OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Labelled Dataset for Sentiment Analysis of Videos on YouTube, TikTok, and Other Sources about the 2024 Outbreak of Measles
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

The work of this paper presents a dataset that contains the data of 4011 videos about the ongoing outbreak of measles published on 264 websites on the internet between January 1, 2024, and May 31, 2024. The dataset is available at https://dx.doi.org/10.21227/40s8-xf63. These websites primarily include YouTube and TikTok, which account for 48.6% and 15.2% of the videos, respectively. The remainder of the websites include Instagram and Facebook as well as the websites of various global and local news organizations. For each of these videos, the URL of the video, title of the post, description of the post, and the date of publication of the video are presented as separate attributes in the dataset. After developing this dataset, sentiment analysis (using VADER), subjectivity analysis (using TextBlob), and fine-grain sentiment analysis (using DistilRoBERTa-base) of the video titles and video descriptions were performed. This included classifying each video title and video description into (i) one of the sentiment classes i.e. positive, negative, or neutral, (ii) one of the subjectivity classes i.e. highly opinionated, neutral opinionated, or least opinionated, and (iii) one of the fine-grain sentiment classes i.e. fear, surprise, joy, sadness, anger, disgust, or neutral. These results are presented as separate attributes in the dataset for the training and testing of machine learning algorithms for performing sentiment analysis or subjectivity analysis in this field as well as for other applications. Finally, this paper also presents a list of open research questions that may be investigated using this dataset.
CUPID: Contextual Understanding of Prompt-conditioned Image Distributions
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

We present CUPID: a visualization method for the contextual understanding of prompt-conditioned image distributions. CUPID targets the visual analysis of distributions produced by modern text-to-image generative models, wherein a user can specify a scene via natural language, and the model generates a set of images, each intended to satisfy the user's description. CUPID is designed to help understand the resulting distribution, using contextual cues to facilitate analysis: objects mentioned in the prompt, novel, synthesized objects not explicitly mentioned, and their potential relationships. Central to CUPID is a novel method for visualizing high-dimensional distributions, wherein contextualized embeddings of objects, those found within images, are mapped to a low-dimensional space via density-based embeddings. We show how such embeddings allows one to discover salient styles of objects within a distribution, as well as identify anomalous, or rare, object styles. Moreover, we introduce conditional density embeddings, whereby conditioning on a given object allows one to compare object dependencies within the distribution. We employ CUPID for analyzing image distributions produced by large-scale diffusion models, where our experimental results offer insights on language misunderstanding from such models and biases in object composition, while also providing an interface for discovery of typical, or rare, synthesized scenes.
Approximating Optimum Online for Capacitated Resource Allocation
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

We study online capacitated resource allocation, a natural generalization of online stochastic max-weight bipartite matching. This problem is motivated by ride-sharing and Internet advertising applications, where online arrivals may have the capacity to serve multiple offline users. Our main result is a polynomial-time online algorithm which is $(1/2 + κ)$-approximate to the optimal online algorithm for $κ= 0.0115$. This can be contrasted to the (tight) $1/2$-competitive algorithms to the optimum offline benchmark from the prophet inequality literature. Optimum online is a recently popular benchmark for online Bayesian problems which can use unbounded computation, but not "prophetic" knowledge of future inputs. Our algorithm (which also works for the case of stochastic rewards) rounds a generalized LP relaxation from the unit-capacity case via a two-proposal algorithm, as in previous works in the online matching literature. A key technical challenge in deriving our guarantee is bounding the positive correlation among users introduced when rounding our LP relaxation online. Unlike in the case of unit capacities, this positive correlation is unavoidable for guarantees beyond $1/2$. Conceptually, our results show that the study of optimum online as a benchmark can reveal problem-specific insights that are irrelevant to competitive analysis.
LT4SG@SMM4H24: Tweets Classification for Digital Epidemiology of Childhood Health Outcomes Using Pre-Trained Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents our approaches for the SMM4H24 Shared Task 5 on the binary classification of English tweets reporting children's medical disorders. Our first approach involves fine-tuning a single RoBERTa-large model, while the second approach entails ensembling the results of three fine-tuned BERTweet-large models. We demonstrate that although both approaches exhibit identical performance on validation data, the BERTweet-large ensemble excels on test data. Our best-performing system achieves an F1-score of 0.938 on test data, outperforming the benchmark classifier by 1.18%.
Spatial Annealing for Efficient Few-shot Neural Rendering
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) with hybrid representations have shown impressive capabilities for novel view synthesis, delivering high efficiency. Nonetheless, their performance significantly drops with sparse input views. Various regularization strategies have been devised to address these challenges. However, these strategies either require additional rendering costs or involve complex pipeline designs, leading to a loss of training efficiency. Although FreeNeRF has introduced an efficient frequency annealing strategy, its operation on frequency positional encoding is incompatible with the efficient hybrid representations. In this paper, we introduce an accurate and efficient few-shot neural rendering method named \textbf{S}patial \textbf{A}nnealing regularized \textbf{NeRF} (\textbf{SANeRF}), which adopts the pre-filtering design of a hybrid representation. We initially establish the analytical formulation of the frequency band limit for a hybrid architecture by deducing its filtering process. Based on this analysis, we propose a universal form of frequency annealing in the spatial domain, which can be implemented by modulating the sampling kernel to exponentially shrink from an initial one with a narrow grid tangent kernel spectrum. This methodology is crucial for stabilizing the early stages of the training phase and significantly contributes to enhancing the subsequent process of detail refinement. Our extensive experiments reveal that, by adding merely one line of code, SANeRF delivers superior rendering quality and much faster reconstruction speed compared to current few-shot neural rendering methods. Notably, SANeRF outperforms FreeNeRF on the Blender dataset, achieving 700$\times$ faster reconstruction speed.
SynthForge: Synthesizing High-Quality Face Dataset with Controllable 3D Generative Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advancements in generative models have unlocked the capabilities to render photo-realistic data in a controllable fashion. Trained on the real data, these generative models are capable of producing realistic samples with minimal to no domain gap, as compared to the traditional graphics rendering. However, using the data generated using such models for training downstream tasks remains under-explored, mainly due to the lack of 3D consistent annotations. Moreover, controllable generative models are learned from massive data and their latent space is often too vast to obtain meaningful sample distributions for downstream task with limited generation. To overcome these challenges, we extract 3D consistent annotations from an existing controllable generative model, making the data useful for downstream tasks. Our experiments show competitive performance against state-of-the-art models using only generated synthetic data, demonstrating potential for solving downstream tasks. Project page: https://synth-forge.github.io
Output-sensitive Conjunctive Query Evaluation
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

Join evaluation is one of the most fundamental operations performed by database systems and arguably the most well-studied problem in the Database community. A staggering number of join algorithms have been developed, and commercial database engines use finely tuned join heuristics that take into account many factors including the selectivity of predicates, memory, IO, etc. However, most of the results have catered to either full join queries or non-full join queries but with degree constraints (such as PK-FK relationships) that make joins \emph{easier} to evaluate. Further, most of the algorithms are also not output-sensitive. In this paper, we present a novel, output-sensitive algorithm for the evaluation of acyclic Conjunctive Queries (CQs) that contain arbitrary free variables. Our result is based on a novel generalization of the Yannakakis algorithm and shows that it is possible to improve the running time guarantee of the Yannakakis algorithm by a polynomial factor. Importantly, our algorithmic improvement does not depend on the use of fast matrix multiplication, as a recently proposed algorithm does. The upper bound is complemented with matching lower bounds conditioned on two variants of the $k$-clique conjecture. The application of our algorithm recovers known prior results and improves on known state-of-the-art results for common queries such as paths and stars.
DiffPop: Plausibility-Guided Object Placement Diffusion for Image Composition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we address the problem of plausible object placement for the challenging task of realistic image composition. We propose DiffPop, the first framework that utilizes plausibility-guided denoising diffusion probabilistic model to learn the scale and spatial relations among multiple objects and the corresponding scene image. First, we train an unguided diffusion model to directly learn the object placement parameters in a self-supervised manner. Then, we develop a human-in-the-loop pipeline which exploits human labeling on the diffusion-generated composite images to provide the weak supervision for training a structural plausibility classifier. The classifier is further used to guide the diffusion sampling process towards generating the plausible object placement. Experimental results verify the superiority of our method for producing plausible and diverse composite images on the new Cityscapes-OP dataset and the public OPA dataset, as well as demonstrate its potential in applications such as data augmentation and multi-object placement tasks. Our dataset and code will be released.
GENIU: A Restricted Data Access Unlearning for Imbalanced Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

With the increasing emphasis on data privacy, the significance of machine unlearning has grown substantially. Class unlearning, which involves enabling a trained model to forget data belonging to a specific class learned before, is important as classification tasks account for the majority of today's machine learning as a service (MLaaS). Retraining the model on the original data, excluding the data to be forgotten (a.k.a forgetting data), is a common approach to class unlearning. However, the availability of original data during the unlearning phase is not always guaranteed, leading to the exploration of class unlearning with restricted data access. While current unlearning methods with restricted data access usually generate proxy sample via the trained neural network classifier, they typically focus on training and forgetting balanced data. However, the imbalanced original data can cause trouble for these proxies and unlearning, particularly when the forgetting data consists predominantly of the majority class. To address this issue, we propose the GENerative Imbalanced Unlearning (GENIU) framework. GENIU utilizes a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to concurrently train a proxy generator alongside the original model. These generated proxies accurately represent each class and are leveraged in the unlearning phase, eliminating the reliance on the original training data. To further mitigate the performance degradation resulting from forgetting the majority class, we introduce an in-batch tuning strategy that works with the generated proxies. GENIU is the first practical framework for class unlearning in imbalanced data settings and restricted data access, ensuring the preservation of essential information for future unlearning. Experimental results confirm the superiority of GENIU over existing methods, establishing its effectiveness in empirical scenarios.
Content Provider Contributions to Capacity Expansion of a Neutral ISP: Effect of Private Option
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Increasing content consumption by users and the expectation of a better Internet experience requires Internet service providers (ISPs) to expand the capacity of the access network continually. The ISPs have been demanding the participation of the content providers (CPs) in sharing the cost of upgrading the infrastructure. From CPs' perspective, investing in the ISP infrastructure, termed as \emph{public investment}, seems rational as it will boost their profit. However, the CPs can alternatively invest in making content delivery more efficient, termed as \emph{private investment}, as it also boosts their profit. Thus, in this work, we investigate this trade-off between public and private investment of the CPs for a net-neutral ISP. Specifically, we consider centralized decision and non-cooperative forms of interaction between CPs and an ISP and determine the optimum public and private investments of the CPs for each model. In the non-cooperative interaction, we find that at most one CP contributes to the public infrastructure, whereas all invest in their private infrastructure.
Ablation Based Counterfactuals
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Diffusion models are a class of generative models that generate high-quality samples, but at present it is difficult to characterize how they depend upon their training data. This difficulty raises scientific and regulatory questions, and is a consequence of the complexity of diffusion models and their sampling process. To analyze this dependence, we introduce Ablation Based Counterfactuals (ABC), a method of performing counterfactual analysis that relies on model ablation rather than model retraining. In our approach, we train independent components of a model on different but overlapping splits of a training set. These components are then combined into a single model, from which the causal influence of any training sample can be removed by ablating a combination of model components. We demonstrate how we can construct a model like this using an ensemble of diffusion models. We then use this model to study the limits of training data attribution by enumerating full counterfactual landscapes, and show that single source attributability diminishes with increasing training data size. Finally, we demonstrate the existence of unattributable samples.
Balancing Molecular Information and Empirical Data in the Prediction of Physico-Chemical Properties
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Predicting the physico-chemical properties of pure substances and mixtures is a central task in thermodynamics. Established prediction methods range from fully physics-based ab-initio calculations, which are only feasible for very simple systems, over descriptor-based methods that use some information on the molecules to be modeled together with fitted model parameters (e.g., quantitative-structure-property relationship methods or classical group contribution methods), to representation-learning methods, which may, in extreme cases, completely ignore molecular descriptors and extrapolate only from existing data on the property to be modeled (e.g., matrix completion methods). In this work, we propose a general method for combining molecular descriptors with representation learning using the so-called expectation maximization algorithm from the probabilistic machine learning literature, which uses uncertainty estimates to trade off between the two approaches. The proposed hybrid model exploits chemical structure information using graph neural networks, but it automatically detects cases where structure-based predictions are unreliable, in which case it corrects them by representation-learning based predictions that can better specialize to unusual cases. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated using the prediction of activity coefficients in binary mixtures as an example. The results are compelling, as the method significantly improves predictive accuracy over the current state of the art, showcasing its potential to advance the prediction of physico-chemical properties in general.
Characterizing and Detecting Propaganda-Spreading Accounts on Telegram
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

Information-based attacks on social media, such as disinformation campaigns and propaganda, are emerging cybersecurity threats. The security community has focused on countering these threats on social media platforms like X and Reddit. However, they also appear in instant-messaging social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal. In these platforms information-based attacks primarily happen in groups and channels, requiring manual moderation efforts by channel administrators. We collect, label, and analyze a large dataset of more than 17 million Telegram comments and messages. Our analysis uncovers two independent, coordinated networks that spread pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian propaganda, garnering replies from real users. We propose a novel mechanism for detecting propaganda that capitalizes on the relationship between legitimate user messages and propaganda replies and is tailored to the information that Telegram makes available to moderators. Our method is faster, cheaper, and has a detection rate (97.6%) 11.6 percentage points higher than human moderators after seeing only one message from an account. It remains effective despite evolving propaganda.
Flash-VStream: Memory-Based Real-Time Understanding for Long Video Streams
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Benefiting from the advancements in large language models and cross-modal alignment, existing multi-modal video understanding methods have achieved prominent performance in offline scenario. However, online video streams, as one of the most common media forms in the real world, have seldom received attention. Compared to offline videos, the 'dynamic' nature of online video streams poses challenges for the direct application of existing models and introduces new problems, such as the storage of extremely long-term information, interaction between continuous visual content and 'asynchronous' user questions. Therefore, in this paper we present Flash-VStream, a video-language model that simulates the memory mechanism of human. Our model is able to process extremely long video streams in real-time and respond to user queries simultaneously. Compared to existing models, Flash-VStream achieves significant reductions in inference latency and VRAM consumption, which is intimately related to performing understanding of online streaming video. In addition, given that existing video understanding benchmarks predominantly concentrate on offline scenario, we propose VStream-QA, a novel question answering benchmark specifically designed for online video streaming understanding. Comparisons with popular existing methods on the proposed benchmark demonstrate the superiority of our method for such challenging setting. To verify the generalizability of our approach, we further evaluate it on existing video understanding benchmarks and achieves state-of-the-art performance in offline scenarios as well. All code, models, and datasets are available at the https://invinciblewyq.github.io/vstream-page/
Inductive Global and Local Manifold Approximation and Projection
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Nonlinear dimensional reduction with the manifold assumption, often called manifold learning, has proven its usefulness in a wide range of high-dimensional data analysis. The significant impact of t-SNE and UMAP has catalyzed intense research interest, seeking further innovations toward visualizing not only the local but also the global structure information of the data. Moreover, there have been consistent efforts toward generalizable dimensional reduction that handles unseen data. In this paper, we first propose GLoMAP, a novel manifold learning method for dimensional reduction and high-dimensional data visualization. GLoMAP preserves locally and globally meaningful distance estimates and displays a progression from global to local formation during the course of optimization. Furthermore, we extend GLoMAP to its inductive version, iGLoMAP, which utilizes a deep neural network to map data to its lower-dimensional representation. This allows iGLoMAP to provide lower-dimensional embeddings for unseen points without needing to re-train the algorithm. iGLoMAP is also well-suited for mini-batch learning, enabling large-scale, accelerated gradient calculations. We have successfully applied both GLoMAP and iGLoMAP to the simulated and real-data settings, with competitive experiments against the state-of-the-art methods.
Legend: Leveraging Representation Engineering to Annotate Safety Margin for Preference Datasets
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The success of the reward model in distinguishing between responses with subtle safety differences depends critically on the high-quality preference dataset, which should capture the fine-grained nuances of harmful and harmless responses. This motivates the need to develop a dataset involving preference margins, which accurately quantify how harmless one response is compared to another. In this paper, we take the first step to propose an effective and cost-efficient framework to promote the margin-enhanced preference dataset development. Our framework, Legend, Leverages representation engineering to annotate preference datasets. It constructs the specific direction within the LLM's embedding space that represents safety. By leveraging this safety direction, Legend can then leverage the semantic distances of paired responses along this direction to annotate margins automatically. We experimentally demonstrate our effectiveness in both reward modeling and harmless alignment for LLMs. Legend also stands out for its efficiency, requiring only the inference time rather than additional training. This efficiency allows for easier implementation and scalability, making Legend particularly valuable for practical applications in aligning LLMs with safe conversations.