Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ChainForge: A Visual Toolkit for Prompt Engineering and LLM Hypothesis Testing

Evaluating outputs of large language models (LLMs) is challenging, requiring making -- and making sense of -- many responses. Yet tools that go beyond basic prompting tend to require knowledge of programming APIs, focus on narrow domains, or are closed-source. We present ChainForge, an open-source visual toolkit for prompt engineering and on-demand hypothesis testing of text generation LLMs. ChainForge provides a graphical interface for comparison of responses across models and prompt variations. Our system was designed to support three tasks: model selection, prompt template design, and hypothesis testing (e.g., auditing). We released ChainForge early in its development and iterated on its design with academics and online users. Through in-lab and interview studies, we find that a range of people could use ChainForge to investigate hypotheses that matter to them, including in real-world settings. We identify three modes of prompt engineering and LLM hypothesis testing: opportunistic exploration, limited evaluation, and iterative refinement.
Music Source Separation Based on a Lightweight Deep Learning Framework (DTTNET: DUAL-PATH TFC-TDF UNET)

Music source separation (MSS) aims to extract 'vocals', 'drums', 'bass' and 'other' tracks from a piece of mixed music. While deep learning methods have shown impressive results, there is a trend toward larger models. In our paper, we introduce a novel and lightweight architecture called DTTNet, which is based on Dual-Path Module and Time-Frequency Convolutions Time-Distributed Fully-connected UNet (TFC-TDF UNet). DTTNet achieves 10.12 dB cSDR on 'vocals' compared to 10.01 dB reported for Bandsplit RNN (BSRNN) but with 86.7% fewer parameters. We also assess pattern-specific performance and model generalization for intricate audio patterns.
Monitoring of Urban Changes With Multimodal Sentinel 1 and 2 Data in Mariupol, Ukraine, in 2022/23

The ability to constantly monitor urban changes is of significant socio-economic interest, such as detecting trends in urban expansion or tracking the vitality of urban areas. Especially in present conflict zones or disaster areas, such insights provide valuable information to keep track of the current situation. However, they are often subject to limited data availability in space and time. We built on our previous work, which used a transferred deep neural network operating on multimodal Sentinel 1 and 2 data. In the current study, we have demonstrated and discussed its applicability in monitoring the present conflict zone of Mariupol, Ukraine, with high-temporal resolution Sentinel time series for the years 2022/23. A transfer to that conflict zone was challenging due to the limited availability of recent very high resolution (VHR) data. The current work had two objectives. First, transfer learning with older and publicly available VHR data was shown to be sufficient. That guaranteed the availability of more and less expensive data as time constraints were relaxed. Second, in an ablation study, we analyzed the effects of loss of observations to demonstrate the resiliency of our method. That was of particular interest due to the malfunctioning of Sentinel 1B shortly before the selected conflict. Our study demonstrated that urban change monitoring is possible for present conflict zones after transferring with older VHR data. It also indicated that, despite the multimodal input, our method was more dependent on optical multispectral than synthetic aperture radar observations but resilient to loss of observations.
A Course chapter on Quantum Computing for Master Students in Engineering

Quantum computing is a rapidly evolving field encompassing various disciplines such as physics, mathematics, computer engineering, and computer science. Teaching quantum computing in a concise and effective manner can be challenging, especially within the time constraints of a single course or a short period, even for graduate students. This challenge is particularly relevant in two-year MSc programs that include a thesis, which is a typical structure in higher education systems in the USA and Europe. In this paper, the author proposes an approach to teaching quantum computing and shares their experience of conducting a course chapter on the subject within a two-week time frame. The experience reported in this paper is integrated into the"Technologies of Computing Systems"(TCS) course, with a total workload of 6 ECTS (in the context of the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System, one ECTS corresponds to 28 hours of work), conducted in one quarter, over seven weeks. The structure of the course chapter is discussed, involving a series of lectures that were accompanied by lab classes and a lab project, allowing students to receive guidance while also engaging in hands-on learning and independent study. The paper provides an overview of the quantum computing topics covered, and their integration in the TSC course, and gives details about how these topics are studied in the different types of classes. It also discusses the evaluation procedure and presents the results obtained. It can be concluded that the inclusion of the quantum computing component not only significantly increased student interest in the course but also effectively bridged the gap between classical and quantum computing for engineering students within a short period of two weeks.
Security and Privacy on Generative Data in AIGC: A Survey

The advent of artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) represents a pivotal moment in the evolution of information technology. With AIGC, it can be effortless to generate high-quality data that is challenging for the public to distinguish. Nevertheless, the proliferation of generative data across cyberspace brings security and privacy issues, including privacy leakages of individuals and media forgery for fraudulent purposes. Consequently, both academia and industry begin to emphasize the trustworthiness of generative data, successively providing a series of countermeasures for security and privacy. In this survey, we systematically review the security and privacy on generative data in AIGC, particularly for the first time analyzing them from the perspective of information security properties. Specifically, we reveal the successful experiences of state-of-the-art countermeasures in terms of the foundational properties of privacy, controllability, authenticity, and compliance, respectively. Finally, we summarize the open challenges and potential exploration directions from each of theses properties.
Trajectory Tracking Control of Skid-Steering Mobile Robots with Slip and Skid Compensation using Sliding-Mode Control and Deep Learning

Compensating for slip and skid is crucial for mobile robots navigating outdoor terrains. In these challenging environments, slipping and skidding introduce uncertainties into trajectory tracking systems, potentially compromising the safety of the vehicle. Despite research in this field, having a real-world feasible online slip and skid compensation remains challenging due to the complexity of wheel-terrain interaction in outdoor environments. This paper proposes a novel trajectory tracking technique featuring real-world feasible online slip and skid compensation at the vehicle level for skid-steering mobile robots operating outdoors. The approach employs sliding-mode control to design a robust trajectory tracking system, accounting for the inherent uncertainties in this type of robot. To estimate the robot's slipping and undesired skidding and compensate for them in real-time, two previously developed deep learning models are integrated into the control-feedback loop. The main advantages of the proposed technique are that it (1) considers two slip-related parameters for the entire robot, as opposed to the conventional approach involving two slip components for each wheel along with the robot's skidding, and (2) has an online real-world feasible slip and skid compensator, reducing the tracking errors in unforeseen environments. Experimental results demonstrate a significant improvement, enhancing the trajectory tracking system's performance by over 27%.
Exploration of TPUs for AI Applications

Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) are specialized hardware accelerators for deep learning developed by Google. This paper aims to explore TPUs in cloud and edge computing focusing on its applications in AI. We provide an overview of TPUs, their general architecture, specifically their design in relation to neural networks, compilation techniques and supporting frameworks. Furthermore, we provide a comparative analysis of Cloud and Edge TPU performance against other counterpart chip architectures. Our results show that TPUs can provide significant performance improvements in both cloud and edge computing. Additionally, this paper underscores the imperative need for further research in optimization techniques for efficient deployment of AI architectures on the Edge TPU and benchmarking standards for a more robust comparative analysis in edge computing scenarios. The primary motivation behind this push for research is that efficient AI acceleration, facilitated by TPUs, can lead to substantial savings in terms of time, money, and environmental resources.
Deep conditional generative models for longitudinal single-slice abdominal computed tomography harmonization

Two-dimensional single-slice abdominal computed tomography (CT) provides a detailed tissue map with high resolution allowing quantitative characterization of relationships between health conditions and aging. However, longitudinal analysis of body composition changes using these scans is difficult due to positional variation between slices acquired in different years, which leading to different organs/tissues captured. To address this issue, we propose C-SliceGen, which takes an arbitrary axial slice in the abdominal region as a condition and generates a pre-defined vertebral level slice by estimating structural changes in the latent space. Our experiments on 2608 volumetric CT data from two in-house datasets and 50 subjects from the 2015 Multi-Atlas Abdomen Labeling Challenge dataset (BTCV) Challenge demonstrate that our model can generate high-quality images that are realistic and similar. We further evaluate our method's capability to harmonize longitudinal positional variation on 1033 subjects from the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA) dataset, which contains longitudinal single abdominal slices, and confirmed that our method can harmonize the slice positional variance in terms of visceral fat area. This approach provides a promising direction for mapping slices from different vertebral levels to a target slice and reducing positional variance for single-slice longitudinal analysis. The source code is available at: https://github.com/MASILab/C-SliceGen.
In horizon penetrating coordinates: Kerr black hole metric perturbation, construction and completion

We investigate the Teukolsky equation in horizon-penetrating coordinates to study the behavior of perturbation waves crossing the outer horizon. For this purpose, we use the null ingoing/outgoing Eddington–Finkelstein coordinates. The first derivative of the radial equation is a Fuchsian differential equation with an additional regular singularity to the ones the radial one has. The radial functions satisfy the physical boundary conditions without imposing any regularity conditions. We also observe that the Hertz-Weyl scalar equations preserve their angular and radial signatures in these coordinates. Using the angular equation, we construct the metric perturbation for a circularly orbiting perturber around a black hole in Kerr spacetime in a horizon-penetrating setting. Furthermore, we completed the missing metric pieces due to the mass M and angular momentum J perturbations. We also provide an explicit formula for the metric perturbation as a function of the radial part, its derivative, and the angular part of the solution to the Teukolsky equation. Finally, we discuss the importance of the extra singularity in the radial derivative for the convergence of the metric expansion.
Geometry of two-body correlations in three-qubit states

We study restrictions of two-body correlations in three-qubit states, using three local-unitarily invariant coordinates based on the Bloch vector lengths of the marginal states. First, we find tight nonlinear bounds satisfied by all pure states and extend this result by including the three-body correlations. Second, we consider mixed states and conjecture a tight non-linear bound for all three-qubit states. Finally, within the created framework we give criteria to detect different types of multipartite entanglement as well as characterize the rank of the quantum state.
Spatio-temporal Co-attention Fusion Network for Video Splicing Localization

Digital video splicing has become easy and ubiquitous. Malicious users copy some regions of a video and paste them to another video for creating realistic forgeries. It is significant to blindly detect such forgery regions in videos. In this paper, a spatio-temporal co-attention fusion network (SCFNet) is proposed for video splicing localization. Specifically, a three-stream network is used as an encoder to capture manipulation traces across multiple frames. The deep interaction and fusion of spatio-temporal forensic features are achieved by the novel parallel and cross co-attention fusion modules. A lightweight multilayer perceptron (MLP) decoder is adopted to yield a pixel-level tampering localization map. A new large-scale video splicing dataset is created for training the SCFNet. Extensive tests on benchmark datasets show that the localization and generalization performances of our SCFNet outperform the state-of-the-art. Code and datasets will be available at https://github.com/multimediaFor/SCFNet.
Modelling Irregularly Sampled Time Series Without Imputation

Modelling irregularly-sampled time series (ISTS) is challenging because of missing values. Most existing methods focus on handling ISTS by converting irregularly sampled data into regularly sampled data via imputation. These models assume an underlying missing mechanism leading to unwanted bias and sub-optimal performance. We present SLAN (Switch LSTM Aggregate Network), which utilizes a pack of LSTMs to model ISTS without imputation, eliminating the assumption of any underlying process. It dynamically adapts its architecture on the fly based on the measured sensors. SLAN exploits the irregularity information to capture each sensor's local summary explicitly and maintains a global summary state throughout the observational period. We demonstrate the efficacy of SLAN on publicly available datasets, namely, MIMIC-III, Physionet 2012 and Physionet 2019. The code is available at https://github.com/Rohit102497/SLAN.
The ParlaSent multilingual training dataset for sentiment identification in parliamentary proceedings

The paper presents a new training dataset of sentences in 7 languages, manually annotated for sentiment, which are used in a series of experiments focused on training a robust sentiment identifier for parliamentary proceedings. The paper additionally introduces the first domain-specific multilingual transformer language model for political science applications, which was additionally pre-trained on 1.72 billion words from parliamentary proceedings of 27 European parliaments. We present experiments demonstrating how the additional pre-training on parliamentary data can significantly improve the model downstream performance, in our case, sentiment identification in parliamentary proceedings. We further show that our multilingual model performs very well on languages not seen during fine-tuning, and that additional fine-tuning data from other languages significantly improves the target parliament's results. The paper makes an important contribution to multiple disciplines inside the social sciences, and bridges them with computer science and computational linguistics. Lastly, the resulting fine-tuned language model sets up a more robust approach to sentiment analysis of political texts across languages, which allows scholars to study political sentiment from a comparative perspective using standardized tools and techniques.
Reducing Adversarial Training Cost with Gradient Approximation

Deep learning models have achieved state-of-the-art performances in various domains, while they are vulnerable to the inputs with well-crafted but small perturbations, which are named after adversarial examples (AEs). Among many strategies to improve the model robustness against AEs, Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) based adversarial training is one of the most effective methods. Unfortunately, the prohibitive computational overhead of generating strong enough AEs, due to the maximization of the loss function, sometimes makes the regular PGD adversarial training impractical when using larger and more complicated models. In this paper, we propose that the adversarial loss can be approximated by the partial sum of Taylor series. Furthermore, we approximate the gradient of adversarial loss and propose a new and efficient adversarial training method, adversarial training with gradient approximation (GAAT), to reduce the cost of building up robust models. Additionally, extensive experiments demonstrate that this efficiency improvement can be achieved without any or with very little loss in accuracy on natural and adversarial examples, which show that our proposed method saves up to 60\% of the training time with comparable model test accuracy on MNIST, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets.
Mind the (spectral) gap: how the temporal resolution of wind data affects multi-decadal wind power forecasts

To forecast wind power generation in the scale of years to decades, outputs from climate models are often used. However, one major limitation of the data projected by these models is their coarse temporal resolution—usually not finer than three hours and sometimes as coarse as one month. Due to the non-linear relationship between wind speed and wind power, and the long forecast horizon considered, small changes in wind speed can result in big changes in projected wind power generation. Our study indicates that the distribution of observed 10 min wind speed data is relatively well preserved using three- or six-hourly instantaneous values. In contrast, daily or monthly values, as well as any averages, including three-hourly averages, are almost never capable of preserving the distribution of the underlying higher resolution data. Assuming that climate models behave in a similar manner to observations, our results indicate that output at three-hourly or six-hourly temporal resolution is high enough for multi-decadal wind power generation forecasting. In contrast, wind speed projections of lower temporal resolution, or averages over any time range, should be handled with care.
Two-Sided Capacitated Submodular Maximization in Gig Platforms

In this paper, we propose three generic models of capacitated coverage and, more generally, submodular maximization to study task-worker assignment problems that arise in a wide range of gig economy platforms. Our models incorporate the following features: (1) Each task and worker can have an arbitrary matching capacity, which captures the limited number of copies or finite budget for the task and the working capacity of the worker; (2) Each task is associated with a coverage or, more generally, a monotone submodular utility function. Our objective is to design an allocation policy that maximizes the sum of all tasks' utilities, subject to capacity constraints on tasks and workers. We consider two settings: offline, where all tasks and workers are static, and online, where tasks are static while workers arrive dynamically. We present three LP-based rounding algorithms that achieve optimal approximation ratios of $1-1/\mathsf{e} \sim 0.632$ for offline coverage maximization, competitive ratios of $(19-67/\mathsf{e}^3)/27\sim 0.580$ and $0.436$ for online coverage and online monotone submodular maximization, respectively.
Clustering of Urban Traffic Patterns by K-Means and Dynamic Time Warping: Case Study

Clustering of urban traffic patterns is an essential task in many different areas of traffic management and planning. In this paper, two significant applications in the clustering of urban traffic patterns are described. The first application estimates the missing speed values using the speed of road segments with similar traffic patterns to colorify map tiles. The second one is the estimation of essential road segments for generating addresses for a local point on the map, using the similarity patterns of different road segments. The speed time series extracts the traffic pattern in different road segments. In this paper, we proposed the time series clustering algorithm based on K-Means and Dynamic Time Warping. The case study of our proposed algorithm is based on the Snapp application's driver speed time series data. The results of the two applications illustrate that the proposed method can extract similar urban traffic patterns.
Discrete-Time Control Barrier Functions for Guaranteed Recursive Feasibility in Nonlinear MPC: An Application to Lane Merging

In this paper, we present conditions under which the terminal ingredients, defined by discrete-time control barrier function (DTCBF) certificates, guarantee recursive feasibility in nonlinear MPC. Further, we introduce the notion of quasi-DTCBF (qDTCBF) certificates. Compared to DTCBFs, qDTCBF conditions can be satisfied with tighter control input bounds, which is highly advantageous if only limited actuation is possible. Both certificates encourage an earlier reaction of the control system and result in a lower cumulative MPC cost. The methodology is applied to a lane merging problem in automated driving, in which DTCBF and qDTCBF certificates subject to input constraints form the terminal ingredients to guarantee recursive feasibility of the nonlinear MPC scheme. A simulation study demonstrates the efficacy of the concept.
Accelerated Gradient Descent via Long Steps

Recently Grimmer [1] showed for smooth convex optimization by utilizing longer steps periodically, gradient descent's textbook $LD^2/2T$ convergence guarantees can be improved by constant factors, conjecturing an accelerated rate strictly faster than $O(1/T)$ could be possible. Here we prove such a big-O gain, establishing gradient descent's first accelerated convergence rate in this setting. Namely, we prove a $O(1/T^{1.0564})$ rate for smooth convex minimization by utilizing a nonconstant nonperiodic sequence of increasingly large stepsizes. It remains open if one can achieve the $O(1/T^{1.178})$ rate conjectured by Das Gupta et. al. [2] or the optimal gradient method rate of $O(1/T^2)$. Big-O convergence rate accelerations from long steps follow from our theory for strongly convex optimization, similar to but somewhat weaker than those concurrently developed by Altschuler and Parrilo [3].
Temporal Analysis of Dark Patterns: A Case Study of a User's Odyssey to Conquer Prime Membership Cancellation through the "Iliad Flow"

Dark patterns are ubiquitous in digital systems, impacting users throughout their journeys on many popular apps and websites. While substantial efforts from the research community in the last five years have led to consolidated taxonomies of dark patterns, including an emerging ontology, most applications of these descriptors have been focused on analysis of static images or as isolated pattern types. In this paper, we present a case study of Amazon Prime's"Iliad Flow"to illustrate the interplay of dark patterns across a user journey, grounded in insights from a US Federal Trade Commission complaint against the company. We use this case study to lay the groundwork for a methodology of Temporal Analysis of Dark Patterns (TADP), including considerations for characterization of individual dark patterns across a user journey, combinatorial effects of multiple dark patterns types, and implications for expert detection and automated detection.