Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Neural Population Decoding and Imbalanced Multi-Omic Datasets For Cancer Subtype Diagnosis

Recent strides in the field of neural computation has seen the adoption of Winner Take All (WTA) circuits to facilitate the unification of hierarchical Bayesian inference and spiking neural networks as a neurobiologically plausible model of information processing. Current research commonly validates the performance of these networks via classification tasks, particularly of the MNIST dataset. However, researchers have not yet reached consensus about how best to translate the stochastic responses from these networks into discrete decisions, a process known as population decoding. Despite being an often underexamined part of SNNs, in this work we show that population decoding has a significanct impact on the classification performance of WTA networks. For this purpose, we apply a WTA network to the problem of cancer subtype diagnosis from multi omic data, using datasets from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). In doing so we utilise a novel implementation of gene similarity networks, a feature encoding technique based on Kohoens self organising map algorithm. We further show that the impact of selecting certain population decoding methods is amplified when facing imbalanced datasets.
Structured Code Representations Enable Data-Efficient Adaptation of Code Language Models

Current language models tailored for code tasks often adopt the pre-training-then-fine-tuning paradigm from natural language processing, modeling source code as plain text. This approach, however, overlooks the unambiguous structures inherent in programming languages. In this work, we explore data-efficient adaptation of pre-trained code models by further pre-training and fine-tuning them with program structures. Specifically, we represent programs as parse trees -- also known as concrete syntax trees (CSTs) -- and adapt pre-trained models on serialized CSTs. Although the models that we adapt have been pre-trained only on the surface form of programs, we find that a small amount of continual pre-training and fine-tuning on CSTs without changing the model architecture yields improvements over the baseline approach across various code tasks. The improvements are found to be particularly significant when there are limited training examples, demonstrating the effectiveness of integrating program structures with plain-text representation even when working with backbone models that have not been pre-trained with structures.
Symbol as Points: Panoptic Symbol Spotting via Point-based Representation

This work studies the problem of panoptic symbol spotting, which is to spot and parse both countable object instances (windows, doors, tables, etc.) and uncountable stuff (wall, railing, etc.) from computer-aided design (CAD) drawings. Existing methods typically involve either rasterizing the vector graphics into images and using image-based methods for symbol spotting, or directly building graphs and using graph neural networks for symbol recognition. In this paper, we take a different approach, which treats graphic primitives as a set of 2D points that are locally connected and use point cloud segmentation methods to tackle it. Specifically, we utilize a point transformer to extract the primitive features and append a mask2former-like spotting head to predict the final output. To better use the local connection information of primitives and enhance their discriminability, we further propose the attention with connection module (ACM) and contrastive connection learning scheme (CCL). Finally, we propose a KNN interpolation mechanism for the mask attention module of the spotting head to better handle primitive mask downsampling, which is primitive-level in contrast to pixel-level for the image. Our approach, named SymPoint, is simple yet effective, outperforming recent state-of-the-art method GAT-CADNet by an absolute increase of 9.6% PQ and 10.4% RQ on the FloorPlanCAD dataset. The source code and models will be available at https://github.com/nicehuster/SymPoint.
CBVS: A Large-Scale Chinese Image-Text Benchmark for Real-World Short Video Search Scenarios

Vision-Language Models pre-trained on large-scale image-text datasets have shown superior performance in downstream tasks such as image retrieval. Most of the images for pre-training are presented in the form of open domain common-sense visual elements. Differently, video covers in short video search scenarios are presented as user-originated contents that provide important visual summaries of videos. In addition, a portion of the video covers come with manually designed cover texts that provide semantic complements. In order to fill in the gaps in short video cover data, we establish the first large-scale cover-text benchmark for Chinese short video search scenarios. Specifically, we release two large-scale datasets CBVS-5M/10M to provide short video covers, and the manual fine-labeling dataset CBVS-20K to provide real user queries, which serves as an image-text benchmark test in the Chinese short video search field. To integrate the semantics of cover text in the case of modality missing, we propose UniCLIP where cover texts play a guiding role during training, however are not relied upon by inference. Extensive evaluation on CBVS-20K demonstrates the excellent performance of our proposal. UniCLIP has been deployed to Tencent's online video search systems with hundreds of millions of visits and achieved significant gains. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/QQBrowserVideoSearch/CBVS-UniCLIP.
Harnessing Transparent Learning Analytics for Individualized Support through Auto-detection of Engagement in Face-to-Face Collaborative Learning

Using learning analytics to investigate and support collaborative learning has been explored for many years. Recently, automated approaches with various artificial intelligence approaches have provided promising results for modelling and predicting student engagement and performance in collaborative learning tasks. However, due to the lack of transparency and interpretability caused by the use of"black box"approaches in learning analytics design and implementation, guidance for teaching and learning practice may become a challenge. On the one hand, the black box created by machine learning algorithms and models prevents users from obtaining educationally meaningful learning and teaching suggestions. On the other hand, focusing on group and cohort level analysis only can make it difficult to provide specific support for individual students working in collaborative groups. This paper proposes a transparent approach to automatically detect student's individual engagement in the process of collaboration. The results show that the proposed approach can reflect student's individual engagement and can be used as an indicator to distinguish students with different collaborative learning challenges (cognitive, behavioural and emotional) and learning outcomes. The potential of the proposed collaboration analytics approach for scaffolding collaborative learning practice in face-to-face contexts is discussed and future research suggestions are provided.
Learning Optimal Dynamic Treatment Regimes from Longitudinal Data

Studies often report estimates of the average treatment effect. While the ATE summarizes the effect of a treatment on average, it does not provide any information about the effect of treatment within any individual. A treatment strategy that uses an individual's information to tailor treatment to maximize benefit is known as an optimal dynamic treatment rule. Treatment, however, is typically not limited to a single point in time; consequently, learning an optimal rule for a time-varying treatment may involve not just learning the extent to which the comparative treatments' benefits vary across the characteristics of individuals, but also learning the extent to which the comparative treatments' benefits vary as relevant circumstances evolve within an individual. The goal of this paper is to provide a tutorial for estimating ODTR from longitudinal observational and clinical trial data for applied researchers. We describe an approach that uses a doubly-robust unbiased transformation of the conditional average treatment effect. We then learn a time-varying ODTR for when to increase buprenorphine-naloxone dose to minimize return-to-regular-opioid-use among patients with opioid use disorder. Our analysis highlights the utility of ODTRs in the context of sequential decision making: the learned ODTR outperforms a clinically defined strategy.
A survey on recent advances in named entity recognition

Named Entity Recognition seeks to extract substrings within a text that name real-world objects and to determine their type (for example, whether they refer to persons or organizations). In this survey, we first present an overview of recent popular approaches, but we also look at graph- and transformer- based methods including Large Language Models (LLMs) that have not had much coverage in other surveys. Second, we focus on methods designed for datasets with scarce annotations. Third, we evaluate the performance of the main NER implementations on a variety of datasets with differing characteristics (as regards their domain, their size, and their number of classes). We thus provide a deep comparison of algorithms that are never considered together. Our experiments shed some light on how the characteristics of datasets affect the behavior of the methods that we compare.
A comprehensive study on fidelity metrics for XAI

The use of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) systems has introduced a set of challenges that need resolution. Herein, we focus on how to correctly select an XAI method, an open questions within the field. The inherent difficulty of this task is due to the lack of a ground truth. Several authors have proposed metrics to approximate the fidelity of different XAI methods. These metrics lack verification and have concerning disagreements. In this study, we proposed a novel methodology to verify fidelity metrics, using a well-known transparent model, namely a decision tree. This model allowed us to obtain explanations with perfect fidelity. Our proposal constitutes the first objective benchmark for these metrics, facilitating a comparison of existing proposals, and surpassing existing methods. We applied our benchmark to assess the existing fidelity metrics in two different experiments, each using public datasets comprising 52,000 images. The images from these datasets had a size a 128 by 128 pixels and were synthetic data that simplified the training process. All metric values, indicated a lack of fidelity, with the best one showing a 30 \% deviation from the expected values for perfect explanation. Our experimentation led us to conclude that the current fidelity metrics are not reliable enough to be used in real scenarios. From this finding, we deemed it necessary to development new metrics, to avoid the detected problems, and we recommend the usage of our proposal as a benchmark within the scientific community to address these limitations.
Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data

This work presents Depth Anything, a highly practical solution for robust monocular depth estimation. Without pursuing novel technical modules, we aim to build a simple yet powerful foundation model dealing with any images under any circumstances. To this end, we scale up the dataset by designing a data engine to collect and automatically annotate large-scale unlabeled data (~62M), which significantly enlarges the data coverage and thus is able to reduce the generalization error. We investigate two simple yet effective strategies that make data scaling-up promising. First, a more challenging optimization target is created by leveraging data augmentation tools. It compels the model to actively seek extra visual knowledge and acquire robust representations. Second, an auxiliary supervision is developed to enforce the model to inherit rich semantic priors from pre-trained encoders. We evaluate its zero-shot capabilities extensively, including six public datasets and randomly captured photos. It demonstrates impressive generalization ability. Further, through fine-tuning it with metric depth information from NYUv2 and KITTI, new SOTAs are set. Our better depth model also results in a better depth-conditioned ControlNet. Our models are released at https://github.com/LiheYoung/Depth-Anything.
Explainable and Transferable Adversarial Attack for ML-Based Network Intrusion Detectors

espite being widely used in network intrusion detection systems (NIDSs), machine learning (ML) has proven to be highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks. White-box and black-box adversarial attacks of NIDS have been explored in several studies. However, white-box attacks unrealistically assume that the attackers have full knowledge of the target NIDSs. Meanwhile, existing black-box attacks can not achieve high attack success rate due to the weak adversarial transferability between models (e.g., neural networks and tree models). Additionally, neither of them explains why adversarial examples exist and why they can transfer across models. To address these challenges, this paper introduces ETA, an Explainable Transfer-based Black-Box Adversarial Attack framework. ETA aims to achieve two primary objectives: 1) create transferable adversarial examples applicable to various ML models and 2) provide insights into the existence of adversarial examples and their transferability within NIDSs. Specifically, we first provide a general transfer-based adversarial attack method applicable across the entire ML space. Following that, we exploit a unique insight based on cooperative game theory and perturbation interpretations to explain adversarial examples and adversarial transferability. On this basis, we propose an Important-Sensitive Feature Selection (ISFS) method to guide the search for adversarial examples, achieving stronger transferability and ensuring traffic-space constraints.
Q&A Prompts: Discovering Rich Visual Clues through Mining Question-Answer Prompts for VQA requiring Diverse World Knowledge

With the breakthrough of multi-modal large language models, answering complex visual questions that demand advanced reasoning abilities and world knowledge has become a much more important testbed for developing AI models than ever. However, equipping AI models with robust cross-modality reasoning ability remains challenging since the cognition scheme of humans has not been understood systematically. In this paper, we believe that if we can collect visual clues in the given image as much as possible, we will recognize the image more accurately, understand the question better, recall relevant knowledge more easily, and finally reason out the answer. We discover these rich visual clues by mining question-answer pairs in images and sending them into multi-modal large language models as prompts. We call the proposed method Q&A Prompts. Specifically, we first use the image-answer pairs and the corresponding questions in the training set as inputs and outputs to train a visual question generation model. Then, we use an image tagging model to identify various instances and send packaged image-tag pairs into the visual question generation model to generate relevant questions with the extracted image tags as answers. Finally, we encode these generated question-answer pairs as prompts with a visual-aware prompting module and send them into pre-trained multi-modal large language models to reason out the final answers. Experimental results show that, compared with state-of-the-art methods, our Q&A Prompts achieves substantial improvements on the challenging visual question answering datasets requiring reasoning over diverse world knowledge, such as OK-VQA and A-OKVQA.
Upper bound of the lifespan of the solution to the nonlinear fractional wave equations with time-dependent damping

In this paper, we study the Cauchy problem of the nonlinear wave equation with fractional Laplacian and time-dependent damping. Firstly, we derive the weighted Sobolev estimate of the solution operators for the linear wave equation with the damping of constant coefficient, and prove the local existence and uniqueness in the weighted Sobolev space for the power-type nonlinearity and $b(t)\in L^\infty$, by the contraction mapping principle. Secondly, we consider the case of the source nonlinearity $f(u)\approx |u|^p$. In the subcritical and critical cases $1<p\leq p_c=1+\frac \sigma N$, based on the blow-up result on the ordinary differential inequality, we could prove the blow-up of the solution and obtain the upper bound of the lifespan. And the upper bound of the lifespan in the critical case is independent on the coefficient of the time-dependent damping and is completely new even if the classical case $b(t)=1$.
Towards End-to-End GPS Localization with Neural Pseudorange Correction

Pseudorange errors are the root cause of localization inaccuracy in GPS. Previous data-driven methods regress and eliminate pseudorange errors using handcrafted intermediate labels. Unlike them, we propose an end-to-end GPS localization framework, E2E-PrNet, to train a neural network for pseudorange correction (PrNet) directly using the final task loss calculated with the ground truth of GPS receiver states. The gradients of the loss with respect to learnable parameters are backpropagated through a differentiable nonlinear least squares optimizer to PrNet. The feasibility is verified with GPS data collected by Android phones, showing that E2E-PrNet outperforms the state-of-the-art end-to-end GPS localization methods.
Window Stacking Meta-Models for Clinical EEG Classification

Windowing is a common technique in EEG machine learning classification and other time series tasks. However, a challenge arises when employing this technique: computational expense inhibits learning global relationships across an entire recording or set of recordings. Furthermore, the labels inherited by windows from their parent recordings may not accurately reflect the content of that window in isolation. To resolve these issues, we introduce a multi-stage model architecture, incorporating meta-learning principles tailored to time-windowed data aggregation. We further tested two distinct strategies to alleviate these issues: lengthening the window and utilizing overlapping to augment data. Our methods, when tested on the Temple University Hospital Abnormal EEG Corpus (TUAB), dramatically boosted the benchmark accuracy from 89.8 percent to 99.0 percent. This breakthrough performance surpasses prior performance projections for this dataset and paves the way for clinical applications of machine learning solutions to EEG interpretation challenges. On a broader and more varied dataset from the Temple University Hospital EEG Corpus (TUEG), we attained an accuracy of 86.7%, nearing the assumed performance ceiling set by variable inter-rater agreement on such datasets.
Diversity of Ultrafast Spin Dynamics Near the Tricritical Point in a Ferrimagnetic Gd/FeCo Multilayer

It is found that subtle changes in the external magnetic field and temperature result in dramatic changes in the ultrafast response of spins to a femtosecond laser excitation in a ferrimagnetic Gd/FeCo multilayer. A total of six distinct types of spin dynamics were observed and explained by considering the spin-flop transition to the noncollinear phase and the concept of a tricritical point in the $H$-$T$ phase diagram. A particularly interesting type of dynamics is the exchange-driven reversal. These exchange-driven dynamics provide new insights into the tricritical point, which is shown to separate two thermodynamically distinct noncollinear phases with the transition-metal magnetization pointing on adjacent sides of the anisotropy plane.
Critical Data Size of Language Models from a Grokking Perspective

We explore the critical data size in language models, a threshold that marks a fundamental shift from quick memorization to slow generalization. We formalize the phase transition under the grokking configuration into the Data Efficiency Hypothesis and identify data insufficiency, sufficiency, and surplus regimes in language models training dynamics. We develop a grokking configuration to reproduce grokking on simplistic language models stably by rescaling initialization and weight decay. We show that generalization occurs only when language models reach a critical size. We analyze grokking across sample-wise and model-wise, verifying the proposed data efficiency hypothesis. Our experiments reveal smoother phase transitions occurring at the critical dataset size for language datasets. As the model size increases, this critical point also becomes larger, indicating that larger models require more data. Our results deepen the understanding of language model training, offering a novel perspective on the role of data in the learning mechanism of language models.
Noise Contrastive Estimation-based Matching Framework for Low-Resource Security Attack Pattern Recognition

Techniques, Tactics and Procedures (TTP) mapping is an important and difficult task in the application of cyber threat intelligence (CTI) extraction for threat reports. TTPs are typically expressed in semantic forms within security knowledge bases like MITRE ATT&CK, serving as textual high-level descriptions for sophisticated attack patterns. Conversely, attacks in CTI threat reports are detailed in a combination of natural and technical language forms, presenting a significant challenge even for security experts to establish correlations or mappings with the corresponding TTPs.Conventional learning approaches often target the TTP mapping problem in the classical multiclass/label classification setting. This setting hinders the learning capabilities of the model, due to the large number of classes (i.e., TTPs), the inevitable skewness of the label distribution and the complex hierarchical structure of the label space. In this work, we approach the problem in a different learning paradigm, such that the assignment of a text to a TTP label is essentially decided by the direct semantic similarity between the two, thus, reducing the complexity of competing solely over the large labeling space. In order that, we propose a neural matching architecture that incorporates a sampling based learn-to-compare mechanism, facilitating the learning process of the matching model despite constrained resources.
Four top final states with NLO accuracy in perturbative QCD: 4 lepton channel

Triggered by the observation of four top-quark production at the LHC by the ATLAS and CMS collaboration we report on the calculation of the next-to-leading order QCD corrections to the Standard Model process $pp \to t\bar{t}t\bar{t}$ in the $4\ell$ top-quark decay channel. We take into account higher-order QCD effects in both the production and decays of the four top quarks. The latter effects are treated in the narrow width approximation, which preserves top-quark spin correlations throughout the calculation. We present results for two selected renormalisation and factorisation scale settings and three different PDF sets. Furthermore, we study the main theoretical uncertainties that are associated with the neglected higher-order terms in the perturbative expansion and with the parameterisation of the PDF sets. The results at the integrated and differential fiducial cross-section level are shown for the LHC Run III center-of-mass energy of $\sqrt{s}=13.6$ TeV. Our findings are particularly relevant for precise measurements of the four top-quark fiducial cross sections and for the modelling of top-quark decays at the LHC.