Lei Liu

Jingfeng Zhang, Bo Song, Haohan Wang et al.

Label-noise learning (LNL) aims to increase the model's generalization given training data with noisy labels. To facilitate practical LNL algorithms, researchers have proposed different label noise types, ranging from class-conditional to instance-dependent noises. In this paper, we introduce a novel label noise type called BadLabel, which can significantly degrade the performance of existing LNL algorithms by a large margin. BadLabel is crafted based on the label-flipping attack against standard classification, where specific samples are selected and their labels are flipped to other labels so that the loss values of clean and noisy labels become indistinguishable. To address the challenge posed by BadLabel, we further propose a robust LNL method that perturbs the labels in an adversarial manner at each epoch to make the loss values of clean and noisy labels again distinguishable. Once we select a small set of (mostly) clean labeled data, we can apply the techniques of semi-supervised learning to train the model accurately. Empirically, our experimental results demonstrate that existing LNL algorithms are vulnerable to the newly introduced BadLabel noise type, while our proposed robust LNL method can effectively improve the generalization performance of the model under various types of label noise. The new dataset of noisy labels and the source codes of robust LNL algorithms are available at https://github.com/zjfheart/BadLabels.

Mehdi Bahrami, N. C. Shrikanth, Yuji Mizobuchi et al.

Code retrieval is allowing software engineers to search codes through a natural language query, which relies on both natural language processing and software engineering techniques. There have been several attempts on code retrieval from searching snippet codes to function codes. In this paper, we introduce Augmented Code (AugmentedCode) retrieval which takes advantage of existing information within the code and constructs augmented programming language to improve the code retrieval models' performance. We curated a large corpus of Python and showcased the the framework and the results of augmented programming language which outperforms on CodeSearchNet and CodeBERT with a Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) of 0.73 and 0.96, respectively. The outperformed fine-tuned augmented code retrieval model is published in HuggingFace at https://huggingface.co/Fujitsu/AugCode and a demonstration video is available at: https://youtu.be/mnZrUTANjGs .

Mehdi Bahrami, N. C. Shrikanth, Shade Ruangwan et al.

A large scale collection of both semantic and natural language resources is essential to leverage active Software Engineering research areas such as code reuse and code comprehensibility. Existing machine learning models ingest data from Open Source repositories (like GitHub projects) and forum discussions (like Stackoverflow.com), whereas, in this showcase, we took a step backward to orchestrate a corpus titled PyTorrent that contains 218,814 Python package libraries from PyPI and Anaconda environment. This is because earlier studies have shown that much of the code is redundant and Python packages from these environments are better in quality and are well-documented. PyTorrent enables users (such as data scientists, students, etc.) to build off the shelf machine learning models directly without spending months of effort on large infrastructure. The dataset, schema and a pretrained language model is available at: https://github.com/fla-sil/PyTorrent

Jiacheng Wang, Hongtao Lv, Lei Liu

Traditional Federated Learning (FL) faces significant challenges in terms of efficiency and accuracy, particularly in heterogeneous environments where clients employ diverse model architectures and have varying computational resources. Such heterogeneity complicates the aggregation process, leading to performance bottlenecks and reduced model generalizability. To address these issues, we propose FedADP, a federated learning framework designed to adapt to client heterogeneity by dynamically adjusting model architectures during aggregation. FedADP enables effective collaboration among clients with differing capabilities, maximizing resource utilization and ensuring model quality. Our experimental results demonstrate that FedADP significantly outperforms existing methods, such as FlexiFed, achieving an accuracy improvement of up to 23.30%, thereby enhancing model adaptability and training efficiency in heterogeneous real-world settings.

Yunfeng Zhao, Guoxian Yu, Lei Liu et al.

Partial-label learning (PLL) generally focuses on inducing a noise-tolerant multi-class classifier by training on overly-annotated samples, each of which is annotated with a set of labels, but only one is the valid label. A basic promise of existing PLL solutions is that there are sufficient partial-label (PL) samples for training. However, it is more common than not to have just few PL samples at hand when dealing with new tasks. Furthermore, existing few-shot learning algorithms assume precise labels of the support set; as such, irrelevant labels may seriously mislead the meta-learner and thus lead to a compromised performance. How to enable PLL under a few-shot learning setting is an important problem, but not yet well studied. In this paper, we introduce an approach called FsPLL (Few-shot PLL). FsPLL first performs adaptive distance metric learning by an embedding network and rectifying prototypes on the tasks previously encountered. Next, it calculates the prototype of each class of a new task in the embedding network. An unseen example can then be classified via its distance to each prototype. Experimental results on widely-used few-shot datasets (Omniglot and miniImageNet) demonstrate that our FsPLL can achieve a superior performance than the state-of-the-art methods across different settings, and it needs fewer samples for quickly adapting to new tasks.

Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Jimmy Huang, Vladan Smetana et al.

Industrial Information Technology (IT) infrastructures are often vulnerable to cyberattacks. To ensure security to the computer systems in an industrial environment, it is required to build effective intrusion detection systems to monitor the cyber-physical systems (e.g., computer networks) in the industry for malicious activities. This paper aims to build such intrusion detection systems to protect the computer networks from cyberattacks. More specifically, we propose a novel unsupervised machine learning approach that combines the K-Means algorithm with the Isolation Forest for anomaly detection in industrial big data scenarios. Since our objective is to build the intrusion detection system for the big data scenario in the industrial domain, we utilize the Apache Spark framework to implement our proposed model which was trained in large network traffic data (about 123 million instances of network traffic) stored in Elasticsearch. Moreover, we evaluate our proposed model on the live streaming data and find that our proposed system can be used for real-time anomaly detection in the industrial setup. In addition, we address different challenges that we face while training our model on large datasets and explicitly describe how these issues were resolved. Based on our empirical evaluation in different use-cases for anomaly detection in real-world network traffic data, we observe that our proposed system is effective to detect anomalies in big data scenarios. Finally, we evaluate our proposed model on several academic datasets to compare with other models and find that it provides comparable performance with other state-of-the-art approaches.

Lei Liu

Latency-critical services have been widely deployed in cloud environments. For cost-efficiency, multiple services are usually co-located on a server. Thus, run-time resource scheduling becomes the pivot for QoS control in these complicated co-location cases. However, the scheduling exploration space enlarges rapidly with the increasing server resources, making the schedulers hardly provide ideal solutions quickly. More importantly, we observe that there are "resource cliffs" in the scheduling exploration space. They affect the exploration efficiency and always lead to severe QoS fluctuations. Resource cliffs cannot be easily avoided in previous schedulers. To address these problems, we propose a novel ML-based intelligent scheduler - OSML. It learns the correlation between architectural hints (e.g., IPC, cache misses, memory footprint, etc.), scheduling solutions and the QoS demands based on a data set we collected from 11 widely deployed services running on off-the-shelf servers. OSML employs multiple ML models to work collaboratively to predict QoS variations, shepherd the scheduling, and recover from QoS violations in complicated co-location cases. OSML can intelligently avoid resource cliffs during scheduling and reach an optimal solution much faster than previous approaches for co-located LC services. Experimental results show that OSML supports higher loads and meets QoS targets with lower scheduling overheads and shorter convergence time than previous studies.

Yong Gao, Lei Liu, Xing Lin et al.

The modern geographic information retrieval technology is based on quantitative models and methods. The semantic information in web documents and queries cannot be effectively represented, leading to information lost or misunderstanding so that the results are either unreliable or inconsistent. A new qualitative approach is thus proposed for supporting geographic information retrieval based on qualitative representation, semantic matching, and qualitative reasoning. A qualitative representation model and the corresponding similarity measurement method are defined. Information in documents and user queries are represented using propositional logic, which considers the thematic and geographic semantics synthetically. Thematic information is represented as thematic propositions on the base of domain ontology. Similarly, spatial information is represented as geo-spatial propositions with the support of geographic knowledge base. Then the similarity is divided into thematic similarity and spatial similarity. The former is calculated by the weighted distance of proposition keywords in the domain ontology, and the latter similarity is further divided into conceptual similarity and spatial similarity. Represented by propositions and information units, the similarity measurement can take evidence theory and fuzzy logic to combine all sub similarities to get the final similarity between documents and queries. This novel retrieval method is mainly used to retrieve the qualitative geographic information to support the semantic matching and results ranking. It does not deal with geometric computation and is consistent with human commonsense cognition, and thus can improve the efficiency of geographic information retrieval technology.