Abstract

We introduce the task of detection of competing model entities from scientific documents. We define competing models as those models that solve a particular task that is investigated in the target research document. The task is challenging due to the fact that contextual information is required from the entire target document to predict the model entities. Hence, traditional sequence labelling approaches fail in such settings. Furthermore, model entities themselves are long-tailed in nature, i.e, their prevalence in scientific literature is limited, along with a scarcity of labelled data for training supervised learning techniques. To address the above bottlenecks, we combine an Unsupervised Graph Ranking algorithm with a SciBERT-CRF based sequence labeller to predict the entities. We introduce a strong baseline using the above mentioned pipeline. Also, to address the label scarcity of long-tailed model entities, we use distant supervision leveraging an external Knowledge Base (KB) to generate synthetic training data. We address the problem of overfitting in small sized datasets for supervised NER baselines using a simple entity replacement technique. We introduce this model as part of a starting point for an end-to-end automated framework to extract relevant model names and link them with their respective cited papers from research documents. We believe this task will serve as an important starting point to map the research landscape of computer science in a scalable manner, needing minimal human intervention. The code and dataset is available in the given link : https://github.com/Swayatta/Competing-Models

Abstract

Automatic segmentation of retinal blood vessels from fundus images plays an important role in the computer aided diagnosis of retinal diseases. The task of blood vessel segmentation is challenging due to the extreme variations in morphology of the vessels against noisy background. In this paper, we formulate the segmentation task as a multi-label inference task and utilize the implicit advantages of the combination of convolutional neural networks and structured prediction. Our proposed convolutional neural network based model achieves strong performance and significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art for automatic retinal blood vessel segmentation on DRIVE dataset with 95.33% accuracy and 0.974 AUC score

Abstract

An autonomous broker that liaises between retail customers and power-generating companies (GenCos) is essential for the smart grid ecosystem. The effciency brought in by such brokers to the smart grid setup can be studied through a well-developed simulation environment. In this paper, we describe the design of one such intelligent energy broker called VidyutVanika21 (VV21) and analyze its performance using a simulation platform called PowerTAC (Power Trading Agent Competition). Specifcally, we discuss the retail (VV21–RM) and wholesale market (VV21–WM) modules of VV21 that help the broker achieve high net profts in a competitive setup. Supported by game-theoretic analysis, the VV21–RM designs tariff contracts that a) maintain a balanced portfolio of different types of customers; b) sustain an appropriate level of market share, and c) introduce surcharges on customers to reduce energy usage during peak demand times. The VV21–WM aims to reduce the cost of procurement by following the supply curve of the GenCo to identify its lowest ask for each auction which is then used to generate suitable bids. We further demonstrate the effcacy of the retail and wholesale strategies of VV21 in PowerTAC 2021 fnals and through several controlled experiments.

Abstract

Multiple business scenarios require an automated generation of descriptive human-readable text from structured input data. Hence, fact-to-text generation systems have been developed for various downstream tasks like generating soccer reports, weather and financial reports, medical reports, person biographies, etc. Unfortunately, previous work on fact-to-text (F2T) generation has focused primarily on English mainly due to the high availability of relevant datasets. Only recently, the problem of cross-lingual fact-to-text (XF2T) was proposed for generation across multiple languages alongwith a dataset, XALIGN for eight languages. However, there has been no rigorous work on the actual XF2T generation problem. We extend XALIGN dataset with annotated data for four more languages: Punjabi, Malayalam, Assamese and Oriya. We conduct an extensive study using popular Transformer-based text generation models on our extended multi-lingual dataset, which we call XALIGNV2. Further, we investigate the performance of different text generation strategies: multiple variations of pretraining, fact-aware embeddings and structure-aware input encoding. Our extensive experiments show that a multi-lingual mT5 model which uses fact-aware embeddings with structure-aware input encoding leads to best results on average across the twelve languages. We make our code, dataset and model publicly available, and hope that this will help advance further research in this critical area.

Abstract

Reinforcement Learning (RL) enables agents to learn how to perform various tasks from scratch. In domains like autonomous driving, recommendation systems, and more, optimal RL policies learned could cause a privacy breach if the policies memorize any part of the private reward. We study the set of existing differentially-private RL policies derived from various RL algorithms such as Value Iteration, Deep-Q Networks, and Vanilla Proximal Policy Optimization. We propose a new Privacy-Aware Inverse RL analysis framework (PRIL) that involves performing reward reconstruction as an adversarial attack on private policies that the agents may deploy. For this, we introduce the reward reconstruction attack, wherein we seek to reconstruct the original reward from a privacy-preserving policy using the Inverse RL algorithm. An adversary must do poorly at reconstructing the original reward function if the agent uses a tightly private policy. Using this framework, we empirically test the effectiveness of the privacy guarantee offered by the private algorithms on instances of the FrozenLake domain of varying complexities. Based on the analysis performed, we infer a gap between the current standard of privacy offered and the standard of privacy needed to protect reward functions in RL. We do so by quantifying the extent to which each private policy protects the reward function by measuring distances between the original and reconstructed rewards.

Abstract

A method for viding maximum traffic flow throughput and controlling vehicular pollution concentration is pro vided . The method includes ( i ) processing a source location and a destination location obtained from a user device associated with a user to determine at least one possible route to reach the destination location from the source location , ( ii ) determining at least one maximum flow route that includes at least one edge with an edge capacity from the at least one possible route , ( iii ) determining maximum traffic flow capacity for the at least one maximum flow route , ( iv ) determining active traffic flow routes by comparing continuously if shared or common edges of a plurality of route solutions is less than or equal to a pre - defined limit and ( v ) partitioning the maximum traffic flow capacity for the active traffic flow routes and permuting each partition of the maximum traffic flow capacity for the active traffic flow routes .

Abstract

Moving target defense (MTD) has emerged as a key technique that can be used in various security applications to reduce the threat of attackers by taking away their ability to perform reconnaissance and exploit vulnerabilities. However, most of the existing research in the field assumes unrealistic access to information about the attacker’s motivations and/or actions when developing MTD strategies. Many of the existing approaches also assume complete knowledge regarding the vulnerabilities of a particular application and how each of these vulnerabilities can be exploited by an attacker. In this work, we propose an algorithm that generates effective MTD strategies for web applications that does not rely on prior knowledge about the attackers. Our approach assumes that the only information the defender receives about its own reward function, is via interaction with the attacker in a repeated game setting. We evaluate our algorithm using data which is mined from the National Vulnerability Database to show that it matches the performance of the state of the art techniques, despite using much less information.

Abstract

Finding or tracking the location of an object accurately is a crucial problem in defense applications, robotics and computer vision. Radars fall into the spectrum of high-end defense sensors or systems upon which the security and surveillance of the entire world depends. There has been a lot of focus on the topic of Multi Sensor Tracking in recent years, with radars as the sensors. The Indian Air Force uses a Multi Sensor Tracking (MST) system to detect flights pan India, developed and supported by BEL (Bharat Electronics Limited), a defense agency we are working with. In this paper, we describe our Machine Learning approach, which is built on top of the existing system, the Air force uses. For purposes of this work, we trained our models on about 13 million anonymized real Multi Sensor tracking data points provided by radars performing tracking activity across the Indian air space. The approach has shown an increase in the accuracy of tracking by 5 percent from 91 to 96. The model and the corresponding code were transitioned to BEL, which has been tested in their simulation environment with a plan to take forward for ground testing. Our approach comprises of 3 steps:(a) We train a Neural Network model and a CatBoost model and ensemble them using a Logistic Regression model to predict one type of error, namely Splitting error, which can help to improve the accuracy of tracking.(b) We again train a Neural Network model and a CatBoost model and ensemble them using a different Logistic Regression model to predict the second type of error, namely Merging error, which can further improve the accuracy of tracking.(c) We use cosine …

Abstract

Recent focus on transcriptomic studies in food crops like rice, wheat and maize provide new opportunities to address issues related to agriculture and climate change. Re-analysis of such data available in public domain supplemented with annotations across molecular hierarchy can be of immense help to the plant research community, particularly co-expression networks representing transcriptionally coordinated genes that are often part of the same biological process. With this objective, we have developed NetREx, a Network-based Rice Expression Analysis Server, that hosts ranked co-expression networks of Oryza sativa using publicly available messenger RNA sequencing data across uniform experimental conditions. It provides a range of interactable data viewers and modules for analysing user-queried genes across different stress conditions (drought, flood, cold and osmosis) and hormonal treatments (abscisic and jasmonic acid) and tissues (root and shoot). Subnetworks of user-defined genes can be queried in pre-constructed tissue-specific networks, allowing users to view the fold change, module memberships, gene annotations and analysis of their neighbourhood genes and associated pathways. The web server also allows querying of orthologous genes from Arabidopsis, wheat, maize, barley and sorghum. Here, we demonstrate that NetREx can be used to identify novel candidate genes and tissue-specific interactions under stress conditions and can aid in the analysis and understanding of complex phenotypes linked to stress response in rice.

Abstract

Crowdfunding is an efficient method for raising funds for projects. When used for non-excludable public projects, the process is termed Civic Crowdfunding (CC) and is an active research area. Researchers have analyzed CC in game-theoretic settings assuming that agents are interested in (and contribute to) a single public project. Gen- eralizing the existing single project theory to determine agents’ equilibrium contributions for multiple projects is non-trivial – espe- cially with budget-constrained agents. This work hypothesizes that the agents can learn their equilibrium contributions with repeated participation in multi-project CC. We model CC as a game to vali- date the hypothesis and build an RL-based simulator: EqC-Learner. We first show that EqC-Learner learns a policy that mimics equi- librium contributions in a single project case for the existing CC mechanisms. To validate EqC-Learner for the multi-project case, we present certain theoretical results for the general multi-project case. Via extensive simulation-based experiments, we show that the learned contributions in EqC-Learner follow all the available theo- retical analysis. Thus, we believe that such an RL-based simulator can learn equilibrium contributions for the general multi-project CC mechanism