OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
E-Vote Your Conscience: Perceptions of Coercion and Vote Buying, and the Usability of Fake Credentials in Online Voting
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Online voting is attractive for convenience and accessibility, but is more susceptible to voter coercion and vote buying than in-person voting. One mitigation is to give voters fake voting credentials that they can yield to a coercer. Fake credentials appear identical to real ones, but cast votes that are silently omitted from the final tally. An important unanswered question is how ordinary voters perceive such a mitigation: whether they could understand and use fake credentials, and whether the coercion risks justify the costs of mitigation. We present the first systematic study of these questions, involving 150 diverse individuals in Boston, Massachusetts. All participants "registered" and "voted" in a mock election: 120 were exposed to coercion resistance via fake credentials, the rest forming a control group. Of the 120 participants exposed to fake credentials, 96% understood their use. 53% reported that they would create fake credentials in a real-world voting scenario, given the opportunity. 10% mistakenly voted with a fake credential, however. 22% reported either personal experience with or direct knowledge of coercion or vote-buying incidents. These latter participants rated the coercion-resistant system essentially as trustworthy as in-person voting via hand-marked paper ballots. Of the 150 total participants to use the system, 87% successfully created their credentials without assistance; 83% both successfully created and properly used their credentials. Participants give a System Usability Scale score of 70.4, which is slightly above the industry's average score of 68. Our findings appear to support the importance of the coercion problem in general, and the promise of fake credentials as a possible mitigation, but user error rates remain an important usability challenge for future work.
Evolutionary Multi-Objective Optimisation for Fairness-Aware Self Adjusting Memory Classifiers in Data Streams
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

This paper introduces a novel approach, evolutionary multi-objective optimisation for fairness-aware self-adjusting memory classifiers, designed to enhance fairness in machine learning algorithms applied to data stream classification. With the growing concern over discrimination in algorithmic decision-making, particularly in dynamic data stream environments, there is a need for methods that ensure fair treatment of individuals across sensitive attributes like race or gender. The proposed approach addresses this challenge by integrating the strengths of the self-adjusting memory K-Nearest-Neighbour algorithm with evolutionary multi-objective optimisation. This combination allows the new approach to efficiently manage concept drift in streaming data and leverage the flexibility of evolutionary multi-objective optimisation to maximise accuracy and minimise discrimination simultaneously. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach through extensive experiments on various datasets, comparing its performance against several baseline methods in terms of accuracy and fairness metrics. Our results show that the proposed approach maintains competitive accuracy and significantly reduces discrimination, highlighting its potential as a robust solution for fairness-aware data stream classification. Further analyses also confirm the effectiveness of the strategies to trigger evolutionary multi-objective optimisation and adapt classifiers in the proposed approach.
TIMIT Speaker Profiling: A Comparison of Multi-task learning and Single-task learning Approaches
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

This study employs deep learning techniques to explore four speaker profiling tasks on the TIMIT dataset, namely gender classification, accent classification, age estimation, and speaker identification, highlighting the potential and challenges of multi-task learning versus single-task models. The motivation for this research is twofold: firstly, to empirically assess the advantages and drawbacks of multi-task learning over single-task models in the context of speaker profiling; secondly, to emphasize the undiminished significance of skillful feature engineering for speaker recognition tasks. The findings reveal challenges in accent classification, and multi-task learning is found advantageous for tasks of similar complexity. Non-sequential features are favored for speaker recognition, but sequential ones can serve as starting points for complex models. The study underscores the necessity of meticulous experimentation and parameter tuning for deep learning models.
Fortify the Guardian, Not the Treasure: Resilient Adversarial Detectors
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents RADAR-Robust Adversarial Detection via Adversarial Retraining-an approach designed to enhance the robustness of adversarial detectors against adaptive attacks, while maintaining classifier performance. An adaptive attack is one where the attacker is aware of the defenses and adapts their strategy accordingly. Our proposed method leverages adversarial training to reinforce the ability to detect attacks, without compromising clean accuracy. During the training phase, we integrate into the dataset adversarial examples, which were optimized to fool both the classifier and the adversarial detector, enabling the adversarial detector to learn and adapt to potential attack scenarios. Experimental evaluations on the CIFAR-10 and SVHN datasets demonstrate that our proposed algorithm significantly improves a detector's ability to accurately identify adaptive adversarial attacks -- without sacrificing clean accuracy.
On Target Detection in the Presence of Clutter in Joint Communication and Sensing Cellular Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Recent works on joint communication and sensing (JCAS) cellular networks have proposed to use time division mode (TDM) and concurrent mode (CM), as alternative methods for sharing the resources between communication and sensing signals. While the performance of these JCAS schemes for object tracking and parameter estimation has been studied in previous works, their performance on target detection in the presence of clutter has not been analyzed. In this paper, we propose a detection scheme for estimating the number of targets in JCAS cellular networks that employ TDM or CM resource sharing. The proposed detection method allows for the presence of clutter and/or temporally correlated noise. This scheme is studied with respect to the JCAS trade-off parameters that allow to control the time slots in TDM and the power resources in CM allocated to sensing and communications. The performance of two fundamental transmit beamforming schemes, typical for JCAS, is compared in terms of the receiver operating characteristics curves. Our results indicate that in general the TDM scheme gives a somewhat better detection performance compared to the CM scheme, although both schemes outperform existing approaches provided that their respective trade-off parameters are tuned properly.
Faster Optimization Through Genetic Drift
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

The compact Genetic Algorithm (cGA), parameterized by its hypothetical population size $K$, offers a low-memory alternative to evolving a large offspring population of solutions. It evolves a probability distribution, biasing it towards promising samples. For the classical benchmark OneMax, the cGA has to two different modes of operation: a conservative one with small step sizes $Θ(1/(\sqrt{n}\log n))$, which is slow but prevents genetic drift, and an aggressive one with large step sizes $Θ(1/\log n)$, in which genetic drift leads to wrong decisions, but those are corrected efficiently. On OneMax, an easy hill-climbing problem, both modes lead to optimization times of $Θ(n\log n)$ and are thus equally efficient. In this paper we study how both regimes change when we replace OneMax by the harder hill-climbing problem DynamicBinVal. It turns out that the aggressive mode is not affected and still yields quasi-linear runtime $O(n\cdot polylog (n))$. However, the conservative mode becomes substantially slower, yielding a runtime of $Ω(n^2)$, since genetic drift can only be avoided with smaller step sizes of $O(1/n)$. We complement our theoretical results with simulations.
EuSQuAD: Automatically Translated and Aligned SQuAD2.0 for Basque
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The widespread availability of Question Answering (QA) datasets in English has greatly facilitated the advancement of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) field. However, the scarcity of such resources for minority languages, such as Basque, poses a substantial challenge for these communities. In this context, the translation and alignment of existing QA datasets plays a crucial role in narrowing this technological gap. This work presents EuSQuAD, the first initiative dedicated to automatically translating and aligning SQuAD2.0 into Basque, resulting in more than 142k QA examples. We demonstrate EuSQuAD's value through extensive qualitative analysis and QA experiments supported with EuSQuAD as training data. These experiments are evaluated with a new human-annotated dataset.
An Experimental Study on Exploring Strong Lightweight Vision Transformers via Masked Image Modeling Pre-Training
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Masked image modeling (MIM) pre-training for large-scale vision transformers (ViTs) has enabled promising downstream performance on top of the learned self-supervised ViT features. In this paper, we question if the \textit{extremely simple} lightweight ViTs' fine-tuning performance can also benefit from this pre-training paradigm, which is considerably less studied yet in contrast to the well-established lightweight architecture design methodology. We use an observation-analysis-solution flow for our study. We first systematically observe different behaviors among the evaluated pre-training methods with respect to the downstream fine-tuning data scales. Furthermore, we analyze the layer representation similarities and attention maps across the obtained models, which clearly show the inferior learning of MIM pre-training on higher layers, leading to unsatisfactory transfer performance on data-insufficient downstream tasks. This finding is naturally a guide to designing our distillation strategies during pre-training to solve the above deterioration problem. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach. Our pre-training with distillation on pure lightweight ViTs with vanilla/hierarchical design ($5.7M$/$6.5M$) can achieve $79.4\%$/$78.9\%$ top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K. It also enables SOTA performance on the ADE20K segmentation task ($42.8\%$ mIoU) and LaSOT tracking task ($66.1\%$ AUC) in the lightweight regime. The latter even surpasses all the current SOTA lightweight CPU-realtime trackers.
Quantifying Aleatoric and Epistemic Uncertainty with Proper Scoring Rules
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Uncertainty representation and quantification are paramount in machine learning and constitute an important prerequisite for safety-critical applications. In this paper, we propose novel measures for the quantification of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty based on proper scoring rules, which are loss functions with the meaningful property that they incentivize the learner to predict ground-truth (conditional) probabilities. We assume two common representations of (epistemic) uncertainty, namely, in terms of a credal set, i.e. a set of probability distributions, or a second-order distribution, i.e., a distribution over probability distributions. Our framework establishes a natural bridge between these representations. We provide a formal justification of our approach and introduce new measures of epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty as concrete instantiations.
Length Generalization of Causal Transformers without Position Encoding
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Generalizing to longer sentences is important for recent Transformer-based language models. Besides algorithms manipulating explicit position features, the success of Transformers without position encodings (NoPE) provides a new way to overcome the challenge. In this paper, we study the length generalization property of NoPE. We find that although NoPE can extend to longer sequences than the commonly used explicit position encodings, it still has a limited context length. We identify a connection between the failure of NoPE's generalization and the distraction of attention distributions. We propose a parameter-efficient tuning for searching attention heads' best temperature hyper-parameters, which substantially expands NoPE's context size. Experiments on long sequence language modeling, the synthetic passkey retrieval task and real-world long context tasks show that NoPE can achieve competitive performances with state-of-the-art length generalization algorithms. The source code is publicly accessible
An Online Spatial-Temporal Graph Trajectory Planner for Autonomous Vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

The autonomous driving industry is expected to grow by over 20 times in the coming decade and, thus, motivate researchers to delve into it. The primary focus of their research is to ensure safety, comfort, and efficiency. An autonomous vehicle has several modules responsible for one or more of the aforementioned items. Among these modules, the trajectory planner plays a pivotal role in the safety of the vehicle and the comfort of its passengers. The module is also responsible for respecting kinematic constraints and any applicable road constraints. In this paper, a novel online spatial-temporal graph trajectory planner is introduced to generate safe and comfortable trajectories. First, a spatial-temporal graph is constructed using the autonomous vehicle, its surrounding vehicles, and virtual nodes along the road with respect to the vehicle itself. Next, the graph is forwarded into a sequential network to obtain the desired states. To support the planner, a simple behavioral layer is also presented that determines kinematic constraints for the planner. Furthermore, a novel potential function is also proposed to train the network. Finally, the proposed planner is tested on three different complex driving tasks, and the performance is compared with two frequently used methods. The results show that the proposed planner generates safe and feasible trajectories while achieving similar or longer distances in the forward direction and comparable comfort ride.
Design And Flight Testing Of LQRi Attitude Control For Quadcopter UAV
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents the design, implementation, and flight test results of linear quadratic integral regulator (LQRi) based attitude control for a quadcopter UAV. We present the derivation of the mathematical model for the kinematics and dynamics of the UAV, along with the linearized state space representation of the system about hover conditions. LQR and LQRi controllers are then designed to stabilize the UAV in hover conditions and to track desired attitude commands. The controllers are then implemented onboard the Pixhawk flight controller and flight test results are discussed. Finally, the code related to this paper has been published open-source for replication and further research
How Population Diversity Influences the Efficiency of Crossover
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

Our theoretical understanding of crossover is limited by our ability to analyze how population diversity evolves. In this study, we provide one of the first rigorous analyses of population diversity and optimization time in a setting where large diversity and large population sizes are required to speed up progress. We give a formal and general criterion which amount of diversity is necessary and sufficient to speed up the $(μ+1)$ Genetic Algorithm on LeadingOnes. We show that the naturally evolving diversity falls short of giving a substantial speed-up for any $μ=O(\sqrt{n}/\log^2 n)$. On the other hand, we show that even for $μ=2$, if we simply break ties in favor of diversity then this increases diversity so much that optimization is accelerated by a constant factor.
DF-DM: A foundational process model for multimodal data fusion in the artificial intelligence era
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

In the big data era, integrating diverse data modalities poses significant challenges, particularly in complex fields like healthcare. This paper introduces a new process model for multimodal Data Fusion for Data Mining, integrating embeddings and the Cross-Industry Standard Process for Data Mining with the existing Data Fusion Information Group model. Our model aims to decrease computational costs, complexity, and bias while improving efficiency and reliability. We also propose "disentangled dense fusion", a novel embedding fusion method designed to optimize mutual information and facilitate dense inter-modality feature interaction, thereby minimizing redundant information. We demonstrate the model's efficacy through three use cases: predicting diabetic retinopathy using retinal images and patient metadata, domestic violence prediction employing satellite imagery, internet, and census data, and identifying clinical and demographic features from radiography images and clinical notes. The model achieved a Macro F1 score of 0.92 in diabetic retinopathy prediction, an R-squared of 0.854 and sMAPE of 24.868 in domestic violence prediction, and a macro AUC of 0.92 and 0.99 for disease prediction and sex classification, respectively, in radiological analysis. These results underscore the Data Fusion for Data Mining model's potential to significantly impact multimodal data processing, promoting its adoption in diverse, resource-constrained settings.
When Medical Imaging Met Self-Attention: A Love Story That Didn't Quite Work Out
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

A substantial body of research has focused on developing systems that assist medical professionals during labor-intensive early screening processes, many based on convolutional deep-learning architectures. Recently, multiple studies explored the application of so-called self-attention mechanisms in the vision domain. These studies often report empirical improvements over fully convolutional approaches on various datasets and tasks. To evaluate this trend for medical imaging, we extend two widely adopted convolutional architectures with different self-attention variants on two different medical datasets. With this, we aim to specifically evaluate the possible advantages of additional self-attention. We compare our models with similarly sized convolutional and attention-based baselines and evaluate performance gains statistically. Additionally, we investigate how including such layers changes the features learned by these models during the training. Following a hyperparameter search, and contrary to our expectations, we observe no significant improvement in balanced accuracy over fully convolutional models. We also find that important features, such as dermoscopic structures in skin lesion images, are still not learned by employing self-attention. Finally, analyzing local explanations, we confirm biased feature usage. We conclude that merely incorporating attention is insufficient to surpass the performance of existing fully convolutional methods.
SAFLA: Semantic-aware Full Lifecycle Assurance Designed for Intent-Driven Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Intent-driven Networks (IDNs) are crucial in enhancing network management efficiency by enabling the translation of high-level intents into executable configurations via a top-down approach. The escalating complexity of network architectures, however, has led to a semantic gap between these intents and their actual configurations, posing significant challenges to the accuracy and reliability of IDNs. While existing methodologies attempt to address this gap through a bottom-up analysis of network metadata, they often fall short, focusing primarily on intent extraction or reasoning without fully leveraging insights to tackle the inherent challenges of IDNs. To mitigate this, we introduce SAFLA, a semantic-aware framework specifically designed to assure the full lifecycle of intents within IDNs. By seamlessly integrating top-down and bottom-up approaches, SAFLA not only provides comprehensive intent assurance but also effectively bridges the semantic gap. This integration facilitates a self-healing mechanism, substantially reducing the need for manual intervention even in dynamically changing network environments. Experimental results demonstrate the framework's feasibility and efficiency, confirming its capacity to quickly adapt intents in response to network changes, thus marking an important advancement in the field of IDNs.
Switchable Single/Dual Edge Registers for Pipeline Architecture
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

The demand for low power processing is increasing due to mobile and portable devices. In a processor unit, an adder is an important building block since it is used in Floating Point Units (FPU) and Arithmetic Logic Units (ALU). Also, pipeline techniques are used extensively to improve the throughput of the processing unit. To implement a pipeline requires adding a register at each sub-stage that result in increasing the latency. Moreover, designing a low power pipeline adder with low latency has drawn a lot of attention. In a pipelined architecture that uses Dual Edge Triggered (DET) based registers can help in reducing the latency since they can capture input data at both clock edges. However, for high input activity, a DET flip-flop consumes more power than a Single-Edge Triggered (SET) flip-flop. Moreover, it is required to replace each Flip-Flop (FF) in the processor with Dual Edge Triggered (DET) Flip-Flop which will be a considerable area and power overhead. Therefore, it is desirable to have a switchable DET to SET depending on input activity or load condition to reduce the dynamic power consumption. In this paper, we are proposing a new shift register which imitates DET FF based shift register without the need of special DET FF. The proposed shift register improved the latency in a 4-bit pipelined adder by two-fold. Additionally, the power delay product was reduced by 44.16 %.
Normative Requirements Operationalization with Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Normative non-functional requirements specify constraints that a system must observe in order to avoid violations of social, legal, ethical, empathetic, and cultural norms. As these requirements are typically defined by non-technical system stakeholders with different expertise and priorities (ethicists, lawyers, social scientists, etc.), ensuring their well-formedness and consistency is very challenging. Recent research has tackled this challenge using a domain-specific language to specify normative requirements as rules whose consistency can then be analysed with formal methods. In this paper, we propose a complementary approach that uses Large Language Models to extract semantic relationships between abstract representations of system capabilities. These relations, which are often assumed implicitly by non-technical stakeholders (e.g., based on common sense or domain knowledge), are then used to enrich the automated reasoning techniques for eliciting and analyzing the consistency of normative requirements. We show the effectiveness of our approach to normative requirements elicitation and operationalization through a range of real-world case studies.