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2501.11673
Randomized Kaczmarz Methods with Beyond-Krylov Convergence
math.NA cs.DS cs.LG cs.NA math.OC stat.ML
Randomized Kaczmarz methods form a family of linear system solvers which converge by repeatedly projecting their iterates onto randomly sampled equations. While effective in some contexts, such as highly over-determined least squares, Kaczmarz methods are traditionally deemed secondary to Krylov subspace methods, since this latter family of solvers can exploit outliers in the input's singular value distribution to attain fast convergence on ill-conditioned systems. In this paper, we introduce Kaczmarz++, an accelerated randomized block Kaczmarz algorithm that exploits outlying singular values in the input to attain a fast Krylov-style convergence. Moreover, we show that Kaczmarz++ captures large outlying singular values provably faster than popular Krylov methods, for both over- and under-determined systems. We also develop an optimized variant for positive semidefinite systems, called CD++, demonstrating empirically that it is competitive in arithmetic operations with both CG and GMRES on a collection of benchmark problems. To attain these results, we introduce several novel algorithmic improvements to the Kaczmarz framework, including adaptive momentum acceleration, Tikhonov-regularized projections, and a memoization scheme for reusing information from previously sampled equation~blocks.
2501.11689
Randomness, exchangeability, and conformal prediction
cs.LG math.ST stat.ML stat.TH
This paper continues development of the functional theory of randomness, a modification of the algorithmic theory of randomness getting rid of unspecified additive constants. It introduces new kinds of confidence predictors, including randomness predictors (the most general confidence predictors based on the assumption of IID observations) and exchangeability predictors (the most general confidence predictors based on the assumption of exchangeable observations). The main result implies that both are close to conformal predictors and quantifies the difference between randomness prediction and conformal prediction.
2501.11695
Spatially-Delineated Domain-Adapted AI Classification: An Application for Oncology Data
cs.LG cs.AI
Given multi-type point maps from different place-types (e.g., tumor regions), our objective is to develop a classifier trained on the source place-type to accurately distinguish between two classes of the target place-type based on their point arrangements. This problem is societally important for many applications, such as generating clinical hypotheses for designing new immunotherapies for cancer treatment. The challenge lies in the spatial variability, the inherent heterogeneity and variation observed in spatial properties or arrangements across different locations (i.e., place-types). Previous techniques focus on self-supervised tasks to learn domain-invariant features and mitigate domain differences; however, they often neglect the underlying spatial arrangements among data points, leading to significant discrepancies across different place-types. We explore a novel multi-task self-learning framework that targets spatial arrangements, such as spatial mix-up masking and spatial contrastive predictive coding, for spatially-delineated domain-adapted AI classification. Experimental results on real-world datasets (e.g., oncology data) show that the proposed framework provides higher prediction accuracy than baseline methods.
2501.11699
Power Ramp-Rate Control via Power Regulation for Storageless Grid-Connected Photovoltaic Systems
eess.SY cs.SY
Photovoltaic Power Ramp-Rate Control (PRRC) constitutes a key ancillary service for future power systems. Although its implementation through the installation of storage systems or irradiance sensors has been widely investigated, fewer studies have explored the power curtailment approach. The latter lacks efficiency, as it voluntarily produces power discharges, yet it is a cost-effective solution in terms of capital expenditures. This paper proposes a novel storageless and sensorless photovoltaic PRRC for grid-connected applications in which the photovoltaic power, rather than the voltage, is the controlled magnitude. The aforementioned contribution makes the effective tracking of the power ramp-rate limit possible compared to the existing methods in the literature. The method is assisted by a real-time curve-fitting algorithm that estimates the Maximum Power Point while operating suboptimally. Thus, no direct temperature or irradiance measurement systems are needed. The validation of the proposed PRRC strategy has been tested by simulation and compared to another approach available in the literature, considering real-field highly variable irradiance data. Experimental validation of the proposed strategy has been performed in real time via Controller Hardware-in-the-Loop.
2501.11704
Ultra-High Reliability by Predictive Interference Management Using Extreme Value Theory
eess.SY cs.SY
Ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC) require innovative approaches to modeling channel and interference dynamics, extending beyond traditional average estimates to encompass entire statistical distributions, including rare and extreme events that challenge achieving ultra-reliability performance regions. In this paper, we propose a risk-sensitive approach based on extreme value theory (EVT) to predict the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) for efficient resource allocation in URLLC systems. We employ EVT to estimate the statistics of rare and extreme interference values, and kernel density estimation (KDE) to model the distribution of non-extreme events. Using a mixture model, we develop an interference prediction algorithm based on quantile prediction, introducing a confidence level parameter to balance reliability and resource usage. While accounting for the risk sensitivity of interference estimates, the prediction outcome is then used for appropriate resource allocation of a URLLC transmission under link outage constraints. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art first-order discrete-time Markov chain (DTMC) approach by reducing outage rates up to 100-fold, achieving target outage probabilities as low as \(10^{-7}\). Simultaneously, it minimizes radio resource usage \(\simnot15 \%\) compared to DTMC, while remaining only \(\simnot20 \%\) above the optimal case with perfect interference knowledge, resulting in significantly higher prediction accuracy. Additionally, the method is sample-efficient, able to predict interference effectively with minimal training data.
2501.11705
Human services organizations and the responsible integration of AI: Considering ethics and contextualizing risk(s)
cs.CY cs.AI
This paper examines the responsible integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in human services organizations (HSOs), proposing a nuanced framework for evaluating AI applications across multiple dimensions of risk. The authors argue that ethical concerns about AI deployment -- including professional judgment displacement, environmental impact, model bias, and data laborer exploitation -- vary significantly based on implementation context and specific use cases. They challenge the binary view of AI adoption, demonstrating how different applications present varying levels of risk that can often be effectively managed through careful implementation strategies. The paper highlights promising solutions, such as local large language models, that can facilitate responsible AI integration while addressing common ethical concerns. The authors propose a dimensional risk assessment approach that considers factors like data sensitivity, professional oversight requirements, and potential impact on client wellbeing. They conclude by outlining a path forward that emphasizes empirical evaluation, starting with lower-risk applications and building evidence-based understanding through careful experimentation. This approach enables organizations to maintain high ethical standards while thoughtfully exploring how AI might enhance their capacity to serve clients and communities effectively.
2501.11706
Trustformer: A Trusted Federated Transformer
cs.LG cs.CR
Transformers, a cornerstone of deep-learning architectures for sequential data, have achieved state-of-the-art results in tasks like Natural Language Processing (NLP). Models such as BERT and GPT-3 exemplify their success and have driven the rise of large language models (LLMs). However, a critical challenge persists: safeguarding the privacy of data used in LLM training. Privacy-preserving techniques like Federated Learning (FL) offer potential solutions, but practical limitations hinder their effectiveness for Transformer training. Two primary issues are (I) the risk of sensitive information leakage due to aggregation methods like FedAvg or FedSGD, and (II) the high communication overhead caused by the large size of Transformer models. This paper introduces a novel FL method that reduces communication overhead while maintaining competitive utility. Our approach avoids sharing full model weights by simulating a global model locally. We apply k-means clustering to each Transformer layer, compute centroids locally, and transmit only these centroids to the server instead of full weights or gradients. To enhance security, we leverage Intel SGX for secure transmission of centroids. Evaluated on a translation task, our method achieves utility comparable to state-of-the-art baselines while significantly reducing communication costs. This provides a more efficient and privacy-preserving FL solution for Transformer models.
2501.11711
Leveraging graph neural networks and mobility data for COVID-19 forecasting
cs.LG cs.SI
The COVID-19 pandemic has victimized over 7 million people to date, prompting diverse research efforts. Spatio-temporal models combining mobility data with machine learning have gained attention for disease forecasting. Here, we explore Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network (GCRN) and Graph Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory (GCLSTM), which combine the power of Graph Neural Networks (GNN) with traditional architectures that deal with sequential data. The aim is to forecast future values of COVID-19 cases in Brazil and China by leveraging human mobility networks, whose nodes represent geographical locations and links are flows of vehicles or people. We show that employing backbone extraction to filter out negligible connections in the mobility network enhances predictive stability. Comparing regression and classification tasks demonstrates that binary classification yields smoother, more interpretable results. Interestingly, we observe qualitatively equivalent results for both Brazil and China datasets by introducing sliding windows of variable size and prediction horizons. Compared to prior studies, introducing the sliding window and the network backbone extraction strategies yields improvements of about 80% in root mean squared errors.
2501.11712
YouLeQD: Decoding the Cognitive Complexity of Questions and Engagement in Online Educational Videos from Learners' Perspectives
cs.CL
Questioning is a fundamental aspect of education, as it helps assess students' understanding, promotes critical thinking, and encourages active engagement. With the rise of artificial intelligence in education, there is a growing interest in developing intelligent systems that can automatically generate and answer questions and facilitate interactions in both virtual and in-person education settings. However, to develop effective AI models for education, it is essential to have a fundamental understanding of questioning. In this study, we created the YouTube Learners' Questions on Bloom's Taxonomy Dataset (YouLeQD), which contains learner-posed questions from YouTube lecture video comments. Along with the dataset, we developed two RoBERTa-based classification models leveraging Large Language Models to detect questions and analyze their cognitive complexity using Bloom's Taxonomy. This dataset and our findings provide valuable insights into the cognitive complexity of learner-posed questions in educational videos and their relationship with interaction metrics. This can aid in the development of more effective AI models for education and improve the overall learning experience for students.
2501.11714
The Transition from Centralized Machine Learning to Federated Learning for Mental Health in Education: A Survey of Current Methods and Future Directions
cs.CY cs.LG
Research has increasingly explored the application of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) within the mental health domain to enhance both patient care and healthcare provider efficiency. Given that mental health challenges frequently emerge during early adolescence -- the critical years of high school and college -- investigating AI/ML-driven mental health solutions within the education domain is of paramount importance. Nevertheless, conventional AI/ML techniques follow a centralized model training architecture, which poses privacy risks due to the need for transferring students' sensitive data from institutions, universities, and clinics to central servers. Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a solution to address these risks by enabling distributed model training while maintaining data privacy. Despite its potential, research on applying FL to analyze students' mental health remains limited. In this paper, we aim to address this limitation by proposing a roadmap for integrating FL into mental health data analysis within educational settings. We begin by providing an overview of mental health issues among students and reviewing existing studies where ML has been applied to address these challenges. Next, we examine broader applications of FL in the mental health domain to emphasize the lack of focus on educational contexts. Finally, we propose promising research directions focused on using FL to address mental health issues in the education sector, which entails discussing the synergies between the proposed directions with broader human-centered domains. By categorizing the proposed research directions into short- and long-term strategies and highlighting the unique challenges at each stage, we aim to encourage the development of privacy-conscious AI/ML-driven mental health solutions.
2501.11715
GL-ICNN: An End-To-End Interpretable Convolutional Neural Network for the Diagnosis and Prediction of Alzheimer's Disease
cs.CV cs.AI
Deep learning methods based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have shown great potential to improve early and accurate diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) dementia based on imaging data. However, these methods have yet to be widely adopted in clinical practice, possibly due to the limited interpretability of deep learning models. The Explainable Boosting Machine (EBM) is a glass-box model but cannot learn features directly from input imaging data. In this study, we propose a novel interpretable model that combines CNNs and EBMs for the diagnosis and prediction of AD. We develop an innovative training strategy that alternatingly trains the CNN component as a feature extractor and the EBM component as the output block to form an end-to-end model. The model takes imaging data as input and provides both predictions and interpretable feature importance measures. We validated the proposed model on the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset and the Health-RI Parelsnoer Neurodegenerative Diseases Biobank (PND) as an external testing set. The proposed model achieved an area-under-the-curve (AUC) of 0.956 for AD and control classification, and 0.694 for the prediction of conversion of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to AD on the ADNI cohort. The proposed model is a glass-box model that achieves a comparable performance with other state-of-the-art black-box models. Our code is publicly available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/GL-ICNN.
2501.11720
Prediction of Lung Metastasis from Hepatocellular Carcinoma using the SEER Database
q-bio.TO cs.LG
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a leading cause of cancer-related mortality, with lung metastases being the most common site of distant spread and significantly worsening prognosis. Despite the growing availability of clinical and demographic data, predictive models for lung metastasis in HCC remain limited in scope and clinical applicability. In this study, we develop and validate an end-to-end machine learning pipeline using data from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database. We evaluated three machine learning models (Random Forest, XGBoost, and Logistic Regression) alongside a multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network. Our models achieved high AUROC values and recall, with the Random Forest and MLP models demonstrating the best overall performance (AUROC = 0.82). However, the low precision across models highlights the challenges of accurately predicting positive cases. To address these limitations, we developed a custom loss function incorporating recall optimization, enabling the MLP model to achieve the highest sensitivity. An ensemble approach further improved overall recall by leveraging the strengths of individual models. Feature importance analysis revealed key predictors such as surgery status, tumor staging, and follow up duration, emphasizing the relevance of clinical interventions and disease progression in metastasis prediction. While this study demonstrates the potential of machine learning for identifying high-risk patients, limitations include reliance on imbalanced datasets, incomplete feature annotations, and the low precision of predictions. Future work should leverage the expanding SEER dataset, improve data imputation techniques, and explore advanced pre-trained models to enhance predictive accuracy and clinical utility.
2501.11721
Explain-Query-Test: Self-Evaluating LLMs Via Explanation and Comprehension Discrepancy
cs.CL cs.LG
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in generating detailed and coherent explanations of complex concepts. However, the extent to which these models truly comprehend the concepts they articulate remains unclear. To assess the level of comprehension of a model relative to the content it generates, we implemented a self-evaluation pipeline where models: (i) given a topic generate an excerpt with information about the topic, (ii) given an excerpt generate question-answer pairs, and finally (iii) given a question generate an answer. We refer to this self-evaluation approach as Explain-Query-Test (EQT). Interestingly, the accuracy on generated questions resulting from running the EQT pipeline correlates strongly with the model performance as verified by typical benchmarks such as MMLU-Pro. In other words, EQT's performance is predictive of MMLU-Pro's, and EQT can be used to rank models without the need for any external source of evaluation data other than lists of topics of interest. Moreover, our results reveal a disparity between the models' ability to produce detailed explanations and their performance on questions related to those explanations. This gap highlights fundamental limitations in the internal knowledge representation and reasoning abilities of current LLMs. We release the code at https://github.com/asgsaeid/EQT.
2501.11729
SeRpEnt: Selective Resampling for Expressive State Space Models
cs.LG cs.CV
State Space Models (SSMs) have recently enjoyed a rise to prominence in the field of deep learning for sequence modeling, especially as an alternative to Transformers. Their success stems from avoiding two well-known drawbacks of attention-based models: quadratic complexity with respect to the sequence length and inability to model long-range dependencies. The SSM variant Mamba has demonstrated performance comparable to Transformers without any form of attention, thanks to the use of a selective mechanism for the state parameters. Selectivity, however, is only evaluated empirically and the reasons of its effectiveness remain unclear. In this work, we show how selectivity is related to the sequence processing. Our analysis shows that selective time intervals in Mamba act as linear approximators of information. Then, we propose our SeRpEnt architecture, a SSM that further exploits selectivity to compress sequences in an information-aware fashion. It employs a resampling mechanism that aggregates elements based on their information content. Our empirical results in the Long Range Arena benchmark and other language modeling tasks show benefits of the SeRpEnt's resampling mechanism.
2501.11730
Transformer Vibration Forecasting for Advancing Rail Safety and Maintenance 4.0
cs.LG cs.AI stat.ML
Maintaining railway axles is critical to preventing severe accidents and financial losses. The railway industry is increasingly interested in advanced condition monitoring techniques to enhance safety and efficiency, moving beyond traditional periodic inspections toward Maintenance 4.0. This study introduces a robust Deep Autoregressive solution that integrates seamlessly with existing systems to avert mechanical failures. Our approach simulates and predicts vibration signals under various conditions and fault scenarios, improving dataset robustness for more effective detection systems. These systems can alert maintenance needs, preventing accidents preemptively. We use experimental vibration signals from accelerometers on train axles. Our primary contributions include a transformer model, ShaftFormer, designed for processing time series data, and an alternative model incorporating spectral methods and enhanced observation models. Simulating vibration signals under diverse conditions mitigates the high cost of obtaining experimental signals for all scenarios. Given the non-stationary nature of railway vibration signals, influenced by speed and load changes, our models address these complexities, offering a powerful tool for predictive maintenance in the rail industry.
2501.11733
Mobile-Agent-E: Self-Evolving Mobile Assistant for Complex Tasks
cs.CL cs.CV
Smartphones have become indispensable in modern life, yet navigating complex tasks on mobile devices often remains frustrating. Recent advancements in large multimodal model (LMM)-based mobile agents have demonstrated the ability to perceive and act in mobile environments. However, current approaches face significant limitations: they fall short in addressing real-world human needs, struggle with reasoning-intensive and long-horizon tasks, and lack mechanisms to learn and improve from prior experiences. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Mobile-Agent-E, a hierarchical multi-agent framework capable of self-evolution through past experience. By hierarchical, we mean an explicit separation of high-level planning and low-level action execution. The framework comprises a Manager, responsible for devising overall plans by breaking down complex tasks into subgoals, and four subordinate agents--Perceptor, Operator, Action Reflector, and Notetaker--which handle fine-grained visual perception, immediate action execution, error verification, and information aggregation, respectively. Mobile-Agent-E also features a novel self-evolution module which maintains a persistent long-term memory comprising Tips and Shortcuts. Tips are general guidance and lessons learned from prior tasks on how to effectively interact with the environment. Shortcuts are reusable, executable sequences of atomic operations tailored for specific subroutines. The inclusion of Tips and Shortcuts facilitates continuous refinement in performance and efficiency. Alongside this framework, we introduce Mobile-Eval-E, a new benchmark featuring complex mobile tasks requiring long-horizon, multi-app interactions. Empirical results show that Mobile-Agent-E achieves a 22% absolute improvement over previous state-of-the-art approaches across three foundation model backbones. Project page: https://x-plug.github.io/MobileAgent.
2501.11734
MedicoSAM: Towards foundation models for medical image segmentation
eess.IV cs.CV
Medical image segmentation is an important analysis task in clinical practice and research. Deep learning has massively advanced the field, but current approaches are mostly based on models trained for a specific task. Training such models or adapting them to a new condition is costly due to the need for (manually) labeled data. The emergence of vision foundation models, especially Segment Anything, offers a path to universal segmentation for medical images, overcoming these issues. Here, we study how to improve Segment Anything for medical images by comparing different finetuning strategies on a large and diverse dataset. We evaluate the finetuned models on a wide range of interactive and (automatic) semantic segmentation tasks. We find that the performance can be clearly improved for interactive segmentation. However, semantic segmentation does not benefit from pretraining on medical images. Our best model, MedicoSAM, is publicly available at https://github.com/computational-cell-analytics/medico-sam. We show that it is compatible with existing tools for data annotation and believe that it will be of great practical value.
2501.11739
Episodic memory in AI agents poses risks that should be studied and mitigated
cs.AI cs.CY
Most current AI models have little ability to store and later retrieve a record or representation of what they do. In human cognition, episodic memories play an important role in both recall of the past as well as planning for the future. The ability to form and use episodic memories would similarly enable a broad range of improved capabilities in an AI agent that interacts with and takes actions in the world. Researchers have begun directing more attention to developing memory abilities in AI models. It is therefore likely that models with such capability will be become widespread in the near future. This could in some ways contribute to making such AI agents safer by enabling users to better monitor, understand, and control their actions. However, as a new capability with wide applications, we argue that it will also introduce significant new risks that researchers should begin to study and address. We outline these risks and benefits and propose four principles to guide the development of episodic memory capabilities so that these will enhance, rather than undermine, the effort to keep AI safe and trustworthy.
2501.11740
PIR Over Wireless Channels: Achieving Privacy With Public Responses
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we address the problem of Private Information Retrieval (PIR) over a public Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel. In such a setup, the server's responses are visible to other servers. Thus, a curious server can listen to the other responses, compromising the user's privacy. Indeed, previous works on PIR over a shared medium assumed the servers cannot instantaneously listen to other responses. To address this gap, we present a novel randomized lattice -- PIR coding scheme that jointly codes for privacy, channel noise, and curious servers which may listen to other responses. We demonstrate that a positive PIR rate is achievable even in cases where the channel to the curious server is stronger than the channel to the user.
2501.11741
FaceQSORT: a Multi-Face Tracking Method based on Biometric and Appearance Features
cs.CV
Tracking multiple faces is a difficult problem, as there may be partially occluded or lateral faces. In multiple face tracking, association is typically based on (biometric) face features. However, the models used to extract these face features usually require frontal face images, which can limit the tracking performance. In this work, a multi-face tracking method inspired by StrongSort, FaceQSORT, is proposed. To mitigate the problem of partially occluded or lateral faces, biometric face features are combined with visual appearance features (i.e., generated by a generic object classifier), with both features are extracted from the same face patch. A comprehensive experimental evaluation is performed, including a comparison of different face descriptors, an evaluation of different parameter settings, and the application of a different similarity metric. All experiments are conducted with a new multi-face tracking dataset and a subset of the ChokePoint dataset. The `Paris Lodron University Salzburg Faces in a Queue' dataset consists of a total of seven fully annotated sequences (12730 frames) and is made publicly available as part of this work. Together with this dataset, annotations of 6 sequences from the ChokePoint dataset are also provided.
2501.11742
Force-Aware Autonomous Robotic Surgery
cs.RO
This work demonstrates the benefits of using tool-tissue interaction forces in the design of autonomous systems in robot-assisted surgery (RAS). Autonomous systems in surgery must manipulate tissues of different stiffness levels and hence should apply different levels of forces accordingly. We hypothesize that this ability is enabled by using force measurements as input to policies learned from human demonstrations. To test this hypothesis, we use Action-Chunking Transformers (ACT) to train two policies through imitation learning for automated tissue retraction with the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK). To quantify the effects of using tool-tissue interaction force data, we trained a "no force policy" that uses the vision and robot kinematic data, and compared it to a "force policy" that uses force, vision and robot kinematic data. When tested on a previously seen tissue sample, the force policy is 3 times more successful in autonomously performing the task compared with the no force policy. In addition, the force policy is more gentle with the tissue compared with the no force policy, exerting on average 62% less force on the tissue. When tested on a previously unseen tissue sample, the force policy is 3.5 times more successful in autonomously performing the task, exerting an order of magnitude less forces on the tissue, compared with the no force policy. These results open the door to design force-aware autonomous systems that can meet the surgical guidelines for tissue handling, especially using the newly released RAS systems with force feedback capabilities such as the da Vinci 5.
2501.11743
Non-Reversible Langevin Algorithms for Constrained Sampling
cs.LG math.PR stat.CO
We consider the constrained sampling problem where the goal is to sample from a target distribution on a constrained domain. We propose skew-reflected non-reversible Langevin dynamics (SRNLD), a continuous-time stochastic differential equation with skew-reflected boundary. We obtain non-asymptotic convergence rate of SRNLD to the target distribution in both total variation and 1-Wasserstein distances. By breaking reversibility, we show that the convergence is faster than the special case of the reversible dynamics. Based on the discretization of SRNLD, we propose skew-reflected non-reversible Langevin Monte Carlo (SRNLMC), and obtain non-asymptotic discretization error from SRNLD, and convergence guarantees to the target distribution in 1-Wasserstein distance. We show better performance guarantees than the projected Langevin Monte Carlo in the literature that is based on the reversible dynamics. Numerical experiments are provided for both synthetic and real datasets to show efficiency of the proposed algorithms.
2501.11745
Personalized Federated Learning for Cellular VR: Online Learning and Dynamic Caching
cs.IT cs.LG math.IT
Delivering an immersive experience to virtual reality (VR) users through wireless connectivity offers the freedom to engage from anywhere at any time. Nevertheless, it is challenging to ensure seamless wireless connectivity that delivers real-time and high-quality videos to the VR users. This paper proposes a field of view (FoV) aware caching for mobile edge computing (MEC)-enabled wireless VR network. In particular, the FoV of each VR user is cached/prefetched at the base stations (BSs) based on the caching strategies tailored to each BS. Specifically, decentralized and personalized federated learning (DP-FL) based caching strategies with guarantees are presented. Considering VR systems composed of multiple VR devices and BSs, a DP-FL caching algorithm is implemented at each BS to personalize content delivery for VR users. The utilized DP-FL algorithm guarantees a probably approximately correct (PAC) bound on the conditional average cache hit. Further, to reduce the cost of communicating gradients, one-bit quantization of the stochastic gradient descent (OBSGD) is proposed, and a convergence guarantee of $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{T})$ is obtained for the proposed algorithm, where $T$ is the number of iterations. Additionally, to better account for the wireless channel dynamics, the FoVs are grouped into multicast or unicast groups based on the number of requesting VR users. The performance of the proposed DP-FL algorithm is validated through realistic VR head-tracking dataset, and the proposed algorithm is shown to have better performance in terms of average delay and cache hit as compared to baseline algorithms.
2501.11746
SILO: Solving Inverse Problems with Latent Operators
cs.CV cs.AI cs.LG
Consistent improvement of image priors over the years has led to the development of better inverse problem solvers. Diffusion models are the newcomers to this arena, posing the strongest known prior to date. Recently, such models operating in a latent space have become increasingly predominant due to their efficiency. In recent works, these models have been applied to solve inverse problems. Working in the latent space typically requires multiple applications of an Autoencoder during the restoration process, which leads to both computational and restoration quality challenges. In this work, we propose a new approach for handling inverse problems with latent diffusion models, where a learned degradation function operates within the latent space, emulating a known image space degradation. Usage of the learned operator reduces the dependency on the Autoencoder to only the initial and final steps of the restoration process, facilitating faster sampling and superior restoration quality. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on a variety of image restoration tasks and datasets, achieving significant improvements over prior art.
2501.11747
Optimizing Pretraining Data Mixtures with LLM-Estimated Utility
cs.CL cs.AI
Large Language Models improve with increasing amounts of high-quality training data. However, leveraging larger datasets requires balancing quality, quantity, and diversity across sources. After evaluating nine baseline methods under both compute- and data-constrained scenarios, we find token-count heuristics outperform manual and learned mixes, indicating that simple approaches accounting for dataset size and diversity are surprisingly effective. Building on this insight, we propose two complementary approaches: UtiliMax, which extends token-based heuristics by incorporating utility estimates from reduced-scale ablations, achieving up to a 10.6x speedup over manual baselines; and Model Estimated Data Utility (MEDU), which leverages LLMs to estimate data utility from small samples, matching ablation-based performance while reducing computational requirements by $\sim$200x. Together, these approaches establish a new framework for automated, compute-efficient data mixing that is robust across training regimes.
2501.11752
Are generative models fair? A study of racial bias in dermatological image generation
cs.CV
Racial bias in medicine, such as in dermatology, presents significant ethical and clinical challenges. This is likely to happen because there is a significant underrepresentation of darker skin tones in training datasets for machine learning models. While efforts to address bias in dermatology have focused on improving dataset diversity and mitigating disparities in discriminative models, the impact of racial bias on generative models remains underexplored. Generative models, such as Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), are increasingly used in healthcare applications, yet their fairness across diverse skin tones is currently not well understood. In this study, we evaluate the fairness of generative models in clinical dermatology with respect to racial bias. For this purpose, we first train a VAE with a perceptual loss to generate and reconstruct high-quality skin images across different skin tones. We utilize the Fitzpatrick17k dataset to examine how racial bias influences the representation and performance of these models. Our findings indicate that VAE performance is, as expected, influenced by representation, i.e. increased skin tone representation comes with increased performance on the given skin tone. However, we also observe, even independently of representation, that the VAE performs better for lighter skin tones. Additionally, the uncertainty estimates produced by the VAE are ineffective in assessing the model's fairness. These results highlight the need for more representative dermatological datasets, but also a need for better understanding the sources of bias in such model, as well as improved uncertainty quantification mechanisms to detect and address racial bias in generative models for trustworthy healthcare technologies.
2501.11755
A generalizable 3D framework and model for self-supervised learning in medical imaging
eess.IV cs.CV
Current self-supervised learning methods for 3D medical imaging rely on simple pretext formulations and organ- or modality-specific datasets, limiting their generalizability and scalability. We present 3DINO, a cutting-edge SSL method adapted to 3D datasets, and use it to pretrain 3DINO-ViT: a general-purpose medical imaging model, on an exceptionally large, multimodal, and multi-organ dataset of ~100,000 3D medical imaging scans from over 10 organs. We validate 3DINO-ViT using extensive experiments on numerous medical imaging segmentation and classification tasks. Our results demonstrate that 3DINO-ViT generalizes across modalities and organs, including out-of-distribution tasks and datasets, outperforming state-of-the-art methods on the majority of evaluation metrics and labeled dataset sizes. Our 3DINO framework and 3DINO-ViT will be made available to enable research on 3D foundation models or further finetuning for a wide range of medical imaging applications.
2501.11757
An Information Geometric Approach to Local Information Privacy with Applications to Max-lift and Local Differential Privacy
cs.IT math.IT
We study an information-theoretic privacy mechanism design, where an agent observes useful data $Y$ and wants to reveal the information to a user. Since the useful data is correlated with the private data $X$, the agent uses a privacy mechanism to produce disclosed data $U$ that can be released. We assume that the agent observes $Y$ and has no direct access to $X$, i.e., the private data is hidden. We study the privacy mechanism design that maximizes the revealed information about $Y$ while satisfying a bounded Local Information Privacy (LIP) criterion. When the leakage is sufficiently small, concepts from information geometry allow us to locally approximate the mutual information. By utilizing this approximation the main privacy-utility trade-off problem can be rewritten as a quadratic optimization problem that has closed-form solution under some constraints. For the cases where the closed-form solution is not obtained we provide lower bounds on it. In contrast to the previous works that have complexity issues, here, we provide simple privacy designs with low complexity which are based on finding the maximum singular value and singular vector of a matrix. To do so, we follow two approaches where in the first one we find a lower bound on the main problem and then approximate it, however, in the second approach we approximate the main problem directly. In this work, we present geometrical interpretations of the proposed methods and in a numerical example we compare our results considering both approaches with the optimal solution and the previous methods. Furthermore, we discuss how our method can be generalized considering larger amounts for the privacy leakage. Finally, we discuss how the proposed methods can be applied to deal with differential privacy.
2501.11758
A Review Paper of the Effects of Distinct Modalities and ML Techniques to Distracted Driving Detection
cs.CV stat.ML
Distracted driving remains a significant global challenge with severe human and economic repercussions, demanding improved detection and intervention strategies. While previous studies have extensively explored single-modality approaches, recent research indicates that these systems often fall short in identifying complex distraction patterns, particularly cognitive distractions. This systematic review addresses critical gaps by providing a comprehensive analysis of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques applied across various data modalities - visual,, sensory, auditory, and multimodal. By categorizing and evaluating studies based on modality, data accessibility, and methodology, this review clarifies which approaches yield the highest accuracy and are best suited for specific distracted driving detection goals. The findings offer clear guidance on the advantages of multimodal versus single-modal systems and capture the latest advancements in the field. Ultimately, this review contributes valuable insights for developing robust distracted driving detection frameworks, supporting enhanced road safety and mitigation strategies.
2501.11759
Poison-RAG: Adversarial Data Poisoning Attacks on Retrieval-Augmented Generation in Recommender Systems
cs.IR
This study presents Poison-RAG, a framework for adversarial data poisoning attacks targeting retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)-based recommender systems. Poison-RAG manipulates item metadata, such as tags and descriptions, to influence recommendation outcomes. Using item metadata generated through a large language model (LLM) and embeddings derived via the OpenAI API, we explore the impact of adversarial poisoning attacks on provider-side, where attacks are designed to promote long-tail items and demote popular ones. Two attack strategies are proposed: local modifications, which personalize tags for each item using BERT embeddings, and global modifications, applying uniform tags across the dataset. Experiments conducted on the MovieLens dataset in a black-box setting reveal that local strategies improve manipulation effectiveness by up to 50\%, while global strategies risk boosting already popular items. Results indicate that popular items are more susceptible to attacks, whereas long-tail items are harder to manipulate. Approximately 70\% of items lack tags, presenting a cold-start challenge; data augmentation and synthesis are proposed as potential defense mechanisms to enhance RAG-based systems' resilience. The findings emphasize the need for robust metadata management to safeguard recommendation frameworks. Code and data are available at https://github.com/atenanaz/Poison-RAG.
2501.11762
Disentangling stellar atmospheric parameters in astronomical spectra using Generative Adversarial Neural Networks
astro-ph.IM astro-ph.GA astro-ph.SR cs.LG
A method based on Generative Adversaria! Networks (GANs) is developed for disentangling the physical (effective temperature and gravity) and chemical (metallicity, overabundance of a-elements with respect to iron) atmospheric properties in astronomical spectra. Using a projection of the stellar spectra, commonly called latent space, in which the contribution dueto one or several main stellar physicochemical properties is minimised while others are enhanced, it was possible to maximise the information related to certain properties, which can then be extracted using artificial neural networks (ANN) as regressors with higher accuracy than a reference method based on the use of ANN trained with the original spectra. Methods. Our model utilises autoencoders, comprising two artificial neural networks: an encoder anda decoder which transform input data into a low-dimensional representation known as latent space. It also uses discriminators, which are additional neural networks aimed at transforming the traditional autoencoder training into an adversaria! approach, to disentangle or reinforce the astrophysical parameters from the latent space. The GANDALF tool is described. It was developed to define, train, and test our GAN model with a web framework to show how the disentangling algorithm works visually. It is open to the community in Github. Results. The performance of our approach for retrieving atmospheric stellar properties from spectra is demonstrated using Gaia Radial Velocity Spectrograph (RVS) data from DR3. We use a data-driven perspective and obtain very competitive values, ali within the literature errors, and with the advantage of an important dimensionality reduction of the data to be processed.
2501.11765
Is logical analysis performed by transformers taking place in self-attention or in the fully connected part?
cs.CL cs.AI cs.LG
Transformers architecture apply self-attention to tokens represented as vectors, before a fully connected (neuronal network) layer. These two parts can be layered many times. Traditionally, self-attention is seen as a mechanism for aggregating information before logical operations are performed by the fully connected layer. In this paper, we show, that quite counter-intuitively, the logical analysis can also be performed within the self-attention. For this we implement a handcrafted single-level encoder layer which performs the logical analysis within self-attention. We then study the scenario in which a one-level transformer model undergoes self-learning using gradient descent. We investigate whether the model utilizes fully connected layers or self-attention mechanisms for logical analysis when it has the choice. Given that gradient descent can become stuck at undesired zeros, we explicitly calculate these unwanted zeros and find ways to avoid them. We do all this in the context of predicting grammatical category pairs of adjacent tokens in a text. We believe that our findings have broader implications for understanding the potential logical operations performed by self-attention.
2501.11770
The Value of Nothing: Multimodal Extraction of Human Values Expressed by TikTok Influencers
cs.CL cs.CY cs.SI
Societal and personal values are transmitted to younger generations through interaction and exposure. Traditionally, children and adolescents learned values from parents, educators, or peers. Nowadays, social platforms serve as a significant channel through which youth (and adults) consume information, as the main medium of entertainment, and possibly the medium through which they learn different values. In this paper we extract implicit values from TikTok movies uploaded by online influencers targeting children and adolescents. We curated a dataset of hundreds of TikTok movies and annotated them according to the Schwartz Theory of Personal Values. We then experimented with an array of Masked and Large language model, exploring how values can be detected. Specifically, we considered two pipelines -- direct extraction of values from video and a 2-step approach in which videos are first converted to elaborated scripts and then values are extracted. Achieving state-of-the-art results, we find that the 2-step approach performs significantly better than the direct approach and that using a trainable Masked Language Model as a second step significantly outperforms a few-shot application of a number of Large Language Models. We further discuss the impact of fine-tuning and compare the performance of the different models on identification of values present or contradicted in the TikTok. Finally, we share the first values-annotated dataset of TikTok videos. Our results pave the way to further research on influence and value transmission in video-based social platforms.
2501.11773
Can Bayesian Neural Networks Make Confident Predictions?
stat.ML cs.LG math.ST stat.TH
Bayesian inference promises a framework for principled uncertainty quantification of neural network predictions. Barriers to adoption include the difficulty of fully characterizing posterior distributions on network parameters and the interpretability of posterior predictive distributions. We demonstrate that under a discretized prior for the inner layer weights, we can exactly characterize the posterior predictive distribution as a Gaussian mixture. This setting allows us to define equivalence classes of network parameter values which produce the same likelihood (training error) and to relate the elements of these classes to the network's scaling regime -- defined via ratios of the training sample size, the size of each layer, and the number of final layer parameters. Of particular interest are distinct parameter realizations that map to low training error and yet correspond to distinct modes in the posterior predictive distribution. We identify settings that exhibit such predictive multimodality, and thus provide insight into the accuracy of unimodal posterior approximations. We also characterize the capacity of a model to "learn from data" by evaluating contraction of the posterior predictive in different scaling regimes.
2501.11776
EfficientVITON: An Efficient Virtual Try-On Model using Optimized Diffusion Process
cs.CV
Would not it be much more convenient for everybody to try on clothes by only looking into a mirror ? The answer to that problem is virtual try-on, enabling users to digitally experiment with outfits. The core challenge lies in realistic image-to-image translation, where clothing must fit diverse human forms, poses, and figures. Early methods, which used 2D transformations, offered speed, but image quality was often disappointing and lacked the nuance of deep learning. Though GAN-based techniques enhanced realism, their dependence on paired data proved limiting. More adaptable methods offered great visuals but demanded significant computing power and time. Recent advances in diffusion models have shown promise for high-fidelity translation, yet the current crop of virtual try-on tools still struggle with detail loss and warping issues. To tackle these challenges, this paper proposes EfficientVITON, a new virtual try-on system leveraging the impressive pre-trained Stable Diffusion model for better images and deployment feasibility. The system includes a spatial encoder to maintain clothings finer details and zero cross-attention blocks to capture the subtleties of how clothes fit a human body. Input images are carefully prepared, and the diffusion process has been tweaked to significantly cut generation time without image quality loss. The training process involves two distinct stages of fine-tuning, carefully incorporating a balance of loss functions to ensure both accurate try-on results and high-quality visuals. Rigorous testing on the VITON-HD dataset, supplemented with real-world examples, has demonstrated that EfficientVITON achieves state-of-the-art results.
2501.11779
Glinthawk: A Two-Tiered Architecture for Offline LLM Inference
cs.LG cs.DC cs.PF
We introduce Glinthawk, an architecture for offline Large Language Model (LLM) inference. By leveraging a two-tiered structure, Glinthawk optimizes the utilization of the high-end accelerators ("Tier 1") by offloading the attention mechanism to lower-end compute tier ("Tier 2"). This separation allows the memory demand of the attention, known as the key-value cache, to scale independently from the model weights, enabling larger batch sizes and more efficient accelerator usage. Prototyped with NVIDIA T4 GPUs and standard CPU VMs, Glinthawk improves throughput by $5.9\times$ and reduces cost of generation by $2.8\times$, compared to paged attention baselines. For long sequence lengths, it achieves $16.3\times$ throughput improvement at $2.4\times$ less cost. Our evaluation shows that this architecture can tolerate moderate network latency with minimal performance degradation, making it highly effective for latency-tolerant, throughput-focused applications such as batch processing. The prototype is publicly available at https://github.com/microsoft/glinthawk.
2501.11782
Human-AI Collaborative Game Testing with Vision Language Models
cs.HC cs.AI
As modern video games become increasingly complex, traditional manual testing methods are proving costly and inefficient, limiting the ability to ensure high-quality game experiences. While advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) offer the potential to assist human testers, the effectiveness of AI in truly enhancing real-world human performance remains underexplored. This study investigates how AI can improve game testing by developing and experimenting with an AI-assisted workflow that leverages state-of-the-art machine learning models for defect detection. Through an experiment involving 800 test cases and 276 participants of varying backgrounds, we evaluate the effectiveness of AI assistance under four conditions: with or without AI support, and with or without detailed knowledge of defects and design documentation. The results indicate that AI assistance significantly improves defect identification performance, particularly when paired with detailed knowledge. However, challenges arise when AI errors occur, negatively impacting human decision-making. Our findings show the importance of optimizing human-AI collaboration and implementing strategies to mitigate the effects of AI inaccuracies. By this research, we demonstrate AI's potential and problems in enhancing efficiency and accuracy in game testing workflows and offers practical insights for integrating AI into the testing process.
2501.11784
Generating visual explanations from deep networks using implicit neural representations
cs.CV
Explaining deep learning models in a way that humans can easily understand is essential for responsible artificial intelligence applications. Attribution methods constitute an important area of explainable deep learning. The attribution problem involves finding parts of the network's input that are the most responsible for the model's output. In this work, we demonstrate that implicit neural representations (INRs) constitute a good framework for generating visual explanations. Firstly, we utilize coordinate-based implicit networks to reformulate and extend the extremal perturbations technique and generate attribution masks. Experimental results confirm the usefulness of our method. For instance, by proper conditioning of the implicit network, we obtain attribution masks that are well-behaved with respect to the imposed area constraints. Secondly, we present an iterative INR-based method that can be used to generate multiple non-overlapping attribution masks for the same image. We depict that a deep learning model may associate the image label with both the appearance of the object of interest as well as with areas and textures usually accompanying the object. Our study demonstrates that implicit networks are well-suited for the generation of attribution masks and can provide interesting insights about the performance of deep learning models.
2501.11786
Synthetic Data Can Mislead Evaluations: Membership Inference as Machine Text Detection
cs.CL cs.CR cs.LG
Recent work shows membership inference attacks (MIAs) on large language models (LLMs) produce inconclusive results, partly due to difficulties in creating non-member datasets without temporal shifts. While researchers have turned to synthetic data as an alternative, we show this approach can be fundamentally misleading. Our experiments indicate that MIAs function as machine-generated text detectors, incorrectly identifying synthetic data as training samples regardless of the data source. This behavior persists across different model architectures and sizes, from open-source models to commercial ones such as GPT-3.5. Even synthetic text generated by different, potentially larger models is classified as training data by the target model. Our findings highlight a serious concern: using synthetic data in membership evaluations may lead to false conclusions about model memorization and data leakage. We caution that this issue could affect other evaluations using model signals such as loss where synthetic or machine-generated translated data substitutes for real-world samples.
2501.11788
OciorABA: Improved Error-Free Asynchronous Byzantine Agreement via Partial Vector Agreement
cs.DC cs.CR cs.IT math.IT
In this work, we propose an error-free, information-theoretically secure multi-valued asynchronous Byzantine agreement (ABA) protocol, called OciorABA. This protocol achieves ABA consensus on an $\ell$-bit message with an expected communication complexity of $O(n\ell + n^3 \log q )$ bits and an expected round complexity of $O(1)$ rounds, under the optimal resilience condition $n \geq 3t + 1$ in an $n$-node network, where up to $t$ nodes may be dishonest. Here, $q$ denotes the alphabet size of the error correction code used in the protocol. In our protocol design, we introduce a new primitive: asynchronous partial vector agreement (APVA). In APVA, the distributed nodes input their vectors and aim to output a common vector, where some of the elements of those vectors may be missing or unknown. We propose an APVA protocol with an expected communication complexity of $O( n^3 \log q )$ bits and an expected round complexity of $O(1)$ rounds. This APVA protocol serves as a key building block for our OciorABA protocol.
2501.11790
Benchmarking Large Language Models via Random Variables
cs.CL cs.AI
Recent studies have raised concerns about the reliability of current mathematical benchmarks, highlighting issues such as simplistic design and potential data contamination. Therefore, creating a reliable benchmark that effectively evaluates the genuine capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in mathematical reasoning remains a significant challenge. To address this, we propose RV-Bench, a framework for Benchmarking LLMs via Random Variables in mathematical reasoning. Specifically, the background content of a random variable question (RV question) mirrors the original problem in existing benchmarks, but the variable combinations are randomized, making it "unseen" by the LLMs. Models must completely understand the question pattern of the original problem to correctly answer RV questions with various variable values. As a result, the LLM's genuine capability in mathematical reasoning is reflected by its accuracy and robustness on RV-Bench. We conducted extensive experiments on over 30 representative LLMs across more than 1000 RV questions. Our findings suggest that LLMs exhibit an imbalance in proficiency between encountered and "unseen" data domains. Proficiency generalization across similar mathematical reasoning tasks is verified to be limited by accuracy and robustness, but it can still be enhanced through test-time scaling.
2501.11795
Provably effective detection of effective data poisoning attacks
cs.CR cs.CV cs.LG stat.ML
This paper establishes a mathematically precise definition of dataset poisoning attack and proves that the very act of effectively poisoning a dataset ensures that the attack can be effectively detected. On top of a mathematical guarantee that dataset poisoning is identifiable by a new statistical test that we call the Conformal Separability Test, we provide experimental evidence that we can adequately detect poisoning attempts in the real world.
2501.11799
Policy-Adaptable Methods For Resolving Normative Conflicts Through Argumentation and Graph Colouring
cs.AI cs.LO math.LO
In a multi-agent system, one may choose to govern the behaviour of an agent by imposing norms, which act as guidelines for how agents should act either all of the time or in given situations. However, imposing multiple norms on one or more agents may result in situations where these norms conflict over how the agent should behave. In any system with normative conflicts (such as safe reinforcement models or systems which monitor safety protocols), one must decide which norms should be followed such that the most important and most relevant norms are maintained. We introduce a new method for resolving normative conflicts through argumentation and graph colouring which is compatible with a variety of normative conflict resolution policies. We prove that this method always creates an admissible set of arguments under argumentation semantics, meaning that it produces coherent outputs. We also introduce more robust variants of this method, each building upon their predecessor to create a superior output, and we include further mathematical proof of their coherence. Our most advanced variant uses the existing concept of curtailment, where one norm may supersede another without fully eliminating it. The methods we introduce are all compatible with various pre-existing policies for resolving normative conflicts. Empirical evaluations are also performed to compare our algorithms to each other and to others in existing literature.
2501.11800
TFLOP: Table Structure Recognition Framework with Layout Pointer Mechanism
cs.CV
Table Structure Recognition (TSR) is a task aimed at converting table images into a machine-readable format (e.g. HTML), to facilitate other applications such as information retrieval. Recent works tackle this problem by identifying the HTML tags and text regions, where the latter is used for text extraction from the table document. These works however, suffer from misalignment issues when mapping text into the identified text regions. In this paper, we introduce a new TSR framework, called TFLOP (TSR Framework with LayOut Pointer mechanism), which reformulates the conventional text region prediction and matching into a direct text region pointing problem. Specifically, TFLOP utilizes text region information to identify both the table's structure tags and its aligned text regions, simultaneously. Without the need for region prediction and alignment, TFLOP circumvents the additional text region matching stage, which requires finely-calibrated post-processing. TFLOP also employs span-aware contrastive supervision to enhance the pointing mechanism in tables with complex structure. As a result, TFLOP achieves the state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks such as PubTabNet, FinTabNet, and SynthTabNet. In our extensive experiments, TFLOP not only exhibits competitive performance but also shows promising results on industrial document TSR scenarios such as documents with watermarks or in non-English domain.
2501.11803
Automating High Quality RT Planning at Scale
cs.HC cs.LG cs.RO
Radiotherapy (RT) planning is complex, subjective, and time-intensive. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) promise to improve its precision, efficiency, and consistency, but progress is often limited by the scarcity of large, standardized datasets. To address this, we introduce the Automated Iterative RT Planning (AIRTP) system, a scalable solution for generating high-quality treatment plans. This scalable solution is designed to generate substantial volumes of consistently high-quality treatment plans, overcoming a key obstacle in the advancement of AI-driven RT planning. Our AIRTP pipeline adheres to clinical guidelines and automates essential steps, including organ-at-risk (OAR) contouring, helper structure creation, beam setup, optimization, and plan quality improvement, using AI integrated with RT planning software like Eclipse of Varian. Furthermore, a novel approach for determining optimization parameters to reproduce 3D dose distributions, i.e. a method to convert dose predictions to deliverable treatment plans constrained by machine limitations. A comparative analysis of plan quality reveals that our automated pipeline produces treatment plans of quality comparable to those generated manually, which traditionally require several hours of labor per plan. Committed to public research, the first data release of our AIRTP pipeline includes nine cohorts covering head-and-neck and lung cancer sites to support an AAPM 2025 challenge. This data set features more than 10 times the number of plans compared to the largest existing well-curated public data set to our best knowledge. Repo:{https://github.com/RiqiangGao/GDP-HMM_AAPMChallenge}
2501.11813
Utilising Deep Learning to Elicit Expert Uncertainty
cs.LG stat.OT
Recent work [ 14 ] has introduced a method for prior elicitation that utilizes records of expert decisions to infer a prior distribution. While this method provides a promising approach to eliciting expert uncertainty, it has only been demonstrated using tabular data, which may not entirely represent the information used by experts to make decisions. In this paper, we demonstrate how analysts can adopt a deep learning approach to utilize the method proposed in [14 ] with the actual information experts use. We provide an overview of deep learning models that can effectively model expert decision-making to elicit distributions that capture expert uncertainty and present an example examining the risk of colon cancer to show in detail how these models can be used.
2501.11815
CogMorph: Cognitive Morphing Attacks for Text-to-Image Models
cs.CV
The development of text-to-image (T2I) generative models, that enable the creation of high-quality synthetic images from textual prompts, has opened new frontiers in creative design and content generation. However, this paper reveals a significant and previously unrecognized ethical risk inherent in this technology and introduces a novel method, termed the Cognitive Morphing Attack (CogMorph), which manipulates T2I models to generate images that retain the original core subjects but embeds toxic or harmful contextual elements. This nuanced manipulation exploits the cognitive principle that human perception of concepts is shaped by the entire visual scene and its context, producing images that amplify emotional harm far beyond attacks that merely preserve the original semantics. To address this, we first construct an imagery toxicity taxonomy spanning 10 major and 48 sub-categories, aligned with human cognitive-perceptual dimensions, and further build a toxicity risk matrix resulting in 1,176 high-quality T2I toxic prompts. Based on this, our CogMorph first introduces Cognitive Toxicity Augmentation, which develops a cognitive toxicity knowledge base with rich external toxic representations for humans (e.g., fine-grained visual features) that can be utilized to further guide the optimization of adversarial prompts. In addition, we present Contextual Hierarchical Morphing, which hierarchically extracts critical parts of the original prompt (e.g., scenes, subjects, and body parts), and then iteratively retrieves and fuses toxic features to inject harmful contexts. Extensive experiments on multiple open-sourced T2I models and black-box commercial APIs (e.g., DALLE-3) demonstrate the efficacy of CogMorph which significantly outperforms other baselines by large margins (+20.62% on average).
2501.11817
Toward Effective Digraph Representation Learning: A Magnetic Adaptive Propagation based Approach
cs.LG cs.AI cs.DB cs.SI
The $q$-parameterized magnetic Laplacian serves as the foundation of directed graph (digraph) convolution, enabling this kind of digraph neural network (MagDG) to encode node features and structural insights by complex-domain message passing. As a generalization of undirected methods, MagDG shows superior capability in modeling intricate web-scale topology. Despite the great success achieved by existing MagDGs, limitations still exist: (1) Hand-crafted $q$: The performance of MagDGs depends on selecting an appropriate $q$-parameter to construct suitable graph propagation equations in the complex domain. This parameter tuning, driven by downstream tasks, limits model flexibility and significantly increases manual effort. (2) Coarse Message Passing: Most approaches treat all nodes with the same complex-domain propagation and aggregation rules, neglecting their unique digraph contexts. This oversight results in sub-optimal performance. To address the above issues, we propose two key techniques: (1) MAP is crafted to be a plug-and-play complex-domain propagation optimization strategy in the context of digraph learning, enabling seamless integration into any MagDG to improve predictions while enjoying high running efficiency. (2) MAP++ is a new digraph learning framework, further incorporating a learnable mechanism to achieve adaptively edge-wise propagation and node-wise aggregation in the complex domain for better performance. Extensive experiments on 12 datasets demonstrate that MAP enjoys flexibility for it can be incorporated with any MagDG, and scalability as it can deal with web-scale digraphs. MAP++ achieves SOTA predictive performance on 4 different downstream tasks.
2501.11818
Group-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Heterogeneous Agents
cs.LG
Group-agent reinforcement learning (GARL) is a newly arising learning scenario, where multiple reinforcement learning agents study together in a group, sharing knowledge in an asynchronous fashion. The goal is to improve the learning performance of each individual agent. Under a more general heterogeneous setting where different agents learn using different algorithms, we advance GARL by designing novel and effective group-learning mechanisms. They guide the agents on whether and how to learn from action choices from the others, and allow the agents to adopt available policy and value function models sent by another agent if they perform better. We have conducted extensive experiments on a total of 43 different Atari 2600 games to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method. After the group learning, among the 129 agents examined, 96% are able to achieve a learning speed-up, and 72% are able to learn over 100 times faster. Also, around 41% of those agents have achieved a higher accumulated reward score by learning in less than 5% of the time steps required by a single agent when learning on its own.
2501.11820
Comparative Analysis of Control Strategies for Position Regulation in DC Servo Motors
eess.SY cs.SY
A servomotor is a closed-loop system designed for precise movement control, utilizing position feedback to achieve accurate final positions. Due to the ability to deliver higher power output and operate at enhanced speeds, DC servo motors are considered ideal for applications requiring precision and performance. This research aims to design, simulate, and compare various control strategies for precise position control in DC servo motors (DSM). The controllers evaluated in this study include proportional (P), proportional-integral (PI), proportional-integral-derivative (PID), state-feedback controllers (SFC), and state-feedback controllers augmented with integral action (SFCIA). The performance of these controllers was evaluated using MATLAB simulations, characterized by overshoot, settling time, steady-state error, rise time, and peak time. The results indicate that the state-feedback controller with integral action (SFCIA) surpasses other control strategies by achieving zero steady-state error, minimal overshoot, the shortest settling time, and optimized rise and peak times. These findings highlight the effectiveness of SFCIA for tasks requiring high levels of stability, precision, and dynamic performance.
2501.11823
Toward Scalable Graph Unlearning: A Node Influence Maximization based Approach
cs.LG cs.AI cs.DB cs.SI
Machine unlearning, as a pivotal technology for enhancing model robustness and data privacy, has garnered significant attention in prevalent web mining applications, especially in thriving graph-based scenarios. However, most existing graph unlearning (GU) approaches face significant challenges due to the intricate interactions among web-scale graph elements during the model training: (1) The gradient-driven node entanglement hinders the complete knowledge removal in response to unlearning requests; (2) The billion-level graph elements in the web scenarios present inevitable scalability issues. To break the above limitations, we open up a new perspective by drawing a connection between GU and conventional social influence maximization. To this end, we propose Node Influence Maximization (NIM) through the decoupled influence propagation model and fine-grained influence function in a scalable manner, which is crafted to be a plug-and-play strategy to identify potential nodes affected by unlearning entities. This approach enables offline execution independent of GU, allowing it to be seamlessly integrated into most GU methods to improve their unlearning performance. Based on this, we introduce Scalable Graph Unlearning (SGU) as a new fine-tuned framework, which balances the forgetting and reasoning capability of the unlearned model by entity-specific optimizations. Extensive experiments on 14 datasets, including large-scale ogbn-papers100M, have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach. Specifically, NIM enhances the forgetting capability of most GU methods, while SGU achieves comprehensive SOTA performance and maintains scalability.
2501.11827
PXGen: A Post-hoc Explainable Method for Generative Models
cs.LG cs.AI
With the rapid growth of generative AI in numerous applications, explainable AI (XAI) plays a crucial role in ensuring the responsible development and deployment of generative AI technologies. XAI has undergone notable advancements and widespread adoption in recent years, reflecting a concerted push to enhance the transparency, interpretability, and credibility of AI systems. Recent research emphasizes that a proficient XAI method should adhere to a set of criteria, primarily focusing on two key areas. Firstly, it should ensure the quality and fluidity of explanations, encompassing aspects like faithfulness, plausibility, completeness, and tailoring to individual needs. Secondly, the design principle of the XAI system or mechanism should cover the following factors such as reliability, resilience, the verifiability of its outputs, and the transparency of its algorithm. However, research in XAI for generative models remains relatively scarce, with little exploration into how such methods can effectively meet these criteria in that domain. In this work, we propose PXGen, a post-hoc explainable method for generative models. Given a model that needs to be explained, PXGen prepares two materials for the explanation, the Anchor set and intrinsic & extrinsic criteria. Those materials are customizable by users according to their purpose and requirements. Via the calculation of each criterion, each anchor has a set of feature values and PXGen provides examplebased explanation methods according to the feature values among all the anchors and illustrated and visualized to the users via tractable algorithms such as k-dispersion or k-center.
2501.11828
Fact-Preserved Personalized News Headline Generation
cs.CL cs.AI
Personalized news headline generation, aiming at generating user-specific headlines based on readers' preferences, burgeons a recent flourishing research direction. Existing studies generally inject a user interest embedding into an encoderdecoder headline generator to make the output personalized, while the factual consistency of headlines is inadequate to be verified. In this paper, we propose a framework Fact-Preserved Personalized News Headline Generation (short for FPG), to prompt a tradeoff between personalization and consistency. In FPG, the similarity between the candidate news to be exposed and the historical clicked news is used to give different levels of attention to key facts in the candidate news, and the similarity scores help to learn a fact-aware global user embedding. Besides, an additional training procedure based on contrastive learning is devised to further enhance the factual consistency of generated headlines. Extensive experiments conducted on a real-world benchmark PENS validate the superiority of FPG, especially on the tradeoff between personalization and factual consistency.
2501.11830
ShadowGenes: Leveraging Recurring Patterns within Computational Graphs for Model Genealogy
cs.LG cs.CR
Machine learning model genealogy enables practitioners to determine which architectural family a neural network belongs to. In this paper, we introduce ShadowGenes, a novel, signature-based method for identifying a given model's architecture, type, and family. Our method involves building a computational graph of the model that is agnostic of its serialization format, then analyzing its internal operations to identify unique patterns, and finally building and refining signatures based on these. We highlight important workings of the underlying engine and demonstrate the technique used to construct a signature and scan a given model. This approach to model genealogy can be applied to model files without the need for additional external information. We test ShadowGenes on a labeled dataset of over 1,400 models and achieve a mean true positive rate of 97.49% and a precision score of 99.51%; which validates the technique as a practical method for model genealogy. This enables practitioners to understand the use cases of a given model, the internal computational process, and identify possible security risks, such as the potential for model backdooring.
2501.11833
Is your LLM trapped in a Mental Set? Investigative study on how mental sets affect the reasoning capabilities of LLMs
cs.CL cs.AI
In this paper, we present an investigative study on how Mental Sets influence the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. LLMs have excelled in diverse natural language processing (NLP) tasks, driven by advancements in parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) and emergent capabilities like in-context learning (ICL). For complex reasoning tasks, selecting the right model for PEFT or ICL is critical, often relying on scores on benchmarks such as MMLU, MATH, and GSM8K. However, current evaluation methods, based on metrics like F1 Score or reasoning chain assessments by larger models, overlook a key dimension: adaptability to unfamiliar situations and overcoming entrenched thinking patterns. In cognitive psychology, Mental Set refers to the tendency to persist with previously successful strategies, even when they become inefficient - a challenge for problem solving and reasoning. We compare the performance of LLM models like Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct and GPT-4o in the presence of mental sets. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to integrate cognitive psychology concepts into the evaluation of LLMs for complex reasoning tasks, providing deeper insights into their adaptability and problem-solving efficacy.
2501.11834
PDA Construction via Union of Cartesian Product Cache Configurations for Coded Caching
cs.IT math.IT
Caching is an efficient technique to reduce peak traffic by storing popular content in local caches. Placement delivery array (PDA) proposed by Yan et al. is a combinatorial structure to design coded caching schemes with uncoded placement and one-shot linear delivery. By taking the $m$-fold Cartesian product of a small base PDA, Wang et al. constructed a big PDA while maintaining the memory ratio and transmission load unchanged, which achieves linear growth in both the number of users and coded caching gain. In order to achieve exponential growth in both the number of users and coded caching gain, in this paper we propose a PDA construction by taking the union operation of the cache configurations from the $m$-fold Cartesian product of a base PDA. The resulting PDA leads to a coded caching scheme with subpacketization increasing sub-exponentially with the number of users while keeping the load constant for fixed memory ratio. By applying the proposed construction to existing base PDAs, three new coded caching schemes are obtained, which cover some existing schemes as special cases and can achieve lower load with simultaneously lower subpacketization for some memory ratios.
2501.11835
Hybrid Adaptive Modeling using Neural Networks Trained with Nonlinear Dynamics Based Features
cs.LG nlin.AO
Accurate models are essential for design, performance prediction, control, and diagnostics in complex engineering systems. Physics-based models excel during the design phase but often become outdated during system deployment due to changing operational conditions, unknown interactions, excitations, and parametric drift. While data-based models can capture the current state of complex systems, they face significant challenges, including excessive data dependence, limited generalizability to changing conditions, and inability to predict parametric dependence. This has led to combining physics and data in modeling, termed physics-infused machine learning, often using numerical simulations from physics-based models. This paper introduces a novel approach that departs from standard techniques by uncovering information from nonlinear dynamical modeling and embedding it in data-based models. The goal is to create a hybrid adaptive modeling framework that integrates data-based modeling with newly measured data and analytical nonlinear dynamical models for enhanced accuracy, parametric dependence, and improved generalizability. By explicitly incorporating nonlinear dynamic phenomena through perturbation methods, the predictive capabilities are more realistic and insightful compared to knowledge obtained from brute-force numerical simulations. In particular, perturbation methods are utilized to derive asymptotic solutions which are parameterized to generate frequency responses. Frequency responses provide comprehensive insights into dynamics and nonlinearity which are quantified and extracted as high-quality features. A machine-learning model, trained by these features, tracks parameter variations and updates the mismatched model. The results demonstrate that this adaptive modeling method outperforms numerical gray box models in prediction accuracy and computational efficiency.
2501.11836
Data-driven Detection and Evaluation of Damages in Concrete Structures: Using Deep Learning and Computer Vision
cs.CV cs.AI cs.LG
Structural integrity is vital for maintaining the safety and longevity of concrete infrastructures such as bridges, tunnels, and walls. Traditional methods for detecting damages like cracks and spalls are labor-intensive, time-consuming, and prone to human error. To address these challenges, this study explores advanced data-driven techniques using deep learning for automated damage detection and analysis. Two state-of-the-art instance segmentation models, YOLO-v7 instance segmentation and Mask R-CNN, were evaluated using a dataset comprising 400 images, augmented to 10,995 images through geometric and color-based transformations to enhance robustness. The models were trained and validated using a dataset split into 90% training set, validation and test set 10%. Performance metrics such as precision, recall, mean average precision (mAP@0.5), and frames per second (FPS) were used for evaluation. YOLO-v7 achieved a superior mAP@0.5 of 96.1% and processed 40 FPS, outperforming Mask R-CNN, which achieved a mAP@0.5 of 92.1% with a slower processing speed of 18 FPS. The findings recommend YOLO-v7 instance segmentation model for real-time, high-speed structural health monitoring, while Mask R-CNN is better suited for detailed offline assessments. This study demonstrates the potential of deep learning to revolutionize infrastructure maintenance, offering a scalable and efficient solution for automated damage detection.
2501.11839
Supervised Learning for Analog and RF Circuit Design: Benchmarks and Comparative Insights
cs.LG cs.AI cs.AR
Automating analog and radio-frequency (RF) circuit design using machine learning (ML) significantly reduces the time and effort required for parameter optimization. This study explores supervised ML-based approaches for designing circuit parameters from performance specifications across various circuit types, including homogeneous and heterogeneous designs. By evaluating diverse ML models, from neural networks like transformers to traditional methods like random forests, we identify the best-performing models for each circuit. Our results show that simpler circuits, such as low-noise amplifiers, achieve exceptional accuracy with mean relative errors as low as 0.3% due to their linear parameter-performance relationships. In contrast, complex circuits, like power amplifiers and voltage-controlled oscillators, present challenges due to their non-linear interactions and larger design spaces. For heterogeneous circuits, our approach achieves an 88% reduction in errors with increased training data, with the receiver achieving a mean relative error as low as 0.23%, showcasing the scalability and accuracy of the proposed methodology. Additionally, we provide insights into model strengths, with transformers excelling in capturing non-linear mappings and k-nearest neighbors performing robustly in moderately linear parameter spaces, especially in heterogeneous circuits with larger datasets. This work establishes a foundation for extending ML-driven design automation, enabling more efficient and scalable circuit design workflows.
2501.11841
Survey on Monocular Metric Depth Estimation
cs.CV
Monocular Depth Estimation (MDE) is a fundamental computer vision task underpinning applications such as spatial understanding, 3D reconstruction, and autonomous driving. While deep learning-based MDE methods can predict relative depth from a single image, their lack of metric scale information often results in scale inconsistencies, limiting their utility in downstream tasks like visual SLAM, 3D reconstruction, and novel view synthesis. Monocular Metric Depth Estimation (MMDE) addresses these challenges by enabling precise, scene-scale depth inference. MMDE improves depth consistency, enhances sequential task stability, simplifies integration into downstream applications, and broadens practical use cases. This paper provides a comprehensive review of depth estimation technologies, highlighting the evolution from geometry-based methods to state-of-the-art deep learning approaches. It emphasizes advancements in scale-agnostic methods, which are crucial for enabling zero-shot generalization as the foundational capability for MMDE. Recent progress in zero-shot MMDE research is explored, focusing on challenges such as model generalization and the loss of detail at scene boundaries. Innovative strategies to address these issues include unlabelled data augmentation, image patching, architectural optimization, and generative techniques. These advancements, analyzed in detail, demonstrate significant contributions to overcoming existing limitations. Finally, this paper synthesizes recent developments in zero-shot MMDE, identifies unresolved challenges, and outlines future research directions. By offering a clear roadmap and cutting-edge insights, this work aims to deepen understanding of MMDE, inspire novel applications, and drive technological innovation.
2501.11842
Harnessing Rydberg Atomic Receivers: From Quantum Physics to Wireless Communications
cs.IT eess.SP math.IT
The intrinsic integration of Rydberg atomic receivers into wireless communication systems is proposed, by harnessing the principles of quantum physics in wireless communications. More particularly, we conceive a pair of Rydberg atomic receivers, one incorporates a local oscillator (LO), referred to as an LO-dressed receiver, while the other operates without an LO and is termed an LO-free receiver. The appropriate wireless model is developed for each configuration, elaborating on the receiver's responses to the radio frequency (RF) signal, on the potential noise sources, and on the system performance. Next, we investigate the association distortion effects that might occur, specifically demonstrating the boundaries of linear dynamic regions, which provides critical insights into its practical implementations in wireless systems. Extensive simulation results are provided for characterizing the performance of wireless systems, harnessing this pair of Rydberg atomic receivers. Our results demonstrate that they deliver complementary benefits: LO-free systems excel in proximity operations, while LO-dressed systems are eminently suitable for long-distance sensing at extremely low power levels. More specifically, LO-dressed systems achieve a significant signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gain of approximately 44 dB over conventional RF receivers, exhibiting an effective coverage range extension over conventional RF receivers by a factor of 150. Furthermore, LO-dressed systems support higher-order quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) at reduced symbol error rates (SER) compared to conventional RF receivers, hence significantly enhancing wireless communication performance.
2501.11847
A Survey on Memory-Efficient Large-Scale Model Training in AI for Science
cs.LG cs.AI
Scientific research faces high costs and inefficiencies with traditional methods, but the rise of deep learning and large language models (LLMs) offers innovative solutions. This survey reviews LLM applications across scientific fields such as biology, medicine, chemistry, and meteorology, underscoring their role in advancing research. However, the continuous expansion of model size has led to significant memory demands, hindering further development and application of LLMs for science. To address this, we review memory-efficient training techniques for LLMs based on the transformer architecture, including distributed training, mixed precision training, and gradient checkpointing. Using AlphaFold 2 as an example, we demonstrate how tailored memory optimization methods can reduce storage needs while preserving prediction accuracy. We also discuss the challenges of memory optimization in practice and potential future directions, hoping to provide valuable insights for researchers and engineers.
2501.11849
Network-informed Prompt Engineering against Organized Astroturf Campaigns under Extreme Class Imbalance
cs.CL cs.AI cs.SI
Detecting organized political campaigns is of paramount importance in fighting against disinformation on social media. Existing approaches for the identification of such organized actions employ techniques mostly from network science, graph machine learning and natural language processing. Their ultimate goal is to analyze the relationships and interactions (e.g. re-posting) among users and the textual similarities of their posts. Despite their effectiveness in recognizing astroturf campaigns, these methods face significant challenges, notably the class imbalance in available training datasets. To mitigate this issue, recent methods usually resort to data augmentation or increasing the number of positive samples, which may not always be feasible or sufficient in real-world settings. Following a different path, in this paper, we propose a novel framework for identifying astroturf campaigns based solely on large language models (LLMs), introducing a Balanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Balanced RAG) component. Our approach first gives both textual information concerning the posts (in our case tweets) and the user interactions of the social network as input to a language model. Then, through prompt engineering and the proposed Balanced RAG method, it effectively detects coordinated disinformation campaigns on X (Twitter). The proposed framework does not require any training or fine-tuning of the language model. Instead, by strategically harnessing the strengths of prompt engineering and Balanced RAG, it facilitates LLMs to overcome the effects of class imbalance and effectively identify coordinated political campaigns. The experimental results demonstrate that by incorporating the proposed prompt engineering and Balanced RAG methods, our framework outperforms the traditional graph-based baselines, achieving 2x-3x improvements in terms of precision, recall and F1 scores.
2501.11851
Challenges in Expanding Portuguese Resources: A View from Open Information Extraction
cs.CL
Open Information Extraction (Open IE) is the task of extracting structured information from textual documents, independent of domain. While traditional Open IE methods were based on unsupervised approaches, recently, with the emergence of robust annotated datasets, new data-based approaches have been developed to achieve better results. These innovations, however, have focused mainly on the English language due to a lack of datasets and the difficulty of constructing such resources for other languages. In this work, we present a high-quality manually annotated corpus for Open Information Extraction in the Portuguese language, based on a rigorous methodology grounded in established semantic theories. We discuss the challenges encountered in the annotation process, propose a set of structural and contextual annotation rules, and validate our corpus by evaluating the performance of state-of-the-art Open IE systems. Our resource addresses the lack of datasets for Open IE in Portuguese and can support the development and evaluation of new methods and systems in this area.
2501.11852
Cross-Entropy Attacks to Language Models via Rare Event Simulation
cs.CL cs.CR cs.LG
Black-box textual adversarial attacks are challenging due to the lack of model information and the discrete, non-differentiable nature of text. Existing methods often lack versatility for attacking different models, suffer from limited attacking performance due to the inefficient optimization with word saliency ranking, and frequently sacrifice semantic integrity to achieve better attack outcomes. This paper introduces a novel approach to textual adversarial attacks, which we call Cross-Entropy Attacks (CEA), that uses Cross-Entropy optimization to address the above issues. Our CEA approach defines adversarial objectives for both soft-label and hard-label settings and employs CE optimization to identify optimal replacements. Through extensive experiments on document classification and language translation problems, we demonstrate that our attack method excels in terms of attacking performance, imperceptibility, and sentence quality.
2501.11854
WaveNet-SF: A Hybrid Network for Retinal Disease Detection Based on Wavelet Transform in the Spatial-Frequency Domain
eess.IV cs.CV
Retinal diseases are a leading cause of vision impairment and blindness, with timely diagnosis being critical for effective treatment. Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) has become a standard imaging modality for retinal disease diagnosis, but OCT images often suffer from issues such as speckle noise, complex lesion shapes, and varying lesion sizes, making interpretation challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, WaveNet-SF, to enhance retinal disease detection by integrating spatial-domain and frequency-domain learning. The framework utilizes wavelet transforms to decompose OCT images into low- and high-frequency components, enabling the model to extract both global structural features and fine-grained details. To improve lesion detection, we introduce a multi-scale wavelet spatial attention (MSW-SA) module, which enhances the model's focus on regions of interest at multiple scales. Additionally, a high-frequency feature compensation block (HFFC) is incorporated to recover edge information lost during wavelet decomposition, suppress noise, and preserve fine details crucial for lesion detection. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) classification accuracies of 97.82% and 99. 58% on the OCT-C8 and OCT2017 datasets, respectively, surpassing existing methods. These results demonstrate the efficacy of WaveNet-SF in addressing the challenges of OCT image analysis and its potential as a powerful tool for retinal disease diagnosis.
2501.11855
A New Construction Structure on Coded Caching with Linear Subpacketization: Non-Half-Sum Disjoint Packing
cs.IT math.IT
Coded caching is a promising technique to effectively reduce peak traffic by using local caches and the multicast gains generated by these local caches. We prefer to design a coded caching scheme with the subpacketization $F$ and transmission load $R$ as small as possible since these are the key metrics for evaluating the implementation complexity and transmission efficiency of the scheme, respectively. However, most of the existing coded caching schemes have large subpacketizations which grow exponentially with the number of users $K$, and there are a few schemes with linear subpacketizations which have large transmission loads. In this paper, we focus on studying the linear subpacketization, i.e., $K=F$, coded caching scheme with low transmission load. Specifically, we first introduce a new combinatorial structure called non-half-sum disjoint packing (NHSDP) which can be used to generate a coded caching scheme with $K=F$. Then a class of new schemes is obtained by constructing NHSDP. Theoretical and numerical comparisons show that (i) compared to the existing schemes with linear subpacketization (to the number of users), the proposed scheme achieves a lower load; (ii) compared to some existing schemes with polynomial subpacketization, the proposed scheme can also achieve a lower load in some cases; (iii) compared to some existing schemes with exponential subpacketization, the proposed scheme has loads close to those of these schemes in some cases. Moreover, the new concept of NHSDP is closely related to the classical combinatorial structures such as cyclic difference packing (CDP), non-three-term arithmetic progressions (NTAP), and perfect hash family (PHF). These connections indicate that NHSDP is an important combinatorial structure in the field of combinatorial design.
2501.11858
EmbodiedEval: Evaluate Multimodal LLMs as Embodied Agents
cs.CV cs.CL
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown significant advancements, providing a promising future for embodied agents. Existing benchmarks for evaluating MLLMs primarily utilize static images or videos, limiting assessments to non-interactive scenarios. Meanwhile, existing embodied AI benchmarks are task-specific and not diverse enough, which do not adequately evaluate the embodied capabilities of MLLMs. To address this, we propose EmbodiedEval, a comprehensive and interactive evaluation benchmark for MLLMs with embodied tasks. EmbodiedEval features 328 distinct tasks within 125 varied 3D scenes, each of which is rigorously selected and annotated. It covers a broad spectrum of existing embodied AI tasks with significantly enhanced diversity, all within a unified simulation and evaluation framework tailored for MLLMs. The tasks are organized into five categories: navigation, object interaction, social interaction, attribute question answering, and spatial question answering to assess different capabilities of the agents. We evaluated the state-of-the-art MLLMs on EmbodiedEval and found that they have a significant shortfall compared to human level on embodied tasks. Our analysis demonstrates the limitations of existing MLLMs in embodied capabilities, providing insights for their future development. We open-source all evaluation data and simulation framework at https://github.com/thunlp/EmbodiedEval.
2501.11860
Bayesian Despeckling of Structured Sources
cs.IT cs.LG math.IT stat.AP
Speckle noise is a fundamental challenge in coherent imaging systems, significantly degrading image quality. Over the past decades, numerous despeckling algorithms have been developed for applications such as Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and digital holography. In this paper, we aim to establish a theoretically grounded approach to despeckling. We propose a method applicable to general structured stationary stochastic sources. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on piecewise constant sources. Additionally, we theoretically derive a lower bound on the despeckling performance for such sources. The proposed depseckler applied to the 1-Markov structured sources achieves better reconstruction performance with no strong simplification of the ground truth signal model or speckle noise.
2501.11866
Evaluating multiple models using labeled and unlabeled data
cs.LG cs.CY
It remains difficult to evaluate machine learning classifiers in the absence of a large, labeled dataset. While labeled data can be prohibitively expensive or impossible to obtain, unlabeled data is plentiful. Here, we introduce Semi-Supervised Model Evaluation (SSME), a method that uses both labeled and unlabeled data to evaluate machine learning classifiers. SSME is the first evaluation method to take advantage of the fact that: (i) there are frequently multiple classifiers for the same task, (ii) continuous classifier scores are often available for all classes, and (iii) unlabeled data is often far more plentiful than labeled data. The key idea is to use a semi-supervised mixture model to estimate the joint distribution of ground truth labels and classifier predictions. We can then use this model to estimate any metric that is a function of classifier scores and ground truth labels (e.g., accuracy or expected calibration error). We present experiments in four domains where obtaining large labeled datasets is often impractical: (1) healthcare, (2) content moderation, (3) molecular property prediction, and (4) image annotation. Our results demonstrate that SSME estimates performance more accurately than do competing methods, reducing error by 5.1x relative to using labeled data alone and 2.4x relative to the next best competing method. SSME also improves accuracy when evaluating performance across subsets of the test distribution (e.g., specific demographic subgroups) and when evaluating the performance of language models.
2501.11869
Saturation in Snapshot Compressive Imaging
eess.IV cs.IT math.IT stat.AP
Snapshot Compressive Imaging (SCI) maps three-dimensional (3D) data cubes, such as videos or hyperspectral images, into two-dimensional (2D) measurements via optical modulation, enabling efficient data acquisition and reconstruction. Recent advances have shown the potential of mask optimization to enhance SCI performance, but most studies overlook nonlinear distortions caused by saturation in practical systems. Saturation occurs when high-intensity measurements exceed the sensor's dynamic range, leading to information loss that standard reconstruction algorithms cannot fully recover. This paper addresses the challenge of optimizing binary masks in SCI under saturation. We theoretically characterize the performance of compression-based SCI recovery in the presence of saturation and leverage these insights to optimize masks for such conditions. Our analysis reveals trade-offs between mask statistics and reconstruction quality in saturated systems. Experimental results using a Plug-and-Play (PnP) style network validate the theory, demonstrating improved recovery performance and robustness to saturation with our optimized binary masks.
2501.11870
Coarse-to-Fine Lightweight Meta-Embedding for ID-Based Recommendation
cs.IR cs.AI
The state-of-the-art recommendation systems have shifted the attention to efficient recommendation, e.g., on-device recommendation, under memory constraints. To this end, the existing methods either focused on the lightweight embeddings for both users and items, or involved on-device systems enjoying the compact embeddings to enhance reusability and reduces space complexity. However, they focus solely on the coarse granularity of embedding, while overlook the fine-grained semantic nuances, to adversarially downgrade the efficacy of meta-embeddings in capturing the intricate relationship over both user and item, consequently resulting into the suboptimal recommendations. In this paper, we aim to study how the meta-embedding can efficiently learn varied grained semantics, together with how the fine-grained meta-embedding can strengthen the representation of coarse-grained meta-embedding. To answer these questions, we develop a novel graph neural networks (GNNs) based recommender where each user and item serves as the node, linked directly to coarse-grained virtual nodes and indirectly to fine-grained virtual nodes, ensuring different grained semantic learning, while disclosing: 1) In contrast to coarse-grained semantics, fine-grained semantics are well captured through sparse meta-embeddings, which adaptively 2) balance the embedding uniqueness and memory constraint. Additionally, the initialization method come up upon SparsePCA, along with a soft thresholding activation function to render the sparseness of the meta-embeddings. We propose a weight bridging update strategy that focuses on matching each coarse-grained meta-embedding with several fine-grained meta-embeddings based on the users/items' semantics. Extensive experiments substantiate our method's superiority over existing baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/htyjers/C2F-MetaEmbed.
2501.11873
Demons in the Detail: On Implementing Load Balancing Loss for Training Specialized Mixture-of-Expert Models
cs.LG cs.CL
This paper revisits the implementation of $\textbf{L}$oad-$\textbf{b}$alancing $\textbf{L}$oss (LBL) when training Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) models. Specifically, LBL for MoEs is defined as $N_E \sum_{i=1}^{N_E} f_i p_i$, where $N_E$ is the total number of experts, $f_i$ represents the frequency of expert $i$ being selected, and $p_i$ denotes the average gating score of the expert $i$. Existing MoE training frameworks usually employ the parallel training strategy so that $f_i$ and the LBL are calculated within a $\textbf{micro-batch}$ and then averaged across parallel groups. In essence, a micro-batch for training billion-scale LLMs normally contains very few sequences. So, the micro-batch LBL is almost at the sequence level, and the router is pushed to distribute the token evenly within each sequence. Under this strict constraint, even tokens from a domain-specific sequence ($\textit{e.g.}$, code) are uniformly routed to all experts, thereby inhibiting expert specialization. In this work, we propose calculating LBL using a $\textbf{global-batch}$ to loose this constraint. Because a global-batch contains much more diverse sequences than a micro-batch, which will encourage load balance at the corpus level. Specifically, we introduce an extra communication step to synchronize $f_i$ across micro-batches and then use it to calculate the LBL. Through experiments on training MoEs-based LLMs (up to $\textbf{42.8B}$ total parameters and $\textbf{400B}$ tokens), we surprisingly find that the global-batch LBL strategy yields excellent performance gains in both pre-training perplexity and downstream tasks. Our analysis reveals that the global-batch LBL also greatly improves the domain specialization of MoE experts.
2501.11876
FNIN: A Fourier Neural Operator-based Numerical Integration Network for Surface-form-gradients
cs.CV
Surface-from-gradients (SfG) aims to recover a three-dimensional (3D) surface from its gradients. Traditional methods encounter significant challenges in achieving high accuracy and handling high-resolution inputs, particularly facing the complex nature of discontinuities and the inefficiencies associated with large-scale linear solvers. Although recent advances in deep learning, such as photometric stereo, have enhanced normal estimation accuracy, they do not fully address the intricacies of gradient-based surface reconstruction. To overcome these limitations, we propose a Fourier neural operator-based Numerical Integration Network (FNIN) within a two-stage optimization framework. In the first stage, our approach employs an iterative architecture for numerical integration, harnessing an advanced Fourier neural operator to approximate the solution operator in Fourier space. Additionally, a self-learning attention mechanism is incorporated to effectively detect and handle discontinuities. In the second stage, we refine the surface reconstruction by formulating a weighted least squares problem, addressing the identified discontinuities rationally. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves significant improvements in both accuracy and efficiency compared to current state-of-the-art solvers. This is particularly evident in handling high-resolution images with complex data, achieving errors of fewer than 0.1 mm on tested objects.
2501.11877
From Drafts to Answers: Unlocking LLM Potential via Aggregation Fine-Tuning
cs.CL cs.AI
Scaling data and model size has been proven effective for boosting the performance of large language models. In addition to training-time scaling, recent studies have revealed that increasing test-time computational resources can further improve performance. In this work, we introduce Aggregation Fine-Tuning (AFT), a supervised finetuning paradigm where the model learns to synthesize multiple draft responses, referred to as proposals, into a single, refined answer, termed aggregation. At inference time, a propose-and-aggregate strategy further boosts performance by iteratively generating proposals and aggregating them. Empirical evaluations on benchmark datasets show that AFT-trained models substantially outperform standard SFT. Notably, an AFT model, fine-tuned from Llama3.1-8B-Base with only 64k data, achieves a 41.3% LC win rate on AlpacaEval 2, surpassing significantly larger LLMs such as Llama3.1-405B-Instruct and GPT4. By combining sequential refinement and parallel sampling, the propose-and-aggregate framework scales inference-time computation in a flexible manner. Overall, These findings position AFT as a promising approach to unlocking additional capabilities of LLMs without resorting to increasing data volume or model size.
2501.11880
Community-Aware Temporal Walks: Parameter-Free Representation Learning on Continuous-Time Dynamic Graphs
cs.LG cs.AI
Dynamic graph representation learning plays a crucial role in understanding evolving behaviors. However, existing methods often struggle with flexibility, adaptability, and the preservation of temporal and structural dynamics. To address these issues, we propose Community-aware Temporal Walks (CTWalks), a novel framework for representation learning on continuous-time dynamic graphs. CTWalks integrates three key components: a community-based parameter-free temporal walk sampling mechanism, an anonymization strategy enriched with community labels, and an encoding process that leverages continuous temporal dynamics modeled via ordinary differential equations (ODEs). This design enables precise modeling of both intra- and inter-community interactions, offering a fine-grained representation of evolving temporal patterns in continuous-time dynamic graphs. CTWalks theoretically overcomes locality bias in walks and establishes its connection to matrix factorization. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that CTWalks outperforms established methods in temporal link prediction tasks, achieving higher accuracy while maintaining robustness.
2501.11881
Channel Resolvability Using Multiplicative Weight Update Algorithm
cs.IT math.IT
We study the channel resolvability problem, which is used to prove strong converse of identification via channel. Channel resolvability has been solved by only random coding in the literature. We prove channel resolvability using the multiplicative weight update algorithm. This is the first approach to channel resolvability using non-random coding.
2501.11883
An Improved Lower Bound on Oblivious Transfer Capacity Using Polarization and Interaction
cs.IT math.IT
We consider the oblivious transfer (OT) capacities of noisy channels against the passive adversary; this problem has not been solved even for the binary symmetric channel (BSC). In the literature, the general construction of OT has been known only for generalized erasure channels (GECs); for the BSC, we convert the channel to the binary symmetric erasure channel (BSEC), which is a special instance of the GEC, via alphabet extension and erasure emulation. In a previous paper by the authors, we derived an improved lower bound on the OT capacity of BSC by proposing a method to recursively emulate BSEC via interactive communication. In this paper, we introduce two new ideas of OT construction: (i) via ``polarization" and interactive communication, we recursively emulate GECs that are not necessarily a BSEC; (ii) in addition to the GEC emulation part, we also utilize interactive communication in the key agreement part of OT protocol. By these methods, we derive lower bounds on the OT capacity of BSC that are superior to the previous one for a certain range of crossover probabilities of the BSC. Via our new lower bound, we show that, at the crossover probability being zero, the slope of tangent of the OT capacity is unbounded.
2501.11884
Fast Underwater Scene Reconstruction using Multi-View Stereo and Physical Imaging
cs.CV
Underwater scene reconstruction poses a substantial challenge because of the intricate interplay between light and the medium, resulting in scattering and absorption effects that make both depth estimation and rendering more complex. While recent Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) based methods for underwater scenes achieve high-quality results by modeling and separating the scattering medium, they still suffer from slow training and rendering speeds. To address these limitations, we propose a novel method that integrates Multi-View Stereo (MVS) with a physics-based underwater image formation model. Our approach consists of two branches: one for depth estimation using the traditional cost volume pipeline of MVS, and the other for rendering based on the physics-based image formation model. The depth branch improves scene geometry, while the medium branch determines the scattering parameters to achieve precise scene rendering. Unlike traditional MVSNet methods that rely on ground-truth depth, our method does not necessitate the use of depth truth, thus allowing for expedited training and rendering processes. By leveraging the medium subnet to estimate the medium parameters and combining this with a color MLP for rendering, we restore the true colors of underwater scenes and achieve higher-fidelity geometric representations. Experimental results show that our method enables high-quality synthesis of novel views in scattering media, clear views restoration by removing the medium, and outperforms existing methods in rendering quality and training efficiency.
2501.11885
Med-R$^2$: Crafting Trustworthy LLM Physicians through Retrieval and Reasoning of Evidence-Based Medicine
cs.CL
In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable capabilities in clinical scenarios. However, despite their potential, existing works face challenges when applying LLMs to medical settings. Strategies relying on training with medical datasets are highly cost-intensive and may suffer from outdated training data. Leveraging external knowledge bases is a suitable alternative, yet it faces obstacles such as limited retrieval precision and poor effectiveness in answer extraction. These issues collectively prevent LLMs from demonstrating the expected level of proficiency in mastering medical expertise. To address these challenges, we introduce Med-R^2, a novel LLM physician framework that adheres to the Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) process, efficiently integrating retrieval mechanisms as well as the selection and reasoning processes of evidence, thereby enhancing the problem-solving capabilities of LLMs in healthcare scenarios and fostering a trustworthy LLM physician. Our comprehensive experiments indicate that Med-R^2 achieves a 14.87\% improvement over vanilla RAG methods and even a 3.59\% enhancement compared to fine-tuning strategies, without incurring additional training costs.
2501.11887
Connection-Coordination Rapport (CCR) Scale: A Dual-Factor Scale to Measure Human-Robot Rapport
cs.RO cs.HC
Robots, particularly in service and companionship roles, must develop positive relationships with people they interact with regularly to be successful. These positive human-robot relationships can be characterized as establishing "rapport," which indicates mutual understanding and interpersonal connection that form the groundwork for successful long-term human-robot interaction. However, the human-robot interaction research literature lacks scale instruments to assess human-robot rapport in a variety of situations. In this work, we developed the 18-item Connection-Coordination Rapport (CCR) Scale to measure human-robot rapport. We first ran Study 1 (N = 288) where online participants rated videos of human-robot interactions using a set of candidate items. Our Study 1 results showed the discovery of two factors in our scale, which we named "Connection" and "Coordination." We then evaluated this scale by running Study 2 (N = 201) where online participants rated a new set of human-robot interaction videos with our scale and an existing rapport scale from virtual agents research for comparison. We also validated our scale by replicating a prior in-person human-robot interaction study, Study 3 (N = 44), and found that rapport is rated significantly greater when participants interacted with a responsive robot (responsive condition) as opposed to an unresponsive robot (unresponsive condition). Results from these studies demonstrate high reliability and validity for the CCR scale, which can be used to measure rapport in both first-person and third-person perspectives. We encourage the adoption of this scale in future studies to measure rapport in a variety of human-robot interactions.
2501.11893
DynoSAM: Open-Source Smoothing and Mapping Framework for Dynamic SLAM
cs.RO
Traditional Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (vSLAM) systems focus solely on static scene structures, overlooking dynamic elements in the environment. Although effective for accurate visual odometry in complex scenarios, these methods discard crucial information about moving objects. By incorporating this information into a Dynamic SLAM framework, the motion of dynamic entities can be estimated, enhancing navigation whilst ensuring accurate localization. However, the fundamental formulation of Dynamic SLAM remains an open challenge, with no consensus on the optimal approach for accurate motion estimation within a SLAM pipeline. Therefore, we developed DynoSAM, an open-source framework for Dynamic SLAM that enables the efficient implementation, testing, and comparison of various Dynamic SLAM optimization formulations. DynoSAM integrates static and dynamic measurements into a unified optimization problem solved using factor graphs, simultaneously estimating camera poses, static scene, object motion or poses, and object structures. We evaluate DynoSAM across diverse simulated and real-world datasets, achieving state-of-the-art motion estimation in indoor and outdoor environments, with substantial improvements over existing systems. Additionally, we demonstrate DynoSAM utility in downstream applications, including 3D reconstruction of dynamic scenes and trajectory prediction, thereby showcasing potential for advancing dynamic object-aware SLAM systems. DynoSAM is open-sourced at https://github.com/ACFR-RPG/DynOSAM.
2501.11895
Contrastive Masked Autoencoders for Character-Level Open-Set Writer Identification
cs.CV cs.LG
In the realm of digital forensics and document authentication, writer identification plays a crucial role in determining the authors of documents based on handwriting styles. The primary challenge in writer-id is the "open-set scenario", where the goal is accurately recognizing writers unseen during the model training. To overcome this challenge, representation learning is the key. This method can capture unique handwriting features, enabling it to recognize styles not previously encountered during training. Building on this concept, this paper introduces the Contrastive Masked Auto-Encoders (CMAE) for Character-level Open-Set Writer Identification. We merge Masked Auto-Encoders (MAE) with Contrastive Learning (CL) to simultaneously and respectively capture sequential information and distinguish diverse handwriting styles. Demonstrating its effectiveness, our model achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on the CASIA online handwriting dataset, reaching an impressive precision rate of 89.7%. Our study advances universal writer-id with a sophisticated representation learning approach, contributing substantially to the ever-evolving landscape of digital handwriting analysis, and catering to the demands of an increasingly interconnected world.
2501.11896
Systematic Abductive Reasoning via Diverse Relation Representations in Vector-symbolic Architecture
cs.AI
In abstract visual reasoning, monolithic deep learning models suffer from limited interpretability and generalization, while existing neuro-symbolic approaches fall short in capturing the diversity and systematicity of attributes and relation representations. To address these challenges, we propose a Systematic Abductive Reasoning model with diverse relation representations (Rel-SAR) in Vector-symbolic Architecture (VSA) to solve Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM). To derive attribute representations with symbolic reasoning potential, we introduce not only various types of atomic vectors that represent numeric, periodic and logical semantics, but also the structured high-dimentional representation (SHDR) for the overall Grid component. For systematic reasoning, we propose novel numerical and logical relation functions and perform rule abduction and execution in a unified framework that integrates these relation representations. Experimental results demonstrate that Rel-SAR achieves significant improvement on RPM tasks and exhibits robust out-of-distribution generalization. Rel-SAR leverages the synergy between HD attribute representations and symbolic reasoning to achieve systematic abductive reasoning with both interpretable and computable semantics.
2501.11898
Highly Efficient Rotation-Invariant Spectral Embedding for Scalable Incomplete Multi-View Clustering
cs.LG
Incomplete multi-view clustering presents significant challenges due to missing views. Although many existing graph-based methods aim to recover missing instances or complete similarity matrices with promising results, they still face several limitations: (1) Recovered data may be unsuitable for spectral clustering, as these methods often ignore guidance from spectral analysis; (2) Complex optimization processes require high computational burden, hindering scalability to large-scale problems; (3) Most methods do not address the rotational mismatch problem in spectral embeddings. To address these issues, we propose a highly efficient rotation-invariant spectral embedding (RISE) method for scalable incomplete multi-view clustering. RISE learns view-specific embeddings from incomplete bipartite graphs to capture the complementary information. Meanwhile, a complete consensus representation with second-order rotation-invariant property is recovered from these incomplete embeddings in a unified model. Moreover, we design a fast alternating optimization algorithm with linear complexity and promising convergence to solve the proposed formulation. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate the effectiveness, scalability, and efficiency of RISE compared to the state-of-the-art methods.
2501.11899
LASER: Lip Landmark Assisted Speaker Detection for Robustness
cs.CV cs.LG
Active Speaker Detection (ASD) aims to identify speaking individuals in complex visual scenes. While humans can easily detect speech by matching lip movements to audio, current ASD models struggle to establish this correspondence, often misclassifying non-speaking instances when audio and lip movements are unsynchronized. To address this limitation, we propose Lip landmark Assisted Speaker dEtection for Robustness (LASER). Unlike models that rely solely on facial frames, LASER explicitly focuses on lip movements by integrating lip landmarks in training. Specifically, given a face track, LASER extracts frame-level visual features and the 2D coordinates of lip landmarks using a lightweight detector. These coordinates are encoded into dense feature maps, providing spatial and structural information on lip positions. Recognizing that landmark detectors may sometimes fail under challenging conditions (e.g., low resolution, occlusions, extreme angles), we incorporate an auxiliary consistency loss to align predictions from both lip-aware and face-only features, ensuring reliable performance even when lip data is absent. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets show that LASER outperforms state-of-the-art models, especially in scenarios with desynchronized audio and visuals, demonstrating robust performance in real-world video contexts. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/plnguyen2908/LASER_ASD}.
2501.11900
Panoramic Interests: Stylistic-Content Aware Personalized Headline Generation
cs.CL cs.AI
Personalized news headline generation aims to provide users with attention-grabbing headlines that are tailored to their preferences. Prevailing methods focus on user-oriented content preferences, but most of them overlook the fact that diverse stylistic preferences are integral to users' panoramic interests, leading to suboptimal personalization. In view of this, we propose a novel Stylistic-Content Aware Personalized Headline Generation (SCAPE) framework. SCAPE extracts both content and stylistic features from headlines with the aid of large language model (LLM) collaboration. It further adaptively integrates users' long- and short-term interests through a contrastive learning-based hierarchical fusion network. By incorporating the panoramic interests into the headline generator, SCAPE reflects users' stylistic-content preferences during the generation process. Extensive experiments on the real-world dataset PENS demonstrate the superiority of SCAPE over baselines.
2501.11901
Enhancing Adversarial Transferability via Component-Wise Augmentation Method
cs.CV
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are highly vulnerable to adversarial examples, which pose significant challenges in security-sensitive applications. Among various adversarial attack strategies, input transformation-based attacks have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in enhancing adversarial transferability. However, existing methods fail to diversify attention regions across models adequately and introduce excessive information loss during transformations. In this paper, we introduce a novel input transformation-based method, termed Component-Wise Augmentation (CWA), designed to enhance transferability by locally applying block-wise transformations. CWA strategically integrates interpolation and selective rotation on individual image blocks to diversify model attention regions while preserving semantic integrity. Extensive experiments on the standard ImageNet dataset show that CWA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both attack success rates and stability across CNN- and Transformer-based models, while also demonstrating superior performance against multiple defense methods.
2501.11903
Finding the nearest bounded-real port-Hamiltonian system
math.OC cs.NA cs.SY eess.SY math.NA
In this paper, we consider linear time-invariant continuous control systems which are bounded real, also known as scattering passive. Our main theoretical contribution is to show the equivalence between such systems and port-Hamiltonian (PH) systems whose factors satisfy certain linear matrix inequalities. Based on this result, we propose a formulation for the problem of finding the nearest bounded-real system to a given system, and design an algorithm combining alternating optimization and Nesterov's fast gradient method. This formulation also allows us to check whether a given system is bounded real by solving a semidefinite program, and provide a PH parametrization for it. We illustrate our proposed algorithms on real and synthetic data sets.
2501.11905
Phase Transitions in Phase-Only Compressed Sensing
cs.IT eess.SP math.IT
The goal of phase-only compressed sensing is to recover a structured signal $\mathbf{x}$ from the phases $\mathbf{z} = {\rm sign}(\mathbf{\Phi}\mathbf{x})$ under some complex-valued sensing matrix $\mathbf{\Phi}$. Exact reconstruction of the signal's direction is possible: we can reformulate it as a linear compressed sensing problem and use basis pursuit (i.e., constrained norm minimization). For $\mathbf{\Phi}$ with i.i.d. complex-valued Gaussian entries, this paper shows that the phase transition is approximately located at the statistical dimension of the descent cone of a signal-dependent norm. Leveraging this insight, we derive asymptotically precise formulas for the phase transition locations in phase-only sensing of both sparse signals and low-rank matrices. Our results prove that the minimum number of measurements required for exact recovery is smaller for phase-only measurements than for traditional linear compressed sensing. For instance, in recovering a 1-sparse signal with sufficiently large dimension, phase-only compressed sensing requires approximately 68% of the measurements needed for linear compressed sensing. This result disproves earlier conjecture suggesting that the two phase transitions coincide. Our proof hinges on the Gaussian min-max theorem and the key observation that, up to a signal-dependent orthogonal transformation, the sensing matrix in the reformulated problem behaves as a nearly Gaussian matrix.
2501.11906
Multi-source Multi-level Multi-token Ethereum Dataset and Benchmark Platform
cs.CE
This paper introduces 3MEthTaskforce (https://3meth.github.io), a multi-source, multi-level, and multi-token Ethereum dataset addressing the limitations of single-source datasets. Integrating over 300 million transaction records, 3,880 token profiles, global market indicators, and Reddit sentiment data from 2014-2024, it enables comprehensive studies on user behavior, market sentiment, and token performance. 3MEthTaskforce defines benchmarks for user behavior prediction and token price prediction tasks, using 6 dynamic graph networks and 19 time-series models to evaluate performance. Its multimodal design supports risk analysis and market fluctuation modeling, providing a valuable resource for advancing blockchain analytics and decentralized finance research.
2501.11909
Bridging the Communication Gap: Evaluating AI Labeling Practices for Trustworthy AI Development
cs.AI
As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes integral to economy and society, communication gaps between developers, users, and stakeholders hinder trust and informed decision-making. High-level AI labels, inspired by frameworks like EU energy labels, have been proposed to make the properties of AI models more transparent. Without requiring deep technical expertise, they can inform on the trade-off between predictive performance and resource efficiency. However, the practical benefits and limitations of AI labeling remain underexplored. This study evaluates AI labeling through qualitative interviews along four key research questions. Based on thematic analysis and inductive coding, we found a broad range of practitioners to be interested in AI labeling (RQ1). They see benefits for alleviating communication gaps and aiding non-expert decision-makers, however limitations, misunderstandings, and suggestions for improvement were also discussed (RQ2). Compared to other reporting formats, interviewees positively evaluated the reduced complexity of labels, increasing overall comprehensibility (RQ3). Trust was influenced most by usability and the credibility of the responsible labeling authority, with mixed preferences for self-certification versus third-party certification (RQ4). Our Insights highlight that AI labels pose a trade-off between simplicity and complexity, which could be resolved by developing customizable and interactive labeling frameworks to address diverse user needs. Transparent labeling of resource efficiency also nudged interviewee priorities towards paying more attention to sustainability aspects during AI development. This study validates AI labels as a valuable tool for enhancing trust and communication in AI, offering actionable guidelines for their refinement and standardization.
2501.11911
Integrate Temporal Graph Learning into LLM-based Temporal Knowledge Graph Model
cs.IR
Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting (TKGF) aims to predict future events based on the observed events in history. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable capabilities, generating significant research interest in their application for reasoning over temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs). Existing LLM-based methods have integrated retrieved historical facts or static graph representations into LLMs. Despite the notable performance of LLM-based methods, they are limited by the insufficient modeling of temporal patterns and ineffective cross-modal alignment between graph and language, hindering the ability of LLMs to fully grasp the temporal and structural information in TKGs. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel framework TGL-LLM to integrate temporal graph learning into LLM-based temporal knowledge graph model. Specifically, we introduce temporal graph learning to capture the temporal and relational patterns and obtain the historical graph embedding. Furthermore, we design a hybrid graph tokenization to sufficiently model the temporal patterns within LLMs. To achieve better alignment between graph and language, we employ a two-stage training paradigm to finetune LLMs on high-quality and diverse data, thereby resulting in better performance. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets show that our approach outperforms a range of state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.
2501.11914
LuxVeri at GenAI Detection Task 1: Inverse Perplexity Weighted Ensemble for Robust Detection of AI-Generated Text across English and Multilingual Contexts
cs.CL cs.AI
This paper presents a system developed for Task 1 of the COLING 2025 Workshop on Detecting AI-Generated Content, focusing on the binary classification of machine-generated versus human-written text. Our approach utilizes an ensemble of models, with weights assigned according to each model's inverse perplexity, to enhance classification accuracy. For the English text detection task, we combined RoBERTa-base, RoBERTa-base with the OpenAI detector, and BERT-base-cased, achieving a Macro F1-score of 0.7458, which ranked us 12th out of 35 teams. We ensembled RemBERT, XLM-RoBERTa-base, and BERT-base-multilingual-case for the multilingual text detection task, employing the same inverse perplexity weighting technique. This resulted in a Macro F1-score of 0.7513, positioning us 4th out of 25 teams. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of inverse perplexity weighting in improving the robustness of machine-generated text detection across both monolingual and multilingual settings, highlighting the potential of ensemble methods for this challenging task.
2501.11915
Stabilizing Optimal Control for Nonlinear Stochastic Systems: A Parametric Gradient-Based Approach
math.OC cs.SY eess.SY
This study proposes a method for designing stabilizing suboptimal controllers for nonlinear stochastic systems. These systems include time-invariant stochastic parameters that represent uncertainty of dynamics, posing two key difficulties in optimal control. Firstly, the time-invariant stochastic nature violates the principle of optimality and Hamilton-Jacobi equations, which are fundamental tools for solving optimal control problems. Secondly, nonlinear systems must be robustly stabilized against these stochastic parameters. To overcome these difficulties simultaneously, this study presents a parametric-gradient-based method with a penalty function. A controller and cost function are parameterized using basis functions, and a gradient method is employed to optimize the controller by minimizing the parameterized cost function. Crucial challenges in this approach are parameterizing the cost function appropriately and deriving the gradient of the cost. This study provides explicit formulations of an optimally parameterized cost and its gradient. Furthermore, a suitable penalty function is proposed to ensure robust stability, even when using the gradient method. Consequently, the gradient method produces a suboptimal feedback controller that guarantees the robust stability. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through numerical simulations, highlighting its performance in comparison with other baseline methods.
2501.11916
Generating with Fairness: A Modality-Diffused Counterfactual Framework for Incomplete Multimodal Recommendations
cs.IR
Incomplete scenario is a prevalent, practical, yet challenging setting in Multimodal Recommendations (MMRec), where some item modalities are missing due to various factors. Recently, a few efforts have sought to improve the recommendation accuracy by exploring generic structures from incomplete data. However, two significant gaps persist: 1) the difficulty in accurately generating missing data due to the limited ability to capture modality distributions; and 2) the critical but overlooked visibility bias, where items with missing modalities are more likely to be disregarded due to the prioritization of items' multimodal data over user preference alignment. This bias raises serious concerns about the fair treatment of items. To bridge these two gaps, we propose a novel Modality-Diffused Counterfactual (MoDiCF) framework for incomplete multimodal recommendations. MoDiCF features two key modules: a novel modality-diffused data completion module and a new counterfactual multimodal recommendation module. The former, equipped with a particularly designed multimodal generative framework, accurately generates and iteratively refines missing data from learned modality-specific distribution spaces. The latter, grounded in the causal perspective, effectively mitigates the negative causal effects of visibility bias and thus assures fairness in recommendations. Both modules work collaboratively to address the two aforementioned significant gaps for generating more accurate and fair results. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of MoDiCF in terms of both recommendation accuracy and fairness. The code and processed datasets are released at https://github.com/JinLi-i/MoDiCF.
2501.11918
LuxVeri at GenAI Detection Task 3: Cross-Domain Detection of AI-Generated Text Using Inverse Perplexity-Weighted Ensemble of Fine-Tuned Transformer Models
cs.CL cs.AI
This paper presents our approach for Task 3 of the GenAI content detection workshop at COLING-2025, focusing on Cross-Domain Machine-Generated Text (MGT) Detection. We propose an ensemble of fine-tuned transformer models, enhanced by inverse perplexity weighting, to improve classification accuracy across diverse text domains. For Subtask A (Non-Adversarial MGT Detection), we combined a fine-tuned RoBERTa-base model with an OpenAI detector-integrated RoBERTa-base model, achieving an aggregate TPR score of 0.826, ranking 10th out of 23 detectors. In Subtask B (Adversarial MGT Detection), our fine-tuned RoBERTa-base model achieved a TPR score of 0.801, securing 8th out of 22 detectors. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of inverse perplexity-based weighting for enhancing generalization and performance in both non-adversarial and adversarial MGT detection, highlighting the potential for transformer models in cross-domain AI-generated content detection.
2501.11919
Improving Fine-Tuning with Latent Cluster Correction
cs.LG
The existence of salient semantic clusters in the latent spaces of a neural network during training strongly correlates its final accuracy on classification tasks. This paper proposes a novel fine-tuning method that boosts performance by optimising the formation of these latent clusters, using the Louvain community detection algorithm and a specifically designed clustering loss function. We present preliminary results that demonstrate the viability of this process on classical neural network architectures during fine-tuning on the CIFAR-100 dataset.
2501.11921
Goal-oriented Transmission Scheduling: Structure-guided DRL with a Unified Dual On-policy and Off-policy Approach
cs.IT cs.AI cs.LG cs.SY eess.SP eess.SY math.IT
Goal-oriented communications prioritize application-driven objectives over data accuracy, enabling intelligent next-generation wireless systems. Efficient scheduling in multi-device, multi-channel systems poses significant challenges due to high-dimensional state and action spaces. We address these challenges by deriving key structural properties of the optimal solution to the goal-oriented scheduling problem, incorporating Age of Information (AoI) and channel states. Specifically, we establish the monotonicity of the optimal state value function (a measure of long-term system performance) w.r.t. channel states and prove its asymptotic convexity w.r.t. AoI states. Additionally, we derive the monotonicity of the optimal policy w.r.t. channel states, advancing the theoretical framework for optimal scheduling. Leveraging these insights, we propose the structure-guided unified dual on-off policy DRL (SUDO-DRL), a hybrid algorithm that combines the stability of on-policy training with the sample efficiency of off-policy methods. Through a novel structural property evaluation framework, SUDO-DRL enables effective and scalable training, addressing the complexities of large-scale systems. Numerical results show SUDO-DRL improves system performance by up to 45% and reduces convergence time by 40% compared to state-of-the-art methods. It also effectively handles scheduling in much larger systems, where off-policy DRL fails and on-policy benchmarks exhibit significant performance loss, demonstrating its scalability and efficacy in goal-oriented communications.
2501.11923
Progressive Cross Attention Network for Flood Segmentation using Multispectral Satellite Imagery
cs.CV cs.LG
In recent years, the integration of deep learning techniques with remote sensing technology has revolutionized the way natural hazards, such as floods, are monitored and managed. However, existing methods for flood segmentation using remote sensing data often overlook the utility of correlative features among multispectral satellite information. In this study, we introduce a progressive cross attention network (ProCANet), a deep learning model that progressively applies both self- and cross-attention mechanisms to multispectral features, generating optimal feature combinations for flood segmentation. The proposed model was compared with state-of-the-art approaches using Sen1Floods11 dataset and our bespoke flood data generated for the Citarum River basin, Indonesia. Our model demonstrated superior performance with the highest Intersection over Union (IoU) score of 0.815. Our results in this study, coupled with the ablation assessment comparing scenarios with and without attention across various modalities, opens a promising path for enhancing the accuracy of flood analysis using remote sensing technology.