OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
ZEST: Attention-based Zero-Shot Learning for Unseen IoT Device Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Recent research works have proposed machine learning models for classifying IoT devices connected to a network. However, there is still a practical challenge of not having all devices (and hence their traffic) available during the training of a model. This essentially means, during the operational phase, we need to classify new devices not seen in the training phase. To address this challenge, we propose ZEST -- a ZSL (zero-shot learning) framework based on self-attention for classifying both seen and unseen devices. ZEST consists of i) a self-attention based network feature extractor, termed SANE, for extracting latent space representations of IoT traffic, ii) a generative model that trains a decoder using latent features to generate pseudo data, and iii) a supervised model that is trained on the generated pseudo data for classifying devices. We carry out extensive experiments on real IoT traffic data; our experiments demonstrate i) ZEST achieves significant improvement (in terms of accuracy) over the baselines; ii) SANE is able to better extract meaningful representations than LSTM which has been commonly used for modeling network traffic.
Optimization of Federated Learning's Client Selection for Non-IID Data Based on Grey Relational Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

Federated learning (FL) is a novel distributed learning framework designed for applications with privacy-sensitive data. Without sharing data, FL trains local models on individual devices and constructs the global model on the server by performing model aggregation. However, to reduce the communication cost, the participants in each training round are randomly selected, which significantly decreases the training efficiency under data and device heterogeneity. To address this issue, in this paper, we introduce a novel approach that considers the data distribution and computational resources of devices to select the clients for each training round. Our proposed method performs client selection based on the Grey Relational Analysis (GRA) theory by considering available computational resources for each client, the training loss, and weight divergence. To examine the usability of our proposed method, we implement our contribution on Amazon Web Services (AWS) by using the TensorFlow library of Python. We evaluate our algorithm's performance in different setups by varying the learning rate, network size, the number of selected clients, and the client selection round. The evaluation results show that our proposed algorithm enhances the performance significantly in terms of test accuracy and the average client's waiting time compared to state-of-the-art methods, federated averaging and Pow-d.
Long-Tailed Classification Based on Coarse-Grained Leading Forest and Multi-Center Loss
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Long-tailed (LT) classification is an unavoidable and challenging problem in the real world. Most existing long-tailed classification methods focus only on solving the class-wise imbalance while ignoring the attribute-wise imbalance. The deviation of a classification model is caused by both class-wise and attribute-wise imbalance. Due to the fact that attributes are implicit in most datasets and the combination of attributes is complex, attribute-wise imbalance is more difficult to handle. For this purpose, we proposed a novel long-tailed classification framework, aiming to build a multi-granularity classification model by means of invariant feature learning. This method first unsupervisedly constructs Coarse-Grained forest (CLF) to better characterize the distribution of attributes within a class. Depending on the distribution of attributes, one can customize suitable sampling strategies to construct different imbalanced datasets. We then introduce multi-center loss (MCL) that aims to gradually eliminate confusing attributes during feature learning process. The proposed framework does not necessarily couple to a specific LT classification model structure and can be integrated with any existing LT method as an independent component. Extensive experiments show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on both existing benchmarks ImageNet-GLT and MSCOCO-GLT and can improve the performance of existing LT methods. Our codes are available on GitHub: \url{https://github.com/jinyery/cognisance}
Neural Diffusion Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Diffusion models have shown remarkable performance on many generative tasks. Despite recent success, most diffusion models are restricted in that they only allow linear transformation of the data distribution. In contrast, broader family of transformations can potentially help train generative distributions more efficiently, simplifying the reverse process and closing the gap between the true negative log-likelihood and the variational approximation. In this paper, we present Neural Diffusion Models (NDMs), a generalization of conventional diffusion models that enables defining and learning time-dependent non-linear transformations of data. We show how to optimise NDMs using a variational bound in a simulation-free setting. Moreover, we derive a time-continuous formulation of NDMs, which allows fast and reliable inference using off-the-shelf numerical ODE and SDE solvers. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of NDMs with learnable transformations through experiments on standard image generation benchmarks, including CIFAR-10, downsampled versions of ImageNet and CelebA-HQ. NDMs outperform conventional diffusion models in terms of likelihood and produce high-quality samples.
Analyzing User Ideologies and Shared News During the 2019 Argentinian Elections
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

The extensive data generated on social media platforms allow us to gain insights over trending topics and public opinions. Additionally, it offers a window into user behavior, including their content engagement and news sharing habits. In this study, we analyze the relationship between users' political ideologies and the news they share during Argentina's 2019 election period. Our findings reveal that users predominantly share news that aligns with their political beliefs, despite accessing media outlets with diverse political leanings. Moreover, we observe a consistent pattern of users sharing articles related to topics biased to their preferred candidates, highlighting a deeper level of political alignment in online discussions. We believe that this systematic analysis framework can be applied to similar scenarios in different countries, especially those marked by significant political polarization, akin to Argentina.
PU-Ray: Domain-Independent Point Cloud Upsampling via Ray Marching on Neural Implicit Surface
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

While recent advancements in deep-learning point cloud upsampling methods have improved the input to intelligent transportation systems, they still suffer from issues of domain dependency between synthetic and real-scanned point clouds. This paper addresses the above issues by proposing a new ray-based upsampling approach with an arbitrary rate, where a depth prediction is made for each query ray and its corresponding patch. Our novel method simulates the sphere-tracing ray marching algorithm on the neural implicit surface defined with an unsigned distance function (UDF) to achieve more precise and stable ray-depth predictions by training a point-transformer-based network. The rule-based mid-point query sampling method generates more evenly distributed points without requiring an end-to-end model trained using a nearest-neighbor-based reconstruction loss function, which may be biased towards the training dataset. Self-supervised learning becomes possible with accurate ground truths within the input point cloud. The results demonstrate the method's versatility across domains and training scenarios with limited computational resources and training data. Comprehensive analyses of synthetic and real-scanned applications provide empirical evidence for the significance of the upsampling task across the computer vision and graphics domains to real-world applications of ITS.
From CLIP to DINO: Visual Encoders Shout in Multi-modal Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made significant strides in expanding the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) through the incorporation of visual perception interfaces. Despite the emergence of exciting applications and the availability of diverse instruction tuning data, existing approaches often rely on CLIP or its variants as the visual branch, and merely extract features from the deep layers. However, these methods lack a comprehensive analysis of the visual encoders in MLLMs. In this paper, we conduct an extensive investigation into the effectiveness of different vision encoders within MLLMs. Our findings reveal that the shallow layer features of CLIP offer particular advantages for fine-grained tasks such as grounding and region understanding. Surprisingly, the vision-only model DINO, which is not pretrained with text-image alignment, demonstrates promising performance as a visual branch within MLLMs. By simply equipping it with an MLP layer for alignment, DINO surpasses CLIP in fine-grained related perception tasks. Building upon these observations, we propose a simple yet effective feature merging strategy, named COMM, that integrates CLIP and DINO with Multi-level features Merging, to enhance the visual capabilities of MLLMs. We evaluate COMM through comprehensive experiments on a wide range of benchmarks, including image captioning, visual question answering, visual grounding, and object hallucination. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of COMM compared to existing methods, showcasing its enhanced visual capabilities within MLLMs.
A Case-Based Persistent Memory for a Large Language Model
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Case-based reasoning (CBR) as a methodology for problem-solving can use any appropriate computational technique. This position paper argues that CBR researchers have somewhat overlooked recent developments in deep learning and large language models (LLMs). The underlying technical developments that have enabled the recent breakthroughs in AI have strong synergies with CBR and could be used to provide a persistent memory for LLMs to make progress towards Artificial General Intelligence.
Dual-Branch Knowledge Distillation for Noise-Robust Synthetic Speech Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

Most research in synthetic speech detection (SSD) focuses on improving performance on standard noise-free datasets. However, in actual situations, noise interference is usually present, causing significant performance degradation in SSD systems. To improve noise robustness, this paper proposes a dual-branch knowledge distillation synthetic speech detection (DKDSSD) method. Specifically, a parallel data flow of the clean teacher branch and the noisy student branch is designed, and interactive fusion module and response-based teacher-student paradigms are proposed to guide the training of noisy data from both the data distribution and decision-making perspectives. In the noisy student branch, speech enhancement is introduced initially for denoising, aiming to reduce the interference of strong noise. The proposed interactive fusion combines denoised features and noisy features to mitigate the impact of speech distortion and ensure consistency with the data distribution of the clean branch. The teacher-student paradigm maps the student's decision space to the teacher's decision space, enabling noisy speech to behave similarly to clean speech. Additionally, a joint training method is employed to optimize both branches for achieving global optimality. Experimental results based on multiple datasets demonstrate that the proposed method performs effectively in noisy environments and maintains its performance in cross-dataset experiments. Source code is available at https://github.com/fchest/DKDSSD.
ChatKBQA: A Generate-then-Retrieve Framework for Knowledge Base Question Answering with Fine-tuned Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) aims to answer natural language questions over large-scale knowledge bases (KBs), which can be summarized into two crucial steps: knowledge retrieval and semantic parsing. However, three core challenges remain: inefficient knowledge retrieval, mistakes of retrieval adversely impacting semantic parsing, and the complexity of previous KBQA methods. To tackle these challenges, we introduce ChatKBQA, a novel and simple generate-then-retrieve KBQA framework, which proposes first generating the logical form with fine-tuned LLMs, then retrieving and replacing entities and relations with an unsupervised retrieval method, to improve both generation and retrieval more directly. Experimental results show that ChatKBQA achieves new state-of-the-art performance on standard KBQA datasets, WebQSP, and CWQ. This work can also be regarded as a new paradigm for combining LLMs with knowledge graphs (KGs) for interpretable and knowledge-required question answering. Our code is publicly available.
Topological Data Analysis in smart manufacturing: State of the art and futuredirections
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Topological Data Analysis (TDA) is a discipline that applies algebraic topology techniques to analyze complex, multi-dimensional data. Although it is a relatively new field, TDA has been widely and successfully applied across various domains, such as medicine, materials science, and biology. This survey provides an overview of the state of the art of TDA within a dynamic and promising application area: industrial manufacturing and production, particularly within the Industry 4.0 context. We have conducted a rigorous and reproducible literature search focusing on TDA applications in industrial production and manufacturing settings. The identified works are categorized based on their application areas within the manufacturing process and the types of input data. We highlight the principal advantages of TDA tools in this context, address the challenges encountered and the future potential of the field. Furthermore, we identify TDA methods that are currently underexploited in specific industrial areas and discuss how their application could be beneficial, with the aim of stimulating further research in this field. This work seeks to bridge the theoretical advancements in TDA with the practical needs of industrial production. Our goal is to serve as a guide for practitioners and researchers applying TDA in industrial production and manufacturing systems. We advocate for the untapped potential of TDA in this domain and encourage continued exploration and research.
Bad Values but Good Behavior: Learning Highly Misspecified Bandits and MDPs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Parametric, feature-based reward models are employed by a variety of algorithms in decision-making settings such as bandits and Markov decision processes (MDPs). The typical assumption under which the algorithms are analysed is realizability, i.e., that the true values of actions are perfectly explained by some parametric model in the class. We are, however, interested in the situation where the true values are (significantly) misspecified with respect to the model class. For parameterized bandits, contextual bandits and MDPs, we identify structural conditions, depending on the problem instance and model class, under which basic algorithms such as $ε$-greedy, LinUCB and fitted Q-learning provably learn optimal policies under even highly misspecified models. This is in contrast to existing worst-case results for, say misspecified bandits, which show regret bounds that scale linearly with time, and shows that there can be a nontrivially large set of bandit instances that are robust to misspecification.
Integrating Symbolic Reasoning into Neural Generative Models for Design Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Design generation requires tight integration of neural and symbolic reasoning, as good design must meet explicit user needs and honor implicit rules for aesthetics, utility, and convenience. Current automated design tools driven by neural networks produce appealing designs but cannot satisfy user specifications and utility requirements. Symbolic reasoning tools, such as constraint programming, cannot perceive low-level visual information in images or capture subtle aspects such as aesthetics. We introduce the Spatial Reasoning Integrated Generator (SPRING) for design generation. SPRING embeds a neural and symbolic integrated spatial reasoning module inside the deep generative network. The spatial reasoning module samples the set of locations of objects to be generated from a backtrack-free distribution. This distribution modifies the implicit preference distribution, which is learned by a recursive neural network to capture utility and aesthetics. Sampling from the backtrack-free distribution is accomplished by a symbolic reasoning approach, SampleSearch, which zeros out the probability of sampling spatial locations violating explicit user specifications. Embedding symbolic reasoning into neural generation guarantees that the output of SPRING satisfies user requirements. Furthermore, SPRING offers interpretability, allowing users to visualize and diagnose the generation process through the bounding boxes. SPRING is also adept at managing novel user specifications not encountered during its training, thanks to its proficiency in zero-shot constraint transfer. Quantitative evaluations and a human study reveal that SPRING outperforms baseline generative models, excelling in delivering high design quality and better meeting user specifications.
On Implementing Autonomous Supply Chains: a Multi-Agent System Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2024
Year: 2024

Trade restrictions, the COVID-19 pandemic, and geopolitical conflicts have significantly exposed vulnerabilities within traditional global supply chains. These events underscore the need for organisations to establish more resilient and flexible supply chains. To address these challenges, the concept of the autonomous supply chain (ASC), characterised by predictive and self-decision-making capabilities, has recently emerged as a promising solution. However, research on ASCs is relatively limited, with no existing studies specifically focusing on their implementations. This paper aims to address this gap by presenting an implementation of ASC using a multi-agent approach. It presents a methodology for the analysis and design of such an agent-based ASC system (A2SC). This paper provides a concrete case study, the autonomous meat supply chain, which showcases the practical implementation of the A2SC system using the proposed methodology. Additionally, a system architecture and a toolkit for developing such A2SC systems are presented. Despite limitations, this work demonstrates a promising approach for implementing an effective ASC system.
Efficient Link Prediction via GNN Layers Induced by Negative Sampling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Graph neural networks (GNNs) for link prediction can loosely be divided into two broad categories. First, \emph{node-wise} architectures pre-compute individual embeddings for each node that are later combined by a simple decoder to make predictions. While extremely efficient at inference time, model expressiveness is limited such that isomorphic nodes contributing to candidate edges may not be distinguishable, compromising accuracy. In contrast, \emph{edge-wise} methods rely on the formation of edge-specific subgraph embeddings to enrich the representation of pair-wise relationships, disambiguating isomorphic nodes to improve accuracy, but with increased model complexity. To better navigate this trade-off, we propose a novel GNN architecture whereby the \emph{forward pass} explicitly depends on \emph{both} positive (as is typical) and negative (unique to our approach) edges to inform more flexible, yet still cheap node-wise embeddings. This is achieved by recasting the embeddings themselves as minimizers of a forward-pass-specific energy function that favors separation of positive and negative samples. Notably, this energy is distinct from the actual training loss shared by most existing link prediction models, where contrastive pairs only influence the \textit{backward pass}. As demonstrated by extensive empirical evaluations, the resulting architecture retains the inference speed of node-wise models, while producing competitive accuracy with edge-wise alternatives. We released our code at https://github.com/yxzwang/SubmissionverOfYinYanGNN.
Spike-based Neuromorphic Computing for Next-Generation Computer Vision
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

Neuromorphic Computing promises orders of magnitude improvement in energy efficiency compared to traditional von Neumann computing paradigm. The goal is to develop an adaptive, fault-tolerant, low-footprint, fast, low-energy intelligent system by learning and emulating brain functionality which can be realized through innovation in different abstraction layers including material, device, circuit, architecture and algorithm. As the energy consumption in complex vision tasks keep increasing exponentially due to larger data set and resource-constrained edge devices become increasingly ubiquitous, spike-based neuromorphic computing approaches can be viable alternative to deep convolutional neural network that is dominating the vision field today. In this book chapter, we introduce neuromorphic computing, outline a few representative examples from different layers of the design stack (devices, circuits and algorithms) and conclude with a few exciting applications and future research directions that seem promising for computer vision in the near future.
Comparative Analysis of Optimization Strategies for K-means Clustering in Big Data Contexts: A Review
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents a comparative analysis of different optimization techniques for the K-means algorithm in the context of big data. K-means is a widely used clustering algorithm, but it can suffer from scalability issues when dealing with large datasets. The paper explores different approaches to overcome these issues, including parallelization, approximation, and sampling methods. The authors evaluate the performance of various clustering techniques on a large number of benchmark datasets, comparing them according to the dominance criterion provided by the "less is more" approach (LIMA), i.e., simultaneously along the dimensions of speed, clustering quality, and simplicity. The results show that different techniques are more suitable for different types of datasets and provide insights into the trade-offs between speed and accuracy in K-means clustering for big data. Overall, the paper offers a comprehensive guide for practitioners and researchers on how to optimize K-means for big data applications.
Multivariate sensitivity-adaptive polynomial chaos expansion for high-dimensional surrogate modeling and uncertainty quantification
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2024
Year: 2024

This work develops a novel basis-adaptive method for constructing anisotropic polynomial chaos expansions of multidimensional (vector-valued, multi-output) model responses. The adaptive basis selection is based on multivariate sensitivity analysis metrics that can be estimated by post-processing the polynomial chaos expansion and results in a common anisotropic polynomial basis for the vector-valued response. This allows the application of the method to problems with up to moderately high-dimensional model inputs (in the order of tens) and up to very high-dimensional model responses (in the order of thousands). The method is applied to different engineering test cases for surrogate modeling and uncertainty quantification, including use cases related to electric machine and power grid modeling and simulation, and is found to produce highly accurate results with comparatively low data and computational demand.