OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Automated Camera Calibration via Homography Estimation with GNNs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Over the past few decades, a significant rise of camera-based applications for traffic monitoring has occurred. Governments and local administrations are increasingly relying on the data collected from these cameras to enhance road safety and optimize traffic conditions. However, for effective data utilization, it is imperative to ensure accurate and automated calibration of the involved cameras. This paper proposes a novel approach to address this challenge by leveraging the topological structure of intersections. We propose a framework involving the generation of a set of synthetic intersection viewpoint images from a bird's-eye-view image, framed as a graph of virtual cameras to model these images. Using the capabilities of Graph Neural Networks, we effectively learn the relationships within this graph, thereby facilitating the estimation of a homography matrix. This estimation leverages the neighbourhood representation for any real-world camera and is enhanced by exploiting multiple images instead of a single match. In turn, the homography matrix allows the retrieval of extrinsic calibration parameters. As a result, the proposed framework demonstrates superior performance on both synthetic datasets and real-world cameras, setting a new state-of-the-art benchmark.
Learning Class and Domain Augmentations for Single-Source Open-Domain Generalization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Single-source open-domain generalization (SS-ODG) addresses the challenge of labeled source domains with supervision during training and unlabeled novel target domains during testing. The target domain includes both known classes from the source domain and samples from previously unseen classes. Existing techniques for SS-ODG primarily focus on calibrating source-domain classifiers to identify open samples in the target domain. However, these methods struggle with visually fine-grained open-closed data, often misclassifying open samples as closed-set classes. Moreover, relying solely on a single source domain restricts the model's ability to generalize. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel framework called SODG-Net that simultaneously synthesizes novel domains and generates pseudo-open samples using a learning-based objective, in contrast to the ad-hoc mixing strategies commonly found in the literature. Our approach enhances generalization by diversifying the styles of known class samples using a novel metric criterion and generates diverse pseudo-open samples to train a unified and confident multi-class classifier capable of handling both open and closed-set data. Extensive experimental evaluations conducted on multiple benchmarks consistently demonstrate the superior performance of SODG-Net compared to the literature.
Get the Ball Rolling: Alerting Autonomous Robots When to Help to Close the Healthcare Loop
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

To facilitate the advancement of research in healthcare robots without human intervention or commands, we introduce the Autonomous Helping Challenge, along with a crowd-sourcing large-scale dataset. The goal is to create healthcare robots that possess the ability to determine when assistance is necessary, generate useful sub-tasks to aid in planning, carry out these plans through a physical robot, and receive feedback from the environment in order to generate new tasks and continue the process. Besides the general challenge in open-ended scenarios, Autonomous Helping focuses on three specific challenges: autonomous task generation, the gap between the current scene and static commonsense, and the gap between language instruction and the real world. Additionally, we propose Helpy, a potential approach to close the healthcare loop in the learning-free setting.
Drone-Enabled Load Management for Solar Small Cell Networks in Next-Gen Communications Optimization for Solar Small Cells
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

In recent years, the cellular industry has witnessed a major evolution in communication technologies. It is evident that the Next Generation of cellular networks(NGN) will play a pivotal role in the acceptance of emerging IoT applications supporting high data rates, better Quality of Service(QoS), and reduced latency. However, the deployment of NGN will introduce a power overhead on the communication infrastructure. Addressing the critical energy constraints in 5G and beyond, this study introduces an innovative load transfer method using drone-carried airborne base stations (BSs) for stable and secure power reallocation within a green micro-grid network. This method effectively manages energy deficit by transferring aerial BSs from high to low-energy cells, depending on user density and the availability of aerial BSs, optimizing power distribution in advanced cellular networks. The complexity of the proposed system is significantly lower as compared to existing power cable transmission systems currently employed in powering the BSs. Furthermore, our proposed algorithm has been shown to reduce BS power outages while requiring a minimum number of drone exchanges. We have conducted a thorough review on real-world dataset to prove the efficacy of our proposed approach to support BS during high load demand times
CCMR: High Resolution Optical Flow Estimation via Coarse-to-Fine Context-Guided Motion Reasoning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Attention-based motion aggregation concepts have recently shown their usefulness in optical flow estimation, in particular when it comes to handling occluded regions. However, due to their complexity, such concepts have been mainly restricted to coarse-resolution single-scale approaches that fail to provide the detailed outcome of high-resolution multi-scale networks. In this paper, we hence propose CCMR: a high-resolution coarse-to-fine approach that leverages attention-based motion grouping concepts to multi-scale optical flow estimation. CCMR relies on a hierarchical two-step attention-based context-motion grouping strategy that first computes global multi-scale context features and then uses them to guide the actual motion grouping. As we iterate both steps over all coarse-to-fine scales, we adapt cross covariance image transformers to allow for an efficient realization while maintaining scale-dependent properties. Experiments and ablations demonstrate that our efforts of combining multi-scale and attention-based concepts pay off. By providing highly detailed flow fields with strong improvements in both occluded and non-occluded regions, our CCMR approach not only outperforms both the corresponding single-scale attention-based and multi-scale attention-free baselines by up to 23.0% and 21.6%, respectively, it also achieves state-of-the-art results, ranking first on KITTI 2015 and second on MPI Sintel Clean and Final. Code and trained models are available at https://github.com/cv-stuttgart /CCMR.
CIRCLE: Multi-Turn Query Clarifications with Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

Users often have trouble formulating their information needs into words on the first try when searching online. This can lead to frustration, as they may have to reformulate their queries when retrieved information is not relevant. This can be due to a lack of familiarity with the specific terminology related to their search topic, or because queries are ambiguous and related to multiple topics. Most modern search engines have interactive features that suggest clarifications or similar queries based on what others have searched for. However, the proposed models are either based on a single interaction or evaluated on search logs, hindering the naturalness of the interactions. In this paper, we introduce CIRCLE, a generative model for multi-turn query Clarifications wIth ReinforCement LEarning that leverages multi-turn interactions through a user simulation framework. Our model aims at generating a diverse set of query clarifications using a pretrained language model fine-tuned using reinforcement learning. We evaluate it against well established google suggestions using a user simulation framework.
Learning Independently from Causality in Multi-Agent Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) comprises an area of growing interest in the field of machine learning. Despite notable advances, there are still problems that require investigation. The lazy agent pathology is a famous problem in MARL that denotes the event when some of the agents in a MARL team do not contribute to the common goal, letting the teammates do all the work. In this work, we aim to investigate this problem from a causality-based perspective. We intend to create the bridge between the fields of MARL and causality and argue about the usefulness of this link. We study a fully decentralised MARL setup where agents need to learn cooperation strategies and show that there is a causal relation between individual observations and the team reward. The experiments carried show how this relation can be used to improve independent agents in MARL, resulting not only on better performances as a team but also on the rise of more intelligent behaviours on individual agents.
Pyclipse, a library for deidentification of free-text clinical notes
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Automated deidentification of clinical text data is crucial due to the high cost of manual deidentification, which has been a barrier to sharing clinical text and the advancement of clinical natural language processing. However, creating effective automated deidentification tools faces several challenges, including issues in reproducibility due to differences in text processing, evaluation methods, and a lack of consistency across clinical domains and institutions. To address these challenges, we propose the pyclipse framework, a unified and configurable evaluation procedure to streamline the comparison of deidentification algorithms. Pyclipse serves as a single interface for running open-source deidentification algorithms on local clinical data, allowing for context-specific evaluation. To demonstrate the utility of pyclipse, we compare six deidentification algorithms across four public and two private clinical text datasets. We find that algorithm performance consistently falls short of the results reported in the original papers, even when evaluated on the same benchmark dataset. These discrepancies highlight the complexity of accurately assessing and comparing deidentification algorithms, emphasizing the need for a reproducible, adjustable, and extensible framework like pyclipse. Our framework lays the foundation for a unified approach to evaluate and improve deidentification tools, ultimately enhancing patient protection in clinical natural language processing.
Robust Generalization Strategies for Morpheme Glossing in an Endangered Language Documentation Context
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Generalization is of particular importance in resource-constrained settings, where the available training data may represent only a small fraction of the distribution of possible texts. We investigate the ability of morpheme labeling models to generalize by evaluating their performance on unseen genres of text, and we experiment with strategies for closing the gap between performance on in-distribution and out-of-distribution data. Specifically, we use weight decay optimization, output denoising, and iterative pseudo-labeling, and achieve a 2% improvement on a test set containing texts from unseen genres. All experiments are performed using texts written in the Mayan language Uspanteko.
On the Intersection of Self-Correction and Trust in Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in performing complex cognitive tasks. However, their complexity and lack of transparency have raised several trustworthiness concerns, including the propagation of misinformation and toxicity. Recent research has explored the self-correction capabilities of LLMs to enhance their performance. In this work, we investigate whether these self-correction capabilities can be harnessed to improve the trustworthiness of LLMs. We conduct experiments focusing on two key aspects of trustworthiness: truthfulness and toxicity. Our findings reveal that self-correction can lead to improvements in toxicity and truthfulness, but the extent of these improvements varies depending on the specific aspect of trustworthiness and the nature of the task. Interestingly, our study also uncovers instances of "self-doubt" in LLMs during the self-correction process, introducing a new set of challenges that need to be addressed.
Multi-User Multi-IoT-Device Symbiotic Radio: A Novel Massive Access Scheme for Cellular IoT
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Symbiotic radio (SR) is a promising technique to support cellular Internet-of-Things (IoT) by forming a mutualistic relationship between IoT and cellular transmissions. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-user multi-IoT-device SR system to enable massive access in cellular IoT. In the considered system, the base station (BS) transmits information to multiple cellular users, and a number of IoT devices simultaneously backscatter their information to these users via the cellular signal. The cellular users jointly decode the information from the BS and IoT devices. Noting that the reflective links from the IoT devices can be regarded as the channel uncertainty of the direct links, we apply the robust design method to design the beamforming vectors at the BS. Specifically, the transmit power is minimized under the cellular transmission outage probability constraints and IoT transmission sum rate constraints. The algorithm based on semi-definite programming and difference-of-convex programming is proposed to solve the power minimization problem. Moreover, we consider a special case where each cellular user is associated with several adjacent IoT devices and propose a direction of arrival (DoA)-based transmit beamforming design approach. The DoA-based approach requires only the DoA and angular spread (AS) of the direct links instead of the instantaneous channel state information (CSI) of the reflective link channels, leading to a significant reduction in the channel feedback overhead. Simulation results have substantiated the multi-user multi-IoT-device SR system and the effectiveness of the proposed beamforming approaches. It is shown that the DoA-based beamforming approach achieves comparable performance as the CSI-based approach in the special case when the ASs are small.
MultiSPANS: A Multi-range Spatial-Temporal Transformer Network for Traffic Forecast via Structural Entropy Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Traffic forecasting is a complex multivariate time-series regression task of paramount importance for traffic management and planning. However, existing approaches often struggle to model complex multi-range dependencies using local spatiotemporal features and road network hierarchical knowledge. To address this, we propose MultiSPANS. First, considering that an individual recording point cannot reflect critical spatiotemporal local patterns, we design multi-filter convolution modules for generating informative ST-token embeddings to facilitate attention computation. Then, based on ST-token and spatial-temporal position encoding, we employ the Transformers to capture long-range temporal and spatial dependencies. Furthermore, we introduce structural entropy theory to optimize the spatial attention mechanism. Specifically, The structural entropy minimization algorithm is used to generate optimal road network hierarchies, i.e., encoding trees. Based on this, we propose a relative structural entropy-based position encoding and a multi-head attention masking scheme based on multi-layer encoding trees. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the presented framework over several state-of-the-art methods in real-world traffic datasets, and the longer historical windows are effectively utilized. The code is available at https://github.com/SELGroup/MultiSPANS.
Benchmarking Deep Facial Expression Recognition: An Extensive Protocol with Balanced Dataset in the Wild
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Facial expression recognition (FER) is a crucial part of human-computer interaction. Existing FER methods achieve high accuracy and generalization based on different open-source deep models and training approaches. However, the performance of these methods is not always good when encountering practical settings, which are seldom explored. In this paper, we collected a new in-the-wild facial expression dataset for cross-domain validation. Twenty-three commonly used network architectures were implemented and evaluated following a uniform protocol. Moreover, various setups, in terms of input resolutions, class balance management, and pre-trained strategies, were verified to show the corresponding performance contribution. Based on extensive experiments on three large-scale FER datasets and our practical cross-validation, we ranked network architectures and summarized a set of recommendations on deploying deep FER methods in real scenarios. In addition, potential ethical rules, privacy issues, and regulations were discussed in practical FER applications such as marketing, education, and entertainment business.
Imitation Learning based Alternative Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization for Well-Formed Swarm-Oriented Pursuit Avoidance
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Multi-Robot System (MRS) has garnered widespread research interest and fostered tremendous interesting applications, especially in cooperative control fields. Yet little light has been shed on the compound ability of formation, monitoring and defence in decentralized large-scale MRS for pursuit avoidance, which puts stringent requirements on the capability of coordination and adaptability. In this paper, we put forward a decentralized Imitation learning based Alternative Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization (IA-MAPPO) algorithm to provide a flexible and communication-economic solution to execute the pursuit avoidance task in well-formed swarm. In particular, a policy-distillation based MAPPO executor is firstly devised to capably accomplish and swiftly switch between multiple formations in a centralized manner. Furthermore, we utilize imitation learning to decentralize the formation controller, so as to reduce the communication overheads and enhance the scalability. Afterwards, alternative training is leveraged to compensate the performance loss incurred by decentralization. The simulation results validate the effectiveness of IA-MAPPO and extensive ablation experiments further show the performance comparable to a centralized solution with significant decrease in communication overheads.
Virtual Action Actor-Critic Framework for Exploration (Student Abstract)
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Efficient exploration for an agent is challenging in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, a novel actor-critic framework namely virtual action actor-critic (VAAC), is proposed to address the challenge of efficient exploration in RL. This work is inspired by humans' ability to imagine the potential outcomes of their actions without actually taking them. In order to emulate this ability, VAAC introduces a new actor called virtual actor (VA), alongside the conventional actor-critic framework. Unlike the conventional actor, the VA takes the virtual action to anticipate the next state without interacting with the environment. With the virtual policy following a Gaussian distribution, the VA is trained to maximize the anticipated novelty of the subsequent state resulting from a virtual action. If any next state resulting from available actions does not exhibit high anticipated novelty, training the VA leads to an increase in the virtual policy entropy. Hence, high virtual policy entropy represents that there is no room for exploration. The proposed VAAC aims to maximize a modified Q function, which combines cumulative rewards and the negative sum of virtual policy entropy. Experimental results show that the VAAC improves the exploration performance compared to existing algorithms.
SoK: Evaluations in Industrial Intrusion Detection Research
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Industrial systems are increasingly threatened by cyberattacks with potentially disastrous consequences. To counter such attacks, industrial intrusion detection systems strive to timely uncover even the most sophisticated breaches. Due to its criticality for society, this fast-growing field attracts researchers from diverse backgrounds, resulting in 130 new detection approaches in 2021 alone. This huge momentum facilitates the exploration of diverse promising paths but likewise risks fragmenting the research landscape and burying promising progress. Consequently, it needs sound and comprehensible evaluations to mitigate this risk and catalyze efforts into sustainable scientific progress with real-world applicability. In this paper, we therefore systematically analyze the evaluation methodologies of this field to understand the current state of industrial intrusion detection research. Our analysis of 609 publications shows that the rapid growth of this research field has positive and negative consequences. While we observe an increased use of public datasets, publications still only evaluate 1.3 datasets on average, and frequently used benchmarking metrics are ambiguous. At the same time, the adoption of newly developed benchmarking metrics sees little advancement. Finally, our systematic analysis enables us to provide actionable recommendations for all actors involved and thus bring the entire research field forward.
Multi-view learning for automatic classification of multi-wavelength auroral images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Auroral classification plays a crucial role in polar research. However, current auroral classification studies are predominantly based on images taken at a single wavelength, typically 557.7 nm. Images obtained at other wavelengths have been comparatively overlooked, and the integration of information from multiple wavelengths remains an underexplored area. This limitation results in low classification rates for complex auroral patterns. Furthermore, these studies, whether employing traditional machine learning or deep learning approaches, have not achieved a satisfactory trade-off between accuracy and speed. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a lightweight auroral multi-wavelength fusion classification network, MLCNet, based on a multi-view approach. Firstly, we develop a lightweight feature extraction backbone, called LCTNet, to improve the classification rate and cope with the increasing amount of auroral observation data. Secondly, considering the existence of multi-scale spatial structures in auroras, we design a novel multi-scale reconstructed feature module named MSRM. Finally, to highlight the discriminative information between auroral classes, we propose a lightweight attention feature enhancement module called LAFE. The proposed method is validated using observational data from the Arctic Yellow River Station during 2003-2004. Experimental results demonstrate that the fusion of multi-wavelength information effectively improves the auroral classification performance. In particular, our approach achieves state-of-the-art classification accuracy compared to previous auroral classification studies, and superior results in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency compared to existing multi-view methods.