JohnVitz/NLP_Assignment_3_part_3 · Datasets at Hugging Face

2501.03151

Large language models for artificial general intelligence (AGI): A survey of foundational principles and approaches

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems based on large-scale pretrained foundation models (PFMs) such as vision-language models, large language models (LLMs), diffusion models and vision-language-action (VLA) models have demonstrated the ability to solve complex and truly non-trivial AI problems in a wide variety of domains and contexts. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs), in particular, learn from vast and diverse data sources, allowing rich and nuanced representations of the world and, thereby, providing extensive capabilities, including the ability to reason, engage in meaningful dialog; collaborate with humans and other agents to jointly solve complex problems; and understand social and emotional aspects of humans. Despite this impressive feat, the cognitive abilities of state-of-the-art LLMs trained on large-scale datasets are still superficial and brittle. Consequently, generic LLMs are severely limited in their generalist capabilities. A number of foundational problems -- embodiment, symbol grounding, causality and memory -- are required to be addressed for LLMs to attain human-level general intelligence. These concepts are more aligned with human cognition and provide LLMs with inherent human-like cognitive properties that support the realization of physically-plausible, semantically meaningful, flexible and more generalizable knowledge and intelligence. In this work, we discuss the aforementioned foundational issues and survey state-of-the art approaches for implementing these concepts in LLMs. Specifically, we discuss how the principles of embodiment, symbol grounding, causality and memory can be leveraged toward the attainment of artificial general intelligence (AGI) in an organic manner.

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false

522,775

2302.09176

Generative Ornstein-Uhlenbeck Markets via Geometric Deep Learning

We consider the problem of simultaneously approximating the conditional distribution of market prices and their log returns with a single machine learning model. We show that an instance of the GDN model of Kratsios and Papon (2022) solves this problem without having prior assumptions on the market's "clipped" log returns, other than that they follow a generalized Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process with a priori unknown dynamics. We provide universal approximation guarantees for these conditional distributions and contingent claims with a Lipschitz payoff function.

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false

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346,309

2112.13396

Energy-Efficient Trajectory Design for UAV-Aided Maritime Data Collection in Wind

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), especially fixed-wing ones that withstand strong winds, have great potential for oceanic exploration and research. This paper studies a UAV-aided maritime data collection system with a fixed-wing UAV dispatched to collect data from marine buoys. We aim to minimize the UAV's energy consumption in completing the task by jointly optimizing the communication time scheduling among the buoys and the UAV's flight trajectory subject to wind effect. The conventional successive convex approximation (SCA) method can provide efficient sub-optimal solutions for collecting small/moderate data volume, whereas the solution heavily relies on trajectory initialization and has not explicitly considered wind effect, while the computational/trajectory complexity both become prohibitive for the task with large data volume. To this end, we propose a new cyclical trajectory design framework with tailored initialization algorithm that can handle arbitrary data volume efficiently, as well as a hybrid offline-online (HO2) design that leverages convex stochastic programming (CSP) offline based on wind statistics, and refines the solution by adapting online to real-time wind velocity. Numerical results show that our optimized trajectory can better adapt to various setups with different target data volume and buoys' topology as well as various wind speed/direction/variance compared with benchmark schemes.

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273,230

2104.14963

Determining Chess Game State From an Image

Identifying the configuration of chess pieces from an image of a chessboard is a problem in computer vision that has not yet been solved accurately. However, it is important for helping amateur chess players improve their games by facilitating automatic computer analysis without the overhead of manually entering the pieces. Current approaches are limited by the lack of large datasets and are not designed to adapt to unseen chess sets. This paper puts forth a new dataset synthesised from a 3D model that is an order of magnitude larger than existing ones. Trained on this dataset, a novel end-to-end chess recognition system is presented that combines traditional computer vision techniques with deep learning. It localises the chessboard using a RANSAC-based algorithm that computes a projective transformation of the board onto a regular grid. Using two convolutional neural networks, it then predicts an occupancy mask for the squares in the warped image and finally classifies the pieces. The described system achieves an error rate of 0.23% per square on the test set, 28 times better than the current state of the art. Further, a few-shot transfer learning approach is developed that is able to adapt the inference system to a previously unseen chess set using just two photos of the starting position, obtaining a per-square accuracy of 99.83% on images of that new chess set. The code, dataset, and trained models are made available online.

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233,011

2306.05101

Regularizing with Pseudo-Negatives for Continual Self-Supervised Learning

We introduce a novel Pseudo-Negative Regularization (PNR) framework for effective continual self-supervised learning (CSSL). Our PNR leverages pseudo-negatives obtained through model-based augmentation in a way that newly learned representations may not contradict what has been learned in the past. Specifically, for the InfoNCE-based contrastive learning methods, we define symmetric pseudo-negatives obtained from current and previous models and use them in both main and regularization loss terms. Furthermore, we extend this idea to non-contrastive learning methods which do not inherently rely on negatives. For these methods, a pseudo-negative is defined as the output from the previous model for a differently augmented version of the anchor sample and is asymmetrically applied to the regularization term. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our PNR framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in representation learning during CSSL by effectively balancing the trade-off between plasticity and stability.

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372,053

2207.11321

A flexible PageRank-based graph embedding framework closely related to spectral eigenvector embeddings

We study a simple embedding technique based on a matrix of personalized PageRank vectors seeded on a random set of nodes. We show that the embedding produced by the element-wise logarithm of this matrix (1) are related to the spectral embedding for a class of graphs where spectral embeddings are significant, and hence useful representation of the data, (2) can be done for the entire network or a smaller part of it, which enables precise local representation, and (3) uses a relatively small number of PageRank vectors compared to the size of the networks. Most importantly, the general nature of this embedding strategy opens up many emerging applications, where eigenvector and spectral techniques may not be well established, to the PageRank-based relatives. For instance, similar techniques can be used on PageRank vectors from hypergraphs to get "spectral-like" embeddings.

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309,587

1309.7937

Stationary Cycling Induced by Switched Functional Electrical Stimulation Control

Functional electrical stimulation (FES) is used to activate the dysfunctional lower limb muscles of individuals with neuromuscular disorders to produce cycling as a means of exercise and rehabilitation. However, FES-cycling is still metabolically inefficient and yields low power output at the cycle crank compared to able-bodied cycling. Previous literature suggests that these problems are symptomatic of poor muscle control and non-physiological muscle fiber recruitment. The latter is a known problem with FES in general, and the former motivates investigation of better control methods for FES-cycling.In this paper, a stimulation pattern for quadriceps femoris-only FES-cycling is derived based on the effectiveness of knee joint torque in producing forward pedaling. In addition, a switched sliding-mode controller is designed for the uncertain, nonlinear cycle-rider system with autonomous state-dependent switching. The switched controller yields ultimately bounded tracking of a desired trajectory in the presence of an unknown, time-varying, bounded disturbance, provided a reverse dwell-time condition is satisfied by appropriate choice of the control gains and a sufficient desired cadence. Stability is derived through Lyapunov methods for switched systems, and experimental results demonstrate the performance of the switched control system under typical cycling conditions.

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27,435

2403.19365

EthioMT: Parallel Corpus for Low-resource Ethiopian Languages

Recent research in natural language processing (NLP) has achieved impressive performance in tasks such as machine translation (MT), news classification, and question-answering in high-resource languages. However, the performance of MT leaves much to be desired for low-resource languages. This is due to the smaller size of available parallel corpora in these languages, if such corpora are available at all. NLP in Ethiopian languages suffers from the same issues due to the unavailability of publicly accessible datasets for NLP tasks, including MT. To help the research community and foster research for Ethiopian languages, we introduce EthioMT -- a new parallel corpus for 15 languages. We also create a new benchmark by collecting a dataset for better-researched languages in Ethiopia. We evaluate the newly collected corpus and the benchmark dataset for 23 Ethiopian languages using transformer and fine-tuning approaches.

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442,315

2007.07698

Are Hyperbolic Representations in Graphs Created Equal?

Recently there was an increasing interest in applications of graph neural networks in non-Euclidean geometry; however, are non-Euclidean representations always useful for graph learning tasks? For different problems such as node classification and link prediction we compute hyperbolic embeddings and conclude that for tasks that require global prediction consistency it might be useful to use non-Euclidean embeddings, while for other tasks Euclidean models are superior. To do so we first fix an issue of the existing models associated with the optimization process at zero curvature. Current hyperbolic models deal with gradients at the origin in ad-hoc manner, which is inefficient and can lead to numerical instabilities. We solve the instabilities of kappa-Stereographic model at zero curvature cases and evaluate the approach of embedding graphs into the manifold in several graph representation learning tasks.

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false

187,413

1808.04547

Machine Learning for Heterogeneous Ultra-Dense Networks with Graphical Representations

Heterogeneous ultra-dense network (H-UDN) is envisioned as a promising solution to sustain the explosive mobile traffic demand through network densification. By placing access points, processors, and storage units as close as possible to mobile users, H-UDNs bring forth a number of advantages, including high spectral efficiency, high energy efficiency, and low latency. Nonetheless, the high density and diversity of network entities in H-UDNs introduce formidable design challenges in collaborative signal processing and resource management. This article illustrates the great potential of machine learning techniques in solving these challenges. In particular, we show how to utilize graphical representations of H-UDNs to design efficient machine learning algorithms.

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105,178

2004.07995

A generic ensemble based deep convolutional neural network for semi-supervised medical image segmentation

Deep learning based image segmentation has achieved the state-of-the-art performance in many medical applications such as lesion quantification, organ detection, etc. However, most of the methods rely on supervised learning, which require a large set of high-quality labeled data. Data annotation is generally an extremely time-consuming process. To address this problem, we propose a generic semi-supervised learning framework for image segmentation based on a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN). An encoder-decoder based DCNN is initially trained using a few annotated training samples. This initially trained model is then copied into sub-models and improved iteratively using random subsets of unlabeled data with pseudo labels generated from models trained in the previous iteration. The number of sub-models is gradually decreased to one in the final iteration. We evaluate the proposed method on a public grand-challenge dataset for skin lesion segmentation. Our method is able to significantly improve beyond fully supervised model learning by incorporating unlabeled data.

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false

172,928

2209.01279

Distributed Interval Observers for Bounded-Error LTI Systems

This paper proposes a novel distributed interval observer design for linear time-invariant (LTI) discrete-time systems subject to bounded disturbances. In the proposed observer algorithm, each agent in a networked group exchanges locally-computed framers or interval-valued state estimates with neighbors, and coordinates its update via an intersection operation. We show that the proposed framers are guaranteed to bound the true state trajectory of the system by construction, i.e., without imposing any additional assumptions or constraints. Moreover, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the collective stability of the distributed observer, i.e., to guarantee the uniform boundedness of the observer error sequence. In particular, we show that such conditions can be tractably satisfied through a constructive and distributed approach. Moreover, we provide an algorithm to verify some structural conditions for a given system, which guarantee the existence of the proposed observer. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method compared to an existing distributed observer in the literature.

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false

315,824

2111.13921

Transformed K-means Clustering

In this work we propose a clustering framework based on the paradigm of transform learning. In simple terms the representation from transform learning is used for K-means clustering; however, the problem is not solved in such a na\"ive piecemeal fashion. The K-means clustering loss is embedded into the transform learning framework and the joint problem is solved using the alternating direction method of multipliers. Results on document clustering show that our proposed approach improves over the state-of-the-art.

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268,429

2402.12366

A Critical Evaluation of AI Feedback for Aligning Large Language Models

Reinforcement learning with AI feedback (RLAIF) is a popular paradigm for improving the instruction-following abilities of powerful pre-trained language models. RLAIF first performs supervised fine-tuning (SFT) using demonstrations from a teacher model and then further fine-tunes the model with reinforcement learning (RL), using feedback from a critic model. While recent popular open-source models have demonstrated substantial improvements in performance from the RL step, in this paper we question whether the complexity of this RL step is truly warranted for AI feedback. We show that the improvements of the RL step are virtually entirely due to the widespread practice of using a weaker teacher model (e.g. GPT-3.5) for SFT data collection than the critic (e.g., GPT-4) used for AI feedback generation. Specifically, we show that simple supervised fine-tuning with GPT-4 as the teacher outperforms existing RLAIF pipelines. More generally, we find that the gains from RLAIF vary substantially across base model families, test-time evaluation protocols, and critic models. Finally, we provide a mechanistic explanation for when SFT may outperform the full two-step RLAIF pipeline as well as suggestions for making RLAIF maximally useful in practice.

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false

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430,817

2103.08721

A Central Limit Theorem for Differentially Private Query Answering

Perhaps the single most important use case for differential privacy is to privately answer numerical queries, which is usually achieved by adding noise to the answer vector. The central question, therefore, is to understand which noise distribution optimizes the privacy-accuracy trade-off, especially when the dimension of the answer vector is high. Accordingly, extensive literature has been dedicated to the question and the upper and lower bounds have been matched up to constant factors [BUV18, SU17]. In this paper, we take a novel approach to address this important optimality question. We first demonstrate an intriguing central limit theorem phenomenon in the high-dimensional regime. More precisely, we prove that a mechanism is approximately Gaussian Differentially Private [DRS21] if the added noise satisfies certain conditions. In particular, densities proportional to $\mathrm{e}^{-\|x\|_p^\alpha}$, where $\|x\|_p$ is the standard $\ell_p$-norm, satisfies the conditions. Taking this perspective, we make use of the Cramer--Rao inequality and show an "uncertainty principle"-style result: the product of the privacy parameter and the $\ell_2$-loss of the mechanism is lower bounded by the dimension. Furthermore, the Gaussian mechanism achieves the constant-sharp optimal privacy-accuracy trade-off among all such noises. Our findings are corroborated by numerical experiments.

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false

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224,968

2209.07663

Monolith: Real Time Recommendation System With Collisionless Embedding Table

Building a scalable and real-time recommendation system is vital for many businesses driven by time-sensitive customer feedback, such as short-videos ranking or online ads. Despite the ubiquitous adoption of production-scale deep learning frameworks like TensorFlow or PyTorch, these general-purpose frameworks fall short of business demands in recommendation scenarios for various reasons: on one hand, tweaking systems based on static parameters and dense computations for recommendation with dynamic and sparse features is detrimental to model quality; on the other hand, such frameworks are designed with batch-training stage and serving stage completely separated, preventing the model from interacting with customer feedback in real-time. These issues led us to reexamine traditional approaches and explore radically different design choices. In this paper, we present Monolith, a system tailored for online training. Our design has been driven by observations of our application workloads and production environment that reflects a marked departure from other recommendations systems. Our contributions are manifold: first, we crafted a collisionless embedding table with optimizations such as expirable embeddings and frequency filtering to reduce its memory footprint; second, we provide an production-ready online training architecture with high fault-tolerance; finally, we proved that system reliability could be traded-off for real-time learning. Monolith has successfully landed in the BytePlus Recommend product.

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true

false

317,836

2404.07940

InfiBench: Evaluating the Question-Answering Capabilities of Code Large Language Models

Large Language Models for code (code LLMs) have witnessed tremendous progress in recent years. With the rapid development of code LLMs, many popular evaluation benchmarks, such as HumanEval, DS-1000, and MBPP, have emerged to measure the performance of code LLMs with a particular focus on code generation tasks. However, they are insufficient to cover the full range of expected capabilities of code LLMs, which span beyond code generation to answering diverse coding-related questions. To fill this gap, we propose InfiBench, the first large-scale freeform question-answering (QA) benchmark for code to our knowledge, comprising 234 carefully selected high-quality Stack Overflow questions that span across 15 programming languages. InfiBench uses four types of model-free automatic metrics to evaluate response correctness where domain experts carefully concretize the criterion for each question. We conduct a systematic evaluation for over 100 latest code LLMs on InfiBench, leading to a series of novel and insightful findings. Our detailed analyses showcase potential directions for further advancement of code LLMs. InfiBench is fully open source at https://infi-coder.github.io/infibench and continuously expanding to foster more scientific and systematic practices for code LLM evaluation.

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true

446,029

1806.06957

A Comparison of Transformer and Recurrent Neural Networks on Multilingual Neural Machine Translation

Recently, neural machine translation (NMT) has been extended to multilinguality, that is to handle more than one translation direction with a single system. Multilingual NMT showed competitive performance against pure bilingual systems. Notably, in low-resource settings, it proved to work effectively and efficiently, thanks to shared representation space that is forced across languages and induces a sort of transfer-learning. Furthermore, multilingual NMT enables so-called zero-shot inference across language pairs never seen at training time. Despite the increasing interest in this framework, an in-depth analysis of what a multilingual NMT model is capable of and what it is not is still missing. Motivated by this, our work (i) provides a quantitative and comparative analysis of the translations produced by bilingual, multilingual and zero-shot systems; (ii) investigates the translation quality of two of the currently dominant neural architectures in MT, which are the Recurrent and the Transformer ones; and (iii) quantitatively explores how the closeness between languages influences the zero-shot translation. Our analysis leverages multiple professional post-edits of automatic translations by several different systems and focuses both on automatic standard metrics (BLEU and TER) and on widely used error categories, which are lexical, morphology, and word order errors.

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true

false

100,801

2101.06355

Rapid Method for Generation Prioritization during System Restoration with Renewable Resources

Quick and reliable power system restoration is critically important after natural disasters or other sudden threats, such as cyber-attacks. Leveraging renewable resources in system restoration shortens recovery times, resulting in prevented life-loss and avoided economic-loss, and improves the resilience of the entire grid. However, it is not a common practice today; the inherent variability of these resources represents a challenge for a streamlined restoration process. This paper presents a prioritized method - starting with renewable generator units then lowering priority to conventional units - to plan the operational schedule of a power system during the restoration process. The goal is to achieve a well balanced system in the presence of significant renewable penetration. Validation and benchmarking experiments were performed on a customized version of the RTS-GMLC test system using six months out of year-long data, tested through hourly simulations. After evaluating the performance and computational costs, this method proved faster than common approaches: a MILP Unit Commitment algorithm, widely used today, and an "enable-and-try" algorithm. In summary, herein a more convenient method is provided to be utilized during time-sensitive restoration, as an online operation-planning aid.

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true

false

215,683

2006.09785

Self-supervised Knowledge Distillation for Few-shot Learning

Real-world contains an overwhelmingly large number of object classes, learning all of which at once is infeasible. Few shot learning is a promising learning paradigm due to its ability to learn out of order distributions quickly with only a few samples. Recent works [7, 41] show that simply learning a good feature embedding can outperform more sophisticated meta-learning and metric learning algorithms for few-shot learning. In this paper, we propose a simple approach to improve the representation capacity of deep neural networks for few-shot learning tasks. We follow a two-stage learning process: First, we train a neural network to maximize the entropy of the feature embedding, thus creating an optimal output manifold using a self-supervised auxiliary loss. In the second stage, we minimize the entropy on feature embedding by bringing self-supervised twins together, while constraining the manifold with student-teacher distillation. Our experiments show that, even in the first stage, self-supervision can outperform current state-of-the-art methods, with further gains achieved by our second stage distillation process. Our codes are available at: https://github.com/brjathu/SKD.

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true

false

182,653

1911.02736

Analysis of CNN-based remote-PPG to understand limitations and sensitivities

Deep learning based on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has shown promising results in various vision-based applications, recently also in camera-based vital signs monitoring. The CNN-based Photoplethysmography (PPG) extraction has, so far, been focused on performance rather than understanding. In this paper, we try to answer four questions with experiments aiming at improving our understanding of this methodology as it gains popularity. We conclude that the network exploits the blood absorption variation to extract the physiological signals, and that the choice and parameters (phase, spectral content, etc.) of the reference-signal may be more critical than anticipated. The availability of multiple convolutional kernels is necessary for CNN to arrive at a flexible channel combination through the spatial operation, but may not provide the same motion-robustness as a multi-site measurement using knowledge-based PPG extraction. Finally, we conclude that the PPG-related prior knowledge is still helpful for the CNN-based PPG extraction. Consequently, we recommend further investigation of hybrid CNN-based methods to include prior knowledge in their design.

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true

false

152,440

1511.02821

Partial Membership Latent Dirichlet Allocation

Topic models (e.g., pLSA, LDA, SLDA) have been widely used for segmenting imagery. These models are confined to crisp segmentation. Yet, there are many images in which some regions cannot be assigned a crisp label (e.g., transition regions between a foggy sky and the ground or between sand and water at a beach). In these cases, a visual word is best represented with partial memberships across multiple topics. To address this, we present a partial membership latent Dirichlet allocation (PM-LDA) model and associated parameter estimation algorithms. Experimental results on two natural image datasets and one SONAR image dataset show that PM-LDA can produce both crisp and soft semantic image segmentations; a capability existing methods do not have.

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true

false

48,681

1908.05848

Sketch-Driven Regular Expression Generation from Natural Language and Examples

Recent systems for converting natural language descriptions into regular expressions (regexes) have achieved some success, but typically deal with short, formulaic text and can only produce simple regexes. Realworld regexes are complex, hard to describe with brief sentences, and sometimes require examples to fully convey the user's intent. We present a framework for regex synthesis in this setting where both natural language (NL) and examples are available. First, a semantic parser (either grammar-based or neural) maps the natural language description into an intermediate sketch, which is an incomplete regex containing holes to denote missing components. Then a program synthesizer searches over the regex space defined by the sketch and finds a regex that is consistent with the given string examples. Our semantic parser can be trained purely from weak supervision based on correctness of the synthesized regex, or it can leverage heuristically-derived sketches. We evaluate on two prior datasets (Kushman and Barzilay, 2013; Locascio et al., 2016) and a real-world dataset from Stack Overflow. Our system achieves state-of-the-art performance on the prior datasets and solves 57% of the real-world dataset, which existing neural systems completely fail on.

false

true

false

141,831

2409.05527

Power Control of Converters Connected via an L Filter to a Weak Grid. A Flatness-Based Approach

In this article, a nonlinear strategy based on a flatness approach is used for controlling the instantaneous complex power supplied from the Point of Common Coupling (PCC) to a weak grid. To this end, the strategy introduced by the authors in [1] considering a strong grid is robustified for avoiding system instability when the converter is connected to an unknown grid. The robustification method consists of including a notch filter that estimates the PCC voltage and using it to build the controller (i.e. the measured PCC voltage used to design the control strategy for a strong grid is replaced by the PCC voltage estimated with the notch filter). In addition, before designing the controller, the steady-state stability and safe operation limits when injecting complex instantaneous power to a grid of unknown impedance are analyzed. This analysis is independent of the control strategy, and applies to all power injection schemes. Simulations are presented for showing the performance of the proposed controller in presence of a weak grid.

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true

false

486,807

1403.5645

Transaction Repair: Full Serializability Without Locks

Transaction Repair is a method for lock-free, scalable transaction processing that achieves full serializability. It demonstrates parallel speedup even in inimical scenarios where all pairs of transactions have significant read-write conflicts. In the transaction repair approach, each transaction runs in complete isolation in a branch of the database; when conflicts occur, we detect and repair them. These repairs are performed efficiently in parallel, and the net effect is that of serial processing. Within transactions, we use no locks. This frees users from the complications and performance hazards of locks, and from the anomalies of sub-SERIALIZABLE isolation levels. Our approach builds on an incrementalized variant of leapfrog triejoin, a worst-case optimal algorithm for $\exists_1$ formulae, and on well-established techniques from programming languages: declarative languages, purely functional data structures, incremental computation, and fixpoint equations.

false

true

false

31,749

2302.05530

Machine Learning Based Approach to Recommend MITRE ATT&CK Framework for Software Requirements and Design Specifications

Engineering more secure software has become a critical challenge in the cyber world. It is very important to develop methodologies, techniques, and tools for developing secure software. To develop secure software, software developers need to think like an attacker through mining software repositories. These aim to analyze and understand the data repositories related to software development. The main goal is to use these software repositories to support the decision-making process of software development. There are different vulnerability databases like Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE), Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures database (CVE), and CAPEC. We utilized a database called MITRE. MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques have been used in various ways and methods, but tools for utilizing these tactics and techniques in the early stages of the software development life cycle (SDLC) are lacking. In this paper, we use machine learning algorithms to map requirements to the MITRE ATT&CK database and determine the accuracy of each mapping depending on the data split.

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true

false

true

false

true

345,077

1801.01875

Near Optimal Coded Data Shuffling for Distributed Learning

Data shuffling between distributed cluster of nodes is one of the critical steps in implementing large-scale learning algorithms. Randomly shuffling the data-set among a cluster of workers allows different nodes to obtain fresh data assignments at each learning epoch. This process has been shown to provide improvements in the learning process. However, the statistical benefits of distributed data shuffling come at the cost of extra communication overhead from the master node to worker nodes, and can act as one of the major bottlenecks in the overall time for computation. There has been significant recent interest in devising approaches to minimize this communication overhead. One approach is to provision for extra storage at the computing nodes. The other emerging approach is to leverage coded communication to minimize the overall communication overhead. The focus of this work is to understand the fundamental trade-off between the amount of storage and the communication overhead for distributed data shuffling. In this work, we first present an information theoretic formulation for the data shuffling problem, accounting for the underlying problem parameters (number of workers, $K$, number of data points, $N$, and the available storage, $S$ per node). We then present an information theoretic lower bound on the communication overhead for data shuffling as a function of these parameters. We next present a novel coded communication scheme and show that the resulting communication overhead of the proposed scheme is within a multiplicative factor of at most $\frac{K}{K-1}$ from the information-theoretic lower bound. Furthermore, we present the aligned coded shuffling scheme for some storage values, which achieves the optimal storage vs communication trade-off for $K<5$, and further reduces the maximum multiplicative gap down to $\frac{K-\frac{1}{3}}{K-1}$, for $K\geq 5$.

false

true

false

true

false

true

87,818

2109.03464

Level Set Binocular Stereo with Occlusions

Localizing stereo boundaries and predicting nearby disparities are difficult because stereo boundaries induce occluded regions where matching cues are absent. Most modern computer vision algorithms treat occlusions secondarily (e.g., via left-right consistency checks after matching) or rely on high-level cues to improve nearby disparities (e.g., via deep networks and large training sets). They ignore the geometry of stereo occlusions, which dictates that the spatial extent of occlusion must equal the amplitude of the disparity jump that causes it. This paper introduces an energy and level-set optimizer that improves boundaries by encoding occlusion geometry. Our model applies to two-layer, figure-ground scenes, and it can be implemented cooperatively using messages that pass predominantly between parents and children in an undecimated hierarchy of multi-scale image patches. In a small collection of figure-ground scenes curated from Middlebury and Falling Things stereo datasets, our model provides more accurate boundaries than previous occlusion-handling stereo techniques. This suggests new directions for creating cooperative stereo systems that incorporate occlusion cues in a human-like manner.

false

true

false

254,078

1711.01082

On the Capacity of SWIPT Systems with a Nonlinear Energy Harvesting Circuit

In this paper, we study information-theoretic limits for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) systems employing a practical nonlinear radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting (EH) receiver. In particular, we consider a three-node system with one transmitter that broadcasts a common signal to separated information decoding (ID) and EH receivers. Owing to the nonlinearity of the EH receiver circuit, the efficiency of wireless power transfer depends significantly on the waveform of the transmitted signal. In this paper, we aim to answer the following fundamental question: What is the optimal input distribution of the transmit waveform that maximizes the rate of the ID receiver for a given required harvested power at the EH receiver? In particular, we study the capacity of a SWIPT system impaired by additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) under average-power (AP) and peak-power (PP) constraints at the transmitter and an EH constraint at the EH receiver. Using Hermite polynomial bases, we prove that the optimal capacity-achieving input distribution that maximizes the rate-energy region is unique and discrete with a finite number of mass points. Furthermore, we show that the optimal input distribution for the same problem without PP constraint is discrete whenever the EH constraint is active and continuous zero-mean Gaussian, otherwise. Our numerical results show that the rate-energy region is enlarged for a larger PP constraint and that the rate loss of the considered SWIPT system compared to the AWGN channel without EH receiver is reduced by increasing the AP budget.

false

true

false

83,831

1611.01626

Combining policy gradient and Q-learning

Policy gradient is an efficient technique for improving a policy in a reinforcement learning setting. However, vanilla online variants are on-policy only and not able to take advantage of off-policy data. In this paper we describe a new technique that combines policy gradient with off-policy Q-learning, drawing experience from a replay buffer. This is motivated by making a connection between the fixed points of the regularized policy gradient algorithm and the Q-values. This connection allows us to estimate the Q-values from the action preferences of the policy, to which we apply Q-learning updates. We refer to the new technique as 'PGQL', for policy gradient and Q-learning. We also establish an equivalency between action-value fitting techniques and actor-critic algorithms, showing that regularized policy gradient techniques can be interpreted as advantage function learning algorithms. We conclude with some numerical examples that demonstrate improved data efficiency and stability of PGQL. In particular, we tested PGQL on the full suite of Atari games and achieved performance exceeding that of both asynchronous advantage actor-critic (A3C) and Q-learning.

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false

true

false

63,408

2301.12527

Diverse, Difficult, and Odd Instances (D2O): A New Test Set for Object Classification

Test sets are an integral part of evaluating models and gauging progress in object recognition, and more broadly in computer vision and AI. Existing test sets for object recognition, however, suffer from shortcomings such as bias towards the ImageNet characteristics and idiosyncrasies (e.g., ImageNet-V2), being limited to certain types of stimuli (e.g., indoor scenes in ObjectNet), and underestimating the model performance (e.g., ImageNet-A). To mitigate these problems, we introduce a new test set, called D2O, which is sufficiently different from existing test sets. Images are a mix of generated images as well as images crawled from the web. They are diverse, unmodified, and representative of real-world scenarios and cause state-of-the-art models to misclassify them with high confidence. To emphasize generalization, our dataset by design does not come paired with a training set. It contains 8,060 images spread across 36 categories, out of which 29 appear in ImageNet. The best Top-1 accuracy on our dataset is around 60% which is much lower than 91% best Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet. We find that popular vision APIs perform very poorly in detecting objects over D2O categories such as ``faces'', ``cars'', and ``cats''. Our dataset also comes with a ``miscellaneous'' category, over which we test the image tagging models. Overall, our investigations demonstrate that the D2O test set contain a mix of images with varied levels of difficulty and is predictive of the average-case performance of models. It can challenge object recognition models for years to come and can spur more research in this fundamental area.

false

true

false

true

false

342,564

1901.02350

Robust and High Performance Face Detector

In recent years, face detection has experienced significant performance improvement with the boost of deep convolutional neural networks. In this report, we reimplement the state-of-the-art detector SRN and apply some tricks proposed in the recent literatures to obtain an extremely strong face detector, named VIM-FD. In specific, we exploit more powerful backbone network like DenseNet-121, revisit the data augmentation based on data-anchor-sampling proposed in PyramidBox, and use the max-in-out label and anchor matching strategy in SFD. In addition, we also introduce the attention mechanism to provide additional supervision. Over the most popular and challenging face detection benchmark, i.e., WIDER FACE, the proposed VIM-FD achieves state-of-the-art performance.

false

true

false

118,180

2111.12221

Source-free unsupervised domain adaptation for cross-modality abdominal multi-organ segmentation

Domain adaptation is crucial for transferring the knowledge from the source labeled CT dataset to the target unlabeled MR dataset in abdominal multi-organ segmentation. Meanwhile, it is highly desirable to avoid the high annotation cost related to the target dataset and protect the source dataset privacy. Therefore, we propose an effective source-free unsupervised domain adaptation method for cross-modality abdominal multi-organ segmentation without source dataset access. The proposed framework comprises two stages. In the first stage, the feature map statistics-guided model adaptation combined with entropy minimization is developed to help the top segmentation network reliably segment the target images. The pseudo-labels output from the top segmentation network are used to guide the style compensation network to generate source-like images. The pseudo-labels output from the middle segmentation network is used to supervise the learning progress of the desired model (bottom segmentation network). In the second stage, the circular learning and pixel-adaptive mask refinement are used to further improve the desired model performance. With this approach, we achieved satisfactory abdominal multi-organ segmentation performance, outperforming the existing state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods. The proposed approach can be easily extended to situations in which target annotation data exist. With only one labeled MR volume, the performance can be levelled with that of supervised learning. Furthermore, the proposed approach is proven to be effective for source-free unsupervised domain adaptation in reverse direction.

false

true

false

267,903

2407.04489

Dude: Dual Distribution-Aware Context Prompt Learning For Large Vision-Language Model

Prompt learning methods are gaining increasing attention due to their ability to customize large vision-language models to new domains using pre-trained contextual knowledge and minimal training data. However, existing works typically rely on optimizing unified prompt inputs, often struggling with fine-grained classification tasks due to insufficient discriminative attributes. To tackle this, we consider a new framework based on a dual context of both domain-shared and class-specific contexts, where the latter is generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPTs. Such dual prompt methods enhance the model's feature representation by joining implicit and explicit factors encoded in LLM knowledge. Moreover, we formulate the Unbalanced Optimal Transport (UOT) theory to quantify the relationships between constructed prompts and visual tokens. Through partial matching, UOT can properly align discrete sets of visual tokens and prompt embeddings under different mass distributions, which is particularly valuable for handling irrelevant or noisy elements, ensuring that the preservation of mass does not restrict transport solutions. Furthermore, UOT's characteristics integrate seamlessly with image augmentation, expanding the training sample pool while maintaining a reasonable distance between perturbed images and prompt inputs. Extensive experiments across few-shot classification and adapter settings substantiate the superiority of our model over current state-of-the-art baselines.

false

true

false

470,579

2312.06034

Modeling Uncertainty in Personalized Emotion Prediction with Normalizing Flows

Designing predictive models for subjective problems in natural language processing (NLP) remains challenging. This is mainly due to its non-deterministic nature and different perceptions of the content by different humans. It may be solved by Personalized Natural Language Processing (PNLP), where the model exploits additional information about the reader to make more accurate predictions. However, current approaches require complete information about the recipients to be straight embedded. Besides, the recent methods focus on deterministic inference or simple frequency-based estimations of the probabilities. In this work, we overcome this limitation by proposing a novel approach to capture the uncertainty of the forecast using conditional Normalizing Flows. This allows us to model complex multimodal distributions and to compare various models using negative log-likelihood (NLL). In addition, the new solution allows for various interpretations of possible reader perception thanks to the available sampling function. We validated our method on three challenging, subjective NLP tasks, including emotion recognition and hate speech. The comparative analysis of generalized and personalized approaches revealed that our personalized solutions significantly outperform the baseline and provide more precise uncertainty estimates. The impact on the text interpretability and uncertainty studies are presented as well. The information brought by the developed methods makes it possible to build hybrid models whose effectiveness surpasses classic solutions. In addition, an analysis and visualization of the probabilities of the given decisions for texts with high entropy of annotations and annotators with mixed views were carried out.

false

true

false

414,341

2103.12337

Salient Image Matting

In this paper, we propose an image matting framework called Salient Image Matting to estimate the per-pixel opacity value of the most salient foreground in an image. To deal with a large amount of semantic diversity in images, a trimap is conventionally required as it provides important guidance about object semantics to the matting process. However, creating a good trimap is often expensive and timeconsuming. The SIM framework simultaneously deals with the challenge of learning a wide range of semantics and salient object types in a fully automatic and an end to end manner. Specifically, our framework is able to produce accurate alpha mattes for a wide range of foreground objects and cases where the foreground class, such as human, appears in a very different context than the train data directly from an RGB input. This is done by employing a salient object detection model to produce a trimap of the most salient object in the image in order to guide the matting model about higher-level object semantics. Our framework leverages large amounts of coarse annotations coupled with a heuristic trimap generation scheme to train the trimap prediction network so it can produce trimaps for arbitrary foregrounds. Moreover, we introduce a multi-scale fusion architecture for the task of matting to better capture finer, low-level opacity semantics. With high-level guidance provided by the trimap network, our framework requires only a fraction of expensive matting data as compared to other automatic methods while being able to produce alpha mattes for a diverse range of inputs. We demonstrate our framework on a range of diverse images and experimental results show our framework compares favourably against state of art matting methods without the need for a trimap

false

true

false

226,136

2110.10316

Beamforming Design for Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Enhanced Symbiotic Radio Systems

This paper investigates multiuser multi-input single-output downlink symbiotic radio communication systems assisted by an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS). Different from existing methods ideally assuming the secondary user (SU) can jointly decode information symbols from both the access point (AP) and the IRS via multiuser detection, we consider a more practical SU that only non-coherent detection is available. To characterize the non-coherent decoding performance, a practical upper bound of the average symbol error rate (SER) is derived. Subsequently, we jointly optimize the beamformer at the AP and the phase shifts at the IRS to maximize the average sum-rate of the primary system taking into account the maximum tolerable SER constraint for the SU. To circumvent the couplings of variables, we exploit the Schur complement that facilitates the design of a suboptimal beamforming algorithm based on successive convex approximation. Our simulation results show that compared with various benchmark algorithms, the proposed scheme significantly improves the average sum-rate of the primary system, while guaranteeing the decoding performance of the secondary system.

false

true

false

262,101

2410.07097

A Law of Large Numbers for SIR on the Stochastic Block Model: A Proof via Herd Immunity

In this paper, we study the dynamics of the susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) model on a network with community structure, namely the stochastic block model (SBM). As usual, the SIR model is a stochastic model for an epidemic where infected vertices infect susceptible neighbors at some rate $\eta$ and recover at rate $\gamma$, and the SBM is a random graph model where vertices are partitioned into a finite number of communities. The connection probability between two vertices depends on their community affiliation, here scaled so that the average degrees have a finite limit as the network grows. We prove laws of large numbers (LLN) for the epidemic's trajectory to a system of ordinary differential equations over any time horizon (finite or infinite), including in particular a LLN for the final size of the infection. Our proofs rely on two main ingredients: (i) a new coupling of the SIR epidemic and the randomness of the SBM, revealing a vector-valued random variable that drives the epidemic (related to what is usually called the ``force of the infection'' via a linear transformation), and (ii) a novel technique for analyzing the limiting behavior of the infinite time horizon for the infection, using the fact that once the infection passes the herd immunity threshold it dies out quickly and has a negligible impact on the overall size of the infection.

false

true

false

496,467

2311.09476

ARES: An Automated Evaluation Framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems

Evaluating retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems traditionally relies on hand annotations for input queries, passages to retrieve, and responses to generate. We introduce ARES, an Automated RAG Evaluation System, for evaluating RAG systems along the dimensions of context relevance, answer faithfulness, and answer relevance. By creating its own synthetic training data, ARES finetunes lightweight LM judges to assess the quality of individual RAG components. To mitigate potential prediction errors, ARES utilizes a small set of human-annotated datapoints for prediction-powered inference (PPI). Across eight different knowledge-intensive tasks in KILT, SuperGLUE, and AIS, ARES accurately evaluates RAG systems while using only a few hundred human annotations during evaluation. Furthermore, ARES judges remain effective across domain shifts, proving accurate even after changing the type of queries and/or documents used in the evaluated RAG systems. We make our code and datasets publicly available on Github.

false

true

false

true

false

408,144

2105.03523

Test Suites as a Source of Training Data for Static Analysis Alert Classifiers

Flaw-finding static analysis tools typically generate large volumes of code flaw alerts including many false positives. To save on human effort to triage these alerts, a significant body of work attempts to use machine learning to classify and prioritize alerts. Identifying a useful set of training data, however, remains a fundamental challenge in developing such classifiers in many contexts. We propose using static analysis test suites (i.e., repositories of "benchmark" programs that are purpose-built to test coverage and precision of static analysis tools) as a novel source of training data. In a case study, we generated a large quantity of alerts by executing various static analyzers on the Juliet C/C++ test suite, and we automatically derived ground truth labels for these alerts by referencing the Juliet test suite metadata. Finally, we used this data to train classifiers to predict whether an alert is a false positive. Our classifiers obtained high precision (90.2%) and recall (88.2%) for a large number of code flaw types on a hold-out test set. This preliminary result suggests that pre-training classifiers on test suite data could help to jumpstart static analysis alert classification in data-limited contexts.

false

true

false

true

234,168

1904.03796

Minimum Enclosing Ball Revisited: Stability and Sub-linear Time Algorithms

In this paper, we revisit the Minimum Enclosing Ball (MEB) problem and its robust version, MEB with outliers, in Euclidean space $\mathbb{R}^d$. Though the problem has been extensively studied before, most of the existing algorithms need at least linear time (in the number of input points $n$ and the dimensionality $d$) to achieve a $(1+\epsilon)$-approximation. Motivated by some recent developments on beyond worst-case analysis, we introduce the notion of stability for MEB (with outliers), which is natural and easy to understand. Roughly speaking, an instance of MEB is stable, if the radius of the resulting ball cannot be significantly reduced by removing a small fraction of the input points. Under the stability assumption, we present two sampling algorithms for computing approximate MEB with sample complexities independent of the number of input points $n$. In particular, the second algorithm has the sample complexity even independent of the dimensionality $d$. Further, we extend the idea to achieve a sub-linear time approximation algorithm for the MEB with outliers problem. Note that most existing sub-linear time algorithms for the problems of MEB and MEB with outliers usually result in bi-criteria approximations, where the "bi-criteria" means that the solution has to allow the approximations on the radius and the number of covered points. Differently, all the algorithms proposed in this paper yield single-criterion approximations (with respect to radius). We expect that our proposed notion of stability and techniques will be applicable to design sub-linear time algorithms for other optimization problems.

false

true

false

true

126,836

1911.02150

Fast Transformer Decoding: One Write-Head is All You Need

Multi-head attention layers, as used in the Transformer neural sequence model, are a powerful alternative to RNNs for moving information across and between sequences. While training these layers is generally fast and simple, due to parallelizability across the length of the sequence, incremental inference (where such paralleization is impossible) is often slow, due to the memory-bandwidth cost of repeatedly loading the large "keys" and "values" tensors. We propose a variant called multi-query attention, where the keys and values are shared across all of the different attention "heads", greatly reducing the size of these tensors and hence the memory bandwidth requirements of incremental decoding. We verify experimentally that the resulting models can indeed be much faster to decode, and incur only minor quality degradation from the baseline.

false

true

false

true

false

true

false

152,290

1611.04465

Advancing Memristive Analog Neuromorphic Networks: Increasing Complexity, and Coping with Imperfect Hardware Components

We experimentally demonstrate classification of 4x4 binary images into 4 classes, using a 3-layer mixed-signal neuromorphic network ("MLP perceptron"), based on two passive 20x20 memristive crossbar arrays, board-integrated with discrete CMOS components. The network features 10 hidden-layer and 4 output-layer analog CMOS neurons and 428 metal-oxide memristors, i.e. is almost an order of magnitude more complex than any previously reported functional memristor circuit. Moreover, the inference operation of this classifier is performed entirely in the integrated hardware. To deal with larger crossbar arrays, we have developed a semi-automatic approach to their forming and testing, and compared several memristor training schemes for coping with imperfect behavior of these devices, as well as with variability of analog CMOS neurons. The effectiveness of the proposed schemes for defect and variation tolerance was verified experimentally using the implemented network and, additionally, by modeling the operation of a larger network, with 300 hidden-layer neurons, on the MNIST benchmark. Finally, we propose a simple modification of the implemented memristor-based vector-by-matrix multiplier to allow its operation in a wider temperature range.

false

true

false

true

63,847

2306.17456

Human-like Decision-making at Unsignalized Intersection using Social Value Orientation

With the commercial application of automated vehicles (AVs), the sharing of roads between AVs and human-driven vehicles (HVs) becomes a common occurrence in the future. While research has focused on improving the safety and reliability of autonomous driving, it's also crucial to consider collaboration between AVs and HVs. Human-like interaction is a required capability for AVs, especially at common unsignalized intersections, as human drivers of HVs expect to maintain their driving habits for inter-vehicle interactions. This paper uses the social value orientation (SVO) in the decision-making of vehicles to describe the social interaction among multiple vehicles. Specifically, we define the quantitative calculation of the conflict-involved SVO at unsignalized intersections to enhance decision-making based on the reinforcement learning method. We use naturalistic driving scenarios with highly interactive motions for performance evaluation of the proposed method. Experimental results show that SVO is more effective in characterizing inter-vehicle interactions than conventional motion state parameters like velocity, and the proposed method can accurately reproduce naturalistic driving trajectories compared to behavior cloning.

true

false

true

false

376,709

2209.10691

PREF: Predictability Regularized Neural Motion Fields

Knowing the 3D motions in a dynamic scene is essential to many vision applications. Recent progress is mainly focused on estimating the activity of some specific elements like humans. In this paper, we leverage a neural motion field for estimating the motion of all points in a multiview setting. Modeling the motion from a dynamic scene with multiview data is challenging due to the ambiguities in points of similar color and points with time-varying color. We propose to regularize the estimated motion to be predictable. If the motion from previous frames is known, then the motion in the near future should be predictable. Therefore, we introduce a predictability regularization by first conditioning the estimated motion on latent embeddings, then by adopting a predictor network to enforce predictability on the embeddings. The proposed framework PREF (Predictability REgularized Fields) achieves on par or better results than state-of-the-art neural motion field-based dynamic scene representation methods, while requiring no prior knowledge of the scene.

false

true

false

true

false

318,941

2408.15049

Scalable Supervisory Architecture for Autonomous Race Cars

In recent years, the number and importance of autonomous racing leagues, and consequently the number of studies on them, has been growing. The seamless integration between different series has gained attention due to the scene's diversity. However, the high cost of full scale racing makes it a more accessible development model, to research at smaller form factors and scale up the achieved results. This paper presents a scalable architecture designed for autonomous racing that emphasizes modularity, adaptability to diverse configurations, and the ability to supervise parallel execution of pipelines that allows the use of different dynamic strategies. The system showcased consistent racing performance across different environments, demonstrated through successful participation in two relevant competitions. The results confirm the architecture's scalability and versatility, providing a robust foundation for the development of competitive autonomous racing systems. The successful application in real-world scenarios validates its practical effectiveness and highlights its potential for future advancements in autonomous racing technology.

false

true

false

true

483,780

2312.09958

Distilling Large Language Models for Matching Patients to Clinical Trials

The recent success of large language models (LLMs) has paved the way for their adoption in the high-stakes domain of healthcare. Specifically, the application of LLMs in patient-trial matching, which involves assessing patient eligibility against clinical trial's nuanced inclusion and exclusion criteria, has shown promise. Recent research has shown that GPT-3.5, a widely recognized LLM developed by OpenAI, can outperform existing methods with minimal 'variable engineering' by simply comparing clinical trial information against patient summaries. However, there are significant challenges associated with using closed-source proprietary LLMs like GPT-3.5 in practical healthcare applications, such as cost, privacy and reproducibility concerns. To address these issues, this study presents the first systematic examination of the efficacy of both proprietary (GPT-3.5, and GPT-4) and open-source LLMs (LLAMA 7B,13B, and 70B) for the task of patient-trial matching. Employing a multifaceted evaluation framework, we conducted extensive automated and human-centric assessments coupled with a detailed error analysis for each model. To enhance the adaptability of open-source LLMs, we have created a specialized synthetic dataset utilizing GPT-4, enabling effective fine-tuning under constrained data conditions. Our findings reveal that open-source LLMs, when fine-tuned on this limited and synthetic dataset, demonstrate performance parity with their proprietary counterparts. This presents a massive opportunity for their deployment in real-world healthcare applications. To foster further research and applications in this field, we release both the annotated evaluation dataset along with the fine-tuned LLM -- Trial-LLAMA -- for public use.

false

true

false

415,946

2006.08679

Feature Space Saturation during Training

We propose layer saturation - a simple, online-computable method for analyzing the information processing in neural networks. First, we show that a layer's output can be restricted to the eigenspace of its variance matrix without performance loss. We propose a computationally lightweight method for approximating the variance matrix during training. From the dimension of its lossless eigenspace we derive layer saturation - the ratio between the eigenspace dimension and layer width. We show that saturation seems to indicate which layers contribute to network performance. We demonstrate how to alter layer saturation in a neural network by changing network depth, filter sizes and input resolution. Furthermore, we show that well-chosen input resolution increases network performance by distributing the inference process more evenly across the network.

false

true

false

true

false

true

false

182,258

1906.04960

Towards Geocoding Spatial Expressions

Imprecise composite location references formed using ad hoc spatial expressions in English text makes the geocoding task challenging for both inference and evaluation. Typically such spatial expressions fill in unestablished areas with new toponyms for finer spatial referents. For example, the spatial extent of the ad hoc spatial expression "north of" or "50 minutes away from" in relation to the toponym "Dayton, OH" refers to an ambiguous, imprecise area, requiring translation from this qualitative representation to a quantitative one with precise semantics using systems such as WGS84. Here we highlight the challenges of geocoding such referents and propose a formal representation that employs background knowledge, semantic approximations and rules, and fuzzy linguistic variables. We also discuss an appropriate evaluation technique for the task that is based on human contextualized and subjective judgment.

false

true

false

134,892

2304.13357

Deep Lifelong Cross-modal Hashing

Hashing methods have made significant progress in cross-modal retrieval tasks with fast query speed and low storage cost. Among them, deep learning-based hashing achieves better performance on large-scale data due to its excellent extraction and representation ability for nonlinear heterogeneous features. However, there are still two main challenges in catastrophic forgetting when data with new categories arrive continuously, and time-consuming for non-continuous hashing retrieval to retrain for updating. To this end, we, in this paper, propose a novel deep lifelong cross-modal hashing to achieve lifelong hashing retrieval instead of re-training hash function repeatedly when new data arrive. Specifically, we design lifelong learning strategy to update hash functions by directly training the incremental data instead of retraining new hash functions using all the accumulated data, which significantly reduce training time. Then, we propose lifelong hashing loss to enable original hash codes participate in lifelong learning but remain invariant, and further preserve the similarity and dis-similarity among original and incremental hash codes to maintain performance. Additionally, considering distribution heterogeneity when new data arriving continuously, we introduce multi-label semantic similarity to supervise hash learning, and it has been proven that the similarity improves performance with detailed analysis. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that the proposed methods achieves comparative performance comparing with recent state-of-the-art cross-modal hashing methods, and it yields substantial average increments over 20\% in retrieval accuracy and almost reduces over 80\% training time when new data arrives continuously.

false

true

false

true

false

360,549

2308.02569

BioBERT Based SNP-traits Associations Extraction from Biomedical Literature

Scientific literature contains a considerable amount of information that provides an excellent opportunity for developing text mining methods to extract biomedical relationships. An important type of information is the relationship between singular nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) and traits. In this paper, we present a BioBERT-GRU method to identify SNP- traits associations. Based on the evaluation of our method on the SNPPhenA dataset, it is concluded that this new method performs better than previous machine learning and deep learning based methods. BioBERT-GRU achieved the result a precision of 0.883, recall of 0.882 and F1-score of 0.881.

false

true

false

383,691

2008.07861

Depth Completion with RGB Prior

Depth cameras are a prominent perception system for robotics, especially when operating in natural unstructured environments. Industrial applications, however, typically involve reflective objects under harsh lighting conditions, a challenging scenario for depth cameras, as it induces numerous reflections and deflections, leading to loss of robustness and deteriorated accuracy. Here, we developed a deep model to correct the depth channel in RGBD images, aiming to restore the depth information to the required accuracy. To train the model, we created a novel industrial dataset that we now present to the public. The data was collected with low-end depth cameras and the ground truth depth was generated by multi-view fusion.

false

true

false

192,240

2304.14520

Multimodal Dataset from Harsh Sub-Terranean Environment with Aerosol Particles for Frontier Exploration

Algorithms for autonomous navigation in environments without Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) coverage mainly rely on onboard perception systems. These systems commonly incorporate sensors like cameras and Light Detection and Rangings (LiDARs), the performance of which may degrade in the presence of aerosol particles. Thus, there is a need of fusing acquired data from these sensors with data from Radio Detection and Rangings (RADARs) which can penetrate through such particles. Overall, this will improve the performance of localization and collision avoidance algorithms under such environmental conditions. This paper introduces a multimodal dataset from the harsh and unstructured underground environment with aerosol particles. A detailed description of the onboard sensors and the environment, where the dataset is collected are presented to enable full evaluation of acquired data. Furthermore, the dataset contains synchronized raw data measurements from all onboard sensors in Robot Operating System (ROS) format to facilitate the evaluation of navigation, and localization algorithms in such environments. In contrast to the existing datasets, the focus of this paper is not only to capture both temporal and spatial data diversities but also to present the impact of harsh conditions on captured data. Therefore, to validate the dataset, a preliminary comparison of odometry from onboard LiDARs is presented.

false

true

false

true

false

361,004

1902.09835

Can Meta-Interpretive Learning outperform Deep Reinforcement Learning of Evaluable Game strategies?

World-class human players have been outperformed in a number of complex two person games (Go, Chess, Checkers) by Deep Reinforcement Learning systems. However, owing to tractability considerations minimax regret of a learning system cannot be evaluated in such games. In this paper we consider simple games (Noughts-and-Crosses and Hexapawn) in which minimax regret can be efficiently evaluated. We use these games to compare Cumulative Minimax Regret for variants of both standard and deep reinforcement learning against two variants of a new Meta-Interpretive Learning system called MIGO. In our experiments all tested variants of both normal and deep reinforcement learning have worse performance (higher cumulative minimax regret) than both variants of MIGO on Noughts-and-Crosses and Hexapawn. Additionally, MIGO's learned rules are relatively easy to comprehend, and are demonstrated to achieve significant transfer learning in both directions between Noughts-and-Crosses and Hexapawn.

false

true

false

true

false

122,518

1904.03501

DeepSEED: 3D Squeeze-and-Excitation Encoder-Decoder Convolutional Neural Networks for Pulmonary Nodule Detection

Pulmonary nodule detection plays an important role in lung cancer screening with low-dose computed tomography (CT) scans. It remains challenging to build nodule detection deep learning models with good generalization performance due to unbalanced positive and negative samples. In order to overcome this problem and further improve state-of-the-art nodule detection methods, we develop a novel deep 3D convolutional neural network with an Encoder-Decoder structure in conjunction with a region proposal network. Particularly, we utilize a dynamically scaled cross entropy loss to reduce the false positive rate and combat the sample imbalance problem associated with nodule detection. We adopt the squeeze-and-excitation structure to learn effective image features and utilize inter-dependency information of different feature maps. We have validated our method based on publicly available CT scans with manually labelled ground-truth obtained from LIDC/IDRI dataset and its subset LUNA16 with thinner slices. Ablation studies and experimental results have demonstrated that our method could outperform state-of-the-art nodule detection methods by a large margin.

false

true

false

126,743

1503.06914

A Fundamental Inequality for Lower-bounding the Error Probability for Classical and Quantum Multiple Access Channels and Its Applications

In the study of the capacity problem for multiple access channels (MACs), a lower bound on the error probability obtained by Han plays a crucial role in the converse parts of several kinds of channel coding theorems in the information-spectrum framework. Recently, Yagi and Oohama showed a tighter bound than the Han bound by means of Polyanskiy's converse. In this paper, we give a new bound which generalizes and strengthens the Yagi-Oohama bound, and demonstrate that the bound plays a fundamental role in deriving extensions of several known bounds. In particular, the Yagi-Oohama bound is generalized to two different directions; i.e, to general input distributions and to general encoders. In addition we extend these bounds to the quantum MACs and apply them to the converse problems for several information-spectrum settings.

false

true

false

41,416

2108.03022

Utilizing Treewidth for Quantitative Reasoning on Epistemic Logic Programs

Extending the popular Answer Set Programming (ASP) paradigm by introspective reasoning capacities has received increasing interest within the last years. Particular attention is given to the formalism of epistemic logic programs (ELPs) where standard rules are equipped with modal operators which allow to express conditions on literals for being known or possible, i.e., contained in all or some answer sets, respectively. ELPs thus deliver multiple collections of answer sets, known as world views. Employing ELPs for reasoning problems so far has mainly been restricted to standard decision problems (complexity analysis) and enumeration (development of systems) of world views. In this paper, we take a next step and contribute to epistemic logic programming in two ways: First, we establish quantitative reasoning for ELPs, where the acceptance of a certain set of literals depends on the number (proportion) of world views that are compatible with the set. Second, we present a novel system that is capable of efficiently solving the underlying counting problems required to answer such quantitative reasoning problems. Our system exploits the graph-based measure treewidth and works by iteratively finding and refining (graph) abstractions of an ELP program. On top of these abstractions, we apply dynamic programming that is combined with utilizing existing search-based solvers like (e)clingo for hard combinatorial subproblems that appear during solving. It turns out that our approach is competitive with existing systems that were introduced recently. This work is under consideration for acceptance in TPLP.

false

true

false

true

249,533

2406.19396

SimLOB: Learning Representations of Limited Order Book for Financial Market Simulation

Financial market simulation (FMS) serves as a promising tool for understanding market anomalies and the underlying trading behaviors. To ensure high-fidelity simulations, it is crucial to calibrate the FMS model for generating data closely resembling the observed market data. Previous efforts primarily focused on calibrating the mid-price data, leading to essential information loss of the market activities and thus biasing the calibrated model. The Limit Order Book (LOB) data is the fundamental data fully capturing the market micro-structure and is adopted by worldwide exchanges. However, LOB is not applicable to existing calibration objective functions due to its tabular structure not suitable for the vectorized input requirement. This paper proposes to explicitly learn the vectorized representations of LOB with a Transformer-based autoencoder. Then the latent vector, which captures the major information of LOB, can be applied for calibration. Extensive experiments show that the learned latent representation not only preserves the non-linear auto-correlation in the temporal axis, but the precedence between successive price levels of LOB. Besides, it is verified that the performance of the representation learning stage is consistent with the downstream calibration tasks. Thus, this work also progresses the FMS on LOB data, for the first time.

false

true

false

468,407

1809.03182

Towards one-shot learning for rare-word translation with external experts

Neural machine translation (NMT) has significantly improved the quality of automatic translation models. One of the main challenges in current systems is the translation of rare words. We present a generic approach to address this weakness by having external models annotate the training data as Experts, and control the model-expert interaction with a pointer network and reinforcement learning. Our experiments using phrase-based models to simulate Experts to complement neural machine translation models show that the model can be trained to copy the annotations into the output consistently. We demonstrate the benefit of our proposed framework in outof-domain translation scenarios with only lexical resources, improving more than 1.0 BLEU point in both translation directions English to Spanish and German to English

false

true

false

107,257

2302.02117

Learning to Agree on Vision Attention for Visual Commonsense Reasoning

Visual Commonsense Reasoning (VCR) remains a significant yet challenging research problem in the realm of visual reasoning. A VCR model generally aims at answering a textual question regarding an image, followed by the rationale prediction for the preceding answering process. Though these two processes are sequential and intertwined, existing methods always consider them as two independent matching-based instances. They, therefore, ignore the pivotal relationship between the two processes, leading to sub-optimal model performance. This paper presents a novel visual attention alignment method to efficaciously handle these two processes in a unified framework. To achieve this, we first design a re-attention module for aggregating the vision attention map produced in each process. Thereafter, the resultant two sets of attention maps are carefully aligned to guide the two processes to make decisions based on the same image regions. We apply this method to both conventional attention and the recent Transformer models and carry out extensive experiments on the VCR benchmark dataset. The results demonstrate that with the attention alignment module, our method achieves a considerable improvement over the baseline methods, evidently revealing the feasibility of the coupling of the two processes as well as the effectiveness of the proposed method.

false

true

false

343,861

2202.06085

Online V2X Scheduling for Raw-Level Cooperative Perception

Cooperative perception of connected vehicles comes to the rescue when the field of view restricts stand-alone intelligence. While raw-level cooperative perception preserves most information to guarantee accuracy, it is demanding in communication bandwidth and computation power. Therefore, it is important to schedule the most beneficial vehicle to share its sensor in terms of supplementary view and stable network connection. In this paper, we present a model of raw-level cooperative perception and formulate the energy minimization problem of sensor sharing scheduling as a variant of the Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem. Specifically, volatility of the neighboring vehicles, heterogeneity of V2X channels, and the time-varying traffic context are taken into consideration. Then we propose an online learning-based algorithm with logarithmic performance loss, achieving a decent trade-off between exploration and exploitation. Simulation results under different scenarios indicate that the proposed algorithm quickly learns to schedule the optimal cooperative vehicle and saves more energy as compared to baseline algorithms.

false

true

false

true

false

280,089

2303.00694

The Virtues of Laziness in Model-based RL: A Unified Objective and Algorithms

We propose a novel approach to addressing two fundamental challenges in Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL): the computational expense of repeatedly finding a good policy in the learned model, and the objective mismatch between model fitting and policy computation. Our "lazy" method leverages a novel unified objective, Performance Difference via Advantage in Model, to capture the performance difference between the learned policy and expert policy under the true dynamics. This objective demonstrates that optimizing the expected policy advantage in the learned model under an exploration distribution is sufficient for policy computation, resulting in a significant boost in computational efficiency compared to traditional planning methods. Additionally, the unified objective uses a value moment matching term for model fitting, which is aligned with the model's usage during policy computation. We present two no-regret algorithms to optimize the proposed objective, and demonstrate their statistical and computational gains compared to existing MBRL methods through simulated benchmarks.

false

true

false

true

false

348,682

2302.04730

A Benchmark on Uncertainty Quantification for Deep Learning Prognostics

Reliable uncertainty quantification on RUL prediction is crucial for informative decision-making in predictive maintenance. In this context, we assess some of the latest developments in the field of uncertainty quantification for prognostics deep learning. This includes the state-of-the-art variational inference algorithms for Bayesian neural networks (BNN) as well as popular alternatives such as Monte Carlo Dropout (MCD), deep ensembles (DE) and heteroscedastic neural networks (HNN). All the inference techniques share the same inception deep learning architecture as a functional model. We performed hyperparameter search to optimize the main variational and learning parameters of the algorithms. The performance of the methods is evaluated on a subset of the large NASA NCMAPSS dataset for aircraft engines. The assessment includes RUL prediction accuracy, the quality of predictive uncertainty, and the possibility to break down the total predictive uncertainty into its aleatoric and epistemic parts. The results show no method clearly outperforms the others in all the situations. Although all methods are close in terms of accuracy, we find differences in the way they estimate uncertainty. Thus, DE and MCD generally provide more conservative predictive uncertainty than BNN. Surprisingly, HNN can achieve strong results without the added training complexity and extra parameters of the BNN. For tasks like active learning where a separation of epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty is required, radial BNN and MCD seem the best options.

false

true

false

344,798

2107.09158

Improving exploration in policy gradient search: Application to symbolic optimization

Many machine learning strategies designed to automate mathematical tasks leverage neural networks to search large combinatorial spaces of mathematical symbols. In contrast to traditional evolutionary approaches, using a neural network at the core of the search allows learning higher-level symbolic patterns, providing an informed direction to guide the search. When no labeled data is available, such networks can still be trained using reinforcement learning. However, we demonstrate that this approach can suffer from an early commitment phenomenon and from initialization bias, both of which limit exploration. We present two exploration methods to tackle these issues, building upon ideas of entropy regularization and distribution initialization. We show that these techniques can improve the performance, increase sample efficiency, and lower the complexity of solutions for the task of symbolic regression.

false

true

false

246,950

2403.05101

Rule-driven News Captioning

News captioning task aims to generate sentences by describing named entities or concrete events for an image with its news article. Existing methods have achieved remarkable results by relying on the large-scale pre-trained models, which primarily focus on the correlations between the input news content and the output predictions. However, the news captioning requires adhering to some fundamental rules of news reporting, such as accurately describing the individuals and actions associated with the event. In this paper, we propose the rule-driven news captioning method, which can generate image descriptions following designated rule signal. Specifically, we first design the news-aware semantic rule for the descriptions. This rule incorporates the primary action depicted in the image (e.g., "performing") and the roles played by named entities involved in the action (e.g., "Agent" and "Place"). Second, we inject this semantic rule into the large-scale pre-trained model, BART, with the prefix-tuning strategy, where multiple encoder layers are embedded with news-aware semantic rule. Finally, we can effectively guide BART to generate news sentences that comply with the designated rule. Extensive experiments on two widely used datasets (i.e., GoodNews and NYTimes800k) demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

false

true

false

true

false

435,868

2411.00627

Investigating the Gestalt Principle of Closure in Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Deep neural networks perform well in object recognition, but do they perceive objects like humans? This study investigates the Gestalt principle of closure in convolutional neural networks. We propose a protocol to identify closure and conduct experiments using simple visual stimuli with progressively removed edge sections. We evaluate well-known networks on their ability to classify incomplete polygons. Our findings reveal a performance degradation as the edge removal percentage increases, indicating that current models heavily rely on complete edge information for accurate classification. The data used in our study is available on Github.

false

true

false

true

false

504,676

2408.10265

Distributed and Secure Kernel-Based Quantum Machine Learning

Quantum computing promises to revolutionize machine learning, offering significant efficiency gains in tasks such as clustering and distance estimation. Additionally, it provides enhanced security through fundamental principles like the measurement postulate and the no-cloning theorem, enabling secure protocols such as quantum teleportation and quantum key distribution. While advancements in secure quantum machine learning are notable, the development of secure and distributed quantum analogues of kernel-based machine learning techniques remains underexplored. In this work, we present a novel approach for securely computing common kernels, including polynomial, radial basis function (RBF), and Laplacian kernels, when data is distributed, using quantum feature maps. Our methodology introduces a robust framework that leverages quantum teleportation to ensure secure and distributed kernel learning. The proposed architecture is validated using IBM's Qiskit Aer Simulator on various public datasets.

false

true

false

481,786

2302.02407

HyPHEN: A Hybrid Packing Method and Optimizations for Homomorphic Encryption-Based Neural Networks

Convolutional neural network (CNN) inference using fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is a promising private inference (PI) solution due to the capability of FHE that enables offloading the whole computation process to the server while protecting the privacy of sensitive user data. Prior FHE-based CNN (HCNN) work has demonstrated the feasibility of constructing deep neural network architectures such as ResNet using FHE. Despite these advancements, HCNN still faces significant challenges in practicality due to the high computational and memory overhead. To overcome these limitations, we present HyPHEN, a deep HCNN construction that incorporates novel convolution algorithms (RAConv and CAConv), data packing methods (2D gap packing and PRCR scheme), and optimization techniques tailored to HCNN construction. Such enhancements enable HyPHEN to substantially reduce the memory footprint and the number of expensive homomorphic operations, such as ciphertext rotation and bootstrapping. As a result, HyPHEN brings the latency of HCNN CIFAR-10 inference down to a practical level at 1.4 seconds (ResNet-20) and demonstrates HCNN ImageNet inference for the first time at 14.7 seconds (ResNet-18).

false

true

false

true

false

343,989

2411.18376

Preserving Deep Representations In One-Shot Pruning: A Hessian-Free Second-Order Optimization Framework

We present SNOWS, a one-shot post-training pruning framework aimed at reducing the cost of vision network inference without retraining. Current leading one-shot pruning methods minimize layer-wise least squares reconstruction error which does not take into account deeper network representations. We propose to optimize a more global reconstruction objective. This objective accounts for nonlinear activations deep in the network to obtain a better proxy for the network loss. This nonlinear objective leads to a more challenging optimization problem -- we demonstrate it can be solved efficiently using a specialized second-order optimization framework. A key innovation of our framework is the use of Hessian-free optimization to compute exact Newton descent steps without needing to compute or store the full Hessian matrix. A distinct advantage of SNOWS is that it can be readily applied on top of any sparse mask derived from prior methods, readjusting their weights to exploit nonlinearities in deep feature representations. SNOWS obtains state-of-the-art results on various one-shot pruning benchmarks including residual networks and Vision Transformers (ViT/B-16 and ViT/L-16, 86m and 304m parameters respectively).

false

true

false

511,846

2210.15462

He Said, She Said: Style Transfer for Shifting the Perspective of Dialogues

In this work, we define a new style transfer task: perspective shift, which reframes a dialogue from informal first person to a formal third person rephrasing of the text. This task requires challenging coreference resolution, emotion attribution, and interpretation of informal text. We explore several baseline approaches and discuss further directions on this task when applied to short dialogues. As a sample application, we demonstrate that applying perspective shifting to a dialogue summarization dataset (SAMSum) substantially improves the zero-shot performance of extractive news summarization models on this data. Additionally, supervised extractive models perform better when trained on perspective shifted data than on the original dialogues. We release our code publicly.

false

true

false

326,965

1812.03527

A Deep Multi-task Learning Approach to Skin Lesion Classification

Skin lesion identification is a key step toward dermatological diagnosis. When describing a skin lesion, it is very important to note its body site distribution as many skin diseases commonly affect particular parts of the body. To exploit the correlation between skin lesions and their body site distributions, in this study, we investigate the possibility of improving skin lesion classification using the additional context information provided by body location. Specifically, we build a deep multi-task learning (MTL) framework to jointly optimize skin lesion classification and body location classification (the latter is used as an inductive bias). Our MTL framework uses the state-of-the-art ImageNet pretrained model with specialized loss functions for the two related tasks. Our experiments show that the proposed MTL based method performs more robustly than its standalone (single-task) counterpart.

false

true

false

116,037

2307.11288

Kernelized Offline Contextual Dueling Bandits

Preference-based feedback is important for many applications where direct evaluation of a reward function is not feasible. A notable recent example arises in reinforcement learning from human feedback on large language models. For many of these applications, the cost of acquiring the human feedback can be substantial or even prohibitive. In this work, we take advantage of the fact that often the agent can choose contexts at which to obtain human feedback in order to most efficiently identify a good policy, and introduce the offline contextual dueling bandit setting. We give an upper-confidence-bound style algorithm for this setting and prove a regret bound. We also give empirical confirmation that this method outperforms a similar strategy that uses uniformly sampled contexts.

false

true

false

true

false

380,849

1911.11691

Emergent Structures and Lifetime Structure Evolution in Artificial Neural Networks

Motivated by the flexibility of biological neural networks whose connectivity structure changes significantly during their lifetime, we introduce the Unstructured Recursive Network (URN) and demonstrate that it can exhibit similar flexibility during training via gradient descent. We show empirically that many of the different neural network structures commonly used in practice today (including fully connected, locally connected and residual networks of different depths and widths) can emerge dynamically from the same URN. These different structures can be derived using gradient descent on a single general loss function where the structure of the data and the relative strengths of various regulator terms determine the structure of the emergent network. We show that this loss function and the regulators arise naturally when considering the symmetries of the network as well as the geometric properties of the input data.

false

true

false

true

false

155,198

2108.09523

Automating Crystal-Structure Phase Mapping: Combining Deep Learning with Constraint Reasoning

Crystal-structure phase mapping is a core, long-standing challenge in materials science that requires identifying crystal structures, or mixtures thereof, in synthesized materials. Materials science experts excel at solving simple systems but cannot solve complex systems, creating a major bottleneck in high-throughput materials discovery. Herein we show how to automate crystal-structure phase mapping. We formulate phase mapping as an unsupervised pattern demixing problem and describe how to solve it using Deep Reasoning Networks (DRNets). DRNets combine deep learning with constraint reasoning for incorporating scientific prior knowledge and consequently require only a modest amount of (unlabeled) data. DRNets compensate for the limited data by exploiting and magnifying the rich prior knowledge about the thermodynamic rules governing the mixtures of crystals with constraint reasoning seamlessly integrated into neural network optimization. DRNets are designed with an interpretable latent space for encoding prior-knowledge domain constraints and seamlessly integrate constraint reasoning into neural network optimization. DRNets surpass previous approaches on crystal-structure phase mapping, unraveling the Bi-Cu-V oxide phase diagram, and aiding the discovery of solar-fuels materials.

false

true

false

true

false

251,632

2501.17397

Leveraging In-Context Learning and Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Automatic Question Generation in Educational Domains

Question generation in education is a time-consuming and cognitively demanding task, as it requires creating questions that are both contextually relevant and pedagogically sound. Current automated question generation methods often generate questions that are out of context. In this work, we explore advanced techniques for automated question generation in educational contexts, focusing on In-Context Learning (ICL), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and a novel Hybrid Model that merges both methods. We implement GPT-4 for ICL using few-shot examples and BART with a retrieval module for RAG. The Hybrid Model combines RAG and ICL to address these issues and improve question quality. Evaluation is conducted using automated metrics, followed by human evaluation metrics. Our results show that both the ICL approach and the Hybrid Model consistently outperform other methods, including baseline models, by generating more contextually accurate and relevant questions.

false

true

false

528,323

2402.07330

Expert-Adaptive Medical Image Segmentation

Medical image segmentation (MIS) plays an instrumental role in medical image analysis, where considerable effort has been devoted to automating the process. Currently, mainstream MIS approaches are based on deep neural networks (DNNs), which are typically trained on a dataset with annotations produced by certain medical experts. In the medical domain, the annotations generated by different experts can be inherently distinct due to complexity of medical images and variations in expertise and post-segmentation missions. Consequently, the DNN model trained on the data annotated by some experts may hardly adapt to a new expert. In this work, we evaluate a customised expert-adaptive method, characterised by multi-expert annotation, multi-task DNN-based model training, and lightweight model fine-tuning, to investigate model's adaptivity to a new expert in the situation where the amount and mobility of training images are limited. Experiments conducted on brain MRI segmentation tasks with limited training data demonstrate its effectiveness and the impact of its key parameters.

false

true

false

true

false

428,661

2108.02555

DeepScanner: a Robotic System for Automated 2D Object Dataset Collection with Annotations

In the proposed study, we describe the possibility of automated dataset collection using an articulated robot. The proposed technology reduces the number of pixel errors on a polygonal dataset and the time spent on manual labeling of 2D objects. The paper describes a novel automatic dataset collection and annotation system, and compares the results of automated and manual dataset labeling. Our approach increases the speed of data labeling 240-fold, and improves the accuracy compared to manual labeling 13-fold. We also present a comparison of metrics for training a neural network on a manually annotated and an automatically collected dataset.

false

true

false

249,363

2410.05468

PH-Dropout: Practical Epistemic Uncertainty Quantification for View Synthesis

View synthesis using Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and Gaussian Splatting (GS) has demonstrated impressive fidelity in rendering real-world scenarios. However, practical methods for accurate and efficient epistemic Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) in view synthesis are lacking. Existing approaches for NeRF either introduce significant computational overhead (e.g., ``10x increase in training time" or ``10x repeated training") or are limited to specific uncertainty conditions or models. Notably, GS models lack any systematic approach for comprehensive epistemic UQ. This capability is crucial for improving the robustness and scalability of neural view synthesis, enabling active model updates, error estimation, and scalable ensemble modeling based on uncertainty. In this paper, we revisit NeRF and GS-based methods from a function approximation perspective, identifying key differences and connections in 3D representation learning. Building on these insights, we introduce PH-Dropout (Post hoc Dropout), the first real-time and accurate method for epistemic uncertainty estimation that operates directly on pre-trained NeRF and GS models. Extensive evaluations validate our theoretical findings and demonstrate the effectiveness of PH-Dropout.

false

true

false

495,752

1301.0875

On Event Triggered Tracking for Nonlinear Systems

In this paper we study an event based control algorithm for trajectory tracking in nonlinear systems. The desired trajectory is modelled as the solution of a reference system with an exogenous input and it is assumed that the desired trajectory and the exogenous input to the reference system are uniformly bounded. Given a continuous-time control law that guarantees global uniform asymptotic tracking of the desired trajectory, our algorithm provides an event based controller that not only guarantees uniform ultimate boundedness of the tracking error, but also ensures non-accumulation of inter-execution times. In the case that the derivative of the exogenous input to the reference system is also uniformly bounded, an arbitrarily small ultimate bound can be designed. If the exogenous input to the reference system is piecewise continuous and not differentiable everywhere then the achievable ultimate bound is constrained and the result is local, though with a known region of attraction. The main ideas in the paper are illustrated through simulations of trajectory tracking by a nonlinear system.

false

true

false

20,810

1410.3987

Model-Free 3D Reconstruction of Weld Joint Using Laser Scanning

This article presents a novel utilization of the concept of entropy in information theory to model-free 3D reconstruction of weld joint in presence of noise. We show that our formulation attains its global minimum at the upper edge of this joint. This property significantly simplifies the extraction of this welding joint. Furthermore, we present an approach to compute the volume of this extracted space to facilitate the monitoring of the progress of the welding task. Moreover, we provide a preliminary analysis of the effect of variation of the noise on the extraction process of this space to realize the impact of this noise on the computation of its area and volume.

false

true

false

36,758

1906.01603

Do Neural Dialog Systems Use the Conversation History Effectively? An Empirical Study

Neural generative models have been become increasingly popular when building conversational agents. They offer flexibility, can be easily adapted to new domains, and require minimal domain engineering. A common criticism of these systems is that they seldom understand or use the available dialog history effectively. In this paper, we take an empirical approach to understanding how these models use the available dialog history by studying the sensitivity of the models to artificially introduced unnatural changes or perturbations to their context at test time. We experiment with 10 different types of perturbations on 4 multi-turn dialog datasets and find that commonly used neural dialog architectures like recurrent and transformer-based seq2seq models are rarely sensitive to most perturbations such as missing or reordering utterances, shuffling words, etc. Also, by open-sourcing our code, we believe that it will serve as a useful diagnostic tool for evaluating dialog systems in the future.

false

true

false

true

false

true

false

133,771

2106.06174

Competition on Dynamic Optimization Problems Generated by Generalized Moving Peaks Benchmark (GMPB)

The Generalized Moving Peaks Benchmark (GMPB) is a tool for generating continuous dynamic optimization problem instances with controllable dynamic and morphological characteristics. GMPB has been used in recent Competitions on Dynamic Optimization at prestigious conferences, such as the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC). This dynamic benchmark generator can create a wide variety of landscapes, ranging from simple unimodal to highly complex multimodal configurations and from symmetric to asymmetric forms. It also supports diverse surface textures, from smooth to highly irregular, and can generate varying levels of variable interaction and conditioning. This document provides an overview of GMPB, emphasizing how its parameters can be adjusted to produce landscapes with customizable characteristics. The MATLAB implementation of GMPB is available on the EDOLAB Platform.

false

true

false

240,396

2211.03128

Confidence-Ranked Reconstruction of Census Microdata from Published Statistics

A reconstruction attack on a private dataset $D$ takes as input some publicly accessible information about the dataset and produces a list of candidate elements of $D$. We introduce a new class of data reconstruction attacks based on randomized methods for non-convex optimization. We empirically demonstrate that our attacks can not only reconstruct full rows of $D$ from aggregate query statistics $Q(D)\in \mathbb{R}^m$, but can do so in a way that reliably ranks reconstructed rows by their odds of appearing in the private data, providing a signature that could be used for prioritizing reconstructed rows for further actions such as identify theft or hate crime. We also design a sequence of baselines for evaluating reconstruction attacks. Our attacks significantly outperform those that are based only on access to a public distribution or population from which the private dataset $D$ was sampled, demonstrating that they are exploiting information in the aggregate statistics $Q(D)$, and not simply the overall structure of the distribution. In other words, the queries $Q(D)$ are permitting reconstruction of elements of this dataset, not the distribution from which $D$ was drawn. These findings are established both on 2010 U.S. decennial Census data and queries and Census-derived American Community Survey datasets. Taken together, our methods and experiments illustrate the risks in releasing numerically precise aggregate statistics of a large dataset, and provide further motivation for the careful application of provably private techniques such as differential privacy.

false

true

false

true

false

328,835

2105.03627

Improving Cross-Lingual Reading Comprehension with Self-Training

Substantial improvements have been made in machine reading comprehension, where the machine answers questions based on a given context. Current state-of-the-art models even surpass human performance on several benchmarks. However, their abilities in the cross-lingual scenario are still to be explored. Previous works have revealed the abilities of pre-trained multilingual models for zero-shot cross-lingual reading comprehension. In this paper, we further utilized unlabeled data to improve the performance. The model is first supervised-trained on source language corpus, and then self-trained with unlabeled target language data. The experiment results showed improvements for all languages, and we also analyzed how self-training benefits cross-lingual reading comprehension in qualitative aspects.

false

true

false

234,205

2305.04724

Strategy for Rapid Diabetic Retinopathy Exposure Based on Enhanced Feature Extraction Processing

In the modern world, one of the most severe eye infections brought on by diabetes is known as diabetic retinopathy, which will result in retinal damage, and, thus, lead to blindness. Diabetic retinopathy can be well treated with early diagnosis. Retinal fundus images of humans are used to screen for lesions in the retina. However, detecting DR in the early stages is challenging due to the minimal symptoms. Furthermore, the occurrence of diseases linked to vascular anomalies brought on by DR aids in diagnosing the condition. Nevertheless, the resources required for manually identifying the lesions are high. Similarly, training for Convolutional Neural Networks is more time-consuming. This proposed research aims to improve diabetic retinopathy diagnosis by developing an enhanced deep learning model for timely DR identification that is potentially more accurate than existing CNN-based models. The proposed model will detect various lesions from retinal images in the early stages. First, characteristics are retrieved from the retinal fundus picture and put into the EDLM for classification. For dimensionality reduction, EDLM is used. Additionally, the classification and feature extraction processes are optimized using the stochastic gradient descent optimizer. The EDLM effectiveness is assessed on the KAG GLE dataset with 3459 retinal images, and results are compared over VGG16, VGG19, RESNET18, RESNET34, and RESNET50.

false

true

false

true

false

362,882

2407.12009

Using Multimodal Foundation Models and Clustering for Improved Style Ambiguity Loss

Teaching text-to-image models to be creative involves using style ambiguity loss, which requires a pretrained classifier. In this work, we explore a new form of the style ambiguity training objective, used to approximate creativity, that does not require training a classifier or even a labeled dataset. We then train a diffusion model to maximize style ambiguity to imbue the diffusion model with creativity and find our new methods improve upon the traditional method, based on automated metrics for human judgment, while still maintaining creativity and novelty.

false

true

false

true

false

473,718

1407.3926

Strategy Synthesis for General Deductive Games Based on SAT Solving

We propose a general framework for modelling and solving deductive games, where one player selects a secret code and the other player strives to discover this code using a minimal number of allowed experiments that reveal some partial information about the code. The framework is implemented in a software tool Cobra, and its functionality is demonstrated by producing new results about existing deductive games.

false

true

false

true

34,666

1205.6974

The Porosity of Additive Noise Sequences

Consider a binary additive noise channel with noiseless feedback. When the noise is a stationary and ergodic process $\mathbf{Z}$, the capacity is $1-\mathbb{H}(\mathbf{Z})$ ($\mathbb{H}(\cdot)$ denoting the entropy rate). It is shown analogously that when the noise is a deterministic sequence $z^\infty$, the capacity under finite-state encoding and decoding is $1-\bar{\rho}(z^\infty)$, where $\bar{\rho}(\cdot)$ is Lempel and Ziv's finite-state compressibility. This quantity is termed the \emph{porosity} $\underline{\sigma}(\cdot)$ of an individual noise sequence. A sequence of schemes are presented that universally achieve porosity for any noise sequence. These converse and achievability results may be interpreted both as a channel-coding counterpart to Ziv and Lempel's work in universal source coding, as well as an extension to the work by Lomnitz and Feder and Shayevitz and Feder on communication across modulo-additive channels. Additionally, a slightly more practical architecture is suggested that draws a connection with finite-state predictability, as introduced by Feder, Gutman, and Merhav.

false

true

false

16,264

1709.05087

Viewpoint Invariant Action Recognition using RGB-D Videos

In video-based action recognition, viewpoint variations often pose major challenges because the same actions can appear different from different views. We use the complementary RGB and Depth information from the RGB-D cameras to address this problem. The proposed technique capitalizes on the spatio-temporal information available in the two data streams to the extract action features that are largely insensitive to the viewpoint variations. We use the RGB data to compute dense trajectories that are translated to viewpoint insensitive deep features under a non-linear knowledge transfer model. Similarly, the Depth stream is used to extract CNN-based view invariant features on which Fourier Temporal Pyramid is computed to incorporate the temporal information. The heterogeneous features from the two streams are combined and used as a dictionary to predict the label of the test samples. To that end, we propose a sparse-dense collaborative representation classification scheme that strikes a balance between the discriminative abilities of the dense and the sparse representations of the samples over the extracted heterogeneous dictionary.

false

true

false

80,784

2409.11502

Super Resolution On Global Weather Forecasts

Weather forecasting is a vitally important tool for tasks ranging from planning day to day activities to disaster response planning. However, modeling weather has proven to be challenging task due to its chaotic and unpredictable nature. Each variable, from temperature to precipitation to wind, all influence the path the environment will take. As a result, all models tend to rapidly lose accuracy as the temporal range of their forecasts increase. Classical forecasting methods use a myriad of physics-based, numerical, and stochastic techniques to predict the change in weather variables over time. However, such forecasts often require a very large amount of data and are extremely computationally expensive. Furthermore, as climate and global weather patterns change, classical models are substantially more difficult and time-consuming to update for changing environments. Fortunately, with recent advances in deep learning and publicly available high quality weather datasets, deploying learning methods for estimating these complex systems has become feasible. The current state-of-the-art deep learning models have comparable accuracy to the industry standard numerical models and are becoming more ubiquitous in practice due to their adaptability. Our group seeks to improve upon existing deep learning based forecasting methods by increasing spatial resolutions of global weather predictions. Specifically, we are interested in performing super resolution (SR) on GraphCast temperature predictions by increasing the global precision from 1 degree of accuracy to 0.5 degrees, which is approximately 111km and 55km respectively.

false

true

false

489,179

1910.13276

a novel cross-lingual voice cloning approach with a few text-free samples

In this paper, we present a cross-lingual voice cloning approach. BN features obtained by SI-ASR model are used as a bridge across speakers and language boundaries. The relationships between text and BN features are modeled by the latent prosody model. The acoustic model learns the translation from BN features to acoustic features. The acoustic model is fine-tuned with a few samples of the target speaker to realize voice cloning. This system can generate speech of arbitrary utterance of target language in cross-lingual speakers' voice. We verify that with small amount of audio data, our proposed approach can well handle cross-lingual tasks. And in intra-lingual tasks, our proposed approach also performs better than baseline approach in naturalness and similarity.

false

true

false

true

false

151,347

2008.04779

ARX Model Identification using Generalized Spectral Decomposition

This article is concerned with the identification of autoregressive with exogenous inputs (ARX) models. Most of the existing approaches like prediction error minimization and state-space framework are widely accepted and utilized for the estimation of ARX models but are known to deliver unbiased and consistent parameter estimates for a correctly supplied guess of input-output orders and delay. In this paper, we propose a novel automated framework which recovers orders, delay, output noise distribution along with parameter estimates. The primary tool utilized in the proposed framework is generalized spectral decomposition. The proposed algorithm systematically estimates all the parameters in two steps. The first step utilizes estimates of the order by examining the generalized eigenvalues, and the second step estimates the parameter from the generalized eigenvectors. Simulation studies are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method and are observed to deliver consistent estimates even at low signal to noise ratio (SNR).

false

true

false

191,320

1806.08593

Tensor Monte Carlo: particle methods for the GPU era

Multi-sample, importance-weighted variational autoencoders (IWAE) give tighter bounds and more accurate uncertainty estimates than variational autoencoders (VAE) trained with a standard single-sample objective. However, IWAEs scale poorly: as the latent dimensionality grows, they require exponentially many samples to retain the benefits of importance weighting. While sequential Monte-Carlo (SMC) can address this problem, it is prohibitively slow because the resampling step imposes sequential structure which cannot be parallelised, and moreover, resampling is non-differentiable which is problematic when learning approximate posteriors. To address these issues, we developed tensor Monte-Carlo (TMC) which gives exponentially many importance samples by separately drawing $K$ samples for each of the $n$ latent variables, then averaging over all $K^n$ possible combinations. While the sum over exponentially many terms might seem to be intractable, in many cases it can be computed efficiently as a series of tensor inner-products. We show that TMC is superior to IWAE on a generative model with multiple stochastic layers trained on the MNIST handwritten digit database, and we show that TMC can be combined with standard variance reduction techniques.

false

true

false

101,183

2301.13247

Online Loss Function Learning

Loss function learning is a new meta-learning paradigm that aims to automate the essential task of designing a loss function for a machine learning model. Existing techniques for loss function learning have shown promising results, often improving a model's training dynamics and final inference performance. However, a significant limitation of these techniques is that the loss functions are meta-learned in an offline fashion, where the meta-objective only considers the very first few steps of training, which is a significantly shorter time horizon than the one typically used for training deep neural networks. This causes significant bias towards loss functions that perform well at the very start of training but perform poorly at the end of training. To address this issue we propose a new loss function learning technique for adaptively updating the loss function online after each update to the base model parameters. The experimental results show that our proposed method consistently outperforms the cross-entropy loss and offline loss function learning techniques on a diverse range of neural network architectures and datasets.

false

true

false

true

false

342,825

2402.14521

Malaysian English News Decoded: A Linguistic Resource for Named Entity and Relation Extraction

Standard English and Malaysian English exhibit notable differences, posing challenges for natural language processing (NLP) tasks on Malaysian English. Unfortunately, most of the existing datasets are mainly based on standard English and therefore inadequate for improving NLP tasks in Malaysian English. An experiment using state-of-the-art Named Entity Recognition (NER) solutions on Malaysian English news articles highlights that they cannot handle morphosyntactic variations in Malaysian English. To the best of our knowledge, there is no annotated dataset available to improvise the model. To address these issues, we constructed a Malaysian English News (MEN) dataset, which contains 200 news articles that are manually annotated with entities and relations. We then fine-tuned the spaCy NER tool and validated that having a dataset tailor-made for Malaysian English could improve the performance of NER in Malaysian English significantly. This paper presents our effort in the data acquisition, annotation methodology, and thorough analysis of the annotated dataset. To validate the quality of the annotation, inter-annotator agreement was used, followed by adjudication of disagreements by a subject matter expert. Upon completion of these tasks, we managed to develop a dataset with 6,061 entities and 3,268 relation instances. Finally, we discuss on spaCy fine-tuning setup and analysis on the NER performance. This unique dataset will contribute significantly to the advancement of NLP research in Malaysian English, allowing researchers to accelerate their progress, particularly in NER and relation extraction. The dataset and annotation guideline has been published on Github.

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false

431,720

1802.02904

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Image Hashing

Deep hashing methods have received much attention recently, which achieve promising results by taking advantage of the strong representation power of deep networks. However, most existing deep hashing methods learn a whole set of hashing functions independently, while ignore the correlations between different hashing functions that can promote the retrieval accuracy greatly. Inspired by the sequential decision ability of deep reinforcement learning, we propose a new Deep Reinforcement Learning approach for Image Hashing (DRLIH). Our proposed DRLIH approach models the hashing learning problem as a sequential decision process, which learns each hashing function by correcting the errors imposed by previous ones and promotes retrieval accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to address hashing problem from deep reinforcement learning perspective. The main contributions of our proposed DRLIH approach can be summarized as follows: (1) We propose a deep reinforcement learning hashing network. In the proposed network, we utilize recurrent neural network (RNN) as agents to model the hashing functions, which take actions of projecting images into binary codes sequentially, so that the current hashing function learning can take previous hashing functions' error into account. (2) We propose a sequential learning strategy based on proposed DRLIH. We define the state as a tuple of internal features of RNN's hidden layers and image features, which can reflect history decisions made by the agents. We also propose an action group method to enhance the correlation of hash functions in the same group. Experiments on three widely-used datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed DRLIH approach.

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true

false

89,858

2310.12393

Deep Learning Techniques for Video Instance Segmentation: A Survey

Video instance segmentation, also known as multi-object tracking and segmentation, is an emerging computer vision research area introduced in 2019, aiming at detecting, segmenting, and tracking instances in videos simultaneously. By tackling the video instance segmentation tasks through effective analysis and utilization of visual information in videos, a range of computer vision-enabled applications (e.g., human action recognition, medical image processing, autonomous vehicle navigation, surveillance, etc) can be implemented. As deep-learning techniques take a dominant role in various computer vision areas, a plethora of deep-learning-based video instance segmentation schemes have been proposed. This survey offers a multifaceted view of deep-learning schemes for video instance segmentation, covering various architectural paradigms, along with comparisons of functional performance, model complexity, and computational overheads. In addition to the common architectural designs, auxiliary techniques for improving the performance of deep-learning models for video instance segmentation are compiled and discussed. Finally, we discuss a range of major challenges and directions for further investigations to help advance this promising research field.

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true

false

400,994

1312.6945

Quantum Ensemble Classification: A Sampling-based Learning Control Approach

Quantum ensemble classification has significant applications in discrimination of atoms (or molecules), separation of isotopic molecules and quantum information extraction. However, quantum mechanics forbids deterministic discrimination among nonorthogonal states. The classification of inhomogeneous quantum ensembles is very challenging since there exist variations in the parameters characterizing the members within different classes. In this paper, we recast quantum ensemble classification as a supervised quantum learning problem. A systematic classification methodology is presented by using a sampling-based learning control (SLC) approach for quantum discrimination. The classification task is accomplished via simultaneously steering members belonging to different classes to their corresponding target states (e.g., mutually orthogonal states). Firstly a new discrimination method is proposed for two similar quantum systems. Then an SLC method is presented for quantum ensemble classification. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for the binary classification of two-level quantum ensembles and the multiclass classification of multilevel quantum ensembles.

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true

false

29,421

1107.4212

On the Undecidability of Fuzzy Description Logics with GCIs with Lukasiewicz t-norm

Recently there have been some unexpected results concerning Fuzzy Description Logics (FDLs) with General Concept Inclusions (GCIs). They show that, unlike the classical case, the DL ALC with GCIs does not have the finite model property under Lukasiewicz Logic or Product Logic and, specifically, knowledge base satisfiability is an undecidable problem for Product Logic. We complete here the analysis by showing that knowledge base satisfiability is also an undecidable problem for Lukasiewicz Logic.

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true

false

true

11,388

2010.04747

MEEP: An Open-Source Platform for Human-Human Dialog Collection and End-to-End Agent Training

We create a new task-oriented dialog platform (MEEP) where agents are given considerable freedom in terms of utterances and API calls, but are constrained to work within a push-button environment. We include facilities for collecting human-human dialog corpora, and for training automatic agents in an end-to-end fashion. We demonstrate MEEP with a dialog assistant that lets users specify trip destinations.

false

true

false

199,848