Docker is a popular tool for developers and organizations to package, deploy, and run applications in a lightweight, portable container. One key component of Docker is the Dockerfile, a simple text file that specifies the steps needed to build a Docker image. While Dockerfiles are easy to create and use, creating an optimal image is complex in particular since it is easy to not follow the best practices, when it happens we call it Docker smell. To improve the quality of Dockerfiles, previous works have focused on detecting Docker smells, but they do not offer suggestions or repair the smells. In this paper, we propose, Parfum, a tool that detects and automatically repairs Docker smells while producing minimal patches. Parfum is based on a new Dockerfile AST parser called Dinghy. We evaluate the effectiveness of Parfum by analyzing and repairing a large set of Dockerfiles and comparing it against existing tools. We also measure the impact of the repair on the Docker image in terms of build failure and image size. Finally, we opened 35 pull requests to collect developers' feedback and ensure that the repairs and the smells are meaningful. Our results show that Parfum is able to repair 806 245 Docker smells and have a significant impact on the Docker image size, and finally, developers are welcoming the patches generated by Parfum while merging 20 pull requests.
This paper evaluates XGboost's performance given different dataset sizes and class distributions, from perfectly balanced to highly imbalanced. XGBoost has been selected for evaluation, as it stands out in several benchmarks due to its detection performance and speed. After introducing the problem of fraud detection, the paper reviews evaluation metrics for detection systems or binary classifiers, and illustrates with examples how different metrics work for balanced and imbalanced datasets. Then, it examines the principles of XGBoost. It proposes a pipeline for data preparation and compares a Vanilla XGBoost against a random search-tuned XGBoost. Random search fine-tuning provides consistent improvement for large datasets of 100 thousand samples, not so for medium and small datasets of 10 and 1 thousand samples, respectively. Besides, as expected, XGBoost recognition performance improves as more data is available, and deteriorates detection performance as the datasets become more imbalanced. Tests on distributions with 50, 45, 25, and 5 percent positive samples show that the largest drop in detection performance occurs for the distribution with only 5 percent positive samples. Sampling to balance the training set does not provide consistent improvement. Therefore, future work will include a systematic study of different techniques to deal with data imbalance and evaluating other approaches, including graphs, autoencoders, and generative adversarial methods, to deal with the lack of labels.
Named entity recognition is a traditional task in natural language processing. In particular, nested entity recognition receives extensive attention for the widespread existence of the nesting scenario. The latest research migrates the well-established paradigm of set prediction in object detection to cope with entity nesting. However, the manual creation of query vectors, which fail to adapt to the rich semantic information in the context, limits these approaches. An end-to-end entity detection approach with proposer and regressor is presented in this paper to tackle the issues. First, the proposer utilizes the feature pyramid network to generate high-quality entity proposals. Then, the regressor refines the proposals for generating the final prediction. The model adopts encoder-only architecture and thus obtains the advantages of the richness of query semantics, high precision of entity localization, and easiness of model training. Moreover, we introduce the novel spatially modulated attention and progressive refinement for further improvement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves advanced performance in flat and nested NER, achieving a new state-of-the-art F1 score of 80.74 on the GENIA dataset and 72.38 on the WeiboNER dataset.
Deep neural networks (DNN) have outstanding performance in various applications. Despite numerous efforts of the research community, out-of-distribution (OOD) samples remain a significant limitation of DNN classifiers. The ability to identify previously unseen inputs as novel is crucial in safety-critical applications such as self-driving cars, unmanned aerial vehicles, and robots. Existing approaches to detect OOD samples treat a DNN as a black box and evaluate the confidence score of the output predictions. Unfortunately, this method frequently fails, because DNNs are not trained to reduce their confidence for OOD inputs. In this work, we introduce a novel method for OOD detection. Our method is motivated by theoretical analysis of neuron activation patterns (NAP) in ReLU-based architectures. The proposed method does not introduce a high computational overhead due to the binary representation of the activation patterns extracted from convolutional layers. The extensive empirical evaluation proves its high performance on various DNN architectures and seven image datasets.
Anomaly detection (AD) is a crucial machine learning task that aims to learn patterns from a set of normal training samples to identify abnormal samples in test data. Most existing AD studies assume that the training and test data are drawn from the same data distribution, but the test data can have large distribution shifts arising in many real-world applications due to different natural variations such as new lighting conditions, object poses, or background appearances, rendering existing AD methods ineffective in such cases. In this paper, we consider the problem of anomaly detection under distribution shift and establish performance benchmarks on three widely-used AD and out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization datasets. We demonstrate that simple adaptation of state-of-the-art OOD generalization methods to AD settings fails to work effectively due to the lack of labeled anomaly data. We further introduce a novel robust AD approach to diverse distribution shifts by minimizing the distribution gap between in-distribution and OOD normal samples in both the training and inference stages in an unsupervised way. Our extensive empirical results on the three datasets show that our approach substantially outperforms state-of-the-art AD methods and OOD generalization methods on data with various distribution shifts, while maintaining the detection accuracy on in-distribution data.
Smart contracts are programs deployed on a blockchain and are immutable once deployed. Reentrancy, one of the most important vulnerabilities in smart contracts, has caused millions of dollars in financial loss. Many reentrancy detection approaches have been proposed. It is necessary to investigate the performance of these approaches to provide useful guidelines for their application. In this work, we conduct a large-scale empirical study on the capability of five well-known or recent reentrancy detection tools such as Mythril and Sailfish. We collect 230,548 verified smart contracts from Etherscan and use detection tools to analyze 139,424 contracts after deduplication, which results in 21,212 contracts with reentrancy issues. Then, we manually examine the defective functions located by the tools in the contracts. From the examination results, we obtain 34 true positive contracts with reentrancy and 21,178 false positive contracts without reentrancy. We also analyze the causes of the true and false positives. Finally, we evaluate the tools based on the two kinds of contracts. The results show that more than 99.8% of the reentrant contracts detected by the tools are false positives with eight types of causes, and the tools can only detect the reentrancy issues caused by call.value(), 58.8% of which can be revealed by the Ethereum's official IDE, Remix. Furthermore, we collect real-world reentrancy attacks reported in the past two years and find that the tools fail to find any issues in the corresponding contracts. Based on the findings, existing works on reentrancy detection appear to have very limited capability, and researchers should turn the rudder to discover and detect new reentrancy patterns except those related to call.value().
Few-shot object detection (FSOD) aims to expand an object detector for novel categories given only a few instances for training. The few training samples restrict the performance of FSOD model. Recent text-to-image generation models have shown promising results in generating high-quality images. How applicable these synthetic images are for FSOD tasks remains under-explored. This work extensively studies how synthetic images generated from state-of-the-art text-to-image generators benefit FSOD tasks. We focus on two perspectives: (1) How to use synthetic data for FSOD? (2) How to find representative samples from the large-scale synthetic dataset? We design a copy-paste-based pipeline for using synthetic data. Specifically, saliency object detection is applied to the original generated image, and the minimum enclosing box is used for cropping the main object based on the saliency map. After that, the cropped object is randomly pasted on the image, which comes from the base dataset. We also study the influence of the input text of text-to-image generator and the number of synthetic images used. To construct a representative synthetic training dataset, we maximize the diversity of the selected images via a sample-based and cluster-based method. However, the severe problem of high false positives (FP) ratio of novel categories in FSOD can not be solved by using synthetic data. We propose integrating CLIP, a zero-shot recognition model, into the FSOD pipeline, which can filter 90% of FP by defining a threshold for the similarity score between the detected object and the text of the predicted category. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO validate the effectiveness of our method, in which performance gain is up to 21.9% compared to the few-shot baseline.
Detection and recognition of text in natural images are two main problems in the field of computer vision that have a wide variety of applications in analysis of sports videos, autonomous driving, industrial automation, to name a few. They face common challenging problems that are factors in how text is represented and affected by several environmental conditions. The current state-of-the-art scene text detection and/or recognition methods have exploited the witnessed advancement in deep learning architectures and reported a superior accuracy on benchmark datasets when tackling multi-resolution and multi-oriented text. However, there are still several remaining challenges affecting text in the wild images that cause existing methods to underperform due to there models are not able to generalize to unseen data and the insufficient labeled data. Thus, unlike previous surveys in this field, the objectives of this survey are as follows: first, offering the reader not only a review on the recent advancement in scene text detection and recognition, but also presenting the results of conducting extensive experiments using a unified evaluation framework that assesses pre-trained models of the selected methods on challenging cases, and applies the same evaluation criteria on these techniques. Second, identifying several existing challenges for detecting or recognizing text in the wild images, namely, in-plane-rotation, multi-oriented and multi-resolution text, perspective distortion, illumination reflection, partial occlusion, complex fonts, and special characters. Finally, the paper also presents insight into the potential research directions in this field to address some of the mentioned challenges that are still encountering scene text detection and recognition techniques.
It is a common paradigm in object detection frameworks to treat all samples equally and target at maximizing the performance on average. In this work, we revisit this paradigm through a careful study on how different samples contribute to the overall performance measured in terms of mAP. Our study suggests that the samples in each mini-batch are neither independent nor equally important, and therefore a better classifier on average does not necessarily mean higher mAP. Motivated by this study, we propose the notion of Prime Samples, those that play a key role in driving the detection performance. We further develop a simple yet effective sampling and learning strategy called PrIme Sample Attention (PISA) that directs the focus of the training process towards such samples. Our experiments demonstrate that it is often more effective to focus on prime samples than hard samples when training a detector. Particularly, On the MSCOCO dataset, PISA outperforms the random sampling baseline and hard mining schemes, e.g. OHEM and Focal Loss, consistently by more than 1% on both single-stage and two-stage detectors, with a strong backbone ResNeXt-101.
This paper introduces an online model for object detection in videos designed to run in real-time on low-powered mobile and embedded devices. Our approach combines fast single-image object detection with convolutional long short term memory (LSTM) layers to create an interweaved recurrent-convolutional architecture. Additionally, we propose an efficient Bottleneck-LSTM layer that significantly reduces computational cost compared to regular LSTMs. Our network achieves temporal awareness by using Bottleneck-LSTMs to refine and propagate feature maps across frames. This approach is substantially faster than existing detection methods in video, outperforming the fastest single-frame models in model size and computational cost while attaining accuracy comparable to much more expensive single-frame models on the Imagenet VID 2015 dataset. Our model reaches a real-time inference speed of up to 15 FPS on a mobile CPU.
Object detection is an important and challenging problem in computer vision. Although the past decade has witnessed major advances in object detection in natural scenes, such successes have been slow to aerial imagery, not only because of the huge variation in the scale, orientation and shape of the object instances on the earth's surface, but also due to the scarcity of well-annotated datasets of objects in aerial scenes. To advance object detection research in Earth Vision, also known as Earth Observation and Remote Sensing, we introduce a large-scale Dataset for Object deTection in Aerial images (DOTA). To this end, we collect $2806$ aerial images from different sensors and platforms. Each image is of the size about 4000-by-4000 pixels and contains objects exhibiting a wide variety of scales, orientations, and shapes. These DOTA images are then annotated by experts in aerial image interpretation using $15$ common object categories. The fully annotated DOTA images contains $188,282$ instances, each of which is labeled by an arbitrary (8 d.o.f.) quadrilateral To build a baseline for object detection in Earth Vision, we evaluate state-of-the-art object detection algorithms on DOTA. Experiments demonstrate that DOTA well represents real Earth Vision applications and are quite challenging.