OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Integrating Contrastive Learning into a Multitask Transformer Model for Effective Domain Adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

While speech emotion recognition (SER) research has made significant progress, achieving generalization across various corpora continues to pose a problem. We propose a novel domain adaptation technique that embodies a multitask framework with SER as the primary task, and contrastive learning and information maximisation loss as auxiliary tasks, underpinned by fine-tuning of transformers pre-trained on large language models. Empirical results obtained through experiments on well-established datasets like IEMOCAP and MSP-IMPROV, illustrate that our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance in SER within cross-corpus scenarios.
DP-starJ: A Differential Private Scheme towards Analytical Star-Join Queries
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Star-join query is the fundamental task in data warehouse and has wide applications in On-line Analytical Processing (OLAP) scenarios. Due to the large number of foreign key constraints and the asymmetric effect in the neighboring instance between the fact and dimension tables, even those latest DP efforts specifically designed for join, if directly applied to star-join query, will suffer from extremely large estimation errors and expensive computational cost. In this paper, we are thus motivated to propose DP-starJ, a novel Differentially Private framework for star-Join queries. DP-starJ consists of a series of strategies tailored to specific features of star-join, including 1) we unveil the different effect of fact and dimension tables on the neighboring database instances, and accordingly revisit the definitions tailored to different cases of star-join; 2) we propose Predicate Mechanism (PM), which utilizes predicate perturbation to inject noise into the join procedure instead of the results; 3) to further boost the robust performance, we propose a DP-compliant star-join algorithm for various types of star-join tasks based on PM. We provide both theoretical analysis and empirical study, which demonstrate the superiority of the proposed methods over the state-of-the-art solutions in terms of accuracy, efficiency, and scalability.
UFD-PRiME: Unsupervised Joint Learning of Optical Flow and Stereo Depth through Pixel-Level Rigid Motion Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Both optical flow and stereo disparities are image matches and can therefore benefit from joint training. Depth and 3D motion provide geometric rather than photometric information and can further improve optical flow. Accordingly, we design a first network that estimates flow and disparity jointly and is trained without supervision. A second network, trained with optical flow from the first as pseudo-labels, takes disparities from the first network, estimates 3D rigid motion at every pixel, and reconstructs optical flow again. A final stage fuses the outputs from the two networks. In contrast with previous methods that only consider camera motion, our method also estimates the rigid motions of dynamic objects, which are of key interest in applications. This leads to better optical flow with visibly more detailed occlusions and object boundaries as a result. Our unsupervised pipeline achieves 7.36% optical flow error on the KITTI-2015 benchmark and outperforms the previous state-of-the-art 9.38% by a wide margin. It also achieves slightly better or comparable stereo depth results. Code will be made available.
A Comprehensive Survey on Deep Neural Image Deblurring
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Image deblurring tries to eliminate degradation elements of an image causing blurriness and improve the quality of an image for better texture and object visualization. Traditionally, prior-based optimization approaches predominated in image deblurring, but deep neural networks recently brought a major breakthrough in the field. In this paper, we comprehensively review the recent progress of the deep neural architectures in both blind and non-blind image deblurring. We outline the most popular deep neural network structures used in deblurring applications, describe their strengths and novelties, summarize performance metrics, and introduce broadly used datasets. In addition, we discuss the current challenges and research gaps in this domain and suggest potential research directions for future works.
On $\ell$-MDS codes and a conjecture on infinite families of $1$-MDS codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

The class of $\ell$-maximum distance separable ($\ell$-MDS) codes {is a} generalization of maximum distance separable (MDS) codes {that} has attracted a lot of attention due to its applications in several areas such as secret sharing schemes, index coding problems, informed source coding problems, and combinatorial $t$-designs. In this paper, for $\ell=1$, we completely solve a conjecture recently proposed by Heng $et~al.$ (Discrete Mathematics, 346(10): 113538, 2023) and obtain infinite families of $1$-MDS codes with general dimensions holding $2$-designs. These later codes are also been proven to be optimal locally recoverable codes. For general {positive integers} $\ell$ and $\ell'$, we construct new $\ell$-MDS codes from known $\ell'$-MDS codes via some classical propagation rules involving the extended, expurgated, and $(u,u+v)$ constructions. Finally, we study some general results including characterization, weight distributions, and bounds on maximum lengths of $\ell$-MDS codes, which generalize, simplify, or improve some known results in the literature.
Validating Drone Trust Testing in Navigation Deviation Cases in Simulation
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Developing videos for trust testing is very time-consuming, expensive and potentially dangerous. For trust tests, it requires a person to be flying the drone while another might be filming. The drones can be very expensive and if something goes wrong the costs might be very high. In previous work, we have looked at how collisions and basic communication loss can be accurately modeled in simulation and to be able to generate the same trust results from users. That work looked at two specific cases using two drones, but to expand upon this in other cases more testing is required. This paper looks to propose how to test and evaluate the change in user's trust of a drone when it is experiencing path deviation in simulation. If the environment is very realistic can simulations be a good alternative to real life videos for trust testing when there is path deviation? This deviation can occur due to the physical conditions of the space, faulty piloting, or communication loss.
User's Position-Dependent Strategies in Consumer-Generated Media with Monetary Rewards
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2023
Year: 2023

Numerous forms of consumer-generated media (CGM), such as social networking services (SNS), are widely used. Their success relies on users' voluntary participation, often driven by psychological rewards like recognition and connection from reactions by other users. Furthermore, a few CGM platforms offer monetary rewards to users, serving as incentives for sharing items such as articles, images, and videos. However, users have varying preferences for monetary and psychological rewards, and the impact of monetary rewards on user behaviors and the quality of the content they post remains unclear. Hence, we propose a model that integrates some monetary reward schemes into the SNS-norms game, which is an abstraction of CGM. Subsequently, we investigate the effect of each monetary reward scheme on individual agents (users), particularly in terms of their proactivity in posting items and their quality, depending on agents' positions in a CGM network. Our experimental results suggest that these factors distinctly affect the number of postings and their quality. We believe that our findings will help CGM platformers in designing better monetary reward schemes.
Comparative study of multi-person tracking methods
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

This paper presents a study of two tracking algorithms (SORT~\cite{7533003} and Tracktor++~\cite{2019}) that were ranked first positions on the MOT Challenge leaderboard (The MOTChallenge web page: https://motchallenge.net ). The purpose of this study is to discover the techniques used and to provide useful insights about these algorithms in the tracking pipeline that could improve the performance of MOT tracking algorithms. To this end, we adopted the popular tracking-by-detection approach. We trained our own Pedestrian Detection model using the MOT17Det dataset (MOT17Det : https://motchallenge.net/data/MOT17Det/ ). We also used a re-identification model trained on MOT17 dataset (MOT17 : https://motchallenge.net/data/MOT17/ ) for Tracktor++ to reduce the false re-identification alarms. We then present experimental results which shows that Tracktor++ is a better multi-person tracking algorithm than SORT. We also performed ablation studies to discover the contribution of re-identification(RE-ID) network and motion to the results of Tracktor++. We finally conclude by providing some recommendations for future research.
How To Effectively Train An Ensemble Of Faster R-CNN Object Detectors To Quantify Uncertainty
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

This paper presents a new approach for training two-stage object detection ensemble models, more specifically, Faster R-CNN models to estimate uncertainty. We propose training one Region Proposal Network(RPN) and multiple Fast R-CNN prediction heads is all you need to build a robust deep ensemble network for estimating uncertainty in object detection. We present this approach and provide experiments to show that this approach is much faster than the naive method of fully training all $n$ models in an ensemble. We also estimate the uncertainty by measuring this ensemble model's Expected Calibration Error (ECE). We then further compare the performance of this model with that of Gaussian YOLOv3, a variant of YOLOv3 that models uncertainty using predicted bounding box coordinates. The source code is released at \url{https://github.com/Akola-Mbey-Denis/EfficientEnsemble}
Question-focused Summarization by Decomposing Articles into Facts and Opinions and Retrieving Entities
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

This research focuses on utilizing natural language processing techniques to predict stock price fluctuations, with a specific interest in early detection of economic, political, social, and technological changes that can be leveraged for capturing market opportunities. The proposed approach includes the identification of salient facts and events from news articles, then use these facts to form tuples with entities which can be used to get summaries of market changes for particular entity and then finally combining all the summaries to form a final abstract summary of the whole article. The research aims to establish relationships between companies and entities through the analysis of Wikipedia data and articles from the Economist. Large Language Model GPT 3.5 is used for getting the summaries and also forming the final summary. The ultimate goal of this research is to develop a comprehensive system that can provide financial analysts and investors with more informed decision-making tools by enabling early detection of market trends and events.
Algorithms for the Ridesharing with Profit Constraint Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2023
Year: 2023

Mobility-on-demand (MoD) ridesharing is a promising way to improve the occupancy rate of personal vehicles and reduce traffic congestion and emissions. Maximizing the number of passengers served and maximizing a profit target are major optimization goals in MoD ridesharing. We study the ridesharing with profit constraint problem (labeled as RPC) which considers both optimization goals altogether: maximize the total number of passengers subject to an overall drivers' profit target. We give a mathematical formulation for the RPC problem. We present a polynomial-time exact algorithm framework (including two practical implementations of the algorithm) and a (1/2)-approximation algorithm for the case that each vehicle serves at most one passenger. We propose a (2/3*lambda)-approximation algorithm for the case that each vehicle serves at most lambda >= 2 passengers. Our algorithms revolve around the idea of maximum cardinality matching in bipartite graphs and hypergraphs (set packing) with general edge weight. Based on a real-world ridesharing dataset in Chicago City and price schemes of Uber, we conduct an extensive empirical study on our model and algorithms. Experimental results show that practical price schemes can be incorporated into our model, our exact algorithms are efficient, and our approximation algorithms achieve about 90% of optimal solutions, in the number of passengers served.
Large Language Models for Spatial Trajectory Patterns Mining
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Identifying anomalous human spatial trajectory patterns can indicate dynamic changes in mobility behavior with applications in domains like infectious disease monitoring and elderly care. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their ability to reason in a manner akin to humans. This presents significant potential for analyzing temporal patterns in human mobility. In this paper, we conduct empirical studies to assess the capabilities of leading LLMs like GPT-4 and Claude-2 in detecting anomalous behaviors from mobility data, by comparing to specialized methods. Our key findings demonstrate that LLMs can attain reasonable anomaly detection performance even without any specific cues. In addition, providing contextual clues about potential irregularities could further enhances their prediction efficacy. Moreover, LLMs can provide reasonable explanations for their judgments, thereby improving transparency. Our work provides insights on the strengths and limitations of LLMs for human spatial trajectory analysis.
Domain Knowledge Graph Construction Via A Simple Checker
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

With the availability of large language models, there is a growing interest for semiconductor chip design companies to leverage the technologies. For those companies, deployment of a new methodology must include two important considerations: confidentiality and scalability. In this context, this work tackles the problem of knowledge graph construction from hardware-design domain texts. We propose an oracle-checker scheme to leverage the power of GPT3.5 and demonstrate that the essence of the problem is in distillation of domain expert's background knowledge. Using RISC-V unprivileged ISA specification as an example, we explain key ideas and discuss practicality of our proposed oracle-checker approach.
Towards Better Chain-of-Thought Prompting Strategies: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Chain-of-Thought (CoT), a step-wise and coherent reasoning chain, shows its impressive strength when used as a prompting strategy for large language models (LLM). Recent years, the prominent effect of CoT prompting has attracted emerging research. However, there still lacks of a systematic summary about key factors of CoT prompting and comprehensive guide for prompts utilizing. For a deeper understanding about CoT prompting, we survey on a wide range of current research, presenting a systematic and comprehensive analysis on several factors that may influence the effect of CoT prompting, and introduce how to better apply it in different applications under these discussions. We further analyze the challenges and propose some future directions about CoT prompting. This survey could provide an overall reference on related research.
Learning Many-to-Many Mapping for Unpaired Real-World Image Super-resolution and Downscaling
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Learning based single image super-resolution (SISR) for real-world images has been an active research topic yet a challenging task, due to the lack of paired low-resolution (LR) and high-resolution (HR) training images. Most of the existing unsupervised real-world SISR methods adopt a two-stage training strategy by synthesizing realistic LR images from their HR counterparts first, then training the super-resolution (SR) models in a supervised manner. However, the training of image degradation and SR models in this strategy are separate, ignoring the inherent mutual dependency between downscaling and its inverse upscaling process. Additionally, the ill-posed nature of image degradation is not fully considered. In this paper, we propose an image downscaling and SR model dubbed as SDFlow, which simultaneously learns a bidirectional many-to-many mapping between real-world LR and HR images unsupervisedly. The main idea of SDFlow is to decouple image content and degradation information in the latent space, where content information distribution of LR and HR images is matched in a common latent space. Degradation information of the LR images and the high-frequency information of the HR images are fitted to an easy-to-sample conditional distribution. Experimental results on real-world image SR datasets indicate that SDFlow can generate diverse realistic LR and SR images both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Compressed online Sinkhorn
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The use of optimal transport (OT) distances, and in particular entropic-regularised OT distances, is an increasingly popular evaluation metric in many areas of machine learning and data science. Their use has largely been driven by the availability of efficient algorithms such as the Sinkhorn algorithm. One of the drawbacks of the Sinkhorn algorithm for large-scale data processing is that it is a two-phase method, where one first draws a large stream of data from the probability distributions, before applying the Sinkhorn algorithm to the discrete probability measures. More recently, there have been several works developing stochastic versions of Sinkhorn that directly handle continuous streams of data. In this work, we revisit the recently introduced online Sinkhorn algorithm of [Mensch and Peyré, 2020]. Our contributions are twofold: We improve the convergence analysis for the online Sinkhorn algorithm, the new rate that we obtain is faster than the previous rate under certain parameter choices. We also present numerical results to verify the sharpness of our result. Secondly, we propose the compressed online Sinkhorn algorithm which combines measure compression techniques with the online Sinkhorn algorithm. We provide numerical experiments to show practical numerical gains, as well as theoretical guarantees on the efficiency of our approach.
Counter Turing Test CT^2: AI-Generated Text Detection is Not as Easy as You May Think -- Introducing AI Detectability Index
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

With the rise of prolific ChatGPT, the risk and consequences of AI-generated text has increased alarmingly. To address the inevitable question of ownership attribution for AI-generated artifacts, the US Copyright Office released a statement stating that 'If a work's traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it'. Furthermore, both the US and the EU governments have recently drafted their initial proposals regarding the regulatory framework for AI. Given this cynosural spotlight on generative AI, AI-generated text detection (AGTD) has emerged as a topic that has already received immediate attention in research, with some initial methods having been proposed, soon followed by emergence of techniques to bypass detection. This paper introduces the Counter Turing Test (CT^2), a benchmark consisting of techniques aiming to offer a comprehensive evaluation of the robustness of existing AGTD techniques. Our empirical findings unequivocally highlight the fragility of the proposed AGTD methods under scrutiny. Amidst the extensive deliberations on policy-making for regulating AI development, it is of utmost importance to assess the detectability of content generated by LLMs. Thus, to establish a quantifiable spectrum facilitating the evaluation and ranking of LLMs according to their detectability levels, we propose the AI Detectability Index (ADI). We conduct a thorough examination of 15 contemporary LLMs, empirically demonstrating that larger LLMs tend to have a higher ADI, indicating they are less detectable compared to smaller LLMs. We firmly believe that ADI holds significant value as a tool for the wider NLP community, with the potential to serve as a rubric in AI-related policy-making.
Pushing the Limits of Pre-training for Time Series Forecasting in the CloudOps Domain
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Time series has been left behind in the era of pre-training and transfer learning. While research in the fields of natural language processing and computer vision are enjoying progressively larger datasets to train massive models, the most popular time series datasets consist of only tens of thousands of time steps, limiting our ability to study the effectiveness of pre-training and scaling. Recent studies have also cast doubt on the need for expressive models and scale. To alleviate these issues, we introduce three large-scale time series forecasting datasets from the cloud operations (CloudOps) domain, the largest having billions of observations, enabling further study into pre-training and scaling of time series models. We build the empirical groundwork for studying pre-training and scaling of time series models and pave the way for future research by identifying a promising candidate architecture. We show that it is a strong zero-shot baseline and benefits from further scaling, both in model and dataset size. Accompanying these datasets and results is a suite of comprehensive benchmark results comparing classical and deep learning baselines to our pre-trained method - achieving a 27% reduction in error on the largest dataset. Code and datasets can be found https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/pretrain-time-series-cloudops.
Towards Scalable Wireless Federated Learning: Challenges and Solutions
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

The explosive growth of smart devices (e.g., mobile phones, vehicles, drones) with sensing, communication, and computation capabilities gives rise to an unprecedented amount of data. The generated massive data together with the rapid advancement of machine learning (ML) techniques spark a variety of intelligent applications. To distill intelligence for supporting these applications, federated learning (FL) emerges as an effective distributed ML framework, given its potential to enable privacy-preserving model training at the network edge. In this article, we discuss the challenges and solutions of achieving scalable wireless FL from the perspectives of both network design and resource orchestration. For network design, we discuss how task-oriented model aggregation affects the performance of wireless FL, followed by proposing effective wireless techniques to enhance the communication scalability via reducing the model aggregation distortion and improving the device participation. For resource orchestration, we identify the limitations of the existing optimization-based algorithms and propose three task-oriented learning algorithms to enhance the algorithmic scalability via achieving computation-efficient resource allocation for wireless FL. We highlight several potential research issues that deserve further study.