OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Constant Acceleration Flow
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Rectified flow and reflow procedures have significantly advanced fast generation by progressively straightening ordinary differential equation (ODE) flows. They operate under the assumption that image and noise pairs, known as couplings, can be approximated by straight trajectories with constant velocity. However, we observe that modeling with constant velocity and using reflow procedures have limitations in accurately learning straight trajectories between pairs, resulting in suboptimal performance in few-step generation. To address these limitations, we introduce Constant Acceleration Flow (CAF), a novel framework based on a simple constant acceleration equation. CAF introduces acceleration as an additional learnable variable, allowing for more expressive and accurate estimation of the ODE flow. Moreover, we propose two techniques to further improve estimation accuracy: initial velocity conditioning for the acceleration model and a reflow process for the initial velocity. Our comprehensive studies on toy datasets, CIFAR-10, and ImageNet 64x64 demonstrate that CAF outperforms state-of-the-art baselines for one-step generation. We also show that CAF dramatically improves few-step coupling preservation and inversion over Rectified flow. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/mlvlab/CAF}{https://github.com/mlvlab/CAF}.
Understanding and Co-designing Photo-based Reminiscence with Older Adults
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Reminiscence, the act of revisiting past memories, is crucial for self-reflection and social interaction, significantly enhancing psychological well-being, life satisfaction, and self-identity among older adults. In HCI and CSCW, there is growing interest in leveraging technology to support reminiscence for older adults. However, understanding how older adults actively use technologies for realistic and practical reminiscence in their daily lives remains limited. This paper addresses this gap by providing an in-depth, empirical understanding of technology-mediated, photo-based reminiscence among older adults. Through a two-part study involving 20 older adults, we conducted semi-structured interviews and co-design sessions to explore their use and vision of digital technologies for photo-based reminiscence activities. Based on these insights, we propose design implications to make future reminiscence technologies more accessible and empowering for older adults.
Typosquatting 3.0: Characterizing Squatting in Blockchain Naming Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

A Blockchain Name System (BNS) simplifies the process of sending cryptocurrencies by replacing complex cryptographic recipient addresses with human-readable names, making the transactions more convenient. Unfortunately, these names can be susceptible to typosquatting attacks, where attackers can take advantage of user typos by registering typographically similar BNS names. Unsuspecting users may accidentally mistype or misinterpret the intended name, resulting in an irreversible transfer of funds to an attacker's address instead of the intended recipient. In this work, we present the first large-scale, intra-BNS typosquatting study. To understand the prevalence of typosquatting within BNSs, we study three different services (Ethereum Name Service, Unstoppable Domains, and ADAHandles) spanning three blockchains (Ethereum, Polygon, and Cardano), collecting a total of 4.9M BNS names and 200M transactions-the largest dataset for BNSs to date. We describe the challenges involved in conducting name-squatting studies on these alternative naming systems, and then perform an in-depth quantitative analysis of our dataset. We find that typosquatters are indeed active on BNSs, registering more malicious domains with each passing year. Our analysis reveals that users have sent thousands of transactions to squatters and that squatters target both globally popular BNS domain names as well as the domains owned by popular Twitter/X users. Lastly, we document the complete lack of defenses against typosquatting in custodial and non-custodial wallets and propose straightforward countermeasures that can protect users without relying on third-party services.
Discrete RIS Enhanced Space Shift Keying MIMO System via Reflecting Beamforming Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, a discrete reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted spatial shift keying (SSK) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) scheme is investigated, in which a direct link between the transmitter and the receiver is considered. To improve the reliability of the RIS-SSK-MIMO scheme, we formulate an objective function based on minimizing the average bit error probability (ABEP). Since the reflecting phase shift of RIS is discrete, it is difficult to address this problem directly. To this end, we optimize the RIS phase shift to maximize the Euclidean distance between the minimum constellations by applying the successive convex approximation (SCA) and penaltyalternating optimization method. Simulation results verify the superiority of the proposed RIS-SSK-MIMO scheme and demonstrate the impact of the number of RIS elements, the number of phase quantization bits, and the number of receive and transmit antennas in terms of reliability.
Tappy Plugin for Figma: Predicting Tap Success Rates of User-Interface Elements under Development for Smartphones
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Tapping buttons and hyperlinks on smartphones is a fundamental operation, but users sometimes fail to tap user-interface (UI) elements. Such mistakes degrade usability, and thus it is important for designers to configure UI elements so that users can accurately select them. To support designers in setting a UI element with an intended tap success rate, we developed a plugin for Figma, which is modern software for developing webpages and applications for smartphones, based on our previously launched web-based application, Tappy. This plugin converts the size of a UI element from pixels to mm and then computes the tap success rates based on the Dual Gaussian Distribution Model. We have made this plugin freely available to external users, so readers can install the Tappy plugin for Figma by visiting its installation page (https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/1425006564066437139/tappy) or from their desktop Figma software.
StyleTex: Style Image-Guided Texture Generation for 3D Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Style-guided texture generation aims to generate a texture that is harmonious with both the style of the reference image and the geometry of the input mesh, given a reference style image and a 3D mesh with its text description. Although diffusion-based 3D texture generation methods, such as distillation sampling, have numerous promising applications in stylized games and films, it requires addressing two challenges: 1) decouple style and content completely from the reference image for 3D models, and 2) align the generated texture with the color tone, style of the reference image, and the given text prompt. To this end, we introduce StyleTex, an innovative diffusion-model-based framework for creating stylized textures for 3D models. Our key insight is to decouple style information from the reference image while disregarding content in diffusion-based distillation sampling. Specifically, given a reference image, we first decompose its style feature from the image CLIP embedding by subtracting the embedding's orthogonal projection in the direction of the content feature, which is represented by a text CLIP embedding. Our novel approach to disentangling the reference image's style and content information allows us to generate distinct style and content features. We then inject the style feature into the cross-attention mechanism to incorporate it into the generation process, while utilizing the content feature as a negative prompt to further dissociate content information. Finally, we incorporate these strategies into StyleTex to obtain stylized textures. The resulting textures generated by StyleTex retain the style of the reference image, while also aligning with the text prompts and intrinsic details of the given 3D mesh. Quantitative and qualitative experiments show that our method outperforms existing baseline methods by a significant margin.
Enhancing Authorship Attribution through Embedding Fusion: A Novel Approach with Masked and Encoder-Decoder Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The increasing prevalence of AI-generated content alongside human-written text underscores the need for reliable discrimination methods. To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework with textual embeddings from Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) to distinguish AI-generated and human-authored text. Our approach utilizes Embedding Fusion to integrate semantic information from multiple Language Models, harnessing their complementary strengths to enhance performance. Through extensive evaluation across publicly available diverse datasets, our proposed approach demonstrates strong performance, achieving classification accuracy greater than 96% and a Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) greater than 0.93. This evaluation is conducted on a balanced dataset of texts generated from five well-known Large Language Models (LLMs), highlighting the effectiveness and robustness of our novel methodology.
Cityscape-Adverse: Benchmarking Robustness of Semantic Segmentation with Realistic Scene Modifications via Diffusion-Based Image Editing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advancements in generative AI, particularly diffusion-based image editing, have enabled the transformation of images into highly realistic scenes using only text instructions. This technology offers significant potential for generating diverse synthetic datasets to evaluate model robustness. In this paper, we introduce Cityscape-Adverse, a benchmark that employs diffusion-based image editing to simulate eight adverse conditions, including variations in weather, lighting, and seasons, while preserving the original semantic labels. We evaluate the reliability of diffusion-based models in generating realistic scene modifications and assess the performance of state-of-the-art CNN and Transformer-based semantic segmentation models under these challenging conditions. Additionally, we analyze which modifications have the greatest impact on model performance and explore how training on synthetic datasets can improve robustness in real-world adverse scenarios. Our results demonstrate that all tested models, particularly CNN-based architectures, experienced significant performance degradation under extreme conditions, while Transformer-based models exhibited greater resilience. We verify that models trained on Cityscape-Adverse show significantly enhanced resilience when applied to unseen domains. Code and datasets will be released at https://github.com/naufalso/cityscape-adverse.
Synergistic Interplay of Large Language Model and Digital Twin for Autonomous Optical Networks: Field Demonstrations
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

The development of large language models (LLM) has revolutionized various fields and is anticipated to drive the advancement of autonomous systems. In the context of autonomous optical networks, creating a high-level cognitive agent in the control layer remains a challenge. However, LLM is primarily developed for natural language processing tasks, rendering them less effective in predicting the physical dynamics of optical communications. Moreover, optical networks demand rigorous stability, where direct deployment of strategies generated from LLM poses safety concerns. In this paper, a digital twin (DT)-enhanced LLM scheme is proposed to facilitate autonomous optical networks. By leveraging monitoring data and advanced models, the DT of optical networks can accurately characterize their physical dynamics, furnishing LLMs with dynamic-updated information for reliable decision-making. Prior to deployment, the generated strategies from LLM can be pre-verified in the DT platform, which also provides feedback to the LLM for further refinement of strategies. The synergistic interplay between DT and LLM for autonomous optical networks is demonstrated through three scenarios: performance optimization under dynamic loadings in an experimental C+L-band long-haul transmission link, protection switching for device upgrading in a field-deployed six-node mesh network, and performance recovery after fiber cuts in a field-deployed C+L-band transmission link.
Computer Application Research based on Chinese Human Resources and Network Information Security Technology Management and Analysis In Chinese Universities
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

This study investigates the current state of computer network security and human resource management within Chinese universities, emphasizing the growing importance of safeguarding digital infrastructures. To support the analysis, interviews were conducted with managers from two leading Chinese cybersecurity firms and the qualitative data obtained was carefully analyzed to extract key insights and conclusions.
LAM-YOLO: Drones-based Small Object Detection on Lighting-Occlusion Attention Mechanism YOLO
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Drone-based target detection presents inherent challenges, such as the high density and overlap of targets in drone-based images, as well as the blurriness of targets under varying lighting conditions, which complicates identification. Traditional methods often struggle to recognize numerous densely packed small targets under complex background. To address these challenges, we propose LAM-YOLO, an object detection model specifically designed for drone-based. First, we introduce a light-occlusion attention mechanism to enhance the visibility of small targets under different lighting conditions. Meanwhile, we incroporate incorporate Involution modules to improve interaction among feature layers. Second, we utilize an improved SIB-IoU as the regression loss function to accelerate model convergence and enhance localization accuracy. Finally, we implement a novel detection strategy that introduces two auxiliary detection heads for identifying smaller-scale targets.Our quantitative results demonstrate that LAM-YOLO outperforms methods such as Faster R-CNN, YOLOv9, and YOLOv10 in terms of mAP@0.5 and mAP@0.5:0.95 on the VisDrone2019 public dataset. Compared to the original YOLOv8, the average precision increases by 7.1\%. Additionally, the proposed SIB-IoU loss function shows improved faster convergence speed during training and improved average precision over the traditional loss function.
3-Slot-Finality Protocol for Ethereum
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

Gasper, the consensus protocol currently employed by Ethereum, typically requires 64 to 95 slots -- the units of time during which a new chain extending the previous one by one block is proposed and voted -- to finalize. This means that under ideal conditions -- where the network is synchronous, and all chain proposers, along with more than two-thirds of the validators, behave as dictated by the protocol -- proposers construct blocks on a non-finalized chain that extends at least 64 blocks. This exposes a significant portion of the blockchain to potential reorganizations during changes in network conditions, such as periods of asynchrony. Specifically, this finalization delay heightens the network's exposure to Maximum Extractable Value (MEV) exploits, which could undermine the network's integrity. Furthermore, the extended finalization period forces users to balance the trade-off between economic security and transaction speed. To address these issues and speed up finality, we introduce a partially synchronous finality gadget, which we combine with two dynamically available consensus protocols -- synchronous protocols that ensure safety and liveness even with fluctuating validator participation levels. This integration results in secure ebb-and-flow protocols [SP 2021], achieving finality within three slots after a proposal and realizing 3-slot finality.
Automated Classification of Cell Shapes: A Comparative Evaluation of Shape Descriptors
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This study addresses the challenge of classifying cell shapes from noisy contours, such as those obtained through cell instance segmentation of histological images. We assess the performance of various features for shape classification, including Elliptical Fourier Descriptors, curvature features, and lower dimensional representations. Using an annotated synthetic dataset of noisy contours, we identify the most suitable shape descriptors and apply them to a set of real images for qualitative analysis. Our aim is to provide a comprehensive evaluation of descriptors for classifying cell shapes, which can support cell type identification and tissue characterization-critical tasks in both biological research and histopathological assessments.
Early Announcement: Parametricity for GADTs
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2024
Year: 2024

Relational parametricity was first introduced by Reynolds for System F. Although System F provides a strong model for the type systems at the core of modern functional programming languages, it lacks features of daily programming practice such as complex data types. In order to reason parametrically about such objects, Reynolds' seminal ideas need to be generalized to extensions of System F. Here, we explore such a generalization for the extension of System F by Generalized Algebraic Data Types (GADTs) as found in Haskell. Although GADTs generalize Algebraic Data Types (ADTs) -- i.e., simple recursive types such as lists, trees, etc. -- we show that naively extending the parametric treatment of these recursive types is not enough to tackle GADTs. We propose a tentative workaround for this issue, borrowing ideas from the categorical semantics of GADTs known as (functorial) completion. We discuss some applications, as well as some limitations, of this solution.
Adapting Language Models via Token Translation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Modern large language models use a fixed tokenizer to effectively compress text drawn from a source domain. However, applying the same tokenizer to a new target domain often leads to inferior compression, more costly inference, and reduced semantic alignment. To address this deficiency, we introduce Sparse Sinkhorn Token Translation (S2T2). S2T2 trains a tailored tokenizer for the target domain and learns to translate between target and source tokens, enabling more effective reuse of the pre-trained next-source-token predictor. In our experiments with finetuned English language models, S2T2 improves both the perplexity and the compression of out-of-domain protein sequences, outperforming direct finetuning with either the source or target tokenizer. In addition, we find that token translations learned for smaller, less expensive models can be directly transferred to larger, more powerful models to reap the benefits of S2T2 at lower cost.
STAA: Spatio-Temporal Attention Attribution for Real-Time Interpreting Transformer-based Video Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Transformer-based models have achieved state-of-the-art performance in various computer vision tasks, including image and video analysis. However, Transformer's complex architecture and black-box nature pose challenges for explainability, a crucial aspect for real-world applications and scientific inquiry. Current Explainable AI (XAI) methods can only provide one-dimensional feature importance, either spatial or temporal explanation, with significant computational complexity. This paper introduces STAA (Spatio-Temporal Attention Attribution), an XAI method for interpreting video Transformer models. Differ from traditional methods that separately apply image XAI techniques for spatial features or segment contribution analysis for temporal aspects, STAA offers both spatial and temporal information simultaneously from attention values in Transformers. The study utilizes the Kinetics-400 dataset, a benchmark collection of 400 human action classes used for action recognition research. We introduce metrics to quantify explanations. We also apply optimization to enhance STAA's raw output. By implementing dynamic thresholding and attention focusing mechanisms, we improve the signal-to-noise ratio in our explanations, resulting in more precise visualizations and better evaluation results. In terms of computational overhead, our method requires less than 3\% of the computational resources of traditional XAI methods, making it suitable for real-time video XAI analysis applications. STAA contributes to the growing field of XAI by offering a method for researchers and practitioners to analyze Transformer models.
Generative AI and Agency in Education: A Critical Scoping Review and Thematic Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

This scoping review examines the relationship between Generative AI (GenAI) and agency in education, analyzing the literature available through the lens of Critical Digital Pedagogy. Following PRISMA-ScR guidelines, we collected 10 studies from academic databases focusing on both learner and teacher agency in GenAI-enabled environments. We conducted an AI-supported hybrid thematic analysis that revealed three key themes: Control in Digital Spaces, Variable Engagement and Access, and Changing Notions of Agency. The findings suggest that while GenAI may enhance learner agency through personalization and support, it also risks exacerbating educational inequalities and diminishing learner autonomy in certain contexts. This review highlights gaps in the current research on GenAI's impact on agency. These findings have implications for educational policy and practice, suggesting the need for frameworks that promote equitable access while preserving learner agency in GenAI-enhanced educational environments.
Towards High-fidelity Head Blending with Chroma Keying for Industrial Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

We introduce an industrial Head Blending pipeline for the task of seamlessly integrating an actor's head onto a target body in digital content creation. The key challenge stems from discrepancies in head shape and hair structure, which lead to unnatural boundaries and blending artifacts. Existing methods treat foreground and background as a single task, resulting in suboptimal blending quality. To address this problem, we propose CHANGER, a novel pipeline that decouples background integration from foreground blending. By utilizing chroma keying for artifact-free background generation and introducing Head shape and long Hair augmentation ($H^2$ augmentation) to simulate a wide range of head shapes and hair styles, CHANGER improves generalization on innumerable various real-world cases. Furthermore, our Foreground Predictive Attention Transformer (FPAT) module enhances foreground blending by predicting and focusing on key head and body regions. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our CHANGER outperforms state-of-the-art methods, delivering high-fidelity, industrial-grade results.
Physics in Next-token Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We discovered the underlying physics in Next-token Prediction (NTP). We identified the law of information conservation within NTP and proposed the First Law of Information Capacity (IC-1), demonstrating that the essence of intelligence emergence in auto-regressive models is fundamentally a process of information transfer. We also introduced Landauer's Principle into NTP, formulating the Second Law of Information Capacity (IC-2), which establishes the relationship between auto-regressive model training and energy consumption. Additionally, we presented several corollaries, which hold practical significance for production practices. Finally, we demonstrate the consistency between the Law of Information Capacity and the Scaling Law for Neural Language Models, the Knowledge Capacity Scaling Laws, and the Scaling Laws for Precision.