pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Steganographic Capacity of Deep Learning Models
Authors: Lei Zhang, Dong Li, Olha Jurečková, Mark Stamp
Date: 2023-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Malware Classification

As machine learning and deep learning models become ubiquitous, it is inevitable that there will be attempts to exploit such models in various attack scenarios. For example, in a steganographic-based attack, information could be hidden in a learning model, which might then be used to distribute malware, or for other malicious purposes. In this research, we consider the steganographic capacity of several learning models. Specifically, we train a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), and Transformer model on a challenging malware classification problem. For each of the resulting models, we determine the number of low-order bits of the trained parameters that can be altered without significantly affecting the performance of the model. We find that the steganographic capacity of the learning models tested is surprisingly high, and that in each case, there is a clear threshold after which model performance rapidly degrades.
An Intelligent Mechanism for Monitoring and Detecting Intrusions in IoT Devices
Authors: Vitalina Holubenko, Paulo Silva, Carlos Bento
Date: 2023-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Intrusion Detection

The current amount of IoT devices and their limitations has come to serve as a motivation for malicious entities to take advantage of such devices and use them for their own gain. To protect against cyberattacks in IoT devices, Machine Learning techniques can be applied to Intrusion Detection Systems. Moreover, privacy related issues associated with centralized approaches can be mitigated through Federated Learning. This work proposes a Host-based Intrusion Detection Systems that leverages Federated Learning and Multi-Layer Perceptron neural networks to detected cyberattacks on IoT devices with high accuracy and enhancing data privacy protection.
Blockchain-based Federated Learning for Decentralized Energy Management Systems
Authors: Abdulrezzak Zekiye, Öznur Özkasap
Date: 2023-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: energy management, energy trading, Federated Learning, Management

The Internet of Energy (IoE) is a distributed paradigm that leverages smart networks and distributed system technologies to enable decentralized energy systems. In contrast to the traditional centralized energy systems, distributed Energy Internet systems comprise multiple components and communication requirements that demand innovative technologies for decentralization, reliability, efficiency, and security. Recent advances in blockchain architectures, smart contracts, and distributed federated learning technologies have opened up new opportunities for realizing decentralized Energy Internet services. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis and classification of state-of-the-art solutions that employ blockchain, smart contracts, and federated learning for the IoE domains. Specifically, we identify four representative system models and discuss their key aspects. These models demonstrate the diverse ways in which blockchain, smart contracts, and federated learning can be integrated to support the main domains of IoE, namely distributed energy trading and sharing, smart microgrid energy networks, and electric and connected vehicle management. Furthermore, we provide a detailed comparison of the different levels of decentralization, the advantages of federated learning, and the benefits of using blockchain for the IoE systems. Additionally, we identify open issues and areas for future research for integrating federated learning and blockchain in the Internet of Energy domains.
Subgraph Stationary Hardware-Software Inference Co-Design
Authors: Payman Behnam, Jianming Tong, Alind Khare, Yangyu Chen, Yue Pan, Pranav Gadikar, Abhimanyu Rajeshkumar Bambhaniya, Tushar Krishna, Alexey Tumanov
Date: 2023-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

A growing number of applications depend on Machine Learning (ML) functionality and benefits from both higher quality ML predictions and better timeliness (latency) at the same time. A growing body of research in computer architecture, ML, and systems software literature focuses on reaching better latency-accuracy tradeoffs for ML models. Efforts include compression, quantization, pruning, early-exit models, mixed DNN precision, as well as ML inference accelerator designs that minimize latency and energy, while preserving delivered accuracy. All of them, however, yield improvements for a single static point in the latency-accuracy tradeoff space. We make a case for applications that operate in dynamically changing deployment scenarios, where no single static point is optimal. We draw on a recently proposed weight-shared SuperNet mechanism to enable serving a stream of queries that uses (activates) different SubNets within this weight-shared construct. This creates an opportunity to exploit the inherent temporal locality with our proposed SubGraph Stationary (SGS) optimization. We take a hardware-software co-design approach with a real implementation of SGS in SushiAccel and the implementation of a software scheduler SushiSched controlling which SubNets to serve and what to cache in real-time. Combined, they are vertically integrated into SUSHI-an inference serving stack. For the stream of queries, SUSHI yields up to 25% improvement in latency, 0.98% increase in served accuracy. SUSHI can achieve up to 78.7% off-chip energy savings.
An Overview on Generative AI at Scale with Edge-Cloud Computing
Authors: Yun-Cheng Wang, Jintang Xue, Chengwei Wei, C. -C. Jay Kuo
Date: 2023-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Cloud Computing

As a specific category of artificial intelligence (AI), generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) generates new content that resembles what is created by humans. The rapid development of GenAI systems has created a huge amount of new data on the Internet, posing new challenges to current computing and communication frameworks. Currently, GenAI services rely on the traditional cloud computing framework due to the need for large computation resources. However, such services will encounter high latency because of data transmission and a high volume of requests. On the other hand, edge-cloud computing can provide adequate computation power and low latency at the same time through the collaboration between edges and the cloud. Thus, it is attractive to build GenAI systems at scale by leveraging the edge-cloud computing paradigm. In this overview paper, we review recent developments in GenAI and edge-cloud computing, respectively. Then, we use two exemplary GenAI applications to discuss technical challenges in scaling up their solutions using edge-cloud collaborative systems. Finally, we list design considerations for training and deploying GenAI systems at scale and point out future research directions.
Enterprise Disk Drive Scrubbing Based on Mondrian Conformal Predictors
Authors: Rahul Vishwakarma, Jinha Hwang, Soundouss Messoudi, Ava Hedayatipour
Date: 2023-06-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Conformal Prediction

Disk scrubbing is a process aimed at resolving read errors on disks by reading data from the disk. However, scrubbing the entire storage array at once can adversely impact system performance, particularly during periods of high input/output operations. Additionally, the continuous reading of data from disks when scrubbing can result in wear and tear, especially on larger capacity disks, due to the significant time and energy consumption involved. To address these issues, we propose a selective disk scrubbing method that enhances the overall reliability and power efficiency in data centers. Our method employs a Machine Learning model based on Mondrian Conformal prediction to identify specific disks for scrubbing, by proactively predicting the health status of each disk in the storage pool, forecasting n-days in advance, and using an open-source dataset. For disks predicted as non-healthy, we mark them for replacement without further action. For healthy drives, we create a set and quantify their relative health across the entire storage pool based on the predictor's confidence. This enables us to prioritize selective scrubbing for drives with established scrubbing frequency based on the scrub cycle. The method we propose provides an efficient and dependable solution for managing enterprise disk drives. By scrubbing just 22.7% of the total storage disks, we can achieve optimized energy consumption and reduce the carbon footprint of the data center.
Learning Environment Models with Continuous Stochastic Dynamics
Authors: Martin Tappler, Edi Muškardin, Bernhard K. Aichernig, Bettina Könighofer
Date: 2023-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Acrobot, Benchmarking, Decision Making, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Dimensionality Reduction, OpenAI Gym

Solving control tasks in complex environments automatically through learning offers great potential. While contemporary techniques from deep reinforcement learning (DRL) provide effective solutions, their decision-making is not transparent. We aim to provide insights into the decisions faced by the agent by learning an automaton model of environmental behavior under the control of an agent. However, for most control problems, automata learning is not scalable enough to learn a useful model. In this work, we raise the capabilities of automata learning such that it is possible to learn models for environments that have complex and continuous dynamics. The core of the scalability of our method lies in the computation of an abstract state-space representation, by applying dimensionality reduction and clustering on the observed environmental state space. The stochastic transitions are learned via passive automata learning from observed interactions of the agent and the environment. In an iterative model-based RL process, we sample additional trajectories to learn an accurate environment model in the form of a discrete-state Markov decision process (MDP). We apply our automata learning framework on popular RL benchmarking environments in the OpenAI Gym, including LunarLander, CartPole, Mountain Car, and Acrobot. Our results show that the learned models are so precise that they enable the computation of policies solving the respective control tasks. Yet the models are more concise and more general than neural-network-based policies and by using MDPs we benefit from a wealth of tools available for analyzing them. When solving the task of LunarLander, the learned model even achieved similar or higher rewards than deep RL policies learned with stable-baselines3.
Triangle Fees
Authors: Rithvik Rao, Nihar Shah
Date: 2023-06-29 00:00:00

Triangle fees are a novel fee structure for AMMs, in which marginal fees are decreasing in a trade's size. That decline is proportional to the movement in the AMM's implied price, i.e. for every basis point the trade moves the ratio of assets, the marginal fee declines by a basis point. These fees create incentives that protect against price staleness, while still allowing the AMM to earn meaningful fee revenue. Triangle fees can strictly improve the Pareto frontier of price accuracy versus losses generated by the status quo of constant fee mechanisms.
News Verifiers Showdown: A Comparative Performance Evaluation of ChatGPT 3.5, ChatGPT 4.0, Bing AI, and Bard in News Fact-Checking
Authors: Kevin Matthe Caramancion
Date: 2023-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Fact Checking

This study aimed to evaluate the proficiency of prominent Large Language Models (LLMs), namely OpenAI's ChatGPT 3.5 and 4.0, Google's Bard(LaMDA), and Microsoft's Bing AI in discerning the truthfulness of news items using black box testing. A total of 100 fact-checked news items, all sourced from independent fact-checking agencies, were presented to each of these LLMs under controlled conditions. Their responses were classified into one of three categories: True, False, and Partially True/False. The effectiveness of the LLMs was gauged based on the accuracy of their classifications against the verified facts provided by the independent agencies. The results showed a moderate proficiency across all models, with an average score of 65.25 out of 100. Among the models, OpenAI's GPT-4.0 stood out with a score of 71, suggesting an edge in newer LLMs' abilities to differentiate fact from deception. However, when juxtaposed against the performance of human fact-checkers, the AI models, despite showing promise, lag in comprehending the subtleties and contexts inherent in news information. The findings highlight the potential of AI in the domain of fact-checking while underscoring the continued importance of human cognitive skills and the necessity for persistent advancements in AI capabilities. Finally, the experimental data produced from the simulation of this work is openly available on Kaggle.
Cramér-Rao Bound Minimization for IRS-Enabled Multiuser Integrated Sensing and Communications
Authors: Xianxin Song, Xiaoqi Qin, Jie Xu, Rui Zhang
Date: 2023-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: ISAC

This paper investigates an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) enabled multiuser integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) system, which consists of one multi-antenna base station (BS), one IRS, multiple single-antenna communication users (CUs), and one target at the non-line-of-sight (NLoS) region of the BS. The IRS is deployed to not only assist the communication from the BS to the CUs, but also enable the BS's NLoS target sensing based on the echo signals from the BS-IRS-target-IRS-BS link. We consider two types of targets, namely the extended and point targets, for which the BS aims to estimate the complete target response matrix and the target direction-of-arrival (DoA) with respect to the IRS, respectively. To provide full degrees of freedom for sensing, we consider that the BS sends dedicated sensing signals in addition to the communication signals. Accordingly, we model two types of CU receivers, namely Type-I and Type-II CU receivers, which do not have and have the capability of canceling the interference from the sensing signals, respectively. Under each setup, we jointly optimize the transmit beamforming at the BS and the reflective beamforming at the IRS to minimize the Cram\'er-Rao bound (CRB) for target estimation, subject to the minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) constraints at the CUs and the maximum transmit power constraint at the BS. We present efficient algorithms to solve the highly non-convex SINR-constrained CRB minimization problems, by using the techniques of alternating optimization, semi-definite relaxation, and successive convex approximation. Numerical results show that the proposed design achieves lower estimation CRB than other benchmark schemes, and the sensing signal interference cancellation at Type-II CU receivers is beneficial when the number of CUs is greater than one.
Sufficient Conditions on Bipartite Consensus of Weakly Connected Matrix-weighted Networks
Authors: Chongzhi Wang, Haibin Shao, Ying Tan, Dewei Li
Date: 2023-07-03 00:00:00

Recent advancements in bipartite consensus, a scenario where agents are divided into two disjoint sets with agents in the same set agreeing on a certain value and those in different sets agreeing on opposite or specifically related values, have highlighted its potential applications across various fields. Traditional research typically relies on the presence of a positive-negative spanning tree, which limits the practical applicability of bipartite consensus. This study relaxes that assumption by allowing for weak connectivity within the network, where paths can be weighted by semidefinite matrices. By exploring the algebraic constraints imposed by positive-negative trees and semidefinite paths, we derive sufficient conditions for achieving bipartite consensus. Our theoretical findings are validated through numerical results.
CASEIN: Cascading Explicit and Implicit Control for Fine-grained Emotion Intensity Regulation
Authors: Yuhao Cui, Xiongwei Wang, Zhongzhou Zhao, Wei Zhou, Haiqing Chen
Date: 2023-06-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement

Existing fine-grained intensity regulation methods rely on explicit control through predicted emotion probabilities. However, these high-level semantic probabilities are often inaccurate and unsmooth at the phoneme level, leading to bias in learning. Especially when we attempt to mix multiple emotion intensities for specific phonemes, resulting in markedly reduced controllability and naturalness of the synthesis. To address this issue, we propose the CAScaded Explicit and Implicit coNtrol framework (CASEIN), which leverages accurate disentanglement of emotion manifolds from the reference speech to learn the implicit representation at a lower semantic level. This representation bridges the semantical gap between explicit probabilities and the synthesis model, reducing bias in learning. In experiments, our CASEIN surpasses existing methods in both controllability and naturalness. Notably, we are the first to achieve fine-grained control over the mixed intensity of multiple emotions.
Toward Intelligent and Efficient 6G Networks: JCSC Enabled On-Purpose Machine Communications
Authors: Ping Zhang, Heng Yang, Zhiyong Feng, Yanpeng Cui, Jincheng Dai, Xiaoqi Qin, Jinglin Li, Qixun Zhang
Date: 2023-06-30 00:00:00

Driven by the vision of "intelligent connection of everything" toward 6G, the collective intelligence of networked machines can be fully exploited to improve system efficiency by shifting the paradigm of wireless communication design from naive maximalist approaches to intelligent value-based approaches. In this article, we propose an on-purpose machine communication framework enabled by joint communication, sensing, and computation (JCSC) technology, which employs machine semantics as the interactive information flow. Naturally, there are potential technical barriers to be solved before the widespread adoption of on-purpose communications, including the conception of machine purpose, fast and concise networking strategy, and semantics-aware information exchange mechanism during the process of task-oriented cooperation. Hence, we discuss enabling technologies complemented by a range of open challenges. The simulation result shows that the proposed framework can significantly reduce networking overhead and improve communication efficiency.
Inertial Navigation Meets Deep Learning: A Survey of Current Trends and Future Directions
Authors: Nadav Cohen, Itzik Klein
Date: 2023-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Deep Learning, Denoising, Sensor Fusion

Inertial sensing is used in many applications and platforms, ranging from day-to-day devices such as smartphones to very complex ones such as autonomous vehicles. In recent years, the development of machine learning and deep learning techniques has increased significantly in the field of inertial sensing and sensor fusion. This is due to the development of efficient computing hardware and the accessibility of publicly available sensor data. These data-driven approaches mainly aim to empower model-based inertial sensing algorithms. To encourage further research in integrating deep learning with inertial navigation and fusion and to leverage their capabilities, this paper provides an in-depth review of deep learning methods for inertial sensing and sensor fusion. We discuss learning methods for calibration and denoising as well as approaches for improving pure inertial navigation and sensor fusion. The latter is done by learning some of the fusion filter parameters. The reviewed approaches are classified by the environment in which the vehicles operate: land, air, and sea. In addition, we analyze trends and future directions in deep learning-based navigation and provide statistical data on commonly used approaches.
The Human Auditory System and Audio
Authors: Milind N. Kunchur
Date: 2023-06-30 00:00:00

This work reviews the human auditory system, elucidating some of the specialized mechanisms and non-linear pathways along the chain of events between physical sound and its perception. Customary relationships between frequency, time, and phase--such as the uncertainty principle--that hold for linear systems, do not apply straightforwardly to the hearing process. Auditory temporal resolution for certain processes can be a hundredth of the period of the signal, and can extend down to the microseconds time scale. The astonishingly large number of variations that correspond to the neural excitation pattern of 30000 auditory nerve fibers, originating from 3500 inner hair cells, explicates the vast capacity of the auditory system for the resolution of sonic detail. And the ear is sensitive enough to detect a basilar-membrane amplitude at the level of a picometer, or about a hundred times smaller than an atom. This article surveys and provides new insights into some of the impressive capabilities of the human auditory system and explores their relationship to fidelity in reproduced sound.
Modified Parametric Multichannel Wiener Filter \\for Low-latency Enhancement of Speech Mixtures with Unknown Number of Speakers
Authors: Ning Guo, Tomohiro Nakatani, Shoko Araki, Takehiro Moriya
Date: 2023-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Low-latency processing

This paper introduces a novel low-latency online beamforming (BF) algorithm, named Modified Parametric Multichannel Wiener Filter (Mod-PMWF), for enhancing speech mixtures with unknown and varying number of speakers. Although conventional BFs such as linearly constrained minimum variance BF (LCMV BF) can enhance a speech mixture, they typically require such attributes of the speech mixture as the number of speakers and the acoustic transfer functions (ATFs) from the speakers to the microphones. When the mixture attributes are unavailable, estimating them by low-latency processing is challenging, hindering the application of the BFs to the problem. In this paper, we overcome this problem by modifying a conventional Parametric Multichannel Wiener Filter (PMWF). The proposed Mod-PMWF can adaptively form a directivity pattern that enhances all the speakers in the mixture without explicitly estimating these attributes. Our experiments will show the proposed BF's effectiveness in interference reduction ratios and subjective listening tests.
EmoSpeech: Guiding FastSpeech2 Towards Emotional Text to Speech
Authors: Daria Diatlova, Vitaly Shutov
Date: 2023-06-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Speech Synthesis, text-to-speech, Text to Speech

State-of-the-art speech synthesis models try to get as close as possible to the human voice. Hence, modelling emotions is an essential part of Text-To-Speech (TTS) research. In our work, we selected FastSpeech2 as the starting point and proposed a series of modifications for synthesizing emotional speech. According to automatic and human evaluation, our model, EmoSpeech, surpasses existing models regarding both MOS score and emotion recognition accuracy in generated speech. We provided a detailed ablation study for every extension to FastSpeech2 architecture that forms EmoSpeech. The uneven distribution of emotions in the text is crucial for better, synthesized speech and intonation perception. Our model includes a conditioning mechanism that effectively handles this issue by allowing emotions to contribute to each phone with varying intensity levels. The human assessment indicates that proposed modifications generate audio with higher MOS and emotional expressiveness.