id
stringlengths
9
16
title
stringlengths
4
278
categories
stringlengths
5
104
abstract
stringlengths
6
4.09k
2501.12400
Interpolation pour l'augmentation de donnees : Application \`a la gestion des adventices de la canne a sucre a la Reunion
q-bio.QM cs.LG stat.AP stat.ME stat.ML
Data augmentation is a crucial step in the development of robust supervised learning models, especially when dealing with limited datasets. This study explores interpolation techniques for the augmentation of geo-referenced data, with the aim of predicting the presence of Commelina benghalensis L. in sugarcane plots in La R\'eunion. Given the spatial nature of the data and the high cost of data collection, we evaluated two interpolation approaches: Gaussian processes (GPs) with different kernels and kriging with various variograms. The objectives of this work are threefold: (i) to identify which interpolation methods offer the best predictive performance for various regression algorithms, (ii) to analyze the evolution of performance as a function of the number of observations added, and (iii) to assess the spatial consistency of augmented datasets. The results show that GP-based methods, in particular with combined kernels (GP-COMB), significantly improve the performance of regression algorithms while requiring less additional data. Although kriging shows slightly lower performance, it is distinguished by a more homogeneous spatial coverage, a potential advantage in certain contexts.
2501.12405
Scopes of Alignment
cs.CY cs.AI cs.CL
Much of the research focus on AI alignment seeks to align large language models and other foundation models to the context-less and generic values of helpfulness, harmlessness, and honesty. Frontier model providers also strive to align their models with these values. In this paper, we motivate why we need to move beyond such a limited conception and propose three dimensions for doing so. The first scope of alignment is competence: knowledge, skills, or behaviors the model must possess to be useful for its intended purpose. The second scope of alignment is transience: either semantic or episodic depending on the context of use. The third scope of alignment is audience: either mass, public, small-group, or dyadic. At the end of the paper, we use the proposed framework to position some technologies and workflows that go beyond prevailing notions of alignment.
2501.12407
The Streaming Batch Model for Efficient and Fault-Tolerant Heterogeneous Execution
cs.DC cs.LG
While ML model training and inference are both GPU-intensive, CPU-based data processing is often the bottleneck. Distributed data processing systems based on the batch or stream processing models assume homogeneous resource requirements. They excel at CPU-based computation but either under-utilize heterogeneous resources or impose high overheads on failure and reconfiguration. We introduce the streaming batch model, a hybrid of the two models that enables efficient and fault-tolerant heterogeneous execution. The key idea is to execute one partition at a time to allow lineage-based recovery with dynamic resource allocation. This enables memory-efficient pipelining across heterogeneous resources, similar to stream processing, but also offers the elasticity and fault tolerance properties of batch processing. We present Ray Data, an implementation of the streaming batch model that improves throughput on heterogeneous batch inference pipelines by 3--8$\times$ compared to traditional batch and stream processing systems. When training Stable Diffusion, Ray Data matches the throughput of single-node ML data loaders while additionally leveraging distributed heterogeneous clusters to further improve training throughput by 31%.
2501.12408
Control-ITRA: Controlling the Behavior of a Driving Model
cs.AI cs.LG cs.RO cs.SY eess.SY stat.ML
Simulating realistic driving behavior is crucial for developing and testing autonomous systems in complex traffic environments. Equally important is the ability to control the behavior of simulated agents to tailor scenarios to specific research needs and safety considerations. This paper extends the general-purpose multi-agent driving behavior model ITRA (Scibior et al., 2021), by introducing a method called Control-ITRA to influence agent behavior through waypoint assignment and target speed modulation. By conditioning agents on these two aspects, we provide a mechanism for them to adhere to specific trajectories and indirectly adjust their aggressiveness. We compare different approaches for integrating these conditions during training and demonstrate that our method can generate controllable, infraction-free trajectories while preserving realism in both seen and unseen locations.
2501.12415
Comparative Analysis of Hand-Crafted and Machine-Driven Histopathological Features for Prostate Cancer Classification and Segmentation
eess.IV cs.CV cs.LG q-bio.QM
Histopathological image analysis is a reliable method for prostate cancer identification. In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of two approaches for segmenting glandular structures in prostate images to automate Gleason grading. The first approach utilizes a hand-crafted learning technique, combining Gray Level Co-Occurrence Matrix (GLCM) and Local Binary Pattern (LBP) texture descriptors to highlight spatial dependencies and minimize information loss at the pixel level. For machine driven feature extraction, we employ a U-Net convolutional neural network to perform semantic segmentation of prostate gland stroma tissue. Support vector machine-based learning of hand-crafted features achieves impressive classification accuracies of 99.0% and 95.1% for GLCM and LBP, respectively, while the U-Net-based machine-driven features attain 94% accuracy. Furthermore, a comparative analysis demonstrates superior segmentation quality for histopathological grades 1, 2, 3, and 4 using the U-Net approach, as assessed by Jaccard and Dice metrics. This work underscores the utility of machine-driven features in clinical applications that rely on automated pixel-level segmentation in prostate tissue images.
2501.12417
Egoistic MDS-based Rigid Body Localization
cs.RO eess.SP
We consider a novel anchorless rigid body localization (RBL) suitable for application in autonomous driving (AD), in so far as the algorithm enables a rigid body to egoistically detect the location (relative translation) and orientation (relative rotation) of another body, without knowledge of the shape of the latter, based only on a set of measurements of the distances between sensors of one vehicle to the other. A key point of the proposed method is that the translation vector between the two-bodies is modeled using the double-centering operator from multidimensional scaling (MDS) theory, enabling the method to be used between rigid bodies regardless of their shapes, in contrast to conventional approaches which require both bodies to have the same shape. Simulation results illustrate the good performance of the proposed technique in terms of root mean square error (RMSE) of the estimates in different setups.
2501.12418
ImageRef-VL: Enabling Contextual Image Referencing in Vision-Language Models
cs.CV cs.AI
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding multimodal inputs and have been widely integrated into Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) based conversational systems. While current VLM-powered chatbots can provide textual source references in their responses, they exhibit significant limitations in referencing contextually relevant images during conversations. In this paper, we introduce Contextual Image Reference -- the ability to appropriately reference relevant images from retrieval documents based on conversation context -- and systematically investigate VLMs' capability in this aspect. We conduct the first evaluation for contextual image referencing, comprising a dedicated testing dataset and evaluation metrics. Furthermore, we propose ImageRef-VL, a method that significantly enhances open-source VLMs' image referencing capabilities through instruction fine-tuning on a large-scale, manually curated multimodal conversation dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that ImageRef-VL not only outperforms proprietary models but also achieves an 88% performance improvement over state-of-the-art open-source VLMs in contextual image referencing tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/bytedance/ImageRef-VL.
2501.12419
Ensemble score filter with image inpainting for data assimilation in tracking surface quasi-geostrophic dynamics with partial observations
physics.ao-ph cs.LG physics.data-an physics.flu-dyn stat.ML
Data assimilation plays a pivotal role in understanding and predicting turbulent systems within geoscience and weather forecasting, where data assimilation is used to address three fundamental challenges, i.e., high-dimensionality, nonlinearity, and partial observations. Recent advances in machine learning (ML)-based data assimilation methods have demonstrated encouraging results. In this work, we develop an ensemble score filter (EnSF) that integrates image inpainting to solve the data assimilation problems with partial observations. The EnSF method exploits an exclusively designed training-free diffusion models to solve high-dimensional nonlinear data assimilation problems. Its performance has been successfully demonstrated in the context of having full observations, i.e., all the state variables are directly or indirectly observed. However, because the EnSF does not use a covariance matrix to capture the dependence between the observed and unobserved state variables, it is nontrivial to extend the original EnSF method to the partial observation scenario. In this work, we incorporate various image inpainting techniques into the EnSF to predict the unobserved states during data assimilation. At each filtering step, we first use the diffusion model to estimate the observed states by integrating the likelihood information into the score function. Then, we use image inpainting methods to predict the unobserved state variables. We demonstrate the performance of the EnSF with inpainting by tracking the Surface Quasi-Geostrophic (SQG) model dynamics under a variety of scenarios. The successful proof of concept paves the way to more in-depth investigations on exploiting modern image inpainting techniques to advance data assimilation methodology for practical geoscience and weather forecasting problems.
2501.12420
Consolidating TinyML Lifecycle with Large Language Models: Reality, Illusion, or Opportunity?
cs.SE cs.AI cs.LG
The evolving requirements of Internet of Things (IoT) applications are driving an increasing shift toward bringing intelligence to the edge, enabling real-time insights and decision-making within resource-constrained environments. Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML) has emerged as a key enabler of this evolution, facilitating the deployment of ML models on devices such as microcontrollers and embedded systems. However, the complexity of managing the TinyML lifecycle, including stages such as data processing, model optimization and conversion, and device deployment, presents significant challenges and often requires substantial human intervention. Motivated by these challenges, we began exploring whether Large Language Models (LLMs) could help automate and streamline the TinyML lifecycle. We developed a framework that leverages the natural language processing (NLP) and code generation capabilities of LLMs to reduce development time and lower the barriers to entry for TinyML deployment. Through a case study involving a computer vision classification model, we demonstrate the framework's ability to automate key stages of the TinyML lifecycle. Our findings suggest that LLM-powered automation holds potential for improving the lifecycle development process and adapting to diverse requirements. However, while this approach shows promise, there remain obstacles and limitations, particularly in achieving fully automated solutions. This paper sheds light on both the challenges and opportunities of integrating LLMs into TinyML workflows, providing insights into the path forward for efficient, AI-assisted embedded system development.
2501.12421
Tackling Small Sample Survival Analysis via Transfer Learning: A Study of Colorectal Cancer Prognosis
cs.LG cs.AI q-bio.QM
Survival prognosis is crucial for medical informatics. Practitioners often confront small-sized clinical data, especially cancer patient cases, which can be insufficient to induce useful patterns for survival predictions. This study deals with small sample survival analysis by leveraging transfer learning, a useful machine learning technique that can enhance the target analysis with related knowledge pre-learned from other data. We propose and develop various transfer learning methods designed for common survival models. For parametric models such as DeepSurv, Cox-CC (Cox-based neural networks), and DeepHit (end-to-end deep learning model), we apply standard transfer learning techniques like pretraining and fine-tuning. For non-parametric models such as Random Survival Forest, we propose a new transfer survival forest (TSF) model that transfers tree structures from source tasks and fine-tunes them with target data. We evaluated the transfer learning methods on colorectal cancer (CRC) prognosis. The source data are 27,379 SEER CRC stage I patients, and the target data are 728 CRC stage I patients from the West China Hospital. When enhanced by transfer learning, Cox-CC's $C^{td}$ value was boosted from 0.7868 to 0.8111, DeepHit's from 0.8085 to 0.8135, DeepSurv's from 0.7722 to 0.8043, and RSF's from 0.7940 to 0.8297 (the highest performance). All models trained with data as small as 50 demonstrated even more significant improvement. Conclusions: Therefore, the current survival models used for cancer prognosis can be enhanced and improved by properly designed transfer learning techniques. The source code used in this study is available at https://github.com/YonghaoZhao722/TSF.
2501.12422
CroMe: Multimodal Fake News Detection using Cross-Modal Tri-Transformer and Metric Learning
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CV
Multimodal Fake News Detection has received increasing attention recently. Existing methods rely on independently encoded unimodal data and overlook the advantages of capturing intra-modality relationships and integrating inter-modal similarities using advanced techniques. To address these issues, Cross-Modal Tri-Transformer and Metric Learning for Multimodal Fake News Detection (CroMe) is proposed. CroMe utilizes Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models (BLIP2) as encoders to capture detailed text, image and combined image-text representations. The metric learning module employs a proxy anchor method to capture intra-modality relationships while the feature fusion module uses a Cross-Modal and Tri-Transformer for effective integration. The final fake news detector processes the fused features through a classifier to predict the authenticity of the content. Experiments on datasets show that CroMe excels in multimodal fake news detection.
2501.12423
FREYR: A Framework for Recognizing and Executing Your Requests
cs.SE cs.AI
Large language models excel as conversational agents, but their capabilities can be further extended through tool usage, i.e.: executable code, to enhance response accuracy or address specialized domains. Current approaches to enable tool usage often rely on model-specific prompting or fine-tuning a model for function-calling instructions. Both approaches have notable limitations, including reduced adaptability to unseen tools and high resource requirements. This paper introduces FREYR, a streamlined framework that modularizes the tool usage process into separate steps. Through this decomposition, we show that FREYR achieves superior performance compared to conventional tool usage methods. We evaluate FREYR on a set of real-world test cases specific for video game design and compare it against traditional tool usage as provided by the Ollama API.
2501.12424
Multi-Modality Collaborative Learning for Sentiment Analysis
cs.LG cs.AI cs.IR
Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) identifies individuals' sentiment states in videos by integrating visual, audio, and text modalities. Despite progress in existing methods, the inherent modality heterogeneity limits the effective capture of interactive sentiment features across modalities. In this paper, by introducing a Multi-Modality Collaborative Learning (MMCL) framework, we facilitate cross-modal interactions and capture enhanced and complementary features from modality-common and modality-specific representations, respectively. Specifically, we design a parameter-free decoupling module and separate uni-modality into modality-common and modality-specific components through semantics assessment of cross-modal elements. For modality-specific representations, inspired by the act-reward mechanism in reinforcement learning, we design policy models to adaptively mine complementary sentiment features under the guidance of a joint reward. For modality-common representations, intra-modal attention is employed to highlight crucial components, playing enhanced roles among modalities. Experimental results, including superiority evaluations on four databases, effectiveness verification of each module, and assessment of complementary features, demonstrate that MMCL successfully learns collaborative features across modalities and significantly improves performance. The code can be available at https://github.com/smwanghhh/MMCL.
2501.12425
Multi-stage intermediate fusion for multimodal learning to classify non-small cell lung cancer subtypes from CT and PET
eess.IV cs.AI cs.CV q-bio.QM
Accurate classification of histological subtypes of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is essential in the era of precision medicine, yet current invasive techniques are not always feasible and may lead to clinical complications. This study presents a multi-stage intermediate fusion approach to classify NSCLC subtypes from CT and PET images. Our method integrates the two modalities at different stages of feature extraction, using voxel-wise fusion to exploit complementary information across varying abstraction levels while preserving spatial correlations. We compare our method against unimodal approaches using only CT or PET images to demonstrate the benefits of modality fusion, and further benchmark it against early and late fusion techniques to highlight the advantages of intermediate fusion during feature extraction. Additionally, we compare our model with the only existing intermediate fusion method for histological subtype classification using PET/CT images. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms all alternatives across key metrics, with an accuracy and AUC equal to 0.724 and 0.681, respectively. This non-invasive approach has the potential to significantly improve diagnostic accuracy, facilitate more informed treatment decisions, and advance personalized care in lung cancer management.
2501.12427
SafePowerGraph-HIL: Real-Time HIL Validation of Heterogeneous GNNs for Bridging Sim-to-Real Gap in Power Grids
cs.LG cs.AI
As machine learning (ML) techniques gain prominence in power system research, validating these methods' effectiveness under real-world conditions requires real-time hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulations. HIL simulation platforms enable the integration of computational models with physical devices, allowing rigorous testing across diverse scenarios critical to system resilience and reliability. In this study, we develop a SafePowerGraph-HIL framework that utilizes HIL simulations on the IEEE 9-bus system, modeled in Hypersim, to generate high-fidelity data, which is then transmitted in real-time via SCADA to an AWS cloud database before being input into a Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network (HGNN) model designed for power system state estimation and dynamic analysis. By leveraging Hypersim's capabilities, we simulate complex grid interactions, providing a robust dataset that captures critical parameters for HGNN training. The trained HGNN is subsequently validated using newly generated data under varied system conditions, demonstrating accuracy and robustness in predicting power system states. The results underscore the potential of integrating HIL with advanced neural network architectures to enhance the real-time operational capabilities of power systems. This approach represents a significant advancement toward the development of intelligent, adaptive control strategies that support the robustness and resilience of evolving power grids.
2501.12428
SplitQuant: Layer Splitting for Low-Bit Neural Network Quantization
cs.LG cs.AI
Quantization for deep neural networks (DNNs) is the process of mapping the parameter values of DNNs from original data types to other data types of lower precision to reduce model sizes and make inference faster. Quantization often maps different original values to a single quantized value because the range of the original values is larger than the range of the quantized values. This leads to the degradation of the accuracy of the quantized DNNs. Outliers are a main cause of the degradation of quantization resolution because they enlarge the range of original values. To solve the problem, the percentile method is often used to clip outliers. However, clipping the outliers has another problem of removing the important and strong signals in the DNNs. This paper proposes SplitQuant to keep the outliers and improve the quantization resolution at the same time. SplitQuant narrows down the range of the original values and mitigates the effect of outliers by splitting each quantizable layer into three mathematically equivalent layers and applies different scaling factors. Especially, weights and biases are clustered into lower, middle and upper clusters for optimized split. By preprocessing DNNs with SplitQuant, quantization algorithms can achieve better results. SplitQuant was applied on two BERT-Tiny models and improved the accuracy of INT2 quantization by 3.3%p and 2.1%p, achieving accuracies comparable to those of the original FP32 models.
2501.12429
Fuel Efficiency Analysis of the Public Transportation System Based on the Gaussian Mixture Model Clustering
cs.LG cs.AI
Public transportation is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, highlighting the need to improve bus fuel efficiency. Clustering algorithms assist in analyzing fuel efficiency by grouping data into clusters, but irrelevant features may complicate the analysis and choosing the optimal number of clusters remains a challenging task. Therefore, this paper employs the Gaussian mixture models to cluster the solo fuel-efficiency dataset. Moreover, an integration method that combines the Silhouette index, Calinski-Harabasz index, and Davies-Bouldin index is developed to select the optimal cluster numbers. A dataset with 4006 bus trips in North Jutland, Denmark is utilized as the case study. Trips are first split into three groups, then one group is divided further, resulting in four categories: extreme, normal, low, and extremely low fuel efficiency. A preliminary study using visualization analysis is conducted to investigate how driving behaviors and route conditions affect fuel efficiency. The results indicate that both individual driving habits and route characteristics have a significant influence on fuel efficiency.
2501.12430
SCFCRC: Simultaneously Counteract Feature Camouflage and Relation Camouflage for Fraud Detection
cs.LG cs.AI
In fraud detection, fraudsters often interact with many benign users, camouflaging their features or relations to hide themselves. Most existing work concentrates solely on either feature camouflage or relation camouflage, or decoupling feature learning and relation learning to avoid the two camouflage from affecting each other. However, this inadvertently neglects the valuable information derived from features or relations, which could mutually enhance their adversarial camouflage strategies. In response to this gap, we propose SCFCRC, a Transformer-based fraud detector that Simultaneously Counteract Feature Camouflage and Relation Camouflage. SCFCRC consists of two components: Feature Camouflage Filter and Relation Camouflage Refiner. The feature camouflage filter utilizes pseudo labels generated through label propagation to train the filter and uses contrastive learning that combines instance-wise and prototype-wise to improve the quality of features. The relation camouflage refiner uses Mixture-of-Experts(MoE) network to disassemble the multi-relations graph into multiple substructures and divide and conquer them to mitigate the degradation of detection performance caused by relation camouflage. Furthermore, we introduce a regularization method for MoE to enhance the robustness of the model. Extensive experiments on two fraud detection benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.
2501.12431
Modality Interactive Mixture-of-Experts for Fake News Detection
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CL
The proliferation of fake news on social media platforms disproportionately impacts vulnerable populations, eroding trust, exacerbating inequality, and amplifying harmful narratives. Detecting fake news in multimodal contexts -- where deceptive content combines text and images -- is particularly challenging due to the nuanced interplay between modalities. Existing multimodal fake news detection methods often emphasize cross-modal consistency but ignore the complex interactions between text and visual elements, which may complement, contradict, or independently influence the predicted veracity of a post. To address these challenges, we present Modality Interactive Mixture-of-Experts for Fake News Detection (MIMoE-FND), a novel hierarchical Mixture-of-Experts framework designed to enhance multimodal fake news detection by explicitly modeling modality interactions through an interaction gating mechanism. Our approach models modality interactions by evaluating two key aspects of modality interactions: unimodal prediction agreement and semantic alignment. The hierarchical structure of MIMoE-FND allows for distinct learning pathways tailored to different fusion scenarios, adapting to the unique characteristics of each modality interaction. By tailoring fusion strategies to diverse modality interaction scenarios, MIMoE-FND provides a more robust and nuanced approach to multimodal fake news detection. We evaluate our approach on three real-world benchmarks spanning two languages, demonstrating its superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. By enhancing the accuracy and interpretability of fake news detection, MIMoE-FND offers a promising tool to mitigate the spread of misinformation, with the potential to better safeguard vulnerable communities against its harmful effects.
2501.12432
Divide-Then-Aggregate: An Efficient Tool Learning Method via Parallel Tool Invocation
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CL
Although current Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities, performing complex real-world tasks still requires tool learning. Mainstream methods, such as CoT/ReAct, rely on step-by-step tool invocation to interact with external environments, but they are limited in perceptual scope and lack adequate task-planning capability. To address these limitations, other studies introduce the first Search-based Decision Tree (DFSDT), which still suffers from the high computational cost. In this paper, we introduce a novel parallel tool invocation paradigm, DTA-Llama (Divide-Then-Aggregate Llama). First, we transform traditional tree-based tool search paths into Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) structure, generating a high-quality parallel tool invocation dataset. The DTA-Llama is then trained on the dataset to learn to iteratively divide the current task into several parallel tool invocation sub-tasks and aggregate the invocation results to decide the next actions. Furthermore, we introduce an efficient inference framework inspired by the Process/Threads mechanism when applying the DTA-Llama to practical tasks. Experimental results show that our approach substantially enhances task performance while reducing token consumption and inference time. Llama2-7B, using our method, is comparable to the official parallel function calling method of GPT-3.5. The relevant code, dataset, and model weights are available at https://corn0205.github.io/
2501.12433
Owls are wise and foxes are unfaithful: Uncovering animal stereotypes in vision-language models
cs.CV cs.AI cs.CL
Animal stereotypes are deeply embedded in human culture and language. They often shape our perceptions and expectations of various species. Our study investigates how animal stereotypes manifest in vision-language models during the task of image generation. Through targeted prompts, we explore whether DALL-E perpetuates stereotypical representations of animals, such as "owls as wise," "foxes as unfaithful," etc. Our findings reveal significant stereotyped instances where the model consistently generates images aligned with cultural biases. The current work is the first of its kind to examine animal stereotyping in vision-language models systematically and to highlight a critical yet underexplored dimension of bias in AI-generated visual content.
2501.12434
Enhancing Retrosynthesis with Conformer: A Template-Free Method
cs.LG cs.AI
Retrosynthesis plays a crucial role in the fields of organic synthesis and drug development, where the goal is to identify suitable reactants that can yield a target product molecule. Although existing methods have achieved notable success, they typically overlook the 3D conformational details and internal spatial organization of molecules. This oversight makes it challenging to predict reactants that conform to genuine chemical principles, particularly when dealing with complex molecular structures, such as polycyclic and heteroaromatic compounds. In response to this challenge, we introduce a novel transformer-based, template-free approach that incorporates 3D conformer data and spatial information. Our approach includes an Atom-align Fusion module that integrates 3D positional data at the input stage, ensuring correct alignment between atom tokens and their respective 3D coordinates. Additionally, we propose a Distance-weighted Attention mechanism that refines the self-attention process, constricting the model s focus to relevant atom pairs in 3D space. Extensive experiments on the USPTO-50K dataset demonstrate that our model outperforms previous template-free methods, setting a new benchmark for the field. A case study further highlights our method s ability to predict reasonable and accurate reactants.
2501.12447
Tight relations and equivalences between smooth relative entropies
quant-ph cs.IT math-ph math.IT math.MP
The precise one-shot characterisation of operational tasks in classical and quantum information theory relies on different forms of smooth entropic quantities. A particularly important connection is between the hypothesis testing relative entropy and the smoothed max-relative entropy, which together govern many operational settings. We first strengthen this connection into a type of equivalence: we show that the hypothesis testing relative entropy is equivalent to a variant of the smooth max-relative entropy based on the information spectrum divergence, which can be alternatively understood as a measured smooth max-relative entropy. Furthermore, we improve a fundamental lemma due to Datta and Renner that connects the different variants of the smoothed max-relative entropy, introducing a modified proof technique based on matrix geometric means and a tightened gentle measurement lemma. We use the unveiled connections and tools to strictly improve on previously known one-shot bounds and duality relations between the smooth max-relative entropy and the hypothesis testing relative entropy, sharpening also bounds that connect the max-relative entropy with R\'enyi divergences.
2501.12456
Deploying Privacy Guardrails for LLMs: A Comparative Analysis of Real-World Applications
cs.CR cs.AI cs.LG cs.SE
The adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized AI applications but poses significant challenges in safeguarding user privacy. Ensuring compliance with privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA while addressing nuanced privacy risks requires robust and scalable frameworks. This paper presents a detailed study of OneShield Privacy Guard, a framework designed to mitigate privacy risks in user inputs and LLM outputs across enterprise and open-source settings. We analyze two real-world deployments:(1) a multilingual privacy-preserving system integrated with Data and Model Factory, focusing on enterprise-scale data governance; and (2) PR Insights, an open-source repository emphasizing automated triaging and community-driven refinements. In Deployment 1, OneShield achieved a 0.95 F1 score in detecting sensitive entities like dates, names, and phone numbers across 26 languages, outperforming state-of-the-art tool such as StarPII and Presidio by up to 12\%. Deployment 2, with an average F1 score of 0.86, reduced manual effort by over 300 hours in three months, accurately flagging 8.25\% of 1,256 pull requests for privacy risks with enhanced context sensitivity. These results demonstrate OneShield's adaptability and efficacy in diverse environments, offering actionable insights for context-aware entity recognition, automated compliance, and ethical AI adoption. This work advances privacy-preserving frameworks, supporting user trust and compliance across operational contexts.
2501.12465
Adaptive PII Mitigation Framework for Large Language Models
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CR
Artificial Intelligence (AI) faces growing challenges from evolving data protection laws and enforcement practices worldwide. Regulations like GDPR and CCPA impose strict compliance requirements on Machine Learning (ML) models, especially concerning personal data use. These laws grant individuals rights such as data correction and deletion, complicating the training and deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) that rely on extensive datasets. Public data availability does not guarantee its lawful use for ML, amplifying these challenges. This paper introduces an adaptive system for mitigating risk of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and Sensitive Personal Information (SPI) in LLMs. It dynamically aligns with diverse regulatory frameworks and integrates seamlessly into Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) systems. The system uses advanced NLP techniques, context-aware analysis, and policy-driven masking to ensure regulatory compliance. Benchmarks highlight the system's effectiveness, with an F1 score of 0.95 for Passport Numbers, outperforming tools like Microsoft Presidio (0.33) and Amazon Comprehend (0.54). In human evaluations, the system achieved an average user trust score of 4.6/5, with participants acknowledging its accuracy and transparency. Observations demonstrate stricter anonymization under GDPR compared to CCPA, which permits pseudonymization and user opt-outs. These results validate the system as a scalable and robust solution for enterprise privacy compliance.
2501.12473
RIS-Aided Monitoring With Cooperative Jamming: Design and Performance Analysis
eess.SY cs.SY
We investigate a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) aided wireless surveillance system. In this system, a monitor not only receives signal from suspicious transmitter via a RIS-enhanced legitimate surveillance (LS) link but also simultaneously takes control of multiple jammers to degrade the quality of received suspicious signal. Under this setup, to enhance monitoring performance requires improvements of both the received signal quality at the monitor and the cooperative jamming (CJ). Considering that the surveillance system is aided by one RIS, whose phase shift optimization involves both channel state information (CSI) of the LS and CJ links, we utilize partial CSI to alleviate the CSI acquisition burden in our design. We propose two RIS-aided monitoring schemes with optimal jammer selection (OJS), and derive their closed-form expressions of surveillance success probability (SSP), respectively. Furthermore, we consider RIS-aided monitoring schemes with random jammer selection as corresponding benchmarks. Thereafter, we analyze special cases where the jammers are using power control to avoid being found, making it appears like passive monitoring. Also, the effect of RIS is highlighted by considering asymptotically large number of RIS elements. Numerical results verify that the proposed OJS strategy further enhances the RIS-aided monitoring performance compared with non-jammer-selection RISLR and RISCR schemes, where the superiority comes at the cost of CSI knowledge and becomes marginal in the region of high jamming power. In addition, the RISLO shows surveillance performance advantage overRISCOwhen the suspicious power is low or when the number of RIS elements is large.
2501.12477
Slot-BERT: Self-supervised Object Discovery in Surgical Video
eess.IV cs.CV
Object-centric slot attention is a powerful framework for unsupervised learning of structured and explainable representations that can support reasoning about objects and actions, including in surgical videos. While conventional object-centric methods for videos leverage recurrent processing to achieve efficiency, they often struggle with maintaining long-range temporal coherence required for long videos in surgical applications. On the other hand, fully parallel processing of entire videos enhances temporal consistency but introduces significant computational overhead, making it impractical for implementation on hardware in medical facilities. We present Slot-BERT, a bidirectional long-range model that learns object-centric representations in a latent space while ensuring robust temporal coherence. Slot-BERT scales object discovery seamlessly to long videos of unconstrained lengths. A novel slot contrastive loss further reduces redundancy and improves the representation disentanglement by enhancing slot orthogonality. We evaluate Slot-BERT on real-world surgical video datasets from abdominal, cholecystectomy, and thoracic procedures. Our method surpasses state-of-the-art object-centric approaches under unsupervised training achieving superior performance across diverse domains. We also demonstrate efficient zero-shot domain adaptation to data from diverse surgical specialties and databases.
2501.12479
Degree-Based Logical Adjacency Checking (DBLAC): A Novel Heuristic for Vertex Coloring
cs.DM cs.AI
Degree Based Logical Adjacency Checking (DBLAC). An efficient coloring of graphs with unique logical AND operations. The logical AND operation shows more effective color assignment and fewer number of induced colors in the case of common edges between vertices. In this work, we provide a detailed theoretical analysis of DBLAC's time and space complexity. It furthermore shows its effectiveness through prolonged experiments on standard benchmark graphs. We compare it with existing algorithms, namely DSATUR and Recursive Largest First (RLF). Second, we show how DBLAC achieves competitive results with respect to both the number of colors used and runtime performance.
2501.12482
TOFFE -- Temporally-binned Object Flow from Events for High-speed and Energy-Efficient Object Detection and Tracking
cs.CV cs.ET cs.LG cs.NE cs.RO
Object detection and tracking is an essential perception task for enabling fully autonomous navigation in robotic systems. Edge robot systems such as small drones need to execute complex maneuvers at high-speeds with limited resources, which places strict constraints on the underlying algorithms and hardware. Traditionally, frame-based cameras are used for vision-based perception due to their rich spatial information and simplified synchronous sensing capabilities. However, obtaining detailed information across frames incurs high energy consumption and may not even be required. In addition, their low temporal resolution renders them ineffective in high-speed motion scenarios. Event-based cameras offer a biologically-inspired solution to this by capturing only changes in intensity levels at exceptionally high temporal resolution and low power consumption, making them ideal for high-speed motion scenarios. However, their asynchronous and sparse outputs are not natively suitable with conventional deep learning methods. In this work, we propose TOFFE, a lightweight hybrid framework for performing event-based object motion estimation (including pose, direction, and speed estimation), referred to as Object Flow. TOFFE integrates bio-inspired Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) and conventional Analog Neural Networks (ANNs), to efficiently process events at high temporal resolutions while being simple to train. Additionally, we present a novel event-based synthetic dataset involving high-speed object motion to train TOFFE. Our experimental results show that TOFFE achieves 5.7x/8.3x reduction in energy consumption and 4.6x/5.8x reduction in latency on edge GPU(Jetson TX2)/hybrid hardware(Loihi-2 and Jetson TX2), compared to previous event-based object detection baselines.
2501.12483
A Smart IoT Framework for Climate-Resilient and Sustainable Maize Farming In Uganda
cs.CE
This study provides a framework that incorporates the Internet of Things (IoT) technology into maize farming activities in Central Uganda as a solution to various challenges including climate change, sub-optimal resource use and low crop yields. Using IoT-based modeling and simulation, the presented solution recommends cost-effective and efficient approaches to irrigation, crop yield improvement enhancement and prevention of drinking water loss while being practical for smallholder farmers. The framework is developed in a manner that is appropriate for low resource use regions by using local strategies that are easily understandable and actionable for the farmers thus solving the issue of technology access and social economic constraints. Research in this area brought to light the promise that the IoT holds for the evolution of agriculture into a more data-informed, climate-smart sector, contributes to the much-needed food in the world, is economically viable, facilitates sustainable rural development and is a huge step for the agriculture modernization of Uganda.
2501.12485
R2D2: Remembering, Reflecting and Dynamic Decision Making for Web Agents
cs.AI
The proliferation of web agents necessitates advanced navigation and interaction strategies within complex web environments. Current models often struggle with efficient navigation and action execution due to limited visibility and understanding of web structures. Our proposed R2D2 framework addresses these challenges by integrating two paradigms: Remember and Reflect. The Remember paradigm utilizes a replay buffer that aids agents in reconstructing the web environment dynamically, thus enabling the formulation of a detailed ``map'' of previously visited pages. This helps in reducing navigational errors and optimizing the decision-making process during web interactions. Conversely, the Reflect paradigm allows agents to learn from past mistakes by providing a mechanism for error analysis and strategy refinement, enhancing overall task performance. We evaluate R2D2 using the WEBARENA benchmark, demonstrating significant improvements over existing methods, including a 50% reduction in navigation errors and a threefold increase in task completion rates. Our findings suggest that a combination of memory-enhanced navigation and reflective learning promisingly advances the capabilities of web agents, potentially benefiting various applications such as automated customer service and personal digital assistants.
2501.12486
The Journey Matters: Average Parameter Count over Pre-training Unifies Sparse and Dense Scaling Laws
cs.LG cs.CL
Pruning eliminates unnecessary parameters in neural networks; it offers a promising solution to the growing computational demands of large language models (LLMs). While many focus on post-training pruning, sparse pre-training--which combines pruning and pre-training into a single phase--provides a simpler alternative. In this work, we present the first systematic exploration of optimal sparse pre-training configurations for LLMs through an examination of 80 unique pruning schedules across different sparsity levels and training durations. We find that initiating pruning at 25% of total training compute and concluding at 75% achieves near-optimal final evaluation loss. These findings provide valuable insights for efficient and effective sparse pre-training of LLMs. Furthermore, we propose a new scaling law that modifies the Chinchilla scaling law to use the average parameter count over pre-training. Through empirical and theoretical validation, we demonstrate that this modified scaling law accurately models evaluation loss for both sparsely and densely pre-trained LLMs, unifying scaling laws across pre-training paradigms. Our findings indicate that while sparse pre-training achieves the same final model quality as dense pre-training for equivalent compute budgets, it provides substantial benefits through reduced model size, enabling significant potential computational savings during inference.
2501.12487
fabSAM: A Farmland Boundary Delineation Method Based on the Segment Anything Model
cs.CV cs.AI eess.IV
Delineating farmland boundaries is essential for agricultural management such as crop monitoring and agricultural census. Traditional methods using remote sensing imagery have been efficient but limited in generalisation. The Segment Anything Model (SAM), known for its impressive zero shot performance, has been adapted for remote sensing tasks through prompt learning and fine tuning. Here, we propose a SAM based farmland boundary delineation framework 'fabSAM' that combines a Deeplabv3+ based Prompter and SAM. Also, a fine tuning strategy was introduced to enable SAMs decoder to improve the use of prompt information. Experimental results on the AI4Boundaries and AI4SmallFarms datasets have shown that fabSAM has a significant improvement in farmland region identification and boundary delineation. Compared to zero shot SAM, fabSAM surpassed it by 23.5% and 15.1% in mIOU on the AI4Boundaries and AI4SmallFarms datasets, respectively. For Deeplabv3+, fabSAM outperformed it by 4.9% and 12.5% in mIOU, respectively. These results highlight the effectiveness of fabSAM, which also means that we can more easily obtain the global farmland region and boundary maps from open source satellite image datasets like Sentinel2.
2501.12488
Bidirectional Brain Image Translation using Transfer Learning from Generic Pre-trained Models
eess.IV cs.CV q-bio.TO
Brain imaging plays a crucial role in the diagnosis and treatment of various neurological disorders, providing valuable insights into the structure and function of the brain. Techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CT) enable non-invasive visualization of the brain, aiding in the understanding of brain anatomy, abnormalities, and functional connectivity. However, cost and radiation dose may limit the acquisition of specific image modalities, so medical image synthesis can be used to generate required medical images without actual addition. In the medical domain, where obtaining labeled medical images is labor-intensive and expensive, addressing data scarcity is a major challenge. Recent studies propose using transfer learning to overcome this issue. This involves adapting pre-trained CycleGAN models, initially trained on non-medical data, to generate realistic medical images. In this work, transfer learning was applied to the task of MR-CT image translation and vice versa using 18 pre-trained non-medical models, and the models were fine-tuned to have the best result. The models' performance was evaluated using four widely used image quality metrics: Peak-signal-to-noise-ratio, Structural Similarity Index, Universal Quality Index, and Visual Information Fidelity. Quantitative evaluation and qualitative perceptual analysis by radiologists demonstrate the potential of transfer learning in medical imaging and the effectiveness of the generic pre-trained model. The results provide compelling evidence of the model's exceptional performance, which can be attributed to the high quality and similarity of the training images to actual human brain images. These results underscore the significance of carefully selecting appropriate and representative training images to optimize performance in brain image analysis tasks.
2501.12489
Large-image Object Detection for Fine-grained Recognition of Punches Patterns in Medieval Panel Painting
cs.CV cs.AI cs.LG
The attribution of the author of an art piece is typically a laborious manual process, usually relying on subjective evaluations of expert figures. However, there are some situations in which quantitative features of the artwork can support these evaluations. The extraction of these features can sometimes be automated, for instance, with the use of Machine Learning (ML) techniques. An example of these features is represented by repeated, mechanically impressed patterns, called punches, present chiefly in 13th and 14th-century panel paintings from Tuscany. Previous research in art history showcased a strong connection between the shapes of punches and specific artists or workshops, suggesting the possibility of using these quantitative cues to support the attribution. In the present work, we first collect a dataset of large-scale images of these panel paintings. Then, using YOLOv10, a recent and popular object detection model, we train a ML pipeline to perform object detection on the punches contained in the images. Due to the large size of the images, the detection procedure is split across multiple frames by adopting a sliding-window approach with overlaps, after which the predictions are combined for the whole image using a custom non-maximal suppression routine. Our results indicate how art historians working in the field can reliably use our method for the identification and extraction of punches.
2501.12491
Optimizing Blockchain Analysis: Tackling Temporality and Scalability with an Incremental Approach with Metropolis-Hastings Random Walks
cs.CE stat.ML
Blockchain technology, with implications in the financial domain, offers data in the form of large-scale transaction networks. Analyzing transaction networks facilitates fraud detection, market analysis, and supports government regulation. Despite many graph representation learning methods for transaction network analysis, we pinpoint two salient limitations that merit more investigation. Existing methods predominantly focus on the snapshots of transaction networks, sidelining the evolving nature of blockchain transaction networks. Existing methodologies may not sufficiently emphasize efficient, incremental learning capabilities, which are essential for addressing the scalability challenges in ever-expanding large-scale transaction networks. To address these challenges, we employed an incremental approach for random walk-based node representation learning in transaction networks. Further, we proposed a Metropolis-Hastings-based random walk mechanism for improved efficiency. The empirical evaluation conducted on blockchain transaction datasets reveals comparable performance in node classification tasks while reducing computational overhead. Potential applications include transaction network monitoring, the efficient classification of blockchain addresses for fraud detection or the identification of specialized address types within the network.
2501.12493
ELEGNT: Expressive and Functional Movement Design for Non-anthropomorphic Robot
cs.RO cs.HC
Nonverbal behaviors such as posture, gestures, and gaze are essential for conveying internal states, both consciously and unconsciously, in human interaction. For robots to interact more naturally with humans, robot movement design should likewise integrate expressive qualities, such as intention, attention, and emotions, alongside traditional functional considerations like task fulfillment and time efficiency. In this paper, we present the design and prototyping of a lamp-like robot that explores the interplay between functional and expressive objectives in movement design. Using a research-through-design methodology, we document the hardware design process, define expressive movement primitives, and outline a set of interaction scenario storyboards. We propose a framework that incorporates both functional and expressive utilities during movement generation, and implement the robot behavior sequences in different function- and social- oriented tasks. Through a user study comparing expression-driven versus function-driven movements across six task scenarios, our findings indicate that expression-driven movements significantly enhance user engagement and perceived robot qualities. This effect is especially pronounced in social-oriented tasks.
2501.12500
Identification of Nonparametric Dynamic Causal Structure and Latent Process in Climate System
cs.LG stat.ME
The study of learning causal structure with latent variables has advanced the understanding of the world by uncovering causal relationships and latent factors, e.g., Causal Representation Learning (CRL). However, in real-world scenarios, such as those in climate systems, causal relationships are often nonparametric, dynamic, and exist among both observed variables and latent variables. These challenges motivate us to consider a general setting in which causal relations are nonparametric and unrestricted in their occurrence, which is unconventional to current methods. To solve this problem, with the aid of 3-measurement in temporal structure, we theoretically show that both latent variables and processes can be identified up to minor indeterminacy under mild assumptions. Moreover, we tackle the general nonlinear Causal Discovery (CD) from observations, e.g., temperature, as a specific task of learning independent representation, through the principle of functional equivalence. Based on these insights, we develop an estimation approach simultaneously recovering both the observed causal structure and latent causal process in a nontrivial manner. Simulation studies validate the theoretical foundations and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology. In the experiments involving climate data, this approach offers a powerful and in-depth understanding of the climate system.
2501.12502
Sequence Spreading-Based Semantic Communication Under High RF Interference
cs.NI cs.LG
In the evolving landscape of wireless communications, semantic communication (SemCom) has recently emerged as a 6G enabler that prioritizes the transmission of meaning and contextual relevance over conventional bit-centric metrics. However, the deployment of SemCom systems in industrial settings presents considerable challenges, such as high radio frequency interference (RFI), that can adversely affect system performance. To address this problem, in this work, we propose a novel approach based on integrating sequence spreading techniques with SemCom to enhance system robustness against such adverse conditions and enable scalable multi-user (MU) SemCom. In addition, we propose a novel signal refining network (SRN) to refine the received signal after despreading and equalization. The proposed network eliminates the need for computationally intensive end-to-end (E2E) training while improving performance metrics, achieving a 25% gain in BLEU score and a 12% increase in semantic similarity compared to E2E training using the same bandwidth.
2501.12508
The Finite Element Neural Network Method: One Dimensional Study
cs.CE cs.AI
The potential of neural networks (NN) in engineering is rooted in their capacity to understand intricate patterns and complex systems, leveraging their universal nonlinear approximation capabilities and high expressivity. Meanwhile, conventional numerical methods, backed by years of meticulous refinement, continue to be the standard for accuracy and dependability. Bridging these paradigms, this research introduces the finite element neural network method (FENNM) within the framework of the Petrov-Galerkin method using convolution operations to approximate the weighted residual of the differential equations. The NN generates the global trial solution, while the test functions belong to the Lagrange test function space. FENNM introduces several key advantages. Notably, the weak-form of the differential equations introduces flux terms that contribute information to the loss function compared to VPINN, hp-VPINN, and cv-PINN. This enables the integration of forcing terms and natural boundary conditions into the loss function similar to conventional finite element method (FEM) solvers, facilitating its optimization, and extending its applicability to more complex problems, which will ease industrial adoption. This study will elaborate on the derivation of FENNM, highlighting its similarities with FEM. Additionally, it will provide insights into optimal utilization strategies and user guidelines to ensure cost-efficiency. Finally, the study illustrates the robustness and accuracy of FENNM by presenting multiple numerical case studies and applying adaptive mesh refinement techniques.
2501.12516
Robustness of Selected Learning Models under Label-Flipping Attack
cs.LG cs.CR
In this paper we compare traditional machine learning and deep learning models trained on a malware dataset when subjected to adversarial attack based on label-flipping. Specifically, we investigate the robustness of Support Vector Machines (SVM), Random Forest, Gaussian Naive Bayes (GNB), Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM), LightGBM, XGBoost, Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), MobileNet, and DenseNet models when facing varying percentages of misleading labels. We empirically assess the the accuracy of each of these models under such an adversarial attack on the training data. This research aims to provide insights into which models are inherently more robust, in the sense of being better able to resist intentional disruptions to the training data. We find wide variation in the robustness of the models tested to adversarial attack, with our MLP model achieving the best combination of initial accuracy and robustness.
2501.12521
An Empirically-grounded tool for Automatic Prompt Linting and Repair: A Case Study on Bias, Vulnerability, and Optimization in Developer Prompts
cs.SE cs.AI
The tidal wave of advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to their swift integration into application-level logic. Many software systems now use prompts to interact with these black-box models, combining natural language with dynamic values interpolated at runtime, to perform tasks ranging from sentiment analysis to question answering. Due to the programmatic and structured natural language aspects of these prompts, we refer to them as Developer Prompts. Unlike traditional software artifacts, Dev Prompts blend natural language instructions with artificial languages such as programming and markup languages, thus requiring specialized tools for analysis, distinct from classical software evaluation methods. In response to this need, we introduce PromptDoctor, a tool explicitly designed to detect and correct issues of Dev Prompts. PromptDoctor identifies and addresses problems related to bias, vulnerability, and sub-optimal performance in Dev Prompts, helping mitigate their possible harms. In our analysis of 2,173 Dev Prompts, selected as a representative sample of 40,573 Dev Prompts, we found that 3.46% contained one or more forms of bias, 10.75% were vulnerable to prompt injection attacks. Additionally, 3,310 were amenable to automated prompt optimization. To address these issues, we applied PromptDoctor to the flawed Dev Prompts we discovered. PromptDoctor de-biased 68.29% of the biased Dev Prompts, hardened 41.81% of the vulnerable Dev Prompts, and improved the performance of 37.1% sub-optimal Dev Prompts. Finally, we developed a PromptDoctor VSCode extension, enabling developers to easily enhance Dev Prompts in their existing development workflows. The data and source code for this work are available at
2501.12522
Topology of Out-of-Distribution Examples in Deep Neural Networks
cs.LG
As deep neural networks (DNNs) become increasingly common, concerns about their robustness do as well. A longstanding problem for deployed DNNs is their behavior in the face of unfamiliar inputs; specifically, these models tend to be overconfident and incorrect when encountering out-of-distribution (OOD) examples. In this work, we present a topological approach to characterizing OOD examples using latent layer embeddings from DNNs. Our goal is to identify topological features, referred to as landmarks, that indicate OOD examples. We conduct extensive experiments on benchmark datasets and a realistic DNN model, revealing a key insight for OOD detection. Well-trained DNNs have been shown to induce a topological simplification on training data for simple models and datasets; we show that this property holds for realistic, large-scale test and training data, but does not hold for OOD examples. More specifically, we find that the average lifetime (or persistence) of OOD examples is statistically longer than that of training or test examples. This indicates that DNNs struggle to induce topological simplification on unfamiliar inputs. Our empirical results provide novel evidence of topological simplification in realistic DNNs and lay the groundwork for topologically-informed OOD detection strategies.
2501.12523
Federated Discrete Denoising Diffusion Model for Molecular Generation with OpenFL
cs.LG cs.CR
Generating unique molecules with biochemically desired properties to serve as viable drug candidates is a difficult task that requires specialized domain expertise. In recent years, diffusion models have shown promising results in accelerating the drug design process through AI-driven molecular generation. However, training these models requires massive amounts of data, which are often isolated in proprietary silos. OpenFL is a federated learning framework that enables privacy-preserving collaborative training across these decentralized data sites. In this work, we present a federated discrete denoising diffusion model that was trained using OpenFL. The federated model achieves comparable performance with a model trained on centralized data when evaluating the uniqueness and validity of the generated molecules. This demonstrates the utility of federated learning in the drug design process. OpenFL is available at: https://github.com/securefederatedai/openfl
2501.12524
Efficient Lung Ultrasound Severity Scoring Using Dedicated Feature Extractor
eess.IV cs.AI cs.CV
With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, ultrasound imaging has emerged as a promising technique for COVID-19 detection, due to its non-invasive nature, affordability, and portability. In response, researchers have focused on developing AI-based scoring systems to provide real-time diagnostic support. However, the limited size and lack of proper annotation in publicly available ultrasound datasets pose significant challenges for training a robust AI model. This paper proposes MeDiVLAD, a novel pipeline to address the above issue for multi-level lung-ultrasound (LUS) severity scoring. In particular, we leverage self-knowledge distillation to pretrain a vision transformer (ViT) without label and aggregate frame-level features via dual-level VLAD aggregation. We show that with minimal finetuning, MeDiVLAD outperforms conventional fully-supervised methods in both frame- and video-level scoring, while offering classification reasoning with exceptional quality. This superior performance enables key applications such as the automatic identification of critical lung pathology areas and provides a robust solution for broader medical video classification tasks.
2501.12528
Improved Coded Caching Scheme for Multi-User Information Retrieval System
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we study the coded caching scheme for the $(L, K, M, N)$ multi-user information retrieval (MIR) system, which consists of a content library containing $N$ files, a base station (BS) with $L$ antennas that cannot access the library, and $K$ single-antenna users, each of which can cache at most $M$ files from the library. The users communicate with the others assisted by the BS to decode their required files. In this paper, we focus on designing a coded caching scheme with low communication latency measured by normalized delivery time (NDT), computational complexity, and subpacketizations. When $\frac{KM}{N}\geq L$ we first simply the precoding matrix in the downlink step to an identity matrix and use the multiple-antenna placement delivery array (MAPDA), which was originally proposed for the multiple-input single-output networks, to generate several new schemes for MIR system. Compared to the existing schemes, both the theoretical and numerical analyses show that our new schemes achieve much lower computational complexity and smaller subpacketizations with the same NDT.
2501.12535
How Does the Spatial Distribution of Pre-training Data Affect Geospatial Foundation Models?
cs.LG cs.CV
Foundation models have made rapid advances in many domains including Earth observation, where Geospatial Foundation Models (GFMs) can help address global challenges such as climate change, agriculture, and disaster response. Previous work on GFMs focused on tailoring model architecture and pre-text tasks, and did not investigate the impact of pre-training data selection on model performance. However, recent works from other domains show that the pre-training data distribution is an important factor influencing the performance of the foundation models. With this motivation, our research explores how the geographic distribution of pre-training data affects the performance of GFMs. We evaluated several pre-training data distributions by sampling different compositions from a global data pool. Our experiments with two GFMs on downstream tasks indicate that balanced and globally representative data compositions often outperform region-specific sampling, highlighting the importance of diversity and global coverage in pre-training data. Our results suggest that the most appropriate data sampling technique may depend on the specific GFM architecture. These findings will support the development of robust GFMs by incorporating quality pre-training data distributions, ultimately improving machine learning solutions for Earth observation.
2501.12536
Interaction Dataset of Autonomous Vehicles with Traffic Lights and Signs
cs.RO cs.AI
This paper presents the development of a comprehensive dataset capturing interactions between Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) and traffic control devices, specifically traffic lights and stop signs. Derived from the Waymo Motion dataset, our work addresses a critical gap in the existing literature by providing real-world trajectory data on how AVs navigate these traffic control devices. We propose a methodology for identifying and extracting relevant interaction trajectory data from the Waymo Motion dataset, incorporating over 37,000 instances with traffic lights and 44,000 with stop signs. Our methodology includes defining rules to identify various interaction types, extracting trajectory data, and applying a wavelet-based denoising method to smooth the acceleration and speed profiles and eliminate anomalous values, thereby enhancing the trajectory quality. Quality assessment metrics indicate that trajectories obtained in this study have anomaly proportions in acceleration and jerk profiles reduced to near-zero levels across all interaction categories. By making this dataset publicly available, we aim to address the current gap in datasets containing AV interaction behaviors with traffic lights and signs. Based on the organized and published dataset, we can gain a more in-depth understanding of AVs' behavior when interacting with traffic lights and signs. This will facilitate research on AV integration into existing transportation infrastructures and networks, supporting the development of more accurate behavioral models and simulation tools.
2501.12537
Enhancing Privacy in the Early Detection of Sexual Predators Through Federated Learning and Differential Privacy
cs.CL cs.CY
The increased screen time and isolation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have led to a significant surge in cases of online grooming, which is the use of strategies by predators to lure children into sexual exploitation. Previous efforts to detect grooming in industry and academia have involved accessing and monitoring private conversations through centrally-trained models or sending private conversations to a global server. In this work, we implement a privacy-preserving pipeline for the early detection of sexual predators. We leverage federated learning and differential privacy in order to create safer online spaces for children while respecting their privacy. We investigate various privacy-preserving implementations and discuss their benefits and shortcomings. Our extensive evaluation using real-world data proves that privacy and utility can coexist with only a slight reduction in utility.
2501.12538
Academic Case Reports Lack Diversity: Assessing the Presence and Diversity of Sociodemographic and Behavioral Factors related to Post COVID-19 Condition
cs.CL cs.AI
Understanding the prevalence, disparities, and symptom variations of Post COVID-19 Condition (PCC) for vulnerable populations is crucial to improving care and addressing intersecting inequities. This study aims to develop a comprehensive framework for integrating social determinants of health (SDOH) into PCC research by leveraging NLP techniques to analyze disparities and variations in SDOH representation within PCC case reports. Following construction of a PCC Case Report Corpus, comprising over 7,000 case reports from the LitCOVID repository, a subset of 709 reports were annotated with 26 core SDOH-related entity types using pre-trained named entity recognition (NER) models, human review, and data augmentation to improve quality, diversity and representation of entity types. An NLP pipeline integrating NER, natural language inference (NLI), trigram and frequency analyses was developed to extract and analyze these entities. Both encoder-only transformer models and RNN-based models were assessed for the NER objective. Fine-tuned encoder-only BERT models outperformed traditional RNN-based models in generalizability to distinct sentence structures and greater class sparsity. Exploratory analysis revealed variability in entity richness, with prevalent entities like condition, age, and access to care, and underrepresentation of sensitive categories like race and housing status. Trigram analysis highlighted frequent co-occurrences among entities, including age, gender, and condition. The NLI objective (entailment and contradiction analysis) showed attributes like "Experienced violence or abuse" and "Has medical insurance" had high entailment rates (82.4%-80.3%), while attributes such as "Is female-identifying," "Is married," and "Has a terminal condition" exhibited high contradiction rates (70.8%-98.5%).
2501.12539
Compositional Instruction Following with Language Models and Reinforcement Learning
cs.LG cs.CL
Combining reinforcement learning with language grounding is challenging as the agent needs to explore the environment while simultaneously learning multiple language-conditioned tasks. To address this, we introduce a novel method: the compositionally-enabled reinforcement learning language agent (CERLLA). Our method reduces the sample complexity of tasks specified with language by leveraging compositional policy representations and a semantic parser trained using reinforcement learning and in-context learning. We evaluate our approach in an environment requiring function approximation and demonstrate compositional generalization to novel tasks. Our method significantly outperforms the previous best non-compositional baseline in terms of sample complexity on 162 tasks designed to test compositional generalization. Our model attains a higher success rate and learns in fewer steps than the non-compositional baseline. It reaches a success rate equal to an oracle policy's upper-bound performance of 92%. With the same number of environment steps, the baseline only reaches a success rate of 80%.
2501.12540
Comparative Approaches to Sentiment Analysis Using Datasets in Major European and Arabic Languages
cs.CL
This study explores transformer-based models such as BERT, mBERT, and XLM-R for multi-lingual sentiment analysis across diverse linguistic structures. Key contributions include the identification of XLM-R superior adaptability in morphologically complex languages, achieving accuracy levels above 88%. The work highlights fine-tuning strategies and emphasizes their significance for improving sentiment classification in underrepresented languages.
2501.12542
Reinforcement Learning Constrained Beam Search for Parameter Optimization of Paper Drying Under Flexible Constraints
cs.LG cs.AI cs.SY eess.SY
Existing approaches to enforcing design constraints in Reinforcement Learning (RL) applications often rely on training-time penalties in the reward function or training/inference-time invalid action masking, but these methods either cannot be modified after training, or are limited in the types of constraints that can be implemented. To address this limitation, we propose Reinforcement Learning Constrained Beam Search (RLCBS) for inference-time refinement in combinatorial optimization problems. This method respects flexible, inference-time constraints that support exclusion of invalid actions and forced inclusion of desired actions, and employs beam search to maximize sequence probability for more sensible constraint incorporation. RLCBS is extensible to RL-based planning and optimization problems that do not require real-time solution, and we apply the method to optimize process parameters for a novel modular testbed for paper drying. An RL agent is trained to minimize energy consumption across varying machine speed levels by generating optimal dryer module and air supply temperature configurations. Our results demonstrate that RLCBS outperforms NSGA-II under complex design constraints on drying module configurations at inference-time, while providing a 2.58-fold or higher speed improvement.
2501.12547
Human-like conceptual representations emerge from language prediction
cs.CL cs.AI
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) provide a new opportunity to address the long-standing question of how concepts are represented and organized in the mind, which is central to unravelling the nature of human cognition. Here, we reframed the classic reverse dictionary task to simulate human concept inference in context and investigated the emergence of human-like conceptual representations within LLMs. We found that LLMs were able to infer concepts from definitional descriptions and construct representation spaces that converge towards a shared, context-independent structure. These representations effectively predicted human behavioural judgments and aligned well with neural activity patterns in the human brain, offering evidence for biological plausibility. These findings demonstrate that human-like conceptual representations and organization can naturally emerge from language prediction, even without real-world grounding. Our work supports the view that LLMs serve as valuable tools for understanding complex human cognition and paves the way for better alignment between artificial and human intelligence.
2501.12548
Galaxy Codes: Advancing Achievability for Deterministic Identification via Gaussian Channels
cs.IT math.IT
Deterministic identification offers an efficient solution for scenarios where decoding entire messages is unnecessary. It is commonly used in alarm systems and control systems. A key advantage of this approach is that the capacity for deterministic identification in Gaussian channels with power constraints grows superexponentially, unlike Shannon's transmission capacity. This allows for a significantly higher number of messages to be transmitted using this event-driven method. So far, only upper and lower bounds for deterministic identification capacity have been established. Our work introduces a novel construction: galaxy codes for deterministic identification. Using these codes, we demonstrate an improvement in the achievability bound of 1/4 to 3/8, representing a previously unknown advance that opens new possibilities for efficient communication.
2501.12553
ViDDAR: Vision Language Model-Based Task-Detrimental Content Detection for Augmented Reality
cs.CV
In Augmented Reality (AR), virtual content enhances user experience by providing additional information. However, improperly positioned or designed virtual content can be detrimental to task performance, as it can impair users' ability to accurately interpret real-world information. In this paper we examine two types of task-detrimental virtual content: obstruction attacks, in which virtual content prevents users from seeing real-world objects, and information manipulation attacks, in which virtual content interferes with users' ability to accurately interpret real-world information. We provide a mathematical framework to characterize these attacks and create a custom open-source dataset for attack evaluation. To address these attacks, we introduce ViDDAR (Vision language model-based Task-Detrimental content Detector for Augmented Reality), a comprehensive full-reference system that leverages Vision Language Models (VLMs) and advanced deep learning techniques to monitor and evaluate virtual content in AR environments, employing a user-edge-cloud architecture to balance performance with low latency. To the best of our knowledge, ViDDAR is the first system to employ VLMs for detecting task-detrimental content in AR settings. Our evaluation results demonstrate that ViDDAR effectively understands complex scenes and detects task-detrimental content, achieving up to 92.15% obstruction detection accuracy with a detection latency of 533 ms, and an 82.46% information manipulation content detection accuracy with a latency of 9.62 s.
2501.12554
Generalization Performance of Hypergraph Neural Networks
cs.LG
Hypergraph neural networks have been promising tools for handling learning tasks involving higher-order data, with notable applications in web graphs, such as modeling multi-way hyperlink structures and complex user interactions. Yet, their generalization abilities in theory are less clear to us. In this paper, we seek to develop margin-based generalization bounds for four representative classes of hypergraph neural networks, including convolutional-based methods (UniGCN), set-based aggregation (AllDeepSets), invariant and equivariant transformations (M-IGN), and tensor-based approaches (T-MPHN). Through the PAC-Bayes framework, our results reveal the manner in which hypergraph structure and spectral norms of the learned weights can affect the generalization bounds, where the key technical challenge lies in developing new perturbation analysis for hypergraph neural networks, which offers a rigorous understanding of how variations in the model's weights and hypergraph structure impact its generalization behavior. Our empirical study examines the relationship between the practical performance and theoretical bounds of the models over synthetic and real-world datasets. One of our primary observations is the strong correlation between the theoretical bounds and empirical loss, with statistically significant consistency in most cases.
2501.12557
Understanding the LLM-ification of CHI: Unpacking the Impact of LLMs at CHI through a Systematic Literature Review
cs.HC cs.AI cs.CL cs.CY
Large language models (LLMs) have been positioned to revolutionize HCI, by reshaping not only the interfaces, design patterns, and sociotechnical systems that we study, but also the research practices we use. To-date, however, there has been little understanding of LLMs' uptake in HCI. We address this gap via a systematic literature review of 153 CHI papers from 2020-24 that engage with LLMs. We taxonomize: (1) domains where LLMs are applied; (2) roles of LLMs in HCI projects; (3) contribution types; and (4) acknowledged limitations and risks. We find LLM work in 10 diverse domains, primarily via empirical and artifact contributions. Authors use LLMs in five distinct roles, including as research tools or simulated users. Still, authors often raise validity and reproducibility concerns, and overwhelmingly study closed models. We outline opportunities to improve HCI research with and on LLMs, and provide guiding questions for researchers to consider the validity and appropriateness of LLM-related work.
2501.12558
Structural and mechanical properties of W-Cu compounds characterized by a neural-network-based potential
cond-mat.mtrl-sci cs.LG
Tungsten-copper (W-Cu) compounds are widely utilized in various industrial fields due to their exceptional mechanical properties. In this study, we have developed a neural-network-based deep potential (DP) model that covers a wide range of temperatures, ranging from 0 to 3,000 K, and pressures, varying from 0 to 10 GPa. This study presents a model trained using density functional theory data for full concentration CuxW100-x compounds. Through this model, we systematically investigate the structural and mechanical properties of W-Cu alloys and have the following findings. First, the bulk modulus (B) and Young's modulus (E) of W-Cu alloys exhibit a linear decline as the Cu content increases, indicating a softening trend in the CuxW100-x compounds as the Cu concentration rises. Second, a higher Cu content results in higher critical strain and lower critical stress for these compounds. A brittle-to-ductile transition in the deformation mode predicted is predicted at around 37.5 at. % Cu content. Third, tensile loading tests in the W-Cu gradient structure reveal that Cu-poor region serves as a barrier, hindering shear band propagation while promoting new shear band formation in the Cu-rich region. The above results from the DP model are anticipated to aid in exploring the physical mechanisms underlying the complex phenomena of W-Cu systems and contribute to the advancement of methodologies for materials simulation.
2501.12564
Energy Landscape Shaping for Robust Control of Atoms in Optical Lattices
quant-ph cs.SY eess.SY
Robust quantum control is crucial for realizing practical quantum technologies. Energy landscape shaping offers an alternative to conventional dynamic control, providing theoretically enhanced robustness and simplifying implementation for certain applications. This work demonstrates the feasibility of robust energy landscape control in a practical implementation with ultracold atoms. We leverage a digital mirror device (DMD) to shape optical potentials, creating complex energy landscapes. To achieve a desired objective, such as efficient quantum state transfer, we formulate a novel hybrid optimization approach that effectively handles both continuous (laser power) and discrete (DMD pixel activation) control parameters. This approach combines constrained quasi-Newton methods with surrogate models for efficient exploration of the vast parameter space. Furthermore, we introduce a framework for analyzing the robustness of the resulting control schemes against experimental uncertainties. By modeling uncertainties as structured perturbations, we systematically assess controller performance and identify robust solutions. We apply these techniques to maximize spin transfer in a chain of trapped atoms, achieving high-fidelity control while maintaining robustness. Our findings provide insights into the experimental viability of controlled spin transfer in cold atom systems. More broadly, the presented optimization and robustness analysis methods apply to a wide range of quantum control problems, offering a toolkit for designing and evaluating robust controllers in complex experimental settings.
2501.12570
O1-Pruner: Length-Harmonizing Fine-Tuning for O1-Like Reasoning Pruning
cs.CL
Recently, long-thought reasoning LLMs, such as OpenAI's O1, adopt extended reasoning processes similar to how humans ponder over complex problems. This reasoning paradigm significantly enhances the model's problem-solving abilities and has achieved promising results. However, long-thought reasoning process leads to a substantial increase in inference time. A pressing challenge is reducing the inference overhead of long-thought LLMs while ensuring accuracy. In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate that long-thought reasoning models struggle to effectively allocate token budgets based on problem difficulty and reasoning redundancies. To address this, we propose Length-Harmonizing Fine-Tuning (O1-Pruner), aiming at minimizing reasoning overhead while maintaining accuracy. This effective fine-tuning method first estimates the LLM's baseline performance through pre-sampling and then uses RL-style fine-tuning to encourage the model to generate shorter reasoning processes under accuracy constraints. This allows the model to achieve efficient reasoning with lower redundancy while maintaining accuracy. Experiments on various mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that O1-Pruner not only significantly reduces inference overhead but also achieves higher accuracy, providing a novel and promising solution to this challenge. Our code is coming soon at https://github.com/StarDewXXX/O1-Pruner
2501.12571
Exploring Unknown Social Networks for Discovering Hidden Nodes
cs.SI cs.CY
In this paper, we address the challenge of discovering hidden nodes in unknown social networks, formulating three types of hidden-node discovery problems, namely, Sybil-node discovery, peripheral-node discovery, and influencer discovery. We tackle these problems by employing a graph exploration framework grounded in machine learning. Leveraging the structure of the subgraph gradually obtained from graph exploration, we construct prediction models to identify target hidden nodes in unknown social graphs. Through empirical investigations of real social graphs, we investigate the efficiency of graph exploration strategies in uncovering hidden nodes. Our results show that our graph exploration strategies discover hidden nodes with an efficiency comparable to that when the graph structure is known. Specifically, the query cost of discovering 10% of the hidden nodes is at most only 1.2 times that when the topology is known, and the query-cost multiplier for discovering 90% of the hidden nodes is at most only 1.4. Furthermore, our results suggest that using node embeddings, which are low-dimensional vector representations of nodes, for hidden-node discovery is a double-edged sword: it is effective in certain scenarios but sometimes degrades the efficiency of node discovery. Guided by this observation, we examine the effectiveness of using a bandit algorithm to combine the prediction models that use node embeddings with those that do not, and our analysis shows that the bandit-based graph exploration strategy achieves efficient node discovery across a wide array of settings.
2501.12573
Leveraging LLMs to Create a Haptic Devices' Recommendation System
cs.MM cs.AI cs.HC cs.SY eess.SY
Haptic technology has seen significant growth, yet a lack of awareness of existing haptic device design knowledge hinders development. This paper addresses these limitations by leveraging advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) to develop a haptic agent, focusing specifically on Grounded Force Feedback (GFF) devices recommendation. Our approach involves automating the creation of a structured haptic device database using information from research papers and product specifications. This database enables the recommendation of relevant GFF devices based on user queries. To ensure precise and contextually relevant recommendations, the system employs a dynamic retrieval method that combines both conditional and semantic searches. Benchmarking against the established UEQ and existing haptic device searching tools, the proposed haptic recommendation agent ranks in the top 10\% across all UEQ categories with mean differences favoring the agent in nearly all subscales, and maintains no significant performance bias across different user groups, showcasing superior usability and user satisfaction.
2501.12582
Ultralow-dimensionality reduction for identifying critical transitions by spatial-temporal PCA
stat.ML cs.LG
Discovering dominant patterns and exploring dynamic behaviors especially critical state transitions and tipping points in high-dimensional time-series data are challenging tasks in study of real-world complex systems, which demand interpretable data representations to facilitate comprehension of both spatial and temporal information within the original data space. Here, we proposed a general and analytical ultralow-dimensionality reduction method for dynamical systems named spatial-temporal principal component analysis (stPCA) to fully represent the dynamics of a high-dimensional time-series by only a single latent variable without distortion, which transforms high-dimensional spatial information into one-dimensional temporal information based on nonlinear delay-embedding theory. The dynamics of this single variable is analytically solved and theoretically preserves the temporal property of original high-dimensional time-series, thereby accurately and reliably identifying the tipping point before an upcoming critical transition. Its applications to real-world datasets such as individual-specific heterogeneous ICU records demonstrated the effectiveness of stPCA, which quantitatively and robustly provides the early-warning signals of the critical/tipping state on each patient.
2501.12583
Chasing price drains liquidity
cs.CE
Assuming that the price in a Uniswap v3 style Automated Market Maker (AMM) follows a Geometric Brownian Motion (GBM), we prove that the strategy that adjusts the position of liquidity to track the current price leads to a deterministic and exponentially fast decay of liquidity. Next, assuming that there is a Centralized Exchange (CEX), in which the price follows a GBM and the AMM price mean reverts to the CEX price, we show numerically that the same strategy still leads to decay. Last, we propose a strategy that increases the liquidity even without compounding fees earned through liquidity provision.
2501.12584
Entropy Polarization-Based Data Compression Without Frozen Set Construction
cs.IT eess.SP math.IT
Classical source polar codes require the construction of frozen sets for given sources. While this scheme offers excellent theoretical performance, it faces challenges in practical data compression systems, including sensitivity to the accuracy and computational complexity of the construction algorithm. In this letter, we explore the feasibility of construction-free polar compression schemes. By optimally selecting output symbols based on the decoder's behavior, the proposed scheme not only enhances flexibility but also achieves significant improvements in compression rates. Several enhancements are introduced to facilitate the practical implementation of the proposed scheme. Numerical results demonstrate the superior performance compared to existing polar compression approaches.
2501.12587
How Collective Intelligence Emerges in a Crowd of People Through Learned Division of Labor: A Case Study
cs.MA
This paper investigates the factors fostering collective intelligence (CI) through a case study of *LinYi's Experiment, where over 2000 human players collectively controll an avatar car. By conducting theoretical analysis and replicating observed behaviors through numerical simulations, we demonstrate how self-organized division of labor (DOL) among individuals fosters the emergence of CI and identify two essential conditions fostering CI by formulating this problem into a stability problem of a Markov Jump Linear System (MJLS). These conditions, independent of external stimulus, emphasize the importance of both elite and common players in fostering CI. Additionally, we propose an index for emergence of CI and a distributed method for estimating joint actions, enabling individuals to learn their optimal social roles without global action information of the whole crowd.
2501.12588
Fundamental Limits of Non-Adaptive Group Testing with Markovian Correlation
cs.IT math.IT
We study a correlated group testing model where items are infected according to a Markov chain, which creates bursty binfection patterns. Focusing on a very sparse infections regime, we propose a non adaptive testing strategy with an efficient decoding scheme that is nearly optimal. Specifically, it achieves asymptotically vanishing error with a number of tests that is within a $1/\ln(2) \approx 1.44$ multiplicative factor of the fundamental entropy bound a result that parallels the independent group testing setting. We show that the number of tests reduces with an increase in the expected burst length of infected items, quantifying the advantage of exploiting correlation in test design.
2501.12592
FedGrAINS: Personalized SubGraph Federated Learning with Adaptive Neighbor Sampling
cs.LG cs.AI cs.DC cs.IR
Graphs are crucial for modeling relational and biological data. As datasets grow larger in real-world scenarios, the risk of exposing sensitive information increases, making privacy-preserving training methods like federated learning (FL) essential to ensure data security and compliance with privacy regulations. Recently proposed personalized subgraph FL methods have become the de-facto standard for training personalized Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in a federated manner while dealing with the missing links across clients' subgraphs due to privacy restrictions. However, personalized subgraph FL faces significant challenges due to the heterogeneity in client subgraphs, such as degree distributions among the nodes, which complicate federated training of graph models. To address these challenges, we propose \textit{FedGrAINS}, a novel data-adaptive and sampling-based regularization method for subgraph FL. FedGrAINS leverages generative flow networks (GFlowNets) to evaluate node importance concerning clients' tasks, dynamically adjusting the message-passing step in clients' GNNs. This adaptation reflects task-optimized sampling aligned with a trajectory balance objective. Experimental results demonstrate that the inclusion of \textit{FedGrAINS} as a regularizer consistently improves the FL performance compared to baselines that do not leverage such regularization.
2501.12594
A 3-Step Optimization Framework with Hybrid Models for a Humanoid Robot's Jump Motion
cs.RO
High dynamic jump motions are challenging tasks for humanoid robots to achieve environment adaptation and obstacle crossing. The trajectory optimization is a practical method to achieve high-dynamic and explosive jumping. This paper proposes a 3-step trajectory optimization framework for generating a jump motion for a humanoid robot. To improve iteration speed and achieve ideal performance, the framework comprises three sub-optimizations. The first optimization incorporates momentum, inertia, and center of pressure (CoP), treating the robot as a static reaction momentum pendulum (SRMP) model to generate corresponding trajectories. The second optimization maps these trajectories to joint space using effective Quadratic Programming (QP) solvers. Finally, the third optimization generates whole-body joint trajectories utilizing trajectories generated by previous parts. With the combined consideration of momentum and inertia, the robot achieves agile forward jump motions. A simulation and experiments (Fig. \ref{Fig First page fig}) of forward jump with a distance of 1.0 m and 0.5 m height are presented in this paper, validating the applicability of the proposed framework.
2501.12595
A Unified Invariant Learning Framework for Graph Classification
cs.LG cs.AI
Invariant learning demonstrates substantial potential for enhancing the generalization of graph neural networks (GNNs) with out-of-distribution (OOD) data. It aims to recognize stable features in graph data for classification, based on the premise that these features causally determine the target label, and their influence is invariant to changes in distribution. Along this line, most studies have attempted to pinpoint these stable features by emphasizing explicit substructures in the graph, such as masked or attentive subgraphs, and primarily enforcing the invariance principle in the semantic space, i.e., graph representations. However, we argue that focusing only on the semantic space may not accurately identify these stable features. To address this, we introduce the Unified Invariant Learning (UIL) framework for graph classification. It provides a unified perspective on invariant graph learning, emphasizing both structural and semantic invariance principles to identify more robust stable features. In the graph space, UIL adheres to the structural invariance principle by reducing the distance between graphons over a set of stable features across different environments. Simultaneously, to confirm semantic invariance, UIL underscores that the acquired graph representations should demonstrate exemplary performance across diverse environments. We present both theoretical and empirical evidence to confirm our method's ability to recognize superior stable features. Moreover, through a series of comprehensive experiments complemented by in-depth analyses, we demonstrate that UIL considerably enhances OOD generalization, surpassing the performance of leading baseline methods. Our codes are available at https://github.com/yongduosui/UIL.
2501.12596
Adapting OpenAI's CLIP Model for Few-Shot Image Inspection in Manufacturing Quality Control: An Expository Case Study with Multiple Application Examples
cs.CV stat.AP stat.OT
This expository paper introduces a simplified approach to image-based quality inspection in manufacturing using OpenAI's CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining) model adapted for few-shot learning. While CLIP has demonstrated impressive capabilities in general computer vision tasks, its direct application to manufacturing inspection presents challenges due to the domain gap between its training data and industrial applications. We evaluate CLIP's effectiveness through five case studies: metallic pan surface inspection, 3D printing extrusion profile analysis, stochastic textured surface evaluation, automotive assembly inspection, and microstructure image classification. Our results show that CLIP can achieve high classification accuracy with relatively small learning sets (50-100 examples per class) for single-component and texture-based applications. However, the performance degrades with complex multi-component scenes. We provide a practical implementation framework that enables quality engineers to quickly assess CLIP's suitability for their specific applications before pursuing more complex solutions. This work establishes CLIP-based few-shot learning as an effective baseline approach that balances implementation simplicity with robust performance, demonstrated in several manufacturing quality control applications.
2501.12597
Multi-Instance Partial-Label Learning with Margin Adjustment
cs.LG
Multi-instance partial-label learning (MIPL) is an emerging learning framework where each training sample is represented as a multi-instance bag associated with a candidate label set. Existing MIPL algorithms often overlook the margins for attention scores and predicted probabilities, leading to suboptimal generalization performance. A critical issue with these algorithms is that the highest prediction probability of the classifier may appear on a non-candidate label. In this paper, we propose an algorithm named MIPLMA, i.e., Multi-Instance Partial-Label learning with Margin Adjustment, which adjusts the margins for attention scores and predicted probabilities. We introduce a margin-aware attention mechanism to dynamically adjust the margins for attention scores and propose a margin distribution loss to constrain the margins between the predicted probabilities on candidate and non-candidate label sets. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of MIPLMA over existing MIPL algorithms, as well as other well-established multi-instance learning algorithms and partial-label learning algorithms.
2501.12598
On Accelerating Deep Neural Network Mutation Analysis by Neuron and Mutant Clustering
cs.SE cs.LG cs.NE
Mutation analysis of deep neural networks (DNNs) is a promising method for effective evaluation of test data quality and model robustness, but it can be computationally expensive, especially for large models. To alleviate this, we present DEEPMAACC, a technique and a tool that speeds up DNN mutation analysis through neuron and mutant clustering. DEEPMAACC implements two methods: (1) neuron clustering to reduce the number of generated mutants and (2) mutant clustering to reduce the number of mutants to be tested by selecting representative mutants for testing. Both use hierarchical agglomerative clustering to group neurons and mutants with similar weights, with the goal of improving efficiency while maintaining mutation score. DEEPMAACC has been evaluated on 8 DNN models across 4 popular classification datasets and two DNN architectures. When compared to exhaustive, or vanilla, mutation analysis, the results provide empirical evidence that neuron clustering approach, on average, accelerates mutation analysis by 69.77%, with an average -26.84% error in mutation score. Meanwhile, mutant clustering approach, on average, accelerates mutation analysis by 35.31%, with an average 1.96% error in mutation score. Our results demonstrate that a trade-off can be made between mutation testing speed and mutation score error.
2501.12599
Kimi k1.5: Scaling Reinforcement Learning with LLMs
cs.AI cs.LG
Language model pretraining with next token prediction has proved effective for scaling compute but is limited to the amount of available training data. Scaling reinforcement learning (RL) unlocks a new axis for the continued improvement of artificial intelligence, with the promise that large language models (LLMs) can scale their training data by learning to explore with rewards. However, prior published work has not produced competitive results. In light of this, we report on the training practice of Kimi k1.5, our latest multi-modal LLM trained with RL, including its RL training techniques, multi-modal data recipes, and infrastructure optimization. Long context scaling and improved policy optimization methods are key ingredients of our approach, which establishes a simplistic, effective RL framework without relying on more complex techniques such as Monte Carlo tree search, value functions, and process reward models. Notably, our system achieves state-of-the-art reasoning performance across multiple benchmarks and modalities -- e.g., 77.5 on AIME, 96.2 on MATH 500, 94-th percentile on Codeforces, 74.9 on MathVista -- matching OpenAI's o1. Moreover, we present effective long2short methods that use long-CoT techniques to improve short-CoT models, yielding state-of-the-art short-CoT reasoning results -- e.g., 60.8 on AIME, 94.6 on MATH500, 47.3 on LiveCodeBench -- outperforming existing short-CoT models such as GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet 3.5 by a large margin (up to +550%).
2501.12602
BLR-MoE: Boosted Language-Routing Mixture of Experts for Domain-Robust Multilingual E2E ASR
cs.CL cs.SD eess.AS
Recently, the Mixture of Expert (MoE) architecture, such as LR-MoE, is often used to alleviate the impact of language confusion on the multilingual ASR (MASR) task. However, it still faces language confusion issues, especially in mismatched domain scenarios. In this paper, we decouple language confusion in LR-MoE into confusion in self-attention and router. To alleviate the language confusion in self-attention, based on LR-MoE, we propose to apply attention-MoE architecture for MASR. In our new architecture, MoE is utilized not only on feed-forward network (FFN) but also on self-attention. In addition, to improve the robustness of the LID-based router on language confusion, we propose expert pruning and router augmentation methods. Combining the above, we get the boosted language-routing MoE (BLR-MoE) architecture. We verify the effectiveness of the proposed BLR-MoE in a 10,000-hour MASR dataset.
2501.12604
Image Motion Blur Removal in the Temporal Dimension with Video Diffusion Models
eess.IV cs.CV cs.LG
Most motion deblurring algorithms rely on spatial-domain convolution models, which struggle with the complex, non-linear blur arising from camera shake and object motion. In contrast, we propose a novel single-image deblurring approach that treats motion blur as a temporal averaging phenomenon. Our core innovation lies in leveraging a pre-trained video diffusion transformer model to capture diverse motion dynamics within a latent space. It sidesteps explicit kernel estimation and effectively accommodates diverse motion patterns. We implement the algorithm within a diffusion-based inverse problem framework. Empirical results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing techniques in deblurring complex motion blur scenarios. This work paves the way for utilizing powerful video diffusion models to address single-image deblurring challenges.
2501.12607
Low-Dimensional Representation-Driven TSK Fuzzy System for Feature Selection
cs.LG
Feature selection can select important features to address dimensional curses. Subspace learning, a widely used dimensionality reduction method, can project the original data into a low-dimensional space. However, the low-dimensional representation is often transformed back into the original space, resulting in information loss. Additionally, gate function-based methods in Takagi-Sugeno-Kang fuzzy system (TSK-FS) are commonly less discrimination. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel feature selection method that integrates subspace learning with TSK-FS. Specifically, a projection matrix is used to fit the intrinsic low-dimensional representation. Subsequently, the low-dimensional representation is fed to TSK-FS to measure its availability. The firing strength is slacked so that TSK-FS is not limited by numerical underflow. Finally, the $\ell _{2,1}$-norm is introduced to select significant features and the connection to related works is discussed. The proposed method is evaluated against six state-of-the-art methods on eighteen datasets, and the results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method.
2501.12610
Exploring Wikipedia Gender Diversity Over Time $\unicode{x2013}$ The Wikipedia Gender Dashboard (WGD)
cs.CY cs.IR
The Wikipedia editors' community has been actively pursuing the intent of achieving gender equality. To that end, it is important to explore the historical evolution of underlying gender disparities in Wikipedia articles. This paper presents the Wikipedia Gender Dashboard (WGD), a tool designed to enable the interaction with gender distribution data, including the average age in every subclass of individuals (i.e. Astronauts, Politicians, etc.) over the years. Wikipedia APIs, DBpedia, and Wikidata endpoints were used to query the data to ensure persistent data collection. The WGD was then created with Microsoft Power BI before being embedded on a public website. The analysis of the data available in the WGD found that female articles only represent around 17% of English Wikipedia, but it has been growing steadily over the last 20 years. Meanwhile, the average age across genders decreased over time. WGD also shows that most subclasses of `Person' are male-dominated. Wikipedia editors can make use of WGD to locate areas with marginalized genders in Wikipedia, and increase their efforts to produce more content providing coverage for those genders to achieve better gender equality in Wikipedia.
2501.12612
T2ISafety: Benchmark for Assessing Fairness, Toxicity, and Privacy in Image Generation
cs.CL cs.CR
Text-to-image (T2I) models have rapidly advanced, enabling the generation of high-quality images from text prompts across various domains. However, these models present notable safety concerns, including the risk of generating harmful, biased, or private content. Current research on assessing T2I safety remains in its early stages. While some efforts have been made to evaluate models on specific safety dimensions, many critical risks remain unexplored. To address this gap, we introduce T2ISafety, a safety benchmark that evaluates T2I models across three key domains: toxicity, fairness, and bias. We build a detailed hierarchy of 12 tasks and 44 categories based on these three domains, and meticulously collect 70K corresponding prompts. Based on this taxonomy and prompt set, we build a large-scale T2I dataset with 68K manually annotated images and train an evaluator capable of detecting critical risks that previous work has failed to identify, including risks that even ultra-large proprietary models like GPTs cannot correctly detect. We evaluate 12 prominent diffusion models on T2ISafety and reveal several concerns including persistent issues with racial fairness, a tendency to generate toxic content, and significant variation in privacy protection across the models, even with defense methods like concept erasing. Data and evaluator are released under https://github.com/adwardlee/t2i_safety.
2501.12615
GATE: Adaptive Learning with Working Memory by Information Gating in Multi-lamellar Hippocampal Formation
q-bio.NC cs.AI
Hippocampal formation (HF) can rapidly adapt to varied environments and build flexible working memory (WM). To mirror the HF's mechanism on generalization and WM, we propose a model named Generalization and Associative Temporary Encoding (GATE), which deploys a 3-D multi-lamellar dorsoventral (DV) architecture, and learns to build up internally representation from externally driven information layer-wisely. In each lamella, regions of HF: EC3-CA1-EC5-EC3 forms a re-entrant loop that discriminately maintains information by EC3 persistent activity, and selectively readouts the retained information by CA1 neurons. CA3 and EC5 further provides gating function that controls these processes. After learning complex WM tasks, GATE forms neuron representations that align with experimental records, including splitter, lap, evidence, trace, delay-active cells, as well as conventional place cells. Crucially, DV architecture in GATE also captures information, range from detailed to abstract, which enables a rapid generalization ability when cue, environment or task changes, with learned representations inherited. GATE promises a viable framework for understanding the HF's flexible memory mechanisms and for progressively developing brain-inspired intelligent systems.
2501.12617
Deep Learning-Based Identification of Inconsistent Method Names: How Far Are We?
cs.SE cs.AI
Concise and meaningful method names are crucial for program comprehension and maintenance. However, method names may become inconsistent with their corresponding implementations, causing confusion and errors. Several deep learning (DL)-based approaches have been proposed to identify such inconsistencies, with initial evaluations showing promising results. However, these evaluations typically use a balanced dataset, where the number of inconsistent and consistent names are equal. This setup, along with flawed dataset construction, leads to false positives, making reported performance less reliable in real-world scenarios, where most method names are consistent. In this paper, we present an empirical study that evaluates state-of-the-art DL-based methods for identifying inconsistent method names. We create a new benchmark by combining automatic identification from commit histories and manual developer inspections, reducing false positives. We evaluate five representative DL approaches (one retrieval-based and four generation-based) on this benchmark. Our results show that performance drops substantially when moving from the balanced dataset to the new benchmark. We further conduct quantitative and qualitative analyses to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the approaches. Retrieval-based methods perform well on simple methods and those with popular name sub-tokens but fail due to inefficient representation techniques. Generation-based methods struggle with inaccurate similarity calculations and immature name generation. Based on these findings, we propose improvements using contrastive learning and large language models (LLMs). Our study suggests that significant improvements are needed before these DL approaches can be effectively applied to real-world software systems.
2501.12619
Quantification of Large Language Model Distillation
cs.CL
Model distillation is a fundamental technique in building large language models (LLMs), transferring knowledge from a teacher model to a student model. However, distillation can lead to model homogenization, reducing diversity among models and impairing their ability to robustly handle complex or novel tasks. These limitations underscore the need to systematically quantify the distillation process and its impact. In this work, we propose a framework to evaluate and quantify model distillation. Our method addresses two key aspects: (1) Identifying identity cognition contradictions to assess discrepancies in how models perceive and represent identity-related information, and (2) Analyzing multi-granularity response similarities across models to measure the extent of homogenization. Experimental results demonstrate two key insights: (1) Well-known closed-source and open-source LLMs usually exhibit high distillation degrees, except for Claude, Doubao, and Gemini. (2) Base LLMs show higher distillation degrees compared to aligned LLMs. By offering a systematic approach to improve the transparency of LLM data distillation, we call for LLMs with more independent development and more transparent technical reports to improve LLMs' robustness and safety. The code and data are available under https://github.com/Aegis1863/LLMs-Distillation-Quantification.
2501.12620
Adaptive Data Exploitation in Deep Reinforcement Learning
cs.LG cs.AI
We introduce ADEPT: Adaptive Data ExPloiTation, a simple yet powerful framework to enhance the **data efficiency** and **generalization** in deep reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, ADEPT adaptively manages the use of sampled data across different learning stages via multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms, optimizing data utilization while mitigating overfitting. Moreover, ADEPT can significantly reduce the computational overhead and accelerate a wide range of RL algorithms. We test ADEPT on benchmarks including Procgen, MiniGrid, and PyBullet. Extensive simulation demonstrates that ADEPT can achieve superior performance with remarkable computational efficiency, offering a practical solution to data-efficient RL. Our code is available at https://github.com/yuanmingqi/ADEPT.
2501.12622
Towards Robust Multi-tab Website Fingerprinting
cs.CR cs.AI
Website fingerprinting enables an eavesdropper to determine which websites a user is visiting over an encrypted connection. State-of-the-art website fingerprinting (WF) attacks have demonstrated effectiveness even against Tor-protected network traffic. However, existing WF attacks have critical limitations on accurately identifying websites in multi-tab browsing sessions, where the holistic pattern of individual websites is no longer preserved, and the number of tabs opened by a client is unknown a priori. In this paper, we propose ARES, a novel WF framework natively designed for multi-tab WF attacks. ARES formulates the multi-tab attack as a multi-label classification problem and solves it using the novel Transformer-based models. Specifically, ARES extracts local patterns based on multi-level traffic aggregation features and utilizes the improved self-attention mechanism to analyze the correlations between these local patterns, effectively identifying websites. We implement a prototype of ARES and extensively evaluate its effectiveness using our large-scale datasets collected over multiple months. The experimental results illustrate that ARES achieves optimal performance in several realistic scenarios. Further, ARES remains robust even against various WF defenses.
2501.12624
Toward Model-centric Heterogeneous Federated Graph Learning: A Knowledge-driven Approach
cs.LG cs.DC
Federated graph learning (FGL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for collaborative machine learning, enabling multiple parties to jointly train models while preserving the privacy of raw graph data. However, existing FGL methods often overlook the model-centric heterogeneous FGL (MHtFGL) problem, which arises in real-world applications, such as the aggregation of models from different companies with varying scales and architectures. MHtFGL presents an additional challenge: the diversity of client model architectures hampers common learning and integration of graph representations. To address this issue, we propose the Federated Graph Knowledge Collaboration (FedGKC) framework, comprising two key components: Client-side Self-Mutual Knowledge Distillation, which fosters effective knowledge sharing among clients through copilot models; and Server-side Knowledge-Aware Model Aggregation, which enhances model integration by accounting for the knowledge acquired by clients. Experiments on eight benchmark datasets demonstrate that FedGKC achieves an average accuracy improvement of 3.74% over baseline models in MHtFGL scenarios, while also maintaining excellent performance in homogeneous settings.
2501.12626
The Intrinsic State Variable in Fundamental Lemma and Its Use in Stability Design for Data-based Control
eess.SY cs.SY math.DS
In the data-based setting, analysis and control design of dynamical systems using measured data are typically based on overlapping trajectory segments of the input and output variables. This could lead to complex designs because the system internal dynamics, which is typically reflected by the system state variable, is unavailable. In this paper, we will show that the coefficient vector in a modified version of Willems' fundamental lemma is an intrinsic and observable state variable for the system behavior. This argument evolves from the behavioral framework without the requirement of prior knowledge on the causality among system variables or any predefined representation structure (e.g., a state space representation). Such a view allows for the construction of a state map based on the fundamental lemma, bridging the trajectory space and the state space. The state property of the coefficient vector allows for a simple stability design approach using memoryless quadratic functions of it as Lyapunov functions, from which the control action for each step can be explicitly constructed. Using the coefficient vector as a state variable could see wide applications in the analysis and control design of dynamical systems including directions beyond the discussions in this paper.
2501.12627
Deep Reinforcement Learning with Hybrid Intrinsic Reward Model
cs.LG
Intrinsic reward shaping has emerged as a prevalent approach to solving hard-exploration and sparse-rewards environments in reinforcement learning (RL). While single intrinsic rewards, such as curiosity-driven or novelty-based methods, have shown effectiveness, they often limit the diversity and efficiency of exploration. Moreover, the potential and principle of combining multiple intrinsic rewards remains insufficiently explored. To address this gap, we introduce HIRE (Hybrid Intrinsic REward), a flexible and elegant framework for creating hybrid intrinsic rewards through deliberate fusion strategies. With HIRE, we conduct a systematic analysis of the application of hybrid intrinsic rewards in both general and unsupervised RL across multiple benchmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HIRE can significantly enhance exploration efficiency and diversity, as well as skill acquisition in complex and dynamic settings.
2501.12632
TeD-Loc: Text Distillation for Weakly Supervised Object Localization
cs.CV cs.LG
Weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) using classification models trained with only image-class labels remains an important challenge in computer vision. Given their reliance on classification objectives, traditional WSOL methods like class activation mapping focus on the most discriminative object parts, often missing the full spatial extent. In contrast, recent WSOL methods based on vision-language models like CLIP require ground truth classes or external classifiers to produce a localization map, limiting their deployment in downstream tasks. Moreover, methods like GenPromp attempt to address these issues but introduce considerable complexity due to their reliance on conditional denoising processes and intricate prompt learning. This paper introduces Text Distillation for Localization (TeD-Loc), an approach that directly distills knowledge from CLIP text embeddings into the model backbone and produces patch-level localization. Multiple instance learning of these image patches allows for accurate localization and classification using one model without requiring external classifiers. Such integration of textual and visual modalities addresses the longstanding challenge of achieving accurate localization and classification concurrently, as WSOL methods in the literature typically converge at different epochs. Extensive experiments show that leveraging text embeddings and localization cues provides a cost-effective WSOL model. TeD-Loc improves Top-1 LOC accuracy over state-of-the-art models by about 5% on both CUB and ILSVRC datasets, while significantly reducing computational complexity compared to GenPromp.
2501.12633
Inverse Reinforcement Learning with Switching Rewards and History Dependency for Characterizing Animal Behaviors
cs.LG cs.AI
Traditional approaches to studying decision-making in neuroscience focus on simplified behavioral tasks where animals perform repetitive, stereotyped actions to receive explicit rewards. While informative, these methods constrain our understanding of decision-making to short timescale behaviors driven by explicit goals. In natural environments, animals exhibit more complex, long-term behaviors driven by intrinsic motivations that are often unobservable. Recent works in time-varying inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aim to capture shifting motivations in long-term, freely moving behaviors. However, a crucial challenge remains: animals make decisions based on their history, not just their current state. To address this, we introduce SWIRL (SWitching IRL), a novel framework that extends traditional IRL by incorporating time-varying, history-dependent reward functions. SWIRL models long behavioral sequences as transitions between short-term decision-making processes, each governed by a unique reward function. SWIRL incorporates biologically plausible history dependency to capture how past decisions and environmental contexts shape behavior, offering a more accurate description of animal decision-making. We apply SWIRL to simulated and real-world animal behavior datasets and show that it outperforms models lacking history dependency, both quantitatively and qualitatively. This work presents the first IRL model to incorporate history-dependent policies and rewards to advance our understanding of complex, naturalistic decision-making in animals.
2501.12635
Multiple Queries with Multiple Keys: A Precise Prompt Matching Paradigm for Prompt-based Continual Learning
cs.CV
Continual learning requires machine learning models to continuously acquire new knowledge in dynamic environments while avoiding the forgetting of previous knowledge. Prompt-based continual learning methods effectively address the issue of catastrophic forgetting through prompt expansion and selection. However, existing approaches often suffer from low accuracy in prompt selection, which can result in the model receiving biased knowledge and making biased predictions. To address this issue, we propose the Multiple Queries with Multiple Keys (MQMK) prompt matching paradigm for precise prompt selection. The goal of MQMK is to select the prompts whose training data distribution most closely matches that of the test sample. Specifically, Multiple Queries enable precise breadth search by introducing task-specific knowledge, while Multiple Keys perform deep search by representing the feature distribution of training samples at a fine-grained level. Experiments show that MQMK enhances the prompt matching rate by over 30% in challenging scenarios and achieves state-of-the-art performance on three widely adopted continual learning benchmarks. Once this paper is accepted, we will release the code.
2501.12637
DWTNeRF: Boosting Few-shot Neural Radiance Fields via Discrete Wavelet Transform
cs.CV
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) has achieved superior performance in novel view synthesis and 3D scene representation, but its practical applications are hindered by slow convergence and reliance on dense training views. To this end, we present DWTNeRF, a unified framework based on Instant-NGP's fast-training hash encoding. It is coupled with regularization terms designed for few-shot NeRF, which operates on sparse training views. Our DWTNeRF additionally includes a novel Discrete Wavelet loss that allows explicit prioritization of low frequencies directly in the training objective, reducing few-shot NeRF's overfitting on high frequencies in earlier training stages. We also introduce a model-based approach, based on multi-head attention, that is compatible with INGP, which are sensitive to architectural changes. On the 3-shot LLFF benchmark, DWTNeRF outperforms Vanilla INGP by 15.07% in PSNR, 24.45% in SSIM and 36.30% in LPIPS. Our approach encourages a re-thinking of current few-shot approaches for fast-converging implicit representations like INGP or 3DGS.
2501.12640
Dynamics of Toxicity in Political Podcasts
cs.CL cs.AI
Toxicity in digital media poses significant challenges, yet little attention has been given to its dynamics within the rapidly growing medium of podcasts. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing political podcast data to study the emergence and propagation of toxicity, focusing on conversation chains-structured reply patterns within podcast transcripts. Leveraging state-of-the-art transcription models and advanced conversational analysis techniques, we systematically examine toxic discourse in over 30 popular political podcasts in the United States. Our key contributions include: (1) creating a comprehensive dataset of transcribed and diarized political podcasts, identifying thousands of toxic instances using Google's Perspective API, (2) uncovering concerning trends where a majority of episodes contain at least one toxic instance, (3) introducing toxic conversation chains and analyzing their structural and linguistic properties, revealing characteristics such as longer durations, repetitive patterns, figurative language, and emotional cues tied to anger and annoyance, (4) identifying demand-related words like 'want', 'like', and 'know' as precursors to toxicity, and (5) developing predictive models to anticipate toxicity shifts based on annotated change points. Our findings provide critical insights into podcast toxicity and establish a foundation for future research on real-time monitoring and intervention mechanisms to foster healthier discourse in this influential medium.
2501.12644
Current Opinions on Memristor-Accelerated Machine Learning Hardware
cs.ET cs.AR cs.LG eess.SP physics.app-ph
The unprecedented advancement of artificial intelligence has placed immense demands on computing hardware, but traditional silicon-based semiconductor technologies are approaching their physical and economic limit, prompting the exploration of novel computing paradigms. Memristor offers a promising solution, enabling in-memory analog computation and massive parallelism, which leads to low latency and power consumption. This manuscript reviews the current status of memristor-based machine learning accelerators, highlighting the milestones achieved in developing prototype chips, that not only accelerate neural networks inference but also tackle other machine learning tasks. More importantly, it discusses our opinion on current key challenges that remain in this field, such as device variation, the need for efficient peripheral circuitry, and systematic co-design and optimization. We also share our perspective on potential future directions, some of which address existing challenges while others explore untouched territories. By addressing these challenges through interdisciplinary efforts spanning device engineering, circuit design, and systems architecture, memristor-based accelerators could significantly advance the capabilities of AI hardware, particularly for edge applications where power efficiency is paramount.
2501.12651
The potential -- and the pitfalls -- of using pre-trained language models as cognitive science theories
cs.CL cs.AI
Many studies have evaluated the cognitive alignment of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs), i.e., their correspondence to adult performance across a range of cognitive domains. Recently, the focus has expanded to the developmental alignment of these models: identifying phases during training where improvements in model performance track improvements in children's thinking over development. However, there are many challenges to the use of PLMs as cognitive science theories, including different architectures, different training data modalities and scales, and limited model interpretability. In this paper, we distill lessons learned from treating PLMs, not as engineering artifacts but as cognitive science and developmental science models. We review assumptions used by researchers to map measures of PLM performance to measures of human performance. We identify potential pitfalls of this approach to understanding human thinking, and we end by enumerating criteria for using PLMs as credible accounts of cognition and cognitive development.
2501.12654
AnyNav: Visual Neuro-Symbolic Friction Learning for Off-road Navigation
cs.RO
Off-road navigation is essential for a wide range of applications in field robotics such as planetary exploration and disaster response. However, it remains an unresolved challenge due to the unstructured environments and inherent complexity of terrain-vehicle interactions. Traditional physics-based methods struggle to accurately model the nonlinear dynamics of these interactions, while data-driven approaches often suffer from overfitting to specific motion patterns, vehicle sizes, and types, limiting their generalizability. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a vision-based friction estimation framework grounded in neuro-symbolic principles, integrating neural networks for visual perception with symbolic reasoning for physical modeling. This enables significantly improved generalization abilities through explicit physical reasoning incorporating the predicted friction. Additionally, we develop a physics-informed planner that leverages the learned friction coefficient to generate physically feasible and efficient paths, along with corresponding speed profiles. We refer to our approach as AnyNav and evaluate it in both simulation and real-world experiments, demonstrating its utility and robustness across various off-road scenarios and multiple types of four-wheeled vehicles. These results mark an important step toward developing neuro-symbolic spatial intelligence to reason about complex, unstructured environments and enable autonomous off-road navigation in challenging scenarios. Video demonstrations are available at https://sairlab.org/anynav/, where the source code will also be released.
2501.12656
PPO-Based Vehicle Control for Ramp Merging Scheme Assisted by Enhanced C-V2X
cs.NI cs.LG
On-ramp merging presents a critical challenge in autonomous driving, as vehicles from merging lanes need to dynamically adjust their positions and speeds while monitoring traffic on the main road to prevent collisions. To address this challenge, we propose a novel merging control scheme based on reinforcement learning, which integrates lateral control mechanisms. This approach ensures the smooth integration of vehicles from the merging lane onto the main road, optimizing both fuel efficiency and passenger comfort. Furthermore, we recognize the impact of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication on control strategies and introduce an enhanced protocol leveraging Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) Mode 4. This protocol aims to reduce the Age of Information (AoI) and improve communication reliability. In our simulations, we employ two AoI-based metrics to rigorously assess the protocol's effectiveness in autonomous driving scenarios. By combining the NS3 network simulator with Python, we simulate V2V communication and vehicle control simultaneously. The results demonstrate that the enhanced C-V2X Mode 4 outperforms the standard version, while the proposed control scheme ensures safe and reliable vehicle operation during on-ramp merging.
2501.12660
Extracting General-use Transformers for Low-resource Languages via Knowledge Distillation
cs.CL
In this paper, we propose the use of simple knowledge distillation to produce smaller and more efficient single-language transformers from Massively Multilingual Transformers (MMTs) to alleviate tradeoffs associated with the use of such in low-resource settings. Using Tagalog as a case study, we show that these smaller single-language models perform on-par with strong baselines in a variety of benchmark tasks in a much more efficient manner. Furthermore, we investigate additional steps during the distillation process that improves the soft-supervision of the target language, and provide a number of analyses and ablations to show the efficacy of the proposed method.
2501.12666
Explicit Eigenvalue Regularization Improves Sharpness-Aware Minimization
cs.LG cs.CV
Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has attracted significant attention for its effectiveness in improving generalization across various tasks. However, its underlying principles remain poorly understood. In this work, we analyze SAM's training dynamics using the maximum eigenvalue of the Hessian as a measure of sharpness, and propose a third-order stochastic differential equation (SDE), which reveals that the dynamics are driven by a complex mixture of second- and third-order terms. We show that alignment between the perturbation vector and the top eigenvector is crucial for SAM's effectiveness in regularizing sharpness, but find that this alignment is often inadequate in practice, limiting SAM's efficiency. Building on these insights, we introduce Eigen-SAM, an algorithm that explicitly aims to regularize the top Hessian eigenvalue by aligning the perturbation vector with the leading eigenvector. We validate the effectiveness of our theory and the practical advantages of our proposed approach through comprehensive experiments. Code is available at https://github.com/RitianLuo/EigenSAM.
2501.12667
Sequential Change Point Detection via Denoising Score Matching
stat.ML cs.LG
Sequential change-point detection plays a critical role in numerous real-world applications, where timely identification of distributional shifts can greatly mitigate adverse outcomes. Classical methods commonly rely on parametric density assumptions of pre- and post-change distributions, limiting their effectiveness for high-dimensional, complex data streams. This paper proposes a score-based CUSUM change-point detection, in which the score functions of the data distribution are estimated by injecting noise and applying denoising score matching. We consider both offline and online versions of score estimation. Through theoretical analysis, we demonstrate that denoising score matching can enhance detection power by effectively controlling the injected noise scale. Finally, we validate the practical efficacy of our method through numerical experiments on two synthetic datasets and a real-world earthquake precursor detection task, demonstrating its effectiveness in challenging scenarios.