OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Self-Teaching Machines to Read and Comprehend with Large-Scale Multi-Subject Question-Answering Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

In spite of much recent research in the area, it is still unclear whether subject-area question-answering data is useful for machine reading comprehension (MRC) tasks. In this paper, we investigate this question. We collect a large-scale multi-subject multiple-choice question-answering dataset, ExamQA, and use incomplete and noisy snippets returned by a web search engine as the relevant context for each question-answering instance to convert it into a weakly-labeled MRC instance. We then propose a self-teaching paradigm to better use the generated weakly-labeled MRC instances to improve a target MRC task. Experimental results show that we can obtain +5.1% in accuracy on a multiple-choice MRC dataset, C^3, and +3.8% in exact match on an extractive MRC dataset, CMRC 2018 over state-of-the-art MRC baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of our framework and the usefulness of large-scale subject-area question-answering data for different types of machine reading comprehension tasks.
Computing Limits of Quotients of Multivariate Real Analytic Functions
Venue: arXiv cs.SC 2021
Year: 2021

We present an algorithm for computing limits of quotients of real analytic functions. The algorithm is based on computation of a bound on the Lojasiewicz exponent and requires the denominator to have an isolated zero at the limit point.
Every Bit Counts: Second-Order Analysis of Cooperation in the Multiple-Access Channel
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

The work at hand presents a finite-blocklength analysis of the multiple access channel (MAC) sum-rate under the cooperation facilitator (CF) model. The CF model, in which independent encoders coordinate through an intermediary node, is known to show significant rate benefits, even when the rate of cooperation is limited. We continue this line of study for cooperation rates which are sub-linear in the blocklength $n$. Roughly speaking, our results show that if the facilitator transmits $\log{K}$ bits, there is a sum-rate benefit of order $\sqrt{\log{K}/n}$. This result extends across a wide range of $K$: even a single bit of cooperation is shown to provide a sum-rate benefit of order $1/\sqrt{n}$.
Atlas-aware ConvNetfor Accurate yet Robust Anatomical Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Convolutional networks (ConvNets) have achieved promising accuracy for various anatomical segmentation tasks. Despite the success, these methods can be sensitive to data appearance variations. Considering the large variability of scans caused by artifacts, pathologies, and scanning setups, robust ConvNets are vital for clinical applications, while have not been fully explored. In this paper, we propose to mitigate the challenge by enabling ConvNets' awareness of the underlying anatomical invariances among imaging scans. Specifically, we introduce a fully convolutional Constraint Adoption Module (CAM) that incorporates probabilistic atlas priors as explicit constraints for predictions over a locally connected Conditional Random Field (CFR), which effectively reinforces the anatomical consistency of the labeling outputs. We design the CAM to be flexible for boosting various ConvNet, and compact for co-optimizing with ConvNets for fusion parameters that leads to the optimal performance. We show the advantage of such atlas priors fusion is two-fold with two brain parcellation tasks. First, our models achieve state-of-the-art accuracy among ConvNet-based methods on both datasets, by significantly reducing structural abnormalities of predictions. Second, we can largely boost the robustness of existing ConvNets, proved by: (i) testing on scans with synthetic pathologies, and (ii) training and evaluation on scans of different scanning setups across datasets. Our method is proposing to be easily adopted to existing ConvNets by fine-tuning with CAM plugged in for accuracy and robustness boosts.
Detection of Racial Bias from Physiological Responses
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Despite the evolution of norms and regulations to mitigate the harm from biases, harmful discrimination linked to an individual's unconscious biases persists. Our goal is to better understand and detect the physiological and behavioral indicators of implicit biases. This paper investigates whether we can reliably detect racial bias from physiological responses, including heart rate, conductive skin response, skin temperature, and micro-body movements. We analyzed data from 46 subjects whose physiological data was collected with Empatica E4 wristband while taking an Implicit Association Test (IAT). Our machine learning and statistical analysis show that implicit bias can be predicted from physiological signals with 76.1% accuracy. Our results also show that the EDA signal associated with skin response has the strongest correlation with racial bias and that there are significant differences between the values of EDA features for biased and unbiased participants.
Information Energy Capacity Region for SWIPT Systems over Raylegh-Fading Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we study the fundamental limits of simultaneous information and power transfer over a Rayleigh fading channel, where the channel input is constrained to peak-power constraints that vary in each channel use by taking into account high-power amplifier nonlinearities. In particular, a three-party communication system is considered, where a transmitter aims simultaneously conveying information to an information receiver and delivering energy to an energy harvesting receiver. For the special case of static PP constraints, we study the information-energy capacity region and the associated input distribution under: average-power and PP constraints at the transmitter, an HPA nonlinearity at the transmitter, and nonlinearity of the energy harvesting circuit at the energy receiver. By extending Smith \' mathematical framework, we show that the optimal input distribution under those constraints is discrete with a finite number of mass points. We show that HPA significantly reduces the information energy capacity region. In addition, we derive a closed\-form expression of the capacity achieving distribution for the low PP regime, where there is no trade-off between information and energy transfer. For the case with time-varying PP constraints, we prove that the optimal input distribution has a finite support by using Shannonś coding scheme. Specifically, we numerically study a particular scenario for the time-varying PP constraints, where the PP constraint probabilistically is either zero or equal to a non-zero constant.
wChain: A Fast Fault-Tolerant Blockchain Protocol for Multihop Wireless Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

This paper presents $\mathit{wChain}$, a blockchain protocol specifically designed for multihop wireless networks that deeply integrates wireless communication properties and blockchain technologies under the realistic SINR model. We adopt a hierarchical spanner as the communication backbone to address medium contention and achieve fast data aggregation within $O(\log N\logΓ)$ slots where $N$ is the network size and $Γ$ refers to the ratio of the maximum distance to the minimum distance between any two nodes. Besides, $\mathit{wChain}$ employs data aggregation and reaggregation, and node recovery mechanisms to ensure efficiency, fault tolerance, persistence, and liveness. The worst-case runtime of $\mathit{wChain}$ is upper bounded by $O(f\log N\logΓ)$, where $f=\lfloor \frac{N}{2} \rfloor$ is the upper bound of the number of faulty nodes. To validate our design, we conduct both theoretical analysis and simulation studies, and the results only demonstrate the nice properties of $\mathit{wChain}$, but also point to a vast new space for the exploration of blockchain protocols in wireless networks.
Why is FPGA-GPU Heterogeneity the Best Option for Embedded Deep Neural Networks?
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2021
Year: 2021

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are currently the dominating programmable architecture for Deep Learning (DL) accelerators. The adoption of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) in DL accelerators is however getting momentum. In this paper, we demonstrate that Direct Hardware Mapping (DHM) of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) on an embedded FPGA substantially outperforms a GPU implementation in terms of energy efficiency and execution time. However, DHM is highly resource intensive and cannot fully substitute the GPU when implementing a state-of-the-art CNN. We thus propose a hybrid FPGA-GPU DL acceleration method and demonstrate that heterogeneous acceleration outperforms GPU acceleration even including communication overheads. Experimental results are conducted on a heterogeneous multi-platform setup embedding an Nvidia(R) Jetson TX2 CPU-GPU board and an Intel(R) Cyclone10GX FPGA board. The SqueezeNet, MobileNetv2, and ShuffleNetv2 mobile-oriented CNNs are experimented. We show that heterogeneous FPG-AGPU acceleration outperforms GPU acceleration for classification inference task over MobileNetv2 (12%-30% energy reduction, 4% to 26% latency reduction), SqueezeNet (21%-28% energy reduction, same latency), and ShuffleNetv2 (25% energy reduction, 21% latency reduction).
"Alexa, Can I Program You?": Student Perceptions of Conversational Artificial Intelligence Before and After Programming Alexa
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2021
Year: 2021

Growing up in an artificial intelligence-filled world, with Siri and Amazon Alexa often within arm's - or speech's - reach, could have significant impact on children. Conversational agents could influence how students anthropomorphize computer systems or develop a theory of mind. Previous research has explored how conversational agents are used and perceived by children within and outside of learning contexts. This study investigates how middle and high school students' perceptions of Alexa change through programming their own conversational agents in week-long AI education workshops. Specifically, we investigate the workshops' influence on student perceptions of Alexa's intelligence, friendliness, aliveness, safeness, trustworthiness, human-likeness, and feelings of closeness. We found that students felt Alexa was more intelligent and felt closer to Alexa after the workshops. We also found strong correlations between students' perceptions of Alexa's friendliness and trustworthiness, and safeness and trustworthiness. Finally, we explored how students tended to more frequently use computer science-related diction and ideas after the workshops. Based on our findings, we recommend designers carefully consider personification, transparency, playfulness and utility when designing CAs for learning contexts.
Applications of Federated Learning in Smart Cities: Recent Advances, Taxonomy, and Open Challenges
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Federated learning plays an important role in the process of smart cities. With the development of big data and artificial intelligence, there is a problem of data privacy protection in this process. Federated learning is capable of solving this problem. This paper starts with the current developments of federated learning and its applications in various fields. We conduct a comprehensive investigation. This paper summarize the latest research on the application of federated learning in various fields of smart cities. In-depth understanding of the current development of federated learning from the Internet of Things, transportation, communications, finance, medical and other fields. Before that, we introduce the background, definition and key technologies of federated learning. Further more, we review the key technologies and the latest results. Finally, we discuss the future applications and research directions of federated learning in smart cities.
Multilevel Hypergraph Partitioning with Vertex Weights Revisited
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2021
Year: 2021

The balanced hypergraph partitioning problem (HGP) is to partition the vertex set of a hypergraph into k disjoint blocks of bounded weight, while minimizing an objective function defined on the hyperedges. Whereas real-world applications often use vertex and edge weights to accurately model the underlying problem, the HGP research community commonly works with unweighted instances. In this paper, we argue that, in the presence of vertex weights, current balance constraint definitions either yield infeasible partitioning problems or allow unnecessarily large imbalances and propose a new definition that overcomes these problems. We show that state-of-the-art hypergraph partitioners often struggle considerably with weighted instances and tight balance constraints (even with our new balance definition). Thus, we present a recursive-bipartitioning technique that is able to reliably compute balanced (and hence feasible) solutions. The proposed method balances the partition by pre-assigning a small subset of the heaviest vertices to the two blocks of each bipartition (using an algorithm originally developed for the job scheduling problem) and optimizes the actual partitioning objective on the remaining vertices. We integrate our algorithm into the multilevel hypergraph partitioner KaHyPar and show that our approach is able to compute balanced partitions of high quality on a diverse set of benchmark instances.
Generalized Facial Manipulation Detection with Edge Region Feature Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

This paper presents a generalized and robust face manipulation detection method based on the edge region features appearing in images. Most contemporary face synthesis processes include color awkwardness reduction but damage the natural fingerprint in the edge region. In addition, these color correction processes do not proceed in the non-face background region. We also observe that the synthesis process does not consider the natural properties of the image appearing in the time domain. Considering these observations, we propose a facial forensic framework that utilizes pixel-level color features appearing in the edge region of the whole image. Furthermore, our framework includes a 3D-CNN classification model that interprets the extracted color features spatially and temporally. Unlike other existing studies, we conduct authenticity determination by considering all features extracted from multiple frames within one video. Through extensive experiments, including real-world scenarios to evaluate generalized detection ability, we show that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art facial manipulation detection technologies in terms of accuracy and robustness.
It's always personal: Using Early Exits for Efficient On-Device CNN Personalisation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

On-device machine learning is becoming a reality thanks to the availability of powerful hardware and model compression techniques. Typically, these models are pretrained on large GPU clusters and have enough parameters to generalise across a wide variety of inputs. In this work, we observe that a much smaller, personalised model can be employed to fit a specific scenario, resulting in both higher accuracy and faster execution. Nevertheless, on-device training is extremely challenging, imposing excessive computational and memory requirements even for flagship smartphones. At the same time, on-device data availability might be limited and samples are most frequently unlabelled. To this end, we introduce PersEPhonEE, a framework that attaches early exits on the model and personalises them on-device. These allow the model to progressively bypass a larger part of the computation as more personalised data become available. Moreover, we introduce an efficient on-device algorithm that trains the early exits in a semi-supervised manner at a fraction of the whole network's personalisation time. Results show that PersEPhonEE boosts accuracy by up to 15.9% while dropping the training cost by up to 2.2x and inference latency by 2.2-3.2x on average for the same accuracy, depending on the availability of labels on-device.
Clustering with Penalty for Joint Occurrence of Objects: Computational Aspects
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

The method of Holý, Sokol and Černý (Applied Soft Computing, 2017, Vol. 60, p. 752-762) clusters objects based on their incidence in a large number of given sets. The idea is to minimize the occurrence of multiple objects from the same cluster in the same set. In the current paper, we study computational aspects of the method. First, we prove that the problem of finding the optimal clustering is NP-hard. Second, to numerically find a suitable clustering, we propose to use the genetic algorithm augmented by a renumbering procedure, a fast task-specific local search heuristic and an initial solution based on a simplified model. Third, in a simulation study, we demonstrate that our improvements of the standard genetic algorithm significantly enhance its computational performance.
Predicting the Time Until a Vehicle Changes the Lane Using LSTM-based Recurrent Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

To plan safe and comfortable trajectories for automated vehicles on highways, accurate predictions of traffic situations are needed. So far, a lot of research effort has been spent on detecting lane change maneuvers rather than on estimating the point in time a lane change actually happens. In practice, however, this temporal information might be even more useful. This paper deals with the development of a system that accurately predicts the time to the next lane change of surrounding vehicles on highways using long short-term memory-based recurrent neural networks. An extensive evaluation based on a large real-world data set shows that our approach is able to make reliable predictions, even in the most challenging situations, with a root mean squared error around 0.7 seconds. Already 3.5 seconds prior to lane changes the predictions become highly accurate, showing a median error of less than 0.25 seconds. In summary, this article forms a fundamental step towards downstreamed highly accurate position predictions.
Enabling Lower-Power Charge-Domain Nonvolatile In-Memory Computing with Ferroelectric FETs
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2021
Year: 2021

Compute-in-memory (CiM) is a promising approach to alleviating the memory wall problem for domain-specific applications. Compared to current-domain CiM solutions, charge-domain CiM shows the opportunity for higher energy efficiency and resistance to device variations. However, the area occupation and standby leakage power of existing SRAMbased charge-domain CiM (CD-CiM) are high. This paper proposes the first concept and analysis of CD-CiM using nonvolatile memory (NVM) devices. The design implementation and performance evaluation are based on a proposed 2-transistor-1-capacitor (2T1C) CiM macro using ferroelectric field-effect-transistors (FeFETs), which is free from leakage power and much denser than the SRAM solution. With the supply voltage between 0.45V and 0.90V, operating frequency between 100MHz to 1.0GHz, binary neural network application simulations show over 47%, 60%, and 64% energy consumption reduction from existing SRAM-based CD-CiM, SRAM-based current-domain CiM, and RRAM-based current-domain CiM, respectively. For classifications in MNIST and CIFAR-10 data sets, the proposed FeFETbased CD-CiM achieves an accuracy over 95% and 80%, respectively.
Term Algebras, Canonical Representations and Difference Ring Theory for Symbolic Summation
Venue: arXiv cs.SC 2021
Year: 2021

A general overview of the existing difference ring theory for symbolic summation is given. Special emphasis is put on the user interface: the translation and back translation of the corresponding representations within the term algebra and the formal difference ring setting. In particular, canonical (unique) representations and their refinements in the introduced term algebra are explored by utilizing the available difference ring theory. Based on that, precise input-output specifications of the available tools of the summation package Sigma are provided.
Rank-Consistency Deep Hashing for Scalable Multi-Label Image Search
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

As hashing becomes an increasingly appealing technique for large-scale image retrieval, multi-label hashing is also attracting more attention for the ability to exploit multi-level semantic contents. In this paper, we propose a novel deep hashing method for scalable multi-label image search. Unlike existing approaches with conventional objectives such as contrast and triplet losses, we employ a rank list, rather than pairs or triplets, to provide sufficient global supervision information for all the samples. Specifically, a new rank-consistency objective is applied to align the similarity orders from two spaces, the original space and the hamming space. A powerful loss function is designed to penalize the samples whose semantic similarity and hamming distance are mismatched in two spaces. Besides, a multi-label softmax cross-entropy loss is presented to enhance the discriminative power with a concise formulation of the derivative function. In order to manipulate the neighborhood structure of the samples with different labels, we design a multi-label clustering loss to cluster the hashing vectors of the samples with the same labels by reducing the distances between the samples and their multiple corresponding class centers. The state-of-the-art experimental results achieved on three public multi-label datasets, MIRFLICKR-25K, IAPRTC12 and NUS-WIDE, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
PatternMonitor: a whole pipeline with a much higher level of automation for guessing Android lock pattern based on videos
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Pattern lock is a general technique used to realize identity authentication and access authorization on mobile terminal devices such as Android platform devices, but it is vulnerable to the attack proposed by recent researches that exploit information leaked by users while drawing patterns. However, the existing attacks on pattern lock are environmentally sensitive, and rely heavily on manual work, which constrains the practicability of these attack approaches. To attain a more practical attack, this paper designs the PatternMonitor, a whole pipeline with a much higher level of automation system againsts pattern lock, which extracts the guessed candidate patterns from a video containing pattern drawing: instead of manually cutting the target video and setting thresholds, it first employs recognition models to locate the target phone and keypoints of pattern drawing hand, which enables the gesture can be recognized even when the fingertips are shaded. Then, we extract the frames from the video where the drawing starts and ends. These pre-processed frames are inputs of target tracking model to generate trajectories, and further transformed into possible candidate patterns by performing our designed algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first attack system to generate candidate patterns by only relying on hand movement instead of accurate fingertips capture. The experimental results demonstrates that our work is as accurate as previous work, which gives more than 90\% success rate within 20 attempts.
On Skew Convolutional and Trellis Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

Two new classes of skew codes over a finite field $\F$ are proposed, called skew convolutional codes and skew trellis codes. These two classes are defined by, respectively, left or right sub-modules over the skew fields of fractions of skew polynomials over $\F$. The skew convolutional codes can be represented as periodic time-varying ordinary convolutional codes. The skew trellis codes are in general nonlinear over $\F$. Every code from both classes has a code trellis and can be decoded by Viterbi or BCJR algorithms.