OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Deformation Monitoring of Tunnel using Phase-based Motion Magnification and Optical Flow
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

During construction, continuous monitoring of underground tunnels can mitigate potential hazards and facilitate an in-depth understanding of the ground-tunnel interaction behavior. Traditional vision-based monitoring can directly capture an extensive range of motion but cannot separate the tunnel's vibration and deformation mode. Phase-based motion magnification is one of the techniques to magnify the motion in target frequency bands and identify system dynamics. Optical flow is a popular method of calculating the motion of image intensities in computer vision and has a much lower computational cost than Digital Image Correlation. This study combines PMM and OF to quantify the underground tunnel scene's magnified deformation mode pixel displacements. As motion magnification artifacts may lead to inaccurate quantification, the 2D Wiener filter is used to smooth the high-frequency content. With GPU acceleration, a dense OF algorithm computing each pixel's displacement is adopted to derive the whole scene motion. A validation experiment is conducted between the amplification motion and the actual motion of prisms preinstalled in the tunnel.
Jaeger: A Concatenation-Based Multi-Transformer VQA Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Document-based Visual Question Answering poses a challenging task between linguistic sense disambiguation and fine-grained multimodal retrieval. Although there has been encouraging progress in document-based question answering due to the utilization of large language and open-world prior models\cite{1}, several challenges persist, including prolonged response times, extended inference durations, and imprecision in matching. In order to overcome these challenges, we propose Jaegar, a concatenation-based multi-transformer VQA model. To derive question features, we leverage the exceptional capabilities of RoBERTa large\cite{2} and GPT2-xl\cite{3} as feature extractors. Subsequently, we subject the outputs from both models to a concatenation process. This operation allows the model to consider information from diverse sources concurrently, strengthening its representational capability. By leveraging pre-trained models for feature extraction, our approach has the potential to amplify the performance of these models through concatenation. After concatenation, we apply dimensionality reduction to the output features, reducing the model's computational effectiveness and inference time. Empirical results demonstrate that our proposed model achieves competitive performance on Task C of the PDF-VQA Dataset. If the user adds any new data, they should make sure to style it as per the instructions provided in previous sections.
ObliuSky: Oblivious User-Defined Skyline Query Processing in the Cloud
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

The proliferation of cloud computing has greatly spurred the popularity of outsourced database storage and management, in which the cloud holding outsourced databases can process database queries on demand. Among others, skyline queries play an important role in the database field due to its prominent usefulness in multi-criteria decision support systems. To accommodate the tailored needs of users, user-defined skyline query has recently emerged as an intriguing advanced type of skyline query, which allows users to define custom preferences in their skyline queries (including the target attributes, preferred dominance relations, and range constraints on the target attributes). However, user-defined skyline query services, if deployed in the cloud, may raise critical privacy concerns as the outsourced databases and skyline queries may contain proprietary/privacy-sensitive information, and the cloud might even suffer from data breaches. In light of the above, this paper presents ObliuSky, a new system framework enabling oblivious user-defined skyline query processing in the cloud. ObliuSky departs from the state-of-the-art prior work by not only providing confidentiality protection for the content of the outsourced database, the user-defined skyline query, and the query results, but also making the cloud oblivious to the data patterns (e.g., user-defined dominance relations among database points and search access patterns) which may indirectly cause data leakages. We formally analyze the security guarantees and conduct extensive performance evaluations. The results show that while achieving much stronger security guarantees than the state-of-the-art prior work, ObliuSky is superior in database and query encryption efficiency, with practically affordable query latency.
"A Tale of Two Movements": Identifying and Comparing Perspectives in #BlackLivesMatter and #BlueLivesMatter Movements-related Tweets using Weakly Supervised Graph-based Structured Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Social media has become a major driver of social change, by facilitating the formation of online social movements. Automatically understanding the perspectives driving the movement and the voices opposing it, is a challenging task as annotated data is difficult to obtain. We propose a weakly supervised graph-based approach that explicitly models perspectives in #BackLivesMatter-related tweets. Our proposed approach utilizes a social-linguistic representation of the data. We convert the text to a graph by breaking it into structured elements and connect it with the social network of authors, then structured prediction is done over the elements for identifying perspectives. Our approach uses a small seed set of labeled examples. We experiment with large language models for generating artificial training examples, compare them to manual annotation, and find that it achieves comparable performance. We perform quantitative and qualitative analyses using a human-annotated test set. Our model outperforms multitask baselines by a large margin, successfully characterizing the perspectives supporting and opposing #BLM.
My Brother Helps Me: Node Injection Based Adversarial Attack on Social Bot Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Social platforms such as Twitter are under siege from a multitude of fraudulent users. In response, social bot detection tasks have been developed to identify such fake users. Due to the structure of social networks, the majority of methods are based on the graph neural network(GNN), which is susceptible to attacks. In this study, we propose a node injection-based adversarial attack method designed to deceive bot detection models. Notably, neither the target bot nor the newly injected bot can be detected when a new bot is added around the target bot. This attack operates in a black-box fashion, implying that any information related to the victim model remains unknown. To our knowledge, this is the first study exploring the resilience of bot detection through graph node injection. Furthermore, we develop an attribute recovery module to revert the injected node embedding from the graph embedding space back to the original feature space, enabling the adversary to manipulate node perturbation effectively. We conduct adversarial attacks on four commonly used GNN structures for bot detection on two widely used datasets: Cresci-2015 and TwiBot-22. The attack success rate is over 73\% and the rate of newly injected nodes being detected as bots is below 13\% on these two datasets.
Multi-Task Learning-Enabled Automatic Vessel Draft Reading for Intelligent Maritime Surveillance
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The accurate and efficient vessel draft reading (VDR) is an important component of intelligent maritime surveillance, which could be exploited to assist in judging whether the vessel is normally loaded or overloaded. The computer vision technique with an excellent price-to-performance ratio has become a popular medium to estimate vessel draft depth. However, the traditional estimation methods easily suffer from several limitations, such as sensitivity to low-quality images, high computational cost, etc. In this work, we propose a multi-task learning-enabled computational method (termed MTL-VDR) for generating highly reliable VDR. In particular, our MTL-VDR mainly consists of four components, i.e., draft mark detection, draft scale recognition, vessel/water segmentation, and final draft depth estimation. We first construct a benchmark dataset related to draft mark detection and employ a powerful and efficient convolutional neural network to accurately perform the detection task. The multi-task learning method is then proposed for simultaneous draft scale recognition and vessel/water segmentation. To obtain more robust VDR under complex conditions (e.g., damaged and stained scales, etc.), the accurate draft scales are generated by an automatic correction method, which is presented based on the spatial distribution rules of draft scales. Finally, an adaptive computational method is exploited to yield an accurate and robust draft depth. Extensive experiments have been implemented on the realistic dataset to compare our MTL-VDR with state-of-the-art methods. The results have demonstrated its superior performance in terms of accuracy, robustness, and efficiency. The computational speed exceeds 40 FPS, which satisfies the requirements of real-time maritime surveillance to guarantee vessel traffic safety.
Using Learnable Physics for Real-Time Exercise Form Recommendations
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Good posture and form are essential for safe and productive exercising. Even in gym settings, trainers may not be readily available for feedback. Rehabilitation therapies and fitness workouts can thus benefit from recommender systems that provide real-time evaluation. In this paper, we present an algorithmic pipeline that can diagnose problems in exercise techniques and offer corrective recommendations, with high sensitivity and specificity in real-time. We use MediaPipe for pose recognition, count repetitions using peak-prominence detection, and use a learnable physics simulator to track motion evolution for each exercise. A test video is diagnosed based on deviations from the prototypical learned motion using statistical learning. The system is evaluated on six full and upper body exercises. These real-time recommendations, counseled via low-cost equipment like smartphones, will allow exercisers to rectify potential mistakes making self-practice feasible while reducing the risk of workout injuries.
Cost-aware Joint Caching and Forwarding in Networks with Heterogeneous Cache Resources
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

Caching is crucial for enabling high-throughput networks for data intensive applications. Traditional caching technology relies on DRAM, as it can transfer data at a high rate. However, DRAM capacity is subject to contention by most system components and thus is very limited, implying that DRAM-only caches cannot scale to meet growing demand. Fortunately, persistent memory and flash storage technologies are rapidly evolving and can be utilized alongside DRAM to increase cache capacities. To do so without compromising network performance requires caching techniques adapted to the characteristics of these technologies. In this paper, we model the cache as a collection of storage blocks with different rate parameters and utilization costs. We introduce an optimization technique based on the drift-plus-penalty method and apply it in a framework which enables joint caching and forwarding. We show that it achieves an optimal trade-off between throughput and cache utilization costs in a virtual control plane. We then develop a corresponding practical policy in the data plane. Finally, through simulations in several settings, we demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed approach with respect to total user delay and cache utilization costs.
Crowd Counting in Harsh Weather using Image Denoising with Pix2Pix GANs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Visual crowd counting estimates the density of the crowd using deep learning models such as convolution neural networks (CNNs). The performance of the model heavily relies on the quality of the training data that constitutes crowd images. In harsh weather such as fog, dust, and low light conditions, the inference performance may severely degrade on the noisy and blur images. In this paper, we propose the use of Pix2Pix generative adversarial network (GAN) to first denoise the crowd images prior to passing them to the counting model. A Pix2Pix network is trained using synthetic noisy images generated from original crowd images and then the pretrained generator is then used in the inference engine to estimate the crowd density in unseen, noisy crowd images. The performance is tested on JHU-Crowd dataset to validate the significance of the proposed method particularly when high reliability and accuracy are required.
Enhancing expressivity transfer in textless speech-to-speech translation
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2023
Year: 2023

Textless speech-to-speech translation systems are rapidly advancing, thanks to the integration of self-supervised learning techniques. However, existing state-of-the-art systems fall short when it comes to capturing and transferring expressivity accurately across different languages. Expressivity plays a vital role in conveying emotions, nuances, and cultural subtleties, thereby enhancing communication across diverse languages. To address this issue this study presents a novel method that operates at the discrete speech unit level and leverages multilingual emotion embeddings to capture language-agnostic information. Specifically, we demonstrate how these embeddings can be used to effectively predict the pitch and duration of speech units in the target language. Through objective and subjective experiments conducted on a French-to-English translation task, our findings highlight the superior expressivity transfer achieved by our approach compared to current state-of-the-art systems.
An Analysis on Large Language Models in Healthcare: A Case Study of BioBERT
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

This paper conducts a comprehensive investigation into applying large language models, particularly on BioBERT, in healthcare. It begins with thoroughly examining previous natural language processing (NLP) approaches in healthcare, shedding light on the limitations and challenges these methods face. Following that, this research explores the path that led to the incorporation of BioBERT into healthcare applications, highlighting its suitability for addressing the specific requirements of tasks related to biomedical text mining. The analysis outlines a systematic methodology for fine-tuning BioBERT to meet the unique needs of the healthcare domain. This approach includes various components, including the gathering of data from a wide range of healthcare sources, data annotation for tasks like identifying medical entities and categorizing them, and the application of specialized preprocessing techniques tailored to handle the complexities found in biomedical texts. Additionally, the paper covers aspects related to model evaluation, with a focus on healthcare benchmarks and functions like processing of natural language in biomedical, question-answering, clinical document classification, and medical entity recognition. It explores techniques to improve the model's interpretability and validates its performance compared to existing healthcare-focused language models. The paper thoroughly examines ethical considerations, particularly patient privacy and data security. It highlights the benefits of incorporating BioBERT into healthcare contexts, including enhanced clinical decision support and more efficient information retrieval. Nevertheless, it acknowledges the impediments and complexities of this integration, encompassing concerns regarding data privacy, transparency, resource-intensive requirements, and the necessity for model customization to align with diverse healthcare domains.
uxSense: Supporting User Experience Analysis with Visualization and Computer Vision
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Analyzing user behavior from usability evaluation can be a challenging and time-consuming task, especially as the number of participants and the scale and complexity of the evaluation grows. We propose uxSense, a visual analytics system using machine learning methods to extract user behavior from audio and video recordings as parallel time-stamped data streams. Our implementation draws on pattern recognition, computer vision, natural language processing, and machine learning to extract user sentiment, actions, posture, spoken words, and other features from such recordings. These streams are visualized as parallel timelines in a web-based front-end, enabling the researcher to search, filter, and annotate data across time and space. We present the results of a user study involving professional UX researchers evaluating user data using uxSense. In fact, we used uxSense itself to evaluate their sessions.
Deep Aramaic: Towards a Synthetic Data Paradigm Enabling Machine Learning in Epigraphy
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Epigraphy increasingly turns to modern artificial intelligence (AI) technologies such as machine learning (ML) for extracting insights from ancient inscriptions. However, scarce labeled data for training ML algorithms severely limits current techniques, especially for ancient scripts like Old Aramaic. Our research pioneers an innovative methodology for generating synthetic training data tailored to Old Aramaic letters. Our pipeline synthesizes photo-realistic Aramaic letter datasets, incorporating textural features, lighting, damage, and augmentations to mimic real-world inscription diversity. Despite minimal real examples, we engineer a dataset of 250,000 training and 25,000 validation images covering the 22 letter classes in the Aramaic alphabet. This comprehensive corpus provides a robust volume of data for training a residual neural network (ResNet) to classify highly degraded Aramaic letters. The ResNet model demonstrates high accuracy in classifying real images from the 8th century BCE Hadad statue inscription. Additional experiments validate performance on varying materials and styles, proving effective generalization. Our results validate the model's capabilities in handling diverse real-world scenarios, proving the viability of our synthetic data approach and avoiding the dependence on scarce training data that has constrained epigraphic analysis. Our innovative framework elevates interpretation accuracy on damaged inscriptions, thus enhancing knowledge extraction from these historical resources.
Semantic Association Rule Learning from Time Series Data and Knowledge Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Digital Twins (DT) are a promising concept in cyber-physical systems research due to their advanced features including monitoring and automated reasoning. Semantic technologies such as Knowledge Graphs (KG) are recently being utilized in DTs especially for information modelling. Building on this move, this paper proposes a pipeline for semantic association rule learning in DTs using KGs and time series data. In addition to this initial pipeline, we also propose new semantic association rule criterion. The approach is evaluated on an industrial water network scenario. Initial evaluation shows that the proposed approach is able to learn a high number of association rules with semantic information which are more generalizable. The paper aims to set a foundation for further work on using semantic association rule learning especially in the context of industrial applications.
Point Cloud Denoising and Outlier Detection with Local Geometric Structure by Dynamic Graph CNN
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The digitalization of society is rapidly developing toward the realization of the digital twin and metaverse. In particular, point clouds are attracting attention as a media format for 3D space. Point cloud data is contaminated with noise and outliers due to measurement errors. Therefore, denoising and outlier detection are necessary for point cloud processing. Among them, PointCleanNet is an effective method for point cloud denoising and outlier detection. However, it does not consider the local geometric structure of the patch. We solve this problem by applying two types of graph convolutional layer designed based on the Dynamic Graph CNN. Experimental results show that the proposed methods outperform the conventional method in AUPR, which indicates outlier detection accuracy, and Chamfer Distance, which indicates denoising accuracy.
Histopathological Image Classification and Vulnerability Analysis using Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Healthcare is one of the foremost applications of machine learning (ML). Traditionally, ML models are trained by central servers, which aggregate data from various distributed devices to forecast the results for newly generated data. This is a major concern as models can access sensitive user information, which raises privacy concerns. A federated learning (FL) approach can help address this issue: A global model sends its copy to all clients who train these copies, and the clients send the updates (weights) back to it. Over time, the global model improves and becomes more accurate. Data privacy is protected during training, as it is conducted locally on the clients' devices. However, the global model is susceptible to data poisoning. We develop a privacy-preserving FL technique for a skin cancer dataset and show that the model is prone to data poisoning attacks. Ten clients train the model, but one of them intentionally introduces flipped labels as an attack. This reduces the accuracy of the global model. As the percentage of label flipping increases, there is a noticeable decrease in accuracy. We use a stochastic gradient descent optimization algorithm to find the most optimal accuracy for the model. Although FL can protect user privacy for healthcare diagnostics, it is also vulnerable to data poisoning, which must be addressed.
Faster Location in Combinatorial Interaction Testing
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2023
Year: 2023

Factors within a large-scale software system that simultaneously interact and strongly impact the system's response under a configuration are often difficult to identify. Although screening such a system for the existence of such interactions is important, determining their location is more useful for system engineers. Combinatorial interaction testing (CIT) concerns creation of test suites that nonadaptively either detect or locate the desired interactions, each of at most a specified size or show that no such set exists. Under the assumption that there are at most a given number of such interactions causing such a response, locating arrays (LAs) guarantee unique location for every such set of interactions and an algorithm to deal with outliers and nondeterministic behavior from real systems, we additionally require the LAs to have a "separation" between these collections. State-of-the-art approaches generate LAs that can locate at most one interaction of size at most three, due to the massive number of interaction combinations for larger parameters if no constraints are given. This paper presents LocAG, a two-stage algorithm that generates (unconstrained) LAs using a simple, but powerful partitioning strategy of these combinations. In particular, we are able to generate LAs with more factors, with any desired separation, and greater interaction size than existing approaches.