OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Pre-training of Lightweight Vision Transformers on Small Datasets with Minimally Scaled Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Can a lightweight Vision Transformer (ViT) match or exceed the performance of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) like ResNet on small datasets with small image resolutions? This report demonstrates that a pure ViT can indeed achieve superior performance through pre-training, using a masked auto-encoder technique with minimal image scaling. Our experiments on the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets involved ViT models with fewer than 3.65 million parameters and a multiply-accumulate (MAC) count below 0.27G, qualifying them as 'lightweight' models. Unlike previous approaches, our method attains state-of-the-art performance among similar lightweight transformer-based architectures without significantly scaling up images from CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100. This achievement underscores the efficiency of our model, not only in handling small datasets but also in effectively processing images close to their original scale.
Enhanced sampling of robust molecular datasets with uncertainty-based collective variables
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Generating a data set that is representative of the accessible configuration space of a molecular system is crucial for the robustness of machine learned interatomic potentials (MLIP). However, the complexity of molecular systems, characterized by intricate potential energy surfaces (PESs) with numerous local minima and energy barriers, presents a significant challenge. Traditional methods of data generation, such as random sampling or exhaustive exploration, are either intractable or may not capture rare, but highly informative configurations. In this study, we propose a method that leverages uncertainty as the collective variable (CV) to guide the acquisition of chemically-relevant data points, focusing on regions of the configuration space where ML model predictions are most uncertain. This approach employs a Gaussian Mixture Model-based uncertainty metric from a single model as the CV for biased molecular dynamics simulations. The effectiveness of our approach in overcoming energy barriers and exploring unseen energy minima, thereby enhancing the data set in an active learning framework, is demonstrated on the alanine dipeptide benchmark system.
Intensive Vision-guided Network for Radiology Report Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Automatic radiology report generation is booming due to its huge application potential for the healthcare industry. However, existing computer vision and natural language processing approaches to tackle this problem are limited in two aspects. First, when extracting image features, most of them neglect multi-view reasoning in vision and model single-view structure of medical images, such as space-view or channel-view. However, clinicians rely on multi-view imaging information for comprehensive judgment in daily clinical diagnosis. Second, when generating reports, they overlook context reasoning with multi-modal information and focus on pure textual optimization utilizing retrieval-based methods. We aim to address these two issues by proposing a model that better simulates clinicians' perspectives and generates more accurate reports. Given the above limitation in feature extraction, we propose a Globally-intensive Attention (GIA) module in the medical image encoder to simulate and integrate multi-view vision perception. GIA aims to learn three types of vision perception: depth view, space view, and pixel view. On the other hand, to address the above problem in report generation, we explore how to involve multi-modal signals to generate precisely matched reports, i.e., how to integrate previously predicted words with region-aware visual content in next word prediction. Specifically, we design a Visual Knowledge-guided Decoder (VKGD), which can adaptively consider how much the model needs to rely on visual information and previously predicted text to assist next word prediction. Hence, our final Intensive Vision-guided Network (IVGN) framework includes a GIA-guided Visual Encoder and the VKGD. Experiments on two commonly-used datasets IU X-Ray and MIMIC-CXR demonstrate the superior ability of our method compared with other state-of-the-art approaches.
The Instinctive Bias: Spurious Images lead to Illusion in MLLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) have recently experienced remarkable progress, where the advent of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) has endowed LLMs with visual capabilities, leading to impressive performances in various multi-modal tasks. However, those powerful MLLMs such as GPT-4V still fail spectacularly when presented with certain image and text inputs. In this paper, we identify a typical class of inputs that baffles MLLMs, which consist of images that are highly relevant but inconsistent with answers, causing MLLMs to suffer from visual illusion. To quantify the effect, we propose CorrelationQA, the first benchmark that assesses the visual illusion level given spurious images. This benchmark contains 7,308 text-image pairs across 13 categories. Based on the proposed CorrelationQA, we conduct a thorough analysis on 9 mainstream MLLMs, illustrating that they universally suffer from this instinctive bias to varying degrees. We hope that our curated benchmark and evaluation results aid in better assessments of the MLLMs' robustness in the presence of misleading images. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/MasaiahHan/CorrelationQA.
DeMarking: A Defense for Network Flow Watermarking in Real-Time
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

The network flow watermarking technique associates the two communicating parties by actively modifying certain characteristics of the stream generated by the sender so that it covertly carries some special marking information. Some curious users communicating with the hidden server as a Tor client may attempt de-anonymization attacks to uncover the real identity of the hidden server by using this technique. This compromises the privacy of the anonymized communication system. Therefore, we propose a defense scheme against flow watermarking. The scheme is based on deep neural networks and utilizes generative adversarial networks to convert the original Inter-Packet Delays (IPD) into new IPDs generated by the model. We also adopt the concept of adversarial attacks to ensure that the detector will produce an incorrect classification when detecting these new IPDs. This approach ensures that these IPDs are considered "clean", effectively covering the potential watermarks. This scheme is effective against time-based flow watermarking techniques.
MobileVLM V2: Faster and Stronger Baseline for Vision Language Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

We introduce MobileVLM V2, a family of significantly improved vision language models upon MobileVLM, which proves that a delicate orchestration of novel architectural design, an improved training scheme tailored for mobile VLMs, and rich high-quality dataset curation can substantially benefit VLMs' performance. Specifically, MobileVLM V2 1.7B achieves better or on-par performance on standard VLM benchmarks compared with much larger VLMs at the 3B scale. Notably, our 3B model outperforms a large variety of VLMs at the 7B+ scale. Our models will be released at https://github.com/Meituan-AutoML/MobileVLM .
Encoding Version History Context for Better Code Representation
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

With the exponential growth of AI tools that generate source code, understanding software has become crucial. When developers comprehend a program, they may refer to additional contexts to look for information, e.g. program documentation or historical code versions. Therefore, we argue that encoding this additional contextual information could also benefit code representation for deep learning. Recent papers incorporate contextual data (e.g. call hierarchy) into vector representation to address program comprehension problems. This motivates further studies to explore additional contexts, such as version history, to enhance models' understanding of programs. That is, insights from version history enable recognition of patterns in code evolution over time, recurring issues, and the effectiveness of past solutions. Our paper presents preliminary evidence of the potential benefit of encoding contextual information from the version history to predict code clones and perform code classification. We experiment with two representative deep learning models, ASTNN and CodeBERT, to investigate whether combining additional contexts with different aggregations may benefit downstream activities. The experimental result affirms the positive impact of combining version history into source code representation in all scenarios; however, to ensure the technique performs consistently, we need to conduct a holistic investigation on a larger code base using different combinations of contexts, aggregation, and models. Therefore, we propose a research agenda aimed at exploring various aspects of encoding additional context to improve code representation and its optimal utilisation in specific situations.
Soft Prompt Tuning for Cross-Lingual Transfer: When Less is More
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Soft Prompt Tuning (SPT) is a parameter-efficient method for adapting pre-trained language models (PLMs) to specific tasks by inserting learnable embeddings, or soft prompts, at the input layer of the PLM, without modifying its parameters. This paper investigates the potential of SPT for cross-lingual transfer. Unlike previous studies on SPT for cross-lingual transfer that often fine-tune both the soft prompt and the model parameters, we adhere to the original intent of SPT by keeping the model parameters frozen and only training the soft prompt. This does not only reduce the computational cost and storage overhead of full-model fine-tuning, but we also demonstrate that this very parameter efficiency intrinsic to SPT can enhance cross-lingual transfer performance to linguistically distant languages. Moreover, we explore how different factors related to the prompt, such as the length or its reparameterization, affect cross-lingual transfer performance.
Exploring Low-Resource Medical Image Classification with Weakly Supervised Prompt Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Most advances in medical image recognition supporting clinical auxiliary diagnosis meet challenges due to the low-resource situation in the medical field, where annotations are highly expensive and professional. This low-resource problem can be alleviated by leveraging the transferable representations of large-scale pre-trained vision-language models via relevant medical text prompts. However, existing pre-trained vision-language models require domain experts to carefully design the medical prompts, which greatly increases the burden on clinicians. To address this problem, we propose a weakly supervised prompt learning method MedPrompt to automatically generate medical prompts, which includes an unsupervised pre-trained vision-language model and a weakly supervised prompt learning model. The unsupervised pre-trained vision-language model utilizes the natural correlation between medical images and corresponding medical texts for pre-training, without any manual annotations. The weakly supervised prompt learning model only utilizes the classes of images in the dataset to guide the learning of the specific class vector in the prompt, while the learning of other context vectors in the prompt requires no manual annotations for guidance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first model to automatically generate medical prompts. With these prompts, the pre-trained vision-language model can be freed from the strong expert dependency of manual annotation and manual prompt design. Experimental results show that the model using our automatically generated prompts outperforms its full-shot learning hand-crafted prompts counterparts with only a minimal number of labeled samples for few-shot learning, and reaches superior or comparable accuracy on zero-shot image classification. The proposed prompt generator is lightweight and therefore can be embedded into any network architecture.
ZeroPP: Unleashing Exceptional Parallelism Efficiency through Tensor-Parallelism-Free Methodology
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

Large-scale models rely heavily on 3D parallelism for distributed training, which utilizes tensor parallelism (TP) as the intra-operator parallelism to partition model states across GPUs. However, TP introduces significant communication overheads and complexity in modifying single-GPU code. In this paper, we propose a TP-free distributed framework ZeroPP, which leverages the hybrid of scalable inter-operator pipeline parallelism and intra-operator fully sharded data parallelism to train models at scale, reducing memory consumption and enabling high training efficiency. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that ZeroPP achieves significant performance gains of up to 33% compared to conventional 3D parallelism while maintaining comparable GPU memory consumption.
Energy-based Domain-Adaptive Segmentation with Depth Guidance
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recent endeavors have been made to leverage self-supervised depth estimation as guidance in unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) for semantic segmentation. Prior arts, however, overlook the discrepancy between semantic and depth features, as well as the reliability of feature fusion, thus leading to suboptimal segmentation performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel UDA framework called SMART (croSs doMain semAntic segmentation based on eneRgy esTimation) that utilizes Energy-Based Models (EBMs) to obtain task-adaptive features and achieve reliable feature fusion for semantic segmentation with self-supervised depth estimates. Our framework incorporates two novel components: energy-based feature fusion (EB2F) and energy-based reliable fusion Assessment (RFA) modules. The EB2F module produces task-adaptive semantic and depth features by explicitly measuring and reducing their discrepancy using Hopfield energy for better feature fusion. The RFA module evaluates the reliability of the feature fusion using an energy score to improve the effectiveness of depth guidance. Extensive experiments on two datasets demonstrate that our method achieves significant performance gains over prior works, validating the effectiveness of our energy-based learning approach.
Automated Description Generation for Software Patches
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Software patches are pivotal in refining and evolving codebases, addressing bugs, vulnerabilities, and optimizations. Patch descriptions provide detailed accounts of changes, aiding comprehension and collaboration among developers. However, manual description creation poses challenges in terms of time consumption and variations in quality and detail. In this paper, we propose PATCHEXPLAINER, an approach that addresses these challenges by framing patch description generation as a machine translation task. In PATCHEXPLAINER, we leverage explicit representations of critical elements, historical context, and syntactic conventions. Moreover, the translation model in PATCHEXPLAINER is designed with an awareness of description similarity. Particularly, the model is explicitly trained to recognize and incorporate similarities present in patch descriptions clustered into groups, improving its ability to generate accurate and consistent descriptions across similar patches. The dual objectives maximize similarity and accurately predict affiliating groups. Our experimental results on a large dataset of real-world software patches show that PATCHEXPLAINER consistently outperforms existing methods, with improvements up to 189% in BLEU, 5.7X in Exact Match rate, and 154% in Semantic Similarity, affirming its effectiveness in generating software patch descriptions.
NK Hybrid Genetic Algorithm for Clustering
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

The NK hybrid genetic algorithm for clustering is proposed in this paper. In order to evaluate the solutions, the hybrid algorithm uses the NK clustering validation criterion 2 (NKCV2). NKCV2 uses information about the disposition of $N$ small groups of objects. Each group is composed of $K+1$ objects of the dataset. Experimental results show that density-based regions can be identified by using NKCV2 with fixed small $K$. In NKCV2, the relationship between decision variables is known, which in turn allows us to apply gray box optimization. Mutation operators, a partition crossover, and a local search strategy are proposed, all using information about the relationship between decision variables. In partition crossover, the evaluation function is decomposed into $q$ independent components; partition crossover then deterministically returns the best among $2^q$ possible offspring with computational complexity $O(N)$. The NK hybrid genetic algorithm allows the detection of clusters with arbitrary shapes and the automatic estimation of the number of clusters. In the experiments, the NK hybrid genetic algorithm produced very good results when compared to another genetic algorithm approach and to state-of-art clustering algorithms.
RevOrder: A Novel Method for Enhanced Arithmetic in Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents RevOrder, a novel technique aimed at improving arithmetic operations in large language models (LLMs) by reversing the output digits in addition, subtraction, and n-digit by 1-digit (nD by 1D) multiplication tasks. Our method significantly reduces the Count of Sequential Intermediate Digits (CSID) to $\mathcal{O}(1)$, a new metric we introduce to assess equation complexity. Through comprehensive testing, RevOrder not only achieves perfect accuracy in basic arithmetic operations but also substantially boosts LLM performance in division tasks, particularly with large numbers where traditional models struggle. Implementation of RevOrder is cost-effective for both training and inference phases. Moreover, applying RevOrder to fine-tune the LLaMA2-7B model on the GSM8K math task results in a considerable improvement, reducing equation calculation errors by 46% and increasing overall scores from 41.6 to 44.4.
Enhanced Security and Efficiency in Blockchain with Aggregated Zero-Knowledge Proof Mechanisms
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Blockchain technology has emerged as a revolutionary tool in ensuring data integrity and security in digital transactions. However, the current approaches to data verification in blockchain systems, particularly in Ethereum, face challenges in terms of efficiency and computational overhead. The traditional use of Merkle Trees and cryptographic hash functions, while effective, leads to significant resource consumption, especially for large datasets. This highlights a gap in existing research: the need for more efficient methods of data verification in blockchain networks. Our study addresses this gap by proposing an innovative aggregation scheme for Zero-Knowledge Proofs within the structure of Merkle Trees. We develop a system that significantly reduces the size of the proof and the computational resources needed for its generation and verification. Our approach represents a paradigm shift in blockchain data verification, balancing security with efficiency. We conducted extensive experimental evaluations using real Ethereum block data to validate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme. The results demonstrate a drastic reduction in proof size and computational requirements compared to traditional methods, making the verification process more efficient and economically viable. Our contribution fills a critical research void, offering a scalable and secure solution for blockchain data verification. The implications of our work are far-reaching, enhancing the overall performance and adaptability of blockchain technology in various applications, from financial transactions to supply chain management.
Less than one percent of words would be affected by gender-inclusive language in German press texts
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Research on gender and language is tightly knitted to social debates on gender equality and non-discriminatory language use. Psycholinguistic scholars have made significant contributions in this field. However, corpus-based studies that investigate these matters within the context of language use are still rare. In our study, we address the question of how much textual material would actually have to be changed if non-gender-inclusive texts were rewritten to be gender-inclusive. This quantitative measure is an important empirical insight, as a recurring argument against the use of gender-inclusive German is that it supposedly makes written texts too long and complicated. It is also argued that gender-inclusive language has negative effects on language learners. However, such effects are only likely if gender-inclusive texts are very different from those that are not gender-inclusive. In our corpus-linguistic study, we manually annotated German press texts to identify the parts that would have to be changed. Our results show that, on average, less than 1% of all tokens would be affected by gender-inclusive language. This small proportion calls into question whether gender-inclusive German presents a substantial barrier to understanding and learning the language, particularly when we take into account the potential complexities of interpreting masculine generics.
Bezier surfaces with prescribed diagonals
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2024
Year: 2024

The affine space of all tensor product Bézier patches of degree nxn with prescribed main diagonal curves is determined. First, the pair of Bézier curves which can be diagonals of a Bézier patch is characterized. Besides prescribing the diagonal curves, other related problems are considered, those where boundary curves or tangent planes along boundary curves are also prescribed.
Prediction Horizon Requirements for Automated Driving: Optimizing Safety, Comfort, and Efficiency
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Predicting the movement of other road users is beneficial for improving automated vehicle (AV) performance. However, the relationship between the time horizon associated with these predictions and AV performance remains unclear. Despite the existence of numerous trajectory prediction algorithms, no studies have been conducted on how varying prediction lengths affect AV safety and other vehicle performance metrics, resulting in undefined horizon requirements for prediction methods. Our study addresses this gap by examining the effects of different prediction horizons on AV performance, focusing on safety, comfort, and efficiency. Through multiple experiments using a state-of-the-art, risk-based predictive trajectory planner, we simulated predictions with horizons up to 20 seconds. Based on our simulations, we propose a framework for specifying the minimum required and optimal prediction horizons based on specific AV performance criteria and application needs. Our results indicate that a horizon of 1.6 seconds is required to prevent collisions with crossing pedestrians, horizons of 7-8 seconds yield the best efficiency, and horizons up to 15 seconds improve passenger comfort. We conclude that prediction horizon requirements are application-dependent, and recommend aiming for a prediction horizon of 11.8 seconds as a general guideline for applications involving crossing pedestrians.
Batch Universal Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) have recently gained much popularity due to their surprising ability at generating human-like English sentences. LLMs are essentially predictors, estimating the probability of a sequence of words given the past. Therefore, it is natural to evaluate their performance from a universal prediction perspective. In order to do that fairly, we introduce the notion of batch regret as a modification of the classical average regret, and we study its asymptotical value for add-constant predictors, in the case of memoryless sources and first-order Markov sources.