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2501.08284
AfriHate: A Multilingual Collection of Hate Speech and Abusive Language Datasets for African Languages
cs.CL
Hate speech and abusive language are global phenomena that need socio-cultural background knowledge to be understood, identified, and moderated. However, in many regions of the Global South, there have been several documented occurrences of (1) absence of moderation and (2) censorship due to the reliance on keyword spotting out of context. Further, high-profile individuals have frequently been at the center of the moderation process, while large and targeted hate speech campaigns against minorities have been overlooked. These limitations are mainly due to the lack of high-quality data in the local languages and the failure to include local communities in the collection, annotation, and moderation processes. To address this issue, we present AfriHate: a multilingual collection of hate speech and abusive language datasets in 15 African languages. Each instance in AfriHate is annotated by native speakers familiar with the local culture. We report the challenges related to the construction of the datasets and present various classification baseline results with and without using LLMs. The datasets, individual annotations, and hate speech and offensive language lexicons are available on https://github.com/AfriHate/AfriHate
2501.08285
Can Bayesian Neural Networks Explicitly Model Input Uncertainty?
cs.LG cs.CV
Inputs to machine learning models can have associated noise or uncertainties, but they are often ignored and not modelled. It is unknown if Bayesian Neural Networks and their approximations are able to consider uncertainty in their inputs. In this paper we build a two input Bayesian Neural Network (mean and standard deviation) and evaluate its capabilities for input uncertainty estimation across different methods like Ensembles, MC-Dropout, and Flipout. Our results indicate that only some uncertainty estimation methods for approximate Bayesian NNs can model input uncertainty, in particular Ensembles and Flipout.
2501.08286
VINGS-Mono: Visual-Inertial Gaussian Splatting Monocular SLAM in Large Scenes
cs.RO cs.CV
VINGS-Mono is a monocular (inertial) Gaussian Splatting (GS) SLAM framework designed for large scenes. The framework comprises four main components: VIO Front End, 2D Gaussian Map, NVS Loop Closure, and Dynamic Eraser. In the VIO Front End, RGB frames are processed through dense bundle adjustment and uncertainty estimation to extract scene geometry and poses. Based on this output, the mapping module incrementally constructs and maintains a 2D Gaussian map. Key components of the 2D Gaussian Map include a Sample-based Rasterizer, Score Manager, and Pose Refinement, which collectively improve mapping speed and localization accuracy. This enables the SLAM system to handle large-scale urban environments with up to 50 million Gaussian ellipsoids. To ensure global consistency in large-scale scenes, we design a Loop Closure module, which innovatively leverages the Novel View Synthesis (NVS) capabilities of Gaussian Splatting for loop closure detection and correction of the Gaussian map. Additionally, we propose a Dynamic Eraser to address the inevitable presence of dynamic objects in real-world outdoor scenes. Extensive evaluations in indoor and outdoor environments demonstrate that our approach achieves localization performance on par with Visual-Inertial Odometry while surpassing recent GS/NeRF SLAM methods. It also significantly outperforms all existing methods in terms of mapping and rendering quality. Furthermore, we developed a mobile app and verified that our framework can generate high-quality Gaussian maps in real time using only a smartphone camera and a low-frequency IMU sensor. To the best of our knowledge, VINGS-Mono is the first monocular Gaussian SLAM method capable of operating in outdoor environments and supporting kilometer-scale large scenes.
2501.08288
Avoiding subtraction and division of stochastic signals using normalizing flows: NFdeconvolve
stat.ML cs.LG math.PR physics.data-an q-bio.QM
Across the scientific realm, we find ourselves subtracting or dividing stochastic signals. For instance, consider a stochastic realization, $x$, generated from the addition or multiplication of two stochastic signals $a$ and $b$, namely $x=a+b$ or $x = ab$. For the $x=a+b$ example, $a$ can be fluorescence background and $b$ the signal of interest whose statistics are to be learned from the measured $x$. Similarly, when writing $x=ab$, $a$ can be thought of as the illumination intensity and $b$ the density of fluorescent molecules of interest. Yet dividing or subtracting stochastic signals amplifies noise, and we ask instead whether, using the statistics of $a$ and the measurement of $x$ as input, we can recover the statistics of $b$. Here, we show how normalizing flows can generate an approximation of the probability distribution over $b$, thereby avoiding subtraction or division altogether. This method is implemented in our software package, NFdeconvolve, available on GitHub with a tutorial linked in the main text.
2501.08292
HALoGEN: Fantastic LLM Hallucinations and Where to Find Them
cs.CL cs.AI
Despite their impressive ability to generate high-quality and fluent text, generative large language models (LLMs) also produce hallucinations: statements that are misaligned with established world knowledge or provided input context. However, measuring hallucination can be challenging, as having humans verify model generations on-the-fly is both expensive and time-consuming. In this work, we release HALoGEN, a comprehensive hallucination benchmark consisting of: (1) 10,923 prompts for generative models spanning nine domains including programming, scientific attribution, and summarization, and (2) automatic high-precision verifiers for each use case that decompose LLM generations into atomic units, and verify each unit against a high-quality knowledge source. We use this framework to evaluate ~150,000 generations from 14 language models, finding that even the best-performing models are riddled with hallucinations (sometimes up to 86% of generated atomic facts depending on the domain). We further define a novel error classification for LLM hallucinations based on whether they likely stem from incorrect recollection of training data (Type A errors), or incorrect knowledge in training data (Type B errors), or are fabrication (Type C errors). We hope our framework provides a foundation to enable the principled study of why generative models hallucinate, and advances the development of trustworthy large language models.
2501.08295
LayerAnimate: Layer-specific Control for Animation
cs.CV
Animated video separates foreground and background elements into layers, with distinct processes for sketching, refining, coloring, and in-betweening. Existing video generation methods typically treat animation as a monolithic data domain, lacking fine-grained control over individual layers. In this paper, we introduce LayerAnimate, a novel architectural approach that enhances fine-grained control over individual animation layers within a video diffusion model, allowing users to independently manipulate foreground and background elements in distinct layers. To address the challenge of limited layer-specific data, we propose a data curation pipeline that features automated element segmentation, motion-state hierarchical merging, and motion coherence refinement. Through quantitative and qualitative comparisons, and user study, we demonstrate that LayerAnimate outperforms current methods in terms of animation quality, control precision, and usability, making it an ideal tool for both professional animators and amateur enthusiasts. This framework opens up new possibilities for layer-specific animation applications and creative flexibility. Our code is available at https://layeranimate.github.io.
2501.08296
A Survey on Pedophile Attribution Techniques for Online Platforms
cs.CL
Reliance on anonymity in social media has increased its popularity on these platforms among all ages. The availability of public Wi-Fi networks has facilitated a vast variety of online content, including social media applications. Although anonymity and ease of access can be a convenient means of communication for their users, it is difficult to manage and protect its vulnerable users against sexual predators. Using an automated identification system that can attribute predators to their text would make the solution more attainable. In this survey, we provide a review of the methods of pedophile attribution used in social media platforms. We examine the effect of the size of the suspect set and the length of the text on the task of attribution. Moreover, we review the most-used datasets, features, classification techniques and performance measures for attributing sexual predators. We found that few studies have proposed tools to mitigate the risk of online sexual predators, but none of them can provide suspect attribution. Finally, we list several open research problems.
2501.08297
Polynomial Threshold Functions of Bounded Tree-Width: Some Explainability and Complexity Aspects
cs.LG cs.AI
The tree-width of a multivariate polynomial is the tree-width of the hypergraph with hyperedges corresponding to its terms. Multivariate polynomials of bounded tree-width have been studied by Makowsky and Meer as a new sparsity condition that allows for polynomial solvability of problems which are intractable in general. We consider a variation on this theme for Boolean variables. A representation of a Boolean function as the sign of a polynomial is called a polynomial threshold representation. We discuss Boolean functions representable as polynomial threshold functions of bounded tree-width and present two applications to Bayesian network classifiers, a probabilistic graphical model. Both applications are in Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), the research area dealing with the black-box nature of many recent machine learning models. We also give a separation result between the representational power of positive and general polynomial threshold functions.
2501.08303
Advancing Semantic Future Prediction through Multimodal Visual Sequence Transformers
cs.CV
Semantic future prediction is important for autonomous systems navigating dynamic environments. This paper introduces FUTURIST, a method for multimodal future semantic prediction that uses a unified and efficient visual sequence transformer architecture. Our approach incorporates a multimodal masked visual modeling objective and a novel masking mechanism designed for multimodal training. This allows the model to effectively integrate visible information from various modalities, improving prediction accuracy. Additionally, we propose a VAE-free hierarchical tokenization process, which reduces computational complexity, streamlines the training pipeline, and enables end-to-end training with high-resolution, multimodal inputs. We validate FUTURIST on the Cityscapes dataset, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance in future semantic segmentation for both short- and mid-term forecasting. We provide the implementation code at https://github.com/Sta8is/FUTURIST .
2501.08304
A Novel Method for Detecting Dust Accumulation in Photovoltaic Systems: Evaluating Visible Sunlight Obstruction in Different Dust Levels and AI-based Bird Droppings Detection
eess.SY cs.SY
This paper presents an innovative method for automatically detecting dust accumulation on a PV system and notifying the user to clean it instantly. The accumulation of dust, bird, or insect droppings on the surface of photovoltaic (PV) panels creates a barrier between the solar energy and the panel's surface to receive sufficient energy to generate electricity. The study investigates the effects of dust on PV panel output and visible sunlight (VSL) block amounts to utilize the necessity of cleaning and detection. The amount of blocked visible sunlight while passing through glass due to dust determines the accumulated dust level. Visible sunlight can easily pass through the clean, transparent glass but reflects when something like dust obstructs it. Based on those concepts, a system is designed with a light sensor that is simple, effective, easy to install, hassle-free, and can spread the technology. The study also explores the effectiveness of the detection system developed by using image processing and machine learning algorithms to identify dust levels and bird or insect droppings accurately. The experimental setup in Gazipur, Bangladesh, found that excessive dust can block up to 55% of visible sunlight, wasting 55% of solar energy in the visible spectrum, and cleaning can recover 3% of power weekly. The data from the dust detection system is correlated with the 400W capacity solar panels' naturally lost efficiency data to validate the system. This research measured visible sunlight obstruction and loss due to dust. However, the addition of an infrared radiation sensor can draw the entire scenario of energy loss by doing more research.
2501.08305
Benchmarking Graph Representations and Graph Neural Networks for Multivariate Time Series Classification
cs.LG
Multivariate Time Series Classification (MTSC) enables the analysis if complex temporal data, and thus serves as a cornerstone in various real-world applications, ranging from healthcare to finance. Since the relationship among variables in MTS usually contain crucial cues, a large number of graph-based MTSC approaches have been proposed, as the graph topology and edges can explicitly represent relationships among variables (channels), where not only various MTS graph representation learning strategies but also different Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been explored. Despite such progresses, there is no comprehensive study that fairly benchmarks and investigates the performances of existing widely-used graph representation learning strategies/GNN classifiers in the application of different MTSC tasks. In this paper, we present the first benchmark which systematically investigates the effectiveness of the widely-used three node feature definition strategies, four edge feature learning strategies and five GNN architecture, resulting in 60 different variants for graph-based MTSC. These variants are developed and evaluated with a standardized data pipeline and training/validation/testing strategy on 26 widely-used suspensor MTSC datasets. Our experiments highlight that node features significantly influence MTSC performance, while the visualization of edge features illustrates why adaptive edge learning outperforms other edge feature learning methods. The code of the proposed benchmark is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/CVI-yangwn/Benchmark-GNN-for-Multivariate-Time-Series-Classification}.
2501.08306
Path Loss Prediction Using Machine Learning with Extended Features
cs.LG eess.SP
Wireless communications rely on path loss modeling, which is most effective when it includes the physical details of the propagation environment. Acquiring this data has historically been challenging, but geographic information system data is becoming increasingly available with higher resolution and accuracy. Access to such details enables propagation models to more accurately predict coverage and minimize interference in wireless deployments. Machine learning-based modeling can significantly support this effort, with feature-based approaches allowing for accurate, efficient, and scalable propagation modeling. Building on previous work, we introduce an extended set of features that improves prediction accuracy while, most importantly, maintaining model generalization across a broad range of environments.
2501.08312
Everybody Likes to Sleep: A Computer-Assisted Comparison of Object Naming Data from 30 Languages
cs.CL
Object naming - the act of identifying an object with a word or a phrase - is a fundamental skill in interpersonal communication, relevant to many disciplines, such as psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, or language and vision research. Object naming datasets, which consist of concept lists with picture pairings, are used to gain insights into how humans access and select names for objects in their surroundings and to study the cognitive processes involved in converting visual stimuli into semantic concepts. Unfortunately, object naming datasets often lack transparency and have a highly idiosyncratic structure. Our study tries to make current object naming data transparent and comparable by using a multilingual, computer-assisted approach that links individual items of object naming lists to unified concepts. Our current sample links 17 object naming datasets that cover 30 languages from 10 different language families. We illustrate how the comparative dataset can be explored by searching for concepts that recur across the majority of datasets and comparing the conceptual spaces of covered object naming datasets with classical basic vocabulary lists from historical linguistics and linguistic typology. Our findings can serve as a basis for enhancing cross-linguistic object naming research and as a guideline for future studies dealing with object naming tasks.
2501.08313
MiniMax-01: Scaling Foundation Models with Lightning Attention
cs.CL cs.CV
We introduce MiniMax-01 series, including MiniMax-Text-01 and MiniMax-VL-01, which are comparable to top-tier models while offering superior capabilities in processing longer contexts. The core lies in lightning attention and its efficient scaling. To maximize computational capacity, we integrate it with Mixture of Experts (MoE), creating a model with 32 experts and 456 billion total parameters, of which 45.9 billion are activated for each token. We develop an optimized parallel strategy and highly efficient computation-communication overlap techniques for MoE and lightning attention. This approach enables us to conduct efficient training and inference on models with hundreds of billions of parameters across contexts spanning millions of tokens. The context window of MiniMax-Text-01 can reach up to 1 million tokens during training and extrapolate to 4 million tokens during inference at an affordable cost. Our vision-language model, MiniMax-VL-01 is built through continued training with 512 billion vision-language tokens. Experiments on both standard and in-house benchmarks show that our models match the performance of state-of-the-art models like GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-Sonnet while offering 20-32 times longer context window. We publicly release MiniMax-01 at https://github.com/MiniMax-AI.
2501.08314
Mechanics Informatics: A paradigm for efficiently learning constitutive models
cs.CE
Efficient and accurate learning of constitutive laws is crucial for accurately predicting the mechanical behavior of materials under complex loading conditions. Accurate model calibration hinges on a delicate interplay between the information embedded in experimental data and the parameters that define our constitutive models. The information encoded in the parameters of the constitutive model must be complemented by the information in the data used for calibration. This interplay raises fundamental questions: How can we quantify the information content of test data? How much information does a single test convey? Also, how much information is required to accurately learn a constitutive model? To address these questions, we introduce mechanics informatics, a paradigm for efficient and accurate constitutive model learning. At its core is the stress state entropy, a metric quantifying the information content of experimental data. Using this framework, we analyzed specimen geometries with varying information content for learning an anisotropic inelastic law. Specimens with limited information enabled accurate identification of a few parameters sensitive to the information in the data. Furthermore, we optimized specimen design by incorporating stress state entropy into a Bayesian optimization scheme. This led to the design of cruciform specimens with maximized entropy for accurate parameter identification. Conversely, minimizing entropy in Peirs shear specimens yielded a uniform pure shear stress state, showcasing the framework's flexibility in tailoring designs for specific experimental goals. Finally, we addressed experimental uncertainties and demonstrated the potential of transfer learning for replacing challenging testing protocols with simpler alternatives, while preserving calibration accuracy.
2501.08316
Diffusion Adversarial Post-Training for One-Step Video Generation
cs.CV cs.AI cs.LG
The diffusion models are widely used for image and video generation, but their iterative generation process is slow and expansive. While existing distillation approaches have demonstrated the potential for one-step generation in the image domain, they still suffer from significant quality degradation. In this work, we propose Adversarial Post-Training (APT) against real data following diffusion pre-training for one-step video generation. To improve the training stability and quality, we introduce several improvements to the model architecture and training procedures, along with an approximated R1 regularization objective. Empirically, our experiments show that our adversarial post-trained model, Seaweed-APT, can generate 2-second, 1280x720, 24fps videos in real time using a single forward evaluation step. Additionally, our model is capable of generating 1024px images in a single step, achieving quality comparable to state-of-the-art methods.
2501.08317
A Similarity Measure Between Functions with Applications to Statistical Learning and Optimization
cs.LG math.OC stat.ML
In this note, we present a novel measure of similarity between two functions. It quantifies how the sub-optimality gaps of two functions convert to each other, and unifies several existing notions of functional similarity. We show that it has convenient operation rules, and illustrate its use in empirical risk minimization and non-stationary online optimization.
2501.08319
Enhancing Automated Interpretability with Output-Centric Feature Descriptions
cs.CL
Automated interpretability pipelines generate natural language descriptions for the concepts represented by features in large language models (LLMs), such as plants or the first word in a sentence. These descriptions are derived using inputs that activate the feature, which may be a dimension or a direction in the model's representation space. However, identifying activating inputs is costly, and the mechanistic role of a feature in model behavior is determined both by how inputs cause a feature to activate and by how feature activation affects outputs. Using steering evaluations, we reveal that current pipelines provide descriptions that fail to capture the causal effect of the feature on outputs. To fix this, we propose efficient, output-centric methods for automatically generating feature descriptions. These methods use the tokens weighted higher after feature stimulation or the highest weight tokens after applying the vocabulary "unembedding" head directly to the feature. Our output-centric descriptions better capture the causal effect of a feature on model outputs than input-centric descriptions, but combining the two leads to the best performance on both input and output evaluations. Lastly, we show that output-centric descriptions can be used to find inputs that activate features previously thought to be "dead".
2501.08322
Exploring Robustness of Multilingual LLMs on Real-World Noisy Data
cs.CL
Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on Web data that might contain spelling errors made by humans. But do they become robust to similar real-world noise? In this paper, we investigate the effect of real-world spelling mistakes on the performance of 9 language models, with parameters ranging from 0.2B to 13B, in 3 different NLP tasks, namely Natural Language Inference (NLI), Name Entity Recognition (NER), and Intent Classification (IC). We perform our experiments on 6 different languages and build a dictionary of real-world noise for them using the Wikipedia edit history. We show that the performance gap of the studied models on the clean and noisy test data averaged across all the datasets and languages ranges from 2.3 to 4.3 absolute percentage points. In addition, mT5 models, in general, show more robustness compared to BLOOM, Falcon, and BERT-like models. In particular, mT5 (13B), was the most robust on average overall, across the 3 tasks, and in 4 of the 6 languages.
2501.08324
ADAM-1: AI and Bioinformatics for Alzheimer's Detection and Microbiome-Clinical Data Integrations
cs.AI
The Alzheimer's Disease Analysis Model Generation 1 (ADAM) is a multi-agent large language model (LLM) framework designed to integrate and analyze multi-modal data, including microbiome profiles, clinical datasets, and external knowledge bases, to enhance the understanding and detection of Alzheimer's disease (AD). By leveraging retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques along with its multi-agent architecture, ADAM-1 synthesizes insights from diverse data sources and contextualizes findings using literature-driven evidence. Comparative evaluation against XGBoost revealed similar mean F1 scores but significantly reduced variance for ADAM-1, highlighting its robustness and consistency, particularly in small laboratory datasets. While currently tailored for binary classification tasks, future iterations aim to incorporate additional data modalities, such as neuroimaging and biomarkers, to broaden the scalability and applicability for Alzheimer's research and diagnostics.
2501.08325
GameFactory: Creating New Games with Generative Interactive Videos
cs.CV
Generative game engines have the potential to revolutionize game development by autonomously creating new content and reducing manual workload. However, existing video-based game generation methods fail to address the critical challenge of scene generalization, limiting their applicability to existing games with fixed styles and scenes. In this paper, we present GameFactory, a framework focused on exploring scene generalization in game video generation. To enable the creation of entirely new and diverse games, we leverage pre-trained video diffusion models trained on open-domain video data. To bridge the domain gap between open-domain priors and small-scale game dataset, we propose a multi-phase training strategy that decouples game style learning from action control, preserving open-domain generalization while achieving action controllability. Using Minecraft as our data source, we release GF-Minecraft, a high-quality and diversity action-annotated video dataset for research. Furthermore, we extend our framework to enable autoregressive action-controllable game video generation, allowing the production of unlimited-length interactive game videos. Experimental results demonstrate that GameFactory effectively generates open-domain, diverse, and action-controllable game videos, representing a significant step forward in AI-driven game generation. Our dataset and project page are publicly available at \url{https://vvictoryuki.github.io/gamefactory/}.
2501.08326
Omni-RGPT: Unifying Image and Video Region-level Understanding via Token Marks
cs.CV
We present Omni-RGPT, a multimodal large language model designed to facilitate region-level comprehension for both images and videos. To achieve consistent region representation across spatio-temporal dimensions, we introduce Token Mark, a set of tokens highlighting the target regions within the visual feature space. These tokens are directly embedded into spatial regions using region prompts (e.g., boxes or masks) and simultaneously incorporated into the text prompt to specify the target, establishing a direct connection between visual and text tokens. To further support robust video understanding without requiring tracklets, we introduce an auxiliary task that guides Token Mark by leveraging the consistency of the tokens, enabling stable region interpretation across the video. Additionally, we introduce a large-scale region-level video instruction dataset (RegVID-300k). Omni-RGPT achieves state-of-the-art results on image and video-based commonsense reasoning benchmarks while showing strong performance in captioning and referring expression comprehension tasks.
2501.08328
PokerBench: Training Large Language Models to become Professional Poker Players
cs.CL cs.AI cs.GT
We introduce PokerBench - a benchmark for evaluating the poker-playing abilities of large language models (LLMs). As LLMs excel in traditional NLP tasks, their application to complex, strategic games like poker poses a new challenge. Poker, an incomplete information game, demands a multitude of skills such as mathematics, reasoning, planning, strategy, and a deep understanding of game theory and human psychology. This makes Poker the ideal next frontier for large language models. PokerBench consists of a comprehensive compilation of 11,000 most important scenarios, split between pre-flop and post-flop play, developed in collaboration with trained poker players. We evaluate prominent models including GPT-4, ChatGPT 3.5, and various Llama and Gemma series models, finding that all state-of-the-art LLMs underperform in playing optimal poker. However, after fine-tuning, these models show marked improvements. We validate PokerBench by having models with different scores compete with each other, demonstrating that higher scores on PokerBench lead to higher win rates in actual poker games. Through gameplay between our fine-tuned model and GPT-4, we also identify limitations of simple supervised fine-tuning for learning optimal playing strategy, suggesting the need for more advanced methodologies for effectively training language models to excel in games. PokerBench thus presents a unique benchmark for a quick and reliable evaluation of the poker-playing ability of LLMs as well as a comprehensive benchmark to study the progress of LLMs in complex game-playing scenarios.
2501.08329
Predicting 4D Hand Trajectory from Monocular Videos
cs.CV
We present HaPTIC, an approach that infers coherent 4D hand trajectories from monocular videos. Current video-based hand pose reconstruction methods primarily focus on improving frame-wise 3D pose using adjacent frames rather than studying consistent 4D hand trajectories in space. Despite the additional temporal cues, they generally underperform compared to image-based methods due to the scarcity of annotated video data. To address these issues, we repurpose a state-of-the-art image-based transformer to take in multiple frames and directly predict a coherent trajectory. We introduce two types of lightweight attention layers: cross-view self-attention to fuse temporal information, and global cross-attention to bring in larger spatial context. Our method infers 4D hand trajectories similar to the ground truth while maintaining strong 2D reprojection alignment. We apply the method to both egocentric and allocentric videos. It significantly outperforms existing methods in global trajectory accuracy while being comparable to the state-of-the-art in single-image pose estimation. Project website: https://judyye.github.io/haptic-www
2501.08330
Gradient Equilibrium in Online Learning: Theory and Applications
cs.LG math.OC math.ST stat.ML stat.TH
We present a new perspective on online learning that we refer to as gradient equilibrium: a sequence of iterates achieves gradient equilibrium if the average of gradients of losses along the sequence converges to zero. In general, this condition is not implied by, nor implies, sublinear regret. It turns out that gradient equilibrium is achievable by standard online learning methods such as gradient descent and mirror descent with constant step sizes (rather than decaying step sizes, as is usually required for no regret). Further, as we show through examples, gradient equilibrium translates into an interpretable and meaningful property in online prediction problems spanning regression, classification, quantile estimation, and others. Notably, we show that the gradient equilibrium framework can be used to develop a debiasing scheme for black-box predictions under arbitrary distribution shift, based on simple post hoc online descent updates. We also show that post hoc gradient updates can be used to calibrate predicted quantiles under distribution shift, and that the framework leads to unbiased Elo scores for pairwise preference prediction.
2501.08331
Go-with-the-Flow: Motion-Controllable Video Diffusion Models Using Real-Time Warped Noise
cs.CV
Generative modeling aims to transform random noise into structured outputs. In this work, we enhance video diffusion models by allowing motion control via structured latent noise sampling. This is achieved by just a change in data: we pre-process training videos to yield structured noise. Consequently, our method is agnostic to diffusion model design, requiring no changes to model architectures or training pipelines. Specifically, we propose a novel noise warping algorithm, fast enough to run in real time, that replaces random temporal Gaussianity with correlated warped noise derived from optical flow fields, while preserving the spatial Gaussianity. The efficiency of our algorithm enables us to fine-tune modern video diffusion base models using warped noise with minimal overhead, and provide a one-stop solution for a wide range of user-friendly motion control: local object motion control, global camera movement control, and motion transfer. The harmonization between temporal coherence and spatial Gaussianity in our warped noise leads to effective motion control while maintaining per-frame pixel quality. Extensive experiments and user studies demonstrate the advantages of our method, making it a robust and scalable approach for controlling motion in video diffusion models. Video results are available on our webpage: https://eyeline-research.github.io/Go-with-the-Flow. Source code and model checkpoints are available on GitHub: https://github.com/Eyeline-Research/Go-with-the-Flow.
2501.08332
MangaNinja: Line Art Colorization with Precise Reference Following
cs.CV
Derived from diffusion models, MangaNinjia specializes in the task of reference-guided line art colorization. We incorporate two thoughtful designs to ensure precise character detail transcription, including a patch shuffling module to facilitate correspondence learning between the reference color image and the target line art, and a point-driven control scheme to enable fine-grained color matching. Experiments on a self-collected benchmark demonstrate the superiority of our model over current solutions in terms of precise colorization. We further showcase the potential of the proposed interactive point control in handling challenging cases, cross-character colorization, multi-reference harmonization, beyond the reach of existing algorithms.
2501.08333
DAViD: Modeling Dynamic Affordance of 3D Objects using Pre-trained Video Diffusion Models
cs.CV
Understanding the ability of humans to use objects is crucial for AI to improve daily life. Existing studies for learning such ability focus on human-object patterns (e.g., contact, spatial relation, orientation) in static situations, and learning Human-Object Interaction (HOI) patterns over time (i.e., movement of human and object) is relatively less explored. In this paper, we introduce a novel type of affordance named Dynamic Affordance. For a given input 3D object mesh, we learn dynamic affordance which models the distribution of both (1) human motion and (2) human-guided object pose during interactions. As a core idea, we present a method to learn the 3D dynamic affordance from synthetically generated 2D videos, leveraging a pre-trained video diffusion model. Specifically, we propose a pipeline that first generates 2D HOI videos from the 3D object and then lifts them into 3D to generate 4D HOI samples. Once we generate diverse 4D HOI samples on various target objects, we train our DAViD, where we present a method based on the Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) module for pre-trained human motion diffusion model (MDM) and an object pose diffusion model with human pose guidance. Our motion diffusion model is extended for multi-object interactions, demonstrating the advantage of our pipeline with LoRA for combining the concepts of object usage. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate our DAViD outperforms the baselines in generating human motion with HOIs.
2501.08334
High-throughput digital twin framework for predicting neurite deterioration using MetaFormer attention
q-bio.NC cs.CV cs.LG
Neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) cover a variety of conditions, including autism spectrum disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and epilepsy, which impair the central and peripheral nervous systems. Their high comorbidity and complex etiologies present significant challenges for accurate diagnosis and effective treatments. Conventional clinical and experimental studies are time-intensive, burdening research progress considerably. This paper introduces a high-throughput digital twin framework for modeling neurite deteriorations associated with NDDs, integrating synthetic data generation, experimental images, and machine learning (ML) models. The synthetic data generator utilizes an isogeometric analysis (IGA)-based phase field model to capture diverse neurite deterioration patterns such as neurite retraction, atrophy, and fragmentation while mitigating the limitations of scarce experimental data. The ML model utilizes MetaFormer-based gated spatiotemporal attention architecture with deep temporal layers and provides fast predictions. The framework effectively captures long-range temporal dependencies and intricate morphological transformations with average errors of 1.9641% and 6.0339% for synthetic and experimental neurite deterioration, respectively. Seamlessly integrating simulations, experiments, and ML, the digital twin framework can guide researchers to make informed experimental decisions by predicting potential experimental outcomes, significantly reducing costs and saving valuable time. It can also advance our understanding of neurite deterioration and provide a scalable solution for exploring complex neurological mechanisms, contributing to the development of targeted treatments.
2501.08335
MERaLiON-TextLLM: Cross-Lingual Understanding of Large Language Models in Chinese, Indonesian, Malay, and Singlish
cs.CL cs.AI
Multilingual large language models (MLLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across a variety of languages. However, efficacy can differ greatly between different language families, especially for those with limited linguistic resources. This report presents MERaLiON-TextLLM, a series of open-source language models specifically tailored to improve understanding and generation in Chinese, Indonesian, Malay, and Singlish. The initial released model is built on Llama-3-8B-Base and refined through a meticulously crafted process of continued pre-training and weight merging. Our approach achieves performance improvements across benchmarks in these languages, exceeding the capabilities of the official Llama-3 models. We provide the model checkpoints as a resource to support further research and development in cross-lingual language understanding.
2501.08339
Operator Learning for Reconstructing Flow Fields from Sparse Measurements: an Energy Transformer Approach
physics.flu-dyn cs.AI cs.CE
Machine learning methods have shown great success in various scientific areas, including fluid mechanics. However, reconstruction problems, where full velocity fields must be recovered from partial observations, remain challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel operator learning framework for solving reconstruction problems by using the Energy Transformer (ET), an architecture inspired by associative memory models. We formulate reconstruction as a mapping from incomplete observed data to full reconstructed fields. The method is validated on three fluid mechanics examples using diverse types of data: (1) unsteady 2D vortex street in flow past a cylinder using simulation data; (2) high-speed under-expanded impinging supersonic jets impingement using Schlieren imaging; and (3) 3D turbulent jet flow using particle tracking. The results demonstrate the ability of ET to accurately reconstruct complex flow fields from highly incomplete data (90\% missing), even for noisy experimental measurements, with fast training and inference on a single GPU. This work provides a promising new direction for tackling reconstruction problems in fluid mechanics and other areas in mechanics, geophysics, weather prediction, and beyond.
2501.08341
Dissecting a Small Artificial Neural Network
cond-mat.dis-nn cond-mat.stat-mech cs.LG physics.comp-ph
We investigate the loss landscape and backpropagation dynamics of convergence for the simplest possible artificial neural network representing the logical exclusive-OR (XOR) gate. Cross-sections of the loss landscape in the nine-dimensional parameter space are found to exhibit distinct features, which help understand why backpropagation efficiently achieves convergence toward zero loss, whereas values of weights and biases keep drifting. Differences in shapes of cross-sections obtained by nonrandomized and randomized batches are discussed. In reference to statistical physics we introduce the microcanonical entropy as a unique quantity that allows to characterize the phase behavior of the network. Learning in neural networks can thus be thought of as an annealing process that experiences the analogue of phase transitions known from thermodynamic systems. It also reveals how the loss landscape simplifies as more hidden neurons are added to the network, eliminating entropic barriers caused by finite-size effects.
2501.08347
SCOT: Self-Supervised Contrastive Pretraining For Zero-Shot Compositional Retrieval
cs.CV cs.AI
Compositional image retrieval (CIR) is a multimodal learning task where a model combines a query image with a user-provided text modification to retrieve a target image. CIR finds applications in a variety of domains including product retrieval (e-commerce) and web search. Existing methods primarily focus on fully-supervised learning, wherein models are trained on datasets of labeled triplets such as FashionIQ and CIRR. This poses two significant challenges: (i) curating such triplet datasets is labor intensive; and (ii) models lack generalization to unseen objects and domains. In this work, we propose SCOT (Self-supervised COmpositional Training), a novel zero-shot compositional pretraining strategy that combines existing large image-text pair datasets with the generative capabilities of large language models to contrastively train an embedding composition network. Specifically, we show that the text embedding from a large-scale contrastively-pretrained vision-language model can be utilized as proxy target supervision during compositional pretraining, replacing the target image embedding. In zero-shot settings, this strategy surpasses SOTA zero-shot compositional retrieval methods as well as many fully-supervised methods on standard benchmarks such as FashionIQ and CIRR.
2501.08352
A Preliminary Survey of Semantic Descriptive Model for Images
cs.DL cs.CV
Considering the lack of a unified framework for image description and deep cultural analysis at the subject level in the field of Ancient Chinese Paintings (ACP), this study utilized the Beijing Palace Museum's ACP collections to develop a semantic model integrating the iconological theory with a new workflow for term extraction and mapping. Our findings underscore the model's effectiveness. SDM can be used to support further art-related knowledge organization and cultural exploration of ACPs.
2501.08361
Weight Averaging for Out-of-Distribution Generalization and Few-Shot Domain Adaptation
cs.CV cs.LG
Empirical risk minimization (ERM) is not robust to changes in the distribution of data. When the distribution of test data is different from that of training data, the problem is known as out-of-distribution generalization. Recently, two techniques have been developed for addressing out-of-distribution generalization in computer vision: weight averaging (WA) and sharpness-aware minimization (SAM). WA involves training multiple models with different hyperparameters and then averaging the weights of these models, which can significantly improve out-of-distribution generalization performance. SAM optimizes a neural network to find minima in flat regions, which have been proven to perform well under distribution shifts. While these techniques have made great progress, there is still room for improvement and further exploration. In this thesis, we propose increasing the model diversity in WA explicitly by introducing gradient similarity as a loss regularizer to further improve out-of-distribution generalization performance. We also propose combining WA and SAM to solve the problem of few-shot domain adaptation. Our extensive experiments on digits datasets (MNIST, SVHN, USPS, MNIST-M) and other domain adaptation datasets (VLCS, PACS) show that combining WA and SAM leads to improved out-of-distribution generalization performance and significantly increases few-shot domain adaptation accuracy.
2501.08365
Towards Best Practices for Open Datasets for LLM Training
cs.CY cs.AI cs.CL cs.LG
Many AI companies are training their large language models (LLMs) on data without the permission of the copyright owners. The permissibility of doing so varies by jurisdiction: in countries like the EU and Japan, this is allowed under certain restrictions, while in the United States, the legal landscape is more ambiguous. Regardless of the legal status, concerns from creative producers have led to several high-profile copyright lawsuits, and the threat of litigation is commonly cited as a reason for the recent trend towards minimizing the information shared about training datasets by both corporate and public interest actors. This trend in limiting data information causes harm by hindering transparency, accountability, and innovation in the broader ecosystem by denying researchers, auditors, and impacted individuals access to the information needed to understand AI models. While this could be mitigated by training language models on open access and public domain data, at the time of writing, there are no such models (trained at a meaningful scale) due to the substantial technical and sociological challenges in assembling the necessary corpus. These challenges include incomplete and unreliable metadata, the cost and complexity of digitizing physical records, and the diverse set of legal and technical skills required to ensure relevance and responsibility in a quickly changing landscape. Building towards a future where AI systems can be trained on openly licensed data that is responsibly curated and governed requires collaboration across legal, technical, and policy domains, along with investments in metadata standards, digitization, and fostering a culture of openness.
2501.08370
3D Gaussian Splatting with Normal Information for Mesh Extraction and Improved Rendering
cs.GR cs.CV
Differentiable 3D Gaussian splatting has emerged as an efficient and flexible rendering technique for representing complex scenes from a collection of 2D views and enabling high-quality real-time novel-view synthesis. However, its reliance on photometric losses can lead to imprecisely reconstructed geometry and extracted meshes, especially in regions with high curvature or fine detail. We propose a novel regularization method using the gradients of a signed distance function estimated from the Gaussians, to improve the quality of rendering while also extracting a surface mesh. The regularizing normal supervision facilitates better rendering and mesh reconstruction, which is crucial for downstream applications in video generation, animation, AR-VR and gaming. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on datasets such as Mip-NeRF360, Tanks and Temples, and Deep-Blending. Our method scores higher on photorealism metrics compared to other mesh extracting rendering methods without compromising mesh quality.
2501.08389
Toward Zero-Shot User Intent Recognition in Shared Autonomy
cs.RO cs.HC
A fundamental challenge of shared autonomy is to use high-DoF robots to assist, rather than hinder, humans by first inferring user intent and then empowering the user to achieve their intent. Although successful, prior methods either rely heavily on a priori knowledge of all possible human intents or require many demonstrations and interactions with the human to learn these intents before being able to assist the user. We propose and study a zero-shot, vision-only shared autonomy (VOSA) framework designed to allow robots to use end-effector vision to estimate zero-shot human intents in conjunction with blended control to help humans accomplish manipulation tasks with unknown and dynamically changing object locations. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our VOSA framework, we instantiate a simple version of VOSA on a Kinova Gen3 manipulator and evaluate our system by conducting a user study on three tabletop manipulation tasks. The performance of VOSA matches that of an oracle baseline model that receives privileged knowledge of possible human intents while also requiring significantly less effort than unassisted teleoperation. In more realistic settings, where the set of possible human intents is fully or partially unknown, we demonstrate that VOSA requires less human effort and time than baseline approaches while being preferred by a majority of the participants. Our results demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of using off-the-shelf vision algorithms to enable flexible and beneficial shared control of a robot manipulator. Code and videos available here: https://sites.google.com/view/zeroshot-sharedautonomy/home.
2501.08393
Empathetic Conversational Agents: Utilizing Neural and Physiological Signals for Enhanced Empathetic Interactions
cs.HC cs.LG
Conversational agents (CAs) are revolutionizing human-computer interaction by evolving from text-based chatbots to empathetic digital humans (DHs) capable of rich emotional expressions. This paper explores the integration of neural and physiological signals into the perception module of CAs to enhance empathetic interactions. By leveraging these cues, the study aims to detect emotions in real-time and generate empathetic responses and expressions. We conducted a user study where participants engaged in conversations with a DH about emotional topics. The DH responded and displayed expressions by mirroring detected emotions in real-time using neural and physiological cues. The results indicate that participants experienced stronger emotions and greater engagement during interactions with the Empathetic DH, demonstrating the effectiveness of incorporating neural and physiological signals for real-time emotion recognition. However, several challenges were identified, including recognition accuracy, emotional transition speeds, individual personality effects, and limitations in voice tone modulation. Addressing these challenges is crucial for further refining Empathetic DHs and fostering meaningful connections between humans and artificial entities. Overall, this research advances human-agent interaction and highlights the potential of real-time neural and physiological emotion recognition in creating empathetic DHs.
2501.08397
Predict Confidently, Predict Right: Abstention in Dynamic Graph Learning
cs.LG cs.SI
Many real-world systems can be modeled as dynamic graphs, where nodes and edges evolve over time, requiring specialized models to capture their evolving dynamics in risk-sensitive applications effectively. Temporal graph neural networks (GNNs) are one such category of specialized models. For the first time, our approach integrates a reject option strategy within the framework of GNNs for continuous-time dynamic graphs. This allows the model to strategically abstain from making predictions when the uncertainty is high and confidence is low, thus minimizing the risk of critical misclassification and enhancing the results and reliability. We propose a coverage-based abstention prediction model to implement the reject option that maximizes prediction within a specified coverage. It improves the prediction score for link prediction and node classification tasks. Temporal GNNs deal with extremely skewed datasets for the next state prediction or node classification task. In the case of class imbalance, our method can be further tuned to provide a higher weightage to the minority class. Exhaustive experiments are presented on four datasets for dynamic link prediction and two datasets for dynamic node classification tasks. This demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach in improving the reliability and area under the curve (AUC)/ average precision (AP) scores for predictions in dynamic graph scenarios. The results highlight our model's ability to efficiently handle the trade-offs between prediction confidence and coverage, making it a dependable solution for applications requiring high precision in dynamic and uncertain environments.
2501.08401
Navigating Gender Disparities in Communication Research Leadership: Academic Recognition, Career Development, and Compensation
cs.DL cs.SI
This study examines gender disparities in communication research through citation metrics, authorship patterns, team composition, and faculty salaries. Using data from 62,359 papers across 121 communication journals, we find that while female authors are increasingly represented, citation gaps persist, with sole-authored papers by women receiving fewer citations than those by men, especially in smaller teams. Team composition analysis reveals a tendency toward gender homophily, with single-gender teams being more common. In top U.S. communication journals, female authors face underrepresentation and citation disparities favoring male authors. Salary analysis from leading U.S. public universities shows that female faculty earn lower salaries at the Assistant Professor level, though disparities lessen at higher ranks. These findings highlight the need for greater efforts to promote gender equity through inclusive collaboration, equitable citation practices, and fair compensation.
2501.08402
Addressing Quality Challenges in Deep Learning: The Role of MLOps and Domain Knowledge
cs.SE cs.AI
Deep learning (DL) systems present unique challenges in software engineering, especially concerning quality attributes like correctness and resource efficiency. While DL models excel in specific tasks, engineering DL systems is still essential. The effort, cost, and potential diminishing returns of continual improvements must be carefully evaluated, as software engineers often face the critical decision of when to stop refining a system relative to its quality attributes. This experience paper explores the role of MLOps practices -- such as monitoring and experiment tracking -- in creating transparent and reproducible experimentation environments that enable teams to assess and justify the impact of design decisions on quality attributes. Furthermore, we report on experiences addressing the quality challenges by embedding domain knowledge into the design of a DL model and its integration within a larger system. The findings offer actionable insights into the benefits of domain knowledge and MLOps and the strategic consideration of when to limit further optimizations in DL projects to maximize overall system quality and reliability.
2501.08406
OptiChat: Bridging Optimization Models and Practitioners with Large Language Models
cs.HC cs.CL cs.LG math.OC
Optimization models have been applied to solve a wide variety of decision-making problems. These models are usually developed by optimization experts but are used by practitioners without optimization expertise in various application domains. As a result, practitioners often struggle to interact with and draw useful conclusions from optimization models independently. To fill this gap, we introduce OptiChat, a natural language dialogue system designed to help practitioners interpret model formulation, diagnose infeasibility, analyze sensitivity, retrieve information, evaluate modifications, and provide counterfactual explanations. By augmenting large language models (LLMs) with functional calls and code generation tailored for optimization models, we enable seamless interaction and minimize the risk of hallucinations in OptiChat. We develop a new dataset to evaluate OptiChat's performance in explaining optimization models. Experiments demonstrate that OptiChat effectively bridges the gap between optimization models and practitioners, delivering autonomous, accurate, and instant responses.
2501.08408
Leveraging 2D Masked Reconstruction for Domain Adaptation of 3D Pose Estimation
cs.CV cs.LG
RGB-based 3D pose estimation methods have been successful with the development of deep learning and the emergence of high-quality 3D pose datasets. However, most existing methods do not operate well for testing images whose distribution is far from that of training data. However, most existing methods do not operate well for testing images whose distribution is far from that of training data. This problem might be alleviated by involving diverse data during training, however it is non-trivial to collect such diverse data with corresponding labels (i.e. 3D pose). In this paper, we introduced an unsupervised domain adaptation framework for 3D pose estimation that utilizes the unlabeled data in addition to labeled data via masked image modeling (MIM) framework. Foreground-centric reconstruction and attention regularization are further proposed to increase the effectiveness of unlabeled data usage. Experiments are conducted on the various datasets in human and hand pose estimation tasks, especially using the cross-domain scenario. We demonstrated the effectiveness of ours by achieving the state-of-the-art accuracy on all datasets.
2501.08411
BiDepth Multimodal Neural Network: Bidirectional Depth Deep Learning Architecture for Spatial-Temporal Prediction
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CV stat.AP
Accurate prediction of spatial-temporal (ST) information in dynamic systems, such as urban mobility and weather patterns, is a crucial yet challenging problem. The complexity stems from the intricate interplay between spatial proximity and temporal relevance, where both long-term trends and short-term fluctuations are present in convoluted patterns. Existing approaches, including traditional statistical methods and conventional neural networks, may provide inaccurate results due to the lack of an effective mechanism that simultaneously incorporates information at variable temporal depths while maintaining spatial context, resulting in a trade-off between comprehensive long-term historical analysis and responsiveness to short-term new information. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes the BiDepth Multimodal Neural Network (BDMNN) with bidirectional depth modulation that enables a comprehensive understanding of both long-term seasonality and short-term fluctuations, adapting to the complex ST context. Case studies with real-world public data demonstrate significant improvements in prediction accuracy, with a 12% reduction in Mean Squared Error for urban traffic prediction and a 15% improvement in rain precipitation forecasting compared to state-of-the-art benchmarks, without demanding extra computational resources.
2501.08413
Ensemble of Large Language Models for Curated Labeling and Rating of Free-text Data
cs.CL
Free-text responses are commonly collected in psychological studies, providing rich qualitative insights that quantitative measures may not capture. Labeling curated topics of research interest in free-text data by multiple trained human coders is typically labor-intensive and time-consuming. Though large language models (LLMs) excel in language processing, LLM-assisted labeling techniques relying on closed-source LLMs cannot be directly applied to free-text data, without explicit consent for external use. In this study, we propose a framework of assembling locally-deployable LLMs to enhance the labeling of predetermined topics in free-text data under privacy constraints. Analogous to annotation by multiple human raters, this framework leverages the heterogeneity of diverse open-source LLMs. The ensemble approach seeks a balance between the agreement and disagreement across LLMs, guided by a relevancy scoring methodology that utilizes embedding distances between topic descriptions and LLMs' reasoning. We evaluated the ensemble approach using both publicly accessible Reddit data from eating disorder related forums, and free-text responses from eating disorder patients, both complemented by human annotations. We found that: (1) there is heterogeneity in the performance of labeling among same-sized LLMs, with some showing low sensitivity but high precision, while others exhibit high sensitivity but low precision. (2) Compared to individual LLMs, the ensemble of LLMs achieved the highest accuracy and optimal precision-sensitivity trade-off in predicting human annotations. (3) The relevancy scores across LLMs showed greater agreement than dichotomous labels, indicating that the relevancy scoring method effectively mitigates the heterogeneity in LLMs' labeling.
2501.08415
Cross-Modal Transferable Image-to-Video Attack on Video Quality Metrics
cs.CV cs.AI
Recent studies have revealed that modern image and video quality assessment (IQA/VQA) metrics are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. An attacker can manipulate a video through preprocessing to artificially increase its quality score according to a certain metric, despite no actual improvement in visual quality. Most of the attacks studied in the literature are white-box attacks, while black-box attacks in the context of VQA have received less attention. Moreover, some research indicates a lack of transferability of adversarial examples generated for one model to another when applied to VQA. In this paper, we propose a cross-modal attack method, IC2VQA, aimed at exploring the vulnerabilities of modern VQA models. This approach is motivated by the observation that the low-level feature spaces of images and videos are similar. We investigate the transferability of adversarial perturbations across different modalities; specifically, we analyze how adversarial perturbations generated on a white-box IQA model with an additional CLIP module can effectively target a VQA model. The addition of the CLIP module serves as a valuable aid in increasing transferability, as the CLIP model is known for its effective capture of low-level semantics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IC2VQA achieves a high success rate in attacking three black-box VQA models. We compare our method with existing black-box attack strategies, highlighting its superiority in terms of attack success within the same number of iterations and levels of attack strength. We believe that the proposed method will contribute to the deeper analysis of robust VQA metrics.
2501.08416
A Survey on Recent Advances in Self-Organizing Maps
cs.NE cs.AI
Self-organising maps are a powerful tool for cluster analysis in a wide range of data contexts. From the pioneer work of Kohonen, many variants and improvements have been proposed. This review focuses on the last decade, in order to provide an overview of the main evolution of the seminal SOM algorithm as well as of the methodological developments that have been achieved in order to better fit to various application contexts and users' requirements. We also highlight a specific and important application field that is related to commercial use of SOM, which involves specific data management.
2501.08418
CVaR-Based Variational Quantum Optimization for User Association in Handoff-Aware Vehicular Networks
cs.LG cs.AI cs.NI cs.SY eess.SY
Efficient resource allocation is essential for optimizing various tasks in wireless networks, which are usually formulated as generalized assignment problems (GAP). GAP, as a generalized version of the linear sum assignment problem, involves both equality and inequality constraints that add computational challenges. In this work, we present a novel Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR)-based Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) framework to address GAP in vehicular networks (VNets). Our approach leverages a hybrid quantum-classical structure, integrating a tailored cost function that balances both objective and constraint-specific penalties to improve solution quality and stability. Using the CVaR-VQE model, we handle the GAP efficiently by focusing optimization on the lower tail of the solution space, enhancing both convergence and resilience on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. We apply this framework to a user-association problem in VNets, where our method achieves 23.5% improvement compared to the deep neural network (DNN) approach.
2501.08420
Nonlinear Modeling of a PEM Fuel Cell System; a Practical Study with Experimental Validation
eess.SY cs.SY
In this paper, a nonlinear six order model is proposed for a proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) as a control-oriented electrochemical model. Its validation is performed on a specific single cell PEMFC with effective dimension of 5 cm5 cm. This model is described in the nonlinear state space form with 6 state variables. Load current and DC voltage are considered as measurable disturbance and control input respectively. Besides, the model includes fuel cell stack and its auxiliary components as well. In this survey, a nonlinear state space representation is derived by arranging nonlinear equations and combining them with auxiliary components model. The proposed model can be successfully used to design nonlinear controller and nonlinear observer systems. The analyzed PEMFC system consists of air compressor motor dynamic equations, air and fuel supply subsystems, a perfect air humidifier and a fuel cell stack. An experimentally validated nonlinear model that reproduces the most typical features of a laboratory PEMFC system is presented. This model is derived based on physics law in stack, including system gases dynamics. The objective of this paper is to introduce a fully analytical model which has been fully validated on a fuel cell system and its auxiliary components. The proposed method can be used as a general modeling guideline for control-oriented purposes. Moreover, it can be successfully implemented in composing a dynamic subsystem, like hydrogen subsystem, as part of the whole nonlinear model.
2501.08421
SEAL: Speaker Error Correction using Acoustic-conditioned Large Language Models
eess.AS cs.AI cs.CL cs.LG cs.SD
Speaker Diarization (SD) is a crucial component of modern end-to-end ASR pipelines. Traditional SD systems, which are typically audio-based and operate independently of ASR, often introduce speaker errors, particularly during speaker transitions and overlapping speech. Recently, language models including fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) have shown to be effective as a second-pass speaker error corrector by leveraging lexical context in the transcribed output. In this work, we introduce a novel acoustic conditioning approach to provide more fine-grained information from the acoustic diarizer to the LLM. We also show that a simpler constrained decoding strategy reduces LLM hallucinations, while avoiding complicated post-processing. Our approach significantly reduces the speaker error rates by 24-43% across Fisher, Callhome, and RT03-CTS datasets, compared to the first-pass Acoustic SD.
2501.08423
A Constant Velocity Latent Dynamics Approach for Accelerating Simulation of Stiff Nonlinear Systems
stat.ML cs.LG
Solving stiff ordinary differential equations (StODEs) requires sophisticated numerical solvers, which are often computationally expensive. In particular, StODE's often cannot be solved with traditional explicit time integration schemes and one must resort to costly implicit methods to compute solutions. On the other hand, state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) based methods such as Neural ODE (NODE) poorly handle the timescale separation of various elements of the solutions to StODEs and require expensive implicit solvers for integration at inference time. In this work, we embark on a different path which involves learning a latent dynamics for StODEs, in which one completely avoids numerical integration. To that end, we consider a constant velocity latent dynamical system whose solution is a sequence of straight lines. Given the initial condition and parameters of the ODE, the encoder networks learn the slope (i.e the constant velocity) and the initial condition for the latent dynamics. In other words, the solution of the original dynamics is encoded into a sequence of straight lines which can be decoded back to retrieve the actual solution as and when required. Another key idea in our approach is a nonlinear transformation of time, which allows for the "stretching/squeezing" of time in the latent space, thereby allowing for varying levels of attention to different temporal regions in the solution. Additionally, we provide a simple universal-approximation-type proof showing that our approach can approximate the solution of stiff nonlinear system on a compact set to any degree of accuracy, {\epsilon}. We show that the dimension of the latent dynamical system in our approach is independent of {\epsilon}. Numerical investigation on prototype StODEs suggest that our method outperforms state-of-the art machine learning approaches for handling StODEs.
2501.08425
Is Stochastic Gradient Descent Effective? A PDE Perspective on Machine Learning processes
cs.LG math.AP math.PR
In this paper we analyze the behaviour of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD), a widely used method in supervised learning for optimizing neural network weights via a minimization of non-convex loss functions. Since the pioneering work of E, Li and Tai (2017), the underlying structure of such processes can be understood via parabolic PDEs of Fokker-Planck type, which are at the core of our analysis. Even if Fokker-Planck equations have a long history and a extensive literature, almost nothing is known when the potential is non-convex or when the diffusion matrix is degenerate, and this is the main difficulty that we face in our analysis. We identify two different regimes: in the initial phase of SGD, the loss function drives the weights to concentrate around the nearest local minimum. We refer to this phase as the drift regime and we provide quantitative estimates on this concentration phenomenon. Next, we introduce the diffusion regime, where stochastic fluctuations help the learning process to escape suboptimal local minima. We analyze the Mean Exit Time (MET) and prove upper and lower bounds of the MET. Finally, we address the asymptotic convergence of SGD, for a non-convex cost function and a degenerate diffusion matrix, that do not allow to use the standard approaches, and require new techniques. For this purpose, we exploit two different methods: duality and entropy methods. We provide new results about the dynamics and effectiveness of SGD, offering a deep connection between stochastic optimization and PDE theory, and some answers and insights to basic questions in the Machine Learning processes: How long does SGD take to escape from a bad minimum? Do neural network parameters converge using SGD? How do parameters evolve in the first stage of training with SGD?
2501.08426
Causal vs. Anticausal merging of predictors
cs.LG cs.AI stat.ME stat.ML
We study the differences arising from merging predictors in the causal and anticausal directions using the same data. In particular we study the asymmetries that arise in a simple model where we merge the predictors using one binary variable as target and two continuous variables as predictors. We use Causal Maximum Entropy (CMAXENT) as inductive bias to merge the predictors, however, we expect similar differences to hold also when we use other merging methods that take into account asymmetries between cause and effect. We show that if we observe all bivariate distributions, the CMAXENT solution reduces to a logistic regression in the causal direction and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) in the anticausal direction. Furthermore, we study how the decision boundaries of these two solutions differ whenever we observe only some of the bivariate distributions implications for Out-Of-Variable (OOV) generalisation.
2501.08428
Physics-Informed Latent Neural Operator for Real-time Predictions of Complex Physical Systems
cs.LG
Deep operator network (DeepONet) has shown great promise as a surrogate model for systems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs), learning mappings between infinite-dimensional function spaces with high accuracy. However, achieving low generalization errors often requires highly overparameterized networks, posing significant challenges for large-scale, complex systems. To address these challenges, latent DeepONet was proposed, introducing a two-step approach: first, a reduced-order model is used to learn a low-dimensional latent space, followed by operator learning on this latent space. While effective, this method is inherently data-driven, relying on large datasets and making it difficult to incorporate governing physics into the framework. Additionally, the decoupled nature of these steps prevents end-to-end optimization and the ability to handle data scarcity. This work introduces PI-Latent-NO, a physics-informed latent operator learning framework that overcomes these limitations. Our architecture employs two coupled DeepONets in an end-to-end training scheme: the first, termed Latent-DeepONet, identifies and learns the low-dimensional latent space, while the second, Reconstruction-DeepONet, maps the latent representations back to the original physical space. By integrating governing physics directly into the training process, our approach requires significantly fewer data samples while achieving high accuracy. Furthermore, the framework is computationally and memory efficient, exhibiting nearly constant scaling behavior on a single GPU and demonstrating the potential for further efficiency gains with distributed training. We validate the proposed method on high-dimensional parametric PDEs, demonstrating its effectiveness as a proof of concept and its potential scalability for large-scale systems.
2501.08429
Modeling Discrimination with Causal Abstraction
cs.CY cs.AI
A person is directly racially discriminated against only if her race caused her worse treatment. This implies that race is an attribute sufficiently separable from other attributes to isolate its causal role. But race is embedded in a nexus of social factors that resist isolated treatment. If race is socially constructed, in what sense can it cause worse treatment? Some propose that the perception of race, rather than race itself, causes worse treatment. Others suggest that since causal models require modularity, i.e. the ability to isolate causal effects, attempts to causally model discrimination are misguided. This paper addresses the problem differently. We introduce a framework for reasoning about discrimination, in which race is a high-level abstraction of lower-level features. In this framework, race can be modeled as itself causing worse treatment. Modularity is ensured by allowing assumptions about social construction to be precisely and explicitly stated, via an alignment between race and its constituents. Such assumptions can then be subjected to normative and empirical challenges, which lead to different views of when discrimination occurs. By distinguishing constitutive and causal relations, the abstraction framework pinpoints disagreements in the current literature on modeling discrimination, while preserving a precise causal account of discrimination.
2501.08430
Physics-informed neural networks for phase-resolved data assimilation and prediction of nonlinear ocean waves
cs.LG physics.ao-ph physics.flu-dyn
The assimilation and prediction of phase-resolved surface gravity waves are critical challenges in ocean science and engineering. Potential flow theory (PFT) has been widely employed to develop wave models and numerical techniques for wave prediction. However, traditional wave prediction methods are often limited. For example, most simplified wave models have a limited ability to capture strong wave nonlinearity, while fully nonlinear PFT solvers often fail to meet the speed requirements of engineering applications. This computational inefficiency also hinders the development of effective data assimilation techniques, which are required to reconstruct spatial wave information from sparse measurements to initialize the wave prediction. To address these challenges, we propose a novel solver method that leverages physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) that parameterize PFT solutions as neural networks. This provides a computationally inexpensive way to assimilate and predict wave data. The proposed PINN framework is validated through comparisons with analytical linear PFT solutions and experimental data collected in a laboratory wave flume. The results demonstrate that our approach accurately captures and predicts irregular, nonlinear, and dispersive wave surface dynamics. Moreover, the PINN can infer the fully nonlinear velocity potential throughout the entire fluid volume solely from surface elevation measurements, enabling the calculation of fluid velocities that are difficult to measure experimentally.
2501.08435
Secure Composition of Quantum Key Distribution and Symmetric Key Encryption
quant-ph cs.CR cs.IT math.IT
Quantum key distribution (QKD) allows Alice and Bob to share a secret key over an insecure channel with proven information-theoretic security against an adversary whose strategy is bounded only by the laws of physics. Composability-based security proofs of QKD ensure that using the established key with a one-time-pad encryption scheme provides information theoretic secrecy for the message. In this paper, we consider the problem of using the QKD established key with a secure symmetric key-based encryption algorithm and use an approach based on hybrid encryption to provide a proof of security for the composition. Hybrid encryption was first proposed as a public key cryptographic algorithm with proven security for messages of unrestricted length. We use an extension of this framework to correlated randomness setting (Sharifian et al. in ISIT 2021) to propose a quantum-enabled Key Encapsulation Mechanism (qKEM) and quantum-enabled hybrid encryption (qHE), and prove a composition theorem for the security of the qHE. We construct a qKEM with proven security using an existing QKD (Portmann et al. in Rev. of Mod. Physics 2022). Using this qKEM with a secure Data Encapsulation Mechanism (DEM), that can be constructed using a one-time symmetric key encryption scheme, results in an efficient encryption system for unrestricted length messages with proved security against an adversary with access to efficient computations on a quantum computer (i.e. post-quantum secure encryption without using any computational assumptions.)
2501.08440
FARE: A Deep Learning-Based Framework for Radar-based Face Recognition and Out-of-distribution Detection
cs.CV cs.AI cs.LG eess.SP
In this work, we propose a novel pipeline for face recognition and out-of-distribution (OOD) detection using short-range FMCW radar. The proposed system utilizes Range-Doppler and micro Range-Doppler Images. The architecture features a primary path (PP) responsible for the classification of in-distribution (ID) faces, complemented by intermediate paths (IPs) dedicated to OOD detection. The network is trained in two stages: first, the PP is trained using triplet loss to optimize ID face classification. In the second stage, the PP is frozen, and the IPs-comprising simple linear autoencoder networks-are trained specifically for OOD detection. Using our dataset generated with a 60 GHz FMCW radar, our method achieves an ID classification accuracy of 99.30% and an OOD detection AUROC of 96.91%.
2501.08441
Religious Bias Landscape in Language and Text-to-Image Models: Analysis, Detection, and Debiasing Strategies
cs.CL
Note: This paper includes examples of potentially offensive content related to religious bias, presented solely for academic purposes. The widespread adoption of language models highlights the need for critical examinations of their inherent biases, particularly concerning religion. This study systematically investigates religious bias in both language models and text-to-image generation models, analyzing both open-source and closed-source systems. We construct approximately 400 unique, naturally occurring prompts to probe language models for religious bias across diverse tasks, including mask filling, prompt completion, and image generation. Our experiments reveal concerning instances of underlying stereotypes and biases associated disproportionately with certain religions. Additionally, we explore cross-domain biases, examining how religious bias intersects with demographic factors such as gender, age, and nationality. This study further evaluates the effectiveness of targeted debiasing techniques by employing corrective prompts designed to mitigate the identified biases. Our findings demonstrate that language models continue to exhibit significant biases in both text and image generation tasks, emphasizing the urgent need to develop fairer language models to achieve global acceptability.
2501.08442
Jochre 3 and the Yiddish OCR corpus
cs.CL
We describe the construction of a publicly available Yiddish OCR Corpus, and describe and evaluate the open source OCR tool suite Jochre 3, including an Alto editor for corpus annotation, OCR software for Alto OCR layer generation, and a customizable OCR search engine. The current version of the Yiddish OCR corpus contains 658 pages, 186K tokens and 840K glyphs. The Jochre 3 OCR tool uses various fine-tuned YOLOv8 models for top-down page layout analysis, and a custom CNN network for glyph recognition. It attains a CER of 1.5% on our test corpus, far out-performing all other existing public models for Yiddish. We analyzed the full 660M word Yiddish Book Center with Jochre 3 OCR, and the new OCR is searchable through the Yiddish Book Center OCR search engine.
2501.08443
Instruction-Guided Fusion of Multi-Layer Visual Features in Large Vision-Language Models
cs.CV cs.LG
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved remarkable success in a wide range of multimodal tasks by integrating pre-trained vision encoders and large language models. However, current LVLMs primarily rely on visual features extracted from the final layers of the vision encoder, overlooking the complementary information available in shallower layers. While recent approaches have explored the use of multilayer visual features in LVLMs, they tend to be task-agnostic and fail to examine the dependencies of hierarchical visual features on specific tasks. To address these gaps, we systematically investigate the contributions of visual features from different encoder layers using 18 benchmarks spanning 6 task categories. Our findings reveal that multilayer features provide complementary strengths with varying task dependencies, and uniform fusion leads to suboptimal performance. Building on these insights, we propose the instruction-guided vision aggregator, a module that dynamically integrates multi-layer visual features based on textual instructions, without increasing the number of visual tokens. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the superior performance of our method. Additionally, an in-depth analysis of the aggregator's behavior highlights the dominance of mid-to-high-level features in semantic-rich tasks and the critical role of low-level features in fine-grained perception.
2501.08446
Poseidon: A ViT-based Architecture for Multi-Frame Pose Estimation with Adaptive Frame Weighting and Multi-Scale Feature Fusion
cs.CV
Human pose estimation, a vital task in computer vision, involves detecting and localising human joints in images and videos. While single-frame pose estimation has seen significant progress, it often fails to capture the temporal dynamics for understanding complex, continuous movements. We propose Poseidon, a novel multi-frame pose estimation architecture that extends the ViTPose model by integrating temporal information for enhanced accuracy and robustness to address these limitations. Poseidon introduces key innovations: (1) an Adaptive Frame Weighting (AFW) mechanism that dynamically prioritises frames based on their relevance, ensuring that the model focuses on the most informative data; (2) a Multi-Scale Feature Fusion (MSFF) module that aggregates features from different backbone layers to capture both fine-grained details and high-level semantics; and (3) a Cross-Attention module for effective information exchange between central and contextual frames, enhancing the model's temporal coherence. The proposed architecture improves performance in complex video scenarios and offers scalability and computational efficiency suitable for real-world applications. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the PoseTrack21 and PoseTrack18 datasets, achieving mAP scores of 88.3 and 87.8, respectively, outperforming existing methods.
2501.08450
Active Sampling for Node Attribute Completion on Graphs
cs.AI cs.SI
Node attribute, a type of crucial information for graph analysis, may be partially or completely missing for certain nodes in real world applications. Restoring the missing attributes is expected to benefit downstream graph learning. Few attempts have been made on node attribute completion, but a novel framework called Structure-attribute Transformer (SAT) was recently proposed by using a decoupled scheme to leverage structures and attributes. SAT ignores the differences in contributing to the learning schedule and finding a practical way to model the different importance of nodes with observed attributes is challenging. This paper proposes a novel AcTive Sampling algorithm (ATS) to restore missing node attributes. The representativeness and uncertainty of each node's information are first measured based on graph structure, representation similarity and learning bias. To select nodes as train samples in the next optimization step, a weighting scheme controlled by Beta distribution is then introduced to linearly combine the two properties. Extensive experiments on four public benchmark datasets and two downstream tasks have shown the superiority of ATS in node attribute completion.
2501.08453
Vchitect-2.0: Parallel Transformer for Scaling Up Video Diffusion Models
cs.CV cs.LG
We present Vchitect-2.0, a parallel transformer architecture designed to scale up video diffusion models for large-scale text-to-video generation. The overall Vchitect-2.0 system has several key designs. (1) By introducing a novel Multimodal Diffusion Block, our approach achieves consistent alignment between text descriptions and generated video frames, while maintaining temporal coherence across sequences. (2) To overcome memory and computational bottlenecks, we propose a Memory-efficient Training framework that incorporates hybrid parallelism and other memory reduction techniques, enabling efficient training of long video sequences on distributed systems. (3) Additionally, our enhanced data processing pipeline ensures the creation of Vchitect T2V DataVerse, a high-quality million-scale training dataset through rigorous annotation and aesthetic evaluation. Extensive benchmarking demonstrates that Vchitect-2.0 outperforms existing methods in video quality, training efficiency, and scalability, serving as a suitable base for high-fidelity video generation.
2501.08454
Tag&Tab: Pretraining Data Detection in Large Language Models Using Keyword-Based Membership Inference Attack
cs.CR cs.CL
Large language models (LLMs) have become essential digital task assistance tools. Their training relies heavily on the collection of vast amounts of data, which may include copyright-protected or sensitive information. Recent studies on the detection of pretraining data in LLMs have primarily focused on sentence-level or paragraph-level membership inference attacks (MIAs), usually involving probability analysis of the target model prediction tokens. However, the proposed methods often demonstrate poor performance, specifically in terms of accuracy, failing to account for the semantic importance of textual content and word significance. To address these shortcomings, we propose Tag&Tab, a novel approach for detecting data that has been used as part of the LLM pretraining. Our method leverages advanced natural language processing (NLP) techniques to tag keywords in the input text - a process we term Tagging. Then, the LLM is used to obtain the probabilities of these keywords and calculate their average log-likelihood to determine input text membership, a process we refer to as Tabbing. Our experiments on three benchmark datasets (BookMIA, MIMIR, and the Pile) and several open-source LLMs of varying sizes demonstrate an average increase in the AUC scores ranging from 4.1% to 12.1% over state-of-the-art methods. Tag&Tab not only sets a new standard for data leakage detection in LLMs, but its outstanding performance is a testament to the importance of words in MIAs on LLMs.
2501.08455
Keras Sig: Efficient Path Signature Computation on GPU in Keras 3
cs.LG cs.DC
In this paper we introduce Keras Sig a high-performance pythonic library designed to compute path signature for deep learning applications. Entirely built in Keras 3, \textit{Keras Sig} leverages the seamless integration with the mostly used deep learning backends such as PyTorch, JAX and TensorFlow. Inspired by Kidger and Lyons (2021),we proposed a novel approach reshaping signature calculations to leverage GPU parallelism. This adjustment allows us to reduce the training time by 55\% and 5 to 10-fold improvements in direct signature computation compared to existing methods, while maintaining similar CPU performance. Relying on high-level tensor operations instead of low-level C++ code, Keras Sig significantly reduces the versioning and compatibility issues commonly encountered in deep learning libraries, while delivering superior or comparable performance across various hardware configurations. We demonstrate through extensive benchmarking that our approach scales efficiently with the length of input sequences and maintains competitive performance across various signature parameters, though bounded by memory constraints for very large signature dimensions.
2501.08457
Large Language Models For Text Classification: Case Study And Comprehensive Review
cs.CL cs.LG
Unlocking the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in data classification represents a promising frontier in natural language processing. In this work, we evaluate the performance of different LLMs in comparison with state-of-the-art deep-learning and machine-learning models, in two different classification scenarios: i) the classification of employees' working locations based on job reviews posted online (multiclass classification), and 2) the classification of news articles as fake or not (binary classification). Our analysis encompasses a diverse range of language models differentiating in size, quantization, and architecture. We explore the impact of alternative prompting techniques and evaluate the models based on the weighted F1-score. Also, we examine the trade-off between performance (F1-score) and time (inference response time) for each language model to provide a more nuanced understanding of each model's practical applicability. Our work reveals significant variations in model responses based on the prompting strategies. We find that LLMs, particularly Llama3 and GPT-4, can outperform traditional methods in complex classification tasks, such as multiclass classification, though at the cost of longer inference times. In contrast, simpler ML models offer better performance-to-time trade-offs in simpler binary classification tasks.
2501.08458
RWKV-UNet: Improving UNet with Long-Range Cooperation for Effective Medical Image Segmentation
eess.IV cs.CV
In recent years, there have been significant advancements in deep learning for medical image analysis, especially with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and transformer models. However, CNNs face limitations in capturing long-range dependencies while transformers suffer high computational complexities. To address this, we propose RWKV-UNet, a novel model that integrates the RWKV (Receptance Weighted Key Value) structure into the U-Net architecture. This integration enhances the model's ability to capture long-range dependencies and improve contextual understanding, which is crucial for accurate medical image segmentation. We build a strong encoder with developed inverted residual RWKV (IR-RWKV) blocks combining CNNs and RWKVs. We also propose a Cross-Channel Mix (CCM) module to improve skip connections with multi-scale feature fusion, achieving global channel information integration. Experiments on benchmark datasets, including Synapse, ACDC, BUSI, CVC-ClinicDB, CVC-ColonDB, Kvasir-SEG, ISIC 2017 and GLAS show that RWKV-UNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on various types of medical image segmentation. Additionally, smaller variants, RWKV-UNet-S and RWKV-UNet-T, balance accuracy and computational efficiency, making them suitable for broader clinical applications.
2501.08459
Head Motion Degrades Machine Learning Classification of Alzheimer's Disease from Positron Emission Tomography
eess.IV cs.LG
Brain positron emission tomography (PET) imaging is broadly used in research and clinical routines to study, diagnose, and stage Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, its potential cannot be fully exploited yet due to the lack of portable motion correction solutions, especially in clinical settings. Head motion during data acquisition has indeed been shown to degrade image quality and induces tracer uptake quantification error. In this study, we demonstrate that it also biases machine learning-based AD classification. We start by proposing a binary classification algorithm solely based on PET images. We find that it reaches a high accuracy in classifying motion corrected images into cognitive normal or AD. We demonstrate that the classification accuracy substantially decreases when images lack motion correction, thereby limiting the algorithm's effectiveness and biasing image interpretation. We validate these findings in cohorts of 128 $^{11}$C-UCB-J and 173 $^{18}$F-FDG scans, two tracers highly relevant to the study of AD. Classification accuracies decreased by 10% and 5% on 20 $^{18}$F-FDG and 20 $^{11}$C-UCB-J testing cases, respectively. Our findings underscore the critical need for efficient motion correction methods to make the most of the diagnostic capabilities of PET-based machine learning.
2501.08460
Towards Zero-Shot & Explainable Video Description by Reasoning over Graphs of Events in Space and Time
cs.CV cs.AI cs.CL
In the current era of Machine Learning, Transformers have become the de facto approach across a variety of domains, such as computer vision and natural language processing. Transformer-based solutions are the backbone of current state-of-the-art methods for language generation, image and video classification, segmentation, action and object recognition, among many others. Interestingly enough, while these state-of-the-art methods produce impressive results in their respective domains, the problem of understanding the relationship between vision and language is still beyond our reach. In this work, we propose a common ground between vision and language based on events in space and time in an explainable and programmatic way, to connect learning-based vision and language state of the art models and provide a solution to the long standing problem of describing videos in natural language. We validate that our algorithmic approach is able to generate coherent, rich and relevant textual descriptions on videos collected from a variety of datasets, using both standard metrics (e.g. Bleu, ROUGE) and the modern LLM-as-a-Jury approach.
2501.08464
Time series forecasting for multidimensional telemetry data using GAN and BiLSTM in a Digital Twin
cs.LG eess.SP
The research related to digital twins has been increasing in recent years. Besides the mirroring of the physical word into the digital, there is the need of providing services related to the data collected and transferred to the virtual world. One of these services is the forecasting of physical part future behavior, that could lead to applications, like preventing harmful events or designing improvements to get better performance. One strategy used to predict any system operation it is the use of time series models like ARIMA or LSTM, and improvements were implemented using these algorithms. Recently, deep learning techniques based on generative models such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been proposed to create time series and the use of LSTM has gained more relevance in time series forecasting, but both have limitations that restrict the forecasting results. Another issue found in the literature is the challenge of handling multivariate environments/applications in time series generation. Therefore, new methods need to be studied in order to fill these gaps and, consequently, provide better resources for creating useful digital twins. In this proposal, it is going to be studied the integration of a BiLSTM layer with a time series obtained by GAN in order to improve the forecasting of all the features provided by the dataset in terms of accuracy and, consequently, improving behaviour prediction.
2501.08465
Predicting Performance of Object Detection Models in Electron Microscopy Using Random Forests
cs.CV cond-mat.mtrl-sci
Quantifying prediction uncertainty when applying object detection models to new, unlabeled datasets is critical in applied machine learning. This study introduces an approach to estimate the performance of deep learning-based object detection models for quantifying defects in transmission electron microscopy (TEM) images, focusing on detecting irradiation-induced cavities in TEM images of metal alloys. We developed a random forest regression model that predicts the object detection F1 score, a statistical metric used to evaluate the ability to accurately locate and classify objects of interest. The random forest model uses features extracted from the predictions of the object detection model whose uncertainty is being quantified, enabling fast prediction on new, unlabeled images. The mean absolute error (MAE) for predicting F1 of the trained model on test data is 0.09, and the $R^2$ score is 0.77, indicating there is a significant correlation between the random forest regression model predicted and true defect detection F1 scores. The approach is shown to be robust across three distinct TEM image datasets with varying imaging and material domains. Our approach enables users to estimate the reliability of a defect detection and segmentation model predictions and assess the applicability of the model to their specific datasets, providing valuable information about possible domain shifts and whether the model needs to be fine-tuned or trained on additional data to be maximally effective for the desired use case.
2501.08466
A Short-Term Predict-Then-Cluster Framework for Meal Delivery Services
cs.CY cs.AI
Micro-delivery services offer promising solutions for on-demand city logistics, but their success relies on efficient real-time delivery operations and fleet management. On-demand meal delivery platforms seek to optimize real-time operations based on anticipatory insights into citywide demand distributions. To address these needs, this study proposes a short-term predict-then-cluster framework for on-demand meal delivery services. The framework utilizes ensemble-learning methods for point and distributional forecasting with multivariate features, including lagged-dependent inputs to capture demand dynamics. We introduce Constrained K-Means Clustering (CKMC) and Contiguity Constrained Hierarchical Clustering with Iterative Constraint Enforcement (CCHC-ICE) to generate dynamic clusters based on predicted demand and geographical proximity, tailored to user-defined operational constraints. Evaluations of European and Taiwanese case studies demonstrate that the proposed methods outperform traditional time series approaches in both accuracy and computational efficiency. Clustering results demonstrate that the incorporation of distributional predictions effectively addresses demand uncertainties, improving the quality of operational insights. Additionally, a simulation study demonstrates the practical value of short-term demand predictions for proactive strategies, such as idle fleet rebalancing, significantly enhancing delivery efficiency. By addressing demand uncertainties and operational constraints, our predict-then-cluster framework provides actionable insights for optimizing real-time operations. The approach is adaptable to other on-demand platform-based city logistics and passenger mobility services, promoting sustainable and efficient urban operations.
2501.08468
Selective Attention Merging for low resource tasks: A case study of Child ASR
cs.CL cs.SD eess.AS
While Speech Foundation Models (SFMs) excel in various speech tasks, their performance for low-resource tasks such as child Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is hampered by limited pretraining data. To address this, we explore different model merging techniques to leverage knowledge from models trained on larger, more diverse speech corpora. This paper also introduces Selective Attention (SA) Merge, a novel method that selectively merges task vectors from attention matrices to enhance SFM performance on low-resource tasks. Experiments on the MyST database show significant reductions in relative word error rate of up to 14%, outperforming existing model merging and data augmentation techniques. By combining data augmentation techniques with SA Merge, we achieve a new state-of-the-art WER of 8.69 on the MyST database for the Whisper-small model, highlighting the potential of SA Merge for improving low-resource ASR.
2501.08469
Electrostatic Clutches Enable High-Force Mechanical Multiplexing: Demonstrating Single-Motor Full-Actuation of a 4-DoF Hand
cs.RO cs.SY eess.SY
This paper introduces a novel mechanical multiplexing system powered by electrostatic capstan clutches, enabling high-force, single-motor control of multiple degrees of freedom (DoF). The system is capable of both bidirectional single-input single-output time-division and single-input multiple-output multiplexing to actuate a commercial 4-DoF robotic hand with a single motor. Our mechanical multiplexer is also capable of powerless position holding owing to its use of a leadscrew nut acting as the output. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach, achieving individual and simultaneous actuation. This innovation offers a scalable solution for high-DoF robotic systems, providing a path to efficient actuation in robotic platforms.
2501.08470
Detecting Contextual Anomalies by Discovering Consistent Spatial Regions
cs.CV cs.AI
We describe a method for modeling spatial context to enable video anomaly detection. The main idea is to discover regions that share similar object-level activities by clustering joint object attributes using Gaussian mixture models. We demonstrate that this straightforward approach, using orders of magnitude fewer parameters than competing models, achieves state-of-the-art performance in the challenging spatial-context-dependent Street Scene dataset. As a side benefit, the high-resolution discovered regions learned by the model also provide explainable normalcy maps for human operators without the need for any pre-trained segmentation model.
2501.08471
Benchmarking Classical, Deep, and Generative Models for Human Activity Recognition
cs.CV cs.AI
Human Activity Recognition (HAR) has gained significant importance with the growing use of sensor-equipped devices and large datasets. This paper evaluates the performance of three categories of models : classical machine learning, deep learning architectures, and Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) using five key benchmark datasets of HAR (UCI-HAR, OPPORTUNITY, PAMAP2, WISDM, and Berkeley MHAD). We assess various models, including Decision Trees, Random Forests, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), and Deep Belief Networks (DBNs), using metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score for a comprehensive comparison. The results show that CNN models offer superior performance across all datasets, especially on the Berkeley MHAD. Classical models like Random Forest do well on smaller datasets but face challenges with larger, more complex data. RBM-based models also show notable potential, particularly for feature learning. This paper offers a detailed comparison to help researchers choose the most suitable model for HAR tasks.
2501.08472
Energy Storage Arbitrage Under Price Uncertainty: Market Risks and Opportunities
math.OC cs.SY eess.SY
We investigate the profitability and risk of energy storage arbitrage in electricity markets under price uncertainty, exploring both robust and chance-constrained optimization approaches. We analyze various uncertainty representations, including polyhedral, ellipsoidal uncertainty sets and probabilistic approximations, to model price fluctuations and construct efficient frontiers that highlight the tradeoff between risk and profit. Using historical electricity price data, we quantify the impact of uncertainty on arbitrage strategies and compare their performance under distinct market conditions. The results reveal that arbitrage strategies under uncertainties can effectively secure expected profits, and robust strategies perform better in risk management across varying levels of conservativeness, especially under highly volatile market conditions. This work provides insights into storage arbitrage strategy selection for market participants with differing risk preferences, emphasizing the adaptability of efficient frontiers to the electricity market.
2501.08474
The Theater Stage as Laboratory: Review of Real-Time Comedy LLM Systems for Live Performance
cs.CL
In this position paper, we review the eclectic recent history of academic and artistic works involving computational systems for humor generation, and focus specifically on live performance. We make the case that AI comedy should be evaluated in live conditions, in front of audiences sharing either physical or online spaces, and under real-time constraints. We further suggest that improvised comedy is therefore the perfect substrate for deploying and assessing computational humor systems. Using examples of successful AI-infused shows, we demonstrate that live performance raises three sets of challenges for computational humor generation: 1) questions around robotic embodiment, anthropomorphism and competition between humans and machines, 2) questions around comedic timing and the nature of audience interaction, and 3) questions about the human interpretation of seemingly absurd AI-generated humor. We argue that these questions impact the choice of methodologies for evaluating computational humor, as any such method needs to work around the constraints of live audiences and performance spaces. These interrogations also highlight different types of collaborative relationship of human comedians towards AI tools.
2501.08479
Skyrise: Exploiting Serverless Cloud Infrastructure for Elastic Data Processing
cs.DB
Serverless computing offers elasticity unmatched by conventional server-based cloud infrastructure. Although modern data processing systems embrace serverless storage, such as Amazon S3, they continue to manage their compute resources as servers. This is challenging for unpredictable workloads, leaving clusters often underutilized. Recent research shows the potential of serverless compute resources, such as cloud functions, for elastic data processing, but also sees limitations in performance robustness and cost efficiency for long running workloads. These challenges require holistic approaches across the system stack. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no end-to-end data processing system built entirely on serverless infrastructure. In this paper, we present Skyrise, our effort towards building the first fully serverless SQL query processor. Skyrise exploits the elasticity of its underlying infrastructure, while alleviating the inherent limitations with a number of adaptive and cost-aware techniques. We show that both Skyrise's performance and cost are competitive to other cloud data systems for terabyte-scale queries of the analytical TPC-H benchmark.
2501.08490
FLAVARS: A Multimodal Foundational Language and Vision Alignment Model for Remote Sensing
cs.CV cs.LG
Remote sensing imagery is dense with objects and contextual visual information. There is a recent trend to combine paired satellite images and text captions for pretraining performant encoders for downstream tasks. However, while contrastive image-text methods like CLIP enable vision-language alignment and zero-shot classification ability, vision-only downstream performance tends to degrade compared to image-only pretraining, such as MAE. In this paper, we propose FLAVARS, a pretraining method that combines the best of both contrastive learning and masked modeling, along with geospatial alignment via contrastive location encoding. We find that FLAVARS significantly outperforms a baseline of SkyCLIP for vision-only tasks such as KNN classification and semantic segmentation, +6\% mIOU on SpaceNet1, while retaining the ability to perform zero-shot classification, unlike MAE pretrained methods.
2501.08495
Automotive Elevation Mapping with Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar
eess.SP cs.CV eess.IV
Radar is a low-cost and ubiquitous automotive sensor, but is limited by array resolution and sensitivity when performing direction of arrival analysis. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is a class of techniques to improve azimuth resolution and sensitivity for radar. Interferometric SAR (InSAR) can be used to extract elevation from the variations in phase measurements in SAR images. Utilizing InSAR we show that a typical, low-resolution radar array mounted on a vehicle can be used to accurately localize detections in 3D space for both urban and agricultural environments. We generate point clouds in each environment by combining InSAR with a signal processing scheme tailored to automotive driving. This low-compute approach allows radar to be used as a primary sensor to map fine details in complex driving environments, and be used to make autonomous perception decisions.
2501.08496
Quantifying the Importance of Data Alignment in Downstream Model Performance
cs.CL cs.AI cs.LG cs.PL
Contrary to the conventional emphasis on dataset size, we explore the role of data alignment -- an often overlooked aspect of data quality -- in training capable Large Language Models (LLMs). To do so, we use the Task2Vec-based alignment coefficient, a quantitative measure of the similarity between two datasets, to quantify the impact of alignment between training data and evaluation data on downstream performance. In particular, we conduct controlled \textit{interventional} experiments for two settings: 1. the impact of increased alignment coefficients between various pre-training (pt) against evaluation datasets, and 2. the impact of increased alignment coefficients between domain specific fine-tuning (ft) against domain specific evaluation. The domain specific task we explore is Autoformalization -- the machine translation task between natural language and code for formal verification. In both settings, we find a strong, predictable negative correlation between the alignment coefficient of a model's training and evaluation data and the model's loss/perplexity on the respective downstream task. These findings suggest a re-evaluation of LLM training approaches, demonstrating the relevance of data alignment compared to data quantity, especially in specialized downstream tasks such as Autoformalization.
2501.08498
Heterogeneous Update Processes Shape Information Cascades in Social Networks
cs.MA cs.SI
A common assumption in the literature on information diffusion is that populations are homogeneous regarding individuals' information acquisition and propagation process: Individuals update their informed and actively communicating state either through imitation (simple contagion) or peer influence (complex contagion). Here, we study the impact of the mixing and placement of individuals with different update processes on how information cascades in social networks. We consider Simple Spreaders, which take information from a random neighbor and communicate it, and Threshold-based Spreaders, which require a threshold number of active neighbors to change their state to active communication. Even though, in a population made exclusively of Simple Spreaders, information reaches all elements of any (connected) network, we show that, when Simple and Threshold-based Spreaders coexist and occupy random positions in a social network, the number of Simple Spreaders systematically amplifies the cascades only in degree heterogeneous networks (exponential and scale-free). In random and modular structures, this cascading effect originated by Simple Spreaders only exists above a critical mass of these individuals. In contrast, when Threshold-based Spreaders are assorted preferentially in the nodes with a higher degree, the cascading effect of Simple Spreaders vanishes, and the spread of information is drastically impaired. Overall, the study highlights the significance of the strategic placement of different roles in networked structures, with Simple Spreaders driving widespread cascades in heterogeneous networks and Threshold-based Spreaders playing a critical regulatory role in information spread with a tunable effect based on the threshold value.
2501.08501
Scalable Bayesian Physics-Informed Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks
math.NA cs.LG cs.NA
Uncertainty quantification (UQ) plays a pivotal role in scientific machine learning, especially when surrogate models are used to approximate complex systems. Although multilayer perceptions (MLPs) are commonly employed as surrogates, they often suffer from overfitting due to their large number of parameters. Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KANs) offer an alternative solution with fewer parameters. However, gradient-based inference methods, such as Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC), may result in computational inefficiency when applied to KANs, especially for large-scale datasets, due to the high cost of back-propagation. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach, combining the dropout Tikhonov ensemble Kalman inversion (DTEKI) with Chebyshev KANs. This gradient-free method effectively mitigates overfitting and enhances numerical stability. Additionally, we incorporate the active subspace method to reduce the parameter-space dimensionality, allowing us to improve the accuracy of predictions and obtain more reliable uncertainty estimates. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in various test cases, including scenarios with large datasets and high noise levels. Our results show that the new method achieves comparable or better accuracy, much higher efficiency as well as stability compared to HMC, in addition to scalability. Moreover, by leveraging the low-dimensional parameter subspace, our method preserves prediction accuracy while substantially reducing further the computational cost.
2501.08502
Adapting Whisper for Regional Dialects: Enhancing Public Services for Vulnerable Populations in the United Kingdom
cs.CL cs.AI
We collect novel data in the public service domain to evaluate the capability of the state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) models in capturing regional differences in accents in the United Kingdom (UK), specifically focusing on two accents from Scotland with distinct dialects. This study addresses real-world problems where biased ASR models can lead to miscommunication in public services, disadvantaging individuals with regional accents particularly those in vulnerable populations. We first examine the out-of-the-box performance of the Whisper large-v3 model on a baseline dataset and our data. We then explore the impact of fine-tuning Whisper on the performance in the two UK regions and investigate the effectiveness of existing model evaluation techniques for our real-world application through manual inspection of model errors. We observe that the Whisper model has a higher word error rate (WER) on our test datasets compared to the baseline data and fine-tuning on a given data improves performance on the test dataset with the same domain and accent. The fine-tuned models also appear to show improved performance when applied to the test data outside of the region it was trained on suggesting that fine-tuned models may be transferable within parts of the UK. Our manual analysis of model outputs reveals the benefits and drawbacks of using WER as an evaluation metric and fine-tuning to adapt to regional dialects.
2501.08504
SuperSAM: Crafting a SAM Supernetwork via Structured Pruning and Unstructured Parameter Prioritization
cs.CV cs.LG
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is a powerful approach of automating the design of efficient neural architectures. In contrast to traditional NAS methods, recently proposed one-shot NAS methods prove to be more efficient in performing NAS. One-shot NAS works by generating a singular weight-sharing supernetwork that acts as a search space (container) of subnetworks. Despite its achievements, designing the one-shot search space remains a major challenge. In this work we propose a search space design strategy for Vision Transformer (ViT)-based architectures. In particular, we convert the Segment Anything Model (SAM) into a weight-sharing supernetwork called SuperSAM. Our approach involves automating the search space design via layer-wise structured pruning and parameter prioritization. While the structured pruning applies probabilistic removal of certain transformer layers, parameter prioritization performs weight reordering and slicing of MLP-blocks in the remaining layers. We train supernetworks on several datasets using the sandwich rule. For deployment, we enhance subnetwork discovery by utilizing a program autotuner to identify efficient subnetworks within the search space. The resulting subnetworks are 30-70% smaller in size compared to the original pre-trained SAM ViT-B, yet outperform the pretrained model. Our work introduces a new and effective method for ViT NAS search-space design.
2501.08505
Yuan: Yielding Unblemished Aesthetics Through A Unified Network for Visual Imperfections Removal in Generated Images
cs.CV eess.IV
Generative AI presents transformative potential across various domains, from creative arts to scientific visualization. However, the utility of AI-generated imagery is often compromised by visual flaws, including anatomical inaccuracies, improper object placements, and misplaced textual elements. These imperfections pose significant challenges for practical applications. To overcome these limitations, we introduce \textit{Yuan}, a novel framework that autonomously corrects visual imperfections in text-to-image synthesis. \textit{Yuan} uniquely conditions on both the textual prompt and the segmented image, generating precise masks that identify areas in need of refinement without requiring manual intervention -- a common constraint in previous methodologies. Following the automated masking process, an advanced inpainting module seamlessly integrates contextually coherent content into the identified regions, preserving the integrity and fidelity of the original image and associated text prompts. Through extensive experimentation on publicly available datasets such as ImageNet100 and Stanford Dogs, along with a custom-generated dataset, \textit{Yuan} demonstrated superior performance in eliminating visual imperfections. Our approach consistently achieved higher scores in quantitative metrics, including NIQE, BRISQUE, and PI, alongside favorable qualitative evaluations. These results underscore \textit{Yuan}'s potential to significantly enhance the quality and applicability of AI-generated images across diverse fields.
2501.08506
Exploring the Efficacy of Meta-Learning: Unveiling Superior Data Diversity Utilization of MAML Over Pre-training
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CV
Currently, data and model size dominate the narrative in the training of super-large, powerful models. However, there has been a lack of exploration on the effect of other attributes of the training dataset on model performance. We hypothesize that dataset diversity can impact the performance of vision models. Our study shows positive correlations between test set accuracy and data diversity, providing an argument for furthering the research of dataset attributes beyond size. We analyzed pre-training and model-agnostic meta-learning methods on twelve popular visual datasets (e.g., Omniglot, CIFAR-FS, Aircraft) and five model configurations, including MAML variants with different numbers of inner gradient steps and supervised learning. We show moderate to strong positive correlations (R-squared: 0.15-0.42) between accuracy and data diversity and weaker but significant correlations (R-squared: ~0.2) between loss and diversity. These findings support our hypothesis and demonstrate a promising way for a deeper exploration of how formal data diversity influences model performance. This initial study highlights the potential of (Task2Vec) data diversity as a valuable measure in the rapidly evolving field of large-scale learning and emphasizes that understanding the dataset is key to building more powerful and generalizable models.
2501.08507
A Framework for Dynamic Situational Awareness in Human Robot Teams: An Interview Study
cs.RO cs.HC
In human-robot teams, human situational awareness is the operator's conscious knowledge of the team's states, actions, plans and their environment. Appropriate human situational awareness is critical to successful human-robot collaboration. In human-robot teaming, it is often assumed that the best and required level of situational awareness is knowing everything at all times. This view is problematic, because what a human needs to know for optimal team performance varies given the dynamic environmental conditions, task context and roles and capabilities of team members. We explore this topic by interviewing 16 participants with active and repeated experience in diverse human-robot teaming applications. Based on analysis of these interviews, we derive a framework explaining the dynamic nature of required situational awareness in human-robot teaming. In addition, we identify a range of factors affecting the dynamic nature of required and actual levels of situational awareness (i.e., dynamic situational awareness), types of situational awareness inefficiencies resulting from gaps between actual and required situational awareness, and their main consequences. We also reveal various strategies, initiated by humans and robots, that assist in maintaining the required situational awareness. Our findings inform the implementation of accurate estimates of dynamic situational awareness and the design of user-adaptive human-robot interfaces. Therefore, this work contributes to the future design of more collaborative and effective human-robot teams.
2501.08508
Score-based 3D molecule generation with neural fields
cs.LG q-bio.BM
We introduce a new representation for 3D molecules based on their continuous atomic density fields. Using this representation, we propose a new model based on walk-jump sampling for unconditional 3D molecule generation in the continuous space using neural fields. Our model, FuncMol, encodes molecular fields into latent codes using a conditional neural field, samples noisy codes from a Gaussian-smoothed distribution with Langevin MCMC (walk), denoises these samples in a single step (jump), and finally decodes them into molecular fields. FuncMol performs all-atom generation of 3D molecules without assumptions on the molecular structure and scales well with the size of molecules, unlike most approaches. Our method achieves competitive results on drug-like molecules and easily scales to macro-cyclic peptides, with at least one order of magnitude faster sampling. The code is available at https://github.com/prescient-design/funcmol.
2501.08512
Ensuring Truthfulness in Distributed Aggregative Optimization
cs.MA
Distributed aggregative optimization methods are gaining increased traction due to their ability to address cooperative control and optimization problems, where the objective function of each agent depends not only on its own decision variable but also on the aggregation of other agents' decision variables. Nevertheless, existing distributed aggregative optimization methods implicitly assume all agents to be truthful in information sharing, which can be unrealistic in real-world scenarios, where agents may act selfishly or strategically. In fact, an opportunistic agent may deceptively share false information in its own favor to minimize its own loss, which, however, will compromise the network-level global performance. To solve this issue, we propose a new distributed aggregative optimization algorithm that can ensure truthfulness of agents and convergence performance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first algorithm that ensures truthfulness in a fully distributed setting, where no "centralized" aggregator exists to collect private information/decision variables from participating agents. We systematically characterize the convergence rate of our algorithm under nonconvex/convex/strongly convex objective functions, which generalizes existing distributed aggregative optimization results that only focus on convex objective functions. We also rigorously quantify the tradeoff between convergence performance and the level of enabled truthfulness under different convexity conditions. Numerical simulations using distributed charging of electric vehicles confirm the efficacy of our algorithm.
2501.08514
Multimodal Fake News Video Explanation Generation: Dataset, Model, and Evaluation
cs.CV cs.MM
Although existing methods have addressed fake news video detection as a classification problem, it is not clear why certain news content is identified as fake. Without proper explanation, end users may not be able to understand the potential meaning of fake news. Therefore, we propose a novel task, Fake News Video Explanation (FNVE), to generate natural language explanations that reveal the falseness of news videos. To this end, we first developed ONVE and VTSE, two new datasets to explain fake news video posts. Then, we propose a Multimodal Relation Graph Transformer (MRGT) model to benchmark ONVE and VTSE. MRGT introduces a multimodal relation graph to comprehensively represent multimodal relations and then introduces a BART-based decoder to explain generations. The experimental results show that the proposed MRGT outperforms the strong baselines. In addition, the human evaluation on the annotated ONVE and VTSE also achieves high scores in terms of adequacy rating.
2501.08515
Learning Hyperplane Tree: A Piecewise Linear and Fully Interpretable Decision-making Framework
cs.LG
This paper introduces a novel tree-based model, Learning Hyperplane Tree (LHT), which outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) tree models for classification tasks on several public datasets. The structure of LHT is simple and efficient: it partitions the data using several hyperplanes to progressively distinguish between target and non-target class samples. Although the separation is not perfect at each stage, LHT effectively improves the distinction through successive partitions. During testing, a sample is classified by evaluating the hyperplanes defined in the branching blocks and traversing down the tree until it reaches the corresponding leaf block. The class of the test sample is then determined using the piecewise linear membership function defined in the leaf blocks, which is derived through least-squares fitting and fuzzy logic. LHT is highly transparent and interpretable--at each branching block, the contribution of each feature to the classification can be clearly observed.
2501.08516
A Survey on IBR Penetrated Power System Stability Analysis Using Frequency Scanning
eess.SY cs.SY
The rapid rise in inverter-based renewable resources has heightened concerns over subsynchronous resonance and oscillations, thereby challenging grid stability. This paper reviews approaches to identify and mitigate these issues, focusing on frequency scanning methods for stability assessment. It categorizes white-, black-, and gray-box modeling techniques, compares positive-sequence, dq-frame, and alpha-beta domain scanning, and examines perturbation shapes like step, ramp, and chirp. A comparative study highlights their strengths, limitations, and suitability for specific scenarios. By summarizing past events and surveying available tools, this work guides operators and researchers toward more effective, reliable stability analysis methods in grids with high renewable penetration.
2501.08518
Easing Seasickness through Attention Redirection with a Mindfulness-Based Brain--Computer Interface
cs.HC cs.AI eess.SP q-bio.QM
Seasickness is a prevalent issue that adversely impacts both passenger experiences and the operational efficiency of maritime crews. While techniques that redirect attention have proven effective in alleviating motion sickness symptoms in terrestrial environments, applying similar strategies to manage seasickness poses unique challenges due to the prolonged and intense motion environment associated with maritime travel. In this study, we propose a mindfulness brain-computer interface (BCI), specifically designed to redirect attention with the aim of mitigating seasickness symptoms in real-world settings. Our system utilizes a single-channel headband to capture prefrontal EEG signals, which are then wirelessly transmitted to computing devices for the assessment of mindfulness states. The results are transferred into real-time feedback as mindfulness scores and audiovisual stimuli, facilitating a shift in attentional focus from physiological discomfort to mindfulness practices. A total of 43 individuals participated in a real-world maritime experiment consisted of three sessions: a real-feedback mindfulness session, a resting session, and a pseudofeedback mindfulness session. Notably, 81.39% of participants reported that the mindfulness BCI intervention was effective, and there was a significant reduction in the severity of seasickness, as measured by the Misery Scale (MISC). Furthermore, EEG analysis revealed a decrease in the theta/beta ratio, corresponding with the alleviation of seasickness symptoms. A decrease in overall EEG band power during the real-feedback mindfulness session suggests that the mindfulness BCI fosters a more tranquil and downregulated state of brain activity. Together, this study presents a novel nonpharmacological, portable, and effective approach for seasickness intervention, with the potential to enhance the cruising experience for both passengers and crews.
2501.08520
Chance-Constrained Sampling-Based MPC for Collision Avoidance in Uncertain Dynamic Environments
cs.RO cs.SY eess.SY
Navigating safely in dynamic and uncertain environments is challenging due to uncertainties in perception and motion. This letter presents C2U-MPPI, a robust sampling-based Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework that addresses these challenges by leveraging the Unscented Model Predictive Path Integral (U-MPPI) control strategy with integrated probabilistic chance constraints, ensuring more reliable and efficient navigation under uncertainty. Unlike gradient-based MPC methods, our approach (i) avoids linearization of system dynamics and directly applies non-convex and nonlinear chance constraints, enabling more accurate and flexible optimization, and (ii) enhances computational efficiency by reformulating probabilistic constraints into a deterministic form and employing a layered dynamic obstacle representation, enabling real-time handling of multiple obstacles. Extensive experiments in simulated and real-world human-shared environments validate the effectiveness of our algorithm against baseline methods, showcasing its capability to generate feasible trajectories and control inputs that adhere to system dynamics and constraints in dynamic settings, enabled by unscented-based sampling strategy and risk-sensitive trajectory evaluation. A supplementary video is available at: https://youtu.be/FptAhvJlQm8
2501.08521
Mitigating Domain Shift in Federated Learning via Intra- and Inter-Domain Prototypes
cs.LG cs.AI
Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a decentralized machine learning technique, allowing clients to train a global model collaboratively without sharing private data. However, most FL studies ignore the crucial challenge of heterogeneous domains where each client has a distinct feature distribution, which is common in real-world scenarios. Prototype learning, which leverages the mean feature vectors within the same classes, has become a prominent solution for federated learning under domain skew. However, existing federated prototype learning methods only consider inter-domain prototypes on the server and overlook intra-domain characteristics. In this work, we introduce a novel federated prototype learning method, namely I$^2$PFL, which incorporates $\textbf{I}$ntra-domain and $\textbf{I}$nter-domain $\textbf{P}$rototypes, to mitigate domain shifts and learn a generalized global model across multiple domains in federated learning. To construct intra-domain prototypes, we propose feature alignment with MixUp-based augmented prototypes to capture the diversity of local domains and enhance the generalization of local features. Additionally, we introduce a reweighting mechanism for inter-domain prototypes to generate generalized prototypes to provide inter-domain knowledge and reduce domain skew across multiple clients. Extensive experiments on the Digits, Office-10, and PACS datasets illustrate the superior performance of our method compared to other baselines.
2501.08523
Doc-Guided Sent2Sent++: A Sent2Sent++ Agent with Doc-Guided memory for Document-level Machine Translation
cs.CL cs.AI
The field of artificial intelligence has witnessed significant advancements in natural language processing, largely attributed to the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). These models form the backbone of Agents designed to address long-context dependencies, particularly in Document-level Machine Translation (DocMT). DocMT presents unique challenges, with quality, consistency, and fluency being the key metrics for evaluation. Existing approaches, such as Doc2Doc and Doc2Sent, either omit sentences or compromise fluency. This paper introduces Doc-Guided Sent2Sent++, an Agent that employs an incremental sentence-level forced decoding strategy \textbf{to ensure every sentence is translated while enhancing the fluency of adjacent sentences.} Our Agent leverages a Doc-Guided Memory, focusing solely on the summary and its translation, which we find to be an efficient approach to maintaining consistency. Through extensive testing across multiple languages and domains, we demonstrate that Sent2Sent++ outperforms other methods in terms of quality, consistency, and fluency. The results indicate that, our approach has achieved significant improvements in metrics such as s-COMET, d-COMET, LTCR-$1_f$, and document-level perplexity (d-ppl). The contributions of this paper include a detailed analysis of current DocMT research, the introduction of the Sent2Sent++ decoding method, the Doc-Guided Memory mechanism, and validation of its effectiveness across languages and domains.