pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Comparison of Static, Dynamic, and Hybrid Analysis for Malware Detection
Authors: Anusha Damodaran, Fabio Di Troia, Visaggio Aaron Corrado, Thomas H. Austin, Mark Stamp
Date: 2022-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Malware Detection

In this research, we compare malware detection techniques based on static, dynamic, and hybrid analysis. Specifically, we train Hidden Markov Models (HMMs ) on both static and dynamic feature sets and compare the resulting detection rates over a substantial number of malware families. We also consider hybrid cases, where dynamic analysis is used in the training phase, with static techniques used in the detection phase, and vice versa. In our experiments, a fully dynamic approach generally yields the best detection rates. We discuss the implications of this research for malware detection based on hybrid techniques.
Modeling R$^3$ Needle Steering in Uppaal
Authors: Sascha Lehmann, Antje Rogalla, Maximilian Neidhardt, Anton Reinecke, Alexander Schlaefer, Sibylle Schupp
Date: 2022-03-18 00:00:00

Medical cyber-physical systems are safety-critical, and as such, require ongoing verification of their correct behavior, as system failure during run time may cause severe (or even fatal) personal damage. However, creating a verifiable model often conflicts with other application requirements, most notably regarding data precision and model accuracy, as efficient model checking promotes discrete data (over continuous) and abstract models to reduce the state space. In this paper, we approach the task of medical needle steering in soft tissue around potential obstacles. We design a verifiable model of needle motion (implemented in Uppaal Stratego) and a framework embedding the model for online needle steering. We mitigate the conflict by imposing boundedness on both the data types, reducing from R^3 to Z^3 when needed, and the motion and environment models, reducing the set of allowed local actions and global paths. In experiments, we successfully apply the static model alone, as well as the dynamic framework in scenarios with varying environment complexity and both a virtual and real needle setting, where up to 100% of targets were reached depending on the scenario and needle.
A constrained Shannon-Fano entropy coder for image storage in synthetic DNA
Authors: Xavier Pic, Marc Antonini
Date: 2022-03-18 00:00:00

The exponentially increasing demand for data storage has been facing more and more challenges during the past years. The energy costs that it represents are also increasing, and the availability of the storage hardware is not able to follow the storage demand's trend. The short lifespan of conventional storage media -- 10 to 20 years - forces the duplication of the hardware and worsens the situation. The majority of this storage demand concerns "cold" data, data very rarely accessed but that has to be kept for long periods of time. The coding abilities of synthetic DNA, and its long durability (several hundred years), make it a serious candidate as an alternative storage media for "cold" data. In this paper, we propose a variable-length coding algorithm adapted to DNA data storage with improved performance. The proposed algorithm is based on a modified Shannon-Fano code that respects some biochemichal constraints imposed by the synthesis chemistry. We have inserted this code in a JPEG compression algorithm adapted to DNA image storage and we highlighted an improvement of the compression ratio ranging from 0.5 up to 2 bits per nucleotide compared to the state-of-the-art solution, without affecting the reconstruction quality.
Advances in Shannon-Based Communications and Computations Approaches to Understanding Information Processing in the Brain
Authors: James Tee, Giorgio M. Vitetta, Desmond P. Taylor
Date: 2022-03-17 00:00:00

This article serves as a supplement to the recently published call for participation in a Research Topic [1] that is timed to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Shannon's pioneering 1948 paper [2]. Here, we include some citations of key and relevant literature, which reflect our opinions/perspectives on the proposed topic, and serve as guidance to potential submissions.
Deep learning-based sequential pattern mining for progressive database
Authors: Aatif Jamshed, Bhawna Mallick, Pramod Kumar P.
Date: 2020-03-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: Springer 2020 3
Tasks: Deep Learning, Sequential Pattern Mining, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Sequential pattern mining (SPM) is one of the main application areas in the field of online business, e-commerce, bioinformatics, etc. The traditional approaches in SPM are unable to accurately mine the huge volume of data. Therefore, the proposed work employs a sequential mining model based on deep learning to minimize complexity in handling huge data. Application areas such as online retailing, finance, and e-commerce face a dynamic change in data, which results in non-stationary data. Therefore, our proposed work uses discrete wavelet analysis to convert non-stationary data into time series. In the proposed SPM, a reformed hybrid combination of convolutional neural network (CNN) with long short-term memory (LSTM) is designed to find out customer behavior and purchasing patterns in terms of time. CNN is used to find the concerned itemsets (frequent) at the end of the pattern and LSTM for finding the time interval among each pair of successive itemsets. The proposed work mines the sequential pattern from a progressive database that removes the obsolete data. Finally, the accuracy of the proposed work is compared with some traditional algorithms to demonstrate its robustness.
A Discontinuous Galerkin method with weighted averages for advection-diffusion equations with locally vanishing and anisotropic diffusivity
Authors: Alexandre Ern, Annette F. Stephansen, Paolo Zunino
Date: 2007-05-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: modeling and scientific computing 2007 5

We consider Discontinuous Galerkin approximations of advection-diffusion
equations with anisotropic and discontinuous diffusivity, and propose the symmetric weighted interior penalty (SWIP) method for better coping with locally
vanishing diffusivity. The analysis yields convergence results for the natural energy norm that are optimal (with respect to mesh-size) and robust (fully independent of the diffusivity). The convergence results for the advective derivative are
optimal with respect to mesh-size and robust for isotropic diffusivity, as well as for
anisotropic diffusivity in the dominant advection regime. In the dominant diffusivity regime, an optimal convergence result for the the L2-norm is also recovered.Numerical results are presented to illustrate the performance of the scheme.
3D Saliency guided Deep Quality predictor for No-Reference Stereoscopic Images
Authors: Oussama Messai, Aladine Chetouani, Fella Hachouf, Zianou Ahmed seghir
Date: 2022-01-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: journal 2022 1
Tasks: Image Quality Assessment, No-Reference Image Quality Assessment, Stereoscopic image quality assessment

The use of 3D technologies is growing rapidly, and stereoscopic imaging is usually used to display the 3D contents. However, compression, transmission and other necessary treatments may reduce the quality of these images. Stereo Image Quality Assessment (SIQA) has attracted more attention to ensure good viewing experience for the users and thus several methods have been proposed in the literature with a clear improvement for deep learning-based methods. This paper introduces a new deep learning-based no-reference SIQA using cyclopean view hypothesis and human visual attention. First, the cyclopean image is constructed considering the presence of binocular rivalry that covers the asymmetric distortion case. Second, the saliency map is computed considering the depth information. The latter aims to extract patches on the most perceptual relevant regions. Finally, a modified version of the pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is fine-tuned and used to predict the quality score through the selected patches. Five distinct pre-trained models were analyzed and compared in term of results. The performance of the proposed metric has been evaluated on four commonly used datasets (3D LIVE phase I and phase II databases as well as Waterloo IVC 3D Phase 1 and Phase 2). Compared with the state-of-the-art metrics, the proposed method gives better outcomes. The implementation code will be made accessible to the public at: https://github.com/o-messai/3D-NR-SIQA
Coupled Graph ODE for Learning Interacting System Dynamics
Authors: Zijie Huang, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang
Date: 2021-08-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining 2021 8
Tasks: Graph Neural Network

Many real-world systems such as social networks and moving planets are dynamic in nature, where a set of coupled objects are connected via the interaction graph and exhibit complex behavior along the time. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic can be considered as a dynamical system, where objects represent geographical locations (e.g., states) whose daily confirmed cases of infection evolve over time. Outbreak at one location may influence another location as people travel between these locations, forming a graph. Thus, how to model and predict the complex dynamics for these systems becomes a critical research problem. Existing work on modeling graph-structured data mostly assumes a static setting. How to handle dynamic graphs remains to be further explored. On one hand, features of objects change over time, influenced by the linked objects in the interaction graph. On the other hand, the graph itself can also evolve, where new interactions (links) may form and existing links may drop, which may in turn be affected by the dynamic features of objects. In this paper, we propose coupled graph ODE: a novel latent ordinary differential equation (ODE) generative model that learns the coupled dynamics of nodes and edges with a graph neural network (GNN) based ODE in a continuous manner. Our model consists of two coupled ODE functions for modeling the dynamics of edges and nodes based on their latent representations respectively. It employs a novel encoder parameterized by a GNN for inferring the initial states from historical data, which serves as the starting point of the predicted latent trajectories. Experiment results on the COVID-19 dataset and the simulated social network dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
DeepSleep 2.0: Automated Sleep Arousal Segmentation via Deep Learning
Authors: Robert Fonod
Date: 2022-03-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: AI 2022 3
Tasks: Decoder, Deep Learning, Sleep Arousal Detection, Sleep Micro-event detection, Sleep Quality

DeepSleep 2.0 is a compact version of DeepSleep, a state-of-the-art, U-Net-inspired, fully convolutional deep neural network, which achieved the highest unofficial score in the 2018 PhysioNet Computing Challenge. The proposed network architecture has a compact encoder/decoder structure containing only 740,551 trainable parameters. The input to the network is a full-length multichannel polysomnographic recording signal. The network has been designed and optimized to efficiently predict nonapnea sleep arousals on held-out test data at a 5 ms resolution level, while not compromising the prediction accuracy. When compared to DeepSleep, the obtained experimental results in terms of gross area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC) and gross area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) suggest a lightweight architecture, which can achieve similar prediction performance at a lower computational cost, is realizable.
PipeGCN: Efficient Full-Graph Training of Graph Convolutional Networks with Pipelined Feature Communication
Authors: Cheng Wan, Youjie Li, Cameron R. Wolfe, Anastasios Kyrillidis, Nam Sung Kim, Yingyan Lin
Date: 2022-03-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) is the state-of-the-art method for learning graph-structured data, and training large-scale GCNs requires distributed training across multiple accelerators such that each accelerator is able to hold a partitioned subgraph. However, distributed GCN training incurs prohibitive overhead of communicating node features and feature gradients among partitions for every GCN layer during each training iteration, limiting the achievable training efficiency and model scalability. To this end, we propose PipeGCN, a simple yet effective scheme that hides the communication overhead by pipelining inter-partition communication with intra-partition computation. It is non-trivial to pipeline for efficient GCN training, as communicated node features/gradients will become stale and thus can harm the convergence, negating the pipeline benefit. Notably, little is known regarding the convergence rate of GCN training with both stale features and stale feature gradients. This work not only provides a theoretical convergence analysis but also finds the convergence rate of PipeGCN to be close to that of the vanilla distributed GCN training without any staleness. Furthermore, we develop a smoothing method to further improve PipeGCN's convergence. Extensive experiments show that PipeGCN can largely boost the training throughput (1.7x~28.5x) while achieving the same accuracy as its vanilla counterpart and existing full-graph training methods. The code is available at https://github.com/RICE-EIC/PipeGCN.
Neural Machine Translation with Phrase-Level Universal Visual Representations
Authors: Qingkai Fang, Yang Feng
Date: 2022-03-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Multimodal Machine Translation, NMT, Retrieval, Sentence

Multimodal machine translation (MMT) aims to improve neural machine translation (NMT) with additional visual information, but most existing MMT methods require paired input of source sentence and image, which makes them suffer from shortage of sentence-image pairs. In this paper, we propose a phrase-level retrieval-based method for MMT to get visual information for the source input from existing sentence-image data sets so that MMT can break the limitation of paired sentence-image input. Our method performs retrieval at the phrase level and hence learns visual information from pairs of source phrase and grounded region, which can mitigate data sparsity. Furthermore, our method employs the conditional variational auto-encoder to learn visual representations which can filter redundant visual information and only retain visual information related to the phrase. Experiments show that the proposed method significantly outperforms strong baselines on multiple MMT datasets, especially when the textual context is limited.
The Gerber-Shiu discounted penalty function: A review from practical perspectives
Authors: Yue He, Reiichiro Kawai, Yasutaka Shimizu, Kazutoshi Yamazaki
Date: 2022-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey

The Gerber-Shiu function provides a unified framework for the evaluation of a variety of risk quantities. Ever since its establishment, it has attracted constantly increasing interests in actuarial science, whereas the conventional research has been focused on finding analytical or semi-analytical solutions, either of which is rarely available, except for limited classes of penalty functions on rather simple risk models. In contrast to its great generality, the Gerber-Shiu function does not seem sufficiently prevalent in practice, largely due to a variety of difficulties in numerical approximation and statistical inference. To enhance research activities on such implementation aspects, we provide a comprehensive review of existing formulations and underlying surplus processes, as well as an extensive survey of analytical, semi-analytical and asymptotic methods for the Gerber-Shiu function, which altogether shed fresh light on its numerical methods and statistical inference for further developments. On the basis of an ambitious collection of 235 references, the present survey can serve as an insightful guidebook to model and method selection from practical perspectives as well.
STCGAT: A Spatio-temporal Causal Graph Attention Network for traffic flow prediction in Intelligent Transportation Systems
Authors: Wei Zhao, Shiqi Zhang, Bing Zhou, Bei Wang
Date: 2022-03-21 00:00:00

Air pollution and carbon emissions caused by modern transportation are closely related to global climate change. With the help of next-generation information technology such as Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), accurate traffic flow prediction can effectively solve problems such as traffic congestion and mitigate environmental pollution and climate change. It further promotes the development of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and smart cities. However, the strong spatial and temporal correlation of traffic data makes the task of accurate traffic forecasting a significant challenge. Existing methods are usually based on graph neural networks using predefined spatial adjacency graphs of traffic networks to model spatial dependencies, ignoring the dynamic correlation of relationships between road nodes. In addition, they usually use independent Spatio-temporal components to capture Spatio-temporal dependencies and do not effectively model global Spatio-temporal dependencies. This paper proposes a new Spatio-temporal Causal Graph Attention Network (STCGAT) for traffic prediction to address the above challenges. In STCGAT, we use a node embedding approach that can adaptively generate spatial adjacency subgraphs at each time step without a priori geographic knowledge and fine-grained modeling of the topology of dynamically generated graphs for different time steps. Meanwhile, we propose an efficient causal temporal correlation component that contains node adaptive learning, graph convolution, and local and global causal temporal convolution modules to learn local and global Spatio-temporal dependencies jointly. Extensive experiments on four real, large traffic datasets show that our model consistently outperforms all baseline models.
Depth Completion using Geometry-Aware Embedding
Authors: Wenchao Du, Hu Chen, Hongyu Yang, Yi Zhang
Date: 2022-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Completion, Depth Estimation

Exploiting internal spatial geometric constraints of sparse LiDARs is beneficial to depth completion, however, has been not explored well. This paper proposes an efficient method to learn geometry-aware embedding, which encodes the local and global geometric structure information from 3D points, e.g., scene layout, object's sizes and shapes, to guide dense depth estimation. Specifically, we utilize the dynamic graph representation to model generalized geometric relationship from irregular point clouds in a flexible and efficient manner. Further, we joint this embedding and corresponded RGB appearance information to infer missing depths of the scene with well structure-preserved details. The key to our method is to integrate implicit 3D geometric representation into a 2D learning architecture, which leads to a better trade-off between the performance and efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms previous works and could reconstruct fine depths with crisp boundaries in regions that are over-smoothed by them. The ablation study gives more insights into our method that could achieve significant gains with a simple design, while having better generalization capability and stability. The code is available at https://github.com/Wenchao-Du/GAENet.
Improving anatomical plausibility in medical image segmentation via hybrid graph neural networks: applications to chest x-ray analysis
Authors: Nicolás Gaggion, Lucas Mansilla, Candelaria Mosquera, Diego H. Milone, Enzo Ferrante
Date: 2022-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Anatomical segmentation is a fundamental task in medical image computing, generally tackled with fully convolutional neural networks which produce dense segmentation masks. These models are often trained with loss functions such as cross-entropy or Dice, which assume pixels to be independent of each other, thus ignoring topological errors and anatomical inconsistencies. We address this limitation by moving from pixel-level to graph representations, which allow to naturally incorporate anatomical constraints by construction. To this end, we introduce HybridGNet, an encoder-decoder neural architecture that leverages standard convolutions for image feature encoding and graph convolutional neural networks (GCNNs) to decode plausible representations of anatomical structures. We also propose a novel image-to-graph skip connection layer which allows localized features to flow from standard convolutional blocks to GCNN blocks, and show that it improves segmentation accuracy. The proposed architecture is extensively evaluated in a variety of domain shift and image occlusion scenarios, and audited considering different types of demographic domain shift. Our comprehensive experimental setup compares HybridGNet with other landmark and pixel-based models for anatomical segmentation in chest x-ray images, and shows that it produces anatomically plausible results in challenging scenarios where other models tend to fail.
BNS-GCN: Efficient Full-Graph Training of Graph Convolutional Networks with Partition-Parallelism and Random Boundary Node Sampling
Authors: Cheng Wan, Youjie Li, Ang Li, Nam Sung Kim, Yingyan Lin
Date: 2022-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Node Classification

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have emerged as the state-of-the-art method for graph-based learning tasks. However, training GCNs at scale is still challenging, hindering both the exploration of more sophisticated GCN architectures and their applications to real-world large graphs. While it might be natural to consider graph partition and distributed training for tackling this challenge, this direction has only been slightly scratched the surface in the previous works due to the limitations of existing designs. In this work, we first analyze why distributed GCN training is ineffective and identify the underlying cause to be the excessive number of boundary nodes of each partitioned subgraph, which easily explodes the memory and communication costs for GCN training. Furthermore, we propose a simple yet effective method dubbed BNS-GCN that adopts random Boundary-Node-Sampling to enable efficient and scalable distributed GCN training. Experiments and ablation studies consistently validate the effectiveness of BNS-GCN, e.g., boosting the throughput by up to 16.2x and reducing the memory usage by up to 58%, while maintaining a full-graph accuracy. Furthermore, both theoretical and empirical analysis show that BNS-GCN enjoys a better convergence than existing sampling-based methods. We believe that our BNS-GCN has opened up a new paradigm for enabling GCN training at scale. The code is available at https://github.com/RICE-EIC/BNS-GCN.