Computer Sciences Commons^™

Boundary Detection With Bert For Span-Level Emotion Cause Analysis, Xiangju Li, Wei Gao, Shi Feng, Yifei Zhang, Daling Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Emotion cause analysis (ECA) has been anemerging topic in natural language processing,which aims to identify the reasons behind acertain emotion expressed in the text. MostECA methods intend to identify the clausewhich contains the cause of a given emotion,but such clause-level ECA (CECA) can be ambiguous and imprecise. In this paper, we aimat span-level ECA (SECA) by detecting theprecise boundaries of text spans conveying accurate emotion causes from the given context.We formulate this task as sequence labelingand position identification problems and design two neural methods to solve them. Experiments on two benchmark ECA datasets showthat the proposed methods substantially outperform the …

Biasrv: Uncovering Biased Sentiment Predictions At Runtime, Zhou Yang, Muhammad Hilmi Asyrofi, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Sentiment analysis (SA) systems, though widely applied in many domains, have been demonstrated to produce biased results. Some research works have been done in automatically generating test cases to reveal unfairness in SA systems, but the community still lacks tools that can monitor and uncover biased predictions at runtime. This paper fills this gap by proposing BiasRV, the first tool to raise an alarm when a deployed SA system makes a biased prediction on a given input text. To implement this feature, BiasRV dynamically extracts a template from an input text and from the template generates gender-discriminatory mutants (semanticallyequivalent texts …

Automating The Removal Of Obsolete Todo Comments, Zhipeng Gao, Xin Xia, David Lo, John C. Grundy, Thomas Zimmermann

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

TODO comments are very widely used by software developers to describe their pending tasks during software development. However, after performing the task developers sometimes neglect or simply forget to remove the TODO comment, resulting in obsolete TODO comments. These obsolete TODO comments can confuse development teams and may cause the introduction of bugs in the future, decreasing the software’s quality and maintainability. Manually identifying obsolete TODO comments is time-consuming and expensive. It is thus necessary to detect obsolete TODO comments and remove them automatically before they cause any unwanted side effects. In this work, we propose a novel model, named …

A Survey On Complex Knowledge Base Question Answering: Methods, Challenges And Solutions, Yunshi Lan, Gaole He, Jinhao Jiang, Jing Jiang, Wayne Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Knowledge base question answering (KBQA) aims to answer a question over a knowledge base (KB). Recently, a large number of studies focus on semantically or syntactically complicated questions. In this paper, we elaborately summarize the typical challenges and solutions for complex KBQA. We begin with introducing the background about the KBQA task. Next, we present the two mainstream categories of methods for complex KBQA, namely semantic parsing-based (SP-based) methods and information retrieval-based (IR-based) methods. We then review the advanced methods comprehensively from the perspective of the two categories. Specifically, we explicate their solutions to the typical challenges. Finally, we conclude …

Learn To Intervene: An Adaptive Learning Policy For Restless Bandits In Application To Preventive Healthcare, Arpita Biswas, Gaurav Aggarwal, Pradeep Varakantham, Milind Tambe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In many public health settings, it is important for patients to adhere to health programs, such as taking medications and periodic health checks. Unfortunately, beneficiaries may gradually disengage from such programs, which is detrimental to their health. A concrete example of gradual disengagement has been observed by an organization that carries out a free automated call-based program for spreading preventive care information among pregnant women. Many women stop picking up calls after being enrolled for a few months. To avoid such disengagements, it is important to provide timely interventions. Such interventions are often expensive and can be provided to only …

Pruning-Aware Merging For Efficient Multitask Inference, Dawei Gao, Xiaoxi He, Zimu Zhou, Yongxin Tong, Lothar Thiele

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many mobile applications demand selective execution of multiple correlated deep learning inference tasks on resource-constrained platforms. Given a set of deep neural networks, each pre-trained for a single task, it is desired that executing arbitrary combinations of tasks yields minimal computation cost. Pruning each network separately yields suboptimal computation cost due to task relatedness. A promising remedy is to merge the networks into a multitask network to eliminate redundancy across tasks before network pruning. However, pruning a multitask network combined by existing network merging schemes cannot minimise the computation cost of every task combination because they do not consider such …

Crossasr++: A Modular Differential Testing Framework For Automatic Speech Recognition, Muhammad Hilmi Asyrofi, Zhou Yang, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Developers need to perform adequate testing to ensure the quality of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. However, manually collecting required test cases is tedious and time-consuming. Our recent work proposes CrossASR, a differential testing method for ASR systems. This method first utilizes Text-to-Speech (TTS) to generate audios from texts automatically and then feed these audios into different ASR systems for cross-referencing to uncover failed test cases. It also leverages a failure estimator to find failing test cases more efficiently. Such a method is inherently self-improvable: the performance can increase by leveraging more advanced TTS and ASR systems. So, in this …

Pre-Training On Large-Scale Heterogeneous Graph, Xunqiang Jiang, Tianrui Jia, Yuan Fang, Chuan Shi, Zhe Lin, Hui Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Graph neural networks (GNNs) emerge as the state-of-the-art representation learning methods on graphs and often rely on a large amount of labeled data to achieve satisfactory performance. Recently, in order to relieve the label scarcity issues, some works propose to pre-train GNNs in a self-supervised manner by distilling transferable knowledge from the unlabeled graph structures. Unfortunately, these pre-training frameworks mainly target at homogeneous graphs, while real interaction systems usually constitute large-scale heterogeneous graphs, containing different types of nodes and edges, which leads to new challenges on structure heterogeneity and scalability for graph pre-training. In this paper, we first study the …

Characterizing Search Activities On Stack Overflow, Jiakun Liu, Sebastian Baltes, Christoph Treude, David Lo, Yun Zhang, Xin Xia

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To solve programming issues, developers commonly search on Stack Overflow to seek potential solutions. However, there is a gap between the knowledge developers are interested in and the knowledge they are able to retrieve using search engines. To help developers efficiently retrieve relevant knowledge on Stack Overflow, prior studies proposed several techniques to reformulate queries and generate summarized answers. However, few studies performed a large-scale analysis using real-world search logs. In this paper, we characterize how developers search on Stack Overflow using such logs. By doing so, we identify the challenges developers face when searching on Stack Overflow and seek …

Integrating Knowledge Compilation With Reinforcement Learning For Routes, Jiajing Ling, Kushagra Chandak, Akshat Kumar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Sequential multiagent decision-making under partial observability and uncertainty poses several challenges. Although multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) approaches have increased the scalability, addressing combinatorial domains is still challenging as random exploration by agents is unlikely to generate useful reward signals. We address cooperative multiagent pathfinding under uncertainty and partial observability where agents move from their respective sources to destinations while also satisfying constraints (e.g., visiting landmarks). Our main contributions include: (1) compiling domain knowledge such as underlying graph connectivity and domain constraints into propositional logic based decision diagrams, (2) developing modular techniques to integrate such knowledge with deep MARL algorithms, and …

Toward Explainable Deep Anomaly Detection, Guansong Pang, Charu Aggarwal

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Anomaly explanation, also known as anomaly localization, is as important as, if not more than, anomaly detection in many realworld applications. However, it is challenging to build explainable detection models due to the lack of anomaly-supervisory information and the unbounded nature of anomaly; most existing studies exclusively focus on the detection task only, including the recently emerging deep learning-based anomaly detection that leverages neural networks to learn expressive low-dimensional representations or anomaly scores for the detection task. Deep learning models, including deep anomaly detection models, are often constructed as black boxes, which have been criticized for the lack of explainability …

Independent Reinforcement Learning For Weakly Cooperative Multiagent Traffic Control Problem, Chengwei Zhang, Shan Jin, Wanli Xue, Xiaofei Xie, Shengyong Chen, Rong Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The adaptive traffic signal control (ATSC) problem can be modeled as a multiagent cooperative game among urban intersections, where intersections cooperate to counter the city's traffic conditions. Recently, reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved marked successes in managing sequential decision making problems, which motivates us to apply RL in the ATSC problem. One of the largest challenges of this problem is that the observation of intersection is typically partially observable, which limits the learning performance of RL algorithms. Considering the large scale of intersections in an urban traffic environment, we use independent RL to solve ATSC problem in this study. We …

Anomaly And Novelty Detection, Explanation, And Accommodation (Andea), Guansong Pang, Jundong Li, Anton Van Den Hengel, Longbing Cao, Thomas G. Dietterich

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The detection of, explanation of, and accommodation to anomalies and novelties are active research areas in multiple communities, including data mining, machine learning, and computer vision. They are applied in various guises including anomaly detection, out-of-distribution example detection, adversarial example recognition and detection, curiosity-driven reinforcement learning, and open-set recognition and adaptation, all of which are of great interest to the SIGKDD community. The techniques developed have been applied in a wide range of domains including fraud detection and anti-money laundering in fintech, early disease detection, intrusion detection in large-scale computer networks and data centers, defending AI systems from adversarial attacks, …

Bidding Mechanisms In Graph Games, Guy Avni, Thomas A. Henzinger, Dorde Zikelic

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A graph game proceeds as follows: two players move a token through a graph to produce a finite or infinite path, which determines the payoff of the game. We study bidding games in which in each turn, an auction determines which player moves the token. Bidding games were largely studied in combination with two variants of first-price auctions called “Richman” and “poorman” bidding. We study taxman bidding, which span the spectrum between the two. The game is parameterized by a constant τ∈[0,1]: portion τ of the winning bid is paid to the other player, and portion 1−τ to the bank. …

Solving Large-Scale Extensive-Form Network Security Games Via Neural Fictitious Self-Play, Wanqi Xue, Youzhi Zhang, Shuxin Li, Xinrun Wang, Bo An, Chai Kiat Yeo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Securing networked infrastructures is important in the real world. The problem of deploying security resources to protect against an attacker in networked domains can be modeled as Network Security Games (NSGs). Unfortunately, existing approaches, including the deep learning-based approaches, are inefficient to solve large-scale extensive-form NSGs. In this paper, we propose a novel learning paradigm, NSG-NFSP, to solve large-scale extensive-form NSGs based on Neural Fictitious Self-Play (NFSP). Our main contributions include: i) reforming the best response (BR) policy network in NFSP to be a mapping from action-state pair to action-value, to make the calculation of BR possible in NSGs; ii) …

Automated Taxi Queue Management At High-Demand Venues, Mengyu Ji, Shih-Fen Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we seek to identify an effective management policy that could reduce supply-demand gaps at taxi queues serving high-density locations where demand surges frequently happen. Unlike current industry practice, which relies on broadcasting to attract taxis to come and serve the queue, we propose more proactive and adaptive approaches to handle demand surges. Our design objective is to reduce the cumulative supply-demand gaps as much as we could by sending notifications to individual taxis. To address this problem, we first propose a highly effective passenger demand prediction system that is based on the real-time flight arrival information. By …

A Lagrangian Column Generation Approach For The Probabilistic Crowdsourced Logistics Planning, Chung-Kyun Han, Shih-Fen Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In recent years we have increasingly seen the movement for the retail industry to move their operations online. Along the process, it has created brand new patterns for the fulfillment service, and the logistics service providers serving these retailers have no choice but to adapt. The most challenging issues faced by all logistics service providers are the highly fluctuating demands and the shortening response times. All these challenges imply that maintaining a fixed fleet will either be too costly or insufficient. One potential solution is to tap into the crowdsourced workforce. However, existing industry practices of relying on human planners …

Graph-Based Seed Object Synthesis For Search-Based Unit Testing, Yun Lin, You Seng Ong, Jun Sun, Gordon Fraser, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Search-based software testing (SBST) generates tests using search algorithms guided by measurements gauging how far a test case is away from exercising a coverage goal. The effectiveness of SBST largely depends on the continuity and monotonicity of the fitness landscape decided by these measurements and the search operators. Unfortunately, the fitness landscape is challenging when the function under test takes object inputs, as classical measurements hardly provide guidance for constructing legitimate object inputs. To overcome this problem, we propose test seeds, i.e., test code skeletons of legitimate objects which enable the use of classical measurements. Given a target branch in …

Forecasting Pedestrian Trajectory Using Deep Learning, Arsal Syed

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In this dissertation we develop different methods for forecasting pedestrian trajectories. Complete understanding of pedestrian motion is essential for autonomous agents and social robots to make realistic and safe decisions. Current trajectory prediction methods rely on incorporating historic motion, scene features and social interaction to model pedestrian behaviors. Our focus is to accurately understand scene semantics to better forecast trajectories. In order to do so, we leverage semantic segmentation to encode static scene features such as walkable paths, entry/exits, static obstacles etc. We further evaluate the effectiveness of using semantic maps on different datasets and compare its performance with already …

Why Don't You Act Your Age?: Recognizing The Stereotypical 8-12 Year Old Searcher By Their Search Behavior, Michael Green

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Online search engines for children are known to filter retrieved resources based on page complexity, and offer specialized functionality meant to address gaps in search literacy according to a user's age or grade. However, not every searcher grouped by these identifiers displays the same level of text comprehension, or requires the same aid with search. Furthermore, these search engines typically rely on direct feedback to ascertain these identifiers. This reliance on self identification may cause users to accidentally misrepresent themselves. We therefore seek to recognize users from skill based signals rather than utilizing age or grade identifiers, as skill dictates …

Modeling Real And Fake News Sharing In Social Networks, Abishai Joy

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Online media is changing the traditional news industry and diminishing the role of journalists, newspapers, and even news channels. This in turn is enhancing the ability of fake news to influence public opinion on important topics. The threat of fake news is quite imminent, as it allows malicious users to share their agenda with a larger audience. Major social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc., are making it easy to spread fake news due to the minimal moderation/ fact-checking on these platforms.

This work aims at predicting fake and real news sharing in social media. Specifically, we employ a multi-level …

Into The Unknown: Exploration Of Search Engines' Responses To Users With Depression And Anxiety, Ashlee Milton

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Mental health disorders (MHD) are a rising, yet stigmatized, topic. With statistics reporting that one in five adults in the United States will be afflicted by a MHD in their lifetime, researchers have begun exploring the behavioral nuances that emerge from interactions of these individuals with persuasive technologies, mainly social media. Yet, there is a gap in the analysis pertaining to a persuasive technology that is part of their everyday lives: search engines (SE). Each day, users with MHD embark on information seeking journeys using SE. Every step of the search process for better or worse has the potential to …

Modeling And Analyzing Users' Privacy Disclosure Behavior To Generate Personalized Privacy Policies, A.K.M. Nuhil Mehdy

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Privacy and its importance to society have been studied for centuries. While our understanding and continued theory building to hypothesize how users make privacy disclosure decisions has increased over time, the struggle to find a one-size solution that satisfies the requirements of each individual remains unsolved. Depending on culture, gender, age, and other situational factors, the concept of privacy and users' expectations of how their privacy should be protected varies from person to person. The goal of this dissertation is to design and develop tools and algorithms to support personal privacy management for end-users. The foundation of this research is …

Actors For The Internet Of Things, Arjun Shukla

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The actor model is a model for concurrent computation, centered around message passing between entities in a system. It is well suited for distributed programming, due to its semantics including very little guarantees or assumptions of reliability. Actor model implementations have grown more widespread in many languages.

The library Akka (written in Scala) is one of the most popular actor libraries. However, Akka is missing some key features. Our goal is to create our own actor library called Aurum, which not only has these features but exhibits higher performance. The new features include easy ways to forge references, configure and …

Generating Test Inputs From String Constraints With An Automata-Based Solver, Marlin Roberts

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Software testing is an integral part of the software development process. To test certain parts of software, developers need to identify inputs that reach those parts. Data and control dependencies make this a non-trivial task, and as the complexity of software increases it becomes more difficult to manually derive such inputs. Due to complex data manipulations, this process is even more challenging for programs with string inputs, such as security applications. Thus, automated reachability test input generation for string data types is an important research area.

Symbolic Execution is a path-sensitive static program analysis technique that can automatically generate conditions …

Industrial Control System Data Resiliency, Daniel A. Bovard

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This thesis identifies and fortifies against a critical vulnerability in industrial control system (ICS) security. A properly designed ICS security framework consists of a multi-layered approach starting with heavy fortifications in information technology and ending with control information of operational technology. Currently, ICS security frameworks lack visibility and place blind trust in devices at the lowest level of the control hierarchy. Attaining control data visibility at the lowest level of the control hierarchy is critical to increasing the resiliency of an ICS security posture. This thesis demonstrates how this data can be captured at the lowest level of the control …

A Case Study In Representing Scientific Applications (Geoac) Using The Sparse Polyhedral Framework, Ravi Shankar

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Tsunami detection and forecasting is a difficult problem that scientists are trying to tackle. Early path estimation and accurate prediction of the arrival time and size of a tsunami can save lives and help with impact assessment. Tsunami inducing earthquakes cause ground and sea-surface displacements that push up on the atmosphere. This atmospheric disturbance propagates upwards as an acoustic wave and eventually hits the ionosphere. IonoSeis is a software simulation package that leverages satellite-based ionospheric remote-sensing techniques to determine the epicenter of these earthquakes.

The execution time of the ray-tracing component of IonoSeis prevents its use as a real-time modeling …

Narrow Band Active Contour Attention Model For Medical Segmentation, Ngan Le, Toan Bui, Viet-Khao Vo-Ho, Kashu Yamazaki, Khoa Luu

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Medical image segmentation is one of the most challenging tasks in medical image analysis and widely developed for many clinical applications. While deep learning-based approaches have achieved impressive performance in semantic segmentation, they are limited to pixel-wise settings with imbalanced-class data problems and weak boundary object segmentation in medical images. In this paper, we tackle those limitations by developing a new two-branch deep network architecture which takes both higher level features and lower level features into account. The first branch extracts higher level feature as region information by a common encoder-decoder network structure such as Unet and FCN, whereas the …

Fixed Pattern Noise Non-Uniformity Correction Through K-Means Clustering, Andres Imperial

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Imagery obtained with poorly calibrated sensors is often corrupted with fixed pattern noise. Fixed pattern noise presents itself through a non-uniform distribution and therefore is hard to target in noise removal. Traditional noise removal techniques assume that the noise is uniformly distributed and subsequently produces inadequate corrections. Noise correction methods that target fixed pattern noise rely on dynamically identifying present noise and adjust correction values appropriately using nearby information or general assumptions about the image’s composition. If noise identification is not accurate, the correction values will also suffer from low accuracy. Inaccurate correction values can affect the imagery’s quality, and …

Comparative Study Of Machine Learning Models On Solar Flare Prediction Problem, Nikhil Sai Kurivella

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Solar flare events are explosions of energy and radiation from the Sun’s surface. These events occur due to the tangling and twisting of magnetic fields associated with sunspots. When Coronal Mass ejections accompany solar flares, solar storms could travel towards earth at very high speeds, disrupting all earthly technologies and posing radiation hazards to astronauts. For this reason, the prediction of solar flares has become a crucial aspect of forecasting space weather. Our thesis utilized the time-series data consisting of active solar region magnetic field parameters acquired from SDO that span more than eight years. The classification models take AR …