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2501.16539
Generalized Mission Planning for Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Teams via LLM-constructed Hierarchical Trees
cs.RO cs.AI cs.MA
We present a novel mission-planning strategy for heterogeneous multi-robot teams, taking into account the specific constraints and capabilities of each robot. Our approach employs hierarchical trees to systematically break down complex missions into manageable sub-tasks. We develop specialized APIs and tools, which are utilized by Large Language Models (LLMs) to efficiently construct these hierarchical trees. Once the hierarchical tree is generated, it is further decomposed to create optimized schedules for each robot, ensuring adherence to their individual constraints and capabilities. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework through detailed examples covering a wide range of missions, showcasing its flexibility and scalability.
2501.16542
UniPET-SPK: A Unified Framework for Parameter-Efficient Tuning of Pre-trained Speech Models for Robust Speaker Verification
eess.AS cs.LG cs.SD
With excellent generalization ability, SSL speech models have shown impressive performance on various downstream tasks in the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm. However, as the size of pre-trained models grows, fine-tuning becomes practically unfeasible due to expanding computation and storage requirements and the risk of overfitting. This study explores parameter-efficient tuning (PET) methods for adapting large-scale pre-trained SSL speech models to speaker verification task. Correspondingly, we propose three PET methods: (i)an adapter-tuning method, (ii)a prompt-tuning method, and (iii)a unified framework that effectively incorporates adapter-tuning and prompt-tuning with a dynamically learnable gating mechanism. First, we propose the Inner+Inter Adapter framework, which inserts two types of adapters into pre-trained models, allowing for adaptation of latent features within the intermediate Transformer layers and output embeddings from all Transformer layers, through a parallel adapter design. Second, we propose the Deep Speaker Prompting method that concatenates trainable prompt tokens into the input space of pre-trained models to guide adaptation. Lastly, we propose the UniPET-SPK, a unified framework that effectively incorporates these two alternate PET methods into a single framework with a dynamic trainable gating mechanism. The proposed UniPET-SPK learns to find the optimal mixture of PET methods to match different datasets and scenarios. We conduct a comprehensive set of experiments on several datasets to validate the effectiveness of the proposed PET methods. Experimental results on VoxCeleb, CN-Celeb, and 1st 48-UTD forensic datasets demonstrate that the proposed UniPET-SPK consistently outperforms the two PET methods, fine-tuning, and other parameter-efficient tuning methods, achieving superior performance while updating only 5.4% of the parameters.
2501.16544
PLANSIEVE: Real-time Suboptimal Query Plan Detection Through Incremental Refinements
cs.DB
Cardinality estimation remains a fundamental challenge in query optimization, often resulting in sub-optimal execution plans and degraded performance. While errors in cardinality estimation are inevitable, existing methods for identifying sub-optimal plans -- such as metrics like Q-error, P-error, or L1-error -- are limited to post-execution analysis, requiring complete knowledge of true cardinalities and failing to prevent the execution of sub-optimal plans in real-time. This paper introduces PLANSIEVE, a novel framework that identifies sub-optimal plans during query optimization. PLANSIEVE operates by analyzing the relative order of sub-plans generated by the optimizer based on estimated and true cardinalities. It begins with surrogate cardinalities from any third-party estimator and incrementally refines these surrogates as the system processes more queries. Experimental results on the augmented JOB-LIGHT-SCALE and STATS-CEB-SCALE workloads demonstrate that PLANSIEVE achieves an accuracy of up to 88.7\% in predicting sub-optimal plans.
2501.16546
Sample-Efficient Behavior Cloning Using General Domain Knowledge
cs.AI
Behavior cloning has shown success in many sequential decision-making tasks by learning from expert demonstrations, yet they can be very sample inefficient and fail to generalize to unseen scenarios. One approach to these problems is to introduce general domain knowledge, such that the policy can focus on the essential features and may generalize to unseen states by applying that knowledge. Although this knowledge is easy to acquire from the experts, it is hard to be combined with learning from individual examples due to the lack of semantic structure in neural networks and the time-consuming nature of feature engineering. To enable learning from both general knowledge and specific demonstration trajectories, we use a large language model's coding capability to instantiate a policy structure based on expert domain knowledge expressed in natural language and tune the parameters in the policy with demonstrations. We name this approach the Knowledge Informed Model (KIM) as the structure reflects the semantics of expert knowledge. In our experiments with lunar lander and car racing tasks, our approach learns to solve the tasks with as few as 5 demonstrations and is robust to action noise, outperforming the baseline model without domain knowledge. This indicates that with the help of large language models, we can incorporate domain knowledge into the structure of the policy, increasing sample efficiency for behavior cloning.
2501.16549
Reconciling Predictive Multiplicity in Practice
cs.CY cs.LG
Many machine learning applications predict individual probabilities, such as the likelihood that a person develops a particular illness. Since these probabilities are unknown, a key question is how to address situations in which different models trained on the same dataset produce varying predictions for certain individuals. This issue is exemplified by the model multiplicity (MM) phenomenon, where a set of comparable models yield inconsistent predictions. Roth, Tolbert, and Weinstein recently introduced a reconciliation procedure, the Reconcile algorithm, to address this problem. Given two disagreeing models, the algorithm leverages their disagreement to falsify and improve at least one of the models. In this paper, we empirically analyze the Reconcile algorithm using five widely-used fairness datasets: COMPAS, Communities and Crime, Adult, Statlog (German Credit Data), and the ACS Dataset. We examine how Reconcile fits within the model multiplicity literature and compare it to existing MM solutions, demonstrating its effectiveness. We also discuss potential improvements to the Reconcile algorithm theoretically and practically. Finally, we extend the Reconcile algorithm to the setting of causal inference, given that different competing estimators can again disagree on specific causal average treatment effect (CATE) values. We present the first extension of the Reconcile algorithm in causal inference, analyze its theoretical properties, and conduct empirical tests. Our results confirm the practical effectiveness of Reconcile and its applicability across various domains.
2501.16550
PhysAnimator: Physics-Guided Generative Cartoon Animation
cs.GR cs.CV
Creating hand-drawn animation sequences is labor-intensive and demands professional expertise. We introduce PhysAnimator, a novel approach for generating physically plausible meanwhile anime-stylized animation from static anime illustrations. Our method seamlessly integrates physics-based simulations with data-driven generative models to produce dynamic and visually compelling animations. To capture the fluidity and exaggeration characteristic of anime, we perform image-space deformable body simulations on extracted mesh geometries. We enhance artistic control by introducing customizable energy strokes and incorporating rigging point support, enabling the creation of tailored animation effects such as wind interactions. Finally, we extract and warp sketches from the simulation sequence, generating a texture-agnostic representation, and employ a sketch-guided video diffusion model to synthesize high-quality animation frames. The resulting animations exhibit temporal consistency and visual plausibility, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method in creating dynamic anime-style animations.
2501.16551
PackDiT: Joint Human Motion and Text Generation via Mutual Prompting
cs.CV cs.AI cs.LG
Human motion generation has advanced markedly with the advent of diffusion models. Most recent studies have concentrated on generating motion sequences based on text prompts, commonly referred to as text-to-motion generation. However, the bidirectional generation of motion and text, enabling tasks such as motion-to-text alongside text-to-motion, has been largely unexplored. This capability is essential for aligning diverse modalities and supports unconditional generation. In this paper, we introduce PackDiT, the first diffusion-based generative model capable of performing various tasks simultaneously, including motion generation, motion prediction, text generation, text-to-motion, motion-to-text, and joint motion-text generation. Our core innovation leverages mutual blocks to integrate multiple diffusion transformers (DiTs) across different modalities seamlessly. We train PackDiT on the HumanML3D dataset, achieving state-of-the-art text-to-motion performance with an FID score of 0.106, along with superior results in motion prediction and in-between tasks. Our experiments further demonstrate that diffusion models are effective for motion-to-text generation, achieving performance comparable to that of autoregressive models.
2501.16558
Distributional Information Embedding: A Framework for Multi-bit Watermarking
cs.CR cs.IT cs.LG math.IT
This paper introduces a novel problem, distributional information embedding, motivated by the practical demands of multi-bit watermarking for large language models (LLMs). Unlike traditional information embedding, which embeds information into a pre-existing host signal, LLM watermarking actively controls the text generation process--adjusting the token distribution--to embed a detectable signal. We develop an information-theoretic framework to analyze this distributional information embedding problem, characterizing the fundamental trade-offs among three critical performance metrics: text quality, detectability, and information rate. In the asymptotic regime, we demonstrate that the maximum achievable rate with vanishing error corresponds to the entropy of the LLM's output distribution and increases with higher allowable distortion. We also characterize the optimal watermarking scheme to achieve this rate. Extending the analysis to the finite-token case, we identify schemes that maximize detection probability while adhering to constraints on false alarm and distortion.
2501.16559
LoRA-X: Bridging Foundation Models with Training-Free Cross-Model Adaptation
cs.CV
The rising popularity of large foundation models has led to a heightened demand for parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods, such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), which offer performance comparable to full model fine-tuning while requiring only a few additional parameters tailored to the specific base model. When such base models are deprecated and replaced, all associated LoRA modules must be retrained, requiring access to either the original training data or a substantial amount of synthetic data that mirrors the original distribution. However, the original data is often inaccessible due to privacy or licensing issues, and generating synthetic data may be impractical and insufficiently representative. These factors complicate the fine-tuning process considerably. To address this challenge, we introduce a new adapter, Cross-Model Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA-X), which enables the training-free transfer of LoRA parameters across source and target models, eliminating the need for original or synthetic training data. Our approach imposes the adapter to operate within the subspace of the source base model. This constraint is necessary because our prior knowledge of the target model is limited to its weights, and the criteria for ensuring the adapter's transferability are restricted to the target base model's weights and subspace. To facilitate the transfer of LoRA parameters of the source model to a target model, we employ the adapter only in the layers of the target model that exhibit an acceptable level of subspace similarity. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of LoRA-X for text-to-image generation, including Stable Diffusion v1.5 and Stable Diffusion XL.
2501.16562
C-HDNet: A Fast Hyperdimensional Computing Based Method for Causal Effect Estimation from Networked Observational Data
cs.LG stat.ME
We consider the problem of estimating causal effects from observational data in the presence of network confounding. In this context, an individual's treatment assignment and outcomes may be affected by their neighbors within the network. We propose a novel matching technique which leverages hyperdimensional computing to model network information and improve predictive performance. We present results of extensive experiments which show that the proposed method outperforms or is competitive with the state-of-the-art methods for causal effect estimation from network data, including advanced computationally demanding deep learning methods. Further, our technique benefits from simplicity and speed, with roughly an order of magnitude lower runtime compared to state-of-the-art methods, while offering similar causal effect estimation error rates.
2501.16571
Efficient Object Detection of Marine Debris using Pruned YOLO Model
cs.CV cs.AI
Marine debris poses significant harm to marine life due to substances like microplastics, polychlorinated biphenyls, and pesticides, which damage habitats and poison organisms. Human-based solutions, such as diving, are increasingly ineffective in addressing this issue. Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are being developed for efficient sea garbage collection, with the choice of object detection architecture being critical. This research employs the YOLOv4 model for real-time detection of marine debris using the Trash-ICRA 19 dataset, consisting of 7683 images at 480x320 pixels. Various modifications-pretrained models, training from scratch, mosaic augmentation, layer freezing, YOLOv4-tiny, and channel pruning-are compared to enhance architecture efficiency. Channel pruning significantly improves detection speed, increasing the base YOLOv4 frame rate from 15.19 FPS to 19.4 FPS, with only a 1.2% drop in mean Average Precision, from 97.6% to 96.4%.
2501.16573
Optimization Landscapes Learned: Proxy Networks Boost Convergence in Physics-based Inverse Problems
cs.LG math.OC
Solving inverse problems in physics is central to understanding complex systems and advancing technologies in various fields. Iterative optimization algorithms, commonly used to solve these problems, often encounter local minima, chaos, or regions with zero gradients. This is due to their overreliance on local information and highly chaotic inverse loss landscapes governed by underlying partial differential equations (PDEs). In this work, we show that deep neural networks successfully replicate such complex loss landscapes through spatio-temporal trajectory inputs. They also offer the potential to control the underlying complexity of these chaotic loss landscapes during training through various regularization methods. We show that optimizing on network-smoothened loss landscapes leads to improved convergence in predicting optimum inverse parameters over conventional momentum-based optimizers such as BFGS on multiple challenging problems.
2501.16574
Using Database Dependencies to Constrain Approval-Based Committee Voting in the Presence of Context
cs.DB
In Approval-Based Committee (ABC) voting, each voter lists the candidates they approve and then a voting rule aggregates the individual approvals into a committee that represents the collective choice of the voters. An extensively studied class of such rules is the class of ABC scoring rules, where each voter contributes to each possible committee a score based on the voter's approvals. We initiate a study of ABC voting in the presence of constraints about the general context surrounding the candidates. Specifically, we consider a framework in which there is a relational database with information about the candidates together with integrity constraints on the relational database extended with a virtual relation representing the committee. For an ABC scoring rule, the goal is to find a committee of maximum score such that all integrity constraints hold in the extended database. We focus on two well-known types of integrity constraints in relational databases: tuple-generating dependencies (TGDs) and denial constraints (DCs). The former can express, for example, desired representations of groups, while the latter can express conflicts among candidates. ABC voting is known to be computationally hard without integrity constraints, except for the case of approval voting where it is tractable. We show that integrity constraints make the problem NP-hard for approval voting, but we also identify certain tractable cases when key constraints are used. We then present an implementation of the framework via a reduction to Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) that supports arbitrary ABC scoring rules, TGDs and DCs. We devise heuristics for optimizing the resulting MIP, and describe an empirical study that illustrates the effectiveness of the optimized MIP over databases in three different domains.
2501.16577
Generative AI Uses and Risks for Knowledge Workers in a Science Organization
cs.HC cs.AI
Generative AI could enhance scientific discovery by supporting knowledge workers in science organizations. However, the real-world applications and perceived concerns of generative AI use in these organizations are uncertain. In this paper, we report on a collaborative study with a US national laboratory with employees spanning Science and Operations about their use of generative AI tools. We surveyed 66 employees, interviewed a subset (N=22), and measured early adoption of an internal generative AI interface called Argo lab-wide. We have four findings: (1) Argo usage data shows small but increasing use by Science and Operations employees; Common current and envisioned use cases for generative AI in this context conceptually fall into either a (2) copilot or (3) workflow agent modality; and (4) Concerns include sensitive data security, academic publishing, and job impacts. Based on our findings, we make recommendations for generative AI use in science and other organizations.
2501.16581
DialUp! Modeling the Language Continuum by Adapting Models to Dialects and Dialects to Models
cs.CL
Most of the world's languages and dialects are low-resource, and lack support in mainstream machine translation (MT) models. However, many of them have a closely-related high-resource language (HRL) neighbor, and differ in linguistically regular ways from it. This underscores the importance of model robustness to dialectical variation and cross-lingual generalization to the HRL dialect continuum. We present DialUp, consisting of a training-time technique for adapting a pretrained model to dialectical data (M->D), and an inference-time intervention adapting dialectical data to the model expertise (D->M). M->D induces model robustness to potentially unseen and unknown dialects by exposure to synthetic data exemplifying linguistic mechanisms of dialectical variation, whereas D->M treats dialectical divergence for known target dialects. These methods show considerable performance gains for several dialects from four language families, and modest gains for two other language families. We also conduct feature and error analyses, which show that language varieties with low baseline MT performance are more likely to benefit from these approaches.
2501.16583
Directing Mamba to Complex Textures: An Efficient Texture-Aware State Space Model for Image Restoration
cs.CV
Image restoration aims to recover details and enhance contrast in degraded images. With the growing demand for high-quality imaging (\textit{e.g.}, 4K and 8K), achieving a balance between restoration quality and computational efficiency has become increasingly critical. Existing methods, primarily based on CNNs, Transformers, or their hybrid approaches, apply uniform deep representation extraction across the image. However, these methods often struggle to effectively model long-range dependencies and largely overlook the spatial characteristics of image degradation (regions with richer textures tend to suffer more severe damage), making it hard to achieve the best trade-off between restoration quality and efficiency. To address these issues, we propose a novel texture-aware image restoration method, TAMambaIR, which simultaneously perceives image textures and achieves a trade-off between performance and efficiency. Specifically, we introduce a novel Texture-Aware State Space Model, which enhances texture awareness and improves efficiency by modulating the transition matrix of the state-space equation and focusing on regions with complex textures. Additionally, we design a {Multi-Directional Perception Block} to improve multi-directional receptive fields while maintaining low computational overhead. Extensive experiments on benchmarks for image super-resolution, deraining, and low-light image enhancement demonstrate that TAMambaIR achieves state-of-the-art performance with significantly improved efficiency, establishing it as a robust and efficient framework for image restoration.
2501.16587
HopCast: Calibration of Autoregressive Dynamics Models
cs.LG
Deep learning models are often trained to approximate dynamical systems that can be modeled using differential equations. These models are optimized to predict one step ahead and produce calibrated predictions if the predictive model can quantify uncertainty, such as deep ensembles. At inference time, multi-step predictions are generated via autoregression, which needs a sound uncertainty propagation method (e.g., Trajectory Sampling) to produce calibrated multi-step predictions. This paper introduces an approach named HopCast that uses the Modern Hopfield Network (MHN) to learn the residuals of a deterministic model that approximates the dynamical system. The MHN predicts the density of residuals based on a context vector at any timestep during autoregression. This approach produces calibrated multi-step predictions without uncertainty propagation and turns a deterministic model into a calibrated probabilistic model. This work is also the first to benchmark existing uncertainty propagation methods based on calibration errors with deep ensembles for multi-step predictions.
2501.16588
Fine-Tuned Language Models as Space Systems Controllers
cs.LG cs.SY eess.SY
Large language models (LLMs), or foundation models (FMs), are pretrained transformers that coherently complete sentences auto-regressively. In this paper, we show that LLMs can control simplified space systems after some additional training, called fine-tuning. We look at relatively small language models, ranging between 7 and 13 billion parameters. We focus on four problems: a three-dimensional spring toy problem, low-thrust orbit transfer, low-thrust cislunar control, and powered descent guidance. The fine-tuned LLMs are capable of controlling systems by generating sufficiently accurate outputs that are multi-dimensional vectors with up to 10 significant digits. We show that for several problems the amount of data required to perform fine-tuning is smaller than what is generally required of traditional deep neural networks (DNNs), and that fine-tuned LLMs are good at generalizing outside of the training dataset. Further, the same LLM can be fine-tuned with data from different problems, with only minor performance degradation with respect to LLMs trained for a single application. This work is intended as a first step towards the development of a general space systems controller.
2501.16590
Benchmarking Model Predictive Control and Reinforcement Learning Based Control for Legged Robot Locomotion in MuJoCo Simulation
cs.RO cs.SY eess.SY
Model Predictive Control (MPC) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) are two prominent strategies for controlling legged robots, each with unique strengths. RL learns control policies through system interaction, adapting to various scenarios, whereas MPC relies on a predefined mathematical model to solve optimization problems in real-time. Despite their widespread use, there is a lack of direct comparative analysis under standardized conditions. This work addresses this gap by benchmarking MPC and RL controllers on a Unitree Go1 quadruped robot within the MuJoCo simulation environment, focusing on a standardized task-straight walking at a constant velocity. Performance is evaluated based on disturbance rejection, energy efficiency, and terrain adaptability. The results show that RL excels in handling disturbances and maintaining energy efficiency but struggles with generalization to new terrains due to its dependence on learned policies tailored to specific environments. In contrast, MPC shows enhanced recovery capabilities from larger perturbations by leveraging its optimization-based approach, allowing for a balanced distribution of control efforts across the robot's joints. The results provide a clear understanding of the advantages and limitations of both RL and MPC, offering insights into selecting an appropriate control strategy for legged robotic applications.
2501.16591
Applying Ensemble Models based on Graph Neural Network and Reinforcement Learning for Wind Power Forecasting
cs.LG cs.AI
Accurately predicting the wind power output of a wind farm across various time scales utilizing Wind Power Forecasting (WPF) is a critical issue in wind power trading and utilization. The WPF problem remains unresolved due to numerous influencing variables, such as wind speed, temperature, latitude, and longitude. Furthermore, achieving high prediction accuracy is crucial for maintaining electric grid stability and ensuring supply security. In this paper, we model all wind turbines within a wind farm as graph nodes in a graph built by their geographical locations. Accordingly, we propose an ensemble model based on graph neural networks and reinforcement learning (EMGRL) for WPF. Our approach includes: (1) applying graph neural networks to capture the time-series data from neighboring wind farms relevant to the target wind farm; (2) establishing a general state embedding that integrates the target wind farm's data with the historical performance of base models on the target wind farm; (3) ensembling and leveraging the advantages of all base models through an actor-critic reinforcement learning framework for WPF.
2501.16599
Toward Safe Integration of UAM in Terminal Airspace: UAM Route Feasibility Assessment using Probabilistic Aircraft Trajectory Prediction
cs.LG
Integrating Urban Air Mobility (UAM) into airspace managed by Air Traffic Control (ATC) poses significant challenges, particularly in congested terminal environments. This study proposes a framework to assess the feasibility of UAM route integration using probabilistic aircraft trajectory prediction. By leveraging conditional Normalizing Flows, the framework predicts short-term trajectory distributions of conventional aircraft, enabling UAM vehicles to dynamically adjust speeds and maintain safe separations. The methodology was applied to airspace over Seoul metropolitan area, encompassing interactions between UAM and conventional traffic at multiple altitudes and lanes. The results reveal that different physical locations of lanes and routes experience varying interaction patterns and encounter dynamics. For instance, Lane 1 at lower altitudes (1,500 ft and 2,000 ft) exhibited minimal interactions with conventional aircraft, resulting in the largest separations and the most stable delay proportions. In contrast, Lane 4 near the airport experienced more frequent and complex interactions due to its proximity to departing traffic. The limited trajectory data for departing aircraft in this region occasionally led to tighter separations and increased operational challenges. This study underscores the potential of predictive modeling in facilitating UAM integration while highlighting critical trade-offs between safety and efficiency. The findings contribute to refining airspace management strategies and offer insights for scaling UAM operations in complex urban environments.
2501.16600
The Power of Perturbation under Sampling in Solving Extensive-Form Games
cs.GT cs.LG cs.MA
This paper investigates how perturbation does and does not improve the Follow-the-Regularized-Leader (FTRL) algorithm in imperfect-information extensive-form games. Perturbing the expected payoffs guarantees that the FTRL dynamics reach an approximate equilibrium, and proper adjustments of the magnitude of the perturbation lead to a Nash equilibrium (\textit{last-iterate convergence}). This approach is robust even when payoffs are estimated using sampling -- as is the case for large games -- while the optimistic approach often becomes unstable. Building upon those insights, we first develop a general framework for perturbed FTRL algorithms under \textit{sampling}. We then empirically show that in the last-iterate sense, the perturbed FTRL consistently outperforms the non-perturbed FTRL. We further identify a divergence function that reduces the variance of the estimates for perturbed payoffs, with which it significantly outperforms the prior algorithms on Leduc poker (whose structure is more asymmetric in a sense than that of the other benchmark games) and consistently performs smooth convergence behavior on all the benchmark games.
2501.16605
Impact and influence of modern AI in metadata management
cs.DB cs.AI
Metadata management plays a critical role in data governance, resource discovery, and decision-making in the data-driven era. While traditional metadata approaches have primarily focused on organization, classification, and resource reuse, the integration of modern artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has significantly transformed these processes. This paper investigates both traditional and AI-driven metadata approaches by examining open-source solutions, commercial tools, and research initiatives. A comparative analysis of traditional and AI-driven metadata management methods is provided, highlighting existing challenges and their impact on next-generation datasets. The paper also presents an innovative AI-assisted metadata management framework designed to address these challenges. This framework leverages more advanced modern AI technologies to automate metadata generation, enhance governance, and improve the accessibility and usability of modern datasets. Finally, the paper outlines future directions for research and development, proposing opportunities to further advance metadata management in the context of AI-driven innovation and complex datasets.
2501.16606
Governing the Agent-to-Agent Economy of Trust via Progressive Decentralization
cs.MA cs.AI
Current approaches to AI governance often fall short in anticipating a future where AI agents manage critical tasks, such as financial operations, administrative functions, and beyond. As AI agents may eventually delegate tasks among themselves to optimize efficiency, understanding the foundational principles of human value exchange could offer insights into how AI-driven economies might operate. Just as trust and value exchange are central to human interactions in open marketplaces, they may also be critical for enabling secure and efficient interactions among AI agents. While cryptocurrencies could serve as the foundation for monetizing value exchange in a collaboration and delegation dynamic among AI agents, a critical question remains: how can these agents reliably determine whom to trust, and how can humans ensure meaningful oversight and control as an economy of AI agents scales and evolves? This paper is a call for a collective exploration of cryptoeconomic incentives, which can help design decentralized governance systems that allow AI agents to autonomously interact and exchange value while ensuring human oversight via progressive decentralization. Toward this end, I propose a research agenda to address the question of agent-to-agent trust using AgentBound Tokens, which are non-transferable, non-fungible tokens uniquely tied to individual AI agents, akin to Soulbound tokens for humans in Web3. By staking ABTs as collateral for autonomous actions within an agent-to-agent network via a proof-of-stake mechanism, agents may be incentivized towards ethical behavior, and penalties for misconduct are automatically enforced.
2501.16607
MCTS-SQL: An Effective Framework for Text-to-SQL with Monte Carlo Tree Search
cs.DB cs.AI cs.CL cs.PL
Text-to-SQL is a fundamental and longstanding problem in the NLP area, aiming at converting natural language queries into SQL, enabling non-expert users to operate databases. Recent advances in LLM have greatly improved text-to-SQL performance. However, challenges persist, especially when dealing with complex user queries. Current approaches (e.g., COT prompting and multi-agent frameworks) rely on the ability of models to plan and generate SQL autonomously, but controlling performance remains difficult. In addition, LLMs are still prone to hallucinations. To alleviate these challenges, we designed a novel MCTS-SQL to guide SQL generation iteratively. The approach generates SQL queries through Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and a heuristic self-refinement mechanism are used to enhance accuracy and reliability. Key components include a schema selector for extracting relevant information and an MCTS-based generator for iterative query refinement. Experimental results from the SPIDER and BIRD benchmarks show that MCTS-SQL achieves state-of-the-art performance. Specifically, on the BIRD development dataset, MCTS-SQL achieves an Execution (EX) accuracy of 69.40% using GPT-4o as the base model and a significant improvement when dealing with challenging tasks, with an EX of 51.48%, which is 3.41% higher than the existing method.
2501.16608
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Dynamic Clustering and Contrastive Refinement for Gait Recognition
cs.CV
Gait recognition is an emerging identification technology that distinguishes individuals at long distances by analyzing individual walking patterns. Traditional techniques rely heavily on large-scale labeled datasets, which incurs high costs and significant labeling challenges. Recently, researchers have explored unsupervised gait recognition with clustering-based unsupervised domain adaptation methods and achieved notable success. However, these methods directly use pseudo-label generated by clustering and neglect pseudolabel noise caused by domain differences, which affects the effect of the model training process. To mitigate these issues, we proposed a novel model called GaitDCCR, which aims to reduce the influence of noisy pseudo labels on clustering and model training. Our approach can be divided into two main stages: clustering and training stage. In the clustering stage, we propose Dynamic Cluster Parameters (DCP) and Dynamic Weight Centroids (DWC) to improve the efficiency of clustering and obtain reliable cluster centroids. In the training stage, we employ the classical teacher-student structure and propose Confidence-based Pseudo-label Refinement (CPR) and Contrastive Teacher Module (CTM) to encourage noisy samples to converge towards clusters containing their true identities. Extensive experiments on public gait datasets have demonstrated that our simple and effective method significantly enhances the performance of unsupervised gait recognition, laying the foundation for its application in the real-world.The code is available at https://github.com/YanSun-github/GaitDCCR
2501.16609
CowPilot: A Framework for Autonomous and Human-Agent Collaborative Web Navigation
cs.AI cs.CL cs.HC
While much work on web agents emphasizes the promise of autonomously performing tasks on behalf of users, in reality, agents often fall short on complex tasks in real-world contexts and modeling user preference. This presents an opportunity for humans to collaborate with the agent and leverage the agent's capabilities effectively. We propose CowPilot, a framework supporting autonomous as well as human-agent collaborative web navigation, and evaluation across task success and task efficiency. CowPilot reduces the number of steps humans need to perform by allowing agents to propose next steps, while users are able to pause, reject, or take alternative actions. During execution, users can interleave their actions with the agent by overriding suggestions or resuming agent control when needed. We conducted case studies on five common websites and found that the human-agent collaborative mode achieves the highest success rate of 95% while requiring humans to perform only 15.2% of the total steps. Even with human interventions during task execution, the agent successfully drives up to half of task success on its own. CowPilot can serve as a useful tool for data collection and agent evaluation across websites, which we believe will enable research in how users and agents can work together. Video demonstrations are available at https://oaishi.github.io/cowpilot.html
2501.16610
Embracing Reconfigurable Antennas in the Tri-hybrid MIMO Architecture for 6G
cs.IT cs.ET cs.NI math.IT
Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication has led to immense enhancements in data rates and efficient spectrum management. The evolution of MIMO has been accompanied by increased hardware complexity and array sizes, causing system power consumption to rise as a result. Despite past advances in power-efficient hybrid architectures, new solutions are needed to enable extremely large-scale MIMO deployments for 6G and beyond. In this paper, we introduce a novel architecture that integrates low-power reconfigurable antennas with both digital and analog precoding. This \emph{tri-hybrid} approach addresses key limitations in traditional and hybrid MIMO systems by improving power consumption and adding new layer for signal processing. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the proposed architecture and compare its performance with existing solutions, including fully-digital and hybrid MIMO systems. The results demonstrate significant improvements in energy efficiency, highlighting the potential of the tri-hybrid system to meet the growing demands of future wireless networks. We also discuss several design and implementation challenges, including the need for technological advancements in reconfigurable array hardware and tunable antenna parameters.
2501.16612
CascadeV: An Implementation of Wurstchen Architecture for Video Generation
cs.CV
Recently, with the tremendous success of diffusion models in the field of text-to-image (T2I) generation, increasing attention has been directed toward their potential in text-to-video (T2V) applications. However, the computational demands of diffusion models pose significant challenges, particularly in generating high-resolution videos with high frame rates. In this paper, we propose CascadeV, a cascaded latent diffusion model (LDM), that is capable of producing state-of-the-art 2K resolution videos. Experiments demonstrate that our cascaded model achieves a higher compression ratio, substantially reducing the computational challenges associated with high-quality video generation. We also implement a spatiotemporal alternating grid 3D attention mechanism, which effectively integrates spatial and temporal information, ensuring superior consistency across the generated video frames. Furthermore, our model can be cascaded with existing T2V models, theoretically enabling a 4$\times$ increase in resolution or frames per second without any fine-tuning. Our code is available at https://github.com/bytedance/CascadeV.
2501.16613
Safe Reinforcement Learning for Real-World Engine Control
cs.LG cs.AI
This work introduces a toolchain for applying Reinforcement Learning (RL), specifically the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) algorithm, in safety-critical real-world environments. As an exemplary application, transient load control is demonstrated on a single-cylinder internal combustion engine testbench in Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition (HCCI) mode, that offers high thermal efficiency and low emissions. However, HCCI poses challenges for traditional control methods due to its nonlinear, autoregressive, and stochastic nature. RL provides a viable solution, however, safety concerns, such as excessive pressure rise rates, must be addressed when applying to HCCI. A single unsuitable control input can severely damage the engine or cause misfiring and shut down. Additionally, operating limits are not known a priori and must be determined experimentally. To mitigate these risks, real-time safety monitoring based on the k-nearest neighbor algorithm is implemented, enabling safe interaction with the testbench. The feasibility of this approach is demonstrated as the RL agent learns a control policy through interaction with the testbench. A root mean square error of 0.1374 bar is achieved for the indicated mean effective pressure, comparable to neural network-based controllers from the literature. The toolchain's flexibility is further demonstrated by adapting the agent's policy to increase ethanol energy shares, promoting renewable fuel use while maintaining safety. This RL approach addresses the longstanding challenge of applying RL to safety-critical real-world environments. The developed toolchain, with its adaptability and safety mechanisms, paves the way for future applicability of RL in engine testbenches and other safety-critical settings.
2501.16614
FUNU: Boosting Machine Unlearning Efficiency by Filtering Unnecessary Unlearning
cs.LG
Machine unlearning is an emerging field that selectively removes specific data samples from a trained model. This capability is crucial for addressing privacy concerns, complying with data protection regulations, and correcting errors or biases introduced by certain data. Unlike traditional machine learning, where models are typically static once trained, machine unlearning facilitates dynamic updates that enable the model to ``forget'' information without requiring complete retraining from scratch. There are various machine unlearning methods, some of which are more time-efficient when data removal requests are fewer. To decrease the execution time of such machine unlearning methods, we aim to reduce the size of data removal requests based on the fundamental assumption that the removal of certain data would not result in a distinguishable retrained model. We first propose the concept of unnecessary unlearning, which indicates that the model would not alter noticeably after removing some data points. Subsequently, we review existing solutions that can be used to solve our problem. We highlight their limitations in adaptability to different unlearning scenarios and their reliance on manually selected parameters. We consequently put forward FUNU, a method to identify data points that lead to unnecessary unlearning. FUNU circumvents the limitations of existing solutions. The idea is to discover data points within the removal requests that have similar neighbors in the remaining dataset. We utilize a reference model to set parameters for finding neighbors, inspired from the area of model memorization. We provide a theoretical analysis of the privacy guarantee offered by FUNU and conduct extensive experiments to validate its efficacy.
2501.16615
Sparse Autoencoders Trained on the Same Data Learn Different Features
cs.LG
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a useful tool for uncovering human-interpretable features in the activations of large language models (LLMs). While some expect SAEs to find the true underlying features used by a model, our research shows that SAEs trained on the same model and data, differing only in the random seed used to initialize their weights, identify different sets of features. For example, in an SAE with 131K latents trained on a feedforward network in Llama 3 8B, only 30% of the features were shared across different seeds. We observed this phenomenon across multiple layers of three different LLMs, two datasets, and several SAE architectures. While ReLU SAEs trained with the L1 sparsity loss showed greater stability across seeds, SAEs using the state-of-the-art TopK activation function were more seed-dependent, even when controlling for the level of sparsity. Our results suggest that the set of features uncovered by an SAE should be viewed as a pragmatically useful decomposition of activation space, rather than an exhaustive and universal list of features "truly used" by the model.
2501.16616
Few-Shot Optimized Framework for Hallucination Detection in Resource-Limited NLP Systems
cs.CL
Hallucination detection in text generation remains an ongoing struggle for natural language processing (NLP) systems, frequently resulting in unreliable outputs in applications such as machine translation and definition modeling. Existing methods struggle with data scarcity and the limitations of unlabeled datasets, as highlighted by the SHROOM shared task at SemEval-2024. In this work, we propose a novel framework to address these challenges, introducing DeepSeek Few-shot optimization to enhance weak label generation through iterative prompt engineering. We achieved high-quality annotations that considerably enhanced the performance of downstream models by restructuring data to align with instruct generative models. We further fine-tuned the Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3 model on these optimized annotations, enabling it to accurately detect hallucinations in resource-limited settings. Combining this fine-tuned model with ensemble learning strategies, our approach achieved 85.5% accuracy on the test set, setting a new benchmark for the SHROOM task. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of data restructuring, few-shot optimization, and fine-tuning in building scalable and robust hallucination detection frameworks for resource-constrained NLP systems.
2501.16617
Predicting 3D representations for Dynamic Scenes
cs.CV
We present a novel framework for dynamic radiance field prediction given monocular video streams. Unlike previous methods that primarily focus on predicting future frames, our method goes a step further by generating explicit 3D representations of the dynamic scene. The framework builds on two core designs. First, we adopt an ego-centric unbounded triplane to explicitly represent the dynamic physical world. Second, we develop a 4D-aware transformer to aggregate features from monocular videos to update the triplane. Coupling these two designs enables us to train the proposed model with large-scale monocular videos in a self-supervised manner. Our model achieves top results in dynamic radiance field prediction on NVIDIA dynamic scenes, demonstrating its strong performance on 4D physical world modeling. Besides, our model shows a superior generalizability to unseen scenarios. Notably, we find that our approach emerges capabilities for geometry and semantic learning.
2501.16619
SHIELD: Secure Host-Independent Extensible Logging for SATA/Network Storage Towards Ransomware Detection
cs.CR cs.SY eess.SY
As malware such as ransomware becomes sophisticated, the ability to find and neutralize it requires more robust and tamper-resistant solutions. Current methods rely on data from compromised hosts, lack hardware isolation, and cannot detect emerging threats. To address these limitations, we introduce SHIELD - a detection architecture leveraging FPGA-based open-source SATA and Network Block Device (NBD) technology to provide off-host, tamper-proof measurements for continuous observation of disk activity for software executing on a target device. SHIELD provides three distinct contributions: It (1) develops a framework to obtain and analyze multi-level hardware metrics at NBD, FPGA, and SATA storage levels, and shows their ability to differentiate between harmless and malicious software; (2) Broadens the functionality of an open-source FPGA-driven SATA Host Bus Adapter (HBA) to offer complete data storage capabilities through NBD without relying on the host system; (3) Provides a foundation for using the methodology and metrics in automated machine learning-assisted detection and ASIC integration for advanced mitigation capabilities in data storage devices. SHIELD analyzes 10 benign programs and 10 modern ransomware families to illustrate its capacity for real-time monitoring and use in distinguishing between ransomware and benign software. Experimental evidence shows SHIELD's robust host-independent and hardware-assisted metrics are a basis for detection, allowing to observe program execution and detect malicious activities at the storage level.
2501.16621
Chinese Stock Prediction Based on a Multi-Modal Transformer Framework: Macro-Micro Information Fusion
cs.LG cs.AI
This paper proposes an innovative Multi-Modal Transformer framework (MMF-Trans) designed to significantly improve the prediction accuracy of the Chinese stock market by integrating multi-source heterogeneous information including macroeconomy, micro-market, financial text, and event knowledge. The framework consists of four core modules: (1) A four-channel parallel encoder that processes technical indicators, financial text, macro data, and event knowledge graph respectively for independent feature extraction of multi-modal data; (2) A dynamic gated cross-modal fusion mechanism that adaptively learns the importance of different modalities through differentiable weight allocation for effective information integration; (3) A time-aligned mixed-frequency processing layer that uses an innovative position encoding method to effectively fuse data of different time frequencies and solves the time alignment problem of heterogeneous data; (4) A graph attention-based event impact quantification module that captures the dynamic impact of events on the market through event knowledge graph and quantifies the event impact coefficient. We introduce a hybrid-frequency Transformer and Event2Vec algorithm to effectively fuse data of different frequencies and quantify the event impact. Experimental results show that in the prediction task of CSI 300 constituent stocks, the root mean square error (RMSE) of the MMF-Trans framework is reduced by 23.7% compared to the baseline model, the event response prediction accuracy is improved by 41.2%, and the Sharpe ratio is improved by 32.6%.
2501.16624
More Efficient Sybil Detection Mechanisms Leveraging Resistance of Users to Attack Requests
cs.SI
We investigate the problem of sybil (fake account) detection in social networks from a graph algorithms perspective, where graph structural information is used to classify users as sybil and benign. We introduce the novel notion of user resistance to attack requests (friendship requests from sybil accounts). Building on this notion, we propose a synthetic graph data generation framework that supports various attack strategies. We then study the optimization problem where we are allowed to reveal the resistance of a subset of users with the aim to maximize the number of users which are discovered to be benign and the number of potential attack edges (connections from a sybil to a benign user). Furthermore, we devise efficient algorithms for this problem and investigate their theoretical guarantees. Finally, through a large set of experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed algorithms improve detection performance notably when applied as a preprocessing step for different sybil detection algorithms. The code and data used in this work are publicly available on GitHub https://github.com/aSafarpoor/AAMAS2025-Paper/tree/main
2501.16625
A General Bayesian Framework for Informative Input Design in System Identification
eess.SY cs.LG cs.SY
We tackle the problem of informative input design for system identification, where we select inputs, observe the corresponding outputs from the true system, and optimize the parameters of our model to best fit the data. We propose a methodology that is compatible with any system and parametric family of models. Our approach only requires input-output data from the system and first-order information from the model with respect to the parameters. Our algorithm consists of two modules. First, we formulate the problem of system identification from a Bayesian perspective and propose an approximate iterative method to optimize the model's parameters. Based on this Bayesian formulation, we are able to define a Gaussian-based uncertainty measure for the model parameters, which we can then minimize with respect to the next selected input. Our method outperforms model-free baselines with various linear and nonlinear dynamics.
2501.16626
Subject Representation Learning from EEG using Graph Convolutional Variational Autoencoders
eess.SP cs.LG
We propose GC-VASE, a graph convolutional-based variational autoencoder that leverages contrastive learning for subject representation learning from EEG data. Our method successfully learns robust subject-specific latent representations using the split-latent space architecture tailored for subject identification. To enhance the model's adaptability to unseen subjects without extensive retraining, we introduce an attention-based adapter network for fine-tuning, which reduces the computational cost of adapting the model to new subjects. Our method significantly outperforms other deep learning approaches, achieving state-of-the-art results with a subject balanced accuracy of 89.81% on the ERP-Core dataset and 70.85% on the SleepEDFx-20 dataset. After subject adaptive fine-tuning using adapters and attention layers, GC-VASE further improves the subject balanced accuracy to 90.31% on ERP-Core. Additionally, we perform a detailed ablation study to highlight the impact of the key components of our method.
2501.16627
Engaging with AI: How Interface Design Shapes Human-AI Collaboration in High-Stakes Decision-Making
cs.HC cs.AI
As reliance on AI systems for decision-making grows, it becomes critical to ensure that human users can appropriately balance trust in AI suggestions with their own judgment, especially in high-stakes domains like healthcare. However, human + AI teams have been shown to perform worse than AI alone, with evidence indicating automation bias as the reason for poorer performance, particularly because humans tend to follow AI's recommendations even when they are incorrect. In many existing human + AI systems, decision-making support is typically provided in the form of text explanations (XAI) to help users understand the AI's reasoning. Since human decision-making often relies on System 1 thinking, users may ignore or insufficiently engage with the explanations, leading to poor decision-making. Previous research suggests that there is a need for new approaches that encourage users to engage with the explanations and one proposed method is the use of cognitive forcing functions (CFFs). In this work, we examine how various decision-support mechanisms impact user engagement, trust, and human-AI collaborative task performance in a diabetes management decision-making scenario. In a controlled experiment with 108 participants, we evaluated the effects of six decision-support mechanisms split into two categories of explanations (text, visual) and four CFFs. Our findings reveal that mechanisms like AI confidence levels, text explanations, and performance visualizations enhanced human-AI collaborative task performance, and improved trust when AI reasoning clues were provided. Mechanisms like human feedback and AI-driven questions encouraged deeper reflection but often reduced task performance by increasing cognitive effort, which in turn affected trust. Simple mechanisms like visual explanations had little effect on trust, highlighting the importance of striking a balance in CFF and XAI design.
2501.16629
CHiP: Cross-modal Hierarchical Direct Preference Optimization for Multimodal LLMs
cs.CL cs.CV
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) still struggle with hallucinations despite their impressive capabilities. Recent studies have attempted to mitigate this by applying Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to multimodal scenarios using preference pairs from text-based responses. However, our analysis of representation distributions reveals that multimodal DPO struggles to align image and text representations and to distinguish between hallucinated and non-hallucinated descriptions. To address these challenges, in this work, we propose a Cross-modal Hierarchical Direct Preference Optimization (CHiP) to address these limitations. We introduce a visual preference optimization module within the DPO framework, enabling MLLMs to learn from both textual and visual preferences simultaneously. Furthermore, we propose a hierarchical textual preference optimization module that allows the model to capture preferences at multiple granular levels, including response, segment, and token levels. We evaluate CHiP through both quantitative and qualitative analyses, with results across multiple benchmarks demonstrating its effectiveness in reducing hallucinations. On the Object HalBench dataset, CHiP outperforms DPO in hallucination reduction, achieving improvements of 52.7% and 55.5% relative points based on the base model Muffin and LLaVA models, respectively. We make all our datasets and code publicly available: https://github.com/LVUGAI/CHiP.
2501.16634
Towards Resource-Efficient Compound AI Systems
cs.DC cs.AI
Compound AI Systems, integrating multiple interacting components like models, retrievers, and external tools, have emerged as essential for addressing complex AI tasks. However, current implementations suffer from inefficient resource utilization due to tight coupling between application logic and execution details, a disconnect between orchestration and resource management layers, and the perceived exclusiveness between efficiency and quality. We propose a vision for resource-efficient Compound AI Systems through a declarative workflow programming model and an adaptive runtime system for dynamic scheduling and resource-aware decision-making. Decoupling application logic from low-level details exposes levers for the runtime to flexibly configure the execution environment and resources, without compromising on quality. Enabling collaboration between the workflow orchestration and cluster manager enables higher efficiency through better scheduling and resource management. We are building a prototype system, called Murakkab, to realize this vision. Our preliminary evaluation demonstrates speedups up to $\sim 3.4\times$ in workflow completion times while delivering $\sim 4.5\times$ higher energy efficiency, showing promise in optimizing resources and advancing AI system design.
2501.16635
Why Do We Laugh? Annotation and Taxonomy Generation for Laughable Contexts in Spontaneous Text Conversation
cs.CL cs.AI
Laughter serves as a multifaceted communicative signal in human interaction, yet its identification within dialogue presents a significant challenge for conversational AI systems. This study addresses this challenge by annotating laughable contexts in Japanese spontaneous text conversation data and developing a taxonomy to classify the underlying reasons for such contexts. Initially, multiple annotators manually labeled laughable contexts using a binary decision (laughable or non-laughable). Subsequently, an LLM was used to generate explanations for the binary annotations of laughable contexts, which were then categorized into a taxonomy comprising ten categories, including "Empathy and Affinity" and "Humor and Surprise," highlighting the diverse range of laughter-inducing scenarios. The study also evaluated GPT-4's performance in recognizing the majority labels of laughable contexts, achieving an F1 score of 43.14%. These findings contribute to the advancement of conversational AI by establishing a foundation for more nuanced recognition and generation of laughter, ultimately fostering more natural and engaging human-AI interactions.
2501.16638
Analysis of Zero Day Attack Detection Using MLP and XAI
cs.LG cs.CR
Any exploit taking advantage of zero-day is called a zero-day attack. Previous research and social media trends show a massive demand for research in zero-day attack detection. This paper analyzes Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) based approaches to create Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and scrutinizing them using Explainable AI (XAI) by training an explainer based on randomly sampled data from the testing set. The focus is on using the KDD99 dataset, which has the most research done among all the datasets for detecting zero-day attacks. The paper aims to synthesize the dataset to have fewer classes for multi-class classification, test ML and DL approaches on pattern recognition, establish the robustness and dependability of the model, and establish the interpretability and scalability of the model. We evaluated the performance of four multilayer perceptron (MLP) trained on the KDD99 dataset, including baseline ML models, weighted ML models, truncated ML models, and weighted truncated ML models. Our results demonstrate that the truncated ML model achieves the highest accuracy (99.62%), precision, and recall, while weighted truncated ML model shows lower accuracy (97.26%) but better class representation (less bias) among all the classes with improved unweighted recall score. We also used Shapely Additive exPlanations (SHAP) to train explainer for our truncated models to check for feature importance among the two weighted and unweighted models.
2501.16639
Finite Sample Analysis of Subspace Identification Methods
eess.SY cs.SY
As one of the mainstream approaches in system identification, subspace identification methods (SIMs) are known for their simple parameterization for MIMO systems and robust numerical properties. However, a comprehensive statistical analysis of SIMs remains an open problem. Amid renewed focus on identifying state-space models in the non-asymptotic regime, this work presents a finite sample analysis for a large class of open-loop SIMs. It establishes high-probability upper bounds for system matrices obtained via SIMs, and reveals that convergence rates for estimating Markov parameters and system matrices are $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{N})$ up to logarithmic terms, in line with classical asymptotic results. Following the key steps of SIMs, we arrive at the above results by a three-step procedure. In Step 1, we begin with a parsimonious SIM (PARSIM) that uses least-squares regression to estimate multiple high-order ARX models in parallel. Leveraging a recent analysis of an individual ARX model, we obtain a union error bound for a bank of ARX models. Step 2 involves model reduction via weighted singular value decomposition (SVD), where we consider different data-dependent weighting matrices and use robustness results for SVD to obtain error bounds on extended controllability and observability matrices, respectively. The final Step 3 focuses on deriving error bounds for system matrices, where two different realization algorithms, the MOESP type and the Larimore type, are considered. Although our study initially focuses on PARSIM, the methodologies apply broadly across many variants of SIMs.
2501.16642
FlowDAS: A Flow-Based Framework for Data Assimilation
eess.SP cs.LG eess.IV
Data assimilation (DA) is crucial for improving the accuracy of state estimation in complex dynamical systems by integrating observational data with physical models. Traditional solutions rely on either pure model-driven approaches, such as Bayesian filters that struggle with nonlinearity, or data-driven methods using deep learning priors, which often lack generalizability and physical interpretability. Recently, score-based DA methods have been introduced, focusing on learning prior distributions but neglecting explicit state transition dynamics, leading to limited accuracy improvements. To tackle the challenge, we introduce FlowDAS, a novel generative model-based framework using the stochastic interpolants to unify the learning of state transition dynamics and generative priors. FlowDAS achieves stable and observation-consistent inference by initializing from proximal previous states, mitigating the instability seen in score-based methods. Our extensive experiments demonstrate FlowDAS's superior performance on various benchmarks, from the Lorenz system to high-dimensional fluid super-resolution tasks. FlowDAS also demonstrates improved tracking accuracy on practical Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) task, showcasing its effectiveness in complex flow field reconstruction.
2501.16643
An LLM Benchmark for Addressee Recognition in Multi-modal Multi-party Dialogue
cs.CL cs.AI cs.SD eess.AS
Handling multi-party dialogues represents a significant step for advancing spoken dialogue systems, necessitating the development of tasks specific to multi-party interactions. To address this challenge, we are constructing a multi-modal multi-party dialogue corpus of triadic (three-participant) discussions. This paper focuses on the task of addressee recognition, identifying who is being addressed to take the next turn, a critical component unique to multi-party dialogue systems. A subset of the corpus was annotated with addressee information, revealing that explicit addressees are indicated in approximately 20% of conversational turns. To evaluate the task's complexity, we benchmarked the performance of a large language model (GPT-4o) on addressee recognition. The results showed that GPT-4o achieved an accuracy only marginally above chance, underscoring the challenges of addressee recognition in multi-party dialogue. These findings highlight the need for further research to enhance the capabilities of large language models in understanding and navigating the intricacies of multi-party conversational dynamics.
2501.16650
DOCS: Quantifying Weight Similarity for Deeper Insights into Large Language Models
cs.CL cs.AI
We introduce a novel index, the Distribution of Cosine Similarity (DOCS), for quantitatively assessing the similarity between weight matrices in Large Language Models (LLMs), aiming to facilitate the analysis of their complex architectures. Leveraging DOCS, our analysis uncovers intriguing patterns in the latest open-source LLMs: adjacent layers frequently exhibit high weight similarity and tend to form clusters, suggesting depth-wise functional specialization. Additionally, we prove that DOCS is theoretically effective in quantifying similarity for orthogonal matrices, a crucial aspect given the prevalence of orthogonal initializations in LLMs. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of LLM architecture and behavior, offering tools with potential implications for developing more efficient and interpretable models.
2501.16652
Molecular-driven Foundation Model for Oncologic Pathology
cs.CV cs.AI
Foundation models are reshaping computational pathology by enabling transfer learning, where models pre-trained on vast datasets can be adapted for downstream diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic response tasks. Despite these advances, foundation models are still limited in their ability to encode the entire gigapixel whole-slide images without additional training and often lack complementary multimodal data. Here, we introduce Threads, a slide-level foundation model capable of generating universal representations of whole-slide images of any size. Threads was pre-trained using a multimodal learning approach on a diverse cohort of 47,171 hematoxylin and eosin (H&E)-stained tissue sections, paired with corresponding genomic and transcriptomic profiles - the largest such paired dataset to be used for foundation model development to date. This unique training paradigm enables Threads to capture the tissue's underlying molecular composition, yielding powerful representations applicable to a wide array of downstream tasks. In extensive benchmarking across 54 oncology tasks, including clinical subtyping, grading, mutation prediction, immunohistochemistry status determination, treatment response prediction, and survival prediction, Threads outperformed all baselines while demonstrating remarkable generalizability and label efficiency. It is particularly well suited for predicting rare events, further emphasizing its clinical utility. We intend to make the model publicly available for the broader community.
2501.16655
Large Language Model Critics for Execution-Free Evaluation of Code Changes
cs.CL cs.AI cs.SE
Large language models (LLMs) offer a promising way forward for automating software engineering tasks, such as bug fixes, feature additions, etc., via multi-step LLM-based agentic workflows. However, existing metrics for evaluating such workflows, mainly build status and occasionally log analysis, are too sparse and limited in providing the information needed to assess the quality of changes made. In this work, we designed LLM-based critics to derive well-structured and rigorous intermediate/step-level, execution-free evaluation proxies for repo-level code changes. Importantly, we assume access to the gold test patch for the problem (i.e., reference-aware) to assess both semantics and executability of generated patches. With the gold test patch as a reference, we predict executability of all editing locations with an F1 score of 91.6%, aggregating which, we can predict the build status in 84.8% of the instances in SWE-bench. In particular, such an execution-focused LLM critic outperforms other reference-free and reference-aware LLM critics by 38.9% to 72.5%. Moreover, we demonstrate the usefulness of such a reference-aware framework in comparing patches generated by different agentic workflows. Finally, we open-source the library developed for this project, which allows further usage for either other agentic workflows or other benchmarks. The source code is available at https://github.com/amazon-science/code-agent-eval.
2501.16656
Data Mining in Transportation Networks with Graph Neural Networks: A Review and Outlook
cs.LG
Data mining in transportation networks (DMTNs) refers to using diverse types of spatio-temporal data for various transportation tasks, including pattern analysis, traffic prediction, and traffic controls. Graph neural networks (GNNs) are essential in many DMTN problems due to their capability to represent spatial correlations between entities. Between 2016 and 2024, the notable applications of GNNs in DMTNs have extended to multiple fields such as traffic prediction and operation. However, existing reviews have primarily focused on traffic prediction tasks. To fill this gap, this study provides a timely and insightful summary of GNNs in DMTNs, highlighting new progress in prediction and operation from academic and industry perspectives since 2023. First, we present and analyze various DMTN problems, followed by classical and recent GNN models. Second, we delve into key works in three areas: (1) traffic prediction, (2) traffic operation, and (3) industry involvement, such as Google Maps, Amap, and Baidu Maps. Along these directions, we discuss new research opportunities based on the significance of transportation problems and data availability. Finally, we compile resources such as data, code, and other learning materials to foster interdisciplinary communication. This review, driven by recent trends in GNNs in DMTN studies since 2023, could democratize abundant datasets and efficient GNN methods for various transportation problems including prediction and operation.
2501.16658
Contextual Reinforcement in Multimodal Token Compression for Large Language Models
cs.CL cs.AI
Effective token compression remains a critical challenge for scaling models to handle increasingly complex and diverse datasets. A novel mechanism based on contextual reinforcement is introduced, dynamically adjusting token importance through interdependencies and semantic relevance. This approach enables substantial reductions in token usage while preserving the quality and coherence of information representation. Incorporating graph-based algorithms and adaptive weighting, the method captures subtle contextual relationships across textual and multimodal data, ensuring robust alignment and performance in downstream tasks. Evaluations across varied domains reveal significant improvements in accuracy and semantic retention, particularly for tasks requiring detailed cross-modal interactions. Memory usage analyses demonstrate improved computational efficiency, with minimal overhead despite the additional reinforcement processes. Performance gains are further validated through error distribution analyses, showing reduced semantic loss and syntactic inconsistencies compared to baseline models. The modular architecture ensures compatibility with a wide range of open-source frameworks, facilitating scalable implementation for real-world applications. These findings highlight the potential of contextual reinforcement in redefining token management strategies and advancing large-scale model design.
2501.16662
Vision-based autonomous structural damage detection using data-driven methods
cs.CV cs.AI eess.IV
This study addresses the urgent need for efficient and accurate damage detection in wind turbine structures, a crucial component of renewable energy infrastructure. Traditional inspection methods, such as manual assessments and non-destructive testing (NDT), are often costly, time-consuming, and prone to human error. To tackle these challenges, this research investigates advanced deep learning algorithms for vision-based structural health monitoring (SHM). A dataset of wind turbine surface images, featuring various damage types and pollution, was prepared and augmented for enhanced model training. Three algorithms-YOLOv7, its lightweight variant, and Faster R-CNN- were employed to detect and classify surface damage. The models were trained and evaluated on a dataset split into training, testing, and evaluation subsets (80%-10%-10%). Results indicate that YOLOv7 outperformed the others, achieving 82.4% mAP@50 and high processing speed, making it suitable for real-time inspections. By optimizing hyperparameters like learning rate and batch size, the models' accuracy and efficiency improved further. YOLOv7 demonstrated significant advancements in detection precision and execution speed, especially for real-time applications. However, challenges such as dataset limitations and environmental variability were noted, suggesting future work on segmentation methods and larger datasets. This research underscores the potential of vision-based deep learning techniques to transform SHM practices by reducing costs, enhancing safety, and improving reliability, thus contributing to the sustainable maintenance of critical infrastructure and supporting the longevity of wind energy systems.
2501.16663
Data Duplication: A Novel Multi-Purpose Attack Paradigm in Machine Unlearning
cs.CR cs.AI
Duplication is a prevalent issue within datasets. Existing research has demonstrated that the presence of duplicated data in training datasets can significantly influence both model performance and data privacy. However, the impact of data duplication on the unlearning process remains largely unexplored. This paper addresses this gap by pioneering a comprehensive investigation into the role of data duplication, not only in standard machine unlearning but also in federated and reinforcement unlearning paradigms. Specifically, we propose an adversary who duplicates a subset of the target model's training set and incorporates it into the training set. After training, the adversary requests the model owner to unlearn this duplicated subset, and analyzes the impact on the unlearned model. For example, the adversary can challenge the model owner by revealing that, despite efforts to unlearn it, the influence of the duplicated subset remains in the model. Moreover, to circumvent detection by de-duplication techniques, we propose three novel near-duplication methods for the adversary, each tailored to a specific unlearning paradigm. We then examine their impacts on the unlearning process when de-duplication techniques are applied. Our findings reveal several crucial insights: 1) the gold standard unlearning method, retraining from scratch, fails to effectively conduct unlearning under certain conditions; 2) unlearning duplicated data can lead to significant model degradation in specific scenarios; and 3) meticulously crafted duplicates can evade detection by de-duplication methods.
2501.16664
Improving Vision-Language-Action Model with Online Reinforcement Learning
cs.RO cs.CV cs.LG
Recent studies have successfully integrated large vision-language models (VLMs) into low-level robotic control by supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with expert robotic datasets, resulting in what we term vision-language-action (VLA) models. Although the VLA models are powerful, how to improve these large models during interaction with environments remains an open question. In this paper, we explore how to further improve these VLA models via Reinforcement Learning (RL), a commonly used fine-tuning technique for large models. However, we find that directly applying online RL to large VLA models presents significant challenges, including training instability that severely impacts the performance of large models, and computing burdens that exceed the capabilities of most local machines. To address these challenges, we propose iRe-VLA framework, which iterates between Reinforcement Learning and Supervised Learning to effectively improve VLA models, leveraging the exploratory benefits of RL while maintaining the stability of supervised learning. Experiments in two simulated benchmarks and a real-world manipulation suite validate the effectiveness of our method.
2501.16665
CSPCL: Category Semantic Prior Contrastive Learning for Deformable DETR-Based Prohibited Item Detectors
cs.CV
Prohibited item detection based on X-ray images is one of the most effective security inspection methods. However, the foreground-background feature coupling caused by the overlapping phenomenon specific to X-ray images makes general detectors designed for natural images perform poorly. To address this issue, we propose a Category Semantic Prior Contrastive Learning (CSPCL) mechanism, which aligns the class prototypes perceived by the classifier with the content queries to correct and supplement the missing semantic information responsible for classification, thereby enhancing the model sensitivity to foreground features.To achieve this alignment, we design a specific contrastive loss, CSP loss, which includes Intra-Class Truncated Attraction (ITA) loss and Inter-Class Adaptive Repulsion (IAR) loss, and outperforms classic N-pair loss and InfoNCE loss. Specifically, ITA loss leverages class prototypes to attract intra-class category-specific content queries while preserving necessary distinctiveness. IAR loss utilizes class prototypes to adaptively repel inter-class category-specific content queries based on the similarity between class prototypes, helping disentangle features of similar categories.CSPCL is general and can be easily integrated into Deformable DETR-based models. Extensive experiments on the PIXray and OPIXray datasets demonstrate that CSPCL significantly enhances the performance of various state-of-the-art models without increasing complexity.The code will be open source once the paper is accepted.
2501.16666
Federated Learning for Efficient Condition Monitoring and Anomaly Detection in Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems
cs.LG cs.AI
Detecting and localizing anomalies in cyber-physical systems (CPS) has become increasingly challenging as systems grow in complexity, particularly due to varying sensor reliability and node failures in distributed environments. While federated learning (FL) provides a foundation for distributed model training, existing approaches often lack mechanisms to address these CPS-specific challenges. This paper introduces an enhanced FL framework with three key innovations: adaptive model aggregation based on sensor reliability, dynamic node selection for resource optimization, and Weibull-based checkpointing for fault tolerance. The proposed framework ensures reliable condition monitoring while tackling the computational and reliability challenges of industrial CPS deployments. Experiments on the NASA Bearing and Hydraulic System datasets demonstrate superior performance compared to state-of-the-art FL methods, achieving 99.5% AUC-ROC in anomaly detection and maintaining accuracy even under node failures. Statistical validation using the Mann-Whitney U test confirms significant improvements, with a p-value less than 0.05, in both detection accuracy and computational efficiency across various operational scenarios.
2501.16668
Examining Online Social Support for Countering QAnon Conspiracies
cs.SI cs.HC physics.soc-ph
As radical messaging has proliferated on social networking sites, platforms like Reddit have been used to host support groups, including support communities for the families and friends of radicalized individuals. This study examines the subreddit r/QAnonCasualties, an online forum for users whose loved ones have been radicalized by QAnon. We collected 1,665 posts and 78,171 comments posted between 7/2021 and 7/2022 and content coded top posts for prominent themes. Sentiment analysis was also conducted on all posts. We find venting, advice and validation-seeking, and pressure to refuse the COVID-19 vaccine were prominent themes. 40% (n=167) of coded posts identified the Q relation(s) of users as their parent(s) and 16.3% (n=68) as their partner. Posts with higher proportions of words related to swearing, social referents, and physical needs were positively correlated with engagement. These findings show ways that communities around QAnon adherents leverage anonymous online spaces to seek and provide social support.
2501.16671
Data-Free Model-Related Attacks: Unleashing the Potential of Generative AI
cs.CR cs.AI
Generative AI technology has become increasingly integrated into our daily lives, offering powerful capabilities to enhance productivity. However, these same capabilities can be exploited by adversaries for malicious purposes. While existing research on adversarial applications of generative AI predominantly focuses on cyberattacks, less attention has been given to attacks targeting deep learning models. In this paper, we introduce the use of generative AI for facilitating model-related attacks, including model extraction, membership inference, and model inversion. Our study reveals that adversaries can launch a variety of model-related attacks against both image and text models in a data-free and black-box manner, achieving comparable performance to baseline methods that have access to the target models' training data and parameters in a white-box manner. This research serves as an important early warning to the community about the potential risks associated with generative AI-powered attacks on deep learning models.
2501.16672
VeriFact: Verifying Facts in LLM-Generated Clinical Text with Electronic Health Records
cs.AI cs.CL cs.IR cs.LO
Methods to ensure factual accuracy of text generated by large language models (LLM) in clinical medicine are lacking. VeriFact is an artificial intelligence system that combines retrieval-augmented generation and LLM-as-a-Judge to verify whether LLM-generated text is factually supported by a patient's medical history based on their electronic health record (EHR). To evaluate this system, we introduce VeriFact-BHC, a new dataset that decomposes Brief Hospital Course narratives from discharge summaries into a set of simple statements with clinician annotations for whether each statement is supported by the patient's EHR clinical notes. Whereas highest agreement between clinicians was 88.5%, VeriFact achieves up to 92.7% agreement when compared to a denoised and adjudicated average human clinican ground truth, suggesting that VeriFact exceeds the average clinician's ability to fact-check text against a patient's medical record. VeriFact may accelerate the development of LLM-based EHR applications by removing current evaluation bottlenecks.
2501.16673
LLM-AutoDiff: Auto-Differentiate Any LLM Workflow
cs.CL
Large Language Models (LLMs) have reshaped natural language processing, powering applications from multi-hop retrieval and question answering to autonomous agent workflows. Yet, prompt engineering -- the task of crafting textual inputs to effectively direct LLMs -- remains difficult and labor-intensive, particularly for complex pipelines that combine multiple LLM calls with functional operations like retrieval and data formatting. We introduce LLM-AutoDiff: a novel framework for Automatic Prompt Engineering (APE) that extends textual gradient-based methods (such as Text-Grad) to multi-component, potentially cyclic LLM architectures. Implemented within the AdalFlow library, LLM-AutoDiff treats each textual input as a trainable parameter and uses a frozen backward engine LLM to generate feedback-akin to textual gradients -- that guide iterative prompt updates. Unlike prior single-node approaches, LLM-AutoDiff inherently accommodates functional nodes, preserves time-sequential behavior in repeated calls (e.g., multi-hop loops), and combats the "lost-in-the-middle" problem by isolating distinct sub-prompts (instructions, formats, or few-shot examples). It further boosts training efficiency by focusing on error-prone samples through selective gradient computation. Across diverse tasks, including single-step classification, multi-hop retrieval-based QA, and agent-driven pipelines, LLM-AutoDiff consistently outperforms existing textual gradient baselines in both accuracy and training cost. By unifying prompt optimization through a graph-centric lens, LLM-AutoDiff offers a powerful new paradigm for scaling and automating LLM workflows - mirroring the transformative role that automatic differentiation libraries have long played in neural network research.
2501.16675
Variational Schr\"odinger Momentum Diffusion
stat.ML cs.LG
The momentum Schr\"odinger Bridge (mSB) has emerged as a leading method for accelerating generative diffusion processes and reducing transport costs. However, the lack of simulation-free properties inevitably results in high training costs and affects scalability. To obtain a trade-off between transport properties and scalability, we introduce variational Schr\"odinger momentum diffusion (VSMD), which employs linearized forward score functions (variational scores) to eliminate the dependence on simulated forward trajectories. Our approach leverages a multivariate diffusion process with adaptively transport-optimized variational scores. Additionally, we apply a critical-damping transform to stabilize training by removing the need for score estimations for both velocity and samples. Theoretically, we prove the convergence of samples generated with optimal variational scores and momentum diffusion. Empirical results demonstrate that VSMD efficiently generates anisotropic shapes while maintaining transport efficacy, outperforming overdamped alternatives, and avoiding complex denoising processes. Our approach also scales effectively to real-world data, achieving competitive results in time series and image generation.
2501.16677
Improving Interpretability and Accuracy in Neuro-Symbolic Rule Extraction Using Class-Specific Sparse Filters
cs.CV cs.AI
There has been significant focus on creating neuro-symbolic models for interpretable image classification using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). These methods aim to replace the CNN with a neuro-symbolic model consisting of the CNN, which is used as a feature extractor, and an interpretable rule-set extracted from the CNN itself. While these approaches provide interpretability through the extracted rule-set, they often compromise accuracy compared to the original CNN model. In this paper, we identify the root cause of this accuracy loss as the post-training binarization of filter activations to extract the rule-set. To address this, we propose a novel sparsity loss function that enables class-specific filter binarization during CNN training, thus minimizing information loss when extracting the rule-set. We evaluate several training strategies with our novel sparsity loss, analyzing their effectiveness and providing guidance on their appropriate use. Notably, we set a new benchmark, achieving a 9% improvement in accuracy and a 53% reduction in rule-set size on average, compared to the previous SOTA, while coming within 3% of the original CNN's accuracy. This highlights the significant potential of interpretable neuro-symbolic models as viable alternatives to black-box CNNs.
2501.16679
Polyp-Gen: Realistic and Diverse Polyp Image Generation for Endoscopic Dataset Expansion
cs.CV
Automated diagnostic systems (ADS) have shown significant potential in the early detection of polyps during endoscopic examinations, thereby reducing the incidence of colorectal cancer. However, due to high annotation costs and strict privacy concerns, acquiring high-quality endoscopic images poses a considerable challenge in the development of ADS. Despite recent advancements in generating synthetic images for dataset expansion, existing endoscopic image generation algorithms failed to accurately generate the details of polyp boundary regions and typically required medical priors to specify plausible locations and shapes of polyps, which limited the realism and diversity of the generated images. To address these limitations, we present Polyp-Gen, the first full-automatic diffusion-based endoscopic image generation framework. Specifically, we devise a spatial-aware diffusion training scheme with a lesion-guided loss to enhance the structural context of polyp boundary regions. Moreover, to capture medical priors for the localization of potential polyp areas, we introduce a hierarchical retrieval-based sampling strategy to match similar fine-grained spatial features. In this way, our Polyp-Gen can generate realistic and diverse endoscopic images for building reliable ADS. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art generation quality, and the synthetic images can improve the downstream polyp detection task. Additionally, our Polyp-Gen has shown remarkable zero-shot generalizability on other datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/CUHK-AIM-Group/Polyp-Gen.
2501.16683
On Non-intrusive Data-driven Implementations of IRKA and Balanced Truncation
eess.SY cs.SY
This paper introduces quadrature-based approaches that enable offline sampling of the transfer function and its derivative from available frequency response or impulse response data. Unlike quadrature-based data-driven balanced truncation, the proposed methods do not require samples of the transfer function's derivative or the impulse response's derivative. Additionally, a non-intrusive approach to track the error in IRKA as it refines the interpolation data is presented. Furthermore, a non-intrusive data-driven implementation of balanced truncation, equivalent to ADI-based low-rank balanced truncation, is proposed. This approach is not quadrature-based and only requires samples of the transfer function at the mirror images of the ADI shifts to construct the reduced-order model. The quality of the low-rank approximation of the Gramians in this method can also be monitored in a non-intrusive manner. Both the non-intrusive implementations of IRKA and balanced truncation are also extended to discrete-time systems in this paper. For discrete-time IRKA, the impulse response-based implementation uses a truncated summation approach, as the time-domain formulation of discrete-time IRKA involves summations rather than integrals. The paper includes two illustrative examples: one for the non-intrusive data-driven implementations of IRKA and balanced truncation for continuous-time systems, and another for discrete-time systems.
2501.16684
SliceOcc: Indoor 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction with Vertical Slice Representation
cs.CV
3D semantic occupancy prediction is a crucial task in visual perception, as it requires the simultaneous comprehension of both scene geometry and semantics. It plays a crucial role in understanding 3D scenes and has great potential for various applications, such as robotic vision perception and autonomous driving. Many existing works utilize planar-based representations such as Bird's Eye View (BEV) and Tri-Perspective View (TPV). These representations aim to simplify the complexity of 3D scenes while preserving essential object information, thereby facilitating efficient scene representation. However, in dense indoor environments with prevalent occlusions, directly applying these planar-based methods often leads to difficulties in capturing global semantic occupancy, ultimately degrading model performance. In this paper, we present a new vertical slice representation that divides the scene along the vertical axis and projects spatial point features onto the nearest pair of parallel planes. To utilize these slice features, we propose SliceOcc, an RGB camera-based model specifically tailored for indoor 3D semantic occupancy prediction. SliceOcc utilizes pairs of slice queries and cross-attention mechanisms to extract planar features from input images. These local planar features are then fused to form a global scene representation, which is employed for indoor occupancy prediction. Experimental results on the EmbodiedScan dataset demonstrate that SliceOcc achieves a mIoU of 15.45% across 81 indoor categories, setting a new state-of-the-art performance among RGB camera-based models for indoor 3D semantic occupancy prediction. Code is available at https://github.com/NorthSummer/SliceOcc.
2501.16688
MME-Industry: A Cross-Industry Multimodal Evaluation Benchmark
cs.CL
With the rapid advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), numerous evaluation benchmarks have emerged. However, comprehensive assessments of their performance across diverse industrial applications remain limited. In this paper, we introduce MME-Industry, a novel benchmark designed specifically for evaluating MLLMs in industrial settings.The benchmark encompasses 21 distinct domain, comprising 1050 question-answer pairs with 50 questions per domain. To ensure data integrity and prevent potential leakage from public datasets, all question-answer pairs were manually crafted and validated by domain experts. Besides, the benchmark's complexity is effectively enhanced by incorporating non-OCR questions that can be answered directly, along with tasks requiring specialized domain knowledge. Moreover, we provide both Chinese and English versions of the benchmark, enabling comparative analysis of MLLMs' capabilities across these languages. Our findings contribute valuable insights into MLLMs' practical industrial applications and illuminate promising directions for future model optimization research.
2501.16689
MACI: Multi-Agent Collaborative Intelligence for Adaptive Reasoning and Temporal Planning
cs.AI
Artificial intelligence requires deliberate reasoning, temporal awareness, and effective constraint management, capabilities traditional LLMs often lack due to their reliance on pattern matching, limited self-verification, and inconsistent constraint handling. We introduce Multi-Agent Collaborative Intelligence (MACI), a framework comprising three key components: 1) a meta-planner (MP) that identifies, formulates, and refines all roles and constraints of a task (e.g., wedding planning) while generating a dependency graph, with common-sense augmentation to ensure realistic and practical constraints; 2) a collection of agents to facilitate planning and address task-specific requirements; and 3) a run-time monitor that manages plan adjustments as needed. By decoupling planning from validation, maintaining minimal agent context, and integrating common-sense reasoning, MACI overcomes the aforementioned limitations and demonstrates robust performance in two scheduling problems.
2501.16690
Quantum advantage in decentralized control of POMDPs: A control-theoretic view of the Mermin-Peres square
math.OC cs.IT cs.SY eess.SY math.IT quant-ph
Consider a decentralized partially-observed Markov decision problem (POMDP) with multiple cooperative agents aiming to maximize a long-term-average reward criterion. We observe that the availability, at a fixed rate, of entangled states of a product quantum system between the agents, where each agent has access to one of the component systems, can result in strictly improved performance even compared to the scenario where common randomness is provided to the agents, i.e. there is a quantum advantage in decentralized control. This observation comes from a simple reinterpretation of the conclusions of the well-known Mermin-Peres square, which underpins the Mermin-Peres game. While quantum advantage has been demonstrated earlier in one-shot team problems of this kind, it is notable that there are examples where there is a quantum advantage for the one-shot criterion but it disappears in the dynamical scenario. The presence of a quantum advantage in dynamical scenarios is thus seen to be a novel finding relative to the current state of knowledge about the achievable performance in decentralized control problems. This paper is dedicated to the memory of Pravin P. Varaiya.
2501.16692
Optimizing Code Runtime Performance through Context-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation
cs.SE cs.AI
Optimizing software performance through automated code refinement offers a promising avenue for enhancing execution speed and efficiency. Despite recent advancements in LLMs, a significant gap remains in their ability to perform in-depth program analysis. This study introduces AUTOPATCH, an in-context learning approach designed to bridge this gap by enabling LLMs to automatically generate optimized code. Inspired by how programmers learn and apply knowledge to optimize software, AUTOPATCH incorporates three key components: (1) an analogy-driven framework to align LLM optimization with human cognitive processes, (2) a unified approach that integrates historical code examples and CFG analysis for context-aware learning, and (3) an automated pipeline for generating optimized code through in-context prompting. Experimental results demonstrate that AUTOPATCH achieves a 7.3% improvement in execution efficiency over GPT-4o across common generated executable code, highlighting its potential to advance automated program runtime optimization.
2501.16698
3D-MoE: A Mixture-of-Experts Multi-modal LLM for 3D Vision and Pose Diffusion via Rectified Flow
cs.CL cs.CV cs.RO
3D vision and spatial reasoning have long been recognized as preferable for accurately perceiving our three-dimensional world, especially when compared with traditional visual reasoning based on 2D images. Due to the difficulties in collecting high-quality 3D data, research in this area has only recently gained momentum. With the advent of powerful large language models (LLMs), multi-modal LLMs for 3D vision have been developed over the past few years. However, most of these models focus primarily on the vision encoder for 3D data. In this paper, we propose converting existing densely activated LLMs into mixture-of-experts (MoE) models, which have proven effective for multi-modal data processing. In addition to leveraging these models' instruction-following capabilities, we further enable embodied task planning by attaching a diffusion head, Pose-DiT, that employs a novel rectified flow diffusion scheduler. Experimental results on 3D question answering and task-planning tasks demonstrate that our 3D-MoE framework achieves improved performance with fewer activated parameters.
2501.16700
Determining Mosaic Resilience in Sugarcane Plants using Hyperspectral Images
cs.CV cs.AI
Sugarcane mosaic disease poses a serious threat to the Australian sugarcane industry, leading to yield losses of up to 30% in susceptible varieties. Existing manual inspection methods for detecting mosaic resilience are inefficient and impractical for large-scale application. This study introduces a novel approach using hyperspectral imaging and machine learning to detect mosaic resilience by leveraging global feature representation from local spectral patches. Hyperspectral data were collected from eight sugarcane varieties under controlled and field conditions. Local spectral patches were analyzed to capture spatial and spectral variations, which were then aggregated into global feature representations using a ResNet18 deep learning architecture. While classical methods like Support Vector Machines struggled to utilize spatial-spectral relationships effectively, the deep learning model achieved high classification accuracy, demonstrating its capacity to identify mosaic resilience from fine-grained hyperspectral data. This approach enhances early detection capabilities, enabling more efficient management of susceptible strains and contributing to sustainable sugarcane production.
2501.16704
DFCon: Attention-Driven Supervised Contrastive Learning for Robust Deepfake Detection
cs.CV cs.CR cs.LG eess.IV eess.SP
This report presents our approach for the IEEE SP Cup 2025: Deepfake Face Detection in the Wild (DFWild-Cup), focusing on detecting deepfakes across diverse datasets. Our methodology employs advanced backbone models, including MaxViT, CoAtNet, and EVA-02, fine-tuned using supervised contrastive loss to enhance feature separation. These models were specifically chosen for their complementary strengths. Integration of convolution layers and strided attention in MaxViT is well-suited for detecting local features. In contrast, hybrid use of convolution and attention mechanisms in CoAtNet effectively captures multi-scale features. Robust pretraining with masked image modeling of EVA-02 excels at capturing global features. After training, we freeze the parameters of these models and train the classification heads. Finally, a majority voting ensemble is employed to combine the predictions from these models, improving robustness and generalization to unseen scenarios. The proposed system addresses the challenges of detecting deepfakes in real-world conditions and achieves a commendable accuracy of 95.83% on the validation dataset.
2501.16714
Separate Motion from Appearance: Customizing Motion via Customizing Text-to-Video Diffusion Models
cs.CV cs.AI
Motion customization aims to adapt the diffusion model (DM) to generate videos with the motion specified by a set of video clips with the same motion concept. To realize this goal, the adaptation of DM should be possible to model the specified motion concept, without compromising the ability to generate diverse appearances. Thus, the key to solving this problem lies in how to separate the motion concept from the appearance in the adaptation process of DM. Typical previous works explore different ways to represent and insert a motion concept into large-scale pretrained text-to-video diffusion models, e.g., learning a motion LoRA, using latent noise residuals, etc. While those methods can encode the motion concept, they also inevitably encode the appearance in the reference videos, resulting in weakened appearance generation capability. In this paper, we follow the typical way to learn a motion LoRA to encode the motion concept, but propose two novel strategies to enhance motion-appearance separation, including temporal attention purification (TAP) and appearance highway (AH). Specifically, we assume that in the temporal attention module, the pretrained Value embeddings are sufficient to serve as basic components needed by producing a new motion. Thus, in TAP, we choose only to reshape the temporal attention with motion LoRAs so that Value embeddings can be reorganized to produce a new motion. Further, in AH, we alter the starting point of each skip connection in U-Net from the output of each temporal attention module to the output of each spatial attention module. Extensive experiments demonstrate that compared to previous works, our method can generate videos with appearance more aligned with the text descriptions and motion more consistent with the reference videos.
2501.16716
Point Cloud Upsampling as Statistical Shape Model for Pelvic
cs.CV
We propose a novel framework that integrates medical image segmentation and point cloud upsampling for accurate shape reconstruction of pelvic models. Using the SAM-Med3D model for segmentation and a point cloud upsampling network trained on the MedShapeNet dataset, our method transforms sparse medical imaging data into high-resolution 3D bone models. This framework leverages prior knowledge of anatomical shapes, achieving smoother and more complete reconstructions. Quantitative evaluations using metrics such as Chamfer Distance etc, demonstrate the effectiveness of the point cloud upsampling in pelvic model. Our approach offers potential applications in reconstructing other skeletal structures, providing a robust solution for medical image analysis and statistical shape modeling.
2501.16717
Strawberry Robotic Operation Interface: An Open-Source Device for Collecting Dexterous Manipulation Data in Robotic Strawberry Farming
cs.RO
The strawberry farming is labor-intensive, particularly in tasks requiring dexterous manipulation such as picking occluded strawberries. To address this challenge, we present the Strawberry Robotic Operation Interface (SROI), an open-source device designed for collecting dexterous manipulation data in robotic strawberry farming. The SROI features a handheld unit with a modular end effector, a stereo robotic camera, enabling the easy collection of demonstration data in field environments. A data post-processing pipeline is introduced to extract spatial trajectories and gripper states from the collected data. Additionally, we release an open-source dataset of strawberry picking demonstrations to facilitate research in dexterous robotic manipulation. The SROI represents a step toward automating complex strawberry farming tasks, reducing reliance on manual labor.
2501.16718
Outlier Synthesis via Hamiltonian Monte Carlo for Out-of-Distribution Detection
cs.LG
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is crucial for developing trustworthy and reliable machine learning systems. Recent advances in training with auxiliary OOD data demonstrate efficacy in enhancing detection capabilities. Nonetheless, these methods heavily rely on acquiring a large pool of high-quality natural outliers. Some prior methods try to alleviate this problem by synthesizing virtual outliers but suffer from either poor quality or high cost due to the monotonous sampling strategy and the heavy-parameterized generative models. In this paper, we overcome all these problems by proposing the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo Outlier Synthesis (HamOS) framework, which views the synthesis process as sampling from Markov chains. Based solely on the in-distribution data, the Markov chains can extensively traverse the feature space and generate diverse and representative outliers, hence exposing the model to miscellaneous potential OOD scenarios. The Hamiltonian Monte Carlo with sampling acceptance rate almost close to 1 also makes our framework enjoy great efficiency. By empirically competing with SOTA baselines on both standard and large-scale benchmarks, we verify the efficacy and efficiency of our proposed HamOS.
2501.16719
Safety-Critical Control for Aerial Physical Interaction in Uncertain Environment
cs.RO
Aerial manipulation for safe physical interaction with their environments is gaining significant momentum in robotics research. In this paper, we present a disturbance-observer-based safety-critical control for a fully actuated aerial manipulator interacting with both static and dynamic structures. Our approach centers on a safety filter that dynamically adjusts the desired trajectory of the vehicle's pose, accounting for the aerial manipulator's dynamics, the disturbance observer's structure, and motor thrust limits. We provide rigorous proof that the proposed safety filter ensures the forward invariance of the safety set - representing motor thrust limits - even in the presence of disturbance estimation errors. To demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing control strategies for aerial physical interaction, we perform comparative experiments involving complex tasks, such as pushing against a static structure and pulling a plug firmly attached to an electric socket. Furthermore, to highlight its repeatability in scenarios with sudden dynamic changes, we perform repeated tests of pushing a movable cart and extracting a plug from a socket. These experiments confirm that our method not only outperforms existing methods but also excels in handling tasks with rapid dynamic variations.
2501.16720
One Head Eight Arms: Block Matrix based Low Rank Adaptation for CLIP-based Few-Shot Learning
cs.CV cs.AI
Recent advancements in fine-tuning Vision-Language Foundation Models (VLMs) have garnered significant attention for their effectiveness in downstream few-shot learning tasks.While these recent approaches exhibits some performance improvements, they often suffer from excessive training parameters and high computational costs. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Block matrix-based low-rank adaptation framework, called Block-LoRA, for fine-tuning VLMs on downstream few-shot tasks. Inspired by recent work on Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), Block-LoRA partitions the original low-rank decomposition matrix of LoRA into a series of sub-matrices while sharing all down-projection sub-matrices. This structure not only reduces the number of training parameters, but also transforms certain complex matrix multiplication operations into simpler matrix addition, significantly lowering the computational cost of fine-tuning. Notably, Block-LoRA enables fine-tuning CLIP on the ImageNet few-shot benchmark using a single 24GB GPU. We also show that Block-LoRA has the more tighter bound of generalization error than vanilla LoRA. Without bells and whistles, extensive experiments demonstrate that Block-LoRA achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art CLIP-based few-shot methods, while maintaining a low training parameters count and reduced computational overhead.
2501.16722
Hypergraph Diffusion for High-Order Recommender Systems
cs.IR cs.AI cs.DB cs.LG cs.SI
Recommender systems rely on Collaborative Filtering (CF) to predict user preferences by leveraging patterns in historical user-item interactions. While traditional CF methods primarily focus on learning compact vector embeddings for users and items, graph neural network (GNN)-based approaches have emerged as a powerful alternative, utilizing the structure of user-item interaction graphs to enhance recommendation accuracy. However, existing GNN-based models, such as LightGCN and UltraGCN, often struggle with two major limitations: an inability to fully account for heterophilic interactions, where users engage with diverse item categories, and the over-smoothing problem in multi-layer GNNs, which hinders their ability to model complex, high-order relationships. To address these gaps, we introduce WaveHDNN, an innovative wavelet-enhanced hypergraph diffusion framework. WaveHDNN integrates a Heterophily-aware Collaborative Encoder, designed to capture user-item interactions across diverse categories, with a Multi-scale Group-wise Structure Encoder, which leverages wavelet transforms to effectively model localized graph structures. Additionally, cross-view contrastive learning is employed to maintain robust and consistent representations. Experiments on benchmark datasets validate the efficacy of WaveHDNN, demonstrating its superior ability to capture both heterophilic and localized structural information, leading to improved recommendation performance.
2501.16724
B-RIGHT: Benchmark Re-evaluation for Integrity in Generalized Human-Object Interaction Testing
cs.CV
Human-object interaction (HOI) is an essential problem in artificial intelligence (AI) which aims to understand the visual world that involves complex relationships between humans and objects. However, current benchmarks such as HICO-DET face the following limitations: (1) severe class imbalance and (2) varying number of train and test sets for certain classes. These issues can potentially lead to either inflation or deflation of model performance during evaluation, ultimately undermining the reliability of evaluation scores. In this paper, we propose a systematic approach to develop a new class-balanced dataset, Benchmark Re-evaluation for Integrity in Generalized Human-object Interaction Testing (B-RIGHT), that addresses these imbalanced problems. B-RIGHT achieves class balance by leveraging balancing algorithm and automated generation-and-filtering processes, ensuring an equal number of instances for each HOI class. Furthermore, we design a balanced zero-shot test set to systematically evaluate models on unseen scenario. Re-evaluating existing models using B-RIGHT reveals substantial the reduction of score variance and changes in performance rankings compared to conventional HICO-DET. Our experiments demonstrate that evaluation under balanced conditions ensure more reliable and fair model comparisons.
2501.16726
Bridging Neural Networks and Wireless Systems with MIMO-OFDM Semantic Communications
cs.IT cs.AI cs.NI math.IT
Semantic communications aim to enhance transmission efficiency by jointly optimizing source coding, channel coding, and modulation. While prior research has demonstrated promising performance in simulations, real-world implementations often face significant challenges, including noise variability and nonlinear distortions, leading to performance gaps. This article investigates these challenges in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based semantic communication system, focusing on the practical impacts of power amplifier (PA) nonlinearity and peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) variations. Our analysis identifies frequency selectivity of the actual channel as a critical factor in performance degradation and demonstrates that targeted mitigation strategies can enable semantic systems to approach theoretical performance. By addressing key limitations in existing designs, we provide actionable insights for advancing semantic communications in practical wireless environments. This work establishes a foundation for bridging the gap between theoretical models and real-world deployment, highlighting essential considerations for system design and optimization.
2501.16727
xJailbreak: Representation Space Guided Reinforcement Learning for Interpretable LLM Jailbreaking
cs.CL
Safety alignment mechanism are essential for preventing large language models (LLMs) from generating harmful information or unethical content. However, cleverly crafted prompts can bypass these safety measures without accessing the model's internal parameters, a phenomenon known as black-box jailbreak. Existing heuristic black-box attack methods, such as genetic algorithms, suffer from limited effectiveness due to their inherent randomness, while recent reinforcement learning (RL) based methods often lack robust and informative reward signals. To address these challenges, we propose a novel black-box jailbreak method leveraging RL, which optimizes prompt generation by analyzing the embedding proximity between benign and malicious prompts. This approach ensures that the rewritten prompts closely align with the intent of the original prompts while enhancing the attack's effectiveness. Furthermore, we introduce a comprehensive jailbreak evaluation framework incorporating keywords, intent matching, and answer validation to provide a more rigorous and holistic assessment of jailbreak success. Experimental results show the superiority of our approach, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on several prominent open and closed-source LLMs, including Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, Llama3.1-8B-Instruct, and GPT-4o-0806. Our method sets a new benchmark in jailbreak attack effectiveness, highlighting potential vulnerabilities in LLMs. The codebase for this work is available at https://github.com/Aegis1863/xJailbreak.
2501.16728
Optimizing Efficiency of Mixed Traffic through Reinforcement Learning: A Topology-Independent Approach and Benchmark
cs.RO
This paper presents a mixed traffic control policy designed to optimize traffic efficiency across diverse road topologies, addressing issues of congestion prevalent in urban environments. A model-free reinforcement learning (RL) approach is developed to manage large-scale traffic flow, using data collected by autonomous vehicles to influence human-driven vehicles. A real-world mixed traffic control benchmark is also released, which includes 444 scenarios from 20 countries, representing a wide geographic distribution and covering a variety of scenarios and road topologies. This benchmark serves as a foundation for future research, providing a realistic simulation environment for the development of effective policies. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and adaptability of the proposed method, achieving better performance than existing traffic control methods in both intersection and roundabout scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first project to introduce a real-world complex scenarios mixed traffic control benchmark. Videos and code of our work are available at https://sites.google.com/berkeley.edu/mixedtrafficplus/home
2501.16729
On the Interplay Between Sparsity and Training in Deep Reinforcement Learning
cs.LG cs.AI
We study the benefits of different sparse architectures for deep reinforcement learning. In particular, we focus on image-based domains where spatially-biased and fully-connected architectures are common. Using these and several other architectures of equal capacity, we show that sparse structure has a significant effect on learning performance. We also observe that choosing the best sparse architecture for a given domain depends on whether the hidden layer weights are fixed or learned.
2501.16730
Growing the Efficient Frontier on Panel Trees
cs.LG q-fin.PR stat.ML
We introduce a new class of tree-based models, P-Trees, for analyzing (unbalanced) panel of individual asset returns, generalizing high-dimensional sorting with economic guidance and interpretability. Under the mean-variance efficient framework, P-Trees construct test assets that significantly advance the efficient frontier compared to commonly used test assets, with alphas unexplained by benchmark pricing models. P-Tree tangency portfolios also constitute traded factors, recovering the pricing kernel and outperforming popular observable and latent factor models for investments and cross-sectional pricing. Finally, P-Trees capture the complexity of asset returns with sparsity, achieving out-of-sample Sharpe ratios close to those attained only by over-parameterized large models.
2501.16733
Dream to Drive with Predictive Individual World Model
cs.RO cs.CV cs.LG
It is still a challenging topic to make reactive driving behaviors in complex urban environments as road users' intentions are unknown. Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) offers great potential to learn a reactive policy by constructing a world model that can provide informative states and imagination training. However, a critical limitation in relevant research lies in the scene-level reconstruction representation learning, which may overlook key interactive vehicles and hardly model the interactive features among vehicles and their long-term intentions. Therefore, this paper presents a novel MBRL method with a predictive individual world model (PIWM) for autonomous driving. PIWM describes the driving environment from an individual-level perspective and captures vehicles' interactive relations and their intentions via trajectory prediction task. Meanwhile, a behavior policy is learned jointly with PIWM. It is trained in PIWM's imagination and effectively navigates in the urban driving scenes leveraging intention-aware latent states. The proposed method is trained and evaluated on simulation environments built upon real-world challenging interactive scenarios. Compared with popular model-free and state-of-the-art model-based reinforcement learning methods, experimental results show that the proposed method achieves the best performance in terms of safety and efficiency.
2501.16734
Distilling Large Language Models for Network Active Queue Management
cs.NI cs.AI
The growing complexity of network traffic and demand for ultra-low latency communication require smarter packet traffic management. Existing Deep Learning-based queuing approaches struggle with dynamic network scenarios and demand high engineering effort. We propose AQM-LLM, distilling Large Language Models (LLMs) with few-shot learning, contextual understanding, and pattern recognition to improve Active Queue Management (AQM) [RFC 9330] with minimal manual effort. We consider a specific case where AQM is Low Latency, Low Loss, and Scalable Throughput (L4S) and our design of AQM-LLM builds on speculative decoding and reinforcement-based distilling of LLM by tackling congestion prevention in the L4S architecture using Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) [RFC 9331] and periodic packet dropping. We develop a new open-source experimental platform by executing L4S-AQM on FreeBSD-14, providing interoperable modules to support LLM integration and facilitate IETF recognition through wider testing. Our extensive evaluations show L4S-LLM enhances queue management, prevents congestion, reduces latency, and boosts network performance, showcasing LLMs' adaptability and efficiency in uplifting AQM systems.
2501.16735
Stochastic Population Update Provably Needs An Archive in Evolutionary Multi-objective Optimization
cs.NE
Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have been widely applied to multi-objective optimization, due to their nature of population-based search. Population update, a key component in multi-objective EAs (MOEAs), is usually performed in a greedy, deterministic manner. However, recent studies have questioned this practice and shown that stochastic population update (SPU), which allows inferior solutions have a chance to be preserved, can help MOEAs jump out of local optima more easily. While introducing randomness in the population update process boosts the exploration of MOEAs, there is a drawback that the population may not always preserve the very best solutions found, thus entailing a large population. Intuitively, a possible solution to this issue is to introduce an archive that stores the best solutions ever found. In this paper, we theoretically show that using an archive can allow a small population and accelerate the search of SPU-based MOEAs substantially. Specifically, we analyze the expected running time of two well-established MOEAs, SMS-EMOA and NSGA-II, with SPU for solving a commonly studied bi-objective problem OneJumpZeroJump, and prove that using an archive can bring (even exponential) speedups. The comparison between SMS-EMOA and NSGA-II also suggests that the $(\mu+\mu)$ update mode may be more suitable for SPU than the $(\mu+1)$ update mode. Furthermore, our derived running time bounds for using SPU alone are significantly tighter than previously known ones. Our theoretical findings are also empirically validated on a well-known practical problem, the multi-objective traveling salesperson problem. We hope this work may provide theoretical support to explore different ideas of designing algorithms in evolutionary multi-objective optimization.
2501.16737
Consistency Diffusion Models for Single-Image 3D Reconstruction with Priors
cs.CV
This paper delves into the study of 3D point cloud reconstruction from a single image. Our objective is to develop the Consistency Diffusion Model, exploring synergistic 2D and 3D priors in the Bayesian framework to ensure superior consistency in the reconstruction process, a challenging yet critical requirement in this field. Specifically, we introduce a pioneering training framework under diffusion models that brings two key innovations. First, we convert 3D structural priors derived from the initial 3D point cloud as a bound term to increase evidence in the variational Bayesian framework, leveraging these robust intrinsic priors to tightly govern the diffusion training process and bolster consistency in reconstruction. Second, we extract and incorporate 2D priors from the single input image, projecting them onto the 3D point cloud to enrich the guidance for diffusion training. Our framework not only sidesteps potential model learning shifts that may arise from directly imposing additional constraints during training but also precisely transposes the 2D priors into the 3D domain. Extensive experimental evaluations reveal that our approach sets new benchmarks in both synthetic and real-world datasets. The code is included with the submission.
2501.16740
Efficient Knowledge Distillation of SAM for Medical Image Segmentation
eess.IV cs.AI cs.CV
The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has set a new standard in interactive image segmentation, offering robust performance across various tasks. However, its significant computational requirements limit its deployment in real-time or resource-constrained environments. To address these challenges, we propose a novel knowledge distillation approach, KD SAM, which incorporates both encoder and decoder optimization through a combination of Mean Squared Error (MSE) and Perceptual Loss. This dual-loss framework captures structural and semantic features, enabling the student model to maintain high segmentation accuracy while reducing computational complexity. Based on the model evaluation on datasets, including Kvasir-SEG, ISIC 2017, Fetal Head Ultrasound, and Breast Ultrasound, we demonstrate that KD SAM achieves comparable or superior performance to the baseline models, with significantly fewer parameters. KD SAM effectively balances segmentation accuracy and computational efficiency, making it well-suited for real-time medical image segmentation applications in resource-constrained environments.
2501.16743
Hierarchical Trajectory (Re)Planning for a Large Scale Swarm
cs.RO
We consider the trajectory replanning problem for a large-scale swarm in a cluttered environment. Our path planner replans for robots by utilizing a hierarchical approach, dividing the workspace, and computing collision-free paths for robots within each cell in parallel. Distributed trajectory optimization generates a deadlock-free trajectory for efficient execution and maintains the control feasibility even when the optimization fails. Our hierarchical approach combines the benefits of both centralized and decentralized methods, achieving a high task success rate while providing real-time replanning capability. Compared to decentralized approaches, our approach effectively avoids deadlocks and collisions, significantly increasing the task success rate. We demonstrate the real-time performance of our algorithm with up to 142 robots in simulation, and a representative 24 physical Crazyflie nano-quadrotor experiment.
2501.16744
LLM Assisted Anomaly Detection Service for Site Reliability Engineers: Enhancing Cloud Infrastructure Resilience
cs.LG cs.AI
This paper introduces a scalable Anomaly Detection Service with a generalizable API tailored for industrial time-series data, designed to assist Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) in managing cloud infrastructure. The service enables efficient anomaly detection in complex data streams, supporting proactive identification and resolution of issues. Furthermore, it presents an innovative approach to anomaly modeling in cloud infrastructure by utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) to understand key components, their failure modes, and behaviors. A suite of algorithms for detecting anomalies is offered in univariate and multivariate time series data, including regression-based, mixture-model-based, and semi-supervised approaches. We provide insights into the usage patterns of the service, with over 500 users and 200,000 API calls in a year. The service has been successfully applied in various industrial settings, including IoT-based AI applications. We have also evaluated our system on public anomaly benchmarks to show its effectiveness. By leveraging it, SREs can proactively identify potential issues before they escalate, reducing downtime and improving response times to incidents, ultimately enhancing the overall customer experience. We plan to extend the system to include time series foundation models, enabling zero-shot anomaly detection capabilities.
2501.16745
Toward Relative Positional Encoding in Spiking Transformers
cs.NE
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are bio-inspired networks that model how neurons in the brain communicate through discrete spikes, which have great potential in various tasks due to their energy efficiency and temporal processing capabilities. SNNs with self-attention mechanisms (Spiking Transformers) have recently shown great advancements in various tasks such as sequential modeling and image classifications. However, integrating positional information, which is essential for capturing sequential relationships in data, remains a challenge in Spiking Transformers. In this paper, we introduce an approximate method for relative positional encoding (RPE) in Spiking Transformers, leveraging Gray Code as the foundation for our approach. We provide comprehensive proof of the method's effectiveness in partially capturing relative positional information for sequential tasks. Additionally, we extend our RPE approach by adapting it to a two-dimensional form suitable for image patch processing. We evaluate the proposed RPE methods on several tasks, including time series forecasting, text classification, and patch-based image classification. Our experimental results demonstrate that the incorporation of RPE significantly enhances performance by effectively capturing relative positional information.
2501.16748
Through the Prism of Culture: Evaluating LLMs' Understanding of Indian Subcultures and Traditions
cs.CL
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable advancements but also raise concerns about cultural bias, often reflecting dominant narratives at the expense of under-represented subcultures. In this study, we evaluate the capacity of LLMs to recognize and accurately respond to the Little Traditions within Indian society, encompassing localized cultural practices and subcultures such as caste, kinship, marriage, and religion. Through a series of case studies, we assess whether LLMs can balance the interplay between dominant Great Traditions and localized Little Traditions. We explore various prompting strategies and further investigate whether using prompts in regional languages enhances the models cultural sensitivity and response quality. Our findings reveal that while LLMs demonstrate an ability to articulate cultural nuances, they often struggle to apply this understanding in practical, context-specific scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to analyze LLMs engagement with Indian subcultures, offering critical insights into the challenges of embedding cultural diversity in AI systems.
2501.16750
HateBench: Benchmarking Hate Speech Detectors on LLM-Generated Content and Hate Campaigns
cs.CR cs.LG
Large Language Models (LLMs) have raised increasing concerns about their misuse in generating hate speech. Among all the efforts to address this issue, hate speech detectors play a crucial role. However, the effectiveness of different detectors against LLM-generated hate speech remains largely unknown. In this paper, we propose HateBench, a framework for benchmarking hate speech detectors on LLM-generated hate speech. We first construct a hate speech dataset of 7,838 samples generated by six widely-used LLMs covering 34 identity groups, with meticulous annotations by three labelers. We then assess the effectiveness of eight representative hate speech detectors on the LLM-generated dataset. Our results show that while detectors are generally effective in identifying LLM-generated hate speech, their performance degrades with newer versions of LLMs. We also reveal the potential of LLM-driven hate campaigns, a new threat that LLMs bring to the field of hate speech detection. By leveraging advanced techniques like adversarial attacks and model stealing attacks, the adversary can intentionally evade the detector and automate hate campaigns online. The most potent adversarial attack achieves an attack success rate of 0.966, and its attack efficiency can be further improved by $13-21\times$ through model stealing attacks with acceptable attack performance. We hope our study can serve as a call to action for the research community and platform moderators to fortify defenses against these emerging threats.
2501.16751
DebugAgent: Efficient and Interpretable Error Slice Discovery for Comprehensive Model Debugging
cs.CV cs.AI
Despite the significant success of deep learning models in computer vision, they often exhibit systematic failures on specific data subsets, known as error slices. Identifying and mitigating these error slices is crucial to enhancing model robustness and reliability in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we introduce DebugAgent, an automated framework for error slice discovery and model repair. DebugAgent first generates task-specific visual attributes to highlight instances prone to errors through an interpretable and structured process. It then employs an efficient slice enumeration algorithm to systematically identify error slices, overcoming the combinatorial challenges that arise during slice exploration. Additionally, DebugAgent extends its capabilities by predicting error slices beyond the validation set, addressing a key limitation of prior approaches. Extensive experiments across multiple domains, including image classification, pose estimation, and object detection - show that DebugAgent not only improves the coherence and precision of identified error slices but also significantly enhances the model repair capabilities.
2501.16753
Overcoming Semantic Dilution in Transformer-Based Next Frame Prediction
cs.CV cs.AI
Next-frame prediction in videos is crucial for applications such as autonomous driving, object tracking, and motion prediction. The primary challenge in next-frame prediction lies in effectively capturing and processing both spatial and temporal information from previous video sequences. The transformer architecture, known for its prowess in handling sequence data, has made remarkable progress in this domain. However, transformer-based next-frame prediction models face notable issues: (a) The multi-head self-attention (MHSA) mechanism requires the input embedding to be split into $N$ chunks, where $N$ is the number of heads. Each segment captures only a fraction of the original embeddings information, which distorts the representation of the embedding in the latent space, resulting in a semantic dilution problem; (b) These models predict the embeddings of the next frames rather than the frames themselves, but the loss function based on the errors of the reconstructed frames, not the predicted embeddings -- this creates a discrepancy between the training objective and the model output. We propose a Semantic Concentration Multi-Head Self-Attention (SCMHSA) architecture, which effectively mitigates semantic dilution in transformer-based next-frame prediction. Additionally, we introduce a loss function that optimizes SCMHSA in the latent space, aligning the training objective more closely with the model output. Our method demonstrates superior performance compared to the original transformer-based predictors.
2501.16754
SSF-PAN: Semantic Scene Flow-Based Perception for Autonomous Navigation in Traffic Scenarios
cs.RO cs.CV
Vehicle detection and localization in complex traffic scenarios pose significant challenges due to the interference of moving objects. Traditional methods often rely on outlier exclusions or semantic segmentations, which suffer from low computational efficiency and accuracy. The proposed SSF-PAN can achieve the functionalities of LiDAR point cloud based object detection/localization and SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) with high computational efficiency and accuracy, enabling map-free navigation frameworks. The novelty of this work is threefold: 1) developing a neural network which can achieve segmentation among static and dynamic objects within the scene flows with different motion features, that is, semantic scene flow (SSF); 2) developing an iterative framework which can further optimize the quality of input scene flows and output segmentation results; 3) developing a scene flow-based navigation platform which can test the performance of the SSF perception system in the simulation environment. The proposed SSF-PAN method is validated using the SUScape-CARLA and the KITTI datasets, as well as on the CARLA simulator. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms traditional methods in terms of scene flow computation accuracy, moving object detection accuracy, computational efficiency, and autonomous navigation effectiveness.
2501.16756
Random Forest Calibration
cs.LG
The Random Forest (RF) classifier is often claimed to be relatively well calibrated when compared with other machine learning methods. Moreover, the existing literature suggests that traditional calibration methods, such as isotonic regression, do not substantially enhance the calibration of RF probability estimates unless supplied with extensive calibration data sets, which can represent a significant obstacle in cases of limited data availability. Nevertheless, there seems to be no comprehensive study validating such claims and systematically comparing state-of-the-art calibration methods specifically for RF. To close this gap, we investigate a broad spectrum of calibration methods tailored to or at least applicable to RF, ranging from scaling techniques to more advanced algorithms. Our results based on synthetic as well as real-world data unravel the intricacies of RF probability estimates, scrutinize the impacts of hyper-parameters, compare calibration methods in a systematic way. We show that a well-optimized RF performs as well as or better than leading calibration approaches.