Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On Good Practices for Task-Specific Distillation of Large Pretrained Models

Large pretrained visual models exhibit remarkable generalization across diverse recognition tasks. Yet, real-world applications often demand compact models tailored to specific problems. Variants of knowledge distillation have been devised for such a purpose, enabling task-specific compact models (the students) to learn from a generic large pretrained one (the teacher). In this paper, we show that the excellent robustness and versatility of recent pretrained models challenge common practices established in the literature, calling for a new set of optimal guidelines for task-specific distillation. To address the lack of samples in downstream tasks, we also show that a variant of Mixup based on stable diffusion complements standard data augmentation. This strategy eliminates the need for engineered text prompts and improves distillation of generic models into streamlined specialized networks.
Faster algorithms on linear delta-matroids

We show new algorithms and constructions over linear delta-matroids. We observe an alternative representation for linear delta-matroids, as a contraction representation over a skew-symmetric matrix. This is equivalent to the more standard"twist representation"up to $O(n^\omega)$-time transformations, but is much more convenient for algorithmic tasks. For instance, the problem of finding a max-weight feasible set now reduces directly to the problem of finding a max-weight basis in a linear matroid. Supported by this representation, we provide new algorithms and constructions over linear delta-matroids. We show that the union and delta-sum of linear delta-matroids define linear delta-matroids, and a representation for the resulting delta-matroid can be constructed in randomized time $O(n^\omega)$. Previously, it was only known that these operations define delta-matroids. We also note that every projected linear delta-matroid can be represented as an elementary projection. This implies that several optimization problems over (projected) linear delta-matroids, including the coverage, delta-coverage, and parity problems, reduce (in their decision versions) to a single $O(n^{\omega})$-time matrix rank computation. Using the methods of Harvey, previously used by Cheung, Lao and Leung for linear matroid parity, we furthermore show how to solve the search versions in the same time. This improves on the $O(n^4)$-time augmenting path algorithm of Geelen, Iwata and Murota. Finally, we consider the maximum-cardinality delta-matroid intersection problem. Using Storjohann's algorithms for symbolic determinants, we show that such a solution can be found in $O(n^{\omega+1})$ time. This is the first polynomial-time algorithm for the problem, solving an open question of Kakimura and Takamatsu.
Grammaticality illusion or ambiguous interpretation? Event-related potentials reveal the nature of the missing-NP effect in Mandarin centre-embedded structures

In several languages, omitting a verb phrase (VP) in double centre-embedded structures creates a grammaticality illusion. Similar illusion also exhibited in Mandarin missing-NP double centre-embedded structures. However, there is no consensus on its very nature. Instead of treating it as grammaticality illusion, we argue that ambiguous interpretations of verbs can best account for this phenomenon in Mandarin. To further support this hypothesis, we conducted two electroencephalography (EEG) experiments on quasi double centre-embedded structures whose complexity is reduced by placing the self-embedding relative clauses into the sentence's subject position. Experiment 1 showed that similar phenomenon even exhibited in this structure, evidenced by an absence of P600 effect and a presence of N400 effect. In Experiment 2, providing semantic cues to reduce ambiguity dispelled this illusion, as evidenced by a P600 effect. We interpret the results under garden-path theory and propose that word-order difference may account for this cross-linguistic variation.
Diffusion Tempering Improves Parameter Estimation with Probabilistic Integrators for Ordinary Differential Equations

Ordinary differential equations (ODEs) are widely used to describe dynamical systems in science, but identifying parameters that explain experimental measurements is challenging. In particular, although ODEs are differentiable and would allow for gradient-based parameter optimization, the nonlinear dynamics of ODEs often lead to many local minima and extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. We therefore propose diffusion tempering, a novel regularization technique for probabilistic numerical methods which improves convergence of gradient-based parameter optimization in ODEs. By iteratively reducing a noise parameter of the probabilistic integrator, the proposed method converges more reliably to the true parameters. We demonstrate that our method is effective for dynamical systems of different complexity and show that it obtains reliable parameter estimates for a Hodgkin-Huxley model with a practically relevant number of parameters.
Significance of Chirp MFCC as a Feature in Speech and Audio Applications

A novel feature, based on the chirp z-transform, that offers an improved representation of the underlying true spectrum is proposed. This feature, the chirp MFCC, is derived by computing the Mel frequency cepstral coefficients from the chirp magnitude spectrum, instead of the Fourier transform magnitude spectrum. The theoretical foundations for the proposal, and the experimental validation using product of likelihood Gaussians, to show the improved class separation offered by the proposed chirp MFCC, when compared with vanilla MFCC are discussed. Further, real world evaluation of the feature is performed using three diverse tasks, namely, speech-music classification, speaker identification, and speech commands recognition. It is shown in all three tasks that the proposed chirp MFCC offers considerable improvements.
A Multi-Aspect Framework for Counter Narrative Evaluation using Large Language Models

Counter narratives - informed responses to hate speech contexts designed to refute hateful claims and de-escalate encounters - have emerged as an effective hate speech intervention strategy. While previous work has proposed automatic counter narrative generation methods to aid manual interventions, the evaluation of these approaches remains underdeveloped. Previous automatic metrics for counter narrative evaluation lack alignment with human judgment as they rely on superficial reference comparisons instead of incorporating key aspects of counter narrative quality as evaluation criteria. To address prior evaluation limitations, we propose a novel evaluation framework prompting LLMs to provide scores and feedback for generated counter narrative candidates using 5 defined aspects derived from guidelines from counter narrative specialized NGOs. We found that LLM evaluators achieve strong alignment to human-annotated scores and feedback and outperform alternative metrics, indicating their potential as multi-aspect, reference-free and interpretable evaluators for counter narrative evaluation.
A Low-Dissipation and Scalable GEMM Accelerator with Silicon Nitride Photonics

Over the past few years, several microring resonator (MRR)-based analog photonic architectures have been proposed to accelerate general matrix-matrix multiplications (GEMMs), which are found in abundance in deep learning workloads.These architectures have dramatically grown in popularity because they offer exceptional throughput and energy efficiency compared to their electronic counterparts. However, such architectures, due to their traditional realization based on the silicon-on-insulator (SOI) material platform, face two shortcomings. First, the high-index contrast of the SOI platform incurs high scattering losses, which mandates the provisioning of high optical input power.Second, SOI waveguides are susceptible to two-photon absorption, which can incur substantial optical signal losses at moderate-to-high signal fan-in. These shortcomings have severely detrimental effects on the achievable parallelism, throughput, and energy efficiency of SOI MRR-based GEMM accelerators. To address these shortcomings, we present a novel Silicon Nitride (SiN)-Based Photonic GEMM Accelerator called SiNPhAR. SiNPhAR architecture employs SiN-based active and passive devices to implement analog GEMM functions. Since the SiN material exhibits lower index contrast and no TPA, the optical signal losses in our SiNPhAR architecture are very low. This advantage significantly enhances the achievable processing parallelism, throughput, and energy efficiency of SiNPhAR architecture, compared to SOI-based photonic GEMM accelerators from prior work. We quantify and compare these benefits of SiNPhAR architecture via our cross-layer evaluation for a benchmark workload comprising four modern deep neural network models. From the system-level performance analysis, SiNPhAR demonstrates at least 1.7x better throughput FPS while consuming at least 2.8x better energy efficiency (FPS/W) than prior SOI-based GEMM accelerators.
Two-Sample Hypothesis Testing for Large Random Graphs of Unequal Size

Two-sample hypothesis testing for large graphs is popular in cognitive science, probabilistic machine learning and artificial intelligence. While numerous methods have been proposed in the literature to address this problem, less attention has been devoted to scenarios involving graphs of unequal size or situations where there are only one or a few samples of graphs. In this article, we propose a Frobenius test statistic tailored for small sample sizes and unequal-sized random graphs to test whether they are generated from the same model or not. Our approach involves an algorithm for generating bootstrapped adjacency matrices from estimated community-wise edge probability matrices, forming the basis of the Frobenius test statistic. We derive the asymptotic distribution of the proposed test statistic and validate its stability and efficiency in detecting minor differences in underlying models through simulations. Furthermore, we explore its application to fMRI data where we are able to distinguish brain activity patterns when subjects are exposed to sentences and pictures for two different stimuli and the control group.
Generating Survival Interpretable Trajectories and Data

A new model for generating survival trajectories and data based on applying an autoencoder of a specific structure is proposed. It solves three tasks. First, it provides predictions in the form of the expected event time and the survival function for a new generated feature vector on the basis of the Beran estimator. Second, the model generates additional data based on a given training set that would supplement the original dataset. Third, the most important, it generates a prototype time-dependent trajectory for an object, which characterizes how features of the object could be changed to achieve a different time to an event. The trajectory can be viewed as a type of the counterfactual explanation. The proposed model is robust during training and inference due to a specific weighting scheme incorporating into the variational autoencoder. The model also determines the censored indicators of new generated data by solving a classification task. The paper demonstrates the efficiency and properties of the proposed model using numerical experiments on synthetic and real datasets. The code of the algorithm implementing the proposed model is publicly available.
AI Model Placement for 6G Networks under Epistemic Uncertainty Estimation

The adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) based Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) has witnessed significant growth, posing a critical challenge in orchestrating AI models within next-generation 6G networks. Finding optimal AI model placement is significantly more challenging than placing traditional software-based VNFs, due to the introduction of numerous uncertain factors by AI models, such as varying computing resource consumption, dynamic storage requirements, and changing model performance. To address the AI model placement problem under uncertainties, this paper presents a novel approach employing a sequence-to-sequence (S2S) neural network which considers uncertainty estimations. The S2S model, characterized by its encoding-decoding architecture, is designed to take the service chain with a number of AI models as input and produce the corresponding placement of each AI model. To address the introduced uncertainties, our methodology incorporates the orthonormal certificate module for uncertainty estimation and utilizes fuzzy logic for uncertainty representation, thereby enhancing the capabilities of the S2S model. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves competitive results across diverse AI model profiles, network environments, and service chain requests.
SInViG: A Self-Evolving Interactive Visual Agent for Human-Robot Interaction

Linguistic ambiguity is ubiquitous in our daily lives. Previous works adopted interaction between robots and humans for language disambiguation. Nevertheless, when interactive robots are deployed in daily environments, there are significant challenges for natural human-robot interaction, stemming from complex and unpredictable visual inputs, open-ended interaction, and diverse user demands. In this paper, we present SInViG, which is a self-evolving interactive visual agent for human-robot interaction based on natural languages, aiming to resolve language ambiguity, if any, through multi-turn visual-language dialogues. It continuously and automatically learns from unlabeled images and large language models, without human intervention, to be more robust against visual and linguistic complexity. Benefiting from self-evolving, it sets new state-of-the-art on several interactive visual grounding benchmarks. Moreover, our human-robot interaction experiments show that the evolved models consistently acquire more and more preferences from human users. Besides, we also deployed our model on a Franka robot for interactive manipulation tasks. Results demonstrate that our model can follow diverse user instructions and interact naturally with humans in natural language, despite the complexity and disturbance of the environment.
Event-Based Motion Magnification

Detecting and magnifying imperceptible high-frequency motions in real-world scenarios has substantial implications for industrial and medical applications. These motions are characterized by small amplitudes and high frequencies. Traditional motion magnification methods rely on costly high-speed cameras or active light sources, which limit the scope of their applications. In this work, we propose a dual-camera system consisting of an event camera and a conventional RGB camera for video motion magnification, containing temporally-dense information from the event stream and spatially-dense data from the RGB images. This innovative combination enables a broad and cost-effective amplification of high-frequency motions. By revisiting the physical camera model, we observe that estimating motion direction and magnitude necessitates the integration of event streams with additional image features. On this basis, we propose a novel deep network for event-based video motion magnification that addresses two primary challenges: firstly, the high frequency of motion induces a large number of interpolated frames (up to 80), which our network mitigates with a Second-order Recurrent Propagation module for better handling of long-term frame interpolations; and secondly, magnifying subtle motions is sensitive to noise, which we address by utilizing a temporal filter to amplify motion at specific frequencies and reduce noise impact. We demonstrate the effectiveness and accuracy of our dual-camera system and network through extensive experiments in magnifying small-amplitude, high-frequency motions, offering a cost-effective and flexible solution for motion detection and magnification.
Multimodal Emotion Recognition from Raw Audio with Sinc-convolution

Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) is still a complex task for computers with average recall rates usually about 70% on the most realistic datasets. Most SER systems use hand-crafted features extracted from audio signal such as energy, zero crossing rate, spectral information, prosodic, mel frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC), and so on. More recently, using raw waveform for training neural network is becoming an emerging trend. This approach is advantageous as it eliminates the feature extraction pipeline. Learning from time-domain signal has shown good results for tasks such as speech recognition, speaker verification etc. In this paper, we utilize Sinc-convolution layer, which is an efficient architecture for preprocessing raw speech waveform for emotion recognition, to extract acoustic features from raw audio signals followed by a long short-term memory (LSTM). We also incorporate linguistic features and append a dialogical emotion decoding (DED) strategy. Our approach achieves a weighted accuracy of 85.1\% in four class emotion on the Interactive Emotional Dyadic Motion Capture (IEMOCAP) dataset.
Effects of modified atmosphere packaging on the storage and shelf life of Hicaznar pomegranate fruits

This study compared the postharvest quality of Hicaznar pomegranate fruit unpackaged and packaged with 5-kg or 12-kg bags of two different modified atmosphere packaging (MAP) materials (X5, X12, L5, and L12) during 6 months of storage at 6 °C. The fruits were also evaluated during a simulated shelf life period at 20 °C for 7 days after each cold storage period. The MAP bags significantly reduced the loss of titratable acidity and ascorbic acid content and retarded husk discoloration of the fruit during cold storage and the shelf life period. The incidence of fungal decay was lower in fruit packaged with MAP bags than unpackaged fruit. X5 and X12 MAP bags were more effective in reducing weight loss and husk scald than L5 and L12 MAP bags. X5 and X12 MAP bags maintained initial red aril color intensity and antioxidant properties of Hicaznar pomegranates throughout cold storage and the shelf life period. Unpackaged control fruit remained marketable for only 4 months at 6 °C plus shelf life period, while packaged fruit maintained visual quality for up to 6 months at 6 °C plus shelf life period.
Projected Block Coordinate Descent for sparse spike estimation

We consider the problem of recovering off-the-grid spikes from linear measurements. The state of the art Over-Parametrized Continuous Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OP-COMP) with Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) successfully recovers those signals. In most cases, the main computational cost lies in a unique global descent on all parameters (positions and amplitudes). In this paper, we propose to improve this algorithm by accelerating this descent step. We introduce a new algorithm, based on Block Coordinate Descent, that takes advantages of the sparse structure of the problem. Based on qualitative theoretical results, this algorithm shows improvement in calculation times in realistic synthetic microscopy experiments.
Variational Entropy Search for Adjusting Expected Improvement

Bayesian optimization is a widely used technique for optimizing black-box functions, with Expected Improvement (EI) being the most commonly utilized acquisition function in this domain. While EI is often viewed as distinct from other information-theoretic acquisition functions, such as entropy search (ES) and max-value entropy search (MES), our work reveals that EI can be considered a special case of MES when approached through variational inference (VI). In this context, we have developed the Variational Entropy Search (VES) methodology and the VES-Gamma algorithm, which adapts EI by incorporating principles from information-theoretic concepts. The efficacy of VES-Gamma is demonstrated across a variety of test functions and read datasets, highlighting its theoretical and practical utilities in Bayesian optimization scenarios.
PhySU-Net: Long Temporal Context Transformer for rPPG with Self-Supervised Pre-training

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) is a promising technology that consists of contactless measuring of cardiac activity from facial videos. Most recent approaches utilize convolutional networks with limited temporal modeling capability or ignore long temporal context. Supervised rPPG methods are also severely limited by scarce data availability. In this work, we propose PhySU-Net, the first long spatial-temporal map rPPG transformer network and a self-supervised pre-training strategy that exploits unlabeled data to improve our model. Our strategy leverages traditional methods and image masking to provide pseudo-labels for self-supervised pre-training. Our model is tested on two public datasets (OBF and VIPL-HR) and shows superior performance in supervised training. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our self-supervised pre-training strategy further improves our model's performance by leveraging representations learned from unlabeled data.
Robust CLIP: Unsupervised Adversarial Fine-Tuning of Vision Embeddings for Robust Large Vision-Language Models

Multi-modal foundation models like OpenFlamingo, LLaVA, and GPT-4 are increasingly used for various real-world tasks. Prior work has shown that these models are highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks on the vision modality. These attacks can be leveraged to spread fake information or defraud users, and thus pose a significant risk, which makes the robustness of large multi-modal foundation models a pressing problem. The CLIP model, or one of its variants, is used as a frozen vision encoder in many vision-language models (VLMs), e.g. LLaVA and OpenFlamingo. We propose an unsupervised adversarial fine-tuning scheme to obtain a robust CLIP vision encoder, which yields robustness on all vision down-stream tasks (VLMs, zero-shot classification) that rely on CLIP. In particular, we show that stealth-attacks on users of VLMs by a malicious third party providing manipulated images are no longer possible once one replaces the original CLIP model with our robust one. No retraining or fine-tuning of the VLM is required. The code and robust models are available at https://github.com/chs20/RobustVLM
Parameter Efficient Finetuning for Speech Emotion Recognition and Domain Adaptation

Foundation models have shown superior performance for speech emotion recognition (SER). However, given the limited data in emotion corpora, finetuning all parameters of large pre-trained models for SER can be both resource-intensive and susceptible to overfitting. This paper investigates parameter-efficient finetuning (PEFT) for SER. Various PEFT adaptors are systematically studied for both classification of discrete emotion categories and prediction of dimensional emotional attributes. The results demonstrate that the combination of PEFT methods surpasses full finetuning with a significant reduction in the number of trainable parameters. Furthermore, a two-stage adaptation strategy is proposed to adapt models trained on acted emotion data, which is more readily available, to make the model more adept at capturing natural emotional expressions. Both intra- and cross-corpus experiments validate the efficacy of the proposed approach in enhancing the performance on both the source and target domains.
Ricci flow on Courant algebroids

We develop a theory of Ricci flow for metrics on Courant algebroids which unifies and extends the analytic theory of various geometric flows, yielding a general tool for constructing solutions to supergravity equations. We prove short time existence and uniqueness of solutions on compact manifolds, in turn showing that the Courant isometry group is preserved by the flow. We show a scalar curvature monotonicity formula and prove that generalized Ricci flow is a gradient flow, extending fundamental works of Hamilton and Perelman. Using these we show a convergence result for certain nonsingular solutions to generalized Ricci flow.