OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
FUSED-PAGERANK: Loop-Fusion based Approximate PageRank
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

PageRank is a graph centrality metric that gives the importance of each node in a given graph. The PageRank algorithm provides important insights to understand the behavior of nodes through the connections they form with other nodes. It is an iterative algorithm that ranks the nodes in each iteration until all the node values converge. The PageRank algorithm is implemented using sparse storage format, which results in irregular memory accesses in the code. This key feature inhibits optimizations to improve its performance, and makes optimizing the PageRank algorithm a non-trivial problem. In this work we improve the performance of PageRank algorithm by reducing its irregular memory accesses. In this paper, we propose FUSED-PAGERANK algorithm, a compiler optimization oriented approximate technique that reduces the number of irregular memory accesses in the PageRank algorithm, improving its locality while making the convergence of the algorithm faster with better accuracy in results. In particular, we propose an approximate PageRank algorithm using Loop-Fusion. We believe that ours is the first work that formally applies traditional compiler optimization techniques for irregular memory access in the PageRank algorithm. We have verified our method by performing experiments on a variety of datasets: LAW graphs, SNAP datasets and synthesized datasets. On these benchmarks, we have achieved a maximum speedup (vs. -O3 optimization) of 2.05X, 2.23X, 1.74X with sequential version, and ~4.4X, ~2.61X, ~4.22X with parallel version of FUSED-PAGERANK algorithm in comparison with Edge-centric version of PageRank algorithm.
PiDAn: A Coherence Optimization Approach for Backdoor Attack Detection and Mitigation in Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Backdoor attacks impose a new threat in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), where a backdoor is inserted into the neural network by poisoning the training dataset, misclassifying inputs that contain the adversary trigger. The major challenge for defending against these attacks is that only the attacker knows the secret trigger and the target class. The problem is further exacerbated by the recent introduction of "Hidden Triggers", where the triggers are carefully fused into the input, bypassing detection by human inspection and causing backdoor identification through anomaly detection to fail. To defend against such imperceptible attacks, in this work we systematically analyze how representations, i.e., the set of neuron activations for a given DNN when using the training data as inputs, are affected by backdoor attacks. We propose PiDAn, an algorithm based on coherence optimization purifying the poisoned data. Our analysis shows that representations of poisoned data and authentic data in the target class are still embedded in different linear subspaces, which implies that they show different coherence with some latent spaces. Based on this observation, the proposed PiDAn algorithm learns a sample-wise weight vector to maximize the projected coherence of weighted samples, where we demonstrate that the learned weight vector has a natural "grouping effect" and is distinguishable between authentic data and poisoned data. This enables the systematic detection and mitigation of backdoor attacks. Based on our theoretical analysis and experimental results, we demonstrate the effectiveness of PiDAn in defending against backdoor attacks that use different settings of poisoned samples on GTSRB and ILSVRC2012 datasets. Our PiDAn algorithm can detect more than 90% infected classes and identify 95% poisoned samples.
PreTR: Spatio-Temporal Non-Autoregressive Trajectory Prediction Transformer
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Nowadays, our mobility systems are evolving into the era of intelligent vehicles that aim to improve road safety. Due to their vulnerability, pedestrians are the users who will benefit the most from these developments. However, predicting their trajectory is one of the most challenging concerns. Indeed, accurate prediction requires a good understanding of multi-agent interactions that can be complex. Learning the underlying spatial and temporal patterns caused by these interactions is even more of a competitive and open problem that many researchers are tackling. In this paper, we introduce a model called PRediction Transformer (PReTR) that extracts features from the multi-agent scenes by employing a factorized spatio-temporal attention module. It shows less computational needs than previously studied models with empirically better results. Besides, previous works in motion prediction suffer from the exposure bias problem caused by generating future sequences conditioned on model prediction samples rather than ground-truth samples. In order to go beyond the proposed solutions, we leverage encoder-decoder Transformer networks for parallel decoding a set of learned object queries. This non-autoregressive solution avoids the need for iterative conditioning and arguably decreases training and testing computational time. We evaluate our model on the ETH/UCY datasets, a publicly available benchmark for pedestrian trajectory prediction. Finally, we justify our usage of the parallel decoding technique by showing that the trajectory prediction task can be better solved as a non-autoregressive task.
Assessing Progress of Parkinson s Disease Using Acoustic Analysis of Phonation
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

This paper deals with a complex acoustic analysis of phonation in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) with a special focus on estimation of disease progress that is described by 7 different clinical scales ,e. g. Unified Parkinson's disease rating scale or Beck depression inventory. The analysis is based on parametrization of 5 Czech vowels pronounced by 84 PD patients. Using classification and regression trees we estimated all clinical scores with maximal error lower or equal to 13 %. Best estimation was observed in the case of Mini-mental state examination (MAE = 0.77, estimation error 5.50 %. Finally, we proposed a binary classification based on random forests that is able to identify Parkinson's disease with sensitivity SEN = 92.86 % (SPE = 85.71 %). The parametrization process was based on extraction of 107 speech features quantifying different clinical signs of hypokinetic dysarthria present in PD.
Combining Static and Contextualised Multilingual Embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Static and contextual multilingual embeddings have complementary strengths. Static embeddings, while less expressive than contextual language models, can be more straightforwardly aligned across multiple languages. We combine the strengths of static and contextual models to improve multilingual representations. We extract static embeddings for 40 languages from XLM-R, validate those embeddings with cross-lingual word retrieval, and then align them using VecMap. This results in high-quality, highly multilingual static embeddings. Then we apply a novel continued pre-training approach to XLM-R, leveraging the high quality alignment of our static embeddings to better align the representation space of XLM-R. We show positive results for multiple complex semantic tasks. We release the static embeddings and the continued pre-training code. Unlike most previous work, our continued pre-training approach does not require parallel text.
Behavior-aware Account De-anonymization on Ethereum Interaction Graph
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2022
Year: 2022

Blockchain technology has the characteristics of decentralization, traceability and tamper-proof, which creates a reliable decentralized trust mechanism, further accelerating the development of blockchain finance. However, the anonymization of blockchain hinders market regulation, resulting in increasing illegal activities such as money laundering, gambling and phishing fraud on blockchain financial platforms. Thus, financial security has become a top priority in the blockchain ecosystem, calling for effective market regulation. In this paper, we consider identifying Ethereum accounts from a graph classification perspective, and propose an end-to-end graph neural network framework named Ethident, to characterize the behavior patterns of accounts and further achieve account de-anonymization. Specifically, we first construct an Account Interaction Graph (AIG) using raw Ethereum data. Then we design a hierarchical graph attention encoder named HGATE as the backbone of our framework, which can effectively characterize the node-level account features and subgraph-level behavior patterns. For alleviating account label scarcity, we further introduce contrastive self-supervision mechanism as regularization to jointly train our framework. Comprehensive experiments on Ethereum datasets demonstrate that our framework achieves superior performance in account identification, yielding 1.13% ~ 4.93% relative improvement over previous state-of-the-art. Furthermore, detailed analyses illustrate the effectiveness of Ethident in identifying and understanding the behavior of known participants in Ethereum (e.g. exchanges, miners, etc.), as well as that of the lawbreakers (e.g. phishing scammers, hackers, etc.), which may aid in risk assessment and market regulation.
Analysis of Arbitrary Content on Blockchain-Based Systems using BigQuery
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Blockchain-based systems have gained immense popularity as enablers of independent asset transfers and smart contract functionality. They have also, since as early as the first Bitcoin blocks, been used for storing arbitrary contents such as texts and images. On-chain data storage functionality is useful for a variety of legitimate use cases. It does, however, also pose a systematic risk. If abused, for example by posting illegal contents on a public blockchain, data storage functionality can lead to legal consequences for operators and users that need to store and distribute the blockchain, thereby threatening the operational availability of entire blockchain ecosystems. In this paper, we develop and apply a cloud-based approach for quickly discovering and classifying content on public blockchains. Our method can be adapted to different blockchain systems and offers insights into content-related usage patterns and potential cases of abuse. We apply our method on the two most prominent public blockchain systems - Bitcoin and Ethereum - and discuss our results. To the best of our knowledge, the presented study is the first to systematically analyze non-financial content stored on the Ethereum blockchain and the first to present a side-by-side comparison between different blockchains in terms of the quality and quantity of stored data.
elBERto: Self-supervised Commonsense Learning for Question Answering
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Commonsense question answering requires reasoning about everyday situations and causes and effects implicit in context. Typically, existing approaches first retrieve external evidence and then perform commonsense reasoning using these evidence. In this paper, we propose a Self-supervised Bidirectional Encoder Representation Learning of Commonsense (elBERto) framework, which is compatible with off-the-shelf QA model architectures. The framework comprises five self-supervised tasks to force the model to fully exploit the additional training signals from contexts containing rich commonsense. The tasks include a novel Contrastive Relation Learning task to encourage the model to distinguish between logically contrastive contexts, a new Jigsaw Puzzle task that requires the model to infer logical chains in long contexts, and three classic SSL tasks to maintain pre-trained models language encoding ability. On the representative WIQA, CosmosQA, and ReClor datasets, elBERto outperforms all other methods, including those utilizing explicit graph reasoning and external knowledge retrieval. Moreover, elBERto achieves substantial improvements on out-of-paragraph and no-effect questions where simple lexical similarity comparison does not help, indicating that it successfully learns commonsense and is able to leverage it when given dynamic context.
Multi-similarity based Hyperrelation Network for few-shot segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Few-shot semantic segmentation aims at recognizing the object regions of unseen categories with only a few annotated examples as supervision. The key to few-shot segmentation is to establish a robust semantic relationship between the support and query images and to prevent overfitting. In this paper, we propose an effective Multi-similarity Hyperrelation Network (MSHNet) to tackle the few-shot semantic segmentation problem. In MSHNet, we propose a new Generative Prototype Similarity (GPS), which together with cosine similarity can establish a strong semantic relation between the support and query images. The locally generated prototype similarity based on global feature is logically complementary to the global cosine similarity based on local feature, and the relationship between the query image and the supported image can be expressed more comprehensively by using the two similarities simultaneously. In addition, we propose a Symmetric Merging Block (SMB) in MSHNet to efficiently merge multi-layer, multi-shot and multi-similarity hyperrelational features. MSHNet is built on the basis of similarity rather than specific category features, which can achieve more general unity and effectively reduce overfitting. On two benchmark semantic segmentation datasets Pascal-5i and COCO-20i, MSHNet achieves new state-of-the-art performances on 1-shot and 5-shot semantic segmentation tasks.
Video-based Formative and Summative Assessment of Surgical Tasks using Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

To ensure satisfactory clinical outcomes, surgical skill assessment must be objective, time-efficient, and preferentially automated - none of which is currently achievable. Video-based assessment (VBA) is being deployed in intraoperative and simulation settings to evaluate technical skill execution. However, VBA remains manually- and time-intensive and prone to subjective interpretation and poor inter-rater reliability. Herein, we propose a deep learning (DL) model that can automatically and objectively provide a high-stakes summative assessment of surgical skill execution based on video feeds and low-stakes formative assessment to guide surgical skill acquisition. Formative assessment is generated using heatmaps of visual features that correlate with surgical performance. Hence, the DL model paves the way to the quantitative and reproducible evaluation of surgical tasks from videos with the potential for broad dissemination in surgical training, certification, and credentialing.
Canvas: Isolated and Adaptive Swapping for Multi-Applications on Remote Memory
Venue: arXiv cs.OS 2022
Year: 2022

Remote memory techniques for datacenter applications have recently gained a great deal of popularity. Existing remote memory techniques focus on the efficiency of a single application setting only. However, when multiple applications co-run on a remote-memory system, significant interference could occur, resulting in unexpected slowdowns even if the same amounts of physical resources are granted to each application. This slowdown stems from massive sharing in applications' swap data paths. Canvas is a redesigned swap system that fully isolates swap paths for remote-memory applications. Canvas allows each application to possess its dedicated swap partition, swap cache, prefetcher, and RDMA bandwidth. Swap isolation lays a foundation for adaptive optimization techniques based on each application's own access patterns and needs. We develop three such techniques: (1) adaptive swap entry allocation, (2) semantics-aware prefetching, and (3) two-dimensional RDMA scheduling. A thorough evaluation with a set of widely-deployed applications demonstrates that Canvas minimizes performance variation and dramatically reduces performance degradation.
HiStruct+: Improving Extractive Text Summarization with Hierarchical Structure Information
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Transformer-based language models usually treat texts as linear sequences. However, most texts also have an inherent hierarchical structure, i.e., parts of a text can be identified using their position in this hierarchy. In addition, section titles usually indicate the common topic of their respective sentences. We propose a novel approach to formulate, extract, encode and inject hierarchical structure information explicitly into an extractive summarization model based on a pre-trained, encoder-only Transformer language model (HiStruct+ model), which improves SOTA ROUGEs for extractive summarization on PubMed and arXiv substantially. Using various experimental settings on three datasets (i.e., CNN/DailyMail, PubMed and arXiv), our HiStruct+ model outperforms a strong baseline collectively, which differs from our model only in that the hierarchical structure information is not injected. It is also observed that the more conspicuous hierarchical structure the dataset has, the larger improvements our method gains. The ablation study demonstrates that the hierarchical position information is the main contributor to our model's SOTA performance.
Dim Wihl Gat Tun: The Case for Linguistic Expertise in NLP for Underdocumented Languages
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Recent progress in NLP is driven by pretrained models leveraging massive datasets and has predominantly benefited the world's political and economic superpowers. Technologically underserved languages are left behind because they lack such resources. Hundreds of underserved languages, nevertheless, have available data sources in the form of interlinear glossed text (IGT) from language documentation efforts. IGT remains underutilized in NLP work, perhaps because its annotations are only semi-structured and often language-specific. With this paper, we make the case that IGT data can be leveraged successfully provided that target language expertise is available. We specifically advocate for collaboration with documentary linguists. Our paper provides a roadmap for successful projects utilizing IGT data: (1) It is essential to define which NLP tasks can be accomplished with the given IGT data and how these will benefit the speech community. (2) Great care and target language expertise is required when converting the data into structured formats commonly employed in NLP. (3) Task-specific and user-specific evaluation can help to ascertain that the tools which are created benefit the target language speech community. We illustrate each step through a case study on developing a morphological reinflection system for the Tsimchianic language Gitksan.
MatchFormer: Interleaving Attention in Transformers for Feature Matching
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Local feature matching is a computationally intensive task at the subpixel level. While detector-based methods coupled with feature descriptors struggle in low-texture scenes, CNN-based methods with a sequential extract-to-match pipeline, fail to make use of the matching capacity of the encoder and tend to overburden the decoder for matching. In contrast, we propose a novel hierarchical extract-and-match transformer, termed as MatchFormer. Inside each stage of the hierarchical encoder, we interleave self-attention for feature extraction and cross-attention for feature matching, yielding a human-intuitive extract-and-match scheme. Such a match-aware encoder releases the overloaded decoder and makes the model highly efficient. Further, combining self- and cross-attention on multi-scale features in a hierarchical architecture improves matching robustness, particularly in low-texture indoor scenes or with less outdoor training data. Thanks to such a strategy, MatchFormer is a multi-win solution in efficiency, robustness, and precision. Compared to the previous best method in indoor pose estimation, our lite MatchFormer has only 45% GFLOPs, yet achieves a +1.3% precision gain and a 41% running speed boost. The large MatchFormer reaches state-of-the-art on four different benchmarks, including indoor pose estimation (ScanNet), outdoor pose estimation (MegaDepth), homography estimation and image matching (HPatch), and visual localization (InLoc).
Revisiting the Dunn-Belnap logic
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2022
Year: 2022

In the present work I introduce a semantics based on the cognitive attitudes of acception and rejection entertained by a given society of agents for logics inspired on Dunn and Belnap's First Degree Entailment ($\mathbf{E}$). In contrast to the epistemic situations originally employed by $\mathbf{E}$, the cognitive attitudes do not coincide with truth-values and they seem more suitable to logics that intend to consider the informational content of propositions "said to be true" as well as of propositions "said to be false" as determinant of the notion of logical validity. After analyzing some logics associated to the proposed semantics, we introduce the logic $\mathbf{E}^B$, whose underlying entailment relation -- the $B$-entailment -- is able to express several kinds of reasoning involving the cognitive attitudes of acceptance and rejection. A sound and complete sequent calculus for $\mathbf{E}^B$ is also presented.
HDLock: Exploiting Privileged Encoding to Protect Hyperdimensional Computing Models against IP Stealing
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC) is facing infringement issues due to straightforward computations. This work, for the first time, raises a critical vulnerability of HDC, an attacker can reverse engineer the entire model, only requiring the unindexed hypervector memory. To mitigate this attack, we propose a defense strategy, namely HDLock, which significantly increases the reasoning cost of encoding. Specifically, HDLock adds extra feature hypervector combination and permutation in the encoding module. Compared to the standard HDC model, a two-layer-key HDLock can increase the adversarial reasoning complexity by 10 order of magnitudes without inference accuracy loss, with only 21% latency overhead.
Towards non-independence of modular additions in searching differential trails of ARX ciphers: new automatic methods with application to SPECK and Chaskey
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

ARX-based ciphers, constructed by the modular addition, rotation and XOR operations, have been receiving a lot of attention in the design of lightweight symmetric ciphers. For their differential cryptanalysis, most automatic search methods of differential trails adopt the assumption of independence of modulo additions. However, this assumption does not necessarily hold when the trail includes consecutive modular additions (CMAs). It has already been found that in this case some differential trails searched by automatic methods before are actually impossible, but the study is not in depth yet, for example, few effort has been paid to exploiting the root causes of non-independence between CMAs and accurate calculation of probabilities of the valid trails. In this paper, we devote to solving these two problems. By examing the differential equations of single and consecutive modular additions, we find that the influence of non-independence can be described by relationships between constraints on the intermediate state of two additions. Specifically, constraints of the first addition can make some of its output bits non-uniform, and when they meet the constraints of the second addition, the differential probability of the whole CMA may be different from the value calculated under the independence assumption. As a result, we can build SAT models to verify the validity of a given differential trail of ARX ciphers and #SAT models to calculate the exact probabilities of the differential propagation through CMAs in the trail, promising a more accurate evaluation of probability of the trail. Our automic methods and searching tools are applied to search related-key differential trails of SPECK and Chaskey including CMAs in the key schedule and the round function respectively.