pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Secure Experimentation Sandbox for the design and execution of trusted and secure analytics in the aviation domain
Authors: Dimitrios Miltiadou, Stamatis Pitsios, Dimitrios Spyropoulos, Dimitrios Alexandrou, Fenareti Lampathaki, Domenico Messina, Konstantinos Perakis
Date: 2021-11-18 00:00:00

The aviation industry as well as the industries that benefit and are linked to it are ripe for innovation in the form of Big Data analytics. The number of available big data technologies is constantly growing, while at the same time the existing ones are rapidly evolving and empowered with new features. However, the Big Data era imposes the crucial challenge of how to effectively handle information security while managing massive and rapidly evolving data from heterogeneous data sources. While multiple technologies have emerged, there is a need to find a balance between multiple security requirements, privacy obligations, system performance and rapid dynamic analysis on large datasets. The current paper aims to introduce the ICARUS Secure Experimentation Sandbox of the ICARUS platform. The ICARUS platform aims to provide a big data-enabled platform that aspires to become an 'one-stop shop' for aviation data and intelligence marketplace that provides a trusted and secure 'sandboxed' analytics workspace, allowing the exploration, integration and deep analysis of original and derivative data in a trusted and fair manner. Towards this end, a Secure Experimentation Sandbox has been designed and integrated in the ICARUS platform offering, that enables the provisioning of a sophisticated environment that can completely guarantee the safety and confidentiality of data, allowing to any interested party to utilise the platform to conduct analytical experiments in closed-lab conditions.
Enhanced Membership Inference Attacks against Machine Learning Models
Authors: Jiayuan Ye, Aadyaa Maddi, Sasi Kumar Murakonda, Vincent Bindschaedler, Reza Shokri
Date: 2021-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Memorization

How much does a machine learning algorithm leak about its training data, and why? Membership inference attacks are used as an auditing tool to quantify this leakage. In this paper, we present a comprehensive \textit{hypothesis testing framework} that enables us not only to formally express the prior work in a consistent way, but also to design new membership inference attacks that use reference models to achieve a significantly higher power (true positive rate) for any (false positive rate) error. More importantly, we explain \textit{why} different attacks perform differently. We present a template for indistinguishability games, and provide an interpretation of attack success rate across different instances of the game. We discuss various uncertainties of attackers that arise from the formulation of the problem, and show how our approach tries to minimize the attack uncertainty to the one bit secret about the presence or absence of a data point in the training set. We perform a \textit{differential analysis} between all types of attacks, explain the gap between them, and show what causes data points to be vulnerable to an attack (as the reasons vary due to different granularities of memorization, from overfitting to conditional memorization). Our auditing framework is openly accessible as part of the \textit{Privacy Meter} software tool.
Attacking Deep Learning AI Hardware with Universal Adversarial Perturbation
Authors: Mehdi Sadi, B. M. S. Bahar Talukder, Kaniz Mishty, Md Tauhidur Rahman
Date: 2021-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Universal Adversarial Perturbations are image-agnostic and model-independent noise that when added with any image can mislead the trained Deep Convolutional Neural Networks into the wrong prediction. Since these Universal Adversarial Perturbations can seriously jeopardize the security and integrity of practical Deep Learning applications, existing techniques use additional neural networks to detect the existence of these noises at the input image source. In this paper, we demonstrate an attack strategy that when activated by rogue means (e.g., malware, trojan) can bypass these existing countermeasures by augmenting the adversarial noise at the AI hardware accelerator stage. We demonstrate the accelerator-level universal adversarial noise attack on several deep Learning models using co-simulation of the software kernel of Conv2D function and the Verilog RTL model of the hardware under the FuseSoC environment.
Advancing COVID-19 Diagnosis with Privacy-Preserving Collaboration in Artificial Intelligence
Authors: Xiang Bai, Hanchen Wang, Liya Ma, Yongchao Xu, Jiefeng Gan, Ziwei Fan, Fan Yang, Ke Ma, Jiehua Yang, Song Bai, Chang Shu, Xinyu Zou, Renhao Huang, Changzheng Zhang, Xiaowu Liu, Dandan Tu, Chuou Xu, Wenqing Zhang, Xi Wang, Anguo Chen, Yu Zeng, Dehua Yang, Ming-Wei Wang, Nagaraj Holalkere, Neil J. Halin, Ihab R. Kamel, Jia Wu, Xuehua Peng, Xiang Wang, Jianbo Shao, Pattanasak Mongkolwat, Jianjun Zhang, Weiyang Liu, Michael Roberts, Zhongzhao Teng, Lucian Beer, Lorena Escudero Sanchez, Evis Sala, Daniel Rubin, Adrian Weller, Joan Lasenby, Chuangsheng Zheng, Jianming Wang, Zhen Li, Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb, Tian Xia
Date: 2021-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: COVID-19 Diagnosis, Diagnostic, Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving, Specificity

Artificial intelligence (AI) provides a promising substitution for streamlining COVID-19 diagnoses. However, concerns surrounding security and trustworthiness impede the collection of large-scale representative medical data, posing a considerable challenge for training a well-generalised model in clinical practices. To address this, we launch the Unified CT-COVID AI Diagnostic Initiative (UCADI), where the AI model can be distributedly trained and independently executed at each host institution under a federated learning framework (FL) without data sharing. Here we show that our FL model outperformed all the local models by a large yield (test sensitivity /specificity in China: 0.973/0.951, in the UK: 0.730/0.942), achieving comparable performance with a panel of professional radiologists. We further evaluated the model on the hold-out (collected from another two hospitals leaving out the FL) and heterogeneous (acquired with contrast materials) data, provided visual explanations for decisions made by the model, and analysed the trade-offs between the model performance and the communication costs in the federated training process. Our study is based on 9,573 chest computed tomography scans (CTs) from 3,336 patients collected from 23 hospitals located in China and the UK. Collectively, our work advanced the prospects of utilising federated learning for privacy-preserving AI in digital health.
Postdisaster image-based damage detection and repair cost estimation of reinforced concrete buildings using dual convolutional neural networks
Authors: Xiao Pan, T. Y. Yang
Date: 2021-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, object-detection, Object Detection

Reinforced concrete buildings are commonly used around the world. With recent earthquakes worldwide, rapid structural damage inspection and repair cost evaluation are crucial for building owners and policy makers to make informed risk management decisions. To improve the efficiency of such inspection, advanced computer vision techniques based on convolution neural networks have been adopted in recent research to rapidly quantify the damage state of structures. In this paper, an advanced object detection neural network, named YOLO-v2, is implemented which achieves 98.2% and 84.5% average precision in training and testing, respectively. The proposed YOLO-v2 is used in combination with the classification neural network, which improves the identification accuracy for critical damage state of reinforced concrete structures by 7.5%. The improved classification procedures allow engineers to rapidly and more accurately quantify the damage states of the structure, and also localize the critical damage features. The identified damage state can then be integrated with the state-of-the-art performance evaluation framework to quantify the financial losses of critical reinforced concrete buildings. The results can be used by the building owners and decision makers to make informed risk management decisions immediately after the strong earthquake shaking. Hence, resources can be allocated rapidly to improve the resiliency of the community.
COMET: A Novel Memory-Efficient Deep Learning Training Framework by Using Error-Bounded Lossy Compression
Authors: Sian Jin, Chengming Zhang, Xintong Jiang, Yunhe Feng, Hui Guan, Guanpeng Li, Shuaiwen Leon Song, Dingwen Tao
Date: 2021-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Compression

Training wide and deep neural networks (DNNs) require large amounts of storage resources such as memory because the intermediate activation data must be saved in the memory during forward propagation and then restored for backward propagation. However, state-of-the-art accelerators such as GPUs are only equipped with very limited memory capacities due to hardware design constraints, which significantly limits the maximum batch size and hence performance speedup when training large-scale DNNs. Traditional memory saving techniques either suffer from performance overhead or are constrained by limited interconnect bandwidth or specific interconnect technology. In this paper, we propose a novel memory-efficient CNN training framework (called COMET) that leverages error-bounded lossy compression to significantly reduce the memory requirement for training, to allow training larger models or to accelerate training. Different from the state-of-the-art solutions that adopt image-based lossy compressors (such as JPEG) to compress the activation data, our framework purposely adopts error-bounded lossy compression with a strict error-controlling mechanism. Specifically, we perform a theoretical analysis on the compression error propagation from the altered activation data to the gradients, and empirically investigate the impact of altered gradients over the training process. Based on these analyses, we optimize the error-bounded lossy compression and propose an adaptive error-bound control scheme for activation data compression. We evaluate our design against state-of-the-art solutions with five widely-adopted CNNs and ImageNet dataset. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed framework can significantly reduce the training memory consumption by up to 13.5X over the baseline training and 1.8X over another state-of-the-art compression-based framework, respectively, with little or no accuracy loss.
A Novel Optimized Asynchronous Federated Learning Framework
Authors: Zhicheng Zhou, Hailong Chen, Kunhua Li, Fei Hu, Bingjie Yan, Jieren Cheng, Xuyan Wei, Bernie Liu, Xiulai Li, Fuwen Chen, Yongji Sui
Date: 2021-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) since proposed has been applied in many fields, such as credit assessment, medical, etc. Because of the difference in the network or computing resource, the clients may not update their gradients at the same time that may take a lot of time to wait or idle. That's why Asynchronous Federated Learning (AFL) method is needed. The main bottleneck in AFL is communication. How to find a balance between the model performance and the communication cost is a challenge in AFL. This paper proposed a novel AFL framework VAFL. And we verified the performance of the algorithm through sufficient experiments. The experiments show that VAFL can reduce the communication times about 51.02\% with 48.23\% average communication compression rate and allow the model to be converged faster. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/RobAI-Lab/VAFL}
Detecting Cross-Language Plagiarism using Open Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Johannes Stegmüller, Fabian Bauer-Marquart, Norman Meuschke, Terry Ruas, Moritz Schubotz, Bela Gipp
Date: 2021-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Machine Translation, Retrieval

Identifying cross-language plagiarism is challenging, especially for distant language pairs and sense-for-sense translations. We introduce the new multilingual retrieval model Cross-Language Ontology-Based Similarity Analysis (CL-OSA) for this task. CL-OSA represents documents as entity vectors obtained from the open knowledge graph Wikidata. Opposed to other methods, CL-OSA does not require computationally expensive machine translation, nor pre-training using comparable or parallel corpora. It reliably disambiguates homonyms and scales to allow its application to Web-scale document collections. We show that CL-OSA outperforms state-of-the-art methods for retrieving candidate documents from five large, topically diverse test corpora that include distant language pairs like Japanese-English. For identifying cross-language plagiarism at the character level, CL-OSA primarily improves the detection of sense-for-sense translations. For these challenging cases, CL-OSA's performance in terms of the well-established PlagDet score exceeds that of the best competitor by more than factor two. The code and data of our study are openly available.
A Bibliometric Analysis of the BPM Conference Using Computational Data Analytics
Authors: Fabian Muff, Felix Härer, Hans-Georg Fill
Date: 2021-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

The BPM conference has a long tradition as the premier venue for publishing research on business process management. For exploring the evolution of research topics, we present the findings from a computational bibliometric analysis of the BPM conference proceedings from the past 15 years. We used the publicly available DBLP dataset as a basis for the analysis, which we enriched with data from websites and databases of the relevant publishers. In addition to a detailed analysis of the publication results, we performed a content-based analysis of over 1,200 papers from the BPM conference and its workshops using Latent Dirichlet Allocation. This offers insights into historical developments in Business Process Management research and provides the community with potential future prospects.
Assisted Robust Reward Design
Authors: Jerry Zhi-Yang He, Anca D. Dragan
Date: 2021-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving

Real-world robotic tasks require complex reward functions. When we define the problem the robot needs to solve, we pretend that a designer specifies this complex reward exactly, and it is set in stone from then on. In practice, however, reward design is an iterative process: the designer chooses a reward, eventually encounters an "edge-case" environment where the reward incentivizes the wrong behavior, revises the reward, and repeats. What would it mean to rethink robotics problems to formally account for this iterative nature of reward design? We propose that the robot not take the specified reward for granted, but rather have uncertainty about it, and account for the future design iterations as future evidence. We contribute an Assisted Reward Design method that speeds up the design process by anticipating and influencing this future evidence: rather than letting the designer eventually encounter failure cases and revise the reward then, the method actively exposes the designer to such environments during the development phase. We test this method in a simplified autonomous driving task and find that it more quickly improves the car's behavior in held-out environments by proposing environments that are "edge cases" for the current reward.
Successor Feature Landmarks for Long-Horizon Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Christopher Hoang, Sungryull Sohn, Jongwook Choi, Wilka Carvalho, Honglak Lee
Date: 2021-11-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Efficient Exploration, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Operating in the real-world often requires agents to learn about a complex environment and apply this understanding to achieve a breadth of goals. This problem, known as goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL), becomes especially challenging for long-horizon goals. Current methods have tackled this problem by augmenting goal-conditioned policies with graph-based planning algorithms. However, they struggle to scale to large, high-dimensional state spaces and assume access to exploration mechanisms for efficiently collecting training data. In this work, we introduce Successor Feature Landmarks (SFL), a framework for exploring large, high-dimensional environments so as to obtain a policy that is proficient for any goal. SFL leverages the ability of successor features (SF) to capture transition dynamics, using it to drive exploration by estimating state-novelty and to enable high-level planning by abstracting the state-space as a non-parametric landmark-based graph. We further exploit SF to directly compute a goal-conditioned policy for inter-landmark traversal, which we use to execute plans to "frontier" landmarks at the edge of the explored state space. We show in our experiments on MiniGrid and ViZDoom that SFL enables efficient exploration of large, high-dimensional state spaces and outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on long-horizon GCRL tasks.
The Effects of Learning in Morphologically Evolving Robot Systems
Authors: Jie Luo, Aart Stuurman, Jakub M. Tomczak, Jacintha Ellers, Agoston E. Eiben
Date: 2021-11-18 00:00:00

Simultaneously evolving morphologies (bodies) and controllers (brains) of robots can cause a mismatch between the inherited body and brain in the offspring. To mitigate this problem, the addition of an infant learning period by the so-called Triangle of Life framework has been proposed relatively long ago. However, an empirical assessment is still lacking to-date. In this paper we investigate the effects of such a learning mechanism from different perspectives. Using extensive simulations we show that learning can greatly increase task performance and reduce the number of generations required to reach a certain fitness level compared to the purely evolutionary approach. Furthermore, although learning only directly affects the controllers, we demonstrate that the evolved morphologies will be also different. This provides a quantitative demonstration that changes in the brain can induce changes in the body. Finally, we examine the concept of morphological intelligence quantified by the ability of a given body to learn. We observe that the learning delta, the performance difference between the inherited and the learned brain, is growing throughout the evolutionary process. This shows that evolution is producing robots with an increasing plasticity, that is, consecutive generations are becoming better and better learners which in turn makes them better and better at the given task. All in all, our results demonstrate that the Triangle of Life is not only a concept of theoretical interest, but a system architecture with practical benefits.
Reinforcement Learning on Human Decision Models for Uniquely Collaborative AI Teammates
Authors: Nicholas Kantack
Date: 2021-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In 2021 the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory held an internal challenge to develop artificially intelligent (AI) agents that could excel at the collaborative card game Hanabi. Agents were evaluated on their ability to play with human players whom the agents had never previously encountered. This study details the development of the agent that won the challenge by achieving a human-play average score of 16.5, outperforming the current state-of-the-art for human-bot Hanabi scores. The winning agent's development consisted of observing and accurately modeling the author's decision making in Hanabi, then training with a behavioral clone of the author. Notably, the agent discovered a human-complementary play style by first mimicking human decision making, then exploring variations to the human-like strategy that led to higher simulated human-bot scores. This work examines in detail the design and implementation of this human compatible Hanabi teammate, as well as the existence and implications of human-complementary strategies and how they may be explored for more successful applications of AI in human machine teams.
A Survey of Zero-shot Generalisation in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Robert Kirk, Amy Zhang, Edward Grefenstette, Tim Rocktäschel
Date: 2021-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Offline RL, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Survey

The study of zero-shot generalisation (ZSG) in deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to produce RL algorithms whose policies generalise well to novel unseen situations at deployment time, avoiding overfitting to their training environments. Tackling this is vital if we are to deploy reinforcement learning algorithms in real world scenarios, where the environment will be diverse, dynamic and unpredictable. This survey is an overview of this nascent field. We rely on a unifying formalism and terminology for discussing different ZSG problems, building upon previous works. We go on to categorise existing benchmarks for ZSG, as well as current methods for tackling these problems. Finally, we provide a critical discussion of the current state of the field, including recommendations for future work. Among other conclusions, we argue that taking a purely procedural content generation approach to benchmark design is not conducive to progress in ZSG, we suggest fast online adaptation and tackling RL-specific problems as some areas for future work on methods for ZSG, and we recommend building benchmarks in underexplored problem settings such as offline RL ZSG and reward-function variation.
Covered Information Disentanglement: Model Transparency via Unbiased Permutation Importance
Authors: João Pereira, Erik S. G. Stroes, Aeilko H. Zwinderman, Evgeni Levin
Date: 2021-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Disentanglement

Model transparency is a prerequisite in many domains and an increasingly popular area in machine learning research. In the medical domain, for instance, unveiling the mechanisms behind a disease often has higher priority than the diagnostic itself since it might dictate or guide potential treatments and research directions. One of the most popular approaches to explain model global predictions is the permutation importance where the performance on permuted data is benchmarked against the baseline. However, this method and other related approaches will undervalue the importance of a feature in the presence of covariates since these cover part of its provided information. To address this issue, we propose Covered Information Disentanglement (CID), a method that considers all feature information overlap to correct the values provided by permutation importance. We further show how to compute CID efficiently when coupled with Markov random fields. We demonstrate its efficacy in adjusting permutation importance first on a controlled toy dataset and discuss its effect on real-world medical data.