Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
A Study of Password Security Factors among Bangladeshi Government Websites

The Government of Bangladesh is aggressively transforming its public service landscape by transforming public services into online services via a number of websites. The motivation is that this would be a catalyst for a transformative change in every aspect of citizen life. Some web services must be protected from any unauthorised usages and passwords remain the most widely used credential mechanism for this purpose. However, if passwords are not adopted properly, they can be a cause for security breach. That is why it is important to study different aspects of password security on different websites. In this paper, we present a study of password security among 36 different Bangladeshi government websites against six carefully chosen password security heuristics. This study is the first of its kind in this domain and offers interesting insights. For example, many websites have not adopted proper security measures with respect to security. There is no password construction guideline adopted by many websites, thus creating a barrier for users to select a strong password. Some of them allow supposedly weak passwords and still do not utilise a secure HTTPS channel to transmit information over the Internet.
On effective $ε$-integrality in orbits of rational maps over function fields and multiplicative dependence

We give effective bounds for the set quasi-integral points in orbits of non-isotrivial rational maps over function fields under some conditions, generalizing previous work of Hsia and Silverman (2011) for orbits over function fields of characteristic zero. We then use this to prove finiteness results for algebraic functions whose orbit under a rational function has multiplicative dependent elements modulo rings of $S$-integers, generalizing recent results over number fields.
Understanding Characteristics of Commodity Serverless Computing  Platforms

Serverless computing becomes the new trending paradigm in cloud computing, allowing developers to focus on the core application logic and rapidly prototype applications. Due to the great prospects of serverless computing, in recent years, most major cloud vendors have rolled out their commodity serverless computing platforms. However, the characteristics of these platforms have not been systematically studied. To fill this knowledge gap, this paper presents a comprehensive study on characterizing mainstream commodity serverless computing platforms (i.e., AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions, and Alibaba Cloud Function Compute). First, we qualitatively analyze these platforms from development, deployment, and runtime aspects to form the taxonomy of characteristics. Additionally, we quantitatively evaluate the actual performance of different serverless computing platforms through our designed benchmark platform. Our benchmark platform has two types of benchmarks, i.e., microbenchmarks and macrobenchmarks. Based on the results of qualitative and quantitative analyses, we derive a series of findings and provide insightful implications for both developers and cloud vendors.
Retracing the Flow of the Stream: Investigating Kodi Streaming Services

Kodi is of one of the world's largest open-source streaming platforms for viewing video content. Easily installed Kodi add-ons facilitate access to online pirated videos and streaming content by facilitating the user to search and view copyrighted videos with a basic level of technical knowledge. In some countries, there have been paid child sexual abuse organizations publishing/streaming child abuse material to an international paying clientele. Open source software used for viewing videos from the Internet, such as Kodi, is being exploited by criminals to conduct their activities. In this paper, we describe a new method to quickly locate Kodi artifacts and gather information for a successful prosecution. We also evaluate our approach on different platforms; Windows, Android and Linux. Our experiments show the file location, artifacts and a history of viewed content including their locations from the Internet. Our approach will serve as a resource to forensic investigators to examine Kodi or similar streaming platforms.
Red Blood Cell Segmentation with Overlapping Cell Separation and Classification on Imbalanced Dataset

Automated red blood cell (RBC) classification on blood smear images helps hematologists to analyze RBC lab results in a reduced time and cost. However, overlapping cells can cause incorrect predicted results, and so they have to be separated into multiple single RBCs before classifying. To classify multiple classes with deep learning, imbalance problems are common in medical imaging because normal samples are always higher than rare disease samples. This paper presents a new method to segment and classify RBCs from blood smear images, specifically to tackle cell overlapping and data imbalance problems. Focusing on overlapping cell separation, our segmentation process first estimates ellipses to represent RBCs. The method detects the concave points and then finds the ellipses using directed ellipse fitting. The accuracy from 20 blood smear images was 0.889. Classification requires balanced training datasets. However, some RBC types are rare. The imbalance ratio of this dataset was 34.538 for 12 RBC classes from 20,875 individual RBC samples. The use of machine learning for RBC classification with an imbalanced dataset is hence more challenging than many other applications. We analyzed techniques to deal with this problem. The best accuracy and F1-score were 0.921 and 0.8679, respectively, using EfficientNet-B1 with augmentation. Experimental results showed that the weight balancing technique with augmentation had the potential to deal with imbalance problems by improving the F1-score on minority classes, while data augmentation significantly improved the overall classification performance.
Cross-Descriptor Visual Localization and Mapping

Visual localization and mapping is the key technology underlying the majority of mixed reality and robotics systems. Most state-of-the-art approaches rely on local features to establish correspondences between images. In this paper, we present three novel scenarios for localization and mapping which require the continuous update of feature representations and the ability to match across different feature types. While localization and mapping is a fundamental computer vision problem, the traditional setup supposes the same local features are used throughout the evolution of a map. Thus, whenever the underlying features are changed, the whole process is repeated from scratch. However, this is typically impossible in practice, because raw images are often not stored and re-building the maps could lead to loss of the attached digital content. To overcome the limitations of current approaches, we present the first principled solution to cross-descriptor localization and mapping. Our data-driven approach is agnostic to the feature descriptor type, has low computational requirements, and scales linearly with the number of description algorithms. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on state-of-the-art benchmarks for a variety of handcrafted and learned features.
GraphPB: Graphical Representations of Prosody Boundary in Speech  Synthesis

This paper introduces a graphical representation approach of prosody boundary (GraphPB) in the task of Chinese speech synthesis, intending to parse the semantic and syntactic relationship of input sequences in a graphical domain for improving the prosody performance. The nodes of the graph embedding are formed by prosodic words, and the edges are formed by the other prosodic boundaries, namely prosodic phrase boundary (PPH) and intonation phrase boundary (IPH). Different Graph Neural Networks (GNN) like Gated Graph Neural Network (GGNN) and Graph Long Short-term Memory (G-LSTM) are utilised as graph encoders to exploit the graphical prosody boundary information. Graph-to-sequence model is proposed and formed by a graph encoder and an attentional decoder. Two techniques are proposed to embed sequential information into the graph-to-sequence text-to-speech model. The experimental results show that this proposed approach can encode the phonetic and prosody rhythm of an utterance. The mean opinion score (MOS) of these GNN models shows comparative results with the state-of-the-art sequence-to-sequence models with better performance in the aspect of prosody. This provides an alternative approach for prosody modelling in end-to-end speech synthesis.
$DA^3$:Dynamic Additive Attention Adaption for Memory-EfficientOn-Device Multi-Domain Learning

Nowadays, one practical limitation of deep neural network (DNN) is its high degree of specialization to a single task or domain (e.g., one visual domain). It motivates researchers to develop algorithms that can adapt DNN model to multiple domains sequentially, while still performing well on the past domains, which is known as multi-domain learning. Almost all conventional methods only focus on improving accuracy with minimal parameter update, while ignoring high computing and memory cost during training, which makes it difficult to deploy multi-domain learning into more and more widely used resource-limited edge devices, like mobile phones, IoT, embedded systems, etc. We observe that large memory used for activation storage is the bottleneck that largely limits the training time and cost on edge devices. To reduce training memory usage, while keeping the domain adaption accuracy performance, we propose Dynamic Additive Attention Adaption ($DA^3$), a novel memory-efficient on-device multi-domain learning method. $DA^3$ learns a novel additive attention adaptor module, while freezing the weights of the pre-trained backbone model for each domain. Differentiating from prior works, such module not only mitigates activation memory buffering for reducing memory usage during training but also serves as a dynamic gating mechanism to reduce the computation cost for fast inference. We validate $DA^3$ on multiple datasets against state-of-the-art methods, which shows great improvement in both accuracy and training time. Moreover, we deployed $DA^3$ into the popular NIVDIA Jetson Nano edge GPU, where the measured experimental results show our proposed $DA^3$ reduces the on-device training memory consumption by 19-37x, and training time by 2x, in comparison to the baseline methods (e.g., standard fine-tuning, Parallel and Series Res. adaptor, and Piggyback).
Siamese Basis Function Networks for Data-efficient Defect Classification in Technical Domains

Training deep learning models in technical domains is often accompanied by the challenge that although the task is clear, insufficient data for training is available. In this work, we propose a novel approach based on the combination of Siamese networks and radial basis function networks to perform data-efficient classification without pretraining by measuring the distance between images in semantic space in a data-efficient manner. We develop the models using three technical datasets, the NEU dataset, the BSD dataset, and the TEX dataset. In addition to the technical domain, we show the general applicability to classical datasets (cifar10 and MNIST) as well. The approach is tested against state-of-the-art models (Resnet50 and Resnet101) by stepwise reduction of the number of samples available for training. The authors show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art models in the low data regime.
Convergence Proof for Actor-Critic Methods Applied to PPO and RUDDER

We prove under commonly used assumptions the convergence of actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithms, which simultaneously learn a policy function, the actor, and a value function, the critic. Both functions can be deep neural networks of arbitrary complexity. Our framework allows showing convergence of the well known Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and of the recently introduced RUDDER. For the convergence proof we employ recently introduced techniques from the two time-scale stochastic approximation theory. Our results are valid for actor-critic methods that use episodic samples and that have a policy that becomes more greedy during learning. Previous convergence proofs assume linear function approximation, cannot treat episodic examples, or do not consider that policies become greedy. The latter is relevant since optimal policies are typically deterministic.
Ontological Smart Contracts in OASIS: Ontology for Agents, Systems, and Integration of Services (Extended Version)

In this contribution we extend an ontology for modelling agents and their interactions, called Ontology for Agents, Systems, and Integration of Services (in short, OASIS), with conditionals and ontological smart contracts (in short, OSCs). OSCs are ontological representations of smart contracts that allow to establish responsibilities and authorizations among agents and set agreements, whereas conditionals allow one to restrict and limit agent interactions, define activation mechanisms that trigger agent actions, and define constraints and contract terms on OSCs. Conditionals and OSCs, as defined in OASIS, are applied to extend with ontological capabilities digital public ledgers such as the blockchain and smart contracts implemented on it. We will also sketch the architecture of a framework based on the OASIS definition of OSCs that exploits the Ethereum platform and the Interplanetary File System.
TAN-NTM: Topic Attention Networks for Neural Topic Modeling

Topic models have been widely used to learn text representations and gain insight into document corpora. To perform topic discovery, most existing neural models either take document bag-of-words (BoW) or sequence of tokens as input followed by variational inference and BoW reconstruction to learn topic-word distribution. However, leveraging topic-word distribution for learning better features during document encoding has not been explored much. To this end, we develop a framework TAN-NTM, which processes document as a sequence of tokens through a LSTM whose contextual outputs are attended in a topic-aware manner. We propose a novel attention mechanism which factors in topic-word distribution to enable the model to attend on relevant words that convey topic related cues. The output of topic attention module is then used to carry out variational inference. We perform extensive ablations and experiments resulting in ~9-15 percentage improvement over score of existing SOTA topic models in NPMI coherence on several benchmark datasets - 20Newsgroups, Yelp Review Polarity and AGNews. Further, we show that our method learns better latent document-topic features compared to existing topic models through improvement on two downstream tasks: document classification and topic guided keyphrase generation.
Facetwise Mesh Refinement for Multi-View Stereo

Mesh refinement is a fundamental step for accurate Multi-View Stereo. It modifies the geometry of an initial manifold mesh to minimize the photometric error induced in a set of camera pairs. This initial mesh is usually the output of volumetric 3D reconstruction based on min-cut over Delaunay Triangulations. Such methods produce a significant amount of non-manifold vertices, therefore they require a vertex split step to explicitly repair them. In this paper, we extend this method to preemptively fix the non-manifold vertices by reasoning directly on the Delaunay Triangulation and avoid most vertex splits. The main contribution of this paper addresses the problem of choosing the camera pairs adopted by the refinement process. We treat the problem as a mesh labeling process, where each label corresponds to a camera pair. Differently from the state-of-the-art methods, which use each camera pair to refine all the visible parts of the mesh, we choose, for each facet, the best pair that enforces both the overall visibility and coverage. The refinement step is applied for each facet using only the camera pair selected. This facetwise refinement helps the process to be applied in the most evenly way possible.
Determinants concerning Legendre symbols

The evaluations of determinants with Legendre symbol entries have close relation with character sums over finite fields. Recently, Sun posed some conjectures on this topic. In this paper, we prove some conjectures of Sun and also study some variants. For example, we show the following result: Let $p=a^2+4b^2$ be a prime with $a,b$ integers and $a\equiv1\pmod4$. Then for the determinant $$S(1,p):={\rm det}\bigg[\left(\frac{i^2+j^2}{p}\right)\bigg]_{1\le i,j\le \frac{p-1}{2}},$$ the number $S(1,p)/a$ is an integral square, which confirms a conjecture posed by Cohen, Sun and Vsemirnov.
Quick and Robust Feature Selection: the Strength of Energy-efficient Sparse Training for Autoencoders

Major complications arise from the recent increase in the amount of high-dimensional data, including high computational costs and memory requirements. Feature selection, which identifies the most relevant and informative attributes of a dataset, has been introduced as a solution to this problem. Most of the existing feature selection methods are computationally inefficient; inefficient algorithms lead to high energy consumption, which is not desirable for devices with limited computational and energy resources. In this paper, a novel and flexible method for unsupervised feature selection is proposed. This method, named QuickSelection, introduces the strength of the neuron in sparse neural networks as a criterion to measure the feature importance. This criterion, blended with sparsely connected denoising autoencoders trained with the sparse evolutionary training procedure, derives the importance of all input features simultaneously. We implement QuickSelection in a purely sparse manner as opposed to the typical approach of using a binary mask over connections to simulate sparsity. It results in a considerable speed increase and memory reduction. When tested on several benchmark datasets, including five low-dimensional and three high-dimensional datasets, the proposed method is able to achieve the best trade-off of classification and clustering accuracy, running time, and maximum memory usage, among widely used approaches for feature selection. Besides, our proposed method requires the least amount of energy among the state-of-the-art autoencoder-based feature selection methods.
MEVA: A Large-Scale Multiview, Multimodal Video Dataset for Activity Detection

We present the Multiview Extended Video with Activities (MEVA) dataset, a new and very-large-scale dataset for human activity recognition. Existing security datasets either focus on activity counts by aggregating public video disseminated due to its content, which typically excludes same-scene background video, or they achieve persistence by observing public areas and thus cannot control for activity content. Our dataset is over 9300 hours of untrimmed, continuous video, scripted to include diverse, simultaneous activities, along with spontaneous background activity. We have annotated 144 hours for 37 activity types, marking bounding boxes of actors and props. Our collection observed approximately 100 actors performing scripted scenarios and spontaneous background activity over a three-week period at an access-controlled venue, collecting in multiple modalities with overlapping and non-overlapping indoor and outdoor viewpoints. The resulting data includes video from 38 RGB and thermal IR cameras, 42 hours of UAV footage, as well as GPS locations for the actors. 122 hours of annotation are sequestered in support of the NIST Activity in Extended Video (ActEV) challenge; the other 22 hours of annotation and the corresponding video are available on our website, along with an additional 306 hours of ground camera data, 4.6 hours of UAV data, and 9.6 hours of GPS logs. Additional derived data includes camera models geo-registering the outdoor cameras and a dense 3D point cloud model of the outdoor scene. The data was collected with IRB oversight and approval and released under a CC-BY-4.0 license.
A Study of Checkpointing in Large Scale Training of Deep Neural Networks

Deep learning (DL) applications are increasingly being deployed on HPC systems, to leverage the massive parallelism and computing power of those systems for DL model training. While significant effort has been put to facilitate distributed training by DL frameworks, fault tolerance has been largely ignored. In this work, we evaluate checkpoint-restart, a common fault tolerance technique in HPC workloads. We perform experiments with three state-of-the-art DL frameworks common in HPC Chainer, PyTorch, and TensorFlow). We evaluate the computational cost of checkpointing, file formats and file sizes, the impact of scale, and deterministic checkpointing. Our evaluation shows some critical differences in checkpoint mechanisms and exposes several bottlenecks in existing checkpointing implementations. We provide discussion points that can aid users in selecting a fault-tolerant framework to use in HPC. We also provide takeaway points that framework developers can use to facilitate better checkpointing of DL workloads in HPC.
Communication-Efficient Federated Distillation

Communication constraints are one of the major challenges preventing the wide-spread adoption of Federated Learning systems. Recently, Federated Distillation (FD), a new algorithmic paradigm for Federated Learning with fundamentally different communication properties, emerged. FD methods leverage ensemble distillation techniques and exchange model outputs, presented as soft labels on an unlabeled public data set, between the central server and the participating clients. While for conventional Federated Learning algorithms, like Federated Averaging (FA), communication scales with the size of the jointly trained model, in FD communication scales with the distillation data set size, resulting in advantageous communication properties, especially when large models are trained. In this work, we investigate FD from the perspective of communication efficiency by analyzing the effects of active distillation-data curation, soft-label quantization and delta-coding techniques. Based on the insights gathered from this analysis, we present Compressed Federated Distillation (CFD), an efficient Federated Distillation method. Extensive experiments on Federated image classification and language modeling problems demonstrate that our method can reduce the amount of communication necessary to achieve fixed performance targets by more than two orders of magnitude, when compared to FD and by more than four orders of magnitude when compared with FA.
Coq Formalization of a Tableau for the Classical-Intuitionistic Propositional Fragment of Ecumenical Logic

In this paper, we describe a tableau system for reasoning about ecumenical propositional logic, and introduce the central definitions of its implementation in the Coq proof assistant.