OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Resolution-Agnostic Neural Compression for High-Fidelity Portrait Video Conferencing via Implicit Radiance Fields
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Video conferencing has caught much more attention recently. High fidelity and low bandwidth are two major objectives of video compression for video conferencing applications. Most pioneering methods rely on classic video compression codec without high-level feature embedding and thus can not reach the extremely low bandwidth. Recent works instead employ model-based neural compression to acquire ultra-low bitrates using sparse representations of each frame such as facial landmark information, while these approaches can not maintain high fidelity due to 2D image-based warping. In this paper, we propose a novel low bandwidth neural compression approach for high-fidelity portrait video conferencing using implicit radiance fields to achieve both major objectives. We leverage dynamic neural radiance fields to reconstruct high-fidelity talking head with expression features, which are represented as frame substitution for transmission. The overall system employs deep model to encode expression features at the sender and reconstruct portrait at the receiver with volume rendering as decoder for ultra-low bandwidth. In particular, with the characteristic of neural radiance fields based model, our compression approach is resolution-agnostic, which means that the low bandwidth achieved by our approach is independent of video resolution, while maintaining fidelity for higher resolution reconstruction. Experimental results demonstrate that our novel framework can (1) construct ultra-low bandwidth video conferencing, (2) maintain high fidelity portrait and (3) have better performance on high-resolution video compression than previous works.
Rethinking Negative Instances for Generative Named Entity Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities for generalizing in unseen tasks. In the Named Entity Recognition (NER) task, recent advancements have seen the remarkable improvement of LLMs in a broad range of entity domains via instruction tuning, by adopting entity-centric schema. In this work, we explore the potential enhancement of the existing methods by incorporating negative instances into training. Our experiments reveal that negative instances contribute to remarkable improvements by (1) introducing contextual information, and (2) clearly delineating label boundaries. Furthermore, we introduce an efficient longest common subsequence (LCS) matching algorithm, which is tailored to transform unstructured predictions into structured entities. By integrating these components, we present GNER, a Generative NER system that shows improved zero-shot performance across unseen entity domains. Our comprehensive evaluation illustrates our system's superiority, surpassing state-of-the-art (SoTA) methods by 9 $F_1$ score in zero-shot evaluation.
IM-based Pilot-assisted Channel Estimation for FTN Signaling HF Communications
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

This paper investigates doubly-selective (i.e., time- and frequency-selective) channel estimation in faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) signaling HF communications. In particular, we propose a novel IM-based channel estimation algorithm for FTN signaling HF communications including pilot sequence placement (PSP) and pilot sequence location identification (PSLI) algorithms. At the transmitter, we propose the PSP algorithm that utilizes the locations of pilot sequences to carry additional information bits, thereby improving the SE of HF communications. HF channels have two non-zero independent fading paths with specific fixed delay spread and frequency spread characteristics as outlined in the Union Radio communication Sector (ITU-R) F.1487 and F.520. Having said that, based on the aforementioned properties of the HF channels and the favorable auto-correlation characteristics of the optimal pilot sequence, we propose a novel PSLI algorithm that effectively identifies the pilot sequence location within a given frame at the receiver. This is achieved by showing that the square of the absolute value of the cross-correlation between the received symbols and the pilot sequence consists of a scaled version of the square of the absolute value of the auto-correlation of the pilot sequence weighted by the gain of the corresponding HF channel path. Simulation results show very low pilot sequence location identification errors for HF channels. Our simulation results show a 6 dB improvement in the MSE of the channel estimation as well as about 3.5 dB BER improvement of FTN signaling along with an enhancement in SE compared to the method in [1]. We also achieved an enhancement in SE compared to the work in [2] while maintaining comparable MSE of the channel estimation and BER performance.
Learning Based NMPC Adaptation for Autonomous Driving using Parallelized Digital Twin
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

In this work, we focus on the challenge of transferring an autonomous driving controller from simulation to the real world (i.e. Sim2Real). We propose a data-efficient method for online and on-the-fly adaptation of parametrizable control architectures such that the target closed-loop performance is optimized while accounting for uncertainties as model mismatches, changes in the environment, and task variations. The novelty of the approach resides in leveraging black-box optimization enabled by Executable Digital Twins (xDTs) for data-driven parameter calibration through derivative-free methods to directly adapt the controller in real-time. The xDTs are augmented with Domain Randomization for robustness and allow for safe parameter exploration. The proposed method requires a minimal amount of interaction with the real-world as it pushes the exploration towards the xDTs. We validate our approach through real-world experiments, demonstrating its effectiveness in transferring and fine-tuning a NMPC with 9 parameters, in under 10 minutes. This eliminates the need for hours-long manual tuning and lengthy machine learning training and data collection phases. Our results show that the online adapted NMPC directly compensates for the Sim2Real gap and avoids overtuning in simulation. Importantly, a 75% improvement in tracking performance is achieved and the Sim2Real gap over the target performance is reduced from a factor of 876 to 1.033.
Navigating Complexity: Orchestrated Problem Solving with Multi-Agent LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving various tasks, yet they often struggle with comprehensively addressing complex and vague problems. Existing approaches, including multi-agent LLM systems, offer solutions to certain challenges but still require manual setup and lack scalability. To address this gap, we propose a novel approach leveraging decomposition to enable LLMs to tackle vague problems effectively. Our approach involves an orchestrating LLM that interacts with users to understand the problem and then decomposes it into tangible sub-problems. Instead of expecting the LLM to solve the entire problem in one go, we train it to ask follow-up questions to gain a deeper understanding of the user's requirements. Once the problem is adequately understood, the orchestrating LLM divides it into smaller, manageable sub-problems. Each sub-problem is then assigned to specialized LLM agents or non-LLM functions for resolution. These agents work in parallel to solve their respective sub-problems, with the orchestrating LLM overseeing the process and compiling the solutions into a comprehensive answer for the user. By adopting this decomposition approach, we alleviate the constraints imposed by token limitations on LLM outputs and empower them to provide nuanced solutions to complex and ambiguous problems. Through our approach, we aim to enable LLMs to think and operate more like humans, breaking down complex problems into manageable parts and collaboratively solving them. This not only enhances the problem-solving capabilities of LLMs but also offers a scalable and efficient method for addressing a wide range of real-world challenges.
Enhancing Hypergradients Estimation: A Study of Preconditioning and Reparameterization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Bilevel optimization aims to optimize an outer objective function that depends on the solution to an inner optimization problem. It is routinely used in Machine Learning, notably for hyperparameter tuning. The conventional method to compute the so-called hypergradient of the outer problem is to use the Implicit Function Theorem (IFT). As a function of the error of the inner problem resolution, we study the error of the IFT method. We analyze two strategies to reduce this error: preconditioning the IFT formula and reparameterizing the inner problem. We give a detailed account of the impact of these two modifications on the error, highlighting the role played by higher-order derivatives of the functionals at stake. Our theoretical findings explain when super efficiency, namely reaching an error on the hypergradient that depends quadratically on the error on the inner problem, is achievable and compare the two approaches when this is impossible. Numerical evaluations on hyperparameter tuning for regression problems substantiate our theoretical findings.
Integrating Dark Pattern Taxonomies
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

The problem of ``Dark Patterns" in user interface/user experience (UI/UX) design has proven a difficult issue to tackle. Malicious and explotitative design has expanded to multiple domains in the past 10 years and which has in turn led to multiple taxonomies attempting to describe them. While these taxonomies holds their own merit, and constitute unique contributions to the literature, their usefulness as separate entities is limited. We believe that in order to make meaningful progress in regulating malicious interface design, we must first form a globally harmonized system (GHS) for the classification and labeling of Dark Patterns. By leaning on network analysis tools and methods, this paper synthesizes existing taxonomies and their elements through as a directed graph. In doing so, the interconnectedness of Dark patterns can be more clearly revealed via community (cluster) detection. Ultimately, we hope that this work can serve as the inspiration for the creation of a glyph-based GHS for the classification of Dark Patterns.
Set the Clock: Temporal Alignment of Pretrained Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Language models (LMs) are trained on web text originating from many points in time and, in general, without any explicit temporal grounding. This work investigates the temporal chaos of pretrained LMs and explores various methods to align their internal knowledge to a target time, which we call "temporal alignment." To do this, we first automatically construct a dataset containing 20K time-sensitive questions and their answers for each year from 2000 to 2023. Based on this dataset, we empirically show that pretrained LMs (e.g., LLaMa2), despite having a recent pretraining cutoff (e.g., 2022), mostly answer questions using earlier knowledge (e.g., in 2019). We then develop several methods, from prompting to finetuning, to align LMs to use their most recent knowledge when answering questions, and investigate various factors in this alignment. Our experiments demonstrate that aligning LLaMa2 to the year 2022 can enhance its performance by up to 62% according to that year's answers. This improvement occurs even without explicitly mentioning time information, indicating the possibility of aligning models' internal sense of time after pretraining. Finally, we find that alignment to a historical time is also possible, with up to 2.8$\times$ the performance of the unaligned LM in 2010 if finetuning models to that year. These findings hint at the sophistication of LMs' internal knowledge organization and the necessity of tuning them properly.
Language Agents as Optimizable Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Various human-designed prompt engineering techniques have been proposed to improve problem solvers based on Large Language Models (LLMs), yielding many disparate code bases. We unify these approaches by describing LLM-based agents as computational graphs. The nodes implement functions to process multimodal data or query LLMs, and the edges describe the information flow between operations. Graphs can be recursively combined into larger composite graphs representing hierarchies of inter-agent collaboration (where edges connect operations of different agents). Our novel automatic graph optimizers (1) refine node-level LLM prompts (node optimization) and (2) improve agent orchestration by changing graph connectivity (edge optimization). Experiments demonstrate that our framework can be used to efficiently develop, integrate, and automatically improve various LLM agents. The code can be found at https://github.com/metauto-ai/gptswarm.
GISTEmbed: Guided In-sample Selection of Training Negatives for Text Embedding Fine-tuning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Embedding models are integral to AI applications like semantic search, personalized recommendations, and retrieval augmented generation for LLMs, necessitating high-quality training data. However, the limited scalability of manual data curation prompts the need for automated methods to ensure data integrity. Traditional unsupervised triplet mining automates training data generation, crucial for embedding model training, yet inadvertently injects biases and noise, thereby degrading model performance. Addressing this, we introduce GISTEmbed, a novel strategy that enhances in-batch negative selection during contrastive training through a guide model. This approach departs from reliance on random sampling and equal utility assumption of batch negatives, significantly reducing noise from data quality issues and improving model fine-tuning. Benchmarked against the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB), GISTEmbed showcases consistent performance improvements across various model sizes and achieves state-of-the-art results in select categories. This framework enables significant enhancements for smaller models by leveraging the capabilities of powerful yet resource-intensive large models. GISTEmbed can potentially revolutionize the creation of highly efficient, smaller models, democratizing access to advanced AI technologies. Making these technologies more accessible and cost-effective, especially for applications constrained by resources, significantly expands the impact and accessibility of state-of-the-art AI solutions across diverse sectors.
Cross-Modal Projection in Multimodal LLMs Doesn't Really Project Visual Attributes to Textual Space
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) like LLaVA and GPT-4(V) enable general-purpose conversations about images with the language modality. As off-the-shelf MLLMs may have limited capabilities on images from domains like dermatology and agriculture, they must be fine-tuned to unlock domain-specific applications. The prevalent architecture of current open-source MLLMs comprises two major modules: an image-language (cross-modal) projection network and a large language model. It is desirable to understand the roles of these two modules in modeling domain-specific visual attributes to inform the design of future models and streamline the interpretability efforts on the current models. To this end, via experiments on 4 datasets and under 2 fine-tuning settings, we find that as the MLLM is fine-tuned, it indeed gains domain-specific visual capabilities, but the updates do not lead to the projection extracting relevant domain-specific visual attributes. Our results indicate that the domain-specific visual attributes are modeled by the LLM, even when only the projection is fine-tuned. Through this study, we offer a potential reinterpretation of the role of cross-modal projections in MLLM architectures. Project webpage: https://claws-lab.github.io/projection-in-MLLMs/
MB-RACS: Measurement-Bounds-based Rate-Adaptive Image Compressed Sensing Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Conventional compressed sensing (CS) algorithms typically apply a uniform sampling rate to different image blocks. A more strategic approach could be to allocate the number of measurements adaptively, based on each image block's complexity. In this paper, we propose a Measurement-Bounds-based Rate-Adaptive Image Compressed Sensing Network (MB-RACS) framework, which aims to adaptively determine the sampling rate for each image block in accordance with traditional measurement bounds theory. Moreover, since in real-world scenarios statistical information about the original image cannot be directly obtained, we suggest a multi-stage rate-adaptive sampling strategy. This strategy sequentially adjusts the sampling ratio allocation based on the information gathered from previous samplings. We formulate the multi-stage rate-adaptive sampling as a convex optimization problem and address it using a combination of Newton's method and binary search techniques. Additionally, we enhance our decoding process by incorporating skip connections between successive iterations to facilitate a richer transmission of feature information across iterations. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed MB-RACS method surpasses current leading methods, with experimental evidence also underscoring the effectiveness of each module within our proposed framework.
Pioneering Deterministic Scheduling and Network Structure Optimization for Time-Critical Computing Tasks in Industrial IoT
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has become a critical technology to accelerate the process of digital and intelligent transformation of industries. As the cooperative relationship between smart devices in IIoT becomes more complex, getting deterministic responses of IIoT periodic time-critical computing tasks becomes a crucial and nontrivial problem. However, few current works in cloud/edge/fog computing focus on this problem. This paper is a pioneer to explore the deterministic scheduling and network structural optimization problems for IIoT periodic time-critical computing tasks. We first formulate the two problems and derive theorems to help quickly identify computation and network resource sharing conflicts. Based on this, we propose a deterministic scheduling algorithm, \textit{IIoTBroker}, which realizes deterministic response for each IIoT task by optimizing the fine-grained computation and network resources allocations, and a network optimization algorithm, \textit{IIoTDeployer}, providing a cost-effective structural upgrade solution for existing IIoT networks. Our methods are illustrated to be cost-friendly, scalable, and deterministic response guaranteed with low computation cost from our simulation results.
Generative Models are Self-Watermarked: Declaring Model Authentication through Re-Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

As machine- and AI-generated content proliferates, protecting the intellectual property of generative models has become imperative, yet verifying data ownership poses formidable challenges, particularly in cases of unauthorized reuse of generated data. The challenge of verifying data ownership is further amplified by using Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS), which often functions as a black-box system. Our work is dedicated to detecting data reuse from even an individual sample. Traditionally, watermarking has been leveraged to detect AI-generated content. However, unlike watermarking techniques that embed additional information as triggers into models or generated content, potentially compromising output quality, our approach identifies latent fingerprints inherently present within the outputs through re-generation. We propose an explainable verification procedure that attributes data ownership through re-generation, and further amplifies these fingerprints in the generative models through iterative data re-generation. This methodology is theoretically grounded and demonstrates viability and robustness using recent advanced text and image generative models. Our methodology is significant as it goes beyond protecting the intellectual property of APIs and addresses important issues such as the spread of misinformation and academic misconduct. It provides a useful tool to ensure the integrity of sources and authorship, expanding its application in different scenarios where authenticity and ownership verification are essential.
On Trojan Signatures in Large Language Models of Code
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Trojan signatures, as described by Fields et al. (2021), are noticeable differences in the distribution of the trojaned class parameters (weights) and the non-trojaned class parameters of the trojaned model, that can be used to detect the trojaned model. Fields et al. (2021) found trojan signatures in computer vision classification tasks with image models, such as, Resnet, WideResnet, Densenet, and VGG. In this paper, we investigate such signatures in the classifier layer parameters of large language models of source code. Our results suggest that trojan signatures could not generalize to LLMs of code. We found that trojaned code models are stubborn, even when the models were poisoned under more explicit settings (finetuned with pre-trained weights frozen). We analyzed nine trojaned models for two binary classification tasks: clone and defect detection. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to examine weight-based trojan signature revelation techniques for large-language models of code and furthermore to demonstrate that detecting trojans only from the weights in such models is a hard problem.
Selective Task offloading for Maximum Inference Accuracy and Energy efficient Real-Time IoT Sensing Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The recent advancements in small-size inference models facilitated AI deployment on the edge. However, the limited resource nature of edge devices poses new challenges especially for real-time applications. Deploying multiple inference models (or a single tunable model) varying in size and therefore accuracy and power consumption, in addition to an edge server inference model, can offer a dynamic system in which the allocation of inference models to inference jobs is performed according to the current resource conditions. Therefore, in this work, we tackle the problem of selectively allocating inference models to jobs or offloading them to the edge server to maximize inference accuracy under time and energy constraints. This problem is shown to be an instance of the unbounded multidimensional knapsack problem which is considered a strongly NP-hard problem. We propose a lightweight hybrid genetic algorithm (LGSTO) to solve this problem. We introduce a termination condition and neighborhood exploration techniques for faster evolution of populations. We compare LGSTO with the Naive and Dynamic programming solutions. In addition to classic genetic algorithms using different reproduction methods including NSGA-II, and finally we compare to other evolutionary methods such as Particle swarm optimization (PSO) and Ant colony optimization (ACO). Experiment results show that LGSTO performed 3 times faster than the fastest comparable schemes while producing schedules with higher average accuracy.