Authors: Pajon Quentin, Serre Swan, Wissocq Hugo, Rabaud Léo, Haidar Siba, Yaacoub Antoun
This paper presents an investigation into machine learning techniques for violence detection in videos and their adaptation to a federated learning context. The study includes experiments with spatio-temporal features extracted from benchmark video datasets, comparison of different methods, and proposal of a modified version of the "Flow-Gated" architecture called "Diff-Gated." Additionally, various machine learning techniques, including super-convergence and transfer learning, are explored, and a method for adapting centralized datasets to a federated learning context is developed. The research achieves better accuracy results compared to state-of-the-art models by training the best violence detection model in a federated learning context.
Authors: Harshit Shah, Aravindhan G, Pavan Kulkarni, Yuvaraj Govidarajulu, Manojkumar Parmar
A significant number of machine learning models are vulnerable to model extraction attacks, which focus on stealing the models by using specially curated queries against the target model. This task is well accomplished by using part of the training data or a surrogate dataset to train a new model that mimics a target model in a white-box environment. In pragmatic situations, however, the target models are trained on private datasets that are inaccessible to the adversary. The data-free model extraction technique replaces this problem when it comes to using queries artificially curated by a generator similar to that used in Generative Adversarial Nets. We propose for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, an adversary black box attack extending to a regression problem for predicting bounding box coordinates in object detection. As part of our study, we found that defining a loss function and using a novel generator setup is one of the key aspects in extracting the target model. We find that the proposed model extraction method achieves significant results by using reasonable queries. The discovery of this object detection vulnerability will support future prospects for securing such models.
Authors: Benjamin Ramhorst (Imperial College London), George A. Constantinides (Imperial College London), Vladimir Loncar (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Neural networks achieve state-of-the-art performance in image classification, speech recognition, scientific analysis and many more application areas. With the ever-increasing need for faster computation and lower power consumption, driven by real-time systems and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, FPGAs have emerged as suitable devices for deep learning inference. Due to the high computational complexity and memory footprint of neural networks, various compression techniques, such as pruning, quantization and knowledge distillation, have been proposed in literature. Pruning sparsifies a neural network, reducing the number of multiplications and memory. However, pruning often fails to capture properties of the underlying hardware, causing unstructured sparsity and load-balance inefficiency, thus bottlenecking resource improvements. We propose a hardware-centric formulation of pruning, by formulating it as a knapsack problem with resource-aware tensor structures. The primary emphasis is on real-time inference, with latencies in the order of 1$\mu$s, accelerated with hls4ml, an open-source framework for deep learning inference on FPGAs. Evaluated on a range of tasks, including real-time particle classification at CERN's Large Hadron Collider and fast image classification, the proposed method achieves a reduction ranging between 55% and 92% in the utilization of digital signal processing blocks (DSP) and up to 81% in block memory (BRAM) utilization.
Authors: Md. Simul Hasan Talukder, Rejwan Bin Sulaiman
Epilepsy is a prevalent neurological disorder characterized by recurrent and unpredictable seizures, necessitating accurate prediction for effective management and patient care. Application of machine learning (ML) on electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings, along with its ability to provide valuable insights into brain activity during seizures, is able to make accurate and robust seizure prediction an indispensable component in relevant studies. In this research, we present a comprehensive comparative analysis of five machine learning models - Random Forest (RF), Decision Tree (DT), Extra Trees (ET), Logistic Regression (LR), and Gradient Boosting (GB) - for the prediction of epileptic seizures using EEG data. The dataset underwent meticulous preprocessing, including cleaning, normalization, outlier handling, and oversampling, ensuring data quality and facilitating accurate model training. These preprocessing techniques played a crucial role in enhancing the models' performance. The results of our analysis demonstrate the performance of each model in terms of accuracy. The LR classifier achieved an accuracy of 56.95%, while GB and DT both attained 97.17% accuracy. RT achieved a higher accuracy of 98.99%, while the ET model exhibited the best performance with an accuracy of 99.29%. Our findings reveal that the ET model outperformed not only the other models in the comparative analysis but also surpassed the state-of-the-art results from previous research. The superior performance of the ET model makes it a compelling choice for accurate and robust epileptic seizure prediction using EEG data.
Authors: John Joon Young Chung, Eytan Adar
While diffusion-based text-to-image (T2I) models provide a simple and powerful way to generate images, guiding this generation remains a challenge. For concepts that are difficult to describe through language, users may struggle to create prompts. Moreover, many of these models are built as end-to-end systems, lacking support for iterative shaping of the image. In response, we introduce PromptPaint, which combines T2I generation with interactions that model how we use colored paints. PromptPaint allows users to go beyond language to mix prompts that express challenging concepts. Just as we iteratively tune colors through layered placements of paint on a physical canvas, PromptPaint similarly allows users to apply different prompts to different canvas areas and times of the generative process. Through a set of studies, we characterize different approaches for mixing prompts, design trade-offs, and socio-technical challenges for generative models. With PromptPaint we provide insight into future steerable generative tools.
Authors: Miguel-Ángel Fernández-Torres
This PhD. Thesis concerns the study and development of hierarchical representations for spatio-temporal visual attention modeling and understanding in video sequences. More specifically, we propose two computational models for visual attention. First, we present a generative probabilistic model for context-aware visual attention modeling and understanding. Secondly, we develop a deep network architecture for visual attention modeling, which first estimates top-down spatio-temporal visual attention, and ultimately serves for modeling attention in the temporal domain.
Authors: Jin Liu (1), Xingchen Xu (2), Yongjun Li (1), Yong Tan (2) ((1) University of Science and Technology of China, (2) University of Washington)
With the advent of general-purpose Generative AI, the interest in discerning its impact on the labor market escalates. In an attempt to bridge the extant empirical void, we interpret the launch of ChatGPT as an exogenous shock, and implement a Difference-in-Differences (DID) approach to quantify its influence on text-related jobs and freelancers within an online labor marketplace. Our results reveal a significant decrease in transaction volume for gigs and freelancers directly exposed to ChatGPT. Additionally, this decline is particularly marked in units of relatively higher past transaction volume or lower quality standards. Yet, the negative effect is not universally experienced among service providers. Subsequent analyses illustrate that freelancers proficiently adapting to novel advancements and offering services that augment AI technologies can yield substantial benefits amidst this transformative period. Consequently, even though the advent of ChatGPT could conceivably substitute existing occupations, it also unfolds immense opportunities and carries the potential to reconfigure the future of work. This research contributes to the limited empirical repository exploring the profound influence of LLM-based generative AI on the labor market, furnishing invaluable insights for workers, job intermediaries, and regulatory bodies navigating this evolving landscape.
Authors: Hangjie Shi, Leslie Ball, Govind Thattai, Desheng Zhang, Lucy Hu, Qiaozi Gao, Suhaila Shakiah, Xiaofeng Gao, Aishwarya Padmakumar, Bofei Yang, Cadence Chung, Dinakar Guthy, Gaurav Sukhatme, Karthika Arumugam, Matthew Wen, Osman Ipek, Patrick Lange, Rohan Khanna, Shreyas Pansare, Vasu Sharma, Chao Zhang, Cris Flagg, Daniel Pressel, Lavina Vaz, Luke Dai, Prasoon Goyal, Sattvik Sahai, Shaohua Liu, Yao Lu, Anna Gottardi, Shui Hu, Yang Liu, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Kate Bland, Heather Rocker, James Jeun, Yadunandana Rao, Michael Johnston, Akshaya Iyengar, Arindam Mandal, Prem Natarajan, Reza Ghanadan
The Alexa Prize program has empowered numerous university students to explore, experiment, and showcase their talents in building conversational agents through challenges like the SocialBot Grand Challenge and the TaskBot Challenge. As conversational agents increasingly appear in multimodal and embodied contexts, it is important to explore the affordances of conversational interaction augmented with computer vision and physical embodiment. This paper describes the SimBot Challenge, a new challenge in which university teams compete to build robot assistants that complete tasks in a simulated physical environment. This paper provides an overview of the SimBot Challenge, which included both online and offline challenge phases. We describe the infrastructure and support provided to the teams including Alexa Arena, the simulated environment, and the ML toolkit provided to teams to accelerate their building of vision and language models. We summarize the approaches the participating teams took to overcome research challenges and extract key lessons learned. Finally, we provide analysis of the performance of the competing SimBots during the competition.
Authors: Faisal Hawlader, François Robinet, Raphaël Frank
Environmental perception is a key element of autonomous driving because the information received from the perception module influences core driving decisions. An outstanding challenge in real-time perception for autonomous driving lies in finding the best trade-off between detection quality and latency. Major constraints on both computation and power have to be taken into account for real-time perception in autonomous vehicles. Larger object detection models tend to produce the best results, but are also slower at runtime. Since the most accurate detectors cannot run in real-time locally, we investigate the possibility of offloading computation to edge and cloud platforms, which are less resource-constrained. We create a synthetic dataset to train object detection models and evaluate different offloading strategies. Using real hardware and network simulations, we compare different trade-offs between prediction quality and end-to-end delay. Since sending raw frames over the network implies additional transmission delays, we also explore the use of JPEG and H.265 compression at varying qualities and measure their impact on prediction metrics. We show that models with adequate compression can be run in real-time on the cloud while outperforming local detection performance.
Authors: Luv Verma, Varun Mohan
This study performs an ablation analysis of Vector Quantized Generative Adversarial Networks (VQGANs), concentrating on image-to-image synthesis utilizing a single NVIDIA A100 GPU. The current work explores the nuanced effects of varying critical parameters including the number of epochs, image count, and attributes of codebook vectors and latent dimensions, specifically within the constraint of limited resources. Notably, our focus is pinpointed on the vector quantization loss, keeping other hyperparameters and loss components (GAN loss) fixed. This was done to delve into a deeper understanding of the discrete latent space, and to explore how varying its size affects the reconstruction. Though, our results do not surpass the existing benchmarks, however, our findings shed significant light on VQGAN's behaviour for a smaller dataset, particularly concerning artifacts, codebook size optimization, and comparative analysis with Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The study also uncovers the promising direction by introducing 2D positional encodings, revealing a marked reduction in artifacts and insights into balancing clarity and overfitting.
Authors: Marco Jiralerspong, Gauthier Gidel
The AI4GCC competition presents a bold step forward in the direction of integrating machine learning with traditional economic policy analysis. Below, we highlight two potential areas for improvement that could enhance the competition's ability to identify and evaluate proposed negotiation protocols. Firstly, we suggest the inclusion of an additional index that accounts for consumption/utility as part of the evaluation criteria. Secondly, we recommend further investigation into the learning dynamics of agents in the simulator and the game theoretic properties of outcomes from proposed negotiation protocols. We hope that these suggestions can be of use for future iterations of the competition/simulation.
Authors: Pengfei Ding, Yan Wang, Guanfeng Liu
In recent years, heterogeneous graph few-shot learning has been proposed to address the label sparsity issue in heterogeneous graphs (HGs), which contain various types of nodes and edges. The existing methods have achieved good performance by transferring generalized knowledge extracted from rich-labeled classes in source HG(s) to few-labeled classes in a target HG. However, these methods only consider the single-heterogeneity scenario where the source and target HGs share a fixed set of node/edge types, ignoring the more general scenario of cross-heterogeneity, where each HG can have a different and non-fixed set of node/edge types. To this end, we focus on the unexplored cross-heterogeneity scenario and propose a novel model for Cross-heterogeneity Graph Few-shot Learning, namely CGFL. In CGFL, we first extract meta-patterns to capture heterogeneous information and propose a multi-view heterogeneous graph neural network (MHGN) to learn meta-patterns across HGs. Then, we propose a score module to measure the informativeness of labeled samples and determine the transferability of each source HG. Finally, by integrating MHGN and the score module into a meta-learning mechanism, CGFL can effectively transfer generalized knowledge to predict new classes with few-labeled data. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets have demonstrated the superior performance of CGFL over the state-of-the-art methods.
Authors: Yunhao Yang, Cyrus Neary, Ufuk Topcu
Recently developed pretrained models can encode rich world knowledge expressed in multiple modalities, such as text and images. However, the outputs of these models cannot be integrated into algorithms to solve sequential decision-making tasks. We develop an algorithm that utilizes the knowledge from pretrained models to construct and verify controllers for sequential decision-making tasks, and to ground these controllers to task environments through visual observations. In particular, the algorithm queries a pretrained model with a user-provided, text-based task description and uses the model's output to construct an automaton-based controller that encodes the model's task-relevant knowledge. It then verifies whether the knowledge encoded in the controller is consistent with other independently available knowledge, which may include abstract information on the environment or user-provided specifications. If this verification step discovers any inconsistency, the algorithm automatically refines the controller to resolve the inconsistency. Next, the algorithm leverages the vision and language capabilities of pretrained models to ground the controller to the task environment. It collects image-based observations from the task environment and uses the pretrained model to link these observations to the text-based control logic encoded in the controller (e.g., actions and conditions that trigger the actions). We propose a mechanism to ensure the controller satisfies the user-provided specification even when perceptual uncertainties are present. We demonstrate the algorithm's ability to construct, verify, and ground automaton-based controllers through a suite of real-world tasks, including daily life and robot manipulation tasks.
Authors: Hongbo Kang, Yong Wang, Mengyuan Liu, Doudou Wu, Peng Liu, Wenming Yang
Reconstructing 3D poses from 2D poses lacking depth information is particularly challenging due to the complexity and diversity of human motion. The key is to effectively model the spatial constraints between joints to leverage their inherent dependencies. Thus, we propose a novel model, called Double-chain Graph Convolutional Transformer (DC-GCT), to constrain the pose through a double-chain design consisting of local-to-global and global-to-local chains to obtain a complex representation more suitable for the current human pose. Specifically, we combine the advantages of GCN and Transformer and design a Local Constraint Module (LCM) based on GCN and a Global Constraint Module (GCM) based on self-attention mechanism as well as a Feature Interaction Module (FIM). The proposed method fully captures the multi-level dependencies between human body joints to optimize the modeling capability of the model. Moreover, we propose a method to use temporal information into the single-frame model by guiding the video sequence embedding through the joint embedding of the target frame, with negligible increase in computational cost. Experimental results demonstrate that DC-GCT achieves state-of-the-art performance on two challenging datasets (Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP). Notably, our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on all action categories in the Human3.6M dataset using detected 2D poses from CPN, and our code is available at: https://github.com/KHB1698/DC-GCT.
Authors: Ming Gu (1), Gaoming Yang (2), Sheng Zhou (3), Ning Ma (1), Jiawei Chen (1), Qiaoyu Tan (4), Meihan Liu (1), Jiajun Bu (1) ((1) College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, (2) School of Software Technology, Zhejiang University, (3) Zhejiang Provincial Key Laboratory of Service Robot, Zhejiang University, (4) Department of Computer Science, New York University Shanghai)
Graph clustering is a fundamental task in graph analysis, and recent advances in utilizing graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown impressive results. Despite the success of existing GNN-based graph clustering methods, they often overlook the quality of graph structure, which is inherent in real-world graphs due to their sparse and multifarious nature, leading to subpar performance. Graph structure learning allows refining the input graph by adding missing links and removing spurious connections. However, previous endeavors in graph structure learning have predominantly centered around supervised settings, and cannot be directly applied to our specific clustering tasks due to the absence of ground-truth labels. To bridge the gap, we propose a novel method called \textbf{ho}mophily-enhanced structure \textbf{le}arning for graph clustering (HoLe). Our motivation stems from the observation that subtly enhancing the degree of homophily within the graph structure can significantly improve GNNs and clustering outcomes. To realize this objective, we develop two clustering-oriented structure learning modules, i.e., hierarchical correlation estimation and cluster-aware sparsification. The former module enables a more accurate estimation of pairwise node relationships by leveraging guidance from latent and clustering spaces, while the latter one generates a sparsified structure based on the similarity matrix and clustering assignments. Additionally, we devise a joint optimization approach alternating between training the homophily-enhanced structure learning and GNN-based clustering, thereby enforcing their reciprocal effects. Extensive experiments on seven benchmark datasets of various types and scales, across a range of clustering metrics, demonstrate the superiority of HoLe against state-of-the-art baselines.
Authors: Yanjie Li, Mingxing Duan, Bin Xiao
The rudimentary adversarial attacks utilize additive noise to attack facial recognition (FR) models. However, because manipulating the total face is impractical in the physical setting, most real-world FR attacks are based on adversarial patches, which limit perturbations to a small area. Previous adversarial patch attacks often resulted in unnatural patterns and clear boundaries that were easily noticeable. In this paper, we argue that generating adversarial patches with plausible content can result in stronger transferability than using additive noise or directly sampling from the latent space. To generate natural-looking and highly transferable adversarial patches, we propose an innovative two-stage coarse-to-fine attack framework called Adv-Inpainting. In the first stage, we propose an attention-guided StyleGAN (Att-StyleGAN) that adaptively combines texture and identity features based on the attention map to generate high-transferable and natural adversarial patches. In the second stage, we design a refinement network with a new boundary variance loss to further improve the coherence between the patch and its surrounding area. Experiment results demonstrate that Adv-Inpainting is stealthy and can produce adversarial patches with stronger transferability and improved visual quality than previous adversarial patch attacks.
Authors: Lorenz Mindner, Tim Schlippe, Kristina Schaaff
Recently, generative AIs like ChatGPT have become available to the wide public. These tools can for instance be used by students to generate essays or whole theses. But how does a teacher know whether a text is written by a student or an AI? In our work, we explore traditional and new features to (1) detect text generated by AI from scratch and (2) text rephrased by AI. Since we found that classification is more difficult when the AI has been instructed to create the text in a way that a human would not recognize that it was generated by an AI, we also investigate this more advanced case. For our experiments, we produced a new text corpus covering 10 school topics. Our best systems to classify basic and advanced human-generated/AI-generated texts have F1-scores of over 96%. Our best systems for classifying basic and advanced human-generated/AI-rephrased texts have F1-scores of more than 78%. The systems use a combination of perplexity, semantic, list lookup, error-based, readability, AI feedback, and text vector features. Our results show that the new features substantially help to improve the performance of many classifiers. Our best basic text rephrasing detection system even outperforms GPTZero by 183.8% relative in F1-score.
Authors: Yuqing Wang, Yun Zhao
In Large Language Models (LLMs), there have been consistent advancements in task-specific performance, largely influenced by effective prompt design. While recent research on prompting has enhanced the reasoning capabilities of LLMs, a gap remains in further improving their understanding abilities. In this study, we introduce metacognitive prompting (MP), a strategy inspired by human introspective reasoning processes. Using MP, LLMs undergo a systematic series of structured, self-aware evaluations, drawing on both their vast inherent knowledge and new insights. Our experiments involve five prevalent LLMs: Llama2, Vicuna, PaLM, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4, all of which span various general natural language understanding (NLU) tasks from the GLUE and SuperGLUE benchmarks. Results indicate that, although GPT-4 consistently excels in most tasks, PaLM, when equipped with MP, approaches its performance level. Furthermore, across models and datasets, MP consistently outperforms existing prompting methods, including standard and chain-of-thought prompting. This study underscores the potential to amplify the understanding abilities of LLMs and highlights the benefits of mirroring human introspective reasoning in NLU tasks.
Authors: Christopher A. Metz
Efficient and timely calculations of Machine Learning (ML) algorithms are essential for emerging technologies like autonomous driving, the Internet of Things (IoT), and edge computing. One of the primary ML algorithms used in such systems is Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), which demand high computational resources. This requirement has led to the use of ML accelerators like GPGPUs to meet design constraints. However, selecting the most suitable accelerator involves Design Space Exploration (DSE), a process that is usually time-consuming and requires significant manual effort. Our work presents approaches to expedite the DSE process by identifying the most appropriate GPGPU for CNN inferencing systems. We have developed a quick and precise technique for forecasting the power and performance of CNNs during inference, with a MAPE of 5.03% and 5.94%, respectively. Our approach empowers computer architects to estimate power and performance in the early stages of development, reducing the necessity for numerous prototypes. This saves time and money while also improving the time-to-market period.
Authors: Yang Liu, Yuanshun Yao, Jean-Francois Ton, Xiaoying Zhang, Ruocheng Guo Hao Cheng, Yegor Klochkov, Muhammad Faaiz Taufiq, Hang Li
Ensuring alignment, which refers to making models behave in accordance with human intentions [1,2], has become a critical task before deploying large language models (LLMs) in real-world applications. For instance, OpenAI devoted six months to iteratively aligning GPT-4 before its release [3]. However, a major challenge faced by practitioners is the lack of clear guidance on evaluating whether LLM outputs align with social norms, values, and regulations. This obstacle hinders systematic iteration and deployment of LLMs. To address this issue, this paper presents a comprehensive survey of key dimensions that are crucial to consider when assessing LLM trustworthiness. The survey covers seven major categories of LLM trustworthiness: reliability, safety, fairness, resistance to misuse, explainability and reasoning, adherence to social norms, and robustness. Each major category is further divided into several sub-categories, resulting in a total of 29 sub-categories. Additionally, a subset of 8 sub-categories is selected for further investigation, where corresponding measurement studies are designed and conducted on several widely-used LLMs. The measurement results indicate that, in general, more aligned models tend to perform better in terms of overall trustworthiness. However, the effectiveness of alignment varies across the different trustworthiness categories considered. This highlights the importance of conducting more fine-grained analyses, testing, and making continuous improvements on LLM alignment. By shedding light on these key dimensions of LLM trustworthiness, this paper aims to provide valuable insights and guidance to practitioners in the field. Understanding and addressing these concerns will be crucial in achieving reliable and ethically sound deployment of LLMs in various applications.
Authors: Zeyuan Chen, Wei Chen, Jia Xu, Zhongyi Liu, Wei Zhang
Relevance modeling aims to locate desirable items for corresponding queries, which is crucial for search engines to ensure user experience. Although most conventional approaches address this problem by assessing the semantic similarity between the query and item, pure semantic matching is not everything. In reality, auxiliary query-item interactions extracted from user historical behavior data of the search log could provide hints to reveal users' search intents further. Drawing inspiration from this, we devise a novel Behavior Augmented Relevance Learning model for Alipay Search (BARL-ASe) that leverages neighbor queries of target item and neighbor items of target query to complement target query-item semantic matching. Specifically, our model builds multi-level co-attention for distilling coarse-grained and fine-grained semantic representations from both neighbor and target views. The model subsequently employs neighbor-target self-supervised learning to improve the accuracy and robustness of BARL-ASe by strengthening representation and logit learning. Furthermore, we discuss how to deal with the long-tail query-item matching of the mini apps search scenario of Alipay practically. Experiments on real-world industry data and online A/B testing demonstrate our proposal achieves promising performance with low latency.
Authors: Tao Zou, Le Yu, Leilei Sun, Bowen Du, Deqing Wang, Fuzhen Zhuang
Patent classification aims to assign multiple International Patent Classification (IPC) codes to a given patent. Recent methods for automatically classifying patents mainly focus on analyzing the text descriptions of patents. However, apart from the texts, each patent is also associated with some assignees, and the knowledge of their applied patents is often valuable for classification. Furthermore, the hierarchical taxonomy formulated by the IPC system provides important contextual information and enables models to leverage the correlations between IPC codes for more accurate classification. However, existing methods fail to incorporate the above aspects. In this paper, we propose an integrated framework that comprehensively considers the information on patents for patent classification. To be specific, we first present an IPC codes correlations learning module to derive their semantic representations via adaptively passing and aggregating messages within the same level and across different levels along the hierarchical taxonomy. Moreover, we design a historical application patterns learning component to incorporate the corresponding assignee's previous patents by a dual channel aggregation mechanism. Finally, we combine the contextual information of patent texts that contains the semantics of IPC codes, and assignees' sequential preferences to make predictions. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach over the existing methods. Besides, we present the model's ability to capture the temporal patterns of assignees and the semantic dependencies among IPC codes.
Authors: Sivan Schwartz, Avi Yaeli, Segev Shlomov
Trust in AI agents has been extensively studied in the literature, resulting in significant advancements in our understanding of this field. However, the rapid advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and the emergence of LLM-based AI agent frameworks pose new challenges and opportunities for further research. In the field of process automation, a new generation of AI-based agents has emerged, enabling the execution of complex tasks. At the same time, the process of building automation has become more accessible to business users via user-friendly no-code tools and training mechanisms. This paper explores these new challenges and opportunities, analyzes the main aspects of trust in AI agents discussed in existing literature, and identifies specific considerations and challenges relevant to this new generation of automation agents. We also evaluate how nascent products in this category address these considerations. Finally, we highlight several challenges that the research community should address in this evolving landscape.
Authors: Francisco Mena, Diego Arenas, Marlon Nuske, Andreas Dengel
With a rapidly increasing amount and diversity of remote sensing (RS) data sources, there is a strong need for multi-view learning modeling. This is a complex task when considering the differences in resolution, magnitude, and noise of RS data. The typical approach for merging multiple RS sources has been input-level fusion, but other - more advanced - fusion strategies may outperform this traditional approach. This work assesses different fusion strategies for crop classification in the CropHarvest dataset. The fusion methods proposed in this work outperform models based on individual views and previous fusion methods. We do not find one single fusion method that consistently outperforms all other approaches. Instead, we present a comparison of multi-view fusion methods for three different datasets and show that, depending on the test region, different methods obtain the best performance. Despite this, we suggest a preliminary criterion for the selection of fusion methods.
Authors: Nicoletta Prentzas, Antonis Kakas, Constantinos S. Pattichis
Artificial Intelligence in Medicine has made significant progress with emerging applications in medical imaging, patient care, and other areas. While these applications have proven successful in retrospective studies, very few of them were applied in practice.The field of Medical AI faces various challenges, in terms of building user trust, complying with regulations, using data ethically.Explainable AI (XAI) aims to enable humans understand AI and trust its results. This paper presents a literature review on the recent developments of XAI solutions for medical decision support, based on a representative sample of 198 articles published in recent years. The systematic synthesis of the relevant articles resulted in several findings. (1) model-agnostic XAI techniques were mostly employed in these solutions, (2) deep learning models are utilized more than other types of machine learning models, (3) explainability was applied to promote trust, but very few works reported the physicians participation in the loop, (4) visual and interactive user interface is more useful in understanding the explanation and the recommendation of the system. More research is needed in collaboration between medical and AI experts, that could guide the development of suitable frameworks for the design, implementation, and evaluation of XAI solutions in medicine.
Authors: Patrick Palmer, Martin Krueger, Richard Altendorfer, Ganesh Adam, Torsten Bertram
Recent developments and the beginning market introduction of high-resolution imaging 4D (3+1D) radar sensors have initialized deep learning-based radar perception research. We investigate deep learning-based models operating on radar point clouds for 3D object detection. 3D object detection on lidar point cloud data is a mature area of 3D vision. Many different architectures have been proposed, each with strengths and weaknesses. Due to similarities between 3D lidar point clouds and 3+1D radar point clouds, those existing 3D object detectors are a natural basis to start deep learning-based 3D object detection on radar data. Thus, the first step is to analyze the detection performance of the existing models on the new data modality and evaluate them in depth. In order to apply existing 3D point cloud object detectors developed for lidar point clouds to the radar domain, they need to be adapted first. While some detectors, such as PointPillars, have already been adapted to be applicable to radar data, we have adapted others, e.g., Voxel R-CNN, SECOND, PointRCNN, and PV-RCNN. To this end, we conduct a cross-model validation (evaluating a set of models on one particular data set) as well as a cross-data set validation (evaluating all models in the model set on several data sets). The high-resolution radar data used are the View-of-Delft and Astyx data sets. Finally, we evaluate several adaptations of the models and their training procedures. We also discuss major factors influencing the detection performance on radar data and propose possible solutions indicating potential future research avenues.
Authors: Xuanhe Zhou, Guoliang Li, Zhiyuan Liu
Database administrators (DBAs) play a crucial role in managing, maintaining and optimizing a database system to ensure data availability, performance, and reliability. However, it is hard and tedious for DBAs to manage a large number of database instances (e.g., millions of instances on the cloud databases). Recently large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential to understand valuable documents and accordingly generate reasonable answers. Thus, we propose D-Bot, a LLM-based database administrator that can continuously acquire database maintenance experience from textual sources, and provide reasonable, well-founded, in-time diagnosis and optimization advice for target databases. This paper presents a revolutionary LLM-centric framework for database maintenance, including (i) database maintenance knowledge detection from documents and tools, (ii) tree of thought reasoning for root cause analysis, and (iii) collaborative diagnosis among multiple LLMs. Our preliminary experimental results that D-Bot can efficiently and effectively diagnose the root causes and our code is available at github.com/TsinghuaDatabaseGroup/DB-GPT.
Authors: Nick Bryan-Kinns, Berker Banar, Corey Ford, Courtney N. Reed, Yixiao Zhang, Simon Colton, Jack Armitage
Explainable AI has the potential to support more interactive and fluid co-creative AI systems which can creatively collaborate with people. To do this, creative AI models need to be amenable to debugging by offering eXplainable AI (XAI) features which are inspectable, understandable, and modifiable. However, currently there is very little XAI for the arts. In this work, we demonstrate how a latent variable model for music generation can be made more explainable; specifically we extend MeasureVAE which generates measures of music. We increase the explainability of the model by: i) using latent space regularisation to force some specific dimensions of the latent space to map to meaningful musical attributes, ii) providing a user interface feedback loop to allow people to adjust dimensions of the latent space and observe the results of these changes in real-time, iii) providing a visualisation of the musical attributes in the latent space to help people understand and predict the effect of changes to latent space dimensions. We suggest that in doing so we bridge the gap between the latent space and the generated musical outcomes in a meaningful way which makes the model and its outputs more explainable and more debuggable.
Authors: Sapir Gershov, Fadi Mahameed, Aeyal Raz, Shlomi Laufer
Patient's vital signs, which are displayed on monitors, make the anesthesiologist's visual attention (VA) a key component in the safe management of patients under general anesthesia; moreover, the distribution of said VA and the ability to acquire specific cues throughout the anesthetic, may have a direct impact on patient's outcome. Currently, most studies employ wearable eye-tracking technologies to analyze anesthesiologists' visual patterns. Albeit being able to produce meticulous data, wearable devices are not a sustainable solution for large-scale or long-term use for data collection in the operating room (OR). Thus, by utilizing a novel eye-tracking method in the form of deep learning models that process monitor-mounted webcams, we collected continuous behavioral data and gained insight into the anesthesiologist's VA distribution with minimal disturbance to their natural workflow. In this study, we collected OR video recordings using the proposed framework and compared different visual behavioral patterns. We distinguished between baseline VA distribution during uneventful periods to patterns associated with active phases or during critical, unanticipated incidents. In the future, such a platform may serve as a crucial component of context-aware assistive technologies in the OR.
Authors: Candida M. Greco, Andrea Tagarelli
Transformer-based language models (TLMs) have widely been recognized to be a cutting-edge technology for the successful development of deep-learning-based solutions to problems and applications that require natural language processing and understanding. Like for other textual domains, TLMs have indeed pushed the state-of-the-art of AI approaches for many tasks of interest in the legal domain. Despite the first Transformer model being proposed about six years ago, there has been a rapid progress of this technology at an unprecedented rate, whereby BERT and related models represent a major reference, also in the legal domain. This article provides the first systematic overview of TLM-based methods for AI-driven problems and tasks in the legal sphere. A major goal is to highlight research advances in this field so as to understand, on the one hand, how the Transformers have contributed to the success of AI in supporting legal processes, and on the other hand, what are the current limitations and opportunities for further research development.
Authors: Xiaolin Bu, Jiaxin Song, Ziqi Yu
We study the fair division problem and the existence of allocations satisfying the fairness criterion envy-freeness up to any item (EFX). The existence of EFX allocations is a major open problem in the fair division literature. We consider binary valuations where the marginal gain of the value by receiving an extra item is either $0$ or $1$. Babaioff et al. [2021] proved that EFX allocations always exist for binary and submodular valuations. In this paper, by using completely different techniques, we extend this existence result to general binary valuations that are not necessarily submodular, and we present a polynomial time algorithm for computing an EFX allocation.
Authors: Wentao Ning, Xiao Yan, Weiwen Liu, Reynold Cheng, Rui Zhang, Bo Tang
Multi-domain recommendation (MDR) aims to provide recommendations for different domains (e.g., types of products) with overlapping users/items and is common for platforms such as Amazon, Facebook, and LinkedIn that host multiple services. Existing MDR models face two challenges: First, it is difficult to disentangle knowledge that generalizes across domains (e.g., a user likes cheap items) and knowledge specific to a single domain (e.g., a user likes blue clothing but not blue cars). Second, they have limited ability to transfer knowledge across domains with small overlaps. We propose a new MDR method named EDDA with two key components, i.e., embedding disentangling recommender and domain alignment, to tackle the two challenges respectively. In particular, the embedding disentangling recommender separates both the model and embedding for the inter-domain part and the intra-domain part, while most existing MDR methods only focus on model-level disentangling. The domain alignment leverages random walks from graph processing to identify similar user/item pairs from different domains and encourages similar user/item pairs to have similar embeddings, enhancing knowledge transfer. We compare EDDA with 12 state-of-the-art baselines on 3 real datasets. The results show that EDDA consistently outperforms the baselines on all datasets and domains. All datasets and codes are available at https://github.com/Stevenn9981/EDDA.
Authors: U.V.B.L. Udugama, G. Vosselman, F. Nex
The ability of robots to autonomously navigate through 3D environments depends on their comprehension of spatial concepts, ranging from low-level geometry to high-level semantics, such as objects, places, and buildings. To enable such comprehension, 3D scene graphs have emerged as a robust tool for representing the environment as a layered graph of concepts and their relationships. However, building these representations using monocular vision systems in real-time remains a difficult task that has not been explored in depth. This paper puts forth a real-time spatial perception system Mono-Hydra, combining a monocular camera and an IMU sensor setup, focusing on indoor scenarios. However, the proposed approach is adaptable to outdoor applications, offering flexibility in its potential uses. The system employs a suite of deep learning algorithms to derive depth and semantics. It uses a robocentric visual-inertial odometry (VIO) algorithm based on square-root information, thereby ensuring consistent visual odometry with an IMU and a monocular camera. This system achieves sub-20 cm error in real-time processing at 15 fps, enabling real-time 3D scene graph construction using a laptop GPU (NVIDIA 3080). This enhances decision-making efficiency and effectiveness in simple camera setups, augmenting robotic system agility. We make Mono-Hydra publicly available at: https://github.com/UAV-Centre-ITC/Mono_Hydra
Authors: Paula Torren-Peraire, Alan Kai Hassen, Samuel Genheden, Jonas Verhoeven, Djork-Arne Clevert, Mike Preuss, Igor Tetko
Retrosynthesis consists of breaking down a chemical compound recursively step-by-step into molecular precursors until a set of commercially available molecules is found with the goal to provide a synthesis route. Its two primary research directions, single-step retrosynthesis prediction, which models the chemical reaction logic, and multi-step synthesis planning, which tries to find the correct sequence of reactions, are inherently intertwined. Still, this connection is not reflected in contemporary research. In this work, we combine these two major research directions by applying multiple single-step retrosynthesis models within multi-step synthesis planning and analyzing their impact using public and proprietary reaction data. We find a disconnection between high single-step performance and potential route-finding success, suggesting that single-step models must be evaluated within synthesis planning in the future. Furthermore, we show that the commonly used single-step retrosynthesis benchmark dataset USPTO-50k is insufficient as this evaluation task does not represent model performance and scalability on larger and more diverse datasets. For multi-step synthesis planning, we show that the choice of the single-step model can improve the overall success rate of synthesis planning by up to +28% compared to the commonly used baseline model. Finally, we show that each single-step model finds unique synthesis routes, and differs in aspects such as route-finding success, the number of found synthesis routes, and chemical validity, making the combination of single-step retrosynthesis prediction and multi-step synthesis planning a crucial aspect when developing future methods.
Authors: Pierre Nicolay, Yvan Petillot, Mykhaylo Marfeychuk, Sen Wang, Ignacio Carlucho
Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) play a crucial role in surveying marine environments, carrying out underwater inspection tasks, and ocean exploration. However, in order to ensure that the AUV is able to carry out its mission successfully, a control system capable of adapting to changing environmental conditions is required. Furthermore, to ensure the robotic platform's safe operation, the onboard controller should be able to operate under certain constraints. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of Model Predictive Path Integral Control (MPPI) for the control of an AUV. We utilise a non-linear model of the AUV to propagate the samples of the MPPI, which allow us to compute the control action in real time. We provide a detailed evaluation of the effect of the main hyperparameters on the performance of the MPPI controller. Furthermore, we compared the performance of the proposed method with a classical PID and Cascade PID approach, demonstrating the superiority of our proposed controller. Finally, we present results where environmental constraints are added and show how MPPI can handle them by simply incorporating those constraints in the cost function.
Authors: Aadharsh Aadhithya A, Abinesh S, Akshaya J, Jayanth M, Vishnu Radhakrishnan, Sowmya V, Soman K.P
This paper provides an overview of the historical progression of distributed optimization techniques, tracing their development from early duality-based methods pioneered by Dantzig, Wolfe, and Benders in the 1960s to the emergence of the Augmented Lagrangian Alternating Direction Inexact Newton (ALADIN) algorithm. The initial focus on Lagrangian relaxation for convex problems and decomposition strategies led to the refinement of methods like the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM). The resurgence of interest in distributed optimization in the late 2000s, particularly in machine learning and imaging, demonstrated ADMM's practical efficacy and its unifying potential. This overview also highlights the emergence of the proximal center method and its applications in diverse domains. Furthermore, the paper underscores the distinctive features of ALADIN, which offers convergence guarantees for non-convex scenarios without introducing auxiliary variables, differentiating it from traditional augmentation techniques. In essence, this work encapsulates the historical trajectory of distributed optimization and underscores the promising prospects of ALADIN in addressing non-convex optimization challenges.
Authors: Natalie Krueger, Dr. Mounika Vanamala, Dr. Rushit Dave
A deepfake is a photo or video of a person whose image has been digitally altered or partially replaced with an image of someone else. Deepfakes have the potential to cause a variety of problems and are often used maliciously. A common usage is altering videos of prominent political figures and celebrities. These deepfakes can portray them making offensive, problematic, and/or untrue statements. Current deepfakes can be very realistic, and when used in this way, can spread panic and even influence elections and political opinions. There are many deepfake detection strategies currently in use but finding the most comprehensive and universal method is critical. So, in this survey we will address the problems of malicious deepfake creation and the lack of universal deepfake detection methods. Our objective is to survey and analyze a variety of current methods and advances in the field of deepfake detection.
Authors: Pan Liang, Danwei Ye, Zihao Zhu, Yunchao Wang, Wang Xia, Ronghua Liang, Guodao Sun
Large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have demonstrated outstanding performance in various fields, particularly in natural language understanding and generation tasks. In complex application scenarios, users tend to engage in multi-turn conversations with ChatGPT to keep contextual information and obtain comprehensive responses. However, human forgetting and model contextual forgetting remain prominent issues in multi-turn conversation scenarios, which challenge the users' conversation comprehension and contextual continuity for ChatGPT. To address these challenges, we propose an interactive conversation visualization system called C5, which includes Global View, Topic View, and Context-associated Q\&A View. The Global View uses the GitLog diagram metaphor to represent the conversation structure, presenting the trend of conversation evolution and supporting the exploration of locally salient features. The Topic View is designed to display all the question and answer nodes and their relationships within a topic using the structure of a knowledge graph, thereby display the relevance and evolution of conversations. The Context-associated Q\&A View consists of three linked views, which allow users to explore individual conversations deeply while providing specific contextual information when posing questions. The usefulness and effectiveness of C5 were evaluated through a case study and a user study.
Authors: Ushnish Sengupta, Chinkuo Jao, Alberto Bernacchia, Sattar Vakili, Da-shan Shiu
Channel modelling is essential to designing modern wireless communication systems. The increasing complexity of channel modelling and the cost of collecting high-quality wireless channel data have become major challenges. In this paper, we propose a diffusion model based channel sampling approach for rapidly synthesizing channel realizations from limited data. We use a diffusion model with a U Net based architecture operating in the frequency space domain. To evaluate how well the proposed model reproduces the true distribution of channels in the training dataset, two evaluation metrics are used: $i)$ the approximate $2$-Wasserstein distance between real and generated distributions of the normalized power spectrum in the antenna and frequency domains and $ii)$ precision and recall metric for distributions. We show that, compared to existing GAN based approaches which suffer from mode collapse and unstable training, our diffusion based approach trains stably and generates diverse and high-fidelity samples from the true channel distribution. We also show that we can pretrain the model on a simulated urban macro-cellular channel dataset and fine-tune it on a smaller, out-of-distribution urban micro-cellular dataset, therefore showing that it is feasible to model real world channels using limited data with this approach.
Authors: Miao Fan, Chen Hu, Shuchang Zhou
The Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) plays a pivotal role in shaping the impact of large language models (LLMs), contributing significantly to controlling output toxicity and selecting output styles, particularly as LLMs often harbor misleading content, highlighting the urgency to align them with human values for secure AI systems. The RLHF, characterized by complexity, instability, and sensitivity to hyperparameters, makes the evaluation of the reward model for complex tasks challenging, thereby further complicating the use of Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). In this paper, we introduce a simple task designed to employ Gloden as a reward model that validates the effectiveness of PPO and inspires it, primarily explaining the task of utilizing PPO to manipulate the tokenizer length of the output generated by the model. Experiments confirm that PPO is not only effective in manipulating the output tokenizer length to a certain extent in this type of task but also exhibits facilitated training once the influence of the reward model effect is excluded, making it an exciting development.
Authors: Weilong Ding, Tianpu Zhang, Jianwu Wang, Zhuofeng Zhao
Inter-city highway transportation is significant for urban life. As one of the key functions in intelligent transportation system (ITS), traffic evaluation always plays significant role nowadays, and daily traffic flow prediction still faces challenges at network-wide toll stations. On the one hand, the data imbalance in practice among various locations deteriorates the performance of prediction. On the other hand, complex correlative spatio-temporal factors cannot be comprehensively employed in long-term duration. In this paper, a prediction method is proposed for daily traffic flow in highway domain through spatio-temporal deep learning. In our method, data normalization strategy is used to deal with data imbalance, due to long-tail distribution of traffic flow at network-wide toll stations. And then, based on graph convolutional network, we construct networks in distinct semantics to capture spatio-temporal features. Beside that, meteorology and calendar features are used by our model in the full connection stage to extra external characteristics of traffic flow. By extensive experiments and case studies in one Chinese provincial highway, our method shows clear improvement in predictive accuracy than baselines and practical benefits in business.
Authors: D. Adriana Gómez-Rosal, Max Bergau, Georg K.J. Fischer, Andreas Wachaja, Johannes Gräter, Matthias Odenweller, Uwe Piechottka, Fabian Hoeflinger, Nikhil Gosala, Niklas Wetzel, Daniel Büscher, Abhinav Valada, Wolfram Burgard
In today's chemical production plants, human field operators perform frequent checks on the plant's integrity to guarantee high safety standards, and thus are possibly the first to encounter dangerous operating conditions. To alleviate their tasks of failure detection and monitoring by audio, visual, and olfactory perceptions, we present a robotic system that consists of an autonomously navigating robot integrated with various sensors and data processing. We aim to resemble the human sensing and interpretation capabilities of sight, smell, and hearing, for providing automated inspection. We evaluate our system extensively at a wastewater facility in full working conditions. Our results demonstrate that the system is able to robustly navigate a plant and to provide useful information about critical operating conditions.
Authors: Hanzhao Wang, Zhongze Cai, Xiaocheng Li, Kalyan Talluri
Discrete-choice models are used in economics, marketing and revenue management to predict customer purchase probabilities, say as a function of prices and other features of the offered assortment. While they have been shown to be expressive, capturing customer heterogeneity and behaviour, they are also hard to estimate, often based on many unobservables like utilities; and moreover, they still fail to capture many salient features of customer behaviour. A natural question then, given their success in other contexts, is if neural networks can eliminate the necessity of carefully building a context-dependent customer behaviour model and hand-coding and tuning the estimation. It is unclear however how one would incorporate assortment effects into such a neural network, and also how one would optimize the assortment with such a black-box generative model of choice probabilities. In this paper we investigate first whether a single neural network architecture can predict purchase probabilities for datasets from various contexts and generated under various models and assumptions. Next, we develop an assortment optimization formulation that is solvable by off-the-shelf integer programming solvers. We compare against a variety of benchmark discrete-choice models on simulated as well as real-world datasets, developing training tricks along the way to make the neural network prediction and subsequent optimization robust and comparable in performance to the alternates.
Authors: Erkin Ötleş, Brian T. Denton, Jenna Wiens
As data shift or new data become available, updating clinical machine learning models may be necessary to maintain or improve performance over time. However, updating a model can introduce compatibility issues when the behavior of the updated model does not align with user expectations, resulting in poor user-model team performance. Existing compatibility measures depend on model decision thresholds, limiting their applicability in settings where models are used to generate rankings based on estimated risk. To address this limitation, we propose a novel rank-based compatibility measure, $C^R$, and a new loss function that aims to optimize discriminative performance while encouraging good compatibility. Applied to a case study in mortality risk stratification leveraging data from MIMIC, our approach yields more compatible models while maintaining discriminative performance compared to existing model selection techniques, with an increase in $C^R$ of $0.019$ ($95\%$ confidence interval: $0.005$, $0.035$). This work provides new tools to analyze and update risk stratification models used in clinical care.
Authors: Adu-Gyamfi Kojo, Kandiboina Raghupathi, Ravichandra-Mouli Varsha, Knickerbocker Skylar, Hans Zachary N, Hawkins, Neal R, Sharma Anuj
In today's rapidly evolving urban landscapes, efficient and accurate mapping of road infrastructure is critical for optimizing transportation systems, enhancing road safety, and improving the overall mobility experience for drivers and commuters. Yet, a formidable bottleneck obstructs progress - the laborious and time-intensive manual identification of intersections. Simply considering the shear number of intersections that need to be identified, and the labor hours required per intersection, the need for an automated solution becomes undeniable. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach that leverages connected vehicle data and cutting-edge deep learning techniques. By employing geohashing to segment vehicle trajectories and then generating image representations of road segments, we utilize the YOLOv5 (You Only Look Once version 5) algorithm for accurate classification of both straight road segments and intersections. Experimental results demonstrate an impressive overall classification accuracy of 95%, with straight roads achieving a remarkable 97% F1 score and intersections reaching a 90% F1 score. This approach not only saves time and resources but also enables more frequent updates and a comprehensive understanding of the road network. Our research showcases the potential impact on traffic management, urban planning, and autonomous vehicle navigation systems. The fusion of connected vehicle data and deep learning models holds promise for a transformative shift in road infrastructure mapping, propelling us towards a smarter, safer, and more connected transportation ecosystem.
Authors: Kojo Adu-Gyamfi, Sharma Anuj
Modern transportation planning relies heavily on accurate predictions of person and vehicle trips. However, traditional planning models often fail to account for the intricacies and dynamics of travel behavior, leading to less-than-optimal accuracy in these predictions. This study explores the potential of deep learning techniques to transform the way we approach trip predictions, and ultimately, transportation planning. Utilizing a comprehensive dataset from the National Household Travel Survey (NHTS), we developed and trained a deep learning model for predicting person and vehicle trips. The proposed model leverages the vast amount of information in the NHTS data, capturing complex, non-linear relationships that were previously overlooked by traditional models. As a result, our deep learning model achieved an impressive accuracy of 98% for person trip prediction and 96% for vehicle trip estimation. This represents a significant improvement over the performances of traditional transportation planning models, thereby demonstrating the power of deep learning in this domain. The implications of this study extend beyond just more accurate predictions. By enhancing the accuracy and reliability of trip prediction models, planners can formulate more effective, data-driven transportation policies, infrastructure, and services. As such, our research underscores the need for the transportation planning field to embrace advanced techniques like deep learning. The detailed methodology, along with a thorough discussion of the results and their implications, are presented in the subsequent sections of this paper.
Authors: Zhengzhi Lu, He Wang, Ziyi Chang, Guoan Yang, Hubert P. H. Shum
Recently, methods for skeleton-based human activity recognition have been shown to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. However, these attack methods require either the full knowledge of the victim (i.e. white-box attacks), access to training data (i.e. transfer-based attacks) or frequent model queries (i.e. black-box attacks). All their requirements are highly restrictive, raising the question of how detrimental the vulnerability is. In this paper, we show that the vulnerability indeed exists. To this end, we consider a new attack task: the attacker has no access to the victim model or the training data or labels, where we coin the term hard no-box attack. Specifically, we first learn a motion manifold where we define an adversarial loss to compute a new gradient for the attack, named skeleton-motion-informed (SMI) gradient. Our gradient contains information of the motion dynamics, which is different from existing gradient-based attack methods that compute the loss gradient assuming each dimension in the data is independent. The SMI gradient can augment many gradient-based attack methods, leading to a new family of no-box attack methods. Extensive evaluation and comparison show that our method imposes a real threat to existing classifiers. They also show that the SMI gradient improves the transferability and imperceptibility of adversarial samples in both no-box and transfer-based black-box settings.
Authors: Xubin Ren, Lianghao Xia, Yuhao Yang, Wei Wei, Tianle Wang, Xuheng Cai, Chao Huang
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has gained significant interest in recent years as a solution to address the challenges posed by sparse and noisy data in recommender systems. Despite the growing number of SSL algorithms designed to provide state-of-the-art performance in various recommendation scenarios (e.g., graph collaborative filtering, sequential recommendation, social recommendation, KG-enhanced recommendation), there is still a lack of unified frameworks that integrate recommendation algorithms across different domains. Such a framework could serve as the cornerstone for self-supervised recommendation algorithms, unifying the validation of existing methods and driving the design of new ones. To address this gap, we introduce SSLRec, a novel benchmark platform that provides a standardized, flexible, and comprehensive framework for evaluating various SSL-enhanced recommenders. The SSLRec library features a modular architecture that allows users to easily evaluate state-of-the-art models and a complete set of data augmentation and self-supervised toolkits to help create SSL recommendation models with specific needs. Furthermore, SSLRec simplifies the process of training and evaluating different recommendation models with consistent and fair settings. Our SSLRec platform covers a comprehensive set of state-of-the-art SSL-enhanced recommendation models across different scenarios, enabling researchers to evaluate these cutting-edge models and drive further innovation in the field. Our implemented SSLRec framework is available at the source code repository https://github.com/HKUDS/SSLRec.
Authors: Daniel Bogdoll, Lukas Bosch, Tim Joseph, Helen Gremmelmaier, Yitian Yang, J. Marius Zöllner
In recent years there have been remarkable advancements in autonomous driving. While autonomous vehicles demonstrate high performance in closed-set conditions, they encounter difficulties when confronted with unexpected situations. At the same time, world models emerged in the field of model-based reinforcement learning as a way to enable agents to predict the future depending on potential actions. This led to outstanding results in sparse reward and complex control tasks. This work provides an overview of how world models can be leveraged to perform anomaly detection in the domain of autonomous driving. We provide a characterization of world models and relate individual components to previous works in anomaly detection to facilitate further research in the field.
Authors: Ernest Davis, Scott Aaronson
This report describes a test of the large language model GPT-4 with the Wolfram Alpha and the Code Interpreter plug-ins on 105 original problems in science and math, at the high school and college levels, carried out in June-August 2023. Our tests suggest that the plug-ins significantly enhance GPT's ability to solve these problems. Having said that, there are still often "interface" failures; that is, GPT often has trouble formulating problems in a way that elicits useful answers from the plug-ins. Fixing these interface failures seems like a central challenge in making GPT a reliable tool for college-level calculation problems.
Authors: Steffen Hagedorn, Marcel Hallgarten, Martin Stoll, Alexandru Condurache
Automated driving has the potential to revolutionize personal, public, and freight mobility. Besides the enormous challenge of perception, i.e. accurately perceiving the environment using available sensor data, automated driving comprises planning a safe, comfortable, and efficient motion trajectory. To promote safety and progress, many works rely on modules that predict the future motion of surrounding traffic. Modular automated driving systems commonly handle prediction and planning as sequential separate tasks. While this accounts for the influence of surrounding traffic on the ego-vehicle, it fails to anticipate the reactions of traffic participants to the ego-vehicle's behavior. Recent works suggest that integrating prediction and planning in an interdependent joint step is necessary to achieve safe, efficient, and comfortable driving. While various models implement such integrated systems, a comprehensive overview and theoretical understanding of different principles are lacking. We systematically review state-of-the-art deep learning-based prediction, planning, and integrated prediction and planning models. Different facets of the integration ranging from model architecture and model design to behavioral aspects are considered and related to each other. Moreover, we discuss the implications, strengths, and limitations of different integration methods. By pointing out research gaps, describing relevant future challenges, and highlighting trends in the research field, we identify promising directions for future research.
Authors: Phillip Lippe, Bastiaan S. Veeling, Paris Perdikaris, Richard E. Turner, Johannes Brandstetter
Time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs) are ubiquitous in science and engineering. Recently, mostly due to the high computational cost of traditional solution techniques, deep neural network based surrogates have gained increased interest. The practical utility of such neural PDE solvers relies on their ability to provide accurate, stable predictions over long time horizons, which is a notoriously hard problem. In this work, we present a large-scale analysis of common temporal rollout strategies, identifying the neglect of non-dominant spatial frequency information, often associated with high frequencies in PDE solutions, as the primary pitfall limiting stable, accurate rollout performance. Based on these insights, we draw inspiration from recent advances in diffusion models to introduce PDE-Refiner; a novel model class that enables more accurate modeling of all frequency components via a multistep refinement process. We validate PDE-Refiner on challenging benchmarks of complex fluid dynamics, demonstrating stable and accurate rollouts that consistently outperform state-of-the-art models, including neural, numerical, and hybrid neural-numerical architectures. We further demonstrate that PDE-Refiner greatly enhances data efficiency, since the denoising objective implicitly induces a novel form of spectral data augmentation. Finally, PDE-Refiner's connection to diffusion models enables an accurate and efficient assessment of the model's predictive uncertainty, allowing us to estimate when the surrogate becomes inaccurate.
Authors: Haohe Liu, Qiao Tian, Yi Yuan, Xubo Liu, Xinhao Mei, Qiuqiang Kong, Yuping Wang, Wenwu Wang, Yuxuan Wang, Mark D. Plumbley
Although audio generation shares commonalities across different types of audio, such as speech, music, and sound effects, designing models for each type requires careful consideration of specific objectives and biases that can significantly differ from those of other types. To bring us closer to a unified perspective of audio generation, this paper proposes a framework that utilizes the same learning method for speech, music, and sound effect generation. Our framework introduces a general representation of audio, called language of audio (LOA). Any audio can be translated into LOA based on AudioMAE, a self-supervised pre-trained representation learning model. In the generation process, we translate any modalities into LOA by using a GPT-2 model, and we perform self-supervised audio generation learning with a latent diffusion model conditioned on LOA. The proposed framework naturally brings advantages such as in-context learning abilities and reusable self-supervised pretrained AudioMAE and latent diffusion models. Experiments on the major benchmarks of text-to-audio, text-to-music, and text-to-speech demonstrate new state-of-the-art or competitive performance to previous approaches. Our demo and code are available at https://audioldm.github.io/audioldm2.
Authors: Yun-Chun Chen, Vladimir G. Kim, Noam Aigerman, Alec Jacobson
The recent proliferation of 3D content that can be consumed on hand-held devices necessitates efficient tools for transmitting large geometric data, e.g., 3D meshes, over the Internet. Detailed high-resolution assets can pose a challenge to storage as well as transmission bandwidth, and level-of-detail techniques are often used to transmit an asset using an appropriate bandwidth budget. It is especially desirable for these methods to transmit data progressively, improving the quality of the geometry with more data. Our key insight is that the geometric details of 3D meshes often exhibit similar local patterns even across different shapes, and thus can be effectively represented with a shared learned generative space. We learn this space using a subdivision-based encoder-decoder architecture trained in advance on a large collection of surfaces. We further observe that additional residual features can be transmitted progressively between intermediate levels of subdivision that enable the client to control the tradeoff between bandwidth cost and quality of reconstruction, providing a neural progressive mesh representation. We evaluate our method on a diverse set of complex 3D shapes and demonstrate that it outperforms baselines in terms of compression ratio and reconstruction quality.
Authors: Nathan Michlo, Richard Klein, Steven James
Learning disentangled representations with variational autoencoders (VAEs) is often attributed to the regularisation component of the loss. In this work, we highlight the interaction between data and the reconstruction term of the loss as the main contributor to disentanglement in VAEs. We show that standard benchmark datasets have unintended correlations between their subjective ground-truth factors and perceived axes in the data according to typical VAE reconstruction losses. Our work exploits this relationship to provide a theory for what constitutes an adversarial dataset under a given reconstruction loss. We verify this by constructing an example dataset that prevents disentanglement in state-of-the-art frameworks while maintaining human-intuitive ground-truth factors. Finally, we re-enable disentanglement by designing an example reconstruction loss that is once again able to perceive the ground-truth factors. Our findings demonstrate the subjective nature of disentanglement and the importance of considering the interaction between the ground-truth factors, data and notably, the reconstruction loss, which is under-recognised in the literature.
Authors: Rajitha de Silva, Grzegorz Cielniak, Gang Wang, Junfeng Gao
Autonomous navigation in agricultural environments is challenged by varying field conditions that arise in arable fields. State-of-the-art solutions for autonomous navigation in such environments require expensive hardware such as RTK-GNSS. This paper presents a robust crop row detection algorithm that withstands such field variations using inexpensive cameras. Existing datasets for crop row detection does not represent all the possible field variations. A dataset of sugar beet images was created representing 11 field variations comprised of multiple grow stages, light levels, varying weed densities, curved crop rows and discontinuous crop rows. The proposed pipeline segments the crop rows using a deep learning-based method and employs the predicted segmentation mask for extraction of the central crop using a novel central crop row selection algorithm. The novel crop row detection algorithm was tested for crop row detection performance and the capability of visual servoing along a crop row. The visual servoing-based navigation was tested on a realistic simulation scenario with the real ground and plant textures. Our algorithm demonstrated robust vision-based crop row detection in challenging field conditions outperforming the baseline.
Authors: Ayesha Siddique, Ripan Kumar Kundu, Gautam Raj Mode, Khaza Anuarul Hoque
The state-of-the-art predictive maintenance (PdM) techniques have shown great success in reducing maintenance costs and downtime of complicated machines while increasing overall productivity through extensive utilization of Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Deep Learning (DL). Unfortunately, IoT sensors and DL algorithms are both prone to cyber-attacks. For instance, DL algorithms are known for their susceptibility to adversarial examples. Such adversarial attacks are vastly under-explored in the PdM domain. This is because the adversarial attacks in the computer vision domain for classification tasks cannot be directly applied to the PdM domain for multivariate time series (MTS) regression tasks. In this work, we propose an end-to-end methodology to design adversarially robust PdM systems by extensively analyzing the effect of different types of adversarial attacks and proposing a novel adversarial defense technique for DL-enabled PdM models. First, we propose novel MTS Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) and MTS PGD with random restarts (PGD_r) attacks. Then, we evaluate the impact of MTS PGD and PGD_r along with MTS Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) and MTS Basic Iterative Method (BIM) on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), and Bi-directional LSTM based PdM system. Our results using NASA's turbofan engine dataset show that adversarial attacks can cause a severe defect (up to 11X) in the RUL prediction, outperforming the effectiveness of the state-of-the-art PdM attacks by 3X. Furthermore, we present a novel approximate adversarial training method to defend against adversarial attacks. We observe that approximate adversarial training can significantly improve the robustness of PdM models (up to 54X) and outperforms the state-of-the-art PdM defense methods by offering 3X more robustness.
Authors: Sakib Shahriar, Kadhim Hayawi
The emergence of an AI-powered chatbot that can generate human-like sentences and write coherent essays has caught the world's attention. This paper discusses the historical overview of chatbots and the technology behind Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, better known as ChatGPT. Moreover, potential applications of ChatGPT in various domains, including healthcare, education, and research, are highlighted. Despite promising results, there are several privacy and ethical concerns surrounding ChatGPT. In addition, we highlight some of the important limitations of the current version of ChatGPT. We also ask ChatGPT to provide its point of view and present its responses to several questions we attempt to answer.
Authors: Nicola Franco, Daniel Korth, Jeanette Miriam Lorenz, Karsten Roscher, Stephan Guennemann
As the use of machine learning continues to expand, the importance of ensuring its safety cannot be overstated. A key concern in this regard is the ability to identify whether a given sample is from the training distribution, or is an "Out-Of-Distribution" (OOD) sample. In addition, adversaries can manipulate OOD samples in ways that lead a classifier to make a confident prediction. In this study, we present a novel approach for certifying the robustness of OOD detection within a $\ell_2$-norm around the input, regardless of network architecture and without the need for specific components or additional training. Further, we improve current techniques for detecting adversarial attacks on OOD samples, while providing high levels of certified and adversarial robustness on in-distribution samples. The average of all OOD detection metrics on CIFAR10/100 shows an increase of $\sim 13 \% / 5\%$ relative to previous approaches.
Authors: Dominik Klepl, Fei He, Min Wu, Daniel J. Blackburn, Ptolemaios G. Sarrigiannis
Graph neural network (GNN) models are increasingly being used for the classification of electroencephalography (EEG) data. However, GNN-based diagnosis of neurological disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease (AD), remains a relatively unexplored area of research. Previous studies have relied on functional connectivity methods to infer brain graph structures and used simple GNN architectures for the diagnosis of AD. In this work, we propose a novel adaptive gated graph convolutional network (AGGCN) that can provide explainable predictions. AGGCN adaptively learns graph structures by combining convolution-based node feature enhancement with a well-known correlation-based measure of functional connectivity. Furthermore, the gated graph convolution can dynamically weigh the contribution of various spatial scales. The proposed model achieves high accuracy in both eyes-closed and eyes-open conditions, indicating the stability of learned representations. Finally, we demonstrate that the proposed AGGCN model generates consistent explanations of its predictions that might be relevant for further study of AD-related alterations of brain networks.
Authors: Hyojoon Park, Sangeetha Grama Srinivasan, Matthew Cong, Doyub Kim, Byungsoo Kim, Jonathan Swartz, Ken Museth, Eftychios Sifakis
We present a neural network-based simulation super-resolution framework that can efficiently and realistically enhance a facial performance produced by a low-cost, realtime physics-based simulation to a level of detail that closely approximates that of a reference-quality off-line simulator with much higher resolution (26x element count in our examples) and accurate physical modeling. Our approach is rooted in our ability to construct - via simulation - a training set of paired frames, from the low- and high-resolution simulators respectively, that are in semantic correspondence with each other. We use face animation as an exemplar of such a simulation domain, where creating this semantic congruence is achieved by simply dialing in the same muscle actuation controls and skeletal pose in the two simulators. Our proposed neural network super-resolution framework generalizes from this training set to unseen expressions, compensates for modeling discrepancies between the two simulations due to limited resolution or cost-cutting approximations in the real-time variant, and does not require any semantic descriptors or parameters to be provided as input, other than the result of the real-time simulation. We evaluate the efficacy of our pipeline on a variety of expressive performances and provide comparisons and ablation experiments for plausible variations and alternatives to our proposed scheme.
Authors: Ruixiang Jiang, Lingbo Liu, Changwen Chen
Recent advances in visual-language models have shown remarkable zero-shot text-image matching ability that is transferable to downstream tasks such as object detection and segmentation. Adapting these models for object counting, however, remains a formidable challenge. In this study, we first investigate transferring vision-language models (VLMs) for class-agnostic object counting. Specifically, we propose CLIP-Count, the first end-to-end pipeline that estimates density maps for open-vocabulary objects with text guidance in a zero-shot manner. To align the text embedding with dense visual features, we introduce a patch-text contrastive loss that guides the model to learn informative patch-level visual representations for dense prediction. Moreover, we design a hierarchical patch-text interaction module to propagate semantic information across different resolution levels of visual features. Benefiting from the full exploitation of the rich image-text alignment knowledge of pretrained VLMs, our method effectively generates high-quality density maps for objects-of-interest. Extensive experiments on FSC-147, CARPK, and ShanghaiTech crowd counting datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art accuracy and generalizability of the proposed method. Code is available: https://github.com/songrise/CLIP-Count.
Authors: Sanyam Jain, Aarati Shrestha, Stefano Nichele
This research project investigates Lenia, an artificial life platform that simulates ecosystems of digital creatures. Lenia's ecosystem consists of simple, artificial organisms that can move, consume, grow, and reproduce. The platform is important as a tool for studying artificial life and evolution, as it provides a scalable and flexible environment for creating a diverse range of organisms with varying abilities and behaviors. Measuring complexity in Lenia is a key aspect of the study, which identifies the metrics for measuring long-term complex emerging behavior of rules, with the aim of evolving better Lenia behaviors which are yet not discovered. The Genetic Algorithm uses neighborhoods or kernels as genotype while keeping the rest of the parameters of Lenia as fixed, for example growth function, to produce different behaviors respective to the population and then measures fitness value to decide the complexity of the resulting behavior. First, we use Variation over Time as a fitness function where higher variance between the frames are rewarded. Second, we use Auto-encoder based fitness where variation of the list of reconstruction loss for the frames is rewarded. Third, we perform combined fitness where higher variation of the pixel density of reconstructed frames is rewarded. All three experiments are tweaked with pixel alive threshold and frames used. Finally, after performing nine experiments of each fitness for 500 generations, we pick configurations from all experiments such that there is a scope of further evolution, and run it for 2500 generations. Results show that the kernel's center of mass increases with a specific set of pixels and together with borders the kernel try to achieve a Gaussian distribution. Results are available at https://s4nyam.github.io/evolenia/
Authors: Aditya Mohan, Amy Zhang, Marius Lindauer
Reinforcement Learning (RL), bolstered by the expressive capabilities of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) for function approximation, has demonstrated considerable success in numerous applications. However, its practicality in addressing various real-world scenarios, characterized by diverse and unpredictable dynamics, noisy signals, and large state and action spaces, remains limited. This limitation stems from issues such as poor data efficiency, limited generalization capabilities, a lack of safety guarantees, and the absence of interpretability, among other factors. To overcome these challenges and improve performance across these crucial metrics, one promising avenue is to incorporate additional structural information about the problem into the RL learning process. Various sub-fields of RL have proposed methods for incorporating such inductive biases. We amalgamate these diverse methodologies under a unified framework, shedding light on the role of structure in the learning problem, and classify these methods into distinct patterns of incorporating structure. By leveraging this comprehensive framework, we provide valuable insights into the challenges of structured RL and lay the groundwork for a design pattern perspective on RL research. This novel perspective paves the way for future advancements and aids in developing more effective and efficient RL algorithms that can potentially handle real-world scenarios better.
Authors: Zhuoxiao Chen, Yadan Luo, Zheng Wang, Mahsa Baktashmotlagh, Zi Huang
Unsupervised domain adaptation (DA) with the aid of pseudo labeling techniques has emerged as a crucial approach for domain-adaptive 3D object detection. While effective, existing DA methods suffer from a substantial drop in performance when applied to a multi-class training setting, due to the co-existence of low-quality pseudo labels and class imbalance issues. In this paper, we address this challenge by proposing a novel ReDB framework tailored for learning to detect all classes at once. Our approach produces Reliable, Diverse, and class-Balanced pseudo 3D boxes to iteratively guide the self-training on a distributionally different target domain. To alleviate disruptions caused by the environmental discrepancy (e.g., beam numbers), the proposed cross-domain examination (CDE) assesses the correctness of pseudo labels by copy-pasting target instances into a source environment and measuring the prediction consistency. To reduce computational overhead and mitigate the object shift (e.g., scales and point densities), we design an overlapped boxes counting (OBC) metric that allows to uniformly downsample pseudo-labeled objects across different geometric characteristics. To confront the issue of inter-class imbalance, we progressively augment the target point clouds with a class-balanced set of pseudo-labeled target instances and source objects, which boosts recognition accuracies on both frequently appearing and rare classes. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets using both voxel-based (i.e., SECOND) and point-based 3D detectors (i.e., PointRCNN) demonstrate that our proposed ReDB approach outperforms existing 3D domain adaptation methods by a large margin, improving 23.15% mAP on the nuScenes $\rightarrow$ KITTI task. The code is available at https://github.com/zhuoxiao-chen/ReDB-DA-3Ddet.
Authors: Thomas Manzini, Robin Murphy
This paper details the challenges in applying two computer vision systems, an EfficientDET supervised learning model and the unsupervised RX spectral classifier, to 98.9 GB of drone imagery from the Wu-Murad wilderness search and rescue (WSAR) effort in Japan and identifies 3 directions for future research. There have been at least 19 proposed approaches and 3 datasets aimed at locating missing persons in drone imagery, but only 3 approaches (2 unsupervised and 1 of an unknown structure) are referenced in the literature as having been used in an actual WSAR operation. Of these proposed approaches, the EfficientDET architecture and the unsupervised spectral RX classifier were selected as the most appropriate for this setting. The EfficientDET model was applied to the HERIDAL dataset and despite achieving performance that is statistically equivalent to the state-of-the-art, the model fails to translate to the real world in terms of false positives (e.g., identifying tree limbs and rocks as people), and false negatives (e.g., failing to identify members of the search team). The poor results in practice for algorithms that showed good results on datasets suggest 3 areas of future research: more realistic datasets for wilderness SAR, computer vision models that are capable of seamlessly handling the variety of imagery that can be collected during actual WSAR operations, and better alignment on performance measures.
Authors: Zun Wang, Jialu Li, Yicong Hong, Yi Wang, Qi Wu, Mohit Bansal, Stephen Gould, Hao Tan, Yu Qiao
Recent research in language-guided visual navigation has demonstrated a significant demand for the diversity of traversable environments and the quantity of supervision for training generalizable agents. To tackle the common data scarcity issue in existing vision-and-language navigation datasets, we propose an effective paradigm for generating large-scale data for learning, which applies 1200+ photo-realistic environments from HM3D and Gibson datasets and synthesizes 4.9 million instruction trajectory pairs using fully-accessible resources on the web. Importantly, we investigate the influence of each component in this paradigm on the agent's performance and study how to adequately apply the augmented data to pre-train and fine-tune an agent. Thanks to our large-scale dataset, the performance of an existing agent can be pushed up (+11% absolute with regard to previous SoTA) to a significantly new best of 80% single-run success rate on the R2R test split by simple imitation learning. The long-lasting generalization gap between navigating in seen and unseen environments is also reduced to less than 1% (versus 8% in the previous best method). Moreover, our paradigm also facilitates different models to achieve new state-of-the-art navigation results on CVDN, REVERIE, and R2R in continuous environments.
Authors: Samia Kabir, David N. Udo-Imeh, Bonan Kou, Tianyi Zhang
Over the last decade, Q&A platforms have played a crucial role in how programmers seek help online. The emergence of ChatGPT, however, is causing a shift in this pattern. Despite ChatGPT's popularity, there hasn't been a thorough investigation into the quality and usability of its responses to software engineering queries. To address this gap, we undertook a comprehensive analysis of ChatGPT's replies to 517 questions from Stack Overflow (SO). We assessed the correctness, consistency, comprehensiveness, and conciseness of these responses. Additionally, we conducted an extensive linguistic analysis and a user study to gain insights into the linguistic and human aspects of ChatGPT's answers. Our examination revealed that 52% of ChatGPT's answers contain inaccuracies and 77% are verbose. Nevertheless, users still prefer ChatGPT's responses 39.34% of the time due to their comprehensiveness and articulate language style. These findings underscore the need for meticulous error correction in ChatGPT while also raising awareness among users about the potential risks associated with seemingly accurate answers.
Authors: Wei Xiong, Yanfei Xiang, Hao Wu, Shuyi Zhou, Yuze Sun, Muyuan Ma, Xiaomeng Huang
Ocean modeling is a powerful tool for simulating the physical, chemical, and biological processes of the ocean, which is the foundation for marine science research and operational oceanography. Modern numerical ocean modeling mainly consists of governing equations and numerical algorithms. Nonlinear instability, computational expense, low reusability efficiency and high coupling costs have gradually become the main bottlenecks for the further development of numerical ocean modeling. Recently, artificial intelligence-based modeling in scientific computing has shown revolutionary potential for digital twins and scientific simulations, but the bottlenecks of numerical ocean modeling have not been further solved. Here, we present AI-GOMS, a large AI-driven global ocean modeling system, for accurate and efficient global ocean daily prediction. AI-GOMS consists of a backbone model with the Fourier-based Masked Autoencoder structure for basic ocean variable prediction and lightweight fine-tuning models incorporating regional downscaling, wave decoding, and biochemistry coupling modules. AI-GOMS has achieved the best performance in 30 days of prediction for the global ocean basic variables with 15 depth layers at 1/4{\deg} spatial resolution. Beyond the good performance in statistical metrics, AI-GOMS realizes the simulation of mesoscale eddies in the Kuroshio region at 1/12{\deg} spatial resolution and ocean stratification in the tropical Pacific Ocean. AI-GOMS provides a new backbone-downstream paradigm for Earth system modeling, which makes the system transferable, scalable and reusable.
Authors: Juanita Puentes, Angela Castillo, Wilmar Osejo, Yuly Calderón, Viviana Quintero, Lina Saldarriaga, Diana Agudelo, Pablo Arbeláez
Online violence against children has increased globally recently, demanding urgent attention. Competent authorities manually analyze abuse complaints to comprehend crime dynamics and identify patterns. However, the manual analysis of these complaints presents a challenge because it exposes analysts to harmful content during the review process. Given these challenges, we present a novel solution, an automated tool designed to analyze children's sexual abuse reports comprehensively. By automating the analysis process, our tool significantly reduces the risk of exposure to harmful content by categorizing the reports on three dimensions: Subject, Degree of Criminality, and Damage. Furthermore, leveraging our multidisciplinary team's expertise, we introduce a novel approach to annotate the collected data, enabling a more in-depth analysis of the reports. This approach improves the comprehension of fundamental patterns and trends, enabling law enforcement agencies and policymakers to create focused strategies in the fight against children's violence.
Authors: Manikanta Kotaru
Existing approaches to understanding, developing and researching modern wireless communication technologies involves time-intensive and arduous process of sifting through numerous webpages and technical specification documents, gathering the required information and synthesizing it. This paper presents NextGen Communications Copilot, a conversational artificial intelligence tool for information synthesis of wireless communication specifications. The system builds on top of recent advancements in foundation models and consists of three key additional components: a domain-specific database, a context extractor, and a feedback mechanism. The system appends user queries with concise and query-dependent contextual information extracted from a database of wireless technical specifications and incorporates tools for expert feedback and data contributions. On evaluation using a benchmark dataset of queries and reference responses created by subject matter experts, the system demonstrated more relevant and accurate answers with an average BLEU score and BERTScore F1-measure of 0.37 and 0.79 respectively compared to the corresponding values of 0.07 and 0.59 achieved by state-of-the-art tools like ChatGPT.
Authors: Jan Egger, Christina Gsaxner, Xiaojun Chen, Jiang Bian, Jens Kleesiek, Behrus Puladi
At the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June 2023, Apple introduced the Vision Pro. The Vision Pro is a Mixed Reality (MR) headset, more specifically it is a Virtual Reality (VR) device with an additional Video See-Through (VST) capability. The VST capability turns the Vision Pro also into an Augmented Reality (AR) device. The AR feature is enabled by streaming the real world via cameras to the (VR) screens in front of the user's eyes. This is of course not unique and similar to other devices, like the Varjo XR-3. Nevertheless, the Vision Pro has some interesting features, like an inside-out screen that can show the headset wearers' eyes to "outsiders" or a button on the top, called "Digital Crown", that allows you to seamlessly blend digital content with your physical space by turning it. In addition, it is untethered, except for the cable to the battery, which makes the headset more agile, compared to the Varjo XR-3. This could actually come closer to the "Ultimate Display", which Ivan Sutherland had already sketched in 1965. Not available to the public yet, like the Ultimate Display, we want to take a look into the crystal ball in this perspective to see if it can overcome some clinical challenges that - especially - AR still faces in the medical domain, but also go beyond and discuss if the Vision Pro could support clinicians in essential tasks to spend more time with their patients.
Authors: Yifan Zhang, Jingqin Yang, Yang Yuan, Andrew Chi-Chih Yao
While language models are powerful and versatile, they often fail to address highly complex problems. This is because solving complex problems requires deliberate thinking, which has been only minimally guided during training. In this paper, we propose a new method called Cumulative Reasoning (CR), which employs language models in a cumulative and iterative manner to emulate human thought processes. By decomposing tasks into smaller components, CR streamlines the problem-solving process, rendering it both more manageable and effective. For logical inference tasks, CR consistently outperforms existing methods with an improvement up to 9.3%, and achieves the astonishing accuracy of 98.04% on the curated FOLIO wiki dataset. In the context of the Game of 24, CR achieves an accuracy of 94%, which signifies a substantial enhancement of 20% over the previous state-of-the-art method (code is available at https://github.com/iiis-ai/cumulative-reasoning).
Authors: Kai Huang, Feigege Wang, Ye Xi, Yutao Gao
Generalized Few-shot Semantic Segmentation (GFSS) extends Few-shot Semantic Segmentation (FSS) to simultaneously segment unseen classes and seen classes during evaluation. Previous works leverage additional branch or prototypical aggregation to eliminate the constrained setting of FSS. However, representation division and embedding prejudice, which heavily results in poor performance of GFSS, have not been synthetical considered. We address the aforementioned problems by jointing the prototypical kernel learning and open-set foreground perception. Specifically, a group of learnable kernels is proposed to perform segmentation with each kernel in charge of a stuff class. Then, we explore to merge the prototypical learning to the update of base-class kernels, which is consistent with the prototype knowledge aggregation of few-shot novel classes. In addition, a foreground contextual perception module cooperating with conditional bias based inference is adopted to perform class-agnostic as well as open-set foreground detection, thus to mitigate the embedding prejudice and prevent novel targets from being misclassified as background. Moreover, we also adjust our method to the Class Incremental Few-shot Semantic Segmentation (CIFSS) which takes the knowledge of novel classes in a incremental stream. Extensive experiments on PASCAL-5i and COCO-20i datasets demonstrate that our method performs better than previous state-of-the-art.
Authors: Yifu Zhang, Hongru Li, Tao Yang, Rui Tao, Zhengyuan Liu, Shimeng Shi, Jiansong Zhang, Ning Ma, Wujin Feng, Zhanhu Zhang, Xinyu Zhang
Lesion segmentation of ultrasound medical images based on deep learning techniques is a widely used method for diagnosing diseases. Although there is a large amount of ultrasound image data in medical centers and other places, labeled ultrasound datasets are a scarce resource, and it is likely that no datasets are available for new tissues/organs. Transfer learning provides the possibility to solve this problem, but there are too many features in natural images that are not related to the target domain. As a source domain, redundant features that are not conducive to the task will be extracted. Migration between ultrasound images can avoid this problem, but there are few types of public datasets, and it is difficult to find sufficiently similar source domains. Compared with natural images, ultrasound images have less information, and there are fewer transferable features between different ultrasound images, which may cause negative transfer. To this end, a multi-source adversarial transfer learning network for ultrasound image segmentation is proposed. Specifically, to address the lack of annotations, the idea of adversarial transfer learning is used to adaptively extract common features between a certain pair of source and target domains, which provides the possibility to utilize unlabeled ultrasound data. To alleviate the lack of knowledge in a single source domain, multi-source transfer learning is adopted to fuse knowledge from multiple source domains. In order to ensure the effectiveness of the fusion and maximize the use of precious data, a multi-source domain independent strategy is also proposed to improve the estimation of the target domain data distribution, which further increases the learning ability of the multi-source adversarial migration learning network in multiple domains.