use of neural networks pre-trained on auxiliary classification tasks such as ImageNet. However, to our knowledge, no comparative study of robustness to the low data regimes between these approaches has been conducted yet. For quality inspection applications, the handling of limited sample sizes may be crucial as large quantities of images are not available for small series. In this work, we aim to compare three approaches based on deep pre-trained features when varying the quantity of available data in MVTec AD: KNN, Mahalanobis, and PaDiM. We show that although these methods are mostly robust to small sample sizes, they still can benefit greatly from using data augmentation in the original image space, which allows to deal with very small production runs.
Multi-Objectivizing Software Configuration Tuning (for a single performance concern)
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

Automatically tuning software configuration for optimizing a single performance attribute (e.g., minimizing latency) is not trivial, due to the nature of the configuration systems (e.g., complex landscape and expensive measurement). To deal with the problem, existing work has been focusing on developing various effective optimizers. However, a prominent issue that all these optimizers need to take care of is how to avoid the search being trapped in local optima -- a hard nut to crack for software configuration tuning due to its rugged and sparse landscape, and neighboring configurations tending to behave very differently. Overcoming such in an expensive measurement setting is even more challenging. In this paper, we take a different perspective to tackle this issue. Instead of focusing on improving the optimizer, we work on the level of optimization model. We do this by proposing a meta multi-objectivization model (MMO) that considers an auxiliary performance objective (e.g., throughput in addition to latency). What makes this model unique is that we do not optimize the auxiliary performance objective, but rather use it to make similarly-performing while different configurations less comparable (i.e. Pareto nondominated to each other), thus preventing the search from being trapped in local optima. Experiments on eight real-world software systems/environments with diverse performance attributes reveal that our MMO model is statistically more effective than state-of-the-art single-objective counterparts in overcoming local optima (up to 42% gain), while using as low as 24% of their measurements to achieve the same (or better) performance result.
The Semi-Supervised iNaturalist Challenge at the FGVC8 Workshop
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Semi-iNat is a challenging dataset for semi-supervised classification with a long-tailed distribution of classes, fine-grained categories, and domain shifts between labeled and unlabeled data. This dataset is behind the second iteration of the semi-supervised recognition challenge to be held at the FGVC8 workshop at CVPR 2021. Different from the previous one, this dataset (i) includes images of species from different kingdoms in the natural taxonomy, (ii) is at a larger scale -- with 810 in-class and 1629 out-of-class species for a total of 330k images, and (iii) does not provide in/out-of-class labels, but provides coarse taxonomic labels (kingdom and phylum) for the unlabeled images. This document describes baseline results and the details of the dataset which is available here: \url{https://github.com/cvl-umass/semi-inat-2021}.
Variational Empowerment as Representation Learning for Goal-Based Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Learning to reach goal states and learning diverse skills through mutual information (MI) maximization have been proposed as principled frameworks for self-supervised reinforcement learning, allowing agents to acquire broadly applicable multitask policies with minimal reward engineering. Starting from a simple observation that the standard goal-conditioned RL (GCRL) is encapsulated by the optimization objective of variational empowerment, we discuss how GCRL and MI-based RL can be generalized into a single family of methods, which we name variational GCRL (VGCRL), interpreting variational MI maximization, or variational empowerment, as representation learning methods that acquire functionally-aware state representations for goal reaching. This novel perspective allows us to: (1) derive simple but unexplored variants of GCRL to study how adding small representation capacity can already expand its capabilities; (2) investigate how discriminator function capacity and smoothness determine the quality of discovered skills, or latent goals, through modifying latent dimensionality and applying spectral normalization; (3) adapt techniques such as hindsight experience replay (HER) from GCRL to MI-based RL; and lastly, (4) propose a novel evaluation metric, named latent goal reaching (LGR), for comparing empowerment algorithms with different choices of latent dimensionality and discriminator parameterization. Through principled mathematical derivations and careful experimental studies, our work lays a novel foundation from which to evaluate, analyze, and develop representation learning techniques in goal-based RL.
Uncertainty Quantification 360: A Holistic Toolkit for Quantifying and Communicating the Uncertainty of AI
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we describe an open source Python toolkit named Uncertainty Quantification 360 (UQ360) for the uncertainty quantification of AI models. The goal of this toolkit is twofold: first, to provide a broad range of capabilities to streamline as well as foster the common practices of quantifying, evaluating, improving, and communicating uncertainty in the AI application development lifecycle; second, to encourage further exploration of UQ's connections to other pillars of trustworthy AI such as fairness and transparency through the dissemination of latest research and education materials. Beyond the Python package (\url{https://github.com/IBM/UQ360}), we have developed an interactive experience (\url{http://uq360.mybluemix.net}) and guidance materials as educational tools to aid researchers and developers in producing and communicating high-quality uncertainties in an effective manner.
One Representation to Rule Them All: Identifying Out-of-Support Examples in Few-shot Learning with Generic Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

The field of few-shot learning has made remarkable strides in developing powerful models that can operate in the small data regime. Nearly all of these methods assume every unlabeled instance encountered will belong to a handful of known classes for which one has examples. This can be problematic for real-world use cases where one routinely finds 'none-of-the-above' examples. In this paper we describe this challenge of identifying what we term 'out-of-support' (OOS) examples. We describe how this problem is subtly different from out-of-distribution detection and describe a new method of identifying OOS examples within the Prototypical Networks framework using a fixed point which we call the generic representation. We show that our method outperforms other existing approaches in the literature as well as other approaches that we propose in this paper. Finally, we investigate how the use of such a generic point affects the geometry of a model's feature space.
Learning to Select: A Fully Attentive Approach for Novel Object Captioning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Image captioning models have lately shown impressive results when applied to standard datasets. Switching to real-life scenarios, however, constitutes a challenge due to the larger variety of visual concepts which are not covered in existing training sets. For this reason, novel object captioning (NOC) has recently emerged as a paradigm to test captioning models on objects which are unseen during the training phase. In this paper, we present a novel approach for NOC that learns to select the most relevant objects of an image, regardless of their adherence to the training set, and to constrain the generative process of a language model accordingly. Our architecture is fully-attentive and end-to-end trainable, also when incorporating constraints. We perform experiments on the held-out COCO dataset, where we demonstrate improvements over the state of the art, both in terms of adaptability to novel objects and caption quality.
NTIRE 2021 Challenge on High Dynamic Range Imaging: Dataset, Methods and Results
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

This paper reviews the first challenge on high-dynamic range (HDR) imaging that was part of the New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement (NTIRE) workshop, held in conjunction with CVPR 2021. This manuscript focuses on the newly introduced dataset, the proposed methods and their results. The challenge aims at estimating a HDR image from one or multiple respective low-dynamic range (LDR) observations, which might suffer from under- or over-exposed regions and different sources of noise. The challenge is composed by two tracks: In Track 1 only a single LDR image is provided as input, whereas in Track 2 three differently-exposed LDR images with inter-frame motion are available. In both tracks, the ultimate goal is to achieve the best objective HDR reconstruction in terms of PSNR with respect to a ground-truth image, evaluated both directly and with a canonical tonemapping operation.
Optimization of Heterogeneous Systems with AI Planning Heuristics and Machine Learning: A Performance and Energy Aware Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

Heterogeneous computing systems provide high performance and energy efficiency. However, to optimally utilize such systems, solutions that distribute the work across host CPUs and accelerating devices are needed. In this paper, we present a performance and energy aware approach that combines AI planning heuristics for parameter space exploration with a machine learning model for performance and energy evaluation to determine a near-optimal system configuration. For data-parallel applications our approach determines a near-optimal host-device distribution of work, number of processing units required and the corresponding scheduling strategy. We evaluate our approach for various heterogeneous systems accelerated with GPU or the Intel Xeon Phi. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach finds a near-optimal system configuration by evaluating only about 7% of reasonable configurations. Furthermore, the performance per Joule estimation of system configurations using our machine learning model is more than 1000x faster compared to the system evaluation by program execution.
Ethical-Advice Taker: Do Language Models Understand Natural Language Interventions?
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Is it possible to use natural language to intervene in a model's behavior and alter its prediction in a desired way? We investigate the effectiveness of natural language interventions for reading-comprehension systems, studying this in the context of social stereotypes. Specifically, we propose a new language understanding task, Linguistic Ethical Interventions (LEI), where the goal is to amend a question-answering (QA) model's unethical behavior by communicating context-specific principles of ethics and equity to it. To this end, we build upon recent methods for quantifying a system's social stereotypes, augmenting them with different kinds of ethical interventions and the desired model behavior under such interventions. Our zero-shot evaluation finds that even today's powerful neural language models are extremely poor ethical-advice takers, that is, they respond surprisingly little to ethical interventions even though these interventions are stated as simple sentences. Few-shot learning improves model behavior but remains far from the desired outcome, especially when evaluated for various types of generalization. Our new task thus poses a novel language understanding challenge for the community.
Knowing More About Questions Can Help: Improving Calibration in Question Answering
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

We study calibration in question answering, estimating whether model correctly predicts answer for each question. Unlike prior work which mainly rely on the model's confidence score, our calibrator incorporates information about the input example (e.g., question and the evidence context). Together with data augmentation via back translation, our simple approach achieves 5-10% gains in calibration accuracy on reading comprehension benchmarks. Furthermore, we present the first calibration study in the open retrieval setting, comparing the calibration accuracy of retrieval-based span prediction models and answer generation models. Here again, our approach shows consistent gains over calibrators relying on the model confidence. Our simple and efficient calibrator can be easily adapted to many tasks and model architectures, showing robust gains in all settings.
SSMD: Semi-Supervised Medical Image Detection with Adaptive Consistency and Heterogeneous Perturbation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Semi-Supervised classification and segmentation methods have been widely investigated in medical image analysis. Both approaches can improve the performance of fully-supervised methods with additional unlabeled data. However, as a fundamental task, semi-supervised object detection has not gained enough attention in the field of medical image analysis. In this paper, we propose a novel Semi-Supervised Medical image Detector (SSMD). The motivation behind SSMD is to provide free yet effective supervision for unlabeled data, by regularizing the predictions at each position to be consistent. To achieve the above idea, we develop a novel adaptive consistency cost function to regularize different components in the predictions. Moreover, we introduce heterogeneous perturbation strategies that work in both feature space and image space, so that the proposed detector is promising to produce powerful image representations and robust predictions. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed SSMD achieves the state-of-the-art performance at a wide range of settings. We also demonstrate the strength of each proposed module with comprehensive ablation studies.
To Point or Not to Point: Understanding How Abstractive Summarizers Paraphrase Text
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Abstractive neural summarization models have seen great improvements in recent years, as shown by ROUGE scores of the generated summaries. But despite these improved metrics, there is limited understanding of the strategies different models employ, and how those strategies relate their understanding of language. To understand this better, we run several experiments to characterize how one popular abstractive model, the pointer-generator model of See et al. (2017), uses its explicit copy/generation switch to control its level of abstraction (generation) vs extraction (copying). On an extractive-biased dataset, the model utilizes syntactic boundaries to truncate sentences that are otherwise often copied verbatim. When we modify the copy/generation switch and force the model to generate, only simple paraphrasing abilities are revealed alongside factual inaccuracies and hallucinations. On an abstractive-biased dataset, the model copies infrequently but shows similarly limited abstractive abilities. In line with previous research, these results suggest that abstractive summarization models lack the semantic understanding necessary to generate paraphrases that are both abstractive and faithful to the source document.