Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Attack on Grid Event Cause Analysis: An Adversarial Machine Learning Approach

With the ever-increasing reliance on data for data-driven applications in power grids, such as event cause analysis, the authenticity of data streams has become crucially important. The data can be prone to adversarial stealthy attacks aiming to manipulate the data such that residual-based bad data detectors cannot detect them, and the perception of system operators or event classifiers changes about the actual event. This paper investigates the impact of adversarial attacks on convolutional neural network-based event cause analysis frameworks. We have successfully verified the ability of adversaries to maliciously misclassify events through stealthy data manipulations. The vulnerability assessment is studied with respect to the number of compromised measurements. Furthermore, a defense mechanism to robustify the performance of the event cause analysis is proposed. The effectiveness of adversarial attacks on changing the output of the framework is studied using the data generated by real-time digital simulator (RTDS) under different scenarios such as type of attacks and level of access to data.
Graph Optimal Transport for Cross-Domain Alignment

Cross-domain alignment between two sets of entities (e.g., objects in an image, words in a sentence) is fundamental to both computer vision and natural language processing. Existing methods mainly focus on designing advanced attention mechanisms to simulate soft alignment, with no training signals to explicitly encourage alignment. The learned attention matrices are also dense and lacks interpretability. We propose Graph Optimal Transport (GOT), a principled framework that germinates from recent advances in Optimal Transport (OT). In GOT, cross-domain alignment is formulated as a graph matching problem, by representing entities into a dynamically-constructed graph. Two types of OT distances are considered: (i) Wasserstein distance (WD) for node (entity) matching; and (ii) Gromov-Wasserstein distance (GWD) for edge (structure) matching. Both WD and GWD can be incorporated into existing neural network models, effectively acting as a dropin regularizer. The inferred transport plan also yields sparse and self-normalized alignment, enhancing the interpretability of the learned model. Experiments show consistent outperformance of GOT over baselines across a wide range of tasks, including image-text retrieval, visual question answering, image captioning, machine translation, and text summarization.
Few-shot Relation Extraction via Bayesian Meta-learning on Task Graphs

This paper studies few-shot relation extraction, which aims at predicting the relation for a pair of entities in a sentence by training with a few labeled examples in each relation. To more effectively generalize to new relations, in this paper we study the relationships between different relations and propose to leverage a global relation graph. We propose a novel Bayesian meta-learning approach to effectively learn the posterior distribution of the prototype vectors of relations, where the initial prior of the prototype vectors is parameterized with a graph neural network on the global relation graph. Moreover, to effectively optimize the posterior distribution of the prototype vectors, we propose to use the stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics, which is related to the MAML algorithm but is able to handle the uncertainty of the prototype vectors. The whole framework can be effectively and efficiently optimized in an end-to-end fashion. Experiments on two benchmark datasets prove the effectiveness of our proposed approach against competitive baselines in both the few-shot and zero-shot settings.
Geography-Aware Task Scheduling for Profit Maximization in Distributed Green Data Centers

Infrastructure in Distributed Green Data Centers (DGDCs) is concurrently shared by multiple different applications to flexibly provide a growing number of services to global users in a cost-effective way. A highly challenging problem is how to maximize the total profit of the DGDC provider in a market where Internet Service Provider (ISP) bandwidth price, availability of green energy, price of power grid, and revenue brought by the execution of tasks all vary with geographical locations. Unlike existing studies, this article proposes a Geography-Aware Task Scheduling (GATS) approach by considering spatial variations in DGDCs to maximize the total profit of the DGDC provider by intelligently scheduling tasks of all applications. In each time slot, the formulated profit maximization problem is solved as a convex optimization one via the interior point method. Trace-driven simulations show that GATS achieves larger total profit and higher throughput than two typical task scheduling approaches.
COVID-19 Public Opinion and Emotion Monitoring System Based on Time Series Thermal New Word Mining

With the spread and development of new epidemics, it is of great reference value to identify the changing trends of epidemics in public emotions. We designed and implemented the COVID-19 public opinion monitoring system based on time series thermal new word mining. A new word structure discovery scheme based on the timing explosion of network topics and a Chinese sentiment analysis method for the COVID-19 public opinion environment are proposed. Establish a “Scrapy-Redis-Bloomfilter” distributed crawler framework to collect data. The system can judge the positive and negative emotions of the reviewer based on the comments, and can also reflect the depth of the seven emotions such as Hopeful, Happy, and Depressed. Finally, we improved the sentiment discriminant model of this system and compared the sentiment discriminant error of COVID-19 related comments with the Jiagu deep learning model. The results show that our model has better generalization ability and smaller discriminant error. We designed a large data visualization screen, which can clearly show the trend of public emotions, the proportion of various emotion categories, keywords, hot topics, etc., and fully and intuitively reflect the development of public opinion.
Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing

This document describes and analyzes a system for secure and privacy-preserving proximity tracing at large scale.This system provides a technological foundation to help slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2 by simplifying and accelerating the process of notifying people who might have been exposed to the virus so that they can take appropriate measures to break its transmission chain. The system aims to minimise privacy and security risks for individuals and communities and guarantee the highest level of data protection.The goal of our proximity tracing system is to determine who has been in close physical proximity to a COVID-19 positive person and thus exposed to the virus, without revealing the contact’s identity or where the contact occurred. To achieve this goal, users run a smartphone app that continually broadcasts an ephemeral, pseudo-random ID representing the user’s phone and also records the pseudo-random IDs observed from smartphones in close proximity. When a patient is diagnosed with COVID-19, she can upload pseudo-random IDs previously broadcast from her phone to a central server. Prior to the upload, all data remains exclusively on the user’s phone.Other users’ apps can use data from the server to locally estimate whether the device’s owner was exposed to the virus through close-range physical proximity to a COVID-19 positive person who has uploaded their data. In case the app detects a high risk, it will inform the user.The system provides the following security and privacy protections:•Ensures data minimization. The central server only observes anonymous identifiers of COVID-19 positive users without any proximity information. Health authorities learn no information except that provided when a user reaches out to them after being notified.•Prevents abuse of data. As the central server receives the minimum amount of information tailored to its requirements, it can neither misuse the collected data for other purposes, nor can it be coerced or subpoenaed to make other data available.•Prevents tracking of users. No entity can track users that have not reported a positive diagnosis.Depending on the implementation chosen, others can only track COVID-19 positive users in a small geographical region limited by their capability to deploy infrastructure that can receive broadcasted Bluetooth beacons.•Graceful dismantling. The system will dismantle itself after the end of the epidemic. COVID-19 positive users will stop uploading their data to the central server, and people will stop using the app. Data on the server and in the apps is removed after 14 days.We are publishing this document to inform the discussion revolving around the design and implementation of proximity tracing systems. This document is accompanied by other documents containing an overview of the data protection compliance of the design, an extensive privacy and security risk evaluation of digital proximity tracing systems, a proposal for interoperability of multiple systems deployed in different geographical regions,and alternatives for developing secure upload authorisation mechanisms.
CoDaRR: Continuous Data Space Randomization against Data-Only Attacks

The widespread deployment of exploit mitigations such as CFI and shadow stacks are making code-reuse attacks increasingly difficult. This has forced adversaries to consider data-only attacks against which the venerable ASLR remains the primary deployed defense.Data-Space Randomization (DSR) techniques raise the bar against data-only attacks by making it harder for adversaries to inject malicious data flows into vulnerable applications. DSR works by masking memory load and store instructions. Masks are chosen (i) to not interfere with intended data flows and (ii) such that masking likely interferes with unintended flows introduced by malicious program inputs.
Joint Turn and Dialogue level User Satisfaction Estimation on Multi-Domain Conversations

Dialogue level quality estimation is vital for optimizing data driven dialogue management. Current automated methods to estimate turn and dialogue level user satisfaction employ hand-crafted features and rely on complex annotation schemes, which reduce the generalizability of the trained models. We propose a novel user satisfaction estimation approach which minimizes an adaptive multi-task loss function in order to jointly predict turn-level Response Quality labels provided by experts and explicit dialogue-level ratings provided by end users. The proposed BiLSTM based deep neural net model automatically weighs each turn’s contribution towards the estimated dialogue-level rating, implicitly encodes temporal dependencies, and removes the need to hand-craft features. On dialogues sampled from 28 Alexa domains, two dialogue systems and three user groups, the joint dialogue-level satisfaction estimation model achieved up to an absolute 27% (0.43 -> 0.70) and 7% (0.63 -> 0.70) improvement in linear correlation performance over baseline deep neural net and benchmark Gradient boosting regression models, respectively.
LEMMA: A Multi-view Dataset for L Earning Multi-agent Multi-task Activities

Understanding and interpreting human actions is a long-standing challenge and a critical indicator of perception in artificial intelligence. However, a few imperative components of daily human activities are largely missed in prior literature, including the goal-directed actions, concurrent multi-tasks, and collaborations among multi-agents. We introduce the LEMMA dataset to provide a single home to address these missing dimensions with meticulously designed settings, wherein the number of tasks and agents varies to highlight different learning objectives. We densely annotate the atomic-actions with human-object interactions to provide ground-truths of the compositionality, scheduling, and assignment of daily activities. We further devise challenging compositional action recognition and action/task anticipation benchmarks with baseline models to measure the capability of compositional action understanding and temporal reasoning. We hope this effort would drive the machine vision community to examine goal-directed human activities and further study the task scheduling and assignment in the real world.
Enhanced Sparse Model for Blind Deblurring

Existing arts have shown promising efforts to deal with the blind deblurring task. However, most of the recent works assume the additive noise involved in the blurring process to be simple-distributed (i.e. Gaussian or Laplacian), while the real-world case is proved to be much more complicated. In this paper, we develop a new term to better fit the complex natural noise. Specifically, we use a combination of a dense function (i.e. $$l_2$$ ) and a newly designed enhanced sparse model termed as $$l_e$$ , which is developed from two sparse models (i.e. $$l_1$$ and $$l_0$$ ), to fulfill the task. Moreover, we further suggest using $$l_e$$ to regularize image gradients. Compared to the widely-adopted $$l_0$$ sparse term, $$l_e$$ can penalize more insignificant image details (Fig. 1). Based on the half-quadratic splitting method, we provide an effective scheme to optimize the overall formulation. Comprehensive evaluations on public datasets and real-world images demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method against state-of-the-art methods in terms of both speed and accuracy.
Semantic Re-tuning with Contrastive Tension

Extracting semantically useful natural language sentence representations from pre-trained deep neural networks such as Transformers remains a challenge. We first demonstrate that pre-training objectives impose a significant task bias onto the final layers of models with a layer-wise survey of the Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) correlations for multiple common Transformer language models. We then propose a new self-supervised method called Contrastive Tension (CT) to counter such biases. CT frames the training objective as a noise-contrastive task between the final layer representations of two independent models, in turn making the final layer representations suitable for feature extraction. Results from multiple common unsupervised and supervised STS tasks indicate that CT outperforms previous State Of The Art (SOTA), and when combining CT with supervised data we improve upon previous SOTA results with large margins.
SEED: Self-supervised Distillation For Visual Representation

This paper is concerned with self-supervised learning for small models. The problem is motivated by our empirical studies that while the widely used contrastive self-supervised learning method has shown great progress on large model training, it does not work well for small models. To address this problem, we propose a new learning paradigm, named SElf-SupErvised Distillation (SEED), where we leverage a larger network (as Teacher) to transfer its representational knowledge into a smaller architecture (as Student) in a self-supervised fashion. Instead of directly learning from unlabeled data, we train a student encoder to mimic the similarity score distribution inferred by a teacher over a set of instances. We show that SEED dramatically boosts the performance of small networks on downstream tasks. Compared with self-supervised baselines, SEED improves the top-1 accuracy from 42.2% to 67.6% on EfficientNet-B0 and from 36.3% to 68.2% on MobileNet-v3-Large on the ImageNet-1k dataset.
Minimizing Energy Cost for Green Data Center by Exploring Heterogeneous Energy Resource

With the deteriorating effects resulting from global warming in many areas, geographically distributed data centers contribute greatly to carbon emissions, because the major energy supply is fossil fuels. Considering this issue, many geographically distributed data centers are attempting to use clean energy as their energy supply, such as fuel cells and renewable energy sources. However, not all workloads can be powered by a single power sources, since different workloads exhibit different characteristics. In this paper, we propose a fine-grained heterogeneous power distribution model with an objective of minimizing the total energy costs and the sum of the energy gap generated by the geographically distributed data centers powered by multiple types of energy resources. In order to achieve these two goals, we design a two-stage online algorithm to leverage the power supply of each energy source. In each time slot, we also consider a chance-constraint problem and use the Bernstein approximation to solve the problem. Finally, simulation results based on real-world traces illustrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve satisfactory performance.
Beyond Weak Perspective for Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation

We consider the task of 3D joints location and orientation prediction from a monocular video with the skinned multi-person linear (SMPL) model. We first infer 2D joints locations with an off-the-shelf pose estimation algorithm. We use the SPIN algorithm and estimate initial predictions of body pose, shape and camera parameters from a deep regression neural network. We then adhere to the SMPLify algorithm which receives those initial parameters, and optimizes them so that inferred 3D joints from the SMPL model would fit the 2D joints locations. This algorithm involves a projection step of 3D joints to the 2D image plane. The conventional approach is to follow weak perspective assumptions which use ad-hoc focal length. Through experimentation on the 3D poses in the wild (3DPW) dataset, we show that using full perspective projection, with the correct camera center and an approximated focal length, provides favorable results. Our algorithm has resulted in a winning entry for the 3DPW Challenge, reaching first place in joints orientation accuracy.
When One Library Door Closes, Another Virtual One Opens: A Team Response to the Remote Library

The University of Central Florida Health Sciences Library is a digital library with 98% of resources being electronic and available online. Though almost all aspects of the library’s operations were impacted by the closing of the physical space during the coronavirus pandemic, being a digital library helped the library team transition quickly to remote reference, programming and instruction services.
An FPGA-Based LSTM Acceleration Engine for Deep Learning Frameworks

Over the past two decades, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks have been used to solve problems that require modeling of long sequence because they can selectively remember certain patterns over a long period, thus outperforming traditional feed-forward neural networks and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) on learning long-term dependencies. However, LSTM is characterized by feedback dependence, which limits the high parallelism of general-purpose processors such as CPU and GPU. Besides, in terms of the energy efficiency of data center applications, the high consumption of GPU and CPU computing cannot be ignored. To deal with the above problems, Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is becoming an ideal alternative. FPGA has the characteristics of low power consumption and low latency, which are helpful for the acceleration and optimization of LSTM and other RNNs. This paper proposes an implementation scheme of the LSTM network acceleration engine based on FPGA and further optimizes the implementation through fixed-point arithmetic, systolic array and lookup table for nonlinear function. On this basis, for easy deployment and application, we integrate the proposed acceleration engine into Caffe, one of the most popular deep learning frameworks. Experimental results show that, compared with CPU and GPU, the FPGA-based acceleration engine can achieve performance improvement of 8.8 and 2.2 times and energy efficiency improvement of 16.9 and 9.6 times, respectively, within Caffe framework.
A Model of Cryptocurrencies

We model cryptocurrencies as utility tokens used by a decentralized digital platform to facilitate transactions between users of certain goods or services. The network effect governing user participation, in conjunction with the nonneutrality of the token price, can cause the token market to break down. We show that token retradeability mitigates this risk of breakdown on younger platforms by harnessing user optimism but worsens this fragility when sentiment trading by speculators crowds out users. Elastic token issuance mitigates this fragility, but strategic attacks by miners exacerbate it because users’ anticipation of future losses depresses the token’s resale value. This paper was accepted by Agostino Capponi, Special Section of Management Science: Blockchains and Crypto Economics.
Dual non-autonomous deep convolutional neural network for image denoising

We present a Dual Non-Autonomous Deep Convolutional Neural Network , namely DNA-Net, and employ it to resolve the image denoising problem . The DNA-Net models the forward and backward processes of network training as two plain ordinary differential equations (ODEs), while the non-autonomous ODEs are employed in both the two processes for efficient feature learning and gradient propagation. The non-autonomy of the forward process is introduced by incorporating the network input to each layer, which allows low-level features to be well sustained in the entire network. The non-autonomy of the backward process is realized by connecting the network output to each layer, facilitating the gradient to be fluently propagated without vanishing. We prove that the forward process of DNA-Net can stably converge to an input dependent equilibrium in the sense of expectation. As a consequence, DNA-Net can be more efficiently trained than the existing deep networks such as the residual network . Experimental results on image denoising demonstrate the leading performance of the proposed DNA-Net.
Breast Tumor Segmentation using U-NET

Cancer stands in second leading cause of death worldwide, an average of one in six deaths is due to cancer. The occurrence of breast cancer is more in women compared to men. Breast cancer signs are of a breast lump, differences in the nipples or breasts form or texture etc. Its therapy based on the cancer stages. Early detection of cancer will reduce the death risk for patients. The paper's target is to detect the breast cancer area. To give accurate treatment for the patients, symptoms should be observed properly, and a prediction automatic system is needed that will classify the tumor into benign or malignant. As a general convolutional neural network its role focuses on the classification of images, where input is an image and output are one label, but in biomedical cases, not only does it enable us to discern whether a disease occurs, but also to locate the region of abnormality. U-Net is devoted to solving this problem. This research work has proposed a UNET based architecture for segmentation of tumor region in histopathological images. The network is depending on a fully convolutional network and its design is updated and expanded to operate with less pictures of training and to create more accurate segmentations. The proposed method gives an overall accuracy of 94.2 with very less dataset.