Title
Topic
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‘Style2Fab: Functionality-Aware Segmentation for Fabricating Personalized 3D Models With Generative AI’
“With recent advances in Generative AI, it is becoming easier to automatically manipulate 3D models. However, current methods tend to apply edits to models globally, which risks compromising the intended functionality of the 3D model when fabricated in the physical world. For example, modifying functional segments in 3D models, such as the base of a vase, could break the original functionality of the model, thus causing the vase to fall over. We introduce a method for automatically segmenting 3D models into functional and aesthetic elements.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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‘High-Throughput Microscopy Image Deblurring With Graph Reasoning Attention Network’
“High-quality (HQ) microscopy images afford more detailed information for modern life science research and quantitative image analyses. However, in practice, HQ microscopy images are not commonly available or suffer from blurring artifacts. Compared with natural images, such low-quality (LQ) microscopy ones often share some visual characteristics: more complex structures, less informative background, and repeating patterns. … To address those problems, we collect HQ electron microscopy and histology datasets and propose a graph reasoning attention network (GRAN).” Find the paper and full list of authors in the 2023 IEEE 20th International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging proceedings.
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‘MultiPL-E: A Scalable and Polyglot Approach to Benchmarking Neural Code Generation’
“Large language models have demonstrated the ability to generate both natural language and programming language text. Although contemporary code generation models are trained on corpora with several programming languages, they are tested using benchmarks that are typically monolingual. The most widely used code generation benchmarks only target Python, so there is little quantitative evidence of how code generation models perform on other programming languages. We propose MultiPL-E, a system for translating unit test-driven code generation benchmarks to new languages.” Find the paper and full list of authors at IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.
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‘NeRFInvertor: High Fidelity NeRF-GAN Inversion for Single-Shot Real Image Animation’
“Nerf-based Generative models have shown impressive capacity in generating high-quality images with consistent 3D geometry. Despite successful synthesis of fake identity images randomly sampled from latent space, adopting these models for generating face images of real subjects is still a challenging task due to its so-called inversion issue. In this paper, we propose a universal method to surgically finetune these NeRF-GAN models in order to achieve high-fidelity animation of real subjects only by a single image.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the 2023 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition proceedings.
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‘Viper: A Fast Snapshot Isolation Checker’
“Snapshot isolation (SI) is supported by most commercial databases and is widely used by applications. However, checking SI today — given a set of transactions, checking if they obey SI — is either slow or gives up soundness. We present viper, an SI checker that is sound, complete and fast. Viper checks black-box databases and hence is transparent to both users and databases. To be fast, viper introduces BC-polygraphs, a new representation of transaction dependencies.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Proceedings of the Eighteenth European Conference on Computer Systems.
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‘PAC-Learning for Strategic Classification’
‘The study of strategic or adversarial manipulation of testing data to fool a classifier has attracted much recent attention. Most previous works have focused on two extreme situations where any testing data point either is completely adversarial or always equally prefers the positive label. In this paper, we generalize both of these through a unified framework by considering strategic agents with heterogenous preferences, and introduce the notion of strategic VC-dimension (SVC) to capture the PAC-learnability in our general strategic setup. SVC provably generalizes the recent concept of adversarial VC-dimension (AVC).” Find the paper and full list of authors at JMLR.
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‘Framing Frames: Bypassing Wi-Fi Encryption by Manipulating Transmit Queues’
“Wi-Fi devices routinely queue frames at various layers of the network stack before transmitting, for instance, when the receiver is in sleep mode. In this work, we investigate how Wi-Fi access points manage the security context of queued frames. By exploiting power-save features, we show how to trick access points into leaking frames in plaintext, or encrypted using the group or an all-zero key. We demonstrate resulting attacks against several open-source network stacks.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the 32nd USENIX Security Symposium proceedings.
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‘One Tree to Rule Them All: Poly-Logarithmic Universal Steiner Tree’
“A spanning tree T of graph G is a ρ-approximate universal Steiner tree (UST) for root vertex r if, for any subset of vertices S containing r, the cost of the minimal subgraph of T connecting S is within a ρ factor of the minimum cost tree connecting S in G. … We settle [several] open questions by giving polynomial-time algorithms for computing both O(log7n)-approximate USTs and poly-logarithmic strong sparse partition hierarchies.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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‘OASIS: Optimal Arrangements for Sensing in SLAM’
“The number and arrangement of sensors on an autonomous mobile robot dramatically influence its perception capabilities. Ensuring that sensors are mounted in a manner that enables accurate detection, localization and mapping is essential for the success of downstream control tasks. However, when designing a new robotic platform, researchers and practitioners alike usually mimic standard configurations or maximize simple heuristics like field-of-view (FOV) coverage to decide where to place exteroceptive sensors. … We conduct an information-theoretic investigation of this overlooked element of mobile robotic perception in the context of simultaneous localization and mapping.” Find the paper and authors list at ArXiv.
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‘La Independiente: Designing Ubiquitous Systems for Latin American and Caribbean Women Crowdworkers’
“Since 2018, Venezuelans have contributed to 75% of leading AI crowd work platforms’ total workforce. … Few initiatives have investigated the impact of such work in the Global South through the lens of feminist theory. … We surveyed 55 LAC women on the crowd work platform Toloka to understand their personal goals, professional values and hardships. … Most participants shared a desire to hear the experiences of other women crowdworkers.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Adjunct Proceedings of the 2023 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and the International Symposium on Wearable…
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‘SCORE: A Second-Order Conic Initialization for Range-Aided SLAM’
“We present a novel initialization technique for the range-aided simultaneous localization and mapping (RA-SLAM) problem. In RA-SLAM we consider measurements of point-to-point distances in addition to measurements of rigid transformations to landmark or pose variables. Standard formulations of RA-SLAM approach the problem as non-convex optimization, which requires a good initialization to obtain quality results. The initialization technique proposed here relaxes the RA-SLAM problem to a convex problem which is then solved to determine an initialization for the original, non-convex problem.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation proceedings.
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‘Towards Automated Pain Assessment Using Embodied Conversational Agents’
“Narrative accounts are the ultimate authoritative source for pain assessment, and face-to-face encounters provide a rich context in which nonverbal conversational behavior can be used to enrich the detail in these descriptions. Embodied Conversational Agents—animated characters that simulate face-to-face conversation—can provide a medium for automated pain assessment in which multimodal pain narratives are elicited, clarified and grounded. … We describe work towards a conversational agent that elicits various aspects of a pain experience, followed by an empathic summary.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Companion Publication of the 25th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction.
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‘Improving Multiparty Interactions With a Robot Using Large Language Models’
“Speaker diarization is a key component of systems that support multiparty interactions of co-located users, such as meeting facilitation robots. The goal is to identify who spoke what, often to provide feedback, moderate participation, and personalize responses by the robot. … We leverage large language models (LLMs) to identify speaker labels from transcribed text and observe an exact match of 77% and a word level accuracy of 90%.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
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‘NPM-Follower: A Complete Dataset Tracking the NPM Ecosystem’
“Software developers typically rely upon a large network of dependencies to build their applications. … However, prior work on NPM dataset construction typically has two limitations: 1) only metadata is scraped, and 2) packages or versions that are deleted from NPM can not be scraped. … We present npm-follower, a dataset and crawling architecture which archives metadata and code of all packages and versions as they are published and is thus able to retain data which is later deleted.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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‘Sublinear Time Algorithms and Complexity of Approximate Maximum Matching’
“Sublinear time algorithms for approximating maximum matching size have long been studied. Much of the progress over the last two decades on this problem has been on the algorithmic side. … A more recent algorithm by [Behnezhad, Roghani, Rubinstein, and Saberi; SODA’23] obtains a slightly-better-than-1/2 approximation in O(n1+є) time (for arbitrarily small constant ε>0). … Proving any super-linear in n lower bound, even for (1−є)-approximations, has remained elusive. … In this paper, we prove the first super-linear in n lower bound for this problem.” Find the paper and authors list in the Proceedings of the 55th Annual ACM Symposium on…
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‘Testing Methods of Neural Systems Understanding’
“Neuroscientists apply a range of analysis tools to recorded neural activity in order to glean insights into how neural circuits drive behavior in organisms. … Can the tools of neuroscience be applied to artificial neural networks (ANNs) and if so what would this process tell us about ANNs, brains, and – most importantly – the tools themselves? Here we argue that applying analysis methods from neuroscience to ANNs will provide a much-needed test of the abilities of these tools.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Cognitive Systems Research.
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‘Flexible and Optimal Dependency Management via Max-SMT’
“Package managers such as NPM have become essential for software development. The NPM repository hosts over 2 million packages and serves over 43 billion downloads every week. Unfortunately, the NPM dependency solver has several shortcomings. … Although existing tools try to address these problems they are either brittle, rely on post hoc changes to the dependency tree, do not guarantee optimality, or are not composable. We present Pacsolve, a unifying framework and implementation for dependency solving which allows for customizable constraints and optimization goals.” Find the paper and full list of authors at the International Conference on Software Engineering proceedings.
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‘Active Learning for Classifying 2D Grid-Based Level Completability’
“Determining the completability of levels generated by procedural generators such as machine learning models can be challenging, as it can involve the use of solver agents that often require a significant amount of time to analyze and solve levels. Active learning is not yet widely adopted in game evaluations, although it has been used successfully in natural language processing, image and speech recognition, and computer vision, where the availability of labeled data is limited or expensive. In this paper, we propose the use of active learning for learning level completability classification.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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‘Persistent Memory Research in the Post-Optane Era’
“After over a decade of researcher anticipation for the arrival of persistent memory (PMem), the first shipments of 3D XPoint-based Intel Optane Memory in 2019 were quickly followed by its cancellation in 2022. Was this another case of an idea quickly fading from future to past tense, relegating work in this area to the graveyard of failed technologies? … Without persistent memory itself, is future PMem research doomed? We offer two arguments for why reports of the death of PMem research are greatly exaggerated.” Find the paper and authors list in the Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Disruptive Memory…
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‘The Digital-Safety Risks of Financial Technologies for Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence’
“Digital technologies play a growing role in exacerbating financial abuse for survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV). … Scant research has examined how consumer-facing financial technologies can facilitate or obstruct IPV-related attacks on a survivor’s financial well-being. … We simulated both close-range and remote attacks commonly used by IPV adversaries. We discover that mobile banking and peer-to-peer payment applications are generally ill-equipped to deal with user-interface bound (UI-bound) adversaries, permitting unauthorized access to logins, surreptitious surveillance and harassing messages and system prompts.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the 32nd USENIX Security Symposium proceedings.
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‘Continuing WebAssembly With Effect Handlers’
“WebAssembly (Wasm) is a low-level portable code format offering near native performance. It is intended as a compilation target for a wide variety of source languages. However, Wasm provides no direct support for non-local control flow features such as async/await, generators/iterators, lightweight threads, first-class continuations, etc. … We present WasmFX, an extension to Wasm which provides a universal target for non-local control features via effect handlers, enabling compilers to translate such features directly into Wasm. Our extension is minimal and only adds three main instructions for creating, suspending, and resuming continuations.” Find the paper and full list of authors at…
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‘Discovering Informative and Robust Positives for Video Domain Adaptation’
Unsupervised domain adaptation for video recognition is challenging where the domain shift includes both spatial variations and temporal dynamics. Previous works have focused on exploring contrastive learning for cross-domain alignment. However, limited variations in intra-domain positives, false cross-domain positives, and false negatives hinder contrastive learning from fulfilling intra-domain discrimination and cross-domain closeness. This paper presents a non-contrastive learning framework without relying on negative samples for unsupervised video domain adaptation.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ICLR 2023.
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‘Global Aligned Structured Sparsity Learning for Efficient Image Super-Resolution’
“Efficient image super-resolution (SR) has witnessed rapid progress thanks to novel lightweight architectures or model compression techniques (e.g., neural architecture search and knowledge distillation). Nevertheless, these methods consume considerable resources or/and neglect to squeeze out the network redundancy at a more fine-grained convolution filter level. … Structured pruning is known to be tricky when applied to SR networks because the extensive residual blocks demand the pruned indices of different layers to be the same. … In this article, we present Global Aligned Structured Sparsity Learning (GASSL) to resolve these problems.” Find the paper and full list of authors at IEEE…
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‘HammerDodger: A Lightweight Defense Framework Against RowHammer Attack on DNNs’
“RowHammer attacks have become a serious security problem on deep neural networks (DNNs). Some carefully induced bit-flips degrade the prediction accuracy of DNN models to random guesses. This work proposes a lightweight defense framework that detects and mitigates adversarial bit-flip attacks. We employ a dynamic channel-shuffling obfuscation scheme to present moving targets to the attack, and develop a logits-based model integrity monitor with negligible performance loss.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the 2023 60th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference.
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‘STABLE: Identifying and Mitigating Instability in Embeddings of the Degenerate Core’
“Are the embeddings of a graph’s degenerate core stable? What happens to the embeddings of nodes in the degenerate core as we systematically remove periphery nodes (by repeatedly peeling off κ-cores)? We discover three patterns w.r.t. instability in degenerate-core embeddings across a variety of popular graph embedding algorithms and datasets. We correlate instability with an increase in edge density, and then theoretically show that in the case of Erdös-Rényi graphs embedded with Laplacian Eigenmaps.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Proceedings of the 2023 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining.
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‘VertexSerum: Poisoning Graph Neural Networks for Link Inference’
“Graph neural networks (GNNs) have brought superb performance to various applications utilizing graph structural data, such as social analysis and fraud detection. The graph links, e.g., social relationships and transaction history, are sensitive and valuable information, which raises privacy concerns when using GNNs. To exploit these vulnerabilities, we propose VertexSerum, a novel graph poisoning attack that increases the effectiveness of graph link stealing by amplifying the link connectivity leakage. To infer node adjacency more accurately, we propose an attention mechanism that can be embedded into the link detection network.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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‘Implementation-Oblivious Transparent Checkpoint-Restart for MPI’
“This work presents experience with traditional use cases of checkpointing on a novel platform. A single codebase (MANA) transparently checkpoints production workloads for major available MPI implementations: “develop once, run everywhere”. The new platform enables application developers to compile their application against any of the available standards-compliant MPI implementations, and test each MPI implementation according to performance or other features.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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‘Ecosystem-Level Analysis of Deployed Machine Learning Reveals Homogeneous Outcomes’
“Machine learning is traditionally studied at the model level: researchers measure and improve the accuracy, robustness, bias, efficiency, and other dimensions of specific models. In practice, the societal impact of machine learning is determined by the surrounding context of machine learning deployments. To capture this, we introduce ecosystem-level analysis: rather than analyzing a single model, we consider the collection of models that are deployed in a given context.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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‘Random Oracle Combiners: Breaking the Concatenation Barrier for Collision-Resistance’
“Suppose two parties have hash functions h1 and h2 respectively, but each only trusts the security of their own. We wish to build a hash combiner Cʰ¹,ʰ² which is secure so long as either one of the underlying hash functions is. … In this case, concatenating the two hash outputs clearly works. Unfortunately, a long series of works … showed no (noticeably) shorter combiner for collision resistance is possible. … We argue the right formulation of the “hash combiner” is what we call random oracle (RO) combiners.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Cryptology ePrint Archive.
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‘Security With Functional Re-Encryption From CPA
“The notion of functional re-encryption security (funcCPA) for public-key encryption schemes was recently introduced by Akavia et al. (TCC’22), in the context of homomorphic encryption. This notion lies in between CPA security and CCA security: we give the attacker a functional re-encryption oracle instead of the decryption oracle of CCA security. … In this work we observe that funcCPA security may have applications beyond homomorphic encryption and set out to study its properties.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Cryptology ePrint Archive.