OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Empirical Analysis of Limits for Memory Distance in Recurrent Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Common to all different kinds of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) is the intention to model relations between data points through time. When there is no immediate relationship between subsequent data points (like when the data points are generated at random, e.g.), we show that RNNs are still able to remember a few data points back into the sequence by memorizing them by heart using standard backpropagation. However, we also show that for classical RNNs, LSTM and GRU networks the distance of data points between recurrent calls that can be reproduced this way is highly limited (compared to even a loose connection between data points) and subject to various constraints imposed by the type and size of the RNN in question. This implies the existence of a hard limit (way below the information-theoretic one) for the distance between related data points within which RNNs are still able to recognize said relation.
A survey on text generation using generative adversarial networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

This work presents a thorough review concerning recent studies and text generation advancements using Generative Adversarial Networks. The usage of adversarial learning for text generation is promising as it provides alternatives to generate the so-called "natural" language. Nevertheless, adversarial text generation is not a simple task as its foremost architecture, the Generative Adversarial Networks, were designed to cope with continuous information (image) instead of discrete data (text). Thus, most works are based on three possible options, i.e., Gumbel-Softmax differentiation, Reinforcement Learning, and modified training objectives. All alternatives are reviewed in this survey as they present the most recent approaches for generating text using adversarial-based techniques. The selected works were taken from renowned databases, such as Science Direct, IEEEXplore, Springer, Association for Computing Machinery, and arXiv, whereas each selected work has been critically analyzed and assessed to present its objective, methodology, and experimental results.
An AI-Powered VVPAT Counter for Elections in India
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

The Election Commission of India has introduced Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail since 2019. This mechanism has increased voter confidence at the time of casting the votes. However, physical verification of the VVPATs against the party level counts from the EVMs is done only in 5 (randomly selected) machines per constituency. The time required to conduct physical verification becomes a bottleneck in scaling this activity for 100% of machines in all constituencies. We proposed an automated counter powered by image processing and machine learning algorithms to speed up the process and address this issue.
A new weighted ensemble model for phishing detection based on feature selection
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

A phishing attack is a sort of cyber assault in which the attacker sends fake communications to entice a human victim to provide personal information or credentials. Phishing website identification can assist visitors in avoiding becoming victims of these assaults. The phishing problem is increasing day by day, and there is no single solution that can properly mitigate all vulnerabilities, thus many techniques are used. In this paper, We have proposed an ensemble model that combines multiple base models with a voting technique based on the weights. Moreover, we applied feature selection methods and standardization on the dataset effectively and compared the result before and after applying any feature selection.
Chatbots in a Botnet World
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Question-and-answer formats provide a novel experimental platform for investigating cybersecurity questions. Unlike previous chatbots, the latest ChatGPT model from OpenAI supports an advanced understanding of complex coding questions. The research demonstrates thirteen coding tasks that generally qualify as stages in the MITRE ATT&CK framework, ranging from credential access to defense evasion. With varying success, the experimental prompts generate examples of keyloggers, logic bombs, obfuscated worms, and payment-fulfilled ransomware. The empirical results illustrate cases that support the broad gain of functionality, including self-replication and self-modification, evasion, and strategic understanding of complex cybersecurity goals. One surprising feature of ChatGPT as a language-only model centers on its ability to spawn coding approaches that yield images that obfuscate or embed executable programming steps or links.
Quantum Annealing Learning Search Implementations
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2022
Year: 2022

This paper presents the details and testing of two implementations (in C++ and Python) of the hybrid quantum-classical algorithm Quantum Annealing Learning Search (QALS) on a D-Wave quantum annealer. QALS was proposed in 2019 as a novel technique to solve general QUBO problems that cannot be directly represented into the hardware architecture of a D-Wave machine. Repeated calls to the quantum machine within a classical iterative structure and a related convergence proof originate a learning mechanism to find an encoding of a given problem into the quantum architecture. The present work considers the Number Partitioning Problem (NPP) and the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) for the testing of QALS. The results turn out to be quite unexpected, with QALS not being able to perform as well as the other considered methods, especially in NPP, where classical methods outperform quantum annealing in general. Nevertheless, looking at the TSP tests, QALS has fulfilled its primary goal, i.e., processing QUBO problems not directly mappable to the QPU topology.
Generating music with sentiment using Transformer-GANs
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

The field of Automatic Music Generation has seen significant progress thanks to the advent of Deep Learning. However, most of these results have been produced by unconditional models, which lack the ability to interact with their users, not allowing them to guide the generative process in meaningful and practical ways. Moreover, synthesizing music that remains coherent across longer timescales while still capturing the local aspects that make it sound ``realistic'' or ``human-like'' is still challenging. This is due to the large computational requirements needed to work with long sequences of data, and also to limitations imposed by the training schemes that are often employed. In this paper, we propose a generative model of symbolic music conditioned by data retrieved from human sentiment. The model is a Transformer-GAN trained with labels that correspond to different configurations of the valence and arousal dimensions that quantitatively represent human affective states. We try to tackle both of the problems above by employing an efficient linear version of Attention and using a Discriminator both as a tool to improve the overall quality of the generated music and its ability to follow the conditioning signals.
Python client for Isabelle server
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2022
Year: 2022

We contribute a Python client for the Isabelle server, which gives researchers and students using Python as their primary programming language an opportunity to communicate with the Isabelle server through TCP directly from a Python script. Such an approach helps avoid the complexities of integrating the existing Python script with languages used for Isabelle development (ML and Scala). We also describe new features that appeared since the announcement of the first version of the client a year ago. Finally, we give examples of the client's applications in research and education and discuss known limitations and possible directions for future development.
Universal versus system-specific features of punctuation usage patterns in~major Western~languages
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

The celebrated proverb that "speech is silver, silence is golden" has a long multinational history and multiple specific meanings. In written texts punctuation can in fact be considered one of its manifestations. Indeed, the virtue of effectively speaking and writing involves - often decisively - the capacity to apply the properly placed breaks. In the present study, based on a large corpus of world-famous and representative literary texts in seven major Western languages, it is shown that the distribution of intervals between consecutive punctuation marks in almost all texts can universally be characterised by only two parameters of the discrete Weibull distribution which can be given an intuitive interpretation in terms of the so-called hazard function. The values of these two parameters tend to be language-specific, however, and even appear to navigate translations. The properties of the computed hazard functions indicate that among the studied languages, English turns out to be the least constrained by the necessity to place a consecutive punctuation mark to partition a sequence of words. This may suggest that when compared to other studied languages, English is more flexible, in the sense of allowing longer uninterrupted sequences of words. Spanish reveals similar tendency to only a bit lesser extent.
Free-Rider Games for Federated Learning with Selfish Clients in NextG Wireless Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2022
Year: 2022

This paper presents a game theoretic framework for participation and free-riding in federated learning (FL), and determines the Nash equilibrium strategies when FL is executed over wireless links. To support spectrum sensing for NextG communications, FL is used by clients, namely spectrum sensors with limited training datasets and computation resources, to train a wireless signal classifier while preserving privacy. In FL, a client may be free-riding, i.e., it does not participate in FL model updates, if the computation and transmission cost for FL participation is high, and receives the global model (learned by other clients) without incurring a cost. However, the free-riding behavior may potentially decrease the global accuracy due to lack of contribution to global model learning. This tradeoff leads to a non-cooperative game where each client aims to individually maximize its utility as the difference between the global model accuracy and the cost of FL participation. The Nash equilibrium strategies are derived for free-riding probabilities such that no client can unilaterally increase its utility given the strategies of its opponents remain the same. The free-riding probability increases with the FL participation cost and the number of clients, and a significant optimality gap exists in Nash equilibrium with respect to the joint optimization for all clients. The optimality gap increases with the number of clients and the maximum gap is evaluated as a function of the cost. These results quantify the impact of free-riding on the resilience of FL in NextG networks and indicate operational modes for FL participation.
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Trajectory Path Planning and Distributed Inference in Resource-Constrained UAV Swarms
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

The deployment flexibility and maneuverability of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) increased their adoption in various applications, such as wildfire tracking, border monitoring, etc. In many critical applications, UAVs capture images and other sensory data and then send the captured data to remote servers for inference and data processing tasks. However, this approach is not always practical in real-time applications due to the connection instability, limited bandwidth, and end-to-end latency. One promising solution is to divide the inference requests into multiple parts (layers or segments), with each part being executed in a different UAV based on the available resources. Furthermore, some applications require the UAVs to traverse certain areas and capture incidents; thus, planning their paths becomes critical particularly, to reduce the latency of making the collaborative inference process. Specifically, planning the UAVs trajectory can reduce the data transmission latency by communicating with devices in the same proximity while mitigating the transmission interference. This work aims to design a model for distributed collaborative inference requests and path planning in a UAV swarm while respecting the resource constraints due to the computational load and memory usage of the inference requests. The model is formulated as an optimization problem and aims to minimize latency. The formulated problem is NP-hard so finding the optimal solution is quite complex; thus, this paper introduces a real-time and dynamic solution for online applications using deep reinforcement learning. We conduct extensive simulations and compare our results to the-state-of-the-art studies demonstrating that our model outperforms the competing models.
On Safe and Usable Chatbots for Promoting Voter Participation
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

Chatbots, or bots for short, are multi-modal collaborative assistants that can help people complete useful tasks. Usually, when chatbots are referenced in connection with elections, they often draw negative reactions due to the fear of mis-information and hacking. Instead, in this paper, we explore how chatbots may be used to promote voter participation in vulnerable segments of society like senior citizens and first-time voters. In particular, we build a system that amplifies official information while personalizing it to users' unique needs transparently. We discuss its design, build prototypes with frequently asked questions (FAQ) election information for two US states that are low on an ease-of-voting scale, and report on its initial evaluation in a focus group. Our approach can be a win-win for voters, election agencies trying to fulfill their mandate and democracy at large.
Audio Denoising for Robust Audio Fingerprinting
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

Music discovery services let users identify songs from short mobile recordings. These solutions are often based on Audio Fingerprinting, and rely more specifically on the extraction of spectral peaks in order to be robust to a number of distortions. Few works have been done to study the robustness of these algorithms to background noise captured in real environments. In particular, AFP systems still struggle when the signal to noise ratio is low, i.e when the background noise is strong. In this project, we tackle this problematic with Deep Learning. We test a new hybrid strategy which consists of inserting a denoising DL model in front of a peak-based AFP algorithm. We simulate noisy music recordings using a realistic data augmentation pipeline, and train a DL model to denoise them. The denoising model limits the impact of background noise on the AFP system's extracted peaks, improving its robustness to noise. We further propose a novel loss function to adapt the DL model to the considered AFP system, increasing its precision in terms of retrieved spectral peaks. To the best of our knowledge, this hybrid strategy has not been tested before.
What do LLMs Know about Financial Markets? A Case Study on Reddit Market Sentiment Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Market sentiment analysis on social media content requires knowledge of both financial markets and social media jargon, which makes it a challenging task for human raters. The resulting lack of high-quality labeled data stands in the way of conventional supervised learning methods. Instead, we approach this problem using semi-supervised learning with a large language model (LLM). Our pipeline generates weak financial sentiment labels for Reddit posts with an LLM and then uses that data to train a small model that can be served in production. We find that prompting the LLM to produce Chain-of-Thought summaries and forcing it through several reasoning paths helps generate more stable and accurate labels, while using a regression loss further improves distillation quality. With only a handful of prompts, the final model performs on par with existing supervised models. Though production applications of our model are limited by ethical considerations, the model's competitive performance points to the great potential of using LLMs for tasks that otherwise require skill-intensive annotation.
Design Considerations of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for Aerial Filming
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Filming sport videos from an aerial view has always been a hard and an expensive task to achieve, especially in sports that require a wide open area for its normal development or the ones that put in danger human safety. Recently, a new solution arose for aerial filming based on the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), which is substantially cheaper than traditional aerial filming solutions that require conventional aircrafts like helicopters or complex structures for wide mobility. In this paper, we describe the design process followed for building a customized UAV suitable for sports aerial filming. The process includes the requirements definition, technical sizing and selection of mechanical, hardware and software technologies, as well as the whole integration and operation settings. One of the goals is to develop technologies allowing to build low cost UAVs and to manage them for a wide range of usage scenarios while achieving high levels of flexibility and automation. This work also shows some technical issues found during the development of the UAV as well as the solutions implemented.
Adaptive and Dynamic Multi-Resolution Hashing for Pairwise Summations
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we propose Adam-Hash: an adaptive and dynamic multi-resolution hashing data-structure for fast pairwise summation estimation. Given a data-set $X \subset \mathbb{R}^d$, a binary function $f:\mathbb{R}^d\times \mathbb{R}^d\to \mathbb{R}$, and a point $y \in \mathbb{R}^d$, the Pairwise Summation Estimate $\mathrm{PSE}_X(y) := \frac{1}{|X|} \sum_{x \in X} f(x,y)$. For any given data-set $X$, we need to design a data-structure such that given any query point $y \in \mathbb{R}^d$, the data-structure approximately estimates $\mathrm{PSE}_X(y)$ in time that is sub-linear in $|X|$. Prior works on this problem have focused exclusively on the case where the data-set is static, and the queries are independent. In this paper, we design a hashing-based PSE data-structure which works for the more practical \textit{dynamic} setting in which insertions, deletions, and replacements of points are allowed. Moreover, our proposed Adam-Hash is also robust to adaptive PSE queries, where an adversary can choose query $q_j \in \mathbb{R}^d$ depending on the output from previous queries $q_1, q_2, \dots, q_{j-1}$.
Offline Clustering Approach to Self-supervised Learning for Class-imbalanced Image Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Class-imbalanced datasets are known to cause the problem of model being biased towards the majority classes. In this project, we set up two research questions: 1) when is the class-imbalance problem more prevalent in self-supervised pre-training? and 2) can offline clustering of feature representations help pre-training on class-imbalanced data? Our experiments investigate the former question by adjusting the degree of {\it class-imbalance} when training the baseline models, namely SimCLR and SimSiam on CIFAR-10 database. To answer the latter question, we train each expert model on each subset of the feature clusters. We then distill the knowledge of expert models into a single model, so that we will be able to compare the performance of this model to our baselines.
Detecting Network Security Vulnerabilities and Proactive Strategies to Mitigate Potential Threats
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

In multi-tier network systems, custom applications, Web services and platform environments, storing data and information assets becomes a challenge for any organisation. Although there are different methods to secure network systems, the best way to test the level of security is to conduct penetration testing. In this paper, we describe how we performed live penetration testing for a particular network, namely, 192.168.3.0/24 (Case Study) by identifying the system vulnerabilities to enable its penetration. After compromising the system, critical data (Flags) must be found, indicating our successful penetration. As professional penetration testers, we used an arsenal of penetration testing tools utilised by malicious actors on the internet, such as Nmap, Nessus, Sparta and Metasploit, etc. Typically, much effort was employed on reconnaissance & scanning phases, rather than system exploration, due to their importance in identifying security vulnerabilities in the system environment. The vulnerability analysis highlighted the most critical threats, which token is an advantage to gain access, namely, FTP services, HTTP, and human errors. However, comprising the system is not sufficient because the critical data (Flag) generally requires the administrators rights. Consequently, teams often examine the system to find a way to escalate privilege to the root level. Furthermore, some critical data (Flags) require decryption algorithms or the analysis of captured packets to make them readable. We found eight Flags and identified a system security breach. Mitigation strategies addressing the identified vulnerabilities are recommended to ensure the given networks are secured against future attacks.
Multi-queue Momentum Contrast for Microvideo-Product Retrieval
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

The booming development and huge market of micro-videos bring new e-commerce channels for merchants. Currently, more micro-video publishers prefer to embed relevant ads into their micro-videos, which not only provides them with business income but helps the audiences to discover their interesting products. However, due to the micro-video recording by unprofessional equipment, involving various topics and including multiple modalities, it is challenging to locate the products related to micro-videos efficiently, appropriately, and accurately. We formulate the microvideo-product retrieval task, which is the first attempt to explore the retrieval between the multi-modal and multi-modal instances. A novel approach named Multi-Queue Momentum Contrast (MQMC) network is proposed for bidirectional retrieval, consisting of the uni-modal feature and multi-modal instance representation learning. Moreover, a discriminative selection strategy with a multi-queue is used to distinguish the importance of different negatives based on their categories. We collect two large-scale microvideo-product datasets (MVS and MVS-large) for evaluation and manually construct the hierarchical category ontology, which covers sundry products in daily life. Extensive experiments show that MQMC outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines. Our replication package (including code, dataset, etc.) is publicly available at https://github.com/duyali2000/MQMC.