OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Streaming CTR Prediction: Rethinking Recommendation Task for Real-World Streaming Data
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

The Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction task is critical in industrial recommender systems, where models are usually deployed on dynamic streaming data in practical applications. Such streaming data in real-world recommender systems face many challenges, such as distribution shift, temporal non-stationarity, and systematic biases, which bring difficulties to the training and utilizing of recommendation models. However, most existing studies approach the CTR prediction as a classification task on static datasets, assuming that the train and test sets are independent and identically distributed (a.k.a, i.i.d. assumption). To bridge this gap, we formulate the CTR prediction problem in streaming scenarios as a Streaming CTR Prediction task. Accordingly, we propose dedicated benchmark settings and metrics to evaluate and analyze the performance of the models in streaming data. To better understand the differences compared to traditional CTR prediction tasks, we delve into the factors that may affect the model performance, such as parameter scale, normalization, regularization, etc. The results reveal the existence of the ''streaming learning dilemma'', whereby the same factor may have different effects on model performance in the static and streaming scenarios. Based on the findings, we propose two simple but inspiring methods (i.e., tuning key parameters and exemplar replay) that significantly improve the effectiveness of the CTR models in the new streaming scenario. We hope our work will inspire further research on streaming CTR prediction and help improve the robustness and adaptability of recommender systems.
Reducing Causality to Functions with Structural Models
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

The precise definition of causality is currently an open problem in philosophy and statistics. We believe causality should be defined as functions (in mathematics) that map causes to effects. We propose a reductive definition of causality based on Structural Functional Model (SFM). Using delta compression and contrastive forward inference, SFM can produce causal utterances like "X causes Y" and "X is the cause of Y" that match our intuitions. We compile a dataset of causal scenarios and use SFM in all of them. SFM is compatible with but not reducible to probability theory. We also compare SFM with other theories of causation and apply SFM to downstream problems like free will, causal explanation, and mental causation.
Can I say, now machines can think?
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Generative AI techniques have opened the path for new generations of machines in diverse domains. These machines have various capabilities for example, they can produce images, generate answers or stories, and write codes based on the "prompts" only provided by users. These machines are considered 'thinking minds' because they have the ability to generate human-like responses. In this study, we have analyzed and explored the capabilities of artificial intelligence-enabled machines. We have revisited on Turing's concept of thinking machines and compared it with recent technological advancements. The objections and consequences of the thinking machines are also discussed in this study, along with available techniques to evaluate machines' cognitive capabilities. We have concluded that Turing Test is a critical aspect of evaluating machines' ability. However, there are other aspects of intelligence too, and AI machines exhibit most of these aspects.
Machine Learning for Autonomous Vehicle's Trajectory Prediction: A comprehensive survey, Challenges, and Future Research Directions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) have emerged as a promising solution by replacing human drivers with advanced computer-aided decision-making systems. However, for AVs to effectively navigate the road, they must possess the capability to predict the future behavior of nearby traffic participants, similar to the predictive driving abilities of human drivers. Building upon existing literature is crucial to advance the field and develop a comprehensive understanding of trajectory prediction methods in the context of automated driving. To address this need, we have undertaken a comprehensive review that focuses on trajectory prediction methods for AVs, with a particular emphasis on machine learning techniques including deep learning and reinforcement learning-based approaches. We have extensively examined over two hundred studies related to trajectory prediction in the context of AVs. The paper begins with an introduction to the general problem of predicting vehicle trajectories and provides an overview of the key concepts and terminology used throughout. After providing a brief overview of conventional methods, this review conducts a comprehensive evaluation of several deep learning-based techniques. Each method is summarized briefly, accompanied by a detailed analysis of its strengths and weaknesses. The discussion further extends to reinforcement learning-based methods. This article also examines the various datasets and evaluation metrics that are commonly used in trajectory prediction tasks. Encouraging an unbiased and objective discussion, we compare two major learning processes, considering specific functional features. By identifying challenges in the existing literature and outlining potential research directions, this review significantly contributes to the advancement of knowledge in the domain of AV trajectory prediction.
Learning Multiple Coordinated Agents under Directed Acyclic Graph Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

This paper proposes a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) method to learn multiple coordinated agents under directed acyclic graph (DAG) constraints. Unlike existing MARL approaches, our method explicitly exploits the DAG structure between agents to achieve more effective learning performance. Theoretically, we propose a novel surrogate value function based on a MARL model with synthetic rewards (MARLM-SR) and prove that it serves as a lower bound of the optimal value function. Computationally, we propose a practical training algorithm that exploits new notion of leader agent and reward generator and distributor agent to guide the decomposed follower agents to better explore the parameter space in environments with DAG constraints. Empirically, we exploit four DAG environments including a real-world scheduling for one of Intel's high volume packaging and test factory to benchmark our methods and show it outperforms the other non-DAG approaches.
Gastrointestinal Disease Classification through Explainable and Cost-Sensitive Deep Neural Networks with Supervised Contrastive Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Gastrointestinal diseases pose significant healthcare chall-enges as they manifest in diverse ways and can lead to potential complications. Ensuring precise and timely classification of these diseases is pivotal in guiding treatment choices and enhancing patient outcomes. This paper introduces a novel approach on classifying gastrointestinal diseases by leveraging cost-sensitive pre-trained deep convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures with supervised contrastive learning. Our approach enables the network to learn representations that capture vital disease-related features, while also considering the relationships of similarity between samples. To tackle the challenges posed by imbalanced datasets and the cost-sensitive nature of misclassification errors in healthcare, we incorporate cost-sensitive learning. By assigning distinct costs to misclassifications based on the disease class, we prioritize accurate classification of critical conditions. Furthermore, we enhance the interpretability of our model by integrating gradient-based techniques from explainable artificial intelligence (AI). This inclusion provides valuable insights into the decision-making process of the network, aiding in understanding the features that contribute to disease classification. To assess the effectiveness of our proposed approach, we perform extensive experiments on a comprehensive gastrointestinal disease dataset, such as the Hyper-Kvasir dataset. Through thorough comparisons with existing works, we demonstrate the strong classification accuracy, robustness and interpretability of our model. We have made the implementation of our proposed approach publicly available at https://github.com/dibya404/Gastrointestinal-Disease-Classification-through-Explainable-and-Cost-Sensitive-DNN-with-SCL
Assessing and Exploiting Domain Name Misinformation
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Cloud providers' support for network evasion techniques that misrepresent the server's domain name is more prevalent than previously believed, which has serious implications for security and privacy due to the reliance on domain names in common security architectures. Domain fronting is one such evasive technique used by privacy enhancing technologies and malware to hide the domains they visit, and it uses shared hosting and HTTPS to present a benign domain to observers while signaling the target domain in the encrypted HTTP request. In this paper, we construct an ontology of domain name misinformation and detail a novel measurement methodology to identify support among cloud infrastructure providers. Despite several of the largest cloud providers having publicly stated that they no longer support domain fronting, our findings demonstrate a more complex environment with many exceptions. We also present a novel and straightforward attack that allows an adversary to man-in-the-middle all the victim's encrypted traffic bound to a content delivery network that supports domain fronting, breaking the authenticity, confidentiality, and integrity guarantees expected by the victim when using HTTPS. By using dynamic linker hijacking to rewrite the HTTP Host field, our attack does not generate any artifacts that are visible to the victim or passive network monitoring solutions, and the attacker does not need a separate channel to exfiltrate data or perform command-and-control, which can be achieved by rewriting HTTP headers.
Towards Generalizable Detection of Urgency of Discussion Forum Posts
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Students who take an online course, such as a MOOC, use the course's discussion forum to ask questions or reach out to instructors when encountering an issue. However, reading and responding to students' questions is difficult to scale because of the time needed to consider each message. As a result, critical issues may be left unresolved, and students may lose the motivation to continue in the course. To help address this problem, we build predictive models that automatically determine the urgency of each forum post, so that these posts can be brought to instructors' attention. This paper goes beyond previous work by predicting not just a binary decision cut-off but a post's level of urgency on a 7-point scale. First, we train and cross-validate several models on an original data set of 3,503 posts from MOOCs at University of Pennsylvania. Second, to determine the generalizability of our models, we test their performance on a separate, previously published data set of 29,604 posts from MOOCs at Stanford University. While the previous work on post urgency used only one data set, we evaluated the prediction across different data sets and courses. The best-performing model was a support vector regressor trained on the Universal Sentence Encoder embeddings of the posts, achieving an RMSE of 1.1 on the training set and 1.4 on the test set. Understanding the urgency of forum posts enables instructors to focus their time more effectively and, as a result, better support student learning.
Value-based Fast and Slow AI Nudging
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Nudging is a behavioral strategy aimed at influencing people's thoughts and actions. Nudging techniques can be found in many situations in our daily lives, and these nudging techniques can targeted at human fast and unconscious thinking, e.g., by using images to generate fear or the more careful and effortful slow thinking, e.g., by releasing information that makes us reflect on our choices. In this paper, we propose and discuss a value-based AI-human collaborative framework where AI systems nudge humans by proposing decision recommendations. Three different nudging modalities, based on when recommendations are presented to the human, are intended to stimulate human fast thinking, slow thinking, or meta-cognition. Values that are relevant to a specific decision scenario are used to decide when and how to use each of these nudging modalities. Examples of values are decision quality, speed, human upskilling and learning, human agency, and privacy. Several values can be present at the same time, and their priorities can vary over time. The framework treats values as parameters to be instantiated in a specific decision environment.
DistTGL: Distributed Memory-Based Temporal Graph Neural Network Training
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Memory-based Temporal Graph Neural Networks are powerful tools in dynamic graph representation learning and have demonstrated superior performance in many real-world applications. However, their node memory favors smaller batch sizes to capture more dependencies in graph events and needs to be maintained synchronously across all trainers. As a result, existing frameworks suffer from accuracy loss when scaling to multiple GPUs. Evenworse, the tremendous overhead to synchronize the node memory make it impractical to be deployed to distributed GPU clusters. In this work, we propose DistTGL -- an efficient and scalable solution to train memory-based TGNNs on distributed GPU clusters. DistTGL has three improvements over existing solutions: an enhanced TGNN model, a novel training algorithm, and an optimized system. In experiments, DistTGL achieves near-linear convergence speedup, outperforming state-of-the-art single-machine method by 14.5% in accuracy and 10.17x in training throughput.
Data-centric Operational Design Domain Characterization for Machine Learning-based Aeronautical Products
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

We give a first rigorous characterization of Operational Design Domains (ODDs) for Machine Learning (ML)-based aeronautical products. Unlike in other application sectors (such as self-driving road vehicles) where ODD development is scenario-based, our approach is data-centric: we propose the dimensions along which the parameters that define an ODD can be explicitly captured, together with a categorization of the data that ML-based applications can encounter in operation, whilst identifying their system-level relevance and impact. Specifically, we discuss how those data categories are useful to determine: the requirements necessary to drive the design of ML Models (MLMs); the potential effects on MLMs and higher levels of the system hierarchy; the learning assurance processes that may be needed, and system architectural considerations. We illustrate the underlying concepts with an example of an aircraft flight envelope.
PSGformer: Enhancing 3D Point Cloud Instance Segmentation via Precise Semantic Guidance
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Most existing 3D instance segmentation methods are derived from 3D semantic segmentation models. However, these indirect approaches suffer from certain limitations. They fail to fully leverage global and local semantic information for accurate prediction, which hampers the overall performance of the 3D instance segmentation framework. To address these issues, this paper presents PSGformer, a novel 3D instance segmentation network. PSGformer incorporates two key advancements to enhance the performance of 3D instance segmentation. Firstly, we propose a Multi-Level Semantic Aggregation Module, which effectively captures scene features by employing foreground point filtering and multi-radius aggregation. This module enables the acquisition of more detailed semantic information from global and local perspectives. Secondly, PSGformer introduces a Parallel Feature Fusion Transformer Module that independently processes super-point features and aggregated features using transformers. The model achieves a more comprehensive feature representation by the features which connect global and local features. We conducted extensive experiments on the ScanNetv2 dataset. Notably, PSGformer exceeds compared state-of-the-art methods by 2.2% on ScanNetv2 hidden test set in terms of mAP. Our code and models will be publicly released.
Deep ANN-based Touch-less 3D Pad for Digit Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

The Covid-19 pandemic has changed the way humans interact with their environment. Common touch surfaces such as elevator switches and ATM switches are hazardous to touch as they are used by countless people every day, increasing the chance of getting infected. So, a need for touch-less interaction with machines arises. In this paper, we propose a method of recognizing the ten decimal digits (0-9) by writing the digits in the air near a sensing printed circuit board using a human hand. We captured the movement of the hand by a sensor based on projective capacitance and classified it into digits using an Artificial Neural Network. Our method does not use pictures, which significantly reduces the computational requirements and preserves users' privacy. Thus, the proposed method can be easily implemented in public places.
Prawn Morphometrics and Weight Estimation from Images using Deep Learning for Landmark Localization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Accurate weight estimation and morphometric analyses are useful in aquaculture for optimizing feeding, predicting harvest yields, identifying desirable traits for selective breeding, grading processes, and monitoring the health status of production animals. However, the collection of phenotypic data through traditional manual approaches at industrial scales and in real-time is time-consuming, labour-intensive, and prone to errors. Digital imaging of individuals and subsequent training of prediction models using Deep Learning (DL) has the potential to rapidly and accurately acquire phenotypic data from aquaculture species. In this study, we applied a novel DL approach to automate weight estimation and morphometric analysis using the black tiger prawn (Penaeus monodon) as a model crustacean. The DL approach comprises two main components: a feature extraction module that efficiently combines low-level and high-level features using the Kronecker product operation; followed by a landmark localization module that then uses these features to predict the coordinates of key morphological points (landmarks) on the prawn body. Once these landmarks were extracted, weight was estimated using a weight regression module based on the extracted landmarks using a fully connected network. For morphometric analyses, we utilized the detected landmarks to derive five important prawn traits. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was also used to identify landmark-derived distances, which were found to be highly correlated with shape features such as body length, and width. We evaluated our approach on a large dataset of 8164 images of the Black tiger prawn (Penaeus monodon) collected from Australian farms. Our experimental results demonstrate that the novel DL approach outperforms existing DL methods in terms of accuracy, robustness, and efficiency.
On the Utility Gain of Iterative Bayesian Update for Locally Differentially Private Mechanisms
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

This paper investigates the utility gain of using Iterative Bayesian Update (IBU) for private discrete distribution estimation using data obfuscated with Locally Differentially Private (LDP) mechanisms. We compare the performance of IBU to Matrix Inversion (MI), a standard estimation technique, for seven LDP mechanisms designed for one-time data collection and for other seven LDP mechanisms designed for multiple data collections (e.g., RAPPOR). To broaden the scope of our study, we also varied the utility metric, the number of users n, the domain size k, and the privacy parameter ε, using both synthetic and real-world data. Our results suggest that IBU can be a useful post-processing tool for improving the utility of LDP mechanisms in different scenarios without any additional privacy cost. For instance, our experiments show that IBU can provide better utility than MI, especially in high privacy regimes (i.e., when ε is small). Our paper provides insights for practitioners to use IBU in conjunction with existing LDP mechanisms for more accurate and privacy-preserving data analysis. Finally, we implemented IBU for all fourteen LDP mechanisms into the state-of-the-art multi-freq-ldpy Python package (https://pypi.org/project/multi-freq-ldpy/) and open-sourced all our code used for the experiments as tutorials.
TinyTracker: Ultra-Fast and Ultra-Low-Power Edge Vision In-Sensor for Gaze Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Intelligent edge vision tasks encounter the critical challenge of ensuring power and latency efficiency due to the typically heavy computational load they impose on edge platforms.This work leverages one of the first "AI in sensor" vision platforms, IMX500 by Sony, to achieve ultra-fast and ultra-low-power end-to-end edge vision applications. We evaluate the IMX500 and compare it to other edge platforms, such as the Google Coral Dev Micro and Sony Spresense, by exploring gaze estimation as a case study. We propose TinyTracker, a highly efficient, fully quantized model for 2D gaze estimation designed to maximize the performance of the edge vision systems considered in this study. TinyTracker achieves a 41x size reduction (600Kb) compared to iTracker [1] without significant loss in gaze estimation accuracy (maximum of 0.16 cm when fully quantized). TinyTracker's deployment on the Sony IMX500 vision sensor results in end-to-end latency of around 19ms. The camera takes around 17.9ms to read, process and transmit the pixels to the accelerator. The inference time of the network is 0.86ms with an additional 0.24 ms for retrieving the results from the sensor. The overall energy consumption of the end-to-end system is 4.9 mJ, including 0.06 mJ for inference. The end-to-end study shows that IMX500 is 1.7x faster than CoralMicro (19ms vs 34.4ms) and 7x more power efficient (4.9mJ VS 34.2mJ)
The Impact of Space-Filling Curves on Data Movement in Parallel Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

Modern computer systems are characterized by deep memory hierarchies, composed of main memory, multiple layers of cache, and other specialized types of memory. In parallel and distributed systems, additional memory layers are added to this hierarchy. Achieving good performance for computational science applications, in terms of execution time, depends on the efficient use of this diverse and hierarchical memory. This paper revisits the use of space-filling curves to specify the ordering in memory of data structures used in representative scientific applications executing on parallel machines containing clusters of multicore CPUs with attached GPUs. This work examines the hypothesis that space-filling curves, such as Hilbert and Morton ordering, can improve data locality and hence result in more efficient data movement than row or column-based orderings. First, performance results are presented that show for what application parameterizations and machine characteristics this is the case, and are interpreted in terms of how an application interacts with the computer hardware and low-level software. This research particularly focuses on the use of stencil-based applications that form the basis of many scientific computations. Second, how space-filling curves impact data sharing in nearest-neighbour and stencil-based codes is considered.