OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Video Annotator: A framework for efficiently building video classifiers using vision-language models and active learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

High-quality and consistent annotations are fundamental to the successful development of robust machine learning models. Traditional data annotation methods are resource-intensive and inefficient, often leading to a reliance on third-party annotators who are not the domain experts. Hard samples, which are usually the most informative for model training, tend to be difficult to label accurately and consistently without business context. These can arise unpredictably during the annotation process, requiring a variable number of iterations and rounds of feedback, leading to unforeseen expenses and time commitments to guarantee quality. We posit that more direct involvement of domain experts, using a human-in-the-loop system, can resolve many of these practical challenges. We propose a novel framework we call Video Annotator (VA) for annotating, managing, and iterating on video classification datasets. Our approach offers a new paradigm for an end-user-centered model development process, enhancing the efficiency, usability, and effectiveness of video classifiers. Uniquely, VA allows for a continuous annotation process, seamlessly integrating data collection and model training. We leverage the zero-shot capabilities of vision-language foundation models combined with active learning techniques, and demonstrate that VA enables the efficient creation of high-quality models. VA achieves a median 6.8 point improvement in Average Precision relative to the most competitive baseline across a wide-ranging assortment of tasks. We release a dataset with 153k labels across 56 video understanding tasks annotated by three professional video editors using VA, and also release code to replicate our experiments at: http://github.com/netflix/videoannotator.
More than the Sum of Its Parts: Ensembling Backbone Networks for Few-Shot Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Semantic segmentation is a key prerequisite to robust image understanding for applications in \acrlong{ai} and Robotics. \acrlong{fss}, in particular, concerns the extension and optimization of traditional segmentation methods in challenging conditions where limited training examples are available. A predominant approach in \acrlong{fss} is to rely on a single backbone for visual feature extraction. Choosing which backbone to leverage is a deciding factor contributing to the overall performance. In this work, we interrogate on whether fusing features from different backbones can improve the ability of \acrlong{fss} models to capture richer visual features. To tackle this question, we propose and compare two ensembling techniques-Independent Voting and Feature Fusion. Among the available \acrlong{fss} methods, we implement the proposed ensembling techniques on PANet. The module dedicated to predicting segmentation masks from the backbone embeddings in PANet avoids trainable parameters, creating a controlled `in vitro' setting for isolating the impact of different ensembling strategies. Leveraging the complementary strengths of different backbones, our approach outperforms the original single-backbone PANet across standard benchmarks even in challenging one-shot learning scenarios. Specifically, it achieved a performance improvement of +7.37\% on PASCAL-5\textsuperscript{i} and of +10.68\% on COCO-20\textsuperscript{i} in the top-performing scenario where three backbones are combined. These results, together with the qualitative inspection of the predicted subject masks, suggest that relying on multiple backbones in PANet leads to a more comprehensive feature representation, thus expediting the successful application of \acrlong{fss} methods in challenging, data-scarce environments.
Predictive representations: building blocks of intelligence
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Adaptive behavior often requires predicting future events. The theory of reinforcement learning prescribes what kinds of predictive representations are useful and how to compute them. This paper integrates these theoretical ideas with work on cognition and neuroscience. We pay special attention to the successor representation (SR) and its generalizations, which have been widely applied both as engineering tools and models of brain function. This convergence suggests that particular kinds of predictive representations may function as versatile building blocks of intelligence.
CigaR: Cost-efficient Program Repair with LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLM) have proven to be effective at automated program repair (APR). However, using LLMs can be costly, with companies invoicing users by the number of tokens. In this paper, we propose CigaR, the first LLM-based APR tool that focuses on minimizing the repair cost. CigaR works in two major steps: generating a first plausible patch and multiplying plausible patches. CigaR optimizes the prompts and the prompt setting to maximize the information given to LLMs using the smallest possible number of tokens. Our experiments on 429 bugs from the widely used Defects4J and HumanEval-Java datasets shows that CigaR reduces the token cost by 73%. On average, CigaR spends 127k tokens per bug while the baseline uses 467k tokens per bug. On the subset of bugs that are fixed by both, CigaR spends 20k per bug while the baseline uses 608k tokens, a cost saving of 96%. Our extensive experiments show that CigaR is a cost-effective LLM-based program repair tool that uses a low number of tokens to automatically generate patches.
FaBERT: Pre-training BERT on Persian Blogs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

We introduce FaBERT, a Persian BERT-base model pre-trained on the HmBlogs corpus, encompassing both informal and formal Persian texts. FaBERT is designed to excel in traditional Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks, addressing the intricacies of diverse sentence structures and linguistic styles prevalent in the Persian language. In our comprehensive evaluation of FaBERT on 12 datasets in various downstream tasks, encompassing Sentiment Analysis (SA), Named Entity Recognition (NER), Natural Language Inference (NLI), Question Answering (QA), and Question Paraphrasing (QP), it consistently demonstrated improved performance, all achieved within a compact model size. The findings highlight the importance of utilizing diverse and cleaned corpora, such as HmBlogs, to enhance the performance of language models like BERT in Persian Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. FaBERT is openly accessible at https://huggingface.co/sbunlp/fabert
Right or Wrong -- Understanding How Novice Users Write Software Models
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Writing declarative models has numerous benefits, ranging from automated reasoning and correction of design-level properties before systems are built, to automated testing and debugging of their implementations after they are built. Alloy is a declarative modeling language that is well-suited for verifying system designs. A key strength of Alloy is its scenario-finding toolset, the Analyzer, which allows users to explore all valid scenarios that adhere to the model's constraints up to a user-provided scope. However, even with visualized scenarios, it is difficult to write correct Alloy models. To address this, a growing body of work explores different techniques for debugging Alloy models. In order to develop and evaluate these techniques in an effective manor, this paper presents an empirical study of over 97,000 models written by novice users trying to learn Alloy. We investigate how users write both correct and incorrect models in order to produce a comprehensive benchmark for future use as well as a series of observations to guide debugging and educational efforts for Alloy model development.
A Multichain based marketplace Architecture
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

]A multichain non-fungible tokens (NFTs) marketplace is a decentralized platform where users can buy, sell, and trade NFTs across multiple blockchain networks by using cross communication bridge. In past most of NFT marketplace was based on singlechain in which NFTs have been bought, sold, and traded on a same blockchain network without the need for any external platform. The singlechain based marketplace have faced number of issues such as performance, scalability, flexibility and limited transaction throughput consequently long confirmation times and high transaction fees during high network usage. Firstly, this paper provides the comprehensive overview about NFT Multichain architecture and explore the challenges and opportunities of designing and implementation phase of multichain NFT marketplace to overcome the issue of single chain-based architecture. NFT multichain marketplace architecture includes different blockchain networks that communicate with each other. Secondly, this paper discusses the concept of mainchain interacting with sidechains which refers to multi blockchain architecture where multiple blockchain networks are connected to each other in a hierarchical structure and identifies key challenges related to interoperability, security, scalability, and user adoption. Finally, we proposed a novel architecture for a multichain NFT marketplace, which leverages the benefits of multiple blockchain networks and marketplaces to overcome these key challenges. Moreover, proposed architecture is evaluated through a case study, demonstrating its ability to support efficient and secure transactions across multiple blockchain networks and highlighting the future trends NFTs and marketplaces and comprehensive discussion about the technology.
Adversarial Text Purification: A Large Language Model Approach for Defense
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Adversarial purification is a defense mechanism for safeguarding classifiers against adversarial attacks without knowing the type of attacks or training of the classifier. These techniques characterize and eliminate adversarial perturbations from the attacked inputs, aiming to restore purified samples that retain similarity to the initially attacked ones and are correctly classified by the classifier. Due to the inherent challenges associated with characterizing noise perturbations for discrete inputs, adversarial text purification has been relatively unexplored. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of adversarial purification methods in defending text classifiers. We propose a novel adversarial text purification that harnesses the generative capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to purify adversarial text without the need to explicitly characterize the discrete noise perturbations. We utilize prompt engineering to exploit LLMs for recovering the purified examples for given adversarial examples such that they are semantically similar and correctly classified. Our proposed method demonstrates remarkable performance over various classifiers, improving their accuracy under the attack by over 65% on average.
Fostering the integration of European Open Data into Data Spaces through High-Quality Metadata
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

The term Data Space, understood as the secure exchange of data in distributed systems, ensuring openness, transparency, decentralization, sovereignty, and interoperability of information, has gained importance during the last years. However, Data Spaces are in an initial phase of definition, and new research is necessary to address their requirements. The Open Data ecosystem can be understood as one of the precursors of Data Spaces as it provides mechanisms to ensure the interoperability of information through resource discovery, information exchange, and aggregation via metadata. However, Data Spaces require more advanced capabilities including the automatic and scalable generation and publication of high-quality metadata. In this work, we present a set of software tools that facilitate the automatic generation and publication of metadata, the modeling of datasets through standards, and the assessment of the quality of the generated metadata. We validate all these tools through the YODA Open Data Portal showing how they can be connected to integrate Open Data into Data Spaces.
Entropy-Regularized Token-Level Policy Optimization for Language Agent Reinforcement
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise as intelligent agents in interactive decision-making tasks. Traditional approaches often depend on meticulously designed prompts, high-quality examples, or additional reward models for in-context learning, supervised fine-tuning, or RLHF. Reinforcement learning (RL) presents a dynamic alternative for LLMs to overcome these dependencies by engaging directly with task-specific environments. Nonetheless, it faces significant hurdles: 1) instability stemming from the exponentially vast action space requiring exploration; 2) challenges in assigning token-level credit based on action-level reward signals, resulting in discord between maximizing rewards and accurately modeling corpus data. In response to these challenges, we introduce Entropy-Regularized Token-level Policy Optimization (ETPO), an entropy-augmented RL method tailored for optimizing LLMs at the token level. At the heart of ETPO is our novel per-token soft Bellman update, designed to harmonize the RL process with the principles of language modeling. This methodology decomposes the Q-function update from a coarse action-level view to a more granular token-level perspective, backed by theoretical proof of optimization consistency. Crucially, this decomposition renders linear time complexity in action exploration. We assess the effectiveness of ETPO within a simulated environment that models data science code generation as a series of multi-step interactive tasks; results underline ETPO's potential as a robust method for refining the interactive decision-making capabilities of language agents. For a more detailed preliminary work describing our motivation for token-level decomposition and applying it in PPO methods, please refer to arXiv:2405.15821.
Retzzles: Do Jigsaw Puzzle Actions on Interactive Display Maps Increase the Retention of Map Information?
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

While maps provide upfront content, this might not always be the most effective way for users to remember information. With the proliferation of interactive displays for tourists and visitors in public spaces, we can create a more playful user experience with maps than just exploring them. Adding interactions with the map could also help users retain more information as they use them. In this paper, we investigated whether completing a jigsaw puzzle of a map supports users in retaining more information about a specific map. The results of a between-subject study with a sample of n=28 indicate that additional interaction helped improve mean scores of textual and spatial recall but not visual recall. However, the results are not statistically significant, and the topic is subject to further investigation. Our findings contribute to discussions on using interactive touchscreen displays in similar learning scenarios involving memory retention.
Embedding Compression for Teacher-to-Student Knowledge Transfer
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Common knowledge distillation methods require the teacher model and the student model to be trained on the same task. However, the usage of embeddings as teachers has also been proposed for different source tasks and target tasks. Prior work that uses embeddings as teachers ignores the fact that the teacher embeddings are likely to contain irrelevant knowledge for the target task. To address this problem, we propose to use an embedding compression module with a trainable teacher transformation to obtain a compact teacher embedding. Results show that adding the embedding compression module improves the classification performance, especially for unsupervised teacher embeddings. Moreover, student models trained with the guidance of embeddings show stronger generalizability.
Transfer learning with generative models for object detection on limited datasets
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The availability of data is limited in some fields, especially for object detection tasks, where it is necessary to have correctly labeled bounding boxes around each object. A notable example of such data scarcity is found in the domain of marine biology, where it is useful to develop methods to automatically detect submarine species for environmental monitoring. To address this data limitation, the state-of-the-art machine learning strategies employ two main approaches. The first involves pretraining models on existing datasets before generalizing to the specific domain of interest. The second strategy is to create synthetic datasets specifically tailored to the target domain using methods like copy-paste techniques or ad-hoc simulators. The first strategy often faces a significant domain shift, while the second demands custom solutions crafted for the specific task. In response to these challenges, here we propose a transfer learning framework that is valid for a generic scenario. In this framework, generated images help to improve the performances of an object detector in a few-real data regime. This is achieved through a diffusion-based generative model that was pretrained on large generic datasets. With respect to the state-of-the-art, we find that it is not necessary to fine tune the generative model on the specific domain of interest. We believe that this is an important advance because it mitigates the labor-intensive task of manual labeling the images in object detection tasks. We validate our approach focusing on fishes in an underwater environment, and on the more common domain of cars in an urban setting. Our method achieves detection performance comparable to models trained on thousands of images, using only a few hundreds of input data. Our results pave the way for new generative AI-based protocols for machine learning applications in various domains.
Explain Variance of Prediction in Variational Time Series Models for Clinical Deterioration Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Missingness and measurement frequency are two sides of the same coin. How frequent should we measure clinical variables and conduct laboratory tests? It depends on many factors such as the stability of patient conditions, diagnostic process, treatment plan and measurement costs. The utility of measurements varies disease by disease, patient by patient. In this study we propose a novel view of clinical variable measurement frequency from a predictive modeling perspective, namely the measurements of clinical variables reduce uncertainty in model predictions. To achieve this goal, we propose variance SHAP with variational time series models, an application of Shapley Additive Expanation(SHAP) algorithm to attribute epistemic prediction uncertainty. The prediction variance is estimated by sampling the conditional hidden space in variational models and can be approximated deterministically by delta's method. This approach works with variational time series models such as variational recurrent neural networks and variational transformers. Since SHAP values are additive, the variance SHAP of binary data imputation masks can be directly interpreted as the contribution to prediction variance by measurements. We tested our ideas on a public ICU dataset with deterioration prediction task and study the relation between variance SHAP and measurement time intervals.
Domain Adaptation Using Pseudo Labels
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In the absence of labeled target data, unsupervised domain adaptation approaches seek to align the marginal distributions of the source and target domains in order to train a classifier for the target. Unsupervised domain alignment procedures are category-agnostic and end up misaligning the categories. We address this problem by deploying a pretrained network to determine accurate labels for the target domain using a multi-stage pseudo-label refinement procedure. The filters are based on the confidence, distance (conformity), and consistency of the pseudo labels. Our results on multiple datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our simple procedure in comparison with complex state-of-the-art techniques.
High-Rate Fair-Density Parity-Check Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

We introduce fair-density parity-check (FDPC) codes targeting high-rate applications. In particular, we start with a base parity-check matrix $H_b$ of dimension $2 \sqrt{n} \times n$, where $n$ is the code block length, and the number of ones in each row and column of $H_b$ is equal to $\sqrt{n}$ and $2$, respectively. We propose a deterministic combinatorial method for picking the base matrix $H_b$, assuming $n=4t^2$ for some integer $t \geq 2$. We then extend this by obtaining permuted versions of $H_b$ (e.g., via random permutations of its columns) and stacking them on top of each other leading to codes of dimension $k \geq n-2s\sqrt{n}+s$, for some $s \geq 2$, referred to as order-$s$ FDPC codes. We propose methods to explicitly characterize and bound the weight distribution of the new codes and utilize them to derive union-type approximate upper bounds on their error probability under Maximum Likelihood (ML) decoding. For the binary erasure channel (BEC), we demonstrate that the approximate ML bound of FDPC codes closely follows the random coding upper bound (RCU) for a wide range of channel parameters. Also, remarkably, FDPC codes, under the low-complexity min-sum decoder, improve upon 5G-LDPC codes for transmission over the binary-input additive white Gaussian noise (B-AWGN) channel by almost 0.5dB (for $n=1024$, and rate $=0.878$). Furthermore, we propose a new decoder as a combination of weighted min-sum message-passing (MP) decoding algorithm together with a new progressive list (PL) decoding component, referred to as the MP-PL decoder, to further boost the performance of FDPC codes. This paper opens new avenues for a fresh investigation of new code constructions and decoding algorithms in high-rate regimes suitable for ultra-high throughput (high-frequency/optical) applications.
History, Development, and Principles of Large Language Models-An Introductory Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Language models serve as a cornerstone in natural language processing (NLP), utilizing mathematical methods to generalize language laws and knowledge for prediction and generation. Over extensive research spanning decades, language modeling has progressed from initial statistical language models (SLMs) to the contemporary landscape of large language models (LLMs). Notably, the swift evolution of LLMs has reached the ability to process, understand, and generate human-level text. Nevertheless, despite the significant advantages that LLMs offer in improving both work and personal lives, the limited understanding among general practitioners about the background and principles of these models hampers their full potential. Notably, most LLM reviews focus on specific aspects and utilize specialized language, posing a challenge for practitioners lacking relevant background knowledge. In light of this, this survey aims to present a comprehensible overview of LLMs to assist a broader audience. It strives to facilitate a comprehensive understanding by exploring the historical background of language models and tracing their evolution over time. The survey further investigates the factors influencing the development of LLMs, emphasizing key contributions. Additionally, it concentrates on elucidating the underlying principles of LLMs, equipping audiences with essential theoretical knowledge. The survey also highlights the limitations of existing work and points out promising future directions.