Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improving Language Understanding from Screenshots

An emerging family of language models (LMs), capable of processing both text and images within a single visual view, has the promise to unlock complex tasks such as chart understanding and UI navigation. We refer to these models as screenshot language models. Despite their appeal, existing screenshot LMs substantially lag behind text-only models on language understanding tasks. To close this gap, we adopt a simplified setting where the model inputs are plain-text-rendered screenshots, and we focus on improving the text ability of screenshot LMs. We propose a novel Patch-and-Text Prediction (PTP) objective, which masks and recovers both image patches of screenshots and text within screenshots. We also conduct extensive ablation studies on masking rates and patch sizes, as well as designs for improving training stability. Our pre-trained model, while solely taking visual inputs, achieves comparable performance with BERT on 6 out of 8 GLUE tasks (within 2%) and improves up to 8% over prior work. Additionally, we extend PTP to train autoregressive screenshot LMs and demonstrate its effectiveness--our models can significantly reduce perplexity by utilizing the screenshot context. Together, we hope our findings can inspire future research on developing powerful screenshot LMs and extending their reach to broader applications.
Carrollian Amplitudes from Strings

Carrollian holography is supposed to describe gravity in four-dimensional asymptotically flat space-time by the three-dimensional Carrollian CFT living at null infinity. We transform superstring scattering amplitudes into the correlation functions of primary fields of Carrollian CFT depending on the three-dimensional coordinates of the celestial sphere and a retarded time coordinate. The power series in the inverse string tension is converted to a whole tower of both UV and IR finite descendants of the underlying field-theoretical Carrollian amplitude. We focus on four-point amplitudes involving gauge bosons and gravitons in type I open superstring theory and in closed heterotic superstring theory at the tree-level. We also discuss the limit of infinite retarded time coordinates, where the string world-sheet becomes celestial.
Spin-dependent interactions in orbital-density-dependent functionals: non-collinear Koopmans spectral functionals

The presence of spin-orbit coupling or non-collinear magnetic spin states can have dramatic effects on the ground-state and spectral properties of materials, in particular on the band structure. Here, we develop non-collinear Koopmans-compliant functionals based on Wannier functions and density-functional perturbation theory, targeting accurate spectral properties in the quasiparticle approximation. Our non-collinear Koopmans-compliant theory involves functionals of four-component orbitals densities, that can be obtained from the charge and spin-vector densities of Wannier functions. We validate our approach on three emblematic and diverse semiconductors where the effect of spin-orbit coupling goes from small to very large: the III-IV semiconductor GaAs, the transition-metal dichalcogenide WSe$_2$, and the cubic perovskite CsPbBr$_3$. The predicted band gaps are comparable in accuracy to state-of-the-art many-body perturbation theory and include spin-dependent interactions and screening effects that are missing in standard diagrammatic approaches based on the random phase approximation. While the inclusion of orbital- and spin-dependent interactions in many-body perturbation theory requires self-screening or vertex corrections, that emerges naturally in the Koopmans-functionals framework.
A Simple Framework Uniting Visual In-context Learning with Masked Image Modeling to Improve Ultrasound Segmentation

Conventional deep learning models deal with images one-by-one, requiring costly and time-consuming expert labeling in the field of medical imaging, and domain-specific restriction limits model generalizability. Visual in-context learning (ICL) is a new and exciting area of research in computer vision. Unlike conventional deep learning, ICL emphasizes the model's ability to adapt to new tasks based on given examples quickly. Inspired by MAE-VQGAN, we proposed a new simple visual ICL method called SimICL, combining visual ICL pairing images with masked image modeling (MIM) designed for self-supervised learning. We validated our method on bony structures segmentation in a wrist ultrasound (US) dataset with limited annotations, where the clinical objective was to segment bony structures to help with further fracture detection. We used a test set containing 3822 images from 18 patients for bony region segmentation. SimICL achieved an remarkably high Dice coeffient (DC) of 0.96 and Jaccard Index (IoU) of 0.92, surpassing state-of-the-art segmentation and visual ICL models (a maximum DC 0.86 and IoU 0.76), with SimICL DC and IoU increasing up to 0.10 and 0.16. This remarkably high agreement with limited manual annotations indicates SimICL could be used for training AI models even on small US datasets. This could dramatically decrease the human expert time required for image labeling compared to conventional approaches, and enhance the real-world use of AI assistance in US image analysis.
HR-APR: APR-agnostic Framework with Uncertainty Estimation and Hierarchical Refinement for Camera Relocalisation

Absolute Pose Regressors (APRs) directly estimate camera poses from monocular images, but their accuracy is unstable for different queries. Uncertainty-aware APRs provide uncertainty information on the estimated pose, alleviating the impact of these unreliable predictions. However, existing uncertainty modelling techniques are often coupled with a specific APR architecture, resulting in suboptimal performance compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) APR methods. This work introduces a novel APR-agnostic framework, HR-APR, that formulates uncertainty estimation as cosine similarity estimation between the query and database features. It does not rely on or affect APR network architecture, which is flexible and computationally efficient. In addition, we take advantage of the uncertainty for pose refinement to enhance the performance of APR. The extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, reducing 27.4\% and 15.2\% of computational overhead on the 7Scenes and Cambridge Landmarks datasets while maintaining the SOTA accuracy in single-image APRs.
Tunable transport in bi-disperse porous materials with vascular structure

We study transport in synthetic, bi-disperse porous structures, with arrays of microchannels interconnected by a nanoporous layer. These structures are inspired by the xylem tissue in vascular plants, in which sap water travels from the roots to the leaves to maintain hydration and carry micronutrients. We experimentally evaluate transport in three conditions: high pressure-driven flow, spontaneous imbibition, and transpiration-driven flow. The latter case resembles the situation in a living plant, where bulk liquid water is transported upwards in a metastable state (negative pressure), driven by evaporation in the leaves; here we report stable, transpiration-driven flows down to $\sim -15$ MPa of driving force. By varying the shape of the microchannels, we show that we can tune the rate of these transport processes in a predictable manner, using a simple analytical (effective medium) approach and numerical simulations of the flow field in the bi-disperse media. We also show that the spontaneous imbibition behavior of a single structure - with fixed geometry - can behave very differently depending on its preparation (filled with air, vs. evacuated), because of a dramatic change in the conductance of vapor in the microchannels; this change offers a second way to tune the rate of transport in bi-disperse, xylem-like structures, by switching between air-filled and evacuated states.
Improving Assessment of Tutoring Practices using Retrieval-Augmented Generation

One-on-one tutoring is an effective instructional method for enhancing learning, yet its efficacy hinges on tutor competencies. Novice math tutors often prioritize content-specific guidance, neglecting aspects such as social-emotional learning. Social-emotional learning promotes equity and inclusion and nurturing relationships with students, which is crucial for holistic student development. Assessing the competencies of tutors accurately and efficiently can drive the development of tailored tutor training programs. However, evaluating novice tutor ability during real-time tutoring remains challenging as it typically requires experts-in-the-loop. To address this challenge, this preliminary study aims to harness Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT), such as GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models, to automatically assess tutors' ability of using social-emotional tutoring strategies. Moreover, this study also reports on the financial dimensions and considerations of employing these models in real-time and at scale for automated assessment. The current study examined four prompting strategies: two basic Zero-shot prompt strategies, Tree of Thought prompt, and Retrieval-Augmented Generator (RAG) based prompt. The results indicate that the RAG prompt demonstrated more accurate performance (assessed by the level of hallucination and correctness in the generated assessment texts) and lower financial costs than the other strategies evaluated. These findings inform the development of personalized tutor training interventions to enhance the the educational effectiveness of tutored learning.
Efficient construction of the Feynman-Vernon influence functional as matrix product states

The time-evolving matrix product operator (TEMPO) method has become a very competitive numerical method for studying the real-time dynamics of quantum impurity problems. For small impurities, the most challenging calculation in TEMPO is to construct the matrix product state representation of the Feynman-Vernon influence functional. In this work we propose an efficient method for this task, which exploits the time-translationally invariant property of the influence functional. The required number of matrix product state multiplication in our method is almost independent of the total evolution time, as compared to the method originally used in TEMPO which requires a linearly scaling number of multiplications. The accuracy and efficiency of this method are demonstrated for the Toulouse model and the single impurity Anderson model.
Understanding and Detecting Annotation-Induced Faults of Static Analyzers

Static analyzers can reason about the properties and behaviors of programs and detect various issues without executing them. Hence, they should extract the necessary information to understand the analyzed program well. Annotation has been a widely used feature for different purposes in Java since the introduction of Java 5. Annotations can change program structures and convey semantics information without awareness of static analyzers, consequently leading to imprecise analysis results. This paper presents the first comprehensive study of annotation-induced faults (AIF) by analyzing 246 issues in six open-source and popular static analyzers (i.e., PMD, SpotBugs, CheckStyle, Infer, SonarQube, and Soot). We analyzed the issues' root causes, symptoms, and fix strategies and derived ten findings and some practical guidelines for detecting and repairing annotation-induced faults. Moreover, we developed an automated testing framework called AnnaTester based on three metamorphic relations originating from the findings. AnnaTester generated new tests based on the official test suites of static analyzers and unveiled 43 new faults, 20 of which have been fixed. The results confirm the value of our study and its findings.
Prompting a Pretrained Transformer Can Be a Universal Approximator

Despite the widespread adoption of prompting, prompt tuning and prefix-tuning of transformer models, our theoretical understanding of these fine-tuning methods remains limited. A key question is whether one can arbitrarily modify the behavior of pretrained model by prompting or prefix-tuning it. Formally, whether prompting and prefix-tuning a pretrained model can universally approximate sequence-to-sequence functions. This paper answers in the affirmative and demonstrates that much smaller pretrained models than previously thought can be universal approximators when prefixed. In fact, the attention mechanism is uniquely suited for universal approximation with prefix-tuning a single attention head being sufficient to approximate any continuous function. Moreover, any sequence-to-sequence function can be approximated by prefixing a transformer with depth linear in the sequence length. Beyond these density-type results, we also offer Jackson-type bounds on the length of the prefix needed to approximate a function to a desired precision.
Transformable Gaussian Reward Function for Socially-Aware Navigation with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Robot navigation has transitioned from prioritizing obstacle avoidance to adopting socially aware navigation strategies that accommodate human presence. As a result, the recognition of socially aware navigation within dynamic human-centric environments has gained prominence in the field of robotics. Although reinforcement learning technique has fostered the advancement of socially aware navigation, defining appropriate reward functions, especially in congested environments, has posed a significant challenge. These rewards, crucial in guiding robot actions, demand intricate human-crafted design due to their complex nature and inability to be automatically set. The multitude of manually designed rewards poses issues with hyperparameter redundancy, imbalance, and inadequate representation of unique object characteristics. To address these challenges, we introduce a transformable gaussian reward function (TGRF). The TGRF significantly reduces the burden of hyperparameter tuning, displays adaptability across various reward functions, and demonstrates accelerated learning rates, particularly excelling in crowded environments utilizing deep reinforcement learning (DRL). We introduce and validate TGRF through sections highlighting its conceptual background, characteristics, experiments, and real-world application, paving the way for a more effective and adaptable approach in robotics.The complete source code is available on https://github.com/JinnnK/TGRF
SpanSeq: Similarity-based sequence data splitting method for improved development and assessment of deep learning projects

The use of deep learning models in computational biology has increased massively in recent years, and is expected to do so further with the current advances in fields like Natural Language Processing. These models, although able to draw complex relations between input and target, are also largely inclined to learn noisy deviations from the pool of data used during their development. In order to assess their performance on unseen data (their capacity to generalize), it is common to randomly split the available data in development (train/validation) and test sets. This procedure, although standard, has lately been shown to produce dubious assessments of generalization due to the existing similarity between samples in the databases used. In this work, we present SpanSeq, a database partition method for machine learning that can scale to most biological sequences (genes, proteins and genomes) in order to avoid data leakage between sets. We also explore the effect of not restraining similarity between sets by reproducing the development of the state-of-the-art model DeepLoc, not only confirming the consequences of randomly splitting databases on the model assessment, but expanding those repercussions to the model development. SpanSeq is available for downloading and installing at https://github.com/genomicepidemiology/SpanSeq.
Generative Adversarial Network with Soft-Dynamic Time Warping and Parallel Reconstruction for Energy Time Series Anomaly Detection

In this paper, we employ a 1D deep convolutional generative adversarial network (DCGAN) for sequential anomaly detection in energy time series data. Anomaly detection involves gradient descent to reconstruct energy sub-sequences, identifying the noise vector that closely generates them through the generator network. Soft-DTW is used as a differentiable alternative for the reconstruction loss and is found to be superior to Euclidean distance. Combining reconstruction loss and the latent space's prior probability distribution serves as the anomaly score. Our novel method accelerates detection by parallel computation of reconstruction of multiple points and shows promise in identifying anomalous energy consumption in buildings, as evidenced by performing experiments on hourly energy time series from 15 buildings.
Towards singular optimality in the presence of local initial knowledge

The Knowledge Till rho CONGEST model is a variant of the classical CONGEST model of distributed computing in which each vertex v has initial knowledge of the radius-rho ball centered at v. The most commonly studied variants of the CONGEST model are KT0 CONGEST in which nodes initially know nothing about their neighbors and KT1 CONGEST in which nodes initially know the IDs of all their neighbors. It has been shown that having access to neighbors' IDs (as in the KT1 CONGEST model) can substantially reduce the message complexity of algorithms for fundamental problems such as BROADCAST and MST. For example, King, Kutten, and Thorup (PODC 2015) show how to construct an MST using just Otilde(n) messages in the KT1 CONGEST model, whereas there is an Omega(m) message lower bound for MST in the KT0 CONGEST model. Building on this result, Gmyr and Pandurangen (DISC 2018) present a family of distributed randomized algorithms for various global problems that exhibit a trade-off between message and round complexity. These algorithms are based on constructing a sparse, spanning subgraph called a danner. Specifically, given a graph G and any delta in [0,1], their algorithm constructs (with high probability) a danner that has diameter Otilde(D + n^{1-delta}) and Otilde(min{m,n^{1+delta}}) edges in Otilde(n^{1-delta}) rounds while using Otilde(min{m,n^{1+\delta}}) messages, where n, m, and D are the number of nodes, edges, and the diameter of G, respectively. In the main result of this paper, we show that if we assume the KT2 CONGEST model, it is possible to substantially improve the time-message trade-off in constructing a danner. Specifically, we show in the KT2 CONGEST model, how to construct a danner that has diameter Otilde(D + n^{1-2delta}) and Otilde(min{m,n^{1+delta}}) edges in Otilde(n^{1-2delta}) rounds while using Otilde(min{m,n^{1+\delta}}) messages for any delta in [0,1/2].
Pseudorandom unitaries with non-adaptive security

Pseudorandom unitaries (PRUs) are ensembles of efficiently implementable unitary operators that cannot be distinguished from Haar random unitaries by any quantum polynomial-time algorithm with query access to the unitary. We present a simple PRU construction that is a concatenation of a random Clifford unitary, a pseudorandom binary phase operator, and a pseudorandom permutation operator. We prove that this PRU construction is secure against non-adaptive distinguishers assuming the existence of quantum-secure one-way functions. This means that no efficient quantum query algorithm that is allowed a single application of $U^{\otimes \mathrm{poly}(n)}$ can distinguish whether an $n$-qubit unitary $U$ was drawn from the Haar measure or our PRU ensemble. We conjecture that our PRU construction remains secure against adaptive distinguishers, i.e. secure against distinguishers that can query the unitary polynomially many times in sequence, not just in parallel.
Framing in the Presence of Supporting Data: A Case Study in U.S. Economic News

The mainstream media has much leeway in what it chooses to cover and how it covers it. These choices have real-world consequences on what people know and their subsequent behaviors. However, the lack of objective measures to evaluate editorial choices makes research in this area particularly difficult. In this paper, we argue that there are newsworthy topics where objective measures exist in the form of supporting data and propose a computational framework to analyze editorial choices in this setup. We focus on the economy because the reporting of economic indicators presents us with a relatively easy way to determine both the selection and framing of various publications. Their values provide a ground truth of how the economy is doing relative to how the publications choose to cover it. To do this, we define frame prediction as a set of interdependent tasks. At the article level, we learn to identify the reported stance towards the general state of the economy. Then, for every numerical quantity reported in the article, we learn to identify whether it corresponds to an economic indicator and whether it is being reported in a positive or negative way. To perform our analysis, we track six American publishers and each article that appeared in the top 10 slots of their landing page between 2015 and 2023.
Bringing Generative AI to Adaptive Learning in Education

The recent surge in generative AI technologies, such as large language models and diffusion models, have boosted the development of AI applications in various domains, including science, finance, and education. Concurrently, adaptive learning, a concept that has gained substantial interest in the educational sphere, has proven its efficacy in enhancing students' learning efficiency. In this position paper, we aim to shed light on the intersectional studies of these two methods, which combine generative AI with adaptive learning concepts. By presenting discussions about the benefits, challenges, and potentials in this field, we argue that this union will contribute significantly to the development of the next stage learning format in education.
Fine-Tuning Enhances Existing Mechanisms: A Case Study on Entity Tracking

Fine-tuning on generalized tasks such as instruction following, code generation, and mathematics has been shown to enhance language models' performance on a range of tasks. Nevertheless, explanations of how such fine-tuning influences the internal computations in these models remain elusive. We study how fine-tuning affects the internal mechanisms implemented in language models. As a case study, we explore the property of entity tracking, a crucial facet of language comprehension, where models fine-tuned on mathematics have substantial performance gains. We identify the mechanism that enables entity tracking and show that (i) in both the original model and its fine-tuned versions primarily the same circuit implements entity tracking. In fact, the entity tracking circuit of the original model on the fine-tuned versions performs better than the full original model. (ii) The circuits of all the models implement roughly the same functionality: Entity tracking is performed by tracking the position of the correct entity in both the original model and its fine-tuned versions. (iii) Performance boost in the fine-tuned models is primarily attributed to its improved ability to handle the augmented positional information. To uncover these findings, we employ: Patch Patching, DCM, which automatically detects model components responsible for specific semantics, and CMAP, a new approach for patching activations across models to reveal improved mechanisms. Our findings suggest that fine-tuning enhances, rather than fundamentally alters, the mechanistic operation of the model.