OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Fried deconvolution
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper we present a new approach to deblur the effect of atmospheric turbulence in the case of long range imaging. Our method is based on an analytical formulation, the Fried kernel, of the atmosphere modulation transfer function (MTF) and a framelet based deconvolution algorithm. An important parameter is the refractive index structure which requires specific measurements to be known. Then we propose a method which provides a good estimation of this parameter from the input blurred image. The final algorithms are very easy to implement and show very good results on both simulated blur and real images.
Capturing research literature attitude towards Sustainable Development Goals: an LLM-based topic modeling approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The world is facing a multitude of challenges that hinder the development of human civilization and the well-being of humanity on the planet. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were formulated by the United Nations in 2015 to address these global challenges by 2030. Natural language processing techniques can help uncover discussions on SDGs within research literature. We propose a completely automated pipeline to 1) fetch content from the Scopus database and prepare datasets dedicated to five groups of SDGs; 2) perform topic modeling, a statistical technique used to identify topics in large collections of textual data; and 3) enable topic exploration through keywords-based search and topic frequency time series extraction. For topic modeling, we leverage the stack of BERTopic scaled up to be applied on large corpora of textual documents (we find hundreds of topics on hundreds of thousands of documents), introducing i) a novel LLM-based embeddings computation for representing scientific abstracts in the continuous space and ii) a hyperparameter optimizer to efficiently find the best configuration for any new big datasets. We additionally produce the visualization of results on interactive dashboards reporting topics' temporal evolution. Results are made inspectable and explorable, contributing to the interpretability of the topic modeling process. Our proposed LLM-based topic modeling pipeline for big-text datasets allows users to capture insights on the evolution of the attitude toward SDGs within scientific abstracts in the 2006-2023 time span. All the results are reproducible by using our system; the workflow can be generalized to be applied at any point in time to any big corpus of textual documents.
Speaker Emotion Recognition: Leveraging Self-Supervised Models for Feature Extraction Using Wav2Vec2 and HuBERT
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

Speech is the most natural way of expressing ourselves as humans. Identifying emotion from speech is a nontrivial task due to the ambiguous definition of emotion itself. Speaker Emotion Recognition (SER) is essential for understanding human emotional behavior. The SER task is challenging due to the variety of speakers, background noise, complexity of emotions, and speaking styles. It has many applications in education, healthcare, customer service, and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Previously, conventional machine learning methods such as SVM, HMM, and KNN have been used for the SER task. In recent years, deep learning methods have become popular, with convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks being used for SER tasks. The input of these methods is mostly spectrograms and hand-crafted features. In this work, we study the use of self-supervised transformer-based models, Wav2Vec2 and HuBERT, to determine the emotion of speakers from their voice. The models automatically extract features from raw audio signals, which are then used for the classification task. The proposed solution is evaluated on reputable datasets, including RAVDESS, SHEMO, SAVEE, AESDD, and Emo-DB. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed method on different datasets. Moreover, the model has been used for real-world applications like call center conversations, and the results demonstrate that the model accurately predicts emotions.
Hierarchical Orchestra of Policies
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Continual reinforcement learning poses a major challenge due to the tendency of agents to experience catastrophic forgetting when learning sequential tasks. In this paper, we introduce a modularity-based approach, called Hierarchical Orchestra of Policies (HOP), designed to mitigate catastrophic forgetting in lifelong reinforcement learning. HOP dynamically forms a hierarchy of policies based on a similarity metric between the current observations and previously encountered observations in successful tasks. Unlike other state-of-the-art methods, HOP does not require task labelling, allowing for robust adaptation in environments where boundaries between tasks are ambiguous. Our experiments, conducted across multiple tasks in a procedurally generated suite of environments, demonstrate that HOP significantly outperforms baseline methods in retaining knowledge across tasks and performs comparably to state-of-the-art transfer methods that require task labelling. Moreover, HOP achieves this without compromising performance when tasks remain constant, highlighting its versatility.
Constitutive Models for Active Skeletal Muscle: Review, Comparison, and Application in a Novel Continuum Shoulder Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2024
Year: 2024

The shoulder joint is one of the functionally and anatomically most sophisticated articular systems in the human body. Both complex movement patterns and the stabilization of the highly mobile joint rely on intricate three-dimensional interactions among various components. Continuum-based finite element models can capture such complexity, and are thus particularly relevant in shoulder biomechanics. Considering their role as active joint stabilizers and force generators, skeletal muscles require special attention regarding their constitutive description. In this contribution, we propose a constitutive description to model active skeletal muscle within complex musculoskeletal systems, focusing on a novel continuum shoulder model. We thoroughly review existing material models before analyzing three selected ones in detail: an active-stress, an active-strain, and a generalized active-strain approach. To establish a basis for comparison, we identify the material parameters based on experimental stress-strain data obtained under various active and passive loading conditions. We discuss the concepts to incorporate active contractile behavior from a mathematical and physiological perspective, address analytical and numerical challenges arising from the mathematical formulations, and analyze the included biophysical principles of force generation in terms of physiological correctness and relevance for human shoulder modeling. Based on these insights, we present an improved constitutive model combining the studied models' most promising and relevant features. Using the example of a fusiform muscle, we investigate force generation, deformation, and kinematics during active isometric and free contractions. Eventually, we demonstrate the applicability of the suggested material model in a novel continuum mechanical model of the human shoulder.
DA-MoE: Addressing Depth-Sensitivity in Graph-Level Analysis through Mixture of Experts
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are gaining popularity for processing graph-structured data. In real-world scenarios, graph data within the same dataset can vary significantly in scale. This variability leads to depth-sensitivity, where the optimal depth of GNN layers depends on the scale of the graph data. Empirically, fewer layers are sufficient for message passing in smaller graphs, while larger graphs typically require deeper networks to capture long-range dependencies and global features. However, existing methods generally use a fixed number of GNN layers to generate representations for all graphs, overlooking the depth-sensitivity issue in graph structure data. To address this challenge, we propose the depth adaptive mixture of expert (DA-MoE) method, which incorporates two main improvements to GNN backbone: \textbf{1)} DA-MoE employs different GNN layers, each considered an expert with its own parameters. Such a design allows the model to flexibly aggregate information at different scales, effectively addressing the depth-sensitivity issue in graph data. \textbf{2)} DA-MoE utilizes GNN to capture the structural information instead of the linear projections in the gating network. Thus, the gating network enables the model to capture complex patterns and dependencies within the data. By leveraging these improvements, each expert in DA-MoE specifically learns distinct graph patterns at different scales. Furthermore, comprehensive experiments on the TU dataset and open graph benchmark (OGB) have shown that DA-MoE consistently surpasses existing baselines on various tasks, including graph, node, and link-level analyses. The code are available at \url{https://github.com/Celin-Yao/DA-MoE}.
Top-k Stabbing Interval Queries
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

We investigate a weighted variant of the interval stabbing problem, where the goal is to design an efficient data structure for a given set $\mathcal{I}$ of weighted intervals such that, for a query point $q$ and an integer $k>0$, we can report the $k$ intervals with largest weights among those stabbed by $q$. In this paper, we present a linear space solution with $O(\log n + k)$ query time. Moreover, we also present another trade-off for the problem.
Alpha and Prejudice: Improving $α$-sized Worst-case Fairness via Intrinsic Reweighting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Worst-case fairness with off-the-shelf demographics achieves group parity by maximizing the model utility of the worst-off group. Nevertheless, demographic information is often unavailable in practical scenarios, which impedes the use of such a direct max-min formulation. Recent advances have reframed this learning problem by introducing the lower bound of minimal partition ratio, denoted as $α$, as side information, referred to as ``$α$-sized worst-case fairness'' in this paper. We first justify the practical significance of this setting by presenting noteworthy evidence from the data privacy perspective, which has been overlooked by existing research. Without imposing specific requirements on loss functions, we propose reweighting the training samples based on their intrinsic importance to fairness. Given the global nature of the worst-case formulation, we further develop a stochastic learning scheme to simplify the training process without compromising model performance. Additionally, we address the issue of outliers and provide a robust variant to handle potential outliers during model training. Our theoretical analysis and experimental observations reveal the connections between the proposed approaches and existing ``fairness-through-reweighting'' studies, with extensive experimental results on fairness benchmarks demonstrating the superiority of our methods.
Self-supervised cross-modality learning for uncertainty-aware object detection and recognition in applications which lack pre-labelled training data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This paper shows how an uncertainty-aware, deep neural network can be trained to detect, recognise and localise objects in 2D RGB images, in applications lacking annotated train-ng datasets. We propose a self-supervising teacher-student pipeline, in which a relatively simple teacher classifier, trained with only a few labelled 2D thumbnails, automatically processes a larger body of unlabelled RGB-D data to teach a student network based on a modified YOLOv3 architecture. Firstly, 3D object detection with back projection is used to automatically extract and teach 2D detection and localisation information to the student network. Secondly, a weakly supervised 2D thumbnail classifier, with minimal training on a small number of hand-labelled images, is used to teach object category recognition. Thirdly, we use a Gaussian Process GP to encode and teach a robust uncertainty estimation functionality, so that the student can output confidence scores with each categorization. The resulting student significantly outperforms the same YOLO architecture trained directly on the same amount of labelled data. Our GP-based approach yields robust and meaningful uncertainty estimations for complex industrial object classifications. The end-to-end network is also capable of real-time processing, needed for robotics applications. Our method can be applied to many important industrial tasks, where labelled datasets are typically unavailable. In this paper, we demonstrate an example of detection, localisation, and object category recognition of nuclear mixed-waste materials in highly cluttered and unstructured scenes. This is critical for robotic sorting and handling of legacy nuclear waste, which poses complex environmental remediation challenges in many nuclearised nations.
Speech Separation with Pretrained Frontend to Minimize Domain Mismatch
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

Speech separation seeks to separate individual speech signals from a speech mixture. Typically, most separation models are trained on synthetic data due to the unavailability of target reference in real-world cocktail party scenarios. As a result, there exists a domain gap between real and synthetic data when deploying speech separation models in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised domain-invariant pretrained (DIP) frontend that is exposed to mixture data without the need for target reference speech. The DIP frontend utilizes a Siamese network with two innovative pretext tasks, mixture predictive coding (MPC) and mixture invariant coding (MIC), to capture shared contextual cues between real and synthetic unlabeled mixtures. Subsequently, we freeze the DIP frontend as a feature extractor when training the downstream speech separation models on synthetic data. By pretraining the DIP frontend with the contextual cues, we expect that the speech separation skills learned from synthetic data can be effectively transferred to real data. To benefit from the DIP frontend, we introduce a novel separation pipeline to align the feature resolution of the separation models. We evaluate the speech separation quality on standard benchmarks and real-world datasets. The results confirm the superiority of our DIP frontend over existing speech separation models. This study underscores the potential of large-scale pretraining to enhance the quality and intelligibility of speech separation in real-world applications.
Self-supervised Hierarchical Representation for Medication Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Medication recommender is to suggest appropriate medication combinations based on a patient's health history, e.g., diagnoses and procedures. Existing works represent different diagnoses/procedures well separated by one-hot encodings. However, they ignore the latent hierarchical structures of these medical terms, undermining the generalization performance of the model. For example, "Respiratory Diseases", "Chronic Respiratory Diseases" and "Chronic Bronchiti" have a hierarchical relationship, progressing from general to specific. To address this issue, we propose a novel hierarchical encoder named HIER to hierarchically represent diagnoses and procedures, which is based on standard medical codes and compatible with any existing methods. Specifically, the proposed method learns relation embedding with a self-supervised objective for incorporating the neighbor hierarchical structure. Additionally, we develop the position encoding to explicitly introduce global hierarchical position. Extensive experiments demonstrate significant and consistent improvements in recommendation accuracy across four baselines and two real-world clinical datasets.
Developing Simulation Models for Soft Robotic Grippers in Webots
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Robotic simulators provide cost-effective and risk-free virtual environments for studying robotic designs, control algorithms, and sensor integrations. They typically host extensive libraries of sensors and actuators that facilitate rapid prototyping and design evaluations in simulation. The use of the most prominent existing robotic simulators is however limited to simulation of rigid-link robots. On the other hand, there exist dedicated specialized environments for simulating soft robots. This separation limits the study of soft robotic systems, particularly in hybrid scenarios where soft and rigid sub-systems co-exist. In this work, we develop a lightweight open-source digital twin of a commercially available soft gripper, directly integrated within the robotic simulator Webots. We use a Rigid-Link-Discretization (RLD) model to simulate the soft gripper. Using a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) approach, we identify the parameters of the RLD model based on the kinematics and dynamics of the physical system and show the efficacy of our modeling approach in validation experiments. All software and experimental details are available on github: https://github.com/anonymousgituser1/Robosoft2025
GIS Copilot: Towards an Autonomous GIS Agent for Spatial Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advancements in Generative AI offer promising capabilities for spatial analysis. Despite their potential, the integration of generative AI with established GIS platforms remains underexplored. In this study, we propose a framework for integrating LLMs directly into existing GIS platforms, using QGIS as an example. Our approach leverages the reasoning and programming capabilities of LLMs to autonomously generate spatial analysis workflows and code through an informed agent that has comprehensive documentation of key GIS tools and parameters. The implementation of this framework resulted in the development of a "GIS Copilot" that allows GIS users to interact with QGIS using natural language commands for spatial analysis. The GIS Copilot was evaluated with over 100 spatial analysis tasks with three complexity levels: basic tasks that require one GIS tool and typically involve one data layer to perform simple operations; intermediate tasks involving multi-step processes with multiple tools, guided by user instructions; and advanced tasks which involve multi-step processes that require multiple tools but not guided by user instructions, necessitating the agent to independently decide on and executes the necessary steps. The evaluation reveals that the GIS Copilot demonstrates strong potential in automating foundational GIS operations, with a high success rate in tool selection and code generation for basic and intermediate tasks, while challenges remain in achieving full autonomy for more complex tasks. This study contributes to the emerging vision of Autonomous GIS, providing a pathway for non-experts to engage with geospatial analysis with minimal prior expertise. While full autonomy is yet to be achieved, the GIS Copilot demonstrates significant potential for simplifying GIS workflows and enhancing decision-making processes.
Interpretable Predictive Models for Healthcare via Rational Logistic Regression
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The healthcare sector has experienced a rapid accumulation of digital data recently, especially in the form of electronic health records (EHRs). EHRs constitute a precious resource that IS researchers could utilize for clinical applications (e.g., morbidity prediction). Deep learning seems like the obvious choice to exploit this surfeit of data. However, numerous studies have shown that deep learning does not enjoy the same kind of success on EHR data as it has in other domains; simple models like logistic regression are frequently as good as sophisticated deep learning ones. Inspired by this observation, we develop a novel model called rational logistic regression (RLR) that has standard logistic regression (LR) as its special case (and thus inherits LR's inductive bias that aligns with EHR data). RLR has rational series as its theoretical underpinnings, works on longitudinal time-series data, and learns interpretable patterns. Empirical comparisons on real-world clinical tasks demonstrate RLR's efficacy.
Monocular Event-Based Vision for Obstacle Avoidance with a Quadrotor
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

We present the first static-obstacle avoidance method for quadrotors using just an onboard, monocular event camera. Quadrotors are capable of fast and agile flight in cluttered environments when piloted manually, but vision-based autonomous flight in unknown environments is difficult in part due to the sensor limitations of traditional onboard cameras. Event cameras, however, promise nearly zero motion blur and high dynamic range, but produce a very large volume of events under significant ego-motion and further lack a continuous-time sensor model in simulation, making direct sim-to-real transfer not possible. By leveraging depth prediction as a pretext task in our learning framework, we can pre-train a reactive obstacle avoidance events-to-control policy with approximated, simulated events and then fine-tune the perception component with limited events-and-depth real-world data to achieve obstacle avoidance in indoor and outdoor settings. We demonstrate this across two quadrotor-event camera platforms in multiple settings and find, contrary to traditional vision-based works, that low speeds (1m/s) make the task harder and more prone to collisions, while high speeds (5m/s) result in better event-based depth estimation and avoidance. We also find that success rates in outdoor scenes can be significantly higher than in certain indoor scenes.
MME-Finance: A Multimodal Finance Benchmark for Expert-level Understanding and Reasoning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In recent years, multimodal benchmarks for general domains have guided the rapid development of multimodal models on general tasks. However, the financial field has its peculiarities. It features unique graphical images (e.g., candlestick charts, technical indicator charts) and possesses a wealth of specialized financial knowledge (e.g., futures, turnover rate). Therefore, benchmarks from general fields often fail to measure the performance of multimodal models in the financial domain, and thus cannot effectively guide the rapid development of large financial models. To promote the development of large financial multimodal models, we propose MME-Finance, an bilingual open-ended and practical usage-oriented Visual Question Answering (VQA) benchmark. The characteristics of our benchmark are finance and expertise, which include constructing charts that reflect the actual usage needs of users (e.g., computer screenshots and mobile photography), creating questions according to the preferences in financial domain inquiries, and annotating questions by experts with 10+ years of experience in the financial industry. Additionally, we have developed a custom-designed financial evaluation system in which visual information is first introduced in the multi-modal evaluation process. Extensive experimental evaluations of 19 mainstream MLLMs are conducted to test their perception, reasoning, and cognition capabilities. The results indicate that models performing well on general benchmarks cannot do well on MME-Finance; for instance, the top-performing open-source and closed-source models obtain 65.69 (Qwen2VL-72B) and 63.18 (GPT-4o), respectively. Their performance is particularly poor in categories most relevant to finance, such as candlestick charts and technical indicator charts. In addition, we propose a Chinese version, which helps compare performance of MLLMs under a Chinese context.