OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
ROS-LLM: A ROS framework for embodied AI with task feedback and structured reasoning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

We present a framework for intuitive robot programming by non-experts, leveraging natural language prompts and contextual information from the Robot Operating System (ROS). Our system integrates large language models (LLMs), enabling non-experts to articulate task requirements to the system through a chat interface. Key features of the framework include: integration of ROS with an AI agent connected to a plethora of open-source and commercial LLMs, automatic extraction of a behavior from the LLM output and execution of ROS actions/services, support for three behavior modes (sequence, behavior tree, state machine), imitation learning for adding new robot actions to the library of possible actions, and LLM reflection via human and environment feedback. Extensive experiments validate the framework, showcasing robustness, scalability, and versatility in diverse scenarios, including long-horizon tasks, tabletop rearrangements, and remote supervisory control. To facilitate the adoption of our framework and support the reproduction of our results, we have made our code open-source. You can access it at: https://github.com/huawei-noah/HEBO/tree/master/ROSLLM.
Breaking the Script Barrier in Multilingual Pre-Trained Language Models with Transliteration-Based Post-Training Alignment
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Multilingual pre-trained models (mPLMs) have shown impressive performance on cross-lingual transfer tasks. However, the transfer performance is often hindered when a low-resource target language is written in a different script than the high-resource source language, even though the two languages may be related or share parts of their vocabularies. Inspired by recent work that uses transliteration to address this problem, our paper proposes a transliteration-based post-pretraining alignment (PPA) method aiming to improve the cross-lingual alignment between languages using diverse scripts. We select two areal language groups, $\textbf{Mediterranean-Amharic-Farsi}$ and $\textbf{South+East Asian Languages}$, wherein the languages are mutually influenced but use different scripts. We apply our method to these language groups and conduct extensive experiments on a spectrum of downstream tasks. The results show that after PPA, models consistently outperform the original model (up to 50% for some tasks) in English-centric transfer. In addition, when we use languages other than English as sources in transfer, our method obtains even larger improvements. We will make our code and models publicly available at \url{https://github.com/cisnlp/Transliteration-PPA}.
Systematic Literature Review on Application of Learning-based Approaches in Continuous Integration
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Context: Machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) analyze raw data to extract valuable insights in specific phases. The rise of continuous practices in software projects emphasizes automating Continuous Integration (CI) with these learning-based methods, while the growing adoption of such approaches underscores the need for systematizing knowledge. Objective: Our objective is to comprehensively review and analyze existing literature concerning learning-based methods within the CI domain. We endeavour to identify and analyse various techniques documented in the literature, emphasizing the fundamental attributes of training phases within learning-based solutions in the context of CI. Method: We conducted a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) involving 52 primary studies. Through statistical and thematic analyses, we explored the correlations between CI tasks and the training phases of learning-based methodologies across the selected studies, encompassing a spectrum from data engineering techniques to evaluation metrics. Results: This paper presents an analysis of the automation of CI tasks utilizing learning-based methods. We identify and analyze nine types of data sources, four steps in data preparation, four feature types, nine subsets of data features, five approaches for hyperparameter selection and tuning, and fifteen evaluation metrics. Furthermore, we discuss the latest techniques employed, existing gaps in CI task automation, and the characteristics of the utilized learning-based techniques. Conclusion: This study provides a comprehensive overview of learning-based methods in CI, offering valuable insights for researchers and practitioners developing CI task automation. It also highlights the need for further research to advance these methods in CI.
Scalable and Domain-General Abstractive Proposition Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Segmenting text into fine-grained units of meaning is important to a wide range of NLP applications. The default approach of segmenting text into sentences is often insufficient, especially since sentences are usually complex enough to include multiple units of meaning that merit separate treatment in the downstream task. We focus on the task of abstractive proposition segmentation (APS): transforming text into simple, self-contained, well-formed sentences. Several recent works have demonstrated the utility of proposition segmentation with few-shot prompted LLMs for downstream tasks such as retrieval-augmented grounding and fact verification. However, this approach does not scale to large amounts of text and may not always extract all the facts from the input text. In this paper, we first introduce evaluation metrics for the task to measure several dimensions of quality. We then propose a scalable, yet accurate, proposition segmentation model. We model proposition segmentation as a supervised task by training LLMs on existing annotated datasets and show that training yields significantly improved results. We further show that by using the fine-tuned LLMs (Gemini Pro and Gemini Ultra) as teachers for annotating large amounts of multi-domain synthetic distillation data, we can train smaller student models (Gemma 1 2B and 7B) with results similar to the teacher LLMs. We then demonstrate that our technique leads to effective domain generalization, by annotating data in two domains outside the original training data and evaluating on them. Finally, as a key contribution of the paper, we share an easy-to-use API for NLP practitioners to use.
Deceptive Diffusion: Generating Synthetic Adversarial Examples
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We introduce the concept of deceptive diffusion -- training a generative AI model to produce adversarial images. Whereas a traditional adversarial attack algorithm aims to perturb an existing image to induce a misclassificaton, the deceptive diffusion model can create an arbitrary number of new, misclassified images that are not directly associated with training or test images. Deceptive diffusion offers the possibility of strengthening defence algorithms by providing adversarial training data at scale, including types of misclassification that are otherwise difficult to find. In our experiments, we also investigate the effect of training on a partially attacked data set. This highlights a new type of vulnerability for generative diffusion models: if an attacker is able to stealthily poison a portion of the training data, then the resulting diffusion model will generate a similar proportion of misleading outputs.
EgoGaussian: Dynamic Scene Understanding from Egocentric Video with 3D Gaussian Splatting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Human activities are inherently complex, often involving numerous object interactions. To better understand these activities, it is crucial to model their interactions with the environment captured through dynamic changes. The recent availability of affordable head-mounted cameras and egocentric data offers a more accessible and efficient means to understand human-object interactions in 3D environments. However, most existing methods for human activity modeling neglect the dynamic interactions with objects, resulting in only static representations. The few existing solutions often require inputs from multiple sources, including multi-camera setups, depth-sensing cameras, or kinesthetic sensors. To this end, we introduce EgoGaussian, the first method capable of simultaneously reconstructing 3D scenes and dynamically tracking 3D object motion from RGB egocentric input alone. We leverage the uniquely discrete nature of Gaussian Splatting and segment dynamic interactions from the background, with both having explicit representations. Our approach employs a clip-level online learning pipeline that leverages the dynamic nature of human activities, allowing us to reconstruct the temporal evolution of the scene in chronological order and track rigid object motion. EgoGaussian shows significant improvements in terms of both dynamic object and background reconstruction quality compared to the state-of-the-art. We also qualitatively demonstrate the high quality of the reconstructed models.
StreamMOTP: Streaming and Unified Framework for Joint 3D Multi-Object Tracking and Trajectory Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

3D multi-object tracking and trajectory prediction are two crucial modules in autonomous driving systems. Generally, the two tasks are handled separately in traditional paradigms and a few methods have started to explore modeling these two tasks in a joint manner recently. However, these approaches suffer from the limitations of single-frame training and inconsistent coordinate representations between tracking and prediction tasks. In this paper, we propose a streaming and unified framework for joint 3D Multi-Object Tracking and trajectory Prediction (StreamMOTP) to address the above challenges. Firstly, we construct the model in a streaming manner and exploit a memory bank to preserve and leverage the long-term latent features for tracked objects more effectively. Secondly, a relative spatio-temporal positional encoding strategy is introduced to bridge the gap of coordinate representations between the two tasks and maintain the pose-invariance for trajectory prediction. Thirdly, we further improve the quality and consistency of predicted trajectories with a dual-stream predictor. We conduct extensive experiments on popular nuSences dataset and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of StreamMOTP, which outperforms previous methods significantly on both tasks. Furthermore, we also prove that the proposed framework has great potential and advantages in actual applications of autonomous driving.
Virtual Context: Enhancing Jailbreak Attacks with Special Token Injection
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Jailbreak attacks on large language models (LLMs) involve inducing these models to generate harmful content that violates ethics or laws, posing a significant threat to LLM security. Current jailbreak attacks face two main challenges: low success rates due to defensive measures and high resource requirements for crafting specific prompts. This paper introduces Virtual Context, which leverages special tokens, previously overlooked in LLM security, to improve jailbreak attacks. Virtual Context addresses these challenges by significantly increasing the success rates of existing jailbreak methods and requiring minimal background knowledge about the target model, thus enhancing effectiveness in black-box settings without additional overhead. Comprehensive evaluations show that Virtual Context-assisted jailbreak attacks can improve the success rates of four widely used jailbreak methods by approximately 40% across various LLMs. Additionally, applying Virtual Context to original malicious behaviors still achieves a notable jailbreak effect. In summary, our research highlights the potential of special tokens in jailbreak attacks and recommends including this threat in red-teaming testing to comprehensively enhance LLM security.
An Analysis of MLOps Architectures: A Systematic Mapping Study
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Context. Despite the increasing adoption of Machine Learning Operations (MLOps), teams still encounter challenges in effectively applying this paradigm to their specific projects. While there is a large variety of available tools usable for MLOps, there is simultaneously a lack of consolidated architecture knowledge that can inform the architecture design. Objective. Our primary objective is to provide a comprehensive overview of (i) how MLOps architectures are defined across the literature and (ii) which tools are mentioned to support the implementation of each architecture component. Method. We apply the Systematic Mapping Study method and select 43 primary studies via automatic, manual, and snowballing-based search and selection procedures. Subsequently, we use card sorting to synthesize the results. Results. We contribute (i) a categorization of 35 MLOps architecture components, (ii) a description of several MLOps architecture variants, and (iii) a systematic map between the identified components and the existing MLOps tools. Conclusion. This study provides an overview of the state of the art in MLOps from an architectural perspective. Researchers and practitioners can use our findings to inform the architecture design of their MLOps systems.
FI-CBL: A Probabilistic Method for Concept-Based Learning with Expert Rules
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

A method for solving concept-based learning (CBL) problem is proposed. The main idea behind the method is to divide each concept-annotated image into patches, to transform the patches into embeddings by using an autoencoder, and to cluster the embeddings assuming that each cluster will mainly contain embeddings of patches with certain concepts. To find concepts of a new image, the method implements the frequentist inference by computing prior and posterior probabilities of concepts based on rates of patches from images with certain values of the concepts. Therefore, the proposed method is called the Frequentist Inference CBL (FI-CBL). FI-CBL allows us to incorporate the expert rules in the form of logic functions into the inference procedure. An idea behind the incorporation is to update prior and conditional probabilities of concepts to satisfy the rules. The method is transparent because it has an explicit sequence of probabilistic calculations and a clear frequency interpretation. Numerical experiments show that FI-CBL outperforms the concept bottleneck model in cases when the number of training data is small. The code of proposed algorithms is publicly available.
Runtime Instrumentation for Reactive Components (Extended Version)
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Reactive software calls for instrumentation methods that uphold the reactive attributes of systems. Runtime verification imposes another demand on the instrumentation, namely that the trace event sequences it reports to monitors are sound -- that is, they reflect actual executions of the system under scrutiny. This paper presents RIARC, a novel decentralised instrumentation algorithm for outline monitors meeting these two demands. The asynchronous setting of reactive software complicates the instrumentation due to potential trace event loss or reordering. RIARC overcomes these challenges using a next-hop IP routing approach to rearrange and report events soundly to monitors. RIARC is validated in two ways. We subject its corresponding implementation to rigorous systematic testing to confirm its correctness. In addition, we assess this implementation via extensive empirical experiments, subjecting it to large realistic workloads to ascertain its reactiveness. Our results show that RIARC optimises its memory and scheduler usage to maintain latency feasible for soft real-time applications. We also compare RIARC to inline and centralised monitoring, revealing that it induces comparable latency to inline monitoring in moderate concurrency settings, where software performs long-running, computationally-intensive tasks, such as in Big Data stream processing.
Parallax-tolerant Image Stitching via Segmentation-guided Multi-homography Warping
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Large parallax between images is an intractable issue in image stitching. Various warping-based methods are proposed to address it, yet the results are unsatisfactory. In this paper, we propose a novel image stitching method using multi-homography warping guided by image segmentation. Specifically, we leverage the Segment Anything Model to segment the target image into numerous contents and partition the feature points into multiple subsets via the energy-based multi-homography fitting algorithm. The multiple subsets of feature points are used to calculate the corresponding multiple homographies. For each segmented content in the overlapping region, we select its best-fitting homography with the lowest photometric error. For each segmented content in the non-overlapping region, we calculate a weighted combination of the linearized homographies. Finally, the target image is warped via the best-fitting homographies to align with the reference image, and the final panorama is generated via linear blending. Comprehensive experimental results on the public datasets demonstrate that our method provides the best alignment accuracy by a large margin, compared with the state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/tlliao/multi-homo-warp.
Fully Dynamic k-Means Coreset in Near-Optimal Update Time
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

We study in this paper the problem of maintaining a solution to $k$-median and $k$-means clustering in a fully dynamic setting. To do so, we present an algorithm to efficiently maintain a coreset, a compressed version of the dataset, that allows easy computation of a clustering solution at query time. Our coreset algorithm has near-optimal update time of $\tilde O(k)$ in general metric spaces, which reduces to $\tilde O(d)$ in the Euclidean space $\mathbb{R}^d$. The query time is $O(k^2)$ in general metrics, and $O(kd)$ in $\mathbb{R}^d$. To maintain a constant-factor approximation for $k$-median and $k$-means clustering in Euclidean space, this directly leads to an algorithm update time $\tilde O(d)$, and query time $\tilde O(kd + k^2)$. To maintain a $O(polylog~k)$-approximation, the query time is reduced to $\tilde O(kd)$.
GRACE: Graph-Regularized Attentive Convolutional Entanglement with Laplacian Smoothing for Robust DeepFake Video Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

As DeepFake video manipulation techniques escalate, posing profound threats, the urgent need to develop efficient detection strategies is underscored. However, one particular issue lies with facial images being mis-detected, often originating from degraded videos or adversarial attacks, leading to unexpected temporal artifacts that can undermine the efficacy of DeepFake video detection techniques. This paper introduces a novel method for robust DeepFake video detection, harnessing the power of the proposed Graph-Regularized Attentive Convolutional Entanglement (GRACE) based on the graph convolutional network with graph Laplacian to address the aforementioned challenges. First, conventional Convolution Neural Networks are deployed to perform spatiotemporal features for the entire video. Then, the spatial and temporal features are mutually entangled by constructing a graph with sparse constraint, enforcing essential features of valid face images in the noisy face sequences remaining, thus augmenting stability and performance for DeepFake video detection. Furthermore, the Graph Laplacian prior is proposed in the graph convolutional network to remove the noise pattern in the feature space to further improve the performance. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to illustrate that our proposed method delivers state-of-the-art performance in DeepFake video detection under noisy face sequences. The source code is available at https://github.com/ming053l/GRACE.
Mining Reasons For And Against Vaccination From Unstructured Data Using Nichesourcing and AI Data Augmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

We present Reasons For and Against Vaccination (RFAV), a dataset for predicting reasons for and against vaccination, and scientific authorities used to justify them, annotated through nichesourcing and augmented using GPT4 and GPT3.5-Turbo. We show how it is possible to mine these reasons in non-structured text, under different task definitions, despite the high level of subjectivity involved and explore the impact of artificially augmented data using in-context learning with GPT4 and GPT3.5-Turbo. We publish the dataset and the trained models along with the annotation manual used to train annotators and define the task.
The SIFo Benchmark: Investigating the Sequential Instruction Following Ability of Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Following multiple instructions is a crucial ability for large language models (LLMs). Evaluating this ability comes with significant challenges: (i) limited coherence between multiple instructions, (ii) positional bias where the order of instructions affects model performance, and (iii) a lack of objectively verifiable tasks. To address these issues, we introduce a benchmark designed to evaluate models' abilities to follow multiple instructions through sequential instruction following (SIFo) tasks. In SIFo, the successful completion of multiple instructions is verifiable by examining only the final instruction. Our benchmark evaluates instruction following using four tasks (text modification, question answering, mathematics, and security rules), each assessing different aspects of sequential instruction following. Our evaluation of popular LLMs, both closed-source and open-source, shows that more recent and larger models significantly outperform their older and smaller counterparts on the SIFo tasks, validating the benchmark's effectiveness. All models struggle with following sequences of instructions, hinting at an important lack of robustness of today's language models.
BMW Agents -- A Framework For Task Automation Through Multi-Agent Collaboration
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2024
Year: 2024

Autonomous agents driven by Large Language Models (LLMs) offer enormous potential for automation. Early proof of this technology can be found in various demonstrations of agents solving complex tasks, interacting with external systems to augment their knowledge, and triggering actions. In particular, workflows involving multiple agents solving complex tasks in a collaborative fashion exemplify their capacity to operate in less strict and less well-defined environments. Thus, a multi-agent approach has great potential for serving as a backbone in many industrial applications, ranging from complex knowledge retrieval systems to next generation robotic process automation. Given the reasoning abilities within the current generation of LLMs, complex processes require a multi-step approach that includes a plan of well-defined and modular tasks. Depending on the level of complexity, these tasks can be executed either by a single agent or a group of agents. In this work, we focus on designing a flexible agent engineering framework with careful attention to planning and execution, capable of handling complex use case applications across various domains. The proposed framework provides reliability in industrial applications and presents techniques to ensure a scalable, flexible, and collaborative workflow for multiple autonomous agents working together towards solving tasks.
Converter: A CEAML Reasoner Python package to Streamline Orchestration Across Cloud and Edge Continuum
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

In recent years, there has been a concerted effort in both industry and research sectors to innovate new approaches to DevOps. The primary aim is to facilitate developers in transitioning their applications to Cloud or Edge platforms utilizing Docker or Kubernetes. This paper presents a tool called Converter, designed to interpret a TOSCA extension called CEAML and convert the descriptions into Kubernetes or Kubevirt definition files. Converter is available as a Python package and is recommended for use by orchestrators as an auxiliary tool for implementing CEAML.