OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
4DStyleGaussian: Zero-shot 4D Style Transfer with Gaussian Splatting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

3D neural style transfer has gained significant attention for its potential to provide user-friendly stylization with spatial consistency. However, existing 3D style transfer methods often fall short in terms of inference efficiency, generalization ability, and struggle to handle dynamic scenes with temporal consistency. In this paper, we introduce 4DStyleGaussian, a novel 4D style transfer framework designed to achieve real-time stylization of arbitrary style references while maintaining reasonable content affinity, multi-view consistency, and temporal coherence. Our approach leverages an embedded 4D Gaussian Splatting technique, which is trained using a reversible neural network for reducing content loss in the feature distillation process. Utilizing the 4D embedded Gaussians, we predict a 4D style transformation matrix that facilitates spatially and temporally consistent style transfer with Gaussian Splatting. Experiments demonstrate that our method can achieve high-quality and zero-shot stylization for 4D scenarios with enhanced efficiency and spatial-temporal consistency.
Towards Reliable Verification of Unauthorized Data Usage in Personalized Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

Text-to-image diffusion models are pushing the boundaries of what generative AI can achieve in our lives. Beyond their ability to generate general images, new personalization techniques have been proposed to customize the pre-trained base models for crafting images with specific themes or styles. Such a lightweight solution, enabling AI practitioners and developers to easily build their own personalized models, also poses a new concern regarding whether the personalized models are trained from unauthorized data. A promising solution is to proactively enable data traceability in generative models, where data owners embed external coatings (e.g., image watermarks or backdoor triggers) onto the datasets before releasing. Later the models trained over such datasets will also learn the coatings and unconsciously reproduce them in the generated mimicries, which can be extracted and used as the data usage evidence. However, we identify the existing coatings cannot be effectively learned in personalization tasks, making the corresponding verification less reliable. In this paper, we introduce SIREN, a novel methodology to proactively trace unauthorized data usage in black-box personalized text-to-image diffusion models. Our approach optimizes the coating in a delicate way to be recognized by the model as a feature relevant to the personalization task, thus significantly improving its learnability. We also utilize a human perceptual-aware constraint, a hypersphere classification technique, and a hypothesis-testing-guided verification method to enhance the stealthiness and detection accuracy of the coating. The effectiveness of SIREN is verified through extensive experiments on a diverse set of benchmark datasets, models, and learning algorithms. SIREN is also effective in various real-world scenarios and evaluated against potential countermeasures. Our code is publicly available.
Routing on Sparse Graphs with Non-metric Costs for the Prize-collecting Travelling Salesperson Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

In many real-world routing problems, decision makers must optimise over sparse graphs such as transportation networks with non-metric costs on the edges that do not obey the triangle inequality. Motivated by finding a sufficiently long running route in a city that minimises the air pollution exposure of the runner, we study the Prize-collecting Travelling Salesperson Problem (Pc-TSP) on sparse graphs with non-metric costs. Given an undirected graph with a cost function on the edges and a prize function on the vertices, the goal of Pc-TSP is to find a tour rooted at the origin that minimises the total cost such that the total prize is at least some quota. First, we introduce heuristics designed for sparse graphs with non-metric cost functions where previous work dealt with either a complete graph or a metric cost function. Next, we develop a branch & cut algorithm that employs a new cut we call the disjoint-paths cost-cover (DPCC) cut. Empirical experiments on two datasets show that our heuristics can produce a feasible solution with less cost than a state-of-the-art heuristic from the literature. On datasets with non-metric cost functions, DPCC is found to solve more instances to optimality than the baseline cutting algorithm we compare against.
Mobility-Aware Federated Learning: Multi-Armed Bandit Based Selection in Vehicular Network
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we study a vehicle selection problem for federated learning (FL) over vehicular networks. Specifically, we design a mobility-aware vehicular federated learning (MAVFL) scheme in which vehicles drive through a road segment to perform FL. Some vehicles may drive out of the segment which leads to unsuccessful training. In the proposed scheme, the real-time successful training participation ratio is utilized to implement vehicle selection. We conduct the convergence analysis to indicate the influence of vehicle mobility on training loss. Furthermore, we propose a multi-armed bandit-based vehicle selection algorithm to minimize the utility function considering training loss and delay. The simulation results show that compared with baselines, the proposed algorithm can achieve better training performance with approximately 28\% faster convergence.
Principled Bayesian Optimisation in Collaboration with Human Experts
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Bayesian optimisation for real-world problems is often performed interactively with human experts, and integrating their domain knowledge is key to accelerate the optimisation process. We consider a setup where experts provide advice on the next query point through binary accept/reject recommendations (labels). Experts' labels are often costly, requiring efficient use of their efforts, and can at the same time be unreliable, requiring careful adjustment of the degree to which any expert is trusted. We introduce the first principled approach that provides two key guarantees. (1) Handover guarantee: similar to a no-regret property, we establish a sublinear bound on the cumulative number of experts' binary labels. Initially, multiple labels per query are needed, but the number of expert labels required asymptotically converges to zero, saving both expert effort and computation time. (2) No-harm guarantee with data-driven trust level adjustment: our adaptive trust level ensures that the convergence rate will not be worse than the one without using advice, even if the advice from experts is adversarial. Unlike existing methods that employ a user-defined function that hand-tunes the trust level adjustment, our approach enables data-driven adjustments. Real-world applications empirically demonstrate that our method not only outperforms existing baselines, but also maintains robustness despite varying labelling accuracy, in tasks of battery design with human experts.
Self-Assessed Generation: Trustworthy Label Generation for Optical Flow and Stereo Matching in Real-world
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

A significant challenge facing current optical flow and stereo methods is the difficulty in generalizing them well to the real world. This is mainly due to the high costs required to produce datasets, and the limitations of existing self-supervised methods on fuzzy results and complex model training problems. To address the above challenges, we propose a unified self-supervised generalization framework for optical flow and stereo tasks: Self-Assessed Generation (SAG). Unlike previous self-supervised methods, SAG is data-driven, using advanced reconstruction techniques to construct a reconstruction field from RGB images and generate datasets based on it. Afterward, we quantified the confidence level of the generated results from multiple perspectives, such as reconstruction field distribution, geometric consistency, and structural similarity, to eliminate inevitable defects in the generation process. We also designed a 3D flight foreground automatic rendering pipeline in SAG to encourage the network to learn occlusion and motion foreground. Experimentally, because SAG does not involve changes to methods or loss functions, it can directly self-supervised train the state-of-the-art deep networks, greatly improving the generalization performance of self-supervised methods on current mainstream optical flow and stereo-matching datasets. Compared to previous training modes, SAG is more generalized, cost-effective, and accurate.
Improve Meta-learning for Few-Shot Text Classification with All You Can Acquire from the Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Meta-learning has emerged as a prominent technology for few-shot text classification and has achieved promising performance. However, existing methods often encounter difficulties in drawing accurate class prototypes from support set samples, primarily due to probable large intra-class differences and small inter-class differences within the task. Recent approaches attempt to incorporate external knowledge or pre-trained language models to augment data, but this requires additional resources and thus does not suit many few-shot scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel solution to address this issue by adequately leveraging the information within the task itself. Specifically, we utilize label information to construct a task-adaptive metric space, thereby adaptively reducing the intra-class differences and magnifying the inter-class differences. We further employ the optimal transport technique to estimate class prototypes with query set samples together, mitigating the problem of inaccurate and ambiguous support set samples caused by large intra-class differences. We conduct extensive experiments on eight benchmark datasets, and our approach shows obvious advantages over state-of-the-art models across all the tasks on all the datasets. For reproducibility, all the datasets and codes are available at https://github.com/YvoGao/LAQDA.
Advancing Newborn Care: Precise Birth Time Detection Using AI-Driven Thermal Imaging with Adaptive Normalization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Around 5-10\% of newborns need assistance to start breathing. Currently, there is a lack of evidence-based research, objective data collection, and opportunities for learning from real newborn resuscitation emergency events. Generating and evaluating automated newborn resuscitation algorithm activity timelines relative to the Time of Birth (ToB) offers a promising opportunity to enhance newborn care practices. Given the importance of prompt resuscitation interventions within the "golden minute" after birth, having an accurate ToB with second precision is essential for effective subsequent analysis of newborn resuscitation episodes. Instead, ToB is generally registered manually, often with minute precision, making the process inefficient and susceptible to error and imprecision. In this work, we explore the fusion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and thermal imaging to develop the first AI-driven ToB detector. The use of temperature information offers a promising alternative to detect the newborn while respecting the privacy of healthcare providers and mothers. However, the frequent inconsistencies in thermal measurements, especially in a multi-camera setup, make normalization strategies critical. Our methodology involves a three-step process: first, we propose an adaptive normalization method based on Gaussian mixture models (GMM) to mitigate issues related to temperature variations; second, we implement and deploy an AI model to detect the presence of the newborn within the thermal video frames; and third, we evaluate and post-process the model's predictions to estimate the ToB. A precision of 88.1\% and a recall of 89.3\% are reported in the detection of the newborn within thermal frames during performance evaluation. Our approach achieves an absolute median deviation of 2.7 seconds in estimating the ToB relative to the manual annotations.
A Practical Approach to Causal Inference over Time
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we focus on estimating the causal effect of an intervention over time on a dynamical system. To that end, we formally define causal interventions and their effects over time on discrete-time stochastic processes (DSPs). Then, we show under which conditions the equilibrium states of a DSP, both before and after a causal intervention, can be captured by a structural causal model (SCM). With such an equivalence at hand, we provide an explicit mapping from vector autoregressive models (VARs), broadly applied in econometrics, to linear, but potentially cyclic and/or affected by unmeasured confounders, SCMs. The resulting causal VAR framework allows us to perform causal inference over time from observational time series data. Our experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that the proposed framework achieves strong performance in terms of observational forecasting while enabling accurate estimation of the causal effect of interventions on dynamical systems. We demonstrate, through a case study, the potential practical questions that can be addressed using the proposed causal VAR framework.
Fast Reroute with Highly Connected Routes Based on Maximum Flow Evaluation
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Fault-tolerant routing allows the selection of alternative routes to the destination after the route being used fails. Fast Reroute (FRR) is a proactive strategy through which the protocol pre-configures backup routes that are activated when needed. In this work, we propose the MaxFlowRouting algorithm that employs maximum flow evaluation as well as the route size to select routes that are highly connected. The main advantage of the proposed algorithm is that if any component of such a route fails, there are more alternative paths to the destination in comparison with the route computed with Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm. Simulation results are presented in which we compare the two algorithms (Dijkstra's and MaxFlowRouting) for multiple different random graphs (including Erdos-Renyi, Barábasi-Albert, and Watts-Strogatz) and also for the topologies of some of the most important Internet backbones of the U.S.A., Europe, Brazil, and Japan: Internet2, Geant, RNP, and Wide.
Rethinking Legal Judgement Prediction in a Realistic Scenario in the Era of Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This study investigates judgment prediction in a realistic scenario within the context of Indian judgments, utilizing a range of transformer-based models, including InLegalBERT, BERT, and XLNet, alongside LLMs such as Llama-2 and GPT-3.5 Turbo. In this realistic scenario, we simulate how judgments are predicted at the point when a case is presented for a decision in court, using only the information available at that time, such as the facts of the case, statutes, precedents, and arguments. This approach mimics real-world conditions, where decisions must be made without the benefit of hindsight, unlike retrospective analyses often found in previous studies. For transformer models, we experiment with hierarchical transformers and the summarization of judgment facts to optimize input for these models. Our experiments with LLMs reveal that GPT-3.5 Turbo excels in realistic scenarios, demonstrating robust performance in judgment prediction. Furthermore, incorporating additional legal information, such as statutes and precedents, significantly improves the outcome of the prediction task. The LLMs also provide explanations for their predictions. To evaluate the quality of these predictions and explanations, we introduce two human evaluation metrics: Clarity and Linking. Our findings from both automatic and human evaluations indicate that, despite advancements in LLMs, they are yet to achieve expert-level performance in judgment prediction and explanation tasks.
Is Structure Dependence Shaped for Efficient Communication?: A Case Study on Coordination
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Natural language exhibits various universal properties. But why do these universals exist? One explanation is that they arise from functional pressures to achieve efficient communication, a view which attributes cross-linguistic properties to domain-general cognitive abilities. This hypothesis has successfully addressed some syntactic universal properties such as compositionality and Greenbergian word order universals. However, more abstract syntactic universals have not been explored from the perspective of efficient communication. Among such universals, the most notable one is structure dependence, that is, the existence of grammar-internal operations that crucially depend on hierarchical representations. This property has traditionally been taken to be central to natural language and to involve domain-specific knowledge irreducible to communicative efficiency. In this paper, we challenge the conventional view by investigating whether structure dependence realizes efficient communication, focusing on coordinate structures. We design three types of artificial languages: (i) one with a structure-dependent reduction operation, which is similar to natural language, (ii) one without any reduction operations, and (iii) one with a linear (rather than structure-dependent) reduction operation. We quantify the communicative efficiency of these languages. The results demonstrate that the language with the structure-dependent reduction operation is significantly more communicatively efficient than the counterfactual languages. This suggests that the existence of structure-dependent properties can be explained from the perspective of efficient communication.
When Precedents Clash
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Consistency of case bases is a way to avoid the problem of retrieving conflicting constraining precedents for new cases to be decided. However, in legal practice the consistency requirements for case bases may not be satisfied. As pointed out in (Broughton 2019), a model of precedential constraint should take into account the hierarchical structure of the specific legal system under consideration and the temporal dimension of cases. This article continues the research initiated in (Liu et al. 2022; Di Florio et al. 2023), which established a connection between Boolean classifiers and legal case-based reasoning. On this basis, we enrich the classifier models with an organisational structure that takes into account both the hierarchy of courts and which courts issue decisions that are binding/constraining on subsequent cases. We focus on common law systems. We also introduce a temporal relation between cases. Within this enriched framework, we can formalise the notions of overruled cases and cases decided per incuriam: such cases are not to be considered binding on later cases. Finally, we show under which condition principles based on the hierarchical structure and on the temporal dimension can provide an unambiguous decision-making process for new cases in the presence of conflicting binding precedents.
Voltage-Controlled Magnetic Tunnel Junction based ADC-less Global Shutter Processing-in-Pixel for Extreme-Edge Intelligence
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

The vast amount of data generated by camera sensors has prompted the exploration of energy-efficient processing solutions for deploying computer vision tasks on edge devices. Among the various approaches studied, processing-in-pixel integrates massively parallel analog computational capabilities at the extreme-edge, i.e., within the pixel array and exhibits enhanced energy and bandwidth efficiency by generating the output activations of the first neural network layer rather than the raw sensory data. In this article, we propose an energy and bandwidth efficient ADC-less processing-in-pixel architecture. This architecture implements an optimized binary activation neural network trained using Hoyer regularizer for high accuracy on complex vision tasks. In addition, we also introduce a global shutter burst memory read scheme utilizing fast and disturb-free read operation leveraging innovative use of nanoscale voltage-controlled magnetic tunnel junctions (VC-MTJs). Moreover, we develop an algorithmic framework incorporating device and circuit constraints (characteristic device switching behavior and circuit non-linearity) based on state-of-the-art fabricated VC-MTJ characteristics and extensive circuit simulations using commercial GlobalFoundries 22nm FDX technology. Finally, we evaluate the proposed system's performance on two complex datasets - CIFAR10 and ImageNet, showing improvements in front-end and communication energy efficiency by 8.2x and 8.5x respectively and reduction in bandwidth by 6x compared to traditional computer vision systems, without any significant drop in the test accuracy.
Modeling News Interactions and Influence for Financial Market Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2024
Year: 2024

The diffusion of financial news into market prices is a complex process, making it challenging to evaluate the connections between news events and market movements. This paper introduces FININ (Financial Interconnected News Influence Network), a novel market prediction model that captures not only the links between news and prices but also the interactions among news items themselves. FININ effectively integrates multi-modal information from both market data and news articles. We conduct extensive experiments on two datasets, encompassing the S&P 500 and NASDAQ 100 indices over a 15-year period and over 2.7 million news articles. The results demonstrate FININ's effectiveness, outperforming advanced market prediction models with an improvement of 0.429 and 0.341 in the daily Sharpe ratio for the two markets respectively. Moreover, our results reveal insights into the financial news, including the delayed market pricing of news, the long memory effect of news, and the limitations of financial sentiment analysis in fully extracting predictive power from news data.
Traversability-Aware Legged Navigation by Learning from Real-World Visual Data
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

The enhanced mobility brought by legged locomotion empowers quadrupedal robots to navigate through complex and unstructured environments. However, optimizing agile locomotion while accounting for the varying energy costs of traversing different terrains remains an open challenge. Most previous work focuses on planning trajectories with traversability cost estimation based on human-labeled environmental features. However, this human-centric approach is insufficient because it does not account for the varying capabilities of the robot locomotion controllers over challenging terrains. To address this, we develop a novel traversability estimator in a robot-centric manner, based on the value function of the robot's locomotion controller. This estimator is integrated into a new learning-based RGBD navigation framework. The framework employs multiple training stages to develop a planner that guides the robot in avoiding obstacles and hard-to-traverse terrains while reaching its goals. The training of the navigation planner is directly performed in the real world using a sample efficient reinforcement learning method that utilizes both online data and offline datasets. Through extensive benchmarking, we demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves the best performance in accurate traversability cost estimation and efficient learning from multi-modal data (including the robot's color and depth vision, as well as proprioceptive feedback) for real-world training. Using the proposed method, a quadrupedal robot learns to perform traversability-aware navigation through trial and error in various real-world environments with challenging terrains that are difficult to classify using depth vision alone. Moreover, the robot demonstrates the ability to generalize the learned navigation skills to unseen scenarios. Video can be found at https://youtu.be/RSqnIWZ1qks.