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2501.02469
LoRaConnect: Unlocking HTTP Potential on LoRa Backbones for Remote Areas and Ad-Hoc Networks
cs.NI cs.CY cs.SY eess.SY
The minimal infrastructure requirements of LoRa make it suitable for deployments in remote and disaster-stricken areas. Concomitantly, the modern era is witnessing the proliferation of web applications in all aspects of human life, including IoT and other network services. Contemporary IoT and network solutions heavily rely on web applications to render services. However, despite the recent research and development pivoted around LoRa, there is still a lack of studies focusing on web application access over LoRa networks. Specifically, technical challenges like payload size limitation, low data rate, and contentions in multi-user setups limit the applicability of LoRa for web applications. Hence, we propose LoRaWeb, which enables web access over LoRa networks. The LoRaWeb hardware tethers a WiFi hotspot to which the client devices connect and access the web pages using a web browser. LoRa backbone of the network handles the web page transmission from the requester and receiver devices. LoRaWeb implements a synchronization procedure to address the aforementioned challenges for effective message exchange between requesters and responders. The system implements a caching mechanism to reduce latency and contention. Additionally, it implements a message-slicing mechanism in the application layer to overcome the hardware limitations on the message length. The actual hardware-based implementation results indicate seamless deployment, and the results indicate an average access time of ~$0.95 S$ for a $1.5 KB$ and ~$6 S$ for a $10 KB$ size web page.
2501.02471
Hengqin-RA-v1: Advanced Large Language Model for Diagnosis and Treatment of Rheumatoid Arthritis with Dataset based Traditional Chinese Medicine
cs.CL cs.AI
Large language models (LLMs) primarily trained on English texts, often face biases and inaccuracies in Chinese contexts. Their limitations are pronounced in fields like Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), where cultural and clinical subtleties are vital, further hindered by a lack of domain-specific data, such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA). To address these issues, this paper introduces Hengqin-RA-v1, the first large language model specifically tailored for TCM with a focus on diagnosing and treating RA. We also present HQ-GCM-RA-C1, a comprehensive RA-specific dataset curated from ancient Chinese medical literature, classical texts, and modern clinical studies. This dataset empowers Hengqin-RA-v1 to deliver accurate and culturally informed responses, effectively bridging the gaps left by general-purpose models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Hengqin-RA-v1 outperforms state-of-the-art models, even surpassing the diagnostic accuracy of TCM practitioners in certain cases.
2501.02473
IRIS: A Bayesian Approach for Image Reconstruction in Radio Interferometry with expressive Score-Based priors
astro-ph.IM cs.LG eess.IV
Inferring sky surface brightness distributions from noisy interferometric data in a principled statistical framework has been a key challenge in radio astronomy. In this work, we introduce Imaging for Radio Interferometry with Score-based models (IRIS). We use score-based models trained on optical images of galaxies as an expressive prior in combination with a Gaussian likelihood in the uv-space to infer images of protoplanetary disks from visibility data of the DSHARP survey conducted by ALMA. We demonstrate the advantages of this framework compared with traditional radio interferometry imaging algorithms, showing that it produces plausible posterior samples despite the use of a misspecified galaxy prior. Through coverage testing on simulations, we empirically evaluate the accuracy of this approach to generate calibrated posterior samples.
2501.02474
Generalization-Enhanced Few-Shot Object Detection in Remote Sensing
cs.CV
Remote sensing object detection is particularly challenging due to the high resolution, multi-scale features, and diverse ground object characteristics inherent in satellite and UAV imagery. These challenges necessitate more advanced approaches for effective object detection in such environments. While deep learning methods have achieved remarkable success in remote sensing object detection, they typically rely on large amounts of labeled data. Acquiring sufficient labeled data, particularly for novel or rare objects, is both challenging and time-consuming in remote sensing scenarios, limiting the generalization capabilities of existing models. To address these challenges, few-shot learning (FSL) has emerged as a promising approach, aiming to enable models to learn new classes from limited labeled examples. Building on this concept, few-shot object detection (FSOD) specifically targets object detection challenges in data-limited conditions. However, the generalization capability of FSOD models, particularly in remote sensing, is often constrained by the complex and diverse characteristics of the objects present in such environments. In this paper, we propose the Generalization-Enhanced Few-Shot Object Detection (GE-FSOD) model to improve the generalization capability in remote sensing FSOD tasks. Our model introduces three key innovations: the Cross-Level Fusion Pyramid Attention Network (CFPAN) for enhanced multi-scale feature representation, the Multi-Stage Refinement Region Proposal Network (MRRPN) for more accurate region proposals, and the Generalized Classification Loss (GCL) for improved classification performance in few-shot scenarios. Extensive experiments on the DIOR and NWPU VHR-10 datasets show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance for few-shot object detection in remote sensing.
2501.02476
Noise-Tolerant Hybrid Prototypical Learning with Noisy Web Data
cs.CV cs.LG
We focus on the challenging problem of learning an unbiased classifier from a large number of potentially relevant but noisily labeled web images given only a few clean labeled images. This problem is particularly practical because it reduces the expensive annotation costs by utilizing freely accessible web images with noisy labels. Typically, prototypes are representative images or features used to classify or identify other images. However, in the few clean and many noisy scenarios, the class prototype can be severely biased due to the presence of irrelevant noisy images. The resulting prototypes are less compact and discriminative, as previous methods do not take into account the diverse range of images in the noisy web image collections. On the other hand, the relation modeling between noisy and clean images is not learned for the class prototype generation in an end-to-end manner, which results in a suboptimal class prototype. In this article, we introduce a similarity maximization loss named SimNoiPro. Our SimNoiPro first generates noise-tolerant hybrid prototypes composed of clean and noise-tolerant prototypes and then pulls them closer to each other. Our approach considers the diversity of noisy images by explicit division and overcomes the optimization discrepancy issue. This enables better relation modeling between clean and noisy images and helps extract judicious information from the noisy image set. The evaluation results on two extended few-shot classification benchmarks confirm that our SimNoiPro outperforms prior methods in measuring image relations and cleaning noisy data.
2501.02477
A Deep Positive-Negative Prototype Approach to Integrated Prototypical Discriminative Learning
cs.LG cs.CV
This paper proposes a novel Deep Positive-Negative Prototype (DPNP) model that combines prototype-based learning (PbL) with discriminative methods to improve class compactness and separability in deep neural networks. While PbL traditionally emphasizes interpretability by classifying samples based on their similarity to representative prototypes, it struggles with creating optimal decision boundaries in complex scenarios. Conversely, discriminative methods effectively separate classes but often lack intuitive interpretability. Toward exploiting advantages of these two approaches, the suggested DPNP model bridges between them by unifying class prototypes with weight vectors, thereby establishing a structured latent space that enables accurate classification using interpretable prototypes alongside a properly learned feature representation. Based on this central idea of unified prototype-weight representation, Deep Positive Prototype (DPP) is formed in the latent space as a representative for each class using off-the-shelf deep networks as feature extractors. Then, rival neighboring class DPPs are treated as implicit negative prototypes with repulsive force in DPNP, which push away DPPs from each other. This helps to enhance inter-class separation without the need for any extra parameters. Hence, through a novel loss function that integrates cross-entropy, prototype alignment, and separation terms, DPNP achieves well-organized feature space geometry, maximizing intra-class compactness and inter-class margins. We show that DPNP can organize prototypes in nearly regular positions within feature space, such that it is possible to achieve competitive classification accuracy even in much lower-dimensional feature spaces. Experimental results on several datasets demonstrate that DPNP outperforms state-of-the-art models, while using smaller networks.
2501.02481
The Meta-Representation Hypothesis
cs.LG cs.AI
Humans rely on high-level understandings of things, i.e., meta-representations, to engage in abstract reasoning. In complex cognitive tasks, these meta-representations help individuals abstract general rules from experience. However, constructing such meta-representations from high-dimensional observations remains a longstanding challenge for reinforcement learning (RL) agents. For instance, a well-trained agent often fails to generalize to even minor variations of the same task, such as changes in background color, while humans can easily handle. In this paper, we theoretically investigate how meta-representations contribute to the generalization ability of RL agents, demonstrating that learning meta-representations from high-dimensional observations enhance an agent's ability to generalize across varied environments. We further hypothesize that deep mutual learning (DML) among agents can help them learn the meta-representations that capture the underlying essence of the task. Empirical results provide strong support for both our theory and hypothesis. Overall, this work provides a new perspective on the generalization of deep reinforcement learning.
2501.02482
Decoding News Bias: Multi Bias Detection in News Articles
cs.CL
News Articles provides crucial information about various events happening in the society but they unfortunately come with different kind of biases. These biases can significantly distort public opinion and trust in the media, making it essential to develop techniques to detect and address them. Previous works have majorly worked towards identifying biases in particular domains e.g., Political, gender biases. However, more comprehensive studies are needed to detect biases across diverse domains. Large language models (LLMs) offer a powerful way to analyze and understand natural language, making them ideal for constructing datasets and detecting these biases. In this work, we have explored various biases present in the news articles, built a dataset using LLMs and present results obtained using multiple detection techniques. Our approach highlights the importance of broad-spectrum bias detection and offers new insights for improving the integrity of news articles.
2501.02486
LLMPC: Large Language Model Predictive Control
cs.AI cs.CL
Recent advancements in prompting techniques for Large Language Models (LLMs) have improved their reasoning, planning, and action abilities. This paper examines these prompting techniques through the lens of model predictive control (MPC). We show that LLMs act as implicit planning cost function minimizers when planning prompts are used. Under our framework we demonstrate that LLM planning performance can be improved further by incorporating real planning cost functions and evaluators.
2501.02487
ACE++: Instruction-Based Image Creation and Editing via Context-Aware Content Filling
cs.CV
We report ACE++, an instruction-based diffusion framework that tackles various image generation and editing tasks. Inspired by the input format for the inpainting task proposed by FLUX.1-Fill-dev, we improve the Long-context Condition Unit (LCU) introduced in ACE and extend this input paradigm to any editing and generation tasks. To take full advantage of image generative priors, we develop a two-stage training scheme to minimize the efforts of finetuning powerful text-to-image diffusion models like FLUX.1-dev. In the first stage, we pre-train the model using task data with the 0-ref tasks from the text-to-image model. There are many models in the community based on the post-training of text-to-image foundational models that meet this training paradigm of the first stage. For example, FLUX.1-Fill-dev deals primarily with painting tasks and can be used as an initialization to accelerate the training process. In the second stage, we finetune the above model to support the general instructions using all tasks defined in ACE. To promote the widespread application of ACE++ in different scenarios, we provide a comprehensive set of models that cover both full finetuning and lightweight finetuning, while considering general applicability and applicability in vertical scenarios. The qualitative analysis showcases the superiority of ACE++ in terms of generating image quality and prompt following ability. Code and models will be available on the project page: https://ali-vilab. github.io/ACE_plus_page/.
2501.02491
Rethinking IDE Customization for Enhanced HAX: A Hyperdimensional Perspective
cs.SE cs.AI
As Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) increasingly integrate Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering faces both benefits like productivity gains and challenges like mismatched user preferences. We propose Hyper-Dimensional (HD) vector spaces to model Human-Computer Interaction, focusing on user actions, stylistic preferences, and project context. These contributions aim to inspire further research on applying HD computing in IDE design.
2501.02493
Predicting Vulnerability to Malware Using Machine Learning Models: A Study on Microsoft Windows Machines
cs.CR cs.LG
In an era of escalating cyber threats, malware poses significant risks to individuals and organizations, potentially leading to data breaches, system failures, and substantial financial losses. This study addresses the urgent need for effective malware detection strategies by leveraging Machine Learning (ML) techniques on extensive datasets collected from Microsoft Windows Defender. Our research aims to develop an advanced ML model that accurately predicts malware vulnerabilities based on the specific conditions of individual machines. Moving beyond traditional signature-based detection methods, we incorporate historical data and innovative feature engineering to enhance detection capabilities. This study makes several contributions: first, it advances existing malware detection techniques by employing sophisticated ML algorithms; second, it utilizes a large-scale, real-world dataset to ensure the applicability of findings; third, it highlights the importance of feature analysis in identifying key indicators of malware infections; and fourth, it proposes models that can be adapted for enterprise environments, offering a proactive approach to safeguarding extensive networks against emerging threats. We aim to improve cybersecurity resilience, providing critical insights for practitioners in the field and addressing the evolving challenges posed by malware in a digital landscape. Finally, discussions on results, insights, and conclusions are presented.
2501.02497
Test-time Computing: from System-1 Thinking to System-2 Thinking
cs.AI cs.CL cs.LG
The remarkable performance of the o1 model in complex reasoning demonstrates that test-time computing scaling can further unlock the model's potential, enabling powerful System-2 thinking. However, there is still a lack of comprehensive surveys for test-time computing scaling. We trace the concept of test-time computing back to System-1 models. In System-1 models, test-time computing addresses distribution shifts and improves robustness and generalization through parameter updating, input modification, representation editing, and output calibration. In System-2 models, it enhances the model's reasoning ability to solve complex problems through repeated sampling, self-correction, and tree search. We organize this survey according to the trend of System-1 to System-2 thinking, highlighting the key role of test-time computing in the transition from System-1 models to weak System-2 models, and then to strong System-2 models. We also point out a few possible future directions.
2501.02504
Watch Video, Catch Keyword: Context-aware Keyword Attention for Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection
cs.CV cs.AI
The goal of video moment retrieval and highlight detection is to identify specific segments and highlights based on a given text query. With the rapid growth of video content and the overlap between these tasks, recent works have addressed both simultaneously. However, they still struggle to fully capture the overall video context, making it challenging to determine which words are most relevant. In this paper, we present a novel Video Context-aware Keyword Attention module that overcomes this limitation by capturing keyword variation within the context of the entire video. To achieve this, we introduce a video context clustering module that provides concise representations of the overall video context, thereby enhancing the understanding of keyword dynamics. Furthermore, we propose a keyword weight detection module with keyword-aware contrastive learning that incorporates keyword information to enhance fine-grained alignment between visual and textual features. Extensive experiments on the QVHighlights, TVSum, and Charades-STA benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed method significantly improves performance in moment retrieval and highlight detection tasks compared to existing approaches. Our code is available at: https://github.com/VisualAIKHU/Keyword-DETR
2501.02505
Learning when to rank: Estimation of partial rankings from sparse, noisy comparisons
physics.soc-ph cs.SI stat.ML
A common task arising in various domains is that of ranking items based on the outcomes of pairwise comparisons, from ranking players and teams in sports to ranking products or brands in marketing studies and recommendation systems. Statistical inference-based methods such as the Bradley-Terry model, which extract rankings based on an underlying generative model of the comparison outcomes, have emerged as flexible and powerful tools to tackle the task of ranking in empirical data. In situations with limited and/or noisy comparisons, it is often challenging to confidently distinguish the performance of different items based on the evidence available in the data. However, existing inference-based ranking methods overwhelmingly choose to assign each item to a unique rank or score, suggesting a meaningful distinction when there is none. Here, we address this problem by developing a principled Bayesian methodology for learning partial rankings -- rankings with ties -- that distinguishes among the ranks of different items only when there is sufficient evidence available in the data. Our framework is adaptable to any statistical ranking method in which the outcomes of pairwise observations depend on the ranks or scores of the items being compared. We develop a fast agglomerative algorithm to perform Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) inference of partial rankings under our framework and examine the performance of our method on a variety of real and synthetic network datasets, finding that it frequently gives a more parsimonious summary of the data than traditional ranking, particularly when observations are sparse.
2501.02506
ToolHop: A Query-Driven Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Multi-Hop Tool Use
cs.CL
Effective evaluation of multi-hop tool use is critical for analyzing the understanding, reasoning, and function-calling capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, progress has been hindered by a lack of reliable evaluation datasets. To address this, we present ToolHop, a dataset comprising 995 user queries and 3,912 associated tools, specifically designed for rigorous evaluation of multi-hop tool use. ToolHop ensures diverse queries, meaningful interdependencies, locally executable tools, detailed feedback, and verifiable answers through a novel query-driven data construction approach that includes tool creation, document refinement, and code generation. We evaluate 14 LLMs across five model families (i.e., LLaMA3.1, Qwen2.5, Gemini1.5, Claude3.5, and GPT), uncovering significant challenges in handling multi-hop tool-use scenarios. The leading model, GPT-4o, achieves an accuracy of 49.04%, underscoring substantial room for improvement. Further analysis reveals variations in tool-use strategies for various families, offering actionable insights to guide the development of more effective approaches. Code and data can be found in https://huggingface.co/datasets/bytedance-research/ToolHop.
2501.02508
PTEENet: Post-Trained Early-Exit Neural Networks Augmentation for Inference Cost Optimization
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CV
For many practical applications, a high computational cost of inference over deep network architectures might be unacceptable. A small degradation in the overall inference accuracy might be a reasonable price to pay for a significant reduction in the required computational resources. In this work, we describe a method for introducing "shortcuts" into the DNN feedforward inference process by skipping costly feedforward computations whenever possible. The proposed method is based on the previously described BranchyNet (Teerapittayanon et al., 2016) and the EEnet (Demir, 2019) architectures that jointly train the main network and early exit branches. We extend those methods by attaching branches to pre-trained models and, thus, eliminating the need to alter the original weights of the network. We also suggest a new branch architecture based on convolutional building blocks to allow enough training capacity when applied on large DNNs. The proposed architecture includes confidence heads that are used for predicting the confidence level in the corresponding early exits. By defining adjusted thresholds on these confidence extensions, we can control in real-time the amount of data exiting from each branch and the overall tradeoff between speed and accuracy of our model. In our experiments, we evaluate our method using image datasets (SVHN and CIFAR10) and several DNN architectures (ResNet, DenseNet, VGG) with varied depth. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method enables us to reduce the average inference computational cost and further controlling the tradeoff between the model accuracy and the computation cost.
2501.02509
Facial Attractiveness Prediction in Live Streaming: A New Benchmark and Multi-modal Method
cs.CV
Facial attractiveness prediction (FAP) has long been an important computer vision task, which could be widely applied in live streaming for facial retouching, content recommendation, etc. However, previous FAP datasets are either small, closed-source, or lack diversity. Moreover, the corresponding FAP models exhibit limited generalization and adaptation ability. To overcome these limitations, in this paper we present LiveBeauty, the first large-scale live-specific FAP dataset, in a more challenging application scenario, i.e., live streaming. 10,000 face images are collected from a live streaming platform directly, with 200,000 corresponding attractiveness annotations obtained from a well-devised subjective experiment, making LiveBeauty the largest open-access FAP dataset in the challenging live scenario. Furthermore, a multi-modal FAP method is proposed to measure the facial attractiveness in live streaming. Specifically, we first extract holistic facial prior knowledge and multi-modal aesthetic semantic features via a Personalized Attractiveness Prior Module (PAPM) and a Multi-modal Attractiveness Encoder Module (MAEM), respectively, then integrate the extracted features through a Cross-Modal Fusion Module (CMFM). Extensive experiments conducted on both LiveBeauty and other open-source FAP datasets demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Dataset will be available soon.
2501.02511
Can Impressions of Music be Extracted from Thumbnail Images?
cs.CL cs.CV cs.IR cs.SD eess.AS
In recent years, there has been a notable increase in research on machine learning models for music retrieval and generation systems that are capable of taking natural language sentences as inputs. However, there is a scarcity of large-scale publicly available datasets, consisting of music data and their corresponding natural language descriptions known as music captions. In particular, non-musical information such as suitable situations for listening to a track and the emotions elicited upon listening is crucial for describing music. This type of information is underrepresented in existing music caption datasets due to the challenges associated with extracting it directly from music data. To address this issue, we propose a method for generating music caption data that incorporates non-musical aspects inferred from music thumbnail images, and validated the effectiveness of our approach through human evaluations. Additionally, we created a dataset with approximately 360,000 captions containing non-musical aspects. Leveraging this dataset, we trained a music retrieval model and demonstrated its effectiveness in music retrieval tasks through evaluation.
2501.02518
CHAIR -- Classifier of Hallucination as Improver
cs.CL
In this work, we introduce CHAIR (Classifier of Hallucination As ImproveR), a supervised framework for detecting hallucinations by analyzing internal logits from each layer of every token. Our method extracts a compact set of features such as maximum, minimum, mean, standard deviation, and slope-from the token logits across all layers, enabling effective hallucination detection without overfitting. Experiments on TruthfulQA and MMLU datasets demonstrate that CHAIR significantly improves detection accuracy, particularly in zero-shot scenarios, showcasing its robustness and generalizability. Beyond hallucination detection, CHAIR highlights the potential of using internal representations for designing advanced decoding strategies. By leveraging patterns in logits, we suggest that more sophisticated models and adaptive decoding methods could further reduce hallucinations and enhance text completion quality. CHAIR not only offers a practical solution for detecting hallucinations but also lays the groundwork for exploring richer representations in LLMs to improve their factuality and coherence.
2501.02519
Layout2Scene: 3D Semantic Layout Guided Scene Generation via Geometry and Appearance Diffusion Priors
cs.CV
3D scene generation conditioned on text prompts has significantly progressed due to the development of 2D diffusion generation models. However, the textual description of 3D scenes is inherently inaccurate and lacks fine-grained control during training, leading to implausible scene generation. As an intuitive and feasible solution, the 3D layout allows for precise specification of object locations within the scene. To this end, we present a text-to-scene generation method (namely, Layout2Scene) using additional semantic layout as the prompt to inject precise control of 3D object positions. Specifically, we first introduce a scene hybrid representation to decouple objects and backgrounds, which is initialized via a pre-trained text-to-3D model. Then, we propose a two-stage scheme to optimize the geometry and appearance of the initialized scene separately. To fully leverage 2D diffusion priors in geometry and appearance generation, we introduce a semantic-guided geometry diffusion model and a semantic-geometry guided diffusion model which are finetuned on a scene dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can generate more plausible and realistic scenes as compared to state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, the generated scene allows for flexible yet precise editing, thereby facilitating multiple downstream applications.
2501.02521
Remote Inference over Dynamic Links via Adaptive Rate Deep Task-Oriented Vector Quantization
eess.SP cs.AI
A broad range of technologies rely on remote inference, wherein data acquired is conveyed over a communication channel for inference in a remote server. Communication between the participating entities is often carried out over rate-limited channels, necessitating data compression for reducing latency. While deep learning facilitates joint design of the compression mapping along with encoding and inference rules, existing learned compression mechanisms are static, and struggle in adapting their resolution to changes in channel conditions and to dynamic links. To address this, we propose Adaptive Rate Task-Oriented Vector Quantization (ARTOVeQ), a learned compression mechanism that is tailored for remote inference over dynamic links. ARTOVeQ is based on designing nested codebooks along with a learning algorithm employing progressive learning. We show that ARTOVeQ extends to support low-latency inference that is gradually refined via successive refinement principles, and that it enables the simultaneous usage of multiple resolutions when conveying high-dimensional data. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed scheme yields remote deep inference that operates with multiple rates, supports a broad range of bit budgets, and facilitates rapid inference that gradually improves with more bits exchanged, while approaching the performance of single-rate deep quantization methods.
2501.02523
Face-MakeUp: Multimodal Facial Prompts for Text-to-Image Generation
cs.CV cs.AI
Facial images have extensive practical applications. Although the current large-scale text-image diffusion models exhibit strong generation capabilities, it is challenging to generate the desired facial images using only text prompt. Image prompts are a logical choice. However, current methods of this type generally focus on general domain. In this paper, we aim to optimize image makeup techniques to generate the desired facial images. Specifically, (1) we built a dataset of 4 million high-quality face image-text pairs (FaceCaptionHQ-4M) based on LAION-Face to train our Face-MakeUp model; (2) to maintain consistency with the reference facial image, we extract/learn multi-scale content features and pose features for the facial image, integrating these into the diffusion model to enhance the preservation of facial identity features for diffusion models. Validation on two face-related test datasets demonstrates that our Face-MakeUp can achieve the best comprehensive performance.All codes are available at:https://github.com/ddw2AIGROUP2CQUPT/Face-MakeUp
2501.02526
Unified Guidance for Geometry-Conditioned Molecular Generation
q-bio.BM cs.LG
Effectively designing molecular geometries is essential to advancing pharmaceutical innovations, a domain, which has experienced great attention through the success of generative models and, in particular, diffusion models. However, current molecular diffusion models are tailored towards a specific downstream task and lack adaptability. We introduce UniGuide, a framework for controlled geometric guidance of unconditional diffusion models that allows flexible conditioning during inference without the requirement of extra training or networks. We show how applications such as structure-based, fragment-based, and ligand-based drug design are formulated in the UniGuide framework and demonstrate on-par or superior performance compared to specialised models. Offering a more versatile approach, UniGuide has the potential to streamline the development of molecular generative models, allowing them to be readily used in diverse application scenarios.
2501.02527
Vision-Driven Prompt Optimization for Large Language Models in Multimodal Generative Tasks
cs.CV
Vision generation remains a challenging frontier in artificial intelligence, requiring seamless integration of visual understanding and generative capabilities. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, Vision-Driven Prompt Optimization (VDPO), that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to dynamically generate textual prompts from visual inputs, guiding high-fidelity image synthesis. VDPO combines a visual embedding prompt tuner, a textual instruction generator, and a vision generation module to achieve state-of-the-art performance in diverse vision generation tasks. Extensive experiments on benchmarks such as COCO and Sketchy demonstrate that VDPO consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving significant improvements in FID, LPIPS, and BLEU/CIDEr scores. Additional analyses reveal the scalability, robustness, and generalization capabilities of VDPO, making it a versatile solution for in-domain and out-of-domain tasks. Human evaluations further validate the practical superiority of VDPO in generating visually appealing and semantically coherent outputs.
2501.02530
UDMC: Unified Decision-Making and Control Framework for Urban Autonomous Driving with Motion Prediction of Traffic Participants
cs.RO cs.DC cs.SY eess.SY
Current autonomous driving systems often struggle to balance decision-making and motion control while ensuring safety and traffic rule compliance, especially in complex urban environments. Existing methods may fall short due to separate handling of these functionalities, leading to inefficiencies and safety compromises. To address these challenges, we introduce UDMC, an interpretable and unified Level 4 autonomous driving framework. UDMC integrates decision-making and motion control into a single optimal control problem (OCP), considering the dynamic interactions with surrounding vehicles, pedestrians, road lanes, and traffic signals. By employing innovative potential functions to model traffic participants and regulations, and incorporating a specialized motion prediction module, our framework enhances on-road safety and rule adherence. The integrated design allows for real-time execution of flexible maneuvers suited to diverse driving scenarios. High-fidelity simulations conducted in CARLA exemplify the framework's computational efficiency, robustness, and safety, resulting in superior driving performance when compared against various baseline models. Our open-source project is available at https://github.com/henryhcliu/udmc_carla.git.
2501.02531
Towards New Benchmark for AI Alignment & Sentiment Analysis in Socially Important Issues: A Comparative Study of Human and LLMs in the Context of AGI
cs.CY cs.CL
With the expansion of neural networks, such as large language models, humanity is exponentially heading towards superintelligence. As various AI systems are increasingly integrated into the fabric of societies-through recommending values, devising creative solutions, and making decisions-it becomes critical to assess how these AI systems impact humans in the long run. This research aims to contribute towards establishing a benchmark for evaluating the sentiment of various Large Language Models in socially importan issues. The methodology adopted was a Likert scale survey. Seven LLMs, including GPT-4 and Bard, were analyzed and compared against sentiment data from three independent human sample populations. Temporal variations in sentiment were also evaluated over three consecutive days. The results highlighted a diversity in sentiment scores among LLMs, ranging from 3.32 to 4.12 out of 5. GPT-4 recorded the most positive sentiment score towards AGI, whereas Bard was leaning towards the neutral sentiment. The human samples, contrastingly, showed a lower average sentiment of 2.97. The temporal comparison revealed differences in sentiment evolution between LLMs in three days, ranging from 1.03% to 8.21%. The study's analysis outlines the prospect of potential conflicts of interest and bias possibilities in LLMs' sentiment formation. Results indicate that LLMs, akin to human cognitive processes, could potentially develop unique sentiments and subtly influence societies' perceptions towards various opinions formed within the LLMs.
2501.02532
Evaluating Large Language Models Against Human Annotators in Latent Content Analysis: Sentiment, Political Leaning, Emotional Intensity, and Sarcasm
cs.CL cs.AI cs.CY
In the era of rapid digital communication, vast amounts of textual data are generated daily, demanding efficient methods for latent content analysis to extract meaningful insights. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer potential for automating this process, yet comprehensive assessments comparing their performance to human annotators across multiple dimensions are lacking. This study evaluates the reliability, consistency, and quality of seven state-of-the-art LLMs, including variants of OpenAI's GPT-4, Gemini, Llama, and Mixtral, relative to human annotators in analyzing sentiment, political leaning, emotional intensity, and sarcasm detection. A total of 33 human annotators and eight LLM variants assessed 100 curated textual items, generating 3,300 human and 19,200 LLM annotations, with LLMs evaluated across three time points to examine temporal consistency. Inter-rater reliability was measured using Krippendorff's alpha, and intra-class correlation coefficients assessed consistency over time. The results reveal that both humans and LLMs exhibit high reliability in sentiment analysis and political leaning assessments, with LLMs demonstrating higher internal consistency than humans. In emotional intensity, LLMs displayed higher agreement compared to humans, though humans rated emotional intensity significantly higher. Both groups struggled with sarcasm detection, evidenced by low agreement. LLMs showed excellent temporal consistency across all dimensions, indicating stable performance over time. This research concludes that LLMs, especially GPT-4, can effectively replicate human analysis in sentiment and political leaning, although human expertise remains essential for emotional intensity interpretation. The findings demonstrate the potential of LLMs for consistent and high-quality performance in certain areas of latent content analysis.
2501.02534
Pixel-Wise Feature Selection for Perceptual Edge Detection without post-processing
cs.CV
Although deep convolutional neutral networks (CNNs) have significantly enhanced performance in image edge detection (ED), current models remain highly dependent on post-processing techniques such as non-maximum suppression (NMS), and often fail to deliver satisfactory perceptual results, while the performance will deteriorate significantly if the allowed error toleration distance decreases. These limitations arise from the uniform fusion of features across all pixels, regardless of their specific characteristics, such as the distinction between textural and edge areas. If the features extracted by the ED models are selected more meticulously and encompass greater diversity, the resulting predictions are expected to be more accurate and perceptually meaningful. Motivated by this observation, this paper proposes a novel feature selection paradigm for deep networks that facilitates the differential selection of features and can be seamlessly integrated into existing ED models. By incorporating this additional structure, the performance of conventional ED models is substantially enhanced without post-processing, while simultaneously enhancing the perceptual quality of the predictions. Extensive experimental evaluations validate the effectiveness of the proposed model.
2501.02535
A completely uniform transformer for parity
cs.LG cs.AI
We construct a 3-layer constant-dimension transformer, recognizing the parity language, where neither parameter matrices nor the positional encoding depend on the input length. This improves upon a construction of Chiang and Cholak who use a positional encoding, depending on the input length (but their construction has 2 layers).
2501.02536
Low RCS High-Gain Broadband Substrate Integrated Waveguide Antenna Based on Elliptical Polarization Conversion Metasurface
eess.SY cs.SY
Designed an elliptical polarization conversion metasurface (PCM) for Ka-band applications, alongside a high-gain substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) antenna. The PCM elements are integrated into the antenna design in a chessboard array configuration, with the goal of achieving effective reduction in the antenna's radar cross section (RCS). Both the PCM elements and antenna structure exhibit a simple design. The top layer of the metasurface (MS) elements employs an elliptical pattern symmetric along the diagonal, enabling efficient conversion of linearly polarized waves. The antenna component, on the other hand, consists of a broadband dipole antenna fed by SIW slot coupling. Verified through simulations, the polarization conversion bandwidth of this PCM unit reaches 80.38% where polarization conversion ratio (PCR) exceeds 90% (25.3-59.3GHz), demonstrating exceptional conversion performance. When the dipole antenna is combined with the PCM, its -10dB impedance bandwidth reaches to 15.09% (33.7-39.2GHz), with a maximum realized gain of 9.1dBi. Notably, the antenna loaded with the chessboard PCM structure effectively disperses the energy of scattered echoes around, significantly reducing the concentration of scattered energy in the direction of the incident wave, thereby achieving an effective reduction in RCS.
2501.02539
AHMSA-Net: Adaptive Hierarchical Multi-Scale Attention Network for Micro-Expression Recognition
cs.CV
Micro-expression recognition (MER) presents a significant challenge due to the transient and subtle nature of the motion changes involved. In recent years, deep learning methods based on attention mechanisms have made some breakthroughs in MER. However, these methods still suffer from the limitations of insufficient feature capture and poor dynamic adaptation when coping with the instantaneous subtle movement changes of micro-expressions. Therefore, in this paper, we design an Adaptive Hierarchical Multi-Scale Attention Network (AHMSA-Net) for MER. Specifically, we first utilize the onset and apex frames of the micro-expression sequence to extract three-dimensional (3D) optical flow maps, including horizontal optical flow, vertical optical flow, and optical flow strain. Subsequently, the optical flow feature maps are inputted into AHMSA-Net, which consists of two parts: an adaptive hierarchical framework and a multi-scale attention mechanism. Based on the adaptive downsampling hierarchical attention framework, AHMSA-Net captures the subtle changes of micro-expressions from different granularities (fine and coarse) by dynamically adjusting the size of the optical flow feature map at each layer. Based on the multi-scale attention mechanism, AHMSA-Net learns micro-expression action information by fusing features from different scales (channel and spatial). These two modules work together to comprehensively improve the accuracy of MER. Additionally, rigorous experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves competitive results on major micro-expression databases, with AHMSA-Net achieving recognition accuracy of up to 78.21% on composite databases (SMIC, SAMM, CASMEII) and 77.08% on the CASME^{}3 database.
2501.02546
TreeMatch: A Fully Unsupervised WSD System Using Dependency Knowledge on a Specific Domain
cs.CL cs.AI
Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is one of the main challenges in Computational Linguistics. TreeMatch is a WSD system originally developed using data from SemEval 2007 Task 7 (Coarse-grained English All-words Task) that has been adapted for use in SemEval 2010 Task 17 (All-words Word Sense Disambiguation on a Specific Domain). The system is based on a fully unsupervised method using dependency knowledge drawn from a domain specific knowledge base that was built for this task. When evaluated on the task, the system precision performs above the Most Frequent Selection baseline.
2501.02547
Transformers Simulate MLE for Sequence Generation in Bayesian Networks
stat.ML cs.LG
Transformers have achieved significant success in various fields, notably excelling in tasks involving sequential data like natural language processing. Despite these achievements, the theoretical understanding of transformers' capabilities remains limited. In this paper, we investigate the theoretical capabilities of transformers to autoregressively generate sequences in Bayesian networks based on in-context maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). Specifically, we consider a setting where a context is formed by a set of independent sequences generated according to a Bayesian network. We demonstrate that there exists a simple transformer model that can (i) estimate the conditional probabilities of the Bayesian network according to the context, and (ii) autoregressively generate a new sample according to the Bayesian network with estimated conditional probabilities. We further demonstrate in extensive experiments that such a transformer does not only exist in theory, but can also be effectively obtained through training. Our analysis highlights the potential of transformers to learn complex probabilistic models and contributes to a better understanding of large language models as a powerful class of sequence generators.
2501.02548
AMM: Adaptive Modularized Reinforcement Model for Multi-city Traffic Signal Control
cs.LG cs.AI
Traffic signal control (TSC) is an important and widely studied direction. Recently, reinforcement learning (RL) methods have been used to solve TSC problems and achieve superior performance over conventional TSC methods. However, applying RL methods to the real world is challenging due to the huge cost of experiments in real-world traffic environments. One possible solution is TSC domain adaptation, which adapts trained models to target environments and reduces the number of interactions and the training cost. However, existing TSC domain adaptation methods still face two major issues: the lack of consideration for differences across cities and the low utilization of multi-city data. To solve aforementioned issues, we propose an approach named Adaptive Modularized Model (AMM). By modularizing TSC problems and network models, we overcome the challenge of possible changes in environmental observations. We also aggregate multi-city experience through meta-learning. We conduct extensive experiments on different cities and show that AMM can achieve excellent performance with limited interactions in target environments and outperform existing methods. We also demonstrate the feasibility and generalizability of our method.
2501.02549
From Language To Vision: A Case Study of Text Animation
cs.CL
Information can be expressed in multiple formats including natural language, images, and motions. Human intelligence usually faces little difficulty to convert from one format to another format, which often shows a true understanding of encoded information. Moreover, such conversions have broad application in many real-world applications. In this paper, we present a text visualization system that can visualize free text with animations. Our system is illustrated by visualizing example sentences of elementary Physics laws.
2501.02552
Multi-LLM Collaborative Caption Generation in Scientific Documents
cs.CL cs.CV
Scientific figure captioning is a complex task that requires generating contextually appropriate descriptions of visual content. However, existing methods often fall short by utilizing incomplete information, treating the task solely as either an image-to-text or text summarization problem. This limitation hinders the generation of high-quality captions that fully capture the necessary details. Moreover, existing data sourced from arXiv papers contain low-quality captions, posing significant challenges for training large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we introduce a framework called Multi-LLM Collaborative Figure Caption Generation (MLBCAP) to address these challenges by leveraging specialized LLMs for distinct sub-tasks. Our approach unfolds in three key modules: (Quality Assessment) We utilize multimodal LLMs to assess the quality of training data, enabling the filtration of low-quality captions. (Diverse Caption Generation) We then employ a strategy of fine-tuning/prompting multiple LLMs on the captioning task to generate candidate captions. (Judgment) Lastly, we prompt a prominent LLM to select the highest quality caption from the candidates, followed by refining any remaining inaccuracies. Human evaluations demonstrate that informative captions produced by our approach rank better than human-written captions, highlighting its effectiveness. Our code is available at https://github.com/teamreboott/MLBCAP
2501.02556
Spatial Network Calculus: Toward Deterministic Wireless Networking
cs.NI cs.IT math.IT
This paper extends the classical network calculus to spatial scenarios, focusing on wireless networks with heterogeneous traffic and varying transmit power levels. Building on spatial network calculus, a prior extension of network calculus to spatial settings, we propose a generalized framework by introducing spatial regulations for stationary marked point processes. The regulations correspond to two key constraints: the total transmit power within a spatial region and the cumulative received power at a receiver. Then we prove the equivalence of ball regulation and shot-noise regulation for stationary marked point processes and establish a universal lower bound on the performance of all network links under these constraints. This framework is applicable to diverse network scenarios, as demonstrated by the analysis of performance guarantees for networks with multi-class users. In addition, we propose an SINR-based power control scheme adapted to user traffic, which ensures differentiated quality of service (QoS) for different user classes. We derive deterministic performance guarantees for all links in complex and heterogeneous wireless networks.
2501.02558
Neural Error Covariance Estimation for Precise LiDAR Localization
cs.RO cs.CV
Autonomous vehicles have gained significant attention due to technological advancements and their potential to transform transportation. A critical challenge in this domain is precise localization, particularly in LiDAR-based map matching, which is prone to errors due to degeneracy in the data. Most sensor fusion techniques, such as the Kalman filter, rely on accurate error covariance estimates for each sensor to improve localization accuracy. However, obtaining reliable covariance values for map matching remains a complex task. To address this challenge, we propose a neural network-based framework for predicting localization error covariance in LiDAR map matching. To achieve this, we introduce a novel dataset generation method specifically designed for error covariance estimation. In our evaluation using a Kalman filter, we achieved a 2 cm improvement in localization accuracy, a significant enhancement in this domain.
2501.02559
KM-UNet KAN Mamba UNet for medical image segmentation
eess.IV cs.AI cs.CV
Medical image segmentation is a critical task in medical imaging analysis. Traditional CNN-based methods struggle with modeling long-range dependencies, while Transformer-based models, despite their success, suffer from quadratic computational complexity. To address these limitations, we propose KM-UNet, a novel U-shaped network architecture that combines the strengths of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) and state-space models (SSMs). KM-UNet leverages the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem for efficient feature representation and SSMs for scalable long-range modeling, achieving a balance between accuracy and computational efficiency. We evaluate KM-UNet on five benchmark datasets: ISIC17, ISIC18, CVC, BUSI, and GLAS. Experimental results demonstrate that KM-UNet achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods in medical image segmentation tasks. To the best of our knowledge, KM-UNet is the first medical image segmentation framework integrating KANs and SSMs. This work provides a valuable baseline and new insights for the development of more efficient and interpretable medical image segmentation systems. The code is open source at https://github.com/2760613195/KM_UNet Keywords:KAN,Manba, state-space models,UNet, Medical image segmentation, Deep learning
2501.02564
Balanced Multi-view Clustering
cs.CV cs.AI cs.LG
Multi-view clustering (MvC) aims to integrate information from different views to enhance the capability of the model in capturing the underlying data structures. The widely used joint training paradigm in MvC is potentially not fully leverage the multi-view information, since the imbalanced and under-optimized view-specific features caused by the uniform learning objective for all views. For instance, particular views with more discriminative information could dominate the learning process in the joint training paradigm, leading to other views being under-optimized. To alleviate this issue, we first analyze the imbalanced phenomenon in the joint-training paradigm of multi-view clustering from the perspective of gradient descent for each view-specific feature extractor. Then, we propose a novel balanced multi-view clustering (BMvC) method, which introduces a view-specific contrastive regularization (VCR) to modulate the optimization of each view. Concretely, VCR preserves the sample similarities captured from the joint features and view-specific ones into the clustering distributions corresponding to view-specific features to enhance the learning process of view-specific feature extractors. Additionally, a theoretical analysis is provided to illustrate that VCR adaptively modulates the magnitudes of gradients for updating the parameters of view-specific feature extractors to achieve a balanced multi-view learning procedure. In such a manner, BMvC achieves a better trade-off between the exploitation of view-specific patterns and the exploration of view-invariance patterns to fully learn the multi-view information for the clustering task. Finally, a set of experiments are conducted to verify the superiority of the proposed method compared with state-of-the-art approaches on eight benchmark MvC datasets.
2501.02565
Efficient Graph Condensation via Gaussian Process
cs.LG
Graph condensation reduces the size of large graphs while preserving performance, addressing the scalability challenges of Graph Neural Networks caused by computational inefficiencies on large datasets. Existing methods often rely on bi-level optimization, requiring extensive GNN training and limiting their scalability. To address these issues, this paper proposes Graph Condensation via Gaussian Process (GCGP), a novel and computationally efficient approach to graph condensation. GCGP utilizes a Gaussian Process (GP), with the condensed graph serving as observations, to estimate the posterior distribution of predictions. This approach eliminates the need for the iterative and resource-intensive training typically required by GNNs. To enhance the capability of the GCGP in capturing dependencies between function values, we derive a specialized covariance function that incorporates structural information. This covariance function broadens the receptive field of input nodes by local neighborhood aggregation, thereby facilitating the representation of intricate dependencies within the nodes. To address the challenge of optimizing binary structural information in condensed graphs, Concrete random variables are utilized to approximate the binary adjacency matrix in a continuous counterpart. This relaxation process allows the adjacency matrix to be represented in a differentiable form, enabling the application of gradient-based optimization techniques to discrete graph structures. Experimental results show that the proposed GCGP method efficiently condenses large-scale graph data while preserving predictive performance, addressing the scalability and efficiency challenges. The implementation of our method is publicly available at https://github.com/WANGLin0126/GCGP.
2501.02569
A review on reinforcement learning methods for mobility on demand systems
cs.MA
Mobility on Demand (MoD) refers to mobility systems that operate on the basis of immediate travel demand. Typically, such a system consists of a fleet of vehicles that can be booked by customers when needed. The operation of these services consists of two main tasks: deciding how vehicles are assigned to requests (vehicle assignment); and deciding where vehicles move (including charging stations) when they are not serving a request (rebalancing). A field of research is emerging around the design of operation strategies for MoD services, and an increasingly popular trend is the use of learning based (most often Reinforcement Learning) approaches. We review, in this work, the literature on algorithms for operation strategies of MoD systems that use approaches based on Reinforcement Learning with a focus on the types of algorithms being used. The novelty of our review stands in three aspects: First, the algorithmic details are discussed and the approaches classified in a unified framework for sequential decision-making. Second, the use cases on which approaches are tested and their features are taken into account. Finally, validation methods that can be found across the literature are discussed. The review aims at advancing the state of the art by identifying similarities and differences between approaches and highlighting current research directions.
2501.02570
Decoding fMRI Data into Captions using Prefix Language Modeling
cs.CV cs.AI cs.CL
With the advancements in Large Language and Latent Diffusion models, brain decoding has achieved remarkable results in recent years. The works on the NSD dataset, with stimuli images from the COCO dataset, leverage the embeddings from the CLIP model for image reconstruction and GIT for captioning. However, the current captioning approach introduces the challenge of potential data contamination given that the GIT model was trained on the COCO dataset. In this work, we present an alternative method for decoding brain signals into image captions by predicting a DINOv2 model's embedding of an image from the corresponding fMRI signal and then providing its [CLS] token as the prefix to the GPT-2 language model which decreases computational requirements considerably. Additionally, instead of commonly used Linear Regression, we explore 3D Convolutional Neural Network mapping of fMRI signals to image embedding space for better accounting positional information of voxels.
2501.02572
Energy Optimization of Multi-task DNN Inference in MEC-assisted XR Devices: A Lyapunov-Guided Reinforcement Learning Approach
cs.NI cs.AI cs.SY eess.SY
Extended reality (XR), blending virtual and real worlds, is a key application of future networks. While AI advancements enhance XR capabilities, they also impose significant computational and energy challenges on lightweight XR devices. In this paper, we developed a distributed queue model for multi-task DNN inference, addressing issues of resource competition and queue coupling. In response to the challenges posed by the high energy consumption and limited resources of XR devices, we designed a dual time-scale joint optimization strategy for model partitioning and resource allocation, formulated as a bi-level optimization problem. This strategy aims to minimize the total energy consumption of XR devices while ensuring queue stability and adhering to computational and communication resource constraints. To tackle this problem, we devised a Lyapunov-guided Proximal Policy Optimization algorithm, named LyaPPO. Numerical results demonstrate that the LyaPPO algorithm outperforms the baselines, achieving energy conservation of 24.79% to 46.14% under varying resource capacities. Specifically, the proposed algorithm reduces the energy consumption of XR devices by 24.29% to 56.62% compared to baseline algorithms.
2501.02573
LeetDecoding: A PyTorch Library for Exponentially Decaying Causal Linear Attention with CUDA Implementations
cs.LG cs.CL cs.MS
The machine learning and data science community has made significant while dispersive progress in accelerating transformer-based large language models (LLMs), and one promising approach is to replace the original causal attention in a generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) with \emph{exponentially decaying causal linear attention}. In this paper, we present LeetDecoding, which is the first Python package that provides a large set of computation routines for this fundamental operator. The launch of LeetDecoding was motivated by the current lack of (1) clear understanding of the complexity regarding this operator, (2) a comprehensive collection of existing computation methods (usually spread in seemingly unrelated fields), and (3) CUDA implementations for fast inference on GPU. LeetDecoding's design is easy to integrate with existing linear-attention LLMs, and allows for researchers to benchmark and evaluate new computation methods for exponentially decaying causal linear attention. The usage of LeetDecoding does not require any knowledge of GPU programming and the underlying complexity analysis, intentionally making LeetDecoding accessible to LLM practitioners. The source code of LeetDecoding is provided at \href{https://github.com/Computational-Machine-Intelligence/LeetDecoding}{this GitHub repository}, and users can simply install LeetDecoding by the command \texttt{pip install leet-decoding}.
2501.02576
DepthMaster: Taming Diffusion Models for Monocular Depth Estimation
cs.CV
Monocular depth estimation within the diffusion-denoising paradigm demonstrates impressive generalization ability but suffers from low inference speed. Recent methods adopt a single-step deterministic paradigm to improve inference efficiency while maintaining comparable performance. However, they overlook the gap between generative and discriminative features, leading to suboptimal results. In this work, we propose DepthMaster, a single-step diffusion model designed to adapt generative features for the discriminative depth estimation task. First, to mitigate overfitting to texture details introduced by generative features, we propose a Feature Alignment module, which incorporates high-quality semantic features to enhance the denoising network's representation capability. Second, to address the lack of fine-grained details in the single-step deterministic framework, we propose a Fourier Enhancement module to adaptively balance low-frequency structure and high-frequency details. We adopt a two-stage training strategy to fully leverage the potential of the two modules. In the first stage, we focus on learning the global scene structure with the Feature Alignment module, while in the second stage, we exploit the Fourier Enhancement module to improve the visual quality. Through these efforts, our model achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of generalization and detail preservation, outperforming other diffusion-based methods across various datasets. Our project page can be found at https://indu1ge.github.io/DepthMaster_page.
2501.02580
LP-ICP: General Localizability-Aware Point Cloud Registration for Robust Localization in Extreme Unstructured Environments
cs.RO
The Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm is a crucial component of LiDAR-based SLAM algorithms. However, its performance can be negatively affected in unstructured environments that lack features and geometric structures, leading to low accuracy and poor robustness in localization and mapping. It is known that degeneracy caused by the lack of geometric constraints can lead to errors in 6-DOF pose estimation along ill-conditioned directions. Therefore, there is a need for a broader and more fine-grained degeneracy detection and handling method. This paper proposes a new point cloud registration framework, LP-ICP, that combines point-to-line and point-to-plane distance metrics in the ICP algorithm, with localizability detection and handling. LP-ICP consists of a localizability detection module and an optimization module. The localizability detection module performs localizability analysis by utilizing the correspondences between edge points (with low local smoothness) to lines and planar points (with high local smoothness) to planes between the scan and the map. The localizability contribution of individual correspondence constraints can be applied to a broader range. The optimization module adds additional soft and hard constraints to the optimization equations based on the localizability category. This allows the pose to be constrained along ill-conditioned directions, with updates either tending towards the constraint value or leaving the initial estimate unchanged. This improves accuracy and reduces fluctuations. The proposed method is extensively evaluated through experiments on both simulation and real-world datasets, demonstrating higher or comparable accuracy than the state-of-the-art methods. The dataset and code of this paper will also be open-sourced at https://github.com/xuqingyuan2000/LP-ICP.
2501.02583
Gaze Behavior During a Long-Term, In-Home, Social Robot Intervention for Children with ASD
cs.RO cs.CV
Atypical gaze behavior is a diagnostic hallmark of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), playing a substantial role in the social and communicative challenges that individuals with ASD face. This study explores the impacts of a month-long, in-home intervention designed to promote triadic interactions between a social robot, a child with ASD, and their caregiver. Our results indicate that the intervention successfully promoted appropriate gaze behavior, encouraging children with ASD to follow the robot's gaze, resulting in more frequent and prolonged instances of spontaneous eye contact and joint attention with their caregivers. Additionally, we observed specific timelines for behavioral variability and novelty effects among users. Furthermore, diagnostic measures for ASD emerged as strong predictors of gaze patterns for both caregivers and children. These results deepen our understanding of ASD gaze patterns and highlight the potential for clinical relevance of robot-assisted interventions.
2501.02584
Efficient Architectures for High Resolution Vision-Language Models
cs.CV cs.AI cs.CL cs.LG
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have recently experienced significant advancements. However, challenges persist in the accurate recognition of fine details within high resolution images, which limits performance in multiple tasks. This work introduces Pheye, a novel architecture that efficiently processes high-resolution images while training fewer parameters than similarly sized VLMs. Notably, Pheye achieves a high efficiency while maintaining strong performance, particularly in tasks that demand fine-grained image understanding and/or the handling of scene-text.
2501.02593
Evolving Skeletons: Motion Dynamics in Action Recognition
cs.CV cs.AI cs.LG
Skeleton-based action recognition has gained significant attention for its ability to efficiently represent spatiotemporal information in a lightweight format. Most existing approaches use graph-based models to process skeleton sequences, where each pose is represented as a skeletal graph structured around human physical connectivity. Among these, the Spatiotemporal Graph Convolutional Network (ST-GCN) has become a widely used framework. Alternatively, hypergraph-based models, such as the Hyperformer, capture higher-order correlations, offering a more expressive representation of complex joint interactions. A recent advancement, termed Taylor Videos, introduces motion-enhanced skeleton sequences by embedding motion concepts, providing a fresh perspective on interpreting human actions in skeleton-based action recognition. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of both traditional skeleton sequences and Taylor-transformed skeletons using ST-GCN and Hyperformer models on the NTU-60 and NTU-120 datasets. We compare skeletal graph and hypergraph representations, analyzing static poses against motion-injected poses. Our findings highlight the strengths and limitations of Taylor-transformed skeletons, demonstrating their potential to enhance motion dynamics while exposing current challenges in fully using their benefits. This study underscores the need for innovative skeletal modelling techniques to effectively handle motion-rich data and advance the field of action recognition.
2501.02595
Rotatable Antenna Enabled Wireless Communication: Modeling and Optimization
cs.IT eess.SP math.IT
Fluid antenna system (FAS) and movable antenna (MA) have recently emerged as promising technologies to exploit new spatial degrees of freedom (DoFs), which have attracted growing attention in wireless communication. In this paper, we propose a new rotatable antenna (RA) model to improve the performance of wireless communication systems. Different from conventional fixed antennas, the proposed RA system can flexibly alter the three-dimensional (3D) boresight direction of each antenna independently by adjusting its deflection angles to achieve a desired array directional gain pattern. Specifically, we investigate an RA-enabled uplink communication system, where the receive beamforming and the deflection angles of all RAs at the base station (BS) are jointly optimized to maximize the minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) among all the users. In the special single-user and free-space propagation setup, the optimal deflection angles of RAs are derived in closed form with the maximum-ratio combining (MRC) beamformer applied at the BS. Moreover, we analyze the asymptotic performance with an infinite number of antennas based on this solution, which theoretically proves that the RA system can achieve a higher array gain as compared to the fixed-antenna system. In the general multi-user and multi-path channel setup, we first propose an alternating optimization (AO) algorithm to alternately optimize the receive beamforming and the deflection angles of RAs in an iterative manner. Then, a two-stage algorithm that solves the formulated problem without the need for iteration is further proposed to reduce computational complexity. Simulation results are provided to validate our analytical results and demonstrate that the proposed RA system can significantly outperform other benchmark schemes.
2501.02598
GIT-CXR: End-to-End Transformer for Chest X-Ray Report Generation
cs.CL cs.CV cs.LG
Medical imaging is crucial for diagnosing, monitoring, and treating medical conditions. The medical reports of radiology images are the primary medium through which medical professionals attest their findings, but their writing is time consuming and requires specialized clinical expertise. The automated generation of radiography reports has thus the potential to improve and standardize patient care and significantly reduce clinicians workload. Through our work, we have designed and evaluated an end-to-end transformer-based method to generate accurate and factually complete radiology reports for X-ray images. Additionally, we are the first to introduce curriculum learning for end-to-end transformers in medical imaging and demonstrate its impact in obtaining improved performance. The experiments have been conducted using the MIMIC-CXR-JPG database, the largest available chest X-ray dataset. The results obtained are comparable with the current state-of-the-art on the natural language generation (NLG) metrics BLEU and ROUGE-L, while setting new state-of-the-art results on F1 examples-averaged, F1-macro and F1-micro metrics for clinical accuracy and on the METEOR metric widely used for NLG.
2501.02599
Empowering Bengali Education with AI: Solving Bengali Math Word Problems through Transformer Models
cs.CL cs.AI cs.CY cs.LG
Mathematical word problems (MWPs) involve the task of converting textual descriptions into mathematical equations. This poses a significant challenge in natural language processing, particularly for low-resource languages such as Bengali. This paper addresses this challenge by developing an innovative approach to solving Bengali MWPs using transformer-based models, including Basic Transformer, mT5, BanglaT5, and mBART50. To support this effort, the "PatiGonit" dataset was introduced, containing 10,000 Bengali math problems, and these models were fine-tuned to translate the word problems into equations accurately. The evaluation revealed that the mT5 model achieved the highest accuracy of 97.30%, demonstrating the effectiveness of transformer models in this domain. This research marks a significant step forward in Bengali natural language processing, offering valuable methodologies and resources for educational AI tools. By improving math education, it also supports the development of advanced problem-solving skills for Bengali-speaking students.
2501.02600
TAPAS: Thermal- and Power-Aware Scheduling for LLM Inference in Cloud Platforms
cs.DC cs.AI
The rising demand for generative large language models (LLMs) poses challenges for thermal and power management in cloud datacenters. Traditional techniques often are inadequate for LLM inference due to the fine-grained, millisecond-scale execution phases, each with distinct performance, thermal, and power profiles. Additionally, LLM inference workloads are sensitive to various configuration parameters (e.g., model parallelism, size, and quantization) that involve trade-offs between performance, temperature, power, and output quality. Moreover, clouds often co-locate SaaS and IaaS workloads, each with different levels of visibility and flexibility. We propose TAPAS, a thermal- and power-aware framework designed for LLM inference clusters in the cloud. TAPAS enhances cooling and power oversubscription capabilities, reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) while effectively handling emergencies (e.g., cooling and power failures). The system leverages historical temperature and power data, along with the adaptability of SaaS workloads, to: (1) efficiently place new GPU workload VMs within cooling and power constraints, (2) route LLM inference requests across SaaS VMs, and (3) reconfigure SaaS VMs to manage load spikes and emergency situations. Our evaluation on a large GPU cluster demonstrates significant reductions in thermal and power throttling events, boosting system efficiency.
2501.02604
Collision-resistant hash-shuffles on the reals
math.LO cs.CC cs.IT math.IT
Oneway real functions are effective maps on positive-measure sets of reals that preserve randomness and have no effective probabilistic inversions. We construct a oneway real function which is collision-resistant: the probability of effectively producing distinct reals with the same image is zero, and each real has uncountable inverse image.
2501.02612
Chameleon2++: An Efficient Chameleon2 Clustering with Approximate Nearest Neighbors
cs.LG cs.DS
Clustering algorithms are fundamental tools in data analysis, with hierarchical methods being particularly valuable for their flexibility. Chameleon is a widely used hierarchical clustering algorithm that excels at identifying high-quality clusters of arbitrary shapes, sizes, and densities. Chameleon2 is the most recent variant that has demonstrated significant improvements, but suffers from critical failings and there are certain improvements that can be made. The first failure we address is that the complexity of Chameleon2 is claimed to be $O(n^2)$, while we demonstrate that it is actually $O(n^2\log{n})$, with $n$ being the number of data points. Furthermore, we suggest improvements to Chameleon2 that ensure that the complexity remains $O(n^2)$ with minimal to no loss of performance. The second failing of Chameleon2 is that it lacks transparency and it does not provide the fine-tuned algorithm parameters used to obtain the claimed results. We meticulously provide all such parameter values to enhance replicability. The improvement which we make in Chameleon2 is that we replace the exact $k$-NN search with an approximate $k$-NN search. This further reduces the algorithmic complexity down to $O(n\log{n})$ without any performance loss. Here, we primarily configure three approximate nearest neighbor search algorithms (Annoy, FLANN and NMSLIB) to align with the overarching Chameleon2 clustering framework. Experimental evaluations on standard benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed Chameleon2++ algorithm is more efficient, robust, and computationally optimal.
2501.02613
LWFNet: Coherent Doppler Wind Lidar-Based Network for Wind Field Retrieval
physics.ao-ph cs.LG
Accurate detection of wind fields within the troposphere is essential for atmospheric dynamics research and plays a crucial role in extreme weather forecasting. Coherent Doppler wind lidar (CDWL) is widely regarded as the most suitable technique for high spatial and temporal resolution wind field detection. However, since coherent detection relies heavily on the concentration of aerosol particles, which cause Mie scattering, the received backscattering lidar signal exhibits significantly low intensity at high altitudes. As a result, conventional methods, such as spectral centroid estimation, often fail to produce credible and accurate wind retrieval results in these regions. To address this issue, we propose LWFNet, the first Lidar-based Wind Field (WF) retrieval neural Network, built upon Transformer and the Kolmogorov-Arnold network. Our model is trained solely on targets derived from the traditional wind retrieval algorithm and utilizes radiosonde measurements as the ground truth for test results evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that LWFNet not only extends the maximum wind field detection range but also produces more accurate results, exhibiting a level of precision that surpasses the labeled targets. This phenomenon, which we refer to as super-accuracy, is explored by investigating the potential underlying factors that contribute to this intriguing occurrence. In addition, we compare the performance of LWFNet with other state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, highlighting its superior effectiveness and capability in high-resolution wind retrieval. LWFNet demonstrates remarkable performance in lidar-based wind field retrieval, setting a benchmark for future research and advancing the development of deep learning models in this domain.
2501.02615
Parsings of Stationary Processes, Stopping Times and the Fundamental Pointwise Convergence Theorems of Ergodic Theory
math.DS cs.IT math.CO math.IT math.PR
The idea of a parsing of a stationary process according to a collection of words is introduced, and the basic framework required for the asymptotic analysis of these parsings is presented. We demonstrate how the pointwise ergodic theorem and the Shannon-McMillan-Breiman theorem can be deduced from their respective weaker convergence in probability versions combined with our observations regarding parsings, where the parsings are done according to collections that originate in stopping times tailored for that purpose.
2501.02616
Multi-layer Radial Basis Function Networks for Out-of-distribution Detection
cs.LG cs.CV
Existing methods for out-of-distribution (OOD) detection use various techniques to produce a score, separate from classification, that determines how ``OOD'' an input is. Our insight is that OOD detection can be simplified by using a neural network architecture which can effectively merge classification and OOD detection into a single step. Radial basis function networks (RBFNs) inherently link classification confidence and OOD detection; however, these networks have lost popularity due to the difficult of training them in a multi-layer fashion. In this work, we develop a multi-layer radial basis function network (MLRBFN) which can be easily trained. To ensure that these networks are also effective for OOD detection, we develop a novel depression mechanism. We apply MLRBFNs as standalone classifiers and as heads on top of pretrained feature extractors, and find that they are competitive with commonly used methods for OOD detection. Our MLRBFN architecture demonstrates a promising new direction for OOD detection methods.
2501.02618
Identifying Surgical Instruments in Pedagogical Cataract Surgery Videos through an Optimized Aggregation Network
cs.CV
Instructional cataract surgery videos are crucial for ophthalmologists and trainees to observe surgical details repeatedly. This paper presents a deep learning model for real-time identification of surgical instruments in these videos, using a custom dataset scraped from open-access sources. Inspired by the architecture of YOLOV9, the model employs a Programmable Gradient Information (PGI) mechanism and a novel Generally-Optimized Efficient Layer Aggregation Network (Go-ELAN) to address the information bottleneck problem, enhancing Minimum Average Precision (mAP) at higher Non-Maximum Suppression Intersection over Union (NMS IoU) scores. The Go-ELAN YOLOV9 model, evaluated against YOLO v5, v7, v8, v9 vanilla, Laptool and DETR, achieves a superior mAP of 73.74 at IoU 0.5 on a dataset of 615 images with 10 instrument classes, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed model.
2501.02620
Back to Base: Towards Hands-Off Learning via Safe Resets with Reach-Avoid Safety Filters
eess.SY cs.RO cs.SY
Designing controllers that accomplish tasks while guaranteeing safety constraints remains a significant challenge. We often want an agent to perform well in a nominal task, such as environment exploration, while ensuring it can avoid unsafe states and return to a desired target by a specific time. In particular we are motivated by the setting of safe, efficient, hands-off training for reinforcement learning in the real world. By enabling a robot to safely and autonomously reset to a desired region (e.g., charging stations) without human intervention, we can enhance efficiency and facilitate training. Safety filters, such as those based on control barrier functions, decouple safety from nominal control objectives and rigorously guarantee safety. Despite their success, constructing these functions for general nonlinear systems with control constraints and system uncertainties remains an open problem. This paper introduces a safety filter obtained from the value function associated with the reach-avoid problem. The proposed safety filter minimally modifies the nominal controller while avoiding unsafe regions and guiding the system back to the desired target set. By preserving policy performance while allowing safe resetting, we enable efficient hands-off reinforcement learning and advance the feasibility of safe training for real world robots. We demonstrate our approach using a modified version of soft actor-critic to safely train a swing-up task on a modified cartpole stabilization problem.
2501.02621
LLMs Help Alleviate the Cross-Subject Variability in Brain Signal and Language Alignment
cs.NE cs.AI
Decoding human activity from EEG signals has long been a popular research topic. While recent studies have increasingly shifted focus from single-subject to cross-subject analysis, few have explored the model's ability to perform zero-shot predictions on EEG signals from previously unseen subjects. This research aims to investigate whether deep learning methods can capture subject-independent semantic information inherent in human EEG signals. Such insights are crucial for Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) because, on one hand, they demonstrate the model's robustness against subject-specific temporal biases, and on the other, they significantly enhance the generalizability of downstream tasks. We employ Large Language Models (LLMs) as denoising agents to extract subject-independent semantic features from noisy EEG signals. Experimental results, including ablation studies, highlight the pivotal role of LLMs in decoding subject-independent semantic information from noisy EEG data. We hope our findings will contribute to advancing BCI research and assist both academia and industry in applying EEG signals to a broader range of applications.
2501.02625
HALO: Hadamard-Assisted Lower-Precision Optimization for LLMs
cs.LG
Quantized training of Large Language Models (LLMs) remains an open challenge, as maintaining accuracy while performing all matrix multiplications in low precision has proven difficult. This is particularly the case when fine-tuning pre-trained models, which can have large weight and activation outlier values that make lower-precision optimization difficult. To address this, we present HALO, a novel quantization-aware training approach for Transformers that enables accurate and efficient low-precision training by combining 1) strategic placement of Hadamard rotations in both forward and backward passes, which mitigate outliers, 2) high-performance kernel support, and 3) FSDP integration for low-precision communication. Our approach ensures that all large matrix multiplications during the forward and backward passes are executed in lower precision. Applied to LLAMA-family models, HALO achieves near-full-precision-equivalent results during fine-tuning on various tasks, while delivering up to 1.41x end-to-end speedup for full fine-tuning on RTX 4090 GPUs. HALO efficiently supports both standard and parameterefficient fine-tuning (PEFT). Our results demonstrate the first practical approach to fully quantized LLM fine-tuning that maintains accuracy in 8-bit precision, while delivering performance benefits. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/IST-DASLab/HALO}.
2501.02626
On the Independence Assumption in Quasi-Cyclic Code-Based Cryptography
cs.IT cs.CR math.IT
Cryptography based on the presumed hardness of decoding codes -- i.e., code-based cryptography -- has recently seen increased interest due to its plausible security against quantum attackers. Notably, of the four proposals for the NIST post-quantum standardization process that were advanced to their fourth round for further review, two were code-based. The most efficient proposals -- including HQC and BIKE, the NIST submissions alluded to above -- in fact rely on the presumed hardness of decoding structured codes. Of particular relevance to our work, HQC is based on quasi-cyclic codes, which are codes generated by matrices consisting of two cyclic blocks. In particular, the security analysis of HQC requires a precise understanding of the Decryption Failure Rate (DFR), whose analysis relies on the following heuristic: given random ``sparse'' vectors $e_1,e_2$ (say, each coordinate is i.i.d. Bernoulli) multiplied by fixed ``sparse'' quasi-cyclic matrices $A_1,A_2$, the weight of resulting vector $e_1A_1+e_2A_2$ is very concentrated around its expectation. In the documentation, the authors model the distribution of $e_1A_1+e_2A_2$ as a vector with independent coordinates (and correct marginal distribution). However, we uncover cases where this modeling fails. While this does not invalidate the (empirically verified) heuristic that the weight of $e_1A_1+e_2A_2$ is concentrated, it does suggest that the behavior of the noise is a bit more subtle than previously predicted. Lastly, we also discuss implications of our result for potential worst-case to average-case reductions for quasi-cyclic codes.
2501.02628
Cracks in The Stack: Hidden Vulnerabilities and Licensing Risks in LLM Pre-Training Datasets
cs.SE cs.AI
A critical part of creating code suggestion systems is the pre-training of Large Language Models on vast amounts of source code and natural language text, often of questionable origin or quality. This may contribute to the presence of bugs and vulnerabilities in code generated by LLMs. While efforts to identify bugs at or after code generation exist, it is preferable to pre-train or fine-tune LLMs on curated, high-quality, and compliant datasets. The need for vast amounts of training data necessitates that such curation be automated, minimizing human intervention. We propose an automated source code autocuration technique that leverages the complete version history of open-source software projects to improve the quality of training data. This approach leverages the version history of all OSS projects to identify training data samples that have been modified or have undergone changes in at least one OSS project, and pinpoint a subset of samples that include fixes for bugs or vulnerabilities. We evaluate this method using The Stack v2 dataset, and find that 17% of the code versions in the dataset have newer versions, with 17% of those representing bug fixes, including 2.36% addressing known CVEs. The deduplicated version of Stack v2 still includes blobs vulnerable to 6,947 known CVEs. Furthermore, 58% of the blobs in the dataset were never modified after creation, suggesting they likely represent software with minimal or no use. Misidentified blob origins present an additional challenge, as they lead to the inclusion of non-permissively licensed code, raising serious compliance concerns. By addressing these issues, the training of new models can avoid perpetuating buggy code patterns or license violations. We expect our results to inspire process improvements for automated data curation, with the potential to enhance the reliability of outputs generated by AI tools.
2501.02629
Layer-Level Self-Exposure and Patch: Affirmative Token Mitigation for Jailbreak Attack Defense
cs.CR cs.AI cs.CL
As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in diverse applications, including chatbot assistants and code generation, aligning their behavior with safety and ethical standards has become paramount. However, jailbreak attacks, which exploit vulnerabilities to elicit unintended or harmful outputs, threaten LLMs' safety significantly. In this paper, we introduce Layer-AdvPatcher, a novel methodology designed to defend against jailbreak attacks by utilizing an unlearning strategy to patch specific layers within LLMs through self-augmented datasets. Our insight is that certain layer(s), tend to produce affirmative tokens when faced with harmful prompts. By identifying these layers and adversarially exposing them to generate more harmful data, one can understand their inherent and diverse vulnerabilities to attacks. With these exposures, we then "unlearn" these issues, reducing the impact of affirmative tokens and hence minimizing jailbreak risks while keeping the model's responses to safe queries intact. We conduct extensive experiments on two models, four benchmark datasets, and multiple state-of-the-art jailbreak attacks to demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. Results indicate that our framework reduces the harmfulness and attack success rate of jailbreak attacks without compromising utility for benign queries compared to recent defense methods. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/oyy2000/LayerAdvPatcher
2501.02630
Soft and Compliant Contact-Rich Hair Manipulation and Care
cs.RO
Hair care robots can help address labor shortages in elderly care while enabling those with limited mobility to maintain their hair-related identity. We present MOE-Hair, a soft robot system that performs three hair-care tasks: head patting, finger combing, and hair grasping. The system features a tendon-driven soft robot end-effector (MOE) with a wrist-mounted RGBD camera, leveraging both mechanical compliance for safety and visual force sensing through deformation. In testing with a force-sensorized mannequin head, MOE achieved comparable hair-grasping effectiveness while applying significantly less force than rigid grippers. Our novel force estimation method combines visual deformation data and tendon tensions from actuators to infer applied forces, reducing sensing errors by up to 60.1% and 20.3% compared to actuator current load-only and depth image-only baselines, respectively. A user study with 12 participants demonstrated statistically significant preferences for MOE-Hair over a baseline system in terms of comfort, effectiveness, and appropriate force application. These results demonstrate the unique advantages of soft robots in contact-rich hair-care tasks, while highlighting the importance of precise force control despite the inherent compliance of the system.
2501.02631
Prune or Retrain: Optimizing the Vocabulary of Multilingual Models for Estonian
cs.CL
Adapting multilingual language models to specific languages can enhance both their efficiency and performance. In this study, we explore how modifying the vocabulary of a multilingual encoder model to better suit the Estonian language affects its downstream performance on the Named Entity Recognition (NER) task. The motivations for adjusting the vocabulary are twofold: practical benefits affecting the computational cost, such as reducing the input sequence length and the model size, and performance enhancements by tailoring the vocabulary to the particular language. We evaluate the effectiveness of two vocabulary adaptation approaches -- retraining the tokenizer and pruning unused tokens -- and assess their impact on the model's performance, particularly after continual training. While retraining the tokenizer degraded the performance of the NER task, suggesting that longer embedding tuning might be needed, we observed no negative effects on pruning.
2501.02635
Interactive Information Need Prediction with Intent and Context
cs.IR
The ability to predict a user's information need would have wide-ranging implications, from saving time and effort to mitigating vocabulary gaps. We study how to interactively predict a user's information need by letting them select a pre-search context (e.g., a paragraph, sentence, or singe word) and specify an optional partial search intent (e.g., "how", "why", "applications", etc.). We examine how various generative language models can explicitly make this prediction by generating a question as well as how retrieval models can implicitly make this prediction by retrieving an answer. We find that this prediction process is possible in many cases and that user-provided partial search intent can help mitigate large pre-search contexts. We conclude that this framework is promising and suitable for real-world applications.
2501.02640
Multispectral Pedestrian Detection with Sparsely Annotated Label
cs.CV
Although existing Sparsely Annotated Object Detection (SAOD) approches have made progress in handling sparsely annotated environments in multispectral domain, where only some pedestrians are annotated, they still have the following limitations: (i) they lack considerations for improving the quality of pseudo-labels for missing annotations, and (ii) they rely on fixed ground truth annotations, which leads to learning only a limited range of pedestrian visual appearances in the multispectral domain. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework called Sparsely Annotated Multispectral Pedestrian Detection (SAMPD). For limitation (i), we introduce Multispectral Pedestrian-aware Adaptive Weight (MPAW) and Positive Pseudo-label Enhancement (PPE) module. Utilizing multispectral knowledge, these modules ensure the generation of high-quality pseudo-labels and enable effective learning by increasing weights for high-quality pseudo-labels based on modality characteristics. To address limitation (ii), we propose an Adaptive Pedestrian Retrieval Augmentation (APRA) module, which adaptively incorporates pedestrian patches from ground-truth and dynamically integrates high-quality pseudo-labels with the ground-truth, facilitating a more diverse learning pool of pedestrians. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our SAMPD significantly enhances performance in sparsely annotated environments within the multispectral domain.
2501.02647
Trust and Dependability in Blockchain & AI Based MedIoT Applications: Research Challenges and Future Directions
cs.CR cs.AI cs.CY
This paper critically reviews the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and blockchain technologies in the context of Medical Internet of Things (MedIoT) applications, where they collectively promise to revolutionize healthcare delivery. By examining current research, we underscore AI's potential in advancing diagnostics and patient care, alongside blockchain's capacity to bolster data security and patient privacy. We focus particularly on the imperative to cultivate trust and ensure reliability within these systems. Our review highlights innovative solutions for managing healthcare data and challenges such as ensuring scalability, maintaining privacy, and promoting ethical practices within the MedIoT domain. We present a vision for integrating AI-driven insights with blockchain security in healthcare, offering a comprehensive review of current research and future directions. We conclude with a set of identified research gaps and propose that addressing these is crucial for achieving the dependable, secure, and patient -centric MedIoT applications of tomorrow.
2501.02648
Representation Learning of Lab Values via Masked AutoEncoder
cs.LG cs.AI
Accurate imputation of missing laboratory values in electronic health records (EHRs) is critical to enable robust clinical predictions and reduce biases in AI systems in healthcare. Existing methods, such as variational autoencoders (VAEs) and decision tree-based approaches such as XGBoost, struggle to model the complex temporal and contextual dependencies in EHR data, mainly in underrepresented groups. In this work, we propose Lab-MAE, a novel transformer-based masked autoencoder framework that leverages self-supervised learning for the imputation of continuous sequential lab values. Lab-MAE introduces a structured encoding scheme that jointly models laboratory test values and their corresponding timestamps, enabling explicit capturing temporal dependencies. Empirical evaluation on the MIMIC-IV dataset demonstrates that Lab-MAE significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines such as XGBoost across multiple metrics, including root mean square error (RMSE), R-squared (R2), and Wasserstein distance (WD). Notably, Lab-MAE achieves equitable performance across demographic groups of patients, advancing fairness in clinical predictions. We further investigate the role of follow-up laboratory values as potential shortcut features, revealing Lab-MAE's robustness in scenarios where such data is unavailable. The findings suggest that our transformer-based architecture, adapted to the characteristics of the EHR data, offers a foundation model for more accurate and fair clinical imputation models. In addition, we measure and compare the carbon footprint of Lab-MAE with the baseline XGBoost model, highlighting its environmental requirements.
2501.02649
Tighnari: Multi-modal Plant Species Prediction Based on Hierarchical Cross-Attention Using Graph-Based and Vision Backbone-Extracted Features
cs.CV cs.AI
Predicting plant species composition in specific spatiotemporal contexts plays an important role in biodiversity management and conservation, as well as in improving species identification tools. Our work utilizes 88,987 plant survey records conducted in specific spatiotemporal contexts across Europe. We also use the corresponding satellite images, time series data, climate time series, and other rasterized environmental data such as land cover, human footprint, bioclimatic, and soil variables as training data to train the model to predict the outcomes of 4,716 plant surveys. We propose a feature construction and result correction method based on the graph structure. Through comparative experiments, we select the best-performing backbone networks for feature extraction in both temporal and image modalities. In this process, we built a backbone network based on the Swin-Transformer Block for extracting temporal Cubes features. We then design a hierarchical cross-attention mechanism capable of robustly fusing features from multiple modalities. During training, we adopt a 10-fold cross-fusion method based on fine-tuning and use a Threshold Top-K method for post-processing. Ablation experiments demonstrate the improvements in model performance brought by our proposed solution pipeline.
2501.02652
A New Interpretation of the Certainty-Equivalence Approach for PAC Reinforcement Learning with a Generative Model
cs.LG stat.ML
Reinforcement learning (RL) enables an agent interacting with an unknown MDP $M$ to optimise its behaviour by observing transitions sampled from $M$. A natural entity that emerges in the agent's reasoning is $\widehat{M}$, the maximum likelihood estimate of $M$ based on the observed transitions. The well-known \textit{certainty-equivalence} method (CEM) dictates that the agent update its behaviour to $\widehat{\pi}$, which is an optimal policy for $\widehat{M}$. Not only is CEM intuitive, it has been shown to enjoy minimax-optimal sample complexity in some regions of the parameter space for PAC RL with a generative model~\citep{Agarwal2020GenModel}. A seemingly unrelated algorithm is the ``trajectory tree method'' (TTM)~\citep{Kearns+MN:1999}, originally developed for efficient decision-time planning in large POMDPs. This paper presents a theoretical investigation that stems from the surprising finding that CEM may indeed be viewed as an application of TTM. The qualitative benefits of this view are (1) new and simple proofs of sample complexity upper bounds for CEM, in fact under a (2) weaker assumption on the rewards than is prevalent in the current literature. Our analysis applies to both non-stationary and stationary MDPs. Quantitatively, we obtain (3) improvements in the sample-complexity upper bounds for CEM both for non-stationary and stationary MDPs, in the regime that the ``mistake probability'' $\delta$ is small. Additionally, we show (4) a lower bound on the sample complexity for finite-horizon MDPs, which establishes the minimax-optimality of our upper bound for non-stationary MDPs in the small-$\delta$ regime.
2501.02654
Tougher Text, Smarter Models: Raising the Bar for Adversarial Defence Benchmarks
cs.CL cs.AI
Recent advancements in natural language processing have highlighted the vulnerability of deep learning models to adversarial attacks. While various defence mechanisms have been proposed, there is a lack of comprehensive benchmarks that evaluate these defences across diverse datasets, models, and tasks. In this work, we address this gap by presenting an extensive benchmark for textual adversarial defence that significantly expands upon previous work. Our benchmark incorporates a wide range of datasets, evaluates state-of-the-art defence mechanisms, and extends the assessment to include critical tasks such as single-sentence classification, similarity and paraphrase identification, natural language inference, and commonsense reasoning. This work not only serves as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners in the field of adversarial robustness but also identifies key areas for future research in textual adversarial defence. By establishing a new standard for benchmarking in this domain, we aim to accelerate progress towards more robust and reliable natural language processing systems.
2501.02662
Incentive-Compatible Federated Learning with Stackelberg Game Modeling
cs.LG cs.DC
Federated Learning (FL) has gained prominence as a decentralized machine learning paradigm, allowing clients to collaboratively train a global model while preserving data privacy. Despite its potential, FL faces significant challenges in heterogeneous environments, where varying client resources and capabilities can undermine overall system performance. Existing approaches primarily focus on maximizing global model accuracy, often at the expense of unfairness among clients and suboptimal system efficiency, particularly in non-IID (non-Independent and Identically Distributed) settings. In this paper, we introduce FLamma, a novel Federated Learning framework based on adaptive gamma-based Stackelberg game, designed to address the aforementioned limitations and promote fairness. Our approach allows the server to act as the leader, dynamically adjusting a decay factor while clients, acting as followers, optimally select their number of local epochs to maximize their utility. Over time, the server incrementally balances client influence, initially rewarding higher-contributing clients and gradually leveling their impact, driving the system toward a Stackelberg Equilibrium. Extensive simulations on both IID and non-IID datasets show that our method significantly improves fairness in accuracy distribution without compromising overall model performance or convergence speed, outperforming traditional FL baselines.
2501.02666
Multi-Aggregator Time-Warping Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network for Personalized Micro-Video Recommendation
cs.IR cs.AI
Micro-video recommendation is attracting global attention and becoming a popular daily service for people of all ages. Recently, Graph Neural Networks-based micro-video recommendation has displayed performance improvement for many kinds of recommendation tasks. However, the existing works fail to fully consider the characteristics of micro-videos, such as the high timeliness of news nature micro-video recommendation and sequential interactions of frequently changed interests. In this paper, a novel Multi-aggregator Time-warping Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network (MTHGNN) is proposed for personalized news nature micro-video recommendation based on sequential sessions, where characteristics of micro-videos are comprehensively studied, users' preference is mined via multi-aggregator, the temporal and dynamic changes of users' preference are captured, and timeliness is considered. Through the comparison with the state-of-the-arts, the experimental results validate the superiority of our MTHGNN model.
2501.02667
Markov Decision Processes for Satellite Maneuver Planning and Collision Avoidance
cs.RO cs.SY eess.SY
This paper presents a decentralized, online planning approach for scalable maneuver planning for large constellations. While decentralized, rule-based strategies have facilitated efficient scaling, optimal decision-making algorithms for satellite maneuvers remain underexplored. As commercial satellite constellations grow, there are benefits of online maneuver planning, such as using real-time trajectory predictions to improve state knowledge, thereby reducing maneuver frequency and conserving fuel. We address this gap in the research by treating the satellite maneuver planning problem as a Markov decision process (MDP). This approach enables the generation of optimal maneuver policies online with low computational cost. This formulation is applied to the low Earth orbit collision avoidance problem, considering the problem of an active spacecraft deciding to maneuver to avoid a non-maneuverable object. We test the policies we generate in a simulated low Earth orbit environment, and compare the results to traditional rule-based collision avoidance techniques.
2501.02669
Generalizing from SIMPLE to HARD Visual Reasoning: Can We Mitigate Modality Imbalance in VLMs?
cs.CV cs.CL cs.LG
While Vision Language Models (VLMs) are impressive in tasks such as visual question answering (VQA) and image captioning, their ability to apply multi-step reasoning to images has lagged, giving rise to perceptions of modality imbalance or brittleness. Towards systematic study of such issues, we introduce a synthetic framework for assessing the ability of VLMs to perform algorithmic visual reasoning (AVR), comprising three tasks: Table Readout, Grid Navigation, and Visual Analogy. Each has two levels of difficulty, SIMPLE and HARD, and even the SIMPLE versions are difficult for frontier VLMs. We seek strategies for training on the SIMPLE version of the tasks that improve performance on the corresponding HARD task, i.e., S2H generalization. This synthetic framework, where each task also has a text-only version, allows a quantification of the modality imbalance, and how it is impacted by training strategy. Ablations highlight the importance of explicit image-to-text conversion in promoting S2H generalization when using auto-regressive training. We also report results of mechanistic study of this phenomenon, including a measure of gradient alignment that seems to identify training strategies that promote better S2H generalization.
2501.02670
Neural networks meet hyperelasticity: A monotonic approach
cs.CE
We apply physics-augmented neural network (PANN) constitutive models to experimental uniaxial tensile data of rubber-like materials whose behavior depends on manufacturing parameters. For this, we conduct experimental investigations on a 3D printed digital material at different mix ratios and consider several datasets from literature, including Ecoflex at different Shore hardness and a photocured 3D printing material at different grayscale values. We introduce a parametrized hyperelastic PANN model which can represent material behavior at different manufacturing parameters. The proposed model fulfills common mechanical conditions of hyperelasticity. In addition, the hyperelastic potential of the proposed model is monotonic in isotropic isochoric strain invariants of the right Cauchy-Green tensor. In incompressible hyperelasticity, this is a relaxed version of the ellipticity (or rank-one convexity) condition. Using this relaxed ellipticity condition, the PANN model has enough flexibility to be applicable to a wide range of materials while having enough structure for a stable extrapolation outside the calibration data. The monotonic PANN yields excellent results for all materials studied and can represent a wide range of largely varying qualitative and quantitative stress behavior. Although calibrated on uniaxial tensile data only, it leads to a stable numerical behavior of 3D finite element simulations. The findings of our work suggest that monotonicity could play a key role in the formulation of very general yet robust and stable constitutive models applicable to materials with highly nonlinear and parametrized behavior.
2501.02671
Quantum Cognition-Inspired EEG-based Recommendation via Graph Neural Networks
cs.IR
Current recommendation systems recommend goods by considering users' historical behaviors, social relations, ratings, and other multi-modals. Although outdated user information presents the trends of a user's interests, no recommendation system can know the users' real-time thoughts indeed. With the development of brain-computer interfaces, it is time to explore next-generation recommenders that show users' real-time thoughts without delay. Electroencephalography (EEG) is a promising method of collecting brain signals because of its convenience and mobility. Currently, there is only few research on EEG-based recommendations due to the complexity of learning human brain activity. To explore the utility of EEG-based recommendation, we propose a novel neural network model, QUARK, combining Quantum Cognition Theory and Graph Convolutional Networks for accurate item recommendations. Compared with the state-of-the-art recommendation models, the superiority of QUARK is confirmed via extensive experiments.
2501.02672
Re-examining Granger Causality from Causal Bayesian Networks Perspective
stat.ML cs.LG econ.EM stat.ME
Characterizing cause-effect relationships in complex systems could be critical to understanding these systems. For many, Granger causality (GC) remains a computational tool of choice to identify causal relations in time series data. Like other causal discovery tools, GC has limitations and has been criticized as a non-causal framework. Here, we addressed one of the recurring criticisms of GC by endowing it with proper causal interpretation. This was achieved by analyzing GC from Reichenbach's Common Cause Principles (RCCPs) and causal Bayesian networks (CBNs) lenses. We showed theoretically and graphically that this reformulation endowed GC with a proper causal interpretation under certain assumptions and achieved satisfactory results on simulation.
2501.02673
Exploring the Impact of Dataset Statistical Effect Size on Model Performance and Data Sample Size Sufficiency
cs.LG
Having a sufficient quantity of quality data is a critical enabler of training effective machine learning models. Being able to effectively determine the adequacy of a dataset prior to training and evaluating a model's performance would be an essential tool for anyone engaged in experimental design or data collection. However, despite the need for it, the ability to prospectively assess data sufficiency remains an elusive capability. We report here on two experiments undertaken in an attempt to better ascertain whether or not basic descriptive statistical measures can be indicative of how effective a dataset will be at training a resulting model. Leveraging the effect size of our features, this work first explores whether or not a correlation exists between effect size, and resulting model performance (theorizing that the magnitude of the distinction between classes could correlate to a classifier's resulting success). We then explore whether or not the magnitude of the effect size will impact the rate of convergence of our learning rate, (theorizing again that a greater effect size may indicate that the model will converge more rapidly, and with a smaller sample size needed). Our results appear to indicate that this is not an effective heuristic for determining adequate sample size or projecting model performance, and therefore that additional work is still needed to better prospectively assess adequacy of data.
2501.02675
A Novel First-Principles Model of Injection-Locked Oscillator Phase Noise
eess.SY cs.SY
The paper documents the development of a novel time-domain model of injection-locked oscillator phase-noise response. The methodology follows a first-principle approach and applies to all circuit topologies, coupling configurations, parameter dependencies etc. The corresponding numerical algorithm is readily integrated into all major commercial simulation software suites. The model advances current state-of-the-art pertaining to analytical modelling of this class of circuits. Using this novel analytical framework, several important new insights are revealed which, in-turn, translate into useful design rules for synthesis of injection-locked oscillator circuits with optimal noise performance.
2501.02680
From thermodynamics to protein design: Diffusion models for biomolecule generation towards autonomous protein engineering
q-bio.QM cs.AI cs.LG
Protein design with desirable properties has been a significant challenge for many decades. Generative artificial intelligence is a promising approach and has achieved great success in various protein generation tasks. Notably, diffusion models stand out for their robust mathematical foundations and impressive generative capabilities, offering unique advantages in certain applications such as protein design. In this review, we first give the definition and characteristics of diffusion models and then focus on two strategies: Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models and Score-based Generative Models, where DDPM is the discrete form of SGM. Furthermore, we discuss their applications in protein design, peptide generation, drug discovery, and protein-ligand interaction. Finally, we outline the future perspectives of diffusion models to advance autonomous protein design and engineering. The E(3) group consists of all rotations, reflections, and translations in three-dimensions. The equivariance on the E(3) group can keep the physical stability of the frame of each amino acid as much as possible, and we reflect on how to keep the diffusion model E(3) equivariant for protein generation.
2501.02683
From Superficial Patterns to Semantic Understanding: Fine-Tuning Language Models on Contrast Sets
cs.CL cs.AI
Large-scale pre-trained language models have demonstrated high performance on standard datasets for natural language inference (NLI) tasks. Unfortunately, these evaluations can be misleading, as although the models can perform well on in-distribution data, they perform poorly on out-of-distribution test sets, such as contrast sets. Contrast sets consist of perturbed instances of data that have very minor, but meaningful, changes to the input that alter the gold label, revealing how models can learn superficial patterns in the training data rather than learning more sophisticated language nuances. As an example, the ELECTRA-small language model achieves nearly 90% accuracy on an SNLI dataset but drops to 75% when tested on an out-of-distribution contrast set. The research carried out in this study explores how the robustness of a language model can be improved by exposing it to small amounts of more complex contrast sets during training to help it better learn language patterns. With this approach, the model recovers performance and achieves nearly 90% accuracy on contrast sets, highlighting the importance of diverse and challenging training data.
2501.02687
Improving Quantum Machine Learning via Heat-Bath Algorithmic Cooling
quant-ph cs.LG
This work introduces an approach rooted in quantum thermodynamics to enhance sampling efficiency in quantum machine learning (QML). We propose conceptualizing quantum supervised learning as a thermodynamic cooling process. Building on this concept, we develop a quantum refrigerator protocol that enhances sample efficiency during training and prediction without the need for Grover iterations or quantum phase estimation. Inspired by heat-bath algorithmic cooling protocols, our method alternates entropy compression and thermalization steps to decrease the entropy of qubits, increasing polarization towards the dominant bias. This technique minimizes the computational overhead associated with estimating classification scores and gradients, presenting a practical and efficient solution for QML algorithms compatible with noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices.
2501.02688
Decoding specialised feature neurons in LLMs with the final projection layer
cs.CL
Large Language Models (LLMs) typically have billions of parameters and are thus often difficult to interpret in their operation. Such black-box models can pose a significant risk to safety when trusted to make important decisions. The lack of interpretability of LLMs is more related to their sheer size, rather than the complexity of their individual components. The TARS method for knowledge removal (Davies et al 2024) provides strong evidence for the hypothesis that that linear layer weights which act directly on the residual stream may have high correlation with different concepts encoded in the residual stream. Building upon this, we attempt to decode neuron weights directly into token probabilities through the final projection layer of the model (the LM-head). Firstly, we show that with Llama 3.1 8B we can utilise the LM-head to decode specialised feature neurons that respond strongly to certain concepts, with examples such as "dog" and "California". This is then confirmed by demonstrating that these neurons can be clamped to affect the probability of the concept in the output. This extends to the fine-tuned assistant Llama 3.1 8B instruct model, where we find that over 75% of neurons in the up-projection layers have the same top associated token compared to the pretrained model. Finally, we demonstrate that clamping the "dog" neuron leads the instruct model to always discuss dogs when asked about its favourite animal. Through our method, it is possible to map the entirety of Llama 3.1 8B's up-projection neurons in less than 15 minutes with no parallelization.
2501.02690
GS-DiT: Advancing Video Generation with Pseudo 4D Gaussian Fields through Efficient Dense 3D Point Tracking
cs.CV
4D video control is essential in video generation as it enables the use of sophisticated lens techniques, such as multi-camera shooting and dolly zoom, which are currently unsupported by existing methods. Training a video Diffusion Transformer (DiT) directly to control 4D content requires expensive multi-view videos. Inspired by Monocular Dynamic novel View Synthesis (MDVS) that optimizes a 4D representation and renders videos according to different 4D elements, such as camera pose and object motion editing, we bring pseudo 4D Gaussian fields to video generation. Specifically, we propose a novel framework that constructs a pseudo 4D Gaussian field with dense 3D point tracking and renders the Gaussian field for all video frames. Then we finetune a pretrained DiT to generate videos following the guidance of the rendered video, dubbed as GS-DiT. To boost the training of the GS-DiT, we also propose an efficient Dense 3D Point Tracking (D3D-PT) method for the pseudo 4D Gaussian field construction. Our D3D-PT outperforms SpatialTracker, the state-of-the-art sparse 3D point tracking method, in accuracy and accelerates the inference speed by two orders of magnitude. During the inference stage, GS-DiT can generate videos with the same dynamic content while adhering to different camera parameters, addressing a significant limitation of current video generation models. GS-DiT demonstrates strong generalization capabilities and extends the 4D controllability of Gaussian splatting to video generation beyond just camera poses. It supports advanced cinematic effects through the manipulation of the Gaussian field and camera intrinsics, making it a powerful tool for creative video production. Demos are available at https://wkbian.github.io/Projects/GS-DiT/.
2501.02699
EAGLE: Enhanced Visual Grounding Minimizes Hallucinations in Instructional Multimodal Models
cs.CV cs.AI
Large language models and vision transformers have demonstrated impressive zero-shot capabilities, enabling significant transferability in downstream tasks. The fusion of these models has resulted in multi-modal architectures with enhanced instructional capabilities. Despite incorporating vast image and language pre-training, these multi-modal architectures often generate responses that deviate from the ground truth in the image data. These failure cases are known as hallucinations. Current methods for mitigating hallucinations generally focus on regularizing the language component, improving the fusion module, or ensembling multiple visual encoders to improve visual representation. In this paper, we address the hallucination issue by directly enhancing the capabilities of the visual component. Our approach, named EAGLE, is fully agnostic to the LLM or fusion module and works as a post-pretraining approach that improves the grounding and language alignment of the visual encoder. We show that a straightforward reformulation of the original contrastive pre-training task results in an improved visual encoder that can be incorporated into the instructional multi-modal architecture without additional instructional training. As a result, EAGLE achieves a significant reduction in hallucinations across multiple challenging benchmarks and tasks.
2501.02701
Underwater Image Restoration Through a Prior Guided Hybrid Sense Approach and Extensive Benchmark Analysis
cs.CV
Underwater imaging grapples with challenges from light-water interactions, leading to color distortions and reduced clarity. In response to these challenges, we propose a novel Color Balance Prior \textbf{Guided} \textbf{Hyb}rid \textbf{Sens}e \textbf{U}nderwater \textbf{I}mage \textbf{R}estoration framework (\textbf{GuidedHybSensUIR}). This framework operates on multiple scales, employing the proposed \textbf{Detail Restorer} module to restore low-level detailed features at finer scales and utilizing the proposed \textbf{Feature Contextualizer} module to capture long-range contextual relations of high-level general features at a broader scale. The hybridization of these different scales of sensing results effectively addresses color casts and restores blurry details. In order to effectively point out the evolutionary direction for the model, we propose a novel \textbf{Color Balance Prior} as a strong guide in the feature contextualization step and as a weak guide in the final decoding phase. We construct a comprehensive benchmark using paired training data from three real-world underwater datasets and evaluate on six test sets, including three paired and three unpaired, sourced from four real-world underwater datasets. Subsequently, we tested 14 traditional and retrained 23 deep learning existing underwater image restoration methods on this benchmark, obtaining metric results for each approach. This effort aims to furnish a valuable benchmarking dataset for standard basis for comparison. The extensive experiment results demonstrate that our method outperforms 37 other state-of-the-art methods overall on various benchmark datasets and metrics, despite not achieving the best results in certain individual cases. The code and dataset are available at \href{https://github.com/CXH-Research/GuidedHybSensUIR}{https://github.com/CXH-Research/GuidedHybSensUIR}.
2501.02702
QuIM-RAG: Advancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Inverted Question Matching for Enhanced QA Performance
cs.CL cs.AI cs.LG
This work presents a novel architecture for building Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems to improve Question Answering (QA) tasks from a target corpus. Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized the analyzing and generation of human-like text. These models rely on pre-trained data and lack real-time updates unless integrated with live data tools. RAG enhances LLMs by integrating online resources and databases to generate contextually appropriate responses. However, traditional RAG still encounters challenges like information dilution and hallucinations when handling vast amounts of data. Our approach addresses these challenges by converting corpora into a domain-specific dataset and RAG architecture is constructed to generate responses from the target document. We introduce QuIM-RAG (Question-to-question Inverted Index Matching), a novel approach for the retrieval mechanism in our system. This strategy generates potential questions from document chunks and matches these with user queries to identify the most relevant text chunks for generating accurate answers. We have implemented our RAG system on top of the open-source Meta-LLaMA3-8B-instruct model by Meta Inc. that is available on Hugging Face. We constructed a custom corpus of 500+ pages from a high-traffic website accessed thousands of times daily for answering complex questions, along with manually prepared ground truth QA for evaluation. We compared our approach with traditional RAG models using BERT-Score and RAGAS, state-of-the-art metrics for evaluating LLM applications. Our evaluation demonstrates that our approach outperforms traditional RAG architectures on both metrics.
2501.02704
Persistence of Backdoor-based Watermarks for Neural Networks: A Comprehensive Evaluation
cs.LG cs.MM
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have gained considerable traction in recent years due to the unparalleled results they gathered. However, the cost behind training such sophisticated models is resource intensive, resulting in many to consider DNNs to be intellectual property (IP) to model owners. In this era of cloud computing, high-performance DNNs are often deployed all over the internet so that people can access them publicly. As such, DNN watermarking schemes, especially backdoor-based watermarks, have been actively developed in recent years to preserve proprietary rights. Nonetheless, there lies much uncertainty on the robustness of existing backdoor watermark schemes, towards both adversarial attacks and unintended means such as fine-tuning neural network models. One reason for this is that no complete guarantee of robustness can be assured in the context of backdoor-based watermark. In this paper, we extensively evaluate the persistence of recent backdoor-based watermarks within neural networks in the scenario of fine-tuning, we propose/develop a novel data-driven idea to restore watermark after fine-tuning without exposing the trigger set. Our empirical results show that by solely introducing training data after fine-tuning, the watermark can be restored if model parameters do not shift dramatically during fine-tuning. Depending on the types of trigger samples used, trigger accuracy can be reinstated to up to 100%. Our study further explores how the restoration process works using loss landscape visualization, as well as the idea of introducing training data in fine-tuning stage to alleviate watermark vanishing.
2501.02705
Knowledge Distillation with Adapted Weight
cs.LG stat.AP
Although large models have shown a strong capacity to solve large-scale problems in many areas including natural language and computer vision, their voluminous parameters are hard to deploy in a real-time system due to computational and energy constraints. Addressing this, knowledge distillation through Teacher-Student architecture offers a sustainable pathway to compress the knowledge of large models into more manageable sizes without significantly compromising performance. To enhance the robustness and interpretability of this framework, it is critical to understand how individual training data impact model performance, which is an area that remains underexplored. We propose the \textbf{Knowledge Distillation with Adaptive Influence Weight (KD-AIF)} framework which leverages influence functions from robust statistics to assign weights to training data, grounded in the four key SAFE principles: Sustainability, Accuracy, Fairness, and Explainability. This novel approach not only optimizes distillation but also increases transparency by revealing the significance of different data. The exploration of various update mechanisms within the KD-AIF framework further elucidates its potential to significantly improve learning efficiency and generalization in student models, marking a step toward more explainable and deployable Large Models. KD-AIF is effective in knowledge distillation while also showing exceptional performance in semi-supervised learning with outperforms existing baselines and methods in multiple benchmarks (CIFAR-100, CIFAR-10-4k, SVHN-1k, and GLUE).
2501.02706
Multilevel Semantic-Aware Model for AI-Generated Video Quality Assessment
cs.CV
The rapid development of diffusion models has greatly advanced AI-generated videos in terms of length and consistency recently, yet assessing AI-generated videos still remains challenging. Previous approaches have often focused on User-Generated Content(UGC), but few have targeted AI-Generated Video Quality Assessment methods. In this work, we introduce MSA-VQA, a Multilevel Semantic-Aware Model for AI-Generated Video Quality Assessment, which leverages CLIP-based semantic supervision and cross-attention mechanisms. Our hierarchical framework analyzes video content at three levels: frame, segment, and video. We propose a Prompt Semantic Supervision Module using text encoder of CLIP to ensure semantic consistency between videos and conditional prompts. Additionally, we propose the Semantic Mutation-aware Module to capture subtle variations between frames. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method achieves state-of-the-art results.
2501.02709
Horizon Generalization in Reinforcement Learning
cs.LG cs.AI
We study goal-conditioned RL through the lens of generalization, but not in the traditional sense of random augmentations and domain randomization. Rather, we aim to learn goal-directed policies that generalize with respect to the horizon: after training to reach nearby goals (which are easy to learn), these policies should succeed in reaching distant goals (which are quite challenging to learn). In the same way that invariance is closely linked with generalization is other areas of machine learning (e.g., normalization layers make a network invariant to scale, and therefore generalize to inputs of varying scales), we show that this notion of horizon generalization is closely linked with invariance to planning: a policy navigating towards a goal will select the same actions as if it were navigating to a waypoint en route to that goal. Thus, such a policy trained to reach nearby goals should succeed at reaching arbitrarily-distant goals. Our theoretical analysis proves that both horizon generalization and planning invariance are possible, under some assumptions. We present new experimental results and recall findings from prior work in support of our theoretical results. Taken together, our results open the door to studying how techniques for invariance and generalization developed in other areas of machine learning might be adapted to achieve this alluring property.
2501.02711
KG-CF: Knowledge Graph Completion with Context Filtering under the Guidance of Large Language Models
cs.AI cs.CL
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance in various tasks, including knowledge graph completion (KGC). However, current studies mostly apply LLMs to classification tasks, like identifying missing triplets, rather than ranking-based tasks, where the model ranks candidate entities based on plausibility. This focus limits the practical use of LLMs in KGC, as real-world applications prioritize highly plausible triplets. Additionally, while graph paths can help infer the existence of missing triplets and improve completion accuracy, they often contain redundant information. To address these issues, we propose KG-CF, a framework tailored for ranking-based KGC tasks. KG-CF leverages LLMs' reasoning abilities to filter out irrelevant contexts, achieving superior results on real-world datasets. The code and datasets are available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/KG-CF}.
2501.02715
Improved Data Encoding for Emerging Computing Paradigms: From Stochastic to Hyperdimensional Computing
cs.ET cs.AI cs.LG cs.NE
Data encoding is a fundamental step in emerging computing paradigms, particularly in stochastic computing (SC) and hyperdimensional computing (HDC), where it plays a crucial role in determining the overall system performance and hardware cost efficiency. This study presents an advanced encoding strategy that leverages a hardware-friendly class of low-discrepancy (LD) sequences, specifically powers-of-2 bases of Van der Corput (VDC) sequences (VDC-2^n), as sources for random number generation. Our approach significantly enhances the accuracy and efficiency of SC and HDC systems by addressing challenges associated with randomness. By employing LD sequences, we improve correlation properties and reduce hardware complexity. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in accuracy and energy savings for SC and HDC systems. Our solution provides a robust framework for integrating SC and HDC in resource-constrained environments, paving the way for efficient and scalable AI implementations.
2501.02718
Multi-Transmission Node DER Aggregation: Chance-Constrained Unit Commitment with Bounded Hetero-Dimensional Mixture Model for Uncertain Distribution Factors
eess.SY cs.SY
To facilitate the integration of distributed energy resources (DERs) into the wholesale market while maintaining the tractability of associated market operation tools such as unit commitment (UC), existing DER aggregation (DERA) studies usually consider that each DERA is presented on a single node of the transmission network. Nevertheless, the increasing scale and geographical distribution of DERs spur the emergence of DERAs covering multiple transmission nodes, posing new challenges in modeling such multi-transmission-node DERAs (M-DERAs). Indeed, assessing the aggregated impact of an M-DERA on power flows is a non-trivial task, because the sensitivities of each transmission line to DERs at different transmission nodes are not identical. Inspired by the distribution factor (DF) based shift factor (SF) aggregation strategy in industry practice, this paper proposes a novel DF-based chance-constrained UC (CCUC) model to determine system optimal operation plans with M-DERAs. DFs, treated as uncertain parameters to describe possible responses of DERs against aggregated dispatch instructions from regional transmission organizations, are modeled via a bounded hetero-dimensional mixture model (BHMM) by leveraging historical DF records distributed on multiple hyperplanes in a bounded space. With this, power flow limits are modeled as chance constraints in CCUC, which is reformulated into a scenarios-based stochastic form and solved by Benders decomposition. The proposed method is tested on an IEEE 24-bus system to illustrate its effectiveness in managing M-DERA integration while ensuring operational economics and mitigating the overloading of transmission lines.