OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A TETRA-based System for Remote-Health Monitoring of First Responders: Peak AoI Assessment in Direct and Trunked Mode
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we study peak age of information (PAoI) performance of a novel IoT solution for remote health-monitoring of first responders over TErrestrial Trunked RAdio (TETRA) links. The solution features a set of sensors embedded in a smart garment that periodically record and send physiological parameters of first responders to a remote agent. The received data is analyzed by the remote agent, which feeds back notifications and warnings to the first responders in the form of electrotactile stimuli. The communication in the system is performed over the TETRA Short Data Service (SDS), which is the default option for the development of third-party applications and which has rather limited capabilities. The choice of the PAoI as the parameter of interest is motivated by its suitable to measure data freshness in IoT applications with periodic monitoring. We derive closed-form expressions of PAoI for different packet-management schemes allowed by the TETRA standard, and verify the analytical results through extensive simulations under varying message generation rates. Our results provide important insights on the expected PAoI performance, which can be used for the system design guidelines. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that analyzes AoI performance of TETRA networks.
A Multi-solution Study on GDPR AI-enabled Completeness Checking of DPAs
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Specifying legal requirements for software systems to ensure their compliance with the applicable regulations is a major concern to requirements engineering (RE). Personal data which is collected by an organization is often shared with other organizations to perform certain processing activities. In such cases, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires issuing a data processing agreement (DPA) which regulates the processing and further ensures that personal data remains protected. Violating GDPR can lead to huge fines reaching to billions of Euros. Software systems involving personal data processing must adhere to the legal obligations stipulated in GDPR and outlined in DPAs. Requirements engineers can elicit from DPAs legal requirements for regulating the data processing activities in software systems. Checking the completeness of a DPA according to the GDPR provisions is therefore an essential prerequisite to ensure that the elicited requirements are complete. Analyzing DPAs entirely manually is time consuming and requires adequate legal expertise. In this paper, we propose an automation strategy to address the completeness checking of DPAs against GDPR. Specifically, we pursue ten alternative solutions which are enabled by different technologies, namely traditional machine learning, deep learning, language modeling, and few-shot learning. The goal of our work is to empirically examine how these different technologies fare in the legal domain. We computed F2 score on a set of 30 real DPAs. Our evaluation shows that best-performing solutions yield F2 score of 86.7% and 89.7% are based on pre-trained BERT and RoBERTa language models. Our analysis further shows that other alternative solutions based on deep learning (e.g., BiLSTM) and few-shot learning (e.g., SetFit) can achieve comparable accuracy, yet are more efficient to develop.
Can Physics Informed Neural Operators Self Improve?
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Self-training techniques have shown remarkable value across many deep learning models and tasks. However, such techniques remain largely unexplored when considered in the context of learning fast solvers for systems of partial differential equations (Eg: Neural Operators). In this work, we explore the use of self-training for Fourier Neural Operators (FNO). Neural Operators emerged as a data driven technique, however, data from experiments or traditional solvers is not always readily available. Physics Informed Neural Operators (PINO) overcome this constraint by utilizing a physics loss for the training, however the accuracy of PINO trained without data does not match the performance obtained by training with data. In this work we show that self-training can be used to close this gap in performance. We examine canonical examples, namely the 1D-Burgers and 2D-Darcy PDEs, to showcase the efficacy of self-training. Specifically, FNOs, when trained exclusively with physics loss through self-training, approach 1.07x for Burgers and 1.02x for Darcy, compared to FNOs trained with both data and physics loss. Furthermore, we discover that pseudo-labels can be used for self-training without necessarily training to convergence in each iteration. A consequence of this is that we are able to discover self-training schedules that improve upon the baseline performance of PINO in terms of accuracy as well as time.
Optimal Power Flow in Highly Renewable Power System Based on Attention Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The Optimal Power Flow (OPF) problem is pivotal for power system operations, guiding generator output and power distribution to meet demand at minimized costs, while adhering to physical and engineering constraints. The integration of renewable energy sources, like wind and solar, however, poses challenges due to their inherent variability. This variability, driven largely by changing weather conditions, demands frequent recalibrations of power settings, thus necessitating recurrent OPF resolutions. This task is daunting using traditional numerical methods, particularly for extensive power systems. In this work, we present a cutting-edge, physics-informed machine learning methodology, trained using imitation learning and historical European weather datasets. Our approach directly correlates electricity demand and weather patterns with power dispatch and generation, circumventing the iterative requirements of traditional OPF solvers. This offers a more expedient solution apt for real-time applications. Rigorous evaluations on aggregated European power systems validate our method's superiority over existing data-driven techniques in OPF solving. By presenting a quick, robust, and efficient solution, this research sets a new standard in real-time OPF resolution, paving the way for more resilient power systems in the era of renewable energy.
Facilitating Human-Robot Collaboration through Natural Vocal Conversations
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

In the rapidly evolving landscape of human-robot collaboration, effective communication between humans and robots is crucial for complex task execution. Traditional request-response systems often lack naturalness and may hinder efficiency. In this study, we propose a novel approach that employs human-like conversational interactions for vocal communication between human operators and robots. The framework emphasizes the establishment of a natural and interactive dialogue, enabling human operators to engage in vocal conversations with robots. Through a comparative experiment, we demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in enhancing task performance and collaboration efficiency. The robot's ability to engage in meaningful vocal conversations enables it to seek clarification, provide status updates, and ask for assistance when required, leading to improved coordination and a smoother workflow. The results indicate that the adoption of human-like conversational interactions positively influences the human-robot collaborative dynamic. Human operators find it easier to convey complex instructions and preferences, fostering a more productive and satisfying collaboration experience.
Coevolution of Neural Architectures and Features for Stock Market Forecasting: A Multi-objective Decision Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2023
Year: 2023

In a multi objective setting, a portfolio manager's highly consequential decisions can benefit from assessing alternative forecasting models of stock index movement. The present investigation proposes a new approach to identify a set of nondominated neural network models for further selection by the decision maker. A new coevolution approach is proposed to simultaneously select the features and topology of neural networks (collectively referred to as neural architecture), where the features are viewed from a topological perspective as input neurons. Further, the coevolution is posed as a multicriteria problem to evolve sparse and efficacious neural architectures. The well known dominance and decomposition based multiobjective evolutionary algorithms are augmented with a nongeometric crossover operator to diversify and balance the search for neural architectures across conflicting criteria. Moreover, the coevolution is augmented to accommodate the data based implications of distinct market behaviors prior to and during the ongoing COVID 19 pandemic. A detailed comparative evaluation is carried out with the conventional sequential approach of feature selection followed by neural topology design, as well as a scalarized coevolution approach. The results on the NASDAQ index in pre and peri COVID time windows convincingly demonstrate that the proposed coevolution approach can evolve a set of nondominated neural forecasting models with better generalization capabilities.
Learning Saliency From Fixations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

We present a novel approach for saliency prediction in images, leveraging parallel decoding in transformers to learn saliency solely from fixation maps. Models typically rely on continuous saliency maps, to overcome the difficulty of optimizing for the discrete fixation map. We attempt to replicate the experimental setup that generates saliency datasets. Our approach treats saliency prediction as a direct set prediction problem, via a global loss that enforces unique fixations prediction through bipartite matching and a transformer encoder-decoder architecture. By utilizing a fixed set of learned fixation queries, the cross-attention reasons over the image features to directly output the fixation points, distinguishing it from other modern saliency predictors. Our approach, named Saliency TRansformer (SalTR), achieves metric scores on par with state-of-the-art approaches on the Salicon and MIT300 benchmarks.
PortfolioMentor: Multimodal Generative AI Companion for Learning and Crafting Interactive Digital Art Portfolios
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Digital art portfolios serve as impactful mediums for artists to convey their visions, weaving together visuals, audio, interactions, and narratives. However, without technical backgrounds, design students often find it challenging to translate creative ideas into tangible codes and designs, given the lack of tailored resources for the non-technical, academic support in art schools, and a comprehensive guiding tool throughout the mentally demanding process. Recognizing the role of companionship in code learning and leveraging generative AI models' capabilities in supporting creative tasks, we present PortfolioMentor, a coding companion chatbot for IDEs. This tool guides and collaborates with students through proactive suggestions and responsible Q&As for learning, inspiration, and support. In detail, the system starts with the understanding of the task and artist's visions, follows the co-creation of visual illustrations, audio or music suggestions and files, click-scroll effects for interactions, and creative vision conceptualization, and finally synthesizes these facets into a polished interactive digital portfolio.
MINTY: Rule-based Models that Minimize the Need for Imputing Features with Missing Values
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Rule models are often preferred in prediction tasks with tabular inputs as they can be easily interpreted using natural language and provide predictive performance on par with more complex models. However, most rule models' predictions are undefined or ambiguous when some inputs are missing, forcing users to rely on statistical imputation models or heuristics like zero imputation, undermining the interpretability of the models. In this work, we propose fitting concise yet precise rule models that learn to avoid relying on features with missing values and, therefore, limit their reliance on imputation at test time. We develop MINTY, a method that learns rules in the form of disjunctions between variables that act as replacements for each other when one or more is missing. This results in a sparse linear rule model, regularized to have small dependence on features with missing values, that allows a trade-off between goodness of fit, interpretability, and robustness to missing values at test time. We demonstrate the value of MINTY in experiments using synthetic and real-world data sets and find its predictive performance comparable or favorable to baselines, with smaller reliance on features with missing values.
Exactly conservative physics-informed neural networks and deep operator networks for dynamical systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We introduce a method for training exactly conservative physics-informed neural networks and physics-informed deep operator networks for dynamical systems. The method employs a projection-based technique that maps a candidate solution learned by the neural network solver for any given dynamical system possessing at least one first integral onto an invariant manifold. We illustrate that exactly conservative physics-informed neural network solvers and physics-informed deep operator networks for dynamical systems vastly outperform their non-conservative counterparts for several real-world problems from the mathematical sciences.
Machine Learning For An Explainable Cost Prediction of Medical Insurance
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Predictive modeling in healthcare continues to be an active actuarial research topic as more insurance companies aim to maximize the potential of Machine Learning approaches to increase their productivity and efficiency. In this paper, the authors deployed three regression-based ensemble ML models that combine variations of decision trees through Extreme Gradient Boosting, Gradient-boosting Machine, and Random Forest) methods in predicting medical insurance costs. Explainable Artificial Intelligence methods SHapley Additive exPlanations and Individual Conditional Expectation plots were deployed to discover and explain the key determinant factors that influence medical insurance premium prices in the dataset. The dataset used comprised 986 records and is publicly available in the KAGGLE repository. The models were evaluated using four performance evaluation metrics, including R-squared, Mean Absolute Error, Root Mean Squared Error, and Mean Absolute Percentage Error. The results show that all models produced impressive outcomes; however, the XGBoost model achieved a better overall performance although it also expanded more computational resources, while the RF model recorded a lesser prediction error and consumed far fewer computing resources than the XGBoost model. Furthermore, we compared the outcome of both XAi methods in identifying the key determinant features that influenced the PremiumPrices for each model and whereas both XAi methods produced similar outcomes, we found that the ICE plots showed in more detail the interactions between each variable than the SHAP analysis which seemed to be more high-level. It is the aim of the authors that the contributions of this study will help policymakers, insurers, and potential medical insurance buyers in their decision-making process for selecting the right policies that meet their specific needs.
Touch Analysis: An Empirical Evaluation of Machine Learning Classification Algorithms on Touch Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Our research aims at classifying individuals based on their unique interactions on touchscreen-based smartphones. In this research, we use Touch-Analytics datasets, which include 41 subjects and 30 different behavioral features. Furthermore, we derived new features from the raw data to improve the overall authentication performance. Previous research has already been done on the Touch-Analytics datasets with the state-of-the-art classifiers, including Support Vector Machine (SVM) and k-nearest neighbor (kNN), and achieved equal error rates (EERs) between 0% to 4%. Here, we propose a novel Deep Neural Net (DNN) architecture to classify the individuals correctly. The proposed DNN architecture has three dense layers and uses many-to-many mapping techniques. When we combine the new features with the existing ones, SVM and kNN achieved the classification accuracy of 94.7% and 94.6%, respectively. This research explored seven other classifiers and out of them, the decision tree and our proposed DNN classifiers resulted in the highest accuracy of 100%. The others included: Logistic Regression (LR), Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Gaussian Naive Bayes (NB), Neural Network, and VGGNet with the following accuracy scores of 94.7%, 95.9%, 31.9%, 88.8%, and 96.1%, respectively.
Prebunking Design as a Defense Mechanism Against Misinformation Propagation on Social Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2023
Year: 2023

The growing reliance on social media for news consumption necessitates effective countermeasures to mitigate the rapid spread of misinformation. Prebunking, a proactive method that arms users with accurate information before they come across false content, has garnered support from journalism and psychology experts. We formalize the problem of optimal prebunking as optimizing the timing of delivering accurate information, ensuring users encounter it before receiving misinformation while minimizing the disruption to user experience. Utilizing a susceptible-infected epidemiological process to model the propagation of misinformation, we frame optimal prebunking as a policy synthesis problem with safety constraints. We then propose a policy that approximates the optimal solution to a relaxed problem. The experiments show that this policy cuts the user experience cost of repeated information delivery in half, compared to delivering accurate information immediately after identifying a misinformation propagation.
Pseudo-label Correction for Instance-dependent Noise Using Teacher-student Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The high capacity of deep learning models to learn complex patterns poses a significant challenge when confronted with label noise. The inability to differentiate clean and noisy labels ultimately results in poor generalization. We approach this problem by reassigning the label for each image using a new teacher-student based framework termed P-LC (pseudo-label correction). Traditional teacher-student networks are composed of teacher and student classifiers for knowledge distillation. In our novel approach, we reconfigure the teacher network into a triple encoder, leveraging the triplet loss to establish a pseudo-label correction system. As the student generates pseudo labels for a set of given images, the teacher learns to choose between the initially assigned labels and the pseudo labels. Experiments on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and SVHN demonstrate P-LC's superior performance over existing state-of-the-art methods across all noise levels, most notably in high noise. In addition, we introduce a noise level estimation to help assess model performance and inform the need for additional data cleaning procedures.
Distribution Testing with a Confused Collector
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2023
Year: 2023

We are interested in testing properties of distributions with systematically mislabeled samples. Our goal is to make decisions about unknown probability distributions, using a sample that has been collected by a confused collector, such as a machine-learning classifier that has not learned to distinguish all elements of the domain. The confused collector holds an unknown clustering of the domain and an input distribution $μ$, and provides two oracles: a sample oracle which produces a sample from $μ$ that has been labeled according to the clustering; and a label-query oracle which returns the label of a query point $x$ according to the clustering. Our first set of results shows that identity, uniformity, and equivalence of distributions can be tested efficiently, under the earth-mover distance, with remarkably weak conditions on the confused collector, even when the unknown clustering is adversarial. This requires defining a variant of the distribution testing task (inspired by the recent testable learning framework of Rubinfeld & Vasilyan), where the algorithm should test a joint property of the distribution and its clustering. As an example, we get efficient testers when the distribution tester is allowed to reject if it detects that the confused collector clustering is "far" from being a decision tree. The second set of results shows that we can sometimes do significantly better when the clustering is random instead of adversarial. For certain one-dimensional random clusterings, we show that uniformity can be tested under the TV distance using $\widetilde O\left(\frac{\sqrt n}{ρ^{3/2} ε^2}\right)$ samples and zero queries, where $ρ\in (0,1]$ controls the "resolution" of the clustering. We improve this to $O\left(\frac{\sqrt n}{ρε^2}\right)$ when queries are allowed.
Comparative Analysis of Transformers for Modeling Tabular Data: A Casestudy using Industry Scale Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We perform a comparative analysis of transformer-based models designed for modeling tabular data, specifically on an industry-scale dataset. While earlier studies demonstrated promising outcomes on smaller public or synthetic datasets, the effectiveness did not extend to larger industry-scale datasets. The challenges identified include handling high-dimensional data, the necessity for efficient pre-processing of categorical and numerical features, and addressing substantial computational requirements. To overcome the identified challenges, the study conducts an extensive examination of various transformer-based models using both synthetic datasets and the default prediction Kaggle dataset (2022) from American Express. The paper presents crucial insights into optimal data pre-processing, compares pre-training and direct supervised learning methods, discusses strategies for managing categorical and numerical features, and highlights trade-offs between computational resources and performance. Focusing on temporal financial data modeling, the research aims to facilitate the systematic development and deployment of transformer-based models in real-world scenarios, emphasizing scalability.
Highly Detailed and Temporal Consistent Video Stylization via Synchronized Multi-Frame Diffusion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Text-guided video-to-video stylization transforms the visual appearance of a source video to a different appearance guided on textual prompts. Existing text-guided image diffusion models can be extended for stylized video synthesis. However, they struggle to generate videos with both highly detailed appearance and temporal consistency. In this paper, we propose a synchronized multi-frame diffusion framework to maintain both the visual details and the temporal consistency. Frames are denoised in a synchronous fashion, and more importantly, information of different frames is shared since the beginning of the denoising process. Such information sharing ensures that a consensus, in terms of the overall structure and color distribution, among frames can be reached in the early stage of the denoising process before it is too late. The optical flow from the original video serves as the connection, and hence the venue for information sharing, among frames. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in generating high-quality and diverse results in extensive experiments. Our method shows superior qualitative and quantitative results compared to state-of-the-art video editing methods.