OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Fine-Grained Urban Flow Inference with Multi-scale Representation Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Fine-grained urban flow inference (FUFI) is a crucial transportation service aimed at improving traffic efficiency and safety. FUFI can infer fine-grained urban traffic flows based solely on observed coarse-grained data. However, most of existing methods focus on the influence of single-scale static geographic information on FUFI, neglecting the interactions and dynamic information between different-scale regions within the city. Different-scale geographical features can capture redundant information from the same spatial areas. In order to effectively learn multi-scale information across time and space, we propose an effective fine-grained urban flow inference model called UrbanMSR, which uses self-supervised contrastive learning to obtain dynamic multi-scale representations of neighborhood-level and city-level geographic information, and fuses multi-scale representations to improve fine-grained accuracy. The fusion of multi-scale representations enhances fine-grained. We validate the performance through extensive experiments on three real-world datasets. The resutls compared with state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model.
Speed-up of Data Analysis with Kernel Trick in Encrypted Domain
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Homomorphic encryption (HE) is pivotal for secure computation on encrypted data, crucial in privacy-preserving data analysis. However, efficiently processing high-dimensional data in HE, especially for machine learning and statistical (ML/STAT) algorithms, poses a challenge. In this paper, we present an effective acceleration method using the kernel method for HE schemes, enhancing time performance in ML/STAT algorithms within encrypted domains. This technique, independent of underlying HE mechanisms and complementing existing optimizations, notably reduces costly HE multiplications, offering near constant time complexity relative to data dimension. Aimed at accessibility, this method is tailored for data scientists and developers with limited cryptography background, facilitating advanced data analysis in secure environments.
Deep Symbolic Optimization for Combinatorial Optimization: Accelerating Node Selection by Discovering Potential Heuristics
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Combinatorial optimization (CO) is one of the most fundamental mathematical models in real-world applications. Traditional CO solvers, such as Branch-and-Bound (B&B) solvers, heavily rely on expert-designed heuristics, which are reliable but require substantial manual tuning. Recent studies have leveraged deep learning (DL) models as an alternative to capture rich feature patterns for improved performance on GPU machines. Nonetheless, the drawbacks of high training and inference costs, as well as limited interpretability, severely hinder the adoption of DL methods in real-world applications. To address these challenges, we propose a novel deep symbolic optimization learning framework that combines their advantages. Specifically, we focus on the node selection module within B&B solvers -- namely, deep symbolic optimization for node selection (Dso4NS). With data-driven approaches, Dso4NS guides the search for mathematical expressions within the high-dimensional discrete symbolic space and then incorporates the highest-performing mathematical expressions into a solver. The data-driven model captures the rich feature information in the input data and generates symbolic expressions, while the expressions deployed in solvers enable fast inference with high interpretability. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of Dso4NS in learning high-quality expressions, outperforming existing approaches on a CPU machine. Encouragingly, the learned CPU-based policies consistently achieve performance comparable to state-of-the-art GPU-based approaches.
Towards Efficient Pareto Set Approximation via Mixture of Experts Based Model Fusion
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Solving multi-objective optimization problems for large deep neural networks is a challenging task due to the complexity of the loss landscape and the expensive computational cost of training and evaluating models. Efficient Pareto front approximation of large models enables multi-objective optimization for various tasks such as multi-task learning and trade-off analysis. Existing algorithms for learning Pareto set, including (1) evolutionary, hypernetworks, and hypervolume-maximization methods, are computationally expensive and have restricted scalability to large models; (2) Scalarization algorithms, where a separate model is trained for each objective ray, which is inefficient for learning the entire Pareto set and fails to capture the objective trade-offs effectively. Inspired by the recent success of model merging, we propose a practical and scalable approach to Pareto set learning problem via mixture of experts (MoE) based model fusion. By ensembling the weights of specialized single-task models, the MoE module can effectively capture the trade-offs between multiple objectives and closely approximate the entire Pareto set of large neural networks. Once the routers are learned and a preference vector is set, the MoE module can be unloaded, thus no additional computational cost is introduced during inference. We conduct extensive experiments on vision and language tasks using large-scale models such as CLIP-ViT and GPT-2. The experimental results demonstrate that our method efficiently approximates the entire Pareto front of large models. Using only hundreds of trainable parameters of the MoE routers, our method even has lower memory usage compared to linear scalarization and algorithms that learn a single Pareto optimal solution, and are scalable to both the number of objectives and the size of the model.
Sim-to-Real Transfer via 3D Feature Fields for Vision-and-Language Navigation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) enables the agent to navigate to a remote location in 3D environments following the natural language instruction. In this field, the agent is usually trained and evaluated in the navigation simulators, lacking effective approaches for sim-to-real transfer. The VLN agents with only a monocular camera exhibit extremely limited performance, while the mainstream VLN models trained with panoramic observation, perform better but are difficult to deploy on most monocular robots. For this case, we propose a sim-to-real transfer approach to endow the monocular robots with panoramic traversability perception and panoramic semantic understanding, thus smoothly transferring the high-performance panoramic VLN models to the common monocular robots. In this work, the semantic traversable map is proposed to predict agent-centric navigable waypoints, and the novel view representations of these navigable waypoints are predicted through the 3D feature fields. These methods broaden the limited field of view of the monocular robots and significantly improve navigation performance in the real world. Our VLN system outperforms previous SOTA monocular VLN methods in R2R-CE and RxR-CE benchmarks within the simulation environments and is also validated in real-world environments, providing a practical and high-performance solution for real-world VLN.
GeoSEE: Regional Socio-Economic Estimation With a Large Language Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

Moving beyond traditional surveys, combining heterogeneous data sources with AI-driven inference models brings new opportunities to measure socio-economic conditions, such as poverty and population, over expansive geographic areas. The current research presents GeoSEE, a method that can estimate various socio-economic indicators using a unified pipeline powered by a large language model (LLM). Presented with a diverse set of information modules, including those pre-constructed from satellite imagery, GeoSEE selects which modules to use in estimation, for each indicator and country. This selection is guided by the LLM's prior socio-geographic knowledge, which functions similarly to the insights of a domain expert. The system then computes target indicators via in-context learning after aggregating results from selected modules in the format of natural language-based texts. Comprehensive evaluation across countries at various stages of development reveals that our method outperforms other predictive models in both unsupervised and low-shot contexts. This reliable performance under data-scarce setting in under-developed or developing countries, combined with its cost-effectiveness, underscores its potential to continuously support and monitor the progress of Sustainable Development Goals, such as poverty alleviation and equitable growth, on a global scale.
Same App, Different Behaviors: Uncovering Device-specific Behaviors in Android Apps
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

The Android ecosystem faces a notable challenge known as fragmentation, which denotes the extensive diversity within the system. This issue is mainly related to differences in system versions, device hardware specifications, and customizations introduced by manufacturers. The growing divergence among devices leads to marked variations in how a given app behaves across diverse devices. This is referred to as device-specific behaviors. In this work, we present the first large-scale empirical study of device-specific behaviors in real-world Android apps. We have designed a three-phase static analysis framework to accurately detect and understand the device-specific behaviors. Upon employing our tool on a dataset comprising more than 20,000 apps, we detected device-specific behaviors in 2,357 of them. By examining the distribution of device-specific behaviors, our analysis revealed that apps within the Chinese third-party app market exhibit more relevant behaviors compared to their counterparts in Google Play. Additionally, these behaviors are more likely to feature dominant brands that hold larger market shares. Reflecting this, we have classified these device-specific behaviors into 29 categories based on implemented functionalities, providing structured insight into these behaviors. Beyond common behaviors like issue fixes and feature adaptations, we observed 33 aggressive apps, including popular ones with millions of downloads, abusing system properties of customized ROMs to obtain user-unresettable identifiers without requiring permission, substantially impacting user privacy. Finally, we investigated the origins of device-specific behaviors, revealing significant challenges developers face in implementing them comprehensively. Our research sheds light on the promising but less touched research direction of device-specific behaviors, benefiting community stakeholders.
From Manifestations to Cognitive Architectures: a Scalable Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

The Artificial Intelligence field is flooded with optimisation methods. In this paper, we change the focus to developing modelling methods with the aim of getting us closer to Artificial General Intelligence. To do so, we propose a novel way to interpret reality as an information source, that is later translated into a computational framework able to capture and represent such information. This framework is able to build elements of classical cognitive architectures, like Long Term Memory and Working Memory, starting from a simple primitive that only processes Spatial Distributed Representations. Moreover, it achieves such level of verticality in a seamless scalable hierarchical way.
Unraveling Anomalies in Time: Unsupervised Discovery and Isolation of Anomalous Behavior in Bio-regenerative Life Support System Telemetry
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The detection of abnormal or critical system states is essential in condition monitoring. While much attention is given to promptly identifying anomalies, a retrospective analysis of these anomalies can significantly enhance our comprehension of the underlying causes of observed undesired behavior. This aspect becomes particularly critical when the monitored system is deployed in a vital environment. In this study, we delve into anomalies within the domain of Bio-Regenerative Life Support Systems (BLSS) for space exploration and analyze anomalies found in telemetry data stemming from the EDEN ISS space greenhouse in Antarctica. We employ time series clustering on anomaly detection results to categorize various types of anomalies in both uni- and multivariate settings. We then assess the effectiveness of these methods in identifying systematic anomalous behavior. Additionally, we illustrate that the anomaly detection methods MDI and DAMP produce complementary results, as previously indicated by research.
GradeADreamer: Enhanced Text-to-3D Generation Using Gaussian Splatting and Multi-View Diffusion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Text-to-3D generation has shown promising results, yet common challenges such as the Multi-face Janus problem and extended generation time for high-quality assets. In this paper, we address these issues by introducing a novel three-stage training pipeline called GradeADreamer. This pipeline is capable of producing high-quality assets with a total generation time of under 30 minutes using only a single RTX 3090 GPU. Our proposed method employs a Multi-view Diffusion Model, MVDream, to generate Gaussian Splats as a prior, followed by refining geometry and texture using StableDiffusion. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly mitigates the Multi-face Janus problem and achieves the highest average user preference ranking compared to previous state-of-the-art methods. The project code is available at https://github.com/trapoom555/GradeADreamer.
Robust compressive tracking via online weighted multiple instance learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Developing a robust object tracker is a challenging task due to factors such as occlusion, motion blur, fast motion, illumination variations, rotation, background clutter, low resolution and deformation across the frames. In the literature, lots of good approaches based on sparse representation have already been presented to tackle the above problems. However, most of the algorithms do not focus on the learning of sparse representation. They only consider the modeling of target appearance and therefore drift away from the target with the imprecise training samples. By considering all the above factors in mind, we have proposed a visual object tracking algorithm by integrating a coarse-to-fine search strategy based on sparse representation and the weighted multiple instance learning (WMIL) algorithm. Compared with the other trackers, our approach has more information of the original signal with less complexity due to the coarse-to-fine search method, and also has weights for important samples. Thus, it can easily discriminate the background features from the foreground. Furthermore, we have also selected the samples from the un-occluded sub-regions to efficiently develop the strong classifier. As a consequence, a stable and robust object tracker is achieved to tackle all the aforementioned problems. Experimental results with quantitative as well as qualitative analysis on challenging benchmark datasets show the accuracy and efficiency of our method.
Experiments in News Bias Detection with Pre-Trained Neural Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The World Wide Web provides unrivalled access to information globally, including factual news reporting and commentary. However, state actors and commercial players increasingly spread biased (distorted) or fake (non-factual) information to promote their agendas. We compare several large, pre-trained language models on the task of sentence-level news bias detection and sub-type classification, providing quantitative and qualitative results.
Rule Based Learning with Dynamic (Graph) Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

A common problem of classical neural network architectures is that additional information or expert knowledge cannot be naturally integrated into the learning process. To overcome this limitation, we propose a two-step approach consisting of (1) generating rule functions from knowledge and (2) using these rules to define rule based layers -- a new type of dynamic neural network layer. The focus of this work is on the second step, i.e., rule based layers that are designed to dynamically arrange learnable parameters in the weight matrices and bias vectors depending on the input samples. Indeed, we prove that our approach generalizes classical feed-forward layers such as fully connected and convolutional layers by choosing appropriate rules. As a concrete application we present rule based graph neural networks (RuleGNNs) that overcome some limitations of ordinary graph neural networks. Our experiments show that the predictive performance of RuleGNNs is comparable to state-of-the-art graph classifiers using simple rules based on Weisfeiler-Leman labeling and pattern counting. Moreover, we introduce new synthetic benchmark graph datasets to show how to integrate expert knowledge into RuleGNNs making them more powerful than ordinary graph neural networks.
Outlier detection in maritime environments using AIS data and deep recurrent architectures
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

A methodology based on deep recurrent models for maritime surveillance, over publicly available Automatic Identification System (AIS) data, is presented in this paper. The setup employs a deep Recurrent Neural Network (RNN)-based model, for encoding and reconstructing the observed ships' motion patterns. Our approach is based on a thresholding mechanism, over the calculated errors between observed and reconstructed motion patterns of maritime vessels. Specifically, a deep-learning framework, i.e. an encoder-decoder architecture, is trained using the observed motion patterns, enabling the models to learn and predict the expected trajectory, which will be compared to the effective ones. Our models, particularly the bidirectional GRU with recurrent dropouts, showcased superior performance in capturing the temporal dynamics of maritime data, illustrating the potential of deep learning to enhance maritime surveillance capabilities. Our work lays a solid foundation for future research in this domain, highlighting a path toward improved maritime safety through the innovative application of technology.
Bag of Lies: Robustness in Continuous Pre-training BERT
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This study aims to acquire more insights into the continuous pre-training phase of BERT regarding entity knowledge, using the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study. Since the pandemic emerged after the last update of BERT's pre-training data, the model has little to no entity knowledge about COVID-19. Using continuous pre-training, we control what entity knowledge is available to the model. We compare the baseline BERT model with the further pre-trained variants on the fact-checking benchmark Check-COVID. To test the robustness of continuous pre-training, we experiment with several adversarial methods to manipulate the input data, such as training on misinformation and shuffling the word order until the input becomes nonsensical. Surprisingly, our findings reveal that these methods do not degrade, and sometimes even improve, the model's downstream performance. This suggests that continuous pre-training of BERT is robust against misinformation. Furthermore, we are releasing a new dataset, consisting of original texts from academic publications in the LitCovid repository and their AI-generated false counterparts.
STALL+: Boosting LLM-based Repository-level Code Completion with Static Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Repository-level code completion is challenging as it involves complicated contexts from multiple files in the repository. To date, researchers have proposed two technical categories to enhance LLM-based repository-level code completion, i.e., retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and static analysis integration. This work performs the first study on the static analysis integration in LLM-based repository-level code completion by investigating both the effectiveness and efficiency of static analysis integration strategies across different phases of code completion. We first implement a framework STALL+, which supports an extendable and customizable integration of multiple static analysis strategies into the complete pipeline of LLM-based repository-level code completion; and based on STALL+, we perform extensive experiments by including different code LLMs on the latest repository-level code completion benchmark CrossCodeEval. Our findings show that integrating file-level dependencies in prompting phase performs the best while the integration in post-processing phase performs the worse. Additionally, we observe different improvements from static analysis between dynamic languages and static languages, i.e., the best combination is prompting-phase with decoding-phase integration for Java while the best combination is prompting-phase with post-processing-phase integration for Python given the limitations of statically analyzing dynamic languages. Additionally, we find the complementarity between RAG and static analysis integration as well as their cost-effectiveness after combination.
Off-Policy Evaluation from Logged Human Feedback
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Learning from human feedback has been central to recent advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Since the collection of human feedback is costly, a natural question to ask is if the new feedback always needs to collected. Or could we evaluate a new model with the human feedback on responses of another model? This motivates us to study off-policy evaluation from logged human feedback. We formalize the problem, propose both model-based and model-free estimators for policy values, and show how to optimize them. We analyze unbiasedness of our estimators and evaluate them empirically. Our estimators can predict the absolute values of evaluated policies, rank them, and be optimized.
Double-Anonymous Review for Robotics
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Prior research has investigated the benefits and costs of double-anonymous review (DAR, also known as double-blind review) in comparison to single-anonymous review (SAR) and open review (OR). Several review papers have attempted to compile experimental results in peer review research both broadly and in engineering and computer science. This document summarizes prior research in peer review that may inform decisions about the format of peer review in the field of robotics and makes some recommendations for potential next steps for robotics publication.
CycleTrajectory: An End-to-End Pipeline for Enriching and Analyzing GPS Trajectories to Understand Cycling Behavior and Environment
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

Global positioning system (GPS) trajectories recorded by mobile phones or action cameras offer valuable insights into sustainable mobility, as they provide fine-scale spatial and temporal characteristics of individual travel. However, the high volume, noise, and lack of semantic information in this data poses challenges for storage, analysis, and applications. To address these issues, we propose an end-to-end pipeline named CycleTrajectory for processing high-sampling rate GPS trajectory data from action cameras, leveraging OpenStreetMap (OSM) for semantic enrichment. The methodology includes (1) Data Preparation, which includes filtration, noise removal, and resampling; (2) Map Matching, which accurately aligns GPS points with road segments using the OSRM API; (3) OSM Data integration to enrich trajectories with road infrastructure details; and (4) Variable Calculation to derive metrics like distance, speed, and infrastructure usage. Validation of the map matching results shows an error rate of 5.64%, indicating the reliability of this pipeline. This approach enhances efficient GPS data preparation and facilitates a deeper understanding of cycling behavior and the cycling environment.