pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Unsafe's Betrayal: Abusing Unsafe Rust in Binary Reverse Engineering via Machine Learning
Authors: Sangdon Park, Xiang Cheng, Taesoo Kim
Date: 2022-10-31 00:00:00

Memory-safety bugs introduce critical software-security issues. Rust provides memory-safe mechanisms to avoid memory-safety bugs in programming, while still allowing unsafe escape hatches via unsafe code. However, the unsafe code that enhances the usability of Rust provides clear spots for finding memory-safety bugs in Rust source code. In this paper, we claim that these unsafe spots can still be identifiable in Rust binary code via machine learning and be leveraged for finding memory-safety bugs. To support our claim, we propose the tool textttrustspot, that enables reverse engineering to learn an unsafe classifier that proposes a list of functions in Rust binaries for downstream analysis. We empirically show that the function proposals by textttrustspot can recall $92.92\%$ of memory-safety bugs, while it covers only $16.79\%$ of the entire binary code. As an application, we demonstrate that the function proposals are used in targeted fuzzing on Rust packages, which contribute to reducing the fuzzing time compared to non-targeted fuzzing.
Federated Averaging Langevin Dynamics: Toward a unified theory and new algorithms
Authors: Vincent Plassier, Alain Durmus, Eric Moulines
Date: 2022-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Federated Learning

This paper focuses on Bayesian inference in a federated learning context (FL). While several distributed MCMC algorithms have been proposed, few consider the specific limitations of FL such as communication bottlenecks and statistical heterogeneity. Recently, Federated Averaging Langevin Dynamics (FALD) was introduced, which extends the Federated Averaging algorithm to Bayesian inference. We obtain a novel tight non-asymptotic upper bound on the Wasserstein distance to the global posterior for FALD. This bound highlights the effects of statistical heterogeneity, which causes a drift in the local updates that negatively impacts convergence. We propose a new algorithm VR-FALD* that uses control variates to correct the client drift. We establish non-asymptotic bounds showing that VR-FALD* is not affected by statistical heterogeneity. Finally, we illustrate our results on several FL benchmarks for Bayesian inference.
Spatial-Temporal Synchronous Graph Transformer network (STSGT) for COVID-19 forecasting
Authors: Soumyanil Banerjee, Ming Dong, Weisong Shi
Date: 2022-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

COVID-19 has become a matter of serious concern over the last few years. It has adversely affected numerous people around the globe and has led to the loss of billions of dollars of business capital. In this paper, we propose a novel Spatial-Temporal Synchronous Graph Transformer network (STSGT) to capture the complex spatial and temporal dependency of the COVID-19 time series data and forecast the future status of an evolving pandemic. The layers of STSGT combine the graph convolution network (GCN) with the self-attention mechanism of transformers on a synchronous spatial-temporal graph to capture the dynamically changing pattern of the COVID time series. The spatial-temporal synchronous graph simultaneously captures the spatial and temporal dependencies between the vertices of the graph at a given and subsequent time-steps, which helps capture the heterogeneity in the time series and improve the forecasting accuracy. Our extensive experiments on two publicly available real-world COVID-19 time series datasets demonstrate that STSGT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms that were designed for spatial-temporal forecasting tasks. Specifically, on average over a 12-day horizon, we observe a potential improvement of 12.19% and 3.42% in Mean Absolute Error(MAE) over the next best algorithm while forecasting the daily infected and death cases respectively for the 50 states of US and Washington, D.C. Additionally, STSGT also outperformed others when forecasting the daily infected cases at the state level, e.g., for all the counties in the State of Michigan. The code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/soumbane/STSGT.
Denoising neural networks for magnetic resonance spectroscopy
Authors: Natalie Klein, Amber J. Day, Harris Mason, Michael W. Malone, Sinead A. Williamson
Date: 2022-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Denoising, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

In many scientific applications, measured time series are corrupted by noise or distortions. Traditional denoising techniques often fail to recover the signal of interest, particularly when the signal-to-noise ratio is low or when certain assumptions on the signal and noise are violated. In this work, we demonstrate that deep learning-based denoising methods can outperform traditional techniques while exhibiting greater robustness to variation in noise and signal characteristics. Our motivating example is magnetic resonance spectroscopy, in which a primary goal is to detect the presence of short-duration, low-amplitude radio frequency signals that are often obscured by strong interference that can be difficult to separate from the signal using traditional methods. We explore various deep learning architecture choices to capture the inherently complex-valued nature of magnetic resonance signals. On both synthetic and experimental data, we show that our deep learning-based approaches can exceed performance of traditional techniques, providing a powerful new class of methods for analysis of scientific time series data.
Optimizing Closed-Loop Performance with Data from Similar Systems: A Bayesian Meta-Learning Approach
Authors: Ankush Chakrabarty
Date: 2022-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, Meta-Learning

Bayesian optimization (BO) has demonstrated potential for optimizing control performance in data-limited settings, especially for systems with unknown dynamics or unmodeled performance objectives. The BO algorithm efficiently trades-off exploration and exploitation by leveraging uncertainty estimates using surrogate models. These surrogates are usually learned using data collected from the target dynamical system to be optimized. Intuitively, the convergence rate of BO is better for surrogate models that can accurately predict the target system performance. In classical BO, initial surrogate models are constructed using very limited data points, and therefore rarely yield accurate predictions of system performance. In this paper, we propose the use of meta-learning to generate an initial surrogate model based on data collected from performance optimization tasks performed on a variety of systems that are different to the target system. To this end, we employ deep kernel networks (DKNs) which are simple to train and which comprise encoded Gaussian process models that integrate seamlessly with classical BO. The effectiveness of our proposed DKN-BO approach for speeding up control system performance optimization is demonstrated using a well-studied nonlinear system with unknown dynamics and an unmodeled performance function.
The interaction of transmission intensity, mortality, and the economy: a retrospective analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic
Authors: Christian Morgenstern, Daniel J. Laydon, Charles Whittaker, Swapnil Mishra, David Haw, Samir Bhatt, Neil M. Ferguson
Date: 2022-10-31 00:00:00

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused over 6.4 million registered deaths to date and has had a profound impact on economic activity. Here, we study the interaction of transmission, mortality, and the economy during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic from January 2020 to December 2022 across 25 European countries. We adopt a Bayesian Mixed Effects model with auto-regressive terms. We find that increases in disease transmission intensity decreases Gross domestic product (GDP) and increases daily excess deaths, with a longer lasting impact on excess deaths in comparison to GDP, which recovers more rapidly. Broadly, our results reinforce the intuitive phenomenon that significant economic activity arises from diverse person-to-person interactions. We report on the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) on transmission intensity, excess deaths, and changes in GDP, and resulting implications for policy makers. Our results highlight a complex cost-benefit trade off from individual NPIs. For example, banning international travel increases GDP and reduces excess deaths. We consider country random effects and their associations with excess changes in GDP and excess deaths. For example, more developed countries in Europe typically had more cautious approaches to the COVID-19 pandemic, prioritising healthcare, and excess deaths over economic performance. Long term economic impairments are not fully captured by our model, as well as long term disease effects (Long Covid). Our results highlight that the impact of disease on a country is complex and multifaceted, and simple heuristic conclusions to extract the best outcome from the economy and disease burden are challenging.
A robust estimator of mutual information for deep learning interpretability
Authors: Davide Piras, Hiranya V. Peiris, Andrew Pontzen, Luisa Lucie-Smith, Ningyuan Guo, Brian Nord
Date: 2022-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Disentanglement, Representation Learning

We develop the use of mutual information (MI), a well-established metric in information theory, to interpret the inner workings of deep learning models. To accurately estimate MI from a finite number of samples, we present GMM-MI (pronounced $``$Jimmie$"$), an algorithm based on Gaussian mixture models that can be applied to both discrete and continuous settings. GMM-MI is computationally efficient, robust to the choice of hyperparameters and provides the uncertainty on the MI estimate due to the finite sample size. We extensively validate GMM-MI on toy data for which the ground truth MI is known, comparing its performance against established mutual information estimators. We then demonstrate the use of our MI estimator in the context of representation learning, working with synthetic data and physical datasets describing highly non-linear processes. We train deep learning models to encode high-dimensional data within a meaningful compressed (latent) representation, and use GMM-MI to quantify both the level of disentanglement between the latent variables, and their association with relevant physical quantities, thus unlocking the interpretability of the latent representation. We make GMM-MI publicly available.
Fast and parallel decoding for transducer
Authors: Wei Kang, Liyong Guo, Fangjun Kuang, Long Lin, Mingshuang Luo, Zengwei Yao, Xiaoyu Yang, Piotr Żelasko, Daniel Povey
Date: 2022-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

The transducer architecture is becoming increasingly popular in the field of speech recognition, because it is naturally streaming as well as high in accuracy. One of the drawbacks of transducer is that it is difficult to decode in a fast and parallel way due to an unconstrained number of symbols that can be emitted per time step. In this work, we introduce a constrained version of transducer loss to learn strictly monotonic alignments between the sequences; we also improve the standard greedy search and beam search algorithms by limiting the number of symbols that can be emitted per time step in transducer decoding, making it more efficient to decode in parallel with batches. Furthermore, we propose an finite state automaton-based (FSA) parallel beam search algorithm that can run with graphs on GPU efficiently. The experiment results show that we achieve slight word error rate (WER) improvement as well as significant speedup in decoding. Our work is open-sourced and publicly available\footnote{https://github.com/k2-fsa/icefall}.
Delay-penalized transducer for low-latency streaming ASR
Authors: Wei Kang, Zengwei Yao, Fangjun Kuang, Liyong Guo, Xiaoyu Yang, Long Lin, Piotr Żelasko, Daniel Povey
Date: 2022-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

In streaming automatic speech recognition (ASR), it is desirable to reduce latency as much as possible while having minimum impact on recognition accuracy. Although a few existing methods are able to achieve this goal, they are difficult to implement due to their dependency on external alignments. In this paper, we propose a simple way to penalize symbol delay in transducer model, so that we can balance the trade-off between symbol delay and accuracy for streaming models without external alignments. Specifically, our method adds a small constant times (T/2 - t), where T is the number of frames and t is the current frame, to all the non-blank log-probabilities (after normalization) that are fed into the two dimensional transducer recursion. For both streaming Conformer models and unidirectional long short-term memory (LSTM) models, experimental results show that it can significantly reduce the symbol delay with an acceptable performance degradation. Our method achieves similar delay-accuracy trade-off to the previously published FastEmit, but we believe our method is preferable because it has a better justification: it is equivalent to penalizing the average symbol delay. Our work is open-sourced and publicly available (https://github.com/k2-fsa/k2).
Classical ensemble of Quantum-classical ML algorithms for Phishing detection in Ethereum transaction networks
Authors: Anupama Ray, Sai Sakunthala Guddanti, Vishnu Ajith, Dhinakaran Vinayagamurthy
Date: 2022-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Benchmarking, Quantum Machine Learning

Ethereum is one of the most valuable blockchain networks in terms of the total monetary value locked in it, and arguably been the most active network where new blockchain innovations in research and applications are demonstrated. But, this also leads to Ethereum network being susceptible to a wide variety of threats and attacks in an attempt to gain unreasonable advantage or to undermine the value of the users. Even with the state-of-art classical ML algorithms, detecting such attacks is still hard. This motivated us to build a hybrid system of quantum-classical algorithms that improves phishing detection in financial transaction networks. This paper presents a classical ensemble pipeline of classical and quantum algorithms and a detailed study benchmarking existing Quantum Machine Learning algorithms such as Quantum Support Vector Machine and Variational Quantum Classifier. With the current generation of quantum hardware available, smaller datasets are more suited to the QML models and most research restricts to hundreds of samples. However, we experimented on different data sizes and report results with a test data of 12K transaction nodes, which is to the best of the authors knowledge the largest QML experiment run so far on any real quantum hardware. The classical ensembles of quantum-classical models improved the macro F-score and phishing F-score. One key observation is QSVM constantly gives lower false positives, thereby higher precision compared with any other classical or quantum network, which is always preferred for any anomaly detection problem. This is true for QSVMs when used individually or via bagging of same models or in combination with other classical/quantum models making it the most advantageous quantum algorithm so far. The proposed ensemble framework is generic and can be applied for any classification task
Mixed Reality Interface for Digital Twin of Plant Factory
Authors: Byunghyun Ban
Date: 2022-10-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Mixed Reality

An easier and intuitive interface architecture is necessary for digital twin of plant factory. I suggest an immersive and interactive mixed reality interface for digital twin models of smart farming, for remote work rather than simulation of components. The environment is constructed with UI display and a streaming background scene, which is a real time scene taken from camera device located in the plant factory, processed with deformable neural radiance fields. User can monitor and control the remote plant factory facilities with HMD or 2D display based mixed reality environment. This paper also introduces detailed concept and describes the system architecture to implement suggested mixed reality interface.
Natural Language Deduction with Incomplete Information
Authors: Zayne Sprague, Kaj Bostrom, Swarat Chaudhuri, Greg Durrett
Date: 2022-11-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Generation

A growing body of work studies how to answer a question or verify a claim by generating a natural language "proof": a chain of deductive inferences yielding the answer based on a set of premises. However, these methods can only make sound deductions when they follow from evidence that is given. We propose a new system that can handle the underspecified setting where not all premises are stated at the outset; that is, additional assumptions need to be materialized to prove a claim. By using a natural language generation model to abductively infer a premise given another premise and a conclusion, we can impute missing pieces of evidence needed for the conclusion to be true. Our system searches over two fringes in a bidirectional fashion, interleaving deductive (forward-chaining) and abductive (backward-chaining) generation steps. We sample multiple possible outputs for each step to achieve coverage of the search space, at the same time ensuring correctness by filtering low-quality generations with a round-trip validation procedure. Results on a modified version of the EntailmentBank dataset and a new dataset called Everyday Norms: Why Not? show that abductive generation with validation can recover premises across in- and out-of-domain settings.
T5lephone: Bridging Speech and Text Self-supervised Models for Spoken Language Understanding via Phoneme level T5
Authors: Chan-Jan Hsu, Ho-Lam Chung, Hung-Yi Lee, Yu Tsao
Date: 2022-11-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Question Answering, Spoken Language Understanding

In Spoken language understanding (SLU), a natural solution is concatenating pre-trained speech models (e.g. HuBERT) and pretrained language models (PLM, e.g. T5). Most previous works use pretrained language models with subword-based tokenization. However, the granularity of input units affects the alignment of speech model outputs and language model inputs, and PLM with character-based tokenization is underexplored. In this work, we conduct extensive studies on how PLMs with different tokenization strategies affect spoken language understanding task including spoken question answering (SQA) and speech translation (ST). We further extend the idea to create T5lephone(pronounced as telephone), a variant of T5 that is pretrained using phonemicized text. We initialize T5lephone with existing PLMs to pretrain it using relatively lightweight computational resources. We reached state-of-the-art on NMSQA, and the T5lephone model exceeds T5 with other types of units on end-to-end SQA and ST.
TrimTail: Low-Latency Streaming ASR with Simple but Effective Spectrogram-Level Length Penalty
Authors: Xingchen Song, Di wu, Zhiyong Wu, BinBin Zhang, Yuekai Zhang, Zhendong Peng, Wenpeng Li, Fuping Pan, Changbao Zhu
Date: 2022-11-01 00:00:00

In this paper, we present TrimTail, a simple but effective emission regularization method to improve the latency of streaming ASR models. The core idea of TrimTail is to apply length penalty (i.e., by trimming trailing frames, see Fig. 1-(b)) directly on the spectrogram of input utterances, which does not require any alignment. We demonstrate that TrimTail is computationally cheap and can be applied online and optimized with any training loss or any model architecture on any dataset without any extra effort by applying it on various end-to-end streaming ASR networks either trained with CTC loss [1] or Transducer loss [2]. We achieve 100 $\sim$ 200ms latency reduction with equal or even better accuracy on both Aishell-1 and Librispeech. Moreover, by using TrimTail, we can achieve a 400ms algorithmic improvement of User Sensitive Delay (USD) with an accuracy loss of less than 0.2.
E2E Refined Dataset
Authors: Keisuke Toyama, Katsuhito Sudoh, Satoshi Nakamura
Date: 2022-11-01 00:00:00

Although the well-known MR-to-text E2E dataset has been used by many researchers, its MR-text pairs include many deletion/insertion/substitution errors. Since such errors affect the quality of MR-to-text systems, they must be fixed as much as possible. Therefore, we developed a refined dataset and some python programs that convert the original E2E dataset into a refined dataset.
Speech-text based multi-modal training with bidirectional attention for improved speech recognition
Authors: Yuhang Yang, HaiHua Xu, Hao Huang, Eng Siong Chng, Sheng Li
Date: 2022-11-01 00:00:00
Tasks: speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

To let the state-of-the-art end-to-end ASR model enjoy data efficiency, as well as much more unpaired text data by multi-modal training, one needs to address two problems: 1) the synchronicity of feature sampling rates between speech and language (aka text data); 2) the homogeneity of the learned representations from two encoders. In this paper we propose to employ a novel bidirectional attention mechanism (BiAM) to jointly learn both ASR encoder (bottom layers) and text encoder with a multi-modal learning method. The BiAM is to facilitate feature sampling rate exchange, realizing the quality of the transformed features for the one kind to be measured in another space, with diversified objective functions. As a result, the speech representations are enriched with more linguistic information, while the representations generated by the text encoder are more similar to corresponding speech ones, and therefore the shared ASR models are more amenable for unpaired text data pretraining. To validate the efficacy of the proposed method, we perform two categories of experiments with or without extra unpaired text data. Experimental results on Librispeech corpus show it can achieve up to 6.15% word error rate reduction (WERR) with only paired data learning, while 9.23% WERR when more unpaired text data is employed.
FRSUM: Towards Faithful Abstractive Summarization via Enhancing Factual Robustness
Authors: Wenhao Wu, Wei Li, Jiachen Liu, Xinyan Xiao, Ziqiang Cao, Sujian Li, Hua Wu
Date: 2022-11-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Abstractive Text Summarization

Despite being able to generate fluent and grammatical text, current Seq2Seq summarization models still suffering from the unfaithful generation problem. In this paper, we study the faithfulness of existing systems from a new perspective of factual robustness which is the ability to correctly generate factual information over adversarial unfaithful information. We first measure a model's factual robustness by its success rate to defend against adversarial attacks when generating factual information. The factual robustness analysis on a wide range of current systems shows its good consistency with human judgments on faithfulness. Inspired by these findings, we propose to improve the faithfulness of a model by enhancing its factual robustness. Specifically, we propose a novel training strategy, namely FRSUM, which teaches the model to defend against both explicit adversarial samples and implicit factual adversarial perturbations. Extensive automatic and human evaluation results show that FRSUM consistently improves the faithfulness of various Seq2Seq models, such as T5, BART.