OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Talaria: Interactively Optimizing Machine Learning Models for Efficient Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

On-device machine learning (ML) moves computation from the cloud to personal devices, protecting user privacy and enabling intelligent user experiences. However, fitting models on devices with limited resources presents a major technical challenge: practitioners need to optimize models and balance hardware metrics such as model size, latency, and power. To help practitioners create efficient ML models, we designed and developed Talaria: a model visualization and optimization system. Talaria enables practitioners to compile models to hardware, interactively visualize model statistics, and simulate optimizations to test the impact on inference metrics. Since its internal deployment two years ago, we have evaluated Talaria using three methodologies: (1) a log analysis highlighting its growth of 800+ practitioners submitting 3,600+ models; (2) a usability survey with 26 users assessing the utility of 20 Talaria features; and (3) a qualitative interview with the 7 most active users about their experience using Talaria.
SalFoM: Dynamic Saliency Prediction with Video Foundation Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advancements in video saliency prediction (VSP) have shown promising performance compared to the human visual system, whose emulation is the primary goal of VSP. However, current state-of-the-art models employ spatio-temporal transformers trained on limited amounts of data, hindering generalizability adaptation to downstream tasks. The benefits of vision foundation models present a potential solution to improve the VSP process. However, adapting image foundation models to the video domain presents significant challenges in modeling scene dynamics and capturing temporal information. To address these challenges, and as the first initiative to design a VSP model based on video foundation models, we introduce SalFoM, a novel encoder-decoder video transformer architecture. Our model employs UnMasked Teacher (UMT) as feature extractor and presents a heterogeneous decoder which features a locality-aware spatio-temporal transformer and integrates local and global spatio-temporal information from various perspectives to produce the final saliency map. Our qualitative and quantitative experiments on the challenging VSP benchmark datasets of DHF1K, Hollywood-2 and UCF-Sports demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model in comparison with the state-of-the-art methods.
Exploring the Trade-off Between Model Performance and Explanation Plausibility of Text Classifiers Using Human Rationales
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Saliency post-hoc explainability methods are important tools for understanding increasingly complex NLP models. While these methods can reflect the model's reasoning, they may not align with human intuition, making the explanations not plausible. In this work, we present a methodology for incorporating rationales, which are text annotations explaining human decisions, into text classification models. This incorporation enhances the plausibility of post-hoc explanations while preserving their faithfulness. Our approach is agnostic to model architectures and explainability methods. We introduce the rationales during model training by augmenting the standard cross-entropy loss with a novel loss function inspired by contrastive learning. By leveraging a multi-objective optimization algorithm, we explore the trade-off between the two loss functions and generate a Pareto-optimal frontier of models that balance performance and plausibility. Through extensive experiments involving diverse models, datasets, and explainability methods, we demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances the quality of model explanations without causing substantial (sometimes negligible) degradation in the original model's performance.
MARL-LNS: Cooperative Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning via Large Neighborhoods Search
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2024
Year: 2024

Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has been an increasingly important research topic in the last half-decade because of its great potential for real-world applications. Because of the curse of dimensionality, the popular "centralized training decentralized execution" framework requires a long time in training, yet still cannot converge efficiently. In this paper, we propose a general training framework, MARL-LNS, to algorithmically address these issues by training on alternating subsets of agents using existing deep MARL algorithms as low-level trainers, while not involving any additional parameters to be trained. Based on this framework, we provide three algorithm variants based on the framework: random large neighborhood search (RLNS), batch large neighborhood search (BLNS), and adaptive large neighborhood search (ALNS), which alternate the subsets of agents differently. We test our algorithms on both the StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge and Google Research Football, showing that our algorithms can automatically reduce at least 10% of training time while reaching the same final skill level as the original algorithm.
Towards Standards-Compliant Assistive Technology Product Specifications via LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

In the rapidly evolving field of assistive technology (AT), ensuring that products meet national and international standards is essential for user safety, efficacy, and accessibility. In this vision paper, we introduce CompliAT, a pioneering framework designed to streamline the compliance process of AT product specifications with these standards through the innovative use of Large Language Models (LLMs). CompliAT addresses three critical tasks: checking terminology consistency, classifying products according to standards, and tracing key product specifications to standard requirements. We tackle the challenge of terminology consistency to ensure that the language used in product specifications aligns with relevant standards, reducing misunderstandings and non-compliance risks. We propose a novel approach for product classification, leveraging a retrieval-augmented generation model to accurately categorize AT products aligning to international standards, despite the sparse availability of training data. Finally, CompliAT implements a traceability and compliance mechanism from key product specifications to standard requirements, ensuring all aspects of an AT product are thoroughly vetted against the corresponding standards. By semi-automating these processes, CompliAT aims to significantly reduce the time and effort required for AT product standards compliance and uphold quality and safety standards. We outline our planned implementation and evaluation plan for CompliAT.
Semantic Compression with Information Lattice Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Data-driven artificial intelligence (AI) techniques are becoming prominent for learning in support of data compression, but are focused on standard problems such as text compression. To instead address the emerging problem of semantic compression, we argue that the lattice theory of information is particularly expressive and mathematically precise in capturing notions of abstraction as a form of lossy semantic compression. As such, we demonstrate that a novel AI technique called information lattice learning, originally developed for knowledge discovery and creativity, is powerful for learning to compress in a semantically-meaningful way. The lattice structure further implies the optimality of group codes and the successive refinement property for progressive transmission.
A Framework for Guided Motion Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Randomized sampling based algorithms are widely used in robot motion planning due to the problem's intractability, and are experimentally effective on a wide range of problem instances. Most variants bias their sampling using various heuristics related to the known underlying structure of the search space. In this work, we formalize the intuitive notion of guided search by defining the concept of a guiding space. This new language encapsulates many seemingly distinct prior methods under the same framework, and allows us to reason about guidance, a previously obscured core contribution of different algorithms. We suggest an information theoretic method to evaluate guidance, which experimentally matches intuition when tested on known algorithms in a variety of environments. The language and evaluation of guidance suggests improvements to existing methods, and allows for simple hybrid algorithms that combine guidance from multiple sources.
Robust Pronoun Fidelity with English LLMs: Are they Reasoning, Repeating, or Just Biased?
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Robust, faithful and harm-free pronoun use for individuals is an important goal for language model development as their use increases, but prior work tends to study only one or two of these characteristics at a time. To measure progress towards the combined goal, we introduce the task of pronoun fidelity: given a context introducing a co-referring entity and pronoun, the task is to reuse the correct pronoun later. We present RUFF, a carefully-designed dataset of over 5 million instances to measure robust pronoun fidelity in English, and we evaluate 37 model variants from nine popular families, across architectures (encoder-only, decoder-only and encoder-decoder) and scales (11M-70B parameters). When an individual is introduced with a pronoun, models can mostly faithfully reuse this pronoun in the next sentence, but they are significantly worse with she/her/her, singular they and neopronouns. Moreover, models are easily distracted by non-adversarial sentences discussing other people; even one sentence with a distractor pronoun causes accuracy to drop on average by 34 percentage points. Our results show that pronoun fidelity is not robust, in a simple, naturalistic setting where humans achieve nearly 100% accuracy. We encourage researchers to bridge the gaps we find and to carefully evaluate reasoning in settings where superficial repetition might inflate perceptions of model performance.
TEGRA -- Scaling Up Terascale Graph Processing with Disaggregated Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2024
Year: 2024

Graphs are essential for representing relationships in various domains, driving modern AI applications such as graph analytics and neural networks across science, engineering, cybersecurity, transportation, and economics. However, the size of modern graphs are rapidly expanding, posing challenges for traditional CPUs and GPUs in meeting real-time processing demands. As a result, hardware accelerators for graph processing have been proposed. However, the largest graphs that can be handled by these systems is still modest often targeting Twitter graph(1.4B edges approximately). This paper aims to address this limitation by developing a graph accelerator capable of terascale graph processing. Scale out architectures, architectures where nodes are replicated to expand to larger datasets, are natural for handling larger graphs. We argue that this approach is not appropriate for very large-scale graphs because it leads to under utilization of both memory resources and compute resources. Additionally, vertex and edge processing have different access patterns. Communication overheads also pose further challenges in designing scalable architectures. To overcome these issues, this paper proposes TEGRA, a scale-up architecture for terascale graph processing. TEGRA leverages a composable computing system with disaggregated resources and a communication architecture inspired by Active Messages. By employing direct communication between cores and optimizing memory interconnect utilization, TEGRA effectively reduces communication overhead and improves resource utilization, therefore enabling efficient processing of terascale graphs.
Towards Collaborative Family-Centered Design for Online Safety, Privacy and Security
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Traditional online safety technologies often overly restrict teens and invade their privacy, while parents often lack knowledge regarding their digital privacy. As such, prior researchers have called for more collaborative approaches on adolescent online safety and networked privacy. In this paper, we propose family-centered approaches to foster parent-teen collaboration in ensuring their mobile privacy and online safety while respecting individual privacy, to enhance open discussion and teens' self-regulation. However, challenges such as power imbalances and conflicts with family values arise when implementing such approaches, making parent-teen collaboration difficult. Therefore, attending the family-centered design workshop will provide an invaluable opportunity for us to discuss these challenges and identify best research practices for the future of collaborative online safety and privacy within families.
Multi-modal Learning for WebAssembly Reverse Engineering
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

The increasing adoption of WebAssembly (Wasm) for performance-critical and security-sensitive tasks drives the demand for WebAssembly program comprehension and reverse engineering. Recent studies have introduced machine learning (ML)-based WebAssembly reverse engineering tools. Yet, the generalization of task-specific ML solutions remains challenging, because their effectiveness hinges on the availability of an ample supply of high-quality task-specific labeled data. Moreover, previous works overlook the high-level semantics present in source code and its documentation. Acknowledging the abundance of available source code with documentation, which can be compiled into WebAssembly, we propose to learn representations of them concurrently and harness their mutual relationships for effective WebAssembly reverse engineering. In this paper, we present WasmRev, the first multi-modal pre-trained language model for WebAssembly reverse engineering. WasmRev is pre-trained using self-supervised learning on a large-scale multi-modal corpus encompassing source code, code documentation and the compiled WebAssembly, without requiring labeled data. WasmRev incorporates three tailored multi-modal pre-training tasks to capture various characteristics of WebAssembly and cross-modal relationships. WasmRev is only trained once to produce general-purpose representations that can broadly support WebAssembly reverse engineering tasks through few-shot fine-tuning with much less labeled data, improving data efficiency. We fine-tune WasmRev onto three important reverse engineering tasks: type recovery, function purpose identification and WebAssembly summarization. Our results show that WasmRev pre-trained on the corpus of multi-modal samples establishes a robust foundation for these tasks, achieving high task accuracy and outperforming the state-of-the-art ML methods for WebAssembly reverse engineering.
RAnGE: Reachability Analysis for Guaranteed Ergodicity
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

This paper investigates performance guarantees on coverage-based ergodic exploration methods in environments containing disturbances. Ergodic exploration methods generate trajectories for autonomous robots such that time spent in each area of the exploration space is proportional to the utility of exploring in the area. We find that it is possible to use techniques from reachability analysis to solve for optimal controllers that guarantee ergodic coverage and are robust against disturbances. We formulate ergodic search as a differential game between the controller optimizing for ergodicity and an external disturbance, and we derive the reachability equations for ergodic search using an extended-state Bolza-form transform of the ergodic problem. Contributions include the computation of a continuous value function for the ergodic exploration problem and the derivation of a controller that provides guarantees for coverage under disturbances. Our approach leverages neural-network-based methods to solve the reachability equations; we also construct a robust model-predictive controller for comparison. Simulated and experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our approach for generating robust ergodic trajectories for search and exploration on a 1D system with an external disturbance force.
CORP: A Multi-Modal Dataset for Campus-Oriented Roadside Perception Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Numerous roadside perception datasets have been introduced to propel advancements in autonomous driving and intelligent transportation systems research and development. However, it has been observed that the majority of their concentrates is on urban arterial roads, inadvertently overlooking residential areas such as parks and campuses that exhibit entirely distinct characteristics. In light of this gap, we propose CORP, which stands as the first public benchmark dataset tailored for multi-modal roadside perception tasks under campus scenarios. Collected in a university campus, CORP consists of over 205k images plus 102k point clouds captured from 18 cameras and 9 LiDAR sensors. These sensors with different configurations are mounted on roadside utility poles to provide diverse viewpoints within the campus region. The annotations of CORP encompass multi-dimensional information beyond 2D and 3D bounding boxes, providing extra support for 3D seamless tracking and instance segmentation with unique IDs and pixel masks for identifying targets, to enhance the understanding of objects and their behaviors distributed across the campus premises. Unlike other roadside datasets about urban traffic, CORP extends the spectrum to highlight the challenges for multi-modal perception in campuses and other residential areas.
Reservoir Sampling over Joins
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

Sampling over joins is a fundamental task in large-scale data analytics. Instead of computing the full join results, which could be massive, a uniform sample of the join results would suffice for many purposes, such as answering analytical queries or training machine learning models. In this paper, we study the problem of how to maintain a random sample over joins while the tuples are streaming in. Without the join, this problem can be solved by some simple and classical reservoir sampling algorithms. However, the join operator makes the problem significantly harder, as the join size can be polynomially larger than the input. We present a new algorithm for this problem that achieves a near-linear complexity. The key technical components are a generalized reservoir sampling algorithm that supports a predicate, and a dynamic index for sampling over joins. We also conduct extensive experiments on both graph and relational data over various join queries, and the experimental results demonstrate significant performance improvement over the state of the art.
NLP4Gov: A Comprehensive Library for Computational Policy Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Formal rules and policies are fundamental in formally specifying a social system: its operation, boundaries, processes, and even ontology. Recent scholarship has highlighted the role of formal policy in collective knowledge creation, game communities, the production of digital public goods, and national social media governance. Researchers have shown interest in how online communities convene tenable self-governance mechanisms to regulate member activities and distribute rights and privileges by designating responsibilities, roles, and hierarchies. We present NLP4Gov, an interactive kit to train and aid scholars and practitioners alike in computational policy analysis. The library explores and integrates methods and capabilities from computational linguistics and NLP to generate semantic and symbolic representations of community policies from text records. Versatile, documented, and accessible, NLP4Gov provides granular and comparative views into institutional structures and interactions, along with other information extraction capabilities for downstream analysis.
Exploring Emotions in Multi-componential Space using Interactive VR Games
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Emotion understanding is a complex process that involves multiple components. The ability to recognise emotions not only leads to new context awareness methods but also enhances system interaction's effectiveness by perceiving and expressing emotions. Despite the attention to discrete and dimensional models, neuroscientific evidence supports those emotions as being complex and multi-faceted. One framework that resonated well with such findings is the Component Process Model (CPM), a theory that considers the complexity of emotions with five interconnected components: appraisal, expression, motivation, physiology and feeling. However, the relationship between CPM and discrete emotions has not yet been fully explored. Therefore, to better understand emotions underlying processes, we operationalised a data-driven approach using interactive Virtual Reality (VR) games and collected multimodal measures (self-reports, physiological and facial signals) from 39 participants. We used Machine Learning (ML) methods to identify the unique contributions of each component to emotion differentiation. Our results showed the role of different components in emotion differentiation, with the model including all components demonstrating the most significant contribution. Moreover, we found that at least five dimensions are needed to represent the variation of emotions in our dataset. These findings also have implications for using VR environments in emotion research and highlight the role of physiological signals in emotion recognition within such environments.
Multi Positive Contrastive Learning with Pose-Consistent Generated Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Model pre-training has become essential in various recognition tasks. Meanwhile, with the remarkable advancements in image generation models, pre-training methods utilizing generated images have also emerged given their ability to produce unlimited training data. However, while existing methods utilizing generated images excel in classification, they fall short in more practical tasks, such as human pose estimation. In this paper, we have experimentally demonstrated it and propose the generation of visually distinct images with identical human poses. We then propose a novel multi-positive contrastive learning, which optimally utilize the previously generated images to learn structural features of the human body. We term the entire learning pipeline as GenPoCCL. Despite using only less than 1% amount of data compared to current state-of-the-art method, GenPoCCL captures structural features of the human body more effectively, surpassing existing methods in a variety of human-centric perception tasks.
Advancing Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis through Deep Learning Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Aspect-based sentiment analysis predicts sentiment polarity with fine granularity. While graph convolutional networks (GCNs) are widely utilized for sentimental feature extraction, their naive application for syntactic feature extraction can compromise information preservation. This study introduces an innovative edge-enhanced GCN, named SentiSys, to navigate the syntactic graph while preserving intact feature information, leading to enhanced performance. Specifically,we first integrate a bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) network and a self-attention-based transformer. This combination facilitates effective text encoding, preventing the loss of information and predicting long dependency text. A bidirectional GCN (Bi-GCN) with message passing is then employed to encode relationships between entities. Additionally, unnecessary information is filtered out using an aspect-specific masking technique. To validate the effectiveness of our proposed model, we conduct extensive evaluation experiments on four benchmark datasets. The experimental results demonstrate enhanced performance in aspect-based sentiment analysis with the use of SentiSys.