OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Challenges in Comparing Code Maintainability across Different Programming Languages
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Comparing the quality of software written in different computer languages is required in a variety of scenarios, e.g. multi-language projects or application selection process among candidates in different languages. We focus on the challenges related to comparing the maintainability quality typically through a maintainability index or technical debt approaches. We identify and discuss how to manage a number of challenges to produce comparable maintainability assessments across languages related to the programming paradigm (purely procedural vs OO vs multi-paradigm), the coverage of key quality dimensions, and the use of generic metrics vs more languages specific rules. Our work is based on a set of code analysis carried out in Wallonia over the past 15 years.
Teaching Shortest Path Algorithms With a Robot and Overlaid Projections
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Robots have the potential to enhance teaching of advanced computer science topics, making abstract concepts more tangible and interactive. In this paper, we present Timmy-a GoPiGo robot augmented with projections to demonstrate shortest path algorithms in an interactive learning environment. We integrated a JavaScript-based application that is projected around the robot, which allows users to construct graphs and visualise three different shortest path algorithms with colour-coded edges and vertices. Animated graph exploration and traversal are augmented by robot movements. To evaluate Timmy, we conducted two user studies. An initial study (n=10) to explore the feasibility of this type of teaching where participants were just observing both robot-synced and the on-screen-only visualisations. And a pilot study (n=6) where participants actively interacted with the system, constructed graphs and selected desired algorithms. In both studies we investigated the preferences towards the system and not the teaching outcome. Initial findings suggest that robots offer an engaging tool for teaching advanced algorithmic concepts, but highlight the need for further methodological refinements and larger-scale studies to fully evaluate their effectiveness.
Do LLMs Agree on the Creativity Evaluation of Alternative Uses?
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

This paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) show agreement in assessing creativity in responses to the Alternative Uses Test (AUT). While LLMs are increasingly used to evaluate creative content, previous studies have primarily focused on a single model assessing responses generated by the same model or humans. This paper explores whether LLMs can impartially and accurately evaluate creativity in outputs generated by both themselves and other models. Using an oracle benchmark set of AUT responses, categorized by creativity level (common, creative, and highly creative), we experiment with four state-of-the-art LLMs evaluating these outputs. We test both scoring and ranking methods and employ two evaluation settings (comprehensive and segmented) to examine if LLMs agree on the creativity evaluation of alternative uses. Results reveal high inter-model agreement, with Spearman correlations averaging above 0.7 across models and reaching over 0.77 with respect to the oracle, indicating a high level of agreement and validating the reliability of LLMs in creativity assessment of alternative uses. Notably, models do not favour their own responses, instead they provide similar creativity assessment scores or rankings for alternative uses generated by other models. These findings suggest that LLMs exhibit impartiality and high alignment in creativity evaluation, offering promising implications for their use in automated creativity assessment.
How Texts Help? A Fine-grained Evaluation to Reveal the Role of Language in Vision-Language Tracking
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Vision-language tracking (VLT) extends traditional single object tracking by incorporating textual information, providing semantic guidance to enhance tracking performance under challenging conditions like fast motion and deformations. However, current VLT trackers often underperform compared to single-modality methods on multiple benchmarks, with semantic information sometimes becoming a "distraction." To address this, we propose VLTVerse, the first fine-grained evaluation framework for VLT trackers that comprehensively considers multiple challenge factors and diverse semantic information, hoping to reveal the role of language in VLT. Our contributions include: (1) VLTVerse introduces 10 sequence-level challenge labels and 6 types of multi-granularity semantic information, creating a flexible and multi-dimensional evaluation space for VLT; (2) leveraging 60 subspaces formed by combinations of challenge factors and semantic types, we conduct systematic fine-grained evaluations of three mainstream SOTA VLT trackers, uncovering their performance bottlenecks across complex scenarios and offering a novel perspective on VLT evaluation; (3) through decoupled analysis of experimental results, we examine the impact of various semantic types on specific challenge factors in relation to different algorithms, providing essential guidance for enhancing VLT across data, evaluation, and algorithmic dimensions. The VLTVerse, toolkit, and results will be available at \url{http://metaverse.aitestunion.com}.
"All that Glitters": Approaches to Evaluations with Unreliable Model and Human Annotations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

"Gold" and "ground truth" human-mediated labels have error. The effects of this error can escape commonly reported metrics of label quality or obscure questions of accuracy, bias, fairness, and usefulness during model evaluation. This study demonstrates methods for answering such questions even in the context of very low reliabilities from expert humans. We analyze human labels, GPT model ratings, and transformer encoder model annotations describing the quality of classroom teaching, an important, expensive, and currently only human task. We answer the question of whether such a task can be automated using two Large Language Model (LLM) architecture families--encoders and GPT decoders, using novel approaches to evaluating label quality across six dimensions: Concordance, Confidence, Validity, Bias, Fairness, and Helpfulness. First, we demonstrate that using standard metrics in the presence of poor labels can mask both label and model quality: the encoder family of models achieve state-of-the-art, even "super-human", results across all classroom annotation tasks. But not all these positive results remain after using more rigorous evaluation measures which reveal spurious correlations and nonrandom racial biases across models and humans. This study then expands these methods to estimate how model use would change to human label quality if models were used in a human-in-the-loop context, finding that the variance captured in GPT model labels would worsen reliabilities for humans influenced by these models. We identify areas where some LLMs, within the generalizability of the current data, could improve the quality of expensive human ratings of classroom instruction.
Training an Open-Vocabulary Monocular 3D Object Detection Model without 3D Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Open-vocabulary 3D object detection has recently attracted considerable attention due to its broad applications in autonomous driving and robotics, which aims to effectively recognize novel classes in previously unseen domains. However, existing point cloud-based open-vocabulary 3D detection models are limited by their high deployment costs. In this work, we propose a novel open-vocabulary monocular 3D object detection framework, dubbed OVM3D-Det, which trains detectors using only RGB images, making it both cost-effective and scalable to publicly available data. Unlike traditional methods, OVM3D-Det does not require high-precision LiDAR or 3D sensor data for either input or generating 3D bounding boxes. Instead, it employs open-vocabulary 2D models and pseudo-LiDAR to automatically label 3D objects in RGB images, fostering the learning of open-vocabulary monocular 3D detectors. However, training 3D models with labels directly derived from pseudo-LiDAR is inadequate due to imprecise boxes estimated from noisy point clouds and severely occluded objects. To address these issues, we introduce two innovative designs: adaptive pseudo-LiDAR erosion and bounding box refinement with prior knowledge from large language models. These techniques effectively calibrate the 3D labels and enable RGB-only training for 3D detectors. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of OVM3D-Det over baselines in both indoor and outdoor scenarios. The code will be released.
Can a Large Language Model Learn Matrix Functions In Context?
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated the ability to solve complex tasks through In-Context Learning (ICL), where models learn from a few input-output pairs without explicit fine-tuning. In this paper, we explore the capacity of LLMs to solve non-linear numerical computations, with specific emphasis on functions of the Singular Value Decomposition. Our experiments show that while LLMs perform comparably to traditional models such as Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) based Linear Regression and Neural Networks (NN) for simpler tasks, they outperform these models on more complex tasks, particularly in the case of top-k Singular Values. Furthermore, LLMs demonstrate strong scalability, maintaining high accuracy even as the matrix size increases. Additionally, we found that LLMs can achieve high accuracy with minimal prior examples, converging quickly and avoiding the overfitting seen in classical models. These results suggest that LLMs could provide an efficient alternative to classical methods for solving high-dimensional problems. Future work will focus on extending these findings to larger matrices and more complex matrix operations while exploring the effect of using different numerical representations in ICL.
Fixing the Perspective: A Critical Examination of Zero-1-to-3
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Novel view synthesis is a fundamental challenge in image-to-3D generation, requiring the generation of target view images from a set of conditioning images and their relative poses. While recent approaches like Zero-1-to-3 have demonstrated promising results using conditional latent diffusion models, they face significant challenges in generating consistent and accurate novel views, particularly when handling multiple conditioning images. In this work, we conduct a thorough investigation of Zero-1-to-3's cross-attention mechanism within the Spatial Transformer of the diffusion 2D-conditional UNet. Our analysis reveals a critical discrepancy between Zero-1-to-3's theoretical framework and its implementation, specifically in the processing of image-conditional context. We propose two significant improvements: (1) a corrected implementation that enables effective utilization of the cross-attention mechanism, and (2) an enhanced architecture that can leverage multiple conditional views simultaneously. Our theoretical analysis and preliminary results suggest potential improvements in novel view synthesis consistency and accuracy.
GSurf: 3D Reconstruction via Signed Distance Fields with Direct Gaussian Supervision
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Surface reconstruction from multi-view images is a core challenge in 3D vision. Recent studies have explored signed distance fields (SDF) within Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) to achieve high-fidelity surface reconstructions. However, these approaches often suffer from slow training and rendering speeds compared to 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS). Current state-of-the-art techniques attempt to fuse depth information to extract geometry from 3DGS, but frequently result in incomplete reconstructions and fragmented surfaces. In this paper, we introduce GSurf, a novel end-to-end method for learning a signed distance field directly from Gaussian primitives. The continuous and smooth nature of SDF addresses common issues in the 3DGS family, such as holes resulting from noisy or missing depth data. By using Gaussian splatting for rendering, GSurf avoids the redundant volume rendering typically required in other GS and SDF integrations. Consequently, GSurf achieves faster training and rendering speeds while delivering 3D reconstruction quality comparable to neural implicit surface methods, such as VolSDF and NeuS. Experimental results across various benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in producing high-fidelity 3D reconstructions.
Beyond Data Scarcity: A Frequency-Driven Framework for Zero-Shot Forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Time series forecasting is critical in numerous real-world applications, requiring accurate predictions of future values based on observed patterns. While traditional forecasting techniques work well in in-domain scenarios with ample data, they struggle when data is scarce or not available at all, motivating the emergence of zero-shot and few-shot learning settings. Recent advancements often leverage large-scale foundation models for such tasks, but these methods require extensive data and compute resources, and their performance may be hindered by ineffective learning from the available training set. This raises a fundamental question: What factors influence effective learning from data in time series forecasting? Toward addressing this, we propose using Fourier analysis to investigate how models learn from synthetic and real-world time series data. Our findings reveal that forecasters commonly suffer from poor learning from data with multiple frequencies and poor generalization to unseen frequencies, which impedes their predictive performance. To alleviate these issues, we present a novel synthetic data generation framework, designed to enhance real data or replace it completely by creating task-specific frequency information, requiring only the sampling rate of the target data. Our approach, Freq-Synth, improves the robustness of both foundation as well as nonfoundation forecast models in zero-shot and few-shot settings, facilitating more reliable time series forecasting under limited data scenarios.
Beyond adaptive gradient: Fast-Controlled Minibatch Algorithm for large-scale optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Adaptive gradient methods have been increasingly adopted by deep learning community due to their fast convergence and reduced sensitivity to hyper-parameters. However, these methods come with limitations, such as increased memory requirements for elements like moving averages and a poorly understood convergence theory. To overcome these challenges, we introduce F-CMA, a Fast-Controlled Mini-batch Algorithm with a random reshuffling method featuring a sufficient decrease condition and a line-search procedure to ensure loss reduction per epoch, along with its deterministic proof of global convergence to a stationary point. To evaluate the F-CMA, we integrate it into conventional training protocols for classification tasks involving both convolutional neural networks and vision transformer models, allowing for a direct comparison with popular optimizers. Computational tests show significant improvements, including a decrease in the overall training time by up to 68%, an increase in per-epoch efficiency by up to 20%, and in model accuracy by up to 5%.
Benchmarking Active Learning for NILM
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) focuses on disaggregating total household power consumption into appliance-specific usage. Many advanced NILM methods are based on neural networks that typically require substantial amounts of labeled appliance data, which can be challenging and costly to collect in real-world settings. We hypothesize that appliance data from all households does not uniformly contribute to NILM model improvements. Thus, we propose an active learning approach to selectively install appliance monitors in a limited number of houses. This work is the first to benchmark the use of active learning for strategically selecting appliance-level data to optimize NILM performance. We first develop uncertainty-aware neural networks for NILM and then install sensors in homes where disaggregation uncertainty is highest. Benchmarking our method on the publicly available Pecan Street Dataport dataset, we demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms a standard random baseline and achieves performance comparable to models trained on the entire dataset. Using this approach, we achieve comparable NILM accuracy with approximately 30% of the data, and for a fixed number of sensors, we observe up to a 2x reduction in disaggregation errors compared to random sampling.
FedQP: Towards Accurate Federated Learning using Quadratic Programming Guided Mutation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Due to the advantages of privacy-preserving, Federated Learning (FL) is widely used in distributed machine learning systems. However, existing FL methods suffer from low-inference performance caused by data heterogeneity. Specifically, due to heterogeneous data, the optimization directions of different local models vary greatly, making it difficult for the traditional FL method to get a generalized global model that performs well on all clients. As one of the state-of-the-art FL methods, the mutation-based FL method attempts to adopt a stochastic mutation strategy to guide the model training towards a well-generalized area (i.e., flat area in the loss landscape). Specifically, mutation allows the model to shift within the solution space, providing an opportunity to escape areas with poor generalization (i.e., sharp area). However, the stochastic mutation strategy easily results in diverse optimal directions of mutated models, which limits the performance of the existing mutation-based FL method. To achieve higher performance, this paper proposes a novel mutation-based FL approach named FedQP, utilizing a quadratic programming strategy to regulate the mutation directions wisely. By biasing the model mutation towards the direction of gradient update rather than traditional random mutation, FedQP can effectively guide the model to optimize towards a well-generalized area (i.e., flat area). Experiments on multiple well-known datasets show that our quadratic programming-guided mutation strategy effectively improves the inference accuracy of the global model in various heterogeneous data scenarios.
Evaluating Large Language Models for Causal Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we consider the process of transforming causal domain knowledge into a representation that aligns more closely with guidelines from causal data science. To this end, we introduce two novel tasks related to distilling causal domain knowledge into causal variables and detecting interaction entities using LLMs. We have determined that contemporary LLMs are helpful tools for conducting causal modeling tasks in collaboration with human experts, as they can provide a wider perspective. Specifically, LLMs, such as GPT-4-turbo and Llama3-70b, perform better in distilling causal domain knowledge into causal variables compared to sparse expert models, such as Mixtral-8x22b. On the contrary, sparse expert models such as Mixtral-8x22b stand out as the most effective in identifying interaction entities. Finally, we highlight the dependency between the domain where the entities are generated and the performance of the chosen LLM for causal modeling.
From Laws to Motivation: Guiding Exploration through Law-Based Reasoning and Rewards
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) are two powerful approaches for building autonomous agents. However, due to limited understanding of the game environment, agents often resort to inefficient exploration and trial-and-error, struggling to develop long-term strategies or make decisions. We propose a method that extracts experience from interaction records to model the underlying laws of the game environment, using these experience as internal motivation to guide agents. These experience, expressed in language, are highly flexible and can either assist agents in reasoning directly or be transformed into rewards for guiding training. Our evaluation results in Crafter demonstrate that both RL and LLM agents benefit from these experience, leading to improved overall performance.
Recent insights into the impact of geopolitical tensions: Quantifying the structure of computer science professors of Chinese descent in the United States
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

The geopolitical tensions between China and the US have dramatically reshaped the American scientific workforce's landscape. To gain a deeper understanding of this circumstance, this study selects the discipline of computer science as a representative case for empirical investigations, aiming to explore the current situation of US-based Chinese-descent computer science professors. One thousand and seventy-eight tenured or tenure-track professors of Chinese descent from the computer science departments of 108 prestigious US universities are profiled, in order to quantify their structure primarily along gender, schooling, and expertise lines. The findings presented in this paper suggest that China-US tensions have made it more difficult for the US higher education system to retain valuable computer science professors of Chinese descent, particularly those in their mid-to late career stages, and that nearly 50% of the existing professors have less than seven years of faculty experience. In addition, the deterioration in faculty retention varies across fields of research, education backgrounds, and gender groups. Specifically, among the professors we are concerned about, those who do not work on AI or Systems, those who lack study experience at US universities, and those who are women, are underrepresented, albeit in different forms and to varying degrees. In a nutshell, the focal professoriate has not only shrunk in size, as has been widely reported, but also lost some of its diversity in structure. This paper has policy implications for the mobility of scientific talent, especially in an era of geopolitical challenges.
Making Images from Images: Interleaving Denoising and Transformation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Simply by rearranging the regions of an image, we can create a new image of any subject matter. The definition of regions is user definable, ranging from regularly and irregularly-shaped blocks, concentric rings, or even individual pixels. Our method extends and improves recent work in the generation of optical illusions by simultaneously learning not only the content of the images, but also the parameterized transformations required to transform the desired images into each other. By learning the image transforms, we allow any source image to be pre-specified; any existing image (e.g. the Mona Lisa) can be transformed to a novel subject. We formulate this process as a constrained optimization problem and address it through interleaving the steps of image diffusion with an energy minimization step. Unlike previous methods, increasing the number of regions actually makes the problem easier and improves results. We demonstrate our approach in both pixel and latent spaces. Creative extensions, such as using infinite copies of the source image and employing multiple source images, are also given.