OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
DECODE: Data-driven Energy Consumption Prediction leveraging Historical Data and Environmental Factors in Buildings
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Energy prediction in buildings plays a crucial role in effective energy management. Precise predictions are essential for achieving optimal energy consumption and distribution within the grid. This paper introduces a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model designed to forecast building energy consumption using historical energy data, occupancy patterns, and weather conditions. The LSTM model provides accurate short, medium, and long-term energy predictions for residential and commercial buildings compared to existing prediction models. We compare our LSTM model with established prediction methods, including linear regression, decision trees, and random forest. Encouragingly, the proposed LSTM model emerges as the superior performer across all metrics. It demonstrates exceptional prediction accuracy, boasting the highest R2 score of 0.97 and the most favorable mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.007. An additional advantage of our developed model is its capacity to achieve efficient energy consumption forecasts even when trained on a limited dataset. We address concerns about overfitting (variance) and underfitting (bias) through rigorous training and evaluation on real-world data. In summary, our research contributes to energy prediction by offering a robust LSTM model that outperforms alternative methods and operates with remarkable efficiency, generalizability, and reliability.
Fuzz on the Beach: Fuzzing Solana Smart Contracts
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Solana has quickly emerged as a popular platform for building decentralized applications (DApps), such as marketplaces for non-fungible tokens (NFTs). A key reason for its success are Solana's low transaction fees and high performance, which is achieved in part due to its stateless programming model. Although the literature features extensive tooling support for smart contract security, current solutions are largely tailored for the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Unfortunately, the very stateless nature of Solana's execution environment introduces novel attack patterns specific to Solana requiring a rethinking for building vulnerability analysis methods. In this paper, we address this gap and propose FuzzDelSol, the first binary-only coverage-guided fuzzing architecture for Solana smart contracts. FuzzDelSol faithfully models runtime specifics such as smart contract interactions. Moreover, since source code is not available for the large majority of Solana contracts, FuzzDelSol operates on the contract's binary code. Hence, due to the lack of semantic information, we carefully extracted low-level program and state information to develop a diverse set of bug oracles covering all major bug classes in Solana. Our extensive evaluation on 6049 smart contracts shows that FuzzDelSol's bug oracles find bugs with a high precision and recall. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest evaluation of the security landscape on the Solana mainnet.
Exploring Semantic Consistency in Unpaired Image Translation to Generate Data for Surgical Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In surgical computer vision applications, obtaining labeled training data is challenging due to data-privacy concerns and the need for expert annotation. Unpaired image-to-image translation techniques have been explored to automatically generate large annotated datasets by translating synthetic images to the realistic domain. However, preserving the structure and semantic consistency between the input and translated images presents significant challenges, mainly when there is a distributional mismatch in the semantic characteristics of the domains. This study empirically investigates unpaired image translation methods for generating suitable data in surgical applications, explicitly focusing on semantic consistency. We extensively evaluate various state-of-the-art image translation models on two challenging surgical datasets and downstream semantic segmentation tasks. We find that a simple combination of structural-similarity loss and contrastive learning yields the most promising results. Quantitatively, we show that the data generated with this approach yields higher semantic consistency and can be used more effectively as training data.The code is available at https://gitlab.com/nct_tso_public/constructs.
Political Context of the European Vaccine Debate on Twitter
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, fears grew that making vaccination a political (instead of public health) issue may impact the efficacy of this life-saving intervention, spurring the spread of vaccine-hesitant content. In this study, we examine whether there is a relationship between the political interest of social media users and their exposure to vaccine-hesitant content on Twitter. We focus on 17 European countries using a multilingual, longitudinal dataset of tweets spanning the period before COVID, up to the vaccine roll-out. We find that, in most countries, users' endorsement of vaccine-hesitant content is the highest in the early months of the pandemic, around the time of greatest scientific uncertainty. Further, users who follow politicians from right-wing parties, and those associated with authoritarian or anti-EU stances are more likely to endorse vaccine-hesitant content, whereas those following left-wing politicians, more pro-EU or liberal parties, are less likely. Somewhat surprisingly, politicians did not play an outsized role in the vaccine debates of their countries, receiving a similar number of retweets as other similarly popular users. This systematic, multi-country, longitudinal investigation of the connection of politics with vaccine hesitancy has important implications for public health policy and communication.
Cross-domain Sound Recognition for Efficient Underwater Data Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents a novel deep learning approach for analyzing massive underwater acoustic data by leveraging a model trained on a broad spectrum of non-underwater (aerial) sounds. Recognizing the challenge in labeling vast amounts of underwater data, we propose a two-fold methodology to accelerate this labor-intensive procedure. The first part of our approach involves PCA and UMAP visualization of the underwater data using the feature vectors of an aerial sound recognition model. This enables us to cluster the data in a two dimensional space and listen to points within these clusters to understand their defining characteristics. This innovative method simplifies the process of selecting candidate labels for further training. In the second part, we train a neural network model using both the selected underwater data and the non-underwater dataset. We conducted a quantitative analysis to measure the precision, recall, and F1 score of our model for recognizing airgun sounds, a common type of underwater sound. The F1 score achieved by our model exceeded 84.3%, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach in analyzing underwater acoustic data. The methodology presented in this paper holds significant potential to reduce the amount of labor required in underwater data analysis and opens up new possibilities for further research in the field of cross-domain data analysis.
DTW+S: Shape-based Comparison of Time-series with Ordered Local Trend
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Measuring distance or similarity between time-series data is a fundamental aspect of many applications including classification, clustering, and ensembling/alignment. Existing measures may fail to capture similarities among local trends (shapes) and may even produce misleading results. Our goal is to develop a measure that looks for similar trends occurring around similar times and is easily interpretable for researchers in applied domains. This is particularly useful for applications where time-series have a sequence of meaningful local trends that are ordered, such as in epidemics (a surge to an increase to a peak to a decrease). We propose a novel measure, DTW+S, which creates an interpretable "closeness-preserving" matrix representation of the time-series, where each column represents local trends, and then it applies Dynamic Time Warping to compute distances between these matrices. We present a theoretical analysis that supports the choice of this representation. We demonstrate the utility of DTW+S in several tasks. For the clustering of epidemic curves, we show that DTW+S is the only measure able to produce good clustering compared to the baselines. For ensemble building, we propose a combination of DTW+S and barycenter averaging that results in the best preservation of characteristics of the underlying trajectories. We also demonstrate that our approach results in better classification compared to Dynamic Time Warping for a class of datasets, particularly when local trends rather than scale play a decisive role.
A boundary-aware point clustering approach in Euclidean and embedding spaces for roof plane segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Roof plane segmentation from airborne LiDAR point clouds is an important technology for 3D building model reconstruction. One of the key issues of plane segmentation is how to design powerful features that can exactly distinguish adjacent planar patches. The quality of point feature directly determines the accuracy of roof plane segmentation. Most of existing approaches use handcrafted features to extract roof planes. However, the abilities of these features are relatively low, especially in boundary area. To solve this problem, we propose a boundary-aware point clustering approach in Euclidean and embedding spaces constructed by a multi-task deep network for roof plane segmentation. We design a three-branch network to predict semantic labels, point offsets and extract deep embedding features. In the first branch, we classify the input data as non-roof, boundary and plane points. In the second branch, we predict point offsets for shifting each point toward its respective instance center. In the third branch, we constrain that points of the same plane instance should have the similar embeddings. We aim to ensure that points of the same plane instance are close as much as possible in both Euclidean and embedding spaces. However, although deep network has strong feature representative ability, it is still hard to accurately distinguish points near plane instance boundary. Therefore, we first group plane points into many clusters in the two spaces, and then we assign the rest boundary points to their closest clusters to generate final complete roof planes. In this way, we can effectively reduce the influence of unreliable boundary points. In addition, we prepare a synthetic dataset and two real datasets to train and evaluate our approach. The experiments results show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art approaches.
Using representation balancing to learn conditional-average dose responses from clustered data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Estimating a unit's responses to interventions with an associated dose, the "conditional average dose response" (CADR), is relevant in a variety of domains, from healthcare to business, economics, and beyond. Such a response typically needs to be estimated from observational data, which introduces several challenges. That is why the machine learning (ML) community has proposed several tailored CADR estimators. Yet, the proposal of most of these methods requires strong assumptions on the distribution of data and the assignment of interventions, which go beyond the standard assumptions in causal inference. Whereas previous works have so far focused on smooth shifts in covariate distributions across doses, in this work, we will study estimating CADR from clustered data and where different doses are assigned to different segments of a population. On a novel benchmarking dataset, we show the impacts of clustered data on model performance and propose an estimator, CBRNet, that learns cluster-agnostic and hence dose-agnostic covariate representations through representation balancing for unbiased CADR inference. We run extensive experiments to illustrate the workings of our method and compare it with the state of the art in ML for CADR estimation.
Low-rank Matrix Sensing With Dithered One-Bit Quantization
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

We explore the impact of coarse quantization on low-rank matrix sensing in the extreme scenario of dithered one-bit sampling, where the high-resolution measurements are compared with random time-varying threshold levels. To recover the low-rank matrix of interest from the highly-quantized collected data, we offer an enhanced randomized Kaczmarz algorithm that efficiently solves the emerging highly-overdetermined feasibility problem. Additionally, we provide theoretical guarantees in terms of the convergence and sample size requirements. Our numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.
Cross-Utterance Conditioned VAE for Speech Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

Speech synthesis systems powered by neural networks hold promise for multimedia production, but frequently face issues with producing expressive speech and seamless editing. In response, we present the Cross-Utterance Conditioned Variational Autoencoder speech synthesis (CUC-VAE S2) framework to enhance prosody and ensure natural speech generation. This framework leverages the powerful representational capabilities of pre-trained language models and the re-expression abilities of variational autoencoders (VAEs). The core component of the CUC-VAE S2 framework is the cross-utterance CVAE, which extracts acoustic, speaker, and textual features from surrounding sentences to generate context-sensitive prosodic features, more accurately emulating human prosody generation. We further propose two practical algorithms tailored for distinct speech synthesis applications: CUC-VAE TTS for text-to-speech and CUC-VAE SE for speech editing. The CUC-VAE TTS is a direct application of the framework, designed to generate audio with contextual prosody derived from surrounding texts. On the other hand, the CUC-VAE SE algorithm leverages real mel spectrogram sampling conditioned on contextual information, producing audio that closely mirrors real sound and thereby facilitating flexible speech editing based on text such as deletion, insertion, and replacement. Experimental results on the LibriTTS datasets demonstrate that our proposed models significantly enhance speech synthesis and editing, producing more natural and expressive speech.
Performance Analysis of OTSM under Hardware Impairments and Imperfect CSI
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Orthogonal time sequency multiplexing (OTSM) has been recently proposed as a single-carrier waveform offering similar bit error rate to orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) and outperforms orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) in doubly-spread channels (DSCs); however, with a much lower complexity making it a potential candidate for 6G wireless networks. In this paper, the performance of OTSM is explored by considering the joint effects of multiple hardware impairments (HWIs) such as in-phase and quadrature imbalance (IQI), direct current offset (DCO), phase noise, power amplifier non-linearity, carrier frequency offset, and synchronization timing offset for the first time in the area. First, the discrete-time baseband signal model is obtained in vector form under all mentioned HWIs. Second, the system input-output relations are derived in time, delay-time, and delay-sequency (DS) domains in which the parameters of all mentioned HWIs are incorporated. Third, analytical expressions are derived for the pairwise and average bit error probability under imperfect channel state information (CSI) as a function of the parameters of all mentioned HWIs. Analytical results demonstrate that under all mentioned HWIs, noise stays additive white Gaussian, effective channel matrix is sparse, DCO appears as a DC signal at the receiver interfering with only the zero sequency, and IQI redounds to self-conjugated sequency interference in the DS domain. Simulation results reveal the fact that by considering the joint effects of all mentioned HWIs and imperfect CSI not only OTSM outperforms OFDM by 29% in terms of energy of bit per noise but it performs same as OTFS in high mobility DSCs.
SynthoGestures: A Novel Framework for Synthetic Dynamic Hand Gesture Generation for Driving Scenarios
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Creating a diverse and comprehensive dataset of hand gestures for dynamic human-machine interfaces in the automotive domain can be challenging and time-consuming. To overcome this challenge, we propose using synthetic gesture datasets generated by virtual 3D models. Our framework utilizes Unreal Engine to synthesize realistic hand gestures, offering customization options and reducing the risk of overfitting. Multiple variants, including gesture speed, performance, and hand shape, are generated to improve generalizability. In addition, we simulate different camera locations and types, such as RGB, infrared, and depth cameras, without incurring additional time and cost to obtain these cameras. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed framework, SynthoGestures (https://github.com/amrgomaaelhady/SynthoGestures), improves gesture recognition accuracy and can replace or augment real-hand datasets. By saving time and effort in the creation of the data set, our tool accelerates the development of gesture recognition systems for automotive applications.
A Versatile Graph Learning Approach through LLM-based Agent
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Designing versatile graph learning approaches is important, considering the diverse graphs and tasks existing in real-world applications. Existing methods have attempted to achieve this target through automated machine learning techniques, pre-training and fine-tuning strategies, and large language models. However, these methods are not versatile enough for graph learning, as they work on either limited types of graphs or a single task. In this paper, we propose to explore versatile graph learning approaches with LLM-based agents, and the key insight is customizing the graph learning procedures for diverse graphs and tasks. To achieve this, we develop several LLM-based agents, equipped with diverse profiles, tools, functions and human experience. They collaborate to configure each procedure with task and data-specific settings step by step towards versatile solutions, and the proposed method is dubbed GL-Agent. By evaluating on diverse tasks and graphs, the correct results of the agent and its comparable performance showcase the versatility of the proposed method, especially in complex scenarios.The low resource cost and the potential to use open-source LLMs highlight the efficiency of GL-Agent.
Towards Robust Blockchain Price Oracle: A Study on Human-Centric Node Selection Strategy and Incentive Mechanism
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

As a trusted middleware connecting the blockchain and the real world, the blockchain oracle can obtain trusted real-time price information for financial applications such as payment and settlement, and asset valuation on the blockchain. However, the current oracle schemes face the dilemma of security and service quality in the process of node selection, and the implicit interest relationship in financial applications leads to a significant conflict of interest between the task publisher and the executor, which reduces the participation enthusiasm of both parties and system security. Therefore, this paper proposes an anonymous node selection scheme that anonymously selects nodes with high reputations to participate in tasks to ensure the security and service quality of nodes. Then, this paper also details the interest requirements and behavioral motives of all parties in the payment settlement and asset valuation scenarios. Under the hypothesis of rational man, an incentive mechanism based on the Stackelberg game is proposed. It can achieve equilibrium under the pursuit of the revenue of task publishers and executors, thereby ensuring the revenue of all types of users and improving the enthusiasm for participation. Finally, we verify the security of the proposed scheme through security analysis. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme can reduce the variance of obtaining price data by about 55\% while ensuring security, and meeting the revenue of all parties.
FaNS: a Facet-based Narrative Similarity Metric
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Similar Narrative Retrieval is a crucial task since narratives are essential for explaining and understanding events, and multiple related narratives often help to create a holistic view of the event of interest. To accurately identify semantically similar narratives, this paper proposes a novel narrative similarity metric called Facet-based Narrative Similarity (FaNS), based on the classic 5W1H facets (Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How), which are extracted by leveraging the state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs). Unlike existing similarity metrics that only focus on overall lexical/semantic match, FaNS provides a more granular matching along six different facets independently and then combines them. To evaluate FaNS, we created a comprehensive dataset by collecting narratives from AllSides, a third-party news portal. Experimental results demonstrate that the FaNS metric exhibits a higher correlation (37\% higher) than traditional text similarity metrics that directly measure the lexical/semantic match between narratives, demonstrating its effectiveness in comparing the finer details between a pair of narratives.
Duplicate Question Retrieval and Confirmation Time Prediction in Software Communities
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Community Question Answering (CQA) in different domains is growing at a large scale because of the availability of several platforms and huge shareable information among users. With the rapid growth of such online platforms, a massive amount of archived data makes it difficult for moderators to retrieve possible duplicates for a new question and identify and confirm existing question pairs as duplicates at the right time. This problem is even more critical in CQAs corresponding to large software systems like askubuntu where moderators need to be experts to comprehend something as a duplicate. Note that the prime challenge in such CQA platforms is that the moderators are themselves experts and are therefore usually extremely busy with their time being extraordinarily expensive. To facilitate the task of the moderators, in this work, we have tackled two significant issues for the askubuntu CQA platform: (1) retrieval of duplicate questions given a new question and (2) duplicate question confirmation time prediction. In the first task, we focus on retrieving duplicate questions from a question pool for a particular newly posted question. In the second task, we solve a regression problem to rank a pair of questions that could potentially take a long time to get confirmed as duplicates. For duplicate question retrieval, we propose a Siamese neural network based approach by exploiting both text and network-based features, which outperforms several state-of-the-art baseline techniques. Our method outperforms DupPredictor and DUPE by 5% and 7% respectively. For duplicate confirmation time prediction, we have used both the standard machine learning models and neural network along with the text and graph-based features. We obtain Spearman's rank correlation of 0.20 and 0.213 (statistically significant) for text and graph based features respectively.