OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Haptics-based, higher-order Sensory Substitution designed for Object Negotiation in Blindness and Low Vision: Virtual Whiskers
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

People with blindness and low vision (pBLV) face challenges in navigating. Mobility aids are crucial for enhancing independence and safety. This paper presents an electronic travel aid that leverages a haptic-based, higher-order sensory substitution approach called Virtual Whiskers, designed to help pBLV negotiate obstacles effectively, efficiently, and safely. Virtual Whiskers is equipped with a plurality of modular vibration units that operate independently to deliver haptic feedback to users. Virtual Whiskers features two navigation modes: open path mode and depth mode, each addressing obstacle negotiation from different perspectives. The open path mode detects and delineate a traversable area within an analyzed field of view. Then, it guides the user through to the traversable direction adaptive vibratory feedback. The depth mode assists users in negotiating obstacles by highlighting spatial areas with prominent obstacles via haptic feedback. We recruited 10 participants with blindness or low vision to participate in user testing for Virtual Whiskers. Results show that the device significantly reduces idle periods and decreases the number of cane contacts. Virtual Whiskers is a promising obstacle negotiation strategy that demonstrating great potential to assist with pBLV navigation.
Behavior-Based Detection of GPU Cryptojacking
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

With the surge in blockchain-based cryptocurrencies, illegal mining for cryptocurrency has become a popular cyberthreat. Host-based cryptojacking, where malicious actors exploit victims systems to mine cryptocurrency without their knowledge, is on the rise. Regular cryptojacking is relatively well-known and well-studied threat, however, recently attackers started switching to GPU cryptojacking, which promises greater profits due to high GPU hash rates and lower detection chance. Additionally, GPU cryptojackers can easily propagate using, for example, modified graphic card drivers. This article considers question of GPU cryptojacking detection. First, we discuss brief history and definition of GPU cryptojacking as well as previous attempts to design a detection technique for such threats. We also propose complex exposure mechanism based on GPU load by an application and graphic card RAM consumption, which can be used to detect both browser-based and host-based cryptojacking samples. Then we design a prototype decision tree detection program based on our technique. It was tested in a controlled virtual machine environment with 80% successful detection rate against selected set of GPU cryptojacking samples and 20% false positive rate against selected number of legitimate GPU-heavy applications.
How to build trust in answers given by Generative AI for specific, and vague, financial questions
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Purpose: Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has progressed in its ability and has seen explosive growth in adoption. However, the consumer's perspective on its use, particularly in specific scenarios such as financial advice, is unclear. This research develops a model of how to build trust in the advice given by GenAI when answering financial questions. Design/methodology/approach: The model is tested with survey data using structural equation modelling (SEM) and multi-group analysis (MGA). The MGA compares two scenarios, one where the consumer makes a specific question and one where a vague question is made. Findings: This research identifies that building trust for consumers is different when they ask a specific financial question in comparison to a vague one. Humanness has a different effect in the two scenarios. When a financial question is specific, human-like interaction does not strengthen trust, while (1) when a question is vague, humanness builds trust. The four ways to build trust in both scenarios are (2) human oversight and being in the loop, (3) transparency and control, (4) accuracy and usefulness and finally (5) ease of use and support. Originality/value: This research contributes to a better understanding of the consumer's perspective when using GenAI for financial questions and highlights the importance of understanding GenAI in specific contexts from specific stakeholders.
PVAFN: Point-Voxel Attention Fusion Network with Multi-Pooling Enhancing for 3D Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The integration of point and voxel representations is becoming more common in LiDAR-based 3D object detection. However, this combination often struggles with capturing semantic information effectively. Moreover, relying solely on point features within regions of interest can lead to information loss and limitations in local feature representation. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel two-stage 3D object detector, called Point-Voxel Attention Fusion Network (PVAFN). PVAFN leverages an attention mechanism to improve multi-modal feature fusion during the feature extraction phase. In the refinement stage, it utilizes a multi-pooling strategy to integrate both multi-scale and region-specific information effectively. The point-voxel attention mechanism adaptively combines point cloud and voxel-based Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) features, resulting in richer object representations that help to reduce false detections. Additionally, a multi-pooling enhancement module is introduced to boost the model's perception capabilities. This module employs cluster pooling and pyramid pooling techniques to efficiently capture key geometric details and fine-grained shape structures, thereby enhancing the integration of local and global features. Extensive experiments on the KITTI and Waymo datasets demonstrate that the proposed PVAFN achieves competitive performance. The code and models will be available.
3D Point Cloud Network Pruning: When Some Weights Do not Matter
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

A point cloud is a crucial geometric data structure utilized in numerous applications. The adoption of deep neural networks referred to as Point Cloud Neural Networks (PC- NNs), for processing 3D point clouds, has significantly advanced fields that rely on 3D geometric data to enhance the efficiency of tasks. Expanding the size of both neural network models and 3D point clouds introduces significant challenges in minimizing computational and memory requirements. This is essential for meeting the demanding requirements of real-world applications, which prioritize minimal energy consumption and low latency. Therefore, investigating redundancy in PCNNs is crucial yet challenging due to their sensitivity to parameters. Additionally, traditional pruning methods face difficulties as these networks rely heavily on weights and points. Nonetheless, our research reveals a promising phenomenon that could refine standard PCNN pruning techniques. Our findings suggest that preserving only the top p% of the highest magnitude weights is crucial for accuracy preservation. For example, pruning 99% of the weights from the PointNet model still results in accuracy close to the base level. Specifically, in the ModelNet40 dataset, where the base accuracy with the PointNet model was 87. 5%, preserving only 1% of the weights still achieves an accuracy of 86.8%. Codes are available in: https://github.com/apurba-nsu-rnd-lab/PCNN_Pruning
Lossy Catalytic Computation
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2024
Year: 2024

A catalytic Turing machine is a variant of a Turing machine in which there exists an auxiliary tape in addition to the input tape and the work tape. This auxiliary tape is initially filled with arbitrary content. The machine can read and write on the auxiliary tape, but it is constrained to restore its initial content when it halts. Studying such a model and finding its powers and limitations has practical applications. In this paper, we study catalytic Turing machines with O(log n)-sized work tape and polynomial-sized auxiliary tape that are allowed to lose at most constant many bits of the auxiliary tape when they halt. We show that such catalytic Turing machines can only decide the same set of languages as standard catalytic Turing machines with the same size work and auxiliary tape.
A Complete Axiomatisation of Equivalence for Discrete Probabilistic Programming
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2024
Year: 2024

We introduce a sound and complete equational theory capturing equivalence of discrete probabilistic programs, that is, programs extended with primitives for Bernoulli distributions and conditioning, to model distributions over finite sets of events. To do so, we translate these programs into a graphical syntax of probabilistic circuits, formalised as string diagrams, the two-dimensional syntax of symmetric monoidal categories. We then prove a first completeness result for the equational theory of the conditioning-free fragment of our syntax. Finally, we extend this result to a complete equational theory for the entire language. Note these developments are also of interest for the development of probability theory in Markov categories: our first result gives a presentation by generators and equations of the category of Markov kernels, restricted to objects that are powers of the two-elements set.
LyCon: Lyrics Reconstruction from the Bag-of-Words Using Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This paper addresses the unique challenge of conducting research in lyric studies, where direct use of lyrics is often restricted due to copyright concerns. Unlike typical data, internet-sourced lyrics are frequently protected under copyright law, necessitating alternative approaches. Our study introduces a novel method for generating copyright-free lyrics from publicly available Bag-of-Words (BoW) datasets, which contain the vocabulary of lyrics but not the lyrics themselves. Utilizing metadata associated with BoW datasets and large language models, we successfully reconstructed lyrics. We have compiled and made available a dataset of reconstructed lyrics, LyCon, aligned with metadata from renowned sources including the Million Song Dataset, Deezer Mood Detection Dataset, and AllMusic Genre Dataset, available for public access. We believe that the integration of metadata such as mood annotations or genres enables a variety of academic experiments on lyrics, such as conditional lyric generation.
Text-guided Foundation Model Adaptation for Long-Tailed Medical Image Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In medical contexts, the imbalanced data distribution in long-tailed datasets, due to scarce labels for rare diseases, greatly impairs the diagnostic accuracy of deep learning models. Recent multimodal text-image supervised foundation models offer new solutions to data scarcity through effective representation learning. However, their limited medical-specific pretraining hinders their performance in medical image classification relative to natural images. To address this issue, we propose a novel Text-guided Foundation model Adaptation for Long-Tailed medical image classification (TFA-LT). We adopt a two-stage training strategy, integrating representations from the foundation model using just two linear adapters and a single ensembler for balanced outcomes. Experimental results on two long-tailed medical image datasets validate the simplicity, lightweight and efficiency of our approach: requiring only 6.1% GPU memory usage of the current best-performing algorithm, our method achieves an accuracy improvement of up to 27.1%, highlighting the substantial potential of foundation model adaptation in this area.
GPU-Accelerated Counterfactual Regret Minimization
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2024
Year: 2024

Counterfactual regret minimization is a family of algorithms of no-regret learning dynamics capable of solving large-scale imperfect information games. We propose implementing this algorithm as a series of dense and sparse matrix and vector operations, thereby making it highly parallelizable for a graphical processing unit, at a cost of higher memory usage. Our experiments show that our implementation performs up to about 401.2 times faster than OpenSpiel's Python implementation and, on an expanded set of games, up to about 203.6 times faster than OpenSpiel's C++ implementation and the speedup becomes more pronounced as the size of the game being solved grows.
Learning from Complementary Features
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

While precise data observation is essential for the learning processes of predictive models, it can be challenging owing to factors such as insufficient observation accuracy, high collection costs, and privacy constraints. In this paper, we examines cases where some qualitative features are unavailable as precise information indicating "what it is," but rather as complementary information indicating "what it is not." We refer to features defined by precise information as ordinary features (OFs) and those defined by complementary information as complementary features (CFs). We then formulate a new learning scenario termed Complementary Feature Learning (CFL), where predictive models are constructed using instances consisting of OFs and CFs. The simplest formalization of CFL applies conventional supervised learning directly using the observed values of CFs. However, this approach does not resolve the ambiguity associated with CFs, making learning challenging and complicating the interpretation of the predictive model's specific predictions. Therefore, we derive an objective function from an information-theoretic perspective to estimate the OF values corresponding to CFs and to predict output labels based on these estimations. Based on this objective function, we propose a theoretically guaranteed graph-based estimation method along with its practical approximation, for estimating OF values corresponding to CFs. The results of numerical experiments conducted with real-world data demonstrate that our proposed method effectively estimates OF values corresponding to CFs and predicts output labels.
Time-Aware Face Anti-Spoofing with Rotation Invariant Local Binary Patterns and Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Facial recognition systems have become an integral part of the modern world. These methods accomplish the task of human identification in an automatic, fast, and non-interfering way. Past research has uncovered high vulnerability to simple imitation attacks that could lead to erroneous identification and subsequent authentication of attackers. Similar to face recognition, imitation attacks can also be detected with Machine Learning. Attack detection systems use a variety of facial features and advanced machine learning models for uncovering the presence of attacks. In this work, we assess existing work on liveness detection and propose a novel approach that promises high classification accuracy by combining previously unused features with time-aware deep learning strategies.
Correntropy-Based Improper Likelihood Model for Robust Electrophysiological Source Imaging
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Bayesian learning provides a unified skeleton to solve the electrophysiological source imaging task. From this perspective, existing source imaging algorithms utilize the Gaussian assumption for the observation noise to build the likelihood function for Bayesian inference. However, the electromagnetic measurements of brain activity are usually affected by miscellaneous artifacts, leading to a potentially non-Gaussian distribution for the observation noise. Hence the conventional Gaussian likelihood model is a suboptimal choice for the real-world source imaging task. In this study, we aim to solve this problem by proposing a new likelihood model which is robust with respect to non-Gaussian noises. Motivated by the robust maximum correntropy criterion, we propose a new improper distribution model concerning the noise assumption. This new noise distribution is leveraged to structure a robust likelihood function and integrated with hierarchical prior distributions to estimate source activities by variational inference. In particular, the score matching is adopted to determine the hyperparameters for the improper likelihood model. A comprehensive performance evaluation is performed to compare the proposed noise assumption to the conventional Gaussian model. Simulation results show that, the proposed method can realize more precise source reconstruction by designing known ground-truth. The real-world dataset also demonstrates the superiority of our new method with the visual perception task. This study provides a new backbone for Bayesian source imaging, which would facilitate its application using real-world noisy brain signal.
Leveraging Self-supervised Audio Representations for Data-Efficient Acoustic Scene Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

Acoustic scene classification (ASC) predominantly relies on supervised approaches. However, acquiring labeled data for training ASC models is often costly and time-consuming. Recently, self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a powerful method for extracting features from unlabeled audio data, benefiting many downstream audio tasks. This paper proposes a data-efficient and low-complexity ASC system by leveraging self-supervised audio representations extracted from general-purpose audio datasets. We introduce BEATs, an audio SSL pre-trained model, to extract the general representations from AudioSet. Through extensive experiments, it has been demonstrated that the self-supervised audio representations can help to achieve high ASC accuracy with limited labeled fine-tuning data. Furthermore, we find that ensembling the SSL models fine-tuned with different strategies contributes to a further performance improvement. To meet low-complexity requirements, we use knowledge distillation to transfer the self-supervised knowledge from large teacher models to an efficient student model. The experimental results suggest that the self-supervised teachers effectively improve the classification accuracy of the student model. Our best-performing system obtains an average accuracy of 56.7%.
Inverse-Q*: Token Level Reinforcement Learning for Aligning Large Language Models Without Preference Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has proven effective in aligning large language models with human intentions, yet it often relies on complex methodologies like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) that require extensive hyper-parameter tuning and present challenges in sample efficiency and stability. In this paper, we introduce Inverse-Q*, an innovative framework that transcends traditional RL methods by optimizing token-level reinforcement learning without the need for additional reward or value models. Inverse-Q* leverages direct preference optimization techniques but extends them by estimating the conditionally optimal policy directly from the model's responses, facilitating more granular and flexible policy shaping. Our approach reduces reliance on human annotation and external supervision, making it especially suitable for low-resource settings. We present extensive experimental results demonstrating that Inverse-Q* not only matches but potentially exceeds the effectiveness of PPO in terms of convergence speed and the alignment of model responses with human preferences. Our findings suggest that Inverse-Q* offers a practical and robust alternative to conventional RLHF approaches, paving the way for more efficient and adaptable model training approaches.
PMSN: A Parallel Multi-compartment Spiking Neuron for Multi-scale Temporal Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) hold great potential to realize brain-inspired, energy-efficient computational systems. However, current SNNs still fall short in terms of multi-scale temporal processing compared to their biological counterparts. This limitation has resulted in poor performance in many pattern recognition tasks with information that varies across different timescales. To address this issue, we put forward a novel spiking neuron model called Parallel Multi-compartment Spiking Neuron (PMSN). The PMSN emulates biological neurons by incorporating multiple interacting substructures and allows for flexible adjustment of the substructure counts to effectively represent temporal information across diverse timescales. Additionally, to address the computational burden associated with the increased complexity of the proposed model, we introduce two parallelization techniques that decouple the temporal dependencies of neuronal updates, enabling parallelized training across different time steps. Our experimental results on a wide range of pattern recognition tasks demonstrate the superiority of PMSN. It outperforms other state-of-the-art spiking neuron models in terms of its temporal processing capacity, training speed, and computation cost. Specifically, compared with the commonly used Leaky Integrate-and-Fire neuron, PMSN offers a simulation acceleration of over 10 $\times$ and a 30 % improvement in accuracy on Sequential CIFAR10 dataset, while maintaining comparable computational cost.
Dynamic Spectrum Management for 6G Network-in-Network Concepts
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Flexible, self-organizing communication networks will be a key feature in the next mobile communication standard. Network-in-Network (NiN) is one important concept in 6G research, introducing sub-networks tailored to specific application requirements. These sub-networks may be dynamic, i.e., they may appear, disappear, or even move throughout the network. Moreover, sub-networks may operate within a shared frequency spectrum, thereby requiring coordination among them. We demonstrate the concept of Dynamic Spectrum Management (DSM) for future 6G networks that dynamically (re-)allocates spectrum according to active sub-networks in the shared spectrum domain. Resilient control plane connectivity between sub-networks and the DSM is provided by the self-organizing routing protocol KIRA, enabling the aforementioned coordination. This demonstration presents an integrated solution of the DSM concept, providing increased flexibility to support diverse industrial applications and their individual performance requirements simultaneously within the context of a cyber-physical production system (CPPS). For the sub-networks, we use specifically designed hardware for wireless real-time communication and couple them with a network emulation. By switching sub-networks on and off, one can see that the DSM dynamically manages the spectrum allocations for them and that KIRA provides the required connectivity.
Cross-Modal Learning for Chemistry Property Prediction: Large Language Models Meet Graph Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In the field of chemistry, the objective is to create novel molecules with desired properties, facilitating accurate property predictions for applications such as material design and drug screening. However, existing graph deep learning methods face limitations that curb their expressive power. To address this, we explore the integration of vast molecular domain knowledge from Large Language Models (LLMs) with the complementary strengths of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to enhance performance in property prediction tasks. We introduce a Multi-Modal Fusion (MMF) framework that synergistically harnesses the analytical prowess of GNNs and the linguistic generative and predictive abilities of LLMs, thereby improving accuracy and robustness in predicting molecular properties. Our framework combines the effectiveness of GNNs in modeling graph-structured data with the zero-shot and few-shot learning capabilities of LLMs, enabling improved predictions while reducing the risk of overfitting. Furthermore, our approach effectively addresses distributional shifts, a common challenge in real-world applications, and showcases the efficacy of learning cross-modal representations, surpassing state-of-the-art baselines on benchmark datasets for property prediction tasks.