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2501.10879
A Benchmark of French ASR Systems Based on Error Severity
cs.CL
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) transcription errors are commonly assessed using metrics that compare them with a reference transcription, such as Word Error Rate (WER), which measures spelling deviations from the reference, or semantic score-based metrics. However, these approaches often overlook what is understandable to humans when interpreting transcription errors. To address this limitation, a new evaluation is proposed that categorizes errors into four levels of severity, further divided into subtypes, based on objective linguistic criteria, contextual patterns, and the use of content words as the unit of analysis. This metric is applied to a benchmark of 10 state-of-the-art ASR systems on French language, encompassing both HMM-based and end-to-end models. Our findings reveal the strengths and weaknesses of each system, identifying those that provide the most comfortable reading experience for users.
2501.10884
Fixed Point Computation: Beating Brute Force with Smoothed Analysis
cs.GT cs.DS cs.LG
We propose a new algorithm that finds an $\varepsilon$-approximate fixed point of a smooth function from the $n$-dimensional $\ell_2$ unit ball to itself. We use the general framework of finding approximate solutions to a variational inequality, a problem that subsumes fixed point computation and the computation of a Nash Equilibrium. The algorithm's runtime is bounded by $e^{O(n)}/\varepsilon$, under the smoothed-analysis framework. This is the first known algorithm in such a generality whose runtime is faster than $(1/\varepsilon)^{O(n)}$, which is a time that suffices for an exhaustive search. We complement this result with a lower bound of $e^{\Omega(n)}$ on the query complexity for finding an $O(1)$-approximate fixed point on the unit ball, which holds even in the smoothed-analysis model, yet without the assumption that the function is smooth. Existing lower bounds are only known for the hypercube, and adapting them to the ball does not give non-trivial results even for finding $O(1/\sqrt{n})$-approximate fixed points.
2501.10885
CEReBrO: Compact Encoder for Representations of Brain Oscillations Using Efficient Alternating Attention
cs.LG
Electroencephalograph (EEG) is a crucial tool for studying brain activity. Recently, self-supervised learning methods leveraging large unlabeled datasets have emerged as a potential solution to the scarcity of widely available annotated EEG data. However, current methods suffer from at least one of the following limitations: i) sub-optimal EEG signal modeling, ii) model sizes in the hundreds of millions of trainable parameters, and iii) reliance on private datasets and/or inconsistent public benchmarks, hindering reproducibility. To address these challenges, we introduce a Compact Encoder for Representations of Brain Oscillations using alternating attention (CEReBrO), a new small EEG foundation model. Our tokenization scheme represents EEG signals at a per-channel patch granularity. We propose an alternating attention mechanism that jointly models intra-channel temporal dynamics and inter-channel spatial correlations, achieving 2x speed improvement with 6x less memory required compared to standard self-attention. We present several model sizes ranging from 3.6 million to 85 million parameters. Pre-trained on over 20,000 hours of publicly available scalp EEG recordings with diverse channel configurations, our models set new benchmarks in emotion detection and seizure detection tasks, with competitive performance in anomaly classification and gait prediction. This validates our models' effectiveness and efficiency.
2501.10891
OpenEarthMap-SAR: A Benchmark Synthetic Aperture Radar Dataset for Global High-Resolution Land Cover Mapping
eess.IV cs.AI cs.CV eess.SP
High-resolution land cover mapping plays a crucial role in addressing a wide range of global challenges, including urban planning, environmental monitoring, disaster response, and sustainable development. However, creating accurate, large-scale land cover datasets remains a significant challenge due to the inherent complexities of geospatial data, such as diverse terrain, varying sensor modalities, and atmospheric conditions. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery, with its ability to penetrate clouds and capture data in all-weather, day-and-night conditions, offers unique advantages for land cover mapping. Despite these strengths, the lack of benchmark datasets tailored for SAR imagery has limited the development of robust models specifically designed for this data modality. To bridge this gap and facilitate advancements in SAR-based geospatial analysis, we introduce OpenEarthMap-SAR, a benchmark SAR dataset, for global high-resolution land cover mapping. OpenEarthMap-SAR consists of 1.5 million segments of 5033 aerial and satellite images with the size of 1024$\times$1024 pixels, covering 35 regions from Japan, France, and the USA, with partially manually annotated and fully pseudo 8-class land cover labels at a ground sampling distance of 0.15--0.5 m. We evaluated the performance of state-of-the-art methods for semantic segmentation and present challenging problem settings suitable for further technical development. The dataset also serves the official dataset for IEEE GRSS Data Fusion Contest Track I. The dataset has been made publicly available at https://zenodo.org/records/14622048.
2501.10893
Learn-by-interact: A Data-Centric Framework for Self-Adaptive Agents in Realistic Environments
cs.LG cs.AI
Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have the potential to enhance human capabilities, assisting with digital tasks from sending emails to performing data analysis. The abilities of existing LLMs at such tasks are often hindered by the lack of high-quality agent data from the corresponding environments they interact with. We propose Learn-by-interact, a data-centric framework to adapt LLM agents to any given environments without human annotations. Learn-by-interact synthesizes trajectories of agent-environment interactions based on documentations, and constructs instructions by summarizing or abstracting the interaction histories, a process called backward construction. We assess the quality of our synthetic data by using them in both training-based scenarios and training-free in-context learning (ICL), where we craft innovative retrieval approaches optimized for agents. Extensive experiments on SWE-bench, WebArena, OSWorld and Spider2-V spanning across realistic coding, web, and desktop environments show the effectiveness of Learn-by-interact in various downstream agentic tasks -- baseline results are improved by up to 12.2\% for ICL with Claude-3.5 and 19.5\% for training with Codestral-22B. We further demonstrate the critical role of backward construction, which provides up to 14.0\% improvement for training. Our ablation studies demonstrate the efficiency provided by our synthesized data in ICL and the superiority of our retrieval pipeline over alternative approaches like conventional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). We expect that Learn-by-interact will serve as a foundation for agent data synthesis as LLMs are increasingly deployed at real-world environments.
2501.10895
Classical and Deep Reinforcement Learning Inventory Control Policies for Pharmaceutical Supply Chains with Perishability and Non-Stationarity
cs.AI cs.LG math.OC
We study inventory control policies for pharmaceutical supply chains, addressing challenges such as perishability, yield uncertainty, and non-stationary demand, combined with batching constraints, lead times, and lost sales. Collaborating with Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS), we develop a realistic case study incorporating these factors and benchmark three policies--order-up-to (OUT), projected inventory level (PIL), and deep reinforcement learning (DRL) using the proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm--against a BMS baseline based on human expertise. We derive and validate bounds-based procedures for optimizing OUT and PIL policy parameters and propose a methodology for estimating projected inventory levels, which are also integrated into the DRL policy with demand forecasts to improve decision-making under non-stationarity. Compared to a human-driven policy, which avoids lost sales through higher holding costs, all three implemented policies achieve lower average costs but exhibit greater cost variability. While PIL demonstrates robust and consistent performance, OUT struggles under high lost sales costs, and PPO excels in complex and variable scenarios but requires significant computational effort. The findings suggest that while DRL shows potential, it does not outperform classical policies in all numerical experiments, highlighting 1) the need to integrate diverse policies to manage pharmaceutical challenges effectively, based on the current state-of-the-art, and 2) that practical problems in this domain seem to lack a single policy class that yields universally acceptable performance.
2501.10896
Robust Joint Message and State Transmission under Arbitrarily Varying Jamming
cs.IT math.IT
Joint message and state transmission under arbitrarily varying jamming attack is investigated. An inner bound of the robust capacity-distortion region is provided, which includes the worst-case communication rate and the worst-case estimation rate. The bound is optimal for the joint message and lossless state communication.
2501.10897
Unfolding Tensors to Identify the Graph in Discrete Latent Bipartite Graphical Models
math.ST cs.LG stat.TH
We use a tensor unfolding technique to prove a new identifiability result for discrete bipartite graphical models, which have a bipartite graph between an observed and a latent layer. This model family includes popular models such as Noisy-Or Bayesian networks for medical diagnosis and Restricted Boltzmann Machines in machine learning. These models are also building blocks for deep generative models. Our result on identifying the graph structure enjoys the following nice properties. First, our identifiability proof is constructive, in which we innovatively unfold the population tensor under the model into matrices and inspect the rank properties of the resulting matrices to uncover the graph. This proof itself gives a population-level structure learning algorithm that outputs both the number of latent variables and the bipartite graph. Second, we allow various forms of nonlinear dependence among the variables, unlike many continuous latent variable graphical models that rely on linearity to show identifiability. Third, our identifiability condition is interpretable, only requiring each latent variable to connect to at least two "pure" observed variables in the bipartite graph. The new result not only brings novel advances in algebraic statistics, but also has useful implications for these models' trustworthy applications in scientific disciplines and interpretable machine learning.
2501.10900
A Generative Security Application Engineering Curriculum
cs.CY cs.AI
Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) are transforming security by automating many tasks being performed manually. With such automation changing the practice of security as we know it, it is imperative that we prepare future students for the technology landscape they will ultimately face. Towards this end, we describe an initial curriculum and course that attempts to show students how to apply generative AI in order to solve problems in security. By refocusing security education and training on aspects uniquely suited for humans and showing students how to leverage automation for the rest, we believe we can better align security education practices with generative AI as it evolves.
2501.10901
ARD-VAE: A Statistical Formulation to Find the Relevant Latent Dimensions of Variational Autoencoders
cs.LG
The variational autoencoder (VAE) is a popular, deep, latent-variable model (DLVM) due to its simple yet effective formulation for modeling the data distribution. Moreover, optimizing the VAE objective function is more manageable than other DLVMs. The bottleneck dimension of the VAE is a crucial design choice, and it has strong ramifications for the model's performance, such as finding the hidden explanatory factors of a dataset using the representations learned by the VAE. However, the size of the latent dimension of the VAE is often treated as a hyperparameter estimated empirically through trial and error. To this end, we propose a statistical formulation to discover the relevant latent factors required for modeling a dataset. In this work, we use a hierarchical prior in the latent space that estimates the variance of the latent axes using the encoded data, which identifies the relevant latent dimensions. For this, we replace the fixed prior in the VAE objective function with a hierarchical prior, keeping the remainder of the formulation unchanged. We call the proposed method the automatic relevancy detection in the variational autoencoder (ARD-VAE). We demonstrate the efficacy of the ARD-VAE on multiple benchmark datasets in finding the relevant latent dimensions and their effect on different evaluation metrics, such as FID score and disentanglement analysis.
2501.10905
A Remote Sensing Image Change Detection Method Integrating Layer Exchange and Channel-Spatial Differences
cs.CV
Change detection in remote sensing imagery is a critical technique for Earth observation, primarily focusing on pixel-level segmentation of change regions between bi-temporal images. The essence of pixel-level change detection lies in determining whether corresponding pixels in bi-temporal images have changed. In deep learning, the spatial and channel dimensions of feature maps represent different information from the original images. In this study, we found that in change detection tasks, difference information can be computed not only from the spatial dimension of bi-temporal features but also from the channel dimension. Therefore, we designed the Channel-Spatial Difference Weighting (CSDW) module as an aggregation-distribution mechanism for bi-temporal features in change detection. This module enhances the sensitivity of the change detection model to difference features. Additionally, bi-temporal images share the same geographic location and exhibit strong inter-image correlations. To construct the correlation between bi-temporal images, we designed a decoding structure based on the Layer-Exchange (LE) method to enhance the interaction of bi-temporal features. Comprehensive experiments on the CLCD, PX-CLCD, LEVIR-CD, and S2Looking datasets demonstrate that the proposed LENet model significantly improves change detection performance. The code and pre-trained models will be available at: https://github.com/dyzy41/lenet.
2501.10906
Explainable Adversarial Attacks on Coarse-to-Fine Classifiers
cs.CV cs.CR cs.LG
Traditional adversarial attacks typically aim to alter the predicted labels of input images by generating perturbations that are imperceptible to the human eye. However, these approaches often lack explainability. Moreover, most existing work on adversarial attacks focuses on single-stage classifiers, but multi-stage classifiers are largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce instance-based adversarial attacks for multi-stage classifiers, leveraging Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP), which assigns relevance scores to pixels based on their influence on classification outcomes. Our approach generates explainable adversarial perturbations by utilizing LRP to identify and target key features critical for both coarse and fine-grained classifications. Unlike conventional attacks, our method not only induces misclassification but also enhances the interpretability of the model's behavior across classification stages, as demonstrated by experimental results.
2501.10909
Fine-Grained Appropriate Reliance: Human-AI Collaboration with a Multi-Step Transparent Decision Workflow for Complex Task Decomposition
cs.AI cs.HC
In recent years, the rapid development of AI systems has brought about the benefits of intelligent services but also concerns about security and reliability. By fostering appropriate user reliance on an AI system, both complementary team performance and reduced human workload can be achieved. Previous empirical studies have extensively analyzed the impact of factors ranging from task, system, and human behavior on user trust and appropriate reliance in the context of one-step decision making. However, user reliance on AI systems in tasks with complex semantics that require multi-step workflows remains under-explored. Inspired by recent work on task decomposition with large language models, we propose to investigate the impact of a novel Multi-Step Transparent (MST) decision workflow on user reliance behaviors. We conducted an empirical study (N = 233) of AI-assisted decision making in composite fact-checking tasks (i.e., fact-checking tasks that entail multiple sub-fact verification steps). Our findings demonstrate that human-AI collaboration with an MST decision workflow can outperform one-step collaboration in specific contexts (e.g., when advice from an AI system is misleading). Further analysis of the appropriate reliance at fine-grained levels indicates that an MST decision workflow can be effective when users demonstrate a relatively high consideration of the intermediate steps. Our work highlights that there is no one-size-fits-all decision workflow that can help obtain optimal human-AI collaboration. Our insights help deepen the understanding of the role of decision workflows in facilitating appropriate reliance. We synthesize important implications for designing effective means to facilitate appropriate reliance on AI systems in composite tasks, positioning opportunities for the human-centered AI and broader HCI communities.
2501.10910
DeepIFSAC: Deep Imputation of Missing Values Using Feature and Sample Attention within Contrastive Framework
cs.LG stat.ML
Missing values of varying patterns and rates in real-world tabular data pose a significant challenge in developing reliable data-driven models. Existing missing value imputation methods use statistical and traditional machine learning and are ineffective when the missing rate is high and not at random. This paper explores row and column attention in tabular data as between-feature and between-sample attention in a novel framework to reconstruct missing values. The proposed method uses the CutMix data augmentation within a contrastive learning framework to improve the uncertainty of missing value estimation. The performance and generalizability of trained imputation models are evaluated on set-aside test data folds with missing values. The proposed framework outperforms nine state-of-the-art imputation methods across several missing value types and rates (10\%-50\%) on a diverse selection of twelve tabular data sets. We evaluate the quality of imputed data using real-world electronic health records with missing values, demonstrating our proposed framework's superiority to state-of-the-art statistical, machine learning, and deep imputation methods. This paper highlights the heterogeneity of tabular data sets to recommend imputation methods based on missing value types and data characteristics.
2501.10913
Know "No" Better: A Data-Driven Approach for Enhancing Negation Awareness in CLIP
cs.CV cs.CL
While CLIP has significantly advanced multimodal understanding by bridging vision and language, the inability to grasp negation - such as failing to differentiate concepts like "parking" from "no parking" - poses substantial challenges. By analyzing the data used in the public CLIP model's pre-training, we posit this limitation stems from a lack of negation-inclusive data. To address this, we introduce data generation pipelines that employ a large language model (LLM) and a multimodal LLM to produce negation-inclusive captions. Fine-tuning CLIP with data generated from our pipelines, we develop NegationCLIP, which enhances negation awareness while preserving the generality. Moreover, to enable a comprehensive evaluation of negation understanding, we propose NegRefCOCOg-a benchmark tailored to test VLMs' ability to interpret negation across diverse expressions and positions within a sentence. Experiments on various CLIP architectures validate the effectiveness of our data generation pipelines in enhancing CLIP's ability to perceive negation accurately. Additionally, NegationCLIP's enhanced negation awareness has practical applications across various multimodal tasks, demonstrated by performance gains in text-to-image generation and referring image segmentation.
2501.10914
Green Video Camouflaged Object Detection
cs.CV
Camouflaged object detection (COD) aims to distinguish hidden objects embedded in an environment highly similar to the object. Conventional video-based COD (VCOD) methods explicitly extract motion cues or employ complex deep learning networks to handle the temporal information, which is limited by high complexity and unstable performance. In this work, we propose a green VCOD method named GreenVCOD. Built upon a green ICOD method, GreenVCOD uses long- and short-term temporal neighborhoods (TN) to capture joint spatial/temporal context information for decision refinement. Experimental results show that GreenVCOD offers competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art VCOD benchmarks.
2501.10915
LegalGuardian: A Privacy-Preserving Framework for Secure Integration of Large Language Models in Legal Practice
cs.CL cs.CR cs.IR
Large Language Models (LLMs) hold promise for advancing legal practice by automating complex tasks and improving access to justice. However, their adoption is limited by concerns over client confidentiality, especially when lawyers include sensitive Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in prompts, risking unauthorized data exposure. To mitigate this, we introduce LegalGuardian, a lightweight, privacy-preserving framework tailored for lawyers using LLM-based tools. LegalGuardian employs Named Entity Recognition (NER) techniques and local LLMs to mask and unmask confidential PII within prompts, safeguarding sensitive data before any external interaction. We detail its development and assess its effectiveness using a synthetic prompt library in immigration law scenarios. Comparing traditional NER models with one-shot prompted local LLM, we find that LegalGuardian achieves a F1-score of 93% with GLiNER and 97% with Qwen2.5-14B in PII detection. Semantic similarity analysis confirms that the framework maintains high fidelity in outputs, ensuring robust utility of LLM-based tools. Our findings indicate that legal professionals can harness advanced AI technologies without compromising client confidentiality or the quality of legal documents.
2501.10917
Decomposing and Fusing Intra- and Inter-Sensor Spatio-Temporal Signal for Multi-Sensor Wearable Human Activity Recognition
cs.CV cs.AI cs.HC
Wearable Human Activity Recognition (WHAR) is a prominent research area within ubiquitous computing. Multi-sensor synchronous measurement has proven to be more effective for WHAR than using a single sensor. However, existing WHAR methods use shared convolutional kernels for indiscriminate temporal feature extraction across each sensor variable, which fails to effectively capture spatio-temporal relationships of intra-sensor and inter-sensor variables. We propose the DecomposeWHAR model consisting of a decomposition phase and a fusion phase to better model the relationships between modality variables. The decomposition creates high-dimensional representations of each intra-sensor variable through the improved Depth Separable Convolution to capture local temporal features while preserving their unique characteristics. The fusion phase begins by capturing relationships between intra-sensor variables and fusing their features at both the channel and variable levels. Long-range temporal dependencies are modeled using the State Space Model (SSM), and later cross-sensor interactions are dynamically captured through a self-attention mechanism, highlighting inter-sensor spatial correlations. Our model demonstrates superior performance on three widely used WHAR datasets, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art models while maintaining acceptable computational efficiency. Our codes and supplementary materials are available at https://github.com/Anakin2555/DecomposeWHAR.
2501.10920
Data Enrichment Opportunities for Distribution Grid Cable Networks using Variational Autoencoders
cs.LG cs.SY eess.SY
Electricity distribution cable networks suffer from incomplete and unbalanced data, hindering the effectiveness of machine learning models for predictive maintenance and reliability evaluation. Features such as the installation date of the cables are frequently missing. To address data scarcity, this study investigates the application of Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) for data enrichment, synthetic data generation, imbalanced data handling, and outlier detection. Based on a proof-of-concept case study for Denmark, targeting the imputation of missing age information in cable network asset registers, the analysis underlines the potential of generative models to support data-driven maintenance. However, the study also highlights several areas for improvement, including enhanced feature importance analysis, incorporating network characteristics and external features, and handling biases in missing data. Future initiatives should expand the application of VAEs by incorporating semi-supervised learning, advanced sampling techniques, and additional distribution grid elements, including low-voltage networks, into the analysis.
2501.10924
Adaptive Target Localization under Uncertainty using Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning with Knowledge Transfer
cs.LG cs.AI cs.RO
Target localization is a critical task in sensitive applications, where multiple sensing agents communicate and collaborate to identify the target location based on sensor readings. Existing approaches investigated the use of Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning (MADRL) to tackle target localization. Nevertheless, these methods do not consider practical uncertainties, like false alarms when the target does not exist or when it is unreachable due to environmental complexities. To address these drawbacks, this work proposes a novel MADRL-based method for target localization in uncertain environments. The proposed MADRL method employs Proximal Policy Optimization to optimize the decision-making of sensing agents, which is represented in the form of an actor-critic structure using Convolutional Neural Networks. The observations of the agents are designed in an optimized manner to capture essential information in the environment, and a team-based reward functions is proposed to produce cooperative agents. The MADRL method covers three action dimensionalities that control the agents' mobility to search the area for the target, detect its existence, and determine its reachability. Using the concept of Transfer Learning, a Deep Learning model builds on the knowledge from the MADRL model to accurately estimating the target location if it is unreachable, resulting in shared representations between the models for faster learning and lower computational complexity. Collectively, the final combined model is capable of searching for the target, determining its existence and reachability, and estimating its location accurately. The proposed method is tested using a radioactive target localization environment and benchmarked against existing methods, showing its efficacy.
2501.10926
A Semantic Approach to Successive Interference Cancellation for Multiple Access Networks
cs.IT math.IT
Differing from the conventional communication system paradigm that models information source as a sequence of (i.i.d. or stationary) random variables, the semantic approach aims at extracting and sending the high-level features of the content deeply contained in the source, thereby breaking the performance limits from the statistical information theory. As a pioneering work in this area, the deep learning-enabled semantic communication (DeepSC) constitutes a novel algorithmic framework based on the transformer--which is a deep learning tool widely used to process text numerically. The main goal of this work is to extend the DeepSC approach from the point-to-point link to the multi-user multiple access channel (MAC). The inter-user interference has long been identified as the bottleneck of the MAC. In the classic information theory, the successive interference cancellation (SIC) scheme is a common way to mitigate interference and achieve the channel capacity. Our main contribution is to incorporate the SIC scheme into the DeepSC. As opposed to the traditional SIC that removes interference in the digital symbol domain, the proposed semantic SIC works in the domain of the semantic word embedding vectors. Furthermore, to enhance the training efficiency, we propose a pretraining scheme and a partial retraining scheme that quickly adjust the neural network parameters when new users are added to the MAC. We also modify the existing loss function to facilitate training. Finally, we present numerical experiments to demonstrate the advantage of the proposed semantic approach as compared to the existing benchmark methods.
2501.10928
Generative Physical AI in Vision: A Survey
cs.CV cs.AI
Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has rapidly advanced the field of computer vision by enabling machines to create and interpret visual data with unprecedented sophistication. This transformation builds upon a foundation of generative models to produce realistic images, videos, and 3D or 4D content. Traditionally, generative models primarily focus on visual fidelity while often neglecting the physical plausibility of generated content. This gap limits their effectiveness in applications requiring adherence to real-world physical laws, such as robotics, autonomous systems, and scientific simulations. As generative AI evolves to increasingly integrate physical realism and dynamic simulation, its potential to function as a "world simulator" expands-enabling the modeling of interactions governed by physics and bridging the divide between virtual and physical realities. This survey systematically reviews this emerging field of physics-aware generative AI in computer vision, categorizing methods based on how they incorporate physical knowledge-either through explicit simulation or implicit learning. We analyze key paradigms, discuss evaluation protocols, and identify future research directions. By offering a comprehensive overview, this survey aims to help future developments in physically grounded generation for vision. The reviewed papers are summarized at https://github.com/BestJunYu/Awesome-Physics-aware-Generation.
2501.10929
Issues with Neural Tangent Kernel Approach to Neural Networks
stat.ML cs.LG
Neural tangent kernels (NTKs) have been proposed to study the behavior of trained neural networks from the perspective of Gaussian processes. An important result in this body of work is the theorem of equivalence between a trained neural network and kernel regression with the corresponding NTK. This theorem allows for an interpretation of neural networks as special cases of kernel regression. However, does this theorem of equivalence hold in practice? In this paper, we revisit the derivation of the NTK rigorously and conduct numerical experiments to evaluate this equivalence theorem. We observe that adding a layer to a neural network and the corresponding updated NTK do not yield matching changes in the predictor error. Furthermore, we observe that kernel regression with a Gaussian process kernel in the literature that does not account for neural network training produces prediction errors very close to that of kernel regression with NTKs. These observations suggest the equivalence theorem does not hold well in practice and puts into question whether neural tangent kernels adequately address the training process of neural networks.
2501.10933
BeST -- A Novel Source Selection Metric for Transfer Learning
cs.LG stat.ML
One of the most fundamental, and yet relatively less explored, goals in transfer learning is the efficient means of selecting top candidates from a large number of previously trained models (optimized for various "source" tasks) that would perform the best for a new "target" task with a limited amount of data. In this paper, we undertake this goal by developing a novel task-similarity metric (BeST) and an associated method that consistently performs well in identifying the most transferrable source(s) for a given task. In particular, our design employs an innovative quantization-level optimization procedure in the context of classification tasks that yields a measure of similarity between a source model and the given target data. The procedure uses a concept similar to early stopping (usually implemented to train deep neural networks (DNNs) to ensure generalization) to derive a function that approximates the transfer learning mapping without training. The advantage of our metric is that it can be quickly computed to identify the top candidate(s) for a given target task before a computationally intensive transfer operation (typically using DNNs) can be implemented between the selected source and the target task. As such, our metric can provide significant computational savings for transfer learning from a selection of a large number of possible source models. Through extensive experimental evaluations, we establish that our metric performs well over different datasets and varying numbers of data samples.
2501.10935
TSVC:Tripartite Learning with Semantic Variation Consistency for Robust Image-Text Retrieval
cs.CV cs.AI
Cross-modal retrieval maps data under different modality via semantic relevance. Existing approaches implicitly assume that data pairs are well-aligned and ignore the widely existing annotation noise, i.e., noisy correspondence (NC). Consequently, it inevitably causes performance degradation. Despite attempts that employ the co-teaching paradigm with identical architectures to provide distinct data perspectives, the differences between these architectures are primarily stemmed from random initialization. Thus, the model becomes increasingly homogeneous along with the training process. Consequently, the additional information brought by this paradigm is severely limited. In order to resolve this problem, we introduce a Tripartite learning with Semantic Variation Consistency (TSVC) for robust image-text retrieval. We design a tripartite cooperative learning mechanism comprising a Coordinator, a Master, and an Assistant model. The Coordinator distributes data, and the Assistant model supports the Master model's noisy label prediction with diverse data. Moreover, we introduce a soft label estimation method based on mutual information variation, which quantifies the noise in new samples and assigns corresponding soft labels. We also present a new loss function to enhance robustness and optimize training effectiveness. Extensive experiments on three widely used datasets demonstrate that, even at increasing noise ratios, TSVC exhibits significant advantages in retrieval accuracy and maintains stable training performance.
2501.10937
Leveraging Chain of Thought towards Empathetic Spoken Dialogue without Corresponding Question-Answering Data
cs.CL cs.SD eess.AS
Empathetic dialogue is crucial for natural human-computer interaction, allowing the dialogue system to respond in a more personalized and emotionally aware manner, improving user satisfaction and engagement. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized dialogue generation by harnessing their powerful capabilities and shown its potential in multimodal domains. Many studies have integrated speech with text-based LLMs to take speech question as input and output text response. However, the lack of spoken question-answering datasets that include speech style information to supervised fine-tuning (SFT) limits the performance of these systems. As a result, while these systems excel at understanding speech content, they often struggle to generate empathetic responses. In response, we propose a novel approach that circumvents the need for question-answering data, called Listen, Perceive, and Express (LPE). Our method employs a two-stage training process, initially guiding the LLM to listen the content and perceive the emotional aspects of speech. Subsequently, we utilize Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting to unlock the model's potential for expressing empathetic responses based on listened spoken content and perceived emotional cues. We employ experiments to prove the effectiveness of proposed method. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to leverage CoT for speech-based dialogue.
2501.10938
Blockchain-assisted Demonstration Cloning for Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning
cs.LG cs.AI
Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning (MDRL) is a promising research area in which agents learn complex behaviors in cooperative or competitive environments. However, MDRL comes with several challenges that hinder its usability, including sample efficiency, curse of dimensionality, and environment exploration. Recent works proposing Federated Reinforcement Learning (FRL) to tackle these issues suffer from problems related to model restrictions and maliciousness. Other proposals using reward shaping require considerable engineering and could lead to local optima. In this paper, we propose a novel Blockchain-assisted Multi-Expert Demonstration Cloning (MEDC) framework for MDRL. The proposed method utilizes expert demonstrations in guiding the learning of new MDRL agents, by suggesting exploration actions in the environment. A model sharing framework on Blockchain is designed to allow users to share their trained models, which can be allocated as expert models to requesting users to aid in training MDRL systems. A Consortium Blockchain is adopted to enable traceable and autonomous execution without the need for a single trusted entity. Smart Contracts are designed to manage users and models allocation, which are shared using IPFS. The proposed framework is tested on several applications, and is benchmarked against existing methods in FRL, Reward Shaping, and Imitation Learning-assisted RL. The results show the outperformance of the proposed framework in terms of learning speed and resiliency to faulty and malicious models.
2501.10940
Influence- and Interest-based Worker Recruitment in Crowdsourcing using Online Social Networks
cs.SI
Workers recruitment remains a significant issue in Mobile Crowdsourcing (MCS), where the aim is to recruit a group of workers that maximizes the expected Quality of Service (QoS). Current recruitment systems assume that a pre-defined pool of workers is available. However, this assumption is not always true, especially in cold-start situations, where a new MCS task has just been released. Additionally, studies show that up to 96\% of the available candidates are usually not willing to perform the assigned tasks. To tackle these issues, recent works use Online Social Networks (OSNs) and Influence Maximization (IM) to advertise about the desired MCS tasks through influencers, aiming to build larger pools. However, these works suffer from several limitations, such as 1) the lack of group-based selection methods when choosing influencers, 2) the lack of a well-defined worker recruitment process following IM, 3) and the non-dynamicity of the recruitment process, where the workers who refuse to perform the task are not substituted. In this paper, an Influence- and Interest-based Worker Recruitment System (IIWRS), using OSNs, is proposed. The proposed system has two main components: 1) an MCS-, group-, and interest-based IM approach, using a Genetic Algorithm, to select a set of influencers from the network to advertise about the MCS tasks, and 2) a dynamic worker recruitment process which considers the social attributes of workers, and is able to substitute those who do not accept to perform the assigned tasks. Empirical studies are performed using real-life datasets, while comparing IIWRS with existing benchmarks.
2501.10943
InsQABench: Benchmarking Chinese Insurance Domain Question Answering with Large Language Models
cs.CL cs.AI
The application of large language models (LLMs) has achieved remarkable success in various fields, but their effectiveness in specialized domains like the Chinese insurance industry remains underexplored. The complexity of insurance knowledge, encompassing specialized terminology and diverse data types, poses significant challenges for both models and users. To address this, we introduce InsQABench, a benchmark dataset for the Chinese insurance sector, structured into three categories: Insurance Commonsense Knowledge, Insurance Structured Database, and Insurance Unstructured Documents, reflecting real-world insurance question-answering tasks.We also propose two methods, SQL-ReAct and RAG-ReAct, to tackle challenges in structured and unstructured data tasks. Evaluations show that while LLMs struggle with domain-specific terminology and nuanced clause texts, fine-tuning on InsQABench significantly improves performance. Our benchmark establishes a solid foundation for advancing LLM applications in the insurance domain, with data and code available at https://github.com/HaileyFamo/InsQABench.git.
2501.10945
Gradient-Based Multi-Objective Deep Learning: Algorithms, Theories, Applications, and Beyond
cs.LG stat.ML
Multi-objective optimization (MOO) in deep learning aims to simultaneously optimize multiple conflicting objectives, a challenge frequently encountered in areas like multi-task learning and multi-criteria learning. Recent advancements in gradient-based MOO methods have enabled the discovery of diverse types of solutions, ranging from a single balanced solution to finite or even infinite Pareto sets, tailored to user needs. These developments have broad applications across domains such as reinforcement learning, computer vision, recommendation systems, and large language models. This survey provides the first comprehensive review of gradient-based MOO in deep learning, covering algorithms, theories, and practical applications. By unifying various approaches and identifying critical challenges, it serves as a foundational resource for driving innovation in this evolving field. A comprehensive list of MOO algorithms in deep learning is available at \url{https://github.com/Baijiong-Lin/Awesome-Multi-Objective-Deep-Learning}.
2501.10950
Factor Graph-Based Active SLAM for Spacecraft Proximity Operations
cs.RO
We investigate a scenario where a chaser spacecraft or satellite equipped with a monocular camera navigates in close proximity to a target spacecraft. The satellite's primary objective is to construct a representation of the operational environment and localize itself within it, utilizing the available image data. We frame the joint task of state trajectory and map estimation as an instance of smoothing-based simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), where the underlying structure of the problem is represented as a factor graph. Rather than considering estimation and planning as separate tasks, we propose to control the camera observations to actively reduce the uncertainty of the estimation variables, the spacecraft state, and the map landmarks. This is accomplished by adopting an information-theoretic metric to reason about the impact of candidate actions on the evolution of the belief state. Numerical simulations indicate that the proposed method successfully captures the interplay between planning and estimation, hence yielding reduced uncertainty and higher accuracy when compared to commonly adopted passive sensing strategies.
2501.10953
Channel Coding for Gaussian Channels with Mean and Variance Constraints
cs.IT math.IT
We consider channel coding for Gaussian channels with the recently introduced mean and variance cost constraints. Through matching converse and achievability bounds, we characterize the optimal first- and second-order performance. The main technical contribution of this paper is an achievability scheme which uses random codewords drawn from a mixture of three uniform distributions on $(n-1)$-spheres of radii $R_1, R_2$ and $R_3$, where $R_i = O(\sqrt{n})$ and $|R_i - R_j| = O(1)$. To analyze such a mixture distribution, we prove a lemma giving a uniform $O(\log n)$ bound, which holds with high probability, on the log ratio of the output distributions $Q_i^{cc}$ and $Q_j^{cc}$, where $Q_i^{cc}$ is induced by a random channel input uniformly distributed on an $(n-1)$-sphere of radius $R_i$. To facilitate the application of the usual central limit theorem, we also give a uniform $O(\log n)$ bound, which holds with high probability, on the log ratio of the output distributions $Q_i^{cc}$ and $Q^*_i$, where $Q_i^*$ is induced by a random channel input with i.i.d. components.
2501.10956
Multimodal Techniques for Malware Classification
cs.CR cs.LG
The threat of malware is a serious concern for computer networks and systems, highlighting the need for accurate classification techniques. In this research, we experiment with multimodal machine learning approaches for malware classification, based on the structured nature of the Windows Portable Executable (PE) file format. Specifically, we train Support Vector Machine (SVM), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models on features extracted from PE headers, we train these same models on features extracted from the other sections of PE files, and train each model on features extracted from the entire PE file. We then train SVM models on each of the nine header-sections combinations of these baseline models, using the output layer probabilities of the component models as feature vectors. We compare the baseline cases to these multimodal combinations. In our experiments, we find that the best of the multimodal models outperforms the best of the baseline cases, indicating that it can be advantageous to train separate models on distinct parts of Windows PE files.
2501.10957
MARIO: A Mixed Annotation Framework For Polyp Segmentation
cs.CV cs.AI
Existing polyp segmentation models are limited by high labeling costs and the small size of datasets. Additionally, vast polyp datasets remain underutilized because these models typically rely on a single type of annotation. To address this dilemma, we introduce MARIO, a mixed supervision model designed to accommodate various annotation types, significantly expanding the range of usable data. MARIO learns from underutilized datasets by incorporating five forms of supervision: pixel-level, box-level, polygon-level, scribblelevel, and point-level. Each form of supervision is associated with a tailored loss that effectively leverages the supervision labels while minimizing the noise. This allows MARIO to move beyond the constraints of relying on a single annotation type. Furthermore, MARIO primarily utilizes dataset with weak and cheap annotations, reducing the dependence on large-scale, fully annotated ones. Experimental results across five benchmark datasets demonstrate that MARIO consistently outperforms existing methods, highlighting its efficacy in balancing trade-offs between different forms of supervision and maximizing polyp segmentation performance
2501.10958
Rethinking Early-Fusion Strategies for Improved Multimodal Image Segmentation
cs.CV
RGB and thermal image fusion have great potential to exhibit improved semantic segmentation in low-illumination conditions. Existing methods typically employ a two-branch encoder framework for multimodal feature extraction and design complicated feature fusion strategies to achieve feature extraction and fusion for multimodal semantic segmentation. However, these methods require massive parameter updates and computational effort during the feature extraction and fusion. To address this issue, we propose a novel multimodal fusion network (EFNet) based on an early fusion strategy and a simple but effective feature clustering for training efficient RGB-T semantic segmentation. In addition, we also propose a lightweight and efficient multi-scale feature aggregation decoder based on Euclidean distance. We validate the effectiveness of our method on different datasets and outperform previous state-of-the-art methods with lower parameters and computation.
2501.10963
Open FinLLM Leaderboard: Towards Financial AI Readiness
cs.CE
Financial large language models (FinLLMs) with multimodal capabilities are envisioned to revolutionize applications across business, finance, accounting, and auditing. However, real-world adoption requires robust benchmarks of FinLLMs' and agents' performance. Maintaining an open leaderboard of models is crucial for encouraging innovative adoption and improving model effectiveness. In collaboration with Linux Foundation and Hugging Face, we create an open FinLLM leaderboard, which serves as an open platform for assessing and comparing LLMs' performance on a wide spectrum of financial tasks. By demoncratizing access to advanced AI tools and financial knowledge, a chatbot or agent may enhance the analytical capabilities of the general public to a professional-level within a few months of usage. This open leaderboard welcomes contributions from academia, open-source community, industry, and stakeholders. In particular, we encourage contributions of new datasets, tasks, and models for continual update. Through fostering a collaborative and open ecosystem, we seek to ensure the long-term sustainability and relevance of LLMs and agents as they evolve with the financial sector's needs.
2501.10966
DC-PCN: Point Cloud Completion Network with Dual-Codebook Guided Quantization
cs.CV cs.AI
Point cloud completion aims to reconstruct complete 3D shapes from partial 3D point clouds. With advancements in deep learning techniques, various methods for point cloud completion have been developed. Despite achieving encouraging results, a significant issue remains: these methods often overlook the variability in point clouds sampled from a single 3D object surface. This variability can lead to ambiguity and hinder the achievement of more precise completion results. Therefore, in this study, we introduce a novel point cloud completion network, namely Dual-Codebook Point Completion Network (DC-PCN), following an encder-decoder pipeline. The primary objective of DC-PCN is to formulate a singular representation of sampled point clouds originating from the same 3D surface. DC-PCN introduces a dual-codebook design to quantize point-cloud representations from a multilevel perspective. It consists of an encoder-codebook and a decoder-codebook, designed to capture distinct point cloud patterns at shallow and deep levels. Additionally, to enhance the information flow between these two codebooks, we devise an information exchange mechanism. This approach ensures that crucial features and patterns from both shallow and deep levels are effectively utilized for completion. Extensive experiments on the PCN, ShapeNet\_Part, and ShapeNet34 datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method.
2501.10967
Advancing General Multimodal Capability of Vision-language Models with Pyramid-descent Visual Position Encoding
cs.CV cs.AI cs.CL
Vision-language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in advancing general artificial intelligence, yet the irrational encoding of visual positions persists in inhibiting the models' comprehensive perception performance across different levels of granularity. In this work, we propose Pyramid-descent Visual Position Encoding (PyPE), a novel approach designed to enhance the perception of visual tokens within VLMs. By assigning visual position indexes from the periphery to the center and expanding the central receptive field incrementally, PyPE addresses the limitations of traditional raster-scan methods and mitigates the long-term decay effects induced by Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE). Our method reduces the relative distance between interrelated visual elements and instruction tokens, promoting a more rational allocation of attention weights and allowing for a multi-granularity perception of visual elements and countering the over-reliance on anchor tokens. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that PyPE consistently improves the general capabilities of VLMs across various sizes. Code is available at https://github.com/SakuraTroyChen/PyPE.
2501.10969
AI Based Font Pair Suggestion Modelling For Graphic Design
cs.CV cs.CL
One of the key challenges of AI generated designs in Microsoft Designer is selecting the most contextually relevant and novel fonts for the design suggestions. Previous efforts involved manually mapping design intent to fonts. Though this was high quality, this method does not scale for a large number of fonts (3000+) and numerous user intents for graphic design. In this work we create font visual embeddings, a font stroke width algorithm, a font category to font mapping dataset, an LLM-based category utilization description and a lightweight, low latency knowledge-distilled mini language model (Mini LM V2) to recommend multiple pairs of contextual heading and subheading fonts for beautiful and intuitive designs. We also utilize a weighted scoring mechanism, nearest neighbor approach and stratified sampling to rank the font pairs and bring novelty to the predictions.
2501.10970
The Alternative Annotator Test for LLM-as-a-Judge: How to Statistically Justify Replacing Human Annotators with LLMs
cs.CL cs.AI cs.HC
The "LLM-as-a-judge" paradigm employs Large Language Models (LLMs) as annotators and evaluators in tasks traditionally performed by humans. LLM annotations are widely used, not only in NLP research but also in fields like medicine, psychology, and social science. Despite their role in shaping study results and insights, there is no standard or rigorous procedure to determine whether LLMs can replace human annotators. In this paper, we propose a novel statistical procedure -- the Alternative Annotator Test (alt-test) -- that requires only a modest subset of annotated examples to justify using LLM annotations. Additionally, we introduce a versatile and interpretable measure for comparing LLM judges. To demonstrate our procedure, we curated a diverse collection of ten datasets, consisting of language and vision-language tasks, and conducted experiments with six LLMs and four prompting techniques. Our results show that LLMs can sometimes replace humans with closed-source LLMs (such as GPT-4o), outperforming open-source LLMs, and that prompting techniques yield judges of varying quality. We hope this study encourages more rigorous and reliable practices.
2501.10974
Sequential Change Detection for Learning in Piecewise Stationary Bandit Environments
cs.IT cs.SY eess.SY math.IT stat.OT
A finite-horizon variant of the quickest change detection problem is investigated, which is motivated by a change detection problem that arises in piecewise stationary bandits. The goal is to minimize the \emph{latency}, which is smallest threshold such that the probability that the detection delay exceeds the threshold is below a desired low level, while controlling the false alarm probability to a desired low level. When the pre- and post-change distributions are unknown, two tests are proposed as candidate solutions. These tests are shown to attain order optimality in terms of the horizon. Furthermore, the growth in their latencies with respect to the false alarm probability and late detection probability satisfies a property that is desirable in regret analysis for piecewise stationary bandits. Numerical results are provided to validate the theoretical performance results.
2501.10977
SMARTe-VR: Student Monitoring and Adaptive Response Technology for e-learning in Virtual Reality
cs.HC cs.CV
This work introduces SMARTe-VR, a platform for student monitoring in an immersive virtual reality environment designed for online education. SMARTe-VR is aimed to gather data for adaptive learning, focusing on facial biometrics and learning metadata. The platform allows instructors to create tailored learning sessions with video lectures, featuring an interface with an Auto QA system to evaluate understanding, interaction tools (e.g., textbook highlighting and lecture tagging), and real-time feedback. Additionally, we release a dataset containing 5 research challenges with data from 10 users in VR-based TOEIC sessions. This dataset, spanning over 25 hours, includes facial features, learning metadata, 450 responses, question difficulty levels, concept tags, and understanding labels. Alongside the database, we present preliminary experiments using Item Response Theory models, adapted for understanding detection using facial features. Two architectures were explored: a Temporal Convolutional Network for local features and a Multilayer Perceptron for global features.
2501.10979
Control LLM: Controlled Evolution for Intelligence Retention in LLM
cs.LG
Large Language Models (LLMs) demand significant computational resources, making it essential to enhance their capabilities without retraining from scratch. A key challenge in this domain is \textit{catastrophic forgetting} (CF), which hampers performance during Continuous Pre-training (CPT) and Continuous Supervised Fine-Tuning (CSFT). We propose \textbf{Control LLM}, a novel approach that leverages parallel pre-trained and expanded transformer blocks, aligning their hidden-states through interpolation strategies This method effectively preserves performance on existing tasks while seamlessly integrating new knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of Control LLM in both CPT and CSFT. On Llama3.1-8B-Instruct, it achieves significant improvements in mathematical reasoning ($+14.4\%$ on Math-Hard) and coding performance ($+10\%$ on MBPP-PLUS). On Llama3.1-8B, it enhances multilingual capabilities ($+10.6\%$ on C-Eval, $+6.8\%$ on CMMLU, and $+30.2\%$ on CMMLU-0shot-CoT). It surpasses existing methods and achieves SOTA among open-source models tuned from the same base model, using substantially less data and compute. Crucially, these gains are realized while preserving strong original capabilities, with minimal degradation ($<4.3\% \text{on MMLU}$) compared to $>35\%$ in open-source Math and Coding models. This approach has been successfully deployed in LinkedIn's GenAI-powered job seeker and Ads unit products. To support further research, we release the training and evaluation code (https://github.com/linkedin/ControlLLM) along with models trained on public datasets (https://huggingface.co/ControlLLM) to the community.
2501.10980
An analysis of the combination of feature selection and machine learning methods for an accurate and timely detection of lung cancer
cs.LG
One of the deadliest cancers, lung cancer necessitates an early and precise diagnosis. Because patients have a better chance of recovering, early identification of lung cancer is crucial. This review looks at how to diagnose lung cancer using sophisticated machine learning techniques like Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Machine (SVM). The Chi-squared test is one feature selection strategy that has been successfully applied to find related features and enhance model performance. The findings demonstrate that these techniques can improve detection efficiency and accuracy while also assisting in runtime reduction. This study produces recommendations for further research as well as ideas to enhance diagnostic techniques. In order to improve healthcare and create automated methods for detecting lung cancer, this research is a critical first step.
2501.10984
Self-CephaloNet: A Two-stage Novel Framework using Operational Neural Network for Cephalometric Analysis
cs.CV math.OC
Cephalometric analysis is essential for the diagnosis and treatment planning of orthodontics. In lateral cephalograms, however, the manual detection of anatomical landmarks is a time-consuming procedure. Deep learning solutions hold the potential to address the time constraints associated with certain tasks; however, concerns regarding their performance have been observed. To address this critical issue, we proposed an end-to-end cascaded deep learning framework (Self-CepahloNet) for the task, which demonstrated benchmark performance over the ISBI 2015 dataset in predicting 19 dental landmarks. Due to their adaptive nodal capabilities, Self-ONN (self-operational neural networks) demonstrate superior learning performance for complex feature spaces over conventional convolutional neural networks. To leverage this attribute, we introduced a novel self-bottleneck in the HRNetV2 (High Resolution Network) backbone, which has exhibited benchmark performance on the ISBI 2015 dataset for the dental landmark detection task. Our first-stage results surpassed previous studies, showcasing the efficacy of our singular end-to-end deep learning model, which achieved a remarkable 70.95% success rate in detecting cephalometric landmarks within a 2mm range for the Test1 and Test2 datasets. Moreover, the second stage significantly improved overall performance, yielding an impressive 82.25% average success rate for the datasets above within the same 2mm distance. Furthermore, external validation was conducted using the PKU cephalogram dataset. Our model demonstrated a commendable success rate of 75.95% within the 2mm range.
2501.10985
GRID: Protecting Training Graph from Link Stealing Attacks on GNN Models
cs.LG cs.CR
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have exhibited superior performance in various classification tasks on graph-structured data. However, they encounter the potential vulnerability from the link stealing attacks, which can infer the presence of a link between two nodes via measuring the similarity of its incident nodes' prediction vectors produced by a GNN model. Such attacks pose severe security and privacy threats to the training graph used in GNN models. In this work, we propose a novel solution, called Graph Link Disguise (GRID), to defend against link stealing attacks with the formal guarantee of GNN model utility for retaining prediction accuracy. The key idea of GRID is to add carefully crafted noises to the nodes' prediction vectors for disguising adjacent nodes as n-hop indirect neighboring nodes. We take into account the graph topology and select only a subset of nodes (called core nodes) covering all links for adding noises, which can avert the noises offset and have the further advantages of reducing both the distortion loss and the computation cost. Our crafted noises can ensure 1) the noisy prediction vectors of any two adjacent nodes have their similarity level like that of two non-adjacent nodes and 2) the model prediction is unchanged to ensure zero utility loss. Extensive experiments on five datasets are conducted to show the effectiveness of our proposed GRID solution against different representative link-stealing attacks under transductive settings and inductive settings respectively, as well as two influence-based attacks. Meanwhile, it achieves a much better privacy-utility trade-off than existing methods when extended to GNNs.
2501.10990
Societal citations undermine the function of the science reward system
cs.DL cs.SI physics.soc-ph
Citations in the scientific literature system do not simply reflect relationships between knowledge but are influenced by non-objective and societal factors. Citation bias, irresponsible citation, and citation manipulation are widespread and have become a serious and growing problem. However, it has been difficult to assess the consequences of mixing societal factors into the literature system because there was no observable literature system unmixed with societal factors for comparison. In this paper, we construct a mathematical theorem network, representing a logic-based and objective knowledge system, to address this problem. By comparing the mathematical theorem network and the scientific citation networks, we find that these two types of networks are significantly different in their structure and function. In particular, the reward function in citation networks is impaired: The scientific citation network fails to provide more recognition for more disruptive results, while the mathematical theorem network can achieve. We develop a network generation model that can create two types of links$\unicode{x2014}$logical and societal$\unicode{x2014}$to account for these differences. The model parameter $q$, which we call the human influence factor, can control the number of societal links and thus regulate the degree of mixing of societal factors in the networks. Under this design, the model successfully reproduces the differences among real networks. These results suggest that the presence of societal factors undermines the function of the scientific reward system. To improve the status quo, we advocate for reforming the reference list format in papers, urging journals to require authors to separately disclose logical references and social references.
2501.10991
Front Hair Styling Robot System Using Path Planning for Root-Centric Strand Adjustment
cs.RO
Hair styling is a crucial aspect of personal grooming, significantly influenced by the appearance of front hair. While brushing is commonly used both to detangle hair and for styling purposes, existing research primarily focuses on robotic systems for detangling hair, with limited exploration into robotic hair styling. This research presents a novel robotic system designed to automatically adjust front hairstyles, with an emphasis on path planning for root-centric strand adjustment. The system utilizes images to compare the current hair state with the desired target state through an orientation map of hair strands. By concentrating on the differences in hair orientation and specifically targeting adjustments at the root of each strand, the system performs detailed styling tasks. The path planning approach ensures effective alignment of the hairstyle with the target, and a closed-loop mechanism refines these adjustments to accurately evolve the hairstyle towards the desired outcome. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system achieves a high degree of similarity and consistency in front hair styling, showing promising results for automated, precise hairstyle adjustments.
2501.11002
pMixFed: Efficient Personalized Federated Learning through Adaptive Layer-Wise Mixup
cs.LG cs.DC
Traditional Federated Learning (FL) methods encounter significant challenges when dealing with heterogeneous data and providing personalized solutions for non-IID scenarios. Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) approaches aim to address these issues by balancing generalization and personalization, often through parameter decoupling or partial models that freeze some neural network layers for personalization while aggregating other layers globally. However, existing methods still face challenges of global-local model discrepancy, client drift, and catastrophic forgetting, which degrade model accuracy. To overcome these limitations, we propose pMixFed, a dynamic, layer-wise PFL approach that integrates mixup between shared global and personalized local models. Our method introduces an adaptive strategy for partitioning between personalized and shared layers, a gradual transition of personalization degree to enhance local client adaptation, improved generalization across clients, and a novel aggregation mechanism to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that pMixFed outperforms state-of-the-art PFL methods, showing faster model training, increased robustness, and improved handling of data heterogeneity under different heterogeneous settings.
2501.11003
Building low-resource African language corpora: A case study of Kidawida, Kalenjin and Dholuo
cs.CL
Natural Language Processing is a crucial frontier in artificial intelligence, with broad applications in many areas, including public health, agriculture, education, and commerce. However, due to the lack of substantial linguistic resources, many African languages remain underrepresented in this digital transformation. This paper presents a case study on the development of linguistic corpora for three under-resourced Kenyan languages, Kidaw'ida, Kalenjin, and Dholuo, with the aim of advancing natural language processing and linguistic research in African communities. Our project, which lasted one year, employed a selective crowd-sourcing methodology to collect text and speech data from native speakers of these languages. Data collection involved (1) recording conversations and translation of the resulting text into Kiswahili, thereby creating parallel corpora, and (2) reading and recording written texts to generate speech corpora. We made these resources freely accessible via open-research platforms, namely Zenodo for the parallel text corpora and Mozilla Common Voice for the speech datasets, thus facilitating ongoing contributions and access for developers to train models and develop Natural Language Processing applications. The project demonstrates how grassroots efforts in corpus building can support the inclusion of African languages in artificial intelligence innovations. In addition to filling resource gaps, these corpora are vital in promoting linguistic diversity and empowering local communities by enabling Natural Language Processing applications tailored to their needs. As African countries like Kenya increasingly embrace digital transformation, developing indigenous language resources becomes essential for inclusive growth. We encourage continued collaboration from native speakers and developers to expand and utilize these corpora.
2501.11006
GREEN-CODE: Optimizing Energy Efficiency in Large Language Models for Code Generation
cs.DC cs.AI cs.PF cs.SE
Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming integral to daily life, showcasing their vast potential across various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Beyond NLP, LLMs are increasingly used in software development tasks, such as code completion, modification, bug fixing, and code translation. Software engineers widely use tools like GitHub Copilot and Amazon Q, streamlining workflows and automating tasks with high accuracy. While the resource and energy intensity of LLM training is often highlighted, inference can be even more resource-intensive over time, as it's a continuous process with a high number of invocations. Therefore, developing resource-efficient alternatives for LLM inference is crucial for sustainability. This work proposes GREEN-CODE, a framework for energy-aware code generation in LLMs. GREEN-CODE performs dynamic early exit during LLM inference. We train a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent that learns to balance the trade-offs between accuracy, latency, and energy consumption. Our approach is evaluated on two open-source LLMs, Llama 3.2 3B and OPT 2.7B, using the JavaCorpus and PY150 datasets. Results show that our method reduces the energy consumption between 23-50 % on average for code generation tasks without significantly affecting accuracy.
2501.11007
HFGCN:Hypergraph Fusion Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition
cs.CV cs.LG
In recent years, action recognition has received much attention and wide application due to its important role in video understanding. Most of the researches on action recognition methods focused on improving the performance via various deep learning methods rather than the classification of skeleton points. The topological modeling between skeleton points and body parts was seldom considered. Although some studies have used a data-driven approach to classify the topology of the skeleton point, the nature of the skeleton point in terms of kinematics has not been taken into consideration. Therefore, in this paper, we draw on the theory of kinematics to adapt the topological relations of the skeleton point and propose a topological relation classification based on body parts and distance from core of body. To synthesize these topological relations for action recognition, we propose a novel Hypergraph Fusion Graph Convolutional Network (HFGCN). In particular, the proposed model is able to focus on the human skeleton points and the different body parts simultaneously, and thus construct the topology, which improves the recognition accuracy obviously. We use a hypergraph to represent the categorical relationships of these skeleton points and incorporate the hypergraph into a graph convolution network to model the higher-order relationships among the skeleton points and enhance the feature representation of the network. In addition, our proposed hypergraph attention module and hypergraph graph convolution module optimize topology modeling in temporal and channel dimensions, respectively, to further enhance the feature representation of the network. We conducted extensive experiments on three widely used datasets.The results validate that our proposed method can achieve the best performance when compared with the state-of-the-art skeleton-based methods.
2501.11009
Efficient Reconciliation of Continuous Variable Quantum Key Distribution with Multiplicatively Repeated Non-Binary LDPC Codes
quant-ph cs.IT math.IT
Continuous variable quantum key distribution bears the promise of simple quantum key distribution directly compatible with commercial off the shelf equipment. However, for a long time its performance was hindered by the absence of good classical postprocessing capable of distilling secret-keys in the noisy regime. Advanced coding solutions in the past years have partially addressed this problem enabling record transmission distances of up to 165 km, and 206 km over ultra-low loss fiber. In this paper, we show that a very simple coding solution with a single code is sufficient to extract keys at all noise levels. This solution has performance competitive with prior results for all levels of noise, and we show that non-zero keys can be distilled up to a record distance of 192 km assuming the standard loss of a single-mode optical fiber, and 240 km over ultra-low loss fibers. Low-rate codes are constructed using multiplicatively repeated non-binary low-density parity-check codes over a finite field of characteristic two. This construction only makes use of a (2,k)-regular non-binary low-density parity-check code as mother code, such that code design is in fact not required, thus trivializing the code construction procedure. The construction is also inherently rate-adaptive thereby allowing to easily create codes of any rate. Rate-adaptive codes are of special interest for the efficient reconciliation of errors over time or arbitrary varying channels, as is the case with quantum key distribution. In short, these codes are highly efficient when reconciling errors over a very noisy communication channel, and perform well even for short block-length codes. Finally, the proposed solution is known to be easily amenable to hardware implementations, thus addressing also the requirements for practical reconciliation in continuous variable quantum key distribution.
2501.11012
GenAI Content Detection Task 1: English and Multilingual Machine-Generated Text Detection: AI vs. Human
cs.CL
We present the GenAI Content Detection Task~1 -- a shared task on binary machine generated text detection, conducted as a part of the GenAI workshop at COLING 2025. The task consists of two subtasks: Monolingual (English) and Multilingual. The shared task attracted many participants: 36 teams made official submissions to the Monolingual subtask during the test phase and 26 teams -- to the Multilingual. We provide a comprehensive overview of the data, a summary of the results -- including system rankings and performance scores -- detailed descriptions of the participating systems, and an in-depth analysis of submissions. https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/COLING-2025-Workshop-on-MGT-Detection-Task1
2501.11014
Transfer Learning Strategies for Pathological Foundation Models: A Systematic Evaluation in Brain Tumor Classification
eess.IV cs.CV
Foundation models pretrained on large-scale pathology datasets have shown promising results across various diagnostic tasks. Here, we present a systematic evaluation of transfer learning strategies for brain tumor classification using these models. We analyzed 252 cases comprising five major tumor types: glioblastoma, astrocytoma, oligodendroglioma, primary central nervous system lymphoma, and metastatic tumors. Comparing state-of-the-art foundation models with conventional approaches, we found that foundation models demonstrated robust classification performance with as few as 10 patches per case, challenging the traditional assumption that extensive per-case image sampling is necessary. Furthermore, our evaluation revealed that simple transfer learning strategies like linear probing were sufficient, while fine-tuning often degraded model performance. These findings suggest a paradigm shift from extensive data collection to efficient utilization of pretrained features, providing practical implications for implementing AI-assisted diagnosis in clinical pathology.
2501.11015
Wireless Control over Edge Networks: Joint User Association and Communication-Computation Co-Design
cs.IT math.IT
This paper studies a wireless networked control system with multiple base stations (BSs) cooperatively coordinating the wireless control of a number of subsystems each consisting of a plant, a sensor, and an actuator. In this system, each sensor first offloads the sensing data to its associated BS, which then employs mobile edge computing (MEC) to process the data and sends the command signals back to the actuator for remote control. We consider the time-division-multiple-access (TDMA) service protocol among different BSs to facilitate the cascaded communication and computation process, in which different BSs implement the uplink data collection and downlink command broadcasting over orthogonal time slots. We also employ the massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) at BSs, based on which each BS serves its associated sensors or actuators over the same time-frequency resources via spatial multiplexing. Under this setup, we jointly design the association between BSs and sensors/actuators as well as the joint communication and computation resource allocation, with the objective of minimizing the closed-loop control latency of the multiple subsystems while ensuring their control stability. The optimization takes into account the transmission uncertainty caused by both the hyper reliable and low-latency communications (HRLLC) and the inter-user interference , as well as the communication and computation resource constraints at distributed nodes. To solve the challenging non-convex joint optimization problem, we develop an efficient algorithm by employing the techniques of alternating optimization and successive convex approximation (SCA). Numerical results show that the proposed joint BS-sensor/actuator association and resource allocation design significantly outperforms other heuristic schemes and frequency-division-multiple-access (FDMA) counterpart.
2501.11020
Car-GS: Addressing Reflective and Transparent Surface Challenges in 3D Car Reconstruction
cs.CV
3D car modeling is crucial for applications in autonomous driving systems, virtual and augmented reality, and gaming. However, due to the distinctive properties of cars, such as highly reflective and transparent surface materials, existing methods often struggle to achieve accurate 3D car reconstruction.To address these limitations, we propose Car-GS, a novel approach designed to mitigate the effects of specular highlights and the coupling of RGB and geometry in 3D geometric and shading reconstruction (3DGS). Our method incorporates three key innovations: First, we introduce view-dependent Gaussian primitives to effectively model surface reflections. Second, we identify the limitations of using a shared opacity parameter for both image rendering and geometric attributes when modeling transparent objects. To overcome this, we assign a learnable geometry-specific opacity to each 2D Gaussian primitive, dedicated solely to rendering depth and normals. Third, we observe that reconstruction errors are most prominent when the camera view is nearly orthogonal to glass surfaces. To address this issue, we develop a quality-aware supervision module that adaptively leverages normal priors from a pre-trained large-scale normal model.Experimental results demonstrate that Car-GS achieves precise reconstruction of car surfaces and significantly outperforms prior methods. The project page is available at https://lcc815.github.io/Car-GS.
2501.11023
Investigating the Impact of Language-Adaptive Fine-Tuning on Sentiment Analysis in Hausa Language Using AfriBERTa
cs.CL
Sentiment analysis (SA) plays a vital role in Natural Language Processing (NLP) by ~identifying sentiments expressed in text. Although significant advances have been made in SA for widely spoken languages, low-resource languages such as Hausa face unique challenges, primarily due to a lack of digital resources. This study investigates the effectiveness of Language-Adaptive Fine-Tuning (LAFT) to improve SA performance in Hausa. We first curate a diverse, unlabeled corpus to expand the model's linguistic capabilities, followed by applying LAFT to adapt AfriBERTa specifically to the nuances of the Hausa language. The adapted model is then fine-tuned on the labeled NaijaSenti sentiment dataset to evaluate its performance. Our findings demonstrate that LAFT gives modest improvements, which may be attributed to the use of formal Hausa text rather than informal social media data. Nevertheless, the pre-trained AfriBERTa model significantly outperformed models not specifically trained on Hausa, highlighting the importance of using pre-trained models in low-resource contexts. This research emphasizes the necessity for diverse data sources to advance NLP applications for low-resource African languages. We published the code and the dataset to encourage further research and facilitate reproducibility in low-resource NLP here: https://github.com/Sani-Abdullahi-Sani/Natural-Language-Processing/blob/main/Sentiment%20Analysis%20for%20Low%20Resource%20African%20Languages
2501.11024
Laplacian Eigenvector Centrality
cs.SI cs.GT physics.soc-ph
Networks significantly influence social, economic, and organizational outcomes, with centrality measures serving as crucial tools to capture the importance of individual nodes. This paper introduces Laplacian Eigenvector Centrality (LEC), a novel framework for network analysis based on spectral graph theory and the eigendecomposition of the Laplacian matrix. A distinctive feature of LEC is its adjustable parameter, the LEC order, which enables researchers to control and assess the scope of centrality measurement using the Laplacian spectrum. Using random graph models, LEC demonstrates robustness and scalability across diverse network structures. We connect LEC to equilibrium responses to external shocks in an economic model, showing how LEC quantifies agents' roles in attenuating shocks and facilitating coordinated responses through quadratic optimization. Finally, we apply LEC to the study of microfinance diffusion, illustrating how it complements classical centrality measures, such as eigenvector and Katz-Bonacich centralities, by capturing distinctive aspects of node positions within the network.
2501.11030
Tracking Mouse from Incomplete Body-Part Observations and Deep-Learned Deformable-Mouse Model Motion-Track Constraint for Behavior Analysis
cs.CV
Tracking mouse body parts in video is often incomplete due to occlusions such that - e.g. - subsequent action and behavior analysis is impeded. In this conceptual work, videos from several perspectives are integrated via global exterior camera orientation; body part positions are estimated by 3D triangulation and bundle adjustment. Consistency of overall 3D track reconstruction is achieved by introduction of a 3D mouse model, deep-learned body part movements, and global motion-track smoothness constraint. The resulting 3D body and body part track estimates are substantially more complete than the original single-frame-based body part detection, therefore, allowing improved animal behavior analysis.
2501.11031
AdaptiveLog: An Adaptive Log Analysis Framework with the Collaboration of Large and Small Language Model
cs.SE cs.AI cs.CL
Automated log analysis is crucial to ensure high availability and reliability of complex systems. The advent of LLMs in NLP has ushered in a new era of language model-driven automated log analysis, garnering significant interest. Within this field, two primary paradigms based on language models for log analysis have become prominent. Small Language Models (SLMs) follow the pre-train and fine-tune paradigm, focusing on the specific log analysis task through fine-tuning on supervised datasets. On the other hand, LLMs following the in-context learning paradigm, analyze logs by providing a few examples in prompt contexts without updating parameters. Despite their respective strengths, we notice that SLMs are more cost-effective but less powerful, whereas LLMs with large parameters are highly powerful but expensive and inefficient. To trade-off between the performance and inference costs of both models in automated log analysis, this paper introduces an adaptive log analysis framework known as AdaptiveLog, which effectively reduces the costs associated with LLM while ensuring superior results. This framework collaborates an LLM and a small language model, strategically allocating the LLM to tackle complex logs while delegating simpler logs to the SLM. Specifically, to efficiently query the LLM, we propose an adaptive selection strategy based on the uncertainty estimation of the SLM, where the LLM is invoked only when the SLM is uncertain. In addition, to enhance the reasoning ability of the LLM in log analysis tasks, we propose a novel prompt strategy by retrieving similar error-prone cases as the reference, enabling the model to leverage past error experiences and learn solutions from these cases. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AdaptiveLog achieves state-of-the-art results across different tasks, elevating the overall accuracy of log analysis while maintaining cost efficiency.
2501.11034
Generative Retrieval for Book search
cs.IR
In book search, relevant book information should be returned in response to a query. Books contain complex, multi-faceted information such as metadata, outlines, and main text, where the outline provides hierarchical information between chapters and sections. Generative retrieval (GR) is a new retrieval paradigm that consolidates corpus information into a single model to generate identifiers of documents that are relevant to a given query. How can GR be applied to book search? Directly applying GR to book search is a challenge due to the unique characteristics of book search: The model needs to retain the complex, multi-faceted information of the book, which increases the demand for labeled data. Splitting book information and treating it as a collection of separate segments for learning might result in a loss of hierarchical information. We propose an effective Generative retrieval framework for Book Search (GBS) that features two main components: data augmentation and outline-oriented book encoding. For data augmentation, GBS constructs multiple query-book pairs for training; it constructs multiple book identifiers based on the outline, various forms of book contents, and simulates real book retrieval scenarios with varied pseudo-queries. This includes coverage-promoting book identifier augmentation, allowing the model to learn to index effectively, and diversity-enhanced query augmentation, allowing the model to learn to retrieve effectively. Outline-oriented book encoding improves length extrapolation through bi-level positional encoding and retentive attention mechanisms to maintain context over long sequences. Experiments on a proprietary Baidu dataset demonstrate that GBS outperforms strong baselines, achieving a 9.8\% improvement in terms of MRR@20, over the state-of-the-art RIPOR method...
2501.11035
From Arabic Text to Puzzles: LLM-Driven Development of Arabic Educational Crosswords
cs.CL
We present an Arabic crossword puzzle generator from a given text that utilizes advanced language models such as GPT-4-Turbo, GPT-3.5-Turbo and Llama3-8B-Instruct, specifically developed for educational purposes, this innovative generator leverages a meticulously compiled dataset named Arabic-Clue-Instruct with over 50,000 entries encompassing text, answers, clues, and categories. This dataset is intricately designed to aid in the generation of pertinent clues linked to specific texts and keywords within defined categories. This project addresses the scarcity of advanced educational tools tailored for the Arabic language, promoting enhanced language learning and cognitive development. By providing a culturally and linguistically relevant tool, our objective is to make learning more engaging and effective through gamification and interactivity. Integrating state-of-the-art artificial intelligence with contemporary learning methodologies, this tool can generate crossword puzzles from any given educational text, thereby facilitating an interactive and enjoyable learning experience. This tool not only advances educational paradigms but also sets a new standard in interactive and cognitive learning technologies. The model and dataset are publicly available.
2501.11036
LF-Steering: Latent Feature Activation Steering for Enhancing Semantic Consistency in Large Language Models
cs.CL
Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate inconsistent responses when prompted with semantically equivalent paraphrased inputs. Recently, activation steering, a technique that modulates LLMs' behaviours by adjusting their latent representations during inference time, has been explored to improve the semantic consistency of LLMs. However, these methods typically operate at the model component level, such as layer hidden states or attention head outputs. They face a challenge due to the ``polysemanticity issue'', where the model components of LLMs typically encode multiple entangled features, making precise steering difficult. To address this challenge, we drill down to feature-level representations and propose LF-Steering, a novel activation steering approach to precisely identify latent feature representations responsible for semantic inconsistency. More specifically, our method maps the hidden states of the relevant transformer layer into a sparsely activated, high-dimensional feature space based on a sparse autoencoder (SAE), ensuring model steering based on decoupled feature representations with minimal interference. Comprehensive experiments on NLU and NLG datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in enhancing semantic consistency, resulting in significant performance gains for various NLU and NLG tasks.
2501.11039
Beyond Any-Shot Adaptation: Predicting Optimization Outcome for Robustness Gains without Extra Pay
cs.LG
The foundation model enables general-purpose problem-solving and enjoys desirable rapid adaptation due to its adopted cross-task generalization paradigms, e.g., pretraining, meta-training, and finetuning. Recent advances in these paradigms show the crucial role of challenging tasks' prioritized sampling in enhancing adaptation robustness. However, ranking task difficulties exhausts massive task queries to evaluate, thus computation and annotation intensive, which is typically unaffordable in practice. This work underscores the criticality of both adaptation robustness and learning efficiency, especially in scenarios where tasks are risky or costly to evaluate, e.g., policy evaluations in Markov decision processes (MDPs) or inference with large models. To this end, we present Model Predictive Task Sampling (MPTS) to establish connections between the task space and adaptation risk landscape to form a theoretical guideline in robust active task sampling. MPTS characterizes the task episodic information with a generative model and directly predicts task-specific adaptation risk values from posterior inference. The developed risk learner can amortize expensive evaluation and provably approximately rank task difficulties in the pursuit of task robust adaptation. MPTS can be seamlessly integrated into zero-shot, few-shot, and many-shot learning paradigms. Extensive experimental results are conducted to exhibit the superiority of the proposed framework, remarkably increasing task adaptation robustness and retaining learning efficiency in contrast to existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. The code is available at the project site https://github.com/thu-rllab/MPTS.
2501.11041
Enhancing Semantic Consistency of Large Language Models through Model Editing: An Interpretability-Oriented Approach
cs.CL
A Large Language Model (LLM) tends to generate inconsistent and sometimes contradictory outputs when presented with a prompt that has equivalent semantics but is expressed differently from the original prompt. To achieve semantic consistency of an LLM, one of the key approaches is to finetune the model with prompt-output pairs with semantically equivalent meanings. Despite its effectiveness, a data-driven finetuning method incurs substantial computation costs in data preparation and model optimization. In this regime, an LLM is treated as a ``black box'', restricting our ability to gain deeper insights into its internal mechanism. In this paper, we are motivated to enhance the semantic consistency of LLMs through a more interpretable method (i.e., model editing) to this end. We first identify the model components (i.e., attention heads) that have a key impact on the semantic consistency of an LLM. We subsequently inject biases into the output of these model components along the semantic-consistency activation direction. It is noteworthy that these modifications are cost-effective, without reliance on mass manipulations of the original model parameters. Through comprehensive experiments on the constructed NLU and open-source NLG datasets, our method demonstrates significant improvements in the semantic consistency and task performance of LLMs. Additionally, our method exhibits promising generalization capabilities by performing well on tasks beyond the primary tasks.
2501.11043
BF-STVSR: B-Splines and Fourier-Best Friends for High Fidelity Spatial-Temporal Video Super-Resolution
cs.CV cs.AI
Enhancing low-resolution, low-frame-rate videos to high-resolution, high-frame-rate quality is essential for a seamless user experience, motivating advancements in Continuous Spatial-Temporal Video Super Resolution (C-STVSR). While prior methods employ Implicit Neural Representation (INR) for continuous encoding, they often struggle to capture the complexity of video data, relying on simple coordinate concatenation and pre-trained optical flow network for motion representation. Interestingly, we find that adding position encoding, contrary to common observations, does not improve-and even degrade performance. This issue becomes particularly pronounced when combined with pre-trained optical flow networks, which can limit the model's flexibility. To address these issues, we propose BF-STVSR, a C-STVSR framework with two key modules tailored to better represent spatial and temporal characteristics of video: 1) B-spline Mapper for smooth temporal interpolation, and 2) Fourier Mapper for capturing dominant spatial frequencies. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art PSNR and SSIM performance, showing enhanced spatial details and natural temporal consistency.
2501.11053
Learning with Open-world Noisy Data via Class-independent Margin in Dual Representation Space
cs.LG cs.CV
Learning with Noisy Labels (LNL) aims to improve the model generalization when facing data with noisy labels, and existing methods generally assume that noisy labels come from known classes, called closed-set noise. However, in real-world scenarios, noisy labels from similar unknown classes, i.e., open-set noise, may occur during the training and inference stage. Such open-world noisy labels may significantly impact the performance of LNL methods. In this study, we propose a novel dual-space joint learning method to robustly handle the open-world noise. To mitigate model overfitting on closed-set and open-set noises, a dual representation space is constructed by two networks. One is a projection network that learns shared representations in the prototype space, while the other is a One-Vs-All (OVA) network that makes predictions using unique semantic representations in the class-independent space. Then, bi-level contrastive learning and consistency regularization are introduced in two spaces to enhance the detection capability for data with unknown classes. To benefit from the memorization effects across different types of samples, class-independent margin criteria are designed for sample identification, which selects clean samples, weights closed-set noise, and filters open-set noise effectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and achieves an average accuracy improvement of 4.55\% and an AUROC improvement of 6.17\% on CIFAR80N.
2501.11054
Temporal Analysis of Adversarial Attacks in Federated Learning
cs.LG cs.CR
In this paper, we experimentally analyze the robustness of selected Federated Learning (FL) systems in the presence of adversarial clients. We find that temporal attacks significantly affect model performance in the FL models tested, especially when the adversaries are active throughout or during the later rounds. We consider a variety of classic learning models, including Multinominal Logistic Regression (MLR), Random Forest, XGBoost, Support Vector Classifier (SVC), as well as various Neural Network models including Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Convolution Neural Network (CNN), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). Our results highlight the effectiveness of temporal attacks and the need to develop strategies to make the FL process more robust against such attacks. We also briefly consider the effectiveness of defense mechanisms, including outlier detection in the aggregation algorithm.
2501.11057
Machine Learning Surrogates for Optimizing Transportation Policies with Agent-Based Models
cs.CE
Rapid urbanization and growing urban populations worldwide present significant challenges for cities, including increased traffic congestion and air pollution. Effective strategies are needed to manage traffic volumes and reduce emissions. In practice, traditional traffic flow simulations are used to test those strategies. However, high computational intensity usually limits their applicability in investigating a magnitude of different scenarios to evaluate best policies. This paper presents a first approach of using Graph Neural Networks (GNN) as surrogates for large-scale agent-based simulation models. In a case study using the MATSim model of Paris, the GNN effectively learned the impacts of capacity reduction policies on citywide traffic flow. Performance analysis across various road types and scenarios revealed that the GNN could accurately capture policy-induced effects on edge-based traffic volumes, particularly on roads directly affected by the policies and those with higher traffic volumes.
2501.11063
Enhancing Sample Utilization in Noise-Robust Deep Metric Learning With Subgroup-Based Positive-Pair Selection
cs.CV
The existence of noisy labels in real-world data negatively impacts the performance of deep learning models. Although much research effort has been devoted to improving the robustness towards noisy labels in classification tasks, the problem of noisy labels in deep metric learning (DML) remains under-explored. Existing noisy label learning methods designed for DML mainly discard suspicious noisy samples, resulting in a waste of the training data. To address this issue, we propose a noise-robust DML framework with SubGroup-based Positive-pair Selection (SGPS), which constructs reliable positive pairs for noisy samples to enhance the sample utilization. Specifically, SGPS first effectively identifies clean and noisy samples by a probability-based clean sample selectionstrategy. To further utilize the remaining noisy samples, we discover their potential similar samples based on the subgroup information given by a subgroup generation module and then aggregate them into informative positive prototypes for each noisy sample via a positive prototype generation module. Afterward, a new contrastive loss is tailored for the noisy samples with their selected positive pairs. SGPS can be easily integrated into the training process of existing pair-wise DML tasks, like image retrieval and face recognition. Extensive experiments on multiple synthetic and real-world large-scale label noise datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Without any bells and whistles, our SGPS framework outperforms the state-of-the-art noisy label DML methods. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/smuelpeng/SGPS-NoiseFreeDML}.
2501.11065
Enhancing Neural Spoken Language Recognition: An Exploration with Multilingual Datasets
cs.SD cs.AI cs.LG eess.AS
In this research, we advanced a spoken language recognition system, moving beyond traditional feature vector-based models. Our improvements focused on effectively capturing language characteristics over extended periods using a specialized pooling layer. We utilized a broad dataset range from Common-Voice, targeting ten languages across Indo-European, Semitic, and East Asian families. The major innovation involved optimizing the architecture of Time Delay Neural Networks. We introduced additional layers and restructured these networks into a funnel shape, enhancing their ability to process complex linguistic patterns. A rigorous grid search determined the optimal settings for these networks, significantly boosting their efficiency in language pattern recognition from audio samples. The model underwent extensive training, including a phase with augmented data, to refine its capabilities. The culmination of these efforts is a highly accurate system, achieving a 97\% accuracy rate in language recognition. This advancement represents a notable contribution to artificial intelligence, specifically in improving the accuracy and efficiency of language processing systems, a critical aspect in the engineering of advanced speech recognition technologies.
2501.11067
IntellAgent: A Multi-Agent Framework for Evaluating Conversational AI Systems
cs.CL cs.AI cs.LG
Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming artificial intelligence, evolving into task-oriented systems capable of autonomous planning and execution. One of the primary applications of LLMs is conversational AI systems, which must navigate multi-turn dialogues, integrate domain-specific APIs, and adhere to strict policy constraints. However, evaluating these agents remains a significant challenge, as traditional methods fail to capture the complexity and variability of real-world interactions. We introduce IntellAgent, a scalable, open-source multi-agent framework designed to evaluate conversational AI systems comprehensively. IntellAgent automates the creation of diverse, synthetic benchmarks by combining policy-driven graph modeling, realistic event generation, and interactive user-agent simulations. This innovative approach provides fine-grained diagnostics, addressing the limitations of static and manually curated benchmarks with coarse-grained metrics. IntellAgent represents a paradigm shift in evaluating conversational AI. By simulating realistic, multi-policy scenarios across varying levels of complexity, IntellAgent captures the nuanced interplay of agent capabilities and policy constraints. Unlike traditional methods, it employs a graph-based policy model to represent relationships, likelihoods, and complexities of policy interactions, enabling highly detailed diagnostics. IntellAgent also identifies critical performance gaps, offering actionable insights for targeted optimization. Its modular, open-source design supports seamless integration of new domains, policies, and APIs, fostering reproducibility and community collaboration. Our findings demonstrate that IntellAgent serves as an effective framework for advancing conversational AI by addressing challenges in bridging research and deployment. The framework is available at https://github.com/plurai-ai/intellagent
2501.11069
Refinement Module based on Parse Graph of Feature Map for Human Pose Estimation
cs.CV
Parse graphs of the human body can be obtained in the human brain to help humans complete the human pose estimation (HPE). It contains a hierarchical structure, like a tree structure, and context relations among nodes. Many researchers predefine the parse graph of body structure to design HPE frameworks. However, these frameworks struggle to adapt to instances that deviate from the predefined parse graph and are often parameter-heavy. Unlike them, we view the feature map holistically, much like the human body. It can be optimized using parse graphs, where each node's feature is an implicit expression rather than a fixed one. This allows it to adapt to more instances, unconstrained by rigid structural features. In this paper, we design the Refinement Module based on the Parse Graph of feature map (RMPG), which includes two stages: top-down decomposition and bottom-up combination. In the first stage, the feature map is decomposed into multiple sub-feature maps along the channel. In the second stage, the context relations of sub-feature maps are calculated to obtain their respective context information and the sub-feature maps with context information are concatenated along channels to obtain the refined feature map. Additionally, we design a hierarchical network with fewer parameters using multiple RMPG modules for HPE according to the parse graph of body structure, some of which are supervised to obtain context relations among body parts. Our network achieves excellent results on multiple mainstream human pose datasets. More importantly, the effectiveness of RMPG is proven on different methods. The code of RMPG will be open.
2501.11079
Federated Deep Reinforcement Learning for Energy Efficient Multi-Functional RIS-Assisted Low-Earth Orbit Networks
cs.LG cs.AI eess.SP
In this paper, a novel network architecture that deploys the multi-functional reconfigurable intelligent surface (MF-RIS) in low-Earth orbit (LEO) is proposed. Unlike traditional RIS with only signal reflection capability, the MF-RIS can reflect, refract, and amplify signals, as well as harvest energy from wireless signals. Given the high energy demands in shadow regions where solar energy is unavailable, MF-RIS is deployed in LEO to enhance signal coverage and improve energy efficiency (EE). To address this, we formulate a long-term EE optimization problem by determining the optimal parameters for MF-RIS configurations, including amplification and phase-shifts, energy harvesting ratios, and LEO transmit beamforming. To address the complex non-convex and non-linear problem, a federated learning enhanced multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient (FEMAD) scheme is designed. Multi-agent DDPG of each agent can provide the optimal action policy from its interaction to environments, whereas federated learning enables the hidden information exchange among multi-agents. In numerical results, we can observe significant EE improvements compared to the other benchmarks, including centralized deep reinforcement learning as well as distributed multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG). Additionally, the proposed LEO-MF-RIS architecture has demonstrated its effectiveness, achieving the highest EE performance compared to the scenarios of fixed/no energy harvesting in MF-RIS, traditional reflection-only RIS, and deployment without RISs/MF-RISs.
2501.11084
B-Call: Integrating Ideological Position and Political Cohesion in Legislative Voting Models
cs.SI stat.AP
This paper combines two significant areas of political science research: measuring individual ideological position and cohesion. Although both approaches help analyze legislative behaviors, no unified model currently integrates these dimensions. To fill this gap, the paper proposes a methodology called B-Call that combines ideological positioning with voting cohesion, treating votes as random variables. The model is empirically validated using roll-call data from the United States, Brazil, and Chile legislatures, which represent diverse legislative dynamics. The analysis aims to capture the complexities of voting and legislative behaviors, resulting in a two-dimensional indicator. This study addresses gaps in current legislative voting models, particularly in contexts with limited party control.
2501.11086
Can LLM Generate Regression Tests for Software Commits?
cs.SE cs.AI
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown tremendous promise in automated software engineering. In this paper, we investigate the opportunities of LLMs for automatic regression test generation for programs that take highly structured, human-readable inputs, such as XML parsers or JavaScript interpreters. Concretely, we explore the following regression test generation scenarios for such programs that have so far been difficult to test automatically in the absence of corresponding input grammars: $\bullet$ Bug finding. Given a code change (e.g., a commit or pull request), our LLM-based approach generates a test case with the objective of revealing any bugs that might be introduced if that change is applied. $\bullet$ Patch testing. Given a patch, our LLM-based approach generates a test case that fails before but passes after the patch. This test can be added to the regression test suite to catch similar bugs in the future. We implement Cleverest, a feedback-directed, zero-shot LLM-based regression test generation technique, and evaluate its effectiveness on 22 commits to three subject programs: Mujs, Libxml2, and Poppler. For programs using more human-readable file formats, like XML or JavaScript, we found Cleverest performed very well. It generated easy-to-understand bug-revealing or bug-reproduction test cases for the majority of commits in just under three minutes -- even when only the code diff or commit message (unless it was too vague) was given. For programs with more compact file formats, like PDF, as expected, it struggled to generate effective test cases. However, the LLM-supplied test cases are not very far from becoming effective (e.g., when used as a seed by a greybox fuzzer or as a starting point by the developer).
2501.11087
Leveraging counterfactual concepts for debugging and improving CNN model performance
cs.CV cs.AI
Counterfactual explanation methods have recently received significant attention for explaining CNN-based image classifiers due to their ability to provide easily understandable explanations that align more closely with human reasoning. However, limited attention has been given to utilizing explainability methods to improve model performance. In this paper, we propose to leverage counterfactual concepts aiming to enhance the performance of CNN models in image classification tasks. Our proposed approach utilizes counterfactual reasoning to identify crucial filters used in the decision-making process. Following this, we perform model retraining through the design of a novel methodology and loss functions that encourage the activation of class-relevant important filters and discourage the activation of irrelevant filters for each class. This process effectively minimizes the deviation of activation patterns of local predictions and the global activation patterns of their respective inferred classes. By incorporating counterfactual explanations, we validate unseen model predictions and identify misclassifications. The proposed methodology provides insights into potential weaknesses and biases in the model's learning process, enabling targeted improvements and enhanced performance. Experimental results on publicly available datasets have demonstrated an improvement of 1-2\%, validating the effectiveness of the approach.
2501.11088
Multi-LiCa: A Motion and Targetless Multi LiDAR-to-LiDAR Calibration Framework
cs.RO
Today's autonomous vehicles rely on a multitude of sensors to perceive their environment. To improve the perception or create redundancy, the sensor's alignment relative to each other must be known. With Multi-LiCa, we present a novel approach for the alignment, e.g. calibration. We present an automatic motion- and targetless approach for the extrinsic multi LiDAR-to-LiDAR calibration without the need for additional sensor modalities or an initial transformation input. We propose a two-step process with feature-based matching for the coarse alignment and a GICP-based fine registration in combination with a cost-based matching strategy. Our approach can be applied to any number of sensors and positions if there is a partial overlap between the field of view of single sensors. We show that our pipeline is better generalized to different sensor setups and scenarios and is on par or better in calibration accuracy than existing approaches. The presented framework is integrated in ROS 2 but can also be used as a standalone application. To build upon our work, our source code is available at: https://github.com/TUMFTM/Multi_LiCa.
2501.11090
Dynamic semantic networks for exploration of creative thinking
cs.CL
Human creativity originates from brain cortical networks that are specialized in idea generation, processing, and evaluation. The concurrent verbalization of our inner thoughts during the execution of a design task enables the use of dynamic semantic networks as a tool for investigating, evaluating, and monitoring creative thought. The primary advantage of using lexical databases such as WordNet for reproducible information-theoretic quantification of convergence or divergence of design ideas in creative problem solving is the simultaneous handling of both words and meanings, which enables interpretation of the constructed dynamic semantic networks in terms of underlying functionally active brain cortical regions involved in concept comprehension and production. In this study, the quantitative dynamics of semantic measures computed with a moving time window is investigated empirically in the DTRS10 dataset with design review conversations and detected divergent thinking is shown to predict success of design ideas. Thus, dynamic semantic networks present an opportunity for real-time computer-assisted detection of critical events during creative problem solving, with the goal of employing this knowledge to artificially augment human creativity.
2501.11094
Enhanced Suicidal Ideation Detection from Social Media Using a CNN-BiLSTM Hybrid Model
cs.CL cs.AI cs.CY
Suicidal ideation detection is crucial for preventing suicides, a leading cause of death worldwide. Many individuals express suicidal thoughts on social media, offering a vital opportunity for early detection through advanced machine learning techniques. The identification of suicidal ideation in social media text is improved by utilising a hybrid framework that integrates Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM), enhanced with an attention mechanism. To enhance the interpretability of the model's predictions, Explainable AI (XAI) methods are applied, with a particular focus on SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), are incorporated. At first, the model managed to reach an accuracy of 92.81%. By applying fine-tuning and early stopping techniques, the accuracy improved to 94.29%. The SHAP analysis revealed key features influencing the model's predictions, such as terms related to mental health struggles. This level of transparency boosts the model's credibility while helping mental health professionals understand and trust the predictions. This work highlights the potential for improving the accuracy and interpretability of detecting suicidal tendencies, making a valuable contribution to the progress of mental health monitoring systems. It emphasizes the significance of blending powerful machine learning methods with explainability to develop reliable and impactful mental health solutions.
2501.11096
Reproducibility review of "Why Not Other Classes": Towards Class-Contrastive Back-Propagation Explanations
cs.CV cs.LG
"Why Not Other Classes?": Towards Class-Contrastive Back-Propagation Explanations (Wang & Wang, 2022) provides a method for contrastively explaining why a certain class in a neural network image classifier is chosen above others. This method consists of using back-propagation-based explanation methods from after the softmax layer rather than before. Our work consists of reproducing the work in the original paper. We also provide extensions to the paper by evaluating the method on XGradCAM, FullGrad, and Vision Transformers to evaluate its generalization capabilities. The reproductions show similar results as the original paper, with the only difference being the visualization of heatmaps which could not be reproduced to look similar. The generalization seems to be generally good, with implementations working for Vision Transformers and alternative back-propagation methods. We also show that the original paper suffers from issues such as a lack of detail in the method and an erroneous equation which makes reproducibility difficult. To remedy this we provide an open-source repository containing all code used for this project.
2501.11097
Unit Region Encoding: A Unified and Compact Geometry-aware Representation for Floorplan Applications
cs.CV
We present the Unit Region Encoding of floorplans, which is a unified and compact geometry-aware encoding representation for various applications, ranging from interior space planning, floorplan metric learning to floorplan generation tasks. The floorplans are represented as the latent encodings on a set of boundary-adaptive unit region partition based on the clustering of the proposed geometry-aware density map. The latent encodings are extracted by a trained network (URE-Net) from the input dense density map and other available semantic maps. Compared to the over-segmented rasterized images and the room-level graph structures, our representation can be flexibly adapted to different applications with the sliced unit regions while achieving higher accuracy performance and better visual quality. We conduct a variety of experiments and compare to the state-of-the-art methods on the aforementioned applications to validate the superiority of our representation, as well as extensive ablation studies to demonstrate the effect of our slicing choices.
2501.11102
RDG-GS: Relative Depth Guidance with Gaussian Splatting for Real-time Sparse-View 3D Rendering
cs.CV
Efficiently synthesizing novel views from sparse inputs while maintaining accuracy remains a critical challenge in 3D reconstruction. While advanced techniques like radiance fields and 3D Gaussian Splatting achieve rendering quality and impressive efficiency with dense view inputs, they suffer from significant geometric reconstruction errors when applied to sparse input views. Moreover, although recent methods leverage monocular depth estimation to enhance geometric learning, their dependence on single-view estimated depth often leads to view inconsistency issues across different viewpoints. Consequently, this reliance on absolute depth can introduce inaccuracies in geometric information, ultimately compromising the quality of scene reconstruction with Gaussian splats. In this paper, we present RDG-GS, a novel sparse-view 3D rendering framework with Relative Depth Guidance based on 3D Gaussian Splatting. The core innovation lies in utilizing relative depth guidance to refine the Gaussian field, steering it towards view-consistent spatial geometric representations, thereby enabling the reconstruction of accurate geometric structures and capturing intricate textures. First, we devise refined depth priors to rectify the coarse estimated depth and insert global and fine-grained scene information to regular Gaussians. Building on this, to address spatial geometric inaccuracies from absolute depth, we propose relative depth guidance by optimizing the similarity between spatially correlated patches of depth and images. Additionally, we also directly deal with the sparse areas challenging to converge by the adaptive sampling for quick densification. Across extensive experiments on Mip-NeRF360, LLFF, DTU, and Blender, RDG-GS demonstrates state-of-the-art rendering quality and efficiency, making a significant advancement for real-world application.
2501.11107
ChaosEater: Fully Automating Chaos Engineering with Large Language Models
cs.SE cs.AI cs.CL cs.DC cs.NI
Chaos Engineering (CE) is an engineering technique aimed at improving the resiliency of distributed systems. It involves artificially injecting specific failures into a distributed system and observing its behavior in response. Based on the observation, the system can be proactively improved to handle those failures. Recent CE tools realize the automated execution of predefined CE experiments. However, defining these experiments and reconfiguring the system after the experiments still remain manual. To reduce the costs of the manual operations, we propose \textsc{ChaosEater}, a \textit{system} for automating the entire CE operations with Large Language Models (LLMs). It pre-defines the general flow according to the systematic CE cycle and assigns subdivided operations within the flow to LLMs. We assume systems based on Infrastructure as Code (IaC), wherein the system configurations and artificial failures are managed through code. Hence, the LLMs' operations in our \textit{system} correspond to software engineering tasks, including requirement definition, code generation and debugging, and testing. We validate our \textit{system} through case studies on both small and large systems. The results demonstrate that our \textit{system} significantly reduces both time and monetary costs while completing reasonable single CE cycles.
2501.11109
Estimation Error: Distribution and Pointwise Limits
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we examine the distribution and convergence properties of the estimation error $W = X - \hat{X}(Y)$, where $\hat{X}(Y)$ is the Bayesian estimator of a random variable $X$ from a noisy observation $Y = X +\sigma Z$ where $\sigma$ is the parameter indicating the strength of noise $Z$. Using the conditional expectation framework (that is, $\hat{X}(Y)$ is the conditional mean), we define the normalized error $\mathcal{E}_\sigma = \frac{W}{\sigma}$ and explore its properties. Specifically, in the first part of the paper, we characterize the probability density function of $W$ and $\mathcal{E}_\sigma$. Along the way, we also find conditions for the existence of the inverse functions for the conditional expectations. In the second part, we study pointwise (i.e., almost sure) convergence of $\mathcal{E}_\sigma$ under various assumptions about the noise and the underlying distributions. Our results extend some of the previous limits of $\mathcal{E}_\sigma$ studied under the $L^2$ convergence, known as the \emph{mmse dimension}, to the pointwise case.
2501.11110
Chain-of-Reasoning: Towards Unified Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models via a Multi-Paradigm Perspective
cs.CL
Large Language Models (LLMs) have made notable progress in mathematical reasoning, yet they often rely on single-paradigm reasoning that limits their effectiveness across diverse tasks. In this paper, we introduce Chain-of-Reasoning (CoR), a novel unified framework that integrates multiple reasoning paradigms--Natural Language Reasoning (NLR), Algorithmic Reasoning (AR), and Symbolic Reasoning (SR)--to enable synergistic collaboration. CoR generates multiple potential answers using different reasoning paradigms and synthesizes them into a coherent final solution. We propose a Progressive Paradigm Training (PPT) strategy that allows models to progressively master these paradigms, culminating in the development of CoR-Math-7B. Experimental results demonstrate that CoR-Math-7B significantly outperforms current SOTA models, achieving up to a 41.0% absolute improvement over GPT-4 in theorem proving tasks and a 7.9% improvement over RL-based methods in arithmetic tasks. These results showcase the enhanced mathematical comprehensive ability of our model, achieving significant performance gains on specific tasks and enabling zero-shot generalization across tasks.
2501.11111
OpenLiDARMap: Zero-Drift Point Cloud Mapping using Map Priors
cs.RO
Accurate localization is a critical component of mobile autonomous systems, especially in Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS)-denied environments where traditional methods fail. In such scenarios, environmental sensing is essential for reliable operation. However, approaches such as LiDAR odometry and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) suffer from drift over long distances, especially in the absence of loop closures. Map-based localization offers a robust alternative, but the challenge lies in creating and georeferencing maps without GNSS support. To address this issue, we propose a method for creating georeferenced maps without GNSS by using publicly available data, such as building footprints and surface models derived from sparse aerial scans. Our approach integrates these data with onboard LiDAR scans to produce dense, accurate, georeferenced 3D point cloud maps. By combining an Iterative Closest Point (ICP) scan-to-scan and scan-to-map matching strategy, we achieve high local consistency without suffering from long-term drift. Thus, we eliminate the reliance on GNSS for the creation of georeferenced maps. The results demonstrate that LiDAR-only mapping can produce accurate georeferenced point cloud maps when augmented with existing map priors.
2501.11112
A Novel Pearson Correlation-Based Merging Algorithm for Robust Distributed Machine Learning with Heterogeneous Data
cs.LG
Federated learning faces significant challenges in scenarios with heterogeneous data distributions and adverse network conditions, such as delays, packet loss, and data poisoning attacks. This paper proposes a novel method based on the SCAFFOLD algorithm to improve the quality of local updates and enhance the robustness of the global model. The key idea is to form intermediary nodes by merging local models with high similarity, using the Pearson correlation coefficient as a similarity measure. The proposed merging algorithm reduces the number of local nodes while maintaining the accuracy of the global model, effectively addressing communication overhead and bandwidth consumption. Experimental results on the MNIST dataset under simulated federated learning scenarios demonstrate the method's effectiveness. After 10 rounds of training using a CNN model, the proposed approach achieved accuracies of 0.82, 0.73, and 0.66 under normal conditions, packet loss and data poisoning attacks, respectively, outperforming the baseline SCAFFOLD algorithm. These results highlight the potential of the proposed method to improve efficiency and resilience in federated learning systems.
2501.11114
Clinical trial cohort selection using Large Language Models on n2c2 Challenges
cs.CL cs.AI
Clinical trials are a critical process in the medical field for introducing new treatments and innovations. However, cohort selection for clinical trials is a time-consuming process that often requires manual review of patient text records for specific keywords. Though there have been studies on standardizing the information across the various platforms, Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools remain crucial for spotting eligibility criteria in textual reports. Recently, pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have gained popularity for various NLP tasks due to their ability to acquire a nuanced understanding of text. In this paper, we study the performance of large language models on clinical trial cohort selection and leverage the n2c2 challenges to benchmark their performance. Our results are promising with regard to the incorporation of LLMs for simple cohort selection tasks, but also highlight the difficulties encountered by these models as soon as fine-grained knowledge and reasoning are required.
2501.11120
Tell me about yourself: LLMs are aware of their learned behaviors
cs.CL cs.AI cs.CR cs.LG
We study behavioral self-awareness -- an LLM's ability to articulate its behaviors without requiring in-context examples. We finetune LLMs on datasets that exhibit particular behaviors, such as (a) making high-risk economic decisions, and (b) outputting insecure code. Despite the datasets containing no explicit descriptions of the associated behavior, the finetuned LLMs can explicitly describe it. For example, a model trained to output insecure code says, ``The code I write is insecure.'' Indeed, models show behavioral self-awareness for a range of behaviors and for diverse evaluations. Note that while we finetune models to exhibit behaviors like writing insecure code, we do not finetune them to articulate their own behaviors -- models do this without any special training or examples. Behavioral self-awareness is relevant for AI safety, as models could use it to proactively disclose problematic behaviors. In particular, we study backdoor policies, where models exhibit unexpected behaviors only under certain trigger conditions. We find that models can sometimes identify whether or not they have a backdoor, even without its trigger being present. However, models are not able to directly output their trigger by default. Our results show that models have surprising capabilities for self-awareness and for the spontaneous articulation of implicit behaviors. Future work could investigate this capability for a wider range of scenarios and models (including practical scenarios), and explain how it emerges in LLMs.
2501.11122
Optimal Functional $2^{s-1}$-Batch Codes: Exploring New Sufficient Conditions
cs.IT math.IT
A functional $k$-batch code of dimension $s$ consists of $n$ servers storing linear combinations of $s$ linearly independent information bits. These codes are designed to recover any multiset of $k$ requests, each being a linear combination of the information bits, by $k$ disjoint subsets of servers. A recent conjecture suggests that for any set of $k = 2^{s-1}$ requests, the optimal solution requires $2^s-1$ servers. This paper shows that the problem of functional $k$-batch codes is equivalent to several other problems. Using these equivalences, we derive sufficient conditions that improve understanding of the problem and enhance the ability to find the optimal solution.
2501.11123
Assessing Semantic Annotation Activities with Formal Concept Analysis
cs.CL
This paper describes an approach to assessing semantic annotation activities based on formal concept analysis (FCA). In this approach, annotators use taxonomical ontologies created by domain experts to annotate digital resources. Then, using FCA, domain experts are provided with concept lattices that graphically display how their ontologies were used during the semantic annotation process. In consequence, they can advise annotators on how to better use the ontologies, as well as how to refine them to better suit the needs of the semantic annotators. To illustrate the approach, we describe its implementation in @note, a Rich Internet Application (RIA) for the collaborative annotation of digitized literary texts, we exemplify its use with a case study, and we provide some evaluation results using the method.
2501.11124
Rethinking Pseudo-Label Guided Learning for Weakly Supervised Temporal Action Localization from the Perspective of Noise Correction
cs.CV
Pseudo-label learning methods have been widely applied in weakly-supervised temporal action localization. Existing works directly utilize weakly-supervised base model to generate instance-level pseudo-labels for training the fully-supervised detection head. We argue that the noise in pseudo-labels would interfere with the learning of fully-supervised detection head, leading to significant performance leakage. Issues with noisy labels include:(1) inaccurate boundary localization; (2) undetected short action clips; (3) multiple adjacent segments incorrectly detected as one segment. To target these issues, we introduce a two-stage noisy label learning strategy to harness every potential useful signal in noisy labels. First, we propose a frame-level pseudo-label generation model with a context-aware denoising algorithm to refine the boundaries. Second, we introduce an online-revised teacher-student framework with a missing instance compensation module and an ambiguous instance correction module to solve the short-action-missing and many-to-one problems. Besides, we apply a high-quality pseudo-label mining loss in our online-revised teacher-student framework to add different weights to the noisy labels to train more effectively. Our model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art method in detection accuracy and inference speed greatly upon the THUMOS14 and ActivityNet v1.2 benchmarks.
2501.11126
SIC-free Multicast Scheduling for Multi-antenna Coded Caching
cs.IT math.IT
Multi-antenna coded caching (CC) with multicast beamforming typically relies on a complex successive interference cancellation (SIC) structure to decode a superposition of multiple streams received by each user. Signal-level CC schemes require the regeneration and cancellation of interfering signals at the physical layer of each receiver, which complicates practical implementations. To address this, we propose a bit-level multicast scheduling scheme enabling linear, SIC-free decoding of parallel streams by repeatedly transmitting data terms with linearly independent coefficients. Two reference strategies and a novel sparse strategy are considered for constructing the coefficient matrix. The reference cases include the random strategy, which lacks control over matrix construction, and the equal-distant strategy, which balances users' interference and data terms equally. In contrast, the sparse strategy minimizes the number of multicast streams transmitted in parallel during each interval. This approach simplifies both the decoding process and the beamforming design by decoupling the desired data terms for each user and reducing the number of SINR constraints, respectively. To further enhance the symmetric rate, a successive projection algorithm is applied to exploit channel properties and optimize user ordering. With the coefficient matrix and optimized user ordering in place, multicast beamformers are devised to aggregate desired data from relevant multicast streams. Numerical simulations validate the effectiveness of the sparse strategy and user scheduling, demonstrating significant gains in symmetric rate.
2501.11127
A Regularized Online Newton Method for Stochastic Convex Bandits with Linear Vanishing Noise
math.OC cs.LG stat.ML
We study a stochastic convex bandit problem where the subgaussian noise parameter is assumed to decrease linearly as the learner selects actions closer and closer to the minimizer of the convex loss function. Accordingly, we propose a Regularized Online Newton Method (RONM) for solving the problem, based on the Online Newton Method (ONM) of arXiv:2406.06506. Our RONM reaches a polylogarithmic regret in the time horizon $n$ when the loss function grows quadratically in the constraint set, which recovers the results of arXiv:2402.12042 in linear bandits. Our analyses rely on the growth rate of the precision matrix $\Sigma_t^{-1}$ in ONM and we find that linear growth solves the question exactly. These analyses also help us obtain better convergence rates when the loss function grows faster. We also study and analyze two new bandit models: stochastic convex bandits with noise scaled to a subgaussian parameter function and convex bandits with stochastic multiplicative noise.
2501.11128
A Collection of Question Answering Datasets for Norwegian
cs.CL cs.AI
This paper introduces a new suite of question answering datasets for Norwegian; NorOpenBookQA, NorCommonSenseQA, NorTruthfulQA, and NRK-Quiz-QA. The data covers a wide range of skills and knowledge domains, including world knowledge, commonsense reasoning, truthfulness, and knowledge about Norway. Covering both of the written standards of Norwegian - Bokm{\aa}l and Nynorsk - our datasets comprise over 10k question-answer pairs, created by native speakers. We detail our dataset creation approach and present the results of evaluating 11 language models (LMs) in zero- and few-shot regimes. Most LMs perform better in Bokm{\aa}l than Nynorsk, struggle most with commonsense reasoning, and are often untruthful in generating answers to questions. All our datasets and annotation materials are publicly available.
2501.11129
Optimal Binary Variable-Length Codes with a Bounded Number of 1's per Codeword: Design, Analysis, and Applications
cs.IT cs.DS math.IT
In this paper, we consider the problem of constructing optimal average-length binary codes under the constraint that each codeword must contain at most $D$ ones, where $D$ is a given input parameter. We provide an $O(n^2D)$-time complexity algorithm for the construction of such codes, where $n$ is the number of codewords. We also describe several scenarios where the need to design these kinds of codes naturally arises. Our algorithms allow us to construct both optimal average-length prefix binary codes and optimal average-length alphabetic binary codes. In the former case, our $O(n^2D)$-time algorithm substantially improves on the previously known $O(n^{2+D})$-time complexity algorithm for the same problem. We also provide a Kraft-like inequality for the existence of (optimal) variable-length binary codes, subject to the above-described constraint on the number of 1's in each codeword.
2501.11130
Efficient and accurate simulation of the Smith-Zener pinning mechanism during grain growth using a front-tracking numerical framework
cs.CE
This study proposes a new full-field approach for modeling grain boundary pinning by second phase particles in two-dimensional polycrystals. These particles are of great importance during thermomechanical treatments, as they produce deviations from the microstructural evolution that the alloy produces in the absence of particles. This phenomenon, well-known as Smith-Zener pinning, is widely used by metallurgists to control the grain size during the metal forming process of many alloys. Predictive tools are then needed to accurately model this phenomenon. This article introduces a new methodology for the simulation of microstructural evolutions subjected to the presence of second phase particles. The methodology employs a Lagrangian 2D front-tracking methodology, while the particles are modeled using discretized circular shapes or pinning nodes. The evolution of the particles can be considered and modeled using a constant velocity of particle shrinking. This approach has the advantages of improving the limited description made of the phenomenon in vertex approaches, to be usable for a wide range of second-phase particle sizes and to improve calculation times compared to front-capturing type approaches.
2501.11131
Spatio-temporal characterisation of underwater noise through semantic trajectories
stat.AP cs.DB
Underwater noise pollution from human activities, particularly shipping, has been recognised as a serious threat to marine life. The sound generated by vessels can have various adverse effects on fish and aquatic ecosystems in general. In this setting, the estimation and analysis of the underwater noise produced by vessels is an important challenge for the preservation of the marine environment. In this paper we propose a model for the spatio-temporal characterisation of the underwater noise generated by vessels. The approach is based on the reconstruction of the vessels' trajectories from Automatic Identification System (AIS) data and on their deployment in a spatio-temporal database. Trajectories are enriched with semantic information like the acoustic characteristics of the vessels' engines or the activity performed by the vessels. We define a model for underwater noise propagation and use the trajectories' information to infer how noise propagates in the area of interest. We develop our approach for the case study of the fishery activities in the Northern Adriatic sea, an area of the Mediterranean sea which is well known to be highly exploited. We implement our approach using MobilityDB, an open source geospatial trajectory data management and analysis platform, which offers spatio-temporal operators and indexes improving the efficiency of our system. We use this platform to conduct various analyses of the underwater noise generated in the Northern Adriatic Sea, aiming at estimating the impact of fishing activities on underwater noise pollution and at demonstrating the flexibility and expressiveness of our approach.