Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Continual Learning From a Stream of APIs

Continual learning (CL) aims to learn new tasks without forgetting previous tasks. However, existing CL methods require a large amount of raw data, which is often unavailable due to copyright considerations and privacy risks. Instead, stakeholders usually release pre-trained machine learning models as a service (MLaaS), which users can access via APIs. This paper considers two practical-yet-novel CL settings: data-efficient CL (DECL-APIs) and data-free CL (DFCL-APIs), which achieve CL from a stream of APIs with partial or no raw data. Performing CL under these two new settings faces several challenges: unavailable full raw data, unknown model parameters, heterogeneous models of arbitrary architecture and scale, and catastrophic forgetting of previous APIs. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel data-free cooperative continual distillation learning framework that distills knowledge from a stream of APIs into a CL model by generating pseudo data, just by querying APIs. Specifically, our framework includes two cooperative generators and one CL model, forming their training as an adversarial game. We first use the CL model and the current API as fixed discriminators to train generators via a derivative-free method. Generators adversarially generate hard and diverse synthetic data to maximize the response gap between the CL model and the API. Next, we train the CL model by minimizing the gap between the responses of the CL model and the black-box API on synthetic data, to transfer the API's knowledge to the CL model. Furthermore, we propose a new regularization term based on network similarity to prevent catastrophic forgetting of previous APIs.Our method performs comparably to classic CL with full raw data on the MNIST and SVHN in the DFCL-APIs setting. In the DECL-APIs setting, our method achieves 0.97x, 0.75x and 0.69x performance of classic CL on CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and MiniImageNet.
Quantum Monte Carlo simulations in the restricted Hilbert space of Rydberg atom arrays

Rydberg atom arrays have emerged as a powerful platform to simulate a number of exotic quantum ground states and phase transitions. To verify these capabilities numerically, we develop a versatile quantum Monte Carlo sampling technique which operates in the reduced Hilbert space generated by enforcing the constraint of a Rydberg blockade. We use the framework of stochastic series expansion and show that in the restricted space, the configuration space of operator strings can be understood as a hard rod gas in $d+1$ dimensions. We use this mapping to develop cluster algorithms which can be visualized as various non-local movements of rods. We study the efficiency of each of our updates individually and collectively. To elucidate the utility of the algorithm, we show that it can efficiently generate the phase diagram of a Rydberg atom array, to temperatures much smaller than all energy scales involved, on a Kagom\'e link lattice. This is of broad interest as the presence of a $Z_2$ spin liquid has been hypothesized recently.
Engineering Dynamical Phase Diagrams with Driven Lattices in Spinor Gases

We experimentally demonstrate that well-designed driven lattices are versatile tools to simultaneously tune multiple key parameters (namely spin-dependent interactions, spinor phase, and Zeeman energy) for manipulating phase diagrams of spinor gases with negligible heating and atom losses. This opens a new avenue for studying dynamical phase transitions in engineered Hamiltonians. The driven lattice creates additional separatrices in phase space at driving-frequency-determined locations, with progressively narrower separatrices at higher Zeeman energies due to modulation-induced higher harmonics. The vastly expanded range of magnetic fields at which significant spin dynamics occur and improved sensitivities at higher harmonics represent a step towards quantum sensing with ultracold gases.
Bellybutton: Accessible and Customizable Deep-Learning Image Segmentation

The conversion of raw images into quantifiable data can be a major hurdle in experimental research, and typically involves identifying region(s) of interest, a process known as segmentation. Machine learning tools for image segmentation are often specific to a set of tasks, such as tracking cells, or require substantial compute or coding knowledge to train and use. Here we introduce an easy-to-use (no coding required), image segmentation method, using a 15-layer convolutional neural network that can be trained on a laptop: Bellybutton. The algorithm trains on user-provided segmentation of example images, but, as we show, just one or even a portion of one training image can be sufficient in some cases. We detail the machine learning method and give three use cases where Bellybutton correctly segments images despite substantial lighting, shape, size, focus, and/or structure variation across the regions(s) of interest. Instructions for easy download and use, with further details and the datasets used in this paper are available at pypi.org/project/Bellybuttonseg.
Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation via Attribute Decomposition-Aggregation

Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation is a challenging task that requires segmenting novel object categories at inference time. Recent studies have explored vision-language pre-training to handle this task, but suffer from unrealistic assumptions in practical scenarios, i.e., low-quality textual category names. For example, this paradigm assumes that new textual categories will be accurately and completely provided, and exist in lexicons during pre-training. However, exceptions often happen when encountering ambiguity for brief or incomplete names, new words that are not present in the pre-trained lexicons, and difficult-to-describe categories for users. To address these issues, this work proposes a novel attribute decomposition-aggregation framework, AttrSeg, inspired by human cognition in understanding new concepts. Specifically, in the decomposition stage, we decouple class names into diverse attribute descriptions to complement semantic contexts from multiple perspectives. Two attribute construction strategies are designed: using large language models for common categories, and involving manually labeling for human-invented categories. In the aggregation stage, we group diverse attributes into an integrated global description, to form a discriminative classifier that distinguishes the target object from others. One hierarchical aggregation architecture is further proposed to achieve multi-level aggregations, leveraging the meticulously designed clustering module. The final results are obtained by computing the similarity between aggregated attributes and images embeddings. To evaluate the effectiveness, we annotate three types of datasets with attribute descriptions, and conduct extensive experiments and ablation studies. The results show the superior performance of attribute decomposition-aggregation.
Aerodynamic Characterization of a Fan-Array Wind Generator

Experimental assessment of safe and precise flight control algorithms for unmanned aerial vehicles under gusty wind conditions requires the capability to generate a large range of velocity profiles. In this study, we employ a small fan-array wind generator that can generate flows with large spatial and temporal variabilities. We perform a thorough aerodynamic characterization, operating the fans uniformly from low to maximum levels. Particle image velocimetry and hot-wire measurements indicate a jetlike flow with a nearly uniform core, which monotonously contracts in the streamwise direction and the surrounding, growing unsteady shear layers. These complex dynamics result in a limited region with a desired flow profile and turbulence level. The experimental results shed light on the flow generated by a full-scale fan-array wind generator, and they indicate the need for further improvements via properly designed add-ons and dedicated control algorithms.
Towards a Reduced Dependency Framework for Autonomous Unified Inspect-Explore Missions

The task of establishing and maintaining situational awareness in an unknown environment is a critical step to fulfil in a mission related to the field of rescue robotics. Predominantly, the problem of visual inspection of urban structures is dealt with view-planning being addressed by map-based approaches. In this article, we propose a novel approach towards effective use of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) for obtaining a 3-D shape of an unknown structure of objects utilizing a map-independent planning framework. The problem is undertaken via a bifurcated approach to address the task of executing a closer inspection of detected structures with a wider exploration strategy to identify and locate nearby structures, while being equipped with limited sensing capability. The proposed framework is evaluated experimentally in a controlled indoor environment in presence of a mock-up environment validating the efficacy of the proposed inspect-explore policy.
A Text-based Approach For Link Prediction on Wikipedia Articles

This paper present our work in the DSAA 2023 Challenge about Link Prediction for Wikipedia Articles. We use traditional machine learning models with POS tags (part-of-speech tags) features extracted from text to train the classification model for predicting whether two nodes has the link. Then, we use these tags to test on various machine learning models. We obtained the results by F1 score at 0.99999 and got $7^{th}$ place in the competition. Our source code is publicly available at this link: https://github.com/Tam1032/DSAA2023-Challenge-Link-prediction-DS-UIT_SAT.
Multi-fidelity reduced-order surrogate modeling

High-fidelity numerical simulations of partial differential equations (PDEs) given a restricted computational budget can significantly limit the number of parameter configurations considered and/or time window evaluated for modeling a given system. Multi-fidelity surrogate modeling aims to leverage less accurate, lower-fidelity models that are computationally inexpensive in order to enhance predictive accuracy when high-fidelity data are limited or scarce. However, low-fidelity models, while often displaying important qualitative spatio-temporal features, fail to accurately capture the onset of instability and critical transients observed in the high-fidelity models, making them impractical as surrogate models. To address this shortcoming, we present a new data-driven strategy that combines dimensionality reduction with multi-fidelity neural network surrogates. The key idea is to generate a spatial basis by applying the classical proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) to high-fidelity solution snapshots, and approximate the dynamics of the reduced states - time-parameter-dependent expansion coefficients of the POD basis - using a multi-fidelity long-short term memory (LSTM) network. By mapping low-fidelity reduced states to their high-fidelity counterpart, the proposed reduced-order surrogate model enables the efficient recovery of full solution fields over time and parameter variations in a non-intrusive manner. The generality and robustness of this method is demonstrated by a collection of parametrized, time-dependent PDE problems where the low-fidelity model can be defined by coarser meshes and/or time stepping, as well as by misspecified physical features. Importantly, the onset of instabilities and transients are well captured by this surrogate modeling technique.
Anomalous interactions between mesons with nonzero spin and glueballs

Topologically nontrivial fluctuations control the anomalous interactions for the $\eta$ and and $\eta \prime$ pseudoscalar mesons. We consider the anomalous interactions for mesons with higher spin, the heterochiral nonets with $J^{P C} = 1^{+ -}$ and $2^{- +}$. Under the approximation of a dilute gas of instantons, the mixing angle between non-strange and strange mesons decreases strongly as $J$ increases, and oscillates in sign. Anomalous interactions also open up new, rare decay channels. For glueballs, anomalous interactions indicate that the $X(2600)$ state is primarily gluonic.
Unsupervised discovery of Interpretable Visual Concepts

Providing interpretability of deep-learning models to non-experts, while fundamental for a responsible real-world usage, is challenging. Attribution maps from xAI techniques, such as Integrated Gradients, are a typical example of a visualization technique containing a high level of information, but with difficult interpretation. In this paper, we propose two methods, Maximum Activation Groups Extraction (MAGE) and Multiscale Interpretable Visualization (Ms-IV), to explain the model's decision, enhancing global interpretability. MAGE finds, for a given CNN, combinations of features which, globally, form a semantic meaning, that we call concepts. We group these similar feature patterns by clustering in ``concepts'', that we visualize through Ms-IV. This last method is inspired by Occlusion and Sensitivity analysis (incorporating causality), and uses a novel metric, called Class-aware Order Correlation (CaOC), to globally evaluate the most important image regions according to the model's decision space. We compare our approach to xAI methods such as LIME and Integrated Gradients. Experimental results evince the Ms-IV higher localization and faithfulness values. Finally, qualitative evaluation of combined MAGE and Ms-IV demonstrates humans' ability to agree, based on the visualization, with the decision of clusters' concepts; and, to detect, among a given set of networks, the existence of bias.
FACET: Fairness in Computer Vision Evaluation Benchmark

Computer vision models have known performance disparities across attributes such as gender and skin tone. This means during tasks such as classification and detection, model performance differs for certain classes based on the demographics of the people in the image. These disparities have been shown to exist, but until now there has not been a unified approach to measure these differences for common use-cases of computer vision models. We present a new benchmark named FACET (FAirness in Computer Vision EvaluaTion), a large, publicly available evaluation set of 32k images for some of the most common vision tasks - image classification, object detection and segmentation. For every image in FACET, we hired expert reviewers to manually annotate person-related attributes such as perceived skin tone and hair type, manually draw bounding boxes and label fine-grained person-related classes such as disk jockey or guitarist. In addition, we use FACET to benchmark state-of-the-art vision models and present a deeper understanding of potential performance disparities and challenges across sensitive demographic attributes. With the exhaustive annotations collected, we probe models using single demographics attributes as well as multiple attributes using an intersectional approach (e.g. hair color and perceived skin tone). Our results show that classification, detection, segmentation, and visual grounding models exhibit performance disparities across demographic attributes and intersections of attributes. These harms suggest that not all people represented in datasets receive fair and equitable treatment in these vision tasks. We hope current and future results using our benchmark will contribute to fairer, more robust vision models. FACET is available publicly at https://facet.metademolab. com.
The Group Folding Effect: The Role of Collaborative Process Structuring and Social Interaction in Group Work

Group work involves a myriad of complex processes encompassing social, perceptual, cognitive, and contextual factors. However, there is a lack of empirical research on computer-supported group work processes and their impact on outcomes at different stages of group work, especially when creativity and quality of outcomes are significant. Group work processes can interfere and hinder productivity, which we refer to as the “group folding effect. ” We designed a three-stage process structuring to enhance group work productivity. In a field study, we examined how process structuring shapes productivity in two sub-studies: design and peer feedback, each with 40 participants (N = 40). The results revealed that process structuring significantly improved both the quantity and quality of productivity. Additionally, process structuring appeared to reduce inhibitory effects of group work, such as negative priming, fixation on familiar ideas, and social comparison. We discuss the implications of this research in supporting productive group work processes in collaborative tools and insights into a pattern of the group folding effect.
Gender-Fair Language in Translation: A Case Study

With an increasing visibility of non-binary individuals, a growing number of language-specific strategies to linguistically include all genders or neutralize any gender references can be observed. Due to this multiplicity of proposed strategies and gender-specific grammatical differences across languages, selecting the one option to translate gender-fair language is challenging for machines and humans alike. As a first step towards gender-fair translation, we conducted a survey with translators to compare four gender-fair translations from a notional gender language, English, to a grammatical gender language, German. Proposed translations were rated by means of best-worst scaling as well as regarding their readability and comprehensibility. Participants expressed a clear preference for strategies with gender-inclusive character, i.e., colon.
Analysing Mistranslation of Emotions in Multilingual Tweets by Online MT Tools

It is common for websites that contain User-Generated Text (UGT) to provide an automatic translation option to reach out to their linguistically diverse users. In such scenarios, the process of translating the users’ emotions is entirely automatic with no human intervention, neither for post-editing, nor for accuracy checking. In this paper, we assess whether automatic translation tools can be a successful real-life utility in transferring emotion in multilingual tweets. Our analysis shows that the mistranslation of the source tweet can lead to critical errors where the emotion is either completely lost or flipped to an opposite sentiment. We identify linguistic phenomena specific to Twitter data which pose a challenge in translation of emotions and show how frequent these features are in different language pairs. We also show that commonly-used quality metrics can lend false confidence in the performance of online MT tools specifically when the source emotion is distorted in telegraphic messages such as tweets.
Measuring Machine Translation User Experience (MTUX): A Comparison between AttrakDiff and User Experience Questionnaire

Perceptions and experiences of machine translation (MT) users before, during, and after their interaction with MT systems, products or services has been overlooked both in academia and in industry. Tradi-tionally, the focus has been on productivi-ty and quality, often neglecting the human factor. We propose the concept of Ma-chine Translation User Experience (MTUX) for assessing, evaluating, and getting further information about the user experiences of people interacting with MT. By conducting a human-computer in-teraction (HCI)-based study with 15 pro-fessional translators, we analyse which is the best method for measuring MTUX, and conclude by suggesting the use of the User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ). The measurement of MTUX will help eve-ry stakeholder in the MT industry - devel-opers will be able to identify pain points for the users and solve them in the devel-opment process, resulting in better MTUX and higher adoption of MT systems or products by MT users.
MATEO: MAchine Translation Evaluation Online

We present MAchine Translation Evaluation Online (MATEO), a project that aims to facilitate machine translation (MT) evaluation by means of an easy-to-use interface that can evaluate given machine translations with a battery of automatic metrics. It caters to both experienced and novice users who are working with MT, such as MT system builders, teachers and students of (machine) translation, and researchers.
Creating a parallel Finnish-Easy Finnish dataset from news articles

Modern natural language processing tasks such as text simplification or summarization are typically formulated as monolingual machine translation tasks. This requires appropriate datasets to train, tune, and evaluate the models. This paper describes the creation of a parallel Finnish-Easy Finnish dataset from the Yle News archives. The dataset contains 1919 manually verified pairs of articles, each containing an article in Easy Finnish (selkosuomi) and a corresponding article from Standard Finnish news. Standard Finnish texts total 687555 words, and Easy Finnish texts have 106733 words. This new aligned resource was created automatically based on the Yle News archives from the Language Bank of Finland (Kielipankki) and manually checked by a human expert. The dataset is available for download from Kielipankki. This resource will allow for more effective Easy Language research and for creating applications for automatic simplification and/or summarization of Finnish texts.
Training and integration of neural machine translation with MTUOC

In this paper the goals and main objectives of the project MTUOC are presented. This project aims to ease the process of training and integrating neural machine translation (NMT) systems into professional translation environments. The MTUOC project distributes a series of auxiliary tools that allow to perform parallel corpus compilation and preprocessing, as well as the training of NMT systems. The project also distributes a server that implements most of the communication protocols used in computer assisted translation tools.
Adapting Machine Translation Education to the Neural Era: A Case Study of MT Quality Assessment

The use of automatic evaluation metrics to assess Machine Translation (MT) quality is well established in the translation industry. Whereas it is relatively easy to cover the word- and character-based metrics in an MT course, it is less obvious to integrate the newer neural metrics. In this paper we discuss how we introduced the topic of MT quality assessment in a course for translation students. We selected three English source texts, each having a different difficulty level and style, and let the students translate the texts into their L1 and reflect upon translation difficulty. Afterwards, the students were asked to assess MT quality for the same texts using different methods and to critically reflect upon obtained results. The students had access to the MATEO web interface, which contains word- and character-based metrics as well as neural metrics. The students used two different reference translations: their own translations and professional translations of the three texts. We not only synthesise the comments of the students, but also present the results of some cross-lingual analyses on nine different language pairs.
PE effort and neural-based automatic MT metrics: do they correlate?

Neural machine translation (NMT) has shown overwhelmingly good results in recent times. This improvement in quality has boosted the presence of NMT in nearly all fields of translation. Most current translation industry workflows include postediting (PE) of MT as part of their process. For many domains and language combinations, translators post-edit raw machine translation (MT) to produce the final document. However, this process can only work properly if the quality of the raw MT output can be assured. MT is usually evaluated using automatic scores, as they are much faster and cheaper. However, traditional automatic scores have not been good quality indicators and do not correlate with PE effort. We analyze the correlation of each of the three dimensions of PE effort (temporal, technical and cognitive) with COMET, a neural framework which has obtained outstanding results in recent MT evaluation campaigns.