OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
EG-HumanNeRF: Efficient Generalizable Human NeRF Utilizing Human Prior for Sparse View
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Generalizable neural radiance field (NeRF) enables neural-based digital human rendering without per-scene retraining. When combined with human prior knowledge, high-quality human rendering can be achieved even with sparse input views. However, the inference of these methods is still slow, as a large number of neural network queries on each ray are required to ensure the rendering quality. Moreover, occluded regions often suffer from artifacts, especially when the input views are sparse. To address these issues, we propose a generalizable human NeRF framework that achieves high-quality and real-time rendering with sparse input views by extensively leveraging human prior knowledge. We accelerate the rendering with a two-stage sampling reduction strategy: first constructing boundary meshes around the human geometry to reduce the number of ray samples for sampling guidance regression, and then volume rendering using fewer guided samples. To improve rendering quality, especially in occluded regions, we propose an occlusion-aware attention mechanism to extract occlusion information from the human priors, followed by an image space refinement network to improve rendering quality. Furthermore, for volume rendering, we adopt a signed ray distance function (SRDF) formulation, which allows us to propose an SRDF loss at every sample position to improve the rendering quality further. Our experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in rendering quality and has a competitive rendering speed compared with speed-prioritized novel view synthesis methods.
Transmission Scheduling of Millimeter Wave Communication for High-Speed Railway in Space-Air-Ground Integrated Network
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

The space-air-ground integrated network (SAGIN) greatly improves coverage and reliability for millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication in high-speed railway (HSR) scenarios. However, a significant challenge arises in the transmission scheduling due to the rapid changes in channel state, link selection for train mobile relays (MRs), and order of the flow scheduling. To tackle this challenge, we introduce an optimization problem focused on maximizing the weighted sum completed flows that satisfy the quality of service (QoS) requirements for HSR mmWave communication in SAGIN. To facilitate the simultaneous scheduling of flows by base station-MR (BS-MR), satellite-airship-MR, and satellite-MR links, we propose a link selection algorithm, which can help each flow choose a suitable set of links in every frame and determine whether the BS networks need the assistance of the satellite and airship. Furthermore, taking into account the priority and occupied time slots (TSs) resource of different flows, we propose a multi-link weighted flow scheduling (MWFS) algorithm. This algorithm not only prioritizes scheduling high-priority flows but also aims to maximize the weighted sum completed flows for MRs. Our simulation results confirm that the proposed algorithm significantly increases the weighted sum completed flows and the total transmitted bits. Additionally, the proposed algorithm can achieve the optimal flow transmission in different link switching periods and enhance the scheduling of high-priority flows compared to other algorithms.
Dual Action Policy for Robust Sim-to-Real Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents Dual Action Policy (DAP), a novel approach to address the dynamics mismatch inherent in the sim-to-real gap of reinforcement learning. DAP uses a single policy to predict two sets of actions: one for maximizing task rewards in simulation and another specifically for domain adaptation via reward adjustments. This decoupling makes it easier to maximize the overall reward in the source domain during training. Additionally, DAP incorporates uncertainty-based exploration during training to enhance agent robustness. Experimental results demonstrate DAP's effectiveness in bridging the sim-to-real gap, outperforming baselines on challenging tasks in simulation, and further improvement is achieved by incorporating uncertainty estimation.
Irregularity-Informed Time Series Analysis: Adaptive Modelling of Spatial and Temporal Dynamics
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Irregular Time Series Data (IRTS) has shown increasing prevalence in real-world applications. We observed that IRTS can be divided into two specialized types: Natural Irregular Time Series (NIRTS) and Accidental Irregular Time Series (AIRTS). Various existing methods either ignore the impacts of irregular patterns or statically learn the irregular dynamics of NIRTS and AIRTS data and suffer from limited data availability due to the sparsity of IRTS. We proposed a novel transformer-based framework for general irregular time series data that treats IRTS from four views: Locality, Time, Spatio and Irregularity to motivate the data usage to the highest potential. Moreover, we design a sophisticated irregularity-gate mechanism to adaptively select task-relevant information from irregularity, which improves the generalization ability to various IRTS data. We implement extensive experiments to demonstrate the resistance of our work to three highly missing ratio datasets (88.4\%, 94.9\%, 60\% missing value) and investigate the significance of the irregularity information for both NIRTS and AIRTS by additional ablation study. We release our implementation in https://github.com/IcurasLW/MTSFormer-Irregular_Time_Series.git
Consistency Calibration: Improving Uncertainty Calibration via Consistency among Perturbed Neighbors
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Calibration is crucial in deep learning applications, especially in fields like healthcare and autonomous driving, where accurate confidence estimates are vital for decision-making. However, deep neural networks often suffer from miscalibration, with reliability diagrams and Expected Calibration Error (ECE) being the only standard perspective for evaluating calibration performance. In this paper, we introduce the concept of consistency as an alternative perspective on model calibration, inspired by uncertainty estimation literature in large language models (LLMs). We highlight its advantages over the traditional reliability-based view. Building on this concept, we propose a post-hoc calibration method called Consistency Calibration (CC), which adjusts confidence based on the model's consistency across perturbed inputs. CC is particularly effective in locally uncertainty estimation, as it requires no additional data samples or label information, instead generating input perturbations directly from the source data. Moreover, we show that performing perturbations at the logit level significantly improves computational efficiency. We validate the effectiveness of CC through extensive comparisons with various post-hoc and training-time calibration methods, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance on standard datasets such as CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet, as well as on long-tailed datasets like ImageNet-LT.
PAPL-SLAM: Principal Axis-Anchored Monocular Point-Line SLAM
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

In point-line SLAM systems, the utilization of line structural information and the optimization of lines are two significant problems. The former is usually addressed through structural regularities, while the latter typically involves using minimal parameter representations of lines in optimization. However, separating these two steps leads to the loss of constraint information to each other. We anchor lines with similar directions to a principal axis and optimize them with $n+2$ parameters for $n$ lines, solving both problems together. Our method considers scene structural information, which can be easily extended to different world hypotheses while significantly reducing the number of line parameters to be optimized, enabling rapid and accurate mapping and tracking. To further enhance the system's robustness and avoid mismatch, we have modeled the line-axis probabilistic data association and provided the algorithm for axis creation, updating, and optimization. Additionally, considering that most real-world scenes conform to the Atlanta World hypothesis, we provide a structural line detection strategy based on vertical priors and vanishing points. Experimental results and ablation studies on various indoor and outdoor datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our system.
Understanding the Role of LLMs in Multimodal Evaluation Benchmarks
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The rapid advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has been accompanied by the development of various benchmarks to evaluate their capabilities. However, the true nature of these evaluations and the extent to which they assess multimodal reasoning versus merely leveraging the underlying Large Language Model (LLM) backbone remain unclear. This paper presents a comprehensive investigation into the role of LLM backbones in MLLM evaluation, focusing on two critical aspects: the degree to which current benchmarks truly assess multimodal reasoning and the influence of LLM prior knowledge on performance. Specifically, we introduce a modified evaluation protocol to disentangle the contributions of the LLM backbone from multimodal integration, and an automatic knowledge identification technique for diagnosing whether LLMs equip the necessary knowledge for corresponding multimodal questions. Our study encompasses four diverse MLLM benchmarks and eight state-of-the-art MLLMs. Key findings reveal that some benchmarks allow high performance even without visual inputs and up to 50\% of error rates can be attributed to insufficient world knowledge in the LLM backbone, indicating a heavy reliance on language capabilities. To address knowledge deficiencies, we propose a knowledge augmentation pipeline that achieves significant performance gains, with improvements of up to 60\% on certain datasets, resulting in a approximately 4x increase in performance. Our work provides crucial insights into the role of the LLM backbone in MLLMs, and highlights the need for more nuanced benchmarking approaches.
Efficient Diffusion as Low Light Enhancer
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The computational burden of the iterative sampling process remains a major challenge in diffusion-based Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE). Current acceleration methods, whether training-based or training-free, often lead to significant performance degradation, highlighting the trade-off between performance and efficiency. In this paper, we identify two primary factors contributing to performance degradation: fitting errors and the inference gap. Our key insight is that fitting errors can be mitigated by linearly extrapolating the incorrect score functions, while the inference gap can be reduced by shifting the Gaussian flow to a reflectance-aware residual space. Based on the above insights, we design Reflectance-Aware Trajectory Refinement (RATR) module, a simple yet effective module to refine the teacher trajectory using the reflectance component of images. Following this, we introduce \textbf{Re}flectance-aware \textbf{D}iffusion with \textbf{Di}stilled \textbf{T}rajectory (\textbf{ReDDiT}), an efficient and flexible distillation framework tailored for LLIE. Our framework achieves comparable performance to previous diffusion-based methods with redundant steps in just 2 steps while establishing new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results with 8 or 4 steps. Comprehensive experimental evaluations on 10 benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of our method, consistently outperforming existing SOTA methods.
ProSA: Assessing and Understanding the Prompt Sensitivity of LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various tasks, but their performance is highly sensitive to the prompts utilized. This variability poses challenges for accurate assessment and user satisfaction. Current research frequently overlooks instance-level prompt variations and their implications on subjective evaluations. To address these shortcomings, we introduce ProSA, a framework designed to evaluate and comprehend prompt sensitivity in LLMs. ProSA incorporates a novel sensitivity metric, PromptSensiScore, and leverages decoding confidence to elucidate underlying mechanisms. Our extensive study, spanning multiple tasks, uncovers that prompt sensitivity fluctuates across datasets and models, with larger models exhibiting enhanced robustness. We observe that few-shot examples can alleviate this sensitivity issue, and subjective evaluations are also susceptible to prompt sensitivities, particularly in complex, reasoning-oriented tasks. Furthermore, our findings indicate that higher model confidence correlates with increased prompt robustness. We believe this work will serve as a helpful tool in studying prompt sensitivity of LLMs. The project is released at: https://github.com/open-compass/ProSA .
Adding web pentesting functionality to PTHelper
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Web application pentesting is a crucial component in the offensive cybersecurity area, whose aim is to safeguard web applications and web services as the majority of the web applications are mounted in publicly accessible web environments. This method requires that the cybersecurity experts pretend and act as real attackers to identify all the errors and vulnerabilities in web applications with the objective of preventing and reducing damages. As this process may be quite complex and the amount of information pentesters need may be big, being able to automate it will help them to easily discover the vulnerabilities given. This project is the direct continuation of the previous initiative called PThelper: An open source tool to support the Penetration Testing process. This continuation is focused on expanding PThelper with the functionality to detect and later report web vulnerabilities in order to address emerging threats and strengthen the ability of the organizations to protect their web applications against potential cyber-attacks.
Challenges, Methods, Data -- a Survey of Machine Learning in Water Distribution Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Research on methods for planning and controlling water distribution networks gains increasing relevance as the availability of drinking water will decrease as a consequence of climate change. So far, the majority of approaches is based on hydraulics and engineering expertise. However, with the increasing availability of sensors, machine learning techniques constitute a promising tool. This work presents the main tasks in water distribution networks, discusses how they relate to machine learning and analyses how the particularities of the domain pose challenges to and can be leveraged by machine learning approaches. Besides, it provides a technical toolkit by presenting evaluation benchmarks and a structured survey of the exemplary task of leakage detection and localization.
DH-VTON: Deep Text-Driven Virtual Try-On via Hybrid Attention Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Virtual Try-ON (VTON) aims to synthesis specific person images dressed in given garments, which recently receives numerous attention in online shopping scenarios. Currently, the core challenges of the VTON task mainly lie in the fine-grained semantic extraction (i.e.,deep semantics) of the given reference garments during depth estimation and effective texture preservation when the garments are synthesized and warped onto human body. To cope with these issues, we propose DH-VTON, a deep text-driven virtual try-on model featuring a special hybrid attention learning strategy and deep garment semantic preservation module. By standing on the shoulder of a well-built pre-trained paint-by-example (abbr. PBE) approach, we present our DH-VTON pipeline in this work. Specifically, to extract the deep semantics of the garments, we first introduce InternViT-6B as fine-grained feature learner, which can be trained to align with the large-scale intrinsic knowledge with deep text semantics (e.g.,"neckline" or "girdle") to make up for the deficiency of the commonly adopted CLIP encoder. Based on this, to enhance the customized dressing abilities, we further introduce Garment-Feature ControlNet Plus (abbr. GFC+) module and propose to leverage a fresh hybrid attention strategy for training, which can adaptively integrate fine-grained characteristics of the garments into the different layers of the VTON model, so as to achieve multi-scale features preservation effects. Extensive experiments on several representative datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms previous diffusion-based and GAN-based approaches, showing competitive performance in preserving garment details and generating authentic human images.
Advancing Fairness in Natural Language Processing: From Traditional Methods to Explainability
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The burgeoning field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) stands at a critical juncture where the integration of fairness within its frameworks has become an imperative. This PhD thesis addresses the need for equity and transparency in NLP systems, recognizing that fairness in NLP is not merely a technical challenge but a moral and ethical necessity, requiring a rigorous examination of how these technologies interact with and impact diverse human populations. Through this lens, this thesis undertakes a thorough investigation into the development of equitable NLP methodologies and the evaluation of biases that prevail in current systems. First, it introduces an innovative algorithm to mitigate biases in multi-class classifiers, tailored for high-risk NLP applications, surpassing traditional methods in both bias mitigation and prediction accuracy. Then, an analysis of the Bios dataset reveals the impact of dataset size on discriminatory biases and the limitations of standard fairness metrics. This awareness has led to explorations in the field of explainable AI, aiming for a more complete understanding of biases where traditional metrics are limited. Consequently, the thesis presents COCKATIEL, a model-agnostic explainability method that identifies and ranks concepts in Transformer models, outperforming previous approaches in sentiment analysis tasks. Finally, the thesis contributes to bridging the gap between fairness and explainability by introducing TaCo, a novel method to neutralize bias in Transformer model embeddings. In conclusion, this thesis constitutes a significant interdisciplinary endeavor that intertwines explicability and fairness to challenge and reshape current NLP paradigms. The methodologies and critiques presented contribute to the ongoing discourse on fairness in machine learning, offering actionable solutions for more equitable and responsible AI systems.
SEMSO: A Secure and Efficient Multi-Data Source Blockchain Oracle
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

In recent years, blockchain oracle, as the key link between blockchain and real-world data interaction, has greatly expanded the application scope of blockchain. In particular, the emergence of the Multi-Data Source (MDS) oracle has greatly improved the reliability of the oracle in the case of untrustworthy data sources. However, the current MDS oracle scheme requires nodes to obtain data redundantly from multiple data sources to guarantee data reliability, which greatly increases the resource overhead and response time of the system. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a Secure and Efficient Multi-data Source Oracle framework (SEMSO), which nodes only need to access one data source to ensure the reliability of final data. First, we design a new off-chain data aggregation protocol TBLS, to guarantee data source diversity and reliability at low cost. Second, according to the rational man assumption, the data source selection task of nodes is modeled and solved based on the Bayesian game under incomplete information to maximize the node's revenue while improving the success rate of TBLS aggregation and system response speed. Security analysis verifies the reliability of the proposed scheme, and experiments show that under the same environmental assumptions, SEMSO takes into account data diversity while reducing the response time by 23.5\%.
Development of Image Collection Method Using YOLO and Siamese Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

As we enter the era of big data, collecting high-quality data is very important. However, collecting data by humans is not only very time-consuming but also expensive. Therefore, many scientists have devised various methods to collect data using computers. Among them, there is a method called web crawling, but the authors found that the crawling method has a problem in that unintended data is collected along with the user. The authors found that this can be filtered using the object recognition model YOLOv10. However, there are cases where data that is not properly filtered remains. Here, image reclassification was performed by additionally utilizing the distance output from the Siamese network, and higher performance was recorded than other classification models. (average \_f1 score YOLO+MobileNet 0.678->YOLO+SiameseNet 0.772)) The user can specify a distance threshold to adjust the balance between data deficiency and noise-robustness. The authors also found that the Siamese network can achieve higher performance with fewer resources because the cropped images are used for object recognition when processing images in the Siamese network. (Class 20 mean-based f1 score, non-crop+Siamese(MobileNetV3-Small) 80.94 -> crop preprocessing+Siamese(MobileNetV3-Small) 82.31) In this way, the image retrieval system that utilizes two consecutive models to reduce errors can save users' time and effort, and build better quality data faster and with fewer resources than before.
On the Utility of Domain Modeling Assistance with Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Model-driven engineering (MDE) simplifies software development through abstraction, yet challenges such as time constraints, incomplete domain understanding, and adherence to syntactic constraints hinder the design process. This paper presents a study to evaluate the usefulness of a novel approach utilizing large language models (LLMs) and few-shot prompt learning to assist in domain modeling. The aim of this approach is to overcome the need for extensive training of AI-based completion models on scarce domain-specific datasets and to offer versatile support for various modeling activities, providing valuable recommendations to software modelers. To support this approach, we developed MAGDA, a user-friendly tool, through which we conduct a user study and assess the real-world applicability of our approach in the context of domain modeling, offering valuable insights into its usability and effectiveness.
Sound Conflict Analysis for Timed Contract Automata
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2024
Year: 2024

One can find various temporal deontic logics in literature, most focusing on discrete time. The literature on real-time constraints and deontic norms is much sparser. Thus, many analysis techniques which have been developed for deontic logics have not been considered for continuous time. In this paper we focus on the notion of conflict analysis which has been extensively studied for discrete time deontic logics. We present a sound, but not complete algorithm for detecting conflicts in timed contract automata and prove the correctness of the algorithm, illustrating the analysis on a case study.