This note is an attempt to unconditionally prove the existence of weak one way functions (OWF). Starting from a provably intractable decision problem $L_D$ (whose existence is nonconstructively assured from the well-known discrete time-hierarchy theorem from complexity theory), we construct another intractable decision problem $L\subseteq \{0,1\}^*$ that has its words scattered across $\{0,1\}^\ell$ at a relative frequency $p(\ell)$, for which upper and lower bounds can be worked out. The value $p(\ell)$ is computed from the density of the language within $\{0,1\}^\ell$ divided by the total word count $2^\ell$. It corresponds to the probability of retrieving a yes-instance of a decision problem upon a uniformly random draw from $\{0,1\}^\ell$. The trick to find a language with known bounds on $p(\ell)$ relies on switching from $L_D$ to $L_0:=L_D\cap L'$, where $L'$ is an easy-to-decide language with a known density across $\{0,1\}^*$. In defining $L'$ properly (and upon a suitable G\"odel numbering), the hardness of deciding $L_D\cap L'$ is inherited from $L_D$, while its density is controlled by that of $L'$. The lower and upper approximation of $p(\ell)$ then let us construct an explicit threshold function (as in random graph theory) that can be used to efficiently and intentionally sample yes- or no-instances of the decision problem (language) $L_0$ (however, without any auxiliary information that could ease the decision like a polynomial witness). In turn, this allows to construct a weak OWF that encodes a bit string $w\in\{0,1\}^*$ by efficiently (in polynomial time) emitting a sequence of randomly constructed intractable decision problems, whose answers correspond to the preimage $w$.
Satellite Image Time Series (SITS) representation learning is complex due to high spatiotemporal resolutions, irregular acquisition times, and intricate spatiotemporal interactions. These challenges result in specialized neural network architectures tailored for SITS analysis. The field has witnessed promising results achieved by pioneering researchers, but transferring the latest advances or established paradigms from Computer Vision (CV) to SITS is still highly challenging due to the existing suboptimal representation learning framework. In this paper, we develop a novel perspective of SITS processing as a direct set prediction problem, inspired by the recent trend in adopting query-based transformer decoders to streamline the object detection or image segmentation pipeline. We further propose to decompose the representation learning process of SITS into three explicit steps: collect-update-distribute, which is computationally efficient and suits for irregularly-sampled and asynchronous temporal satellite observations. Facilitated by the unique reformulation, our proposed temporal learning backbone of SITS, initially pre-trained on the resource efficient pixel-set format and then fine-tuned on the downstream dense prediction tasks, has attained new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on the PASTIS benchmark dataset. Specifically, the clear separation between temporal and spatial components in the semantic/panoptic segmentation pipeline of SITS makes us leverage the latest advances in CV, such as the universal image segmentation architecture, resulting in a noticeable 2.5 points increase in mIoU and 8.8 points increase in PQ, respectively, compared to the best scores reported so far.
We present a new procedure to infer size bounds for integer programs automatically. Size bounds are important for the deduction of bounds on the runtime complexity or in general, for the resource analysis of programs. We show that our technique is complete (i.e., it always computes finite size bounds) for a subclass of loops, possibly with non-linear arithmetic. Moreover, we present a novel approach to combine and integrate this complete technique into an incomplete approach to infer size and runtime bounds of general integer programs. We prove completeness of our integration for an important subclass of integer programs. We implemented our new algorithm in the automated complexity analysis tool KoAT to evaluate its power, in particular on programs with non-linear arithmetic.
This tutorial serves as an introduction to recently developed non-asymptotic methods in the theory of -- mainly linear -- system identification. We emphasize tools we deem particularly useful for a range of problems in this domain, such as the covering technique, the Hanson-Wright Inequality and the method of self-normalized martingales. We then employ these tools to give streamlined proofs of the performance of various least-squares based estimators for identifying the parameters in autoregressive models. We conclude by sketching out how the ideas presented herein can be extended to certain nonlinear identification problems.
The edge computing paradigm helps handle the Internet of Things (IoT) generated data in proximity to its source. Challenges occur in transferring, storing, and processing this rapidly growing amount of data on resource-constrained edge devices. Symbolic Representation (SR) algorithms are promising solutions to reduce the data size by converting actual raw data into symbols. Also, they allow data analytics (e.g., anomaly detection and trend prediction) directly on symbols, benefiting large classes of edge applications. However, existing SR algorithms are centralized in design and work offline with batch data, which is infeasible for real-time cases. We propose SymED - Symbolic Edge Data representation method, i.e., an online, adaptive, and distributed approach for symbolic representation of data on edge. SymED is based on the Adaptive Brownian Bridge-based Aggregation (ABBA), where we assume low-powered IoT devices do initial data compression (senders) and the more robust edge devices do the symbolic conversion (receivers). We evaluate SymED by measuring compression performance, reconstruction accuracy through Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) distance, and computational latency. The results show that SymED is able to (i) reduce the raw data with an average compression rate of 9.5%; (ii) keep a low reconstruction error of 13.25 in the DTW space; (iii) simultaneously provide real-time adaptability for online streaming IoT data at typical latencies of 42ms per symbol, reducing the overall network traffic.
Detection of hate speech has been formulated as a standalone application of NLP and different approaches have been adopted for identifying the target groups, obtaining raw data, defining the labeling process, choosing the detection algorithm, and evaluating the performance in the desired setting. However, unlike other downstream tasks, hate speech suffers from the lack of large-sized, carefully curated, generalizable datasets owing to the highly subjective nature of the task. In this paper, we first analyze the issues surrounding hate speech detection through a data-centric lens. We then outline a holistic framework to encapsulate the data creation pipeline across seven broad dimensions by taking the specific example of hate speech towards sexual minorities. We posit that practitioners would benefit from following this framework as a form of best practice when creating hate speech datasets in the future.
Computing planar orthogonal drawings with the minimum number of bends is one of the most relevant topics in Graph Drawing. The problem is known to be NP-hard, even when we want to test the existence of a rectilinear planar drawing, i.e., an orthogonal drawing without bends (Garg and Tamassia, 2001). From the parameterized complexity perspective, the problem is fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by the sum of three parameters: the number of bends, the number of vertices of degree at most two, and the treewidth of the input graph (Di Giacomo et al., 2022). We improve this last result by showing that the problem remains fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized only by the number of vertices of degree at most two plus the number of bends. As a consequence, rectilinear planarity testing lies in \FPT~parameterized by the number of vertices of degree at most two.
Graph representations are the generalization of geometric graph drawings from the plane to higher dimensions. A method introduced by Tutte to optimize properties of graph drawings is to minimize their energy. We explore this minimization for spherical graph representations, where the vertices lie on a unit sphere such that the origin is their barycentre. We present a primal and dual semidefinite program which can be used to find such a spherical graph representation minimizing the energy. We denote the optimal value of this program by $\rho(G)$ for a given graph $G$. The value turns out to be related to the second largest eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix of $G$, which we denote by $\lambda_2$. We show that for $G$ regular, $\rho(G) \leq \frac{\lambda_{2}}{2} \cdot v(G)$, and that equality holds if and only if the $\lambda_{2}$ eigenspace contains a spherical 1-design. Moreover, if $G$ is a random $d$-regular graph, $\rho(G)=\left(\sqrt{(d-1)} +o(1)\right)\cdot v(G)$, asymptotically almost surely.
The aim of latent variable disentanglement is to infer the multiple informative latent representations that lie behind a data generation process and is a key factor in controllable data generation. In this paper, we propose a deep neural network-based self-supervised learning method to infer the disentangled rhythmic and harmonic representations behind music audio generation. We train a variational autoencoder that generates an audio mel-spectrogram from two latent features representing the rhythmic and harmonic content. In the training phase, the variational autoencoder is trained to reconstruct the input mel-spectrogram given its pitch-shifted version. At each forward computation in the training phase, a vector rotation operation is applied to one of the latent features, assuming that the dimensions of the feature vectors are related to pitch intervals. Therefore, in the trained variational autoencoder, the rotated latent feature represents the pitch-related information of the mel-spectrogram, and the unrotated latent feature represents the pitch-invariant information, i.e., the rhythmic content. The proposed method was evaluated using a predictor-based disentanglement metric on the learned features. Furthermore, we demonstrate its application to the automatic generation of music remixes.
Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) leverages AI approaches to handle the massive amount of data generated during the operations of software systems. Prior works have proposed various AIOps solutions to support different tasks in system operations and maintenance, such as anomaly detection. In this study, we conduct an in-depth analysis of open-source AIOps projects to understand the characteristics of AIOps in practice. We first carefully identify a set of AIOps projects from GitHub and analyze their repository metrics (e.g., the used programming languages). Then, we qualitatively examine the projects to understand their input data, analysis techniques, and goals. Finally, we assess the quality of these projects using different quality metrics, such as the number of bugs. To provide context, we also sample two sets of baseline projects from GitHub: a random sample of machine learning projects and a random sample of general-purposed projects. By comparing different metrics between our identified AIOps projects and these baselines, we derive meaningful insights. Our results reveal a recent and growing interest in AIOps solutions. However, the quality metrics indicate that AIOps projects suffer from more issues than our baseline projects. We also pinpoint the most common issues in AIOps approaches and discuss potential solutions to address these challenges. Our findings offer valuable guidance to researchers and practitioners, enabling them to comprehend the current state of AIOps practices and shed light on different ways of improving AIOps' weaker aspects. To the best of our knowledge, this work marks the first attempt to characterize open-source AIOps projects.
AI is undergoing a paradigm shift with the rise of models (e.g., BERT, DALL-E, GPT-3) that are trained on broad data at scale and are adaptable to a wide range of downstream tasks. We call these models foundation models to underscore their critically central yet incomplete character. This report provides a thorough account of the opportunities and risks of foundation models, ranging from their capabilities (e.g., language, vision, robotics, reasoning, human interaction) and technical principles(e.g., model architectures, training procedures, data, systems, security, evaluation, theory) to their applications (e.g., law, healthcare, education) and societal impact (e.g., inequity, misuse, economic and environmental impact, legal and ethical considerations). Though foundation models are based on standard deep learning and transfer learning, their scale results in new emergent capabilities,and their effectiveness across so many tasks incentivizes homogenization. Homogenization provides powerful leverage but demands caution, as the defects of the foundation model are inherited by all the adapted models downstream. Despite the impending widespread deployment of foundation models, we currently lack a clear understanding of how they work, when they fail, and what they are even capable of due to their emergent properties. To tackle these questions, we believe much of the critical research on foundation models will require deep interdisciplinary collaboration commensurate with their fundamentally sociotechnical nature.