pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Blockchain-based Access Control for Secure Smart Industry Management Systems
Authors: Aditya Pribadi Kalapaaking, Ibrahim Khalil, Mohammad Saidur Rahman, Abdelaziz Bouras
Date: 2023-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Cloud Computing, Management

Smart manufacturing systems involve a large number of interconnected devices resulting in massive data generation. Cloud computing technology has recently gained increasing attention in smart manufacturing systems for facilitating cost-effective service provisioning and massive data management. In a cloud-based manufacturing system, ensuring authorized access to the data is crucial. A cloud platform is operated under a single authority. Hence, a cloud platform is prone to a single point of failure and vulnerable to adversaries. An internal or external adversary can easily modify users' access to allow unauthorized users to access the data. This paper proposes a role-based access control to prevent modification attacks by leveraging blockchain and smart contracts in a cloud-based smart manufacturing system. The role-based access control is developed to determine users' roles and rights in smart contracts. The smart contracts are then deployed to the private blockchain network. We evaluate our solution by utilizing Ethereum private blockchain network to deploy the smart contract. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and evaluation of the proposed framework's performance.
Feed-Forward Optimization With Delayed Feedback for Neural Networks
Authors: Katharina Flügel, Daniel Coquelin, Marie Weiel, Charlotte Debus, Achim Streit, Markus Götz
Date: 2023-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Biologically-plausible Training, Computational Efficiency

Backpropagation has long been criticized for being biologically implausible, relying on concepts that are not viable in natural learning processes. This paper proposes an alternative approach to solve two core issues, i.e., weight transport and update locking, for biological plausibility and computational efficiency. We introduce Feed-Forward with delayed Feedback (F$^3$), which improves upon prior work by utilizing delayed error information as a sample-wise scaling factor to approximate gradients more accurately. We find that F$^3$ reduces the gap in predictive performance between biologically plausible training algorithms and backpropagation by up to 96%. This demonstrates the applicability of biologically plausible training and opens up promising new avenues for low-energy training and parallelization.
LoRaWAN-enabled Smart Campus: The Dataset and a People Counter Use Case
Authors: Eslam Eldeeb, Hirley Alves
Date: 2023-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Missing Values

IoT has a significant role in the smart campus. This paper presents a detailed description of the Smart Campus dataset based on LoRaWAN. LoRaWAN is an emerging technology that enables serving hundreds of IoT devices. First, we describe the LoRa network that connects the devices to the server. Afterward, we analyze the missing transmissions and propose a k-nearest neighbor solution to handle the missing values. Then, we predict future readings using a long short-term memory (LSTM). Finally, as one example application, we build a deep neural network to predict the number of people inside a room based on the selected sensor's readings. Our results show that our model achieves an accuracy of $95 \: \%$ in predicting the number of people. Moreover, the dataset is openly available and described in detail, which is opportunity for exploration of other features and applications.
Neuro-symbolic Zero-Shot Code Cloning with Cross-Language Intermediate Representation
Authors: Krishnam Hasija, Shrishti Pradhan, Manasi Patwardhan, Raveendra Kumar Medicherla, Lovekesh Vig, Ravindra Naik
Date: 2023-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: C++ code, Code Search

In this paper, we define a neuro-symbolic approach to address the task of finding semantically similar clones for the codes of the legacy programming language COBOL, without training data. We define a meta-model that is instantiated to have an Intermediate Representation (IR) in the form of Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs) common across codes in C and COBOL. We linearize the IRs using Structure Based Traversal (SBT) to create sequential inputs. We further fine-tune UnixCoder, the best-performing model for zero-shot cross-programming language code search, for the Code Cloning task with the SBT IRs of C code-pairs, available in the CodeNet dataset. This allows us to learn latent representations for the IRs of the C codes, which are transferable to the IRs of the COBOL codes. With this fine-tuned UnixCoder, we get a performance improvement of 12.85 MAP@2 over the pre-trained UniXCoder model, in a zero-shot setting, on the COBOL test split synthesized from the CodeNet dataset. This demonstrates the efficacy of our meta-model based approach to facilitate cross-programming language transfer.
Discrepancy-Guided Reconstruction Learning for Image Forgery Detection
Authors: Zenan Shi, Haipeng Chen, Long Chen, Dong Zhang
Date: 2023-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Forgery Detection

In this paper, we propose a novel image forgery detection paradigm for boosting the model learning capacity on both forgery-sensitive and genuine compact visual patterns. Compared to the existing methods that only focus on the discrepant-specific patterns (\eg, noises, textures, and frequencies), our method has a greater generalization. Specifically, we first propose a Discrepancy-Guided Encoder (DisGE) to extract forgery-sensitive visual patterns. DisGE consists of two branches, where the mainstream backbone branch is used to extract general semantic features, and the accessorial discrepant external attention branch is used to extract explicit forgery cues. Besides, a Double-Head Reconstruction (DouHR) module is proposed to enhance genuine compact visual patterns in different granular spaces. Under DouHR, we further introduce a Discrepancy-Aggregation Detector (DisAD) to aggregate these genuine compact visual patterns, such that the forgery detection capability on unknown patterns can be improved. Extensive experimental results on four challenging datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed method against state-of-the-art competitors.
Evaluation of Regularization-based Continual Learning Approaches: Application to HAR
Authors: Bonpagna Kann, Sandra Castellanos-Paez, Philippe Lalanda
Date: 2023-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Recognition, Continual Learning, Human Activity Recognition

Pervasive computing allows the provision of services in many important areas, including the relevant and dynamic field of health and well-being. In this domain, Human Activity Recognition (HAR) has gained a lot of attention in recent years. Current solutions rely on Machine Learning (ML) models and achieve impressive results. However, the evolution of these models remains difficult, as long as a complete retraining is not performed. To overcome this problem, the concept of Continual Learning is very promising today and, more particularly, the techniques based on regularization. These techniques are particularly interesting for their simplicity and their low cost. Initial studies have been conducted and have shown promising outcomes. However, they remain very specific and difficult to compare. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive comparison of three regularization-based methods that we adapted to the HAR domain, highlighting their strengths and limitations. Our experiments were conducted on the UCI HAR dataset and the results showed that no single technique outperformed all others in all scenarios considered.
A Portrait of Emotion: Empowering Self-Expression through AI-Generated Art
Authors: Yoon Kyung Lee, Yong-Ha Park, Sowon Hahn
Date: 2023-04-26 00:00:00

We investigated the potential and limitations of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in reflecting the authors' cognitive processes through creative expression. The focus is on the AI-generated artwork's ability to understand human intent (alignment) and visually represent emotions based on criteria such as creativity, aesthetic, novelty, amusement, and depth. Results show a preference for images based on the descriptions of the authors' emotions over the main events. We also found that images that overrepresent specific elements or stereotypes negatively impact AI alignment. Our findings suggest that AI could facilitate creativity and the self-expression of emotions. Our research framework with generative AIs can help design AI-based interventions in related fields (e.g., mental health education, therapy, and counseling).
Technical Note: Defining and Quantifying AND-OR Interactions for Faithful and Concise Explanation of DNNs
Authors: Mingjie Li, Quanshi Zhang
Date: 2023-04-26 00:00:00

In this technical note, we aim to explain a deep neural network (DNN) by quantifying the encoded interactions between input variables, which reflects the DNN's inference logic. Specifically, we first rethink the definition of interactions, and then formally define faithfulness and conciseness for interaction-based explanation. To this end, we propose two kinds of interactions, i.e., the AND interaction and the OR interaction. For faithfulness, we prove the uniqueness of the AND (OR) interaction in quantifying the effect of the AND (OR) relationship between input variables. Besides, based on AND-OR interactions, we design techniques to boost the conciseness of the explanation, while not hurting the faithfulness. In this way, the inference logic of a DNN can be faithfully and concisely explained by a set of symbolic concepts.
HiQ -- A Declarative, Non-intrusive, Dynamic and Transparent Observability and Optimization System
Authors: Fuheng Wu, Ivan Davchev, Jun Qian
Date: 2023-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

This paper proposes a non-intrusive, declarative, dynamic and transparent system called `HiQ` to track Python program runtime information without compromising on the run-time system performance and losing insight. HiQ can be used for monolithic and distributed systems, offline and online applications. HiQ is developed when we optimize our large deep neural network (DNN) models which are written in Python, but it can be generalized to any Python program or distributed system, or even other languages like Java. We have implemented the system and adopted it in our deep learning model life cycle management system to catch the bottleneck while keeping our production code clean and highly performant. The implementation is open-sourced at: [https://github.com/oracle/hiq](https://github.com/oracle/hiq).
Prompting GPT-3.5 for Text-to-SQL with De-semanticization and Skeleton Retrieval
Authors: Chunxi Guo, Zhiliang Tian, Jintao Tang, Pancheng Wang, Zhihua Wen, Kang Yang, Ting Wang
Date: 2023-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Informativeness, Retrieval, Text Generation, Text to SQL, Text-To-SQL

Text-to-SQL is a task that converts a natural language question into a structured query language (SQL) to retrieve information from a database. Large language models (LLMs) work well in natural language generation tasks, but they are not specifically pre-trained to understand the syntax and semantics of SQL commands. In this paper, we propose an LLM-based framework for Text-to-SQL which retrieves helpful demonstration examples to prompt LLMs. However, questions with different database schemes can vary widely, even if the intentions behind them are similar and the corresponding SQL queries exhibit similarities. Consequently, it becomes crucial to identify the appropriate SQL demonstrations that align with our requirements. We design a de-semanticization mechanism that extracts question skeletons, allowing us to retrieve similar examples based on their structural similarity. We also model the relationships between question tokens and database schema items (i.e., tables and columns) to filter out scheme-related information. Our framework adapts the range of the database schema in prompts to balance length and valuable information. A fallback mechanism allows for a more detailed schema to be provided if the generated SQL query fails. Ours outperforms state-of-the-art models and demonstrates strong generalization ability on three cross-domain Text-to-SQL benchmarks.
ESPT: A Self-Supervised Episodic Spatial Pretext Task for Improving Few-Shot Learning
Authors: Yi Rong, Xiongbo Lu, Zhaoyang Sun, Yaxiong Chen, Shengwu Xiong
Date: 2023-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Image Classification, Few-Shot Learning, image-classification, Image Classification, Self-Supervised Learning

Self-supervised learning (SSL) techniques have recently been integrated into the few-shot learning (FSL) framework and have shown promising results in improving the few-shot image classification performance. However, existing SSL approaches used in FSL typically seek the supervision signals from the global embedding of every single image. Therefore, during the episodic training of FSL, these methods cannot capture and fully utilize the local visual information in image samples and the data structure information of the whole episode, which are beneficial to FSL. To this end, we propose to augment the few-shot learning objective with a novel self-supervised Episodic Spatial Pretext Task (ESPT). Specifically, for each few-shot episode, we generate its corresponding transformed episode by applying a random geometric transformation to all the images in it. Based on these, our ESPT objective is defined as maximizing the local spatial relationship consistency between the original episode and the transformed one. With this definition, the ESPT-augmented FSL objective promotes learning more transferable feature representations that capture the local spatial features of different images and their inter-relational structural information in each input episode, thus enabling the model to generalize better to new categories with only a few samples. Extensive experiments indicate that our ESPT method achieves new state-of-the-art performance for few-shot image classification on three mainstay benchmark datasets. The source code will be available at: https://github.com/Whut-YiRong/ESPT.
Games for Artificial Intelligence Research: A Review and Perspectives
Authors: Chengpeng Hu, Yunlong Zhao, Ziqi Wang, Haocheng Du, Jialin Liu
Date: 2023-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Scheduling

Games have been the perfect test-beds for artificial intelligence research for the characteristics that widely exist in real-world scenarios. Learning and optimisation, decision making in dynamic and uncertain environments, game theory, planning and scheduling, design and education are common research areas shared between games and real-world problems. Numerous open-source games or game-based environments have been implemented for studying artificial intelligence. In addition to single- or multi-player, collaborative or adversarial games, there has also been growing interest in implementing platforms for creative design in recent years. Those platforms provide ideal benchmarks for exploring and comparing artificial intelligence ideas and techniques. This paper reviews the games and game-based platforms for artificial intelligence research, provides guidance on matching particular types of artificial intelligence with suitable games for testing and matching particular needs in games with suitable artificial intelligence techniques, discusses the research trend induced by the evolution of those games and platforms, and gives an outlook.
Bayesian Federated Learning: A Survey
Authors: Longbing Cao, Hui Chen, Xuhui Fan, Joao Gama, Yew-Soon Ong, Vipin Kumar
Date: 2023-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving, Survey

Federated learning (FL) demonstrates its advantages in integrating distributed infrastructure, communication, computing and learning in a privacy-preserving manner. However, the robustness and capabilities of existing FL methods are challenged by limited and dynamic data and conditions, complexities including heterogeneities and uncertainties, and analytical explainability. Bayesian federated learning (BFL) has emerged as a promising approach to address these issues. This survey presents a critical overview of BFL, including its basic concepts, its relations to Bayesian learning in the context of FL, and a taxonomy of BFL from both Bayesian and federated perspectives. We categorize and discuss client- and server-side and FL-based BFL methods and their pros and cons. The limitations of the existing BFL methods and the future directions of BFL research further address the intricate requirements of real-life FL applications.
Score-based Generative Modeling Through Backward Stochastic Differential Equations: Inversion and Generation
Authors: ZiHao Wang
Date: 2023-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Uncertainty Quantification

The proposed BSDE-based diffusion model represents a novel approach to diffusion modeling, which extends the application of stochastic differential equations (SDEs) in machine learning. Unlike traditional SDE-based diffusion models, our model can determine the initial conditions necessary to reach a desired terminal distribution by adapting an existing score function. We demonstrate the theoretical guarantees of the model, the benefits of using Lipschitz networks for score matching, and its potential applications in various areas such as diffusion inversion, conditional diffusion, and uncertainty quantification. Our work represents a contribution to the field of score-based generative learning and offers a promising direction for solving real-world problems.
Reinforcement Learning with Partial Parametric Model Knowledge
Authors: Shuyuan Wang, Philip D. Loewen, Nathan P. Lawrence, Michael G. Forbes, R. Bhushan Gopaluni
Date: 2023-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, model, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We adapt reinforcement learning (RL) methods for continuous control to bridge the gap between complete ignorance and perfect knowledge of the environment. Our method, Partial Knowledge Least Squares Policy Iteration (PLSPI), takes inspiration from both model-free RL and model-based control. It uses incomplete information from a partial model and retains RL's data-driven adaption towards optimal performance. The linear quadratic regulator provides a case study; numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and resulting benefits of the proposed method.
Exploiting CNNs for Semantic Segmentation with Pascal VOC
Authors: Sourabh Prakash, Priyanshi Shah, Ashrya Agrawal
Date: 2023-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Transfer Learning

In this paper, we present a comprehensive study on semantic segmentation with the Pascal VOC dataset. Here, we have to label each pixel with a class which in turn segments the entire image based on the objects/entities present. To tackle this, we firstly use a Fully Convolution Network (FCN) baseline which gave 71.31% pixel accuracy and 0.0527 mean IoU. We analyze its performance and working and subsequently address the issues in the baseline with three improvements: a) cosine annealing learning rate scheduler(pixel accuracy: 72.86%, IoU: 0.0529), b) data augmentation(pixel accuracy: 69.88%, IoU: 0.0585) c) class imbalance weights(pixel accuracy: 68.98%, IoU: 0.0596). Apart from these changes in training pipeline, we also explore three different architectures: a) Our proposed model -- Advanced FCN (pixel accuracy: 67.20%, IoU: 0.0602) b) Transfer Learning with ResNet (Best performance) (pixel accuracy: 71.33%, IoU: 0.0926 ) c) U-Net(pixel accuracy: 72.15%, IoU: 0.0649). We observe that the improvements help in greatly improving the performance, as reflected both, in metrics and segmentation maps. Interestingly, we observe that among the improvements, dataset augmentation has the greatest contribution. Also, note that transfer learning model performs the best on the pascal dataset. We analyse the performance of these using loss, accuracy and IoU plots along with segmentation maps, which help us draw valuable insights about the working of the models.
Towards Explainable and Safe Conversational Agents for Mental Health: A Survey
Authors: Surjodeep Sarkar, Manas Gaur, L. Chen, Muskan Garg, Biplav Srivastava, Bhaktee Dongaonkar
Date: 2023-04-25 00:00:00

Virtual Mental Health Assistants (VMHAs) are seeing continual advancements to support the overburdened global healthcare system that gets 60 million primary care visits, and 6 million Emergency Room (ER) visits annually. These systems are built by clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). At present, the role of VMHAs is to provide emotional support through information, focusing less on developing a reflective conversation with the patient. A more comprehensive, safe and explainable approach is required to build responsible VMHAs to ask follow-up questions or provide a well-informed response. This survey offers a systematic critical review of the existing conversational agents in mental health, followed by new insights into the improvements of VMHAs with contextual knowledge, datasets, and their emerging role in clinical decision support. We also provide new directions toward enriching the user experience of VMHAs with explainability, safety, and wholesome trustworthiness. Finally, we provide evaluation metrics and practical considerations for VMHAs beyond the current literature to build trust between VMHAs and patients in active communications.
Onboard Science Instrument Autonomy for the Detection of Microscopy Biosignatures on the Ocean Worlds Life Surveyor
Authors: Mark Wronkiewicz, Jake Lee, Lukas Mandrake, Jack Lightholder, Gary Doran, Steffen Mauceri, Taewoo Kim, Nathan Oborny, Thomas Schibler, Jay Nadeau, James K. Wallace, Eshaan Moorjani, Chris Lindensmith
Date: 2023-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Ingenuity

The quest to find extraterrestrial life is a critical scientific endeavor with civilization-level implications. Icy moons in our solar system are promising targets for exploration because their liquid oceans make them potential habitats for microscopic life. However, the lack of a precise definition of life poses a fundamental challenge to formulating detection strategies. To increase the chances of unambiguous detection, a suite of complementary instruments must sample multiple independent biosignatures (e.g., composition, motility/behavior, and visible structure). Such an instrument suite could generate 10,000x more raw data than is possible to transmit from distant ocean worlds like Enceladus or Europa. To address this bandwidth limitation, Onboard Science Instrument Autonomy (OSIA) is an emerging discipline of flight systems capable of evaluating, summarizing, and prioritizing observational instrument data to maximize science return. We describe two OSIA implementations developed as part of the Ocean Worlds Life Surveyor (OWLS) prototype instrument suite at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The first identifies life-like motion in digital holographic microscopy videos, and the second identifies cellular structure and composition via innate and dye-induced fluorescence. Flight-like requirements and computational constraints were used to lower barriers to infusion, similar to those available on the Mars helicopter, "Ingenuity." We evaluated the OSIA's performance using simulated and laboratory data and conducted a live field test at the hypersaline Mono Lake planetary analog site. Our study demonstrates the potential of OSIA for enabling biosignature detection and provides insights and lessons learned for future mission concepts aimed at exploring the outer solar system.