OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Robust 3D Object Detection in Cold Weather Conditions
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Adverse weather conditions can negatively affect LiDAR-based object detectors. In this work, we focus on the phenomenon of vehicle gas exhaust condensation in cold weather conditions. This everyday effect can influence the estimation of object sizes, orientations and introduce ghost object detections, compromising the reliability of the state of the art object detectors. We propose to solve this problem by using data augmentation and a novel training loss term. To effectively train deep neural networks, a large set of labeled data is needed. In case of adverse weather conditions, this process can be extremely laborious and expensive. We address this issue in two steps: First, we present a gas exhaust data generation method based on 3D surface reconstruction and sampling which allows us to generate large sets of gas exhaust clouds from a small pool of labeled data. Second, we introduce a point cloud augmentation process that can be used to add gas exhaust to datasets recorded in good weather conditions. Finally, we formulate a new training loss term that leverages the augmented point cloud to increase object detection robustness by penalizing predictions that include noise. In contrast to other works, our method can be used with both grid-based and point-based detectors. Moreover, since our approach does not require any network architecture changes, inference times remain unchanged. Experimental results on real data show that our proposed method greatly increases robustness to gas exhaust and noisy data.
Image Trinarization Using a Partial Differential Equations: A Novel Approach to Automatic Sperm Image Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Partial differential equations have recently garnered substantial attention as an image processing framework due to their extensibility, the ability to rigorously engineer and analyse the governing dynamics as well as the ease of implementation using numerical methods. This paper explores a novel approach to image trinarization with a concrete real-world application of classifying regions of sperm images used in the automatic analysis of sperm morphology. The proposed methodology engineers a diffusion equation with non-linear source term, exhibiting three steady-states. The model is implemented as an image processor using a standard finite difference method to illustrate the efficacy of the proposed approach. The performance of the proposed approach is benchmarked against standard image clustering/segmentation methods and shown to be highly effective.
A Wireless-Vision Dataset for Privacy Preserving Human Activity Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) has recently received remarkable attention in numerous applications such as assisted living and remote monitoring. Existing solutions based on sensors and vision technologies have obtained achievements but still suffering from considerable limitations in the environmental requirement. Wireless signals like WiFi-based sensing have emerged as a new paradigm since it is convenient and not restricted in the environment. In this paper, a new WiFi-based and video-based neural network (WiNN) is proposed to improve the robustness of activity recognition where the synchronized video serves as the supplement for the wireless data. Moreover, a wireless-vision benchmark (WiVi) is collected for 9 class actions recognition in three different visual conditions, including the scenes without occlusion, with partial occlusion, and with full occlusion. Both machine learning methods - support vector machine (SVM) as well as deep learning methods are used for the accuracy verification of the data set. Our results show that WiVi data set satisfies the primary demand and all three branches in the proposed pipeline keep more than $80\%$ of activity recognition accuracy over multiple action segmentation from 1s to 3s. In particular, WiNN is the most robust method in terms of all the actions on three action segmentation compared to the others.
The Data-Production Dispositif
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

Machine learning (ML) depends on data to train and verify models. Very often, organizations outsource processes related to data work (i.e., generating and annotating data and evaluating outputs) through business process outsourcing (BPO) companies and crowdsourcing platforms. This paper investigates outsourced ML data work in Latin America by studying three platforms in Venezuela and a BPO in Argentina. We lean on the Foucauldian notion of dispositif to define the data-production dispositif as an ensemble of discourses, actions, and objects strategically disposed to (re)produce power/knowledge relations in data and labor. Our dispositif analysis comprises the examination of 210 data work instruction documents, 55 interviews with data workers, managers, and requesters, and participant observation. Our findings show that discourses encoded in instructions reproduce and normalize the worldviews of requesters. Precarious working conditions and economic dependency alienate workers, making them obedient to instructions. Furthermore, discourses and social contexts materialize in artifacts, such as interfaces and performance metrics, limiting workers' agency and normalizing specific ways of interpreting data. We conclude by stressing the importance of counteracting the data-production dispositif by fighting alienation and precarization, and empowering data workers to become assets in the quest for high-quality data.
Universal Dependency Treebank for Odia Language
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

This paper presents the first publicly available treebank of Odia, a morphologically rich low resource Indian language. The treebank contains approx. 1082 tokens (100 sentences) in Odia selected from "Samantar", the largest available parallel corpora collection for Indic languages. All the selected sentences are manually annotated following the ``Universal Dependency (UD)" guidelines. The morphological analysis of the Odia treebank was performed using machine learning techniques. The Odia annotated treebank will enrich the Odia language resource and will help in building language technology tools for cross-lingual learning and typological research. We also build a preliminary Odia parser using a machine learning approach. The accuracy of the parser is 86.6% Tokenization, 64.1% UPOS, 63.78% XPOS, 42.04% UAS and 21.34% LAS. Finally, the paper briefly discusses the linguistic analysis of the Odia UD treebank.
FedEntropy: Efficient Device Grouping for Federated Learning Using Maximum Entropy Judgment
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Along with the popularity of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet-of-Things (IoT), Federated Learning (FL) has attracted steadily increasing attentions as a promising distributed machine learning paradigm, which enables the training of a central model on for numerous decentralized devices without exposing their privacy. However, due to the biased data distributions on involved devices, FL inherently suffers from low classification accuracy in non-IID scenarios. Although various device grouping method have been proposed to address this problem, most of them neglect both i) distinct data distribution characteristics of heterogeneous devices, and ii) contributions and hazards of local models, which are extremely important in determining the quality of global model aggregation. In this paper, we present an effective FL method named FedEntropy with a novel dynamic device grouping scheme, which makes full use of the above two factors based on our proposed maximum entropy judgement heuristic.Unlike existing FL methods that directly aggregate local models returned from all the selected devices, in one FL round FedEntropy firstly makes a judgement based on the pre-collected soft labels of selected devices and then only aggregates the local models that can maximize the overall entropy of these soft labels. Without collecting local models that are harmful for aggregation, FedEntropy can effectively improve global model accuracy while reducing the overall communication overhead. Comprehensive experimental results on well-known benchmarks show that, FedEntropy not only outperforms state-of-the-art FL methods in terms of model accuracy and communication overhead, but also can be integrated into them to enhance their classification performance.
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Multi-class Imbalanced Training
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

With the rapid growth of memory and computing power, datasets are becoming increasingly complex and imbalanced. This is especially severe in the context of clinical data, where there may be one rare event for many cases in the majority class. We introduce an imbalanced classification framework, based on reinforcement learning, for training extremely imbalanced data sets, and extend it for use in multi-class settings. We combine dueling and double deep Q-learning architectures, and formulate a custom reward function and episode-training procedure, specifically with the added capability of handling multi-class imbalanced training. Using real-world clinical case studies, we demonstrate that our proposed framework outperforms current state-of-the-art imbalanced learning methods, achieving more fair and balanced classification, while also significantly improving the prediction of minority classes.
Failure Mechanism Traceability and Application in Human System Interface of Nuclear Power Plants using RESHA
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

In recent years, there has been considerable effort to modernize existing and new nuclear power plants with digital instrumentation and control systems. However, there has also been considerable concern both by industry and regulatory bodies for the risk and consequence analysis of these systems. Of concern are digital common cause failures specifically due to software defects. These failures by the software can occur in both the control and monitoring of a system. While many methods have been proposed to identify software failure modes, such as Systems Theoretic Process Analysis, Hazard and Consequence Analysis for Digital Systems, etc., these methods are focused primarily on the control action pathway of a system. In contrast, the information feedback pathway lacks Unsafe Control Actions, which are typically related to software basic events; thus, assessment of software basic events in such systems is unclear. In this work, we present the idea of intermediate processors and Unsafe Information Flow (UIF) to help safety analysts trace failure mechanisms in the feedback pathway and how they can be integrated into a fault tree for improved assessment capability. The concepts presented are demonstrated in two comprehensive case studies, a smart sensor integrated platform for unmanned autonomous vehicles and another on a representative advanced human system interface for safety critical plant monitoring. The qualitative software basic events are identified, and a fault tree analysis is conducted based on a modified Redundancy guided Systems theoretic Hazard Analysis methodology. The case studies demonstrate the use of UIFs and intermediate processors in the fault tree to improve traceability of software failures in highly complex digital instrumentation feedback. The improved method clarifies fault tree construction when multiple component dependencies are present in the system.
Application of Orthogonal Defect Classification for Software Reliability Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

The modernization of existing and new nuclear power plants with digital instrumentation and control systems (DI&C) is a recent and highly trending topic. However, there lacks strong consensus on best-estimate reliability methodologies by both the United States (U.S.) Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the industry. In this work, we develop an approach called Orthogonal-defect Classification for Assessing Software Reliability (ORCAS) to quantify probabilities of various software failure modes in a DI&C system. The method utilizes accepted industry methodologies for quality assurance that are verified by experimental evidence. In essence, the approach combines a semantic failure classification model with a reliability growth model to predict the probability of failure modes of a software system. A case study was conducted on a representative I&C platform (ChibiOS) running a smart sensor acquisition software developed by Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). The testing and evidence collection guidance in ORCAS was applied, and defects were uncovered in the software. Qualitative evidence, such as modified condition decision coverage, was used to gauge the completeness and trustworthiness of the assessment while quantitative evidence was used to determine the software failure probabilities. The reliability of the software was then estimated and compared to existing operational data of the sensor device. It is demonstrated that by using ORCAS, a semantic reasoning framework can be developed to justify if the software is reliable (or unreliable) while still leveraging the strength of the existing methods.
Towards Better Privacy-preserving Electronic Voting System
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

This paper presents two approaches of privacy-preserving voting system: Blind Signature-based Voting (BSV) and Homorphic Encryption Based Voting (HEV). BSV is simple, stable, and scalable, but requires additional anonymous property in the communication with the blockchain. HEV simultaneously protects voting privacy against traffic-analysis attacks, prevents cooperation interruption by malicious voters with a high probability, but the scalability is limited. We further apply sampling to mitigate the scalability problem in HEV and simulate the performance under different voting group size and number of samples.
Inference of a Rumor's Source in the Independent Cascade Model
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2022
Year: 2022

We consider the so-called Independent Cascade Model for rumor spreading or epidemic processes popularized by Kempe et al.\ [2003]. In this model, a small subset of nodes from a network are the source of a rumor. In discrete time steps, each informed node "infects" each of its uninformed neighbors with probability $p$. While many facets of this process are studied in the literature, less is known about the inference problem: given a number of infected nodes in a network, can we learn the source of the rumor? In the context of epidemiology this problem is often referred to as patient zero problem. It belongs to a broader class of problems where the goal is to infer parameters of the underlying spreading model, see, e.g., Lokhov [NeurIPS'16] or Mastakouri et al. [NeurIPS'20]. In this work we present a maximum likelihood estimator for the rumor's source, given a snapshot of the process in terms of a set of active nodes $X$ after $t$ steps. Our results show that, for cycle-free graphs, the likelihood estimator undergoes a non-trivial phase transition as a function $t$. We provide a rigorous analysis for two prominent classes of acyclic network, namely $d$-regular trees and Galton-Watson trees, and verify empirically that our heuristics work well in various general networks.
Improving the Latent Space of Image Style Transfer
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Existing neural style transfer researches have studied to match statistical information between the deep features of content and style images, which were extracted by a pre-trained VGG, and achieved significant improvement in synthesizing artistic images. However, in some cases, the feature statistics from the pre-trained encoder may not be consistent with the visual style we perceived. For example, the style distance between images of different styles is less than that of the same style. In such an inappropriate latent space, the objective function of the existing methods will be optimized in the wrong direction, resulting in bad stylization results. In addition, the lack of content details in the features extracted by the pre-trained encoder also leads to the content leak problem. In order to solve these issues in the latent space used by style transfer, we propose two contrastive training schemes to get a refined encoder that is more suitable for this task. The style contrastive loss pulls the stylized result closer to the same visual style image and pushes it away from the content image. The content contrastive loss enables the encoder to retain more available details. We can directly add our training scheme to some existing style transfer methods and significantly improve their results. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our methods.
A Longitudinal View at the Adoption of Multipath TCP
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

Multipath TCP (MPTCP) extends traditional TCP to enable simultaneous use of multiple connection endpoints at the source and destination. MPTCP has been under active development since its standardization in 2013, and more recently in February 2020, MPTCP was upstreamed to the Linux kernel. In this paper, we provide an in-depth analysis of MPTCPv0 in the Internet and the first analysis of MPTCPv1 to date. We probe the entire IPv4 address space and an IPv6 hitlist to detect MPTCP-enabled systems operational on port 80 and 443. Our scans reveal a steady increase in MPTCPv0-capable IPs, reaching 13k+ on IPv4 (2$\times$ increase in one year) and 1k on IPv6 (40$\times$ increase). MPTCPv1 deployment is comparatively low with $\approx$100 supporting hosts in IPv4 and IPv6, most of which belong to Apple. We also discover a substantial share of seemingly MPTCP-capable hosts, an artifact of middleboxes mirroring TCP options. We conduct targeted HTTP(S) measurements towards select hosts and find that middleboxes can aggressively impact the perceived quality of applications utilizing MPTCP. Finally, we analyze two complementary traffic traces from CAIDA and MAWI to shed light on the real-world usage of MPTCP. We find that while MPTCP usage has increased by a factor of 20 over the past few years, its traffic share is still quite low.
Data-Driven Calibration of Multi-Fidelity Multiscale Fracture Models via Latent Map Gaussian Process
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2022
Year: 2022

Fracture modeling of metallic alloys with microscopic pores relies on multiscale damage simulations which typically ignore the manufacturing-induced spatial variabilities in porosity. This simplification is made because of the prohibitive computational expenses of explicitly modeling spatially varying microstructures in a macroscopic part. To address this challenge and open the doors for fracture-aware design of multiscale materials, we propose a data-driven framework that integrates a mechanistic reduced-order model (ROM) with a calibration scheme based on random processes. Our ROM drastically accelerates direct numerical simulations (DNS) by using a stabilized damage algorithm and systematically reducing the degrees of freedom via clustering. Since clustering affects local strain fields and hence the fracture response, we calibrate the ROM by constructing a multi-fidelity random process based on latent map Gaussian processes (LMGPs). In particular, we use LMGPs to calibrate the damage parameters of an ROM as a function of microstructure and clustering (i.e., fidelity) level such that the ROM faithfully surrogates DNS. We demonstrate the application of our framework in predicting the damage behavior of a multiscale metallic component with spatially varying porosity. Our results indicate that microstructural porosity can significantly affect the performance of macro components and hence must be considered in the design process.
Fairness in Selection Problems with Strategic Candidates
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2022
Year: 2022

To better understand discriminations and the effect of affirmative actions in selection problems (e.g., college admission or hiring), a recent line of research proposed a model based on differential variance. This model assumes that the decision-maker has a noisy estimate of each candidate's quality and puts forward the difference in the noise variances between different demographic groups as a key factor to explain discrimination. The literature on differential variance, however, does not consider the strategic behavior of candidates who can react to the selection procedure to improve their outcome, which is well-known to happen in many domains. In this paper, we study how the strategic aspect affects fairness in selection problems. We propose to model selection problems with strategic candidates as a contest game: A population of rational candidates compete by choosing an effort level to increase their quality. They incur a cost-of-effort but get a (random) quality whose expectation equals the chosen effort. A Bayesian decision-maker observes a noisy estimate of the quality of each candidate (with differential variance) and selects the fraction $α$ of best candidates based on their posterior expected quality; each selected candidate receives a reward $S$. We characterize the (unique) equilibrium of this game in the different parameters' regimes, both when the decision-maker is unconstrained and when they are constrained to respect the fairness notion of demographic parity. Our results reveal important impacts of the strategic behavior on the discrimination observed at equilibrium and allow us to understand the effect of imposing demographic parity in this context. In particular, we find that, in many cases, the results contrast with the non-strategic setting.
Interpretation Quality Score for Measuring the Quality of interpretability methods
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Machine learning (ML) models have been applied to a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks in recent years. In addition to making accurate decisions, the necessity of understanding how models make their decisions has become apparent in many applications. To that end, many interpretability methods that help explain the decision processes of ML models have been developed. Yet, there currently exists no widely-accepted metric to evaluate the quality of explanations generated by these methods. As a result, there currently is no standard way of measuring to what degree an interpretability method achieves an intended objective. Moreover, there is no accepted standard of performance by which we can compare and rank the current existing interpretability methods. In this paper, we propose a novel metric for quantifying the quality of explanations generated by interpretability methods. We compute the metric on three NLP tasks using six interpretability methods and present our results.
Releasing survey microdata with exact cluster locations and additional privacy safeguards
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

Household survey programs around the world publish fine-granular georeferenced microdata to support research on the interdependence of human livelihoods and their surrounding environment. To safeguard the respondents' privacy, micro-level survey data is usually (pseudo)-anonymized through deletion or perturbation procedures such as obfuscating the true location of data collection. This, however, poses a challenge to emerging approaches that augment survey data with auxiliary information on a local level. Here, we propose an alternative microdata dissemination strategy that leverages the utility of the original microdata with additional privacy safeguards through synthetically generated data using generative models. We back our proposal with experiments using data from the 2011 Costa Rican census and satellite-derived auxiliary information. Our strategy reduces the respondents' re-identification risk for any number of disclosed attributes by 60-80\% even under re-identification attempts.