OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
On the Query Strategies for Efficient Online Active Distillation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Deep Learning (DL) requires lots of time and data, resulting in high computational demands. Recently, researchers employ Active Learning (AL) and online distillation to enhance training efficiency and real-time model adaptation. This paper evaluates a set of query strategies to achieve the best training results. It focuses on Human Pose Estimation (HPE) applications, assessing the impact of selected frames during training using two approaches: a classical offline method and a online evaluation through a continual learning approach employing knowledge distillation, on a popular state-of-the-art HPE dataset. The paper demonstrates the possibility of enabling training at the edge lightweight models, adapting them effectively to new contexts in real-time.
Critical Behavioral Traits Foster Peer Engagement in Online Mental Health Communities
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Online Mental Health Communities (OMHCs), such as Reddit, have witnessed a surge in popularity as go-to platforms for seeking information and support in managing mental health needs. Platforms like Reddit offer immediate interactions with peers, granting users a vital space for seeking mental health assistance. However, the largely unregulated nature of these platforms introduces intricate challenges for both users and society at large. This study explores the factors that drive peer engagement within counseling threads, aiming to enhance our understanding of this critical phenomenon. We introduce BeCOPE, a novel behavior encoded Peer counseling dataset comprising over 10,118 posts and 58,279 comments sourced from 21 mental health-specific subreddits. The dataset is annotated using three major fine-grained behavior labels: (a) intent, (b) criticism, and (c) readability, along with the emotion labels. Our analysis indicates the prominence of ``self-criticism'' as the most prevalent form of criticism expressed by help-seekers, accounting for a significant 43% of interactions. Intriguingly, we observe that individuals who explicitly express their need for help are 18.01% more likely to receive assistance compared to those who present ``surveys'' or engage in ``rants.'' Furthermore, we highlight the pivotal role of well-articulated problem descriptions, showing that superior readability effectively doubles the likelihood of receiving the sought-after support. Our study emphasizes the essential role of OMHCs in offering personalized guidance and unveils behavior-driven engagement patterns.
Corgi^2: A Hybrid Offline-Online Approach To Storage-Aware Data Shuffling For SGD
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

When using Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) for training machine learning models, it is often crucial to provide the model with examples sampled at random from the dataset. However, for large datasets stored in the cloud, random access to individual examples is often costly and inefficient. A recent work \cite{corgi}, proposed an online shuffling algorithm called CorgiPile, which greatly improves efficiency of data access, at the cost some performance loss, which is particularly apparent for large datasets stored in homogeneous shards (e.g., video datasets). In this paper, we introduce a novel two-step partial data shuffling strategy for SGD which combines an offline iteration of the CorgiPile method with a subsequent online iteration. Our approach enjoys the best of both worlds: it performs similarly to SGD with random access (even for homogenous data) without compromising the data access efficiency of CorgiPile. We provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis of the convergence properties of our method and demonstrate its practical advantages through experimental results.
Evolving linguistic divergence on polarizing social media
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2023
Year: 2023

Language change is influenced by many factors, but often starts from synchronic variation, where multiple linguistic patterns or forms coexist, or where different speech communities use language in increasingly different ways. Besides regional or economic reasons, communities may form and segregate based on political alignment. The latter, referred to as political polarization, is of growing societal concern across the world. Here we map and quantify linguistic divergence across the partisan left-right divide in the United States, using social media data. We develop a general methodology to delineate (social) media users by their political preference, based on which (potentially biased) news media accounts they do and do not follow on a given platform. Our data consists of 1.5M short posts by 10k users (about 20M words) from the social media platform Twitter (now "X"). Delineating this sample involved mining the platform for the lists of followers (n=422M) of 72 large news media accounts. We quantify divergence in topics of conversation and word frequencies, messaging sentiment, and lexical semantics of words and emoji. We find signs of linguistic divergence across all these aspects, especially in topics and themes of conversation, in line with previous research. While US American English remains largely intelligible within its large speech community, our findings point at areas where miscommunication may eventually arise given ongoing polarization and therefore potential linguistic divergence. Our methodology - combining data mining, lexicostatistics, machine learning, large language models and a systematic human annotation approach - is largely language and platform agnostic. In other words, while we focus here on US political divides and US English, the same approach is applicable to other countries, languages, and social media platforms.
Pisces: Private and Compliable Cryptocurrency Exchange
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Cryptocurrency exchange platforms such as Coinbase, Binance, enable users to purchase and sell cryptocurrencies conveniently just like trading stocks/commodities. However, because of the nature of blockchain, when a user withdraws coins (i.e., transfers coins to an external on-chain account), all future transactions can be learned by the platform. This is in sharp contrast to conventional stock exchange where all external activities of users are always hidden from the platform. Since the platform knows highly sensitive user private information such as passport number, bank information etc, linking all (on-chain) transactions raises a serious privacy concern about the potential disastrous data breach in those cryptocurrency exchange platforms. In this paper, we propose a cryptocurrency exchange that restores user anonymity for the first time. To our surprise, the seemingly well-studied privacy/anonymity problem has several new challenges in this setting. Since the public blockchain and internal transaction activities naturally provide many non-trivial leakages to the platform, internal privacy is not only useful in the usual sense but also becomes necessary for regaining the basic anonymity of user transactions. We also ensure that the user cannot double spend, and the user has to properly report accumulated profit for tax purposes, even in the private setting. We give a careful modeling and efficient construction of the system that achieves constant computation and communication overhead (with only simple cryptographic tools and rigorous security analysis); we also implement our system and evaluate its practical performance.
A Simple Pipeline for Orthogonal Graph Drawing
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2023
Year: 2023

Orthogonal graph drawing has many applications, e.g., for laying out UML diagrams or cableplans. In this paper, we present a new pipeline that draws multigraphs orthogonally, using few bends, few crossings, and small area. Our pipeline computes an initial graph layout, then removes overlaps between the rectangular nodes, routes the edges, orders the edges, and nudges them, that is, moves edge segments in order to balance the inter-edge distances. Our pipeline is flexible and integrates well with existing approaches. Our main contribution is (i) an effective edge-nudging algorithm that is based on linear programming, (ii) a selection of simple algorithms that together produce competitive results, and (iii) an extensive experimental comparison of our pipeline with existing approaches using standard benchmark sets and metrics.
Prompt me a Dataset: An investigation of text-image prompting for historical image dataset creation using foundation models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we present a pipeline for image extraction from historical documents using foundation models, and evaluate text-image prompts and their effectiveness on humanities datasets of varying levels of complexity. The motivation for this approach stems from the high interest of historians in visual elements printed alongside historical texts on the one hand, and from the relative lack of well-annotated datasets within the humanities when compared to other domains. We propose a sequential approach that relies on GroundDINO and Meta's Segment-Anything-Model (SAM) to retrieve a significant portion of visual data from historical documents that can then be used for downstream development tasks and dataset creation, as well as evaluate the effect of different linguistic prompts on the resulting detections.
Softmax Bias Correction for Quantized Generative Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Post-training quantization (PTQ) is the go-to compression technique for large generative models, such as stable diffusion or large language models. PTQ methods commonly keep the softmax activation in higher precision as it has been shown to be very sensitive to quantization noise. However, this can lead to a significant runtime and power overhead during inference on resource-constraint edge devices. In this work, we investigate the source of the softmax sensitivity to quantization and show that the quantization operation leads to a large bias in the softmax output, causing accuracy degradation. To overcome this issue, we propose an offline bias correction technique that improves the quantizability of softmax without additional compute during deployment, as it can be readily absorbed into the quantization parameters. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on stable diffusion v1.5 and 125M-size OPT language model, achieving significant accuracy improvement for 8-bit quantized softmax.
Hybrid data driven/thermal simulation model for comfort assessment
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Machine learning models improve the speed and quality of physical models. However, they require a large amount of data, which is often difficult and costly to acquire. Predicting thermal comfort, for example, requires a controlled environment, with participants presenting various characteristics (age, gender, ...). This paper proposes a method for hybridizing real data with simulated data for thermal comfort prediction. The simulations are performed using Modelica Language. A benchmarking study is realized to compare different machine learning methods. Obtained results look promising with an F1 score of 0.999 obtained using the random forest model.
INTAGS: Interactive Agent-Guided Simulation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

In many applications involving multi-agent system (MAS), it is imperative to test an experimental (Exp) autonomous agent in a high-fidelity simulator prior to its deployment to production, to avoid unexpected losses in the real-world. Such a simulator acts as the environmental background (BG) agent(s), called agent-based simulator (ABS), aiming to replicate the complex real MAS. However, developing realistic ABS remains challenging, mainly due to the sequential and dynamic nature of such systems. To fill this gap, we propose a metric to distinguish between real and synthetic multi-agent systems, which is evaluated through the live interaction between the Exp and BG agents to explicitly account for the systems' sequential nature. Specifically, we characterize the system/environment by studying the effect of a sequence of BG agents' responses to the environment state evolution and take such effects' differences as MAS distance metric; The effect estimation is cast as a causal inference problem since the environment evolution is confounded with the previous environment state. Importantly, we propose the Interactive Agent-Guided Simulation (INTAGS) framework to build a realistic ABS by optimizing over this novel metric. To adapt to any environment with interactive sequential decision making agents, INTAGS formulates the simulator as a stochastic policy in reinforcement learning. Moreover, INTAGS utilizes the policy gradient update to bypass differentiating the proposed metric such that it can support non-differentiable operations of multi-agent environments. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of INTAGS on an equity stock market simulation example. We show that using INTAGS to calibrate the simulator can generate more realistic market data compared to the state-of-the-art conditional Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network approach.
Neural-Singular-Hessian: Implicit Neural Representation of Unoriented Point Clouds by Enforcing Singular Hessian
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Neural implicit representation is a promising approach for reconstructing surfaces from point clouds. Existing methods combine various regularization terms, such as the Eikonal and Laplacian energy terms, to enforce the learned neural function to possess the properties of a Signed Distance Function (SDF). However, inferring the actual topology and geometry of the underlying surface from poor-quality unoriented point clouds remains challenging. In accordance with Differential Geometry, the Hessian of the SDF is singular for points within the differential thin-shell space surrounding the surface. Our approach enforces the Hessian of the neural implicit function to have a zero determinant for points near the surface. This technique aligns the gradients for a near-surface point and its on-surface projection point, producing a rough but faithful shape within just a few iterations. By annealing the weight of the singular-Hessian term, our approach ultimately produces a high-fidelity reconstruction result. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach effectively suppresses ghost geometry and recovers details from unoriented point clouds with better expressiveness than existing fitting-based methods.
Focusing and Calibration of Large Scale Network Sensors using GraphBLAS Anonymized Hypersparse Matrices
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

Defending community-owned cyber space requires community-based efforts. Large-scale network observations that uphold the highest regard for privacy are key to protecting our shared cyberspace. Deployment of the necessary network sensors requires careful sensor placement, focusing, and calibration with significant volumes of network observations. This paper demonstrates novel focusing and calibration procedures on a multi-billion packet dataset using high-performance GraphBLAS anonymized hypersparse matrices. The run-time performance on a real-world data set confirms previously observed real-time processing rates for high-bandwidth links while achieving significant data compression. The output of the analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of these procedures at focusing the traffic matrix and revealing the underlying stable heavy-tail statistical distributions that are necessary for anomaly detection. A simple model of the corresponding probability of detection ($p_{\rm d}$) and probability of false alarm ($p_{\rm fa}$) for these distributions highlights the criticality of network sensor focusing and calibration. Once a sensor is properly focused and calibrated it is then in a position to carry out two of the central tenets of good cybersecurity: (1) continuous observation of the network and (2) minimizing unbrokered network connections.
Efficient Query-Based Attack against ML-Based Android Malware Detection under Zero Knowledge Setting
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

The widespread adoption of the Android operating system has made malicious Android applications an appealing target for attackers. Machine learning-based (ML-based) Android malware detection (AMD) methods are crucial in addressing this problem; however, their vulnerability to adversarial examples raises concerns. Current attacks against ML-based AMD methods demonstrate remarkable performance but rely on strong assumptions that may not be realistic in real-world scenarios, e.g., the knowledge requirements about feature space, model parameters, and training dataset. To address this limitation, we introduce AdvDroidZero, an efficient query-based attack framework against ML-based AMD methods that operates under the zero knowledge setting. Our extensive evaluation shows that AdvDroidZero is effective against various mainstream ML-based AMD methods, in particular, state-of-the-art such methods and real-world antivirus solutions.
Inferring Actual Treatment Pathways from Patient Records
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Treatment pathways are step-by-step plans outlining the recommended medical care for specific diseases; they get revised when different treatments are found to improve patient outcomes. Examining health records is an important part of this revision process, but inferring patients' actual treatments from health data is challenging due to complex event-coding schemes and the absence of pathway-related annotations. This study aims to infer the actual treatment steps for a particular patient group from administrative health records (AHR) - a common form of tabular healthcare data - and address several technique- and methodology-based gaps in treatment pathway-inference research. We introduce Defrag, a method for examining AHRs to infer the real-world treatment steps for a particular patient group. Defrag learns the semantic and temporal meaning of healthcare event sequences, allowing it to reliably infer treatment steps from complex healthcare data. To our knowledge, Defrag is the first pathway-inference method to utilise a neural network (NN), an approach made possible by a novel, self-supervised learning objective. We also developed a testing and validation framework for pathway inference, which we use to characterise and evaluate Defrag's pathway inference ability and compare against baselines. We demonstrate Defrag's effectiveness by identifying best-practice pathway fragments for breast cancer, lung cancer, and melanoma in public healthcare records. Additionally, we use synthetic data experiments to demonstrate the characteristics of the Defrag method, and to compare Defrag to several baselines where it significantly outperforms non-NN-based methods. Defrag significantly outperforms several existing pathway-inference methods and offers an innovative and effective approach for inferring treatment pathways from AHRs. Open-source code is provided to encourage further research in this area.
Towards Robust Plant Disease Diagnosis with Hard-sample Re-mining Strategy
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

With rich annotation information, object detection-based automated plant disease diagnosis systems (e.g., YOLO-based systems) often provide advantages over classification-based systems (e.g., EfficientNet-based), such as the ability to detect disease locations and superior classification performance. One drawback of these detection systems is dealing with unannotated healthy data with no real symptoms present. In practice, healthy plant data appear to be very similar to many disease data. Thus, those models often produce mis-detected boxes on healthy images. In addition, labeling new data for detection models is typically time-consuming. Hard-sample mining (HSM) is a common technique for re-training a model by using the mis-detected boxes as new training samples. However, blindly selecting an arbitrary amount of hard-sample for re-training will result in the degradation of diagnostic performance for other diseases due to the high similarity between disease and healthy data. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective training strategy called hard-sample re-mining (HSReM), which is designed to enhance the diagnostic performance of healthy data and simultaneously improve the performance of disease data by strategically selecting hard-sample training images at an appropriate level. Experiments based on two practical in-field eight-class cucumber and ten-class tomato datasets (42.7K and 35.6K images) show that our HSReM training strategy leads to a substantial improvement in the overall diagnostic performance on large-scale unseen data. Specifically, the object detection model trained using the HSReM strategy not only achieved superior results as compared to the classification-based state-of-the-art EfficientNetV2-Large model and the original object detection model, but also outperformed the model using the HSM strategy in multiple evaluation metrics.
Improving Drone Imagery For Computer Vision/Machine Learning in Wilderness Search and Rescue
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

This paper describes gaps in acquisition of drone imagery that impair the use with computer vision/machine learning (CV/ML) models and makes five recommendations to maximize image suitability for CV/ML post-processing. It describes a notional work process for the use of drones in wilderness search and rescue incidents. The large volume of data from the wide area search phase offers the greatest opportunity for CV/ML techniques because of the large number of images that would otherwise have to be manually inspected. The 2023 Wu-Murad search in Japan, one of the largest missing person searches conducted in that area, serves as a case study. Although drone teams conducting wide area searches may not know in advance if the data they collect is going to be used for CV/ML post-processing, there are data collection procedures that can improve the search in general with automated collection software. If the drone teams do expect to use CV/ML, then they can exploit knowledge about the model to further optimize flights.
TODM: Train Once Deploy Many Efficient Supernet-Based RNN-T Compression For On-device ASR Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models need to be optimized for specific hardware before they can be deployed on devices. This can be done by tuning the model's hyperparameters or exploring variations in its architecture. Re-training and re-validating models after making these changes can be a resource-intensive task. This paper presents TODM (Train Once Deploy Many), a new approach to efficiently train many sizes of hardware-friendly on-device ASR models with comparable GPU-hours to that of a single training job. TODM leverages insights from prior work on Supernet, where Recurrent Neural Network Transducer (RNN-T) models share weights within a Supernet. It reduces layer sizes and widths of the Supernet to obtain subnetworks, making them smaller models suitable for all hardware types. We introduce a novel combination of three techniques to improve the outcomes of the TODM Supernet: adaptive dropouts, an in-place Alpha-divergence knowledge distillation, and the use of ScaledAdam optimizer. We validate our approach by comparing Supernet-trained versus individually tuned Multi-Head State Space Model (MH-SSM) RNN-T using LibriSpeech. Results demonstrate that our TODM Supernet either matches or surpasses the performance of manually tuned models by up to a relative of 3% better in word error rate (WER), while efficiently keeping the cost of training many models at a small constant.