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2501.09327
On Learning Informative Trajectory Embeddings for Imitation, Classification and Regression
cs.LG cs.AI
In real-world sequential decision making tasks like autonomous driving, robotics, and healthcare, learning from observed state-action trajectories is critical for tasks like imitation, classification, and clustering. For example, self-driving cars must replicate human driving behaviors, while robots and healthcare systems benefit from modeling decision sequences, whether or not they come from expert data. Existing trajectory encoding methods often focus on specific tasks or rely on reward signals, limiting their ability to generalize across domains and tasks. Inspired by the success of embedding models like CLIP and BERT in static domains, we propose a novel method for embedding state-action trajectories into a latent space that captures the skills and competencies in the dynamic underlying decision-making processes. This method operates without the need for reward labels, enabling better generalization across diverse domains and tasks. Our contributions are threefold: (1) We introduce a trajectory embedding approach that captures multiple abilities from state-action data. (2) The learned embeddings exhibit strong representational power across downstream tasks, including imitation, classification, clustering, and regression. (3) The embeddings demonstrate unique properties, such as controlling agent behaviors in IQ-Learn and an additive structure in the latent space. Experimental results confirm that our method outperforms traditional approaches, offering more flexible and powerful trajectory representations for various applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/Erasmo1015/vte.
2501.09328
Neural Honeytrace: A Robust Plug-and-Play Watermarking Framework against Model Extraction Attacks
cs.CR cs.AI
Developing high-performance deep learning models is resource-intensive, leading model owners to utilize Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) platforms instead of publicly releasing their models. However, malicious users may exploit query interfaces to execute model extraction attacks, reconstructing the target model's functionality locally. While prior research has investigated triggerable watermarking techniques for asserting ownership, existing methods face significant challenges: (1) most approaches require additional training, resulting in high overhead and limited flexibility, and (2) they often fail to account for advanced attackers, leaving them vulnerable to adaptive attacks. In this paper, we propose Neural Honeytrace, a robust plug-and-play watermarking framework against model extraction attacks. We first formulate a watermark transmission model from an information-theoretic perspective, providing an interpretable account of the principles and limitations of existing triggerable watermarking. Guided by the model, we further introduce: (1) a similarity-based training-free watermarking method for plug-and-play and flexible watermarking, and (2) a distribution-based multi-step watermark information transmission strategy for robust watermarking. Comprehensive experiments on four datasets demonstrate that Neural Honeytrace outperforms previous methods in efficiency and resisting adaptive attacks. Neural Honeytrace reduces the average number of samples required for a worst-case t-Test-based copyright claim from $12,000$ to $200$ with zero training cost.
2501.09331
Identifying Information from Observations with Uncertainty and Novelty
cs.LG stat.ML
A machine learning tasks from observations must encounter and process uncertainty and novelty, especially when it is expected to maintain performance when observing new information and to choose the best fitting hypothesis to the currently observed information. In this context, some key questions arise: what is information, how much information did the observations provide, how much information is required to identify the data-generating process, how many observations remain to get that information, and how does a predictor determine that it has observed novel information? This paper strengthens existing answers to these questions by formalizing the notion of "identifiable information" that arises from the language used to express the relationship between distinct states. Model identifiability and sample complexity are defined via computation of an indicator function over a set of hypotheses. Their properties and asymptotic statistics are described for data-generating processes ranging from deterministic processes to ergodic stationary stochastic processes. This connects the notion of identifying information in finite steps with asymptotic statistics and PAC-learning. The indicator function's computation naturally formalizes novel information and its identification from observations with respect to a hypothesis set. We also proved that computable PAC-Bayes learners' sample complexity distribution is determined by its moments in terms of the the prior probability distribution over a fixed finite hypothesis set.
2501.09333
Prompt-CAM: A Simpler Interpretable Transformer for Fine-Grained Analysis
cs.CV cs.AI
We present a simple usage of pre-trained Vision Transformers (ViTs) for fine-grained analysis, aiming to identify and localize the traits that distinguish visually similar categories, such as different bird species or dog breeds. Pre-trained ViTs such as DINO have shown remarkable capabilities to extract localized, informative features. However, using saliency maps like Grad-CAM can hardly point out the traits: they often locate the whole object by a blurred, coarse heatmap, not traits. We propose a novel approach Prompt Class Attention Map (Prompt-CAM) to the rescue. Prompt-CAM learns class-specific prompts to a pre-trained ViT and uses the corresponding outputs for classification. To classify an image correctly, the true-class prompt must attend to the unique image patches not seen in other classes' images, i.e., traits. As such, the true class's multi-head attention maps reveal traits and their locations. Implementation-wise, Prompt-CAM is almost a free lunch by simply modifying the prediction head of Visual Prompt Tuning (VPT). This makes Prompt-CAM fairly easy to train and apply, sharply contrasting other interpretable methods that design specific models and training processes. It is even simpler than the recently published INterpretable TRansformer (INTR), whose encoder-decoder architecture prevents it from leveraging pre-trained ViTs. Extensive empirical studies on a dozen datasets from various domains (e.g., birds, fishes, insects, fungi, flowers, food, and cars) validate Prompt-CAM superior interpretation capability.
2501.09334
Jodes: Efficient Oblivious Join in the Distributed Setting
cs.CR cs.DB cs.DC
Trusted execution environment (TEE) has provided an isolated and secure environment for building cloud-based analytic systems, but it still suffers from access pattern leakages caused by side-channel attacks. To better secure the data, computation inside TEE enclave should be made oblivious, which introduces significant overhead and severely slows down the computation. A natural way to speed up is to build the analytic system with multiple servers in the distributed setting. However, this setting raises a new security concern -- the volumes of the transmissions among these servers can leak sensitive information to a network adversary. Existing works have designed specialized algorithms to address this concern, but their supports for equi-join, one of the most important but non-trivial database operators, are either inefficient, limited, or under a weak security assumption. In this paper, we present Jodes, an efficient oblivious join algorithm in the distributed setting. Jodes prevents the leakage on both the network and enclave sides, supports a general equi-join operation, and provides a high security level protection that only publicizes the input sizes and the output size. Meanwhile, it achieves both communication cost and computation cost asymptotically superior to existing algorithms. To demonstrate the practicality of Jodes, we conduct experiments in the distributed setting comprising 16 servers. Empirical results show that Jodes achieves up to a sixfold performance improvement over state-of-the-art join algorithms.
2501.09336
Estimating shared subspace with AJIVE: the power and limitation of multiple data matrices
stat.ML cs.LG math.ST stat.TH
Integrative data analysis often requires disentangling joint and individual variations across multiple datasets, a challenge commonly addressed by the Joint and Individual Variation Explained (JIVE) model. While numerous methods have been developed to estimate the shared subspace under JIVE, the theoretical understanding of their performance remains limited, particularly in the context of multiple matrices and varying degrees of subspace misalignment. This paper bridges this gap by providing a systematic analysis of shared subspace estimation in multi-matrix settings. We focus on the Angle-based Joint and Individual Variation Explained (AJIVE) method, a two-stage spectral approach, and establish new performance guarantees that uncover its strengths and limitations. Specifically, we show that in high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regimes, AJIVE's estimation error decreases with the number of matrices, demonstrating the power of multi-matrix integration. Conversely, in low-SNR settings, AJIVE exhibits a non-diminishing error, highlighting fundamental limitations. To complement these results, we derive minimax lower bounds, showing that AJIVE achieves optimal rates in high-SNR regimes. Furthermore, we analyze an oracle-aided spectral estimator to demonstrate that the non-diminishing error in low-SNR scenarios is a fundamental barrier. Extensive numerical experiments corroborate our theoretical findings, providing insights into the interplay between SNR, the number of matrices, and subspace misalignment.
2501.09338
Robust UAV Path Planning with Obstacle Avoidance for Emergency Rescue
cs.RO cs.SY eess.SY
The unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are efficient tools for diverse tasks such as electronic reconnaissance, agricultural operations and disaster relief. In the complex three-dimensional (3D) environments, the path planning with obstacle avoidance for UAVs is a significant issue for security assurance. In this paper, we construct a comprehensive 3D scenario with obstacles and no-fly zones for dynamic UAV trajectory. Moreover, a novel artificial potential field algorithm coupled with simulated annealing (APF-SA) is proposed to tackle the robust path planning problem. APF-SA modifies the attractive and repulsive potential functions and leverages simulated annealing to escape local minimum and converge to globally optimal solutions. Simulation results demonstrate that the effectiveness of APF-SA, enabling efficient autonomous path planning for UAVs with obstacle avoidance.
2501.09341
SE-BSFV: Online Subspace Learning based Shadow Enhancement and Background Suppression for ViSAR under Complex Background
cs.CV
Video synthetic aperture radar (ViSAR) has attracted substantial attention in the moving target detection (MTD) field due to its ability to continuously monitor changes in the target area. In ViSAR, the moving targets' shadows will not offset and defocus, which is widely used as a feature for MTD. However, the shadows are difficult to distinguish from the low scattering region in the background, which will cause more missing and false alarms. Therefore, it is worth investigating how to enhance the distinction between the shadows and background. In this study, we proposed the Shadow Enhancement and Background Suppression for ViSAR (SE-BSFV) algorithm. The SE-BSFV algorithm is based on the low-rank representation (LRR) theory and adopts online subspace learning technique to enhance shadows and suppress background for ViSAR images. Firstly, we use a registration algorithm to register the ViSAR images and utilize Gaussian mixture distribution (GMD) to model the ViSAR data. Secondly, the knowledge learned from the previous frames is leveraged to estimate the GMD parameters of the current frame, and the Expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is used to estimate the subspace parameters. Then, the foreground matrix of the current frame can be obtained. Finally, the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is used to eliminate strong scattering objects in the foreground matrix to obtain the final results. The experimental results indicate that the SE-BSFV algorithm significantly enhances the shadows' saliency and greatly improves the detection performance while ensuring efficiency compared with several other advanced pre-processing algorithms.
2501.09345
Rational Tuning of LLM Cascades via Probabilistic Modeling
cs.LG cs.AI stat.ML
Understanding the reliability of large language models (LLMs) has recently garnered significant attention. Given LLMs' propensity to hallucinate, as well as their high sensitivity to prompt design, it is already challenging to predict the performance of an individual LLM. However, the problem becomes more complex for compound LLM systems such as cascades, where in addition to each model's standalone performance, we must understand how the error rates of different models interact. In this paper, we present a probabilistic model for the joint performance distribution of a sequence of LLMs, which enables a framework for rationally tuning the confidence thresholds of a LLM cascade using continuous optimization. Compared to selecting confidence thresholds using grid search, our parametric Markov-copula model significantly improves runtime scaling with respect to the length of the cascade and the desired resolution of the cost-error curve, turning them from intractable into low-order polynomial. In addition, the optimal thresholds computed using our continuous optimization-based algorithm increasingly outperform those found via grid search as cascade length grows, improving the area under the cost-error curve by 1.9% on average for cascades consisting of at least three models. Overall, our Markov-copula model provides a rational basis for tuning LLM cascade performance and points to the potential of probabilistic methods in analyzing LLM systems.
2501.09347
UVRM: A Scalable 3D Reconstruction Model from Unposed Videos
cs.CV
Large Reconstruction Models (LRMs) have recently become a popular method for creating 3D foundational models. Training 3D reconstruction models with 2D visual data traditionally requires prior knowledge of camera poses for the training samples, a process that is both time-consuming and prone to errors. Consequently, 3D reconstruction training has been confined to either synthetic 3D datasets or small-scale datasets with annotated poses. In this study, we investigate the feasibility of 3D reconstruction using unposed video data of various objects. We introduce UVRM, a novel 3D reconstruction model capable of being trained and evaluated on monocular videos without requiring any information about the pose. UVRM uses a transformer network to implicitly aggregate video frames into a pose-invariant latent feature space, which is then decoded into a tri-plane 3D representation. To obviate the need for ground-truth pose annotations during training, UVRM employs a combination of the score distillation sampling (SDS) method and an analysis-by-synthesis approach, progressively synthesizing pseudo novel-views using a pre-trained diffusion model. We qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate UVRM's performance on the G-Objaverse and CO3D datasets without relying on pose information. Extensive experiments show that UVRM is capable of effectively and efficiently reconstructing a wide range of 3D objects from unposed videos.
2501.09349
ChartInsighter: An Approach for Mitigating Hallucination in Time-series Chart Summary Generation with A Benchmark Dataset
cs.CL cs.HC
Effective chart summary can significantly reduce the time and effort decision makers spend interpreting charts, enabling precise and efficient communication of data insights. Previous studies have faced challenges in generating accurate and semantically rich summaries of time-series data charts. In this paper, we identify summary elements and common hallucination types in the generation of time-series chart summaries, which serve as our guidelines for automatic generation. We introduce ChartInsighter, which automatically generates chart summaries of time-series data, effectively reducing hallucinations in chart summary generation. Specifically, we assign multiple agents to generate the initial chart summary and collaborate iteratively, during which they invoke external data analysis modules to extract insights and compile them into a coherent summary. Additionally, we implement a self-consistency test method to validate and correct our summary. We create a high-quality benchmark of charts and summaries, with hallucination types annotated on a sentence-by-sentence basis, facilitating the evaluation of the effectiveness of reducing hallucinations. Our evaluations using our benchmark show that our method surpasses state-of-the-art models, and that our summary hallucination rate is the lowest, which effectively reduces various hallucinations and improves summary quality. The benchmark is available at https://github.com/wangfen01/ChartInsighter.
2501.09350
Making Your Dreams A Reality: Decoding the Dreams into a Coherent Video Story from fMRI Signals
cs.CV
This paper studies the brave new idea for Multimedia community, and proposes a novel framework to convert dreams into coherent video narratives using fMRI data. Essentially, dreams have intrigued humanity for centuries, offering glimpses into our subconscious minds. Recent advancements in brain imaging, particularly functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), have provided new ways to explore the neural basis of dreaming. By combining subjective dream experiences with objective neurophysiological data, we aim to understand the visual aspects of dreams and create complete video narratives. Our process involves three main steps: reconstructing visual perception, decoding dream imagery, and integrating dream stories. Using innovative techniques in fMRI analysis and language modeling, we seek to push the boundaries of dream research and gain deeper insights into visual experiences during sleep. This technical report introduces a novel approach to visually decoding dreams using fMRI signals and weaving dream visuals into narratives using language models. We gather a dataset of dreams along with descriptions to assess the effectiveness of our framework.
2501.09351
RIS-Aided Fluid Antenna Array-Mounted UAV Networks
cs.IT eess.SP math.IT
This paper investigates reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) downlink networks with fluid antennas (FA), where RIS enables non-line-of-sight (NLoS) transmissions. Moreover, the FA is equipped on the UAV offering dynamic antenna position adjustment, enhancing spatial diversity besides UAV deployment. We aim at total downlink rate maximization while ensuring minimum user rate requirement. We consider joint optimization of active UAV beamforming, passive RIS beamforming, UAV deployment and FA position adjustment. To address the complex problem, we propose beamfomring for RIS/UAV and FA-UAV deployment (BRAUD) scheme by employing alternative optimization, successive convex approximation (SCA) and sequential rank-one constraint relaxation (SROCR) method for the decomposed subproblems. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of RIS-FA-UAV, achieving the highest rate among existing architectures without FA/UAV/RIS deployment and without proper beamforming. Moreover, BRAUD achieves the highest rate among benchmarks of drop-rank method, heuristic optimizations and conventional zero-forcing beamforming as well as random method.
2501.09352
PAL: Prompting Analytic Learning with Missing Modality for Multi-Modal Class-Incremental Learning
cs.LG cs.MM eess.IV
Multi-modal class-incremental learning (MMCIL) seeks to leverage multi-modal data, such as audio-visual and image-text pairs, thereby enabling models to learn continuously across a sequence of tasks while mitigating forgetting. While existing studies primarily focus on the integration and utilization of multi-modal information for MMCIL, a critical challenge remains: the issue of missing modalities during incremental learning phases. This oversight can exacerbate severe forgetting and significantly impair model performance. To bridge this gap, we propose PAL, a novel exemplar-free framework tailored to MMCIL under missing-modality scenarios. Concretely, we devise modality-specific prompts to compensate for missing information, facilitating the model to maintain a holistic representation of the data. On this foundation, we reformulate the MMCIL problem into a Recursive Least-Squares task, delivering an analytical linear solution. Building upon these, PAL not only alleviates the inherent under-fitting limitation in analytic learning but also preserves the holistic representation of missing-modality data, achieving superior performance with less forgetting across various multi-modal incremental scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PAL significantly outperforms competitive methods across various datasets, including UPMC-Food101 and N24News, showcasing its robustness towards modality absence and its anti-forgetting ability to maintain high incremental accuracy.
2501.09354
Style4Rec: Enhancing Transformer-based E-commerce Recommendation Systems with Style and Shopping Cart Information
cs.IR cs.AI
Understanding users' product preferences is essential to the efficacy of a recommendation system. Precision marketing leverages users' historical data to discern these preferences and recommends products that align with them. However, recent browsing and purchase records might better reflect current purchasing inclinations. Transformer-based recommendation systems have made strides in sequential recommendation tasks, but they often fall short in utilizing product image style information and shopping cart data effectively. In light of this, we propose Style4Rec, a transformer-based e-commerce recommendation system that harnesses style and shopping cart information to enhance existing transformer-based sequential product recommendation systems. Style4Rec represents a significant step forward in personalized e-commerce recommendations, outperforming benchmarks across various evaluation metrics. Style4Rec resulted in notable improvements: HR@5 increased from 0.681 to 0.735, NDCG@5 increased from 0.594 to 0.674, and MRR@5 increased from 0.559 to 0.654. We tested our model using an e-commerce dataset from our partnering company and found that it exceeded established transformer-based sequential recommendation benchmarks across various evaluation metrics. Thus, Style4Rec presents a significant step forward in personalized e-commerce recommendation systems.
2501.09355
YETI (YET to Intervene) Proactive Interventions by Multimodal AI Agents in Augmented Reality Tasks
cs.AI cs.CV cs.ET cs.MA
Multimodal AI Agents are AI models that have the capability of interactively and cooperatively assisting human users to solve day-to-day tasks. Augmented Reality (AR) head worn devices can uniquely improve the user experience of solving procedural day-to-day tasks by providing egocentric multimodal (audio and video) observational capabilities to AI Agents. Such AR capabilities can help AI Agents see and listen to actions that users take which can relate to multimodal capabilities of human users. Existing AI Agents, either Large Language Models (LLMs) or Multimodal Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are reactive in nature, which means that models cannot take an action without reading or listening to the human user's prompts. Proactivity of AI Agents on the other hand can help the human user detect and correct any mistakes in agent observed tasks, encourage users when they do tasks correctly or simply engage in conversation with the user - akin to a human teaching or assisting a user. Our proposed YET to Intervene (YETI) multimodal agent focuses on the research question of identifying circumstances that may require the agent to intervene proactively. This allows the agent to understand when it can intervene in a conversation with human users that can help the user correct mistakes on tasks, like cooking, using AR. Our YETI Agent learns scene understanding signals based on interpretable notions of Structural Similarity (SSIM) on consecutive video frames. We also define the alignment signal which the AI Agent can learn to identify if the video frames corresponding to the user's actions on the task are consistent with expected actions. These signals are used by our AI Agent to determine when it should proactively intervene. We compare our results on the instances of proactive intervention in the HoloAssist multimodal benchmark for an expert agent guiding a user to complete procedural tasks.
2501.09357
Path Planning for a UAV Swarm Using Formation Teaching-Learning-Based Optimization
cs.RO cs.SY eess.SY
This work addresses the path planning problem for a group of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to maintain a desired formation during operation. Our approach formulates the problem as an optimization task by defining a set of fitness functions that not only ensure the formation but also include constraints for optimal and safe UAV operation. To optimize the fitness function and obtain a suboptimal path, we employ the teaching-learning-based optimization algorithm and then further enhance it with mechanisms such as mutation, elite strategy, and multi-subject combination. A number of simulations and experiments have been conducted to evaluate the proposed method. The results demonstrate that the algorithm successfully generates valid paths for the UAVs to fly in a triangular formation for an inspection task.
2501.09359
A Multi-tiered Solution for Personalized Baggage Item Recommendations using FastText and Association Rule Mining
cs.IR
This paper introduces an intelligent baggage item recommendation system to optimize packing for air travelers by providing tailored suggestions based on specific travel needs and destinations. Using FastText word embeddings and Association Rule Mining (ARM), the system ensures efficient luggage space utilization, compliance with weight limits, and an enhanced travel experience. The methodology comprises four phases: (1) data collection and preprocessing with pre-trained FastText embeddings for text representation and similarity scoring (2) a content-based recommendation system enriched by user search history (3) application of ARM to user interactions to uncover meaningful item associations and (4) integration of FastText and ARM for accurate, personalized recommendations. Performance is evaluated using metrics such as coverage, support, confidence, lift, leverage, and conviction. Results demonstrate the system's effectiveness in providing relevant suggestions, improving customer satisfaction, and simplifying the packing process. These insights advance personalized recommendations, targeted marketing, and product optimization in air travel and beyond.
2501.09361
Strategic Base Representation Learning via Feature Augmentations for Few-Shot Class Incremental Learning
cs.CV
Few-shot class incremental learning implies the model to learn new classes while retaining knowledge of previously learned classes with a small number of training instances. Existing frameworks typically freeze the parameters of the previously learned classes during the incorporation of new classes. However, this approach often results in suboptimal class separation of previously learned classes, leading to overlap between old and new classes. Consequently, the performance of old classes degrades on new classes. To address these challenges, we propose a novel feature augmentation driven contrastive learning framework designed to enhance the separation of previously learned classes to accommodate new classes. Our approach involves augmenting feature vectors and assigning proxy labels to these vectors. This strategy expands the feature space, ensuring seamless integration of new classes within the expanded space. Additionally, we employ a self-supervised contrastive loss to improve the separation between previous classes. We validate our framework through experiments on three FSCIL benchmark datasets: CIFAR100, miniImageNet, and CUB200. The results demonstrate that our Feature Augmentation driven Contrastive Learning framework significantly outperforms other approaches, achieving state-of-the-art performance.
2501.09362
A Revisit to Rate-distortion Theory via Optimal Weak Transport
cs.IT math.IT
This paper revisits the rate-distortion theory from the perspective of optimal weak transport, as recently introduced by Gozlan et al. While the conditions for optimality and the existence of solutions are well-understood in the case of discrete alphabets, the extension to abstract alphabets requires more intricate analysis. Within the framework of weak transport problems, we derive a parametric representation of the rate-distortion function, thereby connecting the rate-distortion function with the Schr\"odinger bridge problem, and establish necessary conditions for its optimality. As a byproduct of our analysis, we reproduce K. Rose's conclusions regarding the achievability of Shannon lower bound concisely, without reliance on variational calculus.
2501.09363
Identification of Traditional Medicinal Plant Leaves Using an effective Deep Learning model and Self-Curated Dataset
cs.CV
Medicinal plants have been a key component in producing traditional and modern medicines, especially in the field of Ayurveda, an ancient Indian medical system. Producing these medicines and collecting and extracting the right plant is a crucial step due to the visually similar nature of some plants. The extraction of these plants from nonmedicinal plants requires human expert intervention. To solve the issue of accurate plant identification and reduce the need for a human expert in the collection process; employing computer vision methods will be efficient and beneficial. In this paper, we have proposed a model that solves such issues. The proposed model is a custom convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture with 6 convolution layers, max-pooling layers, and dense layers. The model was tested on three different datasets named Indian Medicinal Leaves Image Dataset,MED117 Medicinal Plant Leaf Dataset, and the self-curated dataset by the authors. The proposed model achieved respective accuracies of 99.5%, 98.4%, and 99.7% using various optimizers including Adam, RMSprop, and SGD with momentum.
2501.09368
Aligning Instruction Tuning with Pre-training
cs.AI
Instruction tuning enhances large language models (LLMs) to follow human instructions across diverse tasks, relying on high-quality datasets to guide behavior. However, these datasets, whether manually curated or synthetically generated, are often narrowly focused and misaligned with the broad distributions captured during pre-training, limiting LLM generalization and effective use of pre-trained knowledge. We propose Aligning Instruction Tuning with Pre-training (AITP), a method that bridges this gap by identifying coverage shortfalls in instruction-tuning datasets and rewriting underrepresented pre-training data into high-quality instruction-response pairs. This approach enriches dataset diversity while preserving task-specific objectives. Evaluations on three fully open LLMs across eight benchmarks demonstrate consistent performance improvements with AITP. Ablations highlight the benefits of adaptive data selection, controlled rewriting, and balanced integration, emphasizing the importance of aligning instruction tuning with pre-training distributions to unlock the full potential of LLMs.
2501.09372
Image Segmentation with transformers: An Overview, Challenges and Future
cs.CV
Image segmentation, a key task in computer vision, has traditionally relied on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), yet these models struggle with capturing complex spatial dependencies, objects with varying scales, need for manually crafted architecture components and contextual information. This paper explores the shortcomings of CNN-based models and the shift towards transformer architectures -to overcome those limitations. This work reviews state-of-the-art transformer-based segmentation models, addressing segmentation-specific challenges and their solutions. The paper discusses current challenges in transformer-based segmentation and outlines promising future trends, such as lightweight architectures and enhanced data efficiency. This survey serves as a guide for understanding the impact of transformers in advancing segmentation capabilities and overcoming the limitations of traditional models.
2501.09384
Evaluating LLM Abilities to Understand Tabular Electronic Health Records: A Comprehensive Study of Patient Data Extraction and Retrieval
cs.CL cs.IR
Electronic Health Record (EHR) tables pose unique challenges among which is the presence of hidden contextual dependencies between medical features with a high level of data dimensionality and sparsity. This study presents the first investigation into the abilities of LLMs to comprehend EHRs for patient data extraction and retrieval. We conduct extensive experiments using the MIMICSQL dataset to explore the impact of the prompt structure, instruction, context, and demonstration, of two backbone LLMs, Llama2 and Meditron, based on task performance. Through quantitative and qualitative analyses, our findings show that optimal feature selection and serialization methods can enhance task performance by up to 26.79% compared to naive approaches. Similarly, in-context learning setups with relevant example selection improve data extraction performance by 5.95%. Based on our study findings, we propose guidelines that we believe would help the design of LLM-based models to support health search.
2501.09393
SVIA: A Street View Image Anonymization Framework for Self-Driving Applications
cs.CV
In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in image anonymization, particularly focusing on the de-identification of faces and individuals. However, for self-driving applications, merely de-identifying faces and individuals might not provide sufficient privacy protection since street views like vehicles and buildings can still disclose locations, trajectories, and other sensitive information. Therefore, it remains crucial to extend anonymization techniques to street view images to fully preserve the privacy of users, pedestrians, and vehicles. In this paper, we propose a Street View Image Anonymization (SVIA) framework for self-driving applications. The SVIA framework consists of three integral components: a semantic segmenter to segment an input image into functional regions, an inpainter to generate alternatives to privacy-sensitive regions, and a harmonizer to seamlessly stitch modified regions to guarantee visual coherence. Compared to existing methods, SVIA achieves a much better trade-off between image generation quality and privacy protection, as evidenced by experimental results for five common metrics on two widely used public datasets.
2501.09394
Quantum-Enhanced Transformers for Robust Acoustic Scene Classification in IoT Environments
eess.AS cs.AI cs.LG cs.PF cs.SD
The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices equipped with acoustic sensors necessitates robust acoustic scene classification (ASC) capabilities, even in noisy and data-limited environments. Traditional machine learning methods often struggle to generalize effectively under such conditions. To address this, we introduce Q-ASC, a novel Quantum-Inspired Acoustic Scene Classifier that leverages the power of quantum-inspired transformers. By integrating quantum concepts like superposition and entanglement, Q-ASC achieves superior feature learning and enhanced noise resilience compared to classical models. Furthermore, we introduce a Quantum Variational Autoencoder (QVAE) based data augmentation technique to mitigate the challenge of limited labeled data in IoT deployments. Extensive evaluations on the Tampere University of Technology (TUT) Acoustic Scenes 2016 benchmark dataset demonstrate that Q-ASC achieves remarkable accuracy between 68.3% and 88.5% under challenging conditions, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by over 5% in the best case. This research paves the way for deploying intelligent acoustic sensing in IoT networks, with potential applications in smart homes, industrial monitoring, and environmental surveillance, even in adverse acoustic environments.
2501.09395
ELM-DeepONets: Backpropagation-Free Training of Deep Operator Networks via Extreme Learning Machines
cs.LG cs.AI cs.NA math.NA
Deep Operator Networks (DeepONets) are among the most prominent frameworks for operator learning, grounded in the universal approximation theorem for operators. However, training DeepONets typically requires significant computational resources. To address this limitation, we propose ELM-DeepONets, an Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) framework for DeepONets that leverages the backpropagation-free nature of ELM. By reformulating DeepONet training as a least-squares problem for newly introduced parameters, the ELM-DeepONet approach significantly reduces training complexity. Validation on benchmark problems, including nonlinear ODEs and PDEs, demonstrates that the proposed method not only achieves superior accuracy but also drastically reduces computational costs. This work offers a scalable and efficient alternative for operator learning in scientific computing.
2501.09396
Joint Transmission and Deblurring: A Semantic Communication Approach Using Events
eess.IV cs.CV
Deep learning-based joint source-channel coding (JSCC) is emerging as a promising technology for effective image transmission. However, most existing approaches focus on transmitting clear images, overlooking real-world challenges such as motion blur caused by camera shaking or fast-moving objects. Motion blur often degrades image quality, making transmission and reconstruction more challenging. Event cameras, which asynchronously record pixel intensity changes with extremely low latency, have shown great potential for motion deblurring tasks. However, the efficient transmission of the abundant data generated by event cameras remains a significant challenge. In this work, we propose a novel JSCC framework for the joint transmission of blurry images and events, aimed at achieving high-quality reconstructions under limited channel bandwidth. This approach is designed as a deblurring task-oriented JSCC system. Since RGB cameras and event cameras capture the same scene through different modalities, their outputs contain both shared and domain-specific information. To avoid repeatedly transmitting the shared information, we extract and transmit their shared information and domain-specific information, respectively. At the receiver, the received signals are processed by a deblurring decoder to generate clear images. Additionally, we introduce a multi-stage training strategy to train the proposed model. Simulation results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing JSCC-based image transmission schemes, addressing motion blur effectively.
2501.09399
Fast Searching of Extreme Operating Conditions for Relay Protection Setting Calculation Based on Graph Neural Network and Reinforcement Learning
cs.LG
Searching for the Extreme Operating Conditions (EOCs) is one of the core problems of power system relay protection setting calculation. The current methods based on brute-force search, heuristic algorithms, and mathematical programming can hardly meet the requirements of today's power systems in terms of computation speed due to the drastic changes in operating conditions induced by renewables and power electronics. This paper proposes an EOC fast search method, named Graph Dueling Double Deep Q Network (Graph D3QN), which combines graph neural network and deep reinforcement learning to address this challenge. First, the EOC search problem is modeled as a Markov decision process, where the information of the underlying power system is extracted using graph neural networks, so that the EOC of the system can be found via deep reinforcement learning. Then, a two-stage Guided Learning and Free Exploration (GLFE) training framework is constructed to accelerate the convergence speed of reinforcement learning. Finally, the proposed Graph D3QN method is validated through case studies of searching maximum fault current for relay protection setting calculation on the IEEE 39-bus and 118-bus systems. The experimental results demonstrate that Graph D3QN can reduce the computation time by 10 to 1000 times while guaranteeing the accuracy of the selected EOCs.
2501.09400
Joint Antenna Selection and Beamforming Design for Active RIS-aided ISAC Systems
cs.IT eess.SP math.IT
Active reconfigurable intelligent surface (A-RIS) aided integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) system has been considered as a promising paradigm to improve spectrum efficiency. However, massive energy-hungry radio frequency (RF) chains hinder its large-scale deployment. To address this issue, an A-RIS-aided ISAC system with antenna selection (AS) is proposed in this work, where a target is sensed while multiple communication users are served with specifically selected antennas. Specifically, a cuckoo search-based scheme is first utilized to select the antennas associated with high-gain channels. Subsequently, with the properly selected antennas, the weighted sum-rate (WSR) of the system is optimized under the condition of radar probing power level, power budget for the A-RIS and transmitter. To solve the highly non-convex optimization problem, we develop an efficient algorithm based on weighted minimum mean square error (WMMSE) and fractional programming (FP). Simulation results show that the proposed AS scheme and the algorithm are effective, which reduce the number of RF chains without significant performance degradation.
2501.09403
PISCO: Self-Supervised k-Space Regularization for Improved Neural Implicit k-Space Representations of Dynamic MRI
eess.IV cs.CV cs.LG eess.SP physics.med-ph
Neural implicit k-space representations (NIK) have shown promising results for dynamic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at high temporal resolutions. Yet, reducing acquisition time, and thereby available training data, results in severe performance drops due to overfitting. To address this, we introduce a novel self-supervised k-space loss function $\mathcal{L}_\mathrm{PISCO}$, applicable for regularization of NIK-based reconstructions. The proposed loss function is based on the concept of parallel imaging-inspired self-consistency (PISCO), enforcing a consistent global k-space neighborhood relationship without requiring additional data. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations on static and dynamic MR reconstructions show that integrating PISCO significantly improves NIK representations. Particularly for high acceleration factors (R$\geq$54), NIK with PISCO achieves superior spatio-temporal reconstruction quality compared to state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, an extensive analysis of the loss assumptions and stability shows PISCO's potential as versatile self-supervised k-space loss function for further applications and architectures. Code is available at: https://github.com/compai-lab/2025-pisco-spieker
2501.09408
On the distribution of the statistical sum related to BSC
cs.IT math.IT math.PR
The distribution function of the sum of i.i.d. random variables of the special form is considered. Such sum describes messages posterior probabilities for random coding in binary symmetric channel. Close non-asymptotic lower and upper bounds for that function are derived.
2501.09409
mGeNTE: A Multilingual Resource for Gender-Neutral Language and Translation
cs.CL
Gender-neutral language reflects societal and linguistic shifts towards greater inclusivity by avoiding the implication that one gender is the norm over others. This is particularly relevant for grammatical gender languages, which heavily encode the gender of terms for human referents and over-relies on masculine forms, even when gender is unspecified or irrelevant. Language technologies are known to mirror these inequalities, being affected by a male bias and perpetuating stereotypical associations when translating into languages with extensive gendered morphology. In such cases, gender-neutral language can help avoid undue binary assumptions. However, despite its importance for creating fairer multi- and cross-lingual technologies, inclusive language research remains scarce and insufficiently supported in current resources. To address this gap, we present the multilingual mGeNTe dataset. Derived from the bilingual GeNTE (Piergentili et al., 2023), mGeNTE extends the original corpus to include the English-Italian/German/Spanish language pairs. Since each language pair is English-aligned with gendered and neutral sentences in the target languages, mGeNTE enables research in both automatic Gender-Neutral Translation (GNT) and language modelling for three grammatical gender languages.
2501.09410
MoE$^2$: Optimizing Collaborative Inference for Edge Large Language Models
cs.NI cs.AI cs.LG
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. Exploiting the heterogeneous capabilities of edge LLMs is crucial for diverse emerging applications, as it enables greater cost-effectiveness and reduced latency. In this work, we introduce \textit{Mixture-of-Edge-Experts (MoE$^2$)}, a novel collaborative inference framework for edge LLMs. We formulate the joint gating and expert selection problem to optimize inference performance under energy and latency constraints. Unlike conventional MoE problems, LLM expert selection is significantly more challenging due to the combinatorial nature and the heterogeneity of edge LLMs across various attributes. To this end, we propose a two-level expert selection mechanism through which we uncover an optimality-preserving property of gating parameters across expert selections. This property enables the decomposition of the training and selection processes, significantly reducing complexity. Furthermore, we leverage the objective's monotonicity and design a discrete monotonic optimization algorithm for optimal expert selection. We implement edge servers with NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orins and NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPUs, and perform extensive experiments. Our results validate that performance improvements of various LLM models and show that our MoE$^2$ method can achieve optimal trade-offs among different delay and energy budgets, and outperforms baselines under various system resource constraints.
2501.09411
Towards Robust and Realistic Human Pose Estimation via WiFi Signals
cs.CV
Robust WiFi-based human pose estimation is a challenging task that bridges discrete and subtle WiFi signals to human skeletons. This paper revisits this problem and reveals two critical yet overlooked issues: 1) cross-domain gap, i.e., due to significant variations between source-target domain pose distributions; and 2) structural fidelity gap, i.e., predicted skeletal poses manifest distorted topology, usually with misplaced joints and disproportionate bone lengths. This paper fills these gaps by reformulating the task into a novel two-phase framework dubbed DT-Pose: Domain-consistent representation learning and Topology-constrained Pose decoding. Concretely, we first propose a temporal-consistent contrastive learning strategy with uniformity regularization, coupled with self-supervised masking-reconstruction operations, to enable robust learning of domain-consistent and motion-discriminative WiFi-specific representations. Beyond this, we introduce a simple yet effective pose decoder with task prompts, which integrates Graph Convolution Network (GCN) and Transformer layers to constrain the topology structure of the generated skeleton by exploring the adjacent-overarching relationships among human joints. Extensive experiments conducted on various benchmark datasets highlight the superior performance of our method in tackling these fundamental challenges in both 2D/3D human pose estimation tasks.
2501.09412
FASP: Fast and Accurate Structured Pruning of Large Language Models
cs.LG
The rapid increase in the size of large language models (LLMs) has significantly escalated their computational and memory demands, posing challenges for efficient deployment, especially on resource-constrained devices. Structured pruning has emerged as an effective model compression method that can reduce these demands while preserving performance. In this paper, we introduce FASP (Fast and Accurate Structured Pruning), a novel structured pruning framework for LLMs that emphasizes both speed and accuracy. FASP employs a distinctive pruning structure that interlinks sequential layers, allowing for the removal of columns in one layer while simultaneously eliminating corresponding rows in the preceding layer without incurring additional performance loss. The pruning metric, inspired by Wanda, is computationally efficient and effectively selects components to prune. Additionally, we propose a restoration mechanism that enhances model fidelity by adjusting the remaining weights post-pruning. We evaluate FASP on the OPT and LLaMA model families, demonstrating superior performance in terms of perplexity and accuracy on downstream tasks compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our approach achieves significant speed-ups, pruning models such as OPT-125M in 17 seconds and LLaMA-30B in 15 minutes on a single NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU, making it a highly practical solution for optimizing LLMs.
2501.09420
Dynamic Neural Style Transfer for Artistic Image Generation using VGG19
cs.CV cs.AI cs.LG eess.IV
Throughout history, humans have created remarkable works of art, but artificial intelligence has only recently started to make strides in generating visually compelling art. Breakthroughs in the past few years have focused on using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to separate and manipulate the content and style of images, applying texture synthesis techniques. Nevertheless, a number of current techniques continue to encounter obstacles, including lengthy processing times, restricted choices of style images, and the inability to modify the weight ratio of styles. We proposed a neural style transfer system that can add various artistic styles to a desired image to address these constraints allowing flexible adjustments to style weight ratios and reducing processing time. The system uses the VGG19 model for feature extraction, ensuring high-quality, flexible stylization without compromising content integrity.
2501.09425
Vision-Language Models Do Not Understand Negation
cs.CV cs.CL
Many practical vision-language applications require models that understand negation, e.g., when using natural language to retrieve images which contain certain objects but not others. Despite advancements in vision-language models (VLMs) through large-scale training, their ability to comprehend negation remains underexplored. This study addresses the question: how well do current VLMs understand negation? We introduce NegBench, a new benchmark designed to evaluate negation understanding across 18 task variations and 79k examples spanning image, video, and medical datasets. The benchmark consists of two core tasks designed to evaluate negation understanding in diverse multimodal settings: Retrieval with Negation and Multiple Choice Questions with Negated Captions. Our evaluation reveals that modern VLMs struggle significantly with negation, often performing at chance level. To address these shortcomings, we explore a data-centric approach wherein we finetune CLIP models on large-scale synthetic datasets containing millions of negated captions. We show that this approach can result in a 10% increase in recall on negated queries and a 40% boost in accuracy on multiple-choice questions with negated captions.
2501.09426
AutoCBT: An Autonomous Multi-agent Framework for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in Psychological Counseling
cs.CL
Traditional in-person psychological counseling remains primarily niche, often chosen by individuals with psychological issues, while online automated counseling offers a potential solution for those hesitant to seek help due to feelings of shame. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is an essential and widely used approach in psychological counseling. The advent of large language models (LLMs) and agent technology enables automatic CBT diagnosis and treatment. However, current LLM-based CBT systems use agents with a fixed structure, limiting their self-optimization capabilities, or providing hollow, unhelpful suggestions due to redundant response patterns. In this work, we utilize Quora-like and YiXinLi single-round consultation models to build a general agent framework that generates high-quality responses for single-turn psychological consultation scenarios. We use a bilingual dataset to evaluate the quality of single-response consultations generated by each framework. Then, we incorporate dynamic routing and supervisory mechanisms inspired by real psychological counseling to construct a CBT-oriented autonomous multi-agent framework, demonstrating its general applicability. Experimental results indicate that AutoCBT can provide higher-quality automated psychological counseling services.
2501.09428
AugRefer: Advancing 3D Visual Grounding via Cross-Modal Augmentation and Spatial Relation-based Referring
cs.CV
3D visual grounding (3DVG), which aims to correlate a natural language description with the target object within a 3D scene, is a significant yet challenging task. Despite recent advancements in this domain, existing approaches commonly encounter a shortage: a limited amount and diversity of text3D pairs available for training. Moreover, they fall short in effectively leveraging different contextual clues (e.g., rich spatial relations within the 3D visual space) for grounding. To address these limitations, we propose AugRefer, a novel approach for advancing 3D visual grounding. AugRefer introduces cross-modal augmentation designed to extensively generate diverse text-3D pairs by placing objects into 3D scenes and creating accurate and semantically rich descriptions using foundation models. Notably, the resulting pairs can be utilized by any existing 3DVG methods for enriching their training data. Additionally, AugRefer presents a language-spatial adaptive decoder that effectively adapts the potential referring objects based on the language description and various 3D spatial relations. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets clearly validate the effectiveness of AugRefer.
2501.09429
ADAGE: A generic two-layer framework for adaptive agent based modelling
cs.MA cs.AI cs.LG econ.GN q-fin.CP q-fin.EC
Agent-based models (ABMs) are valuable for modelling complex, potentially out-of-equilibria scenarios. However, ABMs have long suffered from the Lucas critique, stating that agent behaviour should adapt to environmental changes. Furthermore, the environment itself often adapts to these behavioural changes, creating a complex bi-level adaptation problem. Recent progress integrating multi-agent reinforcement learning into ABMs introduces adaptive agent behaviour, beginning to address the first part of this critique, however, the approaches are still relatively ad hoc, lacking a general formulation, and furthermore, do not tackle the second aspect of simultaneously adapting environmental level characteristics in addition to the agent behaviours. In this work, we develop a generic two-layer framework for ADaptive AGEnt based modelling (ADAGE) for addressing these problems. This framework formalises the bi-level problem as a Stackelberg game with conditional behavioural policies, providing a consolidated framework for adaptive agent-based modelling based on solving a coupled set of non-linear equations. We demonstrate how this generic approach encapsulates several common (previously viewed as distinct) ABM tasks, such as policy design, calibration, scenario generation, and robust behavioural learning under one unified framework. We provide example simulations on multiple complex economic and financial environments, showing the strength of the novel framework under these canonical settings, addressing long-standing critiques of traditional ABMs.
2501.09430
HpC: A Calculus for Hybrid and Mobile Systems -- Full Version
cs.PL cs.LO cs.NI cs.SY eess.SY
Networked cybernetic and physical systems of the Internet of Things (IoT) immerse civilian and industrial infrastructures into an interconnected and dynamic web of hybrid and mobile devices. The key feature of such systems is the hybrid and tight coupling of mobile and pervasive discrete communications in a continuously evolving environment (discrete computations with predominant continuous dynamics). In the aim of ensuring the correctness and reliability of such heterogeneous infrastructures, we introduce the hybrid {\pi}-calculus (HpC), to formally capture both mobility, pervasiveness and hybridisation in infrastructures where the network topology and its communicating entities evolve continuously in the physical world. The {\pi}-calculus proposed by Robin Milner et al. is a process calculus that can model mobile communications and computations in a very elegant manner. The HpC we propose is a conservative extension of the classical {\pi}-calculus, i.e., the extension is ``minimal'', and yet describes mobility, time and physics of systems, while allowing to lift all theoretical results (e.g. bisimulation) to the context of that extension. We showcase the HpC by considering a realistic handover protocol among mobile devices.
2501.09431
A Survey on Responsible LLMs: Inherent Risk, Malicious Use, and Mitigation Strategy
cs.AI cs.CL cs.CR cs.CY
While large language models (LLMs) present significant potential for supporting numerous real-world applications and delivering positive social impacts, they still face significant challenges in terms of the inherent risk of privacy leakage, hallucinated outputs, and value misalignment, and can be maliciously used for generating toxic content and unethical purposes after been jailbroken. Therefore, in this survey, we present a comprehensive review of recent advancements aimed at mitigating these issues, organized across the four phases of LLM development and usage: data collecting and pre-training, fine-tuning and alignment, prompting and reasoning, and post-processing and auditing. We elaborate on the recent advances for enhancing the performance of LLMs in terms of privacy protection, hallucination reduction, value alignment, toxicity elimination, and jailbreak defenses. In contrast to previous surveys that focus on a single dimension of responsible LLMs, this survey presents a unified framework that encompasses these diverse dimensions, providing a comprehensive view of enhancing LLMs to better serve real-world applications.
2501.09433
CaPa: Carve-n-Paint Synthesis for Efficient 4K Textured Mesh Generation
cs.CV cs.GR
The synthesis of high-quality 3D assets from textual or visual inputs has become a central objective in modern generative modeling. Despite the proliferation of 3D generation algorithms, they frequently grapple with challenges such as multi-view inconsistency, slow generation times, low fidelity, and surface reconstruction problems. While some studies have addressed some of these issues, a comprehensive solution remains elusive. In this paper, we introduce \textbf{CaPa}, a carve-and-paint framework that generates high-fidelity 3D assets efficiently. CaPa employs a two-stage process, decoupling geometry generation from texture synthesis. Initially, a 3D latent diffusion model generates geometry guided by multi-view inputs, ensuring structural consistency across perspectives. Subsequently, leveraging a novel, model-agnostic Spatially Decoupled Attention, the framework synthesizes high-resolution textures (up to 4K) for a given geometry. Furthermore, we propose a 3D-aware occlusion inpainting algorithm that fills untextured regions, resulting in cohesive results across the entire model. This pipeline generates high-quality 3D assets in less than 30 seconds, providing ready-to-use outputs for commercial applications. Experimental results demonstrate that CaPa excels in both texture fidelity and geometric stability, establishing a new standard for practical, scalable 3D asset generation.
2501.09436
Scaling up self-supervised learning for improved surgical foundation models
cs.CV
Foundation models have revolutionized computer vision by achieving vastly superior performance across diverse tasks through large-scale pretraining on extensive datasets. However, their application in surgical computer vision has been limited. This study addresses this gap by introducing SurgeNetXL, a novel surgical foundation model that sets a new benchmark in surgical computer vision. Trained on the largest reported surgical dataset to date, comprising over 4.7 million video frames, SurgeNetXL achieves consistent top-tier performance across six datasets spanning four surgical procedures and three tasks, including semantic segmentation, phase recognition, and critical view of safety (CVS) classification. Compared with the best-performing surgical foundation models, SurgeNetXL shows mean improvements of 2.4, 9.0, and 12.6 percent for semantic segmentation, phase recognition, and CVS classification, respectively. Additionally, SurgeNetXL outperforms the best-performing ImageNet-based variants by 14.4, 4.0, and 1.6 percent in the respective tasks. In addition to advancing model performance, this study provides key insights into scaling pretraining datasets, extending training durations, and optimizing model architectures specifically for surgical computer vision. These findings pave the way for improved generalizability and robustness in data-scarce scenarios, offering a comprehensive framework for future research in this domain. All models and a subset of the SurgeNetXL dataset, including over 2 million video frames, are publicly available at: https://github.com/TimJaspers0801/SurgeNet.
2501.09444
Solving the Unsolvable: Translating Case Law in Hong Kong
cs.CL cs.AI cs.LG cs.MA
This paper addresses the challenges translating case law under Hong Kong's bilingual legal system. It highlights the initial success of translating all written statutes into Chinese before the 1997 handover, a task mandated by the Basic Law. The effort involved significant collaboration among legal, linguistic, and translation experts, resulting in a comprehensive and culturally appropriate bilingual legal system. However, translating case law remains a significant challenge due to the sheer volume and continuous growth of judicial decisions. The paper critiques the governments and judiciarys sporadic and uncoordinated efforts to translate case law, contrasting it with the thorough approach previously taken for statute translation. Although the government acknowledges the importance of legal bilingualism, it lacks a sustainable strategy for translating case law. The Judiciarys position that translating all judgments is unnecessary, unrealistic, and not cost-effectiveis analyzed and critiqued for its impact on legal transparency and public trust. A proposed solution involves leveraging machine translation technology through a human-machine interactive translation platform, which undergoes two major transitions. Initially based on a neural model, the platform transitions to using a large language model for improved translation accuracy. Furthermore, it evolves from a single-agent system to a multi-agent system, incorporating Translator, Annotator, and Proofreader agents. This multi-agent approach, supported by a grant, aims to facilitate efficient, high-quality translation of judicial judgments by integrating advanced artificial intelligence and continuous feedback mechanisms, thus better meeting the needs of a bilingual legal system.
2501.09446
Double Visual Defense: Adversarial Pre-training and Instruction Tuning for Improving Vision-Language Model Robustness
cs.CV
This paper investigates the robustness of vision-language models against adversarial visual perturbations and introduces a novel ``double visual defense" to enhance this robustness. Unlike previous approaches that resort to lightweight adversarial fine-tuning of a pre-trained CLIP model, we perform large-scale adversarial vision-language pre-training from scratch using web-scale data. We then strengthen the defense by incorporating adversarial visual instruction tuning. The resulting models from each stage, $\Delta$CLIP and $\Delta^2$LLaVA, show substantially enhanced zero-shot robustness and set a new state-of-the-art in adversarial defense for vision-language models. For example, the adversarial robustness of $\Delta$CLIP surpasses that of the previous best models on ImageNet-1k by ~20%. %For example, $\Delta$CLIP surpasses the previous best models on ImageNet-1k by ~20% in terms of adversarial robustness. Similarly, compared to prior art, $\Delta^2$LLaVA brings a ~30% robustness improvement to image captioning task and a ~20% robustness improvement to visual question answering task. Furthermore, our models exhibit stronger zero-shot recognition capability, fewer hallucinations, and superior reasoning performance compared to baselines. Our project page is https://doublevisualdefense.github.io/.
2501.09450
Real-Time Generation of Near-Minimum-Energy Trajectories via Constraint-Informed Residual Learning
cs.RO
Industrial robotics demands significant energy to operate, making energy-reduction methodologies increasingly important. Strategies for planning minimum-energy trajectories typically involve solving nonlinear optimal control problems (OCPs), which rarely cope with real-time requirements. In this paper, we propose a paradigm for generating near minimum-energy trajectories for manipulators by learning from optimal solutions. Our paradigm leverages a residual learning approach, which embeds boundary conditions while focusing on learning only the adjustments needed to steer a standard solution to an optimal one. Compared to a computationally expensive OCP-based planner, our paradigm achieves 87.3% of the performance near the training dataset and 50.8% far from the dataset, while being two to three orders of magnitude faster.
2501.09451
Scaling Graph-Based Dependency Parsing with Arc Vectorization and Attention-Based Refinement
cs.CL
We propose a novel architecture for graph-based dependency parsing that explicitly constructs vectors, from which both arcs and labels are scored. Our method addresses key limitations of the standard two-pipeline approach by unifying arc scoring and labeling into a single network, reducing scalability issues caused by the information bottleneck and lack of parameter sharing. Additionally, our architecture overcomes limited arc interactions with transformer layers to efficiently simulate higher-order dependencies. Experiments on PTB and UD show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art parsers in both accuracy and efficiency.
2501.09456
On the Relation between Optical Aperture and Automotive Object Detection
cs.CV
We explore the impact of aperture size and shape on automotive camera systems for deep-learning-based tasks like traffic sign recognition and light state detection. A method is proposed to simulate optical effects using the point spread function (PSF), enhancing realism and reducing the domain gap between synthetic and real-world images. Computer-generated scenes are refined with this technique to model optical distortions and improve simulation accuracy.
2501.09459
Teaching Wav2Vec2 the Language of the Brain
cs.LG
The decoding of continuously spoken speech from neuronal activity has the potential to become an important clinical solution for paralyzed patients. Deep Learning Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs) have recently successfully mapped neuronal activity to text contents in subjects who attempted to formulate speech. However, only small BCI datasets are available. In contrast, labeled data and pre-trained models for the closely related task of speech recognition from audio are widely available. One such model is Wav2Vec2 which has been trained in a self-supervised fashion to create meaningful representations of speech audio data. In this study, we show that patterns learned by Wav2Vec2 are transferable to brain data. Specifically, we replace its audio feature extractor with an untrained Brain Feature Extractor (BFE) model. We then execute full fine-tuning with pre-trained weights for Wav2Vec2, training ''from scratch'' without pre-trained weights as well as freezing a pre-trained Wav2Vec2 and training only the BFE each for 45 different BFE architectures. Across these experiments, the best run is from full fine-tuning with pre-trained weights, achieving a Character Error Rate (CER) of 18.54\%, outperforming the best training from scratch run by 20.46\% and that of frozen Wav2Vec2 training by 15.92\% percentage points. These results indicate that knowledge transfer from audio speech recognition to brain decoding is possible and significantly improves brain decoding performance for the same architectures. Related source code is available at https://github.com/tfiedlerdev/Wav2Vec2ForBrain.
2501.09460
Normal-NeRF: Ambiguity-Robust Normal Estimation for Highly Reflective Scenes
cs.CV
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) often struggle with reconstructing and rendering highly reflective scenes. Recent advancements have developed various reflection-aware appearance models to enhance NeRF's capability to render specular reflections. However, the robust reconstruction of highly reflective scenes is still hindered by the inherent shape ambiguity on specular surfaces. Existing methods typically rely on additional geometry priors to regularize the shape prediction, but this can lead to oversmoothed geometry in complex scenes. Observing the critical role of surface normals in parameterizing reflections, we introduce a transmittance-gradient-based normal estimation technique that remains robust even under ambiguous shape conditions. Furthermore, we propose a dual activated densities module that effectively bridges the gap between smooth surface normals and sharp object boundaries. Combined with a reflection-aware appearance model, our proposed method achieves robust reconstruction and high-fidelity rendering of scenes featuring both highly specular reflections and intricate geometric structures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on various datasets.
2501.09464
Pruning for Sparse Diffusion Models based on Gradient Flow
cs.LG
Diffusion Models (DMs) have impressive capabilities among generation models, but are limited to slower inference speeds and higher computational costs. Previous works utilize one-shot structure pruning to derive lightweight DMs from pre-trained ones, but this approach often leads to a significant drop in generation quality and may result in the removal of crucial weights. Thus we propose a iterative pruning method based on gradient flow, including the gradient flow pruning process and the gradient flow pruning criterion. We employ a progressive soft pruning strategy to maintain the continuity of the mask matrix and guide it along the gradient flow of the energy function based on the pruning criterion in sparse space, thereby avoiding the sudden information loss typically caused by one-shot pruning. Gradient-flow based criterion prune parameters whose removal increases the gradient norm of loss function and can enable fast convergence for a pruned model in iterative pruning stage. Our extensive experiments on widely used datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance in efficiency and consistency with pre-trained models.
2501.09465
RE-POSE: Synergizing Reinforcement Learning-Based Partitioning and Offloading for Edge Object Detection
cs.CV cs.AI cs.DC
Object detection plays a crucial role in smart video analysis, with applications ranging from autonomous driving and security to smart cities. However, achieving real-time object detection on edge devices presents significant challenges due to their limited computational resources and the high demands of deep neural network (DNN)-based detection models, particularly when processing high-resolution video. Conventional strategies, such as input down-sampling and network up-scaling, often compromise detection accuracy for faster performance or lead to higher inference latency. To address these issues, this paper introduces RE-POSE, a Reinforcement Learning (RL)-Driven Partitioning and Edge Offloading framework designed to optimize the accuracy-latency trade-off in resource-constrained edge environments. Our approach features an RL-Based Dynamic Clustering Algorithm (RL-DCA) that partitions video frames into non-uniform blocks based on object distribution and the computational characteristics of DNNs. Furthermore, a parallel edge offloading scheme is implemented to distribute these blocks across multiple edge servers for concurrent processing. Experimental evaluations show that RE-POSE significantly enhances detection accuracy and reduces inference latency, surpassing existing methods.
2501.09466
DEFOM-Stereo: Depth Foundation Model Based Stereo Matching
cs.CV
Stereo matching is a key technique for metric depth estimation in computer vision and robotics. Real-world challenges like occlusion and non-texture hinder accurate disparity estimation from binocular matching cues. Recently, monocular relative depth estimation has shown remarkable generalization using vision foundation models. Thus, to facilitate robust stereo matching with monocular depth cues, we incorporate a robust monocular relative depth model into the recurrent stereo-matching framework, building a new framework for depth foundation model-based stereo-matching, DEFOM-Stereo. In the feature extraction stage, we construct the combined context and matching feature encoder by integrating features from conventional CNNs and DEFOM. In the update stage, we use the depth predicted by DEFOM to initialize the recurrent disparity and introduce a scale update module to refine the disparity at the correct scale. DEFOM-Stereo is verified to have comparable performance on the Scene Flow dataset with state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods and notably shows much stronger zero-shot generalization. Moreover, DEFOM-Stereo achieves SOTA performance on the KITTI 2012, KITTI 2015, Middlebury, and ETH3D benchmarks, ranking 1st on many metrics. In the joint evaluation under the robust vision challenge, our model simultaneously outperforms previous models on the individual benchmarks. Both results demonstrate the outstanding capabilities of the proposed model.
2501.09468
Sensorimotor Control Strategies for Tactile Robotics
cs.RO
How are robots becoming smarter at interacting with their surroundings? Recent advances have reshaped how robots use tactile sensing to perceive and engage with the world. Tactile sensing is a game-changer, allowing robots to embed sensorimotor control strategies to interact with complex environments and skillfully handle heterogeneous objects. Such control frameworks plan contact-driven motions while staying responsive to sudden changes. We review the latest methods for building perception and control systems in tactile robotics while offering practical guidelines for their design and implementation. We also address key challenges to shape the future of intelligent robots.
2501.09469
Predicting Air Temperature from Volumetric Urban Morphology with Machine Learning
cs.LG cs.AI
In this study, we firstly introduce a method that converts CityGML data into voxels which works efficiently and fast in high resolution for large scale datasets such as cities but by sacrificing some building details to overcome the limitations of previous voxelization methodologies that have been computationally intensive and inefficient at transforming large-scale urban areas into voxel representations for high resolution. Those voxelized 3D city data from multiple cities and corresponding air temperature data are used to develop a machine learning model. Before the model training, Gaussian blurring is implemented on input data to consider spatial relationships, as a result the correlation rate between air temperature and volumetric building morphology is also increased after the Gaussian blurring. After the model training, the prediction results are not just evaluated with Mean Square Error (MSE) but some image similarity metrics such as Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) and Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (LPIPS) that are able to detect and consider spatial relations during the evaluation process. This trained model is capable of predicting the spatial distribution of air temperature by using building volume information of corresponding pixel as input. By doing so, this research aims to assist urban planners in incorporating environmental parameters into their planning strategies, thereby facilitating more sustainable and inhabitable urban environments.
2501.09480
Utilizing AI Language Models to Identify Prognostic Factors for Coronary Artery Disease: A Study in Mashhad Residents
cs.LG
Abstract: Background: Understanding cardiovascular artery disease risk factors, the leading global cause of mortality, is crucial for influencing its etiology, prevalence, and treatment. This study aims to evaluate prognostic markers for coronary artery disease in Mashhad using Naive Bayes, REP Tree, J48, CART, and CHAID algorithms. Methods: Using data from the 2009 MASHAD STUDY, prognostic factors for coronary artery disease were determined with Naive Bayes, REP Tree, J48, CART, CHAID, and Random Forest algorithms using R 3.5.3 and WEKA 3.9.4. Model efficiency was compared by sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy. Cases were patients with coronary artery disease; each had three controls (totally 940). Results: Prognostic factors for coronary artery disease in Mashhad residents varied by algorithm. CHAID identified age, myocardial infarction history, and hypertension. CART included depression score and physical activity. REP added education level and anxiety score. NB included diabetes and family history. J48 highlighted father's heart disease and weight loss. CHAID had the highest accuracy (0.80). Conclusion: Key prognostic factors for coronary artery disease in CART and CHAID models include age, myocardial infarction history, hypertension, depression score, physical activity, and BMI. NB, REP Tree, and J48 identified numerous factors. CHAID had the highest accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. CART offers simpler interpretation, aiding physician and paramedic model selection based on specific. Keywords: RF, Na\"ive Bayes, REP, J48 algorithms, Coronary Artery Disease (CAD).
2501.09481
MonoSOWA: Scalable monocular 3D Object detector Without human Annotations
cs.CV cs.AI cs.LG
Detecting the three-dimensional position and orientation of objects using a single RGB camera is a foundational task in computer vision with many important applications. Traditionally, 3D object detection methods are trained in a fully-supervised setup, requiring vast amounts of human annotations, which are laborious, costly, and do not scale well with the ever-increasing amounts of data being captured. In this paper, we present the first method to train 3D object detectors for monocular RGB cameras without domain-specific human annotations, thus making orders of magnitude more data available for training. Thanks to newly proposed Canonical Object Space, the method can not only exploit data across a variety of datasets and camera setups to train a single 3D detector, but unlike previous work it also works out of the box in previously unseen camera setups. All this is crucial for practical applications, where the data and cameras are extremely heterogeneous. The method is evaluated on two standard autonomous driving datasets, where it outperforms previous works, which, unlike our method, still rely on 2D human annotations.
2501.09484
Exploring the Inquiry-Diagnosis Relationship with Advanced Patient Simulators
cs.CL
Online medical consultation (OMC) restricts doctors to gathering patient information solely through inquiries, making the already complex sequential decision-making process of diagnosis even more challenging. Recently, the rapid advancement of large language models has demonstrated a significant potential to transform OMC. However, most studies have primarily focused on improving diagnostic accuracy under conditions of relatively sufficient information, while paying limited attention to the "inquiry" phase of the consultation process. This lack of focus has left the relationship between "inquiry" and "diagnosis" insufficiently explored. In this paper, we first extract real patient interaction strategies from authentic doctor-patient conversations and use these strategies to guide the training of a patient simulator that closely mirrors real-world behavior. By inputting medical records into our patient simulator to simulate patient responses, we conduct extensive experiments to explore the relationship between "inquiry" and "diagnosis" in the consultation process. Experimental results demonstrate that inquiry and diagnosis adhere to the Liebig's law: poor inquiry quality limits the effectiveness of diagnosis, regardless of diagnostic capability, and vice versa. Furthermore, the experiments reveal significant differences in the inquiry performance of various models. To investigate this phenomenon, we categorize the inquiry process into four types: (1) chief complaint inquiry; (2) specification of known symptoms; (3) inquiry about accompanying symptoms; and (4) gathering family or medical history. We analyze the distribution of inquiries across the four types for different models to explore the reasons behind their significant performance differences. We plan to open-source the weights and related code of our patient simulator at https://github.com/LIO-H-ZEN/PatientSimulator.
2501.09485
The Devil is in the Details: Simple Remedies for Image-to-LiDAR Representation Learning
cs.CV
LiDAR is a crucial sensor in autonomous driving, commonly used alongside cameras. By exploiting this camera-LiDAR setup and recent advances in image representation learning, prior studies have shown the promising potential of image-to-LiDAR distillation. These prior arts focus on the designs of their own losses to effectively distill the pre-trained 2D image representations into a 3D model. However, the other parts of the designs have been surprisingly unexplored. We find that fundamental design elements, e.g., the LiDAR coordinate system, quantization according to the existing input interface, and data utilization, are more critical than developing loss functions, which have been overlooked in prior works. In this work, we show that simple fixes to these designs notably outperform existing methods by 16% in 3D semantic segmentation on the nuScenes dataset and 13% in 3D object detection on the KITTI dataset in downstream task performance. We focus on overlooked design choices along the spatial and temporal axes. Spatially, prior work has used cylindrical coordinate and voxel sizes without considering their side effects yielded with a commonly deployed sparse convolution layer input interface, leading to spatial quantization errors in 3D models. Temporally, existing work has avoided cumbersome data curation by discarding unsynced data, limiting the use to only the small portion of data that is temporally synced across sensors. We analyze these effects and propose simple solutions for each overlooked aspect.
2501.09490
Comparison of Various SLAM Systems for Mobile Robot in an Indoor Environment
cs.RO cs.CV
This article presents a comparative analysis of a mobile robot trajectories computed by various ROS-based SLAM systems. For this reason we developed a prototype of a mobile robot with common sensors: 2D lidar, a monocular and ZED stereo cameras. Then we conducted experiments in a typical office environment and collected data from all sensors, running all tested SLAM systems based on the acquired dataset. We studied the following SLAM systems: (a) 2D lidar-based: GMapping, Hector SLAM, Cartographer; (b) monocular camera-based: Large Scale Direct monocular SLAM (LSD SLAM), ORB SLAM, Direct Sparse Odometry (DSO); and (c) stereo camera-based: ZEDfu, Real-Time Appearance-Based Mapping (RTAB map), ORB SLAM, Stereo Parallel Tracking and Mapping (S-PTAM). Since all SLAM methods were tested on the same dataset we compared results for different SLAM systems with appropriate metrics, demonstrating encouraging results for lidar-based Cartographer SLAM, Monocular ORB SLAM and Stereo RTAB Map methods.
2501.09493
Large Language Models as Evaluators for Conversational Recommender Systems: Benchmarking System Performance from a User-Centric Perspective
cs.IR
Conversational recommender systems (CRS) involve both recommendation and dialogue tasks, which makes their evaluation a unique challenge. Although past research has analyzed various factors that may affect user satisfaction with CRS interactions from the perspective of user studies, few evaluation metrics for CRS have been proposed. Recent studies have shown that LLMs can align with human preferences, and several LLM-based text quality evaluation measures have been introduced. However, the application of LLMs in CRS evaluation remains relatively limited. To address this research gap and advance the development of user-centric conversational recommender systems, this study proposes an automated LLM-based CRS evaluation framework, building upon existing research in human-computer interaction and psychology. The framework evaluates CRS from four dimensions: dialogue behavior, language expression, recommendation items, and response content. We use this framework to evaluate four different conversational recommender systems.
2501.09499
VanGogh: A Unified Multimodal Diffusion-based Framework for Video Colorization
cs.CV
Video colorization aims to transform grayscale videos into vivid color representations while maintaining temporal consistency and structural integrity. Existing video colorization methods often suffer from color bleeding and lack comprehensive control, particularly under complex motion or diverse semantic cues. To this end, we introduce VanGogh, a unified multimodal diffusion-based framework for video colorization. VanGogh tackles these challenges using a Dual Qformer to align and fuse features from multiple modalities, complemented by a depth-guided generation process and an optical flow loss, which help reduce color overflow. Additionally, a color injection strategy and luma channel replacement are implemented to improve generalization and mitigate flickering artifacts. Thanks to this design, users can exercise both global and local control over the generation process, resulting in higher-quality colorized videos. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations, and user studies, demonstrate that VanGogh achieves superior temporal consistency and color fidelity.Project page: https://becauseimbatman0.github.io/VanGogh.
2501.09502
Omni-Emotion: Extending Video MLLM with Detailed Face and Audio Modeling for Multimodal Emotion Analysis
cs.CV
Understanding emotions accurately is essential for fields like human-computer interaction. Due to the complexity of emotions and their multi-modal nature (e.g., emotions are influenced by facial expressions and audio), researchers have turned to using multi-modal models to understand human emotions rather than single-modality. However, current video multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) encounter difficulties in effectively integrating audio and identifying subtle facial micro-expressions. Furthermore, the lack of detailed emotion analysis datasets also limits the development of multimodal emotion analysis. To address these issues, we introduce a self-reviewed dataset and a human-reviewed dataset, comprising 24,137 coarse-grained samples and 3,500 manually annotated samples with detailed emotion annotations, respectively. These datasets allow models to learn from diverse scenarios and better generalize to real-world applications. Moreover, in addition to the audio modeling, we propose to explicitly integrate facial encoding models into the existing advanced Video MLLM, enabling the MLLM to effectively unify audio and the subtle facial cues for emotion understanding. By aligning these features within a unified space and employing instruction tuning in our proposed datasets, our Omni-Emotion achieves state-of-the-art performance in both emotion recognition and reasoning tasks.
2501.09503
AnyStory: Towards Unified Single and Multiple Subject Personalization in Text-to-Image Generation
cs.CV
Recently, large-scale generative models have demonstrated outstanding text-to-image generation capabilities. However, generating high-fidelity personalized images with specific subjects still presents challenges, especially in cases involving multiple subjects. In this paper, we propose AnyStory, a unified approach for personalized subject generation. AnyStory not only achieves high-fidelity personalization for single subjects, but also for multiple subjects, without sacrificing subject fidelity. Specifically, AnyStory models the subject personalization problem in an "encode-then-route" manner. In the encoding step, AnyStory utilizes a universal and powerful image encoder, i.e., ReferenceNet, in conjunction with CLIP vision encoder to achieve high-fidelity encoding of subject features. In the routing step, AnyStory utilizes a decoupled instance-aware subject router to accurately perceive and predict the potential location of the corresponding subject in the latent space, and guide the injection of subject conditions. Detailed experimental results demonstrate the excellent performance of our method in retaining subject details, aligning text descriptions, and personalizing for multiple subjects. The project page is at https://aigcdesigngroup.github.io/AnyStory/ .
2501.09504
HydraMix: Multi-Image Feature Mixing for Small Data Image Classification
cs.CV
Training deep neural networks requires datasets with a large number of annotated examples. The collection and annotation of these datasets is not only extremely expensive but also faces legal and privacy problems. These factors are a significant limitation for many real-world applications. To address this, we introduce HydraMix, a novel architecture that generates new image compositions by mixing multiple different images from the same class. HydraMix learns the fusion of the content of various images guided by a segmentation-based mixing mask in feature space and is optimized via a combination of unsupervised and adversarial training. Our data augmentation scheme allows the creation of models trained from scratch on very small datasets. We conduct extensive experiments on ciFAIR-10, STL-10, and ciFAIR-100. Additionally, we introduce a novel text-image metric to assess the generality of the augmented datasets. Our results show that HydraMix outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods for image classification on small datasets.
2501.09506
Multimodal Marvels of Deep Learning in Medical Diagnosis: A Comprehensive Review of COVID-19 Detection
cs.LG cs.SD eess.AS eess.IV
This study presents a comprehensive review of the potential of multimodal deep learning (DL) in medical diagnosis, using COVID-19 as a case example. Motivated by the success of artificial intelligence applications during the COVID-19 pandemic, this research aims to uncover the capabilities of DL in disease screening, prediction, and classification, and to derive insights that enhance the resilience, sustainability, and inclusiveness of science, technology, and innovation systems. Adopting a systematic approach, we investigate the fundamental methodologies, data sources, preprocessing steps, and challenges encountered in various studies and implementations. We explore the architecture of deep learning models, emphasising their data-specific structures and underlying algorithms. Subsequently, we compare different deep learning strategies utilised in COVID-19 analysis, evaluating them based on methodology, data, performance, and prerequisites for future research. By examining diverse data types and diagnostic modalities, this research contributes to scientific understanding and knowledge of the multimodal application of DL and its effectiveness in diagnosis. We have implemented and analysed 11 deep learning models using COVID-19 image, text, and speech (ie, cough) data. Our analysis revealed that the MobileNet model achieved the highest accuracy of 99.97% for COVID-19 image data and 93.73% for speech data (i.e., cough). However, the BiGRU model demonstrated superior performance in COVID-19 text classification with an accuracy of 99.89%. The broader implications of this research suggest potential benefits for other domains and disciplines that could leverage deep learning techniques for image, text, and speech analysis.
2501.09509
Power-Efficient RAN Intelligent Controllers Through Optimized KPI Monitoring
eess.SY cs.SY
The Open Radio Access Network (RAN) paradigm envisions a more flexible, interoperable, and intelligent RAN ecosystem via new open interfaces and elements like the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC). However, the impact of these elements on Open RAN's power consumption remains heavily unexplored. This work for the first time evaluates the impact of Key Performance Indicator (KPI) monitoring on RIC's power consumption using real traffic and power measurements. By analyzing various RIC-RAN communication scenarios, we identify that RIC's power consumption can become a scalability bottleneck, particularly in large-scale deployments, even when RIC is limited to its core operational functionalities and without incorporating application-specific processes. In this context, also for the first time we explore potential power savings through the elimination of redundant KPI transmissions, extending existing techniques for identical subscription removal and KPI selection, achieving significant power consumption gains exceeding 87\% of the overall RIC power consumption.
2501.09512
PIER: A Novel Metric for Evaluating What Matters in Code-Switching
cs.CL cs.LG
Code-switching, the alternation of languages within a single discourse, presents a significant challenge for Automatic Speech Recognition. Despite the unique nature of the task, performance is commonly measured with established metrics such as Word-Error-Rate (WER). However, in this paper, we question whether these general metrics accurately assess performance on code-switching. Specifically, using both Connectionist-Temporal-Classification and Encoder-Decoder models, we show fine-tuning on non-code-switched data from both matrix and embedded language improves classical metrics on code-switching test sets, although actual code-switched words worsen (as expected). Therefore, we propose Point-of-Interest Error Rate (PIER), a variant of WER that focuses only on specific words of interest. We instantiate PIER on code-switched utterances and show that this more accurately describes the code-switching performance, showing huge room for improvement in future work. This focused evaluation allows for a more precise assessment of model performance, particularly in challenging aspects such as inter-word and intra-word code-switching.
2501.09513
A Dataset Generation Toolbox for Dynamic Security Assessment: On the Role of the Security Boundary
eess.SY cs.SY
Dynamic security assessment (DSA) is crucial for ensuring the reliable operation of power systems. However, conventional DSA approaches are becoming intractable for future power systems, driving interest in more computationally efficient data-driven methods. Efficient dataset generation is a cornerstone of these methods. While importance and generic sampling techniques often focus on operating points near the system's security boundary, systematic methods for sampling in this region remain scarce. Furthermore, the impact of sampling near the security boundary on the performance of data-driven DSA methods has yet to be established. This paper highlights the critical role of accurately capturing security boundaries for effective security assessment. As such, we propose a novel method for generating a high number of samples close to the security boundary, considering both AC feasibility and small-signal stability. Case studies on the PGLib-OPF 39-bus and PGLib-OPF 162-bus systems demonstrate the importance of including boundary-adjacent operating points in training datasets while maintaining a balanced distribution of secure and insecure points.
2501.09514
A Runtime Analysis of the Multi-Valued Compact Genetic Algorithm on Generalized LeadingOnes
cs.NE
In the literature on runtime analyses of estimation of distribution algorithms (EDAs), researchers have recently explored univariate EDAs for multi-valued decision variables. Particularly, Jedidia et al. gave the first runtime analysis of the multi-valued UMDA on the r-valued LeadingOnes (r-LeadingOnes) functions and Adak et al. gave the first runtime analysis of the multi-valued cGA (r-cGA) on the r-valued OneMax function. We utilize their framework to conduct an analysis of the multi-valued cGA on the r-valued LeadingOnes function. Even for the binary case, a runtime analysis of the classical cGA on LeadingOnes was not yet available. In this work, we show that the runtime of the r-cGA on r-LeadingOnes is O(n^2r^2 log^3 n log^2 r) with high probability.
2501.09519
Multi-task deep-learning for sleep event detection and stage classification
eess.SP cs.LG
Polysomnographic sleep analysis is the standard clinical method to accurately diagnose and treat sleep disorders. It is an intricate process which involves the manual identification, classification, and location of multiple sleep event patterns. This is complex, for which identification of different types of events involves focusing on different subsets of signals, resulting on an iterative time-consuming process entailing several visual analysis passes. In this paper we propose a multi-task deep-learning approach for the simultaneous detection of sleep events and hypnogram construction in one single pass. Taking as reference state-of-the-art methodology for object-detection in the field of Computer Vision, we reformulate the problem for the analysis of multi-variate time sequences, and more specifically for pattern detection in the sleep analysis scenario. We investigate the performance of the resulting method in identifying different assembly combinations of EEG arousals, respiratory events (apneas and hypopneas) and sleep stages, also considering different input signal montage configurations. Furthermore, we evaluate our approach using two independent datasets, assessing true-generalization effects involving local and external validation scenarios. Based on our results, we analyze and discuss our method's capabilities and its potential wide-range applicability across different settings and datasets.
2501.09520
RWZC: A Model-Driven Approach for Learning-based Robust Wyner-Ziv Coding
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, a novel learning-based Wyner-Ziv coding framework is considered under a distributed image transmission scenario, where the correlated source is only available at the receiver. Unlike other learnable frameworks, our approach demonstrates robustness to non-stationary source correlation, where the overlapping information between image pairs varies. Specifically, we first model the affine relationship between correlated images and leverage this model for learnable mask generation and rate-adaptive joint source-channel coding. Moreover, we also provide a warping-prediction network to remove the distortion from channel interference and affine transform. Intuitively, the observed performance improvement is largely due to focusing on the simple geometric relationship, rather than the complex joint distribution between the sources. Numerical results show that our framework achieves a 1.5 dB gain in PSNR and a 0.2 improvement in MS-SSIM, along with a significant superiority in perceptual metrics, compared to state-of-the-art methods when applied to real-world samples with non-stationary correlations.
2501.09521
Augmenting a Large Language Model with a Combination of Text and Visual Data for Conversational Visualization of Global Geospatial Data
cs.HC cs.CL
We present a method for augmenting a Large Language Model (LLM) with a combination of text and visual data to enable accurate question answering in visualization of scientific data, making conversational visualization possible. LLMs struggle with tasks like visual data interaction, as they lack contextual visual information. We address this problem by merging a text description of a visualization and dataset with snapshots of the visualization. We extract their essential features into a structured text file, highly compact, yet descriptive enough to appropriately augment the LLM with contextual information, without any fine-tuning. This approach can be applied to any visualization that is already finally rendered, as long as it is associated with some textual description.
2501.09522
Merging Models on the Fly Without Retraining: A Sequential Approach to Scalable Continual Model Merging
cs.LG
Deep model merging represents an emerging research direction that combines multiple fine-tuned models to harness their specialized capabilities across different tasks and domains. Current model merging techniques focus on merging all available models simultaneously, with weight interpolation-based methods being the predominant approaches. However, these conventional approaches are not well-suited for scenarios where models become available sequentially, and they often suffer from high memory requirements and potential interference between tasks. In this study, we propose a training-free projection-based continual merging method that processes models sequentially through orthogonal projections of weight matrices and adaptive scaling mechanisms. Our method operates by projecting new parameter updates onto subspaces orthogonal to existing merged parameter updates while using an adaptive scaling mechanism to maintain stable parameter distances, enabling efficient sequential integration of task-specific knowledge. Our approach maintains constant memory complexity to the number of models, minimizes interference between tasks through orthogonal projections, and retains the performance of previously merged models through adaptive task vector scaling. Extensive experiments on CLIP-ViT models demonstrate that our method achieves a 5-8% average accuracy improvement while maintaining robust performance in different task orderings.
2501.09525
Class Incremental Fault Diagnosis under Limited Fault Data via Supervised Contrastive Knowledge Distillation
cs.LG cs.AI
Class-incremental fault diagnosis requires a model to adapt to new fault classes while retaining previous knowledge. However, limited research exists for imbalanced and long-tailed data. Extracting discriminative features from few-shot fault data is challenging, and adding new fault classes often demands costly model retraining. Moreover, incremental training of existing methods risks catastrophic forgetting, and severe class imbalance can bias the model's decisions toward normal classes. To tackle these issues, we introduce a Supervised Contrastive knowledge distiLlation for class Incremental Fault Diagnosis (SCLIFD) framework proposing supervised contrastive knowledge distillation for improved representation learning capability and less forgetting, a novel prioritized exemplar selection method for sample replay to alleviate catastrophic forgetting, and the Random Forest Classifier to address the class imbalance. Extensive experimentation on simulated and real-world industrial datasets across various imbalance ratios demonstrates the superiority of SCLIFD over existing approaches. Our code can be found at https://github.com/Zhang-Henry/SCLIFD_TII.
2501.09527
Confidence Estimation for Error Detection in Text-to-SQL Systems
cs.LG cs.CL
Text-to-SQL enables users to interact with databases through natural language, simplifying the retrieval and synthesis of information. Despite the success of large language models (LLMs) in converting natural language questions into SQL queries, their broader adoption is limited by two main challenges: achieving robust generalization across diverse queries and ensuring interpretative confidence in their predictions. To tackle these issues, our research investigates the integration of selective classifiers into Text-to-SQL systems. We analyse the trade-off between coverage and risk using entropy based confidence estimation with selective classifiers and assess its impact on the overall performance of Text-to-SQL models. Additionally, we explore the models' initial calibration and improve it with calibration techniques for better model alignment between confidence and accuracy. Our experimental results show that encoder-decoder T5 is better calibrated than in-context-learning GPT 4 and decoder-only Llama 3, thus the designated external entropy-based selective classifier has better performance. The study also reveal that, in terms of error detection, selective classifier with a higher probability detects errors associated with irrelevant questions rather than incorrect query generations.
2501.09528
Comprehensive Survey of QML: From Data Analysis to Algorithmic Advancements
quant-ph cs.IT math.IT
Quantum Machine Learning represents a paradigm shift at the intersection of Quantum Computing and Machine Learning, leveraging quantum phenomena such as superposition, entanglement, and quantum parallelism to address the limitations of classical approaches in processing high-dimensional and large-scale datasets. This survey provides a comprehensive analysis of Quantum Machine Learning, detailing foundational concepts, algorithmic advancements, and their applications across domains such as healthcare, finance, and quantum chemistry. Key techniques, including Quantum Support Vector Machine, Quantum Neural Network, Quantum Decision Trees, and hybrid quantum-classical models, are explored with a focus on their theoretical foundations, computational benefits, and comparative performance against classical counterparts. While the potential for exponential speedups and enhanced efficiency is evident, the field faces significant challenges, including hardware constraints, noise, and limited qubit coherence in the current era of Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum devices. Emerging solutions, such as error mitigation techniques, hybrid frameworks, and advancements in quantum hardware, are discussed as critical enablers for scalable and fault-tolerant Quantum Machine Learning systems. By synthesizing state-of-the-art developments and identifying research gaps, this survey aims to provide a foundational resource for advancing Quantum Machine Learning toward practical, real-world applications in tackling computationally intensive problems.
2501.09531
MOGNET: A Mux-residual quantized Network leveraging Online-Generated weights
cs.LG cs.AR
This paper presents a compact model architecture called MOGNET, compatible with a resource-limited hardware. MOGNET uses a streamlined Convolutional factorization block based on a combination of 2 point-wise (1x1) convolutions with a group-wise convolution in-between. To further limit the overall model size and reduce the on-chip required memory, the second point-wise convolution's parameters are on-line generated by a Cellular Automaton structure. In addition, MOGNET enables the use of low-precision weights and activations, by taking advantage of a Multiplexer mechanism with a proper Bitshift rescaling for integrating residual paths without increasing the hardware-related complexity. To efficiently train this model we also introduce a novel weight ternarization method favoring the balance between quantized levels. Experimental results show that given tiny memory budget (sub-2Mb), MOGNET can achieve higher accuracy with a clear gap up to 1% at a similar or even lower model size compared to recent state-of-the-art methods.
2501.09532
AdaFV: Rethinking of Visual-Language alignment for VLM acceleration
cs.CV
The success of VLMs often relies on the dynamic high-resolution schema that adaptively augments the input images to multiple crops, so that the details of the images can be retained. However, such approaches result in a large number of redundant visual tokens, thus significantly reducing the efficiency of the VLMs. To improve the VLMs' efficiency without introducing extra training costs, many research works are proposed to reduce the visual tokens by filtering the uninformative visual tokens or aggregating their information. Some approaches propose to reduce the visual tokens according to the self-attention of VLMs, which are biased, to result in inaccurate responses. The token reduction approaches solely rely on visual cues are text-agnostic, and fail to focus on the areas that are most relevant to the question, especially when the queried objects are non-salient to the image. In this work, we first conduct experiments to show that the original text embeddings are aligned with the visual tokens, without bias on the tailed visual tokens. We then propose a self-adaptive cross-modality attention mixture mechanism that dynamically leverages the effectiveness of visual saliency and text-to-image similarity in the pre-LLM layers to select the visual tokens that are informative. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art training-free VLM acceleration performance, especially when the reduction rate is sufficiently large.
2501.09534
AI in Support of Diversity and Inclusion
cs.AI
In this paper, we elaborate on how AI can support diversity and inclusion and exemplify research projects conducted in that direction. We start by looking at the challenges and progress in making large language models (LLMs) more transparent, inclusive, and aware of social biases. Even though LLMs like ChatGPT have impressive abilities, they struggle to understand different cultural contexts and engage in meaningful, human like conversations. A key issue is that biases in language processing, especially in machine translation, can reinforce inequality. Tackling these biases requires a multidisciplinary approach to ensure AI promotes diversity, fairness, and inclusion. We also highlight AI's role in identifying biased content in media, which is important for improving representation. By detecting unequal portrayals of social groups, AI can help challenge stereotypes and create more inclusive technologies. Transparent AI algorithms, which clearly explain their decisions, are essential for building trust and reducing bias in AI systems. We also stress AI systems need diverse and inclusive training data. Projects like the Child Growth Monitor show how using a wide range of data can help address real world problems like malnutrition and poverty. We present a project that demonstrates how AI can be applied to monitor the role of search engines in spreading disinformation about the LGBTQ+ community. Moreover, we discuss the SignON project as an example of how technology can bridge communication gaps between hearing and deaf people, emphasizing the importance of collaboration and mutual trust in developing inclusive AI. Overall, with this paper, we advocate for AI systems that are not only effective but also socially responsible, promoting fair and inclusive interactions between humans and machines.
2501.09538
Analyzing Continuous Semantic Shifts with Diachronic Word Similarity Matrices
cs.CL
The meanings and relationships of words shift over time. This phenomenon is referred to as semantic shift. Research focused on understanding how semantic shifts occur over multiple time periods is essential for gaining a detailed understanding of semantic shifts. However, detecting change points only between adjacent time periods is insufficient for analyzing detailed semantic shifts, and using BERT-based methods to examine word sense proportions incurs a high computational cost. To address those issues, we propose a simple yet intuitive framework for how semantic shifts occur over multiple time periods by leveraging a similarity matrix between the embeddings of the same word through time. We compute a diachronic word similarity matrix using fast and lightweight word embeddings across arbitrary time periods, making it deeper to analyze continuous semantic shifts. Additionally, by clustering the similarity matrices for different words, we can categorize words that exhibit similar behavior of semantic shift in an unsupervised manner.
2501.09551
Intra-day Solar and Power Forecast for Optimization of Intraday Market Participation
cs.LG cs.SY eess.SP eess.SY
The prediction of solar irradiance enhances reliability in photovoltaic (PV) solar plant generation and grid integration. In Colombia, PV plants face penalties if energy production deviates beyond governmental thresholds from intraday market offers. This research employs Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Bidirectional-LSTM (Bi-LSTM) models, utilizing meteorological data from a PV plant in El Paso, Cesar, Colombia, to predict solar irradiance with a 6-hour horizon and 10-minute resolution. While Bi-LSTM showed superior performance, the LSTM model achieved comparable results with significantly reduced training time (6 hours versus 18 hours), making it computationally advantageous. The LSTM predictions were averaged to create an hourly resolution model, evaluated using Mean Absolute Error, Root-Mean-Square Error, Normalized Root-Mean-Square Error, and Mean Absolute Percentage Error metrics. Comparison with the Global Forecast System (GFS) revealed similar performance, with both models effectively capturing daily solar irradiance patterns. The forecast model integrates with an Object-Oriented power production model, enabling accurate energy offers in the intraday market while minimizing penalty costs.
2501.09552
Exploring AI-based System Design for Pixel-level Protected Health Information Detection in Medical Images
cs.CV
Purpose: This study aims to evaluate different setups of an AI-based solution to detect Protected Health Information (PHI) in medical images. Materials and Methods: Text from eight PHI and eight non-PHI categories are simulated and incorporated into a curated dataset comprising 1,000 medical images across four modalities: CT, X-ray, bone scan, and MRI. The proposed PHI detection pipeline comprises three key components: text localization, extraction, and analysis. Three vision and language models, YOLOv11, EasyOCR, and GPT-4o, are benchmarked in different setups corresponding to three key components. The performance is evaluated with classification metrics, including precision, recall, F1 score, and accuracy. Results: All four setups demonstrate strong performance in detecting PHI imprints, with all metrics exceeding 0.9. The setup that utilizes YOLOv11 for text localization and GPT-4o for text extraction and analysis achieves the highest performance in PHI detection. However, this setup incurs the highest cost due to the increased number of generated tokens associated with GPT-4o model. Conversely, the setup using solely GPT-4o for the end-to-end pipeline exhibits the lowest performance but showcases the feasibility of multi-modal models in solving complex tasks. Conclusion: For optimal text localization and extraction, it is recommended to fine-tune an object detection model and utilize built-in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. Large language models like GPT-4o can be effectively leveraged to reason about and semantically analyze the PHI content. Although the vision capability of GPT-4o is promising for reading image crops, it remains limited for end-to-end pipeline applications with whole images.
2501.09555
Text-driven Adaptation of Foundation Models for Few-shot Surgical Workflow Analysis
cs.CV cs.AI
Purpose: Surgical workflow analysis is crucial for improving surgical efficiency and safety. However, previous studies rely heavily on large-scale annotated datasets, posing challenges in cost, scalability, and reliance on expert annotations. To address this, we propose Surg-FTDA (Few-shot Text-driven Adaptation), designed to handle various surgical workflow analysis tasks with minimal paired image-label data. Methods: Our approach has two key components. First, Few-shot selection-based modality alignment selects a small subset of images and aligns their embeddings with text embeddings from the downstream task, bridging the modality gap. Second, Text-driven adaptation leverages only text data to train a decoder, eliminating the need for paired image-text data. This decoder is then applied to aligned image embeddings, enabling image-related tasks without explicit image-text pairs. Results: We evaluate our approach to generative tasks (image captioning) and discriminative tasks (triplet recognition and phase recognition). Results show that Surg-FTDA outperforms baselines and generalizes well across downstream tasks. Conclusion: We propose a text-driven adaptation approach that mitigates the modality gap and handles multiple downstream tasks in surgical workflow analysis, with minimal reliance on large annotated datasets. The code and dataset will be released in https://github.com/CAMMA-public/Surg-FTDA
2501.09556
Overshoot: Taking advantage of future gradients in momentum-based stochastic optimization
cs.LG
Overshoot is a novel, momentum-based stochastic gradient descent optimization method designed to enhance performance beyond standard and Nesterov's momentum. In conventional momentum methods, gradients from previous steps are aggregated with the gradient at current model weights before taking a step and updating the model. Rather than calculating gradient at the current model weights, Overshoot calculates the gradient at model weights shifted in the direction of the current momentum. This sacrifices the immediate benefit of using the gradient w.r.t. the exact model weights now, in favor of evaluating at a point, which will likely be more relevant for future updates. We show that incorporating this principle into momentum-based optimizers (SGD with momentum and Adam) results in faster convergence (saving on average at least 15% of steps). Overshoot consistently outperforms both standard and Nesterov's momentum across a wide range of tasks and integrates into popular momentum-based optimizers with zero memory and small computational overhead.
2501.09561
Stylomech: Unveiling Authorship via Computational Stylometry in English and Romanized Sinhala
cs.CL
With the advent of Web 2.0, the development in social technology coupled with global communication systematically brought positive and negative impacts to society. Copyright claims and Author identification are deemed crucial as there has been a considerable amount of increase in content violation owing to the lack of proper ethics in society. The Author's attribution in both English and Romanized Sinhala became a major requirement in the last few decades. As an area largely unexplored, particularly within the context of Romanized Sinhala, the research contributes significantly to the field of computational linguistics. The proposed author attribution system offers a unique approach, allowing for the comparison of only two sets of text: suspect author and anonymous text, a departure from traditional methodologies which often rely on larger corpora. This work focuses on using the numerical representation of various pairs of the same and different authors allowing for, the model to train on these representations as opposed to text, this allows for it to apply to a multitude of authors and contexts, given that the suspected author text, and the anonymous text are of reasonable quality. By expanding the scope of authorship attribution to encompass diverse linguistic contexts, the work contributes to fostering trust and accountability in digital communication, especially in Sri Lanka. This research presents a pioneering approach to author attribution in both English and Romanized Sinhala, addressing a critical need for content verification and intellectual property rights enforcement in the digital age.
2501.09563
A Multi-agent System for Hybrid Optimization
math.OC cs.MA
Optimization problems in process engineering, including design and operation, can often pose challenges to many solvers: multi-modal, non-smooth, and discontinuous models often with large computational requirements. In such cases, the optimization problem is often treated as a black box in which only the value of the objective function is required, sometimes with some indication of the measure of the violation of the constraints. Such problems have traditionally been tackled through the use of direct search and meta-heuristic methods. The challenge, then, is to determine which of these methods or combination of methods should be considered to make most effective use of finite computational resources. This paper presents a multi-agent system for optimization which enables a set of solvers to be applied simultaneously to an optimization problem, including different instantiations of any solver. The evaluation of the optimization problem model is controlled by a scheduler agent which facilitates cooperation and competition between optimization methods. The architecture and implementation of the agent system is described in detail, including the solver, model evaluation, and scheduler agents. A suite of direct search and meta-heuristic methods has been developed for use with this system. Case studies from process systems engineering applications are presented and the results show the potential benefits of automated cooperation between different optimization solvers and motivates the implementation of competition between solvers.
2501.09565
A New Teacher-Reviewer-Student Framework for Semi-supervised 2D Human Pose Estimation
cs.CV
Conventional 2D human pose estimation methods typically require extensive labeled annotations, which are both labor-intensive and expensive. In contrast, semi-supervised 2D human pose estimation can alleviate the above problems by leveraging a large amount of unlabeled data along with a small portion of labeled data. Existing semi-supervised 2D human pose estimation methods update the network through backpropagation, ignoring crucial historical information from the previous training process. Therefore, we propose a novel semi-supervised 2D human pose estimation method by utilizing a newly designed Teacher-Reviewer-Student framework. Specifically, we first mimic the phenomenon that human beings constantly review previous knowledge for consolidation to design our framework, in which the teacher predicts results to guide the student's learning and the reviewer stores important historical parameters to provide additional supervision signals. Secondly, we introduce a Multi-level Feature Learning strategy, which utilizes the outputs from different stages of the backbone to estimate the heatmap to guide network training, enriching the supervisory information while effectively capturing keypoint relationships. Finally, we design a data augmentation strategy, i.e., Keypoint-Mix, to perturb pose information by mixing different keypoints, thus enhancing the network's ability to discern keypoints. Extensive experiments on publicly available datasets, demonstrate our method achieves significant improvements compared to the existing methods.
2501.09571
MatrixNet: Learning over symmetry groups using learned group representations
cs.LG cs.AI math.RT
Group theory has been used in machine learning to provide a theoretically grounded approach for incorporating known symmetry transformations in tasks from robotics to protein modeling. In these applications, equivariant neural networks use known symmetry groups with predefined representations to learn over geometric input data. We propose MatrixNet, a neural network architecture that learns matrix representations of group element inputs instead of using predefined representations. MatrixNet achieves higher sample efficiency and generalization over several standard baselines in prediction tasks over the several finite groups and the Artin braid group. We also show that MatrixNet respects group relations allowing generalization to group elements of greater word length than in the training set.
2501.09572
Towards Spectral Convergence of Locally Linear Embedding on Manifolds with Boundary
math.AP cs.LG
We study the eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of a differential operator that governs the asymptotic behavior of the unsupervised learning algorithm known as Locally Linear Embedding when a large data set is sampled from an interval or disc. In particular, the differential operator is of second order, mixed-type, and degenerates near the boundary. We show that a natural regularity condition on the eigenfunctions imposes a consistent boundary condition and use the Frobenius method to estimate pointwise behavior. We then determine the limiting sequence of eigenvalues analytically and compare them to numerical predictions. Finally, we propose a variational framework for determining eigenvalues on other compact manifolds.
2501.09579
Sequential PatchCore: Anomaly Detection for Surface Inspection using Synthetic Impurities
cs.CV cs.GR cs.LG
The appearance of surface impurities (e.g., water stains, fingerprints, stickers) is an often-mentioned issue that causes degradation of automated visual inspection systems. At the same time, synthetic data generation techniques for visual surface inspection have focused primarily on generating perfect examples and defects, disregarding impurities. This study highlights the importance of considering impurities when generating synthetic data. We introduce a procedural method to include photorealistic water stains in synthetic data. The synthetic datasets are generated to correspond to real datasets and are further used to train an anomaly detection model and investigate the influence of water stains. The high-resolution images used for surface inspection lead to memory bottlenecks during anomaly detection training. To address this, we introduce Sequential PatchCore - a method to build coresets sequentially and make training on large images using consumer-grade hardware tractable. This allows us to perform transfer learning using coresets pre-trained on different dataset versions. Our results show the benefits of using synthetic data for pre-training an explicit coreset anomaly model and the extended performance benefits of finetuning the coreset using real data. We observed how the impurities and labelling ambiguity lower the model performance and have additionally reported the defect-wise recall to provide an industrially relevant perspective on model performance.
2501.09588
Atleus: Accelerating Transformers on the Edge Enabled by 3D Heterogeneous Manycore Architectures
cs.AR cs.LG
Transformer architectures have become the standard neural network model for various machine learning applications including natural language processing and computer vision. However, the compute and memory requirements introduced by transformer models make them challenging to adopt for edge applications. Furthermore, fine-tuning pre-trained transformers (e.g., foundation models) is a common task to enhance the model's predictive performance on specific tasks/applications. Existing transformer accelerators are oblivious to complexities introduced by fine-tuning. In this paper, we propose the design of a three-dimensional (3D) heterogeneous architecture referred to as Atleus that incorporates heterogeneous computing resources specifically optimized to accelerate transformer models for the dual purposes of fine-tuning and inference. Specifically, Atleus utilizes non-volatile memory and systolic array for accelerating transformer computational kernels using an integrated 3D platform. Moreover, we design a suitable NoC to achieve high performance and energy efficiency. Finally, Atleus adopts an effective quantization scheme to support model compression. Experimental results demonstrate that Atleus outperforms existing state-of-the-art by up to 56x and 64.5x in terms of performance and energy efficiency respectively
2501.09591
Metrics for Inter-Dataset Similarity with Example Applications in Synthetic Data and Feature Selection Evaluation -- Extended Version
cs.LG
Measuring inter-dataset similarity is an important task in machine learning and data mining with various use cases and applications. Existing methods for measuring inter-dataset similarity are computationally expensive, limited, or sensitive to different entities and non-trivial choices for parameters. They also lack a holistic perspective on the entire dataset. In this paper, we propose two novel metrics for measuring inter-dataset similarity. We discuss the mathematical foundation and the theoretical basis of our proposed metrics. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed metrics by investigating two applications in the evaluation of synthetic data and in the evaluation of feature selection methods. The theoretical and empirical studies conducted in this paper illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed metrics.
2501.09595
IFRA: a machine learning-based Instrumented Fall Risk Assessment Scale derived from Instrumented Timed Up and Go test in stroke patients
cs.LG cs.AI
Effective fall risk assessment is critical for post-stroke patients. The present study proposes a novel, data-informed fall risk assessment method based on the instrumented Timed Up and Go (ITUG) test data, bringing in many mobility measures that traditional clinical scales fail to capture. IFRA, which stands for Instrumented Fall Risk Assessment, has been developed using a two-step process: first, features with the highest predictive power among those collected in a ITUG test have been identified using machine learning techniques; then, a strategy is proposed to stratify patients into low, medium, or high-risk strata. The dataset used in our analysis consists of 142 participants, out of which 93 were used for training (15 synthetically generated), 17 for validation and 32 to test the resulting IFRA scale (22 non-fallers and 10 fallers). Features considered in the IFRA scale include gait speed, vertical acceleration during sit-to-walk transition, and turning angular velocity, which align well with established literature on the risk of fall in neurological patients. In a comparison with traditional clinical scales such as the traditional Timed Up & Go and the Mini-BESTest, IFRA demonstrates competitive performance, being the only scale to correctly assign more than half of the fallers to the high-risk stratum (Fischer's Exact test p = 0.004). Despite the dataset's limited size, this is the first proof-of-concept study to pave the way for future evidence regarding the use of IFRA tool for continuous patient monitoring and fall prevention both in clinical stroke rehabilitation and at home post-discharge.
2501.09597
Reducing the Sensitivity of Neural Physics Simulators to Mesh Topology via Pretraining
cs.LG cs.AI
Meshes are used to represent complex objects in high fidelity physics simulators across a variety of domains, such as radar sensing and aerodynamics. There is growing interest in using neural networks to accelerate physics simulations, and also a growing body of work on applying neural networks directly to irregular mesh data. Since multiple mesh topologies can represent the same object, mesh augmentation is typically required to handle topological variation when training neural networks. Due to the sensitivity of physics simulators to small changes in mesh shape, it is challenging to use these augmentations when training neural network-based physics simulators. In this work, we show that variations in mesh topology can significantly reduce the performance of neural network simulators. We evaluate whether pretraining can be used to address this issue, and find that employing an established autoencoder pretraining technique with graph embedding models reduces the sensitivity of neural network simulators to variations in mesh topology. Finally, we highlight future research directions that may further reduce neural simulator sensitivity to mesh topology.
2501.09600
Mesh2SLAM in VR: A Fast Geometry-Based SLAM Framework for Rapid Prototyping in Virtual Reality Applications
cs.RO cs.CV
SLAM is a foundational technique with broad applications in robotics and AR/VR. SLAM simulations evaluate new concepts, but testing on resource-constrained devices, such as VR HMDs, faces challenges: high computational cost and restricted sensor data access. This work proposes a sparse framework using mesh geometry projections as features, which improves efficiency and circumvents direct sensor data access, advancing SLAM research as we demonstrate in VR and through numerical evaluation.
2501.09604
From Scarcity to Capability: Empowering Fake News Detection in Low-Resource Languages with LLMs
cs.CL
The rapid spread of fake news presents a significant global challenge, particularly in low-resource languages like Bangla, which lack adequate datasets and detection tools. Although manual fact-checking is accurate, it is expensive and slow to prevent the dissemination of fake news. Addressing this gap, we introduce BanFakeNews-2.0, a robust dataset to enhance Bangla fake news detection. This version includes 11,700 additional, meticulously curated fake news articles validated from credible sources, creating a proportional dataset of 47,000 authentic and 13,000 fake news items across 13 categories. In addition, we created a manually curated independent test set of 460 fake and 540 authentic news items for rigorous evaluation. We invest efforts in collecting fake news from credible sources and manually verified while preserving the linguistic richness. We develop a benchmark system utilizing transformer-based architectures, including fine-tuned Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers variants (F1-87\%) and Large Language Models with Quantized Low-Rank Approximation (F1-89\%), that significantly outperforms traditional methods. BanFakeNews-2.0 offers a valuable resource to advance research and application in fake news detection for low-resourced languages. We publicly release our dataset and model on Github to foster research in this direction.
2501.09605
Managed-Retention Memory: A New Class of Memory for the AI Era
cs.AR cs.AI cs.DC cs.ET
AI clusters today are one of the major uses of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). However, HBM is suboptimal for AI workloads for several reasons. Analysis shows HBM is overprovisioned on write performance, but underprovisioned on density and read bandwidth, and also has significant energy per bit overheads. It is also expensive, with lower yield than DRAM due to manufacturing complexity. We propose a new memory class: Managed-Retention Memory (MRM), which is more optimized to store key data structures for AI inference workloads. We believe that MRM may finally provide a path to viability for technologies that were originally proposed to support Storage Class Memory (SCM). These technologies traditionally offered long-term persistence (10+ years) but provided poor IO performance and/or endurance. MRM makes different trade-offs, and by understanding the workload IO patterns, MRM foregoes long-term data retention and write performance for better potential performance on the metrics important for these workloads.