OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Learning Computational Efficient Bots with Costly Features
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) techniques have become increasingly used in various fields for decision-making processes. However, a challenge that often arises is the trade-off between both the computational efficiency of the decision-making process and the ability of the learned agent to solve a particular task. This is particularly critical in real-time settings such as video games where the agent needs to take relevant decisions at a very high frequency, with a very limited inference time. In this work, we propose a generic offline learning approach where the computation cost of the input features is taken into account. We derive the Budgeted Decision Transformer as an extension of the Decision Transformer that incorporates cost constraints to limit its cost at inference. As a result, the model can dynamically choose the best input features at each timestep. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on several tasks, including D4RL benchmarks and complex 3D environments similar to those found in video games, and show that it can achieve similar performance while using significantly fewer computational resources compared to classical approaches.
VALERIE22 -- A photorealistic, richly metadata annotated dataset of urban environments
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The VALERIE tool pipeline is a synthetic data generator developed with the goal to contribute to the understanding of domain-specific factors that influence perception performance of DNNs (deep neural networks). This work was carried out under the German research project KI Absicherung in order to develop a methodology for the validation of DNNs in the context of pedestrian detection in urban environments for automated driving. The VALERIE22 dataset was generated with the VALERIE procedural tools pipeline providing a photorealistic sensor simulation rendered from automatically synthesized scenes. The dataset provides a uniquely rich set of metadata, allowing extraction of specific scene and semantic features (like pixel-accurate occlusion rates, positions in the scene and distance + angle to the camera). This enables a multitude of possible tests on the data and we hope to stimulate research on understanding performance of DNNs. Based on performance metric a comparison with several other publicly available datasets is provided, demonstrating that VALERIE22 is one of best performing synthetic datasets currently available in the open domain.
Increasing Participation in Peer Production Communities with the Newcomer Homepage
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

For peer production communities to be sustainable, they must attract and retain new contributors. Studies have identified social and technical barriers to entry and discovered some potential solutions, but these solutions have typically focused on a single highly successful community, the English Wikipedia, been tested in isolation, and rarely evaluated through controlled experiments. We propose the Newcomer Homepage, a central place where newcomers can learn how peer production works and find opportunities to contribute, as a solution for attracting and retaining newcomers. The homepage was built upon existing research and designed in collaboration with partner communities. Through a large-scale controlled experiment spanning 27 non-English Wikipedia wikis, we evaluate the homepage and find modest gains, and that having a positive effect on the newcomer experience depends on the newcomer's context. We discuss how this impacts interventions that aim to improve the newcomer experience in peer production communities.
OCR Language Models with Custom Vocabularies
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Language models are useful adjuncts to optical models for producing accurate optical character recognition (OCR) results. One factor which limits the power of language models in this context is the existence of many specialized domains with language statistics very different from those implied by a general language model - think of checks, medical prescriptions, and many other specialized document classes. This paper introduces an algorithm for efficiently generating and attaching a domain specific word based language model at run time to a general language model in an OCR system. In order to best use this model the paper also introduces a modified CTC beam search decoder which effectively allows hypotheses to remain in contention based on possible future completion of vocabulary words. The result is a substantial reduction in word error rate in recognizing material from specialized domains.
Audiovisual Moments in Time: A Large-Scale Annotated Dataset of Audiovisual Actions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We present Audiovisual Moments in Time (AVMIT), a large-scale dataset of audiovisual action events. In an extensive annotation task 11 participants labelled a subset of 3-second audiovisual videos from the Moments in Time dataset (MIT). For each trial, participants assessed whether the labelled audiovisual action event was present and whether it was the most prominent feature of the video. The dataset includes the annotation of 57,177 audiovisual videos, each independently evaluated by 3 of 11 trained participants. From this initial collection, we created a curated test set of 16 distinct action classes, with 60 videos each (960 videos). We also offer 2 sets of pre-computed audiovisual feature embeddings, using VGGish/YamNet for audio data and VGG16/EfficientNetB0 for visual data, thereby lowering the barrier to entry for audiovisual DNN research. We explored the advantages of AVMIT annotations and feature embeddings to improve performance on audiovisual event recognition. A series of 6 Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) were trained on either AVMIT-filtered audiovisual events or modality-agnostic events from MIT, and then tested on our audiovisual test set. In all RNNs, top 1 accuracy was increased by 2.71-5.94\% by training exclusively on audiovisual events, even outweighing a three-fold increase in training data. We anticipate that the newly annotated AVMIT dataset will serve as a valuable resource for research and comparative experiments involving computational models and human participants, specifically when addressing research questions where audiovisual correspondence is of critical importance.
A Trustable LSTM-Autoencoder Network for Cyberbullying Detection on Social Media Using Synthetic Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Social media cyberbullying has a detrimental effect on human life. As online social networking grows daily, the amount of hate speech also increases. Such terrible content can cause depression and actions related to suicide. This paper proposes a trustable LSTM-Autoencoder Network for cyberbullying detection on social media using synthetic data. We have demonstrated a cutting-edge method to address data availability difficulties by producing machine-translated data. However, several languages such as Hindi and Bangla still lack adequate investigations due to a lack of datasets. We carried out experimental identification of aggressive comments on Hindi, Bangla, and English datasets using the proposed model and traditional models, including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM), LSTM-Autoencoder, Word2vec, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), and Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 (GPT-2) models. We employed evaluation metrics such as f1-score, accuracy, precision, and recall to assess the models performance. Our proposed model outperformed all the models on all datasets, achieving the highest accuracy of 95%. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results among all the previous works on the dataset we used in this paper.
ChatGPT-HealthPrompt. Harnessing the Power of XAI in Prompt-Based Healthcare Decision Support using ChatGPT
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

This study presents an innovative approach to the application of large language models (LLMs) in clinical decision-making, focusing on OpenAI's ChatGPT. Our approach introduces the use of contextual prompts-strategically designed to include task description, feature description, and crucially, integration of domain knowledge-for high-quality binary classification tasks even in data-scarce scenarios. The novelty of our work lies in the utilization of domain knowledge, obtained from high-performing interpretable ML models, and its seamless incorporation into prompt design. By viewing these ML models as medical experts, we extract key insights on feature importance to aid in decision-making processes. This interplay of domain knowledge and AI holds significant promise in creating a more insightful diagnostic tool. Additionally, our research explores the dynamics of zero-shot and few-shot prompt learning based on LLMs. By comparing the performance of OpenAI's ChatGPT with traditional supervised ML models in different data conditions, we aim to provide insights into the effectiveness of prompt engineering strategies under varied data availability. In essence, this paper bridges the gap between AI and healthcare, proposing a novel methodology for LLMs application in clinical decision support systems. It highlights the transformative potential of effective prompt design, domain knowledge integration, and flexible learning approaches in enhancing automated decision-making.
Baird Counterexample is Solved: with an example of How to Debug a Two-time-scale Algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Baird counterexample was proposed by Leemon Baird in 1995, first used to show that the Temporal Difference (TD(0)) algorithm diverges on this example. Since then, it is often used to test and compare off-policy learning algorithms. Gradient TD algorithms solved the divergence issue of TD on Baird counterexample. However, their convergence on this example is still very slow, and the nature of the slowness is not well understood, e.g., see (Sutton and Barto 2018). This note is to understand in particular, why TDC is slow on this example, and provide a debugging analysis to understand this behavior. Our debugging technique can be used to study the convergence behavior of two-time-scale stochastic approximation algorithms. We also provide empirical results of the recent Impression GTD algorithm on this example, showing the convergence is very fast, in fact, in a linear rate. We conclude that Baird counterexample is solved, by an algorithm with the convergence guarantee to the TD solution in general, and a fast convergence rate.
Intrinsically Motivated Hierarchical Policy Learning in Multi-objective Markov Decision Processes
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Multi-objective Markov decision processes are sequential decision-making problems that involve multiple conflicting reward functions that cannot be optimized simultaneously without a compromise. This type of problems cannot be solved by a single optimal policy as in the conventional case. Alternatively, multi-objective reinforcement learning methods evolve a coverage set of optimal policies that can satisfy all possible preferences in solving the problem. However, many of these methods cannot generalize their coverage sets to work in non-stationary environments. In these environments, the parameters of the state transition and reward distribution vary over time. This limitation results in significant performance degradation for the evolved policy sets. In order to overcome this limitation, there is a need to learn a generic skill set that can bootstrap the evolution of the policy coverage set for each shift in the environment dynamics therefore, it can facilitate a continuous learning process. In this work, intrinsically motivated reinforcement learning has been successfully deployed to evolve generic skill sets for learning hierarchical policies to solve multi-objective Markov decision processes. We propose a novel dual-phase intrinsically motivated reinforcement learning method to address this limitation. In the first phase, a generic set of skills is learned. While in the second phase, this set is used to bootstrap policy coverage sets for each shift in the environment dynamics. We show experimentally that the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art multi-objective reinforcement methods in a dynamic robotics environment.
Joint Optimization of IRS Deployment and Passive Beamforming to Enhance the Received Power
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has recently emerged as a promising technology for beyond fifth-generation (B5G) and 6G networks conceived from metamaterials that smartly tunes the signal reflections via a large number of low-cost passive reflecting elements. However, the IRS-assisted communication model and the optimization of available resources needs to be improved further for more efficient communications. This paper investigates the enhancement of received power at the user end in an IRS assisted wireless communication by jointly optimizing the phase shifts at the IRS elements and its location. Employing the conventional Friss transmission model, the relationship between the transmitted power and reflected power is established. The expression of received power incorporates the free space loss, reflection loss factor, physical dimension of the IRS panel, and radiation pattern of the transmit signal. Also, the expression of reflection coefficient of IRS panel is obtained by exploiting the existing data of radar communications. Initially exploring a single IRS element within a two-ray reflection model, we extend it to a more complex multi-ray reflection model with multiple IRS elements in 3D Cartesian space. The received power expression is derived in a more tractable form, then, it is maximized by jointly optimizing the underlying underlying variables, the IRS location and the phase shifts. To realize the joint optimization of underlying variables, first, the phase shifts of the IRS elements are optimized to achieve constructive interference of received signal components at the user. Subsequently, the location of the IRS is optimized at the obtained optimal phase shifts. Numerical insights and performance comparison reveal that joint optimization leads to a substantial 37% enhancement in received power compared to the closest competitive benchmark scheme.
An Image is Worth a Thousand Toxic Words: A Metamorphic Testing Framework for Content Moderation Software
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

The exponential growth of social media platforms has brought about a revolution in communication and content dissemination in human society. Nevertheless, these platforms are being increasingly misused to spread toxic content, including hate speech, malicious advertising, and pornography, leading to severe negative consequences such as harm to teenagers' mental health. Despite tremendous efforts in developing and deploying textual and image content moderation methods, malicious users can evade moderation by embedding texts into images, such as screenshots of the text, usually with some interference. We find that modern content moderation software's performance against such malicious inputs remains underexplored. In this work, we propose OASIS, a metamorphic testing framework for content moderation software. OASIS employs 21 transform rules summarized from our pilot study on 5,000 real-world toxic contents collected from 4 popular social media applications, including Twitter, Instagram, Sina Weibo, and Baidu Tieba. Given toxic textual contents, OASIS can generate image test cases, which preserve the toxicity yet are likely to bypass moderation. In the evaluation, we employ OASIS to test five commercial textual content moderation software from famous companies (i.e., Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Baidu Cloud, Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud), as well as a state-of-the-art moderation research model. The results show that OASIS achieves up to 100% error finding rates. Moreover, through retraining the models with the test cases generated by OASIS, the robustness of the moderation model can be improved without performance degradation.
User-centric AIGC products: Explainable Artificial Intelligence and AIGC products
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT and Midjourney, are transforming artistic creation as AI-art integration advances. However, Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) tools face user experience challenges, necessitating a human-centric design approach. This paper offers a brief overview of research on explainable AI (XAI) and user experience, examining factors leading to suboptimal experiences with AIGC tools. Our proposed solution integrates interpretable AI methodologies into the input and adjustment feedback stages of AIGC products. We underscore XAI's potential to enhance the user experience for ordinary users and present a conceptual framework for improving AIGC user experience.
Generative Adversarial Networks Unlearning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

As machine learning continues to develop, and data misuse scandals become more prevalent, individuals are becoming increasingly concerned about their personal information and are advocating for the right to remove their data. Machine unlearning has emerged as a solution to erase training data from trained machine learning models. Despite its success in classifiers, research on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) is limited due to their unique architecture, including a generator and a discriminator. One challenge pertains to generator unlearning, as the process could potentially disrupt the continuity and completeness of the latent space. This disruption might consequently diminish the model's effectiveness after unlearning. Another challenge is how to define a criterion that the discriminator should perform for the unlearning images. In this paper, we introduce a substitution mechanism and define a fake label to effectively mitigate these challenges. Based on the substitution mechanism and fake label, we propose a cascaded unlearning approach for both item and class unlearning within GAN models, in which the unlearning and learning processes run in a cascaded manner. We conducted a comprehensive evaluation of the cascaded unlearning technique using the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that this approach achieves significantly improved item and class unlearning efficiency, reducing the required time by up to 185x and 284x for the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets, respectively, in comparison to retraining from scratch. Notably, although the model's performance experiences minor degradation after unlearning, this reduction is negligible when dealing with a minimal number of images (e.g., 64) and has no adverse effects on downstream tasks such as classification.
Flow-Based Energy Services Composition
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

We propose a novel spatio-temporal service composition framework for crowdsourcing multiple IoT energy services to cater to multiple energy requests. We define a new energy service model to leverage the wearable-based energy and wireless power transfer technologies. We reformulate the problem of spatio-temporal service composition to provision multiple energy requests as a matching problem. We leverage the fragmented nature of energy to offer partial services to maximize the utilization of energy services. We propose EnergyFlowComp, a modified Maximum Flow matching algorithm that efficiently provisions IoT energy services to accommodate multiple energy requests. Moreover, we propose PartialFlowComp, an extension of the EnergyFlowComp approach that considers the partial-temporal overlap between services and requests in provisioning. We conduct an extensive set of experiments to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed framework.
TDG: Text-guided Domain Generalization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Domain generalization (DG) attempts to generalize a model trained on single or multiple source domains to the unseen target domain. Benefiting from the success of Visual-and-Language Pre-trained models in recent years, we argue that it is crucial for domain generalization by introducing extra text information. In this paper, we develop a novel Text-guided Domain Generalization (TDG) paradigm for domain generalization, which includes three following aspects. Specifically, we first devise an automatic words generation method to extend the description of current domains with novel domain-relevant words. Then, we embed the generated domain information into the text feature space, by the proposed prompt learning-based text feature generation method, which shares a common representation space with the image feature. Finally, we utilize both input image features and generated text features to train a specially designed classifier that generalizes well on unseen target domains, while the image encoder is also updated under the supervision of gradients back propagated from the classifier. Our experimental results show that the techniques incorporated by TDG contribute to the performance in an easy implementation manner. Experimental results on several domain generalization benchmarks show that our proposed framework achieves superior performance by effectively leveraging generated text information in domain generalization.
A Comparison of Adversarial Learning Techniques for Malware Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Machine learning has proven to be a useful tool for automated malware detection, but machine learning models have also been shown to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. This article addresses the problem of generating adversarial malware samples, specifically malicious Windows Portable Executable files. We summarize and compare work that has focused on adversarial machine learning for malware detection. We use gradient-based, evolutionary algorithm-based, and reinforcement-based methods to generate adversarial samples, and then test the generated samples against selected antivirus products. We compare the selected methods in terms of accuracy and practical applicability. The results show that applying optimized modifications to previously detected malware can lead to incorrect classification of the file as benign. It is also known that generated malware samples can be successfully used against detection models other than those used to generate them and that using combinations of generators can create new samples that evade detection. Experiments show that the Gym-malware generator, which uses a reinforcement learning approach, has the greatest practical potential. This generator achieved an average sample generation time of 5.73 seconds and the highest average evasion rate of 44.11%. Using the Gym-malware generator in combination with itself improved the evasion rate to 58.35%.
NeutrEx: A 3D Quality Component Measure on Facial Expression Neutrality
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Accurate face recognition systems are increasingly important in sensitive applications like border control or migration management. Therefore, it becomes crucial to quantify the quality of facial images to ensure that low-quality images are not affecting recognition accuracy. In this context, the current draft of ISO/IEC 29794-5 introduces the concept of component quality to estimate how single factors of variation affect recognition outcomes. In this study, we propose a quality measure (NeutrEx) based on the accumulated distances of a 3D face reconstruction to a neutral expression anchor. Our evaluations demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method compared to baseline approaches obtained by training Support Vector Machines on face embeddings extracted from a pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network for facial expression classification. Furthermore, we highlight the explainable nature of our NeutrEx measures by computing per-vertex distances to unveil the most impactful face regions and allow operators to give actionable feedback to subjects.