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2501.01039
MSWA: Refining Local Attention with Multi-ScaleWindow Attention
cs.CL cs.AI
Transformer-based LLMs have achieved exceptional performance across a wide range of NLP tasks. However, the standard self-attention mechanism suffers from quadratic time complexity and linearly increased cache size. Sliding window attention (SWA) solves this problem by restricting the attention range to a fixed-size local context window. Nevertheless, SWA employs a uniform window size for each head in each layer, making it inefficient in capturing context of varying scales. To mitigate this limitation, we propose Multi-Scale Window Attention (MSWA) which applies diverse window sizes across heads and layers in the Transformer. It not only allows for different window sizes among heads within the same layer but also progressively increases window size allocation from shallow to deep layers, thus enabling the model to capture contextual information with different lengths and distances. Experimental results on language modeling and common-sense reasoning tasks substantiate that MSWA outperforms traditional local attention in both effectiveness and efficiency.
2501.01040
Event Masked Autoencoder: Point-wise Action Recognition with Event-Based Cameras
cs.CV
Dynamic vision sensors (DVS) are bio-inspired devices that capture visual information in the form of asynchronous events, which encode changes in pixel intensity with high temporal resolution and low latency. These events provide rich motion cues that can be exploited for various computer vision tasks, such as action recognition. However, most existing DVS-based action recognition methods lose temporal information during data transformation or suffer from noise and outliers caused by sensor imperfections or environmental factors. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework that preserves and exploits the spatiotemporal structure of event data for action recognition. Our framework consists of two main components: 1) a point-wise event masked autoencoder (MAE) that learns a compact and discriminative representation of event patches by reconstructing them from masked raw event camera points data; 2) an improved event points patch generation algorithm that leverages an event data inlier model and point-wise data augmentation techniques to enhance the quality and diversity of event points patches. To the best of our knowledge, our approach introduces the pre-train method into event camera raw points data for the first time, and we propose a novel event points patch embedding to utilize transformer-based models on event cameras.
2501.01042
Image-based Multimodal Models as Intruders: Transferable Multimodal Attacks on Video-based MLLMs
cs.CV cs.CR cs.LG
Video-based multimodal large language models (V-MLLMs) have shown vulnerability to adversarial examples in video-text multimodal tasks. However, the transferability of adversarial videos to unseen models--a common and practical real world scenario--remains unexplored. In this paper, we pioneer an investigation into the transferability of adversarial video samples across V-MLLMs. We find that existing adversarial attack methods face significant limitations when applied in black-box settings for V-MLLMs, which we attribute to the following shortcomings: (1) lacking generalization in perturbing video features, (2) focusing only on sparse key-frames, and (3) failing to integrate multimodal information. To address these limitations and deepen the understanding of V-MLLM vulnerabilities in black-box scenarios, we introduce the Image-to-Video MLLM (I2V-MLLM) attack. In I2V-MLLM, we utilize an image-based multimodal model (IMM) as a surrogate model to craft adversarial video samples. Multimodal interactions and temporal information are integrated to disrupt video representations within the latent space, improving adversarial transferability. In addition, a perturbation propagation technique is introduced to handle different unknown frame sampling strategies. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can generate adversarial examples that exhibit strong transferability across different V-MLLMs on multiple video-text multimodal tasks. Compared to white-box attacks on these models, our black-box attacks (using BLIP-2 as surrogate model) achieve competitive performance, with average attack success rates of 55.48% on MSVD-QA and 58.26% on MSRVTT-QA for VideoQA tasks, respectively. Our code will be released upon acceptance.
2501.01045
ZeroFlow: Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting is Easier than You Think
cs.CV cs.LG
Backpropagation provides a generalized configuration for overcoming catastrophic forgetting. Like, SGD and Adam are commonly used for weight updates in continual learning and continual pre-training. In practice, permission to access gradient information is not always granted (the gradient ban), such as black-box APIs, hardware limitations, and non-differentiable systems. To bridge this gap, we introduce the first benchmark ZeroFlow to evaluate gradient-free optimization algorithms for overcoming forgetting. This benchmark examines a suite of forward pass methods across multiple methods, forgetting scenarios, and datasets. We find that forward passes alone are enough to overcome forgetting. Our findings reveal new optimization principles that highlight the potential of forward-pass in mitigating forgetting, managing task conflicts, and reducing memory demands, alongside novel enhancements that further mitigate forgetting with just one forward pass. This work provides essential insights and tools for advancing forward pass methods to overcome forgetting.
2501.01046
FED: Fast and Efficient Dataset Deduplication Framework with GPU Acceleration
cs.CL
Dataset deduplication plays a crucial role in enhancing data quality, ultimately improving the training performance and efficiency of large language models. A commonly used method for data deduplication is the MinHash LSH algorithm. Recently, NVIDIA introduced a GPU-based MinHash LSH deduplication method, but it remains suboptimal, leaving room for further improvement in processing efficiency. This paper proposes a GPU-accelerated deduplication framework, FED, that optimizes MinHash LSH for GPU clusters and leverages computationally efficient, partially reusable non-cryptographic hash functions. FED significantly outperforms the CPU-based deduplication tool in SlimPajama (using 64 logical CPU cores) by up to 107.2 times and the GPU-based tool in NVIDIA NeMo Curator by up to 6.3 times when processing 30 million documents on a node with four GPUs. Notably, our method dramatically accelerates the previously time-consuming MinHash signature generation phase, achieving speed-ups of up to 260 compared to the CPU baseline. Despite these gains in efficiency, FED maintains high deduplication quality, with the duplicate document sets reaching a Jaccard similarity of over 0.96 compared to those identified by the standard MinHash algorithm. In large-scale experiments, the deduplication of 1.2 trillion tokens is completed in just 6 hours in a four-node, 16-GPU environment. The related code is publicly available on GitHub (\href{https://github.com/mcrl/FED}{https://github.com/mcrl/FED}).
2501.01049
TS-SatMVSNet: Slope Aware Height Estimation for Large-Scale Earth Terrain Multi-view Stereo
cs.CV
3D terrain reconstruction with remote sensing imagery achieves cost-effective and large-scale earth observation and is crucial for safeguarding natural disasters, monitoring ecological changes, and preserving the environment.Recently, learning-based multi-view stereo~(MVS) methods have shown promise in this task. However, these methods simply modify the general learning-based MVS framework for height estimation, which overlooks the terrain characteristics and results in insufficient accuracy. Considering that the Earth's surface generally undulates with no drastic changes and can be measured by slope, integrating slope considerations into MVS frameworks could enhance the accuracy of terrain reconstructions. To this end, we propose an end-to-end slope-aware height estimation network named TS-SatMVSNet for large-scale remote sensing terrain reconstruction.To effectively obtain the slope representation, drawing from mathematical gradient concepts, we innovatively proposed a height-based slope calculation strategy to first calculate a slope map from a height map to measure the terrain undulation. To fully integrate slope information into the MVS pipeline, we separately design two slope-guided modules to enhance reconstruction outcomes at both micro and macro levels. Specifically, at the micro level, we designed a slope-guided interval partition module for refined height estimation using slope values. At the macro level, a height correction module is proposed, using a learnable Gaussian smoothing operator to amend the inaccurate height values. Additionally, to enhance the efficacy of height estimation, we proposed a slope direction loss for implicitly optimizing height estimation results. Extensive experiments on the WHU-TLC dataset and MVS3D dataset show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance and demonstrates competitive generalization ability.
2501.01054
Dynamic Scaling of Unit Tests for Code Reward Modeling
cs.CL cs.SE
Current large language models (LLMs) often struggle to produce accurate responses on the first attempt for complex reasoning tasks like code generation. Prior research tackles this challenge by generating multiple candidate solutions and validating them with LLM-generated unit tests. The execution results of unit tests serve as reward signals to identify correct solutions. As LLMs always confidently make mistakes, these unit tests are not reliable, thereby diminishing the quality of reward signals. Motivated by the observation that scaling the number of solutions improves LLM performance, we explore the impact of scaling unit tests to enhance reward signal quality. Our pioneer experiment reveals a positive correlation between the number of unit tests and reward signal quality, with greater benefits observed in more challenging problems. Based on these insights, we propose CodeRM-8B, a lightweight yet effective unit test generator that enables efficient and high-quality unit test scaling. Additionally, we implement a dynamic scaling mechanism that adapts the number of unit tests based on problem difficulty, further improving efficiency. Experimental results show that our approach significantly improves performance across various models on three benchmarks (e.g., with gains of 18.43% for Llama3-8B and 3.42% for GPT-4o-mini on HumanEval Plus).
2501.01056
Risks of Cultural Erasure in Large Language Models
cs.CL cs.AI
Large language models are increasingly being integrated into applications that shape the production and discovery of societal knowledge such as search, online education, and travel planning. As a result, language models will shape how people learn about, perceive and interact with global cultures making it important to consider whose knowledge systems and perspectives are represented in models. Recognizing this importance, increasingly work in Machine Learning and NLP has focused on evaluating gaps in global cultural representational distribution within outputs. However, more work is needed on developing benchmarks for cross-cultural impacts of language models that stem from a nuanced sociologically-aware conceptualization of cultural impact or harm. We join this line of work arguing for the need of metricizable evaluations of language technologies that interrogate and account for historical power inequities and differential impacts of representation on global cultures, particularly for cultures already under-represented in the digital corpora. We look at two concepts of erasure: omission: where cultures are not represented at all and simplification i.e. when cultural complexity is erased by presenting one-dimensional views of a rich culture. The former focuses on whether something is represented, and the latter on how it is represented. We focus our analysis on two task contexts with the potential to influence global cultural production. First, we probe representations that a language model produces about different places around the world when asked to describe these contexts. Second, we analyze the cultures represented in the travel recommendations produced by a set of language model applications. Our study shows ways in which the NLP community and application developers can begin to operationalize complex socio-cultural considerations into standard evaluations and benchmarks.
2501.01057
HPC Application Parameter Autotuning on Edge Devices: A Bandit Learning Approach
cs.PF cs.LG cs.SY eess.SY
The growing necessity for enhanced processing capabilities in edge devices with limited resources has led us to develop effective methods for improving high-performance computing (HPC) applications. In this paper, we introduce LASP (Lightweight Autotuning of Scientific Application Parameters), a novel strategy designed to address the parameter search space challenge in edge devices. Our strategy employs a multi-armed bandit (MAB) technique focused on online exploration and exploitation. Notably, LASP takes a dynamic approach, adapting seamlessly to changing environments. We tested LASP with four HPC applications: Lulesh, Kripke, Clomp, and Hypre. Its lightweight nature makes it particularly well-suited for resource-constrained edge devices. By employing the MAB framework to efficiently navigate the search space, we achieved significant performance improvements while adhering to the stringent computational limits of edge devices. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of LASP in optimizing parameter search on edge devices.
2501.01059
Dynamic Attention-Guided Context Decoding for Mitigating Context Faithfulness Hallucinations in Large Language Models
cs.CL cs.LG
Large language models (LLMs) often suffer from context faithfulness hallucinations, where outputs deviate from retrieved information due to insufficient context utilization and high output uncertainty. Our uncertainty evaluation experiments reveal a strong correlation between high uncertainty and hallucinations. We hypothesize that attention mechanisms encode signals indicative of contextual utilization, validated through probing analysis. Based on these insights, we propose Dynamic Attention-Guided Context Decoding (DAGCD), a lightweight framework that integrates attention distributions and uncertainty signals in a single-pass decoding process. Experiments across QA datasets demonstrate DAGCD's effectiveness, achieving significant improvements in faithfulness and robustness while maintaining computational efficiency.
2501.01061
An Efficient Outlier Detection Algorithm for Data Streaming
stat.CO cs.LG stat.AP
The nature of modern data is increasingly real-time, making outlier detection crucial in any data-related field, such as finance for fraud detection and healthcare for monitoring patient vitals. Traditional outlier detection methods, such as the Local Outlier Factor (LOF) algorithm, struggle with real-time data due to the need for extensive recalculations with each new data point, limiting their application in real-time environments. While the Incremental LOF (ILOF) algorithm has been developed to tackle the challenges of online anomaly detection, it remains computationally expensive when processing large streams of data points, and its detection performance may degrade after a certain threshold of points have streamed in. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to enhance the efficiency of LOF algorithms for online anomaly detection, named the Efficient Incremental LOF (EILOF) algorithm. The EILOF algorithm only computes the LOF scores of new points without altering the LOF scores of existing data points. Although exact LOF scores have not yet been computed for the existing points in the new algorithm, datasets often contain noise, and minor deviations in LOF score calculations do not necessarily degrade detection performance. In fact, such deviations can sometimes enhance outlier detection. We systematically tested this approach on both simulated and real-world datasets, demonstrating that EILOF outperforms ILOF as the volume of streaming data increases across various scenarios. The EILOF algorithm not only significantly reduces computational costs, but also systematically improves detection accuracy when the number of additional points increases compared to the ILOF algorithm.
2501.01062
Fides: Scalable Censorship-Resistant DAG Consensus via Trusted Components
cs.DC cs.DB
Recently, consensus protocols based on Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) have gained significant attention due to their potential to build robust blockchain systems, particularly in asynchronous networks. In this paper, we propose Fides, an asynchronous DAG-based BFT consensus protocol that leverages Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to tackle three major scalability and security challenges faced by existing protocols: (i) the need for a larger quorum size (i.e., at least 3x larger) to tolerate Byzantine replicas, (ii) high communication costs and reliance on expensive cryptographic primitives (i.e., global common coin) to reach agreement in asynchronous networks, and (iii) poor censorship resilience undermining the liveness guarantee. Specifically, Fides adopts four trusted components-Reliable Broadcast, Vertex Validation, Common Coin, and Transaction Disclosure-within TEEs. Incorporating these components enables Fides to achieve linear message complexity, guaranteed censorship resilience, 2x larger quorum size, and lightweight common coin usage. Besides, abstracting these essential components rather than porting the entire protocol into TEE can significantly reduce the Trusted Computing Base (TCB). Experimental evaluations of Fides in local and geo-distributed networks demonstrate its superior performance compared to established state-of-the-art protocols such as Tusk, RCC, HotStuff, and PBFT. The results indicate that Fides achieves a throughput of 400k transactions per second in a geo-distributed network and 810k transactions per second in a local network. Our analysis further explores the protocol's overhead, highlighting its suitability and effectiveness for practical deployment in real-world blockchain systems.
2501.01067
Enhancing Precision of Automated Teller Machines Network Quality Assessment: Machine Learning and Multi Classifier Fusion Approaches
cs.LG
Ensuring reliable ATM services is essential for modern banking, directly impacting customer satisfaction and the operational efficiency of financial institutions. This study introduces a data fusion approach that utilizes multi-classifier fusion techniques, with a special focus on the Stacking Classifier, to enhance the reliability of ATM networks. To address class imbalance, the Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) was applied, enabling balanced learning for both frequent and rare events. The proposed framework integrates diverse classification models - Random Forest, LightGBM, and CatBoost - within a Stacking Classifier, achieving a dramatic reduction in false alarms from 3.56 percent to just 0.71 percent, along with an outstanding overall accuracy of 99.29 percent. This multi-classifier fusion method synthesizes the strengths of individual models, leading to significant cost savings and improved operational decision-making. By demonstrating the power of machine learning and data fusion in optimizing ATM status detection, this research provides practical and scalable solutions for financial institutions aiming to enhance their ATM network performance and customer satisfaction.
2501.01069
BeliN: A Novel Corpus for Bengali Religious News Headline Generation using Contextual Feature Fusion
cs.CL cs.LG
Automatic text summarization, particularly headline generation, remains a critical yet underexplored area for Bengali religious news. Existing approaches to headline generation typically rely solely on the article content, overlooking crucial contextual features such as sentiment, category, and aspect. This limitation significantly hinders their effectiveness and overall performance. This study addresses this limitation by introducing a novel corpus, BeliN (Bengali Religious News) - comprising religious news articles from prominent Bangladeshi online newspapers, and MultiGen - a contextual multi-input feature fusion headline generation approach. Leveraging transformer-based pre-trained language models such as BanglaT5, mBART, mT5, and mT0, MultiGen integrates additional contextual features - including category, aspect, and sentiment - with the news content. This fusion enables the model to capture critical contextual information often overlooked by traditional methods. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of MultiGen over the baseline approach that uses only news content, achieving a BLEU score of 18.61 and ROUGE-L score of 24.19, compared to baseline approach scores of 16.08 and 23.08, respectively. These findings underscore the importance of incorporating contextual features in headline generation for low-resource languages. By bridging linguistic and cultural gaps, this research advances natural language processing for Bengali and other underrepresented languages. To promote reproducibility and further exploration, the dataset and implementation code are publicly accessible at https://github.com/akabircs/BeliN.
2501.01072
Evidential Calibrated Uncertainty-Guided Interactive Segmentation paradigm for Ultrasound Images
cs.CV
Accurate and robust ultrasound image segmentation is critical for computer-aided diagnostic systems. Nevertheless, the inherent challenges of ultrasound imaging, such as blurry boundaries and speckle noise, often cause traditional segmentation methods to struggle with performance. Despite recent advancements in universal image segmentation, such as the Segment Anything Model, existing interactive segmentation methods still suffer from inefficiency and lack of specialization. These methods rely heavily on extensive accurate manual or random sampling prompts for interaction, necessitating numerous prompts and iterations to reach satisfactory performance. In response to this challenge, we propose the Evidential Uncertainty-Guided Interactive Segmentation (EUGIS), an end-to-end, efficient tiered interactive segmentation paradigm based on evidential uncertainty estimation for ultrasound image segmentation. Specifically, EUGIS harnesses evidence-based uncertainty estimation, grounded in Dempster-Shafer theory and Subjective Logic, to gauge the level of uncertainty in the predictions of model for different regions. By prioritizing sampling the high-uncertainty region, our method can effectively simulate the interactive behavior of well-trained radiologists, enhancing the targeted of sampling while reducing the number of prompts and iterations required.Additionally, we propose a trainable calibration mechanism for uncertainty estimation, which can further optimize the boundary between certainty and uncertainty, thereby enhancing the confidence of uncertainty estimation.
2501.01073
Graph Generative Pre-trained Transformer
cs.LG cs.AI
Graph generation is a critical task in numerous domains, including molecular design and social network analysis, due to its ability to model complex relationships and structured data. While most modern graph generative models utilize adjacency matrix representations, this work revisits an alternative approach that represents graphs as sequences of node set and edge set. We advocate for this approach due to its efficient encoding of graphs and propose a novel representation. Based on this representation, we introduce the Graph Generative Pre-trained Transformer (G2PT), an auto-regressive model that learns graph structures via next-token prediction. To further exploit G2PT's capabilities as a general-purpose foundation model, we explore fine-tuning strategies for two downstream applications: goal-oriented generation and graph property prediction. We conduct extensive experiments across multiple datasets. Results indicate that G2PT achieves superior generative performance on both generic graph and molecule datasets. Furthermore, G2PT exhibits strong adaptability and versatility in downstream tasks from molecular design to property prediction.
2501.01085
Noise-Resilient Symbolic Regression with Dynamic Gating Reinforcement Learning
cs.LG
Symbolic regression (SR) has emerged as a pivotal technique for uncovering the intrinsic information within data and enhancing the interpretability of AI models. However, current state-of-the-art (sota) SR methods struggle to perform correct recovery of symbolic expressions from high-noise data. To address this issue, we introduce a novel noise-resilient SR (NRSR) method capable of recovering expressions from high-noise data. Our method leverages a novel reinforcement learning (RL) approach in conjunction with a designed noise-resilient gating module (NGM) to learn symbolic selection policies. The gating module can dynamically filter the meaningless information from high-noise data, thereby demonstrating a high noise-resilient capability for the SR process. And we also design a mixed path entropy (MPE) bonus term in the RL process to increase the exploration capabilities of the policy. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms several popular baselines on benchmarks with high-noise data. Furthermore, our method also can achieve sota performance on benchmarks with clean data, showcasing its robustness and efficacy in SR tasks.
2501.01087
Bridging Simplicity and Sophistication using GLinear: A Novel Architecture for Enhanced Time Series Prediction
cs.LG cs.CV cs.ET
Time Series Forecasting (TSF) is an important application across many fields. There is a debate about whether Transformers, despite being good at understanding long sequences, struggle with preserving temporal relationships in time series data. Recent research suggests that simpler linear models might outperform or at least provide competitive performance compared to complex Transformer-based models for TSF tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel data-efficient architecture, GLinear, for multivariate TSF that exploits periodic patterns to provide better accuracy. It also provides better prediction accuracy by using a smaller amount of historical data compared to other state-of-the-art linear predictors. Four different datasets (ETTh1, Electricity, Traffic, and Weather) are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed predictor. A performance comparison with state-of-the-art linear architectures (such as NLinear, DLinear, and RLinear) and transformer-based time series predictor (Autoformer) shows that the GLinear, despite being parametrically efficient, significantly outperforms the existing architectures in most cases of multivariate TSF. We hope that the proposed GLinear opens new fronts of research and development of simpler and more sophisticated architectures for data and computationally efficient time-series analysis.
2501.01090
HoneypotNet: Backdoor Attacks Against Model Extraction
cs.CR cs.CV
Model extraction attacks are one type of inference-time attacks that approximate the functionality and performance of a black-box victim model by launching a certain number of queries to the model and then leveraging the model's predictions to train a substitute model. These attacks pose severe security threats to production models and MLaaS platforms and could cause significant monetary losses to the model owners. A body of work has proposed to defend machine learning models against model extraction attacks, including both active defense methods that modify the model's outputs or increase the query overhead to avoid extraction and passive defense methods that detect malicious queries or leverage watermarks to perform post-verification. In this work, we introduce a new defense paradigm called attack as defense which modifies the model's output to be poisonous such that any malicious users that attempt to use the output to train a substitute model will be poisoned. To this end, we propose a novel lightweight backdoor attack method dubbed HoneypotNet that replaces the classification layer of the victim model with a honeypot layer and then fine-tunes the honeypot layer with a shadow model (to simulate model extraction) via bi-level optimization to modify its output to be poisonous while remaining the original performance. We empirically demonstrate on four commonly used benchmark datasets that HoneypotNet can inject backdoors into substitute models with a high success rate. The injected backdoor not only facilitates ownership verification but also disrupts the functionality of substitute models, serving as a significant deterrent to model extraction attacks.
2501.01094
MMVA: Multimodal Matching Based on Valence and Arousal across Images, Music, and Musical Captions
cs.SD cs.AI cs.MM eess.AS
We introduce Multimodal Matching based on Valence and Arousal (MMVA), a tri-modal encoder framework designed to capture emotional content across images, music, and musical captions. To support this framework, we expand the Image-Music-Emotion-Matching-Net (IMEMNet) dataset, creating IMEMNet-C which includes 24,756 images and 25,944 music clips with corresponding musical captions. We employ multimodal matching scores based on the continuous valence (emotional positivity) and arousal (emotional intensity) values. This continuous matching score allows for random sampling of image-music pairs during training by computing similarity scores from the valence-arousal values across different modalities. Consequently, the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in valence-arousal prediction tasks. Furthermore, the framework demonstrates its efficacy in various zeroshot tasks, highlighting the potential of valence and arousal predictions in downstream applications.
2501.01096
Learning-Based Stable Optimal Guidance for Spacecraft Close-Proximity Operations
eess.SY cs.SY math.OC
Machine learning techniques have demonstrated their effectiveness in achieving autonomy and optimality for nonlinear and high-dimensional dynamical systems. However, traditional black-box machine learning methods often lack formal stability guarantees, which are critical for safety-sensitive aerospace applications. This paper proposes a comprehensive framework that combines control Lyapunov functions with supervised learning to provide certifiably stable, time- and fuel-optimal guidance for rendezvous maneuvers governed by Clohessy-Wiltshire dynamics. The framework is easily extensible to nonlinear control-affine systems. A novel neural candidate Lyapunov function is developed to ensure positive definiteness. Subsequently, a control policy is defined, in which the thrust direction vector minimizes the Lyapunov function's time derivative, and the thrust throttle is determined using minimal required throttle. This approach ensures that all loss terms related to the control Lyapunov function are either naturally satisfied or replaced by the derived control policy. To jointly supervise the Lyapunov function and the control policy, a simple loss function is introduced, leveraging optimal state-control pairs obtained by a polynomial maps based method. Consequently, the trained neural network not only certifies the Lyapunov function but also generates a near-optimal guidance policy, even for the bang-bang fuel-optimal problem. Extensive numerical simulations are presented to validate the proposed method.
2501.01097
EliGen: Entity-Level Controlled Image Generation with Regional Attention
cs.CV
Recent advancements in diffusion models have significantly advanced text-to-image generation, yet global text prompts alone remain insufficient for achieving fine-grained control over individual entities within an image. To address this limitation, we present EliGen, a novel framework for Entity-level controlled image Generation. Firstly, we put forward regional attention, a mechanism for diffusion transformers that requires no additional parameters, seamlessly integrating entity prompts and arbitrary-shaped spatial masks. By contributing a high-quality dataset with fine-grained spatial and semantic entity-level annotations, we train EliGen to achieve robust and accurate entity-level manipulation, surpassing existing methods in both spatial precision and image quality. Additionally, we propose an inpainting fusion pipeline, extending its capabilities to multi-entity image inpainting tasks. We further demonstrate its flexibility by integrating it with other open-source models such as IP-Adapter, In-Context LoRA and MLLM, unlocking new creative possibilities. The source code, model, and dataset are published at https://github.com/modelscope/DiffSynth-Studio.git.
2501.01100
Long-range Brain Graph Transformer
cs.LG
Understanding communication and information processing among brain regions of interest (ROIs) is highly dependent on long-range connectivity, which plays a crucial role in facilitating diverse functional neural integration across the entire brain. However, previous studies generally focused on the short-range dependencies within brain networks while neglecting the long-range dependencies, limiting an integrated understanding of brain-wide communication. To address this limitation, we propose Adaptive Long-range aware TransformER (ALTER), a brain graph transformer to capture long-range dependencies between brain ROIs utilizing biased random walk. Specifically, we present a novel long-range aware strategy to explicitly capture long-range dependencies between brain ROIs. By guiding the walker towards the next hop with higher correlation value, our strategy simulates the real-world brain-wide communication. Furthermore, by employing the transformer framework, ALERT adaptively integrates both short- and long-range dependencies between brain ROIs, enabling an integrated understanding of multi-level communication across the entire brain. Extensive experiments on ABIDE and ADNI datasets demonstrate that ALTER consistently outperforms generalized state-of-the-art graph learning methods (including SAN, Graphormer, GraphTrans, and LRGNN) and other graph learning based brain network analysis methods (including FBNETGEN, BrainNetGNN, BrainGNN, and BrainNETTF) in neurological disease diagnosis. Cases of long-range dependencies are also presented to further illustrate the effectiveness of ALTER. The implementation is available at https://github.com/yushuowiki/ALTER.
2501.01101
Deformable Gaussian Splatting for Efficient and High-Fidelity Reconstruction of Surgical Scenes
cs.CV
Efficient and high-fidelity reconstruction of deformable surgical scenes is a critical yet challenging task. Building on recent advancements in 3D Gaussian splatting, current methods have seen significant improvements in both reconstruction quality and rendering speed. However, two major limitations remain: (1) difficulty in handling irreversible dynamic changes, such as tissue shearing, which are common in surgical scenes; and (2) the lack of hierarchical modeling for surgical scene deformation, which reduces rendering speed. To address these challenges, we introduce EH-SurGS, an efficient and high-fidelity reconstruction algorithm for deformable surgical scenes. We propose a deformation modeling approach that incorporates the life cycle of 3D Gaussians, effectively capturing both regular and irreversible deformations, thus enhancing reconstruction quality. Additionally, we present an adaptive motion hierarchy strategy that distinguishes between static and deformable regions within the surgical scene. This strategy reduces the number of 3D Gaussians passing through the deformation field, thereby improving rendering speed. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method surpasses existing state-of-the-art approaches in both reconstruction quality and rendering speed. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness and necessity of our proposed components. We will open-source our code upon acceptance of the paper.
2501.01102
Disambiguation of Chinese Polyphones in an End-to-End Framework with Semantic Features Extracted by Pre-trained BERT
eess.AS cs.AI cs.SD
Grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) conversion serves as an essential component in Chinese Mandarin text-to-speech (TTS) system, where polyphone disambiguation is the core issue. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end framework to predict the pronunciation of a polyphonic character, which accepts sentence containing polyphonic character as input in the form of Chinese character sequence without the necessity of any preprocessing. The proposed method consists of a pre-trained bidirectional encoder representations from Transformers (BERT) model and a neural network (NN) based classifier. The pre-trained BERT model extracts semantic features from a raw Chinese character sequence and the NN based classifier predicts the polyphonic character's pronunciation according to BERT output. In out experiments, we implemented three classifiers, a fully-connected network based classifier, a long short-term memory (LSTM) network based classifier and a Transformer block based classifier. The experimental results compared with the baseline approach based on LSTM demonstrate that, the pre-trained model extracts effective semantic features, which greatly enhances the performance of polyphone disambiguation. In addition, we also explored the impact of contextual information on polyphone disambiguation.
2501.01103
learning discriminative features from spectrograms using center loss for speech emotion recognition
eess.AS cs.AI cs.SD
Identifying the emotional state from speech is essential for the natural interaction of the machine with the speaker. However, extracting effective features for emotion recognition is difficult, as emotions are ambiguous. We propose a novel approach to learn discriminative features from variable length spectrograms for emotion recognition by cooperating softmax cross-entropy loss and center loss together. The softmax cross-entropy loss enables features from different emotion categories separable, and center loss efficiently pulls the features belonging to the same emotion category to their center. By combining the two losses together, the discriminative power will be highly enhanced, which leads to network learning more effective features for emotion recognition. As demonstrated by the experimental results, after introducing center loss, both the unweighted accuracy and weighted accuracy are improved by over 3\% on Mel-spectrogram input, and more than 4\% on Short Time Fourier Transform spectrogram input.
2501.01105
Temperature-Controlled Smart Charging for Electric Vehicles in Cold Climates
eess.SY cs.SY
The battery performance and lifespan of electric vehicles (EVs) degrade significantly in cold climates, requiring a considerable amount of energy to heat up the EV batteries. This paper proposes a novel technology, namely temperature-controlled smart charging, to coordinate the heating/charging power and reduce the total energy use of a solar-powered EV charging station. Instead of fixing the battery temperature setpoints, we analyze the thermal dynamics and inertia of EV batteries, and decide the optimal timing and proper amount of energy allocated for heating. In addition, a temperature-sensitive charging model is formulated with consideration of dynamic charging rates as well as battery health. We further tailor acceleration algorithms for large-scale EV charging, including the reduced-order dual decomposition and vehicle rescheduling. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed temperature-controlled smart charging is superior in capturing the flexibility value of EV batteries and making full use of the rooftop solar energy. The proposed model typically achieves a 12.5--18.4% reduction in the charging cost and a 0.4--6.8% drop in the overhead energy use for heating.
2501.01106
AIM: Additional Image Guided Generation of Transferable Adversarial Attacks
cs.CV cs.LG
Transferable adversarial examples highlight the vulnerability of deep neural networks (DNNs) to imperceptible perturbations across various real-world applications. While there have been notable advancements in untargeted transferable attacks, targeted transferable attacks remain a significant challenge. In this work, we focus on generative approaches for targeted transferable attacks. Current generative attacks focus on reducing overfitting to surrogate models and the source data domain, but they often overlook the importance of enhancing transferability through additional semantics. To address this issue, we introduce a novel plug-and-play module into the general generator architecture to enhance adversarial transferability. Specifically, we propose a \emph{Semantic Injection Module} (SIM) that utilizes the semantics contained in an additional guiding image to improve transferability. The guiding image provides a simple yet effective method to incorporate target semantics from the target class to create targeted and highly transferable attacks. Additionally, we propose new loss formulations that can integrate the semantic injection module more effectively for both targeted and untargeted attacks. We conduct comprehensive experiments under both targeted and untargeted attack settings to demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed approach.
2501.01108
MuQ: Self-Supervised Music Representation Learning with Mel Residual Vector Quantization
cs.SD cs.AI cs.CL cs.LG eess.AS
Recent years have witnessed the success of foundation models pre-trained with self-supervised learning (SSL) in various music informatics understanding tasks, including music tagging, instrument classification, key detection, and more. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised music representation learning model for music understanding. Distinguished from previous studies adopting random projection or existing neural codec, the proposed model, named MuQ, is trained to predict tokens generated by Mel Residual Vector Quantization (Mel-RVQ). Our Mel-RVQ utilizes residual linear projection structure for Mel spectrum quantization to enhance the stability and efficiency of target extraction and lead to better performance. Experiments in a large variety of downstream tasks demonstrate that MuQ outperforms previous self-supervised music representation models with only 0.9K hours of open-source pre-training data. Scaling up the data to over 160K hours and adopting iterative training consistently improve the model performance. To further validate the strength of our model, we present MuQ-MuLan, a joint music-text embedding model based on contrastive learning, which achieves state-of-the-art performance in the zero-shot music tagging task on the MagnaTagATune dataset. Code and checkpoints are open source in https://github.com/tencent-ailab/MuQ.
2501.01109
BatStyler: Advancing Multi-category Style Generation for Source-free Domain Generalization
cs.CV cs.AI
Source-Free Domain Generalization (SFDG) aims to develop a model that performs on unseen domains without relying on any source domains. However, the implementation remains constrained due to the unavailability of training data. Research on SFDG focus on knowledge transfer of multi-modal models and style synthesis based on joint space of multiple modalities, thus eliminating the dependency on source domain images. However, existing works primarily work for multi-domain and less-category configuration, but performance on multi-domain and multi-category configuration is relatively poor. In addition, the efficiency of style synthesis also deteriorates in multi-category scenarios. How to efficiently synthesize sufficiently diverse data and apply it to multi-category configuration is a direction with greater practical value. In this paper, we propose a method called BatStyler, which is utilized to improve the capability of style synthesis in multi-category scenarios. BatStyler consists of two modules: Coarse Semantic Generation and Uniform Style Generation modules. The Coarse Semantic Generation module extracts coarse-grained semantics to prevent the compression of space for style diversity learning in multi-category configuration, while the Uniform Style Generation module provides a template of styles that are uniformly distributed in space and implements parallel training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method exhibits comparable performance on less-category datasets, while surpassing state-of-the-art methods on multi-category datasets.
2501.01110
MalCL: Leveraging GAN-Based Generative Replay to Combat Catastrophic Forgetting in Malware Classification
cs.CR cs.AI
Continual Learning (CL) for malware classification tackles the rapidly evolving nature of malware threats and the frequent emergence of new types. Generative Replay (GR)-based CL systems utilize a generative model to produce synthetic versions of past data, which are then combined with new data to retrain the primary model. Traditional machine learning techniques in this domain often struggle with catastrophic forgetting, where a model's performance on old data degrades over time. In this paper, we introduce a GR-based CL system that employs Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) with feature matching loss to generate high-quality malware samples. Additionally, we implement innovative selection schemes for replay samples based on the model's hidden representations. Our comprehensive evaluation across Windows and Android malware datasets in a class-incremental learning scenario -- where new classes are introduced continuously over multiple tasks -- demonstrates substantial performance improvements over previous methods. For example, our system achieves an average accuracy of 55% on Windows malware samples, significantly outperforming other GR-based models by 28%. This study provides practical insights for advancing GR-based malware classification systems. The implementation is available at \url {https://github.com/MalwareReplayGAN/MalCL}\footnote{The code will be made public upon the presentation of the paper}.
2501.01111
Regularized Proportional Fairness Mechanism for Resource Allocation Without Money
cs.GT cs.LG
Mechanism design in resource allocation studies dividing limited resources among self-interested agents whose satisfaction with the allocation depends on privately held utilities. We consider the problem in a payment-free setting, with the aim of maximizing social welfare while enforcing incentive compatibility (IC), i.e., agents cannot inflate allocations by misreporting their utilities. The well-known proportional fairness (PF) mechanism achieves the maximum possible social welfare but incurs an undesirably high exploitability (the maximum unilateral inflation in utility from misreport and a measure of deviation from IC). In fact, it is known that no mechanism can achieve the maximum social welfare and exact incentive compatibility (IC) simultaneously without the use of monetary incentives (Cole et al., 2013). Motivated by this fact, we propose learning an approximate mechanism that desirably trades off the competing objectives. Our main contribution is to design an innovative neural network architecture tailored to the resource allocation problem, which we name Regularized Proportional Fairness Network (RPF-Net). RPF-Net regularizes the output of the PF mechanism by a learned function approximator of the most exploitable allocation, with the aim of reducing the incentive for any agent to misreport. We derive generalization bounds that guarantee the mechanism performance when trained under finite and out-of-distribution samples and experimentally demonstrate the merits of the proposed mechanism compared to the state-of-the-art.
2501.01114
Generalized Task-Driven Medical Image Quality Enhancement with Gradient Promotion
cs.CV
Thanks to the recent achievements in task-driven image quality enhancement (IQE) models like ESTR, the image enhancement model and the visual recognition model can mutually enhance each other's quantitation while producing high-quality processed images that are perceivable by our human vision systems. However, existing task-driven IQE models tend to overlook an underlying fact -- different levels of vision tasks have varying and sometimes conflicting requirements of image features. To address this problem, this paper proposes a generalized gradient promotion (GradProm) training strategy for task-driven IQE of medical images. Specifically, we partition a task-driven IQE system into two sub-models, i.e., a mainstream model for image enhancement and an auxiliary model for visual recognition. During training, GradProm updates only parameters of the image enhancement model using gradients of the visual recognition model and the image enhancement model, but only when gradients of these two sub-models are aligned in the same direction, which is measured by their cosine similarity. In case gradients of these two sub-models are not in the same direction, GradProm only uses the gradient of the image enhancement model to update its parameters. Theoretically, we have proved that the optimization direction of the image enhancement model will not be biased by the auxiliary visual recognition model under the implementation of GradProm. Empirically, extensive experimental results on four public yet challenging medical image datasets demonstrated the superior performance of GradProm over existing state-of-the-art methods.
2501.01115
Co-Design of a Robot Controller Board and Indoor Positioning System for IoT-Enabled Applications
cs.RO cs.SY eess.SY
This paper describes the development of a cost-effective yet precise indoor robot navigation system composed of a custom robot controller board and an indoor positioning system. First, the proposed robot controller board has been specially designed for emerging IoT-based robot applications and is capable of driving two 6-Amp motor channels. The controller board also embeds an on-board micro-controller with WIFI connectivity, enabling robot-to-server communications for IoT applications. Then, working together with the robot controller board, the proposed positioning system detects the robot's location using a down-looking webcam and uses the robot's position on the webcam images to estimate the real-world position of the robot in the environment. The positioning system can then send commands via WIFI to the robot in order to steer it to any arbitrary location in the environment. Our experiments show that the proposed system reaches a navigation error smaller or equal to 0.125 meters while being more than two orders of magnitude more cost-effective compared to off-the-shelve motion capture (MOCAP) positioning systems.
2501.01116
HarmonyIQA: Pioneering Benchmark and Model for Image Harmonization Quality Assessment
cs.CV cs.MM
Image composition involves extracting a foreground object from one image and pasting it into another image through Image harmonization algorithms (IHAs), which aim to adjust the appearance of the foreground object to better match the background. Existing image quality assessment (IQA) methods may fail to align with human visual preference on image harmonization due to the insensitivity to minor color or light inconsistency. To address the issue and facilitate the advancement of IHAs, we introduce the first Image Quality Assessment Database for image Harmony evaluation (HarmonyIQAD), which consists of 1,350 harmonized images generated by 9 different IHAs, and the corresponding human visual preference scores. Based on this database, we propose a Harmony Image Quality Assessment (HarmonyIQA), to predict human visual preference for harmonized images. Extensive experiments show that HarmonyIQA achieves state-of-the-art performance on human visual preference evaluation for harmonized images, and also achieves competing results on traditional IQA tasks. Furthermore, cross-dataset evaluation also shows that HarmonyIQA exhibits better generalization ability than self-supervised learning-based IQA methods. Both HarmonyIQAD and HarmonyIQA will be made publicly available upon paper publication.
2501.01117
Robust COVID-19 Detection from Cough Sounds using Deep Neural Decision Tree and Forest: A Comprehensive Cross-Datasets Evaluation
cs.SD cs.AI cs.LG eess.AS
This research presents a robust approach to classifying COVID-19 cough sounds using cutting-edge machine-learning techniques. Leveraging deep neural decision trees and deep neural decision forests, our methodology demonstrates consistent performance across diverse cough sound datasets. We begin with a comprehensive extraction of features to capture a wide range of audio features from individuals, whether COVID-19 positive or negative. To determine the most important features, we use recursive feature elimination along with cross-validation. Bayesian optimization fine-tunes hyper-parameters of deep neural decision tree and deep neural decision forest models. Additionally, we integrate the SMOTE during training to ensure a balanced representation of positive and negative data. Model performance refinement is achieved through threshold optimization, maximizing the ROC-AUC score. Our approach undergoes a comprehensive evaluation in five datasets: Cambridge, Coswara, COUGHVID, Virufy, and the combined Virufy with the NoCoCoDa dataset. Consistently outperforming state-of-the-art methods, our proposed approach yields notable AUC scores of 0.97, 0.98, 0.92, 0.93, 0.99, and 0.99 across the respective datasets. Merging all datasets into a combined dataset, our method, using a deep neural decision forest classifier, achieves an AUC of 0.97. Also, our study includes a comprehensive cross-datasets analysis, revealing demographic and geographic differences in the cough sounds associated with COVID-19. These differences highlight the challenges in transferring learned features across diverse datasets and underscore the potential benefits of dataset integration, improving generalizability and enhancing COVID-19 detection from audio signals.
2501.01118
Pruning-based Data Selection and Network Fusion for Efficient Deep Learning
cs.LG cs.AI
Efficient data selection is essential for improving the training efficiency of deep neural networks and reducing the associated annotation costs. However, traditional methods tend to be computationally expensive, limiting their scalability and real-world applicability. We introduce PruneFuse, a novel method that combines pruning and network fusion to enhance data selection and accelerate network training. In PruneFuse, the original dense network is pruned to generate a smaller surrogate model that efficiently selects the most informative samples from the dataset. Once this iterative data selection selects sufficient samples, the insights learned from the pruned model are seamlessly integrated with the dense model through network fusion, providing an optimized initialization that accelerates training. Extensive experimentation on various datasets demonstrates that PruneFuse significantly reduces computational costs for data selection, achieves better performance than baselines, and accelerates the overall training process.
2501.01119
Leverage Cross-Attention for End-to-End Open-Vocabulary Panoptic Reconstruction
cs.CV cs.RO
Open-vocabulary panoptic reconstruction offers comprehensive scene understanding, enabling advances in embodied robotics and photorealistic simulation. In this paper, we propose PanopticRecon++, an end-to-end method that formulates panoptic reconstruction through a novel cross-attention perspective. This perspective models the relationship between 3D instances (as queries) and the scene's 3D embedding field (as keys) through their attention map. Unlike existing methods that separate the optimization of queries and keys or overlook spatial proximity, PanopticRecon++ introduces learnable 3D Gaussians as instance queries. This formulation injects 3D spatial priors to preserve proximity while maintaining end-to-end optimizability. Moreover, this query formulation facilitates the alignment of 2D open-vocabulary instance IDs across frames by leveraging optimal linear assignment with instance masks rendered from the queries. Additionally, we ensure semantic-instance segmentation consistency by fusing query-based instance segmentation probabilities with semantic probabilities in a novel panoptic head supervised by a panoptic loss. During training, the number of instance query tokens dynamically adapts to match the number of objects. PanopticRecon++ shows competitive performance in terms of 3D and 2D segmentation and reconstruction performance on both simulation and real-world datasets, and demonstrates a user case as a robot simulator. Our project website is at: https://yuxuan1206.github.io/panopticrecon_pp/
2501.01120
Retrieval-Augmented Dynamic Prompt Tuning for Incomplete Multimodal Learning
cs.CV cs.AI
Multimodal learning with incomplete modality is practical and challenging. Recently, researchers have focused on enhancing the robustness of pre-trained MultiModal Transformers (MMTs) under missing modality conditions by applying learnable prompts. However, these prompt-based methods face several limitations: (1) incomplete modalities provide restricted modal cues for task-specific inference, (2) dummy imputation for missing content causes information loss and introduces noise, and (3) static prompts are instance-agnostic, offering limited knowledge for instances with various missing conditions. To address these issues, we propose RAGPT, a novel Retrieval-AuGmented dynamic Prompt Tuning framework. RAGPT comprises three modules: (I) the multi-channel retriever, which identifies similar instances through a within-modality retrieval strategy, (II) the missing modality generator, which recovers missing information using retrieved contexts, and (III) the context-aware prompter, which captures contextual knowledge from relevant instances and generates dynamic prompts to largely enhance the MMT's robustness. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets show that RAGPT consistently outperforms all competitive baselines in handling incomplete modality problems. The code of our work and prompt-based baselines is available at https://github.com/Jian-Lang/RAGPT.
2501.01121
PatchRefiner V2: Fast and Lightweight Real-Domain High-Resolution Metric Depth Estimation
cs.CV
While current high-resolution depth estimation methods achieve strong results, they often suffer from computational inefficiencies due to reliance on heavyweight models and multiple inference steps, increasing inference time. To address this, we introduce PatchRefiner V2 (PRV2), which replaces heavy refiner models with lightweight encoders. This reduces model size and inference time but introduces noisy features. To overcome this, we propose a Coarse-to-Fine (C2F) module with a Guided Denoising Unit for refining and denoising the refiner features and a Noisy Pretraining strategy to pretrain the refiner branch to fully exploit the potential of the lightweight refiner branch. Additionally, we introduce a Scale-and-Shift Invariant Gradient Matching (SSIGM) loss to enhance synthetic-to-real domain transfer. PRV2 outperforms state-of-the-art depth estimation methods on UnrealStereo4K in both accuracy and speed, using fewer parameters and faster inference. It also shows improved depth boundary delineation on real-world datasets like CityScape, ScanNet++, and KITTI, demonstrating its versatility across domains.
2501.01123
TED: Turn Emphasis with Dialogue Feature Attention for Emotion Recognition in Conversation
cs.CL cs.AI cs.LG
Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) has been attracting attention by methods for modeling multi-turn contexts. The multi-turn input to a pretraining model implicitly assumes that the current turn and other turns are distinguished during the training process by inserting special tokens into the input sequence. This paper proposes a priority-based attention method to distinguish each turn explicitly by adding dialogue features into the attention mechanism, called Turn Emphasis with Dialogue (TED). It has a priority for each turn according to turn position and speaker information as dialogue features. It takes multi-head self-attention between turn-based vectors for multi-turn input and adjusts attention scores with the dialogue features. We evaluate TED on four typical benchmarks. The experimental results demonstrate that TED has high overall performance in all datasets and achieves state-of-the-art performance on IEMOCAP with numerous turns.
2501.01124
Graph2text or Graph2token: A Perspective of Large Language Models for Graph Learning
cs.LG
Graphs are data structures used to represent irregular networks and are prevalent in numerous real-world applications. Previous methods directly model graph structures and achieve significant success. However, these methods encounter bottlenecks due to the inherent irregularity of graphs. An innovative solution is converting graphs into textual representations, thereby harnessing the powerful capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to process and comprehend graphs. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of methodologies for applying LLMs to graphs, termed LLM4graph. The core of LLM4graph lies in transforming graphs into texts for LLMs to understand and analyze. Thus, we propose a novel taxonomy of LLM4graph methods in the view of the transformation. Specifically, existing methods can be divided into two paradigms: Graph2text and Graph2token, which transform graphs into texts or tokens as the input of LLMs, respectively. We point out four challenges during the transformation to systematically present existing methods in a problem-oriented perspective. For practical concerns, we provide a guideline for researchers on selecting appropriate models and LLMs for different graphs and hardware constraints. We also identify five future research directions for LLM4graph.
2501.01125
DuMo: Dual Encoder Modulation Network for Precise Concept Erasure
cs.CV
The exceptional generative capability of text-to-image models has raised substantial safety concerns regarding the generation of Not-Safe-For-Work (NSFW) content and potential copyright infringement. To address these concerns, previous methods safeguard the models by eliminating inappropriate concepts. Nonetheless, these models alter the parameters of the backbone network and exert considerable influences on the structural (low-frequency) components of the image, which undermines the model's ability to retain non-target concepts. In this work, we propose our Dual encoder Modulation network (DuMo), which achieves precise erasure of inappropriate target concepts with minimum impairment to non-target concepts. In contrast to previous methods, DuMo employs the Eraser with PRior Knowledge (EPR) module which modifies the skip connection features of the U-NET and primarily achieves concept erasure on details (high-frequency) components of the image. To minimize the damage to non-target concepts during erasure, the parameters of the backbone U-NET are frozen and the prior knowledge from the original skip connection features is introduced to the erasure process. Meanwhile, the phenomenon is observed that distinct erasing preferences for the image structure and details are demonstrated by the EPR at different timesteps and layers. Therefore, we adopt a novel Time-Layer MOdulation process (TLMO) that adjusts the erasure scale of EPR module's outputs across different layers and timesteps, automatically balancing the erasure effects and model's generative ability. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on Explicit Content Erasure, Cartoon Concept Removal and Artistic Style Erasure, clearly outperforming alternative methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Maplebb/DuMo
2501.01126
Source-free Semantic Regularization Learning for Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation
cs.CV
Semi-supervised domain adaptation (SSDA) has been extensively researched due to its ability to improve classification performance and generalization ability of models by using a small amount of labeled data on the target domain. However, existing methods cannot effectively adapt to the target domain due to difficulty in fully learning rich and complex target semantic information and relationships. In this paper, we propose a novel SSDA learning framework called semantic regularization learning (SERL), which captures the target semantic information from multiple perspectives of regularization learning to achieve adaptive fine-tuning of the source pre-trained model on the target domain. SERL includes three robust semantic regularization techniques. Firstly, semantic probability contrastive regularization (SPCR) helps the model learn more discriminative feature representations from a probabilistic perspective, using semantic information on the target domain to understand the similarities and differences between samples. Additionally, adaptive weights in SPCR can help the model learn the semantic distribution correctly through the probabilities of different samples. To further comprehensively understand the target semantic distribution, we introduce hard-sample mixup regularization (HMR), which uses easy samples as guidance to mine the latent target knowledge contained in hard samples, thereby learning more complete and complex target semantic knowledge. Finally, target prediction regularization (TPR) regularizes the target predictions of the model by maximizing the correlation between the current prediction and the past learned objective, thereby mitigating the misleading of semantic information caused by erroneous pseudo-labels. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our SERL method achieves state-of-the-art performance.
2501.01127
InDeed: Interpretable image deep decomposition with guaranteed generalizability
cs.CV
Image decomposition aims to analyze an image into elementary components, which is essential for numerous downstream tasks and also by nature provides certain interpretability to the analysis. Deep learning can be powerful for such tasks, but surprisingly their combination with a focus on interpretability and generalizability is rarely explored. In this work, we introduce a novel framework for interpretable deep image decomposition, combining hierarchical Bayesian modeling and deep learning to create an architecture-modularized and model-generalizable deep neural network (DNN). The proposed framework includes three steps: (1) hierarchical Bayesian modeling of image decomposition, (2) transforming the inference problem into optimization tasks, and (3) deep inference via a modularized Bayesian DNN. We further establish a theoretical connection between the loss function and the generalization error bound, which inspires a new test-time adaptation approach for out-of-distribution scenarios. We instantiated the application using two downstream tasks, \textit{i.e.}, image denoising, and unsupervised anomaly detection, and the results demonstrated improved generalizability as well as interpretability of our methods. The source code will be released upon the acceptance of this paper.
2501.01130
An Inclusive Theoretical Framework of Robust Supervised Contrastive Loss against Label Noise
cs.LG
Learning from noisy labels is a critical challenge in machine learning, with vast implications for numerous real-world scenarios. While supervised contrastive learning has recently emerged as a powerful tool for navigating label noise, many existing solutions remain heuristic, often devoid of a systematic theoretical foundation for crafting robust supervised contrastive losses. To address the gap, in this paper, we propose a unified theoretical framework for robust losses under the pairwise contrastive paradigm. In particular, we for the first time derive a general robust condition for arbitrary contrastive losses, which serves as a criterion to verify the theoretical robustness of a supervised contrastive loss against label noise. The theory indicates that the popular InfoNCE loss is in fact non-robust, and accordingly inspires us to develop a robust version of InfoNCE, termed Symmetric InfoNCE (SymNCE). Moreover, we highlight that our theory is an inclusive framework that provides explanations to prior robust techniques such as nearest-neighbor (NN) sample selection and robust contrastive loss. Validation experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of SymNCE against label noise.
2501.01132
Missing Data as Augmentation in the Earth Observation Domain: A Multi-View Learning Approach
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CV
Multi-view learning (MVL) leverages multiple sources or views of data to enhance machine learning model performance and robustness. This approach has been successfully used in the Earth Observation (EO) domain, where views have a heterogeneous nature and can be affected by missing data. Despite the negative effect that missing data has on model predictions, the ML literature has used it as an augmentation technique to improve model generalization, like masking the input data. Inspired by this, we introduce novel methods for EO applications tailored to MVL with missing views. Our methods integrate the combination of a set to simulate all combinations of missing views as different training samples. Instead of replacing missing data with a numerical value, we use dynamic merge functions, like average, and more complex ones like Transformer. This allows the MVL model to entirely ignore the missing views, enhancing its predictive robustness. We experiment on four EO datasets with temporal and static views, including state-of-the-art methods from the EO domain. The results indicate that our methods improve model robustness under conditions of moderate missingness, and improve the predictive performance when all views are present. The proposed methods offer a single adaptive solution to operate effectively with any combination of available views.
2501.01136
Symmetries-enhanced Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
cs.RO cs.AI cs.LG cs.MA math.RT
Multi-agent reinforcement learning has emerged as a powerful framework for enabling agents to learn complex, coordinated behaviors but faces persistent challenges regarding its generalization, scalability and sample efficiency. Recent advancements have sought to alleviate those issues by embedding intrinsic symmetries of the systems in the policy. Yet, most dynamical systems exhibit little to no symmetries to exploit. This paper presents a novel framework for embedding extrinsic symmetries in multi-agent system dynamics that enables the use of symmetry-enhanced methods to address systems with insufficient intrinsic symmetries, expanding the scope of equivariant learning to a wide variety of MARL problems. Central to our framework is the Group Equivariant Graphormer, a group-modular architecture specifically designed for distributed swarming tasks. Extensive experiments on a swarm of symmetry-breaking quadrotors validate the effectiveness of our approach, showcasing its potential for improved generalization and zero-shot scalability. Our method achieves significant reductions in collision rates and enhances task success rates across a diverse range of scenarios and varying swarm sizes.
2501.01138
Semantics-Guided Diffusion for Deep Joint Source-Channel Coding in Wireless Image Transmission
cs.IT eess.SP math.IT
Joint source-channel coding (JSCC) offers a promising avenue for enhancing transmission efficiency by jointly incorporating source and channel statistics into the system design. A key advancement in this area is the deep joint source and channel coding (DeepJSCC) technique that designs a direct mapping of input signals to channel symbols parameterized by a neural network, which can be trained for arbitrary channel models and semantic quality metrics. This paper advances the DeepJSCC framework toward a semantics-aligned, high-fidelity transmission approach, called semantics-guided diffusion DeepJSCC (SGD-JSCC). Existing schemes that integrate diffusion models (DMs) with JSCC face challenges in transforming random generation into accurate reconstruction and adapting to varying channel conditions. SGD-JSCC incorporates two key innovations: (1) utilizing some inherent information that contributes to the semantics of an image, such as text description or edge map, to guide the diffusion denoising process; and (2) enabling seamless adaptability to varying channel conditions with the help of a semantics-guided DM for channel denoising. The DM is guided by diverse semantic information and integrates seamlessly with DeepJSCC. In a slow fading channel, SGD-JSCC dynamically adapts to the instantaneous signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) directly estimated from the channel output, thereby eliminating the need for additional pilot transmissions for channel estimation. In a fast fading channel, we introduce a training-free denoising strategy, allowing SGD-JSCC to effectively adjust to fluctuations in channel gains. Numerical results demonstrate that, guided by semantic information and leveraging the powerful DM, our method outperforms existing DeepJSCC schemes, delivering satisfactory reconstruction performance even at extremely poor channel conditions.
2501.01140
Communicating Unexpectedness for Out-of-Distribution Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
cs.MA
Applying multi-agent reinforcement learning methods to realistic settings is challenging as it may require the agents to quickly adapt to unexpected situations that are rarely or never encountered in training. Recent methods for generalization to such out-of-distribution settings are limited to more specific, restricted instances of distribution shifts. To tackle adaptation to distribution shifts, we propose Unexpected Encoding Scheme, a novel decentralized multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm where agents communicate "unexpectedness," the aspects of the environment that are surprising. In addition to a message yielded by the original reward-driven communication, each agent predicts the next observation based on previous experience, measures the discrepancy between the prediction and the actually encountered observation, and encodes this discrepancy as a message. Experiments on multi-robot warehouse environment support that our proposed method adapts robustly to dynamically changing training environments as well as out-of-distribution environment.
2501.01142
Adaptive Hardness-driven Augmentation and Alignment Strategies for Multi-Source Domain Adaptations
cs.CV
Multi-source Domain Adaptation (MDA) aims to transfer knowledge from multiple labeled source domains to an unlabeled target domain. Nevertheless, traditional methods primarily focus on achieving inter-domain alignment through sample-level constraints, such as Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD), neglecting three pivotal aspects: 1) the potential of data augmentation, 2) the significance of intra-domain alignment, and 3) the design of cluster-level constraints. In this paper, we introduce a novel hardness-driven strategy for MDA tasks, named "A3MDA" , which collectively considers these three aspects through Adaptive hardness quantification and utilization in both data Augmentation and domain Alignment.To achieve this, "A3MDA" progressively proposes three Adaptive Hardness Measurements (AHM), i.e., Basic, Smooth, and Comparative AHMs, each incorporating distinct mechanisms for diverse scenarios. Specifically, Basic AHM aims to gauge the instantaneous hardness for each source/target sample. Then, hardness values measured by Smooth AHM will adaptively adjust the intensity level of strong data augmentation to maintain compatibility with the model's generalization capacity.In contrast, Comparative AHM is designed to facilitate cluster-level constraints. By leveraging hardness values as sample-specific weights, the traditional MMD is enhanced into a weighted-clustered variant, strengthening the robustness and precision of inter-domain alignment. As for the often-neglected intra-domain alignment, we adaptively construct a pseudo-contrastive matrix by selecting harder samples based on the hardness rankings, enhancing the quality of pseudo-labels, and shaping a well-clustered target feature space. Experiments on multiple MDA benchmarks show that " A3MDA " outperforms other methods.
2501.01144
BlockDialect: Block-wise Fine-grained Mixed Format Quantization for Energy-Efficient LLM Inference
cs.CL cs.LG
The rapidly increasing size of large language models (LLMs) presents significant challenges in memory usage and computational costs. Quantizing both weights and activations can address these issues, with hardware-supported fine-grained scaling emerging as a promising solution to mitigate outliers. However, existing methods struggle to capture nuanced block data distributions. We propose BlockDialect, a block-wise fine-grained mixed format technique that assigns a per-block optimal number format from a formatbook for better data representation. Additionally, we introduce DialectFP4, a formatbook of FP4 variants (akin to dialects) that adapt to diverse data distributions. To leverage this efficiently, we propose a two-stage approach for online DialectFP4 activation quantization. Importantly, DialectFP4 ensures energy efficiency by selecting representable values as scaled integers compatible with low-precision integer arithmetic. BlockDialect achieves 10.78% (7.48%) accuracy gain on the LLaMA3-8B (LLaMA2-7B) model compared to MXFP4 format with lower bit usage per data, while being only 5.45% (2.69%) below full precision even when quantizing full-path matrix multiplication. Focusing on how to represent over how to scale, our work presents a promising path for energy-efficient LLM inference.
2501.01148
Adaptive posterior distributions for uncertainty analysis of covariance matrices in Bayesian inversion problems for multioutput signals
stat.CO cs.CE stat.ML
In this paper we address the problem of performing Bayesian inference for the parameters of a nonlinear multi-output model and the covariance matrix of the different output signals. We propose an adaptive importance sampling (AIS) scheme for multivariate Bayesian inversion problems, which is based in two main ideas: the variables of interest are split in two blocks and the inference takes advantage of known analytical optimization formulas. We estimate both the unknown parameters of the multivariate non-linear model and the covariance matrix of the noise. In the first part of the proposed inference scheme, a novel AIS technique called adaptive target adaptive importance sampling (ATAIS) is designed, which alternates iteratively between an IS technique over the parameters of the non-linear model and a frequentist approach for the covariance matrix of the noise. In the second part of the proposed inference scheme, a prior density over the covariance matrix is considered and the cloud of samples obtained by ATAIS are recycled and re-weighted to obtain a complete Bayesian study over the model parameters and covariance matrix. ATAIS is the main contribution of the work. Additionally, the inverted layered importance sampling (ILIS) is presented as a possible compelling algorithm (but based on a conceptually simpler idea). Different numerical examples show the benefits of the proposed approaches
2501.01149
A3: Android Agent Arena for Mobile GUI Agents
cs.AI
AI agents have become increasingly prevalent in recent years, driven by significant advancements in the field of large language models (LLMs). Mobile GUI agents, a subset of AI agents, are designed to autonomously perform tasks on mobile devices. While numerous studies have introduced agents, datasets, and benchmarks to advance mobile GUI agent research, many existing datasets focus on static frame evaluations and fail to provide a comprehensive platform for assessing performance on real-world, in-the-wild tasks. To address this gap, we present Android Agent Arena (A3), a novel evaluation platform. Unlike existing in-the-wild systems, A3 offers: (1) meaningful and practical tasks, such as real-time online information retrieval and operational instructions; (2) a larger, more flexible action space, enabling compatibility with agents trained on any dataset; and (3) automated business-level LLM-based evaluation process. A3 includes 21 widely used general third-party apps and 201 tasks representative of common user scenarios, providing a robust foundation for evaluating mobile GUI agents in real-world situations and a new autonomous evaluation process for less human labor and coding expertise. The project is available at https://yuxiangchai.github.io/Android-Agent-Arena/.
2501.01153
Robot localization in a mapped environment using Adaptive Monte Carlo algorithm
cs.RO
Localization is the challenge of determining the robot's pose in a mapped environment. This is done by implementing a probabilistic algorithm to filter noisy sensor measurements and track the robot's position and orientation. This paper focuses on localizing a robot in a known mapped environment using Adaptive Monte Carlo Localization or Particle Filters method and send it to a goal state. ROS, Gazebo and RViz were used as the tools of the trade to simulate the environment and programming two robots for performing localization.
2501.01156
TexAVi: Generating Stereoscopic VR Video Clips from Text Descriptions
cs.CV cs.AI cs.LG
While generative models such as text-to-image, large language models and text-to-video have seen significant progress, the extension to text-to-virtual-reality remains largely unexplored, due to a deficit in training data and the complexity of achieving realistic depth and motion in virtual environments. This paper proposes an approach to coalesce existing generative systems to form a stereoscopic virtual reality video from text. Carried out in three main stages, we start with a base text-to-image model that captures context from an input text. We then employ Stable Diffusion on the rudimentary image produced, to generate frames with enhanced realism and overall quality. These frames are processed with depth estimation algorithms to create left-eye and right-eye views, which are stitched side-by-side to create an immersive viewing experience. Such systems would be highly beneficial in virtual reality production, since filming and scene building often require extensive hours of work and post-production effort. We utilize image evaluation techniques, specifically Fr\'echet Inception Distance and CLIP Score, to assess the visual quality of frames produced for the video. These quantitative measures establish the proficiency of the proposed method. Our work highlights the exciting possibilities of using natural language-driven graphics in fields like virtual reality simulations.
2501.01157
Ultrasound Lung Aeration Map via Physics-Aware Neural Operators
eess.IV cs.LG physics.med-ph
Lung ultrasound is a growing modality in clinics for diagnosing and monitoring acute and chronic lung diseases due to its low cost and accessibility. Lung ultrasound works by emitting diagnostic pulses, receiving pressure waves and converting them into radio frequency (RF) data, which are then processed into B-mode images with beamformers for radiologists to interpret. However, unlike conventional ultrasound for soft tissue anatomical imaging, lung ultrasound interpretation is complicated by complex reverberations from the pleural interface caused by the inability of ultrasound to penetrate air. The indirect B-mode images make interpretation highly dependent on reader expertise, requiring years of training, which limits its widespread use despite its potential for high accuracy in skilled hands. To address these challenges and democratize ultrasound lung imaging as a reliable diagnostic tool, we propose LUNA, an AI model that directly reconstructs lung aeration maps from RF data, bypassing the need for traditional beamformers and indirect interpretation of B-mode images. LUNA uses a Fourier neural operator, which processes RF data efficiently in Fourier space, enabling accurate reconstruction of lung aeration maps. LUNA offers a quantitative, reader-independent alternative to traditional semi-quantitative lung ultrasound scoring methods. The development of LUNA involves synthetic and real data: We simulate synthetic data with an experimentally validated approach and scan ex vivo swine lungs as real data. Trained on abundant simulated data and fine-tuned with a small amount of real-world data, LUNA achieves robust performance, demonstrated by an aeration estimation error of 9% in ex-vivo lung scans. We demonstrate the potential of reconstructing lung aeration maps from RF data, providing a foundation for improving lung ultrasound reproducibility and diagnostic utility.
2501.01158
Attending To Syntactic Information In Biomedical Event Extraction Via Graph Neural Networks
cs.CL
Many models are proposed in the literature on biomedical event extraction(BEE). Some of them use the shortest dependency path(SDP) information to represent the argument classification task. There is an issue with this representation since even missing one word from the dependency parsing graph may totally change the final prediction. To this end, the full adjacency matrix of the dependency graph is used to embed individual tokens using a graph convolutional network(GCN). An ablation study is also done to show the effect of the dependency graph on the overall performance. The results show a significant improvement when dependency graph information is used. The proposed model slightly outperforms state-of-the-art models on BEE over different datasets.
2501.01163
3D-LLaVA: Towards Generalist 3D LMMs with Omni Superpoint Transformer
cs.CV
Current 3D Large Multimodal Models (3D LMMs) have shown tremendous potential in 3D-vision-based dialogue and reasoning. However, how to further enhance 3D LMMs to achieve fine-grained scene understanding and facilitate flexible human-agent interaction remains a challenging problem. In this work, we introduce 3D-LLaVA, a simple yet highly powerful 3D LMM designed to act as an intelligent assistant in comprehending, reasoning, and interacting with the 3D world. Unlike existing top-performing methods that rely on complicated pipelines-such as offline multi-view feature extraction or additional task-specific heads-3D-LLaVA adopts a minimalist design with integrated architecture and only takes point clouds as input. At the core of 3D-LLaVA is a new Omni Superpoint Transformer (OST), which integrates three functionalities: (1) a visual feature selector that converts and selects visual tokens, (2) a visual prompt encoder that embeds interactive visual prompts into the visual token space, and (3) a referring mask decoder that produces 3D masks based on text description. This versatile OST is empowered by the hybrid pretraining to obtain perception priors and leveraged as the visual connector that bridges the 3D data to the LLM. After performing unified instruction tuning, our 3D-LLaVA reports impressive results on various benchmarks. The code and model will be released to promote future exploration.
2501.01164
Towards Interactive Deepfake Analysis
cs.CV
Existing deepfake analysis methods are primarily based on discriminative models, which significantly limit their application scenarios. This paper aims to explore interactive deepfake analysis by performing instruction tuning on multi-modal large language models (MLLMs). This will face challenges such as the lack of datasets and benchmarks, and low training efficiency. To address these issues, we introduce (1) a GPT-assisted data construction process resulting in an instruction-following dataset called DFA-Instruct, (2) a benchmark named DFA-Bench, designed to comprehensively evaluate the capabilities of MLLMs in deepfake detection, deepfake classification, and artifact description, and (3) construct an interactive deepfake analysis system called DFA-GPT, as a strong baseline for the community, with the Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) module. The dataset and code will be made available at https://github.com/lxq1000/DFA-Instruct to facilitate further research.
2501.01166
Deep Learning in Palmprint Recognition-A Comprehensive Survey
cs.CV cs.AI
Palmprint recognition has emerged as a prominent biometric technology, widely applied in diverse scenarios. Traditional handcrafted methods for palmprint recognition often fall short in representation capability, as they heavily depend on researchers' prior knowledge. Deep learning (DL) has been introduced to address this limitation, leveraging its remarkable successes across various domains. While existing surveys focus narrowly on specific tasks within palmprint recognition-often grounded in traditional methodologies-there remains a significant gap in comprehensive research exploring DL-based approaches across all facets of palmprint recognition. This paper bridges that gap by thoroughly reviewing recent advancements in DL-powered palmprint recognition. The paper systematically examines progress across key tasks, including region-of-interest segmentation, feature extraction, and security/privacy-oriented challenges. Beyond highlighting these advancements, the paper identifies current challenges and uncovers promising opportunities for future research. By consolidating state-of-the-art progress, this review serves as a valuable resource for researchers, enabling them to stay abreast of cutting-edge technologies and drive innovation in palmprint recognition.
2501.01168
Blind Men and the Elephant: Diverse Perspectives on Gender Stereotypes in Benchmark Datasets
cs.CL cs.AI
The multifaceted challenge of accurately measuring gender stereotypical bias in language models is akin to discerning different segments of a broader, unseen entity. This short paper primarily focuses on intrinsic bias mitigation and measurement strategies for language models, building on prior research that demonstrates a lack of correlation between intrinsic and extrinsic approaches. We delve deeper into intrinsic measurements, identifying inconsistencies and suggesting that these benchmarks may reflect different facets of gender stereotype. Our methodology involves analyzing data distributions across datasets and integrating gender stereotype components informed by social psychology. By adjusting the distribution of two datasets, we achieve a better alignment of outcomes. Our findings underscore the complexity of gender stereotyping in language models and point to new directions for developing more refined techniques to detect and reduce bias.
2501.01170
Automated monitoring of bee colony movement in the hive during winter season
eess.SY cs.NI cs.SY
In this study, we have experimentally modelled the movement of a bee colony in a hive during the winter season and developed a monitoring system that allows tracking the movement of the bee colony and honey consumption. The monitoring system consists of four load cells connected to the RP2040 controller based on the Raspberry Pi Pico board, from which data is transmitted via the MQTT protocol to the Raspberry Pi 5 microcomputer via a Wi-Fi network. The processed data from the Raspberry Pi 5 is recorded in a MySQL database. The algorithm for finding the location of the bee colony in the hive works correctly, the trajectory of movement based on the data from the sensors repeats the physical movement in the experiment, which is an imitation of the movement of the bee colony in real conditions. The proposed monitoring system provides continuous observation of the bee colony without adversely affecting its natural activities and can be integrated with various wireless data networks. This is a promising tool for improving the efficiency of beekeeping and maintaining the health of bee colonies.
2501.01174
L3D-Pose: Lifting Pose for 3D Avatars from a Single Camera in the Wild
cs.CV cs.AI
While 2D pose estimation has advanced our ability to interpret body movements in animals and primates, it is limited by the lack of depth information, constraining its application range. 3D pose estimation provides a more comprehensive solution by incorporating spatial depth, yet creating extensive 3D pose datasets for animals is challenging due to their dynamic and unpredictable behaviours in natural settings. To address this, we propose a hybrid approach that utilizes rigged avatars and the pipeline to generate synthetic datasets to acquire the necessary 3D annotations for training. Our method introduces a simple attention-based MLP network for converting 2D poses to 3D, designed to be independent of the input image to ensure scalability for poses in natural environments. Additionally, we identify that existing anatomical keypoint detectors are insufficient for accurate pose retargeting onto arbitrary avatars. To overcome this, we present a lookup table based on a deep pose estimation method using a synthetic collection of diverse actions rigged avatars perform. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of this lookup table-based retargeting approach. Overall, we propose a comprehensive framework with systematically synthesized datasets for lifting poses from 2D to 3D and then utilize this to re-target motion from wild settings onto arbitrary avatars.
2501.01182
RingFormer: A Neural Vocoder with Ring Attention and Convolution-Augmented Transformer
cs.SD cs.LG eess.AS
While transformers demonstrate outstanding performance across various audio tasks, their application to neural vocoders remains challenging. Neural vocoders require the generation of long audio signals at the sample level, which demands high temporal resolution. This results in significant computational costs for attention map generation and limits their ability to efficiently process both global and local information. Additionally, the sequential nature of sample generation in neural vocoders poses difficulties for real-time processing, making the direct adoption of transformers impractical. To address these challenges, we propose RingFormer, a neural vocoder that incorporates the ring attention mechanism into a lightweight transformer variant, the convolution-augmented transformer (Conformer). Ring attention effectively captures local details while integrating global information, making it well-suited for processing long sequences and enabling real-time audio generation. RingFormer is trained using adversarial training with two discriminators. The proposed model is applied to the decoder of the text-to-speech model VITS and compared with state-of-the-art vocoders such as HiFi-GAN, iSTFT-Net, and BigVGAN under identical conditions using various objective and subjective metrics. Experimental results show that RingFormer achieves comparable or superior performance to existing models, particularly excelling in real-time audio generation. Our code and audio samples are available on GitHub.
2501.01183
Machine Learning-Based Prediction of ICU Readmissions in Intracerebral Hemorrhage Patients: Insights from the MIMIC Databases
cs.LG
Intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) is a life-risking condition characterized by bleeding within the brain parenchyma. ICU readmission in ICH patients is a critical outcome, reflecting both clinical severity and resource utilization. Accurate prediction of ICU readmission risk is crucial for guiding clinical decision-making and optimizing healthcare resources. This study utilized the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV) databases, which contain comprehensive clinical and demographic data on ICU patients. Patients with ICH were identified from both databases. Various clinical, laboratory, and demographic features were extracted for analysis based on both overview literature and experts' opinions. Preprocessing methods like imputing and sampling were applied to improve the performance of our models. Machine learning techniques, such as Artificial Neural Network (ANN), XGBoost, and Random Forest, were employed to develop predictive models for ICU readmission risk. Model performance was evaluated using metrics such as AUROC, accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. The developed models demonstrated robust predictive accuracy for ICU readmission in ICH patients, with key predictors including demographic information, clinical parameters, and laboratory measurements. Our study provides a predictive framework for ICU readmission risk in ICH patients, which can aid in clinical decision-making and improve resource allocation in intensive care settings.
2501.01184
Vulnerability-Aware Spatio-Temporal Learning for Generalizable and Interpretable Deepfake Video Detection
cs.CV
Detecting deepfake videos is highly challenging due to the complex intertwined spatial and temporal artifacts in forged sequences. Most recent approaches rely on binary classifiers trained on both real and fake data. However, such methods may struggle to focus on important artifacts, which can hinder their generalization capability. Additionally, these models often lack interpretability, making it difficult to understand how predictions are made. To address these issues, we propose FakeSTormer, offering two key contributions. First, we introduce a multi-task learning framework with additional spatial and temporal branches that enable the model to focus on subtle spatio-temporal artifacts. These branches also provide interpretability by highlighting video regions that may contain artifacts. Second, we propose a video-level data synthesis algorithm that generates pseudo-fake videos with subtle artifacts, providing the model with high-quality samples and ground truth data for our spatial and temporal branches. Extensive experiments on several challenging benchmarks demonstrate the competitiveness of our approach compared to recent state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/10Ring/FakeSTormer.
2501.01189
Can Human Drivers and Connected Autonomous Vehicles Co-exist in Lane-Free Traffic? A Microscopic Simulation Perspective
eess.SY cs.ET cs.SY
Recent advancements in connected autonomous vehicle (CAV) technology have sparked growing research interest in lane-free traffic (LFT). LFT envisions a scenario where all vehicles are CAVs, coordinating their movements without lanes to achieve smoother traffic flow and higher road capacity. This potentially reduces congestion without building new infrastructure. However, the transition phase will likely involve non-connected actors such as human-driven vehicles (HDVs) or independent AVs sharing the roads. This raises the question of how LFT performance is impacted when not all vehicles are CAVs, as these non-connected vehicles may prioritize their own benefits over system-wide improvements. This paper addresses this question through microscopic simulation on a ring road, where CAVs follow the potential lines (PL) controller for LFT, while HDVs adhere to a strip-based car-following model. The PL controller is also modified for safe velocities to prevent collisions. The results reveal that even a small percentage of HDVs can significantly disrupt LFT flow: 5% HDVs can reduce LFT's maximum road capacity by 16%, and a 20% HDVs nearly halves it. The study also develops an adaptive potential (APL) controller that forms APL corridors with modified PLs in the surroundings of HDVs. APL shows a peak traffic flow improvement of 23.6% over the PL controller. The study indicates that a penetration rate of approximately 60% CAVs in LFT is required before significant benefits of LFT start appearing compared to a scenario with all HDVs. These findings open a new research direction on minimizing the adverse effects of non-connected vehicles on LFT.
2501.01191
Data-Driven Yet Formal Policy Synthesis for Stochastic Nonlinear Dynamical Systems
eess.SY cs.SY
The automated synthesis of control policies for stochastic dynamical systems presents significant challenges. A standard approach is to construct a finite-state abstraction of the continuous system, typically represented as a Markov decision process (MDP). However, generating abstractions is challenging when (1) the system's dynamics are nonlinear, and/or (2) we do not have complete knowledge of the dynamics. In this work, we introduce a novel data-driven abstraction technique for nonlinear dynamical systems with additive stochastic noise that addresses both of these issues. As a key step, we use samples of the dynamics to learn the enabled actions and transition probabilities of the abstraction. We represent abstractions as MDPs with intervals of transition probabilities, known as interval MDPs (IMDPs). These abstractions enable the synthesis of control policies for the concrete nonlinear system, with probably approximately correct (PAC) guarantees on the probability of satisfying a specified control objective. Through numerical experiments, we illustrate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach in achieving reliable control under uncertainty.
2501.01195
Data Augmentation Techniques for Chinese Disease Name Normalization
cs.CL cs.AI
Disease name normalization is an important task in the medical domain. It classifies disease names written in various formats into standardized names, serving as a fundamental component in smart healthcare systems for various disease-related functions. Nevertheless, the most significant obstacle to existing disease name normalization systems is the severe shortage of training data. Consequently, we present a novel data augmentation approach that includes a series of data augmentation techniques and some supporting modules to help mitigate the problem. Through extensive experimentation, we illustrate that our proposed approach exhibits significant performance improvements across various baseline models and training objectives, particularly in scenarios with limited training data
2501.01196
Sparis: Neural Implicit Surface Reconstruction of Indoor Scenes from Sparse Views
cs.CV
In recent years, reconstructing indoor scene geometry from multi-view images has achieved encouraging accomplishments. Current methods incorporate monocular priors into neural implicit surface models to achieve high-quality reconstructions. However, these methods require hundreds of images for scene reconstruction. When only a limited number of views are available as input, the performance of monocular priors deteriorates due to scale ambiguity, leading to the collapse of the reconstructed scene geometry. In this paper, we propose a new method, named Sparis, for indoor surface reconstruction from sparse views. Specifically, we investigate the impact of monocular priors on sparse scene reconstruction, introducing a novel prior based on inter-image matching information. Our prior offers more accurate depth information while ensuring cross-view matching consistency. Additionally, we employ an angular filter strategy and an epipolar matching weight function, aiming to reduce errors due to view matching inaccuracies, thereby refining the inter-image prior for improved reconstruction accuracy. The experiments conducted on widely used benchmarks demonstrate superior performance in sparse-view scene reconstruction.
2501.01197
LayeringDiff: Layered Image Synthesis via Generation, then Disassembly with Generative Knowledge
cs.CV
Layers have become indispensable tools for professional artists, allowing them to build a hierarchical structure that enables independent control over individual visual elements. In this paper, we propose LayeringDiff, a novel pipeline for the synthesis of layered images, which begins by generating a composite image using an off-the-shelf image generative model, followed by disassembling the image into its constituent foreground and background layers. By extracting layers from a composite image, rather than generating them from scratch, LayeringDiff bypasses the need for large-scale training to develop generative capabilities for individual layers. Furthermore, by utilizing a pretrained off-the-shelf generative model, our method can produce diverse contents and object scales in synthesized layers. For effective layer decomposition, we adapt a large-scale pretrained generative prior to estimate foreground and background layers. We also propose high-frequency alignment modules to refine the fine-details of the estimated layers. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our approach effectively synthesizes layered images and supports various practical applications.
2501.01202
Empirical Analysis of Nature-Inspired Algorithms for Autism Spectrum Disorder Detection Using 3D Video Dataset
cs.LG cs.NE
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a chronic neurodevelopmental disorder symptoms of which includes repetitive behaviour and lack of social and communication skills. Even though these symptoms can be seen very clearly in social but a large number of individuals with ASD remain undiagnosed. In this paper, we worked on a methodology for the detection of ASD from a 3-dimensional walking video dataset, utilizing supervised machine learning (ML) classification algorithms and nature-inspired optimization algorithms for feature extraction from the dataset. The proposed methodology involves the classification of ASD using a supervised ML classification algorithm and extracting important and relevant features from the dataset using nature-inspired optimization algorithms. We also included the ranking coefficients to find the initial leading particle. This selection of particle significantly reduces the computation time and hence, improves the total efficiency and accuracy for ASD detection. To evaluate the efficiency of the proposed methodology, we deployed various combinationsalgorithms of classification algorithm and nature-inspired algorithms resulting in an outstanding classification accuracy of $100\%$ using the random forest classification algorithm and gravitational search algorithm for feature selection. The application of the proposed methodology with different datasets would enhance the robustness and generalizability of the proposed methodology. Due to high accuracy and less total computation time, the proposed methodology will offer a significant contribution to the medical and academic fields, providing a foundation for future research and advancements in ASD diagnosis.
2501.01203
HetGCoT-Rec: Heterogeneous Graph-Enhanced Chain-of-Thought LLM Reasoning for Journal Recommendation
cs.SI
Academic journal recommendation requires effectively combining structural understanding of scholarly networks with interpretable recommendations. While graph neural networks (GNNs) and large language models (LLMs) excel in their respective domains, current approaches often fail to achieve true integration at the reasoning level. We propose HetGCoT-Rec, a framework that deeply integrates heterogeneous graph transformer with LLMs through chain-of-thought reasoning. Our framework features two key technical innovations: (1) a structure-aware mechanism that transforms heterogeneous graph neural network learned subgraph information into natural language contexts, utilizing predefined metapaths to capture academic relationships, and (2) a multi-step reasoning strategy that systematically embeds graph-derived contexts into the LLM's stage-wise reasoning process. Experiments on a dataset collected from OpenAlex demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms baseline methods, achieving 96.48% Hit rate and 92.21% H@1 accuracy. Furthermore, we validate the framework's adaptability across different LLM architectures, showing consistent improvements in both recommendation accuracy and explanation quality. Our work demonstrates an effective approach for combining graph-structured reasoning with language models for interpretable academic venue recommendations.
2501.01205
Harnessing Multi-Agent LLMs for Complex Engineering Problem-Solving: A Framework for Senior Design Projects
cs.MA cs.AI cs.CL cs.LG
Multi-Agent Large Language Models (LLMs) are gaining significant attention for their ability to harness collective intelligence in complex problem-solving, decision-making, and planning tasks. This aligns with the concept of the wisdom of crowds, where diverse agents contribute collectively to generating effective solutions, making it particularly suitable for educational settings. Senior design projects, also known as capstone or final year projects, are pivotal in engineering education as they integrate theoretical knowledge with practical application, fostering critical thinking, teamwork, and real-world problem-solving skills. In this paper, we explore the use of Multi-Agent LLMs in supporting these senior design projects undertaken by engineering students, which often involve multidisciplinary considerations and conflicting objectives, such as optimizing technical performance while addressing ethical, social, and environmental concerns. We propose a framework where distinct LLM agents represent different expert perspectives, such as problem formulation agents, system complexity agents, societal and ethical agents, or project managers, thus facilitating a holistic problem-solving approach. This implementation leverages standard multi-agent system (MAS) concepts such as coordination, cooperation, and negotiation, incorporating prompt engineering to develop diverse personas for each agent. These agents engage in rich, collaborative dialogues to simulate human engineering teams, guided by principles from swarm AI to efficiently balance individual contributions towards a unified solution. We adapt these techniques to create a collaboration structure for LLM agents, encouraging interdisciplinary reasoning and negotiation similar to real-world senior design projects. To assess the efficacy of this framework, we collected six proposals of engineering and computer science of...
2501.01209
A redescription mining framework for post-hoc explaining and relating deep learning models
cs.AI cs.LG
Deep learning models (DLMs) achieve increasingly high performance both on structured and unstructured data. They significantly extended applicability of machine learning to various domains. Their success in making predictions, detecting patterns and generating new data made significant impact on science and industry. Despite these accomplishments, DLMs are difficult to explain because of their enormous size. In this work, we propose a novel framework for post-hoc explaining and relating DLMs using redescriptions. The framework allows cohort analysis of arbitrary DLMs by identifying statistically significant redescriptions of neuron activations. It allows coupling neurons to a set of target labels or sets of descriptive attributes, relating layers within a single DLM or associating different DLMs. The proposed framework is independent of the artificial neural network architecture and can work with more complex target labels (e.g. multi-label or multi-target scenario). Additionally, it can emulate both pedagogical and decompositional approach to rule extraction. The aforementioned properties of the proposed framework can increase explainability and interpretability of arbitrary DLMs by providing different information compared to existing explainable-AI approaches.
2501.01212
Real-time Cross-modal Cybersickness Prediction in Virtual Reality
cs.CV cs.HC
Cybersickness remains a significant barrier to the widespread adoption of immersive virtual reality (VR) experiences, as it can greatly disrupt user engagement and comfort. Research has shown that cybersickness can significantly be reflected in head and eye tracking data, along with other physiological data (e.g., TMP, EDA, and BMP). Despite the application of deep learning techniques such as CNNs and LSTMs, these models often struggle to capture the complex interactions between multiple data modalities and lack the capacity for real-time inference, limiting their practical application. Addressing this gap, we propose a lightweight model that leverages a transformer-based encoder with sparse self-attention to process bio-signal features and a PP-TSN network for video feature extraction. These features are then integrated via a cross-modal fusion module, creating a video-aware bio-signal representation that supports cybersickness prediction based on both visual and bio-signal inputs. Our model, trained with a lightweight framework, was validated on a public dataset containing eye and head tracking data, physiological data, and VR video, and demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in cybersickness prediction, achieving a high accuracy of 93.13\% using only VR video inputs. These findings suggest that our approach not only enables effective, real-time cybersickness prediction but also addresses the longstanding issue of modality interaction in VR environments. This advancement provides a foundation for future research on multimodal data integration in VR, potentially leading to more personalized, comfortable and widely accessible VR experiences.
2501.01213
Range-Only Localization System for Small-Scale Flapping-Wing Robots
cs.RO
The design of localization systems for small-scale flapping-wing aerial robots faces relevant challenges caused by the limited payload and onboard computational resources. This paper presents an ultra-wideband localization system particularly designed for small-scale flapping-wing robots. The solution relies on custom 5 grams ultra-wideband sensors and provides robust, very efficient (in terms of both computation and energy consumption), and accurate (mean error of 0.28 meters) 3D position estimation. We validate our system using a Flapper Nimble+ flapping-wing robot.
2501.01216
TabTreeFormer: Tabular Data Generation Using Hybrid Tree-Transformer
cs.LG
Transformers have achieved remarkable success in tabular data generation. However, they lack domain-specific inductive biases which are critical to preserving the intrinsic characteristics of tabular data. Meanwhile, they suffer from poor scalability and efficiency due to quadratic computational complexity. In this paper, we propose TabTreeFormer, a hybrid transformer architecture that incorporates a tree-based model that retains tabular-specific inductive biases of non-smooth and potentially low-correlated patterns caused by discreteness and non-rotational invariance, and hence enhances the fidelity and utility of synthetic data. In addition, we devise a dual-quantization tokenizer to capture the multimodal continuous distribution and further facilitate the learning of numerical value distribution. Moreover, our proposed tokenizer reduces the vocabulary size and sequence length due to the limited complexity (e.g., dimension-wise semantic meaning) of tabular data, rendering a significant model size shrink without sacrificing the capability of the transformer model. We evaluate TabTreeFormer on 10 datasets against multiple generative models on various metrics; our experimental results show that TabTreeFormer achieves superior fidelity, utility, privacy, and efficiency. Our best model yields a 40% utility improvement with 1/16 of the baseline model size.
2501.01222
Classification of Operational Records in Aviation Using Deep Learning Approaches
cs.LG
Ensuring safety in the aviation industry is critical, even minor anomalies can lead to severe consequences. This study evaluates the performance of four different models for DP (deep learning), including: Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM), Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and Simple Recurrent Neural Networks (sRNN), on a multi-class classification task involving Commercial, Military, and Private categories using the Socrata aviation dataset of 4,864 records. The models were assessed using a classification report, confusion matrix analysis, accuracy metrics, validation loss and accuracy curves. Among the models, BLSTM achieved the highest overall accuracy of 72%, demonstrating superior performance in stability and balanced classification, while LSTM followed closely with 71%, excelling in recall for the Commercial class. CNN and sRNN exhibited lower accuracies of 67% and 69%, with significant misclassifications in the Private class. While the results highlight the strengths of BLSTM and LSTM in handling sequential dependencies and complex classification tasks, all models faced challenges with class imbalance, particularly in predicting the Military and Private categories. Addressing these limitations through data augmentation, advanced feature engineering, and ensemble learning techniques could enhance classification accuracy and robustness. This study underscores the importance of selecting appropriate architectures for domain specific tasks
2501.01223
Conditional Consistency Guided Image Translation and Enhancement
cs.CV cs.LG
Consistency models have emerged as a promising alternative to diffusion models, offering high-quality generative capabilities through single-step sample generation. However, their application to multi-domain image translation tasks, such as cross-modal translation and low-light image enhancement remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce Conditional Consistency Models (CCMs) for multi-domain image translation by incorporating additional conditional inputs. We implement these modifications by introducing task-specific conditional inputs that guide the denoising process, ensuring that the generated outputs retain structural and contextual information from the corresponding input domain. We evaluate CCMs on 10 different datasets demonstrating their effectiveness in producing high-quality translated images across multiple domains. Code is available at https://github.com/amilbhagat/Conditional-Consistency-Models.
2501.01227
Comparative Analysis of Topic Modeling Techniques on ATSB Text Narratives Using Natural Language Processing
cs.LG
Improvements in aviation safety analysis call for innovative techniques to extract valuable insights from the abundance of textual data available in accident reports. This paper explores the application of four prominent topic modelling techniques, namely Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (pLSA), Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), and Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF), to dissect aviation incident narratives using the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) dataset. The study examines each technique's ability to unveil latent thematic structures within the data, providing safety professionals with a systematic approach to gain actionable insights. Through a comparative analysis, this research not only showcases the potential of these methods in aviation safety but also elucidates their distinct advantages and limitations.
2501.01230
Modeling Multi-Task Model Merging as Adaptive Projective Gradient Descent
cs.LG
Merging multiple expert models offers a promising approach for performing multi-task learning without accessing their original data. Existing methods attempt to alleviate task conflicts by sparsifying task vectors or promoting orthogonality among them. However, they overlook the fundamental requirement of model merging: ensuring the merged model performs comparably to task-specific models on respective tasks. We find these methods inevitably discard task-specific information that, while causing conflicts, is crucial for performance. Based on our findings, we frame model merging as a constrained optimization problem ($\textit{i.e.}$, minimizing the gap between the merged model and individual models, subject to the constraint of retaining shared knowledge) and solve it via adaptive projective gradient descent. Specifically, we align the merged model with individual models by decomposing and reconstituting the loss function, alleviating conflicts through $\textit{data-free}$ optimization of task vectors. To retain shared knowledge, we optimize this objective by projecting gradients within a $\textit{shared subspace}$ spanning all tasks. Moreover, we view merging coefficients as adaptive learning rates and propose a task-aware, training-free strategy. Experiments show that our plug-and-play approach consistently outperforms previous methods, achieving state-of-the-art results across diverse architectures and tasks in both vision and NLP domains.
2501.01231
Exploiting Latent Properties to Optimize Neural Codecs
cs.CV cs.LG
End-to-end image and video codecs are becoming increasingly competitive, compared to traditional compression techniques that have been developed through decades of manual engineering efforts. These trainable codecs have many advantages over traditional techniques, such as their straightforward adaptation to perceptual distortion metrics and high performance in specific fields thanks to their learning ability. However, current state-of-the-art neural codecs do not fully exploit the benefits of vector quantization and the existence of the entropy gradient in decoding devices. In this paper, we propose to leverage these two properties (vector quantization and entropy gradient) to improve the performance of off-the-shelf codecs. Firstly, we demonstrate that using non-uniform scalar quantization cannot improve performance over uniform quantization. We thus suggest using predefined optimal uniform vector quantization to improve performance. Secondly, we show that the entropy gradient, available at the decoder, is correlated with the reconstruction error gradient, which is not available at the decoder. We therefore use the former as a proxy to enhance compression performance. Our experimental results show that these approaches save between 1 to 3% of the rate for the same quality across various pretrained methods. In addition, the entropy gradient based solution improves traditional codec performance significantly as well.
2501.01235
SVFR: A Unified Framework for Generalized Video Face Restoration
cs.CV cs.LG eess.IV
Face Restoration (FR) is a crucial area within image and video processing, focusing on reconstructing high-quality portraits from degraded inputs. Despite advancements in image FR, video FR remains relatively under-explored, primarily due to challenges related to temporal consistency, motion artifacts, and the limited availability of high-quality video data. Moreover, traditional face restoration typically prioritizes enhancing resolution and may not give as much consideration to related tasks such as facial colorization and inpainting. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for the Generalized Video Face Restoration (GVFR) task, which integrates video BFR, inpainting, and colorization tasks that we empirically show to benefit each other. We present a unified framework, termed as stable video face restoration (SVFR), which leverages the generative and motion priors of Stable Video Diffusion (SVD) and incorporates task-specific information through a unified face restoration framework. A learnable task embedding is introduced to enhance task identification. Meanwhile, a novel Unified Latent Regularization (ULR) is employed to encourage the shared feature representation learning among different subtasks. To further enhance the restoration quality and temporal stability, we introduce the facial prior learning and the self-referred refinement as auxiliary strategies used for both training and inference. The proposed framework effectively combines the complementary strengths of these tasks, enhancing temporal coherence and achieving superior restoration quality. This work advances the state-of-the-art in video FR and establishes a new paradigm for generalized video face restoration. Code and video demo are available at https://github.com/wangzhiyaoo/SVFR.git.
2501.01237
Self-Refinement Strategies for LLM-based Product Attribute Value Extraction
cs.CL
Structured product data, in the form of attribute-value pairs, is essential for e-commerce platforms to support features such as faceted product search and attribute-based product comparison. However, vendors often provide unstructured product descriptions, making attribute value extraction necessary to ensure data consistency and usability. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their potential for product attribute value extraction in few-shot scenarios. Recent research has shown that self-refinement techniques can improve the performance of LLMs on tasks such as code generation and text-to-SQL translation. For other tasks, the application of these techniques has resulted in increased costs due to processing additional tokens, without achieving any improvement in performance. This paper investigates applying two self-refinement techniques (error-based prompt rewriting and self-correction) to the product attribute value extraction task. The self-refinement techniques are evaluated across zero-shot, few-shot in-context learning, and fine-tuning scenarios using GPT-4o. The experiments show that both self-refinement techniques fail to significantly improve the extraction performance while substantially increasing processing costs. For scenarios with development data, fine-tuning yields the highest performance, while the ramp-up costs of fine-tuning are balanced out as the amount of product descriptions increases.
2501.01238
EHCTNet: Enhanced Hybrid of CNN and Transformer Network for Remote Sensing Image Change Detection
cs.CV cs.LG
Remote sensing (RS) change detection incurs a high cost because of false negatives, which are more costly than false positives. Existing frameworks, struggling to improve the Precision metric to reduce the cost of false positive, still have limitations in focusing on the change of interest, which leads to missed detections and discontinuity issues. This work tackles these issues by enhancing feature learning capabilities and integrating the frequency components of feature information, with a strategy to incrementally boost the Recall value. We propose an enhanced hybrid of CNN and Transformer network (EHCTNet) for effectively mining the change information of interest. Firstly, a dual branch feature extraction module is used to extract the multi scale features of RS images. Secondly, the frequency component of these features is exploited by a refined module I. Thirdly, an enhanced token mining module based on the Kolmogorov Arnold Network is utilized to derive semantic information. Finally, the semantic change information's frequency component, beneficial for final detection, is mined from the refined module II. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of EHCTNet in comprehending complex changes of interest. The visualization outcomes show that EHCTNet detects more intact and continuous changed areas and perceives more accurate neighboring distinction than state of the art models.
2501.01239
High-Order Tensor Regression in Sparse Convolutional Neural Networks
cs.LG
This article presents a generic approach to convolution that significantly differs from conventional methodologies in the current Machine Learning literature. The approach, in its mathematical aspects, proved to be clear and concise, particularly when high-order tensors are involved. In this context, a rational theory of regression in neural networks is developed, as a framework for a generic view of sparse convolutional neural networks, the primary focus of this study. As a direct outcome, the classic Backpropagation Algorithm is redefined to align with this rational tensor-based approach and presented in its simplest, most generic form.
2501.01240
Asymmetric Reinforcing against Multi-modal Representation Bias
cs.CV
The strength of multimodal learning lies in its ability to integrate information from various sources, providing rich and comprehensive insights. However, in real-world scenarios, multi-modal systems often face the challenge of dynamic modality contributions, the dominance of different modalities may change with the environments, leading to suboptimal performance in multimodal learning. Current methods mainly enhance weak modalities to balance multimodal representation bias, which inevitably optimizes from a partialmodality perspective, easily leading to performance descending for dominant modalities. To address this problem, we propose an Asymmetric Reinforcing method against Multimodal representation bias (ARM). Our ARM dynamically reinforces the weak modalities while maintaining the ability to represent dominant modalities through conditional mutual information. Moreover, we provide an in-depth analysis that optimizing certain modalities could cause information loss and prevent leveraging the full advantages of multimodal data. By exploring the dominance and narrowing the contribution gaps between modalities, we have significantly improved the performance of multimodal learning, making notable progress in mitigating imbalanced multimodal learning.
2501.01242
An Efficient Attention Mechanism for Sequential Recommendation Tasks: HydraRec
cs.IR cs.AI
Transformer based models are increasingly being used in various domains including recommender systems (RS). Pretrained transformer models such as BERT have shown good performance at language modelling. With the greater ability to model sequential tasks, variants of Encoder-only models (like BERT4Rec, SASRec etc.) have found success in sequential RS problems. Computing dot-product attention in traditional transformer models has quadratic complexity in sequence length. This is a bigger problem with RS because unlike language models, new items are added to the catalogue every day. User buying history is a dynamic sequence which depends on multiple factors. Recently, various linear attention models have tried to solve this problem by making the model linear in sequence length (token dimensions). Hydra attention is one such linear complexity model proposed for vision transformers which reduces the complexity of attention for both the number of tokens as well as model embedding dimensions. Building on the idea of Hydra attention, we introduce an efficient Transformer based Sequential RS (HydraRec) which significantly improves theoretical complexity of computing attention for longer sequences and bigger datasets while preserving the temporal context. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate other linear transformer-based RS models and compared with HydraRec across various evaluation metrics. HydraRec outperforms other linear attention-based models as well as dot-product based attention models when used with causal masking for sequential recommendation next item prediction tasks. For bi-directional models its performance is comparable to the BERT4Rec model with an improvement in running time.
2501.01243
Face-Human-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Face and Human Understanding for Multi-modal Assistants
cs.CV cs.AI cs.CL
Faces and humans are crucial elements in social interaction and are widely included in everyday photos and videos. Therefore, a deep understanding of faces and humans will enable multi-modal assistants to achieve improved response quality and broadened application scope. Currently, the multi-modal assistant community lacks a comprehensive and scientific evaluation of face and human understanding abilities. In this paper, we first propose a hierarchical ability taxonomy that includes three levels of abilities. Then, based on this taxonomy, we collect images and annotations from publicly available datasets in the face and human community and build a semi-automatic data pipeline to produce problems for the new benchmark. Finally, the obtained Face-Human-Bench comprises a development set with 900 problems and a test set with 1800 problems, supporting both English and Chinese. We conduct evaluations over 25 mainstream multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) with our Face-Human-Bench, focusing on the correlation between abilities, the impact of the relative position of targets on performance, and the impact of Chain of Thought (CoT) prompting on performance. Moreover, inspired by multi-modal agents, we also explore which abilities of MLLMs need to be supplemented by specialist models.
2501.01245
SeFAR: Semi-supervised Fine-grained Action Recognition with Temporal Perturbation and Learning Stabilization
cs.CV cs.LG
Human action understanding is crucial for the advancement of multimodal systems. While recent developments, driven by powerful large language models (LLMs), aim to be general enough to cover a wide range of categories, they often overlook the need for more specific capabilities. In this work, we address the more challenging task of Fine-grained Action Recognition (FAR), which focuses on detailed semantic labels within shorter temporal duration (e.g., "salto backward tucked with 1 turn"). Given the high costs of annotating fine-grained labels and the substantial data needed for fine-tuning LLMs, we propose to adopt semi-supervised learning (SSL). Our framework, SeFAR, incorporates several innovative designs to tackle these challenges. Specifically, to capture sufficient visual details, we construct Dual-level temporal elements as more effective representations, based on which we design a new strong augmentation strategy for the Teacher-Student learning paradigm through involving moderate temporal perturbation. Furthermore, to handle the high uncertainty within the teacher model's predictions for FAR, we propose the Adaptive Regulation to stabilize the learning process. Experiments show that SeFAR achieves state-of-the-art performance on two FAR datasets, FineGym and FineDiving, across various data scopes. It also outperforms other semi-supervised methods on two classical coarse-grained datasets, UCF101 and HMDB51. Further analysis and ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our designs. Additionally, we show that the features extracted by our SeFAR could largely promote the ability of multimodal foundation models to understand fine-grained and domain-specific semantics.
2501.01246
Large Language Model-Enhanced Symbolic Reasoning for Knowledge Base Completion
cs.CL
Integrating large language models (LLMs) with rule-based reasoning offers a powerful solution for improving the flexibility and reliability of Knowledge Base Completion (KBC). Traditional rule-based KBC methods offer verifiable reasoning yet lack flexibility, while LLMs provide strong semantic understanding yet suffer from hallucinations. With the aim of combining LLMs' understanding capability with the logical and rigor of rule-based approaches, we propose a novel framework consisting of a Subgraph Extractor, an LLM Proposer, and a Rule Reasoner. The Subgraph Extractor first samples subgraphs from the KB. Then, the LLM uses these subgraphs to propose diverse and meaningful rules that are helpful for inferring missing facts. To effectively avoid hallucination in LLMs' generations, these proposed rules are further refined by a Rule Reasoner to pinpoint the most significant rules in the KB for Knowledge Base Completion. Our approach offers several key benefits: the utilization of LLMs to enhance the richness and diversity of the proposed rules and the integration with rule-based reasoning to improve reliability. Our method also demonstrates strong performance across diverse KB datasets, highlighting the robustness and generalizability of the proposed framework.
2501.01248
Bayesian Active Learning By Distribution Disagreement
cs.LG
Active Learning (AL) for regression has been systematically under-researched due to the increased difficulty of measuring uncertainty in regression models. Since normalizing flows offer a full predictive distribution instead of a point forecast, they facilitate direct usage of known heuristics for AL like Entropy or Least-Confident sampling. However, we show that most of these heuristics do not work well for normalizing flows in pool-based AL and we need more sophisticated algorithms to distinguish between aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty. In this work we propose BALSA, an adaptation of the BALD algorithm, tailored for regression with normalizing flows. With this work we extend current research on uncertainty quantification with normalizing flows \cite{berry2023normalizing, berry2023escaping} to real world data and pool-based AL with multiple acquisition functions and query sizes. We report SOTA results for BALSA across 4 different datasets and 2 different architectures.
2501.01256
Digital Guardians: Can GPT-4, Perspective API, and Moderation API reliably detect hate speech in reader comments of German online newspapers?
cs.CL cs.LG
In recent years, toxic content and hate speech have become widespread phenomena on the internet. Moderators of online newspapers and forums are now required, partly due to legal regulations, to carefully review and, if necessary, delete reader comments. This is a labor-intensive process. Some providers of large language models already offer solutions for automated hate speech detection or the identification of toxic content. These include GPT-4o from OpenAI, Jigsaw's (Google) Perspective API, and OpenAI's Moderation API. Based on the selected German test dataset HOCON34k, which was specifically created for developing tools to detect hate speech in reader comments of online newspapers, these solutions are compared with each other and against the HOCON34k baseline. The test dataset contains 1,592 annotated text samples. For GPT-4o, three different promptings are used, employing a Zero-Shot, One-Shot, and Few-Shot approach. The results of the experiments demonstrate that GPT-4o outperforms both the Perspective API and the Moderation API, and exceeds the HOCON34k baseline by approximately 5 percentage points, as measured by a combined metric of MCC and F2-score.
2501.01257
CodeElo: Benchmarking Competition-level Code Generation of LLMs with Human-comparable Elo Ratings
cs.CL
With the increasing code reasoning capabilities of existing large language models (LLMs) and breakthroughs in reasoning models like OpenAI o1 and o3, there is a growing need to develop more challenging and comprehensive benchmarks that effectively test their sophisticated competition-level coding abilities. Existing benchmarks, like LiveCodeBench and USACO, fall short due to the unavailability of private test cases, lack of support for special judges, and misaligned execution environments. To bridge this gap, we introduce CodeElo, a standardized competition-level code generation benchmark that effectively addresses all these challenges for the first time. CodeElo benchmark is mainly based on the official CodeForces platform and tries to align with the platform as much as possible. We compile the recent six months of contest problems on CodeForces with detailed information such as contest divisions, problem difficulty ratings, and problem algorithm tags. We introduce a unique judging method in which problems are submitted directly to the platform and develop a reliable Elo rating calculation system that aligns with the platform and is comparable with human participants but has lower variance. By testing on our CodeElo, we provide the Elo ratings of 30 existing popular open-source and 3 proprietary LLMs for the first time. The results show that o1-mini and QwQ-32B-Preview stand out significantly, achieving Elo ratings of 1578 and 1261, respectively, while other models struggle even with the easiest problems, placing in the lowest 25 percent among all human participants. Detailed analysis experiments are also conducted to provide insights into performance across algorithms and comparisons between using C++ and Python, which can suggest directions for future studies.
2501.01262
Detail Matters: Mamba-Inspired Joint Unfolding Network for Snapshot Spectral Compressive Imaging
cs.CV
In the coded aperture snapshot spectral imaging system, Deep Unfolding Networks (DUNs) have made impressive progress in recovering 3D hyperspectral images (HSIs) from a single 2D measurement. However, the inherent nonlinear and ill-posed characteristics of HSI reconstruction still pose challenges to existing methods in terms of accuracy and stability. To address this issue, we propose a Mamba-inspired Joint Unfolding Network (MiJUN), which integrates physics-embedded DUNs with learning-based HSI imaging. Firstly, leveraging the concept of trapezoid discretization to expand the representation space of unfolding networks, we introduce an accelerated unfolding network scheme. This approach can be interpreted as a generalized accelerated half-quadratic splitting with a second-order differential equation, which reduces the reliance on initial optimization stages and addresses challenges related to long-range interactions. Crucially, within the Mamba framework, we restructure the Mamba-inspired global-to-local attention mechanism by incorporating a selective state space model and an attention mechanism. This effectively reinterprets Mamba as a variant of the Transformer} architecture, improving its adaptability and efficiency. Furthermore, we refine the scanning strategy with Mamba by integrating the tensor mode-$k$ unfolding into the Mamba network. This approach emphasizes the low-rank properties of tensors along various modes, while conveniently facilitating 12 scanning directions. Numerical and visual comparisons on both simulation and real datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed MiJUN, and achieving overwhelming detail representation.
2501.01263
Stealthy Backdoor Attack to Real-world Models in Android Apps
cs.CR cs.AI
Powered by their superior performance, deep neural networks (DNNs) have found widespread applications across various domains. Many deep learning (DL) models are now embedded in mobile apps, making them more accessible to end users through on-device DL. However, deploying on-device DL to users' smartphones simultaneously introduces several security threats. One primary threat is backdoor attacks. Extensive research has explored backdoor attacks for several years and has proposed numerous attack approaches. However, few studies have investigated backdoor attacks on DL models deployed in the real world, or they have shown obvious deficiencies in effectiveness and stealthiness. In this work, we explore more effective and stealthy backdoor attacks on real-world DL models extracted from mobile apps. Our main justification is that imperceptible and sample-specific backdoor triggers generated by DNN-based steganography can enhance the efficacy of backdoor attacks on real-world models. We first confirm the effectiveness of steganography-based backdoor attacks on four state-of-the-art DNN models. Subsequently, we systematically evaluate and analyze the stealthiness of the attacks to ensure they are difficult to perceive. Finally, we implement the backdoor attacks on real-world models and compare our approach with three baseline methods. We collect 38,387 mobile apps, extract 89 DL models from them, and analyze these models to obtain the prerequisite model information for the attacks. After identifying the target models, our approach achieves an average of 12.50% higher attack success rate than DeepPayload while better maintaining the normal performance of the models. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method enables more effective, robust, and stealthy backdoor attacks on real-world models.
2501.01264
ProgCo: Program Helps Self-Correction of Large Language Models
cs.CL cs.AI cs.LG
Self-Correction aims to enable large language models (LLMs) to self-verify and self-refine their initial responses without external feedback. However, LLMs often fail to effectively self-verify and generate correct feedback, further misleading refinement and leading to the failure of self-correction, especially in complex reasoning tasks. In this paper, we propose Program-driven Self-Correction (ProgCo). First, program-driven verification (ProgVe) achieves complex verification logic and extensive validation through self-generated, self-executing verification pseudo-programs. Then, program-driven refinement (ProgRe) receives feedback from ProgVe, conducts dual reflection and refinement on both responses and verification programs to mitigate misleading of incorrect feedback in complex reasoning tasks. Experiments on three instruction-following and mathematical benchmarks indicate that ProgCo achieves effective self-correction, and can be further enhance performance when combined with real program tools.
2501.01266
PIMAEX: Multi-Agent Exploration through Peer Incentivization
cs.MA cs.AI
While exploration in single-agent reinforcement learning has been studied extensively in recent years, considerably less work has focused on its counterpart in multi-agent reinforcement learning. To address this issue, this work proposes a peer-incentivized reward function inspired by previous research on intrinsic curiosity and influence-based rewards. The \textit{PIMAEX} reward, short for Peer-Incentivized Multi-Agent Exploration, aims to improve exploration in the multi-agent setting by encouraging agents to exert influence over each other to increase the likelihood of encountering novel states. We evaluate the \textit{PIMAEX} reward in conjunction with \textit{PIMAEX-Communication}, a multi-agent training algorithm that employs a communication channel for agents to influence one another. The evaluation is conducted in the \textit{Consume/Explore} environment, a partially observable environment with deceptive rewards, specifically designed to challenge the exploration vs.\ exploitation dilemma and the credit-assignment problem. The results empirically demonstrate that agents using the \textit{PIMAEX} reward with \textit{PIMAEX-Communication} outperform those that do not.